Harden

by D. J. Molles

  We got here as quick as we could.

  A few gnats had already managed to scent him out. They hovered around his eyes and ears, and he waved them off. The spring sunshine was just now cresting the trees and warming the cool shadows that the night had left. The gnats seemed to like this intermediate temperature.

  Lee snapped the fingers of his left hand, and glanced into the truck.

  From between the two front seats a head protruded. Long, wolf-like snout. Pointed ears swiveling in his direction. Golden eyes locked in with intensity.

  “Deuce,” Lee said, quietly. “Come.”

  The dog needed no further encouragement. It was a nervy dog by nature, and sought to stick to Lee’s side whenever possible. Deuce scrambled out. Hit the ground at a trot, then cut a wide circle around Lee, with his nose in the air.

  The golden eyes looked everywhere. In the woods. Towards the field. Towards the tractors and their implements sitting lifelessly in the dirt. And always, every couple of seconds, a glance up at Lee, as though Deuce were using Lee’s face as a gauge for whether or not he was operating correctly.

  After a few more circles, Deuce plastered his side to Lee’s leg and let out a tiny chuff.

  “Nothing?” Lee kept his eyes up. Scanning the fields, although he felt some of the tension ebb from him. If Deuce wasn’t growling, then there likely wasn’t any infected nearby.

  However, they moved fast. Very fast. You might think you were safe, but that could change very quickly.

  Lee made it a point never to let himself feel safe.

  He gently closed the door to the truck, then looked through the open window.

  Tomlin in the driver’s seat. The usual glint of mischief in his eyes had become an intense hyper-focus. His normally good-humored face was pinched down, his lips tight.

  Abe sat on the rear bench seat. His dark, serious gaze scrutinizing everything, as though that rock over there, or that tree, might suddenly come to life and threaten them.

  “Alright,” Lee said. “I’m gonna walk you in. Go slow. Stay frosty.”

  Lee glanced behind him, raised a hand and twirled his index finger in the air once—we’re rolling.

  Then he started walking.

  Deuce trotted alongside him.

  The trucks rolled, their tires making slow and constant crunching noises on the dirt beneath them.

  The sun was warming the back of his neck. The smell of morning dew rising. Sand. Pine needles. Freshly turned dirt.

  Somewhere off to his right, a crow cawed obnoxiously, and took to the air. Its argumentative voice faded with distance.

  Lee snugged up into his rifle. Raised the muzzle as he walked.

  Around them the trees stretched out. Still and silent.

  He stopped first at the tractor that had been drilling post holes. He surveyed the scene from a few paces off, taking in the details. They’d drilled maybe a dozen post holes along the wood line. They’d managed to erect a few of the steel, ten-foot posts. But they hadn’t put up any of the chain link, or the high voltage wires.

  He heard footsteps behind him and turned with a jerk.

  Julia had exited her truck and was approaching him with her usual soft stride.

  “Relax,” she said, though it was almost tongue-in-cheek.

  No one was relaxed. Especially not outside the Safe Zone.

  “You just can never stay in the truck,” Lee mumbled.

  Julia shrugged.

  She liked to do her own thing. She was about as bullheaded as Lee himself. They got along well. Except for when they didn’t, which was usually when their bullheadedness clashed.

  Deuce sauntered over to the tractor with the auger attached and gave it a once over with his nose. He found something interesting on the ground and spent some time inhaling it fervently, then lost interest and moved on.

  He still had not growled.

  “Look like primals to you?” Julia asked.

  “That would be my guess.”

  Julia’s restless gaze had wandered on from the abandoned fencing operation. Out across the half-tilled fields. To the trailer and HEMTT. She nodded towards it. “There’s your last stand.”

  Lee followed her gaze. Closer now to the trailer, he saw some details he hadn’t seen earlier. There was a peppering of bullet holes in the metal siding. Likely bullets that had been shot from inside out. Shooting at the creatures that had surrounded them.

  “Alright,” Lee said. “Let’s move it in.”

