by James Cook
One of the men working—a lean, wiry fellow with hollow blue eyes and a mess of scars on one side of his face—was busy pounding barricades together with a rubber mallet. He was the second newest member of Ethan’s platoon, having only been with Delta Squad for six months. He rarely spoke, and when he did, it was with a thick Texas drawl. Several times, he had demonstrated an uncanny knowledge of wilderness survival, and often supplemented the platoon’s meager rations with wild game he brought down with his M-4. An impressive feat, considering he didn’t have a hunting scope.
“Hicks,” Ethan said.
Jonas’ eyebrows came together just a bit. “Hicks?”
“He’s the best woodsman in the platoon. Quiet as a mouse, and he can shoot the nuts off a squirrel. He’ll be my scout.”
“All right then. Who else?”
“Cole.”
Jonas turned to look at Ethan, amused. “Why Cole? Don’t get me wrong, he’s a good soldier, but he’s also a wrecking ball. That really what you need for this mission?”
“Actually, sir, I’m hoping I don’t need him at all. But if we’re spotted, well…consider it an insurance policy.”
The lieutenant grinned. “I like the way you think, Thompson. I really do.” With that, he turned and strode away, leaving Ethan alone.
The young staff sergeant shuffled in place for a few seconds, not wanting to take the first step forward. If he did, he would have to round up his team and move out, after which they would be in the field, in the red zone, with an unknown number of enemy combatants possibly closing in on them. None of which filled Ethan with a sense of ease.
“Dammit Thompson,” he muttered, forcing one foot in front of the other. “Don’t just stand around pissing yourself. You’re a soldier. Act like one.”
A few minutes later, he and the three men he’d chosen moved off to the east and melted into the treeline. As Ethan wandered further and further away from camp, a dark uneasiness began to send cold tendrils whispering through his gut. He had felt it before, many times, but had never quite gotten used to it.
With his free hand—the one not clutching his rifle in a white-fingered grip—he reached up and touched his left chest pocket. The one with a picture of a bearded young man, about twenty pounds heavier, with a happy, unlined face, his arms around a beautiful red-haired woman. In the woman’s arms was a baby, not yet six months old, but still obviously taking after his father. Same nose, same wide jaw, same dark brown eyes.
Holding the image in his mind, Ethan gritted his teeth and seized upon his fear, mastering it, making it his own. With hammer blows of determination, he melted it down, beat it into shape, and turned it into something else. Something his wife would not have recognized in the laughing, boisterous man she had married. It was something sharp. Something ugly.
Something deadly.
SEVEN
One advantage of being dead is that discomfort no longer applies, at least physically. The long, dark hours that night would have been unbearable for me as a living person, soaked to the skin and chilly as the air had to be. I say that without certainty because another of the important functions no longer in service was sensitivity to hot and cold.
It was there. It was just...well, shitty.
I could feel the wet bodies of the other ghouls rubbing up against mine, and though I could see the moisture and hear the wind dancing through the trees, I didn't get cold. I couldn't even feel the wind, which told me just how desensitized my body was.
Death was still a new ordeal for me, a gem with so many facets that it took time to even count them all much less examine each one. For example, it took me until that wet shamble up the other side of the creek to realize I no longer felt pain of any kind. While doing barrel rolls down the stony incline, I felt the pressure of the fall and the impacts all across my body, but it didn’t hurt in the slightest. I would have chalked it up to luck had my hand not risen in front of my face after we left the creek, blindly feeling out for obstacles in the dense woods.
My right pinky was broken, and not in an 'oh, we're just going to set this and splint it' kind of way. Think industrial accident and you're getting warmer. Maybe my mind was just acclimating to the new way of things, but seeing my mangled finger flopping from my hand like a clown shoe didn't bother me at all. I found it rather fascinating, to tell the truth. I only wished I could fiddle with it, or at least move it closer.
I was caught completely off guard when the hand did move closer to my face. Not all the way in, but perhaps a few inches more toward my eyes.
Had I done that? I bent my will to the task of trying to move the hand closer, focusing everything I had on the image of my right hand arcing toward my face. If I could have controlled the necessary muscles, my face would have screwed up in concentration, teeth clenched, eyes narrowed.
Fucking hand didn't go anywhere, though. Probably just a coincidence. My body was prone to doing odd things, after all. Like dying and then going for a stroll. Mom always said my priorities were wrong.
My body stumbled onward, weighed down and off balance thanks to a gallon or two of creek water in its stomach and chest cavity. Though our tumble had been chaotic, I remembered the water going down my throat and into my lungs. Maybe a minnow or something went with it. The idea of a little life swimming around in there amused me until a few seconds later when I realized it would be certain death for the poor little fishy.
The wet slog that followed was boring but not terribly long. Soon enough, a pinprick of light appeared in the distance. It didn't have the steady burn of an electric bulb. It danced, flickering dim to bright in a wavering cycle. A campfire, maybe, if it was far away. A candle if it was closer. A single point of brightness in the night.
