by James Cook
“KPA,” I said. “So that’s who they are.”
“Yep. Some Chinese troops too, and a few Russians. I don’t think the Russians were part of the plan from the outset though. I suspect they tagged along out of self-preservation.”
My ears perked up. “What makes you say that?”
Mike put the bottle down, picked up his glass, and stared into it while he swirled the ice around.
“Probably don’t make much sense what’s going on here, does it? Folks back east only know what the government told ‘em, and that ain’t much. Been keeping a tight lid on this little war of ours. The more people know about it, the harder it’ll be to take care of business. Too many chiefs and not enough Indians back in the Springs. Need to keep as many hands out of the pot as we can.”
Mike went quiet again. Neither of us spoke for a stretch. I picked up my glass and sipped the whiskey. It was smooth and fragrant and went down like greased ambrosia. Compared to the moonshine I had gotten used to, it was like climbing out of a Volkswagen and hopping behind the wheel of a Porsche.
“Got some things I need to ask you,” Mike said.
There was no getting around it, so I didn’t try. “Sophia.”
Mike sipped his whiskey and put it down. “Yep.”
“You know what happened?”
“I do.”
“Central?”
“Sort of. Jacobs looked into it for me after he first made contact with the Resistance. Show of good faith on his part.”
I felt my heart rate pick up. Something was squeezing my chest and making it hard to breath. My hands felt hot, and I doubted I could have stood up without swaying.
“I’m sorry, Mike.”
He reached out and patted my forearm. “It’s not your fault, Caleb. You couldn’t have stopped what happened.”
I took a deep breath. The breath made the boa constrictor around my heart eased its grip, so I took another one. And another. I had expected to choke up and not be able to talk at this point, but to my surprise, I was holding it together. Perhaps once a man has shed enough tears over a lost loved one, it gets easier to talk about them without breaking down.
“I wasn’t there when it happened.”
“Tell me about it.”
I looked at Mike. “What did Jacobs tell you?”
“Just the facts. She went into premature childbirth and died from blood loss due to complications. The baby didn’t survive. You named her after your stepmother.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded.
“Jacobs told me where the ashes are buried. He also told me about what happened to you afterward. Not the details, but what was on the record. Said you damn near killed a fella in a drunken brawl, got hit with a felony assault charge, and had to choose between prison and the Army.”
Another deep breath. “Yeah. That about covers it.”
“If you ask me, you made the right choice.”
I shifted in my seat. “Sometimes I wonder.”
Mike looked away and drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Jacobs also said you underwent treatment for severe alcohol withdrawal.”
“That’s right.”
“You ain’t no drunk, Caleb. I know you better than that.”
I picked up my whiskey and drained it. The burn steadied me. “You ever seen that old movie Leaving Las Vegas?”
“Nicolas Cage and Elizabeth Shue, right?”
“That’s the one.”
“Most depressing damn movie I ever saw.”
“Yeah, well, try living it.”
Another silence. We both finished our drinks, and Mike poured two more. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you failed in that endeavor.”
“For what it’s worth, so am I.”
“Now about Sophia…”
I sipped the whiskey again. “She was seven months pregnant at the time. They probably told you that already.”
Mike nodded.
“I quit my job with the city when I found out we were having a baby. Tyrel was on a salvage crew. Wanted me to sign on. Put in a good word with the boss. Dangerous work, but it brought in trade, lots of it. We lived pretty well for a while. The day it happened, Sophia’s friends were throwing her a baby shower. I wasn’t invited, so I made plans. My crew wasn’t scheduled to go out for another week or so, and I was bored. So me and Tyrel and a friend of ours named Rojas went to this little town outside the Springs, Woodland Park. Place is nothing but an empty patch of dirt, now. Army took everything, even the bricks and scrap lumber. But back then it was virgin pickings.”
I set my empty glass down and poured more whiskey from the bottle. Mike made no protest.
“Long story short, we got ambushed by another salvage crew that made it there first. Fought ‘em off, but Rojas got killed. When we got back to town, we stopped by the crew’s company office to let our boss know what happened. He gave me a note one of Sophia’s friends left for me that said she was in the hospital, and she was in bad shape. Fastest I ever ran in my life.”
I put the glass down again. It was empty. I didn’t remember draining it.
“Better slow it down, son,” Mike said.
My face was hot and the burn in my stomach was low and steady. I looked at the bottle and decided Mike was probably right. So when I poured another one, it was only half as much as last time.
“You pretty much know the rest. They told me she passed. I had to identify her body. She didn’t look dead. That was the worst part. I kept looking down at her face, and she looked so serene, and I kept expecting her to open her eyes and laugh and tell me it was all a joke.”
I drained my glass in one gulp. “The folks at the hospital let me hold Lauren. Just once, and only for a little while, but I got to hold her. She looked just as calm and beautiful as her mother. She was so small, barely bigger than my hand, and her little skin was so cold. I asked the nurse to bring her a blanket, and that was when they took her out of my hands and led me away.”
I put the glass down, and Mike gently confiscated it. My eyes burned, and when I reached up to wipe them, my cheeks were wet.
