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  “Yeah.” Lee nodded. “I had hoped to ask for that during the meeting. It kinda got derailed.”

  Jerry held up both of his hands and backed away. “You can count me out of your crusades, Captain. Me and my people have no desire to get ourselves killed for nothing.”

  Lee spat in the dirt. “I only ask that if you’re not willing to help, you get out of the way of those who are.”

  Jerry’s supporters, about a dozen from the original Camp Ryder group, bolstered up behind him as he looked directly at Lee and shook his head. All he said, loud and clear, was, “Madman.”

  CHAPTER 6

  A Long Night

  With Jerry and White and their groups of supporters gone from the meeting, there still remained about sixty people from Camp Ryder and Smithfield, unsure of what to do and where to go.

  The winter sky had turned a deep blue in the waning twilight, and the horizon behind Lee was a pastel-colored smudge that would soon disappear. As the last sliver of sunlight glowed dimly across their faces, they began to huddle closer in the cold, pulling their jackets tighter around themselves as their collective breath took vaporous form and hovered over them. Many of them wore the OD green parkas that Lee had brought from his bunker, while others wore jackets that had been pilfered during scavenging operations.

  In the last bit of light, Lee met as many of them in the eye as he could. “I know I’m asking a lot. I’m asking for you to possibly leave your loved ones and definitely to put yourself in harm’s way. But I would not ask for you to do so if I didn’t think we could accomplish the mission. I need help, folks. I need as much help as I can get.”

  Lee held up a hand. “This isn’t an altar call. You don’t have to step forward now. Go get some food. Talk to the people you need to talk to. Sleep on it. Come see me in the morning if you think you are willing and able to help. Thank you.”

  With that, Lee turned, and his team went with him. They made their way toward the Camp Ryder building, and behind them they could hear Bus thanking everyone for showing up. Kip Greene was still standing there next to Bus, probably confused, or dismayed, or scared shitless. God only knew what the man was thinking, whether it be about the near-violent disunion among the members of the Camp Ryder Hub or about the impending threat that loomed over everyone.

  As they entered the building, the smell of Marie’s cooking filled the place. Rather than ration food out to each family and individual, Marie cooked community meals from a combination of Lee’s supplies, foodstuffs that had been scavenged, and meat from the hunters—most commonly venison, but sometimes squirrel or rabbit. Even with Lee supplementing from his bunkers, there wasn’t a lot to go around. With the population of Camp Ryder growing, feeding everyone was always a challenging prospect. More and more people had to turn to scavenging to feed themselves and their families, but eventually that too would run out.

  Still, every evening, Marie would have a meal prepared, however meager.

  The group headed for the line that was beginning to form at Marie’s little kitchen area, but Julia remained by Lee’s side. He approached the metal staircase and turned to climb it.

  “You not hungry?” she asked.

  Lee rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ll come down in a minute… once the line’s died down.”

  She regarded him dubiously.

  “Just give me a minute.”

  She shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  Lee clomped up the stairs. In the office, he placed his rifle against the far wall, beside the bedroll that he kept there. He would sleep in the office tonight, as he would most of his first nights back. He hated waking in the middle of the night, cold with sweat and his heart pounding, to find Angela and Abby and Sam staring at him because he had shouted them awake in his sleep. It was always worst the first night back.

  Most survivors had the dreams, but almost everyone on Lee’s team had them with disturbing frequency. They were dreams of helplessness, mostly, and they often shared similar ones. The most common was their weapons not firing, or the bullets dribbling out of the barrel or simply being ineffective. Some dreamed that the claymore mines would not go off, or that the infected had found them and swarmed the building they were atop.

  Lee’s own personal nightmare was something less tangible. In the dream he knew he was asleep and that his eyes were closed, but he would see the room where he slept in vivid detail. And always at his feet was something, some dark figure crouched there, formless and black and inexplicable. Its presence filled him with dread, and he would try to shake himself awake and to move, but his body would be paralyzed under the weight of sleep, as though he were encased in concrete.

