by Kuhn, Steve
Lilly pouted slightly and replied, “It’s just that there’s so much going on, and any one of us can die any second. I just miss you, and I don’t know what I’d do without you. I guess, I just got scared because I got to see what it feels like not having you guys around.”
Kylee frowned. She understood what Lilly was driving at, and neither of us had given any of it a second thought. Now, here we were faced with this perfect, precocious, little girl spilling her feelings, and it felt really shitty. I felt guilty. I felt sorry, too. I got down on one knee, feeling myself wince at the stiffness in my joints, and locked eyes with Lilly. I told her, “That’s all you had to say, Lil. No one will get mad at you for feeling the way you’re feeling as long as you express it with a mind to get it fixed. You’re right that any one of us could be dead and gone in an instant. That’s why it’s important to tell us things like this immediately instead of bottling it up inside and holding a grudge. People are always gonna have arguments and fights, but now more than ever, it’s important to keep the slate clean. You never know if you’ll get the chance to make it right, and you don’t want to carry that around with you forever if one of us doesn’t make it. Please, always remember that.”
She wiped her nose and hugged me. It felt good to put that to rest, and I think Kylee felt the same way. We shared a quiet stare that told me we were going to do better, and that was the end of it.
Even without binoculars, I could see that this city was slightly smaller than the last, but the buildings were taller. It looked like it was more of a commerce center than a bustling city in the days of the living. The glass-faced skyscrapers reflected the afternoon sun, and the whole thing glittered. It was a stark contrast to the fetid smell in the air.
Hicks approached us, tugging at his belt like he had just gotten finished droppin’ a deuce, and said, “Good news is that it looks quiet. Bad news is that we can’t have any overhead cover because the Goddamn structures are so tall. No way in hell we’re clearing buildings just to post snipers in the upper floors. We’re gonna have to drive through and hope for the best.” He spat on the ground and observed, “Damn, kid, you look like shit.”
I waved him off, saying, “No biggie. Just a little off my game.”
He huffed and said flatly, “Well, you better get back on your game sooner rather than later, savvy? Maybe if you two weren’t spendin’ your nights humpin’ like a couple of epileptic rabbits with the hiccups, you wouldn’t be such a mess.”
“I’ll be fine.”
I am a little worried, though. My head still feels like it’s getting stuck with hot pokers, and even though the sore throat has passed, my mouth tastes horrible and bitter. No fever or anything, so I’m not panicking yet, but if I find out I caught the flu or some shit, I’m gonna be pissed. Trying to stay ahead of the symptoms, I popped some Advil we had stashed in the trailer and told Parker how I was feeling.
He confirmed I had no fever and told me, “Unless you spike one, you’re just gonna have to deal. Jesus, I got seventeen men complaining of everything from bad knees, ankle sprains, and back spasms to runny noses and a wicked case of blue balls. Quit bein’ a pussy.”
That was the end of that.
We put Lilly up on top of D-Prime with Boyd as we made our way into the city. I told her, “You wanna fight. I understand that. All I ask is that you do it from up there.” She agreed without hesitation and slid the bolt of her rifle forward to chamber a round. She knelt next to Boyd and patted him on the back, saying, “You an’ me, Boyd! Let’s crack some heads today.”
With the caravan of vehicles following behind D-Prime, Hicks had a unit of about fifteen men on the ground, marching patrol-style in between the last two vehicles. They could be seen hacking up a few bernies that wandered towards the vehicles as we entered into the main gut of the city.
Unexpectedly, one of the Hummers bumped up on top of one of the bodies, a big, fat bernie with old, rotted bullet wounds all over its torso, and got stuck. The wheels made a high-pitched whizzing sound as the driver tried to break it free, and a couple of the guys on the ground sat on the hood and stood on the running boards in hopes of adding extra weight to get the wheels gripping again. After a few pumps on the gas pedal, the Hummer lurched forward, but one of the guys on the hood fell off. He shrieked as his legs were crushed under the tires, crying out, “Ahh, fuck! Get it offa me! Get it off!”
