by D. J. Molles
They’d made an effort to clean up the bodies to prevent the spread of disease, but even so you couldn’t erase scars like that. On the road that they traveled there were still patches of skin and bones and clothing that clung to the concrete. To the sides, where massive funeral pyres had been lit, scorched tangles of bones remained behind like monuments. After several operations to reclaim the city, there had been so many bodies that most of them had just been pushed into uncovered mass graves. The stink of them still tainted the air, though Tomlin understood that it had been much, much worse in the previous months.
Jared dodged around a mass of tangled something lying in the middle of the road. Up ahead, Tomlin could see the top of the hospital looming. It was a four-or five-story construction, with a parking deck attached to one side. Ground-floor access from several points. Not to mention the access doors at each level of the parking garage. It had been sitting abandoned for a little over a week now. And like a boot left outside, it needed to be shaken out to make sure there were no biting things inside.
Tomlin leaned forward in his seat. “Take us right up to the front, Jared.”
“The front?”
“Yeah.” Tomlin checked his weapon—not out of any real necessity but simply out of habit. “We gotta clear this entire structure. The late great Jacob left this fine establishment abandoned to the elements, so it’s up to us to make sure there ain’t nobody creepin’ around in the halls, takin’ us unawares. We’re gonna start from the front door—the most likely point of entry—and we’re going to clear and secure as we go. Once everything is safe, we’ll set up our post at the top.”
“Okay,” Jared said, steering the sedan around a dilapidated barricade and into the parking lot of the hospital.
“Okay,” Brandy echoed.
Joey-the-student just nodded.
I can make do, Tomlin reminded himself. “Any of you guys seen any shit?” he asked hopefully. “Get in any shootouts?”
They looked between themselves as though they were all mysterious strangers to each other, though Tomlin got the impression that they knew each other quite well. None of them spoke up. Tomlin’s heart dropped just a tiny bit. He supposed it would be a little too much to hope for to get a few seasoned fighters in his group of volunteers. But the seasoned fighters were all dead or used up on other aspects of the mission.
There’s old survivors and there’s bold survivors, Tomlin thought with some irritation. But there ain’t no old, bold survivors. Is that the shape of it?
“Okay then,” he said, shouldering his rifle. “You already know the basics of how to use that rifle Lee gave you. All I can add is… watch where you put your muzzle—not into my back, please—and make sure you ID a target before engaging. I think everything else is pretty much common sense. I hope.” Tomlin sniffed. “I’ll go point. Y’all just follow me and do what I do.”
They pulled to a stop at the front of the hospital. The sliding glass doors were open. And that did not make Tomlin feel any better. The engine in the little old sedan died and the doors popped open. Tomlin stepped out into cold sunshine. The sun hanging in its low winter arc. Everything seemed alternately golden and gray.
Tomlin took a brief moment to listen to the world around him. The ears were one of the more underutilized tools, but they had so much information to give. If you just sat still for a few moments, you could often get a sense of what was going on around you. Small things made noises. Other things were noted by their lack of noise. Just like right at that moment as Tomlin stood there. Everything was silent. Silent save for the ticking of the old four-banger engine. The sound of engine fluids. A slight gust of wind.
No birds.
No people.
No other cars.
It felt like the surface of the moon.
Tomlin looked at the sliding glass doors to the hospital. They were southern exposed, and the sky was reflecting madly off of them. It was difficult to see inside. Tomlin started moving. Stillness was death. He always felt awkward standing in one place too long. Habits developed in third-world countries with enemy snipers were difficult to overcome. Behind him, his three inexperienced partners followed.
Tomlin angled himself as he moved, trying to defeat the reflection of the sky while trying not to stay directly in front of the doors and the fatal funnel they created. It wasn’t just infected creeping around in the darkness that concerned him. Other things had been known to take up residence in the abandoned places of the world. Things with guns.
About a yard or two from the front door, he was able to see into the building. His eyes went deep into the atrium of the hospital, looking behind desks and pillars. It looked clear, for the most part. There was a bad stench coming from inside, but it wasn’t until Tomlin drew his focus a little closer that he saw what was making the smell.
He had looked over them, thinking they were small piles of trash that the wind had blown in. But when he looked harder at them, he could see the red-brown of blood, the tatters of clothing, the shards of bones. Three of them, all just inside the entryway. The sliding glass doors were painted with old gore from these bodies, and their deconstructed state was not from a week or two of corruption, but because something had gotten to them when they were still fresh. There wasn’t enough between the three piles to piece together one person.
“Infected must’ve got ’em,” Tomlin said, wrinkling his nose and aiming his rifle into the shadows of the atrium. If an animal found an abandoned building that yielded a meal, wouldn’t it peruse the rest of the building? But these bodies had been ravaged some time ago. Perhaps the infected had moved on.
“Who were they?” Brandy said, her voice hollow and flat.
Tomlin shrugged, then stepped into the atrium of the hospital and around the bodies. He lowered his voice. “Best guess? Doc Hamilton and his two guards. Jacob never said what happened to them.”
