This Shattered Land - 02

by James Cook

  John snorted. “Yeah, I can imagine what kind of ‘special’ treatment they gave ‘em. Probably the kind that comes from the barrel of a Colt 1911.”

  The old man drained the last dregs from the flask and flicked the butt of his cigarette away into the night. “Now let me tell you something folks. Ya’ll should feel real special because other than Grandpa, you’re the only living people that I ever told that story to. I realize I’m committing an act of treason by telling you about it, but somehow I don’t think I have to worry about the Feds coming to arrest me.” At that he broke into phlegmy, wheezing laughter that ended in a coughing fit.

  No one spoke for a few moments. I think we were all too stunned to say anything.

  “That’s one hell of a story.” Tom said, breaking the silence.

  “Yeah, I reckon it is. It’s true though, every word of it.” John replied.

  Tom nodded. “I don’t doubt it. Just makes me wonder how long the Phage has been around, you know?”

  “If the military knew about the Phage back in World War One, then it’s pretty safe to assume that the conspiracy to keep it quiet was as old as it was widespread. Not to mention well funded.” Gabe said.

  John sighed. “Yeah, I imagine it was. Not that it matters too much now.”

  “Still,” I said, jumping in, “why not just tell the public? I mean, there were plenty of epidemics and disasters before the Outbreak that people managed to survive without descending into anarchy. Wouldn’t it have been better to simply tell people how to prepare for an outbreak of the Phage rather than hide the possibility that it could happen? Maybe I’m just a crazy liberal, but I think that with the right education and awareness, people could have learned to cope with the threat of the undead just as well as anything else.”

  John shrugged. “In my experience, the government always worked from the assumption that people are a bunch of panicky, stupid sheep. Sad thing is, for the most part they were right. That being said, I do agree that things might not have gone so bad a couple of years ago if people knew what it was they were up against.”

  “And how to fight it.” Gabe said.

  John glanced at him at him and nodded.

  “Well guys, this is all very fascinating,” Sarah chimed in, “but at this point it’s academic. And I’m tired. It’s been a long day, and I want to get some rest. Anybody want to volunteer for the first watch?”

  “I’ll do it.” Brian said, sitting up quickly.

  Sarah smiled at him, “No honey, you need your rest.” She turned and focused those big blue eyes on the rest of us. “So how about it? Any volunteers?”

  Tom got to his feet. “I got it, babe. You get some rest, you’ve earned it.”

  She smiled and pulled him down by his arm for a kiss. “Thanks sweetie. Wake me up at midnight and I’ll take over, ‘kay?”

  He nodded. “No problem.”

  “Dad, can I stand watch with you?” Brian asked.

  Tom shot his son a withering scowl. “What did your mother just say?”

  Brian sighed in irritation. “Look dad, I know you guys still see me as a little kid, but I’m getting older and I’m not a weak little puppy, okay? I just want to do my part, I want to help. How am I ever going to do that if you keep treating me like a baby?”

  Tom looked like he was about to make an angry retort, but Gabe jumped in. “You know Tom, the kid has a point.”

  Tom shot him an angry glance. Gabe held up his hands in a mollifying gesture. “I’m just saying. He’s handled himself pretty well so far. Maybe it’s time to let him start taking on some responsibilities.”

  Tom’s anger faded as he mulled it over. “You know,” He said after a moment, “you might have a point there.”

  Brian perked up, looking hopeful.

  “Alright, you can stand watch with me.” Tom said, pointing a finger at his son, “But only until eleven. Then you have to go to sleep, understood?”

  “Yes sir.” Brian said, nodding.

  “Sarah, wake me up at dawn.” Gabe said. “I’ll take the watch tomorrow night.”

  She nodded. “Alright. You have any idea what we’re going to do about all those walkers down there?” She said, pointing a finger toward the ground.

  Gabe shrugged. “We’ll figure something out in the morning. Just put in your earplugs and get some rest.”

