by Pete Aldin
He said, "There's life the way it should be. There's life the way it is. The best we can hope for is to move it closer to what it should be. And for that, we have to fight."
She reached out and none-too-gently patted his cheek. "Good pep talk, Sarge. Write me some poetry some time?"
He jerked a thumb at the back of the Ute the way she had. "Sure, like that's gonna happen. Right now, I have to do this thing."
"I'll help."
They climbed out and went around back.
Spider waited, his gaze raking the countryside around them, holding a SERP .40 cal. He now wore a duffel coat and sneakers, symbols perhaps of distancing himself from his former "tribe".
Rit gave Elliot a nod from behind the Land Rover's windscreen, focused and calm now his kids were safely under their mother's care.
Sturgis leaned against the outside of Rit's door, his face hard.
Elliot readied his own .40 cal while Angie opened the Ute's cargo pod.
Both captives were in there. Kyle blinked out at them, apparently emotionless, resigned. Driscoll by comparison shivered enough to make his handcuffs rattle; one side of his face was swollen, purple and red from contusions and abrasions. He hadn't held out nearly as long as Woodsy had.
Angie moved inside and jerked Kyle from his seat by the elbow. Elliot blinked in surprise at her strength; Kyle was not a lightweight; perhaps her sudden strength was born of rage.
"You, we'll keep a little longer," Elliot told Driscoll and closed the pod.
"I wouldn't trust anything he told you," Kyle said. His voice sounded off, warped by a broken nose full of dried blood. "He'll say anything to stay alive."
"Shut up," Elliot said and helped Angie march Kyle to the side of the road where the grassy verge dipped toward the fence. "I'll take it from here," he told her.
"But—"
"My job."
She bit the inside of her cheek, wrestling against her objection, then snorted and raised her hands in a whatever gesture.
"You morons can't save everyone," Kyle said. "There'll always be—"
Elliot shoved him down the small slope. Soundlessly, the SERP boss rolled to the bottom then got himself upright immediately, his cuffed hands out before him for balance. He hadn't sworn, hadn't so much as gasped in pain. In another man, Elliot might have respected that inner grit. In Kyle, it made him even less human.
Elliot had parked the Ute near a gate he hadn't noticed last time he was here. He opened it, shoved Kyle through, and followed him into the field.
As they trudged, Kyle spoke, affecting a whiny voice. "Where are you taking me; you don't have to do this; we can work this out; let's be friends." He laughed and resumed his normal haughty tone. "Guess that's the kind of bullshit you expect me to try on? Most people whine and plead when facing sentence. Like Woodsy, eh? Like Driscoll up there, the soft little turd. Not you and me, Elliot. We accept what is. No point fighting it. I've lived a few years longer than I expected to, that's for sure." He laughed again. "The only thing I would like to ask is: can we please stop walking and get it over with? I've never been a fan of long hikes."
Not so many days ago, Elliot had been thinking that some deaths were meant to happen, that some kills were good kills. He'd been correct. And he'd been wrong at the same time. This had to happen, it was the right thing to do. But there was nothing good and nothing satisfying about it.
"You listening to me, Elliot? I said, just shoot me and be done with it."
Elliot didn't reply, pushing his prisoner deeper into the field of high, dry grass. Following. And when he'd gone as far as he dared, he closed the distance between them, kicked Kyle's knee from under him. With a surprised grunt, Kyle toppled onto one side, fought for purchase with elbows and knees. Elliot pointed the .40 cal out into the field and fired a single round.
"What in ...?" Kyle started asking. Then he caught the sound the same time Elliot did. The rasp of clothing against dry grass. Someone was coming. Something was coming.
"Oh, shit," Kyle said.
A growl then. From Elliot's two o'clock. A mewl from his ten. He drew his knife and tapped it hard against the pistol, like a man calling his dogs in for dinner. He took a couple steps back as the grassland came to life. If he could call it life.
Kyle was up on his knees and for the first time, there was panic in his eyes. There was real fear. He put his cuffed hands out in front of him, a grim and desperate supplicant.
