Refugees

by D. J. Molles

  He heaved and managed to close the door again. “Hurry the fuck up!”

  “Got it…” LaRouche yanked the crowbar out of the pack and rushed to Lee’s side with it. He worked it around Lee’s white-knuckled hands and into the door handle, then jammed it all the way through. “Move!”

  Lee didn’t wait to see if the barricade would hold. He spun on the balls of his feet and sprinted for the stairs, scooping up his pack as he ran. Ahead of him, Jim stood at the base of the stairs waving them on, his rifle held at a low-ready. Lee shoved him as he ran by, encouraging him to follow them as he and LaRouche pounded up the stairs two at a time.

  Behind them, the door rattled violently. Lee’s legs felt frail and wobbly, his muscles soft, and his blood diluted and watery. He couldn’t take the stairs fast enough, had only cleared the first landing…

  The sound of metal clanking on the ground.

  The door burst open.

  Screeches and roars and the tumble of bare feet.

  It was over. They wouldn’t be able to outrun them, so now they had to fight. He dipped his head into the loop of his rifle’s sling, letting it hang on his neck like a gigantic pendant, and then slung into his pack—it contained everything, including his GPS, and he could not leave it behind. Then he turned and looked down the stairs as the first of the mad creatures came scurrying around the corner, one filthy set of claws clutching the banister and the other reaching for him, its mouth agape.

  A well-placed double tap sent the thing sprawling backward into its den mates, where it fell to the stairs and was trampled under their feet.

  As Lee swung his muzzle toward the next and nearest target, he began backpedaling up the stairs. He moved his feet blindly, feeling the edge of the step with his toes and then launching himself backward until he pulled his foot behind him and it caught.

  He felt his balance leave him.

  Only a few steps down from him, an infected loped toward him on all fours, its mouth spread grotesquely wide, its tongue hanging out.

  Lee fell backward, clinging to his rifle.

  This was it.

  But then he felt a hand grab the drag strap of his tactical vest and he felt himself get a little lighter. Someone had ahold of him and they were dragging him backward up the stairwell. In his right peripheral he could see the muzzle of an M4 resting against his shoulder. It blossomed a white-hot rose of fire, and Lee felt the heat on his face, but he didn’t hear the noise, didn’t seem to hear anything outside of his own huffing breath and rushing blood.

  The face of the infected on all fours seemed to suddenly flatten in on itself, as though it had run headlong into an invisible wall. It fell instantly, spread-eagle upon the steps.

  Lee shouldered his rifle again.

  Targets popped up.

  Flashing thunder knocked them down.

  Just like the reactive steel targets in basic.

  Reload.

  Keep shooting.

  Keep backpedaling.

  Reality seemed warped. In the strange darkness of the stairwell, lit by the strobing of his muzzle flashes, each section of stairs looked the same as the last, with dark, hollow eyes and snarling teeth below him. His legs burned as he thrust himself up each riser, and he could not remember how many flights of stairs he had ascended.

  It seemed without end.

  He reloaded his rifle for a third time, and when he brought the muzzle up and slapped the slide release, feeling the bolt clunk forward, chambering that next round, there was nothing below him to target. The stairs were a hollow well beneath his feet that hung heavily with swirling clouds of cordite.

  “Did we get ’em all?” Jim’s voice wavered breathlessly.

  “I dunno.” Lee turned. “Keep going.”

  From the dimness below them, crawling up the bloody flight of stairs, a wounded infected appeared, gibbering as it clawed past the bodies of its den mates, the concept of its impending death lost behind the urging of its own bloodlust. Its dark eyes fixed them with a blank stare, devoid of emotion, and it reached for them, eyes dark and alien.

  “I shot that thing in the head!” Jim said shakily. “How’s it…?”

  Lee put two in its chest and it collapsed backward.

  “Why didn’t it die?” Jim demanded, his voice on the edge of panic.

  “Just go!” Lee shouted and hauled himself up the last flight.

