Aftermath (24 page)

He walked up and stood about a foot from Doc, his lips a bloodless line, just staring at him with those cold, dead eyes, one hand on his hip, the other on the handle of his Bowie knife.

Doc unwittingly bowed his head. “Milo.”

“
Doc,” Milo’s voice was low and even. “I thought we had an arrangement.”

“
Well, I didn’t want to be late because you said...” Doc began, but Milo cut him off, his voice gaining volume.

“
The arrangement—if you recall—was that you bring me this ‘supply guy’ so that I can speak with him. And for this service, I give you back your beloved fiancee and let the two of you ride off into the sunset together.” Milo stared silently for a brief moment, then continued. “So now, I look behind you and I can’t help but notice that there are no other people inside your pickup truck. Therefore, I must ask the following question:
where the FUCK is my guy
?”

Doc finally found his voice, but it shook when he used it. “I can lead you to him, I swear to God. I will lead you there. I just...he changed the plan and I wasn’t going to be able to bring him in time, and didn’t have a way to get in contact with you. I didn’t want to be late.” Doc took a breath and looked around, trying to see into the windows of the trucks. “Where’s Nicole?”

“
Would you shut the fuck up about Nicole, for chrissake?” Milo squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “First, I have to say, I am not pleased. That being said, the deal is not necessarily off,
if
you can still get me what I need.” Milo jabbed a stiff index finger into Doc’s chest. “Even though you royally fucked me over and I should gut you where you stand.”

Doc nodded. “Okay.”

“
I notice the truck is full. Are those supplies?”

“
Yes.”

Milo regained his cold composure. “Are there more?”

Doc hesitated for a brief second, but saw the fingers of Milo’s hand slowly wrapping around the handle of that Bowie knife, so he spoke up. “Yes. The guy is legit. He’s got supplies. Shit-loads of supplies.”

Milo looked down his nose at Doc. “What type of supplies?”

“
Everything. Food, water, medicine, weapons, radios. You name it.”

Milo appeared thoughtful and looked up at the sky. Doc noticed that it had all but stopped raining. The last few rain drops were falling in brief smatterings, but the brunt of the storm appeared to be passing, or at least pausing to gather its strength, as the summer storms often did.

“
Okay,” Milo crossed his arms and Doc was just happy his hand was away from that Bowie knife. He’d seen the man use that thing and didn’t want any part of it. “Do you remember where the supplies are? Can you take us back there?”

“
Well,” Doc was not sure how to break the information. “I can. But it won’t do you any good. The captain has to physically be there to open the door to the supply bunker.”

“
The captain, huh?” Milo scoffed. “Well, I guess we need to get the captain then, don’t we?”

Doc didn’t respond.

“
Where is he?”

“
Smithfield,” Doc said slowly. “It’s a little town up...”

“
Oh, I know Smithfield.” Milo smiled. “Yeah. We’re great friends with Smithfield. Really great friends.”

***

Everyone in the Chevrolet Lumina stared out the windshield at the small city below them, wondering why Josh and Doc were not answering their radio. The wind was gone and the rain had all but died. Far to the south, a corner of the thick gray storm clouds folded back and the sun broke through, like it was fighting to beat back the clouds, but was eventually overwrought and covered up again. It was close to midday.

“
It’s a good distance from here to where you left them,” LaRouche observed. “You sure the radios can reach that far?”

Lee looked at the radio in his hand. “Yeah. The distance shouldn’t be a problem on these.”

“
Maybe the storm’s interfering with the signal,” Miller suggested.

Harper shifted around in his seat. “We need to go back.”

“
Uh-uh.” LaRouche shook his head vehemently. “You can’t go out during the day.”

Lee and the men from Camp Ryder looked confused. “I thought you didn’t go out at night.”

Now it was LaRouche’s turn to look confused. “You don’t go in the woods at night, and you don’t go in the city during the day.” He hiked an arm up on the passenger seat so he could twist around and look at the others. “Jesus Christ, guys. You don’t know that? How are you still alive?”

“
You were out during the day,” Miller said, as though it were an accusation.

“
Yeah,” LaRouche raised his voice. “Trying to get some fucking diesel for the hospital generator before it runs out.”

Lee raised a placating hand. “We’re not arguing here. Sergeant, can you explain to us what the difference between the city and the woods is—besides the obvious.”

LaRouche seemed indignant for a second, giving everyone a look that made it very clear that he didn’t like being called into question. “Yeah. You got ‘hordes’ and you got ‘packs.’ The city crazies tend to gather in one big horde. There doesn’t seem to be a single leader, they just all go where the others go. Mindless. Like cattle. The ones out in the woods tend to be in smaller packs, though they can still get pretty big. They seem to have one ‘pack leader’ that they follow, and they tend to be a little more clever.”

Lee remembered the horde that had attacked them at the Petersons’ house, and he remembered the Shovel Guy that had almost killed Angela. He’d seemed to be the leader of that group, and they were large, probably around eighty strong. Lee said as much to LaRouche.

The sergeant answered with a shrug and upraised hands. “I don’t know, Captain. I’m just telling you what I’ve seen. I’ve heard the same type of stories from a couple of others. Keep in mind I’m not a scientist. I don’t know how this shit works. That being said, these crazy people, they still have to eat, right? So what happens when these hordes in these cities have picked clean everything there is to eat in the city? I don’t think they’ll just sit around and wait to starve to death. I think they start...migrating, I guess.”

Lee didn’t know about LaRouche’s theory on migrating hordes, but the sergeant was at least correct that they didn’t have much information about the infected. Everything they knew was based on anecdotal evidence. There were no officials any more to tell them what was normal and why. Strange shit was happening, and they just had to deal with it and worry about the reasons later when there was time.

