by Lundy, W. J.
“That what I think it is?” Culver whispered.
“I don’t see what you are looking at.”
Culver pointed a gloved finger. “Between the dumpster and that garage. You see it now?”
Gyles lifted his own rifle and looked out through the scope. He scanned left and spotted it: a curled and twisted hand connected to a grey arm. Panning right, he spotted more of the twisted shapes behind the dumpster. He exhaled loudly and nodded his head. “I see it. A body drop.”
“You want to go check it out?”
Gyles cleared his throat and looked back to the building and the closest entrance door. “No, we’re here for the living, not the dead. As far as I know, Primals don’t stack up bodies. Let’s see if we can find a way inside and see who does.”
Culver stood again, and this time, they moved together in a tight crouch; Culver with his rifle ahead, trained on the door, with Gyles off his right shoulder, covering the outside and sweeping to check behind them. Soon they were climbing a narrow set of steps up to a back door made of wood planks and painted a bright white. Culver moved to the right of it as Gyles positioned himself to the left. There was a sign on the door, something about clothing drop-offs and a food bank.
The young soldier reached below the sign and put his hand on the knob. He paused and made eye contact with Gyles, who nodded. He twisted the knob, but the door didn’t open. Culver shook his head no. Culver reached for a tactical tomahawk on his belt, prepared to break the door in, when Gyles held up a hand to stop him.
“If there are people in there, I don’t want to go busting in their door,” he whispered. “Might piss them off.”
“So, what then?” Culver looked at him. “You want to check for another way in?”
Gyles shook his head. “Nah,” he said and rapped his knuckles on the solid surface of the planks. “Let’s try this first.” He knocked again and the pair listened intently. Within minutes, they heard movement inside and then the knob moved. Instead of opening, a second door farther down the wall opened and a pair of men poured out, holding shotguns and rifles to their shoulders.
“Whoa.” Gyles stepped back and held up his hands, letting his own rifle hang on its sling. “We didn’t come looking for trouble, gentleman.”
With their attention now down the wall, the door to their immediate front opened. An elderly black man in a dark coat stepped out, holding a pistol. “And who might you be?” the man asked.
Chapter Four
Day of Infection, Plus Eighteen
Camp Alamo, Near Hayslette, Virginia
“No—absolutely not. You cannot stay here,” Luke insisted.
The girl didn’t budge, holding her place on a kitchen chair just inside the tiny room. Narrow and no larger than a converted storage closet, it was hardly big enough to hold a pair of duffel bags and his bedroll. Luke owned a single piece of furniture, and the girl was presently occupying it. The tiny room, located on the third floor of the camp’s garrison building, wasn’t much of a barracks space.
The small size of the space in this instance was a blessing to Luke, as it meant he wasn’t required to have a roommate, and he really wanted to keep it that way. They’d only stopped here on the way to the admin office so he could give her some extra survival gear and a field jacket. His intent was to keep her moving so he could turn her over to the Marines. Unfortunately, that plan had stalled out, and she was now refusing to leave his room. Luke stood in the open doorway, his hand rubbing his forehead. Marines passed by, grinning at him as they glanced inside, one pumping his index finger into a balled fist.
“Fuck off, perv, she’s a kid,” Luke said.
The Marine laughed. “Hey, no judgment, old man.”
“Old man?” Luke grimaced. “Get lost before I show you who’s an old man.”
The girl stomped her feet and pushed the chair against the wall. “See? Right there, even with you guys. You know what will happen to me down there in the survivors’ block? You know what they’ll do once they find out I’m all alone?”
“Come on, work with me here,” Luke said. “I could get kicked out of this block just for having you in my room. Civilians aren’t allowed up here. You think these dickheads will keep this a secret?”
“Then why am I here—Luke?” She said his name with contempt, shaking her head as she dropped the syllable. “I should have just stayed out there. I was better off with the monsters.”
