by D. J. Molles
“I’ll hold the hall,” Lee whispered. “You two clear the rooms.”
“Moving,” LaRouche acknowledged.
The two men slipped behind Lee and into the first room, moving at a steady pace, smoothly taking the corners of the room and clearing it quickly of threats. It was empty. Just more of the same refuse as in the hallway. While they cleared, Lee remained in the hall, his rifle snug in his shoulder, and he scanned, taking each door and trying to see farther into that big room past the double doors, but failing.
“Clear.”
“Clear.”
“Behind you.” LaRouche touched Lee’s shoulder as he crossed the hall to the next room.
Their flashlights played across the walls in glowing phantasms.
Lee found himself fixated on the room at the end.
With each breath he took in, smelling dank and ripe with all the odors of these filthy animals, his grip squeezed tighter on his rifle, his cheek pressed harder against the buttstock, the little red dot of his scope burned hotter in the abysmal darkness at the end of the hall.
“Clear.”
“Clear.”
“Moving.”
Lee stepped closer to the door. It was a deep black square in the center of his gun light’s bright halo. Movement inside? Something pale and slick flitted across that tiny shaft of light that the double doors allowed in. A trick of the light, perhaps.
“Clear.”
“Clear.”
“Moving.”
Another few paces forward.
Now Lee faced the door, only about ten feet from it. His angle was still poor to see inside and he considered adjusting, but then again, if he could see them, they could see him.
If there were anything there at all.
“Clear.”
“Clear.”
“All clear, Cap.”
“There’s something in that room straight ahead. I think I saw it move.” He didn’t take his eyes off the door as he spoke. “You still got your frags in your vest, LaRouche?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re gonna frag and clear. Two frags—one from me, one from you. Jim, you’re gonna pull hard cover on that door until we slip those frags in, then hug the wall so you don’t get hit with shrapnel.”
“Okay.” Jim’s voice was tight.
“Go ahead and cover us.” Lee waited until he could see the ring of light created by Jim’s gun light, squared up on the door. Then he lowered his rifle and plucked a fragmentation grenade from a pouch on his vest and moved closer to the door, hunching down as he went. LaRouche moved alongside him. Lee took the right-hand side of the door, and LaRouche took the left.
The base of the doorway was cluttered not only with trash but with rotting, discarded carcasses that appeared mostly consumed. Cats, dogs, rats, a rib cage from something larger that Lee couldn’t identify.
From inside, something muttered and drew a harsh breath.
Lee looked up at LaRouche. In the illumination of Jim’s gun light, half of LaRouche’s face was plunged into deep shadow and he looked otherworldly. They both held up the green spheres in their hands and pulled the soft metal pins. Lee held up one finger, then two, then three, and then the two men leaned forward and chucked the fragmentation grenades into the room.
There was a hiss of alarm.
The sound of both heavy objects striking the floor, the spoons flying off and clattering across the floor.
Lee turned away from the doorway and pushed himself up against the wall, one ear shoved tightly against his shoulder, the other plugged with the fingers of his left hand, while his right took the grip of his rifle and prepared to start firing.
It seemed to take forever for the grenades to go off.
In Lee’s mind, he was sure that before they could go off, the infected would exit the room and tear them to pieces.
He knelt there, huddled against the wall, and looked down between his legs. A feline corpse smiled up at him with one cloudy eye, its skin drawn back and displaying its full set of teeth. Such a small thing, with so many sharp teeth. What was mankind’s obsession with domesticating predatory creatures?
He felt the shockwaves punch him through the wall, one after the other, hammering his chest and jarring him to the bone. A billow of smoke loomed in the entrance, both doors blown open wide. He could hear a sound like hail on a tin roof, but it was debris and dust and chunks of plaster skittering across the tile floors of the hallway.
Lee hauled himself up and stabbed the button of his gun light.
When the light came on, the cloud of dust and smoke rolled over them, and it was like high beams in a thick fog, blinding them. He turned in the general direction of where he thought the door was and began moving forward. Through the smoke, he could see the glowing cone of LaRouche’s gun light moving swiftly through the open doors.
LaRouche was yelling. “Get on the ground! Get on the ground!”
Old habits…
Lee cleared the doorframe and the room began to materialize in the smoke, as though it were being born of the smoke itself, and the particles floating through the air were converging in the room to form the long conference table that had been shoved to one side, the office chairs piled atop it.
And bodies.
There were bodies in the room.
Not carcasses that had been fed upon, but the bodies of infected they had just killed. Lee wanted to look down at them but he passed them by, chasing that cone of light from LaRouche that was beginning to fade into a crisp silhouette. Still, as he stepped over the bodies, his subconscious registered something important, even if his conscious mind was ignoring it.
“Did we get ’em all?” LaRouche shouted.
“Keep checking,” Lee called back.
He found the corner of the room he’d been seeking, and it was unoccupied by anything alive. He turned and looked out into the room, his light now able to push clear through the smoke and darkness and see the far wall. He registered the mounds of flesh in the center of the room—perhaps five or six of them. Their limbs were tangled together, and some of those limbs were detached from the bodies they belonged to, blown off in the blast.
