The Remaining: Extinction

by D. J. Molles

  “How long you been out here?” Brett asked, looking back toward the fires that Mac was stoking back to life.

  “Couple hours.”

  “Why don’t you go take a break. I’m walking the perimeter anyways. No point in you being out here.”

  Roland didn’t need any extra encouragement. He flicked up a finger to acknowledge and then was gone, walking back to the camp and the fires that would warm him. Brett stood in the spot that Roland had been in and took another good survey of the buildings around them. Except for the scorch marks and bullet holes, everything looked relatively peaceful. A few decayed bodies up against the bases of buildings, or huddled in ditches, but you found your eyes glossing over them after a while. Bodies were commonplace inside the cities and towns. A lack of them would be something to be concerned about.

  Brett kept walking clockwise, with the wall of cement to his left side. The conversations of the people in the center of the fortifications seemed quiet and far away. They paid Brett no mind as he continued on to the opening where the vehicles came and went. By now they would be several miles away in either direction.

  Brett patted the pocket of his jacket to reassure himself that the spare mag was there before he stepped through the opening and out into the town beyond so that the wall of Jersey barriers was between him and the camp.

  His eyes traced over the buildings, but they were just as quiet and abandoned on this side as they’d been on the other. But somehow, he knew that they were not. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but he knew this was it. This was the time they had told him about.

  Go and be a part of this Camp Ryder Hub. And when you know that we are coming, open the way for us.

  And they were coming, Brett knew. They were coming for Camp Ryder.

  Brett pulled the spare magazine out of his pocket and set it on the top of a Jersey barrier so that it would be right there when he needed it. Then he laid the muzzle of the rifle gently over the top of the cement, pointed inward. He took a deep breath and sighted the rifle at the dozen people, clustered in the center of Newton Grove. He sought out Mac first, though he wasn’t sure why.

  Then he started shooting.

  SIXTEEN

  HARD PLACES

  WHEN IT WAS FINISHED, Brett stood behind the wall, looking over at what he’d done. He took a moment to evaluate himself, both physically and mentally. Physically, he’d taken some shrapnel from return rounds spat out by a few of the more heads-up people in the group that had sprayed bits of concrete into his face. He could feel the blood trickling down from the half-dozen little cuts on his forehead, around his eye, and his left cheek. He didn’t think any of the shrapnel had gotten into his eye—at least it didn’t hurt if it did—but it was difficult to see out of his left eye because of all the blood dribbling into it.

  Mentally, he felt rock-steady. He gave himself time to feel remorse, or even just a pause, but there was none. This was what he’d been sent to do. Chalmers and the Followers knew about the Camp Ryder Hub. They’d heard about it from people they’d captured and from people that had joined them. They knew that if they ever had to move west, it would become a problem. So they sent him out, among others. To join small groups that would be overrun by the Followers and then seek asylum in the Camp Ryder Hub.

  Brett had done his job. He’d executed it flawlessly. Chalmers would be proud. They would bless him. His place in heaven would be a high throne for the things he had done for the Kingdom of God and for the Lord’s Army.

  He stepped back into the ring of Jersey barriers. Not everyone inside was dead. A few still clung to life. He went to them, because even a warrior of the Lord’s Army was required to show mercy. He was no barbarian. He did not want them to suffer.

  He thought about the men hung on crosses, but those men had refused to bend the knee. He could not fault Mac and Roland and all the others in this group—they’d never been given a chance to bend their knee and submit. Therefore, they did not need to be punished. They only needed to die.

  Brett walked to the center, where most of them had fallen. A few had made a run for the copse of trees in the center, but Brett was a good shot. He’d taken them out on the run, and they now lay unmoving in the dirt and grass. Brett was very conscious that any of them lying still could very well be alive, waiting for a moment to surprise-attack him. He was on the side of God, but that did not mean that God made him invincible. He still needed to be cautious.

