“That’s it. Good eyes, soldier,” Ballantine said.
Hartman slowed the Humvee after glancing in the left side-view mirror. “How do you want to play this, sir?”
Hastings keyed his radio. “Stilley, stop out here on the road and keep an eye on things. Break. Sergeant Reader, you’ll have OPCON of the Humvee. Stand guard out here and keep watch. We’ll be turning down a driveway in just a moment, and you’ll lose sight of us. I’ll keep you advised of our situation. Over.”
“Roger that. Over,” Reader responded.
“Hartman, back us in,” Hastings said. “If we have to make a quick getaway, I want us pointed in the right direction.” He leaned back in his seat and shouted, “Guerra, we’re turning here. Hold on.”
“Squared away, Captain.”
Hartman drove past the mouth of the driveway and cranked the wheel to the left. He pulled the vehicle across the street then reversed down the driveway, rolling backward slowly. The second Humvee halted just short of the driveway, leaving the opening clear.
“How far off the road is it, Ballantine?” Hastings asked. He knew he should have asked that question much earlier and used the answer to inform his tactical approach, but he was still numb over seeing the remains of Fort Drum. He wasn’t thinking straight, and a small voice in his mind told him that was going to be a problem if he couldn’t overcome the shock soon.
“About three hundred feet,” Ballantine said. “Uh, you think we should dismount and go in on foot, sir?”
“Too late for that. Let’s stay in the vehicle.” Hastings leaned back again. “Guerra, stay sharp up there!”
“Always am, Captain.” Guerra had the MK19 oriented toward the Humvee’s sloped rear.
The vehicle swayed from side to side as it trundled down the uneven driveway, and gravel clicked and crackled beneath its big tires. Overhead, the interlocking branches of mature oak trees filtered out the late-afternoon sunlight. Birds tweeted, and cicadas thrummed. If the world hadn’t ended, Hastings would have thought it was just another summer afternoon. He kept his eyes on the side-view mirror, watching for any sign of reekers lurking in the woods. He knew they were out there; he just didn’t know if they were close.
The reflection of a small green house filled the mirror, and the driveway widened so that a couple of vehicles could be parked in front. An old F-150 sat in the driveway, along with five reekers lying face down on the gravel.
“Okay, we have bodies out here,” Guerra said quietly. “House is about twenty meters behind us.”
“Stop here, Hartman,” Hastings said. “Ballantine, not yet!” he snapped when the sergeant first class reached for the door release.
Ballantine stopped, his fingers wrapped around the handle. He glared at Hastings with angry, confused eyes.
“We need to sync our approach,” Hastings said. “Hartman, I want you and Guerra to remain with the vehicle. Each of you should dismount and secure the sides. Watch your lanes—don’t worry about us, just watch your lanes. Use your brain bars if anything gets close, but if it’s a lot of somethings, don’t be afraid to light ’em up.” Louder, he said “Guerra, you get that?”
“Good copy, Captain.” Guerra turned in a slow circle inside the cupola, sweeping the barrel of the MK19 around with him.
“Ballantine, you and I will check the cabin. You’ll have point because you know the area. Don’t forget who you are and what you do, man. I know you want to find your family, but if you don’t soldier right, you’ll wind up dead.”
“Hooah,” Ballantine said unenthusiastically.
“All right. Dismount.”
The soldiers exited the Humvee, weapons at the ready. Once they were clear, Guerra left the MK19 and hopped out to cover the right side of the vehicle. Hastings glanced over his shoulder and saw the trooper’s eyes were on the woods. Good.
Hastings spoke into his headset microphone. “Reader, we’re on the move. We’ve found the cabin, and Ballantine and I will check for any civilians. Hartman and Guerra have security. Over.” He kept his M4 shouldered as he and Ballantine cautiously approached the cabin.
They examined the zombies around the pickup truck. Each had been shot through the head with a round bigger than anything the task force had. Hastings guessed .308 or .380 caliber, a decent man-killing round if ever there was one. Flies buzzed around the corpses, and Hastings saw with detached disgust that one of the bodies was literally overrun by maggots. Only when the reekers were no longer animated would the flies do their job.
