The Remaining: Allegiance

by D. J. Molles

  They had kept up a quick pace. Tomlin could tell from the way his body threatened to roll and the man keeping him pinned almost lost his balance when they went into a turn. He thought about trying to jump up when the man’s balance was off and just throwing himself off the pickup bed, but then he thought that he had no idea where he was or where he was going and for all he knew they could be driving through streets that were crowded with hostile forces. And then the man pinned him again with his knee before Tomlin could give it another thought.

  When they stopped, they stopped hard. The crew that had captured him didn’t talk much, save for a few mumbled commands that Tomlin couldn’t make out. They had clearly done this before, and had enough practice that they were fluid without having to communicate each move. They took him up and hauled him out of the pickup truck. Tomlin stayed limp. There was truly no point in resisting them at this point. He couldn’t run, he couldn’t fight, and he couldn’t see.

  You’re not here to fight anyway, he told himself. You’re here to try to make an ally. And this is normal. This is exactly how you would do it if some guy came waltzing into your compound.

  Well, maybe not quite like this.

  He thought about how Lee had conducted Camp Ryder. Kind of an open-door policy, with a little bit of vetting mixed in. But Lee was a little kinder about it than Tomlin might have been. However, to give Lee his dues, Camp Ryder had grown a lot more rapidly and successfully than his own budding group of survivors, before he had left them down in South Carolina.

  And Camp Ryder betrayed him, Tomlin thought grimly.

  But that was always the catch. You could do it safe and slow, or you could do it hard and fast. Either way was a risk. And it was clear to Tomlin that whoever was in control of Fort Bragg preferred to play it safe and slow. Or they were just going to rob and murder him like everyone else that wandered into their trap, looking for help. But that remained to be seen.

  Once out of the truck, they brought him into some place. He wasn’t sure where, but he was sure he was inside, which brought him a momentary burst of relief. It was warm and it was dry. A little warmer than it really should have been, and Tomlin couldn’t smell or hear a fire.

  Electricity?

  They had electricity at Camp Ryder, but it was only enough to run the radio in the office, and certainly wasn’t for such frivolous things as heat. At Johnston Memorial Hospital in Smithfield, they had big diesel generators that could be turned on to power the entire hospital, but Lee had told him that they rarely did it, due to how much fuel it used up. The last time they turned on the generators was when Jacob was there, running his tests on the infected female that he’d captured. And now Jacob was gone, as well as Doc Hamilton, and anybody else that knew what the fuck to do with a hospital.

  So in the shocking warmth and dryness, Tomlin was shoved to his knees and there he stayed until he heard a heavy door swing open roughly. For the moment that the door was open, he could hear the rain driving outside.

  Wet rubber-soled shoes squeaked as they crossed the floor, halting just in front of Tomlin.

  “This is the new guy, huh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, they’re poppin’ outta the woodwork now, aren’t they?” There was a momentary sigh. “Take off the hood.”

  The black hood came off.

  Tomlin blinked. A medium-sized man with a balding head and a trimmed beard was looking down at him. At first the man’s eyes were bored and cold but then suddenly they sparked and narrowed and the man pulled his head back, as though he was trying to get a different perspective of Tomlin.

  “What’s your name?” the man asked, warily.

  Tomlin found his own eyes narrowing. “Brian Tomlin.”

  Both Tomlin and the man’s eyes went wide at the same time, but it was Tomlin who voiced the recognition first: “Holy shit. What the hell are you doing here?”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  STOPGAP

  THE BAD NEWS CAME in heavy hammer blows, and it didn’t stop until Lee felt almost breathless. Wilson was dead. One of the northern hordes had made it over the Roanoke River and into North Carolina. Eden was lost and Harper had been forced to retreat. Julia was badly injured and needed to be shipped back to Camp Ryder. A second northern horde was leaking out of Eden and it wouldn’t be long until they were moving south as well. For all intents and purposes, the plan to keep the hordes out of North Carolina had failed.

  For all the bitter pills to swallow, one kept lodging in his throat.

  Wilson died. And LaRouche is gone, probably dead. That was the group I was supposed to meet up with. Before everything fell apart and Eddie Ramirez stole my GPS. I should’ve been there. I could have helped them.

