“The next one is going into the back of your head, asshole!” I shouted. “Don’t think that I won’t!”
He stopped crawling immediately and then he stuck out his arms in front of his head, holding them inches above the ground.
Cruze raced up from behind me and dashed ahead, her weapon covering him the entire time. I hustled my ass forward until I was standing directly in front of the sniper.
“
Don’t
… just don’t shoot!” he stammered. “I give up.”
“Cover him, Cruze,” I said angrily. I gave him a hard kick to the ribs and then dug the barrel of my carbine into his side, giving it a small shove. He rolled over onto his back, his face a mask of pain. The bullet Cruze fired into his leg had landed just above the knee, but he wasn’t bleeding out like she’d severed the artery – or he’d have been dead by now. I glanced up at Cruze, who was fishing a field dressing out of the pocket of her combat pants. I shook my head quickly and she stuffed it back into her pocket.
“You killed my 2IC,” I snarled as I dropped to one knee. “How many of you are there up ahead?”
His face twisted itself in knots. I could tell he was fighting the urge to spill the beans.
“Answer him, prick!” Cruze said venomously. “Kate was the best of us and you killed her.”
The sniper rolled his head toward Cruze and then back to me. His eyebrows arched up. “You … you’re freaking
kids
!” he gasped, as if he couldn’t believe he’d actually said the words. “I got shot by some fucking
teenagers
!”
“And you shot one of ours, asshole,” I growled. “You’re about ten seconds away from having your skull splattered across the field unless you tell me what’s down in the coulee.”
He nodded quickly, his hands still held up over his shoulders. “Okay … okay, I’ll talk. I was just following fucking orders!”
I gave Cruze a quick nod and she pulled the field dressing out again, ripped open the packaging and removed the large yellow gauze pad. She pressed it hard onto the man’s leg. He cried out in pain as she reefed on the strips of gauze to hold it in place.
“You won’t die. Yet,” she said.
I motioned for my APC to move onto our position. It arrived in less than a minute, leaving a huge cloud of snow in its wake. The rear doors flew open and out jumped Dawn-Marie, who took one look at the sniper and lunged at him, kicking him repeatedly in the leg.
“You son of a bitch!”
she roared. “I’ll fucking kill you!”
Cruze dove across the sniper and tackled Dawn-Marie, the pair landing hard on the ground a few feet away.
“Looks to me like you two have some history,” I said. “Cruze, when you’ve got Dawn-Marie calmed down, we’ll stuff this asshole into the carrier and question him.”
“Roger …
ugh
… that!” Cruze huffed as she fought to restrain her.
“Good,” I answered, my eyes boring into the sniper. “Pal, you’d better get ready to fess up. And you’d better like digging holes in the ground.”
He visibly gulped. “H-How come?”
“Because you’re going to bury our friend Kate Dawson.”
I checked the body of the spotter for Intel and found a cotton-duck-covered field message pad. I tore off the cover and flipped it open. Each page that had been written on was folded in half – a neat way to refer back to earlier orders, but not the smartest of tactical moves – you might wind up getting killed, and anything left in that pad is valuable information for whoever killed you should they check your body.
Clearly the dead man broke that rule. I scanned the pages looking for anything that would be of use. All I found were map references and timings – ten full pages of them. I quickly pulled out my map and checked to see where the grid references led but they didn’t make any tactical sense: each location was either middle of farmer’s field and area of high ground or in the center of thick bush. The timings were interesting, though, and I decided to question the sniper to see what they meant, assuming he was in the mood for sharing.
All soldiers are trained to keep their traps shut – that’s why interrogation techniques have become so complex over the years. I wasn’t planning on water boarding the guy, but I was going to make it crystal clear that his life depended on answering questions. I also had an ace up my sleeve. Dawn-Marie recognized him. I made a mental note to have her with me when I started asking questions.
Climbing back into the carrier, I ordered Doug to take us back to Ark Two. I left the navigation up to him, turning my attention to the rear of the carrier. Our prisoner’s hands were bound behind his back with cable ties. He stared at the floor while Cruze and Dawn-Marie kept a close eye on him. He wasn’t bleeding to death, but a 5.56 millimeter bullet was lodged in his thigh – that would have to come out if the guy had any hope of keeping his leg from becoming infected and eventually turning gangrenous. It probably hurt like hell, too.
A few minutes later the carrier rolled to a halt alongside Ark Two. Jo did her level best to give me a big smile, only it wasn’t working. Her eyes were puffy and she’d been crying pretty hard.
I climbed inside and lifted her chin with my index finger. “Hey, kiddo – how are you holding up?”
Jo offered the tiniest of shrugs and sniffled loudly. “I’m okay,” she said in a whisper of a voice. “I’m just sad because of what happened to Katie.”
I drew her close and gave her a warm hug. “I know, Jo. It’s not fair that she was killed. Katie was the bravest person I’ve ever met, but we have to be grateful that she didn’t die … badly.”
Jo gazed up at me and blinked a few times. “You mean that it’s a good thing it wasn’t a creeper that got her.”
I nodded. “That’s the worst way to go.”
She sniffled again and said, “Are you mad at Sid?”
