Odyssey Read online

  When sorrows come, he thought stoically, they come not single spies, but in battalions…

  * * *

  Sarah didn’t know for sure it was a Foxtrot bushwhacking Homer from behind – she’d never encountered one in her life before yesterday, and she couldn’t see well enough to identify it anyway. She only saw a leaping bipedal shadow, like the very night come alive, moving at a speed no man, never mind a dead one, should ever achieve, heading straight toward Homer’s back.

  With no time to react or think of a better plan, and seeing Homer tangled up with the snarling dog, she simply opened up, frantically trying to aim and track the rushing and madly jigging shade as it closed the distance to her partner.

  For just one second, she imagined she hit it.

  But when it didn’t fall, she realized all she’d done was distract it. Her rifle might not be effective at engaging a fast and erratically moving target at 50 meters in the dark.

  But it was a hell of a good noisemaker.

  And she also quickly worked out that, while she had solved one problem for Homer, she had created a whole new set of them for herself. Because the creature made an inhumanly fast 90-degree turn, seeming not even to slow.

  And it took off, tear-assing and gamboling straight at her.

  She triggered off another half-dozen rounds in a controlled panic – stopping only when she realized Homer was in her background somewhere. It was impossible to focus on everything at once. And, even in that second’s hesitation, the Foxtrot had covered the 50 yards and was on her.

  And Homer had left his goddamned door open.

  * * *

  Homer straightened up, recovering from the dull blow to the head, and also straightened his helmet, which had the effect of straightening his NVGs. Job number one at this point, as at most points, was SA – situational awareness. Before he could act, he had to develop some sense of where he stood tactically.

  A lot had changed in the last five seconds.

  Most salient was that the 25 meters of cleared-up road to the north had shrunk to five. The trudging horde from the town was back again. He brought his rifle up and took five shots, dropping the four closest staggering figures, and also emptying his mag. Switching from primary to secondary was always faster than reloading, so he let his rifle fall on its sling and drew his side arm in a blur, shooting carefully and perfectly, clearing farther up, until the slide locked back.

  Then he holstered the pistol and yanked his boarding axe from the ground, spinning to his right and advancing, beheading two more coming at him from the treeline beside the road.

  Only then did he realize the dog was no longer chomping on his leg, and connect this fact to the branch that had conked him on the head. The boy was climbing down. Homer spun again – just in time to see the kid lightly fall to earth, in the newly cleared area beneath the tree.

  And then take off running into the night, dog at his heels.

  Homer opened his mouth to call after him—

  But this was cut off by urgent sounds behind him: shrieking, banging, thrashing, and more shouts of alarm from Sarah.

  He hesitated, having to make a split-second calculation. There was almost no chance of catching the kid, not with his combat load, having no knowledge the area or terrain, and three times the boy’s age. And if he tried, it would take him God knew how far away from the truck, and Sarah, who was clearly in trouble. Moreover, the boy was safe, for now – about as safe as anyone could be in this world.

  So Homer turned, and took off up the road.

  Reloading as he ran.

  * * *

  Sarah had not been schooled in the superhuman leaping abilities of Foxtrots, so she didn’t know to be surprised, even if she’d had time, that the streaking undead monstrosity didn’t leap over the roof of the truck at her – but instead piled straight through the open door and across the cab at her.

  What she did have time to do, and probably only because there was pure unfiltered adrenaline running through her veins, was hop out onto the blacktop and slam the driver’s-side door shut with a force that rocked the truck on its springs. But that rocked it a lot less than the screaming and thrashing Foxtrot slamming into the door from the other side.

  It also cracked the glass of the window with its face.

  Sarah thanked God with all her battered heart that she’d rolled up that window, against the grasping hands of the dead thronging the road on their approach.

