The Remaining: Fractured (49 page)

Dead?

No. He could see them moving. A slow squirm. Nestling into each other for warmth.

And just like that, his heart was suddenly hammering. But oddly he just kept thinking how he’d always wondered how they slept at night, wondered if they hid in dens or just slept out in the open like deer. He made eye contact with Tomlin, but neither dared speak loud enough to be heard. They tried mouthing some words back and forth, but clearly something was being lost in translation, or their lips were not being properly read in the darkness, because they ended with matching facial expressions of
I can’t tell what the hell you’re saying.

One of them would have to move, and Lee knew that it was him. The simple action of having to turn around meant that Tomlin might make too much noise. So Lee clenched every muscle in his body until his abdominals ached and his vision throbbed and he very slowly, very painstakingly lifted his right foot up out of the leaves and loamy forest dirt, then swept it forward and very carefully placed it down. Of course, every noise he made sounded like a brass band falling on top of each other, but he knew from experience that to a casual listener it might as well have been complete silence.

But was an infected a “casual listener?”

Lee had his doubts, but he kept putting one foot in front of the other, breathing through his open mouth because in the back of his mind it seemed like the wind through his nostrils was too noisy. Eventually he reached Tomlin, who had managed to ease himself into a crouch. The two of them brought their heads close together, both pairs of eyes staring out into the darkness at the huddled mass of flesh.

“You see this shit?” Tomlin hissed, holding a hand in front of his mouth to direct the sound towards Lee.

“That’s not a pack,” Lee said. He tried to pry through the gloom with his eyes, tried to see a little more of what lay ahead, but the details were lost. “Packs don’t sleep at night.”

“It’s too small to be a horde. Plus we’re in the woods.”

Lee touched the other man’s shoulder to garner eye contact. “Hunters.”

Tomlin searched Lee’s face, then bared his teeth, a tiny sound of dissatisfaction coming from between them.

Lee looked back out. It had to be hunters—had to be. Nothing else made sense. And if they were hunters, then Lee wanted no part of them. They would be too close to Camp Ryder by now to fire their weapons without being heard. And having seen the speed and strength of these strange specimens—people whose genetic makeup made them more adaptive, more aggressive, and stronger—he didn’t want to try anything hand-to-hand, especially since he wasn’t 100%.

“We gotta back up and go around,” Tomlin mumbled, clearly thinking along the same lines as Lee.

“I’ll cover you first.” Lee brought his rifle up and Tomlin turned without any further discussion, eager to be leaving the area, even if putting the creatures behind him made the skin prickle along his spine. Lee kept the barrel of his rifle pointing downrange at the creatures as Tomlin made his slow, quiet progress back.

The steady, rustling sound of his feet situating themselves in the dried leaves, the slow crunch as he settled his weight on them. Not even enough to make a cat perk its ears…

One of the infected stirred.

Lee stopped breathing. His finger touched the trigger.
Stay asleep,
he willed it.
Stay the fuck asleep
. Then he looked back over his shoulder to see if Tomlin had stopped moving, but he couldn’t even make his partner out in the shadows. He turned back around and found the thing looking at him.

From across the distance, Lee could see its dark eyes, and they seemed to be resting on him, but he forced himself to think calmly. There was nothing special about these creatures. They had not developed super powers. They could see no better at night than he could, and Lee was hidden in the shadow of a tree, half his body behind it. If he just stayed very still…

He let the breath he’d been holding out, slow and steady. Not making too much noise, and not creating steam from his breath. His lungs began to ache for him to breathe faster, but he wasn’t willing to do that just yet. He waited until his lungs were empty, then inhaled. Smelled the loamy scent of the forest. Bark. Cold. Stinging the back of his throat.

The thing just kept looking at him. Or at least in his direction. What had drawn its attention? Had the noises that Tomlin had made been louder than Lee had thought? Or maybe the hunters just did this. Maybe they woke up every so often to look around. Check their surroundings.

Maybe it could feel Lee staring back at it.

But Lee dared not take his eyes off of it again.

