by D. J. Molles
"You not hungry?" she asked.
Lee rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ll come down in a minute…once the line’s died down.”
She regarded him dubiously.
“Just give me a minute.”
“Suit yourself,” she shrugged.
Lee clomped up the stairs. In the office, he placed his rifle against the far wall, beside the bedroll that he kept there. He would sleep in the office tonight, as he would most of his first nights back. He hated waking in the middle of the night, cold with sweat and his heart pounding, to find Angela and Abby and Sam staring at him because he had shouted them awake in his sleep. It was always worst the first night back.
Most survivors had the dreams, but almost everyone on Lee's team had them with disturbing frequency. They were dreams of helplessness, mostly, and they often shared similar ones. The most common was their weapons not firing, or the bullets dribbling out of the barrel, or simply being ineffective. Some dreamed that the Claymore mines would not go off, but that the infected had found them and swarmed the building they were atop.
Lee’s own personal nightmare was something less tangible. In the dream he knew he was asleep, and that his eyes were closed, but he would see the room where he slept in vivid detail. And always at his feet was something, some dark figure crouched there, formless and black and inexplicable. Its presence filled him with dread, he would try to shake himself awake and to move, but his body would be paralyzed under the weight of sleep, as though he were encased in concrete.
Lee had no explanation for the dream, save that it was some fetid mental byproduct of the things he had witnessed while awake.
Every day was full of fear. Not only fear for oneself, but for the people that you cared for and loved. There was no safe haven, no place of peace. The dangers were constant and inescapable. Worst of all, there was no light at the end of the tunnel, no date that one could point to and say, "yes, I'll be back home at this time, I'll be out of danger if I can last just a few more months." And no one, not even Lee, could escape the effect that this had on the subconscious.
Lee shook his head to open his drooping eyes. He blinked a few times and then stepped over behind the desk to where they had installed the base station for their radios. The base station and all the digital repeaters that Lee and his team had installed around the Camp Ryder Hub were fed from small but powerful solar panels.
He changed the channel on the base station to a prearranged frequency, used for the Coordinators to communicate with each other. Captain Mitchell had easily made contact with the others because he still had use of the secure connections in his original bunker. Establishing contact with the other coordinators had become a problem for Lee when his original bunker had been buried underneath the burning ruins of his house.
Lee picked up the handset and made the same transmission he always made: "This is Captain Lee Harden, Project Hometown, North Carolina, to any other Coordinator that can copy this transmission…please respond."
He released the transmit button and sat on the desk and stared at the radio. It hissed and crackled a bit after he ended his transmission, and then became silent. He sat and waited for the radio to speak up and perhaps catch something from another Coordinator, some stray radio wave bouncing across the atmosphere.
As he stared at the silent box, everything around him grew gray and monochromatic as his eyes lost focus and his mind slipped into a haze of sleepiness. He felt his head falling forward and jerked awake, and then tried to shake the sleep away, but the wakefulness would only last for another minute or so.
A rap on the door frame caused him to turn.
Julia entered, holding a bowl and a spoon. It was laden with a stew that Marie had prepared and tendrils of steam lifted off of it. She walked over to the desk where Lee sat and placed the bowl next to him and stuck the spoon in it.
"Brought you some dinner."
Lee smiled. "Thank you."
She stepped back and waited.
"Just give me a few minutes..."
"You need to eat," she said sternly.
"I will."
"Eat."
"Okay. You win. I'll eat."
"What's the matter? You don't like my sister's food?"
Lee took the bowl and shoveled a spoonful in his mouth. "I love your sister's food." He took another mouthful without swallowing the first so that his cheeks bulged out with it. He mumbled around the food, "See? Love it."
She smiled and sat beside him on the desk. She motioned to the bedroll. "You sleeping up here tonight?"
Lee nodded while he ate. The stew was actually very good. He really would have gone down and got himself some in a little bit...or fallen asleep. The hot food took the edge off his hunger and relaxed him even more, so that his whole body felt warm and heavy.