  As they reached the top of the stairs and stumbled into the muted light of dawn, Lee could no longer hear the thing clinging to life. On the rooftop, they found the other members of the team huddled in the center of the roof. Julia was bent over Jake, working feverishly at starting an IV. The others crowded around her, and among their bodies, Lee caught glimpses of Jake. His mouth was open and his eyes stared vacantly at Julia. The only evidence that he was still alive was the rapid rise and fall of his chest.

  No one watched the stairwell door that he and LaRouche and Jim had just emerged from. They were all watching Jake and mumbling encouragement to him, leaving their backs exposed.

  “Hey!” Lee barked. “Someone gonna watch the fucking stairs?”

  Wilson popped up at the sound of Lee’s voice and shouldered his rifle. “I got it, Cap.”

  Lee strode quickly to Julia’s side and knelt down beside her. Jake’s eyes tracked him, still glassy and out of it. “How’s he looking?”

  Julia’s lips were set in a thin line, her jaw clenched, red smears across her face and neck. “He needs blood. I don’t have the equipment to do a transfusion, and I don’t have time to test everyone’s blood types.” She swabbed the inside of Jake’s elbow and then looked up at Lee. “We need to get him to Smithfield, and fast.”

  “Okay.” Lee nodded, but he had no idea how possible that would be. “Gimme a minute.”

  Lee stood up, caught LaRouche’s eye, and motioned him over. They kept low, below the line of sight from any rooftops around them.

  “Cap?”

  “What do you think?”

  “That was a high-caliber rifle, and close.” LaRouche glanced out beyond the edges of the roof. “I didn’t see a muzzle flash, but I’d think he was on top of one of these adjacent buildings.” He looked at Lee. “Who do you think it was?”

  “I have no fucking idea,” Lee growled. “Some asshole, trigger-happy scavenger.”

  “Let’s check it out.” LaRouche nodded toward the edge of the roof.

  They moved toward the edge, hunching lower as they went toward the abutment until they were duckwalking. Without prearranging it, they separated so they were about ten yards apart.

  Lee put his shoulder to the abutment and looked at LaRouche. “On three.”

  “Okay.”

  He counted with his fingers, one, two, three, and they both popped up and looked out over the nearby rooftops. In the brief moment they were exposed, they searched for movement, for anything that seemed unnatural, for the glint of gunmetal or the flash of a scope lens. When they ducked back into cover, they looked at each other and shook their heads.

  “Nothing,” LaRouche said.

  “I got nothing,” Lee confirmed. “One more time, a little slower.”

  Again they counted down, and on three they both stood up partially and looked out over the small-town rooftops laid out around them, but they could find no evidence of the sniper. Lee had to agree with LaRouche’s assessment. That had been a high-powered rifle round, and it had come from someplace very close to them. And yet there was no one on the roofs. None of the nearby buildings had facing windows from which a sniper could have made the shot.

  LaRouche swore. “He must’ve bugged out already.”

  Hit-and-run tactics? Lee thought.

  “What about the infected?”

  Lee leaned farther over the edge. There was no movement in the alley below him, and when he switched to overlook the street, there was none there either.

  “Should be about fifty, right?” Lee asked.

  “Yeah.”

  He turned and looked at the kid
in the center of the roof, lying on his back and barely there anymore. “Jake needs to get to Smithfield ASAP. We’ll clear the stairwell and do a headcount on the way, see how many we took down. That’ll give us an idea of how many are left.”

  “Okay.” LaRouche looked pained. “We’re not pulling out, are we?”

  Lee stared at the den. “No. We need to get in there.” He jogged over to Wilson and tapped him on the shoulder. “Wilson, I need you and your team to come with me.”

  Wilson nodded firmly. “Will do, Cap.”

  Lee moved back into the stairwell and Jim followed, LaRouche remaining behind with Julia and Jake.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Den

  Lee clicked on his gun light, illuminating the darkness. His knees felt rubbery and fatigued as he made his way down. On level five he found the last infected Jim had claimed to have shot in the head. He and Jim leaned over the body and inspected it. The lifeless eyes stared at them, wide and lemur-like. A jagged groove ran from the top of the infected’s forehead, all the way back to its crown.

