Surviving the Dead (Book 7): The Killing Line (9 page)

A squeeze of the trigger made one less of them in the world. I shifted aim to a man of middle height, clothes worn away by time and the elements; mouth a rictus of dried blood, shredded lips, and blackened teeth. I fired again and he fell out of sight.

The next target appeared. I did my best not to look at it too closely, especially the eyes. The eyes are the worst. Wide, bloodshot, and whitish in appearance. The bleached out irises are always dilated and fixed with malevolent intensity on whatever prey they happen to be pursuing.

In this case, me.

Unlike many people, I do not hate the infected. They did not ask to be what they are. In fact, most of them fought tooth and nail to avoid their fate. But they didn’t. And now they are trapped in a half-existence of mindless rage and unending hunger. When I kill them, I do not feel vindicated. I feel no elation or sense of revenge satisfied. I feel a small swell of pity, and I feel I have done the person they once were a kindness.

“Cease fire,” Sarah called out.

We complied. The horde was only ten meters away now. 

“On me.”

The riders in front of me followed Sarah as I gave Red a light kick. He stopped sniffing through the snow, raised his head, and set off after the horse in front of him. I had to tug the reins to keep him from getting too close.

We rode westward around the horde until we were directly in their center. Sarah called a halt and we reset formation. I fired the last few rounds in my magazine, dropped it, drew a fresh one, and stowed the old one. A short time later I had to reload again.
Four left,
I told myself.

We had whittled the horde down by half when Sarah called another cease fire and repositioned us. Jones followed along at a distance, one hand resting on a battle axe that looked like something a Viking would carry on a raid. I wondered where he’d gotten the trade to afford something like that. Custom-forged hand weapons are expensive, and guardsmen aren’t paid all that well.

The next halt came at the northern side of the horde. The ghouls in front of us were in full disarray, stumbling in the snow and bouncing off one another and tripping over their fallen brethren. I had noticed during the excitement that Sarah and the guardsmen were focused primarily on the front ranks of undead, so I had shifted aim to ghouls farther in the back, anticipating we might have to come at them from the other side. My forethought was paying off.

No grays remained, all of them having died permanently at the outset of the fight. The ghouls still in play were all slower ones, crippled to varying degrees by damaged limbs. And not all of the damage had occurred when they died. Ghouls are clumsy. They tend to trip over things, step on unstable objects, and attempt to cross terrain they simply lack the wherewithal to navigate. The results are dislocated ankles, broken knees, compound fractures, and other severe mechanical injuries. Ghouls feel no pain, but the human machine relies on its component parts for ambulation. Consequently, even in warm weather, these remaining infected would have moved at a snail’s pace. In the cold, they were proverbial sitting ducks.

“Open fire.”

I was already sighted in and waiting. A ghoul dropped. Then another. And another. And another. Half a magazine emptied itself seemingly of its own volition. I was squeezing the trigger on the sixteenth round when I heard Jones call out behind me.

“Garrett, on our six!”

I turned and my gaze followed where he pointed. A small knot of a dozen or more infected were straggling from the treeline behind us, still over fifty yards away.

One of the duties of the anchor is to watch the team’s back and warn of any encroaching hostiles. Jones had done his job. I mentally commended him as I shouted to Sarah. She gave a thumb’s up and kept her concentration on the task at hand, trusting me to handle things. I had no intention of letting her down.

“Need a hand?” Jones asked as I rode by.

“No, stay on anchor. Good looking out, by the way.”

If he acknowledged, I did not hear it. I slung my rifle across my back and drew my falcata. The wind picked up and drove streamers of stinging white against my eyes, forcing me to stop long enough to don my goggles.

Should have done that from the beginning, numbnuts. You’re getting sloppy in your old age. Screw your head on straight and focus.

The voice in my head sounded remarkably like Gunnery Sergeant Tyrone Locklear, the tall, whipcord thin drill instructor with dark black skin and fearsome eyes who, all those years ago on Paris Island, took a raw, oversized eighteen-year-old kid and turned him into a Marine. I shook my head to clear the memories and gripped my sword.

