This Shattered Land - 02

by James Cook

  He told us that they had set up a relay system to attract the undead to the cabin, and he didn’t know where the others were right then. Probably wandering around out in the hills somewhere. They were supposed to wait a couple of days, and then rendezvous at an abandoned house about half a day’s walk away from our cabin. Gabe got the location of the house from him just before the man lost consciousness. We tried reviving him, but no amount of shouting or slapping brought him around. His blood soaked through his bandages into the ground beneath us, and soon his breathing became shallow before stopping altogether. We didn’t bother with CPR.

  I stood up and walked away, grimacing at the blood making my pants stick to my legs. Gabe watched me sling my rifle over my shoulder and take a long pull from a canteen before getting slowly back to his feet.

  “One question we never did get out of him.” I said, staring at the raider’s corpse.

  “How the hell did he and his buddies find us?” Gabe replied. I glanced at him and nodded.

  “Come on,” Gabe said, “let’s get this guy over the cliff.”

  I helped him hoist the dead man up over his shoulder and gathered up his belongings. Old Irish folk tales my father used to tell me as a kid came to mind as I looked over the dead raider’s weapons. The legends always went that victorious warriors would claim their slain enemy’s weapons by right of conquest after a battle. The rifle I picked up was a finely crafted Savage chambered for .300 Winchester Magnum, and his pistol was a venerable Beretta 92. Gabe had threading tools and a suppressor that would work for the Beretta, and we had a couple hundred rounds of .300 Win Mag that we found on a scouting trip last summer for the rifle. My previous reservations about killing the bastard dangling over Gabriel’s shoulder had dispelled the moment I found out what he was involved in, and I figured ridding the world of a piece of garbage like him was about as close to conquering an enemy as I was going to get. As far as I was concerned, his weapons were rightfully mine. I stepped on his hunting knife as I turned to follow Gabe, and stooped down to pick it up. It looked like the kind of cheap piece of junk that flea markets used to hawk to people who didn’t know what good steel looked like. I stuck it in my belt and followed Gabe back to the cabin.

  No one was in the yard when we stepped back through the front gate. Sarah came out of the cabin wearing a tactical vest and sporting a pair of reflective sunglasses. She cut a seriously no-nonsense figure with her hair pulled back in a tight bun and an M-4 on a sling around her shoulders.

  “You guys okay?” She asked, stepping down off the front porch.

  “We’re fine.” I replied, pointing at the dead man over Gabe’s shoulder.

  “Can’t say the same for this guy.”

  Sarah walked over to us and looked down at the body Gabe unceremoniously dumped on the ground. She kneeled down and gave the corpse a quick examination, pausing when she saw his wounds.

  “Jesus, how many times did you shoot him?”

  “Four, altogether.” I said. “He bled out while we were questioning him.”

  “Why didn’t you get him back here for medical attention?” She asked, standing up and pushing her sunglasses back on her forehead.

  Given the fact that I had just been through a harrowing firefight and had probably saved her life, I didn’t particularly care for her tone.

  “Uh, maybe because this asshole tried to kill me? Are you going to ask me what we found out when we interrogated him?” I said.

  “Do you mean interrogated, or do you mean tortured?” She asked.

  I ground my teeth and leaned in close to her. “Pick one.”

  A large iron-fingered hand gripped my shoulder and forced me back a couple of steps. Sarah wore a strange expression, as though she couldn’t decide if she should be pissed off or apologetic.

  “What he means to say, is that this guy is responsible for the infected that attacked us this morning.” Gabe said, giving me a hard glare before releasing my shoulder.

  “I’m guessing he told you that.” Sarah deadpanned, flipping a hand at the body. Gabe frowned and nodded.

  “Yes, actually he did. And yes, I hurt him to get him talking. It worked because I convinced him that he wasn’t dying, when in fact he was well on his way to bleeding to death. I’ve done a few interrogations in my time, and I know how to get answers out of people.”

