by Lauren Beltz
hardly had the humility he thought she ought to have learned from the incident. He had gotten lucky that he had missed most of the skirmish, but it could have ended a lot worse for him in Nathan’s apartment, and she didn’t even feel the need to apologize for putting all of their lives in danger in her quest to prove she was right.
He stepped back into the hallway to give her room to pass. “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”
“At least I don’t have my head up mine,” she rebutted.
He had half the mind to grab either end of the towel, whip it into a rope, and lash it out at her. But that would hardly make him feel better, and it certainly wouldn’t remove them from the rut they seemed to be in now. Perhaps he had been avoiding her. After all, now he was pissed that he had opened his mouth to say anything, as the tension had only gotten worse. Their numbers were dropping, and the last thing he needed to be doing was going around and making enemies out of his friends, which was exactly where they seemed to be at now.
She emphasized her stance as she took the time to drop the buckets in the hallway in order to slam his front door as hard as she possibly could.
Anna
“This is hopeless,” Sebastian snapped as he banged his fist down on the kitchen bar in frustration. Anna slammed through the cabinets and pantry haphazardly with the same sentiment. “We’ve wasted an entire week,” he continued as he sat down on a barstool and ran his hands through his hair, “and what do we have to show for it? My own cabinets are starting to look as bare as this place. We haven’t found a single useful thing, and we don’t have any idea what to do now that the clock is running out.”
She tried to be the voice of reasonable hope since he took the role of pessimist this time. It was a toss up on any given day as to which one of them was going to snap in frustration first and which would have to act as the emotional anchor for the rest of the day. “Well then, let’s brainstorm. This place is as good as any, and it’s far enough away from William that we don’t need to worry about him overhearing.” They had only made it halfway back up through the building to their own floor, though that pace was drastically quicker than when they had cleared and scavenged the floors the first time around.
Anna dropped herself onto the bar stool next to him. “There’s the store directly across the street we could try. And then there’s the other one, across the street and down one block.”
“The only way out of this building, apart from jumping out of a second or third story window - which we can forget about - is to remove the barricade on the first level and the front doors. Is that something we really want to attempt, or something the others will even allow?” His question was rhetorical.
“What other choice do we have?” she asked logically. “We are out of options in the building, and that sad excuse of a garden that your sister and Davidson attempted on the roof didn’t produce anything. There’s nowhere to go except out.”
“What do we do to the person, or the persons, who volunteer to go, if we can even get any? Do we barricade the doors back up and hope they can make it on their own, or do we set up a defense at the front of the building while they scavenge? We have no idea how many infected there even are now, but from what I’ve seen from the roof, we don’t have anywhere near the manpower to hold this fort once the perimeter is breached. And, food or no food, we can’t afford to lose our stronghold, or we are royally screwed.”
Anna thrummed her fingers against the countertop as she thought. He was right, of course. If an infected got into the building, it would bring a horde after it. Gruesome sightings from the roof in the early stages of the takeover had proved that beyond a doubt. They might be able to hold off a single infected, but they would be powerless against more than a few. They couldn’t risk leaving the front of the building exposed, but that would leave their runners with no way back into the building with supplies.
“What if we could fashion some sort of zipline across the street? Then we could run buckets back and forth, above street level, from one building to the other with the food.”
He thought about it for a moment before he shook his head. “I don’t see how you would be able to get the line attached to the other building off the first level. And even if we could, there’s no telling if the market across the street even has access to the second floor of the building or if we could get to the second floor. And across 91st is one thing, but Broadway is a wide intersection. I doubt we would be able to get enough rope to even make such a system.
“But say we managed to figure out how to do all of that. We would still need a way to get the others back into the building. And there’s no telling what they are going to find in these other buildings that weren’t blockaded. That market could be teeming with infected people they wouldn’t be able to see until they got inside and it was too late.”
He ran his hands against the sides of his head, deep in thought. Their brainstorming was making her lose confidence in their ability to do anything outside of their own building, which did not bode well for how the others were sure to react to the news. After wasting a week with meaningless searching, they now found themselves staring down the barrel of the gun. She wished for the first time that she had agreed to take the issue to the group a week ago when he had suggested it, instead of playing along with William’s desire to calm the storm.
They hadn’t seen Nathan all week. Lenore and Daniel still weren’t on speaking terms, and Daniel hadn’t spoken to Anna either. Davidson didn’t seem to have an issue with her, but every time she saw him he appeared deep in thought on something or another. And then she had sworn she had seen Lenore and Davidson in a physical altercation the last time she went up to the roof to sponge off. She even felt like she was on shaky terms with Sebastian these days with their mutual mounting tension. Waiting hadn’t calmed the group; if anything, tensions were steadily on the rise.
“We need to tell them,” he repeated for what must have been the hundredth time that week, but for the first time she found herself in complete agreement. Their brainstorming session was going exactly how the previous ones had been, and they were still beating their heads against the wall. If they brought the situation to the group, they would have twice as many heads to come up with a plan. Anna’s own food supply was getting drastically low, and she knew that none of them were going to last long without food. William had been pressuring her heavily about finding something on their runs for the past three days, but offered no solution himself.
“How do we tell them?” she asked. They would have to gather everyone together, which would be difficult with Nathan’s current state and would rouse suspicion as they had not had a group meeting in weeks now.
It took Sebastian a while to respond, and she thought he was trying to process what her question actually meant. She had finally given into his urgings, and it was obviously coming as a shock to him. “We pull everyone into the hallway,” he responded as if it would be as simple as knocking on everyone’s door and asking for a brief minute of their time. “Preferably in front of Nathan’s apartment so that he can hear through the door, since I doubt he’s going to come out, and I don’t really think we want him to even if he would.”
“But we don’t tell William,” she added as an afterthought.
“No,” Sebastian agreed. “If we tell him, he’ll find a way to commandeer the meeting and derail it before we even start.”
“Right. So I’ll just have to deal with him once the meeting is over and everyone knows. That will be a pleasant conversation to be sure.”
“A necessary evil,” he said. She knew he was right, but that didn’t make the prospect of the idea any better. “So do we tell them now?”
“Today, for sure,” she said as her fingers continued to dance across the countertop as she pulled together a hasty plan. “But not right this minute. Davidson and your sister are tied up with the storm right now, and we should give them some time to get situated once it’s passed before we bombard everyone. But this evenin
g, right before the sun sets, when everyone is winding down for the day.
“Everyone will be exhausted, which isn’t ideal, but hopefully then they won’t have the energy to stir up much of a fuss. It will also give them tonight to process the information so we can start discussing our options tomorrow morning.”
Sebastian let out a sigh as his forehead dropped to rest on the countertop. “This is not going to go well at all.”
He was stating the obvious, of course, but hearing the words aloud made her doubt her change of heart. The group was hardly solid with tight bonds of relationships that would be hard to break. They hadn’t known each other for all that long, and even Lenore and Sebastian didn’t seem like they were on the best of terms before the world went to hell.
“Tonight,” she repeated as her hands balled into fists at the thought.
Davidson
He had to admit, he was impressed when she managed to pin his arm behind his back. Granted, he could have gotten out of the hold and easily incapacitated her had he tried, but considering her lack of muscular build and previous knowledge, she was catching on quickly.
“Good,” he told her so as she held his arm bent behind his back. He didn’t have to see her face to imagine