by D. J. Molles
Either or. Lee looked at the body for a long time as he sat at idle. Should he have dispatched the person so coldly? It was a person, after all. These were all American citizens, sick or not. Was it his place to wipe them out wholesale and without warning? The girl had attacked him, and Caddy Shack definitely seemed to be making a run for it, but thinking back to Hammer Guy, pounding on the glass with his hammer and saying “open the fucking door,” then carving “HELLP” into the dirt...perhaps the person was just looking for help. Looking for a place of refuge. In his fear of the infected, had he mistaken a cry for help as aggression?
Lee shuttered those thoughts away in a dark corner of his mind. Things to think about later. Right now, there were three potential survivors stuck on a roof. People that could be saved. Uninfected. Those were his priority, those were the people he was responsible for saving. Not the dead and dying.
Lee continued backing out of the driveway and onto Morrison Street. He headed south and did the only thing he could do: He hoped for the best.
***
Morrison Street stretched on through miles of farming country. To either side of the two-lane blacktop, fields would stretch out, framed by thin stands of forest. Mainly, Lee saw tobacco, but some of the fields were tilled dirt, and a few were corn. Every so often he passed a farmhouse, sometimes close to the road, sometimes out in the distance. He drove slowly, and when he saw a house, he would stop and look at it for a long moment, trying to determine if the previous residents were still using it.
They all appeared empty. The windows were dark or boarded up, the driveways overgrown with weeds. No sign of movement inside or on the neighboring fields. He would slowly drive on, after giving each house a look-over, constantly scanning the fields around him for signs of trouble. He did not like driving on these roads. Though Morrison Street was only a small back road, and raiders would likely stick to higher-traffic and more target-rich environments, he still felt as though there were eyes in the trees, watching him and waiting for a moment of vulnerability.
He came upon a curve that opened into a long, straight stretch of road. He stepped on the brakes, harder than normal, and came to a stop in the roadway. A large, green combine hulked in the middle of the roadway, blocking the southbound lane and most of the northbound lane. From the tire-marks in the dirt, it appeared to have come from the field to Lee’s right.
Lee immediately put a hand out to his M4, where it was sitting in the passenger seat. The road blockage was a typical ambush point. The raiders could be inside the combine, on the other side, or waiting in a nearby hide. Or it could just be a combine sitting in the roadway. He grabbed the 3x scope from his M4 and brought it to his eyes, surveying the field to his right, where a wide swath had been cut through the massive hay field, all the way up to the road. Using the magnifier, he noticed lumps scattered around the hay field, lying in the path cut by the combine. Lee wasn’t positive, but they looked like bodies.
He pictured some old farmer in blue-jean overalls and a straw hat, trapped in his little farmhouse, surrounded by unending acres of chest-high hay fields, and a horde of infected wandering through, like alligators in a moat. If Lee had been in that situation, the combine would have been the most likely ticket out. It showed a violent resourcefulness that Lee could appreciate, and again pictured the old farmer, laughing around a wad of Redman as he mowed both the grass and his captors down.
Lee took a moment to count the bodies lying in the path. Seventeen. Possibly more he couldn’t see. Assuming they were infected, that was a big group. Much more than the “five or ten” Sam had claimed to have seen. Did they have enough mental functioning to attack in organized groups, or did they just amble around, grouping themselves together out of some latent social instinct? And why did they not attack each other?
According to Sam, he had witnessed them killing each other. And his father compared them to a pack of wild dogs. Lee considered the pack instinct, as prevalent in human beings as it was in dogs, but more well-controlled in modern society. Social controls or not, human’s sought to be in groups. It was not a stretch of the imagination to believe that this would continue despite massive damage to the frontal lobe because of the bacterium. In fact, Lee believed that without reasoning abilities, many of mankind’s ingrained instincts would become more pronounced.
It was a lot of hypothesizing on not much evidence.
Lee eased the pickup forward, still keeping an eye on the combine and the surrounding fields, but less concerned with a raider ambush and more concerned with the possibility that the escaping farmer hadn’t gotten all the infected that were between him and freedom, leaving a few stragglers behind to attack travelers like Lee.
He drove the pickup around the combine, thinking that at any moment it would roar to life and a crazed old man in blue-jean overalls would run him over in the massive piece of farm equipment, shredding the pickup truck and Lee along with it. But the combine remained still as he passed, like a stuffed lion in a museum that you feel might come back to life as you walk by and pounce on you. Lee accelerated once passed, uncomfortable with having the thing lurking behind him.
Not a mile down the road, Lee saw something else that made him stop.
Approximately 50 yards from the roadway, in a tilled-dirt field to Lee’s left, a female figure was hunched over. Whoever it was, she had long blonde hair that stirred slightly in the breeze as it swept across the field. Her back was to Lee and her head was bowed, but she appeared to hold something that captured her interest, though Lee could not see what it was. She wore a white camisole and blue jeans and no shoes.
She knelt so motionless, that Lee would have driven passed her had her white camisole not stood out, though as Lee looked more closely, it appeared to be smudged with dirt and grime.
His first instinct told him that she was alive. Dead bodies do not remain in kneeling positions.
