by James Cook
There was a chance we could come back from this if enough people survived to start again. I knew that. No matter how slim or weak, the possibility existed. But the fabric of what we'd been was gone. There was no going back, not ever. My generation and maybe that of my children would remember a world that could never exist again. No matter what came after, all of history no longer mattered. It was a clean slate or nothing.
Locked inside my head, I wept. My body did not care.
*****
Long hours later, my body decided to have a rest. I don't know if it was from a lack of food or due to some other factor I was ignorant of, but I didn't question it. My muscles were no longer my own, my every movement the result of a nervous system not beholden to my whims, and the stillness gave me the illusion of control. If I wasn’t walking somewhere, I could pretend it was my urge to die driving me to stand motionless.
I know self-delusion is unhealthy, but let’s be real. Long-term considerations no longer applied to me.
For a while, I just enjoyed the day. Piercing sun, a sky more blue than any other I could recall—though I admit it might have been the idea that this day could be my last giving me that impression—and a breeze strong enough that even my dull senses could appreciate it.
Truth be told, I would have been thankful if a volcano had erupted a hundred yards away. Seeing the dead in that little town and knowing my future wasn't much different created some perspective. Living like this forever was something my mind just wasn't equipped to handle.
Knowing your days are short is awful, even if those days are spent trapped in the body of a nearly mindless killing machine. But worse, much worse, is the possibility you'll stay stuck that way. Because we humans are hopeless fools, I'm an optimist. Death was my only hope, but my determination to meet it only added to the sweetness of every moment between all the horrors. The town was enough to sour me on the idea of soldiering on, however small the urge had been. Having set my mind on reaching the finish line, I couldn't help squeezing every drop of life and meaning from even the dullest moments.
Hell of a time to become sentimental.
The rest of the swarm stopped with us, which took my illusions and twisted them up nicely before setting them on fire. Daylight was not kind to them, and as we stood in the middle of nowhere for no reason I could fathom, I saw what pitiful things those bodies had become.
Their flesh was withering, the pallor of death too obvious to ignore. Many carried wounds all the worse for being free of blood and gore, dry testaments to our unnatural state. Less poetic, some of those ghouls lacked limbs, faces, and in one case, most of their midsection. Horrible to see, worse to think about, and ultimately as unavoidable as every other sight was for me.
Distant gunshots sounded again, a rapid double tap splitting the air a good distance away. The spacing of the shots rang a bell somewhere, and after a moment perusing my recent memories, I realized I'd heard them before. The very first night after the clatter of many guns dwindled down, there were those two shots, exactly those. The memory was crisp for me, solid and clear. They were nearly identical in volume, texture, and timing.
Were we chasing someone? Dim moments began to creep up on me. Those times when my awareness had been taken up entirely by the horrors around me, but my body went right on recording. I focused, and the recollections cleared enough for me to recognize it again, buried beneath my own remembered screams.
Those same damn shots.
The swarm lurched into action immediately, moving as one. My body’s three-dimensional hearing propelled it toward the sound, stoking the flames of its hunger. Intent as I was on the situation, I noticed for the first time all the strange signals I had taken for background noise. The constant hum of sensory data I'd been taking as interference between my active mind and my body.
Now that I was looking for it, I knew it was anything but static. I felt my senses sharpen a little and realized they'd done so to a much larger degree the night before. I hadn't understood what was happening then—maybe it was lack of context, or maybe I wasn't wired to interpret it correctly—but my body didn't have that failing. I sifted through the input, analyzing and cataloguing, trying to better understand what my body was doing, but failed to discern anything enlightening. Finally, after hours of frustration, I turned my attention back to the matter at hand.
The repetition of those gunshots seemed odd to me. As the miles passed beneath my feet, I wondered if the whole thing was just me trying to make sense of a senseless situation. Then, around noon, I heard them again. Still far away but clear as a bell, a repeat performance that realigned the swarm in a new direction.
Odd.
