This Shattered Land - 02

by James Cook

  The road beneath us was cracked and pitted with large potholes scattered every dozen yards or so. Already, nature had begun reclaiming the pavement for vegetation. Sprigs of grass and tiny saplings grew between the breaks and fissures in the road, hastening its destruction. In twenty years no one would be able to tell there was ever a road here.

  It amazed me how quickly the work of mankind was being torn down and replaced with natural growth now that there was no one around to maintain it. All of the little pieces, parts, and functions of civilization that I once took for granted lay in ruins. The world was not a perfect place before the Outbreak, and the human race was guilty of some terrible things, but for all of our crimes and ignorance, I don’t think we deserved such a harsh punishment as what we got. I just hoped that those of us who survived could learn from the mistakes of the past, and build something better for those who come after.

  The sun rose high in the sky, but a close canopy of branches overhead obscured most of its light as they rustled and swayed in the gentle breeze. There was a time when I enjoyed the sound of limbs jostling against one another, singing the same old song this forest had sung for untold millennia, but when on the lookout for walkers, it was just annoying. Background noise makes it hard to distinguish the sounds of the undead approaching from the natural sounds of the forest. The infected, for their part, pay the wind no heed at all. They only have ears for the sounds of living flesh.

  Just as I was thinking this, we rounded a bend in the road and spotted several infected wandering in our direction. We stopped and watched them.

  “Shit, man, do you think they heard us coming?” I asked.

  “I hope not.” Gabe replied. “I know their hearing is good, but I didn’t think it was that good.”

  The undead spotted us. The ones that were still capable of doing so began to moan and croak. I cursed under my breath as I drew my pistol and attached the suppressor to the barrel. That moaning was going to attract every undead corpse within half a mile if we didn’t put a stop to it, and quickly. I didn’t waste any time. I jogged to within fifteen yards of the walkers and assumed a relaxed shooting stance. The first infected was barely recognizable as the person that he once had been. His face was almost completely gone, and his flesh hung in tattered strips exposing white bone and desiccated muscle tissue. It surprised me that as screwed up as he was he was still capable of locomotion. The Kel-Tec made a muted crack, and he fell down to the pavement. I lined up on the next one, trying not to notice the gaping hole where her intestines used to be, and sent another supersonic projectile through her rotten skull. Five left. I shot three more, and then holstered my pistol. No sense in wasting ammo when we could simply take them out one on one. I drew my fighting knife and gestured for Gabe to move up. He unsheathed his Falcata and fell into a fighting stance next to me. I pulled the scarf around my neck up over my mouth and tied it back, then slipped on my ski goggles. Gabe did the same.

  “You ready?” I asked.

  “Yep.” He replied through his scarf. “Let’s get this done.”

  We moved forward at the same time. Our hard knuckled Kevlar gloves would protect our hands from bites and infected tissue, but we would have to be careful not to let them get their jaws close to any other parts of our limbs. I approached my target and delivered a strong front kick to its chest. It stumbled backward, but did not fall down. It was a large, strong man before it died, and it was not going to be easy to knock over. I cursed under my breath, slapped away its grasping hands, and kicked it again, this time following up with a reverse foot sweep. In a rare display of bad technique, I blew the timing and landed the kick when the ghoul had its weight on the leg I was trying to sweep. Its foot did not budge, but the creature stumbled over my ankle as it tried to right itself, and toppled over backward.

  It ain’t pretty, I thought, but I’ll take it.

  I popped up and rushed over to its head. The ghoul had already started sitting up, so I pushed it back down with a boot across the throat, lined up my knife with its eye socket, and shoved the sharply pointed blade down into its skull. The creature shuddered and clutched at my leg with a frighteningly powerful grip as it died. Once it went limp, I stepped away from it to see how Gabe was doing. His undead opponent was already down with a massive section of its skull caved in. Gabe looked over at the ghoul I dispatched, gave me a grunt of approval, and then walked over to clean his blade with a handful of leaves and grass from the side of the road.

  “Hey, come here and look at this.” He said, pointing at the ground in front of him.

  I walked over and looked where he was pointing. “Deer tracks.”

  Gabe nodded. “That would explain why these things are out here. Probably following Bambi around, trying to scare up some dinner.”

  “Well, let’s hope there aren’t too many more of them. I’m running low on ammo for this thing.” I said, patting my pistol.

  I took a moment to clean the infected tissue off my knife and pass a lighter over it to kill anything that might still be clinging to the surface of the steel. Gabe did the same with his Falcata before we proceed ahead down the road. We came across a couple of abandoned cars along the way, and searched them for anything useful. One of the cars was empty, and the other one had its front end wrapped around a tree with brown smears of old dried blood everywhere and bones scattered around inside the cab. Gabe reached in and swept the bones aside as he put one knee on the passenger seat and opened the glove box.

  “Hell yeah, look what we got here.” He said, cracking a smile.

  “Whatcha got?”

  Gabe stood and held up a small nine-millimeter pistol in a nylon holster and a box of ammunition. He handed me the gun and checked the ammo.

  “Got a full hundred-round box here. Looks like we both get to carry some real firepower today.” He said.

