The Remaining: Refugees (11 page)

"What
’s wrong
?" Lee yelled, scanning the fence.

One of the men pointed and looked back at Lee. "You see it? Right there!"

Lee
focused
into the woods and saw it almost immediately. The glassy, vacant eyes. The slack jaw. The withered torso, ribs standing out grossly. A moving sack of tissue and organs. For some reason, the small gathering on Lee's side of the fence fell abruptly silent, and Lee could swear he could
hear
the thing's breathing;
heavy, labored, and raspy.

"What the fuck's it doing?" one of the men
whispered
.

Lee raised his rifle and took a step forward, feeling soft grass beneath his feet, instead of hard concrete. The creature in the woods had that wild-eyed look of the infected, but it did not charge them, did not show any clear aggression. It stood in a small clearing between two trees, just a few yards from the fence line and watched them with eerie curiosity. Its head tilted to one side
, and then the other
, like a perplexed dog listening to a confusing sound.

After a few steady steps, Lee was between the other two men, all three pointing their rifles at the creature on the other side, but still it made no movement towards them.

"What's wrong with it?"
one of the men said.

The infected
—
an
emaciated male
—
turned in the direction of the man who spoke.

"Holy shit!" the man gasped. "It's fucking looking at me!"

"Are you gonna shoot it?"
another
asked.

Lee’s finger touched the cold trigger.

"Captain?"

Lee glanced to his left at the man who had spoken
, but
he could not keep his eyes from wandering back to
the
creature
that stood
on the other side of the fence
, mere yards away. He remembered the infected woman and her dead infant, kneeling out in the middle of that tilled field, his first day out
of the bunker
. Was this one of the same? One of the rare, non-violent infected?

"Is it infected, Captain?"

Lee watched the thing as it tracked the flight of a bird through the trees, its head moving slowly and lazily, eyes squinting i
n the sun. It seemed child-like.

"It's gotta be infected," Lee said absently
, and raised his rifle marginally
.

A
voice called out, thin and reedy: "Wait! Don't shoot it! Don't shoot it!"

Lee turned and found Jacob hobbling quickly towards them, his feet bare, and his right hand clutching at his gut. His face was scribbled with the effects of pain, and he was still sweating, despite the cold.

Lee’s own body prickled in gooseflesh as he remembered how cold it was.

Jacob came abreast of them, panting and shaking his head
rapidly back and forth. "Don't…
Don't shoot it."

Lee regarded the man with
a doubtful look
. "Why
not
?"

Jacob
took a gulp of air. "Because
I can use it."

"The fuck is this crazy guy talking about?" one of the two men grumbled.

Lee raised a
n eyebrow. "You mean capture it?
"

Jacob nodded vehemently.

"Absolutely fucking not." Lee turned back toward the fence.

"Wait!" Jacob hissed and pawed at Lee's elbow. "I've got to get samples from somew
here
! Clearly he's a non-aggressive infected, which means he's the safest one to get it from!"

"What the fuck are you gonna do with samples, even if you get them
?" Lee said. "You've got no lab, y
ou've got no equipment
…
"

"No, Jenny told me
about Smithfield and the hospital. I can do research ther
e. I have so much left to learn!
Things that can help us, not only understand them, but possibly to develop some sort of cure! Please!"

Lee
sighed through his nose, felt the warm air brush across his bare chest
. "This is ridiculous."

"It's not ridiculous. It's science."

"Where the hell you gonna keep it?"

"Wherever."

"Wherever?" Lee felt himself shivering again. "We're completely unprepared for this.
What are you gonna do when the
damn thing gets loose and fucking bites one of the kids?"

"It's non-aggressive!"

"It's
unpredictable."

"Fine.
” Jacob drew himself up.
“
I'll do it myself."

The scientist
turned and began to limp away.

"Jacob, don't leave that gate."

But
Jacob continued on, calling over his shoulder with bitter resolve, "Captain Mitchell would never have kept me from my research!"

Lee stared at the scarecrow of a man striding determinedly towards the front gates. What were they going to
do?
H
old him prisoner? Restrain him for his own safety? He looked back towards the fence and swore under his breath. The infected was staring up at the sky, its mouth agape. It didn't look dangerous at all
…

Lee felt a welling of pity for it, rather than fear.

He raised his rifle and fired.

The thing rocked back and
collapsed.

