This Shattered Land - 02 (12 page)

After
the better part of an hour, only a hundred or so infected were still moving
between the fence and the cliff. Gabe and I climbed down from our roosts and
gave Tom and Sarah the all clear. They were more than happy to take up their
M-4’s and help us deal with the remaining undead. We formed a firing line along
the fence and went to work dispatching the few stragglers that somehow managed
not to fall off the mountain. A few minutes and a lot of burned cordite later,
the last few revenants slumped to the ground with bullet-sized holes in their
skulls.

Gabe
and I stood outside the fence with the others for a few moments looking out
over our handiwork. My ears rang from the sound of gunfire, my shoulder was
sore from recoil, and my headache had returned with a pounding vengeance, but
in spite of all that I couldn’t help but feel a sense of elation. A horde of
over a thousand undead had attacked us, and we managed to defeat their threat
with only a little bit of damage to the fence and a minimal expenditure of
ammunition. My good mood was short lived, however, when I remembered that these
corpses didn’t find us on their own, but were led to us. Gabe made a gesture at
the vultures that were already circling overhead.

“Reckon
we ought to do something about this mess?” He said. “Damn buzzards ain’t gonna
wait too much longer.”

I
nodded in agreement. The last thing we needed was a swarm of giant carrion
eaters spreading bird crap and infected tissue all over the place. Better they
do that at the bottom of the cliff.

“Tell
you what, if you and Tom don’t mind pushing those bodies over the edge, I’ll
take Sarah and put down any crawlers still moving in the field.”

“Sounds
like a plan, come give us a hand if you get finished before we do.” He said.

I
clapped him on the shoulder and walked over to Sarah. She and Brian followed me
as I moved toward the eastern gate. Sarah noticed that her son was in tow and
rounded on him, pinning him in place with the kind of stern, no-nonsense glare
that mothers have used since time immemorial to stop unruly children in their
tracks.

“Where
exactly do you think you’re going?” She asked.

“Shouldn’t
I come help you two?” Brian said. He looked genuinely confused.

Sarah
opened her mouth to say something else, but I interrupted her.

“Its
okay, Sarah. He can stay close to me, I’ll make sure he’s safe. This is
important, he needs practice fighting the infected.”

Sarah
looked ready to argue for a few seconds, but then relaxed and let out a breath.

“You’re
right.” She said, reaching out to ruffle her son’s hair. “But you stay right
next to us, understand? Right next to us.”

Brian’s
face brightened, and he nodded. “Stay close. Got it.”

 “Alright,”
I said, gesturing with my rifle at the corpse-strewn field, “let’s get to
work.”

 Determined
not to be caught by surprise, I set a slow, deliberate pace as we walked among
the fallen undead, constantly searching the bodies around me for signs of
movement. Walkers are bad enough, but crawlers are the freaking worst. Some of
the infected are so physically ruined before they turn that they are unable to
get to their feet. Walkers you can see coming from a mile away, and you can
hear them howling for flesh if their throat hasn’t been torn out. Crawlers
almost always have their throats ripped out, and because they are so low to the
ground it is easy to overlook them. All it takes is one bite, one infected
fingernail breaking the skin, one little moment of carelessness, and it is game
over. And don’t go thinking the crawlers are too slow to keep up with the
walkers, some of them can cover ground at virtually the same speed even over
long distances, depending on how fucked up they are. The damn things never get
tired.

As
we made our way down the mountain, Brian stayed behind me while Sarah fanned
out to my right. A vulture landed on the ground a few feet from me and began
picking at the milky white eyes of a dead ghoul. I turned to shoo it away and
caught a flash of something unnaturally bright out of the corner of my eye. I
almost turned to look at it, but caught myself at the last second and pretended
to keep searching for crawlers. Without being too obvious about it, I turned in
the direction of the glare and scanned the trees across the meadow without
actually looking up at them. My steps slowly brought me closer to Sarah, and I
made sure to put Brian squarely behind me.

