Aftermath (20 page)

This was a sign of infection.

Stay in your homes.

Hang a white cloth outside your house, so we know a member of your household is sick.

Help is on the way.

The doors on many of these houses stood open, like the gaping mouth of someone who had died in mid-scream. Like the kid Harper had gutted with that bayonet.
Like the dirty redneck boys that Lee had gunned down for killing Sam’s father.

The people in those houses had stayed inside, with their white flags waving outside, slipping into madness and killing each other. Now those houses looked empty and Lee wondered whether they had lingered here in the town they had called home, or run off into the surrounding wilderness and packed together like wolves.

The pickup truck swerved
and Harper swore
. “Lot of bodies in the road.”

Looking out over the dashboard,
Lee could see dozens of dark mounds
, like trash scattered in the roadway
. Some were curled up, others splayed out, spread eagle.
They were in varying states of dress: some wore business suits, others wore oil-stained coveralls, some wore bathing suits, and still others wore nothing at all
.

Many
had dark red trails behind them, like bloody comets. Those were the ones that had kept crawling. Interspersed through these remains were pock marks in the cement
, like small meteoric craters
.

Lee remembered a checkpoint outside of Fallujah where he stood with one of his squads when an old, tan Mercedes started towards the roadblock. It happened so fast, they barely had time to fire a warning shot from the .50 cal and it began to accelerate towards them. Every gun in that squad started firing, and the Mercedes jerked and swerved off into a ditch, the windshield and door panels shredded with bullet holes.

When they had ventured out to inspect the vehicle, Lee remembered a hand lying in the road, sheared off by one of the big .50 caliber rounds. All around that hand were the same pock marks, where their bullets had gouged out chunks of the cement.

Lee
pointed, suddenly. “Heads up.
”

Their progress came to a halt at Brightleaf Boulevard and Woodall Lane, where a line of cement barriers stood
, concertina wire strung across the tops.
Behind the hastily erected cement wall, a
police vehicle and a National Guard Humvee
sat with the doors open, abandoned
.
The men
stared at the barricade, their eyes sweeping along and
piecing together what had happened.

Mashed headlong into the barricade was a small white sedan. The windshield was riddled with bullet holes
, just like that tan Mercedes so many years ago
. To either side of the cement barricade, the shoulder of the road had been blocked with tangles of
concertina wire
. In amongst these metal brambles were bodies, hanging in the wire, as though they had tried to blindly march through. In places, their arms or legs hung off them loosely by a thread of gristle. Blood had coagulated in stagnant pools
beneath
them. One section of barbed wire was choked so severely with dead bodies that they had flattened out the barbed wire, creating a bridge across.

The gusting wind made the spirals of concertina wire shiver.

A flurry of trash drifted across the road.

“
These people...” Harper’s voice trembled. “Were they just gunned down?”

Lee took a look at the big .50 cal mounted on top of the Humvee, tilted back and pointed skywards now. Vehicle-mounted .50 cals were hardly typical crowd-control fare. They were made for combat, and that is what they were used for.

“
I don’t think they were regular people,” Lee
observed
quietly. “I think these barricades were put up to keep the infected out
. C
reate a safe-zone to evacuate out of.”

“
Doesn’t look like it worked too well,” Doc sounded nervous.

“
No,” Lee agreed. “It doesn’t.”

“
Should we try to get around on some other roads?” Harper looked to the left where Woodall Lane stretched in a straight line
, deeper into the city.

Lee followed his gaze but saw only a jam of vehicles and bodies at every intersection. “It looks like they barricaded those streets as well. We could spend half the day trying to find a way to drive our truck through.”

Harper tapped the wheel. “You wanna go in on foot?”

“
Yes.”

“
What about the supplies?”

“
We’ll have to leave someone here.”

Josh’s hand shot up. “Yeah, I’ll stay. I’ll stay with the truck.”

Lee turned in his seat to look at Doc and Miller
,
who was sticking his head in through the back glass again. “Someone has to stay with Josh.”

“
Nah, man.” Miller shook his head. “I’m tired of sittin’ in the bed. I’m comin’ with you.”

Lee turned his gaze to Doc. “You cool with staying here?”

Doc
seemed to consider it for an oddly long time. Finally he nodded
. “Yeah.
That’s fine
.”

Lee dove his hand into his pack and retrieved one of the long-range radios he’d brought. He handed it over to Doc. “We’ll be on system ten, subchannel one.”

Doc regarded the radio like it was a tablet written in sanskrit, but eventually made sense of the buttons and got the thing turned on and tuned in to the right channel. When he had it switched over, Lee keyed
his mic
. The radio in Doc’s hand burped and squelched.

Lee gave him a thumbs up. “Looks like it works.”

They parked the car facing away from the roadblock so they could make a quicker getaway if necessary. Doc took over the driver’s seat, while Josh took over Miller’s overwatch position in the bed of the truck
, shrugging his shoulders against the wind.

Lee held up his radio. “Doc, if you guys run into trouble, call me on the radio.”

Doc just nodded.

Lee turned to the barricade. He did not relish the idea of walking across the bridge of dead bodies to get to the other side of the concertina wire, but there didn’t seem to be any other options to safely cross. He hitched his pack higher onto his shoulders and tightened the straps. With his rifle held snug into his shoulder and the comforting weight of his tactical vest on his torso, he made for the gap in the wire, and Miller and Harper fell in behind him.

