After the Roads- Sidney’s Way

by Brian Parker

  “Now that it’s free,” Scott said, “we pull it under the fence and drag it to a pile.”

  Sally grabbed a hand as he gripped a foot, then they pulled it under the bottom strand of wire. “Let’s drag it by the arms,” he suggested, wiping his glove on the grass. She didn’t want to know what he’d put his hand into.

  They each held an arm as they pulled the body behind them. “Why don’t we just leave them on the other side of the fence?” she asked.

  “A couple of reasons. First, all those bodies would make an easy ramp up and over for the infected. This way, we keep using the fence as it was intended.”

  “Okay, that makes sense.”

  “Second,” he continued, “Mr. Campbell thinks that they’re cannibals.”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, it makes sense. They have to be eating something to stay alive. We’ve seen them eat grass and you remember the cattle we lost. There have also been a lot of them that we’ve run across here recently with bite marks and actual chunks missing from their bodies.”

  “That’s just…nasty.”

  “Yeah, pretty gross, huh?”

  They reached the nearest pile and Scott offered to grab the feet while she held the hands. “On the count of three,” Scott directed as they swung the body. It landed about halfway up the pile, then rolled back down.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Miss Sally. That’s as good a place as any.”

  They walked slowly to where Grandpa stood near the center of the field, staring off in the direction of town. “What is it?” Sally asked when they reached him.

  “Nothing. I just thought I heard a gunshot from way over yonder.”

  “A gun? What kinda dummy would be usin’ a gun?” Jesse chuckled.

  “Now, don’t you be making light of someone’s misfortune, Jesse,” the old man scolded.

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  Grandpa nodded. “This far along in the game, any survivors know not to use guns unless it’s a last-ditch effort.”

  “You think it was the Cullen brothers, Russ and Tim?” Scott asked.

  “No way to tell without going over there,” Grandpa said. “And I ain’t about to risk our lives by leaving the safety of the farm for those two—especially when every infected in the county will be headed toward the sound of that gun.”

  “I hope they’re alright,” Sally remarked. “They used to be so nice to me and Katie when we visited for the summers.”

  “I don’t know,” Grandpa rumbled. “I’ve always gotten a bad feeling from those two. Something about them always seemed a little bit off.”

  “Oh, you’re just mad because they’re so much older than us,” Katie said, rolling her eyes as they began to walk home.

  “You’re darned right. What kind of twenty-five year old man hits on fourteen and fifteen year olds?”

  “They’re harmless, Grandpa,” Sally laughed. Of course, she never told anyone, not even Katie, that she’d let Tim play with her breasts when she was sixteen. He’d wanted to go further, but she’d stopped him. Maybe in the back of her mind, she knew that it wasn’t right that they were so much older and hanging out with the kids at the city park.

  “Harmless, my behind. There’s something not right with those two. I can feel it.” He smacked his gloved hands on his jeans. “What are the odds that the only other survivors for twenty miles around are those two degenerates?”

  Sally laughed quietly at her grandfather’s frustration. He was such a wonderful man, but he was going to have to learn to be more trusting of people now that there were so few of them left. Maybe we should go visit Tim and Russ sometime, she thought. I bet they’d like that.

  12

  * * *

  FORT BLISS SOUTHERN WALL, EL PASO, TEXAS

  OCTOBER 8TH

  It’d been almost a month since Jake had talked to the pregnant woman from the camp. Sidney Ban-something. Their schedules hadn’t synched up like they had the morning after the Sam’s Club supply run, so he hadn’t been able to talk to her again, but he had thought about what she said—too much, actually. The infected certainly reacted to sights and sounds, that much was clear.

  He glanced at the waning sun and then back across the rubble of the El Paso ruins where the infected in this sector usually filtered through. The light was beginning to change and his men would need to switch to thermals soon. He couldn’t see anything moving out there through his scope—but there were several known avenues of approach where line-of-sight was blocked out to about two hundred and fifty meters.

