These Dead Lands (Book 2): Desolation

by Knight, Stephen

  “Get it,” Guerra said, voice gruff.

  “All right. Good. Presuming there’s nothing else?” Ballantine looked at the rest of the men, and his eyes lingered on Stilley. The soldier kept his eyes downcast, and for an instant, Ballantine saw Reader a few days ago after he had killed the woman who had emerged from beneath the car. Everyone was run out; they were operating on fumes. One wrong word, and they would all explode. They’d been pushed to their limits, and he had to figure out a way to give them time to recuperate.

  Just not possible, he said to himself. We’re on the run. Even if we get to Carson and it’s buttoned up like a fortress, it’s going to go down just like the Gap.

  With the thought came the notion that they would all fall. Diana and Kenny. Kay and the kids. Unless they got a handle on the reeker infestation and were able to apply it quickly, then everything that meant anything to Ballantine would end up just so much dead meat. The thought of it made his heart race and his mind want to close down. There was only so much stress a guy could take, and Carl Ballantine was fast approaching his limit.

  The guys ... take care of the guys.

  “Guys, if there’s something I can do for you, tell me,” he said, looking at each of them. “We’re kind of carpetbaggers here, but if you need something, I’ll see if I can get it.”

  “Aside from a few cases of beers and hot strippers, I’d ask for one thing,” Guerra said.

  “Hey, we’re already traveling with a hot stripper. There, got that one out of the way nice and quick,” Ballantine replied. “Next time, don’t make things so easy.”

  “Yeah, I’m a bit light on benjamins right now. Besides, she’d probably rip my dick out by the roots—I’m pretty sure she has a Venus flytrap for a snatch. But what I would like to know is: what’s next? Maybe Colonel Jarmusch could give a few dogfaces some clues as to what’s gonna go down once we get to Carson.”

  “I’ll bring it up to him, but as far as I know the plan is to reconstitute at Carson and await orders,” Ballantine said. “At this point in time, Jarmusch and the Pennsylvania Army National Guard are going to do whatever Big Army tells them.”

  “Just looking for some clarity on that,” Guerra said. “Sorry to push that into your lap, Carl. But Hastings is gone, and he was the golden child. Someone has to carry his water as long as we’re separated. You get what I mean?”

  “I read you, Hector,” Ballantine replied. “Once you’re in your snuggies and asleep and the rest of the guys are tending to their shit, I’ll go forward and see what I can find out. Good enough for you?”

  “Good enough, man. Just don’t fall off the train.”

  “Shit, brother. They call me Spider-Man.”

  Guerra snorted and made a show of rubbing his face where Ballantine had struck him. “Yeah, more like the not-so-jolly Green Fucking Giant.”

  “Aw, you get sand in your mangina, Guerra?”

  Guerra gave him a thin smile. “Next time it won’t be so easy, Sergeant First Class Ballantine.”

  “I get you, Hector. I get you.”

  “So if you can find out what’s next for us, that might be cool,” Guerra said.

  Ballantine nodded. “All right. Will do. Anything else?” He gave the men a few moments, but no one had anything they wanted to bring up. He nodded again. “Okay. Guerra, you have orders—execute.”

  “You want to have a word with the fam before I encamp?”

  “Not necessary. Get some rest.” Ballantine turned to Stilley. “What I said about your people is the real deal. If they can hold out long enough, we’ll get to them.”

  “They dead, Sergeant,” Stilley said, and for once his voice was soft and barely audible.

  “You can’t think like that, man.” Tharinger was the one who spoke. “You have to hold onto that shit. It gives you life, dude.”

  Stilley looked at him, and his eyes were white against his dark skin. “You want me to lie to myself for a while, right?”

  “Want you to have faith, bro,” Tharinger said. “Faith, man. We all need it now.”

  “Like that really matters?” Stilley asked in earnest.

  “It matters,” Guerra said, and for once his gruff voice was soft. “If it didn’t, none of us would be here.”

  “Let’s put things in motion, gentlemen,” Ballantine said. “Start squaring your shit away and get some rest. I’ll head forward and meet with the boss, if he’ll deign to see me.”