  “Is that where I shot him?” Jim asked.

  Lee nodded. “Sometimes the round skips off the skull. I’ve seen it happen before.”

  They continued on down the stairwell and Lee started counting heads. As he went down, the bodies got thicker and he hesitantly stepped among them, certain that at any moment one of them would explode up and latch its filthy jaws into his jugular. On level two, the stairwell was so choked with bodies that Lee had to walk over them, their soft flesh and blood squirming under his boots as he put his weight on them. Here, the walls were spackled with red dots and white chunks of brain and bone. Bullet holes marred the wall like a hidden picture could be revealed if all those dots were connected.

  At the bottom, he stopped and looked around.

  “Forty-two,” he said aloud.

  They moved to the door, which had closed on its own. Lee pushed it open partially and took a quick sweep outside, finding only three more infected bodies and no snipers on the rooftops sighting in on him. He stepped out and held the door, motioning Wilson and his three teammates to pass through.

  He grabbed Wilson and looked him in the eye. “Be quick, but don’t be stupid.”

  Wilson nodded curtly. “We’ll be back in a second.”

  Lee and Jim made their way back up the stairs, having to stop on level three to give Jim’s legs a rest. Lee didn’t push it. To be honest, his legs felt fatigued as well.

  At the rooftop again, he found LaRouche kneeling near Julia and Jake. The sky above them was gray and purple like a contused body. Lee called him over, away from Julia and her patient. The three men huddled together, but their eyes lingered on their wounded comrade. They knelt about fifteen feet away and eventually they dragged their attention back.

  “Is he gonna make it?” Jim asked.

  LaRouche looked away. “Julia says it’s pretty bad. The artery can be closed to keep him from losing blood pressure, but there are complications that go along with sealing a major blood vessel. It sounds like the bullet might have collapsed his lung too. She won’t know until they open him up.”

  They all knew what that meant.

  They’d found a medical professional to replace Doc, but Dr. Hamilton was a general practitioner, not a surgeon. The equipment was there at Johnston Memorial Hospital in Smithfield, but the experience and the knowledge were not. He did the best he could, but often it was not enough.

  “Damn.” LaRouche shook his head.

  Lee couldn’t disagree. “Let’s try to stay focused here.” He pointed back toward the stairwell. “I got forty-five dead bodies, and we estimated fifty yesterday.”

  “We didn’t count to the man,” LaRouche pointed out.

  “I know.” Lee sniffed at his nose, which was beginning to run in the cold. “So, worst case scenario, there are some still inside the den, but I don’t think that’s likely. I’ve never seen the hordes separate into groups. They’re all or nothing.”

  LaRouche cleared his throat. “We keep putting these rules on them, Cap. Like they’ve got ROEs, but they don’t. They’re just wild fucking animals. They’re unpredictable. The truth is, we don’t know what those bastards are gonna do next.”

  Lee rubbed his forehead. “I’m just judging from past behaviors. Look, I know going in there doesn’t sound very pleasant. But if there’s something we can find out by doing it, I don’t want to pass it by because we were afraid to get our hands dirty.”

  LaRouche sighed. “Yeah, I know. I’m with you.”

  The sound of a diesel engine rumbling below them drew their attention.

  Lee stepped to the edge of the roof, first taking a glance at the rooftops around them, and then looking over at the big green vehicle below. Wilson leaned out of the front passenger’s seat and looked up. Lee gave the younger man a thumbs-up and then turned to the others on the roof with him.

  “They’re ready. Let’s get Jake down there.”

  LaRouche and Jim each took an arm and Lee took the legs. Julia followed behind, holding the IV above the wounded man. Jake was in and out of consciousness as they moved him and he made thin, high-pitched mewling sounds at random intervals as he became more wakeful. Then shock would take him over again and his body would sag heavily in his comrade’s arms.

  Lee made eye contact with Julia.

  He could see the detachment in her gaze. Jake was no longer a friend; he was a patient, and a patient was nothing more than a broken machine that needed to be fixed.

