Savages (11 page)

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.”

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.

There was a time when Gabe would have fought with two weapons—sword in the right hand, axe in the left. But a few months ago, someone took exception to his left ring finger and shot it off. He had been working on strengthening the remainder of his hand to compensate, but was not yet confident enough to start dual-wielding again.

While the rest of us watched, the big man went through the ghouls like a scythe, killing all but one of them with a single blow. The last one was nearly as tall as him, and had very long arms. Not wanting to risk it grabbing him, he spun his sword in a figure-eight and sent the arms flipping away into the darkness. An overhead chop completed the motion, splitting the walking corpse’s head straight down the middle. The two halves yawned away from each other to reveal a grotesque cross-section of the human skull. Gabe pulled his sword free and the corpse went down.

“Come on,” he said, turning back to us. “No time to waste.”

We took a moment to clean our weapons with homemade disinfecting wipes—AKA rags soaked in nearly pure alcohol from Mike Stall’s still—and headed northward. As we circumnavigated the horde, I looked at them through the grainy image of my goggles. No funeral for these folks. No mourners. Someone must have loved them, once. Someone had given them their first bath, their first dress, their first kiss. They must have had wives, husbands, siblings, children, friends. But none of that mattered now. The dead in this little patch of woodland would be attended by vultures and insects until their flesh was gone, and after, their bones would lay in this place until they turned to dust.

The last dead ghoul I passed was a gray. The grays were a recent phenomenon. At first they had been a rumor, something a friend of a friend had seen, but no one in Hollow Rock gave the stories much credence. Then, about four months ago, we started seeing them. Only a few at first, but lately in greater numbers. There was a lot of speculation as to what it meant, but no real answers. All anyone knew was the grays had all been dead a long time, probably more than a year, and they were ugly as hell.

Personally, I thought the answer to the mystery lay in the age factor. Was it something they all went through if they lived long enough, or only specific ones? In either case, there had to be some kind of catalyst that triggered the change. Which, to me, begged an obvious question:

Over time, would they change any further?

No
, I told myself.
I’m sure there is some perfectly logical explanation why they change. Probably something to do with being dead and exposure to the elements.

I wanted it to be a comforting thought. But as we cleared the horde, I could not help but stare, as if staring long enough would answer my questions. The gray looked so utterly alien, so completely inhuman, I could not help but wonder what its transformation meant.

And the wondering made me uneasy.