by D. J. Molles
“Across the intersection, you see that two-toned building? Red on top, white on bottom?”
“Yeah.”
“You see the entry to that building? Right there next to the square pillar. I think it’s a person.”
Lee stared at the building, squinting against the low-slung sun. “I don’t see…”
The words rolled to a stop on his tongue as a head poked out from behind the pillar. He couldn’t see the features of it from this distance, but he could see it looking around as though scanning for threats. After a moment of this looking back and forth, it disappeared and then emerged again, dragging something behind it—what looked like the lower half of a dog.
“Shit,” LaRouche whispered.
“That ain’t a person,” Lee murmured.
It dragged its prize quickly across the street, then paused on the other side to look around again.
“Why can’t it be a person? You’ve never eaten dead dog?” LaRouche was trying to make a joke, but when Lee snapped a look at him, there was a thin sheen of sweat across his brow that belied his lackadaisical attitude.
The person, the creature, the infected—whatever the hell it was—must have determined that the coast was clear again. It reached down and grabbed one of the dog’s legs and pulled it around the corner towards an open building door, and then disappeared inside.
“Where’s he going?” LaRouche asked shakily.
“Den, maybe.”
“What, are they hoarding food?”
“I don’t know. I’m watching the same damn thing you are.”
A minute passed.
The infected came out from the darkness of the building, this time without the dog’s hindquarters. Still in the shade of the buildings portico, it looked back and forth, and then scampered across the street where it had come from.
“I’ve never seen them that cautious before,” Lee said quietly, as though the infected might hear him from so far away.
“You think it’s a pack or a horde?”
“There’s only one.”
“What do you think he’s a part of?”
Lee shook his head. “I’ve never seen a pack this far into an urban area.”
“So you think it’s a horde?”
Lee didn’t answer.
“What do we do?” LaRouche asked after a moment.
“I wanna know what the fuck is in that building.”
LaRouche suddenly ducked and pointed. “There he is again!” he hissed.
The same movements. Stopping at the building across the street, poking the head out, looking back and forth a few times, running across, looking back and forth…but this one was different.
“Not the same one,” Lee said. “The other one was wearing a shirt and jeans. This one’s just got some khaki shorts, it looks like.”
“What’s it holding?”
They both squinted. The infected at the corner was holding something cradled in its two spindly arms, but they couldn’t tell what it was. It disappeared into the building and came back out a moment later with nothing in its arms. Before crossing the street again, it looked both ways, as though it were a pedestrian concerned about vehicular traffic. For a moment, its gaze lingered in their direction and Lee felt his heart jump into his throat. But then the creature jogged across the street and disappeared, following the same trail as the other infected.
“They’re like ants,” Lee stated with sudden certainty. “They’re out there scavenging something and bringing it back to their den. They’ve got a fucking den inside that building.”
LaRouche kept chewing at his lip. “We could take ‘em out in their den, while they’re sleeping.”
Lee looked at him like he was insane. “Not a fucking chance. I’m not wandering into that building in the dark to fight some infected. That’s nuts.”
“Okay,” LaRouche didn’t put up an argument.
Apparently he didn’t like the sound of his own idea.
“No,” Lee looked back towards the south. “We’ll do a trap in the morning. Catch ‘em right outside of the den. Once we’ve wiped ‘em out, we’ll check out the den.”
“We should do some more recon.”
Lee nodded. “We need to get a head count on them, and I want to see what they’re scavenging.”
“Alright,” LaRouche took a deep breath, like he was preparing to take a dive. “Let’s do it.”
They made for the stairs and headed for the ground floor. They were quicker going down than they’d been coming up, and in a minute or two Lee peeked out of the building and took a glance at the city around him. It was devoid of life, just as before. They faced north, onto Carthage Street.
Moving with cautious urgency, they slipped out and hugged the wall of the building, jogging west for a short distance and then quickly cutting down an alley that ran behind the store fronts. The intersection where they had seen the infected crossing was only one block down from them. On that corner, another tall building stood, some sort of apartments or condos.
When they reached it they found a steel door standing closed and locked between them and the inside. If they checked the street-side for doors, they would expose themselves, so it was this door or nothing.
“I got it,” Lee whispered, and pointed to the corner of the building where a narrow alley led out to the street. “Watch that alley.”
LaRouche moved to the corner, keeping back away from it a few feet and leaning out just far enough to see down the alley. He scanned back and forth quickly, then leaned back into cover. He looked to Lee and gave him a thumbs up. “Alley’s gated off at the street.”
Lee nodded. “Watch my back.”
He dropped his pack near the steel door and unzipped the main compartment. After his first few scavenging trips, Lee had learned the value of two items: a crowbar and a bolt cutter. Without the proper tools, it was incredibly difficult to make your way through an urban area after everything had been boarded up, chained up, and locked up by business owners hoping to eventually come back and reopen their doors. It was times like these that the crowbar and the bolt cutter justified the extra twenty pounds they added to his pack.
He pulled the crowbar out and shifted his sling so his rifle hung on his left side, out of the way. He glanced over his shoulder as he stepped to the door. LaRouche was still at the corner, peeking out, and then scanning behind them.
