Surviving the Dead 03: Warrior Within (29 page)

AK-47.

And there was shouting. A lot of shouting. At least three voices, maybe more. I ducked behind a tree, dropped my pack and the Ruger, and waited.

A few more shots. Semi-automatic, more focused, directed. The screaming stopped, and I went cold. The startled panic in me subsided, washed over by the icy current spreading outward from my chest. Before I knew what I was doing, I was moving.

AK-47s meant the Legion. The fact that they started shooting so soon after I left meant that we had missed crossing paths by a narrow margin. They must have approached from the highway, or from the other side of town. If I had hung around just a minute or two longer, they might have seen me and gotten the drop on me. But they didn’t, which meant that for the moment, I had the advantage. An advantage that would last until they discovered their ransacked weapons cache, and the still-warm grill that I had cooked my breakfast on. Then they would know that I had been there, and would start searching for me.

I couldn’t let them capture me, not here. They would find Grayson Morrow’s map that I was still carrying, and they would put two and two together. I wouldn’t live long enough to regret it.

I unbuckled the belt on my web gear, took off everything but the CZ and the spare ammo, put the belt back on, and moved westward. My shoulder hit a wall two blocks down and a couple of blocks over from where the gunshots had come from. From what I could tell, all the shots had sounded from the same place. It started with one rifle, then others had joined in. Probably one or two guys spotted the tiger, panicked, fired upon it, and alerted the others who added their guns to the fray.

Sons of bitches.

I
pied on the corner, saw nothing, and moved up. There was a narrow street connecting the buildings around me with the buildings going through the central part of town. I looked one way. Nobody. I looked the other way. Nothing. I darted across the street and took cover behind a large green dumpster, eased around it, and worked my way forward until I reached the corner. I looked east, away from the sound of the gunshots. No one there.

Again, I pied my way out, moving in tight little increments, exposing as little of my head and shoulders as possible, keeping my gun trained in the same direction as my eyes. There, at the intersection in front of the furniture store, standing over the twitching, convulsing body of the tiger.

Five of them.

Five dead men.

I slipped back, went to the end of the building, and used the side street to get close. First one block, then another. I leaned into a corner and listened. I could just make out what they were saying.

“… scared the shit out of me.” A nervous laugh. “Big motherfucker, never seen anything like it.”

A different voice. “Think that’s why we found them goats the way we did? Maybe this thing did it?”

A third voice. “Could be. Didn’t look like nothin’ no dog could do.”

“It don’t fucking matter.” Fourth voice. Older, deep, rough. “We’re here for ammo. Mark, go get the pull-cart out of the post office. Dave, take Aaron and start staging the crates in the restaurant. Don’t forget about them goddamn booby traps, I don’t want to be scraping your asses up with a squeegee. Me and Red are gonna go up on lookout. Keep your eyes open, and watch out for the dead. They might’a wandered in while we was away. Go on, get movin’.”

This guy had the voice of authority. Like someone who was used to giving orders and having them followed. He would die last. He had things to tell me. But I had to move quickly. As soon as they stepped around the corner, they would see the infected I had killed. Fresh corpses among the bones of the long dead would put them on alert. I couldn’t let that happen.

While they were talking, I eased my way out. I could see four of them, including the leader, all standing in a cluster around the dead tiger. Stepping out, I crouched down on one knee, steadied my aim, and let off the first shot.

I didn’t have any optics, but I had spent plenty of time practicing with iron sights, and my aim was good. The shot took the first one in the side of the head and penetrated straight through. The man beside him was shorter, so the bullet missed him, but the side of his face went red from the splash of blood that erupted from his friend’s head. He had a half-second to register shock before my second and third shots hit him center of mass, right in the chest. He doubled over, choked out a scream, and took a few running steps away. I shifted my aim and nailed a third one with another two-round burst, one in the chest, and one through the throat. He coughed out a spray of blood and fell down.

“Fuck!” The leader spotted me and raised his AK, but I was already moving.

Unlike what you see in the movies, when an assault rifle as powerful as an AK-47 opens up on a brick wall, the bricks disintegrate. You don’t want to be standing behind them when that happens, especially at close range. I ran to the other side of the building, checked the corner, then turned it and sprinted toward the street.

When I reached the edge, the leader had stopped firing and was shouting at his last man, pulling on his arm. The other man’s face was blank with shock. He stood still, his attention fixed on his choking, dying comrades.

“Dammit, Red, come on!”

Red was facing me while the leader stood to one side, out of my line of fire. I pictured a white line running from the base of Red’s throat, all the way down to his belt buckle. Centerline of the body—a bad place to get shot. Lots of vital organs and big arteries there, and behind them, the all-important spinal cord. Put enough rounds through the centerline, and they’re dead before they hit the ground. So sayeth Gabriel, world without end, amen.

I stitched four rounds up Red’s middle, starting down just below his belt, and ending at the hollow of his throat. He didn’t even scream, just toppled over like a felled tree. The leader turned to me, and tried to lift his rifle again. I let out half a breath, shifted the front sight, and fired a single shot at his right arm. The bullet slammed into his deltoid, probably breaking the bones beneath, and he dropped the rifle.

I stepped out of cover and approached. The leader was screaming, high pitched and pleading, like a child with his finger caught in a door.

“Shut up!” I yelled at him.

He fumbled for the pistol at his belt. I raised my rifle again.

“Don’t.”

He did anyway. I stopped, took aim, and put a bullet in his other shoulder. He cried out all over again, louder this time.
How do you like it, you fuck
?

