by D. J. Molles
CHAPTER 12: RUMORS
Timber Creek seemed much smaller now. Staring out at the condominium complex from where his little truck idled at the front gates, Harper remembered how it felt the first time he’d come there to scavenge. At that time, with nothing but a few weapons to split amongst everyone, a handful of cartridges, and relying heavily on Molotov cocktails, this place had seemed like an entire world of danger.
Now the burned out buildings seemed small and familiar, like he knew every charred brick, every gutted car, and every broken piece of concrete that littered the complex. He’d been here so many times even before his first encounter with Captain Lee Harden. He remembered the man, exhausted, weaponless, blood running down his back from multiple lacerations.
Harper smiled grimly.
He remembered he’d told him to get lost…among other things.
Over the past three months, they’d been there many times more. It was Lee’s preferred spot to take them for putting some rounds down range and to practice their squad tactics. And now Harper was here with the twenty volunteers from Camp Ryder.
To train them, apparently.
Harper had no idea how to train people into a working unit, so he did exactly what he remembered Lee doing: sweep the complex for infected, split everyone into two groups, instruct one group while the other watches your back.
The first ten lined up, facing one of the long brick condominium buildings. Harper took a roll of duct tape and pasted ten crosses at chest height, at even intervals along the wall. One for each trainee. Then he paced them back about fifteen yards.
As he did this, he noticed the almost military rigidity of the trainees and it pissed him off a bit.
He was no firearms expert. And he sure as hell wasn’t a drill instructor. He didn’t know what these people anticipated when he told them he would be training them, but it wasn’t going to be any crawling under barbed wire fences and bullshit like that. As far as Harper was concerned, that was great for what Lee referred to as “stress-inoculation,” when you were trying to get Johnny Dough-Boy out of his comfort zone. But all of these people were already inoculated to stress in the worst way, and the proof of it was that they were still alive.
He crossed his arms. “Everyone relax,” he grouched. “You’ve all learned the basics of how to work and sight your rifle—stance, grip, trigger pull, good sight picture and sight alignment. Take your time. Put ten rounds in your target.”
He stepped back and waited.
It took everyone a moment to realize there weren’t any more instructions.
Then they shouldered their rifles and began sighting in at the duct tape crosses staring back at them. The first fusillade rang out, always the loudest. It started with a single shot then grew to a crescendo as everyone joined in. It tapered off and began to take a steadier pace, as each trainee found their own rhythm.
When ten rounds had been fired, Harper walked behind them and took a glance at their targets. Not bad shooting, overall. Of course there were a few people that needed help, but there were a few people who had punched the entire center of their target out.
“Again,” he called.
Ten more rounds fired out, slow and deliberate.
When they were finished, Harper re-taped the crosses and faced the trainees with a furrowed brow. They stared at him expectantly, rigidly, as though this were some intense military training. He didn’t know why that bothered him, but it did, and he needed to say something about it.
“Look…let’s get something out of the way here early on,” he said. “Captain Harden asked me to train you folks how to work as a team, and how to shoot those firearms he gave you during combat. I’m not a soldier. I’m not a professional instructor. Captain Harden asked me to do something, and I’m doing it.”
He twirled the roll of duct tape in his hands. “I’m not going to yell at any of you. There’s not going to be any PT, or punishment. This isn’t boot camp. You’ve already been through boot camp. It was called ‘surviving the end of the world’.”
There was a brief moment of laughter and the tension eased, slightly.
“I’m going to try to impart to you a little bit of what I’ve experienced,” he said, feeling a little more comfortable as the people surrounding him began to relax. “When I put in my two cents, some of you may already know what I have to say. That’s fine. Hear me out anyways. I’m not going to act like I’ve been through more shit than you, because we’ve all been through enough in our own separate ways. At the end of this, there’s no promotions, no honors, no awards. You’ll just hopefully be a little more prepared for what’s coming. And that little bit might be the difference, right?”
The trainees rumbled in agreement.
“On that note,” Harper rubbed his beard. “Does anyone have any questions?”
The small crowd looked side to side at each other, assessing how open their companions were to asking questions. It didn’t seem like anybody was in an inquisitive mood, but then a younger guy stepped forward and raised his hand. He was a mousy looking kid, with red-flushed cheeks and shifty, nervous eyes.
“Yeah,” Harper gestured to him. “What’s up?”
The kid looked unsure of himself. “Do you think we’ll have to shoot other people? Like…real people?”
“Non-infected?” Harper ventured.
“Yes.” The kid glanced around at his peers. “You’ve done it before, right?”
Harper considered this. “What are you getting at?”
“Well, I think most of us have had to kill crazies before.” He shifted his weight. “But I don’t think many of us have had to shoot at real people. Do you think we’ll have to do that?”
The rest of the trainees were looking at the kid uncomfortably, as though they weren’t sure whether to tell him to shut up or not, but there was also the sense that most of them had the same question: were they capable of killing a non-infected human being?
