by D. J. Molles
Lee launched himself for the pistol on the ground, landing stretched out on his left side, right onto the gunshot wound. Bright, lightning pain scorched him, but he reached out his left hand—his weak hand—because it was the closest, and he wrapped his fingers around the gun.
Lee’s eyes were focused on the gun. But he could hear Greg, he could hear the wordless roar, and the sound of dirt and gravel scraping and shifting as Greg came at him, determined not to let Lee get the gun up. Lee held up one foot, trying to ward Greg off while he brought the pistol into his chest and racked the slide, clearing the jam. The spent casing flew out, a fresh one slamming into the chamber.
Lee felt his foot being swiped out of the way and he felt the heavy bulk of Greg landing on him. He rocked his hips up, gritting through the pain in his core and side, and he wrapped one leg around Greg’s midsection. He tried to get the other leg around, but Greg put his elbows down into Lee’s thigh, pinning it and spiking his femoral nerve.
The one leg was enough, though. It was enough to keep Greg from posting up on him. Greg thrust his arms forward, his one good hand grabbing massive handfuls of Lee’s clothing, the fingers digging viciously into the skin, desperate like a wild animal. Like he was trying to claw his way up to Lee’s chest, reaching for the pistol.
Lee pulled the pistol as far back as he could, then looked down the line of his body. He saw Greg, his head at about waist level, staring up at Lee with his teeth bared, mouth wide open, an incredible mask of rage and pain.
Lee punched out with the little subcompact pistol and fired.
The bullet entered the corner of Greg’s right eye, splashed through his cranial cavity, and erupted out of the back of Greg’s skull, near the spine. Greg instantly was still, all the weight of his body crashing down onto Lee, and everything that was in his head began coming out, pouring over Lee’s midsection.
Lee just sat there, staring at the mess of it and trying to catch his breath. He felt his whole body trembling and he wasn’t sure whether it was cold or exhaustion or adrenaline. For a moment, all he could hear was his rushing blood, but as his heart seemed to downshift, another sound came to him. The sound of feet pounding through the woods. Crashing through brush. Lee stretched out onto his back, looking at the world upside down, holding the little pistol out with both hands. Finger on the trigger. Ready to go again.
“Whoa!” A familiar voice. “Easy, Buddy. Friendly fire.”
Tomlin standing there, breathing hard from a sprint, holding his bolt gun in one hand, the other waving at him.
Lee relaxed slightly and took long, deep breaths. He smelled the air. Tasted the dust and the scent of stone. Loam and leaves from the nearby forest. The sharp tang of cordite that clung to him. And blood. Familiar. Intimate. Bitter.
Some of it his. Most of it Greg’s.
Lee wiped his mouth. Pulled a piece of Greg from his tongue and shuddered violently. But he didn’t think about what he’d done. He didn’t contemplate the savagery of it. And perhaps that was a victory in and of itself. But it was a cold one. A broken one. That there was not enough left of his old morals, or that he had strangled that part of himself into silence. He didn’t know and didn’t care. He’d done what needed to be done.
He’d done what was required of him.
Tomlin looked out into the trees. “C’mon, we need to get out of the woods.”
Lee leaned up, pushed Greg’s body off of him. Almost immediately his midsection grew cold as the blood that soaked his clothing cooled in the air. He rolled painfully onto his side, and lifted his jacket to look at the wound in his side. Two little red pock-marks, separated by about six inches of flesh, one entering just above Lee’s left hip-bone, and one exiting just under his bottom ribs. The flesh between the two holes was swollen and puffy-looking.
Tomlin bent over it. “That hit any bones?”
Lee lifted his hips a bit, then maneuvered into a sitting position. It was painful—very painful—but not pulverized-hip-bone painful. He shook his head. “No. Think it’s just skin and muscle.”
“Well, shit…” Tomlin extended a hand to Lee. “That’s nothing.”
Lee accepted the hand and let himself be pulled to his feet. He steadied himself on Tomlin, blinking rapidly to clear his head, fighting off a bit of faintness. “Did they take the building?”
