At the End of the World

by Charles E Gannon

“Yeah?”

  “Infected might not assume that a gunshot—or a lot of them—means ‘chow time.’ But if you shout, they will know you’re food.”

  “Yeah—delivery, in this case,” Rod added.

  Jeeza had toggled in, giggled before she could release.

  Chloe didn’t say anything. I could imagine her fuming fifty yards downslope. “Prospero, you having the same problem with the NODs?”

  “I am,” he admitted. “Never worked with them before. Thought it would be easier.”

  I nodded to no one. It was a nasty surprise. I had presumed that, being in the military, Prospero would have been familiar with them, and he never said otherwise. The rest of us knew only what we’d seen in movies and video games, both of which made it look pretty easy to use NODs in a gunfight. But, if we had to pop off half a dozen rounds for every infected that showed up, our night vision strategy would be way too expensive, both in terms of risk and ammunition. “Change of plans,” I announced.

  “Alvaro—” began Prospero in his almost-patronizing voice.

  “Not now,” I snapped. Damn it, when is Prospero going to learn that the middle of an operation is not the time for a debate? “Contact team goes to shotguns and enters the grounds of objective one. We stick close, find a choke point, set up, wait for any hostiles to come out. Cover team, advance to the lane leading into objective one. Keep a watch uphill to objective two.”

  “And maintain overwatch on you, too, right?”

  “That is a secondary priority. Secure our rear.”

  “Alvaro!” It was Chloe. “We can’t help you if—”

  “Chloe, we just learned that NODs are only good for recon. Not your fault you can’t aim with them. Now, get moving. The stalkers will be, if any heard that gunfire.”

  Steve and Rod were right behind as I sprinted up past the dead stalker and ducked under the heavy, overgrown boughs that used to arch over the lane into the first pousada.

  One good thing about fighting the infected: they don’t care about being quiet. If they know, or even suspect, that they have prey, they yowl like people in an asylum.

  That’s what happened at the first pousada. No sooner were we in that narrow, bushy lane than they started sounding like refugees from the psych ward. Which told us how many were coming, where from, and roughly how far off they were. Or so I thought.

  Two came leaping down the stairs from the main building on the left, and we all swung that direction, raising our shotguns. But at the last second, another two came sprinting up from the pool area down a slight slope to the right.

  There wasn’t time to coordinate targets; we just started pumping and firing. It’s not even like we were “engaging targets.” If we saw something moving in our front one-hundred-and-eighty-degree arc, we fired and cycled and fired again until it went down. The range was never less than thirty feet, so there was no time to even see if you hit. There was just enough moonlight to see them coming, to see them fall down, and to see that there were a few more behind them.

  I wish I could remember more details than that, but I don’t. Maybe that’s because it all happened so fast, or because I was so shit-scared. I do remember Rod, on my right flank, taking a step back. So I did too, yelling “Back one!” over the sound of Steve’s shotgun and my own. I don’t know if they heard me, or just noticed that I’d given ground. The net effect was that we kept a line, just in time to greet the new stalkers that came charging up from the pool and down from the house.

  These infected were slower, like they were still waking up. One was limping. In between shots, I remember thinking that we wouldn’t have survived if they had all come at once. I also remember thinking (in the same moment) that it was weird that none of them had come boiling out at us right after Chloe started firing. Or after she shouted.

  Two more had gone down. The last two were almost on us. I thought I had one round left. Steve still had his shotgun up. Rod had dropped his Rexio, was reaching for his pistol—

  “Coming in!” shouted Chloe, right as:

  —I fired my last round and went for my flensing knife;

  —Rod got his M9 unholstered and fired;

  —Steve squeezed his shotgun’s trigger, got a dry click, and hissed “Shit!”;

  —and Chloe, god love her, showed up beside me, NODs down like a bug-eyed monster and blasting away with her Browning Hi-Power.

