The Remaining: Refugees (14 page)

"Guys!" Bus stepped between them. "I think there's been enough shouting for one meeting."

But White was done. He kept shaking his head and then he brought up his finger and waved it towards Lee. "This man is a criminal. He's a warlord. All he wants is power, and he'll spend your lives to get it!" White turned before anyone else could speak. "We're done with this meeting. Clearly no one here is going to listen to reason."

Professor White and the others from Fuquay-Varina gathered around him and slowly began to edge away. The young people looked accusingly across at Lee as they crowded around their beloved leader and comforted him, as though Lee had physically hurt the man. The older ones followed the crowd, but they avoided looking up at Lee, or anyone else from Camp Ryder. Their faces were full of shame.

Lee watched them go, grinding his teeth.

Jerry remained standing with his arms crossed. He shook his head slowly, looking between Lee and Bus. "Bus, I think your judgment has been clouded. In fact, I think your judgment has been clouded since Captain Harden arrived here. This isn't something we can fight. Sometimes you have to cut your losses and run."

"It's not something you can run from either," Lee said, taking a
step towards the ma
n, but keeping his voice as level as he could manage. "What happens when the infected reach Georgia? There are no more mountains to hold them in. They'll just keep spreading. Are you going to live on top of a mountain for the rest of your life, scared to death to go down into the rest of the country? Is that the future you want?"

Jerry shook his head. "This is all gonna blow over."

"You don't know that."

Jerry sighed smugly, as though he knew something Lee did not, and that he was unable to explain it to Lee because the captain was so simple minded he wouldn't be able to understand. "Where does your plan start, Captain? What's your first order of business?"

"Sanford," Lee said. "Sanford to recover what military equipment was left over from the evacuation attempt. Then to Bunker #2 on the other side of Sanford. Once we have the equipment we need to begin, we'll split up. One team east, one team north."

"You still don't have the manpower."

"Yeah," Lee nodded. "I had hoped to ask for that during the meeting. It kinda got derailed."

Jerry held up both of his hands and backed away. "You can count me out of your crusades, Captain. Me and my people have no desire to get ourselves killed for nothing."

Lee spat in the dirt. "I only ask that if you're not willing to help, you get out of the way of those that are."

Jerry's supporters, about a dozen from the original Camp Ryder group, bolstered up behind him as he looked directly at Lee and shook his head. All he said, loud and clear, was "Madman."

CHAPTER 6:
A LONG NIGHT

With Jerry and White and their groups of supporters gone from the
meeting, there still remained
about
sixty
people
from Camp Ryder and Smithfield, unsure of what to do and where to go.

The winter sky had turned a deep blue in the waning twilight, and the horizon behind Lee was a pastel-colored smudge that would soon disappear. As the last sliver of sunlight glowed dimly across their faces, they began to huddle closer in the cold, pulling their jackets tighter around themselves as their collective breath took vaporous form and hovered over them
. Many of them wore the OD green parkas
that Lee had brought from his bunker, others wore jackets that had been pilfered during scavenging operations.

In the last bit of light, Lee met as many of them in the eye as he could. "I know I'm asking a lot. I'm asking for you to possibly leave your loved ones, and definitely to put yourself in harm's way. But I would not ask for you to do so if I didn't think we could accomplish the mission. I need help, folks. I need as much help as I can get.
”

Lee held up a hand.
"This isn't an altar call.
You don't have to step forward now. Go get some food. Talk to the people you need to talk to. Sleep on it. Come see me in the morning if you think you are willing and able to help. Thank you."

With that, Lee turned, and his team went with him. They made their way towards the Camp Ryder building, and behind them they could hear Bus thanking everyone for showing up. Kip Greene was still standing there next to Bus, probably confused, or dismayed, or scared shitless. God only knew what the man was thinking, whether it be about the near-violent disunion amongst the members of the Camp Ryder Hub, or about the impending threat that loomed over everyone.

As they entered the building, the smell of Marie's cooking had
filled the place. Rather than ration food out to each family and individual, Marie cooked community meals from a combination of Lee’s supplies, foodstuffs that had been scavenged, and meat from the hunters—most commonly venison
, but sometimes squirrel or rabbit
.
Even with Lee supplementing from his bunkers, there wasn’t a lot to go around. With the population of Camp Ryder growing, feeding everyone was always a challenging prospect. More and more people were having to turn to scavenging to feed themselves and their families, but eventually that too would run out.

Still, every evening, Marie would have a meal prepared, however meager.