  In the office, it was Lee sitting in a chair behind the desk with the radio receiver clutched in white knuckles. Colonel Staley sat in front of the desk. Between them, the desk was laid with the map of North Carolina that Lee had appropriated from the wall. The points where the Roanoke River plan had failed were marked on the map with little black X’s. Behind Staley, Brinly hadn’t spoken much, but he absorbed everything in his silence and kept watching Lee, always evaluating, it seemed.

  Deuce had found his way back to the office. He looked perturbed when he came through the door, and then even more so when he looked around the room and saw how many people were crammed into that small area. Strangers that he didn’t know. He grumbled, his head and tail hanging low, and slunk around to the desk, hugging the wall. Then he curled up at Lee’s feet, underneath the desk.

  Lee leaned over and hung the radio receiver back onto its cradle. Staley had had the information before Lee, and had relayed it to him once they were behind closed doors. A quick hail from Lee’s radio setup received the same information from Harper, and after a few calls, Dorian responded from Wilson’s group and confirmed the bad news on their end as well. Both elements had attempted to contact Camp Ryder when things had gone bad, but Lee had been out of Camp Ryder, and Angela had been avoiding the office. Lee was pissed about that at first—pissed and feeling a little guilty—until he realized there was absolutely nothing he could have done for either group just by hearing the bad news. Wilson’s group was on the run, back toward Camp Ryder, trying to pick their way south through prickly unknown territory they believed might have recently been covered by the Followers. Harper’s group was holed up with a squad of Staley’s Marines in a small town several miles southeast of Eden, waiting for further instructions.

  Staley spoke softly, as he was in the habit of doing. The very opposite of the leather-lunged Marine that people somehow expected. “Far be it from me to tell you what to do with your people, Captain Harden. However, having them in the north is not doing us any good anymore.” He leaned forward and pointed to the map. “I understand that you wanted to use Eden as the pinch point. That was a good plan, I’ll admit, but I don’t think it’s manageable right now. Without the bridge east of Eden being demo’d, the area they can spread through would be too large for us to hold them to.”

  Lee felt a small measure of indignation rising up in him. But that was just prideful feelings. Everything Staley said was correct. And at the end of the day, Staley was a colonel, and Lee was just a captain. Lee was not holding himself to military decorum—he would do what he saw fit—but he was smart enough to recognize that Staley had years of experience on him and his advice was likely sound.

  Besides, Lee had already come to the same bitter conclusion.

  Staley continued, gesturing to the Highway 421 corridor. “You say this is your supply route that has been cleared, correct? The route to Eden?”

  Lee nodded. “Yeah. It should be clear. Harper’s group can probably make the trip within a day, as long as something doesn’t slow them down. We haven’t been seeing roadblocks much, but there’s always the chance of infected.”

  “Of course.” Staley considered the map.

  Lee rubbed his chin. His beard was getting a bit long. “I was honest with you about both our stre
ngths and our weaknesses here at Camp Ryder. I know it’s uncomfortable for you, but in order for us to come up with a plan, I need to know what you’re capable of.”

  Staley leaned back. He looked over his shoulder at First Sergeant Brinly. “I think First Sergeant Brinly would likely have more up-to-date information on that than I do. He is the one in charge of keeping the day-to-day operations out of Camp Lejeune running smoothly.”

  Brinly stepped up and leaned a single fist on the desk, looking down at the map with a slow, thoughtful sigh. He was likely doing the same thing as Staley and Lee: trying to come up with another plan. And for a moment, Lee found it nice to not be completely alone in his impossible deliberations. Misery loved company.

  “Our strengths.” Brinly seemed to consider the words. When he spoke, he rounded his consonants and shortened his vowels. Some mixture of rural Midwest with a dash of Chicago. Despite his somewhat stony demeanor, he spoke with plenty of inflection. “Our strengths are in numbers and equipment. We’ve got plenty of fighting men, and a whole shitload of civilians that have volunteered and gone through an abbreviated boot camp. I wouldn’t call them Marines, but they’re more than just cannon fodder. As far as equipment goes, we’ve got helos. Mostly SuperCobras, but we have a few Chinooks, as well. And some arty. I think we have fourteen M198s, and plenty of trucks to tow them with, and men to drive the trucks.”

