When it was over there was another of those haunted silences.
I relaxed, one rigid muscle at a time, and turned to the soldier. He had his last name embroidered on his jacket. Al-Harti. He was about twenty, with corporal stripes on his sleeves. A good-looking young guy who had laugh lines around his eyes.
I stuck out my hand. “Joe Ledger.”
He stared at me, at my hand, and then licked his lips. Then he shook. “Abdul.”
Then his knees buckled, and he fell.
I caught him under the arm and lowered him down, then helped him scoot back until he had his back to a sycamore. I snapped the blood from my sword with a sharp downward shake, then removed any lingering traces with a thick handful of green grass before resheathing it. Baskerville came and sat down, panting from his exertions. His body language told me that there were no more threats. I squatted down, removed my Wilson folding knife, snapped the blade into place and cut away the elbow pad and sleeve to expose Abdul’s bite.
We looked at it, and he nodded. “I’m done.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry, brother.”
He smiled. “Me, too.”
It was six months since the world ended. Everyone alive knew the math. If he’d been resting, the patho
gen would take all day to spread. But with elevated heart rate and respiration, and all the adrenaline in his bloodstream, it was already everywhere. Another design feature of the bioweapon—kill the soldiers who are pumped and engaged in resistance.
There is, I hope, a special place in hell for the kind of people who designed weapons like this. The reality was that he had hours before sickness took him and darkness blanked out his mind. After that it would simply be a matter of him dying and coming back. He wouldn’t be himself anymore by midnight—maybe not even by full dark.
“You . . . ” he began, and then lost the rest in a sob. I waited while he pulled himself together, my hand on his shoulder. Baskerville lay down with his head on his paws and whined softly. Abdul tried it again, “You should probably go, y’know, before . . . ”
“Not a chance,” I said. “I’m not double-parked.”
“Why stay?”
I shrugged. “Why not? Wouldn’t you stay with your buddies?”
He nodded. “But you don’t know me.”
“What do I have to know? Corporal Adbul Al-Harti, Maryland National Guard.”
“Pennsylvania,” he said. “My guys and I moved on with some refugees.”
I tapped my chest. “Captain Joe Ledger, Rangers.”
“Army?”
“Sure,” I said. The truth was too complicated to waste time on; and once upon a time I had been a Ranger. “Retired, though. I was off the clock when this shit came down.”
“Guess everyone who mattered was,” said Abdul, hurting me without intending it. The two groups I’d run with, the Department of Military Sciences and then Rogue Team International were the cats who were supposed to always be on deck. We were the ones who were supposed to stop this from happening. The fact that we didn’t was never going to stop twisting a knife in me.
I put a light dressing on his elbow, more to discourage flies than anything else. He sat with the arm held slightly out to the side as if trying to distance himself from the bite. Or disown the arm. I pretended not to notice and instead glanced around at the bodies.
“You guys kicked some ass,” I observed. “Looks like it was a running fight.”
“Long range patrol,” he explained. “When the command structure fell apart a bunch of us kind of went out on our own, you know? Looking for survivors, helping them get out of tight spots. We’ve been sending them south.”
“To Asheville?”
He brightened. “Yeah, you heard about that?”
“I’ve been doing pretty much the same thing.” I explained about Dez Fox and Billy Trout, and Abdul began nodding.
“Sure, they were all over the news. Trout was doing those ‘Live From the Apocalypse’ news reports from inside a school in Stebbins. And Officer Fox was kicking ass and taking names trying to protect a bunch of kids. So, they got out?”