The thing seemed to suddenly relax. It lowered its head back down. Disappeared behind the others. Lee felt a tremor work through him. Partially from holding his position so rock-still for the last few minutes, and partially from all the stress-chemicals coursing through his veins.

He didn’t move for another five minutes. Simply wouldn’t risk it. Wanted to give that tweeky bastard enough time to fall back into a deep slumber before he made his escape. And after five minutes, it felt like he had been imprisoned. His calf began to cramp and his shoulders ached from holding the rifle up. He rose with considerable effort, his knees popping loud enough to cause him to freeze in place again.

He looked out.

No reaction from the sleeping hunters.

He turned and made his escape, maybe moving a little faster than he should have, but unable to stop himself. He desperately, desperately needed to get out of there. He’d had run ins with regular packs and they all ended in near-disaster, particularly when he was on foot. He had never had a run in with the hunters, but he could only imagine that it would be worse.

He made his way through the trees, moving faster as he gained distance. He wasn’t quite sure which direction he was heading, and sure as hell didn’t know where Tomlin was until he stumbled across him, hiding behind a tree.

“The fuck took you so long?” Tomlin stressed.

Lee looked over his shoulder, back into the woods. “One of them woke up. I had to wait for it to go back to sleep.”

Tomlin shook his head, wearing an expression like he’d just dodged a bullet. “Didn’t you tell me how those hunters were preying on the other infected?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve noticed there hasn’t been much infected activity in these woods the last few times I’ve been in here.” He looked pointedly at Lee. “I bet I know why. And I sure as hell don’t like leaving those fuckers behind us. I don’t like it one bit.”

Lee agreed. “I don’t like it either. You think of a better idea, you let me know.”

Tomlin pointed them west again. “Let’s just get ourselves back on track.”

***

Lee stared at the dark compound through a thin curtain of tree branches. It seemed dark, like they’d journeyed to it only to find it abandoned, and it was a disquieting sensation. When Lee had been a child he’d had a recurring dream wherein he would leave his childhood house to complete some menial chore such as getting the mail, or walking the dog, and when he went back into the house, it would be empty and dark. All the furniture gone. Cobwebs in the corners.

He felt the same feeling now that he’d felt waking from that dream as a child. Like he’d been too late. Like he’d missed something terribly important. Like life and all of his loved ones had moved on without him and he was left there, alone.

But here, he could at least smell the smoke from the smoldering fires.

And he knew that people were here.

They didn’t speak this close to the fence. The fortifications that had been welded and tied and strapped and chained to the fence to create more of a barricade for an attacking force, also blocked large portions of their view, so that they could never be sure where the guards that patrolled the fence line were, and whether they were close enough to hear a slight whisper.

Tomlin motioned for Lee to stay where he was, and then crept forward, crawling along the ground on his hands and feet, like a bear crawl, but lower. Watching him Lee thought it looked less like a bear and more like a lizard.

Tomlin reached the fence and dislodged a large white stone—a piece of quartz, perhaps—that had sunk into the dirt. It was a little smaller than Tomlin’s own head and he simply propped it up with one hand while the other pulled out the note and placed it under the rock. The rock was close enough to an open section of the fortifications, and in a section of fencing where the bottom of the chain links hung a few inches off the ground, so that someone on the other side could quickly reach through and access the stone.

He reseated the stone, then crawled back into the bush.

Then the two of them sat and waited.

Movement at the fence. Lee and Tomlin both hunched into the brush around them. A shadow passed between the gaps in the fortifications. Moving slowly, relaxed. As it came abreast of them, Lee could see that it was one of the sentries, though he did not recognize the face. It was an average sized man with longish hair. What appeared to be an M1A rifle held loosely across his chest.

Could use one of those,
Lee thought as he watched the sentry pass.

There was a certain thrill to it. Something that appealed to the predatory nature in men in general, and soldiers in particular. Something about lying silently in the trees and watching someone who didn’t know they were being watched. Knowing that you had the drop on them.

The sentry passed on, down the side of the fence to the back corner where he stayed for a moment, taking a noisy piss through the chain link, and then continued on.

