The Remaining: Fractured (58 page)

“What the fuck was that?” Dorian screamed.

Wilson could barely hear him over the ringing in his ears. He just shook his head, made a noise like a deaf man trying to speak, tried to work his jaw to pop his ears, to make them stop the brutal assault of cymbals that seemed to go on forever inside of his ear canal. He stood up, a little unsteady.

“C’mon,” he said, waving them on. “Whatever that was, I wanna get away from it.”

CHAPTER 37: SEMPER FI

Jerry stalked to the medical trailer, simply
not in the fucking mood.
After his little speech reassuring the good people of Camp Ryder that he had everything under control, Jerry had retired into the building and told Greg and Arnie to lock the bitch and her kids up tight—and separately. He’d been awake since about one in the damn morning, when Greg had come to him with the information that he’d got from Jenny, which was apparently a sore subject between the two of them at this point.

He’d wanted to get some more sleep, so Arnie and Greg moved Angela into the empty old utility closet and locked the door. In the quiet of the building, they could still hear the mumbles and crying of the two rotten little bastards that had shot Paul. Jerry shut the office door so he wouldn’t have to hear them while he was trying to sleep, and when he lay down he slept with the readiness of a man without a conscience.

Apparently, sometime during that first blessed half hour of early morning sleep, there had been some shouting, some stabbing, and some driving through the front gate. Jerry didn’t know. He’d slept through it. Until Kyle came through the door, sweating profusely, stuttering about how Marie had stabbed Arnie and there was a hole in the gate and two infected had already tried to get inside and been shot.

So now Jerry found himself awake again, and walking, and cold, and
not in the fucking mood.
He approached the medical trailer and could hear a combination of moaning, groaning, and arguing. He couldn’t pick out the specific words because they hid behind the cries of the two wounded men, but he could tell that it was Jenny and Greg, and neither was thrilled with the other.

Un-fucking-believable.
He wanted to strangle them both.
You can’t possibly be doing a good job patching my guys up if you’re having a goddamned lovers’ quarrel in the middle of it all!

He turned the corner of the medical trailer and stood in the opening.

Jenny: “I told you that in confidence, you sonofabitch!”

Greg: “What the fuck did you expect me to do with it? Sit on my fucking hands?”

Jerry cleared his throat loudly and the arguing ceased. Greg stepped to the side and Jerry could see past him into the maul of blood and dirty bandages that surrounded Jenny and the two men that lay half-conscious on the cots. Jenny’s sleeves were rolled up past her elbows and still managed to be soaked in blood. Her arms looked like they’d been dipped in it.

Paul lay on the far cot, his clothes cut away but still clinging to him. He twitched and mumbled and looked ghostly pale. His midsection was bandaged thickly, but there was barely any white left in the gauze. It was all soaked through and nearly black.

Arnie was a little more awake, but seemed on the verge of falling into shock. His arms kept flailing about, but they were like a drunken man’s and they seemed purposeless and random. Jenny sat there, bent over his naked crotch in some horrific parody of a sex act.

“Jesus…” Jerry grimaced. “What the fuck happened here?”

Greg left his position hanging over Jenny’s shoulder and stood before Jerry, his face clenched. “It was Marie. She fucking stabbed him in the cock and ran off with his car. Ran through the fucking gate. We have no idea where she went.”

Jerry stared. “You have no idea where she went?” Jerry felt a welling of rage, like hot lava flow. He swung his arm and slapped Greg on the shoulder, probably more painful for his hand than Greg, but the bigger man flinched away from it anyways. “You have no idea where she went?” he repeated, raising his voice. “Try ‘whoever the fuck is planning to take this shit over’! Goddammit, do I have to think for everyone in this hellhole? How does this happen, Greg? How does this fucking happen? Please explain!”

Greg looked away. “Marie said she had information. Said she’d only give it to Arnie in private. Then I don’t know what happened because we haven’t been able to get Arnie to talk after that. All I can say is she stabbed him in the crotch and ran off with his car.”

“Oh,” Jerry shook his head. “Oh-ho-ho.” He shifted his gaze like a target tracker, landing and locking it on Jenny. He pointed at her. “You. You.”

