The Remaining: Refugees (49 page)

They were silent
for a while
.

After a time,
Lee pointed out the windshield. “There, to the right. That’s our road.”

LaRouche
cranked the wheel to the right and they pulled onto the
unpaved
road. It was just plain dirt
-turned-to-mud,
and mostly overgrown.
Lee consulted his GPS again, but the screen was frozen with the error message again.

“Son of a
bitch
…” Lee shook the device as though maybe a wire was loose. Finally he gave up. “Just go straight down. We’ll find the damn thing.”

***

It took
five minutes to find the bunker—a big cement lump protruding from the forest floor with an iron door that looked as formidable and secure as a bank vault. A large tree branch, still adorned with wilted and crinkled brown leaves, had fallen
over the door, partially obscuring it from view.

After finding the bunker, it took
over two hours to
load everything into the trucks
. The first LMTV—the one with the .50 caliber bullet hole in the windshield—was crammed full of 1000 pounds of C4, fuses, blasting caps, and detcord.
There was another 1000 pounds from Bunker #4 back at Camp Ryder. It sounded like a lot, but cutting bridges took a lot of explosives.

P is for “Plenty”,
Lee thought absently.

The other LMTV held crates of Claymores, grenades, and ammunition that only took up about half of the cargo bed, so they filled in the cracks with M4s, boxes of magazines, and a jumble of the
six-magazine shoulder bags, haphazardly thrown on top of everything else. There was room in the Humvee and in the cab of the HEMTT, so Julia hauled up as many medical supplies as she could fit in those spaces.

By then it was early afternoon and it had stopped raining.

Lee closed and secured the bunker and convened with his team. Strapping back into his rifle and gear which he’d doffed to carry supplies back and forth, his eyes traveled from person to person. Tired faces, but hard as well
. Hard with violence and loss
.

“I know i
t’s been a rough couple of days,” He said.
“
Sanford didn’t take as much time as we thought, but we paid the price for it. I know you guys want to get back to Camp Ryder, and I don’t blame you, so I’ll leave it up to you guys.” He situated his sling around his neck. “Eventually, we’re going to need to scavenge whatever vehicles the
N
ational
G
uard left for us at the airport outside of Sanford. We can do it now, on the way back to Camp Ryder, or we can go straight home and make another trip tomorrow.” He shrugged. “
I’ll leave it up to you
.”

They looked between each other and murmured.

A consensus was quickly reached.

LaRouche nodded. “Let’s do it now. Get it out of the way.”

“Alright,” Lee gestured for the trucks. “Then let’s not burn any more daylight.”

The unpaved road dead-ended in a slight clearing with a few sapling trees trying to push up out of the shadows of their brethren, their growth frozen for the time being as they stood dormant for the winter. It was tight, but with some maneuvering and some spinning of the tires through the muck and mud, they were able to get the trucks turned around and on the move.

They
moved on,
kept turning through bends in the road
,
and
Lee
expected to see a roadblock with rifles pointed at him, but there were none. They had not seen any sign of
roadblocks
in over a month. Bandits, Lee had heard them referred to. Such an old word, for such a seemingly new problem.

But it wasn’t really new, was it?

It was the same old humanity, suffering from the same old problems.

T
hese problems didn’t stem from
a fallen government. T
he
y
lay within humanity’s
base instincts,
and the collapse of society only made it easier for it to manifest itself
. Perhaps Julia was right. Perhaps there truly was no difference between the infected and the uninfected. They all had the same problem lurking inside of them. One simply had the ability to cover it up, and the other did
no
t.

Because society is just a mask that we wear
, constructed to look like something else, something better, something we
wish
we could be.
If y
ou live in that society long enough,
if
you wear the mask long enough,
then you
eventually forget that you’re only a few generations removed from
savagery
, and you let yourself believe that it’s no longer a part of who you are.

You’re better than that now.

You’re “evolved.”

But it’s an inescapable part of you, just as it’s a part of a dog, and
the
infected hordes, and the packs of hunters. It’s the rabid selfishness of an animal that knows no morals or laws. It’s a common bond between humans and everything else that lives and breathes
. T
he only thing that sets
humans
apart is
their often-
errant desire to
distance themselves from it
.
To be greater than that small creature inside of them.

Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

But if humanity is anything, it is stubborn.

And resilient.

And self-deceiving in the extreme.

