by D. J. Molles
They made it into Sanford, to the tallest building they could find. Some four-story structure on the corner of Steele Street and Carthage Street that bore a sign of faded white paint across red brick that declared it the Sanford Business College. The doors and windows were already busted in, so Lee and LaRouche made their way to the stairs and went up to the roof.
Clearing the entire building would have taken too much time, but as they ascended the stairwell, they opened the door to each level and listened carefully. Their concern was with any human occupation, rather than infected. Except in the pursuit of prey, infected tended to stay on the ground. They heard nothing at each floor, and if the building was occupied, those inside were staying very quiet.
As they went, Lee thought about the lack of females, and the more he thought about it the more he began to insist to himself that they would see some today. Sanford had the biggest population of any city they’d cleared since Smithfield, so it stood to reason the horde would be larger or there would be several hordes inside the city. It was just a numbers game.
Surely there would be females here.
And when they saw the females, that knot in the cradle of his stomach would go away. Things would go back to their relative normalcy. The infected would be the same enemy, and he would continue to deal with them in the same ways. The lack of females in the last few cities would be a curiosity but nothing more. There would be nothing new to worry about.
They reached the roof, dropped their packs, and settled in.
They waited.
Hours passed.
The hard roof and brick abutment became uncomfortable, and the two men shifted positions often. They sipped water to stay hydrated and occasionally ate a strip of deer jerky to stave off hunger. Frequently one of them would poke his head over the ledge to see if a horde had emerged from their den, but they both knew before looking that there wasn’t—they would have been able to hear it or smell it.
The knot in Lee’s stomach cinched itself a little tighter.
Around midday, LaRouche rose to his knees, exposing his entire torso, and let out an exasperated sigh. “What the fuck, man? This place is a goddamned ghost town.”
Lee wanted to tell him to settle down, that they would show up, but the truth was that LaRouche had taken the words right out of his mouth. He hitched one arm onto the abutment and pulled himself to his knees beside the sergeant. Together, they looked out over the city.
Across from them stood a bank, more shops, a diner. There were no cars parked alongside the road, which was odd. Plenty of trash, though. More than a few shell casings glittered on the concrete below them. Here and there, an empty magazine ejected from an M4. Trails of pockmarks ran across brick walls like ellipses on an unfinished sentence.
Something violent had happened.
Nothing unusual.
There were a few bodies, decayed and beginning to skeletonize. Other than their quiet presence, the place was deserted.
“I dunno,” Lee said tightly.
“I feel like we usually have eyes on them by now.”
“Maybe they’re in another section of the city.”
“Could be.”
“Maybe we should move.” Lee raised one knee and rested his elbow there.
LaRouche made a face and looked out at the city again. “Well, we’ve already wasted half the day.”
Lee nodded. “I say we move south toward the other end of town, see if we can catch sight of the horde.”
“If there is one.”
“Why wouldn’t there be?”
“I don’t know.” LaRouche shrugged and said no more.
Lee stood and shouldered his pack. “There’ll be a horde.”
Almost as though he hoped for it.
On his feet, he could see farther over the abutment to the south end of town. Steele Street stretched out and continued on through several intersections. He wished they could cut across the tops of the buildings. Roofs had become a sort of safety zone for them. The ground was where the danger was.
Lee moved toward the door to the stairwell. “Let’s get going.”
“Hold up…”
Lee glanced behind him, expecting to see LaRouche dawdling with his pack, but instead the man was standing, his neck extended out, focused intently on something to the south, tense like a bird dog with its eyes on a quail. Lee instinctively tried to follow LaRouche’s gaze, but there was so much to see from this vantage point that he had no idea what the sergeant was looking at.
“What is it?”
LaRouche waved a hand and knelt. “Get down… Come here.”
Lee watched him duckwalk quickly to the southern-facing abutment and peer over. Lee followed closely behind, settling to his knees but looking at LaRouche rather than over the abutment. “What is it? What do you see?”
“I can’t tell,” LaRouche whispered. “Way down there at the intersection.”
Lee rose slowly so he could just see over the abutment to the intersection south of them. “What am I looking for?”
“Across the intersection, you see that two-toned building? Red on top, white on bottom?”
“Yeah.”
“You see the entry to that building? Right there next to the square pillar. I think it’s a person.”
Lee stared at the building, squinting against the low-slung sun. “I don’t see…”
The words rolled to a stop on his tongue as a head poked out from behind the pillar. He couldn’t see its features from this distance, but he could see it looking around as though scanning for threats. After a moment of this looking back and forth, it disappeared and then emerged again, dragging something behind it—what looked like the lower half of a dog.
“Shit,” LaRouche whispered.
“That ain’t a person,” Lee murmured.
It dragged its prize quickly across the street, then paused on the other side to look around again.
“Why can’t it be a person? You’ve never eaten dead dog?” LaRouche was trying to make a joke, but when Lee snapped a look at him, there was a thin sheen of sweat across his brow that belied his lackadaisical attitude.
