Crucifixion - 02 (13 page)

Hacking and slashing through the brush I arrived at the
point where the group’s trail had come up to a sharp drop off that formed the
waterfall.  They had angled towards the valley wall on that side and had made
their way down in a zig-zag pattern.  The waterfall only dropped about 50 feet
and at the edge of the drop off I could see down to the flat valley floor
below.  The group was huddled tightly, backs against the large pool the
waterfall spilled into.  Rachel, Dog and Betty stood at the edge of the group
protecting the kids from a large pack of infected males.

Dropping to my stomach I looked through the rifle scope.  14
males were shambling towards the group.  Six infected bodies lay on the ground,
apparently having been shot by Rachel.  As I watched I saw her struggling with
the rifle and realized she had experienced a malfunction of some kind.  The
kids were screaming and pushing away from the infected, the back rank of the
group standing in water up to their knees.  The infected were about 150 yards
away from my position.  Not a terribly difficult shot, but not a slam dunk
either, especially at night.  Taking a deep breath I slowly exhaled and calmed
my body as I sighted on the male closest to the group.

I fired and his head nearly exploded as the body dropped to
the wet ground.  Finding my next target I fired, then kept finding targets and
firing as soon as I saw the result of my shot in the scope.  When I ran out of
targets I was surprised, which is a good thing.  I had been ‘in the zone’ and
so focused on finding and eliminating targets that I wasn’t thinking about
counting how many I had dropped.  14 infected down with 14 shots, 150 yards
downhill at night.  Not too shabby.  Moving the rifle I looked at Rachel and
the group through the night vision.  They were all looking in my direction, but
I knew they couldn’t see me.  Standing up I waved and started following their
path down the steep drop.  Dog met me half way down the incline, happy to see
me.  I couldn’t progress until I stopped and scratched his head, then he was
content to lead me the rest of the way down to the valley floor.

Walking up to the group Rachel greeted me with a smile and
an extended rifle.  I took it, turned sideways so she could observe and quickly
cleared the misfire.  A round had failed to seat fully and wouldn’t let the
rifle cycle as it was just far enough out of position that the extractor
couldn’t grab it when Rachel pulled the charging handle.  I showed her the
forward assist knob and gave her a 15 second tutorial on how to clear the
weapon.  I didn’t ask but guessed that her training on the firing range back at
Arnold had been limited to marksmanship and they hadn’t had a chance to go over
the nuances of the design of the M4. 

I spent another few minutes getting the group rallied and
held a brief discussion and tutorial with the kids about dragging their feet. 
A couple of them got it, but most just looked at me like I was from Mars. 
Finally in exasperation I had them stand in a large circle and watch me walk across
it, then had them try to find my footprints.  Then I had them get back in the
circle and picked one of the more sullen kids, a slightly overweight boy who
was always the last to start moving and first to sit down, and had him walk the
same path.  As I knew he would he didn’t pick his feet up and left a mark on
the ground with each step he took.  When I had the kids move in and look I saw
the light come on for most of them.  That was when I noticed there were only
eight kids.

“You lost one?”  I asked Betty in a low voice the kids
couldn’t hear.

She nodded.  “Jessica Hunt.  She went into the bushes to pee
when we stopped and that group of infected took her before we even knew they
were there.”  She gestured at the bodies littering the ground.

I looked around at all the bodies, shaking my head.  Then I
relayed to Rachel and Betty what I had encountered with the females.  Betty
absorbed it, but hadn’t fought the infected like Rachel and I had so it didn’t
register with her how much this might change the game.

“All of them?”  Rachel asked, worry creasing her forehead.

“Don’t know,” I said.  “Two, for sure.  The five that were
tracking you above the waterfall, I just can’t say.  I didn’t really see any
sign of it, but then I never gave any of them an opportunity so I don’t know.”

“We’re fucked,” she said.