“Sid made a big mistake, Jo,” I replied. “And I think he knows he let everyone down, especially Kate. That’s why it’s so important that we’ve got each other’s backs. We can’t let our feelings cloud our judgment, because it has an effect on everyone in the team.”
Jo’s eyes darkened as she lowered her eyebrows, shifting her gaze to the floor of the carrier. “You have the bad guy that shot Katie now, right?”
I nodded. “That’s right. I need to question him. We have to find out as much as we can about Sunray and all the people who work with him.”
What she said next sent me reeling.
“I want you to kill him, David,” she said in a cold, hard voice. “He killed Katie and I want you to shoot him in the head just like he shot her.”
Holy shit.
I might have done a lot of things wrong since Day Zero, but I’d tried my level best to protect Jo from the worst of this dangerous new world. I’d long known that there was no way to shield her from every bad thing that could happen, but if we were going to survive, I was desperate to provide my little sister with that most precious of commodities: hope. But maybe I didn’t understand Jo as much as I’d thought. The long months of scraping by, of surviving by inches and facing threat after threat after threat had changed my little sister, in spite of my best efforts. She was a soldier now, just like the rest of us.
A child.
I dropped down onto the jump seat opposite Jo unsure of what to say to her. She gave me a curious look and for the first time in my life, I didn’t have any answers for her. I couldn’t look her in the eye and tell her that it was okay to shoot someone who was your prisoner. I just couldn’t do it, so I took the coward’s way out: I didn’t give her a definitive yes or no. Instead, I just answered her question by
not
answering her question.
“We’ll figure out what to do with him once we get the information we need,” I said, sounding deflated. “In the meantime you stay hatches down and rest up, Jo. It’s going to be a long day and everyone needs to focus.”
“Alright, David,” she said easily. All the stone cold seriousness had left her voice and the old Jo had returned.
For how long was anyone’s guess.
***
We shrouded Dawson’s body in a groundsheet, binding it tight with bungee cord. A few minutes later we pulled both carriers into an area of low ground about a hundred meters clear of the highway. I booted the sniper out of the back of the carrier and then tossed him a shovel.
“Start digging, prick,” I said menacingly. “And don’t get any crazy ideas about going ape shit with that shovel on our people because I’ll shoot you where you stand.”
He nodded quickly and then hobbled a few feet away from the rear doors to begin his task. And surely he was thinking the grave was meant for him. I’m sure everyone on the team would have liked to give Kate a proper burial in a place that wasn’t a dried out slough in the middle of a farmer’s field. Somewhere peaceful with trees overlooking a valley, but there wasn’t any time.
“Dig faster, asshole,” said Cruze as she watched the shooter scraping madly at the partially frozen ground. “The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can get the fuck out of this exposed position.”
Sid leaned against the back of the carrier and slid down against a rear wheel. He avoided my gaze as the gravity of Kate’s death started to sink in. He stared across the snow covered field as he fished a cigarette out of his pocket.
“Fuck … I should have kept my mouth shut,” he whispered as he ran a sleeve across his eyes. “I caused this and now Kate’s gone and-“
“You’re fucking right you caused this, Sid.” Cruze interrupted. “And Kate would probably kick you in the balls for wasting time crying over her.”
“I’m not crying, okay?” Sid answered.
Kenny climbed out of his carrier and fired a murderous look at the shooter.
“Prick,” he hissed. “Please tell me he’s digging a grave for himself.”
I shook my head. “No – we’re going to bury Kate then we’re going to get moving. I’ll interrogate this asshole later. If he’s smart, he’ll cooperate.”
“And if he doesn’t?” said Cruze.
The shooter glanced nervously over his shoulder at me and stared at my carbine.
“He’ll talk.” I said threateningly.
Jo kept inside the carrier and didn’t even bother poking her head out to look at our prisoner. He was dressed in camouflage combat fatigues – the new ones they’d issued to the regular force as opposed to the tattered hand-me-downs the reservists got. He had brown hair that had grown shaggy at the back and his eyes had that same haunted expression you saw in the eyes of everyone who survived Day Zero. He looked older than us, with crow’s feet around his eyes and a thick five o’clock shadow. I’d have pegged him to be in his late twenties to early thirties. On his combat jacket were three chevrons on each sleeve – he was a Sergeant. His regimental affiliation was nowhere to be seen – not that it mattered anymore because the army as we knew it was long dead.
The shovel scraped against the partially frozen ground and echoed across the field as the team looked on. I gazed down at Kate’s shrouded body and felt my throat beginning to tighten up – we’d survived so much over the past few months. We’d seen other members of the King’s Own die in the weeks and months after the siege, but the loss of Kate Dawson hit everyone hard. Doug Manybears crawled out the back of Ark One and began chanting something in his native language, his voice lilting up an octave. A haunting, mournful song poured out from between his lips as he knelt before Kate’s body.
He continued singing for another fifteen minutes until the grave was completed. The sniper climbed out and sat down on the dirt covered snow under the watchful eye of Mel Dixon. Doug and Sid gently carried Kate’s body to the grave and slid her down the edges. A sharp gust of wind blew across the spoil from Kate’s grave and we all just stood there looking down at the body of our friend. It was as if each of us was waiting for someone to conduct a makeshift service. I’d have said something but there really wasn’t anything to say that would lessen the shock we’d all experienced.
