The Remaining: Fractured

by D. J. Molles

“So, what’s happened since I’ve been gone?”

  “Marie’s been pretty scarce.” Keith looked at the ceiling of his shack. “Jerry has his boys distribute rations instead of having her cook community meals. Vicky disappeared—guess now I know why. Couple other families took off right when things went down. Jerry hasn’t come out and said so much, but I think he’s forcing out the families that just got here. The ones that haven’t been able to contribute much.”

  “Oh my God.” Angela’s eyes widened. “He can’t do that!”

  Keith shrugged. “My opinion? He already has. You know how he’s been about newcomers. Wants us to cloister ourselves off. Nobody leaves, nobody comes. He thinks we can just isolate ourselves and hoard our supplies and everything will pass in the end.”

  “What about the other settlements?”

  “Haven’t heard from any of them except Smithfield. I think he’s keeping them in the loop because he wants to keep the hospital. From what I can gather through the grapevine, he’s kept OP Benson staffed to keep the roads between here and Smithfield open, but everyone else is in the wind. Lillington, Broadway, Newton Grove…haven’t heard from any of them. Pretty sure he’s cut them off.”

  She leaned in. “We have to do something.”

  Keith looked at her sternly and spoke very slowly, as though each word was of paramount importance. “You best be very careful who you say that to. Not everybody thinks like you and me.”

  “Who can we trust?”

  “Right now? Nobody.” Keith rubbed his weathered face. “Hon, you want everybody to be asking ‘Hey, whatever happened to that Angela girl and her daughter?’ you just keep asking questions like that. Get you and your girl thrown out of here in a heartbeat.”

  Angela’s fist balled against her leg. “Keith...”

  He looked at her. “What?”

  “I’m gonna tell you something, but you can’t tell anyone else about it. You can’t tell them that I told you a secret. Nothing can get back to Jerry that I said a damn word. Understand?”

  “Well, maybe you just shouldn’t say anything at all.”

  She shook her head vehemently. “No. I can’t let this lie, Keith. Not this.”

  Keith avoided her eyes, found the dirt floor.

  “Bus wasn’t killed in a firefight with Jerry’s men.”

  The older man’s eyebrow twitched, but otherwise he gave no indication of even having heard her.

  Angela continued. “I was in the room with Bus when all this went down. We surrendered, Keith. We threw down our weapons and we unlocked the door. And Jerry and his men come barging into the room, they surround us. And then Jerry and Bus are arguing about the infected and Jerry starts yelling for Bus to shut up. And the next thing I know, Jerry points that big, sawed-off shotgun right at Bus and shoots him in the chest.”

  Keith closed his eyes and grimaced as though he were being forced to eat something he wanted none of. “Goddammit, Angela.”

  She reached out and grabbed the older man’s shoulder. “Keith, listen to me.”

  Tired: “I’m listenin’.”

  “Bus didn’t die right away. He was alive for a few more seconds, and I ran over to him, knelt down next to him. I was asking them to help, asking them to get something to stop the bleeding, but nobody moved.” Angela realized that her throat was constricting again. “They all just stood around and watched him die. But he said something to me, Keith. He looked right at me and he said, ‘Take it, Angela. You have to take it’.”

  She swiped at her eyes as though they had betrayed her. “I didn’t know what he was talking about, Keith. I didn’t realize it because I was too confused. I was thinking about Abby and getting back to her and that was the only thing I could grasp.” She jabbed her index finger into her thigh to punctuate her next words. “But he was talking about this! He was talking about Camp Ryder. He was telling me not to let it die, not to give up on it.”

  Keith grimaced. “He was dying, Angela. You have no idea what was goin’ through that man’s head. For all you know, he could have been delirious.”

  She shook her head. “No. You weren’t there, Keith. You didn’t see his eyes. He looked right at me when he said it.”

  “Angela…”

  “This is our home,” she said abruptly, as though she had issued an argument that could not be refuted. “This is our life. And we’ve worked hard to make it safe, to make it a place that’s worth living in. Jesus Christ, when I first got here I thought about killing myself every miserable day. The only reason I didn’t was Abby. But you know what? We turned it around. We made our lives worth living again.” She pointed outside. “Now that man has come along and is taking all of that away. He’s taking it all away from us, Keith, and no one wants to do a damn thing about it.”