"Trouble in paradise?" she asked.
Lee looked at her, confused for a moment, then realized she was speaking about Angela. He shook his head and looked back to his bowl. "No, it's not like that with us."
"Hm." She pondered this for a moment. "What is it, then?"
Lee shrugged. "I dunno. Friends, maybe?"
"More than that," she said quietly.
"Yeah. More than that." He finished his bowl in silence, and then felt the need to clarify himself. "But never...you know..."
"Really?"
"No."
"I would've thought so."
"Nope."
"Weird."
He bobbled his head. "It’s good."
"So you're sleeping up here because...?"
"Oh." Lee set the bowl down on the desk. "I don't want to wake her and Sam and Abby up at night. From the dreams."
"Yeah."
Lee looked at Julia as she stared at the ground absently. "How are they for you?"
"I hate going to sleep at night. Especially by myself."
"I thought you were staying with Marie?"
Julia smiled. "Well, Marie's been staying with Harmon."
Really? Lee thought. Good for Harmon.
It was getting late and Lee decided it was time to roll out the bed. The talk of going to sleep was doing him in.
"You can sleep up here with me, if you like." The words came out before Lee's tired mind could really put much effort into vetting them. Immediately after the last word left his mouth his mind began to race. He hadn't meant it quite like it had sounded. When they were out beyond the wire, they all slept together anyways, and it didn't seem odd to him in that moment to offer it up.
"What I meant was..." he tried to correct himself.
"Okay," she said.
Lee glanced at her. "Okay.”
“I just don’t wanna sleep alone,” she said quietly.
“Yeah. Me neither.”
“You have any extra blankets?”
“Yes.”
Before rolling out his bed, he switched the radio back to the main channel and took the lantern from the desk. Then he pulled the extra blankets from his pack and gave them to Julia. He extended his own bedroll and lay the blankets across, and Julia situated herself to his left. In an odd, and yet somehow comfortable silence, they laid down on the bedroll, not touching, but close enough if one were to reach out. Lee turned off the LED lantern that glowed brightly and the two of them, exhausted and secure in the comfort of human company, fell asleep almost instantly.
***
He was with his father in this dream, as he was in many other dreams of late. A presence that imparted quiet encouragement in the face of a deep and paralyzing dread that Lee could only feel when he was asleep, lost in the twists and turns of his subconscious. Gene Harden had always been a quiet man, and in these dreams he never spoke a word.
They were on the front porch of a house that Lee had never lived in, some house drawn from memories of his father’s old western movies. They stared out at a barren, windswept landscape and it filled Lee’s soul with an empty fear, like the howling of wind in a canyon. When he looked to his right, he could see his father, as young
as he’d looked when Lee was a boy, perhaps seven or eight years old, and his father in his late thirties. His father stared out at the wasteland before them and he smiled and nodded.
Lee turned away from the scene, hoping to escape into the house, but instead found himself in Lillington, or some poor facsimile of it, manufactured from disjointed bits and pieces from his subconscious. He was standing outside, in the middle of the street, and all around him were the corpses of the dead infected he had killed. Across from him he could see Father Jim, and the man wept violently and beat at his chest.
"What's wrong?" Lee asked.
And Father Jim gestured all around them, at the bodies that littered the streets, and his tears ran bitter down his face. "Where are the females, Lee? Where are all the females?"
Lee looked down at the bodies all around him, pale flesh smeared with dirt and dried blood and shit. All of them were naked, and they were all females, and they all bore Lee’s old girlfriend Deanna's face, in all the different grotesque attitudes of death. In some of them Deanna's tongue lolled out, others her eyes were open, gazing at the sky, or at some invisible fixed point beyond reckoning. In the dream, the sight of Deanna's face had very little effect on him. It was a face from another life, another time.
Someone he could barely remember.
