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That's great – it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane – Lenny Bruce is not afraid...
They leave messages wherever and whenever they can and, separated, they roam the lonely desert roads like ghosts. He has to believe that Bravo Actual is still out there. He thinks himself as Bravo Two, and, isolated, completely alone, they struggle to keep each going. They've gone so far that they hold onto each other when they lie down shoulder to shoulder in the dark. Ray rarely sleeps, dry-swallowing Ripped Fuel and restlessly trying to raise a solid signal from the white noise. Brad knows that it never should have done down like this. It had all happened so fucking quickly, devastatingly fast. There was no way that they could have been trained for this. Nobody could have been prepared.
Faithfully, the Reporter writes down what he sees.
On the net, when Ray can raise it, they catch fragments.
Like a story being passed back:
In the Somme,they came up like shocks of bloody flowers and it took a bayonet through the eye to put them down forever. In France, they walked scalpless and were indiscriminate, taking down American and Nazi alike but, in Bastogne, the 101st had been resourceful, roped them to trees and waited for the shells to fall and blow bodies into a confetti of blood and bone. At Guadalcanal, there had been makeshift Molotov cocktails fixed up in beer bottles and discarded coconut shells (Brad had smiled at that part, his first true smile since this whole shit-storm started. He'd nodded. Marines make do). In Afghanistan, none of them remembered seeing the walking dead but maybe they had been harder to see; the living wired to explode had been so common, let alone the dead.
And, everywhere, the faces of your friends.
At twilight, the nine of them hunker down around a weak-ass campfire. They talk but there isn't a man among them who actually relaxes. They're too well trained for that; they're too aware of what's at stake. Sleep only comes on the tail of exhaustion. They find little ways to keep busy while sleepless. Poke writes another letter home; he keeps them together with a rubber band and hopes to one day deliver them. Pappy methodically checks over his sniper rifle; even without a spotter, it's saved their asses more than once. Doc Bryan and Stiney sit so close together, heads nodding so that they almost touch. Brad pretends not to notice how dark the circles under both of their eyes are getting.
And Walt and Trombley sit together in the darkness, SAWs resting across their knees and neither of them talk about it but both of them are watching in the dark.
Brad's seen his fair share of Zombie movies, so he knows how this probably ends. In all likelihood, it doesn't end well for any of them but, somewhere out there in the dark, there's others; Rudy and Q-Tip, Manimal, a handful of others and, if anyone can get them through the end of the world, Brad has to believe that it's Nate Fick (He has to believe that he gets to see Nate at least one last time). He has to put his trust in something; he's never really been on speaking terms with God.
Ray sings less now than he did before – somehow, that's the saddest thing for Brad. When Ray sings, he forces himself to sing too.
"Who the fuck could actually feel fine at the end of the world, Homes?" asks Ray, dark eyes wide and somehow, incredibly, still smiling in a dirt-smeared face. Brad doesn't have an answer for him so he just shrugs and shakes his head. Ray proclaims the song bullshit, but he keeps singing anyway when he goes back to fiddling with his dials.
Brad pushes up out of the pile of rubble that he's been sitting in with a desperate need to piss. Doc Bryan and Stiney have fallen asleep, and one of the Doc's arms is tight across Stiney's chest. Holding tight, holding on. A week ago, when all of this started, Ray had launched into a discussion on what kind of zombie assholes they were up against; '28 Days Later' Rage Zombies or 'Dawn of the Dead' Zombies? Brain munchers or into blood or guts? Doc Bryan had bent low over his knees and tugged off his bandanna, rubbed his fingers through his short hair and shook his head.
"None of them," he'd said, voice rough. "These are zombies of motherfucking indifference."
They'd laughed like it was a joke, at the time.
An hour later and they're back in the Humvees, rattling out of town, bouncing down the rutted road and Brad's got his weapon up, watching his sector, so intently watching his sector that he almost misses it. The flat end wall of an office building, letters five feet high, ringed in fairy-lights, white lights, the kind his Mom used to put up when she decided it wasn't fair for Brad and his sister to miss out on Christmas.
"Stop the vehicle, Ray," he says, his gun dipping, just slightly, as the Humvee rolls to a halt. Over the radio, he can hear the crackle of what the fuck's the hold up, Brad? but Brad's not listening. He opens the door while the wheels are still rolling, and his boots hit the ground.
Ray comes to stand beside him, hands on his hips.
"The LT?" he asks, finally, and Brad nods. He closes his eyes for a couple of seconds and then he opens them.
"Come on," he says, tearing himself away. "We need to stay Oscar Mike."
They can't afford for anything to have time to catch up to them.
White letters. White fairy-lights. One person who he knows that he can believe in, more than any of the others in the whole, wide world. Trust, but more than that. Behind him, the Reporter takes a picture.
EVERYTHING WILL BE ALRIGHT.