"What's going on back there?" Wilson said, his voice up an octave with stress.

"Joel got hit!" LaRouche said, pressing both hands down into the leg and still not cutting off the flow. Red spurted up between his fingers as the movement of the vehicle slipped him around. And Joel wouldn't f.u.c.king hold still. LaRouche looked at Jim who was trying to contort his body in the narrow backseat area to provide room for Joel to raise his leg.

"It's the femoral," LaRouche said, like it was a death sentence. "Caught his f.u.c.kin' femoral."

"My what?" Joel said, his words flattened out by the grimace on his face, strained and strangled by pain. "Is my d.i.c.k still there? They didn't shoot my d.i.c.k off?"

LaRouche hitched his knees up onto his seat so he could apply more downward pressure. "Your d.i.c.k's fine, bro."

Joel craned his neck and Jim failed to stop him from looking. His pale blue eyes stretched impossibly wide. "Lemme see...lemme see...HOLY s.h.i.t! Oh my G.o.d, Sarge, that's too much blood! That's too much! I lost too much!"

"Shut the f.u.c.k up!" LaRouche yelled. "You ain't a motherf.u.c.kin' doctor!"

Joel grit his teeth, screamed through them.

LaRouche looked at Jim. "Lemme have your belt." Back to Joel. "Is Jim praying right now?"

Joel looked confused. "No," he whimpered.

"Is he giving you last rights?"

"No!"

"Then you're not dying! You got that? Don't you f.u.c.king puss out on me right now!" LaRouche looked back over his shoulder, which was looking forward through the windshield. They were just coming out of that curve. The initial blast of adrenaline wasn't strong enough anymore to keep his wounded arm from spiking, sapping his strength and preventing him from pressing down hard enough on the hole in Joel's leg. "Wilson, stop here."

The M2 fell silent as the barricade pa.s.sed out of sight behind the curve.

Wilson looked around, seemed on the verge of questioning it, but then slammed on the brakes. "Why are we stopping?" he said before they'd even halted. "Why are we f.u.c.king stopping?"

"I can't push with my arm," LaRouche motioned with his head. "Put pressure right where my hands are until Jim gets that tourniquet nice and tight. We're gonna switch places."

"Aw, f.u.c.k..." Wilson squirmed out of his seat, reached through and took over for LaRouche.

Jim wrestled his own belt from around his waist, already knew what to do with it. He leaned over all the arms and legs in his way and wrapped it around Joel's thigh, above the wound, almost at his crotch, and tightened the belt as tight as it would go.

"Ah! Jesus Christ, that hurts!"

"You're good," Wilson nodded, pressing his body down onto the wound. "You're good, man."

LaRouche stumbled out of his seat and around the front of the vehicle, wiping blood-soaked hands on his jacket. He felt oddly dazed. Like none of it was real. He jumped into the driver's seat, slammed the door and threw the vehicle in gear. The sounds behind him were a slurry of encouragement, fear, agony. LaRouche blinked rapidly, felt his stomach twist up inside of him. He swallowed against the burning sensation clawing up his throat, tasted acid on the back of his tongue. Acid and blood.

He kept his eyes on the road, but turned slightly to shout into the backseat. "Did you get that tourniquet on yet?"

"Yeah," Jim replied, his voice raised. "What next?"

"Here," LaRouche leaned over into the floor of the pa.s.senger seat and swiped up his pack, stuffing it into the backseat where the others were crowded. "Hemostats in the side pouch. You gotta find the artery and clamp it. Glove up before you go in."

LaRouche kept looking back, the vehicle swerving every time he did.

"We got this, Sarge," Wilson said.

"Do what the Sarge says," Joel mumbled, beginning to sound out of it. "Don't let me die, guys. You gotta...you gotta keep me alive."

"We're working on it, buddy."

"We got you, Joel."

LaRouche just stared straight ahead.

Abandoned houses.

Auto salvage and tiny airstrip.

Going back the way they came.

He balled one hand into a fist and punched the steering wheel.

Wilson glanced back at him.

