August Burning (Book 3): Last Stand (2 page)

The fool saw him now. The portly man dropped his first slug, and it clattered loudly on the marble. His hands shook and his beard vibrated as he saw Troy’s men surrounding him in the foyer. Troy could make out his face now, in the morning light.

“It’s going to be a lovely day, I think,” Troy said. “Do you hear the morning birds outside?”

As the sweaty man finally slid a slug into his weapon, Troy bounded across the space and delivered a hard kick to his groin. As he fell to his knees, Troy snatched the weapon from the air.

“Are you from the Citadel?” The brigand croaked through his tears. “What faction are you? What is this!?” His eyes danced around the room, struggling to interpret the heavily armed soldiers that now stood before him.

Troy removed his helmet. “The Eagle isn’t a very well know faction. We like to keep it that way. You probably thought they would send the Lion straight through the front door, with their loud shield formations and rusty melee weapons…or maybe you thought the Bear would meander around the outskirts of the mansion with their old guns…like this one you managed to steal. Or maybe you thought the Wolf…with their hunting bows. No.” Troy kneeled before the man, so he could smell his putrid breath. He was probably thirty. He looked forty. “No. You see, those factions all deal with the infected. There is only one faction that deals with other survivors that betray the Citadel.” Troy tapped his Eagle insignia as he spoke.

He rose, and turned on his heel, confident his own men would finish the job. “The Citadel sends its regards.”

He heard a pop that echoed like thunder in the marble foyer. Seven.

Chapter Two

The Citadel

She loved the feeling of his rough fingers tickling her scar tissue. It had been a long winter, and a slow spring. Adira shivered, and laughed lightly.

“At least you let me touch it now…”

Adira pursed her lean lips and rubbed her aches and bruises. “I’m going to miss summer,” she said, before turning to Jaxton. His brown beard had been trimmed back from its winter glory, and his head was shaved. There was a scar above his left cheek, and dozens of others secreted away across his body. But they were all scarred these days.

“Remember last summer? When we couldn’t even bathe because the infected were still wandering near all the rivers and lakes?”

Adira shook her head. “I remember discovering how humans really smell, for the first time. I remember learning how to stop caring. But you stuck around,” she winked. The pair pulled away from each other and kept walking around the back of the old field house. As they rounded the corner a pair of survivors jumped to their feet for their officer. Adira waved their salutes down, not even bothering to make eye contact.

“Did the Eagle succeed?” Adira asked sideways.

Jaxton nodded, hoping that no one had overheard. Troy’s unit had an almost mythical aura, and he hoped to keep it that way. “Of course. Those idiots that stole our supplies, beat up three of our men, and occupied the Mansion got what they deserved.”

“So they were all killed?” Adira asked softly.

Jaxton sighed. “I don’t ask questions. The Eagle gets an order. They execute it.” He noticed Adira’s measured silence, and continued. “I can’t control the faction leaders like I can my own men. Ultimately he answers to you and I, I suppose, but Troy needs to have some of his own authority. And besides, it’s no coincidence Wilder found his way onto the team.”

Adira chuckled, supremely confident. “Your little inside man?”

A girl approached, her hair totally shaved. Her bright eyes flashed happily and she grinned. “Adira!” she shouted.

Jaxton slowed, but Adira kept strolling forward, as if she was in a park one fine Sunday before the Outbreak. “Don’t tell me about the gasoline supply, I already know.”

The girl fell in alongside the couple. Jaxton admired the rearing horse on her olive
tank top.  Adira had chosen a fine symbol for her faction. The Destrier had never let anyone down.
“We ran the horses into the ground for that extraction yesterday, for the Eagle’s retreat from the Mansion. We need to be more aggressive taming those foals. They’ve never seen the infected before, and when they do-“

Adira finally paused and turned to her officer with a knowing smile. “Kylie, you don’t have to ask permission from me to make these decisions. You’re my first officer for a reason.”

