Surviving the Dead (Book 4): Fire In Winter

by James Cook

  Looking behind me, I saw the guards had left their towers and were on their way back to the rendezvous point. Soon, they would be close enough to hear me. I could not let that happen. Time to move.

  Thirty yards went by without incident. I skirted around a cluster of ten or fifteen undead, increasing my pace to maintain distance. Once around them, I passed one I had not seen, a very little one, just a toddler before it turned. It was close enough to lunge for me, its baby face twisted with mindless hunger, fingers curled into obscene little claws. Without breaking stride, I booted it the chest and sent it flipping through the air.

  After dodging two more clusters, I sidestepped a pair of reaching hands and made it another forty yards before I had to fight again. There was a line of ghouls walking side by side as if in a skirmish line, separated from each other by less than ten feet. Going around them would cost me time I couldn’t afford and force me to fight more infected. Not an appealing prospect. Better just to go right through them.

  Aiming for the widest gap, I leapt into the air and hit the ghoul in front of me with my best flying punch. The hard plastic shell over my knuckles absorbed the brunt of the blow, saving me from a broken hand. The ghoul’s sinus cavity collapsed with a sickening crunch as it fell backward. I tried to run over it, but my right foot caught its armpit and I went sprawling in the snow. Recovering quickly, I pushed myself up, kicked the ghoul’s hands away, and kept running.

  Finally, I reached the treeline. But there was no solace there, just more ghouls. My breath was coming in short, hitching gasps. My legs were weak from spent adrenalin. I had no time to rest, not with so many of them nearby. The ghouls had heard me, and they were coming.

  Slow down, you big dummy. It’s cold. They’re sluggish. No need to wear yourself out. Use your head for something other than growing hair. You see all those trees? You see all those branches? You see how awkward and clumsy the infected are? You have a sword, right? Do the math.

  Right. Branches.

  I found a good one, a sapling. A quick swipe from my falcata felled it, and a few more chops trimmed it down until it was a seven-foot pole with Y-shaped branches at the end. Perfect for knocking down half-frozen walkers.

  Referencing the map in my head, I turned northeast toward the highway. At a hard pace, I could reach it in less than half an hour. Once there, I simply had to outrun the infected and follow the road to the scene of Montford’s murder. Then the real work would begin.

  I made it exactly two steps before I heard a branch snap to my right. Turning, I saw a ghoul less than five feet away. Medium build, long dead, skin shredded, huge gouges of flesh missing from its chest and abdomen, throat torn out. No wonder it was so quiet. I braced my feet, aimed the sapling at its throat, and took two running steps. The branch hit it just below the jaw and shoved it backward, arms reaching for me as it fell. When it was down, I stomped on its ankle and heard a satisfying crunch. That’ll slow you down.

  Looking around, the next closest ghoul was ten feet away and closing. The plunging temperature had slowed its shuffling gait to a halting shamble, barely a mile an hour. I could outrun it crawling on my knees.

  “Okay. Easy part’s done. Now for the hard part.”

  I headed for the highway.

  *****

  As the pavement became visible ahead, it occurred to me that if Montford’s murderer wanted to set a trap for me, the road to the crime scene was a good place to do it. I stopped and debated what to do next.

  Sun Tzu once wrote that if you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. I knew my enemy, and I certainly knew myself. Problem was, my enemy had the same advantage. There was no doubt what lay ahead of me.

  I was walking into a trap.

  But I had no other way to track him down, and he knew it. He knew I would have to actually go to the scene and look around. That I would search for his trail in the darkness, and when I found it, I would follow it. Doing so would make me vulnerable, open to attack. He knew what kind of a marksman I am, and he would be taking no chances.

  Sun Tzu also wrote that the mark of a great soldier is that he fights on his own terms, or he fights not at all. So how could I put this fight on my terms and not his?

  You’re a sniper. A sniper is a hunter of men. Don’t let yourself be the hunted. Be the hunter.

