The Farm - 05 Read online

  THE FARM

  by Stephen Knight

  © 2013 by Stephen Knight

  The farm house was surrounded by bodies.

  From her vantage point atop the small hill that overlooked the farm and the gentle rolling countryside that surrounded it, Biggs could see the house had been converted into a poor man’s fortress. The doors and windows had been either boarded up or hidden behind sand bags that looked pretty damned heavy. Even the wraparound porch that adorned the structure had been walled off, turned into another defensive element. In between the sand bags and lumber that had been erected to cover the porch, she could see cut outs. Nothing too big, just enough to accommodate the barrel of a weapon. Sniper positions. Murder holes.

  Tilting her field glasses upward slightly, she examined the home’s second story. Many of the windows there were boarded up as well, though a few were still exposed, uncluttered by any sort of defense. While she couldn’t see through them—curtains were drawn across most, and in the two that weren’t, the darkness inside hid whomever might be looking out—she knew why the windows were open. So the people inside would have unencumbered fields of fire when they needed to defend the place.

  As she watched, another stench slowly shambled toward the farm house. The structure was visible from the road, and Biggs had noticed that structures like the bright white farm house below could attract their attention. Even though the stenches were dead, zed apparently still had an eye for the finer things. Especially when those things might contain fresh meat. She focused her attention on the zombie for a moment, peering down at it through her Army-issue binoculars. It moved along at a slow pace, due to the remarkable damage that had been done to one of its legs. Through the filthy, shredded blue jeans it wore, Biggs saw its thigh had been pretty fairly butchered. The femur had been laid bare in places, and the stringy mass of muscle and sinew that had been left behind no longer possessed the ability to deliver reliable motive power to the remainder of the limb. A living person would have been in excruciating pain. A stench didn’t even realize it had been damaged.

  The walking corpse jerked then, as half its skull disintegrated into a gooey, ichor-laced mess. The ghoul fell to its knees, then slammed to the ground face-first as a tinny, distant-sounding retort barely registered with her ears. The sniper in the farm house had dropped another zombie.

  “Hey, Captain. You realize you’re silhouetted against the sky?”

  Biggs didn’t glance down at Sergeant First Class Eugene Powers. Both he and the kid, Specialist Leo Klein, were lying on their bellies in the tall grass that covered the hill. She didn’t need to look down to make sure they were still there. She could smell them easily enough, or at least, she thought she did. It was more than possible that the stink of sweat and grime that filled her nostrils came from herself. Her Army Combat Uniform was covered with filth, some of it desiccated gore from several stenches she’d had to kill at almost zero range.

  “I know, Sergeant. I want him to see me.”

  “Whoever’s in that house has a sniper rifle with a can on it, ma’am. And he’s a dead-eye.”

  “He’s only shooting the stenches, Powell.”

  “You want to give him the opportunity to tap a live person, Captain?”

  Biggs finally lowered her field glasses and slipped them back into the pouch on her hip. She looked down at the two men. Powell was facing the farm, while Klein was oriented in the other direction, covering their rear. Powell had his M4 assault rifle trained on the house below, and he peered through the 4x scope mounted to the rifle’s upper Picatinny rail. Biggs took a moment to wipe the sweat that was building beneath the brim of her Advanced Combat Helmet. This far from the coast, the fall day was still hot, with temperatures in the low 70s even though the sun was within an hour of kissing the horizon.

  “It’s going to be night in a few hours,” she said.

  “Yeah? So?”

  Biggs found herself getting annoyed with the big black NCO. Powers hailed from Detroit, and the only thing that separated him from living a thugsta’s life was the uniform he wore. In her estimation, Sergeant First Class Powers was an excellent soldier when it came to organizing his troops for battle, but when it came to thinking Big Picture, he was always grasping at the short straws.

