by Joshua Guess
The woman, injured and haggard though she was, lit into a glorious smile. “Thank you.”
I sent her on her way and kept on moving through the building. The layout of the place was burned into my brain. I knew where King and his lieutenants kept themselves holed up. I knew the narrow little byways that would keep me out of the fighting.
I used every goddamn one of them. The rows of rooms used to keep the kids locked up were a fraction of the total floor space here. The bigger spaces toward the center of the building didn't have those partitions, not by design. But the Sons had taken great joy in turning the place into a warren of twisting lanes bordered by discarded boxes stacked improbably high, or pallets of supplies positioned around spots they'd be used. As a result, there were endless blind spots and narrow alleyways lining the big floor space like overgrown veins.
I avoided them by slipping into an access hall twenty feet into the second main room. The smoke concealed me as much as the chaos boiling over in every direction. I shouldered through that access door without drawing so much as a sideways glance. Being large, armed, and clearly pissed off probably helped. My last sight before letting the door swing shut behind me was of the vast straight line carved through the messy communal living space by the tank.
Good. Fuck these guys. They deserved far worse than just having their home jacked up.
There were emergency lights burning in the narrow utility hallway just around the short landing before it branched off in both directions at a right angle. By sheer luck, the guy guarding the door on the inside happened to be both facing away from me and yawning when I stepped inside.
I didn't have the room or time to raise the gun properly, so I set my legs and angled it upward slightly at my chest. The noise of the shot made my ears ring, and a fine mist of blood and brain matter drifted into my mouth.
“Gross,” I muttered as I stepped over his body, spitting.
I checked left. Nothing. Then I looked down the right hallway, which was where I wanted to go. Held back by a section of thin wire fence nailed across the width of the space were zombies. They filled the hallway. Could have been a dozen, or a hundred. There was no way to count them in the dark beyond the emergency light.
“I'm getting real tired of you assholes,” I told the dead people. The sentiment was also directed at the Sons for putting this clever little defense in place. With a sigh, I got to work.
Answer: close to a hundred. As it turned out, the magazine already in my rifle was nearly empty when I picked it up, and the pair stuffed into my pockets weren't even half full. Common trick when you're running low on critical supplies like ammunition to spread what you have out to make yourself look better armed and supplied than you actually are. An enemy who thinks you can shoot back as much as you like is far less likely to fuck with you than if he knows you'll blow your load in the first salvo.
We'd known the Sons were scraping the bottom of the barrel for bullets. It was another factor in why we felt our patchwork attack plan had a real chance to succeed. You can take a lot of chances on educated guesses when the other guy is going to avoid taking a shot at you as long as humanly possible.
I tossed the gun aside and eyed the carpet of dead zombies beyond the homemade gate before deciding to leave my pistol alone. I might need those rounds later.
I drew my knife and pulled the wire free on one side, carefully stepping on the dead littering the ground as I worked my way toward the depressing number of them still up and kicking.
There was no art to it. The narrowness of the hallway made the job simple if not exactly easy. The zombies pushed on each other and if that effort was purely in forward motion, they'd have rolled over me in a tide in seconds. The problem was a lack of coordinated effort. They bunched up and were pushed against the walls in clots. I used my left arm to ward off their teeth and limbs, and struck with the knife in my right over and over again. A bit like chopping wood, to be honest. Killing my way through the hall had that same sort of boring rhythm.
I don't mean to make it sound like there wasn't any danger. There was. Those zombies could have broken loose at any moment and surged forward, and I'd have had to turn tail and get some distance while stepping on the uneven scrum of bodies I left behind. But that didn't happen. The piece of custom plastic armor I wore on my left forearm beneath my coat didn't suffer a failure, and the coat held up to bites and scratches.
Toward the end took a little more work, and though I should have been exhausted to the point of falling over, I only felt a new burst of energy as I reached the last few zombies. My arm was getting a bit tired from the repetitive thrusts of the knife, but other than that I felt just fine.
The last zombie fell forward and I took a few seconds to catch my breath. Clearing the hall didn't require much skill or creativity, but it was work.
After that brief rest, I kept on moving. I followed the left branch of the hall when it split off again—this section of the facility needed a lot more infrastructure since it was once home to several frozen foods suppliers. The walls were also thicker and better insulated, which was presumably why King made it his home.
About forty feet from the door I hoped wouldn't be welded shut, I heard a gargantuan noise. Attenuated through several walls as it was, my brain couldn't quite work out what I was hearing. It was sharp and had a clattering quality to it, but other than that I drew a blank. The possibility existed that I'd tripped some kind of alarm, though I hadn't seen anything along the way. That didn't mean there wasn't a hidden infrared laser somewhere I blithely walked through, just that if there was, I missed it.
I was even more cautious those last few yards, sidling up to the door against the wall. This hallway was blocked off in every other direction according to my sources. The way I'd come was also the only way out. I assumed King set it up that way in case he and his boys wanted to make an escape—they knew they'd have to kill their way out but that no one else was likely to even try to enter this way.
Silently praying there wasn't a trap hooked up to the steel door, I slid my face all the way up to the small rectangular window running vertically above the handle.