“I think they got it, buddy,” Tomlin said, taking a few steps away and stooping to retrieve Lee’s rifle. He held it up to Lee. “Haven’t heard any gunshots from inside. Hopefully that’s a good thing.”
Lee put the sling of his rifle over his neck, looked down and regarded the dead man lying in the road. He stood there for just a second or two, watching the blood soak into the ground. He did not feel remorse or regret for the man. But he did feel a heaviness. A gravity.
“Come on,” Tomlin prodded, pushing him gently towards Camp Ryder.
Lee stumbled along. “He had a kid,” Lee said as he walked. “And there are others. Others just as guilty as Greg. But they still have children. Still have families. How the fuck are we gonna deal with that?” He spat in the dirt. “Everyone’s all fucking intermingled.”
Tomlin just shook his head silently, kept looking behind him to make sure that there was nothing stalking them. Ahead of them, barely visible past the gates, a small crowd had formed, watching in a sort of daze as Lee’s team led two men out of the Camp Ryder building, their wrists bound behind their backs. They forced them to sit in front of the building, prisoners. They were quickly joined by a third and a forth.
“How are we gonna treat ‘em?” Lee said. “Criminals? Enemy combatants?”
“We’ll work on it.” Tomlin said, quickening his pace just slightly.
Lee shivered a little as the wind continued to chill the blood on his clothes. He didn’t think he’d lost that much blood, but then again, he didn’t feel quite right either. He could feel the hot and cold flushes over his skin. The tingling sensation across his face.
And goddammit everything hurt.
Nose and stomach complained the loudest, but it seemed his entire body was at least grumbling at him. Protesting. Getting ready to throw in the towel. You can be big and bad all you want, but at a certain point, the body just starts to break. It is not built for days on end of combat, with little sleep and little nutrients, and too many wounds to fix, too many infections to fight off.
Tomlin slowed a bit, turned to look at Lee. “You gonna make it?”
Lee waved him off. “I’m fuckin’ fine.”
Tomlin nodded. “Good to go?”
“Good to go.”
Ahead of them, Lee could see others were pouring out of the Camp Ryder building now. The sound of voices spiked as families and friends found each other alive. Some of them were supporters of Lee. Others were supporters of Jerry. There was also the sound of weeping. Lee would not have deluded himself to believe that the day could have ended without tragedy. It was simply unavoidable. It was the cost of doing business. All of the men who had allied themselves with Jerry, who had fought against this action, they had families, just like Greg. And their wives, their children, they would gather around the bodies of their husbands and fathers and they would scream and tear at their hair. And there would be still others who had simply gotten caught in the crossfire. Innocents.
Cost of doing business, Lee kept telling himself.
They navigated the broken gate and began walking towards the cluster of people in front of the building. Lee stared at it, thinking of how easily the infected hunters had vaulted over it. Thinking of how easily they could come inside Camp Ryder any time they wanted. These people were not safe anymore. And if Lee had figured it out, so would others. It would only be a matter of time before that fear began to invade people’s conversations. The fear that they would wake up one night being dragged out of their beds by sinuous arms and slathering jaws. The fear that no place was safe.
We’ll have to build higher, Lee thought. We’ll have to adapt our defenses.
As he and Tomlin approached the gathered crowd, heads began to turn. Fingers were pointed. Eyes went wide with surprise. Some reactions were good. Others bad. Some people shouted and clapped, broad smiles over their faces. Others stared on sullenly and murmured amongst each other. As Lee and Tomlin made their way through the crowd, they searched faces, and perhaps half of the people drew away from them, while the other half grabbed their hands and shook them, slapped them on the back and told them what a great fucking job they did.
Lee wanted to feel elated.
Mostly he just felt exhausted.
They reached the front steps of the building and stopped there in front of the four prisoners kneeling on the ground. Nate and Old Man Hughes stood with them, rifles ported but ready. When Nate saw Lee and Tomlin, his eyes immediately went to the bloody mess of Lee’s midsection, saw the hole in the fabric of Lee’s jacket.
“Holy shit, Cap.” He pointed. “You’re shot!”
Lee cleared his throat. “I’m fine. Are these the only prisoners?”
