He made his way quietly out of the bunker and up to his basement.
Without Tango there to be his early-warning system, he spent more time listening and waiting. Before opening the hatch to his basement, he hung on the ladder with his ear pressed to the steel but didn’t hear any movement from inside. He thought he could still hear the banging from the infected he had begun to mentally refer to as Hammer Guy. The sound was so faint, he entertained the possibility that he could just be imagining it.
When he did open the hatch, he did it slowly and quietly. Once it was open, he crept out, careful to control his M4 and other attached gear so it would not bang on the walls or the hatch and make noise.
Now in the basement, he listened and realized he was not hearing Hammer Guy or Caddy Shack. The basement was silent, and the upstairs along with it. This set Lee off his pace even more than hearing the two goons still trying to break in. Because if he heard them trying to break in, that meant they were still outside. Now, in the silence, he was not so sure.
He checked his chamber to ensure he was locked and loaded. Up the stairs.
SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training taught him to compartmentalize so his life didn’t seem so impossible. When you are surrounded by enemy forces and fear drives you to ground and makes you think you are incapable of moving to your objective, you simply compartmentalize. Instead of moving to your objective, you focus on just crawling to that fallen log, and then from there, slithering down into the swamp. You divide it up into manageable tasks that don’t seem so life-or-death.
Right now, though fear told him Hammer Guy and Caddy Shack were sniffing around the house for him, making it to the top of the stairs seemed feasible. So he put one foot in front of the other, rifle trained at the door, and quietly eased his way up.
He stopped and listened again.
Hearing nothing, he opened the door just an inch so that he could catch a glimpse of the patio doors where Hammer Guy had been. As he cracked the door, he could see Hammer Guy, squatted down on the ground, facing away from the house, carving something into the dirt of Lee’s backyard with the claw of the hammer. The air seemed warmer than it had been when he’d first entered the house, but he’d been in his bunker, which he kept at a cool seventy degrees. He supposed his body had acclimated to the cooler temperature and felt the difference in the slightly warmer house.
Lee watched Hammer Guy work, disturbed by the infected man’s raw intensity and aggression. After a few moments, Lee edged farther out of the doorway and looked to the front of the house to see if Caddy Shack was still hanging around. His angle wasn’t very good, but that also meant Caddy Shack couldn’t see him. He wanted the two infected calm and quiet so he could get a better position of attack on them. And he wanted to kill them silently so he wouldn’t attract any more attention.
Lee was beginning to think that the strange howling noise the infected made was some vestige of predatory instinct left over in human DNA from the days of hunting in packs. To Lee, it sounded like the call of a wolf on game, and Lee got the distinct feeling that when one infected made the howl, more infected would come running, out of some primal, knee-jerk response to the call of prey.
He slipped through the doorway, then down a hallway that led to the main portion of his house and the stairs to the second level. He slid quickly around the banister and took the stairs two at a time. He turned left at the top, facing the front of the house where the still-unaccounted-for Caddy Shack had last been seen.
In the guest bedroom decorated in nautical style, Lee squatted down and duck-walked to the window overlooking the front porch and front lawn. The porch was covered, but if Caddy Shack moved out into the yard, Lee would have a good bead on him. Wood blinds covered the windows and were pulled closed. Lee used a single finger to lift one of the slats and gain a view of his front yard.
The view was too narrow. He couldn’t see Caddy Shack.
“Sonofabitch…” Lee dropped his go-to-hell pack with a little less caution than normal. Something hard on the bottom of the pack made a heavy thump on the hardwood floors. Lee cringed.
Somewhere in one of the upstairs bedrooms, something glass shattered.
Lee swept the rifle up to his shoulder, thinking, What the fuck was that? but not daring to breathe a word. He knew damn well what it was. Something was fucking around in one of the upstairs bathrooms and had heard him drop his pack. The warmth in the house wasn’t because the thermostat was set a few degrees higher—it was because someone had done enough kicking to break in his front door. Now the heat and humidity—and whoever had kicked down the door—were inside his house.
Lee kept an eye on the far end of the hallway through the bedroom door and reached with his free hand into his pack to withdraw a suppressor from a side pocket. He repositioned himself so that he had quick access to the MK23 on his leg should something come into view while he was attaching the suppressor, then turned the M4 skyward and started threading the suppressor.
Something crashed down the hall.
Lee tried to focus on finding the thread but found himself staring back down the hallway. He didn’t want to shoot this fucker without a suppressor on his gun. The noise would be loud enough to not only draw attention from other infected in the area, but it would draw them right into his house through the open front door.
He heard the sound of something regurgitating, then the splash of fluid on hardwood floors.
He found the thread and started twisting, fast.
There was a gasp from down the hallway and then pounding feet. Scratching with each footstep. Like cleats. Or golf shoes.
Come on…
Lee twisted as fast as his hands could manage. Footsteps were at the door. Done. Something loomed into the bedroom.
