Southlands

by D. J. Molles

  Abe was also healing up. The wound in his left calf still caused a “hitch in his giddyup,” as Tex described it. But Abe was that variety of man that always looked filled out, no matter the severity of the hardships. He had roundish facial features as it was, but even if his face began to go gaunt, you wouldn’t be able to see it past the thick black beard he kept.

  Glued to Lee’s right leg as usual, Deuce stood, his tongue lolling out, and even the dog that seemed to be so serious all the time appeared excited about leaving the bunker. As the elevator reached the top, he wagged his tail a few times and his ears perked forward.

  Lee let his hand fall to Deuce’s head and gave the dog a scratch behind the ears.

  The elevator doors slid open, and warm, dry air gusted in.

  They stepped out into an expanse of Texas plains, blinking against the strong sun. The smell of heat and grass and dew hit them, along with the smell of diesel exhaust.

  Tex waited for them beside a running Chevy Silverado. He wore a battered pair of jeans and a t-shirt today, but he still had on his plate carrier and his rifle. He smiled at them, his eyes obscured by the Oakley M-frames he cherished.

  “How are my two house guests today?” he asked in his Texas drawl.

  Lee bumped Tex’s fist by way of greeting. “Good. Ready to get out.”

  “Ready to earn your keep?”

  Lee gestured to his own plate carrier and rifle. “We didn’t get dressed up for nothing.”

  Tex nodded. “Well, hopefully it won’t be like that. But you never know.”

  “What are we doing?” Abe asked, smoothing his beard out.

  Tex hiked a thumb over his shoulder to the pickup bed, which was filled with a mix of plastic crates and buckets. Mostly food stuffs, it looked like. “We’re running some goodies out to OP Elbert. Little program I like to call ‘MREs for TPOs.’”

  Lee raised an eyebrow. He was still playing catchup with some of the jargon that Tex and his mostly-military constituents used. He wasn’t familiar with “MREs for TPOs,” but he understood that they called the primals “teepios,” which originated from TPO, which stood for “two-point-oh.” As in “Infected: 2.0.”

  Lee appreciated a good, obscure acronym.

  Tex opened the passenger-side door of the truck, and gestured for Lee and Abe to get in the back. “Let’s get rolling. I’ll explain on the way.” He stopped, with one leg in the truck and looked back at Lee and Abe. “Just be forewarned: OP Elbert is one of my civilian groups. And they’re squirrelly as fuck. So stay on your toes.”

  Lee and Abe exchanged a glance.

  “Roger that,” Lee said, and then climbed in the back. Deuce hopped up to sit on the floorboard between him and Abe.

  The pickup took off, not wasting any time. The “roads” were little more than tire trails, and Lee was jostled about violently in the back. The driver was a younger soldier that Lee had seen with Tex before, and he didn’t seem to care much for slowing down over potholes.

  Tex flicked a hand back and forth. “Lee and Abe, this is Corporal Thompson. Thompson, this is Lee and Abe. Thompson should be a sergeant, I guess. But then again I should be a general, so…”

  Thompson didn’t give a response to the greeting. Just kept ramming them over the potholes.

  Tex turned around in his seat. “By the way, the crew that Julia’s with just checked in about fifteen minutes ago. Everything’s good.” A pause. “I appreciate you letting me dispatch her out there. Good combat medics are something we don’t have enough of.”

  Lee grunted. “You can thank Julia. She pretty much does what she wants.”

  Tex regarded Lee for a moment with a strange set to his lips. But he never said anything.

  Lee hadn’t liked Julia running off with Tex’s hit squad. But they needed a medic, and she said she’d go, and that was that. Lee wanted to keep his own team together until they got a better sense of things here in Texas. But, so far, there hadn’t been much to set off any alarms in Lee’s head.

  Tex was definitely doing things differently than in the UES. But that didn’t mean it was bad. Just different. Ultimately, Lee wanted to get Texas to ally with the UES. They’d be stronger together.