  “Works for me.” I dropped the mag and worked the slide a couple of times, then dry fired it. It seemed to be in good working order, so I stuffed it into my pack along with the box of ammo.

  Gabe reached down and pulled the lever to pop the trunk. I had to tug on it a few times to get it open. The stale, musty odor of rotten upholstery wafted up from the wet compartment. The only thing I could see in the trunk was a black duffel bag. I unzipped it and turned it over. Neatly wrapped bundles of cash poured out in a green cascade, spreading out across the bottom of the trunk.

  “Holy shit. Dude, look at this.”

  Gabe stepped around the back of the car and peered into the trunk.

  “Well, I guess we know where this guy’s priorities were.” He said.

  “This kind of thing makes me sad, man. The world starts falling apart, and all this person was worried about was money.” I shook my head.

  “Anything useful in there?” Gabe asked.

  I shoved the money aside and searched the trunk, not finding anything.

  “Nothing here. Unless you want the tire iron.” I said.

  Gabe frowned, and turned to continue down the road. I closed the trunk and followed him. We hiked a few more miles toward Marion and passed a rotting wooden sign that displayed the town’s former population. I pointed at it as we walk by.

  “Hard to believe a place with that many people used to be considered a small town.” I said.

  Gabe nodded. “I hope to God we find a population that large between here and Colorado.”

  We continued on in silence until we reached the summit of a steep hill that branched off into a gravel road. We turned and followed it a quarter mile until it reached a scenic overlook with an excellent view of the town below. My heart sank as I took out my little binoculars and scanned the streets at the bottom of the valley.

  “Dammit. The place is crawling with infected.” I said.

  Gabe sighed, and adjusted his pack. “I thought that might be the case. The valley around here is steep, I was worried it might box in most of the dead.”

  I looked toward the east at a road that led away from town. I could see about a half-
mile of its length, before it disappeared around a sharp curve and snaked down the back of a ridge.

  “Tell you what, you stay here, and I’ll go draw the dead over that ridge, and then double back through the woods on the north side of town.”

  Gabe considered it for a moment, and then gave a curt nod. “That’ll work. Just be careful, I’ll need your help getting supplies back to the boat.”

  I shot him a glare. “Yeah, we wouldn’t want you to throw your back out or anything while I’m down there trying not to get eaten.”

  Gabe gave a half smile, and made a low grunting sound that is his version of a chuckle. I dropped my pack and a few other pieces of gear I didn’t need at the moment, and started the hike toward the eastern side of town. I crossed the paved two-lane where it branched off onto the gravel road leading to the overlook and slipped into the forest on the other side. The carpet of dead leaves under my boots was thick, and every step made a soft crunching sound. I drew my pistol and thumbed the safety off just in case the noise attracted any walkers.

  The hike to the eastern side of town went by without incident. The undead stumbled in the distance, but none of them had noticed me yet. That was about to change. I broke cover from the tree line and walked out onto the narrow highway that accessed the town from the east. A few broken down vehicles sat forgotten on the side of the road, one of them a large RV with a ladder on the side.

  Perfect. I thought with a smile, and climbed up to stand on top of it.

  The roof of the RV gave me a good vantage point to see the horde that occupied the streets ahead of me. I removed the suppressor from my pistol, pointed it into the air, and fired a single shot. The loud crack echoed across the floor of the valley, and about two thousand heads snapped around in my direction all at the same time.

  The moaning cry of the walking dead spread through the burned out town like wildfire. A hundred cries went up, then five hundred, spreading as fast as an avalanche. In less than a minute, every ghoul in the valley was stumbling toward me, reaching and groaning for flesh. I holstered my pistol and climbed down from the RV. The buildings lining the side of the highway formed a chokepoint for the infected. Horrid fascination set in as they made their slow march toward me, gathering into a festering clump in the street. It was slow going for them, but they were coming. They might not move very fast, but they didn’t need to. They were already dead, and they would never get tired. Ever. They would walk, and walk, and walk all the way to the end of the Earth if that was what it took to reach their prey. I might be faster, but I am alive, and I need to rest eventually. I need food, and water, and protection from the elements. The dead need nothing, care for nothing except the ceaseless, gnawing hunger that drives them onward.

  When they got to within thirty yards, I turned and led them eastward on the highway. The dead appear slower than they actually are, and I learned long ago that one has to maintain a brisk pace to keep ahead of them. A few ghouls who had wandered off into the woods who the hell knows how long ago emerged from the trees around me. Most were not close enough to pose any danger, but I increased my pace to a slow jog anyway to get ahead of them.

  I crested a hill and waited at the top to let the infected catch up. Looking down the slope on the opposite side, I saw there was a knot of seven or eight undead that I would not be able to avoid. Once sure that the undead on the road behind me would not have any trouble following, I walked down the hill and drew my pistol. The first ghoul got to within twenty feet before I dropped him with a single shot through the eye. Not quite where I was aiming, but I couldn’t argue with the result. I sighted in again, and the next one hit the dirt. Without willing it, I fell into the easy, steady rhythm of shooting. I’d practiced so much that it only took me about a second and a half per creature to kill them with well placed shots. The Kel-Tec felt like an extension of my arm, the fiber optic sights a familiar splash of color just before the squeeze of the trigger. In less than twenty seconds, eight permanently dead corpses littered the ground in front of me. A glance over my shoulder revealed that the lead walkers had already crested the hill. Time to get moving.