“There’s no difference.” Harper said steadily. As the words left his mouth, he wondered whether they were true or not. He remembered the young man at the roadblock when he’d gone with Lee to his first bunker. Back when Doc and Josh and Miller were alive. He remembered putting that rusted, pitted bayonet blade through the kid’s stomach and firing the rifle. He remembered the screams, remembered the feeling of absolute revulsion. Could he tell others about that? Could he tell these volunteers, when he hadn’t spoken of it since?
The kid looked confused. “Sure there’s a difference…”
“No difference,” Harper said sternly. “The only difference is in your perception. Those people infected with FURY, they aren’t another species. They’re not animals. They’re human beings. And I don’t care whether a human being is in their right mind or their brain looks like Swiss cheese, if they’re trying to kill me, I’m gonna rip their goddamn heart out if I have to.
“The fact is, you may come into contact with normal human beings that want to hurt you, want to kill you, and want to kill your teammates. You need to decide right now whether you can pull the trigger on one of those people. Because in the middle of a shootout is not the time to discover that you can’t do it.” Harper looked at them all. “And there ain’t no shame in it. What’s a shame is lying to yourself and then making your team pay for it.
“You want me to tell you what to expect?” He shook his head. “I can’t do that. It’s different for every person. Some people feel guilt, some people feel elated, some people feel nothing at all. Just depends on the person. If you decide that you can kill a person, and if that opportunity presents itself and you take someone out, my advice would be to not make a big deal about it. Don’t dwell on it. People have been killing people for thousands of years, and only recently has our society decided that killing another person mentally destroys you. You hear that crap enough times, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.” He pointed at the kid. “You gotta kill a man, maybe you gotta kill a girl…you do it and you get it over with. Ain’t no need to mourn
‘em or think about them afterwards. And that’s all I’m gonna say about that.”
That seemed to end it.
No one left.
Apparently they had all decided they were capable of killing a sane human being. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. It wasn’t for Harper to determine. He just wanted them to shut up, shoot straight, and learn how to cooperate with each other.
When he’d cycled all twenty through the warm-up, he had them take a quick sweep of the complex again to make sure nothing had been drawn in by the sound of gunfire. While they cleared the area, he re-taped the targets again. The brick siding was looking ragged and pockmarked. Holes were punched through completely in places.
When they returned, Harper was holding his own rifle.
“What we’re gonna do next is some ‘point-shooting’ or ‘snap-shooting’.” He turned so the trainees were on his right. “Having a good sight picture and sight alignment is great, but in all likelihood, when you are in a combat situation, either a shootout with non-infected, or being overrun by a pack, you won’t have the time or the presence of mind to look through those tiny little sights and squeeze off a perfectly aimed shot. Instead, you’ll shoot instinctively.”
He motioned for the mousy kid to step forward. “It’s Devon, right?” Harper recalled.
A hesitant smile. “Yeah.”
“You know how to point at something?”
“Of course.”
“Then you know how to point-shoot.” Harper smiled. “I could go into a whole lot of technical mumbo-jumbo about why that is, but suffice it to say you don’t have to aim your rifle to hit the target. You just point and fire. You want the long explanation, you can talk to Captain Harden about it.
“Here,” Harper shouldered the rifle and faced the targets. “How I’m going to practice my point shooting is by linking my body’s muscle memory between instinctive shooting and static shooting. So I’m going to take my time, get a good sight picture, aim, and fire one round. Then I’m going to drop my muzzle to a low-ready and immediately snap it back up and fire a second round without aiming.”
Harper demonstrated and impressed himself by putting both holes within an inch of each other. “When you start out, your two shots are probably going to be a little wide of each other. That’s okay. As you practice, the distance between your aimed shot and your snap shot will begin to decrease until you can more or less put them in the same spot.” He gestured for the line to step up. “Go ahead and do it.”
They picked up quick. It helped that most of them had probably done this type of shooting before, though they may not have known what it was called. Harper walked behind them and saw the shots striking the target in rapid succession. He had everyone empty their mags and then switched groups. The next group completed the exercise just as well.
Everyone reloaded, and he took them through some other basic move-and-shoot drills. Lee had explained to him once that he had always been taught to “aggress on the threat,” which meant that when a threat presented itself, you moved toward it while you were shooting. The action of aggressing on the target was affective because it forced your target into a fear response, where they essentially froze up, torn between the decision to stand and fight or cut and run.
The only problem was that it was completely ineffective against the infected. You could not intimidate them, could not force them to think a certain way. They were there to attack you, and moving towards them only made their job easier. Lee had quickly learned this, and nixed the “aggress on the threat” portion of training. Now they trained to move laterally, and to back up. Any sort of shooting while moving was difficult, but the group picked up on it as fast as they had picked up on everything else.
It was a good group.
After several hours of drills, interspersed around sporadic sweeps of the Timber Creek Condominiums, they took a break for some food and water. It was late morning, nearing midday by now. Harper took an old two-liter bottle full of water and a can of sliced peaches to the tailgate of his truck and hoisted himself onto it.
He was joined shortly by the mousy kid, Devon.
“What’s up?” Harper asked him as he finagled with the pull-tab on the can.
