“Stay on this road for six miles,” Sallinger told the young black PFC. “I’ll let you know when to turn.” The captain was using a folding paper map they’d found in the highway department truck. He radioed the same information back to his top sergeant.
Skye, seated behind the Ranger officer, leaned forward. “How far is it to Reno?”
“About a hundred and thirty miles. In the old world it would have taken us two or three hours.” He turned and grinned at her. “It’s going to take us a lot longer than that.”
Skye nodded. The captain had told her he expected snow to be blocking the pass through the Sierras, and that it was going to be a serious problem. He’d added that there were other issues that could slow or stop their progress; a collapsed infrastructure and vehicle wreckage from the final days, survivors with their own agenda, and of course the dead. There was no way to predict what lay ahead, so everyone was on alert, weapons sticking out side windows despite the cold. Sallinger ordered his driver to proceed slowly so they wouldn’t roll up too fast on an obstacle or ambush. Skye suspected this was behavior the officer had learned or been taught in either or both wars.
The roads through the low country leading to the Sierra foothills were mostly empty. On occasion they would pass a car abandoned on the shoulder, often with luggage strapped to the roof and the doors standing open as if the occupants had fled in a hurry. They slowed once as they came upon a Jeep Cherokee stopped in the right lane, a piece of cardboard in the rear window with the word HELP written on it in black marker. A quick inspection revealed an empty vehicle, with no one in view in the surrounding area.
A couple of times the two Ranger trucks had to leave the road briefly in order to get around eighteen-wheelers stopped crooked and blocking both lanes. One had been a livestock hauler, a flyblown, reeking box of deceased sheep. Skye saw smears of dried gore on the outer walls, as well as what appeared to be hundreds of fingernail scratches down the dirty metal sides. She imagined the dead encircling the trailer while the sheep were still alive, pawing at it and reaching through the ventilation spaces, moaning in frustration as the animals inside bleated in terror. As with the previous vehicles they’d encountered, there was no one around. The dead were the only things moving out here, and they were both scattered and infrequent.
A few corpses shuffled along the road in places, lurching, rotten things in soiled rags. The drivers were able to avoid hitting them, not wanting to risk damaging the trucks, and as the vehicles rolled past, the dead pawed at the sides, smearing glass with yellow and brown streaks. A few had to be nudged out of the way with the bumpers. Out in the winter fields to either side of the road, occasional figures moved slowly through dead crops.
Skye watched the other soldiers with her in the truck cab, observing their expressions and reactions to what they saw. For her, there was nothing new outside the windows, but these men, although they had been in combat with the dead over the last week, seemed to be trying to come to grips for the first time with just how widespread this deceased world had become. Skye didn’t suffer from their grim wonder. She knew what was out there.
“Captain,” she said, not wanting to know these men but unable to quell her curiosity, “what’s your story? How did you get to this place in Reno? What have you seen of the world since it all started?”
Sallinger took a moment before answering, and when at last he spoke he remained facing forward, staring out the windshield. “My company was part of Second Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment. The entire battalion was on maneuvers at a base in Nevada, training in preparation for another deployment to Iraq.” He tapped the patch on his shoulder, one that depicted a coiled copperhead snake. “We’re desert fighters. We train for all environments, but my company specialized in sand and rock.”
“Deployed again?” Skye asked.
“The Top and I have done two tours in Iraq, and he did a previous tour in Afghanistan before I met him. Bracco and Cole each did a year.”
“And you still had to go back? I thought it was all over.”
The captain paused, and his voice took on an edge. “It’s far from over. We go where we’re told, and we wanted to go.”
Skye glanced at the weightlifter beside her. He didn’t pull his attention or his weapon away from the open truck window. She’d been a preschooler when 9/11 happened (so had most of these men she realized, except for the captain and the master sergeant) and hadn’t been part of the national outrage. None of her family and no one she’d known had fought in the wars that followed, so for her that terrible day in September was little more than an historical event. According to many of her teachers, the wars were an expensive waste of lives and resources. She’d never had much of an opinion either way, and had never really taken the time to develop one. The passion so many felt – especially those in the military – about fighting and winning the wars had been alien to her, but her life and some of the people she’d grown close to since the outbreak had created an understanding in her. The desire to personally take part in defeating an enemy might begin with ideas about patriotism, adventure and loyalty, but often resolved into the more primal need to avenge the deaths of innocents and friends by wreaking destruction. These were emotions with which she was familiar. Skye understood rage.
“When this all broke out last summer,” the captain continued, “the rest of the battalion deployed to Southern California. We didn’t go with them. They detached an understrength platoon from my company and sent us to the Facility outside Reno to harden their security.”
“You saw Reno?” Skye was thinking of her home town, wondering what it looked like now, but already knowing the answer.
He shook his head. “From maps only. We flew into a small private airfield somewhere on the outskirts of Reno, and a couple of trucks were waiting to drive us into the Facility. I never really saw the city. The Air Force security police had already cleared out the few skinnies in the immediate area of the campus, so me and my Rangers settled in to defend against a threat that never came.”
“What do you mean?”