The person, the creature, the infected—whatever the hell it was—must have determined that the coast was clear again. It reached down and grabbed one of the dog’s legs and pulled it around the corner toward an open building door, and then disappeared inside.
“Where’s he going?” LaRouche asked shakily.
“Den, maybe.”
“What, are they hoarding food?”
“I don’t know. I’m watching the same damn thing you are.”
A minute passed.
The infected came out from the darkness of the building, this time without the dog’s hindquarters. Still in the shade of the building’s portico, it looked back and forth, and then scampered across the street where it had come from.
“I’ve never seen them that cautious before,” Lee said quietly, as though the infected might hear him from so far away.
“You think it’s a pack or a horde?”
“There’s only one.”
“What do you think he’s a part of?”
Lee shook his head. “I’ve never seen a pack this far into an urban area.”
“So you think it’s a horde?”
Lee didn’t answer.
“What do we do?” LaRouche asked after a moment.
“I wanna know what the fuck is in that building.”
LaRouche suddenly ducked and pointed. “There he is again!” he hissed.
The same movements. Stopping at the building across the street, poking the head out, looking back and forth a few times, running across, looking back and forth… but this one was different.
“Not the same one,” Lee said. “The other one was wearing a shirt and jeans. This one’s just got some khaki shorts, it looks like.”
“What’s it holding?”
They both squinted. The infected at the corner was holding something cradled in its two spindly arms but they coul
dn’t tell what it was. It disappeared into the building and came back out a moment later with nothing in its arms. Before crossing the street again, it looked both ways, as though it were a pedestrian concerned about vehicular traffic. For a moment, its gaze lingered in their direction and Lee felt his heart jump into his throat. But then the creature jogged across the street and disappeared, following the same trail as the other infected.
“They’re like ants,” Lee stated with sudden certainty. “They’re out there scavenging something and bringing it back to their den. They’ve got a fucking den inside that building.”
LaRouche kept chewing at his lip. “We could take ’em out in their den while they’re sleeping.”
Lee looked at him like he was insane. “Not a fucking chance. I’m not wandering into that building in the dark to fight some infected. That’s nuts.”
“Okay.” LaRouche didn’t put up an argument.
Apparently he didn’t like the sound of his own idea.
“No.” Lee looked back toward the south. “We’ll do a trap in the morning. Catch ’em right outside of the den. Once we’ve wiped ’em out, we’ll check out the den.”
“We should do some more recon.”
Lee nodded. “We need to get a head count on them, and I want to see what they’re scavenging.”
“All right.” LaRouche took a deep breath, like he was preparing to take a dive. “Let’s do it.”
They made for the stairs and headed for the ground floor. They were quicker going down than they’d been coming up, and in a minute or two Lee peeked out of the building and took a glance at the city around him. It was devoid of life, just as before. They faced north, onto Carthage Street.
Moving with cautious urgency, they slipped out and hugged the wall of the building, jogging west for a short distance and then quickly cutting down an alley that ran behind the storefronts. The intersection where they had seen the infected crossing was only one block down from them. On that corner, another tall building stood, some sort of apartments or condos.
When they reached it, they found a steel door standing closed and locked between them and the inside. If they checked the street side for doors, they would expose themselves, so it was this door or nothing.
“I got it,” Lee whispered, and he pointed to the corner of the building where a narrow alley led out to the street. “Watch that alley.”
LaRouche moved to the corner, keeping back away from it a few feet and leaning out just far enough to see down the alley. He scanned back and forth quickly, then leaned back into cover. He looked to Lee and gave him a thumbs-up. “Alley’s gated off at the street.”
Lee nodded. “Watch my back.”
He dropped his pack near the steel door and unzipped the main compartment. After his first few scavenging trips, Lee had learned the value of two items: a crowbar and a bolt cutter. Without the proper tools, it was incredibly difficult to make his way through an urban area after everything had been boarded up, chained up, and locked up by business owners hoping to eventually come back and reopen their doors. It was times like these that the crowbar and the bolt cutter justified the extra twenty pounds they added to his pack.
He pulled out the crowbar and shifted his sling so his rifle hung on his left side, out of the way. He glanced over his shoulder as he stepped to the door. LaRouche was still at the corner, peeking out, and then scanning behind them.
All appeared quiet.
Lee set the flat, curved head of the crowbar into the narrow crack between the steel door and the jamb, right above the latch. The head of the crowbar was just a sliver too thick, so Lee put his weight onto it and struck it three times with the palm of his hand until it was embedded nicely into the crack. Then he took the end of the crowbar and began leveraging up and down, bending the frame away from the steel door.
“Psst!”
Lee looked up.
LaRouche made eye contact with him and held up a single finger, then pointed down the alley.
Lee bit his bottom lip and went back to work, that old familiar shudder working its way through his limbs. He focused on his task, kept prying up and down, up and down. Not worrying about what LaRouche’s hand signals meant. He was close now, but these industrial doors were tough.
