These Dead Lands: Immolation

by Stephen Knight

  “You work at the naval facility, Walker?” Hastings asked.

  “He did not,” Slater answered. “He was a truck driver, making a water delivery. His truck broke down, and before he could catch a ride out of there, the facility was under attack.”

  “And that’s when you found him, Sergeant?” Hastings asked.

  “More or less, Captain. More or less.”

  “So why did you keep him?”

  “Like I said, sir. He’s pretty good with a baseball bat. But also, I needed someone I could sacrifice real quick if I needed to.”

  Walker jerked his head up. “What?”

  Slater nodded. “Afraid so, Mister Walker. You were the designated sacrifice. If the reekers broke in and we needed to get out, you were the one I was going to leave behind. Want to know how I was going to do it? I’d hobble you so you’d fall behind. Slash one of your Achilles’ tendons. The reekers, they love a slow-moving meal, so—”

  “Are you kidding me?” Walker asked.

  “Yeah, okay,” Hastings said. “Thanks, Sergeant. Let’s all go to our neutral corners, all right?”

  Slater chucked while looking up at Walker. “I never liked bullies too much, Mister Walker. And I’d imagine no one else does, either, so you might want to look into investing in some self-improvement.”

  Walker just stared at Slater, obviously unsure of what to say.

  Hastings gave the bigger man a little push in the right direction. “Go sit with the rest of your people. We’ll make formal introductions after my team here syncs up with Slater.”

  Walker beat feet, joining the new detachment of civilians camped out near the front of the barracks. Everything was winding down, and the drama was over, but Hastings could read the resentment on the faces of the newcomers. Some were directed at Hastings and his men, but most were oriented toward Walker. The guy really didn’t seem to have much of a fan club.

  Hastings turned back to Slater. “Good to see you again, Slater.”

  Slater smiled thinly. “I guess it’s good to be seen. Looks like you guys have yourself a sweet setup here, sir.” He pointed at the ceiling, where the paint was peeling around the pipes and lighting fixtures. “Kind of a fixer-upper, though.”

  “Can’t be choosy about the accommodations during the zombie apocalypse. You’re in charge of these people?” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, indicating the cluster of civilians behind them.

  Slater nodded. “Only by default, sir. They were doing mostly okay when I arrived at the facility, but that changed pretty quickly.”

  “How did you wind up with them?” Hastings asked.

  “I needed a place to bed down for a while. I wasn’t abandoning my mission, which was to get back to Bragg, but I needed to rest and reconstitute a bit. I figured the Gap would’ve been overrun already, and I was aware of the facility’s existence from previous work, so I checked it out. I was surprised to see it was still intact, so I went over the fence and found my way inside.” Slater pointed at Walker. “That guy there tried to kill me, but like I said before, he’s a pussy. Wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle, though I sometimes wonder why I didn’t just deep six him and call it a day.”

  “It’s probably for the best to avoid killing the living, if possible,” Hastings said. “After all, there might not be so many of us left. I guess the command group put you guys here?”

  Slater gave him that oddly blank expression. “Yes, sir. We didn’t just arbitrarily decide to enter this barrack unit by ourselves. We were directed here by some Nasty Girl types. I guess they want to try to keep all the new arrivals in one place for a while.”

  “You go through decon, Sergeant?” Ballantine asked.

  “Hell, yes. See these?” Slater tugged on the collar of his clean Army Combat Uniform. “It kills me to have to wear a set of ACUs after styling in multicam for the past few years. About the only place this uniform could provide camouflage is on a dot-matrix battlefield.”

  Hastings snorted. “Thankfully, the current combatant force doesn’t really seem to care much for style cues.”

  “Camouflage is camouflage, Captain. Anything that helps is a good thing to have.”

  “I don’t disagree, but I’m pretty sure ACUs are all that we’re going to find here,” Hastings said. “We’ll have to make do. So after you landed at the naval facility, then what?”

