Savages (19 page)

I took off my boots and lay down on one of the beds. My vest and other equipment rested against the wall within arm’s reach. Upon arriving at the hotel, Great Hawk had distracted the manager and his staff with questions and requests while the rest of us unloaded the government-issue weapons and equipment and smuggled it all up to the room in overnight bags. Once behind a locked door, we cleaned and reassembled the weapons and stowed them in bureau drawers. A suppressor-equipped Berretta waited under my pillow in case we had any uninvited guests. Caleb had one as well. My beloved Kel-Tec resided in my rucksack, along with its ammo. The .22 magnum was great for dealing with the undead, but there is no substitute for stopping power when fighting the living. Ergo, the Beretta.

I still had the backup revolver. The guards had not found it when they searched me. Amateurs.

My fighting dagger lay on the table. I picked it up, unsheathed it, and thumbed the edge. Still sharp enough to shave with. No blood stains. Vague scent of alcohol from when I had cleaned it the night before after plunging it into several ghouls’ eye sockets.

I thought about Stewart. I wondered what would happen to his body, how long it would take his corpse to decay. I wondered how his fellow soldiers were taking his death. I searched myself and tried to find a scrap of feeling for the lost man, but found only coldness.

I stared at the ceiling, thumb flicking along the blade of my knife, and wondered how long it would be until I lay on the ground as Stewart had, torn and bleeding and breathing my last. I hoped, on that day, I would not be alone. I hoped I would not lay abandoned where I fell, dead eyes staring like dull glass into that final, unending night. I remembered Anderson’s hand slowly pressing Stewart’s eyes shut. I remembered the somber voices speaking in low tones as they stripped his gear. I remembered calloused hands wiping away tears on the way back to camp.

At least Stewart died among friends. Not that such things mattered to him anymore.

*****

After leaving the abandoned chicken farm the previous day, we had set a hard pace to reach Carbondale. Unfortunately, by the time we arrived, the gate was closed for the night. Tired and dejected, we’d backtracked a couple of miles until we found a suitable clearing next to the road. We circled the carts, ate a cold meal, set a watch, and bedded down for the night. No fire. Too warm for it, and we did not want to attract attention.

Stewart and Taylor took the first watch. I unrolled my bed in the grass and was out in seconds.

I dreamed of my childhood, my mother and father sitting in lawn chairs on the shores of the Outer Banks. Ocracoke, I think it was. I played in the sand and collected seashells in a bucket. My mother’s blond hair blew in the breeze, her sky-colored eyes hidden behind a pair of Chanel sunglasses. A man with my face but dark hair and eyes sat next to her, tall, handsome, a dimpled smile. His white teeth flashed below a pair of Ray Bans while he watched me.

The sun was warm overhead and the sea breeze whipped against my skin. I splashed in the shallows and let the balmy Atlantic water pull my ankles as spent waves rolled under the breakers. There was a sense of disorientation while I watched the tide roll out, as though the retreating foam wanted me to follow it. Maybe it did. Maybe it wanted to feed me to its sea creatures.

Outgoing waves suctioned sand from under my feet, making it coarser until I stood upon the shattered fragments of seashells. A new wave came in, buried me to my shins, and tried to knock me over. I kicked free and ran laughing up the beach.

A voice called behind me in a pleasant tenor. I turned and saw my father waving a tanned arm for me to return. I sprinted back, anxious to show him my bucket and its bounty. But when I arrived, my father was no longer smiling. The face so much like mine was different. The straight nose was not straight anymore. It had a bend in the middle, like a small knuckle. I stared at it; my father’s nose had never been broken, not like mine. Where did that bend come from?

“What will you do now?” he asked.

“What?” My voice was not the voice of a child. Too harsh. Too grating. Too damaged from shouting over gunfire and explosions.

Mom looked over and removed the sunglasses. My own irises stared at me, skin the same golden pallor I obtained when I spent too much time in the sun. “You’ve made it this far, Eric. What will you do now?”

“I don’t know. What should I do?”

“Only you can answer that,” Dad said. Michael. His name was Michael.

“Any suggestions?”

“We can’t do that, baby,” Mom said. Julia. Never forget. Julia Marie Boisseau Riordan. Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, July 12
th
1960. Died November 22nd 20-

“Your uncle is still alive.” Dad said.

I shook my head to clear it. “Roger?”

“Yes.”

“I barely know him.”

“He remembers you. Go to him.”

“Where is he?”

“You’ll find him. Just look.”

“How …”

“Honey.” My mother. I looked at her.

“Yes?”

“Does Allison know your middle name?”

I shook my head. “No. I haven’t told her.”

“Where you went to college? Grad school?”

“No.”

“Does she know our names?”

I shook my head again.

“What about her parents?”

Another shake.

“You know her father.” A statement, not a question.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Okay.”

“Ask her. Tell her the things she doesn’t know.”

A change in the light made me look up. The afternoon shifted quickly, the sun plummeting and giving way to harshly glaring stars. The light of the moon was absent in the empty sky. I struggled to make out the figures of my parents in the oppressive darkness.

“That’s what you live for now,” Dad said. “Go back to Allison. Do as your mother and I say. It will start you on the path.”

I heard a pop and listened as fireworks boomed and red lights lit up the ink-colored beach. More pops. More flashes. My father’s face alternated red and black. I said, “What path?”

“The only one that matters.”

More pops. I was being pulled away, pulled upward and downward at the same time. The world spun, the waves took me under, I struggled to breathe, felt water pour down my throat and then …

“Riordan!”

I awoke. Gunfire. Moans.
Infected.

“Riordan, you awake?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m awake.” The hand on my shoulder stopped shaking me. “We under attack?”

The voice above me belonged to Anderson. “Yes. Grab your rifle and follow me.”

