This Shattered Land - 02 (14 page)

Sarah
looked unhappy, her lips pressed tight in hard line, but she nodded. “That
still doesn’t answer the question of how they found us.” She said.

Gabe
sighed, and gestured toward the bunker. “I think I might be able to shed some
light on that, but I’ll need a few minutes to figure it out. Eric, you want to
take care of that body over there while I work on it?” He nodded toward the
corpse in the yard. I looked over my shoulder.

“Yeah,
I’ll take care of it.”

Gabe
turned and motioned to Tom and Sarah. “Why don’t you guys hang out up here for the
moment, I’ll let you know when I have something for you.”

They
gave him slightly perplexed looks, but agreed anyway. I grabbed the corpse by
the ankles and dragged him over to the edge of the cliff. By sitting down and
shoving against him with my legs, I managed to gain enough leverage to push him
over the precipice. I didn’t see him tumble down the cliff, but the
bone-crunching thud of a body breaking over sharp rocks made it up to my ears a
few seconds later when he hit bottom.

I
got my feet under me and sat down heavily in one of the chairs next to the fire
pit. Only dark grey ashes remained of the fire we had warmed ourselves by the
night before. My hangover was even worse than it was when I woke up now that
the adrenaline had worn off, and my sticky clothes reeked from the dark brown blood
drying on them. A quick glance at my watch told me it wasn’t even eleven in the
morning yet—less than two hours since the swarm attacked. I had defeated over a
thousand infected and killed one live person in a shootout, and all of that
before lunchtime. I briefly debated whether or not a pull from my flask was in
order, considering how busy the morning had been.

Hell
with it.
I
thought.
After all this shit, I fucking earned it.

Corpses
from the earlier fight still littered the ground all around me between the
cliff and the fence. The meadow leading out to the tree line didn’t look any
better. Vultures and crows circling overhead were growing bolder now that the
commotion had died down, and began spiraling down closer to the buffet. I shut
them out by closing my eyes and leaning my head back to let the warm sun shine
down on my face while trying to ignore the pervading stench. Swishing a couple
mouthfuls of fiery bourbon around in my mouth before gulping them down helped
with that somewhat. Footsteps crunched in the rocky soil behind me, and I
recognized Sarah’s light tread even before she spoke up.

“Mind
if I join you for a minute?” She asked.

I
gestured to the chair next to me without opening my eyes. “It’s a free
wasteland.”

The
chair creaked and her clothes rustled softly as she sat down next to me.
Neither of us spoke for a few moments. If she was expecting me to feed her a
line, she was in for a long wait.

“I’m
sorry about that earlier.” She said, finally breaking the silence between us.
“I guess old habits are hard to break.”

I
leaned my head up and cast her a one-eyed squint against the pain in my head.
“Old habits?”

“Come
on, Eric, you know what I mean.”

“No,
Sarah, I’m afraid I don’t. Care to explain it to me?”

She
turned her head to look at me with irritation etched into her pretty face. “I
was an FBI agent, smart guy. That means I went through a shit-load of training
to deal with things like what happened today.”

“Really?”
I said, laughing incredulously. “The Bureau trained you to fight lawless
bandits that use armies of walking corpses to fight their battles for them? Is
that what my tax dollars went to at Quantico? No wonder it took us so long to
catch Bin Laden.”  

Her
skin flushed and she half-rose out of her chair. “You know, I came over here to
say I was sorry. If you want to be an asshole about it I can go back to the
cabin and not waste any more of your time.”

I
shook my head and held up a hand in a placating gesture. “Okay, you’re right,
I’m sorry.” I leaned back against the chair again and turned my face up to the
sun. “Just been a hell of a morning, you know? That thing with the infected was
bad enough, but having to kill a man right on the heels of that…” I sighed and
took another pull from my flask. “It’s not the first time I’ve had to do it,
but repetition doesn’t make it sit any better.”

“It’s
okay to feel that way, Eric.” Sarah said, her tone softening. “If killing a
living, breathing person ever stops being a big deal, that’s when you need to
start worrying.”

I
turned my head to look at her. “Is that what got you all riled up earlier? Did
I seem too nonchalant about it?”

She
looked down and studied the ground between her feet for a moment. “Yes. Maybe.
I don’t know.” She huffed an irritated breath and stood up to take a few steps
toward the cliff face.

“When
you told me you killed that guy, this voice in the back of my head kept telling
me to cuff you and place you under arrest.” She shook her head and let out a
single mirthless laugh. “How crazy is that?”

I
shrugged. “You were falling back on your training. Gabe talks about that a lot,
how people in military and law enforcement run on instinct when they don’t know
what to do. Apparently it works pretty well most of the time.”

Sarah
laughed again, a little more genuine this time. “Yeah, maybe you’re right.
Either way, you risked your life to protect all of us, and you deserved better
than the way I spoke to you earlier. I’m sorry about that.”

I
waved off her apology. “Forget it. Water under the bridge, and all that.
Consider yourself forgiven.”

She
sat back down next to me and we enjoyed a companionable silence for a few minutes.
I offered her a shot of booze, but she declined, saying it was a little too
early for her. I shrugged, more for me. A couple of minutes later, Gabe climbed
halfway out of the bunker hatch and called us over. Sarah glanced at me with a
quizzical expression.

“Come
on, let’s see what he found out.” I said. Sarah got up and walked with me to
the bunker.

We
followed Gabe down the ladder, along with Tom and Brian, and shut the hatch
behind us. The big man walked into the dim interior of the bunker toward the
laptop that controlled the electrical system.

“So
what did you find out?” I asked.

“They’ve
been watching us for a few days now.” Gabe replied.

