Survivors (32 page)

“Is it your shift?”

“No, but it never hurts to be nice, right?” chuckled Jack, making his way toward the Fac’s back door.

“Hey! Wait a second!” Hal called out.

Jack stopped and turned.

“Never caught your last name, Jack!” said Hal.

Jack turned slowly, and grinned. “I’m just a welder, Hal. Just a welder.”

A moment later, the contractor vanished into the Fac, the heavy door swinging shut behind him. Sherman laughed, and Hal shot him a curious glance.

“What’s so funny?”

“He hasn’t told anyone his last name. There’s an unofficial pool going. Some of us think he’s on the lam—or was, before the law went out the window with everything else—and some others think it must be a terrible name, for him to keep it secret.”

“I guess it’s his business,” shrugged Hal.

“Well,” said Sherman, “shall we walk?”

“Sure,” said Hal, following alongside Frank. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask, you guys got anything for a fellow to drink around here? I’m sure Allen would love a snort, too.”

Sherman made a so-so motion with his hand. “Trevor knows how to rig up a still. He’s got it up on the roof. Can’t say I can stomach the stuff myself, but for a vet like you, it’d probably go down smooth enough.”

“Remind me to badger him for a cup, later.”

“It’s a multipurpose brew,” Sherman said. “You can drink it. You can also use it to strip rust off a bumper.”

Hal laughed. “That’s what I like to hear. Finest kind.”

The pair was walking along the edge of the chain-link fence that kept the Fac’s backyard safe from intruding infected. Sherman stopped at each post to check that the mesh was securely bolted, and hadn’t worked its way loose over the weeks.

“So, tell me about your little cross-country trek,” Sherman said as he gave one of the posts an experimental kick. It held firm. “Somehow you made it from the islands all the way to the mainland. What happened? You get tired of retirement?”

“Don’t get me started on that,” Hal said, scowling. “They kicked me out when I spoke up for the sailors.”

“The sailors from the
Ramage
?”

“Of course. What, do you think any other ship would just come stumbling into that little atoll in the middle of nowhere? You’d have to get a local topo map to even see it. As far as the world is concerned, my island doesn’t exist. Or, my ex-island, anyway.”

“So they came back. Captain Franklin and his crew, I mean.”

Hal nodded. “They had nowhere else to go. I wanted them to come live on the island, but the LIPs weren’t too hot on the idea.” Hal slipped back into Army lingo for native individuals—Local Indigenous Personnel. “They have their own idea of quarantine, you know. And it’s a pretty good one. Just cut off everything, and hope the plague misses you. It works, too. Never saw a single infected while I was there. My neighbors didn’t want the sailors around. Thought they’d bring Morningstar in with them, even though I told them the ship was clean.”

“And so one thing led to another . . .” began Sherman.

“. . . and suddenly I find myself being driven out of town with pitchforks and torches. Figuratively speaking. It was more like spears and bows.” Hal appeared thoughtful for a moment. “And one 1911. Still not sure where that guy got a hold of a .45.” He shrugged. “
C’est la vie
. Right?”

“I’m sorry. About your retirement, I mean. I know it meant a lot to you, living out there.”

Hal shrugged. “I got over it. Mostly. What’s that they used to say in the Army, about getting used to new circumstances?”

“‘Adapt and overcome,’” said Sherman, by rote. “Many of us live by it. Ask Thomas, if you’re really curious. He follows doctrine like an evangelist follows the Holy Bible.”

Hal nodded. “That’s it.”

“Then what happened?”

The pair had worked their way halfway across the fenced-in yard and stood under the shadow of a rusting grain lift. The lift was one of Krueger’s favorite places. He would climb the ladder on the side with his rifle over his shoulder and a book taken from one of the many abandoned stores and relax atop the structure, ready to give covering fire in any direction. The sharpshooter would even sleep up there from time to time, weather permitting.

Hal continued his story. “Well, the crew was getting restless. A lot of infighting. They couldn’t last much longer cooped up. Franklin brought us back to the coast and told us all to abandon ship.”

“Franklin didn’t survive the trip here, then?” asked Sherman, a pained expression on his face.

Hal rushed to reassure him. “Oh, no. As far as I know, he’s still sitting comfortably on the
Ramage
. She’s anchored right off the coast of Washington. There’s still one or two missiles on that destroyer. Maybe he didn’t want to leave them unattended.”

