I stopped dead in my tracks. “You’ve met him?”
She walked three paces more, then turned. “Yes. A lovely man.”
“Wait, wait, stop,” I said, touching her arm. “This is important to me. I need to know if we’re really talking about the same person. Describe him to me.”
“Why is it so important?” she asked, and I could almost see defensive shutters drop between us.
“Remember me telling you about the two special operations teams I used to run with? The Department of Military Sciences and—”
“Rogue Team International,” she finished. “Yes. Why?”
“Church created both organizations. I worked for him and with him, and as far as I’m concerned, he is the strongest, smartest and most critically important person I’ve ever known. If anyone can help us beat this, it’s him and—”
“‘Beat this’?” she echoed. “Joe, much as I admire optimism, much as I like to think of the glass half full and a waiter coming with a fresh pitcher, there is no way to fix this. We lost the world. Millions of people are dead, possibly hundreds of millions or even billions. There is no infrastructure, many of the cities have been destroyed with nuclear weapons, the power grid is out, cell phones don’t work, not even cars will drive. The soldiers I’ve met have all said that there is no one giving orders anymore. And all of those dead people are actively hunting a dwindling number of surviving living people. I’m not trying to kick you below the belt, Joe, but how can anyone fix that?”
“I . . . ” But my words faltered. “I don’t know, Abigail. That’s the whole thing. He probably has a plan. When you talked to him, did he say anything about that? About how we’re going to beat this plague?”
Instead of answering immediately, she began walking again and I fell into step beside her. We walked maybe a hundred yards before she spoke.
“Joe, I only spoke with him a few times. Maybe twice at any length. If he had any knowledge about how to stop the plague, or some way to reverse it, he never said so. Mostly we talked about how to manage things as they were. He had some very good ideas about scavenging, about locating and establishing a safe haven. That’s why we’re heading south now.”
“Are you going to Asheville?” I asked.
“That’s a long walk,” she said. “We have a pregnant woman in our group and quite frankly I don’t think she could make it. No, Mr. Church told me about a food distribution warehouse forty or so miles from here. It was overrun at first, but he said that the people who were there had not acted in practical ways. He found the place and cleared it out, then sealed it so that it would be accessible to travelers who knew how to get in. Even left an inventory of the supplies and refilled the tanks on the generator. He hid some weapons and told me where to find them. I had the impression that he was very particular about who he trusted with this information. He even told me a code phrase to use if someone else got there first, so they would know we were also sent by him. Does . . . that sound like the person you used to know?”
I smiled, and it was a genuine smile. Not forced. Not a wince. “Yes,” I said, “it really does. May I ask what that code phrase is?”
She hesitated. “Look, Joe, I feel that you’re a good man. You could have done us harm if you wanted to, but instead you brought us food.”
“But . . . that’s not enough for you to want to share certain details,” I said. “No problem, I get it. Who knows, maybe I’d even be able to figure it out. Church would want to use a phrase that’s easy to remember. Something simple but unique, and unexpected, given the circumstances.”
She cut me a look. “I could give you a hint, if you like. Because if you did guess, then it would tell me something.”
“Worth a try,” I said. Baskerville was standing on the road watching something, but it proved to be an owl who moved from one tree to another. I let Abigail work out the risk/reward thing on her own.
“Okay,” she said. “A hint. Something vague. Maybe too vague, because it’s a literary reference.”
“Hit me.”
“Leonard Pine.”
I actually burst out laughing. “I knew it!”
We stopped and she studied me as I laughed. A real laugh, even more real than my smile. It wasn’t that it was all that funny, but it was proof. Real proof that we were talking about Mr. Church. No doubt at all.
I said, “Vanilla wafers. That’s the code phrase, or something like it.”
She gasped. “You do know him. And extra points for understanding the reference.”
