The Darkest Place: A Surviving the Dead Novel (50 page)

“Sorry officer. My friend here had a few too many. I’m gonna walk him home.”

He eyed Dills with a mixture of pity and irritation. “See that you do.”

“Yes sir.”

As we stumbled away, I smiled.

I let Tyrel handle the unpleasant part.

The Navy trained him for that sort of thing, after all. Interrogation was a particular skill he and the others never went into with me. I did not blame them. It is not exactly the kind of thing you teach a young child. “Here, Caleb. This is how you heat an iron over a fire. This is how you drill a hole in someone’s kneecap. This is how you twist skin with a pair of pliers until it bleeds. Tomorrow, we’ll do an introductory course in waterboarding.”

Not that I was above it. If I was right about Tom Dills, and where he got his medallion, those were the least of the agonies I would inflict upon him. It was not squeamishness that kept me from participating. Tyrel knew me well, and he did not want me doing something drastic unnecessarily. We needed Dills alive for the moment.

There was not much screaming. A little, but not much. Ty had to make sure Dills knew he was not messing around. He wanted answers, and if he was not satisfied with what he heard, consequences would follow. That was the key. Consequences.

I sat on the ground in front of a round stone fire pit and poked the coals with a stick. The cabin behind me had once belonged to Tyrel’s grandfather. Ty supplemented his income by renting it out as a hunting shack before the Outbreak. We were on the side of a mountain somewhere west of Pike’s Peak. If I had paid more attention, I could probably have memorized the route we took to get here. But on the ride over, I had been too preoccupied with the unconscious man under the tarps, and what he knew, to concern myself with logistics.

Presently, Tyrel emerged from the cabin and took a seat next to me. It was dark outside, and cold, the stars shining brightly above. The hanging road of the Milky Way was a broad swath of purple-white cosmos floating against the endless black of the sky. Ty poured some water over his hands and I watched red stains sizzle into the coals, turning them dark, extinguished. The wind shifted direction, blowing smoke into my eyes. My breath steamed in the air when I said, “What did you find out?”

The firelight cast shadows under the crags and valleys of Tyrel’s sharp face. “You were right.”

“So he was part of the group that ambushed us in Boise City?”

A nod.

“Where are the rest of them?”

“Didn’t get that far.”

“Are we sure he’s telling the truth, and not just saying what he thinks we want to hear?”

Tyrel took a sip of water from his canteen. “He knows details. Stuff you told me about. He was there when it happened.”

I drew my knife and stared at its black blade in the orange glow of the fire. The steel felt cold in my hands. “I want to know where the others are. All of them.”

Tyrel stood up. “Let’s see what we can find out.”

Dills looked terrified. He sat in a pool of light thrown by the room’s single dim lantern. We came through the door and shut it behind us and stood staring stone-faced at the doomed man. The naked blade of my knife dangled from my right hand.

Dills’ boots scrambled across the wood-plank floor as he struggled to push himself further into the corner of the cabin. Not that it would do him any good. The chains restraining him to the thick support posts were anchored by deep-driven eyebolts. He was not going anywhere.

“You have a choice.” My voice came out flat, harsh, and cold as the winter wind. “Die quick, or die slow. Tell me what I want to know, and you’ll go fast. Make me work for it, and you’ll die screaming until you can’t scream anymore.”

I waited a while. When you tell a man he is going to die, and you want information from him, you have to give him time to accept it. He begged for a few minutes, but when he figured out it was having no effect, he began spitting and cursing.

“Fuck you bastards,” he said, eyes aflame with defiance. “I ain’t telling you shit.”

My smile felt dry and dead, and I watched some of the fire leave Dills’ eyes. His snarl sagged and grew brittle.

“We’ll just see about that.”

*****

Every man has a breaking point. Dills took less time than expected to reach his.

There are certain pains you can inflict that leave a person intact, physically speaking. Others do permanent damage, something from which a person will never recover. It happens, and they know they will never be the same again. There is no healing from this.

I took no pleasure in it. Much like killing the infected, it was a means to an end. But unlike dispatching the undead, I did not consider it a kindness. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Small droplets of blood spattered my pants and the legs of my chair. Three fingers and a thumb lay on the ground in front of me, neatly arranged. It was important he see them lying there. Dills huddled over his ruined hand, moaning. The smell of burnt flesh was heavy in the air.

“I’m going to leave you here with Tyrel,” I said. “I’m going to check out what you’ve told me. If you told the truth, you’ll die quickly. If you lied to me,” I pointed to his severed fingers, “those are just the beginning. So if you’ve lied to me at all, unless want to die knowing what your own dick and balls taste like, now would be the time to confess.”

