At the End of the Journey, page 9
part #8 of Black Tide Rising Series
I thought for a moment. “Change the order of objectives.”
He nodded. “So, first the roof of the bank, then the car?”
I nodded back. “Right. We’ll need that better view to spot a promising ride.” I laid my finger closer to my M4’s safety. “Ready?” They nodded. “Then let’s go.”
It was fifty yards from the lip of the hill to the bank. One story, better construction than most of the local buildings. We’d seen a picture of it in one of the guidebooks, probably because it was the only bank on the whole damn island. We sprinted toward it, Steve slightly in the lead.
He charged up its front walkway, where the edge of the roof was closest. He threw his back against the wall, crouched, braced, put his hands together as a stirrup for me.
I stopped alongside him, dropped everything except my M4 and the coiled Jacob’s ladder that Tai looped around my shoulder. “Ready?” I asked. Steve nodded. I put my right foot in his linked palms and hopped up as he boosted me.
The gloves we got from Ascension saved my fingers from getting ripped to shreds; it was a metal roof and the edges had become pretty rough. But, using a fish hook in my left hand, I got a firm hold and clambered up. “Any sign of stalkers?” I asked in a very loud whisper.
Tai’s voice was a little louder. “Not yet.”
I got another hook under the shingles and around one of the bolts or nails or whatever held it in place, attached the Jacob’s ladder, and rolled it down over the edge. They handed up my gear, the heavier parts of their own (mostly spare ammo), and climbed. I don’t think any of us drew a full breath until we were all crouching on that roof.
While Steve called in our first radio check, Tai and I scanned the areas around and beyond the Old Town square for cars. She spotted one almost fifty yards up a street that led to the higher, more modern part of Vila dos Remédios. “Shit,” she said. She’d adopted the English word. “Dass kinda far, chefe.”
I gritted my teeth, made sure my voice was controlled before I continued. “Yeah, we might have to bring Chloe and Jeeza up here. To cover us from this roof when we try for it.”
Steve, done with the radio check, leaned over to look at the car. “I don’t know, Alvaro. Lots of places you can’t see from up here.”
I shrugged, trying to act like it was all in a day’s work. “Yeah, but that works two ways. And having some cover on the approach is better than none.” Which was true, but also not very reassuring. Which he and I both knew.
But Tai was frowning again. She rose to a squat and side-stepped farther up the slope of the roof.
“Where are you going?” I hissed.
She glanced over the peak of the roof, then laughed. It was just a low chortle, but at that moment, it seemed loud enough to wake the dead. Or the plague’s equivalent.
“What’s so funny?” Steve muttered.
She shook her head; suppressing laughter, she pointed behind the bank. We crept up next to her, peeked over the top of the roof…
And found ourselves looking down on about half a dozen cars parked in front of the small houses that had been built behind it.
She smiled. “Sorry. Forgot about this li’l neighborhood, chefe. Never walked back here much.”
Steve nodded. Despite his poker face, he looked pretty relieved.
“And that,” I murmured to no one in particular, “is why you always bring a local.”
Even though these cars were pretty close to us, I still decided to get Chloe and Jeeza up on the roof of the bank before we got down on the ground again. So we covered their approach up the hill and then, when they’d set up, climbed down to survey the vehicles. Frankly, even if none of the cars started, some of the local dune-buggy knock-offs were light enough that we could push one an inch or two beyond the crest and keep it there with a quick haul on the hand brake. Then, if we needed a quick get-away, we’d just pop the brake and trust to gravity.
But nothing ever works the way you expect. After rejecting the first two cars (one had two flat tires, the other had been torched), we discovered a third that was not only intact, but, after a couple of tries, started responding to the charger.
But so did a stalker that had been snoozing nearby. He came out of the closest house in a rush—fast but stumbling—and Steve, who was our local overwatch, fired at him: a miss. Steve pump-fired another load of buck, which caught him in the lower leg.
