Aftermath

by D. J. Molles

  “Nah, man.” Miller shook his head. “I’m tired of sittin’ in the bed. I’m comin’ with you.”

  Lee turned his gaze to Doc. “You cool with staying here?”

  Doc seemed to consider it for an oddly long time. Finally, he nodded. “Yeah. That’s fine.”

  Lee dove his hand into his pack and retrieved one of the long-range radios he’d brought. He handed it over to Doc. “We’ll be on system ten, subchannel one.”

  Doc regarded the radio like it was a tablet written in Sanskrit, but eventually he made sense of the buttons and got the thing turned on and tuned in to the right channel. When he had it switched over, Lee keyed his mic. The radio in Doc’s hand burped and squelched.

  Lee gave him a thumbs-up. “Looks like it works.”

  They parked the car facing away from the roadblock so they could make a quicker getaway if necessary. Doc took over the driver’s seat, while Josh took over Miller’s overwatch position in the bed of the truck, shrugging his shoulders against the wind.

  Lee held up his radio. “Doc, if you guys run into trouble, call me on the radio.”

  Doc just nodded.

  Lee turned to the barricade. He did not relish the idea of walking across the bridge of dead bodies to get to the other side of the concertina wire, but there didn’t seem to be any other options to safely cross. He hitched his pack higher onto his shoulders and tightened the straps. With his rifle held snug into his shoulder and the comforting weight of his tactical vest on his torso, he made for the gap in the wire, and Miller and Harper fell in behind him.

  As they disappeared behind the barricade, the first fat raindrops began to fall.

  * * *

  Doc sat in the driver’s seat and started to sweat.

  He stared straight ahead, his jaw muscles bunching. A single bead of perspiration gathered and broke from his eyebrows, slipping down into his eye and forcing him to blink. He breathed in deep through his nose and let it slowly out through pursed lips. Doing this a few times usually helped him to relax.

  Not now.

  Outside, the downpour had begun, turning the blacktop into glistening snakeskin.

  In the truck bed and open to the elements, Josh swore at the rain.

  Doc could feel his heavy pulse starting in his heart and radiating out to his fingers like shockwaves. All those electrical impulses coursing through his brain, branching out through his nervous system and triggering the beating chambers of his heart, sending all those oxygen-laden blood cells to all the organs that needed it.

  It was amazing that he knew how all this stuff worked.

  Right now, his brain was perceiving a life-or-death situation.

  This shot a tiny signal down to his adrenal glands and they began to spew their chemical cocktail, igniting a chain reaction. The heartbeat quickened, the respiration increased, the palms began to sweat. Blood was drawn from certain organs, like those of his digestive system, and reallocated to the large muscle groups in his body. The decrease in blood to the head caused his cornea to flatten, reducing his vision down to a 2 percent field of view, also known as “tunnel vision.”

  This was his body gearing up for disaster.

  And all he could wonder was, If I fire a shot, will Lee and the others hear it?

  He forced his eyes up to the rearview mirror and looked through the breach in the wire. The open intersection across from that breach was empty. The other three men had moved on, but how far? A quarter mile by now? Maybe more. Would they be able to run back if they heard gunshots?

  If I fire a shot inside the car, will they still hear it?

  Doc had to imagine that the vehicle had a suppressive effect on a gunshot. After all, the sound of a gunblast was only a combination of the bullet breaking the sonic barrier and the gunpowder turning into a rapidly expanding gas. If the car contained the gas (and possibly the bullet), wouldn’t it make sense that the sound outside the car would be muffled?

  Another spike of adrenaline.

  Jesus Christ… help me…

  He breathed again. Slowly.

  In through the nose, out through the mouth.

  He couldn’t think about it anymore.

  He grabbed the M4 sitting in the passenger seat next to him. Then he turned to face the rear of the vehicle. Through the open back glass he could see most of Josh’s legs and torso, standing up in the bed and facing forward.

  Doc lifted the rifle and shot Josh in the stomach.

