Seventh instalment

Eagle eye

Grayson had spent the last three days stuck up on a roof. The Chief had released the night shift as soon as the threat had been affirmed; letting those who could get back to their families, and those who couldn’t, get the hell out of dodge. Everyone else hid under desks, or ran to the basement, he went deeper, the staircase on the center of the city block, six levels of car parking below the surface. After the shaking stopped he tried like hell to fall asleep, pass the time quicker. He ended up staring at the blank concrete wall as dust floated down from above in lazy loops. An emergency generator somewhere went undamaged, and red light flooded the staircase, giving him dim light to see by. Four days he waited, cramped up in the stairway. The fifth day he slowly climbed his way up debris piles to the surface and walked over the door of the police station. He didn’t find anything but bodies in the offices, so he made his way to the basement, hoping someone there would be alive. Not a soul was to be found. There were a few bodies pinned under what had been flying or falling debris, but if there had been anyone else there, they were long gone. The only evidence he found of any survivors was a large pool of dried blood, with a half dozen three inch nails in the center of it. He found the Chief pinned under a hardwood desk that had been thrown against the wall on the main floor, rummaging through his pockets he got the key to the armory. If what he thought had happened with those nails was right, he was going to need some guns. He got to the armory and the storage lockers and got some body armor, nothing big just a Kevlar vest, an MK23 pistol with a thigh holster, and an M21 sniper rifle with an adjustable 6-12X scope.
After that it got a little hazy, the days ran together, one ruined building after another and no signs of survivors except for the odd gunshot echoing across the waste. Until three days ago, somebody stupid had tried to sneak up on him while he was napping in a fourth story window. He winged the sucker pretty good, but didn’t think he’d quite finished him off and would have given chase if it weren’t for a three inch nail protruding from his shoulder. He made his way cautiously into a hospital a little West of downtown and rummaged for medical supplies; after bandaging himself up, he made his way to a five story building that looked in moderately good condition on the outskirts of downtown. He made sure he could get up to the roof easily, and after doing so looted the remains of a nearby gas station for food and bottled water and set up camp on the roof. That night someone had made another attempt at killing him; six nails shot through the wood door and thunked into an air conditioner unit that had been ripped from its mounting and thrown halfway across the roof. He fired a few rounds through the doorway with his MK23 and after a few seconds of nothing, he cracked the door open to see a blood splatter on the far wall with the sounds of running echoing up through the stairwell.
After that he had piled as much debris in front of the doorway as he could, and spent the daylight hours trying to spot anyone he could through his M21’s scope. Three days of that and mild amounts of sleep had left him fatigued and annoyed. He had seen so many objects that looked human to the naked eye that it was hard to believe that not a single one hadn’t been. Yesterday he had heard too much gunfire for his mind to rationalize it as someone giving in to the disparity of post-apocalyptic life. So today he woke up and scanned the city thoroughly for any signs of life, and a few hours past noon he saw a series of small dots on the horizon. A quick glance through the scope revealed it was four figures in camo making their way over piles of debris and heading for the downtown area. Another hour and they were barely a mile away. Grayson looked through the scope again to get a better look at them.
The guy in the lead was about six two and was carrying an assault rifle. He was wearing a camo combat vest over a black t-shirt, camo pants, and black combat boots. His face was shaded by a camo boonie hat, but as he looked sideways the shadow moved from his face and he saw steady brown eyes set above a nose that had been broken at least once and about five days worth of beard growth. He had moderately long brown hair that was swept backwards from his head and hung down to the base of his neck under the boonie. He looked to be about two hundred pounds or so, but by the way he was moving Grayson could tell that he was in damn good shape and moved with almost complete confidence. Behind him was a woman; she had a similar camo combat vest that covered her torso completely and similar pants and boots, she carried an odd shaped submachine gun that Grayson knew to be a P90 and her long light brown hair was swept behind her head and held in place by a knot tied at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were a light green and her face bore a look of determination and alertness. Behind her was a Hispanic man with another assault rifle. He had brown eyes and heavy eyebrows that sat under a camo dew rag. He was smaller than the point man, but not by much, and he carried himself with the same ease and confidence. Bringing up the rear was a behemoth of a man, at least six foot seven with close cropped blond hair and hard, ice blue eyes. He easily weighed in at two fifty and his arms cradled a large M60 heavy machine gun as if it were a small baby. Grayson watched their approach into the downtown area with reserved anticipation, noting that they set up camp in the second floor of a building. He started removing the debris blocking the door and set out to reach their camp a half hour later.