“Or maybe he just wanted to stay with his ship.”

Hal shrugged. “Maybe that. The quintessential captain: staying with his ship until the very end.”

A shrill whistle cut through the air. Sherman and Hal’s heads shot up. Denton, having taken over as roof guard while Mitsui and Jack prepared chow, was leaning over the edge, pointing excitedly into the distance behind the pair of old veterans. His voice rang out over the courtyard, tense and animated.

“Here they come!” Denton warned. “Two of them! Shamblers! Coming up as fast as they can manage! Should I sound the alarm?” Denton was referring to the building’s fire alarms. They’d deactivated the water from the sprinklers, but the sirens and lights worked fine. The little setup let everyone in the building know when trouble was afoot, and would summon every survivor to their battle stations.

“No, hold the alarm,” said Sherman, waving Denton off. “We can handle two shamblers ourselves. Well, Hal,” Sherman muttered, “welcome to your first defensive action at the Fac.”

Hal reached for his sidearm, but felt Sherman’s hand clasp over his before he could pull the weapon free from its holster.

“No,” Sherman said. “We don’t shoot unless we need to. We’ve got a different way to deal with the shamblers. See those tamp bars leaning up against the Fac, there?”

Hal looked. Among the overgrown grass lining the brick building was a pair of tamping bars. Normally, they were simple digging tools, but thanks to a grinder the survivors had found in the abandoned industrial complex behind the Fac, they’d narrowed down the wedge ends of the tools to sharp points. The bars were heavy and unwieldy, but, then, they weren’t forged for pitched battles. Despite this, the survivors had found a creative use for the six-foot lengths of steel.

“Yeah, I see them,” said Hal.

“Grab one,” Sherman said, striding off in the direction of the tools.

Above, Denton watched their progress and called down from the rooftop: “Need any help?”

“No,” said Sherman, “we’ll take these two. Who’s on shit detail?”

Sherman rarely swore, but he’d adopted the lingo of his men—“shit detail” was what the survivors had taken to calling corpse disposal.

“Uh, Brewster is, I think,” said Denton, after a moment’s thought. He was distracted by the approaching shamblers.

“Who else?”

Denton shrugged. “Just Brewster.”

“Wonder what he did to deserve that?” murmured Sherman, raising his eyebrows. He pushed one of the modified tamp bars in Hal’s direction. He raised his voice to shout up at Denton. “Grab Krueger! Have him give Brewster a hand once we finish these two off. Make sure they burn the bodies down to ash. Tell him to be more thorough this time. Last time he left half a shambler in the trench!”

“Will do, Frank.”

“The spare diesel cans are in the back of the utility truck,” Sherman added. “Tell him to be generous. The last thing we need is for all of us to get sick from one of those bodies lying out in the sun too long.”

The shamblers, meanwhile, had crossed most of the distance to the fence. Spying live prey, they had picked up their pace, managing a quick walk. They were nearly on the perimeter. Hal felt a shudder run down his spine at their moans.

“All right,” said Sherman, grunting slightly as he hefted the tamp bar on his shoulder. “It’s as easy as this. Watch and learn.”

The first shambler, missing a cheek and three of the fingers on its right hand, stumbled up against the fence, pressing its face against the links.

“And, thus,” said Sherman, thrusting the bar forward in a smooth motion. The pointed end of the bar speared the shambler through an eye socket. Sherman twisted the bar in his hands and yanked it free. The shambler stood frozen in place a moment, and slowly crumpled to the ground, motionless. “Next one’s yours.”

Hal grinned. “Hey, pretty clever. Much better than shooting at them on the run.” His spear thrust caught the second shambler above the bridge of its nose, caving it in. The force Hal put behind the blow wasn’t quite enough to punch through to its brain, however, and the shambler loomed up again. A second thrust penetrated with a sickening noise, and the undead attacker went down, crumpling to lie next to its companion in the grass outside the fence.

“Damn. Two tries,” muttered Hal. “Guess retirement’s no good for my muscles, eh?”

“You’ll get better,” Sherman said.

The pair regarded the corpses on the ground a moment longer. Sherman shook his head and grasped Hal’s shoulder, leading him away from the scene. Brewster and Krueger would be along to dispose of the infected corpses soon enough.

“So, where were we?” he asked. “You were telling me about landfall.”

