Torri approached them, and the three tightened the edge of their group, as though their conversation were confidential.

"You guys need help going down there?" Torri asked.

Harper looked over her shoulder. "Yeah. I was gonna ask Mike..."

"I'll go with you," Torri said quickly.

Julia ducked her head a bit to find Torri's gaze. "What's wrong with him?"

Torri glanced over at her husband quickly, then down at her shoes, her pretty features clouded with concern. "I don't know. He's been like this ever since he shot that guy."

Harper rubbed his neck. "He knows it wasn't his fault, right?"

Torri just shrugged. "You said it. I said it. He's gotta know...he didn't have a choice!" she took a shaky breath, blew it out and straightened, as though gathering herself up. "He's just been out of it. He used to get like this sometimes. Back then. Stress, I guess. He'd get all quiet, but he'd just go on a fishing trip or backpacking or something and he'd be okay." She smiled wanly. "Now..."

Harper put a hand on her shoulder and began to slowly move towards their Humvee, finishing her sentence in his mind: Now there's no peaceful place. You can't escape it. You live in it non-stop.

"Just keep talking to him," Harper said gently. "We can't have him checked out like this. But right now we need to go check those bodies, so let's get going and not make a big deal out of this." He pointed Torri towards the convoy. "See if you can't find Gray and tell him to get his a.s.s in the turret."

Harper and Julia walked quickly to their Humvee. When they had settled in and closed the doors, Harper checked the side view mirror, keeping an eye on Torri as she flagged down Gray. The two engaged in a brief exchange that appeared silent in the reflection of the mirror. It involved much waving and hand-pointing and after a moment, the two of them walked towards the Humvee, side by side. Too far away to hear anything that was said inside.

Still, Harper spoke quietly. "We haven't killed enough people yet?"

Julia gave him a questioning look.

Harper rubbed the top of his bald head. "How many people you think Mike's killed since this s.h.i.t happened? Even if you don't include the infected, he's probably still shot at least a half dozen or so." His hand fell to his knee with a slap. "And he chooses now to blank out on us? He's so f.u.c.king torn up about this one guy that he shot? Makes no f.u.c.king sense."

Julia disengaged the emergency brake and shifted into drive. "If I've learned one thing from all of this s.h.i.t, it's that everyone's got a different way of handling what's going on. You just have to...let them work it out."

Harper growled. "He's not working it out. He's just f.u.c.king standing there."

"Harper..." Julia had a warning tone.

Torri and Gray reached the Humvee and climbed in, Torri taking the seat directly behind Harper, and Gray making tired grunts and groans as he sat himself on the canva.s.s strap of the turret that served as his seat. He propped his foot up on the radio, and Harper looked down at the dirty brown boots and thought of how Lee would always cuss at LaRouche for doing the same thing.

"It's a radio, not a footstool," Lee would gripe.

Or he would just elbow them off.

But Gray didn't seem like the type to appreciate that.

Harper looked forward again as the Humvee started moving out of the parking lot, the rest of the crews beginning to find their ways back to their vehicles. He wondered how LaRouche and Lee were doing at the moment. What they were doing. Were they fighting? Were they in danger? How close was LaRouche to reaching the Roanoke River? And had Lee found the man he thought was out to kill him?

They rumbled up onto the asphalt, and Julia cranked the wheel to the right. She looked both ways out of sheer habit. There would be no other cars to watch out for. No pedestrians to walk in front of them. Harper remembered an abandoned shopping center where he took that 1972 C10 to do burnouts, figure eights, and generally abuse it and waste gas. He could do anything he wanted in that parking lot, because there was never anyone else there.

The whole world was like that now.

Empty. Overgrown. Run down.

The road dipped down. Ahead of them, the valley, and then a tiny bridge spanning over a creek, and then the steep rise to the hillcrest on the other side. The last one that Julia had shot lay in the center of the road, just a pale blob in the middle of all that charcoal gray cement with the double-yellow lines bisecting it like it was some strange, fleshy bead suspended on a wire. A dark ribbon ran out of it, heading downhill and towards the shoulder, and as they descended into the valley, the ribbon caught the sun and shimmered brilliantly for a moment, like the dead thing bled quicksilver.

They crossed the small bridge, saw the slow-moving muddy water below them. Then they were up the other side and pulling to a stop. Julia left it running, out of gear with the emergency brake on. Harper opened his door, stepped out. The wind brought the scent of the infected to him, only slightly diluted. He wrinkled his nose, let the door of the Humvee swing closed behind him as he approached the first body. The wind buffeted him, sounded like roaring water for a moment.