“I think that’s enough for tonight, son.”
I nodded. Mike went into the kitchen and came back with a thin cloth. I wiped my eyes and blew my nose and asked him what to do with the cloth.
“Laundry chute over there,” he said, pointing.
I swayed and stumbled across the room. “Think I better go get some sleep,” I said.
“Good idea. I’ll go with you.”
He held my arm, waited while I fumbled with the card key, helped me lay down in bed, and then arranged the covers over me.
“See you in the morning, son,” Mike said on his way out. “I’ll make sure you’re up in time for the briefing.”
“Thanks.”
He left and closed the door behind him. I reached over and turned off the lamp and lay awake in the quiet darkness. The good, safe feeling I’d enjoyed earlier was now as distant as the moon.
There would be no peace for me in this emptiness. I’d made a terrible mistake. I’d bent my mind toward a black corner long ago quarantined, and with good reason. Only pain awaited me in that place. I had surrounded the path leading there with land mines and barbed wire and walls with locked gates and signs warning me to stay away.
Danger.
Here there be monsters.
But I couldn’t stay away anymore. I had dodged the traps and picked the locks and entered the wasteland beyond the forbidden zone. And now there was no easy way out.
Sleep was not soon in coming. I learned that night that while I may not have any tears left for Sophia, I still had plenty for my daughter.
THIRTY
I should have been bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but instead I was bleary and nauseated and wishing like hell the pounding in my head would let up. Which, in retrospect, says something about the content of the briefing. Because not only did I pay attention, I listened with rapt, wide-eyed interest.
The au
dience consisted of Romero and his men, about two dozen special operations types who arrived late the previous afternoon, and my team. We skipped introductions for the moment while Jacobs addressed us and asked us to be seated. At that point, Mike, or Colonel Holden as Jacobs called him, began speaking.
“Some of you have been here since the beginning,” Mike nodded to Romero and several Resistance fighters seated around him. “Some of you have been helping out for a while now, and some of you just got here. Like General Jacobs said, this is a joint operation. The Resistance will provide the bulk of the troops needed, and you JSOC folks will take the lead on the final assault. But before we get into that, those of you new to the theatre need a brief history of the Resistance.”
He nodded to a young man seated at a laptop controlling the projector. The lights dimmed and a map of a small coastal city appeared on the white screen.
“Humboldt Bay, California. As you all know, this is where the Flotilla set up its base of operations and began offloading its ships. When they arrived, there were somewhere north of seven hundred vessels all together. Not that the ships matter much now; they’re a bunch of stripped hulks off the coast of San Francisco. But when they first got here, they were loaded for bear. A small fleet of car carriers, or roll on/roll off ships you might have heard ‘em called, brought over most of the North Korean, Chinese, and Russian troops. Just over thirty thousand of them, at best estimate. The remainder of the Flotilla were container ships, warships, sixteen oil tankers, and various support vessels. Between them, the tankers were carrying over 25 million barrels of oil. For context, the entire United Kingdom only used about 1.6 million barrels a day back before the Outbreak. And that was for a country of 60 million people.”
A collective mutter went around the room, accompanied by expletives and shaking of heads. Mike waited for it to subside, then continued.
“Not long after landing, KPA troops, civilian workers, and a few dozen engineers repurposed a warehouse into a refining facility using equipment brought in on the container ships. That was when the real trouble began.”
Mike motioned to the man at the laptop. The map disappeared and an aerial reconnaissance photo came up on the screen. “By the time Flotilla forces mobilized, they had already made contact with pockets of survivors in the immediate area. KPA translators assured everyone they encountered that the new arrivals were nothing more than refugees fleeing the chaos pouring out of China. It wasn’t too hard to believe at the time. Back before everything went dark, the news had been full of ghouls overrunning China’s military. Not to mention the newsfeeds out of India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.”
Mike took a sip of water and motioned for the next slide. A picture of the Pacific Northwest appeared with arrows pointing at familiar areas.
“Once the refinery was online, the invaders began a pacification campaign. KPA infantry consisted of roughly twenty thousand regular troops, about four thousand special operations personnel, five thousand aircrew and mechanics, and a thousand or so support staff, including senior officers. That’s in addition to the eight thousand civilians that crewed the Flotilla across the Pacific. On our side, the survivors in Northern California, Oregon, and Southern Washington were divided into pockets of a few hundred each, and those only poorly armed and barely able to hold off the undead, much less well-supplied, well-armed, highly-trained military forces. It wasn’t even a fight.”
Mike picked up a laser pointer.
“This here is the Humboldt Bay internment camp. It was the first, but it isn’t the largest. Most of the folks here were rounded up in Northern California, but some of them came from Oregon as well. By the time this camp was built and the local populace put to slave labor, the other three main camps were already under construction. It’s worth noting the North Koreans didn’t build the labor camps. The prisoners did.”
Mike put the water glass down and turned toward the assembled crowd.
“I won’t bore you with the details because it’s a long story and we don’t have all day, but this is about the time me and some other folks formed the original cells that would become the Resistance.”
