Authors: James Cook
We fanned out at ten-yard intervals, steadied our rifles on standard-issue telescoping Y-poles, and waited. That was the hard part. The waiting. Standing still and staying relaxed while a mass of mangled, white-eyed monstrosities bore down with no greater desire than to peel me from the bone. No matter how many times I did it, it was still unnerving.
The horde was relatively small, maybe three-hundred strong. Which made sense considering ghoul wrangling is extremely dangerous, not to mention strenuous. Wranglers have to travel light, which means very little food, water, and minimal weapons and ammo. Mostly they survive on what they can hunt or scavenge along the way. Casualty rates among them are roughly equivalent to a pre-Outbreak nursing home. I could only imagine the amount of effort that had gone into capturing thirty or forty of the things, rigging them with explosives, blending them in with a few hundred of their undead brethren, and leading them hundreds of miles across open terrain to Hollow Rock. And that was just the horde in front of us.
All of which, when taken in context with the suicide troops and sacrificed artillery, told me something as important as it was disturbing. Someone wanted to destroy Hollow Rock, and they wanted it very, very badly.
“Riordan, you ready?” Ethan called to me.
“Yep.” I leaned over my rifle.
“What range do you have?”
Using the reticles on my scope and a few mental calculations, I said, “About eighty yards, give or take.”
Thompson said, “Riordan and Fuller
only
, fire at will. The rest of you wait until they’re at forty yards standoff, then start piling them up. That includes you, Cole.”
“Man, shit.”
I spared a glance at the giant. At six foot four and roughly two-hundred-seventy pounds, Isaac Cole handled his heavy SAW machine gun as though it weighed no more than a twig. It was unusual for a sergeant to be a SAW gunner, a task usually assigned to a junior man, but Cole had refused to give up his beloved weapon. Thus far, no one seemed inclined to argue.
Beside me, Private Fuller’s M-203 made its characteristic
phump,
a small dark shape hurtled into the midst of the infected, and a blast of dirt and body parts erupted in the center of the horde. The explosion destroyed a few infected, disabled a few more, and knocked roughly a dozen to the ground. The rest shambled on heedlessly, open mouths belting out high, keening wails of animal hunger. Bloody, ragged hands reached in our direction while ruined legs trudged tirelessly through the tall grass. Most of the ghouls were older, their clothes long since fallen away. Some of them had undergone the change that reduces a walker’s skin to a scaly crust that eventually flakes off, exposing dark gray muscle tissue beneath. I could also see shriveled internal organs where the muscle had been eaten away, indicating how the infected had died.
The old ones were the hardest to look at. The more recently dead still resembled humans, but the old ones looked like something else entirely. Only their shape and vaguely human-like faces stood as testimony to the people they had once been. I had heard rumors the older infected were capable of healing, that their teeth were harder and less likely to break, and that their bones were stronger and denser than the newly dead. Whether or not this was true, I had no idea. All I knew was my sword and my guns killed them. That was enough for me.
“Hey Riordan, you gonna get busy or what?”
I looked over at Fuller. He had loaded another grenade and was angling for a follow-up shot.
“Right, sorry.”
The first infected I lined up on was an old one. Tall, broad, must have been a big man in life. In death, he looked like something out of a lunatic’s nightmare. Around his waist, secured by nylon webbing and thick strips of Velcro, was what appeared to be a not insubstantial amount of dynamite. I could see the wiring and duct tape holding the works together, as well as a box in the upper right corner of the vest. Someone had spray-painted the box black, ostensibly to conceal it. I assumed the box was the receiver for the detonation signal, so just for giggles, I shot it.
The vest blew up.
The explosion was huge. The shock of it hit me like an invisible hand, blowing dirt and grass into my face. The force of the detonation caused everyone on the firing line to cover their eyes and take a step back. Ahead, the TNT had taken out not only the ghoul wearing the vest, but more than a dozen others in close proximity.
“Mary, mother of God,” I muttered. Turning, I shouted to Ethan. He rushed over and gripped my shoulder.
“What the hell was that, Eric? What did you do?”
I explained about shooting the black box on the infected’s vest. Ethan’s quick mind found another gear. He turned away from me and began speaking rapidly and concisely into his radio. Moments later, he turned to his squad.
“Everyone back off another twenty yards and maintain that distance. Kill as many infected as you can, but if you see one wearing a vest, aim for the little black box in the upper right corner. Fuller, Cole, go to work. Riordan, keep doing what you’re doing.”
Understanding spread rapidly. These men had seen more action than most other soldiers in history and did not need to be told twice. Kelly’s squad followed the same maneuvering. His designated marksman, a specialist named Thorne, sighted through his sniper carbine and hit the detonator box on another walker. The results were the same. We were still on the retreat and had to cover our heads against a hail of dead tissue and dirt clods.
“Goddammit, Kelly,” Ethan shouted into his radio. “Did you not hear the part about falling back twenty yards?”
When we reached a safe distance, the squad turned and opened fire. Cole’s SAW rattled angrily as it cut the legs out from under the foremost rank of ghouls. Fuller loaded grenade after grenade into his launcher and sent them flying. The others aimed through their ACOGs and dropped infected as quickly as they could without overheating their rifles. I blew up six more vests with only eight shots. Not bad. The impact of the explosions was less pronounced at this distance, but the results within the swarm were equally as devastating. In less than five minutes, just as the sound of a tank engine and squealing treads came over the ridge, we had reduced the horde by half.
It occurred to me I had not seen any grenades go off in the last few seconds, so I turned to my right to look for Private Fuller. He wasn’t there. I had just started to look around for him in the tall grass when something tugged hard at a pouch on my vest. I heard an all too familiar
whup,
and an instant later, a
crack
split the air.
“Shit!”
