by D. J. Molles
Lee looked up at the sky and saw the faint glimmer of dawn to the east, or perhaps it was his imagination. It wasn’t until you spent time outside of the comfort of civilization that you began to realize why people in ages past feared the night. The night was long, it was uncomfortable, and it was dangerous. The dawn marked the end of the dark misery and the return of warmth and safety.
“You know what time it is?” Lee looked briefly at Bus.
“About four in the morning.”
Lee felt his heart sink. The light to the east was just his imagination after all. Dawn was two long hours away and there would be no sleeping after this. The pain in Lee’s back was beginning to catch up to him.
A dark figure strode up to them as they crossed the center of camp. All Lee could see was the figure’s right side, illuminated by the cold blue light of an LED lantern. As the figure approached, it raised the lantern up to eye level and Lee recognized the pursed face and the balding dome of his head, washed out and pale in the glow. The angle of the light cast shadows that made his face look weirdly severe.
Lee thought he remembered Miller calling the man Bill.
He was the one who had resisted bringing them back to camp, only to be convinced by Lee’s arguments and Miller’s pleading to give them a chance. He was of average height, and probably average weight before he had been forced to ratchet down on his belt during these lean times. He was probably in his forties and going bald on top, with a ring of wiry gray-brown hair. Overall, his body language and his facial expression communicated to Lee that he was not a pleasant person to be around.
“Bus.” He nodded to his superior with respect then turned a somewhat disdainful eye on Lee. “Are you supposed to be up? I thought Doc wanted you recuperating.”
Lee was about to respond, but Bus cut him off, and Lee was grateful. He was too tired to argue. With a dismissing wave of one meaty hand, Bus said, “Harper, we have a problem. Captain Harden is just helping me out, and then I will let him go straight back to bed.”
The man’s cold silence said enough.
Lee quirked his eyebrows. “So is it Bill or Harper?”
“Bill Harper,” he said with a grumble. “Miller’s the only one who calls me Bill. Everyone else calls me Harper.”
Lee nodded. “Harper it is.”
Bus led the trio toward the Ryder building. The larger structure towered over the shantytown like a castle amongst the villagers’ mud huts. It was a two-story cement structure with very few windows that Lee could see. Purely industrial, with very little to beautify it. Lee wasn’t sure what it had been used for prior to the arrival of its current occupants, but he immediately began looking for its strong points, its weak points, and how it could be improved as a defensive location. If a firefight occurred, the thin walls of the shanties would provide very little protection. This building would have to be their defense.
It had a lot going for it. In addition to no windows and concrete walls, Lee could only see one entrance, which was two steel doors flanked by narrow sidelights—too narrow for a man to squeeze through. The roof looked like it was easily accessible, and Lee imagined some sandbags and a few machine gun nests up there could lay a pretty damn good field of fire on any attacking force.
Infected or otherwise.
Lee pointed up toward the big building. “What do you guys use it for?”
“When we first got here, we all lived inside,” Bus explained. “We very rarely left. The security of the fence was no big deal, because the building was our security. We welded the cargo-bay doors shut, which left only two sets of double doors to worry about—the ones you’re looking at now and another set on the opposite side. We had everyone in there, but it was only about twenty people.”
They reached the double doors and Bus pushed them open. Lee noticed the smell first. It was the smell of the refugee camps outside Al-Waleed and the smell of a homeless shelter he’d once visited in D.C. It was sweating bodies and grimy clothes, exacerbated by the warm air. Lee could only imagine how much worse it smelled during the day.
After the double doors, a short hallway opened into the main portion of the building where Lee could see that the Ryder trucks had once been serviced. But instead of trucks and tools and lifts, Lee only saw another collection of shanties, these built less sturdily than the ones outside and more for the purpose of privacy. Lee thought there were about fifteen different dwellings crammed into the space, most of them with a lantern glowing inside. All the lamplight eking through wooden slats cast a kaleidoscope of light on the ceiling.
