“Who did?”
“Him.” Sandbag nodded at the kid. “He’s talking about himself. He said he did it.”
The little boy had an annoyed expression on his face. He said something else, as if he were correcting the translator. He spoke for a long time. Sandbag’s eyes kept getting wide.
“He says he made them take their shoes off so their feet would bleed on the rocks and thorns, and to not stop until they fell. They’re probably dead from thirst by now.” Sandbag was distressed. He’d never struck Carver as the religious type, so when he unconsciously crossed himself, it unnerved her. “That was only for the ones who pray. The rest he nailed to the poles.”
“Little fucker would need a ladder,” Corvus muttered. “He’s gone mental.”
“He says they brought him here, but they didn’t understand what they dug up. He’s insulted they thought he was just some mere weapon.”
The kid smiled at them.
Then he began weeping blood.
That was when everything went horribly wrong.
* * *
Rudy realized he was gripping the edge of the table so hard that his knuckles had turned white.
“What’s wrong, Rudy?” Lieutenant Carver asked him with unnerving calm. “You seem frightened.”
“I’m fine.”
“No. You are broken. You are an unworthy vessel.”
All the hair on his arms stood up. “You mean my eye?”
“Among other things.” She smiled, but it wasn’t a real smile. It was more as if something were wearing Carver’s face as a mask, and pulled the strings to make the face muscles perform the motions it assumed were appropriate. “I’ve been hidden away so long. The world above has changed. I do not understand it anymore. I was supposed to rest until the final days. Only the Canaanites opened my tomb. By the time I was fully awake, they had brought me to the hot lands below.”
“Canaanites?”
“I don’t care what you name them now. I was weak, without purpose. I have found one again. I will seek out my old enemy, and begin our war anew.”
Rudy didn’t know where his next question came from. “Why did you come here?”
“I heard this one’s song. I had to come and see for myself if it was true. Is my enemy here?”
“Who?” It was now so cold his breath came out as steam.
She leaned close and whispered to him.
Rudy bolted upright and headed for the door. He pounded on it. Thankfully the MPs opened it right away. “Keep that locked. Nobody else goes in or out.” He didn’t have the authority to order them around, but it wasn’t a suggestion.
Church was waiting for him in the observation area. “She really seems to be opening up to you, Doctor.”
Rudy raised one hand to stop Church. He wasn’t in the mood. He was silent for a long time, breathing hard, staring through the glass at the woman on the other side. She’d gone back to trembling, knees nervously bouncing, just a poor, traumatized woman who had seen her squad turn on each other and rip themselves to pieces.
“Clinically, on the record, I’d say she’s severely delusional.”
“And off the record?”
“I’m not going back in there without a priest.”
Then the lights went out.
“Stay calm.” Church’s voice was flat.
The logical part of his mind immediately rationalized the power outage. The overworked air conditioner had caused the building to blow a fuse. But the part of him that had just been laid bare, and terrified by an alien presence that should not be, knew that wasn’t the case.
The lights came back on.
She had left two bloody red handprints on the other side of the glass for them.
“Carver’s gone.”
The interrogation room was empty. The handcuffs were on the table, still closed, as if she’d just torn her hands right out of them. The door was closed.
Church moved to the hall. The MPs were still there, oblivious but unharmed. He threw open the door, and despite Rudy’s admonition to the contrary, they knew not to mess with Mr. Church. He came back out. “Sound the alarm. Find her, but do not engage.” The soldiers rushed off. Church returned a moment later, glowering. “She’s escaped.”
Nothing ever seemed to shake Church, but Rudy was sick to his stomach. “That specialist who’s on the way … he’s an exorcist, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know if Agent Franks puts that on his business cards, but I suppose that might be among his many qualifications,” Church replied. “This is important, Doctor. I couldn’t make it out over the speaker, but the last thing she said to you, when you asked her about this old enemy, about why she’d come here, what did she say to you?”
