Savages, page 3
part #5 of Surviving the Dead Series
I put my rifle, vest, and web belt on the floor behind the counter and poked my head in the storage room. “Sam?”
Samantha Walcott, physician’s assistant, stood up and faced me. She was in her early fifties, over six feet tall, lean, weathered, and hard as an iron chisel. “What?” she snapped.
“I’m here to help.”
“Take these,” she handed me a bundle of clear plastic bags. “Bandages. Give them out to the nurses, then head to the gate and help the guardsmen look for wounded.”
“Where’s Allison?”
“Busy.” Sam turned around and began sorting through boxes again. I was dismissed.
I went back to the parking lot. More bodies came in on carts, on horseback, in the Sheriff Department’s lone electric vehicle, on litters born by weary, frightened townsfolk. Some of the wounded walked themselves in, bleeding and limping and crying out in pain. A boy of no more than fifteen stumbled, fell, and was still. A nurse ran to him and checked his pulse, then rolled him over. There was a piece of shrapnel the length of a man’s forearm protruding from his chest. His eyes were wide open and fixed, glassy, lifeless. The nurse closed his eyes, dragged his body into the grass, and moved on.
Nurses took the bandages from me. When my arms were empty, I ran for the north gate.
*****
Mayor Stone’s paranoia was Hollow Rock’s saving grace.
I remember once going to see her at town hall on some small matter of public affairs she had asked me to look into. As I entered her office, she sat facing a window, feet perch on the sill, silhouetted in warm morning light. She turned when she heard me knock and asked me to sit down.
“Something on your mind, Elizabeth?” I asked.
“There’s always something on my mind.”
“What’s the topic of the day?”
“The wall,” she said.
“What about it?”
She laced her fingers over her stomach. “Too many people in this town take it for granted. Especially on the north side of town where it’s all concrete and steel. I look at the wall and I think about the Outbreak. I think about all the military hardware leftover from units that were overrun. I think about grenades, and bombs, and rocket launchers, not to mention all the materials that can be used to make improvised explosives. All just lying around waiting to be snatched up. I think about that, and I think about the Alliance, and the ROC, and all the raiders and marauders and assorted scum out there, and I think about how easy it would be to plant something ugly and volatile against the wall and watch from a good safe distance while it lit up the night. I think about that, and I wonder what we would do if it ever happened.”
“I’ve lost sleep a few nights dwelling on that subject myself.”
She spun around in her chair. “Did your contemplations yield any useful insights?”
I looked down at my fingernails. “The way things are going, I don’t think it’s a question of if, Liz. It’s a question of when. And how bad. You should talk to Ethan Thompson about it.”
“Why Thompson?”
“He told me a war story once about a place back in North Carolina called Steel City. Went there to stop some lunatic from leading a horde around and attacking small settlements. Ask him about the layout of Steel City. Might give you some ideas.”
She nodded twice, turned back to the window, and looked steadily toward the east wall while I gave her my report.
I did not get much sleep that night.
*****
By two in the afternoon on the day of the attack, everyone that could be saved had been. Forty-eight people lost their lives, including Private Fuller, a sheriff’s deputy on the force less than a month, and two men from Second Platoon on duty at the main gate when the first shells hit. In less than ten minutes, a small band of ROC suicide troops had killed more than twice as many people as the Free Legion did in over a year of raids.
I was filthy, sweaty, and exhausted by the time I helped pull the last of the bodies out of the rubble and ashes. The town’s sole functioning fire engine put out most of the fires, while crews with shovels and buckets kept the isolated ones contained until they burned out. To the north, the sound of gunfire tattooed the air as all of Echo Company and the Ninth Tennessee Volunteer Militia, reinforced by the Sheriff’s Department and a hundred town guardsmen, engaged the infected attracted by the fighting.
