The night was warm and humid. A low-lying veil of thin clouds scudded past overhead, casting a halo around the bright half-moon. Hastings stopped on the concrete stoop. Outside the pool of light generated by the single porch light behind him, there wasn’t much to see. The barracks he and his people were housed in was one of ten such buildings arranged in a neat row. Theirs was at the end of the line, and Hastings knew that at least seven of the others were fully occupied with a mix of active-duty troops, National Guardsmen, and in some cases, reservists and civilians. He hadn’t had much time to get to know his neighbors, nor was he particularly interested in doing so. There was a lot to be done, and community hobnobbing wasn’t high on his list of missions to accomplish.
He heard the crunch of gravel, and he turned to see a single Humvee pull around the far corner of the row of barracks several hundred feet away. The vehicle was rolling up the driveway at a slow rate of speed, headlights bobbing slightly as it trundled over small rises and dips. Its diesel engine rattled beneath its wide hood. When the Humvee drew near, it came to a stop. Hastings could make out the forms of several soldiers inside—MPs on security patrol.
“Everything all right, sir?” the driver asked.
“We’re good,” Hastings replied. “Anything happening out in the world?”
“Seems pretty quiet right now. You sure you’re square, sir?”
“Totally sure,” Hastings said. “You guys mind pulling on? We’ve got an autistic civilian inside, and if he wakes up, he’s going to start screaming.”
The MP nodded. “Have a good one, sir.”
The vehicle pulled away, rounded the corner, and disappeared from view.
“What did they want?”
Startled, Hastings spun around. Diana stood on the concrete stoop behind him. She wore black jeans and a dark T-shirt.
“Take it easy, General,” she said. “I come in peace.”
Hastings relaxed minutely. He found he was gripping his M4, ready to use it. He released the weapon’s forestock, allowing the barrel to drop back down. “Sorry about that. It was just a normal security patrol. Military police, out keeping the peace. Nothing to worry about.”
Diana stepped up beside him and ran a hand through her long black hair. “What are you doing out here? Standing guard?”
“I guess.”
She slid her hands into the back pockets of her jeans. “Do we need to do that?”
“Do what?”
“Stand guard.”
Hastings shook his head. “No. I’m not really standing guard. I just… couldn’t sleep.”
“The kid woke you up?”
“No. Like I said, I couldn’t sleep.”
Diana looked out into the night. “It’s tough to catch some shut-eye lately, that’s true.”
“I guess the end of the world will do that to you. Thanks for taking care of the kid. I think he’d be lost without you.”
“Motherhood doesn’t suit me. The only person I’m used to taking care of is myself. Don’t get me wrong. I know he needs someone to look after him, but I’m really the wrong choice, General.”
“I’m not a general,” Hastings said.
“I know, I know. You’re a captain. But from where I sit, they might as well make you a general. You’re like the only guy who does shit around here.” She pointed at the other barracks buildings. “See anyone else standing around out here? No, they’re all sleeping like babies because they’re stupid dopes who don’t know what’s about to happen.”
“Soldiers can sleep anywhere, anytime,” Hastings said.
She looked over at him. “Then why can’t you?”
Hastings shrugged and avoided her gaze. Out of habit, he did a quick scan of the area. Crickets chirped, and other insects trilled in the night. A mosquito buzzed by his left ear, and he waved it away. Moths fluttered against the light behind them, banging into the glass cover again and again like zombies crashing against a car window, trying to get at people trapped inside.
“Sorry you lost your people,” Diana said.
He didn’t know what to say to that, either. “Thanks” was all he could manage.
“And, uh, thanks for taking us in,” she blurted. “I know I’m a bitch, and Kenny’s, well, Kenny. You could have pitched us a long time ago. Thanks for that.”
“We’re not the kind of guys to do that,” Hastings said.
“Yeah, well, thanks anyway.”
“You’re welcome.” Hastings paused. “So why were you traveling with Kenny’s family?”
“They had supplies, and the husband wanted to fuck me, so it was easy to tag along,” Diana said. “I wasn’t interested, but I made him think I was, so he invited me along. It was safer than being alone.”
“So you led a guy on so he’d protect you?”
“Yes.” She looked up at him again. “All I have are my looks and my brains. I can tell what guys want; it’s how I made my living before… all this. I could tell who was willing to pay and who was just interested in trying to get me drunk enough to sleep with them. I got a lot of drinks. Asian girls are popular in places like Boston and New York.”
Hastings grunted. “Sounds like a miserable life.”
“Not really. I made over two hundred thousand a year. Sure, I had to work for it but not a lot. There are eight thousand, seven hundred sixty hours in a year. I could make two hundred grand in five hundred hours. When I toured and did the dance club circuit, I could make another hundred grand or so. But that took up a hell of a lot of time, so I didn’t do that very often, though sometimes the change in scenery wasn’t bad.”
Hastings shook his head. “So selling yourself to the highest bidder was easier, huh?”
