by D. J. Molles
What he’d seen earlier in the night… shook him. All along, through all the stories that he’d heard, and even through meeting Captain Harden, the man had seemed very calm. So calm, in fact, that Brett sometimes wondered if he was capable of doing the hard, nasty things that needed to be done. But seeing him come off those steps and call the stupid fucks out for trying to pull a knife on Angela? That had been an interesting thing to see. Not a completely positive experience, mind you, because it was shocking to see someone that had previously been so even-keel erupt into such anger. But in the same breath that Brett took in shock, he breathed out, hoping that Captain Harden would have pulled the trigger on that fucker lying on the ground.
In the end, Captain Harden had refrained, either based on his own choices or from the urging of Angela. In either case, Brett was half disappointed and half relieved. Disappointed because he thought the man that had pulled the knife had deserved it. Relieved because all hell would have broken loose inside that building if Captain Harden had pulled the trigger.
He supposed they had made the wisest choice.
Which led him to this point now. Because of the tension and the double occupancy, the guard shifts had been doubled, and so it had fallen to Brett to fill in where it was needed. Two of his compatriots patrolled the wall. Another stood by the front gate. And he stood atop the building, keeping a bird’s-eye view of things. The worst duty, and the most important, rolled into one.
He’d been a smoker, when you could still get cigarettes, and he wanted nothing more than to have that cheerful little cherry dancing in front of his lips while heat filled his lungs and made him feel a little better about life. But he could not have that. So he stood atop his watchtower, hunched down into his jacket, his rifle slung onto his back. And he paced. And he sat on the cold cement abutments of the roof. And he paced some more. It was difficult to see when the sun first went down, but as the evening deepened and his night vision sharpened, he could see past the fence and the ramshackle fortifications that had been erected. He could see into the woods, where the leafless trees swayed in the cold, cold winds.
You could see small animals back there, trotting the fence line. Deer, of course—there were tons of them, though he suspected their numbers would begin to dwindle again as everyone was forced to hunt them for food. But during the four or five times he had pulled roof duty, he’d also seen a fox, and a coyote, and one time something that might have been a large feral cat, or perhaps a bobcat.
He scanned the woods for these creatures, wondering if they were out and about that night. Wondering if they had any concept of what was going on with the dumbass humans all around them, and if they could think, whether they would truly give a shit or not.
Probably not.
Hey, we noticed that a bunch of y’all have gone crazy and are trying to kill and eat each other. That’s pretty fucked-up. Well… good luck with that!
Brett turned toward Shantytown and looked down at it. He was entering the last hour of his watch, and by now, almost everyone in the camp was asleep in their shacks, the campfires dwindling, but smoke still rose off them in four ghostly pillars, evenly spaced through the camp. The camp was quiet. Somewhere in the back section, someone coughed.
The situation with the newcomers had mostly been squashed. There were still some grumblings, but they were camped inside the building below him, with another guard posted at the top of the stairs, keeping an eye on things. Whatever they resented about a single man dying, they were able to put it aside to stay warm for a night.
A lot of the Camp Ryder folk had started sleeping inside the building during cold nights, though they still kept their shanty outside. Those folks had given up their spaces on the floor to make room for the newcomers to sleep there. Brett hoped that the act of kindness shamed them.
He turned back to the woods.
Something big slipped between trees—there one second and gone the next.
Brett drew a sharp breath and stood frozen for a moment, his eyes wide, while his heart kick-started into overdrive. His first thought was animal, but he knew that wasn’t right. It had been too big. Maybe it was a large deer or a small black bear. There were bears around here, though they were pretty few and far between. But he didn’t think that was it, either.
Bandits.
He crouched down low, so that whoever was out there could not sight him through a rifle scope. He crept up closer to the abutment of the roof so he could peek over with his own scoped rifle and maybe get a better idea of what was out there. He thought about sounding the alarm… but what if it turned out to be just an animal?
It’s not an animal.
But then he thought, If it is, everyone is going to think you’re a fucking coward.
“Just wait,” he breathed to himself. “Verify the threat before you go hollering out like a goob.”
But his hard-beating chest was telling him differently.
He scooted up to the edge of the wall and hunched over his legs. They were cold, pressed against the roof. He shouldered his rifle and got his cheek weld about where it should be and then slowly rose himself up so that he could see over the ledge and into the woods where the shape had disappeared into the trees.
He pictured some wild-eyed bandit with a long gun taking a lucky potshot from two hundred yards away, offhanded, and clipping the top of his skull off. Like a cigar cutter. Not quite enough to kill him instantly, but enough to make him flop around for a few moments, his jangled brain sending mix-and-match messages to his body. He’d seen it happen.
Through the scope, the image of the woods was stark, but it wavered with his own unsteady hands. He thought he saw something else again, but when he tried to focus on it and still his hands to get a better image, it was gone. If it had ever been there in the first place.
Something rattled the fence, far off to his left.
He whipped the rifle in that direction and his thought was panicked, but true: Deer never rattle the fence! Deer never rattle the fence!