  The din of the infected was a steady, irritating roar below us. Without hearing protection, none of us were likely to get any sleep. Thankfully, we all carried a few pairs of foam earplugs with us at all times, just in case. It was Gabe’s idea, and as usual, it was a good one.

  “I apologize ahead of time folks, but I snore like a sumbitch.” John said. “Don’t suppose anybody has a spare pillow or a blanket they could lend on old man, do ya’?”

  I took the wool blanket out of my pack and tossed it to him along with the ground mat I usually put under my sleeping bag. “Use that however you want, I only have one pillow, and I’m not sharing.”

  The old man spread out the ground mat, laid down on it, and then rolled his jacket up into a ball under his head after he shook the blanket out over his legs. “Much obliged, friend, much obliged.” He said as he settled in to go to sleep.

  I wasn’t entirely comfortable having a stranger in our midst, but with the dead milling about below, it was unlikely that he would try anything during the night. After all, he would need our help if he expected to get down out of this barn anytime soon.

  I watched Tom and Brian take a seat near the edge of the loft. The fading light of Brian’s wind-up lantern silhouetted them against the starry night sky. They talked about something that I couldn’t quite hear with my earplugs in, but their voices made for a nice contrast to the croaks of the undead below. I was a little worried I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep, but exhaustion eventually trumped noise and I drifted off.

  *****

  Sarah shook me awake just before the sun cleared the eastern hills. Gabe was already up and moving. I looked out over the edge of the loft, and the sky was mostly grey that brightened into a thin line of orange and yellow in the distance. The air was damp and heavy. A thin coat of condensation covered my sleeping bag, and glistened on the grass below. Sarah looked worn out with heavy bags under her eyes and worry lines creasing her mouth.

  “The dead are still down there.” She said. “I was hoping maybe they would wander off, but they didn’t.” She shot a meaningful glance at Rollins, who was still snoring loudly.

  “Well, he did warn us.” I said.

  “So what are we going to do about all those corpses down there?”

  “What we always do. Distract them, create some breathing room, and then get the hell out of Dodge.”

  I unzipped my sleeping bag and got to my feet. My back was painfully stiff from sleeping on the bare wooden platform without my ground mat. Stretching one way and then the other loosened it up a bit while I looked around for my gear. It was right where I left it next to my pack. I buckled on the harness, checked my rifle, and joined Gabe at the edge of the loft. He stared down into the horde, no doubt turning over different plans to get everyone out of this barn and back on the road.

  “We need a distraction.” He said, not looking up.

  I nodded. “Got any bright ideas?”

  Gabe laid a hand on the axe at his belt, then turned and pointed at a spot on the roof at the back of the barn. “I hoist you up, you cut a hole to crawl through the ceiling, and then you rappel down to the ground. Meanwhile, everybody in here makes as much noise as they can to keep the infected’s attention. You get them to follow you a little ways off, and then double back here and we haul ass up the highway.”

  I nodded and looked out over the edge of the platform. The horde was not that large, maybe fifty or sixty ghouls strong at best. Most of the infected were inside the barn beneath the loft, and the few that were not struggled just outside the entrance thrashing and heaving at the tightly compacted bodies in front of them. I doubted that any of them still lu
rked outside the walls or at the back of the barn.

  “That’s actually a pretty good plan.” I said. “One little flaw, though.”

  Gabe scowled. “What’s that?”

  “You want me to rappel down. Where’s the rope I’m going to do that with?”

  Gabe reached into a pocket on his vest and produced a pair of hundred-foot lengths of para-cord. I looked at them, then looked up at him.

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

  Gabe smiled. “Come on man, you know I wouldn’t mess with you on something like this. I’ve used this stuff before, and it’ll hold my big ass. A single strand is rated for five hundred pounds. We’re going to be using double that. What are you these days, about one-eighty, one-ninety?”

  “One eighty-five.” I mumbled, staring at the cord. Gabe was right. Para-cord looks small, but it is extremely strong and durable. Two lengths used in tandem would be more than enough to support my weight rappelling down the barn. The problem was, I didn’t have a rappelling harness, much less a figure eight with a carabiner or a Grigri.

