The Remaining: Fractured (50 page)

The urgency of it all began to drown under a sea of exhaustion.

Her eyes flickered shut again.

Weird half dreams intruded into her thoughts, creating a bizarre landscape of true concerns and imagined complications. Her eyes snapped open again though she wasn’t sure why, so she looked to her right and found Marie slipping through the tarp covering her doorway.

Angela sat bolt-upright in bed. She didn’t speak.

Marie peered through a crack in the tarp, checking to see if she was followed. When she turned, she wore an unreadable expression.

Angela found herself gripping the blankets with white knuckles, jaw locked. Still she didn’t say anything.

Marie stepped over towards her and knelt down, a hesitant smile playing across her lips. She held out a piece of paper, folded several times into a little square. “It’s Lee. He’s still alive. And we’ve got a plan.”

***

He came to her in the middle of the night, as he always did when his duties were finished. He moved quietly into her shanty, and she pretended to wake up, though she had been awake the whole time. He put his rifle down and his dirty old Yankees ball cap and he bent down to the bed of blankets and kissed her, his hands reaching under the covers and touching her.

He was not an exceptional lover, but he seemed to care for her, and she had not realized until lately how much she had missed being cared for. She spent so much of herself caring for others, day after day, that she felt empty when she went to sleep at night. Used up. But when he was with her, she felt loved again, felt the feelings that seemed to have been dead and buried with the rest of the world.

She finally found something that was hers. That she did not have to give away.

When they were finished, he moved to the edge of the bedding, pulling on his pants and his boots. He moved slowly, she thought, because he did not want to leave. He wanted to spend the night with her, but they knew the trouble that both of them would be in if people started to talk.

Jenny hitched herself up on her elbow, looking at him very seriously. She was caught now between that rock and a hard place her grandma had always told her about. She didn’t want to be where she was at, but she found herself there nonetheless. She hated Jerry, wanted to see Camp Ryder turned back to what it was. But she didn’t want the violence that she knew would follow, because every time she thought about it, she pictured Greg being shot in the middle of it all. And then she would have to operate on him. And then she would fail. And he would die, because she couldn’t do enough.

Greg glanced back at her as he tied his boots, then stopped and turned. “What’s wrong?”

Jenny stared up at him, tears in her eyes, heart hammering.

Greg reached back, touched her face. “Jesus, babe. What’s goin’ on with you?”

She grabbed his hand. “If I tell you something, will you promise not to tell Jerry?”

CHAPTER 32: FALLING OUT

LaRouche did not sleep.

His belly ached—hunger with no appetite. His brain nauseated itself with repetition. His heart just kept pounding like he’d just finished running a race and no amount of controlled breathing seemed to take the edge off. The Humvee felt like a cattle car. The hole in the windshield stared back at him like an accusation. Like a scornful look, made in silence.

The others slept, though he doubted it was peaceful. They often moaned in their sleep, or whimpered. In their unconscious state, they sounded less like the fighters he’d come to know, and more like children. He wanted to cry for them. He wanted to feel something for them. But he felt disconnected at heart. Like the part of him that felt human emotions, that perceived them and granted them to others, had simply broken, or ceased working somehow.

The closeness of the Humvee, the sounds of his comrade’s intermittent snoring and crying out in their sleep, it all crowded him, made a cold sweat start to break out on his brow. He thought of leaving, of just walking away. Grabbing his rifle and seeing how far a bottle of water and an MRE could take him. He wasn’t cut out for this shit. He was just a simple country boy, born and raised in Tennessee, who got a wild hare up his ass one day and decided to join the military. He wasn’t cut from the same cloth as Captain Harden, and he never would be. He wasn’t a leader. He didn’t make good decisions. He was brash. He was impulsive. If he was designed for anything, it was grunt work—following orders and shooting guns at whoever he was told to shoot at. Letting other people ride the hot seat of responsibility. He’d never wanted it, and he didn’t want it now.

And yet here it was. Like a millstone around his neck.

Quietly he reached into his pack that rested between his feet. He slowly unzipped the main compartment, a kid sneaking into mom’s purse. The steady breathing from the others in the Humvee remained undisturbed. He reached in and felt his way around several other objects, mostly the items that he’d used to operate on Joel. He closed his hand around the bottle of whiskey. Flat. Concave on one side.