“I guess this happened to them.” Her voice sounded a little tight. Then she gagged, audibly, and moved past the bodies. “Sorry. I’m fine. It’s just… the smell.”
Tomlin didn’t mind. Nobody got used to that smell. The smell of dead flesh was a warning sign that went straight down deep into your DNA and rang a bunch of warning bells. It was not only a putrid odor; it disturbed something inside the mind as well. A way for your animal brain to shout at you, Don’t go in there! People die in there!
“Guys.” Tomlin pointed behind him. “Slide those doors shut for me. We gotta secure as we go. Any open door needs to be closed and locked. And barricaded, if we can manage it.”
Tomlin motioned Brandy to move with him while Joey and Jared muscled the doors shut and manually locked them. The atrium was mostly empty. No furniture. Nothing that could be moved in front of the doors to block them. There were several large support pillars with fancy tile work on them that a few anonymous bullet holes had ruined, just a reminder from some little forgotten spat, that nothing and no place was truly safe. There was a large front desk area. A few doors that remained closed. To the left, Tomlin spotted the doors to the stairs that would take them to the upper levels.
Tomlin looked behind the pillars, behind the desk, and in utility closets and bathrooms with push-open doors. The interiors of the bathrooms were lightless like dungeons. Each stall sat in murky pools of shadow. He listened hard at the entryway, but inside was only silence. A deep breath through the nose revealed only a dank, musty smell. Not the smell of rot, or the smell of long-unwashed bodies. He glanced behind him to make sure that Brandy was close.
“Hold the door,” he whispered.
He moved in, navigating by the light coming in from the open bathroom door. Unlike Lee, Tomlin still had his original rifle—the one he’d come out of his bunker with—rather than the stripped versions that were handed out to everyone else. Tomlin’s still had the items he’d customized it with, including the light kit.
He swept the white beam of light over the stalls. He used it in flashes and quick sweeps. You never just left your gunlight on.
It gave you light, but it was also a beacon for people and things to shoot at. Besides, using it sparingly conserved the batteries.
He went to the stalls randomly. The middle one first, then the two sides.
They were unoccupied.
The women’s bathroom was similarly empty, though he found a pile of clothes in one corner and an empty can of black beans. The inside of the can was old and dried. The clothes were matted down from lying there for a while. It looked like someone had slept there for a night, but not recently.
He wondered how many single survivors there were, wandering around out there. He imagined that there couldn’t be many, but perhaps there were. This could not have been more than one or two people. Maybe a small family at the very most—two adults and a child. He imagined them huddled around that single can of black beans, sharing it. He wondered if they knew how close they were to Camp Ryder when they’d stopped here for the night, or if they’d just kept going whatever direction they were heading, hoping that safety lay in some direction. But besides Mac and Georgia’s group, no one had come to Camp Ryder within the last week or so. Whoever this had been had not found Camp Ryder.
Back in the atrium, Tomlin found Joey and Jared standing in the center, looking about warily. They had successfully closed the door. Joey looked a little green in the face. Tomlin noticed what looked like a fresh puddle of vomit near the sliding glass doors.
“They locked?” Tomlin asked.
Jared nodded.
“Okay. We’ve got to clear every single level of this hospital.” Tomlin looked above him as though he could see the challenge that awaited them through the ceiling. “It’s going to take a while, so we might as well get started. Stick together. No breaking up. In every room we go into, I’ll be point, then Brandy, then Jared. Joey, you’re going to stand in the door and watch our backs, make sure nothing comes at us from behind or tries to sneak around us. Got that?”
“Yeah.” Joey nodded, swallowing. “I got it.”
“Finger off the trigger and outside the trigger guard until you see a threat.” Tomlin had already told them this, but it was just one of those rules that needed to be repeated, especially when he was standing in front of them. “And try not to muzzle-sweep each other.”
Nods all around.
“All right, then.” Tomlin headed for the stairs to the second level.
Lee wasn’t doing it consciously, but he kept catching himself gripping the GPS in white knuckles. Only when his hands began to tremble with the strain did he realize it and force himself to relax. It reminded him of when he was ten years old and his father had let him shoot his shotgun for the first time. Not a youth shotgun. Not a shotgun chambered for a light round. A hunting shotgun loaded up with double-ought buck. He’d been so simultaneously thrilled and terrified. He had clutched that shotgun in a similarly intense grip, partly because he feared it would buck out of his small hands, and partly because the opportunity was so unexpected that he thought if he put the shotgun down, his father would never let him pick it up again.
On the screen, his life was held in the balance of pixels. One blue dot moving toward a stationary waypoint marked B#3. And coming in fast. Closing the distance quickly. Below them, the eastern North Carolina crop lands were a jumble of geometric shapes.
Sitting directly beside Lee was Carl and a few of his Delta boys. They’d been introduced quickly, and Lee hadn’t remembered their names, but he’d been able to pick them up by listening to what Carl called them.
Rudy was a bald man with a pale, blond mustache, and pale skin. The only one that stuck to a mustache instead of a beard. He had the disposition of an old hound dog, and despite being young, he had a sort of jowly face that heightened the hound dog illusion. Lee wondered how many units during his military career had dubbed him Huckleberry Hound. Lee had yet to see the man move or say anything with more vigor than one might expect from a backyard barbecue. He spoke straight Texas with no affectations of anything else to water it down.
