Chapter 17
Crowley Homestead, 119 Miles
Northwest of the Prison
Jonas Crowley was hauling a bucket of
water from the spring as the sun stretched its plum-orange fingers across the
eastern meadows of his ranch. The immense spread of fields bordered by conifer
trees had been in his family for four generations and occupied a stretch of
sparsely populated landscape in the highlands of south-central Washington.
Despite the hard times his community of survivors had faced in the months that
followed the pandemic, they had managed to fortify their location and hold on
through the onslaught of winter, tending to the needs of their twenty-three
members. Crowley’s crops provided a mainstay for their group and the
self-reliant nature of the other ranchers from adjoining areas had enabled them
to adapt easier to the pioneer-like conditions of this new era. He had heard
about the stronghold at Fort Lewis—some of the people in the surrounding
communities had retreated there during the early days of the pandemic—but
Crowley was determined to stick it out at his ranch with its ample resources
and isolated location.
He placed the dripping bucket down on the
leaf-strewn ground and wiped the sleeve of his Carhart jacket across the frost-encrusted
whiskers around his mouth. He kept glancing back at the treeline, wondering why
there were no ravens cawing with their usual irritating ruckus. The forest was
still, harboring its own secrets as his senses strained to plumb the dark
interior.
Crowley had worked his range most of his
six decades, being yanked away for a few years during Vietnam. The elements
scouring his face for so many decades had left an indelible print upon his
furrowed cheeks, which resembled a piece of driftwood. As he lifted the
galvanized steel bucket, he slid back his Remington shotgun, the handmade
leather strap resuming its place over his shoulder.
He trudged along the snow-encrusted trail
leading to the main two-story house. He gazed upon the surrounding hills whose
morning fog was beginning to dissipate in the stabbing rays of sunlight. The
barn to his right held a dozen horses that they used for negotiating the
countryside, saving the precious fuel in their two trucks for occasional forays
further out. He saw the faint shapes of two teenagers inside the barn as they
flitted hay around the stalls while an older man outside was busy skinning
three squirrels that he’d just removed from wire snares behind the building.
Next to the immense gable-roofed structure
was a large plankboard building that served as the blacksmith forge and tool
shop. A steady rivulet of smoke rose from the chimney as Norm, his oldest son,
was inside feeding the forge for fashioning small utilitarian knives from
rebar.
Behind the blacksmith area was a smaller
home that had once served as temporary housing for ranch hands. Now it housed
three families that had sought refuge during the early days of the virus.
Crowley could hear the faint murmurings of the children inside being rustled
awake by their parents to start their daily chores. Life had returned to the
days of his youth when he had worked his fingers raw, trying to wrest a living
from an unforgiving landscape that always sought to reclaim what you had just
taken.
As he walked up the steps of his own
two-story house to the left, silver vapors of moisture puffed out from his thin
lips. He walked around to the front of the wraparound porch and was met by his
grandson, Jake, a stocky man who had just turned twenty-one.
“Here, I’ll get that for you,” said the
young man, reaching for the bucket. “Grandma said that she needs some kindling
to get the woodstove in the kitchen going. I need to help at the barn or I’d
get it myself.”
“I reckon that’s the only way we’ll get
breakfast this morning. People gonna get ornery if they don’t get any coffee,
eh,” he said with a faint smile as he nodded at his grandson. “Tell her I just
gotta look in on the chickens and get some fresh eggs, then I’ll be right back
with that wood.”
Crowley stepped towards the railing and
loosened a few buttons on his jacket. The walk up from the spring had broken
off the morning chill and he hardly felt the forty-degree temperature. He
arched back to stretch his shoulders and caught sight of two women heading into
the treeline with their bows. No birds sang as the women approached the forest.
They were two sisters from a few miles away whose ranch had been lost early on
to marauders. Now, they were the deer hunters who often brought back fresh
venison to replenish their stores of smoked meat.
Crowley looked at the two women
disappearing into the thick forest and thought he saw them stagger and fall but
the woods were still too foggy to be certain—maybe they had just slipped on a
wet, moss-covered log. Before he could step off the porch to investigate, he
was pushed back and felt his midsection reel in pain as two rounds pierced his
abdomen, the blood saturating his tawny canvas jacket. He sputtered out a
partial yell before collapsing to his knees, wondering where the shots had
emanated from. Crowley heard more rounds shattering the window behind him and
screams from his wife inside.
