by Evan Currie
When people died and kept walking, though, that was a problem.
“What are you thinking, Alex?”
Norton looked over to see Masters sidling up to him, his voice pitched low.
“You know the movie Aliens?” he asked. “The one where they say, ‘We should take off and nuke the site from orbit’?”
Masters winced. “Shit. I hope you’re kidding.”
“Only marginally. The good news is that it’s contained,” Alex said. “This weather won’t last. Another week or so and the power generator up here will probably run out of fuel, and they’ll all turn into corpsicles. It’ll be a big mystery in the papers that gets blamed on some new virus outbreak or maybe a chemical spill.”
“And the bad news?”
“We’re standing in the middle of a fucking vampire den, you stupid bastard,” Norton hissed. “Do you really need me to tell you the bad news?”
“What about the civilians?”
“You mean how many are left alive?” the “consultant” asked dryly.
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“No way to know without rooting this whole place out and putting every last one of these things back in the graves they crawled out of,” Norton admitted, “and I doubt we have the manpower or firepower to pull it off.”
“So you advise we pull out.”
“Fuck yes. We run like hell, don’t look back, and call for someone to pick us up.”
Masters was quiet for a long moment; then he shook his head.
“What the hell are you shaking your head for? We don’t have a play here.”
“Some civilians are still alive, Alex.”
“Well boohoo for them, but we’ve seen worse. You and me both, Hawk,” Alex Norton growled. “If our team gets killed, it won’t do much to keep them alive.”
“This is exactly the sort of thing the admiral contacted me to handle,” Masters said quietly. “This is why I called the team together.”
“You should have called a few more men in that case.”
“I called SEALs — we have enough men.”
Alex shook his head. “I never knew you to be either delusional or stupid.”
“We’re not leaving American civilians here to be slaughtered or…turned into the enemy,” Masters said with conviction. “Put that out of your head right now. These people may not be from your community, but they are from mine.”
Alex sighed. “I knew from the moment I met you in that bar down in Mexico that you were going to be trouble. I should have blown you off right then, because you’re going to get me killed.”
“The only easy day, my friend, was yesterday.”
Masters walked away, leaving Alex to fume.
Stupid Rambo wannabe is going to get us all killed. Worse, we’ll be walking when our bodies finish cooling. I hate macho idiots who don’t know the game they’re playing.
* * *
There were people moving around in the streets.
They thought they were being clever, hiding in the shadows and moving quietly.
Fools.
The shadows didn’t belong to them.
The pack couldn’t see them, but they could smell them. Feel them as they passed. They were out there, so it was time to move again.
Doors opened around the town and shadows were cast by figures stepping out of the light and into the dark. One, five, twenty more.
The streets of Barrow were coming alive again.
After a fashion.
* * *
“Oh shit.”
Hale swore under his breath, checking his spotter scope again before pressing his eye to the starlight scope of his rifle. A second later he thumbed open his throat mic. “Boss,” he said. “You’ve got company.”
“Say again?”
“The streets crawl, boss. Get under cover.”
“Roger. Thanks.”
Hale didn’t bother responding; he rested the butt of his rifle down against the roof and turned back to the spotter scope. Through its wide angle he could see the figures walking in the streets below him, moving with a decidedly unnatural gate.
He didn’t need to do it, but a glance through his forward-looking infrared (FLIR) scope told the story. When something moves and doesn’t give off body heat, you have a problem. If you’re lucky, it’s just a reptile problem, but when the figures are shaped like humans…well, that was a whole different story.
He’d encountered these things before, and while he didn’t know what they called themselves, he knew enough to label them in his own mind.
Zombies. Walking dead. A whole array of other names. It didn’t matter to Hale what they were called.
There were now targets to be serviced.
Of course, there was one big problem with that.
I don’t think I packed enough bullets.
* * *
“Everyone, under cover!” Masters hissed. “Now!”
They scrambled for the cover of buildings, hiding in the sparse shrub growth and small constructions of the town. The men wanted to ask why, but they knew better, and the answer was forthcoming anyway.
As they lay spread out across the ground, hiding around corners or under debris, their weapons to their shoulders and trained on the streets, it quickly became clear that Barrow’s days as a ghost town were officially over. They’d moved right into the Halloween portion of the festivities, and it was apparent that no one had skimped on their costumes.
“Holy shit,” Mack whispered, “it’s the fucking living dead. Zombies are real.…I can’t believe it!”
“They’re not zombies,” Alex whispered back, annoyed. “If they were zombies the worst we’d have to worry about would be that they’d till the soil and plant sugarcane. They’re vampires.”
“Plant sugarcane?” Mack blurted, face contorted in confusion.
Alex sighed. “Zombies were traditionally raised as menial labor. Doesn’t anyone study mythology anymore?”
“Well, sorry, I was wasting my time studying useless crap like tactics, logistics, advanced math, and languages people actually know how to speak,” Mack growled, annoyed.
“They look like zombies to me,” Derek sided with his buddy.