  He went to Roland first. It was unfortunate that it had to be this way. He had always liked Roland. He wished that Roland had been given the chance to kneel, to submit. He would have made a good soldier for the Lord’s Army. Brett would have been proud to serve next to him.

  Roland was squirming, bleeding from the gut, but his hands were clamped around his own neck, where a bullet had clipped him. Blood was still pulsing from his carotids and Brett did not think that Roland had very long to live.

  “Roland, I am sorry it had to be like this. You seemed like a good man, even in your sin.”

  Roland’s voice was barely audible. Just a gurgling whisper. “You son of a bitch…”

  Brett was disappointed in Roland, but he understood that pain and blood loss sometimes made people say things they didn’t really mean. Brett gave the man on the ground a serene smile to let him know that there was peace between them, and then he finished him off with a shot to the head.

  He continued on, finding three more people that were not completely dead. One attempted to make a go for the rifle that had fallen from their grip and was lying several yards away, but he could not out-crawl a bullet. Brett put them all down without much effort.

  As the last shots faded, Brett heard another sound: engines.

  He peered over the top of the barrier and watched a vehicle approaching. A truck, but not the truck that had so recently departed from Newton Grove. That truck would not be back for quite a while. This was a different truck, one that he did not recognize, but somehow knew who was in it. He stood in the center of the camp, surrounded by his gory work, the smell of fresh blood and bowels mixing with the rot from the old carcasses.

  The truck pulled up to the Jersey barriers. It was a large one, full of armed men in the cab, and in the back. None of them pointed their weapons at him. They all wore the white armband and black cross of the Followers.

  Brett smiled broadly.

  Two men exited the passenger’s side of the truck and approached him as the others began to fan out. One seemed very rough. His eyes were not full of peace but a sort of reptilian coldness. Something that said he would kill if and when he damn well pleased, and that emotions and morals and sympathies did not make an appearance in that decision-making process. Still, there was something vaguely familiar about him.

  Brett recognized the other man as he drew closer, though he was now a little worse for wear since the last time that Brett had seen him. His hair was longer, pulled back into a ponytail, and his glasses were scratched and bent askew on his head. It took him a moment before recognition broke out across his face.

  “Holy…” the man said, bewildered.

  “Clyde,” Brett said, opening his arms and embracing the other man. “It’s been a long time.”

  “I thought you were dead,” Clyde said. “Where have you been?”

  “On a mission,” Brett said, feeling satisfaction flood him. Victory. Completeness.

  The rough-looking man regarded Brett with that cold look. He was a distrustful one. “Who is this?” he said, pointing a casual finger at Brett.

  “Brett,” Clyde introduced. “This is LaRouche, one of our newest men. LaRouche, this is Brett, one of our best.”

  LaRouche narrowed his gaze. “I recognize you from somewhere.”

  Brett squinted back, feeling that same sense of familiarity. “Yes. Where are you from?”

  LaRouche considered for a moment, still taking the measurement of Brett, it seemed. “Camp Ryder,” he finally said. “I was sent east to blow the bridges…” He trailed
off. Then he lifted a finger.

  Brett remembered as well. “Ah yes, LaRouche. How could I forget? We met on the road. You told me to go to Smithfield. Your name was the whole reason I was even able to get into Camp Ryder. ‘Tell them LaRouche sent you’ was what you said to me. And it worked! It worked quite well.”

  LaRouche lowered his upraised finger. Something hot flickered behind all that ice in his eyes. “Yeah. I remember now.”

  Brett then took the measurement of LaRouche. “You’re quite new to be riding in the front and conducting operations with one of our oldest lieutenants,” Brett said, casting a glance at Clyde, for whom he had tremendous respect.

  Clyde held up a hand and spoke for LaRouche, and for the first time Brett got the sense that LaRouche might be volatile. Clyde seemed to be treating him like a dog that liked to bite. “LaRouche has proven very valuable to the Followers. Chalmers has already used him in several important situations. Such as this one.”

  Brett felt almost giddy. “We’re taking the Camp Ryder Hub?”

