The Remaining: Refugees (3 page)

They
went down and
emerged from
the pharmacy onto Front Street. It was
Lee, Harper, Julia,
and Father Jim
. They were a good team, Lee had to admit. Though Julia refused to take part in the traps t
hey set to clear the
small towns of infected, she still did
the training and pulled her weight
along with everyone else
. Plus
,
her medical knowledge made her invaluable
. Lee had spent a lot of time training
his team
, and they were practiced and tested almost every day. They were
still a far cry from professional soldiers
, but they were fluid, most of them were decent shots, and they got the job done.

Standing on the sidewalk in front of the shop, they
stared at the
carnage
in the streets.

"Jim,
Harper
..." Lee pointed to the front of the shop. "Post up here. We'll strip the pharmacy."

The two
men nodded their heads. Julia followed Lee back into the building. The interior already looked ransacked, but
most things did
these days. There wasn't much left, but they managed to pull a few large bottles of medications that Lee was unfamiliar with, along with some prescription pain relievers, and some over-the-counter items such as anti-diarrhea
l
medicines, ibuprofen, acetaminophen, and antibacterial ointments. Julia piled these items into her pack just as the Humvees rumbled into the back parking lot.

Lee called out to Jim and
Harper
and they
all
headed for the back lot.

T
he two
Humvees sat
in the interior parking lot
, one behind the other. The lead Humvee had been outfitted with
a
dozer blade that now sat angled up so as not to impede the vehicle's ground clearance
—a bit of creative welding
. Wilson and his three teammates were already offloading spools of barbed wire, some of which they had taken from the barricades in Smithfield, and some they had found in various farm equipment stores.

The back lot was half paved, and half dusty gravel. Two small sedans and a pickup truck sat abandoned, parked along the rear of the buildings. There were two entrances into the back lot, one from the south, and one from
the west. The western entrance
was only wide enough for one vehicle to pass through at a time, while
the southern entrance
was much bigger. For this reason, Lee made the decision to block the
southern
entrance. The materials to barricade it would be harvested from the refuse around them, including the cars already parked in the back lot, dumpsters, and any other heavy
objects
they could haul into place.

While the rest of the team finished offloading the Humvees, Lee sat in the passenger seat of the lead vehicle and grabbed the handset to the SINCGARS radio mounted inside. He dispensed with proper radio protocols and used plain English when he spoke.

"Captain Harden to Camp Ryder. How do you copy me?"

A hiss of static.

A gravelly voice answered. "Yeah, I got you, Captain."

Lee smiled. "Morning, Bus. Haven't had your coffee?"

"Don't remind me
. Haven’t had coffee in months
." Bus cleared his throat. "Did you get Lillington cleared?"

"Yeah, i
t's clear."

"Anybody hurt?"

"Nope." Lee looked out at
his team,
now in the process of breaking into the abandoned cars in the back lot so they could be
moved and
used as barricades. "They're just getting everything set up
right now
."

"Sounds
good. I know Old Man Hughes won't tell you, but everyone from Dunn really appreciates what you're doing out there.
It’s been cramped quarters over here.
"

Lee nodded. Old Man Hughes was the leader of nineteen other survivors from the town of Dunn to the southeast. He was a crotchety
old
bastard, but for some reason the Dunn survivors loved him. Due to overcrowding at Camp Ryder, the twenty from Dunn were slated to move to Lillington and establish an outpost there, along with another twelve from Fuquay-Varina.

"Not a problem," Lee said simply.

"I'll let Old Man Hughes know. They'll be on their way shortly. Any trouble on the roads?"

"No,
the
road was clear. Make sure they stick to the route we planned."

"Will do. What time should we expect you back?"

Lee thought out loud. "I think we'll leave most of the scavenging for the new residents. My guys need some sleep and I need to restock some of our ordnance. So we'll probably head out shortly after they get here." He clucked his tongue. "I'd say around noon at the latest."

"Sounds good. See you at noon."

"Roger. Out." Lee put the handset back on its cradle.

As he stood from the Humvee, he watched Harper exit the back door of the pharmacy. The older man's face was clouded, and he approached Lee with a purposeful walk, avoiding eye-contact until he was standing right in front of him.

Lee
felt
that old familiar certainty of the worst-case-scenario creeping up on him.
“What’s wrong?”

Harper
squinted one eye
. "Not really sure."

Lee stared at him blankly.

