Surviving the Dead (Book 7): The Killing Line (32 page)

To my left, Sabrina lay in the prone position. She had taken a wad of clothing out of her pack, balled it up, and laid it over the handrail, her rifle resting atop it. While I worked I counted the shots she took. When she had expended fifty rounds I stopped what I was doing and asked her how many she’d taken down.

“Forty-two,” she said, not looking away from her point of aim.

I did the math. Eighty-four percent kill rate. At this range, that was four percent higher than what the Army expected from infantry grunts. However, her rate of fire was less than half what Eric and I were capable of.

As I watched her, I noted small mistakes she was making. My instinct was to make in-the-moment corrections the way my instructors had done at Quantico, but I resisted the urge. The context of our current situation was a world away from my days at sniper school. Sabrina was not trying to pass a course of instruction, she was killing walking dead people swarming toward us with unnerving, single-minded persistence. Best just to let her practice and trust my memory to catalogue all constructive criticisms for another day.

Ten minutes later, my rifle was starting to burn my hands through the barrel shroud. The wind was still blowing strongly, so I stood up and held my weapon in the air to let the wind help cool it down. Looking around, I noticed several of the troops with us doing the same. Two men had laid down their guns and were busy reloading magazines. A hatch in the top of the container lay open, several green ammunition boxes on the roof next to it. The soldiers reloading magazines were working furiously, but not fast enough to keep up with demand.

“Looks like they could use a hand,” Eric said. He had stopped firing and stood next to me.

“Maybe you should show ‘em how it’s done.”

A sigh. “Looks like someone needs to.”

Eric fished a magazine loader from his MOLLE vest, grabbed a box of ammunition, and sat down cross-legged. He then took off his boonie hat, laid it upside-down in his lap, and poured four boxes of 5.56 rounds into it. A soldier brought him a stack of magazines. He took one, affixed the loader, and went to work. It was a thing to behold.

Eric has square hands with long fingers. He is the most skilled guitarist I have ever met. The deftness with which his fingers pluck notes from a guitar is only one example of his remarkable dexterity. I am firmly convinced it is this dexterity, this awareness of his body and its component parts, that makes him such a deadly marksman and an uncommonly skilled fighter. It has been three years since the last time I actually enjoyed a sparring session with Eric. These days, it just hurts.

But in this instance, he was not fighting. He was reloading magazines, specifically standard-issue metal STANAG magazines. The fastest I’ve ever managed to reload one was eighteen seconds. Eric could do it in twelve, and demonstrated as much to the soldiers in attendance. The other two men reloading noted this with no small amount of jealousy and redoubled their efforts.

I turned, peered through my scope, and examined what was left of the horde. The artillery from the tank and relentless assault from the Bradleys, combined with the efforts of those of us on the HEMTT, had reduced them by maybe forty percent. The teardrop formation had stalled due to the long line of corpses piled at the front of the horde’s ranks, a pile formed deliberately by the marksmen, tanks, and Bradleys. It was a ghoul-slowing tactic known technically as a revenant berm. Or, as most troops called it, a shitpile.

The infected coming toward us had bunched up at the shitpile, clustered together as close as sardines in a can. Unable to move forward, they stood stomach to back, hands reaching toward the sound of living flesh ahead of them. Some of the ones on the flanks began to envelope the sides of the pile and push past it. An officer standing on the roof of a Humvee saw this and said something into his radio. Moments later, more Humvees came pouring over the hill behind us, laden with troops. The soldiers formed up into squads and moved into position on the left and right sides of the horde. I heard the squealing of treads and the roar of engines as the Abrams and Bradleys backed off. Machine-gun crews took position on hillsides, grenadiers following along. The marksmen around me on the HEMTT continued firing over their heads.

The Abrams pointed its gun upward and fired. There was a sound like a rocket passing close by, a high whistle, and the round detonated a few feet above the horde’s rearmost ranks. At a signal from the officer on the Humvee, the reinforcements opened fire, further containing the undead with the bodies of their own brethren.

The rest was clockwork. The ground troops kept the horde contained and bunched together while the Abrams decimated them with methodical precision. The marksmen on the HEMTT with me ceased fire and settled in to watch the show. I sat down next to Sabrina, who had also stopped firing, and now sat quietly as the tank did its work.

