Surviving the Dead 03: Warrior Within (20 page)

I often wondered what he would have thought of me, of how I had turned out. Would he be proud? Disappointed? Ashamed? How would he feel about the things I’d done, the people I had killed? I would never know. Not in this life, at least.

Mom had been proud of me, once. That much I knew. She had cried the day I left for basic training. I was seventeen then, having graduated high school a year early. I had to get her permission to enlist.

Mom had cried, and held me, and told me to be careful and stay out of trouble. I held her back, careful not to squeeze too hard, and told her I would. Told her I’d write to her, and call her as soon as I had the chance. We hadn’t known it then, but that was the last time I would see her alive. The cancer had already gotten ahold of her. She was riddled with it but didn’t know. Her symptoms had been mild. Flulike. No big deal, nothing worth paying a doctor for.

Until one day, she collapsed at work. She had her diagnosis within a week. Pancreatic cancer. Terminal. Nothing they could do.

I put in for emergency leave, and the Corps granted it, but not soon enough. She was dead before my plane landed in Louisville. As soon as I stepped out of the gate and saw my uncle’s face, I knew. He had broken down on the spot. He kept saying how sorry he was, and I kept telling him it wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. Still, he had cried and cried. A tired, broken-down old man, holding on to the last person he had left in the world.

Uncle Aaron died himself a few years later. The doctors said it was a heart attack. It took him down quick. He probably didn’t know what hit him.

I never believed that.

He’d seen too much pain in his life. First he lost his wife, then his brother, then his sister-in-law who had lived with him for ten years, whose son he had helped to raise. I think it was just too much for the old man. I think death is a greedy, hungry thing, and when people lose their will to live, it comes swiftly. Life held only pain for Uncle Aaron, and I think he was ready to be done with it.

As I thought of these things, I realized that the sun was creeping over the horizon, and that my hands had gone still. The knife and the whetstone lay forgotten in my lap. I put them away, tugged on my boots, and walked down the road to face the music.

*****

I kept my head down on the walk to the camp. Watched the ground pass between my feet. Dirt, and gravel, and mud from the morning dew. I thought about those two soldiers I had lost, and the desolation on their families’ faces when Allison delivered the bad news. As I walked, the mud crept up the sides of my boots and ruined the polish I had put on them that morning.

I was fifty yards into the clearing before I looked up. I’d expected to be greeted with the sight of an empty field. Not the Grinder anymore, just a field. It was only the Grinder if there were people there to grind on it. Instead, when I looked up, what I saw stopped me in my tracks.

The first thing I noticed was the platform. Grabovsky was standing on it, as well as the other drill instructors, Cohen and Wilkins. The two navy SEALs that had flown in with General Jacobs were there as well. Great Hawk and Marshall. In their black fatigues, they were a marked contrast to the other three men. In front of them, standing in neatly ordered ranks, was the militia.

I did a quick head count, length times width. They were all there, all the surviving members, less the two whose injuries prevented them from returning. For a moment, all I could do was stand and stare. I had seen things before that had hit me in a profound way, that made me step back and reassess my lack of faith in the human race. But never had anything struck so sharp of a chord. Never had any other sight made my throat tighten, and my chest burn, and my legs go shaky. There, standing in that field at parade rest, was my sense of purpose. My contribution to society. Something I was working to build, something of lasting importance. Something that the world, or at least a small part of it, could remember me by. Something good, and decent, and right, in a lifetime of mistakes.

I took a deep breath, got ahold of myself, and marched up to the platform. I was glad the recruits were required to be silent while in ranks. If any of them had spoken to me, offered any small words of encouragement, I might not have held it together. God, would that have been embarrassing.

I walked up the three wooden steps and stopped in front of Grabovsky. He saluted, even though I wasn’t technically an officer, and I saluted back.

“All present and accounted for?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

“All present and accounted for.”

I nodded, and Grabovsky moved back with the other instructors. Stepping to the edge of the small stage, I addressed the recruits.

“I know it must have been difficult for all of you to return to training. I know how tough it is, losing friends. It’s a danger we face every day as warriors. But as proud as I am to see you here today, and as much of an honor as it is to serve with you, I still have a job to do. Your training is not complete. You’ve all seen combat now, and you all fought bravely, but you still have a long way to go. Now is not the time for me to take it easy on you. Now is not the time to slack off. If anything, we have to train harder. Push ourselves. Do whatever it takes to get ready for the fight ahead of us. That’s what I’m here to do. I think you all understand that now. Am I right?”

They responded in unison. A single, strident voice, “YES, SIR!”

I had to grit my teeth to keep from tearing up. “Very well.”

I turned back to Grabovsky. “Have the squad leaders form their squads and report to the mess hall. Do a quick briefing and then lay out the plan of the day. We’ll introduce the new instructors shortly. They’re all yours, Sergeant.”

Grabovsky took my place and began cracking off orders. The recruits fell out, organized into squads, and set off for the mess hall. The other four men, Cohen, Wilkins, and the two SEALs, stayed behind. Judging by the looks on their faces, we had much to discuss.

*****

Marcus Cohen and Curtis Wilkins are my workhorses.

They’re steady, dependable, efficient, and I wouldn’t trade them for all the thoroughbreds in the world. Grabovsky and I handled the lion’s share of the recruits’ combat training, but there was a great deal more that went into running the militia. That’s where Cohen and Wilkins came in—the administrative stuff. They made sure that the recruits got their meals, their equipment, and their medical evaluations. They kept track of the militia’s personnel records, our ammunition inventory, made sure all the weapons were accounted for after firing exercises, and about a hundred other dull, monotonous jobs that Grabovsky and I simply did not have time for. And they did it all without complaint.

