The Remaining: Fractured

by D. J. Molles

  Losing Bus.

  Losing Keith.

  Losing Lee…

  And her two children—one blood, one adopted—watching their innocence bled out of them day by day, like a thousand tiny cuts opening them up, when all she wanted to do was stitch them back together. Show them safety and love. Give them some semblance of a childhood. And knowing full well that those days were gone. Knowing that whether or not they survived with their souls intact wasn’t up to her, but to some predetermined chemical makeup of their brain. Could they filter out all the bad, and glean what good was possible from this life? Or would it all overwhelm and destroy them?

  She closed her eyes against the burning sensation in them.

  Heat from the fire. Or the sting of salt tears.

  “Hey.”

  She opened her eyes, blinked rapidly.

  The woman from the other family knelt next to her. Short. Petit, like Angela had always wished to be. Elfish little hands and feet. Very delicate in appearance, like something not meant for this world. Like the one piece of china still intact after the bull had run through the shop.

  Angela saw the swirling blur at the bottom of her vision and swiped quickly at her eyes. “Hey.”

  The woman nodded to the pot, which was beginning to boil. “Here.” She produced a little white bottle. A salt shaker—the disposable kind you get in a two-pack with a pepper shaker at the grocery store. “Got it on our last scavenging trip. Right before they told us we couldn’t leave the gates.”

  She leaned over the pot, shaking it generously into the boiling mixture of rice and water.

  Angela watched the salt granules fall in, highlighted by the fire. She wanted to stop the tiny woman, didn’t know if she could receive their kindness gracefully. But the lump in her throat had grown too large to get words around.

  The woman turned to Angela and touched her on the shoulder the way a friend would. She smiled and it was sad, like a child learning about cruelty. Then from her pocket she retrieved a small, brightly colored box and put it in Angela’s hands. It was an unopened package of Fruit Rollups.

  “For the kids,” the woman said. “Maybe it will cheer them up.”

  Before Angela could protest, the woman stood and retreated to the opposite side of the fire, rejoining her family. Angela watched her rejoin them, and then couldn’t. She looked down at the little package in her hands, finding it difficult to accept kindness, and it almost broke her down.

  She pulled the boiling rice away from the fire. Inside the rice had grown, soaked up most of the water. She wrapped her hands with a few cloths, double and triple-folded, then picked the pot up by its handles, the whole side of it black from being so near the fire.

  “Abby. Sam.” Angela spoke with a tone absent of thought. “Come on.”

  She turned away from the fire, feeling the cold night pressing up against her face. The two kids fell in beside her, walking so closely abreast that their shoulders touched. Angela remained facing straight ahead, like the steam rising from the pot was putting her into a trance. She walked down the narrow little corridor that separated this row of shanties from that one, so many of them vacant with everyone gone away with LaRouche and Harper.

  She heard quick footsteps behind her. Heavy. Like an adult.

  She turned quickly, almost quickened her pace, but found that it was only Marie.

  The other woman drew up beside her, hands stuffed into the pockets of her jacket that seemed too big on her. Immediately Angela could sense the tension coming off of her like an electrical field. Everything about her was tightened, thin cords standing out on her neck as she looked this way and that.

  “You okay?” Angela asked, lowering her voice simply because of how Marie acted.

  Marie nodded. “You need help with that?”

  “No, I got it,” Angela quirked an eyebrow. “What happened?”

  “Inside.” Marie pointed.

  They’d reached Angela’s shanty. Marie opened the flap for them and Angela and the two kids scurried in, steam trailing after them like a locomotive. Marie stood in the doorway, not quite letting the flap fall just yet, looking both ways down the row, seeing if anyone was being nosy and watching them.

  Angela put the pot down and hurried over. “Marie!” she hissed. “Did you do it?”

  Marie didn’t directly answer. Instead she drew out a crumpled piece of old newspaper, the ink faded and sun-bleached. She handed it to Angela, delicately, as though it were more than just a piece of trash. Like it contained diamonds.

