by Joshua Guess
“It's a big trade commodity,” Jo said, sounding like she was reading from a textbook. Unlike Tabby, she spent her formative years out here dealing with reality. “Spices are too, but people can live without those. Salt can get you twenty times its weight in food. More, if you're smart about who you trade with.”
We checked barrel after barrel, and they were all the same. The crates varied, however. Some were full of useful goods for farming, from shovels to seeds. Others contained once common items that were, if not luxuries, at least in demand enough to garner a premium. One of those was a five by five crate of what was clearly new toilet paper. Manufactured after the Fall.
It was an incredible haul by anyone's definition.
“Tabby, can you please go back to the van and get in touch with Ron? I want the flying company here ASAP to guard this while a detail from Haven gets set up. He can call Will and set that up, too. We have maybe a day and a half before the Sons are back here if we're lucky. I want to take as much of this as we can.” Tabby nodded and took off at a jog, seemingly unbothered by another long run through woods that might surprise her with zombies. I turned to Jo. “We need to catalog this stuff if possible.”
Jo gave me her best 'come the fuck on, man' look and held up the small notebook she carried with her obsessively, and shook it. “I kept a list while you two were doing the hard work. It's comprehensive.”
“Is there anything you do that isn't?” I asked.
Jo shrugged. “I'm an indifferent lover.”
I put my hands over my ears. “Gah! I've known you since you were in a training bra! I don't need to hear that.”
Jo turned and walked off with a snicker. She wandered deep into the warehouse, surely to continue noting everything in it we missed on the first pass, and probably figure out a way to make the process of stealing all this shit easier. Luck was on our side: Haven was like every other community with its years of practice taking large volumes of supplies when discovered. This place was out of the way by design. Sneaking a couple semi-trucks in to pursue a five-finger discount was business as usual.
I hopped up on the hood of the truck left behind by the Sons we'd killed. It too would be taken. Everything would. That was all part of the plan.
I set my brain into the weird mode where I listened for everything and anything that might be a threat without really thinking about it. If zombies showed up, I would catch the noise of their footsteps before they became a problem. Both entrances to the warehouse were directly behind me—no chance of anything sneaking in to surprise Jo without my being aware of its presence first.
I pulled my own little notebook out and flipped to the last few pages. The script appeared to be complete nonsense, the letters and numbers a code my dad and I came up with when I was a kid. Contained in those few pages were, in condensed form, all the plans and ideas for the strike force. It was a living document by necessity. I had to change things and shift strategy and tactics as facts on the ground changed.
The plan—it was hard to think of as a war since it was closer to the operations I used to run than any shooting war—was always going to be executed in three parts. There would be weeks yet of the first stage, but capturing the warehouse would certainly accelerate the timetable. Months of observations never showed us this place. It was only after getting into the field that we discovered a whole depot full of valuable supplies to take away from the enemy.
As I wrote down my thoughts, Jo appeared once more. The sun was noticeably lower in the sky than when I sat to jot in the book.
“What's going on in that pretty little head of yours?” she asked as she pulled herself up onto the hood of the truck. “You're always talking about these situations being fluid. How does this change the game?”
I finished writing down a thought and stowed the book. I gazed off into the distance, thinking hard. “I always wondered why there weren't more obvious shipments of supplies coming in. I mean, we saw the trucks entering the compound. We knew they were coming from somewhere. That distribution center has a shitload of stuff in it, but not the kinds of things the Sons need to build a home. We just assumed we hadn't found the routes their trucks were using. If there's one of these supply dumps, there are probably others. They've got to be using them as outside trading posts.”
Jo chewed on that for a few seconds, and then lit up. “Oh. Because otherwise they'd just stock all this stuff up at their compound. No need to leave it here unless they're exchanging some of it with third parties.”
I nodded. “And they knew we'd notice that kind of traffic. It's smart, and it's risky. Leaves them open for exactly what happened here today.”
Jo whistled. “Oh, shit. That means we can take or torch their stuff and figure out who they're trading with and cut off access. They'll be reliant on just what they have in their compound.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Way faster than we planned for. Gotta be careful, though. Lopping off their supply lines is critical, but if we do it wrong they'll starve or get desperate before we're ready. The last thing we want is the Sons deciding to kill their captive work force, including those kids.”
It was a concern, but a manageable one. A problem a lot of smart people put a great deal of time and effort into solving. We'd figure it out using those blueprints. What worried me far more were the random unknowns. Wild cards always fucked up the game, especially when you didn't even know they were in play.
Right now, that was wondering who the hell would or even could trade with these assholes right under our noses.
10
Starve the roots. That's the way you have to do it. Cut off the flow of nutrients into the main body and eventually the branches weaken. The trunk saves itself. That's what phase one was meant to do to the Relentless Sons, and we managed it nearly perfectly.
Nearly.
Three weeks of teams hijacking every fuel run, every food shipment, every scout mission all culminated in the exact response we expected. The Sons recalled their people back from the sprawl of interconnected little camps spread out for miles in every direction outside the compound. We assumed they expected the strike force—of whom there were now painfully aware—to pilfer and search them, so we avoided it. The enemy wasn't stupid. They surely planted traps.
