At the End of the World

by Charles E Gannon

  Nothing came out at us, but at three different buildings, the dogs got agitated, straining toward a particular doorway. Once we’d noted those, we pulled back into a position where we could keep all of the duplexes and barracks under observation. Then, with one of us always watching the rear, we put on our construction goggles, surgical masks, and gloves (for all the good they’d do), and wrestled our heads into the cricket helmets we’d scrounged from the locals.

  We went back to the first building and set up in a triangle that gave all of us a clear shot on the door. We weren’t quiet about it; better to make enough noise to bring the stalkers out into our kill zone than going in after them.

  Except none came out.

  Fine: we’d anticipated that. That’s why we had also hit up the locals for a string of those little firecrackers that you see on the Fourth of July or Chinese New Year. We detached one, lit it, tossed it into the doorway: a loud enough pop to alert anything inside, but not in the other target buildings.

  Still nothing.

  “What the hell—?” Chloe started.

  “Hang on,” Prospero said softly, which in Brit doesn’t mean “just give me a second,” but rather, “wait; I’ve got an idea.” He studied our position relative to the other two doorways. “Alvaro, I think these buggers may be too knackered to come out and play.”

  Which agreed with my own suspicions. “Okay. So, more stumblers, probably. What do you want to do?”

  “Use the Rovers’ horns. The other two doors are far enough that if anything does come out of them, we’ve got plenty of time to put them down.”

  I shrugged and nodded at Rod, who was now hanging back with the less modified vehicle. Since we had started using it to transport the dogs, we had called it the Rover Rover. One hand controlling the leashes, Rod slipped sideways into the interior and leaned on the horn.

  It took about half a minute for one stalker to show up, lurching awkwardly out of the farthest doorway. As he came out of the shadows, we saw that most of his left foot was gone. So was his right hand. Looked like he’d lost an ear, too.

  He was an easy target. Steve took him down with one round of single-aught buck. The breath rushed out of the stumbler as he hit the ground, motionless. We walked over to check him.

  Prospero kept his own Rexio trained on the corpse. “Well, it’s plain to see why he stayed out of sight.”

  “He was prey, now,” Steve nodded. “What about the other two doors?”

  Prospero glanced back at them. “An excellent question, Steven.”

  I shrugged. “Let’s get the answer.” I let the AK slip into a cradle-carry and made my way to the next one, a barrack.

  “Surely you don’t mean to go in there?” Prospero muttered at my back.

  “Don’t really have a choice if we want to finish the job.” I raised my voice: “Rod, bring one of your pups. One you can manage easily.”

  “What for?”

  “Need a nose to tell us when we’re about to run into trouble.”

  Rod met us at the doorway with the smartest of the dogs: a border collie-shepherd mix that was fast, steady, obedient, attentive. Just what we needed for going into a dark building. Along with the headlamps we slipped on.

  “I’m in first,” I muttered. “Just to make sure there’s nothing right on the other side of the door. Then you bring the pup in, Rod, and we take our cues from him. Everyone, shoot high. Don’t clip Rin Tin Tin. On three. One, two—”

  On “three,” I shoved the door sharply. It flew back hard; it had only been leaned closed. I wasn’t the only one startled; I almost blew apart a bird that came flying out, and damn near had a heart attack as I swung my weapon up to do so. “We’re clear,” I shouted, both for my own benefit and the team’s.

  Rod brought the pooch in, who took two sniffs and started to growl, joints stiffening as it started to pull him down the hall. “I can hold him,” Rod muttered, shortening the leash. “But I can’t keep him quiet forever.”

  “Don’t try. Let him bark.”

  Rod shrugged, leaned toward the dog and whispered in an excited tone. “Whatta you smell, boy? What’s back there? Can you get it? Will you get it?”

  The dog didn’t bark; it let out a full-on Cujo-of-the-Baskervilles howl, broken up by bloodthirsty growlings.

  Rod glanced at me. “Should we—?”

  “Hold your ground. Weapons up.”

  About the same time I followed my own order, there was movement toward the end of the barrack’s corridor: a figure scampered—scampered?—out of a doorway, headed toward the one across from it.