  Marie stepped away, holding the tarp door open with a single hand. “We’ll talk later.”

  Angela looked from the piece of trash in her hand up to Marie, confusion evident on her face.

  Marie just pointed to the paper, then let the tarp drop.

  Angela looked behind her. Saw the two children sitting next to the warm pot, watching her with curiosity. Then she looked at the paper in her hands. Slowly unfolded it. Feeling her heart beating faster. Some sort of writing on it. Thick bold letters written in what looked like charcoal. Heart beating much faster now. Because Marie had gone to the roof to try to make contact and then she came back with a note. A note from someone. And it said who it was right there at the bottom.

  WE ARE HERE. CHECK AGAIN AFTER MIDNIGHT.

  --CAPT. TOMLIN

  CHAPTER 25: A WAY OUT

  LaRouche sat alone in the cab of the LMTV. It was more roomy than the Humvee and he had a little more space to spread his legs out and try to sleep. That was his excuse for dismissing himself—trying to catch some sleep. In reality, he simply had no desire to mingle with these strangers from Parker’s Place.

  It was a little community, tucked back into some woods. Almost the same setup as the camp where they’d found the girl’s father earlier in the day, except this one was surrounded by forest rather than open cropland. Judging by the cluttering of tents and scrap-made shelters, there were about twice the people living here as there had been in the other.

  A few of the men that had been captured by The Followers and had escaped during LaRouche’s attack had made their way to this group. Jackson met them with grieving embraces, but they remained silent about anything that had happened. All that LaRouche heard them tell the people from Parker’s Place was that they’d been attacked by The Followers and had managed to escape.

  No mention of being captured.

  No mention of hanging their friends on crosses.

  Instead there’d been much backslapping and eager questions and sudden bouts of trading back and forth between the people of Parker’s Place and LaRouche’s group. LaRouche felt suddenly lost in the middle of it, looking about at his people like they were insane. How could they so easily switch back and forth? Not like him. He seemed stuck in the “on” position.

  Feeling awkward and out of place, he’d slipped away, mumbling about getting sleep.

  Now he just sat in the cab of the LMTV, unable to close his eyes, unable to quench that roiling, acid burn in his stomach as it tried to creep its way up his throat. He reflexively pressed his gut when it pained him. Kept pressing there without thinking about it until he noticed the flesh felt sore and bruised from doing it so often.

  He stared out the window of the LMTV, through the dark woods and into the little settlement. He could just barely see the shadowy figures of his group and the group of strangers, all mixed together like it was some sort of bonfire in the woods, like nothing was wrong, like they were all just best fucking friends forever.

  He leaned his head back, tried to get comfortable. Shifted positions several times. Kicked his feet up so he lay back against the door, his feet on the driver’s seat. His mind wandered to and fro, kept coming back to Nick and wondering if the man was going to reach Camp Ryder, and if so, what he was going to find. But it felt like fruitless worrying, so he closed his eyes. But then his heart started beating. The feeling like he’d forgotten something. The feeling that something was sneaking up on him.

  Finally, he sa
t up. “Fuck this shit,” he grumbled to himself.

  He stared blankly out the front of the vehicle for a moment. All around him, except to his left where the camp of survivors was set back into the woods, everything was dark. Black. Stars not even shining through the tree tops. From some source of ambient light he wasn’t able to figure, he could just barely make out the pale face of one his team, keeping watch from the turret of one of the LMTV’s a few spaces in front of him.

  He could find no other way to occupy himself, so he reached down into the floorboard where he’d stowed his chest rig and rustled around in it. He touched the plastic bottle of whiskey that he’d taken from the man he’d interrogated, but pushed passed it and found his map. It was creased in odd places, tattered a bit along the edges. It was wearing out with the frequency with which LaRouche pulled it out and unfolded it. Like rosary beads for a Catholic, but rather than touch the beads and utter a prayer to God when he needed comfort, he would unfold the map and look at the lines, look at his progress and try to plan ahead to meet his goals. A prayer to the god of strategy. Just like people thought they could pray enough to make bad things go away, he thought he could plan enough to keep them away.