  “Okay, so assuming I believe this shit won’t drop me and kill me, where am I going to get a harness? You got one in your pack?” I asked.

  Gabe’s smile broadened. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  I stared at him for a moment. “Of course you do. Of fucking course you do. Why wouldn’t you?”

  The big man fetched his harness and held it out to me. I recognized it from a few years ago when we went climbing in Alaska for my birthday. Rather than do the smart thing and shop around for some good quality rock climbing gear, I had bought a bunch of cheap crap from a local outfitter that damn near got me killed on a high Aleutian peak. Gabe had used his old reliable military issue stuff, and it worked just fine. When my shitty store-bought equipment failed, he had to climb down and help me get to safety. I hoped we were not about to have a repeat of that incident.

  “This thing isn’t sized for me.” I said.

  “No problem, it’s adjustable.” Gabe replied.

  “Yes, of course it is.” I grumbled, stepping into it.

  The others looked on while I geared up. They all wore the same half-amused, half-worried expression, except for John. The old man was obviously feeling the flask of tequila he’d drank the night before. I couldn’t tell if he was concerned for my safety, or just squinting against a headache. My money was on the latter.

  Gabe stood under the spot on the roof where I was to climb out and interlaced his fingers for me to step in. Tom held me steady while I used my hatchet to cut an appropriate sized hole through a long tin shingle near the ceiling joist. Once satisfied it was wide enough that I wouldn’t snag my clothes or cut myself climbing out, I stepped down and ran the para-cord through the figure eight ring on the climbing harness. Tom and Gabe boosted me up through the opening, and I ran out the belay line behind me and down the side of the barn to the ground. Gabe anchored the line to a ceiling joist, double checked the knot, then gave me a thumbs-up and signaled for me to descend.

  “Why do I always have to do this shit?” I muttered as I eased slowly toward the edge of the roof.

  My Kevlar gloves gave me a good grip on the thin nylon cord. I kept a firm hand on the belay line and paid it out nice and easy. When I reached the edge, I realized that the tin roof had a nearly foot-long overhang past the support beam under my feet. Toes planted on the solid board beneath me, I leaned backward over empty space and dug my heels against the metal shingle. It scraped and popped against the other shingles interlocked to it. I ground my teeth in frustration at all the noise, the last thing I needed was a curious ghoul spotting me with my ass hanging in the wind. Gabe, God bless him, heard the noise and started yelling at the infected from the edge of the loft. He must have indicated for the others to join him, as a few seconds later I heard several more voices join in. I took advantage of the distraction and stomped the metal down flat, then began descending.

  It took three kicks off the wall to make it down the side of barn. The palm pads on my gloves were painfully hot from friction by the time my feet touched the ground. Not wasting any time, I stepped out of the harness and tied it to the cord so that Gabe could retrieve it. No sense wasting perfectly good climbing gear.

  I walked around the back of the barn for a few moments to gather my wits and come up with a game plan. The walkers were concentrated under the loft and just in front of the entrance. If I circled wide around them behind the tree line, then emerged at their backs, I could lead them off through the woods to the east a mile or so, and then double back to the farmhouse.

  Simple enough, and simple is good. I set off toward the woods and snuck around to the other side of the barn. The sun was high in the sky by the time I stepped out of cover. The horde didn’t notice me right away, so I drew my pistol and shot a few of the rotten bastards in the head. The noise made me very popular, very quickly. Gabe and the others went quiet and stepped out of sight so that I would have the full attention of the undead.

  The rest went like clockwork.

  The dead followed me, I blasted a few crawlers out in the woods, and then I shouted a few obscenities at my admirers before running the mile back to the farm. Running through a dense forest in combat fatigues and heavy boots is much more tiring than running on flat roads, especially when you have to go up steep hills. I’d led the horde down into a hollow formed at the base of three mountains, making sure to approach from the north so that I would have an unobstructed path westward.