He focused on the fence out to his left—there were serious fortifications there, in the form of tall spikes and loops over loops of barbed wire and razor wire. But when he was able to hold the rifle still enough to see through the scope, he saw the big, pale shape on the other side, and the iron fingers stuck through the chain link, and the wide, insane eyes that were staring at him.
Then the thing thrust itself off the fence and hurtled back into the woods, but at an angle almost parallel with the fence. Brett cranked off a single round from his rifle, more out of reaction than anything else, and when he had found his voice through his own fumbling fear, he shouted at the top of his lungs.
“Hunters! Hunters on the fence!”
Lee had lain down for a while, but not slept. In the abandoned office, he waited in the dark for the pain to go away, but though he felt exhausted, his body kept twitching to keep him awake and his eyes did not want to close. Besides that, the pain wouldn’t let him rest. He endured it for perhaps two hours before it slowly began to abate. By then most of the murmur of voices from inside the Camp Ryder building had died away
He rose around ten o’clock to stare at the map that was still laid out across the metal desk. He did this by the light of a single lantern. It was cold enough in the room to see his breath in the glow. He looked at the map intensely for a while, and then began to feel the weariness in his bones. The Marines had bunked in their trucks, including Colonel Staley. All the strangers were inside the Camp Ryder building, under guard. Occasionally Lee could hear the thump of the roof guard’s footsteps. Other than that, it was dreamily quiet.
Lee went to his chair and sat down. He was staring at the map, but no new revelations were really coming to him, nor was he trying to hash them out of his scrambled brain. The same strategies he had told Staley were playing over and over, and mixed in was an occasional sense of irritation and gloom that went with feeling his body fail. It made him feel weak, and he was not a man accustomed to that feeling.
Eventually his eyes did close, though his legs and arms kept twitching just as he began to doze, so he never fully slept. He just kind of meandered around in the shallows of sleep, never quite committing to the plunge. He woke up to the sound of Deuce growling from underneath the desk. He thought for a moment that Deuce was dreaming, but when he opened his eyes, he saw Deuce, wide awake and alert.
Then the rifle shot.
Lee was out of his chair, his head spinning with loss of blood pressure, his eyes darkling. His face felt flushed with sudden adrenaline, and the first thing he thought of was the man that had tried to kill Angela earlier, and whether he had just been successful.
He was sprinting around the desk for the rifle that lay next to his bedroll when he heard the cry.
“Hunters! Hunters on the fence!”
Better or worse than he had imagined?
Worse, he thought. But at least Angela was not dead.
She’s not dead, is she?
Then Lee thought of the thirty-some-odd people that would come stirring awake in the Camp Ryder building. And he pictured a mass panic and people trying to run out the doors, when in fact they were sleeping in not only the warmest and most sheltered place that Camp Ryder had to offer, but the safest.
He grabbed his rifle off the floor, feeling his ankle and his side yelp out in unison. He swore and then hobbled to the door with two hitching strides and threw it open. Down on the ground floor, he could see people rising, and their voices were beginning to grow, two whispering, then four demanding, then ten of them yelling.
“Hey!” Lee bellowed as he raced down the steps. “No one moves from inside this building! This is the safest place! We need to get everyone else inside of here, so everyone start scooting your shit against the back wall! Move!”
He didn’t wait to see if they complied. The guard they had posted on the stairs—a younger guy from Old Man Hughes’s group—took up the call without hesitation, pointing to the back wall and hollering at everyone inside the building to back it up and make some room.
From outside, three more gunshots.
At the bottom of the stairs, Lee shot down the hall, the stiffness either working itself out of his ankle and side, or becoming lost in the adrenaline dump. He pushed through the double doors of the Camp Ryder building and surged out into night air that was harsh and stinging in its chill. It smelled like ice and snow.
More gunshots, this time a smattering of them coming from the far side of the camp, where the empty shipping containers were stacked. Lights were winking on—both flashlights and lanterns—and they were emerging from all the hovels of Shantytown.
“Back side!” someone shouted. “They’re moving toward the back side!”
That was a relative term, but Lee knew it was generally used to describe the section of camp out past Shantytown, where all the empty shipping containers were stacked. It was also the one section of fence that they had not been able to build up against the hunters with pikes and concertina wire.
People were already pouring from their shanties, heading for the Camp Ryder building, but Lee cupped his hand around his mouth and yelled anyways. “Everyone inside! Now! Get everyone inside the building!” Then he stood off to the side, holding one of the double doors open with a foot while he held his rifle tight to his chest and scanned what he could see of the perimeter.
He didn’t have that good a view.
The first few people reached the doors to the building and started filing in. Their faces looked haggard and worried. They were right to be worried. The last time the hunters had hit them they’d carried away four people. That was what they did. They jumped the fence and they raided the camp, and Lee still remembered thinking, foxes in a henhouse.
Lee grabbed the first man with a gun and posted him at the door to keep it open for the others. Then he pushed out of the recessed doorway to give himself a better view of the camp. The guard at the gate was still holding his position, though his feet were prancing, unsurely. He looked at Lee as though seeking his permission.
Lee waved him on. “Get the fuck in here, man!”