The panicked driver backed up slightly, and a couple of guys dragged the wounded man clear. We exited the vehicles to check out the situation with a number of guys spreading out to cover us.
The dead came. They poured in from the side streets in tight packs, clamoring to feed as the guy continued to yelp in pain. It was like they were there the entire time, just tucked away in sleep mode in every nook and cranny of the city, hiding and waiting.
The marine’s legs were both badly broken. Shards of bone had torn through his skin and now poked through his fatigues as Parker hurried and cut away the material to assess the wounds further. Parker snapped at us, “Get him up and inside the trailer, now! We gotta get outta here!”
I reached down to help him up, but I aborted the motion midway through because Seth’s gauntlet shot past my head. It thudded into the face of a bernie I didn’t even know was there right behind me. Seth popped into my view, his bad arm slung tightly to his chest, as he shook the gauntlet off. It clanged to the ground, but not before he had his pistol drawn. He winked at me and popped two rounds into the face of another geek, shouting, “Run, Dext! This guy’s had it!”
The injured man looked to the sky as the bernies fell upon both him and Parker. I heard Parker’s gurgling as one of the dead chomped into his throat with an evil snarl. It raised its head to pull away his flesh, and its neck was bathed in the spurting, arterial blood that spewed forth from Parker. He likely bled out in seconds. The man on the ground was even less fortunate as they set in on his legs first. As more joined in, they began tearing out his organs and struggling over them in a macabre tug-of-war.
The gunfire started. I jetted past Hicks and Big Stank towards D-Prime as the bernies closed in around me. Boyd and Lilly were now on their feet on top of the trailer, and they were working in tandem. Boyd fired down to my left, exploding the head of one of the pack, spraying me with all manner of filth, then Lilly fired her shot as Boyd ejected his casing to chamber the next round. Her shot found its home in the face of a geek that was just inches from Nick.
Nick called out to her, “Nice shot, Lil!”
She yelled back to him as she ejected her empty casing, “Got yer back, Jack! Get Seth!”
I made it to the trailer and scrambled up to join Lilly and Boyd. Kylee was hanging out of the cab’s window, popping off rounds left and right, cussing with each shot, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
I shouted to Nick as I drew my pistol, “He’s in trouble! We’ll cover you!”
The dead were everywhere now, mingled in amongst the marines in a vicious firefight, and Seth was in the shit. He was entirely surrounded, but he never stopped fighting. He blasted them, one after another, but every time one fell to the ground, another took its place. He was only ten yards away, but it may as well have been a mile.
Nick sprinted to him, kicking one aside, then reached down and scooped up the gauntlet. Just as one opened its mouth to take a bite out of Seth, Nick jammed the gauntlet into its gaping maw, shattering its teeth and blocking the attack. Seth cried out as he desperately tried the one-handed reload. His magazine tumbled to the ground uselessly once again. “I’m out, I’m out!”
Nick and Seth stood back to back as the bernies closed in on them. Nick snapped over his shoulder at Seth, “Stay still, asshole!” He reached into his belt and grabbed a spare mag then no-looked that bitch behind his back, sliding it into Seth’s weapon for him like a boss! Seth thumbed the slide release and started firing again.
Up on the trailer, Lilly, Boyd, and I lost all semblance of order and began unloading into the crowd surrounding the hit men.
We were on point, though, and swiftly cut them a path back to us. Nick and Seth dashed in our direction with bernies in hot pursuit. Boyd and I dragged Nick up once he got a foothold on D-Prime’s rear tire, and then I reached for Seth to follow. As we pulled him up by his good arm, one of the dead grabbed onto his boot, and we began fighting over him.
Thunk!
Lilly’s knife tumbled end over end and found its home in the eye socket of the offending bernie. It slumped to the ground, releasing Seth, allowing us to pull him up the rest of the way.
Kylee gunned the engine, and we started off down the street and out of the city. Boyd lay prone, taking aim off in the distance behind the vehicles full of the remains of Kilo Company. Nick touched his shoulder and said, “Don’t waste the ammo, Boyd. We made it.”
Boom!