  “Plenty of people want to do something about it.” Keith leaned away from her. “I’m just not sure it’s the right time.”

  “It’s the only time we have.” She put her hands on his knee. “You have to help me.”

  The old man heaved a sigh and looked at her for a long moment. “You know, when I was growin’ up, just startin’ to feel my oats and all, my pops told me that blonde women were nothin’ but trouble.”

  Angela hung her head and cracked a long-suffering smile.

  Keith patted her hand and gave it a squeeze. “I never did listen to my pops.” He rose, his joints complaining with loud pops and cracks. He looked down at the woman sitting before him, her eyes just looking so cold despite the smile on her lips. Like they’d forgotten what it felt like to have hope. And it made what little mirth he’d been able to muster drift away like the last dregs of muddy water from a dammed riverbed.

  He shoved his weathered hands into his pockets and his normally-kind face grew stern. “You can’t afford to be runnin’ around talking to folks about this stuff. You let me do that for you, okay?”

  Angela considered it for a moment, then nodded. “Okay.”

  “We gotta keep this real quiet.” He turned partially away from her, eyes on the dirt floor again. “I see a lot of folks dyin’ if we don’t keep it shored up good and tight.”

  CHAPTER 4: SEPARATION

  LaRouche stepped out of the Humvee, followed by Father Jim. Their boots crunched on gravel half-buried beneath a layer of weeds. Jeriah Wilson remained in the driver’s seat, the engine still running. His right hand rested on the wheel, the two stubs of his missing fingers twitching. He eyed the building in front of them. He seemed skeptical, as usual.

  LaRouche rubbed his grimy fingers under his nose. “Kinda looks like home, doesn’t it?”

  The old warehouse looked like it had been abandoned long before the collapse. The parking lot leading up to it was cracked through, and tall, brown weeds struggled to exist in these narrow fissures. Windows took up one side of the building and appeared to belong to the offices of whoever had worked there. Mostly, the glass was broken out, but a few panes remained, dark with dirt and mildew, creeping vines twining their way through the window frames and rooting themselves in the soft, damp carpet inside.

  It was buffered from the main road by a cluster of office suites, housing a range of businesses—an alarm company here, a catering company there. Behind those businesses, a hard-packed gravel road led back behind a fence with a rusted padlock and dead kudzu hanging on the barbed wire coils. Some quick use of the bolt cutters had opened up the fence for them and they now sat just inside the gate.

  “Little overgrown.” Wilson hung his elbow out the open window.

  “It’ll do for the night.” LaRouche nodded towards a pair of bay doors large enough for a tractor-trailer to get through. “Me and Jim will clear it and see if we can’t roll those doors open. Maybe we can get the trucks inside.”

  “Roger ‘at.”

  “Hey…” LaRouche scratched at the overgrowth of his chin and looked at the young Air Force cadet in the driver’s seat. “Give it another try.”

  Wilson sighed, the dark skin of his face twitching into a su
btle grimace. “Alright,” he said quietly. “I’ll try again.”

  LaRouche tapped the hood of the Humvee, ending the conversation. Then he and Jim hefted their rifles and moved out. LaRouche led and Jim followed, just a few paces behind. They slipped in through a section of broken windows and found themselves in a spacious office. The walls were ripped apart, completely gutted of copper pipes and wiring. Jagged sections of plate glass crunched and snapped underfoot like thin sheets of ice. A ragged bird’s nest sat abandoned in the joist of a pair of two-by-fours.

  They stuck together as they moved through the maze of offices, each adjoining the other, with a common break room in the middle of it all. The light scrape of their boots across tile and carpeting were the only noises in the building.

  They exited the office area and entered a dark hallway. LaRouche stood there in the shadows for a moment, letting his eyes adjust and taking a deep whiff of the air. It smelled of a dank old building, and nothing more. No body odor and feces. No smell of recently-lit fires from other squatters.

