These Dead Lands: Immolation

by Stephen Knight

  “Wait. It’ll happen.”

  Hastings snorted. She gave him a small smile before turning away to look down the line of barracks. Hastings did one of his scans of the area.

  “All right, Phil,” she said. “I’ll catch you tomorrow. Hope you can get some sleep. I’d better get back inside. For all I know, Kenny’s pissing all over the floor.”

  Hastings frowned. Her acerbic tone left him confused. For the past few minutes, she had been acting like a normal person and discussing Kenny in a compassionate way. Then suddenly, she was acting as though the boy was more trouble than he was worth.

  “You need help with him, you let us know,” he said. “I know taking care of a kid is a lot of work, especially one like him.”

  “I’ll manage. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  Diana returned to the barracks, leaving Hastings alone. He looked up at the sky, watching the stars wink in and out of sight as the clouds sculled across overhead.

  Scotty. Terry.

  His eyes burned as tears spilled and ran down his cheeks.

  *

  When Ballantine got to the assembly area, the sun still hadn’t risen. In the predawn gloom, he checked out the long line of tractor trailers idling in the darkness, their lowboy trailers laden with CONEX containers. Also along for the ride were several five-ton trucks, most of which were full of cargo, while the rest carried a company’s worth of troops. Security was provided by four MRAPs. No Humvees were there, but a bleary-eyed Hastings had explained that the Humvees were too soft and that they needed to be pulled off the line wherever possible. Ballantine didn’t disagree, and so long as he had an MRAP to ride in, he was willing to sacrifice some marginal speed for armored security.

  He saw a bunch of officers milling around the MRAPs, so he headed in that direction, carrying his usual lightfighter loadout. The soldiers he would be working with were from the 2nd Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, part of the Colonel Victor’s Brigade Combat Team. They were Airborne troops serving with the 101st Airborne Division out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

  Ballantine approached the officers and saluted. “Captain Vogler.”

  “Sergeant First Class Ballantine,” Vogler said, returning the salute. “Are you joining us?”

  Vogler was a beefy, red-faced sort with broad shoulders and an almost equally broad forehead. He looked like the poster child for Good Ol’ Southern Boys Gone Bad, but Ballantine knew that impression wasn’t true. He had met the officer the night before when his train had rolled in, and Vogler had congratulated him on a job well done.

  “Yes, sir. If you’ll have me, that is.”

  Vogler nodded. “Hell yes! A lightfighter is always a good thing to have around, especially since the rest of us are too slow and fat these days. I take it your commanding officer sent you my way?”

  “Yes, sir. Captain Hastings figured it would be a good idea for you to have someone on site who’s familiar with the techniques we used in New York. He thought I might be able to bring a little bit to the table and toss it into the mix with what you guys figured out in Philly.”

  “You ever been to Philly, Ballantine?” Vogler asked.

  “Yes, sir. A few times.”

  “You ever eat at Chink’s Steakhouse?”

  Ballantine thought that was an odd question. “Uh, yes, I did, sir. It was highly recommended, and it was certainly pretty good.”

  “It’s gone.”

  Ballantine blinked. “Well, a lot of establishments were shut down due to the emergency, sir.”

  Vogler waved one big hand in the air. “No, no, not because of that. They drove the place out of business because of the name. All the liberal PC dirtbags had a hissy fit because it was called Chink’s. You know, like what you’d call a Chinaman?”

  “Yes, sir. I know.”

  “Anyway, I finally make it to Philly, and I’m looking forward to one of those world-renowned cheesesteak sandwiches, and what do I get? Not a goddamn thing.”

  Ballantine was severely confused. “Captain, did you get any sleep last night?”

  “It’s all right, Sergeant,” a first lieutenant said. “He’s so pissed about Chink’s closing down that he’s been going on about it for almost two months.”

  “Damn right I’m pissed about it,” Vogler said. “But I guess there are bigger things to get worked up over now. Ballantine, your boss is the guy behind all these taskings, isn’t he? The trains, the defenses in depth, and whatnot?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ballantine said. “Is that a bad thing?”

