Rise (Book 3): Dead Inside

by Gareth Wood

  She paused here, and I watched her sort the memories dwelling behind her eyes. She went on after a moment.

  "She tried to run back to the gate," Robyn said. "Almost made it. By the time a bunch of us had armed and reached the gate they were feeding on her and a whole bunch had found their way inside. Most of us died that night."

  "That's horrible, Robyn. I'm sorry."

  "That was the worst thing I ever saw. I had to kill three of my friends who had turned that night. Everything since then has been easy, including putting Nick down." Her expression challenged what she'd just said, however. I realised that I might not be the only one on this trip suffering from OTSD.

  We passed several hundred more vehicles without speaking. I let her be, to sort her demons and put them back into whatever closets she had in her mind. One thing about this new world, the survivors are adaptable, so it didn't take her long to come back to the here and now.

  "What's the worst thing you've ever seen, Amanda?"

  I was tempted to tell her a Vanilla Ice video, or Willy Nelson live on stage, but I was afraid she'd leave me here in the middle of nowhere. I'd deserve it too. The real answer was in my head right away, and made me choke up a little just thinking about it. But we were still getting to know each other, so I couldn't blow this off with a flippant joke, or she'd never trust me. So as much as I didn't want to, I was going to tell her. She'd shown me hers, after all.

  "Back when I was on the Salvage Team in Alberta, we lost a member of our team. We came into the mountains. This is the same run where we met that biologist. You know where Golden is?"

  She nodded. "I went skiing there a few times."

  "We were told the town might have survivors. Our team leader had been through it right after the dead rose, and it was holding on then. So about a year later the brass at Cold Lake decided to send us there to see if they were still around."

  "What happened?" she asked.

  "Town was empty. No one there, broken barricades, and very few bodies. So we went looking around. The dead were still there, hundreds of them, and they came out after us. We got trapped on a bridge, and it was getting out of that mess that one of our team got bit." I realised I had tears in the corners of my eyes, and had to stop to blink them away. Damn. I hadn't thought about Eric in years. I thought I was over him.

  Robyn stopped a little farther along and waited, looking at me with sympathy. I think she could tell how deeply this cut ran. In for a penny, as they say.

  "We didn't notice at first. It was such a small injury, hardly even a scratch. But Eric showed us, so we holed up in a house outside of town. We found some booze, and got Eric drunk. Told stories and laughed and joked. By the time he passed out his injury was turning black and he was feverish. Brian, our team leader, used a Euthanasia Kit. When he was dead…" I had to stop here. My eyes again. I had to stop and wipe them.

  "When Eric was dead," I went on shakily, "Brian shot him in the head. He had to, you know?"

  Robyn nodded, but didn't say anything.

  "We argued a lot, Eric and I. About anything. It entertained me, and I loved baiting him with outrageous stuff. But what none of the rest of the team knew was that from the first day we met I was in love with him. He felt the same way, and I've learned you take love wherever you can find it in this world."

  Robyn put a hand on my arm. "I'm so sorry," she said.

  "That's the second time someone I loved has died. It's probably the reason I haven't let anyone too close to me since."

  It still felt like it had just happened. Tearing open a wound like this, even years later, was not a pleasant thing at all. But I'd had other lovers since, and lived long enough to reach Mission. Eric's death had had nothing to do with my leaving. I'd stayed in Cold Lake doing my job right up until the disaster.

  Robyn and I started forward again, but we didn't talk too much. We were both wrapped up in our memories.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Outside the Wall, September 9, 2013

  The sun was dipping into the trees above the horizon, leaving streaks of shadows across the small clearing where Alexander worked. Two trucks, both white and with 'Essential Supplies' painted in black on the doors, were parked side by side just off the nearly overgrown forestry road. Dense rainforest vegetation grew in all the space between the trees, a carpet of mushrooms and moss and ferns and fallen logs. Birds sang and chirped, small animals roamed and climbed the trees, searching for food for the approaching winter.