TEN
Two things happened at once.
A raider darted by on a black horse, and Ethan saw the outer edge of a horde heading toward the U-trac. It wasn’t a terribly large one, maybe only a few hundred strong, but it was big enough to be a problem.
“Do you think he saw us?” Cole asked. The two of them had slid to a halt when the horse and rider flashed by less than twenty yards ahead.
“Don’t think so,” Ethan replied. “Seems a little preoccupied.”
The raider was circling along the edge of the horde, shouting and gesturing, trying to direct the ghouls’ attention toward the tracks. He got too close to one of the infected and had to fend it off with a boot to the face.
Ethan didn’t need to think about what to do next.
He leveled his rifle, led the rider a little bit, and squeezed the trigger. A three-round burst rattled out, muffled by the suppressor, and struck the raider high in the chest. He screamed in agony and pitched sideways out of his saddle, right into the waiting arms of the infected. The horse whinnied in fear and bolted away. As Ethan watched, the ghouls began to tear into the doomed marauder. Several of them seized him by the arms while others chomped away at his neck, shoulders, and chest. One of them buried its face in his abdomen, leaned back with a mouthful of bleeding flesh, swallowed it, and then went back for seconds. When its face came up again, its teeth were trailing a loop of pinkish-white intestine. The screams were ear splitting.
“Man, that is just wrong,” said Cole.
Ethan swallowed and tugged on the gunner’s arm. “Come on, let’s try to get around them. Keep your eyes peeled for more riders.”
Changing direction, they headed due north. As they ran, Ethan kept thinking about the raider he’d just shot. Not only his gruesome death, but the fact that he was guiding a horde. Which meant there must be other raiders out there preparing for an attack. How many there were, or where they had managed to acquire a horde of walkers, was anybody’s guess. But if he and Cole could get to the U-trac first and give warning, the marauders wouldn’t stand a chance.
Despite the cold, both men were sweating and tired by the time they emerged into the tall grass bordering the railroad tracks. In the distance, Ethan could just make out the shape of the U-trac. He heard the crack of gunfire beating the air like a drum, louder than before.
“Come on, man, we’re almost there.” He clapped Cole on the shoulder. The big man blew out a breath.
“Goddamn, I hate running.”
“So do I, but it beats the alternative.”
“Walking?”
“No. Dying.”
Ethan set the pace as they took off again. A lookout spotted them a hundred yards from the U-trac, ordered them to stop, and called out a standard challenge. When they replied with the appropriate password, the sentry waved them in.
Lieutenant Jonas stood with his back turned peering through a pair of field glasses. When they reached him, Ethan and Cole stopped and leaned over with their hands on their knees, trying to catch their breath. Nearby, Hicks and Holland were ushering the three prisoners into a passenger car and locking them in. Only a few other soldiers were visible.
“LT, we got trouble.”
“Tell me about it.” Jonas lowered his field glasses and held them out. Ethan raised them to his eyes and saw a line of r
iflemen a hundred yards away, one rank kneeling, the other standing and firing just like they’d drilled back at Fort Bragg. Beyond them was a multitude of ragged, staggering figures teeming through the tall grass, far more than the small horde he’d stumbled upon a few minutes ago. He gave the glasses back to Jonas.
“I’m afraid that’s not all of them, sir. We spotted another horde about a quarter mile that way.” He raised a hand and pointed southeast. “Marauder was leading them on horseback. They’re headed right for us. We should get everybody on the U-trac and get out of here.”
Jonas glanced at him, his expression disappointed. “Negative, Sergeant. I want you to think real hard and tell me why that’s a bad idea.”
Ethan glared in confusion, biting down on a sharp retort. Instead of arguing, he stood up straight, took a deep breath, and forced his thoughts into order.
The first thing he needed to figure out was the marauders’ plan. They were sending infected out ahead of them. Why? A distraction? What good would that do? They had to know from their first encounter that the U-trac was armored. If the marauders wanted loot, they would have to get up close and personal and find a way to get the soldiers out of their …
“Shit,” he said, succinctly.
