The Remaining: Refugees (43 page)

Th
e group looked at her, awkward and
silent. They waited for her to continue, but she
had said her
mind
. After a stretch, Lee stepped around Wilson and put a hand on her arm, firm but
gentle
. “Come on, let’s get cleaned up.”

“I’m fine,” she said
.

“You still need to clean up.” Lee pulled
slightly
, and she allowed herself to be removed from the circle. “Jim, why don’t you get some food going?”

Jim
nodded
. “You got it.”

Lee grabbed his pack as he walked
with
Julia towards an area where Kip Greene had told them there was a rain basin. The last little bit of crimson light coming from the sunset lit up Julia’s face and blended all of the gore together so that Lee could not tell where it stopped and her skin began. She stared straight ahead, her face immovable.

“What’s the problem, Captain?” There was bite in her voice.

Lee chose not to take the bait. She was looking for a conflict, looking for some way to exercise those emotions she kept under lock and key, but fighting with him wasn’t going to solve anything. “No problem, Julia. You said your peace, now it’s time to get cleaned up. You know…wash your hands for supper and all that?”

“And I need an escort to do that?” She jerked her arm away from him.

Lee looked behind him, feeling his blood rise and wondering who might be watching
them
. “Cool it,” he said
in a warning tone
.

“Why you gotta walk with me, huh?” Julia shook her head and turned the corner of a single-story brick building where a rain catch sat,
filled
almost
to
overflowing
. “Make sure that crazy Julia doesn’t go off the fucking deep end? Screw you. I can handle myself just fine.”

Lee clenched his hands at his sides. “Clearly.”

“Yeah.” She looked up at him, fire in her eyes. “Clearly. Now why don’t you go play army man with your buddies out there and leave me the fuck alone.”

Lee took two quick steps and his hand shot out, almost involuntarily, but he stopped it before it
touched her. He
extended his finger so it pointed right into her face. “Is that the best you can fucking do?” he spat. “Is that the best you can come up with?”

Julia swatted his hand out of her face. “Leave me the hell alone!”

Lee faced her, putting his hands down, but not leaving. “No. You give me a fucking answer. Is that the best you can do?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Rob, and I’m talking about Jake.” He leaned forward so their faces were separated only by a few inches
. He could smell
the blood on her, and the sweaty
scent of her
. His words came out of him, strained and hot and barely controlled. “You never even reacted to Rob being killed. You can cry a goddamned river for the infected we
shoot
, but when it comes to your own people, your own friends, you shut down and strike out at the people that are here for you.”

She looked like she was about to hit him.

Lee didn’t care. “So is that the best you can come up with? One of our own is about to die, and the most emotion you can wring out of yourself is to be a fucking bitch to your friends? To the people that care for you? Is that the best we can expect?”

Her voice trembled. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“Then tell me, Julia! Tell me that I’m wrong!”

She hit him
in the chest
with both palms, rocking him back on his heels.
“This coming from you? What about you, Lee? I’ve never seen you shed a fucking tear!”

“If I thought twice about all the people that have died because of me, I’d never be able to make a decision again.” He threw his arms out. “What’s your excuse?”

“Don’t you tell me what I feel.” Her whole body shook with rage. “I think about Rob every damn day. And now I’m gonna think about Jake. And the two of them are going to be stuck in my head forever and I’m never going to be able to get them out, along with all the other people I’ve lost.” She took a step forward. “What is it that you want to see? You want to see me cry? Is it not good enough for you until I come and dry my tears on your shoulder like a good little girl? Fuck you!”

She spoke with such force that Lee found
himself searching for a response, but coming up empty-handed
.

Julia
raised
her head. “You wanna see tears, you’re gonna wait a
while, because all I am is pissed
.”
Her
voice dropped in volume. “
I’m bitter, and I’m angry, and I can feel it just sucking the life out of me
.
Because every day I wake up and I’m confused
.
” The stiff aggression of her body suddenly slacked, like high tension wires snapping. He shoulders sagged, her head lolled, and her arms flopped to her sides. “
I look around and I wonder where my house went, where my family went and I have to remind myself
every day
that all of that is over. I just keep thinking that I’m not supposed to be here. That maybe tonight is the night that I go to sleep and I wake up and things are back to normal.” She shook her head. “But it’s never going back. I’m stuck here. I’m trapped.”