  Brinly rubbed his face. He kept himself clean-shaven but had a five o’clock shadow now, and his fingers made a raspy, sandpapery sound as he drew them across his cheeks. “Our weakness is aviation fuel and small arms and ammunition. We’ve got plenty of ordnance for the helos and arty, but I’ve got Marines that don’t have weapons and not enough ammunition to go around to the ones that do. We can pound shit into dust, but we can’t hold territory.”

  It was not what Lee wanted to hear. His group was much the same, though on a smaller scale. Without access to his bunkers, Lee was not able to keep the people inside Camp Ryder armed. He had hoped that Camp Lejeune would have been able to throw some small arms and ammunition their way, as well as the help from air support and artillery pieces.

  At the same time that he felt himself cringing at the news, he supposed it made sense. Camp Lejeune was a large military base, and the city around it would have had a lot of citizens trying to get inside the gates of the base. The Marines had probably spent a good amount of their resources not only protecting themselves, but, with a larger population to care for, they would have had to invest more small arms and ammunition in scavenging parties.

  Plus there were the Followers. That was clearly taking up some resources.

  What came as an unpleasant surprise to Lee was the issue of aviation fuel. He glanced between Staley and Brinly. “How much longer do you think you can keep running your birds?”

  The first sergeant grimaced. “We started out with plenty. Unfortunately, with our small arms becoming depleted, we had to figure out other ways of keeping pressure on the Followers.” Here Brinly paused and exchanged a quick look with Staley. If Lee hadn’t been paying attention, he might have missed it. But there was something there. Something between the two men that smelled to Lee like an unresolved issue.

  With a quick breath, Brinly continued. “We were consistently mounting ground assaults on the Followers, mostly hitting their raiding parties and supply chains, but about two weeks ago we started to realize that the cost of ammunition for these raids was getting too high to sustain. So keeping pressure on them has now fallen to our air wings. Prior to that, we’d burned through maybe a thousand gallons of fuel. In the last two weeks alone we’ve gone through almost thirty percent of our reserves. We’re running nine birds—seven SuperCobras and two Chinooks—depending on what’s down for repairs at the time. We can reliably have one of the Chinooks available for transport, like today, or four of the attack helicopters on the ready at any one point in time.”

  Lee leaned forward and looked at the map. There was really no skirting around the issue. He knew that he didn’t like playing word games with people, and he wanted to assume that two military men that had survived the collapse of the nation they were sworn to serve would also have no time for blowing sunshine in each other’s asses.

  “I think we both know that we’re playing a stop-loss game here,” Lee said. “I’d meant to cut off the threat completely, but obviously that ain’t gonna happen now. So we know that the infected have busted through at two points, and maybe some points between that we don’t even know about. But I think we both know that what has managed to get across the Roanoke River so far is just the tip of the iceberg. And neither of us is prepared to deal with the whole iceberg.”

  Staley smiled humorlessly. “You make me feel like the Titanic.”

  Lee shook his head. “I’ve no intention of drowning, but we need to plug up the leaks while we’re still afloat.” He dragged his finger along the thin blue line that skirted the top of North Carolina. Along it the points where bridges crossed the Roanoke River were circled in red. “I’ve still got more than a dozen possible crossing points sitting intact over the river and no way to get to them at this point. It’s clear that the teams I sent were too little, too late.”

  Staley leaned forward and tapped the map with one, long index finger. “You want to know if we have the fuel to run demo sorties with our birds and take out the rest of the crossings before more of them get across.”

  Lee shrugged. “It’s either that or we go ahead and call it a day. Pack up and head for Middle America and hope that President Briggs is a forgiving man. And I can personally attest that he is not.” Lee splayed his hands out in front of him. “It’s a foregone conclusion for me, gentlemen. I’m not sure how you feel about the issue, but for me there’s only one way out of this shit storm, and I think everyone in this room knows what it is.”