As the last recruits disappeared inside the mess hall, Cohen held out a hand to me and smiled. He was a tall, rangy kid with dark hair, a square jaw, straight teeth and hazel eyes. The kind of
good looks that had half the single women in Hollow Rock setting their sights on making an honest man out of him. Lucky bastard.

He had been an infantryman in the Marines before the Outbreak. Did a tour in Afghanistan, saw action there, and had the scars to prove it. He had been home on leave when the Outbreak struck, and like many members of the armed services when the call had come down to report for duty, he had ignored it. He’d stayed in Hollow Rock to look after his family. Considering how things had turned out, I didn’t blame him, and I had made sure he knew as much.

Now, even though he still wore his MARPATs and carried an M-4, he only helped out with the militia part-time. (If you can call thirty to forty hours a week part-time.) He was also a full-time sheriff’s deputy, and one of the few people entrusted with maintaining law and order in Hollow Rock. 

“Good to see you again, Gabe,” he said. “Glad to have you back.”

“Back?” I said. “What do you mean, back? The militia’s been on furlough since Sunday.”

“Yeah, but we haven’t,” Wilkins chimed in.

“Huh?” was my eloquent response.

He smiled, his white teeth contrasting with his skin, so black it was almost blue. He was tall like Cohen, but with a heavier build. Neither man was quite as tall as me. But then again, few people are.

Wilkins had come to Hollow Rock by way of Fort Bragg. When Steve got his captain’s bars, both he and Grabovsky had been placed under his command. The three Green Berets later traveled to Tennessee to investigate reports of a large community of survivors, and although they were still technically under the authority of Central Command, they had pretty much gone native.

“We’ve been doing inventory on everything the Chinook brought in,” he said. “Stocking up on supplies, getting everything ready for training to pick back up, that kinda thing. Got a lot of nice stuff, man. Rifles, SAWs, grenade launchers, mortars, LAWs, even a few Carl
Gustavs. Not to mention uniforms, ammo, boots, radios, portable solar panels, all kinds of shit.”

He handed me a three-ring binder with a report inside. “S’all in there, man. Everything we got.”

I flipped through it, reading the columns and rows detailing every molecule of equipment the militia had at its disposal. They must have been at it for the last two days, at least. I never would have been able to get all this done on my own, and having this list at hand would make my life a lot easier.

“We also updated all the personnel records,” Cohen added. “Notated their unit citations and individual awards. Took the liberty of issuing uniforms and other gear. Figured it would save everybody time if we went ahead and knocked it out.”

I closed the binder and smiled at the two men.

Workhorses.

“Damn fine work, fellas. Don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Cohen snorted. “Fall the fuck apart, that’s what you’d do.” 

I let that one go, and turned to the two black-clad SEALs.

“Gabriel Garrett, nice to meet you.” I held out a hand. The shorter of the two men shook it.

“Gunner’s Mate First Class Wayne Marshall,” he said, the lack of R’s in his pronunciation practically screaming Massachusetts. “The big guy back there is Boatswain’s Mate First Class Lincoln Great Hawk. But his friends just call him the Mad Apache.”

The tall, dark-skinned man swiveled his obsidian eyes to Marshall disapprovingly for a moment, and then went back to staring blankly at me. His face looked like it was carved out of mahogany, stark and striking, with a heavy brow, high, flat cheekbones, and a large, blade-shaped nose. I figured him for about six-foot-three and maybe a solid two-thirty.

“I am
Mashgalénde
,” he said. “The Spanish called us
Mescaleros
. You ignorant whites call many nations the Apache, as if we are all the same. We are not.”

Marshall nodded, and hooked a thumb toward Great Hawk. “You’ll get used to the noble savage here. He grows on you. Kind of like nail fungus.”

I decided to get the conversation moving. “Is there anything we need to discuss before we introduce you to the militia?”

“The only one of us you need to introduce is me,” Marshall said. “Great Hawk doesn’t do training. He’s just here to kill people and blow things up. I’ll be the one helping out with the militia.”

I looked at Great Hawk and studied him for a moment. He stared back, his face an impassive mask. We needed to have a talk, the two of us. But I let it go for the moment, turning back to Marshall.

“So you’re not here to help us fight the Legion?”

“Officially, no. But my orders have this wonderful way of changing every five minutes, and the next thing I know I’m ass-deep in fucking alligators. So I wouldn’t rule it out.”

“But for right now, you’re here in a support capacity. Is that right?”

“For right now, yeah.”

“How much training experience do you have?” The last thing I needed was this guy undoing all my hard work.

“I trained two other militias in the past eight months. One out in Nevada, and another up north of here in Kentucky. Just finished with that last one about three weeks ago, then got orders down here.” 

I nodded. “Fair enough. Anything else before you get started? You have lodging, food, everything you need?”

“Already took care of it,” Cohen said from behind me.

Marshall nodded in agreement. “Yeah, your guys here have been great. We’re good to go.”

“All right then.” I turned to my two instructors. “I’ll leave the introductions in your capable hands.”

Marshall left with Cohen and Wilkins, headed toward the mess hall. Great Hawk stayed behind, still staring at me.

“Is there something you need?” I asked once the other three were out of earshot.

“I need you to brief me on the situation here in Hollow Rock,” he replied.

“Nobody filled you in on the way out here?”

He shook his head. “Only in general terms. You have fought the enemy. You have looked into his face. I need to know what you have seen.”

There was a steadiness to him as he spoke, but also a kind of dangerous energy. Like a mountain lion perched on a rock, warming itself in the sun. His claws might be sheathed, but they were still there. Still deadly.