by Joshua Guess
By the time I made it to the house, Jem was already helping people out of the open back of the truck. Years of training in threat assessment, combined with my suspicious nature, made me automatically assess the new arrivals.
Three adult women. One girl in her late teens. One young boy, maybe seven. Three adult men. The ladies of the group I scanned and found no problems with. They radiated relief in an almost palpable aura. The young woman, to my surprise, picked up the boy and smiled at him as if her were her own as she hugged him. Brother and sister, maybe.
The men didn’t strike me as immediately dangerous, though anyone who had made it this far was neither stupid or cowardly. Even staying locked in a store meant keeping quiet enough to avoid detection, and enduring the sounds of the world falling apart around them without utterly losing it. Where the women seemed thrilled to be here, the men looked wary. Made sense to me. When a thing looks too good to be true, it should always be viewed with healthy skepticism.
Pushing down the part of my brain screaming for me to go hide under my blankets rather than talk to people, I walked up to the biggest of the men and put out a hand. “Hi. I’m Ran. Welcome to my place.”
The guy was pretty large, maybe six three. He had dark hair and deeply tan skin, though it wasn’t obvious if this was due to genetics or sunlight. “I’m Robert,” he said in an even baritone. He jerked his chin toward the man on his left, who was average size with light blond hair. “That’s Shane. The redhead is Gregory.”
I half-expected Robert to be corrected, because honestly, who the fuck chooses to go by Gregory? But no, this was apparently what they slight man went by. Okay, then.
“You guys hungry?” I asked the group.
Robert shook his head. “We ate not an hour before your friends found us. But I wouldn’t say no to a shower, if that’s possible.”
“We still have water pressure,” I said. “No reason everyone can’t clean up, though the water heater won’t last for long. If you don’t mind staggering them out a bit, I can make sure you at least all get to clean up some. Why don’t the ladies come with me, and Jem can take you fellas to the guest bathroom.”
Jem, who was standing behind the group, caught my eye. His raised eyebrow was a question, and I narrowed my eyes back at him just enough to get the point across. Don’t say anything out loud, just do it.
“Sure,” Jem said. “I’ll update you on our haul once the guys are settled in.”
I shot him a grin. “Sounds good.”
The group of women, the youngest still carrying the boy on her hip in a display of strength and stamina impressively close to lifting a car off someone, followed me into the house. I led them to my bedroom and closed the door behind us, gesturing to the adjoining bathroom before taking a seat on the edge of the bed.
“I kind of lied,” I said, pointing at the bathroom. “Since we still have power, this bathroom won’t run out of hot water. It has an on-demand water heater. So please, take your time.”
The oldest of them, a black woman who looked to be in her early fifties by her salt-and-pepper hair, touched the girl on her shoulder. “You go ahead, Sandy. Take Connor in there and both of you clean up. We can wait.”
The girl—Sandy, apparently—bobbed her head and rushed into the bathroom. Nearly gave the kid whiplash when she did it, too.
“Like I said, I’m Ran.” I put out my hand to the older woman. She took it with both of hers and squeezed.
“I’m Maria,” she said. “Thank you for taking us in.”
“I’m planning to make you all work for it,” I said with a smile. “But I’ll be right there next to you.”
The other two introduced themselves to me.
“I’m Grace,” said one of them, a thin white woman in her thirties with shoulder-length brown hair. “God, I’m so glad we’re out of that store. The food was okay, but man, it was so stuffy and dark. We had to be quiet all the time, and stuck in there with those guys.”
I frowned. “Were they a problem?”
“No,” said the third woman, Lisa. “Not really. It was just really cramped. I mean, you don’t really have much in the way of sleeping arrangements in a grocery store. All of us,” she said, sweeping a hand around the room, “slept in the office. The guys crashed in the break room.”
We chatted until Jem tapped on the door a few minutes later. I made sure to point out the entrance to the bunker before leaving the room. “There are clean clothes down there. We made sure to grab a little bit of everything.”
Closing the door behind me, I motioned for Jem to step away from my room. We walked through the back door and stood together on the tiny porch.
“Why did you want to separate them?” he asked. “Did you see something I missed?”
I shook my head. “Just wanted to double check and make sure everything was kosher. Also, splitting up the group is a good way to make sure they don’t set themselves up as an insular tribe within a tribe.”
Jem blinked at me. “Really? You thought about that ahead of time?”
“You would have to, if you had to edit a textbook and five drafts of a doctoral thesis on group dynamics,” I said. “I also didn’t want to let the men down into the bunker before I had a chance to make sure the weapons were all under lock and key.”
Jem pursed his lips. “You don’t trust them.”
I goggled at him. “Do you? I don’t know them, Jem. At all. They’re complete strangers. I’m happy to give them somewhere to sleep and food to eat, but I’d be a complete fucking moron to assume they’re wonderful people who would never do anything wrong. Because people are never known to react badly in shitty situations, right?”
Fact: people are well-known for reacting badly in shitty situations.
19
The core group—me, Jem, Carla, and Tony—made the decision to keep my illness from the others. There wasn’t any sinister motive beyond not scaring anyone and my desire for privacy. I’d have told them if it mattered, but since the symptoms grew weaker every day, there didn’t seem to be any point.
