Wilson shrugged. "Well...I'm glad."

LaRouche snorted. "Go ahead and say it."

"What?" Wilson laughed. "Say what?"

"You were right. Can't contract it like that."

Wilson held up a staying hand. "Now hold on. I never said you couldn't contract it like that. I'm sure if you get enough infected blood in your mouth, you can get the plague. But based on what the guy from Virginia said, that's the least likely method of infection." Wilson clapped a hand on LaRouche's shoulder. "But you never know. I'm glad you're in the clear. And some people might say that you overreacted, but I'd like to see how they'd act if they got infected blood in their mouth."

LaRouche smiled, a rare expression. "Thanks, buddy."

Wilson looked behind him at the column of vehicles. They were all sitting at idle. The faces of LaRouche's crew could be seen behind the obscuring reflections of the windshields. Off to the side, the people of Parker's Place stood around and watched. The new owners of the rifles stood up front, weapons held across their chest proudly. Father Jim was the last to leave, still shaking hands with people.

"Think everyone's ready," Wilson hefted his rifle and shifted under the weight of his rig.

LaRouche opened his door and slid in. Joel was already up in the turret, and as Wilson crossed in front of the Humvee to take the driver's seat, the door behind LaRouche opened up and Father Jim climbed in with a grunt and a groan.

LaRouche cleared his throat. "Ya'll good back there?"

Joel mumbled something unintelligible from up top.

Father Jim reached through the narrow spot between LaRouche's seat and the side of the Humvee and gave LaRouche a friendly squeeze of the shoulder. It took LaRouche by surprise a bit, forced down some of the latent hostility he'd been feeling towards the other man.

"Good to go," Jim said. "Let's get on with this."

LaRouche watched the people from Parker's Place shrink in the side view mirror as they rolled out in a wide circle and retreated down the narrow dirt road they'd come from. Just before rounding a bend towards the main road, he could see the father and the little girl-Jackson and Tessa-standing there watching them leave. The little girl in her dirty old dress. A man-sized coat draped over her shoulders like a blanket. One skinny, stick of an arm raised up and waving to them.

LaRouche didn't wave back. He faced forward. Let a slow breath out of his nose and hugged his rifle closer to him. "Bulls.h.i.t," he mumbled, inaudible to anyone else in the rumbling vehicle as they jostled over the pot-holed road, most of the gravel worn away and now just dirt and mud.

They exited out onto paved road. Rolling pasture and cropland stretched out to either side, lines of trees delineating one property from another, the stands looking like short hedgerows in the distance. A defunct tractor standing in the middle of a half-harvested field of hay, the giant rolled bales at intervals behind it, marking its progress. The hay turned from golden to a grayish brown, the perfect circular form rotted and drooping, like it was in the process of melting into the earth.

They approached a junction marked 64.

"Make a right," LaRouche said.

Wilson made the right without stopping and the rest of the convoy followed.

"Gonna stay on this for a while." LaRouche shifted in his seat as though preparing for a long journey. "It's rural most of the way, so we shouldn't hit too many snags."

The scenery didn't change.

A few vehicles on the road, but most of them were far enough towards the shoulder, and spa.r.s.e enough that they were able to dodge around them and didn't have to stop to push cars out of the way. With a sigh, LaRouche dropped his window, feeling the cold immediately, as it sucked the body heat off of him. He rested the muzzle of his rifle in the open window and stared out. Behind him, he could hear Jim's window drop as he followed suit.

LaRouche watched the world fly by past the muzzle of his rifle, a familiar view. A monotonous view. Melancholy in its compulsiveness. Obsessive caution that forced you to point a weapon at the world when the softer part of you only wanted to look at it and for once simply appreciate the sunrise lighting up the countryside, or the low fog that clung to where the trees met the fields. But instead you only scanned, scanned, scanned for threats.

He stared at three figures that stood in the middle of a field. Human. Not sane, he didn't think. They huddled over something that had fallen in the field, bending over it and feeding, then standing up as the sound of the convoy reached them. The three figures turned towards the road and followed them with the same blank sense of curiosity that any predatory animal gives a human in a vehicle. LaRouche stared back at them with an empty sense of apprehension, knowing that even if they ran after them, they would never reach them. Just before they pa.s.sed out of sight, one of them bent back down to its meal.

LaRouche eyed the rising sun, giving a yellowed, aged look to everything. Late to bed? He wondered about the infected out in the field. Or "hunters", like we saw in Sanford?

The convoy trundled on. The gentle rocking motion, the rumble of the vehicles moving at a steady 35-40 miles per hour, made his eyes droop with all the sleep that his spring-loaded mind had kept away the night before. He drifted off, snapped awake, back and forth like that for a time, unsure how much time pa.s.sed because one mile of eastern Carolina farmland looked exactly like the next.

