Surviving the Dead 03: Warrior Within (14 page)

There was a camaraderie there on that stretch of empty road that transcended any boundaries that might have otherwise separated us. We were alone, surrounded by monsters, and we had no one to depend on but each other. If I wanted to live to see another day, I had to count on the man standing next to me, and he had to count on me. It didn’t matter who he was, what he had done in his life, or what beliefs he held. We were on the same side, we would fight to the death to protect other, and that was all that mattered. It was us against them, plain and simple.

“Shooters in the front, thumbs up if you’re ready,” Gabe shouted.

I held up an arm, but not a thumb, using an altogether different digit. It took the big man a few seconds to catch it.

“Go fuck yourself, Riordan.”

I could hear the smile in his voice as heads swiveled in my direction to see what he was talking about. Laughs and chuckles followed, further breaking down the pervading atmosphere of nervous tension.

“Anybody else does that, and I’ll break your fingers.”

“All fucking around aside,” Grabovsky broke in, playing the part of bad-cop, “tighten your shit up. This is the real deal, ladies. Let’s do it right.”

Smiles disappeared, eyes narrowed, and mouths set into hard lines as the recruits took deep breaths, shook off the levity of the moment, and settled down over their weapons.

I peered through my scope and sighted in on the closest walker in my lane, centering the reticle just above its forehead. It was impossible tell what it had looked like in life, what its race had been, or even if it was a man or a woman. Its clothes were long gone, and its skin, what was left of it, looked like bleached saddle leather stretched tight over blackening cords of muscle tissue. A gaping hole spilled out from what had once been its abdomen, and its left arm was missing from the elbow down.

As I looked at the walker’s face, with its yawning teeth and milk-white eyes, I felt all the old conflicted feelings bubble to the surface again. Revulsion tugged at the gag reflex in the back of my throat, pity twisted in my chest, and an icy, razor-edged ball of fear roiled in my gut, threatening to give me the shakes.

I shoved it all down, took a deep breath, and tapped my fingertips against the cold metal of the trigger guard.

Concentrate
.

“Enemy in range,” Grabovsky called out. From the corner of my eye, I saw him looking through a handheld rangefinder.

“Roger that,” Gabe called back. “Soldiers on the firing line, mark range one hundred yards. Standby.”

I slipped my finger over the trigger, breathing steadily. A few more seconds ticked by, and the ghouls shuffled ever closer, their moans drowning out everything but the hammering of my own heartbeat.

“Eighty yards,” Grabovsky shouted.

“Roger, standby.”

The walker in my crosshairs grew larger, its eyes locked in my direction. I could swear it was looking at me. I willed my pulse to slow down.

“Sixty yards.”

“All right, this is it,” Gabe bellowed, his voice ringing out over the low valley. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is what we trained for. You’ve fought well today, but the day ain’t over yet. You all know what to do, now let’s see you do it. FIRE AT WILL.”

A dozen rifles fired in rapid succession, the reports drowning out the wailing cry of the undead. I added my own rifle to the fray, dropping the walker I had been watching with my first shot. The walker behind it didn’t flinch or slow down, not even when brain and bone shards splattered into its face. I shifted my aim and sent another round downrange, hitting the mark and sending it to join its friend.

The tightness in my shoulders loosened and I felt myself begin to relax, settling into a steady rhythm and pulling the trigger with metronome cadence. Not for the first time, a zenlike state descended upon me. The world narrowed down to the lens of my scope, the stock against my shoulder, and the cool roughness of the trigger under my finger.

Aim,
crack
, down goes a walker.

Aim,
crack
, down goes a walker.

In thirty seconds, I fired thirty shots, and put down thirty infected. I almost reached for another mag, but I remembered that I was supposed to fall back and let another shooter take my spot while I reloaded.

The man behind me settled down on the crate I had just vacated and began racking up a score of his own. I dropped my mag, stuffed it into a pouch, and popped in a fresh one. The two people in front of me were shuffling with impatience, anxious to get in on the fight.

I smiled at their backs, thinking about how far these survivors of the Outbreak had come. When they were living their old lives, back before the world went insane, did they ever think they would be standing in formation behind a barricade of U.S. Army cargo crates, fighting off wave after wave of flesh-eating monsters? I shook my head.

Of course they didn’t, no one did.

But here we were.

A cloud blew past in the sky overhead, revealing the sun and letting yellow light diffuse down to the world below. The rays that broke through were pale and weak, as though ashamed to waste their brightness on such a gruesome scene. If I had been a ray of light that morning, looking down upon the carnage on that lonely stretch of road in western Tennessee, my shine might have faded a bit as well. 

*****

I wondered if before the Outbreak, had the Army been as well prepared to fight the undead as these militia recruits, how might things have gone differently? Could the National Guard have stopped the Phage in Atlanta, and prevented it from wiping out nearly the entire world?

I guess we’ll never know.

As it was, I only got three turns on the firing line before Gabe called a ceasefire to conserve ammunition. Thirty-seven rifles, mine included, had whittled the horde’s numbers down to just over a dozen. Gabe rounded up half that number of recruits, ordered them gather up an assortment of blunt instruments, drew his Falcata, and set out to split a few skulls. Where most people shied away from fighting the undead hand to hand, for Gabe, it was therapeutic. I watched his hulking form stalk toward the last walkers, naked steel in hand, and couldn’t help but chuckle.

While dealing with the horde, not everyone had displayed the same level of marksmanship as I had (the average kill ratio was only about one ghoul for every two shots), but it was enough. Considering that they only had six weeks of formal training under their belts, the fledgling militia had performed amazingly well. Both against the infected, and against the Legion. 

