-1-
“This is Billy Trout reporting live from the apocalypse …”
The radio still worked. That was something.
As long as that kept working Sam thought there might be a chance. He didn’t believe in much. Didn’t really believe in that. But a guy has to hold onto something.
He held on.
-2-
Sam Imura leaned against the hard plastic wall of his elevated tree stand and carefully and quietly opened a can of beer. Doing it slowly to allow the gas to hiss very softly and to keep the metal from screeching. He pushed the tab down into the opening and folded the ring back. Nice and neat.
The beer was warm. A local brew that tasted almost, but not exactly, like piss. He drank piss once. Years ago, during a week of hardship training at Fort Bragg. Anyone who complained about it got shipped back to whatever branch of service they came from. Sam sipped the beer and revised his opinion. This stuff tasted every bit as bad as hot urine. He took another swallow and set the can down.
The deer stand was in a nice spot. Just inside a shadowy tree line. To either side and behind, he could see well into the woods, which rose in a series of small humps. Lots of trees, not too much shrubbery. Exposed roots, which made animals walk carefully and made two-legged targets trip. The other direction looked out on a big field that wandered up toward a farmhouse.
The house was empty, cleared out two nights ago. A smoldering mound of gristle and bone was humped in front of the porch. Three other mounds were situated around the property, including one by the blackened shell of a pickup truck that had blown itself up by an old gas pump. There was a story there, but Sam didn’t know what it was.
The house itself wanted to tell another story. From what he could tell, a few people had tried to reinforce it, but fucked it all up. They nailed boards in a haphazard way across all the windows, but the nails had been driven straight in, not toe-nailed, not screwed. Nothing to give them real resistance. And someone had rigged the cellar door with crossbeams, but for some reason hadn’t hidden down there.
There was blood everywhere—and some shell casings.
From the mess in the yard Sam could tell that a wave of people had come through and cleaned out the leavings of the failed stronghold. Shell casings told him that it wasn’t military, though. Mostly pistol and hunting rifle rounds, some commercial shotgun shells, so he figured it was local hunters and maybe some cops. That made sense. There would be more of them, and this was rural Pennsylvania. Every goddamn person out here owned a couple of guns.
By the time Sam got here, though, the killing was done and the killers had moved on. He hoped they were the good guys. If there were any good guys left. He was cynical enough to have his doubts. While running with DELTA and later with the Department of Military Sciences, he’d seen a lot of the worst side of humanity. The tendency toward savagery. The kneejerk reaction to lash out in fear, and to grab in need.
He took another sip of beer, adjusted his billed cap to shade his eyes and studied the field. Nothing moved except what the wind pushed, but that didn’t mean anything. There was something out there.
At the very edge of his unaided visual range was his truck. Sitting in the middle of the road with a busted axle. When he’d driven out of here two days ago, he got exactly three hundred yards. That was it. He knew it hadn’t been the road that killed the truck. It was them.
Them.
Bodies break and burst under the wheels of a big rig, but they are still made of bone, they still have mass. Sometimes he’d had to smash into crowds of them. Sometimes he’d driven over them. Bumping and thumping over dozens of bodies. Men. Women.
Children.
It was worse than driving down a rutted country road. He figured he cracked the axle punching through the last bunch. Maybe did something to the radiator and the engine. The truck was as dead as everything else around here.
Sam never considered abandoning it, though, because he’d spent the best part of a day using a forklift to load pallet after pallet of supplies into a semi. Food, water, camping gear, fuel oil, tents, tools. All the things he thought would be useful to any group of survivors he met.
So far, he had no one to share his supplies with, and no motivation to leave it behind. His plan—still a bit rough around the edges—was to secure the house and the area up to a mile in every direction. Kill anything that needed killing and clear the way for survivors to come find him. There was a cemetery near here, in a town about seventeen miles away, a town called Willard, but Sam couldn’t find it on a map or with the truck’s GPS. Useless as fuck.
So, he stayed where he was.