Bus guided the three of them to the right and they began to ascend a metal staircase. “After the shit officially hit the fan and FEMA tucked its tail and ran, we started getting a steady trickle of survivors. We tried to take in only people who had something to contribute, but…” Bus trailed off. “It was tough. A lot of tough decisions had to be made.”
As they reached the top of the stairs, Lee spied a panel of glass to his right: a large window belonging to an office that overlooked the floor. In the dark window, Lee could see his reflection staring back at him and it almost stopped him in his tracks. He was thinner than he remembered; his neck and arms just bundles of taut cords with flesh stretched over them. His once-tidy crew cut was slightly overgrown and four days worth of beard had grown in thick.
He was shocked to discover that the once gentle set of his face had turned into hard angles. His lips were pressed, the corners in a slight downturn, his jaw set as though preparing for a blow. The eyes that his last girlfriend, Deana, had always told him were kind now shone cold and savage. He forced his face to relax, and there he could see some semblance of the person he remembered. But it was only a grim parody. That person didn’t exist anymore.
Lee realized Bus was still speaking and tore his attention away from the harsh visage in the window, refocusing on the conversation.
“I’ve always believed that we shouldn’t turn anyone away—more manpower, you know? But a lot of people don’t agree with me.” Bus opened the door to the small office overlooking the floor. Lee supposed it had once housed a foreman or supervisor. Inside, it was sparsely furnished with a few folding chairs, a large desk, and a big corkboard with a county map pinned to it. Bus stepped behind the desk but didn’t sit. He continued speaking as he stood there, fishing through one of the desk drawers. “Even being selective, we eventually got too crowded for everyone to fit in the building, so we allowed people to start making their camps outside. Seeing that it was safe, some of the people who were living in here decided to move out too. You think it looks cramped now, you should have seen it before.” Bus sighed. “Pretty soon, we’ll have too many for that, and then we’ll have some real problem-solving to do.”
Bus finally found what he was looking for and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. He smiled wanly at it and gestured his two companions toward the folding chairs. “Have a seat, gentlemen.”
Harper and Lee both took a chair facing the desk.
Bus snagged the chair behind the desk and hauled it over to the front, so the three men were positioned in a small circle. He took his seat with a sigh, adjusting the straps of his holster. He leaned back and unscrewed the cap off the whiskey. “Wish I could say it was good stuff, but it ain’t.” He took a swig and offered the bottle to Harper, who accepted.
“So…” Lee tapped his fingers on his knee.
There was a long, awkward silence as Bus stared at Harper, who stared at the bottle in his hands. Harper seemed to take notice of the silence and looked up at Lee. “Did we have a problem you were going to help us with?”
Bus leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Harper, we found a hole cut in the fence. Someone had put a CD player on the ground, playing an audiobook to attract infected. We think it was Milo.”
Harper deflated with a single long sigh. He leaned back and finally took a swig of the whiskey with a violent grimace on his face. Then he passed the bottle to Lee. “Yeah… Milo.”
Lee smiled unsurel
y. “What’s the backstory on this guy?”
Harper looked to Bus and seemed to be waiting for him to take the reins.
“Uh-uh.” Bus folded his arms. “You tell him. Milo’s your brother.”
CHAPTER 3
Blood Ties
Lee eyed the plastic bottle in his hands as he waited for Harper to collect himself. It was a fifth of whiskey—bottom-shelf stuff, which was a shame, but Lee didn’t want to offend. He took a sip and swallowed fast, trying to avoid letting the harsh liquid sit on his tongue for longer than necessary.
He managed to get it down without too much of a grimace and passed the bottle on, then leaned back in his chair and looked at Harper. In the well-lit room, there was much more to see than just the harsh lines that his lantern had thrown on his face. Lee noted his dirty hands, blistered and torn up from hard work but lacking that permanent, calloused thickness of a lifetime of manual labor. The wrinkles on his face that seemed unpleasant in the darkness now looked like old smile lines and laugh lines that had simply fallen into disuse. A scowl seemed to be his predominant expression now.