Mayor Stone appeared out of the dissipating smoke near the entrance to the clinic. She was speaking to Allison and one of the doctors from the Phoenix Initiative, Sudesh Khurana. Dr. Khurana was a small man in his late forties, balding, dark brown skin, rimless glasses, and sharp, intelligent eyes. His manner was brusque, but according to Allison, he was a highly skilled and eminently competent surgeon. An education at Johns Hopkins has that effect on people, evidently.
Allison spotted me on my way over, stopped talking mid-sentence, and ran into my arms. The mayor looked on with kind impatience.
“You’re all right,” she said.
I had to clear my throat before I could speak. “Yeah. I am.”
Her arms tightened and we stood that way for a few seconds, holding each other. I kissed the top of her head and then her lips and tried very hard to breathe against the constriction in my chest. I let her go and held her at arm’s length.
“How are you holding up?”
“I’d say I’ve seen worse, but that would be a lie.”
“And the baby?”
A small smile. “The baby is fine, Eric. I’m only five months pregnant. It’ll be a while before it’s big enough to cause trouble.”
I looked down at the slight bulge in her trim stomach. Anyone not as familiar with her body as I was would not have noticed it. But I did. I stared at it often, and covered it with my hand when we slept at night, and wondered with a mix of fear and anticipation what the little person growing in there would be like when they came out. Would we have a boy or a girl? Would he or she look like me, or Allison? Either way, I hoped the baby had blue eyes. I have always liked having blue eyes.
“Doctor Laroux,” Sudesh Khurana said. “We have patients.”
Allison nodded and stepped away. “I don’t know when I’ll be home,” she said.
“Me either. I’m going to go help out with the infected. Could be a long fight.”
“Be careful.”
“Always. Mayor, I assume you’ve set that contingency plan we discussed into motion?”
“Deputy Glover is coordinating as we speak,” Elizabeth Stone said. “But the forklifts and propane are in storage on the other side of town. When you reach the lines, tell Captain Harlow we need twenty minutes to get the containers in place and probably another half hour to fill them with ballast.”
“I’ll let him know.”
“Thank you. I’ll send a rider when the breach is secured.”
“I’ll let him know that too.”
Allison’s cheek was covered in soot, but I kissed it anyway. Then I retrieved my rifle and gear and made my way toward the sounds of combat.
FOUR
Gabriel, Captain Harlow, and a radioman I did not know stood atop the command vehicle. Gabe and the captain peered through binoculars at the battlefield. Gabe made suggestions, which Harlow passed to his radioman, who passed them on to platoon COs and squad leaders. I announced my presence by joining them on the roof of the Humvee.
“Something I can do for you, Mr. Riordan?” Harlow asked without lowering his binoculars.
“Message from the mayor,” I said. “Repair crews need about fifty minutes to move the shipping containers into place at the north gate and fill them with ballast. Think you can buy them that much time?”
“I hope so,” he replied, still not looking at me. “Depends on how many more infected show up.”
“I heard about Fuller,” Gabe said, turning to face me. “He was a good kid.”
“Yes, he was.”
“Is Allison all right?”
“Yes. She’s at the clinic right now.”
Gabe wiped the back of his neck. “Good to hear. How many casualties do you think?”
“Forty-eight, I believe.”
“Jesus. Including Fuller?”
“Yeah. Two other troops from Second Platoon as well.”
Harlow finally lowered the binoculars. “Are you sure of that?”
“I was the one who found the bodies.”
His face fell and he cursed softly. The radioman said, “Should I notify Lieutenant Chapman, sir?”
“No, Private. I’ll do it myself, later. For now, I want Chapman focused on fighting the infected.”
“Yes sir.”
I said to Harlow, “You have a plan, or are we playing by ear?”
“Oh sure, I have a plan,” he said. “You see those infected out there? I’m going to have my men shoot every one they see. Infantry will hold the middle ground while tanks and Bradleys cover their flanks. The Apache is grounded for now, so the Chinook’s going to fly back and forth making ammo drops and searching for hordes. When the crews in town get the gate patched up, we’ll retreat to Fort McCray and regroup. And come up with a better plan.”
