The Remaining: Fractured (39 page)

He never stopped.

What would he do in this situation?

And then the thought occurred to her, sneakily, like it was whispered to her from someone else to undermine her. Like a weed poking up in the middle of a flower bed—obstinate, divisive.

He’s dead.

Lee was dead.

They’d stopped him.

He’d finally lost a battle, and now he wasn’t coming back. All that “never surrender” bullshit hadn’t gotten him anywhere. He ended up the same as everyone else in this world: dead. Fucking dead. Missing and unaccounted for, actually, but nowadays it was the same damn difference.

She turned her mind away from him, like you turn away from a gravestone.

Her thoughts went to the new worry: how to get down from the roof without being caught. Although now, she supposed she could just say “I was just trying to get some fresh air and be alone for a bit,” and she supposed that would be fairly close to the truth, since that was pretty much all she had accomplished.

She stepped to the square opening in the roof with the ladder rungs curving up and out of it and looked down. The coast looked clear below her. She put a hand on the ladder, and just by chance, she glanced up, towards the northern woodline. And there in the darkness between the trees a light flashed.

***

Angela stood near the cookfire, sharing it with another family that lived on her same row of shanties—a middle-aged couple with a ten year old boy. They were reserved, and Angela knew that they were two of Jerry’s supporters. They didn’t speak, but instead offered a quiet nod when Angela had approached with her little pot with rice and water in it.

Sam and Abby huddled near the fire, warming themselves by it. They were quiet as well, as though they understood that the people they shared their fire with were neither friends nor enemies. Or perhaps a little of both.

Angela looked at them by firelight. The way it glowed on their faces, and the way the shadows accented every crease in their young faces. There were far too many creases for children their age. In Abby’s face, it was all around the eyes. A darkness and a brooding that she’d been harboring since the death of her father. Since this all began, really.

With Sam, the wear of all those negative emotions began to bleed through to other parts of his face. His mouth. The wrinkles around his nose. His lips were constantly compressed, as though trying to keep something in. The dark line of them always in a slight downward curve. A permanent frown.

Angela knelt in front of her pot of rice, elbows resting on her knees, chin resting on her hands. She regarded those two young people and felt a sorrow so overwhelming she thought she might break down right there in public, with the other family watching. It hurt so bad, she almost didn’t care. Everything hurt.

Losing Bus.

Losing Keith.

Losing Lee…

And her two children—one blood, one adopted—watching their innocence bled out of them day by day, like a thousand tiny cuts opening them up, when all she wanted to do was stitch them back together. Show them safety and love. Give them some semblance of a childhood. And knowing full well that those days were gone. Knowing that whether or not they survived with their souls intact wasn’t up to her, but to some predetermined chemical makeup of their brain. Could they filter out all the bad, and glean what good was possible from this life? Or would it all overwhelm and destroy them?

She closed her eyes against the burning sensation in them.

Heat from the fire. Or the sting of salt tears.

“Hey.”

She opened her eyes, blinked rapidly.

The woman from the other family knelt next to her. Short. Petit, like Angela had always wished to be. Elfish little hands and feet. Very delicate in appearance, like something not meant for this world. Like the one piece of china still intact after the bull had run through the shop.

Angela saw the swirling blur at the bottom of her vision and swiped quickly at her eyes. “Hey.”

The woman nodded to the pot, which was beginning to boil. “Here.” She produced a little white bottle. A salt shaker—the disposable kind you get in a two-pack with a pepper shaker at the grocery store. “Got it on our last scavenging trip. Right before they told us we couldn’t leave the gates.”

She leaned over the pot, shaking it generously into the boiling mixture of rice and water.

Angela watched the salt granules fall in, highlighted by the fire. She wanted to stop the tiny woman, didn’t know if she could receive their kindness gracefully. But the lump in her throat had grown too large to get words around.

The woman turned to Angela and touched her on the shoulder the way a friend would. She smiled and it was sad, like a child learning about cruelty. Then from her pocket she retrieved a small, brightly colored box and put it in Angela’s hands. It was an unopened package of Fruit Rollups.