Lee brought up the rifle and fought the panicked instinct to just start shooting. He put the red dot center mass on the approaching figure and pulled the trigger twice in rapid succession. Both rounds punched neat holes in Caddy Shack’s chest, staggering him back into the door. Strangely, the suppressed M4 sounded to Lee like the snap of someone driving a golf ball down the fairway.
Caddy Shack seemed to recover from the blows after only a second. He looked at Lee and opened his mouth. Thick red blood dribbled out. He reached out with both hands, the fingers twisted into claws, and lurched toward him.
This time Lee did shoot reflexively, pulling the trigger three times. Caddy Shack didn’t stop coming. Lee backpedaled fast, pushing his back against the wall and shooting from the hip.
It didn’t take long for Caddy Shack to cross the bedroom, and when he was within arm’s length, Lee stopped shooting and kicked out like he was kicking a door in Iraq, connecting with Caddy Shack’s chest and sending him to the ground. Lee stumbled, recovered his balance, and shoved the suppressor against Caddy Shack’s head. The muzzle blast did more damage than the bullet, nearly inverting Caddy Shack’s face.
Lee fell backward once he was sure the man was dead and scooted away from the body until his back was against the wall again. “Fuck me…” Lee breathed hard, his chest thumping like a kick drum. He could feel the adrenaline pumping through his body and knew if he wasn’t holding his M4 in an iron grip, his hands would be shaking.
He pulled himself up and stepped over to a bedroom mirror, checking his face for blood spatter, but couldn’t find any.
The shakiness reached its peak and then the relief flooded his system, his body dumping endorphins into his bloodstream.
“Woo.” Lee huffed a few more times, then decided to get moving.
He shouldered his pack and moved down the stairs again, leaving Caddy Shack for later. He didn’t want the body stinking up his house, but he didn’t have the time or protective equipment to remove it. He found the front door open, as he’d suspected. Little circular star marks were dented all over the door. The tiny cleats from his golf shoes. He’d kicked the door God knew how many times to get the latch to give. After a quick inspection, Lee realized his error. Distracted by getting Sam into the house, he had not engaged the deadbolt.
Lee swore to himself and closed the door, this time turning the deadbolt. Since the frame was steel, it barely showed any damage, and neither did the door. It was simply the latching mechanism that had given way to hundreds of kicks.
Since Caddy Shack was no longer an issue, Lee felt no need to use stealth on Hammer Guy. He opened the back patio door and put a bullet in his head. Quick and easy. He took a moment to look at what he’d been carving in the dirt.
HELLP
Lee looked back and forth between the dead body and the words it had written in the earth. This misspelling seemed to imply both the state of the world and what everyone in it wanted. But Lee knew the infected weren’t able to reason to the point of cleverness.
Could they?
Lee continued on to his detached garage and went inside, watching his back as he entered and closed the door behind him. His Chevy 1500 still sat where he’d left it, apparently untouched and still with a full tank. He tossed his pack in first, then climbed in and set his M4 on the passenger seat. He buckled in, cranked it up, and only then did he hit the garage door opener.
The door rattled and cranked its way open. Anyone within a quarter mile could have heard it. Lee backed out and surveyed his yard. There appeared to be nothing there, except the dead body of the man who had been crying out for help. Or saying that the world had gone to hell.
Either or. Lee looked at the body for a long time as he sat at idle. Should he have dispatched the person so coldly? It was a person, after all. These were all American citizens, sick or not. Was it his place to wipe them out wholesale and without warning? The girl had attacked him, and Caddy Shack definitely seemed to be making a run for it, but thinking back to Hammer Guy, pounding on the glass with his hammer and saying “Open the fucking door,” then carving “HELLP” into the dirt… perhaps the person was just looking for help. Looking for a place of refuge. In Lee’s fear of the infected, had he mistaken a cry for help as aggression?
Lee shuttered those thoughts away in a dark corner of his mind. Things to think about later. Right now, there were three potential survivors stuck on a roof. People who could be saved. Uninfected. Those were his priority; those were the people he was responsible for saving. Not the dead and dying.
Lee continued backing out of the driveway and onto Morrison Street. He headed south and did the only thing he could do: He hoped for the best.
* * *
Morrison Street stretched on through miles of farming country. To either side of the two-lane blacktop, fields would sprawl out, framed by thin stands of forest. Mainly, Lee saw tobacco, but some of the fields were tilled dirt and a few were corn. Every so often he passed a farmhouse, sometimes close to the road, sometimes out in the distance. He drove slowly, and when he saw a house, he would stop and look at it for a long moment, trying to determine if the previous residents were still using it.
They all appeared empty. The windows were dark or boarded up, the driveways overgrown with weeds. No sign of movement inside or on the neighboring fields. He would slowly drive on after giving each house a look-over, constantly scanning the fields around him for signs of trouble. He did not like driving on these roads. Though Morrison Street was only a small back road, and raiders would likely stick to higher-traffic and more target-rich environments, he still felt as though there were eyes in the trees, watching him and waiting for a moment of vulnerability.