  I remember hacking at two different stalkers with the whaling tool. Only the first one had been moving. I’m not sure whether panic, adrenaline, or an excess of caution got me swinging at the second. At any rate, we accounted for all eight and they never did touch us, although they got within inches of doing so. Literally.

  Not like it would have turned into a game of “tag, you’re dead,” because we were in pretty heavy protective gear. But it came way too close, and for me, effective leadership meant ensuring that physical contact wasn’t even possible. That wasn’t my gold standard; that was my definition of minimum acceptable performance. And I had just fucked up. Royally.

  Which is why I only muttered a quick, “thanks” at Chloe before pushing past her.

  I could feel her staring after me. “Alvaro, what—?”

  “I fucked up. Which means we’ve got to finish this quickly. Everyone reload. While I listen.”

  “Listen for what?” Prospero chirped.

  For you to be quiet, asshole. “For more infected. There were more than we guessed, and we made a lot of noise bringing them down. Which could bring in more from the towns on the other side of the airport.” The runway was five hundred yards inland. A few hundred yards farther north was the main road along which all the island’s tiny villages were clustered. It also led to FdN’s one real town: Vila dos Remédios. I wasn’t worried about the gunfire being heard that far off, but if the infected near the airport got excited, their yelling could trigger a chain reaction.

  But like some corny old song says, all we heard were the sounds of silence. “Let’s move,” I said, starting toward the second pousada, only one hundred fifty yards farther up the slope. I say “only” because I was still cruising on adrenaline.

  “Alvaro, is that a good idea?” Rod’s voice was careful.

  “It’s better than any other,” I shot back, not entirely sure of what I was saying. But I’d feed myself to a stalker before I’d let myself sound uncertain. “If we stop to grab stuff here, any new stalkers will show up while we’re scavenging, distracted. Bad deal. We beat feet back to the dinghy? Then we did this for nothing. Because any infected that wander down here will eat these bodies. They’d be awake and strong by the time we return. Another bad deal.”

  We were halfway to the second pousada. I nodded toward it. “We hit this fast. Then survey and scavenge. Then back down to objective one and do the same. Always with two people on watch. If stalkers come, we drop everything and split.” I crouched down beside the land leading into the second pousada. “Remember, once we leave here, we always move back toward the dinghy.”

  Steve nodded as he drew alongside me. “And we’re ready to book it all the way if we have to.”

  Rod had joined us. “Okay. Let’s do this.”

  Chloe and Prospero posted themselves at the right-hand curve just beyond us. From there, the road ascended in a straight shot to the airport. They nodded when they were set. We charged toward the pousada.

  We’d taken only three steps when Chloe sent a quick message: the batteries on her NODs had petered out. Meaning that their operational life was to be measured in minutes, not hours. Welcome to the post-apocalypse, even if you have battery rechargers.

  It also meant that Prospero’s night-vision could fail any second, too. No time to waste. I got my team to the objective and into entry formation.

  Prospero toggled in. “Update.”

  “Go.”

  “NODs shows what looks like base housing, one hundred fifty yards up the airport road.”

  Shit! “Describe.”

  “Better than barracks; more like
a row of duplexes. Just south of the airport. Probably for crews, security, other personnel on temporary assignment or layover. Not uncommon on these small islands.”

  “Any sign of activity?”

  “None. Looks a wreck, though.”

  “Hurricane-wreck or infected-wreck?”

  “The latter, I’m afraid.”

  For a few moments, I thought real hard about turning around and heading for the dinghy. But my gut told me that the infected we’d killed at objective one were a pack that had successfully staked out their own territory. Between what they scrounged at the pousada and the occasional fish that washed up in the bay, they were able to stay active. Logically, then, potential rivals that were close to torpor wouldn’t like the odds of tangling with them. Passives would run in the other direction. And any packs large enough to be a threat probably had better luck prowling among the buildings north of the airport, particularly after the passenger terminal had been picked clean of bodies and pre-packaged foods.

  That decided me. “We stick with the plan. But no noise. Rod, you’re on the lights.”

