by D. J. Molles
Righting himself and leaning forward, Lee was able to look back and see out his window to the football fields, where the dark shapes of three infected were visible, sprinting toward them in a wide skirmish line. The one in the center was bulky and brown-skinned with wild black hair…
“Jesus! They’re fast!” Lee exclaimed.
The Humvee shuddered and the dog in the backseat yelped in surprise as LaRouche opened up with the fifty. Just before they shot through the barriers and turned back onto Bragg Street, Lee could see the white streaks of the tracers lancing out at the pursuing infected, kicking up chunks of concrete.
Then they were on Bragg Street, and Lee could no longer see them.
* * *
Harper knocked twice on the plywood wall and then pushed open the blue tarpaulin curtain that served as a front door. Inside, Jacob knelt on the dirt floor and appeared to be stuffing his backpack with the personal items he’d arrived with, and a few things Julia and Jenny, who most often served as the welcome party, had provided him. Beside the pack, the plate carrier that had once belonged to Captain Mitchell from Virginia sat on the floor, three aluminum box magazines lying across the chest.
Jacob looked up at Harper and regarded him enigmatically.
The guy’s a real puzzle, Harper thought. Obviously, he was sharp as a tack. Not just book smart but street smart. There was a bit of a fighting dog lurking under all that education.
His eyes, expressionless, returned to his work. “Can I help you, Mr. Harper?”
“Mind if I come in?”
“Come on.”
“Thanks.” Harper slipped through the door and pulled the tarpaulin back into place. “You goin’ somewhere?”
“Yes.” Jacob zipped up the main compartment of his pack. “I think I can do some good at the hospital in Smithfield. I found a pair of scavengers who are making a run out past that direction. They’re going to drop me off on their way.”
Harper chewed at his lip. “Yeah, uh…”
Jacob pointed to the three magazines. “Would I be able to get some extra magazines from you? Those three are the last I have left, and one of them is only half loaded. Is there any way I can get three more mags and, say, two hundred rounds of ammunition from you?”
Harper rubbed his nose. “Jacob, we need your help with something.”
The scientist tilted his head back. “Oh?”
“Captain Harden and his team made a very interesting discovery today. He wants me to take you and a team to Lillington to… check something out.”
Jacob smiled. “Mr. Harper, you’re going to have to be more specific.”
“Captain asked me to keep it quiet, so what I tell you stays here.”
“Of course.”
Harper stepped closer and knelt down so that they were on eye-level, and then told him what there was to tell. As he spoke, Jacob continued to work at packing his things, but as the truth of the matter came out, his movements began to slow until he appeared frozen in place.
“Pregnant?” Jacob’s mouth worked silently for a moment. He seemed both terrified and dazzled by this news, and the edges of his mouth ticked up as though he wanted to smile but couldn’t bring himself to. “I don’t believe it.”
Harper looked at the floor. “I didn’t either, but—”
“Do you know what this means?” Jacob suddenly demanded.
“Uh…”
“It’s reproduction. It’s continuity in the line.” That scared smile again. “There will be mutations—there have to be mutations. It would take years and years… unless the gestation period is decreased. It could be. I just don’t know.” He snapped his head up and looked at Harper gravely. “Please tell me…”
Harper shook his head. “They were killed before the captain realized what they were.”
Jacob threw his hands up with a loud groan.
“Listen.” Harper looked around as though someone might be in the shadows of the room, eavesdropping. “The captain doesn’t think this is the only den with females in it. That’s why he wants us to check Lillington.”
Jacob had been in the process of smearing his hands down his face, but he stopped when he heard this last part. His forehead and cheeks looked flushed from the pressure he’d exerted on his skin. “Because you wiped out the Lillington horde, but you didn’t check for the den.”
“And there might be females there.”
“Are you going to kill them?”
“We’re gonna try to get a test subject.”
Jacob turned, his hands at his sides and the fingers working back and forth with a manic energy. “And if she’s pregnant… that’ll answer so many questions. I’ll be able to watch the gestation period. And see how the baby grows.” He turned to Harper. “What effects does the plague have on the fetus? We don’t know. We can assume a lot, but until we watch it with our eyes, observe and record it, it’s just bunkum.”
Harper gave him a questioning look. “You seem excited.”
Jacob shook his head. “Not excited. Fascinated, though. Truly, truly fascinated. But very scared. This isn’t a laboratory anymore. This isn’t studying something that’s safely contained. This is studying something that is right here, right now, wiping us out.” He took a deep breath. “It’s a lot of pressure.”
Harper put a hand on the scientist’s shoulder. “Don’t get bogged down just yet. We still have to catch one of them.”
Jacob stalked over to a corner of the small cube that he called his home and snatched up a metal pole with a thin cable coming out of the top, a makeshift dogcatcher’s pole. “Same as you catch any other animal that wants to bite you. I’d suggest the use of a heavy tranquilizer, but I don’t want to take any chances with the fetus.”
Harper eyed the pole. “Where’d you come up with this thing?”
