The Road to Hell- Sidney's Way

by Brian Parker

  “Yeah,” Jim agreed. “Indulge me. I talked to the CG’s aide before we came into the field. It’s the last number in the sat phone. General Bhagat is hiding the truth from us.” Sergeant Turner’s eyebrows shot up above his sunglasses. “Corporal Jones was right. The North Koreans and the Iranians have troops here in—” He had to stop as he retched, the taste of bile assaulting his mouth once more.

  “The Koreans and Iranians are here in the States,” Jim continued. “That was probably a MiG that Sergeant Chen saw.”

  “Are they behind the infection?”

  Jim shook his head. “Lieutenant MacArthur didn’t know that. He only said that there are foreign troops operating freely on US soil, part of a UN contingent, and that their nations hadn’t been affected by the infection. I think they may be behind all this, but… Well, that’s not my fight anymore.”

  “What am I supposed to do with this information, sir?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just… I just wanted someone else to know about it.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll think about it on the drive back to Fort Bliss.”

  Turner’s statement made Jim’s heart leap into his chest. He wouldn’t be making that return trip back to the base where his family was safe behind the walls. “There’s one more thing.”

  Sergeant Turner sighed, obviously done talking to the dying colonel. “What is it, sir?” There was a half-hearted scream of frustration from an infected nearby that was cut short by the muffled report of a rifle.

  “Bhagat sent Lieutenant Murphy to the refugee camp on purpose. He wanted another riot that would reduce the population. I don’t think he meant for it to be as bad as it was—especially not the burning of the food storage facility—but it was a calculated move. Don’t trust him.”

  Sergeant Turner shook his head. “Fucking officers. Goddammit, what the hell?” He stopped and appeared to refocus on Jim. “You knew about that, too?”

  “After the fact, yeah.”

  “And you kept it secret. The lieutenant was right. All of this…” He composed himself and set his jaw.

  “I’ve been working through it on the trip up here,” Jim said. “I think that’s why Bhagat is so fired up for us to get Murphy. He’s the only one left who can say that putting him down in that refugee camp was meant to start a riot—well, after me, but, you know… Bhagat doesn’t want any loose ends.”

  “Come on, sir. Feeling sorry for yourself ain’t gonna change a damn thing. We have a mission to complete.”

  Jim agreed. He’d let Bhagat manipulate that kid—he’d even been the one to deliver the sentence. It wasn’t right. Bringing in Lieutenant Murphy unharmed just got a whole lot more important in his mind. If they could bring down Bhagat and get the word out about the Iranians and North Koreans, then maybe the people at Fort Bliss would have a chance at survival.

  The colonel rolled onto his stomach and began to crawl forward once more. Behind him, he could hear Sergeant Turner following close by. The discomfort of doing a high crawl as a forty-six year old man that Jim had experienced before was dulled. He felt the pain, but more than anything, he felt a burning desire to be near his wife and kids one more time. He wouldn’t get it. Depending on how quickly his body reacted to the infection, he’d be dead somewhere in the next twelve to twenty-four hours.

  The life of a fucking soldier.

  It took less than ten minutes for all of Jim’s dismounts to arrive at the edge of the cornfield. Out of the close confines of the cornrows, the snow swirled in a beautiful arc across his vision. He’d always loved the snow.

  Jim looked through a small pair of binoculars that he’d bought for hunting originally, but always took them with him to the field because they folded and fit into a pouch on his tactical vest. The farmhouse appeared abandoned.

  Several decomposing corpses littered the gravel driveway leading to the two-story white farmhouse. The front door was open and what looked to be about a hundred large-caliber bullet holes riddled the building’s exterior, beginning on the first floor and then concentrated around a window on the second floor. “Looks like Murphy shot up the place with the Stryker’s .50 cal,” Jim whispered to Sergeant Turner beside him.

  “Ten-to-one there was a sniper in that room upstairs,” the sergeant replied.