The deer stand was already here, though old and in disrepair. He fixed it. Sam was always good with tools. Building things was as much therapy as it was a hobby. It had the precision that satisfied his sniper’s need for detail, and it made things instead of destroying them. That mattered.
Killing was a constant in his life. He enlisted on his eighteenth birthday, choosing that path instead of following his father into law enforcement. His younger brother, Tom, was in the police academy in California. Sam wondered if any of his family was still alive. Maybe Tom. The kid was resourceful. Practical and tough. His dad was old and slowing down, though. Sam didn’t know a lot about his stepmom and had never seen his baby half-brother, Benny. They were three thousand miles away, high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Central California. Maybe this plague hadn’t reached that far.
Maybe pigs would sprout wings and fly out of his ass.
That news guy, Billy Trout, said it was everywhere, that it was traveling at the speed of human need. Planes, trains, and automobiles. Out-flying and outdistancing prophylactic measures. Outrunning all common sense and precaution; spread by the people who were trying to outrun it.
There was a joke in there somewhere. His old boss, Captain Joe Ledger could have said something funny about that. A twist of wit, sarcasm, and social commentary. Sam wondered where he was. Probably dead, too.
He drank the rest of the beer and put the can into the canvas cooler because he didn’t want the breeze to knock it off the deer stand. Sam was cautious like that.
He froze.
Something out there moved. He was sure of it.
Sam raised his rifle. It was a CheyTac M200 Intervention sniper rifle. Best of the best for someone like him. Too much gun for hunting, but this wasn’t really deer season. He scanned the field with his shaded eyes first to zero on where he’d heard the movement. Found it. Something moving through the corn off to his left. He leaned into the spotting scope, but the corn was tall and green and lush. The stalks moved, but he couldn’t see why.
He’d used super glue to attach a sock filled with beans to the rail of the tree stand, and he rested the rifle on that. He did the math in his head. Baseline trajectory and bullet drop. His breathing was calm, his finger relaxed along the outside of the trigger guard.
If this was a deer, then he’d let it go past. He could be here for a while if no one came, and there was plenty of food in the truck. It would make more sense to let the deer breed next year’s food. Sam had a feeling that would matter.
If it was a person, he’d have to coax them into the open and make them stand there until he could come over, pat them down, check them for bites, and ask a few questions.
But if it was one of them … then there was only one option. A single round placed just so. Catastrophic brain shot. Something he’d done in hostage rescue situations more times than he could count. A shot to the brain stem or the neural motor cortex that kills so instantly that body reflexes cannot react. What was funny—in a curious rather than humorous way—was that it was a golden shot for snipers, something they aspired to, but which was rarely even considered by other branches of the military. Most of the soldiers he’d known on the way up had been more concerned with seeing how much ordnance they could throw downrange, operating on a more is better plan. Snipers were stingy with their rounds. It was a matter of pride with them, and Sam seldom pulled a trigger unless he was certain of a kill.
He was loaded with .408 Cheyenne Tactical cartridges in a single-stack seven-round magazine, and at four hundred rounds he could kill anything he wanted dead. He’d dropped targets at much greater distances, too, but this wasn’t that kind of war. If this was one of them, then they would walk right up to take the bullet.
“Come on,” he murmured, softer than the whispering breeze.
The weeds parted.
It was a child.
Six years old. Maybe seven. Sandy blond hair riffled by the wind. Jeans and a Spider-Man sweatshirt. Red sneakers. Holding something in his hands.
For a moment Sam thought it was a teddy bear. Or a doll dressed all in red.
“No,” he said, and it came out as a sob.
It wasn’t a doll.
It wasn’t a fucking doll.
It wasn’t.
It …
-3-
Sam took the shot.
-4-
The bullet did what it was designed to do. It ended all brain function. It ended life. Snap. Just like that.
The boy’s head was blown apart like a melon. Very immediate and messy. The body puddled down, dropping the awful red thing it carried.
A perfect shot.
Sam sat back and down, thumping hard onto his ass. Gasping as if the shot had punched a hole in the world through which all air was escaping. The day, even here in the shade, was suddenly too bright.
