This Shattered Land - 02

by James Cook

  That is the key to beating these things, really. Just keep moving and don’t let them surround you. Easier said than done.

  With a quick count, I estimated that I had taken down about half of the horde. I ran partway up the slope behind me and laid my blades on the ground next to a flat boulder jutting out from the hillside. The boulder looked comfortable enough, so I sat down and reached back for my rifle. Now that I was above it, I could see the infected I had killed formed an interwoven line of corpses along the curve of the basin below. The remaining undead tripped over them as they struggled up the hill, further slowing them down. Good. That was just what I needed. I lined up my rifle and started picking shots.

  I exhausted the last ten rounds in the magazine, then replaced it with a fresh one and burned down thirty more infected. That left just over a dozen still moving. For that small of a number, it wasn’t worth it to use up any more ammunition. I was about to take up my blades and finish the job when an idea popped into my head. I took out the walkie-talkie that Brian gave me.

  “Brian, you listening? Over.”

  A second or two went by, and then Brian’s voice crackled through the speaker.

  “Uh, right here, Gabe. I’m here. You okay?”

  I smiled. “No, this is my ghost on the radio, genius. And say ‘over’ when you finish talking, over.”

  “Sorry about that. Do you need any help?” There was a few seconds pause, and then he keyed the mike again. “Uh, over.”

  “Make sure the parking lot is clear and then meet me outside, out.”

  I stuffed the radio in my pocket and picked my way down the embankment. There were only three undead between me and the hill that led back to the road. I dispatched them with the axe, and started climbing back up the slope on the other side. With the axe tucked into my belt, I had one free hand to grip saplings and tree trunks to haul myself up the mountain. Some old shrapnel wounds burned and ached in my side, and the soreness in my knees let me know that I was not getting any younger. I was tired and more than a little winded by the time I reached to the two-lane road leading back to the hostel. I could hear the last nine or ten infected moaning and scrambling in the brush behind me. I stopped to catch my breath and make sure that they followed me before turning back down the road to the inn.

  Normally, I don’t really pay that much attention to my appearance, but seeing Sarah standing in the parking lot made me realize that I was sweating, disheveled, dirty, and that my hands were covered in pine sap. I was going to have to take another bath.

  Brian stood next to his mother with his MP5. He looked tense, his head swiveling around every few seconds to search for enemies. Sarah seemed alert, but collected, a stark contrast to her son’s eager nervousness. She held the M6 that Eric gave her in a relaxed grip, her finger off the trigger and pointing down the side of the rifle. If I didn’t know better, I would swear that she had served in the military. Seeing her standing there with her long red hair pulled back in a ponytail and a pair of aviator sunglasses shading her eyes got my heart beating a little faster.

  Stop it, dammit. I thought. She is a married woman, and you are heading for disaster if you don’t get yourself under control.

  The two of them watched me approach until I stopped a couple of steps in front of Brian. I pulled the axe from my belt and held it out as I reached for the MP5. He looked at me in confusion.

  “What?” He asked.

  “Take this,” I said shaking the axe at him, “and give me the gun.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  I put on my best withering scowl.

  “Fine, whatever.” He said, and handed me the rifle.

  I gave him the axe, still dripping with gore from the infected I just killed, and stepped aside to point back the way I came.

  “There are about nine infected coming our way. Here is your scenario: You’re alone. You are out of ammo, and your only weapon is that axe you’re holding. You are tired, and you don’t have enough energy left to escape the walkers chasing you down. You have no choice but to turn and fight. What do you do?”

  Brian looked where I pointed and paled. The walkers had made it back to the road and were shambling toward us. Sarah looked intensely at them, then at me. I could almost feel her eyes boring into me from behind her sunglasses, her lips pressed into a flat unhappy line. While Brian stared at the infected, I glanced at Sarah and gave a little wink.

  She did not seem reassured.

  “I need to kill the ones on the edges first.” Brian said, taking a deep breath to steady himself, and adjusting his grip on the axe.

  I nodded. “What else?”

  “I should run around their perimeter from one side to the other. Make them trip over each other, and take them out one at a time.”

  “And…” I said.

  “And, uh, make sure they don’t grab me?” He looked up at me, squinting against the sun.

  I leaned down and laid a hand on his shoulder. “If you remember nothing else I ever taught you, remember that. They’re not any stronger than they were when they were alive, but their grip will never loosen, their muscles will never tire. That makes them seem superhumanly strong.”

  Brian nodded. The apprehension in his eyes was fading, morphing into grim determination. His stance relaxed, and he started shuffling slightly from foot to foot like a prizefighter, hands opening and closing on the haft of his axe.

  “Stay calm, and remember to breath. With your adrenaline up like this, it’s very easy to tire out.” I said.

  Brian glanced up at me and nodded before taking a few deep breaths. The infected had closed to about a hundred feet.

  “This is crazy.” Sarah said, her voice strained. “No way am I letting you take those things on my yourself, Brian.” She thumbed off the safety to her rifle and raised it.

  “Wait.” Brian said, reaching up and laying a hand on top of her gun.