  “So since we lost our Humvee, we need to find a place to hole up. We’ve got about a million stenches a day behind us, if that.” She motioned toward the farm below, even though Powers wasn’t looking at her, and wouldn’t be able to see the motion. “That house is pretty well fortified, and whoever’s shooting the stenches is using a suppressed weapon. His SUV is penned, and the only unblocked window on the lower floor is right over it. He’s ready to bug out if the shit hits the fan, and I want us to go with him.”

  “So what’re you gonna do, Captain? Walk up and ask him if he’ll give us poor ol’ soldiers a ride?”

  “You want to spend the night out here, Sergeant?”

  Biggs waited, but when Powers didn’t debate it further, she decided she had her answer. She shucked off her MOLLE II rucksack and let the load-bearing gear hit the ground. There wasn’t much left in it, so she didn’t have to worry about the rig’s plastic frame taking too heavy of a shock.

  “It doesn’t sound like he’s firing five-five-six—more like seven-six-two. If he wanted me dead, he could’ve tagged me out here. Just the same, I’ll leave my shit with you guys. If he takes me out, you two move on. Hooah?”

  “Hooah,” Powers said, the response barely more than a grunt.

  Biggs unslung her M4A3 and walked down the hillside. For the moment, there were no zombies about, though she could see a gaggle of them slowly creeping down the road. She kept an eye on them as they advanced toward the farm house, but it was obvious they hadn’t seen her. If they had, they would have deviated immediately, hoping to have a late hot lunch.

  The farm house stood tall and proud in the field. Birds chirped in the few trees on the property, and even a few cicadas still buzzed. Biggs thought this might have been a working farm at one point in the past, but no longer. A barn stood off to one side, further from the road than the house. It looked a bit dilapidated, its pale paint weathered and peeling. As she drew nearer to the house, Biggs glanced down at the corpses that littered the area. All were dead from head shots. Suddenly mindful of this, she slowly raised her rifle over her head as she walked right up to the front of the house. No zombies lay inside of a hundred feet of the structure, except for one: a matronly-looking woman, someone who had probably been a kindly housewife when she had been alive. Biggs looked at the corpse, already crawling with flies. It had been shot several times in the chest before the final blast to the head lowered the curtains on her—it—forever.

  “Okay, that’s close enough, girl,” a husky voice said from above her. Biggs snapped her head up and looked at the dark, second story window where she thought the voice had come from. She thought she glimpsed a small flash of movement somewhere up there. A rifle barrel? A muted gleam off a scope?

  “I’m not here to cause you any problems,” she said.

  “I see two more of you in the weeds up on the hill. You with the One Eighty-Seventh?”

  Biggs was surprised he could determine her unit. Her guess that the shooter was prior service was apparently right on the money.

  “Roger that. They’re my men.”

  “Where’s the rest of your battalion?”

  “Dead,” Biggs said.

  “You Task Force New York?”

  “We were.”

  A hard, cynical laugh came from the darkness beyond the window frame. “And you’re all that’s left, huh? Where you headed?”

  “Fort Indiantown Gap. The Army has a holding force there,” Biggs said. There was no reason to lie about it.


  “Where are your vehicles?”

  “Gone. Out of gas. We’re on foot.”

  “Tough break. But Indiantown Gap’s a long ways from here. You were maybe thinking of helping yourself to my vehicle?”

  “Negative—like I said, we don’t want any trouble. We just need a place to stay for the night.” Biggs’s arms were starting to get tired holding her rifle up over her head. “You mind if I lower my rifle, sir?”

  “This ain’t no hotel,” the voice said, ignoring her question. “There’s nothing for you here, Captain. Better keep moving.”

  “You prior service?” Biggs asked.

  “U.S. Marine Corps, up until last year. I eat lightfighters like you for breakfast.”

  “Sniper?”

  “Oorah. It’s what I do, Army.” The voice paused. “You’re pretty ballsy, for a girl. Saw you drop your gear up there. Afraid I was going to put the zap on you?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  “I don’t kill the living. Not anymore, not since there’s so many of the God damned dead. Hey, do me a favor, Army?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Move two steps to your right.”

