November 25
This time, when we heard the sand hiss under the semirigid hull of our Zodiac, it didn’t feel like we were returning to Praia do Cachorro. It felt more like we were landing at Normandy.
No, we were not under fire, but this day, death felt much closer than it had since the first time we actually took the fight to the stalkers, back on Ascension Island. Because like that day, we were sharply aware how much we did not know about our enemy.
I jumped over the Zodiac’s side, snagged the nearest grab-line and started hauling the boat higher up on the beach. I heard the others jump into the water behind me. We weren’t trying to be stealthy, exactly, but we kept talk quiet and to a minimum. Today was the opposite of our typical modus operandi, where we wanted the stalkers to know where we were and come running. This was our first day playing on their turf. So, particularly during first hours, we needed to be as silent and invisible as possible.
As it was, people weren’t making a lot of noise because they were just plain grumpy. Well, I guess “sullen” is the right word—although I’m not sure I’ve ever used it before. But yeah; they were sullen. Because they weren’t happy with the plan. Which was not the same thing as thinking it was a bad plan or that they had a better one: they just weren’t happy with it.
Today was going to be all about speed and endurance. Whoever was first up the road into the northern part of Vila dos Remédios had to be ready—and able—to run all the way back without stopping. And the more of us that went, the more likely we were to alert any nearby stalkers. So it was me, Tai, Steve. No one else, not for the first recon.
The bitching when I announced that roster last night was epic. It was also expected. I just folded my arms and let it run its course. Other than Tai and Steve, the only one who didn’t join in the gripe-fest was Prospero. He just glanced at me, sighed, nodded, and leaned back to wait it out.
When Rod, Jeeza, and Chloe were done, I explained the selection criteria. They shut right up; none of them were anything vaguely like track stars. Frankly, neither was I, but one of my nicknames growing up was Energizer Bunny. And it wasn’t because I was small (which I was) or white and pink (which I wasn’t).
I filled in the rest. Tai read and spoke Portuguese: the language on every sign we were going to run into. Also, on the wildly unlikely chance that we encountered survivors, we needed her as a translator. Lastly, Tai—the lady who was supposedly on the fence about joining us—was now unwilling to stay on the bench. Fine by me; that was movement in the right direction.
Steve was fit, cool in a crisis, and an increasingly good shot, particularly with shotguns and pistols. Which we knew we might wind up using a lot: given the short sight ranges and blind corners, fast, levelheaded proficiency with close-range weapons was key.
And, in addition to being the crown idiot who had come up with a plan that put my own head in the tightest possible noose, I have a skill that could prove crucial: I know how to hot-wire cars. Yeah, that’s right—even though I don’t drive. And that’s all I’m saying about it. Some shit you take to your grave, apocalypse notwithstanding.
There was one other reason I was going, one I didn’t mention. I wasn’t about to send anyone into danger that I wouldn’t face myself. Which had originally scared me. A lot. But not anymore. See, once you’ve done it, and once you accept that being the leader means it’s just part of your job, you get kind of fatalistic about it. Hell, it’s not like you can chew your nails, torn between hoping you won’t have to go and hating what it meant: that you would let your friends get killed in your place. Because in a small group like ours, the leader can rest assured of one thing: if anyone’s going into the shit, he or she is leading the way.
Everyone was a little surprised that I had chosen Praia do Cachorro as our landing point. Frankly, I hadn’t been leaning that way initially. From the first, I knew that hot-wiring a car would mean lugging around one of the charging batteries we got from Ascension. My mind’s eye saw only one acceptable way of doing that: marching up the straight, well-paved road that rose from St. Anthony’s Bay to the town.
Except, as it turned out, that road didn’t really go straight into Vila dos Remédios. Digging into the maps revealed that the small cluster of buildings at the top of the slope wasn’t really part of Vila dos Remédios. It was a kind of subtown: a dozen houses dispersed along a crooked route.
In other words, the straight road was actually less direct and, if we had to haul ass out of there, was far more dangerous. Too many buildings to check and clear, particularly since this first step was to be recon, not engagement. So, even though the road up from Praia do Cachorro was a steep switchback, it would put us right on the outskirts of town. If we could control the bend, and then the crest, we’d be able to enter the town and (hopefully) find a functional car without having to worry about getting cut off from a secure route of retreat.
Although the bitching had quieted by this morning, the “sullen” was still there, even as we beached the Zodiac and started checking gear.