  Jim continued to scan the area. Two rows of fencing guarded a pathway from the house to a large, faded red barn with an old grain silo next to it. From his vantage point, it looked like all the doors on the barn were closed. Directly outside the barn was a horse trailer filled with bodies. Arms and heads stuck through the openings in the trailer’s sides. None of them were moving.

  “What the fuck is that?” Jim muttered, attempting to hand the binoculars to the NCO, who declined. “Oh yeah,” he replied, remembering that the bloody vomit was still on his face.

  “Looks like somebody captured a whole bunch of infected in that trailer, then left ’em to starve,” Sergeant Turner said.

  Another rifle report reminded Jim that they needed to move. “I think this place is abandoned.”

  “Looks like it. We gonna check it out or just go back to the trucks?”

  Jim didn’t answer. Instead, he pushed himself to his feet and staggered onto the gravel. His knees protested the movement after crawling for so long, but he willed himself forward. He heard the crunch of more gravel behind him as the others followed his lead.

  Not far off the road leading to the farm, one of the soldiers found a scattering of spent .50 caliber casings in the snow, confirming Jim’s assumption about Murphy lighting the place up with the Stryker. But why?

  He supposed he’d never know. He advanced on the house rapidly, stepping on the old wooden porch steps as lightly as possible. Jim didn’t have anything to fear, he was already a dead man, so he entered the house.

  More bodies inside told him of a fight through the house. These were mostly nude or covered in a small tattering of fabric, meaning they were the infected. A kitchen to the left of the foyer was empty, so he went back across the hall to a bedroom. There, the remains of a very fat body with giant holes in its chest and abdomen told him the Stryker had killed him—or her, he supposed. It was difficult to tell.

  Jim heard his soldiers searching the back of the house, so he left the bedroom and went up the stairs. At the top, immediately to the left was the room that had been hit by the .50 cal. He walked in and found a man with two or three small caliber bullet holes in his upper body and massive damage to his legs. He guessed the .50 cal had hit the guy low and then someone came in to finish the job.

  Jim used the end of his rifle to lift the man’s head from his shoulders, turning it so he could see the face. It wasn’t Lieutenant Murphy. Besides all the infected, there were two bodies inside the farmhouse, neither of which were the lieutenant. What had he been doing here?

  A quick search of the upstairs yielded nothing so he walked back down to the first floor. He endured several uneasy glances from the soldiers he found there, which he ignored and tried to assure them with a confident smile. Walking toward the back of the house, he met Sergeant Turner returning down the fence line from the barn.

  “Anything?”

  “We found a lot of weird homemade shit that looks like they were torturing people. Can’t tell if it was infected or non-infected, though.”

  “Any clues about Lieutenant Murphy or the soldiers with him?”

  “Not a damned thing, sir. They hit this house, wiped everyone out and then took off. No idea where to.”

  Jim grunted in frustration. He looked through the windows toward the cornfield beyond the barn as Sergeant Turner called the trucks on his radio to bring them up.

  They hadn’t found Murphy or the other soldiers. There was no Stryker hidden in the barn. They didn’t even know where Murphy had gone after getting into the firefight here.

  It was all for nothing. He’d been given a death sentence, for nothing. Such was the life of a fucking soldier.

  10

  * * *


  NEAR LIBERAL, KANSAS

  FEBRUARY 12TH

  Jake plodded along behind the girls and Mark, taking up the rear of their small group. The way he’d come from the farm, directly up Hatcher Road, was blocked by a large group of infected. They seemed to be pretty worked up about something, but the small group of survivors had no idea what it could have been, so Sally suggested they swing out onto Highway 54, head south for about two miles and then take one of the side roads north toward the Campbell’s farm.

  He’d agreed since he didn’t know the area nearly as well as she did. He’d gained most of his knowledge outside the farm’s immediate surroundings through map reconnaissance. Sally had spent almost every summer in the town. He had to trust that she knew a few ways home that he didn’t.