  They started walking again. Rifles up higher now.

  The two pickup trucks trundled alongside them.

  Deuce took a hurried piss on the side of the tractor’s tire and trotted to catch up with Lee and Julia.

  As they drew closer to the trailer, the scene began to clarify.

  A patch of blood here.

  Drag marks in the dirt over there.

  Footprints—both bare, and booted.

  A rifle lying dropped and abandoned in a clump of weeds. Brass casings all around it. The bolt locked back on an emptied magazine.

  A hand.

  A foot.

  The workers sent to secure this little field of agriculture had attracted the wrong attention. And they hadn’t had the fence up. The primals had come, probably from many different directions. Picked away at the workers and their protection detail.

  And it hadn’t taken them long, either. The protective detail had only had the chance to get out one radio transmission:

  “QRF!” the man had screamed. “QRF now!”

  Lee and his team had immediately dispatched from the Fort Bragg Safe Zone, twenty miles away, and they had hauled as fast as they possibly could over roads that were washed out, potholed, and obstructed by fallen trees. But not fast enough.

  Deuce growled.

  Lee stopped dead in his tracks.

  He was about ten yards from the trailer now.

  He glanced down at Deuce. The dog was stock-still next to his leg, his tail low and stiff, his body tense. He issued a long, protracted rumble in his chest that ended in a chuff. Ears completely forward. Locked onto that trailer.

  Lee looked at the closed trailer door. The siding.

  Bloody smears around the door.

  Whoever the primals had caught inside the trailer, they’d dragged them back out the front door. And whoever that had been, they’d been alive and struggling when it had happened.

  Behind Lee, the trucks rolled to a gentle stop, and a few doors creaked open. The team was well-versed with Deuce’s alerts. They didn’t need to ask what was going on.

  Carl and Tomlin flanked around Lee, moving with softly rolling footfalls towards the command trailer, their rifles trained on the door. They stopped, a pace or so away.

  Lee leaned down and gave Deuce a scratch behind the ears. “Good boy,” he whispered, then put that same hand on Deuce’s grumbling chest and gave it a gentle press. “Ssh,” Lee said.

  It was a new command that Lee was working on. And it didn’t always work.

  Deuce kept growling at the trailer, louder now, getting to that point where it sounded like he might start barking.

  “I hear you,” Lee hissed at the dog. “But you need to ssh.”

  Another press on the dog’s chest.

  Deuce glanced at him. Then took a half step backwards and was silent.

  “Good boy,” Lee mumbled, bringing his rifle back up to the door of the trailer.

  He approached, Julia right behind him.

  Nate and Abe stayed behind the wheels of the running trucks, ready to go into escape maneuvers at a moment’s notice.

  Lee pulled up to the right of the door, sidled up close to Carl’s tall form. The sun was shining off of Carl’s sweating, prematurely-bald scalp. He blinked as a drop of it got into his eye. Glanced at Lee with eyes as still and cold as a deeply frozen lake.

  “You hear anything?” Lee breathed.

  Carl nodded once. Pulled his lips back and gave two deliberate chomps of his teeth.

  The g
esture was disturbing, but its meaning was clear.

  Feeding.

  Lee caught Julia’s gaze, then nodded towards the door.

  Julia pulled her rifle up into a high-ready and side-stepped to the left of the door, her hand hovering over the doorknob. Then she looked at Lee.

  He squared himself to the door.

  Rifle up. Looking over the top of his sights.

  Julia’s fingers touched the knob. Squeezed. Gently turned.

  From inside, there was the sudden sound of something thrashing.

  A wet, throaty bark.

  Julia thrust the door open.

  Lee punched the entry hard, flowing into the room as the door opened. He shouldered the door onto its stopper, and for a moment thought there might be something behind it. But the second he’d taken a single step into the room, he caught a flash of pale flesh in his left periphery.

  A blur of movement.

  A high-pitched screech.

  Lee pivoted deftly on his right foot, eyes already in his optic by the time he faced left.

