The Remaining

by D. J. Molles

  The view was too narrow. He couldn’t see Caddy Shack.

  “Sonofabitch…” Lee dropped his go-to-hell pack with a little less caution than normal. Something hard on the bottom of the pack made a heavy thump on the hardwood floors. Lee cringed.

  Somewhere in one of the upstairs bedrooms, something glass shattered.

  Lee swept the rifle up to his shoulder, thinking, What the fuck was that? but not daring to breathe a word. He knew damn well what it was. Something was fucking around in one of the upstairs bathrooms and had heard him drop his pack. The warmth in the house wasn’t because the thermostat was set a few degrees higher—it was because someone had done enough kicking to break in his front door. Now the heat and humidity—and whoever had kicked down the door—were inside his house.

  Lee kept an eye on the far end of the hallway through the bedroom door and reached with his free hand into his pack to withdraw a suppressor from a side pocket. He repositioned himself so that he had quick access to the MK23 on his leg should something come into view while he was attaching the suppressor, then turned the M4 skyward and started threading the suppressor.

  Something crashed down the hall.

  Lee tried to focus on finding the thread but found himself staring back down the hallway. He didn’t want to shoot this fucker without a suppressor on his gun. The noise would be loud enough to not only draw attention from other infected in the area, but it would draw them right into his house through the open front door.

  He heard the sound of something regurgitating, then the splash of fluid on hardwood floors.

  He found the thread and started twisting, fast.

  There was a gasp from down the hallway and then pounding feet. Scratching with each footstep. Like cleats. Or golf shoes.

  Come on…

  Lee twisted as fast as his hands could manage. Footsteps were at the door. Done. Something loomed into the bedroom.

  Lee brought up the rifle and fought the panicked instinct to just start shooting. He put the red dot center mass on the approaching figure and pulled the trigger twice in rapid succession. Both rounds punched neat holes in Caddy Shack’s chest, staggering him back into the door. Strangely, the suppressed M4 sounded to Lee like the snap of someone driving a golf ball down the fairway.

  Caddy Shack seemed to recover from the blows after only a second. He looked at Lee and opened his mouth. Thick red blood dribbled out. He reached out with both hands, the fingers twisted into claws, and lurched toward him.

  This time Lee did shoot reflexively, pulling the trigger three times. Caddy Shack didn’t stop coming. Lee backpedaled fast, pushing his back against the wall and shooting from the hip.

  It didn’t take long for Caddy Shack to cross the bedroom, and when he was within arm’s length, Lee stopped shooting and kicked out like he was kicking a door in Iraq, connecting with Caddy Shack’s chest and sending him to the ground. Lee stumbled, recovered his balance, and shoved the suppressor against Caddy Shack’s head. The muzzle blast did more damage than the bullet, nearly inverting Caddy Shack’s face.

  Lee fell backward once he was sure the man was dead and scooted away from the body until his back was against the wall again. “Fuck me…” Lee breathed hard, his chest thumping like a kick drum. He could feel the adrenaline pumping through his body and knew if he wasn’t holding his M4 in an iron grip, his hands would be shaking.

  He pulled himself up and stepped over to a bedroom mirror, checking his face for blood spatter, but couldn’t find any.

  The shakiness reached its peak and then the relief flooded his system, his body dumping endorphins into his bloodstream.

  “Woo.” Lee huffed a few more times, then decided to get moving.

  He shouldered his pack and moved down the stairs again, leaving Caddy Shack for later. He didn’t want the body stinking up his house, but he didn’t have the time or protective equipment to remove it. He found the front door open, as he’d suspected. Little circular star marks were dented all over the door. The tiny cleats from his golf shoes. He’d kicked the door God knew how many times to get the latch to give. After a quick inspection, Lee realized his error. Distracted by getting Sam into the house, he had not engaged the deadbolt.

  Lee swore to himself and closed the door, this time turning the deadbolt. Since the frame was steel, it barely showed any damage, and neither did the door. It was simply the latching mechanism that had given way to hundreds of kicks.

  Since Caddy Shack was no longer an issue, Lee felt no need to use stealth on Hammer Guy. He opened the back patio door and put a bullet in his head. Quick and easy. He took a moment to look at what he’d been carving in the dirt.

  HELLP

  Lee looked back and forth between the dead body and the words it had written in the earth. This misspelling seemed to imply both the state of the world and what everyone in it wanted. But Lee knew the infected weren’t able to reason to the point of cleverness.

  Could they?

  Lee continued on to his detached garage and went inside, watching his back as he entered and closed the door behind him. His Chevy 1500 still sat where he’d left it, apparently untouched and still with a full tank. He tossed his pack in first, then climbed in and set his M4 on the passenger seat. He buckled in, cranked it up, and only then did he hit the garage door opener.

  The door rattled and cranked its way open. Anyone within a quarter mile could have heard it. Lee backed out and surveyed his yard. There appeared to be nothing there, except the dead body of the man who had been crying out for help. Or saying that the world had gone to hell.

  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 Lee’s 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 who 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 sprawl 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 he pictured the old farmer, laughing around a wad of Red Man as he mowed down both the grass and his captors.

  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 see. 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, humans 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 and pounce on you as you walk by. Lee accelerated once past, uncomfortable with having the thing lurking behind him.

  Not a mile down the road, Lee saw something else that made him stop.

  Approximately fifty 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 blond 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 with blue jeans and no shoes.

  She knelt so motionless that Lee would have driven past 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 did 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 who 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 off the pickup 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 toward the woman, as far as the edge of the asphalt, then stopped. “Ma’am!” He called it out loud and commandingly, 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 held 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 toward 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’am…” he repeated several times as he drew closer to her, now within twenty 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 fifteen 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 toward 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 who 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 houses 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 six hundred 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 it gave Lee a slightly better image than the naked eye, and through it 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?