Surviving the Dead 03: Warrior Within (51 page)

“Okay. Let’s go.”

She left the dishes where they were and went to the hall closet to get her coat. I smiled, grabbed my jacket, and followed her out the door.

Gabe was in his yard when we arrived, hacking away with a sling-blade at the dead, knee-high grass surrounding his porch. It struck me as odd, watching the big man doing something so tediously normal. I had seen him in action so many times, teeth bared and a blazing rifle clutched in his fists, that it was hard to perceive him any other way. But like anyone else, he was just a person. Just a man getting on into his forties. A man who liked to sit on his front porch sipping whiskey, and who, in the midst of a war where he would soon be on the front lines, still found time for the little things. Like yard work. If the next few days went badly, he might not live long enough to enjoy the neatness of a well-tended yard, but nevertheless, here he was. Thwacking away. It made me smile.

Allison crossed the yard ahead of me and called out, “You know, there are people in town you can hire to help you with that. It’ll take you a week to knock all this grass down by yourself.”

Gabe stopped working, looked up, and grinned. “Yeah, but I’m old and miserly. I’d rather do it myself and save a nickel.”

He propped the blade against the porch and made his way over. “What are you two troublemakers getting into today?”

“Just coming over to make sure you got home in one piece,” I said.

“Ah hell, I’m fine. I got in yesterday morning. Spent half the day debriefing with General Jacobs. He wants to see you next time you’re free, by the way.”

“Why? Didn’t he get my statement from Steve?”

“Yeah, he did. But he wants to hear it from you, face to face.”

I groaned, and ran a hand across my forehead. “Well, he’s gonna have to wait. I don’t feel like rehashing that. Not right now, at least.”

“You know, he told me to have you report to him at 0800 yesterday. Do you believe that? Like you’re his fucking errand boy, or something. I reminded him, none too politely I might add, that you’re not in the Army, and he has no authority to go ordering you around. If anything, he owes you a debt of gratitude.”

“What did he say to that?”

Gabe grinned even wider. “He goes, ‘Shit, I keep forgetting that Riordan’s a civilian.’ So I say, ‘So am I, just in case you forgot. And this is the last time you try to give me an order, understood?’ He didn’t like that too much, but he kept his mouth shut. I tell you, it’s a lot of fun talking shit to a general and getting away with it.”

That got a laugh out of me. Allison smiled, and rolled her eyes. Movement caught my eye from the intersection down the street, and I saw a young man in a militia uniform riding a bike toward us.

“Shit.” I sighed. “What now?”

The cyclist caught sight of Allison and swerved down Gabe’s driveway. His brakes squealed in protest as he slid to a halt a few feet away from us.

“Mornin’ Robinson,” Gabe said, recognizing the young man. “What do you need?”

He pointed a finger at Allison. “One of the patients fell out of his bed and broke his arm.”

Allison’s smile disappeared, and the calm, clear-eyed mien of a doctor took its place. “How bad?”

The kid paled a bit, which was impressive considering how dark his skin was. “I could see the bone poking through.”

Allison said something decidedly unladylike, and reached toward Robinson’s bike. “I need to commandeer this from you.”

He hopped off hurriedly. “Yeah, go on. Take it.”

Allison climbed on and turned to Gabe and me. “Guys, I’m sorry, I have to go.”

I waved her off. “It’s fine, sweetie. Sounds like somebody needs you more than we do.”

She reached out, grabbed my arm, stole a quick kiss, and then pedaled down the road. Robinson followed her at a brisk trot. When they had gone out of sight over a hill, I turned to Gabe and said, “Care for a drink?”

He sighed, and started walking toward the porch. “Why the hell not?”

Once inside the dark, cool house, Gabe poured two tumblers of Mike Stall’s finest and we took a seat in the kitchen. I put my back to the warm sun coming in through the window and looked across the table at Gabriel.

“Listen Gabe, we need to talk.”

His eyebrows came together. “About what?”

“Since when do you speak Russian?”

The eyebrows drew down tighter. “The hell difference does it make?”

