Surviving the Dead (Book 7): The Killing Line (22 page)

Heinrich awoke soaking wet on the northern bank of the Chikaskia River. Maru sat nearby, rifle in hand, surrounded by six men Heinrich assumed were his inner circle, or at least part of it. He stood and approached them, one hand close to the handle of his pistol.

“Good to see you alive, Chief,” Maru said. He kept his gaze steady to the west, a large pair of field glasses held to his eyes.

“What have you got?”

“Nothing good. Looks like it was the Army hit us last night.”

Heinrich wanted to remain standing but found himself too tired to do so.
Fuck it
, he thought.
If they wanted me dead I would be
.

He sank into the grass by the riverbank. “Any idea how bad?”

“Pretty bad. After the attack everyone moved to the fallback position. What happened to you?”

Heinrich turned his head and glared at Maru. Any other day he would have shot the man for his impertinence. But this morning, with a hematoma pressing his temple, hunger gnawing at his gut, dehydration clawing his throat, and possessed of a healthy dose of gratitude that he was not dead, he let it go.

“Ran into a fucking tree in the dark. Knocked myself out.”

Maru lowered the field glasses, looked at Heinrich’s forehead, and made a face. “Christ. You look like a baby seal after the club.”

“Feel like one too.”

The men around Maru looked nervous. Heinrich took a few deep breaths, got his feet underneath him, and rose as steadily as he was able.

“What time is it?”

Maru looked at the sun and held up a hand. “About nine in the morning, give or take.”

“How’s the tribe?”

“Scattered. Lost a lot of men. We’re the only ones crazy enough to still be near camp.”

Heinrich pondered that. The Army did not usually move against raiders in half measures. They either attacked with overwhelming force and killed or apprehended everyone in sight, or they attacked not at all.

“So they came in, strafed us, and left.”

Maru stood up. “More to it than that.”

“I was in my command tent when the attack started. Fill me in.”

“One of the patrols went missing. Found out about it maybe thirty seconds before that chopper tore into us. Rider came in to report, and the next thing I saw was tracers.”

“So we were under surveillance.”

“Seems so. And it gets worse. The women are gone.”

“Gone?”

“No trace. Holes cut into the wagons, some of the fence posts on that side dug up and loosened.” Maru gestured to a man sitting on his left. “This fella found one of our guys dead where the women were being kept. Looked like someone shoved a goddamn machete through the back of his neck. Nearly took his head off.”

Heinrich felt his teeth clench and his fists ball up. “It was a goddamn rescue mission. They came for the women, probably sent a few spec-ops types.”

Maru edged closer, his voice lowering. “We’re compromised here, Chief. We should move on.”

Heinrich shook his head. “If they could muster enough troops to show up here in force, they would have.”

“They might be back. In fact, I’d say it’s just a matter of time.”

“Agreed. But we have to salvage what we can.”

“What are you saying?”

“Round up the men. Get them back here. Do a damage assessment and regroup.”

Maru sighed. “Hell of a risk. The Army comes back, we’re dead.”

“We’re worse than dead if we don’t. Lot of rivals in this part of the state.”

Maru wiped a hand across the back of his neck. “Fair enough. So we regroup. Then what?”

“Scatter protocol.”

The big Maori thought it over. “Okay. They won’t all come back.”

“Then they leave with nothing. They complain, kill them.”

Maru looked at his men and gestured. They moved off toward the sound of horses clomping through grass. “I’ll do a BDA and report back. Where should I look for you?”

“In the center of camp.”

“Right, Chief.”

*****

There was a small group of infected pushing ineffectively against the cable fence surrounding the livestock. The animals kept their distance, but otherwise seemed unperturbed. Heinrich felt around his torso and found his kukri and pistol were still in place. He tried to remember if he had grabbed his rifle before fleeing the hail of red fire pouring from the sky the night before, but his head was pounding so hard he couldn’t think.

Focus on the task at hand
.

He drew his pistol, removed the magazine, and worked the slide. It seemed to work fine. Looking ahead, he saw the infected were now less than thirty yards away around a curve of the cable fence. They had not noticed him yet, but would soon. They always did.

Heinrich replaced the magazine in the gun, chambered a round, and walked to within ten yards of the undead. There were eight of them. His weapon held fifteen rounds, plenty enough to get the job done. He assumed a firing stance, leveled the sights, and squeezed the trigger. The report echoed across the plains, startling the livestock. Oxen and horses bayed and snorted as the undead whipped toward the sound of gunfire. The ghoul in Heinrich’s sights slumped to the ground in a limp heap.