  Biggs stood there, holding her rifle over her head, sweating, heart pounding, arms going slowly numb from reduced blood flow. She wondered what the hell was up, but after a long moment, she took one slow step to her right. Then another.

  CRACK! There was a muted flash from inside the window, and a bullet zipped past her head. Biggs flinched, lowering her rifle and pulling the stock tight against her shoulder. She heard something hit the ground behind her, and she glanced over her shoulder, just took one quick bite of a look to see what was happening. A zombie lay face down on the grass. Brackish slurry leaked from its shattered skull.

  “You got shit for situational awareness, Army. That zed was creeping up on you for almost two minutes.”

  “Thanks for taking it out,” Biggs said, feeling more than a little bit stupid.

  “How long’ve you guys been on the move?”

  “Six days. We left New York six days ago.”

  “Six days, and you’ve only made it here? Damn, girl. You guys might want to pick up the pace a bit.” The voice paused for a long moment. “You can’t come into the house, but you can use the barn. You need to leave at first light. And if you think about trying anything funny, I’ve got murder holes all over this place. Try and help yourself to what’s mine, and you’ll be as dead as that stench behind you. You read me, Army?”

  “Good copy, Marine.”

  “You should sleep in the hay loft. Barn ought to be empty, there’s nothing in there to attract the dead, but you never know. You have any field sanitation gear with you?”

  “We still have some, yeah.”

  “Then use it. You piss or shit in barn, it’ll attract the stenches. And if they attack you, they’re your problem—not mine.”

  Biggs looked up at the black maw that was the window and nodded. “Roger that.” She lowered her eyes after a moment, and looked back at the dead zombie that lay on the ground before the barricaded porch. The one that had been shot multiple times. She looked back up at the window suddenly. “Hey, you need anything from us?”

  “Negative. We’re good,” the voice said, for the first time indicating there were others in the house. Biggs figured it was a slip of the tongue. The sniper was probably tired from manning his weapon all day.

  “Anyone bitten in there?” she asked.

  “Like I said—we’re good,” the voice responded, but there was something false to it. Biggs squinted as she looked up at the open window.

  “Listen, if someone’s bitten, that’s real bad news. That’s how the virus spreads.”

  “Thanks for the hot tip. You’d better get a move on. The light’s fading.”

  Biggs shrugged and nodded. “I’ll call my men forward. That all right?”

  “I don’t see how they’re going to make it to the barn unless they, you know, actually come down off the hill and walk toward it. But hey, listen. If you’re worried about me killing them, rest easy. I could’ve done it a long time ago. Near, far, it doesn’t matter. If I can see it, I can kill it.”

  Biggs nodded again, not sure how else to respond.

  “Don’t forget, you leave at first light. Come near the house, I’ll kill you. That’s our arrangement, Army. Remember that.”

  “I read you,” Biggs said.

  “Sleep well.”

  ~

  The barn was mostly empty, and without many hiding places. Biggs, Powers, and Klein inspected it very carefully, just the same. With the world slowly being overrun by carnivorous corpses, the soldiers had a huge reservoir of caution to draw from, and they scrutinized every shadow, every nook, every cranny inside the weathered structure. Other than some old, unused sand bags, a few empty barrels, and various rusty farming implements, there was nothing exciting to be discovered. That suited Biggs just fine. She’d had enough excitement over the past few weeks to last several lifetimes.

  She clambered up the rickety ladder that led up to the hay loft. The slatted floor there creaked beneath her weight in places, but the loft was entirely serviceable for sleeping, and it was big enough to accommodate all three troopers and the remains of their gear. An added bonus was that stenches, to the best of her knowledge, hadn’t yet mastered the art of climbing ladders. Or hadn’t they? She’d heard the stories from the troops in Manhattan how some of them seemed to exhibit a kind of cunning, an ability to recall past abilities, such as operating weapons and some common machinery. Would a ladder be much of a deterrent?

