“Yes, I agree. However, it is fortunate I realized my error before it was too late. I have heard it said that God looks after children and idiots. Perhaps this is proof of such a thing. But let us put this unpleasantness behind us, yes? I have something to show you.”
“What is it?”
“Come,” the priest held out an arm in invitation. “You will not be disappointed.”
*****
“Is that scaffolding?”
Cortez smiled, white teeth showing through his beard. “It is indeed.”
A section of I-10 roughly two-hundred yards long was a beehive of activity. Nearly every person in Father Cortez’s militia, with the exception of the fifty riflemen armed with M-4s—who stood vigilant watches in a circle around the work area—were busy retrieving metal poles and grated steel catwalk planks and putting them together with metal retaining pins. Each platform was ten feet long by six feet wide and stood on large, odd-looking wheels. The wheels were made of rubber, but they did not look like tires. They looked like a geometric web with a circle of treads around the edges. The platforms also had some kind of lever-operated mechanism that operated a series of chained gears. Looking closer to the ground, I saw the axles had shafts connecting them to a sway-bar steering system.
“What’s all this for?”
“This is how we do it.”
“Do what?”
“Exterminate the muertos.”
I gave the priest a disbelieving look. “Exterminate?”
Cortez pointed toward Phoenix. “We will lure them, as many as we can, to this spot. And then my people will begin the long, difficult work of giving them a merciful death.”
I blinked a couple of times, mouth trying to form words, and finally settled for scratching the back of my head.
“Padre, what you’re talking about is suicide. This will never work. How are you going to kill them all?”
“With those,” he said, pointing.
I looked. From the backs of several wagons, a crew of two dozen people were climbing the completed areas of scaffolding and stacking long poles on the catwalks. After a second’s examination, I realized they were not poles. They were spears, long ones, with spikes for blades and a crossbar about seven inches from the needle-sharp tip.
“Where did you get those?”
“We brought them from Colorado Springs,” the priest said. “They are of my own design. Very similar to a boar spear, but with a spike instead of a blade. The spike penetrates a skull much easier because of its narrow profile. Simple physics, you see.”
I looked at the priest again, deeply skeptical. “How many people do you have?”
“Seven hundred and eighty-one able-bodied fighters. Sixteen more who are too injured to fight. We started out with a thousand, but as you can imagine, we have lost people along the way.”
I did the math in my head. If what Cortez was saying was true, he had lost over two-hundred people.
Which also means…
“Wait,” I said. “Are you telling me you’ve done this before?”
“Yes. Quite a few times. But I must admit, Phoenix is our most ambitious project to date.”
I looked at the scaffolding going up, then at the priest, and back at the scaffolding.
“Why are you showing me this?”
Cortez looked at me, the smile returning. “We could use your help. You are a strong man, I can see that by looking at you. Also, I believe I know who you are. The long hair and the beard concealed your identity at first, but the swelling on your ears and the scar on your forehead gave you away.”
I shook my head. “I like you, Padre. You seem like a decent man. But if you think I’m going to have any part of this, you’re insane.”
The priest looked disappointed, but nodded agreeably. “I am sorry to have wasted your time then, Mister Alex. If you will not be here, where will you go?”
“I’m going back to my cabin,” I said. “I’m going to bar the door and lie quietly on my bed until this whole thing blows over.”
“It may be several days. Perhaps a week or more.”
“I got enough food and water to last me.”
Cortez kept his gaze on the scaffolds. His expression said he wanted to argue further, but he simply said, “Very well then. I will see you when our work is finished.”
“Good luck, Padre.”
I turned on my heel and headed home.
TEN
A noise woke me up.
It had come to me on the cusp of consciousness, the moment of drifting, distant awareness between the sleeping mind and the waking one. When I heard it, I sat up straight in bed, eyes open wide, ears straining.
C-Crack.
“What is that?”
My ears strained. Another echo sounded, followed by several more. I was at the door now, looking eastward. Several minutes passed. I heard nothing else.