LaRouche just kept his eyes on the road, kept that double-yellow line pa.s.sing right between his tires. And before he could fully process everything that happened, before he could work his mind around what he had done and the implications of it, he found themselves back with the others. The LMTVs and the Humvees crowded up on the road. The occupants pouring out of them as they saw the bullet hole in the windshield, and Jim exiting the backseat, covered in blood. LaRouche could hear the talking, the yelling, but it was like background noise. The dull hum of a crowd through thick walls. He could hear the emotion in their voices, the fear and the loathing at the sight of Joel being carried out of the back of the Humvee, his eyes half-lidded, sweat dotting his upper lip. Everyone panicking to save him, everyone pushing and shoving, trying to help him in some way. And LaRouche standing off to the side, one hand on the hot metal of the Humvee's hood, watching them with the expression of someone gone catatonic. Standing off to the side, because he already knew the truth.

They laid Joel out on the pavement and he disappeared behind a wall of bodies.

He wouldn't be saved.

All the care, and all the prayer in the world couldn't put all that blood back into his veins.

Wilson shoved through the crowd, parting it with his arms. "LaRouche!" he yelled. "Need a f.u.c.king IV here, man!"

LaRouche wanted to say, "It doesn't matter how many bags of IV you shove into him, it ain't gonna make a s.h.i.t's worth of difference!" But he couldn't bring himself to say that ugly truth, not after everything he'd done. And it wasn't so much that he'd given a command that had resulted in someone getting hurt-that s.h.i.t happened and you couldn't get around it. But he could see their trust in him flagging. He couldn't simply act like he didn't care.

He went into motion, shoving through the crowd. "Middle pouch," he yelled at Jim, who still held his pack with all the medical supplies. "Gimme the IV bag that says 'Lactated Ringers'." He knelt down, started fishing for some latex gloves. "And get his jacket off."

Dorian had wrangled himself out of the turret and knelt at Joel's head. He began to work the jacket off.

LaRouche found a rolled up pair of gloves and struggled to work his fingers into them, his skin catching, tacky with half-dried blood. As he did this, Jim placed the IV bag of clear liquid in front of him. It wasn't going to save Joel, not by a long shot-it would only swell his blood pressure back into a semi-normal range, and maybe not even that, depending on how much blood he'd lost. He glanced down at Joel's leg, saw the hemostat dangling, and the wound no longer squirting.

Maybe...

He shook his head. He wouldn't allow himself that hope. He pressed his fingers to Joel's radial, felt what could have been a pulse. Then checked the carotid and felt it there, but weakly. No. There was no hope to this. This was an exercise in futility. An empty performance. A dog and pony show for the rest of the people that wanted to believe that the man in charge of them actually gave a s.h.i.t.

He pulled a sealed plastic bag out of the same pouch Jim had retrieved the IV from. Inside were a few needles, a few blood catheters, a coil of tubing, a green rubber strap. Your run-of-the-mill IV kit. He opened the bag, rummaged through for the iodine wipes-actually thought of not bothering with cleaning the needle site, but then stubbornly figured that he might as well give Joel the best chance that he could. He might as well do it right.

So he went through the motions. Swabbed the inside of Joel's elbow, staining it yellow. Tapped the vein. Slipped the needle in until the blood showed in the catheter. Looked up at Joel's face, saw that he was barely conscious, a look of serenity on his features, that warm, wonderful shock just washing over him like a blanket. A little gift that nature gives you to make the end not so bad.

He connected the IV bag. Adjusted it to a heavy drip. He pa.s.sed it off to Jim. "Hold that up high," he said, realizing that he didn't need to shout because everyone was deathly quiet. He didn't stop working, because he couldn't stand up and look any one of them in the eyes. So he turned himself to the leg and began trying to fix it. Wilson held the wound open with a pair of spreaders, the metal tongs grasping at Joel's raw wound and not affecting him at all. His eyes just stared dreamily up at the sky like none of it mattered. He worked on pulling the artery out enough that he might be able to suture the two severed ends back together, but it was a long, and painstaking process.

Maybe another twenty minutes had pa.s.sed before LaRouche smelled the bowels and when he looked over at Joel he could no longer see the chest rising and falling. He leaned over the man's body, touched his finger to the neck again and this time felt nothing. Held his cheek over Joel's mouth and felt no brush of breath.