  Biggs walked over to the wide loft door and, with some difficulty, slid it open. Its casters squealed inside the rusty metal track, a noise that seemed so loud to her that she wouldn’t have been surprised if it alerted every zed in the state as to their whereabouts. The door finally seized to a stop before the she could get it halfway open, but that was good enough. Even though it afforded coverage of only one direction, the view was excellent; she could keep an eye on the house and the surrounding territory. The fact that the loft was right above the barn’s main door was a bonus point. The lightfighters would be able to maintain surveillance of the only easy axis of attack available to the carnivorous ghouls, should the stenches suddenly elect to try and force their way into the barn.

  And it also allowed them to make sure the crazy bastard in the house didn’t traipse across the field and murder them while they slept, should he be so inclined.

  Movement caught her eye. She raised her rifle to her shoulder and looked through the 4x mag red dot scope on the weapon’s upper rail. Two stenches bumbled down the hill the soldiers had used to recon the farm. Their gait was slow and clumsy. One wore only a pair of cargo shorts, and its head was covered with a crust of dried gore. Its lips were gone, and it seemed to leer at the world behind a skeletal grin. The second ghoul was a woman, almost totally nude except for one shoe and a pair of filthy pink panties. Its breasts had been savaged, virtually torn from the pale white chest they had previously been anchored to. Its lank hair ruffled in the cool breeze. The sun had set, and twilight stood poised to emerge.

  Crack. Crack. Both stenches went down within two seconds as bullets slammed through their skulls. Biggs started to swing her rifle toward the house, to try and get a look at the shooter in his second floor lair, then thought better of it. He was probably paying attention to the barn, just as she was observing the farm house. Seeing her put a bead on his firing position probably would not be well received by him, even if she had no intention of engaging him. The sniper had said he didn’t kill the living any longer, but Biggs was pretty sure he would do it in a heartbeat if he felt threatened. She didn’t want to go there, so she lowered the rifle from her shoulder instead.

  “Guess he’s going to defend God’s Little Acre for as long as he can, huh?”

  Biggs glanced over her shoulder to see Klein standing behind her. Powers was hauling himself up the ladder in
the background.

  “What?”

  Klein motioned to the house, visible through the open hay loft door. “Our new pal. The jarhead.”

  Biggs shrugged. “Where you from, Specialist?” It was a question service people asked each other all the time. Klein was brand new to her unit, and she didn’t know him at all. As a matter of fact, she could only remember seeing him a few times when they were securing the New Jersey side of the upper George Washington Bridge, along with three other infantry battalions and one New York Army National Guard military police unit.

  “Chicago,” Klein said. He seemed to reconsider his answer. “Well, Winnetka, actually.”

  “Winnetka…ain’t that a money ‘hood?” Powers asked as he stood up in the loft. He looked up at the wood beam ceiling overhead, scowling at the dusty cobwebs that swayed gently in the air.

  Klein shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”

  Powers glared at him. “I hate rich kids,” he said.

  “Then you got no beef with me, Sergeant. I’m not rich.” Klein pulled on the mandarin collar of his ACU coat. “If I was, I probably wouldn’t be wearing this, right?”

  Powers grunted, and said nothing further.

  “Where you from, Sergeant?” Klein asked, after the silence had grown uncomfortable.

  “I come from a place where they kick people’s asses for fucking around. Get your shit squared away. I’m hungry, and I want to take a load off and have somethin’ to eat,” Powers said. He looked at Biggs.

  Biggs nodded to him, then leaned her rifle against a nearby wall and shrugged off her pack. As she opened up the bag, she looked over at Klein.

  “People in this part of the country don’t abandon their homes, Klein.”

  Klein looked at her, confused. “Ma’am?”

  “You said the guy over there”—Biggs jerked her chin toward the farm house—“was going to defend his home for as long as he could. I’m telling you, you’re right. People like him, they’re the salt of the earth. You couldn’t pry them out of their houses, any more than you could take away their guns.”

  “Aw, the guy’s nuts, Captain. He should’ve evacuated days ago.” As he spoke, Klein removed his own MOLLE gear and dropped it to the floor at his feet.