  Lee had no explanation for the dream, save that it was some fetid mental by-product of the things he had witnessed while awake.

  Every day was full of fear. Not only fear for oneself but for the people you cared for and loved. There was no safe haven, no place of peace. The dangers were constant and inescapable. Worst of all, there was no light at the end of the tunnel, no date that one could point to and say, “Yes, I’ll be back home at this time; I’ll be out of danger if I can last just a few more months.” And no one, not even Lee, could escape the effect that this had on the subconscious.

  Lee shook his head to open his drooping eyes. He blinked a few times and then stepped over behind the desk to where they had installed the base station for their radios. The base station and all the digital repeaters that Lee and his team had installed around the Camp Ryder Hub were fed from small but powerful solar panels.

  He changed the channel on the base station to a prearranged frequency, used for the Coordinators to communicate with each other. Captain Mitchell had easily made contact with the others because he still had use of the secure connections in his original bunker. Establishing contact with the other Coordinators had become a problem for Lee when his original bunker had been buried underneath the burning ruins of his house.

  Lee picked up the handset and made the same transmission he always made: “This is Captain Lee Harden, Project Hometown, North Carolina, to any other Coordinator who can copy this transmission… please respond.”

  He released the transmit button and sat on the desk and stared at the radio. It hissed and crackled a bit after he ended his transmission, and then became silent. He sat and waited for the radio to speak up and perhaps catch something from another Coordinator, some stray radio wave bouncing across the atmosphere.

  As he stared at the silent box, everything around him grew gray and monochromatic as his eyes lost focus and his mind slipped into a haze of sleepiness. He felt his head falling forward and jerked awake, and then tried to shake the sleep away, but the wakefulness would only last for another minute or so.

  A rap on the doorframe caused him to turn.

  Julia entered, holding a bowl and a spoon. It was laden with a stew that Marie had prepared and tendrils of steam lifted off of it. She walked over to the desk where Lee sat, placed the bowl next to him, and stuck the spoon in it.

  “Brought you some dinner.”

  Lee smiled. “Thank you.”

  She stepped back and waited.

  “Just give me a few minutes…”

  “You need to eat,” she said sternly.

  “I will.”

  “Eat.”

  “Okay. You win. I’ll eat.”

  “What’s the matter? You don’t like my sister’s food?”

  Lee took the bowl and shoveled a spoonful in his mouth. “I love your sister’s food.” He took another mouthful without swallowing the first so that his cheeks bulged out with it. He mumbled around the food, “See? Love it.”

  She smiled and sat beside him on the desk. She motioned to the bedroll. “You sleeping up here tonight?”

  Lee nodded while he ate. The stew was actually very good. He really would have gone down and gotten himself some in a little bit… or fallen asleep. The hot food took the edge off his hunger and relaxed him even more, so that his whole body felt warm and heavy.
r />   “Trouble in paradise?” she asked.

  Lee looked at her, confused for a moment, then realized she was speaking about Angela. He shook his head and looked back to his bowl. “No, it’s not like that with us.”

  “Hmm.” She pondered this for a moment. “What is it, then?”

  Lee shrugged. “I dunno. Friends, maybe?”

  “More than that,” she said quietly.

  “Yeah. More than that.” He finished his bowl in silence, and then felt the need to clarify. “But never… you know…”

  “Really?”

  “No.”

  “I would’ve thought so.”

  “Nope.”

  “Weird.”

  He bobbled his head. “It’s good.”

  “So you’re sleeping up here because…?”

  “Oh.” Lee set the bowl down on the desk. “I don’t want to wake up her and Sam and Abby at night. From the dreams.”

  “Yeah.”

  Lee looked at Julia as she stared at the ground absently. “How are they for you?” he asked.

  “I hate going to sleep at night. Especially by myself.”

  “I thought you were staying with Marie?”

