Surviving the Dead (Book 7): The Killing Line

by James N. Cook

  “Sure, Sarah.”

  A curt nod. “Standard tactics. Ride and halt on my command, fall out if your gun jams, and for God’s sake, don’t forget to stake your horses before we move in on foot. Everyone clear?”

  We were.

  “Stay loose, gentlemen. Be ready to go.”

  Sarah adjusted her M-4 on its sling and checked the chamber. I did the same. Made sure the magazine was seated. Safety off. Suppressor screwed on tight. Then we waited. The wind died down somewhat. The groaning of ghouls became gradually louder until the first of them emerged from the treeline.

  Your average ghoul, assuming their legs work properly, moves along at about two miles an hour. Under the current conditions, with thirty-something degree air clutching at their necrotic tissues, they moved at maybe half that.

  Step by halting step, the horde took shape on the field. After ten minutes of watching and waiting, more than two-hundred ghouls marched disjointedly across the white plain in the now-familiar teardrop formation, the fastest ghouls in the lead, the slower ones in the press behind. They were spread out loosely, perhaps ten feet or more between one walking corpse and another. This was both good and bad. Good because targeting would be easier, bad because it was farther for the horses to travel.

  Riding a horse is not like in the movies where the animals run and run tirelessly. Horses are living things that need oxygen, water, food, and rest. Their muscles get sore. They are prone to injury. When they run, they get tired. And just like people, some are in better shape or more athletic than others. That said, the hard part of riding in formation is not keeping pace, it’s preventing the horses’ instinctive herd mentality from letting them bunch together in a cluster. Doing so is great for confusing predators, not so much for fighting the undead. In this case, I was not worried. Red was a good mount, and I had worked with the other guys before. They, and their steeds, were reliable.

  “Okay, looks like we’re ready,” Sarah said, lowering the field glasses. “Everybody good?”

  A round of affirmatives.

  “Ten yard intervals, fellas. Let’s move.”

  The good deputy rode out first, Eric and the rest following behind. I went last and urged Red gently with my heels to maintain the proper distance. In less than two minutes, we reached the horde and rode a few circles around it at a slow canter. This caused the ghouls to attempt to follow us, thereby ruining their formation and causing them to collide and trip over one another. The effect was like dragging a magnet around a pile of iron filings.

  By the time Sarah called a halt, the horses were steaming the air with perspiration. The smell of death and sweaty horse filled my nose as I rode a short distance away from the main formation. At least it was cold. The odor would have been twice as bad in the heat of summer.

  Red’s flanks heaved slowly beneath me, but not hard enough to cause worry. He was just catching his breath; he’d be good in less than a minute. I sighted down my rifle and estimated the distance to the horde at twenty to twenty-five meters. Dangerously close in warm weather, but at the rate this horde was moving, it would be a full five minutes before they reached us.

  Sarah patted her horse’s neck, stood up in the saddle, shouldered her rifle, and turned to look at me. “Gabe, eyes on.”

  “Roger that.”

  She aimed her weapon. “Fire at will.”

  A staccato chorus of muted cracks filled the gusting air. We were all armed with M-4s on loan from the Army, equipped with suppressor’s and ACOG sights. Our ammo had been purchased by the City of Hollow Rock during the summer with trade from tax revenue, not a small amount of it collected from G&R Transport and Salvage. The fact that I was sleeping with the mayor did not exempt me from the responsibilities of citizenship. I did not mind. I knew my taxes were being used wisely.

  On the firing line, Eric was racking up the highest tally, as per usual. I took a small amount of pride in this. He learned almost everything he knows from me, after all. His keen eyesight and cool head under pressure have saved the lives of many of Fort McCray’s soldiers. And while they do not entirely accept him, the troops at least respect him.

