The Remaining: Refugees (39 page)

“Did we get ‘em all?” LaRouche shouted.

“Keep checking,” Lee called back.

He found the corner of the room he’d been seeking, and it was unoccupied by anything alive. He turned and looked out into the room, his light now able to push clear through the smoke and darkness and see the far wall. He registered the mounds of flesh in the center of the room—perhaps five or six of them. Their limbs were tangled together, and some of those limbs were detached from the bodies they belonged to, blown off in the blast.

Look at them…look at them…

But he looked passed them, and he could see LaRouche, still moving deeper into the long room. The shadow of his body and his cone of light kept retreating, getting smaller and it gave Lee the false sensation that this room was not a conference room at all, but some massive undergrou
nd cave that just kept on going.

Look at the bodies!

Lee forced his eyes down into the bloody mess before him.

Pale, thin limbs. They seemed small and childlike. The flesh on these seemed softer somehow than the other infected he’d noticed, like there was more fat on them, as though they had not been starved as extensively as the others. Long tangles of hair, matted and dreadlocked in places. All of the infected
had somewhat
overgrown hair, but the
hair on these was
longer than normal. Some of their faces were contorted, as though they were enraged by what had happened to them. Others stared serenely at the ceiling
.

“Oh my God…”

Lee took a step forward and blazed his light down onto the one closest to him. Splayed out in a twisted position, legs spread in different directions, one arm trapped beneath the body, the other reaching out as though clawing its way across the floor. Fair skin and blonde hair, sullied by clumps of dried gore and filth. Fresh, bright red blood flowed from the nose and ears, down over its blank face, and down in bright red ribbons across the mounds of breasts.

“LaRouche!” Lee said, but his voice was quiet, either truly without volume, or lost under the roaring sound in his ears, like shouting into a hurricane.

“Captain?”

Lee moved his gunlight to illuminate another body.

“Captain?”

He looked up to find LaRouche standing there on the other side of the bodies, shining his light into them. It seemed that they had died, clinging to each other in terror.

Lee’s voice was a croak. “It’s the females. They’re all here. Why were they kee
ping them here? I don’t…I don’t get it.
”

“Look at them,” LaRouche said with an empty voice.

But Lee had not taken his eyes off of them. There were more than he’d thought at first
—probably
about
ten, though it was difficult to tell in such a pile of arms and legs. They were so tightly packed together…

“Look at them,” LaRouche repeated.

“I’m looking at them…”

“No.” LaRouche leaned over and pointed, very deliberately, very slowly. “You see that?”

In the wreck of flesh before him, amongst the obliterated remains jumbled together like the rest of the garbage strewn across the floors, under all that red-painted skin, he hadn’t noticed it. He saw the first one, and
felt immediately sickened
. The roaring in his ears was the rush of a
million pointless thoughts
. And when he looked to the next female, lying dead and dismembered on the floor, he saw that it was the same with her, and with all of the others.

He could barely find his voice. “They’re all pregnant.”

CHAPTER 18:
A SIMPLE EQUATION

Lee’s stomach did somersaults around his other organs.
His brain went to work,
interpreting and extrapolating what he was learning with what he already knew and trying to shove the images that his eyes were generating into
place along
with
all the other thing that he knew, like unwieldy pieces of a
jigsaw puzzle with a
picture that made no sense.

Some of them were close to giving birth, the skin of their bellies stretched tight.

Some of the other fem
ales were not far along at all, and just beginning to show.

Could they have mated even after they were infected?

Why wouldn’t they reproduce?

How stupid were they to believe that those instincts
for survival
were relegated only to the hunt for food? Their instincts clearly went further than that. The males in these hordes, they still looked emaciated despite all the food they were scavenging, because they were gathering it for the pregnant females and eating only what their bodies needed to survive.
Ancient
instincts of the hunter-gatherer,
buried under millennia of civilization, and now
resurrected before their eyes.

Each conclusion only carried with it another question, and each question required greater understanding than he had. They spun around in his head like debris caught in a tornado.

Lee suddenly wanted to take a seat. He wanted to be in his Humvee, surrounded by the familiar things, the smell of diesel fumes and grease and metal, the smell of gun oil and cordite, of the musty bedroll he slept on every night.
Instead, he took in a deep breath of the rank air and tried to ignore his churning stomach.

Compartmentalize. Make the problem small.

First, let’s get the fuck out of this room.

Lee turned towards the door and took one step before the room flashed and jumped.