“We’ve been fucked for a while now,” I responded with a
grin, not wanting her to go into a funk.  Depression was the last thing we
could afford at the moment.  I got a half assed grin in return.

“Betty, where does this valley go?”  I asked.

“This is the Little Chambers River,” she replied.  “It ends
up winding around and emptying into the Cumberland just south of Nashville. 
But if we follow this valley for a few more miles we’ll come to a little county
road we can follow into Murfreesboro.”

“OK,” I said after a moment.  “You two get these kids moving
again.  I had to leave my pack behind, again, and I’m going to go back and
check our rear and get my pack.  I’ll catch up.”

Betty reached out and placed her hand on my arm.  “Young
man, is that the best idea?  If you hadn’t been here that group would have
finished us off.”

I looked at her for a moment, then Rachel and finally at the
group of kids sitting huddled by the water.  “That pack has ammunition, food
and medical supplies we need,” I said.  “And if I hadn’t been behind you there
would have been five females attacking from one side while we fought off the
males.  We need our rear checked and we need the supplies.  I’ll be back as
fast as I can.  Keep the kids quiet, remind them to pick up their damn feet and
I’ll see you before you know it.”

Betty kept her hand on my arm for another moment then
finally nodded her head and walked away.  Rachel reached out and placed her
hand on my chest for a brief time then followed Betty to get the kids up and on
the move.  Dog stood beside me with an expectant look on his face, but Rachel
and the group needed him more than I did.  I kneeled next to him and wrapped my
arm around his thick neck and scratched his chest.  I was rewarded with a tail
wag and a big wet lick across the face.  The tail stopped wagging when I told
him to stay with Rachel.  With a wave I headed back up the valley, quickly
climbing the steep slope to the top of the waterfall where I stopped and
scanned ahead of me.  All clear at the moment.

I had dropped my pack when I’d started tracking the infected
females and it was just up at the head of the valley I was in.  Moving quietly
through the forest I was close in about 20 minutes.  I didn’t go right up to
the pack, rather moved up the valley wall on my right and set up in a stand of
young trees.  My pack was 40 yards below me in the brush at the edge of the
trail and I carefully scanned the brush around it.  Nothing waiting for me.  I
scanned again with the same results, then expanded the area I was checking and
saw movement across the valley floor at the river, but it was only a couple of
deer dipping their heads for a drink.  Continuing to scan I looked up into the
narrower valley we had come down earlier and saw more movement.  This time it
was of the two legged variety.

Watching for a minute I was confident these were not
infected.  They moved like normal human males that know how to move in the
woods at night.  There were five of them and they were spread out across the
valley floor.  And they were tracking us.  Shit!  More guys from the ambush? 
What the hell?  Why were they so persistent?  What the hell had Rachel and I
stumbled into?  These had to be locals, up to something.  The guys I’d ambushed
with the grenades were definitely locals and were certainly not trained for
combat.  I didn’t get it.  They’d gotten their asses seriously kicked.  Twice. 
What was pushing them to keep coming after us?  Pride only goes so far.  This
was something else.

The closest of the five men was over 200 yards out, and
while they weren’t moving slow, they were moving cautious.  Breaking cover I
dashed down to where my pack was, did a quick inspection to make sure it hadn’t
been messed with before touching it, then shouldered it and started back
towards my group at a fast run.  I wanted to set up a couple of surprises for
these guys and needed to get to the top of the drop off by the falls with
enough time to get it done.  I didn’t really expect to encounter any more
infected along this stretch of the valley, but ran with the Kukri gripped in my
hand just in case. 

Ten minutes later I reached the thicker foliage at the top
of the drop off and dropped my pack.  Taking a quick look over the edge I was
glad to see Rachel and the group had moved on so I got to work.  One thing
about having come into the Army while there was still a large amount of Vietnam
combat vets serving was the knowledge.  Vietnam had been a very nasty guerilla
war, and the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army – NVA – had been masters of
booby traps using whatever the forest had to offer.  Many of these tricks had
been taught to me by an instructor at Fort Bragg who had been a Special Forces
team leader for two tours in Vietnam in the late 60s.  He was one tough son of
a bitch and he’d learned a lot from his enemy.  When I left the Army I never
thought any of those lessons would ever be needed.  Boy was I wrong.