“I swear to God,” Dills sobbed. “I told you everything.”

“For your sake, I hope you’re right.”

Outside, Tyrel grabbed me by the arm and walked me away from the cabin. “Caleb … you sure about this? I know a thing or two about revenge, son. It leaves you empty and cold and you get back nothing you lost. And it’s a damn good way to get yourself killed.”

“Doesn’t matter now.”

He stepped closer, looking me in the eye. “It matters to me, Caleb.”

I almost pulled away until I saw the concern in his eyes, the affection he had invested in me since I was seven years old. You do not simply dismiss someone who has cared for you for that long. A lump rose in my throat and my eyes stung in the chill night air. “Ty, I have to do this. I can’t live with it. The anger. I have to do something or it’s just going to burn me up inside until there’s nothing left.”

An understanding passed between us, then. Tyrel still had the bloodstains on the sheath of his knife. I had seen the sniper rifle hanging in his home above the fireplace. There were no words necessary. We shared the simple acknowledgement of two people who had been in the same place and knew what it had cost them. And when you find yourself there in the depths, down in the darkest place, you make a light any way you can. Even if it means burning down the world.

“Take the horse,” Tyrel said. “He’ll let you know if there’s infected nearby.”

“Thanks,” I whispered.

He let go of my arm. “Ride fast, son. And if it comes to it, shoot straight.”

I embraced my old friend, and then set off down the mountain.

A wave of murders struck Colorado Springs.

The first of them I caught up with on the way home from a drinking hole I heard about when I worked for the Civilian Construction Corps, a place called Flannery’s. It was a dingy, stinking bar made of two shipping containers with the center walls cut away by an acetylene torch, a foot-wide length of steel welded over the top joint to keep the rain out, and it had cheap grog, a tiny stage, and a few desultory strippers. It did a good turn of business.

I hung out in the place downing drinks that tasted like turpentine and nightmares and listened to the mark get rowdy with his friends. The description fit, and he lived in the part of town Dills said he did, but I needed the name to be sure. It did not take long to get it.

“Hey Ryan,” one of the roughnecks at his table said. “You got the next round or what?” He held up his empty glass and shook it.

The mark, Ryan, held up a hand. “Fine, fine, you thirsty fucker. Be right back.”

When he bellied up to the bar, I turned to him. “Your name Ryan?”

He eyed me suspiciously. “Who’s asking?”

“Dan Foley, out of Austin. Your last name Bromley?”

He shook his head. “No. Martin.”

I feigned a look of disappointment. “Dang. Sorry to bother you. You look like someone I knew from … before. When I heard your name was Ryan, I thought …” I looked down into my glass.

“Don’t sweat it,” Ryan Martin said. He patted my shoulder with genuine sympathy. “I got one of those faces. Hope you find your friend.”

The bartender brought him his drinks, and he went back to his table. I stayed in my stool, nursing grog and pretending to enjoy the gaunt, limp-breasted women gyrating on stage. At an hour before curfew, the bartender turned off the cell phone connected to a small speaker playing old hip-hop songs, plugged the phone into a solar trickle-charger that would do absolutely no good at all until morning, and announced the bar was closed. The last dancer picked up her tips—a collection of small but fairly valuable trade—and tiredly left the stage.

The few remaining patrons complained loudly, but finished their drinks quickly. Minutes later, Martin and his group got up and walked out. I paid my tab with four .308 cartridges and followed.

My hands were steady. The few drinks I’d had kept the shakes away, and probably would continue to do so for at least another hour. I had a pistol and a knife under my coat, but contrary to my normal operating procedure, the knife was primary and the pistol was backup. I wanted to do this quiet, but I would take it any way I could get it.

Martin’s two friends broke off from the pedestrian road at separate intervals, leaving the ex-soldier walking alone toward his corner of the refugee districts. I kept my distance until he turned down his street, then I sped up. If he had been less inebriated, he probably would have heard me coming and I would have had to resort to the pistol. As it was, I managed to sneak up behind him just as he was about to climb the ladder to his roof hatch.

At the last instant, he either heard me or sensed something was wrong, and half turned in my direction. There was an alarmed question on his lips, but he never got a chance to ask it. My feet were set, heels dug in, hips twisting, arm following through with the momentum of a right hook that clipped him squarely on the chin, my fist striking with only the first two knuckles to avoid breaking my hand. I put everything I had into that punch, and I am fairly certain it would have dropped a rhino.

Martin’s head clanged off a ladder rung as he went down. I glanced around to see if anyone had seen. The district was dark and quiet, the residents huddled next to their fireplaces or resting up for the long workday ahead. That is how you know you are in a working class neighborhood: the wood smoke is heavy, and people go to bed at a decent hour.

