The Remaining: Refugees (31 page)

Movement from the other side of the door.

Shuffling feet, noisy breathing.

It was sniffing the air.

It was just a human. It was not another species. Nothing had changed, anatomically or physiologically in the infected. Its nose was no more sensitive now than it had been when it was a whole and healthy person. However, there was a part of Lee that thought perhaps that mammalian, instinctive part of the brain—the only part left over after FURY—might be capable of interpreting scent data more clearly than the conscious
and
logical mind was able to do. The infected may not be blood hounds, but that was not to say their instinctive brains were not able to cypher from the air whether a person had been standing there recently.

His arms began to
fatigue
, tiring from holding the door shut so tightly.

The
sniffing, scenting noise became more pronounced, as though the infected were pressing its nose against the door frame, trying to inhale their scents from the other side. Abstractly, Lee wondered whether bathing made their scent more or less obvious. Was it the strange smell of soap that tickled its brain, or was it the smell of a living thing
’
s body odor?

On the other side of the door, the creature began to make a guttural sound: “Guh…Guh…Guh…” It wasn’t loud, and Lee didn’t think it was any sort of call to other infected. Perversely, it reminded him of a toddler, trying to sound out new syllables.

“Guh…Guh…”

From the outside, the door handle jiggled and the door moved slightly under Lee’s grip. He grit his teeth and held tighter. In his mind he pictured losing his grip, the door being yanked open, and the infected bursting through
biting and grasping at them. He would move back, quickly, as soon as he felt he was going to lose his grip
…

“Cap.
”

Lee jumped at the hot breath in his ear. He turned and thought he could see the faintest outline of LaRouche’s face in some dim, ambient light. He was standing very close to Lee now.

His voice was the barest thread of a whisper. “I think it’s gone.”

Lee listened and heard only silence. No more s
niffing, no more shuffling feet
.
No more grunted syllables.
But Lee didn’t release the door, or open it to retrieve his pack. Not just yet. He waited in the disorienting darkness, steeped in the smell of rotted flesh, for what could have been a minute, or possibly
ten
. It was difficult to tell.

T
he smell of the air
became a physical image in his head
, like a series of close up photos of every dead and corrupted thing he’d
ever
seen:
bloodless
skin, stretched to bursting with noxious gasses, brown fluids leaking, maggots squirming
busily.

He tasted vomit.

Unable to wait any longer, he used every bit of control
he had
to open the door
only an inch or so and look out
. The small vertical shaft of light bisected his face, and compared to the deep blackness of the inside, the outside seemed completely white. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust
to the light.

His stomach heaved.

H
e pushed the door open a little further.

No infected.

“Clear?” LaRouche croaked.

“Yeah…”

LaRouche fumbled past Lee, to his credit, still moving quietly. He went down to his hands and knees and stooped until his face was only inches from the pavement and he vomited. He’d had the presence of mind to spill his guts close to the ground so that it wouldn’t make a splashing sound.

Seeing LaRouche blow didn’t help, and Lee followed suit.

Between bouts of quietly purging mostly stomach acids, water, and bits of deer jerky, they both looked up and around but saw no threats. The ordeal last
ed
less than a minute before the two of them wiped strings of
sputum
from their noses and mouth
s
and dragged themselves back into the building
, along with Lee’s pack
.

Feeling marginally better, but still queasy from the inescapable smell, Lee slung into the backpack and closed the steel door behind him. He clicked on his rifle’s light and shined it down the hall, his face squeezed tight.

There, down at the end of the hallway, Lee could see that hunched thing he’d seen before, and also the likely source of the smell.
It was so badly decomposed, the only reason Lee could tell it was human were the soiled clothes it wore.

“Stairs,” Lee burped
and spat.

Directly to their right rose a stairwell. They moved to it and began to climb. T
he air
in the stairwell
may have still smelled like the corpse, but to their overwrought noses, it tasted clean
er
and fresh
er as they rose
. They took deep breaths
and
blew hard out of th
eir noses,
trying to clear their sinuses.

“Never get used to that smell,” LaRouche remarked.