I worked for almost 20 minutes and using young, flexible but
strong trees I had set up a whip trap that would slash across the path when
tripped.  The tree trunk that was bent back like a spring and waiting to be
released was lined with a dozen sharpened sticks that were each two feet long. 
Anyone on the path when it tripped would get impaled with at least two of the
stakes attached to the tree as it whipped into them at waist height.  A
secondary trap of the same design was set to trip to the side of the path to
catch anyone trying to go around.  The trip wires were the same thin, black
nylon line I’d used for the grenade trap, only it was stretched across the
forest floor with a scattering of leaves hiding it.  The wire was stretched so
tight to the stick holding the trap in place that simply stepping on it would
trigger the release.  Moving down the slope I set up one more of the same trap,
then a little further down a loop of line hidden in leaves and attached to a
tall tree that I had forced into an arc and set up with another trip wire. 
Step in it and the tree would release, close the noose around your leg and yank
you though the air where you’d slam into the trunk of the tree.  For good
measure another half a dozen sharpened stakes protruded from the tree at the
same height a body would slam into it.  Satisfied with my preparations I
shouldered the pack and made my way to the valley floor.

The Reverend pulled a sweat stained bandana out of his back
pocket and wiped the sweat off his forehead.  He stood just off the pavement in
the edge of the forest and watched as his disciples fought with the Pagans occupying
the military vehicle they had ambushed.  The Pagans were fighting back and when
they opened up with the machine gun the Reverend momentarily feared for his own
safety, but the tree he sheltered behind was over three feet thick and no machine
gun bullet could penetrate.  As he watched, one of his favorite disciples aimed
the large sniper rifle the Chosen had liberated from the National Guard armory
and fired at the vehicle, knocking the engine out of commission.  Unfortunately
the machine gunner returned fire and shredded the Reverend’s followers that
were clustered around the rifle, including the sniper.

James Earl Boone said a silent prayer for the fallen
disciples and pulled out a small note pad to make a note for himself to be sure
and praise them during his next sermon.  He wrote in a cramped hand, the
letters poorly formed and most words misspelled.  Jimmy, as he had been called
before taking the title of The Reverend, had almost no formal education.  The
son of a whore that worked the Nashville truck stops along I-40 and an unknown
father he had stopped going to school in the third grade.  Despite no education
The Reverend was a very intelligent man and instinctively knew how to influence
and control others as if it was the most natural thing in the world for him. 
With a formal education he would have perhaps been a successful politician or
even a CEO of a large company, but the voices in his head would have talked to
him no matter what he did.

A large man at nearly six and a half feet tall and 300
pounds he had worked as a hand on the barges that plied the Mississippi River,
bounced drunks out of bars and brothels from St. Louis to New Orleans and had
broken legs for Cletus Harmon, the most vicious loan shark in Middle
Tennessee.  Time spent in prisons in Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas had
packed muscle onto his frame and refined his fighting skills, but at heart he
was still a coward which he masked by being a bully.  But a few years ago
Jimmy’s voices had told him it was time to spread the word of God and gather a
flock of disciples.  He had attended adult literacy classes to learn to read
and had devoured the Bible, Torah, Koran and the Book of Mormon.  From each of
these he had drawn the beliefs he preached, picking and choosing the parts that
spoke to him but he absolutely preferred the wrathful God of the Old
Testament.  Many times he had the thought that what the world needed was
another vengeful and wrathful God and in his mind that was what he was
becoming.