Prospero was fussing over Steve’s radio. “I want a radio check every five minutes.”
Steve just stared at him. “Yes, mother.”
Chloe looked devilish. “So, Steve, does that make you a mother-fu—?”
“Chloe!” exclaimed Jeeza.
“Jeeza!” Chloe facetiously exclaimed right back at her.
“Okay, okay,” I interrupted. At least they were smiling. “Heads in the game, now, guys. Prospero, you’re in charge of comms.”
“Yeh, and stuck back here, wanking off,” he grumbled. But he knew why I put him there; although he didn’t have much training at small unit ops, he had a shit-ton more than the rest of us put together. So coordinating between multiple maneuver elements while keeping the comm chatter down to a minimum was one of his specialties. And if we ran into trouble, he was the de facto XO.
Rod was with him, hand on Cujo’s collar, M4 slung.
“Keep him quiet until we need him,” I reminded him, nodding toward the grinning dog.
“Easier said than done,” Rod groused.
“Yeah, and a lot easier down here on the beach,” I countered. Cujo was with us for two reasons. First, if any stalkers had wandered down close to the shore overnight and awoke, Cujo would be the early warning system. Secondly, if anything went wrong, he was another asset. None of us wanted to put him in combat, but if our lives were on the line, it was all hands—and paws—on deck.
I nodded at Jeeza and Chloe. As soon as they had risen to follow, I started humping my load away from the surf. Lemme tell you, carrying a recharger for car batteries is no fun. Doing it through sand is worse.
We moved up the hill, the others with their weapons in an assault carry: something else Prospero had taught us. Two hundred yards up, the road turned sharply left behind low trees. We stopped while Chloe and Jeeza set up in the brush by the side of the road and radioed Prospero that waypoint one had been secured. Now, if we retreated—well, routed—back down the switchback from the northern edge of town, they’d be in a position to clip any stalkers chasing us. Presuming we remembered to stick to the far right side of the road so that they had a clear angle on the pursuit. Once they were concealed and set, Steve, Tai, and I continued upward.
Three hundred and fifty yards uphill in a fireman’s coat and SCBA mask, carrying a full load of ammo and that damn recharger, is not my idea of daybreak fun. Even though we don’t seal our masks, they totally mess up situational awareness. The saving grace was that the shore down to our left had been cleared, the slope to our right was more like a cliff, and we had Chloe covering us from the rear. So we could live with the limited vision through the masks so long as we kept it focused on the crest of the hill.
Which we reached safely. We drifted into the bushes where the road leveled off, and scoped out the town square. Although this was Vila dos Remédios’ northernmost part, it was also the Old Town. The ancient mission-style church and governor’s palace had made it tourist central. So it seemed logical that there would be a lot of cars there, but—
“So where the hell are the cars?” muttered Steve.
Even Tai was surprised at first, but then nodded. “People prolly stayed home when the sick started. Wait for it to pass.” If true, that was some top-shelf irony.
Steve raised his Rexio slightly. “So whadda we do?”
I thought for a moment. “Change the order of objectives.”
He nodded. “So, first the roof of the bank, then the car?”
I nodded back. “Right. We’ll need that better view to spot a promising ride.” I laid my finger closer to my M4’s safety. “Ready?” They nodded. “Then let’s go.”
It was fifty yards from the lip of the hill to the bank. One story, better construction than most of the local buildings. We’d seen a picture of it in one of the guidebooks, probably because it was the only bank on the whole damn island. We sprinted toward it, Steve slightly in the lead.
He charged up its front walkway, where the edge of the roof was closest. He threw his back against the wall, crouched, braced, put his hands together as a stirrup for me.
I stopped alongside him, dropped everything except my M4 and the coiled Jacob’s ladder that Tai looped around my shoulder. “Ready?” I asked. Steve nodded. I put my right foot in his linked palms and hopped up as he boosted me.
The gloves we got from Ascension saved my fingers from getting ripped to shreds; it was a metal roof and the edges had become pretty rough. But, using a fish hook in my left hand, I got a firm hold and clambered up. “Any sign of stalkers?” I asked in a very loud whisper.
Tai’s voice was a little louder. “Not yet.”
I got another hook under the shingles and around one of the bolts or nails or whatever held it in place, attached the Jacob’s ladder, and rolled it down over the edge. They handed up my gear, the heavier parts of their own (mostly spare ammo), and climbed. I don’t think any of us drew a full breath until we were all crouching on that roof.