His second, more paranoid thought was that it was a trap. It was not unheard of for an ambush party to use a female that appeared to be lost or in distress as bait in a trap. He looked at her for a moment, then surveyed the area around her. It was an odd place for an ambush, not a bottleneck that would force a victim to come to her. Not much nearby cover for ambushers to hide behind.
Lee put the pickup truck in park and grabbed the M4 from the passenger seat. He gave his surroundings a good second look-over for any threats and then opened his door. The vehicle dinged, reminding him that his keys were still in the ignition and the pickup truck was running. After a moment’s consideration, Lee turned the pickup off and shoved the keys in his pants pocket before exiting the vehicle.
Immediately, he brought the rifle to his shoulder and scanned the area through the 3x magnifier. Now out of the car, he could hear the soft sound of crying lilting over the field. He looked at the woman’s back and watched her shoulders rise and fall in shudders.
He kept looking around, feeling like someone was creeping up behind him. He didn’t want to leave the pickup truck for fear that it was a trap and he would be too far to make it back, or that someone was waiting in the ditch to rob him of his only form of transportation.
He walked towards the woman, as far as the edge of the asphalt, then stopped. “Ma’am!” he called it out loud and commanding, his voice a cannon-blast in the stillness.
The figure of the woman stiffened and the head turned partially, as though she was regarding him out of the corner of her eye. He still could not see her face as her hair hung in front of it.
Something was wrong. “Ma’am, I’m Captain Lee Harden of the United States Army and I’m here to help you.”
That invisible, sidelong stare for another long moment. Then the woman turned her attention back to whatever was in front of her. Lee wanted to leave, but knew it was not an option. He stepped off the road and walked very slowly towards the woman, angling to her left, attempting to get a better read on her face and what she was holding. He kept his rifle at his shoulder and at low-ready.
“Ma’a
m...” he repeated several times as he drew closer to her, now within 20 feet. He wanted the woman to know he was walking up to her. “I’m coming to you, okay? Can you talk to me? Can you say something to let me know you’re still with me?”
He never received a response.
About 15 feet from her, he stopped. He was directly to her left and could see her face in profile. She’d been pretty once, and was still young, though all recognition and intelligence were drained from her eyes. Her mouth was hanging open and a frothy buildup shimmered at the corners of her mouth. Glistening trails of snot ran from her nostrils across the side of her dirty face.
“Oh God...” Lee swallowed against the hard fist clenching at his throat and pulled the rifle in a bit tighter, dropping his finger to the trigger.
The woman stared down at a small figure in her arms, pale and sallow. The eyes were sunken in and the lips puckered. The skin looked limp and leathery and the ribs were visible. The baby had been dead for some time.
Somehow his voice cut through to the woman and she turned her head. Lee noticed that she also was mere skin and bones, probably very near a death of malnutrition and dehydration. Her vacant eyes wandered across the field to Lee’s boots, then up, slowly, to his face. For a moment, Lee thought there was some sanity there, perhaps some hope. The woman shifted her weight slightly, causing Lee to take a step back, but she did not get up. She lifted her arms, the tiny corpse still cradled in her hands, and she extended the body towards Lee.
Can you help? Can you fix my baby?
The woman, or what was left of her, let out a soft moan.
Lee wanted to shoot her right there. Put her out of her sad existence. But he could not bring himself to do it. This was one of the rare infected that was not violent. Lee wondered what this woman had been like before the plague had destroyed her brain, if even when her reasoning centers had been rotted away, she could not be brought to violence. Lee thought she must have been a very kind person.
She did not deserve this. No one deserved this. Slowly, her hands and the emaciated figure they bore, sunk to the ground. Another sound, like a soft sigh, escaped her throat. Her eyes followed her dead child to the dirt, where it lay motionless, and once again she knelt, staring, unmoving except for the strands of her hair caught in the breeze.
Lee stepped away from the woman, leaving her to fade in her grief, her mind lost and wandering an endless plain of primitive, instinctual memories—the sensation of life from life, and flesh from flesh, of nurturing and love, but also of the empty loneliness of death, the desolation of loss.
When he was far enough away, he turned and ran back to the truck.
He got in and closed the door hurriedly, afraid that she had followed him, but when he looked back across the field, she still sat there. Strangely, he thought of Deana again, though he didn’t know why. Some small portion of him wished he’d had a family, but the larger part of him was thankful that he had survived alone. The loneliness was nothing compared to the pain of separation.
He started the pickup and kept driving.
***
He’d been on the road for nearly a half-hour when he finally came to a stop and looked out across a field, to a house in the distance. He’d passed so many open fields with no house attached, he was starting to think he had missed it and that Sam’s eyes were sharper than his. But here was a farmhouse set up on a hill, about 600 yards out from the road. He just couldn’t see anyone on the roof.
He pulled the magnifier off his rifle again and scoped the house. The magnifier was not as powerful as binoculars, but they gave Lee a slightly better image than the naked eye, and through them he could just make out what looked like two figures, lying down on the roof. Their dark clothes blended in with the roofing shingles. Though he couldn’t see them clearly, they did not look like they were moving.