“Forty,” I said.

Sabrina turned to me. “What?”

The tank fired again. I pointed at it. “Forty-one.”

“How can you keep track?”

Another boom. “Forty-two. Time to reload.”

As if on cue, the tank commander spoke into his radio and the officer on the Humvee waved in response. The Abrams backed off down the hill.

“How’d you know that?” my daughter asked.

“Abrams M1A2. Max loadout is forty-two rounds for the 120mm cannon. Glad these guys were by the book. Would have looked silly if I were wrong.”

Sabrina smiled at me and nudged me with her elbow. “Nobody likes a know-it-all.” 

“Time to head back,” the HEMTT driver called through his window. “Infantry’s got the rest of ‘em.”

I slung my rifle across my chest and held on as the HEMTT did a U-turn and headed back toward the convoy.

The storm flew right over us, turned abruptly south, and dumped its contents on the communities along the Arkansas River southeast of Pueblo. The convoy headed steadily westward on Highway 94, beset on all sides by the flat brown plains underlining the distant towering peaks of the Rocky Mountains.

Sabrina had never been this far west before, and found the prospect of seeing it through the window of an automobile fascinating. Consequently, she talked our driver, a young private named Wilson, into letting her ride shotgun. Wilson was perhaps nineteen years old and looked like he was about twelve. I smiled to Sabrina’s face and told her it was a great idea, give her a chance to see the countryside. And as soon as she was out of sight, I pulled Wilson aside and informed him that if he so much as dreamed of laying a hand on my daughter he would die choking on his own testicles. He offered no argument.

The last night before arriving in the Springs, the convoy stopped a few miles outside of town. There were a few convoys and trade caravans ahead of us, all of which had to go through mandatory processing, so the captain in charge had elected to camp overnight to let the traffic die down before we approached the city gates. 

The vehicles in the convoy formed a circle, Bradleys and Humvees and the Abrams positioned to lay down fire while infantry and support troops erected modular watch towers, fired up generators, and set up spotlights. Watchmen checked out NVGs from a supply sergeant and went out on patrol. Those not on working or on watch sat down in clusters and ate good-naturedly from field rations. I talked a friendly HEMTT driver into parting ways with a few wooden shipping palettes and built a small cook fire in the center of camp. Eric cooked us a meal from our dwindling supplies and we ate quietly, trying to ignore the elephant in the room. After a while, Elizabeth stood up and said she was going for a walk.

“Want me to come with you?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “I need to be alone for a while.”

“Okay.”

She walked toward the perimeter. I stared down at the remnants of my meal and felt my appetite fade.

“You should go after her,” Sabrina said.

I looked at her. Her fork moved rapidly from her plate to her mouth, steady as a metronome. The hard years she had spent on the road had taught her to eat as much as she could, when she could, and to eat it quickly. She had probably spoken without pausing. I wondered if she would ever learn to slow down and enjoy her food.

“She said she wants to be alone.”

Sabrina glanced up. “You really don’t know much about women, do you?”

I set my plate on the ground and looked at Eric. “You?”

“It’s what I would do,” he said.

I took a deep breath. “Okay then.”

I walked toward the perimeter, following Elizabeth’s tracks. Near the perimeter, spotlights lit up the night outside the circle of vehicles, but on my side, it became too dark to make out footprints. So I stood and closed my eyes and listened. A crunch of gravel sounded off to my left. I moved toward it and spotted her staring at the ground next to a Humvee with a flatbed trailer attached to it.

When I was close enough so she could hear me, I said, “Hey there.”

Elizabeth jumped and rounded on me. “Jesus Christ.”

I held up my hands, palms out. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

She came forward and slapped me on the chest. “Goddammit Gabe. What have I told you about that?”

“I said I was sorry.”

“You almost gave me a fucking heart attack.”

This was not going the way I had hoped. “I’m sorry. Really. Come on, let’s sit down.”

We took a seat on the empty flatbed trailer. It had been carrying a pair of ATVs until a couple of hours ago. I heard their engines revving as soldiers rode by on patrol. Elizabeth took a seat next to me, still trying to get her heart rate under control.

“It’s not right,” she said.