The group
headed for the line that was beginning to form
at Marie's little kitchen area, but
Julia remained by Lee's side
.
H
e approached the metal staircase and turned to climb it.

"You not hungry?" she asked.

Lee
rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ll come down in a minute…once the line’s died down.”

She regarded him dubiously.

“Just give me a minute.”

“Suit yourself,” she shrugged.

Lee clomped up the stairs
. In the office, he
placed his rifle against the far wall
,
beside the bedroll that he kept there. He would
sleep in the office
tonight, as he
would
most of his first nights back.
He hated waking
in the middle of the night
,
cold
with
sweat and his heart pounding
,
to find Angela and Abby and Sam staring at him because he had shouted them awake in his sleep. It was always worst the first night back.

Most survivors had the dreams, but almost everyone on Lee's team had them with disturbing frequency. They were dreams of helplessness, mostly, and they often shared similar ones. The most common was their weapons not firing, or the bullets dribbling out of the barrel, or simply being ineffective. Some dreamed that the Claymore mines would not go off, but that the infected had
found them
and swarmed the building they were atop.

Lee
’s own personal nightmare was something less tangible
. In the dream he
knew he was asleep, and that his eyes were closed, but he would see the room where he slept in vivid detail. And always at his feet was something, some dark figure crouched there, formless and black and inexplicable.
I
ts presence filled him with
dread, he would try to shake himself awake and to move, but his body would be paralyzed under the weight of sleep, as though he were encased in concrete.

Lee had no explanation for the dream,
save that it was some fetid mental byproduct of the things he had
witnessed while awake
.

Every day was full of fear. Not only fear for oneself, but for the people that you cared for and loved. There was no safe haven, no place of peace. The dangers were constant and inescapable. Worst of all, there was no light at the end of the tunnel, no date that one could point to and say, "yes, I'll be back home at this time, I'll be out of danger if I can last just a few more months." And no one, not even Lee, could escape the effect that this had on the subconscious.

Lee shook his head to open his drooping eyes. He blinked a few times and then stepped over behind the desk to where they had installed the base station for their radios. The base station and all the digital repeaters that Lee and his team had installed around the Camp Ryder Hub were fed from small but powerful solar panels.

He changed the channel on the base station to a prearranged frequency, used for the Coordinators
to communicate with each other
. Captain Mitchell had easily made contact with the others because he still had use of the secure connections in his original bunker. Establishing contact with the other coordinators had become a problem for Lee when his original bunker had been buried underneath the burning ruins of his house.

Lee picked up the handset and made the same transmission he always made: "This is Captain Lee Harden, Project Hometown, North Carolina, to any other Coordinator t
hat can copy this transmission…
please respond."

He released the transmit button and sat on the desk and stared at the radio. It hissed and crackled a bit after he ended his transmission, and then became silent.
H
e
sat
and wait
ed
for the radio to speak up and perhaps catch something from another Coordinator, some stray radio wave bouncing across the atmosphere.

As he stared at the silent box,
everything around him
grew gray and monochromatic as his eyes lost focus and his mind slipped into a haze of sleepiness. He
felt
his head falling forward and jerk
ed awake, and then tried
to shake the sleep away, but
the wakefulness
would only last for another minute
or so
.

A rap on the door frame caused him to turn.

Julia entered, holding a bowl and a spoon. It was laden with a stew that Marie had prepared and tendrils of steam lifted off of it. She walked over to the desk where Lee sat and placed the bowl next to him and stuck the spoon in it.

"Brought you some dinner."

Lee smiled. "Thank you."

She stepped back and waited.

"Just give me a few minutes..."

"You need to eat," she said sternly.

"I will."

"Eat."

"Okay. You win. I'll eat."

"What's the matter? You don't like my sister's food?"

Lee took the bowl and shoveled a spoonful in his mouth. "I love your sister's food." He took another mouthful without swallowing the first so that his cheeks bulged out with it. He mumbled around the food, "See? Love it."

She smiled and sat beside him on the desk. She motioned to the bedroll. "You sleeping up here tonight?"

Lee nodded while he ate. The stew was actually very good. He really would have gone down and got himself some in a little bit...or fallen asleep. The hot food took the edge off
his hunger
and relaxed him even more, so that his whole body felt warm and heavy.

"Trouble in paradise?" she asked.

Lee looked at her, confused for a moment, then realized she was speaking about Angela. He shook his head and looked back to his bowl. "No, it's not like that with us."

"Hm." She pondered this for a moment. "What is it, then?"

Lee shrugged. "I dunno. Friends, maybe?"

"More than that," she said quietly.