Look at them… Look at them…
But he looked past them, and he could see LaRouche, still moving deeper into the long room. The shadow of his body and his cone of light kept retreating, getting smaller, and it gave Lee the false sensation that this room was not a conference room at all but some massive underground cave that just kept on going.
Look at the bodies!
Lee forced his eyes down into the bloody mess before him.
Pale, thin limbs. They seemed small and childlike. The flesh on these seemed softer somehow than the other infected he’d noticed, like there was more fat on them, as though they had not been starved as extensively as the others. Long tangles of hair, matted and dreadlocked in places. All of the infected had somewhat overgrown hair, but the hair on these was longer than normal. Some of their faces were contorted, as though they were enraged by what had happened to them. Others stared serenely at the ceiling.
“Oh my God…”
Lee took a step forward and blazed his light down onto the one closest to him. Splayed out in a twisted position, legs spread in different directions, one arm trapped beneath the body, the other reaching out as though clawing its way across the floor. Fair skin and blond hair, sullied by clumps of dried gore and filth. Fresh, bright red blood flowed from the nose and ears, over its blank face and down in bright red ribbons across the mounds of breasts.
“LaRouche!” Lee said, but his voice was quiet, either truly without volume or lost under the roaring sound in his ears, like shouting into a hurricane.
“Captain?”
Lee moved his gun light to illuminate another body.
“Captain?”
He looked up to find LaRouche standing there on the other side of the bodies, shining his light onto them. It seemed that they had died, clinging to each other in terror.
Le
e’s voice was a croak. “It’s the females. They’re all here. Why were they keeping them here? I don’t… I don’t get it.”
“Look at them,” LaRouche said with an empty voice.
But Lee had not taken his eyes off of them. There were more than he’d thought at first—probably about ten, though it was difficult to tell in such a pile of arms and legs. They were so tightly packed together…
“Look at them,” LaRouche repeated.
“I’m looking at them…”
“No.” LaRouche leaned over and pointed, very deliberately, very slowly. “You see that?”
In the wreck of flesh before him, among the obliterated remains jumbled together like the rest of the garbage strewn across the floors, under all that red-painted skin, he hadn’t noticed it. He saw the first one and felt immediately sickened. The roaring in his ears was the rush of a million pointless thoughts. And when he looked to the next female, lying dead and dismembered on the floor, he saw that it was the same with her, and with all of the others.
He could barely find his voice. “They’re all pregnant.”
CHAPTER 18
A Simple Equation
Lee’s stomach did somersaults around his other organs. His brain went to work, interpreting and extrapolating what he was learning with what he already knew and trying to shove the images that his eyes were generating into place along with all the other things he knew, like unwieldy pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with a picture that made no sense.
Some of them were close to giving birth, the skin of their bellies stretched tight.
Some of the other females were not far along at all, and just beginning to show.
Could they have mated even after they were infected?
Why wouldn’t they reproduce?
How stupid had he been to believe that those instincts for survival were relegated only to the hunt for food? Their instincts clearly went further than that. The males in these hordes, they still looked emaciated, despite all the food they were scavenging, because they were gathering it for the pregnant females and eating only what their bodies needed to survive. Ancient instincts of the hunter-gatherer, buried under millennia of civilization, and now resurrected before their eyes.
Each conclusion only carried with it another question, and each question required greater understanding than he had. They spun around in his head like debris caught in a tornado.
Lee suddenly wanted to take a seat. He wanted to be in his Humvee, surrounded by the familiar things, the smell of diesel fumes and grease and metal, the smell of gun oil and cordite, of the musty bedroll he slept on every night. Instead, he took in a deep breath of the rank air and tried to ignore his churning stomach.
Compartmentalize. Make the problem small.
First, let’s get the fuck out of this room.
Lee turned toward the door and took one step before the room flashed and jumped.
He spun, his mouth and eyes wide open, swinging his rifle up, and found LaRouche standing over the dead females with a cold, blank look in his eyes. His rifle was pointed down at one of the females, and a tiny hole had appeared in the center of her bulging stomach. No blood came out of it—her heart was no longer pumping.
“Are you okay? Was she still alive?” Lee took a step forward. “Did she try to bite you?”
LaRouche didn’t respond, didn’t look at him. He stepped over the body he had just put a bullet into and pointed his rifle at another, aiming for the belly. He pulled the trigger and shot her too.
“Jesus!” Lee shouted. “What the hell are you doing?”
LaRouche stepped over to another one. “I’m killing those fucking things before they can crawl out.” He pulled the trigger again.
“Stop!” Lee took a step toward the man, though he wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do if LaRouche didn’t obey. Was he going to fight LaRouche over it? Over dead infected? Over the very same thing he argued with Professor White about?
LaRouche turned and sighted down the barrel at another target.
