The Remaining: Refugees (23 page)

As he ate he judged the eastern horizon with a skeptical eye. It had changed almost imperceptibly from complete black
to a charcoal gray. They were entering
the golden hour just before dawn when the packs that hunted the countryside at night
were
less active, but the hordes inside the towns and cities had n
ot yet emerged from their dens.

They needed to
get going
.

He rested his hands on his magazines and tapped at them impatiently. The minutes slunk by as he waited in the early morning silence. A flicker of movement from down the street caught his eye and he stood up, his hand reaching for the grip of his rifle. The figures drew closer. It was LaRouche and Jim.

Lee took a relieved breath. “Alright,” he called. “Everyone mount up. We’re rollin’ out.”

Two minutes later, they were moving.

***

They stopped just outside
the north end of town
. They had swung around the city on the 421 bypass and exited on a small two-lane road that led
into
the north end of
town. Lee wanted to start
there
and work his way south.

Here on the back
roads, Lee took a quick scan of his surroundings.
To their right, a bank of woods, the interior still shaded and dark with night while the treetops began to show the silvery glint of daylight just over the horizon.
To their right, a field of corn stood brown and wilted, the ears long since shriveled away unharvested, or picked through by animals. Straight ahead, Lee cou
ld see the first few houses of
suburbia, set back amongst stands of trees.

Lee opened his door and swung his legs out. “LaRouche, you’re with me.”

“Uh-huh
.
”

Lee stood there at the door and checked through his gear. When he was satisfied, he clipped his rifle to his sling and let it rest against
his
extra magazines. He motioned for Wilson to join him and the young cadet jumped out of his Humvee and jogged over. Young often went hand-in-hand with inexperience and a general lack of wisdom, and Wilson was no exception. However, he was a clear thinker under pressure, and decisive. Lee trusted him for one reason only: he felt confident that Wilson could handle everyone on the team if it came down to any sort of engagement.

Lee glanced between Jim
,
Julia
,
and Wilson. “Wilson’s in charge. Me and LaRouche both have handhelds, so maintain radio silence unless we’re calling you. Keep an ear perked up, though—if shit hits the fan, we’re gonna
need you to come in and
extract us.”

They all nodded.

He continued: “Hold tight right here, and Wilson, make sure we’re maintaining a solid 360 defense. You guys are out in the open here, so keep your eyes peeled and no
fuckin’ around
.”

“I got it, Captain,” Wilson said.

Lee eyed him.
Of course you do.

Lee trusted him to get the job done, but that didn’t mean he was without misgivings.

H
e kept
his thoughts
to himself and looked over Wilson’s shoulder at LaRouche, who had just finished securing his pack onto his shoulders. “You ready?”

“Ready.”

Lee took the radio from its pouch on his chest and switched it on. He waited for it to light up, then keyed it and spoke quickly, “Radio check, radio check.” He could hear the squelch and his own voice echoing back at him from inside the Humvee and from the radio on LaRouche’s shoulder.

“Alright. Let’s go.”

The two men set out into the breathless morning, silent as a bank of fog as they moved down the road in the cadaver-gray light of dawn. Lee took point, LaRouche staying about ten yards behind him, constantly checking behind them and walking backwards to watc
h their flanks and make sure nothing
was sneaking up on them.

They walked hunched at the shoulders, tension ratcheted through their core and legs, their progress slow and deliberate. Ceaselessly
,
their eyes scanned from left to right and back, checking every shadow and stopping at the slightest stir from the cornfield on their right, or the woods on their left. Sometimes they would stay knelt there in the middle of the road, silent and still for minutes on end, and they would never hear another sound, or see what had made the first.

They would rise slowly and continue on, hoping that those furtive noises were not the creeping of something deadly, stalking them just out of view.

They reached the first street of the residential area and stopped there. It was an even grid of two-lane blacktop, unmarked by painted lines, but littered with old trash and the strange flotsam of a town that had panicked and fled and
then
been overrun. Every town, every apartment complex, every housing development that they had been through
, held some strange thing that could not be easily explained
. Things that made no sense, unless you had been there to witness how it had happened.

