“Did you say we’re out here for people today?” Mark asked, remembering their brief conversation when he first got into the truck.
“Yep.”
“Great.”
A double pisser. Excursions outside the city were always more risky and unpredictable when civilians were involved. More importantly, if they weren’t out here collecting supplies, there’d be nothing for them to take a cut from when they got back.
“Look on the bright side,” Marshall said under his breath, sharing Mark’s disappointment and almost managing to smile. “Loads more of those cunts die when the public are involved.”
He was right. As soon as the first civilians took a step out of their hiding place, hordes of Haters would inevitably descend on them from every direction. Maybe that was the plan? Easy pickings for the helicopter and the forty or so armed soldiers traveling with them in this convoy. He wondered what kind of state the survivors they rescued would be in. Would they even be worth rescuing? He couldn’t imagine how they’d managed to last for so long out here. Christ, it had been hard enough trying to survive back in the city. If these people thought their situation was going to get better after they were rescued, they were very wrong.
The road they followed used to be a busy commuter route into town, permanently packed with traffic. In today’s baking afternoon heat it was little more than a silent, rubbish-strewn scar that snaked its way between overgrown fields and run-down housing projects. Sandwiched between the first military vehicle and the squat armored troop transport bringing up the rear, the three empty, high-sided wagons clattered along, following the clear path that had been snowplowed through the chaos like the carriages of a train following an engine down the track. Still bearing the bright-colored logos and ads of the businesses that had owned them before the war, they were conspicuously obvious and exposed as they traveled through the dust-covered gray of everything else.
Mark stared at the back of a row of houses they thundered past, convinced he’d seen the flash of a fast-moving figure. There it was again, visible just for a fraction of a second between two buildings, a sudden blur of color and speed. Then, as he was trying to find the first again, a second appeared. It was a woman of average height and slender build. She athletically scrambled to the top of a pile of rubble, then leaped over onto a parched grass verge, losing her footing momentarily before steadying herself, digging in, and increasing her pace. She sprinted alongside the convoy, wild hair flowing in the breeze behind her like a mane, almost managing to match the speed of the five vehicles. Mark jumped in his seat as a lump of concrete hit the truck door, hurled from the other side of the road and missing the window he was looking through by just a few inches. Startled, he glanced into the side mirror and saw that they were being chased. His view was limited, but he could see at least ten figures in the road behind the convoy, running after them. They were never going to catch up, but maybe they sensed the vehicles would be stopping soon. They kept running with a dogged persistence, the gap between them increasing but their speed and intent undiminished. He looked anxiously from side to side and saw even more of them moving through the shadows toward the road. Their frantic, unpredictable movements made it hard to estimate how many of them there were. It looked like there were hundreds.
Marshall remembered the place they were heading to from before the war, a modern office building in the middle of an out-of-town business park; as part of his job in his former life he’d made deliveries to a depot nearby on numerous occasions. He was glad he was following and not leading the way today. It was getting harder to navigate out here, and he’d convinced himself they had farther to go than they actually did. Everything looked so different out here beyond the exclusion zone, the landscape overgrown and pounded into submission after months of continuous fighting. A reduction in the number of undamaged buildings was matched by a marked increase in the level of rubble and ruin. There were more corpses here, too. Some were heavily decayed, sun-dried and skeletal; others appeared fresh and recently slaughtered. Christ, he thought to himself, not wanting to voice his fears and observations, what would this place be like a few months from now? There were already weeds everywhere, pushing up through cracks in the pavements and roads and clawing their way up partially demolished buildings, no municipal workers with weed-killer sprays left to halt their steady advance. Recent heavy rainstorms and the relative heat of early summer had combined to dramatically increase both the rate of growth of vegetation and the rate of decay of dead flesh. Everything seemed now to have a tinge of green about it, like mold spreading over spoiled food. The outside world looked like it was rotting, and the stench that hung heavy in the air was unbearable.
High above the line of trucks, the helicopter suddenly banked hard to the right and dropped down. Mark leaned forward and watched its rapid descent, knowing that the sudden change in flight path meant they’d reached their destination. Despite an irrational fear of heights, at moments like this he wished he were up there picking off the enemy from a distance rather than trying to deal with them down at ground level. Not that he was expected to fight unless he had to, of course. His role was simply to get as much food, supplies, civilians, or whatever they were out here to acquire into the trucks in as short a time as possible. He wasn’t stupid, though. He knew that these missions were often little more than thinly veiled excuses to stir up as many of the enemy as possible, draw them into a specified location, and blow the shit out of them. Their uncoordinated, nomadic behavior and apparently insatiable desire to kill made them surprisingly easy to manipulate and control. Any activity outside the exclusion zone would inevitably cause most of them within an unexpectedly wide radius to surge toward the disturbance, where they could be taken out with ease. And if civilians, soldiers, or volunteers like him got hurt in the process? That was an acceptable risk he had to get used to. Anyone was expendable as long as at least one Hater died with him.
The convoy swung the wrong way around a traffic circle, then joined the road that led into the business park. Once well maintained and expensively landscaped, it was now as run-down and overgrown as everywhere else. The snowplow truck smashed through a lowered security barrier, then accelerated again, bouncing up into the air and clattering heavily back down as it powered over speed bumps. Mark could see the office building up ahead, the sun’s fierce reflection bouncing back at him from its grubby bronzed-glass fascia. He tried to look for an obvious entrance, but at the speed they were approaching it was impossible. He clung to the sides of his seat and lurched forward as Marshall, following the lead of the driver in front, turned the truck around in a tight arc and backed up toward the building. He slammed on the brakes just a couple of yards short of the office, parallel with the other vehicles.
Mark didn’t want to move.
Marshall glared at him. “Go!”
He didn’t argue. The tension and fear suddenly evident in Marshall ’s voice were palpable. Mark jumped down from the cab and sprinted around to open up the back of the truck. He was aware of sudden noise and movement all around him as soldiers poured out of their transports and formed a protective arc around the front of the building and the rest of the convoy, sealing them in. More soldiers, maybe a fifth of their total number, ran towards the office building’s barricaded entrance doors and began to try to force their way inside. A burned-out car surrounded by garbage cans full of rubble blocked the main doorway.