Lee stared at her for a long moment.
T
he resentment, the frustration,
and
the fear all came out of him in a breath and he leaned forward onto the rain
catch
, hanging his head just above the water, smelling that clean smell of rain, seeing the shimmering image of his silhouette against the darkening sky.

She waited for a long time before speaking again. “
You think about them, too
.”

He felt the side of the rain catch shift as she put her weight on it.

She continued:
“Because if you weren’t thinking about them, you wouldn’t be so worried about whether I was thinking about them.”

A grim smile touched Lee’s lips.

“
You’re just
as fucked up as the rest of us,
”
she said. “You just do a better job hiding it.”

Lee looked at her. She had her back turned to the rain catch, leaning on it with one elbow and looking down a
t the ground, her face set in an expression that had no name.
Not quite
resignation
.
Not quite determination. M
ore like the resignation to be determined. It was something that spoke
of the drive to gut it out when
crushing defeat
was all you had to look forward to.

It was the look of a human being who no longer saw, nor cared to see, anything of beauty, but instead focused solely on the concept of survival.
Same as a wild animal will not appreciate the splendor of the jungle it lives in, but instead sees only the danger that lurks inside.

This was not a moment of a
bsolution or enlightenment
.
It was a
hard
realization that while the infected seemed
to be moving forward
, the rest of mankind seemed headed in the opposite direction. The two were still worlds apart, but they seemed bound and determined to meet in some wretched middle, where fighting for food and water and procreating the next generation was an all-consuming task. Simple propagation of the species, and nothing more.

“Friend of yours?”

Lee saw her looking out towards the street. He followed her gaze and found the stray dog that they had rescued—or had rescued them, depending on how you looked at it—standing at the corner of the building and regarding the two
of them
cautiously.

Lee stood up. “Yeah. We found him in Sanford today. Still pretty skittish, but he’s even more afraid of infected than he is of us. And he can sniff ‘em out way before we can.”

Julia raised an eyebrow. “An infected-sniffing dog.”

Lee bent down and held out his hand. The dog approached, still timid, but it gave a demure wag of its tail and stretched itself out to lick Lee’s fingers tentatively. “
Good boy.
” Lee turned his wrist in an attempt to scratch the dog behind the ears but it backed away quickly. Lee stood straight again. “He’s still a little shy.”

“What’s his name?”

Lee wiped the dog slobber off on his pants. “
I’m gonna call him
Deuce.”

Julia held out a hand. “Hey, Deuce.”

The dog regarded her with a tilt of his head, but didn’t come any closer.

“He’s still warming up to us,” Lee said quietly. He looked back at Julia. “Listen, I didn’t mean
..
.”

Julia shook her head. “You’re right, though. I can’t take it out on you and the others.”

Lee nodded once, but didn’t respond. He put his hands in his pockets and decided to leave the whole conversation where it was
: a mutual understanding that they were both dealing with these things in
their own
way
, and they both needed their space to mourn in the way they saw fit. He turned back to the street and put one foot in front of the other. Behind him, he could hear Julia gathering a bucket of water to clean herself off with.

Deuce backed away from him as he crossed the street, but paralleled him, keeping about ten feet of distance between them at all times. He was interested in whatever food Lee might drop, but still not willing to roll over and show his belly just yet.

LaRouche met him before he reached the fire. “You guys okay?”

“Fine.” Lee waved it off.
When they reached the fire, Lee hitched his foot up onto an overturned bucket and leaned on his knee, looking at his group gathered around the fire. “Listen…” he cleared his throat. “You all did great today. Every one of you. It’s just…sometimes it doesn’t matter.”

They all nodded and looked down into the fire.

At the edge of the amber light, Deuce grumbled and trotted around them.

Wilson raised his head. “Cap…I don’t know if you thought about it already, but we were talking about what happened earlier. The shooter…”

Lee
spoke without emotion:
“
He was aiming for me
.”

CHAPTER 20:
HARD TRUTHS

Wilson looked surprised. “What are you talking about?”

“The only reason I didn’t get shot was because I bent down when the shooter fired. Otherwise, the round would have gone through both of us.”

“How do you know the shooter wasn’t just aiming for Jake?”

“I don’t.” Lee shrugged. “But that infected was put there to slow us down, to get us to bunc
h up around the door. And yet the shooter
only fires one shot. Whoever it was, they weren’t just trying to ambush us, or they would have hosed us all down. They were trying to take out a specific target. And I have a hard time believing that someone was gunning for Jake.”