The Remaining: Fractured (3 page)

Jacob and Doc Hamilton watched as the two men got her into the corner, using the shield to protect themselves and to pin her down while they got the dog catcher’s pole around her neck.

“We got her! Come on!”

Doc Hamilton was surprisingly quick for such a small man. He ran in and slipped quickly between the two men, sticking the writhing form in the side and squeezing the payload into her blood stream. She became more violent at first, but that was typical. After perhaps thirty seconds, the fighting slowed, and her screeching turned into a hollow-sounding moan. And maybe ten seconds after that she was completely unconscious. Arms and legs twitching. Eyelids fluttering.

“Alright,” Jacob pushed the ultrasound machine into the room. “Get her up on the bed.”

There was already a bed there in the room, kicked off to the side. She didn’t use it—at least not as intended. She would push it into the corner, creating a little den with it, and she would hide underneath sometimes, and often sleep there. But never on it. Like she feared being exposed.

The two guards hauled her up, one at her feet, and the other at her head. As they waddled backwards towards the bed, they heard the steady dribbling sound of liquid hitting the floor. The guard at the feet glanced down and grimaced.

“I think she’s pissing herself.”

Jacob nodded, following them with the ultrasound cart, but avoiding the yellowish puddles left behind. “She’s heavily sedated. Not unusual.”

They hefted her onto the bed and then vacated quickly, wiping their hands off on their clothes, their noses wrinkled in disgust.

Jacob pulled the ultrasound up beside the bed. Doc Hamilton hurried over, disposing the needle in one of the biohazard bins, and then plugging the machine in. While they waited for it to boot up, Jacob put the tray of food on the floor and slid it away from them, then he gloved up and began squeezing the tube of light-blue gel onto the pregnant belly.

“Doing good, Stacey,” Jacob said softly as he worked.

Doc Hamilton regarded him with some distaste. “Why you gotta name the damn thing?”

Jacob glanced at him. They’d already been through this. “We have to call it something.”

“How about Subject One?”

To Doc, the creature before them was just a science experiment. He didn’t want to consider that it had once been a person, and he thought that Jacob’s naming of the thing spoke of some sort of hopeful naiveté, as though Jacob thought they might coax this damaged thing back to sanity. But Jacob didn’t name it because he thought it was still a person.

Jacob shrugged. “She looks like a Stacey.”

“You must’ve had a very bad encounter with a girl named Stacey,” Doc mumbled.

Jacob smiled. He’d never actually known a Stacey—at least that he could remember. But for some reason when he thought of what to call the creature lying unconscious before him, he just kept thinking of her as Stacey. No idea why. It just was.

“It’s ready,” Doc said, handing Jacob the ultrasound wand.

Jacob pressed it against the swollen stomach. The thing called Stacey twitched a bit, but then lay still again. She made an unpleasant gargling sound. Drool coming from the corner of her mouth. The speaker on the equipment crackled like a garbled radio transmission. Fluidic sounds of something squirming through the amniotic sac inside.

The heavy, steady
thump-thump
of Stacey’s heart.

Then a more rapid beat.

Jacob steadied the wand, kept it there. He eyed the screen.

Doc Hamilton leaned around to get a look at the screen. “Looks like it’s still alive in there.”

He almost sounded disappointed.

Maybe Jacob was too. He didn’t really know how he felt about it.

Doc frowned after almost a minute passed. “That…” he made a face. “That heartbeat doesn’t sound quite right.”

“No?” Jacob eyed his partner. Doc Hamilton was the general practitioner. Granted, he was no OB/GYN, but he probably had a lot more experience with pregnant women than Jacob had, since Jacob had essentially none. Jacob knew about small things. Viruses. Bacteria. Infections.

Not reproduction.

Doc Hamilton raised his wrist and looked at the wind-up watch he still had strapped to it. He seemed utterly focused on it, the little second hand moving about and Doc’s eyes watching it like a hawk, all the while the air in the room filled with the strange
slish-slosh
of the fetus’s movements, and the rapid
thip-thip-thip
of its heart.

“What’s wrong with it?” Jacob asked.

