Don't Call Me Ishmael

by Chris Kennedy

  The man came back with Jacobs in less than two minutes.

  “How ya doing, Fred?” Jacobs asked. “You look kind of pale—are you sure you should be up?”

  “Looks like you guys are about to go get my car back. I want to make sure I get all my stuff that was inside it, too.”

  “We are,” he said. “But I don’t think you’re going to be up for it.”

  “When do you leave?”

  “We’re going to take a bus over to the first checkpoint in about an hour, and then we’ll hit them at about two in the morning.”

  “I want in,” I said. “Except…”

  “Except what?”

  I held out my empty hands. “No one at the hospital seems to know what happened to my weapons. I’m sure I could be more of an asset if I was armed.”

  Jacobs chuckled. “I’m sure you could. Happily, of all the stupid questions I’ve received today, that’s one I can answer. Your weapons are in my office. I’ve been holding them for you. Come with me.”

  He led me back to his office, where there were several men waiting.

  “These are the team leaders,” Jacobs said. “This is Hubbard, Wade, and Mullins, who will be in charge of Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie teams, respectively. Gentlemen, this is Fred.”

  “So what’s the plan?” I asked after we’d all shaken hands, and they had brought in an extra chair for me. I have to admit I was ready for it.

  “We’ve had a couple of folks watching the town and their checkpoint,” Hubbard said. “Every three days, they’ve been sending teams out. Most of ‘em come our way, as our town’s the biggest one around, aside from Montgomery, which I wouldn’t want to be in or around right now. It’s our goal to capture one or more of the teams and use them to hit the checkpoint they have on Highway 22, then roll everyone into Maplesville and wipe them all out.”

  “Everyone?” I asked. “Men, women, and children?”

  Jacobs’ face was grim. “Everyone old enough to be eating solid food. If we find any babies, we’ll bring them back and raise them. Aside from that, though…”

  “It’s the way it has to be,” Wade said. A big man, he looked equally grim.

  I shook my head. “Seems kind of… I don’t know.”

  “It’s legal,” Jacobs said. “There was a trial at the courthouse, and we gave them notice that they had to cease and desist. Anyone that turned themselves in by last week would have been spared.”

  “Anybody turn themselves in?” I asked.

  “Not a one,” Mullins, a large black man replied. “We had hoped they would…but no one came.”

  “And now, since they have a taste for it,” Wade added, “they have to be put down. It’s just the way it has to be. Besides—” he looked around at the other men, “—we hear they are led by a monster.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “Anyone that would lead a group of cannibals isn’t—”

  “No,” Mullins said, cutting me off. “Not a monster of a human being, but a real, honest-to-God monster. Some say he’s part crocodile—that he crawled from the swamps to lead them in this new world.”

  “Part crocodile?” I asked, rolling my eyes.

  “Could be,” Jacobs said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Geno Freak.”

  The other men flinched away from Jacobs, as if in fear of the term. My eyebrows knit. I couldn’t remember ever hearing it before, yet somehow that term sounded familiar.

  “Geno Freak…” I muttered, then shook my head. “I got nothing.”

  “It was a fad ten to fifteen years ago with the young folks. They would splice different types of animal DNA into their bodies to become one with the animals—kind of like the ultimate furry experience. You weren’t just dressed up as one—you were one.”

  “I hear a ‘but’ coming on,” I said.

  “Yeah, there’s always a ‘but,’ isn’t there?” Jacobs asked with a half-smile. “Sure it gave them whatever they wanted—fur, claws, hell, even fangs—but it was illegal. Not just because it was immoral, but because it didn’t work. Human body just couldn’t support the splicing and most people didn’t live any more than another three to four years in their new ‘condition.’ I don’t want to say that the fad ‘died out’ quickly…but it did. And thankfully so.”

  “So, if it’s one of these Geno Freak things, how would it still be alive?”

  Jacobs shrugged. “Supposedly, the lizard ones were able to live longer. If this is a Geno Freak—not saying it is, but if it were—that might be why.”

  I chuckled. “Okay, so if I see a guy running around with a crocodile mouth full of teeth, I’ll just go ahead and put him out of his misery.”

  “That shit ain’t funny,” Mullins muttered.

  “Sure it is,” I said, laughing. “A guy running around with a crocodile head? That’s a damn funny mental picture.”

  Jacobs shook his head. “No, it isn’t funny. Not only is it just wrong, it’s also possible the Freak had other things modified, too. It—if it exists—will probably be inhumanly strong. Probably faster than normal, too. Maybe like a snake striking. If there is a Freak there leading them, it’s going to be tough to put down, but put down it must be, along with any of its followers or, Heaven forbid, any offspring it might have had.”

  “Those things can sire more?” Mullins asked, aghast.

  “I don’t know,” Jacobs said, “but it’s a genetic mod. If he were to sire children, it’s possible that could be passed on.”

  “So kill them all, and let God sort them out,” I said with a smile, trying to lift some of the blackness that came over the room with that thought. I wasn’t sure that killing everyone in Maplesville was the best way to go about it, but it was their town, and they would have to live with it. “Whatever you guys say,” I replied. “I just want my car and my stuff.”