He came upon a curve that opened into a long, straight stretch of road. He stepped on the brakes, harder than normal, and came to a stop in the roadway. A large green combine hulked in the middle of the roadway, blocking the southbound lane and most of the northbound lane. From the tire marks in the dirt, it appeared to have come from the field to Lee’s right.
Lee immediately put a hand out to his M4, where it was sitting in the passenger seat. The road blockage was a typical ambush point. The raiders could be inside the combine, on the other side, or waiting in a nearby hide. Or it could just be a combine sitting in the roadway. He grabbed the 3x scope from his M4 and brought it to his eyes, surveying the field to his right, where a wide swath had been cut through the massive hay field, all the way up to the road. Using the magnifier, he noticed lumps scattered around the hay field, lying in the path cut by the combine. Lee wasn’t positive, but they looked like bodies.
He pictured some old farmer in blue jean overalls and a straw hat, trapped in his little farmhouse, surrounded by unending acres of chest-high hay fields and a horde of infected wandering through, like alligators in a moat. If Lee had been in that situation, the combine would have been the most likely ticket out. It showed a violent resourcefulness that Lee could appreciate, and again he pictured the old farmer, laughing around a wad of Red Man as he mowed down both the grass and his captors.
Lee took a moment to count the bodies lying in the path. Seventeen. Possibly more he couldn’t see. Assuming they were infected, that was a big group. Much more than the “five or ten” Sam had claimed to see. Did they have enough mental functioning to attack in organized groups, or did they just amble around, grouping themselves together out of some latent social instinct? And why did they not attack each other?
According to Sam, he had witnessed them killing each other. And his father compared them to a pack of wild dogs. Lee considered the pack instinct, as prevalent in human beings as it was in dogs, but more well-controlled in modern society. Social controls or not, humans sought to be in groups. It was not a stretch of the imagination to believe that this would continue despite massive damage to the frontal lobe because of the bacterium. In fact, Lee believed that without reasoning abilities, many of mankind’s ingrained instincts would become more pronounced.
It was a lot of hypothesizing on not much evidence.
Lee eased the pickup forward, still keeping an eye on the combine and the surrounding fields, but less concerned with a raider ambush and more concerned with the possibility that the escaping farmer hadn’t gotten all the infected that were between him and freedom, leaving a few stragglers behind to attack travelers like Lee.
He drove the pickup around the combine, thinking that at any moment it would roar to life and a crazed old man in blue-jean overalls would run him over in the massive piece of farm equipment, shredding the pickup truck and Lee along with it. But the combine remained still as he passed, like a stuffed lion in a museum that you feel might come back to life and pounce on you as you walk by. Lee accelerated once past, uncomfortable with having the thing lurking behind him.
Not a mile down the road, Lee saw something else that made him stop.
Approximately fifty yards from the roadway, in a tilled-dirt field to Lee’s left, a female figure was hunched over. Whoever it was, she had long blond hair that stirred slightly in the breeze as it swept across the field. Her back was to Lee and her head was bowed, but she appeared to hold something that captured her interest, though Lee could not see what it was. She wore a white camisole with blue jeans and no shoes.
She knelt so motionless that Lee would have driven past her had her white camisole not stood out, though as Lee looked more closely, it appeared to be smudged with dirt and grime.
His first instinct told him that she was alive. Dead bodies did not remain in kneeling positions.
His second, more paranoid thought was that it was a trap. It was not unheard of for an ambush party to use a female who appeared to be lost or in distress as bait in a trap. He looked at her for a moment, then surveyed the area around her. It was an odd place for an ambush, not a bottleneck that would force a victim to come to her. Not much nearby cover for ambushers to hide behind.
Lee put the pickup truck in park and grabbed the M4 from the passenger seat. He gave his surroundings a good second look-over for any threats and then opened his door. The vehicle dinged, reminding him that his keys were still in the ignition and the pickup truck was running. After a moment’s consideration, Lee turned off the pickup and shoved the keys in his pants pocket before exiting the vehicle.
Immediately, he brought the rifle to his shoulder and scanned the area through the 3x magnifier. Now out of the car, he could hear the soft sound of crying lilting over the field. He looked at the woman’s back and watched her shoulders rise and fall in shudders.
He kept looking around, feeling like someone was creeping up behind him. He didn’t want to leave the pickup truck for fear that it was a trap and he would be too far to make it back, or that someone was waiting in the ditch to rob him of his only form of transportation.
He walked toward the woman, as far as the edge of the asphalt, then stopped. “Ma’am!” He called it out loud and commandingly, his voice a cannon blast in the stillness.
The figure of the woman stiffened and the head turned partially, as though she was regarding him out of the corner of her eye. He still could not see her face, as her hair hung in front of it.
Something was wrong. “Ma’am, I’m Captain Lee Harden of the United States Army and I’m here to help you.”
That invisible, sidelong stare held for another long moment. Then the woman turned her attention back to whatever was in front of her. Lee wanted to leave but knew it was not an option. He stepped off the road and walked very slowly toward the woman, angling to her left, attempting to get a better read on her face and what she was holding. He kept his rifle at his shoulder and at low-ready.
