Fourth Instalment

Evac

Saunders was up before the crack of dawn for his second watch. Hernandez had taken over after the nail gun attack, and now he was bedding down for a short nap before the sun came up and they were moving out. Saunders set up diagonally down from where he had been previously, with his back in a corner, watching both his old spot and the campsite. The light diminished slightly before dawn at a gap between the rising sun and the setting stars, the moon having gone down long ago. Saunders watched a solitary hawk scoured the ground for prey, it must have been stationed outside the city when the missiles hit and flown in to fill the power vacuum caused by the loss of its brethren.
As the pre-dawn light seeped into the Northern Hills community, Saunders picked up his equipment he had laid around him and scouted out more of the buildings. Most of them were empty and devastated to the same extent as everything else that was in this blasted out city. His only good find was a small wooden box. It was made of redwood; hand carved, and would have been beautiful if it hadn’t been thrown into a brick wall by a nuclear shockwave. Inside the broken pieces of the box were a few Cuban cigars. Never being one for smoking, Saunders hadn’t smoked one before, but for some reason he was drawn to the idea of smoking a cigar and surveying a broken city landscape. It seemed too fitting to the word “apocalypse” to pass up.
Dawn broke and Saunders was at a wall near the south end of the compound, looking out over a broken wall at the smoldering remains of the city. He could make out at least three craters from where he stood, one at the base, one near the exact center of the city, and one on the Southwest side. He knew from Hernandez that there was a fourth nearby, blocked from his view by the hill he was on and a series of low foothills that emanated from a spur of the mountains that wrapped around the northern end of the city. He crushed the remains of the cigar under his heel and had just finished popping one of the damned orange pills into his mouth when Hernandez came up behind him. “Sir, I’m packed and ready, and the survivors are just getting up. When are we going to start back to the base?” “You are going to escort the survivors back to the base, make sure they’re looked after and tell Bates I’m conducting a bit of an investigation. If I finish before you get back to base, I’ll catch up. If not, tell him to expect me somewhere around 1300 hours.” “Yes sir.” “And take it easy on our survivors; they may not be up to the hike back, take it slow, make sure they’re ok. The kid might complain, but something tells me that woman is harder then she looks.” “Yes sir.” At that, Hernandez departed and went to get the survivors suited up, and Saunders went to retrieve his bedroll and make sure the fire was extinguished. The child looked almost as if he’d just returned from an entertaining camping trip, beat up a bit and dirty, but otherwise none the worse for wear. The woman was a different story. She was still malnourished, that wasn’t going to be fixed overnight, but her eyes where what told the story. They were almost empty; she stared blankly at objects in the house. The tattered remains of a rug, the couch that had been thrown against the far wall and the television that had partially melted in a small fire that burned out long before it could cause any real damage beyond what the shockwave did. The daylight revealed that she wasn’t pale from injury or shock, she was just naturally light skinned, and despite the hollow look in her eyes she carried herself with a sort of hard determination that Saunders had seen in very few people. After Saunders had packed up the remainder of his gear, he looked at Hernandez first, and then the survivors. “Ok people, Cpl. Hernandez here is going to lead you two back to the base where you should get some medical attention and food. Don’t drink water along the way unless Hernandez gives it to you, and ask him if you need anything at all. Hernandez, don’t take any back-roads or shortcuts. If I hear anything that sounds like gunshots I’ll come running, so I need you to stick to the main roads, it’ll be easier going anyway. If either of the two of you need a break, don’t hesitate to ask; and lady, don’t suck it up if you’re hurt. Tell Hernandez and he’ll know what to do. I’m going to go see if I can find that sucker who attacked me last night. I’ll catch up with you or see you at the base. Good luck.” With that, he left out the hole in the wall and walked behind the house he had been in to pick up the trail.

