by D. J. Molles
It just keeps getting better, Harper thought.
With a measure of exhaustion, he sighed. “What’s that, Bus?”
“He said that when the hunters attacked the horde, they ran back to the den but stopped short of running inside. He said they just stood outside and turned back toward the hunters like they were ready to fight, but the hunters took their kills and disappeared.”
Harper forced himself to think about it at length.
He gave up after a moment. “Okay. Beats me what the hell they’re doing.”
“I think we should talk to Jacob.”
Harper nodded. “I think that’s a good idea.”
* * *
Jerry stood in the dinner line with the rest of the people. In his own mind this was a chance to rub elbows with the common man, a demonstration that he was just like everyone else. For him, being among everyone else was an act of goodwill on his part, despite the fact that he wouldn’t be fed if he weren’t there.
While he smiled and laughed—or looked gravely concerned, depending on the conversation topic—he saw Harper and Bus slip out of the upstairs office and tread swiftly down the stairs. They glanced out at the people in line for dinner, but if they noticed Jerry there, they gave no indication.
Jerry had spent a lot of his lifetime being underhanded, and he was able to recognize it when he saw it. Old Bus and his lapdog Harper were up to something, sure as shit. Those were the expressions of men who were trying to keep a very wily cat inside its bag. And if they wanted it in, it stood to reason that it could benefit Jerry to let it out.
“What do you think?”
Jerry refocused on the tall lady in front of him and her rather short and stubby spouse. Interesting combination. Had they been married before the collapse or was this an arrangement of circumstance? More importantly, what the hell had they been talking about?
He took his cue from the couple’s intensely serious faces and affixed a somber look of contemplation to his features. “Hmm,” he said, as though interested. “I think it’s something that bears consideration.”
They nodded knowingly.
The man spoke quietly, leaning in so Jerry could smell his breath, sharp and sour. “We appreciate that you actually take the time to think and don’t just shout out whatever answers you think people want to hear. You know we’re behind you, Jerry. Anything you need.”
Jerry smiled. “Thank you. I’ll keep that in mind.”
He reached the folding table where Marie was dishing out some thick reddish stew or chili, made with some unknown meat, a bit of corn, a bit of beans.
“This looks delightful, Marie.” Jerry smiled as the woman dished him a bowl of the stuff.
In truth, he resented how Marie couldn’t make shit except stews, soups, or chili. He understood that there were nearly a hundred mouths to feed, but it certainly wasn’t the five thousand, and even that had come with a fish option. He looked down into the pot of ruddy mush and tried hard not to sneer.
Marie pushed the bowl into his hands and smiled, syrupy sweet to the point of being a little sarcastic. “Anything for you, Jerry. I’m just glad I could please you.”
His smile became wooden. “Yes. That’s very nice of you. Thanks again.”
He stuck his spoon into the chili/stew/mush and turned toward the open area inside the building, all the tents and huts thrown up on top of the grease-stained floor where trucks used to park and mechanics would tune them up. Still, underneath all the smells of the food and the stink of the people and the little bit of smoke from the cook fires and candles, he could still smell that little tinge of eau de grease monkey. His father had been a mechanic, and the smell still gave Jerry a hollow feeling in his gut.
On the other side of the little indoor shantytown, there were a number of folding tables and chairs, as well as crates and buckets and anything else you could sit your ass on. This was where the community came together and shared their evening meals in the company of their peers, and a quiet conversation off to the side could go unnoticed among the rabble.
Jerry took a bite of the food as he made his way over. The same mystery-meat-and-beans taste as every other dish Marie made. Would it kill her to make a fucking steak every now and then? Couldn’t she make steaks with deer meat? He had to admit, prior to surviving the collapse, he’d never eaten venison, but it was just a meat like every other four-legged animal. He was sure steaks could be made out of it. Or, Christ, at the very least some hamburgers.
A man with a dirty old Yankees hat was waiting for him in the corner.
“Jerry.” He nodded and spooned up a mouthful of chili.
“Greg. How’s the kid?”
“He’s doin’ all right.” Greg glanced under the bill of his cap at the people closest to them, but they were all lost in loud conversations. “You talk to White today?”
“This morning.” Jerry pushed his food around. “He’s in.”
“He’s worthless.”
“He gives us a majority.”
Greg smirked. “Who’s gonna train them how to use those weapons?”
Jerry shook his head. “Won’t be necessary. We have enough of his students to stand around holding them and it should be enough to discourage a firefight.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.”
Greg regarded him for a brief moment, and in that time Jerry felt that the other man was scanning him up and down to determine whether he should throat-punch him or not. In the end he took another monstrous bite of food. He chewed, swallowed, and sucked at something in his teeth before speaking again. “How many will there be?”
“Five.” Jerry set his bowl on the ground, no longer interested. “You’ll take four. You’re gonna need to rough one of ’em up before you let him go. Make it believable—it’s gotta convince Old Man Hughes that something happened. He’s my weak link in this whole thing. If he thinks something is suspicious or doesn’t add up, he’ll say so to Captain Harden.”
“How believable do you want it?”