  When his eyes had adjusted, LaRouche moved down the hallway to where it opened into a cavernous space, roughly twice as big as the interior of the Camp Ryder building. The tiny sounds of their feet on the ground and the brush of their pant legs together echoed back to them in the huge empty space. A crack in the roof exposed a sliver of daylight. Water dripped through the ceiling. Big fat drops that landed loudly into a puddle. The sound was even and rhythmic, as if it were set to a metronome.

  They worked around the entire inside of the area finding nothing to indicate that anyone or anything had taken up residence in the abandoned warehouse. When they were comfortable with the area, when every dark space, every closet, every bathroom stall in the building had been cleared at the muzzle of a rifle, they moved quickly to the bay doors. The latching mechanism keeping them in place was simple enough, and had been left unlocked.

  Nearly fifteen minutes had passed by the time Jim rolled open one of the bay doors, cranking the chain while LaRouche stepped out into the dull light of the shrouded sun and waved their small convoy inside. The vehicles rolled into the warehouse—Wilson’s Humvee, then the LMTV, the HEMTT tanker, and finally the second Humvee to bring up the rear. They cut a wide circle around the evenly-spaced support beams and positioned themselves in order, oriented towards the door. So they could escape quickly.

  LaRouche gave one last look around the exterior of the warehouse property, seeing nothing but a few piles of trash and some overgrown shrubs that threatened to consume the fence. He backed into the shadows, then turned and nodded to Jim, who let the chain slide noisily out of his hands and the rolling bay door rattled back down into its place.

  As the echo of the rolling door bounced around the man-made cave of a building, the rumble of the four trucks rolled into a high idle and then died, one by one. Hydraulics hissed and engine components ticked, and then the space became clamorous with the noise of opening doors and the babble of conversation as LaRouche’s team climbed out of their vehicles and began pulling their packs and gear down.

  LaRouche’s eyes glided over them for a moment as the smell of diesel fumes rolled into him, hot and pungent. To anyone of his people he would seem to be focused in that moment, but in fact his mind jumped from topic to topic, asking questions but not staying long enough to receive an answer. First he thought of the Red Man in his cargo pocket and how long could he make it last, and then he thought about food and water and how long he could make that last, and finally he thought of bodies lashed to telephone poles, crucified and gutted where they hung…

  “What’s that look for?” Jim asked from beside him.

  LaRouche snapped his head right, found the ex-priest regarding him with the half-curiosity of someone who already has a good idea of the answer to their question. LaRouche realized that he was baring his teeth, just slightly—his bottom lip quirked down to expose a row of teeth that were gradually yellowing with tobacco stains and lack of brushing.

  He let the expression slide off of his face and pulled the sling of his M4 from around his shoulders, then touched the raw spot where the nylon had managed to get through his layers of clothing and rub at the bottom of his neck. He leaned the rifle against the wall, then dove into his cargo pocket and retrieved the chaw.

  “They’re out there,” LaRouche said quietly as he worked.

  Jim planted his hands in the pockets of his parka. “Yeah.”

  LaRouche rolled the wad of tobacco into his cheek, brushed a few stray pieces of tobacco off on his pants, and then replaced the pouch. “Just hope they stay the fuck out of our way.”

  Jim only nodded.

  Wilson joined them, looking between the two older men with a taut expression.

  LaRouche knew what it meant. “No luck, huh?”

  “No.” Wilson crossed his arms. “I tried four times while you guys were clearing the building. Still getting nothing.”

  “Alright,” LaRouche said. “Until we know what’s going on, I think we should do all inter-squad communication on a subchannel, and stop attempting to make contact. We will keep one of the Humvees monitoring the main channel, in case Camp Ryder attempts to contact us.”

  Wilson looked at the other two men, and they stared at the floor in front of them.

  “It’s been two days,” Jim said, speaking carefully. “I think we’re at a point now where we need to decide what we’re going to do.”

  LaRouche cocked his head to the side. “What do you mean?”

  Jim took off his tortoiseshell glasses and inspected the lenses. “I know this isn’t going to be the popular opinion with you guys, but I think we need to consider going back.”