It was the braking that jerked him awake again. The vehicle coming to a stop, and LaRouche's head tipping forward, almost smacking into the b.u.t.tstock of his rifle before he snapped alert again. The simple motion of the vehicle slowing set his heart racing on ahead.

"What happened?" he mumbled, sucking in a bit of drool that threatened to spill over his lip.

Wilson sat erect in his seat, neck craned out, eyes narrowed. "Straight ahead," he pointed.

LaRouche saw it, maybe a few hundred yards ahead of them. They came out of a turn through some forested area, and this was the first straightaway. There ahead of them were two abandoned cars pushed together, their noses touching at the center line, bodies angled so that they formed an arrow pointing at LaRouche.

"You got it, Joel?" LaRouche yelled up.

"Yeah I got it." Joel's boots fidgeted nervously on the radio.

Jim was between Joel's legs and LaRouche, thrusting a finger out. "You see that? You see that guy right there?"

LaRouche squinted, saw a form walking upright between the cars.

Staggering, actually.

A man. Shirtless. His chest a b.l.o.o.d.y mess.

Infected, LaRouche thought instantly.

But the man looked like he was bound at the wrists, his hands secured behind his back.

"Holy s.h.i.t," Wilson's face drooped. Some mix of astonishment and dismay. "Is that Nick?"

CHAPTER 29: ONE SHOT.

No.

LaRouche immediately rejected it. Nick had gone back to Camp Ryder. Nick had gone back to be with his family. To make sure that they were safe. To make sure that it wasn't just radio problems that kept them from making contact. Nick had left days ago. There was no way he could be here now.

He thought it, but he didn't truly believe it.

He believed his eyes, which clearly saw the man. Knew him less from his face, which distance and blood obscured, but from the lankiness of his form, the way his shoulders sat high like he held them in a permanent shrug.

Nick, you stupid sonofab.i.t.c.h...

"Cover me," LaRouche spit out.

Wilson growled something, but didn't protest-knew better than to argue with LaRouche on things like this, and the other man was already out the door. Instead he turned to the backseat and looked at Father Jim. "f.u.c.kin' go with him!"

Jim shoved his way out, gritting his teeth.

In the turret, Joel's legs danced about. "Who is it? Did you say it was Nick?"

In the street, LaRouche had his rifle up. He sighted in on Nick as the two men approached each other, Nick moving with the look of someone half dead, bleeding from his head and chest, his eyes blank with pain and exhaustion, his mouth hanging open like a dead fish. LaRouche kept moving, slow and controlled, heel-to-toe, his rifle first on Nick, but then scanning, scanning to either side, scanning into the woods and behind the two cars that blocked the roadway ahead.

Somebody's out there, he knew.

"Nick," LaRouche called out as they drew within twenty yards or so of each other. "Stop right there! Stop where you are!"

Nick didn't stop coming. He opened his mouth and a pitiful sound came out of him: "Sarge..."

"f.u.c.kin' stop!" LaRouche bellowed, putting his rifle back on the man. "Stop walking!"

Nick seemed to register the word, his feet stuttered to a stop. His whole form drooped.

LaRouche didn't know why, but he thought, He's a suicide bomber. He's gonna blow up the convoy. He could clearly see the man wasn't strapped-at least not in the front. But he couldn't see his hands. Couldn't see whether they held a grenade, or some other explosive device. He really had no justification for this feeling, didn't know who would have captured Nick and put a bomb on him in the first place.

The Followers?

"Please," Nick croaked.

"Don't come any closer!" LaRouche shouted. "Turn around and face away from me!"

"Please..."

"f.u.c.kin' do it or I'll shoot you right now!"

A warning tone from Jim: "Sarge..."

LaRouche turned his head to the right to project his words at Jim, but kept his eyes on Nick. "Shut the f.u.c.k up, Jim! Either help me out or get the f.u.c.k back in the truck!" He re-faced Nick. "I said. Turn. The f.u.c.k. Around!"

Nick's head lolled. He turned, lazily, back the way he had come. LaRouche squinted to see over his rifle's sight post, could see Nick's hands tied up with some sort of brown rope. The fingers and palms were nearly purple from loss of blood flow.

LaRouche moved forward again, closing the twenty yards at a steady pace, lowering his rifle just slightly as he came within arm's reach of the man. "Turn around," he commanded.

