by D. J. Molles
The two of them ducked back into the shanty and Katie stood stiffly in the center and set the pot down on the ground. Angela stood with her back to the door. Katie looked her up and down, not in an unfriendly way, but sizing her up as though she hoped to pre-determine what Angela had come to say.
Angela sighed. She knew she would come to Katie first, but she hadn’t really planned out what to say, or how to broach such a sensitive conversation. As much as she thought she could trust Katie, there really was no basis for that opinion outside of the fact that she was Nate Malone’s wife, and Nate had been a staunch supporter of Lee and Bus.
“It’s no secret that I don’t see eye to eye with Jerry,” Angela said simply. “That’s putting it a little lightly, but there it is. Our conversation can end right now, if you’re not comfortable talking about it.”
Katie crossed her arms. Raised her chin slightly. “Go on.”
Angela clasped her hands together. “How do you feel about Jerry?”
Katie’s jaw worked. “Angela…it’s not a secret whose wife I am. And it’s not a secret how Nate felt about Jerry. And now Nate’s gone, and Jerry is trying to tell me that he’s tried to make contact, and that Lee and Harper and LaRouche have all abandoned us here.” Her eyes became very intense. “That’s fucking horseshit and you and I both know it. You and I both know that Jerry hasn’t done anything with that radio, and probably deactivated it. Because that’s the type of idiot he is. And if that motherfucker ever comes near me and tries to say one goddamned word, I swear I’ll knock his teeth down his throat.”
Angela nodded firmly. “Well, we need to talk.”
***
LaRouche and Wilson didn’t have time to teach the survivors from Parker’s Place how to use the rifles. Some of them were already familiar with the AR platform, and others had prior military service and were at least nominally informed about how to take it down and put it back together. From the group of nearly forty people, ten received rifles and 200 rounds apiece.
Jim wanted to give them more, such as food and medical items, but that extended LaRouche’s generosity far past its breaking point. Or perhaps he simply rejected the idea because it came from Jim, and lately LaRouche found himself tuning the man out, immediately categorizing everything the man said as bullshit.
LaRouche took solace in the fact that in this particular situation, Wilson appeared to side with him. As Machiavellian as it seemed, Wilson agreed that the survivors from Parker’s Place were only valuable as a buffer between them and The Followers. Giving them the weapons was a strategic decision, not a humanitarian effort. Jim didn’t like it, but he shrugged it off and LaRouche was grateful for that. He had enough on his plate without worrying about butting heads with the ex-priest every damn step of the way.
LaRouche stayed out of the way of the entire transaction and the farewells and the thanks. All of these people—Parker’s Place and LaRouche’s group alike—acting like they were lifelong friends. As though the simple fact that they were both alive somehow gave them all the common ground necessary to develop a lasting friendship.
LaRouche didn’t want a friendship with any of them. They were walking dead men. Just a matter of time before The Followers wiped them out.
Strange how even the definition of friendship had changed. A friend was no longer someone that you liked, or got along with. A friend was someone you believed would still be breathing in another month. No use wasting all that effort. No use exposing yourself to more heartache than you already had to deal with.
Maybe he had grown hard-hearted. Or maybe he took things harder than everybody else. Maybe he tended to internalize things more. Case in point, he didn’t see anybody else developing bleeding stomach ulcers. Sometimes he felt like he was tapped into deeper, swifter currents, while everyone else splashed around in the shallow waters and looked at him and wondered why he wouldn’t lift his feet off the ground.
Because he knew he’d be swept away.
Only way to stay present was to stay rooted.
Stay focused.
Their mission was to blow bridges, not make friends. When and if Captain Harden ever showed up then he could decide whether or not to make nice with the folks from Parker’s Place. But as of right now, they were headed north to the Roanoke River, to blow their first bridge, where Highway 45 crossed the river. If all went well, they would reach it before nightfall. If they made good time, perhaps they could get started setting charges before dark. Either way, the bridge would be rubble by tomorrow afternoon.
LaRouche ruminated on these things while he stood at the right side of his Humvee, leaning his back against the passenger’s side door and itching for some Red Man. He reached into his pocket and took out the pouch, the desire for a little buzz winning out.
