The Remaining: Fractured (35 page)

James shrugged like it didn’t matter. “Whatever.”

Shumate grew very serious. “Stay sharp when we’re out there. I know this guy’s beat the fuck up, but he was beat up when I first met him and it didn’t slow him down much. I ain’t saying he’s a badass, I’m just saying it would be dangerous to underestimate him. Okay?”

Aaron nodded calmly.

James watched him, wondered if he felt the jangling nerves and was hiding it behind a mask, just like James. Probably not. Aaron was a cold-ass bastard. James had never seen him lose his shit, never seen him scared or shaken or even wide-eyed. Everything that ever happened to them, it seemed he’d been expecting it from the get-go and he greeted it with a deadpan expression, as if to say, “Yeah, I figured.”

James didn’t consciously think it, but inside his chest where the scared little kid was hiding, he wanted badly to be just like Aaron. He just wanted to be unafraid. He just wanted to live, and not always worry about dying. It took up so much of his time that he never actually thought about living. Not that there was much of a life to be had anymore.

“Aight,” James scooted over to the window. “I gotcha guys covered.”

Shumate touched him on the shoulder. “You see anything pop up on that roof, you put it down. You got that?”

“Yeah, I got it, man.” James shook his head, as though he were miffed that Shumate felt the instructions needed repeating. “I got this shit.”

Behind his back, Shumate and Aaron exchanged a glance and just shook their heads.

James may have been a scared kid, but you don’t live through the end of the world without being smart. At least when it came to survival, which often times came down to the little details that helped you shoot someone else, and not be shot yourself.

So, instinctively, he backed away from the window about two feet, kept his profile low. Not because some tactical range instructor had taught him this, but because in his own experience he knew that someone far behind a glass window was a lot harder to see than a person right up against it. He kept his body low because he knew it took away those precious angles—the angles that his opponent would try to use to land a bullet in him, while James used the angles to do the same.

Angles, angles.

It all came down to angles.

And yet I failed trigonometry.

He propped himself up slightly on his elbows, just enough to give the 50-round magazine of his AK an inch of clearance off the ground. Wasn’t good to use the mag as a monopod. Made the gun jam. Sometimes it made the mag come off after firing.

Even in the failing light, he could make out the opposing rooftop nicely. It was a red brick building, but the top was crowned with white stone that stood out against the darkening sky. Captain Harden would be very visible, whenever he popped his head up to see what was going on.

“Keep an eye for us,” Shumate said quietly from the darkness behind James.

The kid grunted. A nonverbal sound of confidence he didn’t actually feel.

Behind him, the light sound of the steps creaking as Shumate and Aaron descended out of the attic space. James didn’t look back, but just pictured them disappearing into the stairwell, and he felt suddenly and irrevocably alone. Chilled, like a growing doubt that he’d see the sun again. And the thought broke through all the fake macho, tough-guy walls that he’d erected around himself, and he had the fleeting emotion of sadness. But he wasn’t sure about what.

No reason to be sad
, he told himself.
You’ll make it through this.

Because he’d made it through many other things. This was not the first time he’d felt that coldness in his gut. He settled his cheek onto the wooden stock of his rifle. Wondered how loud the blast was going to be in this attic space. Probably pretty bad, at least until he’d shot the window out and the noise and the concussion had somewhere to go. He considered breaking the glass, but that thought was discarded almost immediately. Breaking glass was noisy. Shumate and Aaron would have a fit.

From his vantage point, set back from the window a few feet, he couldn’t see down into the street. But he heard the creak of the front door opening. The building housed a little sporting goods store, mostly football stuff, but some other things as well. All the glass had been broken in the windows and the door, but there were bars on all of it, so that James had been able to reach his skinny arm through and unlock the front door when all hell had broken loose and the street started filling with infected. He and Shumate and Aaron had run inside, quickly locking the front door behind them and bolting for the back rooms, hoping for someplace a little more secure.