“Shit is right.” Jonas had a small smile.
“They want us to run. That’s what the horde is for, to push us into a trap.”
The lieutenant nodded. “What do they have that we don’t?”
“Time,” Ethan replied. “They don’t have to kill us, they just have to disable the U-trac. Then they can sic the infected on us and keep us penned up in the cars until we run out of water. After that, we either try to escape, in which case they can pick us off at their leisure, or we die of dehydration and they get our shit without a fight.”
“All in all, not a bad plan,” Jonas said. “That’s exactly why we’re going stay right where we are.”
“I assume you have a plan of your own, sir?”
The old soldier grinned. “Don’t I always? Come on, kids.”
Jonas walked over to a cargo container and unlocked one of its side panels. Inside was a stack of inch-thick armor coverings for the passenger cars’ windows, complete with pre-installed hinges and locks. Normally, the soldiers preferred to ride without them because they obstructed airflow, rattled in their hinges, and made a hell of a racket, none of which was helpful when traveling through infected territory. Since passing Hamlet, however, the infected were not the worst of their problems.
As a precaution, Jonas ordered Holland and Hicks to grab a few people and start putting the armored shutters in place. If they had to bug out, Jonas wanted his men as protected as possible.
Looking inside the cars, Ethan didn’t see any soldiers within, just the three prisoners they captured earlier. “Hey LT, where is everybody?”
“Some of them are out dealing with the horde, just enough to make it look like we have a full complement. I split the rest into two fire teams and deployed them in the woods a hundred meters out. The rest of your squad is with Schmidt up on the northeast corner. Ashman and three of his boys are set up on the other side to the west. You, me, and the rest of these apes are going to hang around and draw the bad guys in.”
Ethan’s stomach dropped. “Sounds like fun.”
“It needs doing,” Jonas said. “I don’t want these fuckers dogging our trail all the way to Tennessee.”
Finished with securing the prisoners and tethering the captured horses, Hicks and Holland wandered over to where Ethan stood with Cole and the lieutenant.
“Oh good, you’re just in time,” Jonas said, breaking a smile. “Staff Sergeant, you and these men go help Sergeant Kelly clean up the Rot. Keep an eye out for raiders while you’re at it, and try not to waste too much ammo. Command gets pissy when I have to call in a supply drop.”
Ethan nodded. “Yes sir.” He turned to his troops. “All right, you heard the man. Let’s grab some ammo and get moving.”
He stopped by the armory—which was just a small freight car packed to the brim with rifles and boxes of ammo—and had each man grab a bandolier of pre-loaded thirty round magazines. Ten mags per bandolier gave each soldier three-hundred rounds, which they would be responsible for reloading once the fighting was done. Assuming they were still alive, of course.
When they reached the action, Sergeant Kelly was walking the ranks with a pair of field glasses in one hand and a stepladder in the other. Occasionally he would put the ladder down, climb it, survey the horde, and then reposition shooters to one flank or the other. Ethan was glad Kelly was the one in charge. He had a knack for keeping soldiers calm in the face of the moaning, gnashing, stomach-turning horror that was the undead.
It was a waking nightmare facing those things. Sometimes there were hundreds of them, or even thousands, marching implacably forward, their hungry eyes fixed fixated on you, teeth bared, moans filling the air, stench making you retch, fear clawing at your brain, heart hammering in your ears, instincts screaming for you to run, run, run. An enemy that couldn’t be reasoned with, placated, or even intimidated, no matter how many of them you killed. They just kept coming, no hesitation, no mercy, relentless. They never got tired, never got discouraged. They came on like rain, like a hurricane wind, like an avalanche bent on grinding down everything in its path. A force of nature with but one unswayable goal: to feed.
Facing that, it was easy to be scared. How do you beat an enemy that doesn’t care if it dies?
