Death Springs Eternal: The Rift Book III (2 page)

CHAPTER 1

S.N.F.

The general peered through his binoculars, watching the scene unfolding in the town below. There were five men down there
—
civilians
—
fighting against the zombie horde, wielding shovels, hatchets, and pipes as weapons. These men moved with purpose, rushing to one of the abandoned shops, four standing guard while the fifth dashed inside and salvaged whatever he could. When he emerged with his sack heavy, they moved on to the next shop and performed the same ritual. It was a delicate ballet, constantly treading the thin line between life and death. The general thought it was beautiful.

“What’re they doing?” the man to his right asked.

Dropping his binoculars, the general rubbed the stubble on his chin.
“Looting the stores.
Surviving.
It’s admirable.” He looked to the large man who spoke. “Lieutenant Pitts, what do you think we should do?”

Pitts hunched his back and smoothed the wrinkles in his jean jacket. “I guess we should head down there,” he said while twirling the corner of his mustache. “Help clear the area.”

The general looked at him cockeyed and scowled, to which Pitts replied, “Sorry, we should head down there,
sir
.”

“Better.”

For a few minutes they stood silent, with the general still peering through his binoculars. Pitts teetered from one leg to the other, then, sheepishly, asked, “Should I do it now, General Bathgate?”

Bathgate exhaled through clenched teeth and replied, “Of course, you moron.”

Pitts raised his arm and signaled for the others to approach. The general felt the Marauders draw near from behind him, fifty strong and well armed, wearing their sashes over their uniforms with pride and holding the
SNF
banner high.
His best boys.
He smiled despite himself, even as he observed the chaos in the town below.

“We’re moving in now,” he heard Pitts say.
“Time to nail those fuckers.”

“What formation?” a young, sarcastic voice asked. “What methods we gonna use?” Bathgate knew exactly whose voice it was and turned around.

Standing at the front of the battalion was Sergeant Jackson, a man in his early twenties with sandy-blonde hair, a wiry build, and a wild gleam in his eye. The general sighed, knowing he had to stem the tide of internal conflict, since Pitts’s broad shoulders were already rising and falling in an exaggerated manner while he stared at the young soldier. Bathgate understood the apprehension his Sergeant displayed—Cody Jackson had been a real soldier in the actual Army before the fallout, Greg Pitts hadn’t—but Lieutenant Pitts was the general’s closest confidant, the man who saved his life, and he owed it to him to shield him from embarrassment.

“Do not question orders from your superior, Sergeant,” the general hissed. “Just get a move on. Keep the banner high. No flanking maneuvers this time. We’re going for a straightforward gang-fuck here. Hit them head on, cut them down. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir!” said
Jackson
, snapping his heels together. His previously unruly eyes became squinted and forthright.
This
was the look General Bathgate was after, that of a man ready to do his part.

“Now GO!”

His soldiers went screaming past him, running down the hill with their various weapons raised. Bathgate sensed Pitts heading off, as well, and grabbed him with the hand not wrapped around the binoculars.

“I want you with me,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” replied Pitts.

Bathgate watched as the ghastly horde of rotting humanity turned toward the sound of the onrushing soldiers. The first shot rang out just as a wave of undead beasts lumbered forward, followed by a deafening cacophony of gunfire as the rest of his men followed suit. The sound hurt the general’s ears, but at least it drowned out the beasts’ moaning.

Five, ten, fifteen of the inhuman mass toppled over as bullets ripped through their decaying bodies. Still his soldiers surged onward, those with full magazines stepping to the foreground so those who’d discharged all their ammunition could reload. Three more of the undead fell, followed by another ten or so, blood leaking from the smoking holes peppering their hides. It was a surgical strike—virtually every shot his men fired found purchase in the flesh of their enemy, cutting them down before they could get close enough to do any harm. The general smiled. These were the Marauders, the best trained and most successful of his army. In that moment, he felt confident that no matter what stood in their way, the SNF would triumph.

He turned away from the battle, focusing instead on those who’d been looting the stores. They were standing before the entrance to a ransacked pharmacy, hatchets and pipes clutched in their hands, gawping at the skirmish before them with astonishment and relief in their eyes. Even in their awe, they still had the presence of mind to strike out at any lingering undead that ignored the soldiers, bashing skulls, severing limbs. The general twisted the dial on his binoculars, zooming in on the survivors, capturing their faces one-by-one. There were four black men and one dark-skinned Hispanic, none older than Sergeant Jackson’s twenty-one years, most much younger. He dropped the field glasses and shook his head.

“What’s wrong, boss?” asked Pitts.

“Nothing,” the general replied.

Pitts didn’t push the issue.

In a matter of no more than ten minutes, the skirmish had settled down.
Only a handful of undead remained standing, ambling as if they didn’t know where to go.
The soldiers rushed up to them and systematically fired bullets into each of their skulls at close range. With the end of the ordeal at hand, General Bathgate turned to his lieutenant, gestured with his hand, and descended the hill.

His feet hit the blood-smeared, cracked pavement, the heels of his boots clanking on the concrete. Pitts stayed by his side, reducing his long strides to keep pace with the shorter man while they maneuvered through the minefield of human remains. The general peered over, saw the look of disgust on Pitts’s face as he surveyed the bloodshed, and gently elbowed him in the ribs.

