by D. J. Molles
Two hours in, he finished prepping the first cut. Now, despite the cold, he was sweating profusely and his shoulders were aching from working overhead. His legs trembling from maintaining his balance so intensely. He’d worked his way over the width of the bridge and from up top dangled a length of det-cord, which he affixed to his series of charges.
The green bag, emptied now for the fifth time, was drawn up and then the rope came back down, this time for Wilson. He got ahold of it with the pole and drew it into his hands, then tied the same knots he’d tied before, forming the harness for himself. Then came the leap of faith.
“All right, take me up!” he shouted, then hung on to the rope.
The sound of the truck revving again, and this time the slack was drawn out. Wilson bent his knees and got low to the pylon, letting the tension draw him off of his perch slowly to reduce the swinging. Then he was hanging in midair again, and the engine grumbled louder and he was being lifted.
Never a sense of relief until he made it over the top and put his feet on solid ground.
Then he took the ropes off of himself, almost a little too eagerly, and let out a big breath.
Dorian was there, smiling, and he gave Wilson a pat on the back. Dark-haired. Olive-complected—Italian, Wilson thought, or maybe Greek. He couldn’t recall. Some sort of Mediterranean descent. He had an aloof manner, but he’d warmed to Wilson over the last few days, and with Wilson’s two best friends dead and missing, he accepted it without much question. It was nice to have someone to talk to.
“God, I really fucking hate that,” Wilson said under his breath.
Dorian gathered the rope up in his arms, still smirking. “You look like a cat in water.”
A new voice called out. “First cut all set up?”
Wilson turned in the direction of the voice, found a blocky-looking man in desert digital camouflage and a tan fleece cap looking down at him from the bed of one of their LMTVs. Behind the man stood stacked crates of explosives, det-cord, and detonators. Some other odds and ends, but mostly just ordnance.
Wilson nodded to the man. “Primed and ready.”
“You packed each side of the I-beams?” the man asked.
“Yeah.”
“And you got det-cord going to each side? It’s all connected?”
“All connected,” Wilson confirmed.
The man in the LMTV swung his legs over the gate and hopped down. After meeting Colonel Staley four days ago, they’d received very little assistance, except for the man that was now standing with them. Lance Corporal Gilmore. Gilmore wasn’t a demolitions expert by any means, but he had more experience with the stuff than Wilson did. He didn’t do much but offer advice and instruction, but acted more like the liaison between Wilson’s crew and Colonel Staley.
More pragmatically put, Gilmore was a way for Staley to keep an eye on them.
Wilson got the distinct feeling that Staley wasn’t going to commit much to them until he had a better grasp of the situation, and certainly not until he’d powwowed with Lee, which had yet to happen. On the one hand, Wilson understood Colonel Staley’s reticence. On the other hand, it irritated the fuck out of him, because he could have really used some help taking out these bridges in a timely manner.
Now they were getting down to the wire, racing the clock every fucking day and trying to stay ahead of the massive infected hordes on the other side of the river. And it seemed like the Marines were nowhere to be found.
Gilmore blew warm air into his thick, stubby-fingered hands, then rubbed them together. “How about you? You good? You need to grab some water? Some food?”
Wilson shook his head. “No, we need to get rolling on the second cut and get the fuck out of here before our friends show up.”
“Which ones?” Gilmore asked with some biting sarcasm. Alluding to the fact that they were deep in territory that was being pushed hard by the Followers. Infected hordes on one side of the river. Violent radicals on the other. Framed in on all sides by enemies.
“Either-or,” Wilson said without humor.
“We’re making the second cut close to the far shore, right?” Gilmore asked, already knowing the answer, but wanting to make sure that Wilson was on the same page.
Wilson started to answer, but all he got out was a nod.
The sound of a roaring engine and screeching tires cut off any further conversation.
Wilson, Dorian, and Gilmore all snapped their heads toward the far side of the bridge. Coming off the highway, seeming to vault its way onto the bridge, a green Humvee charged toward them, a hand held out the driver’s-side window.
“That’s Tim,” Dorian said.
Wilson felt his skin prickle. Electricity tingling in his fingers and toes.
No one wants to see their scout come back, hauling ass like that. It rarely means good news.
The Humvee screeched to a stop just a few yards from Wilson, still coming in so fast by the time it reached them that Wilson and the other two men took a step back, thinking for a half second that the big green vehicle was just going to bowl them all over.
The engine went out of gear, the tone of it changing to a high idle.
The driver’s door swung open and Tim flew out, his long, thin limbs flailing about like a stick-built marionette. One hand gripping his rifle, the other pointed back behind him to the far bank. “The infected’re about five miles out, Wilson! And they’re coming in quick!”
FIVE
HEAD GAMES
WILSON TOUCHED HIS HEAD with both hands. He could feel his own icy fingers against his scalp as he pressed them through his hair. His eyes darted for a second and he had to remind himself that five miles was still too far to see in this terrain.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he whispered to himself, his mind gone to calculations. The ones in these massive hordes moved at a steady clip. Not quite a run, but not quite a walk, either. He’d watched them, his stomach turning, from the opposite bank of the river. They would jog forward, then stop and shuffle along for a bit. They went in spurts, bumping into each other, always scanning around and sniffing the air. Always looking for something edible.
