by D. J. Molles
The man was silent now, his face made of stone.
Before the man could interrupt, Lee pressed on. “You already admitted that you don’t have any extra food or water, but I think maybe you don’t have any at all, or at least not enough to get you more than a few weeks down the road. I figure you wouldn’t be sending two outgunned men into a war zone unless things were pretty desperate.” Lee raised his eyebrows. “Should I go on? Any medical supplies to speak of? Of course not. Who has medical supplies when you’re just trying to find your next meal and not get killed or infected? Any basic communications systems? I think if you had them, your boys would have been using them to speak with you.”
“Just shut the fuck up,” the man said quietly. “If you try to fuck with us, I will personally find you and rip your fucking heart out.”
Lee held up his hands and blinked to clear his rapidly fading vision. “I’m not here to hurt anyone. I’m here to help. I can get you access to everything you need. Guns, ammo, food, water, medical supplies. You name it. But whether you accept my help or not is up to you. Me and my group will continue to survive like we have been, and eventually we will encounter a group of survivors that wants our help and they will graciously receive everything I have to offer. Too bad it won’t be you guys.”
“Yeah.” The old man shook his head. “Too bad. Look, I understand the desperate situation you find yourselves in, but I’ve heard people promise all kinds of things just to get some food and water.”
Lee could tell the older man was waffling on his decision or he wouldn’t be defending it. “Then don’t give us anything. Blindfold us, tie us up, and don’t even take us into your camp. Just let me speak with whoever is in charge. If he doesn’t like what I have to say, you can kick us to the curb, and you didn’t lose a thing.”
The man stared at Lee for a long time.
“Come on, Bill…” Red, who had now removed his face covering, prodded. “It can’t hurt. And he needs to see Doc.”
Bill took another moment, just to make it clear that he had come to his decision on his own and not from the prodding of his underlings. “Fine.” He pointed a thick finger at Lee. “But you’re all getting blindfolded and tied up until we figure out what’s going on.”
* * *
Lee maintained consciousness for perhaps another two minutes. Getting blindfolded and tied up and placed in the back of the pickup truck was hazy. After that he was in a dark, nonsensical dreamland. He was on a roller coaster that wouldn’t stop going down. It just kept plummeting and everyone on it was trying to get out. One by one, their safety harnesses failed and they went flying out of the coaster, screaming as they floated off into space. Eventually it was only Lee riding that lonely roller coaster to oblivion.
He woke up when the roller coaster slammed into the ground.
The pickup truck had hit a stiff bump and he’d banged his head on the bed of the truck. He could smell the rust and the dried leaves and dirt that caked the truck bed, but none of it made sense to him. Then he quickly lost consciousness again. In the brief moments when he was awake, he desperately tried to twist around to feel and make sure that the GPS device was still in his cargo pocket. He thought it was. But he wanted to put his hands on it. The pain of the cuts in his back made the twisting movement difficult, and he never quite succeeded in getting his hand in his pocket.
After the smell of the truck bed, the next thing Lee remembered was standing up.
He couldn’t see anything. It was dark as midnight, but he could feel warm sun on his face. Someone was angry, but he was fairly certain they were not angry with him. He felt strong hands gripping his arms and holding him up. He was glad, because his legs felt rubbery, and he knew that if the hands were not there, he would fall.
He wondered if this was another dream.
“Jesus Christ, Bill!” the angry voice said. “Did you have to blindfold them? This guy’s half dead anyway. Doc! Doc!”
“Where the hell did he go?”
“He was right behind me.”
“Someone get Doc.”
“He’s right here; he’s right here.”
“Fuckin-A, Bill, did you do this?” It was a new voice, slightly higher than the others, but still a male voice, Lee thought.
“No. I think Milo’s guys did it to him.”
Lee opened his mouth but his throat was dry and scratchy.
“What? You gotta speak up, buddy.”
“I just got scraped by nails.… Angela and Abby are… dehydrated.… Sam too.”
