by D. J. Molles
Slowly, the Marines beside him complied.
Lee didn’t respond to Brinly. He felt the urge of violence, but that wasn’t the purpose of this.
“Brett,” Lee called out. “Remove the weapons from those Marines.”
Brett took a step forward, but Brinly’s voice stopped them.
“Negative!” Brinly bellowed. “You take a step back, you boot-fuck piece of shit. I’ll stand here and put my hands on my head, but you ain’t takin’ my goddamned weapons. You get close to me again and I will hollow that disgusting fat body out like a fucking canoe.” Brinly turned his wrathful gaze on Lee. “You. Explain yourself.”
“Explain Sergeant Kensey,” Lee snapped back.
Brinly’s jaw jutted. “You better make more sense than that or this shit’s gonna go south real quick.”
Lee spoke through clenched teeth. “Explain why Sergeant Kensey is holding my people hostage.”
Brinly looked taken aback. “Jesus Christ…”
Lee lost the grip on his restraint. His finger went to the trigger. “I need some fucking answers here, Brinly!”
“I’ve got nothing to do with that!” Brinly shouted back. “I have no idea what the hell that idiot is doing, but it certainly wasn’t on my orders! I don’t know what the fuck is going on right now!”
“What about Staley?” Lee demanded. “Does he know?”
“No,” Brinly said. Then, “I don’t fucking know.”
One of the Marines stepped forward, hands still raised. “The colonel don’t know about it. Neither does the first sergeant.”
Lee stared at the younger man. The Marine stood there, that same stupid smirk on his face that had been there all day. This was the one that liked to talk. The one that liked to joke down in the bunker. His eyes were bright with secret knowledge. He seemed pleased with himself.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“Lance Corporal Turner, Captain Harden. And before you think about killing me, let me tell you that I’m the only one that can get that GPS to them in twenty-four hours. I’m the only one that knows where they are.”
Brinly had put his hands down and looked like he was about to latch them around Corporal Turner’s neck. “You a part of this, Marine?”
“Yes, sir.” Turner nodded. “I’m sorry, sir. I have nothing but respect for you, but I’m done with what we’re doing here. We’re not serving the United States anymore. We’re serving Colonel Staley. And me and some of the other Marines are tired of sticking around, just to look for Staley’s daughter. She’s fucking dead. The colonel burned our chance to go west and join up with President Briggs and the rest of the fucking military. Now we have a chance to make that right, and I intend to do so.”
Corporal Turner had grown serious as he spoke. He turned to Lee again. “All you have to do is give me the GPS device and let me leave. Give me a car. Don’t follow me. I’ll get it to them before the twenty-four hours is up and you get your people back, along with the truckloads of supplies they had. If you kill me, then the GPS will never show up, and your buddy, Major Bowden, he’s gonna kill your people and burn those trucks.”
Lee realized he was trembling. He wanted to kill; he wanted violence and blood so bad in that moment that it seemed the only possible thing in the world. He felt like bombs were going off in his chest and he was having a hard time containing it. His breathing had become quick and strained. Behind his eyes, he could feel the dull ache coming on.
Not now. No time for this now.
“Where?” he said. “Where are they?”
Turner just smiled. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
Lee took two steps, dropping the rifle and letting the sling take it. With his free hands, he grabbed Turner up by the throat—he was surprisingly light—and planted his left leg behind Turner’s feet and whipped the man over his hip in a vicious throw. Turner hit the ground, choking and coughing, grabbing at his throat. But he was breathing, so Lee supposed he had not crushed the man’s larynx. It had not been his intent to do it, but Lee still wanted it bad. Kensey and his fucking buddies were miles and miles away and they couldn’t be touched, but this shithead was right here right now.
It only felt right that he pay for everyone’s sins at once.
Lee put a knee in Turner’s chest, continued to grip him by the throat.
