by Justin Bell
Garza didn’t even shout, he just lurched and fell backwards, striking the pavement shoulder first, his hands releasing his weapon as he slumped to the ground.
The roadway was quiet, gunshots fading into silence, rising up into the sky, and the man with the burned face looked over the scene around him. Garza’s face was a mask of red, blood splashed over the hood of the military vehicle, and he lay as still as a corpse. Smitty hadn’t moved since he’d elbowed him, his body showing no sign of an intake of breath.
He looked down at Douglas who rolled on the ground, clutching at his broken arm, his hand twisted at an awkward angle from the rest of the limb. A low groan escaped his lips as he lay there, his fingers clamped around his forearm as if he could somehow put the puzzle back together again.
“Thank you for your donation,” the man hissed in a low, accented voice. Douglas glanced up at him through narrowed eyes. He thought he’d recognized the accent. Was it… Russian?
The man with the burnt face didn’t speak again. He lifted the M4 with one hand and pulled the trigger, firing once into Douglas’s curious face. The muzzle flash swallowed the entirety of his head and it snapped back against the pavement, then his entire body lay there, prone, like a statue fallen over.
Looking around him, the man with the burned and ruined face smiled again, as much as he could, his eyes focusing on the weapons, the body armor, the uniforms, and finally the Humvee. Everything was here, ripe for the picking. Everything he would need to escape this city. Everything he would need to survive.
***
Back when it came off the assembly line, comfort wasn’t a top priority for the old-school Ford pickup truck. Jackson could tell. It rolled along the unpaved access road, each bump, stone, and slightly shifting bit of terrain jolting straight up through the suspension, into the stainless-steel bed, right up into his tailbone. His fingers clutched the edge of the bed, holding on for dear life as the vehicle bounced and careened down one final, bumpy slope toward town.
“Gonna make it, Jack?” Clark asked, his mouth twisted into a crooked smirk.
“Old man, I’ve been riding in trucks like these since I was six. Ain’t no thing.”
They hit another slight incline, and the truck bounced before leaping over the other side, slamming back down into the tightly packed dirt.
Jackson winced. “Doesn’t mean it hurts the ass any less, though.”
Clark laughed as he coiled in the front right corner of the flat bed, pressing his shoulder into the cab, just below the rear windscreen, holding himself steady in a kneel. On the opposite corner, Javier and Melinda huddled, a wide grin on Mel’s face as the cool wind blew back her lightly colored hair and ran over her smoothly tanned skin. Broderick sat on the wheel well, looking out behind them as they drove, steadying himself with a hand on the wall of the bed. He wasn’t speaking, and hadn’t spoken since they’d hopped in the twenty-year-old four-wheel-drive.
Granted the sounds of rattling crashes and bangs of the vehicle slamming down over unkempt roads didn’t exactly lend itself to conversation, but Jackson looked at the man in the yellow uniform and wondered just what was going through his head.
In the past forty-eight hours, he’d lost most of the members of his team, and the one that survived had tried to kill him. He’d been stranded in a city that was rapidly becoming a flaming morgue, he’d been shot at, he’d killed others, and the threat his team had been formed solely to fight was ravaging the nation seemingly undeterred.
Not the best days of the man’s life, Jackson suspected. Safe to say the past few days hadn’t been the best days in anyone’s life. The pickup truck seemed to pitch left and down as it crested another uneven slope, and Jackson tightened his grasp on the edge of the bed, trying to keep from toppling over sideways. The change in direction and acceleration was significant enough that Broderick turned his head as well, looking over the cab toward where they were headed.
“I see some buildings through the trees,” he said, nodding ahead. “Town coming up.”
“Town may be overstating it,” said the man seated in the bed of the truck with them. “It’s a full blown one-horser without the horse.”
“They at least have a car dealership?” asked Clark.
The man shrugged. “Dealership? Nah. They’ve got a couple garages, though. And way things are going, the guys who run ‘em are probably keeled over at home in front of the TV.”
