by D. J. Molles
Harper ripped the ear buds out.
He looked at them as though they’d told him a dreadful secret, and then he dropped them back onto the dead body and stood up.
“You okay?” Julia asked.
“Yeah, fine.”
“What kind of music was it?”
Harper shook his head. “It was nothing.”
He put his hands on both sides of the counter and began to step over the body into the back of the pizza shop, when a voice drew his attention outside. Gray came crunching onto the glassy sidewalk just outside the door of the shop, pointing northward. “Got three of ‘em comin’ up the road.”
Harper turned and looked at Julia. “You’re up.”
She looked heavily at the body on the ground, then nodded, pulling the rifle from where it was slung over her shoulder. “Alright. I’ll check it out.”
Harper gave a distasteful glance into the back of the pizza parlor, saw a mess of ransacked shelving, piles of excrement in the corners of the kitchen where people had relieved themselves while using the place as a shelter. He turned away from the wreckage. “Yeah, I’m comin’ out, too.”
Julia was already out the door, followed closely by Gray, and then Harper.
Outside the parking lot sprawled out in grays and blacks. All the vehicles lined up, one after the other, pointing towards the exit and ready for flight. The parking lot rose at the exits, meeting the road at a slight incline, and on this small crest, Harper could see Mike Reagan standing there in the center of the street, staring northward while the others crowded around in the bottom of the parking lot.
Julia quickened her pace to a jog as she hit the incline. On the street, Mike seemed to regard whatever he saw in the distance with a blank look, his rifle simply hanging from his fingers, not tucked into his shoulder. Nothing in his body language saying that he was alarmed or on edge. He seemed apathetic.
“Mike,” Julia called as she neared him.
He twitched slightly, as though someone had touched him, but still he didn’t look around. Julia glanced back at Harper, then at the faces of the others. Harper turned, looking for Torri’s face and hoping that she could provide some explanation into Mike’s odd behavior.
Julia raised her voice this time: “Hey! Mike!”
He snapped his head in her direction, eyes narrowed. The rifle jerked in his grip—a small movement, but enough for Harper to slow his roll and for Julia to put a hand up.
“You okay?” she said, a little edge to her voice, as though she really meant to say snap out of it!
“Huh?” Mike shook his head, reconnecting to reality. “Yeah. Fine.” He looked back down the roadway, clearing his throat and blinking rapidly. “Uh…three of them, I think. Just crested that last rise in the road.” He squinted. “I can see two of them now. Don’t know where the third went.”
Julia raised the rifle up, not aiming, but just using the scope to glass the farthest rise in the road. “I got three,” she said quietly.
Harper peered over her shoulder, saw them only as small dark shapes—two of them walking on the road, while the third seemed to dance spastically in and out of the tree line on the far edge of the roadway. Harper watched the strange movements for a second, wondering silently what the hell the creature was doing. Which crisscrossed neurons were firing erratically in its brain, perhaps making it see things in the trees? Or maybe it was simply like a dog, running in circles because it was excited.
“The fuck is that thing doing?” he mumbled.
Julia lowered the rifle, still squinting. “No idea.”
Mike rubbed his eyes. “You, uh, want me to hit the horn a few times?”
Julia extended the rifle’s bipod. Her lips pursed for a moment. She looked down at the rifle, the chamber. Made sure the bolt was snug and the breech loaded. A bit of hair that had escaped her tie-back flitted about restlessly in the wind and nagged at her nose and eyes. She worked some spit onto her tongue, then licked her fingers and pasted the hair back behind her ears.
“No.” She looked back up. “Don’t worry about it.”
She started to lean down, but Harper stopped her with a gentle touch of the shoulder. She turned to face him and he masked the concern on his face as best he could, but knew that some of it bled through. “You sure about that?” he said, quietly. “I mean, it ain’t no thing to hit the horn. If it’s gonna make you feel better about…”
“Honestly…” she trailed off as she took a knee, then settled into a prone position. She looked back up at him with a sad, tired smile that he’d grown familiar with. “I don’t think it makes a damn bit of difference anymore.”
She didn’t wait for an answer, and Harper wasn’t sure he really had one. But it hurt to see that little bit of her simply float away on the breeze. That stubborn part of her that insisted she give these deranged people the benefit of the doubt. It hurt him to watch it because he knew it was a piece of herself that she would never get back.
But he just laid his hand on the pistol grip of his rifle and thought, welcome to the real world.
Welcome to cold, hard truth.
Welcome to a world with no room for delusion.
The rifle boomed. Harper flinched. Dust and cordite mixed in a swirl of gray in front of the muzzle and was gone. She racked the bolt action, seated another round in the chamber, settled over the rifle with the comfort of old friends embracing. She breathed in, exhaled slowly, fired again.
Harper put his eyes downrange, saw only one figure left, racing towards them. Whether it had seen them, or just heard the sound of the gunshot and was drawn, Harper didn’t know. Didn’t really care. He shifted uncomfortably as he watched the thing run towards them, still a long way off, but there was something disconcerting about seeing the way they moved—some bastardization of human and animal alike.
The third shot brought it down.