The stalker stumbled but kept pushing on—but in an attempt to get past us.
“Down!” Chloe screamed, so loud that she drowned out her own voice coming from the radio.
We dove. The bolt-action cracked. The stalker fell headlong. We got up on the vehicle—it was a pickup truck with an empty cargo bed—and each took one hundred and twenty degrees of coverage, hunching over our sights as a dark red stain spread like wings on the back of the stalker.
We waited a full minute. No sound, no movement. Hell, not even any birds.
I toggled the radio. “Jeeza?”
“No sign of movement anywhere, Alvaro. Out to the limit of visibility.”
“Then I’ll call it clear,” I said. “Jeeza, report the contact to Prospero.”
“Already did.”
I toggled off, hopped down, went toward the facedown stalker.
“Chefe—” Tai began.
I waved away her worry, although I was glad to hear it. She had become one of us even faster than I had suspected she might. I examined the body as best I could. “Really gaunt,” I reported.
“Makes sense, if he was a passive,” Steve offered with a shrug.
I nodded. “Yeah. He wouldn’t have joined the ones who showed up at the Massacre or the Alamo. Maybe he was too weak to even go down to the beach and feed on the corpses.”
Tai spat. “Don’ matter. He dead. So he good, now.”
I nodded. “We can’t assume that we’ll see any more like him up here. But we shouldn’t be surprised by it either. And as far as I can recall, none of the passives on Ascension ever holed up together. They were always solo.”
Steve nodded. “That’s right.” He looked at the car. “Think you can get that engine to turn over?”
I shrugged. “Let’s find out.”
We got the car running. Then, with Chloe and Jeeza on overwatch, we swept the buildings that faced the square. Nobody home. No one alive, that is.
What we’d seen three weeks ago, down south at the pousadas near Baia Sueste, was both more and less disturbing than this. That had been more disturbing because a lot of those corpses were still mostly intact. But here in town, it was the sheer number of bodies that was staggering. And most were so torn to pieces that it was hard to get an accurate count. Every bone had been damn near stripped clean. Limbs and even heads had been removed. In many cases, the marrow had been sucked out. And we encountered a lot of very small spines and skulls in that gruesome mix.
So with the immediate surroundings cleared, we took the risk of bringing Rod and Prospero up the hill while we got siphons going to drain the tanks of other vehicles. We left the pickup’s engine running—as ragged as it was—for two reasons: to recharge the battery and to keep the truck ready for a quick extraction back down the hill.
While we were doing that, Jeeza spotted a stumbler way up on the high ground behind the governor’s palace: about one hundred twenty yards away. It didn’t seem to know we were there, and it moved furtively: almost surely another passive. But passive or not, it was infected and required extermination. One bark from Chloe’s .308 and the stumbler collapsed. It didn’t move again.
With the truck fueled and idling and Prospero at the wheel and manning the radio, Rod and Cujo joined us at the governor’s palace while Jeeze and Chloe remained in overwatch. The palace is essentially a three-story structure, built on a big concrete platform that is partially dug back into the slope. Its roof was the highest point for almost two hundred yards in every direction, making it the next sniper’s perch for covering our staged advance into Vila dos Remédios. We checked our gear, particularly where we had used tape to seal seams and hold crucial items in place, and then crept up the palace’s long front staircase. When we got to the door, Cujo started growling—but like he was disturbed, rather than alarmed.
So when we pushed through the partially open door—Tai going high and me going low (because I do start a lot closer to the floor)—none of us were surprised to find ourselves ankle-deep in stalker spoor. Yes, I do mean shit, but not just that. Hair, old clothes, gnawed bones, bits of furniture and even plaster: the infected were pretty tough on housing.
We made sure our masks were tight and moved inside. Cujo became bored, rather than more agitated.
“I bet a lot of the ones that came to our party came from here,” Rod said quietly.
“I’ll bet you’re right,” I agreed. “Let’s finish the sweep.”