  “The lights” were our contingency for situations where we wanted to attract any nearby stalkers without alerting others that were farther away. High-power flashlights from the airbase at Ascension gave us just what we needed: a tight, focused beam that we could play over small target areas like windows, doorways, corridors.

  No sooner had Rod aimed the light at the pousada’s open doorway than we heard furniture falling over and, a moment later, a stumbler came out, blinking like an old geezer roused out of his nap. I nodded at Steve, who aimed and fired one round before the infected could even screech. The stumbler fell headlong down the stairs, didn’t move. We waited. Really? Just one, lone—?

  “Movement!” hissed Rod, swinging his light and Rexio to the side of the house.

  A figure—actually, just its haunches—disappeared into the overgrown plantings that ran around the back of the building.

  Steve aimed, but I waved him down. “It’s a passive.”

  “Still a stalker,” Steve pointed out.

  I nodded. “Yeah, but tonight, we don’t make any more noise than we have to.”

  “Is that all of them? Really?” Chloe asked, her voice high with disbelief. I wasn’t aware she was even on the channel.

  “Let’s wait a minute and see. Rod, lights on the windows again.”

  Two minutes passed. No motion inside or outside the house. None up at the airfield housing, either, according to Prospero.

  I breathed deeply. I still wanted to turn around, run down to the beach, jump in the dinghy, and keep the outboard’s throttle wide open until we got back to Voyager. But what I said was, “Okay; entry formation. Let’s clear the objective, then mark for salvage.”

  So then…wedid we…th…and it w…

  November 5

  I meant to write more but I fell asleep over this damn journal. That was two days ago.

  At least I recorded all the important stuff before I went face down in the gazpacho I was dreaming about. The weird thing is that although those events aren’t even a hundred hours in the past, it feels like they’re a million years—and a whole world—away.

  And we really are in a different world, now. Yesterday we arrived at Rocas Atoll, which truly looks and feels like another planet. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Gotta finish the after action report from Fernando de Noronha.

  So, we went into the second pousada with our limbs shivering from being whipsawed between adrenaline and fear…and discovered it was empty. Which sounds like it should be a relief, but it wasn’t. Because if anticlimax is not a fun mental state, your body’s version of it is friggin’ awful.

  When I went through that front door, and then leap-frogged room to room, my adrenaline levels must have been through the roof. Which is logical, because my lizard hindbrain was insisting there wouldn’t be a tomorrow if my adrenal glands didn’t keep me juiced. Only after we confirmed it was a dry hole did we let ourselves stand down. Except we couldn’t. Not really.

  We were all pumped up with no place to go apeshit. It’s the whole-body equivalent of that moment when you step out of a car that’s been speeding through the desert all night. The world slows down, but you don’t. You can’t. But then, when your head and heart finally come to stop, you really do crash; that’s when you learn where that expression comes from. One minute you’re cruising, the next you hit the wall. Done.

  It’s just like that when you’re all amped up to kill or be killed. Except about a million times worse. Because it’s not just a sensation in your head; it’s a ragged, humming feeling all through your body. Like your limbs might lash out and do something—anything—before you could stop them. You’re not really out of control, but it sure doesn’t feel like you’re totally in control, either.

  We’d all felt a little of that after clearing the passenger terminal on Ascension. But the stakes hadn’t been so high and the risk hadn’t been so absolute. Because we had all sorts of ways to get out of, or control, that situation.

  Fernando de Noronha was completely different. It was in the middle of the night, in a place we’d never been before, using tactics we hadn’t really tested, with unknown numbers of stalkers all around us. So yeah, it took a while for the adrenaline to ease off enough that our hands stopped trembling and the soundless hum faded out of our ears. Surveying objective two for salvage was what finally helped us come down from that awful high, because we had to focus if we wanted to find all the survival-crucial goods hidden there.

  Unfortunately, this pousada was not a jackpot. Its so-called restaurant was more like a kitchen that could do buffets and breakfast. Everything had been trashed by the infected, who had soiled this place with extreme prejudice. We’re talking scat all over, including the walls. We’d never seen that before. The same treatment was lavished on anything that looked like art or was visually creative in any way. In some cases, they hadn’t merely flung, but hand-smeared, their own crap across it.