I tried to think of something to add, but under the circumstances, there was not much else to be done. So I said, “What can I do to help?”
“I need marksmen on the line. Recon team is still out in the woods.”
“Sure. Where’s First Platoon?”
“Not with them. Over there.” Harlow pointed to a bucket lift being offloaded from a HEMTT.
I said, “Are we sure there aren’t any more snipers within striking distance?”
“No.”
“Great. Sounds like fun. What about you, Gabe? You staying here?”
“For now,” Gabe said. “Probably be in a bucket on the other flank pretty soon.”
“At least I won’t be the only one with my ass dangling in the wind.”
I climbed down from the Humvee and went toward the bucket lift. I did not run. My legs were too tired from dragging dead bodies and carrying wounded toward the clinic. Besides, it was not as if the infected would be leaving any time soon.
*****
The repair crews bulldozed the broken concrete and twisted reinforcement bar from the north gate, moved shipping containers into place with forklifts, and poured dirt into them through holes pre-cut through the top for the purpose. The dirt came from piles placed near the gate months ago. Two long human chains passed buckets from the piles to the gate and back again. The whole operation took forty-four minutes, six minutes faster than projected.
When Harlow ordered the retreat, I was on the ground taking a bandolier of loaded thirty-round magazines from a runner. The projectiles from all but a small amount of my personal loadout currently resided in the skulls of permanently dead ghouls. My rifle’s barrel was hot enough to give me a third-degree burn, my stomach grumbled angrily, and if I did not piss soon, I was going to need a new pair of pants.
As I was stuffing mags into my vest pouches, the crackling of gunfire ceased. Squad leaders shouted instructions to their men, one of them close enough for me to understand.
“The gate is secure,” he said. “We’re to fall back to Fort McCray, double-time.”
“Aren’t there ghouls between here and there?” one of his men asked.
“Yes. Armored cavalry is going ahead to clear the way. Don’t engage a revenant unless you have to. Just outrun ‘em. Everybody clear?”
I held the bandolier out to the runner. “Guess I won’t be needing this.”
He pushed it back in my direction. “Keep it. You never know.”
“True enough. Thanks.”
I fell in with the nearest squad and ran with them back to Fort McCray. They gave me a few looks, but said nothing. I was well known in Echo Company: Eric Riordan, the civilian with no prior military service who infiltrated a rogue militant group calling themselves the Free Legion. Even the vaunted Green Berets had trouble tracking them down. He was held prisoner and beaten daily for months, I sometimes heard them say. When I did, I corrected them that it was not nearly that long. He worked in the dark digging tunnels and starving, they said. That part was mostly true. He entered a tournament where men were forced to fight to the death. He won, they said, and that was how he earned the Legion’s trust. It was not to the death, I told them. Although in truth, I did accidentally kill a man. And I never actually earned the Legion’s trust, they were always suspicious of me. I just managed to play the charade long enough for Gabriel Garrett to find me and get me away from them. Without him, none of what followed would have been possible.
No one outside of Delta Squad quite knew what to make of me. He must be CIA, or what’s left of it, they said. Some kind of spook, anyway. Or maybe he is part of the Phoenix Initiative—they must have a militant wing. People trained to deal with the kinds of unconventional threats that arise in a post-apocalyptic world. I tried to dispel these rumors, but soldiers like to talk, and nothing spreads slower than the truth. The man they described was actually a lot more like Gabriel than me, but good luck convincing anyone of that.
The truth is Gabriel taught me everything I know. I learned a little hand-to-hand stuff on my own, but it was Gabe who showed me how to really make myself dangerous. To turn my body into a weapon. To shoot, to use a blade, to make and disarm explosives. He taught me combat tactics, close quarters fighting, how to employ a variety of weapons, and, most importantly, the art of the sniper. I was well renowned among Echo Company for my marksmanship. They may not have fully trusted me, but they had no qualms about letting me help them out of bad situations. If I showed up at the enlisted club on base, I could always count on someone buying my first drink. Usually someone whose life I had saved at one point or another.