“The song said ‘God Is an American.’”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Larry Correia is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of the Monster Hunter International series, the Grimnoir Chronicles, the Dead Six trilogy, and Son of the Black Sword. He has also written dozens of short stories and two novels set in the Warmachine universe, is actually the basis of a G.I. Joe character, and wrote the audiobook The Adventures of Tom Stranger, Interdimensional Insurance Agent. Before becoming a full-time writer, Larry was an accountant, a machine gun dealer, a firearms instructor, and a military contractor. He lives in the mountains of northern Utah.
* * *
EDITORS’ NOTE: This story is a crossover between the Ledger-verse and Dana Fredsti’s character Ashley’s world from her exciting Plague Town series. Although Joe Ledger appears in the Rot & Ruin novels, which also tell how he would survive a zombie apocalypse, the Plague Town novels are set in a different version of that catastrophe. Which one is the real future for Joe Ledger is a matter of some speculation. It’s a big, strange, complicated universe, and as explored in the eighth Ledger novel, Kill Switch, the future is in no way set in stone. Anything could happen. The story here is one glimpse into a dark, nasty, possible future.
* * *
CRASH COURSE
BY DANA FREDSTI
“Why are we doing this again?”
“Because Colonel Paxton owes someone a favor.”
Nathan held out a hand to me as I climbed out of the helicopter on unsteady legs, one hand clutching my katana. My legs weren’t the only shaky thing about me. My stomach turned one or two more gentle somersaults even after my feet hit the tarmac, and the whupwhupwhup of the rotors throbbed unpleasantly through my head. Helicopter travel has been on my shit list ever since a copter I was on was sabotaged and went down in zombie-infested San Francisco.
“So we’re paying Paxton’s debt? Hardly seems fair.”
“It’s not,” Nathan agreed. “But it’s SOP in corporations and the military.”
“Huh?”
“Standard operating procedure.”
“Evidently so are acronyms,” I muttered.
Nathan grinned. “Why do you think I went off the grid for so long?”
Nathan’s one of those rough-hewn but handsome types who could be anywhere between forty and sixty. When he smiles it knocks at least ten years off his age, and I can almost see why my mentor, Simone, likes him.
“Now stop bitching and let’s get going. We have people to meet.”
Almost.
Our mission? Fly to a little island off Costa Rica to pick up Brock, the son of some Very Important gajillionaire industrialist or arms dealer or whatever. The kid was bitten when zombies breached the family compound and left for dead by the faithful family retainers during the subsequent evacuation. Only the kid didn’t die.
Can you say very wealthy wild card?
When the dad—who’d been stateside doing business when the shit went down—found out his son and heir was alive and well, he immediately started pulling strings to get him out of Costa Rica. Those had to be some hefty strings to let him commandeer people from two of what were formerly top-secret security organizations—the Dolofónoi tou Zontanoús Nekroús and the Department of Military Sci
ences—to be what sounded like glorified babysitters.
Nathan and I were supposed to be meeting two operatives from the DMS. Colonel Paxton had told us they were hot shit. Okay, my words, not his, but honestly, he’d practically gone all fanboy when he’d talked about them. Not something I’d ever expected—or wanted—to see from our boss.
We walked across a reassuringly bustling airfield on NAS North Island, located on the far end of the Coronado Peninsula in San Diego. Thanks to quick thinking on someone’s part, Coronado had been turned into a relatively safe zone by blowing up a section of the Coronado Bridge and putting up an effective blockade on the strip of land leading to Imperial Beach. The beaches were patrolled 24/7 to make sure no one infected with Walker’s made it to shore.
“And there’s our ride.”
I followed the direction of Nathan’s pointing finger and stopped short.
“You said there’d be a plane.” I didn’t bother to hide the accusation in my voice.
“That is a plane,” Nathan replied calmly. “Oh. And the thing we flew in on? That was a helicopter.”
