The Remaining: Refugees (15 page)

"Yeah. More than that." He finished his bowl in silence, and then felt the need to clarify himself. "But never...you know..."

"Really?"

"No."

"I would've thought so."

"Nope."

"Weird."

He bobbled his head. "
It’s good
."

"So you're sleeping up here because...?"

"Oh." Lee set the bowl down on the desk. "I don't want to wake her and Sam and Abby up at night. From
the dreams
."

"Yeah."

Lee looked at Julia as she stared at the ground absently. "How are they for you?"

"I hate going to sleep at night. Especially by myself."

"I thought you were staying with Marie?"

Julia smiled. "Well, Marie's been staying with
Harmon
."

Really?
Lee thought.
Good for
Harmon
.

It was getting late and Lee decided it was time to roll out the bed
. The talk of going to sleep was doing him in
.

"You can sleep up here with me, if you like." The words came out before Lee's tired mind could really put much effort into vetting them. Immediately after the last word left his mouth his mind began to race. He hadn't meant it quite like it had sounded. When they were out beyond the wire, they all slept
together
anyways, and it didn't seem odd to him in that moment to offer it up.

"
What I meant was
..." he tried to correct himself.

"Okay," she said.

Lee glanced at her. "Okay
.”

“I just don’t wanna
sleep alone,” she said quietly.

“Yeah. Me neither.”

“You have any extra blankets?”

“Yes.”

Before rolling out his bed, he
switched the
radio back to the main channel and took the lantern from the desk.
T
hen
he
pulled the extra blankets from his pack and gave them to Julia.
He extended his own bedroll and lay the blankets across, and Julia situated herself to his left.
In an odd, and yet somehow comfortable silence, they laid down on the bedroll, not touching, but close enough if one were to reach out. Lee turned off the LED lantern that glowed brightly and the two of them, exhausted and secure in the comfort of human company, fell asleep almost instantly.

***

He was with his father in this dream, as he was in many other dreams of late. A presence that imparted quiet encouragement in the face of a deep and paralyzing dread that Lee could only feel when he was asleep, lost in the twists and
turns of his subconscious. Gene
Harden had
always been a quiet man, and in these dreams he never spoke a word.

They were on the front porch of a house that Lee had never lived in, some house drawn from memories of his father’s old western movies. They stared out at a barren, windswept landscape and it filled Lee’s soul with an empty fear, like the howling of wind in a canyon. When he looked to his right, he could see his father
,
as young as he’d looked when Lee was a boy, perhaps seven or eight years old, and his father in his late thirties. His father stared out at the wasteland before them and he smiled and nodded.

Lee turned away from the scene
, hoping to escape into the house, but instead found himself in
Lillington, or some poor facsimile of it, manufactured from disjointed bits and pieces from his subconscious. He was standing outside, in the middle of the street, and all around him were the corpses of the dead infected he had killed. Across from him he could see Father Jim, and the man wept violently and beat at his chest.

"What's wrong?" Lee asked.

And Father Jim gestured all around them, at the bodies that littered the streets, and his tears ran bitter down his face. "Where are the females, Lee? Where are all the females?"

Lee looked down at the bodies all around him, pale flesh smeared with dirt and dried blood and shit. All of them were naked, and they were all females, and they all bore
Lee’s old girlfriend
Deanna's face, in all the different grotesque attitudes of death. In some of them Deanna's tongue lolled out, others her eyes were open, gazing at the sky, or at some invisible fixed point beyond reckoning. In the dream, the sight of
Deanna's face had very little e
ffect on him. It was a face from another life, another time.

Someone he could barely remember.

He tried to comfort Jim by pointing to all the dead bodies. "No, Jim! We got 'em all! They're right here!"

But Jim was inconsolable, and he only continued to ask, "Where are all the females?"

***

"Lee."

He opened his eyes to darkness, staring at the ceiling above his head.

"Lee."

He leaned forward and could see the dark shape of Julia, wrapped in a blanket, and standing at the door to the office. The Camp Ryder building had grown cold in the night and Lee could see her breath, fogging in the black air. Julia looked at him and made a little waving motion from underneath her blanket.

"There's someone at the gate," she whispered.

Lee leaned up onto his elbows, sweeping a layer of dust from his slumbering mind and trying to remind himself why he should care if someone was at the gate. The sound of it was faint when he heard it. Someone was yelling outside, and another was raising his voice. Two men in disagreement.