  Clyde nodded, then turned to LaRouche. “Send the men to get Chalmers. Tell them we own Newton Grove and all roads are clear to Camp Ryder.”

  Not much left. Not much left. Not… much… left.

  Three words of the English language, the only ones that remained solid and substantial in her mind, and they looped endlessly through Jenny’s brain. She knew these words, and she knew what they meant. She knew that she had known many other words, many other sounds that could be used to express herself, but they were all gone now. She tried hard to make them come back, but there just was not much left.

  She felt frustration. Incredible frustration, though the concept was just a concept. She knew that she had once been able to find the things making her frustrated and make them better, but all she could do now was feel. Her brain was an instruction manual written in a foreign language. And because she could not make it better, it only made it worse. Fluttering, beating, roaring frustration.

  And anger. She felt that, too, again without words. Just the hotness in her chest. The quickening of her pulse. The way her entire body was locked up and tense. She used to have command of it, but now it seemed to have a mind of its own, and hers and its were not in communication. More and more of her was being turned over to autopilot, as her logical brain made its last death throes and kept thinking, Not much left.

  Not much left, and soon there would not even be those words. The captain would be dead in the cockpit. The machine would be running itself. Already there was no forethought. There was very little memory outside of clips and images that made no sense and were completely disassociated, like photos of another person’s life stuck in her neural passageways, and they only made her more angry. Because sometimes they blocked the NOW. And the NOW was the important thing. There was nothing before or after that concerned her. Just NOW.

  Now she was cold and hot. Cold outside, hot on the inside.

  Now she was hungry. A pain that drove her in the pit of her stomach. There were images, and these few were welcome. Something bloody. Juice and gristle in her teeth. Satisfaction in her guts. The pain would go away.

  Now she was frustrated and angry. She punched walls and felt bones crack, but it only made her more angry, so she kept doing it.

  Now there were noises. Noises that she’d heard before. No pictures to go along with them, none that made any sense to her, but a feeling. A feeling of fear. Once the noises didn’t mean fear, but that was before the NOW. The noises made her want to run. Made her want trees and leaves and places to hide. She sank low and circled around in the semiblackness, feeling cold hardness all around her. Sharp hardness. She pictured rocks and stones, but that was not right. This cold hardness was a different kind of cold hardness.

  When she banged on the walls, it was very loud.

  She screamed, and it was louder. She waited to hear another scream—another thing like her that had heard her and knew she was here, to answer back, to make a connection. She knew the screaming was wrong. She knew she shouldn’t do it. But she could not control the urge to be heard, to rage, to vent.

  Not much left—her secret words slipped away. The meaning of them was becoming strange, black like the darkness around her. Other things were more important. Smells. Noises. Feels. With the meaning of the words went the importance of them, the fear that they brought to her belly. Thinking them no longer made her stomach twist. That was good. Her stomach got twisted a lot from things that were outside of the NOW. She didn’t like the twisting. It was good that it was gone.

  The NOW was good.

  Sam followed Deuce around the corner of the Camp Ryder building. He was on the side of it now, right next to the big water containers that they’d built. Sam could smell the cold, blank smell of the water in the square bins, almost as tall as he was. Ahead of him, Deuce was scenting the air and growling low in his throat.

  Sam heard the shuffle of feet on gravel behind him.

  He turned. Abby was standing there, caught trying to follow him. Her blond ringlets framed a guilty face and wide blue eyes.

  “I told you to wait on the steps!” Sam said.

  “Mom told us both to wait on the steps,” Abby insisted.

  “Deuce is growling.”

  “So?”

  “So he only growls when there’s infected somewhere around.”

  “So why didn’t you tell one of the grown-ups?”

  Sam looked back over his shoulder and saw that Deuce had advanced to the second water container. The dog was moving slowly. Cautiously. But if Sam waited around too long, the dog would go and he wouldn’t be able to… to…

  To handle the problem.

