“Seems like a shitty thing to do to a man, regardless of his offense.”
“Maybe,” Tyrel said, “But you don’t see too many repeat offenders.”
I lingered a moment more, watching the prisoners march westward. Everyone in town knew what happened to people who ran afoul of the law. There was too much work to be done and too little food to allow convicts to languish in prison cells, so they were forced to work on the wall from sunup to sundown, fed once a day, and given barely enough water to stay alive. No one liked it, but it made for a hell of a criminal deterrent.
Before that moment, I had harbored a vague, self-centered disregard for the suffering of the convicted. But there is a difference between hearing about a thing and seeing it for yourself. The suffering of others loses its abstract distance when you add a human face. It bothered me.
“Come on,” Tyrel said over his shoulder. “Long walk ahead of us.”
Our destination was a neighborhood on the outskirts of Monument, about twenty miles to the north. One of the squad leaders in Tyrel’s platoon had scouted it a few weeks ago, and after deliberation, Tyrel and the platoon commander, a man named LaGrange, decided it was worth investigating.
LaGrange was short, stocky, had a face like a frying pan, and a nose that had been broken no less than five times. And that’s being conservative. He ran first squad, Tyrel second, while third and fourth were headed up by a couple of hard-cases named Henning and Caraway.
Rather than march single file, we spread out at squad strength over an area roughly half a mile long. One of the earliest lessons Tyrel and LaGrange had learned was it was better to disperse their lines than congregate in one place. Keeping the squads separated meant if a squad found themselves surrounded by infected, they could radio for help from one of the others. The best way to deal with hordes was to give them multiple targets to pursue, break them up, and once divided, run far away. But to do that, we had to maintain a minimum distance.
Additionally, spreading out distributes searching eyes farther afield, increasing our chances of finding salvage worth carrying back to town. We were not above saving the trip to Monument for another day if we found easier pickings.
Tyrel’s squad—me included—pulled ‘rabbit’ duty, which meant scouting ahead and setting the pace for the rest of the platoon. We covered eighteen miles before sundown, making me grateful for all the long, hard days spent working on the wall. It might have been hellish work, but it kept me in shape.
We stopped at the now-abandoned Air Force Academy and made camp on the rooftop of a service building. The building itself had been stripped long ago by the Army, along with the rest of the academy. First squad joined us a short time later, while third and fourth made camp on the other side of the campus.
The sun slid low behind the peaks of the Rampart Range behind me, painting the sky in blues and reds. The colors were richer and darker than I had ever seen them, and there was a sharp chill in the air. I thought about reports I’d heard of a nuclear exchange in the Middle East and wondered what color the sky was in Pakistan.
“Gonna be a cold winter,” one of Tyrel’s men said. Billings was his name. Late thirties, average height, lean build, brown hair and eyes, a well-tended beard. By the way he ran his fingers over it, I knew he was proud of that beard.
“You from around here?” I asked.
“Pretty close, yeah. Grew up down in Pueblo.”
“No shit?” Tyrel said. “I lived there ‘til I was eleven.”
Billings grunted. “Small world.”
Being the new guy, it was my job to prepare the evening meal. I boiled rice and dried venison over a small propane stove and served it on cold pre-made flatbread. The men in the squad were quiet as they ate, worn out by the day’s long hike. When we finished, I wiped the plastic dishes and aluminum cookware with a wad of boiled cloth and put them away. The other men bedded down for the night, but since I had the first watch, I took a few minutes to fix my suppressor to my rifle and attach my night vision scope. The man on watch with me, a short Mexican named Rojas, eyed my gear jealously.
“You could get a good price for that silencer,” he said.
“Suppressor. And it’s not for sale.”
He smiled like he knew something I didn’t. “Sooner or later, kid, everything’s for sale.”
The first two hours passed mostly in silence. Rojas held a crossbow in one hand and rested the other on a quiver of bolts hanging from his belt. A few times, he began singing softly to himself in Spanish, then stopped and shook his head ruefully, calling himself a few not-so-nice words in his native language. He seemed like a man trying to break a bad habit. Or not a bad habit, necessarily, but definitely a dangerous and unwise one.
We walked the perimeter of the rooftop, scanned the distance for infected, and conducted radio checks with the other squads across campus every half hour. Near the halfway point of our watch, a knot of four walkers heard our boots crunching on the tiny rocks covering the roof and wandered close. To Rojas, I said, “What should we do about those things?”
He looked at me from the corner of his eye. “What do you mean? We draw ‘em close and kill ‘em.”
“Won’t they start making noise if we do that?”
“You never seen a walker up close at night, have you?”
I shook my head.
“See man, at night they don’t make noise until they get right on you. Makes it easy to take ‘em out if you can spot ‘em in time. Here, watch this.”
He tapped his foot a few times, sending muted thumps out into the night. I watched through my scope as the walker’s heads snapped up and they increased their shuffling pace in our direction. Just as Rojas predicted, they made no sound.
“Son of a bitch.”
“Told you, man,” Rojas said. “When they’re close enough, take ‘em out.”
I let the undead approach to within fifty yards. By that point, I had lain down on the edge of the roof so I could fire from the prone position. The undead were a mixed group: one white guy in his twenties, a black girl no older than twelve or thirteen, an Asian woman who must have been in her nineties when she died, and a middle-aged Hispanic man with a great bushy moustache. Their wounds showed up black against the grainy green night-vision image. I let my breath ease out and squeezed the trigger. The little girl fell. The rest of the ghouls marched on heedlessly.
I kept the reticle on the girl for a few seconds, thinking about how long it had been since I’d shot a walker, and after everything I had been through, how little the killing affected me. It was as if the part of me that used to feel sorry for them, some kind of emotional sympathy gland, had atrophied during the long months in Colorado Springs.
“Nice shot,” Rojas said.
In response, I cracked off three more rounds in less than four seconds, each one finding its mark.
“Damn, kid.” Rojas’ teeth flashed white in silver of the moon. “You’re not a rookie, you’re a killer.”
I stood up and brushed myself off. “Something like that.”
FIFTY-ONE
We marched parallel to I-25 until we reached a road that ran under a highway overpass. It was early morning. The yellow circle of the sun was hazy and muted behind a gauze of powdery gray clouds. A bracing chill in the air kept us cool as we set a hard pace.
Rojas marched ahead of me as we turned off the highway and followed an access road up the slope of the Rampart Range. The altitude increased sharply for half a mile, then the lead squad turned right onto another road marked by a green sign gilded with ornate black ironwork, reading Aspen Applause Way. Another sign with tarnished brass letters announced we were entering Aspen Acres Luxury Homes.
LaGrange called the platoon to a halt and radioed for his squad leaders to meet him at the head of the column. While they talked, the rest of us sat down and drank some water. During the march, I had noticed a long, cylindrical bundle wrapped in brown canvas lashed to Rojas’ pack. Curious, I asked him about it.