  No one waited for my order—“Fire!”—not even me. Two shotgun blasts and a quick AK stutter deafened us, momentarily lighting up the interior like a weak strobe-light show.

  The figure slipped, crawled. Steve put another round into it. The stalker howled—but not so much in anger as pain. It wasn’t quite a human sound, but it also wasn’t the insane raging-at-creation-itself snarl-shrieks of your typical infected.

  Prospero started heading toward it, hand moving off his Rexio’s grip and toward his pistol—

  “Hold position,” I snapped.

  He looked at me, startled.

  “We’re in the dark. We don’t know the floorplan. Rod, quiet that dog. If you can.”

  “But—” Steve started.

  “We stay put. That stalker isn’t going anywhere. We’ll put it out of its—and our—misery when we’ve cleared this corridor by the numbers. No rushing. Leapfrog advance. Assuming Cujo there can pipe down.”

  It took another few seconds for Rod to get the now-renamed dog under control. Mostly.

  It was just a thirty-foot corridor, but if I’d been able to bite my nails, I’d probably have chewed them clean off. Not because there was anything in the hall—there wasn’t—but because of how vulnerable we were. No armor except ratty old cricket helmets and only a little daylight seeping in, here and there. After the first ten feet, every one of us was thinking the same thought: What the hell are we doing? This is a job for professional soldiers!

  Except we didn’t have any professional soldiers. It was up to us.

  By the time we reached the stalker, it was dead or as good as. Prospero didn’t take any chances; he pulled a Taurus M9 and put one in its skull. It didn’t even flinch. We saw what it had been running for: a broken window in the room across the hall. The room it had burst out of—its lair—was a nasty stew of scat and rat carcasses. Some of the rats had been as big as groundhogs.

  We continued, doorway by doorway to the far end of the barrack, and went out that door into the early morning mist.

  I yanked off the cricket helmet. “Shit.”

  Rod came up alongside me, and Cujo sniffed gently at my hand. “Alvaro, what’s wrong?”

  “I’m stupid, that’s what’s wrong!” I remembered to bring my gun up and cover the open approaches as I headed back toward the Rovers.

  “Stupid? How?”

  Chloe and Jeeza were sitting bolt upright; I guess my posture told them I was pissed. “Stupid for not thinking to break all the fucking windows before we went in! Christ, we didn’t have to go door-to-door in the dark. It’s a single story. Every room has a window. Just put a shooter at the entry on each end. Then put another on the side of the building opposite while the fourth shooter just smashes the windows and clears each room from the outside!” I waved at the barrack behind me; I would have torched it if I could have. “Goddamn, it’s like I’m Pavlov’s fucking tactical dog, trained by fucking movies and video games. I could have gotten us all killed—or at least one of us bitten—by playing hide-and-go-seek in that hallway. I am a moron.”

  “No,” Chloe said from atop the Rover. “You’re just not perfect. And no one expects you to be. Except you.”

  I looked up. Her eyes added, and I love you, more clearly than words could have.

  I don’t know how or why, but that steadied me. “Okay, I may be the only one who had to learn this lesson the hard way, but we can’t sim
ply trust pre-plague tactics. A lot still work, but a lot don’t, mostly because they’re based on assumptions that no longer apply. Like the tactics for entering an enemy building.”

  Prospero nodded. “Because the stalkers aren’t really ‘enemies’ in the military sense of the word. They are not thinking opponents.”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry I put all of you through that,” I said, looking individually at Rod, Steve, and Prospero.

  Rod smiled, Steve shrugged, and the corners of Prospero’s mouth crinkled as he admitted, “I hadn’t thought it through either, mate. For good or for ill, we’re all in the same boat.”

  I straightened up, wished I had a washcloth to wipe the sweat out of my armpits, headed toward the third and last building the dogs had tweaked to. “Now,” I said, “let’s go do this the right way.”

  * * *

  The third and last housing unit was, as Steve put it, a slam dunk. The fourth window that I smashed revealed yet another cowering stalker. She loped weakly across the hall—and straight into two rounds of single-aught from Prospero’s Rexio.

