by David Peters
It took nearly four hours walking from Paradise Falls to the meadow overlooking Sumter they were now sitting in. Whitey had picked out a loan Alder tree to lean against and showed Dylan how to sit and blend into the surroundings and still be somewhat comfortable. He leaned back comfortably and took in the view in front of them. Sumter was spread out far below them. Just off to their right were the walls that used to house the Wal-Mart shopping center they had been in the previous year. It looked like a fire had claimed all but the solid concrete walls that made up the large building. On his left were the police station and the remains of the medical clinic they had raided. On the far side of the small city was the hive towering above anything man-made that remained in the small town. The far side of the town was framed by the long winding river. The one bridge that had been built to cross it was sagging dangerously about fifty feet away from the far shore.
When Whitey would talk he would lean in and whisper directly into Dylan’s ear, “Now we wait. Thirty on, thirty off. I suggest you rest your eyes as much as you can when not on watch. When you are trying this hard to see something, your eyes will get tired and your mind will go ahead and see things that aren’t there. Cap-Cap will have me for lunch if we hump out here and park our ass all day for nothing.”
Dylan nodded back and looked through Whitey’s powerful spotting scope. They had circled around to the far side of Sumter following one of the low lying central ridges. Dylan followed the mountainside on the opposite of town from their hill and at the very top of the second crest he could just make out the small columns of smoke from the cabins in Paradise Falls. He felt an extremely long ways away from home. They were more than a mile from the entrance to the hive but they could clearly see anything that came and went without having to relocate. “Ok, I have the two Guards standing there like the last time. No movement anywhere in town from what I can see.” Whitey had a small notepad and wrote down the details and times of what Dylan could see.
“No wind is going to make movement really stand out. Keep in mind that’s a two way street though. Move too much or too fast and you may as well stick a strobe light on your head.” Whitey leaned slightly back, “Now we wait dude.”
Dylan smiled and nodded as he turned back to the spotting scope.
It was over two hours later when Dylan caught movement through the scope, “I have two Hunters moving across the far side of the parking lot towards the main entrance of the loading ramp!”
“Dude, take it down about ten notches. We’re bushes, remember? Bushes don’t do a whole lot of yelling.”
Dylan mentally kicked himself for speaking so loud then continued to follow the pair’s movements. In a much quieter voice he spoke, “Ok. They just entered the hive, no reaction from the Guards and they didn’t appear to be carrying anything.”
“Noted,” Whitey whispered back.
It was only five more minutes before Dylan caught more movement, “Ok, two Hunters leaving the hive. They are moving southeast from the entrance, our direction.” He couldn’t hide the nervous sound in his voice.
“Keep it cool. They are more than a mile away and we are invisible from anything further away than ten feet, I think. Just track their route.”
Dylan apologized quietly, “Sorry Whitey, this kind of scouting stuff is a little new to me.”
“No worries dude,” he whispered back
Dylan tracked the Hunters’ movement through the town. There was a small elementary school off to one side with a large overgrown playfield, “They are cutting through the middle of the play field now.”
“Is there a trail?”
Dylan wrinkled his brow at the odd question, “Of course, why?”
“Corrupted are the only game in town, if there is any kind of a trail, they are the only things that could have made it. And the only way they would make a trail is by traveling the same route all the time, and if they travel the same route…” Whitey left the sentence open for Dylan.
“We can ambush them.”
“Correctamundo.”
“Ok, they just jumped a short chain link fence and turned down that street of burned out track homes. Right down the center of the street. Both just stopped. Looks like they found something to smell on the road, not sure what, I can’t see anything. They both are looking around the area and smelling.”
Whitey looked at his small map, “That looks like, Maple Drive.” He noted the course in his log.
A few moments went by as the two Hunters appeared to look for something, “Ok, they are continuing now.”
“They just entered the woods at the far side of the neighborhood, I can’t see them anymore.”
“Now we wait. It would be good to get an idea of how long it takes them to return. We could get a good guess at how far they range based on how fast they were walking through the streets.” Whitey wrote out a small calculation on this pad and showed it to Dylan, “We need this number here, how long it takes them to get back to that point. This will tell us roughly how far they path out, divide this number by three and we get a rough distance.”
“Why not two?”
“Because most patrols don’t walk out in a straight line and come back. It is closer to a circle, at least for humans anyway. Three gives a rough number to work with dude.”
Dylan moved back to scanning the hive and the edge of the town. After another ten minutes they switched roles and Whitey began his part of the watch cycle while Dylan rested his eyes and took notes of Whitey’s observations.
“Movement, northeast side of town. Two Hunters. Too far and too fast to be the two we watched earlier. So they have multiple patrols out at any given time. Makes sense but makes our job a little harder. Wonder if we could talk them into wearing numbers?”
