These Dead Lands: Immolation (6 page)

“Why isn’t Daddy
with us?” Curtis, the youngest boy, asked.

Kay Ballantine looked shell-shocked. She held the boy on her lap, while the older one sat on the other side of Guerra’s legs, since the soldier was back to manning the MK19 grenade launcher.

“He’s right behind us, buddy,” Hastings said when it became clear that Kay was too overwhelmed to answer. Hastings figured she had probably been preparing to die in that cellar with her two sons, and the abrupt change in fate had left her unable to cope for the time being.

“Is he going to die out there?” the boy shot back.

“No,” Hastings said, even though there was no way in hell he could guarantee that. “He’s going to be fine. We’ll help him if there’s any trouble. Don’t worry about that.”

“Where we headed, sir?” Hartman asked. He had turned the vehicle right when pulling out of the driveway, away from the advancing zombies the others were holding back with the .50.

Hastings ignored the question. He spoke into his headset’s boom microphone. “Stilley, fall in after the pickup truck. Over.”

“Fall in after the pickup, roger that. Over.”

“Sir?” Hartman prodded.

“Let’s just get the hell away from Watertown and Drum, Hartman,” Hastings said. “Head back to Rutland Street then go south down Main. You know what I’m talking about, or do you need the GPS?”

“Negative, I know the territory, sir. Back to Rutland then right onto South Main. How far south am I driving, sir?”

Hastings gave that a minute of thought. “Past the Rutland Cemetery. Get us to State Street—Route 126. We’ll start to look for vehicles to refuel from there, then we’ll plan our next move.”

“Roger that, sir.”

Hastings heard something from the backseat, and he turned and looked at the Ballantines. One of the boys was slowly unwinding, slipping into sleep; the other was looking out the window.

Only Kay Ballantine met his eyes. “I said thank you,” she whispered.

Hastings nodded and faced forward again. He couldn’t stand that she and her kids were sitting where Terry and Scotty should have been. And he couldn’t keep from beginning to hate her and her kids, and that was something that shocked him, even through the layers of grief that he was only just able to hold at bay.

“Fuck this,” he muttered.

“Captain?”

“Nothing, Hartman. Just drive, man.”

“Hooah, sir.”

*

The three vehicles
cut through the countryside of upstate New York. The back roads were actually quite deserted, something they had noticed on their way to Fort Drum. The zombie apocalypse had happened so fast that most folks just hadn’t had enough time to evacuate. As they drove past the occasional farmhouse, Hastings wondered if they should stop and search for survivors. And every now and then, they would see figures stumbling through the fields, either alone or in small groups, their tattered clothes hanging off their thin, necrotic frames. Hastings peered at each through his binoculars, just to verify that the figures were more walking dead and not living people. They were always reekers.

The presence of the zombies took away from the almost idyllic summer afternoon. Hastings leaned back in his seat, pulled out his maps, and spread them open across his lap. They would certainly need to reprovision and find shelter for the night. With Ballantine’s family along, they couldn’t all sleep in the Humvees—there just wasn’t enough room—and Hastings didn’t think it would be wise to have anyone bed down in Ballantine’s truck. He had seen zombies go after people trapped inside automobiles, and while they hadn’t been able to penetrate heavy windshields with their bare hands, the crazy things had been able to smash through the tempered safety glass in the doors. Of course, they didn’t have many fingers left when they finally got through, but that hardly mattered.

So they needed to find some kind of defensible shelter. Their ammunition supply was decent, but they would have to keep the Humvees close. The last thing he wanted was to fight through a thousand deadheads with civilians in tow.
Gotta go over this with Ballantine.

“There’s a field about a mile down the road,” he said. “Let’s pull off the road there. We need to have a powwow to plan our next move.”

“Okay,” Hartman said. “No problem, sir.”

The small convoy covered the distance to the turn off, and Hartman signaled his intention. Hastings waved a hand. “Keep going. I want to get off the road.”

“Roger that.” Hartman pulled the Humvee into the center of the field and executed a sweeping left-hand turn, stopping only when the vehicle’s front bumper was pointed back toward the road.

Ballantine parked his pickup next to the Humvee, and Stilley came up on the other side.

Hastings examined the territory for a moment through the thick passenger window then opened the heavy door. “Mrs. Ballantine, you and the boys should stay here,” he said. “We’re going to review our next steps, but we’ll be right outside.”

Hastings stepped out and crossed in front of the Humvee. Ballantine came over as Hastings was spreading his maps out across the vehicle’s hood. The sun was still bright and hot in the sky, and insects trilled in the steamy day. Hartman and Guerra stood nearby, the latter scanning the the area. The rest of the troops walked over, hands on weapons.

“What’s the op, sir?” Stilley asked in his foghorn-loud voice.

Hastings shook his head. “I want you on security over there,” he ordered, pointing back at the Humvee Stilley had come from. “Take Tharinger with you. Keep your eyes out on the entire approach from that side, and make sure you watch your lanes. Hartman, I want you and Reader to do the same on this side. Guerra, you’re with me and Ballantine.”

The soldiers murmured their assent and set about enacting his orders.

Hastings waved Ballantine and Guerra closer. “Okay, we need to figure out what we’re going to do next. We don’t have a lot of intel on what’s going on in the world, but I think we can agree that from what we know, the country’s basically falling apart. If what we saw in New York is any gauge, then we can assume the military response to the situation didn’t get a lot of traction. So we should consider ourselves cut off and on our own. The question is: where do we go?”