“Yeah. Four hundred dollars an hour. Every now and then, a guy would be generous. For a while, I had a regular who flew me to California. He gave me ten thousand dollars to spend a weekend a month with him in Santa Barbara. Had a gorgeous house up in the hills, some big hacienda-like place that had a view of the town and the Pacific Ocean. He had two Lambos, one white, one black. So I’d fly to Los Angeles on a first-class ticket, and he had a helicopter take me to his place. Direct. Get there at about two o’clock in the afternoon on Friday, leave at the same time on Sunday. I treated him right, and he tossed in a hell of a tip. It wasn’t bad working for him. I just had to do what he told me to do, and he never did anything that left any marks. He was a catch.”
“Maybe you should’ve kept him,” Hastings said.
She shook her head. “Not a chance. Guys like that, they have short attention spans. I got four months out of him, then he found something else to do with his time. Doing what with whom, I don’t know, but that’s how things work out. So, yeah, I sold myself to the highest bidder and made out like a bandit. If you’re smart about it, it’s pretty low risk.”
“So I guess you’re smart then.”
“I graduated from New York University, so I’d better be.”
Hastings glanced over at her then turned away when she looked up at him. “NYU, huh? They teach pole dancing there?”
“No, but they do teach finance and accounting. I was planning on being a tax attorney. After NYU, I was going to head out to Berkeley and get my JD. Things got sidetracked in my senior year, though. I started dancing for money at Scores and Sin City, and that’s when I got into the life.”
“So you were just going to let that education go to waste?” Hastings shook his head. “All that time with your nose to the grindstone?”
“Not a lot of people are able to make six figures out of the starting gate. I was able to pay back a lot of loans in less than two years. And I was getting more than what I’d make as a paralegal, or even as an entry-level attorney at a big firm, without having to work hundred-hour-plus weeks. And hey, sometimes it was fun.”
“So no boyfriend?” Hastings asked. “I would guess a husband would be out of the question.”
“I had boyfriends in college. A few relationships after that, but nothing too serious. I didn
’t want any complications, and face it, no guy’s gonna want to date a girl like me long term, doing the work that I did.” She crossed her arms. “Why the interest, General?”
Hastings huffed. “Stop calling me that.”
“Okay. Captain. Or do you prefer I just call you ‘sir’? I can do that, you know. One of my former clients was an ex-Marine. He liked it when I put on a uniform and bossed him around.”
Hastings snorted. “You sure led an interesting life. Weren’t you afraid of catching AIDS?”
“Sure. But with the proper compensating controls, you can manage the risk.”
“‘Compensating controls’? ‘Manage the risk’?” Hastings chuckled. “You keep that up, your new job will be creating PowerPoint presentations for staff meetings.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so. Me in meetings doesn’t go over very well. Besides, all you military guys do is stare at my tits and talk about whacking off all over them. That guy Stilley, his voice really carries. Just in case you didn’t know.”
“Yeah, everyone knows that.”
She fell silent, staring off into the distance. Hastings wished she would keep talking. It kept his mind off darker things.
After a few minutes, she asked, “So, is that creepy guy right?”
“Who? Stilley?”
“No. The new guy. The one who asked if you thought you could stop a few million zombies. Is he right? Are millions of them coming?”
He sighed. “Eventually.”
Diana turned to face him. “Can you stop them?”
He thought she would look frightened, but she didn’t. Either she didn’t realize the tremendously precarious position they were in, or she had faith they would get through it. Or maybe she was just resigned to whatever fate threw her way.
“We’re making plans to deal with them.” He pointed in the direction of the rail yard. “That’s why those guys are off-loading the trains. We’re going to build a series of defensive positions, so we can take the reekers out when they try to roll up on us.”
“Can you really kill millions of them?”
“Technically, yes. We have enough munitions here. It’s going to take some doing, though. It’s a big job.” What Hastings didn’t tell her that it would mean every shot had to count, that every soldier had to be a regular dead-eye with every bullet. There was no wounding the dead and expecting them to give up. Even concentration fire from artillery batteries wouldn’t stop them; the most it could do would delay them. He considered explaining that using the natural barriers the terrain provided would help redirect or contain the horde, but he got the idea she wasn’t into the minutiae of combat operations. She just wanted some reassurance. “We’ll be fine,” he said.
“And what if we’re not? What if they get in here? What’s the plan?”
“They won’t get in,” Hastings said.
“Really? Because I watched them sack Boston, and it didn’t look like they had to work very hard. Everything the soldiers and cops did, nothing worked. They started coming out of the woodwork. Out of the hospitals, out of the suburbs. One day, there were a dozen of them. The next day, a hundred. A couple of days later, thousands. The police, the military, no one could keep up with it, and even though they had to have killed thousands of them, the number of zombies just kept getting bigger, while live people kept getting eaten. So you think you can stop them from taking us out?”
“We have some advantages,” Hastings said. “We’re on a military reservation. We have full fields of fire. We don’t have the same kind of considerations that the Guard and police had in Boston.”
“What about New York? How many of you guys were there?” She pointed at the 10th Mountain Division patch on his sleeve. “You know, your unit.”
“My division, you mean? Yeah, we were all there. Over ten thousand guys.”
