Once Mike had everything just so, he carefully retreated to where his partner waited. The guy they paired him with was a moonfaced kid from Monroeville named Cyrus who never said two words when no words would do. Mike knew chattier rocks. But that was okay. It was better when Cyrus said nothing because when he did say something it was dumb shit like, “Look, a deer.” Like it was a thing of wonder.
A deer.
In the woods?
How amazing.
This was the ass-end of Pennsylvania, deep in farm country, and both Stebbins and Fayette counties overlapped with state forests. Deer were as thick as mosquitoes out here, and just as annoying.
Big brown rats, in Mike’s view.
In the dark, though, and with all this rain, deer were a real problem. You could hear them and not know what was moving in the woods. You could see them and not know what they were, because they blended in so well, and moved so quietly. And they could just as easily trip a mine as one of the infected.
Mike explained this to Cyrus, who didn’t so much nod or say he understood as simply look marginally less vacant for a moment.
“We need an elevated shooting position,” suggested Mike. “That way if we see any deer coming along the path we can put them down, keep the network of devices intact. Okay?”
Cyrus made a grunting sound that Mike took as assent.
He put Cyrus in the crotch of an elm. For all his apparent vacuity, the kid could climb like a monkey. He was also a good shot, a safe weapons-handler. He wasn’t rewarding company but Mike didn’t expect to take any friendly fire.
With Cyrus in place, Mike drifted down a game trail, stepping around or over tripwires, double-checking that everything was just so.
Then he froze.
It wasn’t exactly that Mike heard or saw anything, but instead had a sense that something moved out there in the storm-filled, shadowy woods. He turned very slowly, surveying the landscape. The boughs of the trees swayed like the arms of drunks fighting for balance. Rain fell between the trees, gathered into fat dollops, and dropped from branches and leaves. Winds howled through the forest at ground level, slapping the bushes and shrubs this way and that.
There was so much movement that Mike couldn’t tell if there was nothing out there or an entire herd of deer.
Command had warned of packs of infected crossing farm fields after the bombs in Bordentown, but so far Mike hadn’t seen a single one of them. He hard the chatter on the radio and knew that there were some real problems out there, but it all seemed to be happening elsewhere. Sure as hell not here. So far the most they’d seen was a red fox, a bunch of squirrels, and not much of anything else.
The forest kept moving, but as far as Mike could tell it was just Superstorm Zelda being a total bitch.
He found his own tree and climbed up onto the lowest limb, relieved to have the dense canopy of leaves shield him from the heaviest of the rain.
And then he saw something that was neither wind nor squirrel.
The leaves trembled on the far side of a slope, and Mike put his rifle to his shoulder and aimed at the center of a wall of rustling shrubs. If it was a deer, he was going to shoot its Bambi-ass before it could trip one of the mines.
Then the shrubs parted and something stepped through.
It wasn’t a deer.
It wasn’t a fleeing civilian.
It was a soldier.
It was a soldier, in fact, that Mike knew. It was a good friend of his.
“Teddy?”
Sergeant Teddy Polk staggered out of the dense line of shrubs and nearly lost his footing at the top of the rise. His white hazmat suit was covered in mud and torn in several places, the hood hanging down behind his back. Polk had no rifle and he walked uncertainly, weakly, with one hand clamped to his left bicep. Polk’s foot came down wrong and he pitched forward, staggering down the slope toward the pressure mine hidden halfway down.
“Teddy! No!” bellowed Mike as he dropped from the tree and began to run toward his friend. He knew the pattern of his traps; Teddy was walking right toward a blast mine.
“Stop!” screamed Mike. “For God’s sake, Teddy, freeze. Don’t move. Land mines!”
Teddy stopped. He looked around but his face was clouded by pain and confusion. He blinked and his mouth worked for a moment, trying to form a word.