Prologue
Gabriel raised the stock of the Belgian P90 assault rifle to his shoulder, took aim, and squeezed the trigger. The weapon’s silencer muffled most of the noise from the shot. It made a dull crack, like an empty box dropped on a concrete floor, followed by the metallic clang of the next round going into the chamber. He moved the barrel a few inches to the left and fired again.
Crack-clang.
“You are way too good with that thing,” I said. “Scary good.”
Gabriel lowered his rifle and grinned as he looked at his handiwork. Two dead bodies lay face down on the ground about forty yards ahead of us on the other side of the perimeter fence. Both had gaping exit wounds visible on the backs of their heads, and a rust colored sludge began to ooze from their broken skulls, staining the snow beneath. Cold mountain air stung my nostrils with the acrid scent of cordite as Gabriel turned to face me, still smiling. His white teeth stood out in contrast to his dark black beard, and his bright gray eyes twinkled with humor.
“You didn’t think it was too scary last week when I saved your ass from getting eaten,” he said, his breath rising around his face in a thick fog.
It was a cold late December morning, and the sun was just beginning to crest the peaks in the distance. Reddish-gold shafts of light pierced the gloom, sparkling against the snow and frozen tree limbs. The air was biting cold, but not bad enough to get its teeth past my heavy winter coat.
“First of all, you didn’t save me from anything,” I said. “I knew those two walkers were behind me, and I would have killed them right after I finished dealing with the one crawling under the fence. Second, those shots went by close enough to tickle me. You know how to say ‘duck’, right? Maybe you should try that next time.”
Gabriel laughed. “Hey, I was just trying to help you out.”
“You’re an ass, Gabe. I hope you know that.”
We made our way down to the fence, snow crunching under our boots as we walked. The incident Gabe referred to happened a little over a week ago as he and I were coming back from an unsuccessful scouting trip. We were making a circuit of the ten-foot steel fence that encircles the mountaintop, and as we approached the main gate, we spotted a crawler trying to pull itself under the bottom rail. It heard us coming, and started hauling itself across the ground.
At the same time, I heard rustling in the evergreens to my right, and turned around to see two walking maggot farms stumbling in my direction. They must have heard the other one moan, and set off in the direction of the sound. I decided to deal with the crawler first, before it made too much more noise. The other undead probably wouldn’t start moaning until they actually saw me.
I drew my small-sword from its sheath on my back as I approached the crawler. The small-sword is a descendant of the rapier style swords that were popular in Europe a few centuries ago, but unlike the rapier, a small-sword does not have sharp edges. It does, however, have a very sharp tip, and due to the triangular shape of the blade, it is slender and narrow, but as strong and durable as a suspension spring. Despite its name, a small-sword is actually twenty-seven inches from cross guard to tip, making it the perfect weapon for skewering undead eyeballs and rotten brain matter.
I kicked the crawler over onto its back, planted a boot on its withered neck, lined the sword up with its left eye, and plunged the blade downward. A quick twist of the ornate handle scrambled its brain, and the crawler went limp. Just as I was about to turn around and deal with the two walkers behind me, I heard the familiar thump-clang of Gabriel’s P90, and the distinctive thup-thup of bullets passing by close to my head. Two bodies crumpled to the dirt a few feet behind me. I shot Gabriel an irritated glance.
“Cut that one close enough, asshole?”
“They were getting too close,” he said. “You can’t let them do that.”
“I knew they were there, Gabe. I had plenty of time. Next time just say something first.”
I have the utmost confidence in Gabe’s marksmanship, but I do not like being downrange of anyone firing a weapon if I can help it. Gabe brought my thoughts back to the present by tapping me on the shoulder and pointing a gloved finger down the mountainside.
“More of ‘em coming. Guess they didn’t want their friends here to have all the fun.”
I looked where Gabe was pointing and saw a loose knot of five ghouls staggering their way toward us. They looked to be about a hundred yards away.
“I wish like hell I could figure out how they keep finding us,” I said. “You think they know we’re here somehow?”
“I doubt it,” Gabe replied. “Probably just wandering around looking for food, chasing deer or something.”
I had seen the remains of a few animals unlucky enough to be blindsided by the walking meat sacks, and although it was not a pretty sight, it was encouraging to see direct evidence that the Reanimation Phage does not affect animals. Gabe has known for years that the infection only affects humans, and has told me as much many times, but it was still nice to confirm it for myself. Undead people are bad enough. The last thing I want to encounter is a revenant mountain lion or brown bear.
Gabe shifted his P90 around to his back and held out a hand for my hunting rifle.
“No way, dude,” I said. “You already got to have some fun this morning. Besides, I need the target practice.” Gabe frowned, but dropped his hand.