“People hit hard even way out here?” Broderick asked.
The man shrugged again. “Near as I can tell, people have been hit hard everywhere. I ain’t been here since all this stuff went down, but I don’t see why it would be any exception.”
Trees scraped along the roof of the truck and Broderick held up his arm to deflect some narrow branches reaching down to grasp at him as they passed underneath overgrown foliage. They were on a narrow path leading from the access road to the small town, which was slowly growing into visibility on the other side of the row of trees and brush.
Pushing through one last group of trees, the truck thumped over the last stretch of dirt, pulling down between two buildings and emerging onto a cracked and heaved paved path that Jackson figured passed as Main Street in this neck of the woods. He knew because it immediately reminded him of Aldrich, his small hometown in Connecticut, and there were some sharp pains of recognition there.
The truck slowed as it turned onto the paved road and Jackson looked back at the buildings that had flanked their entrance into town. On the left was a yellow farmhouse, shutters pulled tight, the ratty, filthy siding walking left to right across the front of the home. The grass out front was short, mostly due to the time of year, and a small blue car sat in the driveway. Across the way from the first house was a brown house, a two-level cape, about a hundred years past its prime. He could tell from the street that curtains were pulled tight and the lights were dark inside. There was a garage right next to the dark colored house, looking even more run down than the main building, tilting to one side, the door permanently open, revealing a strangely shaped cavity within, tools scattered about. Over on the brown grass next to the garage an old truck sat askew, rust coated and neglected.
Jackson couldn’t help but smile. They could have been any two rural houses on the outskirts of Aldrich, houses he’d driven past hundreds of times throughout his childhood, a stark remembrance of the town he grew up in, which had started to fade from memory even though he’d only been in Boston for six months. The truck roared forward again, moving down the street, the only vehicle passing along the narrow road. Jackson looked toward the side of the road as they drove and thought he saw moving figures in the shadows of another set of houses, but they disappeared as quickly as they had appeared.
“You see that?” he asked Clark.
“What’s that?”
“I think there were people over there.”
Clark craned his neck around and looked out over the side of the truck. “If this place got hit like everywhere else, I don’t blame ‘em for being skittish.”
As they watched the shadows beyond the rows of scattered houses, the truck slowed. Jackson leaned back, looking out in front of the path of the vehicle. Up ahead he saw the junction of another paved road and a series of route signs directing travelers.
“We’ll be letting you out here,” the man in the back of the truck said without emotion. “We’re jumping off here and continuing our trek west. Sorry, folks, you’re on your own from here on out.”
The truck slowed to a stop, the engine trickling down to nothing, idling softly as the driver’s side window cranked down.
“All right, folks!” the driver shouted. “We’re getting off here, all right?”
Javier was already swinging his leg over the side of the truck, dropping down onto the road, then extended his arms to help Melinda follow him down. Broderick shouldered the heavy canvas bag and slipped over himself, hitting the road on the opposite side of the truck as Jackson and Clark made their way over the rear of t
he tailgate. Jackson’s own backpack thumped against his shoulders as he moved down onto the road, the hilt of the sword tapping him on the back of his head.
“Man, I’m surprised these boys even gave you a ride with that dang sword in your backpack,” Clark laughed.
“They probably admired my sense of style,” Jackson replied, throwing a wink at the older man.
“Guess that’s one way to approach it.”
The group collected on the side of the road, looking up toward the beat up, nearly ancient pickup truck and the driver nodded his head at them.
“Travel safe, okay?” he said. “Scary place out here these days.”
“Thanks for the ride,” Jackson replied.
The driver leaned out and glanced toward Melinda who stood shoulder-to-hip with Javier, not ever more than a few feet from him.
“Thank the kid,” the driver replied. “Only reason I stopped. Something tells me we won’t be seeing too many of them for a while.”