He and Julia reached the first body, inspected it from a distance of about five or six feet away before going any closer. It was a male. Young. High school or college, maybe. Scraggly hair. Just the barest beginnings of a beard. Hairless torso. Two big slashes across its abdomen that looked swollen and angry. A crushed right arm that looked gangrenous. A big hole where its heart used to be.

Harper didn't know where the other injuries had come from-fighting with other infected, perhaps?-but he knew that it was Julia's bullet that had turned its heart to pulp, and the thing was as dead as a bullet could make him.

Harper wanted to make a comment on the quality of the shot, but wasn't sure how Julia would take it, so he decided to leave it be.

Julia made a help yourself gesture towards the body.

Harper sighed. "Suppose it is my turn."

He stepped up to the body, knelt down.

The noisy wind died down.

But somehow the noise continued.

In fact, it seemed louder now than it had before.

Harper stopped with his hand halfway outstretched towards the body. He leaned back a bit, looked up the hill, then down the hill to the muddy creek at the bottom. It was a noise like a strong wind tearing through a forest, or perhaps it was indeed rushing water, but the creek at the bottom was slow and small. This was a sound more like white water.

"What?" Julia looked around.

"You hear that?"

She listened. "Sounds like a waterfall."

"Yeah." Harper withdrew his hand.

Julia regarded him. "You gonna search that guy, or do I hafta do it again?"

Harper rose up, his head turning this way and that, like a radar dish scanning. Triangulating. He faced up the road, almost positive that was where the sound was coming from. "No. Let's get back in the Humvee."

Julia snorted, a smile on her face like Harper was playing some stupid joke. But the smile cracked and fell away like dried and brittle plaster, and underneath was a look of dread. She knew when Harper was serious. And he was serious now.

They turned back to the Humvee. The heels of their boots. .h.i.t the concrete with a little more vigor than usual. Gray eyed them from the turret, and Torri stood beside the vehicle, both their faces bearing the same question that Julia had just asked.

Harper waved at them. "Get back in the truck."

"What?" Torri called back to him.

From behind them-yes, definitely coming from behind them-the noise had grown. It wasn't a waterfall, or a strong wind. It was a rumble in the ground that tingled their feet. A vibration in the air that pressed at their ears. Like a tornado was bearing down on them.

Or a freight train.

Harper yelled this time. "Get back in the f.u.c.king truck!"

He realized he was running.

The Humvee was twenty feet away now, and Gray looked pa.s.sed him, up the hill, and his eyes had gone wide and his mouth had dropped open. Harper slammed into his door, ripped it open like he planned to remove it from its hinges, and only then did he look back towards the top of the hill.

The first few crested the hill at a dead sprint. Behind them, like a tidal wave reaching its breaking point, hundreds more swallowed the hilltop, saw the Humvee, the people in it, and then they pitched into a headlong, downhill run.

CHAPTER 20: STRAGGLER.

The interior of the Humvee was chaos.

Julia slammed the thing into gear and hit the gas, whipping it into a tight left-hand turn before Harper could even close the door behind him. The centrifugal force almost pitched him out of the vehicle. Julia's mouth moved rapidly, but Harper couldn't hear what she said. The turret blasted, the bra.s.s. .h.i.tting the roof, clanking down into the vehicle. Torri leaned out the window, her rifle stabbing at the air with spits of fire and smoke.

Harper could hear none of this. The only thing registering in his ears was a strange, basal tone like a rolling timpani drum, and it drowned everything else out. He just held on, trying not to fall out of the vehicle. The blur of pavement threatening to chew him up if he let go. His eyes rose to the hilltop again and all he could think was there's so f.u.c.king many of them!

The Humvee straightened. He pulled back and shut the door.

The guns still blazed.

"Cut it out!" Harper bellowed, elbowing Gray in the legs. "There's too many!"

Behind him, he could hear Torri cursing and breathing, the clatter of metal on metal as she dropped her empty magazine and inserted a new one.

Julia shouted over the roaring engine. "We need some distance, Harper!"

Harper lunged at the radio handset, keying it before he even brought it out of the cradle. "Everyone turn around and get up the road!" he transmitted. "Turn around and get up the road now!"

Gray leaned down into the cabin. "Holy f.u.c.k! That's a lot of crazies!"

"What do we do?" Torri yelped.

The Humvee hit the bridge again, clattered over it. Harper glanced in the side view mirror, trying to size up the horde spilling over the top of that hill, but there didn't seem to be an end to them. They just kept coming and coming. At least a thousand. Maybe more.