“I made it.” Jacob set it beside his pack. “I took to heart what Captain Harden said to me the other day, when I was about to throw myself out of the gates for a chance to snare one of them. Admittedly, that was not smart. He was right; I was wrong. So I made the catch pole, and if I’m not mistaken, there are many unused rooms at Johnston Memorial Hospital that might serve perfectly for housing a test subject.”
“I believe there are.”
Jacob nodded, very serious. “Then I believe I’m in.”
* * *
They met at Broadway just before sundown. Lee, Jim, and LaRouche had already made it back and downloaded their gear, and by the time Wilson’s Humvee pulled past the roadblock at the eastern end of Broadway, Jim had already started a fire and pulled out food.
At the telltale rumble of the Humvee, Lee and his two companions looked up and watched the vehicle roll down the strip toward them. The last they’d heard from Wilson was that they were firing up the generators and blowing the dust off the equipment they needed to operate on Jake. No prognosis outside of Dr. Hamilton’s general assessment that things didn’t look good.
They waited tensely as the vehicle stopped and the doors opened. Wilson stepped out, but his expression remained blank. The other members of his team followed, and they looked mostly exhausted. They hoisted their packs onto their shoulders and began meandering their way toward the glow of the fire like moths drawn to the light.
Lee and Jim offered quiet encouragement as they dropped their packs and took their places around the fire. Lee looked back to the vehicle and watched as Julia slid out last. Her clothes were soaked in blood and the pale skin of her arms was smeared with it. Like a fierce blush, it reddened her neck and face. Strands of her hair were stained from the base of her scalp all the way back, clumped together from constantly brushing her hair away with bloody hands.
It appeared that she made a conscious effort to avoid eye contact with Lee, looking everywhere else as she slowly approached. Wilson stepped to her side, put a gentle hand on her shoulder, and said something that Lee couldn’t make out. Whatever he said, Julia offered a faltering smile and a nod.
Lee looked down into the flames. “
What’s the news?”
Julia answered, her voice stone-cold. “Doc Hamilton is operating now. He said he’d hit us on the radio as soon as he had news.”
Lee glanced up and saw her eyelids flutter.
“He’s gotta go in,” she said in a flat monotone. “Repair the artery. Close up the chest wound. Hope the blood pressure doesn’t drop too low.”
“Julia did phenomenally,” Wilson said to Lee. “She was on point the whole way there. If Jake makes it, he owes it to her.”
Julia shot Wilson a withering look. “Let’s not play pretend, okay?” She looked at Lee for the first time, angry, though he wasn’t sure if it were directed at him or some nebulous power responsible for what had happened. “Jake’s not gonna make it. He was shot through the chest with a high-powered rifle round, and it took almost forty-five minutes for him to get anything but the most basic battlefield care. He already lost too much blood by the time we got him into surgery, and Doc Hamilton poking around in there is only going to make him bleed more. They can pump him full of IV fluid to keep his BP up, but at some point in time it’s going to dilute the blood too much, and they don’t have anything to replace it with. And then Jake’s going to die.”
The group looked at her, awkward and silent. They waited for her to continue, but she had apparently spoken her mind. After a stretch, Lee stepped around Wilson and put a hand on her arm, firm but gentle. “Come on, let’s get cleaned up.”
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You still need to clean up.” Lee pulled slightly, and she allowed herself to be removed from the circle. “Jim, why don’t you get some food going?”
Jim nodded. “You got it.”
Lee grabbed his pack as he walked with Julia toward an area where Kip Greene had told them there was a rain basin. The last little bit of crimson light coming from the sunset lit up Julia’s face and blended all of the gore together so that Lee could not tell where it stopped and her skin began. She stared straight ahead, her face immovable.
“What’s the problem, Captain?” There was a bite in her voice.
Lee chose not to take the bait. She was looking for a conflict, looking for some way to exorcise those emotions she kept under lock and key, but fighting with him wasn’t going to solve anything. “No problem, Julia. You said your piece, and now it’s time to get cleaned up. You know… wash your hands for supper and all that?”
“And I need an escort to do that?” She jerked her arm away from him.
Lee looked behind him, feeling his blood rise, and wondering who might be watching them. “Cool it,” he said in a warning tone.
“Why you gotta walk with me, huh?” Julia shook her head and turned the corner of a single-story brick building where a rain catch sat, filled almost to overflowing. “Make sure that crazy Julia doesn’t go off the fucking deep end? Screw you. I can handle myself just fine.”
Lee clenched his hands at his sides. “Clearly.”
“Yeah.” She looked up at him, fire in her eyes. “Clearly. Now why don’t you go play army man with your buddies out there and leave me the fuck alone.”
Lee took two quick steps and his fist shot out, almost involuntarily, but he got control of himself well before it touched her. He extended his finger so it pointed right into her face. “Is that the best you can fucking do?” he spat. “Is that the best you can come up with?”
Julia swatted his hand out of her face. “Leave me the hell alone!”
Lee faced her, putting his hands down but not leaving. “No. You give me a fucking answer. Is that the best you can do?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Rob, and I’m talking about Jake.” He leaned forward so their faces were separated by only a few inches. He could smell the blood on her and the sweaty scent of her. His words came out of him, strained and hot and barely controlled. “You never even reacted to Rob being killed. You can cry a goddamned river for the infected we shoot, but when it comes to your own people, your own friends, you shut down and strike out at the people who are here for you.”