So we rebuild
¸ Lee thought to himself.
For better or worse, we’re gonna try again.

He sighed and rubbed his face.
I’m just tired. Just fucking tired.

The twists and turns of the empty roads led them on for nearly an hour before they finally reached
the narrow two-lane road
that led
into the regional airport.

Lee could see what it had been before, and also what it had become. To either side of the road stood old farmhouses. These had been walled off with hastily-erected chain-link fencing, staked into the shoulder of the road with metal poles. Lee could remember the monumental amount of trash his unit had left behind them everywhere they went during the invasion of Iraq, and here was no different. Even simply transporting the refugees from the High School in Sanford to the airport for evacuation had resulted in such a trash clog, that the edges of the fence were cluttered with it up to about knee-height. Water bottles, MRE wrappers
, diapers, cigarette butts, and even bits of clothing, sneakers, and electronic accessories like iPods and cell phones littered the side of the road. It was like everyone had simply started shedding dead weight at this point in the road, throwing whatever they didn’t need over the side and into the road.

The houses and the chain-link fencing stopped as they crossed over a bridge with a single se
t of railroad tracks underneath.
O
n the rails,
a freight train
sat stalled, its lengthy bulk trundling motionless
off into the distance in either direction, its cargo of coal and cedar chips and whatever else it carried stuck in limbo forever.

After the bridge, the trees to either side of the road disappeared and the land opened up into a sprawl of white hangars and a squat brick building
right in the center of it all.
The municipal airport had no security measures to speak of. No gates to block their progress either into the airport or onto the tarmac. The road led to a parking lot
in front of the brick building, and there was a cluster of military vehicles there, spread out onto the tarmac. Imme
diately, Lee could see a couple of
“gun truck” Humvees, as well a few more LMTVs and a HEMTT with a wrecker attachment.

Jim pulled the truck
up over the curb, the other two vehicles following in a slow parade as they circled the compound at a steady twenty miles-per-hour. As they did, Lee
counted
the vehicles, including several that he had not seen, parked hurriedly beside and behind some hangar buildings as though the operators had abandoned them in a rush and caught the last flight out of town.

T
here were no aircraft left on the field save for a few civilian propeller planes
, now just abandoned chunks of fiberglass and metal. All the helicopters were gone, and if anything like a C-130 had been here, Lee saw no evidence of it now.

The vehicles that remained were three Humvees, two of them with guns, and the other just an old two-seater cargo truck; two more LMTVs identical to the two they had; and two more HEMTTs, one with a wrecker attachment and the other with a tanker on the back.

After taking a long, cautious loop around the perimeter of the airport, they saw nothing to make them believe there were any infected in the area. Lee directed
LaRouche
onto the tarmac, and they parked it there, about fifty yards from the cluster of abandoned military vehicles.

Lee pushed open his door. “Sit tight for a second.”

He jumped down, scanning around him carefully as he jogged back to the other Humvee.
Lucky was driving, and
Wilson
sat in the passenger seat, his jaw clenched and sweating profusely. Tough kid to lose two fingers and have them seared shut with no pain medication.

“How you holdin’ up?” Lee asked.

Wilson just grunted and nodded.

Lee patted him on the shoulder. “Hand me that radio.”

Lucky reached forward for Wilson and plucked the handset from the console and leaned across Wilson’s body to give
it to the captain. Lee nodded in
thanks and keyed the radio. He called for Harper twice before garnering a response.

“Yeah, go ahead, Captain. This is Harper.”

Lee turned and faced away from the Humvee as he talked, scanning the area behind
him. He could still hear Deuce
complaining f
rom the back of the LMTV, but he
had quieted some. “Harper, you still in Lillington, or have you headed out?”

“We’re still here, but we were about to hit the road.” A pause. “Jacob has his…thing.”

“Copy. Switch over to private channel,” Lee said quickly.

After a moment and a few adjustments, Harper was the first to transmit. “Are you sure about this?”

Lee rubbed his eyebrows. “No. How’s it look? Is it secured?”

“Yeah, it’s secure.” There was a level of resignation in his
voice. “It makes a lot of noise
, but it doesn’t seem to want to attack us. It just kind of lashes out if you get too close.”

Natural instinct
, Lee thought.
Lot of posturing, but a pregnant female won’t go for a fight unless it absolutely has to. Too much risk to the fetus.