“Ma’am…” he repeated several times as he drew closer to her, now within twenty feet. He wanted the woman to know he was walking up to her. “I’m coming to you, okay? Can you talk to me? Can you say something to let me know you’re still with me?”
He never received a response.
About fifteen feet from her, he stopped. He was directly to her left and could see her face in profile. She’d been pretty once and was still young, though all recognition and intelligence were drained from her eyes. Her mouth was hanging open and a frothy buildup shimmered at the corners of her mouth. Glistening trails of snot ran from her nostrils across the side of her dirty face.
“Oh God…” Lee swallowed against the hard fist clenching at his throat and pulled the rifle in a bit tighter, dropping his finger to the trigger.
The woman stared down at a small figure in her arms, pale and sallow. The eyes were sunken in and the lips puckered. The skin looked limp and leathery and the ribs were visible. The baby had been dead for some time.
Somehow his voice cut through to the woman and she turned her head. Lee noticed that she also was mere skin and bones, probably very near a death of malnutrition and dehydration. Her vacant eyes wandered across the field to Lee’s boots, then up, slowly, to his face. For a moment, Lee thought there was some sanity there, perhaps some hope. The woman shifted her weight slightly, causing Lee to take a step back, but she did not get up. She lifted her arms, the tiny corpse still cradled in her hands, and she extended the body toward Lee.
Can you help? Can you fix my baby?
The woman, or what was left of her, let out a soft moan.
Lee wanted to shoot her right there. Put her out of her sad existence. But he could not bring himself to do it. This was one of the rare infected who was not violent. Lee wondered what this woman had been like before the plague had destroyed her brain, if even when her reasoning centers had been rotted away, she could not be brought to violence. Lee thought she must have been a very kind person.
She did not deserve this. No one deserved this. Slowly, her hands and the emaciated figure they bore sunk to the ground. Another sound, like a soft sigh, escaped her throat. Her eyes followed her dead child to the dirt, where it lay motionless, and once again she knelt, staring, unmoving except for the strands of her hair caught in the breeze.
Lee stepped away from the woman, leaving her to fade in her grief, her mind lost and wandering an endless plain of primitive, instinctual memories—the sensation of life from life and flesh from flesh, of nurturing and love, but also of the empty loneliness of death, the desolation of loss.
When he was far enough away, he turned and ran back to the truck.
He got in and closed the door hurriedly, afraid that she had followed him, but when he looked back across the field, she still sat there. Strangely, he thought of Deana again, though he didn’t know why. Some small portion of him wished he’d had a family, but the larger part of him was thankful that he had survived alone. The loneliness was nothing compared to the pain of separation.
He started the pickup and kept driving.
* * *
He’d been on the road for nearly a half hour when he finally came to a stop and looked out across a field, to a house in the distance. He’d passed so many open fields with no houses attached, he was starting to think he had missed it and that Sam’s eyes were sharper than his. But here was a farmhouse set up on a hill, about six hundred yards out from the road. He just couldn’t see anyone on the roof.
He pulled the magnifier off his rifle again and scoped the house. The magnifier was not as powerful as binoculars, but it gave Lee a slightly better image than the naked eye, and through it he could just make out what looked like two figures lying down on the roof. Their dark clothes blended in with the roofing shingles. Though he couldn’t see them clearly, they did not look like they were moving.
In the yard below them, Lee could not see any infected. The front door to the house was hanging open, and it was possible that the ten infected Sam had reported were taking shelter from the heat inside, while the house’s original occupants baked on the roof.
Now came the question: Should he traverse the distance to the house, putting himself at risk and leaving his vehicle behind, only to discover that the figures on the roof were no longer alive? Or should he honk the horn to attempt to gain their attention, confirming that they were alive but ruining all chances for stealth and making their rescue that much harder?
Lee knew himself better than to labor long over the dilemma. If the two on the roof failed to respond when he honked his horn, that would not be enough for Lee to leave them to rot on the rooftop. He would need to see them, look at them, and check them for pulses before he abandoned them.
Which simplified the situation.
There was a deep drainage ditch on the side of the road, separating him from the field that stretched out to the house. Traversing the ditch in the pickup truck was out of the question. It was possible that he could make it, but Lee preferred to be sure that his getaway vehicle would be ready for him if things went bad and he had to get lost. However, he did pull the vehicle as far off the roadway as he felt comfortable with, then exited, closing and locking the door quietly.
He hitched up his go-to-hell pack and dipped down into the drainage culvert. If he could get within a few hundred yards of the house he might be able to communicate with the two figures on the roof and hopefully plan an exit for them, if the threat of infected still remained.
Lee held out hope that the infected that had tried to kill the family earlier would have lost interest and left the area. Lee had absolute confidence in his ability to take on a threat, but there was no denying that the warped and destroyed minds of the people infected with the FURY plague didn’t go down easily. And taking on ten of them at a time was going to be that much harder.
