After they got the final number, it would be time for him to give one of those emotional speeches about loss, hope, and all that. He was terrible at speeches, but the men deserved to hear his thoughts. They’d been through a lot together, and now Jake was going to officially, unofficially release them from their service obligation to First Platoon.
They were being reassigned to protection duty in New York. Their new mission was to keep the men and women of the city safe. He didn’t really have the authority to do that, but if the Army wanted to make an issue about it in a few years when it’d unfucked itself, then the men’s defense would be that they followed the final, lawful orders of Lieutenant Jake Murphy.
For him, he was done. Once they got back to Vern’s farm in Kansas, he would help Sidney and the old man as best he could. And Carmen. Shit. He’d forgotten about Carmen. He did not envy a reunion with the fiery Puerto Rican. Their parting had been terrible. She’d called him a pendejo and threw him out of her room when she found out that he was leaving to go to DC—they hadn’t even known about New York at that point. Carmen was a force to be reckoned with, that was for sure.
He pushed his way into the apartment. Maybe he should go to Bliss with Sergeant Turner he mused.
35
* * *
LIBERAL, KANSAS
MARCH 23RD
Sidney looked around the farm. It hadn’t suffered that much in the month that they’d been absent. The front door had been kicked in, but the Iranians hadn’t burned down the house or the barn, which was her main fear when she told Vern that she was going to go check it out.
They’d left the cattle in the pasture, but from what she could tell, they were gone. The Iranians must have taken them for their use. Bastards. There seemed to be enough chickens left just hanging around the area, though. If they could recapture them and put them into the barn, then they’d be okay.
“What about the solar and the well?” Mark asked, handing her the binoculars.
“We’ll have to go in and see.”
She and Mark had grown close during their mission to destroy the Iranian base at the airport. Hours upon hours spent in close proximity to one another when the infected answered their calls to attack meant a lot of time to learn about one another. He was a good kid. If she’d been a little less responsible when she was a teenager, he was the right age to have been her son. As it was, she’d begun to think of him like that, as crazy as it sounded to her.
“Hopefully, those bastards didn’t booby trap the place.” She gave him a sidelong glance. “I’m thinking they might have done something, so we need to be very careful, okay?”
“Yeah.”
“What is it?” Sidney could sense there was more that he wanted to say.
“It’s just…” He sighed in frustration. “Is this smart? They know where we are if we come back here. Isn’t this just risking a new set of assholes coming to attack?”
“I think we accomplished our mission. There wasn’t a single Iranian left alive at the airport and they killed a shit ton of infected during the attack. You saw it, thousands of the damn things. The bodies were stacked three or four high. They did us a huge favor.”
They’d sat nestled deep inside that stand of spruce trees, afraid to move beyond the cover they provided, for four days. The Iranians put up one hell of a fight, but in the end, the sheer number of infected had overwhelmed them. No reinforcements had arrived in an attempt to save the day like they’d done at the outpost. No one escaped the airport to go beg for help from another base somewhere else. They’d been completely alone, and that is what gave Sidney hope that the Iranians wouldn’t return.
“Yeah, but won’t more of them just come back?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. They suffered way too much loss over the last few months. We were hitting them, killing every one of them we saw—”
“The Redskins, right?” Mark said, laughing.
“Yeah, the Redskins. We hurt them bad even before the stuff we did last week. Wreckage from that big plane is blocking the runway, so they can’t land troops at the airport—which was how they were able to get here in the first place. That fighter jet they had on the far side of the cargo plane looked like it was pretty messed up too. I didn’t put any explosives on it, but that big mother burned hot.”
She let the binoculars hang low as she stared blankly down the road in the direction of town. “After being here for a while, they should know that there’s nothing really of value out here. I don’t know why they’d bother to come back—especially since they can’t land here now. Going overland is a fool’s errand—”
Her voice caught in her throat. “Jake?” Mark asked.
“Yeah. Those idiots aren’t ever coming back. Even with those big Army trucks, they never would have made it. A mob of infected would stop them dead in their tracks.”
She pushed the binoculars forcefully into the outside pocket of her backpack and zipped it closed. “Anyways, that doesn’t matter. They’re long gone, just like the Iranian assholes. We’re alone out here, except for the infected. Vern had a very good setup here at the homestead, and we left with only the stuff we could carry on our backs, so this place is our best chance at long-term survival.”
“Alright. Um… You ready to go check it out, then?”
“Yeah. Like I said, we take it slow, okay?”
He nodded solemnly as they stood from their place of cover behind the burned out remains of Vern’s old truck. It had been shoved to the side of the road to allow the Iranian vehicles freedom of movement.
“Cover me,” Sidney said as she walked cautiously around the truck’s bumper toward the Campbell homestead. They hadn’t seen any infected on their way from the house where the rest of the family was holed up, but only a moron would think that they weren’t out here still. They couldn’t let their guard down. But, if there was a bright spot to the former Iranian presence, it was that they’d killed tens of thousands of the damn things during their time here. That would help to make long-term living much easier than if they’d remained.
