The Remaining: Refugees (10 page)

Jacob stood up silently and prepared to leave.

Lee turned around fully and stepped up to the man, placing both of his hands on his shoulders. "You did a damn fine job. Captain Mitchell would have been proud."

Jacob
smiled weakly
. "Thank you."

"
G
o rest." Lee looked up at LaRouche. "
Make
sure he gets back okay
.
"

"Will do
,
"
LaRouche said.

The two men left. As they walked through the door, Lee could see that Kip Greene was still
standing outside. Lee blinked and felt his eyes moving sluggishly, burning with a need for sleep
. The exhaustion of the last few days was catching up to him quickly now,
even overpowering the aching hunger in his stomach
.

Lee waved the man inside. "Mr. Greene, come in here for a moment."

The man stepped back into the room and Lee stepped back to the map, placing his finger on a dot called Sanford. "This is Sanford. I need to clear Sanford, because I need to access what
’
s on the other side of Sanford. It's not an option
at this time. It just became a
necessity. Is that clear?"

Kip nodded slowly.

"
We didn’t want to hardball you, but the situation has changed.
We'll give you a fair trade for your food. But I'm not gonna beat around the bush." He looked the man in the eyes. "If you're not going to at least let us operate out of your town while we retake Sanford, then I think we're done talking."

Kip didn't respond directly. He considered this for a long time and through several noisy sighs, and then said, "Everything that guy said...is it true?"

"He has no reason to lie."

"What are you gonna do about it?"

Lee looked at Harper and Bus. "Right now we're going to gather our leaders together so we can figure that out.
Y
o
u're welcome to stay if you’
d like. Our committees can get interesting."

CHAPTER 4:
GRAY AREAS

Harper left the room as Lee, Bus, and Kip struggled to come to an agreement over the exchange rates between
food
and ammunition. In fleeting moments like this, Harper saw himself very clearly, as though the real him was still asleep in his comfortable king-size bed, in his nice 3,000-square foot house in a pleasant little neighborhood, just dreaming a strange dream where he was no longer brokering million dollar contracts between banking firms, but instead finagling over the price of
corn
versus 5.56 mm cartridges.

But no…

This was his life now. This was his reality, however unreal it was. No more king-size bed. No more lawn service. No more three-piece suits and conference calls.
Annette
was dead, and that hurt the most. His brother Milo was dead, and that was just a blank spot in his memory that he refused to think about. And at times he would wake up at night crying, but he wouldn't remember what his dream had been, only the residual feeling of a great loss.

In a way, the suddenness of the collapse was a blessing. It had acted as a severance between his old life and his new, so that it seemed to him at times that he had simply ceased to exist in that alternate universe, and appeared here in this one. Had the collapse dragged out over months and years, it would have been an invisible thread that forever tied him unmercifully to all the things from that aching hole in his subconscious that left him confused and teary-eyed in the early morning hours.

He was much the same man, though without the frills. His suits were replaced with a
green
, military-issue
parka
and a pair of old jeans.
H
is
Italian leather shoes had turned into old work boots
.
No more trips to the barber to keep him looking presentable—h
is nose hair was ridiculous, and
Annette
would scream if she saw the overgrowth of his back hair. He didn't carry a brief case
anymore
,
just
a rifle. He didn't worry about interest rates, he worried about how much rain they were going to get this week, and whether he was going to get eaten by a pack of starving cannibals.

Yes, many things had changed, but for the most part, Bill Harper was still Bill Harper. The partner. The adviser. The go-to-guy. But not the leader.
Never the tip-top.
B
ecause he wasn't comfortable there, and he wasn't good at it. He couldn't think clearly or objectively when he was in control of everything and everyone. Second tier suited him just fine.

He exited the Camp Ryder building and headed down what they had dubbed "Main Street,"
the
wide, open
dirt path
that ran through the length of the camp, with the shanties crowd
ing in on either side. There were
nearly twice the people in Camp Ryder than there had been whe
n Harper had first arrived. There
were stragglers from other towns, people that escaped the larger cities, refugees that never got evacuated. Most came in pairs, but a few were in small groups or family units. Some of them had skills and knowledge that contributed to the effort, but most of them had to be taught something to keep them occupied and useful. Jerry had a fucking hissy fit every time they let someone into the camp, whether that person had a useful skill set or not. But Jerry smartly steered clear of Harper after he'd knocked him out.