“That Special Forces guy said there was a fight down at Bragg,” Guerra said. “If the Eighty-Second and the other units there have consolidated their fires and fortified their positions, then maybe they’ll hold out. We might be able to find some safety down there.”

“Even if what that guy said was true,” Ballantine said, “then that means we’ll have to fight through bands of reekers to get to the fort. I’m not sure that’s exactly what we want to do, since we already know what happens when those things amass for an attack. We don’t have enough organic firepower to repel them.”

“Might be able to get help from Bragg,” Guerra said, “especially if the Eighty-Second’s aviation brigade is still active.”

“We don’t know that it is,” Hastings said. “And it would definitely suck big balls if we were to get close to the base and then get taken out by a swarm because the troops remaining at Bragg couldn’t help us. Or, possibly, we might get close only to find out Bragg’s been overrun.” He stared down at the maps. “Okay, big picture: the eastern portion of the country is basically falling to the dead. We know from what we’ve heard that infestations in the west were contained more quickly, and we know that the mountain states were the ones with the least occurrences. Slater mentioned Denver being turned into a fortress. I have no idea if that’s true or not, but to me, heading west seems pretty attractive.”

“Agreed,” Ballantine said. “Of course, if the reekers are actually migrating west, then we might find ourselves in the same kind of situation we would find down at Bragg. We’d have to fight through bands of zombies, and then we’d always have them at the back door. But the rationale is that we’d then be driving through territory that’s nominally more secure.”

Hastings nodded. “That’s my read as well.”

“What about that place in Pennsylvania, the National Guard base?” Guerra asked. “Indiantown Gap. It’s out in the middle of fucking nowhere, surrounded by forests.”

Hastings cocked an eyebrow. “Yeah, so?”

“I heard it was a fallback site,” Ballantine said. “Senator Cornell is there. He’s one of us, former lightfighter, served in Somalia. Retired as a brigadier general then went into politics. Finally made it as Pennsylvania’s representative to the senate.”

Guerra and Hastings exchanged expressions, and Guerra shrugged with a small smile. Hastings was delighted that at least one of them had paid attention to things going on in the world outside of the Tenth’s mission profile.

“Don’t tell me he’s a liberal,” Guerra said.

“Ain’t no liberal in Jesus, baby,” Ballantine said, “but there sure as hell is a G, O, and P in gospel.”

“I don’t think he’s worried about reelection right now.” Hastings ran a finger across the map and found Fort Indiantown Gap. “Anyone ever been there?”

Ballantine shook his head. “Not me. Guerra?”

“Negative.”

“How many Guardsman could we expect to find there?” Hastings asked.

Ballantine shrugged. “Ten thousand? Two thousand? Don’t really know.”

Hastings still thought that moving as far west as possible was in their best interest, but that mission was going to be a huge undertaking. Maybe not even a possibility. He would have to break the movement down into manageable chunks, and adding Fort Indiantown Gap to the list as a waypoint wasn’t a bad idea. Not that he expected the place to still be standing.

“All right, then. Let’s go for that,” he said. “It looks like it’s going to take a good six or seven hours to get there, depending on what we find in our way. We should stop for provisions as soon as we can—I don’t want us to have to scrounge around for anything at night. And we’ll have to find some shelter along the way as well.”

“Plenty of farms all around here,” Ballantine said. “We can stash the vehicles in barns to minimize our profile then bed down for the night.”

“Roger that. Let’s play that by ear. Sergeant Guerra, any concerns?”

“You kidding me? Sir, concerns are all I got right now.” Guerra pointed at the map. “Hey, did any of you guys ever hear anything about California? I got family in San Luis Obispo. I heard LA was taking it in the shorts, but I didn’t hear anything outside of what was going down in the big cities.”

“Negative on that, Sergeant,” Hastings said. “Sorry, man.”

“Same here,” Ballantine said. “Cell service is down and out, so it’s not like we can just call the San whatever-it-is police department and get a status check. California’s a long, long way away, Guerra. It might be months until you can find out anything, and you should probably start preparing yourself for the worst.”

“Didn’t work out that way for you.” Guerra voice had an almost petulant tone to it, and his dark eyes practically drilled holes in Ballantine’s skull. “Your family made it fine, Ballantine.”

“My family was prepared,” Ballantine said. “Was yours?”

Guerra looked away and didn’t respond.

The talk about families left Hastings suddenly pissed off. He gathered the maps, using the action as cover as he tried to tamp down on the bolt of emotion that was only a hair’s breadth from leaving him gutted. “Tell you what, guys. Let’s not rub each other raw about who’s got what and whose family is where, all right? Because frankly, I
know
my wife and kid are dead… or worse. So I really don’t want to hear that shit. Questions on that?”

“No, sir,” Ballantine said. “Sorry about that, Captain.”

“I’m cool, sir,” Guerra said.

“Let’s get back on the road.”

*

Fifteen miles later,
they found several abandoned vehicles in the parking lot of a diner that had been overrun by the dead. It appeared that a dozen or so people had tried to barricade themselves inside the establishment, but a fire had broken out, which put an end to their safe place. Pools of dried blood were scattered throughout the parking lot, along with dried, tacky bones. The driver’s door to one Ford pickup truck was open, and as Hartman slowly eased the Humvee past it, Hastings saw that the vehicle’s interior was splattered with blood and gore. He also noticed the PowerStroke insignia. The truck was a diesel.