“Gunshots,” I said to the empty air. “Those were gunshots.”
Logic applied itself to the problem. Gears turned over and the computations began. The shots could have come from Cortez’s people. It was a possibility. But I was pretty sure all those people were less than a kilometer away over flat terrain. The reports would have been louder, and there would not have been the long, repeating echoes I had heard. Echoes meant hard surfaces, and there was nothing between me and the camp but sand and brush. No vertical planes for sound to bounce off of. That meant the shots had come from somewhere in the far distance, in a place where there were solid walls and changes in elevation to bat the sharp reverberations around before they found me.
I looked north, south, and finally east again. The gunshots had come from the same direction I had seen smoke on the horizon the day before.
“Someone’s out there.”
The night stayed silent. I heard crickets and dry bushes rustling on the breeze and the skittering of nocturnal creatures hunting each other in the sand and rocks and tiny subterranean passages under my feet. I wondered if I should be worried. But then I remembered there was a small army parked nearby, and unless the people on the other side of the valley were suicidal, homicidal, and aggressive beyond comprehension, there was little chance they would cause me any trouble. Besides, there was an entire ghoul-infested city between us. Whoever they were, I hoped for their sake they moved on soon. It was a hard land I lived in.
I put the whole thing out of my mind and went back to bed.
*****
Three hours later I was still awake. I lay on my little bed in my little cabin thinking big, dangerous thoughts.
What have I been doing all these years?
The memories were vivid, the worst of them born during the Outbreak. I was going through training camp in San Diego when the news started showing people being eaten alive by the walking dead. Seeing this, the decision to hightail it to Flagstaff—where I had a childhood friend who owned a hunting cabin in the nearby wilderness—took no thought at all.
In my panic, I figured it would be a good place to ride out the storm. But what I didn’t know, what was not apparent back then but should have been, was the storm was not something to be waited out. It wasn’t a storm at all, in fact. It was an end of things, a final entry in the last volume of the long epic that was mankind’s golden age.
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.
Yeats had been right all along.
I’d had no desire to face that widening gyre head on, so I had grabbed my newly-purchased Mossberg shotgun and two boxes of shells, got in my truck, and headed east.
It amazed me, at the time, how many people didn’t believe the Outbreak would cross the Mississippi. Martial law had been declared by then and evacuation notices were going out as fast as news stations, social media, and emergency broadcast systems could announce them. Nevertheless, I found a few communities along the way, small desert towns for the most part, totally abandoned. Not a soul in sight. It was in one of those places, in a modest ranch home in a tiny town just past the California border, where
I found the axe and AR-15 rifle.
The front door had been open when I arrived. I brought my shotgun with me but kept the barrel down.
“Anyone home?” I called out. Only the sigh of windblown sand answered me.
I pushed the door open and entered slowly. The house was dark. The windows were open, letting the desert breeze billow the curtains. I called out again and still received no answer. Another glance outside showed me no cars in the driveway. There were none visible out back through the kitchen window either.
Upon entering, I turned to my left. A living room stared back, as lifeless as the rest of the house. A surprisingly large fireplace sat empty and cold, the dust of long-ago fires blanketing the hearth. On the mantle above hung the axe, its fine steel gleaming softly in the low afternoon light. I approached it and lifted it from its mounting brackets. The weight of it was comforting in my hand, the sharpness of the blade a living thing begging to be unleashed. I carried it out to the truck, set it on the passenger seat, and went back inside. A search of the house turned up nothing useful until I opened the bedroom closet. Inside was a gun cabinet that had been mostly emptied. Judging by the empty racks and decluttered shelves, whoever had left here had taken with them everything they had deemed useful and left the rest. The last remaining weapon was the AR and a cardboard box full of ammo. A sticky note had been stuck to the cabinet wall next to it.
It read:
To whom it may concern,
If you got one to spare, leave it. If you don’t, take whatever is here, and good luck to you.
God help us all.
