The Remaining: Refugees (67 page)

“You’re a fucking liar!” She pointed her finger in a broad sweeping gesture. “And you’re all fucking cowards for letting him do it! Murderers and cowards!”

Jerry’s sneer returned to his face like stagnant water freezing over. “Tie her up and find someplace to put her. Someplace where she won’t be heard.”

Moving slowly, still in shock, two men took Angela by the arms and placed them behind her back
. One held them clasped there while the other began to restrain her with thin cordage that bit painfully into her skin.

The anger and disbelief were suddenly vaporized in an explosion of thoughts for her daughter, for Abby, and for Sam. “Jerry! I’ve got children! You can’t do this!”

“I’ll make sure they’re taken care of,” he said quietly. “Perhaps when you decide to calm down, you can see them again.”

Angela began to pull against her bindings but they’d already been tied too tight. “I’ve got to see my daughter! You can’t do this! Let me see my daughter! Let me see Abby!”

Jerry gave her one last look of disdain, strangely tainted with remorse, and then shook his head. “Get her out of my office.”

Angela screamed bloody murder and thrashed wildly as they carried her out, until they managed to gag her and safely lock her in the very same shipping container that Tomlin had occupied, only a day before.

W
hen the people of Camp Ryder
saw Angela being dragged past them, kicking and screaming, they averted their eyes or simply shook their head
s
because they knew that her loyalties were to Bus and Captain Harden, and most of them that remained supported Jerry.

T
he
y
looked on, scared and unsure
, and some of them thought it was shameful
to see such a nice lady treated like that
, but none of them lifted a finger to do anything about it
, because they were sure that Jerry had his reasons for doing what he did
.

This would be the new Camp Ryder, and they trusted in Jerry, that he had made the right decision
, no matter what it was
. Now they had hope for their future. Now, things would change for the better. No more of Captain Harden’s warmongering.
No more sending their people out to die for reasons they couldn’t understand.
No more of Bus wasting their precious resources on refu
gees that had no right to them.

Yes, everything would be better, now that Jerry had taken control.

***

LaRouche stood with his feet on the double-yellow line running down the center of the highway. He faced south, his head tilted up as though scanning the skies for evil portents of things to come. A bloody sun splattered the western sky with red, a bleeding heart viewed through an open wound. The shadow of the day covered them with a cadaverous chill, and LaRouche zipped up the collar of the
micro fleece
sweater he wore under his jacket to cover his exposed neck.

His eyes remained affixed to
some elevated object in front of
him.

Jim’s voice was shaky beside him. “Should we…take them down?”

LaRouche blinked
, without words
.

They stood on a section of highway just outside of Fremont. To the south, a narrow but well-traveled dirt road led away from the main highway, and presumably to the camp that the man with the convoy of two pickup trucks had escaped from.

Beginning there at the dirt road, and extending east along the highway at intervals of perhaps 300 feet, were wooden utility poles sunk into the dirt alon
g the shoulder. Upon these poles
were hung the naked bodies of ten
men, some of them young, some of them older. They were hung upon crossbeams of two-by-fours, spiked through their wrists and feet, and the crossbeams lashed to the poles with rope and wire.

It was exactly as the man had described.

The aspect of their deaths that
the man
had been unable to
describe
was the disembowelment. The executors had not simply hung the victims and left them to die, but had slit them across the bottom of their midsections, just below their navels. Their carcasses hung h
o
llow on
the crosses, their insides piled
below them at the base of the pole, tethered to them only by the pale linkage of unraveled intestine.

Hung around the neck
of
each body
were placards on which a single word had been printed: UNREPENTANT.

LaRouche put a fist to his mouth and swallowed hard. The air was filled with stenches unimaginable, and he could feel the acid of his stomach eking up his throat,
a
prodding nausea insistent that he purge himself. His gaze traveled down the road.

On the side of the road, perhaps 25 yards from LaRouche, lay the bodies of three infected that had been tearing at the bodies like carrion eaters
before
the convoy had arrived and gunned them down. The fourth of their small pack had fled into the woods, wounded in the leg.

Finally, LaRouche fought down the urge to vomit enough to speak. “No. Leave them.”
He turned and faced Jim, whose eyes were filled with tears, and who looked like he was struggling to con
tain his own
stomach
. “We don’t have time to bury them all before dark. And they might serve to warn away anyone traveling east.”

Jim nodded, trembled. “Except us.”