Two days after the boys brought in the new arrivals, we had a zombie attack. By that I don’t mean one or two wandered across the property since that happened every other day or so. No, this was a largish herd of them. I guess they got tired of being hungry in town when all the easy prey dried up. It wasn’t much of a surprise they’d managed to find us. They seemed unnaturally talented at locating people.
I’d run inside a few minutes earlier, feeling a fit coming on. Carla had explained my occasional absences away as kidney problems, though I found out later from Maria that she’d said I had a spastic bladder, and while I wasn’t thrilled to have my fictional difficulties with urination a topic of discussion, it did give me cover to go sit in the tub and twitch freely.
I actually did go to the bathroom when it was over, and I was just rubbing some sanitizer on my hands when the alarm sounded. The alarm in question was Nikola, who could smell zombies coming long before we could see or hear them. The weird way my house sat back off the road and the screen of trees in the distance made it just as hard for us to see out as it made it hard for others to see in.
Grabbing my holstered Springfield from the edge of the sink, I only slowed for a second in the bedroom to throw my motorcycle jacket on. It wasn’t armor, but the hard plastic plates and dense nylon offered decent protection.
I stood by the front door as everyone streamed in. We were all working on construction projects of one kind or another. I’d been helping put together raised beds for food with Maria and the other women.
When the last of them came inside, Nikola followed. He stood on the scuffed linoleum, body tense and curly tail wagging. I closed the door—now with the same bars on its window as every other window in the house—and pointed at it. “Stand guard,” I ordered.
Nik backed up and sat down facing the door, his eyes locked on it intently. Everyone but Carla, who was surely working down in the bunker, looked confused.
“What
’s a dog going to do?” Shane asked as he pulled off his work gloves.
“He gave you warning,” I said lightly. “So there’s that. Also, if something manages to get through that door, which is unlikely unless zombies have somehow managed to learn to work together in the use of a battering ram, he’ll kill it. Or die trying.” The thought of my dog dying bothered me way more than I would ever admit out loud, but in this case I wasn’t fussed. Zombies were strong, and they scratched and bit a lot, but Nikola was a hundred and twenty pounds of predator designed by nature to fuck up the day of anything human size or smaller. He was fast, strong, and a few bites would only piss him off.
I grabbed the weird baseball bat we’d picked up at the police station and threw it over my shoulder. “You guys hang tight. I’m gonna go take a look at what we’re dealing with. I’ll call Jem and Tony back if we need the help.”
This elicited a collection of reactions ranging from stark disbelief to, in the case of little Connor, outright awe. I shot the boy a wink before disappearing into what had once been the storage closet between the common bathroom and the guest bedroom.
Tony had installed roof access and a ladder here, which meant he cut a big-ass hole in my roof. In fairness, it was a pretty good job; the homemade hatch locked from the inside and was sealed tight against the weather. Score one for living in a flat-topped trailer.
The scene outside was not ideal.
“What’s it look like?” a muffled voice asked through the closed hatch.
I sighed and shouted back, “Pretty bad.”
Though it was hard to count since I could only make the zombies out through the screen of trees separating my property from the road, there had to be thirty of them at least. They were clearly not on a flyby, either. Every one of them had turned toward the house and was trying to make their way through the trees.
I hefted the bat, feeling the reassuring mass of it resist my muscles. I could slip down the ladder and into some protective gear. Getting back outside would be easy. I was certainly well-rested, and I figured I could swing the thing a hundred times before it started to wear me out. The last few days of working outside proved my endurance wasn’t too damaged by my illness.
The thought appealed to me the more it lingered. I fell into a sort of quasi-catatonia as I imagined the feeling of my gloved hands sliding along the grip, the tension in my wrists traveling up my arms as I flexed to swing. I wanted very much to say fuck it and jump down right then. The visual of wading into the crowd and breaking heads was intoxicating.
“Ran? Are you okay up there?”
Even through the hatch I could discern Carla’s voice. The worried tone was clear. I snapped out of my reverie and shook my head to banish the suicidally dangerous thoughts.
“Yeah, I’m good,” I said, watching the zombies filter through the trees and onto the property. “I’m coming down.”
“What are we going to do?” Maria asked. It was a matter-of-fact question, not at all panicked. The other women had varied reactions, though the only one who looked afraid was Sandy. Given the way she was clutching Connor, I suspected it was more out of fear for his safety than her own.
“My first instinct is to fight,” I said. “And that’s dumb. We’re safe in here, and even if they somehow got in the house, we could easily just go to the bunker and close it off. There’s no immediate threat.”
Robert nodded at this. “That makes sense. Shouldn’t we be worried about too many of them building up out there, though? What if they attract more?”
I shrugged. “If there were a thousand of them, we wouldn’t have many options. Even a few dozen is a lot. I wouldn’t want to fight them with this many people out there on open ground. I suggest we radio Jem and Tony, let them know what’s up, and watch to see what happens. Remember, when they come home, they’ll be driving a loaded truck. Running down zombies will be a piece of cake.”