  But now she had a goddamned Foxtrot trapped inside her truck – which was like having Satan in a box, thrashing and writhing and going absolutely apeshit. Plus it was going to bash through that window, either intentionally or accidentally, in the next few seconds. She stepped back and raised her rifle—

  “Don’t fire,” Homer said, in a loud but otherwise normal speaking voice, slowing to a trot as he reached the opposite side of the rocking truck. She didn’t, but also didn’t lower the weapon; then squinted when Homer actuated the bright white light on the barrel rail of his rifle, stepping backward to create some space – and sideways, to his right, to get Sarah out of his background. When the light didn’t get the attention of the Foxtrot, which was still fixated on her like a mongoose on a cobra, he finally shouted:

  “Hey! Dead guy! Eat me!”

  The manic undead monstrosity didn’t switch gears – it simply slithered and turned on a dime and launched itself out the open hole of the windshield, scrabbling over the hood and hitting the ground sprinting. Homer had to fire four shots before he found the brainstem, which left the creature draped across the toes of his Salomon GTX boots.

  “If the trailer’s rockin’,” Sarah said, “don’t come knockin’.” More combat adrenaline, and giddiness. But before either could laugh, she raised her rifle to her shoulder and shouted, “Behind you!”

  Spinning again, Homer could see the 50 meters of clear space to the tree had shrunk again, to 20, 15… But when he retreated and started to throw himself into the truck cab, Sarah shouted another warning, so he stopped short, and it wasn’t hard to see why. Luring the Foxtrot out before destroying it had saved them from painting the whole interior of the vehicle with its brains and lethally infectious fluids.

  But it hadn’t kept it from slathering viscous gunk on the upholstery in its manic thrashing around inside, which now glistened in the moonlight. And that gunk could still infect and kill them.

  “What’s your intent?” Homer asked, turning and raising his rifle again. Sarah tried to tell if he sounded very slightly rattled, which would be a lot more rattled than she had ever heard him sound before. But, no, he didn’t. She was just projecting.

  Not taking time to answer, she raced around the truck, got the rear hatch open, dove into the supplies, and came out with a gallon jug. She could both hear and see Homer taking quick but evenly spaced shots on the reinforced and fast-approaching horde, as she leaned in the cab behind him, and splashed caustic liquid over the surfaces inside.

  “Now!” she said, tossing the jug, jumping in the driver’s seat, and starting and gunning the engine, even as Homer piled in and pulled his door shut, then spinning the tires and cutting the wheel as dead hands banged on Homer’s side… but then finally receded into the gloom behind them.

  Sarah stole a look, and saw Homer wrinkling his nose again.

  “More bleach, huh?”

  “Five percent solution. I could have shelled out for industrial or medical surface disinfectants. But this is cheaper and better – guaranteed to sterilize anything.” But it wasn’t the cleaning products Sarah felt like talking about at this point. “Kid just ran off, huh?” She’d seen it from the truck.

  Homer just exhaled. “He’s alive. At least for today.”

  Sarah got his point: he wouldn’t be, if they hadn’t stopped, and if Homer hadn’t acted. He’d saved the child. But Sarah didn’t let it go. “He would have seen the Foxtrot from all the way up there. Coming at your back. But he didn’t say anything.”

  Homer just blinked in the dark. But
Sarah guessed he also got her point: they’d both nearly gotten killed, all for an ungrateful kid, a stranger to them both. And, much worse, if they had died, they might have gotten Homer’s kids killed, as well. He couldn’t rescue his own children if he got taken out rescuing someone else’s.

  “He was just a boy,” he said finally.

  This was the sort of choice Sarah knew Homer had been forced to make before, most recently in choosing to go for his family rather than stay with his team, his brothers and sister in Alpha. It wasn’t for her to judge whether that was the right decision.

  But she had a feeling more hard choices were coming.

  That Bag of Bricks

  “Hey,” Homer said. “Can you pull over, please?”

  This time Sarah complied without hesitating. Not only were they safely away from the horde back at the treed boy, they also now appeared to be a million miles from anything. While they still rolled past the occasional deserted intersection, nothing surrounded them on either side – no signs, buildings, dead.

