“Oh, my God.”
“Yeah. When we saw it, it was like the whole world stopped. Even the firefight.”
But when Sarah’s laughter bled away, she snorted, a mordant sound.
“What?” Homer asked.
“You said we’ve got a chance to catch the carrier, assuming no more mishaps. But we’re already had two, both nearly lethal. And all before even getting on the highway. Bad luck’s stealing a march on us already. And I’m not sure I see our odds improving.”
Homer shrugged. “Luck is always a factor. But the way you beat steep odds is with resilience, and resolve. Resilience to all difficulties, and resolve to carry on, to complete the mission. When things went sideways, a SEAL sniper instructor I knew always said, ‘Tough. Deal with it. Adapt and overcome.’ With those last three words, you almost can’t lose at life. If there are more mishaps, then we just deal with them, together. You and I are swim buddies now.”
“And let me guess – you never leave your swim buddy.”
“Exactly. Worst thing you can do. Many SEALs have died in combat. But not one has ever been left behind.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. “Great. So, whatever happens, at least I know my body will get dragged down off the stone wall.”
Homer exhaled. “It’s not just about that. It’s about teamwork. Figuring out how to work together – to survive.”
Sarah exhaled herself now, sounding relieved. Homer guessed that, after two years nearly on her own, taking care of a husband and son who were not much cut out for the end of the world, and who seemed less interested in working together to survive than in being taken care of, she liked the sound of this.
But then she laughed again.
“What now?” He looked across at her in the dark and wind.
“Your name. I assume it’s a nickname.”
Homer didn’t answer, but just watched her in the dark.
“There’s a real irony to it. It’s been a long time. But I seem to remember the goddess prophesied Odysseus would have his full share of misery on the seas, before he finally reached his homeland and regained his family.”
Homer nodded. It was hard not to see the commonalities: Long journey. Unknown hazards. All to get home – and, mainly, to get his wife and children back.
“But instead,” Sarah continued, “you’re going to have all your miseries on the land.” She nodded ahead at the road which spooled out across the immense continent that lay ahead. “Endless land.”
“Less ironic than you think,” he said. “SEALs have been fighting on land – mainly mountains and deserts, about as far as you can get from the sea – for many years now.”
“Is that where you got that?” Sarah asked. She reached across the cabin and touched his shemagh – the green-and-black fringed scarf that he habitually wore draped around his neck and tied in a layered, triangular pattern. She’d never yet seen him take it off.
Homer touched the fringe of it. “Yes.”
“Come on,” Sarah said when he stopped. “Another story.”
Homer smiled. “Okay. It was Afghanistan, Wardak Province, back in the early days of OEF. I had inserted with a four-man team. Our main job was to provide terminal guidance for air strikes – laser designation, ten-digit grid references for targets – basically to be a force multiplier for one of the Northern Alliance militias fighting the Taliban.”
“You guys really do it all, don’t you?”
“A little bit. But aside from the JTAC duties, we were also tasked with keeping their commander alive. This guy was judged critical to toppling the government in Kabul, and the Taliban knew it, so they wanted him dead. Anyway, long story slightly less long, we got detected during a night-time recce of an enemy desert encampment, then pinned down by a mortar barrage in a wadi. I was on the radio trying to get fast movers to come in so we could break contact, but they had good spotting, and we couldn’t find or take out their spotter. So these huge 120mm Soviet mortar rounds kept walking in on us. Finally, I felt this huge body on top of me, shielding me from the shrapnel and dirt raining on our heads.”
“Let me guess. Their commander.”
“Yep. When I looked around, our whole team was buried in Northern Alliance fighters. When I asked the commander about it later, he said: ‘If something happens to me or one of my men, someone else will take over. But if something happens to your team, we will lose our bombs – and the support of the US. And the Taliban will go back on the offensive, raping and killing all the way to Uzbekistan.’ Then he took off his shemagh and used it to wipe the mud off my face. Laughing, he said, ‘You look like a donkey rooting in shit. Keep it.’ So I kept it.”
“I can imagine why. I’d want to remember that lesson, too.”
Homer smiled. “No, actually I keep it because it’s incredibly useful – keeps you warm up on a freezing mountain, wraps your face against a 100-knot sand storm down on the desert floor, can be used to tie off a wound if necessary. Mainly, it’s great at wiping crap off.”
Sarah laughed. “Like the towels in Hitchhiker’s Guide.”
“Exactly like that.” Homer exhaled, and settled into his seat. “Anyway, to your point. Yes, I’m a SEAL, most at home in the water. But we can survive and operate anywhere.”
“The A and L in SEAL, right? Air and Land.”
“Yes. But, then again, we also always make it back to the water, eventually. As you and I will make it back there.” Homer’s smile faded slightly. “Anyway, I’m not Odysseus.”
“No. You’re Homer. And, maybe, instead of being a plaything of the gods… you’ll get to be author of your own destiny.”
The black road spooled out beneath their wheels.
And Homer and Sarah zoned out and let the wind noise rule.
