Crawlerz | Book 4 | From The Ashes

by Merritt, R. S.

  Jeff had no problem staying behind. He understood the need for him to be there. It made sense for him to be working through the logistical pieces. Those were the pieces he was really good at anyway. He already knew what was going on with most of the country. After all, he’d been the one who set up what most of the country had to work with in the first place. He had no problem with that. He had a major problem with the next thing Captain Lindsey had to say.

  “Yue should come with us too.” The captain said. Yue merely nodded and continued eating while everyone else waited for an explanation. Everyone except for Jeff anyway.

  “Yeah, no that’s not happening.” Jeff stated emphatically. Yue continued chewing without making eye contact with anyone. She was happy to let them fight over her. She knew who was going to end up winning though.

  “She knows she’s not doing anyone any good sitting in this hole. She belongs out in the field. She’ll save lives and help us accomplish the mission. Not just this first mission either. The more she understands about how the enemy ticks the better she can help come up with tactics for wiping them off the planet.” Lindsey argued. You didn’t get to be the leader of a hardcore military group that called itself the suicide squad by being the type to back down from authority.

  “I’m not letting her go out their alone.” Jeff said simply. He sat back with his arms crossed and his face turning a deep shade of angry red. Lindsey didn’t seem overly impressed.

  “She’s not going to be alone. I’ve already got four guys dedicated to just her safety. I’ll double that and use somebody you trust to lead them. Plus don’t you think her brothers would come along?” Lindsey said intently. She was in full on sales mode. The President of the United States had just told her Jeff was her new boss and she was already doing her best to piss him off. It was just the way she was wired she supposed.

  “I need LeBron here to help with the planning.” Jeff shot back.

  “Really? He’s like twelve and you want him doing the planning when you have all these grownups around here to help?” Lindsey was starting to get a bit heated. If there was one thing that she hated it was bureaucracy. Which was why it’d taken the apocalypse to see her get promoted.

  “It’s ok for you to drag a twelve year old off to fight an army of the infected though?” Jeff asked back. He was leaning forward now with both hands on the table. LeBron wanted to say that he wasn’t a twelve year old. He was worried that trying to say anything about that would only make him look like a twelve year old though. He just couldn’t think of a non-whiny way to say it.

  “You’re ok with me boarding the death train though?” Drew had finally picked up on the fact that no one was fighting for him to stay behind. He’d rather roll out with the crazies to hunt the infected anyway, so he wasn’t overly upset. Shaun was watching the argument evolve and wondering if he should’ve left off the alcoholic beverage options for the lunch meeting.

  “I tell you what sir. Have a conversation with Yue and LeBron about what makes the most sense and how they feel they can help the most. I’ll abide by their decisions.” Lindsey said with a sickeningly sweet smile.

  “Great ideas. Let’s keep this briefing moving forward. On top of the ships out there we’ve also reached out to all the bases to let them know about the change in leadership and get a status from them.” Shaun said deftly changing the subject. There was hope for him to be a decent politician yet. The conversation continued centered around numbers and projections. Jeff and LeBron were both animated and asking questions as the man presenting the information provided the summaries. Everyone else looked like they desperately wanted to ask for much more alcohol than was appropriate for a working lunch.

  Chapter 36: On a Train Bound for Nowhere

  The trainyard was a disaster area. They’d been using it all week to practice the techniques they were planning on using to eradicate large numbers of crawlerz. It was going to take forever to do it this way, but they had to start somewhere. Once someone came up with a better plan they’d happily jump on board. Until then they’d kill the man eating bastards one at a time if they had to.

  It took three large trucks multiple trips to get them all loaded up and ready to go. In the end it was agreed that Yue and Drew would be going with the train. Lisa was also going to be tagging along as she refused to be separated from Drew. No matter how stupid she thought leaving the base full of modern conveniences for a life on the road was. Everyone had tried to convince her to stay but she’d been dead set on going. Her argument for going was actually pretty solid. Drew was an idiot. Yue was going to be too busy doing her witchy psychic thing to make sure he didn’t do anything dumb.

  Jeff and LeBron were staying behind. LeBron hated letting them leave without him on such a dangerous mission, but he got that he could be extremely valuable to Jeff on the strategic planning side. Plenty of people thought that Jeff and the others telling LeBron he’d be more useful at the base was just talk. Just a way to make the kid feel good about staying behind while his brother and sister took off on the death train for a ride straight into the mouth of hell.

  The people who knew LeBron knew that wasn’t true at all. Jeff had already set him up with the office next to his in the suite that Shaun had provided him to run the operation from. The only thing Jeff was struggling with around LeBron was which project to put him in charge of first. All of the people who were assigned to work with them could tell within an hour or two that first impressions couldn’t be trusted. The kid was like some kind of logistical savant. LeBron was excited about the work he’d be doing but was at war with himself over not going with his siblings.

