by Joshua Guess
We slipped below ground one after the other, each barely waiting for the last person to get down the ladder before flying down it ourselves. I was the last in, and pulled the hatch shut on my way.
“We good?” Tabby asked in a low voice. The space was completely black and we were packed in tight. I pulled a glow stick from a pocket and cracked it.
The harsh while light filled the tiny space, which was barely large enough to fit all of us. We stood in a chopped cab from a van, a space maybe five feet high and six feet on a side. When our people installed it here, freshly fabricated in Haven, it was lowered into an existing land feature and then covered. This spot was chosen for a very important reason.
That reason gaped darkly even in the light of the glow stick: a pipe. What had been the front end of the van's cabin was fitted over a drain pipe just wide enough for a person to crawl through without fear of being stuck. It was long, at least a hundred yards, and led under the road I'd spied in the distance. The very road we drove here on. From what my people had been able to gather, the drain must have been in place because the other end was prone to flooding and endangered the road. At two and a half feet wide, a lot of water could come through here, at least before the engineers blocked it off.
“Okay, let's get moving,” I said. “I'll go first.”
Jo put a hand on my shoulder, gentle but firm. “No. Let me dress your face.”
I shook my head. “It's fine. We can deal with it later.”
“No, we can't,” Jo said. “You're bleeding, and the smell will drive any zombies close to us into a frenzy. Better to let me slap something on there now.”
She was, of course, right. I nodded and let her get to it, keeping my mouth shut and my head still as she efficiently worked on my wounded mug.
“They were planning all that,” Tabby mused in a low voice. “They had to have been watching us, tracking our movements. How long were they hiding those zombies out there just for a moment like this?”
Marie made a thin growling sound in her throat, the kind that happens unintentionally. “Had to have been for weeks at least. We walked right into it. How did we miss it?”
“We got overconfident,” Jackie said. “So goddamn focused on the next move and how smooth things were going we didn't stop and look as hard as we should have at all the facts. That, or the Sons just straight up out-thought us.”
Probably all correct, but I didn't say it. Instead I let Jo put my face back together and wondered whether another swarm would be waiting for us at the other end of the pipe.
16
Things that are not fun: a list.
1) Dental work.
2) Having your heart broken.
3) Crawling through a decades-old drain pipe in a line with no group coordination to speak of, alternately titled 'How I Got Kicked in the Wound on My Face Eleven Times in Two Hours.'
It didn't actually take us that long to traverse the distance, but we stopped a few times to rest and once we got to the end had to wait a good distance from the hatch to listen for signs of enemies nearby. Zombies weren't like the living in the ways people were used to. They didn't randomly cough or shuffle around once they got in place. Oh, they'd drag their feet at warp speed once locked onto their prey. But the actual waiting around part? They were preternaturally silent and patient.
It made listening for them kind of a bitch. You have to be very careful in the best circumstances, and straining your ears twenty feet inside a pipe behind a heavy steel hatch wasn't ideal.
After a while of not hearing any obvious sounds of bodies filling the depression on the other side of the road, we decided to risk it. Very carefully risk it, mind you. No running out like a bunch of idiots for us. Once a day was more than enough of that.
Jackie was in the front and was the first to reach the hatch. Bless our engineers for the ridiculous amount of work they'd done under incredibly dangerous conditions. Those extra months paid off by giving us time to sneak people in and prepare the area. When I got home I planned to apologize to Will for complaining about not giving us the green light sooner.
“Hide the light,” Jackie whispered back to me. “Gonna open it up.”
I slid the latest glow stick into a pouch and zipped it shut. My heart raced as she unlocked the hatch, opening it with slow caution. The thing was a marvel of on-the-fly engineering, fabricated by measurements taken back to Haven by scouts and welded to the end of the pipe by eye.
No shriek of grating metal erupted from the hatch, thank every god in the universe. The thing must have been heavily oiled before the team who installed it left. There was the slightest squeal as the hatch opened into the night, letting a cold breeze wash over us. Jackie didn't immediately move, instead taking a full minute to let her eyes adjust so she could scan the area.
“I think we're good,” she said in a low voice.
I grinned, though no one could see it. “Come on, we basically live in a horror movie. You should know better than the hand the world a line like that.”
As it turned out, we actually were good. There were no zombies in sight as I pulled myself out of the pipe and to my feet. Jackie and I kept watch while the others did the same.
“What's the next move?” Jo asked, exhaustion heavy in her voice. We were all tired, and no matter your level of endurance or how used to pushing your limits you might be, a long day full of terror always takes it out of you. “The Castle is pretty close to here, right? Like a mile and a half?”
“Yeah,” Marie said. “Mile and a half in the dark, with no backup. Gotta figure the zombies will smell us before long.”
Tabby stepped forward, aiming herself in the general direction of the Castle. “We better get our asses in gear, then.”