Just A Boy
But both came jolting back to the present, knocked around in the dark and windblown interior of the truck, when Sarah swerved twice to avoid abandoned cars in the lane ahead. There was a lot less of this on the highway than back on the state route, and definitely less than the onramp.
Or maybe it wasn’t less, Homer thought.
Maybe it was just the vastness of America – and the unimaginably long stretches of highway that crossed it. There was too much space here to be clogged up, even by the 300 million vehicles in the US before the Fall. Too much even for the 400 million people who used to live here.
More space than could be filled by a nation of the dead.
But Homer knew they were out there.
He checked his map, and quickly realized not only that he’d been off in his reveries too long, but also that the darkness hid more than one kind of threat. In this case, the trouble was navigation – and the lights that used to illuminate the highway signs, now extinguished for years.
“Our first turn’s coming up,” he said.
“Good to know,” Sarah said, squinting ahead. They could both make out the reflective lettering on the highway signs, but only just as the headlights hit them, which was also about two seconds before they disappeared again in the rearview.
Homer also saw the latest mile marker, and checked it against their theoretical GPS location on his map.
“That thing actually know where we are?” Sarah asked.
“Most of the time. The GPS satellites have been slowly falling out of their orbits for two years, without maintenance. But I still get a solid fix more often than not.”
“So what’s this turn of ours, then?”
“We need to get off the east–west Interstate, and jog south down to the next one, I-90. The connection is State Route 23.”
So much for empty stretches of highway, Homer thought.
“Which exit?” Sarah asked.
“Two miles ahead, 148B. The state route also jogs us around the edge of Lake Erie.”
Sarah stole a glance over his map. “Oh, yeah? And how far around Detroit does it jog us?”
Homer took her meaning. They had both known from the start of this journey that population centers were
going to be the biggest threat. Wherever large groups of people had lived, now the dead ruled. Ex-population density was bad.
“Not far enough for comfort. Worse, we’re also going to have to circle around the outskirts of Ann Arbor.”
“Can we bypass? Detour farther around?”
Homer checked the map, then his watch. “Not and get where we’re going. Not in time. There’s the exit.”
Sarah eased off the accelerator, looking distinctly uneasy about leaving the highway. But when she stole a glance over at Homer, his face didn’t betray any worry. And it was not just because he was an unflappable special operator, whose whole job was basically going head-first into every kind of danger. It was also for the same reason he’d seemed so calm when they set off – because he had finally made a decision. After two years of waking up every morning, impossibly torn between his competing duties, knowing that as a father and husband he should go to his family… now he was finally doing it.
But making a decision was one thing. Figuring out how to implement it another.
The devil was usually in the details.
* * *
Or, these days, the devil was in the dead.
It had seemed that way so far tonight, and things didn’t look like changing anytime soon. The slip road back off the Interstate proved clear enough. During the Fall, the desperate flight of refugees was always in the direction of away, which usually meant getting on the highway, not off it.
But as soon as they hit the state route, the problem of abandoned cars – many left at odd angles, in awkward places, some at the ends of long twisting skid marks – came back good and hard. Sarah was able to maneuver around them, usually just using the other southbound lane, or else the emergency lane.
As they passed through what looked like a moderately populated area, suburban or small towns, the road remained partitioned, with two lanes on each side of a concrete median. But after they exited the built-up area, it became an unpartitioned two-laner, with shoulders but no emergency lanes. They started having to use the verge to get around obstructions. But they were still moving, only having to slow a little, which was the main thing.
Motion was life.
And, then, unexpectedly, about a half-hour in, they spotted an upright figure tottering in the headlights, and then another. These were the first living dead they had seen on the roads since that first onramp. Quickly, the obstruction problem became not just the former vehicles of the dead – but the dead themselves, stumbling and staggering down the road on foot, in growing numbers. They were all heading the same direction – south, away from the populated area. At first, it was just ones and twos, but it soon thickened up, in some places forming a thin crowd scattered across both tarmac and verge.
Blasting down the highway at night at nearly a hundred, the world veiled in darkness to either side, it had been easy enough to pretend they weren’t sharing this continent with the legions of the dead. Now they couldn’t pretend. Worse, they were sharing what was starting to feel like a very narrow road with them.
Sarah looked across at Homer in the dark.
“This gets much worse…” she said.
He didn’t make her finish. Soon they’d be running down dead bodies, a significant hazard – first to their mobility, then to the vehicle itself, and then to their lives. At a certain point, they’d be jammed up. At another, soon after, they’d be dead or infected.
Homer was already pulling down his NVGs, and also hauling himself out the passenger window, for an elevated look up the road ahead. When he dropped back inside, he said,
“We’re okay. It clears up soon.”
“What? Why?”
“We’re about to find out,” Homer said, pulling his rifle into his lap. “The dead usually don’t rouse themselves for no reason.”
Sarah didn’t argue with him. Of course the dead wouldn’t all be trudging their rotting asses down the road just for the exercise.
Something was drawing them.
* * *
“Ah, crap,” Homer said.