He climbed up out of the ditch and headed toward the house, skirting along a small clump of trees that bordered the field. He moved at a trot, stopping every few moments to survey the area and check behind him. Each time he checked, he looked back at his vehicle. He didn’t like the way it was sitting there, all alone and painfully conspicuous on the side of the road. It was begging for attention.
He also took the time to look at the house and see what he could through the windows and the open front door, but he was either too far to see the movement or there was simply no one inside. The thought meandered across his mind that, if the house was empty, what was the family still doing on the roof?
Unless they were already dead.
After several circuits of scooting along the edge of the woods and stopping and looking around, he was about two hundred yards from the house. That was close enough. He took another good look through his magnifier at the two individuals on the roof. It was two females, one about mid-thirties, the other a child, maybe five or six. Still, neither moved. From this distance, Lee could not see the rise and fall of their chests to determine if they were breathing.
Or maybe he was close enough and they just weren’t.
He bear-crawled a few yards forward to a stand of thick brush that gave him good concealment. There, he dropped his go-to-hell pack and slipped a hand into one of the side pockets. He rooted around a bit, then came out with a compact of camouflage face paint. He didn’t want to camouflage himself right then, but he did want the mirror inside.
He opened the compact and angled it toward the sun until he saw a dull square of light flash over the front of the house. He wiggled it around, finally centering it on the adult female and flicking it over her eyes. He did this several times but garnered no response. He turned the mirror slightly so that reflection washed over the younger female’s face and repeated the flicking.
This time the head came up.
Lee could see the girl sit up slightly, shield her eyes, and then peer out into the woods where the flashing light was coming from. The girl had curly blond hair that whipped around in the breeze. She looked concerned and obviously did not see the flashing light as anything friendly. It had probably been so long since anything friendly came by that she wouldn’t believe it even if she knew.
Lee kept flashing her with the mirror, then dropped it and came out of his concealment just long enough to wave a quick arm.
This time the look on the girl’s face changed from suspicion to urgency. She rolled toward her mother and shook her arm. The mother, her face sunburned and grimed, looked up, appearing out of sorts or possibly woozy in the afternoon heat. The girl began silently pointing toward Lee, who took the moment to step out of cover again and wave once more.
The mother sat bolt upright and began wildly waving both arms. Then she shouted. “Help! Please help!”
Lee swore under his breath and motioned to her, palms to the earth with both hands—Calm down!
But it was too late. From somewhere inside the house came that horrid screech.
Lee pointed at the house, counted with his fingers—1, 2, 3—then raised his hands in question, attempting to communicate: How many are inside? The woman looked down below her feet as though she would see through the roof with x-ray vision, then looked back up at Lee and shrugged. Lee wasn’t sure whether the shrug meant she didn’t know how many were inside or she didn’t understand the question.
He motioned for her to calm down once more, then fell back into his concealment.
Not a second after he did this, a figure burst through the front door. It was a male, tall and very skinny. His left leg appeared injured and he dragged it behind him, though he moved fast, despite the handicap. He was wearing only a pair of briefs and some dress socks. He dragged a garden rake behind him.
The infected craned his neck up to see the two survivors on the roof and began making chuffing noises that sounded like an anxious dog. He came down the front steps, the steel head of the rake clattering after him.
The two females on the roof heard him coming out into the yard and flattened themselves onto the roof. Lee didn’t know whether Slim had already seen them or not, but the shout was enough to rev his engine. He grabbed the rake with both hands and started swinging it overhead like an ax. The tines smacked the rain gutter and he pulled, ripping a section down.
From around the other side of the house, drawn by the commotion, two more infected appeared. They ran to where Slim was standing and started pacing around, looking up at the roof like they knew someone was up there. Neither of the newcomers had a weapon in hand, but both seemed agile and, so far, uninhibited by the plague’s effect on motor skills.
Lee waited, breathing hard now. No others came out of the house or from around the back. There were only three left. Lee wondered where the others had gone. Then he wondered why these ones were still here. Were they really that persistent? How long did it take for them to lose interest in something? And did they ever get exhausted, or would they continue trying to get to their victims for hours on end?
Lee quietly pulled on his go-to-hell pack. Then he shouldered his rifle and stood behind the brush with one knee on the ground, peering through the leaves at the scene before him. The rake was broken, and now all three infected were making strange noises and staring up at the roof. One was still pacing back and forth, but the other two stood in place, hands clenched by their sides as though ready to fight. On the roof, the woman held the girl in her arms, and both stared fearfully below the edge of the roof, where unseen threats waited to tear them apart.
“Head shots this time…” Lee slowed his breathing, in through the nose, out through the mouth, then stepped out of his hiding place.
He moved forward, wanting to cover as much distance as possible to make his head shots more accurate. He figured that a shot to the head would almost always put someone down, no matter how persistent he was, and if all three bum-rushed him, he would need them to drop fast.
He walked at a steady pace, heel to toe, rifle to his shoulder, red dot trained on the pacer. He seemed most likely to notice Lee’s approach, since the other two had their backs to Lee and were still staring up at the roof.
He closed to about one hundred and fifty yards, and they still had not noticed him.