LaRouche just stood up, his knees aching, his wounded arm screaming for attention. "Dorian," he said, his words quiet and empty. Nothing left in him.

"Yeah."

LaRouche began stripping the gloves off. "Grab some shovels. I'll pick a spot."

CHAPTER 31: SECRETS.

The moon had lit the night so fully that they'd been able to drive without the use of their headlamps. Tomlin drove them on in silence and seemed to navigate by memory. They reached a wide swath cut through the woods to accommodate several sewer-access tunnels. They protruded from the overgrown gra.s.s like forgotten monoliths in the silver light.

Once in the woods, though, the light diminished into a confusing crisscross of dull moon glow and pitch black shadow. The two men fell into a sort of rhythm, which came naturally and unconsciously to them. They'd both done their fair share of "walking to the X" in the dead of night, and every movement felt familiar. The slight ache in the wrist from holding their rifles at a low ready. The tension that wound all the way up their legs as they moved smoothly across the dry, crackling leaves, always softly planting the heel, then rolling on the outside, steadily to the b.a.l.l.s of their feet. Eyes wide to soak up light. Ears attuned to every sound.

They waded through the stifling darkness for what seemed like hours, Tomlin in the lead and Lee falling in behind. Tomlin pulled to a stop near a large pine and dropped quietly to one knee. He pulled a compa.s.s from his jacket pocket and maneuvered into a shaft of moonlight so he could see their course. As he worked, Lee sank down onto his haunches and stared back through the near-blackness they had just covered. He held his breath and listened to the forest, but it gave up no sound in the cold.

The quiet snap of the compa.s.s closing.

Lee turned his head.

Tomlin looked at him. He knife-handed into the forest-the correct direction for Camp Ryder.

Lee nodded and they moved out again.

The silence of the forest forced them to move slow, fearing not only being found out by one of Jerry's men, but also knowing full well what hunted the woods at night. And in the quiet, the slightest rustle of their feet across pine needles and dried leaves seemed like it echoed through the forest.

It was sometime close to eleven, and Lee scanned the sky for a glimpse of the moon, when he heard the barest tsst of a hiss through teeth. He stopped in mid-pace, found Tomlin halted about a dozen yards in front of him, frozen in place.

His left arm slightly extended.

The finger splayed, patting the air rapidly: Stop moving!

Lee wanted to sink to his knees-get low was his first reaction-but he didn't want to move, felt like he'd stepped onto a trip wire and the slightest shifting of his feet could set something off. Though he wasn't quite sure what that something was.

Slowly, very slowly, Tomlin turned his head partially. His hand came up, moving at the same chameleon-like pace. Two fingers to the eyes, then pointing straight ahead, and a little to the right. Lee followed the motion, stared into the woods, his neck craning out as though willing himself to get closer so he could see through the darkness.

Moonlight framed it. Like white paint drawn on a black canvas. At first Lee couldn't tell what it was, because it was jumbled together with so many other, strange lines, very pale so that they stood out almost preternaturally in the earthen colors of the forest. But when he focused on them, when he knew where to look, then he was able to see the line, the slope of shoulders, a draped arm. A leg. A face.

Maybe ten bodies all cl.u.s.tered together, about thirty yards ahead of them.

Dead?

No. He could see them moving. A slow squirm. Nestling into each other for warmth.

And just like that, his heart was suddenly hammering. But oddly he just kept thinking how he'd always wondered how they slept at night, wondered if they hid in dens or just slept out in the open like deer. He made eye contact with Tomlin, but neither dared speak loud enough to be heard. They tried mouthing some words back and forth, but clearly something was being lost in translation, or their lips were not being properly read in the darkness, because they ended with matching facial expressions of I can't tell what the h.e.l.l you're saying.

One of them would have to move, and Lee knew that it was him. The simple action of having to turn around meant that Tomlin might make too much noise. So Lee clenched every muscle in his body until his abdominals ached and his vision throbbed and he very slowly, very painstakingly lifted his right foot up out of the leaves and loamy forest dirt, then swept it forward and very carefully placed it down. Of course, every noise he made sounded like a bra.s.s band falling on top of each other, but he knew from experience that to a casual listener it might as well have been complete silence.

