by D. J. Molles
How many more?
LaRouche put his shoulder to the front wall and scanned out the front door at the yard.
A large oak tree stood in the front yard.
No movement.
Lee faced the opposite direction. The front door opened into a spacious living room. A half wall divided it from the kitchen. A hallway to the left, leading farther into the house. Lee could see dim daylight making its way into the house from around the corner of the hallway, and just beyond, he could see that the kitchen opened into a dining area.
He could hear LaRouche’s breathing, and not much else.
The house seemed quiet, tense.
“How many were there?” Lee said quietly, taking small steps toward the hall, pieing off the corner. He could see the dining area now, an ornate wooden table with chairs, tableware and napkins still set out as though prepared to receive guests. Beyond the table was a sliding door onto a patio. The glass had been shattered.
“I think…” LaRouche started.
“Shh!”
They held their breath.
Silence.
Then something in the dining room creaked.
Despite the cold, Lee could feel the sweat on his face, trickling down into his eyes. He swiped at it, and his fingers came away red, with a small chunk of brain matter from the infected.
The half wall extended partially down the hall, with a wide opening directly between the kitchen and dining room. A hand was gripping the top of the half wall, steadying something that was crouched down on the other side.
“Contact!” Lee grunted and fired into the wall.
Plaster and drywall exploded.
The hand disappeared down and then the beast, a tall and skinny thing that seemed to be all arms and legs, came scrabbling out of the dining room with a shriek. It launched itself through the wide opening at Lee and he fired wildly as he backed up. He felt something hit the back of his legs and he fell backward over a coffee table. He pulled his finger from the trigger just as his muzzle passed over LaRouche, still standing at the front door. Lee let himself roll, feeling the floor on the top of his head, the strain as his body bore down on his neck, and then he came up on his hands and knees, having performed a complete backflip. He whipped his rifle up.
“You got it! You got it!” LaRouche waved a hand at him.
Looking down the barrel of his rifle, Lee could see the gangly form stretched out at the mouth of the hallway, only a foot or so from where he had originally been standing. Blood was shooting out of its nose onto the carpet. Its eyes blinked rapidly, then slowed, then stared, half lidded, at the growing pool before it. Lee had caught it right between the eyes.
Lee pulled himself up to his feet, feeling the shakes coming over him heavily.
“Should we call them in for extract?” LaRouche said, his voice strained.
“No.” Lee shook his head. “We can still do this.”
“Did we get them all?”
“Did you notice how many there were?”
“No.” LaRouche scanned the yard again. “I didn’t count.”
“Me neither.” Lee moved to the front door. “We can’t just sit here, though.”
“You think we woke up the hordes?”
“No way to tell until it’s too late.” Lee stepped out onto the porch to get a better angle at the side of the house and the rest of the yard. Through the surrounding trees, Lee could see the sky turning bright and pink, but the sun hadn’t yet shown over the horizon. If they hadn’t stirred them with the gunfire, any hordes in the area wouldn’t emerge from their dens until the sun was out. “We’re just a couple blocks away from the urban area. I say we make for the buildings now while we still have a chance.”
LaRouche didn’t seem to like that, but he nodded anyway. “You’re the boss.”
Lee took a last glance at the three bodies jumbled inside the house and the one lying at his feet. Something bothered him. Without another word, he took the stairs down into the front yard. He heard the light footsteps of LaRouche taking up the rear again.
They moved quicker now, unsure whether they’d killed the entire pack. Four was a small pack, but then again, they’d all been crammed in underneath that deck. He couldn’t see many more than four fitting under there. Maybe five. Perhaps if there were others, they’d decided that there were easier meals elsewhere.
Then it struck him what had been bothering him.
None of them were females.
* * *
Jerry rose early that morning.
Like everyone else in Camp Ryder, he lived in a shanty, and he slept on whatever he found to make his nights more comfortable. Lucky for him, he’d gone through the trouble of locating and hauling a twin-size mattress out of a nearby house. The mattress was his pride and joy, the reason he could wake up in the morning and smile at the people of Camp Ryder, rather than scowl at them like Captain Harden and his henchmen. He also felt a measure of pride in the fact that he had carted off the mattress by himself, carried it to and from the pickup truck, all the while scanning for infected.
Yes, infected.
Professor White preferred the term “plague victim,” but Jerry didn’t share the man’s sympathy for them. He’d witnessed those creatures tear plenty of people apart, and he felt comfortable saying they weren’t human. However, Professor White and Jerry agreed on one very important point: Captain Lee Harden and his sock puppet, Bus, should not be running Camp Ryder.
Jerry stood up from his mattress, oblivious to the creaks and groans of the inner springs. Half a year ago, Jerry would have been outraged to be forced to sleep on such a mattress. Then he spent two months sleeping on dirt, and he grew to appreciate the barest of cushions between himself and the ground. Now the stained, popping mattress felt luxurious, like the finest bed, wrapped in Egyptian cotton.