  I was hot, sweaty, and tired when I got back to camp. The others had already packed up and made ready to leave. John Rollins was nowhere in sight.

  “Where’d the old man get off to?” I asked Gabe as he climbed into the MUV’s passenger seat.

  “Went back to his cabin.” Gabe replied.

  “Did you tell him about Colorado?”

  Gabe nodded. “He’s running low on supplies, same as we were. Said he would be heading that way.”

  “I’m guessing you didn’t offer to let him come with us?”

  “Do we have room for anyone else?”

  Gabe was right. We were nearly overloaded as it was. “No, I guess not.”

  It was my turn to suck exhaust fumes while Sarah drove. It was a bumpy, uncomfortable ride clinging to the trailer, and I had to shout for Sarah to slow down once when she nearly threw Tom and me to the side of the road. A few times, we reached impassable traffic snarls left behind by the Outbreak, and fallen trees that forced us to double back and find alternate routes westward.

  The next few days were easy travel, aside from fighting the infected. We all got plenty of practice at that. The suppressors on our weapons proved again how valuable they were, allowing us to kill the ghouls without drawing too much attention to ourselves. We tried to conserve ammunition as much as possible, which led to me swapping out my Kel-Tec for the Sig .22 in my pack. It didn’t have quite as much oomph as the larger .22 magnum, but we had literally thousands of rounds for it in the cart. Better to use them first and save the more powerful stuff for the living enemies we were almost guaranteed to encounter sooner or later. Whenever possible, rather than shooting the revenants I put on a balaclava, wrapped a scarf around my mouth, slipped on a pair of ski goggles, and used my small sword to do the killing. Sarah and Brian were skeptical of the slender weapon, but after seeing me dispatch literally dozens of walkers using my Y-stick and eye-stab method in rapid succession, they admitted to being impressed. Not only was it faster than cleaving the undead’s skulls with an axe, it used up less energy.

  That’s me, Mr. Efficiency.

  Our fuel supply steadily dwindled, and progress was slower than what we had hoped. As we crossed into Tennessee, the hordes of infected grew larger and harder to outrun. We implemented a strategy of parking the MUV, which is what was really attracting the dead with all its noise, and splitting up into two groups to make camp at separate locations. That way, if any one of us made too much noise and attracted unwanted attention from
the ghouls, the others could distract them and lead them away. It made for lonely, paranoid nights, but we were quickly learning that a certain level of paranoia was a healthy thing.

  Along the way, we saw evidence of other survivors traveling the same roads. The remnants of old campfires, plumes of smoke drifting into the air in the far distance, and occasionally, revenants with their skulls bashed in told us that we were not alone. Although we saw the signs of other survivors in the region, we never actually crossed paths with any of them. There were too few, and the territory was too wide with plenty of caves, ravines, and abandoned buildings within which to hide. We knew, because we used them too.

  Exactly one week after leaving our cozy mountaintop mini-fortress, Gabe poured the last five gallons in the tank and stared despondently down the road. We had hoped to make the treated gasoline last for six-hundred miles, but what we actually accomplished was somewhere just north of four-hundred. If we didn’t run into any roadblocks, the last bit of fuel might get us another eighty or so, and then after that we would be on foot. The good news was that we had cleared the Appalachian range a couple of days ago and proceeded down into lower, flatter territory. The bad news was we had about a thousand miles to walk to reach Colorado.

  Gabe pulled out a map and waved everyone over. We put down our breakfast dishes and joined him at the trailer. He had raised the trailer’s lid and spread out the map over our supplies and equipment to give us all a clear look at the route he planned to take.

  “Here’s what we’re gonna do,” He said. “We follow this road here northwest until we reach these railroad tracks. Once there, I’ll swap out the wheels and we follow the railways all the way to Colorado. Eric and I will take turns scouting ahead before we move locations to check for trouble. It’ll be slow going, but we’ll be able to stay well supplied, and I doubt too many survivors will have thought to use the railroad, much less have brought the right maps with them.”