Refugees

by D. J. Molles

  “A den? Like an infected den?”

  “Yes. It’s gonna be pretty nearby where we set up the Lillington outpost. I would say within a few blocks, but go out at least five blocks in each direction. You’ll smell it when you reach it. It should be a low place with open doors, easy to access. Probably dark, not a lot of windows.”

  “Okay. I got it.” Harper touched his forehead. “What are we doing?”

  Lee’s words became very deliberate. “Before you do any of that, I need you to work with Jacob and come up with a way to safely capture a live infected, to safely transport it, and to safely keep it contained.”

  “Whoa, Lee…” Harper stared at the radio as if it had bitten him. “You wanna tell me what’s going on here?”

  “Is anyone in the room with you, and is the door closed?” Lee asked.

  Harper glanced over at Bus, who nodded. “Yeah, Bus is in here. Door’s shut.”

  “Okay.” An audible intake of breath. “What I’m about to tell you does not leave that room.”

  * * *

  Harper placed the handset back on its cradle. He felt shaky. Weak. Unsure of himself. The concept, the dream of one day making it through this alive, felt like land receding quickly from his view as a riptide carried him out to sea.

  He turned around and found Bus, still contemplative, sitting at his desk.

  “What do you think?” Harper asked him.

  Bus looked up as though he’d forgotten Harper was in the room. He shrugged. “I choose to trust the captain because—let’s be honest—I don’t have much of a choice. I’m sure some people call it blind faith, but that’s not really accurate, because I do take the time to think about everything he asks me to do. And you know what?” Bus smiled. “Sometimes I don’t agree with him. But I weigh that in the balance of his track record and the consequences of not going along with him.”

  “How do you mean?” Harper slid his hands into his pockets. “You think he would pull support if you refused to do something?”

  Bus shook his head. “No. I don’t think Captain Harden would do something like that, especially after everything we’ve been through. The consequences I speak of are more… intangible. Such as, if me and him are divided, what kind of precedent does that set for everyone else? And what if he’s right and I’m wrong? What if I refuse to do something, and it turns out that I should have? How many people are going to be hurt? At the end of the day, you have to realize that the captain is very utilitarian. In other words, he might risk the lives of five people, but it’s only to save the lives of a hundred.”

  Bus leaned forward and regarded his rough hands, folded on the desktop. “You know, I think he sees things as a very simple equation: how many people risked versus how many people saved. If the number of people saved is greater than the risk, he’ll do it. And sometimes I resent his thinking.” Bus looked at Harper with a pointed stare. “But I wouldn’t want to make the decisions he makes.”

  Harper found himself on the cusp of jumping in to defend Lee—he knew the captain, and he knew he didn’t make his decisions lightly. But when the survival of a nation was in jeopardy, the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few. Lee had the survival of more than just himself to think about, and when you began to get into numbers that spanned an entire region, an entire state, then the computations became very complex indeed.

  And realizing this, Harper knew where his heart was.

  He nodded to Bus and turned for the door. “I need to find Jacob.”

  * * *

  Lee and his two companions worked their way through Sanford. They roamed cautiously up and down the side streets, their pace slow and deliberate. Not so fast that they would miss something important, but not so slow as to make an easy target. They scanned for signs of further infected but found none. They looked for evidence of raiders, but the roads were deserted. As they continued their sweep, they made mental notes of places that could provide good scavenging.

  Lee scanned left, found a pair of boots on the radio console.

  “LaRouche. Your feet. On my radio. Again.”

  The boots retracted. “Sorry.”

  In the southern section of town, they eventually found what they were looking for.

  The school sat in a slight hollow, the surrounding streets overlooking it. From their vantage point on Bragg Street, they could see that barriers had been erected around the school. It was a combination of chain-link fencing, concrete blocks, and concertina wire. This metal and concrete wall extended around the entire perimeter of the school. The perimeter had been breached in several sections. Not just man-size holes but gaping swaths of chain link and barbed wire that had been trampled and pushed out of the way.