“Ten thousand guys couldn’t stop it?” She raised her eyebrows. “Holy crap, how many guys are here?”
“About six thousand total. Some reconstituted line units, National Guard units, even some reservists. That number doesn’t include civilians, only uniforms.”
“So if ten thousand couldn’t stop them then—”
He raised his hand. “New York, Boston, Philly… those were cities. Big metropolitan areas, full of Americans. Our initial rules of engagement were very restrictive to prevent civilian collateral damage. Here, we don’t have the same considerations. The Gap is out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by forests and rivers. We’ll block off the avenues of approach and clear out the towns surrounding us. The zombies won’t be able to come after us all at once. It’ll be a piecemeal affair. That doesn’t mean it will be pretty. And it doesn’t mean it won’t be a long fight. But at the end of the day, the only way to survive is to kill all those fuckers and send them back to hell.”
“And what if they do come in a single wave? Isn’t that what happened in New York?”
Hastings nodded slowly. He remembered the legions of dead emerging from the city, prowling for a new food supply. The 10th Mountain had set up a series of barricades and bottlenecks that funneled them into kill zones. At first, it worked, but the sheer number of reekers—hundreds of thousands, if not millions—overwhelmed the barriers and streamed across bridges, overrunning post after post. The Air Force had blown the bridges, and Army engineers had collapsed the Holland and Lincoln tunnels in a bid to prevent the hordes from leaving Manhattan Island, but they overlooked the subway and PATH rail tunnels for a day. By that time, the dead were coming out behind them. Not that it really mattered. The zombies that made it to the Hudson River. Tens of thousands of reekers just waded right into it and apparently walked across the bottom of the river. The dead didn’t need to breathe. A couple of days later, they strolled right onto the New Jersey shoreline. The military was perplexed. They couldn’t stop the dead with indirect fires, and restraining defenses in depth were of limited use. The only things that could stop the zombies were bullets to the head and fire—lots of fire.
“We have different containment plans,” Hastings said. “Those containers we’re going to put up? They’re big and heavy. They’ll be like solid walls. The dead won’t be able to climb them, and they won’t be able to move them. We can fight from on top of them and take the reekers out before they get too close.” He waved his hand. “We’ll set them up away from the fort, on bridges and roads, and we’ll start knocking them down out there. If we have to fall back, we’ll fall back to secondary fighting positions and keep it up. If we’re lucky, we won’t have to diminish our perimeter much at all. In other words, the farther away we keep them, the safer everyone will be.”
“Okay. I believe you,” she said. “But what if that doesn’t happen?”
“We’ll come back and get you guys and head out. Probably on one of the trains.”
“And if you don’t come back?”
Hastings was getting a little annoyed with the sudden round of questioning. “We’ll work something out, some kind of system where you guys will be able to evacuate.”
“To where?” she asked softly. “Where could we go?”
He shrugged. “We’re working on identifying other population centers that haven’t fallen or areas that could be easily defended. Once we find something, we’ll develop plans to get out there.” When he saw his response hadn’t satisfied her, he added, “Listen, we haven’t been here for very long. We need some time to plan our actions. Right now, we’re in a good place, and we don’t have to run, but the Army always plans for every contingency. We’ll get something worked out.”
“Okay,” she said after a long pause.
“But in the meantime, if something does happen, you guys need to wait for us,” Hastings said. “Kay has a radio, and Ballantine’s taught her how to work it. I’ll see if I can get one for you, so that way, we’ll be able to stay in touch.” He pointed at their vehicles, sitting nearby. “We have the trucks, too. Better if you have a Humvee or hook up with an MRAP crew, but if you can’t, you have access to the pic
kups. If you need to leave, use those. Find a house, barricade yourselves inside, and try to reach us on the radio. We’ll come for you.”
“And if you don’t, we’re on our own.” She folded her arms across her chest. “A stripper, a housewife, and three little boys, one who would have major troubles getting through a normal day, much less a day in the world as it is now.”
Hastings sighed. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.”
“Gee, thanks a million, General. I mean, Captain. I mean—” She gave him a jaunty salute with her left hand. “Sir.”
It was a fumbling attempt at levity, but it was enough to make Hastings crack a smile. “Call me Phil.”
“Hi, Phil. Call me ma’am.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Diana smiled and put her hands back in her pockets. “We should learn how to shoot. Me and Kay, if she doesn’t already. Maybe Josh and Curtis, too. I know how to use a gun, but that little rifle you gave me is a lot different from my pistol.”
“We can see to that. Not so sure about the boys. I’d have to leave that to Ballantine. Absolutely not Kenny, though.”
Diana shook her head. “No. Not him. He’s … too innocent.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“He’s autistic and maybe mentally retarded, too. But there’s a sweetness to him. I saw it when he was with his parents. He’s not one of those detached autistic kids. He’s able to relate to people at a certain level.”
“People like you.”
Diana sighed and shook her head. “Yeah. I never said he was a good judge of character.”
“You seem to be getting along all right. You haven’t threatened to kick me in the nuts the entire time we’ve been talking.”
These Dead Lands: Immolation Page 33
