The Remaining: Fractured

by D. J. Molles

  Decision time.

  Lee grabbed Devon’s shoulder, for no other reason than he was the closest. He shouted, “You go low around the corner! I’ll go high!” He made a wide circling motion with his hand. “I’m gonna swing around you and go for the door. Don’t stop shooting until I’m in front of you.”

  Devon nodded. “Okay. I got it.”

  Lee shook his shoulder. “And hey…”

  “What?”

  “Don’t fucking shoot me.”

  “Okay.”

  Lee and Devon switched places quickly so that Devon was closest to the corner. Lee pushed him down to his knees and prepared to move. Behind them, another infected dodged around the corner, received a volley from Jacob that clipped its arm, and then jumped back into cover.

  He took one breath, because that was all he could afford. Then he slapped Devon hard on the back and shouted, “Move!”

  Devon popped out, began firing.

  Lee jumped around him, took the center of the stairs and charged forward, firing as he went. Little dots appeared all over the steel door as the bullets punched through. Lee could see the muzzle of the gunman’s rifle sticking out of the door, spewing out smoke in jarring concussions that tingled in Lee’s sinuses, but he just kept pushing forward because he knew that the motherfucker behind the door couldn’t see him. As all the holes appeared in the door, perforating it in every place that the gunman could possibly be, Lee could hear the man screaming, a high-pitched wail of fear and pain.

  Lee slammed into the door with everything he had, trapping the rifle between the door and the jam. He reached down and grabbed the hot barrel, burning his skin, but he didn’t feel it. He pulled the door just slightly and ripped the rifle out of the gunman’s grip, sending it clattering down in the entryway.

  He opened the door, saw the man on his knees, clutching his gut with blood-soaked hands, still screaming, and he kicked the man in the face. The teeth clacked noisily and the consciousness immediately left the man’s eyes. Lee didn’t think he would regain it before the wounds in his gut bled him out.

  Another man was off to the side, his rifle laying at his feet and he raised his hands and waved them, a dark splotch spreading in the seat of his pants. “Don’t shoot me! Don’t shoot me!”

  Lee leaned on the door until it was as open as far as it would go and he could see farther into Camp Ryder. He pointed his rifle at the man begging for his life. It was strange for just a split second, because he knew the man. Wes was his name, Lee thought. He’d helped Lee build the rain catches that sat on the side of the Camp Ryder building. A little talkative, but otherwise a nice guy.

  Lee put a foot into the man’s shoulder, pushing him to the floor. “Get on the fuckin’ ground!”

  The man flattened himself, his hands covering his head.

  Lee held the door, almost looked behind him to see if the others were moving up, but they didn’t require an invitation. Devon came staggering up the stairs, nearly tripping over the unconscious man in the doorway and the rest of them followed.

  And then suddenly the doorway to the building was jammed with bodies. Lee turned and looked and could see a column of perhaps fifteen or twenty people, all bunching into the alcove of the Camp Ryder building, mixing in with his entry team and trying to get the hell away from Shantytown. At first, Lee thought that it was because of the gunfight going on. But then he saw the other shapes that slipped in and out amongst the shanties.

  The hunters were in Shantytown, and they moved like foxes in a henhouse. Like a feeding frenzy. They reached out and grabbed at anyone who was within reach, their teeth gnashing wildly as their prey ran about in a sheer panic. Two of them seized upon a woman as she burst through the door of her shanty, screaming, and they dragged her to the ground where Lee could no longer see her, though he could see the creatures’ arms ripping at her, could see the blood spurting up onto the outer wall of the shanty, and then one of the hunters took hold of the woman’s leg and began dragging her towards the fence.

  Lee kept his body pushed up against the door, people shoving past him, climbing over each other in a sheer panic. Most of them were unarmed, but Lee didn’t have time to check them—if he would have tried to stop them, he would have been trampled. Just inside the building, Lee could hear his team shouting commands at someone, and the column of people slowed to a standstill, unable to push into the building.

