Surviving the Dead (Novel): The Hellbreakers

by James N. Cook

  After that, I moved the supplies and my newfound weapons inside the cabin and shuttered the place. A single skylight less than a foot in diameter provided the room’s only illumination.

  I remember looking over my newly discovered weapons, the Damascus steel axe and the AR-15, in the dim light of the living room. The axe looked solid enough, but I was not willing to trust my life to the AR-15 until I had put it through its paces.

  When I found it, I had also found a green ammo can with a few hundred rounds marked as 5.56x45 XM193, and a box containing 300 Speer 75 grain soft points in twenty round containers. The rest of the ammo was loaded into metal magazines. Six occupied a bandolier with a shoulder strap, a seventh in the magazine well of the rifle itself.

  I put all the weapons under the couch cushions except the shotgun. That one I kept at hand.

  Weeks went by. I was burning through my supplies far faster than I had anticipated, so I started rationing. After week eight, I stepped on the bathroom scale and saw I had dropped from two hundred pounds down to one-ninety. Still not bad for being six-foot-one. But the problem was I had been lean before the Outbreak. Which meant, despite my daily exercise routine, I was losing muscle mass.

  Not good.

  A week later, the panic of survival instinct lessened and cabin fever began to set in. I woke up in the middle of the night and sat with my shotgun across my lap staring at the skylight. When it showed the first gray signs of dawn, I disassembled the barricade on the front door and walked outside.

  It was early, and warm, and birds were singing, and the fresh air was like cold water after slogging through miles of desert—a feeling I would soon come to know intimately. I did a patrol of the area immediately around the cabin, but found nothing. I decided to spend the night outside.

  After pitching Sean’s pup tent in the back yard, I sat on a lawn chair and munched beef jerky and peanuts until the sun went down. After dark, I got a serious case of the yawns and laid down in my sleeping bag, the tent flaps zippered shut.

  Sleep came quickly.

  *****

  The sound of voices woke me up.

  I opened my eyes inside the tent, put my hand on the shotgun, and listened without moving. The voices were not far off, just over the shallow ridge separating Sean’s cabin from the valley leading down to Flagstaff.

  I sat up and slowly exited the tent, leading with the shotgun. There was a full moon out, and I could see the surrounding terrain clearly. The pointed tips of enveloping pine forest lanced sharply into the silver-lighted sky. There was no one in sight.

  Sean had picked this site specifically because it was remote, and therefore hard to find. I wondered if the voices over the ridge knew how close we were, and told myself: Of course they don’t. If they did, I would be dead, and they would be looting my cabin.

  I slung the shotgun, stuffed extra shells into my jacket pockets, and belly crawled up the hill behind the cabin. As I progressed, the voices became gradually louder. Near the top of the ridge, I stopped. The drop to the other side of the hill was short, maybe ten feet in elevation slanting away fifty or so feet. I dared not crawl any closer for fear of alerting the men below to my presence.

  Raising my head just enough to see over the ridge, I looked down at six men sitting around a small campfire in a dug-out pit. From my vantage point, the fire was hard to see, emitting very little smoke. I would learn later, in the pages of a survival guide written by a Special Forces veteran, it was called a Dakota fire.

  Near the six men lay two bodies. I was not initially sure how I knew they were dead, but I was certain of it nonetheless. There is a distinctive stillness—no shallow rhythm of breath, no involuntary movement, no adjustment of position to achieve comfort—which accompanies the end of a life. The bodies lay awkwardly, limbs in strange positions, as if they had gotten up to run and been cut down before they could. The next morning I would discover that ‘cut down’ was exactly the right phrase.

  They had been killed with daggers.

  But right then, all I knew was there were dead bodies. Which led me to conclude the people responsible were gathered below me, acting as if they had not just committed a grisly atrocity.

  Minutes crawled by while I lay with my face close to the ground, ears straining. Sound has a way of carrying on a clear, cool night, and the sloping floor of the shallow valley served as a natural amplifier.

  “So what do you want to do with those two?” a voice asked. A man in camouflage clothing, which I recognized as Army combat fatigues, pointed at the dead bodies.

  “Nothing,” another voice, this one with his back to me, replied. “We leave ‘em for the coyotes.”

  “You ain’t worried somebody’ll find ‘em?”

  The head turned. “Like who? The cops? Hell, they’re probably dead by now. And we will be too if we don’t find a place to hole up.”

  The speaker’s pronouncement was received with solemn nodding of heads.

  “So what’s the plan?” a new voice asked.

  There were a few seconds of silence while the apparent leader decided how to answer. “We’ll recon the area in the morning. I doubt those two over there chose this campsite at random. I get the feeling they were headed somewhere. Nobody crosses land like this on foot unless they know where they’re going.”

  “Could be they got lost,” someone said.

  “Could be. Either way, it won’t hurt us to have a look around. If there’s nothing useful, we’ll move on.”

  “I got NVGs and some spare batteries,” a man said. “Want me to recon now?”

