Fireteam Delta, J. Halpin [online e book reading .txt] 📗

“Dead people that get up and walk?” Summers amended.

“Oh. Yes! Skeen eat dead, lay egg, then wear dead. Trick people to come close, then eat, make dead, make more skeen. Only mother smart.”

“It’s like a parasite, then?” Cortez asked from atop the Humvee.

Asle tilted her head once again.

“We’ve got to teach her more words,” Summers said after a few seconds.

“They sound like skin-walkers,” Adams said. “They’re a Navajo thing. Creepy as shit. Talk in your voice, just like these things did. Not sure about the dead part, though,” he explained.

“Okay, then. Everyone in favor of not having an army of zombies behind us, say aye.” Nowak raised his voice slightly for emphasis.

It was unanimous.

“So, ideas on how we accomplish that?” Nowak asked the group. “I don’t know if we have the manpower to bury it all.”

Cortez beamed. “I got an idea, Sarge.”

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Boom!

Even from a distance, Summers could feel the impact from the explosion in his bones. Cortez had mounted every bit of boom she could to the Humvee, but they still had some of the larger ordinance left over.

So, the solution they’d settled on was to dig a pit, then blow it all to hell, creating a larger, more accommodating pit. Rinse and repeat. Once they’d finished their pit, they tossed in a few thermite grenades to ensure that nothing was getting back up or being used ever again.

Summers stood with the others as they finished their mass pyre, hoping that the burnt barbecue smell wouldn’t linger in his memory for long. He’d picked out the face of the private who had, in a fashion, given his life to save Summers and his friends. He said a silent prayer for the man before they turned to finish packing up the camp.

The explosions had taken care of their problems in one fell swoop, as explosions tended to do. Say what you want about the army, when you need something blown to hell, accept no substitutes.

“Got the helmet?” Nowak asked.

Summers handed over a helmet filled to the brim with dog tags they’d taken off the bodies. Nowak nodded and started heading back toward the Humvee. Pragmatic as they were, they still felt some level of respect for the dead. If they lived long enough to make it back home, at least the families would have something left to bury.

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The Humvee was hard to see at this point under the sheer mountain of ordinance strapped to it. Some were quite literally strapped. With duct tape. Summers looked over at Cortez, who was securing even more crap onto the increasingly ridiculous-looking pile.

“Almost done packing your toys?” Summers asked.

Cortez just beamed in response. “I’m going to get to blow up so much shit. I can just feel it.”

“I appreciate the optimism.” Summers smiled back.

Cortez hopped down, her smile dimming.

“How’s our boy doing? He said anything yet?”

“Nothing coherent,” Summers responded. She was talking about Logan. It had only been a few days since the fight, but his condition wasn’t improving. They’d managed to wire him up to an IV and get some new blood into him. Summers’ blood, actually. Turns out, he was the only O-negative in the group, so he’d be acting as the resident blood bag for the foreseeable future. Which was just dandy, as far as he was concerned.

“Nowak knows we’re not going to be able to do it on the road, right? Why’s he dragging his feet?” Cortez asked.

“How’d you feel if you woke up missing a leg?” Summers responded. They’d hoped that Logan would have been awake by now. His leg had taken a turn from “terrible” to “god-awful” to “Jesus Christ” in the span of a few short days. They needed to take it off, but Nowak didn’t want to do it without some sort of consent from Logan himself—a stipulation that was proving to be more difficult than anticipated.

“You’re right, though. Guy’s not going to last much longer,” Summers responded.

Cortez gave him a long, even stare. “Fine. We’ll talk to Nowak. If it helps him sleep better at night, he can blame me.”

“How ’bout this, we’ll put it to a vote, all right? If Logan has a problem with it, he can blame all of us.”

“Fine,” Cortez agreed. With a sigh, Summers headed back to the cave’s entrance.

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The vote was unanimous. Even Asle agreed, once they’d explained the situation. The poor kid had done her damnedest to stay at Logan’s side for as often as she could manage. Nowak worked quickly after that, and they managed to stitch up Logan’s leg just below the knee. He didn’t scream. He didn’t react at all—which was, in some ways, more worrying than the alternative.

After they got him settled and ensured his stitches wouldn’t be popping open in the back seat, they loaded up in the Humvee and took off due south.

“You sure he’s not going to wake up?” Adams asked. He glanced at Logan in the back, where he was propped up on a makeshift bed of ammunition and a briefcase Summers could only assume housed something equally deadly.

“Sure as hell hope not. We gave him enough morphine to kill an elephant,” Nowak called back. He was riding shotgun, while Summers drove.

In the rearview, Summers noticed Asle fidgeting. “It’s just an expression. He’s just going to be asleep for a while.”

Her expression didn’t change, but her shoulders relaxed. He’d noticed that happened a lot. Maybe elves, or whatever she was, were more expressive in body language than anything else. Which meant she could have been terrified after the ordeal earlier and none of them noticed. Just one more guilty fact to file away in the dark recesses of his mind and never revisit again.

Nowak looked over a journal with scribblings of rivers and