  Jacob came around the corner into the alcove and stopped in the middle of the stairs, just before the jam of people that kept Lee pinned to the door, all of them still trying to squirm their way in. Jacob opened his mouth as though to shout, and Lee knew what he was going to say—that the infected were coming. But Jacob saw the people, saw their panic, and knew it would only make it worse. So he shut his mouth, and then turned his back to Lee and faced out.

  One of the infected came around the corner, on all fours, its arms and legs scrabbling for purchase on the gravel. It propelled itself towards Jacob and he let out a small scream of surprise at the thing’s sudden appearance and danced backwards a bit, firing several times and stopping it dead in its tracks.

  Someone in the back of the crowd of people pushing through the door heard the gunshots and turned in time to see the infected crumple to the ground. They screamed, “infected!” and the already-palpable fear of the group exploded into full-blown hysteria.

  Lee turned his head and bellowed into the Camp Ryder building, “Get these people inside! Get them inside the fucking building, NOW!”

  Lee took one breath, two breaths, and whatever was stopping the people from getting inside was abruptly removed and they began to pile in again. He turned to Jacob and waved. “Jacob! Get in here!” But even as he said it, he knew, he just knew that the infected would pile into the opening of that alcove before all of these people could get into the building and close the doors behind them.

  And Jacob knew the same damn thing.

  Two more infected rounded that corner, already fixated on Jacob.

  Lee raised his rifle, began firing around and over the civilians that crowded him. He aimed to hit whatever Jacob did not shoot at, trying to give him time. Jacob stood in the middle of the stairs, shooting to his left, then shooting to his right. He fired three rounds into one infected, toppling it backwards, then pivoted and fired four more rounds into another as it reached for him, stopping the thing dead in its tracks as the last round plastered through its cranium. An infected that he’d already shot continued to crawl towards him and he planted his foot on the brow of the thing, shoving it back and destroying it with two point-blank shots. Jacob was lost in the sudden orgy of violence and seemed for a moment to forget that he was in danger.

  “Jacob!” Lee yelled. “Get the fuck in the building!”

  Two more came at Jacob, came around the corner quick, and Lee could not fire on them because he would have had to fire through Jacob. Jacob yelped, lurched backward away from them, tried to backpedal, but tripped. As he went down, Lee sighted in on one and fired, sending three rounds through its chest but not stopping it before it landed on top of Jacob and the man began to scream.

  Lee pushed forward, breaking away from the crowd, just as the second infected landed atop Jacob and for a moment, Lee could not even see the scientist. He could only see the infected, how they were burying their faces into their victim and clamping down with their jaws, biting into his belly and ripping around until Jacob’s guts began to fold out onto the ground. Jacobs screams became harsh and breathless and he tried weakly to push the creatures away from him with his rifle.

  No matter how close they were to Jacob, Lee had to take the shot. He fired into the tangle of arms and legs and blood and the first infected jolted backwards, its jaw ripped from its face and its left eyeball punched out by a well-placed round. But the second creature grabbed a hold of Jacob’s legs and began dragging him backwards. Trying to take him away.

  Just like the lady in Shantytown.

  Jacob tried to fight it, but he couldn’t m
aneuver the rifle in his grip anymore and either shock or the purity of his fear was causing his entire body to seize up. The rifle tumbled out of his grip as the thing pulled him down the stairs. The infected twisted and screeched at Lee, but Lee spread his feet, got a good sight picture, pulled the trigger, and put a bullet straight into its mouth, pulverizing its brain stem and killing it instantly.

  It collapsed onto Jacob. Lee ran forward, feeling the blood pounding through the veins in his temples, warping his vision. He quick-footed down the steps, swinging his rifle back and forth, certain that another infected was going to come around the corner. But they were out in Shantytown now. They’d gone after the easier prey, and they were already beginning to pull back. Two of them clung to the tops of the fence with one hand, and with their other hands clutched a body by the leg. Lee stared at the dead faces in horror, thinking that he recognized them. He knew those people, even if it was only in passing. Then the hunters slipped over the top of the fence, pulling the limp corpses over with them where they seemed to disappear.

