These Dead Lands: Immolation (11 page)

“What’s the op, sir?” Ballantine asked as he hurried over, carrying his rifle.

Behind him, Stilley, Guerra, and Tharinger dismounted and took up defensive positions. Reader stayed with the .50, keeping an eye out from the cupola.

Hastings pulled his laminated map from his pocket and spread it out across the truck’s warm hood. “We need to find someplace to go. What do you think?”

Ballantine looked at the map. “Well, population centers are out. We don’t want to go anywhere near those. They’ll be reeker central, and we’ve got enough problems to deal with right now.”

“Roger that. But it’s going to be dark soon. We’ll need to find someplace to hole up. We don’t want to spend the night out here. I’d rather move at night myself, but we’ve got civilians with us now. And we’ve got to stop to check out that kid.”

“Okay. Roger that.”

“We’ve been passing by farmhouses for the past couple of miles. Let’s find a place that’s not right on the road but set back a little bit. But not too far off the road. We can make better time on the pavement if things go sideways. Also, we should look for one that’s made out of brick, just in case reekers attack.”

Ballantine nodded. “Sounds good. A second story might be a good thing to have, too. We can always block the stairway, but if we get surrounded by a few hundred of the fuckers…”

“If we get surrounded like that, it wouldn’t matter where we were. We’re not going to be able to make a lot of fortifications in the amount of time we have, so they’d be able to get to us, anyway.”

“Understood.” Ballantine checked his watch. “We’ve got about two hours of full sunlight left, so we’d better get on that.”

Hastings nodded and ran a hand over his dirty face. A shower would be awesome, but that probably wasn’t in the cards anytime soon. “All right, let’s get back on the road. If we don’t spot anything suitable in an hour or so, we’ll have to take the best thing we can find.”

*

Twenty minutes later,
they came across the kind of house Hastings had hoped for. It wasn’t all that far from the road, and it appeared to be deserted—not that it mattered. Hastings thought several armed soldiers approaching wouldn’t exactly make some homesteader with an itchy trigger finger go all gonzo, especially when he or she caught sight of the .50 and the grenade launcher on the Humvees. Hartman went first, easing his Humvee up the bumpy asphalt driveway with Guerra hanging onto the MK19 and keeping it oriented on the house. Hastings was next in his captured truck, then Ballantine in his rig, followed by Stilley in the second Humvee. The house was silent, and through the windows, Hastings saw no signs of movement.

Hastings put the GMC in park, cut the engine, and slipped out. “Ballantine, stay here and keep an eye on things. Send Stilley forward.”

Ballantine motioned to Stilley, and the soldier looked surprised to have been given something to do other than drive a Humvee. Hastings was happy to put a smile on the guy’s face, but he’d chosen Stilley because the soldier was pretty severely disliked by the rest of the troops, so if he caught a bullet in the head, no one would be weeping. And it was time for the loudmouthed soldier to start doing something.

“Yes, sir?” Stilley fairly brayed when he walked up to Hastings, his rifle in his hands.

“Try and keep it down, Stilley. You and I are going to secure this place. Stick with me, and don’t say anything unless you need to. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Stilley said, trying to keep his voice down and not failing entirely.

“Okay. Here we go.” Hastings looked back at the vehicles and saw Guerra and Reader had the farmhouse covered with the cupola weapons, while Ballantine, Hartman, and Tharinger had taken defensive positions outside the vehicles. He continued his scan, surveying the immediate area, but saw no movement. No people and, more importantly, no reekers.

He led Stilley to the front of the house, keeping his eyes on the windows. He mounted the three cement stairs and crossed the porch. Stilley held back, covering him and not crossing in front of the window that overlooked the porch. At the door, Hastings listened for a twenty count. He heard nothing. He figured he had two options: kick it down and see what happened, or knock and see what happened.

He chose the latter. Standing off to one side, he rapped on the door three times with his knuckles then dropped back, holding his M4 ready.

No response.

He looked at Stilley, who only shrugged. Sweat ran down the soldier’s dark face, and his eyes looked a little wild.

“Try not to shoot me in the back,” Hastings whispered.

Stilley nodded.

Hastings reached out and tried the doorknob. It turned freely, and he eased the door open. The foyer was dark and rather uninviting. Hastings edged forward, his M4 pressed tight against his shoulder. He sensed Stilley moving in behind him, a bit closer than Hastings would have liked. He resisted the urge to turn and tell the black soldier to step back a bit, to not bunch up so they were both targets, but he feared that Stilley might respond with his Foghorn Leghorn voice, and that just wouldn’t do. Remaining covert for as long as possible was in their best interest.

The foyer was basically a tiny hallway that led directly into the living room. Old dusty furniture sat on well-worn carpet. A battered leather recliner was positioned strategically before a surprisingly large LED television. Ashtrays were everywhere, and all of them were full. The reek of old cigarette smoke hung in the air, but beneath that, there was something else, something pungent and rotten, like four-day-old garbage left out in baking heat.

He led the way deeper into the house, clearing every room, moving as cautiously as he could while mindful of the fact that everyone else was still outside, clearly visible. Despite their weapons, they were another collection of targets for the reekers, and Hastings hated leaving them exposed for longer than necessary. Stilley breathed loudly beneath his facial armor. Hastings struggled to keep from gagging from the stench that strengthened as they moved through the house. The odor grew even more pervasive when they entered the kitchen. Then he saw why: a golden retriever lay on the warped tile floor, surrounded by its own excrement, its belly distended. Empty food and water bowls were against the far, and the wooden back door bore many scratch marks. The dog had obviously been dead for days, but nothing had been chewing on it, so Hastings took that as a good sign.