“
So,” Lee tapped his lips with the radio antenna. “Why is it more dangerous to go out during the day if you’re in the city? What difference does it make?”

“
Again, I can’t tell you why, because I just don’t know.” LaRouche seemed to be losing patience. “All I can tell you is that the ones in the woods get way more active at night, and their senses are like an animal. They’ll sniff you out and I swear to God they can hear a squirrel fart from 300 yards away.” He shook his head. “The ones in the city are the exact opposite. They get lethargic or something at night and just stand there, hundreds of them, standing there in the moonlight. It’s creepy as fuck. But their senses aren’t as tuned as the infected in the woods. They rely more on their eyesight, I think. Like regular people. So we try to avoid them during the day when they’re moving around a lot and can see much better.”

Harper’s voice was quiet. “They’ve changed a lot since a month ago.”

The implication was obvious, and everyone knew exactly what Harper was really saying, because they had all just had the same thought. First the bacteria burrows through the brain. People get sick. Then they lose their mind. They don’t appear to have any will to survive, they throw themselves in harm’s way. They are simply full of aggression towards everything around them. Then they form groups, the aggression towards other infected subside. These groups turn into hordes that threaten survivors simply by their massive numbers. Then the infected begin to develop a pack instinct. They are on the brink of starvation, so they begin to hunt the easiest prey for a human to catch—another human. And they begin to feed.

A cycle of instinctive survival.

All in a little over a month.

If the infected were capable of evolving this far, what would life be like for the survivors in another month? In two? What about a year? The unspoken hope in everyone’s mind was that winter would come and wipe out a large portion of the infected, killing them with exposure, hypothermia, and starvation. But if they can think enough to hunt, if their survival instincts are reigniting inside their brains, what’s to stop them from hibernating, or developing some other method of coping with the cold?

“
So what do we do about Doc and Josh?” Harper asked.

Lee breathed deep, trying to rid his stomach of that leaden feeling. “I guess we have to wait until dark.”

LaRouche opened his door. “That would be advisable. In the meantime, I’ll introduce you to Deputy Shumate and maybe we can talk about helping each other.”

Lee felt strange to simply dismiss the situation like that. But he could see the sergeant had a point. As Harper and Miller and Lee had just witnessed, the hordes were too large to contend with. It would be impossible to kill them all. The only present solution was to wait until dark and sneak out to check on Doc and Josh.

“
Okay,” he opened his door and stepped out.

Reluctantly, Harper and Miller followed.

LaRouche pointed to their rifles. “Let’s go ahead and leave those in the car for now. I’m sure Deputy Shumate won’t mind you guys havin’ them, but he likes to have the say-so. You don’t want to start on the wrong foot with him.”

The other two men looked to Lee for approval.

Lee nodded, depositing his own rifle in the front seat.

When all the rifles were secured in the car, Lee realized he was tense, expecting LaRouche to use that moment to betray them, pull his sidearm, and capture them. But LaRouche only nodded. “Alright, come on in.”

CHAPTER 14: THE HOSPITAL

They followed the sergeant to a steel door where he knocked twice.

“
Who is it?” a muffled voice demanded.

“
LaRouche, asshole.” The sergeant leaned on the door frame. “Grapefruit.”

The door clanked open. Lee assumed “grapefruit” was some sort of code word. The man on the other side of the door was a tall, rat-faced man, with strangely long fingers wrapped around a shotgun. He looked at the men from Camp Ryder with narrowed eyes, still standing in the doorway.

“
Who’re they?” His voice was gravelly.

LaRouche threw his thumb over his shoulder. “Couple more survivors.”

“
More mouths to feed,” but it sounded like
mo mahths.

A Cajun accent, perhaps?

LaRouche just stared for a long moment. “So, can we come in?”

Still staring at them with his beady rat eyes, the man stepped out of the way and allowed them to pass. They entered a stairwell where the air was slightly dank and cooler than it felt outside, almost like a cellar should be. The party descended two floors and stopped at a door marked with the number 4. Beyond that landing, the stairwell below them was blocked with jumbles of concertina wire, ostensibly to prevent anyone from coming up.

LaRouche opened the door and they all stepped inside the hospital.

It was dim inside, but not dark. They were on the floor of a nondescript ward, the outer walls bearing large windows that let in the diffused light from the cloudy day outside. Adding to the muted glow were red emergency lights, the kind that popped on when the hospital was completely out of power.

“
Did your genny run out?” Lee asked, looking at the emergency lighting.

“
Not just yet.” LaRouche led them to a nurses’ station. “One of the guys here is an electrician. He rigged up the wiring so we wouldn’t use so much fuel burning lights and bullshit like that. Now these fucking emergency lights are on all the time. They’ll start to get on your nerves.” LaRouche sneered. “But we only use the genny to keep electricity running to the sliding doors on the bottom level. They’re designed to open in case of a power outage, so we have to keep a current running through them at all times or we might get some unwanted guests.”

It finally made sense why LaRouche had decided to risk a day trip to get the diesel fuel. The alternative was to run raggedly close to the “E” line and possibly lose power to the doors. What didn’t make sense was why LaRouche had ventured out on his own? Lee thought about what the sergeant had said about his fellow survivors. It seemed that maybe LaRouche just didn’t trust any of them enough to accompany him.

At the nurses’ station, LaRouche put his hands on the countertop and nodded to two men on the other side. They were both middle-aged men with pistols stuck in their waistbands. One was a little shorter than the other with dark hair, and the other was taller and leaner looking, with a mop of straw-colored hair. They both looked less than enthusiastic, and Lee guessed that they were on guard duty.

LaRouche raised two fingers as a greeting. “Gentlemen. Where’s Shumate?”