by D. J. Molles
Ice-cold water hit Abe’s face in a steady flow, like it was coming out of a hose. It soaked the wet cloth already over his face and he could feel water seeping through and leaking down in to his nostrils, burning in his sinuses. He coughed violently, unable to keep himself. The men holding him down only pressed down harder. The water tasted muddy and foul, like it had come from a drainage pond.
The stream of water left his face.
Warmth from the halogen lights.
Abe couldn’t breathe through his nose so he was forced to spit water out of his mouth and suck in air that way. He coughed a few more times, then gritted his teeth and tried to force himself to relax, even though it felt like every muscle in his body remained taut.
Carl’s voice and breath on his cheek. “There is nothing you can say or do that is going to make this stop. The things you say in this room have consequences. You will deal with those consequences, but while you do, consider answering my questions: Where did you come from? Why are you here? Who sent you here? What happened to your rank?”
Then the water came again.
TWENTY-THREE
NEWCOMERS
THE RAIN STARTED POURING around eight o’clock. It seemed that the sun had no sooner managed to lift itself up over the trees and shine down on Camp Ryder, than black clouds roared in from the southwest and covered it all up in shadow again.
And isn’t that appropriate? Angela thought as she stood at the front door of the Camp Ryder building and looked out over Shantytown and the glistening roofs made of tarpaulin and sheet metal and in a few instances, just plain old rotting plywood. As soon as we get our feet under us, another haymaker cleans our clock. When is it okay just to lie down and let the ref count you out?
Is it ever okay?
She thought she knew how Lee would answer that question. Despite how different he was these days, he was still Lee Harden. And it seemed that Lee Harden never knew when to quit. He would be that proverbial boxer that just continued to stand up until the stuff between his ears had been punched to a bloody pulp. He was the type of person to die before giving up. And it wasn’t hubris, she didn’t think. More like…
Well, she really didn’t have a word for it.
Lee just was what he was.
And what about you, Angie-Girl? Her own mind using the name her father had called her when she was in pigtails and jumpers. A name she hadn’t heard in decades and which came back unexpectedly and somewhat disconcertingly to her mind. How’s your clockwork? Can you take a licking and keep on ticking? Are you built for the long haul?
The words had the flavor of something her father would have said. If she’d been a superstitious person, she might have claimed it was his ghost. But no matter how long a father has been in the ground, he always speaks to his children. A person forever remembers their mother’s arms and their father’s words.
She wondered about her father. She wondered whether Abby would have loved him and hated him as much as she had. Because she’d loved him until thirteen, and then hated him until he died when she was sixteen. And then she’d loved him again, but a little too late. Because, while he’d been a loving man, and a good father, he had been frank, and his rules had been iron. And when you’re a teenage girl the last thing you want is honesty and strict rules.
She regretted it, of course. But dead is dead and cannot be changed.
Perhaps she should thank him for the sometimes cold practicality that she had. A strength, she thought, though her late, philandering husband had disagreed. To him, it had been a lack of heart, a lack of warmth. But his quest for the warmth he so desired had eventually killed him. Or at least it had set forward a chain of events that led to him being killed.
By Lee.
Angela shivered. She remembered Jenny’s words and they skittered up her spine and back down again and made her entire body feel nervous and uncomfortable. Things aren’t what they seem, Jenny had said. When you stop lying to yourself.
About Lee, of course.
Whatever she felt for Lee—and to be honest, she wasn’t sure what that was—she had to remember that Lee had his own brand of practicality, which had always been harsher than her own. He had done and would continue to do things that Angela would never do. She wondered what dark places he’d already been, and what Jenny had meant when she had said that things were not what they seemed.
And it was not just Lee that concerned Angela now.
It was Jenny as well. The woman seemed… dark. Detached.
And then there was Abby to think about. And Sam, of course. She couldn’t forget about him. The two were close, and growing closer. They were with each other almost every minute of the day now, and in some aspects Angela thought it was good. Sam being there for Abby not only gave Sam something to do, but it gave Abby someone to talk to that was a little more accessible than her mother—which she felt guilty for, of course.
But on the other hand, their closeness bothered Angela in certain ways. They conversed with each other and grew silent when others came around. They didn’t play with the other kids. Instead, Sam clung to his rifle and Abby clung to him. Sam had been teaching Abby the basics of shooting, though he had not actually let her shoot the rifle yet.
At least to her knowledge.
She wasn’t comfortable with Abby learning to shoot, though she couldn’t figure out why. Sometimes maternal instinct overrode even the most practical personalities. She didn’t want her baby playing with guns, even though, when she closed her eyes and thought about it logically, she knew very well that Abby knowing how to use a gun was more likely to save her life than hurt it at this juncture.
Conflicted, she had said nothing. She watched when Sam put the rifle in Abby’s hands and taught her how to hold it. Even that small, .22-caliber rifle seemed enormous in Abby’s hands, but Abby never seemed intimidated by it. When Sam was “teaching” her, Abby’s expression became dogged, and Angela saw herself in ways that twisted her up inside.
Abby and Sam. And Jenny. And Lee. And elections.
Worries, worries, worries.
They wore her down.