There was no signature. I sighted through the scope and knew immediately I was holding a quality weapon.
Whoever you are, pal, thank you.
I left the door open and got back on the road.
As I drove, I stopped wherever I could and filled my truck with as many supplies as it would hold. I thought at the time Flagstaff would be a safe place. I thought I could stick it out there with my old friend until the government, hopefully, got this weird thing happening under control.
But to my dismay, when I reached Flagstaff I found the town in a state of panic. As I rolled in from the highway, a group of townsfolk, driven mad with fear, saw the supplies in my truck and attempted to stop me. Several of them ran out into the road, frantically waving their hands in the air. I guess the intention was to seem as though they were asking for help. But the guns they carried and the bloodstains on their clothes sent a different message.
I stomped the gas pedal and let the brush guard do its job. To this day I can still hear their screams, the thump of bodies rebounding off unyielding metal, the crunch and snap of breaking bones, and the squelch of organs being ground to paste under heavy tires.
A couple of gunshots thumped into the supplies stacked in the bed of the truck, and one shattered my rear window and blew a hole through the front windshield.
“Fuck!”
I came to a bend in the road and laid rubber, fishtailed, regained control, and smashed the accelerator to the floor. The road was straight from there. Twenty minutes later, I was parked at the edge of a pine forest surrounding a public campground. There wasn’t a soul for miles.
Or so I thought.
It had been hours since the last time I’d relieved myself, and my bladder was screaming for attention. I slowed down and parked on the roadside beneath the shade of a long, graceful line of lodge-pole pines. The sky was clear, it was sunny and cool, and the pines stood strong and proud as they marched toward the distant snowcaps of Rocky Mountain peaks. I gazed at them for a few seconds, then got out of the truck and racked a 12 gauge double-ought buckshot into the chamber of my shotgun. To be safe, I replaced the round in the tube and made sure the safety was off.
After walking a few yards beyond the treeline, the road at my back and the wilderness of Northern Arizona ahead, I unzipped and began tending to business. The shotgun was over my shoulder in my left hand, my right hand occupied with not pissing down my leg. Just as I finished, there was a shuffling sound behind me and I heard a click that sounded an awful lot like a safety catch being disengaged.
“Don’t move,” said a voice behind me.
I didn’t. But I listened hard.
“I want your stuff, not your life,” the voice said. It was distinctly feminine, and about as gentle as a hammer to the kneecap. “But don’t think for a second I won’t kill you. Now where are your keys?”
“In my pocket.” I replied, still not moving.
“Take them out slowly and throw them over your shoulder.”
“Okay.” I reached a slow hand in my right hip pocket, dick still dangling in the wind, and rooted around. The movement made a good cover for repositioning the shotgun in the direction I had heard the voice.
Keeping my movements slow, I took out the keys, jingled them in the air for a few seconds, and tossed them.
At the same instant, I pulled the trigger on the shotgun.
I must have hit close because the person behind me let out a startled yelp. I heard foliage crunch and a grunt as she dove for cover.
There was a tall, thick pine a few feet to my left. I scrambled behind it, chambered another shell, and aimed toward where I thought my attacker was. A young woman, who could not have been a day over twenty, had leveled a rifle in my direction. I beat her to the punch. My first shot hit the tree she squatted behind, sending a shower of splinters into her face. She squawked again and fell on her ass. I racked the slide, took careful aim, and fired.
The buckshot hit her in the chest from less than twenty yards away. To put it gently, the damage was instantly fatal and visually frightening. I stayed where I was, racked the shotgun again, and listened. Minutes passed. I heard nothing but birdsong and a gentle spring wind blowing through the branches above me.
I stood up, zipped my pants, and reluctantly approached the body. The face was locked in an expression of surprise and panic, the young skin bloody from the spray of wood shrapnel I had blasted into it. A purse was slung across the girl’s demolished chest, the bag lying open on the ground. I rooted through it until I found a driver’s license.