  “Fair enough,” Jacobs said. “The mayor already told you that if you help us, you’ll get it back. I will make sure that happens.”

  “Then what do you need me to do?” I asked.

  Sometimes you have to make hard choices in this Fallen World.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  An hour later, we loaded into several buses from the local high school and went through a number of back roads to a church on the west end of town, then walked the rest of the way to the buildings I had seen right before being captured by Clanton’s sentry. One of the biggest buildings was a warehouse, and we mustered inside of it. From there, a number of Hubbard’s Alpha Team members spread out into the local countryside to wait in ambush for the hunter/gatherer teams coming from Maplesville.

  I slept.

  It wasn’t that I was lazy; it was more that I’d been assigned to Bravo Team. The people in Alpha knew the lay of the land there, and in many cases knew the people they were there to protect; they made far better members of ambush teams than I would have.

  And I was tired. It’s not every day I almost die, after all. More like every month or so, I reckoned. Still, I knew I’d need my energy later, so while the rest of Bravo and Charlie teams huddled in the dark, talking via whispers, I slept, and it was a good sleep.

  Eventually, though, like all good things, it had to come to an end, and someone shook me awake far sooner than I would have liked. I could see via the moonlight coming through a couple of windows that the other members of my team were gathered near one of the doors, and I grabbed my gear and walked over to find out what was going on.

  “Okay,” Wade said, “I have good news. Alpha managed to capture two of the groups, and a third group was killed. They grilled the people they captured, somewhat literally, and were able to get some information from them. We now know that they hunt in groups of five, and that they don’t take more than five people at a time. While they rest up for the attack on Maplesville, it’s now up to us to take out the checkpoint. In one hour, a group of ten will walk up to it, dressed as one of the teams and its victims, and, while their attention is on our folks, the re
st of us will hit them from behind, as planned. Any questions?”

  I didn’t have any. Although the plan hadn’t been mine, the part of it where the group distracted the people at the checkpoint had been something I had added when the team leaders discussed the plan with me, so I was very familiar with it.

  “Let’s go,” the leader said to my group as the meeting broke up, and the others sorted out who was doing what, based on the descriptions we had of the people who had been caught coming from Maplesville. We even had the clothing from two of the groups, so they would be dressed authentically. The people from Maplesville didn’t need the clothes anymore.

  I had five of Clanton’s best hunters and woodsmen with me, and we slipped out the door into the cool night air. One of the men lived just east of where we were and had been hunting this forest all his life; he led us to the north to where a small house sat, and then to the west. We didn’t have to worry about anyone sounding an alarm from the house—the family that lived there had been some of the earliest victims of the Maplesville cannibals and, since it was on the front line of the confrontation, the house had been vacant ever since.

  We went west for another hundred yards or so, and then turned toward the checkpoint to the south. The group crept like wraiths through the forest, using the cover of a breeze blowing through to move from tree to tree until we were within fifty feet of the cannibals’ checkpoint. We were downwind of them, and I could smell them. Perhaps it was their equipment, but I was willing to bet it was them. They were rank, and we didn’t have to worry about if the wind shifted direction—they wouldn’t be able to smell us over their own stench.

  The leader gave us the halt sign, then the “go to ground,” and we got onto our bellies and into position. As one of our better marksmen, I had drawn the M2 gunner as my target, and I sighted in on him before taking a moment to look at the larger scene in front of me. We had come in from behind them and had a fairly good view of the back of the barricade. There were five men in sight, all of whom were watching the other direction.

  We waited, lying on the cool leaves, and I did my best not to wonder what else might be crawling through the leaves, looking for a new home on the inside of my clothes. Ticks I knew about, and immediately began having creepy crawly feelings all over my body. It was all I could do not to flick my arm when I saw the slug slowly inching its way up my sleeve toward my face. I tried to brush it off quietly, but my finger made a soft swish! on my jacket. The leader shook his head at me.

  I went back to watching my target, and happily didn’t have long to wait. A couple of minutes later, I could see the group come to attention.

  “Someone’s coming,” one of them said, the breeze bringing his words to our ears.

  “Who is it?” the M2 gunner asked.

  “Looks like one of the recon groups,” the first to speak replied.

  I couldn’t see the group, but expected it was our people. The group at the barricade relaxed slightly, but then one of them pointed and yelled, “That’s not them!” and everyone jumped into motion. I flipped off the safety as the lead hunter yelled, “Fire!” and looked through the sights at the M2 gunner. He was just leveling the enormous weapon when the first of my bullets hit him in the back. A second and a third followed as quickly as I could get the rifle in line again, and he slumped, never having fired a shot.

  A second person jumped up to the gun, and I fired again, hitting an arm. The person—a woman I could see as she turned—looked to see who’d shot her, and I hit her again in the chest. She fell backward onto the bed of the truck, then slid off the opposite side. It seemed like everyone around me was firing, and I could hear the other group firing as well, but I couldn’t see any more targets.