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Incoming

The hike to their current campsite had been uneventful and long. They picked a large sized room on the second floor of a bombed out office building to make their base of operations in. Before they rested, Saunders had Hernandez and Johansson move some furniture around the doorway, making a covered position ten feet from the entrance of the doorway that gave them a line of fire that covered the entrance. Using other debris, they added shoulder high barriers on either side of the door, forcing someone entering to walk straight at the desk for a good five feet. Meanwhile, Saunders and Anara checked the two windows in the room for ease of access from the ground floor. Once they decided the area was safe, Saunders and Hernandez went to go a quick scout of the area before the sun set, leaving Anara and Johansson to watch the base. They went around the block their building was situated on then expanded into the surrounding area, checking for buildings that survived the blast in decent shape. There were very few, but more buildings here than in the area immediately outside the city center, where the buildings were less reinforced concrete and more wood or brick. A few minutes from sunset, Saunders spotted a bloody hand print on the side of a doorway that had somehow remained in place. He tapped Hernandez, and they both stopped and looked at the door for a minute. Saunders brought up his M4 and crept towards the doorway and listen beside the door for a minute to see if he heard anything, then moved his left hand up to turn the knob. He swept the room behind the door twice with his eyes; it was empty, but there were signs of inhabitants who had stayed there after the strike; inhabitants with a sick sense of decorating. There was an area in the corner that was covered in dried and congealed blood, and unlit torches encircled it. On the walls were human hearts; sun dried and nailed to the wall, more than two dozen of them ‘decorated’ the area. Saunders checked the back room for any other signs of life, but only found an eerie mural of a raven, painted in blood. He’d seen enough and made his way to the door. He opened the door again just in time to see Hernandez tackled by blackened figure with a knife, Saunders brought his gun up as the figure pulled the knife from Hernandez’s shoulder and prepared to plunge it into his chest, he could tell Hernandez had been knocked out by the fall, a pool of crimson blood seeped from the back of his head, almost meeting the pool from his shoulder. Saunders raised his M4 to shoot and shouted at the figure to try and buy a split second more to aim. The figure spun its upper body toward Saunders and let out a hideous screech. Its teeth were blackened and its eyes were bloodshot, but if you’d asked him to describe it right there and then, that’s all he’d have been able to say, because that’s all there was to this figure, bloodshot eyes and black stained teeth. The knife slowly began to plunge towards Hernandez’s chest, and Saunders had the figures head in his sights and squeezed the trigger. The figure’s head disappeared in a cloud of crimson blood spray as Saunders’ bullets struck the concrete behind where the figure had been. Saunders fell to a crouch, taking cover behind an upturned dumpster and snapped his head around, looking for the other shooter in the dying light and saw a person running towards him. He was about five foot ten and was wearing a black Kevlar vest. He had an M21 sniper rifle and a pistol in a thigh holster. His hair was short cropped and black, with a matching thick and short goatee. The man sprinted towards him, vaulting over a car hood, landed, and ran up to Hernandez. He pulled the figure off and rolled it to the side, then checked Hernandez for cuts other than his head and shoulder. Saunders walked up and knelt down beside the man. “That was a pretty nice shot. You a civilian?” without looking up, the man replied “No sir, well, kind of sir, I’m Sgt. Thomas Grayson, from the local SWAT. Your buddy got dinged up pretty bad from what I can tell, stab wound to the shoulder, probably a concussion too, and I think he’s got a few cracked ribs from the bastard landing on top of him.” Grayson helped Saunders carry the limp body of Hernandez back to the second floor base camp, where they set him down on a flat surface and introductions were made as they bandaged him up.