They worked their way up the stairs and found the rooftop access. It was nearly identical to the roof of the business college, but here they found something interesting: a couple sand bags, some empty
5.56 mm ammunition cans, and some discarded aluminum box magazines were scattered in a corner. Brass shell casings
made a glittering carpet in the
corner. A few feet away were the remains of a case of MRE’s and a case of bottled water.

“Looks like some of our boys picked a nice overwatch,” LaRouche commented and poked at the
empty box of MRE’s with the toe
of his boot.

Lee eyed the discarded brass. “They hosed
somebody
down.”

“Bet I know who.”

They moved to the edge of the roof, crouching low and peered over at the intersection where they’d seen the infected crossing earlier. They could see the building where the infected had entered—the likely location of their den. The streets were pock-marked with bullet-strikes. There were a few old corpses off to the side, but not enough to justify the expenditure of ammunition sitting at their feet.

“Where are all the bodies?” Lee wondered.

“Maybe they ate them.” LaRouche glanced at Lee. “The infected, that is.”

Lee scanned up the street a little farther, in the direction they had seen the infected coming from. He tapped LaRouche on the shoulder and pointed, hunching low and trying to keep his body flush with the roof’s abutment. “There. You see ‘em?”

About two blocks west of the intersection, there was a large box truck, halfway embedded into a storefront.
Lee could not read the words on the side, but he could clearly see the enlarged picture of a cornucopia of grains, vegetables, fruits, and meats.

A
grocery truck.

The back end of
the truck hung halfway open, and all around it and inside of it was a crowd of tattered, filthy souls, all clambering to get inside. Lee could hear them occasionally barking at each other, but they were quieter than normal, he thought
. T
here were perhaps fifty of them
.
They would climb into the back of the truck, disappearing inside. Then they would emerge a moment later, their arms full
.

“They are rat-fucking the shit out of that truck,” LaRouche whispered in amazement.

L
ee watched, quiet and still.

He was overtaken by the pure
oddity
of what he was seeing
. Lee’s
first instinct was to try to explain away what he was seeing,
but he couldn’t deny
it
. They were gathering food from the truck and taking it back to
their den, or what Lee
assumed
was their den
. It was not a free-for-all. They were not eating whatever they got their hands on.

And
Lee didn’t know
how
he felt about this.

Fear.

Uncertainty.

Loathing.

Fascination.

“Those are cans they’re carrying,” LaRouche mumbled suddenly, as one of the infected passed by on the street below them.

“Jacob sa
id he’d seen them get into cans,
” Lee
breathed
. “
T
hey understand that it’s food.”

LaRouche turned and looked at the captain. “What else do they understand?”

Lee
didn’t answer
.

“Where’s the rest of them?”
he asked.

“I dunno.”

“
You know what else?
”

“What’s that?”

“No females,” Lee said.

LaRouche took a long moment to look, but could find none for himself. “Not a goddamned one,
”
he confirmed.

CHAPTER 14:
EVOLUTION

Another moment of observation passed.

Lee sidled a little closer to LaRouche and pointed in the direction of the truck. “You see the one across the street? Standing on the car? He’s got a red hoodie on.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s keeping watch.”

“How do you know that?”

“He hasn’t moved. Everyone else is gathering food, and he’s been standing on that car, looking back and forth the whole time.”

“Keeping watch,” LaRouche repeated, as though testing to see if the words made any sense. “What the hell are they keeping watch for?”

“
P
rey, maybe?”

“Maybe.”

Their answer came only a
moment later
when it suddenly let out an eerie, ululating cry unlike any Lee had heard come from the infected. At first Lee thought that they had been spotted up on their high overlook, but somehow knew that was no
t
right
. The noise from this infected
was not a scr
eech or a bark. It was a scream
.

“The hell…?” LaRouche jumped back at the noise, but didn’t take his eyes off the scene unfolding.

All at once, the fifty infected gathered around the box truck began to stampede for the den. The ones carrying food dropped it to the concrete. Boxes and packages spilled out and were trampled underfoot, canned goods went rolling and scattering across the road. As each of the infected horde began to run, they echoed the cry from the watcher.

“What are they doing?” LaRouche looked like he wanted to run
too
. “Should we get the fuck out of here?”