These Dead Lands (Book 2): Desolation

by Knight, Stephen

“Look. They have to know we’re here,” Bellara said after a moment. Flies buzzed around the two men.

  Ballantine shrugged. “You want to try and climb over that wall, sir? I don’t really see an easy way over it, but hey. You might get lucky.”

  Bellara pointed at the slowly writhing reekers caught up in the barbed wire. “Didn’t seem to work out for them.”

  Ballantine curled up his tongue and put his thumb and middle finger under it. He let out a loud, sharp whistle that made Bellara jump.

  “Damn!” the captain said.

  “Pretty sure even the reekers heard that,” the first sergeant drawled from the other side of the Humvee.

  Reader asked, “Hey Sarge, you want me to lean on the horn?”

  “No need for that, Mike.” Ballantine pointed at the wall, where a pair of heads appeared over the top of the irregular wall. Two men peered down at them from the mountain of garbage. They didn’t expose much of themselves below their noses.

  “Hey there,” Bellara called out. “I’m Captain Bellara, Pennsylvania Army National Guard. Wondering if—”

  “What is it that you want?” one of the men called back.

  “Was getting to that. Wondering if we could come in and talk?”

  “What do you need to know?”

  Bellara spread his hands. “Look, guy. This isn’t a shakedown or anything—we just want to know who you guys are, how you’re getting along, and if there’s anything we can do to help.”

  “Sure could’ve used your help a month ago before those things started popping up and attacking our people,” the second man said. After a pause, he added an acidic, “Captain.”

  “Okay, sir. This isn’t going to go our way,” Ballantine said. “I’ve seen this before. Let’s cut our losses and get back to the train.”

  Bellara looked up at Ballantine, and his customary smile dimmed. “We’ll go when I say so, Sergeant.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Walk with me. First Sergeant, stay with the vehicle.” Bellara began walking toward the wall, keeping his weapon lowered. Ballantine mirrored him, his right hand wrapped around the pistol-grip of his rifle, his index finger lying straight alongside its frame, keeping away from the trigger. The safety was off, and he didn’t want to have any accidents.

  “So guys. One of you in charge here?” Bellara asked.

  “No. We’re just watching the wall. You guys come in on that train?”

  “Happy to answer questions from your boss,” Bellara said. “But from you guys? Not so much. Get where I’m headed here?”

  The two men paused for a long moment, looking out over the small column of Humvees and the soldiers standing around them. They exchanged glances, and one of them disappeared behind the wall. The other remained where he was. He wore a red, sweat-stained bandana over his head.

  “Stay there,” he said. “Wait for a bit.”

  “Standing around in the middle of the zombie apocalypse isn’t something you should advise,” Bellara said.

  “Wait ... Captain.” Again with the sarcastic tone. And then, he withdrew behind the wall as well.

  “Guess that dude has some issues with authority figures,” Bellara said.

  “Maybe he’s just pissed that we’re basically showing up with our hats in our hands,” Ballantine said.

  Bellara looked up at him. “But we’re not.”

  Ballantine nodded to the town on the other side of the wall. “Tell it to them, sir.”

  “Hey, Ballantine!”

  Ballantine turned back to the column. Guerra pointed off to the formation’s right, and Ballantine stepped away from Bellara and raised his rifle. A single reeker stumbled toward them, plowing through the tall grass. It walked with a limp. Its black garments were coated with dust and dried blood. After a moment, Ballantine realized the ghoul wore the tattered remnants of a Catholic priest’s cassock. The full white collar around its neck was stained the color of rust. Clearly, the clergyman had fed well at some point in the past.

  “Well, God damn,” Ballantine said aloud.

  Bellara snorted. “Well. Who’s going to administer last rites?”

  Ballantine motioned to Guerra. “Get on with it, Hector.”

  “Hey man, I’m Catholic! Can’t be shootin’ no priest!”

  “I’ll do it, Sergeant!” Stilley brayed, his teeth bright and white against his dark skin. He raised the SAW to his shoulder and tucked it in tight.