  Jarmusch and the rest of the command group were located in the first passenger coach, located pretty much dead center in the consist. Getting to it wasn’t a major problem, since the coaches were all connected together, sandwiched between flat beds that held road gear and hundreds of troops. Just the same, Ballantine left most of his gear in his assigned passenger coach and took only his body armor, radio, weapon and some mags. If something happened and he found himself being sliced and diced beneath the consist’s steel wheels, then at least he wouldn’t be taking anything mission critical to the great beyond with him. The rest of the guys could rat-fuck his stuff and split it among themselves.

  There was no problem getting admittance to the command car, though its occupants were a little surprised to see him. Major Gaylord was apparently acting as Jarmusch’s aide-de-camp, a role that was usually reserved for those in service to a general officer. But Jarmusch’s command footprint had swelled during the zombie outbreak, and he was responsible for a much larger component than he had originally been designated to oversee. While the majority of Jarmusch’s charges were Pennsylvania Army National Guard, other units had made it to the Gap before its fall. Colonel Victor had pretty much overseen them during his time on post, but now that the two men had parted ways Jarmusch was next in the pecking order. As such, he was essentially operating with a three star general’s staff, not to forget a three star general’s mission. Jarmusch had thousands of men and women under his command, from different branches of service, as well as a large component of civilians. If Gaylord was helping the colonel manage all that friction, then Ballantine certainly had no issue speaking to Gaylord instead of Jarmusch himself.

  “What’s up, Sergeant Ballantine?” Gaylord asked. Jarmusch sat a few rows away in a club seating area. He looked up as Ballantine was announced by the sentries in the adjacent vestibule. Gaylord returned Ballantine’s salute.

  “Sorry for the intrusion, Major. Was just wondering if there was a chance I could get dialed in on the bigger picture. Usually I’d have that information doled out to me by Captain Hastings, but since he’s been chopped to Colonel Victor’s element...” Ballantine let the sentence trail off with a shrug.

  “I get the need for information,” Gaylord said, “but with respect to your contributions during your time with us, why do you think a noncommissioned officer needs to be told what’s going on in the world of command?”

  Ballantine blinked. “Sir?”

  Gaylord waved around the passenger coach. “See all this? This is all the brains we have. Do you think you fit in here?”

  Ballantine found himself getting pissed, but he felt he managed to retain his poker face. “I got that, sir. But since I’m nominally overseeing the noncombatants that joined us at the Gap in addition to the remains of my unit, I was hoping to step inside the inner circle for a short time. Not looking to rain on anyone’s parade—just want to see if there’s a way we might be able to become more useful in the short term, sir.”

  “Gaylord,” Jarmusch called from his seat. “You really don’t have to quarantine me, here. Ballantine and his men are some of the very best we have. Come on over, Ballantine. I’ll try and answer your questions.”

  If Gaylord was put out by having his wings clipped, he didn’t let it show. “Yes, sir.” He waved Ballantine forward. Ballantine nodded his thanks to both men, but kept his eyes on Jarmusch.

  “Thanks for the helping hand, sir. I don’t really need to take up a ton of your time,” he said as he followed Gaylord to Jarmusch’s sitting area. Radios crackled at both ends of
the car where teams were set up, working out specific issues.

  “It’s not a problem,” Jarmusch said. “I get that you’re maybe feeling a bit disconnected. You and Hastings really did a bang up job saving our bacon, so if there’s something I can do for you, then you just need to let me know. How are things with your guys?”

  “Everything’s stable, sir. I’m just here to try and figure out what we might be needed to do next.”

  Jarmusch nodded. “Have you met my command sergeant major?” he asked, indicating a broad-shouldered black man seated across the fold-out table from him.

  “I have not,” Ballantine said. “I only met Parker.”

  “Old Oratious is Victor’s senior NCO,” said the CSM with a smile. “I’m Willis Headley. Glad to finally meet you, Sergeant Ballantine.” As he spoke, the smaller man extended his hand. Ballantine shook it, and his grip was strong and sure, just as one might expect from a command sergeant major.

  “Carl Ballantine,” he replied.

  “I heard you had some friction with one of the first sergeants, Ballantine,” Headley said. His accent had a sing-song quality to it, like a Caribbean islander.

