Текст книги "The Darkest Place"
Автор книги: James N. Cook
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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 34 страниц)
“Works for me.” He leaned down and said something to the driver, and they were off.
Dad, Blake, and Lance abandoned their positions, double-timed it back to the vehicles, and safely ensconced themselves in a Humvee. The Army vehicle drove into the middle of the infected, laid down a broad volley of fire, then stopped and waited while the horde gathered round. The gunner turned so he was facing the vehicle’s rear and let out occasional bursts of fire to keep the undead from blocking their escape route. When the undead had pressed in tightly enough to begin climbing the hood and beating on the windows, the driver put it in reverse and peeled out, running over a few infected along the way.
One of the ghouls clung to the hood and was steadily climbing toward the gunner who still had his back turned. Mike and I shouted warnings, pointing at the thing behind him. He heard us, turned, reached a hand into a pocket of his vest, and produced a snub-nosed revolver. With the ghoul almost in arm’s reach, he stuck the gun in its face and pulled the trigger. Gore splashed across the creature’s back as the top of its head flew apart, brain and skull spatter painting the front end of the Humvee. From the report, I knew the gun was a .357 magnum. Hollow point slugs too, judging by the damage. At that range, he may as well have shot it in the face with an artillery piece. The creature collapsed, nearly headless, and slid from the vehicle.
The driver turned a slow circle around the now congregated infected while the gunner stashed his pistol and returned his focus to the SAW. Once again, the ratatatat of controlled fire rang out, and once again, undead legs flew to pieces. The soldiers worked quickly, driving four laps around the ghouls in concentric circles, gradually whittling them down. Finally, none were left standing.
The Humvee drove to where the other vehicles were parked, squelching over a few corpses along the way. One of them grabbed part of the right rear fender and was dragged along, its lower body remaining in place while the torso trailed an ever-lengthening rope of intestine. Sophia made a choking sound next to me and turned away.
“God, that is so fucking gross.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Just give me a minute.”
I watched as the Humvee stopped next to where the others waited. Mike climbed down from the container by lowering himself over the edge and then dropping the last few feet. I followed suit, then turned and caught Sophia on the way down and lowered her gently.
“Thank you,” she said, standing close enough to kiss. It amazed me that even here, standing in a field of stinking, festering undead, the male sex drive was strong enough to rear its ancient, incorrigible head. I ignored it and put a hand on Sophia’s lower back as we threaded our way through the corpses on the way back to the vehicles.
“Gonna be a hell of a mess to clean up,” I overheard one of the soldiers say to my father. “We’ll have to get some people out here. Haul those thing away to a good safe distance.”
“Hey,” I called, getting his attention. He looked at me. “Isn’t one of those HEMTTs equipped with a shovel, or a bucket attachment, or whatever you call it?”
His eyes grew sharp. “Yes. Yes it is. Good thinking, I’ll see if I can get it out here. You folks okay in the meantime?”
“We’re fine,” Dad said. “But we appreciate the help. While you’re gone, we’ll go around and make sure these things are taken care of permanently.”
“Be careful doing that,” the soldier said. “Those things are twice as dangerous on the ground. Don’t let them get their hands on you, they’re strong as hell.”
“I’m well aware. Thanks again, gentlemen.”
“Be back soon.”
The Humvee drove away. My father looked around at the rest of us, checked his rifle, and tilted his head toward the crawling, moaning horrors in the parking lot. “The sooner we get started, the sooner we’ll be finished.”
I looked at the infected, their blood black and shiny in the fading afternoon light, and watched them drag their carcasses toward me, unconcerned with their injuries, shredded hands grasping at gore-soaked asphalt.
Feeling a shift in my stomach, I looked away to the north woodlands, above the parking lot, over the infected, and across the roof of the brewery beyond. Knobby treetops rustled under a sky darkening to electric purple as I thought about what lay across the Mississippi River. The last newscast I had seen before they stopped airing was from California. The talking head was relaying information from affiliates in the Midwest.
The east coast has gone dark.
Nice way to put it. The most verdant, populous region of the country, home to over a hundred and fifty million people, had been overrun. Everything east of the Appalachians was now an infested, toxic, and in many places radioactive no man’s land.
Gone dark.