Having the full picture, Lee realized it wasn’t so much that Bill Harper was a naturally unpleasant person but that he’d become unpleasant due to his circumstances. And really, who could blame him? Maybe he’d once been a happy, soft man, living a soft life, with a soft job. But now, in the harsh reality of the new world, he had to fit in, had to find his place, and most of all, had to survive. Harper was in the process of turning into a colder, harder, more pragmatic version of himself.
Harper seemed to gather the story and then began speaking with a loud exhale. “Milo and I were born ten years apart. I’m older. Our mother was raising us by herself, so by the time Milo was starting school, she wanted me to get a job. So I got a job. I finished school. Got a scholarship. Worked my way through college. But Milo… he never cared to be committed to anyone, let alone to his family. He was the wild one. While I was working, he was partying, getting locked up, and costing me more goddamn money. I can’t remember how many times I had to wire Mom money to bail him out.
“Milo just never grew up. He lived with my mom in their shitty-ass trailer until she died a few years back from lung cancer, thanks to sixty years of Virginia Slims. Then he sat in that trailer and continued being the shitbag that he is. Meanwhile, I’d become successful. I worked for a bank, made a 100K-plus salary, and I owned some land outside Wilkesboro. Even though he never worked for shit in his life, I think Milo resented my success.
“When all this went down, Milo shows up out of the blue at my property and starts talking about family and how we’re blood and we owe it to each other. Just a whole big chip-on-the-shoulder bullshit speech. I know my brother, even though we were never close, and he’s a manipulator. But damn me, I’m a weak man and I didn’t want to rock the boat. He was family, after all, so me and my wife took him in.
“Then they evacuated us. First to Wilkes County Airport, and from there they bused us and choppered us over to the camp in Sanford. That lasted less than a day before it got overrun by infected.” Harper stopped there and laughed bitterly. “At the time, they didn’t really know much about noise discipline around the infected, so you have the camp in Sanford, with almost no perimeter defense, bright lights on twenty-four/seven, choppers landing and taking off at all hours of the night. Seemed like they attracted every fucking crazy in the eastern half of the state.
“Anyway”—the bitter smile fled from Harper’s lips and now there was only that slate-gray scowl—“Milo made it out, but not my wife. Not a trade I would have brokered. But me and him were alive and we started walking. Didn’t know where we were going. Just surviving. Eventually we came across Camp Ryder before their requirements became a little more stringent, and Bus here let a fumbling banker and his asshole brother stay.
“After about a week, Milo started getting stir-crazy. Started talking about how we needed to fight the infected. You’d have thought he woke up one day and believed he was in a war movie, the stupid fuck. He disappeared for a day and came back riding a goddamn Hummer with a machine gun on the back, driven by two other worthless shitheads he’d found—he’s always been a magnet for shithead friends. He just pulled right into Camp Ryder like he owned the place and laid down an ultimatum: We could join him and fight the infected or we could get in his way and suffer the consequences.”
Harper’s eyes darkened. “Naturally, we told him to go fuck himself. He drove off without a word, but just as he was about to drive out of sight, he let a burst loose from that .50-cal on his Hummer.” Harper rubbed his face. “Hit a ten-year-old girl and her mother. This was before Doc came here, so we lost the mother almost immediately. Thought the girl was going to pull through, but her wound went septic and she died.”
Harper straightened up in his chair and planted his hands on his knees. “Ever since then, he has been collecting other people like himself—criminals and lowlifes—and running around pillaging everything and everyone. And that is why there is no love lost between us, and why I will put a bullet in his brain the next time I see him.”
Lee raised his brow. He thought of the people who had attacked them at Jack Burnsides’s house and later burned Lee’s house to the ground. They had a Humvee, and the description was very similar. The thought put a flash of heat down his back. “Any other group out there causing problems, or is it pretty much just Milo?”
