Savages, page 9
part #5 of Surviving the Dead Series
“How you holding up in there junior?” I said. “Doing some pushups? Jumping rope on your umbilical cord? Keep it up. Mommy needs you to be good and strong so you can come out quick. Nobody around here wants a long delivery. No slacking.”
She laughed a little and wiped her eyes. “Just come back,” she said. “That’s all I ask, Eric. Just come back.”
“That’s a relief. I thought you wanted me to find some diapers while I was out there.”
A smile. “Well, if you happen to spot any …”
And then I heard it; knock, knock, knock.
“Shit.”
Allison sat up. “You should answer that.”
“Are you sure? It’s not too late. I can still back out.”
“Yes, and feel like a coward for the next ten years. No, Eric. We both know this is something you have to do.
knock, knock, knock “Mr. Riordan? Are you home?”
“Yeah,” I shouted. “Just a minute.”
“Sorry sir.”
“I’m going to slap that fucker. I hate being called sir. Makes me feel old.”
Allison smiled. Everything I wanted in the world was in that smile. Now that I knew what it meant to love, really love, with everything I had and everything I would ever be, there was no going back. Without Allison, there was no life. No world. I kissed her softly.
“I love you, Allison.”
“I know. You’re the best man I’ve ever known. You can be a knucklehead sometimes, but I love you. Come back to me.”
Something changed inside me, then. I had felt it before. A soft spot in my chest turned to ice. The tension of leaving fell away. There was no more fear. I wanted to get out that door. I wanted to face the Alliance on their home turf and hit them where they lived. I wanted to get there as soon as I could. And when I did, I would do everything I could to burn them down.
“I will.”
Allison looked closely at me, searched my eyes, and nodded to herself. “Go on. I’ll be all right.”
I hugged my wife one last time, kissed her, and left.
*****
“What’s with you?” Gabe asked.
“What?”
“You haven’t said five words since you got here.”
I looked at my old friend. “You want me to start talking?”
“Not really. It’s just not like you. The silence.”
I went back to staring at the helipad. I was sitting on a rucksack and holding an Alliance style AK-47. The last three hours had seen me put nearly a thousand rounds through it—first at the target range, then at the close-quarters combat facility. It had more recoil than my M-6, but hit harder. The sights weren’t terrible. I could ping a ten inch steel disc at a hundred yards without a scope, and do it reliably. Gabe thought that was good enough. Afterward, he showed me how to take the AK apart and clean it. I practiced until I could do it without help. My shoulders were sore from recoil, I had the beginnings of a headache, and my ears felt grimy from three hours of wearing double hearing protection and sweating.
“Great Hawk hasn’t spoken much either. You don’t seem concerned about him.”
If the Apache heard me, he gave no indication. He was lying on the ground, head propped on his pack, reading a hardcover copy of The Brothers Karamazov. Gone were the black fatigues and tactical gear, replaced by stained and threadbare traveling clothes and sturdy hiking boots. Same for Gabe, Hicks, and me.
“Yeah, but he’s not the talkative type. You are. Usually. So what’s the deal?”
“I don’t know, Gabe. Maybe it’s the fact I’m leaving my pregnant wife behind so I can go sleep in the dirt for a couple of weeks and get shot at by a bunch of Alliance assholes. Or, maybe it’s the prospect of crossing open territory on foot with God knows how many infected around. Possibly, it’s both.”
“Sorry I asked.”
I picked up a blade of grass and started tearing it into little pieces. Hicks stood up, said he had to use the latrine, and walked away.
Gabe was right. I was not myself. The sharp, icy feeling in my chest had not left. It seemed to be expanding. The reasons I gave Gabe for acting the way I did were bullshit. I was not worried about leaving home. I was not worried about anything at all. I was impatient. I was ready to fight. And I wanted to do it now. But I couldn’t. I had to sit near this helipad and ignore the looks passing soldiers gave us. I could have waited at headquarters or the mess hall, but I was used to spending most of my life outdoors and wanted to be outside. Gabe, Hicks, and the Hawk had come along without being asked.