He pictured himself tripping and falling as he traversed the uneven ground, the three infected descending on him as he attempted to right himself. He looked down at the ground to inspect his footing. When he looked back up, the pacer was sprinting at him.
“Shit—” was all Lee could get out of his mouth. He planted one foot behind him as the infected closed the distance with surprising speed. All in that same second he told himself to be still, be calm, and to take a good shot, then he thought about the infected girl, sitting in the field, mourning her infant’s death, and wondered if he should give warning before shooting this unarmed infected, the same warning he would give any other person.
Hesitation.
He put the red dot on the infected’s head—closing about a hundred yards—and breathed out slowly. The 3x magnifier gave the infected the appearance of being much closer, and Lee’s instincts screamed to take the shot, but he waited. Another breath in… getting closer… breath out…
Lee pulled the trigger once, watched the shot clip the infected’s shoulder and spin him, fired again, and saw the neat hole punched right above his left ear. The figure dropped.
Lee lowered the scope to see the big picture, which was two other infected, hauling ass toward him and screeching wildly. Lee chose the faster one without the damaged leg and fired quickly. The head shot was perfection and the body dropped. Lee pivoted to the third infected, so close now that his snarling face and skin-and-bones torso filled up Lee’s scope. Three shots brought him to the ground, but he didn’t want to die and kept crawling on all fours until Lee finished him with a round to the top of the head. Slim died about twenty feet from Lee.
It wasn’t until after Slim stopped moving that he heard the screaming.
Lee looked up and saw both survivors standing at the edge of the roof, the woman holding her daughter as she reached out, tears in her eyes and her face clenched in grief and anger. She was screaming at Lee, but he couldn’t tell what she was saying; all of her words were contorted with emotion. Lee looked at the mother and saw the look in her eyes, and then he looked down at the body twenty feet from him and heard the little girl cry out for Daddy.
It wasn’t Daddy anymore, but this five-year-old didn’t know that.
“Fuck.” Lee felt that pressing coldness in the pit of his stomach like he had just massively screwed something up. But what was he supposed to have done? Let the man tear into him because he was afraid to make a five-year-old cry? Lee shook his head and moved toward the house.
When he was close enough to talk, the little girl had turned away from him and buried her face in her mother’s chest. He opened his mouth to tell them his customary script, but the words caught in his mouth. He felt ashamed, though he knew there was nothing that could have been done differently. Even so, he didn’t want to introduce himself as the conquering hero of the United States Army one minute after gunning down this girl’s father.
He went with a simple, “I’m sorry, there’s nothing I could do to save him. I’m here to help you. How did you get up there?”
The woman blinked away tears, obviously upset but also rational enough to understand that her husband had been rendered insane by the plague and would have killed any of them had Lee not put him down. She pointed to the backside of the roof.
“There’s a ladder on the ground in the backyard.” Her voice was hoarse and cracked. Lee could not see any supplies on the roof and assumed they were both parched dry from lack of water.
He jogged around the house, taking the corners slowly and panning to see what threats lay beyond. When he saw the backyard was clear, he walked, searching the overgrown grass and weeds for a ladder.
He found a painter’s ladder lying in the knee-high grass, angled away from the house, and Lee reasonably inferred that it had been propped against the house, then kicked off to prevent their attackers from following.
Lee picked up the ladder with one hand and heaved it back into place, leaning against the roof. The woman and her daughter appeared over the crest of the roof and worked their way carefully down the incline to the ladder.
The woman pointed to the ladder. “Abby, go down first.”
The little girl shook her head violently, her blond curls flying. “I don’t wanna go down with him!”
Lee felt stung. “It’s okay, sweetie. I promise I won’t hurt you.”
Abby wasn’t having it and screamed in an ear-splitting shriek, “You killed my daddy!”
“Abby.” The woman’s voice was shaking but stern. “You will not talk to him like that.”
The little girl was still sobbing but didn’t say anything else. The woman turned and made her way down the ladder. She moved slowly and a bit clumsily, making Lee concerned about the level of dehydration. When she finally reached the bottom, she held out her arms and motioned for the girl to come down. Finally Abby swung her tiny legs out and began climbing down, her mother hovering underneath her, arms outstretched, waiting to catch her if she fell.
When both of them were on the ground, Lee placed a hand gently on the woman’s shoulder and pointed toward the brick wall of the house. The angle of the sun cast this side of the house in shade, which was what both of them needed. He noticed that despite the heat, the woman wasn’t sweating, which only meant that her body didn’t have the fluids to spare.
“Come over here.” Lee held her by the arm as she walked slowly into the shade. “Cool down for a minute. I have water.”
The mention of water made both of the survivors’ eyes go wide. The woman nodded as she sat down against the brick wall. “Please. We haven’t had water in days.”
Lee unhooked his rifle and leaned it against the wall, still close by. Then he took off his pack and set it on the ground. From the main portion, he withdrew four bottles of water, setting two on the ground and handing one to each of the females.
“They’re not cold,” Lee advised. “Drink it slow at first or you might vomit.”
