Eastern Front: Zombie Crusade IV (8 page)

Jack squeezed his little brother’s shoulder in reassurance, “Everything we’re doing down here is for our people back home. This war we’re fighting is gonna have at least two phases. We have to stop Barnes, and anyone else, from organizing the hunters into huge forces and overwhelming the groups of survivors in the country. Then we have to reclaim the land from the packs that are getting smarter and stronger every day. I doubt that we’ll see the end of the war in our lifetimes. As long as the infection remains alive in the world
, we’ll never be completely safe from it. Bottom line is that we have to stop Barnes before we can do anything else.”

David knew his brother was right. “Yeah
, I get the picture. What do you need me to do?”

“Well, out with it—what does Luke need to know?” Gracie’s voice was shaking as she looked from Christy to Vickie.

Christy didn’t miss a beat. “Actually, you both should know.” The color drained from Vickie’s face, and she opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. Christy sounded reassuring, “I don’t want to put a damper on anyone’s potential happiness, but we really do need Father O’Brien to do some scouting farther north. I know you and Luke were planning on getting married as soon as possible, but it will probably take several weeks or more to locate some isolated islands we could use if we need to retreat from here. We shouldn’t rely completely on Middle Bass.”

Gracie looked skeptical. “We won’t have several weeks to wait if Barnes makes it across the Ohio.”

“I have faith that our guys will succeed—at least in slowing him down. It would be foolish of us to assume we won’t need a back-up plan, and some options for a northern hideaway could be the perfect solution.” She looked at Vickie. “The good doctor here pointed out that surviving a northern winter requires planning and preparing. We should start the process as soon as possible. Father O’Brien is an experienced navigator—I think he’s our best choice.”

“That makes sense. I understand, and Luke will too.” Gracie started setting up a meal on the table in front of Christy. “Now you eat. I’ll contact Father O’Brien and let him know what we need.” She smiled at Vickie. “Ever since you guys saved me in Cleveland, you all have been my family. When Luke and I do get married, I want you and Christy to stand up with me. I think bridesmaids’ dresses are out of the question, so you got lucky there. Anyway, you’re both so beautiful I would have put you in strapless fuchsia monstrosities with big bows and polka dots to make sure you didn’t upstage me.”

Christy laughed, “Well, at least the apocalypse was good for something.” She looked at the odd assortment of food before her. “I wonder what we can expect for the rehearsal dinner?”

“I promise no MREs, but that’s the best I can do,” Gracie replied as she slipped on her backpack and headed for the door.

As soon as Gracie had left again, Vickie asked, “So now what? Gracie will be radioing Father O’Brien to send him on a wild goose chase.”

“Not really. It is a good idea to have some designated safe areas where we can hide civilians or rendezvous and regroup. In fact, I am surprised we didn’t think of it earlier.” Christy nibbled at some peanut butter crackers. “The Great Lakes are huge, with plenty of islands to get lost in. Besides, Barnes thinks he’s president of the United States. As far as I know, he didn’t say anything about Canada.”

Marcus and Bobby were
tasked with wiring the bridge with explosives, while Carter and David were sent zipping downstream for an hour before sending the radio transmission to Fort Wayne. Jack hoped that any hostile forces would have a difficult time triangulating a radio signal moving along the Ohio, and at the very least, somebody tracking the transmission would think the people responsible for it were at least twenty miles east of the critical bridge. In the meantime, Jack and Luke were going to round up the prisoners and get them into their coats and sleeping bags; all of them appeared to be in the early stages of hypothermia.

Just before sunrise Jack left Luke to guard the captives while he slipped into town with the SUV and a set of booster cables. By the time dawn’s first rays spilled over the Ohio River Valley, the son of an auto-dealership owner was back with a hot-wired bus with which they were able to better block the bridge. As the huge vehicle was being maneuvered into position
, Marcus and Bobby reported that the explosives were all in place, and they’d just seen Carter and David’s boat come into view.

Twenty minutes later
they all were eating a breakfast of MREs inside the bus, discussing what had been learned over the radio, and considering their next move.