The radio barked at him: "Harper! What's going on?"

Harper didn't recognize the voice when it yelled. He keyed the mic back. "Lot of infected comin' our way. We're going back up the street."

"Where are we going?" The radio asked.

Harper wasn't able to force himself to sound calm and collected. "We're f.u.c.king going someplace else! If everyone would shut the f.u.c.k up I might be able to figure out where!"

Julia pointed up the road. "There was an industrial park a few miles from here."

Harper looked at her, released the microphone b.u.t.ton. "What?"

"We pa.s.sed it a few miles back. Big industrial park." She pointed her thumb backwards. "If we break line of sight, they'll slow down a bit. We can hide out in one of the buildings, or at least off the road so they don't see us. Maybe they'll pa.s.s by."

"f.u.c.k." Harper rubbed his head, suddenly overcome by the gravity of the situation. This was the biggest horde he'd seen since they'd cleared Smithfield, and they'd been contained in the city. He'd never seen a horde out roaming the countryside like this. He almost felt responsible to stop them before they railroaded some innocent group of survivors.

But what could they do? They didn't have the resources to make an effective stand. And they didn't have the time to hunt the horde, thinning it out over the course of a week like a herd of bison. He could no more stop it than he could stop the pa.s.sage of a hurricane bound for them. Their only option would be to sit it out, wait for it to pa.s.s, and hope others in the way got lucky.

Camp Ryder, he thought. What if they follow the highway all the way back to Camp Ryder?

Unlikely.

But the thought still made his guts clench, cold and fiery all at once.

"Fine," he waved up the road. "Go for it."

The Humvee rolled past the shopping center on the left, the convoy pulling out into the roadway behind them, everyone hanging out windows and turrets and trying to get a look at the horde, pointing and yelling with wide open eyes and mouths like they were witnessing some seismic event, some crack in the earth's crust that was racing towards them.

Torri was suddenly slapping the back of Harper's seat. "Mike! Mike!"

Harper jerked away from her, but looked out the left side of the vehicle as they pa.s.sed by the shopping center. He wasn't sure what he was looking for, but he a.s.sumed it had something to do with Mike. "What? What's wrong?"

Torri was on the verge of hysteria. "Mike! They forgot Mike!"

They were too far pa.s.sed the shopping center now. Harper couldn't see what she was talking about, only the snake of green and tan vehicles lumbering up and out of the parking lot behind them, diesel fumes pluming out of their pipes as their engines worked in overdrive. "s.h.i.t! Are you sure?"

Torri was sure enough that she seemed on the verge of throwing herself out of the moving vehicle, twisting every which way in a panic, hands going to the door as though she might open it at any moment. "Go back! Go back!"

"f.u.c.k! Julia, spin us around." Then he grabbed up the radio again and transmitted. "Everyone else keep going to the industrial..." he groaned, trying to keep himself upright as Julia chirped tires cutting a tight U-turn. "...the industrial park a few miles up. Everyone just keep going."

The front end of the Humvee lifted up as Julia accelerated back towards the shopping center. The string of their convoy ripped pa.s.sed them, the wind from their bulks shoving the Humvee around, the drivers and their pa.s.sengers staring at Harper's Humvee as though they were insane to go back.

Up ahead, Harper could see a figure that seemed to be running after the convoy, and it stopped in the middle of the road, stutter stepped with anxiety, then turned and looked northward. Then the figure bolted back towards the shopping center.

"That's Mike!" Torri cried. "That's him!"

"Where the f.u.c.k's he going?" Julia yelled. "Can't he see us coming back for him?"

"C'mon, Mike," Harper growled to no one in particular. "Don't make us f.u.c.king chase you."

Julia honked the horn, trying to get his attention, but either he couldn't hear it, or didn't care. The figure disappeared back into the parking lot. "He's gonna try to hide, dammit."

Harper leaned forward in his seat. "Get in there, Julia!"

She hit the parking lot, taking the curb and screeching tires. Out the driver's side, Harper could see down the dip in the road, and the wall of bodies racing towards them, close enough to see the insanity in their eyes, their gnashing teeth, their clawed fingers. The roar of them overpowered the noise of the engines, the thousands of them screeching madly, filled with some insatiable hunger.

Torri leaned between Harper and Julia's seats, pointing out the windshield. "There! There! Mike!" she yelled, as though he could hear her.

Straight ahead of them, Mike ran for one of the closed businesses.

The Humvee shuddered violently and this time Harper could definitely hear the M2 thundering over their heads, the concussion of each gunshot seeming like a physical thing, slapping the roof of the vehicle.