Even as the echo of the shot died, Lee turned and found Jacob staring wide-eyed at the fallen body out beyond the fence. He rushed forward with his arms outstretched towards the thing, as though he might cra
dle it and coax it back to life, a beloved child.

"What did you do?" Jacob screamed as he came forward.

Behind him, people ran out of their shacks to see what the gunshot had been. They filled
Main Street
and craned their necks to see. As Jacob tried to run past, Lee took two steps and intercepted him, grabbing a firm hold on his jacket and pulling the man close to him so that he could smell the stink of his skin and the warm staleness of the man's breath.

In the narrow space between them, Lee spoke with force, but quietly so no one else could hear. "What were you going to do, Jacob? Were you going to go all the way around the fucking fence by yourself? What if that thing's friends came out of the woods after you? Were you gonna make it back to the gate before they got you? Did you even fucking think about that?"

The people were beginning to stare and murmur.

Lee released the man's jacket, causing him to stumble back a bit. Looking with grim resolve out at the gathering crowd, he slung into his rifle and felt the nylon strap rasp across his skin. Jacob stood, slope-shouldered and dejected, and Lee kept his voice low when he spoke again. "When and if it's safe for us to do so, we'll capture one of them for your goddamned sampling. But only if it's
safe
.
” He jammed a thumb into his chest.
“
And I'm the one that determines whether it's safe."

Jacob didn't reply.

The crowd looked at Lee, and Lee at them. He struggled to determine what he should say in that moment, and eventually decided to say nothing at all. Disgusted, though unsure who he was disgusted with, Lee turned and marched briskly back to the shower stall where he snatched up his belongings and headed back to the foreman's office.

***

Bus followed him into the Camp Ryder building. "What the hell was that?" he said with exasperation.

Lee tossed him a sidelong glance. "That was Jacob trying to get himself killed, and me stopping him."

"Lee," Bus held up a hand for him to stop.

The two men halted at the base of the staircase to the foreman's office and faced each other.

"What do you want, Bus?"

"We're on the same side here." Bus lowered his head and looked at Lee from under his bushy eyebrows. "I'm with you. I get it. I understand. But some of these other people don't. And every time you do something like that, they use it against you, and they use it against me."

"Every time?" Lee leaned on the railing. "Because I do
things like that so
often?"

Bus put a hand to his temple. "No..."

"No, I
don't." Lee nodded. "Look, Bus...
I have a job to do, and I don't give a fuck about so
me wannabe commandos trying to
second-guess
every
god
damn decision I make. They can say what they want, as long as they're not standing in the way of me doing my job. Right now, I need Jacob, it's that simple. I need his information, and I need his knowledge. If anyone puts that in jeopardy, including him, then they force my hand." Lee began climbing the stairs. "Trust me, Bus, I don't want to be the bad guy. But I'm also not going to play games with people."

Bus stormed after him. "I'm not asking you to play games. I'm asking you to think about the backlash from people like Jerry and Professor White. They already have enough people backing them, they don't need a rallying cry."

Lee made a derogatory noise
. “What are they gonna do? Picket me?” He
could feel himself going on the defensive,
and he didn’t like it
.
He
took a
deep
breath and stopped halfway up the stairs.
"I understand that my actions sometimes put you in a shitty situation. There are hundreds of situations where I've avoided taking action, because I knew it
would put you in that situation
." He leaned against the
railing
. "But you gotta loo
k at things from my perspective
. What was I going to do there, Bus? If I let Jacob leave the gate,
I let him put himself in unnecessary danger. And if I restrain
him from leaving the gate, I
turn him into a prisoner
." Lee tossed up his hands. "Yes, it's a shitty fucking situation. But the alternatives were worse."

Bus hung his head. "We just can't win, can we?"

"Maybe we're just not winning the way we want to win."

Lee turned and continued up the stairs, not waiting to see if Bus would follow. When he reached the door to the office, Bus was no longer on the stairs. Gone off to conduct damage control
, perhaps
. Why? Because Lee was a loose cannon? Because Lee was someone that needed a spin doctor to defend his actions?

Lee shut the office door behind him and dropped his things next to his pack. He knelt down there and p
laced his hand on the tan nylon
and
became still
. For a long moment his eyes were unfocused, unseeing, and he sat silent and
unmoving
for the better part of a minute. There were no conscious thoughts that went through his mind at that moment, just the overwhelming sensation of being absol
utely and completely exhausted.