The Remaining: Refugees (2 page)

Still, there could be some salvage there.

Lee rested his bearded chin on his hand as he knelt
. He watched and waited and
remained silent along with his group as the minutes dragged themselves by like wounded animals, slow and painful. One of the group checked the chamber of their rifle, and then snicked the bolt back into place. LaRouche spit out a stream of tobacco juice that hit the tar paper with a sharp
splat
. Somewhere the lilting voice of a winter bird called out from a barren tree.

"Cap," someone whispered.

Lee looked over
and saw Jeriah Wilson, the stocky
black kid
fresh out of the Air Force academy.
He’d been a running back throughout high school, and his build showed it. His face bore only patchy wisps of hair across his chin, but his once-regulation crew cut had now become shaggy.

H
e tapped his
ear and pointed out to the east
towards Main Street.

Lee strained to hear, and for a brief moment as the steady cold breeze lulled, he could hear the patter of numerous feet coming from the streets below them. He looked at Jeriah again and nodded, then leaned up slightly over the abutment so he could see Main Street.
Everything looked empty and devoid of life, and yet Lee could hear their soft footfalls just around the corner.

They were coming.

He shifted slightly and his hand came down slowly to touch the comforting grip of his rifle. His eyes stayed locked on the intersection.

The footfalls were louder now, and intersp
ersed with short, breathy snorts
that could have been mistaken for some other noise from nature, if Lee was not so familiar with it. It was the noise they made when they were
tracking something. Especially when they were tracking by smell.

The first one came around the corner quickly and then slowed.

Seeing it made every muscle in Lee’s body stiffen.

Staring at it from his concealed vantage point, Lee thought i
t was a young
boy
, d
ark haired and
short of stature
. He
wore a stained pair of jeans and what had once been a white t-shirt, now tattered and darkened with gore. Steam rolled off the boy's shoulders, his body still hot from whatever wretched hovel he and his hundreds of den mates had packed themselves into for warmth. They liked low pl
aces, like basements and cellars, and they
all huddled together during the night in one giant, twitching mass.

The thought of it made Lee's
skin crawl
.

“Eyes on,” Lee whispered.

“Eyes on,” LaRouche repeated down the line.

In the street below, t
he boy trotted cautiously out, now hunching down, now standing erect. His squinted eyes surveyed the scene,
but
always
came
back to what had drawn him to this intersection: the scent of the deer guts, steaming atop that single-burner grill.

Marie had been right. T
he smell of cooking drew them in quickly. It tickled some tiny memories in their violently rearranged brains that promised food. It worked better than anything else.

The boy sniffed the air and eyed the grill again, then began to move closer. Beh
ind him, his den mates appeared,
a bedraggled horde of them. They began to chitter back and forth to each other excitedly. As they drew closer, their calling got louder, and they began to bark and screech and growl. They worked their hands reflexively and snapped at the air with their jaws. Lee counted as they moved onto Front Street, measuring them in segments of 25, up until he reached approximately 150. The old and the weak and the nearly-dead straggled in, taking up the rear of the column.

Lee crouched there on the abutment and breathed very slowly so that the fog of his breath would not give him away.
His pulse was strong and quick, and he could feel the tightness in his stomach and in his throat.

He lowered himself very slowly and touched LaRouche on the shoulder. The sergeant looked up and Lee whispered, "You ready?"

LaRouche moved his chaw around in his mouth and nodded, his lips stained brown. He reached down to his side and held up a little green box with a wire running off of it.

Looking out onto the street again, Lee watched as the horde gathered around the boy. Now others were on the scent,
and they were
less cautious, and quicker to move in on a possible source of food. This was a herd, not a pack. There was no leader, only the instinct to stay together, to move together. The stink of the burning entrails began to mix with the pungent living odor of the infected and it lifted up on the breeze and made
bile
rise in the back of Lee's throat.

"Little closer," he whispered to no one
in particular
, his lips barely moving.