The captain shrugged. “I was told that the Facility was a high-value research asset of some kind, and we had orders to hold it at all costs. But there was no attack, no swarms of the undead.”
“But Reno has a lot of people in it,” Skye said.
“The Facility is pretty remote,” said Sallinger. “None of the dead made it out there. Well, we get stragglers now and then, but either our sentries take them out at a distance, or we go out and collect them. Whatever they used to do there before the plague, now they’re doing research on the dead.”
Skye was silent for a moment. “So you haven’t really seen…any of this.”
Now the Ranger turned in his seat and shook his head slowly. “We heard and saw it all fall apart over the radio and internet, learned what we could about the virus and the skinnies, what was happening, but that’s it. What we saw from the air, and our combat action in Oroville and Chico, was our real introduction to what it’s all become.”
The young woman thought about this, hoping for something positive. “But you’ve been in combat.”
Sallinger gave her a thin smile. “That was different. Nothing like this.”
Skye leaned back in the seat. These men were highly trained combat soldiers, Special Forces troops who had been to war. They had the skills needed to survive, no question about that. But this was their first real taste of a nightmare world. Sooner or later they would experience the same, devastating loss she’d gone through, the realization that their homes and families, everyone they’d ever loved or cared about had been consumed by the walking dead.
Part of her ached for their pain.
Another part of her, a colder place deep inside, saw this as weakness, a liability. Yes, they had training and hard exteriors, but it was the psychological impact that would make them vulnerable. She’d gone through that loss more times than she wanted to remember, had faced waves of the dead and felt their relentless pursuit. Wou
ld these men crack when that kind of pressure was applied? She didn’t know, but Skye did know she would have to look out for herself.
They rode in silence until Sallinger gave his driver the order to turn. The orange work truck followed them down this new road, farm country slowly giving way to rising hills and towering, snowy peaks beyond. PFC Moore let out a soft curse as the Nissan Titan came upon a cluster of corpses in the road. As he pushed slowly through them, a figure that looked like it might once have been a migrant worker folded under the front bumper and crunched beneath the tires. The others stumbled along the pickup’s sides, dead hands slapping at metal.
Beyond this little knot of the dead, the road was clear, and they drove on.
“Keep your heads down,” the master sergeant rasped. “Burke, you spot their position?”
Specialist Burke was prone at the left rear tire of the utility truck, looking down the barrel of his M249, the bipod snapped out and supporting the weapon. “Negative, Top,” he called back to Cribbs, who was kneeling at the front tire, his head down and out of sight below the hood. The master sergeant looked down at PFC Rooker, who was prone on his left, poking his M4 around the tire just as Burke was at the back. The sparkle of glass fragments covered his body armor.
“Top, give me a sit-rep,” Sallinger’s voice said over the radio.
“We’re under cover behind the truck,” Cribbs responded. “Zero casualties, but we don’t have the shooter’s position.” The orange truck was stopped at an angle in the road, both left doors standing open, the windshield shattered by a high-powered bullet that had come close enough to Rooker’s head for the young soldier to feel the vibration of it passing through the air. Fifty yards ahead of them, Sallinger’s Nissan Titan was also stopped, the team out and scattered, lying flat and trying to pinpoint the origin of the shot.
Cribbs risked a quick glance over the hood, then ducked back down. A line of trees was ahead on the left, to their exposed flank. A hundred yards to the right, on the other side of the truck, was a cluster of buildings that included a house, a barn and a few sheds with farm machinery parked around it.
That’s where he is, the master sergeant thought. Half-assed ambush attempt, or lone nut with a rifle?
“Burke, Rooker, put eyes on those buildings. Call out any movement.”
Skye was in the weeds on the left side of the road, prone behind a slight rise of earth climbing to the pavement. Her eye was pressed to the M4’s combat sight as she slowly tracked the weapon across the farm; vehicles, barn, house, windows. Riding in the lead truck, they’d all heard the shot, but couldn’t identify its direction. Bracco was lying not far from her, facing away from the road and protecting their rear, watching the tree line. Sallinger and PFC Moore were off to her right, the Ranger captain on his radio with Cribbs and using a pair of field glasses, inspecting the buildings.
Shoot at us again, Skye thought. Then I’ll have you.
Nothing.
The air was still, the trees around them unmoving. A V-shape of geese passed above them in a cloudless blue sky, honking distantly. There weren’t even any corpses wandering the surrounding, fallow fields.
“Hold position,” said Sallinger. “Keep watching.”
Skye saw him glance over to where she was lying, and the look annoyed her. Either he didn’t think she would listen to his command, or was worried about the little civilian girl. She didn’t need a babysitter. She’d probably wiped more blood off her face than all these men put together. Her rifle sight swept back across the farm. Oh, how she longed for a real scope.
There was a long silence, and then Sallinger’s tense voice broke it. “Farmhouse, movement upper right window. Light it up!”
At once, Specialist Burke’s light machine gun began to rip out long bursts, joined a second later by three other rifles. Skye had been scanning the barn, and quickly looked back to the house. A storm of bullets was obliterating the upper right window and the white-painted siding all around it, wood splinters and glass flying as the air was filed with the roar of automatic gunfire.
