This Shattered Land - 02 (25 page)

Stop
it, dammit.
I
thought.
She is a married woman, and you are heading for disaster if you
don’t get yourself under control.

The
two of them watched me approach until I stopped a couple of steps in front of
Brian. I pulled the axe from my belt and held it out as I reached for the MP5.
He looked at me in confusion.

“What?”
He asked.

“Take
this,” I said shaking the axe at him, “and give me the gun.”

“Why?
What’s going on?”

I
put on my best withering scowl.

“Fine,
whatever.” He said, and handed me the rifle.

I
gave him the axe, still dripping with gore from the infected I just killed, and
stepped aside to point back the way I came.

“There
are about nine infected coming our way. Here is your scenario: You’re alone.
You are out of ammo, and your only weapon is that axe you’re holding. You are
tired, and you don’t have enough energy left to escape the walkers chasing you
down. You have no choice but to turn and fight. What do you do?”

Brian
looked where I pointed and paled. The walkers had made it back to the road and
were shambling toward us. Sarah looked intensely at them, then at me. I could almost
feel her eyes boring into me from behind her sunglasses, her lips pressed into
a flat unhappy line. While Brian stared at the infected, I glanced at Sarah and
gave a little wink.

She
did not seem reassured.

“I
need to kill the ones on the edges first.” Brian said, taking a deep breath to
steady himself, and adjusting his grip on the axe.

I
nodded. “What else?”

“I
should run around their perimeter from one side to the other. Make them trip
over each other, and take them out one at a time.”

“And…”
I said.

“And,
uh, make sure they don’t grab me?” He looked up at me, squinting against the
sun.

I
leaned down and laid a hand on his shoulder. “If you remember nothing else I
ever taught you, remember that. They’re not any stronger than they were when
they were alive, but their grip will never loosen, their muscles will never
tire. That makes them seem superhumanly strong.”

Brian
nodded. The apprehension in his eyes was fading, morphing into grim determination.
His stance relaxed, and he started shuffling slightly from foot to foot like a
prizefighter, hands opening and closing on the haft of his axe.

“Stay
calm, and remember to breath. With your adrenaline up like this, it’s very easy
to tire out.” I said.

Brian
glanced up at me and nodded before taking a few deep breaths. The infected had
closed to about a hundred feet.

“This
is crazy.” Sarah said, her voice strained. “No way am I letting you take those things
on my yourself, Brian.” She thumbed off the safety to her rifle and raised it.

“Wait.”
Brian said, reaching up and laying a hand on top of her gun.

“Brian-”

“No,
Mom. Gabe is right, I need to learn. Let me do this. If I get into trouble, you
guys are right here.”

Sarah
hesitated, looking at Brian for a moment, and then up at me.

“If
anything happens to him, I will kill you.” She said flatly.

I
shook my head. “I won’t let him get hurt, I promise.”

Sarah
glared at me a moment longer, and then lowered her rifle.

“Fine,
but Gabe, you stay close to him, and if I for one second think that Brian is in
danger I am going to kill every damn one of those things. Understood?”

“Understood.”
I said, and motioned to Brian. “You ready?”

He
nodded, and started walking toward the undead. I flipped off the MP5’s safety and
followed a few steps behind.

Time
to see what the kid could do.

Chapter 8

Bear Country

Tom
and I made a game out of killing the infected we ran into on the lonely
mountain road. He seemed to think that his axe was superior to my small-sword
for dispatching ghouls. I had never told him that I was once a fairly skilled
fencer, and bet four pairs of my wool socks against one of his hunting knives
that I could kill five infected with my sword in the time it would take him to
kill two with his axe. I stopped by the side of the road and used my machete to
chop down a sturdy sapling. It ended in a Y-shaped curve at one end, and would
work nicely for what I had planned. Trimmed down, it looked like a long walking
stick with a slingshot on one end.

“What
the heck are you gonna do with that? Kill rabbits?” Tom asked.

I grinned.
“Just you wait and see.”

He
rolled his eyes and muttered something under his breath.

It
took us about three miles or so to get the requisite number of walking dead on
our trail before we turned to settle the bet. I drew my sword and made a show
of whipping the ornate weapon through the air in a series of sweeping, whirling
slashes accompanied by graceful form and footwork. Tom responded by doing a
comical series of clumsy hacks and spins with his axe, and finished the
sequence by glaring at me and sticking up his middle finger. I smirked. The
dead drew near, and I held the tip of my blade in Tom’s direction.

“Alright,
my friend. May the best man win.”

Tom
tapped his axe against my sword. “Whatever. I got the two on the end over
there.”

“Fair
enough.” I said.

We
let the infected get to within a few yards before moving toward them. Tom broke
left and jogged around the far side. I walked straight at the nearest ghoul
with my stick tucked under one arm like a javelin. Taking careful aim, I lodged
it under the creature’s jaw and pushed upward, stopping it in its tracks. I was
just out of its reach, which allowed me to line up my sword and thrust it
through the creature’s eye socket. A quick turn of the wrist, and down it went.

In
the back of my mind, a little voice was trying to explain to me that there
should be nothing amusing about fighting the undead. It was nasty, dangerous
business. I explained to that voice that I was a fundamentally damaged human
being, and that it should shut up and stop trying to ruin my fun.

