The Remaining: Refugees (47 page)

H
ow many were there?

Only one person shooting at them with a .50 cal, it sounded like.

But he might have a buddy
to watch his back
.

Regardless
,
it
was one of those shitty situations where it didn’t really matter. You had to do what you had to do, and if it turned out that you made the wrong choice, you were going to have to adapt and overcome. Even a wrong action is better than no action.
Stasis is the enemy on a dynamic battlefield.

As he ran, he shucked a 40mm grenade from a pouch
o
n his vest and slipped it into the launcher under his M4
. In his mind, he
pictured
two men, laying side-by-side in a sniper’s hide, facing away from him as he crept silently up behind them and put a 40mm grenade right between them, ripping their bodies apart. He held onto the image
, clutched it like a talisman
.

He slowed to a jog, glancing up the steady in
c
line
,
in the direction of the road.

BOOM.

It almost halted him in his tracks for a moment. The attackers had fired another round out, and he hoped and prayed silently that it had not hit one of his people. Who the fuck were these guys? Were they just your average raiders who had stumbled across a .50 caliber rifle?

No…

They seemed to have discipline in their fire.
T
he superb round-placement when they took out his engine
block
. That was precision, to hit a moving vehicle right where you wanted it. Precision and discipline.

Lee waited for the sound of LaRouche and Jim returning fire on one of the M2s, but it didn’t come. Just the sporadic, random crack of the 5.56mm rifles, striking out ineffectively into the woods.

They had not yet pin-pointed the sniper.

He kept going.

It seemed like he had been running a while, but he knew how adrenaline could distort your sense of time.
The last rifle shot he’d heard seemed omnidirectional
, with n
o real way to triangulate where it was coming from.
He had to make
sure he was passed the sniper
before he cut back in towards the road. I
f he didn’t run far enough, he ran the risk of walking right up on them
and giving away his advantage
.

Go for thirty more seconds.

Lee
kept
count as
evenly
as
he could
, and when the thirty seconds was up, he knelt down next to the creek bed and shouldered his rifle. To his left, the creek was petering out into a muddy, rock-filled hole. A faded can of Budweiser was half submerged in the silt. To his right, the slope was shallower.

He’d already passed the highest point of the hill
.

T
hat was where the sniper would be.

BOOM.

Lee’s head snapped
to his right. This time the rifle report had a definite direction.

M
ore muffled chatter of return fire echoed through the woods, suddenly bolstered by the much louder sound of one of Lee’s M2s spitting out rounds. Lee heard the rounds snapping branches way over his head, and saw one of the tracers burn through the woods.

“Yes,” he whisper
ed, hunching low. “Light ‘em up…
”

Low to the ground now, Lee moved quietly up the side of the
slope, towards the sound of the last rifle report. As he gained
ground
, he sunk lower
,
to the point where he was on his hands and knees, scooting forward a few yards at a time. Tension stretched his eyes wide and caused his bladder to tighten. He kept moving.

Close to the top now, he heard voices, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying.

Another rake of fire from the M2 and this time one of the rounds hit a tree so close to Lee that he could feel the splinters of wood tickle the back of his neck.

The voices ahead of him cried out in alarm.

Then there was the sound of running feet.

Shit!
Lee’s heart squirmed into his gullet. He rose up on one knee, pulling his rifle in tight and sighting down at the crest of the hillock. The red dot of his Aimpoint hovered there just above the
carpet of leaves
.

Two shapes suddenly appeared, sprinting to get over the h
ill. One of them carried an M4 at the ready, with
what looked like a scoped bolt-action rifle strapped to his back
, and the other carried a
Barrett
M82 by its carrying handle, the bipod still extended out like he’d simply grabbed it and run.

They both wore ACUs.

There was a moment when the man with the M4 saw Lee kneeling there on the ground, and they made eye-contact. There was hesitation. Just looking at him, the way he wore the uniform, the way he carried his rifle, he was a copy of every soldier Lee had ever known.

He didn’t want to pull that trigger.

T
he ma
n shouted, “It’s him!” and raised his rifle.