Blacked out. “Well, shit,” I murmured. “Whoever watches out for me, just give me this one last bit of luck, please.”
I opened the door with excruciating care. Anything could have been attached, any kind of bomb or mine or even a gun. I've almost had my head blown clean off three different times by shotguns rigged to doorways.
There was nothing. No traps or even alarms. And inside the room was...also nothing.
Oh, there were things. The place was clearly lived-in and for a fairly long time. The detritus of human occupation was everywhere. The large space, once surely an open floor filled with racks and shelves for bulk refrigerated goods, was now lined on the edges with what looked like small apartments or rooms. Built right there just like in the hangar back home. It looked as if whoever was here left in quite a hurry. They hadn't even closed the door behind them.
I ambled over to the large bay door, at least twenty feet across and with grooves in the floor long enough to make me sure entire semi-trailers were loaded onto the platform to be emptied in the once-cold room, and looked outside. The rolling door itself was nestled deeply between two wings of the facility, which spread out and away at gentle angles. The wall of metal outside the bay door which had armored it from attack—we'd looked into it—was gone. No, not gone. Knocked flat. I saw it laying there on the ground, a hinge secured to the concrete now obvious in the moonlight.
Gone. King and his closest allies managed to get away. How many, I had no way to know. But if he'd been planning this for a while, there could be hundreds of Relentless Sons out there with him. I saw a section of wall—what looked like the northwest corner—simply gone, a huge gap where the toppled trees should have been. That massive noise had to have been those bastards vacating. I'd just missed them.
Looking at the room, I became more sure we'd been played. The infiltration was easy enou
gh and made sense, but the lack of real opposition inside looked too easy in retrospect. The furious parents attacking the Sons should have met serious resistance.
Unless King had withdrawn all but a fraction of his people. The ones he considered expendable. If that was the case, and I would know for sure very soon, it meant the worst of the worst had all escaped together.
“Son of a bitch,” I said to the empty space.
24
There were consequences. I wish it weren't so.
The fighting went on all through the night and into the morning—it really couldn't have lasted beyond the break of day. Once visibility increased, the fractured groups of remaining Sons couldn't hide themselves in shadows or run away through any of the gaps in the wall.
Many of them surrendered. Many did not. Some fought right to the bitter end and a portion of those made it their goal in life to punish any of their captives or the more reluctant Sons in any way they could.
In short, the remaining hours of night were the worst kind of warfare. It was messy and cruel, wasteful in material and lives. Especially lives. The kids we'd taken from their hiding spot were not all the children; there were twice as many teens and other young adults among the fighters who had graduated to their positions. All told, the Sons had taken more than six hundred kids and their families, leaning more strongly toward keeping families with children old enough to work and fight.
Totaled up it was close to a thousand people. Of that, we rescued the two hundred and put them in the cave. Of the remaining eight hundred actual innocents, less than five hundred survived the night.
I contemplated this number in my command post at the southern edge of the wall, now a splintered mess where the tank had come back out when it was done. I sat on a rickety folding chair with one hand wrapped around my other fist, my mouth pressed close against them.
“How many orphans did we make today?” I asked.
Allen, who sat across from me with a bandage wrapped around most of his head, leaving only his right eye and mouth exposed, didn't lean forward or otherwise move when he replied. “Maybe a lot. You think any of those parents wouldn't have traded their lives to get their kids to safety? A lot of them did, you know.”
Now that it was over, I could berate myself all I wanted. The plan made such perfect sense to me before the assault. I knew logically that it was the right way to go. Isolate the enemy. Tweak their psyches just enough to create doubt. Find pressure points. Drive wedges. Sow disinformation. We did all of that and more, even up to making the strike force look just overconfident enough to be believable when we let ourselves be seen so we King would never think the militia was on its way to help us.
For the millionth time, I wished that the Sons had only ever been a bunch of marauders. We could have wiped them off the map in an hour, then. Less. It would have been so easy. Don't get me wrong, I was happy to take the kids away and get them to safety.
But this right here was why I left the Navy. This overwhelming and pervasive sense of responsibility for the deaths out there.
“Numbers are in,” Jo said as she stepped beneath the canopy, slapping a clipboard down in my folding table. “Best anyone can tell is King took about five hundred with him. Almost as many surrendered to us. About four hundred more escaped. We'll probably never get an accurate count of the dead, but the rebels and our people left behind a lot of bodies. At least two thousand. This place was packed.”
I nodded. “Okay. But why are you telling me this? I'm not in command anymore.”
“I thought you'd want to know,” Jo said, sounding a little hurt. “Mason, you did an incredible job here. The biggest problem we might have is feeding all these extra mouths until we get them to Haven. That's definitely the kind we want.”
I saw Tabby walking with Logan a few dozen yards away. They held hands, neither seeming to want to let the other go. And who could blame them?
“We've got scouts tracking King and his bunch,” Jo continued doggedly. “Patrols are also looking for smaller bands of Sons out there that might have split up. They're going to be a problem for anyone they run across, so Kate is dead set on hunting them down.”
