Allison Hewitt Is Trapped

by Roux, Madeleine

  It didn’t surprise me, the way their story unfolded. This is the land of hunting, of fishing and farms and Harley-Davidson. I never felt close to that part of our state but I can’t help but feel for them, for the way they tried like hell to defend themselves. We cross the thin, empty strip of floor that separates the Wives from everyone else. There are plenty of people here that seem to ignore or outright dislike the Wives. They sense, rightly, that the Wives are proud of who and what they are and may be a bit insane, taken to the extreme end of charity by the horrible losses they have suffered. I hear that some children are cautioned to stay away from that side of the arena and some tents have purposely been set up as far away from the Wives as possible.

  It’s a lot like West Side Story but without all the dancing.

  Their tents are all gathered in a ring, the entrances facing the middle. You might expect to see a big bonfire there, but instead they’ve put up a cross made out of two-by-fours and duct tape. There is a strange kind of symmetry to it, their low hobbit holes all circled up like a brigade of wagons with a big, foreboding cross watching over them all. They emerge from the tents one by one, as if summoned by an invisible gong.

  And they’re hollow, completely empty, and trying so hard to be full again.

  The Wives are bustling today, excited. A new family has arrived, the Stocktons. They’re not from Black Earth but that doesn’t matter; any and all families are warmly welcomed and invited to live among the Wives. The Wives are, across the board, turned down. But the Stocktons seem promising, or that’s the rumor. I don’t remember meeting them.

  “They’re at the med tent,” Collin murmurs. “The father suffered a few minor abrasions, maybe a sprained ankle. You should meet them later. I’ll introduce you.”

  But first I need to meet the Wives. It’s a daunting experience, a bit like parachuting into the middle of a Stepford Wives convention and being bombarded with questions and pats on the back. Collin (who they primly refer to as Mr. Crane), of course, tells them about my harrowing deed, the vanquishing of the evil Zack. Of all the villagers, they are the most impressed, the most thankful and awed. They stare at me as if I’ve just come to hand them the blood of Christ, their mouths forming wide Os of shock. It’s their reactions that frighten me the most.

  “Bless you, bless you, God bless you for seeing to that … rat.”

  “God be with you—He must be. He must be.”

  On and on it goes. I try to be humble, to look like the martyred hero they expect. But it doesn’t feel authentic. Collin notices my discomfort and steers me away from the group, bringing me over to one Wife sitting apart. She’s perched on an empty plastic crate, her hands tucked demurely into her lap. She’s wearing a gingham skirt and a loose blue sweater with daisies embroidered around the collar. Her permed red hair is matted and greasy. When she looks up at us I see that the front of her sweater is stained down the front with a broad brush stroke of blood.

  “Marianne? This is Allison.”

  She doesn’t extend her hand or really even show that she’s seen me. Her eyes go straight through my body, through my veins and bones and I can feel the steely chill. At first I think we’re done, that Collin is going to drag me away from this phantom, this ghost, but her eyes crackle to life suddenly and her chapped lips drop open.

  “My son,” she says in a whimper, breathing hard as though she’s just noticed that he’s gone missing. “My son … My son ate my baby girl. My son ate my baby girl!”

  She repeats it again and again, her voice rising until she’s screaming at me at the top of her lungs.

  “MY SON ATE MY BABY GIRL!”

  This is when Collin drags me away, shooting a look at the other Wives who hurry over to take care of Marianne. They enfold her in a tangle of arms, rocking her, clucking softly at her like a brood of giant mother hens, their foreheads all bowed to touch her face. Marianne disappears behind them, silenced, lost in the sea of their sudden and overwhelming care.

  “Holy shit,” I mutter, shaking my head to try and stop the painful ringing in my ears. Collin nods.

  “Marianne is … Well, she’s lost, I think. There are a few people like that here, but she’s the worst. I asked Susan about her once. She told me Marianne’s house was hit first, that she watched her son … Well, you heard her.”

  I did. It’s hard to get that sound out of my head and when I blink I see her terror-stricken eyes. They look like Holly’s—vacant, swept under.