“For the kids,” the woman said. “Maybe it will cheer them up.”

Before Angela could protest, the woman stood and retreated to the opposite side of the fire, rejoining her family. Angela watched her rejoin them, and then couldn’t. She looked down at the little package in her hands, finding it difficult to accept kindness, and it almost broke her down.

She pulled the boiling rice away from the fire. Inside the rice had grown, soaked up most of the water. She wrapped her hands with a few cloths, double and triple-folded, then picked the pot up by its handles, the whole side of it black from being so near the fire.

“Abby. Sam.” Angela spoke with a tone absent of thought. “Come on.”

She turned away from the fire, feeling the cold night pressing up against her face. The two kids fell in beside her, walking so closely abreast that their shoulders touched. Angela remained facing straight ahead, like the steam rising from the pot was putting her into a trance. She walked down the narrow little corridor that separated this row of shanties from that one, so many of them vacant with everyone gone away with LaRouche and Harper.

She heard quick footsteps behind her. Heavy. Like an adult.

She turned quickly, almost quickened her pace, but found that it was only Marie.

The other woman drew up beside her, hands stuffed into the pockets of her jacket that seemed too big on her. Immediately Angela could sense the tension coming off of her like an electrical field. Everything about her was tightened, thin cords standing out on her neck as she looked this way and that.

“You okay?” Angela asked, lowering her voice simply because of how Marie acted.

Marie nodded. “You need help with that?”

“No, I got it,” Angela quirked an eyebrow. “What happened?”

“Inside.” Marie pointed.

They’d reached Angela’s shanty. Marie opened the flap for them and Angela and the two kids scurried in, steam trailing after them like a locomotive. Marie stood in the doorway, not quite letting the flap fall just yet, looking both ways down the row, seeing if anyone was being nosy and watching them.

Angela put the pot down and hurried over. “Marie!” she hissed. “Did you do it?”

Marie didn’t directly answer. Instead she drew out a crumpled piece of old newspaper, the ink faded and sun-bleached. She handed it to Angela, delicately, as though it were more than just a piece of trash. Like it contained diamonds.

Marie stepped away, holding the tarp door open with a single hand. “We’ll talk later.”

Angela looked from the piece of trash in her hand up to Marie, confusion evident on her face.

Marie just pointed to the paper, then let the tarp drop.

Angela looked behind her. Saw the two children sitting next to the warm pot, watching her with curiosity. Then she looked at the paper in her hands. Slowly unfolded it. Feeling her heart beating faster. Some sort of writing on it. Thick bold letters written in what looked like charcoal. Heart beating much faster now. Because Marie had gone to the roof to try to make contact and then she came back with a note. A note from someone. And it said who it was right there at the bottom.

WE ARE HERE. CHECK AGAIN AFTER MIDNIGHT.

--CAPT. TOMLIN

CHAPTER 25: A WAY OUT

LaRouche sat alone in the cab of the LMTV. It was more roomy than the Humvee and he had a little more space to spread his legs out and try to sleep. That was his excuse for dismissing himself—trying to catch some sleep. In reality, he simply had no desire to mingle with these strangers from Parker’s Place.

It was a little community, tucked back into some woods. Almost the same setup as the camp where they’d found the girl’s father earlier in the day, except this one was surrounded by forest rather than open cropland. Judging by the cluttering of tents and scrap-made shelters, there were about twice the people living here as there had been in the other.

A few of the men that had been captured by The Followers and had escaped during LaRouche’s attack had made their way to this group. Jackson met them with grieving embraces, but they remained silent about anything that had happened. All that LaRouche heard them tell the people from Parker’s Place was that they’d been attacked by The Followers and had managed to escape.

No mention of being captured.

No mention of hanging their friends on crosses.

Instead there’d been much backslapping and eager questions and sudden bouts of trading back and forth between the people of Parker’s Place and LaRouche’s group. LaRouche felt suddenly lost in the middle of it, looking about at his people like they were insane. How could they so easily switch back and forth? Not like him. He seemed stuck in the “on” position.