Without being asked, Carl had leapt forward as soon as Lee got Turner on the ground and was removing the man’s rifle, and the large combat knife he kept in a shoulder-mounted sheath. Carl flung them away and Lee heard them clatter across the ground, far away.
Turner coughed and gasped and Lee forced himself to let up on his throat. The man below him looked up, eyes red and face redder, his expression one of anger and determination. That was fine. Everyone was determined at the outset, but pain had a way of robbing you of that determination. They would see how determined young Turner truly was.
Lee bent down, eyes locked and spoke quietly to Turner’s face. “This isn’t going to go the way you want it to go, Turner. This is not going to end well for you. I am not the one to fuck with. I do not let people like you stand in the way of my mission. And I will accomplish my mission. I don’t care what I have to do, or who I have to destroy. You will learn this. Because your chances for mercy died as soon as you stepped forward.”
He didn’t want a response from Turner, so he pressed his throat a little harder to keep him silent and leaned in even closer, his voice just a whisper: “You’re going to see who I’ve become, Corporal Turner.”
FOURTEEN
CONTACT
“OKAY, STOP HERE, STOP here.” Devon was struggling with reading the road map as the icy wind from his rolled-down passenger-side window ripped it around. His rifle was sitting between his legs, propped on the dash with the barrel pointed up. He muttered a few curses and cranked the window up.
Nate sat in the driver’s seat. He pulled to a stop in the middle of the road.
Devon flattened the expansive paper out and hunched into it, muttering to himself. “Goddamn maps. Maps. Who uses maps anymore?” He looked at Nate grudgingly. “You know what generation I come from, don’t you, Nate? We had smartphones. I don’t know how to use this thing.”
Nate had heard this complaint before. “I swear to God, a three-year-old could do this.” He leaned over the center console and splayed his palm onto the map to angle it in his direction. “We’re on Highway 421… Highway 421… right there. Here’s 421. And we’re near Julian. Which puts us here. Coming up on Highway 62.”
Devon did not look pleased. “You should have let me drive.”
“You drive for shit.” Nate traced his finger along Highway 62. “See? This heads north. This is what we want.”
“It goes right into Burlington. Burlington hasn’t been cleared.”
“Well, we just turn off before we get to Burlington, then.”
Devon leaned down, almost to the point that his nose was touching the paper.
“You need glasses or something?” Nate asked.
“Just… just let me do this.” Devon waved him off. “Focus on driving, if you’re so damn good at it.”
Nate shrugged and accelerated. “You told me to stop.”
Up ahead, he could see the signage for the Highway 62 interchange. He took the exit and then they were heading east, and then southeast, and then Highway 62 made a left-hand turn and went north, as intended. There wasn’t a whole lot around. The usual gathering of gas stations that had been looted, the tanks drained dry and all the windows smashed in. The houses were spread far apart, though occasionally they passed a subdivision. Several subdivisions made Nate take a second look—there were smoke trails and signs of use in some of them. Perhaps small pockets of survivors that had banded together as a neighborhood. But it wasn’t Nate’s job to find people right now.
He was trying to find a horde.
They drove on in silence for a while. Devon seemed to find what he was looking for on the map. He folded it back together with tha
t section up, though the fold was haphazard and lazy, and tossed the map on the dash so that he could reassume his position in the shotgun seat. The roadblocks that plagued the highways in the first month or so after the collapse seemed to have died away. Most of the people that could be robbed had already been robbed and many of them killed. Nate guessed that in the beginning, the roadblocks were easy because the victims were easy. Now everybody traveled warily, fingers hovering over triggers, and cautious when they went around bends and curves. Robbing by way of a roadblock had probably just become more dangerous than it was worth.
Nate didn’t think things were settling. The dangers were still there. The people that had manned those roadblocks in groups of three and four were now parts of larger groups, he imagined. Groups like the Followers.
No, things were not settling. They were growing. From small spats between small groups to something like tribal warfare.
Tribes. Bunch of fucking tribes. Like the Middle East or something.
