These Dead Lands: Immolation (21 page)

Just when Hastings thought he was about to lose his shit, he became aware that the flow of conversation had stopped. All eyes were on him. He hadn’t been completely tuned out and had caught the gist of the S3’s presentation, but he’d missed the specific question. “I’m sorry. Could you repeat that?”

The S3 frowned. “Sure. Can you give us some insights into the reeker movements and their estimated numbers based on what you encountered during your trip?”

Hastings cleared his throat. “Can someone bring up some satellite imagery? I’ll need at least a hundred-klick radius.”

One of the guys sitting along the wall, a young staff sergeant from the S2 shop, jumped up and started changing screens on the computer display. “Sir, this is the current Modified Combined Obstacle Overlay. Will this work for you?”

Hastings peered at the screen. “Yes, this’ll work for starters. What else do you have available besides the MCOO?”

The staff sergeant looked over at the S2 officer, who gave the young soldier a slight nod, then turned back to Hastings. “Sir, we’ve got the usual overlays and products. If you want, I can pull up the Significant Activities overlay or the doc template so you can see what we think are the most likely courses of action the reekers will take.”

Hastings considered his options then asked the staff sergeant to pull up the Significant Activities, or SIGACTS, overlay. When it appeared on the wall, he studied the display with a keen eye, noting all the points where they had encountered reekers to date. “And when was the last time you had a contact?”

“The last time we had a TIC was here”—he staff sergeant indicated one of several points marked on the screen—“approximately ten klicks north of the base. One of our patrols came across a group of ten reekers moving south along the road, towards our position. The patrol reported ten EKIA and zero friendly casualties. That was a day ago, sir.”

“Has a sizeable force ever attacked the post?”

“Sir, we had contact with an estimated one to two hundred reekers in the beginning. But since then, we’ve only encountered small groups during the long-range and routine perimeter patrols.”

Hastings and Ballantine looked at each other at the same time, and Hastings saw his own shock reflected on Ballantine’s face. The hook-nosed sergeant first class swallowed and stared down at his hands on the table. Hastings could see the gears in Ballantine’s head beginning to spin. Hell, his own mind was already going in a thousand different directions. He had no idea where to start or how to tell them about the wave of death coming their way without sounding like a raving lunatic.

The S2 officer said, “Based on our past patrols, we’ve established their main avenues of approach and identified Named Areas of Interest in the following areas. Based on this, we’ve taken steps to increase our force protection in these areas by—”

Hastings couldn’t restrain himself any longer. He jabbed a finger at the SIGACTS display and leaned forward over the table as he talked over the S2. “Those are your NAIs? You think you’ve taken adequate steps to increase force protection? Seriously?” He looked down the table at Victor. “Colonel Victor, if I may? I hate to be the bearer of bad news, since the messenger usually gets killed, but in this case, if you don’t make some major changes immediately, we will all be dead, and I am not exaggerating when I say that.”

Colonel Victor steepled his fingers and rested his chin on the tips. He stared at Hastings with an award-winning poker face. An awkward silence descended before he responded. “All right, Captain Hastings, in your assessment, what steps need to be taken to improve our situation? How do you propose we stop a larger assault on our position?”

Hastings saw the dread lurking in Ballantine’s eyes, and he knew the sergeant was thinking about his family and their safety. Hastings turned back to Colonel Victor. “Sir, how do you prepare to stop a tsunami? Because that’s what’s coming our way. Indiantown Gap has just seen the quiet before the storm.”

*

The makeshift barracks
proved to be a nice respite for everyone in the group. The only problem was that it became nearly impossible to switch to “off” mode when you’d been switched on for what seemed like forever. To make matters worse, there wasn’t anything for them to do.

Typically, Staff Sergeant Guerra would have assigned priorities of work for everyone to carry out, be it pulling security, weapons maintenance, or vehicle PMCS, but none of that was necessary. He thought about doing some hip pocket training, individualized instruction sessions that every soldier endured while coming up in the ranks, but it just didn’t seem right given everything they’d been through. He felt pretty confident that fighting off a zombie horde already met all of the requirements, and then some, of the Skills Qualification Testing subjects for an 11B. Besides, no one liked doing SQTs anyway.

As far as he was concerned, all of his guys were “T”s across the board since there were no criteria to be considered “Trained” against zombies. Nevertheless, it felt wrong to be sitting still and not doing something, like an itch he couldn’t scratch.

Guerra decided to check up on the men to see what morale was like and how everyone was holding up. The guys had formed up in a small group and were sitting around chatting and playing cards. But they spent more time scanning their surroundings than their cards. As Guerra approached the group, he couldn’t help wonder where someone had found a deck of cards. Joes—no matter where you took them, they somehow found something to get into and someone inevitably produced a deck of cards, even if they had to make them out of pieces of the cardboard boxes found in the MREs, something he had seen overseas not long ago.

Sergeant Hartman and Private Tharinger were paired up against Sergeant Reader and PFC Stilley in what looked to be a slow game of Spades. The only ones who seemed to be enjoying the moment were Tharinger and Stilley. Reader was on a head trip someplace else, and Guerra figured the soldier was still beating himself up for killing the woman on the road.

“Why do you think they made us do all that shit just to get in here, and why did they take our blood?” Tharinger asked. “I mean, I can see why they would want to check us for bites, but what do they want with our blood? Every time we go somewhere or do something, they’re taking blood samples, and no one knows what it’s really for. I mean, really, how many times do they need to check my cholesterol levels and make sure I don’t have HIV? I feel like a fucking pin cushion.”

