by D. J. Molles
Bus stopped and looked Lee in the eyes. “Bullshit,” he said.
Lee shrugged. “Think about it. That’s the first time you’ve ever seen them come from both directions. Usually they’re in one solid group and they just charge you. This was different. It was like they were trying to distract us so the other two could get in close.”
Bus didn’t answer. He just started walking along the fence line again. The truth was that the words were bitter. It was not an “aha” moment, it was an “oh shit” moment. The infected were bad enough as a mindless herd. The thought of them in small packs, hunting them like prey, was a hard pill to swallow.
But Lee wasn’t willing to ignore the situation either.
“This is the first time we’ve seen them maneuver like that.” He followed along with Bus while he spoke. “When the situation changes, your tactics need to change along with it. If they’re getting smart enough to get past your chain-link fence, we’re going to need to think of something else to keep them out.”
Bus shook his head fiercely. “Even a dog can dig himself under a fence. That doesn’t mean anything. They’re mindless shells of what once were human beings. They’re just running on autopilot now. There’s no evolution in this.”
He sounded distraught, as though he were attempting to convince himself. I reject your reality, and substitute my own. Lee decided not to push it. He just hoped Bus had other things on his mind and wasn’t this unreceptive all the time.
Lee had to admit to himself that it was difficult to tell with the infected. Sometimes their actions seemed like the result of logical thought, and other times it just looked like instinct. Most of them appeared to be able to manipulate tools, but they weren’t using them properly, they were simply using them as blunt objects to strike out with. Just because a monkey can strike somebody in the head with a wrench doesn’t mean it can fix your sink. They all seemed to hold on to some rudimentary intelligence, but it also seemed to vary from individual to individual. Just as some were more aggressive than others, some were more intelligent than others. But then the question arose again, was it intelligence or instinct? Lee kept coming back to the example of a wolf pack. When a pack hunts, singles out the weakest prey, and then flanks it to take it down, is the success of their hunt based on a premeditated plan or ingrained animal instinct?
A voice came hollering across the compound. “Bus!”
Bus and Lee both looked and saw Miller running up, breathing heavily. “I think we found where they came in.” He took a big gulp of air. His eyes darted back and forth, carrying grave meaning. “I think you should take a look at it.”
Miller turned on his heel and started jogging back across the compound. They followed behind him, their flashlights strobing up and down as they ran. Lee took a sidelong glance across the center of the compound and saw the crowd at the medical trailer being pushed out by a man Lee didn’t recognize. From inside the trailer Lee could hear screaming, high-pitched and wretched. Doc had begun the amputation.
“Right here.” Miller had stopped and was pointing.
They turned the corner of a shanty made out of aluminum siding and blue tarp. Lee and Bus looked forward as they slowed to a walk and approached what Miller pointed at. Confusion passed over their faces followed by a deep, dreadful uncertainty. They looked at each other and then back at the object of their attention.
An opening had been peeled back from the fence, from top to bottom. The chain links had been pulled away and rolled up like two sides of a scroll. Only they weren’t pushed inside, but pulled outward and tucked in so neatly to create the man-sized breach in their defenses that it left little room for question about who or what had done this.
It was then that Lee and Bus both noticed a low, husky voice, quietly intoning some strange narrative: “… but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves…”
“What the fuck is that?” Bus glared and shot his flashlight toward the sound of the voice. The flashlight played around a bit and then found the culprit. Nestled in a patch of overgrown grass at the corner of the shack was a small black CD player, round and glistening like an insect’s head; the two bulbous speakers stared up at them like compound eyes.
“… the breathless hunter came so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible…”
Bus moved swiftly forward, raising his foot as though to stomp the thing out of existence, but Lee’s hand shot out and grabbed him by his arm, hauling him backward. Bus looked at him like he was about to turn that foot on Lee, but then understanding dawned.
Lee nodded. “Might want to check that out real good before you go stomping around it. Depending on who put it there, it could be booby-trapped.”
Bus managed a halfhearted smile. “That’s why I keep you around.” He gestured toward the CD player. “I’m guessing you have much more experience with booby-traps than I do. You tell me.”
The voice, supremely ignorant of the circumstances, continued its droning: “… the blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley of his steady wake…”
Lee gave the big man a humorless smirk and leaned forward with extreme caution. He shined the flashlight first around the immediate area of his feet, then lit up the patch of overgrown grass. When he saw nothing to alarm him he stepped forward and peered down into the nest of grass, working the flashlight around at different angles.
“… the hunters who namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured to assail it; but had fatally found that quietude…”
Lee let out a long breath and relaxed a bit. Then he knelt down and stabbed the top of the CD player with his finger. The black cover popped open and the disembodied voice went silent. Underneath, a white disk spun madly at first, and then came to a gradual stop. Lee reached his hand in and plucked the CD from the tray, looking at the title and reading aloud: “Moby Dick by Herman Melville. It’s an audiobook.”