Boyd took his final shot and said sadly, “C-couldn’t leave him like that. P-P-Parker… I liked P-Parker.”
He must’ve turned.
Two cities down. Our numbers are nearly halved now, and I’m sure our ammo situation just got even shittier. Our medic is dead, so hopefully Big Stank can step up and take over. He’s no Parker, but Seth says he did a helluva job assisting with the bullet hole in his arm back at the field. We’ll have to see. To top it all off, now that the adrenalin has eased from my body, I’m able to feel the full effect of whatever it is I have going on. I’m sweating like a pig, but I’m shivering.
I’m scared…
Entry 162
The Dead Sea—I’ll be among them soon. I figured it out. I probably should’ve known when the first signs started to show, but I think I may have talked myself out of it—denial. Like the initial reaction of finding out your illness is terminal, you refuse to believe there isn’t a cure. It takes time to settle into your mind. The infection took its time to settle into me just the same.
I felt numbness in my neck where Kylee had bitten me, so I checked it out in the rearview mirror. There was no mistaking the blue-black bruising that surrounded the marks or the snaking trails of the capillaries turning dark and spider-webbing their way out from the wound. It was a wound now after all. What was once a playful nibble had opened slightly at every mark of her teeth, and it oozed an orange-ish, cloudy fluid that stunk of dying tissue. Kylee infected me…
I don’t know how, nor do I know the science behind it, nor do I even care anymore. I’m dying…
I’m dying.
I suppose it was inevitable. I made it farther than I ever should have. If I had to bet on who the survivors would be, I would have counted myself out a long time ago anyway. But to go like this, though? This is shitty. Finally, after everything we’ve seen and done, Kylee and I found happiness with one another, and that’s precisely what killed me. I say that in the past tense because I died the moment she bit me. I always thought I’d get torn apart or shot up somehow. Never in a million years would I have thought that the one who was with me through everything would be my undoing.
I hate to say, I told you so, but I did. I said that love would be the death of me, and now it has come to pass. Damn shame, too, because I was hoping to see Lilly grow up. I wanted more than anything to see that little girl find safety and security, to grow up and rediscover her innocence. Goddammit! This is such bullshit! Now I’m just getting fuckin’ pissed off. This piece-of-shit fever isn’t helping me see any more clearly either. I snuck into Parker’s old medical bag and found a thermometer. I’m almost at 104 degrees. Much more and I’ll burn out like a light bulb.
I had to tell her. I didn’t want to, obviously, because I didn’t want her to have to feel guilty or responsible. I knew that’s how she’d take it. She’d cry and tell me she was sorry, and then she’d have to carry her guilt for the rest of her life, regardless of how long or short it may be. And that’s exactly what happened when I confessed to her. I’m not writing that conversation here—not just because time is short, but also because what was spoken between me and Kylee today isn’t really any of your business. But she had to know. She’s really the only one who would respect my wishes anyway. If anyone else found out, they’d surely kill me on the spot. I have to see this through to the end. I’m going to try to fight it for as long as I possibly can, and when I lose the fight, Kylee knows what to do.
We were perched atop a high ridge, looking down into the sea of the dead after having climbed for an hour or so. I felt like shit. Every step shot needles into my limbs and made my head throb. I was going through water more than anyone else, and it was tricky to keep my canteen to myself when the others were passing them around freely. I couldn’t risk sharing with them, though.
Boyd peered through his scope as he knelt next to Hicks, surveying the situation. The valley bottlenecked just as Hicks described it, and the dead were thick, probably numbering upwards of a thousand. The valley kept them packed tightly, as it was only about fifty yards across at the widest point. Most were in sleep mode, standing completely still or lying down, but about a third of them remained shuffling aimlessly. It’s scarier when they’re like that. It means they’re hungry. See, when the dead are feeding, they’re in a zone, and it almost takes something drastic to pull their attention away. When they’re like this, though, they’re voracious and violent at the first sign of life.
Hicks spat on the ground and whispered, “Any bright ideas? Sound them off now.”
Boyd just shook his head and looked to me and Kylee. “I g-got n-nothin’.”
