November 22
We returned to try the same tactic the following day. After three hours, only five stumblers, and no real stalkers, we gave it up and re-scouted the site we’d seen at Ilha da Conceição before sailing back to Ilha Rata. We’d had no way of knowing if it would bring down a fresh wave of infected or whether we’d already reached all those that we could attract.
Much of the day was spent reviewing how much we didn’t and couldn’t know. Two weeks ago, we had estimated that there were probably about nine hundred infected left, of which three hundred were active—maximum. Except now we had killed almost four hundred in one day. Was that because there were more left than we had guessed? We didn’t know. Was it because half or more of those who showed up had been in torpor until roused by either the sound of our guns or the activity of the other infected? Again, we didn’t know. Or were our tentative assumptions about torpor fundamentally wrong? Was there some kind of periodicity at work, so that if stalkers went for more than a week without food, their impulse toward in-group predation dwindled and so they began shutting down? Of course, we didn’t know that either.
Unfortunately, if we were significantly wrong about any of a dozen other variables, that made our initial estimates almost entirely worthless. Which left us with three big questions. First, how many infected were left after the St. Anthony’s Bay Massacre? Second, how could we tell when we had reduced their active numbers to the point that we could safely move upon the island itself? And third, how many did we have to kill at Praia do Cachorro before we could risk pushing on at all?
After hours of useless theorizing, we kicked all those cans down the road and resolved to try yet another version of Wizard’s Tower in the hope that the results would give us more insight into the actual challenge we were facing.
So today we sailed Voyager a mile farther west, following along the north side of FdN bearing landward as we came abreast of Forte dos Remédios. That put us in the small bay that was home to Praia do Cachorro: a beach shaped like a cutlass, bounded on the east by the high ground upon which the fort was perched and on the west by the rough, stony molar that the maps labeled Ilha da Conceição. From what we could tell, it didn’t spend much time as an island. For a few hours at high tide, water did separate it from FdN. But that water was knee-high, at most.
The structure we hoped to make Wizard’s Tower Number Three was located toward the end of the tapering spit of land that connected FdN to Ilha da Conceição. It was a small, one-story bar with a high foundation. It had views of not only Praia do Cachorro but also Praia da Conceição to the west. The only avenue of access was a long, narrow road that started paralleling the beach and then descended from the steep slopes that fell away from the north side of Vila dos Remédios.
We landed with Cujo, whose nonchalant lope through and around the one-story bar proved it to be uninhabited by infected, torpid or otherwise. He stuck around with Rod, watching the road while we prepared Tower #3.
Normally, we wouldn’t have taken a chance on so small and low a building, but it was made from poured concrete, and the roof was high, almost another half story. That put it beyond the jumping range of the infected. Chloe and Steve—sniper and security—went up to ready it for a long day’s work while the rest of us started clearing the ground around it and filling a few small, makeshift sandbags to pass up to them.
I was shoving my third bag up toward the roof when Jeeza came up behind me. “This isn’t right, Alvaro.”
“Whaddya mean? The sandbags can’t be any larger, but we need them on the side of the roof facing the bay. In case we have to provide flanking fire.”
“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”
She was right; I did. But I’d hoped to be able to skip over this.
“I’m the spotter,” Jeeza said, her voice low and hard. “I am going up there. You are not cutting me out.”
I held in a sigh. “Look, Jeeza, I know how you feel about getting this close to the stalkers. It’s not right to ask you to—”
“Alvaro, I don’t like taking unnecessary chances, but I’m part of the team. You start giving me special treatment and everyone else will resent me. Besides, if you start doing that for one person, how do you not do it for others?”
The thing about arguing with Jeeza is that you are very, very likely to lose. Because by the time she does decide to have a confrontation, she’s thought out every angle and boiled it down to simple, inescapable truths.
This was one of those times. “Okay, Jeeza. Get your gear and up you go.”
She nodded, looked up the one hundred thirty yards of slightly curving road to the point where it hung a sharp left and continued its ascent behind a solid wall of trees. “I’ll get a double load of ammunition.”
I nodded. “Better safe than sorry.”
She nodded back and left. Which was a pretty terse exchange for usually expressive Jeeza, but I didn’t take it amiss. If she had been angry at me, she wasn’t any more: Jeeza’s not that kind of person. No, she was steeling herself to being face-to-face with the infected in a way she hadn’t been since she was perched, terrified, on top of the Range Rover at Ascension.
We finished our preparations by dismantling the semipermanent tin roof over the entry to the bar and pulling down the metal posts that had held it up. We didn’t have any idea if the infected were good pole climbers, but we sure as hell didn’t want to find out.