Her name was Kirsten Mulberry, age 19. There was also an Arizona State University student ID. I picked up her rifle and examined it. The writing on the back end of the receiver identified it as a Ruger Ranch Rifle, caliber .223. The survivalist in me told me to take the rifle, but I didn’t. I knew if I did, every time I looked at it I would think of the face of that girl, and the hole in her chest, and the fact I hadn’t even tried to talk her out of what she was doing.
I could have offered to take her with me. I could have tried to reason with her. I could have told her to drop the rifle after I knocked her down. Instead I had just reacted, a fighter’s instincts taking over.
And now, in the course of less than an hour, I had become a mass murderer.
Shove it down, I thought. Put it in a box and deal with it later.
I got back in my truck and started driving. There were printed directions to the cabin on the passenger seat, but I was far from the roads they told me to drive on.
When I was well away from the campsite, I stopped on the side of the road and consulted a map of Arizona I had grabbed at a gas station when I entered the state. I found the area where I was standing, and then continued driving until I saw a road sign informing me of the distance from my location to two small towns. After that, I consulted a compass to see in what direction I needed to go. Reaching the cabin from there was a straight shot to the east.
The low fuel light illuminated on the dashboard just as I pulled into the long gravel driveway leading to the cabin. I figured my friend, who I considered a like-minded man, had probably done the careful thing and decided to hide out in his wilderness retreat. But when I reached the cabin, I did not see any vehicles. I drove around back, figuring he might have parked there so a passerby could not tell the place was occupied. Made sense. But again, nothing.
I got out of the truck, shotgun he
ld at port arms, and rapped loudly on the back door.
“Sean! You in there? It’s Alex.”
No answer. I tried the door handle. It was locked.
“Sean, come on, man, open the door. I got supplies out here.”
Still silence. I debated what to do for a moment.
Fuck it.
I used the shotgun to break a pane of glass on the back door close to the lock. That done, I swept the shards aside with the barrel, reached a careful arm in, and unlocked the door. Before entering, I leveled the shotgun, took a few steps back, and looked over as much of the interior as I could see. There was no sign of anyone. I stepped inside and swept the interior exactly the way my father, a SWAT officer with the LAPD, had taught me.
“Well hell,” I muttered, standing in the middle of the living room, shotgun dangling from one hand. After pouring myself a drink and considering what I should do, I decided to play it safe.
Sean was a skilled carpenter—he had built the cabin with his own hands—so I figured there would be wood and tools in the large shed out back. I figured correctly. After pouring gasoline from a metal gerry can into Sean’s gigantic generator, I used a table saw and several sheets of plywood to cover the windows both inside and out. That done, I barricaded the back door and nailed together a simple frame on the front door that allowed me to not only bar it shut, but reinforce it with another sheet of plywood. The barriers were not impenetrable, but by the time anyone got through them, I’d be sending buckshot at them with malicious intent.
Speaking of…
I went into Sean’s bedroom and opened the gun cabinet. There was a scoped .308 hunting rifle and a box of twenty match-grade cartridges. Nothing else.
The only approach to the cabin accessible by vehicle was the driveway. I did not want any cars or trucks full of desperate people sneaking up on me in the dark of night, so I set to work sabotaging the way in.
At the head of the driveway, using Sean’s trusty Husqvarna chainsaw, I started sawing down pines and letting them fall across the gravel pathway. Near the head of the drive, at the far end of a sharp curve, I sawed three trees to almost the point of falling over, braced them with four-by-four posts of treated lumber from Sean’s supply, and then sawed the trees further until the posts were the only things holding the trees up—and that not by much. I then removed the cable from the winch on Sean’s ATV and used it to tie the three boards together at about six inches off the ground. It would be plainly visible during the day to someone on foot, but if they came at night, unless they were using flashlights, they were likely to trip over it. Doing so would, hopefully, be enough to tip the trees over and, if not kill, then at least dissuade anyone invading my territory with thievery in mind.
Surviving the Dead (Novel): The Hellbreakers Page 5