  Closing my eyes, I called up everything I could remember about the crime scene. Before leaving it earlier in the day, I had given the scene and the surrounding landscape a thorough scan, committing it all to memory. I knew I would be coming back, and I wanted to know the terrain when I did.

  I played the events back, searching for something that could help me. There was the tree, and Montford’s reanimated corpse hanging from it. No help there. Then there was the surrounding forest, bare branches stretching like skeletal fingers against the darkening sky. Not a good place to hide. Too easy to spot me there. I turned, gazing over the horizon, taking in the details.

  There.

  On a low hill, maybe half a mile away, the top of a grain silo cresting over the blanket of trees. Too far away for my rifle to be of any use, but not too far for my scope. I couldn’t reach out and touch him, but I could sure as hell look for him.

  It was a place to start.

  *****

  The pole broke halfway to the grain silo. As far from town as I was, I didn’t see any harm in switching to my falcata.

  The walkers were everywhere, hundreds of them. It looked as though the McKenzie horde had followed their noses to Hollow Rock, but dispersed over a wide area along the way. My blade was slick with gore by the time I reached the farm.

  From a distance, the silos were the only distinguishable feature in the landscape. But as I got closer, I saw there were several large mounds of snow swelling upward from the surrounding flatness. I walked to the nearest mound and kicked the snow aside, revealing a rusted-out 1978 Ford pickup truck, tires flat, windows shattered, halfway collapsed to the ground. By next year, the only thing left standing would be the engine block. Eventually, even that would sink into the spongy earth.

  The other mounds turned out to be a few pieces of farming machinery and the burned out remains of a house and barn. There was something familiar about the place, like I had been there before. Referencing the map in my head, I followed the highway lines and realized I was standing on the old Leary place. It brought to mind a story I heard not long after arriving in Hollow Rock about the people who had lived here, and what happened to them.

  Seamus Leary had been a farmer. Old Irish stock, hard worker, God fearing, polite and respectful, avoided the devil’s drink, generally well liked by everyone who knew him. Then the loosely-knit band of raiders that would eventually form the Free Legion came and murdered him, burned down his farm, destroyed his crops, killed his livestock, and kidnapped his wife and daughter. All because he refused to let them hide stolen loot in his barn.

  The daughter survived the ordeal. She was one of the sex slaves Eric and I helped rescue last year. But her mother wasn’t so lucky. They raped her so badly she started hemorrhaging internally and got an infection. When it was clear there was no saving her, the raiders shot her and left her body for the infected. They made the daughter and the other slaves watch, a lesson to them should they ever entertain delusions of trying to escape.

  The Free Legion. May they burn in hell.

  I shook the dark thoughts out of my head and proceeded to the grain silo. The ladder was rusty, but sturdy. I gave it a few shakes just to be sure and got a faceful of snow for my efforts. At least the ladder was stable.

  After taking a few moments to clean the blood and ichor from my sword, I climbed the ladder to the top. The silo was about a hundred-thirty feet tall, offering a good view of the countryside. I looked for a place to set up, but the roof slanted toward the center at a steep angle with no flat spots to lie down. Not wanting to risk sliding off, I sat on the narrow catwalk and propped my rifle on the handrail.

&nb
sp; The FLIR imager on the M-6’s upper rail worked in conjunction with an adjustable Nightforce scope mounted behind it. I switched on the imager and peered through the scope’s illuminated digital reticle. It was set at 10x magnification, but could go as high as 25x. If I were intent on doing murder, I would leave it at the 10x setting. But with the crime scene being over eight-hundred yards away, and my rifle’s max effective range at about three-hundred fifty yards, I wasn’t killing anything. Not yet, at least. This part was strictly recon.

