November 19
You’d think that the end of the world meant the end of being rushed, that with no businesses, no stock market, no commuting, no e-mail, that everything would slow way down.
Bullshit. When you’re fending for yourself in a world without any of the amenities and conveniences all that activity enabled, you are working from dawn to dusk. Every day. And you never have a problem sleeping—except on the nights where you’re going to go on salvage the next day. Like last night.
But the three days leading up to that were constant activity. When we weren’t teaching Tainara how to shoot, we were getting her to go over our maps of FdN and add in anything—anything—that she could remember about the island. Turned out that the tourist maps were the “not to scale” kind and some things were just dead wrong, or had changed since Fodor’s or Frommer’s or Baedeker had last bothered to send one of their contributors to this mostly-forsaken little archipelago.
It also turned out that while Tainara was only fair learning her way around a pistol, she had a natural gift for shotguns—the shorter the better. I could tell from looking at her that she wished that she had held out for one of the Rexios as her payment. I just smiled. That was all to our advantage. We gladly shifted gears and focused her training on the twelve-gauge.
In the midst of all this we fished, surveyed Tainara’s well-dispersed and hidden farm, got her to tell us where she thought the best salvage targets were on FdN, and how best to approach them. Meanwhile, we brought Daisy ashore and, on the second day, she popped out seven pups. One didn’t make it past the first hour; that’s often the case, particularly in conditions like ours. But the others were healthy little shut-eyed balls of fluff—or were, as soon as she had licked them clean. Best of all, once Rod had made a successful approach, Daisy let the rest of us handle the new additions and accepted tidbits from us along with the slow, gentle petting that was her well-earned reward for bringing six very important—and cute—puppies into our world.
And every spare moment—when we ate, collapsed after training, or even took a piss—we were talking through the details of Wizard’s Tower Two, or as Prospero optimistically relabeled it, the St. Anthony’s Bay Massacre. It was a long reach from that reference to the most infamous Chicago gangland slaughter of the Roaring Twenties, but he was very pleased with himself and no one pointed out that we wouldn’t have made the connection if he hadn’t explained it.
But the name grew on us, because it kind of jazzed us, too. We were going to slay dozens, maybe hundreds of stalkers to take back an island for healthy human beings. The risk and brute practicality of the mission got infused with a kind of nobility, which was good for morale.
It was such a simple plan, and so safe compared to anything we’d done to date, that I really don’t know why none of us slept soundly the night before. Maybe it was because it was the start of something really big—of clearing a whole island of stalkers all by ourselves. Maybe it was because we knew that although the first days would be pretty easy, we were committing ourselves to ultimately leaving our safe positions to hunt down the last stragglers. Or maybe it was a symptom of what Chloe had warned us about: that you can’t afford to take too long a break from work that involves the wholesale slaughter of rabid humans, even if they are mindless and rabid. It’s too easy to lose the edge—and the emotional calluses—you have to have if you’re going to keep pulling the trigger.
We sailed into St. Anthony’s Bay—really just a mooring—while the east was still dove-gray. On the leeward side of the jetty, there was a small floating wharf that had originally been equipped with two boarding ramps. One was nowhere to be seen; the other was still in place. We liked that it was light, steel, and sturdy yet portable. But we didn’t like where it was located: halfway down the long arm of the jetty’s “L,” the part that connected to the shore. So the first object was to land, get the ramp, and reposition it at the end of the outer, shorter leg of the “L”: a poured-concrete lading platform for boats with deep drafts. Unfortunately, we had no way of knowing whether there were any stalkers snoozing in the vicinity. Tainara told us she’d never seen them shelter there, but she wasn’t offering—nor were we hearing—that as anything like a guarantee.
So we started Voyager’s motor and kept it low, but pulsed it. Just enough so anyone in the vicinity of the bay would hear it, but not up the road that led into Vila dos Remédios.
