There was blood everywhere—and some shell casings.
From the mess in the yard Sam could tell that a wave of people had come through and cleaned out the leavings of the failed stronghold. Shell casings told him that it wasn’t military, though. Mostly pistol and hunting rifle rounds, some commercial shotgun shells, so he figured it was local hunters and maybe some cops. That made sense. There would be more of them, and this was rural Pennsylvania. Every goddamn person out here owned a couple of guns.
By the time Sam got here, though, the killing was done and the killers had moved on. He hoped they were the good guys. If there were any good guys left. He was cynical enough to have his doubts. While running with DELTA and later with the Department of Military Sciences, he’d seen a lot of the worst side of humanity. The tendency toward savagery. The kneejerk reaction to lash out in fear, and to grab in need.
He took another sip of beer, adjusted his billed cap to shade his eyes and studied the field. Nothing moved except what the wind pushed, but that didn’t mean anything. There was something out there.
At the very edge of his unaided visual range was his truck. Sitting in the middle of the road with a busted axle. When he’d driven out of here two days ago he got exactly three hundred yards. That was it. He knew it hadn’t been the road that killed the truck. It was them.
Them.
Bodies break and burst under the wheels of a big rig, but they are still made of bone, they still have mass. Sometimes he’d had to smash into crowds of them. Sometimes he’d driven over them. Bumping and thumping over dozens of bodies. Men. Women.
Children.
It was worse than driving down a rutted country road. He figured he cracked the axle punching through the last bunch. Maybe did something to the radiator and the engine. The truck was as dead as everything else around here.
Sam never considered abandoning it, though, because he’d spent the best part of a day using a forklift to load pallet after pallet of supplies into a semi. Food, water, camping gear, fuel oil, tents, tools. All the things he thought would be useful to any group of survivors he met.
So far, he had no one to share his supplies with, and no motivation to leave it behind. His plan—still a bit rough around the edges—was to secure the house and the area up to a mile in every direction. Kill anything that needed killing, and clear the way for survivors to come find him. There was a cemetery near here, and a town about seventeen miles away, in a town called Willard, but Sam couldn’t find it on a map or with the truck’s GPS. Useless as fuck.
So he stayed where he was.
The deer stand was already here, though old and in disrepair. He fixed it. Sam was always good with tools. Building things was as much therapy as it was a hobby. It had the precision that satisfied his sniper’s need for detail, and it made things instead of destroyed them. That mattered.
Killing was a constant in his life. He enlisted on his eighteenth birthday, choosing that path instead of following his father into law enforcement. His younger brother, Tom, was in the police academy in California. Sam wondered if any of his family was still alive. Maybe Tom. The kid was resourceful. Practical and tough. His dad was old and slowing down, though. Sam didn’t know a lot about his stepmom and had never seen his baby half-brother, Benny. They were three thousand miles away, high in the Sierra Nevada mountains of central California. Maybe this plague hadn’t reached that far.
Maybe pigs would sprout wings and fly out of his ass.
That news guy, Billy Trout, said it was everywhere, that it was traveling at the speed of human need. Planes, trains and automobiles. Outflying and outdistancing prophylactic measures. Outrunning all common sense and precaution; spread by the people who were trying to outrun it.
There was a joke in there somewhere. His old boss Captain Joe Ledger could have said something funny about that. A twist of wit, sarcasm and social commentary. Sam wondered where he was. Probably dead, too.
He drank the rest of the beer and put the can into the canvas cooler because he didn’t want the breeze to knock it off the deer stand. Sam was cautious like that.
He froze.
Something out there moved. He was sure of it.
Sam raised his rifle. It was a CheyTac M200 Intervention sniper rifle. Best of the best for someone like him. Too much gun for hunting, but this wasn’t really deer season. He scanned the field with his shaded eyes first to zero on where he’d heard the movement. Found it. Something moving through the corn off to his left. He leaned into the spotting scope, but the corn was tall and green and lush. The stalks moved, but he couldn’t see why.
He’d used super glue to attach a sock filled with beans to the rail of the tree stand, and he rested the rifle on that. He did the math in his head. Baseline trajectory and bullet drop. His breathing was calm, his finger relaxed along the outside of the trigger guard.
If this was a deer, then he’d let it go past. He could be here for a while if no one came, and there was plenty of food in the truck. It would make more sense to let the deer breed next year’s food. Sam had a feeling that would matter.
If it was a person, he’d have to coax them into the open and make them stand there until he could come over, pat them down, check them for bites, and ask a few questions.
But if it was one of them… then there was only one option. A single round placed just so. Catastrophic brain shot. Something he’d done in hostage rescue situations more times than he could count. A shot to the brain stem or the neural motor strips that kills so instantly that body reflexes cannot react. What was funny—in a curious rather than humorous way—was that it was a golden shot for snipers, something they aspired to, but which was rarely even considered by other branches of the military. Most of the soldiers he’d known on the way up had been more concerned with seeing how much ordnance they could throw downrange, operating on a more is better plan. Snipers were stingy with their rounds. It was a matter of pride with them, and Sam seldom pulled a trigger unless he was certain of a kill.
He was loaded with .408 Cheyenne Tactical cartridges in a single-stack seven-round magazine, and at four hundred rounds he could kill anything he wanted dead. He’d dropped targets at much greater distances, too, but this wasn’t that kind of war. If this was one of them, then they would walk right up to take the bullet.
“Come on,” he murmured, softer than the whispering breeze.
The weeds parted.
It was a child.
Six years old. Maybe seven. Sandy blond hair riffled by the wind. Jeans and a Spider-Man sweatshirt. Red sneakers. Holding something in his hands.
For a moment Sam thought it was a teddy bear. Or a doll dressed all in red.
“No,” he said, and it came out as a sob.
It wasn’t a doll.
It wasn’t a fucking doll.
It wasn’t.
It.
Sam took the shot.
The bullet did what it was designed to do. It ended all brain function. It ended life. Snap. Just like that.
The boy’s head was blown apart like a melon. Very immediate and messy. The body puddled down, dropping the awful red thing it carried.
A perfect shot.
Sam sat back and down, thumping hard onto his ass. Gasping as if the shot had punched a hole in the world through which all air was escaping. The day, even here in the shade, was suddenly too bright.
He felt the burn in his eyes. Not from muzzle flash or gunpowder. Tears burn hotter than those things.
The sound of the shot echoed off of the farmhouse and the ranks of corn and the walls of hell. It went away and then found him again, punching the last air from his lungs as he fell onto his back and squeezed his eyes shut.