Refugees

by D. J. Molles

  “Yeah.” He turned away and faced Jeriah Wilson’s Humvee and called out to them with a deceptively steady voice. “Everyone take twenty minutes and get some food and water.”

  Wilson gave a thumbs-up and all the doors to the Humvee opened simultaneously as if the five men inside were all waiting for Lee to tell them they could get out. They stood up and stretched their legs and began pulling provisions out of their packs. Lee put his hand up against the Humvee and could feel a small shake moving through his limbs.

  He shook his head, irritated with himself.

  “They’ll be fine,” Julia said and stepped out, arching her back and groaning as she stretched.

  “I know,” he mumbled in response.

  Kip appeared beside him. “So what’s your plan for this thing?”

  Lee swung his arms, disguising his nervous energy as getting his blood moving against the cold morning. “We’ll get in close to Sanford. Then me and LaRouche will go in on foot to recon the area. See how many we’re dealing with.”

  “Just two?”

  Lee nodded. “Two is safe. More is better in a fight, but we’re trying not to engage until we’re ready. Two is relatively easy to sneak in and out with. More than that tends to get us noticed.”

  “Hmm.” Kip nodded slowly. “You’ve really worked it to a science.”

  “We’ve done it a few times.”

  Kip clucked his tongue. “Well, if you’re comfortable with two…”

  “Oh, it’s not about comfort. More like necessity.” Lee stuck his hands inside his tactical vest to warm them. “If I could go in with an army, I would. But we’ve gotta go with what we have. Which are ten guns against hundreds of infected. The only way to even the odds is that we choose the time and place for the engagement.”

  “Engagement,” Kip remarked with a chuff.

  Lee eyed the man and wondered where he stood on the debate the other night. Did he side with Jerry and Professor White? Did he believe that it was murder to lure the infected in and wipe them out indiscriminately? Or was he simply commenting on Lee’s sterile word usage for a very dirty job?

  “So how long do you think it will take you?” Kip wondered.

  “If all goes well, about five days, give or take.”

  Kip’s eyes widened. “Five days?”

  Lee nodded. “Smithfield took longer, and Sanford is a little bigger. But we didn’t really have things down pat when we took on Smithfield. We’re more experienced now, so I hope that translates to being quicker.”

  Kip seemed to have exhausted his list of questions, so Lee busied himself with getting a little food in his stomach and washing it down with water. It was a couple of oat biscuits that Marie had prepared, wrapped up in a piece of cloth. They got a little dry after sitting in the cloth for a while, but they were okay. The water was painfully cold in his mouth and he forced himself to drink more than he wanted to, in order to stay hydrated.

  As he ate, he judged the eastern horizon with a skeptical eye. It had changed almost imperceptibly from complete black to a charcoal gray. They were entering the golden hour just before dawn when the packs that hunted the countryside at night were less active but the hordes inside the towns and cities had not yet emerged from their dens.

  They needed to get going.

  He rested his hands on his magazines and tapped at them impatiently. The minutes slunk by as he waited in the early morning silence. A flicker of movement from down the street caught his eye and he stood up, his hand reaching for the grip of his rifle. The figures drew closer. It was LaRouche and Jim.

  Lee took a relieved breath. “Alright,” he called. “Everyone mount up. We’re rollin’ out.”

  Two minutes later, they were moving.

  * * *

  They stopped just outside the north end of town. They had swung around the city on the 421 bypass and exited on a small two-lane road that led into the north end of town. Lee wanted to start there and work his way south.

  Here on the back roads, Lee took a quick scan of his surroundings. To their right was a bank of woods, the interior still shaded and dark with night while the treetops began to show the silvery glint of daylight just over the horizon. To their right, a field of corn stood brown and wilted, the ears long since shriveled away, unharvested or picked through by animals. Straight ahead, Lee could see the first few houses of suburbia, set back among stands of trees.