Ethan had asked that question, once. He had just been thinking out loud, didn’t know anyone could hear him. But Lieutenant Jonas had. He’d been standing right behind him. He had chuckled, and patted Ethan on the shoulder.
“It’s easy, son,” he said. “You aim your gun, and you shoot one of ‘em in the head. When it goes down, you pick another and you shoot it too. Keep at it until they’re all dead.”
“What happens if you run out of ammo?”
The old man grinned. “You got an axe, don’t you?”
Even then, all joking aside, Ethan had known it wasn’t that easy. The bigger the horde, the harder they were to fight. Doing so required sufficient resources, disciplined, well-trained troops, and most importantly, skilled, confident leadership. Kelly fit that bill, as did Lieutenant Jonas. But there had been a time, back when Ethan was with a different platoon, when the leadership element had failed. When one pigheaded, irresponsible idiot ignored the advice of his NCOs and made a series of bad decisions that left his men alone, low on ammo, and facing a horde nearly five-thousand strong.
What ensued was a slaughter with the bravest, most stalwart fighters being the first to die. A shit reward for having the courage to stand their ground.
He wasn’t proud of it, but Ethan had been one of the soldiers running while others stayed behind. It became obvious their position was about to be overrun, and like most of the other men in his platoon, he had fled. He would have died that day if not for Cole and his ever-present SAW, and his own skill with an axe.
The memory brought on an involuntary shudder and an old, familiar anger. At himself for being a coward, mostly. But also at the idiot butterbar who, through a combination of ineptitude, inexperience, and stubbornness, had marched them headlong into disaster. If only he’d listened to his platoon sergeant, the stupid bastard. Sixty-three men might still be alive.
Singletary Lake. What a fucking disaster.
Kelly, however, was doing things properly. The front rank was firing from a seated position, a pair of crossed sticks propping up the forearm of each man’s rifle. Behind them stood another rank with their rifles resting on Y-shaped poles to help steady their aim. There were eighteen men, all of them firing with steady, metronome cadence. A few runners moved up and down the ranks making sure everyone had ammo while also carrying spare rifles to hand out if someone got a jam. Kelly didn’t want soldiers wasting time clearing a fouled weapon. Better to simply hand it off to a runner, grab another one, and get back to work.
Looki
ng out past the front rank, Ethan could see the bodies starting to pile up in a heaping, stinking berm. A shitpile, they called it. An apt term, if not terribly imaginative. In the case of the infected, shitpiles were a good thing. They formed a barrier that slowed the walkers down by forcing them to crawl over a mound of their own permanently dead brethren. A shitpile was also a good gauge of how well a squad leader was dealing with a horde.
A nice, even line running from one edge of a horde to another indicated good management. The soldiers were calm, picking their shots carefully, and waiting until their targets were at a predetermined standoff range before firing. A loose, ragged shitpile indicated a lack of communication and discipline. It meant the soldiers were nervous, they weren’t aiming properly, and they weren’t paying attention to where the bodies were falling. All very bad things. The trick to beating a horde, after all, was slowing them down. A loose shitpile wouldn’t slow down anything. You had to keep it precise, and that was exactly what Kelly and his men were doing.
“Heard you could use a few extra rifles!” Ethan called out over the cacophony of gunfire. “Where do you want us?”
Kelly pointed and raised his voice. “Goddamn walkers are starting to bunch up behind the shitpile. This hill keeps pushing them down to our left side. Position your men there at three-yard intervals and ten-yard vectors, but swing back in a curve with the last man ninety degrees to the front rank. Maintain standoff at thirty yards, and for God’s sake, don’t let ‘em get behind us.”
Ethan gave a thumbs-up, repeated the orders to his men, and then gestured them into motion. They took up position where Kelly requested, swinging their line backward until the last firing vector was perpendicular to the front rank. A runner came over and handed them all a pole to steady their rifles on, made sure they had plenty of ammo, and then scurried off.
