Survivors (4 page)

Gunshots had alerted the townsfolk to the danger, and, like the survivors they were, they quickly banded together. There were two sources of water in Abraham: a modest water tower that stood in the center of town, and various hand pumps scattered here and there, mostly on private property. Bucket brigades were formed, and the townsfolk ran as fast as they could from pump to pump, tower to blaze. Bit by bit, they were containing the fire, limiting damage to only the clinic.

Sheriff Keaton Wallace paused in his mad dash for a fresh bucket of water, unable to continue. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d made the run back and forth, and now he hunched over on his knees, gasping for breath.

One of his deputies, a man named Wes, paused by the Sheriff’s side. “You all right, Keaton?”

Keaton waved him off. “I’m fine, I’m fine. Don’t worry about me! Keep going! Keep going!”

With a last, pained look, Wes took off in the direction of the nearest hand pump, an empty bucket dangling from each hand.

Keaton glanced up at the smoldering ruins of the clinic and gritted his teeth.

“God damn you, Lutz,” he muttered. “I should have killed you when I had the chance.”

The moment the words left Keaton’s mouth, he regretted them. Murder was the mark of the raiders. He was better than that. So were the good people of Abraham. He couldn’t allow himself to sink to the level of the Lutz brothers and their marauders.

“Hey!” came a voice. Keaton looked up at the face of one of Abraham’s newest residents.

“Ron,” said Keaton, still resting on his knees. “Where’s your girl?”

“Katie’s looking after the burn victims,” Ron said. “The fire’s burned itself out, though. Shouldn’t be much longer. Love to talk more, Sheriff, but I’ve gotta get some more water!”

Ron turned and ran off in the same direction as Wes, buckets clanging together as he ran.

Abraham had been through a lot since Morningstar had visited their town months before. When the first infected had appeared, the present-minded among them had risen up and contained the outbreak, then set themselves to fortifying their town. They’d put up chain-link fencing, constructed guard towers, and patrolled along the city’s edge. At first, the battles had been intense, with infected coming at them a dozen at a time. As time went on, their numbers had begun to dwindle, and the citizens of Abraham had begun to feel safer. Areas had been fenced off and crops planted.

That was when the Lutzes made their appearance.

Recruiting followers from the dregs of society—many of whom Keaton had had previous run-ins with—Herman and George had set themselves up as the uncontested warlords of the area, taking over a nearby distribution center that held enough resources to keep their murderous rampages well supplied for the time being.

Their first raids were meant to do little more than shock and awe the townsfolk into acquiescing to their demands of food and supplies.

When Abraham had taken a stand and refused to surrender, the raiders had stepped things up a notch, burning the crops outside the protective fences and depriving the town of their most abundant sources of food. Then they had taken to lying in ambush outside the town, waiting for citizens to venture forth in hunting and scavenging parties.

The men they encountered were killed, and stripped of their gear.

The women were taken away, back to the raider’s base, and Keaton shuddered as he thought of what they had been put through at the hands of the criminals who held them as slaves.

Then, right when Keaton had begun to despair that the raiders were there to stay, Abraham had received some unexpected visitors. Their leader, who called himself Francis Sherman, was in dire need of repairs, saying he and his companions needed to get to Omaha and couldn’t very well do so with broken-down vehicles. Abraham’s mechanic, Jose Arctura, had volunteered to fix up their vehicles, on one condition: rescue his daughter from the ravages of the raiders, or kill as many of them as possible.

The soldiers had not only managed to rescue most of the captured women, including Jose’s young daughter, but had also set fire to the distribution center. George Lutz had been killed in the action. The other had lain wounded after a firefight with Abraham’s ardent defenders, and had been taken to the clinic to recover before being hauled off to a jail cell.

Unfortunately, as Keaton remembered a touch too late, Lutz was possessed of a canny intelligence. Over the days he’d spent in the clinic, he must have slowly cobbled together a makeshift bomb, and had used it to great effect in the still morning air before the town was up and about. From the damage to the structure, it looked to Keaton that Lutz had blown out a window and part of a wall, setting the building aflame.

Herman Lutz had escaped in the confusion.

“Next time,” promised Sheriff Keaton. “Next time, you’re a dead man.”

A low rumble and the sudden storm cloud of billowing black smoke rising above the trees did not bode well for the group of men taking a hard trail east. It smelled of oil, burning rubber, and death—and it was right in their path.

Hal Dorne, a man with graying hair and a slight paunch, the eldest of the group and the one most prone to a good session of griping, was the first to notice the plume of smoke, and he pointed it out to the rest of the group. It was yet another obstacle in what had become a veritable gauntlet of challenges and battles for them. Their attrition rate was staggering. Out of the nearly thirty seamen from the USS
Ramage
that had started the trek, just under a dozen now remained. One crippled Army private named Mark Stiles limped along beside Hal, using his rifle as a crutch. He had a badly wounded leg that was refusing to heal properly, and he cringed in pain with each step he took.

“Looks like we’ll have to go around again,” Hal murmured to Commander Harris, grimacing, with his hands planted on his hips. “If there’s trouble down the road, we better do what we can to avoid it.”

Stiles shook his head and leaned hard against a rusting signpost, sliding down to a sitting position. “Not again, guys. I can’t take this. My leg feels like it’s on fire. Can’t we at least get close enough to see what the problem is? Maybe it’s nothing . . . just natural.”

“What, and lose two more of us, like last time?” asked a sailor named Rico. He was a Hispanic man in his young twenties, wearing faded jeans and a patched brown button-up shirt. Months earlier, he would have been decked out in white: a proper sailor’s uniform. “To hell with that. I say we go around.”