  “Hell no, not from where I sit,” Vogler said. The sky had brightened, and Ballantine could see that Vogler was sporting what practically looked like a five o’clock shadow. “I’m glad for the motivation, actually. Ever since we fell back to the Gap, we’ve been wondering what the hell we were going to do to get some payback. I don’t know what you lightfighters drink up there in the North Country, but whatever it is, you must’ve given Victor a shot of it. He hasn’t been this spooled up in weeks, and personally, I’m all for it.”

  Ballantine didn’t know exactly what they had gone through in Philadelphia, but whatever it was had been bad enough for the remains of the Brigade Combat Team to fall back to the Gap. However, he didn’t feel that Vogler and his staff of young officers truly appreciated the shit storm that would eventually be headed their way.

  And it’s not up to me to straighten them out. “Just glad to help out, sir. But today, we’re just establishing some forward defenses.”

  Vogler nodded like an eager puppy. “Oh, yeah. We’re ready for it.”

  “Great, sir. Great. So where do you want me?”

  Vogler looked at the first lieutenant standing next to him. “We have any spaces left in the MRAPs, Jonesy?”

  “Fourth one down,” Jonesy said, pointing to the rear of the convoy. “Glad to have you aboard, Sergeant.”

  “Happy to be here, sir. Happy to be here.”

  “Catch you out on the interstate, Sergeant Ballantine,” Vogler said.

  Ballantine saluted and stepped off. He found the idling MRAP as the sun broke over the eastern horizon like a bright baleful eye that made the sparse clouds shine with an almost ethereal luminescence. He nodded at the troops sitting behind the rig’s windshield and walked to the rear of the vehicle. The boarding ramp was still down, so he put a foot on the bottom step and looked up into the slab-sided vehicle’s interior. Several soldiers stared back at him.

  “Hey, I’m Ballantine. Vogler told me to catch a ride with you guys. His XO said you had room?”

  One of them waved him up. “Come on in.”

  Ballantine trotted up the ramp, shrugging off his heavy rucksack as he did so. There was maybe half a seat left, but Ballantine shoved his butt into it anyway, forcing the other men to shift deeper into the truck. He plopped his big ruck between his feet then secured his M4. The members of the One-Oh-Worst looked at Ballantine with some suspicion as he fussed with all his lightfighter gear. They weren’t as well equipped as he was, and they regarded his heavy ruck with smirks.

  “Well, well, it’s Climb to Glory personified,” a sergeant first class said. “You hauling a golf bag in there somewhere, Butch?”

  “Well, well, it’s the Pukin’ Pigeons greatest hits,” Ballantine responded. “Everyone take their Dramamine? If not, don’t worry about it. I didn’t polish my boots. Heave-ho if you need to, boys.”

  “You one of those guys from Tenth Mountain that rolled in a few days ago?” another soldier asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Huh. So you work for Captain Glory, is that it?”

  Ballantine was confused. “Captain Glory? No, I work for Captain Hastings.”

  The soldier nodded and sneered. “Yeah. Captain Glory. That guy must be blowing the command group through a glory hole, seeing as how he’s giving us all this work.”

  Ballantine was the biggest guy in the vehicle, so he didn’t know why the 101st troops were giving him shit. “Well, hell, boys. I u
nderstand you guys pulled in a couple of weeks before we did. Seems like your officers had enough time to figure out what had to be done, but no, they waited for some lightfighters to show up and get the post squared away. Am I right?”

  The sneering soldier raised his hand to his face, pantomiming a blow job while sticking his tongue up against his cheek. “Lightfighter candy, right?”

  Ballantine looked at the sergeant first class sitting across from him. “So you in charge of these guys or not? Because I’ve got a job to do, and this fucker here’s about to get listed as KIA before we even start rolling,” he said, jerking a thumb at the soldier next to him.

  The NCO turned to the soldier. “That’ll be enough, McBride. You ought to know better than to start fucking around with a guy who’s a lot bigger than you are.”

  McBride looked at his companions for some sign of support, but no one volunteered any. He adopted a surly expression and waved the comment away. “Yeah, okay. Didn’t mean nothing by it.”