He felt the burn in his eyes. Not from muzzle flash or gunpowder. Tears burn hotter than those things.
The sound of the shot echoed off of the farmhouse and the ranks of corn and the walls of hell. It went away and then found him again, punching the last air from his lungs as he fell onto his back and squeezed his eyes shut.
This was the world.
This was how the world was.
-5-
He came down from the tree stand and stood for a moment, leaning against the rough oak bark. The rifle was up there. He couldn’t bear to touch it.
It was bad enough that it had been one of them. He’d been sent to this part of Pennsylvania at the start of the plague. He knew the science of it. Lucifer 113, an old Cold War bioweapon cooked up in some Russian lab but brought out of history’s trash bin by a deranged prison scientist named Herman Volker and used on a death row inmate. The plan had been to torture the condemned serial killer by introducing the genetically engineered parasites that would hotwire the man’s brain whole, hijacking his motor cortex and cranial nerves. It would keep the higher functions awake and aware, but with no connection to motor functions. The killer would go into his grave totally connected to all five senses—hyperaware of each—while his body, unable to die any normal death, slowly rotted. But aware. Completely and irrevocably aware.
The killer never made it to the grave because when it came to doing things right the system was almost always in clusterfuck mode. A relative appeared out of the devil’s asshole, or someplace equally unlikely, claimed the body, and brought it home to a little shithole town called Stebbins. In the local funeral home, the killer woke up.
Woke up hungry.
That was how it started. Less than a goddamn week ago. Sam knew the story because he was one of the people who had a need to know. Most people probably still didn’t know what the plague was, or why it was, or how it spread. And the one thing that was nowhere on the news was the fact that every single motherfucking one of them was aware. Trapped inside. Connected and in touch with every taste, every smell, everything nerve conduction could share. All of those people. Helpless passengers, forced to be both witnesses and accomplices in the murders they committed.
All of them.
The little boy, too.
And the baby he carried.
Every.
Last.
One.
Sam staggered out into the field. Not to see the boy. That kid was gone. Freed, if that word could apply. No. He had to find the baby.
The red, ragged bundle the boy had been carrying.
No, Sam demanded of himself. Tell the truth. Know the truth. Have the balls to honor the dead by accepting the truth.
The boy had been feeding on the infant. Carrying it around.
Eating.
-6-
It was in there. On the ground. Twitching.
Handless. Footless. Faceless.
Alive.
Or … un-alive. Sam didn’t know the new language required for this fucked up version of the world.
What were these things? They were not living. They weren’t dead. Not really. The body was hacked, controlled. All nonessential systems were shut down to conserve food and other resources for the parasites. So much so that a lot of the surface flesh and even some of the organs became necrotic, and the slow rot released chemicals and proteins which the parasites devoured. If not alive and not dead, what was the third option?
Living dead?
It had a lurid quality to it, but it also fit. Like a bullet fits the hole it creates as it drills in the flesh. Forced, but functional. Sufficient to its purpose.
The living dead.
This is what Sam chewed on while he knelt in the dirt and dug a hole with his hands. No, not a hole. A grave. He bruised his fingers on roots, tore his nails, numbed his flesh with the cold, cold soil.
Digging.
There were better ways to do this. He had a knife, and it could chop the earth better. That was reasonable. He drew the blade and used it. Tried not to listen to the sound he made. Could not bear to listen to the sounds the little undead thing made. Gurgles. Like a baby would. Like a real, normal baby would.
He chopped and stabbed the ground, widening the hole. Deepening it. Then he stopped when he realized that he was making the hole too neat, too perfect. Overdoing it.
“Fuck,” he said, and then almost apologized out loud because there were kids there. Kids. Holy fuck.
The infant squirmed and tried to reach for him with its ragged stumps of arms. The hole was deep enough but there were two logistical challenges. Lifting the child meant touching it. And then ending it.
This was not shooting three or four hundred yards from an elevated firing position. This was right here, up close and way too personal.
With a baby.