  The steady flow of infected had been relatively light the past couple of days, all things considered. That was on top of the reduction over time from those ungodly first few months. Was it time to ask the CO whether they should test Sidney’s theory? He’d talked to the Old Man about it a few times and he’d been just as intrigued as Jake had been by the idea. Like the woman had said, what could it hurt besides having a mass of targets below? If their recent activity continued, the hundreds that would trickle in over a few hours’ time would be nothing compared to the untold thousands that they’d fought each day and night early on.

  Jake walked to the back of his Stryker and looked through the open back door. “Switch to the TWS, Jones,” he ordered his gunner inside the vehicle. He watched as the corporal’s fingers tapped the Stryker’s targeting display to switch from daytime use of the Laser Target Locator Module to the Thermal Weapons Sight and the familiar colors of thermal heat signatures replaced the regular camera view.

  Almost immediately, ten or fifteen shapes illuminated. They were behind the scrub brush that grew at six hundred meters, walking steady toward the wall. “Temperature?”

  He didn’t know why he bothered to ask anymore. There wasn’t anyone left within a hundred miles of El Paso that wasn’t infected. Everything beyond the walls was already dead, they were just too fucking stupid to know it.

  “One-oh-six,” Jones replied in his thick Jersey accent. “Permission to engage, sir?”

  The fuckers’ body temp always spiked when they were active and an uninfected human couldn’t survive temperatures like that without being in the hospital. They certainly wouldn’t be up walking around.

  “Light ’em up.”

  The large .50 caliber machine gun on top of the Stryker began spitting out rounds at the infected beyond the range of the standard infantryman’s ability to engage. Jake watched the display in satisfaction as the figures crumpled under the withering fire. They hadn’t tried to take cover or duck out of the way when their buddies began to fall around them, so he knew that he’d made the right call.

  The infected were coming out for the night.

  All along the base’s perimeter, he could hear the heavy machine guns of the other vehicles stationed every fifty feet along the wall. Thinking about those first few months, he was amazed that they’d survived them with only helicopter close air support and dismounted infantry on the single-stacked walls. Over time, the walls had been thickened and heightened and were now two shipping containers tall and two wide in most places, allowing for the Strykers and gun trucks to be driven up on top of the wall to provide heavy weapons support. It added a dimension of depth and firepower to the already considerable stand-off advantage they had. Only the sheer number of infected had been an issue.

  Now, that seemed to be changing. Maybe?

  “Ah, fuck it,” he muttered.

  “Say again, sir?” Jones asked, turning around in the seat.

  “Nothing, man. Just thinking about something else.”

  “Don’t do that to me, sir!” the gunner exclaimed. “I thought maybe you’d changed your mind about me shooting those freaks.”

  “No, you’re okay, Jones. I was just thinking about how there have been less of them than there used to be.”

  “We’ve killed everything that ever came this way, sir. Maybe there’s just not that many of them left anymore.”

  Jake thought back to his experience in Midland a
nd shook his head. “Nah, there are millions of them left. Maybe even hundreds of millions. Think about it. There are four million here, supposedly fifteen million in New York—and that’s it, besides the random people holed up in the middle of nowhere. So, say that’s a total of twenty-five million, out of what? Three hundred and eighty million Americans before this all started?”

  Jones nodded and then looked at the display screen. He used the joystick to pan the thermals back and forth in his sector to make sure it was clear and then looked back to Jake. “Don’t forget about Mexico and Canada, sir.”

  “Yeah. And South America, and Europe and Asia…”

  It was too much. If the higher-ups on post, or whatever was left of the US Government, knew how far-reaching this thing was, then they sure as hell weren’t sharing that information with anyone. It made sense, given the relatively slow infection rate for bites and scratches, that someone feasibly could have gotten on a plane and made it to Europe—if it didn’t start there in the first place. Jake had no idea what the truth was.