“Fine, but try not to waste too much ammo. We’ve only got a few hundred rounds left for that thing,” he said.
I put one hand on a fence rail and rested the forearm of the rifle between my thumb and forefinger, tucked the stock firmly into my right shoulder, and peered through the scope. I lined up the crosshairs slightly above the forehead of the lead walker to compensate for the drop of the projectile, and concentrated on timing its jerky, uncoordinated movements. Through the magnified view of the scope, I could see that the undead shuffling in front had been a tall, lean young man before it died. The tattered remains of a business suit flapped around its grayish skin, and its shoes had long since fallen apart, leaving its ruined feet exposed to the elements. A lime green tie dangled listlessly from its neck in the frigid wind.
I let out half a breath, held it, and squeezed the trigger. The stock bucked backward into my shoulder, and even with a silencer on the barrel, the rifle’s report was loud enough to make me flinch. Through the scope, I saw the dead man in the suit collapse, his brain matter splattering the face of the corpse behind him in specks of gray and brown.
“Nice shot,” Gabe said, peering through his binoculars. “See if you can do it four more times.”
I worked the bolt of the rifle, chambering another round. The next three undead dropped with one shot each, but on the last target, my aim was slightly low and the bullet punched a hole through the ghoul’s cheekbone. It staggered backward, then righted itself and doggedly trudged forward. Most of the left half of its face was gone, but its brain remained intact. The hunting rifle was out of ammunition, so I handed it to Gabriel and reached back for my sword.
“No sense wasting any more ammo on just one,” I said. “Reload that for me?”
Gabe slung the hunting rifle over his shoulder and opened the cover to my backpack, taking out a handful of thirty-ought six rounds. I stuck the point of my sword into the frozen ground, propped the handle up against a steel fencepost, and crossed my forearms over the rail as I watched the corpse stagger up the mountain.
“You making any progress on that journal of yours?” Gabe asked as he reloaded the Winchester.
“Yeah, I guess. Mostly simple stuff. Supply and ammo inventories, places we’ve scouted already, fresh water and building materials, things like that.”
“I thought you were going to write about what happened to you after the Outbreak.”
I turned my head to look at him. “It’s not my favorite subject.”
“Mine either. But it might be a good way to pass the time.”
I watched the big man thumb a few rounds into the Winchester’s magazine, and then looked thoughtfully back out at the frost white shimmer of the surrounding woodlands. A gentle easterly breeze blew in, sending small swirls of powdery snow dancing through the air.
Good that the wind is blowing east, I thought. That’ll keep the worst of the radiation away from us.
Gabe finished loading the rifle, worked the bolt to chamber a round, and handed it back to me. I slung the strap across my chest to leave my hands free as the walker shuffled to within ten yards of the fence. I was expecting it to start moaning and gurgling, and frowned when it didn’t. Holding up a hand to shield my eyes from the sun, I saw the reason why the ghoul was so quiet—its throat had been torn out.
It wore the tattered remains of a police officer’s uniform, and gaped at us with wide, bloodshot eyes turned milky white, mouth hanging open, a look of perpetual hunger contorting its wasted features into something sub-human. It ran into the fence rails and began to heave against them, reaching bone-white arms through the gaps.
I brought my sword up and drove the point through the walker’s eye, giving the blade a practiced twist as it went in. When I felt it hit the backside of the creature’s skull, I quickly drew back, covering an arm over my face to avoid splatter. The corpse shuddered, tottered for a moment, and then crumpled to the ground. I reached a hand under the lowest rail in the fence and started pulling it toward me.
“What’re you doin’?” Gabe asked.
“He’s still got his duty belt on. I want to see if it has anything useful on it,” I replied.
Gabe bent down and helped me pull the body to the fence, dragging it close enough for me to reach through and unbuckle the duty belt. After some tugging and cursing on my part, I finally managed to rip it free and pull it off the corpse.
I stood up and looked it over. Leather attachments for handcuffs, a radio, and a taser were all empty, but the expandable baton was still in its sheath, along with a rusted can of pepper spray. Most importantly, the pistol was still in its holster, which I recognized it as a Sig Sauer 9mm with a magazine in it, and two more magazines on the backside of the belt.
“Well I’ll be damned,” I said, holding up the belt for Gabe to see. “Look what we got here.”
“Nice. Let’s hope it still works.”
I nodded in agreement. A serviceable pistol and forty-five rounds of ammo was more than we had scored on our last two scouting trips. I stepped behind Gabe and put the duty belt in his pack.
The rest of the patrol passed without incident, and the good fortune of finding the dead cop’s weapon buoyed our spirits. Life had been tough over the past few months, and any stroke of good luck was a welcome change.