  Sarah looked back and forth at us for a few moments, and then seemed to deflate. “So what did you find out?” She asked, shaking her head.

  Gabe related everything the raider confessed to us. When he finished, Sarah’s eyes grew dark and there was a dangerous tension about her as she stalked off toward the bunker. She knocked a few times on the hatch and called down to Tom to come out. He blinked against the bright mid-day sunlight as he emerged from the shelter.

  “Everybody okay?” He asked, reaching down to help Brian out of the hatch.

  “Everyone’s fine, ‘cept that guy.” I hooked a thumb over my shoulder.

  Tom looked past me and paled when he saw the dead man on the ground in the middle of the yard.

  “Jesus.” He breathed. “What happened?”

  I told him, leaving out the details of the interrogation for Brian’s sake. An angry scowl deepened the lines in Tom’s face by the time I was done.

  “So what are we going to do about the others?” He asked.

  “And how did they find us in the first place?” Sarah added.

  “We’re going to set a trap for the other raiders.” Gabe said. “We know where they are, and we know about when to expect them. I’ll recon their safe house from a distance over the next couple of days and hoof it back here when it looks like they’re ready to make their move. I have a few high-powered radio’s we can use to maintain comms in the mean time. I’m sure I can come up with a proper welcome for them when they show up.”

  Sarah looked unhappy, her lips pressed tight in hard line, but she nodded. “That still doesn’t answer the question of how they found us.” She said.

  Gabe sighed, and gestured toward the bunker. “I think I might be able to shed some light on that, but I’ll need a few minutes to figure it out. Eric, you want to take care of that body over there while I work on it?” He nodded toward the corpse in the yard. I looked over my shoulder.

  “Yeah, I’ll take care of it.”

  Gabe turned and motioned to Tom and Sarah. “Why don’t you guys hang out up here for the moment, I’ll let you know when I have something for you.”

  They gave him slightly perplexed looks, but agreed anyway. I grabbed the corpse by the ankles and dragged him over to the edge of the cliff. By sitting down and shoving against him with my legs, I managed to gain enough leverage to push him over the precipice. I didn’t see him tumble down the cliff, but the bone-crunching thud of a body breaking over sharp rocks made it up to my ears a few seconds later when he hit bottom.

  I got my feet under me and sat down heavily in one of the chairs next to the fire pit. Only dark grey ashes remained of the fire we had warmed ourselves by the night before. My hangover was even worse than it was when I woke up now that the adrenaline had worn off, and my sticky clothes reeked from the dark brown blood drying on them. A quick glance at my watch told me it wasn’t even eleven in the morning yet—less than two hours since the swarm attacked. I had defeated over a thousand infected and killed one live person in a shootout, and all of that before lunchtime. I briefly debated whether or not a pull from my flask was in order, considering how busy the morning had been.

  Hell with it. I thought. After all this shit, I fucking earned it.

  Corpses from the earlier fight still littered the ground all around me between the cliff and the fence. The meadow leading out to the tree line didn’t look any better. Vultures and crows circling overhead were growing bolder now that the commotion had died down, and began spiraling down closer to the buffet. I shut them out by closing my eyes and leaning my head back to let the warm sun shine down on my face while trying to ignore the pervading stench. Swish
ing a couple mouthfuls of fiery bourbon around in my mouth before gulping them down helped with that somewhat. Footsteps crunched in the rocky soil behind me, and I recognized Sarah’s light tread even before she spoke up.

  “Mind if I join you for a minute?” She asked.

  I gestured to the chair next to me without opening my eyes. “It’s a free wasteland.”

  The chair creaked and her clothes rustled softly as she sat down next to me. Neither of us spoke for a few moments. If she was expecting me to feed her a line, she was in for a long wait.

  “I’m sorry about that earlier.” She said, finally breaking the silence between us. “I guess old habits are hard to break.”