One part of me yearned for it, to be sitting near a warm fire. Another recognized the hard truth in front of me: a single fire or candle probably meant a single person or a small family. Undoubtedly not enough to stop even the few dozen ghouls I could see as my body stared straight ahead, much less the seventy or so others out of my line of sight. Interestingly, as we walked, I got the feeling my body, as well as the other ghouls’, didn’t care so much about the fire ahead of us as they did about the faint, distant sounds coming from the people around it. Sounds that, until a short time ago, would have been far below my range of hearing from this far away.
Another interesting fact about victims of whatever plague reanimated me: our bodies have enough remnant human instinct to take the path of least resistance. There was a wide path, maybe six or seven feet across, going straight through the woods. Most of us were on it, the packed dirt offering little in the way of brush or twigs. The trees surrounding us were old growth, tall and widely spaced. Not much debris from those ancient fellows.
We weren't moving silently, but close enough to it that the people around the fire were in for a bad night.
*****
The walking dead, as it happens, can breathe, they just don't need to.
The day before, when I first woke up to my body tearing its victim apart, the fight was almost over. I was seeing it from the other side now, and even knowing I was one of the attackers, part of the overwhelming force and not a potential meal, I was scared.
The sounds coming from the other dead people were what did it. Most of them stayed quiet, but a few began to huff, working their chests like bellows. It looked like a lot of work, and the handful that did it were fresh, only dead for maybe a few months. Then they hissed and moaned, a thin and reedy sound you never hear outside of a person dying.
Hearing a death rattle in an emergency room is one thing. Being surrounded by it in the middle of the night is quite another. I didn't bother suppressing the urge to run; it would have just been a waste of energy anyway. I let the fear run its course, then took the mental equivalent of a deep breath and waited for bad things to happen.
It wasn't a long delay. Shouts went up almost as soon as the dead people around me began making their shrill little noises. That strange sense of triang
ulated sound washed through me again, pointing exactly to where my eyes knew the source to be. I could see them there—a group, but small—flickering in and out of view between the press of corpses between us. I heard a woman scream for someone to get in a car and a faint whimper from what I assumed was a child.
The woman's voice wasn't filled with panic, which put her above me. My own early experiences with the infected, back when I was still alive, were filled with shame.
My family and I ran at every opportunity. I shouldn’t have felt bad about that—everyone else was running too—but I did. When measured against catastrophe, I came up short. There was no fight in me. I spent my life behind a desk, avoiding trouble. Nothing in it had prepared me for life-and-death struggles.
The man in the group didn't have that problem. He and his wife must have been a damned good match, because as I heard her barking orders to the rest of the group and the accompanying sound of car doors slamming, the husband (I assumed) raised an animal howl of protest. There was no trace of fear in his voice, not a shred of self-preservation. His war cry filled the night like a rock concert, shattering the silence, punctuated by a drumbeat of steel against flesh.
I saw the husband rise up against the front of the swarm, and the sight of him left me agape. He was huge, towering over the ranks of undead. The long crowbar in his hands was tiny in comparison. His swings were fast enough that the stiffened muscles in my body's neck couldn't twitch fast enough to follow them.
Fearless, the husband waded into the crowd. Strike after strike, merciless, and every one thumping into—and sometimes through—a skull. Head trauma. The only known killing blow for the thing I had become.
The sheer ferocity of the husband's attack took the swarm by surprise. It's easy to get the wrong idea when you're running away from a horde of dead people, but they're really more complex than first impressions led me to believe. As I watched, I saw subtlety in them. Rather than behaving like mindless cannibals, many of them reacted to the obvious danger by stepping back, bodies tense and cautious. Not the reaction of purely instinct-driven automatons. Closer to a predatory animal, albeit a very stupid one.
Still, the hunger burned inside me—rather, inside my body—and I was getting some of it, like a smoldering coal that could only be quenched in blood. My body didn't rush into the fray. It was clever enough to bide its time.
But it didn't run away, either.
The space between us opened for a moment, my view of the husband unobstructed. In that snapshot of time I saw his thick arms extended on the backside of a swing that took one of my cohorts off his feet, nearly decapitating him. That frozen instant showed a giant of a man with a face full of rage, teeth bared against the impossible odds. Bits of his enemy arced through the air around him, splinters of broken teeth and shards of rent flesh.
Five hundred years ago, that man could have been a Viking, a berserker unafraid as he faced an opposing force. The image of him as a barbarian from some fantasy series was only slightly marred by the jeans he wore, the polo shirt. They seemed like unimportant details, the camouflage used to hide in a modern age long since departed.
They say tragedy shows you who you really are. If I was a coward, and in fairness I have to say I was, then the husband was a hero. Laying into the swarm with nothing but rage and a length of metal to buy his family time—is there anything more deserving of the word?
The moment passed, and the swarm began to surge forward. At the same time, the car behind the man came to life, although with very little noise. If not for my body’s unnaturally altered hearing, I would never have picked it up. I was confused for a moment, wondering why the engine didn’t belt out the usual guttural roar, and then it dawned on me: electric car. Nearby, in the dim light, I caught the outline of a hodge-podge solar array on a crudely slapped together scaffolding. I realized I was looking at a carefully crafted and well-orchestrated escape plan.
