The Darkest Place: A Surviving the Dead Novel (17 page)

“On a fast horse, maybe.”

He punched me in the arm. “Keep your head on a swivel. We’ll be back soon.”

They rolled away in the Humvees, a plume of dust marking their trail. I started to think about Perry Torrance, and how many more infected just like him were out there, and the population of San Antonio, and the fires we had all nervously watched to the south, the orange glow in the night sky, the crack of distant gunfire like a miles long string of ladyfingers, and knew I had to do something to clear my head or I would jump in Blake’s Jeep and follow that plume at a good safe distance until I caught up to them too far away to send me back.

So I suited up in my tactical gear, cleaned my carbine and pistol, and went on patrol around the neighborhood. Every ten minutes my watch beeped and I called the cabin to make sure everything was okay. Lauren answered each time with a simple, “We’re good.”

If anything had been wrong, or if she were under duress, the answer would have been “A-okay.” That was the signal to hurry my ass home and be prepared to do violence.

I finished my sweep, exchanged a few polite words with Lance, and was on my way home when a
crack
and a
pop
caught my attention.

“The hell …”

It didn’t sound like a gunshot. I looked in the direction of the sound and saw a bright red flare light up the sky to the north, right over Bob and Maureen’s house.

I broke into a sprint.

Lauren and Sophia were standing outside when I arrived. “Lauren, get your gun,” I said as I went into the kitchen looking for the keys to Blake’s Jeep. “You too Sophia.”

“What’s going on?” Lauren asked. “Was that Bob and Maureen?”

“I think so. I’m gonna go check it out.”

Sophia emerged from her bedroom clutching an M-4. Her father had spent an hour each day over the last week teaching her how to use it. She had never shown much interest in firearms until now, but was quickly gaining proficiency. “Do you want me to go with you?” she asked.

I was so surprised by the question I couldn’t answer for a moment. “Uh … no, that’s all right. Stay here with Lauren. Lock the doors, stay away from the windows, and don’t open the door for anyone but me. If someone starts poking around, call me on the radio. If someone tries to break in, shoot them.”

Sophia nodded, eyes hardening. “All right.”

“Wait,” Lauren broke in, “you can’t go alone, Caleb.”

“I don’t plan to. I’ll stop by Lance’s place, see if he can help.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

I snatched up a first aid kit, a canteen of water, and started for the door. “I’ll improvise.”

Evidently, Lance had seen the flare as well. He stood in his yard, armed and outfitted with a pistol, rifle, and MOLLE vest, waiting.

As he approached, I got a look at his sidearm. It rode in a quick draw holster, and had been so thoroughly customized I could not figure out what model it was other than it looked like a nine-millimeter. The barrel was long, fitted with a muzzle brake, the trigger and hammer were chrome whereas the rest of the gun was black, and had a reflex sight perched atop a rail. The only place I had ever seen weapons like that were at shooting competitions, the kind where people competed for serious money and wore polyester t-shirts with sponsors’ trademarks on them.

He saw me coming and approached. I leaned over to the Jeep’s open window and said, “I’m gonna go check on Bob and Maureen.”

“I’ll go with you.”

I opened the door and he climbed in. Neither of us spoke as I sped north around the perimeter of the lake, only slowing down when the Kennedys’ house rose into view.

“Take a left at this alley,” Lance said. “We’ll circle the block and approach from the back.”

“Sounds good.” I turned onto the street he indicated, then took another right a couple of blocks later. When we were four houses down from Bob and Maureen’s place, Lance pointed at a wide expanse of yard between two houses. “Stop here.”

I did, approving of the location. We were around a bend in the street, the top of the Kennedys’ house just visible over their neighbors’ roofs. From where we were, no one in the immediate vicinity of the Kennedys’ property could spot us, allowing us to move in unseen.

After I parked, Lance hopped out and beckoned me after him. “I’ll take point,” he said. “Follow my lead.”

Lance knew the neighborhood better than I did, so I figured it best to defer to his wisdom. We leap-frogged from house to house, one of us covering the other as he moved, until we stood in the back yard of the home immediately behind the Kennedys’ place. I kept my back close to the wall as Lance crept to the corner and looked around.