Now the rain was coming in sheets, and the wind was picking up again. It had gusted the dark storm clouds in and then calmed as the rain started falling, but now it was coming down harder than before and the wind was pushing it this way and that. A swirl of wind shoved the falling rain toward Angela and she took a step back to keep dry. Misted droplets clung to her hair, making it seem like a layer of frost had settled on it.
Out of the gray-wash of rain a figure came running. It wore a dark green parka, Angela could see as it drew closer, the hood pulled up and kept there by a hand. A small-statured person, small boots pounding through puddles that were steadily gathering in the gravel lot between Shantytown and the Camp Ryder building.
Marie took the steps two at a time. When she was out of the rain, she threw the hood of her parka back. Her curly brown hair was in tangles. Despite the hood, she had not been able to keep the rain off her face and she swiped a palm across it to clear the water.
“Hey,” Angela said with a smile, reaching out and touching the other woman’s shoulder with one hand as she opened the door to the building. “Let’s get inside. Kitchen fire’s heating the place up pretty good.”
Marie shuffled inside, shaking the water off. “Yeah, wood’s runnin’ low, though.” Before Jerry had mucked everything up, Marie had taken care of the kitchen and preparing community meals for the entire camp, usually just breakfast and dinner—sometimes just dinner, if supplies were getting low. Since Jerry had been… dispatched… she’d taken over her previous duties. She lit the fires in the morning and stoked them back to life in the evening and the building was one of the only places in the camp that stayed somewhat warm.
Wood running low. Yet another thing to worry about.
Harvesting wood meant people going outside camp, which meant a whole big operation just to keep them safe while they cut up downed trees and hauled the wood back into the camp.
They’d stocked up mountains of wood in the late summer, but burned through it quicker than most had imagined.
Marie had called it, though. Angela distinctly remembered standing next to the woman sometime in late September, and watching Marie’s face screw up as she eyed the piles of wood. It had seemed like too much to Angela, but Marie just shook her head. “That’ll get us into winter, but not through it.”
For now, the interior of the Camp Ryder building was somewhat warmer than outside, though for once the weather seemed to be warming, rather than cooling. More people than usual had gathered inside today. Some were holdovers from breakfast, simply not wanting to brave the rain just yet. Others were trickling in to escape it. The shanties were good for privacy and to give everyone a living space, but they weren’t very watertight and once you were wet, there seemed to be no way to get dry and warm except to come inside the building.
“How’s the food looking?” Angela asked as they began making their way to a table—the same quiet corner table where Angela and Jenny had spoken. The office was quieter, but it was beginning to be a negative place for Angela. She preferred to be away from it when she could. There was too much blood and violence and bad news that had been spilled and committed and given in that little upstairs room.
“Same as the wood. Don’t think we’ve had a hunting party since Lee came back. And scavenging has dropped off significantly since Greg died.” Marie snorted. “I guess he was good for something.”
“Marie…” Angela looked around to see who might be listening. No one seemed to be.
Marie looked down, almost ashamed but not quite. “Yeah. Shouldn’t speak ill of the dead and all. But, to answer your questions, with those infected… hunter… things out in those woods…” She made a face. “Nobody wants to go out past the wire.”
“Well.” Angela sat at the table. “I’m sure they don’t want to starve, either.”
Marie took a seat with a sigh. “I’m sure they don’t.”
“We’ll set up a party for wood and some hunting and some scavenging.” Angela tucked stray blond hair behind her ears. “Or should we just do the election? Let whoever gets elected handle it? Maybe there’s some good ideas out there that we’re just not thinking about yet.”
Marie looked amused. Like she knew something Angela didn’t. But she just shrugged. “We’ve only got wood and food for a few days, so we better hold the election quick.”
Angela nodded. She just wanted this to be over. While she was glad to contribute, somehow she had fallen into a spot where everyone thought that because she was close to Lee, she was in charge. It made her feel almost physically heavy. The weight on her shoulders felt very real. She couldn’t wait to shove this off to someone else and get back to things she needed to focus on.
Like Abby and Sam…
“Angela!”
The voice snapped at her like a whip, almost making her jump. It was not Marie—it was a man’s voice, and coming from across the room right along with the sound of the front doors slamming against the back wall. Everyone in the Camp Ryder building twisted to look that way.
Immediately, Angela’s thoughts went to the worst things: Abby’s hurt. Sam’s hurt. Lee’s hurt… or dead. She stood up sharply from the table, staring at whoever was calling her name.
“Angela! Marie!” A man was running toward them, waving his hand. He wore a yellow poncho, but he seemed a larger man than it was intended for and the sleeves of the jacket he wore underneath looked soaked through. His boots squeaked and squished as he jogged toward them, leaving a trail of water behind him. His face and hands were flushed from the cold.
“This doesn’t look good,” Marie muttered as the man ran up to them.
Angela thought that she recognized him. He was one of the men from the group that had escaped the Followers, and then found Smithfield and Jacob. Brett was his name, she thought.
“What’s wrong?” she said, voice already tight. “What happened?”
Brett pointed back behind him, water dripping from his nose. “People at the front gate. A bunch of them.”
