The Remaining: Refugees (40 page)

Harper had to think about it for a moment. “Private channel” was a particular channel that they could switch to and not be overheard by
the other base stations around the Camp Ryder Hub that might be monitoring the main channel
. Lee had only told the people on his team about what channel he’d selected to be their private channel.

Harper
stepped to the radio and switched the frequency, hoping he’d remembered correctly. He took the handset and keyed it up. “Lee, you there?”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“What happened? I heard something bad happened.”

“Jake’s been shot. Julia is with him, and Wilson and his team are taking them to the hospital.”

“Sonofabitch…”
Lee sounded a little dazed, and that above everything else made Harper worry.
“Who shot him? And who the hell is with you if everyone left for the hospital?”

“Jim and LaRouche are with me, don’t worry. We
’re fine. As for the shooter…” Le
e paused for a long time, and Harper could hear him breathe into the microphone twice, thinking. “We don’t
know who it was.
We didn’t see who shot him. We think it was from the rooftop
s
, but we haven’t had a chance to check it out yet.”

“No one else got hurt?”

“No
,
it was just Jake. He only fired once.”

“Is Jake gonna make it?”

A pause before the transmission.
“I don’t think so, Harper.”

Harper looked at Bus and could see that his face was gray and worn.

“Look, we’ll talk about that later,” Lee said over the radio. “It’s not what I called you for.”

“Okay.” Harper was still processing the news of Jake’s death.
“What do you need?”

Lee
’s voice was distant
. “I need you to get Jacob and a couple of the people that you trust from your group of volunteers, and I want you to go to Lillington
. You don’t need a lot of guys, just three or four of them. You’re going to comb the downtown area of that city. You’re looking for a den.”

“A den? Like an infected den?”

“Yes. It’s gonna be pretty nearby where we set up the Lillington Outpost. I would say within a few blocks, but go out at least five blocks in each direction. You’ll smell it when you reach it. It should be a low place with open doors, easy to access. Probably dark, not a lot of windows.”

“Okay. I got it.” Harper touched his forehead. “What are we doing?”

Lee’s words became very deliberate. “
Before you do any of that,
I need you to work with Jacob and come up with a way to safely capture a live infected, a way to safely transport it,
and to safely keep it contained
.”

“Whoa, Lee…” Harper stared at the radio as if it had
bit him. “You wanna tell me what’s going on here?”

“Is anyone in the room with you, and is the door closed?” Lee asked.

Harper glanced over at Bus, who nodded. “Yeah, Bus is in here. Door’s shut.”

“
Okay.” An audible intake of breath. “
What I’m about to tell
you does not leave that room.”

***

Harper placed the handset back on its cradle. He felt shaky. Weak. Unsure of himself. The concept, the dream of one day making it through this alive, it felt like
land receding quickly from his view as a riptide carried him out to sea.

He turned around and found Bus, still contemplative, sitting at his desk.

“What do you think?” Harper asked him.

Bus looked up as though he’d forgotten Harper was in the room. He shrugged. “I choose to trust the captain because—let’s be honest—I don’t have much of a choice. I’m sure some people call it blind faith, but that’s not really accurate, because I do take the time to think about everything he asks me to do. And you know what?” Bus smiled. “Sometimes I don’t agree with him. But I weigh that in the balance of his track record, and the consequences of not going along with him.”

“How do you mean?” Harper slid his hands into his pockets. “You think he would pull support if you refused to do something?”

Bus shook his head. “
No
. I don’t think Captain Harden would do something like that, especially after everything we’ve been through. The c
onsequences I speak of are more…
intangible. Such as, if me and him are divided, what kind of
precedent does that set for everyone else? And what if he’s right and I’m wrong? What if I refuse to do something, and it turns out that I should have? How many people are going to b
e hurt? At the end of the day, you have to realize that the captain is very utilitarian. In other words, he might risk the lives of five people, but it’s only t
o save the lives of a hundred.”

Bus leaned forward and regarded his rough hands, folded on the desktop. “You
know, I think he sees things as a very simple equation: how many people risked versus how many people saved. If the number of people saved is greater than the risk, he’ll do it. And sometimes I resent his thinking.” Bus looked at Harper with a pointed stare. “But I wouldn’t want to make the decisions he makes.”