Hal rubbed at the back of his neck. “Landfall. So it was myself, Commander Harris, and about twenty sailors who set out from the
Ramage
. Our thought was to follow the track you’d left us—straight inland, making a beeline for Omaha.”

“Makes sense.”

“That’s what we figured, too. We thought we might even catch up with you along the way. We lost a couple of good men in the woods before we hit the first town,” Hal sighed. “It’s hard to see where those running bastards are coming from when you can’t see more than ten feet in front of your face. Finally, we found some civilization.”

“Don’t tell me,” Sherman interrupted. “Hyattsburg.”

“Yeah, that’s the place,” said Hal.

“We nearly got wiped out in there,” Sherman said, going back over the events of months long past in his head. “If it wasn’t for Mbutu’s driving and Stiles’s running we could have all been carrier chow.”

“It was pretty quiet when we went through, Frank. Except for one thing.”

“Stiles.”

“You got it. He was hiding out in a store. Thought we were infected. Shot at us a couple of times before we realized he was one of us. A few of us shot back.”

Sherman whistled. “You want to talk about luck—that’s luck. Imagine accidentally shooting the one guy we know of who’s immune to the Morningstar strain.”

“We’d have felt pretty foolish.”

“Anyway,” Sherman said, replacing the bloodied tamp bar, gore side planted firmly in the earth, against the Fac’s outer wall.

“Anyway, what?”

“Anyway, what happened after Hyattsburg?”

“Smooth sailing, General,” Hal said. “We made it from Oregon all the way through the Rocky Mountains without so much as a skirmish. Thought things were settling down. We walked a lot, but here and there we found a vehicle or two that could get us a few miles down the road before giving out. We made good time. We even stopped in Abraham.”

Something about Hal’s tone bothered Sherman. “I take it that the smooth sailing didn’t last?”

Hal nodded. “Just happened, three, four days ago. There was a dozen of us left then, most of the way here. Lost three on a bridge, then a couple of civilians where we picked up Stone and a couple of vehicles.”

Sherman stayed silent during Hal’s retelling of what happened at the military history museum, his face set hard when he heard of Ron and Katie’s deaths.

“And last night, we were nine, maybe ten miles from here. Harris thought it would be a good idea to hole up for the night and wait until the sun was out again before we risked the city. You know how those infected bastards like the shade. We were in a pretty good spot. Trees all around. Thought they would block us from prying eyes, you know? We even got a little fire going to get some hot food in us. That might have been our mistake.”

Sherman listened intently.

“For the first couple of hours, everything was calm. We had guards watching out for us, of course. I don’t know what happened. Everything was fine, and then . . . chaos. They were in us, among us. Sprinters at first, but then shamblers, too, drawn in by the gunshots and screams. They came in from every direction, right out of the trees. It was chaos. Panic. At first we tried to drive them off, but one by one we broke and ran. It felt hopeless to stay.”

“Are you four the only survivors?” asked Sherman.

“I don’t know,” Hal admitted. “We all went off in different directions. I saw one guy—couldn’t tell who it was, in the darkness—throw down his gun so he could get away faster. Like I said, it was pure panic. Maybe some of them made it. Maybe none of them. I just don’t know.”

Sherman kept his face a carefully controlled mask, but felt his shoulders sag. The sailors from the naval destroyer had fought their way across half a continent to deliver Stiles to Omaha, only to be butchered in the final hours of their journey. Frank remembered many of their faces from the time he had spent on the
Ramage,
and their bravery when confronted with an infection on board. They were good men, and they would be missed.

The practical side of Sherman’s mind reminded him also that the reinforcements would have been a welcome addition to the Fac’s defenses. All of the survivors were weakened by the loss.

“This Stone fellow. Is he a good hand?”

Hal nodded. “Oh, yeah. It took us a little while to get used to the idea of having him with us, but he’s a good man to have at your back. He doesn’t complain and he’ll shoot the ass off a gnat with that M-16.”

The pair of old soldiers paced slowly across the Fac’s yard, moving far enough from the freshly dispatched shamblers to avoid their stomach-churning stench. They stopped near a steel carport that abutted the Fac’s rear wall. Hal leaned his back against one of the vehicles, a large utility truck painted in flat woodland camouflage, a mottled mix of dark green, brown, and black. He looked past Sherman, through the fence and out at the city beyond.