  All just a giant distraction anyways.

  All just a way to try to forget about what could be metastasizing in his blood stream. His mind kept returning to it, despite every effort to push it down another track, like all roads led back to the most worrisome thought yet: I might be infected.

  Like an arachnophobic person constantly feeling the tickle of a spider crawling up their neck, he kept feeling the first flushes of fever that would begin his violent illness. Kept feeling sick, though he knew it was probably more from worry than from anything physical.

  Don’t let me go this way, he thought to no one in particular. Not to God, because he didn’t believe in Him. I’ll take a bullet. I’ll take a knife to the chest in hand-to-hand fighting. I’ll even take a fucking heart attack. But not this. Not this thing that isn’t dead and isn’t alive. I don’t want to simply exist like an animal. And I sure as shit don’t want to have to kill myself when I feel it happening. Really don’t want to kill myself.

  He didn’t believe in God, but didn’t know who else he could be talking to.

  Just focus on the map. Focus on tomorrow.

  He didn’t have an exact location, but he’d notated with a circle where he thought they were, based on the roads he’d seen in the area. They were nearby the very small town of Bethel. Were actually only a few miles from the Roanoke River, which was their target objective, but they were too far inland. They needed to find the easternmost bridge, which would be close to Swan Bay. The quickest route to take out to the Swan Bay, where the Roanoke River began its trek through North Carolina, would be Highway 64. But that would also probably be the most dangerous route, so LaRouche immediately dismissed it. They would keep parallel to Highway 64, between it and the river, and make their way to where Highway 45 crossed the river. That was the first bridge that needed to be blown or blocked or manned.

  He wondered what it would be like when they got there, probably within the next day or two, depending on how slow caution demanded they go. Would there already be swarms of infected trundling across the river? Would they have to fight their way through to blow it? Would it even be possible?

  Another, more disturbing question in LaRouche’s mind was Where the hell is Captain Harden?

  The plan had been for them to go east, and then when Captain Harden had finished dealing with the “mole” situation, he would join them. So that they could access the few bunkers he had out here. LaRouche didn’t know the exact location, but he knew that one of the bunkers was on the northern side of the Roanoke river. If he started blowing bridges before Captain Harden got there, it would make it that much more dangerous and difficult for them to access the bunkers.

  But was the captain even coming?

  Still no word from Camp Ryder. No word from Captain Harden. No bleedover from Harper, though the two were heading in separate directions and LaRouche doubted that Harper’s transmissions would bounce all the way to him.

  Complete silence. Like they were orbiting around the dark side of the moon.

  He would have to make this decision on his own.

  A knock brought his attention up and to the right.

  Just Wilson’s eyes, peering in the window at him.

  LaRouche snapped the map closed and reached over, pushing the door open. Wilson hung onto the side handle of the LMTV cab with one hand and let the door swing past him, then righted himself again and stood there in the frame, half-smiling in a hesitant manner, as though he were feeling out LaRouche’s mood.

  LaRouche folded the map. “What’s up?”

  Wilson shrugged and looked off. “Just getting’ ready to turn in. I see you’ve been catching up on your sleep.”

  “Oh, yeah.” LaRouche stuffed the map back into the pocket of his chest rig, then leaned back. “I feel fuckin’ fantastic.”

  Wilson nodded thoughtfully. He reached into his jacket pocket, squirming his weird, three-fingered hand in and wincing as the fabric brushed past the scar tissue. LaRouche could tell the stumps of his fingers pained him—mentally and physically—but he rarely spoke about it and LaRouche figured he preferred not to dwell on it.

  After a minute, Wilson produced a small, silver roll from his pocket. Two or three inches long. Like a roll of dimes. Faded paper wrap on the outside that read TUMS. He held them out to LaRouche and mumbled the jingle from the old commercials: “Tummmm-tum-tum-tum.” He smiled. “Found these for you.”

  LaRouche looked at them for a moment. “Jesus…what’d you have to trade for these?”