  “No. Save the batteries. We might need them later.”

  “Okay. So where do we go from here, then?”

  “I’m thinking west a ways, then north.”

  “Why not south?” someone else asked. “I hear Phoenix is abandoned.”

  “Yeah, but we’ll have to cross the damn desert to get there. And after that, we’ll be living in a desert. Might as well shoot ourselves in the head right now and spare the suffering.”

  “I’m with Sneed,” someone said. “Fuck a desert, man. I had enough of that shit in Iraq.”

  “Yeah. Good point.”

  I saw small objects being thrown into the fire during the course of the conversation. It occurred to me then the soldiers below, who I could only assume were deserters, were eating MREs, or Meals Ready to Eat. My father, who had been a Ranger in the Army, had told me about MREs years before. The most complimentary thing he could say about them was they would keep a man alive.

  Now I had a decision to make. The truck was out of gas, and there wasn’t enough fuel left in Sean’s gerry can to get me far. Which didn’t matter because I wouldn’t be able to clear the driveway anyhow. And if these soldiers happened upon my cabin, which was almost a certainty, I sincerely doubted my fate would be different than the two poor souls lying in twisted heaps on the forest floor.

  So what now?

  Without my supplies, I was a dead man. If these deserters found me, I was a dead man. If I tried to fight them with a head on attack, I was a dead man. There were a great many actions, and a great many outcomes, which all led to the same place—with me dead.

  I looked again at the corpses. Fear began to transform into anger. Killing those two people had not been necessary. They had tried to run for crying out loud. Why not just disarm them, chase them off, and leave it at that?

  A part of me knew the answer, something my father had drilled into my head from a young age. He had learned it in the Army, and it consisted of two simple words:

  Be sure.

  Don’t guess, don’t assume, don’t leave anything to chance. Prepare. Plan ahead. Go through the scenarios and eliminate as many variables as possible.

  The soldiers had come here, probably under the guise of friendliness, and approached these people with empty hands and reassuring smiles. At some point they had revealed their true intentions, deliberately or otherwise, and the two dead people had tried to flee. And of course, they were
no match for six fit, trained soldiers.

  They had been killed because the soldiers wanted to be sure—not just think, but know—the wayward refugees would cause no further problems.

  I have never been a soldier, and I was definitely not trained in the ways of warfare like the men below. But I did consider myself a warrior. I had tested my courage and toughness seventeen times in the cage. And seventeen times, I had walked away victorious.

  So think of this as just another fight, but with weapons and no rules.

  I knew how to win a fight.

  The first step was to develop a strategy. Then develop a backup strategy. If the first two strategies failed, then it was all down to creativity and guts.

  Last was execution, and a complete abandonment of self-concern. A man could not fully commit himself to battle, any kind of battle, if he burdened himself with thoughts of defeat.

  Bottom line, Alex. Your life is in danger. You have one chance to save yourself, but you’ll have to fight for it. Win, and you walk away with your life. Lose, and … well, just don’t lose.

  I let out a long breath, swept aside all thoughts of existence beyond the next few minutes, and prepared myself for another battle.

  Only this time, the purse was worth far more than money.

  ELEVEN

  Back at Sean’s cabin, after a long and silent retreat, I crept inside and lifted the couch cushions. The polished wooden stock of the .308 Winchester Model 70 gleamed dully in the dim moonlight. Its blued barrel and bolt were little more than shadows against the dark fabric of the sofa.

  I had fired this rifle exactly twice, but that was enough to know it had some kick. The scope was a Leupold, zeroed for two hundred yards. The only reason I knew this was because I had visited Sean the previous August and watched him sight it in for hunting season.

  Tonight, however, I would be shooting at targets less than twenty yards away, so I figured if I aimed at their guts I would probably hit something important. The projectiles fired from the cartridges were some kind of special hunting variety, designed to penetrate deeply and expand upon impact. I had seen what they could do to deer, and it had not been pretty. I figured the results to be no less spectacular against human flesh.

  With the Mossberg slung across my back, I crawled back up the hill and found the six men where I had left them. Only now, instead of eating MREs, they were passing around a large, clear bottle of something dark and heavy.

  Good. Let them be their own enemies.

  I lay in wait and time passed. A good fighter knows how to be patient; when to strike, and when to hold back. Sometimes an opponent will hang himself if you give him enough rope. Muhammad Ali proved as much against George Foreman on that hot night in Kinshasa.

  The liquid in the bottle gradually deteriorated until there was just clear glass and a black label. The leader, still sitting with his back to me, let the last few drops pour out into his upturned mouth before hurling the bottle into the forest. By that point, the men were all in a happy mood, slurred speech and loud laughter passing among them.

  One by one, they lay down on ground mats and covered themselves with blankets. The fire burned low until it was little more than embers. I waited until the men went still and began snoring away their drunkenness.

  There was not much light to see by, but I could make out the leader’s back. He was lying on his side.