  Yue was ok with leaving LeBron behind. The work they were doing was soul destroying. Walking out of a train every morning to kill whatever horribly maimed crawlerz were lying around after the shrapnel ripped through them. Every foreseeable morning was going to involve awakening to a scene from a human slaughterhouse. Every night was going to be spent crushed under the weight of hundreds of the infected trying to get at them. If she could spare LeBron some of that then she was happy to do it.

  Of the three siblings LeBron was the most fragile. He was tough as nails physically and there was no one either Drew or Yue would rather have backing them up in a fight. They both still recognized the fragility around LeBron though. Whether it was because he was so smart or just because he was slightly younger than them, he had an innocence still about him. Even after all the atrocities they’d committed to survive this long he still had that sweet aura Yue loved so much. She was stoked he’d decided not to make a big deal out of being left behind. She’d have hated to have had to fight with him about it.

  Yue grabbed Jeff’s hand as he gallantly assisted her out of the truck. He’d come along to see them all off. He was dreading having to watch the train steam its way out of there. The analytical part of his brain kept getting in fights with the romantic side of his cranium. At an intellectual level he knew this was what made the most sense. At a gut level he was positive that letting Yue ride away to face a world full of monsters without him was the stupidest thing he’d ever done.

  “We’ll be back. We have this pretty much down to a science. We’re going to be checking in over the radio constantly. I know you hate this. Honestly, I love that you hate this. If you weren’t worried, then I’d be pissed. It’s going to be ok though.” Yue said to Jeff. She’d been saying the same sort of things every day for the last week or so. Jeff kissed her on the forehead and held her. After a minute of that he whispered what was on his mind.

  “No where’s safe. The last time we got on a train and took off is when Weathertop went down. Maybe you’re the safe one. Maybe me and LeBron are the ones who need to be worried. The world’s full of danger. I just feel better when we face it together. I don’t like being apart from you. I don’t like missing you.” Jeff said tilting her head back so he could kiss her on the lips instead of the forehead.

  Jeff let her go when a familiar figure in a long black coat walked up. Ha
rley was sporting a fresh new tattoo on his neck. The joker card fit right into his new gig as a commando in the suicide squad. To become a full-fledged member you had to show you deserved it. For most of them that meant jumping into the action when they got somewhere. For Harley it’d meant that he actually head butted a crawler that was coming hard at Lindsey. Head butted it hard enough to knock it off its feet where Lindsey had put a couple of rounds into its heart and head.

  “You officially in the squad now?” Jeff asked checking out the tattoo. Jeff always just called them the ‘squad’ because he thought ‘suicide squad’ was cartoonish and overly pessimistic.

  “It was meant to be considering my name.” Harley answered seriously.

  “Plus the fact that you’re half-crazy and fight like some kind of Viking berserker. “ Yue added.

  “Well. Keep Yue safe or don’t come back.” Jeff said sticking his hand out to shake. Harley being Harley he ignored the extended hand and went in for a way too intimate backslapping bro hug instead.

  “When did you two start dating?” Drew asked coming around the corner to the sight of Harley throwing out all the rules on personal space. As always Lisa was right by his side.

  “Yeah, also shouldn’t he be keeping us all safe or not coming home?” Lisa joked. She looked tired. She was working hard not to second guess her decision to leave a nice safe place to go out into the field with her man. It seemed to her she was getting put into this situation way too often. She needed to find a man who was more interested in libraries and spa packages than killing things.

  “You all need to focus on staying safe and getting back here. Hopefully with some ideas on bumping up our nightly kill quota from the hundreds to the thousands.” Jeff replied.

  “You’re such a romantic.” Yue said punching him in the arm.

  “I wish LeBron had come out.” Drew said. He was missing his little brother already. He was so used to having LeBron at his side that it felt like he’d forgotten to strap on one of his weapons or something. He kept looking around to see what it was he’d forgotten. Every time he remembered it was LeBron, he felt a little more guilty about leaving him behind. He knew how it must be making LeBron feel. That’s probably why LeBron had chosen to stay at the base and get to work rather than come see them off.

  “I wish he’d asked me out instead of you. I’d be sitting in a nice warm break room sipping a hot coffee right now. Instead of trying to survive I’d be trying to figure out if we could use dehydrated milk in the ice cream mixer.” Lisa said.

  “There’s an ice cream mixer?” Yue asked. She smiled when Lisa nodded. “That’s it. We’re not going anywhere until we get an ice cream mixer installed on the train.”

  They talked of inconsequential things for a few more minutes. All of them playfully taking swipes at one another like they did most days. Yue once again pointing out to Jeff that between the train and the base the base was the one that’d actually most recently been overrun with crawlerz. Jeff promised not to let anyone schedule a picnic if Yue and crew agreed to the same. Yue of course refused to limit them on the picnic option.