  Alexander stood in the bed of one of the trucks, lifting a large plastic bin and grunting with the effort. He carried it to the other truck, placing it on a pallet with several others just like it. The bins contained food, water and ammunition, several changes of clothing, blankets and cooking gear, a sleeping bag, and several handguns. There were also five large gas cans in the back of the truck, each filled to capacity with scavenged cooking oil to use as fuel.

  With the bin in place, Alexander stood back and stretched. His spine popped and cracked as he twisted and turned to loosen the sore muscles he had earned this afternoon. He had been gathering this load of supplies for over a month, and it was good to have it here with his escape truck. He jumped off the back and closed the tailgate, wiping his arm across his forehead. Next he took a green tarpaulin and tied it across the bed, sealing everything underneath.

  He opened the driver’s door of the empty truck and pulled out a grey canvas bag, then sat on a log nearby, adjusting the pistol on his hip for better comfort. From the bag he removed a metal bottle of water and took a deep drink, then he pulled out a sandwich wrapped in a cloth. Alexander sat eating his sandwich and watched the sun go down through the trees. He finished just as the bright orb fell below the horizon, and sat in the dusk thinking about Lindsay.

  * * *

  For as long as he could remember, Alexander knew he was different from the others. And for just as long, his sister Lindsay knew it too. Born four years apart, the siblings were as distinctly different in personality as they were physically. Where Alexander, the elder of the two, was fair haired and of average height, Lindsay was tall and willowy, possessed of the most beautiful long black hair, just like Mom. Even as a small child she had moved with a grace and serenity that had amazed Alexander.

  The violent death of his father, and the trauma that caused him to become emotionally detached, had occurred just before Lindsay was born, and while its effects would haunt Alexander for the rest of his life, it never touched Lindsay. As he grew and his detachment turned into sociopathy, Lindsay, almost as if in balance, became so attuned to the emotions and feelings of others as to seem almost empathic.

  Lindsay was deeply afraid of her older brother. In childhood she had her first clue to his nature when she was five, and he was nine. Lindsay found him in the field behind their house with one of Mom's kitchen knives. She thought he was playing with one of the neighbour’s cats, a friendly black and white tom named Ruffalo. Lindsay liked Ruffalo a lot. He was calm and soft and liked sitting with her while she played in the garden. When she got close enough to see what Alexander was really doing she screamed and ran back to the house. Lindsay hid in her room for hours until Mom got home, but by then she couldn't articulate what she'd seen. Her five-year-old vocabulary wasn't up to the task.

  Still, she managed to convey that Alexander had done something to Ruffalo, even if she wasn't sure what. Mom didn't believe her. Alexander had an explanation, an excuse, and denied ever hurting the cat. The kitchen knife was clean and back in its drawer. From that day on Lindsay didn't trust her brother, and grew to fear him. She avoided him when she could. The problem was that Alexander was fascinated by her.

  He followed her almost everywhere, for years. His aim was experimental, to see her reactions. He was aware that he was different, and that sometimes his reactions were wrong, at least to other, normal people. He followed his sister to learn how to react to things, to situations, and to build a false face that others would see. He would never do anything in public, bu
t at home Lindsay had little privacy, and her emotions were his testing grounds.

  When Lindsay was nine, and Alexander was thirteen, she caught him again. They were living in Maple Ridge, in a small house that backed onto a ravine, filled with woods and bushes and animals. Mom worked two jobs to pay the bills, and was seldom home except for Thursday nights and Sundays. He would go into the woods on the weekends and stay out until dark every day. Mom was pleased that he was playing outside and staying fit, though she seemed oblivious to his lack of friends. For Lindsay these weekend days when he was out in the woods were a relief. If he was out there, he wasn't following her, watching.