“Are you kidding me right now?” He grunted. “Fine. You stay here. I’ll go live in the survivors’ block. Anything has to be better than this.” He moved out of the doorframe and shut it behind him. He took a few steps from the door and caught a glance from a Marine on roving guard duty. The man smirked, and Luke raised a pointed finger, cautioning him.
The young Marine grinned and showed his empty palms as a truce sign.
“Listen,” Luke said, “can you keep an eye on that door? Don’t let her leave until I get back.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, I’m no babysitter,” the young man said. “And I ain’t down with you kidnapping no girl, either.”
Luke sighed anxiously. “She’s a witness in a crime.”
“Then you should take her to the Colonel; you know civvies aren’t allowed up here.”
Luke pressed his eyes closed and tried to rub off a piercing headache. “I just need you to keep her in that room until I get back. Nail the damn door shut, if you must. I just don’t want her running off or anyone messing with her. She might be in trouble.”
The Marine’s eyes turned to the door then looked back to Luke with concern. “Is she dangerous?”
“No, she’s a damn kid.”
The Marine scowled and looked at his watch. “My shift ends in an hour; that’s all you got. I ain’t putting this crap in the watch log, and I’m not turning it over to the next shift.”
“Good enough,” Luke said, moving away. He traveled along a passageway and back toward the large factory floor filled with glassed-in offices. He walked to the stairway that led up to the mezzanine offices, where he knew the command staff resided. At the end of the large bay, he saw soldiers entering from the garage bay that was now the motor pool.
He recognized several of them from Gyles’s Reaper Platoon. He considered stopping by and talking out his problem with the sergeant before taking it to the camp admin, but decided otherwise. Gyles had his own real-world problems, and he’d gotten himself into this mess—he’d get himself out of it. Trying to get the girl a room would be the quickest fix.
At the end of the walkway was a double cube made of raw lumber in the middle of the factory. Before all this, it would have been an office where engineers and managers would man desk space and observe the factory floor. Now it was paneled in on all sides, the door reinforced with plywood, a large plank deck and railing surrounding it.
“Damn Seabees,” he muttered to himself. The block-and-plywood construction were the telltale building style of the Navy Combat Construction men—they would wrap everything in plywood, if they could. And since the moment the camp had gone up, the Bees had been going on runs, raiding every Home Depot and lumberyard within a hundred miles before returning to make the camp look like a plywood fortress.
Luke wouldn’t complain about it, though. The barricades and ramparts were impressive and, to date, not a single infected person had breached them. He moved to the door and pushed it open. As he stepped inside, a large coiled spring nearly snapped the door from his hand and slammed it shut. The inside was no more appealing than outside, a deep square of wood that smelled like a lumberyard. Behind a tall plywood counter that hadn’t been there the last time he visited, were desks and tables constructed of even more plywood.
A Marine sergeant looked up at him from a back corner. Her name was Janette Acosta. She had been on duty the night he arrived and they assigned him his room. Since then, they’d somewhat become friends… if you could call being constantly harassed and mocked “friendship”. She was small and wiry but had a Puerto Rican at
titude twice her size. Somehow, she’d gotten it into her head that she and Luke were an item, or she was just doing it to mess with him.
Acosta moved to the counter and leaned against it. He looked away, trying to divert his eyes and not check her out. Attracted to her or not, he was still a male, and as a female, she was hitting high on the averages. “Hey, look at this. It’s Deputy Luke Ross,” she said in a rant heavily laced with sarcasm. “So, please tell me you finally decided to take Master Guns up on his offer to sign back in with the Corps.”
Luke scowled and shook his head. “I’ve got a problem. I think you can help me with it.”
“Oh, I’m sure I could find an officer to swear you in.”
Luke grimaced. “That’s not the problem.”
“Problem then, huh?” She tipped her head to the left like she was thinking. “Is it girlfriend problems because, you know, I am not playing right?”
Luke shook his head and sighed. “I picked up a girl in the survivors’ block.”