“Ted don’t t
hink he can get any rail headin’ this direction in a hurry,” Carter reported. “He said most Indiana lines run east to west, and them that don’t usually pass through Indy. He’s purty sure he could get somethin’ goin’ in a week or two, but he’d need the kinda set-up we had when we busted through Chicago. I just told him to keep workin’ on the problem with the resources he already has. Chad said he don’t need a train anyway; he’s gonna use the vehicles that carried his troops in from Toledo before the Battle of Fort Wayne.

“He’s plannin’ on bringin’ fifty veterans down;
they are bringin’ the 50 cals, but other than that they don’t have our firepower. Every one of ‘em is armored up and ready to fight. They’re bringin’ a bunch of spears and pikes, and the equipment they need to build a better barricade on this bridge. With any luck, they’ll be here before nightfall. The best news I got for ya, though, is what happened in Louisville while I was on the radio with our folks back home.

“John and Tina found a set-up like the one Barnes had here when they arrived
. They flew over the bridge and got shot at after the soldiers guardin’ the place realized the Blackhawk wasn’t one of theirs. Nobody on the chopper got hit, but it made John purty mad. They landed on the Indiana shore and moved in with NVGs. Shot every one of the poor bastards on the other side. Then they blew up a hundred-meter stretch of the bridge and headed east to the next one.”

Everybody except Luke was sm
iling and nodding when they heard about what John’s team had accomplished the previous night; Luke was glad the bridge was gone and his friends were unharmed, but thoughts of the man he’d arrowed a few hours earlier still bothered him. Jack knew what was going on, and after making sure that Lori Alberts was outfitting another river-team that would be on the next Blackhawk available, he took the teen aside for a man-to-man discussion about the sacrifices of being a soldier.   

“I’m the one who finished off that guy on the bridge, Luke. I don’t know what your arrow did except knock him down.”

“I know what my arrow did, Jack; the man went down like that because my broadhead cut his spinal cord. I appreciate you giving him the coup-de-grace, but I made a killing-shot on him.”

Jack was silent for several heartbeats before exp
laining, “I wasn’t much older than you when 9-11 hit and we invaded Afghanistan. My first fight was against the infected when I was Barnes’ driver and me and Carter had to fight our way out of that valley. Every shot fired after that day was against human targets. Most of the time combat was confusing and fast, all of us just opening up with everything we had in the direction bullets were coming from. That was always scary but exhilarating, too. I didn’t like the mess we sometimes found afterward, but I also never really believed I did the killing.

“Then one day we got ambushed in a small village. Carter was the leader of our fire-team
, and Bobby was in charge of the squad. Chad Greenburg was the platoon sergeant, and I’m sure Marcus was there somewhere. Todd Evans got hit bad in the hip so we dragged him into a hooch and radioed John to call in an evac. The Taliban didn’t realize they’d just jumped a squad of Rangers with Apaches hanging out over the horizon. We chewed ‘em up and spit ‘em out in about ten minutes. The fight was over, Carter had Todd’s bleeding slowed, and we could hear the Blackhawk coming in to get him.

“Just then some idiot runs out int
o the street in front of where we’re hiding, and gets ready to fire an RPG at the chopper as it cleared the rooftops. I didn’t think there was time to do anything but shoot the guy, so I opened up on him at about fifteen meters.”

Jack frowned and lowered his eyes before continuing, “Those 5.56 rounds kill as well as most military rounds, but they do a
n even better job of wounding. I mean, they’re only about a third the size of a heavy AK bullet. Anyway, I thought I was missing but most of my shots were right on target. He managed to fire his RPG into the air before he went down, but he wasn’t aiming at anything and the chopper made it in just fine. I went out to look him over a few minutes later; he was so young, barely even a teenager. He was still breathing, just staring at the sky and shaking all over. Most of my bullets had hit him in the gut; but at least one had got him in the chest and he was a goner. One of the medics came over and took one look at him before walking away, shaking his head. The kid saw it, too, knew for sure that he was gonna die.