Kylie blushed and fought to control it. Jaxton guessed she was only twenty or so, and had shown up in the spring with other groups of wandering survivors, fleeing the Hordes. Adira rubbed her shoulders briefly, like a stern matron would her child. “Then break the foals in. They’re big enough to be part of the full unit now.”

Kylie nodded, delighted. She flashed a quick smile at Jaxton and dashed back towards the pastures over the old baseball fields, where six trainers were working with the horses already.

“She reminds me of everything and everyone before the Outbreak.” Jaxton mused aloud.

Adira rapped him on the arm playfully, her sheared black hair shifting only slightly in the summer breeze. “Some innocence is harder to crush than you might think. I admire it.”

The pair strolled between rows of ATVs and pickup trucks, all modified with metal bumpers and shields. Half a dozen mechanics crawled over the iron beasts, the warhorse insignia on their breasts.

Jaxton waved at a cloud of little gnats looking for another meal in the summer sun. “She must not have seen much, to be so naïve.”

Adira stiffened beside him. “Her family came up from the South. It’s medieval down there. There are hundreds of little warlords and factions fighting over limited supplies in the mountains and the bayou. Merciless.” Adira stopped to examine the faction’s lone sedan, a Dodge Charger outfitted with thin metal plate. She nodded approvingly to a mechanic.

“Is it that different anywhere else?” Jaxton asked.

Adira mounted the top of a freshly built wooden fence. “I like to think this valley is different. For us, for everyone who lives here. And sometimes, justice gets its due,” she finished stonily, looking over fields of farmers who toiled to bring in the next round of crops.

Jaxton remained silent for a moment, before looking back towards the old high school, the Citadel. He remembered a rainy day, Adira’s broken body, and Terrence’s shattered face. “That wasn’t justice claiming anything. Justice doesn’t get the credit. That was you, seizing your own fate.”

Adira sighed, and dropped her hand to her side, hoping Jaxton would notice. He did, and he clasped her hand tightly.

“Do you think they’re real?”

Jaxton looked away from her, towards more survivors training with compound hunting bows on a target range. “I think they’re real.”

“What does it mean for us? What if they come to the valley?”

Jaxton spat on the ground and Adira felt him squeeze her hand. “We’ll send them back over the ridges, as we’ve done a hundred times since the winter.”

Adira waved distractedly to a team of workers pushing wheelbarrows of stone to the new dam. “We fight a few infected every week. Maybe five times, we’ve dealt with twenty at once. We’ve heard the whispers. There could be thousands traveling together, looking for another food source.”

“We’re organized. We’re armed. There are hundreds of us now. Ten different settlements all linked back to here, to this high school. We’re as ready as we’ll ever be, Adira.”

Adira forced a smile, but her gut was churning with fear.

North East of the Valley, The Church

“They’re not real. The Hordes aren’t nothin’ but a rumor. Groups of infected in the
thousands?
Why would they even stick together like that?” Leeroy demanded, his pasty face stretching into a sneer.

Bennett rose from his sleeping bag between the pews, and sniffed the foul air. They needed to scrub the blood from the wood. He kicked a flap of deerskin in disgust. “Why do you keep cutting the deer up inside the church? This is where we sleep,” he muttered to no one in particular. He took a look around the sagging church with dusty pews. This was a sad place for his exile.

A rail thin man with wispy grey hair raised his finger in the dark church and began to speak. “They’re real. I’ve seen them. My wife and I, as I’ve said-“ Leeroy guffawed, interrupting the man, and wiped the sweat from his peach fuzz in the torchlight.

“Leeroy, shut the fuck up,” Bennett demanded. “Go on, friend.”

The old man resumed, wheezing for breath. Some of the others in the church stopped playing their board games and paused to listen. “We took a sailboat down from Nova Scotia. And you could see them, moving on the shorelines. Thousands and thousands. Lord above… the stench was so terrible, even miles offshore. The Hordes aren’t some fantasy, boy.”

