“I’m not sure this is worth it.”
I have to agree with my wife—it took us the better part of four days to clear the college campus, mostly through making a lot of noise and running like hell, then hiding and letting the pursuing shamblers get lost in the urban wilderness beyond the campus—and all we have to show for it now are trashed shelves and what looks like a small explosion having gone off years ago in the middle of the engineering department.
It’s the middle of June now, when the days are endless and hot as hell, but it’s usually the humidity that gets to us both. We now have seven caches unevenly distributed over five states, all of them with weapons and a few with our second- and third-best sets of gear. I don’t mind the nomadic lifestyle but I can tell that Bree is itching to settle down, at least for a few weeks to enjoy what we can of the summer—and get ready for the next winter. In the south, it’s warm enough even in January that we don’t have to worry about freezing to death unless we’re stupid or terribly unlucky, but we still need to prepare for the months ahead. We have no clue if the theory is true that the undead migrate when it gets too cold in the northern states to survive, but we’ve both noticed the resident population decline the higher the temperatures climb. We can’t outrun a streak and might only be able to hide for so long from them, but one thing is for sure: we need weapons that allow us to remain silent hunters who can easily move on when a territory becomes too dangerous for us, without having to fall back on rice and stale pasta.
In hindsight, why a university should help us with that is highly debatable.
Then again, it’s been over a year since we found any useful equipment in an outdoor store, let alone a gun shop, so there’s that.
“We could check the history department next,” Bree suggests, kicking idly at what used to be a chair leg, I think, now bent and malformed.
“Why, need to brush up on your Ancient Roman emperors?” I snark.
She sends back a venomous glare. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but what we’re looking for are plans on how best to build weapons that, for the most part, predate the advent of modern technology. I’m not saying I need a zombie-hurling trebuchet, but—”
“But plans for bows, crossbows, and javelins will more likely be found there than here,” I agree, finishing her sentence.
And still, neither of us moves a muscle to leave. Rather than scan the shelves, I watch her instead as she pauses, then ventures farther into the partly destroyed room. She halts a few times before she starts pulling books off the shelves, cursing when a rather large tome slips out of her uneven grasp. I’m right there to pick it up, checking the title and index while I ignore her displeased stare. My first impulse is to tell her to forget it—right after another reprimand about her grumbling at her physical shortcomings; that has started to die down, thankfully, but mostly because she has become more deliberate about her motions and better about avoiding the occasional mishap. But I would be lying if I wasn’t tempted… and switching boots every few months so the calluses on my feet don’t get even more calluses isn’t my definition of easy traveling.
“I doubt we’ll find much that we can jury-rig or set to a new purpose,” I muse as I keep flipping through the book. “And unless you picked up a lot more than any of us thought from pretending to listen to Martinez prep our cars back at the bunker, neither of us has a clue about engines or transmissions beyond how to use them.”
Bree looks less perturbed by my gripe than I’d expected. “So what if it takes us months? It’s not like we have anything but time,” she points out. “And we’ll have to set up a few shelters for winter, anyway. Why not add a bodyshop to one?”
I’m tempted to ask if she also plans to be wearing nothing except boots and strategically cut-out mechanics coveralls—but there are a lot of partly destroyed things around us that she could hurl at my head, and I’d rather not deal with a murderous headache today. Instead, I look at the shelf for what else might be helpful. I never thought I’d dip my toes into electrical engineering 101, but why not?
“Worst thing that happens is we only manage to get some electricity for warm water or recharging batteries,” Bree prattles on, her face more animated than I’ve seen it in weeks. “We’ve seen enough solar panels around that we can scrounge up some undamaged ones this very month. And that will help with—”
“Power tools.”
She pauses in her perusal to give me a nasty glare, but that’s not something I’m backing down from. As much as I try not to let her have to deal with her physical changes, all of our many attempts to build anything using plain ol’ tools has ended in catastrophe. But she doesn’t need to have amazing grip strength or wrists of steel if she has a charged drill driver. I can tell the exact moment the same occurs to her when annoyance gives way to a small smile.