But outside a small circle of close friends, the soldiers did not consider me as one of their own. I was an interloper, a sometimes useful outsider who had a tendency to show up when needed and then go away. Mostly, they knew me for my business interests. G&R Transport and Salvage was one of the most successful ventures in Tennessee. Or anywhere, for that matter. Almost every soldier in Echo Company had an account with us. I ran the company’s operations, for the most part, while my best friend and business partner, Gabriel, supervised the Hollow Rock General Store, the customer-facing part of G&R.
Retail was only part of our business. Most of our money—or trade, as it had come to be known when money disappeared—came from wholesale and business-to-business transactions. And the military, specifically Echo Company, was our biggest customer. As a result, I was privy to knowledge of secret operations most civilians never knew about. And because of my martial skills, I participated in some of these missions on a contract basis.
It was illegal for soldiers to scavenge for salvage—not that this rule stopped them—but the prohibition against scavenging did not extend to informing civilian salvage companies as to the location of trade goods spotted in the field. Nor did it prohibit salvagers from buying fuel from the military at discount prices, reserving municipal transport vehicles, and bartering found goods to the Army. If a soldier’s information turned out to be significantly profitable, there were no rules against paying them a finder’s fee. And even when I traded what I found at a steep bargain compared to value, it was still profitable because the salvage business has very low overhead. A good arrangement all around.
As I thought of this, running on weary legs, the tall brown grass gave way to a gravel path leading from Hollow Rock to the main gate at Fort McCray. I trotted along, keeping pace with the soldiers ahead of me, boots crunching over half-buried rocks. Near a grove of trees, a small ghoul emerged from the treeline and moved quickly toward me.
A little one, I had time to think, and then it was nearly on me. I stopped and aimed a steel-toed boot at its chest. The kick sent it rolling backward, but it was on its feet in a flash. Without thought, my rifle came up, canted so I could look through the iron sights mounted forty-five degrees from my scope, and fired twice. The dead kid had enough speed that when it fell, it skidded several feet over the rocks. I kicked it over. No older than five when it died the first time. The little ones are much faster than the adults, and much harder to look at. I dragged it by its feet away from the path and wished I had a blanket or something to drape over it.
Even after over three years of killing revenants, some things just never got any easier.
I killed two others along the way. One was an older Hispanic woman, recently dead, most of her left arm and the left side of her face eaten away. When she opened her mouth to howl at me, I saw she had no teeth. I shot her in the head anyway. Even toothless, the infected are still dangerous. The last ghoul I killed was a gray, one of the long-dead with no skin. My first shot grooved a furrow around its skull and exited without causing significant brain damage. A rare occurrence, but not unheard of. I let the ghoul come closer and fired twice more at point blank range. This time, it went down.
Finally, I reached the gate to Fort McCray. The soldiers ahead of me kept going, headed for their revenant-proof barracks. Overhead on the catwalk, I heard gunfire rattling. Sharpshooters were keeping the undead away from the gate, allowing their brothers in arms to get through safely. I heaved my way up a set of stairs and asked the officer in charge where he needed me. He glanced at my rifle and the bandolier of magazines across my chest, recognized me, and said to take position on the left flank near the eastern guard tower.
Once settled, I went to work. There is a rhythm to the letting out of breath, steadying of the rifle, gentle squeeze of the trigger until the crack and the recoil and waiting to see if the target goes down. It has a hypnotic quality. Looking through the scope creates a feeling of separation, of detachment. I am here, but I am not here. The me who thinks, loves, laughs, and worries is somewhere else. Somewhere quiet. What remains is a creature of function, of necessity.
These are not people in my sights. They are things. They hunger, are dangerous, and have to be put down. One cannot scare them. Cannot intimidate them. Their morale cannot be damaged because it does not exist. They do not have to be fed, bred, or led like living people do. They recruit from their victims. They hunt because it is all they know how to do. And they will never, ever stop. They are legion. They destroyed the world. The fact that I, or anyone else, have lasted so long against them is nothing short of miraculous.
