by James Cook
“You have a choice.” My voice came out flat, harsh, and cold as the winter wind. “Die quick, or die slow. Tell me what I want to know, and you’ll go fast. Make me work for it, and you’ll die screaming until you can’t scream anymore.”
I waited a while. When you tell a man he is going to die, and you want information from him, you have to give him time to accept it. He begged for a few minutes, but when he figured out it was having no effect, he began spitting and cursing.
“Fuck you bastards,” he said, eyes aflame with defiance. “I ain’t telling you shit.”
My smile felt dry and dead, and I watched some of the fire leave Dills’ eyes. His snarl sagged and grew brittle.
“We’ll just see about that.”
*****
Every man has a breaking point. Dills took less time than expected to reach his.
There are certain pains you can inflict that leave a person intact, physically speaking. Others do permanent damage, something from which a person will never recover. It happens, and they know they will never be the same again. There is no healing from this.
I took no pleasure in it. Much like killing the infected, it was a means to an end. But unlike dispatching the undead, I did not consider it a kindness. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Small droplets of blood spattered my pants and the legs of my chair. Three fingers and a thumb lay on the ground in front of me, neatly arranged. It was important he see them lying there. Dills huddled over his ruined hand, moaning. The smell of burnt flesh was heavy in the air.
“I’m going to leave you here with Tyrel,” I said. “I’m going to check out what you’ve told me. If you told the truth, you’ll die quickly. If you lied to me,” I pointed to his severed fingers, “those are just the beginning. So if you’ve lied to me at all, unless want to die knowing what your own dick and balls taste like, now would be the time to confess.”
“I swear to God,” Dills sobbed. “I told you everything.”
“For your sake, I hope you’re right.”
Outside, Tyrel grabbed me by the arm and walked me away from the cabin. “Caleb … you sure about this? I know a thing or two about revenge, son. It leaves you empty and cold and you get back nothing you lost. And it’s a damn good way to get yourself killed.”
“Doesn’t matter now.”
He stepped closer, looking me in the eye. “It matters to me, Caleb.”
I almost pulled away until I saw the concern in his eyes, the affection he had invested in me since I was seven years old. You do not simply dismiss someone who has cared for you for that long. A lump rose in my throat and my eyes stung in the chill night air. “Ty, I have to do this. I can’t live with it. The anger. I have to do something or it’s just going to burn me up inside until there’s nothing left.”
An understanding passed between us, then. Tyrel still had the bloodstains on the sheath of his knife. I had seen the sniper rifle hanging in his home above the fireplace. There were no words necessary. We shared the simple acknowledgement of two people who had been in the same place and knew what it had cost them. And when you find yourself there in the depths, down in the darkest place, you make a light any way you can. Even if it means burning down the world.
“Take the horse,” Tyrel said. “He’ll let you know if there’s infected nearby.”
“Thanks,” I whispered.
He let go of my arm. “Ride fast, son. And if it comes to it, shoot straight.”
I embraced my old friend, and then set off down the mountain.
SIXTY-TWO
A wave of murders struck Colorado Springs.
The first of them I caught up with on the way home from a drinking hole I heard about when I worked for the Civilian Construction Corps, a place called Flannery’s. It was a dingy, stinking bar made of two shipping containers with the center walls cut away by an acetylene torch, a foot-wide length of steel welded over the top joint to keep the rain out, and it had cheap grog, a tiny stage, and a few desultory strippers. It did a good turn of business.
I hung out in the place downing drinks that tasted like turpentine and nightmares and listened to the mark get rowdy with his friends. The description fit, and he lived in the part of town Dills said he did, but I needed the name to be sure. It did not take long to get it.
“Hey Ryan,” one of the roughnecks at his table said. “You got the next round or what?” He held up his empty glass and shook it.
The mark, Ryan, held up a hand. “Fine, fine, you thirsty fucker. Be right back.”
