The Remaining: Refugees (53 page)

The sidewalk cut through a gently sloping lawn, a few stately oak trees framing it like a gateway. The once-manicured lawn was now an uneven and patchy mess of overgrown clumps of brown fescue and dead weeds as tall as sapling trees. Through the oak trees and up to the red brick building, the bushes surrounding the base of it were wildly untrimmed, their carefully shaped branches just barely visible beyond a screen of new-growth offshoots, slightly lighter in color.

Gregg rounded one of these bushes and then stopped.

A cold wind pressed at his back.

The dormitory door stood open
.

Not so unusual, but for the bloody smear across it.

Gregg dropped the satchel. It made a muted metallic
clank
as it hit the concrete. He shouldered his shotgun and stepped back, away from the door, and then to his right, so that he was back behind the overgrown bushes.

The sound of a car door opening.

Gregg glanced back and saw Arnie running across the waist-high lawn, his old hunting rifle in-hand.
They knew better than to call out to each other, but when Arnie had jogged up within a few feet of Gregg, he took a gulp of air and whispered, “What’s wrong?”

“Blood on the door.”

Arnie raised his rifle up.

The two men edged towards the door.

Taking a longer moment to look at it this time, Gregg noticed blood on the floor of the entryway
as well.
A few drops and then a
long, coagulated smear that
zigzagged
across the tile floors and disappeared into the dark hall. Far down that hallway, at the opposite end, a single window let in pale gray light and illuminated a small area in its glow, but everything between them and that window remained invisible in its shadow.

“Should we go in?” Arnie asked.

“I think we’re gonna have to.”

“Got your flashlight?”

Gregg fished the little yellow
light out of the back pocket of his jeans and flicked it on. The light was a mottled circle that probed dully at the heavy shadows, barely lighting their way. Slowly, the two men entered the dormitory, the candle-like orb of light guiding them along the trail of blood on the floor like wheels on a track.

It terminated in a door left ajar.

The placard to the right of the door read STAIRS.

Gregg pushed the door open with the barrel of his shotgun, holding the pump action with the little flashlight pinched between his fingers. The door swung open and a draft of rank air hit them both, causing throats to clamp shut and eyes to water.

“Jesus Christ…” Arnie stepped back, fanning a hand in front of his face.

Gregg handled it mo
re stoically and pushed into the stairwell.

It was not the smell of rot, but the smell of bowels spilled.

In the corner of the bottom landing lay the top-half of a body.
The head was largely untouched, dark brown hair, a young man’s face, grotesquely serene atop its masticated corpse, reminding Gregg of an obviously photo-shopped picture. Sharp ribs standing out from a spine stripped of meat. The organs scattered across the floor as though they’d been dug out and indiscriminately flung in random directions.

“Is that…?” Arnie choked.

“Yeah,” Gregg turned away from it. “It’s one of the kids.”

“Where are his legs?”

“I’m guessing that’s where the blood trail came from.” Gregg started up the stairs. “Whatever took him down
dragged the other half of him
off somewhere.”

At the fourth floor, they found a single dorm room with a splintered door. A crowd of bloody
foot
prints
stampeded back and forth down the hallway, but centered there at the door that barely hung onto its hinges. Inside, the walls were red, like some hellish brothel, and textured with flesh. It stank of copper coins and sewers. It was too difficult to determine what parts belonged to who, so they counted heads and came up with three.

Arnie shook visibly. “I thought the infected didn’t like to leave the ground floor.”

Gregg shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“What are we gonna tell Professor White?”

Gregg looked at his partner. “We’re not gonna tell him shit.”

***

The shipping container was located back behind the Camp Ryder building and
had
become something of a storage shed for unused mechanical parts and other pieces of junk that people didn’t want to throw away, fearing it would be needed in the future. Cracked radiators, empty oxygen tanks, old hub caps—they wasted nothing, but what they couldn’t find a use for eventually found its place inside this out-of-the-way container.

Two of the
volunteers that had carted Captain Tomlin away still stood at the closed doors of the shipping container, a lock and chain around the bottom. These
were new additions to the box
.

Lee carried with him an unlit LED lantern, though the sky was not yet completely
dark. He set this at
his feet and eyed the
padlock
. “You got the keys to that thing?”

One of the volunteers responded by stretching out his hand, a single key grasped delicately b
etween his thumb and forefinger
.

“Is he still restrained?”

The man with the key nodded. “We put him in there exactly how you gave him to us.”

Captain Tomlin had all the same training that Lee did. And off the top of his head, Lee figured there were a dozen ways he could have gotten free from zip-tie bindings if he were left alone like Tomlin. There were a lot of sharp metallic edges in that shipping container. All it would take was some patience the willingness to get cut a few times.

Lee bladed his stance towards the door
, his rifle ported against his chest. “You mind pulling those doors open for me? Just in case.”

