by D. J. Molles
Lee was quite familiar with that phenomenon, having lost men in his unit while in Iraq. One to sniper fire and two others to a roadside bomb that took out their Humvee. In both cases, he hadn’t felt much during the incidents except for fear and some panic, a feeling of helplessness, like there was something he could be doing to help them but could never figure out what it was. Later, off patrol and back behind the wire, he would lie in his bed and stare at the ceiling, overcome with a heavy sadness that felt like being trapped in a strange dream with no way to wake up.
Lee remembered the terrible emptiness, and along with it, the loneliness.
He walked up quietly to Sam. The kid jumped when he heard a twig snap and looked up to find Lee kneeling down beside him. Sam wiped his eyes quickly, then set his chin on his arms and regarded the forest floor.
Lee took a long, deep breath and stared at the ground along with him. “You made a good choice. Don’t ever feel bad about showing someone mercy.”
“I don’t,” Sam mumbled, his voice thick with tears.
They sat in the quiet of the forest for a long moment. Lee listened to the sounds of the forest, hearing the occasional small branch falling and the incessant chatter of birds, lost in conversations shouted from one end of the woods to the other. Finally, Lee spoke. “What was your dad’s name?”
“Labib.” Sam gave Lee a sidelong glance. “What’s your name?”
“Lee Harden.” He extended his hand, which Sam shook once. “I’m a captain with the US Army.”
“The army?” Sam looked incredulous. “I thought the army was gone.”
Lee suddenly felt like the breath had been knocked out of him. He knew the government would not be at work in the chaos of a post-collapse world, but hearing it come from a kid’s mouth as common knowledge that there was no US Army still hit him hard. He didn’t let the effects show and smiled with a confidence he didn’t feel.
“Oh, we’re not gone. We’re just working a little more quietly than normal.”
“Where are all your guys? Don’t you guys work in teams?” Sam looked behind Lee as though perhaps there were others he had missed.
“Not me, kiddo. I’m trained to work alone.”
Sam nodded. “You did just kill a bunch of guys all by yourself.” Lee wasn’t sure what to say. Sam continued. “Is my dad still up there?”
Lee placed the butt of his M4 on the ground and leaned on it. “Yeah, but he’s buried now.”
“You mean I can’t see him?” Sam’s lip tensed as he tried to hold back more tears.
Lee thought about telling the boy that he didn’t want to see his father like that, considered telling him that it wasn’t his father, it was just a body, but it all seemed so trite, so he didn’t say anything at all. He just shook his head so the boy knew that he couldn’t see his father. He reached into the cargo pocket of his combat pants and withdrew the gold watch he’d removed from Labib before burying him. He looked at the watch face, wiped a smudge of dirt off with his thumb, then extended it toward Sam. “Here.”
Sam took the watch and looked at it, unable to hold the tears back.
“I’m sorry you can’t see him.”
Sam nodded and held the watch in a tight grip as he cried again. Lee wasn’t accustomed to dealing with people in crisis, let alone teenagers. He sat down on the ground and let Sam cry for a moment longer. Lee had become acutely aware of the amount of time they had spent outdoors and the amount of noise and fire and smoke he had created during the firefight. He wasn’t sure what kind of attention it would bring, but he was sure he wanted to be inside when it came.
He still had a viable safe house, and he intended to use it.
As if to reiterate what Lee was thinking, somewhere in the woods, a very human voice screamed out with very inhuman anger. Lee immediately remembered the crazed girl from under his front steps and the sound she’d made when she’d seen him. It was the same insane, rage-filled screech. And it wasn’t too far away.
Lee shouldered his rifle and scanned the woods. “Come on, Sam—we should get indoors.”
* * *
The trio moved through the woods without speaking. Sam had put away his grief for the moment. His eyes were clear and focused. He scanned from right to left in a constant arc, as cautious as any good soldier on patrol. At first, this impressed Lee, as he wondered how Sam had learned to scan and move so quietly through the woods. Then he realized that, though he himself was new to this world, it was the harsh reality that Sam had lived in the past month. Necessity and survival were brutal tutors, and they only gave pass or fail.
The screeching from the woods began to sound less like rage to Lee and more like a beckoning call. Like the howl of a wolf on the scent of game. The similarity made him pick up the pace a bit—they were still a hundred yards from the house. After a few minutes, Lee could swear he heard an answer to the screeching, coming from the opposite side of the woods.
Boxing them in.
Lee reached behind him and grabbed Sam by the arm, pulling him closer as they walked. He spoke in a low voice. “You ever hear that before?”
Sam nodded vigorously. “They heard the shooting.”
“Are they always attracted to loud noises?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever seen them… team up?”
“Not in the beginning, but lately me and Dad have seen them in groups.”
“How big?”
Sam shrugged. “Four? Five? Once we saw about ten of them.”
“Why aren’t they killing each other?”
“They do kill each other.” Sam scanned the woods again, then spoke more quietly. “Dad says they’re like wild dogs—sometimes they get along, other times they fight and kill each other, but they’re never friendly toward us.”