  The problem with shooting him would not be a matter of left or right, but elevation. With the two hundred yard zero on the scope, I had to aim low enough to not shoot over him, but high enough to hit something vital on the first go. My only chance was to kill as many of these bastards as I could before they realized what was happening.

  I strained my eyes to find the scope’s reticle in the dark. The scope was dialed down to its lowest setting at four-power. The back of the man I aimed at looked huge through the glass magnification. I put the crosshairs where his side met the ground, center of mass below the heart, clicked the safety to the off position, and fired.

  The report was shockingly loud. My ears rang and I felt blowback hit me in the face. Nevertheless, my hands went to work. The bolt came back, ejected a round, and went forward again. The man I shot at twitched and blood erupted from his chest, splattering the embers of the fire and sending sizzling minarets of smoke drifting through the air. He did not move.

  One down. Four bullets left.

  Two of the men did not awaken. They lay on their backs, mouths open, drool leaking down their cheeks. Three others sat up at once with wide-eyed alarm etched on their faces. I aimed at the closest one’s stomach and fired again. The bullet hit his chest at an angle, went straight on though, and slapped into a tree close behind him. His mouth opened in a horrified O of surprise, and he had a couple of seconds to look down at the smoking crater in his uniform before falling over backward.

  By the time he was down, I had worked the bolt again and fired at a third target. He was sitting directly across from me, facing my direction. The bullet took him high in the chest, and from the way he went limp and fell over, I surmised the projectile must have shattered his spine on its way out.

  The two sleeping men still had not moved, oblivious to the carnage around them. The fourth man, however, shook off the fog of sleep and alcohol, grabbed a rifle I could only assume was an M-4, and let off a volley in my direction.

  He missed, but not by much. One bullet came close enough I could hear it make a low whup sound as it buzzed by my ear.

  Stand your ground!

  The voice in my head sounded an awful lot like my old corner man, Vinny.

  I backed off just enough to put the berm between me and the shooter, rolled to my left a few times, and crawled back up the hill. When I looked over again, the man with the M-4 was shaking the leg of one of his sleeping comrades.

  “Wilson! Get your ass up, we’re under attack!”

  He was still looking toward the last place he had seen my muzzle flash. I took aim at his belt buckle and let fly. He let out an agonized howl and pitched over on his side, still holding the M-4.

  Shit!

  I lurched backward just in time for him to empty a magazine where my head had been barely a second earlier.

  I remembered, in an instant of time, being fourteen years old and my dad taking me to the pistol range and pointing out the kill-shot areas on a paper target emblazoned with a picture of a man pointing a revolver.

  “This is the T-zone,” Dad had said, running a finger in a cruciform from left to right across the chest, and up and down from forehead to gut. “You hit somebody here, especially with a hollow point, and they’re in big trouble. If you hit here,” he pointed at the center of the chest, “that’s a kill. Same with the head from the nose up. Shut down the motherboard, and it’s all over. Hit down here in the center, below this spot, and you either blow a big damn artery or sever the spine. Either way, he’s out of the fight.”

  Just wait. You hit him in the centerline. He’ll bleed out.

  So I waited. I heard a metallic clacking sound as the wounded man reloaded. A few seconds ticked by, and then he shouted, “Come on, you son of a bitch! Come on and finish me!”

  I shook my head. No way, partner. I’ll just stay right where I am.

  I set the rifle aside. Took a kneeling position behind a tree, and unslung my shotgun. The man kept shouting enraged challenges that gradually grew weaker and weaker. Finally, the shock wore off and pain took over. I heard the man whimpering, and praying, and finally begging me for help. I did not move. Last, he called out for his mother in a voice so plaintive my eyes stung with tears.

  A few minutes later, silence.

  I counted to a hundred, crept a little farther to my left, and dared a peek over the berm. The red embers in the ground illuminated a limp face, eyes glazed and reflecting the scarlet light of the dying fire.

  The other two were still asleep.

  I walked up to one of them, stood a few feet away, sighted in with the Mossberg, and pulled the trigger.
His head disintegrated in a shower of brain and bone, the upper teeth and everything below still mostly intact. That, apparently, was finally enough to awaken his last remaining companion. The man’s eyes fluttered open and he sat up, looking dazedly around.

  “What the…”

  They were his last words.

  I retrieved the .308, walked back to the cabin, stowed the rifle, and reloaded the Mossberg. Then I walked outside, took a deep breath of the chill night air, hit my knees, and vomited until I was as hollowed out and burned up as the empty shell cases I had left behind over the ridge.

  TWELVE

  A knock at my door interrupted old memories of harsher times.

  I went to the window and raised a hand to pull down the slatted shade only to realize I had boarded the place up. There was no peephole in the door, so I picked up the Mossberg, got down on one knee well away from the entrance, and shouted, “Who is it?”

  “Caroline Fleming. I’m the supply officer for the militia.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Can we speak outside? I’d rather not have to shout.”

  “Who’s with you? How many?”

  “It’s just me.”

  I crept forward, unbolted the lock, and lifted the steel brace from its bracket.