by Rod Walker
Then once I finished boot camp, I got rotated into a different, much smaller training company.
It was training for Listeners. People like me, in other words.
We weren’t nearly so clean-cut. Black Division didn’t have as many Listeners as it needed because Listeners were very hard to create. First a victim had to be exposed to the Dark’s conversion weapon, and then the victim had to be treated within a specific window of time, else the conversion would complete and instead of a Listener the Dark would have a new zombie. Adding to the risk was the fact that the treatment had a fifty percent mortality rate. Even so, when the Division captured samples of the conversion weapon, a few men volunteered to become Listeners. Major Randolph was one of them.
That said, the Division got most of its Listeners from those who had survived zombie attacks. Before Invasion Day, if the Dark attacked an isolated area, there were often survivors, and sometimes the Division arrived in time to rescue people and treat them. Those who survived became Listeners. After Invasion Day, there were far more victims, which meant a lot more opportunities to create Listeners. Like me.
My squad had five men in it, counting myself. The next oldest after me was an eighteen-year-old soldier from Georgia named Rufus Archibald Bullock the Fifth, and he had enlisted in the United States Army seven months before. I think he was the only one who was actually excited to become a Listener. When I met him, he enthusiastically started to inform me of his lineage.
“My dad fought in Iraq,” he said. “His dad fought in Vietnam. His dad fought in the Pacific against the Japanese, and his dad fought the Spanish in Cuba…”
“Guess it runs in the family, then,” I said.
He grinned and pumped my hand. He wasn’t doing that thing where he tried to crush my hand, but he was strong. “Call me Bull. Everyone does.”
“Can’t imagine why,” I said, and Bull brayed with laughter. He was a big dude. If he played football in high school, any coach with two brain cells to rub together would have put him in the defensive line, and Bull would have sacked the quarterback two or three times every game.
“I think we’re blessed, you know?” said Bull.
“Sorry?” I said. I supposed we were lucky to be alive, but I hadn’t thought of it in those terms.
“The thing we’ve got in our heads, it’s a gift,” said Bull. “It’s a gift from God. This war is a righteous war to defend all of mankind, and God will be on our side. We are blessed indeed. Other men who have fought in wars had to fight other men. We get to fight monsters, and that does not weigh upon our consciences.”
“I suppose not,” I said. Bull sometimes got in trouble for trying to evangelize to the Mormons, but he and I always got along. He was really excited about killing lots and lots of Darksiders, and I could get behind that.
I also got along with Jack. His real name was John Walter, which made him sound the managing partner of a law firm, but he was actually a cop. Specifically, he was twenty-nine years old, and he had been a Seattle cop for six years. When the gates opened in Seattle, he and four other men from the Seattle police department had kept their heads together and escorted something like five hundred civilians into the countryside once it became obvious that the city was lost. On the other side of the Cascades, they were attacked by a band of drones and zombies. They fought off the Dark, and while Jack had made it, his four friends did not. A patrol from Castle Base came across the scene in time to give Jack the treatment, and he had become one of the Listeners.
“Your dad was a law enforcement officer?” said Jack when we first met. He talked exactly like a cop. He was a former “law enforcement officer”, not a cop. He never went anywhere, he “proceeded” to places. When describing crimes and situations, he had a tendency to use police codes, and then needed to translate them to English. He also had an uncanny ability to exactly guess someone’s height and weight when meeting them.
“Yeah,” I said. “He was in the Division before Invasion Day went down, so he was clued in about the Dark.”
“I’m sorry,” said Jack. “I didn’t have a family—my dad died when I was a kid, and my mom a couple years after I joined the department. Heart attacks, both of them.”
“Sorry about that,” I said.
We stood in silence for a moment.
“Well,” said Jack with a sudden smile, “given my family’s history of Code Blues, I suppose I should have picked a less stressful job.”
“Ha,” I said. “If those zombies didn’t give you a heart attack, then nothing will.”
My dad once said that in every group of ten men, there were two leaders, seven followers, and one troublemaker. I think he was quoting some old-time general or another, but if that general was right, then Jack was our natural leader. He became the leader of his squad by default. It wasn’t so much that he told us what to do, but he helped make sure that we had what we needed to do it.
And if Jack was a natural leader, then Tong was one of nature’s followers.
His full name was Nguyen Tran Tong, and his grandparents and parents were Vietnamese immigrants who had settled in Los Angeles after fleeing from the Communists back in the 70s. His extended family had enough experience with war and displacement to see the writing on the wall when the Darkside gates opened in LA, and they had gotten out of town before everything got really nasty. Somewhere in Nevada, the Nguyen family had been attacked by zombies, and they had been on the verge of getting overwhelmed when one of the Division’s patrols had found them.
Tong had made it. His parents had not, and once he survived the treatment he joined Black Division as a Listener.
Don’t get me wrong—when I say Tong was a follower, that’s not an insult. He was good at, well, everything, and he could field-strip and rebuild his rifle faster than I could manage, and I had way more experience with firearms. He was an absolute genius at organization and planning. That said, I think Mama Nguyen was a bit of a tyrant. Tong tended not to do anything unless he had been explicitly told do it. Fortunately, Jack liked to tell people what to do, so he and Tong got along well.