“Yeah,
I figured that. Did you confirm how many more we’re dealing with?”

“Four
more, according to what I found on the security cameras.”

“I
thought we shut all of those down last year?” I said, frowning.

“Uh,
security cameras?” Sarah asked. “What security cameras?”

“One
of the many precautions I set up back before the Outbreak.” Gabe replied.
“There are hidden cameras all around the cabin, out on the fence, and a few in
the forest that cover all the easiest approaches to the property. They’re all
night vision equipped, but we stopped powering most of them over a year ago. Used
up too much electricity.”

“Most
of them?” I said. “Hell, I thought we shut them all down.”

“No,
I left some on the gates and a few out in the woods functional.” Gabe replied.

“Why
didn’t you ever tell me about that?”

“I
did tell you about it. I believe your response was ‘cool, thanks’.”

“Really?
What was I doing when you said that?”

“You
had your nose buried in the laptop, writing.”

He
had a point. When I write, I kind of go off into my own little world. When I’m
really on a roll, you could tell me that Jesus Christ himself just went by on a
pogo stick with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, and I would
probably just keep right on typing.

Something
else occurred to me, and I pointed a finger at the laptop.

“So
I guess that’s why the batteries never charge beyond ninety percent?”  

Gabe
glanced up at me and snorted. “Nice detective work, Sherlock.”

A
few still images appeared on the laptop’s monitor. The security cameras that
took them were motion activated and took silent snapshots whenever anything
large enough to trip the sensor happened by. The cameras also had
auto-adjusting irises that compensated for all but the lowest light levels. Judging
by the shots in front of me, Gabe kept the four on the gates operational, four
more out on the mountain approaches, and one with a clear panoramic view of the
broad meadow between the fence and the tree line.

“I
went over the shots for the last couple of nights.” Gabe said, moving his mouse
to arrange the four photos on the screen.

He
rolled his chair back away from the computer so I could get a closer look. Sarah
and Tom leaned down on either side of me to peer at the grainy night vision
images. Two of them showed men I didn’t recognize walking up the mountain on
one of the steeper approaches. Both were armed, and judging by the light level
and the date stamp, the photos were taken during the last full moon less than a
week ago. The third image showed a man at the edge of the fence with a pair of
binoculars held to his face, and the last one showed a man holding a pair of bolt-cutters
over the chain that held the gate shut. That one I recognized. His dead body
currently resided on a pile of bones at the bottom of a cliff.

“So
what I don’t get,” I said, standing up straight, “is if you had this system up
and running the last few days, why didn’t it set off any alarms?”

Gabe
grimaced, and ran a hand over his beard.

“Because
I shut the alarms down. They burned up too much juice to keep them running, and
we kept getting false indications every time a deer or one of the infected
happened by. I used to check them every day, but over the last few months I’ve
been letting it slip.”

He
shook his big shaggy head, self-recrimination in his tone. “I got complacent. I
figured there was no way anyone could find us up here. I should have known
better.”

I
patted Gabe on the shoulder. “Look man, I didn’t even think this system was
still working. It was good forward thinking on your part to leave a few cameras
up and running. Don’t beat yourself up over it. We have something to go on, and
the only person who got hurt is one of the bad guys. We’re still ahead of the
game.”

“Besides,”
Sarah added, “laying blame isn’t going to do any of us a damn bit of good at
this point. The bad guys are coming for us, and we need to come up with a plan
to deal with them.”

Gabe
nodded, a dark smile replacing his scowl. “That we do. We have the initiative
now, and I intend to exploit that advantage.”

I
leaned back against a shelf and crossed my arms over my chest. “What are you
thinking?”

He
laid out his plan.

I
liked it.

It
was simple, but brutally efficient, and it gave Gabe an excuse to dust off his
big .338 Lapua Magnum sniper rifle.

“Alright,
sounds like a good idea to me.” I said, and looked over at Sarah. She nodded
her assent.

“So
what are me and Brian supposed to do during all this?” Tom asked, a little
miffed at not being included in the combat preparations. Sarah reached out and
took his hand.

“What
you do is stay here in the bunker and look after our son.” She said. “I love
you, and I know you would do anything to protect us, but the three of us have
more practical experience with this kind of thing. Let us handle this one babe,
you still need time to train.”

“Sarah,
I can’t stand the thought of you doing the fighting for me. What if something
happens to you?” Tom pleaded, stepping closer to his wife. “Let me do this, and
you watch over Brian. If something happens to me, you’ll be better able to look
after him.”

“I
hate to interrupt,” Brian said, stepping between them, “but I can take care of
myself. I don’t need you guys to guard me like I’m a baby or something.”

Sarah
frowned at both of them, her expression hardening. “Alright, both of you
listen, and listen good. Tom, you are not trained for this. You’re a wonderful,
brave man, and I love you more than I know how to say, but we both know I’m the
right person for this job. Brian, as tough as you think you are, you’re not
ready for this. Maybe someday you will be, but not today, and not for a long
while. You are both going to stay here, and you are going to look after each
other while the three of us take care of these assholes. Do I make myself
clear?”

“But
honey—” Tom began.

“No
buts.” Sarah reached up to lay a gentle hand on his face. “Sweetie, please.
Don’t argue with me on this one.”

Between
those big blue eyes, and that firm, gentle tone, any argument Tom might have
been considering was dead in the water long before it ever made it to his lips.
Hell,
I
felt myself melting a little bit.

“Okay,”
Tom said, looking down. “Okay.”

“Mom,
can’t I—” Brian said.

“No,
son.” Tom interrupted, his tone brooking no argument. “You do what your mother
says, and that’s final.”