  “Well, I found the survivors, of course. At first, I was just going to get them squared away as best I could before hitting the road back to Bragg. But when I started poking around the facility, I found there was a shitload of stuff that actually looked useful. I had the same idea about the trains that I guess you did, sir. Those things were just too good to pass up, plus they’d make a mode of transportation that would be very difficult for the dead to stop. But I had no operators, and despite everything the public might believe, railroad operations are not included in the Special Forces training circulars.”

  “But you still set about outfitting one of the trains for movement,” Hastings said. “Why?”

  Slater blinked. “Well, why not, sir? Even if I didn’t have any engineers to drive the things around, they’re still resources that could be tapped. I figured if worse came to worse, I’d eventually find someone to help me get them fully operational. And if not, I might be back up here one day, and they’d still be handy to have. So those fine folks over there helped me out with the weaponization process and the bare bones logistics, and that’s when I heard from you guys here at the Gap.”

  “Damn lucky we were in the zone, Sergeant,” Guerra said. “But what if we hadn’t been?”

  “We’d already repulsed two low-level attacks from the reekers,” Slater said, “but even though we held out, I knew the place was just too big for a dozen people to secure for the long term. We had a couple of trucks on site, and we were going to start hardening those for overland transport. The people at the facility weren’t keen on leaving, but when the second wave of reekers got in through the fence one night and started walking around the parking lots in plain sight, that got them motivated enough to want to kick off.” He looked back at Hastings. “So you have your trains and your containers. I guess now you’ll want to start fortifying the Gap to stop the hordes coming this way from the east?”

  Hastings nodded. “That’s the plan.”

  “You really think you can stop two or three million zombies, sir?” Slater again looked at Hastings with that odd blank expression. It was disconcerting, making him look devoid of intelligence or emotion, a kind of robot or something. A true tabula rasa. “I mean, we tried that at the task force level, right? And we had everything—artillery support, attack aviation, armor, all classes of logistics—pulled forward, static and active defenses in depth. I know my guys failed in the Boston area, and for sure the Tenth got its clock cleaned in Manhattan and up north. By the way, did you make it up to the post?”

  “We did,” Hastings said.

  “Find your people?”

  “No.”

  Slater shook his head. “Anyone lose their dependants up there?”

  “I lost my family,” Hastings said. “Sergeant Ballantine was able to retrieve his, and the rest of the troops didn’t have relations on post.”

  “You lost your family, sir? Shit. That really sucks. I’m very sorry to hear that.” His voice held the first semblance of emotion that Hastings had heard in it to date.

  Hastings waved the sentiment away. “That’s how it went down.”

  “I don’t doubt that, sir. But how long can you stay in the fight?”

  Hastings cocked his head. “What was that, Sergeant?”

  “I asked how long can you stay in the fight? You’ve been compromised in the worst way. I don’t see how you can keep it together twenty-four, seven and not come unglued at some point.”

  “Hey, Sergeant Slater.” Guerra stepped toward Slater. “This is the guy who got us from New York to here in one piece, and he’s the guy who put together the operation that saved your ass. Show
some respect, man.”

  “I wasn’t being disrespectful, Staff Sergeant,” Slater said. “But if you can’t see that, then maybe you might want to step back and let the adults talk this over, okay?”

  Guerra’s face clouded. “What the fuck is—” He started forward, but Ballantine reached out and pulled him back. Slater didn’t move a muscle, and if he felt at all intimidated by Guerra’s response, he didn’t let it show.

  “We’re not doing this,” Ballantine said. “Step back, Hector. Sergeant Slater, you might want to dial back the attitude a little bit with regards to Captain Hastings. He’s done damn fine by us. and by you, too, in case you didn’t notice.”

  “Easy, Big Sarge. I’m not saying you’re wrong. But the captain’s been through hell and back, and he’s still on the line.” Slater turned back to Hastings. “It’s what’s keeping you going, isn’t it? Breaking everything down into little pieces and working them out, one by one. Find the trains. Get the trains. Off-load the containers. Transport the containers. Build a perimeter. Defend the perimeters. Kill the reekers. Is that it, sir?”

