But when he reached the door, he heard something. It sounded like a nattering dragonfly buzzing around his head, but the sound grew louder. He turned back for the wall and searched around overhead, looking for the source of the strange noise.
And then appearing out of the darkness in the cloudless night, something black hovered through the air. It got bigger and bigger and the sound grew louder, not a dragonfly, but the blades of a helicopter.
The Apache opened fire, drilling Noah's Ark with thirty-millimeter rounds.
Tapper shit himself and ran back for the building to take cover. He didn't even make it to the door by the time the first Hellfire missile struck the building. The roof exploded and a huge cloud of flame erupted. Tapper, along with a large portion of the other bandits, were blown to smithereens.
More Hellfire missiles and Hydra rockets lit up the camp, causing half the building to crumble. The Apache tilted forward and took a run through, blazing its M230 chain guns.
The bandits that had survived the initial volley came crawling out like furious ants and tried to returned fire to no avail.
The chopper circled around and launched more missiles and rockets, cutting down every last bandit that wasn't killed with chain gun fire.
When Noah's Ark was nothing more than a fiery crater in the ground, the Apache curved and headed back along the path it came from.
Halcomb leaned on the side of the bridge. The water in the thin river trickled by beneath him and he slapped a hand to the back of his neck to crush a mosquito that was picking at his flesh. He looked back at his camp and the few men that were still awake in the late hour, then he turned his head and looked down the road.
He perked up suddenly, sure that he heard a noise down the dark highway. He squinted his eyes and watched.
A set of two lights flashed, but only for a second, then they were gone.
Halcomb fetched the cigarette from his pocket and jabbed it between his lips. It was his last one, and he was saving it for a special occasion. And now seemed like the right time. He lit it and drew in a cool cloud of smoke into his lungs then pursed his lips and blew it out, watching it dissipate into the air.
He afforded one last look at his camp, then he strolled on down the road toward the momentary headlights. No one else even noticed that he left, and he enjoyed the breeze on his bare torso. In his wistfulness, he even stopped to pick up a small and smooth stone, moving on as he ran his thumb over it and continuing to pull long lungfuls of smoke from the cigarette.
When he reached the Humvee idling in the darkness with its headlights off, he skipped the stone along the road and took a good drag of the cigarette before opening the door and hopping in. He nodded to the soldiers dressed in their usual black gear sitting next to him, but they said nothing and didn't return any kind of acknowledgment. He gave a little shrug and then looked out the window as the Humvee crawled off the road onto a grassy field.
A roaring engine echoed in the distance followed by gunfire and screams. This lasted for less than two minutes, and then the night was silent again. When it was done, the Humvee Halcomb was in flicked its headlights on and pulled back onto the road. It drove through the camp and Halcomb stared out at the slaughtered bodies of his men. When they joined up with the other Humvee, the two of them drove off and Halcomb just grinned ear to ear.
The army that Sarah had been building for their assault was totally destroyed.
Her spine ached more than anything, and that would be her last experience on this earth. The final, grim reminder of the brutally violent world that had pinned her down for the last nine years. She grimaced and waited for the lead to slide into her brain.
But it never came.
Sarah looked up, trying not to gag on the pool of stomach acid and blood in front of her.
Glass took his finger off the trigger of his pistol and pointed it up to the ceiling. "I would kill you too, but it's come to my attention that you're more valuable than I originally thought. All this time I was looking for you and didn't know it, and I haven't even had to do anything; you came right to me."
Sarah's brow scrunched up at his words. She didn't understand.
Glass looked at the soldiers standing around her. "Get her up. She's coming with us."
The soldier kneeling on Sarah's spine pulled the pistol out of her holster and got off her. All the bones and muscles in her back cried out in relief. He yanked her up to her feet and she stood on the spot feebly, small chunks of partially-digested food stuck to her chin as she numbly looked down at Carly's decapitated body.
"Let's go," Glass said, and he strode toward Sarah.
A gun went off and Glass stumbled backward. He looked down at the spot where the round sank into his shoulder, then two more shots went off and struck him in the top of his chest. He took one more step back then slowly raised his head toward the door, seemingly unfazed.
The soldier that had taken Sarah up to her feet spun around and Tommy opened fire on him with an AR-15. The bullets weren't enough to penetrate his body armor, even at this close range, but they made him stagger and fall to the ground.
Before the other soldiers could react, Tommy grabbed Sarah by the arm and pulled her out of the open door.
"Hold your fire!" Glass roared.
The soldiers ran after them, but as soon as they were out of the building, Tommy slammed the door shut and pulled a lighter out of his pocket. He knelt down and held the flame to the edge of the pool of old gasoline in front of the door he'd poured as Glass had been mutilating Carly.
The flames spread immediately and licked halfway up the door.
The door burst open and Tommy opened fire, knocking the first soldier back into the building.
"Come on!" he shouted at Sarah, his voice very weak. He began to pull her along, but after only a few paces it seemed more like she was the one who was helping him. He was whiter than a ghost and she thought he was going to collapse at any second.
