The Remaining: Fractured (40 page)

Another, more disturbing question in LaRouche’s mind was
Where the hell is Captain Harden?

The plan had been for them to go east, and then when Captain Harden had finished dealing with the “mole” situation, he would join them. So that they could access the few bunkers he had out here. LaRouche didn’t know the exact location, but he knew that one of the bunkers was on the northern side of the Roanoke river. If he started blowing bridges before Captain Harden got there, it would make it that much more dangerous and difficult for them to access the bunkers.

But was the captain even coming?

Still no word from Camp Ryder. No word from Captain Harden. No bleedover from Harper, though the two were heading in separate directions and LaRouche doubted that Harper’s transmissions would bounce all the way to him.

Complete silence. Like they were orbiting around the dark side of the moon.

He would have to make this decision on his own.

A knock brought his attention up and to the right.

Just Wilson’s eyes, peering in the window at him.

LaRouche snapped the map closed and reached over, pushing the door open. Wilson hung onto the side handle of the LMTV cab with one hand and let the door swing past him, then righted himself again and stood there in the frame, half-smiling in a hesitant manner, as though he were feeling out LaRouche’s mood.

LaRouche folded the map. “What’s up?”

Wilson shrugged and looked off. “Just getting’ ready to turn in. I see you’ve been catching up on your sleep.”

“Oh, yeah.” LaRouche stuffed the map back into the pocket of his chest rig, then leaned back. “I feel fuckin’ fantastic.”

Wilson nodded thoughtfully. He reached into his jacket pocket, squirming his weird, three-fingered hand in and wincing as the fabric brushed past the scar tissue. LaRouche could tell the stumps of his fingers pained him—mentally and physically—but he rarely spoke about it and LaRouche figured he preferred not to dwell on it.

After a minute, Wilson produced a small, silver roll from his pocket. Two or three inches long. Like a roll of dimes. Faded paper wrap on the outside that read TUMS. He held them out to LaRouche and mumbled the jingle from the old commercials: “Tummmm-tum-tum-tum.” He smiled. “Found these for you.”

LaRouche looked at them for a moment. “Jesus…what’d you have to trade for these?”

Wilson made a dismissive noise. “Don’t flatter yourself, Sarge. I just had them thrown in on another deal I made for some goodies of my own. Plus I figure if you don’t have heartburn, maybe you’ll sleep more and then maybe you won’t be so goddamned grumpy all the time.”

LaRouche grinned. Somehow the ribbing made the gesture easier to accept. He took the item and immediately unwrapped one of the tabs. “Well, what’d you score for yourself?”

Wilson looked a little embarrassed. “Couple odds and ends.”

LaRouche quirked an eyebrow.

Wilson rolled his eyes and reached into his vest. He pulled out the corner of a cloth. Red and white. “One of them had an old US flag. And I wanted it.”

LaRouche regarded Wilson, and then the flag protruding from his vest. He shrugged. “Whatever.” He popped the Tums tablet into his mouth and changed the subject. “Goddamn, you have no idea how much I needed one of these things.”

Wilson looked off, stuffing the flag back into his vest. “Maybe if you were a little more sociable you would’ve found ‘em yourself.”

LaRouche chewed the tab, pinched off the foil end of the tube and slipped it into his own jacket pocket. “That’s what I have you for, Wilson. To be sociable for me. And to run interference with The Pope.”

Wilson looked uncomfortable. “Yeah. I’m not a fan of being your go-between. Ya’ll got some problems that you need to work out man-to-man. Not through me.”

LaRouche sighed, swallowed the chalky mix, felt a slight ease of the burning in his throat. “Thanks for the Tums, man.”

Wilson still hung on the door.

LaRouche looked at him pointedly.

The younger man glanced over his shoulder at the camp behind him. “What are we gonna do with these folks?”

LaRouche leaned back in his seat. “Nothin’.”

“Nothin’?”

A shake of the head. “We’ll leave out at first light tomorrow. Wish them the best of luck.”

“They could help us, you know.”

“How’s that?”

“Lot of them have a bone to pick with The Followers.”

LaRouche pursed his lips. “Wilson, be honest…do I give the impression that I don’t give a shit?”