Wouldn’t you know it; after ten minutes without a stalker showing up and with the landing team—Tainara, Prospero, Rod, Steve—newly ashore, some sleepy-ass stalker comes lurching out of the dilapidated restaurant/snack stand just landward of the floating wharf.
Chloe and Jeeza, as the sniper/spotter team on the roof of Voyager’s pilothouse, called the target—but I saw a problem developing: Tainara was not falling back, but racing forward to engage. “Hold your shot!” I snapped at Chloe.
“If I wait…shit; I’ve lost the shot,” Chloe cursed; Tainara was blocking her line of sight. “What the hell is she—?”
Before Chloe could finish asking the question, Tainara had answered it with action. Wearing my fireman’s coat and a dive mask, she leaped straight at the stalker, swinging a two-handed cleaver for whale-butchering—a flensing knife—as she did.
The heavy blade didn’t catch the still-hoarse stumbler in the head—her clear intent—but it went down into, and through, the bugger’s left shoulder. He fell—whether from the blow or the sudden change of balance, I couldn’t tell.
And Tainara clearly didn’t care. She took that moment to haul the flensing knife back over her shoulder and then struck down across the stalker’s back, severing the spine with such a deep cut that the creature’s torso was ready to hinge apart along the wound. Another blow took off its head.
Tainara stepped back, pushed up the mask, and, forgetting noise discipline, shouted, “Now THAT is a machete!”
“Tainara.” I made the word as quiet, but also as sharp and crisp, as I could.
She looked up, surprised.
“You keep all your gear on until we can decon it. And you. And your weapon. Back away. And next time, you keep your reactions to yourself until we are done. Clear?”
She nodded, mute at first, and then hissed at Prospero, “Jeeeeez, is the pequeno chefe always like this?”
“He is,” Chloe answered in a slow drawl from her perch atop the pilothouse. “When he’s trying to save someone’s stupid ass, anyway.”
“Who you callin’ stupid, bitch?”
“Drop it!” I shouted. I hated breaking my own rules about noise discipline, but allowing dissension and bickering was a lot worse. “You two will settle that shit later. Right now, we are mid-mission. Steve, Rod, Prospero, grab that ramp and get it down to the end of the jetty. All speed. Chloe, Jeeza, cover them. I’ll do decon on Tainara.”
Who stomped on board with all the maturity of a reprimanded three-year-old. “You need to get that stick out of your bunda, chefe.”
“And you need to be a team player if you’re going to work with us.”
“You mean, I need to do what you tell me?”
“Not just me. Whoever is in charge. One day, that might be you. You want people sassing you, ignoring your orders?”
That stopped her. She clumped toward the starboard bow, where we did most of the deconning (too crowded aft, with all the traffic that circulated around the pilothouse and the mizzenmast). “Okay, okay. I get it. But I tell you, after having nothing but little bullshit machetes made for turistas, it was good to swing a real one. Man, I tell you; that are the heaviest I ever swing!”
“I’m not surprised,” I grunted, as I finished Tai’s preliminary full-body hose-down and started sloshing her with what we called our Special Sauce. Its bleach-and-ammonia smell was suddenly thick around us. “That’s not a machete. Like I told you, it’s for cutting apart whales.”
“No shit? I thought you were joking at me. Damn. Well, it sure do work good.”
I wasn’t about to debate it at that moment. The flensing tools were good if you only had to swing them once or twice. More than that and you started slowing down. And if you want to stay alive when you’re being swarmed by stalkers, you cannot slow down. “Turn around,” I ordered, then looked up toward Jeeza. “Anything?”
She kept her eyes to the binoculars as she answered. “Nope. Seems sleeping beauty was all alone out here.”
“Yeah,” added Chloe, “he was so slow and hoarse that I’d bet Twix to tuna that he was in torpor.”
I nodded. “Looked like it.” I stole a glance behind. Prospero was signaling that they had the ramp in place and ready to run out to Voyager.
I stared up at Tainara. “The rest of the decon protocol: you remember it?”