“Let’s start with a compound bow before we work our way up to trucks,” she suggests. “Someone has to keep the cougars off your back, after all.”
I scoff, but yeah, I deserve that one. When she’s right, she’s right. I swallow my suggestion about her wearing nothing but high boots, a leather skirt, and said bow—not just because of what she might fling my way, but what her counter suggestion may very well entail.
We’ve spent way too many endless nights with nothing but our imagination to entertain us. Maybe learning a few new skills will keep us from doing something stupid that will cost our lives? Only time will tell.
Rime covers the outside of the wooden door as I push it to the side to step out onto the landing. What little warmth we’ve managed to contain inside the simple room—mainly by some good old body-on-body friction and layers of insulating fabric—escapes.
I don’t want to leave, but we both know it’s time. Summer—and a fall that has been warmer and longer than we’ve had a right to count on but still did—is gone. It’s time to leave.
I have no clue where the sudden sentimental mood is coming from. This is not the first—or even tenth—temporary home that Bree and I have inhabited, but in many ways, it’s special. It’s the first that we’ve built, more or less. No way could we have gotten all the wood up there to build a tree house, but repurposing a platform that used to be part of some zip-lining park? Easy peasy. Or, if not outright easy, manageable over a few long months of working our asses off day in, day out.
It was the perfect project for the perfect summer—but now it’s time to leave, and hope that all our efforts will last into spring when we can return.
Bree is somber and unnaturally quiet as I let her down from the platform, using a simple rope rather than her rope ladder to climb down myself. It’s easier to get rid of the rope, to make our little hidey-hole look more abandoned than it is. From below, our tree house is half-hidden by what remains of the foliage, and looks a lot less inviting than I know it is. Everything we have collected to keep is already at our next location—a maze of caves that we found that is perfect to last us through the colder months with lots of storage room, and no less than five exits at different elevation levels. We’ll have three separate living rooms, and the largest cavern is ideal to finally start working on our new mode of transportation for next year. I’m surprised Bree hasn’t dubbed it our Bat Cave yet. It’s only a matter of time until she will, I’m sure.
Five days from now, we’ll be dug in like ticks, as safe as we can be on our own.
“Think we’ll return next year?” she asks. I hate how wistful she sounds, as if the place means more to her than just a shelter with a view. It does, even though part of me wants to remind her that it shouldn’t. But I’d be a hypocrite if I did, because on some level I feel the same.
“Let’s see if we still want to,” I propose instead. That sounds less sentimental. “We won’t be able to bring whatever vehicles we’ll get running here. At least not permanently. The tree cover won’t let us charge them reliably.”
She gives me a look that makes me want to grin. “Seriously, you’re discarding months of our work because the car port’s not ideal? I’m sure w
e can find a barn where we can slap on some solar panels that’s a short hike away. Might be better, anyway. If someone finds the vehicles, they’re still a distance from our home. Time aplenty to bail—or dissuade them of wanting to come any closer.” The way her eyes light up, I can tell she’s not talking about diplomatic measures.
Rather than dish out a verbal reply—that might very well get me into the dog house—I nudge her arm with mine as I start walking, deliberately ambling south rather than west, which would be the closest direction toward our destination. On all our trips we’ve always been careful to select a different route, and never the shortest. We’re good about hiding our tracks, but nothing beats no tracks left at all. She follows after a last look back, the relative gloom of the forest soon enveloping us. With the foliage gone, it has lost some of its beauty and added a lot of malevolent austerity. We’re not welcome here anymore, and it’s time we left.
We make good headway, heaps of foliage obscuring dead branches notwithstanding. It’s well into the second day of our trek that we leave the territory that we’ve thoroughly explored over the past months, and late that evening that we reach new-to-us land. It’s only a thirty-mile stretch until we’ll get to the outer perimeter of the cave hideout, but I feel myself get just a little antsy. Home is where you know where all the hiding spots are, or something like that.