“Rooker! Hammer it!” Sallinger yelled into his radio.
A moment later there was a deep THUMP from over by the highway department truck, and then the right corner of the house exploded with the red flash of a detonating forty-millimeter grenade. The boom echoed across unplowed fields.
“Cease fire!” Sallinger called, and at once the rifles and machine gun fell silent. Ahead of them, the bullet-riddled farmhouse was smoking, and flames danced from the destroyed corner, beginning to lick out several adjacent windows.
Skye hadn’t joined the firing, instead continuing to sweep with her rifle sight. The noise was bound to attract attention, and she didn’t want anything creeping-
There!
Movement to the left of the house caught her attention; a pudgy man wearing overalls and a baseball hat, running out a first-floor side door with a deer rifle in his hands. Skye rose to a better shooting position, let out a slow breath, led the target a bit, and squeezed.
Master Sergeant Cribbs saw Skye break cover and rise to one knee, just as he caught distant movement in his peripheral vision. He heard her fire a single round, and a second later the running figure tumbled to the ground.
A hundred and fifty yards. Running target. No shit.
He put his own rifle sight on the man lying face-down near the house. He wasn’t moving. Apparently Sallinger had seen the same thing, because a moment later his voice came over the radio. “Second squad, advance and clear the farm.”
Master Sergeant Cribbs got his men moving.
Both trucks were now parked in the farm’s dirt driveway. Bracco was in the cab of the orange pickup, putting his boot through the windshield to kick out the last of the shattered safety glass, while two other men on security watched outward. The farmhouse was burning merrily behind them, sending a pillar of black smoke into the sky. They all watched the smoke climb, didn’t like it, but knew it couldn’t be helped. No friendly local volunteer fire department would be showing up today.
Sallinger, Cribbs, Skye and PFC Rooker stood in a circle around the body. The dead man was now flat on his back. He was dirty with a ratty beard, smelled foul, and now had two bullet wounds; one under his arm, where Skye’s 5.56mm had punched through and blown out his heart, the other a small, neat, nine-millimeter circle in the center of his forehead, courtesy of the master sergeant. By the time he and his team arrived, the fallen sniper had been back up and walking. Now he was down for good, his deer rifle and pocket full of spare bullets tucked away in a truck bed with the team’s packs and extra gear.
“Redneck,” Cribbs rasped.
“Fucker,” said PFC Rooker, spitting. The dead man’s bullet had nearly taken the boy’s life.
“Don’t know what he was thinking,” said Sallinger, looking from the body to the burning farmhouse. “Taking on two truckloads of armed men with a bolt action hunting rifle? Stupid.”
Skye looked at the body for a moment. “People go crazy these days,” she said softly, turning away.
“Nice shot, Miss Dennison,” the captain said. Skye ignored him. Sallinger had been watching her as she looked at the body, waiting to see signs of remorse or a human tremble. The Ranger saw neither. What he did see was a deadness, a shutting-off of emotions he had encountered among troops assigned to the mountains of Afghanistan, men who had both killed and seen friends taken away by sudden violence. This was a young woman, barely more than a girl, and a civilian as well, but she wasn’t trying to put on a brave show. She was as hard-hearted as any mountain fighter, on either side. To her this dead person was simply someone who’d tried to hurt her, a lifeless body and nothing more, soon to be forgotten. Sallinger wanted to feel pity for her, for what she had become, but he couldn’t. She was what the world now demanded.
The top sergeant took several steps and caught Skye by the arm as she walked away. “Hey,” he rasped.
Skye spun and jerked her arm away. “Don’t you fucking grab me.�
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Cribbs wasn’t intimidated. “You broke cover while we were under fire.”
“I moved to get a better shot at him.”
“And exposed yourself. What, you can’t shoot lying down?”
The corner of her mouth ticked up. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“The captain told everyone to hold position. Something wrong with your ears?” Cribbs towered over her, looking massive in his body armor, helmet, ammo pouches, knee and elbow pads. He glared down at her from behind his yellow shooting glasses.
Skye stared back. The girl she had once been probably would have had a smart-assed reply, something like, Sorry, I was busy getting the bad guy while you big strong men were shooting a house. She wasn’t that girl anymore. Instead, she looked him in the eyes and quietly said, “No, I hear you just fine, Master Sergeant.”
Cribbs scowled at her for a long moment, then said, “Come with me. You too, Rooker.”
Skye shrugged and followed him to the highway department truck, PFC Rooker trailing behind with a worried expression on his face. When they reached the vehicle, the master sergeant retrieved the SCAR battle rifle Skye had seen him carry, the one with the long scope and suppressor. He also picked out a bandolier of oversized magazines and handed it and the rifle to the young civilian.
“You want to play Ranger, little girl?” Cribbs rasped. “Use the right toy.” Then he looked at Rooker. “Educate her.”
Skye held the battle rifle and watched the top sergeant walk away. Then she looked at Rooker, who carried the same weapon but with an attached grenade launcher. “What’s this about?” Her fingertips ran across the weapon’s unusual design. She liked the feel and weight of the thing already.
Omega Days (Book 5): The Feral Road Page 5