The Remaining: Fractured (12 page)

Lucky nodded. “Gon’ relass…i’s not that bad, is it?”

“No, it’s not bad.”

“Feels bad.”

“No, you’ll be okay.”

Lucky shook his head, irritably. “Sarge, I did ever’thin’ I was s’posed to do. I did all my tactical stuff. I can’t believe this shit. Fuckin’ can’t believe I got shot.”

LaRouche grunted as he hefted Lucky’s butt up onto the tailgate and then laid the man down. “You’re doin’ good, man. Just keep talkin’ to me while I check you out.” He shrugged his backpack off and slid it into the truck bed, then climbed in himself. Huddled over the wounded man, he pulled the shoulder bag of magazines off, unzipped the jacket and pulled up Lucky’s fleece sweater.

Two holes—one just inside his right hip bone, and the other a few inches below his left nipple. He rolled Lucky partially on his side, fought to get the jacket and shirt up, and saw two exit wounds. They roughly matched the holes on the front, but it looked like the bullets had entered at an angle. The bullet that had struck him below the left nipple had exited out his side and looked the least dangerous. The one just inside his right hip had exited close to his spine.

LaRouche stared at the exit wounds, ragged and almost black. The wound in his upper torso might not have hit anything important, but the one through his gut most certainly had. There was no imaginary line that LaRouche could draw between the entry and exit wounds that didn’t result in the pulverization of something vital.

Lucky yammered on as LaRouche tried to think: “This’s just stupid. This’s all jus’ fuckin’
stupid
. I jus’ wanted to put in my thirty years at the shop an’ retire. Tha’s all I wanted. Tha’s all I wanted. I didn’t wanna do this shit. I never wanted to do this shit.” His face tensed and he trailed off with a quiet moan. “Hey, Sarge…I’s startin’ to hurt.”

“I know, Buddy,” LaRouche began ripping open his backpack. “That just means it’s not that bad. If it was bad, you wouldn’t feel anything.”

“Is that true?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know…”

“Of course it’s true.”

As LaRouche began pulling out bandages from the front pocket of his backpack, he registered the sounds around him and glanced back over his shoulder. One of the men that had been held captive was still alive, crawling on the ground and moaning. From the direction of the woods there was rustling and thrashing.

LaRouche looked up over the side of the pickup bed and into the woods, and found Wilson and Jim approaching, both with their hands on the man that had taken off running. The man who had shot Lucky. His face was covered in blood and lumpy in places, the beginnings of massive, swollen bruises that would set in over the course of the next hour.

They stopped at the edge of the road, seeing Lucky lying there in the truck bed and knowing from the look on LaRouche’s face that it wasn’t good. Wilson’s and Jim’s faces became tense, like a tried man waiting for a verdict.

LaRouche began wiping away the excess blood around the wound.

His patient swatted weakly at the bandage and shook his head. “Stop. Just come here.”

“What?”

Lucky reached forward and grabbed LaRouche by the arm and pulled him in close.

LaRouche pushed back. “Lucky, you gotta let me work!”

Lucky pulled at him harder. “Stop. Please…come here.” He pulled LaRouche close again, and Lucky leaned his pale face into LaRouche’s jacket as though he took comfort from it. The wounded man’s eyes were wide and scared and he began to breathe rapidly and shallowly.

“Don’t go anywhere,” he told LaRouche. “Don’t go anywhere.”

LaRouche stayed still, let the man hold on to him. He couldn’t do anything else, so he put an arm around Lucky, pulled him in. He looked at Wilson, then at Jim. Both of the men avoided his gaze. They looked off into the woods, then down to the road.

“It’s okay, Buddy,” LaRouche said. “I got you.”

Lucky took three more hitching breaths and died.

LaRouche leaned back, let the dead men slide out of his arms, back onto the bed of the pickup. He put his hands on his hips and knelt there on his haunches. Took slow deep breaths against the burning, ratcheting feeling in his stomach.

Wilson and Jim stood there, still as stones. Their prisoner swayed on his feet between them and spit blood from his mouth. The air was very still, and seemed to have gotten colder for some reason, though the sun shined on them fully. On the street, amongst the bodies, the moaning survivor had ceased to move or make noise.

Wilson took a half step forward. His hand went up towards his head, then hesitated, balled into a fist, then dropped down to his side again. “He died?”

LaRouche nodded. “Yeah. He died.”