  The five guardsmen with us, regulars who did the job full time, conducted their work with casual efficiency. These were not military men, or former law enforcement, or anything like that. They had been farmers and tradesmen and laborers before the Outbreak. But what they lacked in formal training, they made up for in courage and perseverance. Hard necessity had taught them the merciless lessons of survival. They learned marksmanship on the fly. Most of them had never stood next to a horse in their lives before civilization collapsed. But now they all knew how to ride, and shoot, and set up a perimeter, and sweep for ghouls and marauders, and do the dangerous, grinding work it takes to keep their homes safe. They were not professionals yet, but they were learning fast.

  One of the men stopped firing. I sat up a little straighter in the saddle. He canted his rifle to the side and worked the charging handle. A round ejected and disappeared into the snow. The rifle came up and he tried to fire again. Nothing.

  “Jones,” I called out. “You good?”

  He ejected another round, aimed, and squeezed the trigger. Same result.

  “Damn thing ain’t working.”

  He wheeled his mount and exited the line. “All yours, buddy.”

  “Got it.”

  I took his place, maneuvered Red into position, and leveled my M-4. The ACOG reticle settled on a ghoul’s forehead. A gray, this one. I hate grays. Not just because they look completely inhuman, but because I don’t know what is happening to them. I know they started out as human beings, then became infected, and afterward underwent some kind of change where they shed their skin, exposing dead, grayish-black muscle tissue—hence the name—and my experience with them has led me to develop some disturbing theories regarding their capabilities.

  First, they seem to be able to heal. Most ghouls are covered in bite wounds. They wouldn’t be ghouls otherwise. It takes a bite or some other kind of fluid transfer to spread the Reanimation Phage. And when the infected get their hands on prey, they never stop at one bite. Some of the undead are so badly mangled they can barely move. Some are completely immobilized by the injuries that killed them, little more than animated skeletons held together by strips of gristle. But the grays, for the most part, do not have injuries visible on their bodies. I am not the only one who has noticed this.

  Second, their skulls are far more difficult to crack than normal infected. I know this from experience. My falcata is sharp enough to shave with, and made from very high quality steel. With most ghouls, I do not have to swing very hard to make a cross-section out of their craniums. With the grays, however, a swing with the same force results in my sword lodged two inches into dense, fibrous bone. I have learned it is better just to decapitate them.

  Last, and perhaps most disturbingly, they are faster than normal infected. Not as fast as a living person, but fast enough they are at the vanguard of every horde I’ve seen for the last several months. This could be a result of their healing ability. Or it could be an indicator of some kind of long-term metamorphosis. I don’t know. I’m not a biologist, and even if I were, I don’t have enough information to say anything conclusively. What I do know is this: the more grays I kill, the better I feel.

  A squeeze of the trigger made one less of them in the world. I shifted aim to a man of middle height, clothes worn away by time and the elements; mouth a rictus of dried blood, shredded lips, and blackened teeth. I fired again and he fell out of sight.

  The next target appeared. I did my best not to look at it too closely, especially the eyes. The eyes are the worst. Wide, bloodshot, and whitish in appearance. The bleached out irises are always dilated and fixed with malevolent intensity on whatever prey they happen to be pursuing.

  In this case, me.

  Unlike many people, I do not hate the infected. They did not ask to be what they are. In fact, most of them fought tooth and nail to avoid their fate
. But they didn’t. And now they are trapped in a half-existence of mindless rage and unending hunger. When I kill them, I do not feel vindicated. I feel no elation or sense of revenge satisfied. I feel a small swell of pity, and I feel I have done the person they once were a kindness.

  “Cease fire,” Sarah called out.

  We complied. The horde was only ten meters away now.

  “On me.”

  The riders in front of me followed Sarah as I gave Red a light kick. He stopped sniffing through the snow, raised his head, and set off after the horse in front of him. I had to tug the reins to keep him from getting too close.

  We rode westward around the horde until we were directly in their center. Sarah called a halt and we reset formation. I fired the last few rounds in my magazine, dropped it, drew a fresh one, and stowed the old one. A short time later I had to reload again. Four left, I told myself.