Tainara had finished lugging two jerricans up from the beached Zodiac. “What d’hell are dese?”
I took one, cocked my head toward the bar, and started walking. “I’ll show you.”
We stopped at the uphill side, where the slope hit the foundation a few feet higher than on the ocean side. I started uncapping my jerrican. She put hers down, and, hands on hips, frowned at the wall. “This wall—they gonna try an’ jump up. Prolly won’t make it.”
I nodded. “Yeah, but no reason to take chances.”
She nodded back. “So, what you gon’ do? Sharp-like wire—?”
“Nope,” I answered, handing her a long-handled broom. “Hold this.”
She did, frowning as I tipped the jerrican so it poured out on the broom’s fibers. The moment the black sludge oozed out, she smiled, eyes wide. “Yesss! That work good. Real good.”
I hoped she was right. Because of its many uses, we always grabbed all the motor oil we got our hands on. But some was so old and thick and nasty that you wouldn’t want to use it except to burn. Or in this case, to make the walls of the bar so slick that the stalkers couldn’t get a hold of it, wouldn’t somehow find some crack or crevice that would allow them to shinny up and get a hand on the roof.
When we were done, I handed another jerrican up toward Chloe. She raised one alluring eyebrow as she reached down. “To reapply,” I explained, “in case so many try scrambling up, that they wear the first coat away.”
“An all-day slip-and-slide. Good thinking. We about ready?”
I nodded. “Weapons check?”
“Done. One of the AK mags is a little cranky. Might use some of this goop to help it along. Other than that, we’re good to go.”
“Okay. We’ll get set in the surf and start the music as soon as we’ve done a comm check.”
She rubbed the forestock of the .308 eagerly. “Good. I hate waiting.”
I smiled. “Yes. I know that about you.”
She grinned down at me, eyebrows descending into an evil vee. “Just remember that when we get back to the ship.”
We started the music playing and waited. We were prepared for a longer lag time between the first chords that blasted out of the speakers and the first infected that showed up. At St. Anthony’s Bay, the sound followed the smoothly rising land up to the eastern edge of Vila dos Remédios. But here, we were facing a sharp rise. The corner at the top of the slope was about sixty-five feet higher than the bar, and then rose up another forty or fifty feet beyond that. So the music was heading straight into a forested wall; the amount of sound that got over the rise and into Vila dos Remédios would be limited, at best. So every minute or so, Rod—now back on Voyager as the pilot—blew the ship’s horns in the most annoying, ragged pattern he could.
It was over an hour before any stalkers showed up to check out our second party. Just a few, but these were fully alert. Either the walk down the switchback had awakened them or they hadn’t been in torpor. Chloe, who had a full front angle on them from the moment they turned the corner, let them get to one hundred yards and brought them down with one shot apiece. We traded thumbs-ups.
Meanwhile, Prospero, Tainara, and I waited at the edge of the surf with our M4s and respective backup weapons in case of any “overflow” from the anticipated target zone. We were about one hundred twenty yards to the left of the bar, slightly offset to the rear: close enough to whittle away at any who got close, but able to get into the surf within seconds and to the bobbing Zodiac in about a minute. But it would be a bitch to get there in our protective gear, so withdrawal was really a last-ditch option. And if we did, it meant cruising back in closer with the Zodiac and accepting that we’d spend way too many rounds while on that pitching platform: first to clear the beach and then the area around the surrounded bar.
We’d also set up a drying rack with a live fish on at about the midway point. We hung a big bell on it, with the intent of being able to ping it with a round to shift the stalkers’ attention to that free meal. We hadn’t had much luck with that kind of distraction on Ascension Island, but we figured we’d give it one last try.
A quarter hour after Chloe dropped the first pair of stalkers, almost a dozen more showed up. Our “conops” (U.S. military shorthand for “concept of operations,” which Prospero tries squeezing into every planning meeting) was to start thinning out large groups earlier. But that meant more and trickier work for Chloe. Not so much because of the engagement range—only one hundred thirty yards to the top of the slope—but because of a slight bulge in the foliage at the one-hundred-fifteen-yard mark. That could momentarily obscure targets, force her to waste time reacquiring them.
Fortunately, this bunch came down evenly distributed. So Chloe started with the unconcealed ones on the unobstructed right side of the road and worked over to the left as those came farther down and so, fully into view.
