by D. J. Molles
Jerry held up his hands, but he still had that stupid smile on his face. That placating, politician’s smile. The smile of a man who thinks no one can see through him. “Captain, I stand corrected. Clearly, from all accounts, it sounds like Doc was the person responsible for the breach in the fence. I was wrong to accuse you of being with Milo.”
The apology did nothing for Lee. It didn’t take his injuries away, and it didn’t bring back Miller and Josh. Just to watch him squirm, Lee said, “I bashed Milo’s skull in with my bare hands, Jerry. So yes, you were wrong to accuse me.”
Jerry gave a sidelong glance at Bus, as though looking for some help, but Bus had crossed his arms and regarded the other man with a look that said, I told you not to come down here.
“Yes, well...” Jerry trailed off, then seemed to find his train of thought again. He seemed to come to the conclusion that Bus had been right, and this was the wrong time to confront Lee over whatever he felt was so goddamn important. Maybe he would have walked away and left it where it was, but Lee wasn’t going to let him off that easy.
“Was there something you wanted to talk to me about?” Lee asked.
“Well,” Jerry appeared extremely uncomfortable now, shifting his weight back and forth and touching his ears nervously. “I had just wanted to extend my apologies to you...and...”
Bus came in this time. “I believe you had a question about why Captain Harden invited a busload of survivors to join Camp Ryder without first getting clearance from us.” Bus said it in such a way as though he were simply trying to help Jerry remember. “By the way, Captain Harden, I agree with your decision.”
Jerry looked at Bus with venom in his eyes, but didn’t respond directly to him. He realized that a small gathering had followed them over to the medical trailer and was eavesdropping on the conversation. With an audience to watch him, his demeanor changed and he drew himself up, like his dingy shirt and pants were a three-piece suit.
“Yes.” Jerry cleared his throat and spoke louder, like he was on a stage. “I was going to ask you about that. I understand that you did an excellent job getting supplies for Camp Ryder, however...” He glanced around, making sure all eyes were on him. “Let me be frank with you, Captain. Those supplies aren’t enough to go around, and I feel that we should have the final say in how to split up those supplies, because they’re ours...”
Lee’s blood boiled. “They’re yours?”
“Yes, they’re ours. We paid for them with our blood!”
Is he serious? Lee thought. Is he really saying this?
“We sent you out with four of our men and you only return with one!”
I’m going to kick the shit out of him if he doesn’t shut up...
“I think I speak for everyone when...”
Harper saved Lee the trouble and punched Jerry square in the jaw with a vicious right hook. Jerry dropped to the ground where he wiggled around for a moment, twitching and groaning in that weird way that people do when they’ve been knocked unconscious. When he came to a second later, Harper stood over him with one finger pointed directly in his face.
The crowd had gasped suddenly but was now silent and transfixed.
Harper’s entire balding head had turned beet-red. “Where were you, motherfucker? Where were you when we were fighting? Where were you when Josh was murdered? Where were you when Miller died? You didn’t pay for shit! We were the ones that bled! We were the ones that sacrificed! So don’t you ever fucking open your mouth to the captain again! If I ever so much as see you look in his direction again I swear to God I will fucking knock every tooth out of your mouth!”
Dazed and shocked, Jerry put a finger to his mouth and then looked at the blood on his fingertips as though it were the first time he’d ever seen himself bleed. He looked scared and disgusted, and then his look turned to indignation. He turned to Bus, again searching for support.
Bus shook his head. “I told you not come over here.” But he extended a hand and helped Jerry up off the ground. Jerry staggered back away from Lee and Harper who were both looking at him like they might both start into him again if he didn’t back off.
He pointed a trembling hand at them. “You’re both nuts. You’ve lost it.”
Disembodied voices came out of the crowd.
“Give it a rest, Jerry.”
“Yeah, why don’t you fuck off?”
“Shove it up your ass, Jerry!”
Jerry turned his glare on the crowd, but couldn’t see who had spoken. A small contingent of people that clearly sided with Jerry surrounded him and seemed to escort him away like bodyguards for some dignitary, casting disdainful glances over their shoulders. Lee was dismayed to see that Jerry’s supporters were more than a dozen strong.
The rest of the small crowd began to dissipate. Several of them clapped for Harper, others shouted thanks to him, and one younger man threw him a thumbs up and said, “I’ve been wanting to do that for weeks!”
Bus, Harper, and Lee watched them leave, dark foreboding settling on them like a cloud. Jerry and his supporters had gone right, and the others had gone left. Some people remained in the middle, still milling about, not quite sure what to do with themselves.
