The Remaining: Allegiance

by D. J. Molles

  “How’s that, Jenny?” she asked.

  Jenny stuffed her hands into her jacket pockets and it seemed she was closing her gates. “Oh, you’ll figure it out, Angela. You’re a smart woman. Smart and resourceful. You’ll certainly figure out everything on your own. Once you quit lying to yourself.”

  Angela couldn’t help the anger leaking out this time. “Lying to myself about what?”

  Jenny turned and began walking away, and Angela didn’t think she was going to answer, but when she’d gained a few paces of distance, she called a vague and flippant answer over her shoulder: “About Lee, of course.”

  TWELVE

  PROOF

  LAROUCHE WAS FREE, SO it seemed. He had no ropes on his hands. He had no one covering him with an assault rifle. There was a guy with a rifle standing up in the pickup bed where LaRouche and three others were sitting, but it was unclear whether he was there to cover the four unarmed men, or whether he was just there as protection because they were unarmed.

  The pickup truck was dark blue and old. Rust in the bed. Sounded like a cylinder was out of timing. They were the middle vehicle in a convoy rolling south through what LaRouche had to assume was Followers territory—no one seemed overly alert or cautious. It was interesting to him, but the infected seemed scarcer than usual. As the temperatures had continued to plummet, so had evidence of the crazed fuckers, running around naked. He thought about hibernation. Then he thought about exposure to the cold, and wondered what havoc it was wreaking on those packs and small hordes. Maybe that was why they’d seen so few of them. Maybe that was why this convoy proceeded so casually through the countryside.

  The lead vehicle was a van, in which there were supplies. The rear vehicle was another pickup truck with more men in the back. LaRouche assumed that the others in the pickup beds were new recruits. They all had solemn, disastrous faces. They were all as filthy as he was. None of them spoke. LaRouche included. But between them all there seemed to be a tether. Some odd and unspeakable kinship that was found only in the doing of foul deeds. Because, at the end of the day, even when someone puts a gun up to your head, they can’t force you to do anything you don’t want to do.

  Choices had been made. Each of the men in that truck had decided that they would rather kill friends and family than be killed themselves. And it stained them permanently, like each of them were marked with what they had done and recognized the same mark in others, somehow taking comfort from it. Because there was less shame when you could look around you and tell yourself, See? All these guys did it, too!

  LaRouche was the exception, of course. No one had put a gun to his head and forced him to make a choice. No, he’d been the one pointing the gun. And he came to his decisions all on his own. He didn’t need any help to be a filthy savage. Apparently that was just ingrained into him.

  He recalled the muzzle flash in the complete blackness of the night. The way that it had illuminated Father Jim’s face in that last, fleeting microsecond of his life. The expression that it bore…

  LaRouche tried to tell himself in his logical mind that there was no way Father Jim could have even registered the gun being put against his temple. Because LaRouche had pulled the trigger so quickly. There would not have been time for Father Jim to react. There would not have been time for him to look at LaRouche and show an expression. It was all impossible—Father Jim had been reaching for something, and then LaRouche had put a gun to his head and blew his brains out. Simple as that. Nothing else to it. Father Jim hadn’t felt a damn thing.

  But sometimes in LaRouche’s remembering of that microsecond as trigger released pin, and pin struck primer, and primer lit gunpowder, and gunpowder pushed bullet down a barrel, down, down, down a barrel and then through soft, thin layers of scalp, punching through skull and then into the jelly of the brain where it was lights out, Father Jim… sometimes LaRouche remembered his expression being one of agony.

  Other times it was an expression of betrayal.

  Sometimes regret.

  And the worst was when Father Jim’s face strobed through LaRouche’s mind and it bore a smile. Not a mean smile. Not a vicious smile. Just a smile. Like he’d heard a mildly amusing joke. Or maybe he was shaking hands with an old friend.

  LaRouche found himself looking at the other men in the truck bed and thinking, You’re worse than they are. You’re a worse human being. Because they had to be coerced into doing what they did, and you did it willingly. You are a sick fuck and you deserve what’s coming to you.