Dylan smiled as he scribbled furiously as he tried keep up with what Whitey was observing, “The two returning could easily have come off the main trail to Paradise Falls.”
“Would make sense that they keep an eye on us, but it doesn’t do anything to lower the creepy factor any,” Whitey whispered back.
It was another two hours before the two Hunters they watched walk into the woods made their way back into the end of the neighborhood. They exited the trail at the same point they had left. Whitey was on watch and noted their arrival instantly.
“That’s our boys. Well, ‘Rupts I guess. Whatever.” Whitey shrugged his shoulders without looking up from the scope. He watched them make their way back through town and enter the hive through the exact same path they had used to leave the town. He filled in the numbers on his sheet and held it up for Dylan to see, “Looks like they range a good five or six miles out as the crow flies depending how much the path twists and turns. That’s a long ways out either way.”
Whitey started to slowly stand, “I think now would be a good time to head back. We have to cross the same area they were patrolling and we know we have a gap right now. One of those animal trails we had crossed wasn’t made by animals.”
“Sounds like a plan. We have maybe another hour of useable light. It’s going to make for a long trip home in the dark.”
It took them fifteen minutes to pack up their gear and get moving in the same slow hunched over gait they used on the way in. They wouldn’t cover ground very fast but they would cover it nearly invisibly. As the darkness closed in they put their night vision goggles on. Night turned to green dusk and they continued their slow walk home. Occasionally Whitey would stop and listen to their surroundings for several minutes then continue forward into the gathering darkness. Instead of walking directly through the thickets like they did during the daylight hours Whitey would instead walk next to them. In the darkness, even with the goggles, it was nearly impossible to walk quietly through the brush.
Dylan was walking about ten paces behind Whitey when the young man made another stop. He held his arm out to his right side to signal Dylan to stop also. He then made a lowering motion for Dylan to lie down. When they were both prone on the ground Whitey looked over his shou
lder at Dylan. In the green light of his goggles he could see Whitey point to his ear then point up the hillside. He had heard something. It was probably just an elk or some other woodland critter going about its nightly business but better safe than sorry.
He could see the two green figures slowly walking on all fours down the hillside. As the moon partially peeked out from behind a cloud the hillside turned to green daylight in his goggles. The Hunters were walking down a trail. The two they had seen earlier were from a different patrol. This had to be the two they saw leave in the late afternoon. The Corrupted ranged quite a bit further than they had anticipated. Nearly twice as far as they had imagined based on the quick math he did in his head.
The two remained as still as logs as the Hunters moved down the hill. They were going to pass within twenty feet of Whitey. Dylan felt a chill run down his spine. If they were forced to shoot the Hunters now, there was no doubt the sound would reach into Sumter and alert the Corrupted. They didn’t stand a chance of beating them back to Paradise Falls. Dylan slowly turned his head in Whitey’s direction but even with the goggles on he had a difficult time finding him in the low scrub brush that dotted the hillside. It wasn’t until he picked out the regular outline of the younger man’s boot soul that he was able to see him.
The Hunters moved along purposefully. Their heads were methodically looking to the left and right intent on finding anything out of the ordinary with their surroundings. Their normal gate was slightly faster than a man would walk but not quite as fast as a jog.
As they passed the nearest point to Whitey one of the Hunters hissed quietly. Both stopped and stood up to smell the air. The second one hissed and made several low grunts to the first. Dylan was sure the Hunters could smell them. They continued to grunt and look around for the source of the smell for nearly a minute before one of them turned and climbed the nearest tree. After what Dylan had seen in the hive there was no doubt that they could see as well without the goggles as the humans could see with them.
The Hunter didn’t climb the tree so much as he jumped up the large cedar while digging it’s talons into the trunk. Once it was about twenty feet off the ground it sniffed the air around it and hissed again. The one still remaining on the ground grunted and hissed in obvious frustration. The Hunter in the tree grunted several times then sprang from its perch with almost no noise. It landed next to the second with a quiet thump and the two exchanged words in their sandpaper like language. After a few more grunts they continued down the trail. Whitey waited a full twenty minutes before he gave the all clear. Dylan hesitated but when Whitey stood and turned to walk towards him Dylan he figured all must be clear. Without another word they continued past the Hunter trail and several hundred yards further into the heavy brush.
Whitey continued on in silence for another twenty minutes before he signaled Dylan to come up to him, “What’s the problem?”
“No problem Boss, just wanted to say good work back there. I was concerned you might try to run.”
“Running was the furthest thing from my mind. I was too scared to even draw my gun.”
“Well that leads to my second concern. I’m a sniper. I don’t think about close in combat, we should have brought silenced weapons Boss.” Without another word Whitey turned and continued the long walk home.