She had dropped eight by the time the rest reached the twenty-yard mark, at which point she laid aside the rifle and reached for her shotgun. By the time she had trained it over the edge of the roof, though, Steve had fired, pumped, fired, and was pumping again: one down, one limping along on a compound fracture. Jeeza just kept doing her job: scanning for new targets as Steve and Chloe aimed the black muzzles of their Rexios down into the scabrous, lesioned faces of the last two screaming stalkers. Damn near decapitated them.
“Well, that worked well enough,” Prospero muttered.
I nodded. It had. In fact, it had gone precisely according to plan. Which made me happy, relieved—and worried. Being raised Catholic has probably left me with a superstitious side, because when anything works too well—which is to say, just like you planned—I start looking for the other shoe to drop.
After the first rush, there wasn’t much excitement. A smaller, second wave of eight; three managed to get all the way down the hill. About two dozen more followed them over the next ten minutes. A lot of those looked really gaunt and—no surprise—more than half of them didn’t press on to the bar; they stopped to tear chunks out of the ones Chloe had already put down. After she dropped the more determined ones who kept charging down the road, she picked off the others at an almost leisurely pace.
During this mostly uneventful process, there were times when as many as three stalkers were active around the base of the bar. That was the magic number we’d set as our cure to pour in some flanking fire.
To be honest, our per-round accuracy sucked. I mean, it really sucked. We might have hit one time in four. If that. But we had a lot of ammo and there were three of us and Steve’s shotgun was a lot closer and was much better at getting and holding their attention. Yeah, we were only plinking them with 5.56, but still, two or three always did the trick.
Until they came down in a single mass of at least a hundred.
We knew something was up when, despite all the shooting and the few straggling infected that swerved aside toward us, Cujo suddenly jumped up, stiff-legged. He let loose one of his long B-horror-movie howls, head so far back you’d have sworn he was trying to get a whiff of his own spine. Chloe tweaked to his Hound of the Baskervilles performance and paused; the only two remaining infected hadn’t even come halfway down the slope.
That’s when we heard it. For a moment, it was hard to separate the new sound from the surf—Mother Nature’s version of white noise—but then it became distinct: a dim roaring.
I turned to Prospero. “You hear that?”
He swallowed, looking up the hill. “Sounds like a final game between Leeds and Manchester. Presuming the match was a mile away and they were tied one-all going into the last minute.”
That was when the first of the stalkers rounded the corner at the top of the hill and the sound turned into one we were familiar with: the full-throated shrieks and yowls of a pack of infected. But we’d never heard so many screaming in such a concentrated pack. Yeah, we had heard plenty of them at the jetty, of course, but that volume had ebbed and flowed as those in front went into the water and new ones kept arriving at the back.
In this case, the sound hit our ears all at once, the volume growing as more of them came into view around the corner.
And damn, there were a lot of them. Couldn’t even count them, at the time. They were packed so tightly that some were falling off either side of the raised roadbed. It was like a scene out of one of those sword-and-sandal epics or Russian Revolution docudramas where a charging mob fills the street so you can’t even see the ground.
Tainara glanced up at them and then over at me. “Never heard you curse, chefe.”
I blinked. “I cursed?” I wasn’t even aware I had spoken.
“Yeh—unless coño don’t mean what it used to in Spanish.”
Well, so much for the strong-and-silent command image. “Prospero, how many?”
“Too many,” he muttered, shouldering his M4.
Tainara’s fingers were tight around her own weapon’s forestock. “You think mebbe it time for your guys on the roof to leave?”
It might have been, but—“No time, now. That mob will be here before they can get down and into the deep water.” These stalkers were really moving, even though a lot of them were really, really gaunt. Like walking cadavers. What? Reserve energy for a last-ditch attempt to get food? I snapped the M4 off safety.
“You want we should start now?” Tainara’s voice wasn’t exactly shaky but had a deep buzz, like a steel wire about to break.
“No.” Prospero was sighting in at the base of the bar. “If we engage now, too many of the buggers will swerve toward us too soon. The bar is flypaper; we want them to mob up there, give us an easy target. We will inflict more casualties more rapidly.”
“Yah,” she countered, her voice still tense, “you hope.”
Chloe, meanwhile, had been keeping up a trip-hammer pace with the bolt-action. It looked like almost every shot dropped one, but that was like snatching individual raindrops out of a downpour. I saw her put the weapon aside. Jeeza started loading it, but Chloe went for her FAL and shook her head. No point to reloading. “Alvaro…” she muttered over the tactical channel.
“On it. Prospero. Shift to a FAL.”