  Staley glanced up at Lee, then back down at the map. Lee shifted his gaze to Brinly and found the man’s gray eyes settled on him, not communicating much of his thoughts except that he was deep within them.

  Staley dragged his fingers off the map. “This is by no means a commitment on my part. But if we are even capable of carrying out the number of sorties necessary to demo every bridge that crosses the Roanoke, we still have the two hordes that have already broken through. Based on the reports I’m getting from my men, they’re quite sizable. Even one of them has the potential to wipe us out or put us on the run.”

  Brinly leaned over the map to take a look. “From everything that we’ve seen—and, Captain Harden, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong—these larger groups, or hordes, tend to follow lines of drift. The most popular being highways. They go along the path of least resistance. So isn’t there a chance they just follow whatever road they’re on south and eventually right out of the state? Hell, we just lie low for a few months, they could be gone.”

  Lee gave him an uncertain look. “If you guys blow those bridges, and if it’s only those two hordes we have to deal with… yes. There is a possibility that they will just pass us right by. There’s also a possibility that they won’t—there’s a whole lot of roads that crisscross this country, and there’s no telling where they might randomly decide to hang a right or left. Just because they’re heading due south now doesn’t mean that’s what they’ll continue to do. As it was put to me when I found out about this whole thing, it seems like they’re moving where the food is. In general, they’re moving south, but it’s only because there’s no food left up north. They could just as easily come south, spread out and rip everything bare, and then move on to South Carolina.”

  Lee turned to Staley. “Which brings me to my second point. Call me a hopeless idealist if you want, but I can’t just let a half million infected roll by me and wish the next fuckers in line best of luck. That’s not how it works for me, and I hope to God that’s not how it works for you.” Lee shook his head, finding himself getting angry with no real reason. “The buck needs to stop with us. We can’t just shirk this off on somebody else. W
e’re not talking about maybe some people die. We’re talking about a fucking massacre.”

  He took a breath to chill his indignation. He didn’t want to get too fired up and appear like a hothead on the issue. “If the moral obligation isn’t enough for you, I can give you a good practical reason. Have you had any opportunity to observe these… things?”

  “What?” Staley frowned. “Hordes? Or infected in general?”

  “Either, but mainly the hordes is where we’ve seen it.”

  “Seen what?”

  “They’re people, Colonel. They’re not fucking mindless. They think, though it’s stunted. And they still have every bit of instinct coursing through them that we do. That’s what leads them to group together, to hunt, to feed.”

  Brinly seemed to catch on before the words were said. His face twisted up. “No…”

  Lee explained what they had learned. From the dark, smoky back room of the den in Sanford where they’d first discovered them, to the information that Jacob had recorded in his journal, he spilled it all out and held nothing back. There was no point in keeping any of it a secret. It would only benefit them to understand the gravity of the situation.

  Afterward, Lee allowed them their moment of silence as they absorbed the information. He’d needed that moment himself, when he’d found all of this out. When it seemed that they had managed to wrap their brains around it, he raised his brow. “Do you guys see why this needs to be handled now and not later?”

  Staley nodded grimly. “I understand the need. However, I need to understand your plan for doing it. It’s one thing to recognize that you need to exterminate a population numbering in the millions. It’s another thing to actually carry it out. And with resources the way they are…”

  “Tell me about your field artillery,” Lee said.

  “Hundred-fifty-five millimeter howitzers,” Brinly replied. “We’ve got fourteen pieces operational and crewed. I’ve got three more pieces that are good to go, but I got no crews to serve them.” Brinly took a seat with an exhausted huff. “But… problem is, and always has been, the Followers. We’ve managed to push them away from Camp Lejeune and give ourselves some breathing room. But it’s a fucking game of Whac-A-Mole and it seems like they don’t intend to leave. We hit one compound, but it just moves and sets up someplace else. And with our infantry running out of ammunition and small arms, it’s becoming impossible to hold the ground we take with our attack helicopters. So the Followers have essentially created a moat around us. Pretty much everything between Wilmington and here is their territory. If we try to move fourteen field artillery pieces out of Camp Lejeune without a proper infantry escort, we won’t own that artillery very long.”