He pulled it out, glanced back at the others, then gently opened his door and slid out. He pressed the door closed behind him, taking care not to slam it home. Then he stood outside of the vehicle for a moment and stared at his own reflection, and past it, into the dark interior of the vehicle where no one stirred at the sound of his escape. His rifle remained crammed in with everything else in the floorboard. Along with his pack. His chest rig.

But he still had his pistol. His old Beretta M9, the unwieldy piece of shit that it was. Still strapped to his leg as always.

He gripped the bottle in both hands, almost hugging it to his chest. Prized possession. There really wasn’t any denying that this was a terrible idea. He wouldn’t even be able to say that he hadn’t thought about it, because standing there he clearly thought to himself,
This is stupid and dangerous. Get back in the fucking truck.

He wasn’t sure why he turned away from the truck and walked away. The silly pride of a petulant child, perhaps. He was not above self-diagnosing himself in unfriendly terms. But he just couldn’t quite put his finger on it, couldn’t articulate what was coming to a rolling boil inside of him, cooking down to its hard, unpleasant reality.

A cry for help, maybe.

Really?

No. He didn’t want help from anyone. He was honest enough with himself to know that. It didn’t sound like much of a logical reason, but he just didn’t want to be
there
anymore. Didn’t want to be in that Humvee. Didn’t want to be with those people. Didn’t want to be saddled with the responsibility that Captain Harden had put on him. He didn’t want to fight a war. He didn’t want to save the world. He just wanted to be…gone.

So he walked. Not too far—he was trying to be alone, not commit suicide. Walking around in the dark had its inherent dangers, but to him it was an acceptable risk to achieve some solitude. He stayed out of the woods, though he wasn’t sure if that made a difference or not. He supposed that if there were infected watching him from the woods they would come for him regardless.

He trudged through a field left fallow, stepping between weeds grown to chest height and then wilted in the frost. He was going north, he believed, towards a very small hillock, a rare geographical formation in the general flatlands of the North Carolina coastal region. The air smelled cold, but also wet and fertile. Potential lying dormant underneath the wild growth. The kind of land that a settler may have walked out onto and known that this was where he was going to plant.

He walked to the top of the very small slope, and just over the other side, until he could no longer see the convoy when he looked behind him. And then he walked a little farther. He finally stopped at a rock that protruded from the ground, just wide and flat enough for him to sit on. He sat for a while, just looking around him in the blue moonlight. Waiting for everything to stop feeling so strange.

After a while, he uncapped the bottle he still held in his hands, took a long, determined pull, then fought off the jittery feeling in his gut as the hot-cold liquid burned down his throat and into his stomach where it stung him like alcohol on a wound. Which he supposed it was.

This will help me sleep
, he kept telling himself.

He drank on. Stopped thinking. Watched the passage of time by the constellations inching towards the horizon. Felt it in the sinking feeling that soaked through him and seemed to root his feet to the ground. It soured and solidified, like compacted soil, until it was a brick in his gut. Not really painful. Just uncomfortable now.

LaRouche heard the footfalls long before he reacted to them. He closed his eyes and focused on the sound of them. They were steady, clipped. Urgent, almost. They rustled through the dried grasses and overgrowth and then came to an abrupt halt a short distance behind him. LaRouche opened his eyes half way, sucked on his teeth, then spat.

An angry voice in the darkness: “What are you doing?”

LaRouche clenched the bottle in his fist. “The fuck do you want?”

The footfalls stormed up behind him, then stepped around, forcing eye-contact. Jim stood there, glasses crooked on his nose, face red even in the blanching moonlight, hair disheveled. In one hand he held his rifle, not by the grip but by the crook of the barrel and magazine well. The other hand gripped the top of his jacket close to his neck in an attempt to keep him warm. He looked furious.