“Well,” Doc lowered his wrist. “I guess there’s nothing wrong with it, per se.”

Jacob frowned at the other man, trying to get to the meat of what he was saying.

But Doc just stared at the screen, shaking his head. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

***

Greg hated Arnie’s little red Geo. In a world where you were lucky not to be walking, he still hated Arnie’s little red Geo. It stank of decades of decaying fast food, tiny morsels that were lodged somewhere down in between the seats and glued there by soda. Since those glory days of overindulgence, Arnie had shrunken—all that skin that used to be stretched tight by his immense stores of fat now swung around loosely inside his clothing—but when Greg was stuck in the front seat, with Arnie driving beside him, he couldn’t help but picture the man at his fattest state, driving with his knees while he double-fisted cheeseburgers.

With four men crammed into it, the smell became that much worse. With the weather hitting a cold spike over the last few days and true winter coming on, people were using the outdoor shower stalls less and less. Instead, most of them opted to give themselves a “wipedown.” This consisted of wiping your armpits and crotch with a wet cloth. Or a baby wipe, if you were lucky enough to find one.

Great to make sure they didn’t grow fungus, but it didn’t do much for the smell.

So Greg sat in his quiet misery while Arnie drove them down the highway.

West, towards Lillington.

In the days following Jerry’s movement, and the deactivation of the radios at Camp Ryder, there had been no word from OP Lillington. They’d heard from Doc Hamilton and Jacob at Smithfield. They’d heard from OP Benson. But nobody had seen hide nor hair of Old Man Hughes and his group.

In Jerry’s opinion, Smithfield was necessary, because it was a hospital. OP Benson kept the roads between Camp Ryder and Smithfield clear, so that anyone that needed serious medical attention could go to Smithfield and see Doc Hamilton. But OP Lillington was just a waste. Another drain on their resources. It only existed so that Captain Harden could expand his area of influence, and use Lillington as a jump-off point for his operations.

So Jerry sent Greg, Arnie, and the new guy, Kyle, to scout it out. The fourth passenger, crammed in tight with the others, was Professor White, the leader of the group from Fuquay-Varina. He’d been curious about Lillington, and had been pressuring Jerry into letting him take a group to go check it out. Greg supposed that he held some sort of attachment to Lillington, or perhaps to Old Man Hughes and his group, since they had shared Lillington for a short time.

Who knew what Professor White was thinking?

But he’d been very insistent. To the point of accusing Jerry of covering things up. Suggesting that OP Lillington
had
contacted Camp Ryder, but that Jerry just refused to render any help to them. And there were other issues souring their relationship. Professor White felt that he’d been promised that as soon as Captain Harden and Bus were overthrown and the supplies accessed, they would all immediately make a run for the mountains. A mass exodus to escape.

Obviously Jerry was in no hurry to do this, and each day it became more evident that it wasn’t going to happen. Which left White feeling betrayed. And Professor White had never been shy in his attempt to sway the court of “public opinion,” if you could call a few dozen survivors living in shanties the “public.”

White’s presence in the already-cramped car was a result of him butting heads with Jerry for the umpteenth time in the past 48 hours. White wanted to know what had happened to Lillington, and Jerry assured him that he would send a group out to investigate. At which point White insisted that he be a part of it. And if he didn’t get what he wanted he was going to make a stink.

So he got what he wanted.

They turned onto S. Main Street and hit the bridge over the Cape Fear River. Arnie slowed them down, but didn’t stop. They continued rolling until they were across the river. They trundled over a set of train tracks and Greg leaned forward in his seat, motioning Arnie to a stop. He pulled out a pair of binoculars and glassed the downtown area of Lillington. The little square of buildings where the outpost had been set up.

“Why are we stopping here?” White asked, shifting abruptly in the backseat and setting the vehicle to rocking.

A look of mild irritation passed over Greg’s face. He pulled the binoculars away from his eyes and waited for White to quit fidgeting so the car would be still, and then he put the binoculars back up and continued to scan, slowly, carefully.

“We’re checking the area, Professor,” he responded, his voice less than enthusiastic.