"Elliot, please."
Finally, Kyle was afraid. He was feeling exactly what he'd made others fear. He gasped and shuffled a few inches forward as the first two deaders stumbled from of the screen of vegetation, falling over each other to land out of reach of him.
"Your wish is my command," Elliot said and put a bullet through Kyle's head.
Kyle pitched backward to land between the two deaders. They rose and pounced upon this boon.
Elliot turned and strode away as more bodies crashed through the grass behind him, as the flesh tore wetly from Kyle's bones, as the undead began to remove all trace that Kyle had ever darkened the earth with his presence.
⁓
Four people met Elliot back on the road, standing between the two cars. They had weapons in hand, black ballistic vests or coats, hardy boots. Sturgis, Spider, Rit, Angie.
There'd been other vehicles on other roadsides, other warriors waiting for him by them.
There'd been a team in Syria waiting as he walked between the Major's tent and the Humvee, ready to drive to Al-Kasrah. Though he would never have admitted it to them, they were men he liked. Friends. His last friends.
There'd been another fireteam for a time after that, though he hadn't led it. There'd been increasingly risky and covert missions placing Elliot in situations where an enemy's bullet might save him the trouble of doing it himself. After a year of those, when the nightmares didn't ease and the flashbacks got worse, there'd been transfers to less-demanding jobs. And then finally the day that Elliot had decided he wanted a different life. A quieter life.
For a time, he'd had that quieter life, too.
But he'd had no more friends.
Until now. Until The Downs. Claire and Heng and Alyssa and Lewis...
And these four fellow soldiers waiting on a Tasmanian roadway, watching him climb the fence and walk back up to the cars.
Sturgis.
Spider.
Rit.
Angie.
A new fire team.
His new fire team.
"You shot him first?" Sturgis asked as he reached the asphalt. "Before they got there?"
"I did."
Sturgis sniffed. "I'd have hobbled him. Left him alive while they did ..." He gestured to the tall grass thrashing behind Elliot. "... that."
"Ditto," said Rit.
Both men's faces twisted with hate.
Elliot—who had once shot a pedophile child-killer in the throat and stared into his eyes as he'd died—shook his head. "There'll be plenty of chances to kill SERPs soon if you want. Trust me."
"Yeah, well, you didn't watch them kill my brother-in-law," said Rit.
"Or throw my wife in a truck."
Elliot opened his mouth to reply but Angie beat him to it.
"No, he didn't. But we didn't see what happened to Jimmy. Or what Kyle did to Woodsy. Elliot did."
Rit and Sturgis dropped their gazes a moment before returning them to the field past Elliot.
Spider cleared his throat. "Bad joke, but ... speaking of lunch ..."
No one laughed. People back home were cooking hard and packaging much of it in case of evacuation. Or siege. Elliot had to admit that, despite what he'd just seen in the field, the machine that was his body needed fuel. It was hungry.
"Home then," he said.
"I'm driving," Angie said and Elliot followed her as the other men climbed into their Rover.
Behind the wheel, she eased a crick from her neck, waiting while he got his seatbelt on. "I know you're thinking of going back to Jericho," she
said.
He winced. "Sturgis told you."
"Sturgis? He didn't need to. I know you. And before you think I'm going to argue, I won't. People need help there, right? And we still need the meds that started this whole shit storm."
"Yeah. We need to finish what Woodsy started."
"You're blaming him?"
"Not as much as I was."
She started the engine. "Never thought I'd hear love for Woodsy from you."
"Pity, Angie. That's all. He didn't make it to Settlers Downs with this asshole." He gestured to the remaining SERP in the cargo pod. "Not nice to think what might have happened to him."
Driscoll hadn't known the answer to that question. And Kyle hadn't been telling.
She commenced a three-point turn, a tough ask on the tight rural roadway. Back a ways, the Rover started the same thing.
Angie asked, "And Nine Mile River?"
He nodded. "A checklist of crap back home to finish. But, yeah, maybe tomorrow: Nine Mile. Barnabas, too."
