The Darkest Place: A Surviving the Dead Novel

by James Cook

  “Deal.”

  *****

  When we drew near the 306 North junction with 281, Mike ordered the convoy to a halt. “I’m gonna recon ahead, see if the way is clear. Y’all stay here, ‘cept for Caleb. Acknowledge.”

  I hesitated a moment, then keyed my radio. “Copy. On my way.”

  As I walked to the lead Humvee, I kept expecting my father to raise some sort of protest, but he didn’t. I glanced back at him to see him seated in his truck. He gave me a thumbs-up and a strained smile that didn’t quite touch his eyes. Lauren, on the other hand, stared blankly ahead.

  She had not taken the news of our departure well. She and Dad argued. Again. He finally won by telling her if we stayed, we would die. She started to say something, then stopped, looked at the ground, and said, “Fine. Let’s go.” Afterward, she climbed in the truck, buckled her seatbelt, and had not moved or spoken to anyone since.

  “Let’s get moving,” I heard Mike say. “We’re burnin’ daylight.”

  His face was impassive as I approached, dark chestnut-colored eyes so much like Sophia’s focused through a pair of field glasses. He had slung his big sniper-modified M1A battle rifle across his back, barrel pointed at the ground.

  It occurred to me we were about the same height, but because he had roughly fifty pounds of muscle on me, I always felt like I was looking up at him. “Got everything you need?” he asked, not lowering the glasses.

  I checked my canteen was full, ammo carriers stocked, round in the chamber on my carbine, safety on, Beretta in its customary drop holster. “I’m good, as long as we’re not gone for more than a few hours. Think I should bring some food?”

  He lowered the binoculars and shook his head. “No. We won’t be gone that long. Come on.”

  I followed Mike to the other side of the highway, which put us on the left of it as we headed west. The land around us was relatively flat, despite the fact we were in the Texas hill country. Highway 281 lay just short of a mile from where we stood, but despite the flat terrain, there was sufficient bend in the highway and denseness of dead forest ahead to obscure our view.

  As we walked through the incinerated trees, the remains of a few houses were visible nearby, the occasional charred rafter or blackened section of frame reaching up from the scorched ground. We stayed low and kept well clear of the highway, paralleling it toward the junction. We saw no movement until halfway to our destination when we came upon the remnants of two large houses, a swimming pool filled with ashes, a few burned-out vehicles, and a flame-gutted camping trailer.

  The nearest house lay in a blackened pile, fire-seared boards leaning against one another, roof caved in, a refrigerator, dishwasher, stove, and some squat thing I could not identify in a cluster as if holding a meeting among the ashes. The vehicles ahead sat sinking into the ground on bare rotors, tires melted away, upholstery incinerated, paint jobs scorched down to bare metal. I looked beyond them to the camping trailer, identifiable only by its shape. Reaching out a hand, I tapped Mike on the shoulder.

  “Hey,” I whispered. “We should swing that way.” I pointed to my left. “Might be infected in that camper up there.”

  He gave me a skeptical look. “Son, ain’t nothing could have survived these fires. Not even the dead. Now come on.”

  He strode ahead, feet crunching on the crisp, dry ground. I ground my teeth and followed, eyes searching the trailer for signs of movement. Sure enough, when we were about fifty yards away, there was a thump and a clatter, and the trailer rocked on its rear suspension springs. Mike stopped and stared open-mouthed.

  “Goddammit, Mike.”

  It took a few seconds for the creature to find the door and make its way around the camper. Mike and I both drew in a breath at the sight of it.

  It’s clothes were gone, burned away. So was its skin, a few outer layers of muscle tissue, and its eyes. Empty black sockets swiveled left and right as the ghoul cocked its head from one side to the other, turning first its left ear, then its right, in our direction.

  “Holy shit,” Mike muttered.

  I did a face-palm.

