I dialed the magnification on my scope down to 2x and started taking potshots at the infected closest to the main building. Mike and Sophia were doing a good job eliminating the ones closest to our side of the parking lot, while Dad and Blake were steadily mowing down the undead on their side. Despite the progress they were making, it was obvious from my perch they would have to fall back soon. It seemed that for every infected they dropped, two more emerged from somewhere to take their place. I began focusing my fire on the periphery of the horde, trying to cut their numbers before they could reach the parking lot.
The reticle in my vision found what was once a man still wearing a torn and bloody business suit, tie flapping in the breeze, one wingtip shoe missing. The uneven footing caused him to lurch dangerously with every step, looking as though he were about to fall over before wheeling his arms around and righting himself. I timed his movements, noticing that when he stood up straight, there was a second of two of hesitation before he tried to make the next step. So I waited.
Step, totter, groan, flappy-flap of the arms, next foot comes forward, pushes off the ground, torso straightens, head is up for a second and-
CRACK.
Down he goes. Next target: middle aged woman, obese, cardigan, long denim skirt, sensible clogs on her feet, most of her face missing on the right side, right arm chewed down to gristle and bone. Probably someone’s grandma once. She was lumbering at a steady pace toward Dad and Blake, both of her legs still intact. I waited for her to rock left, then pause on the sway to the right before transitioning to the other foot, and
CRACK
.
The bullet struck the back of her head on the part called the occipital bunt and blew most of it off, leaving a ragged, dripping mess in its wake. The wound did not immediately kill her, but it scragged her wiring enough she did a face-plant and stayed there in a twitching, quivering heap. Rather than waste a bullet finishing her off, I moved on to the next target.
A minute or two later, the chamber locked open on an empty magazine. I dropped it, stowed it, and slid home a new one. Before I started firing, I did another battlefield assessment.
Mike and Sophia were doing a good job of reducing the horde on our side. They had widened the semi-circle of ghouls around the container by several meters and counting. Dad and Blake, on the other hand, were dealing with a far denser cluster of undead and were slowly retreating toward the vehicles, dropping corpses as they went. At a signal from Blake, Lance left his post and ran over to back them up. Tyrel, evidently tired of being left out of the action, disappeared into the Humvee for a moment, reappeared with Mike’s M1A, steadied himself on the roof of the Humvee, and filled the air with a cadence of hollow booms.
From the corner of my eye, I saw a dust plume approaching from the south. I came up to my knees and peered in that direction, trying to see who was coming. A few seconds later, a Humvee rounded the corner and pulled into the parking lot. The driver slowed and conferred with the man beside him as though unsure how to approach. I saved him the trouble by standing up and waving him over.
On the way to our position, the SAW gunner standing in the roof turret opened up on the horde with tight, controlled bursts of fire. He had obviously learned a thing or two about fighting the undead because rather than aim center of mass or try for headshots—which would have been next to impossible in a moving vehicle while firing on full-auto—he aimed at the infected’s legs.
Blood and bone and kneecaps and lower halves of legs disintegrated under the hail of bullets. The gunner disabled dozens of undead in the space of less than thirty seconds, and while it did not kill them, it reduced their mobility to a crawl. More importantly, it did so quickly and en masse. I found myself nodding in approval.
Have to remember that one.
The Humvee stopped below us, a few yards away. I shouted to them, “Looks like you missed a few.”
The soldier in the turret turned toward me. “Sorry. Didn’t search this far north, figured all the infected would be coming from the south.”
“Looks like you figured wrong.”
He had the good grace to look sheepish. “How about you folks back off? We’ll take it from here.”
“I have a better idea,” I said. “How about you ride around and do your leg-shooting trick with the rest of these things, and we’ll come behind you and mop up.”
“Works for me.” He leaned down and said something to the driver, and they were off.
Dad, Blake, and Lance abandoned their positions, double-timed it back to the vehicles, and safely ensconced themselves in a Humvee. The Army vehicle drove into the middle of the infected, laid down a broad volley of fire, then stopped and waited while the horde gathered round. The gunner turned so he was facing the vehicle’s rear and let out occasional bursts of fire to keep the undead from blocking their escape route. When the undead had pressed in tightly enough to begin climbing the hood and beating on the windows, the driver put it in reverse and peeled out, running over a few infected along the way.
One of the ghouls clung to the hood and was steadily climbing toward the gunner who still had his back turned. Mike and I shouted warnings, pointing at the thing behind him. He heard us, turned, reached a hand into a pocket of his vest, and produced a snub-nosed revolver. With the ghoul almost in arm’s reach, he stuck the gun in its face and pulled the trigger. Gore splashed across the creature’s back as the top of its head flew apart, brain and skull spatter painting the front end of the Humvee. From the report, I knew the gun was a .357 magnum. Hollow point slugs too, judging by the damage. At that range, he may as well have shot it in the face with an artillery piece. The creature collapsed, nearly headless, and slid from the vehicle.