As they disappeared behind the barricade, the first fat raindrops began to fall.

***

Doc sat in the driver’s seat,
and started to sweat
.

He stared straight ahead
, his jaw muscles bunching
. A single bead of perspiration gathered and broke from his eyebrows, slipping down into his eye and forcing him to blink. He breathed in deep through his nose and let it slowly out through pursed lips. Doing this a few times usually helped him to relax.

Not now.

Outside, the downpour had begun, turning the blacktop into glistening snake skin.

In the truck bed and open to the elements, Josh swore at the rain.

He could feel his heavy pulse starting in his heart and radiating out to his fingers like shockwaves. All those electrical impulses coursing through his brain, branching out through his nervous system and triggering the beating chambers of his heart, sending all those oxygen-laden blood cells to all the organs that needed it.

It was amazing that he knew how all this stuff worked.

Right now, his brain was perceiving a life-or-death situation.

This shot a
tiny
signal down to his adrenal glands and they began to spew their chemical cocktail, igniting a chain reaction. The heartbeat
quickened
, the respiration increased, the palms began to sweat. Blood was drawn from certain organs like those of his digestive system, and reallocated to the large muscle groups in his body. The decrease in blood to the head caused his cornea to flatten, reducing his vision down to a 2% field of view, also known as “tunnel vision.”

This was his body gearing up for disaster.

And all he could wonder was,
If I fire a shot, will Lee and the others hear it?

He force
d
his eyes up to the rearview mirror and
looked
through the breach in the wire. The open intersection across from that breach was empty. The other three men had moved on, but how far? A quarter mile by now? Maybe more. Would they be able to run back if they heard gunshots?

If I fire a shot inside the car, will they still hear it?

Doc had to imagine that the vehicle had a suppressive affect on a gunshot. After all, the sound of a gunblast was only a combination of the bullet breaking the sonic barrier and the gun powder turning into a rapidly expanding gas. If the car contained the gas (and possibly the bullet), wouldn’t it make sense that the sound outside the car would be muffled?

Another spike of adrenaline.

Jesus Christ...help me...

He breathed again. Slowly.

In through the nose, out through the mouth.

He couldn’t think about it anymore.

He grabbed the M4 sitting in the passenger seat next to him. Then he turned to face the rear of the vehicle. Through the open back glass he could see most of Josh’s legs and torso, standing up in the bed and facing forward.

Doc lifted the rifle and shot Josh in the stomach.

The kid stumbled back, but didn’t
fall
. He let out a strange mewling sound and began frantically swiping at the blooming red hole in his shirt like it was a bug he might
brush
off. Doc shot him three more times until he lay still.

His
ears were humming. He stared into the back of the truck at Josh. He began to hyperventilate.
He was horribly, sickeningly out of control; an astronaut that has lost his tenuous grip on the space station and was now drifting out into orbit.

“
Oh my God! Oh fuck! OH FUCK!”
He tried to breathe but just kept swallowing air.
The rifle dropped from his shaking hands. He fumbled for the door release and stepped out of the car,
forcing himself to belch out all the air in his belly
. The rain almost instantly soaked him, matting his hair to greasy-looking strands.
His vision was spinning, t
he dead bodies all around him making laps like a gruesome carousel. He shut his eyes, felt hot tears on his cheeks, and shook
the encroaching gray out of his head
.

He could not lose consciousness here. This was a very bad place to pass out.

“
No. No. No.” He kept shaking his head. He kept saying it as though if he repeated it enough, the situation would right itself. But this fucked up situation would never be right. There was no way to make it right. It was fucked up from the start and now he was a part of it, he was a
filthy
,
bloody
part of it.

“
It’s gonna be okay,” He told himself.

He opened his eyes.

Josh was still lifeless in the bed of the truck. Doc swiped his eyes free of tears
and raked wet clumps of hair out of his face. He
fe
lt his rain-soaked clothes clinging insistently to his chest and back
as he reached into the bed and grabbed one of the kid
’
s arms. He pulled but the kid hardly budged.

“
It’s gonna be okay.” He grunted with effort. “It’s gonna be okay.”

He pulled harder, bracing one foot on the rear tire. He
got
the body
up onto the boxes, and from there it was
easier to roll him off the truck, where his head hit the ground with a dull
thwack
.

Out of breath and sobbing uncontrollably, Doc stared down at Josh
’s body
and tried to repeat to himself that everything was going to be okay. But the tears were filtering down through his sinuses and loosening all the rotten gunk in there, and it was running out his nose and down the back of his throat, garbling his words as he gasped them out: “Ihsguhn behkay. Ihsguhn behkay.”

Unable to bare the sight any longer, he ran from it, staggering into the truck and slamming the door. Panic nipped at his heels, a grayhound on the tail of a rabbit almost run to ground. He cranked the keys
too long and ground the starter
.
He yanked the shifter down into drive and slammed on the gas before the transmission had a chance to catch. The engine roared and finally
dropped into gear. Torque spun the tires for a brief second before the truck tore off, leaving Josh amongst all the other dead bodies that littered the road.