He stretched and twisted, working the kinks out. Another thing that would have ruined his day in his past life, and now just a minor annoyance. Most days bore with them some sort of persistent ache or pain. You couldn’t just pop some muscle relaxers for your back anymore or a couple ibuprofens for your head. You just had to tough it out, and with that came a certain sort of levelheaded patience. Because it was so constant, pain and cold and general discomfort became disconnected from the mind, like white noise just humming in the background.
It made him realize how truly weak humans had become.
If you felt the slightest twinge of pain, you took an ibuprofen. If you were sleepy, you took caffeine. Then, if you couldn’t sleep later, you could take some sleeping pills. In between, if you didn’t take your morning shit right on time, you took a laxative, but then if it didn’t come out right, you took anti-diarrheal medication. If you took too long sitting on the crapper, reading the Wall Street Journal, you might develop hemorrhoids, in which case you could shove a glycerin suppository up your ass. If you had a bad day, you took the white pill. But if you were too happy, then you took the pink pill to calm you the fuck down. Pills, pills, pills, until everyone was the same homogenous, robotic, smiling (but not too smiley) upper-middle-class white male with a two-thousand-square-foot house, a matching set of Volvos, 2.5 kids, a cheerleader wife, and a golden retriever named Buddy.
Hey, you achieved the American Dream!
Your prize?
A failing 401k to obsess about and a mountain of debt to make you consider killing yourself.
That was the life of pathetic stasis that Jerry had come from. He was a man defined by a checklist, as though his life culminated in whatever he could put on his résumé: $100,000-plus salary? Check. President of the HOA? Check.
Platinum American Express?
The most expensive Titleist driver?
Member of the town council?
Check, check, and check.
All of that was gone now. Now his life was difficult. It was dirty mattresses and hunger and pain and wiping your armpits and crotch with baby wipes between your weekly sponge baths. Now you had to be strong to survive,
but the reward was survival itself. And there was no greater sense of purpose than to simply survive. It was, after all, one’s primary instinct.
So here was Jerry, stripped of his titles, and his family, and his belongings that never really meant anything to him in the first place. He was a modern-day Job, but the destruction of his previous life was not a test of his love for God but a blessing, imparting to him a fresh sense of purpose, a new drive to succeed at the most important thing of all: living.
And then there was Captain Harden, some relic of the old world sent to reestablish those very things that had destroyed humanity in the first place. Society, order, government—all just a bunch of bullshit. It might work for a short time, but in the end it was destined to fail. Jerry was no anarchist—he knew there had to be some “system” in place in order for people to get along. But the larger the population, the stronger that system had to be in order to bind all of those divergent threads together. Here in the new world, it was more natural. It was tribal. And Camp Ryder was the tribe. It did not need to expand; it needed to simply survive.
The weak suburbanite that still huddled inside of him made Jerry want to cheer Captain Harden on. The protector! The savior! Come rebuild our society so we can have central air again! But the rest of him loathed the prospect of returning to that place of restriction. Here in the tribal society, every voice was heard because the tribe was small, and so the system was loose. Everyone was on a level playing field, but Jerry, already accustomed to manipulating his way around and over people, had the possibility of rising to the top.
A tribal leader.
But only if Camp Ryder remained a tribe.
When Camp Ryder became a state, then Jerry would once again simply be Jerry, and the only way to be important would be to have things.
As Jerry pulled his faded pair of jeans on over his thermal underwear, he once again ignored the root of the issue in all of his ponderings and rationalizations. The true problem was Jerry’s own obsession with being important. Because in Jerry’s mind, Jerry was number one. Jerry came before everyone else, including the wife and the two children and the golden retriever named Buddy that he’d left inside of his burning house while he ran out the side door and crawled through a hundred yards of tall grass so the hooligans that had set his house ablaze wouldn’t see him escaping. And it wasn’t until he had reached the woods and run another mile that he realized whom he had left behind.
When it hit him, he fell to the forest floor and he wept bitterly and clawed at the rotten leaves. He was not ashamed or grief stricken… he was angry. Angry with his wife and angry with his kids. Jesus Christ, did he have to do everything? Did he have to pick each one of them up and carry them out of the burning house? Were they fucking stupid? The house was burning! They were supposed to RUN!
Now their stupidity had put him in an impossible situation.
Now he was alone in the dark of the woods.
Now he had no one.
How dare they leave him alone in this world!
In spite of their selfishness, he’d survived, and he eventually found Camp Ryder.
Here, he found the true purpose, and here, once again, Jerry was number one.
Or at least tied for first with Bus.
But then G.I. Joe came along, and Jerry was number two.
This was unacceptable. Because Captain Harden wanted to fix things, he wanted to put them back together, back to the way they were. And everyone cheered and clamored, just like that sad little part of him that just wanted to be comfortable again. But all the while, the new Jerry simmered in anger. The captain was trying to take away Jerry’s tribe, in which he could place himself as the leader, the elder, a person of importance.
So Jerry told people what they wanted to hear: that this whole thing would all be over soon, that Captain Harden was just overreacting. No need to rebuild anything, because nothing had been destroyed in the first place. Things were just a little… out of control. It would all get better. They just had to stick together, stop trying to save the world, and everything would be okay.
It was all a bunch of crock.
