Crawlerz | Book 4 | From The Ashes

by Merritt, R. S.

  “Where do the shooters hide?” Drew asked. This wasn’t a subtle approach to taking out the crawlerz. It kind of sounded exactly like the type of plan Drew would’ve come up with.

  “We build them secure nests to shoot from. Too high for the crawlerz to reach. They spend the whole night up there raining down death. Then we spend the next morning scraping up the remains.” Malone said with a slightly pained smile.

  “So we’re bait?” Yue clarified.

  “Not just you. Everyone in this building. If you came here to fight, then get used to it. This is how we’re doing it.” Malone said before tossing out some final instructions and leaving them for the night.

  “Now what?” Yue asked plopping down on a cot.

  “I’m sure they’ll be serving dinner soon.” Lisa said. It was a running gag between the two of them. The base in Weathertop had delivered breakfast, lunch and dinner as reliably as Old Faithful.

  Yue didn’t say anything, but food was the last thing on her mind. She needed Jeff to hurry up and get her. He had a whole lot of explaining to do.

  Chapter 2: Live Bait

  Jeff brought dinner with him when he showed up later that afternoon. Dinner included a few bottles of champagne that’d been nicely chilled in one of the few working refrigerators in the city. Sitting around a makeshift table the group caught Jeff up on how they’d managed to track him down. He was suitably moved that they’d kept looking for him. Especially once they admitted there’d been plenty of times that they assumed he was either dead or locked up in a cell somewhere. They danced around the reason for Harley to have come along. That chapter had hopefully been closed with Harley’s public forgiveness of Jeff.

  “Last time we saw you they were putting a black bag over your head and shoving you in the back of a car.” Drew said looking Jeff up and down. The man looked healthy and wealthy by apocalypse standards. He’d walked into the room with chilled bottles of champagne. The food he’d brought for them hadn’t been room temperature gunk out of a can. He looked like he might have even recently shaved and showered. How much all of that was normal and how much was due to the love of his life showing back up on his doorstep was anyone’s guess.

  “I’m with Drew. How’d you go from a black bag over your head to being in charge of the city?” LeBron asked curiously.

  “Well I’m not in charge of the city. I’m in charge of planning the overall effort to rebuild as it pertains to the non-military survivors. The President finally saw the light as far as utilizing the refugees to help with the effort.” Jeff answered.

  “So you’re not in charge of the military?” Drew asked.

  “No they have a separate chain of command. They report up through the secretary of defense. My old job gave me the tools to be very useful in this phase of the event though.” Jeff answered.

  “So that makes you in charge of what exactly?” Drew asked. If Jeff wasn’t in the chain of the command on the military side, then how was he in charge of anything? It wasn’t like the ragtag groups of refugees out there were going to spontaneously become a single cohesive fighting force and follow his orders. Most refugees were harboring a well-deserved deep distrust of the government. You couldn’t really blame anyone for not following the commands of a government that’d purposefully deserted them when this all started.

  “I’m in command of strategy for the force and the military directly supporting that effort.” Jeff said.

  “And that is…” Drew said rolling his hand to indicate Jeff should keep going. For the first time Jeff saw that all of them looked completely lost. Jeff must not have realized how anti-social his friends were. They hadn’t talked much to any of the other refugees on the train. They’d heard the force mentioned by soldiers, but the military men had made it sound like a joke.

  “Is it the new name for the military all being combined together?” Yue asked. That’s what she’d inferred from her aggressive eavesdropping.

  “Not really. It’s more like the refugee army. Kind of like an apocalyptic militia. We accept volunteers then give them jobs to help with carving out crawler free zones. I’m in charge of developing the plans we’re using for that effort.” Jeff answered. LeBron picked up on something in the way he said it.

  “You’re in charge of the strategy but do you have direct reports? Are you more like a consultant?” LeBron asked trying to drill down into what exactly it was that Jeff did. Yue looked almost as uncomfortable as Jeff with all the probing questions. Even though if this had been anyone besides Jeff, she’d have been the one asking all the questions.

  “A couple of you were on the bridge of the Ford with me. You saw how well I get along with President Thompson. A lot of the officers who were there when the President demoted me made it to Weathertop. I wasn’t given this job to be in charge of anybody or to have any real power. I’m alive to appease certain people and prevent a possible coup. I’m here to make the military feel better about using refugees as cannon fodder.” Jeff said. He was trying to explain decades of political maneuvering in as few words as possible.

  He thought Yue and LeBron may have gotten it. Drew and Lisa were completely confused. Harley had climbed on one of the cots to crack open a book. He’d pointedly turned his back on them to pretend to read. Jeff would bet a box of spam that the man currently testing the maximum weight limit of that cot was actively listening to everything they said. Being big didn’t mean being stupid. Like the professional wrestlers he resembled Harley seemed to be putting on an act most of the time.