Bus’s face was made of granite. “Hilarious.”
Lee shook his head. “I don’t think it was a joke.”
Miller chimed in, pointing to the neatly clipped ends of the chain links. “Pretty sure someone cut his way through this… looks like bolt cutters.” Bus regarded Miller with a dubious look, to which Miller responded drably, “I wasn’t always the upstanding citizen I am now.”
“Milo?” Lee suggested.
Bus crossed his arms. “I don’t see who else would be interested in fucking with us, and given our recent tiff, I think that’s a pretty good deduction.”
“Why not just attack us?” Josh finally spoke.
Lee offered a possible answer. “Because a day attack is too easily defended and they know they can’t be out in the woods at night because of the infected. So they use the infected. Cut a hole in the fence. Put a CD player with just enough volume to attract the infected but not get noticed by us.”
“Kind of clever if you think about it.” Bus stared grimly out at the dark woods. “Audiobook just sounds like some guy talking. Music would have caught our attention.”
Everyone who had survived up to this point seemed to know that the infected had nearly superhuman hearing at night when they became more active. Lee had to assume that because of this, Camp Ryder enforced noise discipline at night. Even at the low volume it had been set on, the CD player had probably been the loudest noise coming out of the camp, though it probably would have gone unnoticed by regular ears or dismissed as a quiet family discussion.
Lee stood up and stepped to Bus’s side. “I think maybe you should tell me about Milo.”
Bus nodded, then pointed to Miller and Josh. “You two patch up that fence. Only one of you working at a time; the other keep watch. Don’t let anyone else sneak in. I’ll send someone else down to help you.” Bus turned to Lee. “Walk with me.”
* * *
The two men walked through the darkness, their flashlights casting a d
ull glow off the ground before them and just barely illuminating their tired faces. Most everyone had gone back to their makeshift homes, but a few stragglers still made their way through the dark. Unlike the deep silence of early morning, there was still a whisper of excitement—quiet voices echoing out of wood and tin shacks, holding furtive conversations. Lee had to wonder how many other infected were in the area to hear those barely audible whispers.
Lee looked up at the sky and saw the faint glimmer of dawn to the east, or perhaps it was his imagination. It wasn’t until he’d spent time outside of the comfort of civilization that he’d begun to realize why people in ages past feared the night. The night was long, it was uncomfortable, and it was dangerous. The dawn marked the end of the dark misery and the return of warmth and safety.
“You know what time it is?” Lee looked briefly at Bus.
“About four in the morning.”
Lee felt his heart sink. The light to the east was just his imagination after all. Dawn was two long hours away and there would be no sleeping after this. The pain in Lee’s back was beginning to catch up to him.
A dark figure strode up to them as they crossed the center of camp. All Lee could see was the figure’s right side, illuminated by the cold blue light of an LED lantern. As the figure approached, it raised the lantern up to eye level and Lee recognized the pursed face and the balding dome of his head, washed out and pale in the glow. The angle of the light cast shadows that made his face look weirdly severe.
Lee thought he remembered Miller calling the man Bill.
He was the one who had resisted bringing them back to camp, only to be convinced by Lee’s arguments and Miller’s pleading to give them a chance. He was of average height, and probably average weight before he had been forced to ratchet down on his belt during these lean times. He was probably in his forties and going bald on top, with a ring of wiry gray-brown hair. Overall, his body language and his facial expression communicated to Lee that he was not a pleasant person to be around.
“Bus.” He nodded to his superior with respect then turned a somewhat disdainful eye on Lee. “Are you supposed to be up? I thought Doc wanted you recuperating.”
Lee was about to respond, but Bus cut him off, and Lee was grateful. He was too tired to argue. With a dismissing wave of one meaty hand, Bus said, “Harper, we have a problem. Captain Harden is just helping me out, and then I will let him go straight back to bed.”
The man’s cold silence said enough.
Lee quirked his eyebrows. “So is it Bill or Harper?”
“Bill Harper,” he said with a grumble. “Miller’s the only one who calls me Bill. Everyone else calls me Harper.”
Lee nodded. “Harper it is.”
Bus led the trio toward the Ryder building. The larger structure towered over the shantytown like a castle amongst the villagers’ mud huts. It was a two-story cement structure with very few windows that Lee could see. Purely industrial, with very little to beautify it. Lee wasn’t sure what it had been used for prior to the arrival of its current occupants, but he immediately began looking for its strong points, its weak points, and how it could be improved as a defensive location. If a firefight occurred, the thin walls of the shanties would provide very little protection. This building would have to be their defense.
It had a lot going for it. In addition to no windows and concrete walls, Lee could only see one entrance, which was two steel doors flanked by narrow sidelights—too narrow for a man to squeeze through. The roof looked like it was easily accessible, and Lee imagined some sandbags and few machine gun nests up there could lay a pretty damn good field of fire on any attacking force.
Infected or otherwise.
Lee pointed up toward the big building. “What do you guys use it for?”
