by John L. Monk
They walked into the party room, and Jack relaxed. He found a spot near a group of children spread around a wheelbarrow full of hot dumbbells. There was a candle burning on the fireplace mantle. In the meager light, the children looked Mandy’s age and younger.
Lisa approached a larger shape lying at the edge of the circle in a sleeping bag. She nudged it with her foot. When it didn’t move, she kicked it, bringing forth a muffled curse, then whispers.
A moment later, Greg said, “He is?”
Lisa shushed him angrily and whispered something else.
Greg got up and came over.
“Hey man,” he said quietly. “Glad you made it. Knew you would, what with your doomy parents and … ah crap, man, I’m sorry.”
Jack smiled. “I know, man. It’s cool. Glad you’re okay.”
“You too, man.”
They talked briefly, catching up a little, enjoying the good news of their mutual survival. For Jack’s part, he was happy he wasn’t alone, and glad there was someone else alive who’d known his parents.
Before leaving, Greg lightly punched his shoulder and said, “Later on, okay?”
“Sure, man.”
The front door opened and closed and the room fell quiet. Jack lay back and shut his eyes.
In the morning, everyone wanted to know more about the new arrivals. Lisa and Greg quickly introduced Pete, Mandy, and Jack to the group. She introduced each child and gave their ages.
Kimberly was a two-year-old girl with fine blond hair.
Brian was four years old.
Two sisters, Riley and Jessica, were seven and eight, respectively.
Not everyone was so young. The twelve-year-old black kid with the pistol on his side was named Tony. Of them all, he appeared the most well fed, if not slightly plump.
Wondering if he’d come from a gang, Jack gazed steadily at him and said, “You’re eating well.”
Tony smirked. “I used to be pretty fat. Now I’m starving. You got something to eat, I’ll show you.”
Jack smiled. He’d forgotten how overweight people were before the Sickness.
“That reminds me.” He turned to Lisa. “I brought some food with me. Is there somewhere …?”
Lisa nodded. “I have just the place for it.”
Jack grabbed his backpack and Pete’s makeshift pack and followed her into the rental office near the entrance.
“There’s a safe under here,” she said, pulling aside a blanket. “I cracked it.”
He stared at her in amazement. “You crack safes now?”
She smiled, basking in the attention. “I learned last year on my grampa’s floor safe. Easy, once you know how they’re made. There were lots of videos online showing how it’s done. Grampa said if I ever robbed a bank I’d have to pay him hush money.” Her smile faltered and she glanced away. “Anyway, it wasn’t too hard.”
Jack nodded at the safe. “So what was in it?”
“A little money, blank checks, papers, stuff like that. We used it for kindling. How much food did you bring?”
Jack broke it down quickly: ten packs of dehydrated trail food, five pounds of rice, five pounds of beans, seven protein bars, and a pound of beef jerky his parents had made from the meat in the freezer after the power went out.
“Dang, Jack,” she said in awe. “It’s a treasure trove. You’re basically a millionaire now.”
“What’s mine is yours.”
For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, she hugged him and cried again. Jack wasn’t sure whether to put his arms around her or thump her on the back like they did on TV, so he just stood there awkwardly and felt guilty for liking it so much.
“Uh, hey,” he said. “You okay?”
She nodded and wiped her eyes. “Yeah. I’m just … I miss my mom and dad, you know?”
He nodded, feeling his own eyes stinging now. No way was he going to cry in front of her, though.
From the doorway, Greg said, “Hey, you two. Everyone’s asking about breakfast. And by everyone, I mean me.”
“Who’s watching the road?” she said.
“Tony and the new girl. What’s her name?”
“Mandy,” Jack said.
“We’ll be there in a minute,” Lisa said.
The safe was nearly empty, but for a few cans of chili and some boxes of spaghetti. Lisa took out the chili, deposited Jack’s contribution, then locked it back up. She cooked the chili in a cast iron pot hanging over the fire pit out back. Ten minutes later they were sitting around a circular table enjoying their meager meals and chatting to fill the silence.
At one point Pete, who’d been quiet the whole morning, said, “So now what? Just sit here like dummies?”
Greg glared at him. “Why don’t you shut up and enjoy the food we just gave you for free?”
Pete shook his head in disgust and wouldn’t look at anyone.
“His delivery sucks,” Jack said, “but he has a point. There wasn’t a lot of food in that safe. And security’s an issue, especially after …” He looked around at the various worried faces. “I think we should, uh … Tony, was it?” The boy nodded. “You, Lisa, Greg, and Pete—we should maybe go have a meeting.”
“What about me?” Mandy said.
“You get to do the dishes,” he said and got up.
Lisa led them to the rental office and shut the door. Though there were several chairs inside, nobody sat. Pete looked nervous, and Greg kept glancing at him with a frown on his face.
“So, Greg,” Jack said, “what’s the plan to save us all?”
Greg, who’d never volunteered for anything since they’d known each other, and who always deferred to either his sister or Jack, said, “Uh … how the heck should I know? You’re the Chosen One.”
Jack almost smiled at that. Ever since he’d confided about his parents’ plan to fast track his childhood, Greg had ribbed him with the moniker at every opportunity.
