Surviving the Dead 03: Warrior Within (10 page)

I gritted my teeth at the implications of that, and took a deep breath to steady my aim.

Seconds that felt like hours ticked by while the raiders worked on a few crates, trying to pry them open. I forced myself to stay calm, slowed my breathing, and sighted in on one of the men below. He was tall, with broad shoulders, a bushy beard, and long hair. Kind of like Gabe before he shaved and got a haircut. Gauging the distance at about a hundred yards, I made another sight adjustment and waited.

Come on Gabe, any time now
.

Just as I was beginning to wonder if Gabe had lost count and started over, the concussive blast of the rocket launcher shattered the air. The warhead, powerful enough to destroy a fully armored tank, slammed into the road in the blink of an eye, swallowing the fifty-caliber and the wheelbarrow in a cloud of white smoke. The force of the explosion thumped upward through the ground and into my chest, leaving me with an odd, hollow feeling in my gut. Concussion and shrapnel ripped into the raiders nearby, shredding one of them like a side of beef and knocking two others to the ground. One writhed in agony, bloody and screaming, while the other laid still, white bone protruding from a jagged hole in his thigh. Rocks and metal rained down around where the rocket had hit, and only a crater remained where the machine gun had been just a few seconds ago.

For a moment, all I could do was stare. I had seen rockets detonate before on television, but never like this—up close and personal. Looking down at that instant, rocket-propelled destruction, a fervent hope took root inside of me that I would never find myself on the receiving end of such a terrible thing.

The raider farthest from the explosion recovered first, snatched up his rifle, and started spraying bullets at the leftover smoke cloud where Gabe had fired. Knowing my friend, he had probably already dropped the canister and was moving to another position, but I wasn’t about to gamble on that. I leaned down over my rifle, took aim, and triggered a three-round burst. All three bullets hit center of mass, dropping the raider to the ground. He let go of his rifle, clutching at his chest—wounded, but still alive. I hit him again, and finally, he went still.

The last two, shellshocked and terrified, turned and bolted for the other side of the road. I tried to take aim at one of them but couldn’t get a good shot. A single muted
crack
, the familiar report of Gabriel’s SCAR, sounded from my left. The shot took one of the would-be escapees high on the back, punched a hole straight through him, and erupted from his chest in an arterial spray. He pitched forward, screaming and trying to crawl toward the trees. Another crack sounded, and the top half of his head disintegrated in a red mist.

Powerful stuff, those .308 rounds.

The other one had already made it to cover, running in a serpentine pattern through the foliage. Sanchez’s M-4 cracked a few times sending splinters flying around him, but nothing hit. The stands of trees were too thick, and soon, he disappeared over the edge of a hill, out of sight.

I cursed, got up on one knee, and began sweeping the far embankment for movement. It didn’t look like we had any other company, so I fell back and made my way over to where I had last seen Gabriel. One of the rocket launchers lay on the ground among the leaves, smoke curling from the open ends, but no sign of him. I made a low whistle, hoping his ears weren’t ringing so badly that he couldn’t hear me. A few seconds went by. Nothing. I whistled again, louder. This time, I heard him whistle back, ahead of me and off to my left, closer to Sanchez’s position.

Now that I knew where he was, I worked my way back down the hill toward Flannigan, approaching slowly and with caution, not wanting to spook her into doing something I would regret. As I got closer, I heard her voice hiss out through the trees.

“Bluebird.”

It was one of the standard challenges that Grabovsky had drilled into them, a way to identify friend from foe.

“Actual.” I hissed back, surprised at how quickly I remembered it. I suppose the G-man had done a good job teaching me as well.

Flannigan stood up from behind a thick maple trunk and came over to kneel beside me. “What happened back there?”

“Gabe took out the fifty, and five guys down the hill are having a very bad day.”

“I thought there were six.”

“There were. One got away.”

She nodded, turning her head to scan the forest, pale blue eyes flitting back and forth.

“I’m gonna head back up the hill,” I said. “Stay hidden, and if you see anything, give a holler. I’ll come running.”   

“Won’t I give away my position if I do that?”

“Yes, but we don’t have radios, so it’s the best we can do. Don’t be a hero. If trouble shows up, call for help. Understood?”

She nodded. “Yes, sir.”

I gave her a pat on the shoulder and made my way back up to my firing position. The wind had died down, and the road had gone still and quiet, save for the weakening cries of the lone surviving raider. He lay in a widening pool of blood, and even from this far away, I could see that his skin was ghostly pale. So much for taking a prisoner.

After what felt like half an hour had gone by, I looked at my watch and saw that it had only been five minutes. The raider down the hill had gone still, and when I looked at him through my scope, it didn’t look like his chest was moving. Too bad for him. He should have thought twice before trying to steal from the United States Army.

Looking at the crater left behind by the LAW rocket, my brain finally revved into gear, and I started puzzling out the pieces of the morning’s events. The presence of a heavy machine gun, combined with the fact that the Legion had known where to set it up, all begged some very pressing and disturbing questions.

Where they had gotten the hardware from wasn’t all that difficult to guess. During the Outbreak, when it had become clear that there was no saving the Eastern Seaboard, the president had ordered a massive evacuation across the Mississippi River. The Army had hung back, trying to hold off the undead long enough for millions of refugees to escape to what they thought was safety. It was a valiant effort, but ultimately, it had proven futile. The dead found their way across the Mississippi, and the apocalypse had continued unabated.

During the fighting, countless military units were overrun, and their comrades, helpless to do anything about it, had been forced to leave them behind. As a result, there was an untold wealth of military hardware out in the wastelands just waiting from someone to come along and pick it up.

Hollow Rock wasn’t far from the Mississippi River.

The Legion could move freely for nearly a hundred square miles.

