Surviving the Dead (Book 7): The Killing Line

by James N. Cook

  Eric nodded. “So then they settle in and eventually the boy turns and his parents can’t bring themselves to put him down and he kills them.”

  “One first, then the other. The second one had to watch. Probably too horrified to run away.”

  Eric wiped his face. When his hand came away, he looked a few years older. “Hell of a way to go. How long you think they been down here?”

  “Clothes are still in okay shape. Maybe since the Outbreak.”

  “Jesus.”

  “You may notice they haven’t rotted very much.”

  “Yep.”

  “And I’m willing to bet if they had fed enough, they’d be grays by now.”

  “Yep.”

  We turned and went back out into the open air. There was no discussion necessary. A night in the safety of a storm shelter would have been nice, but there was no way we were sleeping down there.

  *****

  Hicks volunteered to take the first watch. No one argued. We were all too exhausted. I gave the young soldier my IR goggles, admonished him not to hurt them, and watched him melt away into the night.

  The rest of us put down our bedrolls in the barn’s loft and lay down to rest. There was no conversation. No one had the energy.

  The next thing I remember is a creak of wood and Hicks whispering to Eric the IR goggles still had three-quarters charge and to use them sparingly. It was full dark then. Another creak of wood came to me what felt like seconds later, but when I opened my eyes, the first gray shafts of dawn clutched the rim of the horizon.

  “Last watch,” Eric said, handing me the goggles. I took them and checked the battery. Half charged. I handed them back to Eric.

  “Put them on a panel.”

  “Probably won’t charge all the way. Too early.”

  “Do it anyway. Better than nothing.”

  “Sure.”

  I kissed Elizabeth on the cheek, smoothed Sabrina’s hair away from her elfin face, told them both I loved them in a low whisper, and climbed down from the loft.

  The sky was cloudy to the east and clear to the west, which did not really tell me anything. Kansas in late winter is a volatile place. Warm one day and cold the next. I would have to watch the skies carefully going forward, as storms can be downright deadly in this part of the world.

  I walked to the storage building to check on the horses and oxen and found Eric had already fed them and put water in their buckets. The room reeked of piss and shit and filthy animals. I greeted Red and said a few kind words to him and promised better treatment once we were all out of danger.

  Back outside, I walked to the pump Eric had used to water the animals and splashed my face a few times. The cold water revived me somewhat and shook a few of the cobwebs loose. I gazed at the pump for a moment, reminded myself to fill the gerry cans before we left, and desperately hoped we would be able to find enough water in the days ahead to keep the animals, and ourselves, alive.

  A couple of hours later, when the sun was high over the horizon and I had walked and stretched and drank some water and was feeling something more like a human being, I headed back to the loft. The others were already awake and gathered in a circle on the dirt floor of the barn. They had collected chairs from inside the house and Hicks had scrounged a small charcoal grill from somewhere. He had a small fire going, a pot of dried potatoes, dried peas, and chicken jerky rehydrating in the hot water. The smell made my empty stomach groan.

  “Got you a seat,” Elizabeth said, patting a low camping stool beside her. I sat down and kissed her on the side of her neck. Her mouth turned up in a small smile and it made me feel better to see it.

  “So what’s the plan?” Eric said. His eyes, like mine, were fixed firmly on the cook pot. None of us had eaten since the previous morning.

  “We’ll talk after breakfast.”

  The food was done quickly but still took entirely too long. Hicks made plenty of it, and when we were done, there was nary a scrap left over. It was by far one of the better meals I have ever eaten. Cervantes was right. Hunger is the best sauce.

  “For today,” I said finally, “we stay put. We need to rest and so do the animals. That said, we’ll make preparations to ride out of here on a moment’s notice.”

  “I have a proposal,” Hicks said.

  “What’s that?”

  “How about I parallel our back trail and see if I can get a line on those raiders. Recon only. Be nice to know what we’re up against.”

  I thought it over. The man had a point. “It’ll be dangerous.”