Nate blinked rapidly, then shifted his gaze from Lee’s wound to his face. “Uh…yes.”
Lee nodded, then pointed to the gate. “I need that gate fixed immediately. Put guards on it until its secure, and then we need to talk about how to increase the height…”
“Lee.”
He turned, found Angela standing on the stairs, Sam in one arm and Abby in the other. She descended slowly, a little unsteady on her feet. Her face was a swollen wreck. Blood scabbed around her nose and mouth. One eye nearly puffed closed, the skin around it shining purple and red.
He met her at the bottom of the steps to the Camp Ryder building. They approached each other cautiously, as though each feared the other was a mirage. They stared at each other for a moment, until Lee reached out and carefully touched the swelling around her face.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.
“Sorry for what?” she wiped her blood-crusted nose.
“I wasn’t here.”
She reached forward and put an arm around him. It was stiff at first, Lee frozen as though he could not remember how to be around her, and he feared that perhaps that part of him had been killed off with the rest of his old self. And perhaps a part of him feared that she would see it. She would see the ugly changes in him, that he would not be able to hide it from her, and she would fear the new creature he’d become.
But she looked right at him and pulled him close anyway. And it was the smell of her that made it real. It was acrid with sweat and stress, but it was her, and there was an odd, subconscious familiarity to it. The two of them leaned on each other, and they were what they were. Just wretched people with nothing left. That’s all any of them were. Just a bunch of desperate vagrants, broken and reprobate, with nothing in the world to call their own. Nothing but the people that they could reach out and cling to.
Angela’s shoulders shook only once, and when she pulled back from Lee, her face was calm. She looked at Lee, her eyes travelling briefly over his face and they did not recoil from what they found. And Lee thought he saw in her some of the very same coldness that he knew was in himself.
“You’re here now,” she said.
“Angela,” Sam’s voice was quiet and sober at their side.
Lee looked down and found the kid eyeing his wound.
“I think Lee needs a doctor.”
Lee put his hand on Sam’s shoulder. “I’m fine.”
Angela pulled back, looked at his midsection with wide eyes. “Lee…”
The doors to the Camp Ryder building flew open behind them and Devon came partially out. He looked around, seemed to be slightly surprised at the gathering of people. Then he found Lee’s face and he waved to him, his expression urgent.
“Captain! You need to come in here.”
Angela pulled away from Lee, her expression clouding as though she knew what they had found inside the building. As though on some level she was sickened by it. She took a single step back, then put her arms around Abby and Sam again.
Tomlin appeared at Lee’s side, touching his elbow gently. Lee looked at Angela and the two exchanged a brief, unspoken message. Lee nodded, just slightly, and then ascended the steps alongside Tomlin. At the doors, Devon ushered them through, careful to close the door behind him.
Lee stood there in the entryway and looked around bitterly at the building. It was all a defiled memory. He recalled the warm smells of Marie’s cooking, even remembered the underlying mechanical odor favorably, the smell of heavy grease and old, used engine oil that undercut everything in the building. Stains that time had a hard time erasing. And the warmth of it, from the cookfires, and from the people that were always jammed in here, clustered about, talking, commiserating, sharing their woes, their struggles, their triumphs. The rumble of conversation. The office up the stairs to the right and the stillness that could always be found there. Bus sitting behind his desk, stressing over small things. Always thinking about what was best for Camp Ryder. A staunch supporter of the people. At all costs. Even until the end. This place of refuge where Lee went, retreating from the harshness of the world outside. This place that could be solitary and temple-like in the dead of night, when everyone slept. This place that Lee had called home.
Now it was smeared with blood. Now the smell of it was cold and heartless, and the walls screamed of murder. Now it was simply a cement box. A tomb, full of silence and chill.
There was another man there, standing outside of a door at the far end of the giant open space. He was one of Old Man Hughes’ people. He held his rifle up, pointing into the room.
“What is it?” Lee asked, his voice brittle.
Devon clenched his jaw. “We found him.”
