Surviving the Dead (Book 4): Fire In Winter

by James Cook

  His muffled screams intensified. With my free hand, I drew my pistol and aimed it at his heart. He went rigid, eyes bulging, shaking his head. His hands came up in a warding gesture.

  “Whatever price he offered you, it wasn’t worth it.”

  I pulled the trigger twice.

  The suppressor was a good one. Military grade. There was the clank of the slide going back and forth, but nothing else. The man convulsed a few times, spit blood between my fingers, and then died. His last breath rattled out when I took my hand from his face. I left him there and moved on.

  Back in the hallway, I thought I heard something moving and stopped, ears straining. A few seconds passed. Nothing, just the sound of my own breathing. I kept walking to the next room and reached for the door handle. Just as I did, it opened from the other side.

  Shit.

  I stepped back, going still, blending in with the shadows. Another man about the same age as Jason stepped out and glared around dazedly. He was taller, heavier built, shaggy hair and beard. A pistol dangled loosely in his right hand.

  “Jason? Rick? What the hell is going on over th-hrrggk”

  The blade went in under his sternum, angled upward, piercing his heart. At the same time, I wrenched his pistol out of his hand. His mouth worked around a couple of hitching gasps, face slack, eyes bulging with pain. I leaned close and whispered a single word in his ear.

  “Murderer.”

  Withdrawing the knife, I caught him and eased him to the floor.

  One left.

  SEVENTEEN

  I cleaned the blade on the dead man’s clothes and sheathed it before switching to my rifle. The last door lay ahead, still closed. There was a possibility the man behind it had heard the commotion, and if he had, he was no doubt awake and wary. Not a good situation for me. If I had flashbangs and a ballistic shield, I might have tried a room entry. But I didn’t, and I wasn’t in a hurry to test the durability of my body armor.

  Instead, I left the hallway and put my back against the wall between the kitchen and the living room. I removed the suppressor from the Beretta, aimed out the kitchen window, and fired a single shot. The report was deafening in the enclosed space. There was a thump and a muffled curse from the back of the house.

  “Mike, get out here.” I yelled, raising my voice to sound like Jason. “This fucker killed Tommy and Rick.”

  The door slammed open and I heard footsteps pounding down the hallway. Mike, the man who had tortured Montford, stopped and stared down at Tommy’s dead body.

  “Son of a bitch. Jason! Where are you?”

  He moved into the living room, rifle in hand. “Jason?”

  I took two steps and came down on the back of his neck with the butt of the pistol. He went to his knees with a surprised grunt, rifle clattering to the floor. The blow had dazed him, but he was still conscious and struggling to get back to his feet. Another blow to the brachial nerve put him on his face. After checking him for weapons, I folded his arms over his chest and dragged him outside.

  He lay in the snow for a minute or two, breath coming in gasps, snoring like a man with sleep apnea. Finally the cold got through to him and woke him up. He rolled onto his stomach with a groan and staggered to his feet, barefoot and shivering in the cold. I stood and watched him silently, blade in hand, unmoving. When his eyes cleared enough to see me in the dim starlight, he jumped.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  I responded by unclipping my folding knife with one hand and tossing the Ka-bar at his feet with the other. “You know who I am.”

  He glanced warily at the knife, then back at me. “You’re him, aren’t you? You’re Garrett.”

  “My friends call me Gabe, not that it makes any difference.”

  His eyes darted around looking for help, looking for escape, tensing as though he might try to make a run for it. I moved aside my ghillie suit so he could see the rifle in my hand.

  “You’re thinking about running, aren’t you? Totally understandable, given your current situation. But I wouldn’t try it if I were you. As it stands, you have a fighting chance. If you run, I’ll just kneecap you and leave you for the infected.”

  He went still. “What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to pick up that knife.”

  “If I do, you’ll just shoot me.”

  “If I wanted to shoot you, I would have done it already.”

  No answer.