  “Stilley, stand down! I’ve got it!” Ballantine trotted toward the reeker, and the movement alone was enough to get its attention. It diverted its course and shambled toward him, arms outstretched, its jaws snapping open and closed. Ballantine was in no hurry. He waited until it drew within fifty feet of him, then sighted on its head and squeezed off a single shot. The report was loud and sudden—he regretted not sending out a message ahead of time, alerting the teams at the train that this was a single engagement. Now, hundreds of guys would be spooling up, wondering if the entirety of a reeker horde was about to pour over them. For its part, the priest reeker’s head snapped back as it received the 5.56-millimeter pain reliever. The walking corpse dropped to the weeds a scant second later and lay still.

  “Hey, good shootin’ there, Tex,” Bellara said, affecting a deep Texas drawl.

  “Thanks, but I’m from Indiana,” Ballantine replied. He returned to the captain’s side as Bellara spoke into his headset microphone, updating the rest of his company on the team’s status. In the distance, more gunfire barked. It came from quite a distance to the west, which told Ballantine that the roving teams in the MRAPs had just made hostile contact. He wondered how substantial that contact was.

  There was more movement atop the wall. Ballantine looked up to see several people exposing themselves to plain view, a mix of men and women. One of them, an older woman, called down to the soldiers.

  “How many of you need to come in?” she asked.

  “Pretty much just two of us,” Bellara responded. He motioned to Ballantine. “Him and me, if that’s okay.”

  “Sir, some more guns might be advisable,” Ballantine said.

  Bellara gave him a side-eye. “What the hell for, Sergeant?”

  “Well, in case they decide they want to kill us and take our shit?”

  Bellara looked at him oddly. “You really think that might be a possibility, Sergeant?”

  Ballantine snorted. “Sir? Would I bring it up if it wasn’t?”

  A caving ladder was dropped over the irregular wall. The woman pointed at it. “You can use that to come over the wall,” she said.

  Ballantine regarded the ladder critically. “That going to be able to support our weight?”

  “It should, if you come up one at a time. It’s secured back here.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Ballantine shook his head and marched back to the Humvees, shrugging off his pack as he went.

  “What are you doing?” Bellara asked.

  “Leaving my shit back here,” Ballantine replied. “Just in case they’re wrong about the ladder, and just in case they decide they might want to keep it. You might want to do the same, sir.” Ballantine swung out of his ruck and dropped it in front of the Humvee. “Mike, stay eyes out,” he said to Reader as the lightfighter observed what he was doing.

  “You know it,” Reader replied.

  Bellara seemed a little frustrated, but he emulated Ballantine’s actions. The two men returned to the wall, and Ballantine grabbed the ladder and gave it a strong yank. Despite his anxiety, the ladder seemed secure enough.

  “I’ll go first, sir. Don’t come up until I give you the all clear,” he said to Bellara.

  “I don’t think we have all day here, Sergeant.”

  “Hey guy, it’s your life. You want to go up solo? Fine by me.”

  Bellara looked up at Ballantine for a long moment, then indicated the ladder with a jerk of his head. “After you then, Ballantine.”

  Ballantine grunted and grabbed onto the caving ladder’s all-too-flexible frame. To him
, it was flimsy and to a guy who weighed in at two hundred and twenty pounds on a good day, that was hardly encouraging. Just the same, he hauled himself onto it and commenced scaling its length. Pulling himself hand over fist he rose into the air and climbed up the irregular wall’s face. It afforded an occasional foot- and handhold, and that alone told him the wall wasn’t worth shit. The reekers would be able to compromise it, and wouldn’t have a great deal of trouble doing so.

  So what the fuck are we doing here, then? he wondered. It’s not like we can take an entire town with us.

  He pushed the thought aside as he continued scaling up the ladder, hand over hand. When he reached the top, he found two shaggy-looking men in their fifties reaching down for him. Their faces were lined by middle age and worry, and Ballantine saw the nervousness in their eyes. One was big and burly, definitely a farmer type complete with long beard and John Deere cap. The other was narrow and bald, a scruff of a beard on his chin. His head was bald, and his scalp was sunburned.

