But we never meant to kill him, Adam thought. That was an accident. They had only meant to get Cody off of Artem, to restrain him. To knock him out, if they had to. He and Sara had been horrified by what they had done.
We never meant for him to die.
He couldn’t say the same thing about John. Adam hadn’t wanted to fire that shot. He hadn’t wanted this encounter to end in violence. But he had pulled the trigger knowing full well what the end result would be. He had intended to kill John.
And he had been successful.
He retched again and spat on the floor, then dropped to his knees, feeling as if he’d been deboned. He was shaking all over. Part of that was the adrenaline, he knew. His body was trying to calm down after the stress of the fight. It helped to think about that clinically. It helped to distance himself from the horror of what he had just done.
But the thought kept creeping back in. I murdered him. I’m a killer. He closed his eyes and tried to swallow the cry that wanted to escape him.
“Hey.” A soft hand came to rest on his shoulder. “Are you okay?”
He opened his eyes. Ella was crouching beside him. She had a bottle of water in one hand and she passed it over to him. He took it and drank gratefully.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You did what you had to do.”
“I killed him,” Adam said. His voice sounded hollow.
“Yeah,” she said. Her hand made its way down his back and rubbed slow circles there, and to Adam’s surprise, he felt comforted. “Keep it together, though, okay? I can’t carry you out of here if you pass out.”
“I’m not going to pass out.” He took a few deep breaths and drank some more of the water. “I’m just a little shaken. I’ll be okay.”
“Good,” she said. “You know, you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Ella, I killed a man.”
“It was self-defense. He was about to shoot me, and after he did that, he probably would have kept coming for you. He was off his hinges. He was going to force you to either kill him or be killed.”
Adam nodded. “I know that. I just…it feels like I should have found another way out of it. Do you know what I mean? It feels like I should have been able to calm him down and get him to understand who we were.”
“God knows you tried,” Ella said. “A lot harder than I wanted you to.”
He nodded.
“You can’t beat yourself up about this,” she went on. “I mean it, Adam. I’m not just being nice about it. We don’t have time for you to fall apart.”
Her hand squeezed his shoulder, and the pain brought him back to himself a little bit. His head cleared and his eyes focused.
“I need you present,” she said. “I need you to be okay.”
He nodded. “I’m okay,” he said. “I’m just…I don’t know. I know you’re right. It was self-defense, and defense of you. And I did have to do it. I know that. I don’t regret it. I just never thought I’d have to kill somebody.”
“It doesn’t change anything,” Ella said. “It doesn’t change who you are. You don’t need to think of yourself differently because of this. It’s just something that happened. It’s something you had to do to survive. And that sucks, but it’s not you. It’s just a thing.”
She must have reconciled herself to that sort of thinking a long time ago, Adam realized. She must have developed the ability to think about things in those terms when her sister had shot their father.
And she was right.
It was a horrific thing. But it was still just a thing. It wasn’t him.
He took another long swig of the water. “It never stops surprising me,” he said.
“What doesn’t?”
“The world we live in now,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re right that this doesn’t change who I am,” he said. “And I’m glad you said that, because…I was having some pretty dark thoughts a minute ago.”
“I can imagine,” she said.
“But it’s not me who’s changed,” Adam said. “It’s everything else, isn’t it? We live in a different kind of world now. A world where sometimes you have to kill people in order to survive. A world where killing isn’t necessarily murder anymore.”
“Yeah,” Ella said. “It’s messed up to think about, when you put it that way, but…yeah. That’s the world we live in now. Every choice we make has to be about our own survival.”
“Do you think I was too harsh with Rhett?” Adam asked.
She blinked. “What?”
“This is the same thing Rhett did, isn’t it? He killed that man who washed up on the island. I was so upset about that. I thought everyone needed to know. I called it out to his family, and when they didn’t come clean about it, I called it out to the McTerrells too. But was I overreacting?”
“You can’t think that what just happened here is the same as what happened with Rhett,” Ella said.
“Isn’t it?” Adam asked. “I shot that guy. I killed him. And I hear what you’re saying, that I can’t beat myself up about it, that that’s the way the world is now. But that was what Rhett was claiming all along. He said he had to shoot that man because he might pose a threat to us.”
“Yeah,” Ella said. “Because he might pose a threat. He never actually did anything. He wasn’t armed. He wasn’t attacking anybody. Right? That’s what you told me. He was just a helpless, starving guy on a boat. He couldn’t have hurt Rhett even if he had been trying.”
“Yeah,” Adam said hesitantly. “I guess that’s true.”
“It is true, Adam. Rhett didn’t try to make peace with that guy, the way you did with John. He didn’t even try to talk to him. He went straight for his gun. You’ve got to be able to see the difference.”
“You’re right,” Adam said. “Okay. You’re right. I know it isn’t the same.”
“Damn right,” Ella said. “Rhett Birkin was sick, Adam. Even before the virus, he loved violence. He was weird about it, and he used to scare me. What happened here—this is nothing like what Rhett did. Ever. You didn’t enjoy it. You didn’t feel entitled to it. Look at you.” She gestured at him. “You’re still shaking. You hated that.”