  “Brian-”

  “No, Mom. Gabe is right, I need to learn. Let me do this. If I get into trouble, you guys are right here.”

  Sarah hesitated, looking at Brian for a moment, and then up at me.

  “If anything happens to him, I will kill you.” She said flatly.

  I shook my head. “I won’t let him get hurt, I promise.”

  Sarah glared at me a moment longer, and then lowered her rifle.

  “Fine, but Gabe, you stay close to him, and if I for one second think that Brian is in danger I am going to kill every damn one of those things. Understood?”

  “Understood.” I said, and motioned to Brian. “You ready?”

  He nodded, and started walking toward the undead. I flipped off the MP5’s safety and followed a few steps behind.

  Time to see what the kid could do.

  Chapter 8

  Bear Country

  Tom and I made a game out of killing the infected we ran into on the lonely mountain road. He seemed to think that his axe was superior to my small-sword for dispatching ghouls. I had never told him that I was once a fairly skilled fencer, and bet four pairs of my wool socks against one of his hunting knives that I could kill five infected with my sword in the time it would take him to kill two with his axe. I stopped by the side of the road and used my machete to chop down a sturdy sapling. It ended in a Y-shaped curve at one end, and would work nicely for what I had planned. Trimmed down, it looked like a long walking stick with a slingshot on one end.

  “What the heck are you gonna do with that? Kill rabbits?” Tom asked.

  I grinned. “Just you wait and see.”

  He rolled his eyes and muttered something under his breath.

  It took us about three miles or so to get the requisite number of walking dead on our trail before we turned to settle the bet. I drew my sword and made a show of whipping the ornate weapon through the air in a series of sweeping, whirling slashes accompanied by graceful form and footwork. Tom responded by doing a comical series of clumsy hacks and spins with his axe, and finished the sequence by glaring at me and st
icking up his middle finger. I smirked. The dead drew near, and I held the tip of my blade in Tom’s direction.

  “Alright, my friend. May the best man win.”

  Tom tapped his axe against my sword. “Whatever. I got the two on the end over there.”

  “Fair enough.” I said.

  We let the infected get to within a few yards before moving toward them. Tom broke left and jogged around the far side. I walked straight at the nearest ghoul with my stick tucked under one arm like a javelin. Taking careful aim, I lodged it under the creature’s jaw and pushed upward, stopping it in its tracks. I was just out of its reach, which allowed me to line up my sword and thrust it through the creature’s eye socket. A quick turn of the wrist, and down it went.

  In the back of my mind, a little voice was trying to explain to me that there should be nothing amusing about fighting the undead. It was nasty, dangerous business. I explained to that voice that I was a fundamentally damaged human being, and that it should shut up and stop trying to ruin my fun.

  Tom, for his part, utilized some of his newly learned skills to deal with his two targets. He executed a textbook front kick and knocked one of the infected back onto its ass. A couple of bouncing steps got him back on balance before he gripped his axe with both hands and slammed it into the face of another undead. His aim was low, and the weapon crushed the creature’s face. The blow did not kill it, but it did stumble backward. Tom cursed as he wrenched his weapon free and hit it again with an overhead strike. That one put it down. He looked over to see how I was doing, and saw me kill two more undead rapid-fire using my hold and stab method. He cursed again and turned to the ghoul he kicked over a few seconds ago. It was almost back to its feet, but was bent over facing the ground. Tom brought his axe down once, twice, three times. Finally, the creature went still. He turned around to see me leaning on my walking stick faking a yawn, and affecting a look of boredom.

  “Took you long enough.” I said.

  He muttered something under his breath, and walked to the side of the road to grab a handful of tall grass.

  “You cheated. You didn’t say anything about using a stick.” He said, using the grass to wipe gore from his axe.

  “You didn’t say I couldn’t either.”

  He shook his head. “Damn Irish. You’re tricksters, every one of you.”

  “Hey, my family has been in this country since 1850. We’re American on purpose.”

  That one got a laugh out of him. I cleaned off my sword and put it back in its sheath. A quick search of the infected yielded nothing useful, so we left them where they lay and hiked on down the road. We made good time, only having to put down a dozen or so infected over the next few miles. Along the way, we searched a few abandoned cars. Most of them were empty, but one yielded a lever action rifle and a couple of boxes of .357 magnum ammunition. Unfortunately, we had to deal with its previous owner who was still belted into the driver’s seat, thrashing and moaning at us. A bullet from my new M-6 painted the creature’s brain across the dashboard and shattered the driver’s side window. I dragged the body to the side of the road while Tom checked the trunk. The rifle was lying next to a trash bag filled with canned food.

  “What do you think, is it worth the extra weight?” Tom asked, hefting the rifle in one hand.

  “If you don’t want it, I’ll take it.” I said. “These old repeaters are great rifles.”

  “But you can’t put a silencer on it.”

  “True, but you never know when something like this will come in handy. If nothing else, we can use it for trade somewhere.”