  The kid stumbled back but didn’t fall. He let out a strange mewling sound and began frantically swiping at the blooming red hole in his shirt like it was a bug he might brush off. Doc shot him three more times until Josh lay still.

  His ears were humming. He stared into the back of the truck at Josh. He began to hyperventilate. He was horribly, sickeningly out of control, an astronaut who had lost his tenuous grip on the space station and was now drifting out into orbit.

  “Oh my God! Oh fuck! OH FUCK!” He tried to breathe but just kept swallowing air. The rifle dropped from his shaking hands. He fumbled for the door release and stepped out of the car, forcing himself to belch out all the air in his belly. The rain almost instantly soaked him, matting his hair to greasy-looking strands. His vision was spinning, the dead bodies all around him making laps like a gruesome carousel. He shut his eyes, felt hot tears on his cheeks, and shook the encroaching gray out of his head.

  He could not lose consciousness here. This was a very bad place to pass out.

  “No. No. No.” He kept shaking his head. He kept saying it as though if he repeated it enough, the situation would right itself. But this fucked-up situation would never be right. There was no way to make it right. It was fucked up from the start and now he was a part of it; he was a filthy, bloody part of it.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” he told himself.

  He opened his eyes.

  Josh was still lifeless in the bed of the truck. Doc swiped his eyes free of tears and raked wet clumps of hair out of his face. He felt his rain-soaked clothes clinging insistently to his chest and back as he reached into the bed and grabbed one of the kid’s arms. He pulled but the kid hardly budged.

  “It’s gonna be okay.” He grunted with effort. “It’s gonna be okay.”

  He pulled harder, bracing one foot on the rear tire. He got the body up onto the boxes, and from there it was easier to roll him off the truck, where his head hit the ground with a dull thwack.

  Out of breath and sobbing uncontrollably, Doc stared down at Josh’s body and tried to repeat to himself that everything was going to be okay. But the tears were filtering down through his sinuses and loosening all the rotten gunk in there, and it was running out his nose and down the back of his throat, garbling his words as he gasped them out: “Ihsguhn behkay. Ihsguhn behkay.”

  Unable to bear the sight any longer, he ran from it, staggering into the truck and slamming the door. Panic nipped at his heels, a greyhound on the tail of a rabbit almost run to ground. He cranked the keys too long and the starter screamed. He yanked the shifter down into drive and slammed on the gas before the transmission had a chance to catch. The engine roared and finally dropped into gear. Torque spun the tires for a brief second before the truck tore off, leaving Josh among all the other dead bodies that littered the road.

  CHAPTER 13

  House to House

  The rain was coming in gales now.

  The three figures moved through the slurry of gray, one after the other, bodies hunched against the rain, eyes darting from side to side. The splashing rain gave the effect of a low fog hugging the ground, but the humps of the dead bodies still rose out of that gray cloud like scattered islands in a misty sea.

  Lee took point. His torso was like a turret: everywhere his eyes went, his rifle followed. He scanned down streets and into open windows and doors. A few short steps behind him, Miller kept an eye on their flanks, and a few steps behind Miller, Harper took rear guard, constantly twisting and checking the road behind them to make sure no one was tai
ling them.

  Lee was grateful that the rain was beating down the stench of putrefaction that still rose from the bodies like the dense smell of a cold Dumpster. But the rain also coated the entire area in a wash of white noise, forcing him to scan more with his eyes, since his ears would never pick up the sound of running feet over the rush of the driving rain.

  They moved along Church Street, one road down from Woodall Lane, where the barricades had been erected. One block over, Lee could see where the troops guarding those barricades had gone once their barricades had been breached. It was a residential street, and most of the houses were boarded up. But several were open, burned-out husks, with broken windows and bullet-riddled walls. The troops, and probably a few die-hard deputies, had used the houses to mount a defense. Each burned-out house covered an intersection. Bodies choked the lawns and cross streets. Most of them were whole, but some of them were in pieces. The bodies that were torn apart wore shreds of ACU camouflage. The rain washed away some of the blood and gave the flesh a blanched look.