Nick turned. His face was a b.l.o.o.d.y mess of abrasions and purple and yellow bruising. Brown flecks of dried blood still clung to his upper lip and cheek, and crusted the insides of his nostrils. His right eye was swollen shut, the skin stretched tight. But it was not his battered face that made LaRouche's jaw drop, his heart plummet. It was Nick's chest.

"Oh, G.o.d..." Jim muttered.

Words. Words had been carved into Nick's chest, the red meat almost invisible behind the red blood that still poured out of the wounds and slaked his abdomen. But here, up close and personal, where you could see the texture and the glistening, twitching muscle fibers, the writing was clear.

GO BACK OR DIE.

LaRouche looked up, stared into Nick's one good eye.

Nothing there but defeat.

Nick closed his eyes, as though he didn't want LaRouche to see what was there. "Please...you should go back."

"What?" LaRouche had nothing else to say.

Nick's voice raised a bit. "You should go back and tell the others! Tell them not to..."

Nick's chest burst.

A thunderous rifle report.

Nick's eyes rolled up, and his body pitched forward.

Brutal pain exploded through LaRouche's left arm. He twitched backward, dodging Nick's falling body as it landed face-first in front of him. Tried to bring his rifle up, but his arm wouldn't cooperate. Jim yelled, reaching down for Nick, getting on his knees and trying to plug the hole in the man's chest that spewed out onto the concrete.

LaRouche looked at his arm, half-expecting it to be hanging by a thread of skin or gristle, but there was only a dark hole in his jacket, just above his elbow, the fabric clinging to his arm and blooming with a glistening blackness. In one movement he let his rifle drop to his chest and swept up his pistol as he backpedaled, instinctively cradling his injured arm to his chest.

"Jim! Let's f.u.c.king go!"

Jim looked back at him, then turned and faced the far woodline, where the shot had come from. He looped an arm through Nick's bound hands, turning them into a yoke for dragging, and began to try to pull the man behind him. He looked up at LaRouche, as though asking for help.

LaRouche took one glance at Nick. Head hanging, tongue bulging out. Blood pouring from his mouth and from the wound in his chest. Enough blood that it streamed in rivulets towards the shoulder of the road. Too much blood.

"He's f.u.c.king dead!" LaRouche screamed at Jim. "Leave him!"

Then he summoned every ounce of self-control, forcing himself not to turn and run despite every instinct to do so. Because no matter how much Jim had begun to grate on him, no matter how much Jim trying to drag that dead body and looking at LaRouche like he was wrong for leaving it behind, no matter how much that made him want to throttle the ex-priest, he wasn't going to turn and run and leave Jim on the road by himself.

So, with his one good arm he raised the pistol towards the woods, thinking, Whole h.e.l.l of a lotta f.u.c.kin' good a 9mm is gonna do me, and he spread his feet across the double-yellow, hoping to G.o.d that Jim got the picture before another shot punched LaRouche's heart right out of his chest.

Jim looked at LaRouche for a second more.

A second that felt much, much longer.

Then he finally did get the picture.

He released his grip on Nick's already-dead body and began sprinting for the vehicles. LaRouche held his ground, held it with a clenched jaw and a tensed body, almost closed his eyes, just antic.i.p.ating that next shot that would take him out. Jim ran past him, slapped him on the shoulder like it was a relay race and LaRouche broke for the vehicles, two steps behind.

The vehicles were already in the process of turning around. LaRouche's Humvee still sat stolidly in the road, Joel atop the turret with eyes gone wide. LaRouche exploded at him as he ran, waving his good arm manically behind them.

"f.u.c.king cover, Joel! f.u.c.king cover!" he yelled. "Light that motherf.u.c.ker up!"

Joel started to protest, and LaRouche was just sure he was going to say some asinine thing like, "I don't know where he is," but instead he snapped his mouth shut and opened up with the M2. Because it didn't matter where the shooter was. It mattered that they put some f.u.c.king rounds downrange.

They flew into the vehicle and Wilson already had it rolling before LaRouche's boots left the ground. The rest of the convoy spun their tires on the gravel shoulder, kicking up dust and bits of rock that pelted the windshield as they clambered to get back on the concrete and get out of there as fast as possible.

LaRouche breathed heavily, angrily. The air felt hot. Musty. Like there wasn't enough oxygen in it. He pressed himself out the window, looking behind them at the improvised roadblock as it pa.s.sed out of sight. He'd never seen the shooter. Could have been behind one of the cars. Could have been in the woods.

He tried to situate himself on his seat, relied too heavily on his left arm and cried out. He looked down at his jacket as Jim came through the center and Wilson took his eyes off the road for a moment to stare, frightened, at the blood that had now soaked LaRouche's entire sleeve.

"Oh my G.o.d!"

"You're hit!"