While Steve called in our first radio check, Tai and I scanned the areas around and beyond the Old Town square for cars. She spotted one almost fifty yards up a street that led to the higher, more modern part of Vila dos Remédios. “Shit,” she said. She’d adopted the English word. “Dass kinda far, chefe.”
I gritted my teeth, made sure my voice was controlled before I continued. “Yeah, we might have to bring Chloe and Jeeza up here. To cover us from this roof when we try for it.”
Steve, done with the radio check, leaned over to look at the car. “I don’t know, Alvaro. Lots of places you can’t see from up here.”
I shrugged, trying to act like it was all in a day’s work. “Yeah, but that works two ways. And having some cover on the approach is better than none.” Which was true, but also not very reassuring. Which he and I both knew.
But Tai was frowning again. She rose to a squat and side-stepped farther up the slope of the roof.
“Where are you going?” I hissed.
She glanced over the peak of the roof, then laughed. It was just a low chortle, but at that moment, it seemed loud enough to wake the dead. Or the plague’s equivalent.
“What’s so funny?” Steve muttered.
She shook her head; suppressing laughter, she pointed behind the bank. We crept up next to her, peeked over the top of the roof…
And found ourselves looking down on about half a dozen cars parked in front of the small houses that had been built behind it.
She smiled. “Sorry. Forgot about this li’l neighborhood, chefe. Never walked back here much.”
Steve nodded. Despite his poker face, he looked pretty relieved.
“And that,” I murmured to no one in particular, “is why you always bring a local.”
Even though these cars were pretty close to us, I still decided to get Chloe and Jeeza up on the roof of the bank before we got down on the ground again. So we covered their approach up the hill and then, when they’d set up, climbed down to survey the vehicles. Frankly, even if none of the cars started, some of the local dune-buggy knock-offs were light enough that we could push one an inch or two beyond the crest and keep it there with a quick haul on the hand brake. Then, if we needed a quick get-away, we’d just pop the brake and trust to gravity.
But nothing ever works the way you expect. After rejecting the first two cars (one had two flat tires, the other had been torched), we discovered a third that was not only intact, but, after a couple of tries, started responding to the charger.
But so did a stalker that had been snoozing nearby. He came out of the closest house in a rush—fast but stumbling—and Steve, who was our local overwatch, fired at him: a miss. Steve pump-fired another load of buck, which caught him in the lower leg.
The stalker stumbled but kept pushing on—but in an attempt to get past us.
“Down!” Chloe screamed, so loud that she drowned out her own voice coming from the radio.
We dove. The bolt-action cracked. The stalker fell headlong. We got up on the vehicle—it was a pickup truck with an empty cargo bed—and each took one hundred and twenty degrees of coverage, hunching over our sights as a dark red stain spread like wings on the back of the stalker.
We waited a full minute. No sound, no movement. Hell, not even any birds.
I toggled the radio. “Jeeza?”
“No sign of movement anywhere, Alvaro. Out to the limit of visibility.”
“Then I’ll call it clear,” I said. “Jeeza, report the contact to Prospero.”
“Already did.”
I toggled off, hopped down, went toward the facedown stalker.
“Chefe—” Tai began.
I waved away her worry, although I was glad to hear it. She had become one of us even faster than I had suspected she might. I examined the body as best I could. “Really gaunt,” I reported.
“Makes sense, if he was a passive,” Steve offered with a shrug.
I nodded. “Yeah. He wouldn’t have joined the ones who showed up at the Massacre or the Alamo. Maybe he was too weak to even go down to the beach and feed on the corpses.”
Tai spat. “Don’ matter. He dead. So he good, now.”
I nodded. “We can’t assume that we’ll see any more like him up here. But we shouldn’t be surprised by it either. And as far as I can recall, none of the passives on Ascension ever holed up together. They were always solo.”
Steve nodded. “That’s right.” He looked at the car. “Think you can get that engine to turn over?”
I shrugged. “Let’s find out.”
We got the car running. Then, with Chloe and Jeeza on overwatch, we swept the buildings that faced the square. Nobody home. No one alive, that is.