  “When you say using refugees as cannon fodder?” Drew asked picking out the one part of all of Jeff’s ramblings that truly concerned him. It also happened to be the phrase that’d stood out to everyone else as well. The rest of it was noise. A game being played on a stage in a theatre they couldn’t even afford tickets to. Jeff smiled ruefully at the question. He was regretting his choice of words. Attempting to be as honest and direct as possible he answered Drew’s question.

  “The building we’re in right now will have a massive mosh pit of crawlerz bouncing all around it in a couple of hours. Just in case the cannon fodder doesn’t get them here we’ll be shooting up fireworks to get their attention. The area around here’s pretty open. We built towers for our snipers to spend the night in. They’ll stay up all night bagging as many crawlerz as they can. We have other guys on the roof taking shots as well. In the morning we bulldoze the dead bodies over a few blocks and burn them. The refugees get to help out by scraping up the pieces and parts that break off when they’re getting bulldozed. It’s pretty gross.” Jeff said. Most what he’d just said merely corroborated what they’d already been told by Private Malone.

  “Cannon fodder’s a pretty harsh term. This place looks like its built pretty solid. I’d be more worried if I was one of those snipers out there.” Drew said. He wasn’t really seeing a downside to this. Jeff may be overreacting or just trying to blow off steam. All the high level political stuff could just be Jeff showing off for Yue. They needed the actual truth. Jeff had evidently been spending too much time with politicians lately.

  “We should be safe here.” Jeff admitted. “They’ve done the same thing before in other places where the buildings weren’t as secure. I’ve heard some horror stories about what happened to those refugees. Not to mention the soldiers who went in to try and save them. I’m trying to come up with ways to deploy the force so that their value is more than just bait for the crawlerz.” That made sense. Being considered bait when you had a nice solid fortress to pass the time in was one thing. You didn’t want to be the pig who was told to sit in the straw house when the wolf was going to come howling that night.

  Jeff was playing in a different league than the rest of them. He’d been a high ranking government bureaucrat in an obscure department when this all started. He’d risen rapidly through the ranks once it turned out his department had been the only one to have plans for an eventuality like the crawlerz. Jeff was accustomed to playing politics and working with the big
wigs. Yue was very much aware that she’d been a waitress at IHOP when this all started. Her brothers and Lisa had been in high school and for all she knew Harley had been serving time somewhere.

  The apocalypse had pretty much leveled the playing field though. Jeff’s world might have been way out of their reach before. Now they kept finding themselves being pulled right into its orbit. The man was sitting there confiding everything to them. There was no way they were cleared to be hearing what they were hearing. Not that clearances and such really mattered anymore. It still wouldn’t do for the cannon fodder refugees to find out that’s what they were seen as. Then it dawned on her that of course the refugees already knew that. They knew it and accepted it.

  Talk turned to the other methods the force was working on to try and massacre as many of the infected masses as possible. The concept of creating crawler free zones was really only practical for islands. Otherwise you had to build thirty footy walls around whatever you were trying to protect to have any hope of keeping them out. Even with those massive walls in place you could never be sure one of them wouldn’t come along who could skip right over it.

  “Why not just build a lot of buildings like this one for people to live in?” Lisa asked Jeff. The answer immediately rolled off Jeff’s lips. It was something he’d already put a good deal of thought into.

  “That could be the solution once the infected population has been cut way down. Right now a soldier needs to be able to shoot and endure the mental part also. The mind games those things play when big groups of them are attacking. Those are way more dangerous than their teeth. We have suicides on almost a daily basis here. You guys know what it feels like to hide in a stairwell and have those things creeping into your thoughts. Now imagine you have to do that every night for forever.” Jeff explained.

  “Valium.” Harley said from his cot.

  “What about it?” Jeff asked curiously.

  “Give people half a pill before they go to bed. It’s what I’ve figured out works the best for me so far. Those things still get in my head, but it’s not even a tenth as bad.” Harley answered.

  “Thanks Harley. I’ll check and see what we have as far as a Valium supply goes.” Jeff said. His eyes had a faraway look indicating he was mentally checking the inventory as he spoke.

  “All this thinking and strategy and stuff and you’re still just shooting them to kill them? What about traps or fire or people shaped balloons full of poison?” Drew asked. He was visualizing a cross between a gatling gun and a crossbow. You could just pick the darts out of the dead bodies and reuse them the next night. Why he thought that idea wasn’t worth mentioning while the balloon shaped people filled with poison tactic had come right out was one of those things that he hoped he never had to explain.

  “We’re doing other things as well. It’s baby steps though. Like the towers we built are basically reinforced port a potties sitting on top of utility poles. Our guys use spiked boots and a pulley system to climb up and down. We thought it’d be a good idea to put spikes all over the poles to impale the crawlerz who try to jump up and climb the pole. The crawlerz jumped up and got impaled just as planned. The problem was the next wave of crawlerz used those bodies to boost themselves up and attack the sniper position at the top. We lost all six snipers that night. Watched it happen over and over again with nothing we could do about it. Even when we focused our fire to try and save them.” Jeff said.