I sat up. Unlike my dream, the moon above was just past full, still plenty bright. Now that my night vision had kicked in, I could see well enough to move around. I grabbed my rifle and sprinted after Anderson.

The fight raged on all sides of the cart barrier. Stewart and Taylor ran back toward camp in a low crouch as Hicks and Bjornson fired over their heads, taking out pursuing infected. The two fleeing soldiers leapt over the barrier and tumbled to a halt a few feet past the firing line. In an instant, they were back on their feet, reloading and joining the fight.

I took position where Anderson told me to. The only person there was Liddell, and he was hard pressed to keep the infected back. The closest of them were only a few feet away. I let the AK dangle from its sling and drew my pistol. The Makarov felt strange in my hands, but the sights lined up just fine. I focused on a pallid face and fired. The forehead erupted red and the face disappeared. I repeated the process as fast as I could until the mag was empty, only missing once. Now we had some breathing room.

“Thanks,” Liddell said as he reloaded. He was my height, shaved head scorched brown in the sun, long red beard, strong build. “Nice shooting.”

“Kind of my thing.” I aimed the AK and fired. Better. Much more accurate than the pistol at this range. The thirty-round mag was nice too.

I went to work. The old hypnotic feeling came over me the same as it always did. I could almost swear I heard a metronome at work in the back of my head, and with each tick of the striker, each second, my finger twitched and a ghoul dropped. I no longer took note of their features. My eyes were motion detectors. My brain became little more than facial recognition software. Was it alive? No? Shoot it.

The chamber locked back on an empty mag. Reload. A little different process with the AK. I had to move the weapon off my point of aim, depress a lever, sweep the mag free, and then lock in a new one. With an M-4 configuration rifle, I could have just let the mag drop without shifting my aim. Much faster that way.

More bloody faces. More gunfire. The ghouls just kept coming, and coming, and coming. I knew what the problem was. It was the noise. All these guns firing, firing, firing, but we had no choice. We were surrounded. So I kept shooting, and eventually, I heard the shouts begin behind me.

“I’m out!”

“Last mag!”

“Going to my sidearm!”

“Get ready to draw hand weapons!” It was the first time I ever heard Great Hawk raise his voice.

Worry began to pierce the fog. I had my sword and stick, but would they be enough? No time to worry. It didn’t matter. If things did not work out, there was always the backup revolver. I reached to the small of my back and felt its comforting weight there. The cyanide pill was in its place as well. No worries.

I emptied the last magazine on my vest. The barrel of my rifle glowed a dull, muted red in the darkness. Probably a good thing I was out of ammo, wouldn’t want a cookoff with a round in the chamber. I dropped the rifle and handed Liddell my Makarov and two spare mags.

“Hold them off.”

“Wait! Where are you-”

I did not hear the rest because Liddell started shooting.

I shouted, “Gabe! Gabe, you with me?”

“Over here!”

I stopped at my bedroll, grabbed my sword and stick, and ran toward the sound of his voice. When I reached him, he was emptying his own pistol, each shot sending an infected to its final rest.

“Got your sword?”

He reached a diminished left hand under his vest, grunted, tugged, and produced the blade. His right hand kept firing, each round finding its mark.

“Let’s jump the carts. Hit ‘em on the move.”

He fired his last two rounds and dropped the pistol. “On me.”

The big man did a flat-footed leap over the cart in front of him and hit the ground swinging. I lifted the handles, stepped past, and let the cart fall. No need for dramatics on my part.

I dug an Army surplus L-shaped flashlight with a red lens cover from my web belt, clipped it to my vest, and hit the switch. A dim cone of red light shone in front of me, lighting up the pale, wasted faces of ghouls. There were dozens of them. Piles of dead bodies littered the ground in a wide circle beyond the line of carts, making hard going for the undead. Good. I braced my Y-stick, brought my sword up to shoulder level, and went to work.

I allowed myself no more than two seconds per ghoul. Hit the neck with the stick, lift a little, touch the sword point to the top of the cheekbone, and thrust. A quick rotation of the wrist, then withdraw. I did not wait to watch them fall. It would have been a waste of time.

Ahead of me, Gabe’s sword flashed in the moonlight, the polished blade growing dark with accumulated gore. The gunshots behind me stopped, and I heard Anderson shout for two of his men to collect magazines, grab a box of ammo from a cart, and get to work reloading. Everyone else drew hand weapons—axes, crowbars, and a couple of homemade warhammers—and started busting skulls.

“What are you two doing?” Great Hawk shouted. He sounded angry. “You are going to get yourselves killed!”

“Trust us,” I called back. “We’ve done this before.”

The others stood behind the carts and used them as a buffer, swinging their weapons from a distance. This technique worked fine so long as only one or two undead pushed against the barriers. Three or more, and their forward pressure would be enough to shove the carts out of the way. It was better not to rely on them, and instead utilize humanity’s best weapon against the walking dead—agility.

We ran hard, killing only enough ghouls to clear the path until, finally, we were clear of the horde. Gabe and I paused a moment, hands on knees, and drew in deep breaths. We were not winded, but the work ahead would be difficult. Best to flood our muscles with oxygen while we had the chance. Back at camp, somebody shouted something unintelligible and I heard the unmistakable bark of an AK.

“Looks like they’re reloading fast,” Gabe said.

“Not fast enough. Come on.”

We started shouting as loud as we could and clanging our weapons against our knives. Slowly, one by one, the ghouls turned in our direction. But others closer to the sound of gunfire did not notice us. Gabe indicated he was going right, so I took off to my left.

As I ran, I darted in from time to time and dropped a ghoul. I kept my mind carefully blank. Running half-blind through the darkness while surrounded by God only knows how many infected is the kind of thing best done with as little thought as possible. Think too much and you start to panic. Better to keep moving.