  And also, if Lee were being honest with himself, some of his urgency in helping Tex was because the sooner he got the UES and Texas allied, and the sooner they managed to handle the Nuevas Fronteras problem, the sooner he and Julia and Abe could go back to Fort Bragg, and Lee could start training the new generation of operators that the UES was desperately going to need.

  Not to mention, Lee could finally take a damn break.

  Thinking about that was the only thing that seemed to ease the semi-permanent ball of tension that had taken up residence in his chest over the course of the last year.

  Lee refocused himself on the task at hand. He nodded at Tex. “So what’s ‘MREs for TPOs’?”

  Tex faced forward again. “It’s how we stay alive, my friend. I understand you got fences and whatnot over in the UES. Got a power plant to juice some high voltage wires, keep the teepios from munching on your civvies. But we kind of went a different route around here. More of an ‘earn your keep’ philosophy.”

  Lee thought about that. Thought about how the primals had breached Fort Bragg only a few nights ago. Thought about how Abby had been bit. It made his stomach sour. That was the last they’d heard from Fort Bragg, and Lee had opted to keep communications to a minimum until he got a better sense of Texas.

  As Tex explained, he had gone a different route with things. At first, it’d been standard Project Hometown: he’d begun to gather everyone at Fort Hood, trying to set up an interim government. But after finding out that Greeley was on the hunt for Coordinators that weren’t toeing the line with President Briggs, he decided that a more guerilla-style approach suited Texas better.

  They’d dispersed. Around a thousand former soldiers, airmen, and Texas National Guardsmen. And another thousand civilians that were able to keep up. The Texas Coalition consisted of ten outposts, spread out around the northern half of Texas and into the panhandle.

  Their philosophy was “Small, light, mobile.”

  So far, it had worked. They’d stayed alive and combat effective, despite the fact that Texas was a triple-decker shit sandwich of war fronts: Greeley’s growing influence to the north; the Nuevas Fronteras cartel pushing up from the south; and the constant war with the infected, which were everywhere.

  “Anyway,” Tex kept on. “Keeping our exposure low, we haven’t put up barriers or anything. So we just have to stay very heads-up. And we pay for teepios killed. It’s a bit of a subjective system. But you show me the bodies, you get food and medicine. Hence ‘MREs for TPOs.’”

  Lee looked across the cab at Abe. “Kinda makes me wish we’d done something like that in the UES.” He thought about the posters that some of the civilians had posted on light poles in Fort Bragg—always depicting Lee as a mindless killer. It still rankled. “We got a lot of idiot civvies that need taking care of.”

  A frown creased Abe’s dark brow, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Yeah, well,” Tex said. “We don’t have the luxury of taking care of people that aren’t fighting. I’m not saying that we have it harder than y’all or anything. Just saying…the situation is different. We’re at war. And a civilian-run government like what you got in the UES would have us all dead in a month. Maybe someday when we’ve made things safe enough for them, we can let the civvies take control again.”

  Abe shifted in his seat. It didn’t escape Lee that he looked troubled.

  Thompson suddenly jammed on the brakes.

  The big pickup came skidding to a stop, their own cloud of dust rolling over them.

  “Nine o’clock,” was all Thompson said, before kicking his door open and dragging his rifle out from between the two front seats.

  They were all out of the truck within a few seconds, all four pairs of eyes darting out to their left flank where a copse of trees clung to the top o
f a hill.

  Thompson had his rifle up to his shoulder. “In the mesquite. See ‘em?”

  “Yup,” Tex answered. He hadn’t pulled his rifle up. He walked around the front of the truck, and Lee followed. The heat from the running engine gusted up at him.

  The trees were three hundred yards out. Scraggly things, with just enough leaf to give shade. Lee didn’t see them at first, but when he squinted against the bright sun, he caught the stir of movement in the shadows.

  “Want me to peg ‘em from here?” Thompson asked.

  “How many are there?” Tex wondered.

  Lee wished he had his scoped M14, but he’d come out with his lighter M4 today. All this open country around here was better suited to the bigger bullet of the M14.

  “Five. Six, maybe,” Thompson counted.