  “Uh huh.” Ballantine remained unconvinced. “Tell you what, son—you keep your trap shut, and we’re going to get along just dandy.” He studied the sergeant first class. “So you know the op, right?”

  “We deliver a bunch of containers to the far side of I-78 overpass at Swatara Creek then arrange them into a wall formation and harden them so the reekers can’t get past them.” His dark face was somewhat pockmarked, and Ballantine thought he looked Asian, even though his nametape read MAHON. “Word is, this is going to be a type of firebase setup.”

  “That’s correct,” Ballantine said. “Another is going up on the Swatara Gap Bridge. These’ll be the first two defensive barriers. Hope you guys don’t have a problem sweating your balls off doing heavy work, because this is what we’re all going to be up to for the next couple of weeks.” He jerked a thumb out the vehicle’s open rear. “And the weather looks like it’s gonna hit the high eighties, with high humidity. Hope everyone has their CamelBaks filled up.”

  The MRAP’s horn blared, and the ramp rose on hydraulic servos until it clanged shut.

  *

  The drive to the highway overpass was long, not from distance but because of all the stalled traffic that had been left behind, along with trees the Guard had felled in an attempt to block any zombie swarms from marching up the interstate and turning the Gap into an all-you-can-eat buffet in the early days after the chain of command had been broken.

  Ballantine spent a lot of time pulling security, something as familiar to him as ironing a uniform or loading out his rucksack. Since the tractors hauling the lowboys couldn’t cross the other bridges over Swatara Creek, the interstate was the only avenue of attack, which meant some grunt work. He had floated the idea that they use the Chinooks to ferry the containers to their sites, but Hastings said the command group didn’t want to risk losing any more aircraft. They had already lost one during BOXCAR, and no one wanted to shoulder the weight of losing another. Ballantine could get behind that. CH-47s were worth their weight in gold.

  Abandoned cars and trucks had to be pushed out of the way, and fallen trees had to be moved. All of that took hours, and for most of that time, the convoy sat motionless, a great big, fat target that invited attack. Ballantine was nervous. Though the occasional reeker would stumble toward the column—then get taken down well before it could become a direct threat—he was more concerned with raiders or homesteaders, like those that had engaged Guerra’s column during BOXCAR. Ballantine couldn’t fathom why someone would want to engage a well-armed military convoy, but someone had, and he worried that the same could happen to them. The last thing he wanted was to be involved in some sort of firefight. They weren’t in Iraq or Afghanistan, so if things went pear shaped, he’d be killing fellow Americans. As misguided as they might be, he didn’t want to have any part in such a thing. Life was precious, even more so lately, and he didn’t want to be put in a position where he had to snuff out any living person, even if it was a belly-crawling lowlife trying to inflict harm on the convoy. But if push came to shove, he had a family to get back to, which meant he’d shoulder his weapon and fire until the threat was neutralized.

  Finally, the column made it to a stretch of highway where travel speed was pretty decent. The five-tons worked on clearing dead traffic out of the way, and Ballantine was able to remain in the MRAP’s air-conditioned interior. The troops from the 101st had finally stopped giving him the side eye, which suited him just fine. He was even able to doze a bit during the stretches where the MRAP could drive for a distance before braking to a halt.

  “So, Ballantine,” the sergeant first class seated across from him said when the MRAP stumbled to a halt, “what happened in New York? How’d it go down?”

  Ballantine opened his eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “How did you guys manage to get out of there?”

  Ballantine shrugged. “We were pulled off the line for a while, for rest and refit. By the time we got back into the swing of things, it was already too late. All of the guys in my company that went up to the George Washington Bridge got run over by the reekers pouring across. The captain ordered us to stand ready to retreat, and when the order never came, he took it upon himself to save what little was left of the company.”

  “Wow. So he bugged out without orders?”

  “No one abandoned their positions, Mahon. It was retreat or die. The fucking Air Force was supposed to take down the bridge three days before the barricades were overrun, but the civilian leadership developed a serious case of butt-hurt over it. No one wanted to pony up the money to rebuild it, I guess.” He shrugged. “They chose poorly.”

  Mahon gave him a quirky smile. “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, right?”