  The creature stopped moving, empty hollow circles of black fixed squarely our way. It opened its skeletal mouth, bereft of skin and lips, and tried to moan, but only a dry scratching sound like sandpaper over rusty metal came out. Mike raised his rifle and began to sight in, but I reached out and forestalled him.

  “Wait,” I said, and drew my knife.

  “Why?”

  “Haven’t you figured it out yet?”

  “What?”

  “They hunt by sound, Mike.”

  He lowered his rifle and turned his gaze back to the ghoul. “Yeah, I kinda figured. Sorry. Wasn’t thinking.”

  “They tend to have that effect on people.”

  I approached the half-roasted ghoul with my knife held low at my side. The creature moved more slowly than the others I had seen, almost like stop-motion animation. The fire must have done something to what remained of its nerves, interfered with its motor skills. I considered it a lucky break. The thing’s lack of agility made my job that much easier.

  The fight went quickly. I batted its grasping hands aside, stepped behind it, and stomped its right knee ninety degrees the wrong direction. There were a rapid series of dry cracks, like snapping a handful of thin carrots in a dishtowel, and the ghoul pitched over on its face.

  It had not been a large person in life—and I say person because its gender was impossible to guess—and burning to a crisp had done nothing to increase its mass. Nevertheless, it was a struggle to keep its arms pinned behind its back while I placed the tip of my dagger against the base of its skull and pushed. There was resistance at first, so I pushed harder until the blade went in with a crunch. The ghoul twitched a few times, then went still.

  As I stood up and placed a boot on its skull to wrench my knife free, Mike came up beside me. “Should I put a bullet in its head just to make sure?”

  “It’s dead Mike. Permanently this time. Besides, wouldn’t that kind of defeat the purpose?”

  I waved the knife in the air. He looked at it and let out a long breath. “Yeah, I guess. You sure that thing’s dead?”

  “Sure as I can be. We still have work to do, Mike. Lead the way.”

  He turned a final glance to the skeletal creature on the ground and nudged it with a boot. In a horrid sort of way, the creature blended well with its blasted, scalded surroundings. “You believe in omens?” he asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Well I do. And I think that,” he pointed at the infected, “is a bad one.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “It looks like a settlement,” Mike said, handing me the field glasses. I peered through them.

  At the highway junction, there was a gas station, a farmers market, and an RV park, all separated from the forest by a broad asphalt parking lot. The fireproof buffer zone had kept the structures and recreational vehicles safe from the fires that had come through not long ago. From where Mike and I lay at the top of a rise near the treeline, we could see the people below had moved the RVs so they formed a ring around the two buildings. They had also packed the space beneath the vehicles with dirt and were using the wide trenches left behind as latrines.

  Now that’s what I call multi-tasking.

  I counted a couple of dozen people, some of them standing guard, others engaged in menial tasks, and still more doing nothing much at all. There seemed to be an even dispersion of men and women, even a few children here and there. I gauged the size of the small compound and the amount of work that must have gone into securing it, and decided something did not add up.

  “There’s not enough people,” I said.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Mike replied.

  “All that dirt, the number of RVs, there must be others somewhere.”

  “Or maybe there were, but they moved on.”

  I put the field glasses down. “Could be.”

  “Let’s give it a while. Ke
ep an eye on them, see what we see.”

  “Good idea.”

  We settled in.

  It was nostalgic, in a way, lying there among the torched foliage. During the years when Mike was imparting the lessons he had learned from his days at Quantico and on the battlefield, we had spent countless hours in the wilds, lying motionless, waiting, just like we were doing then.

  In the early days, my targets had been javelina, deer, and coyotes. Those initial hunts were organized so Mike could teach me the basics. He figured since animals had better senses, better instincts, and are generally more perceptive than humans, if I could get close to them, I could get the drop on a man with no problem. Mike’s lessons took hold quickly, and it was not long before he decided I was ready for phase two.