“What?”

“Nobody your size should be able to move that quietly.”

I smiled and shrugged. “Saved my life a few times.”

She looked at me from the corner of her eye. I figured it was a good segue to the heart of why I had followed her.

“You’ve been awfully quiet yourself lately,” I said.

She looked down at her hands and twisted her fingers together. A few seconds went by.

“Eric told me what happened.”

A small nod, but that was all. I knew what was bothering her. My instinct was to think of something to say to fix the problem, to make Elizabeth feel better about what she had done, but that would have been the wrong tactic. Trying to fix it would have made the problem about me, not her. And this was definitely not about me. Women and men are different. Men see a problem, and the first thing we want to do is get rid of it. But when women experience trouble, they have a more internalized response. Not in all cases, but enough to make it statistically significant. So I reached out and laid a hand on Elizabeth’s shoulder and said the best thing I could think of.

“I’m sorry that happened to you.”

I felt her start to tremble. She scooted closer to me, wrapped her arms around my chest, and the dam finally broke. We held each other in the darkness, the sound of engines and generators buzzing around us, spotlights streaking through the night, alone together on the high plains of Colorado. I looked up at the brilliant stretch of stars overhead, the hanging road of the Milky Way contrasting against the dark indifference of the universe, and wondered if there really was anything to look forward to after this life. If I had my choice, I would spend my eternity reliving moments like this one. I could think of no better heaven.

“I know I shouldn’t feel bad about it,” Elizabeth said after a while.

“Doesn’t help.”

“No, it doesn’t. I keep seeing it over and over again. Lining up the sights, pulling the trigger, the blood, the screams. I dream about it.”

“I know.”

She untucked her head from my chest, wiped the tears from her face, and looked up at me. Her eyes were wide, dark pools under the moonlight. “Do I talk in my sleep?”

“Sometimes. Mostly you just thrash and moan. I’ve done my fair share of that.”

“You still do.”

“I know.”

Her head resumed its place against my torso, face nuzzled close to my heart. I wondered if she could hear it beating.

“Does it ever get easier?”

“Yes,” I said. “It takes time, but it does.”

Elizabeth let go of me and stood up and walked a few steps away, face turned upward to the night sky. “Do you still remember the first one?”

“In my case, it was more like eight. Happened in Afghanistan. Militants put a few women and children on the hood of a truck and charged us. I was on a fifty-cal.”

Elizabeth looked over her shoulder. “So what did you do?”

“What I had to.”

“Dear God. I’m so sorry, Gabe.”

“It was a long time ago. I’ve killed a lot of people since then.”

She came over and sat down again. “I know that. I’ve always known that about you. But seeing what it’s like for myself …”

“Makes it more visceral.”

“Yes.”

“Here’s the thing about killing,” I said, turning so I could look her in the eye. “There’s two kinds of people. People who’ve taken a life, and people who haven’t. These days there are a lot more of the former than there used to be, but the dividing line still exists. Killing goes against our instincts. Most people just aren’t built for it. But therein lies the problem. When you cross the killing line, it’s only difficult the first time. And like all lines, the more you cross it, the easier it gets. After a while, you forget why the line was ever there to begin with. It’s when you reach that point you have to be very, very careful. You have to make sure your reasons are justifiable. If you don’t, if you fail to examine closely why you choose to end a life, each and every time, it gets too easy. And that’s when you stop being a defender and start being a monster.”

Elizabeth wrapped a gentle hand around the back of my neck and pulled until our foreheads touched. “You are not a monster, Gabe.”

“No, I’m not. But I speak the language.”

A smile. “And that’s why you’re so good at what you do.”

“Yes.”

We sat together a while longer, then headed back toward camp. Elizabeth’s step was lighter and she was holding her head high again.

As we walked I said, “For what it’s worth, I’m proud of you.”

Elizabeth looked owlish. “Proud?”

“It took a lot of courage to do what you did. Most people couldn’t have done it. So yeah, I’m proud of you. You’re as tough as you are beautiful.”

She slipped her fingers through mine, raised my hand to her lips, and kissed one of my knuckles.

“You’re not the most sensitive man I’ve ever met, Gabe. But sometimes you know exactly what to say.”