Surviving the Dead (Book 7): The Killing Line

by James N. Cook

  “Could have been a lot worse,” Heinrich muttered.

  He sat in the stillness of the abandoned camp a few minutes, eyes closed, forcing the pain in his head to recede and reorganizing his thoughts. The sound of helicopter rotors and the searing blaze of red tracers flashed in his memory. He remembered shouts of surprise and screams of fear, the braying and bleating of livestock, dozens of men running in all directions at once, most of them tripping and falling in the darkness outside the ring of campfires. He remembered footsteps pounding away into the night.

  Heinrich struggled to establish a timeline. He knew he had stood in the entryway to his tent when he first heard the chopper approach. Whatever he was doing before that moment was a dim blur. He let it go. It was not important. The next thing he remembered was seeing the tracers arc downward and slice through his men like a great flaming scythe. There had been more than fifty troops congregated in the center of camp while the booze was being handed out. He remembered hearing Carter tell someone to go fetch the women. Was that before or after?

  Doesn’t matter.

  Of the fifty or so men gathered around the liquor crates, perhaps five or six managed to escape. The rest had been reduced to parts and pieces, little more than mush. Heinrich had seen it happen before, but never so close. The bullets had hit his troops with unbelievable ferocity, flattening them like human nails being driven into the ground by a thousand falling hammers. Men one second, a mess of indistinguishable chum the next. Then he was running, pushing himself as hard as he could, a single word blaring like an alarm klaxon in his brain: MINIGUN!

  While fleeing toward the river, he had seen a few brave, disciplined souls raise their weapons and attempt to return fire. They had not known how doomed they were. They knew nothing about miniguns, how fast they fired, how accurate they were, or how easily a gunner could shift from one target to the next. Firing their weapons had made them stand out brilliantly in the gunner’s FLIR sights. A quick adjustment of the gunner’s aim, and the raiders were dead before the last tracer hit the dirt.

  Heinrich had seen it, registered it, and kept running. He had slipped in the thick mud near the riverbank and stood back up and groped his way forward in the dark. Then he was in the river, the water shallow, only chest-high at its deepest. He struggled across, and when his feet found grass on the opposite bank, he took off at a sprint. Then there was a flash of white, and the next thing he remembered was waking up on the riverbank, soaked to the skin, with a hematoma the size of a walnut on his temple and his right eye swollen mostly shut. And now he sat in the same wet clothes looking at the only possessions he had owned before starting down the path that led him here, a path of blood and fire and pain, and wondered if he could mend what was left of the Storm Road Tribe.

  Probably have to kill some people.

  He thought about the first life he had ever taken, long before he joined the Marines. He had been twelve. The boy’s name was Bennie Woodhouse, and he had been a bullying shit. Heinrich had always been big for his age, so bullies rarely bothered him. But Bennie decided one day to embarrass him by pushing him down from behind so that he fell into a mud puddle. For a moment, Heinrich had been merely confused. Then he heard the laughter.

  It was the first time he was ever in a fight. He did not remember it well. He knew he went at the boy and that Bennie was bigger and grossly fat and hard to move around. So he’d gone for the eyes with one hand and the balls with the other. Both found their mark. Heinrich remembered Bennie’s squeal, how he’d sounded like a pig being gutted alive. Then strong hands grabbed him and pulled him away and the burly history teacher who was also the football coach lifted him bodily and carried him to the principal’s office.

  Bennie had wept while they sat next to each other, one hand clutching a bruised testicle and the other covering a left eye with an abraded retina. The principal droned on about how fighting was irresponsible and they were both to be suspended and he would be calling their parents to pick them up immediately. Heinrich had not cared. He had stared at Bennie and smiled the smile of the converted zealot. The assistant principal standing in the corner watched Heinrich’s face the whole time, head shaking, eyes sad. He knew what he was looking at. And for the first time in his life, Heinrich knew as well.