  Lee’s first instinct was to shoot at them. He thought perhaps those people they were carrying were still alive, and maybe just maybe he could save them. But he could see how limply they swung against the fence and were pulled to the other side. It was not the looseness of a person knocked unconscious. It was complete lifelessness. So Lee just stared at them as they went, stunned and sickened.

  Two other hunters vaulted the fence, both of them carrying parts of a body in their mouths—one with part of a leg, and the other an arm. The last one of them looked back and for a brief, strange moment, Lee was certain that it was looking directly at him. Just a strange, freakish and mutated version of what had once been a person, crouching there atop a fence with a bloody limb hanging from its mouth. Then the thing simply dropped over the other side and was gone.

  They had made their kills. They had taken what they came for.

  Their hunt had been successful.

  Lee remembered what he had descended the steps for. He looked down at his feet, saw the ruined man lying on the steps in front of him. He came down to his knees at Jacob’s side. The stomach had not only been torn open, but there was obvious damage to his organs as well. Even if Lee could have piled all of those guts back into Jacob’s body, they would have leaked their contents into his blood and Jacob would have gone into septic shock.

  Jacob’s eye fluttered, his mouth lolling open. His body pumping all kinds of doping chemicals into his blood. Lee stared down at him, wanting to say something to keep him awake, keep him talking, keep him fighting. But for what? What good would it do? Besides the irreparable condition of his insides, Jacob had been bitten. All that infected saliva had gotten inside of him. The bacteria coursed through his veins, replicating, infesting, clustering at his frontal lobe.

  “Fuck,” Lee muttered and grabbed Jacob’s hands.

  They squeezed back. Jacob opened his eyes as though struck with a sudden urgency. “Notebook in my backpack,” he mumbled, blood working into the corners of his mouth.

  Lee nodded. “Okay, Buddy. Notebook in your backpack.”

  Jacob’s head rose off the ground, trembled violently. “There are some things…just read it.”

  “Okay. I’ll read it.”

  Jacob looked Lee in the eyes. “It’s not good, Lee. It’s not good.”

  The sounds of the world around him seemed suddenly to envelope him, as though his brain could no longer block them out. There were people shouting inside the building behind him. A few people yelling out in Shantytown. A kid crying. A woman screaming, though Lee couldn’t tell if it was pain or grief. There were gunshots still coming from the woods, from the snipers shooting at gunmen inside Camp Ryder, or perhaps shooting at the hunters as they attempted to escape with their meals.

  Jacob’s eyes crossed, looked skyward.

  “Jacob!” Lee shook him. “What do you mean it’s not good?”

  But the only response that Lee got was Jacob’s grip quickly fading, the hands that Lee held soon hanging there, limp. Lee looked at them, then dropped them, almost threw them away from himself and rocked back on his heels. He swore loudly, angrily. Looked around him to see if there were any threats that had crept up on him while he was distracted.

  Motion drew his attention up. At the front gate, a man hobbled under the broken section, dragging his left leg behind him. As he moved, a jagged piece of chain link fence caught the brim of his Yankees ball cap and it fell to the ground. The man turned back as though to get it, but then looked up and saw Lee staring at him.

  “Greg,” Lee churned, with all of the bitterness that could be imparted by a single word.

  Greg turned away and began to run, as fast as his wounded leg would allow him, kept looking back to see if he was being pursued, his arms pumping madly to make up for the momentum lost on his wounded leg. For a second or two, Lee just watched him, thinking about what Marie had told him about Jerry and Greg and Arnie and their whole fucking team, and everything that they’d done at Camp Ryder. All of the ways that they had ruined what Lee had built. All the harm that they had done to the people that Lee tried to protect.

  And then Lee thought about Shumate.

  Thought about how loose ends always come back to haunt you.

  No loose ends this time.

  Lee began to run after him.