  What exactly is coming to me?

  Oh, I don’t know. But karma’s a bitch.

  His gut burned. Bile and blood wrestling their way to the top of his throat. He didn’t want to spew in front of the others. Instinctively, he knew that it could be bad to show weakness. Weakness would garner attention. Attention he did not want. So he kept swallowing, manically. Trying to lean his head forward in a way that would alleviate some of the uncomfortable roiling, acidic sensation hovering in his esophagus.

  Time stretched in the back of the pickup truck. It was cold and uncomfortable. The driver seemed to hit every pothole in the road, to the point that LaRouche would often look down and make sure that they were still even on a road. The wind roared over the cab of the pickup and it was the only thing that filled him until it was a hypnotic static that warped his perception of time.

  By the time they reached the encampment, LaRouche almost felt a sense of relief. Then he thought about where he was and the feeling quickly faded. He had a general idea, but it was painted in broad strokes. There were four camps under Deacon Chalmers’s command. Out of these camps the Followers launched their raids and took ground. The camps were made to be temporary and mobile so that when the raiding parties moved forward, the camps could pull up stakes and gain the ground. A leaping and bounding maneuver, so to speak. The camps stretched from north to south across North Carolina, and their slow, inexorable movement was west.

  To LaRouche’s knowledge, the camp that he’d been held at for the previous four days, the one that Deacon Chalmers had decided to make his headquarters, was the northernmost of the four camps. This one was the next one south. If he walked due west for long enough, he suspected he would run right into Raleigh. Or the clusterfuck that he was sure Raleigh had become.

  Everything in this new camp was just as it had been at the last camp. The place was situated in a field that had once been cropped and now showed only some wheat stubble in the few places that it had not been trampled completely to dirt, or gouged out by tire treads. There were tents mostly, but some campers, too. Vehicles mixed in. Various types and colors, makes and models. Like some shitty used car dealership with a bad inventory and a bunch of squatters taking up residence in the middle of it.

  When they came to a stop, the three vehicles in their little convoy began to unload. LaRouche stood and stretched. His muscles had taken on that stiff, achy jitteriness that seemed to poison them when his nerves were getting the best of him. The pain around his bullet wound smarted when he moved the arm, but he was surprised at how quickly it seemed to be healing. As he tried to stretch some normalcy back into his body, he looked to the pickup that was behind them and saw a familiar face getting out.

  Clyde, wearing a thick black coat maybe a size too snug for him. His rifle slung on his back.

  It was weird, but LaRouche felt better seeing him there.

  They made eye contact and Clyde began to walk toward him.

  Someone slapped the side of the pickup truck. LaRouche looked down and saw another man holding a rifle—not the one that had been in the bed of the truck with them—and he was looking up expectantly at LaRouche.

  “You comin’ with the rest of us, buddy?” the man asked.

  Clyde reached the back of the pickup truck. “I’ll take care of this one.”

  The man looked at him with some mix of confusion and suspicion.

  “Trust me, friend,” Clyde said to the stranger as LaRouche swung his legs out of the pickup bed.
“You probably don’t want to be anywhere near us right now. Deacon Chalmers sent us, and we need to speak to your commanding officer.”

  The man actually took a step back. “Uh…”

  “Perhaps you could point out where command stays,” Clyde said with a sigh.

  It was obvious to LaRouche that accompanying him here had not been Clyde’s idea, or his choice. Why Chalmers had sent anyone at all was a mystery to LaRouche. The impression that LaRouche had gotten from Chalmers was that he didn’t really give a shit what happened to LaRouche.

  How do you want me to do it? LaRouche had asked.

  To which Chalmers had simply shrugged and said, Figure it out.

  The stranger that clearly wanted no part of what they were up to pointed to a motor home. Nothing extravagant, but more than a Winnebago. He said nothing. His gesture was enough of an answer. Then he stepped out of the way and LaRouche began walking toward the motor home, Clyde in tow.

  He ached for something to douse the fire in his stomach and throat.

