The M-240s wreaked their own brand of havoc on the infected’s legs, blasting them to pieces the same as I had seen in the brewery parking lot back in Blanco. However, despite the hail of lead and tungsten, only the first few ranks of undead went down. The horde behind them was so large the Bradleys’ onslaught did little to halt their advance. It was like trying to hold back an avalanche with two bulldozers. Realizing they were doing nothing more than buying themselves a few extra seconds, the Bradleys reversed, turned up the road, and fled with the rest of the convoy.
By that point, Sophia had turned around to watch the show. As the Bradleys gained on the column and Morgan broadcast an order to pick up the pace, she turned and looked at me, her face pale and drawn, lips pressed tightly together.
“They just don’t stop, do they?” she said. “It doesn’t matter how many of them we kill, how many we blow up, nothing scares them. They just keep coming.”
I reached back and clasped her hand, feeling the tremor in her grasp. “We have a few advantages over them, Sophia.”
“Like what?”
“Well for one, we’re smarter than they are. We’re also faster, we can use weapons, and we can build fortifications. They can’t do any of those things.”
“But what if that changes? What if they get smarter? What if they start to remember things?”
I thought about it, and felt a cold black dread well up inside me. I let go of Sophia’s hand and sat down in my seat.
“We just have to hope that doesn’t happen.”
THIRTY-SIX
Two days later,
Near Boise City, Oklahoma
There are times when you sense trouble coming. When you see its shadow darken your sky, and your hackles go up, and you reach for the nearest sharp object.
It happens in the sleeping mind, beneath the surface, where we understand the patterns that connect the ebb and flow of life and events. Where we perceive the symmetry of probabilities and execute the intuitive calculus of expected outcomes. Within this hidden depth, we understand the mercurial animal that is human nature and how it creates its own cause and effect. If we are careful, and wary, and keep our eyes open, we can sometimes deduce the problems before they catch us. We can strike, dodge, parry, and set traps.
There are also times when trouble catches us by surprise.
*****
The slow, tedious slog up the Texas panhandle took its toll.
It takes a lot of food to fill over a hundred hungry bellies, and we were three days into a road trip that under normal circumstances should have taken no more than two. So out of necessity, anytime we saw someplace that looked uninhabited and could potentially be a source of food, we stopped and raided it. Doing so kept us fed, but also slowed our progress and cost the lives of two more soldiers.
The deaths happened at a trailer park in the middle of a small town too insignificant to have its own sign. We passed it on the highway, and after a few minutes of observation, one of Morgan’s staff sergeants deemed it abandoned. The usual crowd—Dad, Blake, Mike and I—accompanied two squads of regular infantry to the park. (Tyrel’s leg was still healing, and Lance had taken it upon himself to make sure none of the soldiers got any funny ideas about our womenfolk. Consequently, the four of us had become Morgan’s de facto outriders.)
The regular troops waited while we zipped through the trailer park and fired a few rounds in the air before returning to their position. That done, we gripped our weapons and watched for movement. Other than a slight breeze to mitigate the blazing midday sun and air rippling upward from the hot pavement, we saw nothing.
“All stations, Recon One,” Dad said into his handheld. “You are clear to move in, but take it slow. Keep your eyes peeled, and be ready to bug out on a moment’s notice.”
“Copy,” said the senior squad leader, a young staff sergeant named Alvarado. “Moving in.”
We followed the four Army Humvees at a distance, Mike manning the machine-gun turret and Dad driving. The vehicles ahead of us stopped and the soldiers piled out, weapons up, ready for trouble. Almost immediately, I saw a profound difference between the two squads.
Alvarado’s men were alert, focused, and seemed to appreciate the gravity of the situation. They moved with the skill of long practice, each man knowing his role, maintaining muzzle discipline, checking their corners, communicating in the shorthand of soldiers who knew what to expect from one another.
The other squad, led by a sergeant named Farrell, strolled casually through the cracked and pitted streets, their attitudes every bit that of the conquistador. Sergeant Farrell reminded me of every rich-kid frat-boy who ever came to Black Wolf Tactical on his father’s dime looking to inflate his fragile ego by busting caps on the close-quarters combat range.
His men glared around greedily, grins on greasy, dirty faces, gleeful avarice written in every gesture. I had the profound impression I was witnessing both the best and worst the United States Army had to offer.
“Take the west end, Farrell,” Alvarado radioed. “We’ll start from the east and meet you in the middle. Recon One, I need you on patrol.”
“Wilco,” Dad replied.
We drove slowly, bouncing and jostling over potholes and sending lizards scurrying through the brown grass lining the dead gray streets. The trailer park looked like any other trailer park from Texas to the Carolinas: shabby, poorly constructed rectangles squatting sullenly on tiny lots, dented mail boxes standing at vandal-abused angles, garbage lining the shallow drainage ditches, underpinning torn away to reveal collapsing insulation and cinder block mountings, sagging porches, windows covered with cheap blinds, rust marks streaking down from window-mounted air conditioners, and a general miasma of hopelessness and despair endemic of the crippling poverty so many Americans didn’t want to admit existed.
I had lived in places like this. I got to know the people who occupied them. There were generally two kinds: the renters, the people who stayed for a short while and then moved on, and then there were the owners, the permanent residents. Renters were the overwhelming majority.
Most people from both categories worked their asses off at low-paying jobs that made civilized life possible for the more fortunate. They usually did not have health insurance or retirement savings. Many of them were on government assistance of one form or another. Drug and alcohol abuse were common, but no worse than anywhere else, really.
People drove past these homes and sneered or shuddered or shook their heads in pity. Many of the people living in these places had children early in life, limiting their options and giving their kids little chance of escaping the circumstances they were born into. It was a repeating cycle, generation after generation, with the occasional success story giving some aging mother or father something be proud of, or dismiss with jealousy. Those who escaped were often not welcome when they returned to visit. Perhaps not in an overtly hostile way, but behind whispers, and looks, and a deadpan stiffness to any attempt at being polite.
In its own way, these places were as exclusive as the country clubs and boardrooms of the well-heeled. If you were from here, you were one of them, love you or hate you. You had a pass. You could come and go at your leisure.
Outsiders, not so much.
I watched through the dusty window as the Humvee rumbled through the trailer park’s confines, rifle between my knees, eyes searching for movement. Radio chatter rattled in my ears. Alvarado’s squad cleared trailers and hastily stacked food in yards for later pickup, while Farrell’s men took their sweet time ransacking the place for anything valuable and gathering non-perishables as an afterthought.
An hour passed. Since we had a surplus of fuel, we kept the AC running. Mike’s bulk occupied enough space in the gunner’s hatch he kept us from losing too much cool air. I pitied the Army grunts for not having a climate control option in their vehicles. When they rolled, they were forced to sweat it out under the merciless Oklahoma sun. But they rarely complained. I respected that, even though I felt no guilt whatsoever at not sharing in their misery.