LaRouche didn’t respond.

Wilson leaned out of the lead Humvee, just a few yards behind them. “Sarge, I can’t get anyone from Camp Ryder to respond.”

LaRouche looked at the dark-skinned man and considered this for a moment. “I’m sure they’re just missing the transmission. They’re probably…” He swallowed again. “…eating dinner.”

“Do you want me to keep trying?” Wilson asked, his voice sounding vacant.

“We’ll try again in a little while.”

LaRouche turned back towards the south, but he could not look at the crucified bodies again.

Jim spoke. “What do we do now?”

A cold wind blew from the north and buffeted against their backs.
It scrubbed away the foul stenches like white-wash clearing a canvas to a blank slate. But it was only so that new and unknown horrors could be painted on it. It froze them to their cores and its soft voice whispered of an end to the things they knew and a beginning of long, dark months ahead, of changes that would not only reshape them as people, but would also reshape the world around them.

“We keep going
.
” LaRouche said quietly. “We complete the mission. Whatever
it
takes.”

CHAPTER 32:
WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU

Images of flashing smoke and burning spark
s, conforming to roiling towers of flame that reached for him, seared his eyes and puckered his flesh, and melted into vast fields of lava flow that distorted his vision with heat like the surface of the sun. He felt the right side of his head melting, hot and tingling at first, and then cold and clammy.

A beast appeared before him, its breath hot and rank and it gnashed its teeth at him and began to eat the melted portion of his head. He did not react to this because it did not make sense, and it could only be a part of some strange death-dream.

Behind the beast that fe
d on him he could see
random
crisscrossing
patterns of light and dark, slate gray and deep navy blue. The dark shapes clawed at the corners of his vision, the gray took the center and gave way to the flailing talons of these dark creatures. In the immensity of the gray stood a lone
some
spark that burned, burned, and throbbed.

Slowly, dreamily, he reached up and pushed the beast away from him, because he could not bear the sensation of it eating his melted head any longer…

Like a series of firecrackers going off along a lit fuse
, the truth began to light up his mind, beginning with the feeling of
fur
.

Fur.

Dog’s fur.

Not a beast.

Deuce.

He wasn’t gnashing at him, he was barking.

Lee touched the side of his head
that he thought had melted and
felt
it was intact, save for
a raised, fleshy groove that stung at the prodding of his fingertips and caused him to jerk his hand back. Deuce continued to wail and bark and whine at him, and this was not truly registering with him just yet. He was dead. He was dead.

He had been shot in the head.

This wasn’t—couldn’t—be real.

He forced his fingers
once again
to the ragged wound that ran along his scalp from the hairline of his right temple to the back of his head, behind his ear.
The pain cleared his mind, but only slightly.
It burned badly now, the only sensation of coolness coming from the evaporation of Deuce’s saliva as he dutifully licked his master’s wound.

Sometimes the bullet skips off the skull
, Lee
heard himself say, as though it was some fleeting memory of a past life.

The barking…

The barking…

The barking…meant there were infected near.

Lee blinked rapidly, trying to clear his head, trying to organize a million thoughts that screamed at him for his attention. No, he could not give them his attention. He could not think about
Eddie
Ramirez, or betrayal, or Abe Darabie
, or—
Shit! Where’s my GPS?

In his pack.

In the Humvee that was long gone.

Sonofabitch…

But h
e was here, he was now, and
that GPS was somewhere else. He had a different set of problems that he needed to solve first. There was the present to worry about. And presently,
there were infected nearby.

Infected.

Infected,
Lee forced himself to focus.

Compartmentalize…

Deuce had turned himself so that his
stiff and fearful
tail was nearly touching Lee, and he faced into the woods, barking savagely.

Weapon?

Of course not. He leaned upwards, felt dizzy for a moment, saw sparkle
s
at the edge of his vision and a massive, nearly debilitating headache throbbed through his skull. Perhaps a fracture. Perhaps a concussion. Perhaps swelling on the brain that would kill him momentarily anyway.

Can you even be conscious and have brain swelling?

He didn’t think so.

He felt around on the ground, searched it with his eyes, but found nothing but rocks and dirt. Then he felt his vest
, still strapped to
him
. His magazines remained in place,
along with
his Ka-Bar. Eddie Ramirez must have shot him and just kicked him out of the driver’s seat and into the road. If he had bothered to take the time to search the body, maybe he would have discovered that Lee was not actually dead.