  My first problem was locating the crime scene in pitch darkness from half a mile away. That was where the FLIR device came in. After taking a quick compass reading, I peered through the magnified white, black, and gray image and scanned the forest below until I located the highway. At this distance, it was just a thin ribbon of smudgy white cutting through the undulating carpet of woodland. Increasing the magnification from 10x to 20x, I followed the sliver of road until I spotted the large, unmistakable outline of the massive oak tree Montford’s body had been suspended from. Around it, suspended above the snow and just barely visible, was a square of thin white lines.

  The fuck is that?

  I cranked the magnification up to its maximum setting and looked again. The lines of the square stood out as clear, brilliant filaments about fifty yards on each side around the big oak tree. I had an idea what it might be and followed one of the lines to its source.

  Low to the ground, just a few inches above the snow, was a bundle of exposed scrub and vegetation. Most people wouldn’t look at it twice, but I wasn’t most people. I knew that bundle of crud didn’t belong there. If it had grown there naturally, it would be just as covered with snow as everything else. No, someone had placed it there deliberately.

  I followed the rest of the lines and found three more such bundles, carefully arranged to avoid detection. I examined the lines again, and realized they weren’t filaments, or string, or tripwires. They were far too straight, far too precise. There is only one thing that fires a straight line with that kind of precision.

  Infrared sensors.

  So that was how he planned to catch me, the sneaky bastard. This spoke to a level of planning and resources I had not anticipated. But for all his guile, he had not factored in the possibility I might have access to FLIR technology. That I might see the trap and be able to bypass it.

  Quite often, when two evenly matched opponents engage in combat, victory and defeat hinges upon who makes the first mistake. And Montford’s killer had screwed up right out of the gate by committing the unforgivable sin of assumption. Of underestimating his opponent’s capabilities. Of saying to himself, there’s no way he’ll have thermals. They’re too rare, too expensive. The Army only gives those things to special ops guys. Garrett is a civilian. The best he can probably do is night vision. But even that would be a long shot.

  Wrong answer, buddy. I’m nothing if not resourceful. You should have known better.

  Now that I had the initiative, the question became how best to use it to my advantage. In order to do any damage at all, I still had to figure out where my attacker was hiding. How far away was he? How did he plan to kill me?

  Did he plan to kill me?

  Maybe he wanted me alive. Maybe he planned to give me some of the same treatment he had given Sean Montford. If all he wanted to do was kill me, he need not have gone through all this trouble. He could have done it any time. Unless, maybe, he didn’t have the right equipment?

  I doubted that very much. Hunting rifles are quite common, even three years after the Outbreak. Ammo is tough to find in some places, but not impossible. He could have acquired a .308 or something bigger, equipped it with a decent scope, conducted surveillance, and waited for an opportunity. One shot, one kill, no more Gabriel Garrett.

  But he hadn’t. Why?

  There was a strong possibility my theory was correct, and he wanted me alive. Considering our history, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit. But there was also the possibility he didn’t know for sure if I was in Hollow Rock. The more I thought about that one, the more it made sense.

  Logic test number one: put yourself in your opponent’s place.

  There is someone I want to kill. I have information that leads me to believe he is in Hollow Rock. He thinks I died years ago. I want to use this information to lure him out of hiding so I can kill him at my leisure. How best to do that?

  Answer: Sean Montford.

  Implications: he knows a thing or two about Hollow Rock. He knows about the patrols, and the sheriff’s department. He knows where to leave a body so the patrols find it. He knows that if I really am in town, the sheriff will find me and he will want to know what the words carved into Montford’s back mean. He will want to know if I know who committed the crime.

  The next part was a leap of logic. How did he know I would respond the way I did? That I would come out here alone? That I would not want anyone to know what happened all those years ago?

  When in doubt, the simplest answer to a question is quite often the correct one. The simplest answer in this case?

  He didn’t.

  He was guessing, playing a hunch.