  “We’re making a dent, though,” Jake asserted, unsure if he believed it himself, but knowing that he needed to keep his spirits up in front of the men. “Between us and the Air Force, we’ve carved out a nice little piece of the desert.”

  “Hey, sir. Can I talk to you about something?”

  “Sure, what is it, Jones?”

  “Well…” He trailed off as he tapped on the TWS display to zoom in to an area. Determining that the heat signature posed no threat, he said, “It’s only a dog or big cat. Anyways, sir. You know that hot chick that stays with Third Platoon—well, I mean, she would be hot if she wasn’t so pregnant. Anyways, you know who I’m talking about?”

  Jake grimaced. “Yeah, I’ve met her.” What the hell is this about, he wondered.

  “Well, she has a theory that pretty much everyone in the Third Herd is on board with. It’s crazy as fuck, but it makes sense too, sir.”

  “Do you mean the one where Able Company gets the entire First Armored Division to cease fire for a couple of days to see if the infected go away?”

  Jones nodded. “Yeah, that one, sir. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It might just work.”

  Jake thought about the gunner’s background before answering. Jones was smart. He’d graduated from Brown University a little over a year ago with a business degree and more than two hundred thousand dollars in debt. As a result, he joined the Army for the college loan repayment program to wipe out about half of it for a four-year enlistment, pretty good deal—especially now, since being in the Army at Fort Bliss was likely the only thing that kept the kid alive. He was more than just book smart, though, and his ability to see things for how they actually were instead of following the party line had been one of the qualities that Jake admired in him, and often used the enlisted man as a sounding board.

  “Yeah. I’ve been thinking about it a lot too,” Jake admitted. “The soldier in me says it’s a terrible idea, but when I watch these things’ reactions… I don’t know. I think it might work.”

  Jones nodded enthusiastically. “I know it would work, sir. We could—contact!”

  The lieutenant sighed. They wouldn’t get an opportunity to test the theory if… “Hold your fire, Jones,” he said. “Just hold on. I’m gonna go talk to Sergeant Turner.”

  “Oh, he ain’t gonna like this, sir. Not one bit.”

  Jake nodded in agreement as he stepped away from the open hatch. The last time he’d seen his platoon sergeant, he was over on the far right flank talking to Sergeant Gallegos. The two of them were only a few years apart in age, which made them by far the oldest in the platoon, so it was natural that they had some type of bond. It turned out that they both loved old MTV shows, the kind that weren’t on the air any longer. Well, weren’t even on the air when there still was television.

  When he walked up, the two old soldiers were arguing over which Singled Out co-host was hotter, Jenny McCarthy or Carmen Electra. Turner liked the blonde, Gallegos preferred the brunette. “Hey, Sergeant Turner,” Jake interrupted. “Can I get a second?”

  “Sure thing, sir. I’m gettin’ tired of Gallegos’ asinine delusions anyway.”

  They walked a few feet and the old NCO asked, “What’s up, sir?”

  Jake took three or four minutes to outline Sidney’s idea and his own belief that a cease-fire would work. Once he was finished, he asked, “So what do you think? Is it worth giving it a shot?”

  “Sir, can I be candid with you?”

  “Of course. I don’t—”

  “It’s the goddamned stupidest idea I’ve ever fucking heard,” Turner bellowed. “Those fucking things don’t think. They don’t reason. They don’t decide that if we go dark and quiet for a little bit that they’ll just go away. They are coming after us because they’re drawn to us. I don’t know how or why—check that, I do know why. They want to spread their virus. We go allowing them to get up close to the walls, they’ll eventually find their way to the gates. Once enough of them are pressed up against them, they’ll fail, and then they have unrestricted access to all that nice, juicy refugee meat. We allow them to get inside the walls and we risk the extinction of the human race.”

  Jake chuckled uneasily. “Okay, that’s a little dramatic, Sergeant Turner, but point taken. I’m not advocating allowing them inside the walls or even close enough to make us worry about the gates. I just want to see what these things will do if we give them the opportunity to simply go away and die of starvation someplace else.”