Alex rolled his eyes. “God, I hate virgins.”
Both SEALs turned to scowl at him, but he just shrugged them off with no further comment.
“They’re sticking to the streets for now, so let’s start crawling back toward the houses,” Masters ordered. “We’ll use the buildings for cover while we figure out what to do.”
They started moving back, slowly and painstakingly, as they had to keep from drawing attention while dragging their gear along for the ride. In the cold, wet environment of the half-thawed town it was a miserable exercise, but one that had to be done right the first time.
They wouldn’t get a second chance.
Masters slowed even more to get a grip on Captain Andrews, who was moving a little jerkily and too quickly for her, or their, good. She was shaking now, and he didn’t think it was from the cold.
“Calmly, Captain,” he whispered into her ear. “Slow and smooth.”
She nodded, stopping for a second before moving again, this time slower and with more confidence.
“W-what are those?” she asked. “I mean”—Andrews swallowed before continuing—“are they infected or something?”
“Or something,” Masters told her as they moved. “Don’t worry about it.”
She almost choked.
“Don’t worry about it? Is it a virus? Are we infected? What can we do?”
“Quietly,” he hissed. Her voice was moving up into a higher range than was safe. “If you don’t keep quiet, I’ll put you out, Captain.”
She swallowed again, nodding. “Do…do you know what’s going on?”
“Yes.”
“What is it, then?”
“You don’t want to know.”
She froze momentarily at that familiar refrain, hesitating as she shot him an a
nnoyed glare. Masters just smiled back at her, and though she was infuriated, Judith Andrews locked it down and started moving again.
The team slowly made their way back off the street, crawling through the muck and slush that was probably someone’s yard. All the while, they watched the forms moving through the streets, one or two figures giving way to a dozen and then more.
Masters felt the hair stand up along the back of his neck, making him tuck his Beowulf in closer to his shoulder as he kept an eye on the teeming streets.
He realized then that he had been wrong. The ghost town wasn’t the creepiest thing ever.
This shambling mass wandering through the streets? This was officially the creepiest thing ever.
Under cover again, Masters turned to look at Alex. “Confirmation?”
“Oh yeah. Bloodsuckers, no doubt,” Alex told him, “but I still have no clue how they got here.”
“How what got here?” Mack asked, eyeing the scene over the sights of his 417.
“Vampires,” Masters answered.
“Vampires? You sure? I still think they look more like zombies.” Mack frowned.
Alex rolled his eyes. “For the last time, they’re not frigging zombies.”
Mack shrugged. “I’m just saying, they’re stumbling around, they look like dead bodies, and that poor state trooper bastard looked like someone had eaten his throat. I’m pretty sure I saw all that in Dawn of the Dead.”
Alex let out a sound that came off suspiciously like a whimper before ducking his head down into the muck to hide his face.
“Other side, give me strength,” he whispered, shaking his head before looking over at Mack. “Seriously? Your evidence is a bad B-horror movie? Let me guess, you think vampires sparkle in daylight, right?”
Mack started to say something, but Alex cut him off.
“And I swear to whatever god you believe in that if you say yes, I’m going to throw you out there for those things to chew on.”
Before Mack could make a reply to that, or alternatively pound the much skinnier man into the tundra, Derek started chuckling. Mack scowled at his long-time partner. “Shut up, man.”
“Look,” Alex growled, “forget movies and TV bullshit, forget any pop culture novels you’ve read, and most especially forget that jackass Stoker and his idiotic ideas about vampires. Bloodsuckers have been around for as long as anyone can remember — every culture has at least one version of them — but vampires are very specific to the cultures from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. They don’t hang around ballrooms seducing women, they’re not even remotely immortal, but they’re still damned hard to kill. Thank the other side that they can’t change shape, fly, or any of that other bullshit.”
“Can a bullet kill them?” Mack asked seriously.
“If you hit them in the head or the spine? Most of them will go down, sure,” Alex said. “But their internal organs are rotted mush already, so don’t expect results if you hit them in the heart or lungs. They’re still human, though, fundamentally. Take out the nervous system, and they shut down.”
“Good to know.”
“Don’t get any ideas,” Masters spoke up. “We don’t have that many bullets.”
That was a quick reality check for the men, who were hiding from an increasingly large and ghastly enemy force. Masters could literally see each of the SEALs around him mentally count their bullets, comparing that number to the seething masses out on the street. The lights came on in their eyes, and each of their guns seemed to droop down slightly as they realized the predicament.
“Any ideas, Alex?” Masters asked. “Oh, and I liked Stoker’s Dracula.”
Alex snorted. “You would. You ever wonder why practically every vampire since has seemed a little…effeminate?”
“No, actually, I haven’t,” Masters replied dryly. “That’s not actually shit I think about.”
“Uh huh. Stoker wasn’t writing about vampires in Dracula, he was writing about a serial killer by the name of Elizabeth Báthory. Only he didn’t have the balls to publish a book with a female villain, so he swapped out the name and some key details. Presto, we all get gay supervampires ever since,” Alex said, clearly disgusted. “Real vampires aren’t romantic. They’re walking corpses that stay mobile by drinking blood and eating a little flesh on the side.”