“So you do think that someone is there,” White pronounced, triumphantly.

Greg sighed and dropped the binoculars in his lap. “I think that if I blundered into unknown situations without checking them out from a distance, then I’d be dead by now. I can’t see any movement in or around the buildings.” He glanced back at White. “Hostile or otherwise.”

“So…”

Greg turned fully in his seat and looked at White. The professor regarded him with that usual pinched expression that sat amid all of that snow-white hair. His head slightly inclined, looking down through his thick glasses at Greg. Like he resented being forced to converse with such a low-brow specimen.

Greg adjusted his Yankees ball cap. “Let me explain something to you, Professor. You might be able to manipulate Jerry and get what you want out of him by threatening to trash him publicly, but I don’t like you. I am not beholden to you. I don’t give a fuck what you think or say. I only allowed you to come along with us today as a favor to Jerry. And given the fact that I generally regard you as an idiot, whose survival so far defies logic and probability, I’m going to need you sit back there and shut the fuck up. Okay?”

Professor White stared back at Greg, looking somewhat shocked.

But silent, at least.

Kyle sat beside Professor White and looked tense and awkward. Which wasn’t difficult for him. He was one of those guys whose awkward stage somehow lasted well into their twenties. A thin, gawky neck. Just a thin smattering of unsightly facial hair that clumped at his cheeks and his chin, leaving the other areas bare.

Arnie grinned, chuckled. His loose folds of empty skin quivered under his chin like a wattle.

Greg turned back around. “Go ahead and take us in, Arnie. Slow and easy.”

“You got it, Boss.”

They rolled on, Greg and Kyle readying themselves for whatever they might find, while Professor White sulked. They rolled their windows down and laid their rifles on the doors, barrels protruding out, though it was tight to maneuver a rifle in such a small vehicle.

They stopped at the intersection of S. Main Street and Front Street, caddy-corner to OP Lillington. The ring of red brick buildings had been partially secured—most of the windows and doors were boarded or covered with some sort of barricade. A few were still open, giving it the look of an abandoned project.

Greg leaned forward again, looked up to the roof of the building and watched it for a minute.

“No watchman?” Kyle asked.

Greg just shook his head. “Go ahead and take us around back.”

Arnie took them into the entrance, a narrow alley wide enough for a single vehicle. The end of the alley was usually barricaded by a car, which the guards at OP Lillington would roll out of the way for incoming friendlies, like you might open a gate.

The barricade car was rolled away. No one around it.

They crept passed, then stopped in the middle of the open space, surrounded completely by all those buildings. The other barricades still stood intact—the dumpsters and tires and other abandoned cars still stacked up and crowned with loops of barbed wire. It was only the entrance that had been left open. Like an abandoned house with the front door hanging off its hinges.

Greg opened his door, stepped out. He took a moment to survey his surroundings while behind him the others squirmed their way out of the tiny hatchback car. It was very still there in the center of OP Lillington. Greg would still check the interiors of the buildings, just to say that he had, but he already knew that the place was abandoned. He could tell just from the immense silence of it.

“Hellooooo?” Professor White yelled. “Anybody here?”

Greg spun on the man. The professor had his hands cupped around his mouth like a megaphone and took another deep breath to continue his shouting. Greg slapped the hands away from his mouth, then stood there, glaring.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

White looked concerned. “I was trying to call out…”

“Didn’t I tell you to shut the fuck up?”

“But what if there are people around?”

“And what if they’re the wrong people?” Greg shook his head. “Jesus, it really is astounding that you’ve lived this long.” He turned away from the professor, stood without moving for a moment, feeling out the ensuing silence, listening for sounds of anything that might be coming for them.

Nothing.

Greg started walking for the buildings. “Kyle, you’re with me. Arnie, stay with the professor, please. Make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.”

“You got it.”

The professor sounded indignant. “I don’t need a babysitter, Greg!”

“Oh, I think you do,” Greg said without turning around.

They cleared the buildings and found nobody, just as Greg had suspected. Nor did they find any sign of anybody. Or any clue as to where they had gone. Like OP Lillington had never existed.