by D. J. Molles
She continued on. Passed only one person close enough for them to see her face in the darkness, and they smiled and nodded to her, free of suspicion. She smiled and nodded back. This was the relationship she had with most of Camp Ryder, probably the reason why she’d been able to say the things she’d said to Jerry during the last group meeting and not be shouted down by his supporters.
Or disappear.
There wasn’t a person in the camp that hadn’t been fed by Marie. Not a child inside these fences that hadn’t been by her little kitchen with an empty plate, before Jerry had seized control of all the supplies. She’d slipped extra portions to the people that needed it the most, the hard workers, the growing children.
In the beginning, she’d been one of the only women that knew how to take care of herself without a grocery store and a pharmacy—one of the only people, for that matter. Though a lot of the men around these parts were country boys and fancied themselves some sort of backwoods survivalists, she’d taught them a thing or two as well.
She’d been invaluable.
Now, it seemed she was being forced into some sort of stasis.
Too well-liked to get rid of, and too dangerous to keep around.
It was good to be needed again, Marie realized. Even though her heart jacked in her chest, and she despised the situation she found herself in, hated it not only for herself but for Angela and the children, she could feel the satisfaction of just doing something. Of being integral. Of being useful.
She and her sister alike. Always needing to be doing something. Always needing to be busy. Never a minute for quiet. Thoughts and silence were just what happened when you were going from one job to the next. And that was alright with them. It made life simpler in a lot of ways.
The wind kicked up, seeming to freeze-dry her, leaching both moisture and warmth from her so that she felt the unpleasant burn of her lips starting to chap. She thought of her sister. Wondered where she was and what she was doing. Hoped to God she was okay. Hoped that she knew that Marie was okay. Hoped she would get to see her again. A big aching want that just wasn’t going to be filled. Not anytime soon.
She reached the Camp Ryder building and looked up the stairs. The inside glowed dully from lantern light. There was no one outside the front doors, and a quick glance around her revealed that she was alone. All the others were in The Square or in their shanties.
She took the stairs quickly, head down, hands in her pockets. Shoved through the double doors and into the big cement building. She stopped there, breathing in the heavy air, thick with smoky smells, and she let the door close behind her quietly. Directly ahead of her, she could see the main floor of the Camp Ryder building. The tables and chairs that had been used as a sort of communal dining hall were now mostly abandoned. A few old timers played cards on them, or shared a rare, hand-rolled cigarette that they’d made from tissue paper and the tobacco pinched from old cigarette butts. When they’d been able to scavenge, a pack of cigarettes was a hard find. A carton like striking a mother lode of gold. There wasn’t quite enough to feed an addiction, so it was simply one of those luxuries that people enjoyed while they were around, knowing full well it might be their last ever.
Marie looked to the right, to the metal staircase that rose up to the office. She still thought of it as Bus’ office, but knew exactly who might be lurking there. That was going to be the problem. If that sonofabitch was still in his office, and if he had his door open, she’d be screwed.
A slew of excuses rolled through her brain.
I needed to talk to you about something…
I left something up here…
I thought I saw something…
She cringed, knew exactly how unconvincing she would sound if she was put on the spot. She wasn’t a great actor, especially under stress. But she was committed now. So she swallowed down her hesitation and turned onto the metal staircase, easing up the noisy risers as quietly as possible without looking like she was trying to be quiet.
In her experience, working in the makeshift kitchen which was directly below the stairs, when someone just walked up them it clanged and banged and creaked and made all types of ungodly noises. She hoped to God that no one watched her now, seeing how she ascended them without making a sound because she knew no matter how hard she tried to make it look natural, it would raise suspicion.
Hey, Marie…what are you up to?
Oh, nothing. Just sneakin’ around for no reason.
Halfway up the stairs she could see the door to the office—Bus’ office, now Jerry’s office—and it was closed. She felt a tense little sprig of hope. The door was closed. All the old timers on the ground floor enjoyed their cigarettes and Gin Rummy. She might make it. She might just squeeze by.
The door swung open.