Lee threw his blanket off of himself and the cold air bit at him mercilessly. He grabbed his
jacket
and his rifle and fumbled them on as he headed for the door. Julia had dropped her blanket and was donning her jacket as well. Lee thought about telling her to stay put, but there really was no purpose to it. Besides, they might need a medic.

He took the metal stairs as quietly as he could, not wanting to wake anyone sleeping inside the building, but the sounds of the disturbance outside were already beginning to cause people to stir. In the small quarters constructed in the middle of the building, lanterns and flashlights were beginning to flicker and glow.

"What time is it?" he asked Julia as she followed him.

"Almost three."

Damn.
Lee grit his teeth.
You can't pay for a good night's sleep
nowadays
.

They reached the bottom of the steps, turned through the short hall to the front doors, and slipped out of the Camp Ryder building. From the elevated entryway, Lee could see clear to the gate. A flashlight illuminated a small bubble of existence there and it consisted of two men and
the
chain-link fence
that divided
them. All through the shantytown of Camp Ryder, more lights were coming on and people were poking their heads out of their little shacks
,
try
ing to
see what the yelling was about.

L
ee began to run for the gate
. Sleep and cold
stiffened
his joints now, particularly his left ankle, and he c
ouldn't hide his limp as he ran
. Ahead of him, Lee could see that the sentry was stepping away from the gate, pointing his rifle at a man on the other side, some strange, bulky looking
bear-man
, with wild eyes and wire beard stained with blood. The crazed man on the outside had his fingers woven through the chain-link and he was shaking it and yelling.

For a moment, Lee slowed his pace and raised his rifle, wondering why the sentry was not taking this infected out. Then he heard Juli
a's voice huffing alongside him:
"Is that the guy from the woods?"

"What?"
Lee asked, but then
realized who she was talking about. The man and the woman, and the two children, with their blankets and coats draped heavy and thick over their shoulders. The ones
Jim
had tried to make
contact with, but had run away
.

The bear-man shook the gate again. "Get out here! I know you can help! You said! You said you could help! Get the fuck out here and help me, goddammit!"

Lee stopped at the gate, rifle ported. "What the hell is this?"

The man on the other side looked at Lee. "
You were there! You were with that guy that said he would help! Where is he? It's my wife and kids…w
e need help!"

Lee leaned closer and hissed through his teeth. "Would you shut the fuck up? I'm going to help you, but you gotta be quiet!"

The man lowered his voice. “Please…”

Lee nodded to the sentry.

"You sure?" The sentry
was
shocked.

Lee
skewered him with a look
. "Yes, I'm sure.
Open the damn gat
e.
"

The sentry hopped to
,
and Lee leveled his
rifle at the strange man who stood outside the gate, wringing his hands and looking about nervously
. "Put your hands up and don't make any sudden movements. I'll help you, but you need to cooperate with me first, or you're not getting shit. Understand?"

The man’s wild and desperate eyes locked onto Lee. Then he nodded and raised two dirty, blood-stained hands
.

Lee turned to Julia. Her matted blonde hair was bulging out in odd directions and there were dark rings under her wide eyes. "Go grab the team and tell them to suit up. Better grab your medic pack, too."

She nodded rapidly and ran for the Camp Ryder building.

Lee turned and found that there was no longer a
fence between him and the bear-
man, and only about ten feet of open space separated them. His arms were still raised up, but now his head had leaned back and his eyes were staring up at the sky and they looked hopeless.

"Are you listening to me?" Lee asked.

Th
e man didn't look, but he said, “Yes.”

Lee spoke slowly and clearly. "Kneel down, and put your hands on top of your head, interlacing your fingers."

The man complied, going to his knees with a sudden collapse, like a wounded beast.

"Do not move, just answer my questions. Do you have any weapons?"

"Crowbar
," the man said
. "In my belt. K
nife in my pocket. Look man…we gotta hurry…
"

Lee made eye-contact with the sentry and nodded. As the sentry moved towards the stranger, Lee spoke again. "The sentry is going to take your weapons. If you move, I will kill you. Do you understand?"

"Yes.
"

The sentry rifled through the man's thick layers of clothing, then paused and looked at his own hands, which were dark and glistening. "Jesus," the sentry exclaimed. "He's fucking covered in blood!"