Aftermath (9 page)

Lee swore quietly under his breath. “Well we don’t have much of a choice, do we?”

Harper looked uncomfortable. “Not really.”

“
Fine.” Lee turned back towards Keith and extended his hand. “One rifle of your choosing, and we provide the gas. You got a deal.”

Keith shook Lee’s hand vigorously, with a big smile plastered across his weathered old face.

***

Lee and Harper eventually decided that filling the Ram’s monstrous 35-gallon tank was being overly optimistic. Working by the same calculations as he had when he’d appropriated the Petersons’ truck, he figured on the 35-gallon tank getting them approximately 350 miles, if it was full. For their needs, they settled on rounding up to forty miles both ways, with a forty-mile buffer...just in case.

This left them at 120 miles, or approximately a third of a tank.

Which still meant they had to come up with at least twelve gallons.

Coming up with a few five-gallon gas cans was the easy part. Almost everyone that had come to Camp Ryder in a vehicle had packed a few extra cans of gas and had since used them up. They now sat around as useless as their fuel-less cars. However, Harper felt that given the edgy climate of the camp, begging and borrowing from others would prove to be troublesome. As luck would have it, he knew of a supply shed around the back of the Ryder building. When the survivors had first made camp here, Harper had been tasked with looting everything inside the compound for useful supplies, and recalled the shed having a few empty gas cans.

While Harper went to retrieve the gas cans, Bus met Lee at the rear of Harper’s old Nissan Frontier, which they planned to use for their gasoline-finding mission. Lee greeted the big man with a reserved smile and leaned against the side of the pickup’s bed. Bus carried with him an olive-green duffel, much like the stuff sack Lee had been issued in the army. Hopefully it contained something worth smiling about. “Turned up anything good?”

Bus pulled the tailgate down and set the duffel on it. The bag made a heavy clank as it hit the rusty bed. “Well, it’s not an arsenal, but it’ll get the job done.”

Lee peered into the truck bed as Bus opened the duffel and pulled out a Mossberg 500 shotgun, a Savage Axis in .308, a black revolver, and a small black pistol. Judging by the tiny bores of both the handguns, Lee correctly guessed that they were both .22 caliber.

The Mossberg was a no-frills ass-beater, designed to put rounds down range and not much else. The tube held five rounds of 12-gauge ammunition, of which Bus had managed to scrape up ten rounds of buckshot.

The Savage Axis was a reasonably accurate rifle chambered for an excellent man-killing round. The .308 caliber round was rated to take down any animal in North America, and that included humans. Bus had managed to score thirteen cartridges of .308 in mix-and-match brands. Most of them were “Full Metal Jacket,” but a few had little red ballistic tips. The FMJ’s were pretty standard issue, but the ballistic tips were designed to expand on impact, increasing trauma to the target.

The revolver held eight .22 rounds, and the small pistol held ten. Of the ubiquitous .22 caliber, Bus had been able to gather fifty rounds. While the .22 wasn’t a show-stopper in terms of power, the cartridge was small enough that anyone could carry a massive amount of ammunition on them without truly weighing themselves down. In reality, while the round wouldn’t stop anything bigger than a squirrel past a hundred yards, in close-quarters it was known to have just enough power to get inside the body cavity, but not quite enough to get out, causing the projectile to ricochet around a bit and rearrange a few organs. The .22 caliber projectile was the same size projectile as in the 5.56 mm cartridge Lee used in his M4, just with much less
oomph
behind it.

Bus slung the empty duffel over his shoulder. “Keep in mind, that’s what I was able to scrounge up, so don’t waste it all today when you guys go out to get your gas. Avoid a fight if you can.”

Lee smiled. “Goes against my nature, but okay.”

Harper came walking up lugging two red five-gallon fuel cans. He set them on the edge of the pickup’s bed and slid them in. He looked at the four firearms in front of him. “You choose your weapons already, Captain?”