  Collin takes me out of the arena and down a long, narrow corridor. We go outside into a fine October mist. It’s certainly brisk out here, but there are plenty of extra clothes now, and the Wives have been busy sewing blankets and turning university jerseys into thick, patchy sweaters. They’re not very warm but they do a decent job against the wind. As soon as we walk outside I hear gunfire. I’m getting used to that, to hearing shots every time I step into the open air.

  The pale sun behind the clouds with its teasing hint of warmth has made the mist rise up on the horizon. Everything is gray beyond the close border of the arena yard. You can just make out a hint of tennis courts and a sidewalk, and a few yards in front of that a parked truck with a man standing guard behind it. There’s ash in the air and the strange, briny smell of warmth seeping out of the ground. It rained last night but now the earth is almost dry.

  Luckily, the nearest gunfire is just practice. Collin and his redheaded nephew, Finn, have set up a firing range out here. They’ve decided to take Ted and me and turn us into soldiers. But Ted is still inside at the med tent. He seems far more interested in learning how to suture wounds and set bones than to come with me to target practice.

  “Where did they all come from?” I ask, nodding toward the gun Collin is now aiming at a far-off stack of wooden crates. He seems different with the gun primed and ready to fire. He’s more distant, pulled behind a kind of sobering veil. His face is still gently creased, his eyes are still bright, but the feeling he exudes is chilling. There are so many weapons, so many supplies, that I can’t help asking. It seems like something that should be left unsaid; it doesn’t matter where the guns came from, it only matters that there are people here who know how to use them.

  “The police. They’re not trained for stuff like this. Maybe in New York or Chicago they would have experience with rioters and gang violence, but here they just weren’t prepared. There’s a difference between keeping a cool head under pressure and being intelligent under pressure.” Collin must be immune to the sound of gunfire because he barely flinches as he pulls the trigger and the round explodes out of the barrel. I, however, am not used to this sound and it’s deafening and scary every single time.

  “They wanted to get citizens into the arena, to keep a safe, solid perimeter and have a central location for survivors to go to. That was a good step, a good idea. But then they set up that damn barricade right out front, right down the main artery. I’m sure they were thinking that a wall would keep the undead out. They were right, sort of, but it also kept citizens out. I don’t know if you can guess, but when you have panicking citizens with a barricade on one side and undead on the other … Well, now you have a problem because you have three times as many undead as you did before. That barricade is coming down and your perimeter has gone to hell.”

  “So the police, they left? They just left those people there to die?”

  “No,” he says, lowering the gun. “They died too.”

  “So the flak jackets and the truck and the guns—those belonged to the cops?” I ask.

  Collin nods, reloading the gun slowly so I can watch and then handing it to me. He seems to have returned to his former self, the man with the ready teacher’s smile and prodding eyes. The gun is warm from his grip.

  “Finn served in the Royal Air Force, and so did I. It was a family tradition. I kept my uniforms around for, oh I don’t know, something like sentiment, a reminder of being a young man. The uniforms are just for peace of mind, for show. If you have a bunch of frightened people, d
esperate for help, nothing creates a little order like uniforms and assault rifles. Once you have order you can organize raids on the corner markets, on the libraries and the pharmacies and the ambulances, and once you have supplies you have happy people.”

  “You did all that by yourself?”

  “Finn helped.”

  “Right. But you did it by yourself?”

  “Of course,” he says, tapping my elbow. He’s impatient. He thinks I’ll make a good soldier if I can just learn to shoot without tensing up every time I squeeze the trigger. I can’t help it. I know that sound is coming, the explosion. “You don’t think in situations like this, Allison, you act. I think you know that already.”

  “But you’re just so … so calm. How do you do that? How do you not just completely lose it?”

  “Hold on,” he says, firmly pushing on my arms until the gun is pointed at the ground in front of us. “Did you lose someone? More than one person?”

  “My mother,” I stammer, caught off guard. “I don’t … I don’t know where she is. We were supposed to meet up but she never showed.”