  In several places, Lee could see bite marks.

  Miller stared at a body as they passed. “Are they… eating them?”

  Lee felt the contents of his stomach press up into his throat. “I don’t know.” He thought about every survivor he’d met and their lean, drawn features. Everyone was starving. It was only logical that the infected were starving too. If they had been reduced to their basest instincts, what instinct was more basic than the urge to feed?

  They continued on until Church Street ended at Fifth Street.

  The group stopped at the intersection and looked around. To their right was a big single-story house with a large front porch and a white picket fence. The gutter spouts bubbled and spewed white rainwater. A body lay facedown at the base of the fence, a splatter of blood marring the white paint and beginning to run down the fence slats in pink trails.

  “There.” Miller pointed.

  It appeared that Church Street doglegged and continued on about a block down. Lee could read the sign from where they stood. They made the decision to continue on Church Street because they felt it was the most logical place to find the biggest church in town. As they moved down the street, the signs of house-to-house fighting continued. The destruction, the burned-out buildings, the bullet-riddled and partially consumed corpses. This street named after a place of worship had turned into a hellish nightmare.

  As they neared the intersection of Fourth Street, Lee saw the top of a tall church steeple poking up above the trees. “That’s gotta be it.”

  The group was moving faster now, the idea of getting off the streets spurring them on. The First Baptist Church was not on Church Street at all, but took up a large portion of Fourth Street. Hurriedly, they turned the corner onto Fourth Street.

  They stopped suddenly, arms spread out like burglars caught in the act.

  Lee was the first to react, grabbing Miller by the collar and yanking him to the side of the street, where a large pickup truck had jumped the curb and struck a fire hydrant. The two of them scrambled to hide behind the pickup truck, but Harper didn’t move. He stood in the middle of the street, staring at the front of the First Baptist Church, where a crowd milled about, an innumerable mass of dark, featureless shapes behind the curtains of rain.

  “Harper!” Lee hissed through gritted teeth. “Get the fuck over here!”

  Harper looked at Lee, his eyes wide, blinking away the rain dribbling into them.

  The next thing Lee heard was a high-pitched howl.

  Lee stuck his head around the car and felt his stomach drop.

  A block away, one of the infected was racing straight toward them. It grunted and growled as it ran, its breathing so heavy and ragged that Lee could hear it from where he crouched. A thick rope of black saliva hung out of its mouth, trembling like the tail of a half-eaten snake. It was moving fast and Lee knew he didn’t have time to outrun it.

  He raised his rifle and put two in the thing’s chest.

  It stumbled, then fell. Hitting the ground, it skidded to a stop, then raised its head and began crawling toward them. Lee didn’t waste any more ammunition on it—the creature would never reach them.

  But the two shots he had fired had gained him all the attention he could handle. The horde of infected that swarmed the front of the church all snapped their heads in his direction and momentarily froze, like a bird dog pointing out game. The howls that suddenly erupted from them were loud and hot and hungry. All in an instant, the entire mass of bodies was churning toward them.

  “Gotta move!” was all Lee could shout.

  Miller was already on his feet, firing wildly at them.

  Lee broke left, heading for the church. He braved a glance behind him and saw both of his companions on his heels. He jumped the sidewalk and almost lost his footing as he came down in a slick patch of wet grass. He was running blindly, but he quickly found a destination—another white picket fence cordoned off a yard and ran adjacent to the side of the church, creating a narrow alleyway that Lee thought might force the horde into a bottleneck and give the three men a fighting chance.

  As he hit the mouth of the alley, he saw a window into the church, just big enough for a man to get through, and immediately changed his plan. Without thinking it through, he lunged for the window, holding his rifle in front of him. In the moment, as he hung suspended in the air, he imagined the glass not breaking. Vividly, he saw himself bouncing off the window like a bad slapstick joke, unable to get to his feet before the infected reached him and began to tear him apart, tooth and nail.