“Come on, you bitch,” he mumbled to himself, straining hard to bend the metal.
Light but rapid footsteps behind him.
Lee turned and found LaRouche beside him, eyes wide. “Gate’s not latched!” he hissed. “One’s coming down!”
From the alley, the faint sound of rusted hinges.
The clatter of a metal gate on a brick wall.
“Open it!” LaRouche urged under his breath.
Lee set himself into the door, fingers aching from their grip on the crowbar, his forearms beginning to burn from the strain. “I’m fucking trying!”
LaRouche made an angry growling noise low in his throat and turned his attention to the alley, raising his rifle. “This is about to be bad.”
“I’m almost there…”
From the alley came that distinctive chuffing sound.
Something sniffing the air.
“Captain…”
Lee gritted his teeth, trying to work fast, but trying to work quietly at the same time. If he rushed, he would make noise, and noise would only draw the infected to them faster. And the others would follow.
“I got it… I got it…”
He pushed in the crowbar one more time, and this time instead of leveraging up and down, he pried with steady, firm pressure.
The door popped with a little scrape. Lee ducked in, leaving his pack outside on the ground. LaRouche slipped in just in time for Lee to close the door as quietly as he could, plunging them into darkness. In the brief flash of sunlight when he’d opened the door, Lee had seen a long hallway, white walls, and red carpeting. It smelled like death.
Something farther down the hall.
A hunched figure.
Alive or dead?
He felt his stomach tighten involuntarily as the stench of the rot, held in so long in this dark, enclosed space, permeated his mouth and nose and seeped into his throat and sinuses. He could feel the churn in his gut, and his mouth began to water, preparing for vomit. He tried to bury his nose in the fold of his shemagh that lay wrapped around his neck but couldn’t quite reach.
He wanted to ask LaRouche if he had seen anything down the hall, but he was afraid to speak. He wanted to click on the flashlight of his rifle and illuminate this petrifying dark, but he was afraid to move. He remained glued to the outward-opening door, both hands clamped on the handle and pulling it shut as tightly as he could. If he made a move, if he allowed himself to vomit or even breathe too loudly, the infected would hear him.
It would cry out to the others, knowing there was something to feed on inside.
Lee and LaRouche’s chances of survival went downhill from there.
He strained, sweat on his palms making his grip on the handle slippery. His ears searched for any sound but heard only the overwhelming silence of the building. Whatever he had seen down the hall, real or imagined, it was not making any noise.
Movement from the other side of the door.
Shuffling feet, noisy breathing.
It was sniffing the air.
It was just a human. It was not another species. Nothing had changed, anatomically or physiologically, in the infected. Its nose was no more sensitive now than it had been when it was a whole and healthy person. However, there was a part of Lee that thought perhaps that mammalian, instinctive part of the brain—the only part left over after FURY—might be capable of interpreting scent data more clearly than the conscious and logical mind was able to. The infected may not be bloodhounds, but that was not to say their instinctive brains were not able to cipher from the air whether a person had been standing there recently.
His arms began to fatigue, tiring from holding the door shut so tightly.
The sniffing, scenting noise became more pronoun
ced, as though the infected were pressing its nose against the doorframe, trying to inhale their scents from the other side. Abstractly, Lee wondered whether bathing made their scent more or less obvious. Was it the strange smell of soap that tickled its brain, or was it the smell of a living thing’s body odor?
On the other side of the door, the creature began to make a guttural sound: “Guh… Guh… Guh…” It wasn’t loud, and Lee didn’t think it was any sort of call to other infected. Perversely, it reminded him of a toddler trying to sound out new syllables.
“Guh… Guh…”
From the outside, the door handle jiggled and the door moved slightly under Lee’s grip. He gritted his teeth and held tighter. In his mind he pictured losing his grip, the door being yanked open, and the infected bursting through, biting and grasping at them. He would move back quickly, as soon as he felt he was going to lose his grip…
“Cap.”
Lee jumped at the hot breath in his ear. He turned and thought he could see the faintest outline of LaRouche’s face in some dim, ambient light. He was standing very close to Lee now.
His voice was the barest thread of a whisper. “I think it’s gone.”
Lee listened and heard only silence. No more sniffing, no more shuffling feet. No more grunted syllables. But Lee didn’t release the door or open it to retrieve his pack. Not just yet. He waited in the disorienting darkness, steeped in the smell of rotted flesh, for what could have been a minute or possibly ten. It was difficult to tell.
The smell of the air became a physical image in his head, like a series of close-up photos of every dead and corrupted thing he’d ever seen: bloodless skin, stretched to bursting with noxious gases; brown fluids leaking; maggots squirming busily.
He tasted vomit.
Unable to wait any longer, he used every bit of control he had to open the door only an inch or so and look out. The small vertical shaft of light bisected his face, and compared to the deep blackness of the inside, the outside seemed completely white. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the light.