The Appalachians had not stopped them. The Mississippi River had not stopped them. The combined might of the U.S. Armed Forces had not stopped them. Nothing stopped them. Delayed them, maybe. Held them back for a while. But there was no stopping them. All we had done here was buy time, nothing more. A buffer zone, breathing room, enough space to get some rest and then move on.
I looked down at my rifle and wondered what it would be like to try to wipe out a swarm of mosquitos with it.
“I don’t know Dad,” I said. “As far as killing the infected goes, I’m not sure if we’ll ever be finished.”
THIRTY-THREE
Full dark, and the stars came out.
I lay on my bedroll, eyes open to the brilliance of the sky. Sophia was a warm, heavy weight next to me.
“I’ve never seen it like this,” she said. “The night sky.”
“You mean without a roof between you?”
She slapped my shoulder. “No, asshole. I mean bright. Like this.” She pointed a finger heavenward.
“It’s because the power is out,” I said. “No streetlights, no city lights, no light at all. Light pollution obscures the sky at night. Drowns out the stars. Must have been very disappointing for all those photons.”
“Disappointing?”
“To travel billions of years only to fizzle out in a smog-choked haze.”
“You say it like the stars actually care. Last I heard, they’re just big burning balls of plasma.”
“We’re made of them, you know. Human beings. The dust of stars given life.”
“What?”
“The fundamental elements, the components, the building blocks of life. All deposited on this planet by stars, flung across the universe as they died.”
Sophia was silent for a while, then said, “There’s a kind of beauty in that, I think. The lifeless given life.”
I turned my head and gazed over the edge of the white metal roof. The distant moans of infected drifted to my ears. “The lifeless given life. It supports the duality, I suppose.”
Sophia shuffled closer, lips brushing against my neck. “Now I understand why you don’t talk much. You don’t make a bit of fucking sense.”
There was something wildly erotic about the way she said it, our warmth nestled together under the coldness of an indifferent sky. “It’s beauty and corruption, Sophia. Light and dark. Life and death. For every point, a counterpoint. We, the human race, are the defiance. The struggle of sentience in an ocean of oblivion. Those things out there, they’re a corruption of us. An abomination of something beautiful.”
Another silence, then she said, “You really think people are beautiful? I mean, with all the things we’ve done to each other? War and murder and all the rest of it?”
“I think life is beauty, Sophia. And while there are as many tragedies as there are people in the world to live them, those tragedies don’t diminish the importance of our existence. Think of how far we’ve come. It wasn’t all that long ago we were lying on bare ground, fires burning next to us, wondering what all those bright spots in the big wide dark were all about. Now we know. Now we can draw their chemical components on computer diagrams and replicate their energy in small scale. Ever seen a plasma torch cut through two inches of steel in less time than it takes to say it?”
“No.”
“It’s a thing to see.”
I lay in the dark and tightened my arms around Sophia and wondered what was wrong with the night. The hot starkness of day no longer assaulted us; the warmth of the metal under my back had faded hours ago. There was a gentle breeze, a stirring of leaves flush with the green blessing of late spring. I listened, ears tuning out the moans, the booming snores of Mike and my father twenty yards distant, and the rumbling of a Humvee engine as a patrol checked on us. I closed my eyes against the brilliance of a searchlight playing over the rooftop, face turned into the sweetness of Sophia’s scent, and the answer came to me.
There were no crickets. The fires had sent them all away.
*****
Midnight.
Had to be. Otherwise the hand on my shoulder would not have been there.
“Rise and shine, lover boy,” Blake said. “We’re on the clock.”
I gently disentangled myself from Sophia’s arms and pushed aside the leg draped over my midsection. She stirred a little, then rolled over to her other side, heaved a deep breath, and continued snoring quietly.
Blake laid a steadying hand on my shoulder as I stood up and nearly toppled over. The scant two hours of sleep I’d managed were just enough to make me truly feel like shit.
“You all right?” Blake asked.
“Ask me again in five minutes.”
“Just make sure you keep your gun pointed away from me.”
“Hardy-har-har.”
“I’m not kidding.”
I left my pack where it lay, but donned my vest, belt, drop holster, and slung my rifle. One hastily chugged canteen of water later, I felt almost human.
“Okay,” I said. “Let the mid-watch begin.”