  Lee opened his door and swung his legs out. “LaRouche, you’re with me.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Lee stood there at the door and checked through his gear. When he was satisfied, he clipped his rifle to his sling and let it rest against his extra magazines. He motioned for Wilson to join him and the young cadet jumped out of his Humvee and jogged over. Youth often went hand-in-hand with inexperience and a general lack of wisdom, and Wilson was no exception. However, he was a clear thinker under pressure and decisive. Lee trusted him for one reason only: He felt confident that Wilson could handle everyone on the team if it came down to any sort of engagement.

  Lee glanced between Jim, Julia, and Wilson. “Wilson’s in charge. Me and LaRouche both have handhelds, so maintain radio silence unless we’re calling you. Keep an ear perked up, though—if shit hits the fan, we’re gonna need you to come in and extract us.”

  They all nodded.

  He continued. “Hold tight right here, and Wilson, make sure we’re maintaining a solid three-sixty defense. You guys are out in the open here, so keep your eyes peeled and no fuckin’ around.”

  “I got it, Captain,” Wilson said.

  Lee eyed him. Of course you do.

  Lee trusted him to get the job done, but that didn’t mean he was without misgivings.

  He kept his thoughts to himself and looked over Wilson’s shoulder at LaRouche, who had just finished securing his pack onto his shoulders. “You ready?”

  “Ready.”

  Lee took the radio from its pouch on his chest and switched it on. He waited for it to light up, then keyed it and spoke quickly. “Radio check, radio check.” He could hear the squelch and his own voice echoing back at him from inside the Humvee and from the radio on LaRouche’s shoulder.

  “Alright. Let’s go.”

  The two men set out into the breathless morning, silent as a bank of fog as they moved down the road in the cadaver-gray light of dawn. Lee took point, LaRouche staying about ten yards behind him, constantly checking behind them and walking backward to watch their flanks and make sure nothing was sneaking up on them.

  They walked hunched at the shoulders, tension ratcheted through their core and legs, their progress slow and deliberate. Ceaselessly, their eyes scanned from left to right and back, checking every shadow and stopping at the slightest stir from the cornfield on their right or the woods on their left. Sometimes they would stay kneeling there in the middle of the road, silent and still for minutes on end, and they would never hear another sound or see what had made the first.

  They would rise slowly and continue on, hoping that those furtive noises were not the creeping of something deadly, stalking them just out of view.

  They reached the first street of the residential area and stopped there. It was an even grid of two-lane blacktop, unmarked by painted lines but littered with old trash and the strange flotsam of a town that had panicked and fled and then been overrun. Every town, every apartment complex, every housing development they had been through held some strange thing that could not be easily explained. Things that made no sense, unless you had been there to witness how it had happened.

  Here on the outskirts of Sanford, in whatever community made up this grid of split-level and ranch houses, the first strange sight was the body of a woman, all the features long since decayed and blackened, lying against the base of a tree. She wore a blue terrycloth robe, stained brown with the putrid fluids of her decomposition. In her right hand she clutched a newspaper, and in her left she held the handle to a broken coffee mug. Her cause of death was a mystery, as the rot and the ani
mals had disguised it among the mar of flesh they’d left behind.

  They didn’t linger, as they never did, attempting to piece together these odd puzzle pieces left behind by the violent collapse of a society.

  Graffiti seemed more prevalent here than in the other places they’d been. Various political or religious sentiments had been scrawled across doors and signs and the blank white canvasses of house siding. All of them had a different scapegoat, a different person or deity to blame for the catastrophe. One simply said FUCK THE WORLD in red spray-painted letters nearly six feet high.

  Red for anger.

  Red for blood.

  Red seemed to be the dominant color choice for graffiti everywhere.

  The houses looked ransacked, which was not unusual. An intact window was hard to find. Lee thought that even the survivors broke them out of spite when they found them, some deep-seated resentment toward the civilization that had spawned and betrayed them. Maybe those glass windows were just another reminder of the things they felt they would never have again.

  More mysteries to be pondered at a later time.

  Loose curtains billowed from the open windows, like a dead thing’s insides oozing out.