Bus was the first to put it into words. “This place is divided, guys.”
“I’m sorry, Bus.” Harper shook his head. “I shouldn’t have lost my cool like that.”
“He deserved it,” Bus said simply.
“The food is going to make things worse,” Lee observed. “It’ll calm things down at first, keep everyone’s bellies full for a little while. But we have no crops to harvest. We’re going to have to work hard to get through the winter.”
“Even harder with this many people,” Bus agreed.
“Once the food starts running low again, the divisions will become more obvious, unless we do something about it now.” Lee shifted his weight on the crutch. “How bad is it?”
Bus scratched his bearded chin. “Jerry wants us to be a cloister. He wants to reinforce our defenses and stay here and not let anyone in or out. He thinks letting any more people into the group is going to make it too difficult to survive. And there are a lot of people that agree with him. Not just the people you saw walking away with him.”
“And what do you think, Bus?” Lee asked.
“I think I agree with your plan. Jerry wants to batten down the hatches and wait it out, like it’s all eventually gonna blow over. I think he’s wrong. I think this is our life now, and we need to start adapting to it. More survivors only gives us more manpower. We’re just going to need more resources to support them.”
“We’re going to have to start hunting,” Lee nodded. “There’s plenty of game around. And we need to start scavenging. There’s things we can use out there, we just have to find them. With better weapons and more people, it’ll be safer to do. We’ll need to find a bigger place, fortify it better. Someplace with enough land to plant some crops come spring.”
All three men nodded. They agreed, but what about the other people? What about Father Jim’s group? And the group from Smithfield? Now there were three distinct groups all jammed into one place together. They would have different ideas, and different people that they trusted. Even in Camp Ryder they were split, and Lee could only imagine it was the same for the Smithfield group—some would trust LaRouche simply based on his military knowledge, and some would trust Julia, because she took care of them. Father Jim’s group was clearly united in their opinion that he was in charge, but they were the smallest group by far.
“It’s gonna be a bumpy road, gentlemen.” Lee looked at their faces and saw only determination. “I hope you know what you’re getting into.”
Harper nodded, still looking out at Camp Ryder, and it sounded like Miller when he said, “We’re with you, Captain.”
Bus took a deep breath. “Yep. We’re with you.”
CHAPTER 26: A DEAD MAN’S WISH
The two men collapsed at the base of a tree.
One wore jeans
with holes in them and a plain white t-shirt with sooty smudges all over it. The other wore an ACU-pattern uniform, with a heavy tactical vest and an M4 slung around his shoulder. They both breathed hard as they lay at the base of the tree, but the man in the uniform was obviously not well. His breathing was more labored and it rattled in his chest wetly. His skin was unnaturally pale in the moonlight, and he sweat profusely. His eyes seemed vacant when they were open, which wasn’t often now. A bloody bandage was wrapped around his thigh.
“Jacob,” the man in uniform whispered.
“I’m here.” Jacob took hold of the other man’s shoulder. This was a rare moment of lucidity, when Captain Mitchell was not only able to form a coherent thought, but speak clearly. In the past few hours since the firebomb, Captain Mitchell had only spoken twice. Once was to ask for water, and the second time was a rambling and slurred lamentation about some predatory fish called an Oscar that he used to keep in his bunker. Except he didn’t call it a bunker. He called it “The Hole.”
Now his fevered eyes were open wide, as though sensing the impending end of himself. Not his physical death, so to speak, but the death of the person that he was. Staring at him in the moonlight, Jacob thought of that efficient little bacterium working its way through the captain’s brain, eating away all those non-essential human affectations and leaving behind...what? An insane person? A wild animal? A new species, perhaps?
Captain Mitchell coughed and his eyes lost some of their focus. That look lasted for the better part of a minute, until they snapped back into reality and he pinned Jacob with that intense stare of his.
“Jacob, where’s my knife? I need my knife.”
Jacob’s eyes flashed down to the blade strapped to the front of the captain’s vest. He spoke coherently enough, but was it wise to give him a knife when he was almost gone? “Why do you need your knife, Captain?”
“I...uh...” the captain lost his train of thought again.
Jacob thought he knew the answer to the question anyway.
Thought recaptured, the captain spoke again with urgency. “I need my knife. You have to help me. I don’t want to be like that.”
Because a gunshot would only attract the thousands of them milling about only a mile or two from where they were. The captain wasn’t willing to risk Jacob in that way. Jacob was an oracle now, something to be valued and protected. That was why they were in the situation they were in. Because the captain had been protecting Jacob. At the cost of everyone else.