“Don’t break any bones or anything. Little black eye, cut lip. That should be enough.”
“I can do that. Where you want me to take the other four?”
“Hole ’em up in the university somewhere.”
“Okay.” Greg scraped up the last of his meal. At least he seemed to be enjoying the stuff. “When?”
“The morning after tomorrow. They’ll meet you across the Cape Fear bridge, right outside of town.”
“All right.” Greg smiled unpleasantly. “We’ll be there.”
CHAPTER 15
Diversion
Jacob stood, looking out over a fire at the thickening darkness in the woods beyond their protective fence. He posed a peculiar figure: skeletal, long-limbed, pale-skinned. He wore boots and a pair of the olive drab pants he’d received from Lee, a tan pullover, and a matching watch cap. They’d given him back Captain Mitchell’s M4, and he wore it in a single-point sling, hanging across his shallow chest.
If he didn’t look so damn weird, Harper thought he might look like a soldier.
“That is very strange,” Jacob said quietly and looked down into the fire.
No, he isn’t a soldier, Harper decided. His eyes showed no hardness in them. Not like he’d seen in Lee. But there was something there, something Harper couldn’t put a finger on, but he felt it was the reason why Jacob had been able to survive the trip from Virginia to North Carolina by himself.
Probingly, Bus said, “Thoughts?”
Jacob flexed his spidery fingers and began cracking each knuckle. “My thoughts are that it creates yet another disadvantage for us. Well…” He eyed the two men. “Primarily for Captain Harden. Besides the obvious issue of them appearing to be faster and stronger, there’s the added issue of their sleep cycle. Up until this point, I’ve seen packs work at night in the rural areas and the hordes during the day in the urban areas. This seems to be a pack, preying on the hordes, and working in an urban area during the day.”
He grabbed a long stick and jabbed at the fire, his free hand cradling his rifle against his chest to keep it from swinging into the fire as he bent over. His train of thought seemed to jump tracks and drifted off into the night with the fog of his breath in the air.
Harper shuffled a little closer to the fire and held his hands out to warm them. “What about the adaptation? I mean, this is the first time we’ve seen this…”
Jacob held up a finger. “Not the first time.”
They waited for him to elaborate.
He held the stick in the fire until the edge became blackened. “And I wouldn’t call it ‘adaptation’ necessarily. Not in the sense that I think you mean it, as though they are evolving.” He held up the tip of the stick and stared at the smoking point. “No. Evolution can’t happen that fast. Not in the period of three months. Not even in three years. It takes generations for changes to occur. So to see what makes them different than the other infected, we have to look at normal, everyday differences.
“Chemicals in the body can play a part. For instance, some races produce more testosterone than others. Certain people are more capable of accessing instinctive memories. Some people are genetically predisposed toward violence. Physiologically, some people can eat certain things, including raw meat, and others cannot.” He smiled faintly. “We’re not all as homogenous as our previous popular culture would have us think.”
“So…” Harper closed his eyes and tried to think. “Some people are naturally better at being an infected. Is that what you’re saying?”
Jacob watched smoke rise from the stick. “Essentially… yes. Genetic predispositions. While they are not evolving in the sense of growing tails and cat’s eyes to see at night, it is an evolutionary principle that we are seeing take place here: survival of the fittest.” He rammed the stick into the dirt and looked at the two men, his eyes glistening in the firelight. “You have to understand that civilization has been breeding the survival instinct out of humanity for generations upon generations. Survival is based upon aggression, but aggression is rooted out in modern society. If a modern human being is then infected with FURY and the bacterium eats through his frontal lobe, all he has left to rely upon are his animal instincts. The more intact those instincts are, the more successful that human will be at surviving. The instinctively weak will become food for the instinctively strong.”
That hollow feeling was back in Harper’s stomach. “How do you figure out which ones are instinctively strong?”
Jacob scratched at the crook of his neck with a single long finger. “Obviously a person who was athletic when he got infected will be more able to catch prey. Some people see better than others, some people hear better than others, and some people smell better than others. Then there will be people who exhibit several of these… survival attributes. If I’m correct, then what Captain Harden saw in the hunters was just the cream rising to the top, so to speak.”
“I don’t believe this,” Bus mumbled.
Harper tilted his head back a bit. “What area of science did you say you were in?”
Jacob smiled patronizingly. “Microbiology on all my paperwork. But genetics is something of an interest. I’ve probably done enough research on my own time to constitute a doctorate.”
Harper clenched his jaw. “You can tell us all about the genetics, but you can’t tell us where the bacteria came from?”
Jacob’s expression soured a bit. “A large part of genetics is simply observing and understanding key characteristics, whereas microbiology requires a lab. It is, by definition, the study of things that can’t be seen with the naked eye.” He sniffed. “Hence the ‘micro’ in microbiology.”
Harper loaded a retort but was stayed by Bus’s voice.
“So this isn’t going away,” Bus said. “They’re not just gonna… die out.”