Dylan smiled to himself as he thought, “Another lesson learned. At least this one didn’t involve any pain.”
Chapter 5
Dylan put an ‘X’ on the whiteboard, “Cap-Cap and Whitey both agree that this is probably our best bet for a whole host of reasons. One, it is a safe takedown area; there isn’t much visibility into the canyon from the trail so we are fairly isolated visually. Two, there is little to no chance of the hive being alerted. Three is the big one. If for whatever reason the whole thing goes south and we have to start shooting up the valley and running for our collective lives we should be able to get back to Paradise Falls before they can get to the valley.” Dylan put the marker down and turned to the group assembled behind him. He was nervous at finally revealing his plan. It wasn’t concern about talking in front of the group; it was the concern that he missed some mundane point that would make the whole plan fall apart.
The large whiteboard in Doc’s office had been drawn out to show the mountains around Sumter. Over the past three days they had been able to map out quite a bit of the route that the Hunters used on the south side of town. The sniper suits that Cap-Cap and crew had brought with them proved invaluable to the observation teams. After getting a good idea of the travel routes and times they hatched Dylan’s plan. They had put together a five man ambush team but the small room-turned-lab was filled to overflowing with people concerned about what would happen when the time came to finally push the button.
“How do we know there won’t be a mushroom cloud of radiation?” Julie asked with concern. “I mean, what if Paradise Falls gets a bunch of radioactive fallout? What are we supposed to do then? Can you guarantee that won’t happen?”
Cap-Cap got a nod from Dylan and took the floor, “I can’t give that guarantee Julie, but we won’t detonate the weapon until we know it is deep. Also, the winds over the last three days, and more like three weeks based on memory, have all been blowing to the northwest. That means even if we are wrong and there is an above ground release, the cloud would blow away from us. That is a huge if though. We will be monitoring the entire course of the weapon.”
“How do you know we won’t get blown up with it?” asked another. “How do you know that thing won’t blow up this whole mountain?”
“Listen folks, we need to calm down a little. Yes this is a large weapon by just about any standard except when compared to other nukes. This one is about as small as they come. If you can get past the fear of the unknown and simply look at the weapon as a tool then you won’t be so afraid of the thing. All of you have fought long odds to get this far. All that we are asking is that you have a little faith in us and maybe throw a small measure of hope our way.”
Dylan stepped forward, “Now if there aren’t any other questions specific to the execution of the plan we need to get ready to move out.” Dylan looked around and found nothing but concerned eyes. “I want to wish us all luck. You will know if and when we are successful.”
The crowd filed out of the small room with murmurs of both concern and hope. Dylan and Cap-Cap turned back to the whiteboard, “How do you feel about this Cap-Cap? Will it work?”
“My main concern will be them getting a whiff of us too soon. The only quiet weapons we have are the two silenced pistols Jokester stole, ah, I mean liberated, from Colorado. If we can’t take care of them with those two weapons then the plan is shot to hell.”
Dylan smiled at the man, “I’m glad he had sticky fingers at the time.” Dylan picked up his backpack and rifle up and motioned to the door, “Shall we?”
--1--
They rode the trail single file. Dylan had his rifle slung across his chest and kept his eyes moving around them looking for possible attacks. Now that they had a better idea of where the patrols went they were a little more confident that they wouldn’t run into any Corrupted. He felt better safe than dead though so he kept an eye out for anything out of the ordinary. Dylan was riding at the front with Cap-Cap behind him. Jokester, Whitey and Travis were riding in line behind them with one pack mule carrying the camouflaged netting and the backpack they were going to need.
With a mile to go they dismounted from the horses and left them in a small meadow to graze. Either the horses would stay and enjoy the afternoon sun or they would wonder back home. Either way, Dylan didn’t want them anywhere near the fighting or have their presence alert the Hunters that anything was out of place. They each grabbed gear off of the mule and set off on foot towards the ambush site.
It took another hour of hard hiking to reach the top of the small valley. There were no trails and the low trees and thick underbrush made for slow going when trying to remain quiet. Every snap of a branch sounded
like a gunshot to Dylan.
Cap-Cap took over as the military portion of the plan became active, “Alright, Travis, Whitey, I want you to set things up down the hill there, to the left of that big rock.” He waited for each to acknowledge that they understood. The two stood and began the slow purposeful walk down the hillside.
“Jokester, you’re the runner in the group, I want you at the top of the valley trail, far enough around the bend that you can give yourself a few minute lead time to get down the trail. If our guests show up earlier than planned take them out and we try again later.” Jokester nodded and headed down the steep hill to his assigned area. He had one of the blue smoke grenades to use if he was discovered and couldn’t break contact. It would leave the Hunters in a condition that wouldn’t allow them to proceed with the plan and have any assurance the backpack would make it to the hive.