Samantha Walcott, physician’s assistant, stood up and faced me. She was in her early fifties, over six feet tall, lean, weathered, and hard as an iron chisel. “What?” she snapped.
“I’m here to help.”
“Take these,” she handed me a bundle of clear plastic bags. “Bandages. Give them out to the nurses, then head to the gate and help the guardsmen look for wounded.”
“Where’s Allison?”
“Busy.” Sam turned around and began sorting through boxes again. I was dismissed.
I went back to the parking lot. More bodies came in on carts, on horseback, in the Sheriff Department’s lone electric vehicle, on litters born by weary, frightened townsfolk. Some of the wounded walked themselves in, bleeding and limping and crying out in pain. A boy of no more than fifteen stumbled, fell, and was still. A nurse ran to him and checked his pulse, then rolled him over. There was a piece of shrapnel the length of a man’s forearm protruding from his chest. His eyes were wide open and fixed, glassy, lifeless. The nurse closed his eyes, dragged his body into the grass, and moved on.
Nurses took the bandages from me. When my arms were empty, I ran for the north gate.
*****
Mayor Stone’s paranoia was Hollow Rock’s saving grace.
I remember once going to see her at town hall on some small matter of public affairs she had asked me to look into. As I entered her office, she sat facing a window, feet perch on the sill, silhouetted in warm morning light. She turned when she heard me knock and asked me to sit down.
“Something on your mind, Elizabeth?” I asked.
“There’s always something on my mind.”
“What’s the topic of the day?”
“The wall,” she said.
“What about it?”
She laced her fingers over her stomach. “Too many people in this town take it for granted. Especially on the north side of town where it’s all concrete and steel. I look at the wall and I think about the Outbreak. I think about all the military hardware leftover from units that were overrun. I think about grenades, and bombs, and rocket launchers, not to mention all the materials that can be used to make improvised explosives. All just lying around waiting to be snatched up. I think about that, and I think about the Alliance, and the ROC, and all the raiders and marauders and assorted scum out there, and I think about how easy it would be to plant something ugly and volatile against the wall and watch from a good safe distance while it lit up the night. I think about that, and I wonder what we would do if it ever happened.”
“I’ve lost sleep a few nights dwelling on that subject myself.”
She spun around in her chair. “Did your contemplations yield any useful insights?”
I looked down at my fingernails. “The way things are going, I don’t think it’s a question of if, Liz. It’s a question of when. And how bad. You should talk to Ethan Thompson about it.”
“Why Thompson?”
“He told me a war story once about a place back in North Carolina called Steel City. Went there to stop some lunatic from leading a horde around and attacking small settlements. Ask him about the layout of Steel City. Might give you some ideas.”
She nodded twice, turned back to the window, and looked steadily toward the east wall while I gave her my report.
I did not get much sleep that night.
*****
By two in the afternoon on the day of the attack, everyone that could be saved had been. Forty-eight people lost their lives, including Private Fuller, a sheriff’s deputy on the force less than a month, and two men from Second Platoon on duty at the main gate when the first shells hit. In less than ten minutes, a small band of ROC suicide troops had killed more than twice as many people as the Free Legion did in over a year of raids.
I was filthy, sweaty, and exhausted by the time I helped pull the last of the bodies out of the rubble and ashes. The town’s sole functioning fire engine put out most of the fires, while crews with shovels and buckets kept the isolated ones contained until they burned out. To the north, the sound of gunfire tattooed the air as all of Echo Company and the Ninth Tennessee Volunteer Militia, reinforced by the Sheriff’s Department and a hundred town guardsmen, engaged the infected attracted by the fighting.
Mayor Stone appeared out of the dissipating smoke near the entrance to the clinic. She was speaking to Allison and one of the doctors from the Phoenix Initiative, Sudesh Khurana. Dr. Khurana was a small man in his late forties, balding, dark brown skin, rimless glasses, and sharp, intelligent eyes. His manner was brusque, but according to Allison, he was a highly skilled and eminently competent surgeon. An education at Johns Hopkins has that effect on people, evidently.