  Hastings stared at Slater. The rangy master sergeant was essentially calling his shit out on the carpet right in front of the men. That should have motivated Hastings to metaphorically break his foot off in Slater’s ass, but the challenge didn’t have that effect at all. Hastings figured Slater probably knew it wouldn’t, which just strengthened his hand. The idea behind Slater’s premise was easy to discern—Hastings had been severely compromised emotionally, but he was still in command, which went against all common sense. By rights, Hastings should have been sidelined. Slater was right to be concerned about that, because in his real world view, his ass was going to depend on Hastings holding his shit together over the long term with no opportunity to properly grieve and purge himself of loss and guilt. There would be no time to heal as he ran from emergency to emergency, from operation to operation. Slater had called it by the numbers, and Hastings could sense that Ballantine and the others were suddenly interested in the issue as well.

  It hadn’t bothered them while we were neck deep in the shit, but now it’s a concern. That should have bothered him too, but it didn’t. It was as if Hastings’s emotions were in suspended animation, on ice at temperatures so cold that it would take a long time to revive them.

  “You’re right, Sergeant,” Hastings said. “That’s exactly what I’m doing. There’s nothing else to do. We are where we are, and circumstances aren’t going to change just because my people are gone. I still have a job to do, and I’m doing it. Bit by bit, just like you said.”

  “Command group know about this?” Slater asked.

  “About my family?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “They do. Didn’t seem to faze them all that much,” Hastings said.

  Slater sighed then shrugged. “Okay. Maybe it’s not a big deal. But you know where I’m coming from on this, sir? I’m not particularly worried about myself, or these boys here. All the Joes can take care of themselves. But it’s those people”—he pointed at the civilians who had accompanied him from the naval facility, then at Ballantine’s boys, and finally at Kenny and Diana—“who are depending on you more than you might really be aware of. I heard some talk about continuity of government operations and the like, but that’s all strategic, big picture stuff. Tactically, we need to take care of our people.”

  “Why, Master Sergeant Slater,” Hastings said, “I didn’t know you cared so much.”

  Something stirred in Slater’s eyes. Anger? Frustration? Even though still waters ran deep, Hastings saw that there were currents inside the NCO, and they ran strong.

  “I took an oath and put on this uniform because I care, sir. No one goes into Special Forces because of the easy duty and fast track promotion rate,” Slater said.

  “I hear you, Sergeant. We’re in the same boat.”

  “So what are you going to do when the dead overrun the defenses, sir?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Guerra said.

  Slater ignored him. His vacant gaze remained rooted on Hastings, and he stood there, waiting for an answer.

  “We have the trains,” Hastings replied, “and a lot of heavy ground vehicles, not to mention some aviation assets. When the time comes, we’ll bug out. To where, I don’t know just yet, but I’m working on that.”

  “Has the command group been in contact with any other installation, sir?” Slater asked. “Federal or local?”

  Hastings shook his head. “Not reliably. As far as I know, the communications network is still up and operational, but no one’s transmitting.”

  Slater seemed to consider that for a long moment. “I might have some additional frequencies for the group to try, ones that wouldn’t be in the usual run books. That was another reason I went to the naval facility. I wanted to see if I could reach out and talk to some people, but the communications shack was down since the backup generators had shit the bed two weeks ago. Your people here at the Gap, though, they might be able to make all the difference.”

  “Who did you have in mind we call, Sergeant Slater?”

  “Rawhide,” Slater said.

  Hastings snorted. He looked around at the other soldiers, and their blank expressions indicated that they didn’t know what the hell Slater was talking about, either. “Rawhide, Sergeant?”

  “Yes, sir. Rawhide. That’s a call sign, in case you’re interested.”

  “I’m interested, Sergeant Slater, but whose call sign is it?”

  Slater smiled thinly. “It’s what’s left of United States Army Special Operations Command and all subordinate SF units at Fort Bragg, sir. Who else would I want to talk to, other than the people who might actually have survived the outbreak of the zombie apocalypse?”

  “Bragg again, huh?” Ballantine said.