Her reply was part sigh, part growl. “Jus’ ’cause I get excited don’ mean I forget what you show me.”
“Good. Now stand inboard and grab a handhold.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re motoring over to the lading platform. Time to set up for the dance.”
Rod’s response to my nod was, “Let’s rock!” He jabbed an eager index finger at the sound system we had scavenged from an officer’s billet at Wideawake airfield. The speakers had once been the overpowered PA system for its terminal.
Eighties head-banging rock came roaring out of them, hit the tightly packed boulders of the sixteen-foot-high breakwater, and bounced up toward Vila dos Remédios, just under a mile away.
“Think they’ll hear it?” Rod asked.
I shrugged. It was the best we could do. We’d thought about various other ways of getting their attention, but all of them involved going ashore: starting a fire, setting off explosions, blowing the horns of the bigger docked boats. Problem was that if there were more torpid stalkers nearby, they could come out from places and at the moments we least expected it. Not a risk we wanted to take unless we had to.
One of the biggest problems when fighting the infected is that although their behavior is mostly predictable, their locations and lairs are not. They’re like rats; they seem to be able to get into everything. And if they can get in somewhere, some of them always do. But there’s no way of knowing where all those places might be until they come boiling out of them. Then you have to add in the further whacky variable of unpredictable timing. Not only are there always some of them in torpor on these low-meat-density islands, but they seem to show the same sleep spectrum as regular humans. Some are light sleepers, some are deep sleepers, and most are someplace in between.
So the first requirement of our plan was to reduce those uncertainties as much as we could. That’s why we ditched our first version of the op plan for the St. Anthony’s Bay Massacre, in which we considered putting Chloe and Jeeza at the optimum sniper overlook: the end of the long causeway—at the bend in the L—and up on the crest of its breakwater. But the stalkers were sure to clamber up the rocks after them, so we had to have an evacuation boat on the back side of the jetty. Which made us decide against that plan: way too many moving parts and we just couldn’t be certain that enough of the infected would stay mobbed up for us to eliminate in large numbers.
But the real deal-breaker was the risk factor: some of the stalkers were sure to chase Chloe and Jeeza over the crest and down the other side. And if either of them twisted an ankle hopping boulder to boulder down to the evacuation boat, they’d never make it out; the infected may not be as agile and sure-footed as mountain goats, but they are at least as fearless.
But the time we spent on that plan didn’t turn out to be a waste of time, because it reminded us that just because the pier looked like a natural stalker-funnel, it wouldn’t necessarily prove to be so. If some of the ones at the back of the mob got impatient, they might run up the sides of the breakwater—just like a mountain goat would. At worst, they might go over its crest and then reappear someplace along its length, flanking whoever we put on shore.
So in our final plan, we put Tainara in the Zodiac on the other side of the breakwater. From there, she could watch any stalkers who were approaching us using the ocean side of the breakwater. It wasn’t likely; any infected who tried it would be slowed down big time, and you can always count on them to make a straight line for their prey. But that was our only blind side and shit happens, particularly in combat. And particularly when you’re fighting stalkers.
Tainara wasn’t too happy about the assignment, complaining that “Is way out away from the action!” I managed not to smile. This was coming from the same person who’d called us crazy for even thinking about landing on the big island. But now, here she was, already grumping because she wasn’t in the front line…even though I’d put her on the landing team. But she couldn’t argue with why I chose her for the job: she had the least experience and poorest accuracy with firearms. And guns, not machetes, were how we would win the St. Anthony’s Bay Massacre. Assuming we did.
Rod was Voyager’s designated pilot, but at that moment, he was focused on his job as psyops overseer. Which he was working more like a deejay as he deafened us with hits from the Eighties onward. And it kept him safe and ready in the pilothouse in case we did need to haul ass for some unforeseen reason. I was the only other person on Voyager, which I didn’t like very much, because it meant I was too far away to help if something went really wrong really fast.