Devon directed him to take a left on a road as they began to close the distance to Burlington. Nate didn’t demand to double-check the map for himself, but he hoped to God that Devon wasn’t taking them the wrong way. Some risks you just have to take if you hope to maintain a good relationship with someone. And Devon was not an idiot. He was a smart kid. But his calling was definitely not topography.
Nate took the left as instructed, hoping they were going to pass between Burlington and Greensboro, as he knew had been Harper’s plan when they’d set out. But with each mile, Nate grew more nervous about what was around the next corner. With each mile, his certainty that Harper and Julia were dead was growing. And each mile brought him closer to a horde large enough to swallow a city whole.
Devon seemed to have an uncanny ability to sense what Nate was thinking about. “You think this will work?” he asked.
“What?”
“You think this horde will just up and follow us?”
Nate tapped the steering wheel. “I dunno. Seems consistent with the behavior that I’ve seen. You’ve seen it, too. You get one chasing you, they all want to chase you. Even the packs are like that. The packs just try to flank you. But they’re just running on prey drive. They see food and they go after it.”
“So you think it will work?”
“I just told you I don’t know.”
“You said—”
“I said we’ve both seen how they act when they’re in a horde. But we’ve only seen hordes of what… couple thousand at the most? Who knows what they do when there’s fucking… a million of them.” Nate realized he was gripping the steering wheel a bit aggressively. He relaxed. “We’ll just have to see.”
The last few visible houses passed them by. Ahead, the road extended out onto a bridge. The trees ended, and the water began. Nate slowed as he approached the bridge. There was the cluster of an uncleared accident up against one of the bridge abutments and it sprawled out, taking up much of the two available lanes.
Nate edged to get around it and onto the bridge. Then he stopped.
In the passenger seat, Devon stiffened, then grabbed for his rifle.
“Oh, Jesus…” Nate breathed, losing his voice in fear.
The bridge was swarming with them. From the halfway point and on, he could not see concrete from the number of bodies that had crowded onto the structure. And far beyond, the opposite shore was a moving mass of bodies, as far as Nate’s eyes could see. They seemed to swallow the world on the other side of that bridge, and they were beginning to consume the bridge.
There was a brief moment in time, just a half second or so, when they were stopped there at the foot of the bridge, that there was a sort of pause. Only the sound of the engine. Nate and Devon, staring out at the mass of people that crowded onto the bridge and the opposite bank, and all of those people, those infected people, those crazy people, they were staring right back.
Then, almost at the same instant, every one of those infected that saw them started screaming.
The sound of it hit him like a physical thing. Rattled in his eardrums.
“Go, man!” Devon was shouting. “Fucking go!”
Nate fumbled with the shifter. It seemed his entire body was made of senseless rubber. He managed to get the pickup truck into reverse, then jammed the gas and jerked the wheel. The truck burned rubber backing up and slammed into the side of one of the abandoned vehicles. But Nate wasn’t stopping. He could look out his window and see them, pouring toward him across the bridge, more infected than he had ever seen. More infected than he had ever anticipated.
And they were all coming for him.
“GO NATE GO GO FUCKING GO!”
Nate put it in drive and squealed tires again. And when he saw the road racing underneath them, a little piece of his brain managed to make itself heard over the tumult of instinctive fight-or-flight. This is why you’re here, Nate. You’re not supposed to RUN you’re supposed to LURE.
He slammed on the brakes. “Get in the bed!”
“What?” Devon seemed aghast. “Why?”
Nate put a hand on the younger man’s shoulder and shoved him into his door. “Because that’s the fucking plan, jackass! Get in the fucking bed!” Nate looked into the rearview mirror. He had put up maybe a quarter mile before steadying his mind, and behind him, the infected had just crossed the halfway point of the bridge. “You can do it. You got time.”
Devon looked behind them, not making the same estimate that Nate had, but he opened his door anyways and hopped out, swinging hurriedly into the truck bed. “Okay! Now can we go? Can we go now?”