  Slater nodded. “A bunch of National Guard guys and some remaining active duty troops managed to make it here, right? You think that the same thing couldn’t happen down at Bragg?”

  “The Gap is in the middle of nowhere,” Ballantine said. “Bragg? I don’t know. That was a major active duty post—”

  “If any post is still operational, it’ll be Bragg,” Slater said.

  “What makes you so sure, Slater?” Hastings asked.

  “Aside from Fayetteville and some smaller towns in the area, there’s not a huge population in the area. There’s a sense of community down there, not like up here, where everyone is an island unto themselves. You have the chance to talk with any of the guys here from the One-Oh-One?”

  “Some,” Hastings said.

  “Then you know Campbell is gone, just like Drum. But those guys I talked to during in-processing, they said they’d heard Bragg was still operational. Under siege, maybe, but holding out. Lots of smart people down that way, and look at it this way: the Eighty-Second was sent to hold DC, but Task Force Washington came apart at the seams. Those guys would’ve had a straight shot back to the post. About the same distance as it was from New York to Drum, but they would have a single high-speed approach taking them directly from point A to point B.”

  “Okay,” Hastings said. “Let me ask you this: do they have rail access down there?”

  “Cape Fear railroad, sir,” Slater said with another vague smile. “And there’s also another track to Fayetteville.”

  Hastings nodded. Exhaustion was settling in, and his eyes burned. He rubbed them for a moment then looked back at Slater. “All right. Give us your frequencies, and I’ll have someone run them over to the TOC.”

  *

  When the day had run its course, after the missions had been completed and the troops had been tended to, Hastings found he had nothing to do but wrestle with his loss.

  The barracks building was dark and silent, save for the snoring. Hastings was stretched out on a lower bunk, not far from where Kenny and Diana lay. In the darkness beyond them, the Ballantine family slept on two bunk beds that had been pushed together, with Ballantine and his w
ife on the lower bunks and Curtis and Joshua on the uppers. The rest of the troops from 10th Mountain were nearby as well, scattered across five bunks. Every man had claimed a lower bunk to sleep on, with their gear laid out on the units above them. Slater and the civilians he had brought in were near the door, while Hastings and his party were closer to the latrine.

  Outside, Fort Indiantown Gap was mostly quiet—no helicopters, no moving equipment, no voices. The only sounds Hastings could discern were the distant thumps and booms as the CONEXes were lifted off railcars by crane and deposited on waiting lowboy trailers. Hastings stared at the underside of the bunk above him and listened to the distant symphony of men working through the night.

  Scotty. Terry.

  There was no way Hastings couldn’t think of his wife and son. Even when he was busy writing out operational orders, planning the next move in the campaign against the dead, or meeting with the command staff, the emptiness left behind by their deaths was always present. Sometimes, the loss was just a vague apparition, ghostly and pale in the distance, waiting for the time to assert itself. At others, like in the darkness of the barracks building, it was front and center, entreating him to consider his despair at length.

  I should have been there. I should have died with them.

  As if feeling his remorse, Kenny moaned slightly in his sleep and shifted beneath the blanket. Hastings looked over at the boy, feeling a sudden surge of annoyance. The last thing anyone needed was for the kid to wake up and start screaming. He quelled the irritation an instant later, reminding himself that Kenny had likely watched as his father was murdered and his mother was raped to death, even as he himself was being defiled.

  Cut the kid some slack. He lost people, too.

  Kenny moaned again. Hastings threw back his blanket and rolled into a sitting position. He watched the boy, ready to tend to him if he awakened. Kenny stirred on more time then lay still. His breathing became slow and deep as he reentered a heavy sleep.

  Hastings relaxed a bit, though if he were honest, he would have preferred to have a distraction. He looked over at Diana and saw that she was awake. Hastings nodded to her then got to his feet. He pulled on his ACU trousers. He didn’t want to just lie in his rack and let the punishing despair run over him. If sleep wasn’t coming, then he had to do something to keep him occupied. He put on his socks and boots then his uniform blouse. After grabbing his weapon, he walked down the aisle between the rows of bunks and slipped out one of the front doors.