“If you don’t know how to save us,” Jack said, “why did you call out Pete in there?”
Greg shrugged. “Didn’t like his attitude.”
“I don’t see a lot of people signing on to help us,” Jack said. “We shouldn’t pick fights with each other. Now shake hands.”
Greg’s face grew momentarily hard. Then he sighed and held out his hand. Pete looked at it like he’d never seen so strange a custom before as handshaking, then reached out and grimaced through the experience.
Jack turned to Lisa. “What’s your plan?”
Her lips twitched into a challenging smirk. “I’m waiting to see where you’re going with this.”
“Me too,” he said. “Okay, Pete. You brought it up—got any big plans to keep us alive?”
“Why are you asking me? I don’t have guns and stuff.”
Jack looked at Tony. “How about you?”
Tony’s smiled slyly. “We should make a crew of our own and take stuff, too. If we don’t, other people gonna take everything, and then what?”
Lisa gasped and started to say something, but Jack held up his hand.
“As bad as that sounds on the surface,” he said, “it’s hard to blame him. And though I’ll never steal food from people or force them to join us, I like what he said about forming our own group. We need people, but they have to be old enough to carry a gun.”
“None of us are old enough to carry guns,” Pete said. “We’re not grownups.”
“Even though he’s talking like one,” Tony threw in, laughing and looking around to see if anyone else laughed, too. No one did.
Jack glanced from him to Pete. “We’re not old enough to drive, either. Time to face the facts: we’re the grownups now. We need to act like it.”
Lisa pointed outside to the party room. “I’m not kicking out those children, Jack, and you’re not either. We have a duty to protect them and anyone else who needs it.”
He raised his hands in a calming gesture. “Nobody said anything about kicking anyone out. But we have to be realistic. There
’s a murderer out there named Blaze, and he’s snapping up all the teenagers he can. What’s more, he’s sucking the area dry of what little food there is. Once he’s done, he’ll have to branch out or his people will mutiny.”
“Can’t mutiny on land,” Pete said.
Everyone turned to look at him—calmly, as if studying a strange bug that had crawled into the room—then looked back at Jack.
Greg said, “How long until that happens?”
“No idea. When he raided my house, they got enough food to feed three people for a year. Mom had quite the survival pantry. Who knows how many other houses like mine he’s found? Or how many people he’s killed?”
Jack went on to describe the scene with the gang at his house, the journey with Pete, and the eventual killing of one of Blaze’s own people. He left out that it had been with his rapier. In an odd way, he felt … not responsible for it, exactly, but connected to it on a personal level.
After he finished, Tony said, “What if we joined him? We’d be safe then, right?”
Jack pulled a leaf from his learning excursions with his dad and paused, pretending to think about it long and hard.
“Nobody’s safe anymore, least of all them. Blaze is like Stalin in World War Two. He thought everyone was out to get him, so he started killing his generals and replacing them with idiots. I’m not joining a guy like that.”
“Stalin?” Tony said. “I get it. He’s like a drug cartel boss.”
Jack didn’t know much about drug cartel bosses, so he said, “Exactly like a drug cartel boss.”
The younger boy seemed to deflate. “So if we ain’t joining them, then what?”
Jack smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.”
9
Their immediate problems, Jack said, were food, secure shelter, manpower, medicine, and a safe and dependable water supply. When Greg pointed out they had a giant pool of water out back, he asked how long it would stay clean when rodents inevitably fell in and drowned. Better if they had something they didn’t have to boil every time they got thirsty, like a natural spring, or a well with a pump (though he had no idea how they’d power it).
Jack had a few ideas about how to get more food beyond simple scavenging, but didn’t go into that. For now, their hoarded food would have to last them.
Medicine, he said, would have to be scrounged from homes and any pharmacies that hadn’t already been looted. He figured looters would have gone for the painkillers, and even then, he wondered how many survivors in the area were pill poppers. He didn’t know anything about drug addiction, though he suspected it was one of the reasons his parents hadn’t wanted him going to high school.
In addition to drugs, the doctors and dentists of the world were all gone. Broken arms could be splinted. He could learn how to pull teeth. But fillings and root canals and the like were now a lost science. Going forward, he asked that everyone maintain a strict no-sugar policy, and that brushing came second only after staying awake on watches in terms of priorities.
“If I had my way,” Jack added, “we’d limit carbohydrates, too. The Inuit never had to brush their teeth. All they ate was blubber and protein and organs, and they had near perfect dental health.”
He’d learned that from his mom, who taught in the biology department at the university. Other hunter-gather societies were the same, she’d said.
Pete made a face. “That’s disgusting. You’re full of it.”
Jack just shrugged and continued to the next thing: shelter.
The problem with the Welcome Center was it had eight different entrances, huge windows front and back, and it was sitting in the middle of a large number of other apartment complexes and housing communities. Worse, the smoke from the pit out back was a beacon to the food gangs. They needed to relocate to a more remote location with a fireplace—preferably with a stove, like he’d seen at a cabin with his parents a few years ago. The stove sat inside the fireplace and kept the whole cabin toasty, and there was even a cooking surface on top. Way more efficient use of fuel.
