At the End of the World

by Charles E Gannon

  I watched the reduced gang close on the fifty-yard mark. That’s where my AK was supposed to come in; Steve would engage at twenty-five. But there were only three untagged stalkers by the time they reached my marker, and at the rate the FALs were taking them down, I decided to hold fire to Steve’s mark.

  One got to thirty before Rod double-tapped him in the center of mass.

  I exhaled—maybe the first time since the battle rifles had started deafening me. “Jeeza,” I shouted, “range to next group?”

  “Two hundred. But—”

  “Yeah?”

  “Two, uh, ‘leakers’ from the first group: the ones that went into the brush on the east. They’re coming up from that side. One going for the tuna. One is—”

  “I’ve got it,” Chloe interrupted. “Just call—”

  “No. Chloe, start hitting the next group down the hill with the scoped rifle. Prospero, swap in a fresh mag on her FAL as well as your own. I’ll get the leaker.”

  “Alvaro—!”

  “Do it.” I laid down the AK and picked up the shorter Rexio. “Jeeza, give me a range and bearing.”

  “The leaker is at your one o’clock. Forty yards.”

  We’d defined the southbound road as twelve o’clock, and after weeks at sea, responding to clock-face and compass calls to get bearings was second nature. I pushed into the road-lining bushes, got through, and headed toward open ground, away from the stalker’s line of approach.

  “Twenty yards. She’ll come out right in front of—”

  The stalker tore out of the bushes, screaming in the direction of the Rover—and at the sight of her long, black hair, I froze.

  Up until now, the infected had been targets at range. Like enemies in a video game, you never had enough time or proximity to make out any defining features. But now I was seeing a human, not a stalker. A hideous human—seamed and seared-looking skin, sunken cheeks, wild eyes, caked blood and drool at the corners of cracked lips—but still a human. And a deeper reflex—the primal and cultural imperative to never harm a woman—froze my trigger finger as I took a step back and almost fell into the brush.

  The stalker hadn’t really noticed me until then; she’d been utterly intent upon the figures responsible for making all the aggressive noise atop the car and on the hillock. But now she spun toward me, let out a weird, warbling shriek, and charged.

  “Alvaro!” Jeeza screamed. Chloe’s curses were almost as loud as the stalker’s yowls.

  I started—suddenly, I wasn’t seeing a woman anymore, wasn’t reminded of all the women in my family who had the same long, black hair. I was back in the present-day of our dying world, a monster charging at me.

  I raised the Rexio, sighted along its fifteen-inch barrel, and started firing and pumping. Firing and pumping. I stopped when the trigger clicked and nothing happened. I think the stalker was hit by the second round, went down with the third, and was finished by the fourth, but I don’t really remember it that way. It was just shoot and cycle the action; kill or be killed. I remember her stumbling forward, because I had to shift my aim point downward. But that’s all.

  Next I knew I was clawing back through the bushes, realizing that I needed to reload the Rexio—when Steve shouted, “East flank! East flank!”

  Suddenly, the world was all crisp and sharp again. I dropped the Rexio near the other one we had ready at the front of the Rover. I snatched up my AK and brought it up—but not to aim along the eastern road. I trained it on the high ground that ran up to the southeast corner of the intersection: the rocky spur that had been the focus of both my waking and sleeping nightmares.

  And sure enough, there was a stalker’s head, topping that long, low rise. But since the ground there was at least ten feet higher than the roadway—“Chloe?”

  “Can’t. No time.” Her hunting rifle cracked, its report echoing down the southern road. I couldn’t remember when she’d started picking off the leaders of the next northbound mass, but I wasn’t about to interrupt her. She had to keep thinning those ranks or they might swamp us.

  “Jeeza,” I called, “to the east; got a head count?”

  “Not really. At least half a dozen. Maybe more. That ground is too rough to get a good count.”

  By the time she was done reporting, it was all academic, anyway. Two of the stalkers had crawled over the lip of the embankment that was catty-corner to our position and were scuttling down like human beetles. “Steve—”

  “I see ’em. Got some coming along the east road, too. Start the music?”