Living dead or not, it was a baby. If there was anything more clear in the rulebook of soldiering it was that soldiers were there—by their nature—to protect the innocent. All arguments about collateral damage aside, this was a certainty; to go against that was the ultimate taboo. Militarily and as a human goddamn being.
“Do your duty, soldier,” he told himself. Speaking out loud. Speaking in an ordinary tone of voice, which was way the fuck out of the ordinary, all things considered.
He paused for a moment, listening to what was going on inside his head. Is this it? he wondered. Is this me going crazy?
After hundreds of conflicts in scores of battles, after pulling the trigger on a legion of targets, Sam had always taken some rough pride in being stable. No PTSD. Snipers were practical, pragmatic. Grounded.
Except he was talking to himself in a cornfield after shooting one kid and contemplating how best to murder another. Kneeling by a hole he’d dug that was surgically neat.
Oh, yeah, no chance of mental damage here, folks. Move along, nothing to see.
The baby rolled over on its side and then flopped onto its belly. The truncated legs pushed against the dirt. The toothless mouth snapped at the air in his direction. Biting the smell of him.
“Jesus fuck,” said Sam. This time there was nothing normal or calm or controlled in his voice.
He looked away. The knife that stood straight from the mound of dirt he’d removed. Then down at the automatic in the shoulder rig he wore. Bullet or blade. Either would get it done. Which, though, would hurt less. The baby. Him. Both.
Knife was quicker. It was right there, but he couldn’t do it. Sam could not even bring himself to touch the handle. Not for something like this. Knives were too personal. They were meant for enemy flesh. He’d used that knife, and others over the years, to cut throats, puncture hearts, end lives. Those targets had been enemies. They were playing the same game of war and understood the rules. The knife, in those moments, was a tool no different than the hammer the person who’d boarded up the windows of the house had used.
Sam knew he could never use that knife on this target. This child. Never in ten million years. On himself, maybe. Sure. That even felt likely. Attractive. Comforting in its way.
Not on a baby.
The gun, though?
He drew it and held it, weighing it. The gun was a SIG Sauer P320-M17. Fully loaded, as it was now, it weighed twenty-nine-point-four ounces. Seventeen 9mm jacketed hollow point rounds. It was too much gun. A .22 would do it. And it would be appropriate because that caliber was notorious as an assassin’s gun. And was this an assassination? A murder? Certainly not an act of war.
Or, he wondered, was it?
The plague was spreading exponentially across the country, and by now almost certainly globally. It was unique in that anyone killed by the plague, or improperly killed by any other means, was recruited by design into the opposing force. A self-sustaining war of attrition. The infected were clear aggressors.
So, sure. War.
The baby kept trying to reach him. To bite him, even though it had no hands to grab, no teeth to bite. If Sam was in hell, then so was it. He bent down and looked into its eyes, wondering if there was an infant’s mind looking back. But it was a stupid thing to do because he wasn’t sure he could even tell that with a living baby. Maybe he could have with the boy.
Do it, he told himself.
“Do it,” he said aloud.
I can’t.
The gun fired. Immediate. Unexpected. Blasting a big red hole in the world.
It was a massive sound because he was bent down close to the baby and because he had no idea his hand was going to fire. The blast punched him in the side of the head and he cried out, reeling, dropped the weapon, grabbed his head. Screamed.
The green corn stalks were painted with bad colors. Red and black. The blood hadn’t yet undergone the full biochemical change from normal to totally infected blood. Even so, he could see tiny threadlike worms wriggling in the droplets as they ran down the cornstalks.
-7-
Sam did not remember burying the child.
For the rest of that day and all through a bad night he wasn’t sure he had. But when he went out in the morning the hole was filled in, with a hump of dirt patted neatly above it. And there was a second mound next to that one. Bigger. The boy. Sam understood that he must have dug that grave, too, but there was no shred of memory anywhere in his head.
He knew that he should be worried about that. Really worried.
He went and sat on the porch steps to try and sort out exactly how worried. There was a small cloud—just one—skating across the sky. He watched it, leaning back to track its slow progress. He squinted into the sun, closed his eyes for a moment, and woke to darkness.
