The Dying of the Light (Book 3): Beginning (9 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“No chance you just found this one lying there and figured you’d blame it on him?”

Eden caught a weird note of hope in Gaines’s voice but ignored it. “What? No way!” she shouted, then realized who she was shouting at. “I mean, no way, sir. That is definitely what I fought out there.” She held up her arm for emphasis, the adrenaline coursing through her veins preventing her from feeling the pain.

Gaines sighed and closed his eyes, running a hand over his face and pinching the bridge of his nose. “Well, shit.”

Nonplussed, Eden stared at this giant of a man across from her, unsure what was happening. Had it been anyone else, she would’ve thought he was… if not scared, then certainly worried. But Colonel Dalton Gaines didn’t
get
scared, did he? And if it scared him, how scared should she be?

What the hell was going on?

He interrupted her thoughts when he reached over, picked up the phone, and sat straight in his chair. “Get me Blake. No, the other one.” There was a pause as the connection went through, and Gaines continued. “Kim, we’ve got a problem. No, it’s about the walker Eden—No, she’s fine, but I think our friend in black might have left us a surprise. No, I’m not kidding. Yes, I think so. Right, 1830 hours tonight. Yes, ma’am.” Gaines hung up the phone and looked back at Eden. “How many people have you told about this? Be specific.”

She stuttered as she answered, thrown for a loop by the intensity in his voice and gaze. “Uh, maybe… Maybe two or three, sir. I tried to talk to Mom and Dad, but I was pretty loopy on the pain meds they gave me, so I don’t think they believed me, if they understood at all. I might’ve mentioned it to a nurse or something too.”

“Who probably also thought you were delusional from the pain meds. Got it. At least there’s that.” He glanced again at the images on his computer. “I’m going to need to keep your camera for a while. Since you’re on restricted duty, I can’t have you out in the field, but we’ve got a lot for you to do here to keep you busy. Go see Sergeant Sensa. She’ll give you something to do while you’re healing. It’ll be boring, but we all get shit assignments now and again. I want you to get all healed up. We need you back in the field, now more than ever. Dismissed.”

“What about the others, sir? Marquez is—”

“I’m dealing with something a bit bigger than your ego right now, Blake. It’s your job to figure out how to deal with your CO and squadmates.”

“Yes, sir.” She stood up and moved to the door. “Thank you, sir,” she said and let out the breath she’d been holding without realizing it. All things considered, that had gone pretty well.

“Don’t thank me yet. Sensa’s a harder taskmistress than I’ll ever be. And send in Marquez.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. As she left, she pulled the door without quite closing it and looked to her right. Marquez, her Hunter squadron CO, sat in a chair, going over a report. “Lieutenant, sir, the colonel says you’re to go in now.”

Marquez looked up at her, scowling as he stood. “You’re on KP, Corporal. Three weeks.”

She sighed. Eden had expected some sort of discipline for her insubordination at the gate, but when Colonel Gaines hadn’t done anything, she’d started to hope. So much for that. “Sir, the colonel ordered me to restricted duty for at least a month, sir.”

Marquez glowered. “Then you’ll just have to find a way to push a broom, Corporal. That’s light enough, I should think. Dismissed.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. She shook her head at his back as he turned and entered the colonel’s office after a double knock. What a prick.

She looked for Sergeant Sensa, and it didn’t take long to find the short, plain woman at the other end of the room. The sergeant was the peaceful eye at the center of the information hurricane that surrounded her.

She looked up as Eden approached, and her smile transformed her whole demeanor. It was what her father referred to as a megawatt smile, like her mom had. Eden stood at attention. “Corporal Eden Blake reporting for restricted duty as ordered, ma’am.”

Sensa stood and came around the table. Shorter even than Eden had thought, the sergeant was just shoulder height to the taller redhead. Fit but not skinny, she had mouse-brown hair and grey eyes that sparkled. Eden had a feeling she would like Sensa, and her feelings about people were rarely wrong.

“Nice to meet you, Corporal. The colonel and I already discussed your work for the next month, so let me show you what you’ll be doing. It’s not glamorous, I’m afraid, but it is vital, especially now.”