Wilson considered it for a moment. “Yes.”

LaRouche turned, his gaze intensifying. “That’s my fault. I apologize if that is the impression that I give. I don’t like what I’m seeing. I don’t like what The Followers are doing. I wanna put a bullet in their heads just like the rest of you. I want to find all those girls that they’ve captured and get them back to their families. That would feel real nice. Be the hero and everything. Save the fuckin’ day. Get a goddamn parade.”

Wilson sensed the biting sarcasm. “It’s about doing the right thing.”

“I know what the right thing is,” LaRouche said. “I’ve got fucking morals of my own. And you know what? Sometimes they get broken. Sometimes I break my own fucking rules. Sometimes I walk the line and I step over pretty far. And that’s something I need to deal with. But I do those things because they need to be done in order for everyone else to live. I don’t do them because they feel good. I don’t do them because they benefit me in any way.”

He pointed out in a nebulous direction. “We’re just miles from the river, Wilson. And at any point in time, if it hasn’t happened already, there’s going to be some big-ass hordes of infected coming over every bridge that spans that river. And they are going to come down here and they are going to overpower everyone. And everyone is going to die. And the only thing that stands between our current reality, and that future reality, is me and you and our team. And if we get sidetracked, if we lose focus on what needs to be accomplished in the big picture, we’re going to all end up dead. And the fact that some girls got raped and some guys had to nail their friends to a cross is going to be a moot point because everyone is going to be dead.”

“Fine,” Wilson held up a hand. “Jesus, man, I’m not arguing that point.”

“Well, what are you fucking arguing?”

“Give ‘em guns and ammo,” Wilson said with exasperation. “Let them fight the good fight while we continue on to our objective. It will make them an ally to us in the future, if we ever come back through, rather than having to deal with hurt feelings because we abandoned them. And they’ll run interference for us by keeping The Followers distracted while we do what we gotta do.”

LaRouche stared straight ahead, feeling like a dumbass and suddenly understanding why dozens of commanding officers over his military career would shoot down his common sense thinking. Because it was easier to do that than simply admit that you weren’t able to see the forest through the trees. That you were wrong and somebody under you was right.

LaRouche huffed. “When you’re right, you’re right.”

Wilson lifted a brow. “So…”

LaRouche nodded. “We’ll do it.”

Wilson didn’t make a deal over it. Just kind of shrugged it off and sighed. “Well, I’ll let you sleep then.”

He started to get down from the LMTV but LaRouche reached out and grabbed his jacket sleeve. The younger man stopped and looked back at his bedraggled superior. Bags under his eyes, creases all over his face like he’d been wrung out and left to dry.

“You’re gonna be a good leader,” LaRouche said quietly. Then he released his grip on Wilson’s sleeve and crossed his arms over his chest, closing his eyes and seeming to situate himself for sleep. “Now get out of here before you let all my warm air out.”

Wilson smirked, then hopped down and closed the door behind him.

***

While night deepened, Harper’s group to the west lit no fires and remained mostly silent. Their place in the industrial park had not changed. The horde of infected had come and had slowed and had meandered around the area, all while Harper’s group waited in their vehicles, the engines at idle while Julia stood atop one of the buildings and occasionally glassed the road out with her scoped rifle.

For hours the distant clamor of the horde went on, so that Harper would sometimes think they had passed and he would have to focus on listening in order to hear them again. By the time they could truly not hear the horde any more, the sun was already touching the horizon and they shut the engines off and decided to make camp. Double watch, due to limited fortifications.

They ate quietly. The mood of the group was in a downward spiral, it felt like. First the clash with the other group of survivors, and then the loss of Gray, which everyone bore without a word or a tear, simply bore it up like another burden to be carried on their backs. Winced like it caused them pain when they looked for him and Harper only shook his head.

And Mike. Mike losing his shit. Now sitting wordlessly with his back to the cold corrugated steel of the building they’d parked next to. His head was tilted back, eyes to the sky. And then he would nod forward and stare at the ground. Harper ate a meal that he wouldn’t remember, and didn’t taste, and he watched the man repeat the movement over and over. The upward look of pleading. The downward look of despair.

A man begging God and not hearing an answer.