When he bellied up to the bar, I turned to him. “Your name Ryan?”
He eyed me suspiciously. “Who’s asking?”
“Dan Foley, out of Austin. Your last name Bromley?”
He shook his head. “No. Martin.”
I feigned a look of disappointment. “Dang. Sorry to bother you. You look like someone I knew from … before. When I heard your name was Ryan, I thought …” I looked down into my glass.
“Don’t sweat it,” Ryan Martin said. He patted my shoulder with genuine sympathy. “I got one of those faces. Hope you find your friend.”
The bartender brought him his drinks, and he went back to his table. I stayed in my stool, nursing grog and pretending to enjoy the gaunt, limp-breasted women gyrating on stage. At an hour before curfew, the bartender turned off the cell phone connected to a small speaker playing old hip-hop songs, plugged the phone into a solar trickle-charger that would do absolutely no good at all until morning, and announced the bar was closed. The last dancer picked up her tips—a collection of small but fairly valuable trade—and tiredly left the stage.
The few remaining patrons complained loudly, but finished their drinks quickly. Minutes later, Martin and his group got up and walked out. I paid my tab with four .308 cartridges and followed.
My hands were steady. The few drinks I’d had kept the shakes away, and probably would continue to do so for at least another hour. I had a pistol and a knife under my coat, but contrary to my normal operating procedure, the knife was primary and the pistol was backup. I wanted to do this quiet, but I would take it any way I could get it.
Martin’s two friends broke off from the pedestrian road at separate intervals, leaving the ex-soldier walking alone toward his corner of the refugee districts. I kept my distance until he turned down his street, then I sped up. If he had been less inebriated, he probably would have heard me coming and I would have had to resort to the pistol. As it was, I managed to sneak up behind him just as he was about to climb the ladder to his roof hatch.
At the last instant, he either heard me or sensed something was wrong, and half turned in my direction. There was an alarmed question on his lips, but he never got a chance to ask it. My feet were set, heels dug in, hips twisting, arm following through with the momentum of a right hook that clipped him squarely on the chin, my fist striking with only the first two knuckles to avoid breaking my hand. I put everything I had into that punch, and I am fairly certain it would have dropped a rhino.
Martin’s head clanged off a ladder rung as he went down. I glanced around to see if anyone had seen. The district was dark and quiet, the residents huddled next to their fireplaces or resting up for the long workday ahead. That is how you know you are in a working class neighborhood: the wood smoke is heavy, and people go to bed at a decent hour.
A quick search turned up his keys. I unlocked his front doors, dragged him inside, then closed and re-locked them. Seconds later, I climbed down through the roof hatch and locked it as well.
Martin was beginning to come around, moaning groggily on the floor. I did a quick search of the room with my tactical light and saw a gallon jug of water on a shelf. Perfect. I set it on the ground and put my tactical light next to it, bathing the room in dim white luminescence. That done, I drew my pistol, sat Martin up, and slapped him awake. When his eyes finally focused, they saw the pistol and widened in alarm.
“Look man, take whatever you want,” he said. “I don’t have much, but-”
“I’m not here to rob you.”
He blinked in confusion. “Then what do you want?”
I pulled Blake’s medallion from my jacket pocket.
“Recognize this?”
He looked at it blankly. I held it closer, but still nothing.
“I’ve never seen that before.”
“Ever been to Boise City, Oklahoma? Some people were ambushed there a while back. Lots of shooting and grenades. Ugly business.”
Now his face changed and all doubts drifted away like smoke on the wind. “Wait, man,” he said, hands upraised. “You don’t understand.”
“Oh, I understand perfectly. You and a bunch of other deserters thought we were there to find you. You thought we had been sent by the Army to root you out. So rather than, you know, ask us why we were there, you shot first and didn’t bother with questions.”