Angela came out of the front doors of the building, trailing Marie and Brett. Her hand was on her belt line, checking for her pistol and making sure she could get to it under the parka. Her mind seemed in the habit of jumping to the worst possible conclusions, but maybe that wasn’t such a bad habit. Maybe that was the type of thing that kept you alive.
Are they friendly?
She kept straining to hear the sound of fighting, but there was nothing but rainfall, heavy and insistent. Angela was so focused on listening, her hand still grasping the pistol at her side, she didn’t even think to flip the hood up until the rain had already soaked her head. She released the wet but comforting grip of her pistol and flipped the hood up as she came down the steps to the building, peering through the rain at the front gate.
Muddy rainwater and wet gravel splashed and crunched under her boots. She wasn’t quite running, but she wasn’t walking, either. She was already on the balls of her feet, like someone ready to start fighting. Through the downpour of rain she could see the gates were still closed, and that took some of the tension out of her belly.
There were two Camp Ryder guards standing at the gate, rifles in hand, but they weren’t brandished—just held at port, across their chests, or pointed at the ground. The gate itself had once been regular chain link, but had since been reinforced with a mishmash of random hard objects—some of them ballistically safe, and others not. But across the gate, about eye level, they had left a gap of about six inches that went across the entire gate. Beyond that gap, Angela could see the shapes of many people, though they stood as still as trees, even in the rain. Probably too soaked to really care.
She peered around different pieces of stuff that had been used to reinforce the gate, trying to get a better idea of who was standing beyond it. She couldn’t see a vehicle. These folks had been walking, and the closer Angela got, the rougher they looked, and more tired, and more wet and cold. There was a lot of potential cases of pneumonia brewing in that group, she thought.
Don’t take pity on them yet, she thought. You have no idea who they are.
As she drew up to the gate, her pace slowed. She was counting heads, scanning the crowd at the gates. There had to be thirty of them, at least. And then came the equation of practicality, the math of survival: If I let thirty in, will we be able to push them out again?
Simple numbers game. Thirty of them. Against how many in Camp Ryder?
The parka’s hood did little to stop the often sideways rain. The water ran down her face and trickled onto her lips and into her mouth and it tasted salty by the time it got there. She spit it out and glanced over her shoulder at her companions. Marie would know how many people were inside those gates, down to a man. Angela could take an educated guess, though.
Forty. Maybe fifty?
That’s a big difference, Angela told herself. Thirty versus forty is almost a toss-up. Thirty versus fifty makes me more comfortable.
“Marie, how many people are in Camp Ryder right now?”
“Originals, or everybody?”
Angela gave her a pinched look. “What’s originals?”
“You and me.” Marie smirked. “Hell, there’s only eleven of us left. But if you count all of Old Man Hughes’s group and Brett’s folks that came in with Jacob, and all the others”—she looked skyward, thinking—“minus the ones that left with Lee… we got… fifty-two.”
As the two women spoke, Brett remained silent, watching the gate and the people beyond. Angela was now about ten feet from the gate and there she stopped, assessing the people on the other side. If they meant to rape and pillage, they hid it well. They were a depressing lot. Several children huddled by mothers and fathers and a few old people that Angela didn’t think would last the winter. Young and old, weak and strong, they were soaked to the bone and looked it. They had the same limpness as waterlogged plants, like a stand of wheat beaten down by storms.
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br /> “I don’t see guns,” Brett mumbled.
“Guns can be hidden,” Marie answered.
Angela nodded in agreement. Then she raised her hand to the people outside the gate. “Who is in charge of your group here?” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the all-encompassing sound of rain.
One of the men that was already standing at the front raised his hand back to her and took another cautious step toward the gate so that he was within arm’s reach of it. For some reason, Angela didn’t like him being so close, but when she looked at him, he seemed as nervous as she was.
When the world is full of wolves in sheep’s clothing, how do you decide who to let in the gate?
Angela stepped up to the gate, looking through the gap at the man on the other side. “What’s your name?”
“Mac,” he said. The single word had every bit of exhaustion to it that Angela had expected. It was like he knew the drill, knew not to ask for shit, just to answer the questions. Maybe he’d been through this before. Maybe he’d found himself hat-in-hand at some other folks’ doorstep.
And maybe those folks are dead now.
Maybe the whole pathetic act took them off guard, too.
Angela swiped some rain away and narrowed her eyes. “What do you want?”
“Same thing as everybody else that comes knocking, I guess.” He wore a hat, and a hooded sweatshirt underneath a thick leather jacket. He had the hood pulled up, though it was cotton and didn’t seem to be doing him much good anymore. Water gathered at the brim of his cap and came off in streams. He looked up at her from underneath the brim and behind his miniature waterfall. “Whatever you can offer us, really. Safe place to sleep. Get warm and dry, maybe. I know food and water is hard enough to come by, but we can work for it. If you got things that need gettin’ done.”
Angela looked behind him. Her eyes fell on a young girl. She looked nothing like Abby, and yet she looked everything like Abby. Something in the eyes. Something that shouldn’t be in children’s eyes, and it broke Angela’s heart looking at that little girl, just like it broke her heart when she saw the look in her own daughter’s eyes.