Allison spotted me on my way over, stopped talking mid-sentence, and ran into my arms. The mayor looked on with kind impatience.
“You’re all right,” she said.
I had to clear my throat before I could speak. “Yeah. I am.”
Her arms tightened and we stood that way for a few seconds, holding each other. I kissed the top of her head and then her lips and tried very hard to breathe against the constriction in my chest. I let her go and held her at arm’s length.
“How are you holding up?”
“I’d say I’ve seen worse, but that would be a lie.”
“And the baby?”
A small smile. “The baby is fine, Eric. I’m only five months pregnant. It’ll be a while before it’s big enough to cause trouble.”
I looked down at the slight bulge in her trim stomach. Anyone not as familiar with her body as I was would not have noticed it. But I did. I stared at it often, and covered it with my hand when we slept at night, and wondered with a mix of fear and anticipation what the little person growing in there would be like when they came out. Would we have a boy or a girl? Would he or she look like me, or Allison? Either way, I hoped the baby had blue eyes. I have always liked having blue eyes.
“Doctor Laroux,” Sudesh Khurana said. “We have patients.”
Allison nodded and stepped away. “I don’t know when I’ll be home,” she said.
“Me either. I’m going to go help out with the infected. Could be a long fight.”
“Be careful.”
“Always. Mayor, I assume you’ve set that contingency plan we discussed into motion?”
“Deputy Glover is coordinating as we speak,” Elizabeth Stone said. “But the forklifts and propane are in storage on the other side of town. When you reach the lines, tell Captain Harlow we need twenty minutes to get the containers in place and probably another half hour to fill them with ballast.”
“I’ll let him know.”
“Thank you. I’ll send a rider when the breach is secured.”
“I’ll let him know that too.”
Allison’s cheek was covered in soot, but I kissed it anyway. Then I retrieved my rifle and gear and made my way toward the sounds of combat.
FOUR
Gabriel, Captain Harlow, and a radioman I did not know stood atop the command vehicle. Gabe and the captain peered through binoculars at the battlefield. Gabe made suggestions, which Harlow passed to his radioman, who passed them on to platoon COs and squad leaders. I announced my presence by joining them on the roof of the Humvee.
“Something I can do for you, Mr. Riordan?” Harlow asked without lowering his binoculars.
“Message from the mayor,” I said. “Repair crews need about fifty minutes to move the shipping containers into place at the north gate and fill them with ballast. Think you can buy them that much time?”
“I hope so,” he replied, still not looking at me. “Depends on how many more infected show up.”
“I heard about Fuller,” Gabe said, turning to face me. “He was a good kid.”
“Yes, he was.”
“Is Allison all right?”
“Yes. She’s at the clinic right now.”
Gabe wiped the back of his neck. “Good to hear. How many casualties do you think?”
“Forty-eight, I believe.”
“Jesus. Including Fuller?”
“Yeah. Two other troops from Second Platoon as well.”
Harlow finally lowered the binoculars. “Are you sure of that?”
“I was the one who found the bodies.”
His face fell and he cursed softly. The radioman said, “Should I notify Lieutenant Chapman, sir?”
“No, Private. I’ll do it myself, later. For now, I want Chapman focused on fighting the infected.”
“Yes sir.”
I said to Harlow, “You have a plan, or are we playing by ear?”
“Oh sure, I have a plan,” he said. “You see those infected out there? I’m going to have my men shoot every one they see. Infantry will hold the middle ground while tanks and Bradleys cover their flanks. The Apache is grounded for now, so the Chinook’s going to fly back and forth making ammo drops and searching for hordes. When the crews in town get the gate patched up, we’ll retreat to Fort McCray and regroup. And come up with a better plan.”
I tried to think of something to add, but under the circumstances, there was not much else to be done. So I said, “What can I do to help?”