  He felt it like tightness in his chest. His pulse working a little harder. His breath coming a little shorter and sharper now. He wanted to find what Deuce was growling at. He wanted to be the one to do it. Not run to one of the adults and cry to them about it. He had his rifle. He’d killed before. And now everyone looked at him like he was some poor wounded boy.

  He was a man. He could handle this.

  It was probably just an infected on the fence anyways. Sam could just sight the little rifle from twenty yards away, just like he’d done with the squirrel, and put whoever or whatever it was down with a shot to the eye. It wasn’t even dangerous.

  Deuce crept forward a little more, almost to the back corner of the building.

  Full-on growling now.

  Sam said the bad word that Abby had been trying to get him to interpret. Then he looked back at her. “Fine. You can come along if you stay quiet. And if there’s something bad, you have to run. You have to run back to the Square. Okay?”

  Abby nodded fiercely.

  “Okay,” Sam said. “Be quiet.”

  Then he started moving again.

  Deuce stopped at the corner of the building, looking left into the backyard. Sam could see the dog’s hackles were up, his tail stiff and level with the ground, his teeth starting to show as his lips curled back a bit. Then he looked back at Sam, as though to say, Are you coming to take care of this or what?

  Sam brought his rifle up to his shoulder and stepped wide around the corner of the building. He took it in slow, side-straddling steps. He watched his sight picture swing over the back fence, then the open area of the backyard, then the big steel container, and finally the wall of the Camp Ryder building itself.

  Sam lowered his rifle, confusion playing across his face.

  “What’s wrong?” Abby whispered. “What’s he growling at?”

  Sam glanced down at the dog. Deuce was still standing stock-still, growling quite loudly now. “I dunno,” Sam said. “There’s nobody back here. Nothing.”

  Deuce barked once, making Sam and Abby jump. Then the dog looked up at him and whined. Then back to the object of his concern, growling again. Sam followed the dog’s gaze, but the only thing there was the big steel container. Just like all the other steel shipping containers scattered around the interior of Camp Ryder.

>   Abby was craning her neck around the corner. “I don’t—”

  Something rattled. Clanked.

  Sam felt like he’d taken a little jolt of electricity. There was something both good and bad about that feeling. He raised the rifle and stepped farther around the corner. “Stay there, Abby. I mean it.”

  The girl sidled closer to the wall, putting a hand out to touch it for reassurance.

  “There’s something in that container,” Sam said.

  “You should call someone,” Abby replied, her voice almost begging.

  “It’s fine. Just stay right there.”

  “Sam…” Abby whined.

  Sam looked back at her, perturbed. “I can handle this, Abby.”

  “But Deuce only growls if it’s in-feck-a-tid.”

  “Why would there be infected in a shipping container?”

  Another sound, like someone pounding on the inside of the metal. And then a distinct creaking noise. Like rusty hinges.

  Sam spun back to the shipping container.

  Deuce started barking madly.

  The door was open.

  Sam lifted his rifle up. He felt his legs suddenly heavy and unwieldy. Like they were just hollow sacks of flesh filled with dead, lifeless sand. It’s not locked in, it’s not locked in, it’s not locked in, what do you do? What are you gonna do?

  Something moved in the shadows of the container.

  Deuce had pressed himself against Sam’s leg and would not stop barking.

  “Sam!” Abby was frightened. “Sam, let’s go!”

  Be a man. Handle this.

  He moved one leg in front of the other, a halting, shaky twitch of his body. He struggled to make his mouth work in conjunction with his throat, his diaphragm. Don’t be scared. Nothing to be scared of. You have a rifle. You’ve shot people before. You’ve killed things before.

  He finally found his voice. “Hey!” he called out, trying to sound like an adult. “Who’s in there? Come out! Let me see your hands!”

  The door to the shipping container swung open a little farther. Something—someone—edged out. Pale skin. Blond hair hanging lank around a slack face. She looked sickly. Like she might keel over at any moment. Like she’d looked when Lee and Angela had carted her into the Camp Ryder building the other night, so sick she could barely walk on her own.