“Oh, man,” Wilson’s face screwed up. “Oh, man…it’s my fault.”

“Shut up,” LaRouche said.

Tears glimmered in Wilson’s eyes now. “I shoulda waited. I wasn’t thinking. I just…started shooting without planning anything or coordinating.”

LaRouche slid off the tailgate and spat. “I said, ‘shut the fuck up’.”

Wilson closed his eyes, turned his head skyward.

LaRouche approached the prisoner, whose one open eye tracked him suspiciously, the other bulbous and turning purple. LaRouche stood an arm’s length from the man and eyed him up and down, thinking,
So this is one of the big, bad “Followers”?
He was a short, unimpressive individual with shoulder-length blonde hair. He had a wiry body and a fidgety manner that LaRouche always found off-putting.

“He have anything on him?” LaRouche asked.

Wilson held up a pint-size, plastic bottle of whiskey. “Just this.”

LaRouche took the bottle, hefted it in his hands. It was still full. He flipped it so he held the top of the bottle, and then abruptly swung it, smacking the prisoner in the face with it. It wasn’t hard enough to do any real damage, but it made the man grunt in pain, and LaRouche thought about doing it again. Instead, he just rapped the man twice on the forehead with it. “Mine now.”

He slipped the bottle in his back pocket and then reached forward and took the man by the face, thinking that he would only direct the man’s gaze to where he wanted. But when his fingers touched the man’s skin he suddenly felt his blood roaring and within a split second became enraged with the man—his stink, his bleeding, his lumpy, bruised face, and the very fact that he dared to be alive when Lucky was dead.

His grip tightened, causing the man to cry out and his mouth to mush inwards, pinched between LaRouche’s bloodless fingers. He pulled the man in close and jerked his head to the right, forcing him to look at the pickup truck while he spoke into his ear, louder than necessary.

“You see that shit? You see that man lying there?” LaRouche grated in the man’s face. “You did that. To my fucking friend.”

The man shook his head violently, getting his face free of LaRouche’s vice-grip. Then he looked right in LaRouche’s eyes, defiance blazing, and spoke with a thick northern accent: “Your dead friend interrupted the Lord’s work. He got his. And you’ll get yours.”

LaRouche wanted murder. He grabbed the man by the shoulders, pulled him out of Jim’s and Wilson’s arms and shoved him to the ground. He wound back with his right boot and sent it solidly into the man’s side, cracking ribs loud enough to be heard.

“LaRouche,” Jim spoke up, raising a hand.

LaRouche either didn’t hear him or ignored him completely. He kicked the man in the side again so the man curled up into the fetal position and began gasping for air, horrible rasping sounds. LaRouche bent down onto one knee, took the man by the collar, and began hammering his already bruised face with his fist. He got in three strikes and nearly knocked the man unconscious before Father Jim finally leapt in, seizing the upraised arm.

“LaRouche!” he shouted. “Knock it off!”

LaRouche looked up at him. “You got a fuckin’ problem with this, Jim?”

The two stared at each other for a moment.

Then Jim nodded. “Yeah, I do.”

LaRouche continued to stare up at his comrade for a long moment. Jim released his grip on LaRouche’s arm. The man on the ground continued to cough and splutter and wail incoherently about his broken ribs.

Finally LaRouche just nodded. “Fine. Take the pickup and drive Lucky’s body back to the others.” He gave it another second’s thought and then looked at the ground. “Wilson, go with him.”

“I want to be here.”

“Wilson!” LaRouche looked up at him sharply. “You’ve done enough for one fuckin’ day! Just go with him!”

Wilson and Jim exchanged glances, both pained, but they stayed silent. They moved to the truck, closed the tailgate, pulled the dead driver out of the door, and kicked the shattered windshield out. LaRouche watched them, catching his breath. Then he forced his prisoner to his feet and guided him to the back of the van, opening the rear doors and manhandling him into the narrow space between the backseat and the door stop. Then he shut the door, pinning the man in place.

Behind him, an engine cranked loudly, failing to catch. LaRouche turned and found Jim in the driver’s seat of the pickup truck, and Wilson riding shotgun. The pickup’s engine caught and ran roughly for a few seconds, but evened out. They both looked up at LaRouche and he nodded sternly to them, so Jim simply cranked the wheel hard to the left and completed a tight U-turn, then drove back towards the convoy.