He spun, his mouth and eyes wide open, swinging his rifle up, and found LaRouche standing over the dead females with a cold, blank look in his eyes. His rifle was pointed down at one of the females, and a tiny hole had appeared in the center of her bulging stomach. No blood came out of it—her heart was no longer pumping.

“Are you okay? Was she still alive?” Lee took a step forward. “Did she try to bite you?”

LaRouche didn’t respond, didn’t look at him. He stepped over the body he had just put a bullet into and pointed his rifle at another, aiming for the belly. He pulled the trigger and shot her
,
too.

“Jesus!” Lee shouted. “What the hell are you doing?”

LaRouche stepped over to another one. “I’m killing those fucking things before they can crawl out.” He pulled the trigger again.

“Stop!” Lee
took a step towards the man, though he wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do if LaRouche didn’t obey. Was he going to fight LaRouche over it? Over dead infected? Over the very same thing he argued with Professor White about?

LaRouche turned and sighted down the barrel at another target.

Lee grabbed the foregrip of the rifle and jerked it up. He didn’t know why. His heart was slamming in his chest. For the first time in a very long time, Lee didn’t know where his head was at. But he pulled that rifle in close so that the two men were face to face, and LaRouche gave no more reaction to being stopped than he
’d
had to shooting the dead bodies.

Lee shook his head, looking into
the sergeant’s
vacant
eyes.

“Stop.” His voice trembled. “Just…stop.”

“Okay.” LaRouche blinked, but the look of emptiness did not leave him.

“You guys…” J
im’s voice cut through the room
like a rope to drowning men. Something tangible to hold onto. They turned and watched the ex-priest as he stood in the doorway, his rifle hang
ing from its sling
, both his hands clutching his temples. “Oh my God.”

Lee took LaRouche firmly by the shoulders and pulled him away from the corpses on the floor. They stepped over the arms and legs of these
lost females, sequestered away, protected in this god-forsaken hovel from the
dangers
outside.

Lee pointed the other two men towards the exit. “Let’s go.”

Outside, the cold breeze scoured the stench from their clothes and the three men stood in the street for a moment,
just
breathing
fresh air
. Lee was the first to snap out of his daze and chastised himself for letting the shock of the moment set him off-balance. All of the survivors had their perceptions about how the great and highly-trained Captain Harden should act, and to be truthful, he held some of these perceptions himself.

But sometimes the moment just got the better of you.

“We need to get out of the open,”
he said over his shoulder.

They crossed the street at a jog, and
Lee decided to just keep going. They nee
ded to get to the Humvee anyway
an
d get in contact with Wilson’s group
and Camp Ryder.
Jim and LaRouche
didn’t ask any questions, and Lee didn’t give them any explanations. He just kept heading north, away from the den, and they
followed
him.

The Humvee with the dozer attachment was still sitting where they’d left it. Jim climbed in the driver’s seat, LaRouche in the back, and Lee in the front passenger’s seat. They shut the doors and the heat from their bodies and breath began to fog the windows.

Lee picked up the handset to the radio, but then set it back down again. His fingers lingered on it as he spoke. “W
e can’t tell anyone about what happened in the den
.”

Silence.

Then Jim: “Uh, Captain…I think…”

Lee turned to face him. “
People have a hard enough time accepting the traps. You think they’re gonna go along with blowing up a dozen pregnant women?”

“Infected,
” LaRouche spat.

Lee spun on him. “Do you not see the fucking difference? Jerry and Professor White are gonna use this to sway everyone’s opinion. It’s gonna fuel the fires and burn us, I guarantee it. I know we feel like we should report everything back, but this seriously jeopardizes my mission.” Lee stabbed at the dashboard with a finger. “We’ve come too goddamned far to have it fucked up by some bullshit like this. It even took
us
by surprise, and we’re out here doing this shit every day. How do you think the average person is going to take it?”

Jim
looked wary, like he was making his way across an unsteady foot bridge. “Captain, I understand that this is not going to be popular, but I think we have a moral obligation to tell people. I mean, not only could this give Jacob useful information, but it’s also a safety issue. If there’s a den here with females in it, there might be one of the same in Lillington.”

Lee thought about it and knew that Jim was right. “
Let me handle that.”

***

Harper bounded up the steps to the
Camp Ryder
office
. Concrete walls blurred by, metal stair risers clanging under his feet. He
found Bus standing and facing the
radio
. He turned when he heard Harper come through the door.

“What’s wrong?” Harper said, breathing hard. “Did someone get hurt?”

Bus nodded. “Lee’s on the line. He’s telling me to go to ‘private channel,’ whatever that means.”