Lee didn’t ask any more questions and Sam didn’t elaborate any further. They came to the tree line of Lee’s yard but didn’t exit the woods. Lee stood for a moment and took a good look to make sure there wasn’t anyone around, normal or infected. The noon sun was hot and sticky and even the birds were silent, unwilling to spend energy making their usual racket in this heat. Just the insects chirped now, loud and insistent, the jungle-like air a natural habitat for them.
Satisfied that it was clear, Lee wiped sweat from his eyebrows and stepped out into the open, hunched over and moving quickly to limit his time exposed. He made straight for the front porch, Sam following and Tango bringing up the rear.
Lee kept an eye on the body of the dead girl lying on the front porch as he opened his front door and motioned Sam and Tango to go inside. Sam stared sideways at the body as he moved slowly past it, hypnotized by death. Lee wondered how much of it the kid had seen in the past month, how indelibly screwed up he would be for the rest of his life, or whether he was constructed of the type of soul that shrugs things off and keeps moving on.
Once Sam and Tango were inside the house, Lee slipped in behind them and closed and bolted the door. The air conditioning was glorious, and it felt almost arctic on his sweat-soaked body. He’d done his time in the brutal heat and even in places with high humidity, but there was something uniquely cloying and irritating about a North Carolina summer. Of course, the presence of central air made all of that better.
Sam sounded astonished when he spoke. “Is this your house? You have air conditioning?”
“Yeah, it’s mine. Feels good, doesn’t it?”
Sam immediately sat on Lee’s couch and leaned back with his arms out. “How do you have air conditioning? I thought nobody had electricity anymore.”
Lee dropped his go-to-hell pack and fished out two more bottles of water. “It’s running on solar power and battery cells. We have lights, air conditioning, and I even have a computer and TV downstairs.” Lee passed one of the bottles to Sam. “We’ll go down into my bunker in a minute, but I need to ask you some questions.”
Lee sat himself down on a lounge chair across from the couch. Normally, sweaty, dirty clothes would not be allowed in his
living room, but he supposed it really didn’t matter now. He took a long drink from his own water bottle, then looked at Sam. “Tell me about you and your dad.”
Sam seemed to sink back into the couch, somber again. “We used to live in a big house in Apex with my mom and my sister. Then the plague came and everyone died.”
Lee realized Sam wasn’t going to spill a lot of information. He would have to ask the questions to get the answers. “What did your dad do for work?”
“He worked for a computer security company. Protected computers from hackers and stuff. He was really good at it. Other companies were always trying to get him to move and offering him more money, but he liked Apex. Plus my mom was a schoolteacher and didn’t want to leave.” Sam looked up at the ceiling and Lee could see his eyes glistening. “We had a pool in our backyard. A big pool with lights inside of it that changed colors. Dad spent a lot of money to have it built last summer. By the time it was done, it was too cold to swim. We barely got to use it before all this happened.”
Lee leaned forward a bit. “And do you know what happened?”
“Not really. Dad says someone attacked America with a plague and it was making people crazy. Said it was like rabies and made people attack each other. Mom got sick and Dad told me to hide in the basement. After that I didn’t see Mom or my sister again. This was about a month ago.” Sam paused for a long moment, staring at the tiny ripples in his bottle of water. “I think he had to kill Mom. I don’t know whether Farah was sick too and Dad had to kill her, or whether Mom went crazy and killed her before Dad could stop her.”
Lee could not believe how much loss Sam had endured in such a short time. In the span of a month, this boy had lost everyone he knew and loved. “When your mom and sister were gone, did you guys stay in the house or did you move out?”
“No, we stayed for another week. Then these buses came, and there were soldiers inside, and they said they were taking us to someplace safe. They had nurses that were taking our temperatures before we could get on the bus. Everyone had to wear masks. One of the guys wasn’t allowed to get on after they took his temperature and he started yelling and shouting, then these two soldiers with gas masks came up and grabbed him and carried him into this big tent and he got really quiet. I think they gave him a shot, like the kind you give a dog when you have to put it down.”
Though the story obviously came with some pain, Lee needed to hear more about the camps and why Sam and his father weren’t there, and had been on the road. “So did you go to the camp?”
Sam shook his head. “We were in line, but then there was a lot of shooting, and some helicopters came in. I think there was a big crowd of infected people coming for us, and the buses left without us. Dad and I only had time to grab a few things out of our luggage and then some guy let us get in the back of his pickup truck and drive with them.”
“Was it the guys from earlier today?”
“No. Those are different guys. This was… two weeks ago?” Sam motioned with his hand to display his uncertainty about the time frame. “Anyway, we drove out into the country where this family had a cabin. They were really nice to drive us, and they even gave us some water, but they told us that they didn’t have enough supplies to take care of us and that we should start heading toward the FEMA camp in Sanford. It was supposed to be safe; no one there was sick.”
“Is that where you guys were headed?”
“Yeah. We’ve been on the road for ten days. Last night, we came up on the guys in the red pickup truck. They made us take off our backpacks and searched them. Dad asked them to leave us some water. They said they would leave us water if he would give me to them. Dad said, ‘Fuck you, sons of bitches,’ and then grabbed me and took off running. We hid in the woods all night long. They were searching for us too, and they found us, so we started running again. We came to this house first, but you weren’t home when we knocked, so we ran through the woods and came to the other house. And that’s when they caught us.” Sam took a tentative sip from his water. “You were there. You saw what happened.”