The man skinning squirrels by the barn was
the first to rush up to him only to suffer the same fate as a round to the head
sent him crashing back through the front window. Seconds seemed like minutes to
Crowley as he slumped on his side, trying to unsling his shotgun. He heard
others running out of the buildings and taking up defensive positions or trying
to get to him while the shrieks of frightened children filled the morning air.
As gunshots echoed out from the dwellings around him, he heard the rumble of a
vehicle and saw a black armored truck roll into the meadow a hundred yards away.
Men in army fatigues raced around the back, opening the heavy doors. Crowley
raised himself up on one arm, his hands slipping on the blood-covered porch. He
saw a black stream of fifty or more flesh-hungry monsters pouring out of the
trucks led by several fast-moving mutants. Within minutes the creatures made
their way to the main ranch, and he could hear the screams of his people
slowing being snuffed out by distant gunfire or the mutants quickly taking down
his fighters in front.
He felt the color draining from his face
and he collapsed again on his side. As he struggled to stay conscious, the pain
searing his belly, he saw a yellow-faced mutant bound onto the porch by his
feet. It looked down at him and hissed then reached for his leg. It paused when
the front door swung open and his grandson appeared. Crowley used his final bit
of life force to raise his shotgun up and blast the beast in the chest, sending
it backwards off the railing into a mud puddle.
His grandson dragged him into the house
and propped him against an antique bookcase. He saw the slumped, bullet-riddled
body of his wife in the living room, her eyes still open, looking his way but without
the sparkle he had known for so many years. He clutched his grandson’s jacket. “You
need to get everyone out of here, Jake,” Crowley said, his voice reduced to a
whisper as his throat filled with blood. “Go out the back game trails. We can’t
stay and fight…too many...too many.”
With the mantle of responsibility passed
unexpectedly to him through his grandfather’s last breath, Jake grabbed his
rifle and ran to the back porch. He yanked a survival pack from a shelf and
checked behind the house. He saw two girls by the far edge of the barn, twin
sisters clinging to their lifeless parents. He bolted out the door and ran
towards them, slamming the butt of his Winchester into the head of a lone zombie.
Not slowing his stride, he reached the edge of the barn, scooping up the
eight-year-old girls and kept running for the treeline. He ran and ran, his
legs powered by the words of his grandfather and the echo of the last few screams
filling the burning homestead behind him.
***
It was early afternoon when the last of
the undead were shot by Mitchell’s men. The two remaining mutants were rounded
up using the remote control device and loaded back into the armored truck. Mitchell
drove to the main house to inspect the results of his handiwork. He got out and
sauntered up the steps, leaning his hands against the door frame and peering
inside as his goons gathered behind him. “This might make a nice summer home
one day—I like the earth tones on the dining room walls.” His men hung on his every
word, dissecting them for hidden meaning, unsure if he was being sarcastic
again, straightforward, or sputtering something riddled with metaphor.
As Mitchell dragged his soiled boot across
Crowley’s blood-spattered jacket near the doorway, a gangly man with thick chin
whiskers came up beside him. “Colonel, everything’s secure. The place is ours.”
Mitchell stood silent, issuing a nod then
taking in the quaint living room and antique furniture. “Alright, bring up the
trucks with the rest of the alpha teams. Tell the men to make themselves at
home here tonight. I’ll brief them shortly on their role in the upcoming
assault.”
The wispy man glanced around at all the
supplies being ransacked from the homes and barn by the constant trickle of
Mitchell’s men. “Looks like one more threat to overall security in the region
has been removed from the picture, eh.”
Mitchell opened his shirt pocket under his
thick wool coat, prying out a single stick of Beeman’s gum. He unwrapped it and
slid the gray wedge into his mouth. As he chewed, he looked back at the ravaged
meadow that was strewn with corpses. “Oh, they were no threat, least of all to
us—just peaceful ranchers trying to forge a new life for themselves.” He chewed
vigorously, glancing down at a severed arm on the porch. “However, make no
mistake, they were in the path to our main target and I didn’t want to waste
time on a surrender speech—and why they should think about their kids’ futures—and
then give ’em two hours to pack up, blah, blah, blah.” He leaned forward to spit
the gum out onto Crowley’s chest. “This was a helluva lot easier and I’m all
about easy these days. Besides, this was a good test run for our new fighting tactics.”
Jeffers came up from the rear section of
the walkaround porch. “Do you want me to radio back to the prison for the rest
of the men to prepare to depart for the dam tomorrow?”
“I’m going to head back there right now
and will speak with them when I arrive. In the meantime, have this place cleaned
up and these disgusting bodies burned—this place just reeks.”