  “Hey guys,” he said as he hauled himself over the edge of the wall. The two men regarded him with a mixture of respect and suspicion was Ballantine stepped over the wall’s lip and stood up straight. He towered over both of them. Below, a small group of people had gathered at the wall’s interior base, and they looked up at him while shading their eyes against the sun.

  “Thanks for the help,” he said to the men on the wall with him.

  “No problem,” said the bearded farmer. “So you guys have a train, huh?”

  “We do. Yeah.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “Fort Carson, Colorado.”

  The bald man leaned over the wall to watch Bellara as the captain began scaling up the ladder. “Why there?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “Because we were told it’s safe,” Ballantine answered. He also leaned over the wall slightly to keep an eye on Bellara as he hauled himself up the ladder.

  “Is it?” the farmer asked.

  Ballantine looked back at him momentarily. “Don’t know. Unless I missed something, we’re not there yet.” He turned back as Bellara made it to the top, and he helped the dark-skinned officer onto the wall.

  “Thanks, Sergeant.” Bellara looked at the men on the wall with him and Ballantine. “Captain Amar Bellara, Pennsylvania Army National Guard. Are one of you gentlemen in authority here?”

  The bald man shook his head. “Not us. We’re just chattel.”

  Bellara frowned for a moment as he processed that. “Uh, okay. Who can I talk to, then?”

  “Mags,” the farmer-type man replied. He pointed at the clutch of people standing inside the wall. “See the lady with the gray hair there? That’s Mayor Mags. She’s the one you’ll need to talk to.”

  Bellara nodded to another ladder that led into the town below. “Mind if we climb down?”

  “I guess you’re going to have to, unless you want to yell back and forth to Mags. Right?”

  The man’s delivery was so perfectly deadpan that Ballantine snickered. Bellara cleared his throat and looked a little embarrassed by the statement, then nodded.

  “Great, thanks.” He moved to the ladder and carefully began climbing down the rungs. Ballantine watched the deliberate slowness of the officer’s movements, and he decided Bellara was perhaps slightly afraid of heights. Once Bellara alighted onto the ground below, Ballantine hauled himself onto the ladder and climbed down. The aluminum ladder shook and trembled beneath his formidable weight, and Ballantine decided he wasn’t exactly a fan of heights either.

  He formed up on Bellara as soon as he was on the ground, and together the two men advanced toward the group of people who were standing nearby. Ballantine saw lots of weapons present, rifles and pistols. Some were military-grade, and the folks who handled those seemed to be as well. Just the same, there was an air of quiet desperation hovering over the group. Ballantine felt slightly sick to his stomach when he saw them regarding him and Bellara with something akin to hope coming up in their eyes.

  “I guess I’m looking for Mayor Mags,” Bellara said.

  “And you found her,” said the gray-haired woman the man on the wall had pointed out. She wore a light-colored long sleeve shirt and faded jeans. Ballantine made her to be in her sixties, and was apparently the no muss, no fuss type. She had her hair in a bun and wore dark sunglasses over her eyes.

  Bellara extended his hand. “Amar Bellara, Pennsylvania Army National Guard,” he said, by way of greeting. “This is Sergeant Ballantine, with the Tenth Mountain Division out of New York.”

  “Margaret Mason, better known as Mayor Mags,” the woman replied, shaking first Bellara’s hand, then Ballantine’s. Her grip was strong and dry. She looked up at Ballantine. “From New York, eh?”

  “Fort Drum, ma’am,” Ballantine said. “That’s upstate, around Binghamton. But I was last on duty in New York City, if that’s what you were getting at.”

  “It was. What happened over there? From what we saw over here on our TVs before they went dark, things were definitely falling apart.”

  Ballantine exchanged a glance with Bellara, then looked across the small group that was now edging closer. “New York City belongs to the dead now, ma’am. We were forced out of there almost two months ago. I’m pretty sure it’s been picked clean of anything living at this point.”

  The mayor nodded slowly. “Yes. We’d figured that out for ourselves, especially when we heard all the big cities were being overrun. I didn’t really think New York might be any different, but you seem to have made it?”