  Nothing but flat southern Michigan farmland.

  Nonetheless, she killed the lights before she rolled them to a stop. Then she killed the engine. And she parked them in the middle of the road, in a section that had no trees or other hiding places in sight. The only shape they could make out was the vertical smudge of a distant grain silo.

  “Thanks for having my six,” Homer said. “Back there.”

  “Hey, what was I supposed to do? Let you be lunch?”

  Homer knew Sarah probably still had her doubts about the wisdom of stopping to help the boy. But if she did, she was keeping them to herself.

  She twisted in her seat to face him. “Handon said you’ve been scavenging for the last two years. For a vaccine. A cure.”

  “That’s right.”

  She cocked her head. “You deal with many survivors?”

  “Almost none. Europe was nearly totally black.”

  “I’m not surprised. High population density. Social-democratic governments, with highly developed social-welfare systems. All of which would crash and burn fast and hard when the shit came down.”

  Homer held her gaze, wondering where this was going.

  She said, “But North America is different. And I don’t mean the coasts, where you’re from. Never forget, this is a frontier country. It’s got as big a population as Europe, but much more spread out. Mainly, its people have got a very different attitude, especially here in the middle. One centered on self-reliance. Europeans would have been screwed within about three days – when the power went off, the food deliveries stopped, the ambulances stopped coming, and the water mains shut off. North Americans, on the other hand, especially your countrymen south of the border, and not least here in the heartland, were big on stockpiling things – like food and water. Not to mention guns and ammo.”

  Homer nodded. “Well, being Canadian didn’t slow you down.”

  She laughed. “No. And it was being an American-style redneck survivalist that kept me alive – through the Fall, and two years after. But my point is, I’m not the only prepper nutjob on this continent. My guess is, whether your survivor registry in Britain catalogued them or not, there are a lot more out here. And there’s a chance we’re going to run into them.”

  Homer was listening, but he wasn’t worried. Sarah’s concerned look said he still didn’t get it. She narrowed her eyes and tried again.

  “And they’re not all going to be unarmed boys stuck up in trees. They’re going to be overgrown boys, toting big guns, and overflowing with testosterone. It’s not going to be safe for you to just go wading in like a Boy Scout or good Samaritan. You can’t count on being rewarded for it.”

  “Okay,” Homer said. He didn’t want to argue with her.

  Sarah grasped his arm. “I’m serious. The presence of the living makes things trickier. And you need to be ready for it. The dead are predictable, while the living are capable of anything. My sense is you’re a profoundly good man, and you still have faith in people. But expecting other people to treat you nicely because you’re a good person is like expecting the bear not to eat you because you’re a vegetarian.”

  Homer exhaled, and absorbed this in silence.

  An old principle in the spec-ops world, one that had been drilled into him over two decades of deployments in dodgy places, was that local knowledge was king – or, as they put it, “always trust the man on the ground.” And Sarah had been on this ground a long time. In this case, what she was trying to tell him made him uneasy. But that’s what principles were for.

  They were what you lived by, even when it wasn’t easy.

  * * *

  “I wouldn’t have been lunch,” he said, finally.

  “What?”

  “I wouldn’t have been lunch. That thing back there was a Foxtrot. And they don’t feed. They just infect – then move on to the next one, fast.”

  Now Sarah seemed to take this on board, sobered. “And the next one it infected would have been me.”

  “Exactly,” Homer said. “I’ve already seen people go down to these things before they could blink, react, or defend themselves. And that could easily be both of us, out here, on our own. Foxtrots move a million miles an hour, they’re almost impossible to make a headshot on, and we still don’t know how many of them there are on this continent.”

  “Okay,” Sarah said. “So we’re both in for new experiences.” She exhaled. “But I’m guessing you didn’t have me pull over just so we could depress the shit out of each other.”