The driver turned a slow circle around the now congregated infected while the gunner stashed his pistol and returned his focus to the SAW. Once again, the
ratatatat
of controlled fire rang out, and once again, undead legs flew to pieces. The soldiers worked quickly, driving four laps around the ghouls in concentric circles, gradually whittling them down. Finally, none were left standing.
The Humvee drove to where the other vehicles were parked, squelching over a few corpses along the way. One of them grabbed part of the right rear fender and was dragged along, its lower body remaining in place while the torso trailed an ever-lengthening rope of intestine. Sophia made a choking sound next to me and turned away.
“God, that is so fucking gross.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Just give me a minute.”
I watched as the Humvee stopped next to where the others waited. Mike climbed down from the container by lowering himself over the edge and then dropping the last few feet. I followed suit, then turned and caught Sophia on the way down and lowered her gently.
“Thank you,” she said, standing close enough to kiss. It amazed me that even here, standing in a field of stinking, festering undead, the male sex drive was strong enough to rear its ancient, incorrigible head. I ignored it and put a hand on Sophia’s lower back as we threaded our way through the corpses on the way back to the vehicles.
“Gonna be a hell of a mess to clean up,” I overheard one of the soldiers say to my father. “We’ll have to get some people out here. Haul those thing away to a good safe distance.”
“Hey,” I called, getting his attention. He looked at me. “Isn’t one of those HEMTTs equipped with a shovel, or a bucket attachment, or whatever you call it?”
His eyes grew sharp. “Yes. Yes it is. Good thinking, I’ll see if I can get it out here. You folks okay in the meantime?”
“We’re fine,” Dad said. “But we appreciate the help. While you’re gone, we’ll go around and make sure these things are taken care of permanently.”
“Be careful doing that,” the soldier said. “Those things are twice as dangerous on the ground. Don’t let them get their hands on you, they’re strong as hell.”
“I’m well aware. Thanks again, gentlemen.”
“Be back soon.”
The Humvee drove away. My father looked around at the rest of us, checked his rifle, and tilted his head toward the crawling, moaning horrors in the parking lot. “The sooner we get started, the sooner we’ll be finished.”
I looked at the infected, their blood black and shiny in the fading afternoon light, and watched them drag their carcasses toward me, unconcerned with their injuries, shredded hands grasping at gore-soaked asphalt.
Feeling a shift in my stomach, I looked away to the north woodlands, above the parking lot, over the infected, and across the roof of the brewery beyond. Knobby treetops rustled under a sky darkening to electric purple as I thought about what lay across the Mississippi River. The last newscast I had seen before they stopped airing was from California. The talking head was relaying information from affiliates in the Midwest.
The east coast has gone dark.
Nice way to put it. The most verdant, populous region of the country, home to over a hundred and fifty million people, had been overrun. Everything east of the Appalachians was now an infested, toxic, and in many places radioactive no man’s land.
Gone dark.
The Appalachians had not stopped them. The Mississippi River had not stopped them. The combined might of the U.S. Armed Forces had not stopped them. Nothing stopped them. Delayed them, maybe. Held them back for a while. But there was no stopping them. All we had done here was buy time, nothing more. A buffer zone, breathing room, enough space to get some rest and then move on.
I looked down at my rifle and wondered what it would be like to try to wipe out a swarm of mosquitos with it.
“I don’t know Dad,” I said. “As far as killing the infected goes, I’m not sure if we’ll ever be finished.”
Full dark, and the stars came out.
I lay on my bedroll, eyes open to the brilliance of the sky. Sophia was a warm, heavy weight next to me.
“I’ve never seen it like this,” she said. “The night sky.”
“You mean without a roof between you?”
She slapped my shoulder. “No, asshole. I mean bright. Like this.” She pointed a finger heavenward.
“It’s because the power is out,” I said. “No streetlights, no city lights, no light at all. Light pollution obscures the sky at night. Drowns out the stars. Must have been very disappointing for all those photons.”
“Disappointing?”
“To travel billions of years only to fizzle out in a smog-choked haze.”
“You say it like the stars actually care. Last I heard, they’re just big burning balls of plasma.”
“We’re made of them, you know. Human beings. The dust of stars given life.”
“What?”
“The fundamental elements, the components, the building blocks of life. All deposited on this planet by stars, flung across the universe as they died.”
Sophia was silent for a while, then said, “There’s a kind of beauty in that, I think. The lifeless given life.”
I turned my head and gazed over the edge of the white metal roof. The distant moans of infected drifted to my ears. “The lifeless given life. It supports the duality, I suppose.”
Sophia shuffled closer, lips brushing against my neck. “Now I understand why you don’t talk much. You don’t make a bit of fucking sense.”