  We had whittled the horde down by half when Sarah called another cease fire and repositioned us. Jones followed along at a distance, one hand resting on a battle axe that looked like something a Viking would carry on a raid. I wondered where he’d gotten the trade to afford something like that. Custom-forged hand weapons are expensive, and guardsmen aren’t paid all that well.

  The next halt came at the northern side of the horde. The ghouls in front of us were in full disarray, stumbling in the snow and bouncing off one another and tripping over their fallen brethren. I had noticed during the excitement that Sarah and the guardsmen were focused primarily on the front ranks of undead, so I had shifted aim to ghouls farther in the back, anticipating we might have to come at them from the other side. My forethought was paying off.

  No grays remained, all of them having died permanently at the outset of the fight. The ghouls still in play were all slower ones, crippled to varying degrees by damaged limbs. And not all of the damage had occurred when they died. Ghouls are clumsy. They tend to trip over things, step on unstable objects, and attempt to cross terrain they simply lack the wherewithal to navigate. The results are dislocated ankles, broken knees, compound fractures, and other severe mechanical injuries. Ghouls feel no pain, but the human machine relies on its component parts for ambulation. Consequently, even in warm weather, these remaining infected would have moved at a snail’s pace. In the cold, they were proverbial sitting ducks.

  “Open fire.”

  I was already sighted in and waiting. A ghoul dropped. Then another. And another. And another. Half a magazine emptied itself seemingly of its own volition. I was squeezing the trigger on the sixteenth round when I heard Jones call out behind me.

  “Garrett, on our six!”

  I turned and my gaze followed where he pointed. A small knot of a dozen or more infected were straggling from the treeline behind us, still over fifty yards away.

  One of the duties of the anchor is to watch the team’s back and warn of any encroaching hostiles. Jones had done his job. I mentally commended him as I shouted to Sarah. She gave a thumb’s up and kept her concentration on the task at hand, trusting me to handle things. I had no intention of letting her down.

  “Need a hand?” Jones asked as I rode by.

  “No, stay on anchor. Good looking out, by the way.”

  If he acknowledged, I did not hear it. I slung my rifle across my back and drew my falcata. The wind picked up and drove streamers of stinging white against my eyes, forcing me to stop long enough to don my goggles.

  Should have done that from the beginning, numbnuts. You’re getting sloppy in your old age. Screw your head on straight and focus.

  The voice in my head sounded remarkably like Gunnery Sergeant Tyrone Locklear, the tall, whipcord thin drill instructor with dark black skin and fearsome eyes who, all those years ago on Paris Island, took a raw, oversized eighteen-year-old kid and turned him into a Marine. I shook my head to clear the memories and gripped my sword.

  “Come on, Red. Get up.”

  A light kick, and the horse stretched his legs to a light gallop. I pulled the reins just a bit to slow him down. Red is big and long-legged, not unlike his owner, and when he gets a mind to, he can build up a head of steam. I wanted him moving quickly, but not so quickly I could not swing accurately. When Red slowed to the right speed I loosened my hold on the reins.

  We had done this enough times Red knew what to do. Without prompting, he angled toward the infected coming up ahead of us so that we would miss him by less than three feet. I dug my feet into the stirrups and whirled my sword overhead in anticipation of the blow. The blade spun toward my right side, a reminder of a lesson learned the hard way: always swing away from your horse.

  Not long after acquiring Red, I had been on a patrol not unlike this one. I had ridden him close to a rank of ghouls and swung my falcata in the usual cross-body pattern that I had grown accustomed to. It worked very well when I was standing on the ground with my feet planted. On that day, however, cruising and bouncing along at close to fifteen miles an hour, my aim had been off and my sword glanced off the top of the ghoul’s head. I had put too much force in the swing, I realized too late, and could only watch helplessly as the out-of-control blade swept toward my horse’s shoulder. Thankfully, the angle was such that the only injury was the last few millimeters of sharp edge drawing a thin line of blood on Red’s skin. He barely noticed.