  CHAPTER 42: WHAT IS REQUIRED

  In three steps, Lee pictured all the things that Greg had done. How he had worked alongside Jerry to overthrow everything that Lee had spent blood, sweat, and tears creating. How he was complicit in the murder of Bus, and the murder of Keith Jenkins. But mostly, it was how he had hurt the people that Lee called his own. Those that were dead, and those that still lived.

  Lee hit the gate, slid under it with a single hand steadying himself on the ground, the harsh gravel rasping through the knees of his pants and breaking the skin. He came up on the other side with barely a loss of momentum and continued after Greg. He was already gaining on him, Greg’s wounded leg slowing him to about half the pace of Lee.

  Fuck it, Lee decided. I’m just gonna shoot him.

  He raised his rifle and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  Empty.

  As he ran, he looked down, hands slapping his chest rig for a spare magazine as he dropped the one in the rifle. But he had no more spares. He’d used them all up. He was out of ammunition, and too damn late to turn back now. He began to unsling the rifle from around his shoulders, preparing to toss it.

  Maybe ten yards ahead of him, Greg fumbled in his waist band and he stopped abruptly and turned. Something small and black in his hands. Lee already knew what it was and put the brakes on his all-out sprint to catch up to Greg.

  Pop.

  Lee felt something hit his side. He didn’t stop to look at the damage. He gripped the rifle by the stock, holding it like a baseball bat and he hurled it at Greg’s face. A wracking pain split through his stomach. The rifle spun through the air and Greg tried to avoid it by raising a hand to ward it off, but it struck him anyways with a nose-breaking clatter and Greg stumbled back, stunned.

  Lee had already closed the gap. He leapt, his body horizontal, and he speared Greg right in the midsection. The two collided, air leaving lungs with an explosive hoomph. They landed in the dirt, rolling violently across the gravel, their scrambling feet kicking up dust and rocks. Lee grappled for the gun in Greg’s hand, as Greg contorted his wrist, trying to get a close range shot off at him.

  Lee grabbed it by the barrel and shoved it up and away from him. It was a small, subcompact semi-auto of some kind. It went off with an ear-splitting crack, so close to Lee’s head. Lee felt the slide work under his finger, ripping some of the flesh away, but he managed to hold his grip on it and the action jammed, failing to cycle back all the way and leaving the spent casing unejected in the chamber.

  With both of Lee’s hands wrapped around the gun, Greg saw his opportunity and slammed Lee in the face with an elb
ow. Lee wasn’t sure how many times and in how many ways his nose could break, but he felt another crack and excruciating pain shot through his face, back into some parts of his skull that he didn’t even know had nerve endings. It jarred him, almost to the point of unconsciousness, and he felt his strength suddenly drained out of him simply from the magnitude of the pain.

  Greg didn’t waste time or give Lee any chances. He rolled Lee onto his back and put his free hand on Lee’s chest, pushed the pistol up to Lee’s head with the other hand and without thought, with the complete intention to kill Lee then and there, he pulled the trigger.

  It mushed in harmlessly. It had never been reset.

  Lee had recovered enough to act on it before Greg could truly wrap his brain around the weapon’s malfunction and how he was going to fix it. Lee seized Greg’s wrist with both hands, and used the only weapon he had left. He already knew what he was going to do. He’d already decided on it. Brutality was required.

  He lunged out and bit down on Greg’s wrist. It was not a bite to inflict pain, or to simply scare Greg into getting off of him. It was a bite to inflict as much damage as possible, and Lee buried his face in the man’s wrist, and Greg began to shriek. Lee pushed his teeth into the meat between the radius and ulna bones of the wrist and when he could feel the hard, gristly cordage of Greg’s tendons between his teeth, he jerked back with his head. He could feel the gristle in between his teeth, could feel the tendons snapping as he clamped down and ripped back. Blood squirting into the back of his mouth.

  Greg recoiled backward, nearly catapulting himself off of Lee. The pistol went flying from his grip as his hand contorted into strange shapes and flopped around like a thing possessed. Lee gagged and coughed out the chunks and tendrils of Greg’s flesh and kicked the man in the chest, sprawling him backwards. Greg rolled, came up hunched over his arm, cradling it and screaming.