“Wait, so you’re cheating on me then? Is that it, Luke?”
“It’s not like that,” Luke grunted in frustration, not amused by the game. “This kid, she was in trouble. I had to arrest a few guys messing with her, and now she thinks she isn’t safe in the block.”
“I heard about that, Mr. Hero. Sounded like you did a lot more than arrest them fools. I heard you nearly killed one of them. No worries about it, though. They’ll be exiled by sundown. It’s nothing for you to lose sleep over.”
Luke shrugged. “And that’s really not going to help her case with the locals. Like I said, she isn’t safe in the block anymore. She fears retaliation, so I took her back to my room.”
“Damn, Luke—you sure it isn’t like that?” she said, staring him down. “You brought a girl back to your room? You gone completely loco?”
Luke looked away. When he looked back up, he could see he’d gained the rest of the admin office’s attention. A young Marine private was looking at him, holding a fist and pumping an index finger. “Holy hell, what is it with you damn Marines?” Luke said. “I told you it’s not like that. She was being harassed by some guys. I had to break up a fight and pull her out of there. Now she can’t return without the rest of the crew coming after her.”
“Broken record,” Acosta said and raised her hands, showing her palms. Luke clenched his fists and went to speak again, when she held up her palm to his face. “Calm down, hero. So, she can’t go back to Block A. I can find her something in B.” She grinned. “But if you can hold on to her a couple days, I might have something better.”
“No,” Luke snapped back quickly. “I cannot hold on to her. She needs something now, and she is refusing to go back to the survivors’ blocks. Any block, for that matter.”
Acosta shrugged. “Nobody is forced to stick around; send her packing. Show her the door.”
“She’s an unaccompanied minor, Janette.” Luke knew he was taking a risk, dropping Acosta’s first name in front of her Marines. Even though she played loose with formalities, she took her rank seriously.
Acosta appeared unfazed by the name drop, but Luke knew he would be catching shit for it later. The woman sighed and asked, “How old is the girl?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know sixteen, eighteen maybe?”
“Which is it?” she said, her tone softening. “Big difference between sixteen and eighteen.”
Luke knew he had her on the hook now. From the look on the woman’s face, he could see that her gears were turning, her sensitive side waking up. Now he just had to reel her in. “I’m not sure how old, but she’s a young girl all alone. You can relate, right?”
Acosta looked up at him, her brows suddenly tightened, the concerned look gone. “No, I can’t relate. Ain’t nobody messing with me.”
Damn. Stupid move. Acosta can’t relate to anyone, he thought to himself as the line broke and the hook was thrown into the murky depths. “Come on, just assign her a room up on the garrison deck,” he said, pointing to the whiteboard with the room assignments written on it. There were still several squares showing empty or listed as supply closets. “I’ll get her a job on this side. She can work in here or in the military chow hall. Help me out; I can’t just ditch her.”
The woman shook her head no, then turned back to face him. “Look, best I can do is find a family to try and foster her. There are plenty of kids like that in the blocks right now. Besides, no way the Colonel would allow a civilian to stay in the troop barracks.”
“I’m sorry, that won’t work,” Luke said, turning his back to the counter.
“Luke, hold up,” Acosta said. She reached down and grabbed a rifle from a rack as she rounded the wooden counter. “Let’s grab a cup of coffee.”
Luke tucked in his lip and nodded. “Okay.”
He stepped aside and let the Marine move past him out of the wooden cube and onto the deck. He followed her out and down the steps. She waited for him in the passageway then turned to walk toward the Marine galley at the far end of the factory floor.
“I didn’t know there was any coffee left in camp,” Luke said.
She laughed. “There isn’t, but I told my Marines I quit smoking.” She kept moving and turned toward a steel shuttered door. She pulled away several blocking bars then unlocked and pulled the door open, revealing a caged-in area with several crudely constructed picnic tables. They were outside the structure, against an edge of the steel-clad building surrounded by blacktop, and in the distance, the earthen wall. Roars of the infected and diesel engines outside drifted toward them from the far side of the berm. Luke could see tall towers of heavy black smoke roiling into the distant sky.