  Next, he began setting up targets in open fields and had me try to shoot at them while he watched for me through a spotting scope. By the time I was fourteen, I could consistently fire two shots on target undetected from two-hundred yards.

  When I could do it from eighty yards, Mike decided it was time to up the ante with mock sniper duels.

  I took on all of them: Mike, Dad, Tyrel, and Blake. Even a few of their students who wanted to try their luck against me. We would start on opposite ends of various landscapes in the Texas hill country, make our way to one of three pre-established destinations, and try to spot the other guy in the distance. If we did, we fired at a steel target hung above and away from them to stop the match. If the shooter hit the right target, he then had to walk a spotter via radio to where the other sniper lay hidden. If he was successful, he won. If not, we reset and started over. The match went on until one of us was victorious or it grew too late and we had to call it.

  Mike was the only one I never beat. He taught me, after all, so he knew all my tricks.

  The others I had much better luck with. Which is not to say I bested them on a consistent basis—I didn’t—but I got them enough times to know my skills were well above average.

  So despite the heat, and the smell of charred wood clogging my nose, and the slowly building pressure in my bladder, I lay still and watched. Mike did the same, but he was not as still as I was. There was the occasional twitch and fidget and shift of torso, a surplus of unnecessary movement. The untrained eye would never have seen it, but to someone who had seen Mike lie still as a stone for hours on end, it was like watching him pace around wringing his hands. After a while, I grew tired of it.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Huh?”

  “Something’s bothering you. What is it?”

  “Nothing. I’m fine.”

  “Bullshit.”

  There was a rustle of fabric as he turned his head. “I’m fine.”

  “Mike …”

  “All right already. You want to know what’s on my mind? I’ll tell you.” He leaned close so he was right next to my ear. “Did you sleep with my daughter, Caleb?”

  My face turned to ice. “Um …”

  “Well?”

  “I wouldn’t put it in those terms, exactly.”

  “You did, didn’t you?”

  “Mike, it wasn’t like that.” I met his gaze, and what I saw there made me want to back away slowly and avoid sudden movements. It hurt to see it; Mike was almost as much a father to me as my real one. I blurted out, “I love her, Mike.”

  He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Caleb, you’re only eighteen. You don’t know what love is.”

  “Look, maybe I haven’t been around the block like you have, but I know how I feel. You talk about what’s between me and Sophia like it’s some sordid, tawdry thing. It’s not. We care about each other. I’ve had feelings for her for a long time, and she told me she feels the same way. We just never said anything to each other about it.”

  Mike looked at me again, much of the hardness gone from his gaze. “Do you really care about her, Caleb? You’re not just taking advantage of her?”

  “What? No, Mike. I would never do that. You know that.”

  “She’s been under a lot of stress lately. Stress can make a girl vulnerable, make her do things she normally wouldn’t.”

  “I told you, Mike. I would never do that to her, or any other girl for that matter.”

  He sighed and turned his face back down the hill. “Sorry, son. I didn’t mean to … listen you have to understand what it’s been like for me all these years. Guys have been coming after Sophia since she was eleven years old. Fuckin’ hordes of them. All this time, it was all I could do to keep her from ending up like my mom, barefoot and pregnant by the time she was sixteen. I don’t want that to happen to Sophia.”

  “You don’t think she’s smart enough to avoid that?”

  “I think she’s a kid,” Mike said. “I think she’s made some bad decisions along the way. The partying, the drugs, the crowd she hangs out with … well, used to hang out with, anyway. For a while there, I thought I was gonna lose her.”

  “But you didn’t, Mike. She did some crazy teenager shit like most teenagers do, and she got over it.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Didn’t what?”

  “Do a bunch of crazy teenager shit.”

  I gave a small shrug. “I’m not like most teenagers.”

  Mike stared at me. “Yeah. I guess not.” He grabbed the field glasses and peered down the hill again, sweeping slowly from left to right. I lay next to him, chin on my hands, thinking about Sophia. Enough time passed I thought he had dropped the subject, so when he spoke, it startled me.