  I leaned my head up and cast her a one-eyed squint against the pain in my head. “Old habits?”

  “Come on, Eric, you know what I mean.”

  “No, Sarah, I’m afraid I don’t. Care to explain it to me?”

  She turned her head to look at me with irritation etched into her pretty face. “I was an FBI agent, smart guy. That means I went through a shit-load of training to deal with things like what happened today.”

  “Really?” I said, laughing incredulously. “The Bureau trained you to fight lawless bandits that use armies of walking corpses to fight their battles for them? Is that what my tax dollars went to at Quantico? No wonder it took us so long to catch Bin Laden.”

  Her skin flushed and she half-rose out of her chair. “You know, I came over here to say I was sorry. If you want to be an asshole about it I can go back to the cabin and not waste any more of your time.”

  I shook my head and held up a hand in a placating gesture. “Okay, you’re right, I’m sorry.” I leaned back against the chair again and turned my face up to the sun. “Just been a hell of a morning, you know? That thing with the infected was bad enough, but having to kill a man right on the heels of that…” I sighed and took another pull from my flask. “It’s not the first time I’ve had to do it, but repetition doesn’t make it sit any better.”

  “It’s okay to feel that way, Eric.” Sarah said, her tone softening. “If killing a living, breathing person ever stops being a big deal, that’s when you need to start worrying.”

  I turned my head to look at her. “Is that what got you all riled up earlier? Did I seem too nonchalant about it?”

  She looked down and studied the ground between her feet for a moment. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.” She huffed an irritated breath and stood up to take a few steps toward the cliff face.

  “When you told me you killed that guy, this voice in the back of my head kept telling me to cuff you and place you under arrest.” She shook her head and let out a single mirthless laugh. “How crazy is that?”

  I shrugged. “You were falling back on your training. Gabe talks about that a lot, how people in military and law enforcement run on instinct when they don’t know what to do. Apparently it works pretty well most of the time.”

  Sarah laughed again, a little more genuine this time. “Yeah, maybe you’re right. Either way, you risked your life to protect all of us, and you deserved better than the way I spoke to you earlier. I’m sorry about that.”

  I waved off her apology. “Forget it. Water under the bridge, and all that. Consider yourself forgiven.”

  She sat back down next to me and we enjoyed a companionable silence for a few minutes. I offered her a shot of booze, but she declined, saying it was a little too early for her. I shrugged, more for me. A couple of minutes later, Gabe climbed halfway out of the bunker hatch and called us over. Sarah glanced at me with a quizzical expression.

  “Come on, let’s see what he found out.” I said. Sarah got up and walked with me to the bunker.

  We followed Gabe down the ladder, along with Tom and Brian, and shut the hatch behind us. The big man walked into the dim interior of the bunker toward the laptop that controlled the electrical system.

  “So what did you find out?” I asked.

  “They’ve been watching us for a few days now.” Gabe replied.

  “Yeah, I figured that. Did you confirm how many more we’re dealing with?”

  “Four more, according to what I found on the security cameras.”

  “I thought we shut all of those down last year?” I said, frowning.

  “Uh, security cameras?” Sarah asked. “What security cameras?”

  “One of the many precautions I set up back before the Outbreak.” Gabe replied. “There are hidden cameras all around the cabin, out on the fence, and a few in the forest that cover all the easiest approaches to the property. They’re all night vision equipped, but we stopped powering most of them over a year ago. Used up too much electricity.”

  “Most of them?” I said. “Hell, I thought we shut them all down.”

  “No, I left some on the gates and a few out in the woods functional.” Gabe replied.

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me about that?”

  “I did tell you about it. I believe your response was ‘cool, thanks’.”

  “Really? What was I doing when you said that?”

  “You had your nose buried in the laptop, writing.”

  He had a point. When I write, I kind of go off into my own little world. When I’m really on a roll, you could tell me that Jesus Christ himself just went by on a pogo stick with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, and I would probably just keep right on typing.