The last James had glimpsed of the street, he’d seen the van, seen the infected pulling Kev’s dead body out of the back. Ripping him to shreds. He’d looked away. Couldn’t bear to watch it for some reason. Wasn’t sure why.

It was strange. He would have thought the amount of violence and bloodshed he’d witnessed would have inoculated him to the shock of it, but it sometimes felt like it was only making him more sensitive. Like every time he saw someone ripped apart, or when Shumate or Aaron shot some poor hobo, it took off a layer of his skin. Until he felt flayed. Laid open. Every dust mote a piercing needle. Every breeze a wash of acid.

Then other times it didn’t affect him at all.

Honestly he didn’t know which was worse.

He breathed heavily, and it carried across to the window, fogging it for a second before it dissipated. He closed his mouth, breathed through his nose. Fog behind the glass could’ve been a giveaway if someone watched the window.

Though he couldn’t see the street below, he could see just a sliver of the sidewalk on the opposite side, and the window was wide enough that he had a fairly panoramic view. Far to the right, he saw the murky flutter of two shapes, one quickly following the other, disappear around the corner of a building and blend into the darkness.

It made his heart jump, though he knew it was Shumate and Aaron. If you didn’t jump when you saw things sneaking around, you probably wouldn’t last long. Paranoia is an ally when it seemed the world was out to kill you. Plagues. Madmen caused by the plagues. Dangerous men caused by the collapse of law and order…

He almost scoffed at himself.

Hated cops when they were around. Disliked Shumate for being one before the collapse. Felt like they were out to get him. Never took a moment to consider that there were worse things than paying fines and going to jail. Things that had somehow been kept at bay by all those self-righteous motherfuckers with their badges and guns.

I can take care of myself
, he used to say. And it was true. He didn’t need a fucking cop to defend him. But what he wouldn’t give now to be able to hop in a truck and take a drive without worrying about running into some rednecks at a roadblock and taking a bullet. What he wouldn’t give to meet a girl and be able to have a normal conversation because she knew he wasn’t going to put a gun to her head and rape her.

That got him thinking about Shelley, and that made him drop the whole damn subject. He wouldn’t shed a tear for the bitch, but there was something undeniably shitty about how it ended for her. How miserable the last months of her life had been. How she just deluded herself into thinking that it was okay. Like an addict. Except she never did it for drugs, she did it for safety. She was addicted to feeling safe.

And now she was just a pile of bones.

A bloodstain on the road.

Few patches of hair and skin.

Maybe some teeth.

Just drop it…

Across the street and slightly to the left, the two shadows reappeared. They looked up at James, hiding behind his window, their faces blue in the twilight. Shumate gave him a nod, and then the two began to move towards the door to the shop that they’d seen Captain Harden slip into. The door that now hung open, shattered by the horde that had come through, looking for flesh. Looking for food.

They slipped into the darkness.

James swallowed hard, watching them enter that place.

Like a dragon’s lair. Like a spider hole. You go in. You don’t come out.

Funny how after all those mental gymnastics to turn Captain Harden into Donald Weathers, to minimize him to the level of an alcohol-addled bum, he couldn’t get rid of the knot in his stomach.

James squinted slightly, waiting for the muzzle flashes to light up the interior of the antique shop. Waited for the rapid
pop-pop-pop
of a gunfight. Bullets whizzing everywhere. Shattering through Grandma’s old rocking chair. Shumate and Aaron trying to hide behind musty old wood while Captain Harden moved like a ghost and tore them apart with the use of some strange, field-expedient weapons he’d constructed from old cedar chests and glass figurines.

James puffed his lips out. “Bullshit,” he mumbled. “That fucker’s almost dead already.”

He felt a slight prick on the back of his neck.

First thought:
Spider!
And he almost reached up to swat the little bastard, but then all at once he smelled the smell of strong, rank body odor—someone else’s body odor—and felt the cold, iron-like grip on his shoulder.

The voice was barely a whisper, but it held all the substance of an anvil falling. “Don’t move.”

A million options, a million thoughts.

Terror screeching like locked tires.