“Yeah,” Adam said. “I wish I hadn’t had to do it.”
“But you did have to,” Ella said. “And now we need to move on.”
“Okay,” Adam said. He got to his feet and found that his legs were steady enough to hold him. “Where’s the other gun? We should get that.”
Ella picked her way across the floor through the pool of blood that had begun to form around John’s body. Carefully, she lifted the gun from his pocket, checked that the safety was on, and stowed it away in the pocket of her jacket.
“You’ve still got his?” she asked.
“Yeah.” He showed her.
“You keep that one, then, and we’ll both be armed.”
“You’re going to have to give me some training at some point,” he said.
“You were getting pretty good at hunting, back on the island.”
“I wasn’t great, though,” he said. “And those were rifles, not handguns. I’ve never used one of these before.”
“Okay,” said Ella. “We’ll have shooting practice. But later. Right now we should get out of here.”
“There’s no way we can take much of this food with us,” Adam said. “I hate to leave it behind.”
“Yeah, I know,” she agreed. “But we can always come back if we need to stock up, and I know you don’t want to stay down here with a dead body any more than I do.”
“No,” he said.
She handed him the duffel bag. “Unpack everything in here and leave behind whatever we don’t need,” she said. “Fill it up with food. I’m going to go look in the other room and see if there’s another bag in there.”
Adam nodded. He opened the bag and pawed through it as Ella disappeared into the water room.
Most of the things she had packed weren’t expendable. He didn’
t want to get rid of the jerky—it was lightweight and flat and didn’t take up much space in the bag. Neither did the granola bars. There was a spare jacket folded up in there, and that was taking up some real estate, but Adam didn’t want to leave it behind. After a moment’s thought, he pulled it out and tied it around his waist. Then he removed the few cans of cat food that remained at the very bottom of the bag.
He turned his attention to the shelves. There was so much here. So much to choose from. He added jars of peanut butter and cans of beans to the bag. A box of crackers also made the cut, even though Adam knew they wouldn’t be as long-lasting as the other foods he’d chosen—they would be filling, and that was important too. He also added some cans of fruit and vegetables, knowing that it was important that he and Ella got enough vitamins to keep them healthy. That was a problem he had faced on the yacht.
Ella returned from the back room with a bulging tote bag slung over her shoulder. She held a small cardboard box cradled under her arm. “Got room in your bag for this?”
“What is it?” he asked.
“Spare ammo.”
He took the box and flicked it open to see rows and rows of bullets inside.
“Do you know how to use this?” he asked.
“How to load the gun, d’you mean? Of course.”
He nodded and tucked it into his bag, then buckled the closures. “Ready to go?”
“God, yeah,” Ella said. She glanced down at John’s body, shuddered, and moved toward the stairs. “I don’t want to stay down here a minute longer than we have to.”
“Agreed,” Adam said, slinging the duffel bag over his shoulder. He followed her to the stairs and back up into the natural light of the gas station’s market.
It felt strange to be back out on the road after what had happened. It felt strange to be able to walk away from it, to leave John’s body behind at the scene of the crime—it’s not a crime, Adam told himself firmly, there’s no law anymore so there’s no such thing as crime—and go on with their day as if nothing had happened. Adam felt as though the confrontation in the basement ought to have leveled him. He felt as though the fact that he was capable of functioning now was indicative of some deep psychological damage on his part.
And yet, he knew he was only doing what the situation required. He just didn’t have time to fall apart, to fret about the moral implications of what he’d done. He needed to hold it together for Ella’s sake, and for his own. Maybe someday they’d get to a place where they could relax long enough to brood about all the choices they’d had to make along the way. Maybe Julie’s house would be that place. But they weren’t there yet.
As long as we’re on the road, we’re in danger. And as long as we’re in danger, we’ve got to keep our minds in the here and now. He knew that was what Artem would have said.
He thought Artem and Ella probably would have gotten along well. They were both survivors. Adam knew he had a lot to thank them for.
For now, he decided, he was just glad to be out of that basement. The more distance they put between themselves and John, the less real it felt. It was like they had descended into some kind of nightmare, a nightmare that they were now able to put behind them.
Ella, who was a little ahead of him on the road, glanced back. “Do you want me to take the duffel for a while?” she asked.
He was lagging, he realized. “That’s okay,” he said. “I’ve got it.” He picked up the pace a little until he had pulled even with her.
Ahead of them, the road stretched out for miles, disappearing into the horizon, bleak and unending.
Chapter 10
“What do you think that is?” Ella asked after they had come about a mile.
Her voice broke a silence that felt as if it weighed a ton. Adam had been trying to think of a way to speak into the void since they’d left the gas station and John’s body behind them. He was glad Ella had spoken up, but at the same time, he wished he’d been the one to do it. It would have been a way of bringing the situation back under his control.
Adam felt badly out of control.