He tried to comfort Jim by pointing to all the dead bodies. "No, Jim! We got 'em all! They're right here!"
But Jim was inconsolable, and he only continued to ask, "Where are all the females?"
***
"Lee."
He opened his eyes to darkness, staring at the ceiling above his head.
"Lee."
He leaned forward and could see the dark shape of Julia, wrapped in a blanket, and standing at the door to the office. The Camp Ryder building had grown cold in the night and Lee could see her breath, fogging in the black air. Julia looked at him and made a little waving motion from underneath her blanket.
"There's someone at the gate," she whispered.
Lee leaned up onto his elbows, sweeping a layer of dust from his slumbering mind and trying to remind himself why he should care if someone was at the gate. The sound of it was faint when he heard it. Someone was yelling outside, and another was raising his voice. Two men in disagreement.
Lee threw his blanket off of himself and the cold air bit at him mercilessly. He grabbed his jacket and his rifle and fumbled them on as he headed for the door. Julia had dropped her blanket and was donning her jacket as well. Lee thought about telling her to stay put, but there really was no purpose to it. Besides, they might need a medic.
He took the metal stairs as quietly as he could, not wanting to wake anyone sleeping inside the building, but the sounds of the disturbance outside were already beginning to cause people to stir. In the small quarters constructed in the middle of the building, lanterns and flashlights were beginning to flicker and glow.
"What time is it?" he asked Julia as she followed him.
"Almost three."
Damn. Lee grit his teeth. You can't pay for a good night's sleep nowadays.
They reached the bottom of the steps, turned through the short hall to the front doors, and slipped out of the Camp Ryder building. From the elevated entryway, Lee could see clear to the gate. A flashlight illuminated a small bubble of existence there and it consisted of two men and the chain-link fence that divided them. All through the shantytown of Camp Ryder, more lights were coming on and people were poking their heads out of their little shacks, trying to see what the yelling was about.
Lee began to run for the gate. Sleep and cold stiffened his joints now, particularly his left ankle, and he couldn't hide his limp as he ran. Ahead of him, Lee could see that the sentry was stepping away from the gate, pointing his rifle at a man on the other side, some strange, bulky looking bear-man, with wild eyes and wire beard stained with blood. The crazed man on the outside had his fingers woven through the chain-link and he was shaking it and yelling.
For a moment, Lee slowed his pace and raised his rifle, wondering why the sentry was not taking this infected out. Then he heard Julia's voice huffing alongside him: "Is that the guy from the woods?"
"What?" Lee asked, but then realized who she was talking about. The man and the woman, and the two children, with their blankets and coats draped heavy and thick over their shoulders. The ones Jim had tried to make contact with, but had run away.
The bear-man shook the gate again. "Get out here! I know you can help! You said! You said you could help! Get the fuck out here and help me, goddammit!"
Lee stopped at the gate, rifle ported. "What the hell is this?"
The man on the other side looked at Lee. "You were there! You were with that guy that said he would help! Where is he? It's my wife and kids…we need help!"
Lee leaned closer and hissed through his teeth. "Would you shut the fuck up? I'm going to help you, but you gotta be quiet!"
The man lowered his voice. “Please…”
Lee nodded to the sentry.
"You sure?" The sentry was shocked.
Lee skewered him with a look. "Yes, I'm sure. Open the damn gate."
The sentry hopped to, and Lee leveled his rifle at the strange man who stood outside the gate, wringing his hands and looking about nervously. "Put your hands up and don't make any sudden movements. I'll help you, but you need to cooperate with me first, or you're not getting shit. Understand?"
The man’s wild and desperate eyes locked onto Lee. Then he nodded and raised two dirty, blood-stained hands.
Lee turned to Julia. Her matted blonde hair was bulging out in odd directions and there were dark rings under her wide eyes. "Go grab the team and tell them to suit up. Better grab your medic pack, too."
She nodded rapidly and ran for the Camp Ryder building.