Amazing how much sarcasm the man can impart without changing his inflection. You’d think I’d be used to it by now. Of course, you’d also think I’d be used to traveling via helicopter, as I’d had to do it at least a dozen times since the zombocalypse had started.
“I meant a real plane. Not a … a … a Tinkertoy.” I gestured at the little plane sitting on the tarmac at the far end of North Island’s military base. It looked like one of the toy planes my dad collected, not much longer than the copter we’d flown in on, and sure as hell didn’t look sturdy enough for a trip to Costa Rica and back.
“Did I just hear her call my Porter a Tinkertoy?”
I looked up to see a burly black man wearing worn jeans and a green-and-black-checked flannel shirt walking toward us and giving me one hell of a hairy eyeball. He was flanked by two other men, one in his late twenties or so and the other somewhere in his thirties or early forties.
Both men toted an impressive amount of high-tech-looking weaponry, and both wore the type of camo meant to blend into forests and jungles, same as Nathan and me. They were also both blond, but that was the only physical attribute they had in common. The younger guy had to be at least six and a half feet, maybe taller. The very definition of corn-fed.
Assuming a metric shit-ton of corn was involved.
The other man wasn’t as physically overwhelming, but he carried himself in a way that I’d learned to associate with people who could probably kick the shit out of 99 percent of the population. Kind of like Nathan. Same look in the back of the eyes that hinted of dark things that, once seen, couldn’t be unseen.
Nathan shook hands with the black man. “Jack, good to see you. Ash, you’ll be glad to know that Jack is one of the best pilots around.”
“Damn straight I am,” Jack growled, still giving me stink-eye.
Nathan turned to the shorter of the two blond men. “You must be Joe Ledger.”
The man nodded. “And you’re Nathan Smith.”
They shook hands, one of those manly-men handshakes that had the potential to degenerate into an arm-wrestling match unless the men involved were both secure in their masculinity. No arm wrestling ensued and the testosterone levels in the atmosphere remained tolerable.
Ledger and his companion exchanged a brief look and I got the sense Nathan had just passed some sort of unspoken test.
“I’m Ash,” I said brightly. Both men looked at me.
“You’re Ashley Parker, huh?” Ledger’s tone was neutral.
“Um. Yeah.”
“Huh.”
Another brief silent exchange between the two men.
Maybe I was feeling insecure, but I got the feeling I was not what he’d expected. Maybe someone taller?
Whatever, I didn’t need to be a mind reader to know I’d most likely failed whatever exam Nathan had just aced.
“Statistics prove you’re safer in a plane than driving in traffic,” Corn-fed said. “You’re a lot more likely to be roadkill than ground jam.”
I stared without love at Mr. Corn-Fed-on-Steroids. His full name, if it was to be believed, was Harvey Rabbit, but Ledger called him Bunny.
“Aren’t you supposed to be invisible?”
Bunny just grinned at me. He and Ledger sat across from me and Nathan in two of the plane’s four passenger rows. Jack had modified the interior so the front and third rows were reversed to face the second and fourth rows, making conversation easier. It also made it a lot harder to ignore one’s fellow passengers.
Thanks a lot, Jack.
To be fair, once Jack realized how deeply I hated flying, he had done his best to reassure me how safe I’d be in his beloved Porter by inundating me with statistics. Factoids involving takeoff and landing performance, payloads, airfoil, and other stuff that rattled around in my head like marbles in an empty can. I paid as much attention as I could, especially in regard to the location of a very tiny bathroom at the back of the plane.
At this point, all I cared about was that the Porter would get us safely from San Diego to Costa Rica and then back again ASAP. The shorter my in-flight incarceration with Joe Ledger and his man-mountain sidekick, the better. They made me feel totally incompetent—and kind of girly—just by their existence.
“So,” I said, desperate to talk about something other than road jam, “other than friends in nose-bleedingly high places, is there a good reason this kid rates such kick-ass escorts?”
“The dad already sent a team to extract him,” Nathan said. “They didn’t come back and both the team and the kid have gone radio silent.”