The compound itself was massive, a former distribution center once used as a hub for goods at dozens of local super stores. The volume of canned food inside alone would be enough to feed thousands for months or longer, and that's after the slow attrition to the stores caused by Haven taking supplies from it off and on when needed. We'd used it and used it hard, but hundreds of tons of food remained by the time the Sons moved in.
The space surrounding it was unrecognizable from six months earlier. A rough barrier of fallen trees created a ring nearly a mile across to keep out the dead, and there were a lot of dead. Zombies milled around in the hundreds outside the tangled masses of trees and limbs, and within the circle farmland dominated. There were pens set up for livestock, a long row of chicken coops that looked constructed either by an amateur or a madman, and a holding area for dissidents.
I saw all of this from a distance of about half a mile from the edge of the ring. Even from the water tower and with my powerful binoculars, it was all fairly vague. I knew what I was looking at mostly from intel gathered from captives.
I was alone on the tower. This was an obvious location to watch the enemy, so chances were decent someone with a good scope and a steady hand would take a shot if they saw me. My outfit and face, all my gear in fact, were dusted with a faded blue pigment to match the paint of the tower as closely as possible. I wasn't invisible, but it was good enough to keep me unnoticed if I used enough care.
“What do you see?” Allen asked, his voice coming in over the ear piece with surprising clarity. He waited with the others at the tower's base and used our encrypted radio.
I'd kept the wire for the earpiece in my hand so I didn't have to make any quick movements to talk back. Very handy for it to have a contro
l box embedded in the wire. “What we expected. They've got regular guards and sentries along the walls and roof. Not much happening out in the grounds. Too cold, I guess. Everyone is inside except for them. They've got zombies all over the exterior. That's a pretty effective deterrent.”
Allen mumbled a reply, which I thought took dedication to his entire grumpy persona since he actively had to push a button to get his wordless irritation across. Not that I disagreed with it; phase two was going to be the hardest part of the job.
“Allen, make a note for the next watcher up here,” I said, trying to think around all the corners. “See if they can get a better set of eyes on the compound. Something more powerful than my binoculars. If any of their sentries are using infrared or thermal imaging, we need to know that ahead of time. Won't do us any good to try to sneak up on them if they can see us anyway.”
“Will do,” Allen said. “Lemme hand you off so I can take care of that now, assuming you aren't staying up there for the next eight hours.”
Greg came on the radio next. “Hey, you're gonna want to get down from there pretty soon. One of those herders is coming in from the west with a big group of zombies. Hardening the defenses, I guess.”
I frowned. “Why is that a problem for us?” The Sons had taken a deer or something like it and apparently fed it through a wood chipper—the walls were liberally splashed with blood and chunks of meat at regular intervals to keep the attention of the dead. “We're on the east. We're good. It's not like their zombies will smell us this far away.”
“No,” Greg said patiently, as if to a dumb child, “but our intel, if you bothered to read through all of it, says those herders do a full circle around the wall to make sure they've got coverage. They do it every time. We're not that far from the path our people have seen them take. So get your ass down here. We're leaving. Better safe than sorry.”
Thankfully, the ladder was on the side of the tower facing away from the compound. That meant I could climb down as fast as I wanted, which was a nice change of pace since I had to inch backward on the platform. I idly wondered why the Sons hadn't taken down the water tower. It was after all a handy perch for people like me. Maybe they didn't have access to the kinds of firepower or explosives needed to do the job. Might just not have been worth it.
Then I realized exactly why the tower was still there: they'd used it for the same purpose themselves right up until we made them retract into their base like a pair of balls exposed to an Alaskan winter.
I made it down with time to spare. The herder wouldn't be near us for at least ten or fifteen minutes.
Unfortunately the small squad of Relentless Sons and their protective swarm of at least twenty zombies that managed to sneak up on us chose that moment to pop out of the nearby woods and raise weapons. Yes, the zombies too.
A few things hit me all at once. The first was that the water tower made a nice trap. If you're going to leave it up, might as well have a hidden scout watching it to see if you catch anything. The second was a brief flurry of mental activity that was all emotion but translated roughly to 'how the fuck did they sneak up on us like that oh god what did I miss' followed by a sudden burst of confusion and pain as a bullet winged me in the shoulder.
Someone grabbed my jacket and pulled me to the dirt, rolling me behind a section of the concrete road barrier surrounding the base of the tower, which sat just behind the failing chain-link fence that once kept the animals at bay.
“You froze?” Greg said incredulously. “You? I didn't think that happened.”
I didn't see Jo or Tabby, which was a good sign. Greg and his brother were remarkable woodsmen, able fighters, and guys I'd be happy to have at my back. But Jo and Tabby existed on a level of dangerous I can only describe as petty. They weren't the scariest people in the world, but both had learned the hard way to pull no punches and give no quarter. If they'd managed to slip away, something super unpleasant was going down, and soon.
“You're shot,” Greg noted in the same tone he'd have used to mention that water was wet or the Pope: secretly Catholic.
“I'm a little shot,” I said. “Just a graze. I'm fine. Notice how no one else is shooting?”
