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.
SIXTY-THREE
I arrived back at the cabin none too soon. Tyrel was low on food, and had been seriously considering putting a bullet in the head of Clayton Briggs—also known by his alias, Tom Dills—and leaving his body for the infected and heading back to town to look for me.
“You would have done that on foot?” I asked him.
He looked up from the outdoor fire pit where he was boiling water in a kettle and heating potatoes and canned vegetables in a skillet. The horse was picketed a few yards away, snuffling through the snow for bits of dead grass. Brilliant sunlight poured over the white mountain peaks, bathing the pines on the slopes in polished gold.
“Damn right,” Tyrel said. “I’ve hiked farther through harsher territory.”
I sat down next to him and opened a jar of instant coffee. “Well, the deeds are done.”
“You get all of them?”
“Yes.”
“Leave anything behind to tie it back to you?”
“No. I was careful. No witnesses, and the murder weapon is probably scattered all over the landfill by now.”
“What about your knife?”
“Cleaned it and soaked it in bleach. Even a forensics lab couldn’t get anything off of it.”
Tyrel nodded, satisfied. “So what do you do now?”
I thought about the interrogation of Clayton Briggs. How he had remained defiant until the second finger came off and the hot iron touched the stump. Then off came the third finger, and his resolve began to waver. When I severed his thumb, leaving only a pinky finger protruding from the blistered ruin of his right hand, he finally broke.
He told me there had been eleven of them, initially. They had all left together from the San Antonio quarantine in stolen Humvees and decided to hole up in Boise City. They knew it was abandoned, and it seemed like a good place to hide. A logical enough conclusion.
The retreat from San Antonio was so disastrous they did not think the Army would send anyone to look for them. For all the chain of command knew, they had been killed like most of the other soldiers holding the line. The horde that overran their defenses had been enormous. They figured they would not be missed in the confusion.