  “The Russian waltz,” I agreed and trained the AK on the stalker who’d crawled down the side of the spur far enough to leap to the roadway.

  Sometimes in combat you get unlucky—like having a bunch of attackers come from where no one else thought they might. But then, sometimes, you get stupid lucky in the very next moment. Which happened as I squeezed the AK’s trigger. To save ammo, I was keeping it on semi-auto, and figured I’d fire three fast rounds at this stalker. Except he was getting ready to jump right as I started. So I cheated the barrel lower, trying to catch him before he could leap down. I overcorrected, aimed too low.

  But he jumped a split second earlier than I thought. So although the first round went under him, he fell straight into the path of the next two. Both center of mass hits. He fell, and lay, as limp and still as a bag of potatoes.

  The effect on the second was that she got even more impatient, leaped early, stumbled as she landed—which gave me enough time to line her up and double-tap her. Although one of those taps hit the volcanic rock behind her instead. I won’t write what I muttered at myself, just that the third shot put her down for good.

  After that it gets a little blurry. Steve’s AK went from aimed semiautomatic to quick dut-dut-dut! full auto bursts. I never had the time to look down his way, but it must have gotten pretty hairy; at one point, Jeeza started blasting away to the east with one of the Rexios.

  That was about the same time that Chloe’s hunting rifle stopped and all the FALs started competing with each other to be the first to deafen me. I dropped two more that came down the side of the embankment, caught movement out of the corner of my eye; two of the mass of stalkers from the south had somehow survived to get within a dozen yards of the Rover. I turned quickly, pulled up on the AK’s selector switch: too hard. I’d engaged the safety. So I tightly controlled it back down into the middle, full auto position, and leaned forward into the weapon as I squeezed the trigger. I walked it across the two approaching torsos when they were about four yards shy of the Rover’s hood. They went down, then so did the empty mag as I hit the ejector.

  That was the moment that the AK’s little reloading quirk—you kind of have to rock the mag into place before you can drive it up and home—got the better of my trembling hands. It was also the moment when eight or nine of the skinned-looking bastards came scrambling over the embankment. Half of them were on the ground before I could get the magazine seated properly and palm-rammed it into place. It was a waste to stay on full auto, but they were coming fast and, well, yeah, I panicked. Dumped the whole mag. Maybe half of them went down. Steve got the last one in line with flanking fire and Prospero’s FAL started whacking the ones who had just reached the ground. But there was still one coming at me, straining claws only three yards from my face.

  I don’t remember pulling the Browning Hi-Power and dumping half its mag into that staggering, and already much-vented, skel.

  And then—nothing. The battlefield wasn’t silent, not hardly; lots of the infected were still dying, making weird guttural noises that were equal parts impatient distress and impotent fury. We were all panting. Jeeza puked. A lot of us started reloading our weapons. Or tried to: our hands were shaking that badly. But still, it seemed almost eerily quiet. Just a few moments before, the only sound was guns—hundreds, it seemed—going off all around me: a magic circle that kept out more of the shrieking, once-human demons than we’d been able to keep track of.

  We all wan
ted to leave right then, before anything else could happen. We were happy—and goddamned surprised—to be alive and unbitten, and we didn’t want to tempt fate. We just wanted to haul ass back to town, get into a house with thick walls and double-boarded windows, and hyperventilate until all the jitters and terror were out of us.

  But first we had to count the bodies, and then anoint each with a pint of old, useless motor oil. No raging pyre; gas was too precious and there was no way we were going to risk contagion by gathering the bodies. Of which there were fifty-three. It seemed like there had been hundreds, and that the fight had gone on for hours.

  When we finally thought to check our watches on the ride back, we learned the truth:

  Chloe had taken her first shot only sixteen minutes earlier, and we’d spent the last ten—at least—counting and torching the bodies.

  October 18 (second entry, after dinner)

  Had to take a break and eat dinner. About which: turtle is tasty, but like anything else, gets old pretty fast.