Now the tip of the crowd had reached the bubbling pan of guts
. T
hey stood back perhaps three feet away
or so and circled around, wary
of the heat, but certain that
there was
food
there
. They were all on the verge of starvation, their skin stretched taut over their bones and their ribs standing out like the rungs on a ladder. The rest of the horde bunched up behind them, fanning out and filling the street.

Almost there,
he thought.

The sweat on his palms chilled in the air.

The first of the infected leaned forward and took a swipe at the pan, knocking it off the grill and spilling the hot, bloody contents into the street. They screeched and jumped forward, their claw-like fingers rasping across the concrete as they grabbed chunks of organs and long strings of intestines. The horde pressed in, compacted, became one blob of flailing, grasping limbs
,
and the screeches became desperate as the feeding frenzy began.

"Now," Lee said.

LaRouche counted out the three clicks from the detonator: "One, two,
away
."

Lee watched as the four, daisy-chained Claymore mines exploded from where they
were
hidden in the piles of trash, scattering tatters of white paper that billowed out into the crowd like some violent confetti cannon.

The outside of the horde appeared to wilt as they were
cut down
by the
hundreds of steel balls shooting out of the
four simultaneous detonations. With the dust and smoke still hanging in the air, and the horde of infected still unsteady on their feet
,
as their eardrums bled and their animal minds attempted to comprehend this thunder that had
struck down
their den mates, the rest of Lee's team crested the abutment with their rifles at the ready and barrages of withering fire erupted along the rooftop.

The creatures below howled in rage and pain. They turned in mad circles
,
striking out at each other in the smoke, biting and slashing at anything before them. They began to scatter, but then they
bunched
up again as their instinct took over, and they would run this way
and that
, as the rifle fire echoed off the storefronts and confused them.

Their screeching began to lessen as more and more of them fell. The horde became a few stragglers trying to cling to life, and then only
a
dozen or so wounded that crawled and moaned and growled. The rifle fire became sporadic until
there was only one infected left.

It was
the same small boy that had come around the corner. His left arm was
sheared
off at the shoulder and he clutched his belly with the hand he had left and made a hideous noise.

Calmly,
LaRouche raised his rifle while all the others ported theirs,
smoke rising from the
barrels
. The boy writhed and moaned as LaRouche squinted through his sights and fired
.
T
hen there was silence.

LaRouche spat. "That's the last one."

The group looked down at their handiwork
.

In the street lay the sprawled remains of what was left of Lillington's populace
. Some of them stared
up into the sky with glassy eyes
, while others lay
face down in their own muck. The spaces between their bodies glistened darkly as thin streams of red meandered away from the road and towards the trash-clogged drains.

LaRouche
slapped
Harper
’s shoulder
and pointed. "Shit, Harper. I think your grill is still going."

Harper nodded slowly and
looked slightly nauseous
. "Yeah."

LaRouche
was clearly
impressed. "Damn thing's indestructible."

Lee grabbed his pack up from the floor and slung his arms into it. "Everyone refresh your mags."

Those that had not done so already put fresh magazines in their rifles and stowed the half-full ones in the pockets of their field jackets
. They stooped and gathered their
empty magazines and put them in a different pocket.

Julia remained still
during this
.

She hadn't fired a shot.

"Wilson," Lee pointed to the
Air Force cadet
. "Get your guys and pull the Humvees around. Let's start setting up shop."

Wilson nodded
and headed for the ladder down, his three companions falling
in
behind him.

The two Humvees that Lee had repossessed from Milo were parked around the corner. The block of buildings which they
stood in
created a perfect square around an empty parking lot.
With some measures to fortify the doors and windows of these buildings, the interior parking lot could be used as a
base
and the buildings as a wall. A little concertina wire and some barricades, and Outpost Lillington would be secure
.

Wilson and his team slid quickly down the ladder and disappeared into the empty pharmacy below. Lee thought about telling them to be cautious
—
there woul
d be others lurking in the city.
But
it was unnecessary. E
veryone was already cautious.
They all
jumped at shadows and slept lightly
, always anticipating the next round of misfortune
.

"Let's go
down there and check it out." Lee
put a hand on LaRouche's shoulder. "You mind keeping overwatch again?"

The sergeant
shook his head. "Nope
. I got it.
"