  “I see. I lost my wife. I don’t know where she is either, but I can guess. I’m not invincible, Allison. I’m just doing the best I can. And really, that’s all I’m asking of you.”

  Target practice goes badly. I can’t focus and I can’t stop thinking about my mom. I shouldn’t have told Collin about her, I should have just kept my mouth shut.

  Ted doesn’t come back to the tent until very late. He’s been taking care of the Stocktons. He really likes them, especially their two young sons. Dapper is my only company as I wait up for Ted, and even the dog seems uninterested in my sulky mood. When Ted gets back he falls asleep right away, exhausted by a hard day’s work. I want him to stay up. I want to talk and joke, to tell him that I’m useless with a gun, and hear him laugh when I say that Collin thinks I’m a complete sissy. These days Ted’s unruly hair has all but colonized the surface of his glasses and he’s reduced to constantly pushing it out of his face just to see where he’s going. When he flops down on his sleeping bag his dark hair fans out around his head like a handful of daggers.

  Collin has asked if I want to have a drink. Finn will be there because Collin wants his nephew to apologize. I’m sure he wants us all to get on. I remember that’s the phrase he uses, “Get on.” I politely tell him no, that I’m not interested, that I’m very tired.

  Now I wish I had accepted the invitation because I’m sitting here reading what all of you have said. You’re alive. A few of you are doing more than surviving, and I can easily imagine your disdain for someone like me, someone who can do nothing but sit around and wallow and stare at my sleeping roommate like a creepy shut-in. I shouldn’t be alone like this. I should be having a whiskey with Collin and his nephew, I should be letting myself live.

  But then again, every time I think of Collin, of his voice and how I looked to it on the radio for guidance and peace, I automatically think of Zack. After that catastrophic misstep, how can I trust my judgment? How can I trust myself?

  Tomorrow, Collin wants me to meet the Stocktons. They’re a very nice family, he says. A real, whole family.

  I miss you, Mom. If you’re reading this: I miss you.

  COMMENTS

  Rev. Brown says:

  October 9, 2009 at 6:45 pm

  We survivors know your soul, Allison. I read aloud from what you write in the Kingdom House here in Atlanta. And it was my Jamal, all of nine, who offered me both solutions to your moral problem.

  Allison, you can’t know if what you did was a sin. You know you had righteous cause and you sought virtuous justice. Your manner may have lept towards malice—your soul may have blackened with a stain of mere, cruel vengeance—but God does not command that we forgive our enemies. Jesus Christ our Lord has demanded we treat others as we would be treated ourselves. And I know, just as I feel His spirit stir in your words, that His word would move you. If you stole a collective’s food, you’d demand your own hands be taken, just as our forebears demanded of thieves.

  It’s all The Lord’s work.

  Logan says:

  October 9, 2009 at 7:09 pm

  Took a while to find it, working internet. I’m using SNet, is that what you’re using too? Such a thing I used to take for granted, but you know the saying. See, where I’m at here in Colorado, we had warning. A few sparse broadcasts before They came. Most of us just meandered on with the daily routines, but some of us … Some of us knew that it wouldn’t stop before it got to us.

  We, myself and a few others from the area where I work, took the two weeks of warning, and prepared. At least I thought we did. In retrospect there wasn’t much we really could have done to truly prepare for what was coming. A few of us even got arrested by the police for stealing before The Infected even showed up in … person. Not sure what happened to them, but lets take a look outside the window shall we? It’s not too terribly hard to guess. I guess the military taught me things I never really realized. Survival is not a right, but more something earned. Survival of the Fittest indeed.

  God or not, keep up the good fight. There ARE others and we WILL “fix” this, even if that means putting a 9mm bullet or the blade of a sword or axe in between the eyes of every last one of Them.

  Matthew H says:

  October 9, 2009 at 7:36 pm

  Dear Allison,

  Your words give us so much hope. Just knowing that there are others who have made it is so very encouraging. I’m very sorry to hear about your friends who have passed. We have each lost loved ones here as well.