  On returning to Georgetown and telling what happened on the south road—the “after action report,” as Prospero put it—the council seemed ready to give us a victory parade. We smiled, thanked them, said we’d return tomorrow with our ideas for the next phase of the operation, and ran for home without actually sprinting.

  As soon as we were through the door, Chloe threw down her rucksack and threw herself into a chair. “What a shitshow,” she spat. She really did spit at the end of the word “shitshow.”

  I sighed, leaned back against the wall. “I made a lot of mistakes,” I agreed.

  She looked at me like I’d grown an extra head. “Alvaro. Get over yourself. This isn’t about you. This is about the plan.” She stared at Prospero.

  Whose eyebrows jumped toward his hairline. “The plan which we came up with as a group,” he said.

  “Based on your information—first-hand information—of what the stalkers here were like.”

  I used my shoulder blades to push off the wall. “That’s enough.”

  They both stared at me.

  I didn’t stop. “Assigning blame isn’t going to help us finish the job.”

  “Finish the job?”

  “Yeah. We’re not done.”

  Chloe’s mouth opened—

  “And I’m not, either. Let’s focus on what worked and what didn’t.”

  “Fucking fish didn’t work at all,” Chloe grumped, crossing her arms. The way that modified the outlines of her torso almost made me forget what the hell I was talking about. “Maybe three—three—of them stopped to take a bite. And they were the lazier ones.”

  Prospero put up a hand. “I will own that. My idea; my bad. In my defense, you must understand: I’ve never seen them in a group like this. They behaved…differently.”

  “Yeah,” Rod murmured. “Like they were pack animals.”

  “That’s because they—we—are pack animals,” Chloe fumed.

  “Well, they were,” I amended.

  Jeeza looked over at me. “What do you mean, they were pack animals, Alvaro?”

  “Just that the infected don’t really seem—well, social anymore.” I glanced at Chloe. “Certainly not on a par with wolves, right?”

  Chloe, child of the Denali, perked right up. “Yeah. Wolves have a pretty complex society. There’s a lot of mating control, a lot of cooperative hunting, and a really clear chain of command.” She shot a quick glare at me, but focused a longer one on Prospero. “So you’re right. The zombies really aren’t pack animals anymore. They’re more like a horde of psychopaths busting out of a nuthouse.” She looked up at me. “Or a school of sharks, where the only ‘social’ rule is not to attack each other too often.”

  Jeeza was nodding. “Sure, because the infected don’t have to cooperate. Not even as much as sharks do.” She jabbed an index finger back in the direction of the south road. “The infected don’t have a…a reproduction imperative anymore. It’s gone.”

  Jeeza’s nod spread to Prospero. “Which explains why we’ve never seen very old or very young persons as stalkers, even though we know some of each turned. They were too weak. The others ate them. Just as a school of sharks does with their own injured.” He grew pale. “They probably do the same to new mothers.”

  “I doubt a pregnant stalker would reach her third trimester,” I added quietly. “If the infected are all about killing and power—”

  “—then a newly pregnant stalker is just a future meal for the rest,” Steve finished while staring at a blank wall. “So is her child. Maybe for her.” He felt our stares, turned, stared back. “Does it really make any sense that a stalker would care about her own, or any other, baby?”

  I looked away. What could I say? He was probably right, and we all knew it. “So,” I started, “our job is to do better than we did today. Rule one is to follow the plan. I didn’t when I told Jeeza to reload the hunting rifle. That pulled her off overwatch. And we almost got overrun because of it.”

  Chloe shook her head. “Not so fast, Alvaro. You may have given new orders, but if you hadn’t, I would have had to load that rifle. Instead, I was able to pick it up and started thinning out that second group from the south. Big time. You were too busy to see, but that was probably why we weren’t overrun. Anyhow”—she frowned—“I was the one who almost got us killed.”

  “What? How?”

  She shrugged, looked away. “I should have said something about the conditions.”

  “The conditions?” Rod echoed.