  “Ma’am, my men and I are the only ones out of my entire infantry division who survived,” Ballantine said. “Our company commander ordered us to retreat after the bridges were blown by the Air Force, but that didn’t stop the dead. They just marched into the Hudson River and climbed out in New Jersey.” He pointed toward the wall. “Looks like you saw some action yourselves? We noticed a few police cruisers in a fighting position out there.”

  “They were overrun by a herd of dead almost three weeks ago,” the mayor told him.

  “Lots of hardware out there,” Ballantine said. “Might want to send someone out to pick it up. Weapons, ammunition...”

  “No one goes over the wall,” Mayor Mags said. “We don’t show ourselves at all, day or night.”

  “Well, you might want to reconsider that,” Bellara said.

  “Oh? Why?”

  “Because there’s about seventy-five to a hundred thousand reekers heading this way,” Bellara told her. “They overran our defenses at Fort Indiantown Gap. That’s why we’re on a train heading west. My commanding officer wanted us to make contact and advise you of the threat. You’re going to need to leave, Mayor.”

  “How many did you say again?”

  “Almost a hundred thousand, if not more. They pushed over from New York, and another group headed up from Philly. They’re moving mostly westward. You’re going to be right in their path, one way or another.”

  The mayor reached up and slowly removed her sunglasses. Her eyes were ice blue, and she regarded the two soldiers with some shock. “A hundred thousand,” she said.

  Bellara nodded. “Yes, ma’am. How many people are in this town?”

  “About two thousand. A little less. Call it nineteen-hundred.”

  “Well. You’re going to need to get organized and prepare to leave, ma’am. You’ve got a few days, but that’s about it.”

  “Your train...?”

  “We’re full up, ma’am. We already have thousands of troops and dependent civilians occupying every space available,” Bellara said. “I’m sorry, but we don’t have any spare capacity right now.”

  “You can offload some of those trucks and vehicles from those flatbed cars,” a man in the group said. He was heavy set with a full beard. There was a panicky tic to one of his eyelids, and it made him look like he was winking spasmodically. “Two or three of those could hold us all, I imagine.”

  “We don’t have the time,” Bellara said, a
nd Ballantine thought he did well not to mention the fact Colonel Jarmusch would likely be quite disinclined to offload what little equipment they had left. “As soon as we get the signals straightened out, that train’s on its way. We can’t stay in one spot for long. It’s big, it’s loud, and it’s going to attract every reeker around for miles.” As he spoke, gunfire rang out in the distance, clearly audible over the faraway throb of the train’s diesel engines. “Hear that? It’s happening already.”

  “So if you can’t help, why did you even bother?” asked the man with the beard and the wink. Disgust was plain in his voice.

  “To give you some warning,” Ballantine said.

  “Where would you advise us to go, sir?” the mayor asked Bellara. “And how?”

  “Take every vehicle you can, load them up with supplies, and make for Fort Carson, Colorado. We’ve been told it’s a safe haven. It’s our destination too, as a matter of fact.”

  “I don’t think we have enough vehicles for a trip like that,” the mayor said. “And we certainly don’t have enough supplies that can sustain all of us for several days. Are you sure there’s nothing you can do to help us?”

  Bellara spread his hands. “Time, ma’am. We just don’t have any.”

  “Can you at least take our children with you?”

  “I can ask, but again—not enough room. We might be able to leave some supplies like ammunition, food and water, but that’s about all. But let me ask, all right?” Bellara looked over at Ballantine as he patted the MBITR strapped to his body armor. Ballantine nodded. Bellara took a few steps away and began speaking into his headset’s boom microphone.

  The mayor looked at Ballantine. “Sergeant Ballantine...there’s really nothing you can do?”

  “What, me? Ma’am, I’m pretty down the food chain here, and the majority of the troops on that train are National Guardsmen. I can’t tell them what to do.”

  “So you’re just going to abandon us?” The mayor shook her head, her lips compressed into a tight line. She put on her sunglasses again. Ballantine waved at a fly that was buzzing laps around his head.

  Great. I smell so gamey I’m attracting bottle flies.

  “If we can’t leave, how can we survive?” she asked him. “You said you and your men made it out of New York. How can we manage if we can’t get away from the dead?”