The Remaining: Refugees (63 page)

Seeing this pathetic bunch of refugees, he lowered his rifle just a bit further.

LaRouche made eye-contact with the driver of the lead vehicle. “Step out of the truck. We’re not going to hurt anyone, and we don’t want to take anything from you.
We just need
one of you
to
hop out and come talk to me.”

There was a long moment of hesitation, but the middle-aged man in the lead pickup truck finally gave a shrug, resolutely opening his door and stepping out onto the road. His hands were raised, and in his eyes was a look of
defeat.
“What do you want from us?”

LaRouche shook his head. “We don’t want anything from you. We wanna pass on our way without any trouble, and without you causin’ us trouble on down the road.”

The man turned and for a moment LaRouche thought he was looking back at his people sitting in the pickup trucks. Then LaRouche realized he was looking back down the road, as though picturing whatever he had come from. When he turned back to face LaRouche, he shook his head. “Ain’t nothin’ for us back there.”

Suspicion squinted LaRouche’s eyes. “Where you comin’ from?”

The man
looked grim
. “Ain’t much left of it now.” He pointed back east. “Had a little settlement outside Fremont. Me and a few of the others were in the city, pickin’ through the scraps when we saw the smoke. By the time we got back to camp they’d burned everythin’ to the ground. We picked up the rest of these folks about a mile down the road—they managed to run before the camp got taken
over
.”

LaRouche
tasted something sour.
“Who are you talking about? Who’s ‘they’?”

The man wiped his brow and seemed to just move the soot and dirt around. “I’m guessin’ it was The Followers.”

LaRouche wanted to roll his eyes, but in the face of this man’s tragedy, he though
t
it would simply be rude. So he restrained his response to a slightly sarcastic, “And what makes you think it was The Followers?”

“Well…” The man put his hands on his hips and spat on the road. “
Prolly because they hung ten of our men from crosses.” His face twisted just slightly and his eye
s
blinked
quickly
. He met LaRouche’s gaze, and
there
was grief
but
also
anger
. “See, what they do is use the telephone poles. First they nail ‘em to a two-by-four, then they lash that to the telephone pole.” The man began to visibly shake
and
his
words became more strangled
.

He appeared to be trying to say something else, but
couldn’t quite do it
. He brought a white-knuckled fist to his mouth and breathed ragged, furious breaths for a moment before regaining his composure enough to speak. “I can’t tell you the other thing they do. I can’t get
it out of my mouth. You’ll see…i
f you’re headed that way.”

LaRouche found himself staring at the man with his rifle hanging loosely at his side. Cautiously he pressed forward. “The Followers are real?”

“Hell, I dunno.” The man swiped at his eyes. “Whatever the fuck you wanna call ‘em. Don’t matter to me. But we’ve been hearing the rumors of them from folks travelling out of the coastal region. Thought they was fake...” He grew quiet for a moment, then shook his head again. “
D
idn’t think they’d come this far west.”

“When did this happen?”

He raked his dirty hair and rubbed the back of his neck. “We saw the smoke about an hour ago. I’m guessin’ it took some time
to…do what they did.”

LaRouche stepped closer to the man and spoke softer. “We don’t have much to spare for you folks, and I’m sorry for that. But we come from a large community, and it’s less than an hour’s drive from here. They’ll be able to help.”

The man looked up, dumbfounded. “You guys from Camp Ryder?”

LaRouche drew his head back slightly. “Uh…yeah, actually.”

“Are you…are you Captain Harden?”

LaRouche was so stunned by the question that he wasn’t able to muster an answer for a moment.
He almost told the man that he was Captain Harden, not because he wanted to take credit, but simply because the man’s eyes looked so completely
hopeful
. The look of defeat and desperation had fled from the man’s face for that brief moment, and LaRouche didn’t want him to be disappointed.

But in the end
, he shook his head. “No, I’m not Captain Harden.”

“Oh.” The man
almost looked like he didn’t believe him
. “Do you know him? Is he real?”

LaRouche smiled. “Yeah. He’s real. We’re actually out here, on his orders.”

The man looked confused. “What are you doing?”

LaRouche shook his head. “It’s complicated. Look, you’re less than thirty miles from Smithfield. They’re part of the Camp Ryder Hub, so they’ll help you out. Go there and tell them Sergeant LaRouche sent you, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Listen…”
LaRouche took another step forward. “Anything you know would be helpful. Up to this point, I’ve pretty much dismissed The Followers as
bullshit
. If you know what we’re heading into…”

“Yeah.” The man shoved his hands in his pockets and his shoulders drew up. “Everything we’ve heard has turned out to be true…except that, as far as I can tell, they didn’t eat nobody. But they did kill most of the men, and several are missing, along with most of the women.” The man’s chin quivered. “They say they take all the girls that are old enough to bear children. They give the males a choice to join them. The ones that don’t join willingly are…put on the crosses.”