  “Okay, fine.” I said, and dropped the M-6 to the ground behind me, followed by the Beretta and falcata. Taking a few steps closer, I interposed my body between the mercenary and the weapons.

  “These are yours if you can get past me.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Are you still thinking about running? I bet you are. I know how I must look right now. Big guy, ghillie suit, night vision goggles. Pretty intimidating, huh? Well don’t let that scare you. Underneath all this, I’m just a man, same as you. I have bones and organs and blood, and I can be killed just like anybody else.”

  Slowly, I started walking toward him. He stepped back, not making a move toward the Ka-bar.

  “I’m going to start cutting you whether you fight back or not. Your choice.”

  For a while there, he had me convinced he was frozen with fear. I thought I would have to cut him a few times to anger him enough to fight back, but the clever bastard surprised me. When I was four steps away he reached down, snatched up the knife, and threw it straight at my face.

  The throw was a good one. He gripped the handle in the correct spot and gave the blade just the right amount of spin as he sent it flying. The blade crossed the distance in less than a second, whistling through the air. If I were a little slower, it might have hit me.

  I am a lot of things, but slow is not one of them.

  By the time the blade was in his hand, I had already shifted my weight forward to the balls of my feet. As he drew his hand back to throw it, my knees were already bent, shoulders lowered, torso falling to the ground. When the blade cut the air where my face had been, I was in the middle of a forward somersault that ended with me standing in front of him.

  With surprising speed, he launched a punch at my midsection. I could have dodged, but I didn’t. I let it land and folded with it, dissipating the shock. The mercenary grunted as his fist impacted the thick barrier of my MOLLE vest and the layered ceramic body armor beneath. I whipped my knife out and caught him across the upper arm, laying open a deep gash. A shout of pain tore loose from him as he stumbled backward.

  “Hurts, doesn’t it?”

  “Fuck you.”

  I laughed and stood up from my fighting stance. “Looks like you lost your weapon.”

  He glared, gripping the cut on his arm. “Fuck you.”

  “Is that all you have to say? These are your last words, my friend. Maybe you should come up with something a little more creative.”

  “You’re a coward. Drop that knife and we’ll see how tough you are.”

  “Says the guy who tortures and murders innocent farmers.”

  No answer. The fear left his face, eyes growing cold.

  “Your boy Jason told me how you get off on hurting people. On murder. Doesn’t feel so good being on the receiving end, does it?”

  He dropped into a fighting stance, lips curling back from his teeth. “Like I said. If you’re such a tough guy, why don’t you drop that knife and see what happens.”

  I pulled back the hood of my ghillie suit so he could see my face.

  “Okay,” I said, and smiled.

  The knife hit the snow at his feet.

  “Go for it.”

  He aimed the first slash at my legs, trying to open me up, maybe make a follow up pass at my face or throat. Instead of hopping straight back, I circled to his weak side and cracked him on the jaw with a straight right. He stumbled few feet away, shaking his head to clear the cobwebs.

  “You’re going to have to do better than that.”

  He came on again, feinting
and jabbing, blade flashing in the moonlight. He faked a slash at my throat, then reversed his feet and diverted the blade toward my groin. I deflected the attack with my forearm, caught his wrist, and pulled him off balance. With my free hand, I locked his arm out straight, then stepped in, twisted my shoulders, and forced him down to his face.

  “The groin? Really? That’s not very nice.”

  I put a boot on the back of his shoulder, peeled the knife out of his hand, reached down, and sawed at his ear until it fell away from his head. His screams echoed out into the forest. When I let him up, he pressed his hand against the side of his head, blood dripping between his fingers, jaw clenched with rage. Once again, I stepped between him and the pile of weapons.

  “Here,” I said, tossing the blade at his feet. “Try again.”

  He picked it up.

  We kept going like that for a while, him trying to kill me, and me busting him up. Sometimes I let him keep the knife, while others I disarmed him and cut him before throwing the blade at his feet. Each time I did, I issued the same challenge.

  “Go on. Try again.”

