The nearest house lay in a blackened pile, fire-seared boards leaning against one another, roof caved in, a refrigerator, dishwasher, stove, and some squat thing I could not identify in a cluster as if holding a meeting among the ashes. The vehicles ahead sat sinking into the ground on bare rotors, tires melted away, upholstery incinerated, paint jobs scorched down to bare metal. I looked beyond them to the camping trailer, identifiable only by its shape. Reaching out a hand, I tapped Mike on the shoulder.
“Hey,” I whispered. “We should swing that way.” I pointed to my left. “Might be infected in that camper up there.”
He gave me a skeptical look. “Son, ain’t nothing could have survived these fires. Not even the dead. Now come on.”
He strode ahead, feet crunching on the crisp, dry ground. I ground my teeth and followed, eyes searching the trailer for signs of movement. Sure enough, when we were about fifty yards away, there was a thump and a clatter, and the trailer rocked on its rear suspension springs. Mike stopped and stared open-mouthed.
“Goddammit, Mike.”
It took a few seconds for the creature to find the door and make its way around the camper. Mike and I both drew in a breath at the sight of it.
It’s clothes were gone, burned away. So was its skin, a few outer layers of muscle tissue, and its eyes. Empty black sockets swiveled left and right as the ghoul cocked its head from one side to the other, turning first its left ear, then its right, in our direction.
“Holy shit,” Mike muttered.
I did a face-palm.
The creature stopped moving, empty hollow circles of black fixed squarely our way. It opened its skeletal mouth, bereft of skin and lips, and tried to moan, but only a dry scratching sound like sandpaper over rusty metal came out. Mike raised his rifle and began to sight in, but I reached out and forestalled him.
“Wait,” I said, and drew my knife.
“Why?”
“Haven’t you figured it out yet?”
“What?”
“They hunt by sound, Mike.”
He lowered his rifle and turned his gaze back to the ghoul. “Yeah, I kinda figured. Sorry. Wasn’t thinking.”
“They tend to have that effect on people.”
I approached the half-roasted ghoul with my knife held low at my side. The creature moved more slowly than the others I had seen, almost like stop-motion animation. The fire must have done something to what remained of its nerves, interfered with its motor skills. I considered it a lucky break. The thing’s lack of agility made my job that much easier.
The fight went quickly. I batted its grasping hands aside, stepped behind it, and stomped its right knee ninety degrees the wrong direction. There were a rapid series of dry cracks, like snapping a handful of thin carrots in a dishtowel, and the ghoul pitched over on its face.
It had not been a large person in life—and I say person because its gender was impossible to guess—and burning to a crisp had done nothing to increase its mass. Nevertheless, it was a struggle to keep its arms pinned behind its back while I placed the tip of my dagger against the base of its skull and pushed. There was resistance at first, so I pushed harder until the blade went in with a crunch. The ghoul twitched a few times, then went still.
As I stood up and placed a boot on its skull to wrench my knife free, Mike came up beside me. “Should I put a bullet in its head just to make sure?”
“It’s dead Mike. Permanently this time. Besides, wouldn’t that kind of defeat the purpose?”
I waved the knife in the air. He looked at it and let out a long breath. “Yeah, I guess. You sure that thing’s dead?”
“Sure as I can be. We still have work to do, Mike. Lead the way.”
He turned a final glance to the skeletal creature on the ground and nudged it with a boot. In a horrid sort of way, the creature blended well with its blasted, scalded surroundings. “You believe in omens?” he asked.
“Not really.”
“Well I do. And I think that,” he pointed at the infected, “is a bad one.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
“It looks like a settlement,” Mike said, handing me the field glasses. I peered through them.
At the highway junction, there was a gas station, a farmers market, and an RV park, all separated from the forest by a broad asphalt parking lot. The fireproof buffer zone had kept the structures and recreational vehicles safe from the fires that had come through not long ago. From where Mike and I lay at the top of a rise near the treeline, we could see the people below had moved the RVs so they formed a ring around the two buildings. They had also packed the space beneath the vehicles with dirt and were using the wide trenches left behind as latrines.
Now that’s what I call multi-tasking.
I counted a couple of dozen people, some of them standing guard, others engaged in menial tasks, and still more doing nothing much at all. There seemed to be an even dispersion of men and women, even a few children here and there. I gauged the size of the small compound and the amount of work that must have gone into securing it, and decided something did not add up.
“There’s not enough people,” I said.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Mike replied.
“All that dirt, the number of RVs, there must be others somewhere.”
“Or maybe there were, but they moved on.”
I put the field glasses down. “Could be.”
“Let’s give it a while. Keep an eye on them, see what we see.”
“Good idea.”
We settled in.
It was nostalgic, in a way, lying there among the torched foliage. During the years when Mike was imparting the lessons he had learned from his days at Quantico and on the battlefield, we had spent countless hours in the wilds, lying motionless, waiting, just like we were doing then.
In the early days, my targets had been javelina, deer, and coyotes. Those initial hunts were organized so Mike could teach me the basics. He figured since animals had better senses, better instincts, and are generally more perceptive than humans, if I could get close to them, I could get the drop on a man with no problem. Mike’s lessons took hold quickly, and it was not long before he decided I was ready for phase two.
Next, he began setting up targets in open fields and had me try to shoot at them while he watched for me through a spotting scope. By the time I was fourteen, I could consistently fire two shots on target undetected from two-hundred yards.
When I could do it from eighty yards, Mike decided it was time to up the ante with mock sniper duels.
I took on all of them: Mike, Dad, Tyrel, and Blake. Even a few of their students who wanted to try their luck against me. We would start on opposite ends of various landscapes in the Texas hill country, make our way to one of three pre-established destinations, and try to spot the other guy in the distance. If we did, we fired at a steel target hung above and away from them to stop the match. If the shooter hit the right target, he then had to walk a spotter via radio to where the other sniper lay hidden. If he was successful, he won. If not, we reset and started over. The match went on until one of us was victorious or it grew too late and we had to call it.
Mike was the only one I never beat. He taught me, after all, so he knew all my tricks.
The others I had much better luck with. Which is not to say I bested them on a consistent basis—I didn’t—but I got them enough times to know my skills were well above average.
So despite the heat, and the smell of charred wood clogging my nose, and the slowly building pressure in my bladder, I lay still and watched. Mike did the same, but he was not as still as I was. There was the occasional twitch and fidget and shift of torso, a surplus of unnecessary movement. The untrained eye would never have seen it, but to someone who had seen Mike lie still as a stone for hours on end, it was like watching him pace around wringing his hands. After a while, I grew tired of it.