“You think about this shit way too much, Alex,” Rankin told him.
The man known as The Black merely shrugged. “It’s part of how I make my living.”
“Speaking of living,” Masters said, rolling his eyes, “could we maybe get back to the situation at hand? Any ideas, Alex?”
“I already told you my thoughts on the situation.” Alex pinned him with a cool stare. “You didn’t care to listen to me. Now we’re trapped, so I figure I might as well educate the ignorant before things go to hell.”
“Hey!” Mack bitched. “Who are you calling ignorant?”
Alex just shot him a look that pretty clearly said, “Who do you think?” then proceeded to ignore the man. He looked back to Masters. “You want my advice? Again, we have to get out of here. This is a no-win situation, Hawk. We’re boned if we stay here.”
Hawk Masters grimaced, looking away from Alex and his men as he returned his focus to the motion on the streets. He hated the idea of turning tail — he’d lost too much to the other side of the veil already. He was here to be the one who kicked some ass, not to get his own tail kicked.
None of that will do an ounce of good if I get us all killed here.
“All right, fine,” he said. “We’re going to pull out as quietly as possible. Back to the coast, by the numbers. Once we’re clear of town, we’ll follow the coast north and link up with the Coastie cutter they have waiting in the Beaufort.”
The men nodded as they started to pull back away from the things roaming through the streets of Barrow. Creeping north, they stayed close to the buildings, hiding in the shadows as much as they could. Every motion was deliberate and as slow as the proverbial glacier, an irony that was lost on the men, who were far too focused on simply getting out of town alive.
As laudable a goal as that was, however, it soon ran into a wall when they reached the street just north of their position and found that it too was filled with the walking dead.
“Well, we’re screwed,” Rankin said from his prone position on the ground, looking over the iron sights of his Beowulf rifle.
“There’s got to be a way across,” Masters gritted out, his face grim. “That’s Ogrook Street. If we cross here, it’s almost a straight line to the coast, with cover the whole way.”
“If you show yourself to that,” Alex told him, nodding to the street, where a few dozen figures were walking up and down repetitively, “they’ll be on you before you go fifty feet. Don’t be fooled by the way they’re stumbling, they may have a limited sense of balance, but they can move like the wind, given enough motivation.”
Masters nodded slowly. “All right. Jack, you’re in charge. Get them to the cutter.”
Jack Nelson shot him a surprised look.
“What the hell are you planning, Hawk?” Rankin demanded before the lieutenant could open his mouth.
“You need a distraction to get across, and I’m going to provide one,” he said, starting to inch back from the street. “When you get a chance to move out, don’t wait. Just go. I’ll either be along later, or I won’t.”
“Hawk! Hawk! Damn you,” Rankin hissed as his friend crawled back and was lost in the shadows of the buildings. “Goddamn it, things weren’t supposed to turn out this way.”
“What did you expect? You’re challenging the other side openly to a knuckle-dragging fistfight,” Alex said softly. “When it comes to knuckle draggers, they hold all the cards.”
Nelson was quiet for a moment, and then he shrugged. “So be it.”
* * *
“Djinn.”
Hale paused for a moment, stopping his near obsessive scanning of the area below and around his position t
o key open his throat mic.
“Go for Djinn,” he grunted.
“I’m going to set off a little distraction in a few minutes…,” Hawk Masters’s voice said over the comm. “When I do, you better pull out and join up with the team. They’re going to head north to the Coastie cutter up the coast.”
“What about you, boss?” Nathan asked.
“I’ll be behind you.”
Nathan was silent for a moment, tilting his head over to look through the starlight scope at the streets below.
“What kind of distraction?” he asked finally, a hint of disbelief entering his voice. If you want a distraction everyone can walk away from, send in Keyz!
“You’ll know it when you see it.”
Oh, this does not sound good.
There wasn’t much he could say about it, though, so he just keyed his throat mic one more time. “Roger that.”
From his vantage, the town looked about as hostile as anything he’d ever seen in his life, and he’d spent over half of it in the ugliest places on earth. He didn’t know the name for what he was seeing, but he knew enough to know that these things weren’t human any longer. Some of them looked almost like real people until he got a real good look right into their eyes.
Even in the starlight enhancement he could see the fog of death in their gaze.
Boss. Don’t do something stupid.
* * *
Harold “Hawk” Masters was contemplating doing something really stupid.
Not that that was particularly out of the ordinary, given his history and predilection for getting himself into tight spots. His father had certainly been of the opinion that joining the navy was one of the stupider things a man could do with his life, right up until Hawk had “doubled down on stupid” in his opinion and signed up for BUD/S.
They’d stopped talking a lot after that.
That was probably one of the stupider things he could remember doing, from his own point of view, but that really was how his life went.
This, though, this would be his crowning moment of stupidity.
Well, at least I’ve been lugging this damned duffel bag around all night for a good reason.