  Tex stepped out from the tire trail now, into the knee-high prairie grass. He looked relaxed. Kept walking out, slow and steady. “Let’s see if they won’t come to us.”

  Abe looked unsure. “Be easier to hit them while they’re sitting still.”

  “We start hitting them now, they might take off. They’re smart enough. Until their blood gets up.”

  “There’s four of us,” Abe pressed. “We can take most of them out.”

  Tex didn’t answer. Instead he waved one of his tattooed arms over his head and let out a high-pitched yelp.

  There was an immediate reaction.

  The shapes in the shadows stirred, two of them coming upright and, as though it was somehow pre-planned, one started cutting wide to the right, and one to the left. They were far away, but Lee saw how strange their almost-human shapes were when they went onto all fours and started wolf-trotting through the grass.

  “There you go,” Tex murmured to himself, and raised his rifle.

  Lee hadn’t noticed Deuce jump out of the truck, but the dog caught the scent in the air and started barking, right next to Lee’s leg. He jolted at the sudden noise and almost kneed the dog out of pure reaction.

  Tex looked over his shoulder at Deuce. “Yeah, boy. You keep calling to them.”

  The other shapes emerged from under the trees now. Four of them. Which made it six in total. The ones in the center spread out, while the ones on the flanks started to curve in.

  “How close you wanna let them get?” Lee asked, tracking the one on the right flank, now about two hundred yards out, and closing fast.

  He realized that his heart was slamming in his chest.

  And he realized it was only half from fear. The other half was savage anticipation. He had the thought, in the middle of it all, that he and that primal at the other end of his rifle, they were probably feeling the same thing. They both sensed the destruction in the wind, like lightning in the air. And they both wanted it.

  One wanted to feed its belly.

  The other wanted a different type of satisfaction.

  Tex’s voice was muffled by the stock of the rifle pressed to his cheek. “Let them get close enough that they won’t get away if they choose to hightail it.”

  Lee felt Deuce pressed against his leg. Felt the heat of the dog’s body, the flanks heaving as he barked. He didn’t bother telling Deuce to quiet down. It wouldn’t do any good at this point—when the primals were this close, Deuce couldn’t be reasoned with.

  Lee kept tracking. That little red dot, dialed down as low as it could be seen in the bright daylight, leading that loping shape by about a foot. He couldn’t see much of the primal. Just it’s sun-tanned back, slipping through the grasses. Its eyes, locked onto Lee. Like no eyes that should be in a human face.

  Breathing.

  And tracking.

  “Alright, hit ‘em.”

  Lee fired.

  Watched pink mist puff out behind the primal. It kept coming. Faster now, like the bullet had only spurred it.

  He was peripherally aware of the other gunfire, but he was focused on his target, that surging, burning sensation in him. Primal in its own rights.

  Lee fired again. Hit again. And this time the creature seemed to lose its momentum, but then it charged forward again. 5.56mm was a small round. And these were big, dangerous game.

  It was closing fast.

  Fifty yards.

  Heart pounding.

  More fear now.

  Lee let loose. Three rounds, as fast as he could pull them. Two struck. The third plumed in the dirt behind the primal, but its legs went out from under it and it planted itself in the grasses and didn’t get back up.

  Lee pivoted. No more breathing. The air was trapped in his lungs now. He bore down on it, teeth clenched.

  Another, much closer.

  It was full-on towards Lee, racing at him like a bull. He saw its muscles rippling under its browned hide, the claws chewing up dirt, the wide, inhuman mouth hanging open. Lee fired, staring into that mouth, and that’s where the rounds went, and knocked the base of its brain out the back of its skull.

  It tumbled into the dirt twenty yards from him.

  Lee scanned. Left. Right.

  No one fired.

  Everyone searched for another target, and didn’t find one.

  Lee let the air out of his lungs when they started to burn. Took in a steady breath. Purged the carbon dioxide out of him.

  A tremble worked its way into his limbs. He clutched his rifle harder so it didn’t show.

  One by one, the four of them lowered their rifles.

  The only sound was that of the pickup idling behind them.

  Deuce had gone quiet, like he knew that it was over.