  Julia smiled. “Well, Marie’s been staying with Harmon.”

  Really? Lee thought. Good for Harmon.

  It was getting late and Lee decided it was time to roll out the bed. The talk of going to sleep was doing him in.

  “You can sleep up here with me if you like.” The words came out before Lee’s tired mind could really put much effort into vetting them. Immediately after the last word left his mouth his mind began to race. He hadn’t meant it quite like it had sounded. When they were out beyond the wire, they all slept together anyway, and it didn’t seem odd to him in that moment to offer it up.

  “What I meant was…” He tried to correct himself.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Lee glanced at her. “Okay.”

  “I just don’t wanna sleep alone,” she said quietly.

  “Yeah. Me neither.”

  “You have any extra blankets?”

  “Yes.”

  Before rolling out his bed, he switched the radio back to the main channel and took the lantern from the desk. Then he pulled the extra blankets from his pack and gave them to Julia. He extended his own bedroll and laid the blankets across, and Julia situated herself to his left. In an odd and yet somehow comfortable silence, they lay down on the bedroll, not touching, but close enough if one were to reach out. Lee turned off the LED lantern that glowed brightly and then, exhausted and secure in the comfort of human company, fell asleep almost instantly.

  * * *

  He was with his father in this dream, as he was in many other dreams of late. A presence that imparted quiet encouragement in the face of a deep and paralyzing dread that Lee could only feel when he was asleep, lost in the twists and turns of his subconsciousness. Gene Harden had always been a quiet man, and in these dreams he never spoke a word.

  They were on the front porch of a house that Lee had never lived in, some house drawn from memories of his father’s old western movies. They stared out at a barren, windswept landscape and it filled Lee’s soul with an empty fear, like the howling of wind in a canyon. When he looked to his right, he could see his father, as young as he’d looked when Lee was a boy, perhaps seven or eight years old, and his father in his late thirties. His father stared out at the wasteland before them and he smiled and nodded.

  Lee turned away from the scene, hoping to escape into the house, but instead found himself in Lillington or some poor facsimile of it, manufactured from disjointed bits and pieces from his subconsciousness. He was standing outside, in the middle of the street, and all around him were the corpses of the dead infected he had killed. Across from him he could see Father Jim, and the man wept violently and beat at his chest.

  “What’s wrong?” Lee asked.

  And Father Jim gestured all around them, at the bodies that littered the streets, and his tears ran bitter down his face. “Where are the females, Lee? Where are all the females?”

  Lee looked down at the bodies, pale flesh smeared with dirt and dried blood and shit. All of them were naked, and they were all females, and they all bore Lee’s old girlfriend Deana’s face, in all the different grotesque attitudes of death. In some of them Deana’s tongue lolled out, in others her eyes were open, gazing at the sky or at some invisible fixed point beyond reckoning. In the dream, the sight of Deana’s face had very little effect on him. It was a face from another life, another time.

  Someone he could barely remember.

  He tried to comfort Jim by pointing to all the dead bodies. “No, Jim! We got ’em all! They’re right here!”

  But Jim was inconsolable, and he only continued to ask, “Where are all the females?”

  * * *

  “Lee.”

  He opened his eyes to darkness, staring at the ceiling above his head.

  “Lee.”

  He leaned forward and could see the dark shape of Julia, wrapped in a blanket and standing at the door to the office. The Camp Ryder building had grown cold in the night and Lee could see her breath, fogging in the black air. Julia looked at him and made a little waving motion from underneath her blanket.

  “There’s someone at the gate,” she whispered.

  Lee leaned up onto his elbows, sweeping a layer of dust from his slumbering mind and trying to remind himself why he should care if someone was at the gate. The sound of it was faint when he heard it. Someone was yelling outside, and another was raising his voice. Two men in disagreement.