“Good for her,” I said. Then I stood up. “I'm going home.”
Jo blinked. “You're just...leaving?”
“I'm just leaving,” I said. “I did what I set out to do. I kept my promise. I miss Bobby and Hannah. I miss having heat. I'm hurt and tired and I'm fucking furious King got away. So for now I'm going back to my family and not thinking about any of this for a while.”
At that moment, I meant it. I didn't realize at the time that just as when I hadn't jumped down the hole and into the cave, I was lying to Jo again.
I drove myself, taking one of the many vehicles left behind by the fleeing Sons. There were a lot of them lined up along the vast concrete spaces around the abandoned compound that had been their home only a day before. Rather than some macho truck with big ass spikes on it as you might believe fitting for a guy with my skills and reputation, I picked a Honda that had been new in the final days of human civilization. Give the Sons credit where it was due; they were smart enough to pick reliability over style.
It did have spikes, though. A couple.
I glided down the highway at about twenty miles an hour, sometimes as fast as forty if the lanes were especially clear. Going slow was just a way of life now. Too many things hid beneath the thin layers of debris overgrown trees shed onto the roadways. Not just traps like the ones we'd used against the Sons. Even natural consequences were dangers to be watched for. Cracked and crumbling blacktop, immense potholes, even animal carcasses made difficult to see until you were right on top of them.
I took the time to think. Part of it was self-recrimination for the endless dead left behind. Too many innocents. I certainly cycled through the laundry list of things I probably could have done better. I told myself that in the moment, in the field, you can only operate as the situation dictates. I knew questioning myself was a losing battle just as I knew that once in a while it did pay off with an insight that might help me save more lives in the next fight, whatever form that might take.
But increasingly heavy on my mind were the facts I hadn't been able to put together, the information only taking a coherent shape once the right seed crystal dropped into them to pull the pieces into a whole.
King had run. King and a lot of his people had run.
Their lair was huge, with the central space left clear. How many school buses or other vehicles capable of carrying a lot of people could have fit there? Ten? At least. How many had exited through the bay door once it was open, moving on foot ahead of time and out of sight of our scouts? We knew a lot of them had to have done that, because we found a fucking tunnel dug from just outside King's wing of the building all the way under the wall and letting out on the other side right into a convenient gully that meandered away from the battlefield for a good half mile.
These thoughts consumed me as I drove home. They were on my mind when I parked the car and walked through Haven's gate, even when I kissed Bobby hello and gave Hannah a twirl.
They were there as he and I sat down later that night and I filled him in.
Bobby's elbows rested on the table, fingers laced together and face deadly serious. “You think King was planning to run from as soon as you started picking off his supply runners, huh? That he played you?”
I chewed on the inside of my lip and gave a half-nod, half-shrug. “I know that much. He wasn't bluffing with the kids. He'd have tortured them all to death if it gained him anything. I think he figured we'd make a play for them and made it just hard enough for us to feel real. He let us take them because he knew it would buy him time to get his people out. We know from a couple eyewitness accounts they drove buses out of there. And that's what bothers me.”
Bobby frowned. “What does? I don't get it.”
“Where King decided to house his throne room,” I said. “He set up right in a place with a good exit and
with access to a straight shot away. He planned ahead far enough that the wall his people built was designed to be super close to his wing of the place. Because I think he knew even when they moved into it that they'd be leaving. Planned on it.”
Bobby pinched the bridge of his nose and said, in a long-suffering voice, “Stop being a cryptic asshole, please.”
“I don't just think King was always planning to leave,” I said. “Having an exit strategy is just good, basic doctrine. I think his entire plan was always to leave. Ask yourself why he'd send his people so far south from the distribution facility just to snatch up people he had to know would be missed. It's not like he wasn't aware of Haven or that it was our territory.”
Bobby's eyes grew wide. “Wait. He fucking wanted us to come at him? Why?”
“They were a dead nation,” I said. “That kid Colin was right. I think King moved his whole band down here with the intent to pick a fight. If he'd have tried to break away on his own, or killed too many people to thin the numbers, he'd have risked being overwhelmed. I think that motherfucker used us to lift his biggest problem right from his shoulders. We cut away four, four and a half thousand people that were dead weight to him and his boys.”
“Jesus,” Bobby said. “If that's true, he's a scary dude. That's a lot of thinking around corners.”
I gave a halfhearted shrug. “It's what I would have done in his place, if those were my problems and I was a sociopath.”
Bobby put up his hands. “Oh, I get the utility of it. It's just cold blooded is all. Tricking people into a war just to give himself an exit. It's...a lot to process.”
It took me a while to work up my nerve enough to broach the subject I knew he wouldn't want to hear but also knew he'd expect. “We need to talk about what comes next.”
“What do you mean?” he asked with a thoroughly unconvincing attempt at sincere innocence. “You're all done, right?”
“Let's not do this, please,” I implored him, putting a hand on his. “King is cold-blooded. Even if I'm wrong and he didn't deliberately pick a fight to get rid of his dead weight, I don't think he'll come for us. You'll be safe. Hannah will be safe. But...”