Jacob slid the knife out of its sheath and placed it in Captain Mitchell’s open palm. He tensed when he released his grip on the knife, wondering if the captain would turn and begin slashing at him with it. But the captain only looked at the cold edge of the blade and spoke haltingly. “You gonna ‘member what I told you ‘bout?”
Jacob nodded. “I remember. I’ll get there. I promise.”
With some effort, the captain removed the sling of his M4 rifle, followed by his tactical vest and laid them in a pile next to Jacob. When words escaped his tongue, the captain just pointed to the items, and then to Jacob.
“You want me to put it on?”
The captain nodded weakly. He was beginning to twitch.
“I can’t leave until dawn,” Jacob said, looking around at the dark woods. “You know how they hear at night. Do you think you can make it through the night?”
Captain Mitchell shook his head. The twitching was beginning to turn into full body spasms. There were only minutes left now. The captain realized this, some part of him was clear enough to know he had to die, and knew it had to happen soon. And he knew he’d already made Jacob promise that whatever happened, Jacob would not let him turn into one of them.
Jacob had made that promise, as the captain had made that promise to him.
The captain held the knife back out to Jacob and fought for his garbled words. “You,” was all he managed to choke out. “You.”
Jacob tried to be clinical. How do you kill a person painlessly with a knife? It didn’t work. As he reached out to take the blade, the question turned into something different: How do you kill your friend painlessly with a knife? And when his fingers closed around the handle of the blade he began to weep.
The captain’s tenuous grasp on reality slipped and his head began lolling around, his eyes tracking hallucinations in the darkness. His legs began to twitch as though kicking out at something. The fingers of his hands opened and closed. His breathing became rapid and shallow.
Quick. He had to do it now.
Jacob looked around for something heavy and found a rock a little bigger than his hand. It would do. He got up on his knees, unable to control his hitching chest and the tears that streamed down his face. Nor was he able to control the nausea curling in his stomach and he was certain that he was going to vomit, but forced himself to wait until he had completed his promise.
The captain was not all there anymore, but he wasn’t violent just yet, and he allowed himself to be lowered to the ground by his shoulders. With his head jerking spasmodically on the ground, Jacob set the tip of the knife against his temple with one trembling hand, and gripped the rock with the other.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
But Captain Mitchell wasn’t there. His gray eyes had gone vacant and though they were open, they were not seeing, and they surely did not recognize Jacob. He’s already gone, Jacob thought to himself. So I’m really not killing him.
It didn’t help.
He gritted his teeth and swung the rock down on the handle of the knife like he was driving a nail. The blade slipped in with surprising ease. The captain twitched a few more times and then lay still in the leaves at the base of the tree.
Jacob leaned back against the tree and wept bitterly and quietly for a little while longer. The vomit didn’t come after all, and the nausea in his gut was replaced with a deep, unforgiving grief. When the cold feeling in his gut was all that was left, he gathered the captain’s things up and began to put them on. The vest was still slightly warm and damp with the captain’s sweat. It felt heavy and encumbering, but he knew it would protect him. He slung into the rifle, feeling marginally better that he had a weapon now, though he was unfamiliar with it outside of its basic functions.
To the north, Jacob could see the little twinkle of orange firelight where their compound on the edges of Petersburg, Virginia continued to burn. It made his heart ache to think about all of the dead people turning to ashes in that fire, all the men and women and children that he had known, that the captain had tried to so hard to protect.
He never closed his eyes even once during the night, but kept scanning the trees for the black shadows that would be stalking him. Throughout the entire night, he heard the howls and screeches of the infected. Sometimes they sounded close, other times they were far away. They were searching for him, combing the woods for him.
He waited for the gray light of dawn before standing and facing south.
South, because there was nothing left for them up north.
Stay off the roads. Captain Mitchell had told him. And you’ll have to walk. I know it’s a long ways, but you have to do it. They need the information that you have. They can still make it. They still have a fighting chance.
His other words rattled around inside Jacob’s head, so much information he had a hard time holding on to it all. It was all random and disjointed in his mind, none of it neatly organized according to category: Don’t drink anything but fresh rain water; full auto just wastes ammunition; follow the interstate, but don’t get too close to it; always be aware of your surroundings; don’t make contact with anyone until you’ve watched them for at least a day; don’t ever tell anyone why you’re looking for him...
He wished he’d written it all down.
He looked over his shoulder one last time at the body of Captain Mitchell, laying at the base of the tree. Then he checked his watch. It was 6 o’clock now.
Time to get a move on.
It was a long wal
k to North Carolina.
END OF BOOK TWO
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Book Three is in progress...
