Aftermath (2 page)

Who am I kidding?
Lee thought numbly.
This is a shantytown. And America is a third world country now.

Lee noticed that the shantytown was beginning to churn with bodies, like an anthill after you scuff the top layer off. People in raggedy clothes were emerging out of cars and shacks and tents. Everyone carried flashlights or lanterns in one hand and a weapon in the other. A few had firearms, but mostly it was axes, shovels, crowbars, and baseball bats. It felt like a lynch mob. The townspeople heading out to find Frankenstein's monster.

They ran past Lee and Bus, towards the center of Camp Ryder where a large but shallow pit had been dug and lined with bricks and stones. A fire pit perhaps? It appeared to be full of ash. Lee guessed correctly that this was "the square."

Suddenly remembering something, Lee stopped and began craning his neck around, trying to see through the jostling crowd and the darkness. To Bus, he spoke with a measure of urgency: “Where’s Angela and the kids?”

Bus motioned for him to keep walking. “Josh is telling everyone to gather in the square. They’ll be there.”

As they walked, Bus snatched an axe handle from where it was leaning up against a tent. It was thinner towards the base of the handle and thicker towards the top where the metal axe-head was missing, which made it perfectly weighted for a striking weapon.

"Harris!" Bus yelled.

A man in the growing crowd of people looked up.

"Captain Harden is borrowing your axe handle."

The man nodded and gave a thumbs-up.

The axe handle was pushed into Lee’s arms. He noticed that someone had written on the handle in magic marker: BRAIN BUSTER.

Cute.

Lee cinched the drawstring of his shorts up tight and stuck the little Ruger LCP in his waistband. Bus stepped in front of the crowd and looked like he was hurriedly counting heads. Lee estimated about fifty, which was close to the number Bus had given him last night. As he looked out over the crowd, he could see a tangled mess of blonde hair on the other side of the crowd. In the glimmering lamplight, he could see Angela’s face, etched in worry. As the crowd shifted, he glimpsed the two children, standing to either side of her.

A fear he hadn’t realized he’d been harboring released its vice-grip on his stomach. He thought about calling to them, but decided against it. They were here with the group. They were relatively safe. For now.

Josh ran up beside him and stopped to catch his breath for a brief second. "That's everyone."

"Hopefully," Bus murmured.

"So…" Lee looked around at the gathered mass of people. He noticed that everyone had their backs to the fire pit and had placed their flashlights at their feet, creating a bright, noisy gathering. Lee was about to ask what the plan was, but suddenly managed to figure it out on his own. He turned so his back was also to the fire pit and got a solid grip on the axe-handle.

He looked at Bus and shook his head. "I can't say I like this idea."

Bus only shrugged and then shouted to the crowd. "Alright folks, call 'em when you see 'em!"

Lee saw stony faces, all etched in harsh light and deep shadows. Glimmering and fearful eyes stared out into the darkness. Weathered hands twisted tighter and tighter grips on an assortment of opportunistic weapons. Those with firearms were at the front, pointing their hunting shotguns and deer rifles out at the suspicious stillness.

Circling the wagons.

The quiet of the night felt forced. Like a breath taken and held for fear of someone hearing. Even the night birds and chirping crickets were conspicuously absent.

Lee shifted his weight and tried to focus on anything that lay beyond the ring of light created by the dozens of flashlights.

The silence stretched uncomfortably.

Someone whispered, "Why aren't they attacking?"

And another, "This is weird."

And still another, "Are you sure there are more?"

Someone’s dog began barking.

Then a shout: "I see movement!"

The group collectively tensed.

"Over by the trash bins!"

Heads turned, everyone simultaneously spinning in the same direction. Lee followed suit because he didn't know where the "trash bins" were. He saw a collection of old steel shipping containers, identical to the one that held Doc's medical station. The tops of the containers had been removed so that they looked like big, open sardine cans. Several of them were filled with the monumental amount of trash that came from refugees all jam packed in and living together.

In the murky shadows of the trash bins, Lee strained to see the movement.

A couple of the stronger flashlights probed the darkness, but didn't reveal anything. The darkness was becoming disorienting. He realized he still wasn’t thinking clearly, wasn’t operating like normal. The injury and the lack of food and water had taken more of a toll on his body than he’d thought, and he was only just beginning to recover. He kept repeating in his mind,
It’s time to do work. It’s time to do work.
Because that was what he used to tell his squad when they had to focus on completing a mission.

It’s time to do work.

"There!" Someone shouted.

A flash of movement between two trash bins.

"I see it!" A man with a deer rifle stepped forward a bit, but then hesitated. "Why isn't it coming at us?"

A chunk of trash suddenly shifted and that strange, unearthly screeching sound echoed out at the band of survivors. Lee couldn't see any details of the figure, but it ran straight at them. Just as it was within 25 yards of them it suddenly stopped and veered off. For a moment, it trotted along the edge of their lights, like a wolf probing a herd for weaknesses.

The entire crowd seemed frozen and perplexed, like everyone was trying to figure out what the hell this one was doing.

"Shoot it!" Bus shouted at the man with the deer rifle.

The rifle barked.

Lee watched the dirt at the infected's feet explode. Sympathetic gunfire followed the rifle shot as the tension became too much for some trigger fingers to handle. The night was abruptly engulfed in a volley of shotgun blasts and rifle fire. A scattershot of rounds caught its legs, then ripped into its shoulder, pummeled its chest and finally split its head open.

It wasn't until that moment when Lee watched the miserable thing collapse to the ground that a small, familiar voice cut into his brain, dissipating the fog of disorientation and reminding him of who he was, and how he had been trained.