Blake smiled. He had not done much of that lately and it was good to see it again. “Look at it this way. It’s only four hours, then you can go back to sleep.”
“Lovely.”
“Your breath is wonderful, by the way.”
“Duly noted.”
After pissing over the edge of the roof with my eyes closed for the better part of a thousand years, I used the last splash of water in my canteen to wet my toothbrush, applied a minimum of paste, solved the problem, and spit the excess to the parking lot. To my surprise, it landed on the face of an infected wandering below the edge of the periphery. Looking around, I saw the shadows of dozens more stumbling and shambling in the light of the half-moon.
“Son of a bitch!”
“Yeah,” Blake said behind me. “They wandered in over the last hour.”
“Did anyone radio Captain Morgan?”
Blake snickered. “Captain Morgan. Man, I hope that guy gets promoted soon.”
“Well?”
“Yeah, Joe called it in. They’ll send the Bradleys around at daybreak. It’s nothing a twenty-five millimeter chain gun can’t take care of.”
I relaxed, comforted by the idea of armored cavalry. The infected may have been legion, but they were composed of flesh, after all. And in the battle of flesh versus high-velocity tungsten, I knew where I would be placing my bets.
We walked along the rooftop, staying well clear of the edge. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and wondered what the hell the point of posting a watch was anyway. There were over a hundred troops nearby, not to mention the fact we were thirty feet off the ground. I had posed this question to my father after being informed I had pulled the mid-watch, and his answer was a shrug and a simple, “You never know. Better safe than sorry.”
Hard to argue with that logic.
I looked down as we passed the shipping container and ladder we had used to ascend the brewery. A search of a nearby neighborhood had yielded the ladder, but it was too short for what we needed. So after the bucket-equipped HEMTT had cleared the permanently-dead infected from the parking lot, I talked the driver into bulldozing an empty shipping container next to the wall. After that, it was easy.
“So,” Blake said, breaking the silence. “You and Sophia.”
“Yeah. Me and Sophia.”
“You know that girl done had a crush on you for years now, right?”
“So she says.”
“You never seen it?”
“She never gave me the time of day, Blake.”
He bobbed his head from side to side. “She always did get quiet when you were around. Then again, you did the same thing. Never tried to flirt with her. Probably what got her interested. All those boys coming after her all the time, and you barely paying her any attention. Kind of thing makes a girl curious.”
“I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know much about girls, Blake.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret.” He leaned in close and lowered his voice. “No one does. Not even them. It’s how they keep us off balance.”
I laughed, and gently slapped him on the arm. Blake was the kind of guy it was hard not to laugh around. He was always quick with a smile or a joke, or if needed, a word of encouragement. When I was about eleven or twelve, I asked him why he was so happy all the time. He sat me down and told me what it was like for him growing up.
He was from New Orleans, originally. His father died in an accident at work when he was only three, leaving his mother to raise him alone. She worked two jobs, sometimes three, to make ends meet. They used food stamps to buy groceries, bought clothes at Goodwill and the Salvation Army, and because he was black, and poor, and the child of a single mother, he was stigmatized everywhere he went.
The neighborhood he grew up in was rough. Drugs were endemic. If you were not a dealer, someone you knew or were related to was. The cops were an ever-present evil, looming over everything and everyone. Walking down the street was reason enough to get thrown up against a wall and searched, and if you mouthed off, dragged into an alley and beaten.
Blake knew. It had happened to him many times.
His early impressions of life were of white faces buying drugs down the street from his house, and white faces snarled with hate swinging a baton at his head, and white faces looking at him with fear and contempt at every turn, the whispers, the snide comments, the subtext of every interaction the same.
You are a thug, and I don’t trust you.
But there was one problem.
They were wrong.
He dressed the part. He acted the part. Every young man in the neighborhood did because they had to. Failure to conform was punished harshly. You did not want to be seen as non-complicit. Savage beatings on a daily basis were a very real possibility for those who did not tow the line with the drug gangs. One did not have to participate, but you sure as hell better not get in the way or give any indication of disapproval. To do so was to invite disaster.
So Blake walked the line. He stayed out of trouble at school, quietly keeping his grades up. He steered clear of the gangs, being careful not to get on their bad side. Which is not to say he never broke the law—he did what he had to do to survive—but he was careful about it.