  Jaws. Teeth. Claws.

  Lee fired five rounds, backpedaling. His back hit the wall behind him.

  The thing hit the ground.

  Lurched. Trembled. Then rolled onto its back with a groan that turned into a gurgle, and then it was still.

  Lee’s heart hammered on the inside of his chest, worked its way up his throat, started pounding in his head. He consciously removed his finger from the trigger. Then lowered the muzzle a few inches.

  “Fuck,” his voice shook.

  “You good?”

  Lee jerked.

  Julia was standing in the door to his left, but she wasn’t looking at him. She, and her rifle, were addressed towards the thing on the floor.

  Lee let his eyes take in the entirety of the trailer for the first time.

  It was a small area. Metal cabinets on the walls. Two rolling chairs, both upended.

  Blood on the walls.

  On the floors.

  Brass.

  Bullet holes.

  Through the stink of spent gunpowder, Lee caught a heavy whiff of blood and bowels.

  Julia edged forward, towards the tangle of strangely-shaped limbs on the ground in front of them. Lee stepped forward with her.

  The thought crossed his mind to give it a security round, but he knew it was dead. Knew it by the worm of brain matter that was actively oozing out of a hole in its head. Curling, like pus out of a cist.

  “Got one,” Julia called to Carl and Tomlin outside. Rote. Mechanical. “Dead.”

  From outside the trailer, Carl called out: “Primal?”

  “Yeah,” Lee answered. He frowned as he lowered his rifle, standing over the body on the floor.

  It wasn’t human. Not in the strictest sense.

  Some bastardized version of it, though. The basics were there. It had two arms and two legs and a torso and a chest and a head. It had five fingers on each hand. Eyes and ears and mouth and nose.

  Head, shoulders, knees and toes.

  Yeah, all the basics were there.

  But could you really call them fingers? Or were they claws?

  Could you really call it a nose? Or was it a snout?

  Mouth too large to be normal. Gaping open.

  Lee twisted his head as he looked down at it.

  Strange.

  Not many teeth.

  The ones that were there were small. Like toddler’s teeth.

  In fact, the whole fucking body was small, wasn’t it?

  Small and pale and scrawny.

  Naked.

  Female.

  “Fuck me running,” Julia breathed.

  Lee swallowed and felt it go down hard, like taking a large pill on a dry throat. He looked at the wide, open mouth. The slick blood around it. The bits of gristle still stuck between the thing’s smallish teeth. Then his gaze tracked to the corner of the room where the primal had come from.

  A bloody pile of rags and limbs and intestines. A bare ribcage evident, poking up through a tattered green jacket stained with red.

  “Carl,” Lee called.

  Carl stepped into the trailer. He stood at the door and looked at Lee, then down at the body on the floor. He tilted his head, just like Lee had. Like a dog hearing a confusing noise. Then he stepped forward. Stood between Lee and Julia.

  He reached out with the toe of his boot and turned the head so that he could see it better. The shape and dimensions of the face. The small teeth. The bare gums where molars should have been.

  “Another one of the juveniles?” he suggested.

  “So it’s true,” Julia said.

  “I didn’t doubt it.”

  “First time I’ve seen one up close.”

  Lee shifted his feet. “We should take it with us.”

  Carl frowned. “Why?”

  “I wanna know how old it is.”

  “You want Doc Trent to take a look?”

  Lee nodded.

  “The fuck you think a general practitioner’s gonna do?”

  “Teeth. Bones. I dunno.” Lee shrugged. “He can make a better guess than me.”

  “What’s your guess?”

  Lee looked down at the body and tried to equate it to a human child, but it wasn’t a fair comparison. “No clue,” Lee decided. “That’s why I want Trent to take a look.”

  Lee switched the sling on his rifle from a single point to a two point, and then shoved it off to his side where it wouldn’t be in the way. He knelt to grab the corpse’s filthy feet. It stank like a wild animal. “Come on. Grab the other end.”

  He had the fleeting thought that maybe ignorance was bliss.