  One day Lindsay followed him into the woods, hoping to find that he was passing time with fishing or climbing trees or even reading a book beside a creek. He wasn't. Nearly an hour’s walk along a stream bed took her to his secret place, following furtively and often hiding as he turned to check his trail, and she stayed in the trees to watch him sharpening sticks into stakes with a big knife he had bought from a hunting store. A number of bones hung on strings from the branches overhanging the ravine where Alexander lurked. She saw him gather a raccoon from a trap, and watched as he stabbed it with his knife. He had carefully aligned the blade so that the animal was killed with one stab. She felt less shock at the poor animal's death than at his reaction. His expression as the animal twitched and bled and died was one of curiosity, utterly removed from any pity or awareness of the pain the creature felt. After that Lindsay began locking her bedroom door at night.

  When Lindsay was thirteen and Alexander was seventeen she shot up several inches in height, only stopping when she was two inches taller than her brother. A good student, she had read about Dissociative Personality Disorder, and believed that her elder sibling was a sociopath bordering on psychopathy. No one believed her when she told them. Alexander was very good at telling people what they wanted to hear, and he could be charming and pleasant. She knew that he practised responses, repeated in the mirror endlessly. He would smile and frown, grin and cry, laugh and brood, all in the privacy of his room. He would shut the door for hours, and Lindsay in the room next door could hear him talking to the mirror. It was about this time that Mom started to suspect there was more to Alexander, but Lindsay knew it was the opposite. There was less to him. Much less.

  When Lindsay was fifteen Alexander moved out of their home. He didn't go far, getting a job at a warehouse and a small apartment above a grocery store. For Lindsay this was the best time of her life. With her sibling at work or his own home, she felt she could finally be free of his scrutiny. He still came by the house to visit, brief entrances that lasted only hours, still long enough to remind her why she was far happier with him gone. She began to write everything down that she remembered about Alexander and his strange habits, keeping a journal under her mattress.

  On her eighteenth birthday she planned to go out with friends to celebrate. She was saving to move out of the province, to Edmonton, where she would study psychology at the University of Alberta. On her way to meet her friends she vanished. It wasn't until the next summer that hikers found her body, reduced to a skeleton, in some brush far up a mountain valley. Alexander was questioned, but he was never charged with any crime. He had been too careful, his only failure that she was found at all.

  INTERLUDE THREE

  Ruins of UBC, July 29, 2004

  Robyn crept from her hiding place beside the wall of a townhouse on Montgomery Place. It was three in the morning, she was tired and cold, and the rain still hadn't let up. She hadn't found any food so far on this trip, but the pharmacy on the Mall had been stocked with all kinds of medicines, many of which were now secured in her pack.

  She had made her way here along Agronomy Road, dodging the undead in the darkness until she had stumbled into one that was standing silent behind a tree. It had lunged out at her, and she'd cried out in surprise before slashing its head open with her machete. Unfortunately her cry had been heard, and she spent the next fifteen minutes evading a low speed pursuit along Agronomy Road and then Pearkes Lane, sneaking between cars and behind trees, finally turning onto Montgomery and hiding in the darkness between two townhouses. The slow crowd of dead pursuers had passed by without pausing, but it was still hours before she became brave enough again to venture out of cover. She dared not sleep, and looking over her shoulder all night as she lay on the driest bit of ground she could find, hoping that the shadows she lay in were deep enough to conceal her, had left her freezing and exhausted. When her watch told her she had been there for two long hours, and the undead hadn't come back, she got up.

  "This was such a bad idea," she muttered to herself. Robyn was convinced, however, that if she didn't deliver some more food people were going to starve to death. It was a constant emergency, the lack of food and medicine. So she would just have to be smarter than the undead, which didn't appear to be too smart at all.

  All the townhouses around her, and for blocks in all directions, were student residences. Low cost, minimal furnishings, and crowded with young and enthusiastic students. She had lived in one herself until last May. She shied away from that memory before it even got started, and turned to her left. Since she was here she may as well look for food in the apartments. The locks on the doors were notoriously easy to break, and she wasn't worried about anyone calling the police.