  A mix of heartfelt and lighthearted goodbyes left Jeff standing alone on the train platform. He found himself facing the moment he’d been dreading ever since he’d lost the argument about Yue being part of this mission. The train pulling out was taking a big chunk of his heart along with it. He wasn’t going to feel right again until Yue came back to him. He wasn’t even willing to consider the alternative. Trying to distract himself he walked back over to the truck mentally ticking off the list of things he needed to get moving on once they made it back to the base.

  On the train Yue had settled into her cramped bunk space to try and get in a cat nap. None of them had slept well the night before between final preparations and the stress of knowing what they were about to be doing. None of them except Drew anyway Yue thought with a smile. The smile faded as she thought of the additional pressure that was going to be on her.

  The brutish way they were going about this began with rolling up into areas where they suspected there’d be tons of crawlerz. Those areas happened to be major cities for the most part. Which was convenient since the railway system didn’t focus all that much on conveying people to smaller towns unless they happened to be along the route. Once stopped for the day they’d set up explosives all around the perimeter to take out as many of the infected as showed up. They were planning on popping off some fireworks right at dusk to attract as many of them as possible.

  For absolutely no really good reason that Yue could infer everyone was looking to her to come up with a better method for the mass murdering. Her sensitivity allowed her to slip into the psychic party line the crawlerz used as a primitive form of communication. Everybody seemed capable of catching glimpses of it but only a select few like Yue had been able to really master it. According to Lindsey the others who’d been as sensitive as her were mostly insane or dead now.

  Yue didn’t have any additional ideas for better ways to put the infected out of their misery. She’d spent so much time in their heads that she was really starting to feel sorry for them. Not sorry in a let them live way. More like sorry in a let’s hurry up and blow their heads off way. The people they’d been before becoming infected may still be buried deep inside them, but they weren’t going to be coming back anytime soon. There was no happy ending for people who’d been driven insane enough to lustily rip into the soft throats of their own parents and children.

  It wasn’t long before they pulled into the first stop that they’d be trying this at. The second place really if you counted the train station by Weathertop where they’d been trying out ideas for a few consecutive nights as well. The train jerked to a halt. Yue climbed out of her bunk to be joined by Harley and one of her other assigned guards. Captain Lindsey was putting a very high value on Yue and her capabilities.

  The captain herself met Yue at the door. They hopped out after the area had been cleared to look for the best place to setup the mines. They had crates of the claymores ready to be set up. There wasn’t a real art to it. At least not that they’d developed yet. Lindsey suspected they were missing out on maximizing the kill zones. They’d been working hard on trying to guess where the most crawlerz would mass up overnight to get the biggest bang for their buck. This was one of those areas where they’d looked to Yue to provide some input.

  Yue stood on the train platform looking around. She had absolutely zero ideas on where the crawlerz would come to hang out in between beating on the walls of the train to try and get at them. She’d told everyone who would listen that the crawlerz themselves weren’t going to plan where to stand. They were going to slither and slide in wherever they could. The captain chose to take that answer as Yue needing more time to figure it out.

  The men went around carefully setting the charges. They were busy making sure the explosive propelled ball bearings would travel away from the trains as much as possible. They were also trying to avoid destroying the network of webcams being setup around the train. Another small group was rigging up a series of lights to make it easier to watch the carnage. The whole point of this mission was to gather the information to share out with hundreds of other groups to do the same kind of work. It was going to take forever to make a dent in the millions of infected roaming the continent, but operation “Whistle-stop” was now officially under way.

  Epilogue: An Apocalyptic Shift in Paradigm

  LeBron stared at the screen in front of him. The laptop he’d been issued was a fancy, expensive looking one he’d hooked up to multiple monitors on his desk. The desk was in an office inside a suite of offices typically reserved for high ranking political officials and their staff. The other men in the offices around him were all now assigned to Jeff as well. All of them hammering away on the impossible logistics required to resuscitate the country.

  There were far too few of them for the task to which they’d been set. Luckily the ships cruising off the east coast were only too happy
to send them reinforcements. The ship’s crews were down to minimal rations per day at this point. The difficulty of loading supplies compounded by the nightmare scenario of the infection getting aboard somehow. Universally the commanders of the state of the art warships were waiting until the last second to attempt supply runs. The shore was looked at the same way as most four year old’s look at their closet when they hear a funny noise after the lights are turned out.

  LeBron wasn’t holding out much hope that there’d be any sort of super savior showing up who could solve all of their problems for them. No he was taking on that responsibility himself. He may not be old enough for most adults to take him seriously yet but luckily the handful that did were fairly powerful people. Shaun had somehow ended up the POTUS and LeBron was close to him. Jeff had been put in charge of taking back and rebuilding the country. Presidents kept giving and taking away that power, but it was pretty obvious to everyone Jeff was the best leader for that effort.