by D. J. Molles
Outside his shanty, he looked up at the sky and found stars staring down at him, clear and crystalline. Dawn was still an hour away, and to the untrained eye, the sky was still dark. But a person who lies awake in the cold nights can see even the slightest change in the color of the sky.
Gonna be a clear day. Maybe even a little warm.
He meandered among shanties full of sleeping families and couples. People who had someone else to cling to in the night. Someone to give them warmth and comfort. It struck him that modern society had robbed something from people when their lives and beds were so comfortable that they preferred to sleep alone. Man wasn’t meant to spend these nights by himself. The pleasure of human company in these hard times overcame any number of personality quirks that would have become “deal breakers” in the old world.
We got so picky, he thought to himself. My steak’s not cooked right, and my bed doesn’t align my spine properly, and my wife just put on some weight.
Who gives a fuck?
LaRouche could recall any number of women he’d dated, only to delete them from his phone and avoid them at all costs because her laugh was weird, or she left her wet towel on the bathroom floor, or she had too many cats.
Now he’d give anything to have one of those women in his bed at night, warm and soft, and maybe, just maybe, he’d sleep the whole night through.
Like the rest of these fuckers. LaRouche made a face as he passed a shanty that was rumbling with someone’s loud snoring. How did you sleep that deeply when it was only thirty degrees out? Unbelievable.
He reached the large circle of ash ringed with stones. He knelt down over the rocks and held his hand close above the ashes. There was still some heat there. He stepped over to a large and mysterious mound that sat a few yards from the fire pit, covered by a tarp. He lifted the tarp and tossed it back halfway, revealing a stack of wood and kindling.
God bless all the people who did the chores around here. The hunting and the gathering and the splitting wood for fires. Of course, LaRouche had his own job to do and it came with its own unique set of challenges, but not once had he gone to this stack of wood and found it depleted.
He grabbed up an armload of kindling and two split logs and carried them to the side of the fire. He brushed the ashes away and revealed the glowing embers underneath. He placed the kindling over this patch of coals and blew on it steadily until the embers began to blaze hotly and the kindling caught. Slowly but surely, he nursed the fire back to life.
He stared into the flames for a long time, feeling the heat on his face as the fire began to envelop the split logs, the splinters burning and curling back on themselves, the bark beginning to steam and bubble as what little moisture was left inside of it boiled. In those long, hypnotic moments, his mind left him and traveled to a kitchen with white cabinets and gray granite countertops and the smell of strong coffee. His parents’ house in Tennessee. The bright, early-morning light seeping through the bay windows of the breakfast nook. The way the sun felt warm coming through the windows, but he could look outside and see the frost shimmering on everything. The way the house felt almost too hot when he came in from the outside, the vents kicking out air that smelled of home, a box of a dozen fresh doughnuts in his hand. That was breakfast, and it would be the only thing they ate until Thanksgiving dinner in the early afternoon. A dozen doughnuts to fuel a day of turkey frying, cigar smoking, and backyard football playing.
He thought of their faces. His mother, his father, his younger brother. Faces that would gather around the island and look at each other with that tired affection of waking up to a full house of long-lost family, in town for the holidays. Tired, but comfortable in their belonging.
He missed them, but he tried not to think about them, because he knew they were probably dead. It felt cold of him to think it, but he wouldn’t fool himself into a false hope. The LaRouche family was nothing if not pragmatic, and they would not want him to labor under the assumption that they had survived against all odds. They’d lived just outside of Nashville, and so likely hadn’t made it. His dad would run a hand over his thick salt-and-pepper goatee and adjust his glasses and say, “Son, you worry about yourself. We can manage just fine.”
“I see you couldn’t sleep either?”
LaRouche jerked at the interruption to his thoughts and looked up from the fire to find Father Jim standing there beside him, his arms tight around his chest and the hoods up over his head of both the parka and the sweatshirt he wore underneath.