They were also spread out across a large swath of land. It forced them to be unable to stick to roads, and these boggy backwoods would slow their progress. Did he have enough time to set the next cut in the bridge, or should they just run right then and there? The average man could walk three miles per hour over varied terrain. Wilson decided to round up to be safe.
“I give them one hour,” Wilson said, a little shakily. He looked to Lance Corporal Gilmore questioningly. “If you helped me rig the second cut, do you think we could get it done in an hour?”
Gilmore grimaced. “Fuck, that’s cutting it close.”
Wilson felt a little flash of anger that he couldn’t quite explain. He wasn’t the angry type, but you couldn’t just completely ignore the irony of a man who could summon the cure to all your ills with a single direct dial call from his satellite phone, telling you that he wasn’t sure you were going to make it.
“You could always make the call,” Wilson said, trying to mask the heat in his words.
Gilmore’s lips tightened. “I’m not the one making the rules here, bud.”
Wilson looked away from Gilmore before his expression became a full-on glare. “Yeah, I know.” He looked at the ground. Under his feet, thick concrete. Under the concrete, more than a hundred pounds of C4 rigged to blow. You’d think it would be enough to blow one of these fucking bridges, but no. You had to have two cuts. One would just mangle shit up. It would make it impassable for vehicles, but people would still be able to get across, and that included the infected.
What if they decide to start swimming? Wilson wondered. Then this would have all been a damn waste anyways.
He hadn’t seen them swim. Hadn’t seen them do much but splash around in knee-deep water and then scramble out, like it scared them. He wasn’t sure if they didn’t like it, or just weren’t sure what to do with it. May
be they would eventually figure it out. But he hoped they didn’t.
Hope. What a joke.
He looked up at Tim. Pointed at his chest, decisively. “Take one more with you and get down that service road that borders the river on our side. As soon as you get a visual on them, I want you to get their attention.” Wilson took a big breath, exhaled pure anxiety. “Hit them with the fifty. Keep rolling east. See if you can’t convince them to follow you. Or at least slow them down. Can you do that?”
Tim nodded. “We’re runnin’ low on fifty-cal ammo.”
Wilson shot another glance in Gilmore’s direction. They probably had stockpiles of that shit. “Fine,” he said to Tim. “Just do what you can. Try to buy us some time.”
Tim nodded hastily, then ran for the Humvee.
Wilson spoke to Gilmore again. “So you gonna help me or what?”
Gilmore was already walking to the LMTV with all of the ordnance piled in the back. “If we’re gonna do it, let’s do it.”
Lee waited in the woods, facing the back side of Camp Ryder. He was shielded from view by a copse of some evergreen bush that stood as one of the few blots of color in the entire winter-gray landscape. A few other bushes like it ran along the low points and small gullies that came off the hill, created by centuries of rainwater runoff. It provided perfect cover and if he was quiet, his comings and goings went unnoticed.
Well, not unnoticed.
His absence was noticed. But when and where he left and returned was a mystery to everyone else, though he was sure that most could make an educated guess.
Do you feel guilty for this? he questioned himself.
I don’t know. Should I feel guilty?
Maybe.
In the cover of the bush, he waited with Deuce at his side. The dog was a natural hunter. There was no need to teach the dog how to sneak because it seemed that when they left the confines of safety, the dog was doing it automatically. Now the dog stood next to Lee’s crouched form, and he did not move. The dog’s head and tail were low, and he was motionless, except for his eyes and the occasional drift of his head as he peered through the foliage. Much like Lee.
Through the small green leaves of the bush, Lee could see the top of the building and the figure that stood there. The moment that Camp Ryder had been taken back into his control, Lee had posted a guard on the roof, where they had a three-sixty view of the entire camp and could alert the rest if anyone was attempting to breach their fence—particularly any infected.
Particularly the hunters.
The guards did a good job, but they were hardly a challenge for someone with Lee’s training and experience. They developed their patterns, even when they didn’t mean to. And Lee knew this guy. He knew that this guard spent a lot of time facing into the sun. Whether he was just trying to warm his face, or if he thought that hostile forces might use the rising sun as cover, Lee wasn’t sure. But the sun was in the opposite direction as Lee, and at any moment Lee knew the guard would turn himself east, putting his back to Lee for a good minute or two.
When the time came, Lee slid quietly forward, though it was not without effort. Being stealthy was a lot easier when your body was not broken. Deuce followed Lee up to the fence. Lee lifted the chain link and Deuce scooted under, but Lee would not fit, so he opened the cut in the fence—the same one that Devon had cut in the chain link during the assault, as an entry point for their team to take back Camp Ryder from Jerry and his men. They had closed it up with heavy-gauge wire to keep the infected out, since fine motor skills seemed close to impossible for them. But a few twists with nimble fingers opened the gash back up.
It took some dexterity to wrangle the wire from the chain link, especially with cold fingers. The cold, stubborn wire made his fingers ache as he twisted the links open. He sucked on his fingertips to warm them, then continued. He opened the bottom of the cut, crouched down to move through it, checked to make sure the guard was still looking away, then secured the wires again.