Lee
squeezed off two shots, striking the man once in the head and once in the chest, and spinning him backwards to the ground. As the man fell back, Lee swung on
the other
and began aggressing on him, shouting, “Drop that weapon! Drop it!”

The giant Barrett rifle clattered to the ground, but this man had no intention of sticking around. He turned and threw himself down the hill with all the speed and desperation of a rabbit running from
a coyote
. Lee tracked him with his rifle, the red dot leading him just slightly as he plunged down the hill
.

Lee intentionally aimed low and fire
d
a quick burst of rounds. He wasn’t sure how many of them connected, or where
they hit
, but the running man jerked and tripped and then tumbled all the way down the hill until he rolled into a tree. The man groaned and grabbed his ass, his legs grinding out grooves in the wet forest floor
that shown
black underneath the
ochre
leaves.

Lee turned quickly to address the
first man he’d shot
. He lay flat on his back, with his head tilted up and his mouth open. Red bubbles were still gurgling out of his nose, and everything above his nostrils was coated in it so that Lee could not see his eyes, nor where the bullet had entered his skull. He was positive that the man was dead, even if his heart was still pumping blood for the next few seconds. He’d seen that type of bleeding before
, and it only occurred when there wasn’t much left but pulp
between the ears
.

The rifle strapped to the man’s back was a Remington 700.

Probably the rifle that had killed Jake.

Lee
lowered his
M4
and turned back to the
man that still writhed at the bottom of the hill
. The rain
began
to fall harder, its patter across the leaves of the forest floor
drowning out the murmurs and curses
.
It would also cover the sound of approaching infected.
With all the gunfire, it was just a matter of time before
they showed up to investigate
.

Maybe they were already there
.

Lee made his way down
the slope
.
The man on the ground
caught sight of Lee approaching
and twisted
himself so that h
is back was against the tree,
baring his teeth in a grimace.
Lee stopped short just a few feet and pointed at the man with the muzzle of his rifle.

“
Who the fuck are you?”

The man groaned and clutched at his wound but did not respond. The crotch of the man’s pants was dark with blood, and it soaked the entire pant leg. It looked like the round had caught the man high on the inside of his thigh and exited near his buttocks.
The amount of blood suggested damage to the
femoral artery.

Lee got the sensation that he was being watched and he turned to
glance
behind him. The woods stretched on in a glistening, rainy
pallor
. There was no wind to cause anything to move and the forest sat preternaturally still in the steady downpour. Over the sound of the rain, he thought he heard a distant growl, but when he listened, it was not repeated.

He turned back to the man and knelt down.
“Let me lay this out for you, hotshot. I give it three minutes before you pass out from blood loss.” Lee rubbed his beard thoughtfully. “
I don’t know how long it will take the infected to find you, but I can’t imagine it will take long. So…you think you’ll still be awake to be eaten alive, or do you think the blood loss will get you first?
”

The man blinked rapidly and began looking around.

“All that shooting?” Lee said
. “There’s gotta be a pack of them somewhere around here, coming to investigate. So you tell me…you wa
nna sit here and see how it ends for you…
or do you want some help?”

The man shook his head. “I don’t wanna die.”

Lee’s face became flint-rock hard.
“Who are you?”

A moment’s hesitation, and then: “Sergeant Prestone.”

“You army?”

A shaky nod. “82
^nd
Airborne.”

“Why are you trying to kill me?”

The man’s eyes glinted and a red smile touched his lips. “Because you’re a fucking traitor, Captain Harden…a fucking traitor.”

Lee reacted without conscious thought. He leaned forward and struck out with the buttstock of his rifle, hitting the wounded man in his upper thigh, right where the bullet had entered him. The man’s eyes went wide and he made a tortured sound and curled in on himself like a little gray pill bug.

Lee sidled closer and grabbed the man by the face, forcing eye contact. “Do not fuck with me.”

“It’s the truth,” the man moaned. He was beginning to shake and his skin was becoming pale. “It’s the truth…”

Lee shook him. “Who sent you?”

“No. Get me out of here…the infected…”

“The infected are going to rip you to shreds unless you tell me who sent you.”

“Save me and I’ll tell you.” The
sergeant’s
voice was faint.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Lee shook his head. “You tell me who sent you…”