While the two survivors undid the caps on their bottles of water and sipped at them, obviously using significant self-restraint to keep from gulping them down, Lee scanned the perimeter of the property but saw no threats. Satisfied, he closed the main portion of his pack and opened a smaller section where he kept a stash of medical supplies. From inside he pulled out two packs of electrolyte tablets and two ice packs.
He handed the packs of electrolyte tablets to the mother. “When you get done with the bottle of water, put both tablets in the next bottle and shake it up. They’ll help rehydrate you.” As he said this he crushed the ice packs, breaking the chemical bags inside and turning the contents to a frozen slush.
With an ice pack in hand, he approached Abby cautiously, as you would a dog you were unsure of. The little girl looked at him with fearful blue eyes but didn’t react, so he put on a disarming smile and held out the ice pack. “This is gonna help you feel better, okay?”
Happy to be drinking water, though still obviously distraught, the girl nodded and allowed him to place the ice pack against her head.
After a second she pulled away. “It’s cold.”
“Honey,” the mother said, sounding tired and out of it. “It’s gonna cool you down so the heat’s not so bad. Just let him do it.”
Abby relaxed and Lee put the ice pack back on her head, then worked it down to the base of her neck and held it there. After a few moments, he took her hand and put it where his was. “Hold that there, okay? Even if it starts to feel uncomfortable.”
Then he turned and put the ice pack on the mother’s head. Her eyes were closed and tears were coming out, gathering grime as they ran down her face. Lee spoke soothingly. “It’s gonna be all right. I’m gonna get you guys someplace safe.”
The woman opened her eyes, now red-rimmed with tears. Her voice was a soft whisper. “Thank you.”
Lee nodded in response. “What’s your name?”
“Angela…” She thought for a moment, like she couldn’t remember. “Mooring.”
“Angela, I’m Lee Harden.” He still decided not to introduce his rank and purpose.
Later, he thought. Now’s not the time.
While Lee held the ice pack to the base of her neck, Angela finished the first bottle of water and opened the second, dropping in the contents of one of the packs of electrolytes—two tablets. They immediately began to dissolve and turn the water an orangey yellow. She shook the bottle, though her movements were sluggish.
“How long were you on the roof?”
“I think… three days?”
“Have you had any water at all?”
“We brought up a gallon. That was all we could grab on our way out. They were already breaking through the front windows.”
“Was it just you three?”
She nodded.
Lee looked at both of them. “You guys did really well. You’re both going to be very dehydrated, but hopefully the few bottles and electrolytes will get you out of the danger zone until I can get you back to my safe house.”
“You have a safe house?” Angela said it with some awe, as though she could not fathom the concept of a secure location.
“It’s several miles from here.”
“Did you walk?”
“No, I drove my truck—” No sooner had the words left Lee’s mouth than he heard the distant slam of a car door. A very distinct sound in the quiet of nature. He immediately froze and looked around. Angela and Abby sat unmoving, staring at him while his eyes scanned.
He grabbed up his M4 and stood. Angela’s hand shot out, the quickest she’d moved yet, and held his arm. “Please… don’t go.”
Lee looked down, pitying her. “I’m not going far. And I’ll be right back.”
She released his arm and he stepped to the corner of the house, then peered around. He could see the land laid out in front of him and his truck on the road. No… not his truck. Someone else’s, parked facing the opposite direction. A dark blue Dodge Ram. Lee leaned out a little farther, gaining a better angle and seeing the rest of the scene.
His own pickup truck was boxed in by the Ram in front and an olive drab Humvee to the rear. Outside of the vehicles, two figures were inspecting his truck, while three others approached the house from the road. A remnant of the US military? More likely just pirated US military equipment. Lee brought up his rifle, using his scope to look at the three men approaching. Two of them wore ACUs but lacked any identifying marks, and neither was wearing Kevlar, which made them look like civilians who had raided an army-navy store. The third wore an old woodland camouflage jacket and jeans. All three carried M4s. They walked with the rifles across their chests, not addressed toward the house. Lackadaisical.
If they were military, they were most likely an inactive unit or reservists. They were not equipped and they did not act like an active military unit. Whether their intentions were good or bad, Lee didn’t know, and now was not the time to find out. He racked his brain for any readily available plan to snatch back his truck, but none of them was possible with the two survivors to look after.
Lee lowered the scope and estimated the distance.
The three approaching men were about four hundred yards out and walking at a slow but steady pace. That gave Lee and his two survivors only a few short minutes to get the hell out of the area.
He pulled himself back around the corner. Angela and Abby were staring up at him with wide, expectant eyes. “We gotta move.”
“What?” Angela stood and Abby followed suit.
Lee grabbed her by the shoulder and gave her a gentle push away from the house. “Head for the woods. There are people coming. I don’t know if they are friendly, and we’re not finding out.”
“They could be here to help.” Angela argued over her shoulder, stumbling along with Lee. “They could be friendly.”
“There’s five of them and they’re all armed.” Lee said, lowering his voice despite the urgency spurring his feet. “If they don’t have our best interests in mind, we’re fucked.… Excuse me.”