  LaRouche waited for a moment. “Okay.” He opened his palms. “Why?”

  Jim seated the glasses back on his face. “I think something is wrong. We haven’t been able to raise Camp Ryder on the radio in two days. I know the mission is important, but so is Camp Ryder. If they’re in trouble, we should go help them.”

  “We don’t know that they’re in trouble,” Wilson said. “You’re just assuming that because we haven’t been able to get the radios to work. Could be something as simple as one of our repeaters going down.”

  “But do we want to take the chance?” Jim asked. His voice was low. “I don’t think we should take chances with other people’s lives. We need to work on the side of caution here.”

  “And if we go back now, and it turns out that nothing was wrong, then that’s six days gone. For nothing.” Wilson addressed himself to LaRouche this time. “You heard Lee when he briefed us. We’re already behind the ball on this thing. We don’t have time to waste.”

  Jim rubbed his head, seemed exasperated. “Wilson…we’re talking about our friends. Our families.”

  Wilson raised an eyebrow. “We’re also talking about the entire eastern seaboard, Jim. We’re losing time as we speak. What happens if we don’t blow these bridges in time? There’s more at stake than just our friends and families.” Wilson seemed to not like the sound of the words coming out of his own mouth and looked like he’d tasted something sour. “It sounds harsh, but it’s the truth.”

  Jim’s jaw locked. “Fine. Let me and four others take one of the Humvees and backtrack.”

  LaRouche gave him a pained look.

  Jim continued. “We’ll head back towards Camp Ryder, but we’ll check the repeaters as we go. If we can find the problem and fix it, and reestablish contact with the camp, then we’ll head back and rejoin you guys.”

  “Absolutely not,” LaRouche shook his head.

  “Why?”

  LaRouche spit off to the side and wiped a string of tobacco juice from the stubble on his chin. “I’m not splitting up the team,” he growled. “Jesus, Jim, you know what’s out there right now—you’ve seen it with your own eyes! We’re already looking at long odds, I’m not gonna cut my team in half.”

  Wilson spoke evenly. “Well, then we really only have two choices. We either all go back, or we all
go forward.” He shrugged. “I say we go forward.”

  “I say we go back,” Jim said stubbornly.

  They both looked at LaRouche.

  The sergeant shook his head. “We’ve gotta keep going. I said it two days ago, and I haven’t changed my mind. We’ve got a job to do and Lee is counting on us doing it as quickly as possible. Whatever is going on…” he trailed off for a moment, then simply stated, “We’re gonna keep going.”

  “LaRouche…” Jim began.

  “Decision’s been made,” LaRouche said, curtly.

  The ex-priest looked at him from under his brow. LaRouche knew that Jim wouldn’t defy him, but that didn’t mean that he agreed with all of LaRouche’s decisions. In fact, he seemed to disagree more often than not.

  “Does everybody else know the situation?” Wilson asked.

  “Seems like it would just invite argument,” LaRouche sighed. “I hate to keep things from them, but it’s better that we make the decisions and go with it, or we’re going to be sitting around, discussing it for days on end.”

  Wilson shifted uncomfortably. “Sarge, you know I have your back, whatever decision you make. But I don’t think keeping it a secret is going to go over well.” He turned partially so he could look at the others as they pulled out blankets and foodstuffs to prepare dinner. “Some of these guys have family back at Camp Ryder. I don’t think it would be right not to give them the option of going back.”

  LaRouche pursed his lips in irritation, but didn’t respond immediately.

  “I know you don’t want to split up the team,” Jim lowered his voice. “At least explain the situation. Let them come to their own decisions.”

  “How many have family back at Camp Ryder?” LaRouche asked.

  “Joel and Dorian both have wives, and Nick has a wife and a kid.”

  “Fine.” LaRouche snatched his rifle off the wall. “We’ll do it your way.”

  He marched over to the group of ten that had formed a tight circle between the LMTV and the tanker, enjoying the residual warmth of the engines as they laid out their bedrolls and got a few small propane camping stoves burning. Wilson and Jim followed behind, but kept their distance as though they feared being present for the backlash.