“For some reason I couldn’t just leave him there alone; I mean, I felt like I would be committing some heinous sin if I just left him there to die by himself. So I sat there without saying
or doing anything, just watching bloody bubbles come out of his mouth as he tried to breath. I briefly thought about putting a round through his head to get it over with, but that seemed just as awful as leaving him to die. Finally, he stopped moving and I looked into his eyes just in time to see the life fade from them. I mean, it really seemed like time stopped for a few seconds, almost as if the world just froze. Then Carter shook my shoulder and pulled me to my feet.

“After everything I’d seen and done over there
, when that kid finally died I threw up and started bawling like a baby. John actually sent me back to battalion and they made me drop three sleeping pills so I would crash. Slept for twelve hours, and woke up as if it had all been a bad dream. The memory returned, still does, but I was able to deal with it better.”

Luke had a lump in his throat as Jack looked off into the distance
before explaining, “I’m sure that the kid wasn’t even your age. The young ones were always the bravest over there, and the dumbest. They died like flies while the tribal elders accepted bribes from us, and sent more youngsters out the back door to find the local Taliban recruiter.

“When I went to war I worried a little bit about getting killed, or worse. Deep inside I guess I never stopped worrying about that the whole time I was over there, but what I didn’t know was the toll killing takes on your soul. I’m not exactly sure who I was when I went to Afghanistan, but that person damn sure didn’t come back.
We were all Rangers, and we were a crazy bunch of bastards. I don’t know if war bothered any of the other guys like it did me, but they didn’t judge me after I came back to the platoon a few days after my breakdown. I never hesitated in a fight—always had my buddy’s back. But I wasn’t the same, ever.

“What happened in that village Barnes infected was a nightmare, unbelievable even, but shooting that kid and watching him die was the worst thing that ever happened to me. And you know what? Things like that happened to almost everyone fighting over there. We went from video games and anime to killing other humans halfway around the world.

“Aw, hell, kid, I know I’m rambling on when I really should be listening to how you feel right now, but I just want you to know that most of us understand exactly what you’re going through. It’s the price we pay to keep our families and friends safe from the monsters at the city-gate, and trust me, there are always monsters at the gate. Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Huns, Mongols, al Quada . . . some crazy bastards are always willing to use force and terror to get what they want. It’s always been that way, and guys like you and me, and the rest of the people we’ve been fighting beside the past four months, are the only thing between the monsters and the destruction of our homes and loved ones. It’s really that simple, Luke, and even if we win we lose part of our souls doing it.”

Finally, Jack seemed to run out of words and a silence settled on the pair as Luke conti
nued to digest what the veteran warrior had shared with him. He realized that he’d always assumed the older guys who’d been to war were somehow different, immune to killing and maybe even fear. Jack and Carter, and every other former Ranger Luke had met since joining the settlement, seemed to almost be characters forged from the hazy myths of warriors-past. The way they carried themselves, the confidence they displayed as they prepared for battle, and especially the way they kept their composure in combat, had greatly impressed the teen. The fact that the veterans viewed him as some sort of mysterious, mystical, almost-otherworldly warrior-priest had never really hit home. From the first time Jack’s war-buddies had seen Luke in battle they’d wondered where he’d come from, and how he was able to kill hunters so efficiently and quickly. Most of all, they couldn’t understand the teen’s seeming lack of fear no matter what the odds. But now Luke had killed a person who didn’t even have a weapon raised, and the youngster turned out to be as unprepared for that nastiness as any other rookie soldier.

One thing Luke had learned as well as everyone else who’d survived the outbreak was the utter inability
of words to accurately describe what they had endured. Language could never capture the visceral fear and terror felt when first seeing what was thought to be a corpse move again, let alone watch the creature drag down and eat people while they screamed in mindless horror. But in this time and place, Jack’s words did help Luke cope with how he was feeling. Just understanding that he wasn’t alone made him feel better, and knowing that the warriors he idolized had suffered through emotions similar to what he was experiencing after killing someone helped him see the situation differently.