We hit the town of Lena, seven or eight miles from Speranta, on the afternoon of the first day. We’d scouted it before, looking for a phonebook or well-drilling equipment. I already knew it was abandoned and thoroughly looted. We pushed on another three or four miles before spending the night in an abandoned farmhouse the forward scouts had found.
We covered about ten miles the next day, reaching the outskirts of Freeport just before dusk. I had never been there, but it looked much bigger than Warren or Stockton. The scouts hadn’t seen anyone all day. The silence and stillness of the landscape seemed ominous—where had all the people gone?
We trudged up to a restaurant at the edge of town: Family Affair Cafe, according to the signpost out front. The restaurant itself was covered in a snowdrift so massive, it nearly engulfed the building. At the lee side of the cafe, a window had been smashed. I set up a guard rotation, and we built a small fire right there in the middle of the restaurant. With the snow covering most of the building and all of us packed tightly together, it was warm enough, and I slept well.
In the morning I sent out four pairs of scouts with instructions to explore for an hour and then report back. The rest of us spent the hour resting and repairing snowshoes.
The team I sent along our back trail found nothing, which was expected but still a relief. It was good to know nobody was following us. Another pair found the library in downtown Freeport, but the maps, phone books, and the useful parts of the nonfiction section—everything on agriculture and engineering—were gone.
The pair I had sent south had followed road signs to Highland Community College, but when they got there, they found it ringed by a huge wall built of frozen dirt. Sentries atop the wall had shot at them, and they had hightailed it back to our base in the cafe.
The final pair of scouts—Nylce and Francine—had followed West Avenue to a commercial district on the south side of town. When they returned, they were grim and ashen-faced. I could hardly believe what they told me. Instead of talking about it longer—which I couldn’t bear to do—I asked them to take me there.
We went as a party of six—me, Nylce, Francine, Ed, Darla, and another survivor of the Warren massacre, Trig Boling. He was a lanky nineteen-year-old with a slightly misshapen face, like it had been frozen while he was scowling in a particularly energetic way. But despite his appearance, Trig was unfailingly friendly and cheerful—I liked having him around.
We only had three guns, but everyone was carrying at least one knife. We stalked through the city in silence, dreading our destination. After about ten minutes, we passed the Freeport City Cemetery—only a few of its tallest monuments protruded above the snow, lonely sentinels standing watch over a buried age.
Most of the buildings on West Avenue had burned. The first two shopping centers we passed had collapsed. As we approached the third, I noticed that Francine was caressing the handle of her knife, rubbing it as if it were a knotted muscle. Nylce’s head flicked constantly from side to side as if she were afraid someone would sneak up on her in the few seconds since her last sidelong glance.
As we approached the Meadowlands Shopping Center, I saw a glint of firelight through the glass storefront of a J. C. Penney. We slowed our approach, using the snow-covered mounds hiding parked cars as cover. When we got close enough to see inside the Penney’s, I realized that if anything, my scouts had understated the horror of the scene.
Three men dressed in ragged, bloodstained clothing crouched in front of a greasy fire. Around them were scattered thousands of burnt and cracked bones. Behind them, the grisly bone pile nearly reached the high ceiling. I could identify femurs, ribs, hip bones, and skulls—all of them fragmentary, roasted and cracked for their marrow.
All the bones were human.
Chapter 46
I dropped down behind the car/snow mound we were using as cover. What would Ben do? There were six of us and only three of them, but we had only three guns. Focus on the mission, Ben would probably say. The mission was acquiring supplies for the greenhouse.
“Move out,” I whispered. “Back to base.”
Darla nodded and started backtracking, but Francine grabbed my arm. “You can’t just leave them here. They’ll keep killing people.”
“There are 105 people who’ll die if we don’t find supplies for building greenhouses,” I whispered.
“Killing a few flensers won’t help us find those supplies.”
“Uh, Chief?” Ed said.
“What?” Obviously I needed to spend some more time working on turning this ragtag band of refugees into obedient soldiers.
“The flensers—they’re gone.”
I looked back at the J. C. Penney. The space in front of the fire was empty. Crap. Had they heard us? Better assume they had. “Where’d they go?”
“Two to our left, one to our right.”
“Getting help? Or going out the side doors of that store to circle around us?”
“Or maybe to follow us back to camp.”
That was a nasty thought. If they followed us, they could pick off our scouts two at a time as they came and went from the camp. I couldn’t allow that to happen.
Nylce had the bolt-action rifle—much better for sniping than the semi-automatics. “Get up on that hill behind us,” I told her. “Take Francine to spot for you.”
“On it.”
I handed the semi-automatic rifle I was carrying to Ed. “Take Trig. Set up an ambush over there at the edge of the parking lot. Darla and I will swing around and try to flush them out, push them toward you.”
“Yessir,” Ed replied.
Darla and I moved out to our right, hoping to intercept the singleton who had broken in that direction. We flitted from car to car, trying to stay under cover. I had no idea what kind of weapons these flensers might have.
We got around to the side door of the J. C. Penney without encountering anyone. There was no wide expanse of glass here, just a single glass door. Darla and I pressed ourselves against the brick wall to either side of the door and peered in.
The inside of the store was illuminated by the hellish flickers of the still-burning fire. I couldn’t see anyone inside, although anything could have been hiding behind the bone pile or in the dark corners of the room. I pointed at myself and the bone pile and then at Darla and her rifle.
Darla nodded and readied the rifle. I pulled the door open and slipped through, running in a crouch for the cover of the bone pile’s nearest edge.
It was impossible to be both fast and silent. The floor was littered with the cannibals’ detritus. Fragments of bone crunched under my boots, and larger pieces skittered and clacked as I kicked them.
I stopped at the edge of the bone pile in a crouch. The stench of rotted meat was nearly overpowering—would have been unbearable except for the cold. There was a sort of low ridge of jumbled bones separating me from the hidden area behind the pile. Cautiously I raised my head up over the ridge and peered into the darkness beyond.
And found myself face-to-face with a flenser.
Chapter 47
The flenser’s hand shook, making dark shadows play across the blade of the knife he held. He took an awkward, shuffling step forward. Bones skittered around his feet. He raised the knife as if to plunge it into the top of my head.
There are two basic approaches to dealing with a knife attack. If you can, you should dodge backward and try to create enough space to run away. If that’s not an option, or if you have the training and practice necessary, you can block the strike and disarm the attacker with a variety of techniques: a wrist grab, an X-block, or a strike to the hand holding the knife. I chose a third option—one taught in no school anywhere but an option I’d been practicing for months. I blocked the strike with my hand—or rather, my hook.