“Dude, you forget I’ve seen the chicks you pick up at the clubs,” Stilley said. “HIV’s probably the least of your problems. You shouldn’t be complaining about those tests.”

“Ha-ha, very fucking funny, smart ass. Do I need to remind you about that dependapotamus I saw you pick up and bring back to the barracks? Dude, if she was an ounce under two fifty, I’d be surprised. That bitch was
big
.”

“Hey now, don’t go hating just because she had a little meat on her bones. Besides, the only thing I saw was the top of her head. Man, I tell you, she could suck a golf ball through a mile of garden hose while swallowing half a mile of it at the same time. I’m not going to lie. At first, I thought the bitch was hungry and had me confused with a hot dog. But sometimes I wonder whatever happened to her.”

“Well, if it were under other circumstances, my guess is she would be making noises like
uhg! uhg! uhg!
on some other dude’s dick, but chances are she’s going
uhg! uhg! ugh!
while she drags her fat ass down the road, looking for someone else to eat.”

Both Tharinger and Stilley broke out into laughter, something no one had done in a while.

“But seriously, what do you think they want with everyone’s blood?” Tharinger asked again.

Stilley shrugged. “I guess they want to look at it under a microscope, look for antibodies and shit like that. You know, so they can find a cure and make a vaccine and give your sorry ass another shot.”

Tharinger rolled his eyes. “Oh great, another fucking vaccine shot we’ll end up having to get whenever we do pre-deployment. I can see it now. They’ll come out with a vaccine for this shit, and everyone will have to get one at some point or when they’re born, just like they do for other diseases. How much you wanna bet that if they somehow
do
come up with a vaccine that there will be people against using it? You remember that shit in the news about parents not wanting to give their kids vaccines against measles and other diseases and how those diseases were starting to show up again? I will bet you a month’s pay that if they come up with a zombie vaccine that there’ll be people against it. What was that dumb bitch’s name, that Hollywood chick that was like the spokesperson against vaccines? Wasn’t it Carmen Elektra or someone like that?”

“No, dipshit,” Stilley said. “You’re thinking of Jenny McCarthy, the ditzy blond chick with tiny boobs. Carmen Elektra is a different chick. She’s the one that was boning Dennis Rodman, and she has brown hair. But she falls in the dumb bitch category, so I can see how you could confuse them.”

Tharinger nodded emphatically. “Yeah, yeah, that’s her name. Man, that bitch straight up lost her fucking mind when she opened her mouth about vaccines. And the sad part is people listened to her. Kids got sick, the diseases started making a comeback, and now we’ve got this zombie shit to deal with. I wonder what that bitch would think about a zombie vaccine? Think she would be against it, too?”

“Who knows, man? Even if she was for it, I guarantee you there would be other motherfuckers out there against it, or better yet, some organization like the ACLU that would be screaming about zombie rights and zombie rights activist groups worried about the zombie rights.”

Reader threw a card down on the makeshift table, and the conversation paused while the others took their turns.

“You think McCarthy is still alive right now?” Tharinger asked. “What about all those anti-gun people? I bet those fuckers were wishing they had a gun when this shit kicked off.”

Stilley finished marking down the score of the last hand then laid down his card. “Dude, my guess is she’s dead, like all the rest of California probably is. I guess if you were to look on the bright side of things, we always have that to look forward to after this shit is over. Imagine that, a world where all the shitheads in California and the all anti-gunners are gone.”

At that, all four men smiled and chuckled as they continued to play. Guerra didn’t smile. He had family in California.

“Hey, speaking of big tits,” Tharinger said, “did anyone else catch those cans attached to Diana during the checkpoint strip search?”

“Dude, those puppies and that body are slammin’. You think they’re real?” Stilley asked.

“Yeah, those are real, all right… real fake. What are you, Stilley? New or just stupid?”

Guerra had heard enough. It was squad business as usual, and everyone seemed to be doing as well as could be expected. He didn’t see any sense in trying to find something for them to do other than what they were already doing. Besides, they had all earned some R and R while they could get it. He made a mental note to keep an eye on Reader. The soldier hadn’t been engaging as much as usual since they’d come in off the road, and Guerra figured he was still torn up over killing the woman at the accident site. Reader would get over it in time, but until he did, Guerra would keep him on his personal radar.

He looked down at the far end of the barracks building, where the civilians were camped out. Guerra wasn’t sure how they were adjusting to their current situation. Civilians could be predictable in certain circumstances, but the new world was highly irregular. Plus, there were children involved. While children were the most resilient and quickest to adapt to a new environment, the adults overseeing them seemed to have the hardest time.

Civilians, especially US civilians, seemed like an entirely different species to Guerra. Considering most Americans never ventured outside of the country, let alone to a third-world shit hole, most had no real idea how the rest of the world lived on a daily basis. All across the rest of the world, if armed men in uniform stood outside of a supermarket, on a street corner, or in front of a bank or someone’s home, that was basically normal. But if they did that in the US, the civilians would pretty much lose their minds.

Guerra thought about how very sheltered the average US citizen was, not to mention oblivious to their surroundings. Situational awareness was something the average American seemed to lack. He could never figure out why some people thought it was okay to just suddenly stop in the middle of a busy concourse in an airport and hold conversations. Most civilians seemed to live in their own worlds, happy to do what they wanted with no regard for others around them.

He couldn’t help but notice the similarity in the way the reekers staggered around and how most people typically walked when out it public. It was one of his pet peeves. He often wondered how civilians could get anywhere or get anything done when they all walked so slow. And they never went in a straight line, always zigzagging or walking abreast in a group so you couldn’t get around them. It drove him crazy.