She looked like she was about to hit him.
Lee didn’t care. “So is that the best you can come up with? One of our own is about to die, and the most emotion you can wring out of yourself is to be a fucking bitch to your friends? To the people who care about you? Is that the best we can expect?”
Her voice trembled. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Then tell me, Julia! Tell me that I’m wrong!”
She hit him in the chest with both palms, rocking him back on his heels. “This coming from you? What about you, Lee? I’ve never seen you shed a fucking tear!”
“If I thought twice about all the people who have died because of me, I’d never be able to make a decision again.” He threw out his arms. “What’s your excuse?”
“Don’t you tell me what I feel.” Her whole body shook with rage. “I think about Rob every damn day. And now I’m gonna think about Jake. And the two of them are going to be stuck in my head forever and I’m never going to be able to get them out, along with all the other people I’ve lost.” She took a step forward. “What is it you want to see? You want to see me cry? Is it not good enough for you until I come and dry my tears on your shoulder like a good little girl? Fuck you!”
She spoke with such force that Lee found himself searching for a response but coming up empty-handed.
Julia raised her head. “You wanna see tears? You’re gonna wait a while, because all I am is pissed.” Her voice dropped in volume. “I’m bitter, and I’m angry, and I can feel it just sucking the life out of me. Because every day I wake up and I’m confused.” The stiff aggression of her body suddenly slacked, like high-tension wires snapping. He shoulders sagged, her head lolled, and her arms flopped to her sides. “I look around and I wonder where my house went, where my family went, and I have to remind myself every day that all of that is over. I just keep thinking that I’m not supposed to be here. That maybe tonight is the night that I go to sleep and I wake up and things are back to normal.” She shook her head. “But it’s never going back. I’m stuck here. I’m trapped.”
Lee stared at her for a long moment. The resentment, the frustration, and the fear all came out of him in a breath, and he leaned forward onto the rain catch, hanging his head just above the water, smelling that clean smell of rain, seeing the shimmering image of his silhouette against the darkening sky.
She waited for a long time before speaking again. “You think about them too.”
He felt the side of the rain catch shift as she put her weight on it.
She continued. “Because if you weren’t thinking about them, you wouldn’t be so worried about whether I was thinking about them.”
A grim smile touched Lee’s lips.
“You’re just as fucked-up as the rest of us,” she said. “You just do a better job of hiding it.”
Lee looked at her. She had her back turned to the rain catch, leaning on it with one elbow and looking down at the ground, her face set in an expression that had no name. Not quite resignation. Not quite determination. More like the resignation to be determined. It was something that spoke of the drive to gut it out when crushing defeat was all one had to look forward to.
It was the look of a human being who no longer saw, nor cared to see, anything of beauty, but instead focused solely on the concept of survival. Same as a wild animal will not appreciate the splendor of the jungle it lives in, but instead sees only the danger that lurks inside.
This was not a moment of absolution or enlightenment. It was a hard realization that while the infected seemed to be moving forward, the rest of mankind seemed headed in the opposite direction. The two were still worlds apart, but they seemed bound and determined to meet in some wretched middle where fighting for food and water and procreating the next generation was an all-consuming task. Simple propagation of the species and nothing more.
“Friend of yours?”
Lee saw her looking out toward the street. He followed her gaze and found the stray dog they had rescued—or who had rescued them, depending on how you looked at it—standing at the corner of the building and regarding the two of them cautiously.
Lee stood up. “Yeah. We found him in Sanford today. Still pretty skittish, but he’s even more afraid of infected than he is of us. And he can sniff ’em out way before we can.”
Julia raised an eyebrow. “An infected-sniffing dog.”
Lee bent down and held out his hand. The dog approached, still timid, but it gave a demure wag of its tail and stretched itself out to tentatively lick Lee’s fingers. “Good boy.” Lee turned his wrist in an attempt to scratch the dog behind the ears, but it backed away quickly. Lee stood straight again. “He’s still a little shy.”
“What’s his name?”
Lee wiped the dog slobber off on his pants. “I’m gonna call him Deuce.”
Julia held out a hand. “Hey, Deuce.”
The dog regarded her with a tilt of his head, but didn’t come any closer.
“He’s still warming up to us,” Lee said quietly. He looked back at Julia. “Listen, I didn’t mean…”
Julia shook her head. “You’re right, though. I can’t take it out on you and the others.”
Lee nodded once but didn’t respond. He put his hands in his pockets and decided to leave the whole conversation where it was: a mutual understanding that they were both dealing with these things in their own ways, and they both needed their space to mourn in the way they saw fit. He turned back to the street and put one foot in front of the other. Behind him, he could hear Julia gathering a bucket of water to clean herself off with.
Deuce backed away from Lee as he crossed the street but paralleled him, keeping about ten feet of distance between them at all times. He was interested in whatever food Lee might drop but still not willing to roll over and show his belly just yet.