Crickets sang in the corn and in the grass. Fireflies danced in the air, and overhead someone had shot holes in the nighttime sky, through which cold light shone. The moon was down and the day was gone.
Gone.
Gone where, though?
Sam sat there, shivering with cold that had nothing to do with the temperature. He got slowly and painfully to his feet. Everything ached. Every muscle and tendon; every inch of his skin. The bones of his ass hurt, and he knew that he must have been there all day. How long? Ten hours? Twelve? More.
It terrified him.
Then he heard the sound.
Soft. Furtive. Sneaky. Not close, but out in the cornfield. Near where …
Suddenly he was off the porch and running across the lawn, past the trees and the driveway, past the burned wreck of the pickup truck and the splintered shell of the gas pump. He reached the front wall of corn and plunged into it. The stiff, sharp leaves slashed at him, cutting his face and hands, but Sam bashed at them, slapped them aside as he ran.
There were noises in the field now. Grunts. Whispers. No … not whispers. It was more basic than that. Moans.
Then he burst through one row and collided into someone.
Some-thing.
A man. A farmer in coveralls. The man fell backward and down, landing hard. Sam rebounded and caught his heel on something, and he went down, too, crashing down on his aching buttocks, jarring his tailbone. He cried out as pain punched from his coccyx all the way up his spine.
The farmer grunted, too. But not in pain. It was a strange noise. A duller, less emphatic sound. Air jolted from lungs but absent of pain.
“I’m sorry,” said Sam.
And knew that it was not the thing to say. There was nothing he could say to make this moment work, to fix it. The man sat up and in the darkness his face was etched with blue starlight. His eyes were dull and seemed to look straight through Sam. His lips hung rubbery and slack. There was dirt on his hands from where he’d been digging.
Digging.
For food.
The farmer uttered that same moan. It was a terrible sound of bottomless hunger. Of a need that could never be satisfied. An ugly, awful sound.
“I’m sorry,” said Sam again as he reached for his gun.
Which. Was. Not. There.
No gun. No knife.
The farmer lumbered to his feet and reached for him, moaning louder now. From deep inside the cornfield there were answering sounds. Other moans. Many, many more.
Sam Imura screamed.
Special operator. World-class sniper. DELTA gunslinger. Killer. He screamed because the world was not the world anymore. This was the world. It was all broken, and, in that moment, beneath the crowds of stars gathered to witness it, Sam realized that he, too, was broken.
So very badly broken. Splintered, fragmented. Torn loose from the things that fastened him to any understanding.
He screamed and the woods erupted with newer, louder moans. The green stalks shivered and shook as pale figures shambled toward him. Reaching and reaching. Farmers and cops, housewives and school kids. A man in a funeral suit. A naked woman with three bullet holes in her stomach. An old lady in a hospital gown. A nurse without eyes. A fireman with no hands. Coming for him.
Sam screamed and screamed, and then something in him broke. Snapped. Shattered.
He was running across the field with no awareness of leaving the cornfield. He was running and yelling. Figures came out of the shadows and he swung at them, chopped at them with the edges of his hands, kicked at them to break knees. They fell but did not die. The broken ones crawled after him. The others walked, lumbered, loped, staggered.
But he ran.
-8-
He blinked his eyes and he was in the plastic tree stand, up in the tree. His hands were cut and sore; he had scrapes on his shins. But the rifle was there. His gear bag with the four boxes of shells was there. His other handgun, a Glock 26, was there. Even his canvas bag of beer and food was there.
He was there.
The moon peered over the tops of the trees. More time was missing, but he thought he understood it now. He was going mad, or had gone mad, but some part of him was still on duty, still protecting him. That part of him did not allow Sam to see everything. Not the worst parts. It disallowed him to witness the process of his own collapse, and so it skipped forward, letting the body do what it needed to do and then allowing his consciousness to catch up.
Sure, he thought, that sounds reasonable.
And it was reasonable. Just not to the sane. Not to the unbroken.
