by D. J. Molles
Cold practicality.
“How many people are in your group?” she asked, keeping all emotion out of her face and her voice flat. Disinterested. The suffering of children could not drag charity from her. Not when the survival of her family, as well as every other family inside that gate, depended on her making a good decision.
“Thirty… two.” Some hesitation in his answer.
Angela looked at him distrustfully.
“Was thirty-three,” he explained, almost inaudible over the rain. “We lost one. During the night.”
“Infected?” Angela asked, almost like she was trying to change the subject.
“No. Sickness, I guess.”
“Any of you been bit?”
“No.”
“Then lemme ask you this.” Angela hung a hand on the chain-link fencing, one finger sticking through and wagging at the crowd that huddled behind the man who called himself Mac. “Why’s a group of thirty-two people wandering around in the middle of a rainstorm? With winter coming on? Shouldn’t you guys be holed up somewhere? You’re telling me that four months after everything goes to shit, you folks are still wandering around?”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “Not wandering. Running.”
“Running?”
“Things are a little dicey up north,” he said. “There are hordes. Thousands. Maybe more. Coming out of the cities. Filling up the roads. They all seem to be moving south. So being out there ain’t safe. We’re trying to stay ahead of them, but it’s tough. We have to rest, but it sure as hell doesn’t seem like they do.” The man’s lips pressed together for a moment. Then he tilted his head and looked up at the sky, as though wondering if it was going to stop raining anytime soon. Angela got the sense that he was holding back a bit, but what he was holding back and why was a mystery. When he looked back down at her, he sighed, clouding the air in front of him. “Listen… we can earn our keep. For a place to stay warm and dry, and maybe even a little bit of food? I got twelve strong men and ten strong women, and we can do all kinds of things. And if bringing you news from up north is one of those things, then I’d say we’d be happy to exchange that, too.”
“Weapons?”
“Yeah, we got ’em.” He nodded. “Not a lot, though. Might be able to spare one, but we don’t have much ammo.”
It actually brought a wry smile to Angela’s face. “We don’t want your weapons. I ask for our protection.”
Mac glanced at the guards, to either side of Angela and Brett and Marie standing behind her. He might’ve been able to see the gun on Angela’s hip, but he definitely saw that each of the others was armed. “Ma’am, you got more guns in your little crew right there than all of us combined. And I suspect there’s more inside.”
Angela didn’t respond. She looked at the crowd again. “Who would you consider your second in command?”
“Well,” Mac said with a shrug. “We don’t have much of a ranking system or nothin’, but I suppose it would be Georgia here.” He turned and nodded to a middle-aged woman. A hand came out of his pocket and made a short, introductory gesture.
Georgia stepped forward and stood beside Mac. She was in her late forties or early fifties by Angela’s estimation. She had graying hair that showed signs of having once been a brilliant red color. She had unfortunate square features and a hawk nose that gave her a more masculine appearance. Grayish green eyes looked at Angela, giving almost as much suspicion as she got.
“So you two run this group?” Angela said.
Georgia and Mac both nodded.
“Can you vouch for your people?”
“Yes,” Georgia said.
Mac remained silent.
“Good,” Angela said. “Because you two are going to stay with me at all times, and if any of your people do anything to hurt any of my people, me and my friend Marie here are going to immediately kill both of you, no questions asked.”
Silence, except for the rain.
Angela glanced behind her. Marie was there, thumb tucked into her rifle strap. She just nodded once. Angela turned back to Mac and Georgia. “Now that you know how things are going to be, do you still want to come inside?”
Mac and Georgia exchanged a glance. There was some silent give-and-take there, but they seemed to come to an agreement. They turned back to Angela. This time it was Mac who spoke. “Yeah,” he said. “We still want to come inside.”
TWENTY-FOUR
INTROSPECTION
THEIR CONVOY MEANDERED OVER long stretches of back roads, windshields white with driving rain. They went slow, especially in the low points of the road where the water sheeted across and threatened to flood the roads.
Lee sat with the window closed, the wind and the rain more than he was willing to deal with. He looked in the side-view mirror and saw the headlights of the vehicles that were following him and his small crew. He sighed, heavy and slow, and leaned until his forehead rested on the cool glass of his window. He wanted to close his eyes, but a closed window was as lax as he was willing to be.
Some haggling with Colonel Staley had occurred. Eventually, with the storm threatening, the decision was reached that Colonel Staley would follow Lee back to Camp Ryder. It was a risk for both of them. Neither wanted to follow the other back to their home crowd, but they both knew that Staley could do more damage than Lee, even on Lee’s home turf. Neither seemed happy about it when they went to their respective vehicles. But Lee had been told that was the sign of a good compromise.
Or a great way to sour a relationship.
To Lee, Colonel Staley and his Marines were a dangerous animal. A friendly dangerous animal? Perhaps. But dangerous nonetheless. And which is worse—letting the dangerous animal into your home, or going to the den where the dangerous animal lives?
Lee didn’t think that Staley was out to get them—he kept returning to the argument that if Staley wanted them, he would have already taken them. But the decision demanded caution anyway, so Lee had consulted with Old Man Hughes. They had agreed that both options were shit, but that the less horrendous of the two was to play host for the Marines.