It didn’t take a genius to connect the dots.

As for how they had known where to set up their ambush, there were a couple of different ways that could have played out. The most frightening possibility was that someone from Hollow Rock had known what direction the Chinook would be coming from and had somehow fed that information back to the Legion. If Hollow Rock had a spy in its midst, then our problems had just gotten a hell of a lot more complicated. Which was ironic, considering that we were preparing to do the exact same thing to them.

Another possibility was that the Legion had found more than one machine gun, and had set up several firing positions around town on likely paths of approach for the helicopter. It would not have been difficult to do, considering how many abandoned buildings there were scattered throughout this portion of Carroll County. If that was the case, then the Legion’s threat level had just jumped up the scale from annoying to fucking terrifying.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the fact that the Legion had actually managed score a few hits on the Chinook meant that they had at least one person with military experience in their ranks who could not only operate a heavy weapon, but do so skillfully. Unlike what was once portrayed in the movies, hitting an aircraft on the wing with a ground-based weapon, even one as powerful as the ma deuce, is extremely difficult to pull off. It would have taken an experienced, well-trained gunner to do it. That did not bode well.

My thoughts were interrupted when I heard faint footsteps crunching through leaves on their way to my position. Through the trees, I saw Gabe approaching, moving slowly and scanning the woods behind us for threats. He must have wanted me to notice him coming. Otherwise, I never would have heard a thing until he was right next to me.

Gabe’s ability to disappear into thin air is as uncanny as it is unnerving. Occasionally, he amuses himself by sneaking up on me and appearing from nowhere at my side (which is annoying as hell), but he never does it when he knows that I’m holding a weapon. Which is wise, on his part.

“See anything? Any movement?” he asked when he reached me.

“No, nothing. But I have been thinking about that fifty-cal.”

Gabe nodded grimly. “Yeah, that occurred to me, too. I got a feeling things just got a lot worse for us in this fight.”

“You didn’t happen to bring a radio, did you?” I asked.

“No. Didn’t have any charged up. I loaned the solar panels to Sheriff Elliott last week. Didn’t figure we’d need ’em.”

I snorted. “Well ain’t that just great. I trust you’ll be getting those back, assuming we get out of this alive?”

Gabe smiled ruefully. “Yeah, at least enough of them to charge our radios, anyway.”

I looked back down the valley. “So what’s the plan now? You want to go on recon, or stay here and wait for backup?”

He thought about it for a moment, staring down the hill. “No, we should stay here. If it were just you and me, I’d say let’s see what we can find, but with the other two …”

“Understood,” I  said. “You should probably have Flannigan move closer to our position. If she gets flanked, she’ll be isolated, and one of us will have to break off to help her.”

“Good idea. Keep your eyes peeled.”

With that, he moved off lower down the hill toward Flannigan.

Alone again, I started doing a deliberate, systematic scan of the opposite ridgeline and both approaches on the highway—a technique Gabe had taught me to ward off boredom and stay alert. I was only at it for maybe another five minutes before I caught movement. I had been worried that the raider who escaped might be coming back with friends, and it looked like my concerns were justified. At first there were only three, then four more appeared, and another couple of dozen behind them.

“Shit,” I muttered. “Shit, shit, shit. This is not good.”

They were staying low and advancing in a leapfrog fashion, taking turns moving up and providing cover. One of them left himself exposed as he kneeled down behind a tree, so I took careful aim, let out a breath, and squeezed off a single shot. The match grade bullet punched a hole in his forehead, just above the eye, and blew a spray of blood out the back of his skull. He went limp and slumped to the ground.

I had no doubt that Gabe and the others had heard the crack from the shot, but the suppressor did its job, and it didn’t seem to have reached the men across the hill. They kept advancing, oblivious to the fact that one of their number lay dead just behind them. Figuring this wouldn’t last long, I shifted my aim and bagged another one at the rear of their formation. Still no response.

Come on, just one more
…

Another gunman kneeled behind a narrow pine trunk that was too thin to cover him. The angle was awkward and, when I fired, my aim was slightly low and the shot took him through
the throat. He dropped his rifle and fell down kicking and screaming, blood spurting from the wound in his neck.

The reaction from his comrades was immediate; they all stopped, shouted to each other, took cover, and began laying down suppressing fire. Behind them, more figures emerged over the hill and began moving up.

Bullets peppered the berm below me and slammed into the trees over my head sending splinters and rocks flying in staccato bursts. Nothing was hitting close enough to hurt me, but it was still damned unnerving. Getting shot at is never fun, no matter how far away the shots are landing. I briefly considered backing off, but my firing position was a good one, and they clearly hadn’t seen me yet. If they had, they would have been concentrating fire at my section of the ridge.

Gritting my teeth, I hunkered down, peered through my scope, and kept shooting. Sharp reports from my left let me know that Gabe and Sanchez were also returning fire. If Flannigan was smart, she would
do what she was trained to do—stay low and continue to watch our flanks. It might not be as exciting as getting into the heat of a gunfight, but it was no less important. Being as high up as we were, if we got flanked, we would be royally screwed. It was her job to make sure that didn’t happen.

Since the raiders obviously had an idea of where we were, stealth was no longer an issue, and there was no point in trying to make headshots. Another point in my favor was that the advancing enemy, as far away as they were, couldn’t see the muzzle flash from my barrel, which allowed me to take my time and fire with impunity. I picked a target, put my scope reticle center of mass, squeezed the trigger, and sent a three-round burst downrange.

In less than a minute, I had reduced their number by four, Gabe had accounted for at least twice that number, and the rapidly mounting casualties forced them to retreat to the other side of the hill. The volume of enemy fire died down to just a few rifles, and instead of the near-panicked fusillade that they had thrown at us before, they settled down into a more disciplined suppression pattern.