Then came graduation, and the recruiter’s office, and the Army, and his tearful, dutiful mother telling him to shake the dust from his feet and write as soon as he got the chance.
She died a few years later from a stroke. Blake had been sending her money every month, hoping that between the two of them they could save enough for her to move to a better neighborhood. She never spent a dime of the money.
“I had a choice to make,” Blake said. “I could succumb to hate, and anger, and spend the rest of my life being bitter, or I could do what my momma always told me to do when things were bad.”
He looked at me then, tears in his dark, thoughtful eyes. “She said to me, ‘Baby, you just got to smile. No matter what the world throws at you, you just got to smile.’ So that’s what I do. No matter what the world throws at me, I just keep right on smiling. I used to see it as revenge, but then I got older and realized that’s a foolish way to look at things. Revenge never did no good for anybody. The world ain’t got nothing against me. What happened, happened. I just got to rise above it and move on. And that’s what I do.”
“So where you see this going, the two of you?” Blake asked, interrupting my thoughts.
“Hell if I know, man. I’m just taking it a day at a time.”
He looked out toward the hotel and the dim orange dots of campfires in the parking lot. Humvees patrolled and rifles cracked in the distance as the troops on watch kept the infected at bay. His customary smile faded, replaced by a fearful solemnity that hurt me to see on his jovial face. “Guess that’s all anybody can do right now, things being the way they are.”
We walked in the dark for a while, each in his own thoughts. As we passed by Sophia’s sleeping form, I stopped to watch her. Blake stopped as well, back turned, giving me a moment to myself. He was good that way. Perceptive. The kind of guy who understood things without needing someone to say it outright.
“What’s going to happen to us, do you think?” I asked.
I heard Blake’s boot scrape the metal roof as he turned and walked over to me. His hand was warm on my shoulder as he stood beside me, voice close to my ear. “Caleb, I don’t know. You’re a grown man now, so I ain’t gonna bullshit you. Things are bad. Real bad. Worst I ever seen.”
“I know that much.”
“I know you do. What I’m saying is, I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I think we’re in the early stages of something long, and dark, and terrible. If we want to get through it, we got to be strong. We got to stick together like family. You understand?”
I nodded, and did.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s keep moving. Best lesson I ever learned—when in doubt, keep moving.”
The half-moon was clear the next few hours. No clouds obscured its shine on an oasis of green in a sea of charred black. At four in the morning, after an impossibly long watch, I woke Mike and Lance and waited while they cleared their heads and armed themselves. Afterward, I ambled back to my bedroll, back to Sophia. She stirred as I lay down and draped an arm around her.
“Hey,” she muttered. “Ev’thing okay?”
I kissed her cheek. “Everything’s fine, pretty lady. Go back to sleep.”
She smiled. I closed my eyes to the stars and the moon and languished in her sweet, humid, feminine warmth.
Even the gunshots and roar of engines could not keep me awake.
THIRTY-FOUR
“Come on,” Dad said, shaking my arm. “Spear practice.”
I sat up and blinked against the early light of dawn. To the east, the sun was an angry scarlet eye peeking over the hills in the distance. Low banks of clouds rolled overhead in varying shades of red, orange, pale yellow, and finally blue that darkened to steel gray in the west. The air was cool, but heavy with humidity and the promise of higher temperatures to come.
Sophia had rolled away from me in the night and lay curled up under her thin blanket. I brushed the hair from her face and kissed her cheek. She stirred, sighed, and smiled. I kissed her again before I left.
Dad had set up a fast-rope descent to the parking lot. When I arrived, he slid down it like the practiced expert he was, then tossed his harness up to me. Although I was quite a bit taller than him, we were about the same through the hips. The harness fit me just fine. I repeated the process, albeit without quite the same grace and fluidity.
The bucket-equipped HEMTT was already on site, breaking the infected’s bodies by crushing them, then scraping them into a pile in the middle of the pavement. It was gruesome work, but effective. The parking lot was almost clear. Two Bradleys circled the operation, big chain-guns aimed at the thicker knots of undead.