  After four cuts, I could see fear in his eyes. His attacks grew sloppier, more desperate. He had thought himself a competent knife fighter up until then, but he had never faced anyone like me. Desperation began to take hold. At eight cuts, the pain and blood loss made him tired and weak. His attacks devolved until they were just shy of feeble, like a toddler attacking a lion.

  At twelve cuts, he started begging for mercy.

  “Don’t waste your breath,” I said. “You didn’t show that poor farmer any mercy, so don’t expect any from me.”

  His eyes hardened and he launched himself at me one last time. I let him get within a few inches of stabbing my leg before I caught his hand. Unable to free the blade, he tried to punch me, but I caught that hand as well. He bared his teeth and lunged at me, panting and dripping blood, a mix of anger and fear in his eyes. A head butt to the bridge of his nose dropped him to his knees. He kneeled there in the snow, hands falling to his sides.

  “That all you got? I didn’t even break a sweat.”

  “Fuck you,” he said, spraying blood from ruined lips.

  I laughed at him and kicked snow in his face. “You feel that emptiness in your chest? There’s a word for that feeling. It’s called hopelessness. You feel that burning in your stomach? It’s called defeat. Tastes like a shit sandwich, doesn’t it? Tell me something, Mike. How does it feel to know you’re about to die?”

  “Fuck you. Just get it over with.”

  “You think this is bad? You think I’ve hurt you? I saw that man’s body, you sick fuck. I saw what you did to him. This is nothing. This is downright merciful. You’re lucky I’m short on time, my friend, or I would burn you at the stake.”

  I walked over to my weapons and picked up the Beretta. Screwed the suppressor back on. Pointed it at his head. “Any last words?”

  His ruined face split into a smile and he laughed, high and hysterical, leering at me through bloody teeth. “He begged me to stop, you know. He begged and begged and begged. They all do that. It’s like they’re reading from a script or something, like there’s a process to it. First there’s the outrage. What are you doing, what’s wrong with you, you don’t have to do this. It takes a while for the reality of it to sink in. They think these things only happen to other people, it can’t be happening to them. I always tell them the same thing, then, and I smile when I do it. I tell them that before it’s over with, they’ll thank me. From then on, I don’t say a word. No matter what they do, I just keep working.”

  I lowered the pistol. A dark red tinge began to creep into my vision, crackling at the edges. My stomach began to burn with a low, smoldering fire.

  “Then comes the begging. Please don’t, please stop, please don’t do this. They tell me about their families, their kids, their husbands and wives. As if I’m supposed to give a shit. I don’t talk then either. It unnerves them, you see. Builds up the tension. The excitement.”

  The red tinge became a mist, obscuring my vision. The fire in my gut began to spread outward, growing hotter, searing into my chest. My hand grew tense around the grip of the Beretta. I took a step forward.

  “Then they start trying to bargain. I have this, I have that. I’ll give you whatever you want. I’ll do whatever you want. Just please don’t kill me. I swear I’ll never tell anyone.”

  I kept walking, step by step, finger slipping over the trigger. He’s baiting you. Trying to make you angry, trying to make you slip up. You’re smarter than this. Don’t fall for it. Stay alert.

  “Near the end, they start begging again. Not to let them go, but for death. You see, once you maim someone to a certain point, once the damage is disfiguring and permanent, they don’t want to live anymore. They give up. They want you to kill them. And when you finally put a gun to their head and tell them it’s over with, they thank you. They thank you from the bottom of their heart, and they fucking mean it. That’s the part that makes me cum. The surrender. The acknowledgement. And just before I kill them, I always tell them the same thing. A conclusion to the ritual, so to speak. I say, I told you so.”

  Something was wrong with the NVGs. There was a shimmering, a mirage effect in front of my eyes. My vision had gone completely red despite the green glow of the imager. My body felt hot, like lying on pavement in Baghdad in the summer, waves of heat boiling over me, the angry sun blinding me. I felt light and delicate, like a strong wind could come along and blow me away. I stepped to within a few feet of the man kneeling in the snow.