  Lee had seen her like this before. There’d been another member of their team, Rob Kiker, a middle-aged guy from Jim’s congregation. A firefighter with some basic recreational-weapons knowledge. They’d gotten in a scuffle with a pair of unknown scavengers just outside of Camp Ryder, and he’d been stabbed twice in the chest with a pocketknife.

  He’d been one of those guys that was everyone’s friend. No one had a bad thing to say about him. And when he was lying on the concrete among some overgrown weeds pushing up through the cracks, bleeding out into a growing pool, Julia had been there with this same blank, emotionless expression on her face. She never said his name once when she was working on him. She kept referring to him as “patient.”

  “Patient’s BP is dropping pretty low” and “I think the patient’s aorta got nicked.”

  And in that moment, Lee resented her. He resented that she refused to call him Rob and that she’d never cried a tear for him and probably would never cry a tear for Jake, and yet she grew sick and pale and she trembled at the thought of the systematic killing of these creatures, the same ones who hunted them, who killed them, who fed on them.

  They deserved her emotion, but not Rob? Not Jake?

  Lee looked away from her, feeling his expression beginning to reveal his thoughts.

  They loaded Jake into the back of the Humvee as quickly and as gently as they could, and Julia climbed in the back with him, the IV pack nearly empty already. Lee shut the back hatch of the vehicle and slapped it twice. Without any further acknowledgement, the Humvee took off, bearing Jake toward Smithfield.

  In the settling dust, the three men moved out.

  They emerged from the blue shadows between the buildings and discovered that the sun had cauterized the bruised sky and now sat on the horizon, that kind of white-hot that was too bright to look at but gave off no heat. At the mouth of the alley, Lee stood as point and he looked right and then left, studying the street in both directions. When he felt it was safe, he moved on.

  They crossed Wicker Street and stood at the south side of the intersection, looking across Steele Street at the entrance to the den. It was strange to stand there with the wind blowing at their backs and bearing with it that silent and empty sound, like a missed note from a woodwind instrument that is held indefinitely. It was the call of vast and lonely places, and it settled into these ghost towns like a thin layer of dust, coating everything. It was not the complete absence of sound, but instead the presence of sounds you
are unaccustomed to hearing because they are normally drowned out by the busy noise of human existence.

  Here in this abandoned city, it was the creaking of the stoplights hanging from their hinges, the skitter of dried leaves and trash along the concrete, the steady trickling noise of water moving beneath them in the sewers. It is these noises that make you so acutely aware that there are no other people around.

  “You smell that?” Jim said quietly.

  Lee sniffed. It was faint, but it was there.

  “Might be some more in there,” Jim observed.

  “It’s where they sleep. It’s bound to smell like them.” Lee curled his nose. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”

  He crossed Steele Street and found himself facing the tan brick wall. Only a few inches of masonry were between him and whatever was inside. He found himself pulling away from the wall, as though the building that contained these creatures’ den was itself alive and predatory, its entrance just another hungry mouth waiting to consume them.

  A bank of three windows above them, the glass that used to be in their frames now littering the sidewalk under their feet. He listened but did not hear anything coming from inside.

  A blue mailbox on the corner.

  A NO PARKING sign, bent almost in half.

  Two trees, one on each side of the corner.

  Lee pushed up to the turn and glanced around. The stench there in the alcove of the building’s entrance was enough to make him curl his nose and take short breaths. “All right… slow and deliberate. Take your time. Make sure you check everything.”

  The front door was open.

  Lee faced it straight-on and clicked on his gun light. It gave him a direct view down a hallway with white walls. He approached, angling first to the right, and then to the left of the door to see what was on either side.

  Trash.

  Empty cans of food.

  Dark piles of excrement.

  He moved through the door. The hallway extended down about forty feet and terminated at a pair of double doors. Lee could see that the doors were open but the inside was dark, and the angle of the doors only allowed tiny slivers of his light to punch through. On either side of the hall, there were doors. Two to the right and two to the left.