  “What isn’t these days?”

  I nodded at that. “I’ll go with you.”

  Elizabeth turned to me. “Gabe…”

  “I don’t want him going alone. It’s too dangerous. We’ll have our radios with us and we’ll bring the horses. We’ve done this kind of thing before, Elizabeth. We know how to stay out of sight.”

  “I don’t think either of you should go. What if someone sees you and follows you back here?”

  “That’s extremely damned unlikely. But regardless, it’s a risk we have to take. Right now, those raiders are between us and Colorado. We have to find a way past them. If we don’t, then sooner or later they’re going to catch up to us. If that happens, I’d rather have it on my terms, not theirs.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” Hicks said.

  “There’s also the matter of what happened to Spike’s caravan,” Eric said.

  I scratched the side of my jaw, nails scraping the week-old beard. “Yeah. I’d like to know that too.”

  “You haven’t said a word about your trade,” Sabrina said. I glanced at her and she held my gaze with steady, implacable determination. “That was our meal ticket. Won’t do us much good to reach Colorado flat-on-our-ass broke. I’ve heard about the refugee camps outside the Springs, and I gotta tell you, I’d rather take my chances in the mountains.”

  “What I brought with us was only about a third of my net worth,” I said. “The rest is still back in Hollow Rock. I do business regularly with several merchants in the Springs, and at least a few of them will give me credit enough to get us set up. Not to mention I have a job offer from the largest mercenary outfit around. We’ll manage.”

  “Except you don’t have a job offer. You have a letter of interest. I might just be a poor uneducated Traveler girl, but I know they’re not the same thing.”

  “I’ll get the job, don’t worry about that. But at the moment, that’s of secondary concern. Right now we need to figure out how we’re going to get to Colorado alive.”

  “And that’s looking like a tall order,” Eric said.

  “Maybe not.” I reached into a pocket on my vest and produced my satellite phone.

  “That thing charged?” Eric asked.

  “No. Can you take care of it while we’re out?”

  “No problem.”

  “Radios too. We’ll take the fresh batteries while the others charge.”

  Eric nodded. “Hicks, did you throw out the deep-cycle battery?”

  “No. ‘Bout the only heavy thing I didn’t throw out. Figured we’d need it.”

  “Good man.”

  I stood up. “Caleb?”

  The young soldier grabbed his rifle and stood as well. “Let’s get it done.”

  TWENTY

  We tethered the horses in a small stand of trees a mile and a half away from the ambush site and proceeded the rest of the way in on foot. The tall grass concealed us as we traversed the last few hundred yards on our bellies.

  When we reached the edge of the highway, I slowly raised my head and pulled up the hood of my ghillie suit. A slight rustle beside me told me Hicks was doing the same. I heard no sound above the wind and could see no movement in the town or on the road leading to it. We were on the east side of Haviland, looking westward, about two hundred feet from the first building lining the highway.

  “Anything?” Hicks whispered.

  “Not yet.”

  I carefully removed
a small pair of binoculars from my belt and cupped my hands around the lenses to hood them from the sun. Doing so reduced the possibility of creating a flash in the sunlight. I watched the town for the better part of an hour, remaining as still as possible. Hicks watched the other side of the highway through a little hunting monocular he’d bought from Eric a few months ago. He made no sound, not even a rustle of grass from the movement of his lungs as he breathed. I would have been very interested to know who had trained Hicks, because it sure as hell was not the Army. The average grunt cannot do the things Hicks can do. Not with the same degree of casual skill, anyway. I had asked him about it before, and he had stonewalled me. Whatever mysterious forces had made him who he was, he wasn’t talking. Not to me, at least. Which, of course, only made me all the more curious.

  “I got nothing over here,” Hicks said. “You?”

  “Nada. Let’s move in. See what we see.”

  And we did. Forty-five minutes later we had swept the town and found it empty of everything except tracks.

  “We should go back and get the horses,” I said. “Ride a circle around this place, mark each track we find. Maybe get an idea how many raiders there are.”

