by James Cook
“Where exactly do you think you’re going?” She asked.
“Shouldn’t I come help you two?” Brian said. He looked genuinely confused.
Sarah opened her mouth to say something else, but I interrupted her.
“Its okay, Sarah. He can stay close to me, I’ll make sure he’s safe. This is important, he needs practice fighting the infected.”
Sarah looked ready to argue for a few seconds, but then relaxed and let out a breath.
“You’re right.” She said, reaching out to ruffle her son’s hair. “But you stay right next to us, understand? Right next to us.”
Brian’s face brightened, and he nodded. “Stay close. Got it.”
“Alright,” I said, gesturing with my rifle at the corpse-strewn field, “let’s get to work.”
Determined not to be caught by surprise, I set a slow, deliberate pace as we walked among the fallen undead, constantly searching the bodies around me for signs of movement. Walkers are bad enough, but crawlers are the freaking worst. Some of the infected are so physically ruined before they turn that they are unable to get to their feet. Walkers you can see coming from a mile away, and you can hear them howling for flesh if their throat hasn’t been torn out. Crawlers almost always have their throats ripped out, and because they are so low to the ground it is easy to overlook them. All it takes is one bite, one infected fingernail breaking the skin, one little moment of carelessness, and it is game over. And don’t go thinking the crawlers are too slow to keep up with the walkers, some of them can cover ground at virtually the same speed even over long distances, depending on how fucked up they are. The damn things never get tired.
As we made our way down the mountain, Brian stayed behind me while Sarah fanned out to my right. A vulture landed on the ground a few feet from me and began picking at the milky white eyes of a dead ghoul. I turned to shoo it away and caught a flash of something unnaturally bright out of the corner of my eye. I almost turned to look at it, but caught myself at the last second and pretended to keep searching for crawlers. Without being too obvious about it, I turned in the direction of the glare and scanned the trees across the meadow without actually looking up at them. My steps slowly brought me closer to Sarah, and I made sure to put Brian squarely behind me.
“Sarah, don’t look up and don’t react, okay?” I said in a low voice, still scanning the ground. “I think we have company.”
To her credit, the only reaction she gave was a hardening of her expression. The spirited, laughing woman I had come to know over the last few weeks disappeared in an instant. In her place stood a hardened, steely-eyed federal agent.
“Where?” She asked, keeping her voice just above a whisper.
“High in the trees, at my one o’clock.”
“How the hell can you see that far? I can’t make out a damn thing.”
The sharp flash of light glinted through the trees in the same place as before. I cursed under my breath. Someone was looking at us through a pair of binoculars, or more likely a long-range scope. Apprehension sank sharp fangs into my stomach and kicked my heartbeat into overdrive.
“I don’t have time to explain. Just trust me, someone’s out there.” I replied.
When I was younger, my vision was absolutely awful. I think it was twenty-seventy five, or something like that. For most of my life I was damn near blind as a bat without a pair of thick coke-bottle glasses perched on my nose. Then, thank the mighty heavens, came the advent of Lasik surgery. On my twentieth birthday my old man forked out three grand for the procedure, and ever since then my eyesight has been twenty-ten. Not twenty-twenty, but twenty-ten. As in way better than normal eyesight. It was pretty novel at first being able to see farther than most other people, but after a while I just got used to it. I never really thought about it much. In the next few seconds, I found myself once again grateful to my father for paying for that expensive surgery. If not for his generosity, and the skill of the doctor who fixed my eyes, I never would have seen the distant figure swinging the barrel of a rifle in Sarah’s direction.
“Sarah, get down!” I shouted.
Smart lady that she is, she didn’t hesitate. She flew to her right and executed a quick roll before popping up to one knee and bringing up her M-4. The moment I shouted at her, I thumbed the selector on my HK to full auto and blasted a salvo that ripped into the tree limbs around where the gunman was hiding. The shots probably wouldn’t hit him at that rate of fire, but I wasn’t trying to kill him just yet. I needed to suppress his fire, and keep him from sending aimed fire downrange in our direction. Sarah fired off a quick burst from her carbine in the same general direction as me, and then motioned frantically at her son.