“Twenty-round magazine, Alvaro. It means reloading more freq—”
“Doesn’t matter. We need one-shot kills. Tai”—I’d never used a nickname for Tainara, but right then, there was no time for all the syllables—“if I change to my AK, you take a few more shots and change to your Rexio.”
“I—uh—?”
“Tai: repeat what I told you.”
She sounded annoyed—and more clear-headed. “When you go to AK, I shoot a few times, then go to shotgun.”
“Good.” The first infected that managed to get through Chloe’s semiautomatic torrent from the FAL fire leaped as high as he could, almost got his hands on the edge of the roof—but then slid off to the side, shrieking in shocked outrage.
“Slip and slide, you bastards!” Chloe yelled, ramming another magazine into her FAL while Steve fired into the bounding mob with his Rexio and Jeeza popped off a stream of 9mm from her Brazilian M9 that sounded almost as fast as autofire.
But that didn’t even cause a ripple in the wave of bodies now about to hit the bar. For a split second, I had a nightmare vision of the entire structure being carried away by the sheer weight of that howling pack, then dismissed it as a panicked delusion. Which I knew it to be. Knew it. Almost.
Fortunately, Chloe and her team kept the rate of fire high enough, and kept it on the close approaches to the wall. Survivors were accumulating just a little faster than the rate at which the nearest ones were being killed. But the central bulge of the mob had just charged past the twenty-yard marker—
“Hit that wave!” I shouted at Prospero and Tai. “Now!”
It wasn’t where we had planned to aim, wasn’t like anything we had practiced. But we’d set range markers all along the road, and had a more massive target than we ever imagined.
I could barely hear my M4 over the hammering of Prospero’s FAL. The need to inflict as many casualties as quickly as possible meant our “aiming” wasn’t much more than recovering from the recoil, getting our weapons re-centered on the mass of stalkers, firing, recovering again. As fast as we could.
There was no time to assess the effects, watch ammunition expenditure, or consider shifting our point of fire. Maybe if we’d been The Captain, we could have done all those things simultaneously. But we were self-taught and we hadn’t prepared for this eventuality.
So of course, the three of us shot ourselves dry at the same time.
Shit! So very not good. “Tai, go to your Rexio,” I ordered as I backslung the M4 and wrestled the AK around on its sling. “Prospero, reload.”
“The FAL?”
Really? You have to ask? “Yes. Now. Keep hitting them around the bar as soon as you’re ready. We’ll cover you.”
At which point I saw the back half of the big wave of infected hit the bar. From a hundred-fifteen yards away, I could still hear a sound like fifty NFL linesmen trying to body-block a brick wall. Dust went up. So did furious and agonized yowls. I was ready to puke because I half-expected to see the bar list and collapse. Yet, when the dust cleared, it was still there.
But for some reason, these new stalkers were apparently able to jump higher than the others. Chloe, Jeeza, and Steve were backing away from the edge of the roof to stay clear of their raking, grasping fingers. So they had no way to safely apply a second coat of oil. Which meant that it was only a matter of time before these super-jumping stalkers got on the roof.
Right as the terror of that thought made my face hot and my hands cold, I also noticed that, weirdly, although the bar hadn’t fallen over, it had sunk into the ground. Which made no sense…
Until I looked more closely: “Shit! The bodies!”
“What?” said Prospero.
“Huh?” screamed Chloe over the background soundtrack of their Rexios.
I didn’t have time to explain, I only had time to give orders. “Prospero, shift your fire away from the bar.”
“Wha—?”
“The pile of bodies: it’s becoming a ramp.”
“Filho da puta!” Tai shouted. “Li’l chefe is right! The bastards get running starts, now!” Head down over the Rexio, she drew a bead.
“No, Tai. You cover me.”
She looked like she wanted to spit. “From what?”
“From them.” I took a step forward and raised the AK.
Since Prospero was now hitting infected that had not yet reached the bar, we were finally being noticed by some that still hadn’t entered the single-minded kill frenzy that comes over them when they lock in on a target. So the ones he didn’t kill looked around to see why their pals were dying. And saw us. Half a dozen broke off and charged in our direction.
“We so fodido!” Tai shouted as she shifted her aim.
“You engage at twenty yards,” I shouted at her as I brought up the AK and snapped down the huge safety. It was already set to full auto.
The first was in my sights. I grazed the trigger. Of the three or four rounds, one clipped and slowed her. Good enough; move on. The next went down. I wasted damn close to half a mag on the third, which stumbled out of my sight picture.
Three left. Seventy yards and they were fast. I hoped I had enough rounds because I had no time to swap mags.