Or maybe the hint of anxiety comes from the fact that I’m about to deliberately betray my wife’s trust.
We hike for another hour until we reach a spot that’s perfect to set up camp. We snack on the soaked rice, oatmeal, and nuts that we’ve kept in our packs as trail rations, Bree much more enthusiastic than I am since she can’t tell that everything absolutely tastes like cardboard. We’re sleeping outside tonight since there is no good man-made shelter close, and I valiantly volunteer to take first watch so she’ll get the rest she needs. I listen to her breathing slowly evening out but never reach that rhythm of deep sleep that I’ve gotten so used to over the past months. She remains alert even when she’s out cold. Twice when I get up to stretch and relieve myself, I hear her wake up, so I pretend to need to stretch my legs as I lurk close until she has dozed off once more.
Then I turn toward the road we’ve followed most of the evening—a good three hundred feet away—and walk off into the night, backtracking our path.
It’s only two miles, but those are four miles in total that I leave her, helpless and on her own, and that chews on my conscience more than I expected. My skin is prickling with the sense of being watched the entire way back to the mailbox in the middle of nowhere. It’s right where I saw it earlier, set back from the road and half-hidden behind two bushes, no road leading away to a house. Even as I come to a stop, my eyes scanning my surroundings, I wonder whether I should do this. It’s not too late to abandon my half-assed plan—and I might very well be signing our death warrant doing this; I’m very aware of that. Do I trust Richards not to tattle on us? Yes, but I’m also aware of the forces that may easily break his mind, and all loyalty and good intentions won’t help us if that happens. I almost wish a bear or wolf would break out of the cover of the trees and come for me, to keep me from getting a folded paper in a plastic wrap from the depth of my pack where it’s been traveling with us from the very day we set foot back on US soil. On it are the coordinates of every single one of our caches and possible hiding places, should someone need to track us down—and the next drop-off location for the updated version to follow come spring.
I ask myself—for what feels like the millionth time, and probably is—if I’m doing the right thing, but in the end I’m not thinking about either Bree’s or my own safety as I drop the thin package into the otherwise empty mailbox. We can take care of ourselves—but not everyone has that luxury. If it was just the two of us, I would have taken us both to either South America or the very northern reaches of Alaska, and made it impossible for anyone to ever find us again. But while we seldom talk about it, we both know that our hiatus is just that, and eventually we will return to civilization.
I have a feeling it won’t be our choice when and how, and I’m weirdly okay with that.
Of course, chances are when that happens we’ll be up to our necks in shit, and I’ll be kicking myself for ever thinking this.
I consider dropping one of the few grenades we’ve managed to scavenge into the box and never look back. It wouldn’t just be a dramatic gesture—and get my ass kicked when Bree inevitably rears up and realizes I left her alone—but a final one. Yet if the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that I’m less of a lone wolf than I’ve always seen myself as, and I’m unwilling to cut those last few ties that still connect me to the people I care about. Maybe stalling for another year or two will do the trick, and all our problems will miraculously solve themselves. I don’t believe it, but it could happen. We survived the fucking zombie apocalypse—I’m up for anything short of giving up.
After a last look at the mailbox, I trudge back to the road and return to my wife, hoping that I didn’t just doom us for good.
Hope
Hope: Nate's point of view of a part in the second half of GF#10: Uprising
Hope
I pace up and down my cell—five steps one way, five steps back—incapable of standing still.
I’m so fucking hungry, I feel like my insides are about to tear apart, leaving a hole where my stomach used to be. Those few bites of muscle have done nothing to satisfy the hunger, might even have worsened it.
Why haven’t they fed me yet? Didn’t I perform exactly as expected?
I stop to stare up at the slit high up in the wall that lets in virtually no light since it’s not just dark, but a storm is raging outside. Rainwater is starting to run down the wall, making my cold, dark hole one degree more inhospitable than it already is.