He remained calm and steady, tried to control his heart rate and respiration. Being caught worried him, though he was sure he could simply repeat the lie that he told when Angela asked him where he went in the mornings. “For a walk. To be alone for a while.”
“Why do you have to sneak out?”
“Because I don’t want to be followed. And knowing you, Angela, you’d send someone to keep an eye on me and make sure I didn’t get myself killed.”
Plausible enough, he thought. But somehow he knew that being caught in his comings and goings would deepen any suspicions that people might be harboring about what Lee was doing out beyond the wire. It was best to leave it in the realm of the hypothetical.
If you were doing the right thing then you wouldn’t need to hide it from people.
He stood up, started walking. Glanced up at the guard, who was still facing away.
Deuce was trotting out into the open area behind the Camp Ryder building, occasionally looking back to check on Lee’s progress. The dog liked the back wall of the building. It was his personal bulletin board for pissings. With no other dogs inside Camp Ryder, Lee imagined it was like talking to yourself. But Deuce didn’t seem to mind. He made his way to the wall and lifted his leg to give it a sprinkling. Then he stood and waited for Lee.
Lee hesitated. He was close enough to the building that the guard would not be able to see him unless he leaned over the edge and looked down. But here was a moment of relative safety and privacy and in it he leaned against the frosted cinder-block wall of the building and he closed his eyes for a long moment. If only for a moment, he could let his guard down. And he needed to close his eyes. He could feel the start of the pain, creeping around the back of his head, hiding behind his eyes, and slithering down into his gut.
It would come on strong within the next hour. But he was grateful that at least it had waited this long. There was really no way to get it to leave him. No technique that solved the problem. How do you solve the jangled insides of your head after a bullet has struck your skull? The answer was that you didn’t. In the past, you would take heavy doses of pain medication. Now you waited it out. It would go away on its own. Eventually.
A warm presence leaning up against his legs. A curious whine.
Lee let his hand hang down and touched the dog’s head. Cold fur on top. Warm hide below. He pulled himself off the wall of the building, opening his eyes and smiling down at the dog. If a dog could grasp the finer concepts of reality, the weak filaments of our thoughts that kept us bound to our moralities, then Deuce would understand why things were the way they were. Deuce would get it.
When Lee looked up from the dog, he found himself looking at Brian Tomlin.
His heart thudded aggressively for a moment, but then revved down.
Tomlin stood at the corner of the building, arms crossed over his chest, and Lee could not tell whether the body language was stern or simply cold. His expression seemed to be one of concern, instead of confrontation.
“Your head?” Tomlin said quietly.
Lee nodded once.
Tomlin’s eyes tracked up and down, as though trying to see if Lee carried with him any evidence of where he’d been. Then his eyes came up and they bored into Lee, all those questions being funneled into one look. Tomlin seemed to be trying to find the right words.
Lee broke the gaze and looked around them. He spoke before Tomlin could. “Not here.”
“What?”
“We’ll talk. But not here.”
“Okay.”
Lee pointed toward the front of the building and began walking. “Inside. Out of the cold.”
And out of the light, he added silently.
Tomlin fell into step with Lee and Deuce, and they walked to the front of the Camp Ryder building and then inside. Neither spoke. They looked outward, catching eye contact from other people in the camp. Lee searched the faces of the people that they passed, and wondered if they knew the truth. But they either didn’t know or didn’t care one way or th
e other. They all gave him a nod, and that funny half smile that people give another person they seem to respect but simultaneously view as unapproachable.
He’d gone in and out of the Camp Ryder building so many times now that the smell seemed more familiar and present in his mind than the smell of his old house. The smell of grease and old fuel, still just faintly clinging to the building despite everything else that had inundated it since it had been used for those purposes—all the cook fires and the shanties that had once been erected in here, and the reek of filthy people sweating in the summer heat.
That was when Lee had first come to this place.
A lot had happened since then.
Many people had died.
Many nightmares had become simple facts. All of them had changed. The world without, and the world within, each always affecting the other. So the world changed, and people adapted, and their adaptation forced more change. This was the laws of thermodynamics, Lee knew. Everything is in a constant state of atrophy. And yet the decay had no bottom, no endpoint. It seemed there was always room for things to worsen. Unless they all died. Unless all the people in the world killed each other, and the few that were left were eaten by the infected. Then what had been an aberration would be the new humankind. Unless, of course, they then simply ate themselves. Ate themselves until there was only one, fat, engorged bastard left. And then he would die. And he would become dirt. And everything else would continue on, sans humanity, and probably, it would be okay.
These types of thoughts tended to crowd Lee’s brain just before the onset of his daily nuclear headaches. He wondered if it was something that had been knocked loose, some little gland somewhere in his brain stem that wasn’t getting a signal to stop spewing nonsense chemicals into his brain. Or maybe it wasn’t physiological at all. Maybe it was all just a state of mind.
Maybe you just need to quit bitching, he told himself, halfheartedly. You’re alive. You’re still kicking. Still doing work. What else do you need?
Soft bed warm shower hot food.