The fear now took on a shade of confusion. “How did you …”
“Tom Dills,” I said. “Or as you know him, Clayton Briggs. You two served together, right? He’s not doing so well right now. He’s chained to a wall in a cabin missing a few teeth and a few fingers. But that’s not your problem. In fact, you don’t have problems anymore.”
I drew back the hammer on the pistol. It was a .38 revolver I had taken from one of the men who tried to rob me a few days ago. Martin cringed and opened his mouth to scream for help, eyes pinned to the steel against his forehead. In his terror, he didn’t see what my other hand was doing.
At least, not until he felt the blade slide between his ribs and enter his heart.
He gasped, mouth opening and closing, going stiff with pain. I gripped him by his chin and said, “Consider yourself lucky. I can’t afford too much noise.”
His eyes dimmed, and with the last air in his lungs, he said, “Why?”
“My father. And a good man named Blake Smith. That’s why.”
And then he died.
*****
The next four were far less dramatic.
I realized I had been stupid. I had acted out of anger, out of a need to make the kill personal. It did not need to be that way. When I had followed Ryan Martin into that shitty bar, if someone had suggested I do the job from a rooftop a hundred yards away, I would have laughed in that person’s face. But after two nights of sleeping in the bed Sophia and I once shared, and seeing Martin’s face in my nightmares, and the regret in Martin’s eyes as he breathed his last, I knew there needed to be a distance. A disconnect. Look too deep into the abyss, and the abyss looks into you.
Like Dills and Martin, I exercised due diligence. I would not kill the wrong people. There is a difference between retribution and murder, although I doubt the law would agree with me on that. Maybe I was right, maybe I was wrong. I don’t know. I’m no philosopher. I just knew I could not stand the thought of Blake and Dad being dead and gone while their murderers lived free, unconcerned with punishment. Even if I went to the police, I could not prove anything. Not enough evidence. And they would want to know how I got my information, a question I could not answer.
Justice may wear a blindfold, but I do not.
I verified who they were. I drank just enough to keep myself steady without dulling my perceptions. My father’s lessons in tradecraft served me well. I followed them one by one, arranged meetings, determined their identities beyond doubt, then handled things the smart way.
A sniper’s bullet kills a man just as dead as a knife. And when you have a suppressor to mask the report of your rifle, avoiding detection becomes a simple matter of careful planning and camouflage.
By the fifth kill, the city was apoplectic. All anyone talked about was the psycho murderer randomly killing people in the refugee districts. Was it a disgruntled soldier? A serial killer? Someone driven mad by the horrors of life after the Outbreak? No one knew.
Except me.
After the last kill, I sat on the roof of my container drinking an insanely valuable bottle of Pappy Van Winkle, the M-4 I did the deeds with scattered in various dumpsters throughout the city. I watched people hurry home, eyes watchful, parents clutching their children protectively.
Worry not, I thought, drunkenly tipping my glass in their direction. The threat has passed.
A few alert police and military patrols rolled past my street, eyes on the rooftops. A soldier on top of an APC spotted me, told the driver to stop, and put a pair of field glasses on me. I pretended I did not see him and poured myself a tall one, singing a slurred, nonsensical song. A few moments passed, and his posture changed. He had dismissed me as just another harmless drunk. God knew there were plenty of them around these days.
Nevertheless, I decided tomorrow would be a good day to get out of town.
SIXTY-THREE
I arrived back at the cabin none too soon. Tyrel was low on food, and had been seriously considering putting a bullet in the head of Clayton Briggs—also known by his alias, Tom Dills—and leaving his body for the infected and heading back to town to look for me.
“You would have done that on foot?” I asked him.
He looked up from the outdoor fire pit where he was boiling water in a kettle and heating potatoes and canned vegetables in a skillet. The horse was picketed a few yards away, snuffling through the snow for bits of dead grass. Brilliant sunlight poured over the white mountain peaks, bathing the pines on the slopes in polished gold.
“Damn right,” Tyrel said. “I’ve hiked farther through harsher territory.”