“Don’t show your repulsion,” he said, softly. “Act like
you’ve
been there before.”

Pitts stiffened his lips and squinted, taking on the aura of a Hell’s Angel on a mission, with his jacket and leather chaps pressed tight against his huge frame. Even his handlebar mustache, which could seem laughable at times, now looked imposing. This was good. The general wanted his men to respect the lieutenant—
needed
them to—and that wouldn’t happen if Pitts gave the impression that the sight of a massacre sickened him.

His soldiers, the last few of which were burying the final shots in the few twitching bodies on the ground, gradually fell in line behind him as he made his way down the street. He led them to the pharmacy and the five bedraggled survivors, who had stepped off the store’s front walk and into the road. They waved their arms in victory. From their mouths came proclamations of joy.

“Let’s hear it for the Army!” one of them shouted.

“Woo-hoo!” decreed another. “Way to take the fuckers out!”

The general stopped walking, leaving ten feet between him and the five young men. His soldiers
halted,
a movement so in sync that all of their feet came to rest at virtually the same time. He stood there for a long moment, staring at those dark, grinning faces without saying a word. The five young men eventually began to grow wary. Their expressions slackened, their body language uneasy, and they muttered among themselves.

Finally one of them—the oldest, by the looks of it—stepped forward. “Yo,” he said in a deep, rumbling baritone. “What’s going on?”

The general nodded at him and said, “I find your determination to live commendable. I thought you should know that.”

To this the man cocked his head, shrugged, and mouthed,
thanks
.

In a single motion, General Bathgate spun on his heels, raised his hand in the air, twirled his finger, and stepped behind his soldiers. Pitts was right behind him. He heard the sound of crumpling fabric as his men raised their weapons in unison, the click of rounds being locked into place, and then one of the survivors shouting, “Oh FUCK NO!”

More gunfire followed as his men peppered the five derelicts with bullets. Unlike the walking corpses, their screams rose above the ruckus, causing a twinge of guilt in his gullet. He chomped down on his tongue and swallowed hard, drowning his shame.
There are things that have to be done
, he thought.
This is the way of the new world, the way of the
SNF.

He and Pitts turned around when the firing stopped. His soldiers parted so he could see the bodies of the five men, splayed out unceremoniously on the concrete, bleeding. One still moved, using his remaining good arm to drag his stiffening body across the street. The general caught Sergeant Jackson’s eye, and the young man burst into action, dashing up to the youngster, kicking him, rolling him over, and jamming the business end of his automatic rifle into his crotch.

“Where
you
going?”
Jackson
asked.

The dying man mumbled pleas of mercy, and
Jackson
emptied a round into his scrotum. A high-pitched wailing filled the air as the man writhed, grasping at his ruined nethers with that one good hand.

“This is a
no-fly-zone
, you piece of shit,”
Jackson
shouted over his yowls. “This place belongs to the SNF now, which means you fuckers stealing our shit don’t fly.”

With that,
Jackson
pressed the barrel of his rifle into the man’s eye socket and blew his brains out the back of his head. He shrugged his backpack off his shoulders with an insane grin plastered across his face, dropped it to the ground, took out a Polaroid camera, and started taking pictures of the bodies surrounding him. The other soldiers cheered and slapped each other on the back. General Bathgate was instantly intrigued, just as he always was when he saw his men’s reaction to Sergeant Jackson’s work.

Lieutenant Pitts shivered beside him, and Bathgate glanced over his shoulder. His friend gave him a beseeching look.

“I know,” the general said. “It may not be for us, but it’s the way of the world now.
Might as well get used to it.”

*
  
*
  
*

The pilfering of the tiny, ancient town of
Enfield
,
North Carolina
, took all of three hours. There wasn’t much left, not now, six months after the end of the world. The supermarkets were bereft of food, the gun shops of guns, the hardware stores of everything but lawnmowers and other motorized landscaping tools. But that was something General Bathgate and the rest of the SNF leadership expected. What the general understood, and many others didn’t, was that there were treasures aplenty remaining in the silos and barns on the outskirts of town: seedlings, plants,
grains
, lumber, everything a pioneer would need to feed his people and build a sustainable society.

So while the general led his men through the town proper, killing the mongrels who appeared along the way, both human and undead, another battalion was busy on the other side of the township, tearing down structures and loading a fleet of eighteen-wheelers with all the raw materials they would need. The general, too, found some luck. Along the way, stowed in the historic district, his men discovered seven upper-class families who’d endured months of hardship, locked away in their nineteenth-century, fortress-like estates. These people were all of good stock, German, Irish, English, and Italian. He accepted them into his care and ushered them aboard the armored school buses that arrived to pick them up. He watched as the families, each member thin near the point of starvation, boarded the vehicles, expressions of disbelieving relief on their weary faces. They would be comfortable on their trip back to camp until Registration, when each individual’s value to the collective was assessed. Not all would be accepted into the SNF society. That much he knew. The old were almost always the first to go, and there were quite a few in these families who approached elderly status. The general was left to hope that they might possess some skill that could be of use, be they doctors or farmers or electricians, but that hope was fleeting. In his experience over the last few months, most of the survivors he ran across worth saving were white-collar folks, as they were the only ones with the resources to fortify their homes before the first wave of Wraiths tore across the land. To the general’s thinking, nothing was less important in the aftermath of the apocalypse than businessmen, and aged businessmen even less so.