Below the tree stand were them. At least forty. Maybe more. When the moon was all the way up, he would be able to count better. He had four boxes of rifle ammunition, fifty cartridges to a box. And a hundred rounds of pistol bullets. Sam Imura, broken or not, didn’t need more than one round per target. Not at this range. Not with these slow, shambling targets.
He thought about it. About what the best play was here. He could fight, and maybe clear these things out of his fields—and they were his fields now. Or he could use that handy little Glock and go find his brother and his parents and his friends. After all, if the world was this badly broken, why not simply opt out?
Why not?
This wasn’t the war he trained for. This wasn’t the world he fought for.
Right?
He removed the Glock from the bag, ejected the magazine, held it to the light to make sure it was fully loaded and slapped it back into place. Made sure there was one in the pipe, too. Ready to rock and roll.
The moonlight painted the tops of the corn a lovely silver. He couldn’t see the graves he’d dug, but knew they were there. Two graves. One small, the other smaller. Digging those graves cost him more than he ever wanted to spend. It wasn’t fair that he had to pay that price. It wasn’t fair that those kids had to die like that.
He bent and picked up his radio and fiddled with the dial.
“This is Billy Trout reporting live from the apocalypse,” said the voice. As if waiting for Sam to find him. Billy was still there. Sam listened to the reporter give updates on what was going on out there. About battles. About losses. About a convoy of school buses taking kids down south to North Carolina. To Ashville, where the military was making a big stand. Billy talked and talked, and there were tears in his hoarse voice.
Sam listened. The dead moaned.
“If you can hear my voice,” said Billy, “here’s what you can do.”
He ran down the ways to kill these living dead. Billy called them zombies, but the word didn’t work for Sam. Billy went on to list safe roads, and ones that were impassable. He listed shelters and rescue stations, and disputed the ones that were overrun. Billy talked and talked and talked as the moon rose.
Sam stood there with the Glock. Sometimes he pressed the barrel up under his chin. Sometimes he pointed it down at the white faces.
The two graves burned in his mind.
Billy was with the convoy of school buses. All those kids. Living kids.
That’s how it started for Sam. He and his team helped Billy and his girlfriend, a local cop named Dez Fox, get as many kids out of Stebbins as possible. Some adults, too. Heading south. Heading to Asheville.
Those kids.
Still alive.
The moon was up now and he could count. Fifty-six of them. And probably more out there. Maybe as much as a hundred more who might be drawn by the sound of gunshots. Maybe two hundred more.
Sam smiled. Okay, say two hundred and fifty of them between him and the house. And ten thousand rounds of ammunition split between the house and the truck.
Those kids.
The living ones.
He could not bear the thought of rows of little mounds of carefully sculpted dirt. Could not bear it. That hurt worse than trying to hold onto his sanity. It hurt worse than trying to stay alive.
All those kids. With a single cop, a few adults, and a stupid news reporter to keep them safe.
“This is crazy,” he told himself, saying it out loud, putting it on the wind.
The dead moaned. Dead people moaned.
So, yeah. Crazy.
But at least this was on the sanest side of crazy. Useful crazy. That’s how Sam saw it.
He raised the pistol and took aim. It was a target-rich environment. Any shot would hit. Only careful, precise shots, though, would kill.
He was very careful.
He was very precise.
He never missed. Not once.
And if he was crazy, then so what? Surely the world—the broken, hungry world—was crazier. So that balanced it all out. At least he was crazy with a purpose, a goal. A mission. Soldiers need a mission. Even insane ones.
Maybe especially insane ones.
That’s what Sam told himself. As he fired and fired and fired.
“I’m coming,” he said to the night. To the wind. To all those children on the buses. “I’m coming.”
-9-
Sam did not really remember leaving the farm.
He had no idea where he got the UPS truck, or how he filled it with supplies from his crippled truck. So many things were blurry or simply gone.
Sam smiled. “I’m coming.”
The sign ahead said, Welcome to West Virginia.
The truck rolled on, heading south.