The guard sprinted for them, leaving the gate unattended.
The gate was solid, though. It was topped with tangled loops of barbed wire, which seemed to be the best defense against the hunters. They seemed to have learned from previous experiences and they avoided the tangles of barbed wire now, though they could scale a fence, or even the walls of a building, in the blink of an eye.
Lee stepped to the side, letting the guard pass him and get into the building. Lee tried to see through all the fortifications. The fence was more like a wall now with all the shit they’d strapped to it, but it was mostly effective. The only downside was the visibility.
Still, he didn’t see anything by the gate.
Deuce had made his way down from the office and stood at the doors to the building, barking loudly, nonstop.
The Marine truck was parked to the right of the gate, and its doors were open, the Marines standing around it defensively, their rifles shouldered and sighting in all around them. Colonel Staley stood by the back passenger-side door, scowling.
“Colonel!” Lee called out. “Bring your men in the building!”
Staley broke free of his men’s containment and stalked to Lee with a rifle in hand. “What’s going on?”
“Infected.”
“They won’t come over the fence,” Staley said, as though it were fact.
Lee shook his head. “These ones will. I need your men on the roof. I need a fire team up there now to cover the people running for the building. Can you do that?”
“Absolutely.” Staley turned to his small group of Marines. “Y’all heard him. Let’s get on the roof. We gotta earn our keep tonight.”
The Marines shouldered rifles and two of them ripped open the back of the MATV and started pulling boxes of ammunition out. Heavy-laden, the Marines took off for the Camp Ryder building, the ammo cans and gear rattling as their boots pounded gravel.
Lee heard his name shouted. He turned back toward Shantytown. Angela was jogging up, Sam beside her, dragging Abby along with him. He felt a sense of relief seeing them, knowing that they would be inside, where it was safe. Or safer. Abby still hesitated to loosen up around him, but they were the closest thing to family that he had. Thoughts of their safety were something that plagued him against his will.
“You guys okay?” he demanded as they got closer. “Did you see anything?”
Angela shook her head, pushing Sam for the building. “Take Abby inside and wait for me there.”
Sam nodded quickly and pulled Abby toward the building. He stopped long enough to put a knee gently against Deuce’s side and push the barking dog back. “Come on, Deuce!” he called. “We know! We hear you! Let’s go inside!” After a few more barks, Deuce began to concede.
Angela drew her pistol in one hand and held it down by her side. She looked at Lee. “Have you seen Jenny? Has she come in?”
Lee shook his head. “I have no idea. I didn’t notice.”
“She seemed out of sorts.”
Lee had his eyes back on Shantytown. The last of the tiny exodus was filtering out now, the rear taken up by the two guards that had been on perimeter duty. They were pointing behind them at the back side of the fence.
“Captain! There’s at least three of them!” one of the guards shouted. “I saw them in the woods, moving that way!”
“Fine,” Lee said. “Get inside and get upstairs. You know the drill.”
They nodded and ran.
Lee turned his attention back to Angela. “Jenny… what’s the problem?”
Angela seemed irritated. “I think she’s sick. I think she caught that pneumonia thing.”
“Okay.” Lee nodded rapidly, realizing what Angela was getting at. “You think she didn’t make it out of her tent?”
“We should check.”
“I’ll check, you go inside.”
“No, I’ll come with you.”
“Fine.” Lee didn’t argue. He took off for Shantytown at a run, his feet crunching in the gravel and Angela keeping pace beside him.
THIRTY-THREE
WEAK POINTS
SAM PULLED ABBY OUT of the way just before the front steps of the Camp Ryder building. The door was clogged with people trying to mill in, and those that were inside were not making room as quickly as they should have been. Sam watched it with a growing sense of fear. He wanted to be inside with the others. He wanted to be inside, but he wasn’t going to get caught up in the smash of bodies.
You’ll make it inside. It’s okay. You have time.
The Marines were shoving through the bodies now, urgency carrying them. They started with “S’cuse me, s’cuse me,” which quickly became “Move! Everyone get outta the fuckin’ way!”
Inside the Camp Ryder building was a roar of voices, like nearing a waterfall. Sam could hear it through the open doors. It sounded like panic. Inside the building was the safest place, but when people were all jammed in together like that, they tended to start acting strange. Sam had seen it before. He’d seen it during the collapse, and when he and his father were trying to make it to a FEMA camp.
That’s what this felt like. That’s why his gut was in knots.
Running, helpless sheep. Cattle being circled by wolves.
Sam looked out into the darkness of Camp Ryder. Flashlights were playing across the tops and fronts of the shanties. Faces were illuminated in stark, fearful paleness. Small bands of people running for the Camp Ryder building, the rear being taken up by a few of the guards that had been on perimeter duty. And beyond them, Lee and Angela, running the other way, running back into Shantytown.
“What are they doing?” Sam said aloud, his voice clenched and tight.
“What?” Abby’s own words were shaky and uncertain. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” he responded. Telling Abby that her mother was running back into danger was only going to set the little girl off worse. She was on the edge as it was. “It’s nothing to worry about.”