Tom,
for his part, utilized some of his newly learned skills to deal with his two
targets. He executed a textbook front kick and knocked one of the infected back
onto its ass. A couple of bouncing steps got him back on balance before he
gripped his axe with both hands and slammed it into the face of another undead.
His aim was low, and the weapon crushed the creature’s face. The blow did not
kill it, but it did stumble backward. Tom cursed as he wrenched his weapon free
and hit it again with an overhead strike. That one put it down. He looked over
to see how I was doing, and saw me kill two more undead rapid-fire using my
hold and stab method. He cursed again and turned to the ghoul he kicked over a
few seconds ago. It was almost back to its feet, but was bent over facing the
ground. Tom brought his axe down once, twice, three times. Finally, the
creature went still. He turned around to see me leaning on my walking stick
faking a yawn, and affecting a look of boredom.

“Took
you long enough.” I said.

He
muttered something under his breath, and walked to the side of the road to grab
a handful of tall grass.

“You
cheated. You didn’t say anything about using a stick.” He said, using the grass
to wipe gore from his axe.

“You
didn’t say I couldn’t either.”

He
shook his head. “Damn Irish. You’re tricksters, every one of you.”

“Hey,
my family has been in this country since 1850. We’re American on purpose.”

That
one got a laugh out of him. I cleaned off my sword and put it back in its
sheath. A quick search of the infected yielded nothing useful, so we left them
where they lay and hiked on down the road. We made good time, only having to
put down a dozen or so infected over the next few miles. Along the way, we
searched a few abandoned cars. Most of them were empty, but one yielded a lever
action rifle and a couple of boxes of .357 magnum ammunition. Unfortunately, we
had to deal with its previous owner who was still belted into the driver’s seat,
thrashing and moaning at us. A bullet from my new M-6 painted the creature’s
brain across the dashboard and shattered the driver’s side window. I dragged
the body to the side of the road while Tom checked the trunk. The rifle was
lying next to a trash bag filled with canned food.  

“What
do you think, is it worth the extra weight?” Tom asked, hefting the rifle in
one hand.

“If
you don’t want it, I’ll take it.” I said. “These old repeaters are great
rifles.”

“But
you can’t put a silencer on it.”

“True,
but you never know when something like this will come in handy. If nothing else,
we can use it for trade somewhere.”

Tom
shrugged as he handed me the rifle. I lashed it to my backpack and stashed in
the ammo in a side pocket. A nice repeater and two hundred cartridges were too
good of a find to pass up, even if they were heavy. As the day wore on, and we
got closer to the spot on the map where we had agreed to meet the others, I
began to think about what life might be like out in Colorado. The President was
still technically in charge, with high-ranking military officials handling most
of the day-to-day operations. Next year was supposed to be an election year,
and the President made it clear that he had no intention of running for
re-election. I wondered how that would play out, especially considering the
Supreme Court and all but a few members of Congress were dead, and most of the
country’s survivors scattered to the four winds.

“You
ever wonder what makes those things tick?” Tom said, interrupting my thoughts.

“What
do you mean?” I replied.

“The
infected. What is it about the Phage that makes them function even though
they’re dead? Is it really a disease, or is it something else?”

I
shrugged. “I have no idea. I knew a doctor a while back who thought it had
something to do with inactive DNA in the human genome.”

“How
so?”

“Well,
apparently most of human DNA is just filler material. It doesn’t really do
anything, and nobody ever really understood why it’s there. Bill, the doctor I
mentioned, thought that maybe the Phage activates some part of our genetics
that causes the undead to operate differently than a live human body.”

Tom
mulled it over for a moment. “Did he say what he thought it changed, or how it
might work?”

“Yeah,
but I don’t remember all of it. Something about how our bodies use enzymes to
break down proteins, the role of the brain stem in regulating the body’s
functions, and the mechanics of cellular regeneration. It was pretty technical,
and honestly, I didn’t follow a lot of it. Besides, what difference does it
make? The damage is done. The only thing we can do now is kill as many of them
as we can, and try to rebuild.”

“But
what if we could find a vaccine? Can you imagine how much easier it will be to
destroy all the carriers if everyone is immune?”

The
idea gave me pause. I honestly had not thought of that before.

 “That
would be nice, but I don’t think we should get our hopes up.”

Tom
glanced over at me as we walked. “Why not?”

“Think
about it. The kind of research it takes to study diseases like the Phage has to
happen in laboratories. High-tech laboratories. Even if some super-secret
government disease lab is still functional, where are they going to get the
necessary doctors to staff it? Where are they going to get resources and
supplies? Maybe you didn’t notice, but there ain’t exactly a lot of manufacturing
going on these days.” 

Tom
frowned as he thought about it. “Yeah, you’re probably right. Still though, it
would be nice. At least we’d know this couldn’t happen again.”

There
were a few things I could have said about that, but I kept them in. The more I
reflected on what life was like before the Outbreak, the more I had to admit
that maybe the collapse of civilization and a resulting extinction event were
inevitable. I mean, for Christ’s sake, we used fossil fuels to power almost
everything. Even though we knew that those sources of energy would not last
indefinitely, as a species, we did very little to address the issue. Sure,
there were some private energy firms working on it, and several world
governments threw money at the problem, but how much real progress did we make
before the end? On top of that, we had a global population that was growing
exponentially, dwindling supplies of fresh water, rising food costs, and
rapidly increasing energy demand. The whole damn mess was just one big
unsustainable cluster-fuck. Maybe I am an insensitive prick, but I can’t help
but see the opportunity that the Outbreak has provided. If we could somehow get
the undead problem under control, the human race might have a chance to start
over and maybe do things right this time.