They never asked LaRouche what he intended to do, nor expressed concern about him being by himself. They all knew that it wouldn’t do them any good, because LaRouche had already made up his mind what he was going to do, and LaRouche was nothing if not mule-stubborn.

He slid into the driver’s seat of the van, putting his rifle in the passenger’s seat.

The keys were in the ignition. He cranked them and the van started up nicely.

He looked in the rearview mirror and saw the man still wedged in the back, murmuring something and wriggling around. LaRouche called out to him coldly, “Cool it back there. You might hurt yourself.” Then he pulled the shifter into drive and hit the gas.

CHAPTER 8: THE LORD’S WORK

The drive was short, but each passing second LaRouche’s mind delved deeper into some dark compaction at the core of himself. He stared straight ahead, colors turning to black and white, eyes drying, saliva turning thick in his mouth. The man in the back of the van prayed loudly for God to kill LaRouche, pled for his life, and finally offered LaRouche a high-ranking position in The Lord’s Army.

LaRouche never responded to any of it.

He pulled into the business park and drove behind it, taking the corners fast and stomping alternately on the gas and the brake so that the tires squealed and chirped. He didn’t stop to remove the chain or open the gate to the warehouse where they’d slept the night before, he simply rammed it with the van and skidded to a stop in front of the rolling doors, which still stood open from their departure earlier.

He stepped out of the van and stopped for a moment, his hand moving to his stomach, the tension in his shoulders seeming to falter for a moment as he dipped his head and swallowed hard. The burning sensation reached up from his stomach, through his chest, and into his throat. His mouth watered, threatening vomit, but he forced it down again. The burning subsided to a dull ache in his gut.

He growled and straightened himself back up, then proceeded to the back of the van. He pulled open the doors and looked at the sack of flesh laying before him. The man looked back and found no comfort in LaRouche’s eyes, just a cold indifference. And maybe a hint of regret that was more frightening than anything LaRouche could have said.

LaRouche reached in and grabbed the man, pulled him out of the van and onto his feet. He noticed for the first time that the man’s wrists were bound with one of their rifle straps—either Jim’s or Wilson’s. He took hold of the man’s arm and walked him briskly into the warehouse. In the center of the space, he looked up at the rafters and I-beams overhead and stopped.

He kicked the man in the back of the knee, sprawling him on the concrete floor. He pointed at him. “Don’t move,” he said.

He took a few steps away to a pile of rope on the floor. It looked to be a suitable length. He dragged it over to his prisoner, looped one end under his armpits and around his chest, then cinched a knot behind his back.

The man watched him work, his face blank. “What are you doing?”

LaRouche shook his head, avoiding eye contact with the man. His emotions were like sediment that time and pressure had turned into a brick, and now it lodged in his chest, hard, and dull, and uncomfortable. Something that needed to be purged from him.

He took the opposite end of the long rope and slung it high above his head where it looped over one of the rafters. He fed the rope upwards until the end dangled down low enough for him to grab, and then he yanked up the slack.

“Get up,” he ordered.

The man complied, not really showing any true fear anymore, as though he had resigned himself to what was coming.  LaRouche yanked the rope until the man stood up straight as a board, then tied it to the loop around the chest so that if the man were to lift his feet he would simply dangle from the rafters like a crude ornament.

“You can’t hurt me,” the man closed his eyes. “God is my strength.”

LaRouche walked to the front of the man, hands on his hips and looked at him until he opened his eyes again. They were feral eyes. Ignorant and wanton.

“What’s your name?”

The man’s nostrils flared and he looked around as though hoping for something that would show him a way out of the situation he was in.

“What’s your name?” LaRouche repeated.

His eyes shifted back to LaRouche. “Willie.”

“Well, Willie,” LaRouche scratched his cheek. “You can call me ‘Sarge,’ and how about we start this relationship off with a little bit of honesty. How’s that sound?”

Willie swallowed. “Okay.”

“Yeah, okay.” LaRouche folded his arms. “I’m gonna hurt you, Willie. I’m gonna hurt you bad. Until the sun goes down in about seven hours. And then I’m gonna kill you. But before that, I’m gonna try a bunch of different stuff. Find out what you can’t handle. Maybe it’s being burned. Maybe it’s having your toes crushed. Maybe it’s…” LaRouche made cutting motions with his index finger. “…having the skin on the soles of your feet flayed off. Make you walk around on the gravel out there.”