“When we first got here, we all lived inside,” Bus explained. “We very rarely went out. The security of the fence was no big deal, because the building was our security. We welded the cargo-bay doors shut, which left only two sets of double doors to worry about—the ones you’re looking at now and another set on the opposite side. We had everyone in there, but it was only about twenty people.”
They reached the double doors and Bus pushed them open. Lee noticed the smell first. It was the smell of the refugee camps outside Al-Waleed and the smell of a homeless shelter he’d once visited in DC. It was sweating bodies and grimy clothes, exacerbated by the warm air. Lee could only imagine how much worse it smelled during the day.
After the double doors, a short hallway opened into the main portion of the building where Lee could see that the Ryder trucks had once been serviced. But instead of trucks and tools and lifts, Lee only saw another collection of shanties, these built less sturdily than the ones outside and more for the purpose of privacy. Lee thought there were about fifteen different dwellings crammed into the space, most of them with a lantern glowing inside. All the lamplight eking through wooden slats cast a kaleidoscope of light on the ceiling.
Bus guided the three of them to the right and they began to ascend a metal staircase. “After the shit officially hit the fan and FEMA tucked its tail and ran, we started getting a steady trickle of survivors. We tried to take in only people who had something to contribute, but…” Bus trailed off. “It was tough. A lot of tough decisions had to be made.”
As they reached the top of the stairs, Lee spied a panel of glass to his right: a large window belonging to an office that overlooked the floor. In the dark window, Lee could see his reflection staring back at him and it almost stopped him in his tracks. He was thinner than he remembered; his neck and arms just bundles of taut cords with flesh stretched over them. His once-tidy crew cut was slightly overgrown and four days’ worth of beard had grown in thick.
He was shocked to discover that the once gentle set of his face had turned into hard angles. His lips were pressed, the corners in a slight downturn, his jaw set as though preparing for a blow. The eyes that his last girlfriend, Deana, had always told him were kind now shone cold and savage. He forced his face to relax, and there he could see some semblance of the person he remembered. But it was only a grim parody. That person didn’t exist anymore.
Lee realized Bus was still speaking and tore his attention away from the harsh visage in the window, refocusing on the conversation.
“I’ve always believed that we shouldn’t turn anyone away—more manpower, you know? But a lot of people don’t agree with me.” Bus opened the door to the small office overlooking the floor. Lee supposed it had once housed a foreman or supervisor. Inside, it was sparsely furnished with a few folding chairs, a large desk, and a big corkboard with a county map pinned to it. Bus stepped behind the desk but didn’t sit. He continued speaking as he stood there, fishing through one of the desk drawers. “Even being selective, we eventually got too crowded for everyone to fit in the building, so we allowed people to start making their camps outside. Seeing that it was safe, some of the people who were living in here decided to move out too. You think it looks cramped now, you should have seen it before.” Bus sighed. “Pretty soon, we’ll have too many for that, and then we’ll have some real problem-solving to do.”
Bus finally found what he was looking for and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. He smiled wanly at it and gestured his two companions toward the folding chairs. “Have a seat, gentlemen.”
Harper and Lee both took a chair facing the desk.
Bus snagged the chair behind the desk and hauled it over to the front, so the three men were positioned in a small circle. He took his seat with a sigh, adjusting the straps of his holster. He leaned back and unscrewed the cap off the whiskey. “Wish I could say it was good stuff, but it ain’t.” He took a swig and offered the bottle to Harper, who accepted.
“So…” Lee tapped his fingers on his knee.
There was a long, awkward silence as Bus stared at Harper, who stared at the bottle in his hands. Harper seemed to take notice of the silence and looked up at Lee. “Did we have a problem you were going to help
us with?”
Bus leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Harper, we found a hole cut in the fence. Someone had put a CD player on the ground, playing an audiobook to attract infected. We think it was Milo.”
Harper deflated with a single long sigh. He leaned back and finally took a swig of the whiskey with a violent grimace on his face. Then he passed the bottle to Lee. “Yeah… Milo.”
Lee smiled unsurely. “What’s the backstory on this guy?”
Harper looked to Bus and seemed to be waiting for him to take the reins.
“Uh-uh.” Bus folded his arms. “You tell him. Milo’s your brother.”
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Chapter 1: The Hole
Chapter 2: The Brief
Chapter 3: Thirty Days
Chapter 4: Break Out
Chapter 5: The Petersons
Chapter 6: Sam
Chapter 7: Guardian
Chapter 8: Down the Road
Chapter 9: … Especially Our Snipers
Chapter 10: Night
Chapter 11: Company
Chapter 12: Home Again
Chapter 13: Horde
Chapter 14: Siege
Chapter 15: Decision Time
Chapter 16: On the Road
Chapter 17: Timber Creek
Chapter 18: The Patrol
Chapter 19: The Survivors
Chapter 20: The Deal
Extras Meet the Author
Also by D.J. Molles
A Preview of The Remaining: Aftermath