Chloe and Jeeza were not in their normal sniper’s roost on top of the pilothouse. Despite the calm waters, Chloe had made a convincing case that the increased accuracy of operating on land would still make the battle shorter and more decisive. So we had settled on putting her and Jeeza on top of the wharf-sheltering poured-concrete wall just five yards beyond the ramp we’d now run out to Voyager. That gave her a higher, stable platform from which she could still sweep the whole jetty. Prospero and Steve, FALs and shotguns at the ready, were behind a decent barricade we’d erected about ten yards away from the ramp in the other direction: the side from which the stalkers would come.
My job was command, control, and communication: I’ve seen it referred to as “C3” in some of the older manuals we found at Ascension (usually in the billets of career NCOs). And because it was up to me to signal a withdrawal if it looked like too many infected were getting too close, pulling the ramp back aboard Voyager was also my job.
I ran radio checks, made sure all the mags for my AK were both snug and easily pulled, and waited.
Forty minutes later, two shamblers came stumbling into view. From the wrong direction. Of course.
Instead of coming down the long hill from Vila dos Remédios, they staggered out of the little combination museum and restaurant just across from where the jetty’s access lane met FdN’s main highway. Where “main highway” is defined as the wider and longer of the island’s two paved roads.
“Wow,” Rod commented in a flat tone. “That’s a whole two more we woke out of torpor.”
I toggled the radio. “You see them, Jeeza?”
“Before you did. Chloe wants to wait until they’re within one hundred twenty yards. No reason to waste ammo on anything other than a sure shot.” Which meant that she’d engage them at a shallow oblique angle from across the anchorage, just as they walked beyond the floating wharf.
Okay, I look at what I just wrote and realize that, if you weren’t there, it would be damn near impossible to visualize what I’m talking about. First, think of a capital “L.” That’s the shape of the whole jetty. The top of the vertical leg is where it connects to the land. About two hundred and twenty yards into the water, it turns ninety degrees to the left: that’s the L’s bottom “arm.” It’s seventy-five yards long and shelters the anchorage from the sea. Like I said, we put Chloe at the far end of that part, from which she could see and hit any target anywhere along the vertical leg. For those of us who do trig in our heads, that means her longest shot—to the top of the “L”—was only (only!) about two hundred sixty-five yards. (And no, it was not a perfect L, so it is not a precise trig answer. Deal with it.)
Therefore, she had lots of time to aim and shoot at every infected who charged down that vertical arm of the “L.” And once they turned the corner, they were full frontal; from that angle, she didn’t even have to lead them. But that corner was also only sixty yards away from the barricade being manned by Prospero and Steve. So the objective was to weed the infected out as they charged down the main causeway so only stragglers got to the bend. If they started coming at us faster than she could take them down…well, that’s when we’d shift to Phase Two.
But the two from the restaurant-museum didn’t make it three steps past the floating wharf. Chloe’s .308 barked and one of them fell like a sack of flour. A second report and the other sprawled sideways, still kicking and thrashing. She’d been hit in the hip, which, like knee shots, always causes the wildest reactions in stalkers. They keep trying to get up and run even harder, but the shattered joint won’t support them for more than a step or two, at which point they once again go sprawling and shrieking in rage. And they keep trying that, again and again, until another bullet puts an end to their loud, spastic fury.
This time was no different. Chloe waited for her moment, then hit the base of the stalker’s throat as she lurched upright.
There wasn’t really anything to say. It was a pretty anticlimactic opening engagement. After five seconds, Jeeza murmured a thoroughly bored, “Yay. We win.”
We settled in to wait some more.
What we didn’t anticipate—but should have—is that the sound of the .308 was what we needed to get the dance party hopping. Rod’s rock mix featured a heavy dose of drums and bass that just didn’t reach out and grab attention the way high-pitched sounds do. Or maybe we just needed bigger and better speakers.