Calm down, idiot. Pretty soon, you’ll have all the fireworks you can handle.
We sat in silence and waited. Night fell. The stealth Blackhawk was practically on top of us before we heard it. The chopper landed in the dark and the three of us picked up our gear and headed toward the open bay door. Crewmen in black fatigues with painted faces ushered us in wordlessly and made sure we were strapped in before taking off.
As quiet as it was outside the helicopter, it was a cacophony inside. I put on a headset and, after flipping a switch, found I could talk to the others and the flight crew. We did a quick mic check and then rode in silence.
It was not my first time in a stealth chopper. The last time had been on an infiltration mission. I had worked for weeks with a friend of mine, who was now dead, to develop my cover. It worked. I did not like to think about the rest of it. The tunnels, the beatings, starving in the dark with other gaunt men, accidentally killing a man in a fight—a man who had done nothing to deserve his fate. Or maybe he did. I don’t know. Our only interaction was to fight, and that ended with him lying in a pool of his own blood. Didn’t exactly leave much time for conversation.
It took us an hour to reach the rendezvous, so I figured the Blackhawk must have been cruising at about a hundred and fifty miles an hour. A swift bird. When we were close, the crewmen helped us into rappelling harnesses.
While training to infiltrate the Free Legion, Gabe and my dead friend, Captain Steven McCray, had taught me how to fast-rope. I still practiced once a week, partly to maintain proficiency, and partly because I thought it was a good time. Hollow Rock is a nice place to live, but a den of pleasures and delights it is not. A man has to entertain himself somehow.
The chopper hovered over a clearing in the middle of a broad swath of green known as the Apple Creek Conservation Area. We were a few miles from the Mississippi River on the Missouri side. We were to hike to a specific area marked on GPS and meet two operators from Task Force Falcon. According to General Jacobs, they had a boat waiting for us. I hoped he was right. Swimming was not an option, and we did not have time to build a raft.
The pilot hovered patiently while we harnessed up, donned our NVGs, and fast-roped out of the cargo bay. Gabe and the Hawk descended one side while Hicks and I took the other. In seconds, our boots hit terra firma, we dropped our harnesses, and the helicopter slid off into the night.
We needed to orient ourselves, but first, we had to get out of sight. When entering enemy territory via air, it is critical to move away from the landing zone as soon as possible. No telling who might have seen us.
I turned off my NVGs momentarily and flipped them up. The night was nearly pitch black despite the fact we were only three days from a full moon. I looked at the sky and saw low heavy clouds scudding along under dim pewter luminescence. Hardly any light reached the ground. Good. Unless someone had been watching this specific area with a night vision scope, we most likely had not been seen.
Before leaving for the mission, I had talked to General Jacobs regarding my concerns there might be a mole in either Echo Company or Central Command. I told him it was a bad idea to have a pre-determined LZ. Somebody might talk, and I had no desire to be captured as soon as I hit the ground. Furthermore, it would be best if he did not reveal the mission specifics to anyone until we were already well within Alliance territory. He assured me the only people who knew the plan were him, me, Gabe, Hicks, and Great Hawk. Everyone else involved was a bit player. They knew their part, but not the whole picture. He would keep a lid on everything until it was done. I told him if someone was smart, and was monitoring the goings-on there at Fort McCray, they might see a pattern. They might send a message just to cover their ass. He told me I was appropriately paranoid. That was a good thing. But this was not the general’s first rodeo, and he was taking precautions. I took him at his word.
Half a mile of hiking through the piney woods wearing NVGs is not as easy as one might think. NVGs throw off depth perception and limit peripheral vision. You reach your hand out for a tree an arm’s length away and nearly fall because, as it turns out, it was actually a few inches out of reach. Or, you jam your fingers because it was closer than it looked. Then there are roots, vines, and big rocks. It is best to high-step over obstacles just to be safe.