“You know where they
went
? How many there are?”

The man shook his head. “
Went back east. Don’t know how many there were. They was gone by the time we got back. Had to be at least fifty of them to take over our settlement that quickly.” He swallowed hard. “We had a lot of people in that camp.” His hand searched for something to do as he spoke and eventually just flopped down to his sides like dead meat. “This is what they do. They send out raiding parties and they kidnap people. Force them to work in The Lord’s Army.”

LaRouche absorbed the information. “Anything else you can tell me?”

The man thought for a moment. “No. I’m sorry, there’s nothing else I can think of.”

LaRouche nodded. “Thank you. Please, go to Smithfield. They can help you.”

The man
eyed
him
. “You’re really from Camp Ryder?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Tell me something about Captain Harden…so I know you’re tellin’ the truth.”

LaRouche almost laughed at the man, but he could see how fragile the courage was in his clouded eyes, and he didn’t want
it to break
. He could have given the man some random factoid about Lee Harden that might have sufficed for the moment, but he knew the power of rumors, and the power of legends, and he knew how they imparted hope and inspiration to the people that heard them, even if sometimes the truth was stretched to its limit.

“
O
nce
, when we were fighting the infected,
” LaRouche said.
“
I
saw him fall down a three story elevator shaft. Shoulda broken every bone in his body after that fall. But you know what the bastard did when I went over to try to wake him up?” LaRouche balled his fist. “He got up and punched me right in the nose
because he thought
I was an infected
trying to attack him
.”

The man smiled widely. “Is that a fact?”

“That’s a fact.” LaRouche nodded. “When you get to Camp Ryder, you watch him walk. He’s got a limp in his right leg. That’s from his fall down the elevator shaft.”

“Alright.” The man extended his hand to LaRouche, and they shook firmly. “I believe you.”

“Go see for yourself.”

The man stepped back a few paces, then face
d
eastward, where it seemed that he paused for a half a beat, perhaps struck by the forlorn appearance of his friends and family in their filthy rags and downtrodden faces
. O
r perhaps staring down that stretch of road and picturing the things that lay beyond that cold horizon.

Then he continued to his truck.

Just as the man reached his truck and opened the driver’s door to get in, he stopped and look
ed back at LaRouche, his face once again grave. “
Y
ou boys be careful if you’re headed east. Ain’t nothin’ out there anymore but madmen. All of ‘em…madmen.”

LaRouche swallowed. “We’ll keep that in mind.”

“Best you do,” the man said. “Best you do.”

***

As they left Lillington and drove towards the Sanford airport, Eddie grew more and more quiet. For a while, he held onto his rifle as though it were a blanket, but gradually he released his death-grip on it and now it rested between his legs
,
leaned forward on the dash.

Lee chalked it up to nerves—it was the first time the guy had been out since he got to Camp Ryder, and his last experience hadn’t exactly been pleasant. Now Eddie had his left hand planted firmly on his knee and the other hand was inside his jacket pocket, and he looked out the side window at the countryside as it moved by them at a steady clip. He didn’t speak, but when Lee took occasional glances at his passenger, he saw the man’s jaw bunching quickly.

“Listen,” Lee said. “I’m not saying it’s going to be clear when we get there, but when we were here yesterday, there were no infected in the area. And if there are any today, we won’t stick around.” Lee wrangled the steering wheel as he made a right-hand turn. “Trust me. I’m not trying to get in a fight today.”

“How far are we away from Lillington?” Eddie asked.

“I dunno. Maybe fifteen miles?”

“And how far from Camp Ryder?”

“Twenty or so.”

Eddie finally looked away from the window, looking at Lee for a brief moment, and then at the rifle in front of him. “Do the patrols come up this way?”

“Yeah, but not often.” Lee stretched his neck. “They run between settlements mostly, so they’ll cover the roads between Lillington and Broadway more than out here.”

It was an odd question, but he was obviously worried about the dangers of the road.

Lee did his best to set his passenger at ease. “We haven’t seen any raiders in a
few weeks
—we’ve done a pretty good job of pushing them out of the region. And as for infected…well, they can’t outrun a Humvee.”

Eddie listened with his eyes closed, nodding. His lips were pressed down and pale.

Lee looked at him with a measure of concern. “Hey…you alright, man?”

Eddie’s eyes opened. “Yes. Can we stop?”

“Right here?”

“Yes. Stop right here.”

Is he car sick?
Lee thought.
Having a panic attack, maybe?

Eddie looked at him. “Please.”

Lee let his foot off the accelerator and looked around, checking through the windows and the mirrors, and scanning the woods and the fields to the side of the road. Everything was empty and barren. Just more anonymous American wasteland.