  I, on the other hand, had been horrified. A couple of inches lower, and the thick, heavy blade would have buried itself in my horse’s shoulder tissue and probably sent us both hurtling and tumbling to our deaths. It was a mistake I had vowed never to repeat.

  So as we reached the ghoul, I made sure to swing out, down, and back up on the follow through. I did not look back to see if my aim was true. I could tell by the way it felt: the crunch, the twist of blade through soft brain matter, the way the sword cleared the skull easily and drifted back up to shoulder level without noticeable friction. If I had done it wrong, the blade would have gotten stuck and been wrenched from my grasp. The fact I was still holding it was all the reassurance I needed.

  I had just enough time to reposition and swing at the next ghoul. The top half of its head sailed off like a Frisbee, dripping blood and blackish-red brain matter as it flew. The sparkle of my blade’s polished steel reminded me of a haiku I read long ago:

  The bright blade flashes,

  inscribing the final arc

  on all tomorrows.

  I kept my arm in motion and hit four more undead before hauling the reins to the left and circling for another pass. If my left hand were still fully intact, I would simply have switched grips and reversed direction. But my left hand was not fully intact. A bullet from a Kalashnikov wielded by a piece of marauding scum, who happened to be part of a group calling themselves the Crow Hunters, had taken my left ring finger off at the second knuckle. All that was left was a small nubbin I could wiggle around a little. I had been working on strengthening the hand to compensate, but was not yet confident enough to trust my life to it. I was beginning to wonder if I ever would be.

  So I rode back to the other side of the encroaching undead, turned Red toward my targets, and kicked his flanks. Another pass reduced the number of infected to three. Red was showing signs of fatigue, so I let him rest, slid my rifle around, and clipped the last few ghouls with headshots.

  Back at the formation, Sarah and the others had cut the horde down to no more than two dozen. Just as I arrived, she called a cease fire.

  “All right, that’s enough,” she said. “Stake your horses and draw hand weapons. Gabe, we good on our six?”

  “All clear.”

  “Good. Get ready to move in on foot. Make sure you cover your eyes and mouths. Riordan, I want you on overwatch.”

  He looked disappointed. “Will do.”

  I dismounted, and, from a saddlebag, removed a stake and a short length of rope with a spring-loaded hook clip on one end. The rope had a lanyard spliced into it so it could loop around the stake, which I drove into the ground with the back of my hatchet. Finished, I c
onnected the hook clip to Red’s halter.

  “Hang out here, big guy. Be right back.”

  He snorted and lowered his muzzle to root in the snow for dead grass.

  The others fanned out at five yard intervals, Riordan still atop his mount with his rifle at the ready should any of us get into trouble. I moved to put my hatchet back in the saddlebag, then looked at it and thought, why not? It’s just a hatchet. If I lose it, I have plenty more. And if I can’t hold onto it, I drop it and rely on my sword. Be no worse off than I was before.

  Riordan saw the axe in my left hand and raised his eyebrows as I walked by, but said nothing. I took my place at the end of the line next to McCoy. He held a long, crude cleaver that looked to have been forged from leaf springs. I had seen quite a few of them around lately. A blacksmith had set up shop in nearby Brownsville and was turning out effective, if not aesthetically pleasing weapons and selling them relatively cheap. The others down the line held mostly wood-cutting axes, with the exception of Jones, who hefted his battle-axe with the enthusiasm of a child with a new toy.

  Sarah held up a hand. “On my command.”

  We all looked at her.

  “Advance.”

  We approached the horde at a steady pace. I was tempted to start singing cadence, but knew the distraction would not be appreciated.

  The hatchet felt heavy in my gloved left hand. I had cut the ring finger on the glove to size and sewed it shut so it would not interfere with my grip. In fact, I had done the same thing with all my gloves. The first time Allison saw me wearing a pair, she’d said, “Aw, that’s so cute. A nubbin sock.” I was not amused. She looked at me a moment after speaking and saw something in my eyes that made her face go blank.