After we finished patrolling, we loaded the body closest to the fence onto a makeshift sled and dumped it over the sheer cliff that made up the entire western face of the mountain. It tumbled down gracelessly, taking its place among a steadily growing heap of corpses lying broken on the rocks below.
Rest easy, friend, and thanks for the gear.
“What do you want to do about the bodies down the hill?” I asked, as we walked back toward the gate.
“I’m too tired and hungry to drag those sons of bitches all the way up here,” Gabe replied. “Let’s just fire up the truck and use the winch.”
Normally I would have protested the use of precious fuel, but the morning was cold, and the rumbling of my empty stomach was becoming a distraction. I grunted in agreement and went into the cabin to get the keys. We pulled the Tacoma up to the eastern side of the fence and used the winch mounted on the front to haul the bodies up to the gate. I would have checked them to see if they still had anything useful, but like most infected, their clothing had been reduced to shreds. It wasn’t worth the effort.
After the last of the morning’s casualties had been disposed of, Gabe and I parked the truck under the carport and went inside to make breakfast.
To avoid tracking in mud, we left our boots just inside the door, hung our guns up on hooks set into the wall, and propped our swords up in a corner. Gabe squatted down by the stove to get a fire going, while I grabbed a few strips of dried meat and some canned potatoes from the pantry. Taking the lid off a rain barrel, I ladled clean water into a pot with the dried meat, then poured some more water into a larger pot and set both of them on the stove.
“What’s the hot water for?” Gabe asked.
“Tea.”
He rocked back on his heels and looked over his shoulder. “What’s the occasion?”
“When was the last time you looked at a calendar?”
He shrugged. “Not sure. Couple weeks, maybe.”
I chuckled, shaking my head. “Well, Merry Christmas.”
He looked bewildered for a moment, then laughed.
“No shit. Man, I totally forgot. Christmas...” He shook his head and went back to feeding little sticks into the kindling. As the fire grew, he motioned toward a stack of firewood a few feet away.
“You feel like going out and cutting down some more wood today? Between what’s here in the cabin and under the tarp out back, we’ve got about three days’ worth. Maybe more if we start sleeping down in the bunker.”
“Yeah, might as well,” I replied. “We’re gonna need it sooner or later. Better get it done while the weather is tolerable.”
Our underground shelter stayed a constant 60 degrees, but since we had finished work on the perimeter fence, we preferred to sleep aboveground in the cabin. It saved electricity, which was a lot tougher to come by than firewood.
Once Gabe had the fire burning brightly, he tossed a few larger pieces of wood into the stove and shut the door, twisting the air valve open to keep it fed. By the time breakfast was ready, the cabin had warmed considerably, and Gabe and I were able to hang up our heavy coats before sitting down to eat. I poured the tea into a pair of metal cups and handed one to Gabe.
“To Christmas,” I said, holding mine up, “and being alive to see it.”
“To Christmas.” Gabe clinked his cup against mine, and we took a sip.
“Mmm, good lord, I forgot how good this stuff is,” I said.
“Tell you what,” Gabe said, “come the spring thaw, we should shoot down the river over to Marion. Remember that store there, Heavenly Leaves, or something like that?”
“Marion is that little town just west of here right? About fifteen miles or so down the river?”
Gabe nodded.
“Might not be a bad idea,” I said.
It would be a risk canoeing all the way to Marion, but then again, anything was a risk these days. And besides, a little caffeine pick-me-up is always welcome on the trail.
We finished the meal in companionable silence, eating the canned goods and splitting up the boiled meat. Gabe lifted the pot to pour some of the broth into my empty cup, but I stopped him.
“Nope, that’s all yours buddy. My Christmas present to you.”
Gabe chuckled. “Damn, now I gotta get you something.”
I pointed toward his pack. “You get that Sig we found this morning in working condition, and get those bullets cleaned up, and we’ll call it even.”
“You got a deal.”
Gabe poured the rest of the broth into his cup and sat back in his chair, drinking it in little sips. When boiled in clean water, smoked venison makes a nice savory broth. Water gets boring after a while, and most of the food we ate didn’t have much flavor to it. Dried meat and canned vegetables will keep you alive, but without spices and salt to add flavor, their taste leaves a lot to be desired. Gabe had a few barrels of salt in the underground shelter, but we didn’t waste it on edible food. We only used it to preserve meat from wild game we hunted in the forest, or caught from nearby lakes and streams.
After breakfast, we spent the rest of the morning cleaning the guns we brought with us on patrol, and then set to cleaning our hand weapons. My small-sword is easy to maintain, as it doesn’t have any edges that require sharpening. All I have to do is wipe smears of brain matter off the last seven or eight inches, and run a steel file over the tip to keep it nice and pointy. Gabe’s Falcata, however, with its high-carbon steel and sweeping leaf-shaped blade, takes quite a bit more work to keep sharp.