  “I do like the idea of them suffering a long, agonizing death alone in the sand,” the NCO grunted.

  Jake shrugged. “If you need that visual to help you give this a try, then sure.” He looked around at the portion of his platoon that he could see. The rest were spread out over a two-mile length of the eastern section of the wall, but those that were nearby seemed to be watching him, waiting for him to give the order. He didn’t know how many people that Sidney had talked with, but the fact that Jones knew her was enough to convince him that she talked to a lot of his men.

  He focused back on the platoon sergeant before speaking. “I want to give this a try. We’re gonna go dark in our sector and I don’t want the men to engage any of the infected until I give the order. Understood?”

  “You talked to the Old Man about this, sir?”

  “No, I haven’t discussed it with Captain Massey,” he replied.

  “Don’t you think you should?”

  “No,” Jake said, shaking his head and using the movement to give him a little more conviction in the plan. “The CO is a man who wants data, evidence that something might or might not work, not just an untried concept. If I can take him some real-world observations about how the infected react, then I might be able to convince him to try it company-, or even battalion-wide.”

  “Are we really doing this, sir?”

  “Yeah, we are. Order the men to hold their fire and don’t engage anything—unless it’s attacking a refugee trying to make it inside the walls.” He flicked a finger at the generators chugging noisily behind them. “We’ll cut the generators to turn off the lights. Go dark and keep the men quiet. Then we’ll see what happens.”

  The platoon sergeant stared him in the eyes for a moment and Jake thought he was going to challenge the order. Sergeant Turner dipped his chin slightly and grunted. “I was due a new lieutenant anyways.”

  Jake frowned as the grizzled NCO went to Gallegos to tell him the order personally. After a few quick sentences and several hurried glances in the direction of the lieutenant, Gallegos nodded and Sergeant Turner walked hurriedly to his Humvee where he picked up the radio and passed Jake’s order along to everyone in the platoon.

  “Well,” Turner called from the front seat. “Looks like your little theory is gonna have a rough first night.”

  “Why’s that?” he asked as he scanned the wreckage in front of his platoon’s sector.

  “Multiple TWS hits,” Turner replied. “Looks li
ke the infected are here for the party.”

  The NCO’s face disappeared in the darkness as someone flipped the switch to turn off the lights, and then cut the motor on the portable spotlight’s generator. The action was repeated more or less in order down the line as the pools of light illuminating his men disappeared.

  With the generators turned off, Jake could hear the confused screams of the infected as their prey, once visible up high on the wall, disappeared. The creatures continued to advance toward the last place they’d seen humans and Jake prayed that his men could keep calm and not shoot into the crowd of infected that would soon be at their door.

  “Here we go…” he muttered under his breath.

  13

  * * *

  ABLE COMPANY HEADQUARTERS, FORT BLISS, TEXAS

  OCTOBER 9TH

  “What the hell were you thinking, Jake?” Captain Massey seethed.

  Jake stood at rigid attention in front of his commander’s desk. Even though the October temperatures were easily twenty degrees cooler than the heat of summer, beads of sweat ran down his back and pooled along his beltline. Last night hadn’t gone like he’d expected it to.

  “I—” He stopped and organized his thoughts quickly, leaning on vernacular he’d learned in Ranger School before all of this happened. “Sir, I had a theory that if the unit practiced good noise and light discipline, then the infected would stop their movement toward the base and seek other prey.”

  “They sure as shit did seek other prey, Lieutenant,” a familiar voice boomed behind him as Captain Massey jumped to his feet. Jake shuddered and stared straight ahead at his commander’s “I love me” wall of diplomas and certificates. His sleeve rustled as the brigade commander, Colonel Albrecht, pushed past him. “They went after troopers along other sections of the wall.”

  The colonel turned toward Jake and then sat on the edge of the Able Company commander’s desk. “Stand at ease, Lieutenant. Todd,” the older man nodded at the captain.