“They’ve got a heavy machine gun!” I shouted into my radio. “How big?”
“It’s a .50!” Sid answered in a panicked voice. “I can see it … they’ve mounted it in the bucket of that loader. Holy shit, where the hell did they get that?”
“Don’t know and don’t care!”
I barked. “Ark Two, how’s Mel?”
The radio hissed. “I’ve got a field dressing on Mel’s shoulder,” said Cruze. “It’s not too bad – I can’t find the projectile anywhere but thank God it was shrapnel she got nailed with.”
“Pull back now, Cruze! They’ve got a .50 caliber and if that thing hits either of us, we’re screwed!”
“Roger,” Cruze replied.
A .50 caliber machine gun is a deadly weapon to face in any battle. Our lightly armored carriers were no match even for non-armor piercing rounds. The muzzle velocity from the gun alone would give the bullets enough power to blast through our hull like it was a paper target. We had to do something fast – once the smoke cleared we’d be shot to pieces, even if we were better armed than they were.
I looked back over my shoulder. “Dawson … pull out the 60 mm mortar, I’m coming back and we’re going to take that gun down now!”
She gave me a thumbs-up as she unstrapped the mortar tube from the hull and screwed on the base plate.
I scrambled to the rear of the carrier and pulled a long metal box out from underneath the tarp on the floor. Ripping off the safety wire, I flipped open the lid to see a dozen long black tubes with the words HE FRAG painted on the sides in yellow. I quickly started tearing off the tape holding the ends of the tubes together and gave each a sharp twist. Inside each one was a 60 mm mortar round with charge increments attached just above the tail fins. Dawson threw open the rear door and hopped out of the carrier, keeping low for cover. I shifted my legs out the back and hauled the case containing the twelve rounds onto the crew seat.
I gave Jo a stern look and pointed to her jump seat. “Stay inside, and when I start hammering on the door, Jo, you make freaking sure you look to see that it’s me and Dawson before you let anyone in, got it?”
She nodded, the helmet bouncing up and down over her eyes. “Okay … just be careful,” she said, her voice trailing off.
I lifted the case of ammo onto the ground and shut the door, my carbine slung over my shoulder. I quickly scanned the area surrounding us for a firing position with decent cover, deciding on the shoulder of the road a few feet away from the carrier’s left side.
“Over there,” I said. “Push the base plate in good and hard and I want a fixed firing pin – no lever firing, I want these rounds away as quickly as possible.”
Dawson nodded as she scrambled to a spot on the shoulder. I crouched over, pulled the ammo crate up beside her and then took a quick look up the road. The entire area in front of the barricade was obscured by our smokescreen, but that didn’t mean we weren’t taking on enemy fire. Small arms rounds ricocheted off the hull of my carrier and whizzed up into the air, the defenders of Dinsmore firing blindly into the field of white smoke. The good news was that I didn’t hear the distinctive
pop, pop, pop
of the machine gun, but that would last only as long as our smokescreen did.
I could still make out the entire grain elevator, along with the sign for the Fast Gas station. In a few moments we’d be raining down a lethal mixture of high explosives and sharp metal fragments on the Eden tribe and I didn’t want them to come anywhere near that fuel station.
There is a sight line painted up the side of a mortar for the team to align the gun, but what’s really happening is that you’re eyeballing it when you aim. You have to estimate the distance to the target, and you have to adjust the propellant increments on the tail fins of each bomb to match your estimate, or the rounds will overshoot the enemy.
I guessed that the barricade was about 500m away, and the machine gun in the front-end loader bucket about 100m further behind. I decided to remove four of the five propellant increments and use the first round as a gauge. “You ready?” I said to Dawson. “We’re talking five hundred meters … you lined up?”
Dawson adjusted the angle of the tube and pushed hard into the dirt. “The first one will decide the rest of the shots. I’m ready to go.”
I pulled off the safety wire on each round and laid them out in a row beside me. Then I took one last look up the middle of the road and carefully inserted the tail fin assembly into the tube.
“Here goes nothing,” I said shakily as I let go of the round, the tail fins disappearing into the tube.