Watch your lane.

When learning to operate in a squad, each member would have a designated “lane of fire” to watch for enemies. If you were constantly checking to make sure that your buddy wasn’t missing things in his lane, then you were probably missing things in your own lane. In other words: stop worrying about everyone else, and do what you know you’re supposed to be doing
.

Squad Tactics 101.

Watch your lane.

Lee spun around just in time to see two claw-like hands latch onto a young teenage girl and yank her backwards. Lee watched the girl's dark hair fly up like it was suddenly in zero gravity as she was pulled to the ground. Her eyes locked onto Lee, and he saw a scared indignance, as though she was thinking,
this isn’t supposed to happen to me
.

The infected was an older female. It hunched over the younger girl and lunged for the neck. The girl let out a small cry and her hands came up, trying to block the infected's mouth from reaching her jugular. The old woman bit down hard on the girl’s wrist and Lee heard tendons snap.

He managed to yell, "Behind us!" and then swung for the fences. The axe-handle connected just behind the ear and left a deep hollow in the old woman’s skull.

It was only then that Lee realized there was a second infected. It lunged out of the darkness and seized hold of the teenage girl and began to backpedal, trying to drag her away from the crowd, looking at the other survivors and hissing aggressively. It pulled her by the shirt collar with one hand, and hammered the girl’s face with the other, knocking her unconscious after two or three blows.

Lee jumped forward and wound up for the swing. A gun went off just to the right side of his head. The infected’s throat exploded and it collapsed into a writhing ball. Lee instinctively recoiled from the noise of the gunshot so close to him. As Lee clenched his jaw against the ringing in his ears, the crowd swarmed around him yanking the girl away from the infected and then bludgeoning it to death.

He looked to his right, where the gunshot had just come from, and saw a man drop a small revolver to the ground. His face was ashen. He rushed past Lee and slid to his knees next to the girl and began to wail.

The gathering erupted in confusion.

Everyone was yelling and pressing forward to hover over the girl. A younger man in the crowd turned and looked at Lee with accusatory eyes, as though Lee had done something wrong, as though it was
his
fault that the girl had been attacked. In a flash of anger, Lee thought about using the axe-handle on him, too. But in the back of his mind he thought,
isn’t it your fault? Shouldn’t you have been paying attention? You’re the professional here…

Over it all he heard Bus yelling, "Steve! Steve!" and the man who had fired the revolver wailing: "Oh Jesus! Oh Fuck! Come on, baby! Wake up! I'm so sorry, baby!"

The girl’s father?

Bus tried to push past with the rest of them but Lee was thinking a little bit clearer now, thinking about how those infected had hid from them and flanked them. There could be more. And if they didn’t find where the intruders had come through, there
would
be more. He reached out and caught Bus with a firm hand to his chest. "Are there any others?"

Seeming to ignore him, the big bearded man craned his neck to see the girl on the ground, then abruptly realized that Lee was speaking to him. "What?"

Lee pulled the man closer, speaking low so as not to be overheard and start a panic. "Are there any other infected?"

"Uh…" He tapped his Colt 1911 against his thigh and wiped his sweaty brow. "Shit. God. I don't know."

The group was already scattering to the wind. Doc and Jenny were pushing people out of the way and Doc's skinny voice was needling at the crowd: "Everyone get the fuck outta the way! Someone help me lift her!"

More people than necessary to carry a 120-pound girl stepped in. Everyone was trying to get a hand in to help and becoming more of a hindrance. The girl's father cradled her head in his arms as they moved her quickly towards the medical trailer.

Bus was staring at the girl again, so Lee shook him gently to get his attention. "Grab a couple guys. We need to close whatever hole those fuckers came through and then do a perimeter sweep."

CHAPTER 2: INVESTIGATION

Bus seemed to gain his senses again. He reached out with a thick arm, course with wiry black hair, and grabbed Josh as the young man attempted to run past and join the crowd as they whisked the bitten girl off to Doc’s medical trailer.

“
You’re with us,” Bus said, and when he spoke he had returned to his normal steady tone. “We gotta find where they’re coming through the fence.”

“
But what about Kara?” Josh’s eyes were wide and concerned.

Bus looked the young man in the eye. “Let Doc handle that. You can’t do anything for her right now. We have other things to take care of. Now let’s go.”

Josh didn’t argue further. He nodded once and then both men turned towards Lee.

He quickly surveyed his surroundings and made a decision. “We need a fourth...” Lee spotted a familiar face. Miller, wasn’t it? The man in the red bandana that had helped them escape Timber Creek with the use of some Molotov cocktails. Lee waved him over. “Hey! Borrow you for a second?”

Miller took a second to recognize him in the darkness, but after shining his light a few times in Lee’s face, he came running over, hand on his holstered .38 Special to keep it from flopping around on his belt. “Yeah?”

He was roughly the same age as Josh, but taller, and his features more gaunt. While Josh gave the impression of someone much younger, everything about Miller was older, from the squint of his eyes to his confident-but-not-cocky stride. There was something else there, too. Something in the tilt of his head, in the set of his jaw. Miller liked to fight.

Lee pointed to the fence behind the trash bins, as it was the closest section of fence to their current location. “We’ll both start there. Run the fence line in opposite directions and see if we can find where the infected are getting through. If you find the hole, post up and secure it as best you can until we all meet back up.”

Three heads nodded quickly.

“
Bus, you and I will go clockwise. Miller and Josh, you guys go counterclockwise.” Lee and Bus took off for the fence at a trot and began walking briskly along it, inspecting the integrity of the chain links as they went.