If Tong was one of nature’s followers, then the last member of our squad was one of nature’s troublemakers.
I never managed to figure out Nate Rigger’s ethnicity, and he didn’t volunteer information about himself. He was twenty-five years old, and to judge from his tattoos and some of his passing remarks, he had escaped from prison when the Dark had overrun the complex. He might have been Hispanic, or he might have been a Caucasian who had spent a lot of time in the sun. He was surly and argumentative, and he had a cruel, nasty streak, but he had survived the zombies, so he was a Listener. In less desperate times, the Division would never have taken him because of his tendency to settle problems through violence, but there was a war on and Rigger was a Listener.
And he didn’t like me on sight.
I didn’t know why and he never did tell me. In hindsight, I think it was because I was the youngest one in the group, and whatever governed the buzzing mass of violent impulses that served as Rigger’s brain decided I would make a likely target. Rigger embarked on a campaign of petty harassment—tying my bootlaces together, hiding my gear so I would get in trouble, that kind of thing. He also never hesitated to shove me into the nearest wall, so long as no one was watching it.
After about two weeks of that, I decided it was time to take action.
We were walking back to the barracks after class, and Rigger gave me a shrug that sent me stumbling. I caught my balance, gave him a big sunny smile, and then hit him in the nose. Palm strike, open-handed, and the shock of the impact went all the way up my arm. Dad had been very clear about protecting your knuckles in physical combat.
Rigger staggered back, dark eyes wide with shock, blood streaming from his nose, then bellowed and came at me.
It turned out to be about an even match. Rigger was bigger and had considerably more practical experience of violence, but I had the benefit of Dad’s lessons, I was in better shape, and I
kept my head better. He might have survived prison, but I’d killed my share of men and Darksiders. We wound up rolling around on the grass, grappling for leverage and landing whatever blows we could. I took a pretty good elbow to the head, but I caught him with a knee to the stomach just before we were wrenched apart by others. I got to my feet, but my head was still spinning, and I took a step backward before falling on my backside.
Rigger sat up, glaring daggers at me. “I’m gonna crack your head open like…”
He paused, blinked, and held up one finger, then turned his head and threw up his breakfast. Guess my knee had hit him hard.
“Okay,” he said. “Now I’m gonna…”
He turned his head and puked again, and I started to laugh.
Rigger glared at me once he’d finish. “What? What’s so funny?”
“It’s not,” I said, “but you can’t crack my head open if you keep throwing up.”
Rigger stared at me in confusion, then he made a wheezing noise. I thought he was going to puke again, but the wheezing sound kept coming, and I realized that he was laughing.
I wasn’t sure what was funny, but it was so absurd that I started laughing too.
“Yeah,” croaked Rigger. “Yeah, guess I can’t.”
And then he laughed again. Just like that, he stopped giving me trouble. We still didn’t like each other, but he didn’t give me grief anymore.
That incident also helped me figure out my place in the squad. Remember what I said about the natural leaders and followers and troublemakers?
It turns out that everyone saw me as the squad psycho. I followed all the rules to the letter. I really enjoyed using firearms, and I knew more about them than everyone else in the squad, even Jack and Bull. I didn’t really have much of a sense of humor, except at inappropriate times. And even Rigger didn’t give me trouble, and if Rigger didn’t give a guy trouble, you knew he had to be dangerous. I got along with everyone, but they were a little afraid of me.
Because I had become the squad’s psycho.
I didn’t mind. I supposed I really was Daniel Kane’s son, and I bet he had been the squad psycho wherever he went. And while I didn’t think I was a psychopath, I knew I wasn’t normal. I had shot that guy who tried to grab Maggie without hesitation and without regret. Granted, he had probably deserved shooting even before the Conquest, but I think most people would have felt something when shooting a man for the first time.
I didn’t, and that didn’t bother me. Because if God and Daniel Kane had made me into a killer, then I was going to kill a whole lot of Darksiders.
After appropriate classroom instruction, of course.
Major Randolph and a few other officers who were Listeners taught the class. There were classes on tactics and strategy and on the history of signal intelligence, which made sense as we were basically living signal intelligence assets. I supposed the classes on strategy and tactics were to help us interpret whatever information we picked up from the Dark.
“The central problem of being a Listener,” said Randolph, standing in front of the little classroom where we met, “is that you are now essentially a modified human, a hybrid of sorts. You are tapping into the Dark’s hive mind, and the human mind has not evolved to handle those kind of sensations–”
“God created the Heavens and the Earth in six days, sir,” said Bull.
“Don’t interrupt,” said Randolph.
“Sir,” said Bull.
“Whether evolution or God or aliens from the Dog Star made the human mind,” continued Randolph, “the fact remains that your brain is not equipped to interpret a connection to an alien hive mind. It interprets the connection to the hive mind in the context of sensations with which you are already familiar. Fortunately, we have seen a uniformity of response among the Listeners. The purpose of this class is to teach you how to better understand those sensations so that you can utilize them for combat purposes.”