The mortar kicked, and emitted a loud, hollow
thunk
, the round shooting out of the tube faster than the eye could follow. Seconds later there was a flash of light, followed quickly by an explosion as the round hit. A mixture of dirt and black smoke drifted high into the air, followed shortly after by bloodcurdling screaming.
“Good aiming, Dawson,” I said as I pulled the safety wire off a second round.
She shuddered. “We’re firing blindly, Dave. We need to take out that gun.”
No sooner had the words left her lips when I saw the bucket lift slowly higher into the air, above our rapidly dissipating smoke screen. Its gun started firing in a series of loud pops, the rounds hitting the road in front of us and ricocheting high.
“We need to take that out now!” I roared. Dawson tilted the tube forward no more than an inch, and I slid the tail fin assembly into the nose of the tube and released it.
There was another hollow-sounding
thunk
followed seconds later by an explosion, and this time I could see that we’d landed a round behind the barricade. The Eden tribe’s machine gun started firing full auto now in an attempt hit us; the rounds kept ricocheting off the road about 30 feet to our front.
“That got ‘em,” Dawson shouted.
“Fire for effect!”
I pulled the safety wires and propellant increments off the remaining ten mortar rounds and started dropping them into the tube one after the other. Round after round of high explosive, high fragmentation bomblets rained down on the Eden tribe’s barricade, filling the air with a deadly mixture of metal fragments and explosive force but that .50 caliber machine gun kept on firing at a murderous rate.
We quickly ran out of mortar rounds. I had another case inside the back of the carrier, but I didn’t want to waste them firing blindly at that barricade. Judging from the wails of the Eden tribe’s wounded, they’d taken on serious casualties – now the only thing left to do was to silence their machine gun. I raised my carbine to my shoulder and took aim through my scope. Two men, who looked about middle-aged, were seated firmly inside the enormous bucket I was just about to squeeze off a pair of rounds when a sharp burst of automatic fire shot out from the turret of Ark One, tearing into the men and sending a splatter of gore into the shining steel bucket. I lowered my weapon and motioned for Dawson to get the mortar back into the carrier.
She picked up the tube and raced back to the carrier, banging on the door with the base plate. It swung open seconds later and Dawson climbed safely back inside. My heart pounded like a jackhammer as I pulled my weapon back to my shoulder and gazed down the road at the carnage we’d caused. Through a thin haze of smoke I could see a number of cars in the barricade were on fire. Voices called out from behind the barricade, laced with pain and anguish.
Regret burned through me, even as I tried to remind myself that they’d shot at us first. We were simply defending ourselves against the people who’d killed that family in the barn, a few miles back. It was suicide for outgunned amateurs to engage a pair of fully armed APC’s in combat, but clearly the Eden tribe hadn’t figured that one out in time. I lowered my weapon as I spotted a strip of white cloth dotted with a smattering of blood fixed firmly to the barrel of a hunting rifle.
Dinsmore had decided to surrender and I whispered a small prayer of thanks. Without Cruze’s quick thinking in calling for a smokescreen, we would have been ripped to shreds by that heavy machine gun. I shouldered my rifle and plodded back to the carrier, where Jo handed me a bottle of water. I slugged it back in a series of shaky gulps, then wiped my mouth with the sleeve of my coat and handed the bottle back to Jo.
“Good shooting, Sid!” I shouted.
“Yeah … you see that flag?”
I crawled into the back and pulled the door closed. “I saw it. How bad are they?”
The turret spun quickly to the left and then to the right. “I can’t see any bodies, but I do see a chick running around back there with a first aid kit.”
I climbed back into my crew commander’s hatch and flipped open the door. I slipped on my headset and looked over across the road at Cruze, who was peering at the carnage through a pair of binoculars.
“Ark Two,” I said into the radio, my voice still shaking. “Weapons hold … move up and secure the area. We can’t offer a lot, but we’ll do what we can for their wounded. Keep your guard up.”
The radio hissed. “Will do. Are we expecting a counter attack?” asked Cruze.
I sighed heavily. “Beats the hell out of me, Cruze. We’re six months past the end of the freaking world – why should we expect anything less?”