Harper nodded and Julia rose up to her elbows. “Three shots…damn.”
Julia didn’t respond. She heaved herself up onto her knees, then her feet, then picked the rifle up from the ground and collapsed the bipod.
Harper looked behind him, thought to call out to Mike, ask him to help them go check the bodies. But when his eyes fell on the man, he was half sitting, half standing against the front bumper of one of the LMTVs, shoulders slumped, eyes staring off into the woods behind them. His rifle wasn’t even slung or in his hands. Now it simply stood against the bumper, an arm’s length from Mike. Like it wasn’t even his. Like he didn’t want anything to do with it.
Harper whispered under his breath. “What the fuck?”
He scanned around again, and this time he did find Torri. She walked towards them in the road, her own rifle ported against her chest, her oval face seeming to have been interrupted by a few harsh angles around her eyes and mouth, her lips downturned at the corners. She looked right at Harper and she shook her head.
For a moment, Harper thought that she might have been angry with him, but then she looked back at her husband, leaning up against the LMTV, lackadaisical, in his own little world, and when she looked back her eyes showed worry instead of anger.
Harper gave her a questioning look, but her only response was to look away from him.
Julia stood by his side, rifle propped against her hip. She leaned in to him, her words a murmur. “What’s wrong with Mike?”
Harper flapped his lips. “Hell, I have no idea. Ask his wife.”
Torri approached them, and the three tightened the edge of their group, as though their conversation were confidential.
“You guys need help going down there?” Torri asked.
Harper looked over her shoulder. “Yeah. I was gonna ask Mike…”
“I’ll go with you,” Torri said quickly.
Julia ducked her head a bit to find Torri’s gaze. “What’s wrong with him?”
Torri glanced over at her husband quickly, then down at her shoes, her pretty features clouded with concern. “I don’t know. He’s been like this ever since
he shot that guy.”
Harper rubbed his neck. “He knows it wasn’t his fault, right?”
Torri just shrugged. “You said it. I said it. He’s gotta know…he didn’t have a choice!” she took a shaky breath, blew it out and straightened, as though gathering herself up. “He’s just been out of it. He used to get like this sometimes. Back then. Stress, I guess. He’d get all quiet, but he’d just go on a fishing trip or backpacking or something and he’d be okay.” She smiled wanly. “Now…”
Harper put a hand on her shoulder and began to slowly move towards their Humvee, finishing her sentence in his mind: Now there’s no peaceful place. You can’t escape it. You live in it non-stop.
“Just keep talking to him,” Harper said gently. “We can’t have him checked out like this. But right now we need to go check those bodies, so let’s get going and not make a big deal out of this.” He pointed Torri towards the convoy. “See if you can’t find Gray and tell him to get his ass in the turret.”
Harper and Julia walked quickly to their Humvee. When they had settled in and closed the doors, Harper checked the side view mirror, keeping an eye on Torri as she flagged down Gray. The two engaged in a brief exchange that appeared silent in the reflection of the mirror. It involved much waving and hand-pointing and after a moment, the two of them walked towards the Humvee, side by side. Too far away to hear anything that was said inside.
Still, Harper spoke quietly. “We haven’t killed enough people yet?”
Julia gave him a questioning look.
Harper rubbed the top of his bald head. “How many people you think Mike’s killed since this shit happened? Even if you don’t include the infected, he’s probably still shot at least a half dozen or so.” His hand fell to his knee with a slap. “And he chooses now to blank out on us? He’s so fucking torn up about this one guy that he shot? Makes no fucking sense.”
Julia disengaged the emergency brake and shifted into drive. “If I’ve learned one thing from all of this shit, it’s that everyone’s got a different way of handling what’s going on. You just have to…let them work it out.”
Harper growled. “He’s not working it out. He’s just fucking standing there.”
“Harper…” Julia had a warning tone.
Torri and Gray reached the Humvee and climbed in, Torri taking the seat directly behind Harper, and Gray making tired grunts and groans as he sat himself on the canvass strap of the turret that served as his seat. He propped his foot up on the radio, and Harper looked down at the dirty brown boots and thought of how Lee would always cuss at LaRouche for doing the same thing.
“It’s a radio, not a footstool,” Lee would gripe.
Or he would just elbow them off.
But Gray didn’t seem like the type to appreciate that.
Harper looked forward again as the Humvee started moving out of the parking lot, the rest of the crews beginning to find their ways back to their vehicles. He wondered how LaRouche and Lee were doing at the moment. What they were doing. Were they fighting? Were they in danger? How close was LaRouche to reaching the Roanoke River? And had Lee found the man he thought was out to kill him?
They rumbled up onto the asphalt, and Julia cranked the wheel to the right. She looked both ways out of sheer habit. There would be no other cars to watch out for. No pedestrians to walk in front of them. Harper remembered an abandoned shopping center where he took that 1972 C10 to do burnouts, figure eights, and generally abuse it and waste gas. He could do anything he wanted in that parking lot, because there was never anyone else there.
The whole world was like that now.
Empty. Overgrown. Run down.