  “Gonna take a while.”

  “You got plans today?”

  “Nope.”

  After retrieving the horses, I rooted around a small lumber yard on the edge of town and found a crate of rusted nails in an outdoor shed the Army must have missed when they scavenged the place. Hicks and I used the nails to mark each unique track we found by stabbing a nail into it and keeping count as we went. We started at just after ten in the morning, and by the time we finished, the sun was a low orange ball sitting in a pool of crimson and purple on the horizon.

  “What do you have?” I asked.

  “I count a hundred and fifty-two I’m sure of. Maybe ten or fifteen I can’t tell for certain. You?”

  “Hundred and forty-two confirmed. Thirty or forty might be different, might not be.”

  Hicks nodded silently. Some of the tracks were clearly from unique people, while others may have been repeated prints from the same tracks we’d already identified. Many of the tracks were partial, obscured by hoof prints and scuffs and such, making positive identification impossible.

  “Lot of blood,” Hicks said. “Lot of bullet holes and shell casings. Lot of streaks where bodies were dragged off.”

  I looked around and grunted. Hardly a window was left unshattered or a wall not riddled with bullet holes of various calibers. There was evidence of no less than two RPG blasts, and beneath the eaves of a house on the south side of town bordering the highway, I found the links left behind by the belt-fed ammo of an M-240 heavy machine gun and a slew of NATO 7.62x51 shell casings.

  “Looks like they set up on both sides of the highway,” I said. “Let the caravan get all the way into the zone of fire before they opened up. Hit them with RPGs at the head and rear to prevent escape. M-240 lit ‘em up from the southwest while small arms fire strafed from two other directions.”

  “Takes control to set up a crossfire like that and not hit your own people,” Hicks said. “Shows discipline.”

  “And training.”

  “Still risky for whoever did it. But done properly, highly effective.”

  I looked at the scorch marks to the west. “There’s no bodies, no dropped weapons, no unwanted cargo. Even the wreckage of the destroyed wagons has been hauled away. The only indication anything went awry is the bullet casings, blast marks, and blood. And I’m willing to bet those were only left behind because we escaped and the people they sent to find us never came back.”

  “Which tells us they’re a lot more concerned about getting caught than they are about finding us.”

  “And they’re right to be,” I said. “Probably think we’re running scared and at least a week’s ride away from Wichita. With all these service roads out here, they’d need to send hundreds of people to find us. Easier just to haul away the bodies, wagons, and cargo. If anyone comes to investigate, assuming rain and wind and whatever else haven’t fucked things up too much, all the Army’s going to know is a caravan came through, there was a fight, and the caravan disappeared. They’re not going to waste their time marking tracks or counting bullet casings. They’ll file a report, tell patrols to be on the lookout for a raider force of something more than a hundred, and maybe in a couple of weeks they’ll get a cargo manifest out to the safe zones. Not that it’ll do any good. These assholes will be long gone.”

  Hicks pulled a nail out of the ground and hurled it at a building. It hit the wall with a crack and fell to the ground. “Motherfuckers. This was a professional operation, Gabe. These guys knew what they were doing.”

  “And there’s a lot of them,” I said. “Take away the hundred and thirty or so tracks that belong to Spike’s people, and we’re probably looking at a force of at least two hundred. Ever heard of a raider band that big?”

  “Insurgents, yes, back during the Alliance’s heyday. But raiders? No. Too petty. Too contentious. Too likely to kill each other and break apart into smaller groups.”

  “Which means whoever is leading this bunch must be one ruthless son of a bitch.”

  “Yep.”

  I pulled a clean cloth from a pouch on my vest, poured some water on it, and wiped my face and neck. The cool air on wet skin was refreshing. “Nothing more we can do here. It’s getting late. We should head back.”

  “You go,” Hicks said. “I’ll camp here tonight, see if I can figure out which way they headed in the morning.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Want us to come back for you?”