  “Weather conditions,” she clarified. “Look, no offense, guys, but I’m the only one who knew what today’s wind and clouds were going to do to my ability to reach out and touch the stalkers. I’m the shooter; you’re not. It was my call, and I didn’t even think to make it. Or maybe I was too proud. Either way, I was off. Way off making the number of hits that we needed—and that you all had reason to expect.”

  Jeeza raised her hand sheepishly, like she was in third grade. “And I got distracted too easily. And Alvaro, really: it was on me to tell you if I couldn’t reload the rifle and do my job. Except that—”

  I knew what was coming. “Except what?”

  “I didn’t know who was in charge. I knew I wasn’t. I thought, maybe, you were. It sure sounded like it when you shoved that gun up at me.”

  “Not knowing who was in charge was most definitely not your fault, Jeeza.”

  “Yes,” agreed Prospero, arms crossed. “We’ll need to come back to that.”

  “Damn straight,” I said, looking him in the eyes.

  Rod shuffled his feet. “I got panicked.”

  I could not help smiling. “Are you kidding me? Man, we all nearly shit ourselves. There’s no blame there.”

  He frowned. “But there is, Alvaro. Because—well, because I forgot how much of our plan was based on guesses, not facts. And when some of the guesses turned out to be wrong, I suddenly didn’t know what to do. So I—I froze.”

  “Yeah,” Chloe said, “but you came around. Fast enough to do your job. That’s what counts.”

  Jeeza leaned forward like she was suddenly on the scent of something, “Yeah, but I know what Rod means. Our plan had too many assumptions that we started to treat like facts. For instance, we thought that the infected would stick to the roads, that they’d only come from the base.” She turned toward me. “But you knew different.”

  “No, Jeeza,” I answered, wanting to get off the topic. “I didn’t know. I just didn’t think that was their only possible behavior.”

  “Yeah,” Chloe said, eyes on me and not blinking. “And you were right.”

  “Listen, cariña, when you worry about everything—the way I do—you’re bound to be right some of the time.”

  Chloe leaned forward. She wasn’t smiling. “Yeah, maybe. But maybe that’s part of what we have to do better next time. Not trust the script we wrote. We wanted—maybe we needed—to trust it because that made us feel like we were in control.” Her eyes were hard on me, but in the
way that makes you, well, horny. “You were the one who remembered the lesson that the Captain tried to teach us again and again and again: that no plan lives past—er, no plan…”

  “No plan survives contact with reality.” Steve finished. “She’s right, Alvaro. That’s why we elected you captain for when we’re at sea. Because you don’t forget that.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Prospero’s posture changing. Yeah, this was what I had wanted to put off for a while: a discussion about who should be in charge and why. That topic had to be left for last. Had to be. Because we had to have a plan in place—as a group—before we decided who was going to be in charge. That way, even if a person didn’t like who was chosen to execute the plan, they’d at least know that they’d had an equal part in making the plan. Which is what we had to do right that minute: make a plan.

  It was like Jeeza had read my mind. “So what we haven’t done yet is list the things we got right. Because we don’t want to take those for granted. We want to make sure we focus on those when we make our next plan.” And she looked at me.

  “Well,” I said, “our basic tactics were solid.”

  Prospero nodded. “Solid enough that when fate threw a few googlies our way, we still got the job done.”

  I didn’t know what a googlie was, but I nodded anyway. “We had the right kind of firepower in the right places. Didn’t overestimate our accuracy—”

  “That ain’t sayin’ much,” Chloe observed with a wry twist of her lips. And she was right: with the exception of her, our shooting at range pretty much sucked. It hadn’t been a whole lot better at close quarters, but we’d had enough guns and enough ammo that it overcame our lack of skill.

  “Tell you what I was happiest about, though,” Chloe continued. “No one froze. Not really. Damn, when the shit hit the fan, even Jeeza picked up a twelve-gauge and went total redneck on those stalkers coming down the east road.” They exchanged a smile.

  Steve was looking at the wall again. “And everyone remembered the plan. So it hung together. And because it did, we did.”