Physically, it was a pretty easy job. The rooms were big but few in number and the stairs wide with good visibility. We didn’t like being in a plague house, so we got to the roof, let down a Jacob’s ladder to the second-story veranda, and signaled the all clear.
Once Jeeza and Chloe had climbed up and Cujo joined our entry team, we were able to move more quickly. Both times that there was a live stalker in a building, Cujo tweaked to the scent at least ten yards before we got there. Maybe he smelled a fresh trail they’d left or just heard them snoring. Who knows? All I know is that we flushed each of them out with a rock through the window—which brought them right out into our field of fire.
Even so, it was a long, sweaty day, both because we were suited and sealed on an equatorial island and because—even with Cujo and our overwatch—house-to-house sweeps are more nerve-wracking than anything else I have ever done or imagined. It never becomes a routine. Sure: you eventually fall into a kind of rhythm of tactics and movement, but you never get used to the uncertainty, to the ever-present fear that the next door, the next corner, could be the one where stalkers leap out at you. And if you ever got past the point of fearing that every single time, then it would be time to stop. Because any time could be that time—and if you get complacent, you’ll get dead.
At two in the afternoon, we reversed our advance, canvassing each secured building for useful salvage, spray painting it with an “X” if it had any, and sprinkling powdered chalk at each point of ingress. That was the only way to see if anything went back in after we left. Not perfect, but these days, what is?
Once we got back to Voyager, all of us took long showers. We really needed them. But particularly the entry team: we were rank with tropically cooked fear-sweat. I wasn’t sure that any amount of washing would get the stink out of our clothes, though.
Over dinner, we discussed—with almost disturbing calmness—how we’d do the same thing the next day. And how, as we moved deeper into Vila dos Remédios, we’d move Chloe’s overwatch site from one water tower/cistern to the next. We’d located enough of them that we pretty much had a route of covered advance through almost the entire downtown—such as it is. The remaining cluster of buildings is the most dense and follows along only three roads, each of which is about four hundred yards long. We figured, based on today’s progress, that we could knock off one of those streets every day, assuming we didn’t run into anything too crazy. The truck would follow the entry team at about one hundred yards, so we would never have far to run in case we had to get the hell out of Dodge. We congratulated each other on a job well done, expressed confidence in the new plans, and assured ourselves that tomorrow was going to be a piece of cake.
Which no one believed for one skinny second.
November 28
If there’s a constant in this postapocalyptic world, it’s this: the moment you think everything is going just fine, it goes to shit. And never in the way you expect.
So yesterday, the second day of clearing, went just as we planned. A few more passives, then three stalkers that Cujo smelled fifty yards away. We just let him bark. They came racing out—so emaciated that it was hard to believe they were actually alive—and straight into our guns. I think one got to within twenty yards of us; she was small and fast and took four rounds to put down. We found utility and town survey maps in the glove compartment of a public works pickup truck, and now had a precise bird’s-eye assessment of every street and every building. We were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves.
Today started the same way. By noon, we’d cleared most of the more developed part of the town center. After that, it was either a branch of the main road going east or the one going west. We headed west because we were considering landing at St. Anthony’s Bay tomorrow and rolling up the east branch of the main road from that side. Hell, we were already making plans for how to handle the airport, now that we had real maps.
But as we headed west, we started realizing that, as Tai put it, we were now “in Brazil for real.” Which meant that we started seeing buildings that weren’t on the maps, a lot of which were pretty sketchy structures. If one in three were built to code, I’d give up my carb ration for a week.
End result: things slowed way down. It wasn’t as bad as the first day, though. With Chloe and Jeeza on water towers, we were usually able to compensate for what the maps didn’t show. But not always, and that uncertainty is what eats up extra minutes and makes them extra sweaty.
So we were always a little relieved when we were going into one of the buildings that was not only on the map, but faced right on the street. That may have been what had us a little less ready for the unexpected.