Then Devon’s eyes drifted down to the far end of the building, where the other man stood, rifle trained on something Lee could not see. Lee lowered his head, his face becoming set in stone. He walked through the building, passing through the shadows of the support beams that held the roof up. He reached the door and stood there stiffly, looking in.
Jerry was still alive. Skin pale like the underbelly of a fish. His profuse sweat made it appear just as slick and slimy. He leaned on a collection of five gallon buckets of food supplies that Lee had brought from one of his bunkers—rice, oats, beans. He had one arm jacked up over them, his head lolled off to the side, displaying a metal rod of some sort sticking out of his neck, blood oozing from the wound at a slow trickle.
Jerry stirred a bit, eyes widening as he saw Lee. He groaned, made a strange noise that vibrated oddly through his throat and came out as an unpronounced mewling sound. Fear. The desire to self-preserve. Jerry kicked with his feet like he was trying to get away, but he was weak. It seemed that Lee’s mere presence brought Jerry to the point of anxiety, as he mindlessly tried to back away from Lee, though there was nowhere else to go inside the tiny room, crammed in with all the buckets that Lee had given to Camp Ryder.
Lee turned to the man at the door. “Thank you. I’ll handle this.”
The man looked slightly confused, but then Lee stepped into the room, and he closed the door behind him. The man stared at the door, then looked up at Devon and Tomlin. Devon’s expression was something of fascination. Like a kid who wants to go poke at the roadkill. Tomlin’s was more reserved and he met the man’s gaze and simply shrugged.
Inside the room it was dark.
The doorway was just a bar of silver light along the floor. It took a few moments for Lee’s eyes to adjust, but then he could at least see the outline of Jerry’s body. The glint of the little metal object in his neck. Lee wondered what it was. Couldn’t quite tell.
He shuffled forward, his feet nudging up against Jerry’s legs and he knelt down, hissing a bit as his side inflamed him again, punishing him for such movements. When he was settled on his haunches, he folded his hands and looked at Jerry. He couldn’t see much of his face in the darkness. Just a little bit of the light reflecting off his eyes. Off the wetness of his sweat as it pooled with the
blood around his neck.
He reached forward, gently touched the object.
Jerry recoiled, gasping.
“Who did this to you, Jerry?”
The sound of Jerry’s mouth working. A wet, clicking noise. A gargled whisper: “Angela.”
Lee smiled, though he doubted Jerry could see it. That was fine. He didn’t smile to poke at Jerry. He simply smiled. Something like pride. “She’s strong, Jerry. Did you mistake her for something else?”
No response.
Then: “Help me.”
Lee stared through the dark, thought he saw the glistening of tears in Jerry’s eyes.
“Help me!” Jerry wheezed with a little more force.
No loose ends.
“No, Jerry,” Lee said softly. “We’re all just…done with you.”
Then, with nothing further to say, Lee simply reached forward and plucked the metal rod from Jerry’s neck. Lee felt the blood spurt out and he stood up, taking a step back. On the ground, Jerry began to thrash. His hands went to his neck, trying to keep the blood in. He tried to speak, but the blood from his clipped artery, the blood that had been mostly sealed by the metal rod, started pouring into the hole in his larynx, filling his throat with blood. He coughed violently, kept trying to take a breath, but every time he breathed he just sucked more blood into his lungs. He kept stubbornly coughing and taking gulps of air. He went on like this for almost a minute.
Eventually he drowned in his own blood.
Lee waited for absolute silence in the small, dark room. He waited for the last bit of air to bubble out of Jerry. Waited for the man’s foot to stop tapping against the buckets—the last involuntary twitches. He waited until it seemed he floated in a vacuum. Then he dropped the metal object—a tire pressure gauge?—and listened to it clank lightly on the ground.
He turned and opened the door. Light poured in. Bathed him.
He stepped out of the room, leaving Jerry behind.
CHAPTER 43: REPENTANCE
Harper and Julia crouched atop a water tower, facing north across the Dan River. Same thing as the Roanoke, just a different section of it. On the other side of the slow-moving, brown water stood Eden. Small town. A lot of neighborhoods, it looked like. The downtown area bisected into east and west sections by an offshoot of the Dan River.
