Refugees - 03

by D. J. Molles

  And bodies.

  There were bodies in the room.

  Not carcasses that had been fed upon, but the bodies of infected that 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 passed 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 blonde hair, sullied by clumps of dried gore and filth. Fresh, bright red blood flowed from the nose and ears, down 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 gunlight to illuminate another body.

  “Captain?”

  He looked up to find LaRouche standing there on the other side of the bodies, shining his light into them. It seemed that they had died, clinging to each other in terror.

  Lee’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, amongst 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 thing that 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 were they 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 towards 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 towards 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 at. 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 onto. 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 god-forsaken hovel from the dangers outside.

  Lee pointed the other two men towards 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 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: “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 foot bridge. “Captain, I understand that 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…” Lee sounded a little dazed, and that above everything else made Harper 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. He only fired once.”

  “Is Jake gonna make it?”

  A pause before the transmission. “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 death. “What do you need?”

  Lee’s voice was distant. “I need you to get Jacob and a couple of the people that 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.”

  “A den? Like an infected den?”

  “Yes. It’s gonna be pretty nearby where we set up the Lillington Outpost. I would say within a few blocks, but go out at least five blocks in each direction. You’ll smell it when you reach it. It should be a low place with open doors, easy to access. Probably dark, not a lot of windows.”

  “Okay. I got it.” Harper touched his forehead. “What are we doing?”

  Lee’s words became very deliberate. “Before you do any of that, I need you to work with Jacob and come up with a way to safely capture a live infected, a way to safely transport it, and to safely keep it contained.”

  “Whoa, Lee…” Harper stared at the radio as if it had bit him. “You wanna tell me what’s going on here?”

  “Is anyone in the room with you, and is the door closed?” Lee asked.

  Harper glanced over at Bus, who nodded. “Yeah, Bus is in here. Door’s shut.”

  “Okay.” An audible intake of breath. “What I’m about to tell you does not leave that room.”

  ***

  Harper placed the handset back on its cradle. He felt shaky. Weak. Unsure of himself. The concept, the dream of one day making it through this alive, it felt like land receding quickly from his view as a riptide carried him out to sea.

  He turned around and found Bus, still contemplative, sitting at his desk.

  “What do you think?” Harper asked him.

  Bus looked up as though he’d forgotten Harper was in the room. He shrugged. “I choose to trust the captain because—let’s be honest—I don’t have much of a choice. I’m sure some people call it blind faith, but that’s not really accurate, because I do take the time to think about everything he asks me to do. And you know what?” Bus smiled. “Sometimes I don’t agree with him. But I weigh that in the balance of his track record, and the consequences of not going along with him.”

  “How do you mean?” Harper slid his hands into his pockets. “You think he would pull support if you refused to do something?”

  Bus shook his head. “No. I don’t think Captain Harden would do something like that, especially after everything we’ve been through. The consequences I speak of are more…intangible. Such as, if me and him are divided, what kind of precedent does that set for everyone else? And what if he’s right and I’m wrong? What if I refuse to do something, and it turns out that I should have? How many people are going to be hurt? At the end of the day, you have to realize that the captain is very utilitarian. In other words, he might risk the lives of five people, but it’s only to save the lives of a hundred.”

  Bus leaned forward and regarded his rough hands, folded on the desktop. “You know, I think he sees things as a very simple equation: how many people risked versus how many people saved. If the number of people saved is greater than the risk, he’ll do it. And sometimes I resent his thinking.” Bus looked at Harper with a pointed stare. “But I wouldn’t want to make the decisions he makes.”

  Harper found himself on the cusp of jumping in to defend Lee—he knew the captain, and he knew he didn’t make his decisions lightly. But when the survival of a nation was in jeopardy, the needs of the many outweighed the needs of
the few. Lee had the survival of more than just himself to think about, and when you began to get into numbers that spanned an entire region, and entire state, then the computations became very complex indeed.

  And realizing this, Harper knew where his heart was at.

  He nodded to Bus and turned for the door. “I need to find Jacob.”

  ***

  Lee and his two companions worked their way through Sanford. They roamed cautiously up and down the side streets, their pace slow and deliberate. Not so fast that they would miss something important, but not so slow as to make an easy target. They scanned for signs of further infected, but found none. They looked for evidence of raiders, but the roads were deserted. As they continued their sweep, they made mental notes of places that could provide good scavenging.

  Lee scanned left, found a pair of boots on the radio console.

  “LaRouche. Your feet. On my radio. Again.”

  The boots retracted. “Sorry.”

  In the southern section of town, they eventually found what they were looking for.

  The school sat in a slight hollow, the surrounding streets overlooking it. From their vantage point on Bragg Street, they could see that barriers had been erected around the school. It was a combination of chain link fencing, concrete blocks, and concertina wire. This metal and concrete wall extended around the entire perimeter of the school. The perimeter had been breached in several sections. Not just man-sized holes, but gaping swaths of chain link and barbed wire that had been trampled and pushed out of the way.

  Inside the complex, the sports fields were occupied by the tattered remnants of tents, giant decontamination domes that sat crumpled and collapsed in the center of the football field. The parking lots where students used to congregate and engage in their secret teenage rebellions were now cleared as landing pads for helicopters, but only one remained: an AH-64 Apache, parked slightly askew in the right corner of the parking lot, as though its pilot had set it down hard and quick. Lee could see the cockpit was open and empty. The rotors hung limp and motionless.