Its loss reminds her of the loss of so many people at Camp Defiance, which reminds her of the loss of her husband and children.
Anne suppresses her feelings until they boil back up as rage. Rage, she can use.
¦
She sets out a cloth, makes sure her pistols are unloaded, and field strips them for cleaning: frame, rod and spring assembly, barrel, slide. Her Springfield nine-millimeters don’t have the stopping power of her sniper rifle, an old military-issue M21 with telescopic sight. They are light and have little recoil, however, and with nineteen bullets in the magazine and one in the firing chamber, she can punch holes in any Infected that get too close with a fair degree of accuracy.
“We need to figure things out,” Marcus says, gazing at the fire as he feeds it another branch. “Unless someone has a better idea, I think we have two choices. We can either go to Camp Nightingale, or stay here until things cool down, and then backtrack to Defiance.”
“Why Defiance?” says Gary, his arm around Jean. “They’re all dead or Infected.”
“There’s a huge amount of food and equipment just sitting there now.”
“Sounds dangerous,” Evan says. He is a small, wiry man who has survived for so long because, like Ethan Bell, he is able to think several moves ahead; that is why Anne chose him for the team. In the time before, he was an electrical engineer.
“The Infected will migrate,” Marcus points out. “They’ll leave a giant stockpile of gear we can use. We could pick up enough supplies to keep us going for months. If we grab another decent vehicle, even longer.”
“That’s right,” Evan counters. “There are possibly a hundred thousand Infected, and they’ll be migrating everywhere. And all those dead bodies are going to attract monsters looking for an easy meal.”
Marcus glances at Anne to gauge her reaction, but she ignores him, dipping her bore brush into her bottle of solvent and running it through the barrel with the cleaning rod.
Normally, she and Marcus act as a team. After leaving Sarge’s band of survivors, she found Marcus alone, bloodied and wild and liable to be mistaken for Infected himself, wandering the wasteland killing with bat and axe. The willpower involved in killing another human being, face to face and with a blunt weapon—not to mention the strength and stamina required to survive long bouts of hand to hand combat—amazed her.
He recognized in Anne a kindred spirit, and decided to follow her. But while they share a vision of wiping the Infected from the earth, they are doing it for different reasons. Motivated by hate, Anne kills for revenge against the organism that destroyed her life. Marcus kills to release lost souls enslaved by the virus; he kills for compassion. For him, it is about mercy.
While they have never touched, they are something like lovers. More feelings to suppress. Anne knows Marcus would follow her off a cliff if that is what she wanted.
Today is different, however. Today, Marcus must make up his own mind. Anne is planning her own mission, and it is not up for debate.
“Some of us have people back at Defiance,” Todd says. “I want to go.”
“You know what the odds are,” Evan says. “I’m sorry to say it like that, but we’re making decisions that will affect our survival. Even if she survived, by the time we go back, she will probably be long gone.”
“I have to see,” Todd says.
“And you’re willing to put our lives on the line for that.”
“Yes,” the boy says, glaring back at him.
Anne smiles, pushing a cotton swab through the barrel.
“He doesn’t have to justify his vote,” Marcus says.
“We should be logical about this,” Evan tells them. “The smart move is to go to Nightingale. They’re picky about who gets permanent citizenship, but we know people there who will vouch for us. Once we get in, we could organize a scavenging expedition to Defiance.”
“If they let us in, we’d have no say in what we would do,” Ramona says. Slim and athletic like Anne, she sits cross-legged near the fire, eating Spam from a can. Overweight people are rare these days, at least outside the camps; they either dropped the pounds due to exercise and change in diet, or died out. “They run a tight ship at Nightingale. They have people at the top making all the decisions. They might break up our unit and make us scrub toilets. That’s how it is.”
“We formed this unit so we didn’t have to be citizens of anything,” says Marcus. “We’ve always worked on the outside. I think it’s best if we keep it that way. We’re better off on our own.”
“We might have to rethink some things,” Evan answers. “The fall of the camp changes everything. We need to be flexible. I’d rather scrub toilets than throw my life away.”
Anne pauses in her work to squint at Evan.
“What about us?” Gary says, staring at Jean, who gapes wide eyed at the fire, shivering. “Don’t we get a vote?”
“Fine,” Marcus sighs. “That all right with everyone?”
The others murmur their assent. Gary and Jean are refugees, not part of Anne’s Rangers, but the situation is unique, with extreme stakes.
“We need to get to the other camp,” Jean says, struggling with the words, her face and voice straining with effort. Anne studies her briefly, noting the symptoms. “Can’t you see that? Are you blind? We’re out in the open here. We’re all going to die if we don’t get somewhere safe.”
At one time Jean was a beautiful woman, Anne believes, and this is the person Gary sees when he looks at her. Now her hair is disheveled, her eyes puffy and glazed, her mouth twisted into a grimace. They locked themselves inside the Wild Arts Gallery in Hopedale during the first days of the epidemic, and survived there for weeks. People will do whatever it takes to survive. The only problem is they have to live with what they’ve done afterwards.
They do not know Anne found the trash can in the back office, next to the gas grill, filled with human bones.
“So that’s three for Defiance, three for Nightingale,” Marcus says quickly, obviously regretting agreeing to give the refugees a vote. He turns to Anne, who rubs a drop of gun oil across the slide of one of her reassembled Springfields. “Anne, it seems you’re the tie breaker.”
Anne loads the pistol and holsters it.
“Anne?”
“I’m going south.”
The survivors glance at each other. Marcus clears his throat and asks why.
“I’m going to kill Ray Young.”
The Rangers watch her in stunned silence.
“This is the guy you think is some kind of Typhoid Mary,” says Evan.
“He murdered a hundred thirty thousand people,” Anne says. Most of them are not dead, are in fact Infected, but it is all the same to her. “He’s a walking neutron bomb. He needs to die.”
“Even if he did what you believe,” Evan ventures, “what’s the point of revenge?”
“If he goes to Washington, he will infect the soldiers fighting there,” she tells them. “The military is our last hope. If they can’t retake the city, it will be over for us. The war will be over.”
“How would we even find him?” Todd wants to know. “He could be anywhere.”
“He’s heading southeast,” she says. “That was his heading when he left the camp. He knows the Army is in Washington, and might go there thinking someone can help him.”
For the next hundred miles, a single east-west road cuts through the Cherokee Valley, linking up with the highway system just east of Morgantown. They will need to move fast, and hunt and catch him on this stretch of road.
The survivors grow quiet, considering this.
“We don’t know that for sure,” Evan says.
Anne stands, wiping the gun oil on her hands onto her camo pants.