The rest of the infected began shambling in his direction, mouths open, hands outstretched. Dimly, Heinrich noted that three of them were grays. They got off to a faster start than their still vaguely-human brethren and covered ground quicker. Heinrich shifted aim and dropped them before they were within five yards. Four left. Heinrich killed one more at point-blank range, then holstered his pistol.

His head hurt. His thoughts, much like his men, were scattered. He was in a bad situation. He had been caught by surprise and nearly lost everything and had been forced to flee in fear for his life like one of his victims. The sense of invincibility he had enjoyed the last few months was gone. In its place, buzzing angrily at the base of his skull, was the urge to kill something with his hands, an impulse that swelled and stretched and raked hot nails against the backs of his eyes. The ghouls were available. A living person would have been better, but Heinrich believed in making due with the resources on hand. He drew his kukri, the same one a Blackthorn had used to sever two of his fingers.

The first ghoul was a woman, middle aged when she died, probably turned at least a year ago. When she reached for him, Heinrich sidestepped, grabbed her wrist, and pulled her toward his outstretched ankle. She fell face first to the ground and was still for the briefest of instants. It was enough time for Heinrich to raise a boot and bring his heel down on the back of her neck with crushing force. There was a wet crunch and the ghoul went still.

The next one was there in an instant. Heinrich jumped a couple of feet backward to avoid its grasping hands. He was a strong man, but he had learned long ago not to test himself against even the smallest undead. Only a fool tried to overpower something that felt no pain. Instead, he rolled to his left, came up in a crouch at the ghoul’s side, and slashed at the back of its knee. Tendons and ligaments parted like frayed cord and the ghoul fell over. A short, brutal chop to the side of its skull ended its struggles.

With the last infected, Heinrich took his time. The kukri was a big knife, easily capable of removing limbs in skilled hands. And Heinrich was certainly skilled.

First, he took the arms off at the elbows so the ghoul could not grab him. Then, he hacked at the creature’s knees so it could not stand up. Satisfied it was no longer a threat, Heinrich stepped back and let it pull itself toward him on the stumps of its arms. He smiled as he watched and thought to himself he had to admire the thing’s dedication. It knew what it wanted and pursued that goal with relentless determination. Something he knew a thing or two about.

When Heinrich grew bored teasing the pathetic monster, he put a foot on the back of its head, pressed its face into the dirt, and hacked at the creature’ spine just below the base of its neck. The ghoul immediately went limp, but did not die. Heinrich backed off to admire his work. The creature’s mouth twitched uselessly, its milky white eyes rolling in its head, limbs paralyzed.

“Have a nice eternity,” Heinrich said, and walked away. On the way to his command tent he decided the exercise had done him good. He felt a little better now.

His pack, rifle, and other possessions were right where he had left them.

The tent had collapsed in the chaos, but the contents within were unharmed. Heinrich found enough unbroken posts to re-erect the command tent, and when finished, laid out the contents of his rucksack on his cot so he could check each item for damage. Everything was in good order, the most important item being his IR scope.

“Could have been a lot worse,” Heinrich muttered.

He sat in the stillness of the abandoned camp a few minutes, eyes closed, forcing the pain in his head to recede and reorganizing his thoughts. The sound of helicopter rotors and the searing blaze of red tracers flashed in his memory. He remembered shouts of surprise and screams of fear, the braying and bleating of livestock, dozens of men running in all directions at once, most of them tripping and falling in the darkness outside the ring of campfires. He remembered footsteps pounding away into the night.

Heinrich struggled to establish a timeline. He knew he had stood in the entryway to his tent when he first heard the chopper approach. Whatever he was doing before that moment was a dim blur. He let it go. It was not important. The next thing he remembered was seeing the tracers arc downward and slice through his men like a great flaming scythe. There had been more than fifty troops congregated in the center of camp while the booze was being handed out. He remembered hearing Carter tell someone to go fetch the women. Was that before or after?

Doesn’t matter
.

Of the fifty or so men gathered around the liquor crates, perhaps five or six managed to escape. The rest had been reduced to parts and pieces, little more than mush. Heinrich had seen it happen before, but never so close. The bullets had hit his troops with unbelievable ferocity, flattening them like human nails being driven into the ground by a thousand falling hammers. Men one second, a mess of indistinguishable chum the next. Then he was running, pushing himself as hard as he could, a single word blaring like an alarm klaxon in his brain: MINIGUN!

While fleeing toward the river, he had seen a few brave, disciplined souls raise their weapons and attempt to return fire. They had not known how doomed they were. They knew nothing about miniguns, how fast they fired, how accurate they were, or how easily a gunner could shift from one target to the next. Firing their weapons had made them stand out brilliantly in the gunner’s FLIR sights. A quick adjustment of the gunner’s aim, and the raiders were dead before the last tracer hit the dirt.