To fight? To give up? The hand was incredibly strong, the voice resolute. He had snuck up on him good, took him by surprise. A nightmare of how Donald Weathers might have been had he not been pass-out-drunk that night in the woods.

The spider bite was a knife—had to be. Right at the base of his skull, and James just thought about his skinny neck, the fragile vertebrae just underneath his skin, such a weak defense for his spinal column, now that he thought of it. One shove, and he’d be gone.

Strangely, he felt the fear, but also something else. It was not peace. It was more like just…stopping. Like the zebra in the nature films when three lions are dragging it to the ground. The look in the animal’s eyes after it realizes that no amount of kicking and screaming and scratching and biting is going to get it out of the situation it is in. The inevitability of it. And somehow, the strange release. The freedom of no longer having to think about your next step.

The look in that zebra’s eyes.

Like,
Well…shit…

James took his hand off the AK. Took his finger off the trigger, and realized in a split-second epiphany that that was all Captain Harden wanted him to do. Just take that finger off the trigger so that when the knife severed the spinal column, he didn’t pull off a round and alert the others.

Well…shit…

CHAPTER 22: GONE

Lee plucked the knife from the back of the man’s head.
Man
was a generous term.
Boy
was more like it. But a boy with an AK-47 wasn’t a boy at all. He was a hostile. A threat. A target to be neutralized.

He looked down at the figure, lying there, face to the ground. Just a small drip of blood coming from the wound in his neck where the knife had slipped in between the vertebrae with a fatal scrape of bone. He did feel pity. Pity like you might feel for an animal that had stepped out in front of traffic. Stepped out and tangled with things it didn’t understand.

Stupid
, Lee thought, remembering hazily the way the kid had talked. The tough guy, always trying to impress the others and failing miserably. And that was the extent of the thought that he gave to the kid he'd known as James. He wiped the blade off on his pants, like he was wiping away what little emotion he could muster.

He slipped the knife back into its sheath.

Nausea roiled, the room swam.

He closed his eyes, breathed deep. When the swirling feeling went away, he blinked a few times, then looked around to see if perhaps they’d had some supplies they’d carried with them into the attic. But there was nothing. Just dusty old pieces of outdated sports equipment, languishing in the corners. Perhaps saved as memorabilia. Who knew.

Lee bent down, grabbed the AK-47 up off the ground, then backed up a few paces. He stood there for a moment, gathering his thoughts. Staring out the half-moon window in front of him like a high diver might stare at the pool below him. Planning it out. Going through the motions in his head. Knowing he only had one chance to get it right.

He realized his eyes were closed. His mind wandered into some half-light dream state, then jerked back, still holding the threads of whatever his subconscious was weaving. Something about money. Something about bullets being currency. He rode out a wave of sickness, then refocused himself.

Almost there.

He pulled the M4 he’d taken from Kev off his back and set it on the floor by his feet. He would need to make a fast transition from the AK to the M4. From his current vantage point, he could not see the street through the window, but he could see the front door of the antiques shop where he’d been. And he could see the roof. Where Deuce was still probably pacing about, wondering why he’d been abandoned by yet another human.

“I’m comin’ back, buddy.” The words came out of his mouth in a slurry.

He was in bad shape. How he’d managed to sneak up on the kid, he didn’t know. He could barely remember coming up the stairs into the attic space. Remembered slipping down through the buildings and across the street a few blocks down, working his way towards the building where he now was. He remembered seeing Shumate and the Quiet Man slip out the front door of the shop and scurry down and across. He’d been in the shadows not thirty feet from them.

Then the space between when he’d entered the door they’d left open, and when he stood behind the kid in the attic space was kind of a blur. Like he was drunk. Bits and pieces left out. The chronology of it skewed.

Bad shape, but still operating.

Good to go.

With the M4 at his feet, he shouldered the AK-47 and pointed it towards the rooftop, but slightly down and to the right—didn’t want to accidentally shoot Deuce. His only hope was that his position inside the building would muffle the sound of the gunshots enough so that they didn’t draw the attention of the infected.