Whatever the reason, about fifteen minutes after the two museum-dwelling stalkers went facedown on the jetty’s roadway, Tainara used the squelch break that signaled a request for vox-grade commo. (Because there are potentially pirates out there, we tend to keep voice commo to a minimum.) I toggled my handset. “Voyager here. Go.”
“We have companies—eh, company. Lookit top of the hill.”
I had to step out of the pilothouse to see that far behind us. Sure enough, there was a small, dispersed group of infected running toward us. Faster, it seemed, as they started hearing the music more clearly. They howled every time the lead guitar surged louder, like animals responding to the challenge calls of an enemy.
Tainara sounded very excited and a little scared. Or maybe eager. “I thin’ shooting is like hook the fish, and now music reel them in, yeh?”
“Looks like it,” I agreed. I leaned out the side door of the pilothouse and waved to the others, pointing back up the hill. Jeeza had eyes on them already. Chloe just smiled wolfishly and answered with a thumbs-up.
As soon as the new group got on the causeway, she started taking them on. Despite the long range, the angle was only ten degrees off a full frontal shot. Chloe’s bolt-action spoke steadily, but even so, the occasional miss, and the occasional stalker who somehow survived two shots were left for Steve and Prospero. Their marksmanship had improved enough to hit more than half the time. If that sounds like miraculous improvement, remember that they didn’t engage until the survivors were only sixty yards away and coming straight at them.
After almost thirty steady minutes of this, Tainara went straight to voice comms. “Hey, chefe, you party getting real pop’lar, now.”
I turned: the road down the hill was now as crowded as an entry gate into an actual concert stadium.
Rod saw what I was looking at. He swallowed. “Alvaro, do you think—I mean, can we really—?”
I simply toggled the general channel on the handset. “Withdrawal in two minutes.”
“What the hell—?” started Chloe. Then a long pause as she looked back over her shoulder. “Oh. Yeah. Two minutes. A big ‘Roger that.’”
“Remember the drill. Sniper element unasses first. Barricade line thirty seconds after.”
Tainara’s voice came on, surf sounds behind her. “And then?” She had clearly not been listening carefully when we rolled out the final plan.
“And then,” I replied, “we pull back seven yards and keep blasting the music as loud as we can. And wait.”
She was silent for a moment. Then memory kicked in. “Oh,” she said. “Yah. Now I remember. Phase Two.”
“Yes. Remember: before you start back, toss out the chum cage as far as you can. Tow it around until you have some followers, then motor in. We need all hands for this last part.”
By the time Tainara snugged the Zodiac against Voyager’s stern, everyone was back aboard, the ramp had been pulled in, and the party animals were lined up five deep along the poured-concrete sides of the jetty. They were typical infected; shrieking, howling, mostly naked, wild eyes, open sores, and oblivious to everything except their immediate prey: us.
Voyager’s sails were reefed; that way, we couldn’t be pushed back toward their snapping jaws by a sudden gust. Besides, when your sails are up, you need to man them and the wheel or you are tempting fate. And in this case, we couldn’t spare anyone from the task at hand.
We’d kind of become deaf to the music playing on a loop, blaring over our heads at the mob of stalkers straining toward us. But they kept hearing it, reacting to it like a challenge. Which it was.
Tainara returned topside, having snagged more ammo for her Rexio.
“You ready?” I asked.
She nodded and glanced at the sharks that had followed her chum cage into the anchorage. “They looking bored. Gotta start soon.”
“Right now,” I agreed, and brought the M4 up to my shoulder. “Phase Two,” I said loudly. “Ready on the line.” I’d heard that in some movie. A Civil War flick, I think. Funny how I remember everything I read, but not everything I hear. At least not as precisely.
Everyone muttered that they were ready.
“Okay. Remember: there’s no reason to rush. Look for the least stable target. If one round makes them fall into the water, so much the better. Safeties off.” I heard a ragged chorus of metallic clicks. “Fire.”