  He glanced over his shoulder once again, checking the road behind them for any signs that they’d picked up a trail. As he started to turn around, something caught his eye to the south. Jake stopped and stared. There was a plane—two planes!—flying toward them on the horizon.

  “Hey, guys, look!” he called, pointing toward the aircraft.

  The others turned to where he pointed as the shape of the planes became clearer. Jake had seen the jets from Holloman Air Force Base flying attack missions around El Paso for months, but he’d never seen anything like the ones coming toward them. Now he knew why the infected in town were all riled up.

  Something in the back of his brain screamed out to him in warning.

  Jake shouted, “Get down!” Now was not the time to whisper like they always did when they were outside. He threw himself off the road, landing in the ditch. The others hesitated for a moment before following suit.

  “What is it?” Sidney asked. “Are you afraid they’re going to try to—”

  The roar of jet engines cut her off as they passed overhead, less than a hundred feet above them. Jake looked up, there was a flag that he didn’t recognize and what appeared to be the depiction of an explosion painted in red on the tail of the second aircraft. That’s not good, he thought.

  He stood and looked northward in the direction the planes had gone. They split apart and then circled back around. “Oh shit, guys. I think they saw us,” he said.

  “Then maybe we’re saved?” Sally offered.

  “Get back down,” Jake ordered. “Those aren’t US aircraft.”

  “What do you mean?” Sidney asked. “Why wouldn’t they be US warplanes?”

  The planes passed overhead once again. This time, one of them continued southward while the other turned only a short distance away. Jake watched in horror as it lined up on them. They were sitting ducks in the ditch. A strafing run from above on their position would kill them all instantly. Jake turned, frantically searching for some type of cover, but there was none.

  Before he could turn back, the plane passed overhead, lower this time than it had been before. He slid his hands up under his helmet and clamped them over his ears. It was so loud that he thought his brain would burst.

  Then it was past them and the sound of the engine changed. Jake risked a glance to the north and saw the jet continuing lower with its landing gear down. “That thing’s landing,” he told the others.

  “Jake, what’s going on?” Sidney asked.

  He glanced at the girls, then at Mark. “I don’t know, but I have to find out.”

  “What do you mean you have to find out?” Sally asked, bewildered.

  “I have to find out why there are Chinese or Russian—” He stopped. That wasn’t right, the old Soviets had used a red star, but the Russians had their flag painted on the tail fins of their jets, he’d learned that at the Infantry Officers’ Basic Course. The red starburst emblem that he’d seen was odd. “I don’t know who they are, to be honest. But they aren’t American, that’s for sure. I need to go to that airport to figure it out.”

  “Even if you do, what good is it gonna do us?” Sally pressed.

  The second jet roared overhead along the same path that the first had taken, causing the four of them to duck lower into the ground once more. When it was past them, Jake said, “If it’s something completely crazy, I can always call the Army back in El Paso. I have all the commo equipment in the Stryker turned off and unplugged, but it won’t take long to turn it all on and get in contact with somebody to tell them what I saw.”

  “Jake, you’re not a soldier anymore,” Sidney reminded him. “You don’t—”

  “I may have turned my back on the Army because they were completely fucking wrong in what they were doing, but my oath to the nation will never expire. There is no reason, and I mean like zero, that a couple of foreign jets should be flying over Oklahoma and then landing at a local airport.”

  Sidney studied his face for a moment and then nodded. “There’s no talking you out of this, is there?”

  “No, so don’t even try.”

  She held up her hands, letting the M-4 dangle on its sling across her chest. “I’m not trying to convince you otherwise, Jake.”

  “Good,” he replied, lifting the duffle bag’s strap over his head and letting it fall into the snow. “Do you guys think you can carry these two bags?” The large backpack tumbled to the ground as well, hitting the duffle and falling sideways. It made more noise than Jake had intended.

  “What do you mean?” Sally interjected. “We came to get you. We’re not gonna just let you go off by yourself.”

  Jake ground his teeth in frustration. “Thank you for helping me out of the grocery store. This is entirely different. I need to do a military-style recon so I can observe without being seen. Having three additional bodies is not going to help.”