A day after Harper had punched him, Jerry called for a public apology.

Harper told him to go fuck himself.

So
,
that was one bridge burned.

He reached the Humvee and yanked open the passenger's side door, then he sat down and palmed the handset. "Camp Ryder to Wilson or anyone at Outpost Lillington."

A crackle. "Go ahead for Wilson."

"Hey,
relay this message to Wilson from Captain Harden:
you guys need to hold down the fort
while Old Man Hughes and Professor White come in for a meeting
. We just got some bad news
and
Captain Harden needs all the group leaders back at Camp Ryder so they can, you know...talk about shit forever."

"Yeah. Alright." A pause. "So, how bad
is bad
?"

"Bad." Harper said to the handset. "
Real bad.”

***

Nearly an hour had passed by behind the closed door of the foreman's office when Lee, Bus, and Kip Greene finally exited with an arrangement made. Fi
ve rifles and
9
00
rounds of 5.56 mm ammunition i
n exchange for ten pounds of wheat
flour
, ten pounds of cornmeal, and thirty large mason jars of
home-
canned cor
n
.

Kip Greene agreed to let
Lee and his team use Broadway as a stepping stone to Sanford, but they refused to fall underneath the
purveyance
of
the Camp Ryder Hub
.
He didn’t like the idea of being told how to run things by “outsiders,” but he relented that it would be a relief when Lee had cleaned out Sanford of infected
.

Throughout the process,
s
leep deprivation and distracting thoughts wormed their way through
Lee’s
mind and caused flicker
s
of
brief, nightmarish
images behind his eyes, as though his brain were a television set picking up some hijacked broadcast
.

When they finally left
the office
, Lee turned b
ack inside and went to his pack. H
e
took from it
an old red cloth
, the kind used as a mechanic's shop towel. Inside the folded cloth was the remainder of a bar of soap Lee had steadily been using for the last month. It was amazing how long you could stretch a single bar of soap when you only bathed every few days.

He took his cloth and soap and his rifle and made his way downstairs.
Outside, near the rain catches, there was a collection of buckets in various sizes and colors. Lee took one and filled it with water from one of the rain catches, feeling the bitter coldness of
it as it splashed on his hands and woke him up a bit.

Feeling slightly less dead-on-his-feet, h
e took
his bucket around the other side of the Camp Ryder building where something of a "bathing area" had been set up using some tent poles and tarp
s
to create privacy screens. He shrugged his shoulders against a gust of wind that pestered at his clothing. Between the cold water, and the cold wind,
it
promised to be an unpleasant experience.

The stalls of blue tarp
s
had been erected over a cement sidewalk that
ran parallel to
the fence so that you could stand on the hard surface, rather than in the grass and dirt. It was early afternoon and the warmest part of the day, therefore the best time to bathe, so Lee only found one open stall. He entered and put the tarp back over the opening like a shower curtain. He stripped
down all of his dirty and blood-
stained clothing, placing his rifle atop these, and out of habit, he checked himself thoroughly for bites and scrapes.

A few purplish bruises here and there, but no broken skin.

He stood over the bucket of cold water with his little sliver of soap and steeled himself. Then he plunged in and scrubbed himself down as quickly as he could. A moment later he was done and shivering
. H
e swiped the excess water from his body and dabbed the rest of it up with the
red
towel he'd taken from his pack. He pulled on the same dirty pair of trousers and stomped into his old
Bates M6
boots
, still trustily holding together
.

That was when the screaming started
.

"Shoot it!"

“Oh my God!”

"Get away from the fence!"

In a flash, Lee was
standing outside of the stall, his rifle in his hand, cold wind scouring his back dry. In front of him,
five people filled the twenty foot space between the
showering area
and the chain link fence that bordered the camp.
Three of them were backing away quickly from the fence, while the other two were shouldering their rifles.

Lee’s
first thought was,
Shit! There's a breach in the fence!