She completed her turn and waited for Rit to complete his. "You sure?"
"They at least deserve to know about the bad guys. And who else besides Spider's moron buddies can we ask for help?"
"They won't give it."
"Probably not. But we gotta try. I hope to Christ this is a short war, but any war needs soldiers. More we have, the better."
"War," she sighed. "I guess it is."
"Well, we got one advantage." He offered her a grim smile and tapped his chest. "Those SERP assholes haven't had a decent opposing force to deal with so far. But now? Now they're messing with a truly devious sonofabitch."
"Wow," she said, looking anything but impressed. "You want that on your tombstone?"
"Sure. In about fifty years."
Angie hit the gas, expression softening. "Attempting contact with Nine Mile again gives me one of those bad feelings that movies used to talk about."
McGovern had said something similar on the day he died. Elliot hoped it wasn't a portent.
He replied, "Everything gives me a bad feeling these days." She shot him a warning glance, so he reached over to play with a loose strand of her hair and corrected himself. "Almost everything."
<<<<>>>>
Acknowledgements & Comments
My thanks follow at the end of this section. Before that, I make comments on three things ...
Firstly, I apologise to members of the police force in Tasmania and elsewhere. My police here are not intended to represent any real law enforcement or emergency services personnel. They are a fictional device; their original genesis was the questions "Who in gun-wary Tasmania would have hardcore weaponry apart from outlaw bikers?" and "Who might have reason and opportunity to lord it over other people?"
Secondly, the place where Elliot stands between two ecosystems (pine forest one side of the road, rain forest the other) was an actual place I visited in Tasmania. It awed me and freaked me out. It was self-indulgent of me to include it in Came Monsters, but it accurately captures the constant mini-ecosystems crammed up against each other in Eastern Tassie.
Thirdly, the way Elliot kills the guard by using the man's rifle: I anticipate objections to this. However, this method is an unusual but very real special forces technique. It was described for me by James Jackson of The Ward Room (wdrmmta.wordpress.com). Elliot's action with the strap-and-rifle would exert pressure against the victim's trachea and the C section of his spinal column. Eventually the man's trachea would collapse and/or his neck break. Usually, I'm told, this is all over within 6-8 seconds. I took the liberty of making it a little quicker in this case, to keep the story moving. And before you say, "But the strap would break", JR told me (and I quote):
Funny thing is, the companies that make those slings market the product with claims that you could rappel or abseil (using the sling) and that it can hold up to 300lbs before failure. Neck failure results long before the sling would ever break.
So there.
Do not try this at home.
⁓
As I've said elsewhere, you can't write anything half-decent without the generous support and advice of others. As I continue working on this series, I offer heartfelt thanks to ...
Janine. For everything. Absolutely everything.
Zompoc author and military advisor to writers, JR Jackson. Amazing insight and corrections, as always. This series would be a joke without him.
Tamra Crow for some awesome proofreading and funny Messenger conversations.
Authors D Robert Digman, Krawleigh Adams, Shannon Lawrence, Noel Osualdini, Tim Annable. For reads and re-reads.
Melody Simmons for wonderful cover design based on those reaching hands at the SERPs' Pankhurst "Night Court".
Mark Stallings. For helping me correct that prologue.
The Feendz. You know who you are and you share my love for things that happen beyond The End.
God. Yes, seriously. God. One of my sons almost died during the period I wrote this project. Miraculously (and it's a long and personal story), he did not. I am eternally grateful. A major theme in Came Monsters is family: perhaps you, dear reader, can understand why this theme is so important to me.
Some errors and untruths in this novel represent an author taking liberties, bending Truth to serve Story. Others, I'm sure, are simply errors.
By this author...
Black Marks (audiobook, eBook, paperback)
Nine Tales (eBook only)
Illegal (eBook, with Kevin Ikenberry)
The Doomsday's Child series
Doomsday's Child (eBook, paperback)
Rescue Mission (eBook only)
Came Monsters (eBook, paperback)
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Before Elliot met Lewis ...