In the yard below them, Lee could not see any infected. The front door to the house was hanging open, and it was possible that the ten infected Sam had reported were taking shelter from the heat inside, while the house’s original occupants baked on the roof.
Now came the question: should he traverse the distance to the house, putting himself at risk, and leaving his vehicle behind, only to discover that the figures on the roof were no longer alive...Or should he honk the horn to attempt to gain their attention, confirming that they were alive, but ruining all chances for stealth and making their rescue that much harder?
Lee knew himself better than to labor long over the dilemma. If the two on the roof failed to respond when he honked his horn, that would not be enough for Lee to leave them to rot on the rooftop. He would need to see them, look at them, and check them for pulses before he abandoned them.
Which simplified the situation.
There was a deep drainage ditch on the side of the road, separating him from the field that stretched out to the house. Traversing the ditch in the pickup truck was out of the question. It was possible that he could make it, but Lee preferred to be sure that his getaway vehicle would be ready for him if things went bad and he had to get lost. However, he did pull the vehicle as far off the roadway as he felt comfortable with, then exited and closed and locked the door quietly.
He hitched up his go-to-hell pack and dipped down into the drainage culvert. If he could get within a few hundred yards of the house he might be able to communicate with the two figures on the roof and hopefully plan an exit for them, if the threat of infected still remained.
Lee held out hope that the infected that had tried to kill the family earlier would have lost interest and left the area. Lee had absolute confidence in his ability to take on a threat, but there was no denying that the warped and destroyed minds of the people infected with the FURY plague didn’t go down easy. And taking on ten of them at a time was going to be that much harder.
He climbed up out of the ditch and headed towards the house, skirting along a small clump of trees that bordered the field. He moved at a trot, stopping every few moments to survey the area and check behind him. Each time he checked, he looked back at his vehicle. He didn’t like the way it was sitting there, all alone and painfully conspicuous on the side of the road. It was begging for attention.
He also took the time to look at the house and see what he could through the windows and the open front door, but he was either too far to see the movement, or there was simply no one inside. The thought meandered across his mind that, if the house was empty, what was the family still doing on the roof?
Unless they were already dead.
After several circuits of scooting along the edge of the woods and stopping and looking around, he was about two hundred yards from the house. That was close enough. He took another good look through his magnifier at the two individuals on the roof. It was two females, one about mid-thirties, the other a child, maybe ten. Still, neither moved. From this distance, Lee could not see the rise and fall of their chests to determine if they were breathing.
Or maybe he was close enough and they just weren’t.
He bear-crawled a few yards forward to a stand of thick brush that gave him good concealment. There, he dropped his go-to-hell pack and slipped a hand into one of the side pockets. He rooted around a bit, then came out with a compact of camouflage face paint. He didn’t want to camouflage himself right then, but he did want the mirror inside.
He opened the compact and angled it towards the sun until he saw a dull square of light flash over the front of the house. He wiggled it around, finally centering it on the adult female and flicking it over her eyes. He did this several times but garnered no response. He turned the mirror slightly so that reflection washed over the younger female’s face and repeated the flicking.
This time the head came up.
Lee could see the girl sit up slightly, shield her eyes, and then peer out into the woods where the flashing light was coming from. The girl had curly blond hair that whipped around in the breeze. She looked concerned and obviously did not see the flashing light as anything
friendly. It had probably been so long since anything friendly came by that she wouldn’t believe it even if she knew.
Lee kept flashing her with the mirror, then dropped it and came out of his concealment just long enough to wave a quick arm.
This time the look on the girl’s face changed from suspicion to urgency. She rolled towards her mother and shook her arm. The mother, her face sunburned and grimed, looked up, appearing out of sorts or possibly woozy in the afternoon heat. The girl began silently pointing towards Lee, who took the moment to step out of cover again and wave once more.
The mother sat bolt upright and began wildly waving both arms. Then she shouted. “HELP! PLEASE HELP!”
Lee swore under his breath and motioned to her, palms to the earth with both hands--Calm down!
But it was too late. From somewhere inside the house came that horrid screech.
Lee pointed at the house, counted with his fingers—1, 2, 3—then raised his hands in question, attempting to communicate How many are inside? The woman looked down below her feet as though she would see through the roof with x-ray vision, then looked back up at Lee and shrugged. Lee wasn’t sure whether the shrug meant she didn’t know how many were inside, or she didn’t understand the question.
He motioned for her to calm down once more, then fell back into his concealment.
Not a second after he did this, a figure burst through the front door. It was a male, tall and very skinny. His left leg appeared injured and he dragged it behind him, though he moved fast, despite the handicap. He was wearing only a pair of briefs and some dress socks. He dragged a garden rake behind him.
The infected craned his neck up to see the two survivors on the roof and began making chuffing noises that sounded like an anxious dog. He came down the front steps, the steel head of the rake clattering down after him.
The two females on the roof heard him coming out into the yard and flattened themselves onto the roof. Lee didn’t know whether Slim had already seen them or not, but the shout was enough to rev his engine. He grabbed the rake with both hands and started swinging it overhead like an axe. The tines smacked the rain gutter, and he pulled, ripping a section down.