“How you feelin’ this morning?”
LaRouche glanced up. Found Wilson standing there. “Fine,” he said, and tucked a wad of tobacco into his cheek, brushed his fingers off on his vest.
“No aches?” Wilson’s eyebrow went up, prodding. “No fever? No chills?”
LaRouche shook his head. “Nope. Seems I’m in the clear.”
Wilson shrugged. “Well…I’m glad.”
LaRouche snorted. “Go ahead and say it.”
“What?” Wilson laughed. “Say what?”
“You were right. Can’t contract it like that.”
Wilson held up a staying hand. “Now hold on. I never said you couldn’t contract it like that. I’m sure if you get enough infected blood in your mouth, you can get the plague. But based on what the guy from Virginia said, that’s the least likely method of infection.” Wilson clapped a hand on LaRouche’s shoulder. “But you never know. I’m glad you’re in the clear. And some people might say that you overreacted, but I’d like to see how they’d act if they got infected blood in their mouth.”
LaRouche smiled, a rare expression. “Thanks, buddy.”
Wilson looked behind him at the column of vehicles. They were all sitting at idle. The faces of LaRouche’s crew could be seen behind the obscuring reflections of the windshields. Off to the side, the people of Parker’s Place stood around and watched. The new owners of the rifles stood up front, weapons held across their chest proudly. Father Jim was the last to leave, still shaking hands with people.
“Think everyone’s ready,” Wilson hefted his rifle and shifted under the weight of his rig.
LaRouche opened his door and slid in. Joel was already up in the turret, and as Wilson crossed in front of the Humvee to take the driver’s seat, the door behind LaRouche opened up and Father Jim climbed in with a grunt and a groan.
LaRouche cleared his throat. “Ya’ll good back there?”
Joel mumbled something unintelligible from up top.
Father Jim reached through the narrow spot between LaRouche’s seat and the side of the Humvee and gave LaRouche a friendly squeeze of the shoulder. It took LaRouche by surprise a bit, forced down some of the latent hostility he’d been feeling towards the other man.
“Good to go,” Jim said. “Let’s get on with this.”
LaRouche watched the people from Parker’s Place shrink in the side view mirror as they rolled out in a wide circle and retreated down the narrow dirt road they’d come from. Just before rounding a bend towards the main road, he could see the father and the little girl—Jackson and Tessa—standing there watching them leave. The little girl in her dirty old dress. A man-sized coat draped over her shoulders like a blanket. One skinny, stick of an arm raised up and waving to them.
LaRouche didn’t wave back. He faced forward. Let a slow breath out of his nose and hugged his rifle closer to him. “Bullshit,” he mumbled, inaudible to anyone else in the rumbling vehicle as they jostled over the pot-holed road, most of the gravel worn away and now just dirt and mud.
They exited out onto paved road. Rolling pasture and cropland stretched out to either side, lines of trees delineating one property from another, the stands looking like short hedgerows in the distance. A d
efunct tractor standing in the middle of a half-harvested field of hay, the giant rolled bales at intervals behind it, marking its progress. The hay turned from golden to a grayish brown, the perfect circular form rotted and drooping, like it was in the process of melting into the earth.
They approached a junction marked 64.
“Make a right,” LaRouche said.
Wilson made the right without stopping and the rest of the convoy followed.
“Gonna stay on this for a while.” LaRouche shifted in his seat as though preparing for a long journey. “It’s rural most of the way, so we shouldn’t hit too many snags.”
The scenery didn’t change.
A few vehicles on the road, but most of them were far enough towards the shoulder, and sparse enough that they were able to dodge around them and didn’t have to stop to push cars out of the way. With a sigh, LaRouche dropped his window, feeling the cold immediately, as it sucked the body heat off of him. He rested the muzzle of his rifle in the open window and stared out. Behind him, he could hear Jim’s window drop as he followed suit.