LaRouche smiled marginally and looked back into the fire. “I gave up on it about an hour ago.”
“Yeah. I’ve been lying awake for a while.”
“What’s bothering you?”
Father Jim chuckled. “Death? Dismemberment? The unknown?”
LaRouche laughed quietly. “Yeah, that’ll keep you up at night.”
“Let me guess: big responsibilities and fear of failure?”
“Swing and miss, Father.” LaRouche rose up and stretched his legs.
“Well, I’m not a mind reader.” Jim held his hands out to the fire.
LaRouche let the silence stretch for a minute. “You have family, Jim?”
“Yes.”
“Wife? Kids?”
“No. Never married. I’ve got a mother and father, but they live in upstate New York, so…”
“Oh.”
“I guess I should say ‘lived.’ ”
“Do you know that they’re dead?”
“They were pretty old.”
“Still…”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
LaRouche eyed the ex-priest. “Any thoughts? Devotionals? Words of wisdom?”
Jim smiled. “How about a verse of the day?”
“Okay. I’m listening.”
Jim squeezed LaRouche’s shoulder and spoke with the quiet confidence of a clergyman. “ ‘But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who believe and are saved. Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.’ ”
“Hmm.” LaRouche considered the words for a time. “How do you keep all of those scriptures in your head?”
Jim laughed. “Oh, I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible, unfortunately. I know… that doesn’t make me a very good priest, but then again, I never pretended to be a very good priest.” He sighed. “No. The scriptures that I’m able to quote directly are only because I’ve quoted them to myself every day since this all began, trying to remind myself that I’m gonna get through this.”
“You have doubts?”
“I always have doubts. It’s human nature to doubt. But faith isn’t the absence of doubt; it’s the decision to believe in something contrary to what you observe.”
“So you believe that we’ll come out of this okay?”
A faint smile. “I’ve made the decision to believe that there is a purpose to all of this, that everything works together for the glory of God, and that whether or not my own personal survival is in the cards, what we’re doing here needs to be done and will be done.”
“What if the purpose is to wipe out the human race?”
Jim looked at him askew. “What if there’s no God?”
LaRouche seemed taken aback by the suggestion.
“You can gloom and doom it all day long, and I guarantee you won’t beat me at it—my family’s Irish Catholic.”
LaRouche chuffed and rolled his eyes.
“Positive thinking to us is expecting the worst and hoping it’s over quickly.”
“Okay.” LaRouche laughed. “You’ve got me beat.”
“Hopefully you’ve learned your lesson.” Jim adjusted his glasses and spoke sternly. “Don’t ever try to one-up me on depressing thoughts.”
“So, you’re ready for this?”
Jim thought about it. “I suppose so. You?”
“Yeah. I suppose so, as well.”
CHAPTER 27
Traitors
Marie made a special breakfast th
at morning. She began cooking when it was still dark and continued on until everyone had eaten. She viewed it as her job to keep everyone fed, and with the two groups due to depart later that day, she felt it was her duty to cook an extravagant breakfast, or at least what passed for extravagant at Camp Ryder. It became apparent as she cooked that she’d been hiding away stashes of goods a little bit at a time. Things that she normally didn’t use in the regular cooking. Things like sugar and cinnamon—things that were hard to come by.
So Camp Ryder and its members, who had volunteered to go out to the east and to the north to blow bridges and rescue refugees, felt like kings at breakfast and full of good food and lifted by the lighthearted conversation that went with it, when they left to gather their things and say their good-byes.
Lee, Harper, and LaRouche began to arrange the vehicles into two columns and to load the LMTVs with their respective payloads of ordnance and munitions, as well as stocking the Humvees with extra ammunition, food, and water. After a while, Wilson and Lucky joined them, and helped load in the last couple hundred pounds of C4 and several crates of claymore mines.
As they worked, the day began to warm slightly, and they even started to sweat, though it was quickly chilled from their foreheads once they stood still for a moment. The jackets came off, and they worked in just their hoodies and sweaters.