Cujo didn’t make any sound until the door opened. Then he yipped like he’d stepped on a tack and started growling, hair standing straight up all along his spine. That had never happened before, so we defaulted into a defensive wedge, me in the front and low, Steve and Tai behind and to either side of the doorway.
Nothing. Cujo was still growling but sniffing high in the air, from side to side, as if he was confused.
Then he lunged to the left.
As Rod hauled him back in, all of us—like dopes—aimed left.
But the rush of movement came from the right flank. We turned and fired: pure reflex.
The figure—a female—sprawled, and then scramble-crawled into the room to the left. We kept blasting rounds after her; none hit, despite the close range. Given how shaken and jittery we were, I’m just glad we didn’t vent each other. (Well, vent me, since I was the only one out in front of anyone’s muzzle.)
The radio went nuts. Prospero wanted a report. Chloe was shouting to find out if anyone was hurt. But we didn’t have time to wait for that chaos to resolve. I called for a staged magazine swap. First Steve and Tai, then me. Then we swept left and entered the room into which the stalker had disappeared.
I should have known this entry would be different. Cujo’s initial confusion, the stalker fleeing across our field of fire: looking back, it was hinky. But when the adrenaline is pumping and you’re worried that you might get buried under a horde of pseudo-zombies, you’re not tracking the details. You’re just doing what you think will keep you alive. And that meant finishing the job we had started.
So the last thing we expected to see when we came around the door was the female on the floor, curled into a fetal position and, well, wailing. She didn’t jump up or threaten us; she just stayed there, writhing from multiple leg wounds, it seemed. The only reason none of us fired was because in some part of what they call the lizard hind-brain, we knew this was a position of submission. So we were looking at a passive. But rather than flee—we had seen there was a window on the back wall, busted clear of all glass—she had charged into this side room from which there was no other exit.
Then her writhing grew wilder, and she seemed to be pawing at the floor under her—right before a kid popped out of the hole she’d been lying across. And that kid did not move like a passive; he came straight at us. Reflex took over: we shifted aim and blasted away.
At a kid.
I thought I was going to throw up. Partly out of fear—he was fast and small and as ferocious and deranged as any stalker we’d yet faced—but mostly out of revulsion at what I was doing: shooting a child.
And then I was falling on my ass. The instant we started firing, the female came roaring at us, talonlike fingers raking wildly. I thought I was a goner: being the smallest and in the lead, I was the natural target. But she knocked me over in her rush to get at Tai.
Tai turned and fired, missed, and was down under the female. Steve staggered back a step, shocked (there’s a first for everything) and paralyzed by indecision as the female’s jaws snapped down at Tai’s neck. The yellowed teeth missed Tai’s makeshift gorget by an inch.
I wish I could say my actions were cool and collected and deliberate, but they weren’t. I don’t even remember thinking. I just rolled up to my feet, pulled my HP-35, stepped to point blank, and fired into the back of the passive’s skull. Three times.
Just like that, it was over.
But panic followed. The passive had torn Tai’s seals and my rounds had sprayed infected blood and brains all over the place. The truck raced in. Frenzied, Tai wanted to jump up and start wiping herself off. We had to hold her down until Prospero got there with the field decon kit, did a quick survey, and then doused her with the mix. Tai kept shrieking at him to tell her if she’d been bitten or if the blood had gotten on her; Prospero just kept asking her to stay calm, because he couldn’t see well enough to answer her question.
One of our disciplines was to report any and all cuts and scratches, from whatever source. That way, we could hopefully discriminate between a wound that had been incurred in the normal course of day-to-day living (on a boat, that means a lot of scrapes) or something that had been inflicted by a stalker. But Tai wasn’t much for protocols and she’d been pretty lax about this one. And now, in her panic, she couldn’t remember which cuts and scratches she’d had at the start of the day. Most of them looked old, but when you sweat from dawn onward in the tropics and you’re wearing abrasive makeshift armor, you rub off a lot of scabs. This day had been no exception.