“Brian, get your ass over here!”
He hesitated in confusion for a moment before sprinting over to stand behind his mom.
“Come on, stay behind me.” Sarah said, and started moving back toward the cabin with one hand on the boy’s shoulder.
I kept up a steady stream of fire at our would-be attacker until the slide locked open on my rifle. Sarah picked up the slack with carefully aimed shots while I dropped my mag and slapped in a fresh one. With the HK’s optics out of my line of sight, I could see the man practically falling out of the tree in his haste to take cover. Even if none of our shots found their mark, they hit close enough to send volleys of high-velocity wood shrapnel into him. If he wasn’t shot, he was probably still hurt and bleeding in a dozen places. I held my fire and hesitated for a moment, unsure what to do next. Sarah ran out of ammo just as the man hit the ground harder than he meant to and pitched over into the brush.
I am not normally the shoot-first type, but pointing a gun at someone I care about is a rocket-fast express train to the absolute pinnacle of my shit list. Putting Sarah in his crosshairs was a dumb move on this guy’s part, but he really hadn’t done anything to hurt us.
Or had he?
A massive horde of undead had just tried to overrun our defenses, and this guy was sitting in a tree with a scoped rifle watching the whole show go down like Saturday night at the marquee. At least I assumed he was. What other possible reason could he have for being up there? Maybe he just happened to be nearby when the swarm hit and he climbed a tree to get away from them, fox-hunt style?
Yeah, right.
Horde of ghouls, guy in a tree with a scoped rifle, no attempt to call out to us or make contact in any way, and I’m entertaining the thought that this dude had nothing to do with it? No way. That is just too damn many coincidences.
All of this flashed through my mind in scarcely more than a second. I made a decision and took off at a full sprint across the field. Mister Tree Sniper got back to his feet and brought his rifle to his shoulder to take aim at me. Maybe he wasn’t my enemy before, but he sure as hell was now. I zigged to my right and sent a poorly aimed burst of fire in his direction. I didn’t hit him, but it did distract him enough to throw off his aim. His shot sent up a plume of dirt about twenty feet in front of me. Twenty feet may sound like a wide miss, but trust me, when bullets are flying at you even twenty feet is un-fucking-comfortably close to the mark.
“Sarah, get Brian back to the bunker, and send Gabe after me.” I shouted over my shoulder.
I didn’t turn around to look at them, I knew Sarah was probably on her way before I even said anything. Slowing down long enough to shout at them gave the guy with the hunting rifle sufficient time to turn and bolt off into the woods. I growled something vile and chased after him.
Two years of walking up and down mountains every day in the high country had made my legs lean and strong. They fired like two pistons as I hurled myself in a serpentine pattern toward the forest. A loud report sounded at about the same time a bullet zinged off a small boulder to my right, close enough to spray my leg with shards of rock shrapnel. I ignored the pain and switched direction, zig-zagging the last few meters to the cover of the forest. A short leap carried me over the trunk of a dead maple, and I skidded into cover behind a wide
oak tree. My assailant’s rifle cracked again, breaking splinters from a tree off to my left. I could tell which direction he was shooting from, but I couldn’t see the shooter. Most bolt action rifles only hold between three and five rounds, so I knew he was going to have to reload soon.
I leaned around the edge of the tree using the ‘cut the pie’ method Gabe taught me to limit my target profile, fired in his general direction, and then ducked back behind cover. He took the bait and fired again. The bullet hit the tree just to the left of where my head was a moment ago. Four rounds down for him. Either he had only one left, or he was reloading. I debated what to do; he had me zeroed in, and risking another shot would end with my brain splattered on the fallen leaves behind me if he had another bullet. Not doing anything wasn’t an especially appealing option either. Another bullet ricocheted from just above my head on the opposite side of the tree. I grinned. That was pretty stupid.