  Inside the complex, the tattered remnants of tents occupied the sports fields, giant decontamination domes that sat crumpled and collapsed in the center of the football field. The parking lots where students used to congregate and engage in their secret teenage rebellions were now cleared as landing pads for helicopters, but only one remained: an AH-64 Apache, parked slightly askew in the right corner of the parking lot, as though its pilot had set it down hard and quick. Lee could see the cockpit was open and empty. The rotors hung limp and motionless.

  “Why the fuck they need attack helicopters for an evacuation?” LaRouche asked from the back.

  Lee shook his head. “Someone thought they were needed.”

  There were boxes and crates strewn everywhere, but they looked looted and torn apart, either by scavengers or by the infected searching for food. Among these, bodies lay where they’d fallen. It was difficult to tell due to the level of decay, but some of them were whole, and Lee presumed these were the infected, shot down by defending troops. Others were in pieces—the civilians who hadn’t made it to safety before the infected caught up with them.

  In another, lower parking lot, Lee could see a collection of school buses. They would have been used to ferry survivors back and forth to the airport. He saw himself for a moment, sitting in one of those buses, the air hot, the vinyl seats sticking to his skin, sweat and panic thick in the air. Driving down these deserted back roads with an armed escort of Humvees, a pair of Apache attack helicopters making flybys overhead.

  Discomfort.

  Terror.

  Lack of control.

  These were someone’s last memories.

  Behind the school buses, parked closer to the buildings, were the hulks of OD green and desert tan. He leaned forward in his seat and pointed. “See ’em? Coupla LMTVs and a tanker.”

  The LMTVs were two-and-a-half-ton trucks that had replaced most of the old M35 “Deuce and a Half” trucks. Lee supposed they could share the same name, but for some reason most people just called them LMTVs. Two of these were parked alongside a HEMTT truck, with the M978 fuel tanker modification.

  LaRouche whistled. “That’s a couple thousand gallons for you.”

  “If they left anything for us.” Lee waved his hand toward the high school complex. “Bring us in there, Jim.”

  The Humvee rolled forward through a gap in the Jersey barriers that had been left open for vehicles to pass in and out of the complex. A rollaway section of barbed-wire-topped fencing lay bent and toppled to the ground, what was left of a body clad in ACUs lying on top.

  Jim took it slowly and tried to avoid the dark mounds of decaying flesh that littered the parking lot, but there were far too many, and occasionally Jim would cringe and the tires would thump across some old corpse. The sound of brittle bones snapping would be muffled through the rotting meat.

  “You’re doin’ good, Jim.”

  The ex-priest nodded hastily. “You want to go all the way back to those trucks and the tanker?”

  “Yeah.” Lee looked out his window and scanned the rooftops with a suspicious eye. “All the way back.”

  The smell was not as bad as Lee had thought it would be. The sun and wind and rain had soaked and leached most of the putrid odor from these remains. In tiny updrafts of air, carried o
n the heat of the engine block, Lee could smell the faintness of their death like disturbing memories that cannot quite be grasped.

  “Movement!” LaRouche called.

  “Shit.” Lee hunched lower over his rifle.

  “You want me to keep rolling?” Jim asked.

  “Where’s the movement coming from?” Lee called out.

  “Down near the vehicles… I can’t tell what it is…”

  Lee slapped the dash. “Stop here.”

  The Humvee jerked to a halt.

  “I saw it behind the HEMTT.” LaRouche pronounced it heh-mit. “It’s like an animal or something.”

  Lee peered at the cluster of vehicles. They all faced outward, the bulk of the building casting a pallorous shadow over half their bodies, while bright sunlight lit their hoods and reflected off their windshields. Beyond the glare, Lee could see nothing in the shadows.

  “Jim, honk the horn and be ready to haul ass,” Lee instructed. “LaRouche, if it’s infected that come popping out of there, light ’em up.”

  “Yeah, I gotcha.”

  “Ready?” Jim asked, his hand on the horn.

  Lee nodded.

  The vehicles were perhaps fifty yards out, maybe a little more.

  Jim punched the horn.