Harper found himself on the cusp of jumping in to defend Lee
—he knew the captain, and he knew he didn’t make his decisions lightly.
But when the survival of a nation was in jeopardy, the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few. Le
e had the survival of
more than just himself to think about, and when you began to get into numbers that spanned an entire region, and entire state, then the computati
ons became very complex indeed.

And realizing this, Harper knew where his heart was at.

He nodded to Bus and turned for the door. “I need to find Jacob.”

***

Lee
and his two companions
w
orked their way through Sanford. They roamed cautiously
up and down
the
side streets
, their pace slow and deliberate.
Not so
fast that they would miss something important, but not so slow as to make an easy target. They
scanned for signs of further infected, but found none. They looked for evidence of raiders, but the roads were deserted
.
As they continued their sweep, they made mental notes of places that could provide good scavenging.

Lee scanned left, found a pair of boots on the radio console.

“LaRouche. Your feet. On my radio. Again.”

The boots retracted. “Sorry.”

In the southern section of town, they eventually found what they were looking for.

The school sat in a slight hollow, the surrounding streets overlooking it. From their vantage point on Bragg Street, they could see that b
arriers had been
erected around the
school. It was a combination of chain link fencing, concrete blocks, and concertina wire. This metal and concrete wall extended around the
entire perimeter of the school
. The perimeter had be
en breached in several sections.
Not just
man-sized hole
s
, but gaping swaths of chain link and barbed wire
that
had been trampled and
pushed out of the way.

Inside the complex, the sports fields were occupied by the tattered remnants of tents, giant decontamination domes
that
sat crumpled and collapsed in the center of the football field. The parking lots where students used to congregate
and engage in their secret teenage rebellions were now cleared as landing pads for hel
icopters, but only one remained:
an AH-64 Apache
,
parked slightly askew in the right corner of the parking lot, as though its pilot had set it down hard and quick. Lee could see the cockpit was open and empty. The rotors hung limp and motionless.

“Why the fuck they need attack helicopters for an evacuation?” LaRouche asked from the back.

Lee shook his head. “Someone thought they were needed.”

There were boxes and crates strewn everywhere, but they looked looted and torn apart, either by scavengers or by the infected, se
arching for food. Between the
se, bodies lay where they’d fallen
. It was difficult to tell due to the level of decay, but some of them were whole, and Lee presumed these were the infected, shot down by defending troops. Others were in pieces
—
the civilians that hadn’t made it to safety before the infected caught up with them.

In another, lower parking lot, Lee could see a collection of school buses
. They would have been
used to ferry survivors back and forth to the airport. He saw himself for a moment, sitting in one of those buses, the air hot, the vinyl seats sticking to his skin, sweat and panic thick in the air. Driving down these deserted back roads with an armed escort
of
Humvees, a pair of Apache attack helicopters making flybys overhead.

Discomfort.

Terror.

L
ack of control.

These were someone’s last memories.

Behind the school buses
,
parked
closer to the
building
s
, Lee saw
the
hulks of OD green
and desert tan
. He leaned forward in his seat and pointed. “See ‘em? Coupla
LMTVs and a tanker
.”

The LMTVs were two-and-a-half ton trucks that
had replaced most
of the old M35 “Deuce-and-a-Half” trucks. Lee supposed that they could share the same name, but for some reason most people just called them LMTVs.
Two of these were parked alongside a HEMTT truck, with the M978 fuel tanker modification.

LaRouche whistled. “That’s a couple thousand gallons for you.”

“If they left anything for us.”
Le
e waved his hand towards the high school c
omplex. “Bring us in there, Jim
.”

The Humvee rolled forward through a gap in the jersey barriers that had been left open for vehicles to pass in and out of the complex. A roll-away section of barbed-wire-topped fencing lay bent and toppled to the ground, what was left of a body clad in ACUs lying on top.

Jim took
it slow and tried to avoid the dark mounds of decaying flesh that littered the parking lot, but there were far too many and occasionally Jim would cringe and the tires would thump across some old corpse and the sound of brittle bones snapping was muffled through the rotting meat.

“You’re doin’ good, Jim.”

The ex-priest nodded hastily. “You want to go all the way back to those trucks and the tanker?”

“Yeah.” Lee looked out his
window and scanned the rooftops with a suspicious eye
. “All the way back.”