  The fat fucker, as Heinrich always remembered Bennie, had spent the night in the hospital. Heinrich’s mother had been distraught. How could her sweet little boy have gotten into a fight? His father assured her he would get to the bottom of things, took his son by the shoulder, and marched him upstairs to his room. The elder Heinrich then closed the door and ordered his son, who still went by Johnnie in those days, to sit down on his bed.

  “So what happened?”

  Heinrich told him. Truthfully, and in exacting detail. His father listened without comment or expression.

  “Bennie Woodhouse, huh?”

  “Yes sir.” He always called his father ‘sir’. One did not call a former Marine Corps officer ‘daddy’ if one wanted to keep one’s teeth in one’s head.

  “I know his father,” The old man said. “Used to work together at Tilbert Auto Supply. Want to know a secret about him?”

  “Sir?”

  “You want to know or not?”

  Heinrich’s father was smiling. He found himself smiling back. “Yes sir.”

  “Guy’s a fucking fairy.”

  “You mean a fag?”

  “Fairy, fag, same thing. Wife came home for lunch one day and caught him sucking some guy’s dick in the living room. You believe that shit? Right in his own house.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “Damn right it is.”

  Heinrich and his father stared silently a moment, both still smiling. Finally his father said, “So you put a hurtin’ on that fat little shit he calls a son, huh? Good. He had it coming. Kid ever bothers you again, stomp him flat and tell him his old man’s a cocksucker. See how he likes it.”

  “What about mom?”

  “Let me worry about her.”

  As his father left the room he stopped, looked back, and winked. “Nice work, son.”

  Before that day, Heinrich never had any feelings at all toward his father. Not love, or hate, or anything else. He had never felt much of anything for anyone except a stirring in his genitals around pretty girls. But in that moment, he felt a connection with Harold Martin Heinrich. The old man had, just for a moment, pulled back his veil and let his son see the toothy monster beneath. Heinrich had done the same, and from then on, there was a connection between the two of them. Not love, necessarily, but an understanding. An acceptance of like-minded beings. As he got older, he and his father developed a silent shorthand, often glancing at each other with mute amusement at some stupid utterance from someone they knew or taking shared delight in someone else’s misfortune. They never spoke of it, but they both knew it was there.

  So two weeks later, when he caught up with Bennie and told him he was sorry and could the two of them go see a movie or something, and the boy accepted with the meekness of the beaten and humbled, and Heinrich stopped by his house to borrow money from his mom, his father had poked his head around the corner and given Heinrich a thoughtful look. He winked at his father and made a motion like breaking a stick. The old man’s eyes twinkled with delight and he mouthed, be careful.

  Heinrich gave a thumbs up.

  They did not go to the movies. When they got off the bus, Heinrich asked if Bennie wanted a milkshake before they went to the theatre. Of course, the fat little shit accepted. Heinrich said he knew a good place not far away. He then led Bennie into a dead-end alley between two empty buildings with boarded up windows. Bennie stopped, looked around, and asked where they were.

  Heinrich answered by producing a hunting knife.

  When he was finished, he left Bennie’s corpse under a pile of garbage and walked to the theatre alone. Along the way, he stopped to drop the knife in a storm drain and washed the blood from his hands in the bathroom of a gas station. He h
ad popcorn and a soda with his movie.

  When he got home, he made sure to put his clothes in a trash bag, and the next day, he dropped the bag in a dumpster behind the school cafeteria. Later, sitting in class, he watched a garbage truck pull away from the cafeteria building and felt warm inside.

  The police came the day after. He told them he’d gone to the theatre alone after he and Bennie had an argument over which movie to watch and Bennie said he was going home. The questions went on for an hour before his mother decided they had bothered her son just about enough, and if they needed anything else, they could direct their questions to the family’s attorney.

  It was another two days before a homeless guy found the body. Heinrich clipped the stories from the newspaper for the next couple of weeks and pasted them into a scrapbook and took them out at night and read them lovingly.