The sword was a custom job I had commissioned for him as a birthday present three years ago, which was about a year and a half before the end of civilization.
A few months before Gabriel’s birthday that year, I had driven up to Morganton from my house in Charlotte to give him a hand clearing some brush from a piece of his land. The part of his property that we worked on had once been farmland, but over forty years had passed since the last time anything had been planted there, and where crops had once grown, there were now tall grass, saplings, and scrub brush.
I brought along a military issue machete that my father gave me when I was a boy, and a short axe to cut down the more sturdy growth. Gabe came to his front door carrying only a kukri machete, which at first, I thought would be too short to do any good on the thick shrubbery. But after seeing it in action, I was surprised at the amount of cutting force it could generate, even joking to Gabe that his machete looked like what would happen if a battle-axe and a broadsword had a kid.
Gabe held up the blade and said, “You know, this thing is just a baby compared to what the Spanish used to make. They had a sword with a design a lot like this one called a Falcata. I wish I could get my hands on a good replica. I’ve wanted one of those things since I learned about them in...” he paused for a moment. The smile faded from his face before he continued. “Anyway, it’d be nice to have one.”
That was all I needed to hear.
I placed a call to a guy I knew who worked at Legion Forge, a small company that specialized in making functional custom replicas of historical weapons, and directed him to a website with the sword’s original design. The smith cut the weapon from 5160 high carbon spring steel, heat tempered the blade to strengthen it, and polished the razor-sharp blade to a high, glossy sheen. He also made a horse-head shaped pommel and cross guard out of ornately cast bronze, and fashioned a handle for it from leather and wire wrapped sharkskin over sandalwood grips. The finished product was a gorgeous piece of craftsmanship, and I would be lying if I said that I didn’t briefly consider keeping it for myself. But only briefly.
Later, on his birthday, Gabe heard me pulling into his driveway and stepped out onto the front porch to greet me.
“Happy birthday motherfucker!” I shouted as I got out of my truck. Gabe stopped and blinked a couple of times.
“Shit, it is my birthday, isn’t it?” he said. “I literally turned thirty-six before I knew it.”
I shoved the box into his hands as I went through the front door. Gabe followed me in and set the box down on the table, while I poured a couple of fingers of whiskey into two glasses and handed him one.
“Go on, open it,” I said.
I watched him, waiting for his reaction when he peeled away the wrapping paper and opened the box. He didn’t move or say anything for a moment, he just sat there, staring silently. Finally, he reached in, took the sword out, and drew it from its sheath.
The mirror-polished blade reflected the lamplight, sending a bright yellow ray dancing around on the wall behind me. Gabe ran a thumb over the sword’s centimeter-thick spine, and raised it to eye level to examine the shining, razor-keen edge.
“Where the hell did you get this thing?” he asked.
“The guys at Legion Forge made it for me. You like it?”
“Shit yeah. Is this for me?”
“No Gabe, I boxed it up, gift-wrapped it, and drove my ass up here on your birthday just show it to you. Yes, genius, it’s for you.”
We spent the rest of the night putting away whiskey and rummaging through Gabe’s garage looking for things to cut apart. The next morning, bleary-eyed and nursing hangovers, we spent several painful hours cleaning up the colossal mess we had made, and trying to remember what the hell we had done with the sword. After almost giving it up for gone, Gabe spotted it buried halfway through a tree branch nearly fifty feet off the ground. Neither one of us could remember how it had gotten there.
Gabe brought me out of my reverie by throwing a piece of oil soaked cloth at my head.
“Hey, space cadet, what are you grinning about over there?”
“Just remembering the day I gave you that sword.”
Gabe paused for a moment, then laughed and shook his head. “I hope you can remember more of it than I can. We were so drunk I’m surprised we didn’t cut our own fool heads off. It took me two days to get over that hangover.”
He made another pass over the blade with a sharpening stone.
“I have to say though, this thing has served me pretty well since the world went to shit.”
His smile faded as he tested the edge of the blade with his thumb, and then returned it to its sheath. He propped the sword up against the wall, then stood up to move back to his chair.
“You know, you really should put something together to post to the Net,” Gabe said, jerking a thumb toward the laptop. “Once we get past the Appalachian range we’ll be able to get a signal. We should tell people about everything we’ve seen.”
“If you’re so concerned about it,” I said, “why don’t you write something down?”
“Because you’re better at it, college boy. Besides, I got bullets to polish.”
Gabe walked over to his pack and took out the duty belt we had found that morning. He removed the pistol and the ammo magazines, picked up a cleaning kit, and sat down in front of the stove to begin working on them.
I watched him for a few moments, wondering where to start. Finally, with nothing better to do, I sat down with the laptop, took a breath, flexed my fingers, and began to write.