  Death was the predominant medium in Lee’s mind. Everything was painted in shades of it, and everything existed in some stage of it. He wanted to think in terms of rebirth, but he knew that the rebirth had not yet begun, because the decay had not yet finished.

  They made their way through these abandoned streets and occasionally caught sight of the beginnings of the urban area—businesses erected to support a populace that was no longer there. But they had not yet outlived their use.

  They reached a street called McIver and made a right, heading west into the city.

  Lee pointed straight ahead of them and spoke quietly. “We’ll take up a position on one of those buildings and see what there is to see.”

  “Hopefully one of them will…” LaRouche stopped mid-sentence.

  Lee turned and looked at him. The sergeant’s eyes were scanning the houses around them. They stood about a block from an intersection with stoplights hanging dark from the power lines. They were only a few blocks now from the bigger buildings. The air was very still, no birds to sing in the cold, no insects to make a sound.

  “What?” Lee asked.

  “Something just moved.”

  Lee raised his rifle to a low-ready and scanned.

  His eyes stopped on a wooden porch at the front of one of the houses. The ornamental latticework had been stripped away and the tall brown stalks of grass were matted down in front of the opening. A dead dog, recently killed and partially eaten, lay near the front steps of the house.

  Lee thought back to his own house, his front deck, and the crushed grass there near his steps that should have been his first clue.

  “We should keep moving,” Lee whispered.

  They walked forward, both focused now on the dark underbelly of the porch.

  They’d gone about ten paces when some pale and sinewy thing squirmed partially out of the shadows.

  “Fuck…” LaRouche whispered and sighted down his rifle.

  “Don’t shoot!” Lee hissed. “Just keep moving.”

  The tremor returned to his arms, and his pulse began to pound through his body. Shooting now would only wake every infected within a half mile of them, and there was always the chance this one would ignore them. It was rare, but it had happened before.

  The thing under the deck lay on its side, its head resting on its outstretched arm. As they passed by, it regarded them with a dim intelligence that said it was sizing them up.

  “Don’t shoot unless you have to,” Lee said quietly, trying to control the shake in his voice.

  “Pick up the pace, Captain.”

  “Running is only going to make it want to come after us.”

  LaRouche swore under his breath.

  The thing raised its head and hitched itself up onto its elbows, still watching them. It made a weird guttural sound and another tangle of limbs appeared from underneath the deck.

  “There’s two of them now,” LaRouche said.

  “Just keep walking.” Lee tried to sound calm and reassuring, but it wasn’t convincing to himself and he doubted it was to LaRouche.

  The first infected lurched up to its feet in a sudden movement.

  “Cap…”

  It started toward them, but slowly, as though testing their reaction. Testing whether they would run. Or testing if they were wounded, if they were weak, if they were easy prey. Perhaps running was a better idea…

  It barked.

  The second one stood up and swung its arms loosely.

  A third infected crawled out of the space.

  “Lee!”

  The first one began to jog toward them.

  Lee broke. “Go! Run!”

  CHAPTER 11

  Trouble Brewing

  Adrenaline like an electric shock went through him and Lee forced his legs to go faster, faster—We aren’t going fast enough!

  A stone clattered across the pavement at his feet and he turned to see one of the infected, now in the road less than twenty feet behind them, holding another fist-size stone in its hand. It reared back and hurled the stone at them, catching LaRouche in the leg and causing him to stumble.

  Lee reached out quickly to grab LaRouche’s arm and steady him. The lead infected had gained on them and was now only a few yards behind them. The others were spreading out on the lawns, cutting off their escape, while more of them kept scrambling out from underneath the house.

  Lee shoved LaRouche toward a randomly selected driveway. “Into that house!”

  They weren’t going to outrun this pack. They were fast, and Lee and LaRouche were weighed down with gear. Their only hope was to bottleneck them at the front door and hope the house muffled their gunshots.