Bus fielded the question. “From what we can tell, if there were any separate groups, they’ve all been absorbed into Milo’s. We estimate he has about thirty men, but they’re kind of scattered around the county. He usually only keeps ten or so with him.”
Lee took a long moment to lean back in his chair, stare at the floor, and consider the ramifications of this new information. At first glance, Milo was an enemy to be defeated. At second glance, Milo was the leader of another group of approximately thirty survivors. It seemed pretty obvious that Bus wanted Milo and his group wiped off the face of the earth, but Lee had to consider what was best for his mission. Granted, given their previous actions, Lee didn’t think they would be very open to the concept of allying with him, but the only way to find out would be to talk to them.
Lee kept those cards close to his chest.
Bus took a sip of harsh whiskey and shuddered. “Okay… now that we have our history lesson behind us, I need to steer this toward the meat of the conversation: the breach in the fence.” Bus capped the whiskey and set it behind him on his desk. Then he crossed his arms and allowed a sour expression to push through his heavy, bearded face. “Someone cut that fence up, and I need to know who and when.”
Harper puffed out air and looked around the room, without much to say.
“Well”—Lee looked between the two other men—“I’m going to say it happened at night. Probably sometime within the last two hours.”
“Okay…” Bus waited for elaboration.
“I can’t imagine it taking the infected that long to track down the source of the noise. Even with their hearing at night, they would still have had to be pretty close by,” Lee explained. “I think if we say it happened any earlier than maybe an hour or two, we’re being unrealistic. In all likelihood, they were at the fence within minutes.”
Bus looked skyward as though trying to figure something. “That doesn’t make any sense. If it was placed recently, it would have been nighttime. Milo’s men would have had to travel through the woods at night, which kind of defeats the whole purpose.”
“If I was them, I would have had someone set up in the woods before dark,” Lee said. “Somewhere close to the fence, so when the time came, they could cross the distance without too much noise.”
“They’d still have to get out,” Bus argued. “And if you’re sending in one man, why not send in twenty and take the place over?”
“Because no matter how quiet they are, twenty men will make more noise than one,” Lee answered. “As for getting out after setting the trap, all the guy would have had
to do was run along the fence to the dirt road and he’d be home free.”
Bus considered this, then looked to Harper. “Who was on watch?”
“Sue and Stan,” Harper replied.
“You may want to speak to them,” Bus put in.
Lee leaned forward. “How often do they check the fence? Once an hour? Once a half hour?”
Harper seemed to resent having to answer Lee’s questions, but he squinted and did some arithmetic in his head. “Takes about ten minutes to walk the perimeter, then they spend another ten or fifteen minutes on their sentry points… Yeah, probably between twenty and thirty minutes.”
“Plenty of time to snip-snip and plant the talking box,” Lee said. “Then run to the dirt road and make a good escape. May have had a car waiting out at the road. If the guy moved fast enough, he would have avoided the sentries and the infected.”
Harper seemed to be coming around to Lee’s point of view. “And at that point, there’s no harm in running, even if it makes more noise. In fact, it may have just increased the odds of attracting infected to the area. The guy running doesn’t care because he’s about to get in a car and drive away.”
Bus took a breath to speak but someone started banging on the office door, causing the whole thing to rattle. Lee looked up and could see a dark figure standing on the walkway outside through the smoky glass. Bus let his breath out in a slow, defeated huff and Lee got the feeling that Bus already knew what the person wanted, and it wasn’t good.
“Come on in,” Bus said, just loud enough to be heard.
The door swung open and a boy’s face on a large man’s body stepped in. The big kid easily stood over six feet and probably weighed more than two hundred pounds. He wore dirty old overalls that made him look like a farmhand and wrung a tattered-up baseball cap in his hands. His eyes were red and strained and his whole body shook.