It was an old joke. I was always a huge fan of the novels of Joe Lansdale featuring a couple of down-on-their-luck private detectives, Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. Hap and Leonard never had a good day that couldn’t go south on them, but no matter how weird things got, they always won out in the end. Hap was a white liberal, Leonard was a black conservative, but they were the best of friends and walked through hell together. One element in the books was that Leonard was absolutely addicted to vanilla wafers. It was a mania with him, worse than a junkie hooked on crack. And it was a love shared by Mr. Church, who always had a box of Nilla wafers close at hand. Even the first time I met him, when he interviewed me under deeply weird circumstances for inclusion in his black ops organization, the Department of Military Sciences, he had a plate of vanilla wafers. And Oreos for me. I can’t stand fucking vanilla wafers.
But at that moment I’d have eaten a six-course dinner of nothing but vanilla wafers.
“Where is he?” I begged. “Please, I need to find him. I need to talk to him.”
Her smile faltered. “I . . . I don’t actually know. It’s been weeks since I saw him last.” She named a small town a hundred miles north and explained where Church had been camped, and how he was camped. A big travel trailer pulling a good-sized storage pod filled with supplies. “I doubt he’ll still be there, though. He said he was looking for a place a few travelers had told him about. A gated community with a good wall that had never been overrun. I got the impression he wanted to see if it could be established as a town where he could send other refugee groups like mine. We couldn’t wait, though, because of Sandra and her baby on the way.”
“Where was this community?” I asked. “What do you know about it?”
“It had a name that seems so weird now, under the circumstances, I mean,” she said. “Happy Valley.”
“Yeah,” I said, “that does seem a little weird.”
Abigail looked into my eyes and then around at the dark forest. “The world has become weird, though. Weird and big and dark and scary.”
“We’re still alive, though. You and your people. Church and the people he’s helping. Whoever’s down in Asheville. We’re not going to die out like some species on the edge of natural extinction. Somehow we’ll win this world back from the dead.”
In the cold starlight I saw a mix of emotions in her eyes. Some hope and some humor, some tolerance and some despair. Sadness, too, because any conversation about survival carries with it the memory of who has not survived. Seeing her pain, knowing it was tied to that kind of memory, made my own inner eye look at the empty places in my life. It twisted a knife with practiced, delicate precision.
We walked back to the camp, and she told me where she thought Happy Valley might be. Then we went to our bedrolls. Baskerville spooned with me for warmth. The night passed. In the morning I went my way and they went theirs. I hugged Abigail and told her that I hoped we’d see each other again. She said that would be nice.
We both knew that we wouldn’t. But lies are cheap and they sound good.
— 14 —
DAHLIA AND THE PACK
Life became strange for Dahlia. Surreal. That was the word, she decided. That said it all.
She had always loved that word. Before. It had been a vocabulary word in tenth grade, and she liked the description in one of the dictionaries she read. Perception marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream. That was fun, though she understood at the time that “irrational” did not necessari
ly mean “bad.” It meant that it made no logical sense. That seemed to apply to a lot of things in her world. The whole concept of physical beauty—a lucky happenstance of genetics—being the yardstick by which people were judged made no sense at all. That was irrational. She was so much smarter than pretty much all of the “in crowd,” the preps, the whatevers. Dahlia had been one of the smartest kids in her class, but because she’d always been fat the others discounted her intelligence. Waistlines mattered more than IQ or GPA. Which was nuts. That was surreal in a bad way. The fact that she knew that her brains would matter ten times more when they all graduated was another kind of surreal. Her ability to dive into literary worlds and become lost in them as if what lay between the pages was more real than anything in school . . . yeah, that was surreal. It was an escape hatch that kept her sane and made her smile when nothing else did.
Then the world came to an end and the rules changed. A lot of the pretty kids got eaten. Those that still had enough meat on the bone to reanimate were now pretty fucking ugly. And their clothes looked like shit. How embarrassing to be wearing last year’s fashions forever? That made Dahlia smile, even now. Even though it was petty and a little catty. It was also surreal, though. In a different way, and not entirely in a bad way. Not for her. While everyone she knew at school was dying, she’d come more fully alive. She’d become the leader of a roving band of survivors carving out their place in a post-apocalyptic world mostly populated by zombies. Actual zombies.