The man sitting next to Rudy was called Morrow. He was a big, serious man, with a swarthy complexion and large eyes that soaked up and evaluated everything. He wore what had to be the oldest hat still used in the world—a tattered old ball cap in sun-faded MultiCam, with rips and tears and salt deposits ringing the brow. Thick, black hair curled out from the edges of the ball cap, long enough to cover the back of his collar.
The last of Carl’s crew was Mitch. He was quiet, but Lee could sense the humor in him. He had that slight upturn to his mouth, like he was constantly thinking of something amusing, but held it back. He was smallest of the three men, but stoutly built.
Directly across from Lee was Brinly and his three Marines. Nine men total, all of them experienced fighters. Aside from the fact that he didn’t really know them, Lee had never felt this confident in the competency of a team. They had already flown across the Roanoke River and were on the other side. The side that wasn’t protected and wasn’t patrolled. No one quite knew what to expect when they touched down.
“We’re getting close,” Lee called over the noise inside the cabin of the helicopter.
Carl saw that Lee was speaking, but he had the crewman’s headset on and looked like he was listening, the face of a man absorbing information. He said something into the mic, then pulled one of the ear cups away from his ear and inclined it to Lee. “What?” he said loudly.
Lee tilted the screen of the GPS toward Carl. The dot and the waypoint were nearly on top of each other. “We’re almost there. Probably less than a minute out on this course.”
Carl nodded, but even as he did, Lee felt the helicopter banking to the left. Carl pointed out the right windows. “Look out that window when we come back around. Pilot wants you to see something.”
Lee kept Carl’s eyes for a moment, but the other man remained aloof, and his stare was already directed out the window, his lips compressed into a thin, harsh line across his face. Lee felt the Black Hawk level out, and then bank again, this time to the right. Lee looked out the windows.
The earth and sky were rolling. The ground and horizon seemed to lurch up as the helicopter flew nearly on its side. Out the windows, he seemed to be staring directly down at the ground. And below them the ground was overgrown croplands, and in those lands, like pale spots of mold springing up in a dark petri dish, were hundreds of faces staring up at him.
“Fuck me!” Lee’s breath fogged the window.
The horde below them was scattered, rather than jumbled up. But even scattered, Lee could take a quick count and didn’t like the numbers he was coming up with. They milled about in singles and in groups of a dozen or more, most of them standing in the sun, like they were warming themselves. There must have been at least a thousand there, and Lee could see that there were more in other fields, spread out across God only knew how many miles. Lee could not see a definitive end to them. For all he knew this could have been one of the hordes of millions. There was no way to know.
I should’ve fucking figured, was his first thought. The second was more resolute, and he spoke it aloud: “Well, there ain’t shit we can do about that right now. Still gotta get those supplies. If we gotta land in the middle of them and fight a little bit to the bunker doors, then that’s what we’ll fucking do.”
Lee could see Carl’s jaw muscles bunching. “That might be difficult. You’ll need to guide us right onto your bunker.”
Lee shook his head. “Bunker’ll be in the woods. We may or may not be able to get your bird close to the doors. Probably going to have to move on foot.”
Carl rubbed his face. “I can’t leave my fucking bird in a field, surrounded by infected. We’d have to fight our way to the bunker, and then fight our way back and clear the fuckers off, probably damaging my equipment in the process. No way. We’re not doing that while carrying crates of guns and ammo.”
Lee snapped his teeth together a couple of times, thinking. “Okay. Okay.” He started nodding rapidly. “We can work around this. Stay with me o
n this, Carl. Trust me. I ain’t gonna sacrifice your bird. I need it just as much as you do.”
Carl didn’t look very trusting.
Lee consulted the GPS. “Tell your pilot to keep circling.” He looked up at Brinly. “You and your men will be with me. We’re going to dust off and hoof it in. If we hit contact at the bunker doors, y’all are gonna have to keep ’em off me until I get those doors open. There’s a few security procedures. It’s gonna take me… thirty seconds or so.”
Brinly gave the thumbs-up. “We can do that.”
Their location dot was directly on top of the waypoint on the map. The rest was visual. Lee looked out the window, feeling sick and almost giddy all at once. The chopper was cutting a constant circling pattern over a section of woods. Lee looked for the access road—there was always an access road to the bunkers. This one was no different. It cut the border between two fields and fed into the plot of woodland that could not have been more than ten or fifteen acres. And it looked thankfully sparse. The road had a turnaround, something like a cul-de-sac cut out of the trees. The bunker door was camouflaged well enough, but Lee knew this was where it would be. Lee peered into the trees, but couldn’t see any movement or pale, naked bodies. The fields looked empty as well.
The horde’s north of us. Maybe five miles?
Lee could also see the spire of what looked like an antenna rising up out of a blank spot in the trees. All of the bunkers were designed to fit in. This one was clearly designed to look like a public service radio repeater station, of which there were several dotting the countryside. Something that a farmer or a kid on an ATV would likely not think twice about.