“I can do that,” Maria said, glancing at me for approval. Suppressing a smile at the idea of someone needing my permission for anything, I nodded.
“If you unlocked the guns, we could climb on the roof and kill them all,” Shane said. There was a muted round of reactions at this, making it pretty clear everyone had this thought.
I tried my best not to look immediately dismissive. “Have you ever fired a gun?” I asked him.
“A couple times,” Shane said, not at all defensive. “I mean, if we’re shooting from the roof at zombies ten feet away, it’d be pretty hard to miss.”
“You’d be surprised,” I replied. “People who aren’t used to shooting can be spectacularly inaccurate, even dangerously so, when they first start. It has nothing to do with distance, just reactions. I’ve seen people flinch so badly at the expectation of pulling the trigger they shot twenty feet above a target.”
Shane didn’t seem convinced by this. Nor, for that matter, did most of the others. Gregory, the mostly quiet redheaded man, cocked his head to one side. “I used to hunt. How about you and I go up there with rifles and pick them off?”
The way he asked it was loaded, no pun intended. I couldn’t tell if anyone else caught the subtlety, but I decided to answer it outright. Better now than later, when things might grow out of hand.
“You’re asking me if I trust you with one of my guns,” I said. “Before I answer that, let me point out a few other things. One is that there isn’t an ammunition tree where we can just harvest bullets. We’ll always be on the lookout for more, but we have to think long-term. Which means acting as if what we have is all we’ll have. Another thing to keep in mind is that these things are dead, not deaf. Gunshots carry a long way, and there are also living people out there who might not be as friendly as you.”
This appeal to logic seemed to get through to them, which was my intent. The best way to convince someone to see your point of view, even when it treats them negatively, is to make them understand you’re not an idiot or an asshole.
“And to answer Gregory’s implied question, no. I don’t trust any of you with guns.” I put up a hand to forestall the reactions I knew were coming. “I don’t know you well enough to trust you with weapons that could kill me or the people I care about so easily, not yet. I don’t know if you know this, but people have been known to act on a whim to take things they want from others. I’m not okay with risking that.”
Gregory frowned. “Do you really think any of us would try to?”
“I don’t know,” I said, stressing the words. “Which is the point. I like to think I’m pretty fair, so I want to give all of you the chance to get to know me while I do the same. Because the last thing I want to happen is to have my trust betrayed by someone who thinks a gun is going to gain them something from me.”
Gregory opened his mouth to say something else, but Robert put a hand on his shoulder. The smaller man closed his mouth and swallowed whatever he’d been about to say.
“I get it,” Robert said. “It’s only been a few days. I probably wouldn’t want to hand us weapons, either. But at some point we’ll have to defend ourselves. I don’t really think there’s any way to avoid it, the way things are.”
“Sure,” I agreed. “If and when that comes up, I’ll be happy to arm you. I don’t want anyone to die because of my decisions.” I kept my voice level. “That includes me having to kill them because they aimed a weapon at me.”
Robert recoiled. “You’d kill someone just—”
“Absolutely,” I interrupted. “Have you looked outside?” I flung a hand toward a window, through which the shambling mass of zombies could be seen. “Those things are a threat to our lives, and we kill them without hesitation. Why would I act differently for someone who threatens my life? That’s what I want to avoid by getting this in the open now. Not misunderstandings, no mistrust because we’re not being honest with each other.”
I glanced around the group, which was now absolutely quiet. I hadn’t wanted things to go this way. I didn’t want to put up the facts to bluntly, but that was life. “
I just want us all to be safe. To work together. To get to know each other and build trust. But in the last few weeks the world fell apart, I was captured by murderers, and even before all that I had a lot of reasons to be suspicious. I’m willing to have you in my home, share our supplies and space with you, and all I want in return is some leeway to make sure we can all depend on each other.”
Maria, who had finished making her call, spoke up from behind Robert. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m fine with that.”
Gregory pursed his lips thoughtfully for a second, then bobbed his head. “I get it. I don’t like it, really, because I know I’m not going to hurt anyone, but I can see why you’re skeptical. It took a few days for me to trust Robert and the others.”
“Maria,” I said, eager to distract everyone from starting a group discussion about the ways they’d mistrusted the others. “What did the boys say when you radioed them?”
“They’re on the way back. Already had the truck loaded. The radio did a weird thing, though. Cut out for a second. Even the light went off.”
I processed this information. There was a brief disconnect in my brain where my subconscious raised a flag but my intellect couldn’t quite make out what it was. Then it hit me.
“Shit.” I walked into my bedroom, which was where the breaker box rested. It had a few extra bells and whistles thanks to my giant subterranean lair, one of which was a digital status readout.
Everything was running on batteries. Incoming power was nonexistent. It wasn’t a disaster, but it would make things harder. I immediately began cataloging all the things we’d need to do in order to cook food, have light, shower…
Fighting zombies might be more dangerous, but it was less frustrating.
20
We weren’t stupid about clearing the zombies out.
Carla relayed the plan to the boys over the radio, then went about shutting down everything electrical that wasn’t absolutely critical to our survival. I had some solar panels in storage I’d never bothered to wire up, but they were going to provide a trickle of power compared to what we’d been drawing and using.