Let them see Camp Ryder. Let them see the people they were going to be dealing with—good and bad. Let them understand the severity of the situation beyond the gates of Camp Lejeune, because after a few moments of speaking with Staley, Lee got the sense that living with a bunch of Marines on a military preserve had sheltered Staley from the worst of it.
The meeting had been tense, neither man truly knowing the thoughts of the other. But now, sitting in the pickup truck with the heat blasting and the rain driving and the rhythmic beating of the windshield wipers, Lee felt… melted. Fatigued.
Depressed seemed too strong a word, but not by much.
He was thinking about things that he didn’t want to think about. His mind went on its own, and like a child lost in the forest, it tried to find its way out but just kept wandering deeper and deeper. And the trees in that dark forest were hung with the bodies of the dead—the lost, the killed, and the murdered. And he knew every face in that multitude, and they were friends and foes alike. He thought about the way he had killed some of them, and the way others had been mercilessly snatched from him. And it all bored down into him and poisoned his blood.
God, there’s been so many.
And it had not just been after the collapse. It had been before, when the world had been relatively normal, if not tumultuous. It seemed like all the deaths before were just previews of what was to come. Tests to see how he would handle it. As though the man behind the curtain, making the world go ’round, was seeing how much death Lee could handle and still be able to shrug it off and function.
He’d learned about his parents’ death from his unit commander. This was after returning from one of the worst patrols in his deployment. A roadside bomb took two of his buddies out in the Humvee directly ahead of him, and a third lost both legs. He’d suffered a concussion, as well as his driver, and after he had returned to the FOB and been checked out for b
rain injury, his unit commander had simply asked him if he was going to be okay. Lee told him he was. And then his superior laid the truth on him without any effort to soften the words. Although, to be fair, Lee would have resented it if he had.
“Look. We got a call from the Red Cross. Your parents were in a bad accident. They’re, uh… neither of them made it.”
And that was that.
His memory of that day and the three days that followed were blurry at best. He couldn’t really even remember what he did before he was on patrol that day. There had been dusty streets and shitty villages, as usual, and talk with village elders and smiling kids that might grab a rifle and take potshots at them as soon as they left. And then there had been an earth-shattering explosion and the Humvee in front of him had disappeared into dust and come out the other side just twisted steel. Two friends gone, another wounded for life that Lee would have infrequent and depressing telephone conversations with for the following years. Then he was in a hospital bed and his commanding officer was telling him his parents were dead. Eighteen-wheeler lost control, took them out along with two other cars, though his parents had been the only ones to die. He was granted emergency leave and then there had been a flight home.
He didn’t really remember any of that. He remembered touching down at some airport or another and walking numbly to his next terminal and catching the connecting flight to Raleigh, and then driving home in rain very similar to this, on highways where eighteen-wheelers roared by, oblivious, and Lee wondered detachedly if he would even make it to the funeral.
No one had been there that he cared for. Aunts and uncles, and grandparents. He’d never been close to any of them. A few friends of the family showed up, people Lee remembered from church. He didn’t really recall their condolences, though he was sure that they gave them. He didn’t even really recall looking at his parents and to this day wondered if it had been open or closed casket. It seemed odd to him in retrospect that he drifted through these few days of his life in such a stupor. He had been through plenty before that, and since then, and yet that week seemed to be something his brain did not want to think about. He was not in denial—his parents were dead, that was just a fact—but he didn’t seem to be able to comprehend it fully, or to feel anything about it. And so he figured that it didn’t bother him much, though the more years went by, the more he realized how hard it had affected him, the one-two punch of the friends he’d lost on patrol, and the lone family members that waited for him back home.
He didn’t think that he cried during the wake, or the funeral, or the burial. After they put his parents in the ground, he left and went back to a hotel room, rather than his parents’ house. He purchased a bottle of whiskey on the way. He broke down in the quiet solitude of his hotel room and never opened the bottle. He woke in the morning, still dressed in his black suit and tie. He took it off and replaced it with his uniform. He stopped at his parents’ house just long enough to drop his suit in the empty living room. Then he drove to the airport and caught his flight out, back to Iraq.
Then there had been tours, where other friends had been made, and other friends had been lost. The memory of his parents and their death was something he kept away from the rest of him. Then there had come the day when he had received an odd letter that had led him down a slippery slope to Project Hometown. And now he was here, still kicking, while everyone around him continued to die.
He despised thinking back on these things because they left him feeling open and bare. He was not the person he had been when his parents had died. He had changed in cataclysmic ways, and yet he was very much the same. Still stubborn. Still always pushing the envelope. Still always trying to make things right when they seemed out of whack to him. But different all the same.
Project Hometown and the months of training that followed the signing of that little piece of paper had been a sort of escape for him. A way to run from the man he had been before and to become something different. In Project Hometown, he did not need a family; in fact, it was best that he had none. In Project Hometown you prepared and prepared and prepared and you trained until you were sick and it girded you up and made you think that you were so ready for anything that might happen.