Jerry was good at manipulating, and he used that to his advantage. In order to maintain his tribe, he had to undermine Captain Harden. Captain Harden said that this was a permanent change, that things would not get better on their own, so naturally Jerry insisted that they only needed to wait it out. Captain Harden said that they needed to rescue survivors, so Jerry argued that it was dangerous and a waste of resources.
Then Professor White had come along and provided a new way to contradict Captain Harden.
The “infected” were victims, and they should not be killed without first determining if they were a danger. It was a proven fact that some of the “plague victims” were nonaggressive, so lying in wait atop a city building and gunning them down as soon as they came in sight was murder. History would judge Captain Harden harshly as a butcher who had committed genocide against his own people. Another Hitler. Another Mao. Another Stalin.
Pure genius.
Regardless of the fact that Jerry disagreed with Professor White, he stuck to the old adage: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
He pulled on his heavy wool peacoat he’d traded up a carton of cigarettes for, followed by a wool cap, then stepped into his boots. He’d disdained to accept any of Lee’s “supplies” and even refused to carry one of his M4s. Instead, he carried an old coach gun he’d sawed down to a twelve-inch barrel. He left the wood stock intact, as he was a little nervous that if he made it a pistol grip it would fly out of his hands when he fired it. He carried the shortened scattergun slung at his side, inside of his coat, and one of the pockets was heavy with extra shells.
It was a good weapon for him. Simple and effective. Easy to use. Never jammed. Didn’t require much cleaning.
There was a knock at the door.
“Who is it?” Jerry looked at the plywood slab of a door.
“It’s me, Jerry.” The voice was low.
“Come in.”
The door swung out and a man stepped in quickly amid a rush of cold air, slamming the plywood closed behind him. He was short but solidly built. He’d been a little emaciated when Jerry had first met him, but with the steady stream of supplies from Captain Harden’s bunker, the meat from hunting, and the food from scavenging, the man was beginning to show his build, and he reminded Jerry of one of those migrant workers who stood as high as the average man’s chest but could pick up a slab of concrete with his stubby little arms and carry it on his shoulder.
“Arnie.” Jerry smiled as he laced up his boots. “How cold is it out there?”
The stocky man waffled his hands. “Cold now, but I think it’s gonna be warmer than yesterday.”
“Good.”
Jerry grabbed an empty satchel and slung it over one shoulder. It was just for show. He wouldn’t really need it. He followed Arnie out of his shanty and over to the little red Geo hatchback that sat on the side of Main Street, just a short jog to the gate. Arnie got into the driver’s seat and Jerry squeezed into the front passenger’s.
“What do I owe you for the gas?” Jerry asked.
Arnie cranked the little four-banger to life and put it in gear. “I got it from a friend. Friend of yours too. So don’t worry about it.”
Jerry nodded and smiled. “Sounds good. Thank you.”
“Here.” Arnie pulled two red sashes out of his pocket and handed one to Jerry. “Tie it on your right arm.”
Jerry accepted as they pulled up to the gate. The sentry stepped up to the window and leaned down to peer inside. He greeted Arnie amiably—he was a regular scavenger—but regarded Jerry with a look of surprise.
“Jerry?” The sentry looked confused. “You leavin’ the compound this morning?”
Jerry forced a smile. “Everyone’s gotta pull their weight, right?”
“Right.” The sentry nodded and patted the hood of the car. “Be safe out there.”
“Will do,” Arn
ie said, and cranked the window back up.
The little Geo made its way down the worn dirt entry to Camp Ryder and exited out onto Highway 55. Jerry instructed his driver as they went, making a right onto 55 and taking it down to Highway 27. At the intersection, they could see the town of Coats beyond, which was still a regular stomping ground for scavengers. No outpost had been set up in the town, because it was so close to Camp Ryder, but it had been cleared of infected and still held some small treasures for those who wished to look.
Of course, any place that had been “cleared” wasn’t necessarily safe. The packs roamed where they wished and could often be found skirting the edges of these small towns, though they seemed uncomfortable with so much concrete underneath their feet and would quickly vanish into the woods unless there was prey to run down. Anyone outside the wire kept their weapon on hand and kept checking behind their backs if they wanted to survive.
They made another right on Highway 27 and took it west. It was a long, straight road and it changed names to Leslie Campbell Avenue as it drew closer to Campbell University. The university was a ghost town, as it had mainly been empty during the summer when the FURY pandemic hit. Jerry didn’t even think Captain Harden and his crew had done any clearing operations in it, but had simply reconned the area and declared it “safe.”
It was here at the entrance to Campbell University that they entered a roundabout, turned onto Howard Drive, and immediately pulled left into a small shopping center with a coffee shop on one end and a Chinese food restaurant on the other. They pulled toward the coffee shop and drove around the back of the building, where they found another small car. It was parked alongside the back of the building, facing the same direction as their Geo.
As they parked behind it, Professor Tommy White and one of his students stepped out. The older, long-haired man waved in greeting, but his face was stony, or as stony as it could be on such a flaccid little creature. White’s companion was some white kid with dreadlocks—yet another one of those wannabe hippie stoners, rebelling against two yuppie parents for committing the mortal sin of purchasing shoes made in Malaysia.