There was something wildly erotic about the way she said it, our warmth nestled together under the coldness of an indifferent sky. “It’s beauty and corruption, Sophia. Light and dark. Life and death. For every point, a counterpoint. We, the human race, are the defiance. The struggle of sentience in an ocean of oblivion. Those things out there, they’re a corruption of us. An abomination of something beautiful.”
Another silence, then she said, “You really think people are beautiful? I mean, with all the things we’ve done to each other? War and murder and all the rest of it?”
“I think life is beauty, Sophia. And while there are as many tragedies as there are people in the world to live them, those tragedies don’t diminish the importance of our existence. Think of how far we’ve come. It wasn’t all that long ago we were lying on bare ground, fires burning next to us, wondering what all those bright spots in the big wide dark were all about. Now we know. Now we can draw their chemical components on computer diagrams and replicate their energy in small scale. Ever seen a plasma torch cut through two inches of steel in less time than it takes to say it?”
“No.”
“It’s a thing to see.”
I lay in the dark and tightened my arms around Sophia and wondered what was wrong with the night. The hot starkness of day no longer assaulted us; the warmth of the metal under my back had faded hours ago. There was a gentle breeze, a stirring of leaves flush with the green blessing of late spring. I listened, ears tuning out the moans, the booming snores of Mike and my father twenty yards distant, and the rumbling of a Humvee engine as a patrol checked on us. I closed my eyes against the brilliance of a searchlight playing over the rooftop, face turned into the sweetness of Sophia’s scent, and the answer came to me.
There were no crickets. The fires had sent them all away.
*****
Midnight.
Had to be. Otherwise the hand on my shoulder would not have been there.
“Rise and shine, lover boy,” Blake said. “We’re on the clock.”
I gently disentangled myself from Sophia’s arms and pushed aside the leg draped over my midsection. She stirred a little, then rolled over to her other side, heaved a deep breath, and continued snoring quietly.
Blake laid a steadying hand on my shoulder as I stood up and nearly toppled over. The scant two hours of sleep I’d managed were just enough to make me truly feel like shit.
“You all right?” Blake asked.
“Ask me again in five minutes.”
“Just make sure you keep your gun pointed away from me.”
“Hardy-har-har.”
“I’m not kidding.”
I left my pack where it lay, but donned my vest, belt, drop holster, and slung my rifle. One hastily chugged canteen of water later, I felt almost human.
“Okay,” I said. “Let the mid-watch begin.”
Blake smiled. He had not done much of that lately and it was good to see it again. “Look at it this way. It’s only four hours, then you can go back to sleep.”
“Lovely.”
“Your breath is wonderful, by the way.”
“Duly noted.”
After pissing over the edge of the roof with my eyes closed for the better part of a thousand years, I used the last splash of water in my canteen to wet my toothbrush, applied a minimum of paste, solved the problem, and spit the excess to the parking lot. To my surprise, it landed on the face of an infected wandering below the edge of the periphery. Looking around, I saw the shadows of dozens more stumbling and shambling in the light of the half-moon.
“Son of a bitch!”
“Yeah,” Blake said behind me. “They wandered in over the last hour.”
“Did anyone radio Captain Morgan?”
Blake snickered. “Captain Morgan. Man, I hope that guy gets promoted soon.”
“Well?”
“Yeah, Joe called it in. They’ll send the Bradleys around at daybreak. It’s nothing a twenty-five millimeter chain gun can’t take care of.”
I relaxed, comforted by the idea of armored cavalry. The infected may have been legion, but they were composed of flesh, after all. And in the battle of flesh versus high-velocity tungsten, I knew where I would be placing my bets.
We walked along the rooftop, staying well clear of the edge. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and wondered what the hell the point of posting a watch was anyway. There were over a hundred troops nearby, not to mention the fact we were thirty feet off the ground. I had posed this question to my father after being informed I had pulled the mid-watch, and his answer was a shrug and a simple, “You never know. Better safe than sorry.”
Hard to argue with that logic.
I looked down as we passed the shipping container and ladder we had used to ascend the brewery. A search of a nearby neighborhood had yielded the ladder, but it was too short for what we needed. So after the bucket-equipped HEMTT had cleared the permanently-dead infected from the parking lot, I talked the driver into bulldozing an empty shipping container next to the wall. After that, it was easy.
“So,” Blake said, breaking the silence. “You and Sophia.”
“Yeah. Me and Sophia.”
“You know that girl done had a crush on you for years now, right?”
“So she says.”
“You never seen it?”
“She never gave me the time of day, Blake.”
He bobbed his head from side to side. “She always did get quiet when you were around. Then again, you did the same thing. Never tried to flirt with her. Probably what got her interested. All those boys coming after her all the time, and you barely paying her any attention. Kind of thing makes a girl curious.”