  LaRouche made for the front door and Lee bolted after him, turning just in time to see the pale hand reaching out for him, its gnarled fingers contorted into claws. Lee twisted and struck out with his rifle, slamming the infected across the side of the face and causing it to stumble sideways. It was still up, but it cantered to the right and gave Lee an opening to make for the front steps of the house.

  Ahead of him, LaRouche hit the door without slowing down. It shattered inward with a spray of wood and plaster and LaRouche went sprawling into the foyer, landing on his hands and knees.

  “Get up!” Lee shouted. “Get up!”

  LaRouche turned and saw Lee topping the front porch stairs, and he rolled quickly out of the way. Lee dove for the front door and spun, landing hard on his left knee, his ankle twisting up underneath him and his right leg splaying out for balance. He brought his rifle up as a shape filled the doorway and fired rapidly. Bullets punched through the doorframe, then found flesh, bursting through the creature’s torso in sprays of gristle and blood.

  It wasn’t enough.

  The thing hit Lee full-on, knocking him back, its hungry arms wrapping around him, a grim parody of an embrace. Lee fell onto his back just in front of the door and tried to twist his rifle up, but it was squashed between the two bodies. Hot breath brushed the side of his face, yellow teeth clacked inches from his skin.

  Reflexively, he pulled the trigger.

  The muzzle was close to his head and the blast was like being punched in the face. His vision darkened and sparkled at the edges, but it must have had the same effect on his attacker and its death grip on his torso loosened just enough for Lee to contort his body and jerk the thing off-balance. He rolled, pinning the scrambling creature underneath him.

  “Get this fucking thing off me!” Lee screamed.

  Still struggling to keep the thing on the ground, Lee could feel the front door of the house batting around at his feet. His back was exposed to the other infected who would be coming through the door, and he couldn’t tell where the fuck LaRouche had gone. Pulling his hips off the ground, he drove his weight down on the thing’s chest
and kicked out blindly with his foot, shutting the door behind him and planting his boot there.

  Lee stared down at the infected he had pinned. It was arching its back and writhing about underneath him, its neck stretching up toward Lee, the cords of muscle distending through its skin, the jaws working fast like a wild animal, trying desperately to catch a piece of Lee’s jugular. He registered the sound of gunfire, but it sounded muffled, like he was wearing earplugs. The door at his feet clattered and pressed in at him.

  “LaRouche!”

  A boot came across his vision in a tan blur, and the infected’s head jerked to the right with a muted crunching sound. Blood spewed out across the floor in a brilliant flash, and the thing’s jaw wobbled around, unhinged. The boot came down again and again, and this time the crunch was more distinct and the body underneath him went limp.

  Lee started to rise.

  “Keep that door shut!” LaRouche barked, and he began firing through it.

  Lee could feel the impact of the rounds punching through the wood. He rolled slightly, trying to maintain pressure on the door, but something on the other side suddenly hit it hard and his knee buckled. The door slammed open, catching Lee’s foot between the wall and the door. The infected tumbled in, and Lee could see in a flash-frozen moment that LaRouche was still firing at it, tracking it with his rifle as it fell on top of Lee. Instinctively, Lee curled into a ball, knowing, just knowing that LaRouche was going to accidentally shoot him.

  He felt the weight hit him, but he didn’t feel the bullets. He opened his eyes to the wall, inches from his face, and the splash of gore on it. He stared for a half second and the question circled in his mind, Did that come out of me?

  Fight through it.

  He heaved the body off of him.

  Somewhere in the back of the house, glass shattered.

  “They’re comin’ in the back!” LaRouche’s voice was dim, like he’d gone into another room, but when Lee hauled himself to his feet, LaRouche was standing right in front of him. The sergeant put a hand to Lee’s shoulder. “You okay? Did I hit you?”

  Lee looked down at himself. “I don’t know.” If he’d been hit, he couldn’t see the hole, and the blood wasn’t coming out. “Post up on the front,” he said, shouldering his rifle and shaking his head to clear it of the humming noise that was settling in. Two infected lay dead in the foyer, another outside on the porch.