Gabe and Great Hawk agreed we were far enough away from the LZ to do a little land navigation. The Hawk took a ruggedized tablet from his pack and brought up our position on GPS, his poncho wrapped around him to block the light emitted by the screen. A minute or so went by before he emerged.
“We went a half mile in the wrong direction,” he said. “Rendezvous is northeast of here.”
Gabe leaned his head back and let out a sigh. “All right. How about we swing south half a klick, turn east until we’re in line, and then head north to the rendezvous.”
The Hawk nodded once. “A good plan.”
Hicks also concurred. Nobody looked at me. Since my opinion clearly did not count for much, I adjusted my pack and said to Gabe, “Lead the way.”
We fanned out at five meter intervals and got moving. Gabe set an easy pace. We had radios, but decided not to use them. With the NVGs, we could see each other just fine. The forest around us grew taller the farther we went, transitioning from saplings and brush to tall, old-growth pines, maples, elms, and cedars. The canopy overhead blocked sunlight to the ground, which prevented the formation of significant undergrowth. It made for easy travel, but if we saw someone, there would not be much to hide behind. Tree trunks only conceal from one angle. It takes foliage to provide camouflage. I thought about the ghillie suits we all carried and wished I had suggested putting them on before setting out.
Next time.
We reached the point where we were due south of the rendezvous and turned north. Three kilometers to go. Half the distance went by with no problem. Then, up ahead, Gabe stopped and held up a fist. When he saw we had halted, he lowered a palm toward the ground and walked his fingers a few steps. Danger ahead. Approach my position low and quiet.
The ground had been sloping upward for roughly the last hundred meters. Gabe was just down from the top of the rise. When I joined the others next to him, I saw what the holdup was.
A horde.
Not a big one. By its size, maybe thirty or forty ghouls. The horde may have been small, but it presented a big damn problem. The undead are more active at night than during the day, and if the fight got too loud, every walking corpse within a mile would be coming for us.
“We are too close,” Great Hawk whispered. “If we back off and try to go around, they will hear us.”
I noted the direction the horde was walking—due south. Which meant they were headed straight for us.
“Hawk, my man, I think they already have.”
TWELVE
Fighting ghouls in the dark is, under most circumstances, suicidal. It is hard to fight what you cannot see. And since the undead have a tendency to go for the throat, many of them are unable to howl and groan like their less damaged counterparts. Furthermore, for some reason, at night, ghouls do not snarl until they are right on top of you. During the day, they’ll holler at you from a mile away. At night, they wait until they are within lunging distance. To my knowledge, no one knows why.
If we had been fighting blind, our only option would have been to run for it and hope for the best. But we did not need to run. We had night vision. With NVGs, the ghouls’ stealth became an advantage in our favor.
“Hicks, Eric, you two come with me,” Great Hawk said. “Gabriel, stay up here on overwatch. Do not fire unless you have no other choice.”
The set of Gabe’s mouth said he didn’t like it, but he nodded anyway. “Skirmish line,” he said. “That’s your best bet. Hold the high ground and make them come up the hill.”
“Agreed.”
The Hawk nodded to Hicks and me. We dropped our packs and rifles and drew our hand weapons. In Hicks’ case, it was a spear with a short handle and a long, narrow blade. Spears are not the best tools for fighting the infected, but Hicks’ skill with the weapon more than made up for any inherent disadvantages. I’d been tempted on more than one occasion to ask him where he learned to use it, but held back. One does not ask people about their lives before the Outbreak. It just isn’t done.
My blade of choice was not actually a blade. The Europeans used to call it a small-sword. It looks sort of like a rapier, but the blade does not have sharp edges. It is triangular in design and has a needle sharp point. An ornate handguard winds from the crossguard down to the pommel. The crossguard itself is round, almost like that of a katana. The blade had originally been 27 inches, but I found this unwieldy after a while, and reduced it to eighteen inches with a pair of bolt cutters. Two hours with a steel file later, and the sharp point was restored. The shorter length worked very well; I no longer had to reach three counties behind me to stab something.