Lee gestured politely. “You first.”

“
Okay,” Harper rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ll take the shotty and the pistol. You take the rifle and the revolver.”

“
Sounds good.” Lee agreed.

Bus had turned and was now looking out beyond the perimeter fence. There was about thirty yards of overgrown weeds that built up into old-growth forest with a wide dirt road meandering through it towards the highway. “Where are you guys gonna look for gas?”

“
Well,” Harper sighed. “We usually hit up all the abandoned cars in Timber Creek for gas, but I don’t think it would be wise to go back there so soon. Place was probably about tapped, anyway.”

“
Gotta be some big wrecks and leftover traffic jams from when everyone was trying to get the hell out,” Lee observed. “Probably would be easy pickings along a main highway.”

“
Highway 55 is close,” Harper offered. “I remember there being a nasty wreck up closer to town. Of course, no tellin’ how much gas is left in those cars—I’m sure we’re not the first to think of draining them.”

“
It’s a start.” Bus looked nervous. “How long do you guys think you’ll be?”

Lee didn’t like being pinned down to a timeframe, but he knew how nerve-wracking it was for someone to be in the position of waiting an undetermined amount of time in a possibly life-threatening situation. Lee had worked on both sides of that coin and had come to the conclusion that it was simply a shitty coin.

Still, Lee felt obligated. “Ideally, a few hours. I’d say...four o’clock, latest?”

Harper seemed to agree with a bob of his head. His hairless scalp was beginning to bead with sweat and glistened as he moved. It wasn’t until Lee noticed the sweat that he realized he’d begun to sweat himself. The air was a comfortable temperature if you could find shade, but the sun was hot.

“
Good luck,” Bus was about to turn, but seemed to remember something he had left in the bottom of the duffel bag. He plunged his hand in and brought out a pair of old army fatigue pants and offered them to Lee. “I got these for you. Figured you should have some real pants, rather than just running shorts.”

Lee felt truly grateful, as he’d felt ridiculous in the shorts. He accepted them with more excitement than he’d felt about a pair of pants in quite a while. “Damn, Bus. You made my day.”

“
Well, it wasn’t really up to me.” Bus pointed to Lee’s bare legs. “I was receiving complaints.”

Harper snickered quietly and Lee pulled the pants on with a grin. They were too large and too long but Lee didn’t hesitate to make do. He rolled up the pant legs so they weren’t dragging on the ground and then pulled the draw string from his running shorts and threaded it through the belt loops on the fatigues.

Presto, a field-expedient belt.

“
Thanks again, Bus.” Lee slapped the big man firmly on the shoulder.

“
Don’t mention it.” He pointed to both of them. “You guys be careful.”

CHAPTER 6: TWELVE GALLONS

The wide dirt road leading away from Camp Ryder emptied out onto two-lane black top. Lee cranked the passenger side window down to allow some airflow in the stifling car, and to set the muzzle of the .308 bolt gun against the side-view mirror for quick access. The warm wind gusted through his open window as Harper drove at a steady pace out towards Highway 55.

Harper didn’t say much since leaving camp. He nervously chewed on the inside of his lip, steered with his left hand and kept his right hand on the shotgun that lay between him and Lee. His squinted eyes scanned the roadway, back and forth, then checking his mirrors for anything coming up behind them.

Lee kept his eyes on the woods and pastures that framed the roadway. A few houses, but mostly they were still on back roads. He looked for anything out of the ordinary, even kept his nose in the wind and his ears perked for the tell-tale howl of the infected. The signs of devastation were less evident here. There were no burned-out apartment complexes or looted business to disturb the picture of business as usual. For brief moments Lee felt normal, but this sensation was fleeting, gone as soon as he tried to grasp it.

His new reality was survival. It was looking over your shoulder at all times. It was waking up in the middle of the night with your heart pounding. It was tensing at a rustle in the grass or the snap of a twig. It was the dull throb of fear that underscored every waking minute. But underneath all of that was something clearer and sharper that kept Lee focused.