Here on the outskirts of Sanford
,
in
whatever community made up this grid of split level and ranch houses, the first strange sight was the body of a woman, all the features long since decayed and blackened, l
ying against the base of a tree. She wore
a blue terry cloth robe
,
stained brown with the putrid fluids of her decomposition. In her right hand she clutched a newspaper, and in her left she held the handle to a broken coffee mug. Her cause of death was a mystery, as the rot and the animals had disguised it amongst the mar of flesh they’d left behind.

They didn’t linger, as they never did, attempting to piece together these odd puzzle pieces left behind by the violent collapse of a society.

Graffiti seemed more prevalent here than in the other places they’d been. Various political or religious sentiments had been scrawled across doors and signs and the blank white canvasses of house siding. All of them had a different scapegoat, a different person or deity to blame for the catastrophe. One simply said FUCK THE WORLD in red
,
spray painted letters nearly six feet high.

Red for anger.

Red for blood.

Red seemed to be the dominant color choice for graf
fiti everywhere
.

The houses looked ransacked, which was not unusual. An intact window was hard to find. Lee thought that even the survivors broke them out of spite when they found them, some deep-seeded resentment towards the civilization that had spawned and betrayed them. Maybe those glass windows were just another reminder of the things they felt they would never have again.

More mysteries to be pondered at a later time.

Loose curtains billowed out of the open windows, like a dead thing’s insides oozing out.

Death was the predominant medium in Lee’s mind. Everything was painted in shades of it, and everything existed in some stage of it. He wanted to think in terms of rebirth, but knew that the rebirth had not yet begun, because the decay had not yet finished.

They made their way through these abandoned streets, and occasionally caught sight of the beginnings of the urban area; businesses erected to support a populace that was no longer there. But they had not yet outlived their use.

They reached a street called McIver and made a right, heading west into the city.

Lee pointed straight ahead of them and spoke quietly. “We’ll take up a position on one of those buildings and see what there is to see.”

“Hopefully one of them will…” LaRouche stopped midsentence.

Lee turned and looked at him. The sergeant’s eyes were scanning the houses around them. They stood about a block from an intersection with stoplights hanging dark from the power lines. They were only a few blocks now from the bigger buildings. The air was very still, no birds to sing in the cold, no insects to make a sound.

“What?” Lee asked.

“Something just moved.”

Lee raised his rifle to a low ready and scanned.

His eyes stopped on a wooden porch at the front of one of the houses. The ornamental lattice-work had been stripped away and the tall, brown stalks of grass were matted down in front of the opening. A dead dog, recently killed and partially eaten
,
lay near the front steps of the house.

Lee thought back to his own house, his front deck, and the crushed grass there near his steps that should have been his first clue.

“We should keep moving,” Lee whispered.

They walked forward, both focused now on the dark underbelly of the porch.

They’d gone abou
t ten paces
when
some
pale
and sinewy thing
squirmed partially out of the shadows.

“Fuck…” LaRouche whispered and sighted down his rifle.

“Don’t shoot!” Lee hissed. “Just keep moving.”

The tremor returned to his arms, and his pulse began to pound through his body. Shooting now would only wake every infected within a half mile of them, and there was always the chance this one
would ignore them. It was rare, but it had happened before
.

The thing under the deck
lay
on its side
, its head resting on its outstretched arm. As they passed by,
it
regarded them with a dim intelligence that said it was sizing them up.

“Don’t shoot unless you have to,” Lee said quietly, trying to control the shake in his voice.

“Pick up the pace, Captain.”

“Running is only going to make it want to come after us.”

LaRouche swore under his breath.

The thing raised its head and hitched itself up onto its elbows, still watching them. It made a weird guttural sound and another tangle of limbs appeared from underneath the deck.

“There’s two of them
now
,” LaRouche said.

“Just keep walking,” Lee tried to sound calm and reassuring, but it wasn’t convincing to himself and he doubted it was to LaRouche.

The first infected lurched up to its feet in a sudden movement.

“Cap…”

It started towards them, but slowly, as though testing their reaction. Testing whether they would run. Or testing if they were wounded, if they were weak, if they were easy prey. Perhaps running was a better idea
..
.

It barked.

The second one stood up and swung its arms loosely.

A third infected crawled out of the space.

“Lee!”

The
first one
began to jog
towards them.

Lee broke. “Go! Run!”

CHAPTER 11:
TROUBLE BREWING

Adrenaline like an
electric shock went through him and Lee
forced his legs to go faster, faster—
they were not going fast enough!