I switched to semiautomatic and burned three rounds to hit the closest. I shifted but shot early because I was eager and anxious. Damn. Another two rounds and down went the second. Leaving one. At only twenty yards. “Tai?”
Tai had just finished off one of the first three with enough double-aught to the gut that you might have been able to see daylight. She swung her weapon slightly, pumped two rounds at the second wounded one at ten yards’ range. One pattern hit, reducing its left arm to bloody tatters, but it was still coming. I shifted the AK to double-tap it.
The good news was that I hit it square in the sternum with the first round. The bad news was that the second squeeze of the trigger only produced a dry klik. Shit.
I dropped the AK on its sling, grabbed after my Browning, saw that the stalker was down—and was hit by a battering ram: the limper that had fallen out of my sights earlier.
I hit the sand hard and my breath whooshed out of me. I was aware of only one thing: the impact unseated my fire-mask right as the once-human monster leaped on me, clawing at my face. I got my hands up, one to block, the other to grab its neck and hold it back as long as I—
“Hands down!” Tai screamed.
I pulled my hands back; the distended gargoyle-fanged mouth pitched down—
—but disappeared before it had descended another inch. Blood sprayed, mostly to the left of me as the body fell away. Tai stood over me, one of the flensing tools in her hand. “Bes’ machete ever!” she shouted.
I scrambled to my feet, scanning. I could hardly breathe.
Prospero had swung his FAL toward us, but had checked fire; smart, since by the time he came to bear we were clustered up. Odds were he would have hit one of us, not the stalker. He resumed firing at the stalkers up the beach, but at a faster tempo; more of them had broken away from the bar to charge at us.
The situation around the building itself was not as bad as I’d feared. Steve and Chloe had shifted their fire to those that were at least ten yards off, with Jeeza bringing her machete down on any fingers or hands that managed to get hold of the roof’s edge. Chloe caught sight of me; I heard her shriek a panicked curse, saw her grab toward the bolt-action.
“No,” I wheezed into the radio, “maintain local security. We’re fine.”
“The hell you are!” she yelled without resorting to her radio.
“Maintain local security,” I repeated into my headset’s mic. Right before I swayed and almost fell over.
Look: I’m not a big guy. Yeah, the stalker that tackled me was pretty gaunt, but he was also about six feet tall. Still a lot of mass. And anyone who tells you that sand is soft has obviously never been whole-body slammed down into it. So I was dazed and was barely moving air into and out of my body.
Tai had reloaded her Rexio. “Chefe? You okay?”
I waved off the question. I picked up the AK, pulled the mag, and grabbed at the closest pouch on my web gear. I was going as fast as I could, but I felt like I was moving at the bottom of a vat of cold syrup.
Prospero was changing mags, too. And the leading edge of the next, more dispersed gang of infected was now only forty yards off. If that.
I got the magazine in, did not switch back to auto, but took a knee. I slowly let out what little air I had in my lungs as the first charging outline rose into those really nice AK sights.
I squeezed the trigger, recovered, squeezed again.
The figure had disappeared; whether dead or incapacitated, I didn’t know and I didn’t stop to find out. Taking care of those was part of Tai’s job: close security. Without having to fully take my eyes off the sight picture—because the AK’s almost-ring-sight has a break in the top that allows you to scan around a bit—I found and swung the muzzle to the next stalker in my firing lane. Three rounds until she went down. I peeped over the sights: they were closing faster than Prospero and I were taking down the leaders.
I mentally marked the four closest, snugged my cheek down, and started in on fast semiautomatic fire. I had only dropped three when the trigger clicked dry, but this time, Tai didn’t even have to rush. She took that one down with her Rexio as I changed mags again.
As I did, I saw that there were fewer infected following this bunch than I had originally estimated. In the very next moment, I learned why: I heard the distinctive bark of Chloe’s bolt-action, realized it had been banging away in the background for almost half a minute. I grabbed at the radio, toggled the send—
“Don’t even,” Chloe growled before I could speak (well, wheeze). “If you’re done wrestling with zombies for a few moments, check out our position.”
I did. It was no longer surrounded by a mob. Between her team’s constant hammering at the ones beyond ten yards and those we’d pulled toward us, you could actually see daylight between the bodies in that reduced crowd. I wasn’t about to assume that Chloe, Steve, and Jeeza were safe, but they were no longer in immediate danger, either.
“Okay,” I allowed. “Thanks for the help.”
“Yeah. Remember that, too, lover.” I could hear the smile in her voice. Just as the open channel snicked off and the bolt-action cracked again.
And again and again.