by Brown, TW
I jumped and turned to see Marshawn standing in the doorway to my home. He wasn’t alone, and for just a moment, I felt as if I’d just been caught with my hand in the proverbial cookie jar.
“Wow, you gonna hog all the fun?” the man beside Marshawn snorted.
I didn’t know Andrew Greene very well yet. He was the latest addition to our growing community and seemed an okay sort. However, the fact he was so new was just one of perhaps a half a dozen reasons why I didn’t think this was a conversation for him to be privy to. I shot a look at Marshawn that hopefully conveyed that thought.
“Oh, put your scowl away,” Marshawn said with a snort. “Ya know, every time you try to look tough, I try my best not to laugh. It’s like watching a kitten hiss and spit.”
“Excuse me?”
“Some folks just look like nice guys.” Marshawn shrugged his massive shoulders and stepped inside with Andrew.
“Marshawn told me that you two are going after Evans. I told him I thought it was a stupid idea for you to go at him with just the two of you,” Andrew offered.
“No way,” Alex snapped.
Here we go, I thought.
“Just take a breath…” Andrew scrunched up his face and turned a light shade of pink. “I forgot your name.”
“No way is this guy going and making me stay here,” Alex pressed.
“Hold the phone,” I said calmly. “Andrew isn’t going with us.” I glanced at Marshawn. “Right? He isn’t going with us?” I paused again and stared a bit harder at Marshawn for clarification.
“Nobody has been enlisted to join us.” Marshawn glanced at Andrew and gave him a nod.
“There is another group of people that have been giving Don Evans fits off and on since this whole thing got started.” Andrew scratched his head and chuckled. “They almost managed to kill him early on when it was obvious that he was up to no good. Unfortunately, he rolled in deep with his goons and wiped almost the entire group out in this church they’d been staying in.”
My head jerked up at that. “Out in Happy Valley?”
“Yeah,” Andrew replied with a nod. “My people had been hiding out in these apartments that were under construction. We watched the whole thing. That was when we decided to pack up and leave.”
“You didn’t try to help?” Alex snapped.
“They had machine guns on top of school buses. How would you suggest we helped other than offering up our bodies as hot lead fodder?” Andrew turned to Alex, but he remained calm. “At that time, we numbered six people, had two pistols and one rifle. I think we might’ve had a dozen or so bullets for the pistols and diddly squat for the rifle.”
“So,” I spoke up, stepping into the sight line between Alex and Andrew, “how does that help us?”
“Well, a few of them survived. They escaped. About a week or so later, we were in Boring. We’d found this little hole-in-the-wall bar and were thrilled to discover they had a little kitchen. There was a good amount of canned food as well as about two hundred pounds of potatoes. I guess they made their fries from scratch or something.” His face got a faraway dreamy look for a second. “So, we had been at this spot for about a week trying to figure out what to do…where to go. It was late one night, and I was on watch up on the roof when a huge explosion came. I turned just in time to see this big pillar of flame roll skyward.”
“I imagine this all ties in to how this will help us eventually?” I was getting just a bit impatient.
“Yeah.” Andrew nodded vigorously. “The very next morning, me and a couple of our group headed in the direction of the explosion. There was still a wispy plume of black smoke rising in that direction. When we got close, we spotted the husk of a school bus. Nothing too exciting until we made out the wrecked machine gun that was mounted on top. Felt like too much of a coincidence.”
“I am still not seeing how this helps us.” I felt like I might’ve missed something.
“We were about to leave when this man and woman emerged from some shrubs on the side of the road. They’d done that thing where they stuck a bunch of grass and branches in their clothes to blend in with the scenery. The woman leveled a rifle at me, but the guy pushed it down. He said something to her about how we weren’t the ones.”
To say that my patience with this story had expired would be putting it lightly. As he rambled on, I was now recalling how people had mentioned that Andrew Greene had been found trapped in a revolving door in some downtown Portland department store during the first days of the zombie uprising. If the stories were true, one of his best friends had been trapped as well in another part of the same door. Andrew had been forced to watch his friend die and turn before eventually being rescued. He had a tendency to talk. A lot.
“We eventually traded some of our food for some of their firepower and that was when we learned they were survivors from that church. I guess they swore not to stop until they took down the person who killed all their friends.” Andrew glanced around at us. Maybe he had realized he’d been rambling. Whatever the reason, he blushed just a little and then finished with the information that actually might be helpful. “They have a hideout in the old firehouse there in Boring.”
“Thanks, Andrew.” Marshawn patted the man on the shoulder. He nodded and walked out, leaving the three of us.
“You can’t ask him what’s for dinner without getting a twenty-minute answer,” Alex muttered.
“Regardless,” I said with a wave of my hand, “we now have a direction.”
“So, you are leaving tomorrow, and I am supposed to keep an eye on things?” Alex climbed to her feet.
I was momentarily sidetracked watching her lithe form as she stood and stretched. I heard Marshawn cough and glanced over to discover that my staring was not going unnoticed.
“Before we go,” I turned my focus fully to Marshawn, “I am going to deal with Griffin.”