We pulled into Dinsmore and parked both carriers in front of the now smashed barricade. Tiny shards of glass, mixed with countless strips of torn metal and barbed wire lay scattered about in all directions, and the air smelled of smoke and cordite. A thin stream of blood trickled from underneath the shattered wall of cars, collecting into a pool inside a tire track. They’d probably used the front end loader to build their barricade.
We found a young female, who didn’t look much older than any of us. She had matted blond hair that was filled with dirt and her face was dotted with small flecks of blood. She was dressed in a pair of torn jeans and a grease stained sweatshirt featuring a faded image of a RUSH album cover and her hands and forearms were covered with blood as she applied pressure to a middle-aged man’s neck wound. A human leg lay against a battered automobile door, its former owner lying on his back. His lifeless eyes stared up at the chalk-colored sky – his Remington hunting rifle was twisted around his arm by its sling.
The man with the neck wound looked to be in his mid- forties. His breathing was shallow, and he struggled to say something to the woman, but all he could manage was a gurgle.
When someone dies, it’s as if the body becomes deflated somehow. Your muscles relax and your chest falls as your lungs empty out that last breath of air. Your eyes sink back into your eye sockets and your face becomes loose, almost flaccid.
That’s what I saw the very moment that man died. Beside him was the body of a teenage boy, probably no older than Sid or me. His midsection was torn open – his intestines spilled out across his lap like they’d been dumped out of a bucket. A few feet away, draped across the hood of one of the cars, lay the body of a man whose jeans were coated in arterial blood. A gash about six inches long had been torn into his left thigh. Even in death the man held his rifle, the shining black barrel aimed straight down the middle of the grid road leading into town.
The lone survivor of our attack cursed violently as the man she’d been tending to died with her hands pressed hard against his neck. She lunged toward us, her eyes blazing with hatred. Sid whipped his carbine across his chest in a sharp, almost fluid movement. He landed a hard butt stroke to her forehead and she dropped like a stone.
We caused this.
The survivors of Dinsmore might have fired the first shot, but we ended it in a haze of smoke, high explosives and burning metal. I would have felt pity for those who’d died, but as I gazed at the grim scene, all I could think about was that family of four, murdered in cold blood back at the barn and that if we didn’t protect Jo, if
I
couldn’t protect her, then she’d wind up just like them.
Sid pulled out a couple of nylon cable ties from the pocket of his combat pants. He knelt down in front of the girl and flipped her onto her stomach as she moaned loudly. He pressed his knee on the center of her back and bound her wrists together, giving the end a sharp tug. She wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
He grunted. “Does this mean she’s a prisoner?”
“Of what?” I said flatly. “We’re not at war, Sid.”
The giant Newfoundlander stood up and gazed out at the carnage. He motioned to the closest dead body. “You sure about that, Dave?”
“Get her back to the carrier,” I said, ignoring his comment. “We’ll question her once we move past the barricade. She’ll have probably come to by then.”
Sid nodded as he bent over and picked the girl up. She moaned a couple of times as he slung her over his shoulder like she was a sack of flour. I walked over to the three dead bodies and collected their weapons. They wouldn’t be in need of them again, but we might.
The rumble of our engines filled the air, and I was just about to head through a gap in the barbed wire fence to scope out the area, when at the last second I decided against it. Dinsmore might have been a tiny village and we’d just killed five of its residents, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a sniper willing to take pot shots at me. We still had about an hour to scrounge before nightfall, and I had no desire to stay longer than that – the sound of the mortar explosions would have echoed for miles. That meant the Eden tribe might come running from any number of small towns and villages between our position in front of the barricades and the Alberta-Saskatchewan border.
Not to mention creeps.
And where
were
the creeps? How in the hell could a group of six survivors keep a tiny hamlet clear from the wandering hordes of monsters. We’d already had our own run-in with the creatures a couple of hours down the road – it didn’t add up.
I doubled back to the carriers and scurried behind Ark Two so I could check on Melanie Dixon. I noticed a series of four oblong dents in the hull just behind the crew commander’s hatch. Each ding was about an inch and a half long and the armor looked like it had been folded back – that’s how powerful their gun was. Below the dents was the actual hole where the .50 caliber round had penetrated.