A quick search turned up his keys. I unlocked his front doors, dragged him inside, then closed and re-locked them. Seconds later, I climbed down through the roof hatch and locked it as well.

Martin was beginning to come around, moaning groggily on the floor. I did a quick search of the room with my tactical light and saw a gallon jug of water on a shelf. Perfect. I set it on the ground and put my tactical light next to it, bathing the room in dim white luminescence. That done, I drew my pistol, sat Martin up, and slapped him awake. When his eyes finally focused, they saw the pistol and widened in alarm.

“Look man, take whatever you want,” he said. “I don’t have much, but-”

“I’m not here to rob you.”

He blinked in confusion. “Then what do you want?”

I pulled Blake’s medallion from my jacket pocket.

“Recognize this?”

He looked at it blankly. I held it closer, but still nothing.

“I’ve never seen that before.”

“Ever been to Boise City, Oklahoma? Some people were ambushed there a while back. Lots of shooting and grenades. Ugly business.”

Now his face changed and all doubts drifted away like smoke on the wind. “Wait, man,” he said, hands upraised. “You don’t understand.”

“Oh, I understand perfectly. You and a bunch of other deserters thought we were there to find you. You thought we had been sent by the Army to root you out. So rather than, you know,
ask
us why we were there, you shot first and didn’t bother with questions.”

The fear now took on a shade of confusion. “How did you …”

“Tom Dills,” I said. “Or as you know him, Clayton Briggs. You two served together, right? He’s not doing so well right now. He’s chained to a wall in a cabin missing a few teeth and a few fingers. But that’s not your problem. In fact, you don’t have problems anymore.”

I drew back the hammer on the pistol. It was a .38 revolver I had taken from one of the men who tried to rob me a few days ago. Martin cringed and opened his mouth to scream for help, eyes pinned to the steel against his forehead. In his terror, he didn’t see what my other hand was doing.

At least, not until he felt the blade slide between his ribs and enter his heart.

He gasped, mouth opening and closing, going stiff with pain. I gripped him by his chin and said, “Consider yourself lucky. I can’t afford too much noise.”

His eyes dimmed, and with the last air in his lungs, he said, “Why?”

“My father. And a good man named Blake Smith. That’s why.”

And then he died.

*****

The next four were far less dramatic.

I realized I had been stupid. I had acted out of anger, out of a need to make the kill personal. It did not need to be that way. When I had followed Ryan Martin into that shitty bar, if someone had suggested I do the job from a rooftop a hundred yards away, I would have laughed in that person’s face. But after two nights of sleeping in the bed Sophia and I once shared, and seeing Martin’s face in my nightmares, and the regret in Martin’s eyes as he breathed his last, I knew there needed to be a distance. A disconnect. Look too deep into the abyss, and the abyss looks into you.

Like Dills and Martin, I exercised due diligence. I would not kill the wrong people. There is a difference between retribution and murder, although I doubt the law would agree with me on that. Maybe I was right, maybe I was wrong. I don’t know. I’m no philosopher. I just knew I could not stand the thought of Blake and Dad being dead and gone while their murderers lived free, unconcerned with punishment. Even if I went to the police, I could not prove anything. Not enough evidence. And they would want to know how I got my information, a question I could not answer.

Justice may wear a blindfold, but I do not.

I verified who they were. I drank just enough to keep myself steady without dulling my perceptions. My father’s lessons in tradecraft served me well. I followed them one by one, arranged meetings, determined their identities beyond doubt, then handled things the smart way.

A sniper’s bullet kills a man just as dead as a knife. And when you have a suppressor to mask the report of your rifle, avoiding detection becomes a simple matter of careful planning and camouflage.

By the fifth kill, the city was apoplectic. All anyone talked about was the psycho murderer randomly killing people in the refugee districts. Was it a disgruntled soldier? A serial killer? Someone driven mad by the horrors of life after the Outbreak? No one knew.

Except me.

After the last kill, I sat on the roof of my container drinking an insanely valuable bottle of Pappy Van Winkle, the M-4 I did the deeds with scattered in various dumpsters throughout the city. I watched people hurry home, eyes watchful, parents clutching their children protectively.

Worry not
, I thought, drunkenly tipping my glass in their direction.
The threat has passed.

A few alert police and military patrols rolled past my street, eyes on the rooftops. A soldier on top of an APC spotted me, told the driver to stop, and put a pair of field glasses on me. I pretended I did not see him and poured myself a tall one, singing a slurred, nonsensical song. A few moments passed, and his posture changed. He had dismissed me as just another harmless drunk. God knew there were plenty of them around these days.

Nevertheless, I decided tomorrow would be a good day to get out of town.