  Ballantine maintained his poker face. “Oh, I don’t know about that. I kind of got that he hadn’t had much contact with the reekers, so I was just trying to advise and give him some operational pointers.”

  Headley’s smile widened. “I like that in a noncommissioned officer.”

  “So do I, if anyone’s interested,” Jarmusch said. “I mean, I realize I’m just a throwaway colonel in this conversation, but there it is.”

  “Hardly throwaway from my perspective, sir,” Ballantine said.

  “I also like a noncommissioned officer who knows when to kiss the boss’s ass,” Headley added. “Obsequiousness is a great talent on occasion. Makes things much smoother, right?”

  “Willy, I don’t even know what the hell ‘obsequiousness’ is,” Jarmusch said. “But then and again, I did go to public school in Allentown.”

  “Should have gone to private school like myself, Colonel,” Headley said with a twinkle in his dark eyes.

  Jarmusch jerked his thumb toward Headley while looking at Ballantine. “Believe it or not, my CSM has a doctorate in chemistry. If the reekers hadn’t shown up, he’d probably be calling himself Heisenberg by now and running his own drug cartel.”

  “You’re too kind, sir,” Headley said. “In reality, I’d be in Philly serving ox tail and jerked chicken.”

  Jarmusch laughed at that. “All right, Ballantine. What is it you need to know?”

  “I guess I need to know the potential sequence of events so I can prep the civilians for movement off this train,” Ballantine said.

  A look of surprise crossed Jarmusch’s face. “Come again, Ballantine?”

  Ballantine looked at Gaylord, then Headley. Both men regarded him with consummate poker faces, though he caught a small undercurrent of Boy, you’re fucking yourself from Headley. That didn’t unnerve Ballantine in the slightest. After New York City and the loss of an entire division of light infantry, even the happenings at the Gap were almost a warm Spring rain.

  “Colonel, I’m going to lay it on the line,” he said, refocusing his attention on the National Guard commander. “And I need you to know that this isn’t a regular Army versus reserve component thing. I fought with a shit-ton of Guardsmen in Afghanistan and Iraq, and they could do more than just carry their own water. I consider your people to be an extension of the regular line forces.”

  “Happy to hear that,” Jarmusch said. “Still waiting for you to get to your point.”

  “Sir, do you have a contingency plan for when this train gets stopped well short of Carson?”

  “Of course we do, Ballantine. We’ll go overland in vehicles. But this train isn’t going to be stopping, at least for very long.” Jarmusch pointed at the maps that were spread out before him. “We’ve already plotted our axis of advance. We can successfully skirt the major population areas, and where we can’t, we’ll run through them as hot as we can. No stopping. Not even any slowing.”

  “Colonel, that’s a load of bullshit,” Ballantine said.

  “Come again?”

  “You heard me, sir. Don’t act like I’m out here stupid needing you guys to save me. Any number of things could happen, including the complete derailment of this train we’re on. You have the majority of your forces riding in exposed rail cars. Those units wind up on their side, you’re going to have more casualties than you can care for in the amount of time available to tend to them. You’ve thought of that, right?”

  “Sergeant Ballantine, that is all being handled,” Headley said, and there was no welcome in his tone.

  “Really?” Ballantine fixed him with his patented glare. “Is that so? Because when we rolled into the Gap, you guys were sitting around thinking everything was going to be just hunky dory. It wasn’t until Hastings started lighting a fire under everyone’s asses that everyone started getting behind the weight of the situation.”

  “And look what happened,” Jarmusch said.

  “Yes, sir. We got you a train.”

  Jarmusch sighed heavily and leaned back in his seat. His eyes were cold and predatory, just as they should have been when a mere mortal of an E-7 threw down the gauntlet at an immortal O-6’s feet. Ballantine didn’t expect any different. No one was going to fall to their knees and kiss his ass for doing his duty. He was a grunt and he was a lightfighter, he was used to carrying all the extra weight.