  But he had nothing and knew that nothing would be given to him. Not yet, anyway.

  Why are you doing this? Why don’t you just… just…

  Die?

  Yes.

  Because I don’t want to die.

  You should.

  I know. But not yet.

  He glanced behind him. Clyde’s face was exactly what he expected it to be: irritated. A man being forced to do something he didn’t want to do.

  There was no guard posted around the motor home, a sign of how things were so obviously going wrong in this camp. In fact, the disease of bad morale seemed to have pervaded everything around here. The camp LaRouche had come from had seemed busy. This one seemed dead. Withered. He had not expected military precision, but here the men sat around with bored expressions and eyed him and Clyde as they walked by. There were guards on watch, but they were clustered rather than spread out, and they seemed to be spending more time joking with each other than watching.

  Lack of discipline, LaRouche thought, a doctor diagnosing a patient for whom he had little sympathy, but still felt responsible for. Lack of discipline, and we all know why.

  At the motor home, LaRouche stopped at the door and looked at Clyde. “Should I knock?”

  Inside, they could hear someone being given a heavy-duty dressing down. The man that was yelling stumbled over his words, but his ire remained obvious even as his speech was unclear.

  Clyde pressed his lips together, looking around. If anyone gave a shit that two strangers were standing outside their commander’s motor home, they were doing a great job of hiding it. Finally Clyde just shook his head. “No. Let’s just go in.”

  LaRouche’s stomach heaved—more of a burp than a purge—and some of the biley-bloody mix hit the back of his tongue. He made a face and swallowed hard. He wished for the Tums that Wilson had given him. Wilson. Wilson, his friend, back in the time when he had friends.

  Aren’t these your friends? His own voice was sarcastic in his head.

  He reached forward and yanked the door open, taking the two narrow and steep steps up into the motor home and looking left down a cramped corridor full of wood paneling. A pair of seats with a table between them. Two men standing up. One sitting down. A map laid out across the table. Weighed down by a half-full handle of whiskey.

  The man sitting down was slightly older than the other two, balding on top and graying on the sides. He had a bulbous nose with ruddy gin blossoms in full bloom. He had an expression of drunken anger all over his face and he was looking up at the other two, the veins in his neck protruding violently. The entire motor home stank of bourbon.

  The other two men were middle-aged and they had on their faces the expression of men that are being rebuked by someone they have little respect for. Still, like children that knew their punishment would be quicker if they acted sorry, they were staring at the floor.

  When LaRouche and Clyde entered the motor home, all eyes switched to them. The two men standing and receiving their verbal thrashing seemed only mildly curious about who the hell these newcomers were. But the older man, whose face bore a drunken rage that LaRouche was well familiar with, stood up violently out of his seat.

  “Do you fucking mind?” he bellowed. Then, as it seemed to hit him that he did not recognize either of them, his eyes narrowed, glittering like pig’s eyes. “Who the fuck are you two? Get the fuck outta my goddamned house! I am the commanding officer of this camp, I swear to God…”

  LaRouche began walking toward him. The other two men stepped back, not quite sure what was happening. Behind him, Clyde lifted his rifle and pointed it at the two men, shaking his head slowly, the message not to interfere coming across quite clearly.

  The older man was staring balefully at LaRouche. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  LaRouche felt vomit rising again, but he was starting to be accustomed to it. He reached out and grabbed the bottle of whiskey that was sitting on the map. Quietly, he answered the drunken man’s question, though the man was still yelling and cursing and LaRouche doubted he heard him.

  “Chalmers sent me,” LaRouche said.

  Whether or not the man actually heard him or not, he leaned forward. “What did you say, you mumbling fuck?”

  LaRouche swung with the bottle. It made a solid, heavy crunching noise as it struck the man’s face. The man staggered out from behind the table, his hand flying to his face and his balance teetering either with drunkenness or with the force of the blow, or possibly both. LaRouche felt something dark and needy rising up in him. A shark in bloody water. He had never really considered himself a violent man, but there was something in the way the bone crunched when he hit it that satisfied him. He lifted the bottle again and brought it down on the back of the man’s head, again to the gratifying sound-sensation of bone giving way.