  The Humvee gave its uncharacteristic squawk.

  They waited.

  From underneath the wheelbase of one of the LMTVs, Lee thought he saw a shadow move. A pair of dark-colored winter birds flitted across the sky, swooping and jabbering at each other. A steady breeze gusted through his open window, dried his eyes, and chilled the sweat on the back of his neck. The Humvee hit a rough patch of idling and rumbled underneath them before smoothing out and returning to normal.

  The smell of diesel fumes and decay.

  His pulse was steady.

  “All right.” Lee’s door creaked slightly as he pushed it open. “Jim, you’re with me. LaRouche, maintain overwatch and cover our retreat if we start running back to the Humvee.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Talks

  Jim stepped out with Lee, leaving the vehicle running. The two met at the front of the Humvee. The warmth of the engine washed across Lee’s back as he pulled his rifle in tight and squeezed the foregrip. They maneuvered toward the vehicles, splitting up and flanking, trying to get an angle on what might be hiding behind the bulks of metal and mechanics.

  They were within about twenty yards of the vehicles when Lee saw a flash of brown fur from underneath the chassis of the HEMTT. As he brought up his rifle, a long black snout poked out from behind a tire and evaluated Lee with suspicious eyes, tan ears erect and oriented toward him.

  Irrationally, Lee’s first thought was, Tango?

  He stepped forward, let the muzzle of his weapon drop.

  The dog took two hesitant steps out from behind the tire, still watching Lee, its head level with its haunches and sniffing the air, catching his scent. The resemblance did not go further than the first, immediate impression. It clearly had some German shepherd or maybe some Malinois in its bloodline, but it also just as clearly was a mutt, though Lee wasn’t sure what else it was mixed with. The fur was lighter, almost gray across its flanks where it was clumped with dirt and grime, charcoal around its snout and eyes.

  As it cleared its hide, it caught sight of Jim moving in from the other side, and it stiffened. It looked back and forth a few times and backed away one step, its tail slung low but making nervous wagging gestures, as though it hoped they were regular humans but just couldn’t be sure.

  “Lee,” Jim called, addressing his rifle toward the dog.

  Lee held a hand out. “Hold your fire.”

  Most domesticated dogs had either been infected or turned feral. In either case, when they were encountered, they were shot and chalked up to target practice. As cold as that sounded, it was better than having them rip one of their scavenging crews apart, as they’d been known to do. They might look like old house pets, but their instincts quickly reasserted themselves and they were just as dangerous as wild animals.

  But this one was alone.

  “You gonna shoot it?” Jim asked.

  It was a valid question. In addition to being a danger to people, as long as a dog didn’t display any signs of infection from FURY or rabies, it was a decent meal. The taste was similar to beef, but a little gamier. They’d found the smaller the dog, the more gamy the taste, so if you bagged yourself a large-breed dog, like a Labrador or a Rottweiler, you could almost pretend you were eating steak.

  This one was smaller, maybe fifty pounds, if that. But Lee wasn’t interested in killing and eating it. This one seemed less inclined to attack and more inclined to give them a good long inspection, which made Lee believe that perhaps the dog had not gone feral. He stood there and forced his body to relax, to be loose and controlled, like he was the owner of this dog and expected it to heel.

  “Lee?”

  “Shh.” Lee held a finger to his lips.

  The dog quirked his head at the sound from Lee.

  It kept its eyes mainly on him, as he was the closest, but chanced a look at Jim every few seconds to make sure the other man hadn’t gotten any closer. It kept sniffing the air, as though it wasn’t sure who these people were, but whatever scent particles it was pulling from the breeze weren’t alarming it either.

  Lee patted his leg and spoke calmly. “Come ’ere, boy.”

  Jim took an audible breath, something akin to exasperation, and Lee flicked a glance in his direction. His rifle was still addressed toward the dog, but it was held at a low-ready, and Jim’s eyes were on Lee. “What’re you doing?”

  Lee didn’t give him an answer. Whatever the reason, Lee felt confident that there was a good reason for this dog. He patted his leg again and called out to the dog, but it just wagged its tail hesitantly and moved its paws as though it truly wanted to come closer but couldn’t bring itself to do so.