We lucked out, pure and simple. If another round or two had managed to make its way inside, it could have hit the fuel tanks and brewed up the ten thousand pound machine, burning everyone inside alive.
Our prisoner was huddled in the corner next to the engine panel. She had an angry-looking red welt on her forehead, and her stringy blond hair dangled limply onto her shoulders. She glared at me through narrow green eyes and she stuck her jaw out defiantly and started kicking at the tarp underneath her feet.
“You killed them all!”
she shrieked.
“You’re murderers – every last one of you!”
“Just like your people killed a family of four in a barn less than ten clicks from here!” Cruze barked as she cocked her carbine and placed the barrel against the woman’s right temple. “Another freaking word out of you and I’ll make sure you join them.”
“Cruze, put your freaking weapon away!”
I snapped. “She’s no good to us with a bullet in her head.”
She ground her teeth together and slowly pulled her carbine away from the girl’s head. “All right … fine. But we’re going to have to do something with her. She’s a liability.”
I glanced over at Melanie Dixon. She’d taken off her combat shirt and there was a field dressing bound tightly onto her left shoulder. “You okay, Mel?” I asked.
She glanced down at her shoulder and her eyes panned over to the prisoner. “I’d like to know where the hell they got a fifty cal from.”
“No shit,” said Sid, as he lit a cigarette. “That’s serious hardware.”
I hopped into the carrier and flashed a menacing glare at our prisoner. “We need to fuel these pigs up, and you have diesel, lady. That front end loader doesn’t run on unleaded. How much is in the tanks at the gas station?”
Her eyes blazed furiously, and then she spat in my face. “Fuck you! Fuck all of you!”
I took a deep breath and wiped my forehead with a rag. Then I glanced over at Cruze and said, “Organize the team. Get the Jerry cans prepped. I want everyone ready to move out with five minutes’ notice. In the meantime, we need to figure out how they got that gun.”
Cruze nodded and lifted herself out of the hatch as Melanie Dixon twisted her legs over the edge of the rear door and jumped out onto the gravel. In seconds I could hear Cruze barking orders to my section while Mel kept a close eye on the prisoner, her carbine in one hand.
”Do you have a name?” I asked.
The girl’s lips arched up into a thin maniacal grin, and she mouthed the words
fuck you
. Any other time I would have admired her defiance, but not this time. We needed answers so I decided to take a less antagonistic approach. I reached under the tarp and pulled out a foil envelope containing sliced peaches in syrup. I tore it open with my teeth and then fished out a large slice with my Buck knife. I edged forward and held the dripping slice of fruit a few inches away from the woman’s mouth.
“We’re not the enemy,” I said, jiggling the peach slice like a worm on a hook. “Your people shot at us first. What do you call this place now – is this Eden?”
Her eyes panned from the peach slice on my end of my knife, over to the pouch. I could have sworn I heard her stomach rumble, so I pulled the slice away and slipped it into my mouth.
“We’re what are left of the King’s Own,” said Mel. “We busted out of Calgary yesterday morning, and -“
“You’re from Calgary?” she said, sounding astonished. “You actually made it out of there?”
“Barely. We had more than fifty people when Day Zero happened. We’re heading north – going as far the hell away from built-up areas as we can get.”
“You won’t make it,” she said still eyeballing the foil pouch.
I said nothing, choosing instead to let the effect of the foil pouch sink in. There was silence for about a minute when she narrowed her eyes and gave me a cold, hard once over. She glanced around the inside of the carrier and then finally said, “Day Zero, huh? That’s what you’re calling the first day of the outbreak?”
“Yeah … what do you call it?” I answered.
She snorted, “This is the part where you try to get all chummy with me and spout off about the dead being the bad guys followed by a lovely talk about how we all have to work together to fight a common enemy. I’ve heard it before so save your breath.”
I shrugged and then gently placed the envelope of fruit on her lap. “You can have those if you want. But I need you to answer some questions.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “Why should I tell you anything? You’re going to shoot me anyway – you might as well get it over with.”