“Deal with?” Marshawn arched his left eyebrow so high, it would’ve made the Rock proud.
“I am giving him the choice to leave voluntarily or under escort.”
“And you think he will stay gone?” Alex laughed.
“I don’t expect him to accept either option willingly.”
“Okay, let me see if I have this straight, you’ve been stressing over how we are getting ready to head out with the intention of taking a life, but you are going to actively try to instigate a situation that will almost assuredly force you to kill somebody.”
I considered his words. On the surface they made sense. The problem was that I was forcing myself toward a new mindset. This would be the first step.
I considered all the things that had taken place since Griffin and his people arrived. I’d had a nagging feeling that there was something off about this guy. The only real problem was that I had no hard evidence to indicate that Griffin Alistair Marshall was doing anything wrong or underhanded.
The bottom line was that I was acting on a hunch…a gut feeling. Something was bothering me like a popcorn kernel stuck in my teeth.
“What do you have in mind, Evan?” Marshawn asked.
“I am simply going to tell him that I don’t think he is a good fit for us here and that I want he and his people to move on.”
“Sounds good.” Marshawn tried to stifle a chuckle without success. “If it was really that easy, don’t you think you might’ve sent him packing earlier?”
“Let’s just say that I have new motivation.”
“You want me to come along…as backup?”
I considered Marshawn’s offer, but in the end, this was something that I wanted and needed to do myself. It only had a little to do with the fact that coming at him with backup might make it seem like I didn’t have the stones to send him on his way on my own. The other part was that I wanted to hopefully cause as little fuss as possible. Ganging up might force the scene to take a direction I was honestly hoping to avoid.
“And what keeps him from coming back as soon as you leave?” Alex asked.
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�One reason is that we are not going to make a deal about me and Marshawn leaving.” I turned to face Alex and felt Marshawn exit to leave us alone. “He won’t even know I am gone. If he does anything, it is something that he would try to do whether I was here or not.”
“And that is supposed to make me feel better how?”
“I am simply saying that anything he does won’t be because he thinks he is taking advantage of my absence.”
“And if he does come back…how do you want it dealt with?”
That question hung in the air as I considered it. It was certainly valid. The gut response was that the standing order should be shoot-on-sight. The voice in my head was telling me that I was being a coward. For all my inner self-talk about stepping up and handling things more directly, was I simply ducking the dirty work and letting Alex deal with it…while I was gone?
“I think we need to make a standing order that he is not allowed back and considered potentially hostile,” I answered. The voice in my head roared that I was being weak.
Hadn’t I just told myself that I was about to make a change in how I dealt with things? Yet, here I was, pushing the issue of dealing with Griffin on somebody else.
“Potentially?” Alex scoffed.
“I am going to head over to find him now.”
I didn’t wait for Alex to push the conversation any further, I turned and exited as she mumbled something that sounded pretty angry.
As I walked along the trail, I could not help but marvel at how quickly our little community was coming together. I could hear axes hacking into trees, saws creating their rhythmic noises and the staccato and irregular beat of hammers pounding nails into place.
I paused and smiled. Under all the chorus of construction sounds, I could hear the deep bark of my Chewie. It was a happy sound and I could picture her bounding through the grassy field where a team was digging a deep trench as one of the many lines of defense we were placing.
I came to a clearing in the trees and spotted one of our lookout towers. I could see a shadowy figure at the top, rifle slung over one shoulder. There was an inverted ‘L’ with a piece of metal suspended from it. If the watch spotted something deemed dangerous, he or she would beat on that piece of metal with a steel rod that also hung from the alarm gallows.
That was the only thing that broke the spell of this idyllic setting. Otherwise, it could be any sunny day in late spring before the dead rose.
As I reached the fork in the trail that would take me to the area where Griffin and his people were supposed to be setting up camp, I could catch the occasional bitter stink of the burn pile were the undead were being disposed of on an almost continuous basis—we jokingly referred to it as the Springfield Tire Fire. I wondered if the day would ever come when that fire was out.
As I reached a widening in the trail, I gave myself a mental slap on the face to get primed and ready for what I was certain would be an antagonistic encounter. Why was I nervous, other than the fact that I was never a big fan of confrontation? It wasn’t that I was a pushover, I simply managed to fly low enough under the radar that I seldom ended up in a dispute or disagreement.
As I reached the edge of the clearing that marked where Griffin and his people were supposed to be setting up camp, I paused. This was nothing like any other part of camp.
While every other group, and even the few individuals that had joined us, were setting up something close to permanent, these people were just living in tents. Judging by what I saw, a few weren’t even bothering with tents.
“Evan!” a familiar voice called out.
I glanced around and spotted Griffin. It was hard to control my anger in that moment. And if he chose now to challenge me, it would be hard to take him seriously.
The man was sprawled in a hammock about ten feet above the ground. He had what sure as hell looked like a bottle of beer in his hand that he raised in greeting. Maybe killing the living wouldn’t be as difficult as I thought.