“I want to know. Your always saying, ‘You never asked’ when I find out something new about you that you never told me about. So now I’m asking. Since when do you speak Russian?”

He thought about it for a while, ruminating over his drink. He took one sip and put it down. Spun it twice on the table. Another sip. Another spin. If he was trying to wait me out, he was going to have to wait a long damn time.

“Gabe?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because you’re my best and oldest friend, but sometimes I feel like I don’t know you at all. Or maybe I just know a part of you, the Gabe you let out for the world to see. I think I’ve earned an explanation at this point. You’re not being much of a friend by keeping me in the dark.”

His gaze flickered as I spoke and, by the end of the last sentence, he had lowered his face to the table.

“Okay then.” He pointed a finger toward a bookshelf in the living room. “Go get a book off that shelf for me.”

I turned to look at it. “Which one?”

“Doesn’t matter. Any one of them will do.”

I shot him a quizzical glance, but did as he asked. Returning to the table, I held the book out to him.

“Open it to any page.”

I put my thumb in the middle and flipped it open. It had been shut a long time, and the pages crackled as I pulled them apart. Gabe held out a hand, and I gave him the book.

As I sat back down, he started reading. I watched his eyes flitter back and forth as he worked his way down the page. Finished, he handed the book back to me and pointed at the top margin.

“Read along with me.” He said, and closed his eyes. Over the next minute or so, he proceeded to recite the page he had indicated.

All of it.

The entire thing.

Word for word.

No mistakes, no hesitation. It was as if he was reading it straight from the book, but that wasn’t possible. I was holding the book out of sight, and besides, his eyes were closed. When he had finished the recitation, he gave me a grim smile and said, “Nice trick, huh? Pick another page.”

I did, and he repeated the process. For a long moment, all I could do was sit and stare, jaw slack with astonishment.

“Holy shit, Gabe.”

He picked up his tumbler and sipped it. “Holy shit indeed.”

“You’ve got a fucking photographic memory.”

“Actually, the correct technical term is
eidetic
memory. I’m not limited just to images. I can remember damn near anything, from anytime, even shit that happened decades ago, with a clarity most people will never know.”

“That’s a hell of a gift, man.”

His eyes clouded over. “A gift? Really? You think so?”

He stood up from the table and pulled up his shirt, pointing a finger at a long, ragged scar on his lower abdomen.

“You see that? An RPG did that. Baghdad. It was February eleventh. A Saturday. I had the cookie bar from an MRE for breakfast that morning. When the RPG hit, shrapnel tore open my belly like gutting a fish, and pieces of that cookie bar fell out onto the street. My intestines were dangling down to my knees before I collapsed from blood loss. Imagine what it would be like to relive that memory in vivid detail every time you look at yourself in the mirror. Imagine what it would be like to remember your mother dying of cancer when the passage of time does nothing to dull the memory. Imagine being eight years old, and your father dies under a mountain of rubble in a coal mine, and you can’t make that pain go away no matter how much you wish it would. Imagine the feeling of failure when your marriage falls apart because you’ve turned into a useless drunk. When your wife can’t stand the thought of you being the father of her children, and throws you out. Imagine that staying with you, never fading, never getting any easier. You think about that the next time you want to call what I can do a gift. It ain’t a gift, Eric. It’s a goddamn curse.”

My sense of wonder atrophied under the onslaught of Gabe’s anger. I fished around for something to say, but pulled back an empty hook. Gabe lowered his shirt and sat back down at the table, leaning forward on his meaty forearms. Neither one of us said anything for a long time. The wind blew outside the window, and the house creaked in response, until I finally worked up the courage to open my mouth again.

“So how many languages do you speak?”

The big man sat back in his chair. “Not counting English?”

I nodded.

“Eight. Russian, German, Spanish, French, Mandarin, Arabic, Japanese, and Farsi. That last one isn’t my strongest; I had to learn it on the go.”

“Well, that’s about eight fucking more languages than I speak.”

“I thought you knew Spanish?”

“A little bit. I’m not fluent.”

“Oh.”