The man looked at the key in his fingers. “Oh. Yeah. Sure.”

The
man with the key
bent down at the lock and undid the chain. It clanked
noisily across the metal as he
pulled it away and yanked at the two doors. Lee raised his rifle fractionally, half expecting to see Tomlin crouching in the shadows with a piece of rebar clutched in his hand, or some other such weapon of opportunity. He pictured this in his mind, because it was exactly what he would do if their situations were reversed. He would hide with something sharp, or something heavy, and he would snag the first idiot to walk into that box and he would either open him up or bash in his skull. Then he would grab that man’s weapon and take out whoever else was standing around before heading for the nearest exit.

Yes, that’s what I would do,
Lee thought.
But I would not have stood in the middle of the road waiting to hitch a ride. Clearly, we are not thinking on the same page here.

The doors opened wide, and it took a moment for Lee’s eyes to adjust fully to the dark interior of the shipping container, but he was able to immediately see the form of someone lying on the ground, he could see the pale palms of their hands still secured behind their back, and the slumped, almost fetal position in which they lay.

At the sound of the doors opening, the figure stirred, craning his neck up and around. He was lying on his side, with his back to the entrance, probably in the very same position they’d thrown him in the container. He’d managed to pull the shemagh-tu
rned-blindfold off his eyes and it sat limply on the ground next to his head.

Tomlin craned his neck far enough that he was able to see Lee approachi
ng out of the corner of his eye.
As Lee stooped to place his lantern on the ground and turn it on, t
he man’s face immediately went from hesitant curiosity to
anger
.

“What the fuck is this shit, Lee?” He twisted wildly until he was in a sitting position, partially facing Lee where he stood, just a few feet away. “Are you fucking off the reservation, man? I told you I’m here to help you and you throw me in this fucking shithole with two random guys?” Tomlin’s eyes flashed. “If you had any idea why I was here, you wouldn’t be draggin’ ass comin’ to talk with me.”

While Tomlin spoke, Lee circled around him slightly and visually inspected the bindings to make sure they were still secure. He didn’t want to step too close to Tomlin until he had a few questions answered. He waited until it seemed that Tomlin had said his fill, and then he looked him in the eyes.

“What are you doing here?”

“Close the door and we can talk.”

“Brian, answer the question.”

Tomlin’s eyes jerked to the two men standing at the door. His jaw stuck out defiantly, but when he looked towards them, his eyebrows twitched upwards, almost imperceptibly, but Lee knew the look. It was a look of concern. Whatever he had to say, he really didn’t want those two to hear him.

When he spoke, his voice was very quiet so that Lee had to lean forward to hear.
His eyes remained fixed on the guards
as he whispered: “Please. Please just close the door and tell them to go away.” His eyes turned to Lee and they seemed earnest. “Give me five minutes, Lee. Five minutes and you can do what you want with me.”

Lee searched the man’s eyes. He knew his face well, knew his facial expressions. It was strange to look at a face that he knew so well in his memory, and try to see if it was the person that he knew, as though what he saw before him now was only Brian Tomlin’s body, and some sinister force was controlling it. The face was so familiar to him, it
almost broke him down to see it like this
.

He knew this face in so many different ways, as he knew all of the coordinators
like family
. He knew this face
when it was gaunt and tired after sixty days of Ranger school. He knew it covered in face paint and lit by
night vision
, and he knew it when it was heavy with a twelve pack of beer and lit by the glow of the football game on TV.

He knew the man sitting before him.

He knew him like a brother.

But as Harper would surely agree, even brothers betray each other sometimes.

Nevertheless, Lee found himself standing up, and turned his head partially, his eyes still locked on Tomlin while he spoke to the two men outside the shipping container. “Close the doors, please. You guys are relieved. Go get some chow.”

A brief pause.

“Uh…okay. Thank you.”

The doors swung closed. The flimsy glow of twilight went out completely, and everything in the shipping container that existed beyond the five foot bubble created by the lantern seemed to disappear, as though Lee and Tomlin had suddenly been launched into deep space and were floating there in an abyss of dark matter.

Lee backed up a single step. Now the light was evenly between the two of them. Lee shifted slightly so that he was not pointing his weapon at Tomlin, but the threat was very clear. “You have five minutes, Brian. Please tell me what the hell is going on.”

Tomlin’s eyes closed, and Lee could see them twitching back and forth underneath the lids as he gathered his thoughts. He took a deep breath, his eyes still shut. “The long and short of it is that your life is in danger.”

Lee almost laughed. “
Really
?”

Tomlin’s eyes snapped open. “I’m fucking serious, Lee!”

What trace of black humor Lee had taken from that statement suddenly disappeared like a match puffing out in the
wind. It struck him that Tomlin’s concern was not only for the secrecy of what he was about to reveal, but he appeared to be genuinely concerned for Lee.