Lee grabbed the foregrip of the rifle and jerked it up. He didn’t know why. His heart was slamming in his chest. For the first time in a very long time, Lee didn’t know where his head was. But he pulled that rifle in close so that the two men were face-to-face, and LaRouche gave no more reaction to being stopped than he’d had to shooting the dead bodies.
Lee shook his head, looking into the sergeant’s vacant eyes.
“Stop.” His voice trembled. “Just… stop.”
“Okay.” LaRouche blinked, but the look of emptiness did not leave him.
“You guys…” Jim’s voice cut through the room like a rope to drowning men. Something tangible to hold on to. They turned and watched the ex-priest as he stood in the doorway, his rifle hanging from its sling, both his hands clutching his temples. “Oh my God.”
Lee took LaRouche firmly by the shoulders and pulled him away from the corpses on the floor. They stepped over the arms and legs of these lost females, sequestered away, protected in this godforsaken hovel from the dangers outside.
Lee pointed the other two men toward the exit. “Let’s go.”
Outside, the cold breeze scoured the stench from their clothes and the three men stood in the street for a moment, just breathing fresh air. Lee was the first to snap out of his daze, and he chastised himself for letting the shock of the moment set him off balance. All of the survivors had their perceptions about how the great and highly trained Captain Harden should act, and to be truthful, he held some of these perceptions himself.
But sometimes the moment just got the better of you.
“We need to get out of the open,” he said over his shoulder.
They crossed the street at a jog, and Lee decided to just keep going. They needed to get to the Humvee anyway and get in contact with Wilson’s group and Camp Ryder. Jim and LaRouche didn’t ask any questions, and Lee didn’t give them any explanations. He just kept heading north, away from the den, and they followed him.
The Humvee with the dozer attachment was still sitting where they’d left it. Jim climbed in the driver’s seat, LaRouche in the back, and Lee in the front passenger’s seat. They shut the doors and the heat from their bodies and breath began to fog the windows.
Lee picked up the handset to the radio, but then set it back down again. His fingers lingered on it as he spoke. “We can’t tell anyone about what happened in the den.”
Silence.
Then Jim said, “Uh, Captain… I think…”
Lee turned to face him. “People have a hard enough time accepting the traps. You think they’re gonna go along with blowing up a dozen pregnant women?”
“Infected,” LaRouche spat.
Lee spun on him. “Do you not see the fucking difference? Jerry and Professor White are gonna use this to sway everyone’s opinion. It’s gonna fuel the fires and burn us, I guarantee it. I know we feel like we should report everything back, but this seriously jeopardizes my mission.” Lee stabbed at the dashboard with a finger. “We’ve come too goddamned far to have it fucked up by some bullshit like this. It even took us by surprise, and we’re out here doing this shit every day. How do you think the average person is going to take it?”
Jim looked wary, like he was making his way across an unsteady footbridge. “Captain, I understand this is not going to be popular, but I think we have a moral obligation to tell people. I mean, not only could this give Jacob useful information, but it’s also a safety issue. If there’s a den here with females in it, there might be one of the same in Lillington.”
Lee thought about it and knew that Jim was right. “Let me handle that.”
* * *
Harper bounded up the steps to the Camp Ryder office. Concrete walls blurred by, metal stair risers clanging under his feet. He found Bus standing and facing the radio. He turned when he heard Harper come through the door.
“What’s wrong?” Harper said, breathing hard. “Did someone get hurt?”
Bus nodded. “Lee’s on
the line. He’s telling me to go to ‘private channel,’ whatever that means.”
Harper had to think about it for a moment. “Private channel” was a particular channel that they could switch to and not be overheard by the other base stations around the Camp Ryder Hub that might be monitoring the main channel. Lee had only told the people on his team about what channel he’d selected to be their private channel.
Harper stepped to the radio and switched the frequency, hoping he’d remembered correctly. He took the handset and keyed it up. “Lee, you there?”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“What happened? I heard something bad happened.”
“Jake’s been shot. Julia is with him, and Wilson and his team are taking them to the hospital.”
“Sonofabitch…” Harper thought Lee sounded a little dazed, and that, above everything else, made him worry. “Who shot him? And who the hell is with you if everyone left for the hospital?”
“Jim and LaRouche are with me; don’t worry. We’re fine. As for the shooter…” Lee paused for a long time, and Harper could hear him breathe into the microphone twice, thinking. “We don’t know who it was. We didn’t see who shot him. We think it was from the rooftops, but we haven’t had a chance to check it out yet.”
“No one else got hurt?”
“No, it was just Jake. The guy only fired once.”
“Is Jake gonna make it?”
A pause before the transmission came through. “I don’t think so, Harper.”
Harper looked at Bus and could see that his face was gray and worn.
“Look, we’ll talk about that later,” Lee said over the radio. “It’s not what I called you for.”
“Okay.” Harper was still processing the news of Jake’s imminent death. “What do you need?”
Lee’s voice was distant. “I need you to get Jacob and a couple of the people you trust from your group of volunteers, and I want you to go to Lillington. You don’t need a lot of guys, just three or four of them. You’re going to comb the downtown area of that city. You’re looking for a den.”