“Yeah,” said Ledger. “If we’re lucky, it just means communications went down. Some mechanical failure. Rust in the machine. Whatever. If we’re unlucky, we’re looking at the possibility that hostiles have taken over the compound and are holding the kid for ransom.”
“What about zombies?” I asked. “I mean, if they overran the place once, no reason they couldn’t do it again. And I personally would rather deal with zombies. They don’t shoot back.”
“What little intel we could get showed zombie activity in the jungles outside the walls,” Nathan replied. “But none inside the compound itself.”
The plane gave a sudden lurch. So did my stomach.
“Excuse me.” I unbuckled my seat belt and made my way to the bathroom.
When I opened the bathroom door five minutes or so later, I was less queasy but still defensive. So when I heard Ledger say my name, I stopped and eavesdropped.
“Does Ash know how to use those fancy blades of hers?”
“She’s not bad with them,” was Nathan’s neutral response.
Gee, thanks a lot.
“She spent much time in the field?”
“If by ‘field’ you mean zombie-infested streets,” Nathan said, “then a couple of months.”
Ledger gave a noncommittal grunt that managed to convey how unimpressed he was with my credentials. “I’m just a little surprised she was chosen for this particular mission,” he said. “I get me and Bunny. And you’re an obvious choice. But I’m not quite seeing what she brings to the table, other than a weak stomach.”
That was it.
I stomped over and stood next to his seat, glaring down at him.
“Are you one of those MRA types who thinks I should be cooking and all pregnant and shit?”
“Here we go,” Nathan muttered.
Ledger raised an eyebrow. “Did I say that?”
“You implied it,” I snapped. “I get it. You’re a real manly man, built the Eiffel Tower with brawn and steel, and all your furniture is rich mahogany.”
“You forgot all of my leather-bound books.”
I glared at him. I hate being one-upped on my pop-cultural Tourette’s. “Oh, come on,” I snapped. “You don’t think I can do my job because I’m a woman.”
“Actually,” Ledger said with infuriating calm, “some of the best comb
atants I’ve known have been women. Women who’ve trained for years and, in some cases, been through hell to achieve their skills. You’ve been training for a couple of months.”
Even though I’d been through my own version of hell, I couldn’t argue with him and Nathan didn’t seem inclined to say anything else in my defense. So I did a modified Jan Brady, turning and stomping two feet to the row of seats behind Ledger and Bunny, where they couldn’t see me.
Nathan dropped his voice, but I still heard him. Wild-card hearing and all. “One of the reasons Ash was chosen was because Brock’s supposed to be difficult and his father thought he might respond better to an attractive woman. Ash is good with people.” He paused. “Usually.”
I didn’t have to be a wild card to hear Ledger’s snort, followed by, “Well, this mission is screwed.”
You’re a poo, Ron Burgundy, I thought.
“Trust me,” Nathan said. “She handles herself well under fire.”
Semimollified, I huddled back into the semicomfortable seat, popped two Dramamine, and did my best Hicks impression, falling sound asleep within minutes.
* * *
“Ash, wake up.”
“I’m fine,” I mumbled. “Don’t need to stretch my legs.”
This was the second time someone had tried to wake me out of my Dramamine-induced sleep. The first was when we’d made our first stop to refuel somewhere in Mexico. I’d ignored them then and tried to do the same now.
“Ash. You have to wake up.”
Someone shook me by the shoulders.
“We have to jump.”
My eyelids flew open and all cobwebby sleepy thoughts vanished. Ledger’s face was inches from mine.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
He gave a small shake of his head.
Shit.
I scanned the plane. No Nathan, no Bunny.
Instead there was a man in black holding a nasty-looking firearm, business end pointed at me and Ledger.
He grinned at me. A really smug, ugly grin. I’d have wiped it off his face if not for the aforementioned firearm.
Well, shit.
“Where’s Nathan and Bunny?”