  Lee threw his blanket off of himself and the cold air bit at him mercilessly. He grabbed his jacket and his rifle and fumbled them on as he headed for the door. Julia had dropped her blanket and was donning her jacket as well. Lee thought about telling her to stay put, but there really was no purpose to it. Besides, they might need a medic.

  He took the metal stairs as quietly as he could, not wanting to wake anyone sleeping inside the building, but the sounds of the disturbance outside were already beginning to cause people to stir. In the small quarters constructed in the middle of the building, lanterns and flashlights were beginning to flicker and glow.

  “What time is it?” he asked Julia as she followed him.

  “Almost three.”

  Damn. Lee gritted his teeth. You can’t pay for a good night’s sleep nowadays.

  They reached the bottom of the steps, turned through the short hall to the front doors, and slipped out of the Camp Ryder building. From the elevated entryway, Lee could see clear to the gate. A flashlight illuminated a small bubble of existence there and it consisted of two men and the chain-link fence that divided them. All through the shantytown of Camp Ryder, more lights were coming on and people were poking their heads out of their little shacks, trying to see what the yelling was about.

  Lee began to run for the gate. Sleep and cold stiffened his joints now, particularly his left ankle, and he couldn’t hide his limp as he ran. Ahead of him, Lee could see that the sentry was stepping away from the gate, pointing his rifle at a man on the other side, some strange, bulky-looking bear-man, with wild eyes and a wiry beard stained with blood. The crazed man on the outside had his fingers woven through the chain link and he was shaking it and yelling.

  For a moment, Lee slowed his pace and raised his rifle, wondering why the sentry was not taking out this infected. Then he heard Julia’s voice huffing alongside him. “Is that the guy from the woods?”

  “What?” Lee asked, but then realized whom she was talking about. The man and the woman and the two children, with their blankets and coats draped heavy and thick over their shoulders. The ones Jim had tried to make contact with, but who had run away.

  The bear-man shook the gate again. “Get out here! I know you can help! You said. You said you could help! Get the fuck out here and help me, goddammit!”

  Lee stopped at the gate, rifle ported. “What the hell is this?”

 
; The man on the other side looked at Lee. “You were there! You were with that guy who said he would help! Where is he? It’s my wife and kids… we need help!”

  Lee leaned closer and hissed through his teeth. “Would you shut the fuck up? I’m going to help you, but you gotta be quiet!”

  The man lowered his voice. “Please…”

  Lee nodded to the sentry.

  “You sure?” The sentry looked shocked.

  Lee skewered him with a glare. “Yes, I’m sure. Open the damn gate.”

  The sentry hopped to, and Lee leveled his rifle at the strange man who stood outside the gate, wringing his hands and looking about nervously. “Put your hands up and don’t make any sudden movements. I’ll help you, but you need to cooperate with me first, or you’re not getting shit. Understand?”

  The man’s wild and desperate eyes locked onto Lee. Then he nodded and raised two dirty, bloodstained hands.

  Lee turned to Julia. Her matted blond hair was bulging out in odd directions and there were dark rings under her wide eyes. “Go grab the team and tell them to suit up. Better grab your medic pack too.”

  She nodded rapidly and ran for the Camp Ryder building.

  Lee turned and found that there was no longer a fence between him and the bear-man, and only about ten feet of open space separated them. The man’s arms were still raised up, but now his head had leaned back and his eyes were staring at the sky and they looked hopeless.

  “Are you listening to me?” Lee asked.

  The man didn’t look, but he said, “Yes.”

  Lee spoke slowly and clearly. “Kneel down, and put your hands on top of your head, interlacing your fingers.”

  The man complied, going to his knees with a sudden collapse, like a wounded beast.

  “Do not move; just answer my questions. Do you have any weapons?”

  “Crowbar,” the man said. “In my belt. Knife in my pocket. Look, man… we gotta hurry…”

  Lee made eye contact with the sentry and nodded. As the sentry moved toward the stranger, Lee spoke again. “The sentry is going to take your weapons. If you move, I will kill you. Do you understand?”