  “For a lawn dart, you’re a genius.” Lawn Dart was the appellation given to airborne troops, as their modus operandi was to jump out of airplanes over a battlefield and parachute into combat. Obviously, there were times when things didn’t work out, and a soldier would wind up plummeting to his death, thereby becoming a lawn dart.

  Mahon leaned back in his seat. “How is it that you guys could be overrun? You have single points of advance. They had to come across a bridge to get at you, right?”

  Ballantine shook his head. “Not exactly. There were bridges, tunnels, and the river itself. You know what happens when a reeker goes into the water? It’s not rotting, so it’s not bloated. It sinks. And once it hits the bottom, it just keeps on walking. We had thousands of those things walking across the bottom of the Hudson River, and before we knew it, they were in New Jersey. They couldn’t be contained, man. We were getting hit on all flanks.”

  The images of legions of the dead—men, women, screaming children—clambering out of the Hudson and streaming across bridges and through tunnels played across Ballantine’s mind’s eye. Even through machine-gun fire and mortar bombardments, they kept coming, picking their way through the carcasses of their fellow dead without any regard for their own safety. He had seen plenty of determined fighting in southwest Asia. While the Taliban were mostly inefficient fighters, al Qaeda was not, and they’d fought like hell more than once against the 10th. But when things got too hot, even they suddenly forgot their desire to meet Allah and claim a host of virgin brides, and beat a retreat. Retreat was something that never occurred to the reekers. They just kept coming, and after days of combat, the men began to wear out and break down. The Army held out as long as it could, but facing down millions of combatants who could only be stopped by specific injuries to the brain was too much. And here we are, setting up to do it again.

  Ballantine decided to change the subject. “So how did it go down in Philly?”

  Mahon sobered. “We were hands-off for the first month. Civilian agencies were handling everything. We were just there to help keep the highways and airport open. After a while, the emergency got to the point to where the locals and feds couldn’t hold everything together. Once we stepped in, things were already busting open, man. One week, we killed a thousand reeke
rs and lost maybe a platoon. The next week, we mowed down around twenty thousand… and we lost a battalion. After that, things just blew up. We were fighting off mass attacks from those things as they walked up on us from every radial. We’d been oriented toward defending attacks from inside the city itself, but when the suburbs went dead, that’s when things got really fucked up. And then, we lost the airport—no way out, other than by road.”

  McBride leaned forward in the backseat. “And driving through fifteen thousand deadheads was no fucking fun.”

  Mahon nodded. “Even in force, it was tough. We had Bradleys up front, motoring right over them, but one threw a track trying to shove a semi out of our path, and it basically blocked the roadway. We had a shitty time trying to turn around while fighting off the reekers. Lost a lot of guys there.”

  Ballantine nodded. “What about the Bradley guys?”

  Mahon shrugged. “As far as I know, they’re still buttoned up. No way we could rescue them. Maybe the reekers left them alone after the rest of the column pulled away, and they got out of there on foot. Or maybe they’re still there.”

  Ballantine grunted. Once the fuel ran out, a Bradley would become an oven in the summer heat.

  “Then we started running low on fuel for the column,” Mahon continued. “Lost a shitload more people scavenging for diesel. We wound up abandoning half our shit and trying to make it up in civilian vehicles, but that didn’t work out very well, either.” He shifted on his seat. “We left with about thirty-five hundred guys. Only a little over two thousand made it to the Gap, all of them attrited along the way. It was a real shit-fest.”

  Ballantine thought the 101st had gotten it easy, seeing as how his entire division had been mostly wiped out. It did explain some things, though. Victor’s troops were run out, and the colonel was probably still reeling under the losses his combat team had sustained. Ballantine was no social scientist or therapist, but he could understand why the composite units occupying Fort Indiantown Gap hadn’t been very resolute in fortifying the post. They were probably hoping the waves of the dead would pass them by, which was a suicidal mindset to adopt. No wonder they had been slagging Hastings—he was probably one of the only guys at the Gap who was trying to get things squared away. Ballantine sympathized completely. All he wanted to do was lie low with Kay and the boys, but he knew the only way that could ever become a reality was through a lot of back-breaking work and tedious planning.