  Something else occurred to me, and I pointed a finger at the laptop.

  “So I guess that’s why the batteries never charge beyond ninety percent?”

  Gabe glanced up at me and snorted. “Nice detective work, Sherlock.”

  A few still images appeared on the laptop’s monitor. The security cameras that took them were motion activated and took silent snapshots whenever anything large enough to trip the sensor happened by. The cameras also had auto-adjusting irises that compensated for all but the lowest light levels. Judging by the shots in front of me, Gabe kept the four on the gates operational, four more out on the mountain approaches, and one with a clear panoramic view of the broad meadow between the fence and the tree line.

  “I went over the shots for the last couple of nights.” Gabe said, moving his mouse to arrange the four photos on the screen.

  He rolled his chair back away from the computer so I could get a closer look. Sarah and Tom leaned down on either side of me to peer at the grainy night vision images. Two of them showed men I didn’t recognize walking up the mountain on one of the steeper approaches. Both were armed, and judging by the light level and the date stamp, the photos were taken during the last full moon less than a week ago. The third image showed a man at the edge of the fence with a pair of binoculars held to his face, and the last one showed a man holding a pair of bolt-cutters over the chain that held the gate shut. That one I recognized. His dead body currently resided on a pile of bones at the bottom of a cliff.

  “So what I don’t get,” I said, standing up straight, “is if you had this system up and running the last few days, why didn’t it set off any alarms?”

  Gabe grimaced, and ran a hand over his beard.

  “Because I shut the alarms down. They burned up too much juice to keep them running, and we kept getting false indications every time a deer or one of the infected happened by. I used to check them every day, but over the last few months I’ve been letting it slip.”

  He shook his big shaggy head, self-recrimination in his tone. “I got complacent. I figured there was no way anyone could find us up here. I should have known better.”

  I patted Gabe on the shoulder. “Look man, I didn’t even think this system was still working. It was good forward thinking on your part to leave a few cameras up and running. Don’t beat yourself up over it. We have something to go on, and the only person who got hurt is one of the bad guys. We’re still ahead of the game.”

  “Besides,” Sarah added, “laying blame isn’t going to do any of us a damn bit of good at this point. The bad guys are coming for us, and we need
to come up with a plan to deal with them.”

  Gabe nodded, a dark smile replacing his scowl. “That we do. We have the initiative now, and I intend to exploit that advantage.”

  I leaned back against a shelf and crossed my arms over my chest. “What are you thinking?”

  He laid out his plan.

  I liked it.

  It was simple, but brutally efficient, and it gave Gabe an excuse to dust off his big .338 Lapua Magnum sniper rifle.

  “Alright, sounds like a good idea to me.” I said, and looked over at Sarah. She nodded her assent.

  “So what are me and Brian supposed to do during all this?” Tom asked, a little miffed at not being included in the combat preparations. Sarah reached out and took his hand.

  “What you do is stay here in the bunker and look after our son.” She said. “I love you, and I know you would do anything to protect us, but the three of us have more practical experience with this kind of thing. Let us handle this one babe, you still need time to train.”

  “Sarah, I can’t stand the thought of you doing the fighting for me. What if something happens to you?” Tom pleaded, stepping closer to his wife. “Let me do this, and you watch over Brian. If something happens to me, you’ll be better able to look after him.”

  “I hate to interrupt,” Brian said, stepping between them, “but I can take care of myself. I don’t need you guys to guard me like I’m a baby or something.”

  Sarah frowned at both of them, her expression hardening. “Alright, both of you listen, and listen good. Tom, you are not trained for this. You’re a wonderful, brave man, and I love you more than I know how to say, but we both know I’m the right person for this job. Brian, as tough as you think you are, you’re not ready for this. Maybe someday you will be, but not today, and not for a long while. You are both going to stay here, and you are going to look after each other while the three of us take care of these assholes. Do I make myself clear?”