“Roger that, good copy,” Reader radioed back.
“Movement inside,” Ballantine said sharply and raised his rifle.
Hastings stepped to the tall NCO’s right, separating from him and pulling the brain bar from his belt. “If it’s a single reeker, I’ve got the bar ready.”
As Ballantine grunted in response, the screen door flew open. A tall male zombie with a matted shock of gray hair staggered out onto the wooden porch, its bare feet whispering across the painted wood. The reeker was completely nude, and Hastings made a small sound of disgust when he noticed its genitals had been chewed off. He wondered how that had happened, but he decided he didn’t want to dwell on it.
Moaning, the zombie lurched off the porch and onto the gravel driveway, headed for Ballentine. The NCO didn’t move, but he had his assault rifle lined up for a perfect shot. Hastings started toward the reeker, brain bar raised. For a moment, he wondered if Ballantine would shoot him in the back when he crossed the NCO’s line of fire. Then, he decided it would probably be a gift if he did.
“Hey,” Hastings said softly, stepping forward.
The zombie turned away from Ballantine and began limping toward Hastings. Hastings wound up with the brain bar and laid a good one right across the reeker’s head. Bone cracked, and the zombie made a confused noise as its knees gave out. Hastings slipped to the side and swung again, connecting with the ghoul’s fractured skull a second time on its way down. The corpse crashed to the gravel face-first and didn’t move. Hastings waited a few seconds then rolled the body over with his boot, the brain bar held high. The ghoul’s milky eyes were crossed, and pulpy gray matter peeked out through the massive fracture in its skull. The body had been returned to death’s embrace… for good.
“No blood on this one,” he said to Ballantine. “At least, nothing recent. It doesn’t look like it’s fed on anything.”
“Come on, Captain. Let’s go,” Ballantine said with a hint of urgency in his voice.
“Lead on.” Hastings kept the brain bar out, just in case.
Ballantine pushed open the screen door, and Hastings followed. The inside of the cabin was a mess. A leather sofa was upended, and they checked to ensure nothing was hiding behind it. And old tube television was also lying on its side, glass screen shattered and silver plastic body fractured.
A zombie woman in a frilly pink dress lay on its side on the wooden floor. It had been dead for several days, and the body was beginning to bloat. The stench was awful, and Hastings gagged a few times before he got his stomach under control.
The kitchen was mostly untouched. The two bedrooms were empty, and while it looked as if one or more of the walking dead had traipsed through them, there were no signs of struggle.
Reader’s voice suddenly filled his ears. “Six, we’ve got reekers on the road. About ten to twelve. They’ve seen us, and they’re headed our way. Estimate contact in about two minutes. Over.”
“Roger that, Reader. Engage when you have to. Over.” Hastings turned to Ballantine. “Time to get this over with, Sergeant.”
Ballantine walked over to a narrow door in one wall and reached for the knob. When it didn’t turn, he knocked and called, “Kay? Kay? It’s Carl! Boys, are you down there?” He knocked again, harder. “The door’s locked. They have to be down there.” He stepped back from the door, readying to kick it right off the hinges.
“Daddy?” The small voice from the other side of the door startled Hastings as much as it did Ballant
ine.
Before Hastings could say anything, Ballantine was back at the door, frantically twisting the knob. “Daddy’s here! Daddy’s here! Come on out. We have to leave now!”
The door opened, and three people emerged, squinting against the bright afternoon light streaming through the windows. The woman was a handsome lady with dark hair and a full-bodied figure. She wore dirty jeans and a denim shirt. The boys were miniature versions of Ballantine, about six and four years old, and they were obviously happy to see their father. Ballantine swept them all into his arms, tears glistening in his eyes.
Hastings was surprised to find his own eyes burning a little, though they had welled up for different reasons. Why can’t this be Scotty and Terry?
Outside, the .50 caliber opened up, firing short bursts. At the same time, Reader’s voice came over the radio. “Six, we’re in contact. We have about twenty stiffs on the road now, and if there are any more in the immediate vicinity, they’re going to be headed our way real soon. You guys find what you’re looking for? Over.”