She walked cautiously up the steps and peeked through the open doorway. There were a lot of dried up corn leaves and some other garbage that had blown into the foyer, but that seemed to be the worst of it for having the door open for so long.
Sidney made her way around the first floor, trying in vain not to step on creaky boards or make too much noise in case there were any infected inside the house. Once the first floor was clear, she reemerged onto the porch and called Mark up to the house. The infected couldn’t really climb stairs, so she was confident that the only thing up there could be a trap left by the Iranians.
Once Mark was on the porch, Sidney went upstairs to clear the rooms. There didn’t appear to be any problems inside at all. They were lucky.
“Barn?” Mark asked.
“Yeah. Might as well get this all finished up.”
They walked cautiously toward the barn. Something about it felt weird. When they were near the door, Sidney sniffed hard. The smell of death emanating from inside was faint, but it was there. She put up a hand to warn Mark and he nodded.
They circled the building slowly, trying to determine how it had gotten in there. All the doors were closed and barred from the outside. The Iranians. Was this the trap that Sidney had feared?
She pantomimed her plan and he understood. It wasn’t a particularly hard one. She’d position herself in front of the door with her suppressed rifle and Mark would open it. Then, she’d shoot the beast as it came out. Easy peasy.
Mark gave her a countdown and then opened the door. The sounds of several infected reached Sidney’s ears a moment before the inside of the barn erupted with a roiling mass of bodies.. It wasn’t just one. There were a lot of them. And they were fast. They looked to be newly turned.
“Shit. Shit. Shit,” Sidney said over and over as she fired until the rifle clicked empty. She’d gone through thirty-one rounds in the blink of an eye.
Her
fingers fumbled with the magazine release button and she dropped the replacement. She hadn’t been expecting this many.
“Sidney! The house!” Mark’s voice energized her and she ran. They could barricade themselves in the house and then pick the infected off one-by-one through the window.
She raced toward the doorway and Mark surged past her. He made it up the stairs and inside before she’d even gotten to the porch. Sidney fell through the door and he slammed it behind her.
“Dresser!” he cried out.
She pushed herself up and went to the piece of furniture that Vern had placed in the foyer for this very reason. She pushed with all of her strength, but it was too heavy for her alone.
“I… I can’t move it,” she heaved.
The insane screams of the infected echoed through the house as they fell up the steps and clawed their way onto the porch. Mark threw the deadbolt and shuffled over to her. They slid the dresser in front of the door and both lay heavily across the top of it as the door shuddered from the impacts of the infected bodies against it.
“Guess that answers that question, huh?” Mark said after a moment.
“What?” The infected outside beat relentlessly at the door and side of the home, making it nearly impossible to hear.
“The race,” he replied. “You gave me crap about how slow I was. But I had that machine gun, remember?”
“Oh yeah…” She couldn’t help herself as she burst out laughing.
He grinned back at her. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing, kiddo. You’re just…” She sobered quickly. “I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“You didn’t get me into anything, Sidney. We’re a team. We were clearing the property and the Iranians set a trap for us. It’s not your fault.”
“You think that’s what happened out there?”
“Absolutely. I had a minute to see those infected from the side before you ran out of ammo. They don’t look like they’ve been out here for a year like the other ones. Those people were only turned a little while ago.”
Everything clicked in her mind with his confirmation that the infected outside were newly turned. The Iranians had rounded up the last of the survivors in the area and put them in that barn. That was the Redskins’ punishment. Those people had died because of Sidney’s actions.
She shared her thoughts with the boy. “No way. Those people would have died anyway. The fact that they died in Vern’s barn is just a matter of location. The Iranians wouldn’t have let them live.”
A window broke in the kitchen and Sidney rushed toward the sound. The window over the kitchen sink was out and several arms snaked through. Sidney wasn’t concerned with them getting in that way. It was much too high for their uncoordinated efforts.
Then the window in the sitting room on the other side of the foyer broke.
“Shit!” she completed her magazine change and chambered a round.
“What’s that noise?” Mark asked.
“What?”
“Listen!” he directed, putting a hand on the carrying handle of her rifle.
She took a moment to listen. Engines. There were engines. The infected screeched louder and the beating on the side of the home eased, then ceased altogether. Glass tinkled to the ground as the arms through the kitchen window disappeared, leaving behind a trail of blood and gore.
Outside, three large green vehicles turned into the driveway, their big tires crunching on the gravel.
“Are those Iranian?” Mark asked.
“No!” she replied excitedly. “Those are Strykers—the trucks that Jake and the Army guys used. It’s Jake. He’s back!”
She expected the big guns on the top of the trucks to open up on the mass of infected racing toward them, but they didn’t. Instead, the vehicles turned around and shut off their engines. “What the hell?”
By the time they’d finished their maneuvering, the twenty or so infected had surrounded the trucks. They beat uselessly against the metal sides. A head appeared at the top of the truck, followed quickly by the rest of the man’s body. He stood on the top of the Stryker and stretched his arms skyward leisurely in a stretch. Then the guy did a few exaggerated calisthenics like he was warming up for a game of backyard two-hand touch football.