Kylee pursed her lips and put her hand on her hip, saying, “Wish we had some sort of explosives left. Maybe we could’ve blown a path right through it.”
Smirking devilishly, Boyd quipped, “You’ve done enough b-blowing lately.” She flipped him off while Seth and Nick chuckled to themselves.
Hicks called for a retreat back to the vehicles, and I spent the next hour pretty much sliding down hills of dirt and gravel. When we got back to the others, Boyd had a stroke of genius.
“Carlos N-Norman Hathcock! That’s th-the answer!”
We stared at him blankly. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. Some of the other snipers knew what was up immediately, though. They nodded thoughtfully.
Seth rolled his eyes at Boyd for leaving us hanging and said, “Sooooo… you wanna fill us in?”
Boyd started stammering through an explanation, but Hicks cut him off, saying, “Just stop it, ya stutterin’ prick. I’ll explain it. We ain’t got all Goddamn day.” He told us, “Gunny, they called him, though the gooks called him Long Trang du Kich. It means the ‘White Feather Sniper.’ Back in Nam he was known for wearing a white feather in his cover, and at the time he held the record at ninety-three confirmed kills, which is bullshit, by the way. He probably killed over three hundred Charlies on his own. He also held the record for the longest kill shot up until the Afghanistan and Iraq shit, but our snipers have much better technology these days, so that’s comparing apples to oranges. He’s a fuckin’ legend. They say he once killed an enemy sniper with a shot directly into his eye, through his fuckin’ scope, and I don’t wanna hear that MythBusters shit. It fuckin’ happened!”
Seth looked slightly impressed and offered, “Okay. So, he was a bad motherfucker. What’s he got to do with us?”
One of the other snipers who had already put two and two together explained further, “One time, Gunny took a mission to kill a NVA general behind enemy lines. Fuckin’ guy was in a compound and heavily guarded. Ol’ Gunny strapped up his ghillie suit and crawled inch by inch across the compound to get the shot. He almost got stepped on by the guards at one point and nearly got bitten by a viper, too. Took him four days and three nights without sleep to slip in close enough for the shot. He killed that son of a bitch and crawled right back out like he was never there. Tough bastard!”
Seth listened intently, but it was Nick who spoke up. “So, Boyd’s suggesting we camouflage ourselves and crawl through a thousand jerks? Like hell!” He shook his head incredulously.
Boyd snapped, “No! That’s n-not what I’m
s-sayin’. How m-much det cord we g-g-got left?” He turned to Hicks for an answer.
Hicks spat on the ground and told us, “We got det cord for miles. It’s that high-impact shit, too, but we ain’t got shit left when it comes to big booms.”
Boyd nodded.
Big Stank went on to explain that det cord, or detonation cord, was this stuff that they used to set off multiple charges at once. Apparently, it was kind of like a big, explosive fuse—exploding cord, more or less. Back in Iraq, the engineers found that they could line the high-impact stuff across a minefield, and once it detonated, it would clear a slice where they could pass the vehicles straight through. It was beginning to make sense, especially since the stuff Hicks had on hand was powerful enough to take down small trees on its own, without any extra explosives wired to it. Surely it could decimate some half-rotten corpses.
Hicks asked the obvious question, “So, which of you crazy fuckers is gonna be the one to string that shit to the other side?”
Boyd was the only one to speak. “M-me. I’ll d-do it.”
Hicks nodded, impressed. “Never thought you’d have the balls, Boyd. I’m shocked.”
There wasn’t a single person who was gonna argue with Boyd on this one, I promise you.
We decided to double up the cord, just to make sure we did enough damage, and tied it to his ankle using some climbing rope. The idea was that he would pull a Hathcock and drag it behind him, inch by inch through the dead, and once on the other side of the valley, detach it from his leg, pop smoke to signal he was clear of the blast, and then Hicks would blow the cord. (How’s that for a run-on sentence, you fuckin’ grammar Nazis? Suck it!) Anyway, if it worked, we’d have sliced a path down the entire valley, killing almost every bernie simultaneously with the concussion alone.