“What?” Sarah asked again. She couldn’t see a damned thing, other than the thickening ranks of bodies in the headlights immediately ahead. But then she did hear something, an unexpected sound.
Barking – sharp, nonstop, and growing louder.
Finally she could see a dog dancing and leaping around, outside a ring of dead encircling the base of a big hardwood tree, a few feet off the side of the road. And she could also see, beyond all this, that the road was finally clear ahead. She pulled the truck way up onto the shoulder of the oncoming lane, opposite the tree and its undead fan club, managed to skirt around the whole circus, then began to accelerate.
“Wait,” Homer said. “We’ve got to stop.”
“What?”
“Get fifty meters past this, then pull over and kill the lights. Actually, kill the lights now.”
“What?” Sarah said again, starting to feel like the kid on the couch in Pulp Fiction. “Why?” But even as she said it, she knew the rough outlines of the answer: Homer had seen something she hadn’t. Couldn’t.
“There’s a boy,” Homer said, charging his weapon. “Stuck up in that tree.”
“Ah, crap,” Sarah echoed.
She killed the lights and eased off the accelerator, letting them coast away from the elevated boy buffet behind them. But she also didn’t stop, not yet. She put her hand on Homer’s arm.
“Hey, think about this first.”
“No time,” he said, gripping the door handle.
She firmed up her grip on his arm. “Look. My family’s dead. But yours may still need you. Think about your own kids.”
Homer smiled at her from under his protruding, wall-eyed space-man goggles. “They’re exactly who I’m thinking about.” He didn’t have to elaborate. Sarah got it. He meant that if his own kids were in trouble, he hoped, or maybe even believed, that someone would stop to help them.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, hopping out lightly as Sarah turned the truck sideways across the road. “Don’t move.” He left his door open, as if he were going to be right back.
And then he was gone.
But Sarah did move. She opened her own door on the opposite side, climbed up and out, dragging her rifle after her.
And she covered him over the top of the roof.
* * *
Despite the lack of body heat, the crowd of dead around the tree resolved clearly enough as Homer waded into the outskirts of it. The cloud cover had cleared, and the ambient starlight was enough for the NVGs to amplify.
What did pop, like canine fireworks, was the dog – leaping and snapping and barking, as dead mouths and hands grabbed and swiped at it, dancing away, then wading back in, totally fearless. Homer had no idea how the poor pooch was still on its paws. But he wished it well – not least because it was probably the only thing keeping its human alive. By distracting the horde that had treed the kid, the dog was preventing it from piling up around the trunk, which without question it eventually would. The multiplying horde from the population centers down the road made this inevitable.
The kid had perhaps saved his own life by getting in the tree. But he was now in danger of drawing a singularity – a crowd of dead whose moaning just kept drawing more dead, from farther and farther out, conceivably forever. And, not only would he never get out of the tree again, but he also wouldn’t be able to climb high enough to escape the ravenous mouths and hands below. Not for long. Dog notwithstanding, eventually they’d pile up to his level.
They always did.
And, stealing a glance upward, where the boy also popped in red and yellow against the cold dark background of the night sky, Homer could see he was already about as high as he was going to get. This wasn’t a great climbing tree.
Now his only hope was Homer.
Who now had a few tactical decisions to make – and only seconds to make them. With the dead already riled up and coming in fast, silence wasn’t a big priority. Speed was. And, ev
en aside from not worrying about the noise of gunfire – and suppressed weapons still made noise – guns were still the preferred method of dealing with most threats. For good reasons, the first of which was, you could get it done from a safe distance.
But Homer also had to worry about ammo now.
He had no idea how long this mission might last, what threats they might face, or when he would next get to top up on rifle or pistol rounds. So he mixed it up, dropping a few on the outskirts with perfectly placed rifle shots, as he fast-walked smoothly forward – then, letting the rifle fall on its sling, he drew his boarding axe from the side of his assault pack.
And he waded into the thick of it.
This was dicey, both closer quarters and more crowded than he might have preferred. But he was a pro, at the top of his game, and in barely a minute he had the crowd around the base of the tree cleared up – mostly by turning the rampaging dead creatures into piles of dead bodies on the one hand, and still animated but safely disembodied heads lying nearby. He then let the tip of the axe blade thunk into the ground, brought his rifle up again, and spent most of the rest of his mag clearing to the north, 25 meters back up the road.
Bodies dropped to the ground, like their souls were called home.
When he finally had enough breathing room to try to deal with the boy, who was the whole point of this operation…
Five things happened, nearly at once.
First, the damned dog bit him, right on the calf muscle.
That’s gratitude for you, Homer thought, flapping his leg at the dog and trying to shake it off him, grateful for the bite-proof suit, which was as effective at stopping sharp living canines as it was dull but more deadly human incisors.
But even as he did this, he heard a shout of warning from Sarah behind him – overlapping with an inhuman shriek coming at his back at nightmare speed – which then overlapped with the sharp crack of unsuppressed firing, also from the truck.
Finally, a heavy branch fell out of the tree and right onto his head, bashing his helmet and knocking his NVGs askew.
Odyssey Page 5