I set my rifle’s selector to semi-auto and leaned out to fire, hoping to catch him reloading. He proved not to be quite as dumb as I thought he was, and rather than sit there feeding cartridges into his weapon, he had gotten up and ran further into the forest to put some distance between us. I got up and pursued him a few steps, then had to dive for cover when he skidded to a halt, rounded on me, and snatched a pistol from his belt before I could bring my rifle up. Three shots blazed out rapid fire while I scurried on my belly as fast as I could behind a thick stand of trees. I had no idea where the shots went, but they didn’t hit me, so at least that part worked out okay. I heard him move off to my right and stop. A metallic rasping sound came from behind a tree telling me he had brought the bolt of his rifle back to reload. Or maybe he opened the chamber nice and loud to make me think that was what he was doing while he aimed in my direction with his pistol. That’s what I would have done, anyway. It also occurred to me that I didn’t know for sure that he was the only bad guy I might be facing. He could very well be leading me further into the forest and straight into an ambush if he had friends nearby. I could break off and sneak back to the cabin, but if I did that, I would lose the chance to find out if he was responsible for the massive ghoul attack. If he was, I didn’t want to give him a chance to come up with a plan B and take another shot at us.
I crawled behind cover and worked my way up to one knee with my rifle held at the low ready. A quick peek around the tree in front of me did nothing to reveal my enemy’s location. Fallen leaves covered the forest floor under every tree, which meant that a loud series of conspicuous crunches would herald any attempt by either one of us to change position.
The other guy probably couldn’t shoot me from where he was or he would have tried it already, so I took a few deep breaths, forced myself to relax, and settled in to wait. With help on the way, time was on my side. If I could keep this asshole’s attention, that would give Gabe a chance to work his ninja-magic to sneak up on him and capture him alive.
The seconds ticked slowly by. My heart rate began to slow. I closed my eyes and focused on my hearing, tuning out all other sensory input. Maybe a minute to two went by, and then I heard it. A faint crunch, followed by another, and another, moving toward me and around to my right. The shooter was putting the sun at his back at the cost of moving further down the hill’s embankment and giving me the high ground. That was a big mistake. I pulled my knit cap down over my eyes to shield them from the sun and waited for my chance to strike. He didn’t keep me waiting long. The crunching stopped, and I knew that he had to be lining up a shot. Rather than give him the chance, I gathered my legs beneath me, sprang forward, and barreled straight toward a boulder buried halfway into the ground about ten yards ahead to my left. My weapon was already up and firing by the time I stopped behind it. I wasn’t exactly sure where he was, but I had a pretty good idea. If he took the bait and returned fire, I would know for sure and be able to walk him down, assuming he didn’t just kill me outright. My shots were hitting wide of where I thought he was, which I hoped would make him overconfident and trick him into breaking cover to take a shot at me.
It worked.
About fifty yards away, a flurry of movement resolved into a rifle coming around a tree, and a man standing behind it trying to steady his aim against the trunk. Alarm flashed across his face as he realized his mistake. By the time his gun was halfway up, he was already staring down the barrel of my HK. We both fired at the same time.
His shot went left and low, impacting the boulder I crouched behind and spraying pulverized granite across the fallen leaves. I took an extra half second to let out a breath and squeezed off a three-round burst. One of the bullets caught him high on his left hip, and the other two went wide. He let out a snarling grunt of pain before trying to turn and run away. I shifted my aim and let another three rounds go. This time my accuracy was better and I stitched him across the lower portion of his thighs, just above the knees. He crumpled to the ground, screaming in pain but still clutching his rifle.
“Toss the gun away, asshole, or the next one goes into your stomach.” I called out.
He responded by working the bolt on his rifle and firing a poorly aimed shot in my direction. I’m not sure where his bullet went, but the next time I pulled the trigger, I hit one of his forearms a few inches from the wrist. His rifle fell from nerveless fingers as he screamed in renewed agony.
“Okay, so I lied.” I shouted, repressing a dark spasm of horrid laughter. “Seriously though, if you try anything else I’ll gut shoot your ass and leave you here for the infected.”