LaRouche watched the world fly by past the muzzle of his rifle, a familiar view. A monotonous view. Melancholy in its compulsiveness. Obsessive caution that forced you to point a weapon at the world when the softer part of you only wanted to look at it and for once simply appreciate the sunrise lighting up the countryside, or the low fog that clung to where the trees met the fields. But instead you only scanned, scanned, scanned for threats.
He stared at three figures that stood in the middle of a field. Human. Not sane, he didn’t think. They huddled over something that had fallen in the field, bending over it and feeding, then standing up as the sound of the convoy reached them. The three figures turned towards the road and followed them with the same blank sense of curiosity that any predatory animal gives a human in a vehicle. LaRouche stared back at them with an empty sense of apprehension, knowing that even if they ran after them, they would never reach them. Just before they passed out of sight, one of them bent back down to its meal.
LaRouche eyed the rising sun, giving a yellowed, aged look to everything. Late to bed? He wondered about the infected out in the field. Or “hunters”, like we saw in Sanford?
The convoy trundled on. The gentle rocking motion, the rumble of the vehicles moving at a steady 35-40 miles per hour, made his eyes droop with all the sleep that his spring-loaded mind had kept away the night before. He drifted off, snapped awake, back and forth like that for a time, unsure how much time passed because one mile of eastern Carolina farmland looked exactly like the next.
It was the braking that jerked him awake again. The vehicle coming to a stop, and LaRouche’s head tipping forward, almost smacking into the buttstock of his rifle before he snapped alert again. The simple motion of the vehicle slowing set his heart racing on ahead.
“What happened?” he mumbled, sucking in a bit of drool that threatened to spill over his lip.
Wilson sat erect in his seat, neck craned out, eyes narrowed. “Straight ahead,” he pointed.
LaRouche saw it, maybe a few hundred yards ahead of them. They came out of a turn through some forested area, and this was the first straightaway. There ahead of them were two abandoned cars pushed together, their noses touching at the center line, bodies angled so that they formed an arrow pointing at LaRouche.
“You got it, Joel?” LaRouche yelled up.
“Yeah I got it.” Joel’s boots fidgeted nervously on the radio.
Jim was between Joel’s legs and LaRouche, thrusting a finger out. “You see that? You see that guy right there?”
LaRouche squinted, saw a form walking upright between the cars.
Staggering, actually.
A man. Shirtless. His chest a bloody mess.
Infected, LaRouche thought instantly.
But the man looked like he was bound at the wrists, his hands secured behind his back.
“Holy shit,” Wilson’s face drooped. Some mix of astonishment and dismay. “Is that Nick?”
CHAPTER 29: ONE SHOT
No.
LaRouche immediately rejected it. Nick had gone back to Camp Ryder. Nick had gone back to be with his family. To make sure that they were safe. To make sure that it wasn’t just radio problems that kept them from making contact. Nick had left days ago. There was no way he could be here now.
He thought it, but he didn’t truly believe it.
He believed his eyes, which clearly saw the man. Knew him less from his face, which distance and blood obscured, but from the lankiness of his form, the way his shoulders sat high like he held them in a permanent shrug.
Nick, you stupid sonofabitch…
“Cover me,” LaRouche spit out.
Wilson growled something, but didn’t protest—knew better than to argue with LaRouche on things like this, and the other man was already out the door. Instead he turned to the backseat and looked at Father Jim. “Fuckin’ go with him!”
Jim shoved his way out, gritting his teeth.
In the turret, Joel’s legs danced about. “Who is it? Did you say it was Nick?”
In the street, LaRouche had his rifle up. He sighted in on Nick as the two men approached each other, Nick moving with the look of someone half dead, bleeding from his head and chest, his eyes blank with pain and exhaustion, his mouth hanging open like a dead fish. LaRouche kept moving, slow and controlled, heel-to-toe, his rifle first on Nick, but then scanning, scanning to either side, scanning into the woods and behind the two cars that blocked the roadway ahead.
Somebody’s out there, he knew.
“Nick,” LaRouche called out as they drew within twenty yards or so of each other. “Stop right there! Stop where you are!”