Hastings turned away from the Ballantine family reunion and swiped at his eyes. “Roger, we’re—”
A reeker pressed its body against one of the windows. White, milky eyes peered at Hastings from a face covered with gray, mottled flesh. The zombie moaned long and loud as it tried to push through the glass, but its footing must have been bad because it was slipping and sliding.
“Ballantine, get your people and get the hell out of here,” Hastings said. He raised his M4 and fired a single round through the zombie’s skull. Glass shattered as the 5.56-millimeter full metal jacketed round blasted through it and into the zombie’s forehead. The gray face fell away from the window, and Hastings hurried to the door. He kicked it open and cleared both sides then looked toward the Humvee. Guerra met his eyes and pointed into the woods. There. There. And there. Hastings saw three zombies threading their way through the brush, heading for the cabin.
Ballantine appeared in the doorway, his family behind him. “Sir, I’ll take my truck. It’s got a full tank of gas. Can my family ride with you in the Humvee?”
“Is the truck worth it, Ballantine?” As he spoke, Hastings pointed out the zombies in the woods to their right.
Ballantine nodded. “Yes, sir. If we lose one of the Humvees, at least we’ll have a fallback. And it’s four-wheel drive and in great shape.”
“All right. Let’s be quick about it. When we get on the road, you’ll be in the center of the formation—that way we can keep you protected. Hooah?”
“Hooah.”
Hastings led the woman and her two boys toward the waiting Humvee. Ballantine hovered long enough to ensure they were safely aboard the armored vehicle, then he sprinted back to his truck and slid into the cab. As Guerra and Hartman hopped into the Humvee, Hastings heard the F-150’s V8 engine come to life. He climbed into the Humvee and slammed the armored door. The vehicles took off just as the first zombie stepped out of the woods.
*
“Why isn’t Daddy with us?” Curtis, the youngest boy, asked.
Kay Ballantine looked shell-shocked. She held the boy on her lap, while the older one sat on the other side of Guerra’s legs, since the soldier was back to manning the MK19 grenade launcher.
“He’s right behind us, buddy,” Hastings said when it became clear that Kay was too overwhelmed to answer. Hastings figured she had probably been preparing to die in that cellar with her two sons, and the abrupt change in fate had left her unable to cope for the time being.
“Is he going to die out there?” the boy shot back.
“No,” Hastings said, even though there was no way in hell he could guarantee that. “He’s going to be fine. We’ll help him if there’s any trouble. Don’t worry about that.”
“Where we headed, sir?” Hartman asked. He had turned the vehicle right when pulling out of the driveway, away from the advancing zombies the others were holding back with the .50.
Hastings ignored the question. He spoke into his headset’s boom microphone. “Stilley, fall in after the pickup truck. Over.”
“Fall in after the pickup, roger that. Over.”
“Sir?” Hartman prodded.
“Let’s just get the hell away from Watertown and Drum, Hartman,” Hastings said. “Head back to Rutland Street then go south down Main. You know what I’m talking about, or do you need the GPS?”
“Negative, I know the territory, sir. Back to Rutland then right onto South Main. How far south am I driving, sir?”
Hastings gave that a minute of thought. “Past the Rutland Cemetery. Get us to State Street—Route 126. We’ll start to look for vehicles to refuel from there, then we’ll plan our next move.”
“Roger that, sir.”
Hastings heard something from the backseat, and he turned and looked at the Ballantines. One of the boys was slowly unwinding, slipping into sleep; the other was looking out the window.
Only Kay Ballantine met his eyes. “I said thank you,” she whispered.
Hastings nodded and faced forward again. He couldn’t stand that she and her kids were sitting where Terry and Scotty should have been. And he couldn’t keep from beginning to hate her and her kids, and that was something that shocked him, even through the layers of grief that he was only just able to hold at bay.
“Fuck this,” he muttered.
“Captain?”
“Nothing, Hartman. Just drive, man.”
“Hooah, sir.”