“Shit,” he whispered.

“What?”

He rounded on me, a finger pressed over his lips.
Quiet
, he mouthed, then beckoned me forward. He stepped behind me and pointed ahead. I raised my rifle and pied out the corner, exposing as little of my profile as I could. The Kennedys’ back yard was empty, but past the front corner on the north side I saw a knot of about ten people walking slowly toward the front porch. There was a brief moment where I felt a thrill of excitement at the prospect of contacting other survivors.

Then I noticed how they moved.

It reminded me of Perry Torrance: the shuffling, lumbering gait, the stiff posture, the jerky, birdlike movements of the head, the tattered clothes, the mottled gray skin, the white-glazed eyes. From the front of the house, I heard moaning, beginning with just one, then spreading to the others like a contagion. In seconds, dozens of voices rose like a hellish chorus, pounding at my eardrums. I stood on shaky legs, the coldness in my stomach making me feel like I was falling down a mineshaft. Nervously, I turned to Lance.

Infected
, I mouthed.

He leaned close. “Are you sure?”

“Gotta be,” I whispered. “They’re just like that Torrance guy. My Dad told you about him, right?”

He nodded. “Wasn’t sure if I believed him.”

“Believe it. They’re real.”

He stared at the shamblers, indecisive. “What do you think we should do?”

It was the first time in my life I can remember someone older than me asking for my advice. “If the Kennedys are in trouble, we have to help them.”

Lance nodded. “How do you want to do it?”

I thought for a moment, weighing what I knew against how I had been trained. “Those things are not like normal people. They won’t be armed, so we don’t have to worry about weapons. But they’re vicious, Lance. And they’re strong as hell. If one gets ahold of you, it’ll kill you. The only way to kill them is to destroy the brain, so don’t waste bullets shooting center of mass. Go for headshots.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.” I wasn’t, but it was all I had to go on at the moment. If it didn’t work, we could always retreat and come up with something else.

I checked my rifle: round in the chamber, safety off, covers flipped up on the optics. Same deal for my pistol, minus the optics. Lance followed suit.

“You ready?” I asked.

He nodded. “Two-man skirmish line. You take left, I’ll take right.”

“All right. On three.” I counted down, and then we moved.

We got halfway to the Kennedys’ yard before the infected saw us. There were six of them in my line of sight around the corner of the house. I swung a few feet to the left to give Lance a better shot. He made the adjustment without even glancing in my direction.

The walking corpses looked confused for a moment. They swung their heads toward the house, then toward us, then toward the house again in unison. Under other circumstances, it might have been comical. It quickly became un-funny when they focused their ravenous gazes on the two of us and belted out ragged, throat-rending screams.

I stopped, peered through the Aimpoint scope, and centered the glowing red dot on the nose of a smallish round man who had been in his fifties or sixties when he died. Most of the meat on his chest, left arm, and upper left thigh had been eaten away, causing him to shuffle along with a limp. I let out half a breath, held it, and squeezed the trigger. The carbine bucked a little—an M-4 does not have very much recoil—and a fine red mist erupted from the back of the dead man’s head.

He stiffened, shuddered in place for a few seconds, then collapsed.
Well, at least I know
that
works
.

Lance spared me a glance, then sighted down his rifle and fired a double-tap at a walking dead woman behind the man I had just shot. Rather than shudder first, she simply went limp and slumped to the ground.

Lance and I lowered our guns and looked at each other. “It worked,” he said, surprise in his voice.

“Told you so.” I returned my attention to the dead.

We advanced slowly, picking our shots. I missed a couple of times, but scored kills on the follow up. Although we dropped them quickly, we soon found ourselves backing up as more and more undead packed the space between the Kennedys’ house and the house to our left. When it was clear we couldn’t kill them fast enough to keep moving forward, we turned tail and ran about twenty yards.

It was a good thing we did because the undead on the other side of the house had circled the screened-in porch and almost had us surrounded. If I had been on my own, I’m not sure if I would have made it out of there alive. But when Lance saw the situation we were in, he slung his carbine, drew his pistol, walked within ten feet of the undead, and fired eight rounds quicker than you can count it out loud.

Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.