“Let’s find someplace a bit more peaceful,” Dad said. I nodded in agreement and followed him to one of the Humvees. We drove back to 281 and pulled into the parking lot of the hotel where the rest of the soldiers and civilians had spent the night. Evidently, none of them were awake yet except for the guards on patrol. The place was quiet, only a few bleary-eyed troops and roving vehicles on hand to disturb the early morning silence.
Dad pulled around the back of the building near the service entrance where there was a narrow stretch of cracked asphalt, a half-full dumpster, silent AC units, and not much else. To our right was an expanse of slightly overgrown lawn roughly two acres wide.
“Looks like a good spot,” I said. Dad agreed. He drove the Humvee over the curb, parked, and got out.
The old man—who really was not old at all—opened the back so I could crawl inside and dig out our two rubber-tipped practice spears. When I tossed him his full-length faux weapon, he caught it one handed, spun it deftly around his body, and assumed a fighting stance, knees slightly bent, haft close to his hips, rubber tip pointed in my direction.
My own weapon was only half as long, the handle shortened to my specifications. The blade on the end of mine was wider, heavier, and longer than the one my father wielded, although also formed of the same vulcanized rubber. I held it with my hand choked near the blade, the bulk of the handle protruding over my shoulder. In the years since I’d developed this unique fighting style, Dad had never quite sorted out all my tricks.
“You’re too traditional,” I said for the umpteenth time as we circled each other. “Too stiff. You need to innovate.”
“Don’t worry, kid,” he said, a determined look on his face. “I’ll figure you out yet.”
“Why are we still fighting with spears anyway?” I asked. “Wouldn’t knives or machetes make more sense?”
The answer was predictable; I had heard it a thousand times. “Spears were the infantry rifle of the ancient world,” he said. “You’ve probably read volumes about swords, but the truth is spears were the deciding factor in countless battles throughout history. They’re easy to forge, durable, and extend a warrior’s reach by meters without requiring an undue amount of resources to manufacture. Swords, axes, and maces are pretty to look at, but spears, halberds, and billhooks were the preferred weapons of the soldiers of old. And with good reason.”
I nodded along, too tired to argue the merits of modern weapons over ancient. “All right then. Let’s see what you got.”
I barely had time to dodge the tip of his weapon as it whipped past my head. One second my father was standing twelve feet away, and the next he had closed the distance, his spear extended in a two-handed grip. Dad was many things, but slow was not one of them.
Fortunately for me, my boxing coach always insisted I learn and practice the fundamentals of head movement. It is less about being fast than it is about understanding body mechanics, watching your opponent, and knowing where the next attack is coming from. My dad was a competent boxer, among other fighting styles, but he did not start as early as I did. The muscle memory was not as deeply ingrained in him as it was in me. So when he swept the spear to the side after missing with the initial thrust, I had already ducked it and circled away.
“Nice,” he said, grinning. He adjusted his footwork and began closing in on my right. I switched my spear to the other side, having long ago learned the value of being able to fight with either hand.
Keeping my head low and my feet moving, I harassed him with eerie-looking over-the-shoulder thrusts with my spear’s shortened handle, aimed at batting his weapon aside.
“How the hell do you do that?” he muttered, backing off. “It’s like you have a scorpion tail or some shit.”
Rather than answer, I used the distraction to aim a kick at the mid-point of his spear shaft, closed the distance, whipped my weapon forward, and let it slide through my hand. When I felt the slightly flared pommel hit the edge of my palm, I ducked, leapt forward, switched hands, and rolled to my right.
As expected, my father predicted the kick and the thrust, and was ready with a counter-attack. He let his arms go limp to absorb the blow to the spear, executed a spin move like a dancer’s pirouette, and slashed at the spot where my head should have been.
But I wasn’t there.
Instead, the last second dive-and-roll had allowed me to pop up behind him and gently press the blunted rubber edge of my practice spear to his kidney. “Checkmate,” I said.
“I hope you enjoyed that,” he said, smiling over his shoulder. “It’s the last time you’ll get away with it.”
He whipped his spear through a blurring figure-eight motion, nearly knocking my weapon out of my hands and forcing me back a few steps. He pressed the attack, the wooden hafts of our spears clacking loudly against one another. Seven moves later I lay on my back, disarmed, the point of my father’s practice weapon aimed at my throat.
“Okay,” I chuckled. “Point taken.”
“No pun intended?” He helped me to my feet, smiling broadly.