  “I guess if there’s any guy I would want her to end up with,” he said. “It’d be you, Caleb. Just make sure you take good care of her.”

  I looked at him, surprised. I had to swallow a few times before I could speak. “Thanks, Mike. That means a lot to me.”

  He grunted and continued staring down the hill.

  Nothing much happened in the settlement below as the sun stretched the shadows into afternoon. I was beginning to consider suggesting we head back and get the others when I heard the sound of a car approaching.

  “Hand me the eyes,” Mike said. He had given me the field glasses so he could take a rest. I passed them back.

  We watched a car pull up to the compound: a GMC pickup, loaded with supplies, two people seated in the cab. It stopped in front of a low-rider Cadillac that served as the settlement’s main gate. Two men climbed over the Caddy and approached the truck. A brief conversation followed, ending when one of the people in the truck handed something to a gate guard. The guard then ran into the main enclosure, disappeared into an RV, and came back out with a small box in his hands. After handing the box to the man in the truck, there was a quick round of conversation—thank-you-and-goodbye by the look of it—and the truck was off.

  “Huh,” Mike said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Looked friendly enough.”

  “Sure did. I’m thinking I might have an idea.”

  The big Marine glanced at me warily. “Caleb …”

  “What? These people might be able to help us. And I’m a lot less scary looking than you. Besides, if anything goes wrong, you’ll be up here on overwatch.”

  He thought it over. “All right. But approach from the road. If things turn bad, signal me by scratching your right ear with your left hand. Got it?”

  “Right ear, left hand. Got it.”

  *****

  I let them see me coming a long way off.

  After backing down from the shallow hillside, I circled around in defilade and emerged at the base of another hill onto Highway 281. The lookouts at the settlement didn’t see me until I topped the rise and skylined myself.

  I could see them in the distance, eyes peering through binoculars, rifles hung over their shoulders, faint echoes reaching me as they called to one another. Their posture seemed neither aggressive nor overly relaxed. They wanted to make it clear they were aware of my approach, but had no plans to get in my way.

  I stopped in front of the Cadillac—a purple
one, lots of after-market modifications, barely four inches off the ground—and waved at a guard standing atop an RV.

  “Hello.”

  The man nodded in my direction. He was a little shorter than me, heavyset, late thirties, big bushy moustache. He said, “Howdy.”

  “Don’t suppose you have any water in there, do you?”

  “Depends. What you got to trade?”

  “What are you looking for?”

  He reached in his back pocket and pulled out a list. As he did, a light wind kicked up, sending streamers of ash across the soot-stained parking lot. “Got any feminine hygiene products?”

  “Um, no.”

  “Antibiotics?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Pain medicine?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Toilet paper?”

  “No.”

  “Booze?”

  I chuckled at that one. “No.”

  He stuffed the list back in his pocket. “Well, I guess that just leaves ammo.”

  I patted the mag pouches on my vest. “I can spare some five-five-six and nine-mil.”

  “How many rounds?”

  “That depends. How much water are we talking about?”

  One corner of the man’s mouth twitched upward. “You’re pretty sharp for a young fella.” He made a motion over the Caddy. “Come on in. Just hop right over the car there.”

  As I obeyed, the guard turned and shouted to someone I couldn’t see. My feet hit the opposite side of the gate just in time to see several men and two women emerge from RVs, all carrying weapons. My hand tightened on the grip of my rifle, but I stayed relaxed, letting it dangle from its tactical sling. If things went south, after I signaled Mike, the rifle would be a distraction. While all eyes were focused on it, I would quick-draw my pistol and start gunning people down. At this range, the sidearm would be easier to bring to bear.

  “What’s your name?” one of the men said. Tall, about my height, salt-and-pepper hair, mid to late forties, strong build, moved and spoke like a cop. By the way the others gravitated toward him, I figured him for the leader.