Feeling awkward and out of place, he’d slipped away, mumbling about getting sleep.

Now he just sat in the cab of the LMTV, unable to close his eyes, unable to quench that roiling, acid burn in his stomach as it tried to creep its way up his throat. He reflexively pressed his gut when it pained him. Kept pressing there without thinking about it until he noticed the flesh felt sore and bruised from doing it so often.

He stared out the window of the LMTV, through the dark woods and into the little settlement. He could just barely see the shadowy figures of his group and the group of strangers, all mixed together like it was some sort of bonfire in the woods, like nothing was wrong, like they were all just best fucking friends forever.

He leaned his head back, tried to get comfortable. Shifted positions several times. Kicked his feet up so he lay back against the door, his feet on the driver’s seat. His mind wandered to and fro, kept coming back to Nick and wondering if the man was going to reach Camp Ryder, and if so, what he was going to find. But it felt like fruitless worrying, so he closed his eyes. But then his heart started beating. The feeling like he’d forgotten something. The feeling that something was sneaking up on him.

Finally, he sat up. “Fuck this shit,” he grumbled to himself.

He stared blankly out the front of the vehicle for a moment. All around him, except to his left where the camp of survivors was set back into the woods, everything was dark. Black. Stars not even shining through the tree tops. From some source of ambient light he wasn’t able to figure, he could just barely make out the pale face of one his team, keeping watch from the turret of one of the LMTV’s a few spaces in front of him.

He could find no other way to occupy himself, so he reached down into the floorboard where he’d stowed his chest rig and rustled around in it. He touched the plastic bottle of whiskey that he’d taken from the man he’d interrogated, but pushed passed it and found his map. It was creased in odd places, tattered a bit along the edges. It was wearing out with the frequency with which LaRouche pulled it out and unfolded it. Like rosary beads for a Catholic, but rather than touch the beads and utter a prayer to God when he needed comfort, he would unfold the map and look at the lines, look at his progress and try to plan ahead to meet his goals. A prayer to the god of strategy. Just like people thought they could pray enough to make bad things go away, he thought he could plan enough to keep them away.

All just a giant distraction anyways.

All just a way to try to forget about what could be metastasizing in his blood stream. His mind kept returning to it, despite every effort to push it down another track, like all roads led back to the most worrisome thought yet:
I might be infected.

Like an arachnophobic person constantly feeling the tickle of a spider crawling up their neck, he kept feeling the first flushes of fever that would begin his violent illness. Kept feeling sick, though he knew it was probably more from worry than from anything physical.

Don’t let me go this way
, he thought to no one in particular. Not to God, because he didn’t believe in Him.
I’ll take a bullet. I’ll take a knife to the chest in hand-to-hand fighting. I’ll even take a fucking heart attack. But not this. Not this thing that isn’t dead and isn’t alive. I don’t want to simply exist like an animal. And I sure as shit don’t want to have to kill myself when I feel it happening. Really don’t want to kill myself.

He didn’t believe in God, but didn’t know who else he could be talking to.

Just focus on the map. Focus on tomorrow.

He didn’t have an exact location, but he’d notated with a circle where he thought they were, based on the roads he’d seen in the area. They were nearby the very small town of Bethel. Were actually only a few miles from the Roanoke River, which was their target objective, but they were too far inland. They needed to find the easternmost bridge, which would be close to Swan Bay. The quickest route to take out to the Swan Bay, where the Roanoke River began its trek through North Carolina, would be Highway 64. But that would also probably be the most dangerous route, so LaRouche immediately dismissed it. They would keep parallel to Highway 64, between it and the river, and make their way to where Highway 45 crossed the river. That was the first bridge that needed to be blown or blocked or manned.

He wondered what it would be like when they got there, probably within the next day or two, depending on how slow caution demanded they go. Would there already be swarms of infected trundling across the river? Would they have to fight their way through to blow it? Would it even be possible?