“C’mon, Jerry,” Greg mumbled, half-heartedly.

Jenny glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, still focused on her work.

Jerry stood beside her, watched her hands moving about what was left of Arnie’s genitals—white flesh and black pubic hair and a lot of red, glistening meat. “You fucking knew about this shit, didn’t you, you dirty little slut?”

Jenny stopped what she was doing, looked up at him. “What the fuck did you say?”

Jerry bent down, in her face. “You. Dirty. Little. Slut. You knew Marie was part of this shit, and you held that information back! Didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

Jenny lurched to her feet, bloody hands suddenly balled into fists. Jerry’s heart somersaulted—he hadn’t expected her to react so violently—and then he took a step back, raising his hands in preparation to ward off the incoming blows. But before she could start swinging, Greg swooped in and grabbed her arms, pinning them to her side.

It didn’t stop her from kicking at him. “You sonofabitch!” she screamed at him. “I didn’t know shit! You stay out of my face! Get out! Get out of my trailer! GET OUT!”

Jerry dodged the blows. “Greg, control your bitch!”

Greg pulled her away, squeezing her tight enough that it seemed he might crack her rib cage, and he whispered into her ear, his face buried in her flailing hair, “You need to calm the fuck down or this is gonna end badly for you. Please calm down, Jenny. Just calm down.”

She still struggled against him. Her voice was a little more subdued, if not slightly strained from fighting to get a breath past his constricting arms. “You tell him to get out! He has to leave! I won’t help Arnie if he’s in here! I’ll just let him bleed out, I swear to God!”

Greg looked pleadingly at Jerry.

If Jerry was honest with himself, he would have admitted that Jenny’s outburst had been unexpected and it had scared the hell out of him. He would have decided that perhaps this was someone he didn’t want to continue to poke at, since if he were to ever be injured, it would be Jenny who patched him up. She was the only one left in Camp Ryder with any medical experience, and that basically made her untouchable.

If Jerry was honest with himself, he would have realized all this, backed off, and maybe even apologized. You simply don’t fuck with nurses and doctors. You don’t fuck with the people that fix you when you’re broken.

But Jerry was rarely honest with himself, and instead he found himself livid that Jenny had managed to take him by surprise, had managed to humiliate him in front of one of his subordinates. So rather than walk away, he stalked towards her and slapped her across the face.

She went very still, as though it had shocked her.

He put a finger to her nose. “Don’t think that you’re special, Jenny. Don’t think it for one fucking second. You have a skill, and it is keeping you alive. But for your own goddamn sake, don’t become more annoying to me than your skill is useful, do you understand me?”

She didn’t respond. Hung limply in Greg’s arms.

Jerry snorted. Looked down at Arnie and Paul. “And why don’t you give my men some fucking pain medications?”

She held Jerry’s gaze. Her voice was glacier cold, and just as brittle: “Because we don’t have any more medications, Jerry.” The words seemed innocent enough, but their meaning was obvious.
We used to have medications, when Captain Harden was leading us. But you don’t have bunkers full of supplies. So now we’re starving. Now we’re sick. Now we’re in pain. And there ain’t shit you can do about it. Because you are not Captain Harden.

He worked saliva into his dry mouth, sniffed haughtily. “Fine. Do your fucking job.” He turned and began walking away. “Greg!” he barked. “Come with me.”

Greg grit his teeth and released Jenny. He didn’t look at her—couldn’t bring himself to do it—and he jogged after Jerry, shaking his head just slightly.

Outside, Jerry stared at the front gate, a mangled mess of metal with two guards standing around it with their thumbs up their asses, not doing shit but staring at it like it was some sort of goddamned mystery. They shined flashlights through the gate and illuminated the sprawled bodies of two infected that had come scarily close to that breach in their defenses. It was quiet now—no infected screeching in the woods—but Jerry was sure it wasn’t going to last long.

Jerry growled low in his throat, tried to shake off the feeling of crumbling, the feeling that everything was falling down around him. Too hastily built. Too structurally unsound. Maybe he’d made his move too early. Maybe he should have waited. Bided his time until conditions were better.