Heinrich had seen it, registered it, and kept running. He had slipped in the thick mud near the riverbank and stood back up and groped his way forward in the dark. Then he was in the river, the water shallow, only chest-high at its deepest. He struggled across, and when his feet found grass on the opposite bank, he took off at a sprint. Then there was a flash of white, and the next thing he remembered was waking up on the riverbank, soaked to the skin, with a hematoma the size of a walnut on his temple and his right eye swollen mostly shut. And now he sat in the same wet clothes looking at the only possessions he had owned before starting down the path that led him here, a path of blood and fire and pain, and wondered if he could mend what was left of the Storm Road Tribe.

Probably have to kill some people.

He thought about the first life he had ever taken, long before he joined the Marines. He had been twelve. The boy’s name was Bennie Woodhouse, and he had been a bullying shit. Heinrich had always been big for his age, so bullies rarely bothered him. But Bennie decided one day to embarrass him by pushing him down from behind so that he fell into a mud puddle. For a moment, Heinrich had been merely confused. Then he heard the laughter.

It was the first time he was ever in a fight. He did not remember it well. He knew he went at the boy and that Bennie was bigger and grossly fat and hard to move around. So he’d gone for the eyes with one hand and the balls with the other. Both found their mark. Heinrich remembered Bennie’s squeal, how he’d sounded like a pig being gutted alive. Then strong hands grabbed him and pulled him away and the burly history teacher who was also the football coach lifted him bodily and carried him to the principal’s office.

Bennie had wept while they sat next to each other, one hand clutching a bruised testicle and the other covering a left eye with an abraded retina. The principal droned on about how fighting was irresponsible and they were both to be suspended and he would be calling their parents to pick them up immediately. Heinrich had not cared. He had stared at Bennie and smiled the smile of the converted zealot. The assistant principal standing in the corner watched Heinrich’s face the whole time, head shaking, eyes sad. He knew what he was looking at. And for the first time in his life, Heinrich knew as well.

The fat fucker, as Heinrich always remembered Bennie, had spent the night in the hospital. Heinrich’s mother had been distraught. How could her sweet little boy have gotten into a fight? His father assured her he would get to the bottom of things, took his son by the shoulder, and marched him upstairs to his room. The elder Heinrich then closed the door and ordered his son, who still went by Johnnie in those days, to sit down on his bed.

“So what happened?”

Heinrich told him. Truthfully, and in exacting detail. His father listened without comment or expression.

“Bennie Woodhouse, huh?”

“Yes sir.” He always called his father ‘sir’. One did not call a former Marine Corps officer ‘daddy’ if one wanted to keep one’s teeth in one’s head.

“I know his father,” The old man said. “Used to work together at Tilbert Auto Supply. Want to know a secret about him?”

“Sir?”

“You want to know or not?”

Heinrich’s father was smiling. He found himself smiling back. “Yes sir.”

“Guy’s a fucking fairy.”

“You mean a fag?”

“Fairy, fag, same thing. Wife came home for lunch one day and caught him sucking some guy’s dick in the living room. You believe that shit? Right in his own house.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Damn right it is.”

Heinrich and his father stared silently a moment, both still smiling. Finally his father said, “So you put a hurtin’ on that fat little shit he calls a son, huh? Good. He had it coming. Kid ever bothers you again, stomp him flat and tell him his old man’s a cocksucker. See how he likes it.”

“What about mom?”

“Let me worry about her.”

As his father left the room he stopped, looked back, and winked. “Nice work, son.”

Before that day, Heinrich never had any feelings at all toward his father. Not love, or hate, or anything else. He had never felt much of anything for anyone except a stirring in his genitals around pretty girls. But in that moment, he felt a connection with Harold Martin Heinrich. The old man had, just for a moment, pulled back his veil and let his son see the toothy monster beneath. Heinrich had done the same, and from then on, there was a connection between the two of them. Not love, necessarily, but an understanding. An acceptance of like-minded beings. As he got older, he and his father developed a silent shorthand, often glancing at each other with mute amusement at some stupid utterance from someone they knew or taking shared delight in someone else’s misfortune. They never spoke of it, but they both knew it was there.

So two weeks later, when he caught up with Bennie and told him he was sorry and could the two of them go see a movie or something, and the boy accepted with the meekness of the beaten and humbled, and Heinrich stopped by his house to borrow money from his mom, his father had poked his head around the corner and given Heinrich a thoughtful look. He winked at his father and made a motion like breaking a stick. The old man’s eyes twinkled with delight and he mouthed,
be careful
.