All appeared quiet.
Lee set the flat, curved head of the crowbar into the narrow crack between the steel door and the jam, right above the latch. The head of the crowbar was just a sliver too thick, so Lee put his weight onto it and struck it three times with the palm of his hand, until it was embedded nicely into the crack. Then he took the end of the crowbar and began leveraging up and down, bending the frame away from the steel door.
“Psst!”
Lee looked up.
LaRouche made eye-contact with him and held up a single finger, then pointed down the alley.
Lee bit his bottom lip and went back to work, that old familiar shudder working its way through his limbs. He focused on his task, kept prying up and down, up and down. Not worrying about what LaRouche’s hand signals meant. He was close now, but these industrial doors were tough.
“Come on you bitch,” he mumbled to himself, straining hard to bend the metal.
Light but rapid footsteps behind him.
Lee turned and found LaRouche beside him, eyes wide. “Gate’s not latched!” he hissed. “One’s coming down!”
From the alley, the faint sound of rusted hinges.
The clatter of a metal gate on a brick wall.
“Open it!” LaRouche urged under his breath.
Lee set himself into the door, fingers aching from their grip on the crowbar, his forearms beginning to burn from the strain. “I’m fucking trying!”
LaRouche made an angry growling noise low in his throat and turned his attention to the alley, raising his rifle. “This is about to be bad.”
“I’m almost there…
”
From the alley came that distinctive chuffing sound.
Something sniffing the air.
“Captain…”
Lee grit his teeth, trying to work fast, but trying to work quiet at the same time. If he rushed, he would make noise, and noise would only draw the infected to them faster. And the others would follow.
“I got it…I got it…”
He pushed the crowbar in one more time and this time instead of leveraging up and down, he pried with steady, firm pressure.
The door popped with a little scrape. Lee ducked in, leaving his pack outside on the ground. LaRouche slipped in just in time for Lee to close the door as quietly as he could, plunging them into darkness. In the brief flash of sunlight when he’d opened the door, Lee had seen a long hallway, white walls, and red carpeting. It smelled like death.
Something further down the hall.
A hunched figure.
Alive or dead?
He felt his stomach tighten involuntarily as the stench of the rot, held in so long in this dark, enclosed space permeated his mouth and his nose and seeped into his throat and sinuses. He could feel the churn in his gut, and his mouth began to water, preparing for vomit. He tried to bury his nose in the fold of his shemagh that lay wrapped around his neck, but couldn’t quite reach.
He wanted to ask LaRouche if he had seen anything down the hall, but he was afraid to speak. He wanted to click the flashlight of his rifle on and illuminate this petrifying dark, but he was afraid to move. He remained glued to the outward-opening door, both hands clamped on the handle and pulling it shut as tightly as he could. If he made a move, if he allowed himself to vomit, or even breathed too loud, it would be heard by the infected.
It would cry out to the others, knowing there was something to feed on inside.
Lee and LaRouche’s chances of survival went downhill from there.
He strained, sweat on his palms making his grip on the handle slippery. His ears searched for any sound, but heard only the overwhelming silence of the building. Whatever he had seen down the hall, real or imagined, it was not making any noise
Movement from the other side of the door.
Shuffling feet, noisy breathing.
It was sniffing the air.
It was just a human. It was not another species. Nothing had changed, anatomically or physiologically in the infected. Its nose was no more sensitive now than it had been when it was a whole and healthy person. However, there was a part of Lee that thought perhaps that mammalian, instinctive part of the brain—the only part left over after FURY—might be capable of interpreting scent data more clearly than the conscious and logical mind was able to do. The infected may not be blood hounds, but that was not to say their instinctive brains were not able to cypher from the air whether a person had been standing there recently.
His arms began to fatigue, tiring from holding the door shut so tightly.
The sniffing, scenting noise became more pronounced, as though the infected were pressing its nose against the door frame, trying to inhale their scents from the other side. Abstractly, Lee wondered whether bathing made their scent more or less obvious. Was it the strange smell of soap that tickled its brain, or was it the smell of a living thing’s body odor?
On the other side of the door, the creature began to make a guttural sound: “Guh…Guh…Guh…” It wasn’t loud, and Lee didn’t think it was any sort of call to other infected. Perversely, it reminded him of a toddler, trying to sound out new syllables.
“Guh…Guh…”
From the outside, the door handle jiggled and the door moved slightly under Lee’s grip. He grit his teeth and held tighter. In his mind he pictured losing his grip, the door being yanked open, and the infected bursting through biting and grasping at them. He would move back, quickly, as soon as he felt he was going to lose his grip…
“Cap.”
Lee jumped at the hot breath in his ear. He turned and thought he could see the faintest outline of LaRouche’s face in some dim, ambient light. He was standing very close to Lee now.
His voice was the barest thread of a whisper. “I think it’s gone.”
