The Farm - 05 by Stephen Knight Read Free Book Online Page A

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