I hit the ground and found myself lying next to Private Fuller. His eyes were fixed and glassy, the face muscles slack. There was a large red hole where his Adam’s apple should have been. A man shouted, “Sniper! Everybody down!” in a voice that sounded remarkably like mine, but an octave higher.
Thompson had been trying to listen to his radio above the noise. When he spun and saw Fuller, his face went blank for the barest of moments, and then he was moving. In seconds, the firing stopped, we were all lying face down in the waist-high grass, and the Howitzer had changed course to get between us and the treeline.
I lay with my face close to the ground, desperately wishing I had brought my ghillie suit and a more powerful weapon. With time and luck, I could work my way to the treeline and counter-snipe whoever had shot Fuller. But I did not have my ghillie suit, and my carbine fired standard NATO 5.56 millimeter rounds. So I was stuck breathing in dirt and grass like the rest of the squad and hoping like hell the Howitzer could dismantle the horde and scare off the sniper so I could get away without any unwanted perforations in my precious, irreplaceable hide.
It also occurred to me that with all the body armor in my personal arsenal and in my business inventory, there was no excuse not to wear it. Sure, it slowed me down and made me sweat like a glass of ice water on a summer day, but the discomfort beat the alternative.
My thoughts of weapons and armor ceased as the roar of the Howitzer echoed to the far reaches of the vast field. I wanted to look up to see what kind of damage it had done, but did not dare. If I were in the sniper’s position and saw some idiot raise his head, I would smile an evil smile and mutter something nasty while I squeezed the trigger.
A few seconds passed and the Howitzer thundered again. And again. Thompson crawled over to me, spared a glance at Fuller, and asked, “Any idea where the shot came from?”
I looked closely at Fuller’s throat. “The wound is in front, dead center. Shooter probably aimed center of mass, but the round went high. That tells me he’s above us and directly ahead, due east. Probably in a tree somewhere.”
“Any clue how far?” Thompson asked.
I stayed low as I turned Fuller’s body over. The bullet hole in front was small, the one at the back larger, about the size of a golf ball. The projectile had hit the young soldier’s spine at the base of his skull and scattered it into the grass behind him. He died without a peep, probably before he hit the ground. When I considered how focused the squad was on the horde at the time, myself included, I understood why no one noticed him fall.
A few months ago, while working for me on a salvage run, Fuller had taken a shot to the ribcage. We shared a two-person room at the Hollow Rock Emergency Clinic while I recovered from a gunshot wound of my own. During that time, stuck in a room together with nowhere to go, I got to know the young man.
He was intelligent, witty, and had an unusual sense of humor. He told me about his parents, his sister, how they died during the Outbreak. How he had survived afterward by scavenging weapons from dead cops and soldiers, pilfering food from abandoned houses, and sleeping on rooftops. He once shot a goose with a crossbow and ate it raw because he was starving and being pursued by a cult of cannibals, and could not risk making a fire. A few days later, he saw an Army convoy go by and approached them. The soldiers disarmed him, fed him, and then took him to meet the officer in charge. He took the Oath of Enlistment on the spot, and a month later, he was in basic training.
And now here he was, at the age of twenty-three, laid out dead in an empty field in Western Tennessee. It was a familiar story. Fuller, like so many others, had endured hardship that would have been unimaginable before the Outbreak. He had found reserves of strength and courage he probably did not know he possessed. He had fought like a mad animal to stay alive, and succeeded. And despite the odds, despite the bitter struggle his life had become, despite the darkness all around him, he had tried to make a difference in this shattered, crumbling excuse for a world. He had fought to preserve what was left of a once-great civilization and give his fellow survivors a shot at some kind of a future, no matter how bleak. But for all his courage, for all his endurance, for all he had strived to do, his story was at an end. Throat torn out by a sniper’s bullet. Blank eyes staring lifelessly at a blue expanse of impartial sky.
“Thirty caliber projectile,” I said, wiping a hand across my face. “And damned powerful. Probably not a seven-six-two by fifty-four like most of these Alliance and ROC assholes use. It would have hit lower and done more damage.”
“How does that help us?” Thompson asked.
“The shot was almost perfectly centered. Meaning centerline of the body, where all the vital organs are. That sniper out there is good, knows his business. Probably accustomed to firing Dragunovs, or whatever the hell they use. But now he’s using something unfamiliar, something more powerful than what he’s used to. That’s why the round hit high; he expected more drop from the projectile. If it was a seven-six-two by fifty-four, it would have hit Fuller in the chest and made a much bigger exit wound because of the slower speed of the bullet. More kinetic energy would have transferred into the body cavity. But it went straight through at very high speed and didn’t take much tissue with it. Which meant it had enough power to tear through flesh and bone without slowing down very much.” I paused a few seconds, thinking. Thompson stared at me impatiently.
“Well?”
“I’m thinking the sniper is using a .300 Winchester magnum. I’d say he’s between five to six hundred yards away, judging by the wound and the distance to the treeline, and straight across the field from us.”
Thompson responded by keying his radio and relaying what I told him. Moments later, the long barrel of the Howitzer repositioned and began firing again. After four rounds, I risked a glance upward. The big gun pointed at a high angle, laying down a rain of high-explosive fragmentation rounds over a wide area at the range and bearing I had specified. The tall, old-growth trees in the distance splintered and shattered under the barrage, thick limbs crashing to the forest floor. If the sniper had taken position where I suspected, he was having a very bad day. The thought put a smile on my face.
“Eric, I need you to do something for me.”
I looked at Thompson. “What?”
“Use the Howitzer for cover and take a look at the horde through your scope. I need to give Captain Harlow a sitrep.”
The smile died. “Can’t the guys in the tank do it?”
“Not without exposing themselves. You’ll make a smaller target in the grass. Like I told you, use the tank for cover.”