“You make things easy, Griffin,” I sighed as I started toward the man. I stopped a few feet away so I wouldn’t have to crane my neck as much to look up at him. “I came here to talk to you.”
“I figured this was coming,” Griffin said with a grunt as he sat up and swung his legs over, leaping to the ground. “I imagine you want us to help with that trench or something.”
Before the Z-Poc, I watched an episode or two of shows like Survivor. I always questioned if there would or could actually be people who sat by while everybody else did all the work to set up camp. Griffin and his people had certainly dispelled any of those doubts. As a whole, or maybe because they were told to do so, these people had offered almost nothing to the slow but steady process of building our community.
“You and your people need to go.” I let that settle before I continued. “I just don’t think this is a good fit. You and your people obviously don’t want to contribute…and, quite honestly…” I found that I had to steel myself for the next words that would come out of my mouth. “Quite honestly, I don’t trust you and I don’t really like you. I see no reason for you to stay here, and so I want you gone.”
Griffin stood there just smiling and nodding as I spoke. Even when I finished, and as I waited for some sort of caustic retort, he did nothing more than smile.
“Just out of curiosity,” he finally spoke, ending the uncomfortable silence, “if I say no, are you prepared to enforce this?”
“Actually,” a voice from behind me made me jump as Marshawn stepped out to join me with a rifle cradled in his arms, “we are.”
It was only an instant, but I am certain I saw a bitterness in Griffin’s expression that made his eyes squint. Just as fast, it was gone and replaced by a smile that would do a cheesy used car salesman proud.
“I guess that saves us the trouble of telling you and your people that we planned to head out next week anyway.” Griffin turned his focus back to me and continued. “We been picking up a signal out of Vegas. Seems that a community is setting up down there. Supposedly they even have electrical power.”
“I don’t think Evan said anything about next week,” Marshawn snarled.
“Easy, big fella,” Griffin said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I heard what he said. He’s gonna have to give us at least until tomorrow to get packed up.”
“He ain’t gotta give you a motherfucking thing.” Marshawn took a step past me and allowed his rifle to shift ever so slightly.
Everything seemed to freeze for a moment. The world went silent as if even the birds and insects sensed something was about to happen.
“Tomorrow morning.” I stepped back in front of Marshawn and leveled my gaze at Griffin and the few of his people that had gathered around during this exchange.
Without waiting for a reply or counterproposal, I turned to leave. I gave Marshawn a nudge and when he shot an angry glance my way, I made the slightest shake of my head the only response to his unasked question. With a huff, he deflated just a bit and turned to follow me back to our main camp.
I was surprised to see Andrew, Alex, and perhaps a dozen of our people standing just inside the edge of the tree line.
I had more backup than I’d originally thought. I felt a warm feeling swell in my chest. It looked as if I was officially the group’s leader. These people were not only staying here and helping build my new community, but they were prepared to stand with me to defend it. They were even ready to face off with another group of the living.
It might put a few hours delay on my plans to leave with Marshawn, but now I could depart knowing that I was leaving a community that was prepared to stand together.
It was a strangely good feeling. Little did I know it would be the last such feeling I would have for a very long time…perhaps the last one ever.
2
Marshawn
I opened my eyes to the pure darkness that a world void of any electricity provided. It took a moment to adjust to the point where the glitter of stars outside the window began t
o flicker and appear amidst the canopy of trees.
I felt something stir beside me and had to force down the surge of guilt that greeted me this morning and had ever since Alex started sleeping beside me.
Despite the fact that we’d done nothing to further any sort of physical relationship, I could not quell the feelings of guilt and betrayal that soured in my stomach and left a bitter taste in the back of my throat.
It hadn’t helped that I’d had that dream again. It was the one where Stephanie opened her eyes in the hospital and stared at me with that undead gaze.
“Why didn’t you protect me, Evan?” she said in a hollow voice that still managed to drip with accusation despite the flatness of the tone.
“I tried, Steph.”
“You failed.”
It was always at that point where I woke in a cold sweat. My hands clenched and tears threatening to spill from the corners of my eyes. Having Alex’s warm body beside me only compounded the feelings of guilt.
Could you cheat on the dead? It was a question I asked myself every single time that I caught myself allowing my glance to linger on Alex for longer than just a few seconds.
Easing out from under the blankets, I slipped my feet into my boots and pulled the overalls I’d taken to wearing at night up and over my shoulders. Fastening the straps, I headed out into the cool pre-dawn air.
A shiver raced down my spine as my skin pebbled against the cold reminding me that it was not cool…it was freaking freezing! Spring was in mid-stride, but in the Pacific Northwest, that only meant the rain was a degree or two warmer than snow and whipped into a sideways sheet when the winds roared down the Gorge. Tonight was crystal clear, so it was probably below freezing.
My breath came in puffs of mist as I made my way to the community fire that was always kept up. It burned day and night and was fed by the various roving watch patrols that kept the community safe after dark.
Stopping at the neatly stacked supply of split wood, I grabbed a piece and took it to the fire, tossing it in and watching as a swirl of orange embers danced skyward.