By itself, the small-sword is not very useful. The only practical way to kill a ghoul with it is to stab it through the eye. A difficult proposition most of the time. However, I had found a way to overcome this limitation. In my left hand, I held a short length of wood that split into a Y-shape six inches from the end. A handle protruded from its side like a policeman’s night stick, and I had bolted a brace on the lower end that wrapped around the back of my forearm. The idea was to hold the ghoul’s head steady with the Y-pole and stick them with the sword. I’d had plenty of practice. Most people, at first glance, did not believe my method would work. Invariably, this doubt went up in smoke the first time they saw me in action.
The three of us went halfway down the hill and stopped, put on goggles, and wrapped scarves around our mouths. I took a few deep breaths to steady myself. This was going to be a challenging fight; I was not used to battling ghouls at close range with impaired depth perception. I scanned the green-washed area around me and noted the locations of trees and anything I might trip over while walking backward. I took a fighting stance and shifted my weight forward for better balance. Balance is crucial when fighting the undead. Falling down in front of a horde is much akin to tying a steak around your neck and jumping into a pit of starving hyenas.
Great Hawk drew his knife and tomahawk and spun his arms like windmills to loosen them up. Hicks set his feet and held his spear at shoulder level, tip forward, both hands gripping tightly.
“Hold steady,” Great Hawk said. “Let them come to us.”
We waited. Great Hawk was in the center, me on his left, Hicks on his right. I rechecked the distance between us by raising an arm. My fingers just touched the hem of Great Hawk’s shirt. He glanced over, saw what I was doing, and turned his attention back to the horde.
A minute went by. The horde struggled up the incline, which was much steeper on this side of the hill than the southward side. From where we stood, the ground tilted down toward the river a few hundred yards to our right. I put my weapons down, wiped my hands on my shirt to dry them, and resumed my stance. No one said anything. I searched the front rank of undead and picked my first target—a gray. I hate grays. Genderless, skinless, horrid things. A mockery of humanity. Something about them made me feel laughed at, like some powerful, malevolent force in the universe despised everything that was good about me. My hands tightened on my weapons.
Finally, they reached us. The gray I had picked moved a little faster than the infected behind it. Its arms were badly chewed up, but its legs were intact. I caught it by the throat with my Y-stick, raised my sword, and thrust the tip into its left eye socket. A little turn of the wrist, a quick pull backward, and I was ready for the next target. The gray shuddered twice and slumped to the ground.
Half a step back. Catch the throat, thrust, pull, release, repeat. To my right, Great Hawk used the spiked end of his tomahawk to crush skulls while his other hand stabbed infected through the eyes with his knife. When a weapon got stuck, he kicked the ghoul in the mid-section and ripped it free. I did not know many men strong enough to do that, and Gabe was one of them. That told me something.
I could not see Hicks, but I knew his fighting style. A quick thrust through the soft palate or the sinus cavity, a twist that traveled from his hips all the way to his hands, and out came the spear. Kick the dead body out of the way and look for the next one.
Behind my scarf, I kept my mouth open and took big, long breaths. Fighting hand to hand is exhausting, and one of the most fatal mistakes a person can make is to forget to breath. You kill two or three ghouls and think you’re doing okay, and the next thing you know your arms feel like they’re made of lead and your lungs are on fire. Good thing I stay in shape.
The hill made things easier. Holding the high ground gave us a reach advantage, and as we killed more and more infected, their dead bodies tripped the ghouls behind them and slowed their advance. The farther up we went, the more spread out the horde became. At the outset, I’d had to work fast. Now, I could take my time and be sure of my footing before attacking.
When we reached the crest of the hill, there were only eight left. I heard the distinctive shing of Gabe’s sword leaving its scabbard just before I felt his presence beside me.
“Don’t worry, buddy,” I said, breathing a little faster than normal. “We saved a few for you.”
“And I appreciate it.” Gabe took two steps forward, swung his falcata, and half of a cranium spun away into the forest. Its former owner was still falling when Gabe slashed at the next closest ghoul. Sensing what he was doing, I backed off and told Great Hawk and Hicks to do the same.