“Happy to help, ma’am,” Eden said, eliciting a chuckle from Sensa.

“Yeah, right,” the sergeant said. “I can just imagine you’re thrilled. See this madness?” Sensa waved a hand at the rush around them.

“Ma’am?”

“It’s organized, Ms. Blake. Everyone knows their job and does it well, because they know the value of it. Walk with me.” They moved over to the big map table, and Sensa pointed to the various figurines sitting atop it. “Care to take a guess?”

Eden glanced over the map and saw most of the figures positioned around the base in a rough circle. They weren’t marked, but they were all the same type of figure. She looked closer and saw they were green plastic and all sported the same long rifle. She took a guess. “Hunters?”

Sensa smiled again, and Eden felt the flush of pleasure in her cheeks. “Exactly! Those are other Hunter units moving through the city, scouting it out for our future needs.” Sensa pointed to a young soldier poring over reports at a desk to the side. “McNally there takes their reports, collates them, and gives them to me. I combine them with reports from our aircraft—” another pointed finger, and a young airman this time. “And other sources, and it all ends up going to the boss.”

Sensa turned and looked at Eden as she rested a hip against the table and crossed her arms. “How does all this function?”

Eden knew the sergeant didn’t want a quick answer, so she took her time thinking through it and hit on an idea. She laughed. “Because of the boring jobs!”

Sensa smiled and nodded. “Exactly. No one likes tallying supply numbers, least of all me. But it’s one of the most vital jobs we have.”

“I get it,” Eden said. “Yes, Hunters are important and have a high profile because of it. But without the supply chiefs and logistics folks—the boring jobs, at least to me—then the Hunters wouldn’t have what they need to do their jobs. It’s like the pump workers or hydro-farmers in the bunker. They’re just as important, but… different.”

“See, I knew you’d pick it up quick.” The sergeant stood straight and walked back over to her desk, where she picked up a stack of paperwork. “Now that you—”

Sensa was cut off by muffled shouting from the colonel’s office. The noise and conversations in the rest of the room died as though they’d been switched off. Eden couldn’t quite make out what was being yelled, but she could tell it was Gaines’s voice, which only made sense. Marquez was an ass, but he wasn’t stupid enough to yell at the colonel.

Eden was sure Marquez wasn’t getting dressed down because of what happened at the gate. He’d been right to stop her, as irksome as that admission was. So this must be something to do with that crazy-fast walker that she’d just managed to kill. If Gaines was this upset, what the hell was that thing?

One word rang through the room clear as a bell. “Dismissed!” The office door flung open, and Marquez scuttled through the silent and still room to the exit. He spared only a momentary hate-filled glance Eden’s way before he was gone.

“What the hell are y’all looking at?” Gaines yelled. “Back to work!” The door slammed, and as though the switch was thrown again, the room’s conversations and work started up again.

Eden shook herself back into motion, turning to the sergeant. “You were saying, ma’am?”

The sergeant grinned. “I love that man,” she said, chuckling. “Best damn CO I ever had. Right, like I said, not a lot of intrigue, and certainly nothing like a Hunter is used to, but vital work.” She walked Eden over to a table in the corner, piled high with folders and boxes. The sergeant laid the stack of paperwork on top and made sure it settled before letting go. “Welcome to inventory management, Corporal. Your job over the next month is to organize this into a system we can use to keep track of everything going out to the camps and coming back.” Sensa turned and walked back to her desk, leaving Eden staring at the pile of work in front of her.

She supposed, on some cosmic level, that she might possibly deserve this, but even so, it didn’t feel very fair.

Blake Quarters
Bunker One

Eden took a deep breath before knocking on the door of her parents’ quarters. Their relationship had been somewhat strained of late, and their visit to Decon hadn’t helped matters any. Whatever was going on between Colonel Gaines and them couldn’t have made things any easier either.

The door opened, and her father stood there, arms open for a hug. She stepped forward and buried her head against his chest as he held her. She appreciated the care he took not to make her injuries worse. Eden felt some of the stress of the last seventy-two hours drain away. Her father said nothing, just held her, as if he knew that there was nothing he could say to make any of it better. That he helped her just by being there. Even though she was almost twenty, she was still amazed at how this man could always make her feel like she was five years old again.