  About thirty minutes later, we pulled up at the site of the prior day’s musical massacre: the tarmac in front of Wideawake Airfield’s passenger terminal. We knew this was likely to be a more dangerous environment in which to go room to room; it was mostly comprised of irregular, interior spaces that had no windows or other openings for daylight.

  But actually, we’d started preparing for our entry the day before by giving ourselves an advantage that we hoped would compensate for the lack of light deep inside. When the stalkers had stopped emerging from the terminal, we’d poured a wide circle of (now useless) fabric softener around their corpses. And sure enough, a day later, it looked like at least a few of their pals had crossed that heavily scented barrier to snack on their remains.

  But that protective circle (of lemony freshness, not magic) didn’t figure in the first phase of our zombie-clearing plans. Instead, Prospero, Steve and I took up a flanking position to one side of the terminal’s ruined entry while Chloe and Jeeza kept a three-sixty watch for unexpected visitors. Rod had the dogs back at the cars, trying to keep them quiet. I gave him a thumbs-up and he honked the horn. We waited.

  After about a minute, three very strange-looking infected came bounding out of the deeper gloom. They had almost as much physical energy as fully active stalkers, but their bellies were grossly distended; they had probably gorged on the corpses we’d left behind. They rushed forward, blinking into the morning light. The dogs started baying at the same moment I gave Rod the second thumbs-up.

  Jumping from one Rover to the other, he snapped on their high beams.

  The stalkers screeched, threw their hands up against the light as they kept running forward. But their gait was unsteady now, and their focus was on the dogs. That ferocious barking was a clear challenge, and nothing attracts a stalker’s attention faster than that.

  I doubt they even knew the three of us were there until we opened up.

  That big meal had definitely recharged them. It took three hits to put them down. All except the one that Steve hit high; a single aught ball punched through the bridge of her nose and she fell as fast and limp as a bag of wet laundry. None of them got within twenty feet of us. I couldn’t tell if our marksmanship had notched up a bit or if we were just a little more calm and collected when firing in combat. Maybe a bit of both. Or maybe we just got lucky.

  We waited. Nothing. Rod honked the horn again. Still nothing.

  I rose from my kneeling position and waved him in. “Let’s get the dogs working.”

  Despite how much the locals depended upon them, we hadn’t realized how valuable dogs would be against the infected until we started thinking about having to clear the base and the airfield. At which point, their value became obvious. So when the police were prepping our back-up vehicle for Operation Wizard’s Tower (the one we now call the Rover Rover), we went to the council and asked if we could borrow a few of the town’s dogs. We were given our pick, and so, chose three that were known to be even-tempered, easy to work with, and above all, had good noses.

  Those three dogs were now straining at their leashes as Rod joined us at the terminal’s gaping entrance; there wasn’t a bit of glass left in the doors or the ground-to-ceiling windows on either side of them. Rod held out a rag that he’d anointed with the fabric softener. The dogs got the scent and got busy, almost pulling him inside. Weapons in an assault carry, we followed.

  It wasn’t much of a terminal. The single baggage carousel appeared to be an afterthought that no one had ever used. There were fewer seats than you’d find in a large doctor’s office. No amenities of any kind, except for a snack machine. It was the only object that had attracted the stalkers’ attention and had done so in a very big way. It was on its side, glass front shattered. And—

  And there were empty candy-bar wrappers all around it. I looked more closely, and discovered that they’d also devoured a crate’s worth of those cheddar crackers with peanut butter fillings. My comment on this discovery was singularly insightful. “Huh.” I said.

  Prospero was frowning. “Some survivors claimed they’d seen evidence that the grotty bastards have a sweet tooth. I dismissed it, but—”

  “Not just a sweet tooth,” Rod corrected casually as the dogs kept tugging at their leashes. “Look: potato chip wrappers. The stalkers need carbs, too. Probably even more than we do.”

  Prospero pointed at the unmolested bags of sunflower seeds that were still in the vending machine. “How does your theory account for those?”