Angela craned her neck behind her, trying to catch a glimpse of the newcomers. Lee kept a hand on her shoulder and a hand on Abby’s and kept steering them toward the woods. “Come on,” he said. “I know you guys are tired, but we gotta pick up the pace.”
“What about your truck?” Abby whined loudly. “How are we gonna get back to your safe place?”
“Shhh!” Lee hissed, looking behind him as though he expected a barrage of shots in response. “Speak quietly! They have my truck now. We have to walk.”
They hit the wood line and Lee dropped to one knee, tugging on their shoulders and gesturing for them to do likewise. Angela and Abby crowded in close and traded concerned looks, back and forth from their house to Lee.
His speech was a rapid whisper. “You guys keep going straight through the woods until you can’t see the house anymore. I’m going to bring up the rear. When you can’t see the house anymore, lie down and hide. I’ll find you.”
“How will you find us if we’re hiding?” Abby asked.
“Because I’m good at that kind of thing.” Lee looked sternly at both of them. “You both need to start trusting me. If you want to stay alive until I can get you to safety, you will do exactly as I tell you. Don’t question me and don’t try to outthink me. Now go.”
Angela nodded quickly and fiercely, though Abby still looked confused. Her mother grabbed her hand and silently headed deeper into the woods without looking back. They moved quickly and loudly, each footfall like an earthquake to Lee. He just hoped the incoming personnel didn’t notice.
Lee waited for a moment, then swiveled and duck-walked over a few feet to a large tree and peered around it, his rifle raised. He angled himself slowly, until he got a good view of the house through the brush, and then looked through his scope. Nothing yet. With a few quick mental calculations, he decided he had some time to get a little more distance.
He stood and quietly sidestepped his way farther into the woods and away from the house, keeping as much concealing brush and trees as possible between him and the corners of the house. He kept looking where he was stepping, then back at the house. About twenty yards behind him, the woods sloped down. If he could make it to that slope…
Too late.
The three men cleared the corner of the house. One of them moved like a professional—the bald-headed one who wore ACUs—his rifle was shouldered at low-ready and his body pivoted like a tank turret. Everywhere his eyes went, his rifle went, and he cleared the corner quickly and smoothly, gaining an angle on the back of the house. Then he motioned his two comrades forward.
The other one wearing ACUs had longer-than-regulation dark hair. The kind of long, slicked-back hair seen on the front of a bottle of Rogaine. He still held his rifle like an amateur—butt-stock under his armpit, muzzle pointed at the sky—and he walked without urgency. The third one wearing the woodland top and the jeans held his weapon ported, the barrel cradled in his left arm.
One possibly military, the other two… not so much.
Without Angela and Abby to weigh him down, he could probably take out these three goons and have a good chance at using the house as a defensible location to take out the rest of the squad. But without knowing their intentions, he did not want to be the first to open fire. He wasn’t willing to take the gamble on whether they were good or bad guys, but the possibility still remained that they could be partially made up of US Army personnel on a benevolent mission.
Lee had slowly moved his way to another large tree and sank down onto one knee, surveying the scene with only his left eye, peering out from behind the thick trunk.
Bald ACU moved toward the back door of the house, scanning the yard as he did. Rogaine ACU and Woodland followed after him. Bald ACU waited at the back door until Rogaine tapped him on the shoulder, and then all three filed into the house.
That was Lee’s cue to leave.
He pushed off the tree and made a dash for the down slope, then took the hill head-on and flew down at breakneck speed, maximizing the opportunity of having all three unidentified persons distracted by clearing the house. He continued his sprint until he felt he’d lost enough altitude that they would not be able to see him over the hillcrest. He stopped and turned, looking back, and could not see the house.
A brief moment to catch his breath from the sprint and then he took in his surroundings, trying to get his bearings. For a split second, he felt out of his depth, one of those crippling and paralyzing moments where one realizes that people are relying on you and that you cannot fail them. The responsibility of Angela and Abby, and Sam, who was probably wondering what the hell was taking Lee so long, felt like a rope around his chest, tightening steadily.
Then he took another breath, shook his head, and the feeling was gone.
He needed to find Angela and Abby, make a plan that would keep everyone safe and not require too much strenuous activity from the dehydrated and undernourished mother and daughter, and get everyone back to the house before Sam lost it and wandered off, believing Lee was dead.
But the first thing was simply to start looking for Angela and Abby. Compartmentalize. So Lee started walking, looking for signs of human foot traffic through the woods.
* * *
The presence of survivors had not gone unnoticed by the unidentified personnel who had cleared the house. After securing the premises and calling in the rest of the guys, the bald man in the ACUs took a good long look at the back of the house, where the overgrown grass was matted down. Like people had been lying in it. And the couple of empty water bottles, and the two empty packets of electrolyte tablets that were still lying in the grass. There were also two ice packs, still cold and sweating in the heat. It looked to him like two people had been rescued, which meant there had to be at least one rescuer.
At least three people unaccounted for.
And one of them had medical supplies.