Nick didn’t stop coming. He opened his mouth and a pitiful sound came out of him: “Sarge…”
“Fuckin’ stop!” LaRouche bellowed, putting his rifle back on the man. “Stop walking!”
Nick seemed to register the word, his feet stuttered to a stop. His whole form drooped.
LaRouche didn’t know why, but he thought, He’s a suicide bomber. He’s gonna blow up the convoy. He could clearly see the man wasn’t strapped—at least not in the front. But he couldn’t see his hands. Couldn’t see whether they held a grenade, or some other explosive device. He really had no justification for this feeling, didn’t know who would have captured Nick and put a bomb on him in the first place.
The Followers?
“Please,” Nick croaked.
“Don’t come any closer!” LaRouche shouted. “Turn around and face away from me!”
“Please…”
“Fuckin’ do it or I’ll shoot you right now!”
A warning tone from Jim: “Sarge…”
LaRouche turned his head to the right to project his words at Jim, but kept his eyes on Nick. “Shut the fuck up, Jim! Either help me out or get the fuck back in the truck!” He re-faced Nick. “I said. Turn. The fuck. Around!”
Nick’s head lolled. He turned, lazily, back the way he had come. LaRouche squinted to see over his rifle’s sight post, could see Nick’s hands tied up with some sort of brown rope. The fingers and palms were nearly purple from loss of blood flow.
LaRouche moved forward again, closing the twenty yards at a steady pace, lowering his rifle just slightly as he came within arm’s reach of the man. “Turn around,” he commanded.
Nick turned. His face was a bloody mess of abrasions and purple and yellow bruising. Brown flecks of dried blood still clung to his upper lip and cheek, and crusted the insides of his nostrils. His right eye was swollen shut, the skin stretched tight. But it was not his battered face that made LaRouche’s jaw drop, his heart plummet. It was Nick’s chest.
“Oh, God…” Jim muttered.
Words. Words had been carved into Nick’s chest, the red meat almost invisible behind the red blood that still poured out of the wounds and slaked his abdomen. But here, up close and personal, where you could see the texture and the glistening, twitching muscle fiber
s, the writing was clear.
GO BACK OR DIE
LaRouche looked up, stared into Nick’s one good eye.
Nothing there but defeat.
Nick closed his eyes, as though he didn’t want LaRouche to see what was there. “Please…you should go back.”
“What?” LaRouche had nothing else to say.
Nick’s voice raised a bit. “You should go back and tell the others! Tell them not to…”
Nick’s chest burst.
A thunderous rifle report.
Nick’s eyes rolled up, and his body pitched forward.
Brutal pain exploded through LaRouche’s left arm. He twitched backward, dodging Nick’s falling body as it landed face-first in front of him. Tried to bring his rifle up, but his arm wouldn’t cooperate. Jim yelled, reaching down for Nick, getting on his knees and trying to plug the hole in the man’s chest that spewed out onto the concrete.
LaRouche looked at his arm, half-expecting it to be hanging by a thread of skin or gristle, but there was only a dark hole in his jacket, just above his elbow, the fabric clinging to his arm and blooming with a glistening blackness. In one movement he let his rifle drop to his chest and swept up his pistol as he backpedaled, instinctively cradling his injured arm to his chest.
“Jim! Let’s fucking go!”
Jim looked back at him, then turned and faced the far woodline, where the shot had come from. He looped an arm through Nick’s bound hands, turning them into a yoke for dragging, and began to try to pull the man behind him. He looked up at LaRouche, as though asking for help.
LaRouche took one glance at Nick. Head hanging, tongue bulging out. Blood pouring from his mouth and from the wound in his chest. Enough blood that it streamed in rivulets towards the shoulder of the road. Too much blood.
“He’s fucking dead!” LaRouche screamed at Jim. “Leave him!”
Then he summoned every ounce of self-control, forcing himself not to turn and run despite every instinct to do so. Because no matter how much Jim had begun to grate on him, no matter how much Jim trying to drag that dead body and looking at LaRouche like he was wrong for leaving it behind, no matter how much that made him want to throttle the ex-priest, he wasn’t going to turn and run and leave Jim on the road by himself.