For the first time since her hunt, she thought that things might just get back to whatever passed for normal. Someday.

She stepped away from her dad to give her mom a hug. Kim gave her a squeeze back, then motioned to what passed for a dining room in the small quarters. “Ready to eat, honey?” Kim asked.

“Sure, Mom,” she said. She smiled when she saw what was for dinner. “You made chicken marsala, Dad?”

David smiled as well. “You haven’t been over for dinner in months. It was the least I could do.”

She’d forgotten for a brief moment how tense things had been between them for so long. Eden could see a bit of hesitancy behind their smiles, and she knew that it hadn’t been easy for them either. Tonight, she was just going to be happy. “I’m sorry. I’ll try to come over more often.”

“We’re just glad you’re okay,” her mom said as she put some iced tea on the table and they all sat down. “It couldn’t have been easy, what you did. Do you want to talk about it?”

There was a pause as the tension in the room crept back up, but she defused it with a shrug. “Soon, but not right now. Is that okay? I mean, I can tell you what I told the colonel, but I don’t want to get too into it.”

“I… We understand,” her father said. “We’ve both been through things like that, and we get it.”

Her parents held hands and smiled at each other. She’d heard some of the stories over the years, but she had a feeling there were more waiting. “The big thing is the walker I fought,” Eden said. “It wasn’t a regular walker. It reminded me of those things Uncle Johnny used to talk about from back before I was born. Where is Uncle Johnny, anyway? I haven’t seen him around in a while.”

Her parents did their normal “trying not to look at each other” thing, and she sighed to herself. They were hiding something else from her, “protecting” her again.

“He’s around, just busy,” Kim said.

Eden knew when her mother was lying, but she decided not to press the issue. It annoyed her, but she didn’t want to fight about it.

Kim continued. “We know about the walker. We talked to Dalton a little while ago. We weren’t sure if you were ready yet, but after what he told us, there’s no point in not telling you the truth.”

“The truth?”

Her dad sat forward, pushing his plate out of the way to make room for his elbows. His tone was serious and sucked the comfortable energy right out of the room. “You know about runners, right?”

“Yeah, the teenage zombies that get fast because of something to do with the way the prion affects their hormones.”

“That’s right,” her father said. “Well, there’s another kind of walker, one that’s infinitely more dangerous than those. We haven’t told many people about them. In fact, they’re classified. We don’t want to start a panic.”

“Worse than runners? Yeah, I can see that.” She thought back to her encounter with the nightmare in the collapsed building. “These things are way worse.”

“You don’t know the half of it. We call them Driebachs, after the name of the first one we encountered many years ago, before you were born. We hoped he was the only one in this area. But based on the pictures that Dalton showed us and your after-action report, it sounds like there are more of them out there.”

“What makes them so dangerous?”

“First, they’re smart. As smart as you or me.”

“They’re fast too,” Kim said, picking up where her husband left off. “Fast as runners. Something about their prion-mutated makeup allows them to heal damage rapidly too.”

“So, wait. They’re smart, fast, and they heal fast too? What the fuck?”

“We had the same reaction, believe me. These monsters are the most dangerous thing we’ve ever encountered, Eden. You’ve met one face-to-face now and barely survived. If you see one again, you run, and you don’t stop running until you’re safe. Is that clear?”

She’d never seen her dad so scared, and it caused her to stutter. “Yeah… Yeah, I get it, Dad.”

“Good.” He sat back and pulled his plate back in front of him. “We’ll go over what we know later. It’s not exactly dinner conversation.” He shuddered.

Eden noticed her mom go hazy for a moment too and wondered yet again just how bad these things were.

“But first, we have some other news,” Kimberly said. “When we met with the colonel earlier, aside from talking about the Driebachs, our conversation was also about you. More to the point, your future.”

Eden set down her fork, knowing what was coming. The colonel had wanted her parents to break the bad news to her for some reason. She had failed and would never be a Hunter. She sighed and wondered what she would do now. Being a Hunter was all she’d thought about for most of her life.

When she realized her parents were waiting for her to speak, she squared her shoulders and tried to prepare for the blow. “What news?”