Nate accelerated, but then backed it off to twenty miles an hour.
Lure, don’t run.
In the rearview mirror, the very first waves of infected began to flow off of the bridge and onto land. They spread out, taking up the shoulders of the road, filling the entire opening and even spilling into the trees. They stumbled and scrambled over each other. Some of them tripped and fell and were trampled by others. They ran shoulder to shoulder, all huffing and screaming and howling as they did.
All coming for me.
“Carrot on a stick,” he said, his voice tremulous.
It looked like the plan might work after all.
Lee threw the doors to the Camp Ryder building open. His head was full of burning steam. His chest was full of fire. In the background of his mind, something like panic. Ahead of him, the people stood, their faces turning in his direction as the doors rebounded harshly off their stoppers. Behind him, Angela was calling out to him over the sound of the helicopter idling down in the Square.
“Everybody out!” Lee shouted, stepping deeper into the building and hiking his thumbs behind him. “Now! Out!”
The people began to head for the doors. They skirted wide around Lee, giving him sidelong glances full of wariness and fear. They were seeing the man that he had become, and that was okay, because he had to do what he had to do. And he was not their provider, their solace, their elected leader. He was a soldier. He was a fighter. He was a killer.
As the crowd filtered past him, Angela caught up and touched his arm. “What’s going on? What happened?”
Marie was trailing in, close behind Angela.
Lee looked at Angela, but then fixated on Marie, because it was her that needed to hear this news. “The group of Marines that were with Harper and Julia… they turned on us. They’re trying to buy their way back into President Briggs’s good graces by holding Harper and Julia hostage for the GPS.”
Angela put a hand to her mouth, then looked at Marie, gauging the other woman’s reaction.
“Oh my God,” Marie muttered. She put her hand out to brace herself against the wall. “Julia? Is she okay?”
“As far as I know, yes.” Lee looked away. “But they are threatening to execute Harper and Julia both if I don’t have the GPS to them in twenty-four hours.”
Marie was in a daze.
Angela was not much better. But she processed through it quicker.
“Well, what’re you going to do? What’s this about? I don’t… what’s going on?”
Lee pointed outside. “The squad of Marines that did this was working independently. Brinly didn’t know. But one of the men in his squad was in on it. He fessed up right after I got the radio transmissions. And he’s the one that’s supposed to take the GPS to them. He’s the only one that knows where they are.”
“So… I don’t understand.” Angela blinked rapidly. “Is he working with us?”
“No,” Lee said. “He’s not. But I’m going to change his mind.”
“What are you going to do?” Angela said, and then stepped back, as though she knew the question was a bad one.
“Do you really want to know?” Lee asked.
The doors to the outside slammed open again and Rudy and Mitch walked in, each holding one shoulder of Lance Corporal Turner. They had bound him with wire and blindfolded him with a bandanna. He’d also been dealt a hard blow to the face by one of his fellow Marines, and the bottom half of his face was caked in blood.
Lee looked into the Camp Ryder building. It was empty. All the people had fled. Lee pointed into the center of the main open area. “Put him there.”
Behind Carl and his operators came Brinly and his two remaining Marines. Brinly’s face was pinched up tight like a drawstring bag. He glared at the back of Corporal Turner as Rudy and Mitch led him into the center of the Camp Ryder building.
Lee caught Brinly’s gaze. “First Sergeant, you okay with this?”
“No,” Brinly said, almost immediately.
Lee sucked his teeth for a moment. “Maybe you should wait outside, then.”
“Is that gonna make it better?” Brinly snapped. “For fuck’s sake.” He held out a hand in the direction of Turner. “You got one of my men! One of my fucking boys. God damn it, I know he fucked up…” Brinly trailed off. His hand closed into a fist in midair and then dropped. “I don’t know what to fucking do with this.” He looked up sharply at Lee. “Don’t kill him. Promise me that.”