Heinrich gave a thumbs up.

They did not go to the movies. When they got off the bus, Heinrich asked if Bennie wanted a milkshake before they went to the theatre. Of course, the fat little shit accepted. Heinrich said he knew a good place not far away. He then led Bennie into a dead-end alley between two empty buildings with boarded up windows. Bennie stopped, looked around, and asked where they were.

Heinrich answered by producing a hunting knife.

When he was finished, he left Bennie’s corpse under a pile of garbage and walked to the theatre alone. Along the way, he stopped to drop the knife in a storm drain and washed the blood from his hands in the bathroom of a gas station. He had popcorn and a soda with his movie.

When he got home, he made sure to put his clothes in a trash bag, and the next day, he dropped the bag in a dumpster behind the school cafeteria. Later, sitting in class, he watched a garbage truck pull away from the cafeteria building and felt warm inside.

The police came the day after. He told them he’d gone to the theatre alone after he and Bennie had an argument over which movie to watch and Bennie said he was going home. The questions went on for an hour before his mother decided they had bothered her son just about enough, and if they needed anything else, they could direct their questions to the family’s attorney.

It was another two days before a homeless guy found the body. Heinrich clipped the stories from the newspaper for the next couple of weeks and pasted them into a scrapbook and took them out at night and read them lovingly.

Afterward, every once in a while, Heinrich caught his father looking at him with an odd smile. His father knew what he had done, and wanted Heinrich to know he knew. They only spoke of it once, a year to the day after the murder. Heinrich and his father had been in the old man’s car driving to visit his mother’s sister in the hospital.

“So what was it like?” his father said.

Heinrich knew better than to play dumb. He scratched his cheek, looked out the window, and said, “It was a rush. Better than anything I’ve ever felt. Better than the time I talked Linda Welker into sucking my dick. It made me feel powerful. I think I want to do it again.”

His father nodded. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

They looked at each other and shared a smile.

And now, in the ruins of his camp, Heinrich realized he’d violated the one rule of killing his father had always admonished him to keep.

Be careful.

He had not been careful. He had been sloppy, and now he was paying the price for it.
Chalk it up to a lesson learned,
he thought and stood up. Things weren’t as bad as they could have been. He was still alive, after all. As for the men he had lost … well, they knew the risks when they signed on.

Heinrich changed into dry clothes and left his tent to find Maru.

*****

“I found Carter,” one of Heinrich’s sergeants said. “Or what’s left of him.”

Heinrich walked over and looked at the body. The head, part of the torso, and both left limbs were gone. The right arm was intact, however, and Heinrich recognized the tattoos. Maru walked over to stand next to him.

“Poor bastard.”

Heinrich grunted and looked at the sergeant. “He was my friend. Grab five men and bury him.”

“Yes sir. And the others?”

“Leave them. We’ll come back when we have more time.”

Heinrich turned and surveyed the bustle of men salvaging their caravan. At best count, there were sixty dead and four wounded. Two of the wounded were not expected to survive. Another twenty or thirty had either deserted or their bodies had not been found. That left Heinrich with just over a hundred and forty men. Not as strong as before, but still bigger than any other tribe Heinrich knew of.

“We got a status on the wagons?” he asked.

“We do,” Maru said. “Only four destroyed in the attack. Managed to salvage most of the cargo.”

Heinrich shook his head in amazement and pointed at the wagons. “A ten second strafe from that minigun and we’d be picking up splinters. But they didn’t. Single-minded motherfuckers probably didn’t even think to look at the wagons. Too focused on killing us and getting those women out of here. Could have crippled us, and yet here we are with our trade intact.”

“We got lucky, Chief.”

“Indeed.” Heinrich crossed his arms did a few calculations. “From the standpoint of trade and supplies, we’re no worse off than before.”

Maru looked at his chief sharply. “No worse off? Are you blind? You see all these corpses around here? They used to be your men.”

Heinrich returned the stare. Maru paled, closed his mouth, and took an involuntary step backward.

“Don’t state the fucking obvious to me, Maru. I am not fucking blind. I know we lost men. It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last. They’re gone, and we can’t get them back. And in case
you
didn’t notice, we’re in one fuck of a bad situation here. So since I’m the chief and it’s my job to focus on the men still alive and figure out how to keep them that way, I can’t sit around crying over troops we can’t save. If I seem callous to you, grow the fuck up. If my practicality offends your delicate little sensibilities, tough shit. It’s a hard world, and if you want to stay alive in it, you better be a hard motherfucker. Understood?”