*
The three vehicles cut through the countryside of upstate New York. The back roads were actually quite deserted, something they had noticed on their way to Fort Drum. The zombie apocalypse had happened so fast that most folks just hadn’t had enough time to evacuate. As they drove past the occasional farmhouse, Hastings wondered if they should stop and search for survivors. And every now and then, they would see figures stumbling through the fields, either alone or in small groups, their tattered clothes hanging off their thin, necrotic frames. Hastings peered at each through his binoculars, just to verify that the figures were more walking dead and not living people. They were always reekers.
The presence of the zombies took away from the almost idyllic summer afternoon. Hastings leaned back in his seat, pulled out his maps, and spread them open across his lap. They would certainly need to reprovision and find shelter for the night. With Ballantine’s family along, they couldn’t all sleep in the Humvees—there just wasn’t enough room—and Hastings didn’t think it would be wise to have anyone bed down in Ballantine’s truck. He had seen zombies go after people trapped inside automobiles, and while they hadn’t been able to penetrate heavy windshields with their bare hands, the crazy things had been able to smash through the tempered safety glass in the doors. Of course, they didn’t have many fingers left when they finally got through, but that hardly mattered.
So they needed to find some kind of defensible shelter. Their ammunition supply was decent, but they would have to keep the Humvees close. The last thing he wanted was to fight through a thousand deadheads with civilians in tow. Gotta go over this with Ballantine.
“There’s a field about a mile down the road,” he said. “Let’s pull off the road there. We need to have a powwow to plan our next move.”
“Okay,” Hartman said. “No problem, sir.”
The small convoy covered the distance to the turn off, and Hartman signaled his intention. Hastings waved a hand. “Keep going. I want to get off the road.”
“Roger that.” Hartman pulled the Humvee into the center of the field and executed a sweeping left-hand turn, stopping only when the vehicle’s front bumper was pointed back toward the road.
Ballantine parked his pickup next to the Humvee, and Stilley came up on the other side.
Hastings examined the territory for a moment through the thick passenger window then opened the heavy door. “Mrs. Ballantine, you and the boys should stay here,” he said. “We’re going to review our next steps, but we’ll be right outside.”
“What’s the op, sir?” Stilley asked in his foghorn-loud voice.
Hastings shook his head. “I want you on security over there,” he ordered, pointing back at the Humvee Stilley had come from. “Take Tharinger with you. Keep your eyes out on the entire approach from that side, and make sure you watch your lanes. Hartman, I want you and Reader to do the same on this side. Guerra, you’re with me and Ballantine.”
The soldiers murmured their assent and set about enacting his orders.
Hastings waved Ballantine and Guerra closer. “Okay, we need to figure out what we’re going to do next. We don’t have a lot of intel on what’s going on in the world, but I think we can agree that from what we know, the country’s basically falling apart. If what we saw in New York is any gauge, then we can assume the military response to the situation didn’t get a lot of traction. So we should consider ourselves cut off and on our own. The question is: where do we go?”
“That Special Forces guy said there was a fight down at Bragg,” Guerra said. “If the Eighty-Second and the other units there have consolidated their fires and fortified their positions, then maybe they’ll hold out. We might be able to find some safety down there.”
“Even if what that guy said was true,” Ballantine said, “then that means we’ll have to fight through bands of reekers to get to the fort. I’m not sure that’s exactly what we want to do, since we already know what happens when those things amass for an attack. We don’t have enough organic firepower to repel them.”
“Might be able to get help from Bragg,” Guerra said, “especially if the Eighty-Second’s aviation brigade is still active.”
“We don’t know that it is,” Hastings said. “And it would definitely suck big balls if we were to get close to the base and then get taken out by a swarm because the troops remaining at Bragg couldn’t help us. Or, possibly, we might get close only to find out Bragg’s been overrun.” He stared down at the maps. “Okay, big picture: the eastern portion of the country is basically falling to the dead. We know from what we’ve heard that infestations in the west were contained more quickly, and we know that the mountain states were the ones with the least occurrences. Slater mentioned Denver being turned into a fortress. I have no idea if that’s true or not, but to me, heading west seems pretty attractive.”
These Dead Lands: Immolation Page 4