  “Okay. You want to know what we’re looking at, Sergeant? My pleasure to spend a couple of minutes educating.” Jarmusch spun the map before him around so Ballantine could see it. Jarmusch pointed out the train’s approximate position. “Right now, we’re shooting down the CSX rails. These will take us directly to Chicago—what you and your captain had defined as a ‘mega city’ during one of your few briefings. There is no opportunity for us to switch off to a different line before arriving at Chicago. And the rail head there is in—wait for it—Norfolk Southern Calumet Rail Yard, over in south Chi-town.”

  “Which is a poor area,” Ballantine said. Oh fuck. The zombie apocalypse started mostly in the poorer areas of American cities, where health care and law enforcement weren’t as readily available due to the underdeveloped economic status of those vicinities. Ultimately, that was what had given the zombies their foothold in the US. While other portions of the globe went dark with a fairly alarming rapidity, the United States had managed to hold out. Until the virus that reanimated the dead made its way into the poor neighborhoods, where residents had a strong distrust of even 911. It was in places like the south of Chicago that the egg had cracked. No different than the Bronx or Queens in New York City.

  “A poor area is one way to describe it,” Jarmusch said. “Anyway, that’s where we’re headed. Once there, we’ll have to trust our intrepid Lieutenant Munn and his team to figure out how to switch us onto the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railway. The plan is to call a temporary halt outside Chicago and send in recon teams to validate the circumstances ahead of the consist, so we can determine whether or not to proceed or merely dismount in road vehicles and continue the approach toward Colorado Springs by highway.”

  “Highways are going to be clogged with dead traffic, sir,” Ballantine said. “Trust me, we’ve seen it up close and personal. And the reekers use the highway systems for their own mode of attack. That would be fucking suicide, even if we were rolling around in M1 Abrams tanks and had fuel blivets stationed every fifty miles. A shame we didn’t take any of the Chinooks.”

  “It would take hours to prep them for transit by rail, and twice as long to make them airworthy when we needed them,” Headley said. “Wherever we stop, we can’t sit there for eight hours and hope for the best.”

  “But we do have the drones,” Jarmusch said. “The Ravens, they can scout ahead of the advance columns, and through them we can determine the best paths of approach to the switching stations.”

&nbs
p; “Can they be launched while the train is in motion?” Ballantine asked.

  “Launched yes,” Headley said. “Recovered, no. The AMP tells us she can sling those units into the air without much of a problem if the train is slowed down. She even thinks we could recover them if the train is moving fast enough—to hear her talk about it, the Shadows could match speed and essentially sink to one of the rail cars.”

  Ballantine held up a hand. “Sorry, Sarmajor—but AMP?”

  “Air Mission Planner,” Headley said. “One of the regular Army units. She’s a warrant officer, name of Delaney.”

  Ballantine nodded as he was able to put a face to the space. “Right, right. Sorry for the distraction. So she says we can recover, and you said we can’t. Which is it?”

  “Recovery seems pretty risky,” Jarmusch said. “We can’t risk any of our troops getting killed or injured just trying to recover a UAV. Those are essential assets, but we have a surplus of them right now. I’m willing to risk losing one or two.”

  “I get that, sir. But the UAVs, they’re game changers for us.”

  Jarmusch nodded. “Agreed ... which is why I’m willing to sacrifice one or two around the heavy population areas to give us some advantage.” He spread his hands. “It’s all about what you can take with you now, Ballantine.”

  “I get that, sir. But along those lines? If there’s an incident somewhere down the line, we need a plan of action. We’re flying along without a clue here, and that’s no good.”

  Jarmusch rested his chin on his hands and looked at Ballantine openly. Ballantine thought it was an odd thing to do and looked somewhat effete. “What do you want me to tell you, Sergeant? We’re on a train moving between fifty and seventy miles per hour. Something happens, there’s not a god damn thing we can do about it, and you know that. There aren’t even seat belts in the passenger cars, right?”

  The answer left Ballantine feeling a little unnerved. “Sir ... uh ...”

  “We’ll handle it the best we can, Sergeant. But if that does happen, if something catastrophic occurs where this train is unable to proceed? You have my permission to take as many vehicles and personnel as you can round up and head out to Carson overland. Because if you and your boys made it all the way to the Gap from New York City by yourselves, and hauling along an autistic kid at that, then getting across the next half of the country shouldn’t be a problem for you.”