So freaking surreal.
And now . . .
Now this.
Dahlia stood in the center of a clearing, wearing a blindfold around her eyes, holding a Sharpie in each hand. Red in her left, blue in her right. Instead of knives. It was day seven of her training. And her life had now become some kind of action movie training montage. Weird exercises that were part wax-on, wax-off and part Jedi mind tricks. She’d tried calling the old man “Mr. Miyagi” or “Yoda,” but instead of taking offense he’d merely told her to grow up. That stung. A lot more than she thought it would.
“Again,” said Mr. Church.
She heard his voice but couldn’t tell exactly where it came from. He was spooky like that. He made only exactly as much sound as he wanted to. He could vanish without her hearing him go, and could appear as if he’d teleported down from the Enterprise. Scary. Some Jedi mind tricks for sure.
In this exercise he circled her and would lightly touch her somewhere—shoulder, arm, calf—and based on that touch Dahlia had to react, determine the angle of his body to hers, and touch him with one of the markers. He wore a white boiler suit, like a Hazmat suit but without a mask. Any marks she made would reveal how accurate she was, how smart her choice of targets, how fast she moved.
So far she hadn’t made a single mark on him. Not a dot.
She tried to stretch out with her senses. To hear and smell everything. To feel changes in the air around her. Had his voice come from her left side and a little behind? She thought so and shifted her weight to jump that way.
When it came, the touch was on her right hip. A fingertip against her hipbone. Dahlia whipped around and slashed right and left with the markers, crisscrossing the air in overlapping patterns.
There was no resistance.
“Again,” said the voice out of nowhere.
Another touch. Another move, faster than before; really trying.
“Again.”
“Again.”
After ten more tries Dahlia stepped back, flung down the Sharpies, tore off the blindfold and spun around to find him. Church was directly behind her. His boiler suit was unmarked.
“This is bullshit,” snarled Dahlia.
“No,” he said, “it’s not. You’re getting better.”
She glared around. Eighteen members of her Pack sat in cross-legged silence around the edges of the clearing. A few were smiling, but no one was openly jeering. Neeko even gave her an encouraging nod.
“I can’t do this,” snapped Dahlia. “No one can. It’s stupid.”
Church’s face was hard to read, she’d learned that much over the last few days, but did she just see a flicker of something cross his mouth? A tightening, like a small wince? Was that disappointment or irritation? Or both?
Dahlia bent and scooped up the markers and held them out to the old man. “Okay, Yoda, you’re big on asking us to do these dumb exercises and play your silly games, but why don’t you show us how to do it . . . if it’s even possible at all.”
If she expected him to throw that back at her, she was wrong. Church nodded. “That is a reasonable request.” Then he added, perhaps a little unkindly, “One you should have asked before now.”
He waited while Dahlia pulled on a boiler suit, then allowed her to tie the blindfold around his head.
“Satisfy yourself that I can’t see,” suggested Church. “Otherwise this has no value.”
She tied it tight and peered at it until she was sure. The gathered members of her Pack exchanged some looks. More of them were smiling now, though she couldn’t tell if they were happy that the old man was going to get schooled, or because they thought Dahlia was setting herself up. Maybe a little of both.
The old man rolled the markers between his fingers and then shifted his grip so that they were more like scalpels in a surgeon’s hands than combat knives.
“Whenever you’re comfortable,” he said.
Dahlia began moving around him, creeping with utmost stealth. The boiler suit made soft noises, but she turned to Neeko and mimed clapping her hands. He grinned and began clapping with a rhythmic beat. The others joined in slowly, but soon everyone was smacking their hands together and the clearing was filled with so much noise that any rustle of the boiler suit was completely buried.