Doc spoke again. “Mikey, get the chick and the two kids into my triage room. And someone help me with this guy.” To Lee: “Hey, buddy… you say you got scratched by nails? Can you tell me how that happened?”
“Window,” Lee responded.
There was a brief moment of silence and Lee felt the hands pulling him forward. He tried to move his feet and found his knees weak. He was thankful for whoever was holding him up.
“Seriously,” Doc said to someone else. “Can we take the fuckin’ blindfold off? Are we done with this Guantanamo shit? Thank you.”
The world was suddenly very bright. Lee squinted. When his blurry vision cleared, he tried to focus on his surroundings for a moment and figure out where the hell he was. He could see that there was gravel under his feet. There were several large vehicles parked around him, a few beat-up old pickups like the one Bill had been in. Behind the vehicles, Lee could see some curious faces staring at him. He looked straight ahead and saw what appeared to be their destination: a steel shipping container. He also noticed that behind the shipping container were several others, and behind them, a large industrial building of some sort.
“So what happened to you?” Doc asked.
Lee turned to the sound of the voice and found a squirrelly looking man peering up at him. The man was probably no more than 5' 6", and scrawny. He had natty-looking brown hair and, perched on a prominent hook nose, he wore a pair of glasses that bore some evidence of hard times: The lenses were both scratched and the frame was held together with duct tape on one side.
Someone spoke up for Lee. It was Red. “He was trapped in one of the condos, so he kicked open a boarded window, but he could only get it partially open, so he had to squeeze through and the nails from the board scratched the shit out of him.”
“Ahh.” Doc peered around Lee and whoever was carrying him to view his back. “Yeah, that’s more than ‘scratched’ and I hope to God they weren’t rusty because I ain’t got shit to give you if you develop tetanus.”
Lee just nodded.
With Doc leading them, Lee and Red, who was supporting him, turned the corner into the open end of the shipping container. Lee could see scant medical supplies, but he figured by the bloodstained sheets and the smell of disinfectant that this was a medical station. Angela, Abby, and Sam were sitting on a few crates and a woman, Lee guessed about college-age, was handing out bottles of water. The bottles were a mismatched collection and obviously had been refilled and used many times.
Red guided him to a bed with a stained sheet on it. “Lay him on his left side,” Doc said. “His left side… his left side, Miller!”
“Workin’ on it!” Red—aka Miller—snapped back. They lowered him into the bed on his left side. Lee kept squinting because the pain was now coming in long, fiery bursts that started in his side and lower back then radiated out. As soon as he rested his head on the mattress, he felt Doc pulling the ripped and bloody clothing away from his flesh and snipping through it with a pair of medical shears. The entire time he snipped away, he made disapproving noises. Lee assumed his injuries were worse than Doc had believed.
When Lee realized Doc was in the process of cutting through his pants, his hand shot out and touched his cargo pocket. He felt Doc jerk back. Lee thrust his hand into the pocket and felt the plastic casing of the GPS device. He wrapped his hand around it and removed it. The college-age girl tried to take it, but Lee wouldn’t release his grip. “No one touches this,” he mumb
led under his breath.
With his clothes cut through and removed, Lee sat naked on the bed and felt chills coming on. He felt fleetingly embarrassed about being naked in front of strangers, and especially Angela and the kids, but mostly he wondered if Doc had the medical supplies necessary to patch him up. He couldn’t imagine that the bleeding was so bad he could die from it, but he supposed infection was a good possibility.
“Jenny, I need you,” Doc called.
Lee opened his eyes long enough to see the college-age girl who had been tending to Angela and the kids come running over. Though she wasn’t a real looker, she was just attractive enough for Lee to feel even more embarrassed that he was naked.
Doc spoke to her. “Get me one of those towels, and I’m going to need some water for him. And when you get done with that I’m going to need my suturing kit.”
“Be right back,” she said, and twirled around to get what Doc requested.