Leeroy cackled, obviously drunk. “So who’s our line of defense right now? We’ve got two middle schoolers at the top of the steeple with a wooden bow and arrow.”

A short, squat woman wearing a thick denim dress adjusted the long torch in the middle of the wooden church. “God did not bring us here to die in this here valley. Everyone is here to rebuild in the name of the Lord, in His fashion, in the way He has envisioned.”

Leeroy toppled from his perch atop the pew and fell backwards onto a board game, scattering the pieces and sending the children scrambling. Rising, he finished the last of the moonshine in a single gulp. “That’s right. We’re all here to rebuild this church, except two. Not me, and not him,” his pudgy finger wagged at Bennett’s crouched form.
      

Bennett rose from his sleeping bag, furious Leeroy was so foolish after a few drinks.

Leeroy either didn’t notice, or pretended not to. His face flush red, he sauntered around the room, till all twelve people there were watching him in horror. Only then did he continue. “See y’all don’t know, being spring arrivals…but Bennett has been here since the beginning. For four hundred forty days, right Bennett? You can see him getting nervous now! I love it. Bennett has been
exiled
, that’s right. None of the factions will have him.”

The old man stepped forward, his wispy white hair frazzled in the night’s humidity. “Is that true, Bennett?”

Bennett groaned inside, but knew he had to seize this opportunity. “I had some disagreements with the faction leaders, before they were faction leaders. So no, I was not invited to join any of their precious factions.”

The squat woman shooed two children away at her feet to step within a foot of Bennett. She raised her hands to explore his face. He recoiled at first, but then relented, bereft of other options.

“You’ve made some bad decisions, have you not?”

Bennett nodded, unable to withdraw himself.

The woman cooed knowingly. “I know. We all have. But all is forgiven in the light of the Lord. He only asks you give yourself to his mercy, ask for his forgiveness and let Him into your life. We accept you, Bennett.”

Was it really that easy? Bennett nodded his head emphatically. “It wasn’t chance that led me to this Church. It was something greater.”

The old man took a step closer in the torchlight, and Bennett could hear the others inside the church rising to their feet. Leeroy was dumbfounded in the corner. “The Lord has led you to us. Once a sinner, and now you are reborn in his Light.”

A murmur of amen’s from the present crowd. Bennett closed his eyes, and nodded. “I don’t want to be a part of their schemes and their worldly divisions.”

The old man nodded. “You won’t be. Will they protect us while we are on our mission here? Should we prepare to defend ourselves against the infected?”

“The factions will protect us. They may not want me,” Bennett assured them, “but they will protect us. In their egotistical way they still think we’re their citizens. We’re on Main Street. The Wolf covers all the ridges surrounding the Valley. The Lion plugs any breaches in the ravines. The Bear protects the settlements, and the Destrier moves everyone around.”

The sturdy woman added another oil soaked rag to the torch. “You know a lot about them. Should we worry about the Eagle?”

Bennett’s mouth hung open. “You know about the Eagle?”

They laughed at him in the church. “We’re religious boy, but we’re not stupid. We’ve heard the rumors. Tell us.”

Bennett saw Leeroy’s fiendish grin resume in the corner. He ignored it. “The Eagle is the only faction the Council uses to deal with other survivors. They have the best equipment, all the military gear still left, and they’re the most elite. If the Council runs out of food, they send the Eagle to raid other settlements of survivors outside of the valley. If there are rebellious settlements that try to hide their own supplies, they send the Eagle.”

A silence hung in the smoky room. The matron spoke first. “Will they bother us?”

Bennett shook his head, “As long as Jaxton is alive and in overall command, they will never hurt us, or me.”

The matron nodded. “I appreciate the half hearted conversion a minute ago. Time will tell if that was real or not. But till then, you could prove useful to us. You know these people. With all that in mind, welcome.”