My thoughts turned to the four recruits being carried back to town for medical attention, and I felt my stomach sink into my shoes. I knew what it was like to be in that position. Wounded, hurting, and wondering if tree branches cutting through sunlight would be the last thing my eyes would ever see. I offered up a quick prayer for them to whoever might be listening, and then got to work helping to clear the mass of dead bodies from the highway. As I was helping to toss the withered husk of one of the last corpses into a ditch, the crack of a whip and the urging call of a teamster at the reins echoed from the south.

About damn time
.

Grabovsky had Sanchez and Vincenzo turn the first wagon around and take the prisoner back to town straightaway while the rest of the recruits started loading up crates. Gabe and I, along with a few others, patrolled the perimeter and put down any walkers that straggled out of the forest. There weren’t many of them, but it was enough to keep us busy, and enough to chip away at my dwindling supply of 5.56 NATO ammunition. When I got down to my last three magazines, I slid my M-6 around to my back and switched to my pistol. It wouldn’t do at all to be out of ammo for my rifle if the Legion decided to show up again.

The sun was low in the sky, and the eastern horizon was just fading into the dark blue of night, when the last box was finally loaded. There wasn’t enough room for everyone to ride back to town, so Grabovsky had the recruits form into ranks and follow behind on foot as the wagons trundled down the road. We were all tired, hungry, and a little dehydrated, and all any of us wanted was to find a quiet spot to lie down and rest for a while.

Gabe and I stayed on patrol around the edges of the convoy, occasionally gunning down anything dead and hungry that strayed into our path, and generally struggling against exhaustion to keep up with the nervous pace the horses set on the way back to town. I was worried that the horses might break and run at the sight of the undead, but oddly enough, they were more spooked by our rifles than they were by the infected. Sad world that we live in when even animals aren’t impressed by the walkers anymore.

Occasionally, as we walked, I looked at the faces of the recruits with their hollow, glassy eyes and vacant expressions, and it was clear that the day’s fighting was beginning to take its toll. Not that these men and women had never seen violence or hardship—they certainly had, as had anyone who had survived the Outbreak—but being in a firefight and seeing one’s friends wounded and bleeding and crying out in agony was enough to soften the resolve of even the hardest of fighters. Victory and glory are all well and good until the blood on your hands belongs to you or someone that you care about. When that happens, you realize just how dangerous of a game you’re playing when you take up arms against a determined enemy.

I wondered if any of the recruits realized that, as tough as the day had been, this was only the beginning. We had drawn blood against the Legion, and had done so in spades. The Legion was bound to retaliate, and when they did, there would be no holding back, and no quarter.

From here on out, the bloodshed was only going to get worse.

*****

It was after nightfall by the time I got home.

Allison was still at the clinic and would likely be spending the next several days there tending to the surviving wounded. Two of the recruits who were brought in were still in recovery after getting patched up, and were expected to make a full recovery. But the other two, however, were not so lucky.

One of them, a young man named Theodore Russell, had suffered a gunshot wound that nicked his femoral artery and, in spite of the militia’s frantic efforts to get help in time, he had bled out on the way to the clinic. Allison checked his vitals, pronounced him on the spot, and moved on. The other person who didn’t make it was Jennifer Blankenship, age twenty-three, recently engaged to one Brett Nolan.

Brett did not take it well.

The rest of the recruits, along with General Jacobs and his retinue, the sheriff, Mayor Stone, and the families of the wounded, packed into the church across the street, filling up the chapel and the fellowship hall to wait for news. When it came, the palpable air of fear and anxiety broke down into grief and anger.

Shocked, red-eyed people sat in clusters, clinging to one another and, in many cases, weeping quietly. I sat alone in a corner pew near the bathroom, put my head in my hands, closed my eyes, and tried desperately not to think, not to feel. There was too much growing and swelling inside of me, and if I didn’t get it under control, it was going to rip me apart at the seams.

The bodies of the fallen were taken to a nearby funeral home, and their families left to go see them one last time. They would have to be buried the next day due to the lack of a functioning morgue to keep them in, so Allison asked that anyone who wished to pay their respects do so before morning. After delivering the news, she excused herself quietly and began making her way back to the clinic. I slipped out a back door and hurried to catch up.

“Hey, Allison, wait up.”

She turned to look at me, and even in the darkening gloom, I could see the shadows circling under her eyes. When I caught up to her, she slipped her arms around my waist and buried her head in my chest, clinging tightly. We stayed that way for a few minutes, just holding on and taking comfort in each other’s warmth.

“Are you okay?” she asked, finally.

“Not really. But I’m uninjured, if that’s what you mean. What about you?”

She leaned back and gave me a wan smile. “I’ve had better days. That’s for sure.”

I reached up to brush a lock of hair from her face. “If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know, okay? I hate seeing you like this.”

She took my face in her hands and stood on her toes to kiss me. “I’m a big girl.” She looked me in the eyes. “I’ll be fine.”

I nodded and tried to think of something to say, but I couldn’t think of anything. Allison let me off the hook by asking me to get a few things from the house and bring them to her at the clinic. I promised I would, and hugged her one last time before letting her get back to her patients.

Back at the church, Gabe had politely asked everyone not in the militia to give him a few minutes alone to say a few words to his people, and then waited as they filed out into the fellowship hall, leaving him alone with his troops. I stood at the back and watched, while Grabovsky moved next to Gabe at the pulpit to address the recruits seated in the pews.

“Right now, I’m not talking to you as your drill instructor.” Gabe began, a deep huskiness pulling at his voice. “Right now, I’m just a man trying to offer what comfort he can to a group of fine, brave young men and women who have fought hard and gone through hell today.”