“Not to mention that where there’s a town, and a line of carriers waiting to chow down on us,” added Hillyard, another sailor who still wore much of his military gear. The clothing had been abandoned along the way, replaced by practical civilian wear, but he still wore the wide olive drab pistol belt, plastic canteen, and standard-issue holster and pistol about his waist.

“That’d be our luck,” said Wendell, a petty officer first class and the second-highest-ranking military man in the group. He was small in stature, with the look of a person who smiled often, and short brown hair still growing in from his military buzz.

“You Navy bastards,” muttered Stiles, wincing as he moved his leg to keep it from stiffening up. “If this was an Army gig, we’d have that town cleared in half an hour.”

“If this was an Army gig, we’d all be reading our maps upside down,” said Rico, earning chuckles.

Quartermaster Third Class Allen, who read maps for a living, started in on Stiles. “You bet your ass! I saw an Army grunt last year, holding a map on its side and wondering what the
Z
meant on the compass rose. . .”

Hal listened to the banter and scratched at his stubbly chin. It had been days since he’d found the time or inclination to shave. He shifted on his feet, and the light weight of his pack struck him with a new thought.

“—and then he rolled it into a tube, and—”

“You know what, though?” Hal said, interrupting Allen’s diatribe. “We only have enough food to make it another week, tops, on foot. Sooner or later we’ll have to hit a town and see if there’s anything we can scavenge. Until things settle down some more, looting’s our best bet of staying alive. Shit, I can’t believe I’m even saying all this. Do you all realize that a few months ago I was in the South Pacific, lying in a hammock and drinking cold beer? I’m fucking retired. A guy can’t even enjoy his old age in all of this wanton, nasty . . .”

The men in the retinue tuned out the rest of Hal’s rant. He had a tendency to go on for hours about his would’ve-could’ves. No one minded hearing his stories about beautiful half-naked island girls or his tales of fresh, highly alcoholic fruit punches, but they knew better than to interrupt him when he started off on a negative tangent.

Commander Harris, until recently the executive officer of the USS
Ramage,
now the de facto leader of the group of survivors around him, took a chance and cut Hal off.

“Hal’s right. We need to resupply. We’re most of the way to Omaha, and I’ll be damned if we don’t make it because we were too hungry to keep hoofing it. We’ll scout the town, and if it looks right, we’ll see what we can get.”

This left dour faces all around, save for Stiles, who seemed pleased that he would at least be able to walk on even pavement a while longer. He grunted as he lifted himself from his sitting position, jostling the signpost he’d leaned his back against. The top came loose and swung down, hanging by a single hinge.

Harris cocked his head to the side to read the gently swinging sign.

“Abraham,” he read. “Two miles. Well, Abraham, ready or not, here we come. All right, shipmates, check your weapons and ammo. We don’t know what we’re in for, but we’re going to damn well be ready for it.”

The nine remaining crewmen of the USS
Ramage
wearily went about their business, checking bootlaces, tucking in religious medallions that might jingle, one or two saying a quick, silent prayer.

“All right, Harris,” Hal said, folding his arms and keeping a bit of distance between himself and the military men. “This is your show. What’s our angle?”

He looked on as Harris considered the landscape. They had passed a bridge about a mile back where the concrete had been pocked by ricochets, and found two abandoned vehicles. Near those were a few scattered bodies. They looked to have been shot to death rather than killed by infection (or the infected). Hal knew that made Harris nervous. He was learning to deal with the infected, but there was no defense from an enemy sniper. A sharpshooter at range could kill a man before his companions even heard the shot.

Ahead of the group lay a gently curving road, sloping slightly downward and flanked on both sides by evergreens. Even this far inland, the foliage of the Rockies could take root. Harris drew his binoculars up to his eyes and scanned the distance. After a minute of this, he passed the binocs to Hal.

The pines filtered out after about a quarter of a mile. Beyond that, open fields. A pile of chalky debris littered one of them. Harris wondered about it, making a note to check it carefully as they passed, and panned onward. At the far end of the fields, he spotted the town.

Even at this distance, he could see the medieval-looking gates that served as a main entrance. Harris quirked a grin behind the binoculars. The townsfolk were apparently a resourceful bunch. They’d used upended shipping containers as guard towers, improving them with roofs, ladders, and barbed wire. The gates themselves seemed to be made out of wrought iron, welded in spots to further strengthen it.

The front of the town was not, however, where the smoke was coming from. The black funnel issued forth from the rear of the town, and through the binoculars Harris could dimly make out ant-sized people forming an ant-sized bucket brigade. He couldn’t be sure, but he also thought he saw a few men standing by with rifles.

“They’re in trouble,” Harris said, speaking when Hal lowered the binoculars. The others looked over at him expectantly. “I don’t know what to make of it, though. I saw some armed men down there. They might all be hostile, for all we know. They might shoot us on sight. Opinions?”

“They might also be friendly and in need of a few extra hands to handle the fire, sir,” said Allen.

“Either way, we still need food,” chimed Hal.

“Let’s go for it,” said Stiles, leaning heavily on his good leg.

Harris considered. The group had been on foot most of the way eastward. Finding working vehicles was becoming harder and harder. Occasionally they’d get lucky and find one that would take them a few dozen miles before running out of gas or giving in to damage. Consequently, they had become quite adept at road marching, but there was no way they’d make it much farther without replenishing their supplies.

With a nod, he waved the men forward, and they put all that hard march experience to work, making good time from the hill to the open fields in front of the town.