And it was shocking. We’d all seen comrades die but it was always at the hands of the creeps. This was different. Kate Dawson wasn’t being hunted by a monster. She wasn’t in the throes of battle – she’d climbed atop the carrier to do her job as my second in command and she wound up shot to death.
“Fuck this,” said Mel Dixon as she turned on her heels. “If anyone wants me, I’ll be inside Ark Two.”
Her feet crunched loudly in the freshly fallen snow as I grabbed the shovel and tossed it to the prisoner. “Fill the hole – you’ve got five minutes.”
“Then what?” he asked with a groan as he got back to his feet.
“You’ll know when it happens,” I said coldly.
***
We stood around Kate’s now filled-in grave as Jo crawled out of the carrier. In her hands she carried Kate’s SPECTRA helmet which she placed in the center as a kind of marker.
“Hang on, Jo,” said Sid as he disappeared around the carrier. He returned a few moments later with a large stone about the size of a basketball. He brushed off the snow and tossed Jo a thick felt marker from his breast pocket.
“It’s not a proper headstone, but it’s better than a helmet.”
Jo wrote Kate’s name on the flattest side of the stone along with the image of the sun shining in the sky and some birds flying in the distance. Sid carefully placed the stone at the head of Kate’s grave and wiped his eyes again with the sleeve of his combat jacket.
I put a hand on Jo’s shoulder and said, “That was nice, baby sister. Thanks for doing that. Wherever Kate is, she’s probably smiling down on…”
“Mother-fucking contact you assholes!”
Melanie roared from her turret.
“Get your shit in gear – there’s an enemy APC skirting the forward edge of the tree line up ahead!”
In seconds we were under fire. Tracer rounds flew over the top of the carrier. We quickly dropped what we were doing and scrambled into the carriers. Once inside, I frantically cable-tied the prisoner to a gun rack and closed the rear doors and hatches.
“What are you seeing, Sid!” I shouted as I crawled into my crew commander’s hatch.
“Armored Recce!”
he bellowed.
“Jesus H. Christ, we gotta move now, they’ve got a freaking Cougar!”
I fumbled with the headset and pulled my hatch lid down over my head as I peered into my periscope to see a cloud of snow behind the rear wheels of a heavily camouflaged Cougar light tank. The Cougar, though it was the exact same vehicle as the one we were driving, possessed a very significant advantage: a turret from a British Scorpion battle tank and a 76 mm main cannon. A well-placed shot from that gun on any part of our APC and we’d brew up faster than a coffeepot at a truck stop.
“Get us out of here or we’re fucking dead!”
I shouted into the radio.
Doug Manybears was already taking evasive action, having pulled a wide U-Turn in the low ground beside the highway. I peered through my periscope just in time to see the muzzle flash from the cougar’s main gun. Less than a second later our carrier pitched sharply to the left as the high explosive round hit the pavement to my right.
“Smoke! Smoke! Smoke!”
I screamed into my microphone as the turret spun around overhead.
Three loud thunks later and the smoke canisters were away.
“That round came too freaking close for comfort!” Cruze shouted into the radio. “My smoke is away, we’ve got good cover!”
“Copy that – both vehicles onto the highway now – bury the freaking needle and keep your guns at the ready!”
Doug gave me a thumbs-up as I fumbled with my map.
Our sniper had been part of a recce element. That explained why we hadn’t seen a vehicle anywhere. The spotter and the shooter had likely been conducting a foot patrol when they saw us barreling up the highway. The smoke we’d seen was probably from a small fire the rest of their team had been using to warm up – it was well below zero outside. I’d driven us straight into a trap. Part of me hoped we’d wind up getting broadsided by an anti-tank round, because ever since the moment we broke out of the armory, I’d made piss poor decisions and got us all into firefights at every freaking turn.
I heard the turret spin around quickly from behind as Sid’s voice filled my headset. “He’s still a good distance back, but he’s on our tail!”
I snapped out of it, peering through my periscope for a bit of land we could use for cover.
“Are we out of range of that gun?” I barked.
“Yeah … barely,” Sid answered.
“Keep that needle buried, Doug! We need to put more distance between us.”
Doug Manybears answered through a haze of static. “It’s buried. I don’t know how much faster I can make this thing go. We gotta figure out a way to take down that Cougar.”
“No shit! Ark Two – get your ass parallel to our carrier. We’ll slow down slightly and let you take the lead.”
The radio hissed. “Are you nuts, Dave?” shouted Cruze. “He’ll have two big fat olive drab targets to fire at!”
I pressed the PTT button as my heart raced. “Only for a couple of seconds. Just do it!”
“FUCK!” she bellowed.
The pitch from our engine dropped only slightly as the APC’s engine break kicked in. I could make out the nose of Cruze’s carrier in my peripheral vision, so I ordered Doug to let Ark Two take the lead. An enormous cloud of snow filled the air in front of the trim vane as Cruze’s APC moved ahead.