Gradually, the vehicles were filled to capacity and the volunteers began to trickle into the Square, stowing their packs in the rears of the vehicles they would ride in or drive. As the work became lighter and more and more of them stood around in quiet conversation, the jackets were donned again.
When they were finished, Lee met Harper and LaRouche between the two columns of vehicles. He’d left Tomlin upstairs in the office to avoid having to explain things repeatedly. Bus was aware of the situation, and Lee was sure that everyone in Camp Ryder would hear it from the good old-fashioned grapevine soon enough.
He put a hand on both of their shoulders. “You guys feeling okay about this?”
“Sure.” LaRouche nodded.
“I guess,” Harper said, a little less confident.
“I have to work with Tomlin to resolve a couple issues,” Lee continued quietly. “As soon as I can make sure everything is secure back here, I’ll be joining you, LaRouche, out east. You both have a half dozen repeaters in your supplies, so make ’em count and stay in contact so we can coordinate, okay?”
“Roger that.” LaRouche sighed. “How long do you think you’ll be?”
“No idea.” Lee shrugged. “I’ll ballpark it at a week.”
Harper looked at him gravely. “Just be careful, Lee.”
Lee smiled. “I’m always careful.”
“Okay.”
Lee took his hands from their shoulders. “Take it to ’em, guys.”
Without another word, they mounted up and a chorus of diesel engines rumbled to life up and down the columns of vehicles. Lee stood in the middle of them and crossed his arms over his chest, feeling sick to his stomach. If there was anything more nerve-racking than being in danger, it was sending others out to be in danger without you.
The sentries pulled the front gates clear of the road.
In the side-view mirror of the lead Humvee, Lee could see Harper looking at him. His face was pure concern, but when Lee made eye contact with him, he smiled bravely and flicked a salute off his forehead. Lee returned the gesture, and the Humvee rolled away.
Harper’s convoy left first, followed immediately by LaRouche’s. The long train of vehicles kicked up dust as it trundled out of Camp Ryder, slowly and deliberately into a hostile world, and in less than an hour they would be in unknown territory, among unknown threats and unknown people. They would adapt and overcome—they would have to. Everything depended on it.
Out of sight from Camp Ryder, down the winding dirt road that led away from safety and security, Harper’s lead Humvee reached the end of the dirt road and the beginning of the blacktop of Highway 27. The column slowed to a stop as though waiting for a break in traffic before continuing. Then the Humvee’s tires scratched over the gravel, turning right toward Highway 421, which would take them north toward their destination.
The column of vehicles split in the middle, half going right and half going left.
* * *
Jerry leaned against a shanty, quietly regarding the gates as the convoy of military vehicles disappeared from sight. His lips were pursed in concentration and his mind was working quickly now, his heart beating quickly in his chest as he thought about his plan. Camp Ryder was empty of Captain Harden’s thugs—all the volunteers who had any training had just left in a cloud of dust.
His fingers and toes tingled with excitement.
The gates were closed and locked again and Bus and Captain Harden, walking side by side, disappeared back into the Camp Ryder building. Something was going on between them and whoever the guy was that they’d captured yesterday. Eyes and ears around the camp were telling Jerry that the captive was no longer so captive, and possibly he was up in the office with Bus and Captain Harden.
Interesting.
Jerry turned quickly and strode through the rows of shacks toward the fence line. When he reached it, he hung a left and followed the chain-link fence all the way to the quiet northwestern corner of the compound, where a jumble of shipping containers had yet to be put to good use and no shanties had been built. He sidled between two shipping containers and found Greg waiting.
“What’s the news?”
Greg looked around conspiratorially. “Just got word from Doc Hamilton in Smithfield. Apparently that guy from Virginia—”
“Jacob?”
“Yeah… apparently he shows up last night with a ‘package.’ ” Greg’s voice dropped even lower and he leaned forward. “It was an infected. They captured an infected!”