  Tom shrugged as he handed me the rifle. I lashed it to my backpack and stashed in the ammo in a side pocket. A nice repeater and two hundred cartridges were too good of a find to pass up, even if they were heavy. As the day wore on, and we got closer to the spot on the map where we had agreed to meet the others, I began to think about what life might be like out in Colorado. The President was still technically in charge, with high-ranking military officials handling most of the day-to-day operations. Next year was supposed to be an election year, and the President made it clear that he had no intention of running for re-election. I wondered how that would play out, especially considering the Supreme Court and all but a few members of Congress were dead, and most of the country’s survivors scattered to the four winds.

  “You ever wonder what makes those things tick?” Tom said, interrupting my thoughts.

  “What do you mean?” I replied.

  “The infected. What is it about the Phage that makes them function even though they’re dead? Is it really a disease, or is it something else?”

  I shrugged. “I have no idea. I knew a doctor a while back who thought it had something to do with inactive DNA in the human genome.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, apparently most of human DNA is just filler material. It doesn’t really do anything, and nobody ever really understood why it’s there. Bill, the doctor I mentioned, thought that maybe the Phage activates some part of our genetics that causes the undead to operate differently than a live human body.”

  Tom mulled it over for a moment. “Did he say what he thought it changed, or how it might work?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t remember all of it. Something about how our bodies use enzymes to break down proteins, the role of the brain stem in regulating the body’s functions, and the mechanics of cellular regeneration. It was pretty technical, and honestly, I didn’t follow a lot of it. Besides, what difference does it make? The damage is done. The only thing we can do now is kill as many of them as we can, and try to rebuild.”

  “But what if we could find a vaccine? Can you imagine how much easier it will be to destroy all the carriers if everyone is immune?”

  The idea gave me pause. I honestly had not thought of that before.

  “That would be nice, but I don’t think we should get our hopes up.”

  Tom glanced over at me as we walked. “Why not?”

  “Think about it. The kind of research it takes to study diseases like the Phage has to happen in laboratories. High-tech laboratories. Even if some super-secret government disease lab is still functional, where are they going to get the necessary doctors to staff it? Where are they going to get resources and supplies? Maybe you didn’t notice, but there ain’t exactly a lot of manufacturing going on these days.”

  Tom frowned as he thought about it. “Yeah, you’re probably right. Still though, it would be nice. At least we’d know this couldn’t happen again.”

  There were a few things I could have said about that, but I kept them in. The more I reflected on what life was like before the Outbreak, the more I had to admit that maybe the collapse of civilization and a resulting extinction event were inevitable. I mean, for Christ’s sake, we used fossil fuels to power almost everything. Even though we knew that those sources of energy would not last indefinitely, as a species, we did very little to address the issue. Sure, there were some private energy firms working on it, and several world governments threw money at the problem, but how much real progress did we make before the end? On top of that, we had a global population that was growing exponentially, dwindling supplies of fresh water, rising food costs, and rapidly increasing energy demand. The whole damn mess was just one big unsustainable cluster-fuck. Maybe I am an insensitive prick, but I can’t help but see the opportunity that the Outbreak has provided. If we could somehow get the undead problem under control, the human race might have a chance to start over and maybe do things right this time.

  When we reached a point on the map that was five miles from our stop for the day, I suggested that we take a break and eat a quick lunch. The combined growling of our stomachs was bound to attract more walkers if we didn’t do something soon to silence it. We stopped at the top of a steep hill and dropped our packs on the side of the road. A canopy of tree limbs overhead provided a cool, shady spot to rest while we ate. The forest on either side of us was thick with dark green brush and saplings that comp
eted for space beneath tall hardwoods. Tom and I sat down on the cracked pavement next to our packs while we munched on venison jerky and cold flatbread. Out of habit, I laid my assault rifle across my lap and sat where I could watch both sides of the road. Tom was telling me a story about the night that Brian was born, and how his mother was in labor for nearly ten hours. He smiled as he reminisced, describing in loving detail his little boy’s wrinkly face and his tiny little fingers and toes. I was enjoying the story until I heard a rustling off to my right behind where Tom sat, followed by a low, inhuman grunt. I laid my food aside and slowly got to my feet.

  “Tom.” I hissed, cutting him off mid-sentence.

  He snapped out of his reverie and looked up at me. “What, what is it?”

  I pointed toward the woods behind him and leveled my rifle. Tom hopped to his feet.

  “What do you see?” He asked.

  “Nothing yet, but I hear it.”

  “Hear what?” Tom said, his voice sharp and impatient.

  “Bear cub.”

  Tom’s eyes went wide. “Shit. Not good.”

  Having grown up close to the woodlands, Tom was well aware of the danger posed by a nearby bear cub. Or more to the point, the danger posed by its mother. Carolina black bears, like most other species of bear, hibernate during the winter. When spring comes, they wake up ravenously hungry. If they have cubs, they are extremely protective and will attack anything they perceive as a threat to their young. Most bear attacks that occurred before the Outbreak happened when hikers and tourists got too close to a mother bear and her little ones. I backed slowly down and away from the hilltop. Tom followed suit. We didn’t make it more than four steps before a young cub the size of a large dog emerged from the forest with a surprisingly quiet rustle of foliage.

  “Just keep moving.” I muttered.