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Indian Tracker

Saunders followed a few dried drops of blood away from the pool below the window. The trail led to a small hole in the wall of the compound, a few dozen bricks had been knocked out and made a V shaped hole that ended about a foot off the ground. The bricks on the left side of the V had blood smeared on them at just above chest height. Saunders guessed he had hit his would be killer in the abdomen somewhere, and checked on the other side of the wall expecting to find a body. What he saw bothered him more than if he’d just been told he was on a reality show. The wall bordered on a sheer cliff face that fell for about sixty feet, anyone easing their way over the side would have surely missed the small six inch edge that would have allowed them to regret their decision before losing balance and falling to their death. Saunders grimaced as he gazed downward off the cliff, trying to spot a body. The brush at the base of the cliff was broken where something large had obviously fallen. He left the compound through the front gate after placing a bright red throw pillow from one of the houses on the top of the wall near the V so he could find it easily from below.
Twenty minutes later he had worked his way to the base of the cliff and picked up the trail from where the brush had been broken through. The blood trail started to die out as it crossed the road, but a bloody handprint beside the door to a squat building told him that the wounded person had at least tried to gain entrance to it. Saunders edge up next to the door and brought his M4 up in his right hand as his left quickly grabbed the doorknob and, in a twisting motion, threw the door open and brought his M4 to bear on the empty room that met his eyes. The room had escaped most of the devastation, the front wall didn’t face the shockwave and the back wall was attached to a larger building directly behind it that had taken the blunt of the force. The only indication besides the lack of electricity was a hole blown in the back wall where a small safe had been thrown against the wall. A blood trail led through the gap caused by the safe. Saunders crouched quietly and brought up his M4, his left finger by the switch for the light on the rail system.
The sight that met his was haunting. The room was a hotel lobby, large and formerly ornate. The wall facing the street had a bus blown through it at an angle, creating a small hole of light. The ceiling was uncomfortably low, but cracks in it revealed it was hanging down and was lower than it should be. Dust hung in the air, diffusing the light in the room, and dripping water from broken pipes echoed like screams in an empty parking lot. The haunting part about it was surrounded by twelve makeshift torches. The torches were arranged in a circle around a large slab of uprooted concrete from the floor near the bus that had been dragged a good twenty feet into a dark corner opposite the hole in the wall from the safe. Seven shaded figures stood within the circle of torches, one holding a thirteenth torch. On the slab of concrete was the body of a teenage boy, bleeding from the abdomen from what looked like a gunshot wound and his leg was broken, the shin bone poking through his skin. Saunders froze for a second and inched his finger away from the flashlight switch, hoping he could back his way out the same hole he had come through without taking his eyes off the spectacle at hand. Words filtered through the echoing water drops “… and you are aware of the penalty for failure, for being discovered after committing to a kill. The god’s demand blood, and if you fail to provide it with the blood of others, you provide it with your own.” The teenager’s head rolled to the side, and Saunders could see that he was conscious. As the teenager seemed to spot Saunders, a dagger was jammed into his throat, just above his chest bone. The teenager let out a horrible scream that seemed to echo through the entire hotel for hours. Saunders had seen enough and slowly worked his way backwards out the exit, but as he was about out the hole, his foot caught a rock, and it skittered down a pile of debris, making a gut-wrenching series of scuffling and chipping noises that echoed throughout the lobby. The heads of the seven shaded figures around the makeshift altar snapped in his direction and one crouched and started to run in his direction. All bets were off and Saunders rose to a crouch and brought his M4 up, spattering a three shot burst in their direction. The figure running at him dropped and fell with a shot through the leg, the other six dropped to the ground, but Saunders knew they weren’t done yet, and he didn’t know how many more there were in the shadows or elsewhere in the hotel. He used the diversion of his shots and the ensuing confusion and disorganization to sprint through the hole in the wall. As he came into the room with the safe through the wall, a figure obscured the doorway. He brought the gun up again, shot a burst at the figure, which didn’t seem to budge, then shot two rounds through a window about chest height off the ground. It shattered and he took a running dive through it, rolling as he hit the ground, he came quickly to his feet and spun around to see the figure at the doorway lurch sideways and fall to the ground, blood smearing on the sides of the doorway. He didn’t wait to see what else came out the door, he fell into a flat out run, making for the corner two streets down where he turned left, ran another two blocks and turned right, kicked in a door, and climbed to a third story window using debris as a ladder. He perched on a small platform of concrete that was still connected to two walls in a corner by a window and watched in the direction of the hotel till noon passed. He checked his watch to see that it was 1300. Time to move out; he had been in position watching his path for almost three hours, if they were going to track him, they’d have done so already.
He came down from his perch and started in the direction of the military base, he estimated it was a good fifteen miles away by now, but he disliked the idea of spending another night in the city after what he had just witnessed. He made good time and was within sight of the base by 1500 hours, he jogged the remaining mile back to the base, assembling his report in his mind as he ran through the wrecked city streets.