"Take a look at something." Harper began walking back towards the pharmacy, and Lee followed. "Jim just pointed it out to me. I hadn't noticed it before but...well, just
come
look."

They made their way through the pharmacy to the open front door and out onto Front Street. In the middle of the road, mired by bodies lying two-deep in places, and surrounded by the overwhelming stench, Jim stood and looked around at the corpses, a finger pressed thoughtfully to his lips. Lee
turned to catch a glimpse of the rooftop
behind
and above
him and saw LaRouche resting his elbows there on the a
butment. The sergeant
met Lee'
s eyes and gave a minimal shrug, as though Father Jim’s actions mystified him as well.

Lee stood at the edge of the blood bath. "Jim?"

The man in the tortoiseshell glasses looked up and nodded by way of greeting.

Harper put his hands on his hips. "Tell him."

Jim looked around, hesitantly, as though he was in the process of some complicated calculation
, confident that his math was correct, but somehow coming up with the wrong answer every time
. Finally he gestured to the bodies around him. "There are no females."

Lee's brow narrowed.

He looked around as though he might prove Jim wrong. He stared down at the pale limbs covered in dried and fresh blood. Their clothin
g barely clung to them in
tatters. It was difficult to determine gender by a glance
—
malnutrition robbed them of most of their distinctions so that all that remained were bony sacks of flesh. Lee had to look at their faces and see the grizzled, mangy beards, clumped together by clots of blood. Some of them were too young to have beards, but they were male as well.
He searched and searched, but could not find a single female to discount what Jim had said.

"That's weird,"
Lee spoke slowly
. "But..."

"There were none in the last two traps we set in Smithfield, either." Father Jim looked at him with fevered eyes. "
Or at the university. Or at Dunn. In fact, w
hen was the last time you saw an infected female, Captain?"

Lee didn't respond.

H
e had no answer.

"What do you think
happe
ned to them?" Harper asked quietly.

Jim began carefully stepping between the bodies, making his way towards Lee and Harper. "Not sure," he said simply. "Could be that they aren't as strong, so the male infected feed on them."

Lee thought back to the young girl, the first infected he'd encountered as he stepped out of his house and into this new reality
,
so long ago. She had been a scrawny thing, but shockingly powerful. "I don't know about strength being the issue," Lee said. "Besides, if that were the case, why not kill and eat the young ones too?"

Jim shrugged. "I have no idea. I'm just making an observation."

Lee stared down at the bodies for a moment more. He could find nothing further to say on the subject, so he nodded his head back towards the buildings. "Let's get rid of these bodies. I don't want to give the assholes from Fuquay-Varina anything else to bitch about."

***

They drove the Humvee with the dozer attachment out to Front Street and lowered the blade so that it was only an inch off the ground. Lee watched from the sidewalk as Harper moved the vehicle in slow, broad strokes, the blade gathering up a tumble of pale bodies and pushing them towards a vacant lot at the northeastern corner of the intersection. Then Harper would put the vehicle in reverse and back slowly through the thickening blood, the tires slinging droplets of it down the sides of the vehicle. The thought of all that infected blood still gave Lee cause to worry, but
over the last few months, several survivors—including Lee—had come into contact with infected blood and not contracted the plague. They’d determined that simple blood on skin contact didn’t contribute to infection
.

After nearly an hour of back and forth, Harper had managed to clear Front Street of most of the bodies. The ones he couldn't get to
—
the ones that were huddled behind trees and in the corners of buildings
—
were picked up by hand and placed in the path of the dozer so he could push them into the growing pile. They mixed in pallets and pieces of wood and doused it all with diesel fuel and set it on fire with a road flare. Lee stood back away from the blaze and watched the acrid black smoke curl into the sky as Harper drove the Humvee-turned-dozer back into the parking lot behind the buildings.

The use of fuel was a shame, but they didn’t have the equipment to dig mass graves, and leaving rotting bodies out in the open was not only offensive to the senses, but a serious health hazard, even if they were uninfected. An expired human body became a petri dish for diseases of all types. On top of that, the rotting meat had been known to draw other infected into the area. It was best to dispose of them quickly.

Beside him, Father Jim looked down Main Street. "They'll see the smoke, you know."

Lee shrugged
. "Nothing I can do about it, Jim."

"I know." He put a hand on Lee's shoulder. "But you know that asshole
White
is going to say something."

Lee smiled
and looked shocked
. "Father...such language."