I wonder—not for the first time, not even since they dragged me back in from the arena—why I even try to hold on to sanity, or what’s left of it. I hurt all over, outside and inside, the fresh wound across my ribs not helping. At least they allowed me to clean it this time so it won’t hinder me for days, but that means there wasn’t enough water to wash up completely. I can still smell the blood on me, which might be the reason why my body is a step away from feeding-frenzy mode.
It’s so tempting to give in sometimes. To just give up and let go. There are so many options I have once I turn onto that last one-way track: I could just sit down and wait to die—unlikely, but it’s an option: the peaceful one. I could whip myself into a rage and attack them the next time that door opens—that’s the problematic option, because if I don’t convert, or they take me down too quickly, I’m in for a world of pain and humiliation, and I’ve learned the hard way that I very much want to avoid that. Or the easy option—next time I’m in the arena, I don’t fight, or make a crucial mistake at the right moment and die before anyone can keep me from it. As I stare at my hands, trembling from the need to dig into something, I wonder if I could manage to mutilate myself; meat is meat, right? I doubt it. I’m hungry enough to consider it, but my brain still has a few barriers in place that it won’t let me cross. I know my jaws have the strength to snap through fingers and tear out chunks of flesh—
Voices outside make my considerations grind to a halt. Maybe it’s feeding time now? But they pass right by my cell, heading further down the corridor.
They can’t have forgotten. Someone is right now grumbling because they have to take care of four corpses. I’m certain that their disposal routine always ends with scraps for the kitchen. And I am important enough that I get the spoils of my own fights, if not regular meals. That would be too easy; might give me a false sense of security—and maybe pull me back from the edge of madness. I’m so far beyond caring about it that it wouldn’t make a difference—and sometimes, that thought scares me. There’s also comfort in it, because as long as I can adapt, I can—and will—survive. And I have to be alive to worry about fancy concepts like socially acceptable behavior—so stay
ing alive is key.
More voices approach. I feel myself start to salivate, and don’t give a shit about it. Feeling like Pavlov’s dog is one of the more humane iterations of what they’ve twisted me into. I like dogs. Maybe I’ll get one if I get out of here. When I get out of here, I quickly correct myself—must keep thinking positive thoughts. In a pinch, a dog would make a great dinner—
There are no words to describe the amount of self-loathing that’s raging inside of me. I stopped trying to gauge it what must have been weeks ago. It only serves to help them wear me down, so I do my best to just let it pass through my mind like watching water in a stream pass. I can’t make myself abandon it for good; that would mean giving up on something I cannot allow myself to give up on. I’ve already severely compromised myself because I eat; giving up judgment about that would be that one step too far.
The voices stop in front of my cell. I feel myself back against the opposite wall before I can even give my body the command to do so. Nothing good ever comes through that door. Yes, I’m ravenous, but I don’t want the food. I don’t want the fights, either, and everything else that happens when they drag me outside. I hate the primal fear, twined with disgust, that claws at the back of my throat. I should be safe tonight. I not only killed, I made a veritable spectacle out of it, damnit! I pleased the crowds; I deserve to get fed and enjoy my cold, dank hole in the ground without anything that makes me vomit and curl in on myself later—
But I know what’s coming, because if they only intended to feed me, it would be three guards, and that sounds like at least double the number. Exhaling slowly, I try to center myself, to find peace and calm in my mind. What I hate the most about my situation isn’t what’s going to happen now—although I loathe it from the bottom of my heart—but the fact that I have no control whatsoever about it. I was so naive, thinking I could manipulate them. It’s not even like I’ve found my match in Cortez—he is one evil motherfucker, but he’s no genius, and he’s not well-versed in the art of breaking men’s spirits. He doesn’t need to be, because if your only goal is to drive someone insane and see how much more they can take and you don’t give a shit whether your plaything is broken in a day or a week or a year, you’re fucking close to invincible. I gave up thinking I could one-up him a long time ago; now I’m just trying to go the way of least resistance. But as tonight proves, not even that strategy is paying off.
Beyond Green Fields | Book 3 | Lost & Found [A Post-Apocalyptic Anthology] Page 4