And he was different still from the man who had signed that paper, and even from the man who had come out of that training. His life seemed a never-ending series of changes, pressing him, pushing him toward… what?
What was he now?
A soldier? A protector? A diplomat? An advisor?
All of those things, perhaps. And none of them, truly.
What was the endgame? What was he being pushed toward?
He knew what he wanted his ending to be. He wanted to finish this mission, this life, this calling. He wanted to be able to look back and say that he did what he had been called on to do, and he had done it well. He wanted to be able to say that he had fought long and hard, that he had accomplished his purpose, and in completing his work, he wanted simply to rest.
He wanted to be done.
Something nudged Lee in the arm and when he looked he found Deuce there, eyeing him. The dog had his forepaws up on the center console of the pickup truck. He grumbled, but it was not the sound of him alerting to the presence of infected, but more of a friendly verbal acknowledgment. With the rain threatening, they’d decided to pull the dog into the cab of the truck, rather than have him soaked and shivering in the back bed. He didn’t seem to like being sandwiched between Jared and Noah, two people with whom he was unfamiliar, but he was at least not aggressive with them.
Lee reached over and touched the muzzle of the dog. If they could converse, Deuce would understand where Lee was at. Deuce would understand because he was a working dog, whether he’d been bred for it or not. Deuce would understand, because even though it meant he was in danger when he could be curled around a fire, entertaining children, this dog had a purpose, and he seemed to know it. His purpose was to smell the infected, and to alert his human pack when they came close. And he never stopped. Never stopped sniffing, never stopped circling the perimeter, never stopped searching for the threat. Deuce would never shirk his duties, never shy away from his purpose. His instinct demanded that he protect his pack, at least until there came a day when the threat was gone or he was too old to do it.
One day, buddy, Lee thought. One day we will both be done. And when we’re done, both these dogs can have their moment in the sun and be left alone. But until that day, you have to sniff, and I have to fight, and we both have to keep watch.
He nodded to himself and looked straight ahead again. The wipers slapped water out of the way, but were futile in their efforts. The pickup truck and the MATVs following it had slowed to thirty miles an hour and the vehicle was consumed with the sound of the rain. A cleansing sound, but a threatening sound as well. An angry sound.
Maybe that’s what I am. Maybe that’s what I do.
I am not a soldier or a politician or an advisor. I’m a watchman.
Maybe it was the rain, or the cold, or perhaps just plain old luck, but the roads to Camp Ryder were deserted. Lee’s little convoy made good time on the roads, without running into trouble. As the scenery began to be familiar, Lee leaned forward in his seat and held his rifle a little tighter. It was hard to see through the rain-dappled side windows, but he was trying to keep an eye on the woods. He knew what kind of infected were lurking out there. Some of the other people in Camp Ryder might be tricking themselves into a false sense of security, telling themselves that the hunters had moved on, but Lee knew better.
They just hadn’t attacked because Lee had been feeding them.
What would they do now that Lee wasn’t dropping bodies on their doorstep? Would they come back to the source of food? Would they move on?
It wasn’t just the infected that concerned Lee. It was the Marines as well. Miles away from Camp Ryder, it had been an easier decision to allow them to follow Lee home. He put his doubts away and focused on what needed to be done—the
y needed allies, and allies had to have some sort of trust. But now, as he saw the unpaved inlet approaching them—the very same gravel drive that led to Camp Ryder—he felt the doubts reemerging.
The Marines possessed helicopters, artillery, and armored vehicles.
Basically, enough firepower to reduce Camp Ryder to rubble.
But Lee’s options were limited. He did not have intelligence or background to rely on, so he had to go with his gut. And his gut told him that Staley wasn’t there to hurt them, but to work alongside them for the mutual interest of cutting off the massive hordes in the North. He’d already made the decision to hold this meeting at Camp Ryder, and Staley was taking his own risk of sorts by following Lee.
Best to trust yourself.
Camp Ryder wasn’t meant to be a hidden fortress. It was well-known to everyone in the area. They had expanded across several towns to establish security in the region, and though it had been threatened by Jerry’s isolationism, it was still safer here than in many other parts of the state. Now was not the time to back down and go into hiding. Now was the time to make powerful allies and expand influence, and anytime you did those things it bore its own set of risks.
But they are necessary risks.
Old Man Hughes looked at him from the driver’s seat. “You good with this?”
Lee nodded. “It’s gotta be done.”
Hughes cranked the wheel to the left and then they were pulling onto the gravel drive. Muddy, potholed dirt, with giant ruts and splashing puddles. Lee eyed his side-view mirror again, watched the MATVs trundle onto the road behind him.
Through the trees you could see the outline of the Camp Ryder building. Lee felt simultaneously relieved and nervous. It felt like coming home. And with the MATVs behind him, it also felt like being exposed.
The gates of Camp Ryder stood, reinforced and nasty looking with barbed wire and sharpened poles. They’d looped the tops of the fences almost excessively with concertina wire, but Lee was still hesitant to call it safe from the hunters that lurked in the woods. There were weak points that could be exploited. And the hunters seemed smarter than the other infected.