He spun around and fired more shots at the open doorway as the flames raged. The fire spread around the overgrown grass and weeds, creating a wide blaze. The soldiers inside tried to make a break over it, but their nerves got the best of them and they held back.
Sarah pulled Tommy's arm over her shoulder and helped him off of the property, making their way to a nearby stretch of woods and disappearing into the trees.
Glass pushed the soldiers out of the way and stepped out into the flames like they were nothing, walking through them until he came to a gravel path where the fire didn't reach. He looked like some otherworldly wraith, all in black and tinted by the sweltering fire behind him. As he stared toward the woods, standing amongst the intense heat, he squeezed his fists together and remembered the last time he had gone through the flames. The time that had scorched his body and made him take on this new persona, the skull on his face the symbol of all that remained.
16
Cinders
Sarah sat on the curb at the edge of the parking lot while Tommy rested on a cushioned bench inside the back of the auto repair shop's office. Her mind was blank and her whole body felt numb. A single lonely dandelion grew out of a crack in the pavement in front of her and swayed in the breeze as if trying to get her attention and cheer her up.
The neighborhood was empty in the morning's light. Not a single zombie prowled the streets, nor anyone in Glass's command. They'd gone back to the farm to retrieve as much as they could after escaping from him, waiting at the perimeter at first to see if they were walking into an ambush. Tommy had barely made it there, nearly collapsing a few times on the way, but Sarah wouldn't leave him behind. Not after he saved her life.
Carly's screams and the sounds of her flesh and bones ripping and cracking played on repeat in Sarah's head like a broken record. And the image of Carly's lifeless head lying in front of her with eyes half-open was permanently etched onto the back of her eyelids, like the shadows burned into the walls after the atomic blasts in Japan. Sarah didn't think about any of it, not the eve
nt nor the implications of it, but the image and sounds haunted her. She was afraid to think about any of it, because she knew if she did, she would come to the realization that it was her fault that Carly was dead. It was her fault that she handled Carly's advances in the way that she did and made her run off by herself. It was her fault.
She hadn't eaten or drunk anything since, and her body grew weak and shaky. Her skin was pale and she felt like she wouldn't be able to go on much longer.
And there was another memory that wrenched her mind: Jack Glass told her that he was looking for her. For a long time, he seemed to imply. Other memories played along with it in tandem, like important and historic sound bites off a TV: Ron's strained and gargling voice sputtering, "You have to live. You're the key to everything;" the deranged killer who had stalked her through the back roads of Raleigh, "I want what's inside you. They wanted me to find you." The cryptic messages swirled around in a confusing flurry. Somehow they were all connected, but she couldn't understand how or what they meant. Everything seemed just out of her grasp and she felt powerless to change that.
But despite her current state of mind, a reminder niggled in the back of her head: despite everything that had happened, she still got the code to the building in the woods, and as much as she didn't want to, as much as it was something she couldn't even think about right now, there would be a lot of bandits congregating tonight, and they would be looking for her to lead them.
The afternoon sweltered as Sarah and Tommy crept through the woods and fields, staying off the roads and out of sight as they headed for Halcomb's camp. After quite a few hours of rest, they each felt a little better, though neither of them talked to the other much. They each felt the spring in their step was gone, and now they were just going through the motions of the rest of the plan.
When they came over a hill in the field of golden grass, Halcomb's camp came into view on the small bridge.
Sarah and Tommy stopped dead in their tracks.
A swarm of vultures crowded the bridge, strutting around and picking at the bandits' corpses. Some seagulls milled about too, and got chased out when they got too close to a vulture's meal.
The whole bridge was painted red, and it was a sight almost as gruesome to Sarah as what she had witnessed just hours before.
Tommy bent over and threw up. His knees gave out and he fell to the ground, the sharp blades of the dead grass poking his skin and making him itch.
Sarah stood still for a long time, not sure if she should go forward and investigate, or turn around and leave, or just simply take her gun and shoot herself in the head, get it over with. After some deliberation, she chose the first option.
She looked around at the edges of the area... the hills, the trees, the underside of the bridge. When she was sure no one was lying in wait, she stumbled forward, every part of her body not wanting to, but doing it anyway.
The birds squawked at her as she approached, but she fired a shot at the road and they all scattered, creating a cloud of wings and loose feathers gently falling to the pavement.
The stench was already bad in the sun as their bodies slowly baked, and Sarah didn't intend to be there for very long. She came to the first body nearest to her and crouched down to inspect it. When she saw that it had been cut clean in half at the torso, she had a pretty good idea of what happened. She stood up and looked for Halcomb, but the mess that was made left the bodies nearly indistinguishable from each other and she soon gave up.
She felt like tears were falling out of her eyes, but none did. It was like she was dead inside and her body lost the ability to function properly. She turned and looked out to Tommy who was still crouched down and watching from the field. She looked as if to say sorry, even though she knew she didn't owe him anything like that. She wondered if the bandits in Durham were still alive, but somehow she knew the answer to that.