Jerry’s face screwed up. “What? Why the hell would they do that?”
Greg shook his head. “That’s not all, man. Doc Hamilton says that Jacob had him help with the infected. They have it secured in a room so that Jacob can study it, but here’s what really freaked me out…” Greg swallowed. “The infected is a female… and she’s pregnant.”
The two men stared at each other.
“You’re sure about this?”
Greg shrugged. “I haven’t seen it. I’m just relaying what Doc Hamilton told me. And Doc Hamilton was freaked out by this shit. If you’re asking my opinion, then yes… I believe it’s true.”
Jerry rubbed his stubbled chin. “This changes things.”
“They’re procreating. They’re not dying off.”
Jerry looked at his compatriot. “No, they’re not. I don’t think it would be wise to wait until the refugees from up north get here to make our move. This is something we need to get ahead of immediately.”
“We need to move now.”
Jerry nodded. “Send the message to Professor White to be ready to move. The minute he gets his weapons, I want him staging right outside Camp Ryder. Out of sight. You know the plan.”
Greg nodded. “I’ll take care of it.”
Jerry turned to leave, but then stopped himself. “Greg…”
Greg raised an eyebrow.
Jerry wagged a finger. “Don’t tell him about the pregnant infected. Lie to him if you have to, but he cannot know about that.”
Greg looked like he didn’t quite understand, but he nodded anyway.
Jerry slipped quietly out from between the shipping containers.
There was work to be done.
* * *
“Let’s talk about this informant,” Lee said, taking a seat in the office.
Tomlin was center stage between Lee and Bus, his hands clutched in his lap, the subject of Bus’s intense scrutiny. The bigger man sat leaning forward and glaring unsurely at the newcomer from underneath bushy brows. Lee had explained the situation in short form, and to his credit, Bus simply absorbed the information without reaction.
Tomlin nodded to the que
stion. “Okay. But I should be clear: I don’t know the guy.”
“You knew the two marksmen,” Lee pointed out. “Didn’t you? Would you know of anyone else he might send?”
“First, I didn’t know the two marksmen.” Tomlin met their eyes. “I found out about them after they’d already been sent, but I couldn’t have picked them out of a crowd. And I have no idea who they would have sent to do this job.” He shrugged. “I can make some educated assumptions, though.”
“Such as?”
He directed his attention to Bus. “How many people does Camp Ryder take in, let’s say, on a weekly basis?”
Bus, still showing some hesitation, glanced at Lee, who nodded. Bus didn’t seem to want to give Tomlin extra information, but if Lee trusted him…
“Maybe three or four a week? Usually families or groups.”
“I don’t think it’s going to be hard to find this person.” Tomlin unfolded his arms and looked a bit more confident. “They would have come within the last month, so you’re talking about a maximum of maybe a dozen potential suspects. I think we can narrow it down from there.”
“I imagine he would have come alone,” Lee suggested.
Bus grimaced. “I don’t know if we’ve had any single folks come in lately… except maybe Jacob.”
“Jacob, the guy from Virginia?” Tomlin asked.
“Yes.”
Tomlin shook his head but didn’t look very sure of himself. “I don’t know. He came straight from Mitchell. I mean… I guess it’s possible…”
Bus made a grim noise. “If it’s possible, we should pursue it.”
Lee rubbed his neck. “No one else has shown up by themselves?”
Bus thought about it for a moment, mentally flipping the pages of an imaginary ledger. Finally, he shook his head. “No. And I personally oversee everyone who comes into Camp Ryder.”
“What about groups?” Lee said. “He might have inserted himself into another group that was traveling.”
“That would help hide him,” Tomlin agreed.
“Most of the groups we get are families.” Bus tapped a finger. “But we’ve gotten two groups of three in the past month that have not been related to each other. One was two men and a woman, and the other was three guys—a little younger, like maybe fresh out of college.”