  Rod shrugged. “They’re not refined carbs. Doesn’t smell the same. No animal fat, either.” He hauled back on the taut leashes, tilted his head toward the far end of the combination arrivals and departures area. “Look, are we gonna do this or what?”

  If the terminal’s public spaces were small, the private/official sections were disproportionately large. According to Prospero, that was mostly to house security and support services for when and if the airfield ever became a logistics hub again, as it had been during the Falklands War. He’d been in those rear areas a few times and had been able to give us the basic layout, but not a detailed ground plan. He knew the major corridors and bigger rooms, but there were still plenty of question marks on the map.

  The dogs, however, didn’t need any map to find what they, and we, were looking for: the stalkers who’d gone through the fabric softener. Rod gave them the scent again, and once they were done nosing around (and growling) they resumed pulling him deeper into the terminal.

  He didn’t lengthen their leashes, though. For all we knew, there could be other, still torpid stalkers. They might rouse only when we came very near or otherwise disturbed their beauty sleep. And since they could pop up anywhere, we kept the dogs in close, working on clearing each new space we encountered. That way, there was no part of our rear or flanks that we’d overlooked.

  In the outermost areas, we found the lair of the three that had rushed us near the entrance. Lots of still locked rooms, too, which promised lots of undamaged and unused stores of—well, everything. But no stalkers. We pushed deeper.

  This is the part that could easily be told like a campfire ghost story: all the dark niches and blind corners. All the sweaty twists and turns in the darkness. Two of our headlamps flickered out because batteries that have been recharged half a dozen times really suck. Then there were all the moments the dogs got quiet and then started growling—sometimes at the walls. So yeah, it was kind of scary: by the time we were done, we were all putting out that especially rank fear-sweat.

  But in hindsight, it really wasn’t a big deal. The dogs did their job. They found four of the down-tuned stalkers we started calling “passives.” Their only impulse was to get the hell away from us. We killed three of them outright and wounded the other. It almost escaped because one of the dogs (Daisy, a Newfie-Rottweiler mix) pulled so hard on her leash that Rod fell over. And when we came in to protect him, we stumbled into each o
ther.

  But if Daisy made the problem, she also fixed it. She didn’t so much leap on that passive as she tackled him. By which time, Rod had gotten back to his feet and pulled her off as we finished the job.

  That part—killing the passives—was kinda sad. I mean, these infected were entirely different. But even if they weren’t aggressive now, I doubt they’d be so harmless if we were the ones who were vulnerable. They’re probably a lot like rats: skittish when frightened, aggressive if they’ve got the upper hand. Besides, they were infectious. And these days, that’s the bottom line.

  Once we’d cleared every square foot of the terminal, we got out quickly. Jeeza was there with a bleach and water mixture for our bodies (including Daisy’s) and a more human-friendly decon wipe for our faces. We hadn’t gotten close to any of the stalkers, but we weren’t about to take any chances. My biggest fear was that just being in the same enclosed space might be enough to infect us. But Prospero and the councilors had heard enough radio chatter during the start of what they called The Fall to feel pretty sure that there wasn’t any real risk of that. Most infection was through direct contact or exposure to fluids. And if it was transmitted by air, we had taken care to stick to wide corridors and big rooms. The passives did prefer smaller spaces, though. Again, just like rats: they protect themselves by living in small, hard-to-get-to spaces.

  It was at the airfield’s warehouses that we found the only truly surreal scene of the day. Of the two that were no longer sealed, one had simply had both doors thrown wide and stalkers had torn half of the boxes and containers apart. Mostly to get at candy and snacks.

  But at the other warehouse, only one door was slightly ajar. The dogs got a little lively when we approached, so we fastened a tow-line to it and hitched the other end to the lashing ring on the Rover Rover’s front bumper. Jeeza eased the vehicle into reverse and as the warehouse door started opening, we did a silent three-count and then stormed in.

  At first, we couldn’t make out what we were seeing, it was such a crazy mess. There was a well-gnawed human skeleton in the middle of the floor, surrounded by heaps of dead rats. The super-sized groundhog kind. Looking more carefully, we realized that this had been some kind of last stand for a stalker, who had taken at least thirty of the rodents down with it. We closed the door.