Or maybe he’d been too kind. Maybe he’d been too merciful. Perhaps he had tried too hard to play it safe, to please everybody. Perhaps it was time to play a little hardball.

“First thing’s first,” he said to Greg. “Get that fucking fence fixed
yesterday
. I want four armed men on that breach until its put back together and the infected can’t get through. I want however many men that you have left to be roving around the fence and on top of the building, ready for whenever these motherfuckers come for us. Once you have that set up, get Angela into my office. We need to address the threat of whoever might have allied themselves with Angela and Marie.”

“You want me to help you question Angela?”

“No,” Jerry shook his head. “We need to neutralize the threat of more people rebelling inside Camp Ryder.” He looked at Greg. “For their own safety, and to better equip the men that are defending Camp Ryder, I’m going to need everyone to surrender their weapons. If anyone objects to that, those are probably the people we need to be concerned with. Go door to door with three others, and if they give you any problems, lock them up.”

***

They drove slow. The midmorning light came through the trees in slats of brightness, and was caught in the smoke that hung over everything like a heavy fog. Part smoke and part dust. Wilson could smell it—the sharp smell of high explosives and the muted, gritty flavor of cement, so finely pulverized by a blast that the particulate matter seemed weightless in the air. It also reduced their visibility to maybe a hundred yards at the most.

Like they were driving through a cloud.

They approached the bridge over the Roanoke River. No one spoke. Just the steady thrum of the Humvee coasting down the road, the tires
whirring
across the pavement, occasionally encountering a bit of debris that had been thrown so far from the blast sight and crunching over it. This had to be where the horrendous blast had come from.

Wilson had heard other noises when they’d been running back to the convoy. A sound like a giant buzz saw, and men screaming. A few smaller explosions. And then nothing after that. Just the wind in the trees, and a rising column of smoke, a haze that clung stubbornly to the roadway. The faraway murmur of the river as it flowed east.

“Slow down,” Wilson instructed, leaning out of his open window, his rifle ready.

Ahead of them and to the right, a dark object lay sprawled in the road.

A man, Wilson was pretty sure. Or part of him anyways. As they drew closer, the smoke and dust cleared enough to see the details. It was indeed a man, though one if his arms and a large portion of his torso were missing. He wore the white cloth around his arm, the cross-and-circle painted on it. All around him, the cement was cratered in vicious looking lines. He lay in the middle of one of those lines.

Wilson didn’t say anything. Didn’t interpret what he saw, because he honestly didn’t know what to think. He was just an Air Force Academy cadet, not a modern warfare expert. He didn’t know what weapons made what wounds, or what in the hell he’d heard or what could have caused it.

He waved with one hand. “Keep going.”

They continued on. Passed a pickup truck on the side of the road. Riddled with gigantic holes. They couldn’t see what was inside the cab of the pickup because blood and dark, fleshy matter clung to the interior of all the glass, evenly splattered. Two other bodies were in the bed of the pickup truck, still clinging to weapons, though not much else was recognizable.

“Oh, man,” Dorian mumbled from up top.

Tim echoed the sentiment. “I don’t know whether this is a good thing, or really, really fucking bad.”

Wilson swallowed, tasted the smoky dust on his tongue. “Guess it depends on who and what did this.”

The road changed textures. From old, tire-smoothed asphalt, to a rough, white cement. The beginning of the bridge. Here the trees stopped and no longer provided a wind break. Ahead, the smoke and dust was clearer, and Wilson could see the abrupt end of the bridge.

“Holy shit…” Wilson tapped Tim on the arm, signaling him to stop. The Humvee halted, and behind them through the open window Wilson could hear the other vehicle’s brakes engaging, the rumble of their idles mixing with the noise of the river below them. “The fucking bridge is gone.”

Wilson opened his door, stepped out.

“Again,” Tim said as he engaged the Humvee’s emergency brake and stepped out, shouldering his rifle. “Seems like a good thing. But...”

Wilson glanced behind him as the others in his group began piling out of the vehicles. There was a certain, funereal mood to the group. The loss of Father Jim weighed incredibly heavy on them, and despite Wilson’s best efforts, no one was ignorant as to the friction between Jim and LaRouche. And now LaRouche was missing? They were smart enough to figure it out on their own.