Silence took up residence again, sitting down with us at the table. I completely gave up on trying to think of something to say, my mind too stunned to come up with anything meaningful, and settled for drinking my hooch. When my glass was empty, I filled it back up and didn’t feel the least bit guilty about it. At the end of drink number two, just as I was eyeballing the bottle and thinking hard about a third, someone knocked at the front door. Relieved, I stood up and went to answer it.

When I opened it, Grabovsky stood on the porch, grinning. “He broke.”

“What?”

“Lucian. Steve broke him. Come on, we’ve got work to do.”

I glanced at Gabe. The big man stood up and strode over to where his vest and weapons hung from the wall. Mine were still at home. I turned back to Grabovsky.

“Give me ten minutes.”

*****

“That was quick.”

Steve looked at me flatly and handed me a copy of Lucian’s statement. “I can be very persuasive.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

I sat down and started scanning the document. It was an inch thick, printed front and back. Thankfully, Steve—or someone on his staff—had included a summation of pertinent facts in the first few pages. Steve handed additional copies to Gabe, Marshall, Grabovsky, Wilkins, and Great Hawk, and then sat down at the head of the conference table next to General Jacobs and Mayor Stone. The general’s command center was next door at the VFW, but we had chosen to hold the meeting in town hall’s lone conference room rather than crowd everyone into his tiny office.

Jacobs had pinned a large map of western Tennessee to the wall where everyone could see it. The locations of the three remaining Legion strongholds were highlighted in red, along with a rough approximation of the Legion’s tunnel network traced out in yellow. There were four long tunnels, and a dozen or so shorter ones branching out from the main corridors. All radiated out from Legion Central.

After giving everyone a few minutes to read over the intel Lucian had provided, Jacobs got up from his seat and shined a laser pointer at Legion Central.

“As you all know,” he began, “Legion Central has been captured. We still have a contingent of Rangers there guarding the insurgent prisoners, and eliminating the infected population. We have plans to transport the insurgents to a secure facility in Kansas, but due to our tactical situation and resource concerns, that’s on the back burner for the moment.”

He shifted the little red dot to a spot west of Hollow Rock, just north of Huntingdon. “This is Legion West. It’s a smaller facility than Central, but there are more troops stationed there. They’ve set up shop in a small business park just off Highway 77. As you can see, the tunnel they call the connector loop runs directly to it. We believe this is the Legion’s primary staging area for weapons and munitions.”

The dot moved to the east of Hollow Rock this time, not quite five miles from the Tennessee River. “This is the location known among the Legion as Haven. It’s a gated community of luxury homes surrounded by an eight-foot security fence. This location is going to be a problem. According to the insurgents we’ve questioned, there are families and children living here, and a
significant number of slaves. Obviously, we’ll have to approach this one with the utmost caution.”

Last, he indicated another spot south of Hollow Rock, a few miles north of I-40. “And this is Legion South. It’s an old valve factory. Thick walls, easy to fortify. Most of the insurgents stationed here aren’t Lucian’s recruits; they’re reinforcements from the Midwest Alliance. There are some three hundred enemy combatants at this location. We’re going to make sure they don’t bother anyone ever again.”

He clicked off the laser pointer and turned to face the room. “I’m a firm believer that the simplest solution to a problem is often the best solution. So I’m going to make this simple. Legion South and West are the two biggest threats, so that’s where I’ll be directing the most resources. Grabovsky, I want you and the company from the First REU to take down Legion West. You’ll have an Apache and a Chinook for air support. If what this Lucian character tells us is true, there’s a wealth of weapons and ammunition there, not to mention supplies and equipment. I want it. There are a few thousand people on extermination duty back in the Springs that would love to get their hands on that ordnance. Garrett, Riordan, and McCray, I want you to pick a squad of Rangers and get eyes on Legion South. I’m putting the AC-130 at your disposal. Do your worst. The rest of you will be leading the remainder of the Rangers and the Hollow Rock militia to Haven. You’ll have the lion’s share of medical staff, the Pave Hawk, the other Chinook, and the other Apache. Well, two Apaches if you count Great Hawk.”