Lee listened and heard only silence. No more sniffing, no more shuffling feet. No more grunted syllables. But Lee didn’t release the door, or open it to retrieve his pack. Not just yet. He waited in the disorienting darkness, steeped in the smell of rotted flesh, for what could have been a minute, or possibly ten. It was difficult to tell.
The smell of the air became a physical image in his head, like a series of close up photos of every dead and corrupted thing he’d ever seen: bloodless skin, stretched to bursting with noxious gasses, brown fluids leaking, maggots squirming busily.
He tasted vomit.
Unable to wait any longer, he used every bit of control he had to open the door only an inch or so and look out. The small vertical shaft of light bisected his face, and compared to the deep blackness of the inside, the outside seemed completely white. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the light.
His stomach heaved.
He pushed the door open a little further.
No infected.
“Clear?” LaRouche croaked.
“Yeah…”
LaRouche fumbled past Lee, to his credit, still moving quietly. He went down to his hands and knees and stooped until his face was only inches from the pavement and he vomited. He’d had the presence of mind to spill his guts close to the ground so that it wouldn’t make a splashing sound.
Seeing LaRouche blow didn’t help, and Lee followed suit.
Between bouts of quietly purging mostly stomach acids, water, and bits of deer jerky, they both looked up and around but saw no threats. The ordeal lasted less than a minute before the two of them wiped strings of sputum from their noses and mouths and dragged themselves back into the building, along with Lee’s pack.
Feeling marginally better, but still queasy from the inescapable smell, Lee slung into the backpack and closed the steel door behind him. He clicked on his rifle’s light and shined it down the hall, his face squeezed tight.
There, down at the end of the hallway, Lee could see that hunched thing he’d seen before, and also the likely source of the smell. It was so badly decomposed, the only reason Lee could tell it was human were the soiled clothes it wore.
“Stairs,” Lee burped and spat.
Directly to their right rose a stairwell. They moved to it and began to climb. The air in the stairwell may have still smelled like the corpse, but to their overwrought noses, it tasted cleaner and fresher as they rose. They took deep breaths and blew hard out of their noses, trying to clear their sinuses.
“Never get used to that smell,” LaRouche remarked.
They worked their way up the stairs and found the rooftop access. It was nearly identical to the roof of the business college, but here they found something interesting: a couple sand bags, some empty 5.56 mm ammunition cans, and some discarded aluminum box magazines were scattered in a corner. Brass shell casings made a glittering carpet in the corner. A few feet away were the remains of a case of MRE’s and a case of bottled water.
“Looks like some of our boys picked a nice overwatch,” LaRouche commented and poked at the empty box of MRE’s with the toe of his boot.
Lee eyed the discarded brass. “They hosed somebody down.”
“Bet I know who.”
They moved to the edge of the roof, crouching low and peered over at the intersection where they’d seen the infected crossing earlier. They could see the building where the infected had entered—the likely location of their den. The streets were pock-marked with bullet-strikes. There were a few old corpses off to the side, but not enough to justify the expenditure of ammunition sitting at their feet.
“Where are all the bodies?” Lee wondered.
“Maybe they ate them.” LaRouche glanced at Lee. “The infected, that is.”
Lee scanned up the street a little farther, in the direction they had seen the
infected coming from. He tapped LaRouche on the shoulder and pointed, hunching low and trying to keep his body flush with the roof’s abutment. “There. You see ‘em?”
About two blocks west of the intersection, there was a large box truck, halfway embedded into a storefront. Lee could not read the words on the side, but he could clearly see the enlarged picture of a cornucopia of grains, vegetables, fruits, and meats.
A grocery truck.
The back end of the truck hung halfway open, and all around it and inside of it was a crowd of tattered, filthy souls, all clambering to get inside. Lee could hear them occasionally barking at each other, but they were quieter than normal, he thought. There were perhaps fifty of them. They would climb into the back of the truck, disappearing inside. Then they would emerge a moment later, their arms full.
“They are rat-fucking the shit out of that truck,” LaRouche whispered in amazement.
Lee watched, quiet and still.
He was overtaken by the pure oddity of what he was seeing. Lee’s first instinct was to try to explain away what he was seeing, but he couldn’t deny it. They were gathering food from the truck and taking it back to their den, or what Lee assumed was their den. It was not a free-for-all. They were not eating whatever they got their hands on.
And Lee didn’t know how he felt about this.
Fear.
Uncertainty.
Loathing.
Fascination.
“Those are cans they’re carrying,” LaRouche mumbled suddenly, as one of the infected passed by on the street below them.
“Jacob said he’d seen them get into cans,” Lee breathed. “They understand that it’s food.”
LaRouche turned and looked at the captain. “What else do they understand?”
Lee didn’t answer.
“Where’s the rest of them?” he asked.
“I dunno.”
“You know what else?”
“What’s that?”
“No females,” Lee said.
LaRouche took a long moment to look, but could find none for himself. “Not a goddamned one,” he confirmed.
CHAPTER 14: EVOLUTION
Another moment of observation passed.
Lee sidled a little closer to LaRouche and pointed in the direction of the truck. “You see the one across the street? Standing on the car? He’s got a red hoodie on.”