  “What if it’s feral?” Jim called out.

  “If it’s feral, it won’t come when I call.”

  “It doesn’t look like it’s coming.”

  “It will.” Lee reached his hand slowly into his left cargo pocket and brought out his little bag of jerky. Luckily, he hadn’t finished it off earlier and still had a few pieces left. Keeping a steady eye on the dog, he opened it up and pulled out a single, small piece. The dog was skinny, and Lee could see its ribs showing. It would be hungry. He held the piece of jerky into the air and he could see the dog focusing on it, lifting its snout to test the air as the breeze carried the smell of the jerky over to it.

  The dog sniffed and licked its chops once, then let out a little whine and worriedly moved its feet a few times, closing the gap between them by only a foot or so.

  “It’s okay.” Lee spoke calmly. “Come on.”

  The dog wouldn’t come any closer after that, so Lee gently tossed the jerky toward the dog and it landed about halfway between them. The throwing motion spooked the dog and he backed up. When the piece of meat hit the ground, the dog watched it with incredible intensity and crept forward a few feet. Then it bolted and snatched up the morsel before drawing back again.

  Lee smiled. “Yeah, I got you now.”

  The piece of jerky was gone in a flash and the dog was standing there, now attuned to Lee’s every move.

  Lee looked over to Jim. “Let’s walk back.”

  Jim began sidestepping in the direction of their Humvee, not quite willing to turn his back on the dog. Lee, however, turned completely and strode casually on. As he did, he took a strip of jerky and pulled smaller pieces off, then dropped them on the ground as he walked.

  As they neared the Humvee again, LaRouche grinned and shook his head. “I’m guessing we can’t eat your new friend.”

  Lee turned and found the dog, still standing about fifteen feet away from Lee, scarfing up the little pieces of meat from the ground. He walked up to his passenger’s side door and dropped another piece there. He opened the back door and stood there expect
antly.

  The dog regarded the piece of jerky at his feet, and then him.

  “Come on, boy.” Lee motioned toward the backseat. “You wanna go for a ride?”

  The dog wagged its tail.

  “Yeah, you know what a ride is.” Lee set the rest of his jerky on the backseat and then climbed into the front passenger’s seat. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  To his left, Jim settled into the driver’s seat. “I’m not giving you any of my jerky to replace what you fed to that mutt.”

  Lee ignored him and kept his eyes on the dog outside. A little closer now, it gave the Humvee a wide berth but was intent on the backseat. Lee could see the wheels in its head turning, trying to figure out whether the vehicle was a good thing. Lee could see its tail still wagging, and he could almost picture the dog’s faint memories of riding in cars with its face out the window and its tongue hanging out, a pure rush of smells with each breath.

  Then, abruptly, the tail stopped wagging.

  The lean muscles all along its body rippled and tensed. The head snapped out toward the sports fields and rose up, the nose working furiously. Lee followed its gaze but couldn’t see anything. Its lips curled in a low growl, and then, without warning, it shot into the backseat of the Humvee.

  “Whoa!” LaRouche jerked his legs back.

  The dog thrust its dark muzzle between Lee and Jim, facing forward, and then began to bark savagely. Lee and Jim both drew back away from it, but then realized it was barking at something out beyond the front of the vehicle, out in the sports fields.

  Frothy spittle speckled the windshield as the dog continued to bark.

  “You think it smells something?” Jim asked over the sound of the dog’s panicked barking.

  Lee opened his mouth to speak but LaRouche interrupted him.

  “Contact! Infected!”

  Lee leaned out and slammed the rear door, and then his own. “Let’s go, Jim!”

  Jim stomped on the gas, lurching them forward and whipping the vehicle to the right. Lee tumbled into the radio console and the dog, feeling the hot breath and the grungy fur against his face. Jim snapped the vehicle in a complete 180, LaRouche shouting obscenities from the turret as he held on for his life. He straightened out and headed for the gap in the barriers that they had come through.