  We found this yesterday via Blackberry (we have a charger(!), a working outlet just outside(!!), and the satellite Internet still works for now—I wonder for how long?). There are four of us staying in a storefront church on the north side of Las Vegas. You write of the “disdain” that we must have for you. Allison, nothing could be further from the truth. You have brought us into a network of the living—that gives hope, not resentment. Please continue to keep us posted. We’ll stay in touch. We are so very grateful that so many of you are alive.

  In peace,

  Matthew, Caroline, Jamie, Gideon

  October 10, 2009—A Room With a View

  “You kill zomblies too?”

  “Yes, Evan,” I say, patting the little golden boy on his head. “Just like your mom and dad.”

  Right away I can see why Ted admires the Stocktons. Corie and Ned make up a tall, attractive couple with the kind of vigorous likeability that seems to transcend the mire of depression and shock in the Village. Their two sons are extremely charming. Not in the disturbing, doped-up-on-Ritalin sort of way. They have energy and they’re talkative, but you can tell within a few seconds of knowing them that they’ve had a swell childhood full of climbed trees and captured dragonflies. Mikey, the older son, is ten and has the intense, dusky look of his olive-skinned, dark-haired mother. He’s more reserved than his younger brother and informs me in a discrete, adult whisper that his little brother is still “just a baby.” Evan is four, a scrapper, with the all-American J. Crew looks of his dad. Evan is still learning to talk. He travels only by shoulders, straddling his dad’s neck, perched up there like a guru on a mountaintop. Evan wins me over right away when the first words out of his mouth are:

  “I don’t like the zomblies much. Dad says they’re bad. You kill zomblies too?”

  It would be easy to underestimate Corie and Ned, and it’s tempting to write them off as a youngish yuppy couple who are prim and self-possessed on the outside while they hide a turbulent, hateful marriage. But they seem cool, legitimately cool, the kind of people you meet and think later on: I’d like to be like them someday. Corie’s the sort of woman you always dream of outclassing at a high school reunion. Then you get there, smug, educated, successful, only to discover that Corie is now a Pilates instructor and has only become more humble and sweet and that she’s aged gracefully—in fact, she’s more beautiful now in her thirties than she ever was
as a teenager. And you might want to hate her, but then you see her now, in a confusing, shattered world where it’s easy to become numb and depressed and she’s still laughing for her kids, still a rock-solid mom.

  Ned and I don’t hit it off immediately, but then, in a side conversation with Collin and me, he turns into someone I really, really want to know better. He and Corie lived in a suburb not far from Black Earth. When the undead arrived their neighborhood splintered. No one banded together, no one stayed to fight. One neighbor discovered that fire is a powerful weapon against the undead, but it also has a tendency to get out of control. Within an hour their entire cul-de-sac was in flames.

  “I didn’t say, ‘We’re staying, this is our house and we’re staying no matter what.’ Screw that. I knew we had to go. There wasn’t going to be anything left. I knew it. I could feel the house coming down around us and Evan was just screaming. They were coming up the yard, up the drive, everywhere. So I said: honey, make sure the boys are with you, get them up. We’re getting out of here. I didn’t know where we would go. It didn’t matter.”

  (Not that exciting, I know, but this next bit is when I just about nominated him for Village president.)

  “And so I lit the PT Cruiser on fire and pushed it down the driveway.”

  Collin and I share a glance at this, both of us realizing then and there that Ned is going to fit in just fine around here. He and Collin then discover that they’re both ex-military. Ned was an engineer for the U.S. Army in his twenties. This is enough to make them long-lost brothers and they’re soon pounding each other on the back like real compadres. It’s my freshman year of undergrad all over again, when even the most general, tenuous connection helped you befriend strangers. You’re lonely and unsure and scared, so any shared interest at all is enough to forge a lifelong bond—“You like peas? No way! I like peas. Wanna get drunk?”

  That’s Ned and Collin—two camouflaged peas in a pod. Maybe they should be the new Hollianted—Nollin? Cod? Christ. Never mind.