Major Randolph and the other Listener officers had a PowerPoint.
It turned out to be a long PowerPoint.
The first thing we learned about was how to sense the presence of the gates. That one was easy. We could feel the presence of the big gates in Spokane and Seattle, and Randolph explained that our brains were sensing the presence of the transductor crystals the Dark used to force open the portals from their world or dimension or wherever they came from. Our brains interpreted the presence of a transductor as a sensation of pressure, and as we gained experience, we would learn to gauge the distance and size of the gates.
“That is our most vital task, closing the gates,” said Randolph. “Black Division means to drive back the enemy and retake first the United States and then the world, and we’re going to do that by closing the enemy’s gates one by one.”
“How can a gate be closed, sir?” asked Jack.
“At present, the only known way is to send a team through the gate and to the Dark’s home world,” said Randolph. “Once through the gate, they need to locate the transductor crystal powering the gate and carry it with them back through the gate to Earth. That causes the gate to immediately collapse. As you can imagine, the Dark guards their transductor crystals quite well.” He looked the classroom over. “The long-term strategic goal is to close as many gates as possible and to study their transductor crystals until we understand how to block them. That will be our path to victory in this war. Black Division’s original mandate was to defend mankind against the Dark’s incursions, but as we have seen, that reactive and defensive philosophy proved insufficient. The mandate has changed. General Culver and the rest of our leadership will now accept nothing less than total victory over the Dark, and that is the goal of each and every man in this room.”
We spent a lot of time studying the different sensations that different kinds of Darksiders would produce in us. Generally, the presence of Darksiders produced a sensation that felt like water droplets against the skin, and if the Darksider was an Overseer or other sapient form, the temperature of the sensation would rise. If we got close enough, we could even hear the Darksiders speaking to each other within the hive mind. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite like listening in on a phone call. The Darksiders didn’t use language to communicate with each other, but rather a continual flow of data, and there was no way of decoding it that we knew about.
Once we finished basic training, there was a little ceremony. Major Randolph gave a speech, and then we had a dinner. Maggie was there, and I was pleased to see that she was doing well at Castle Base. Dad had always said that the Army was like the DMV but with more guns in terms of paperwork, and Black Division was still the same. She had been working in the central offices between her classes at the base’s school, and I was pleased to see she was doing well.
I was also pleased to learn that General Culver didn’t have any interest in recruiting female combat troops, which meant I didn’t have to worry about Maggie getting drafted and sent into battle. I suppose his opinion had been out-of-step with modern times, but after the Dark had wiped out two-thirds of the human race on Invasion Day, his position on the matter made rather more sense.
We had finished basic training, but that was one thing. Actually sensing the presence of the Dark out in the field was something else entirely. New Listeners were sent out with veteran troops on combat patrols to practice our skills until we mastered them.
Which was how I found myself in my first battle.
Chapter 6: First Mission
The man in charge of my first combat patrol was named Captain Jonas Howard.
Captain Howard had been in Afghanistan and Iraq, which he was willing to talk about, and some other places that he was not. He spoke in a slow Alabama drawl, rarely raising his voice, and constantly chewed sunflower seeds as a means of keeping nicotine addiction at bay. He had learned the truth about the Dark the same way that so many others in Black Division had—on patrol outside Kandahar, a hole ripping itself in the air, and then a horde of giant stinking alien bug-things swarming
out to kill everything in sight.
Or so Captain Howard put it. He had bit of a flair for the dramatic.
Bull and I reported to Captain Howard’s HQ as ordered at 0500 one dark, dry morning. Howard’s HQ was large tent with a space heater, since Castle Base had gotten a bit crowded since Invasion Day. I had heard rumors that Black Division had facilities elsewhere, and that General Culver was taking in more regular Army bases under his command, but I hadn’t visited any of them yet.
Howard stood outside his tent, watching as his men loaded up their armored troop carriers. There were already a dozen sunflower seed shells around his boots. If he wasn’t careful he was going to need dentures by the time he turned fifty, assuming any of us lived that long.
“Sir!” I said. “Corporal Roland Kane and Corporal Rufus Bullock reporting for duty, sir!”
We saluted. Howard sized us up, then saluted back after a moment.
I should have mentioned that. Listeners started at corporal rank, since in the heat of combat we sometimes had to tell privates to move quickly to avoid a Darkside attack.
“You two look too young to be corporals,” grunted Howard. He pointed at me. “You don’t look old enough to drive.”
“I am seventeen years old, sir!” I announced. My birthday had passed while in basic training. Maggie had scraped together enough flour to make me a cupcake, which had been nice.
“Don’t shout unless I tell you,” said Howard. “Some of those drones have ears like bats. Let me guess. You got bit by a zombie, the Division found you in time, and now you’re a Listener?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Howard’s gaze shifted to Bull. “And you. You’re a big fellow, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir!” said Bull with enthusiasm. “I am excited for the opportunity to bring destruction upon the Dark, sir!”