To Lee, he spoke a little softer. “Alright, here’s the situation. Your scratches are more like lacerations. In a couple of places, they’ve cut into muscle tissue, so I’m kind of surprised you’re able to stand upright. The good news is that I have the supplies to suture you up and hopefully keep you from getting infected. The bad news is that I don’t have shit in the way of anesthetic, and it’s gonna take me about an hour, maybe even two hours, to finish stitching you up. So the next two hours of your life will suck, but maybe you’ll be lucky and pass out pretty soon.”
Lee heard Jenny return with the requested items.
“Before you pass out,” Doc continued, “you should drink as much of this water as you can. You lost a lot of blood. Not enough to be concerned with, but you need to hydrate. I’ll see if we can’t get you some juice or something.… Jenny! Juice?”
Lee opened his eyes to see if Jenny was there, but she was out of his field of vision.
“Okay… ‘no’ on the juice. Sorry, buddy. We’re just about tapped out of everything.”
Lee nodded and pressed his face into the mattress. “Do what you gotta do.”
“Good man,” Doc encouraged.
Lee lay on his side while Doc cleaned the wounds. The young physician used a large syringe filled with sterile water to irrigate the wounds and clean out all the pieces of dirt that had been trapped there while Lee had evaded being shot to death. After a thorough cleaning, Doc patted the wounds dry. By then, Lee had finished his second bottle of water.
Lee felt the doctor’s hands leave his back. Lee could hear him working with something behind his back, and he concluded it would be the sound of him threading sutures and getting ready to stitch Lee back up. From Lee’s medical training, he knew that Doc would have to stitch the severed muscle tissue first, and then the skin. This was double the pain for Lee, but he shared Doc’s hope that he would pass out before long.
Doc sighed behind him. “Okay. You ready?”
Lee nodded once again and grabbed a fistful of white bedsheets.
Doc turned out to be right. Lee passed out in no time.
CHAPTER 20
The Deal
When Lee came to, he didn’t recall the details of his dreams, but they left him with an uneasy feeling that clogged his veins and sickened the pit of his stomach. His mind was full of flashed images of violence and gore and inhumanity. He could still feel the GPS device held tightly in his hands. Good. They hadn’t taken it from him.
He opened his eyes and saw he was still lying on the bed in Doc’s little medical trailer. He felt weak and shaky, but he lifted himself up onto one elbow so he could look around. The movement sent splitting pain across his back. It wasn’t until Lee was sitting up that he realized someone was standing at the foot of his bed.
It was a broad man with a dark, bushy beard. He wore a dirty tank top and a pair of old woodland-pattern fatigues. What Lee thought looked like a Colt 1911 pistol hung in a leather shoulder holster under the man’s left arm. The man with the beard stared at Lee for a long moment and then nodded.
“Can you stand?”
Lee didn’t answer because he hadn’t tried. He swung his legs out of the bed and prepared to heave himself up.
The man with the beard smiled. “Don’t get up. Doc said you need to rest. Just curious if you could stand.”
Lee relaxed back onto his elbow, trying not to grimace too much from the pain. “Thanks for patching me up. I know resources are scarce.”
“They are indeed.” The bearded man grabbed a metal folding chair from a desk with a lit propane lamp burning on it that was the sole source of illumination in the cargo container. It wasn’t until that moment that Lee realized it must be dark out. He wondered how long he’d slept. “Name’s long and Greek, so let’s just stick with Bus. I’m kinda the de facto leader of this little operation.”
“Okay, Bus. Lee Harden.”
“Mmm hmm.” Bus relaxed in the chair. “I understand that the arrangement you had with Bill was that you wouldn’t receive any care until you’d sold me on whatever you’re trying to peddle. He didn’t give me many details. And you and your group have also received the food, water, and medical care that we can offer, meager as it is. We’ve done more than keep up our end of the deal. So… what is it that you claim you can do for us?”