  “Got ‘em all?” Tex asked, his voice over-loud, despite the ringing in Lee’s ears.

  Lee glanced to his left at Tex. The man’s lips trembled.

  Thompson spat into the dirt. He let out a swear under his breath. He’d fired a lot. He took a second to swap his magazine out with a fresh one.

  “Alright, let’s clean ‘em up,” Tex said. “Thompson and Abe, start over there. Me and Lee’ll start over here.”

  Thompson led Abe off to the left. Lee and Tex went right.

  The one that had died within twenty yards of them was dead. No brain left in it to make the muscles move. It was a male. Young. Lee wasn’t sure how young. Age was difficult to calculate with them. This one might’ve been born a primal.

  The next they came to was the first one that Lee had shot. The one that wouldn’t go down. And it was still kicking. It was older. Streaks of gray in the long, dreadlocked hair. This one had once been a man. But a bacteria had eaten away its frontal lobe three years ago, and it’d done something to it. Sparked off some evolutionary spurt. It wasn’t a man anymore.

  It pawed at the dirt and murmured, deep in its perforated chest.

  Lee listened to it for a moment.

  Tex seemed pensive. “What do you think it’s saying?”

  Lee jerked his head at Tex. For some reason he couldn’t put his finger on, the question had caused his stomach to flip-flop. “They don’t speak anymore, Tex.”

  He popped it in the head to put it out of its misery.

  That was the most mercy Lee could afford.

  They kept walking through the grass. Almost a full minute passed in silence.

  Off to their left, Abe finished off another live one.

  “I don’t know about that,” Tex said.

  “About what?”

  “I think they talk.”

  “You mean they communicate. Hoots and howls.”

  “No. I mean they talk.” Tex glanced in Lee’s direction, and then away. “Consonants. Vowels. Sounds that mean specific things. You know. Words.”

  Lee stared at the other man, but didn’t say anything back.

  The next one they found was dead.

  That made three.

  Tex called out to Thompson: “You got three dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We got three. That’s all six.”

  “Let’s roll, then.”

  But Lee looked up the hill into the shadows of thos
e mesquite trees. The thin, scraggly limbs, tracing every which way. The way the shade seemed black when compared to the blazing sun around them.

  He looked back to the truck, and saw Deuce, pacing anxious circles around the pickup. The dog hadn’t followed them into the grass.

  He turned, and started towards the copse of mesquite. “Just gonna take a look in there,” Lee said. “Come back me up.”

  Tex only hesitated for a moment, like he couldn’t see the point in it, but he shrugged and started after Lee. He shot a glance over at Thompson and Abe and nodded towards the copse at the top of the hill. Thompson and Abe started toward it as well.

  Lee listened as he approached the trees. He moved steadily through the grass, his feet rustling through the dry thatch. He held his rifle at a low ready. Looked out over top of his sights, into the shadows that grew before him. The thought that he might be acting strange didn’t occur to him.

  He stopped at the very edge of the trees. The sun was high enough at that moment that the shadows didn’t stretch out very far. Once you were in the shadows, you were in the trees.

  Standing close to them, some of the darkness had dissipated. He could see into it now. The shade and the carpet of leaves kept the ground mulched and clear. There was some brush grown up, but not much. And it had a trampled appearance.

  He had a flash of memory.

  Deer hunting with his father when he was young.

  Going through a field of waist-high grasses, and finding the collection of small depressions where warm bodies had curled in upon themselves all night. He remembered his dad looking it over with a knowing eye and gesturing to it.

  “This is a bedding area,” his dad had said. “You can see where they slept.”

  The trampled brush in the shade of the mesquite had the same look to it.

  Lee stepped into the thicket, and Tex followed.

  There were some boulders. The scraggly mesquite had grown up around them, and through the cracks. It was behind one of these boulders that Lee found it.

  It yowled at him when he cleared the back of the rock and saw it. The noise sparked a surge of adrenaline that set his heart thudding in his chest again and he brought his rifle up to his cheek. The little red dot on his optic hovering there on a small, skinny chest.