  Afterward, every once in a while, Heinrich caught his father looking at him with an odd smile. His father knew what he had done, and wanted Heinrich to know he knew. They only spoke of it once, a year to the day after the murder. Heinrich and his father had been in the old man’s car driving to visit his mother’s sister in the hospital.

  “So what was it like?” his father said.

  Heinrich knew better than to play dumb. He scratched his cheek, looked out the window, and said, “It was a rush. Better than anything I’ve ever felt. Better than the time I talked Linda Welker into sucking my dick. It made me feel powerful. I think I want to do it again.”

  His father nodded. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

  They looked at each other and shared a smile.

  And now, in the ruins of his camp, Heinrich realized he’d violated the one rule of killing his father had always admonished him to keep.

  Be careful.

  He had not been careful. He had been sloppy, and now he was paying the price for it. Chalk it up to a lesson learned, he thought and stood up. Things weren’t as bad as they could have been. He was still alive, after all. As for the men he had lost … well, they knew the risks when they signed on.

  Heinrich changed into dry clothes and left his tent to find Maru.

  *****

  “I found Carter,” one of Heinrich’s sergeants said. “Or what’s left of him.”

  Heinrich walked over and looked at the body. The head, part of the torso, and both left limbs were gone. The right arm was intact, however, and Heinrich recognized the tattoos. Maru walked over to stand next to him.

  “Poor bastard.”

  Heinrich grunted and looked at the sergeant. “He was my friend. Grab five men and bury him.”

  “Yes sir. And the others?”

  “Leave them. We’ll come back when we have more time.”

  Heinrich turned and surveyed the bustle of men salvaging their caravan. At best count, there were sixty dead and four wounded. Two of the wounded were not expected to survive. Another twenty or thirty had either deserted or their bodies had not been found. That left Heinrich with just over a hundred and forty men. Not as strong as before, but still bigger than any other tribe Heinrich knew of.

  “We got a status on the wagons?” he asked.

  “We do,” Maru said. “Only four destroyed in the attack. Managed to salvage most of the cargo.”

  Heinrich shook his head in amazement and pointed at the wagons. “A ten second strafe from that minigun and we’d be picking up splinters. But they didn’t. Single-minded motherfuckers probably didn’t even think to look at the wagons. Too focused on killing us and getting those women out of here. Could have crippled us, and yet here we are with our trade intact.”

  “We got lucky, Chief.”

  “Indeed.” Heinrich crossed his arms did a few calculations. “From the standpoint of trade and supplies, we’re no worse off than before.”

  Maru looked at his chief sharply. “No worse off? Are you blind? You see all these corpses around here? They used to be your men.”

  Heinrich returned the stare. Maru paled, closed his mouth, and took an involuntary step backward.

  “Don’t state the fucking obvious to me, Maru. I am not fucking blind. I know we lost men. It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last. They’re gone, and we can’t get them back. And in case you didn’t notice, we’re in one fuck of a bad situation here. So since I’m the chief and it’s my job to focus on the men still alive and figure out how to keep them that way, I can’t sit around crying over troops we can’t save. If I seem callous to you, grow the fuck up. If my practicality offends your delicate little sensibilities, tough shit. It’s a hard world, and if you want to stay alive in it, you better be a hard motherfucker. Understood?”

  Maru looked at the ground. “Understood, Chief. Sorry.”

  “Forgiven. But that’s the last time you take that tone with me, Maru. We clear?”

  “Crystal, Chief.”

  Heinrich glared a few more seconds, then turned his gaze to the livestock pen. “The animals don’t seem the worse for wear.”

  Maru let out a breath. “Yeah. Couple broke their legs panicking, but the rest are all right.”

  “Good. We’re going to need them.”

  Heinrich began walking back toward his tent. Maru followed and asked, “So what’s the plan now, Chief?”