  “No. I’ll catch up. Be back before 1300 hours, rain or shine.”

  “Okay. See you tomorrow.”

  I climbed into the saddle and rode back to camp.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “Looks like it’s rain.”

  Hicks wrinkled his forehead at me.

  “You said you’d be back today by 1300, rain or shine.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  The young soldier dropped his rucksack and sat down in a wooden chair next to Sabrina. His Army-issue pancho was slick with water, his boots were muddy, and there were dark circles under his eyes. The skin of his face looked pale under a thin coating of week-old beard. The rest of us sat wrapped in blankets around a small fire in the barn. Outside, rain came down in sheets while the wind roared and moaned through the eaves above us and made the tin shingles on what was left of the farmhouse’s roof clatter like metal bones. It was just past noon.

  “Don’t look like you slept much,” Elizabeth said.

  Hicks made a slight movement that may have been a shake of his head. “Didn’t.”

  “Wanna tell me what you’ve been up to?” I asked.

  He looked up then, blue eyes sunken from exhaustion. “Afraid I lied to you.”

  “I gathered as much.”

  Another slight movement. Maybe a nod this time. I could not be sure.

  “Picked up the trail pretty easy. Followed it about eight miles before I found them. Dark by then. Backed off a ways, picketed my horse, and went in on my belly.”

  I had to bite down on an angry comment. Going after the raiders alone was a dumb move. He knew it, I knew it, and he knew I knew it. But that’s Hicks for you. He does what he wants to do, and there’s not much one can do to stop him. Reprimanding him after the fact would have been about as productive as asking a wave not to break itself against an ocean wall.

  “Find out anything useful?”

  “There’s at least two hundred of them. Probably more.”

  “What about Spike’s people?”

  “I counted thirteen prisoners. All women and girls. No men, no boys.”

  Elizabeth closed her eyes and put a hand over her mouth. “Jesus.”

  “I ain’t gonna lie,” Hicks went on. “It was bad.”

  “What about the others?” I said. “Any sign?”

  “Yea
h. The bastards dug a mass grave, tossed ‘em in like cordwood. Gave their own dead a proper burial. Looked like eight or nine of them.”

  “That’s it?” Eric asked. “All those people in the caravan, and they only got eight or nine?”

  Hicks nodded. “That’s what it looked like.”

  “Mary mother of God,” Eric whispered. “And we got twelve of them.”

  “Only because we took ‘em by surprise,” Hicks replied, “And only because we had those claymores.”

  “So Hicks has confirmed what we already suspected,” I said, trying to keep everyone focused on the right part of the problem. “We’re facing a professional band of raiders, skilled and coordinated enough to take out even large, well-protected caravans.”

  Eric stood up and began pacing. “Which means they’d crush us like fucking bugs.”

  “If they were worried about us, yeah,” Hicks said. “But I don’t think they are.”

  Eric stopped. “What makes you say that?”

  No one moved for a few seconds. Hicks picked up a stick and poked at the fire. A few of the larger sticks on the pile broke and fell into the coals, new flames curling to life around them.

  “They’re headed south. Saw them leave this morning. Left behind about half of Spike’s wagons, but no cargo.”

  “They didn’t cache anything?” I asked.

  “Nope. Looked like they got no plans to come back any time soon.”

  I mulled this news over. We were near one of the busiest supply routes between Colorado and the eastern settlements. If the raiders planned to come back this way, chances were strong they would have hidden a supply stash somewhere. It was what I would have done, anyway. If they didn’t, it meant either they were very poor planners, which I doubted, or they were finished raiding in southern Kansas for the foreseeable future. I said as much.

  “So we’re in the clear,” Sabrina said. “All we have to do it make it to Colorado Springs.”

  I nodded, but said nothing. I was thinking about those thirteen prisoners, all female. I was thinking about what would happen to them when the raiders got wherever they were going. I looked at Sabrina and Elizabeth and thought about what I would do if they were captured. Eric caught me staring and walked over to stand in front of me.