  His last thought before hitting the window was, Bad idea.

  But the glass offered almost no resistance. It was like jumping through a waterfall, but the water was sharp as razors and sliced at his arms as he landed and rolled to a stop a few feet into a linoleum-floored hallway. He looked back to the window and saw the other two men frantically push their way through and land in a heap on the inside.

  A dark hand shot through the window after them, a shard of glass catching and splitting the skin all the way up the forearm, revealing pink flesh beneath the brown skin. The infected showed no evidence of registering that pain in his ruined cerebrum but kept reaching through that window at Harper, gnashing jagged yellow teeth, his matted dreadlocks flailing.

  Harper started to stagger to his feet.

  Lee brought his rifle up and shouted, “GET DOWN!”

  And Harper got down.

  Lee fired once and the right side of the infected’s jaw disappeared in a spray of bone fragments and flesh. Another bullet punched a hole through his neck, slicing arteries and severing the spinal column. As the thing collapsed onto the window frame, Lee scrambled to his feet, the rubber soles of his wet boots squeaking erratically on the linoleum floor.

  “Get up!” He waved the other men toward him, though they did not need any further encouragement. They shuffled on hands and knees through the broken glass, their rifles clattering along on the floor with them until they finally could lurch to their feet and start running again.

  Lee moved out of their way as they ran past him, then opened up his stance and squared himself to the window. Hungry faces filled the open space, screaming at him in desperate frustration, all of them trying to climb through at once. He shouted over his shoulder, “You gotta find a way through the church!”

  Then Lee lowered his cheek to his rifle and began sending rounds downrange. The dreadlocked infected was ripped out of the windowsill as others tried to worm their way in, and Lee kept shooting, feeling that same trapped-animal feeling he’d felt in the Petersons’ house, that dreadful feeling of no way out. But he kept firing, and the bodies kept falling, and behind him he could hear Harper and Miller kicking their way through a door.

  The last kick was final and reverberating.

  Lee found himself backpedaling down the hall, anticipating an open door.

  “It’s open!” Miller’s voice had raised an octave in stress.

  Lee
turned his back on the window and sprinted for a pair of double doors as Harper and Miller disappeared inside. All along the walls, children’s artwork hung in bright crayon colors that blended together as Lee hauled past them. Signs on the doors to either side announced: MS. CROUCH’S CLASS; MR. BEAKER’S CLASS, and so on.

  This part of the church was a school.

  Lee turned the corner into the double doors. The room they opened into was a spacious lunchroom with rows of tables and chairs and a kitchen area behind a long counter. He saw the backs of Harper and Miller, heading for a door marked EXIT.

  Lee spun and dropped to his knee, snatching a fragmentation grenade from a pouch on his vest. He removed the safety clip and slid the grenade into position, sandwiched between the two double doors. He made sure the lever of the grenade was held tight in place by the weight of the door and then braced the little steel ball with one hand while he gingerly plucked the pin with his other.

  “It’s clear around back!” Harper sounded eager to get out.

  Lee leaned away from the little explosive and spread his palms toward it, as though willing it to stay in place. When it appeared secure, he stood. From down the hall he heard the screech of infected and the tumble of feet scratching through broken glass. A fresh wave of urgency crashed over him—if the infected set off his booby trap before he got out of the lunchroom, the least injury he could hope for was perforated eardrums and probably a shrapnel wound.

  Harper and Miller didn’t quite understand what he’d done to the door, but he started throwing his arms, making a get-the-fuck-out-of-here gesture, and they understood that, turning and launching themselves through the exit. Lee was behind them, slamming the exit door and jamming it in the open position.

  From inside, Lee heard the double doors slam open.

  The words came out like hot, uncontrollable vomit: “Go! Go! Go!”

  But they were already running, across a covered walkway toward the main church building. As the fuse on the grenade cooked down, Lee glanced to his right, toward the road, and saw a few stragglers from the main mass of the horde. These less speedy ones had taken notice of their escape and were now hobbling after them.