  “Cease fire!” I yelled. I yelled it again as I stood. I wanted to go check out the enemy, but I didn’t want to run in front of the idiots who seemed to be shooting just to shoot. I finally got their attention, and I moved forward at a jog, not wanting to get shot by the other group that was approaching, either.

  Amateurs, I thought with a shrug, but when I tried to think about me professionally doing something like this, nothing would come. I was really growing to hate the random thoughts that would spring unbidden into my memory. Why could I remember bits and pieces, but not everything else?

  I walked around the truck, checking the enemy forces. All were dead, some gruesomely so, so I jumped up onto the flatbed, ready for the next phase of the night’s activities. It didn’t take long before we were loaded and moving. Although it was unlikely that anyone had heard the firing—it was seven miles away and almost 2:00AM, there was no sense giving them time to prepare.

  Several buses followed us as the truck turned around and headed toward Maplesville, and I joined the rest of the group—I couldn’t call the motley crew an “assault force”—in tying a strip of red cloth to my upper left arm to identify me as one of the “good guys.”

  The people onboard the flatbed with me were an interesting study of the human condition, from one end of the spectrum to the other. There were several who were either crying or misty-eyed—men as well as women—all the way to people who were excited about having just participated in an assault that led to the killing of another group of people, and who were actively looking forward to doing it again.

  While I realized we needed people toward that end of the spectrum—people who were able and willing to kill—in this new world, that was probably how we had come to the state we were in. The world had gone to war and torn itself apart because there had been too many people who were willing to kill—or to have others do it for them, anyway—as well as people who were willing to carry out orders to do so. Look what it had gotten us.

  I shook my head. What the hell did I know? I was one of those people who had allowed myself to be used by those types of people.

  Happily, the drive wasn’t that long, and I wasn’t forced to dwell on either the world or my place in it for very long. We rolled into Maplesville and the truck stopped at a major intersection along its version of Main Street, where we had good fields of fire in all directions. One of the buses stopped short of our intersection and another went a block further. Without a word, everyone but me jumped off the flatbed or unloaded from the buses and went about their grim work.

  I manned the M2 on the back of the flatbed, content to let them do the house-to-house searches this time. It was their fight, not mine, and my body was already complaining about my overutilization of it. I was content to scan the roads leading into Maplesville for people without the red identifier and listen to the random shots being fired as the houses were cleared. The town could have been anywhere in the American countryside before the war, with little shops on both sides of the street.

  It was almost peaceful, aside from the periodic bouts of gunfire, and I have to admit to zoning out. I don’t think I fell asleep—quite—but then a burst of gunfire rang out close by and someone yelled, “Look out!”

  I snapped fully awake, but it took me a couple of seconds for my brain to catch up with what my eyes were seeing. It took even longer to process it.

  The thing—it had to be the Geno Freak that Jacobs mentioned—had emerged from whatever hole it lived in, and I watched as it tore apart a four-man patrol group. The Freak was larger than a normal human—at least seven feet tall—and faster than anything that big had a right to be. The monster was dark-skinned and shiny across the length of its body—it wasn’t wearing any clothes—and it blended into the night, making it hard to see.

  It was facing away from me, and I watched as it took a swipe at one of the men. It had to have a blade of some sort in its hand, as the man’s throat exploded in a spray of red visible in the light provided by the town’s small street lamps. The man was thrown to the side, but the monster was already in motion. Before the body hit, he had already torn the arm off a second person with a twist and a yank, and punched a third man so hard in the chest that he went flying backward—airborne—at least eight feet through the air. The f
ourth person in the group was a woman, and she screamed.

  It was cutoff as the Freak latched his jaws—not a full crocodile mouth, but jaws that extended at least eight inches from his face—around her throat and pulled back, ripping it out in another spray of blood. As the woman’s body fell, the creature looked around, licking its lips with a tongue long enough to do so.

  At least three of the people were dead, and I wasn’t worried about the fourth as I cut loose with the M2. The Freak saw me as I did so, though, and it leaped to the side, faster than I could train the gun on it. It jumped a fence and blurred as it ran behind a church, moving so fast I could barely see it, much less hit it with the .50 caliber rounds. I took a good chunk out of the church before I could stop myself, but I figured God would understand; that thing needed to die!

  Having made it behind the church, I lost sight of it. If there was one thing I knew, though, it was that I was not chasing it around in the dark; I would stay right in the middle of the intersection, with as much light as possible to see it. I scanned back and forth between the sides of the church, not knowing which side it would appear from, but then saw it had a third option—it had run halfway down the block, and sprinted across the street before I could get the barrel of the M2 around to it.

  People began running toward the flatbed, yelling and asking questions, but I didn’t have time for them. My concentration was locked in on the abomination that was now stalking me. I tried to keep watch on both sides of the line of buildings that ran toward me, but it again did something unexpected—it didn’t come from either side; instead, it leaped off the roof of the library and sprinted toward me.

  It only stopped once, to grab a woman along the way and toss her at me. I would have fired at it, anyway, in spite of the woman, but I was too busy ducking the flesh missile to operate the weapon. I straightened, only to have it leap onto the flatbed and hit me. I didn’t even see it, but it catapulted me backward off the flatbed.