Lee nodded. “I saw.”
There was a long silence as Lee tried to think of other questions he had. Sam broke the silence first. “Why didn’t you shoot them before they shot my dad?” Sam looked directly at Lee when he asked it and Lee couldn’t tell what the kid was thinking about him. It was the same expressionless gaze he’d given Fat Boy when deciding whether to kill him or not.
Lee felt defenseless for a moment as he contemplated his answer. “Sam…” Lee thought for a bit longer. “You’re going to find that there are situations in this world where you can’t do what you want to do. If there was a way to bring you and your dad out of that alive, I would have done it. But if there was a way to do that, I’m not sure what it was. If I had started shooting when I realized they were bad guys, you and your dad would have both died, and probably me too. I had to wait, to make sure I had an advantage, and my advantage came too late. I’m sorry, Sam. I wanted to save both of you. But sometimes you just can’t do what you want.”
Sam continued to stare at Lee, unspeaking, with no obvious emotion on his face. Finally, after several long and awkward moments of Lee staring at the floor, Sam spoke. “When we were on the road, we saw this house, out in the distance. Dad stopped walking because he said he heard someone yelling. I tried to look around, but I couldn’t see anything but a house, way in the distance, across this huge open field. I used a pair of binoculars to look, and I could see three people on the roof. They were looking at me and Dad with binoculars too, and they were waving a white towel at us and shouting. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could tell they were asking for help. I told my dad what I was seeing, and he grabbed the binoculars from me and looked through them. I said to him, ‘Dad, we have to go help them!’ After a really long time, he gave the binoculars back to me and kept walking down the road, telling me to ‘Come on.’
“I got mad and started yelling at my dad. I couldn’t believe he would leave those people up on the roof. I told him, ‘How can we expect others to help us if we don’t help them?’ But he never gave me an answer. He just kept walking. I told him that it wasn’t right. I even said I hated him, but I was only trying to get him to stop and listen. When I said that, he turned around and smacked me, then told me to look through the binoculars again.
“I did, and when I looked again I could see almost ten of them, walking around in the yard below. They were in the house, running around, trying to climb the gutters to get at the people on the roof, throwing big rocks at them. One of them ran into the house and came out with a bunch of knives and started throwing them at the people on the roof.
“Then my dad took the binoculars away from me again. He said, ‘If we try to help them, we will die. And then the people on the roof will die anyway. The only difference will be that we wasted our lives for nothing.’ Then he told me, ‘Sometimes, the only way to win is to not fight.’
“Then we just kept walking. And those people on the roof—it was a man, a woman, and a little girl—they watched us look right at them and then walk away. We couldn’t help them, no matter how much we wanted to.”
Lee chose not to say anything further to defend his actions earlier in the day. He felt that there was an understanding between him and Sam, and that to speak more on the matter would only be scratching at the wound. The decision had been made, and there was no way to change it. Sam recognized that Lee had made the best decision he was capable of making at the time, and that it was not Sam’s place to second-guess him. After a pause, Lee said, “How long ago was that?”
Sam thought for a moment. “Two days ago.”
Lee nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “Do you remember where the house was?”
Sam gave Lee a hard look. “Are you going to go help them?” The insinuation was obvious. Are you better than my dad? He couldn’t save them, but you can?
“Sam, this has nothing to do with your father. He was one man with a revolver and no b
ullets and he had you to think about. Saving people is my job. That’s what I’m here to do. It’s what the US government trained me to do, and I have a lot of guns to do it with. Your dad made the right choice. Going in against ten infected people would have been suicide. But I’m sure if your dad had all the equipment I have, he would have been able to do it, just like I can.”
Sam looked down, somewhat sheepish. “It was on this same road. I don’t know how far back it was. We saw them just before it got dark. Then we kept walking for maybe another hour, and then we slept in the woods. When we got up the next morning we walked until it was about to get dark again, and that’s when we came up on the guys in the red pickup.”
Lee did some mental calculations. The average person could cover upward of twenty miles in a day in the local terrain. That would put the house with the stranded people anywhere within a thirty- to forty-mile range. Morrison Street was a long road that changed names several times as it cut through different cities and counties, but Lee wasn’t sure it was that long. Perhaps they had stopped frequently to rest or to investigate abandoned houses for supplies.
“Did you pass any other survivors?”
“We passed a house with a pile of burning bodies. We couldn’t see anyone inside, but the bodies were still on fire and we couldn’t tell if they were infected people or normal, so Dad and I ran away from the house. We didn’t know if the people who lit the bodies on fire were friendly or not.”
Burning bodies sounded like something one would do to get rid of infected people, but Sam and his dad had been right to give the place a wide berth. People who could kill enough infected to be considered a “pile” would seem to be packing some heavy firepower. That could make them the type of people to stay the fuck away from, or it could make them great allies. Lee made a mental note to approach that house with caution.