Soft footfalls approached from my right, and I turned to see Gabriel huffing and puffing as he closed the distance to me. He stayed low and used the forest for cover, his big battle rifle held out in front of him. I motioned for him to take cover behind a tree to my right.
“What’s the deal, you get the fucker?” He hissed.
“Yeah, one in the hip, two or three in the legs. And I damn near blew his hand off.”
“You get hit?” He asked.
“Nope, I’m good.”
Gabe gave a short nod. “Keep him covered, I want him alive.”
In the time it took me to cast a quick glance down the hill and turn back to ask Gabe what he wanted to do, the big man had disappeared. Just there one second, and gone the next, with nary a sound to mark his departure.
“How the hell does he do that?” I muttered.
Glimpses of a large shadow flitted between the trees a couple of times, then Gabe stepped out of nowhere with his rifle aimed at the man on the ground. A size fourteen boot kicked the gun out of his one good hand before he had a chance to bring it around. Gabe rolled the gunman over on his stomach and pinned him down with a knee to the back while he searched him. The pistol he tried to shoot me with and a large hunting knife went next to the large-caliber hunting rifle on the ground nearby. I stepped out of my hiding spot and walked down the hill to get a better look.
The man looked to be in his mid-to-late thirties, medium build, albeit painfully thin. Filthy threadbare clothes now soaked with blood clung to his gaunt frame. Pale grey eyes stared out from a hollow, grime covered face, a matted beard hanging nearly down to his chest. I couldn’t help but feel a stab of pity for the guy and wonder if I did the right thing by attacking him. His eyes fluttered when Gabe rolled him over onto his back and he began to shudder. Blood loss had rendered his skin pale, and he was clearly going into shock. A muttered, incoherent response was all Gabe could get from him when he tried asking him his name. The big man dropped his pack and started pulling out medical supplies.
“Give me a hand, Eric. We need to try and stabilize him. He ain’t gonna tell us shit if he’s dead.”
I put my weapon down and helped Gabe as best I could. The gunman’s airway and breathing were okay, but he was losing consciousness. He moaned in pain when Gabe elevated his legs and began cutting off his clothes over where I shot him. The hip wound turned out to be a through-and-through just over the bone that didn’t do very much damage. I’m sure it hurt like a
bastard, but by itself it was not life threatening. The real problems were the other wounds. Both of his legs were bleeding profusely, and the shot to his left forearm had broken both the radius and the ulna. We put compression bandages on his legs to staunch the blood flow and applied pressure while Gabe tried to talk to him.
“Hey, hey, stay awake, if you pass out you might not wake up.” Gabe slapped him on the cheek a few times to get his attention. The man’s eyes opened for a moment and he focused on Gabe.
“I’m gonna die, mother fuck I’m gonna die…” He kept repeating it over and over again.
“You’re not dying, dammit.” Gabe snapped. “You’re in shock and you’re weak from blood loss, but you will be dying if you don’t start talking.”
That wasn’t exactly true, I was pretty sure the guy was bleeding to death, but I kept my mouth shut. If we gave him some hope that he could survive he just might tell us what the hell was going on.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?” Gabe asked. The man shook his head.
“Can’t tell you…others will kill me.” His eyes fluttered again. Gabe slapped him hard, causing blood to run from the corner of his mouth. His eyes snapped open as Gabe picked up his broken wrist and gave it a savage squeeze.
“Do I have you’re fucking attention now?” He shouted into his face. The man cried out in pain under Gabe’s iron grip. “Whoever the hell these ‘others’ are, they’re the least of your concerns right now. You’re gonna tell me what you’re doing out here, or I’m going to start breaking bones. Do you understand me?”
The man nodded quickly, his eyes wide with fear. Gabe asked questions, and he got answers. The bleeding man was one of a small group of bandits that had been travelling up and down the old Appalachian Trail and raiding along the way. They mostly picked off individuals or small groups of survivors, murdered them, stole their food and equipment, and did what one would expect raiders to do with any women they found. He started trying to tell us how his raiding party came together, but Gabe cut him off. We didn’t care what his story was, we just wanted to know how many others there were, and where to find them.