“I need marksmen on the line. Recon team is still out in the woods.”
“Sure. Where’s First Platoon?”
“Not with them. Over there.” Harlow pointed to a bucket lift being offloaded from a HEMTT.
I said, “Are we sure there aren’t any more snipers within striking distance?”
“No.”
“Great. Sounds like fun. What about you, Gabe? You staying here?”
“For now,” Gabe said. “Probably be in a bucket on the other flank pretty soon.”
“At least I won’t be the only one with my ass dangling in the wind.”
I climbed down from the Humvee and went toward the bucket lift. I did not run. My legs were too tired from dragging dead bodies and carrying wounded toward the clinic. Besides, it was not as if the infected would be leaving any time soon.
*****
The repair crews bulldozed the broken concrete and twisted reinforcement bar from the north gate, moved shipping containers into place with forklifts, and poured dirt into them through holes pre-cut through the top for the purpose. The dirt came from piles placed near the gate months ago. Two long human chains passed buckets from the piles to the gate and back again. The whole operation took forty-four minutes, six minutes faster than projected.
When Harlow ordered the retreat, I was on the ground taking a bandolier of loaded thirty-round magazines from a runner. The projectiles from all but a small amount of my personal loadout currently resided in the skulls of permanently dead ghouls. My rifle’s barrel was hot enough to give me a third-degree burn, my stomach grumbled angrily, and if I did not piss soon, I was going to need a new pair of pants.
As I was stuffing mags into my vest pouches, the crackling of gunfire ceased. Squad leaders shouted instructions to their men, one of them close enough for me to understand.
“The gate is secure,” he said. “We’re to fall back to Fort McCray, double-time.”
“Aren’t there ghouls between here and there?” one of his men asked.
“Yes. Armored cavalry is going ahead to clear the way. Don’t engage a revenant unless you have to. Just outrun ‘em. Everybody clear?”
I held the bandolier out to the runner. “Guess I won’t be needing this.”
He pushed it back in my direction. “Keep it. You never know.”
“True enough. Thanks.”
I fell in with the nearest squad and ran with them back to Fort McCray. They gave me a few looks, but said nothing. I was well known in Echo Company: Eric Riordan, the civilian with no prior military service who infiltrated a rogue militant group calling themselves the Free Legion. Even the vaunted Green Berets had trouble tracking them down. He was held prisoner and beaten daily for months, I sometimes heard them say. When I did, I corrected them that it was not nearly that long. He worked in the dark digging tunnels and starving, they said. That part was mostly true. He entered a tournament where men were forced to fight to the death. He won, they said, and that was how he earned the Legion’s trust. It was not to the death, I told them. Although in truth, I did accidentally kill a man. And I never actually earned the Legion’s trust, they were always suspicious of me. I just managed to play the charade long enough for Gabriel Garrett to find me and get me away from them. Without him, none of what followed would have been possible.
No one outside of Delta Squad quite knew what to make of me. He must be CIA, or what’s left of it, they said. Some kind of spook, anyway. Or maybe he is part of the Phoenix Initiative—they must have a militant wing. People trained to deal with the kinds of unconventional threats that arise in a post-apocalyptic world. I tried to dispel these rumors, but soldiers like to talk, and nothing spreads slower than the truth. The man they described was actually a lot more like Gabriel than me, but good luck convincing anyone of that.
The truth is Gabriel taught me everything I know. I learned a little hand-to-hand stuff on my own, but it was Gabe who showed me how to really make myself dangerous. To turn my body into a weapon. To shoot, to use a blade, to make and disarm explosives. He taught me combat tactics, close quarters fighting, how to employ a variety of weapons, and, most importantly, the art of the sniper. I was well renowned among Echo Company for my marksmanship. They may not have fully trusted me, but they had no qualms about letting me help them out of bad situations. If I showed up at the enlisted club on base, I could always count on someone buying my first drink. Usually someone whose life I had saved at one point or another.