He keyed his radio. “Ballantine.”

“Go ahead, Six.”

“Ground floor is clear. We’re moving upstairs. Over.”

“Roger. We’re still good to go out here. No activity. Over.”

“Roger.”

Hastings and Stilley moved up the stairs. They cleared the four bedrooms, three of which seemed to not have seen any visitors since the ’70s. The master bedroom was a mess, not from anything untoward, just the apparent fact the usual resident was something of a pig. The musty sheets on the king-size poster bed were rumpled, the blankets tangled up at the foot.

Whoever had lived there had either cleared out or fallen victim to some dreadful experience elsewhere and was unable to return. Given the body of the dog in the kitchen, Hastings felt the latter possibility was the clear winner.

“Ballantine, we’re good. House seems secure. Let’s pull the vehicles around back then get going on fortifying this place.”

“Roger that, Six.”

*

There wasn’t much
that could be done to harden the old farmhouse beyond blocking the windows and barricading the doors. They tossed the dead dog out into one of the fields—they didn’t want to take the time to bury it, even though its stench could serve to lure the dead onto the premises—but Hastings and Ballantine both felt that if they kept all signs the property was inhabited to a minimum, then the reekers would move on. The zombies didn’t exhibit a remarkable ability to determine exactly where their prey might be, beyond the normal five senses.

Kay Ballantine and her kids set about cleaning the kitchen. Diana and the autistic boy—“His name is Kenny,” she had informed Hastings—stayed in the living room. The boy wore only a pull-up diaper, and his narrow chest and arms gleamed with a pale luminescence in the dwindling light that managed to penetrate the dingy curtains. He was beginning to exhibit some signs of stress, muttering in a singsong voice while he stared at his right hand and flexed his fingers. Hastings worried about that. They had inspected the boy’s injuries as well as they could, and he had definitely been sodomized—something that left Hastings feeling a useless kind of fury, even though he had left the boy’s attackers to a miserable fate. His injuries did not appear to be severe, but he would be uncomfortable for the next few days. Hastings thought Kenny would get good medical care at Fort Indiantown Gap if the National Guard post was still there.

But until then, Hastings was concerned that the boy might start acting out. He had no real experience dealing with children afflicted with autism, but he was aware that they could be incredibly uncooperative, and that could be problematic, in the extreme. While he didn’t want to reduce the boy to a tactical inconvenience, remaining covert and not attracting attention was one of the keys to the group’s continued survival. If the boy started screaming and crying, their mission could fly right off the rails.

Hastings knelt by the pair on the couch. The boy leaned against Diana, his eyes big as he stared at his hand.

Diana ran her fingers through Kenny’s dark hair. “His mother did this to keep him calm.”

Hastings nodded. “How active is he?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, how much noise does he make?”

Diana frowned. “He cries. Why?”

“Noise isn’t our friend right now.”

Her eyes narrowed. “So what do you suggest, General? We take him out back and plug him?”

Hastings felt his temper click upward a notch. “Don’t be an asshole, lady. We need to figure out how to keep him occupied and quiet. You going to help with that?”

Diana sighed. “What did you have in mind?”

“There’s a cellar. We could move him down there. He seems to like you. You could go down with him.”

The color drained from her face. “A cellar?”

“Yeah. What’s the problem?”

“Small, tight, and dark, right?”

“I’m afraid so. What, you’re claustrophobic?”

She nodded slightly. “Yeah. I don’t do places like that very well. Sorry.”

“Okay. Maybe Ballantine’s wife and kids—”

“I’ll do it if I need to. But if something happens, you guys aren’t going to leave us down there, are you?”

Hastings shook his head. “No way. No one gets left behind. We’re a team.”

Kenny stopped staring at his hand and looked up at Hastings, his eyes dark and somewhat mournful. Hastings gave the kid the best smile he could manage under the circumstances. He and the kid had something in common. Their families were only memories, though Hastings hoped the kid didn’t have much facility to remember such things. For himself, the pain of losing his wife and son had left a huge crevasse in Hastings’s soul that he didn’t think he could ever fill.

“So when do you want us to move down?” Diana asked.

At the sound of her voice, the boy went back to studying his wagging fingers.

“In a bit. We need to move a mattress or something down there and do another vulnerability assessment. We might put Missus Ballantine and the rest of the kids down there, as well. Maybe that would help?”

“Maybe,” Diana said. “However you want to play it, General.”

Hastings rose. “I’m not a general. I’m a captain. But if it makes you feel better, I’m MacArthur and Patton all rolled into one.”

“Who are they?”

Hastings shook his head. “Never mind. Sit tight. We’ll come for you in a bit.”

He found Ballantine standing watch over his wife and kids in the kitchen. As the senior NCO, Ballantine should have been directly overseeing the fortification process, even though Hartman, Reader, Tharinger, and Stilley had it well in hand. If nothing else, he should have been standing overwatch on the second floor, keeping an eye out for inbound reekers and ensuring they had a line of retreat. Instead, he was hanging around his family. Hastings understood the desire to do so, but Ballantine’s giving in to it was enough to make Hastings more than slightly angry.