Eight undead fell, newly-carved tunnels in their skulls. For a second, all I could do was stare.

“Holy shit,” I said.

Lance smiled, holstered his pistol, and waved a hand at the opening he created. “Shall we?”

We ran until we had established sufficient breathing room. “Hey,” I said, tapping Lance on the shoulder. “You see that?”

I pointed up the street and two houses over. There was a two-story colonial with a second floor deck accessed by an outdoor stairway. “Might be easier if we take the high ground.”

“Good thinking,” Lance said, and started toward the house at a jog. Once there, we clambered up the stairs and took a moment to assess the situation.

There were far more undead than I originally thought. We had killed more than twenty of them, but three times that many slowly converged on our position, watching us as they came, outstretched hands curled into grasping claws, moans filling the air.

“We don’t have much time,” I said. Lance nodded grimly. After taking a moment to kick away the balcony’s flimsy wooden rail, we assumed seated firing positions and started shooting.

It was harder than anticipated. All my life, I had trained to shoot center of mass; headshots were something I did for fun, just to show off. Aside from the men who attacked Lauren, I had only ever shot at paper targets, never at ambulatory human bodies. If my optics had had magnification, it would have been easier. But they didn’t, so I had to make due by firing more slowly than I normally would have. Lance seemed to be having a similar difficulty.

I quickly realized the undead moved faster than their shuffling steps let on. Their gait was slow, but constant, never stopping or slowing down. It reminded me of something Tyrel had once told me about a Navy cruiser he spent a few weeks on. The average cruising speed of the ship, depending on conditions, was usually around fifteen knots, or just over 17 MPH. Which may not seem very fast, especially considering the vast distances ships have to cross, but they travel at that speed
twenty-four hours a day
. As a result, they can cover a lot of miles in a relatively short amount of time. The effect was the same with the undead.

I had reloaded once and was ten rounds into my next magazine when the horde, now reduced by half, reached the bottom of the stairwell and began climbing toward the balcony.

“This isn’t good,” Lance said, getting to his feet. The undead not on the stairs were now beneath the overhang where we could not get a shot at them.

“They’ll bottlenose on the steps,” I said. “Ever read about the battle of Thermopylae?”

Lance used the stock of his rifle to bust out the window of the door leading inside the house, then unlocked it. “If it looks like we’re going to be overrun, we’ll head through the house, throw whatever we can in front of the door, and try to escape on the ground level.”

I gave a single nod, then drew my pistol and knelt in front of the stairs. Lance took position beside me. “I’ll kneecap a few of them,” I said. “Try to slow them down. You take them out when they go down; I have a feeling they’ll try to crawl their way up.”

“Okay.”

We let them get halfway up the steps so they were at point blank range before we started firing. Lance let off four quick shots that toppled an equal number of undead down the stairs. For a few seconds, the tumbling bodies slowed the corpses behind them, but they quickly recovered and began marching upward again. I took careful aim and destroyed the kneecaps of four more, pitching them over face first on the steps. Lance’s pistol cracked four more times, and they went still.

Now we had a pileup. The undead began clambering over the mass of bodies in front of them, but their lack of coordination made them clumsy. I let Lance empty his magazine, then began firing while he reloaded.

Slowly, one by one, we exterminated them all. When we ran out of ammo for our pistols, we switched back to our rifles. By the time we were done, the stairway groaned and popped beneath the weight of all the bodies.

“Let’s get off this thing before it collapses,” Lance said.

We went in through the back and made our way to ground level, exiting through the front door. I almost started back toward the Jeep, then realized I had gotten so caught up killing the undead I had forgotten about Bob and Maureen. The brief moment of confusion was lost on Lance, who stood still, staring at the mess we had made.

“How many of them are there?” he asked.

“Probably about eighty or so.”

He frowned at me. “No, I mean all together. Like across the nation.”

I wiped a hand across the back of my neck. “The news said the whole East Coast is overrun.”

“More than half the country lives on the eastern seaboard,” Lance said. “There must be millions. Tens of millions.”

“Or hundreds,” I said.

For the first time, I saw genuine worry in Lance’s eyes. “I knew things were bad, but this …”

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go check on the Kennedys.”