I shook my head. “We aren’t murderers. If we could have slipped through undetected we would have done it in a heartbeat. Your people started shooting at us and we had to defend ourselves. Where did you get that machine gun from and what exactly is this Eden?”
“Okay, first off,” she said, sliding her back up against the engine panel. “You’re riding around in armored cars with guns pointing at us. We thought you’d come to wipe us out. You could have hoisted a flag or something to show us you had peaceful intentions.”
Mel snorted. “Peaceful intentions? You guys have a fifty caliber heavy machine gun. That isn’t exactly a peaceful farm implement.”
“And these are our fucking farms!” she snapped. “The land you’ve been driving on has been claimed by survivors of all the farms in the region. While the world burns we’re trying to rebuild – it’s not utopia, but it’s something.”
“No, it’s the new Garden of Eden,” said Melanie with an uncharacteristic smugness to her voice. “It’s just going to be heaven on earth isn’t it? Never mind that you assholes work hand-in-hand shooting at anyone who is an outsider.”
“It’s a fucking start,” she spat at Mel. “This territory has been named Eden because those of us still alive have been given a chance for a new beginning. Anyone who wanders onto our land is a risk to every last one of us still alive. Ever since the end came, Eden survivors have cleansed our farms and villages of the monsters and we have lost people in the process.”
“So have we!” Melanie shot back. “Christ, Dave – just get the information we need so we can get out of here!”
I motioned for Mel to calm down and then drew my attention back to the prisoner. “I’d be more inclined to believe your noble purpose if we hadn’t found a family murdered in a barn a few miles back. Oh … and the way you just string up innocent people on a cattle fence at Highway Two? Classy.”
She clenched her jaw tightly and said, “They probably got caught by one of the security patrols. The same thing with the two up at the highway – nobody from Dinsmore was involved.”
I gave her a small shove. “You say that like it suddenly makes everything okay. Two little girls were murdered – two freaking kids!”
“Bullshit! None of our people would ever do such a thing. Fuck this … I don’t even know why I’m arguing with you morons. There’s no freaking chance you’re going to make it off Eden land alive. The patrols are the
law
here, and while I don’t agree with their methods, they don’t shoot trespassers …
only
looters. We have to protect what’s ours if we’re going to survive. Nobody has the right to steal from us and you know something? You’d do the exact same thing if you were in our position.”
She wasn’t entirely wrong about protecting vital food and ammunition but shooting looters? We’d all agreed that we had to protect our provisions with our very lives. There wasn’t a giant leap between protecting your provisions and dispatching a harsh form of justice. Even I wasn’t naive enough to believe that. Then again, who made them or anyone the judge, jury and executioner? If Eden was an attempt to start over, you’d think the survivors would have come up with something better than roving patrols making arbitrary life or death judgments on some poor unfortunate that made the mistake of showing up on their radar.
Sid Toomey appeared at the rear doors, Jerry cans in hand. “We’re all good to go, Dave. How’s the prisoner?”
“She’s just about to tell us where to find some diesel because she knows that we’re going to disappear as soon as we fill our cans. Take Kenny and Cruze and scrounge whatever fuel you can find – I’d start with that front end loader. Oh … and take the bolt out of that fifty cal – we can always use the spare parts. Take the barrel too.”
“Will do,” he said as he trudged off.
I glanced at the box of rations poking out from underneath the tarp and I chewed my lip. I’d planned on releasing her as soon as we’d fuelled up our carriers – she was a security risk for everyone on the team, not to mention another mouth to feed. At the same time, we knew nothing about these security patrols save for the fact they were armed and would be a tactical threat: if they’d somehow managed to scrounge a fifty caliber heavy machine gun together, then it was entirely likely the survivalists were in possession of other dangerous weapon systems and ordinance.
Then it hit me.
These people had run into the Army before, or maybe a former military unit had defected to the Eden tribe, bringing all their weapons with them. That was the only explanation I could think of. If some military elements had defected after Day Zero then we’d be riding into any number of ambush sites or worse, properly defended positions.