  “Same as it was before—we move on Parabellum. Only instead of heading straight in, we’re going to split up into squads of twenty and meet at Brawley’s Cove and regroup before we begin the assault.”

  “You mean…”

  “Yes. Scatter protocol.”

  Maru went quiet, eyes down.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Heinrich said. “And you’re right. This is a worst case scenario. None of us wanted this, but it’s what we have to deal with. What we do now is get together with the officers and NCOs and remind everyone of their role and plot routes for all the squads to follow. I know it’s dangerous traveling in small groups, but it’ll be even more dangerous if we stay together and the Army finds us again.”

  Maru nodded in acceptance. “Right, Chief.”

  “Find yourself a horse. It’ll make things go faster. Get some people to help you, and bring everyone we need to the command tent. We have work to do.”

  “Right Chief.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Gabriel

  “Phone’s charged,” Hicks said.

  I sat up in my bedroll, poked my head out of the Army-issue tent, and looked at the sky. It was clear and sunny, which meant our electronics were now charged and ready for use.

  “Anything on the tablet?”

  “Yep. Got a solid GPS fix on all four transponders.”

  Hicks was sitting across from me. He had propped two MRE chemical heaters against a duffel bag so they could warm our breakfast. The duffel bag itself contained the remaining grenades, ammunition, and LAW rockets the Green Berets had not taken when they left. The horses were picketed not far away, munching contentedly at fresh sprouts of green grass. It was warm that morning, the first balmy stirrings of spring blowing on the breeze.

  “Where are they?” I said.

  “Looks like they split up. I got four different trackers following four different paths, but they all seem to be headed more or less in the same direction.”

  “Which is?”

  “East.”

  I touched one of the MRE heaters with the back of my hand. It felt about right, almost too hot to touch. I removed a packet of corned beef hash, peeled it open, and took a few bites.

  “Sounds like they’ve got someplace in mind,” I said.

  Hicks grabbed the other packet of hash. “And they’re trying to avoid detection getting there.”

  “Dangerous strategy, splitting up. Might run into other marauders. Fuckers can get downright cannibalistic.”

  “No honor among thieves.”

  “None.”

  I took a few more bites of hash. It tasted exactly as I remembered from my days in the Marines: salty, mushy, and strangely delicious. Or maybe I was just hungry enough that a
nything would have tasted good.

  “This whole thing might be a bigger deal than we thought,” I said.

  “How so?”

  “They left Kansas with no intention of returning anytime soon. Do you remember when we were watching them by the river, how much water they were purifying?”

  “I did. It was a lot. Looked like they weren’t planning on stopping for water for a while.”

  “Exactly. Marauders have hideouts, hidden fortresses where they go to do business. So far, the Army hasn’t had much luck rooting them out. If we can find those places and shut them down, it’ll put most marauders out of business. But the problem is finding them.”

  Hicks nodded. “And right now, we got a whole slew of raiders all headed in the same direction.”

  “Which tells us wherever it is they’re going, it’s important to them. I can only think of one kind of place that fits the bill.”

  “Sounds like you need to make a phone call.”

  “Not until I finish breakfast. Dealing with Army brass is a job best done on a full stomach.”

  “You’re just saying that ‘cause you’re a jarhead.”

  “You want to make the call?”

  “That would be a violation of the command structure. You’re a civilian, so technically you outrank me. Also, General Jacobs put you in charge. I’m duty bound to defer such tasks to your superior qualifications.”

  I crumpled the empty MRE pouch into its box. “You know, for a guy who barely talks, you can really spin a line of bullshit.”

  Hicks grinned. “I am a man of many talents.”

  *****

  “As always, you’ve done a great job,” General Jacobs said. “Central Command is tracking the caravan as we speak. We’ll watch them via satellite and find out where they’re headed.”

  “And when you do?”

  “If they stop at one of their hideouts, we’ll monitor them. Observe the comings and goings, so to speak. See if we can track down more such places.”