I shifted my aim downward and pulled the trigger again, this time putting a round in his leg. I kept my aim outside, making sure it didn’t hit the femoral artery. I didn’t want him to bleed out. Not yet.

He fell, screaming nearly as loudly as the tiger had. I stood over him for a moment, staring down.

“How many others?”

His eyes were wide, bulging, panicked. Face pale, going into shock. “What?”

“How. Many. Others. Was it just you five?”

“Fuck you.” He spat the words out at me, a flare of defiance in his eyes. I smiled at him, and whatever he saw there dimmed his fire.

“I still have plenty of bullets, friend. You don’t want to know where the next one is going. Now, I’ll ask you one more time. How many others?”

“What … who … who the hell are you?”

I shook my head. “You’re not listening.” Slowly, I began moving the barrel up his leg, toward his torso. Smoke curled from the flash hider as it inched upward.

“How many others? I won’t ask you again.”

The barrel stopped just over his groin. If he could have jumped out of his skin, he would have. I’d already killed all of his men and shot him three times. There could be no doubt in his mind that I was more than willing to carry out the implied threat, but he wasn’t acknowledging it. Didn’t want to believe it. He was in denial. This couldn’t be happening. Just a minute ago, less than a minute ago, everything was fine. He was on a mission. He was in charge. He was in control. And now, he was lying on the ground, probably bleeding to death with a loaded M-4 pointed at his balls. Must have been a hell of a shock. The poor guy couldn’t get his head around it.

“It’s just us,” he said, breathing rapidly. “There’s just the five of us.”

“There
were
five of you.” I corrected. “What’s your name?”

“What?”

“Your name, asshole. What is it?”

“Carson. Mitchell Carson.”

I reached down and began searching him for weapons. With two blown out shoulders and a badly wounded leg, he wasn’t in much of a position to do anything about it.

“Okay, Carson-Mitchell-Carson. You and I are going to have a chat. “

I found a knife and a small .380 pistol. I tossed them away and made a pile of his weapons, well out of arm’s reach. Slinging the rifle around my back, I knelt down by Carson’s legs and drew my hunting knife. I held it up where he could see it, twisting the flat of the blade to catch the light. His eyes locked to it like a magnet, as if it had its own gravitational pull. A singularity of dense, unrelenting force, drawing him further and further into panic.

“I have a pretty good bullshit detector, and let me tell you Carson-Mitchell-Carson, I don’t like being bullshitted. Am I clear?”

He nodded quickly, eyes still locked on the hunting knife.

“Good. That will save me time, and you a lot of pain. Just to let you know, if I don’t like what you have to say, we’re going to start with your Achilles’ tendon. Then we’ll work our way up from there. Savvy?”

The quick nod again. Still with the wide, fearful gaze.

“Good.” I smiled. “Let’s get started.”

*****

We spoke for a long time, the two of us.

He told me a great many things, some of them useful, some not. He was a low-level leader in the Legion, middle management really. But he knew things that Grayson Morrow didn’t, and he gave me a fairly good idea of where the Legion was getting its weapons. As the questions became more focused and direct, he began to grow reluctant with his answers. Stuttering. Long hesitations between sentences. It finally got to the point where I felt that he wasn’t being honest with me.

That was the part where I severed his Achilles’ tendon.

Left leg. It was a tough piece of tissue, and I had to saw at it a bit before it parted.

I had seen Steve do the same thing to a guy back in North Carolina, and it had worked remarkably well. I’d been pretty squeamish about it at the time, but the years since then had not been kind to me. I had seen too many people suffer horribly at the hands of those with no regard for human life, and I had lost all patience with would-be conquerors. This guy had thrown his lot in with the bad guys, the ones who murdered, and raped, and stole from others. The ones who had nearly killed me, and who had shot two of my closest friends. One of them just a little boy.

No. It didn’t bother me to do it. Carson-Mitchell-Carson had made his choice, and the consequences were his to suffer.

Things went smoothly after that. I didn’t glean enough information to change my mission, but I did learn enough to give me an edge. Finished with the interrogation, I stood up and thanked Carson-Mitchell-Carson for his cooperation.

And then I shot him in the head.

I reached the outskirts of the Legion encampment just after nightfall.

The bridge I was hiding under was part of a highway overpass situated atop a steep, man-made hill. Ahead, less than half a mile away, a sprawling warehouse squatted next to a stretch of empty four-lane blacktop. The featureless concrete structure looked like a white slab of dead flesh in the descending gloom. I was a few hundred feet above it and could see the entire complex from one end to the other.

From the outside, the place looked utterly abandoned. No sound, no stirring of voices, no flicker of campfires, no movement, nothing. The Legion had gone to great pains to make sure that the place looked unoccupied.

But I knew better.

The trek here, after leaving Carson-Mitchell-Carson lying in a puddle of his own blood, had been remarkably uneventful. I didn’t encounter a single infected, a testament to the Legion’s efficiency. It made me wonder, not for the first time, what vendetta the Legion held against the people of Hollow Rock. It wasn’t as if the town had anything that the Legion couldn’t provide for its own. These rogue militants had food, shelter, weapons, everything they needed. They had proven that they could protect themselves from the undead, and their fearsome reputation had kept other, smaller groups of marauders at bay.

Adding to the mystery was the question of how the Legion had evolved from a few loosely affiliated squads of raiders into an organized, well-supplied para-military force. Carson-Mitchell-Carson had conveniently given me one piece of that puzzle—the weapons.

The AK-47s were being transferred in via seven overland routes, all of them originating from different points along the Mississippi River. They came from all over, accompanied by troops from another, larger group that was aiding the Legion.