“Who is that?” she asked. “I can’t tell.”
“It’s that crazy guy. The one who was a spy or whatever.”
“Grady?”
“Yeah. That’s him. What’s…” Mark trailed off as the operator pulled a big knife from his belt and hopped down off the truck into the midst of the infected.
Sidney didn’t understand what happened, but somehow, the man moved the creatures away from himself and he killed them indiscriminately, the knife blade flashing up and down, side to side, in the morning sun.
In a couple of minutes, he’d eliminated the threat using only his knife. He wiped the blade off on the clothes of the dead and walked toward the house.
“Anyone home?” he yelled.
“Yeah! Yeah, we’re here!” Mark shouted.
“Good. ‘Cause I need a drink,” Grady said. He hitched a thumb over his shoulder. “And we got somebody back there who wants to see y’all.”
Sidney’s eyes drifted to the Strykers. The back ramp was coming down on one of them. She watched as it settled into the gravel and a wheelchair emerged, rolling slowly downward.
“Is that?”
“Why’s Jake in a wheelchair?” Mark asked.
“Help me with the dresser,” she said, rushing to the front door.
Sidney didn’t know why Jake was in a wheelchair, but she wasn’t going to wait around to find out. Once the dresser was out of the way, she ran across the front yard, stepping over bodies to reach him.
“You are a sight for sore eyes,” he said, smiling up at her.
“You too,” she replied. “I can’t believe you came back.”
“I told you I would.” His grin was infectious and her lips parted in a wide smile.
“I’m glad you did,” she said. “I’m really glad.”
EPILOGUE
* * *
BIGGS ARMY AIRFIELD, FORT BLISS, EL PASO, TEXAS
APRIL 24TH
Hannah examined her face in the mirror. The stiches were doing good and the brigade surgeon said that she’d be able to take them out in a few days. The unprovoked attack in the showers had left her scarred and emotionally drained. The fact that there was a group of people—soldiers no less—that were anti-immune was insane. People who were immune to the virus should have been celebrated, not attacked.
But, that’s where they were. Division’s intelligence reports said that over the past several months, there’d been a steady increase in the anti-immune graffiti around the refugee camps and that attacks on people accused of being immune to the virus had spiked. There’d been several arrests, but the prevailing thought was all that it did was fan the flames of malcontent amongst the population, especially as rumors of the nuclear attacks spread through the camps. She’d heard reports that the immune were leaving the safety of Fort Bliss in favor of the wilderness outside the walls in an effort to escape the growing persecution. What a crazy world, she thought, disgusted by it all.
Hannah wiped her hands on the small towel she kept inside the wall locker she’d been given for her stuff. She examined what she had. In addition to the pack that she’d carried for a year across two continents, she had her M-4, some new undergarments, and two uniforms that the Army had issued her. That was it. Everything in her life could fit into the tiny space inside the wall locker.
She sighed and closed the door. America hadn’t been nearly what she’d expected during her journey from Brazil. She’d foolishly thought that once she got past the border, things would magically be better. What an idiot, she chided herself.
Nothing was better. It was all the same. The world was shit, but at least she was safe. Outside the base’s walls, there were infected hordes that roamed the countryside, staying alive by ea
ting everything in their path, and foreign troops who’d been let in under the guise of UN help. They were at all-out war with them now. The president’s final act before his death had been to order the bombing of Iran and North Korea. Humanity’s chances of survival became slimmer with each passing day.
“You look like you could use a bite to eat,” a voice from Hannah’s past said from the doorway to her small room.
Her head whipped around. “Grady?”
“In the flesh,” he said, smiling. He’d gotten thinner, and his beard had gone completely rogue on him, but it was him. It was really him.
She rushed across the room and threw her arms around him. He hugged her back. “How?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Give me the Cliff’s Notes version.”
“Um… Let’s see, I got captured in Brazil—”
“I know that part. We went back and raided the facility. I found pictures of you.” She squeezed him hard until her biceps ached. “Oh, Grady. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Shhh,” he said softly. “It’s okay. I’m better. I don’t really remember much of my time there.” He tapped on the side of his head. “The ol’ noggin here decided to block all the bad stuff.”
“Sorry. Go on,” she urged.
“You want to get some food first?”
“No. I—I don’t really like eating in the cafeteria anymore. I’ll explain later. Tell me how you got here.”
She released him and led the operator over to her bed. Sitting down, she patted the open space beside her.
Once he’d sat down, Grady continued. “I don’t know how I got out of the facility, to be honest. Somehow, I ended up in Kansas with the Iranians. We got overrun by the infected and an AWOL platoon from the Army here at Bliss rescued me. I went with them to New York City, overthrew a small gang, got a shit ton of blood drawn and tissue samples taken by a hotshot scientist, and then returned to Kansas. From there, the soldiers came back here to Bliss and I came along with ’em. Figured there’d be an opportunity for somebody with my skills down here. During my debriefing, they told me about a woman who’d also been at the facility in Brazil and I knew they were talking about you, so I came to find you.”
Five Roads To Texas | Book 11 | Reciprocity [Sidney's Way 3] Page 24