Now he followed her outstretched finger. She was pointing at a dark mass on the horizon.
“Maybe it’s another car,” he suggested.
“It doesn’t look like a car,” she said doubtfully.
She had a point. The mass was shaped more like a small hill than a car. Could it be a natural part of the landscape? Maybe the road just rose a bit there. But the incline seemed too sudden, too dramatic, to be natural. It was more like someone had stacked something there.
Maybe there were supplies.
He forced the thought down. Every time he had thought they might find something useful, it had blown up in his face. He wasn’t going to get his hopes up. Not this time.
They walked a bit farther, the silence reasserting itself. Adam was sure Ella was wrestling down her own hopes about what they might find up ahead. He wasn’t worried. So far she had done a much better job than he had at facing the realities of the world as it was now. She could handle it.
Or at least, he wanted to believe that.
He was forced to revise his estimation when she stopped very suddenly, squinting at the object in the road ahead.
“Adam,” she whispered, voice trembling.
“What is it? Are you all right?”
“Do you see them?”
“Them?”
“It’s—they’re bodies.”
Adam’s stomach did a nosedive. Now that she’d pointed it out to him, the shape in the distance began to resolve itself into several shapes. Human bodies, stacked haphazardly in the middle of the road, one on top of another.
“They’re not burned,” he said. It was the only thing he could think of to say. “Whoever brought them here never lit the fire.”
“Why would they have just left the bodies?” Ella asked. The wind gusted and she raised a hand to her mouth. “My God, Adam, the smell—”
He knew it all too well. He had encountered corpses before.
He lifted the collar of his shirt up to cover his nose and mouth and Ella did the same. It didn’t do much to protect them from the rank odor of decaying flesh, but it was better than nothing.
“We need to get closer,” he said, even though it was the last thing he wanted to do. “We need to check them out.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he said, “if we’re going to keep going on beyond this point, we need to know what to expect. There’s every reason to think that whoever left this pile of bodies is between us and Napa Bay. If they left any clues as to why they did this, I want to see them. Don’t you?”
Ella nodded reluctantly. “You’re right. But let’s try to do this quickly, okay? I don’t know how long I can stand it.”
He nodded, and they approached the stack of bodies slowly and carefully. Adam noted that it wasn’t as large as the piles he’d seen burning on the beaches when he’d been at sea—not as large by half. Here there were only about a hundred dead. Still, it was enough to be horrifying.
“Adam,” Ella said, “I don’t think these people died of the nanovirus.”
“No,” he agreed. “I don’t think they could have. The bodies are too fresh.”
It felt wrong to use the word fresh about the decomposing corpses in the middle of the road before them, and yet, the EMP had been weeks ago. If these people had died of the virus, they would have been dead for at least that long. Their bodies would have been worse than malodorous—they would have been bloated and dramatically discolored. As it was, Adam was repulsed by the smell, but he had no problem looking at them.
And also, he realized, if they had died of the virus, there would have been a lot more blood. He saw a little blood around them, here and there, but nothing as intense as what he’d seen the day a victim of the virus had died in front of his NA meeting.
Whatever had killed these people, it was something other than the nanovirus.
Ella gave him a funny look. “I’m not talking about
that,” she said. “Adam…look at them.”
He came a little closer. Almost immediately, he saw what she meant. How could he have missed it?
The bodies were riddled with bullet holes.
This wasn’t an instance of a single, desperate shooting, like Adam’s shooting of John. It wasn’t even a vengeful but targeted attack, like what had happened between Artem and Cody.
This was a massacre.
“God,” Adam whispered, taking it in. “Who would do this? And why?”
“It couldn’t possibly have been just one person,” Ella said. Now that she had taken in the horror of what they were faced with, her rational mind seemed to have taken over. She walked in a slow circle around the bodies, observing, looking for additional clues. “It was some kind of fight. Had to be. These are probably the casualties from both sides.”
He nodded. “But what were they fighting over?”
“Assets, probably.” She looked around. “I bet there’s some food storage or something around here.”
“Do you think it was about the place we just left?”
“John’s place?” Ella shook her head. “Couldn’t be. John would have been in the fight if that were the case.”
“Maybe he was,” Adam said. “Maybe he just survived it.”
“But then wouldn’t the other survivors have raided him?”
“We don’t know for sure that there are any other survivors,” Adam pointed out. “Do you see any signs of life around here?”
“No,” Ella admitted. “Honestly, I don’t think we have a prayer of figuring out what went on here.”
Adam circled the bodies, unwilling to give up. There must be something here that would indicate what had happened, something that could point them in the right direction.
He wasn’t sure why it was so important to him to get these answers. Maybe it was just that the world was such a mystery to him now. He had expected to find answers when he came ashore, but he had found nothing so far to explain to him how society—if such a thing even existed anymore—was functioning. The only clues he had were John, insane and tormented by the loss of his family, the raided warehouse with the angry graffiti inside, and now…this.
Escape The Dark (Book 3): Into The Ruins Page 8