“I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know much about girls, Blake.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret.” He leaned in close and lowered his voice. “No one does. Not even them. It’s how they keep us off balance.”
I laughed, and gently slapped him on the arm. Blake was the kind of guy it was hard not to laugh around. He was always quick with a smile or a joke, or if needed, a word of encouragement. When I was about eleven or twelve, I asked him why he was so happy all the time. He sat me down and told me what it was like for him growing up.
He was from New Orleans, originally. His father died in an accident at work when he was only three, leaving his mother to raise him alone. She worked two jobs, sometimes three, to make ends meet. They used food stamps to buy groceries, bought clothes at Goodwill and the Salvation Army, and because he was black, and poor, and the child of a single mother, he was stigmatized everywhere he went.
The neighborhood he grew up in was rough. Drugs were endemic. If you were not a dealer, someone you knew or were related to was. The cops were an ever-present evil, looming over everything and everyone. Walking down the street was reason enough to get thrown up against a wall and searched, and if you mouthed off, dragged into an alley and beaten.
Blake knew. It had happened to him many times.
His early impressions of life were of white faces buying drugs down the street from his house, and white faces snarled with hate swinging a baton at his head, and white faces looking at him with fear and contempt at every turn, the whispers, the snide comments, the subtext of every interaction the same.
You are a thug, and I don’t trust you.
But there was one problem.
They were wrong.
He dressed the part. He acted the part. Every young man in the neighborhood did because they had to. Failure to conform was punished harshly. You did not want to be seen as non-complicit. Savage beatings on a daily basis were a very real possibility for those who did not tow the line with the drug gangs. One did not have to participate, but you sure as hell better not get in the way or give any indication of disapproval. To do so was to invite disaster.
So Blake walked the line. He stayed out of trouble at school, quietly keeping his grades up. He steered clear of the gangs, being careful not to get on their bad side. Which is not to say he never broke the law—he did what he had to do to survive—but he was careful about it.
Then came graduation, and the recruiter’s office, and the Army, and his tearful, dutiful mother telling him to shake the dust from his feet and write as soon as he got the chance.
She died a few years later from a stroke. Blake had been sending her money every month, hoping that between the two of them they could save enough for her to move to a better neighborhood. She never spent a dime of the money.
“I had a choice to make,” Blake said. “I could succumb to hate, and anger, and spend the rest of my life being bitter, or I could do what my momma always told me to do when things were bad.”
He looked at me then, tears in his dark, thoughtful eyes. “She said to me, ‘Baby, you just got to smile. No matter what the world throws at you, you just got to smile.’ So that’s what I do. No matter what the world throws at me, I just keep right on smiling. I used to see it as revenge, but then I got older and realized that’s a foolish way to look at things. Revenge never did no good for anybody. The world ain’t got nothing against me. What happened, happened. I just got to rise above it and move on. And that’s what I do.”
“So where you see this going, the two of you?” Blake asked, interrupting my thoughts.
“Hell if I know, man. I’m just taking it a day at a time.”
He looked out toward the hotel and the dim orange dots of campfires in the parking lot. Humvees patrolled and rifles cracked in the distance as the troops on watch kept the infected at bay. His customary smile faded, replaced by a fearful solemnity that hurt me to see on his jovial face. “Guess that’s all anybody can do right now, things being the way they are.”
We walked in the dark for a while, each in his own thoughts. As we passed by Sophia’s sleeping form, I stopped to watch her. Blake stopped as well, back turned, giving me a moment to myself. He was good that way. Perceptive. The kind of guy who understood things without needing someone to say it outright.
“What’s going to happen to us, do you think?” I asked.
I heard Blake’s boot scrape the metal roof as he turned and walked over to me. His hand was warm on my shoulder as he stood beside me, voice close to my ear. “Caleb, I don’t know. You’re a grown man now, so I ain’t gonna bullshit you. Things are bad. Real bad. Worst I ever seen.”
“I know that much.”
“I know you do. What I’m saying is, I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I think we’re in the early stages of something long, and dark, and terrible. If we want to get through it, we got to be strong. We got to stick together like family. You understand?”
I nodded, and did.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s keep moving. Best lesson I ever learned—when in doubt, keep moving.”
The half-moon was clear the next few hours. No clouds obscured its shine on an oasis of green in a sea of charred black. At four in the morning, after an impossibly long watch, I woke Mike and Lance and waited while they cleared their heads and armed themselves. Afterward, I ambled back to my bedroll, back to Sophia. She stirred as I lay down and draped an arm around her.
“Hey,” she muttered. “Ev’thing okay?”
I kissed her cheek. “Everything’s fine, pretty lady. Go back to sleep.”
She smiled. I closed my eyes to the stars and the moon and languished in her sweet, humid, feminine warmth.
Even the gunshots and roar of engines could not keep me awake.