He expected the kid to have more questions about shooting and killing and frankly, Harper wasn’t really in the mood to talk any more about it. Not because it was a sensitive subject, but because he had already imparted what minimal wisdom he could on the topic. He’d already said the conversation was over. What else did Devon want?
But instead, the kid furrowed his brow. “Sir, have you ever seen Jerry go outside the gate?”
Harper stared at Devon for a moment. “First, just call me Harper. Second…Yes. I’ve seen Jerry go outside the gate. Once. To get that fucking mattress he loves so much. Why?”
“Oh.” Devon shook his head. “It’s probably nothing, then.”
Harper was in the process of lifting the open can of peaches to his lips for a sip of the juice, but stopped. “What?”
The kid waved a dismissive hand. “It’s just that I saw Jerry leaving really early this morning. Thought it was weird, because I’ve never seen him leave the compound. But, I mean, if he’s done it before, then I guess it’s not a big deal.” Devon shrugged and smiled. “After that big argument the other night, I just thought…well, never mind.”
Harper kept his eyes on the kid. “Yeah. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
***
It was turning into a busy day at the medical trailer, which meant it would be a busy day for Angela. She didn’t know much about medicine, not like Jenny did, but she was competent and willing to help, and she’d proven that she was cool under pressure, so when Jenny was swamped, Angela stepped in to help out. With Sam off learning to hunt with Keith Jenkins, and Abby with the other children her age, she either helped out with the sewing and mending of garments, or she helped out in the medical trailer.
Frankly, she despised sewing. She did it without complaint when that was where she was needed, because she’d volunteered for it before she realized how much it sucked. She knew how to sew and she did it well, but having to do it for hours on end was miserable. In retrospect, she would have much preferred to learn hide-tanning, or even log-splitting, but those were occupations largely held by men.
Sexist?
Maybe.
She hadn’t put much thought into it. There were a few women that hunted, and a few men that knew how to sew. Perhaps it would have offended her four or five months ago, but there wasn’t the sense that she was being squeezed out by a Good Old Boy network. It was more that everyone was just doing what they could do well.
Those that knew how to hunt, hunted.
Those that knew how to sew, sewed.
Of course, that didn’t stop her from learning. When sewing and nurse-assisting were not needed, she hung around Dave, the guy that worked with all the animal skins the hunters brought in and tried to absorb as much knowledge as possible. It was messy work, but for some reason she enjoyed it.
But today was not a day when garments needed to be patched. And Dave didn’t have any hides to work. Today was a day when the cold, or the flu, or whatever it was that was going around, seemed to be exploding inside Camp Ryder.
Angela walked into the medical trailer, and found Jenny with three full cots and two worried families with red, runny noses and children that coughed unabashedly into the air, the noise wet and rattling. The nurse-turned-village-doctor wore a surgical mask over her face and sat on a stool, a boy of perhaps ten standing before her as she illuminated the back of his throat with a small flashlight.
“When did you start to feel yucky?” she asked.
“This morning,” the boy answered.
“And did you notice your nose getting runny any time before that?”
“Yes. And I had a sore throat.”
The mother broke in. “Is it pneumonia?”
Jenny glanced up. “He doesn’t have pneumonia.”
“Can’t
you give him some antibiotics?”
“Antibiotics will do more harm than good at this point in time. If he develops pneumonia, which I don’t think he will since he’s a healthy young boy, then we can talk about giving him something.” Jenny clicked her flashlight off. “At this point in time, he needs to eat, drink, and sleep as much as he can stand.”
The father looked around, his face turning red. “How are we going to find extra food to give him?”
Jenny was now stuck. She could do nothing but shake her head. “I’m sorry. Everyone is in the same boat as you guys.”
The mother took her son by the shoulders and guided him away. “Thank you anyways, Jenny.”
Defeated, Jenny leaned back. “Yeah. No problem.”
Angela took that moment to make herself seen with a small wave of the hand, and offered Jenny an encouraging smile. The other woman looked exhausted. When she saw Angela, she waved sedately and stood up as though she weighed a thousand pounds.
“Thank God,” Jenny said, giving Angela a quick hug. “I’m drowning in here.”
“What can I do?”
Jenny glanced at the remaining family of sick people, and the three patients lying on their cots, two of them asleep, and the other tossing about miserably underneath a blanket, a plastic bucket within arm’s reach. She ushered Angela over away from the others and produced a yellow pill and another surgical mask from her jacket pocket.
“Here. Take the pill, and wear the mask.”
Angela inspected the pill. “What is it?”
“Just vitamins—it’ll help your immune system. But I have to treat it like contraband, because I only have a few left and if anybody sees it, they’re going to want some.”
Angela discreetly popped the pill into her mouth and swallowed it dry. Then she strapped the mask onto her face. “Okay,” she said, slightly muffled through the itchy, sterile-smelling mask. “What do you need me to do?”
Jenny pointed to the three cots. “This cold-flu thing is kicking our ass right now. Some of the older folks like these are starting to develop pneumonia after having it for about a week. These three are today’s casualties.”