But was an infected a "casual listener?"

Lee had his doubts, but he kept putting one foot in front of the other, breathing through his open mouth because in the back of his mind it seemed like the wind through his nostrils was too noisy. Eventually he reached Tomlin, who had managed to ease himself into a crouch. The two of them brought their heads close together, both pairs of eyes staring out into the darkness at the huddled ma.s.s of flesh.

"You see this s.h.i.t?" Tomlin hissed, holding a hand in front of his mouth to direct the sound towards Lee.

"That's not a pack," Lee said. He tried to pry through the gloom with his eyes, tried to see a little more of what lay ahead, but the details were lost. "Packs don't sleep at night."

"It's too small to be a horde. Plus we're in the woods."

Lee touched the other man's shoulder to garner eye contact. "Hunters."

Tomlin searched Lee's face, then bared his teeth, a tiny sound of dissatisfaction coming from between them.

Lee looked back out. It had to be hunters-had to be. Nothing else made sense. And if they were hunters, then Lee wanted no part of them. They would be too close to Camp Ryder by now to fire their weapons without being heard. And having seen the speed and strength of these strange specimens-people whose genetic makeup made them more adaptive, more aggressive, and stronger-he didn't want to try anything hand-to-hand, especially since he wasn't 100%.

"We gotta back up and go around," Tomlin mumbled, clearly thinking along the same lines as Lee.

"I'll cover you first." Lee brought his rifle up and Tomlin turned without any further discussion, eager to be leaving the area, even if putting the creatures behind him made the skin p.r.i.c.kle along his spine. Lee kept the barrel of his rifle pointing downrange at the creatures as Tomlin made his slow, quiet progress back.

The steady, rustling sound of his feet situating themselves in the dried leaves, the slow crunch as he settled his weight on them. Not even enough to make a cat perk its ears...

One of the infected stirred.

Lee stopped breathing. His finger touched the trigger. Stay asleep, he willed it. Stay the f.u.c.k asleep. Then he looked back over his shoulder to see if Tomlin had stopped moving, but he couldn't even make his partner out in the shadows. He turned back around and found the thing looking at him.

From across the distance, Lee could see its dark eyes, and they seemed to be resting on him, but he forced himself to think calmly. There was nothing special about these creatures. They had not developed super powers. They could see no better at night than he could, and Lee was hidden in the shadow of a tree, half his body behind it. If he just stayed very still...

He let the breath he'd been holding out, slow and steady. Not making too much noise, and not creating steam from his breath. His lungs began to ache for him to breathe faster, but he wasn't willing to do that just yet. He waited until his lungs were empty, then inhaled. Smelled the loamy scent of the forest. Bark. Cold. Stinging the back of his throat.

The thing just kept looking at him. Or at least in his direction. What had drawn its attention? Had the noises that Tomlin had made been louder than Lee had thought? Or maybe the hunters just did this. Maybe they woke up every so often to look around. Check their surroundings.

Maybe it could feel Lee staring back at it.

But Lee dared not take his eyes off of it again.

The thing seemed to suddenly relax. It lowered its head back down. Disappeared behind the others. Lee felt a tremor work through him. Partially from holding his position so rock-still for the last few minutes, and partially from all the stress-chemicals coursing through his veins.

He didn't move for another five minutes. Simply wouldn't risk it. Wanted to give that tweeky b.a.s.t.a.r.d enough time to fall back into a deep slumber before he made his escape. And after five minutes, it felt like he had been imprisoned. His calf began to cramp and his shoulders ached from holding the rifle up. He rose with considerable effort, his knees popping loud enough to cause him to freeze in place again.

He looked out.

No reaction from the sleeping hunters.

He turned and made his escape, maybe moving a little faster than he should have, but unable to stop himself. He desperately, desperately needed to get out of there. He'd had run ins with regular packs and they all ended in near-disaster, particularly when he was on foot. He had never had a run in with the hunters, but he could only imagine that it would be worse.

He made his way through the trees, moving faster as he gained distance. He wasn't quite sure which direction he was heading, and sure as h.e.l.l didn't know where Tomlin was until he stumbled across him, hiding behind a tree.