It was a thought that hadn’t occurred to Jackson before, and a thought that didn’t make him especially comfortable now. If this strange event was truly merciless and killed children as well as adults, could they be seeing the effective end of the human race? The numbers of survivors he’d run across had been painfully scarce. The eight or ten people standing together here combined with maybe twenty others he’d seen in the past forty-eight hours—was that indeed the ratio of survivors to the dead?
Even if the world wasn’t over here and now, Jackson had to wonder how long they had left, and what a potentially important role children—not to mention having more of them—could have going forward. Chills raced up his arms as he chewed that idea over in his head.
“Well, thanks. She appreciates it and I do, too,” he said, turning back toward the driver. On the other side of the pickup truck he could see more figures standing near the side of the road, a small grouping of hollowed faces glaring out at them, their eyes wide and blank, not looking at them, but through them into some deep darkness that none of them could see.
Not another word was spoken, the engine roared underneath the boxy hood of the pickup and it shot pebbles of gravel out from its rear tires as the narrow, rectangular vehicle jolted forward and continued on down the road, the orange blinker flicking on to indicate a right-hand turn, even though no one, alive or dead, really cared which way the truck was turning.
***
“I mean, you had to know it was coming, right?” Warrant Officer Tom Greenway angled his grip on the stick and let the rounded nose of the Little Bird MH-6 dip down as they approached the city, a skyline in shadows, blanketed by thick smoke and the continued orange glow of scattered fires.
“What? That we’d get sent to Boston? What the heck are we supposed to do?” Warrant Officer Linda Wexall asked from the co-pilot’s seat. They’d gotten the call at Chicopee a short time before and had immediately moved into action. With the chaos in Boston and surrounding New England states, Chicopee had been on active alert for two days. Several rescue aircraft had begun using it as a transfer and refueling station, coming and going to retrieve survivors, the numbers of which were startlingly low to everyone in active duty at the base. Each time a transport copter landed, they rushed out to assist, and each time, only a scattered few people stumbled from its open doors, skin blackened with smoke and soot, clothes often torn, some of them injured, but all of them with that same vacant stare. That stare that seemed to ask what they had just seen and what else might be soon to come? Questions that nobody in Chicopee had answers to.
They’d gotten the call from Fort Detrick, a distress call saying that one of their support aircraft, a Blackhawk, had gone down right in downtown Boston, swallowed by the flaming wreckage of the coastal city, their signal completely vanishing from the grid up until a few moments ago.
Greenway and Wexall had dispatched immediately, prepping the Little Bird to help escort a second Blackhawk to the crash site, operating in pairs to attempt to avoid the risk of losing yet another expensive aircraft and sacrificing critical lives when so many had been lost already.
“Not sure what they expect,” Greenway replied, “beyond confirmation of the downed bird and checking to see if there are any survivors.”
“Here’s a little hint,” Wexall replied, glancing over at the pilot. “There aren’t.”
“Certainly would seem that way,” he replied.
The rapid thwaps of rotors from both the Little Bird and the larger, heavier Blackhawk behind it were a constant presence as they spoke, slamming through the air as they approached the burning city.
“Good Lord,” Wexall muttered, looking back out the front window. It was like a Hollywood film, only being projected straight onto the curved windscreen of the cockpit rather than a movie screen. The city stretched out before them, its long, kidney-shaped thrust of tall buildings nearly decimated by two days of constant burning. Although it was far from evening, there was an encroaching darkness, smoke rising up toward the pale, gray sky, enveloping the sun and swimming across the horizon, casting a dull pallor over everything underneath. Tendrils of thick smoke connected the floating clouds with the wrecked cityscape below, an angry, gashed wound on the coast of America, smashed and broken, the remains set alight. As they flew in from the northwest they could see the huge gap in the row of tall buildings where the first aircraft had struck, the distinctive row of skyscrapers now obscured by blasted plumes of gray. Fires were slowly crawling up the cornered spines of the surrounding buildings, reaching toward the roof, consuming everything near the penthouse and below.