  The horde followed me a mile and a half down the road before I turned around and faced them. I had increased the distance between us to fifty yards, and on the road behind me, a sharp bend turned down a steep hill that I could use to get out of sight and double back toward town. The mass of corpses heaved and shoved, stumbling and rebounding off one another on the narrow highway. I stood up straight to address them.

  “Well guys, it’s been real, and it’s been fun, but it ain’t been real fun. I gotta go now. Supplies to gather and all that, I’m sure you understand. Ya’ll have a nice day, you rotten fucks!” I flashed a smile at the horde, blew them a kiss, and then ran down the steep embankment behind me.

  I got about a quarter of a mile away, well out of sight of the infected, and left the highway for the cover of the forest. I kept a quick pace, moving in a wide arc toward town. No more infected showed up on the way back until I crested the eastern edge of the valley. There were still a few stragglers and crawlers down below me, but nothing I couldn’t handle. I threaded the suppressor back onto my pistol and began picking my way down the slope.

  The same highway where I led the infected away turned northward for a stretch before taking me back into town. Rather than work my way up to the scenic overlook where Gabriel was waiting, I walked straight on into Main Street. Gabe would see me from the ridge, and I expected that he would be along soon enough.

  Marion was once a quaint, happy little community. Like many small mountain towns, it consisted of a main street with shops, restaurants, a post office, a tiny police station, and a town hall situated on either side of the main thoroughfare. Some of the buildings had burned down, and the ones still standing were in a terrible state of repair. Everywhere I looked, I saw wide, swirling brown streaks of old blood stains smeared on walls and splattered on the ground. Two years of high country weather had not been able to wash them away. Amongst the bloodstains, the bare white bones of people who fell to the infected lay in scattered piles all around me. The small ones were the hardest to look at.

  Nearly every window on the buildings around me was broken. Sharp little cubes of glass formed a bright twinkling carpet on the sidewalk. Before the end of the world, this place would have been bustling with throngs of tourists from Charlotte and other nearby towns at this time of year. Their voices would have echoed up and down the street. Children would have scurried on the sidewalks with cones of ice cream and oversized lollipops. Retirees and young couples would have sat at small tables outside cafés sipping sweet iced tea in the warm sun.

  Not anymore.

  The only sound I heard was the far off cries of birds and the rasp of my own breathing. That was the eeriest part about being in these abandoned places, the endless silence. I took a lap around the town’s shopping and restaurant district to kill the few infected that were too torn up to follow their cohorts after me into the wilderness. A few moans filtered out from ghouls trapped inside buildings, but I left them be. The only structures that I was concerned with were the drug store, the hardware store, and the small outfitter’s shop. The dead could have the rest. Near the center of town, I stepped up onto the crumbling sidewalk and sat down on a park bench in front of what used to be a coffee house. Across the street from me was a tiny little structure built in the style of a Swiss chalet with a sign over the door that read “Heavenly Teas”. I allowed myself a smile and leaned back against the bench with my face turned up to the sun, enjoying its warmth. A few minutes later, boots crunching over broken glass announced Gabe’s arrival. He wore his old rucksack across his broad shoulders, and carried my pack in one ham-sized hand.

  “Took you long enough.” I called out.

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever.” He replied. “Nice work clearing the place out, amigo. You ready for a little shopping?”

  I stood up and reached out a hand to take my pack from him. “Sounds like fun. Where do you
want to start?”

  He pointed across the street. “Let’s hit that hardware store and see if they have a wheelbarrow or something.”

  The door that once stood in the entrance to the hardware store now lay broken on the ground just beyond the threshold. Gabe and I stepped over it and did a quick sweep with our guns drawn, just to be safe. The inside of the store was in shambles, but most of the goods were still there except for building materials. I assumed that the folks living in the nearby community probably bought or pilfered anything during the Outbreak that would reinforce windows and doors against the infected. Gabe went toward the back storeroom to look for a wheelbarrow while I perused the shelves. I came to a display on the wall near the cash registers, and broke into a smile.

  “Hey Gabe, check this out.”

  “What is it?” He asked as he walked over.

  I pointed at the wall in front of me. The big man grinned. “Nice. Think one of those would work for Brian?”

  “Probably so.” I said.

  Hanging from the wall on a low set of racks was a display of large hand tools. Next to a row of shovels and rakes hung several varieties of axes ranging from large splitting mauls to smaller camp hatchets. Gabe looked them over and picked up a medium sized woodcutting axe with a metal handle and blue rubber grip.

  “I think this will do nicely.” He said.

  I took a couple of long handled hatchets for Tom and Sarah, and a larger chopping axe with a durable fiberglass handle for myself. Axes are tremendously useful tools, and they are great for dispatching the infected. More importantly, they never run out of bullets. I wanted to make sure everybody had a good quality one before starting west for Colorado.