  “You couldn’t lay down enough fire to save any of them?” Drew said disbelievingly.

  “No. Once the crawlerz got to the top of the towers they started jumping for the roof. Kind of like the top of that medical office building we got stuck on top of. Most of them didn’t make it but enough did to keep us from being able to focus. It was a complete cluster.” Jeff said.

  “Any other stuff we should know about?” LeBron asked. He was beginning to see the wisdom in having someone like Jeff dedicated to determining the best strategy for making it through this.

  “I haven’t been here that much longer than you guys. At least not in real world time. In apocalypse time it feels like I’ve been here forever.” Jeff said. The small group of people around him nodded. They knew exactly what he was talking about. It wasn’t a matter of killing time to make it to the weekend anymore. It was literally waking up and fighting for your life until it was time to go to bed. When you do that every single day time takes on a whole new meaning. You appreciate every single morning you wake up alive. Once Jeff saw he didn’t need to explain that concept he fed them a few more anecdotes about the Fayetteville base and the force in general.

  Originally the military was seeking out refugees who were supersensitive to the psychic vibes being put off by the infected. Whichever scientist, soldier or politician had been in charge of that effort decided that people with those skills were kind of like Jedi Knights with the mind control thing. Hence the reason they named the group of people they gathered together the force. It was a stupid comparison and the psychic warrior thing never really panned out, but the name stuck. From a recruiting perspective getting people to join the force was much easier than asking if they minded being bait.

  From an ammunition perspective they were going to be ok for a little while at least. There were reserves of bullets stored in massive government warehouses. Senator’s cousins making millions off manufacturing more bullets than the military would ever be able to shoot no matter how many wars that same Senator started. Fort Bragg being right next door offered all kinds of options as far as gear and ammunition went. The problem wasn’t the ammunition so much as how difficult it was to actually bring down a crawler.

  The snipers on the roof started shooting once the crawlerz came into view every night. The infected moved so fast that it was pretty common to expend a magazine just trying to kill one of them. The guys up in the towers had more luck with their shots. Once the crawlerz ran into the wall of the school they tended to stay in one place trying to beat their way in. That was a much easier target than the ones hauling ass towards the building.

  Powerful search lights were used to illuminate the killing fields. They’d rigged up ultra-bright lights on the ground in multiple places. Those would attract some of the infected. A portion of those would stop and stare at the bright light until a sniper had the opportunity to pump a bullet through their heart. They had multiple diesel generators up on the roof to power everything. They’d run out of diesel before they ran out of bullets.

  “Sounds like a well-oiled killing machine except for the psychic attack piece of it. Maybe the Valium will help with that. Maybe we can find out if there’s a stockpile somewhere.” Yue said once Jeff had finished laying out his ideas for the group. He’d put pretty much everything out there on the table. Yue was hoping the bond between the two of them was strong enough that he’d tell her the rest of it later. The parts he wasn’t saying now were the ones she really wanted to know more about.

  “I wish it was as well-oiled as it seems on paper. You’ll see what it’s really like tonight. It’s a freakin nightmare. I’m going to go check on the Valium and see the duty officer to make sure everything’s ready. You guys won’t need to do anything tonight. I’d stay away from the walls. Random bullets have been known to come through them. If all’s well, I’ll come grab you to show you the view from the roof a little later. Otherwise try and get some sleep.” Jeff gave Yue one more quick kiss then rushed from the room. He was checking his watch as he did. It must be a lot of work preparing for an unwinnable battle every single day.

  Chapter 3: Waking Up to a Nightmare

  To absolutely no one’s surprise Drew fell asleep almost immediately. Lisa shoved a cot over so she could sleep beside her snoring beau. Yue sat down on a cot next to LeBron. He had his face shoved into a book about medicinal herbs.

  “I don’t think the fight to legalize it really matters anymore.” Yue said pointing at the book. LeBron laughed and put the book down.

  “I’ve been trying to shove my head full of usef
ul info whenever we’re not actively fighting for our lives.” LeBron answered.

  “Probably a good idea. Good luck finding any wild herbs in this landscape though.” Yue said.

  “It’s making me sleepy at least. Another couple of pages about the best soil types and I’ll be snoozing like a baby.” LeBron said making himself comfortable on the hard military style cot.

  Taking the hint Yue patted her brother on the head and slid her cot over by the wall. She wanted to sit up and think for a few minutes before trying to go to sleep herself. She had so many ideas and questions tumbling around in her head that she doubted she’d be able to fall asleep anyway. Not unless she washed down an Ambien with some Nyquil. Lacking the necessary drugs to knock herself out she stared out the window while she tried to work through the laundry list in her head.

  The windows on the third level weren’t thin sheets of steel. The people who secured the building had bolted chain link on the outside of the window then also put a layer of chain link on the inside wall covering the windows. They were on the third floor of the school so only the extra special crawler should be able to jump this high anyway. If they did manage to get up that high, they’d be stuck hanging on the fencing while the men on the roof shot them at point blank range.