Jacob looked at the big man with something akin to pity. “I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
* * *
Thirty miles away in Broadway, the discussion was much less detailed. Lee and his team asked the same questions but mostly had no answers. A few people had some theories, but none was worth seriously considering. In the end, the discussion of what Lee and LaRouche had witnessed petered out in about five minutes.
They ate cold MREs for dinner and bedded down for the night. There was no joking and no quiet laughter in the darkness, as there usually was. They were all serious and stone-faced, lost in thoughts of what had been and what was still to come.
Jim had the last watch and he woke them two hours before dawn.
They ate a hasty breakfast and Lee took a stick and began to draw in a patch of dirt, using the light from a single gas lantern. What he produced was a reasonable facsimile of the intersection of Wicker Street and Steele Street. Lee used small stones to illustrate buildings and shallow lines in the dirt to show roads. As he finished, his team gathered around him, some of them still eating or drinking, but all of them geared up and ready to go.
Lee knelt down on his haunches and pointed to each item and named it. “This is the intersection of Steele Street and Wicker Street in Sanford. The southeast corner is where the suspected den is located. It’s a tan-ish, sandstone-colored building. Two stories.” He moved his pointer. “On the northwestern corner is the building we’ll be taking. It’s an apartment building, and it’s about…” He looked to LaRouche. “What would you say? Five or six stories?”
“I counted six.”
“Six stories, then.” Lee swept the pointer down along what was Steele Street. “We’re gonna come in from the north, since we didn’t see any activity in that section during recon. We’ll park the Humvees back a few blocks and hoof it into the apartment building. Once we’re on the roof, we’ll overlook the southern-facing wall and set the traps right here.” He circled the street in front of the building.
“Uh…” One of the guys from Jeriah Wilson’s group popped his hand up. A short, redheaded man-boy whom everyone had originally taken to calling Lucky Charms and now just referred to as Lucky. “Isn’t that a little close to the den, Captain?”
“Yes.” Lee pointed to it. “I want it close, because as soon as we take out the infected, we’re going to go in and see what’s inside that den.”
The group grumbled, but no one spoke up.
Lee nodded with a small smile. “I know it sounds unnecessary, but from what we saw yesterday, it seems the infected are storing up food there and are very protective of it. I would like to see what’s inside.”
“Won’t the food be tainted?” Wilson looked disgusted at the prospect of eating food from an infected den.
Lee shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Things like canned goods should be fine. Besides, who knows what else they’re squirreling away up in there. It’s worth a look.”
LaRouche nodded. “It might also give us some insight into how the infected work.”
Lucky sneered with sarcasm. “What is it, a fucking safari?”
“It’s called intelligence,” Lee said evenly. “And you’re welcome to stand guard outside if you don’t want to go in.” He tapped the stick across his knee. “Does anyone else have any questions or concerns before we get going?”
Ten people shook their heads and remained silent.
Lee stood up and flexed his stiff ankle. “Then let’s get going.”
* * *
They moved silently along Horner Boulevard, a road that paralleled Steele Street. Their boots, even the ten pairs of them moving in tandem, made only the barest of whispers across the concrete, and their presence inside this small burg created no more stir than a moon-cast shadow sliding between the dark places between buildings.
Lee had never taught them how to move stealthily, whether in the cities or in the woods. By the time they’d joined his team, they had all learned everything there was to know about avoiding detection. The infected had taught them, as had the thieves and the murderers who stalked the roads. Mistakes were paid for in blood and the lives of the ones you loved, so yo
u learned quickly or you paid dearly.
No do-overs.
No second chances.
Though they lacked the overall discipline and knowledge of a military unit, when Lee considered the world around him and the social collapse they had all survived, and thought of it as a proving ground with an attrition rate of 90 percent, it made these select few more qualified to survive and operate in this world than even the best the military had to offer.
In these moments of clarity, crouching silently at the corner of a red brick building, with an old blue mailbox to his left and a leathery, skeletal corpse to his right, when his eyes scanned down these dim streets and saw the shapeless shadows of his team moving in a tactical column, Lee felt an immense pride. Not the pride of the teacher looking at his students, but the privilege of a man who is astonished at the capabilities of the people he fights alongside.
Lee watched them for a half second longer before turning his gaze south again. These moments were always fleeting in the midst of his work, like shapes in a cloud quickly swept away by the wind. The brief thought was swallowed by the night once more and he was refocused.
He stood at the corner of Horner Boulevard and Carthage Street. Ahead, LaRouche was on point this time and he was on the southern side of Carthage Street, near the alley that led to the rear of their target building. He moved to the mouth of the entrance and put his shoulder to the corner, leaning out partially to get a view of the dark area behind the buildings.
Lee watched, his rifle resting on his knees. He waited for the signal for the rest of them to move up, but LaRouche seemed to be fixated on something. Impatiently, he wanted to call out to him, but he knew it would be unwise. You had to trust your point man. His whole purpose was to feel out the danger, so if he needed an extra minute, he got it.
Lee scanned east and west on Carthage Street, then north and south along Horner Boulevard. Behind him, the others crouched quietly, spaced out along the sidewalk with Wilson taking up the rear and dutifully facing the way they came.
No threats.