"The f.u.c.k took you so long?" Tomlin stressed.

Lee looked over his shoulder, back into the woods. "One of them woke up. I had to wait for it to go back to sleep."

Tomlin shook his head, wearing an expression like he'd just dodged a bullet. "Didn't you tell me how those hunters were preying on the other infected?"

"Yeah."

"I've noticed there hasn't been much infected activity in these woods the last few times I've been in here." He looked pointedly at Lee. "I bet I know why. And I sure as h.e.l.l don't like leaving those f.u.c.kers behind us. I don't like it one bit."

Lee agreed. "I don't like it either. You think of a better idea, you let me know."

Tomlin pointed them west again. "Let's just get ourselves back on track."

Lee stared at the dark compound through a thin curtain of tree branches. It seemed dark, like they'd journeyed to it only to find it abandoned, and it was a disquieting sensation. When Lee had been a child he'd had a recurring dream wherein he would leave his childhood house to complete some menial ch.o.r.e such as getting the mail, or walking the dog, and when he went back into the house, it would be empty and dark. All the furniture gone. Cobwebs in the corners.

He felt the same feeling now that he'd felt waking from that dream as a child. Like he'd been too late. Like he'd missed something terribly important. Like life and all of his loved ones had moved on without him and he was left there, alone.

But here, he could at least smell the smoke from the smoldering fires.

And he knew that people were here.

They didn't speak this close to the fence. The fortifications that had been welded and tied and strapped and chained to the fence to create more of a barricade for an attacking force, also blocked large portions of their view, so that they could never be sure where the guards that patrolled the fence line were, and whether they were close enough to hear a slight whisper.

Tomlin motioned for Lee to stay where he was, and then crept forward, crawling along the ground on his hands and feet, like a bear crawl, but lower. Watching him Lee thought it looked less like a bear and more like a lizard.

Tomlin reached the fence and dislodged a large white stone-a piece of quartz, perhaps-that had sunk into the dirt. It was a little smaller than Tomlin's own head and he simply propped it up with one hand while the other pulled out the note and placed it under the rock. The rock was close enough to an open section of the fortifications, and in a section of fencing where the bottom of the chain links hung a few inches off the ground, so that someone on the other side could quickly reach through and access the stone.

He reseated the stone, then crawled back into the bush.

Then the two of them sat and waited.

Movement at the fence. Lee and Tomlin both hunched into the brush around them. A shadow pa.s.sed between the gaps in the fortifications. Moving slowly, relaxed. As it came abreast of them, Lee could see that it was one of the sentries, though he did not recognize the face. It was an average sized man with longish hair. What appeared to be an M1A rifle held loosely across his chest.

Could use one of those, Lee thought as he watched the sentry pa.s.s.

There was a certain thrill to it. Something that appealed to the predatory nature in men in general, and soldiers in particular. Something about lying silently in the trees and watching someone who didn't know they were being watched. Knowing that you had the drop on them.

The sentry pa.s.sed on, down the side of the fence to the back corner where he stayed for a moment, taking a noisy p.i.s.s through the chain link, and then continued on.

The moment that he was out of sight, they heard they quiet thump of light footfalls in the compacted dirt of the Camp Ryder grounds. Another shadow appeared at the gap where the rock was, this one shorter, a tangled head of dark hair. Lee felt like a castaway seeing a ship on the horizon. The need to bound through the brush and scream and yell and be seen was almost overwhelming.

He didn't scream or yell, but he did suddenly move forward. Tomlin reached out to try to stop him, but he had already moved out of arm's reach. Lee moved as quietly as he could, but still the woman's curly head of hair snapped up in his direction as he approached. She was bent, reaching under the fence and pulling the note out from under the rock, but seeing the dark shape of movement coming at her through the woods, she retracted her hand and took a step back, the note clutched between her fingers.

"Marie!" Lee said, holding out a hand.

She froze in place, one step away from the fence.

Lee reached the fence, stuck his finger through the wire and gripped it like he might try to climb over. "Marie, it's me! It's Captain Harden!"

It seemed to physically rock Marie. Her whole body shook like she'd taken a sudden body blow. She bent slightly at the waist, then her hands came to her mouth. She took a step forward, and the two of them could see each other's faces. "Holy s.h.i.t, Lee..."

"Hey," Lee stretched out his fingers and she reached out to grasp them through the fence, squeezing them fiercely so that they ached. "I'm here."

She stared at him with confusion. "We thought you were dead! We didn't know what happened to you...where the f.u.c.k have you been?"

Lee couldn't help himself from smiling at her. "I've been trying to get back here! Look, we don't have much time. I'm alive. You just let everyone know that I'm alive, and I'm right here, and we're gonna take this s.h.i.t back. Okay?"

Marie nodded furiously. "Okay."

"You tell them that for me."

"I will."

"Marie?" Lee squeezed her hands, his face intense. "Can you be ready at midnight tomorrow? Twenty-four hours from now? Can you have your people ready?"

"Uh..." Marie's heart felt like it was seizing up. "Yes. Yes. We'll be ready. For what? What are we going to do?"

"It's in the note we left for you," he said. "Twelve o'clock midnight, Marie. You've got to pull through for this. We have to work together, or a lot of people are gonna get hurt. If we can coordinate this, and do it quickly and decisively, then less people are going to die."

She nodded fiercely. "Where will you be? If something goes wrong?"

"We're just outside of Lillington," Lee glanced around as he said it. "On 421, just before the turn for OP Lillington. If you get that close, they'll be able to see you and they'll come for you, okay?"

"Alright."

Then Lee pulled his hands away from the fence and disappeared back into the brush with a rustle of leaves and branches. She watched him fade into the shadows like an apparition, left her wondering if she had dreamed the whole thing up, but she knew she was awake because there was terror in her chest too. The certainty of coming bloodshed.

She gathered herself and turned away from the fence, scanned left, then right. Could see no one. No sentries. No busybodies wondering what others were doing at midnight. She shoved the note she'd retrieved from under the rock into her jacket pocket and ran away from the fence.

Angela lay awake because it was midnight.

Somehow, miraculously, her body had developed a keen alarm clock that managed to rip her from a full sleep, simply because she knew it was midnight. How her body knew this was a mystery-she hadn't looked at a clock in over a month. Time of day was estimated by how many hand-widths the sun hovered over the horizon, and the night just became a timeless black swamp. Much more difficult to determine the time during the night, which required knowledge of constellations or moon phases.

But it was midnight now.

Because she was awake.

She lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling of her shanty, stomach in knots. It was colder than usual, and even with three blankets pulled up to her chin, she was still chilly. She should have had Sam and Abby snuggle under the covers with her, but they were fast asleep, clinging to each other in a large sleeping bag and she chose not to disturb them.

Her eyes remained open for a time and she began to wonder if the note had been pa.s.sed, or perhaps her finely-tuned sense of time was at fault and it was not as close to midnight as she thought-or far pa.s.sed and Marie was simply waiting until morning to speak to her about the note.

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 appet.i.te. His brain nauseated itself with repet.i.tion. 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 s.h.i.t. He was just a simple country boy, born and raised in Tennessee, who got a wild hare up his a.s.s 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 s.h.i.t 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 f.u.c.king 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 pa.s.sage 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 gra.s.ses 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 f.u.c.k do you want?"

The footfalls stormed up behind him, then stepped around, forcing eye-contact. Jim stood there, gla.s.ses 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 f.u.c.kin' 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 f.u.c.k 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. .h.i.tting their mark. He dropped the bottle and balled his fists. "I ain't too drunk to beat your motherf.u.c.kin' a.s.s, Jim."