He felt justified.

Complete.

Purposeful.

Like he was born for this fight.

The Nissan’s brakes squealed a bit and the vehicle slowed. Before them stood a four-way intersection. Here, the trees stood farther back from the roadway. The stop sign facing them was canted to the right and bent at the base, as though someone had run it over. A signal light that once flashed red swung dormant from the power lines that crossed the intersection. From a telephone pole, someone had nailed a poster board that had crinkled and weathered in the elements. Though faded, Lee could still read the words written boldly in black paint.

THIS IS GOD’S JUDGEMENT

Harper looked both ways at the intersection. “This is 55,” he said. To either side, the road stretched away from them, empty and devoid of life. A gust of wind blew up a short-lived dust devil that twirled across the road and dissipated on the shoulder. “Which way should we go?”

Lee pointed to their left. “Is that towards town?”

“
Yeah.”

“
Probably have more cars that way.”

Harper seemed hesitant. “More infected too.”

Lee shifted in his seat, getting a good grip on his rifle. “Don’t go far from the truck, and keep an open line of sight both directions.”

Wordlessly, Harper turned the steering wheel to the left. The power steering groaned against his grip and Lee wondered how long their machines would last without parts and maintenance. On his list of valuable people to rescue, he mentally highlighted “mechanic.”

The small pickup moved slowly through the intersection and headed northwest, towards downtown Angier.

Harper kept it at a steady but cautious thirty miles-per-hour.

Nothing but trees and power lines to both sides.

The wind bore no scent but the stale baking smell of the blacktop.

The tires whined, the engine hummed along, settling into third gear. Beyond that was the hypnotic slurry of nature’s constant background noise, louder now for man’s lack of interference. The cicada call, rising and falling, the chatter of birds, a million other life forms acting out their daily existence, oblivious to the changed world around them and the plight of the one species on the planet that seemed to doom themselves at every turn.

A glint of unnatural color ahead.

Lee focused at the road before them, gently curving to the right. In the bend, just coming into view, a small white vehicle had run off the road and mired itself in the ditch on the far side of the shoulder.

“
Slow up,” Lee mumbled, but Harper was already pressing the brakes.

The vehicle was a little more than a half of a mile away. A sniper’s arithmetic produced facts in Lee’s mind without even thinking about it: the vehicle was roughly a thousand yards from him. The shimmering mirage of the roadway was running right-to-left, caused by a strong westerly wind. They were just inside the effective range of anyone with a rifle, but Lee was less concerned due to the wind. Only an experienced marksman with a good cartridge would be able to take them at this range.

Lee leaned into his rifle, resting his cheek on the butt stock. The scope mounted on the Savage was overpowered for almost any application but punching holes in paper at long distances. He guessed it was somewhere between 30x and 40x magnification. During Scout Sniper school, Lee had trained with a variable power scope that topped out at 9x magnification. The less the magnification, the easier it was to track a moving target, so Lee preferred low-magnification scopes.

Still, the overpowered scope gave Lee the ability to see details, even at this distance. Anything that might tell him about the car in the road: a moving shadow, the dark shape of feet underneath the vehicle, or even someone looking out from the backseat. But Lee saw nothing but an abandoned vehicle. A Chevrolet Cavalier, with the front right hubcap missing and a white cloth draped in the window that stirred occasionally in the breeze.

Lee turned his suspicious eyes to the nearby tree line.

The bright, midday sun cast the forest in dark streaks and mottled shadows. Beyond the first screen of leaves glinting in the sunlight, Lee could see next to nothing.

About a minute ticked by.

The pickup rumbled slightly at idle.

Lee looked up from the rifle. “Looks okay.”

“
You want to check it for gas?” Harper was already easing the Nissan forward.

“
Yeah. Pull up right next to it.”