  But they were already carrying the body out.

  FOUR

  ─▬▬▬─

  THE UNION

  Marie stood at the Fort Bragg food distribution center, watching the lines of people like you might watch a kettle start to simmer.

  The woman at the lead of the queue had an expression on her face like she’d just been sold a dog turd disguised as a chocolate bar, and her voice was starting to rise.

  And the young woman on the other side of the table—the poor, hapless worker trying to hand this bitch a box full of rations—was trying to speak, but was losing the volume battle.

  The “food distribution center” was a really fancy name for what was essentially a few battered folding tables set up next to a flatbed truck with two hundred ration boxes stacked on it. The ration boxes themselves were a mix of cardboard crates and plastic laundry baskets that had been re-used God-knew how many times. Most of them were held together with duct tape.

  The whole setup was positioned in a parking lot outside of an activity center on the base. It’d been a cool night, but it was promising to be the warmest day of the year so far. Marie thought that maybe they should’ve set it up on the north side of the building, which was still in shade. They were on the southern side, and the sun was warming the concrete, and perhaps heating people’s tempers as well.

  Marie looked sidelong at Mitch, who stood to her right, and back a pace or two.

  He caught her looking at him and gave her a quirk of one of his bushy, chestnut eyebrows.

  Marie shook her head, knowing that if Mitch and his team got involved it was only going to make things worse.

  His team was in plain clothes today, but you could see the soft-armor that they wore beneath their shirts, and they still had their rifles, although they kept them slung on their sides.

  Ostensibly, they were there to keep the peace. Food was the flashpoint that certain people were using to rile up dissension in Fort Bragg.

  But Marie knew that what Mitch really wanted was to identify the “agitators.”

  Or “Lincolnists,” as the agitators had titled themselves.

  Marie stepped up to the side of her worker, took the box the girl was holding and set it down. She didn’t give the contents of the box a glance. She knew what was in it, because she’d been up all night filling it, and
hundreds of others just like it.

  Instead, she directed herself to the woman across the table.

  She was a tall woman, where Marie was short, so that Marie found herself looking up at her. The woman had short brown hair pulled back by a headband, so that it created an unfortunate, dirty halo that framed her severe features. Features made worse by the anger scribbled all over them.

  “Is there a problem I can help you with?” Marie said, as diplomatically as she could manage.

  “I don’t know if you can help me,” the woman spat, her halo of hair trembling as she spoke. “Can you give me some real fucking milk? Last week we had real milk.”

  “Last week there was enough for everybody to get real milk. We hope that there will be enough to do that again next week.” And then, because she couldn’t help herself, Marie said, “I can’t make the cows lactate any faster.”

  The woman pulled back like she’d smelled shit. “Oh. Nice. Now you’re gonna get smart with me. What is it? Marie, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am, that’s my name.”

  “Well I got a three-year-old at home. And she won’t drink this stuff!”

  From a few people back, a man leaned out and hollered, “Mine won’t either! I got the same damn problem! Can’t you let the people with the kids have the real milk?”

  Marie held out a hand. “We haven’t worked out a fair way to do that just yet—”

  “That’s not my problem,” the woman across from her said. “That’s your problem. You’re the one that’s supposed to have all this shit figured out.”

  Anger was starting to flush Marie’s cheeks. “Ma’am, I’ll do my best to work that out moving forward. But for right now, these are the boxes that we’ve been able to put together.”

  The woman, who was beyond being placated, shoved her hands into the box and batted around a handful of green packages like they were trash. “And these! These fucking MRE’s! They gave my five year old constipation for three days!”

  Another chorus of agreements from the line of people.

  Marie blinked rapidly.

  She couldn’t believe her ears.

  Two years ago, she’d slapped a one-cup scoop of rice and beans in a coffee can and people thanked her for it. She remembered her heart breaking to be thanked for so little. She remembered the faces of those people as they looked at the tiny amount of food they had and tried to figure out how they were going to divvy it up amongst their family.