Harper needed Father Jim with him. He needed someone to tell him that there was a plan to all of this. He needed a scripture, some hocus pocus from three thousand years ago that somehow pulled everything together. He’d never believed, but he wanted it now. Wanted something to believe in.

Harper drank some water. Took a piss, watching the last bit of twilight fade.

The land behind the industrial park fell away into some flood zone, a low point in the land cleared by the construction crews to build the park, and then abandoned back into the clutches of nature where it was now half engulfed, sprouted with adolescent trees and weeds as high as a man. A wisp of fog was just beginning to gather at the base of the land, like nitrogen pooling.

Harper saw no beauty in any of it. Just something cold and unknown. Just a place for danger to hide, like a shadow or a cave. He shivered when he looked at it, zipped himself up and turned his back to it, wishing to be in the relative safety of the Humvee, only to remember the blood inside of it. Gray’s blood.

He went to it anyway. Empty on the inside, like an abandoned house. Julia and Mike the first two on watch. So it was just Harper and what was left of Gray. Harper and his old ghosts. Annette, and Miller, and Josh, and now Gray. Good company, but they didn’t talk much. He just replayed them in his mind like a favorite album, like a treasured vinyl full of songs that made you sad, but you just kept torturing yourself with them because you couldn’t help yourself.

He stared out the windshield until the heat of his body had fogged it and then he closed his eyes. He fell asleep quickly, though it was not restful. His aging body didn’t react well to long nights and long days cooped up inside the cramped vehicle. His lower back woke him often, forcing him to shift positions and alleviate the pain for another half hour or so. He didn’t dream. Just slept.

It was three hours into the night when he woke up suddenly, a gunshot echoing back to him. There was a moment of pause where that rolling crack of a bullet bouncing off the buildings and trees was the only sound, and then shouts could be heard.

Harper threw his door open, blinking his foggy eyes, trying to clear his head. His back protested the sudden movements, every joint screaming at him as he forced his body to be more limber than it was after three hours of no movement. He grabbed his rifle, didn’t think to grab anything else. His boots hit the ground and he hobbled towards the back end of the Humvee, trying to figure out what was going on in the darkness.

There were no other gunshots. Just shouting now.

Desperation. Panic.

“What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck?” he growled as he hitched along, rifle already tucked into his shoulder, his head scanning stiffly this way and that, looking for a sign of what the hell had just happened. Someone ran by on the other side of the vehicles. Doors opened, more of the group stepping out to see what had happened.

Someone yelled: “Mike! Mike, stop!”

Harper sprinted the last few vehicle lengths. He could see two others gathered around the back end of the next-to-last LMTV, and he didn’t like the way they looked. Like they were taking cover behind the tailgate. Just barely peeking around the corner.

Harper didn’t stop. He moved around the corner, saw Julia, saw Mike, felt a sudden gush of relief that they were both alive. Then a tightness in his chest as he pieced together what he saw. Tightness like the sudden intake of breath before you shout.

They stood at the last LMTV in the column. Julia, directly in front of the vehicle, right in the middle of the space between its grill and the tailgate of the next one. Mike off to the side, near the driver’s side door, which hung open. Julia held her rifle into her shoulder, but the barrel held low, as though she felt threatened but wasn’t sure what to do. Mike held his rifle as well, facing Julia, but he didn’t threaten her with it.

He held it inverted, one hand stretched out to touch the trigger, the other holding the barrel directly under his chin.

This isn’t happening
, Harper thought.
This is a nightmare.

“Mike,” Julia said tightly, her feet moving about as though she couldn’t decide whether to move towards the man or away from him. “Put the gun down! Put it down and talk to me!”

Mike closed his eyes. “No…no…no going back now.”

Already one gunshot. Who fired the shot?

Harper’s eyes tracked to the open driver’s side door. This was the LMTV Torri and Mike always drove. The driver’s door hanging open. A single brass shell casing, glittering on the pavement. Blood on the passenger-side window.

“Oh, fuck…” Harper choked. “Mike…”

Mike shook his head vehemently, raising his voice above Julia and Harper’s. “It’s done. It’s fucking done.” He sobbed, a wretched, garbled sound. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry…so sorry…”