Lee rubbed his eyes and tried to clear his foggy mind so he could speak intelligently. “Yeah… uh…”
Bus let out a big sigh. “It’s okay.” He sounded disappointed. “We get this a lot lately. Food and water are hard to come by, so people will act like they have it just to seek refuge here when they really don’t. Just come clean with me and you and your group can leave with our blessing.”
Lee managed a smile. “Sir, I’m not running any con game on you for some sutures and a few bottles of water. What is it that your people need?”
Bus didn’t answer immediately. He spoke slowly. “I’m going to be frank with you, Mr. Harden. I have no reason to trust you. And explaining to you what we lack also tells you where we are weakest. That isn’t information I will readily give out to strangers, and honestly, when you ask those questions, it makes me a little uncomfortable.”
Lee pursed his lips. “I understand.”
“Perhaps if you can explain to me how you came across these alleged supplies, I would be more inclined to believe you. Because right now the thought of anyone having access to some sort of cache seems like a fairy tale.”
So Lee told him everything. He began by explaining his position as a member of Project Hometown, and what that entailed, and how he came to be in possession of several large caches that could supply a small army with everything from boots to bullets to bandages. He explained in detail that the caches were kept in underground bunkers, similar to the one he had come from, and that the access points for these bunkers were hidden, their hatches sealed and locked so that only someone with the proper clearance could find and access them. He left out the specifics of his GPS and the data it contained.
When he finished, Bus looked at him with eyebrows knit with concentration, arms crossed over his broad chest. Not entirely convinced, but considering the facts. Lee hoped that the details he had given would lend his story the ring of truth necessary to convince Bus to trust him.
Lee continued on. “Bus, I’ve got a job to do. I know it’s difficult to believe that the United States government still exists, albeit on a very small scale, but we’re here to rebuild. I’m not asking anything of you. And you know you can’t refuse what I have to offer. I know you don’t want to trust a stranger, but you have to understand that this cannot go on. You and your group won’t survive the winter, scavenging for scraps. We have to start rebuilding and we have to start now.”
Bus sat without moving, and his expression did not change.
Lee had finished talking. There was nothing further to say.
After a long pause, Bus finally let out a deep breath. “Okay. How can we work this? What are you proposing?”
“Quid pro quo. I need you to answer some questions for
me.”
Bus looked like he was in pain for a brief moment. “Fine. Ask away.”
“First of all, where are we?”
“We call it Camp Ryder. We’re in a Ryder truck factory right now. About three miles southwest of Angier.”
“How many people do you have living here?”
“Fifty-eight by my last count.” Bus sounded like he thought about that number quite often.
Lee considered for a brief moment. “Okay. How many of those fifty-eight are capable of fighting?”
Bus made a raspberry. “Twenty, if that.”
“What about guns?”
“A few deer rifles, couple hunting shotguns, and some pistols. Two of the pistols are .22, so they aren’t much good for killing anything accept small game. We take ’em hunting every once in a while.”
“I’m assuming ammunition is low?”
Bus nodded. “That would be correct. And we have Molotov cocktails. We got lots of those made up. Found a recyclables truck last week with a shit-ton of glass bottles in it. It also had several gallons of diesel fuel, and none of our vehicles run on diesel, so we made the cocktails.”
Lee closed his eyes, trying to build a mental picture. “Tell me about the building behind us, defense-wise.”
Bus leaned forward in his chair. “Big cement building. Best we could find. Only two entry and exit points, besides the cargo bay doors, which we managed to weld shut. There’s an electrified fence all around the perimeter of the compound, but our generators aren’t big enough to power it. Still, it keeps out the infected.”
“But not a sane human who wants in.”
Bus shook his head. “We patrol the fence line as often as we can, but we’re undermanned, and even if we caught people breaking in, I’m not sure we’d have the firepower to stop them. Our basic plan is to hole ourselves inside the factory building. But even then we only have enough food and water stores to last us two or three days.”