M4’s don’t sound badass. They are pint-sized, low recoil, and fire a round that a lot of people consider anemic. And when you’ve become used to the sound and recoil and visible effects of 7.62xAnything, you understand where that opinion comes from. But because it fires the 5.56mm round, the M4 is also very easy to control and it shoots as straight as a laser at close ranges (and well beyond).
So six of them crackling along the side of a seventy-foot cutter doesn’t sound like wrathful thunder. But still, they do the job. In this case, that meant dropping targets at a crazy rate. The only imposing reports were the booms of Tainara’s pump shotgun.
The tactics of engagement were basic: hit the ones closest to the edge, since the whole mass of them was behaving just as they always did; jostling, pushing, trying to get as close as they could, despite the twenty feet of water between us. As we’d suspected, one hit was usually enough to topple them. A lot of the rounds also over-penetrated: went all the way through the first stalker to hit the one right behind. These second hits were often messier; the first impact destabilized the round’s orientation and spin, so it wasn’t able to zip through the second body as cleanly. That meant it dumped almost all of its plentiful remaining energy into that second stalker.
Within the first five seconds, twelve of them were in the water, thrashing, roaring, swimming skills gone to whatever abyss had also swallowed their memories of civilization and love. The sharks swerved toward them like meat-seeking missiles. A few actually shied away when the stalkers met them head-on, hands raking furiously.
But the sharks swerved back almost immediately. Not only had the stalkers failed to inflict any noticeable damage, but, unable to swim or even float, they were sinking and growing weaker.
It’s kind of strange watching sharks tear stalkers apart. For one split second, you’re really not sure whose side you’re on. I mean, the stalkers have to be exterminated. It’s them or us, and we need all the help we can get. But sharks? They are ancient enemies, the stuff of nightmares and horror movies.
But then that split second is past and you’re back in the present, remembering that there really aren’t any sides, now. Either a critter—or person—is friendly or it’s not. And if it’s not, well, the cosmic butcher’s bill is now collected by whoever is in the best position to do so.
It took only two seconds for more infected to shove and elbow their way into the gaps left by those who’d become shark food. We scanned for the ones whose footing was already precarious, raised our weapons, and fired. More fell in.
After about the fourth—you really couldn’t miss, given the range and the solid mass of targets—I realized that although we’d killed plenty of infected before, this time was affecting me differently. Part of it was the point-blank range; you could see details like the color of their eyes, rings, surgical scars (C-sections were always the most noticeable), teeth straightened by orthodontia, tattooed messages, and symbols that were now meaningless. All reminders that they had once been something more than mindless, rabid bipeds. They’d been people. Until now, we’d been able to forget that, more or less. But not here, not at this range.
Whether it was the blood in the water, the thrashing at the surface, or the convergence of their own kind, more sharks started arriving in St. Anthony’s Bay after the first few minutes. There were close to a hundred infected in the water by then.
I don’t actually remember many details after that. None of us do. Jeeza thinks it’s about guilt and the repression of bad memories. I’d like to agree, but I can’t. As far as I can tell, it just got kind of routine. There was a point where you stopped noticing the individual features of the infected. From there on, it became like any other repetitive job: you just did it without paying a lot of attention.
Since more and more infected kept arriving to check out the gunfire, it’s hard to know how many we actually put in the water. It was somewhere over two hundred and fifty. Steve tried to keep count, claims it was someplace between two hundred eighty and two hundred ninety. Could be. All I know is that none got out. A few actually tried to jump the twenty feet between the jetty and Voyager. Since they were not former Olympians, that didn’t work out for them.
By 0900, new arrivals had dwindled to a few every fifteen minutes. By noon, it was a few every hour. By 1400, we realized that no more were going to show. We compared our impressions and tentative tallies.
In one morning, we’d brought down at least four hundred infected.
And we’d also learned that when old books describe battles in rivers or bays by using the phrase “the waters ran red,” that wasn’t exaggeration. Not one bit.