  The bottle was not capped and some of the liquid escaped, sluicing down his arm and filling his nostrils with the sharp, fiery smell of whiskey. A smell he had once loved and that now made him sick in his mind. The man hit the floor on his hands and knees, groaning strangely, and he rolled. LaRouche was hardly conscious of the two other men, edging themselves out of the way.

  LaRouche had hoped that the bottle would break so that he could use it to open the man up. Because Chalmers had given him specific instructions: “Kill the man with his beloved whiskey.”

  “How do you want me to do that?” LaRouche had asked, incredulously.

  And his answer had been “Figure it out.”

  All at once, that dark, fast-thinking, violent creature that lay coiled in LaRouche’s brain came up with a way to do it. And he didn’t think anything further. The idea came—not in words, but just an image. And LaRouche—no, not him, he didn’t want to believe it was him—felt that it was right. It just seemed right, even if it was wrong.

  He was flowing now. He was a tidal wave. He was there to crush and drown.

  Drown, drown, drown.

  Drown your sorrows…

  LaRouche mounted the older man and if he had been able to see his own face, he may have been jolted out of his current state of mind and back into something more reasonable. But he couldn’t see, and the wave that was him just kept on coming. He pinned the man’s arms down with his knees and in the man’s semiconscious state, he barely fought it off. Then he put the mouth of the bottle to the man’s lips and upended it. Brown, stinking liquor splashed out of the bottle and over the man’s face, some of it in his mouth, and some of it in his nose.

  But that wasn’t good enough for LaRouche. He put his palm on the bottom of the bottle and rammed it into the man’s mouth. Teeth shattered and broke as the neck of the bottle forced the man’s jaw open impossibly wide. LaRouche thought he heard it snap out of joint. The whiskey began glugging down the man’s throat. That woke him up quick. His eyes went wide. He coughed and a volcano of whiskey spluttered out but that only made LaRouche bear down harder on the bottle, creating a tighter seal. The man thrashe
d underneath LaRouche but it was essentially useless. Blood and bourbon began to jet out of the man’s nose as he tried to take hitching breaths, tried to breathe past the assault of alcohol entering his mouth, his sinuses, his lungs. LaRouche reached around and pinched the man’s nostrils shut, taking away that one small airway that was probably ineffective anyway.

  The man’s eyes bulged, bloodshot. His face was turning from red to purple. His thrashing became more violent as it turned into death panic. LaRouche held on tightly, angrily, furiously, though he did not know why he felt so enraged. The man was bucking hard, but LaRouche was holding on harder. When his grip on the man’s nose became slippery with blood and sweat and whiskey, he would simply reassert it. His entire upper body was pressing the whiskey bottle into the man’s mouth. LaRouche stared right into the man’s eyes and waited, almost breathlessly, for the life to bleed out of him.

  I want you do die. I want you to die so badly.

  And he did. Eventually. After an astoundingly long time. Drunk and old, perhaps. But he fought to live like a wild animal, and when he finally died and his chest gurgled and hitched its last hitch, the man’s heels striking the ground one last hard time as the life went out of him, LaRouche climbed up onto his feet and his knees nearly buckled with fatigue.

  He stood there in the stink of alcohol and the defecation of death, breathing hard and staring down at the lifeless mass at his feet. A man with a whiskey bottle jammed down his throat. Killed by his beloved whiskey bottle, just like Deacon Chalmers wanted.

  Job well done, his mind said, again with the snarky tone.

  Not really his mind, he thought. Some little splinter of his mind, hiding down deep, launching these guerrilla attacks on him. Trying to overthrow him. But even that part of him didn’t know whose side it was on. It was just bitter. Lashing out.

  The rest of him buzzed.

  He felt alternately like he was in some deep, deep trouble, and then felt exultant for reasons he couldn’t explain. If he were honest with himself, he could not explain any of it. He was confused. Lost. Without bearings and with no idea how to gain them back. Perhaps that was why he was so… malleable.