  The first unit she searched had been trashed. The door was unlocked, and clothes and books and dishes and debris of all kinds littered the floor. The kitchen had been looted already, the fridge left open and all the cupboards empty. Robyn went back out and tried the next unit.

  An hour later, and four more units searched Robyn had found one large can of chick peas and a bottle of Cuban rum. The kitchens of each unit had been bare, the apartments searched and in most cases anything useful taken or destroyed. It occurred to her after the fourth unit that she should be looking in bedrooms as well, since in communal kitchen situations students tended to hoard their food in places they could lock when they weren't there. In the next unit she broke into she went to the kitchen first again.

  The smell of something rotting assaulted her, and she gagged as she backed away from the door into the cleaner air outside. The constant rain was helping to keep the stench of decay down. She pulled the bandanna back over her face, flashed her light around inside the common room, and stepped back inside. This one was different. It hadn't been searched. The shelves still held an assortment of magazines, books, and compact disks. There was a desktop computer still plugged into a big monitor on a desk made up of milk crates and plywood. The banners of sports teams hung on the walls, and a long red fabric couch filled the common room in front of a large screen television.

  It looked like the inhabitants had stepped out for something and could return at any time. There were even three pairs of shoes by the door. She made her way to the kitchen, the stench growing stronger with each step. She found the cupboards closed and the fridge standing open. There was a long-dried bloody hand print on the fridge door. A carton of milk lay on its side on the floor, and a mouldy patch on the tiles showed where it had spilled. Robyn went to the nearest cupboard and opened it. Plates and dishes. She went to another, pulled it open. Packages of instant noodles and macaroni and cheese were piled seemingly at random like puzzle blocks, with a few cans of tuna and salmon.

  "Awesome," she sighed, and pulled it all out onto the counter. She laid her machete on the counter and shrugged out of her pack. There wasn't much food here so far, but she loaded all of it into her pack, then went to look for more. In the next cupboard she found boxes of cereal, but mice had chewed through the boxes and into the bags inside. She left those alone, moved on to the next. Beside the stove she found half of a flat of water bottles and a six pack of beer. It was cheap stuff, but she took the beer anyway. That finished the kitchen.

  There were three bedrooms and a bathroom. She explored the bathroom first, shining her flashlight around in the darkness. Two unopened tubes of toothpaste,
a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a package of condoms and three rolls of toilet paper went into her pack. She used a towel to wipe her face and hands, and looked longingly at the shower, suddenly aware of how she smelled. She sighed and moved on.

  The first bedroom was filthy, and whoever had lived there was a pig. Underwear and clothes lay on the floor, dirty dishes were stacked on the dresser, and porno magazines were left lying on the unmade bed. She looked around quickly from the door, then went to the next room.

  She pushed open the door and shone the flashlight inside. A corpse sat on the bed. Robyn shrieked and raised her machete, backing away from the door. The corpse didn't move, and she shone her flashlight on it with a trembling hand.

  "Oh, for fuck's sake," she said in embarrassed relief. This was apparently a suicide, not one of the undead. There was a bloody smear on the wall behind the dead man, and a revolver lay in his rotting hand. The dead man was a student, she suspected. There was a bite mark on his left arm, and he had apparently shot himself in the head. The stink here was intense, eye watering and thick. Robyn went back to the bathroom and grabbed the towel, using it to pull the gun away from the dead man's hand. She took it to the kitchen after closing the bedroom door and placed it on the counter. She looked at it, trying to see how to open the cylinder to unload it, and quickly worked it out. The cylinder rotated and a slider under the barrel pushed the bullets out the back. She unloaded a single spent bullet and three more unfired bullets. The bullets were bigger than she expected, and two of the chambers were empty. Paper towels and a bottle of water cleaned most of the filth off of it, then she used the rubbing alcohol with some toilet paper to clean it as thoroughly as she could. She then poured some of the alcohol on her own hands to clean them. She picked up the gun and tested it, seeing how the cylinder rotated, pulling the hammer back with her thumb, then gently letting it down as she pulled the trigger.