Another hand signal, another slide, this one showing the parking lot of an abandoned big-box retailer littered with the smoking, wrecked debris of a few dozen helicopters.
“The first thing we did was take out their air assets. Most of the founding members of the Resistance were ex-military, so we knew how important air support would be to sustained operations. So aircraft were the first thing we went after.”
The picture changed again, this time showing a civilian airport littered with the detritus of what used to be fighter jets.
“The North Koreans hadn’t done too good a job hiding their aircraft, so it wasn’t that tough to take them out. In less than a year, we had the sons of bitches grounded. Unfortunately, we became the victims of our own success. We’d counted on some sort of response from the KPA, but we hadn’t counted on reprisals.”
Mike put his hands on his hips and seemed to stare at each man in the room at the same time.
“Now I’ll warn you. This next part is hard to watch. I know you’ve all seen some bad things, but it’s something else entirely to see foreign invaders brutalizing your own people. Take a minute to think on that before we go on.”
Mike sat down and closed his eyes and looked old and tired. It didn’t take a genius to figure out he was not looking forward to the next part of the briefing. After a couple of minutes, he stood up and motioned to change the slide. A video began playing on the screen. There was no sound, but the footage was clear, obviously shot from a high-definition camera with a long-range zoom.
The footage showed a prison camp, complete with watchtowers, razor wire, machine gun nests, and two areas where buildings had been erected. One side of the camp hosted an administrative building, storage area, and several barracks. On the other side of the camp were longhouses situated in precise columns, no doubt for the prisoners. The whole setup looked disturbingly like old photos of Auschwitz.
As the video played, a man climbed a tower and started ringing a bell. Almost immediately, a few hundred troops poured out of the barracks and assembled on a broad parade ground. A short, stocky North Korean officer addressed his men via a bullhorn and began talking animatedly. When he finished, the soldiers stood at attention, saluted, and then headed toward the long, low-slung buildings where the slaves slept at night.
The soldiers rousted the terrified prisoners from their quarters and forced them onto the parade ground in their bare feet. It was winter, and the weather was cold, as evidenced by the cloud of steam put into the air by the slaves’ rapid breathing and the way they shivered in their filthy rags. A few dozen soldiers began moving through the crowd, separating people seemingly at random and directing them to the far end of the parade ground. Very quickly, I figured out the separation of the prisoners was not random at all. The soldiers were counting to nine, and then directing every tenth person to move away from the others.
Decimation, I thought.
The word ‘decimate’ does not mean what most people think. It comes from an old Latin word meaning ‘to reduce by one tenth’. It was a brutal form of punishment used in the Roman army for only the most egregious offences. Military units guilty of capital crimes were divided into groups of ten and forced to draw lots. The soldier on whom the lot fell was then beaten to death by his own comrades, who themselves were charged with carrying out the killing on pain of death. The killers usually performed their task with wooden clubs or thrown rocks.
The North Koreans did not bother with sticks and rocks. They simply forced the condemned to line up against the fence and gunned them down with tight, controlled bursts from their Kalashnikov rifles.
At least a fourth of them were children.
The survivors were horrified and enraged and attempted to overwhelm their captors through sheer weight of numbers. They very quickly learned the reality of what happens when unarmed civilians go up ag
ainst armed, disciplined soldiers. By the time the slaves returned bloodied and weeping to their quarters, dozens more of them lay dead. The video ended.
Mike waved his hand wearily and the picture changed to another aerial map.
“Lights,” Mike said.
The picture washed out as fluorescents came on overhead.
“What you just saw was not an isolated incident. Decimations like this one happened all over KPA territory, both in the prison camps and in occupied survivor communities. Up to that point, we’d been relying on a network of support from people the North Koreans either hadn’t found, or agreed to leave alone so long as they did what was asked of them. But after the reprisals, support dried up. No one wanted to help us anymore. Everyone told us we should stop fighting before more innocent people got killed. Can’t say I blame them. I had my own doubts at that point. In fact, I had just about decided to disband the Resistance when this fella showed up.”
To my surprise, Mike pointed at Grabovsky.
“Captain Grabovsky, why don’t you take it from here?”
“Yes sir,” Grabovsky said, and stood up. Mike took a seat.
“When I was first briefed, what I learned was pretty much what Colonel Holden just said. Only part he left out was the Resistance had been in contact with Central Command for a few months, and Central had promised to send help as soon as they could. Now, you gotta remember, this was maybe two-and-a-half years after the Outbreak, and the government was still recovering. The only thing holding the country together was the military. We were still coming to grips with how to deal with ghouls, marauders, and all the goddamn insurgent groups popping up like fucking prairie dogs. Then came the Alliance, and Christ, you know what a mess that was. Anyway, I’d just gotten over some wounds I took helping this guy,” he pointed at Gabe, “deal with some of those insurgents I mentioned. And no sooner am I back on my feet than does General Jacobs show up and ask if I’m interested in a special assignment. Offered me a field commission and told me I’d get to do some honest-to-God guerilla shit. I’ll give you one guess how I answered.”