“Even at the end of the world, the Colonel won’t let us have a cigarette indoors.” She waved her hand, signaling for Luke to exit.
Luke moved through the doorway and into the small chain link cube reminiscent of a prison exercise yard. He hadn’t been outside since arriving to the camp; the sounds of the screams and stench of death reminded him why. The smell of the fire was stronger out here than it had been inside. The stink of diesel and burning garbage brought back memories of Iraq, where the high humidity made the stink stick and linger around his face.
Shaking his head, he turned away. Luke moved to the back and saw an empty paint can filled with cigarette butts. He stepped to a table and sat on the top of it. Acosta walked to his front and dug a pack of cigarettes from a cargo pocket on her thigh. She offered him one, but Luke declined. The woman pointed toward the roars along the south fence. “The infected are stacking up against the barriers, doubling every few hours. The numbers have gotten so thick that it’s almost pointless to shoot them anymore. The Seabees are trying to move them with the dozers, pushing them into the burn pits… until they overflow.”
“Does it work?” Luke asked.
She shook her head. “It was, but it sounds like the things are learning. A lot of them stay back now, moving away from the dozers. Or they get in close to the walls, where the dozers can’t reach them, then rush the backs of them. They’ve even started to bunch up around the gates. They wait until the doors open for the dozers to leave then force their way inside. Some get in before the gates can be closed. The guards have been able to control it so far.”
“They wait by the gate?” Luke asked.
She took a long draw on the cigarette and nodded. “It’s like they know our perimeter, like they are learning it, and learning how we respond. We were starting fires way out in the fields to draw them off earlier.” She shook her head. “It’s the only thing that still seems to work, but we are running out of things to burn.”
“Is this something I should be worried about?”
She shrugged, took a deep drag, then spoke. “Listen, there is something else, and I didn’t want to say anything in there because I’m not really supposed to know this. Last thing we need is a panic.”
Luke’s brows lifted, his attention piqued. “Know what?”
She pulled the cigarette
away and took a seat next to him. “They’ve contacted the surviving units from Fort Stewart. Some infantry guys and mechanized units with tanks and all that, like a real functioning division.”
“Erickson?” Luke said, turning to face her.
“Yeah, that name sounds right. I think that was the guy.” Acosta looked down at her boots. “Military forces are rallying. They’ve got a bunch of Rangers there, some more from the Third Infantry Division, and other straggler units coming back from the Meat Grinder. What’s left of them have set up in Savanah, Georgia.”
“What’s left of them?” Luke said, his eyebrows turning up.
She shook her head. “It’s not looking good for the home team. The Army has lost a lot of people, same as the Corps. We haven’t heard anything from the Airforce and Navy.”
“So what does that mean for us?”
“Nothing right now. Fort Stewart is nearly six hundred miles away. Colonel is still plotting a way for us to combine efforts. A way to get us all there. Ericson is talking about sending a bus convoy to get us all out.”
“Wait,” —Luke shook his head— “get us out? How is that? How did they contact Ericson? Long-range radios are down.”
Acosta locked eyes with him. “Luke, you can’t go spouting this stuff off. You can’t tell anyone.”
He nodded. “Shit, who am I going to tell?”
She grinned at him. “I’ve got a friend in the communications shack. There seems to be some leadership folks left alive out West trying to coordinate a counter offensive. Some military guys working out of a bunker in Colorado, not so much as helping us directly. They are mostly concerned with their own survival, but they’ve been helping us out with intel and tech, troop locations, stuff like that.”
“But the radios—they do, or they don’t work?”
“They work. Just not all the time. There is a window apparently when they open. It’s random and changes every hour, but these bunker guys contacted us and passed the schedule on to Colonel McDuffie. They’ve been talking for almost three days now. They linked us up with Erickson.”