The moment that he was out of sight, they heard they quiet thump of light footfalls in the compacted dirt of the Camp Ryder grounds. Another shadow appeared at the gap where the rock was, this one shorter, a tangled head of dark hair. Lee felt like a castaway seeing a ship on the horizon. The need to bound through the brush and scream and yell and
be seen
was almost overwhelming.

He didn’t scream or yell, but he did suddenly move forward. Tomlin reached out to try to stop him, but he had already moved out of arm’s reach. Lee moved as quietly as he could, but still the woman’s curly head of hair snapped up in his direction as he approached. She was bent, reaching under the fence and pulling the note out from under the rock, but seeing the dark shape of movement coming at her through the woods, she retracted her hand and took a step back, the note clutched between her fingers.

“Marie!” Lee said, holding out a hand.

She froze in place, one step away from the fence.

Lee reached the fence, stuck his finger through the wire and gripped it like he might try to climb over. “Marie, it’s me! It’s Captain Harden!”

It seemed to physically rock Marie. Her whole body shook like she’d taken a sudden body blow. She bent slightly at the waist, then her hands came to her mouth. She took a step forward, and the two of them could see each other’s faces. “Holy shit, Lee…”

“Hey,” Lee stretched out his fingers and she reached out to grasp them through the fence, squeezing them fiercely so that they ached. “I’m here.”

She stared at him with confusion. “We thought you were dead! We didn’t know what happened to you…
where the fuck have you been?
”

Lee couldn’t help himself from smiling at her. “I’ve been trying to get back here! Look, we don’t have much time. I’m alive. You just let everyone know that I’m alive, and I’m right here, and we’re gonna take this shit back. Okay?”

Marie nodded furiously. “Okay.”

“You tell them that for me.”

“I will.”

“Marie?” Lee squeezed her hands, his face intense. “Can you be ready at midnight tomorrow? Twenty-four hours from now? Can you have your people ready?”

“Uh…” Marie’s heart felt like it was seizing up. “Yes. Yes. We’ll be ready. For what? What are we going to do?”

“It’s in the note we left for you,” he said. “Twelve o’clock midnight, Marie. You’ve got to pull through for this. We have to work together, or a lot of people are gonna get hurt. If we can coordinate this, and do it quickly and decisively, then less people are going to die.”

She nodded fiercely. “Where will you be? If something goes wrong?”

“We’re just outside of Lillington,” Lee glanced around as he said it. “On 421, just before the turn for OP Lillington. If you get that close, they’ll be able to see you and they’ll come for you, okay?”

“Alright.”

Then Lee pulled his hands away from the fence and disappeared back into the brush with a rustle of leaves and branches. She watched him fade into the shadows like an apparition, left her wondering if she had dreamed the whole thing up, but she knew she was awake because there was terror in her chest too. The certainty of coming bloodshed.

She gathered herself and turned away from the fence, scanned left, then right. Could see no one. No sentries. No busybodies wondering what others were doing at midnight. She shoved the note she’d retrieved from under the rock into her jacket pocket and ran away from the fence.

***

Angela lay awake because it was midnight.

Somehow, miraculously, her body had developed a keen alarm clock that managed to rip her from a full sleep, simply because she knew it was midnight. How her body knew this was a mystery—she hadn’t looked at a clock in over a month. Time of day was estimated by how many hand-widths the sun hovered over the horizon, and the night just became a timeless black swamp. Much more difficult to determine the time during the night, which required knowledge of constellations or moon phases.

But it was midnight now.

Because she was awake.

She lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling of her shanty, stomach in knots. It was colder than usual, and even with three blankets pulled up to her chin, she was still chilly. She should have had Sam and Abby snuggle under the covers with her, but they were fast asleep, clinging to each other in a large sleeping bag and she chose not to disturb them.

Her eyes remained open for a time and she began to wonder if the note had been passed, or perhaps her finely-tuned sense of time was at fault and it was not as close to midnight as she thought—or far passed and Marie was simply waiting until morning to speak to her about the note.