Her plan was officially over. There was no way that she would be able to do anything with only herself and a barely-standing Tommy by her side. Jack Glass was undefeatable.
But Sarah had acquired a certain nature to herself over the course of the last year, something that became as hardened and stubborn as stone. It told her there was one last person that could help her. She knew he was likely dead with all the rest, but she couldn't walk away if there was even the tiniest chance that he was alive.
It took them a while to find Bill's camp, only a vague idea of its direction from Halcomb's to go off of. They only knew they arrived because they happened upon a smoldering pile of metal, nylon and bodies.
"It's no use," Tommy said. "Let's just go."
He started to turn away, but Sarah said, "No."
She left him standing at the edge of the road as she went on and started picking through the remains. She chased off some more birds, though there weren't as many here as there were at Halcomb's camp, like the bulk of them had already been chased off once.
The bodies were torn apart just the same as the ones she found before, but they had used something incendiary here or at least torched certain parts of the camp when they were done, as thin pillars of smoke still climbed up into the sky from the rubble, and some of the bodies were partially charred as well.
Sarah walked through the entire place, ready to take Tommy's advice and leave, knowing that Bill, too, must have been among the mutilated and indistinguishable dead, but something gave her pause. There was a feeling in the pit of her stomach that told her to stay, that told her there was something she didn't find yet.
She spun around, narrowing her eyes and carefully giving the wreckage another once-over. As she turned and dragged her eyes across the carnage, she found it.
Something moved.
Sarah took her pistol out and quietly walked forward as she glued her eyes to a collapsed heap of metal lying in a ditch off the side of the road that looked like it had once been a barricade.
"Come out of there," she said as she stood next to the pile, aiming her gun at it.
For a moment nothing happened. Then the pile just about exploded as someone darted out from underneath, lunging for a gun that was lying on the ground a few paces away.
But Sarah moved quickly and kicked the gun away, stepping on the man's wrist and pinning it to the ground before he could get to it. "I wouldn't do that. Turn over and let me see you."
The man, caked with ashes and grease, grunted and grudgingly rolled onto his back as Sarah stepped off his wrist. He squinted his eyes against the sun and held his hands up in surrender, a scowl on his face.
"Get it over with," he said.
But instead, a hand reached down and grabbed his, pulling him up to his feet.
"You're just the man I was looking for," Sarah said.
When Bill saw that it was her, the aggression in him eased off a little.
"What happened here?" she asked.
The scowl came back over his face. "Jack sent his lackeys to take us out," he said. "That son of a bitch..."
"How did he know?"
"Someone sold us out," Bill snarled.
The momentary thought crossed Sarah's mind that the turncoat was Bill, but she realized if that were the case she probably wouldn't have found him hiding under a pile of rubble, mangy and rabid like a cornered animal.
"Where's the other one who's usually with you?" he asked, looking at Tommy who was still standing at the edge of the camp.
"She didn't make it," Sarah said solemnly. "Glass ambushed us, but I managed to get away with Tommy's help."
Bill turned and spit on the grass, then he flew into a rage and started battering the heap of metal with his feet, stomping and kicking it, then letting out a torrent of swear words. Tommy slunk away in fear, but Sarah just stood next to him and waited while he let out all of his anger.
"That stinking son of a bitch!" he seethed. "If I had to fall down into the deepest pit of Hell just to drag him with me, I would."
"You can still do that," Sarah told him.
He snapped his head at her. "God,
you're delusional. It's over!"
"There's another way," she said.
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"There's still a way to get to him. Are you in or are you out?"
Bill didn't know if he was more flabbergasted by her disconnection from reality or her tenacity. But the burning hatred in the pit of his soul wanted vengeance.
"I'm in."
17
The Plan
The three of them traveled through the narrow path in the woods after coming off the dead-end road. It was sometime after midnight, although none of them knew quite when.
The place was eerily silent. Sarah had no idea if there was a shipment from the convoy of trucks on the docket tonight; her plan had quickly been unraveling lately, and though it wasn't ideal, this was all they had left. One last shot at getting into the base and rescuing Wayne. Killing Glass and stopping his means of producing zombies were important objectives, but Sarah didn't know how much they would be able to accomplish now that it was just the three of them, with Tommy hardly being in shape to do much of anything, despite his cries to the contrary.
Tommy kept up as best as he could, though his vitality was low. Sarah repeatedly urged him to sit this one out, but he insisted that he still owed her one after she and Carly had both saved his life.
Bill carried on through the woods, a multitude of pistols and rifles rattling around on his person. He took every last bit of weaponry from his decimated camp that he could carry, and he intended to use as much of it as possible on Jack Glass. There was blood in his eyes, and Sarah knew that his killer instinct would be useful to her.
"How much farther is this place?" Bill asked.
"Not far now," Sarah said.
"And are you going to let me in on your plan yet?"
"I want to make sure I'm right about this place first," she said.
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