The streets themselves were nearly impossible to see through the thick, twisting clouds of smog, like ink-soaked cotton stretched long and wide above the shattered civilization.
“How many bodies do you think are down there?” Greenway asked as the smaller helicopter dipped low, approaching the city at its steady, if not swift, pace.
“I don’t even want to know,” Wexall replied. She clicked the radio on the console ahead of her. “Blackhawk, you still on target? We are approaching the city and things are looking hairy.”
“We are on your six and acknowledge. Will be switching to thermals to hopefully see beneath the smoke.”
“Do we have exact coordinates?” a second voice asked from the aircraft behind them.
“Affirmative,” Wexall replied. “Sending them over secure comms now.”
“Got it. Thanks, Little Bird.”
The small, egg-shaped aircraft banked right, moving deeper into the city as it lowered its altitude trying to get orientation to descend into the area south of Boston, near Quincy, where the Blackhawk had vanished from view. They could hear the distinct whine of turbines behind them signaling the larger aircraft following close on their tail.
As they descended, the smoke whipped away underneath their whirling rotors, and the streets below began to fade into unfortunate clarity. The Little Bird was still tipped at a right angle and Wexall could clearly see down to the streets below, and all she saw was destruction. A large passenger bus had collided with a pair of smaller vehicles crossing the road in front of it, twisting them all into a mangled mess of sheet metal, each vehicle nearly indistinguishable from the next. A few people had attempted to escape from the bus, but didn’t make it far, quickly overcome by whatever malady was hitting the population, as their bodies were slumped along the road and sidewalk, at least a dozen of them, just dropped and lying as if all spontaneously taking siesta. About a block to the south a police car was off the road and for a moment Wexall thought she could see the blue wobble of brightness coming from its rectangular light bar. The passenger door was open and a uniformed man had collapsed right there next to his car, still laying unmoving. The driver’s side door was still closed, and she could imagine the driver sitting upright in the seat, eyes vacant and chest still.
The streets were full of these sorts of scenes as they cruised along the west edge of the city, heading south toward their landing zone, and what struck Wexa
ll the most was that every single human being she saw down below was dead. She saw nothing moving:neither emergency vehicles, no frantic parents searching for their children, no hapless strangers coming together to assist in escaping the chaos. Death. Victims. Destruction. That’s all there was within Boston city limits.
Perhaps that was all there would ever be.
Coasting low and fast, the two aircraft cut through the smoke, angling toward Quincy, even more unsure than they had been when they took off.
***
It was a gold mine, pure and simple.
The man with the burnt face backed away, sliding himself free of the back seat of the Humvee, his hands clutching a thickly padded tactical vest. Four M4 rifles had already been neatly stacked, leaning on the vehicle near the rear, each one examined, with all ammunition successfully retrieved from the corpses of the three soldiers who had stumbled upon him.
One of them had called him “Scarface” and the name felt like it fit. His ruined face split into a narrow, lipless grin as he ran a soft hand over the left side of his mangled head, gently touching the raw and burned skin there, which was already starting to scab over in several places. The flesh was tender there, though less painful than he suspected it might be, considering he had no real medications or treatment beyond the burn blanket and the various items he’d acquired at the medical supply store.
He’d learned to live with pain. Learned to accept it and move on from it. One of the first things the Spetsnaz taught him was that pain was merely a frame of mind, and just like hunger, thirst, or the cravings of something sweet, it was something that could be overcome. Substituted for. Set aside with another sensation taking its place.
For Vasily Roserov that replacement sensation was harnessing that pain that he felt, sharpening it, focusing it, and turning it upon others. That’s what had worked for him his entire life, that’s what had helped him excel within Russian Special Forces, and that was one of the only things keeping him moving for the past two days. Every time the crisped flesh on his scalp seized, stabbing him with hot needle agony, he would draw that pain in and hold it inside, close an emotional fist around it and keep it there, just waiting to find someone he could give it to.