Dahlia leaned far over and tapped Church on the right rear shoulder blade.
She never saw the move he made. It was a blur and when he stepped back there was a blue mark on her stomach.
The clapping paused for a moment as everyone gaped.
“Don’t stop,” she roared at them, and the clapping was renewed with increased fervor. She moved and touched. He moved and marked her.
Over and over again.
It very quickly rose from exercise to frenzy, and her taps became hits. Or attempted hits. She struck and struck, and no matter how, or from what angle, or how fast, he reacted. Her rage and frustration rose together, throwing fuel on the fire in her chest. Finally, Dahlia screamed and swung a kick at him, trying to hit him in the groin.
He stepped into it and let the force of the powerful kick expend itself on his thigh. Then he put the flat of his palm on her sternum and gave her a small push. There was no trace of emotion in it, and not even a lot of force, but the angle was good for him and bad for her and Dahlia fell. A sob broke from her as she landed hard on the ground. The noise from the Pack died immediately and there was silence everywhere.
Mr. Church reached up and removed the blindfold, blinking momentarily in the bright sunlight that slanted down through the trees. He fished his tinted glasses from a pocket and put them on.
“You cheated,” she growled, but he waved that away as if it was nothing more important than a gnat. That made her madder, but then she saw that Neeko was staring at her. Not eye-to-eye, but at her stomach. She looked down at the red and blue marks on her boiler suit. They were not random marks. They were words. She twisted the material and cocked her head to read them and saw that they were not in English. It was a short phrase written in Latin. The son of a bitch hadn’t just marked her, he’d actually written on her. She was so absurdly stunned that she could not move except to mouth the words. “Dum spiro spero.”
Dahlia could read it. Latin was one of her languages at school. Had she mentioned that in one of her conversations with the old man? Yes. Probably.
She spoke the English translation in a tight whisper.
“‘While I breathe, I hope.’”
She remembered the lesson in school. The words combined ideas fr
om two different philosophers, Cicero and Theocritus, and was thought to be paraphrased by St. Anthony.
Mr. Church came and squatted down in front of her. “Listen to me,” he said gently, but with a voice pitched loud enough for the others to hear. “Listen. You’ve survived this long on a useful combination of wits and natural talent. That’s good, but it’s not enough. There are tougher and scarier things out here than you. I’m one of them. The dead are a threat, but there are people out here—living people—who are far more powerful, more frightening, and much more dangerous. If you ran into any of them, you’d be dead. You all would.” He paused and gave her a tiny smile. “Lessons like this are frustrating and they’re hard. They’re supposed to be. I won’t make them easier. You need to rise, become craftier, refine your senses, get stronger and faster, become wiser. If I didn’t think you had that potential, we would not be here in this moment. If I thought you were just a thug, like your friend Trash, then you’d either be recovering from wounds received or be dead.”
He rose and looked around at them.
“Understand this,” he said. “I am not a nice man. I am not particularly patient and in no way forgiving. Not before the outbreak and less so now. I am not interested in whether you think these exercises are fair or fun. They are neither. I am not interested in complaints of any kind. If you have assessments, useful opinions, insights or ideas, then that door is always open.”
He turned back to Dahlia.
“You make a lot of jokes about Star Wars and Harry Potter and The Karate Kid. I get them. Maybe if the world hadn’t turned into a horror movie then they might be funny. They’re not. They are both inappropriate and a waste of our time. Either discard them or find something useful in their themes to draw on. Stories often contain wisdom.” When she began to speak he held up a finger. “We will do this exercise again, right now. You will do better this time. You’ll endeavor to take your ego out of gear and stop pretending to be tough . . . and simply become tougher. Do I make myself clear?”
Dahlia got slowly, heavily, to her feet. The others sat in silence, none of them daring to speak a word or make a sound. She wanted to grab a knife and stab the old man. She wanted to tie him down and let the dead have him for lunch.
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