  It made them seem more savage, because it made them seem more human; they hadn’t been entirely random about what they shat on. I’m certainly not saying they were making a “statement,” but on the other hand, you couldn’t fault them for lack of clarity.

  The guest rooms offered mute but clear testimony as to what had become of the tourists staying at the pousada. Intact suitcases and lack of forced entry, combined with blood patterns and gnawed remains, told the stories of each occupant’s final moments. You didn’t need to be a forensics expert to understand that they had all been surprised, either by recently turned locals, staff, or their own family/friends/lovers.

  As we headed back for the front door, we were shaking again, but the reason had changed. We’d never seen that kind of aftermath. At Husvik, the infected we encountered were just rabid monsters. At Ascension, we saw the aftermath of a war between cannibals in a military asylum. But the corpses strewn throughout the second pousada were just regular people who, like most of the world, had become playthings for the plague’s monstrous ironies. Parents had been attacked by their kids. Grooms had been gutted by brides. Octogenarians had leaped out of their z-frames to tear apart people who were one-fourth their age and four times their strength. The rules of the world had turned upside down and blood poured out.

  We left that pousada at a run, racing down the front steps, panting and pushing up our visors. But we hadn’t finished the job; we still had to comb through the outbuildings and sheds (even small hotels need a lot of storage space).

  That walk-through produced some worthwhile finds: rope, jerricans of gasoline, some spare batteries and light bulbs, extension cords, flashlights. However, as we were leaving the gardener’s shed, Steve, who has a pretty keen sense of smell, put his nose in the air and said, “Peppers.”

  He turned toward the land behind the pousada. As he did, I realized it wasn’t just a wildly overgrown field; it was a big-ass garden. Another step and I was at the end of a crop line, looking down
what was left of the rows. Lots of rows.

  It wasn’t a garden at all; it was a small farm. Probably the source of the pousada’s high-priced “fresh-to-the-table” ingredients.

  Steve edged toward one of the furrows of darkness between the half-erased crop lines just as I, too, began to smell fruits and vegetables. But the scent was too strong.

  “It’s rotting,” Steve said. He probably knew the smell because his folks had owned “a cottage in farm country,” whatever the hell that meant. I knew the odor because that’s how “fresh produce” smells when it’s been on sale for two days, just before it spoils. In other words, it smelled like the kind of fruit and vegetables I grew up on.

  “Rotting on the vine,” I added. My mom had always used that phrase, even for things that didn’t grow on vines. And I always had to stop myself from pulling a smirk when she did, thinking, WTF? You trying to be fancy?

  Suddenly I wanted to eat a bullet for every time I’d ever thought that, for being an ungrateful little wiseass shit. “It’s rotting on the vine,” I said again, louder. Like I was slapping my earlier self across the face. I missed my mom so bad I thought I might start bawling right there between the peppers and papayas.

  We left the garden without saying another word.

  * * *

  Because it had a real restaurant, objective one was the goldmine, particularly for staple carbs: rice, beans, flour, cornmeal, even dehydrated milk. A treasure trove of canned goods, too. It was just what Jeeza had predicted.

  And whereas the other pousada’s roof cistern had become a breeding pool for algae, this one had been built with filters and special covers. Access was through a sturdy, locked door on the third floor. Nothing between it and the ground level had been of interest to stalkers: just linens, cleansers, cleaning equipment, spare furniture, and seasonal supplies.

  All of that was in the main house, which had no guest rooms. Which in turn, explained why it was so much more intact than the second pousada: except for the few hours when the restaurant served meals, there was no prey to be found there. Oh, the stalkers had run through the place, grabbed ready-to-hand high energy foods like bread and meats, scatted in various places. But all the killing had taken place in (and wrecked) the high-end bungalows that dotted the property’s grassy bayview slope.