“Is the gas out everywhere, or just here?” he said to Greg at one point. His own house was all electric, and he had no idea if gas was still a viable heating option this long after the Sickness.
“I don’t know about everywhere,” Greg said. “It turned off here the same time as the water and electricity. Lots of freezing kids out there right now.”
Pete grunted. “Most of them are probably dead. I mean, how’s a baby gonna feed itself?”
“We can’t think about that,” Jack said quietly. “Not if we’re going to keep going.” He turned to Lisa. “How many people our age do you still see around here? Minus the ones who attacked you.”
She rubbed her chin. “There’s still one or two I know hiding in their apartments that I couldn’t get to join us. They’re pretty far-gone. The rest float between the supermarkets, restaurants, and houses scrounging for anything they can find. I found a dead cat the other day that looked like it’d been skinned. Messy and wasteful.”
Jack nodded slowly to himself.
“He’s got that look in his eye,” Greg said to his sister. “He’s gonna say something Chosen One-ish.”
Jack ignored that and said, “Let’s do a final sweep of the complex and surrounding neighborhoods—see if we can get more recruits. We’ll go in armed groups of two.” He recalled that nut with the bat, smashing out car windows. “Nobody crazy, and no troublemakers. And try not to get anyone younger than about ten.”
“How do we get them to come?” Greg said.
“If they still have food, offer them security in exchange for sharing. If they don’t have anything, offer security, food, medicine, that kind of thing. The basics.”
Greg looked at him like he was crazy. “We don't have medicine. Nobody’s gotten sick. And if they did, how would you know what to give them?”
“Usually it says on the bottles,” Jack said impatiently. “If it doesn’t, we find a book on it later and figure it out. Next topic: what do we need that you guys haven’t scrounged already?”
Tony said, “Gold and silver. Coins and chains and stuff like that. And diamonds. One day, may have to use that as money.”
Jack wasn’t so sure about that, considering the world’s supply of precious metals and jewels was now available for a tiny population to easily grab. Not wanting to stifle anyone’s creativity, he smiled and nodded.
“Good idea,” he said. “What else?”
Pete said, “Backpacks? For the children. So they can carry stuff.”
“Excellent idea, Pete. Everyone gets their own pack. What else?”
More time passed while they brainstormed ideas, none of them coming up with anything the twins and Tony hadn’t scavenged already.
Jack said, “How about fishing tackle? Rods, reels, lures, that kind of thing. I brought a little with me, but we could use more.”
Lisa quirked an eyebrow. “You know some place to fish around here that I don’t?”
“Not around here,” he said, smiling mysteriously. “Later on, who knows?”
Pete started saying how fish had mercury in them, and that’s why they couldn’t eat them, and they didn’t taste good anyway.
With a teasing twinkle in his eye, Tony said he’d never seen mercury in fish sticks. Pete said you needed a microscope to see mercury, and Tony just laughed at him.
“Guys, please,” Jack said, and they quieted. “Lisa and I will head out together. Greg?”
Greg shrugged. “I’ll go with Tony.”
Lisa looked at Pete. “Someone should stay here and watch the kids. How good are you with a gun?”
“I’m a pacifist.”
Jack sighed. “What about scavenging?”
Pete looked skeptical. “I’m not going anywhere with dead bodies inside.”
“Most of the places have already been opened and searched already,” Lisa said. “For any that aren’t, we have tools in one of the closets. Should be a crowbar in there. As for the dead bodies
: just sniff at the doors. If it’s fresh, go in.”
Jack said, “We need prescription drugs. Look in the bathroom cabinets. Also, bring back any car keys you find.”
Tony said, “Don’t forget gold.”
Pete sighed with impatience. “Anything else?”
“You should bring Mandy and the kids with you,” Lisa said. “They shouldn’t be here alone.”
Pete snorted and stalked from the room.
“Fun guy,” she said.
Jack just smiled.
Jack and Lisa spent the rest of the day ranging through three other apartment complexes. As a precaution, he carried his dad’s AR-15, and Lisa wore a 9mm on her hip.
They took turns knocking on doors. Every door got three rounds of loud knocking before they moved on. As it happened, they moved on quite a bit. Sometimes they’d hear something inside and knock a fourth time, only to leave empty handed.
One time, they knocked on a door and a rail-thin girl around the right age opened without first asking who was there. Her hair was dyed green with blond roots. Jack had never met anyone with green hair before and felt oddly intimidated.
“Hi,” he began. “Uh, I’m Jack, and …”
The girl turned around and walked deeper inside.
The two friends looked at each other, then into the dark apartment. The girl was gone. Like a ghost.
“We going in?” Lisa whispered.
Jack seriously considered shutting the door and leaving.
Lisa said, “Keep that big gun ready,” and walked in.
“Hey,” he whispered, but it was too late.
For the first time in a year, Jack chambered a round in his dad’s rifle. After applying the safety, he followed her inside.
The sour, ever-present stink of the Sickness intruded from everywhere, assaulting him like hammer blows. At a certain point in the process, people lost control of their bowels, too weak to hold anything in.