We followed, and though we were all dog-ass tired, everyone kept up their discipline. We walked with light steps through the woods. It was the safest option. The roads were almost certainly still being watched. The thought put me in an even darker mood; someone on the other side of this conflict was very good. They managed to either train or recruit operators with the skills needed not only to avoid my own people, who were no slouches at tracking, but actually set and hide a long-term trap for us.
They had to have predicted our basic line of reasoning to make that happen. Not terribly hard to work out that we'd try to drive the Sons back to their compound or hem in the surrounding area, but this was more than understanding the broad strategy. These people managed to work out where we'd have holes in our net and hide a fucking army in it. Who knew what else they might have out here?
That thought sent a chill down my spine. If hundreds of mindless, often noisy zombies could be tucked away like the worst Christmas present ever, there was nothing stopping small teams of Relentless Sons operators from doing the same.
“Damn it,” I muttered. “This is gonna be bad. We need to get to a radio.”
The Castle should have one, if we were lucky. All four of the cardinal operating bases did, though my people sometimes took them out in the field. It was the only one of them with any real defense value; the others mostly acted as supply depots for our constantly moving teams.
We were a hundred yards from the Castle when a voice from the darkness grated out a warning.
“Stop where you are, and identify yourself,” it said.
“Scarface,” I said at once. Yes, it was a stupid code phrase, but the name had stuck during training and it worked.
“Glad you're alive,” the speaker said, stepping out from between several trees knotted closely together, their shadows concealing him completely. I was surprised to see Ron. His team should have still been out running patrols between work sites.
“How bad is it?” I asked reluctantly. I didn't really want to know the answer.
Ron's visage was grim. His head remained still, but his eyes darted in a quadrant search. Standard training to look up as well as laterally. “Probably best you come inside. We can talk about it in there.”
“They hit us all over
the place,” Ron said. “Five bands of those fucking zombies, but yours was the biggest. One of my guys figured out how they did it right before the herder leading the pack that stomped us flat shot him in the leg.”
Jo went rigid at this. “He's hurt? Is he here?”
Ron nodded, jerking a thumb over his shoulder toward one of the back rooms making up the first floor of the Castle. “Yeah, he's laid up in the storage room if you want take a look. I took the field medic classes but my hands aren't good with stitches. Figured we'd wait out the night and try to find someone a bit more qualified in the daylight.”
Jo looked at me for approval and I barely had time to nod my head before she was off.
“Dedicated girl,” Ron observed.
I gave him a mirthless smile. “You should see her with a rifle. So, how'd they do it? I'm pretty damn curious.”
Ron nodded in understanding. Anyone on the strike force would want to know. This was the ground warfare equivalent of having our pants yanked down around our collective ankles and getting knocked on our bare asses in front of the whole school.
“We found one of their hidey holes,” Ron said. “It's so simple I can't believe we didn't assume they'd do it. The spot we found was one of those sinkholes all over the damn place out here. Walls were too steep for 'em to walk out. Looked like the herder drew them in, then blocked the entrance. Must have left them alone long enough for the zombies to lie down and hibernate, and then covered them in leaves. There were piles and piles of leaves at the edge of the hole we found. Then all he had to do was remove the block, wake 'em up, and get to business.”
“Shit, that is simple,” I said. “How did we miss it?”
Ron shrugged. “Not that hard, man. There are only so many of us. If I had to guess I'd say they dropped off small groups in between the big herds. Misdirection. We saw what they wanted us to see.”
“Casualties?” I asked, again not looking forward to knowing the answer.
Ron frowned. “Travis, my second in command, has been on the horn all evening trying to put it together. From what we can tell, at least one full team was wiped out, and not by zombies. Team fourteen was overrun by the dead at their work site and ran right into a group of Sons who cut them down.”
I rubbed at my temples as I stared at the floor. “How do we know? A survivor?”
“Nah,” Ron said. “No one was left alive long enough to say. Team five did some pretty fuckin' heroic recon when everything started to fall apart today. Walt did his thing.”
“Ah, okay,” I said. Walt was one of the first volunteers to come to Haven when we were putting the strike force together. He was rare among the troops in that he never had any military experience or a rarefied specialty in any of the disciplines we focused on. What he was, for lack of a better term, was a polymath. He was one of those people who had a knack for just about anything he put half a brain cell toward, and learned most things after one or two repetitions. It made him a formidable soldier because he didn't need the constant refreshers and honing other people did, but that wasn't his most useful set of skills.
Walt was a forensics guy. He could Sherlock a crime scene and give you a breakdown of what had happened based on the position of the bodies and the pattern of the blood. As far as I was concerned, Walt's word on this was golden. It confirmed the presence of enemy units outside the wall. That wasn't something we could allow to continue.
I listened as Ron painted a picture of the day's events. No, not just picture—in my head I drew a map. I marked every location and began to work out the logistics. I forced my head into a cold place, mechanically tallying up the numbers of our dead—almost twenty—and figuring the best way to allocate the personnel we still had. Because this wasn't just about a fight anymore. We couldn't simply hew to the plan and carry on. We had to burn out the enemy in the field, and fast. Root and branch.