  “No,” Homer said, turning and half-climbing into the back. “We need to do some belated mission planning and prep.” He came back with the box with the radios and batteries. He loaded up one of the former with one of the latter, powered it on, then started flipping the digital channel selector, getting it onto the same as his own, Alpha’s working channel. Then he turned off both the beeping function, and the display backlight.

  He said, “We can’t have you shouting down the road at me all the way across undead North America.” Finally he handed it over, nodding at her waist. “Looks like this fits that?”

  Sarah slipped the radio into her belt pouch. “Stupidly put my other one down on the kitchen table back home.” She didn’t have to elaborate on what happened to the table, and anything on it. Nor why she hadn’t had time to grab it on their way out.

  Homer pressed the talk button on the foregrip of his rifle, nestled beside him, then spoke into his throat mic: “Commo check.” His voice came back from Sarah’s belt, just audible.

  “Received,” Sarah said. “Why didn’t we do this before?”

  “Because, with just the two of us, I didn’t anticipate we’d get separated. Or be more than arm’s length away.”

  “Swim buddies,” Sarah said. “Yet we got separated twice.”

  “We did. And I failed to predict it.”

  “So did I.”

  “Yeah, but it’s my job to think of these things.”

  They smiled at each other in the dark. Sarah said, “I cached two radios. Didn’t anticipate I’d need only one.”

  “Oh, you need both.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “‘Two is one, one is none.’ Old spec-ops principle. Everything fails, sooner or later – usually sooner, and generally at the worst possible time. If you only have one…”

  “You’ve effectively got none. Check.”

  * * *

  “Oh, yeah,” Homer said. “Speaking of redundancy.” He shrugged out of his assault pack, unzipped the top-loading pouch, and dug into it, arm disappearing to the shoulder. When his hand finally emerged, it held a little gray device the size of a pack of cards, but with a stubby rubberized antenna sticking out.

  “Radio transponder?”

  “Good guess,” Homer said. “May I?” She nodded, so he slipped it into her vest, sliding it down to the bottom of one of her mag pouches, then Velcro’ing the flap back down. “Now I can always find you. Even when comms are wedged.�
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  “As is also inevitable.”

  “Yeah. Probably.”

  “On that thing?” Sarah asked, pointing to the small ruggedized electronic device strapped to his forearm.

  He nodded, then powered on the screen, which glowed dimly. With a swipe and pinch of his touchscreen shooting gloves, he zoomed in on the map. Now it had two glowing dots on it, nearly on top of each other. One was his location. The other was hers.

  “Hey,” he said, “you mind if I charge this thing?”

  Sarah laughed. “Really not something you need to ask. But I’m afraid USB ports hadn’t been invented when this truck rolled off the assembly line.”

  “No problem,” Homer said, opening his pack, and coming out with not just a micro-USB charging cable, but a small adapter, which he switched out with the cigarette lighter.

  Sarah arched her eyebrows, impressed – not so much with the low-tech adapter as the high-tech location-tracking. She said, “Personal locator beacons the kind of thing you just carry around on missions?”

  “On this one. To keep track of our mission objective.”

  “Your scientist.”

  “Exactly. Ali had the other device. Now it’s on Dr. Park.”

  “And two is one.”

  Homer smiled. Quick student.

  * * *

  Sarah exhaled in the dark, her breath just beginning to frost. She said, “I was always putting radios on my husband and son. So I could keep track of them, while also trying to get some alone time – away from them.”

  “I can understand that,” Homer said. “Anyone would.”

  Sarah wasn’t sure. “And what about your wife?”

  Homer smiled sadly. “Ellie was always waiting for me to come home – from work, from off-site training evolutions, and mainly from overseas deployments. Back-to-back deployments, over and over again. I never said no.”

  “Could you have?”

  Homer shrugged. “I could have retired, left the teams.”

  “If you didn’t do this work, who would have?”

  Homer sighed. “It’s always someone else’s turn eventually. And someone new is always coming up the training pipeline – someone younger, stronger, less bruised and pummeled.” He smiled sadly again. “And also single. Without kids.”