“Sarah,
don’t look up and don’t react, okay?” I said in a low voice, still scanning the
ground. “I think we have company.”

To
her credit, the only reaction she gave was a hardening of her expression. The
spirited, laughing woman I had come to know over the last few weeks disappeared
in an instant. In her place stood a hardened, steely-eyed federal agent.

“Where?”
She asked, keeping her voice just above a whisper.

“High
in the trees, at my one o’clock.”

“How
the hell can you see that far? I can’t make out a damn thing.”

The
sharp flash of light glinted through the trees in the same place as before. I cursed
under my breath. Someone was looking at us through a pair of binoculars, or
more likely a long-range scope. Apprehension sank sharp fangs into my stomach
and kicked my heartbeat into overdrive.

“I
don’t have time to explain. Just trust me, someone’s out there.” I replied.

When
I was younger, my vision was absolutely awful. I think it was twenty-seventy
five, or something like that. For most of my life I was damn near blind as a
bat without a pair of thick coke-bottle glasses perched on my nose. Then, thank
the mighty heavens, came the advent of Lasik surgery. On my twentieth birthday
my old man forked out three grand for the procedure, and ever since then my
eyesight has been twenty-ten. Not twenty-twenty, but twenty-ten. As in way better
than normal eyesight. It was pretty novel at first being able to see farther
than most other people, but after a while I just got used to it. I never really
thought about it much. In the next few seconds, I found myself once again
grateful to my father for paying for that expensive surgery. If not for his
generosity, and the skill of the doctor who fixed my eyes, I never would have
seen the distant figure swinging the barrel of a rifle in Sarah’s direction.

“Sarah,
get down!” I shouted.

Smart
lady that she is, she didn’t hesitate. She flew to her right and executed a
quick roll before popping up to one knee and bringing up her M-4. The moment I
shouted at her, I thumbed the selector on my HK to full auto and blasted a
salvo that ripped into the tree limbs around where the gunman was hiding. The
shots probably wouldn’t hit him at that rate of fire, but I wasn’t trying to
kill him just yet. I needed to suppress
his
fire, and keep him from sending
aimed fire downrange in our direction. Sarah fired off a quick burst from her
carbine in the same general direction as me, and then motioned frantically at
her son.

“Brian,
get your ass over here!”

He
hesitated in confusion for a moment before sprinting over to stand behind his
mom.

“Come
on, stay behind me.” Sarah said, and started moving back toward the cabin with
one hand on the boy’s shoulder.

I
kept up a steady stream of fire at our would-be attacker until the slide locked
open on my rifle. Sarah picked up the slack with carefully aimed shots while I
dropped my mag and slapped in a fresh one. With the HK’s optics out of my line
of sight, I could see the man practically falling out of the tree in his haste
to take cover. Even if none of our shots found their mark, they hit close
enough to send volleys of high-velocity wood shrapnel into him. If he wasn’t
shot, he was probably still hurt and bleeding in a dozen places. I held my fire
and hesitated for a moment, unsure what to do next. Sarah ran out of ammo just
as the man hit the ground harder than he meant to and pitched over into the
brush.

I
am not normally the shoot-first type, but pointing a gun at someone I care
about is a rocket-fast express train to the absolute pinnacle of my shit list. Putting
Sarah in his crosshairs was a dumb move on this guy’s part, but he really hadn’t
done anything to hurt us.

Or
had he?

A
massive horde of undead had just tried to overrun our defenses, and this guy
was sitting in a tree with a scoped rifle watching the whole show go down like
Saturday night at the marquee. At least I assumed he was. What other possible
reason could he have for being up there? Maybe he just happened to be nearby
when the swarm hit and he climbed a tree to get away from them, fox-hunt style?

Yeah,
right.

Horde
of ghouls, guy in a tree with a scoped rifle, no attempt to call out to us or
make contact in any way, and I’m entertaining the thought that this dude had
nothing to do with it? No way. That is just too damn many coincidences.