  Time was on his side, after all. He didn’t need to get me tonight. If his plan didn’t work, all he had to do was slip away and wait until things settled down. The sheriff would eventually call off the investigation, and everything would go back to normal. He could come up with a new plan and try again, meaning this wasn’t necessarily intended to be an end game. He was fishing. Shaking the tree. Throwing shit at a wall to see what would stick.

  Unfortunately for him, his plan worked.

  Now I just had to find him.

  SIXTEEN

  From atop the grain silo, with my scope at its highest magnification, a thorough grid-pattern search of the area surrounding the crime scene yielded no results. If Montford’s murderer was there, he had hidden himself well enough to fool a FLIR imager. My only option was to go down there and look for him. After descending the ladder, I donned my ghillie suit, drew my falcata, and got moving.

  On the way to the road, between bouts of cutting down walkers, I thought about those infrared sensors. I thought about how difficult they were to set up in a well-lit building, much less outdoors. The killer must have set them up in the dark, after the cops left. Otherwise, the deputies would have found them. Which meant he was an expert at surveillance, something which further cemented his identity.

  Another factor was the sensor’s location. They were close to the tree, which meant the killer expected me to start my search there. If I were a little dumber, that’s exactly what I would have done. Lucky for me, I’m not that stupid. The killer also knew that with the snow and the darkness, it would be tough for me to search for his trail and stay alert at the same time. It was probably how he planned to get the drop on me. Wait until I had my head down, then make his move.

  Speaking of, how did he plan to take me down? Assuming he wanted me alive, how did he expect to pull it off? He had seen me in action and knew what I was capable of. Furthermore, he knew I would never allow myself to be captured without a fight. Did he really think he could do it working alone?

  Simplest answer?

  No. He didn’t.

  He was not that stupid. Someone was helping him. But who, and how many?

  Again, I thought of Sun Tzu. When an enemy is relaxed, make them toil. When full, starve them. When settled, make them move.

  The fundamental essence of an ambush is that you lie in wait. You settle in. You stay alert. But if they were hiding within ambush distance of the crime scene, why bother with the sensors? It was dark, but it wasn’t that dark. If my enemy was who I thought he was, he was definitely resourceful enough to score some NVGs. Why not just watch and wait? Why go through the extra trouble?

  Another simple answer: he wasn’t close to the crime scene.

  If he was clever enough to set up infrared sensors, he was clever enough to wire them to a radio transmitter. It wouldn’t take much, Iraqi insurgen
ts could do it with a cell phone. When I broke the beam, he would know I was nearby. Then again, there were also walkers and animals nearby. How would he know if it was a false alarm?

  I knew how I would do it.

  Video surveillance.

  But why do it that way? Why bother with infrared sensors and video cameras and the heinous murder of an innocent man? The whole thing smacked of laziness. There was no discipline in this, no precision. It begged other questions.

  If they weren’t near the tree, where were they? If they didn’t have eyes on the crime scene, where were they monitoring it from? And most importantly, how did they plan to take me down?

  Maybe I was looking at this all wrong. Maybe the killer was not who I thought he was.

  No, that didn’t make any sense. There were only four people who knew about Operation Dragonfly.

  Or were there?

  I had always thought Tolliver worked independently of the Langley bureaucracy. That he kept the names of his operatives confidential to maintain separation between the boots on the ground and the people calling the shots. Nobody wanted to be the one sitting in front of a congressional committee if an op went sideways. They made sure there were enough degrees of separation to be hands clean if things went badly. The suits in D.C. only cared about results. They didn’t give a shit who made things happen so long as they happened.

  No. It had to be him.

  But that still left the question of who was working with him. He knew better than to try to take me on alone. Mercenaries? The remnants of the Free Legion? Either one was a strong possibility.

  Either one was also an assumption.

  Just a few minutes ago, I had been gloating over how my opponent had made too many assumptions, and how it was going to cost him. And here I was doing the same thing.

  Assumptions are bad. Assumptions get you killed. Knowing is better. What did I know so far?