“Come on, Red. Get up.”

A light kick, and the horse stretched his legs to a light gallop. I pulled the reins just a bit to slow him down. Red is big and long-legged, not unlike his owner, and when he gets a mind to, he can build up a head of steam. I wanted him moving quickly, but not so quickly I could not swing accurately. When Red slowed to the right speed I loosened my hold on the reins.

We had done this enough times Red knew what to do. Without prompting, he angled toward the infected coming up ahead of us so that we would miss him by less than three feet. I dug my feet into the stirrups and whirled my sword overhead in anticipation of the blow. The blade spun toward my right side, a reminder of a lesson learned the hard way: always swing
away
from your horse.

Not long after acquiring Red, I had been on a patrol not unlike this one. I had ridden him close to a rank of ghouls and swung my falcata in the usual cross-body pattern that I had grown accustomed to. It worked very well when I was standing on the ground with my feet planted. On that day, however, cruising and bouncing along at close to fifteen miles an hour, my aim had been off and my sword glanced off the top of the ghoul’s head. I had put too much force in the swing, I realized too late, and could only watch helplessly as the out-of-control blade swept toward my horse’s shoulder. Thankfully, the angle was such that the only injury was the last few millimeters of sharp edge drawing a thin line of blood on Red’s skin. He barely noticed.

I, on the other hand, had been horrified. A couple of inches lower, and the thick, heavy blade would have buried itself in my horse’s shoulder tissue and probably sent us both hurtling and tumbling to our deaths. It was a mistake I had vowed never to repeat.

So as we reached the ghoul, I made sure to swing out, down, and back up on the follow through. I did not look back to see if my aim was true. I could tell by the way it felt: the crunch, the twist of blade through soft brain matter, the way the sword cleared the skull easily and drifted back up to shoulder level without noticeable friction. If I had done it wrong, the blade would have gotten stuck and been wrenched from my grasp. The fact I was still holding it was all the reassurance I needed.

I had just enough time to reposition and swing at the next ghoul. The top half of its head sailed off like a Frisbee, dripping blood and blackish-red brain matter as it flew. The sparkle of my blade’s polished steel reminded me of a haiku I read long ago:

The bright blade flashes,

inscribing the final arc

on all tomorrows.

I kept my arm in motion and hit four more undead before hauling the reins to the left and circling for another pass. If my left hand were still fully intact, I would simply have switched grips and reversed direction. But my left hand was not fully intact. A bullet from a Kalashnikov wielded by a piece of marauding scum, who happened to be part of a group calling themselves the Crow Hunters, had taken my left ring finger off at the second knuckle. All that was left was a small nubbin I could wiggle around a little. I had been working on strengthening the hand to compensate, but was not yet confident enough to trust my life to it. I was beginning to wonder if I ever would be.

So I rode back to the other side of the encroaching undead, turned Red toward my targets, and kicked his flanks. Another pass reduced the number of infected to three. Red was showing signs of fatigue, so I let him rest, slid my rifle around, and clipped the last few ghouls with headshots.

Back at the formation, Sarah and the others had cut the horde down to no more than two dozen. Just as I arrived, she called a cease fire.

“All right, that’s enough,” she said. “Stake your horses and draw hand weapons. Gabe, we good on our six?”

“All clear.”

“Good. Get ready to move in on foot. Make sure you cover your eyes and mouths. Riordan, I want you on overwatch.”

He looked disappointed. “Will do.”

I dismounted, and, from a saddlebag, removed a stake and a short length of rope with a spring-loaded hook clip on one end. The rope had a lanyard spliced into it so it could loop around the stake, which I drove into the ground with the back of my hatchet. Finished, I connected the hook clip to Red’s halter.

“Hang out here, big guy. Be right back.”

He snorted and lowered his muzzle to root in the snow for dead grass.

The others fanned out at five yard intervals, Riordan still atop his mount with his rifle at the ready should any of us get into trouble. I moved to put my hatchet back in the saddlebag, then looked at it and thought,
why not?
It’s just a hatchet. If I lose it, I have plenty more. And if I can’t hold onto it, I drop it and rely on my sword. Be no worse off than I was before.