“What do I want?” Jim said. “I want to
not
wake up in the middle of the night and find the man that is supposed to be in charge of our operation wandering around in the dark!” He looked around, like he feared his rising voice would garner him unwanted attention from things lurking in the woods. Then he went right back to LaRouche, pointing at him with the hand that gripped the rifle and, perhaps unintentionally, pointing the barrel at him as well. “I want
you
to grow up! It’s the middle of the night in enemy territory and you’re out here by yourself,
drinking?
”

LaRouche’s face twitched, just slightly. The creases on the sides of his nose flashing for a moment. An unfinished snarl. Then, calmly: “Preacher Man, you better get that fuckin’ rifle barrel out of my face before I beat you to death with it.”

Jim took a step back, incredulous. “Beat me with it? You’re going to beat me to death, LaRouche? Is that what this is about? Is this a personal issue between me and you because I’ve stepped on your toes one too many times? Hurt your pride a little bit? Didn’t make you feel like the big man?”

LaRouche stood up, felt the world sway uncomfortably, nearly tripped over himself. “Preacher…”

“Oh, here we go with the ‘Preacher this’ and ‘Preacher that’.” Jim shook his head. “You got a problem with me, then you got a problem with
me
. You don’t need to take shots at my faith.” He looked LaRouche up and down with disgust. “Look at yourself. Drunk. At this stage in the game?”

LaRouche held the bottle like a club. “I need you to shut the fuck up.”

“What were you planning on doing? Huh?” Jim threw his arms open. “Was it gonna help you forget, LaRouche? You one of those people that thinks they can drink away the fact that they’re responsible for the death of one of their friends?”

LaRouche’s eyes went wide. Jim’s words hitting their mark. He dropped the bottle and balled his fists. “I ain’t too drunk to beat your motherfuckin’ ass, Jim.”

Jim stepped forward. “Fine! I’m tired of you acting this way! You wanna hit me? Hit me!”

And LaRouche did. He grabbed the rifle and ripped it out of Jim’s grip, clumsily and drunkenly, but still too fast and too forceful for Jim to stop it from happening. Then LaRouche smashed his shin as hard as he could into the outside of Jim’s thigh, crunching the common peroneal nerve and making Jim’s knee’s buckle. Then, almost as an afterthought, he slammed the buttstock of the rifle into Jim’s nose, breaking the bone and knocking the man backward, glasses flying off.

LaRouche stood there over him as Jim squirmed around on his back, moaning and groaning and touching his bleeding nose. LaRouche swayed, feeling the fiery burn suddenly returning to his stomach. He burped and tasted whiskey. Still too pissed off to really care. Not about a bleeding ulcer, and certainly not about a bleeding nose that deserved everything that it got.

He yelled. Didn’t care about the volume. “Fuck you, Jim! Fuck you! I made a fucking bad decision! You think I don’t fucking know that? You think I’m drinking to make it all go away? Bullshit! I know this shit doesn’t go away! It’s on me forever! On me! Forever!
That’s
why I’m drinking, Jim!” He held a tight fist up. “So maybe this fucking vice in my guts will stop squeezing so I can sleep!”

Jim tried to struggle up, but LaRouche just shoved the other man back down to the ground with a boot to his chest. “People fucking die! People especially die in war!” He shoved a finger in the center of his own chest. “I know this, Jim. You don’t. You might think you know it because you watched some fucking war movies, but I fucking
know it
. Goddamn intimately. I made a decision. It turned out to be a bad one. Get the fuck over it and move on!”

Jim rolled away from LaRouche’s boot, and the movement was too quick for LaRouche to react. Instead he just stumbled back, still holding the rifle, while Jim lurched to his feet, still holding his nose, taking his hand away and looking at the blood. “Yeah. You made a decision. Against the advice of everyone around you.”

“It’s not a fuckin’ committee,” LaRouche growled. “You got a problem with doin’ what I say, you shoulda stayed back at Camp Ryder. I can’t drive you back there now, but I can put a fuckin’ bullet in your head, you fucking insubordinate piece of shit.”

“Insubordinate?” Jim actually laughed at him. “Insubordinate? For what? Because I don’t want to follow the orders of a man that is clearly not in a stable frame of mind? You’re not General Patton, LaRouche. You’re just some guy that Lee put his faith in, and clearly that was a big mistake.” Jim spat blood onto the ground and reached a hand out. “Gimme back my rifle.”