But outside a small circle of close friends, the soldiers did not consider me as one of their own. I was an interloper, a sometimes useful outsider who had a tendency to show up when needed and then go away. Mostly, they knew me for my business interests. G&R Transport and Salvage was one of the most successful ventures in Tennessee. Or anywhere, for that matter. Almost every soldier in Echo Company had an account with us. I ran the company’s operations, for the most part, while my best friend and business partner, Gabriel, supervised the Hollow Rock General Store, the customer-facing part of G&R.
Retail was only part of our business. Most of our money—or trade, as it had come to be known when money disappeared—came from wholesale and business-to-business transactions. And the military, specifically Echo Company, was our biggest customer. As a result, I was privy to knowledge of secret operations most civilians never knew about. And because of my martial skills, I participated in some of these missions on a contract basis.
It was illegal for soldiers to scavenge for salvage—not that this rule stopped them—but the prohibition against scavenging did not extend to informing civilian salvage companies as to the location of trade goods spotted in the field. Nor did it prohibit salvagers from buying fuel from the military at discount prices, reserving municipal transport vehicles, and bartering found goods to the Army. If a soldier’s information turned out to be significantly profitable, there were no rules against paying them a finder’s fee. And even when I traded what I found at a steep bargain compared to value, it was still profitable because the salvage business has very low overhead. A good arrangement all around.
As I thought of this, running on weary legs, the tall brown grass gave way to a gravel path leading from Hollow Rock to the main gate at Fort McCray. I trotted along, keeping pace with the soldiers ahead of me, boots crunching over half-buried rocks. Near a grove of trees, a small ghoul emerged from the treeline and moved quickly toward me.
A little one, I had time to think, and then it was nearly on me. I stopped and aimed a steel-toed boot at its chest. The kick sent it rolling backward, but it was on its feet in a flash. Without thought, my rifle came up, canted so I could look through the iron sights mounted forty-five degrees from my scope, and fired twice. The dead kid had enough speed that when it fell, it skidded several feet over the rocks. I kicked it over. No older than five when it died the first time. The little ones are much faster than the adults, and much harder to look at. I dragged it by its feet away from the path and wished I had a blanket or something to drape over it.
Even after over three years of killing revenants, some things just never got any easier.
I killed two others along the way. One was an older Hispanic woman, recently dead, most of her left arm and the left side of her face eaten away. When she opened her mouth to howl at me, I saw she had no teeth. I shot her in the head anyway. Even toothless, the infected are still dangerous. The last ghoul I killed was a gray, one of the long-dead with no skin. My first shot grooved a furrow around its skull and exited without causing significant brain damage. A rare occurrence, but not unheard of. I let the ghoul come closer and fired twice more at point blank range. This time, it went down.
Finally, I reached the gate to Fort McCray. The soldiers ahead of me kept going, headed for their revenant-proof barracks. Overhead on the catwalk, I heard gunfire rattling. Sharpshooters were keeping the undead away from the gate, allowing their brothers in arms to get through safely. I heaved my way up a set of stairs and asked the officer in charge where he needed me. He glanced at my rifle and the bandolier of magazines across my chest, recognized me, and said to take position on the left flank near the eastern guard tower.
Once settled, I went to work. There is a rhythm to the letting out of breath, steadying of the rifle, gentle squeeze of the trigger until the crack and the recoil and waiting to see if the target goes down. It has a hypnotic quality. Looking through the scope creates a feeling of separation, of detachment. I am here, but I am not here. The me who thinks, loves, laughs, and worries is somewhere else. Somewhere quiet. What remains is a creature of function, of necessity.
These are not people in my sights. They are things. They hunger, are dangerous, and have to be put down. One cannot scare them. Cannot intimidate them. Their morale cannot be damaged because it does not exist. They do not have to be fed, bred, or led like living people do. They recruit from their victims. They hunt because it is all they know how to do. And they will never, ever stop. They are legion. They destroyed the world. The fact that I, or anyone else, have lasted so long against them is nothing short of miraculous.