I sat down next to him and opened a jar of instant coffee. “Well, the deeds are done.”
“You get all of them?”
“Yes.”
“Leave anything behind to tie it back to you?”
“No. I was careful. No witnesses, and the murder weapon is probably scattered all over the landfill by now.”
“What about your knife?”
“Cleaned it and soaked it in bleach. Even a forensics lab couldn’t get anything off of it.”
Tyrel nodded, satisfied. “So what do you do now?”
I thought about the interrogation of Clayton Briggs. How he had remained defiant until the second finger came off and the hot iron touched the stump. Then off came the third finger, and his resolve began to waver. When I severed his thumb, leaving only a pinky finger protruding from the blistered ruin of his right hand, he finally broke.
He told me there had been eleven of them, initially. They had all left together from the San Antonio quarantine in stolen Humvees and decided to hole up in Boise City. They knew it was abandoned, and it seemed like a good place to hide. A logical enough conclusion.
The retreat from San Antonio was so disastrous they did not think the Army would send anyone to look for them. For all the chain of command knew, they had been killed like most of the other soldiers holding the line. The horde that overran their defenses had been enormous. They figured they would not be missed in the confusion.
Things were all right the first few days, but then one of them, Sergeant Falcone, thought they should move on. Find some civilian clothes, grow their hair and beards, and head north. He had two supporters, but the rest disagreed. He said he wanted to take some supplies, weapons, and ammo, and leave the group. A lieutenant by the name of Guernsey, who had been in charge up to that point, said the men were free to leave, but they would not be taking any gear or weapons with them. Or food.
The next day, as they sat in an office building arguing over what they should do, one of them heard the unmistakable drone of Humvees approaching. All conversation stopped. They fell back on their training and took up defensive positions in separate rooms, close to the windows on the upper floors so they would have the high ground.
Then the Humvees came down the street along with a couple of civilian vehicles, all occupied by men in combat fatigues. They stopped and got out, moving like professionals, like Special Forces types. There was a girl with them, probably someone they rescued.
The lieutenant told everyone to stay low and quiet. There was a chance the
se people did not know about them. It could just be a coincidence. Hold your fire until I say otherwise.
Briggs did not know why the man who shot Blake, a sergeant named Prater, decided to open fire against orders. He had always been trigger happy, and sometimes had trouble keeping his cool in combat. He was his squad’s designated marksman, armed with an M-110, a high-powered semi-automatic sniper rifle.
I put myself in his place, staring through the crosshairs, heart racing, finger taking in the slack on the trigger, and then, out of nowhere, CRACK. A moment of shock, and then the realization that he had squeezed too hard. An accident.
But at that point, there was no turning back. The people in the streets returned fire, so the other deserters opened up on them. From then on, it was all yelling and fire and confusion and explosions. Lieutenant Guernsey had the presence of mind to send three men to take the civilian cars they had hidden in a garage nearby and cut off our escape route to the north. Those would be the cars I fired a grenade at, killing one of the soldiers.
I understood why Guernsey did it. He did not want us revealing their location to anyone if we escaped. Cold, but logical. Thankfully for us, it did not work. We got away, and they were left spitting, cursing, and trying to figure out what to do next.
In the aftermath of the fight, only eight of the original eleven deserters were left. The man who had shot Blake was one of the casualties. I took a small measure of comfort in that. The other two were the man I blasted with a grenade and Lieutenant Guernsey. The lieutenant caught a burst from our SAW that stitched him from neck to abdomen, killing him before he hit the ground. I did not know if it was me or Mike that killed him. Could have been either one of us. It did not matter. He was dead. That was the important thing.
After we escaped, the deserters knew they could not stay in Boise City. Sergeant Falcone took over and they headed north for Colorado Springs. True to his plan, they ditched their uniforms and tactical gear, searched around until they found serviceable civilian weapons, and set about the task of blending in.