  “Hey, man. I don’t want to go,” Mark said. “I was comfortable in my little Walmart and then you came along, telling me about all the nice stuff that your group has on the farm. Now I want to go there, not running all over the countryside with the loonies chasing after me.”

  Jake nodded. “Okay, so that makes it easy then. You girls take Mark to the farm and I’ll run up to the airport for a quick look, then come home after I figure out who the heck they are.”

  “No way,” Sidney replied. “You need somebody watching your back.”

  I can’t believe I’m dealing with this, Jake thought. The others didn’t need to be out here any longer. “What I need is for you to go back to the farm and let me do what I’ve been trained to do. I’m an Army Ranger. I’ve been trained to sneak around without being seen.”

  “Fat lot of good that did you back at the Neighborhood Market,” Sally scoffed.

  He grinned. “I deserved that. Please, Sidney, go back to the farm with Mark and all these supplies that we picked up for Lincoln. The three of you can be back in less than an hour. I’m only gonna go up to the airport, snoop around a bit from a distance, and then head back home. Should only be a couple of hours behind you.”

  “Jake, please…” Sidney started and then stopped. Jake wasn’t really sure where they were in their friendship anymore. He was clearly with Carmen, but at the same time, there was an undeniable attraction between him and Sidney. Hell, she’d left her baby at the farm to come and rescue him; clearly there was more than just friendship there.

  “Sidney, I’ll be safe,” he assured her. “Any sign of trouble and I’ll fade into the fields.”

  The two women exchanged glances, both staring at one another for a long moment before Sidney finally broke eye contact. She nodded and said, “Damn you, Jake. You better keep yourself hidden. Find out whatever it is that you need to know so badly and then get the hell out of there. Do you hear me?”

  “Yeah, I— Hey!” She surprised him by wrapping her arms around him. He hugged her back until she pushed him away.

  “Get going,” Sidney said. “We’ve been standing here too long and need to get moving.”

  He gave Sally a quick hug, then shook Mark’s hand. “Listen to these two. They’re survivors, like you. They know a thing or two about the infected and what to do out here in the open that you didn’t lea
rn from dealing with them while you were holed up. Okay?”

  “Yeah, of course, Jake,” the boy replied. “Take care of yourself, alright?”

  “Yeah,” Jake replied, looking beyond Mark to Sidney. She’d turned her body and stared intently southwest along the length of the road they’d followed. “Don’t forget these two bags,” he said to the three of them. “That’s why we’re out here. See everyone in a couple of hours.”

  He didn’t wait for any more conversation. Instead, he turned back the way they’d come and headed toward the last road they’d passed. He knew from the sign before the exit that it led to the airport, so all he had to do was follow that for a ways before slipping into the fields alongside the road a half mile or so from the airport. Then, he’d figure out what to do based on what he saw there.

  In all likelihood, he’d mistaken the star on the tail fin as they flew by overhead and it was a couple of US Air Force guys trying to refuel their jets. But if it wasn’t, then he wasn’t sure what he’d do.

  One thing he did know: He was a Ranger, and the Regiment’s motto was Sua Sponte, which was Latin for ‘Of their own accord’. He was the only man on the ground here and it was his responsibility to determine if there was a threat to the United States by a foreign power. If they were a threat, then he’d have to stop them the same way he stopped the infected. Permanently.

  “Rangers lead the way,” he whispered to himself, tightening his grip on the rifle. “Sua fucking Sponte.”

  11

  * * *

  NEAR LIBERAL, KANSAS

  FEBRUARY 12TH

  Jake picked his way around the wreckage of a plane. The medium-sized aircraft must have crashed on approach or take off. He wasn’t an aviation guy, but it looked like it was one of those commuter planes that transport passengers from the small regional airports like the one here in Liberal to the larger hubs. He saw several skeletons, picked clean by nature after so many months and wondered briefly who any of them had been.