We faced each other, bowed, and set to in earnest.
No more messing around.
An hour later, we had fought twenty bouts. I won nine. Two were a draw. That put us even. Dad called a halt to the action, leaning heavily on his spear, breath coming quickly. I tossed my weapon to the ground and put my hands on my knees. There was a swelling over Dad’s right eye where I had caught him with an elbow in an attempt to knock him off balance. It didn’t work, and he had skewered me in the ribs for my trouble. The attack left a bruise under my arm I would feel for a week. Other than that, a few minor scrapes aside, we were uninjured.
“You’re getting better,” he said. “Or maybe I’m just slowing down.”
I stood up and stretched, feeling a few vertebrae pop back into place. “If this is what you look like slow,” I said, “I’d hate to have fought you in your prime.”
We both jumped when we heard clapping behind us. Spinning around, I spotted Morgan standing on a second-floor balcony, applauding.
“Nice work, fellas,” he called down. “That was some hard-core kung fu shit. The hell did you learn how to do that?”
I smiled and was about to say something witty, but then I caught my father’s disapproving glare from the corner of my eye. “How long have you been standing there?” he asked, irritation in his voice.
Morgan held up his hands. “Sorry, man, didn’t mean to snoop. The clickity-clacking woke me up. Came outside to see what the noise was all about.”
Dad glared a moment longer, then motioned for me to get in the Humvee. “Come on. Let’s go check on the others.”
I gave Morgan an apologetic shrug, then followed.
“What was that all about?” I asked as we drove away. In response, rather than driving toward the brewery, Dad pulled down a side street and stopped. He left the engine running, the air conditioner laboring against the increasing temperature outside.
“Caleb, there are a few facts of life you need to understand,” he said. “Things I’ve never discussed with you because I didn’t think it would be necessary.”
“Okay,” I said warily. “Like what?”
Dad breathed out through his nose, staring frustratedly out the window. I thought about Lauren, and the trouble he’d been having with her, the tension and arguments and distance between them, and my heart went out to him.
“Dad,” I said gently. “What’s going on? Talk to me.”
He kept his gaze averted for a while, then said, “Caleb, you don’t understand who and what you are. What you represent. What you’re capable of.”
“Okay …”
He reached out and closed his calloused fingers over my forearm with a grip like iron. My father was not a big man, but his strength was a force of nature, muscles hard as oak rippling under sun-browned skin.
“All the training you’ve had,” he said, “the skills you’ve learned … it’s rare, Caleb. It makes you dangerous. People like us, people who can do the things we can do, we’re going to be in high demand very soon. There will be factions vying to round up as many of us as they can get their hands on. The world we knew is over, now. A new world is being born, and it is going to be a dark and violent place. There are people out there who will try to use you if they can. You can’t let them. Never let anyone know what you can do, Caleb. People will try to make a tool out of you. Bend you to their will. If they can’t win you over with charm, they’ll find some leverage, some way to hurt you. They will try to own you. Believe me, son. I know.”
I stared at him for a long time, saying nothing. I had always known my upbringing was unique; the training I had received from Dad, Mike, Blake and Tyrel was something most people never experienced. But it had never dawned on me until that moment just how different it made me. How dangerous.
I had been trained from the age of five to be a super soldier.
I could shoot as well as any Special Forces operator. I was as good a sniper as anything the Marine Corps had ever produced. I had trained for over ten years in jiu jitsu, boxing, wrestling, krav maga, and various weapons styles. Room entries and cover and concealment and combat tactics were as familiar to me as tying my shoes. Not to mention my knowledge of fieldcraft, lock picking, explosives, and a host of other skills.
If I were looking for someone to exploit, I’d be pretty damned high on my list.
Dad saw understanding register on my face and let go of my forearm. “Do you see now, son? You have to be careful. Never reveal more about yourself than absolutely necessary. Do what you have to do to stay alive, but tell no one about your past. Understood?”
“All right,” I said. “I get it, Dad. I really do.”
He stared at me searchingly, and after a few seconds he said, “I believe you.”
The morning sun was bright over his shoulder when I looked at him. “Really?”
“Yes. Because I know you, son, and I can read you like a book.” He leaned closer, lowering his voice.
“And I can see how scared you are.”