  No more talk. Kill.

  His last attempt was quick. Quicker than I would have expected. Perhaps he had been moving slower than he could have during the last few exchanges, trying to make me think he was weaker than he was. Not a bad strategy. In his place, I might have done the same thing. But even at his fastest, he wasn’t as fast as me.

  I caught his hand as the blade came up and squeezed with everything I had. A high, girlish scream erupted from his lips as his bones broke and ground against each other. I raised the Beretta and touched it to his forehead, watched his eyes roll up, glazed and staring. Agonized. Terrified.

  “His name was Sean Montford, you murdering fuck. You think you’re about to die now, but you’re wrong. You’ve been dead this whole time. You died the moment you laid a hand on him.”

  And with that, I pulled the trigger.

  *****

  It took me two hours to search the house.

  I tossed the place from one end to the other, leaving no proverbial stone unturned. When I was done, I stood in the living room staring at the mess I had made. Couch cushions ripped open, upholstery cut from its frame, cabinets torn down from the walls and dismantled, barely more than a few square feet of sheetrock left on the walls. I had emptied the closets, dumped out the drawers, cut open the beds and picture frames, everything I could think of.

  Nothing.

  Just the usual stuff you find in a house except for the mercenary’s clothes, food, and equipment. The only remarkable discovery was a laptop to which they had been streaming video from their surveillance cameras. The laptop’s hard drive was clean, save for a single software application. When I opened it, it showed four views around the tree where Sean Montford was murdered and two more watching the front and rear entrances to the house. Evidently, they had kept one man on watch at all times in case I tripped a sensor or showed up on camera. I could only assume that once they detected me, their plan had been track me down and capture me on foot. Clearly, they either did not know who they were fucking with, or had been warned and chose to ignore it. Either way, it was sloppy. Amateurish. Not what I was expecting.

  The heat signature I had seen earlier turned out to be a kerosene heater, which was still burning in Mike’s bedroom. The liquid in its tank bore the unmistakable odor of jet fuel. JP-8, unless I missed my guess. There was a steel gerry can nearby with about a gallon of foul smelling liquid sloshing in the bottom.
/>   Perfect.

  I dragged the two dead bodies outside and lined them up next to where I had left Mike’s lifeless corpse. Jason was where I had left him, still weeping with fear and shivering. I carried him over to where his three dead partners lay and tossed him so he landed on his side, his face a few inches from the gaping hole in the back of Mike’s skull. When he realized what he was looking at, he began thrashing and struggling against his bonds, eyes nearly bulging out of his head. I gave him a sharp kick to the ribs.

  “Stay quiet and behave yourself while I’m gone. Unless you want to end up like these three.”

  Muffled sobs followed me as I left.

  I made my way to the crime scene, removed the four infrared sensors, and switched them off. That done, I turned my attention to the tree where Montford’s body was found and the cameras mounted to its trunk. They were small, about half the size of a man’s thumb, and very high tech. Zoom lenses, night vision, RF transmitters, the works. The kind of thing you rarely see outside high-level intelligence services.

  Services like the CIA.

  Back at the house, I searched the woods until I found the other two cameras, which were the same model as the other three. All very useful pieces of equipment, but they might have been fitted with bugs. I piled the sensors, the cameras, and the laptop next to the kerosene heater and went back outside.

  Jason stared in tearful horror as I dragged the bodies of his friends back into the house one by one, put them back in their beds, posed them as if they were sleeping, and positioned their weapons exactly where I had found them.

  One last thing to do.

  A set of sheets I found in the course of my search was just long enough to suit my needs. I cut them into thin strips, soaked them in jet fuel, and wrapped them around the top of the kerosene heater where it was hottest. As I stepped off the front porch, I heard the whoosh of the fabric catching fire.

  Jason redoubled his efforts to break loose from his restraints as I drew near, shouting at me through the gag in his mouth, tears dripping from eyes squeezed tightly shut.