I’m starting to think that my mother was right, and I should have gone to law school.
Alexander Norton wasn’t too damned happy with this situation. He was known as The Black in the communities for a reason, but for all that, he didn’t like his odds right now. He knew Masters and Rankin were good guys, but they were all in over their heads.
How the fuck did bloodsuckers get this far north, in the United States of all places? These bastards shouldn’t have been able to move much past their stomping grounds in Eastern Europe. Something stinks, and it’s not just the decomposition off these bloodsuckers.
Unlike the others, he didn’t wonder why the streets were empty. The reason for that was obvious: The pack leader was keeping the undead inside where it was warm.
Unfortunately that meant that most of the town could be dead and mobile.
Dying was bad enough, but Alex had seen enough people die to know it was just the way things went. Someone dying ten, twenty, even fifty or eighty years before their time was just a drop in the universal bucket.
When people died and kept walking, though, that was a problem.
“What are you thinking, Alex?”
Norton looked over to see Masters sidling up to him, his voice pitched low.
“You know the movie Aliens?” he asked. “The one where they say, ‘We should take off and nuke the site from orbit’?”
Masters winced. “Shit. I hope you’re kidding.”
“Only marginally. The good news is that it’s contained,” Alex said. “This weather won’t last. Another week or so and the power generator up here will probably run out of fuel, and they’ll all turn into corpsicles. It’ll be a big mystery in the papers that gets blamed on some new virus outbreak or maybe a chemical spill.”
“And the bad news?”
“We’re standing in the middle of a fucking vampire den, you stupid bastard,” Norton hissed. “Do you really need me to tell you the bad news?”
“What about the civilians?”
“You mean how many are left alive?” the “consultant” asked dryly.
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“No way to know without rooting this whole place out and putting every last one of these things back in the graves they crawled out of,” Norton admitted, “and I doubt we have the manpower or firepower to pull it off.”
“So you advise we pull out.”
“Fuck yes. We run like hell, don’t look back, and call for someone to pick us up.”
Masters was quiet for a long moment; then he shook his head.
“What the hell are you shaking your head for? We don’t have a play here.”
“Some civilians are still alive, Alex.”
“Well boohoo for them, but we’ve seen worse. You and me both, Hawk,” Alex Norton growled. “If our team gets killed, it won’t do much to keep them alive.”
“This is exactly the sort of thing the admiral contacted me to handle,” Masters said quietly. “This is why I called the team together.”
“You should have called a few more men in that case.”
“I called SEALs — we have enough men.”
Alex shook his head. “I never knew you to be either delusional or stupid.”
“We’re not leaving American civilians here to be slaughtered or…turned into the enemy,” Masters said with conviction. “Put that out of your head right now. These people may not be from your community, but they are from mine.”
Alex sighed. “I knew from the moment I met you in that bar down in Mexico that you were going to be trouble. I should have blown you off right then, because you’re going to get me killed.”
“The only easy day, my friend, was yesterday.”
Masters walked away, leaving Alex to fume.
Stupid Rambo wannabe is going to get us all killed. Worse, we’ll be walking when our bodies finish cooling. I hate macho idiots who don’t know the game they’re playing.
There were people moving around in the streets.
They thought they were being clever, hiding in the shadows and moving quietly.
Fools.
The shadows didn’t belong to them.
The pack couldn’t see them, but they could smell them. Feel them as they passed. They were out there, so it was time to move again.
Doors opened around the town and shadows were cast by figures stepping out of the light and into the dark. One, five, twenty more.
The streets of Barrow were coming alive again.
After a fashion.
“Oh shit.”
Hale swore under his breath, checking his spotter scope again before pressing his eye to the starlight scope of his rifle. A second later he thumbed open his throat mic. “Boss,” he said. “You’ve got company.”
“Say again?”
“The streets crawl, boss. Get under cover.”
“Roger. Thanks.”
Hale didn’t bother responding; he rested the butt of his rifle down against the roof and turned back to the spotter scope. Through its wide angle he could see the figures walking in the streets below him, moving with a decidedly unnatural gate.
He didn’t need to do it, but a glance through his forward-looking infrared (FLIR) scope told the story. When something moves and doesn’t give off body heat, you have a problem. If you’re lucky, it’s just a reptile problem, but when the figures are shaped like humans…well, that was a whole different story.
He’d encountered these things before, and while he didn’t know what they called themselves, he knew enough to label them in his own mind.
Zombies. Walking dead. A whole array of other names. It didn’t matter to Hale what they were called.
There were now targets to be serviced.
Of course, there was one big problem with that.
I don’t think I packed enough bullets.
“Everyone, under cover!” Masters hissed. “Now!”
They scrambled for the cover of buildings, hiding in the sparse shrub growth and small constructions of the town. The men wanted to ask why, but they knew better, and the answer was forthcoming anyway.
As they lay spread out across the ground, hiding around corners or under debris, their weapons to their shoulders and trained on the streets, it quickly became clear that Barrow’s days as a ghost town were officially over. They’d moved right into the Halloween portion of the festivities, and it was apparent that no one had skimped on their costumes.
“Holy shit,” Mack whispered, “it’s the fucking living dead. Zombies are real.…I can’t believe it!”
“They’re not zombies,” Alex whispered back, annoyed. “If they were zombies the worst we’d have to worry about would be that they’d till the soil and plant sugarcane. They’re vampires.”
“Plant sugarcane?” Mack blurted, face contorted in confusion.
Alex sighed. “Zombies were traditionally raised as menial labor. Doesn’t anyone study mythology anymore?”
“Well, sorry, I was wasting my time studying useless crap like tactics, logistics, advanced math, and languages people actually know how to speak,” Mack growled, annoyed.
“They look like zombies to me,” Derek sided with his buddy.
Alex rolled his eyes. “God, I hate virgins.”
Both SEALs turned to scowl at him, but he just shrugged them off with no further comment.
“They’re sticking to the streets for now, so let’s start crawling back toward the houses,” Masters ordered. “We’ll use the buildings for cover while we figure out what to do.”