The heads of his enemies, who were actually simply people
who had refused to follow him, decorated tall stakes that his disciples had
driven into the ground along the highway that passed by their compound.  He had
thought about also using the heads of the demons that had appeared in the world
but decided they were better used for sport to amuse his flock and routinely
pitted his best fighters against them.  Knowing that a leader needed to lead,
he also occasionally entered the pit with the demons but always after making sure
his most trusted disciples had weakened them in advance by cutting and bleeding
them.

Now he watched as the fire fight raged on and dozens of his
disciples fell to the Pagan in the Humvee.   When the machine gun finally fell
silent, the barrel so hot it glowed cherry red in the darkness and appeared to physically
droop towards the roof of the vehicle it was mounted on, his men started coming
out from behind their bullet riddled vehicles and advancing on the Humvee with
rifles at the ready.  Seeing the opportunity The Reverend moved out from behind
the tree and quickly crossed the pavement, arriving at the abandoned Humvee
ahead of his disciples.  To them it looked like he was responsible for stopping
the machine gun and as they approached each of them briefly bowed their head to
him in a sign of submission and respect.

“The Pagans have fled our might!”  He raised his voice loud
enough for all to hear, even those who still huddled behind their vehicles. 
“Brother Chris, take some men and go after them.  They must be punished for
resisting us.  Bring me their heads!”

A small man with a face like a ferret stepped forward, bowed
his head briefly then pointed to eight other men and told them to follow him. 
They disappeared into the woods at a trot at the only place the occupants of
the Humvee could have gone.  The Reverend spent a few minutes walking around
the ambush site and rallying his disciples with words of encouragement.  He
came across a young boy, no more than 17, huddling in terror behind the wheel of
a large pickup that had been devastated by the machine gun.

“Rise and fear not the Pagans, young Brother Joseph,” The
Reverend said, standing over him.  The boy sniffed and shook, his fear still
paralyzing him.  The Reverend frowned, bent and gathered the front of the boy’s
shirt in a giant hand and lifted him up with one arm to stand on his toes.  The
smell of urine and voided bowels caused The Reverend’s frown to deepen and he
released the shirt and took a step back, the boy sinking to his knees in the
road and shaking with renewed fear.

The Reverend looked around to make sure his disciples were
paying attention and drew a heavy blade from the sheath that hung along his
right leg.  Grasping a handful of the boy’s hair he raised the blade high in
the air and slashed with all of his strength.  The head separated from the body
and as The Reverend raised his left hand high in the air it swung slowly back
and forth like a pendulum.  Looking around the assembled group of disciples The
Reverend again raised his voice.

“Young Brother Joseph was not worthy.  Fear became his
master.  Your only master is the almighty God, and he has chosen me to lead
you.  I cannot lead you if you accept any master other than God!”  His voice
boomed across the forest and spittle flew from his lips.  “There is nothing to
fear as long as you stay strong in your faith and obedience to me and to God!”

“Praise God!  Praise The Reverend!”  Jeremiah, his most
loyal disciple started the chant and soon the entire group was chanting their
praises at the top of their lungs.  The Reverend looked around, beaming with
pride, the severed head still dangling by its hair from his massive hand.

The chant was interrupted by a loud explosion that sounded
from deep in the forest.  The Reverend looked in the direction of the noise as
if he could see the battle that was being fought.  The chant died out as the
men turned and looked in the same direction.  Several shuffled their feet in
fear, but no one would dare express any doubt or concern.  Fear was a mortal
sin in The Reverend’s church.

“Brother Jeremiah, who knows these woods the best?”  The
Reverend asked, tossing the head to one of the men closest to him who fumbled
it before quickly pulling it to his body and securing it.  He had seen other
men hacked to pieces for allowing one of The Reverend’s heads to touch the
ground.

“Brother Dale, Reverend.  He grew up here and has been
hunting in this forest for 30 years.”

“Good.  Send him and a group into the forest.  I fear
Brother Chris may have failed me.”  The Reverend turned and stalked to the edge
of the forest where he stared at the dark trees and began praying that God
would rain his wrath down on the Pagans.