All
of this flashed through my mind in scarcely more than a second. I made a decision
and took off at a full sprint across the field. Mister Tree Sniper got back to
his feet and brought his rifle to his shoulder to take aim at me. Maybe he
wasn’t my enemy before, but he sure as hell was now. I zigged to my right and
sent a poorly aimed burst of fire in his direction. I didn’t hit him, but it did
distract him enough to throw off his aim. His shot sent up a plume of dirt about
twenty feet in front of me. Twenty feet may sound like a wide miss, but trust
me, when bullets are flying at you even twenty feet is un-fucking-comfortably
close to the mark.

 “Sarah,
get Brian back to the bunker, and send Gabe after me.” I shouted over my
shoulder.

I
didn’t turn around to look at them, I knew Sarah was probably on her way before
I even said anything. Slowing down long enough to shout at them gave the guy
with the hunting rifle sufficient time to turn and bolt off into the woods. I
growled something vile and chased after him.

Two
years of walking up and down mountains every day in the high country had made
my legs lean and strong. They fired like two pistons as I hurled myself in a
serpentine pattern toward the forest. A loud report sounded at about the same
time a bullet zinged off a small boulder to my right, close enough to spray my
leg with shards of rock shrapnel. I ignored the pain and switched direction,
zig-zagging the last few meters to the cover of the forest. A short leap
carried me over the trunk of a dead maple, and I skidded into cover behind a
wide oak tree. My assailant’s rifle cracked again, breaking splinters from a
tree off to my left. I could tell which direction he was shooting from, but I
couldn’t see the shooter. Most bolt action rifles only hold between three and
five rounds, so I knew he was going to have to reload soon.

I
leaned around the edge of the tree using the ‘cut the pie’ method Gabe taught
me to limit my target profile, fired in his general direction, and then ducked
back behind cover. He took the bait and fired again. The bullet hit the tree
just to the left of where my head was a moment ago. Four rounds down for him.
Either he had only one left, or he was reloading. I debated what to do; he had
me zeroed in, and risking another shot would end with my brain splattered on
the fallen leaves behind me if he had another bullet. Not doing anything wasn’t
an especially appealing option either. Another bullet ricocheted from just
above my head on the opposite side of the tree. I grinned. That was pretty
stupid.

I
set my rifle’s selector to semi-auto and leaned out to fire, hoping to catch
him reloading. He proved not to be quite as dumb as I thought he was, and rather
than sit there feeding cartridges into his weapon, he had gotten up and ran
further into the forest to put some distance between us. I got up and pursued
him a few steps, then had to dive for cover when he skidded to a halt, rounded
on me, and snatched a pistol from his belt before I could bring my rifle up. Three
shots blazed out rapid fire while I scurried on my belly as fast as I could
behind a thick stand of trees. I had no idea where the shots went, but they
didn’t hit me, so at least that part worked out okay.  I heard him move off to
my right and stop. A metallic rasping sound came from behind a tree telling me
he had brought the bolt of his rifle back to reload. Or maybe he opened the
chamber nice and loud to make me think that was what he was doing while he
aimed in my direction with his pistol. That’s what I would have done, anyway. It
also occurred to me that I didn’t know for sure that he was the only bad guy I
might be facing. He could very well be leading me further into the forest and
straight into an ambush if he had friends nearby. I could break off and sneak
back to the cabin, but if I did that, I would lose the chance to find out if he
was responsible for the massive ghoul attack. If he was, I didn’t want to give
him a chance to come up with a plan B and take another shot at us.

I
crawled behind cover and worked my way up to one knee with my rifle held at the
low ready. A quick peek around the tree in front of me did nothing to reveal my
enemy’s location. Fallen leaves covered the forest floor under every tree,
which meant that a loud series of conspicuous crunches would herald any attempt
by either one of us to change position.

The
other guy probably couldn’t shoot me from where he was or he would have tried
it already, so I took a few deep breaths, forced myself to relax, and settled in
to wait. With help on the way, time was on my side. If I could keep this
asshole’s attention, that would give Gabe a chance to work his ninja-magic to
sneak up on him and capture him alive.