Riordan saw the axe in my left hand and raised his eyebrows as I walked by, but said nothing. I took my place at the end of the line next to McCoy. He held a long, crude cleaver that looked to have been forged from leaf springs. I had seen quite a few of them around lately. A blacksmith had set up shop in nearby Brownsville and was turning out effective, if not aesthetically pleasing weapons and selling them relatively cheap. The others down the line held mostly wood-cutting axes, with the exception of Jones, who hefted his battle-axe with the enthusiasm of a child with a new toy.

Sarah held up a hand. “On my command.”

We all looked at her.

“Advance.”

We approached the horde at a steady pace. I was tempted to start singing cadence, but knew the distraction would not be appreciated.

The hatchet felt heavy in my gloved left hand. I had cut the ring finger on the glove to size and sewed it shut so it would not interfere with my grip. In fact, I had done the same thing with all my gloves. The first time Allison saw me wearing a pair, she’d said, “Aw, that’s so cute. A nubbin sock.” I was not amused. She looked at me a moment after speaking and saw something in my eyes that made her face go blank.

“Sorry, Gabe. That was inappropriate.”

I grunted and shrugged it off.

To my left, Jones was the first to make contact. There was no whoop of satisfaction, no belligerent shouting, no colorfully worded challenges. Just a grunt of effort, a meaty
thunk
, and the sound of a body collapsing.

I drew close to my first target. She had been a teenage girl, once. Probably had been pretty before a ghoul bit off half her face. A shriveled length of nerve tissue dangled down her cheek, leading me to guess an unsocketed eye once dangled there. Something, somewhere along the way had sheared it off. As I swung my sword into her cranium, I wondered where she had left it and if it was still there, or if it had rotted away.

There was not time for further pondering. Another ghoul, a big one, appeared in front of me. He stumbled on the body of the girl I had just killed, giving me a clear shot at his throat. A swipe of my arm, and his head tumbled to the ground. Immediately to my left, I heard McCoy curse.

“Riordan! Sword’s stuck.”

“Got it.”

Eric’s rifle cracked a few times as he covered McCoy. I heard the man grunting and mumbling as he worked to free his weapon, but I did not turn to look. There were too many infected headed my way.

My next two targets were practically tripping over one another. I would not have time to hit one and then the other with just my sword. Time to use the hatchet.

I let them get almost within lunging distance, than sidestepped and lashed out with my hatchet. The sharp blade bit into a skull, crushing the bone as it entered. I gave it a twist and it pulled free. My grip remained firm all throughout the process. I had expected it to slip in my grasp, but it did not. Maybe all those hours spent squeezing a rubber ball were finally paying off.

There was no time to celebrate, however. No sooner than the first ghoul fell, the second was on me. Its hands reached out and latched onto my MOLLE vest with frightening strength. But this was not my first fight. I knew better than to try and dislodge it. Plenty of people had died over the years because they panicked and did exactly that. Rather, the best thing to do was to remain calm and use my natural advantages over the ghoul. Namely agility.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Eric swing his rifle my way. “Gabe, you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I shouted.

The first thing I did was cross my left hand over and stick the head of my hatchet in the ghoul’s mouth. It bit down on instinct, its jaw muscles flexing hard enough to chip several of its front teeth. The second thing I did was glance behind me to make sure the way was clear and quickly backpedal a few steps. This stretched the ghoul’s arms and forced it to struggle to keep up. Now that it was off balance, it was a simple thing to twist my body and sweep the legs from beneath it. I put a knee on its chest, reversed my grip on my sword, and plunged the tip into the ghoul’s sinus cavity at the same moment I yanked my hatchet free. Bone crunched and thick blood ran out of the ghoul’s face, but its grip did not loosen. I dropped the hatchet and, using my left hand as a hammer, bashed the pommel of my falcata until the tip penetrated through the back of the infected’s skull. The grip relaxed and the hands fell free.