The Reverend stood there for a long time, as still as the
trees he stared at and praying to God in a loud voice.  His disciples stripped
anything useful from the Humvee then pushed it off the road into a shallow
drainage ditch.  They then set about checking their vehicles, pushing the ones
with too much damage into the same ditch and changing tires on others. 
Sometime later they rushed to cluster around The Reverend, rifles at the ready
when they heard the sound of someone stumbling through the underbrush.  Several
flashlights clicked on, aimed at the forest, and a few moments later one of
Brother Dale’s group emerged from the brush and stumbled to his knees in front
of the Reverend.  The man was gasping for air and soaked with sweat, wattles of
fat around his neck quivering.

“What news?”  The Reverend asked, wanting to refer to the
man by name but he was a new disciple and The Reverend didn’t know who he was.

In a shaking voice the frightened and exhausted man relayed
the story of tracking the Pagans through the forest with Brother Dale.  How
they had found the bodies of Brother Chris’s group as well as numerous demons
that had also been slain.  He told of the group following Brother Dale along a
narrow path and how Brother Dale had fallen as if shot even though he hadn’t
heard a shot fired.  Embellishing his role he described how he had helped fight
off the Pagans before escaping back into the trees, the sole survivor of the
group.  The Reverend stood ram rod straight, bending his head down to glare at
the man as he talked.

“Which way are they going?”  He asked after a long silence.

“North, Reverend,” the man stammered.  “They’re following
the Little Chambers River and should be close to the falls by now.”

“Thank you, Brother.”  The Reverend said, reached out and
placed his hand on top of the man’s head.  A moment later he grabbed the hair,
raising the head up and swinging the blade in a blur then tossed the severed
head to one of the men behind him.

“Brother Jeremiah, I believe we have some former military
men that are part of the Chosen?”  He asked, still staring at the trees.

“Yes, Reverend.  Some former Marines and one Navy SEAL.”

“Very good.  Would you ask them to make use of their skills
and go bring me this Pagan’s head?”

“Yes, Reverend.”

The Reverend stayed where he was while Jeremiah organized
the next party, then turned and stalked to a muddy Chevy SUV that had been
shielded from the machine gun fire by the other vehicles.  Jeremiah fell in
step with him, signaling the remaining men to go back to their camp.  At the
Chevy Jeremiah slipped behind the wheel and started the engine, waiting for The
Reverend to tell him where to go.

“North, Jeremiah,” he finally said.  “The trail that cuts
off the road to the falls that the Godless follow when they want to fornicate
and use drugs.  Take us there.  I want to see this Pagan for myself.”

“Yes, Reverend,” Jeremiah answered, shifting into drive and
pulling away with a squeal of tires.

Driving fast he covered the distance to a small turnout in
only a few minutes.  Putting the vehicle in park he locked it up after The
Reverend exited then followed the larger man into the dark forest.  The path
was originally a game trail that local kids had found and used for easy access
to the falls.  The waterfall was a favorite local spot to go drink, smoke pot
and try to get girls out of their clothes.  Not much more than a foot and a
half wide the path was just beaten earth that wound through the heavy foliage. 

It was very dark in the trees, the leafy canopy blocking
almost all of the light from the moon.  No matter, The Reverend knew the sun
would be coming up soon.  Besides, he had taken this path plenty of times with
local girls and they had always taken their clothes off for him.  Whether they
had done so willingly or not was beside the point as far as he was concerned. 
The Reverend killed a female demon that leapt out of the forest at him, the
blade flashing out of the scabbard almost inhumanly fast and stabbing deep into
the demon’s chest, piercing its heart.  He never even broke stride and sheathed
the blade without bothering to wipe the blood from it.  Minutes later the path
opened out and they stopped on a small rock shelf that overlooked the falls. 
Below a figure could be seen making its way down the steep slope that abutted
the waterfall.