Chapter 18
The helicopter with Shane’s team glided in
just over the treeline, flying map-of-earth until they set down in a tiny
valley eight miles out from the prison in Walla Walla.
This would provide them with enough
distance to not draw attention to their arrival but just close enough where
they wouldn’t have a major mountaineering trek to make. Under previous wartime
conditions, Shane would have preferred a HALO jump instead which would have put
them much closer. However only a handful of guys on his team were so qualified
and they didn’t have all the hardware they needed for such an operation. They
were back to using footpower as so many campaigns throughout history had been
waged.
As the helo set down, Shane jumped out of
the side door, his camo-white jacket fluttering under the rotor wash. He headed
to a small cluster of spruce trees a hundred yards away, followed by the five
other operators. It had been a long time since he had done a mission without
Matias by his side and he already felt his friend’s absence. The rest of his team
had proven themselves on countless missions during the past months and he knew
each one was solid in their technical abilities, physical prowess, and specific
expertise. Shane had gone back to the groundwork he learned in the SEALs by
having each person on his team cross-trained in a wide set of medical and
fighting skills along with comms, urban warfare methods, and survival
techniques. With Jared’s help he had also added in a component of lockpicking,
vehicle acquisition skills, and electronic security hacking. In the past two
months they had all trained hard at Fort Lewis and sweated profusely on
missions, gelling into what felt like, at times, a single-celled organism and forming
an example for other teams of how to structure their own internal training.
With all of them huddled around him under
the snow-laden branches, Shane pulled out his topographic map and coupled it with
the SAT image Duncan provided. “We’ve got an eight-mile hump to the promised
land so that should put us there in the late afternoon, given the mountainous
terrain and all this fucking cold-weather gear we’re carrying.” He pulled out
his compass and laid it out on the map to configure the bearings to their
location, after which he adjusted for magnetic declination. The rest of his
team did the same and then studied the contour lines on the map.
“Looks like a good aerobic workout with
the elevation gains here, at least until we hit the town of Walla Walla,” said Langdon,
a younger man with a paintbrush-like bundle of whiskers under his lower lip.
“Yeah, you won’t have to do your evening
Pilates session tonight,” snipped Jared.
“Nah, he seems more like a yoga kinda guy
to me,” said Kress, a blond-haired, blue-eyed fellow with a thick frame.
“Fuck you, pretzel boy. Look at those
scrawny bean-pole legs; you’d be the one to do yoga.” Langdon puffed out his
chest.
Shane raised his eyes up and sneered.
“Everyone’s a bad-ass until they meet a real one.” He glanced at the map one
last time before tucking it into his BDU pocket. He ignored the banter from his
team. He was used to it, having helped to foster it early on by dishing out the
most unsanctimonious comments. Such sarcasm and humor had a way of bleeding off
tension in the group and there was no shortage of that in their daily lives.
“Alright, let’s saddle up. We’ve got some
ground to cover. I want Kress providing rear cover. The rest of you keep your
eyes on the ridges. The SAT imagery indicates the first two-thirds of our route
will be in the timber without any signs of hostiles or lookouts. After that,
it’s gonna be fun and games playing zombie tag and dodging bad guys.”
While walking into the treeline, Shane
slowed up his pace, motioning for Amy to continue leading the group into the
forest while he hung back to talk with Jared.
“Hey, dipshit, I know it was you who
spiked the spaghetti sauce with fucking habaneros.”
Jared tried to keep a straight face and
just looked down at the leaf-strewn ground. “What you talking about, amigo?”
“Don’t even try to squirm out of this one.
I had security dust for fingerprints and yours showed up.”
Jared grinned and bit his lower lip.
“Damn, so much for the perfect crime.”
“So it was you, you son of a bitch. I was
pretty sure but thought I’d see if you’d spill your beans under a little
pressure, you gutless wonder.”
“Wait, you didn’t dust for prints?”
“You’re not the only one who’s good at
pulling a con. Next time you fuck with me, I’ll have you assigned to the
medical clinic changing out bedpans.”
“Don’t gotta worry about that, no sir.”
Jared was silent for a moment, gauging Shane’s attitude. “So besides the heat
index being off the charts in the menu, how’d the dinner date go?”
Shane just gave Jared a sideways glance,
revealing his gritted teeth. “So, cleaning bedpans it is then.” He quickened
his pace, leaving Jared behind as he trotted up the game trail to the lead.
“Hey, man, I was just asking, as one
friend to another.” Jared caught Amy’s wide eyes up ahead as she shot him a puzzled
expression. “Everything’s cool, darlin’. Shane and me, we’re all good. We’re
all good.”