Lee turned and found that there was no longer a fence between him and the bear-man, and only about ten feet of open space separated them. His arms were still raised up, but now his head had leaned back and his eyes were staring up at the sky and they looked hopeless.
"Are you listening to me?" Lee asked.
The man didn't look, but he said, “Yes.”
Lee spoke slowly and clearly. "Kneel down, and put your hands on top of your head, interlacing your fingers."
The man complied, going to his knees with a sudden collapse, like a wounded beast.
"Do not move, just answer my questions. Do you have any weapons?"
"Crowbar," the man said. "In my belt. Knife in my pocket. Look man…we gotta hurry…"
Lee made eye-contact with the sentry and nodded. As the sentry moved towards the stranger, Lee spoke again. "The sentry is going to take your weapons. If you move, I will kill you. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
The sentry rifled through the man's thick layers of clothing, then paused and looked at his own hands, which were dark and glistening. "Jesus," the sentry exclaimed. "He's fucking covered in blood!"
"Keep going," Lee said steadily.
The kneeling man looked at the sentry. "I had to kill two of them to get here,” he said, but did not elaborate.
As the sentry extracted the crowbar and knife, Lee stepped closer to the man. "You can stand up now. What happened?"
The man reached out for Lee as he drew closer and his eyes were sharp and dark as obsidian, chipped to some primitive arrowhead. "Please! We don't have time…they're in the truck! They're in the back of the truck, and they're surrounded!"
"Slow down." Lee helped the man to his feet. "Explain."
The man's eyes flashed back and forth. "They tracked us, the crazies. We ran from our camp and we made it to this big truck and we hid in the back, but they tracked us down." The man breathed rapidly and pointed out into the dark dirt road that led away from Camp Ryder. "I was able to fight my way out and run to you guys. Please, you gotta help!"
"Where’s the truck?"
"It's maybe a mile from the end of this dirt road. I...I don't know." The man made a miserable noise and h
is hand went to his head and raked through his hair. "It's dark. I was disoriented."
The sentry leaned into Lee. "There's an overturned tractor trailer out on Highway 27, near Outpost Benson."
Lee took the man by the shoulder to get his attention. "Are you talking about infected?"
"Yes, the crazy people!"
"Not real people with guns?"
"No...the ones that try to eat you."
"How many of them were there?" Lee asked.
"I don't know. Maybe ten? I killed a few. Or maybe I just wounded them." He began to breathe heavily again. "Shit, I don't know…"
"Alright, calm down." Lee turned and saw Harper jogging towards them down the dark Main Street of Camp Ryder. He held his rifle in one hand and was in the process of pulling on his parka with the other. Lee looked over to the Humvee, parked just a few yards from them. He didn't want to just rush out into the darkness. He didn't know this guy, didn't know his family, didn't know what the threat was. Was it a pack? Was it a horde? How many were there? Ten? Fifty? A hundred?
Maybe there was no infected at all.
Maybe this was just a trap to draw Lee and his team out of Camp Ryder.
But a decision had to be made.
"Alright," Lee said with finality. As Harper pulled up next to him, breathing hard and rubbing sleep from his eyes, Lee pointed to the Humvee. "Get that thing ready to roll. We're headin' out as soon as the others get here."
"Okay,” the man slapped his hands together. “But we gotta go fast!”
Lee looked at him, tight-lipped. "We'll go as fast as we can safely go."
"Uh, Lee..." Harper said quietly.
The two men made eye-contact.
Harper jerked his head over towards the Humvee.
Lee stepped to the side with Harper, already knowing what was coming.
"What the fuck is this about?"
"Look, his wife and kids are trapped in the back of a truck. Surrounded by infected. It's the guy from the road earlier."
Harper peered over Lee's shoulder at the man, as though to confirm that it was the same person that had run away frightened when Jim had tried to make contact with him only hours ago. "It doesn't matter. Are you thinking clearly right now?"