The road dipped down. Ahead of them, the valley, and then a tiny bridge spanning over a creek, and then the steep rise to the hillcrest on the other side. The last one that Julia had shot lay in the center of the road, just a pale blob in the middle of all that charcoal gray cement with the double-yellow lines bisecting it like it was some strange, fleshy bead suspended on a wire. A dark ribbon ran out of it, heading downhill and towards the shoulder, and as they descended into the valley, the ribbon caught the sun and shimmered brilliantly for a moment, like the dead thing bled quicksilver.
They crossed the small bridge, saw the slow-moving muddy water below them. Then they were up the other side and pulling to a stop. Julia left it running, out of gear with the emergency brake on. Harper opened his door, stepped out. The wind brought the scent of the infected to him, only slightly diluted. He wrinkled his nose, let the door of the Humvee swing closed behind him as he approached the first body. The wind buffeted him, sounded like roaring water for a moment.
He and Julia reached the first body, inspected it from a distance of about five or six feet away before going any closer. It was a male. Young. High school or college, maybe. Scraggly hair. Just the barest beginnings of a beard. Hairless torso. Two big slashes across its abdomen that looked swollen and angry. A crushed right arm that looked gangrenous. A big hole where its heart used to be.
Harper didn’t know where the other injuries had come from—fighting with other infected, perhaps?—but he knew that it was Julia’s bullet that had turned its heart to pulp, and the thing was as dead as a bullet could make him.
Harper wanted to make a comment on the quality of the shot, but wasn’t sure how Julia would take it, so he decided to leave it be.
Julia made a help yourself gesture towards the body.
Harper sighed. “Suppose it is my turn.”
He stepped up to the body, knelt down.
The noisy wind died down.
But somehow the noise continued.
In fact, it seemed louder now than it had before.
Harper stopped with his hand halfway outstretched towards the body. He leaned back a bit, looked up the hill, then down the hill to the muddy creek at the bottom. It was a noise like a strong wind tearing through a forest, or perhaps it was indeed rushing water, but the creek at the bottom was slow and small. This was a sound more like white water.
“What?” Julia looked around.
“You hear that?”
She listened. “Sounds like a waterfall.”
“Yeah.” Harper withdrew his hand.
Julia regarded him. “You gonna search that guy, or do I hafta do it again?”
Harper rose up, his head turning this way and that, like a radar dish scanning. Triangulating. He faced up the road, almost positive that was where the sound was coming from. “No. Let’s get back in the Humvee.”
Julia snorted, a smile on her face like Harper was playing some stupid joke. But the smile cracked and fell away like dried and brittle plaster, and underneath was a look of dread. She knew when Harper was serious. And he was serious now.
They turned back to the Humvee. The heels of their boots hit the concrete with a little more vigor than usual. Gray eyed them from the turret, and Torri stood beside the vehicle, both their faces bearing the same question that Julia had just asked.
Harper waved at them. “Get back in the truck.”
“What?” Torri called back to him.
From behind them—yes, definitely coming from behind them—the noise had grown. It wasn’t a waterfall, or a strong wind. It was a rumble in the ground that tingled their feet. A vibration in the air that pressed at their ears. Like a tornado was bearing down on them.
Or a freight train.
Harper yelled this time. “Get back in the fucking truck!”
He realized he was running.
The Humvee was twenty feet away now, and Gray looked passed him, up the hill, and his eyes had gone wide and his mouth had dropped open. Harper slammed into his door, ripped it open like he planned to remove it from its hinges, and only then did he look back towards the top of the hill.
The first few crested the hill at a dead sprint. Behind them, like a tidal wave reaching its breaking point, hundreds more swallowed the hilltop, saw the Humvee, the people in it, and then they pitched into a headlong, downhill run.
&nbs
p; CHAPTER 20: STRAGGLER
The interior of the Humvee was chaos.
Julia slammed the thing into gear and hit the gas, whipping it into a tight left-hand turn before Harper could even close the door behind him. The centrifugal force almost pitched him out of the vehicle. Julia’s mouth moved rapidly, but Harper couldn’t hear what she said. The turret blasted, the brass hitting the roof, clanking down into the vehicle. Torri leaned out the window, her rifle stabbing at the air with spits of fire and smoke.
Harper could hear none of this. The only thing registering in his ears was a strange, basal tone like a rolling timpani drum, and it drowned everything else out. He just held on, trying not to fall out of the vehicle. The blur of pavement threatening to chew him up if he let go. His eyes rose to the hilltop again and all he could think was there’s so fucking many of them!
The Humvee straightened. He pulled back and shut the door.
The guns still blazed.
“Cut it out!” Harper bellowed, elbowing Gray in the legs. “There’s too many!”
Behind him, he could hear Torri cursing and breathing, the clatter of metal on metal as she dropped her empty magazine and inserted a new one.
Julia shouted over the roaring engine. “We need some distance, Harper!”
Harper lunged at the radio handset, keying it before he even brought it out of the cradle. “Everyone turn around and get up the road!” he transmitted. “Turn around and get up the road now!”
Gray leaned down into the cabin. “Holy fuck! That’s a lot of crazies!”