What we’d seen three weeks ago, down south at the pousadas near Baia Sueste, was both more and less disturbing than this. That had been more disturbing because a lot of those corpses were still mostly intact. But here in town, it was the sheer number of bodies that was staggering. And most were so torn to pieces that it was hard to get an accurate count. Every bone had been damn near stripped clean. Limbs and even heads had been removed. In many cases, the marrow had been sucked out. And we encountered a lot of very small spines and skulls in that gruesome mix.
So with the immediate surroundings cleared, we took the risk of bringing Rod and Prospero up the hill while we got siphons going to drain the tanks of other vehicles. We left the pickup’s engine running—as ragged as it was—for two reasons: to recharge the battery and to keep the truck ready for a quick extraction back down the hill.
While we were doing that, Jeeza spotted a stumbler way up on the high ground behind the governor’s palace: about one hundred twenty yards away. It didn’t seem to know we were there, and it moved furtively: almost surely another passive. But passive or not, it was infected and required extermination. One bark from Chloe’s .308 and the stumbler collapsed. It didn’t move again.
With the truck fueled and idling and Prospero at the wheel and manning the radio, Rod and Cujo joined us at the governor’s palace while Jeeze and Chloe remained in overwatch. The palace is essentially a three-story structure, built on a big concrete platform that is partially dug back into the slope. Its roof was the highest point for almost two hundred yards in every direction, making it the next sniper’s perch for covering our staged advance into Vila dos Remédios. We checked our gear, particularly where we had used tape to seal seams and hold crucial items in place, and then crept up the palace’s long front staircase. When we got to the door, Cujo started growling—but like he was disturbed, rather than alarmed.
So when we pushed through the partially open door—Tai going high and me going low (because I do start a lot closer to the floor)—none of us were surprised to find ourselves ankle-deep in stalker spoor. Yes, I do mean shit, but not just that. Hair, old clothes, gnawed bones, bits of furniture and even plaster: the infected were pretty tough on housing.
We made sure our masks were tight and moved inside. Cujo became bored, rather than more agitated.
“I bet a lot of the ones that came to our party came from here,” Rod said quietly.
“I’ll bet you’re right,” I agreed. “Let’s finish the sweep.”
Physically, it was a pretty easy job. The rooms were big but few in number and the stairs wide with good visibility. We didn’t like being in a plague house, so we got to the roof, let down a Jacob’s ladder to the second-story veranda, and signaled the all clear.
Once Jeeza and Chloe had climbed up and Cujo joined our entry team, we were able to move more quickly. Both times that there was a live stalker in a building, Cujo tweaked to the scent at least ten yards before we got there. Maybe he smelled a fresh trail they’d left or just heard them snoring. Who knows? All I know is that we flushed each of them out with a rock through the window—which brought them right out into our field of fire.
Even so, it was a long, sweaty day, both because we were suited and sealed on an equatorial island and because—even with Cujo and our overwatch—house-to-house sweeps are more nerve-wracking than anything else I have ever done or imagined. It never becomes a routine. Sure: you eventually fall into a kind of rhythm of tactics and movement, but you never get used to the uncertainty, to the ever-present fear that the next door, the next corner, could be the one where stalkers leap out at you. And if you ever got past the point of fearing that every single time, then it would be time to stop. Because any time could be that time—and if you get complacent, you’ll get dead.
At two in the afternoon, we reversed our advance, canvassing each secured building for useful salvage, spray painting it with an “X” if it had any, and sprinkling powdered chalk at each point of ingress. That was the only way to see if anything went back in after we left. Not perfect, but these days, what is?
Once we got back to Voyager, all of us took long showers. We really needed them. But particularly the entry team: we were rank with tropically cooked fear-sweat. I wasn’t sure that any amount of washing would get the stink out of our clothes, though.
Over dinner, we discussed—with almost disturbing calmness—how we’d do the same thing the next day. And how, as we moved deeper into Vila dos Remédios, we’d move Chloe’s overwatch site from one water tower/cistern to the next. We’d located enough of them that we pretty much had a route of covered advance through almost the entire downtown—such as it is. The remaining cluster of buildings is the most dense and follows along only three roads, each of which is about four hundred yards long. We figured, based on today’s progress, that we could knock off one of those streets every day, assuming we didn’t run into anything too crazy. The truck would follow the entry team at about one hundred yards, so we would never have far to run in case we had to get the hell out of Dodge. We congratulated each other on a job well done, expressed confidence in the new plans, and assured ourselves that tomorrow was going to be a piece of cake.
Which no one believed for one skinny second.