When Ron was done with his report, I made myself scarce. The Castle was big enough to get lost in. It wasn't actually a castle, of course. Just an imitation one. Someone with more money than taste built it out of heavy stone, a large house with a vast basement and three stories above ground. There was a turret, and that was where I instinctively found myself heading.
Out here in the middle of nowhere, this property must have been wonderful before the Fall. I took it in after letting myself onto the flat roof of the turret, where I sat in lotus and watched the night. What had once surely been empty fields, regularly cut, were now dark masses of tall grass laid flat by the winter and interspersed with random jumbles of brush denuded by the cold. Had the owners come up here to find time to decompress and process their day? They hadn't died here, whoever they were. The place was locked up tight when my guys found it.
“What made you leave?” I asked the empty night. What made a person run from a building this secure? Or were they running to something?
That was the thing about...well, everything, but especially psychology and warfare: you need information. I made a lot of assumptions up to this point, constructed tactics based on what I now knew to be flawed intelligence.
Tomorrow would be the start of a different kind of war, and that meant new information. Where were they hiding? How would I find them?
And oh, yes, I would find them. Maybe not all of them personally, but there was no doubt in my mind I would get my hands on some of the enemies out there ghosting between groups of my people. No one has perfect field craft. Someone will have made a mistake, left a trail. I wasn't thinking of revenge, but information.
I thought closing off the compound also sealed shut the flow of intel I could gather directly. Though it cost more lives than was worth it, the Sons actually did us a favor by leaving teams out here. They gave me a source of data.
And what I learned from them I absolutely would use for revenge.
17
Like many things in life, I took my cues in dealing with the captive directly from Batman.
He wasn't hard to find. The captive, I mean, not Batman. Batman is only found when he wants you to find him.
When you have several dozen pissed-off soldiers combing the earth for you, turns out it's pretty difficult to hide. Especially when, like the dumbass hanging upside down from a hastily-built post on top of the turret, you rabbit as the search parties come within a hundred yards of your location.
I reached out and slapped the guy on the back of his hooded, unconscious head. He jerked awake and started screaming at once. That made a lot of sense considering the ropes holding his arms behind his back and the others securing him to the post. Unless you have a fetish for it, being slapped awake and tied up is no one's idea of a good time. He dangled helplessly about three feet from the edge of the flat roof, which was itself three stories high.
I let him go on for a few seconds before whipping the hood away and letting him get a good look at his situation.
“Hi, buddy,” I said conversationally. “You're having a really bad day. Let's not make it worse.”
He made a choking sound deep in his throat and went mercifully silent. Fun fact: there is a level of fear a human being can reach that makes it impossible to speak. Those weird little physiological reactions are also why so many parents never realize their kid is drowning—when you're actually drowning, the body prioritizes breathing over speech. You literally can't call out for help.
I prodded his hip, spinning the poor bastard around so he could see me. I sat with my legs dangling over the side. Jo had done miraculous work on my face that morning, cleaning and stitching the deep wounds there with a surgeon's skill. I had her leave the bandage off, though. The Chimera in my system was excellent at fighting off infections, and I wanted to put on a show for this guy.
“You're probably thinking that I won't drop you, because you'll land on your head and probably die, which won't give me any information,” I said. I reached up and grabbed a loose end of rope, yanking it hard. The captive immediately flipped around, now hanging with his legs pointed down. “One thing you get goo
d at in the Navy is knots. A lot of fucking knots. We're about thirty feet up, and I can lower you down as far as I want. Now, me? I think torture is overrated. It rarely gives you good intel. I'm not saying I won't hurt you if I have to, but in the end I won't spend a ton of time on this. If broken legs don't get you to talk, well, you probably won't. So I'll just kill you and bring the next guy up here.”
That part was a lie. We didn't have another prisoner just yet, though my people were working on it.
“Here's what I'm going to offer you, and it's a better deal than any of you shitheads deserve,” I told him as he spun in a lazy circle. “You talk, you get to live. I'll ship you down to Haven where you can work in a prison camp for a year or two. If the bosses think you're not a danger to anyone, they'll let you go. Without weapons, food, or even water, but you'd be free. That's something, right?”
The dangling man, eyes wide and wet with terror, nodded. I let him have a few seconds to mull over the facts and get his brain under some kind of control. You can always tell when they're about to speak because the set of rationalizations going on inside their heads show through.
“Tell me what you want to know,” he said. I smiled.
I asked a few questions I already knew the answers to, because I wasn't a fucking idiot. I asked his name—Colin—and how he joined the Sons.
When the question left my lips, a shadow crossed his face. Interesting.
“There was a town where a bunch of us holed up,” Colin said. “Don't know what it was called before the end came. We just called it home, you know?”
I nodded and gently encouraged him to go on. You might think this a weird tactic, but I wanted Colin to tell me the truth and in great detail. If I could build a little trust, that was all to the good. Though it was a strange scene, me giving a sage tilt of the head and a few kind words to a man trussed up like a pig and dangling from the roof.