The giant, crowbar-wielding warrior must have sensed the change in the swarm, then, because he went from reckless abandon one second to retreat in the next. The car was already moving as he turned from the dead in front of him and sprinted toward it, leaping onto the roof with enough force that I could hear his belly slap the metal. A few ghouls snatched at his feet, but the man's tree trunk legs shot like pistons into the faces of his enemies.
And then they were gone, taillights dwindling into the night.
The swarm followed them, of course. The corpses around me might not have been totally without guile, but they were far from smart. Distance didn't matter to them. Speed didn't enter into the equation. My own body was feeling such crippling waves of hunger I had a hard time remembering that eating people was a bad idea.
There was only the need, and the ability to move. That ceaseless drive forward.
The destruction left behind by the husband was impressive. A full dozen bodies lay on the ground, a few of them still twitching as their not-quite-destroyed brains attempted to operate their bodies like a child behind the wheel of a car. It was somehow sad, even having seen them attack an innocent person only a few minutes before.
The sun rose as we carried on.
EIGHT
Ethan may have had a nose for trouble, but it was Hicks who had the sharpest eyes. Walking out on point, the stringy young man held up a fist, signaling everyone to stop. He turned and motioned Ethan forward.
“What have you got?” he asked when he reached him.
“Sign,” Hicks whispered, pointing. His finger indicated a tree trunk and small cluster of leafy, sickly-looking plants. Ethan didn’t see anything wrong, the plants just looked like plants, but Hicks sounded convinced. “Somebody done been through here. Maybe a day or two ago, if that.”
“How can you tell?”
Hicks motioned him closer to the tree and pointed at a section of bark about chest high. “You see that there light spot? Looks like a little scrape. Like somebody braced a hand on it steppin’ over that poison ivy.”
“That’s what this shit is?”
“Yep. Don’t go wipin’ ya’ ass with it. Look here.” He squatted down and pointed at a few stalks near the edge of the cluster. “These is broke. Like somebody stepped on ‘em. And there’s tracks goin’ off thataway. They’s faint, but I can see ‘em. Regular tracks though, don’t look like infected. Too even.”
Ethan looked, but saw only a featureless carpet of dead leaves stretching off into the gloom.
“You want me to follow ‘em, boss?”
Ethan pondered it for a moment, thinking that Hicks had just spoken more in the last thirty seconds than in the last six months, and then nodded. “Might be survivors nearby. If so, we need to know their disposition.”
“Right y’are.” Hicks hunched down and moved off through the woods. Ethan signaled the change of direction, and motioned for the others to maintain five-yard intervals.
The four men moved cautiously, minding where they put their feet and doing their best not to make noise. Hicks was practically a ghost, sliding easily between trees while dodging low hanging branches and sparse foliage. Give that man a ghillie suit, and we’ve got ourselves a sniper. Ethan resolved to mention it to Lieutenant Jonas the next time he got a chance.
Holland was only slightly less adept, moving with calm, practiced ease, eyes constantly alert. He might have been an insufferable shit at times, but Ethan couldn’t deny he was a good man to have on his side in a fight. As was Cole, for that matter.
Ethan swiveled his gaze to look at the powerful gunner. He carried an M-4 loosely in his hands, his heavy SAW dangling across his back on a makeshift sling. If the weight of the big weapon bothered him at all, he didn’t show it. He carried it as effortlessly as he might carry an empty backpack. Ethan was a strong man, but doubted he could have done the same quite so easily.
Less than half a mile from where Hicks had first spotted the trail, he stopped short again, holding up a fist. He leaned forward, peering at something in the distance, then abruptly motioned for the team t
o take cover. Ethan ducked to his right and slid on his belly beneath the boughs of a cedar tree. Once hidden, he crawled slowly forward and peered through his ACOG sights, making sure to stay well hidden beneath the thick, spiny branches. The modest 4x magnification on his optics allowed him to see movement topping a rise about a hundred yards ahead. As he watched, the shifting shadows resolved into a horse and rider.
The rider held a lever action rifle casually in one hand, stock resting on his thigh and the barrel pointed in the air. He was moving at a slow canter, evidently concerned with not making any unnecessary noise. A sensible precaution, considering how many infected there might be in the area. Behind him, the figures of two more riders emerged, similarly armed and moving at the same pace.
With no time to lose, Ethan belly crawled to where he’d seen Holland duck down behind a moss-covered boulder. When he reached it, he spotted Holland’s boots sticking out from the far side. He whispered the sharpshooter’s name and saw his face appear over the top. Ethan kept his head down and crawled over
“Think you can move up that slope and find an elevated firing position before they reach us?” he whispered.
Holland looked up the low hill to his right, gauging. “Yeah, I think so. If Cole stays where he is, he can lay down cover fire if I’m spotted. Make sure he knows where I’m going.”
“Can do.”
“What about Hicks?” Holland asked.
“Not sure. He disappeared, but if I had to guess, I’d say he’s doing the same thing you’re about to do, but on the other side. I sure as hell hope so, anyway.”