Greg, hunkered down and staring at me with eyes that didn't match his otherwise relaxed body language, nodded. “Someone got antsy. What's with the zombies carrying clubs and shit? That's weird, right? It's not just me?”
“They're dead people animated by a weird bug,” I said. “Clubs are kind of meh by comparison.”
Both of us went instantly alert at a loud scraping sound. We'd have heard the group approaching, as there was just no way they could have avoided the carpet of debris from the woods scattered outside the perimeter. Because we set it up that way, not being complete idiots.
I made my mental map of the area. The woods were about thirty yards away. The Sons knew we were trapped, so they were happy to take their time and find good positions. Oh, we could have made a move, but getting out from behind the barrier was a sure way of catching a bullet even if we stayed low.
Greg tensed as the scraping noise echoed over us again. It was louder—closer. I tried to imagine what it could be, but there just wasn't enough information. It didn't matter, really. We were stuck here until something changed. Greg and I were both armed, but I didn't favor shooting blindly in the general direction of my enemies.
The barrier stretched most of the way around the tower. Large blocks of concrete cope well with years of exposure. The few sections that were missing like gaps in a dreary smile were on the other side of the rough circle. I could move a good twenty, thirty feet in either direction before the curve of the low wall gave up on me.
I was just about to suggest Greg and I go opposite directions when the scrape happened again, this time incredibly close. Before I could open my mouth, I saw him react. It was pure gut instinct as his body rocked back in its crouched position, which lifted his head as he tried to catch his balance. No more than the top three or four inches cleared the barrier. Just the eyes on up.
I knew what was about to happen before it came. I'd been that guy before, the one on the other end of a scope. The one who waits for exactly this moment. For a single mistake.
The top of Greg's head transformed into a ragged mist of red and white and gray like a firework gone horribly wrong. My own instinct took over—the one drilled into me over my years of service. My muscles and joints locked down to keep me from doing the obvious thing and leaping toward him.
One difference between a civilian and just about anyone who has seen combat is your reaction to death. After enough people die in front of you, the normal human urge to believe against all fact and evidence that the person you just saw die might still be alive starts to atrophy. The world is a graveyard, now. Most everyone has the same way of seeing it as any veteran.
Instead of dramatically throwing myself on Greg's corpse (and that was what it was now, no question, from friend to empty meat in a fraction of a heartbeat) I waited a few seconds before lowering myself down and crawling closer to him. When I got near enough, I hauled him back up against the wall one hard pull at a time, using his clothes and then his own limbs to pull him next to me.
My degree in psychology and decades of giving it practical use against enemies means I can explain in great detail where the next thing I did came from. I could talk about my history and why I chose to do what came next, but I won't. Instead I'll just give the facts, as hard and unchanging as the shape of a coffin nail.
The gaping, voracious maw of grief tried to open up inside me. It was both a hungry mouth and a gaping wound, an injury come to life after the first major loss I suffered—my mom. I felt it there, never healed but sometimes quiescent, and driving me toward a bad decision. There was no fighting that any more than a man alone could escape gravity. That rising sense of red hot darkness climbing my veins burned.
And as always, I had the choice whether to let it run wild or to use it in a deliberate way. Doing nothing was not an opti
on. Imagine choosing not to grieve for a dead child—that was the sort of compulsive power I was under.
So I grabbed Greg's coat and cut away the front of it in a few deft strokes of my very sharp knife. I slid his pistol into my jeans near my own and stuffed the pair of magazines into my pocket. I wrapped the remains of his coat's front section around my left arm, a shrouded rectangle about a foot tall and eight inches wide. When the work was done, I got myself into a crouch. A ready crouch. The sort sprinters use.
I raised the cloth-wrapped strike plate in front of my face. With my pistol in hand, I took a deep breath and sent out a mental fuck you to the universe before leaping up and over the barrier with cold rage driving me.
11
Whoever killed Greg wasn't quite as quick on the mark the second time around. The shot came a half second too late. By the time the bullet sang through the air, I was already over the barrier and running.
I didn't let myself get tunnel vision. Moving toward an enemy, even obliquely, means seeing what you can see, if you can see it. I took in a lot during that mad, angled sprint toward the trees. The scraping sound had come from a zombie carrying a large club with a piece of metal wrapped around its head. The noise must have come from it dragging the thing as it slowly walked through the debris at a shuffle—pushing the twigs away without snapping them.
Damn. Outfoxed by a dead man.
Some of the enemy were visible to me as I cut to their left in a line, desperate to put trees between us. Their numbers and firearms would mean a lot less with woods acting as a barrier. I'd chosen my direction for that reason; one end of the winding road leading to the tower was near their position. I headed away from it. Toward cover.
A few more shots rang out but missed. Forcing them to try and fire at me through the trees between us was my only chance. I managed to reach the edge of the woods with no more holes in me than when I started. I put my shoulder to the bole of a broad elm and reevaluated. That the Sons were able to train zombies wasn't all that surprising. Even the dumb ones had about as much intelligence as your average dog. Give them food and they'll learn to behave well enough. I'd seen it before.