  Wilson made a dismissive noise. “Don’t flatter yourself, Sarge. I just had them thrown in on another deal I made for some goodies of my own. Plus I figure if you don’t have heartburn, maybe you’ll sleep more and then maybe you won’t be so goddamned grumpy all the time.”

  LaRouche grinned. Somehow the ribbing made the gesture easier to accept. He took the item and immediately unwrapped one of the tabs. “Well, what’d you score for yourself?”

  Wilson looked a little embarrassed. “Couple odds and ends.”

  LaRouche quirked an eyebrow.

  Wilson rolled his eyes and reached into his vest. He pulled out the corner of a cloth. Red and white. “One of them had an old US flag. And I wanted it.”

  LaRouche regarded Wilson, and then the flag protruding from his vest. He shrugged. “Whatever.” He popped the Tums tablet into his mouth and changed the subject. “Goddamn, you have no idea how much I needed one of these things.”

  Wilson looked off, stuffing the flag back into his vest. “Maybe if you were a little more sociable you would’ve found ‘em yourself.”

  LaRouche chewed the tab, pinched off the foil end of the tube and slipped it into his own jacket pocket. “That’s what I have you for, Wilson. To be sociable for me. And to run interference with The Pope.”

  Wilson looked uncomfortable. “Yeah. I’m not a fan of being your go-between. Ya’ll got some problems that you need to work out man-to-man. Not through me.”

  LaRouche sighed, swallowed the chalky mix, felt a slight ease of the burning in his throat. “Thanks for the Tums, man.”

  Wilson still hung on the door.

  LaRouche looked at him pointedly.

  The younger man glanced over his shoulder at the camp behind him. “What are we gonna do with these folks?”

  LaRouche leaned back in his seat. “Nothin’.”

  “Nothin’?”

  A shake of the head. “We’ll leave out at first light tomorrow. Wish them the best of luck.”

  “They could help us, you know.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Lot of them have a bone to pick with The Followers.”

  LaRouche pursed his lips. “Wilson, be honest…do I give the impression that I don’t give a shit?”

  Wilson considered it for a moment. “Yes.”
>
  LaRouche turned, his gaze intensifying. “That’s my fault. I apologize if that is the impression that I give. I don’t like what I’m seeing. I don’t like what The Followers are doing. I wanna put a bullet in their heads just like the rest of you. I want to find all those girls that they’ve captured and get them back to their families. That would feel real nice. Be the hero and everything. Save the fuckin’ day. Get a goddamn parade.”

  Wilson sensed the biting sarcasm. “It’s about doing the right thing.”

  “I know what the right thing is,” LaRouche said. “I’ve got fucking morals of my own. And you know what? Sometimes they get broken. Sometimes I break my own fucking rules. Sometimes I walk the line and I step over pretty far. And that’s something I need to deal with. But I do those things because they need to be done in order for everyone else to live. I don’t do them because they feel good. I don’t do them because they benefit me in any way.”

  He pointed out in a nebulous direction. “We’re just miles from the river, Wilson. And at any point in time, if it hasn’t happened already, there’s going to be some big-ass hordes of infected coming over every bridge that spans that river. And they are going to come down here and they are going to overpower everyone. And everyone is going to die. And the only thing that stands between our current reality, and that future reality, is me and you and our team. And if we get sidetracked, if we lose focus on what needs to be accomplished in the big picture, we’re going to all end up dead. And the fact that some girls got raped and some guys had to nail their friends to a cross is going to be a moot point because everyone is going to be dead.”

  “Fine,” Wilson held up a hand. “Jesus, man, I’m not arguing that point.”

  “Well, what are you fucking arguing?”

  “Give ‘em guns and ammo,” Wilson said with exasperation. “Let them fight the good fight while we continue on to our objective. It will make them an ally to us in the future, if we ever come back through, rather than having to deal with hurt feelings because we abandoned them. And they’ll run interference for us by keeping The Followers distracted while we do what we gotta do.”