CHAPTER 24: PASSING NOTES
Marie stood there for a half a beat, then turned quickly and clomped down the stairs. She could hear someone’s footsteps on the landing above her, the door closing behind them. She found herself shaking, her heartbeat thundering, felt like her pulse was bulging her eyes out and she tried hard to appear calm and normal.
“Hey.” A man’s voice. Slightly deeper than Jerry’s.
Marie halted, turned around with her hand on the banister, trying to hide her jittering legs so that they wouldn’t shake her whole body. She looked up the stairs and found Greg frowning down at her.
“Yeah?” she said back.
He descended the last few steps between them, stopping one step above her. “What were you doin’ hangin’ outside the office?”
She cleared her throat, inwardly screamed at herself for how conspicuous it made her sound. She wanted to brush her hair back but fought off the urge, knowing it would only make her look nervous. “Seemed like you and the Fuhrer were in another super-secret Gestapo meeting. I didn’t want to interrupt.”
Greg sucked on his teeth, looked out at the ground floor. “You know, Marie. I like you. I always have. You’re a good person, and I can appreciate that about you. And that’s the only reason I’m going to tell you this.” He pointed a finger towards her, looked her in the eye. “You’re not making many friends around here talking like that. And if you keep it up you might find yourself losing the ones you got.”
Marie tilted her head. “How’s Caden doing these days? Seems healthy.”
Greg just stared. He knew damn well his boy would most likely be dead if it weren’t for her. Him and his boy. Back in the day before Bus was truly the leader, and Jerry was still trying to secure that for himself, a beat-up Yankee in his New York baseball cap showed up at the gates with a very sick kid. Jerry—as usual—argued to kick them to the curb, not give them any food, even though the kid seemed like he was on death’s door. Dehydrated as hell. Marie was the one that snuck them food and water while Bus and Jerry argued it out.
“Interesting how the tables turn, huh?” Marie remarked. “I guess there’s not much paying it forward in this world. More of just looking out for number one, right?”
Greg just shook his head and edged passed her on the stairs. “Jerry’s in the office. Feel free to go up.”
Marie’s mind raced. In the span of a second she pictured an entire, imagined conversation that would occur later between Greg and Jerry: Greg would ask Jerry, “What did Marie want?” and Jerry would respond, “What are you talking about?” and Greg would say, “Marie didn’t come talk to you?” and Jerry would say, “No. Why?” and Greg would get angry and curse and say, “That bitch was sneaking around outside the office. I knew she was up to no good!”
And it would all go downhill from there.
“Actually,” she said just as he reached the bottom of the stairs. “I was coming to talk to you.”
Greg stopped. Looked over his shoulder in her direction but avoided eye contact. “And what can I do for you, Marie?”
Marie pulled something out of thin air. “You going scavenging any time soon?”
“Tomorrow.”
“We n
eed…uh…Gatorade. If you can find it. Or any kind of sports drink, really. For the sick people. Some of them can’t keep down food, but they need calories or their chances go way down. Calories and electrolytes.”
“Yeah,” he turned away from her again. “Already on it.”
Marie watched him leave. She stood on the stairs for a long moment, wondering if she was indeed that lucky, that Greg had actually bought it and would walk away, leaving her to her own devices. Wondering if he was going to come back around the corner and tell her to get lost and stop snooping.
He didn’t.
She faced back upstairs, realizing her next problem was getting up there without Jerry noticing her, and knowing that he would be a lot less forgiving, and a lot more suspicious. She ascended quietly, hoping that the conversation hadn’t been loud enough for Jerry to hear, and that he wasn’t on the other side of the door at that moment, listening to her.
The door remained closed. She could see nothing through the frosted glass.
She reached the landing, halted to listen, but her nerves wouldn’t let her stay. She started down the catwalk, going a little faster than was probably prudent, but unable to control herself. She felt like breaking into a sprint. Like walking through the woods at night and hearing something rustle in the bushes behind you.
Her eyes were down, looking at the people below her through the slats in the catwalk, feeling like her footsteps were like crashing gongs. But the people below her just kept sitting around. Cigarette smoke, sharp and fragrant, lifted up into the air. Cards were slapped down. Mumbled conversation lulled and rose rhythmically. No one looked up.
She reached the ladder. Realized she hadn’t breathed the entire time. Her chest ached, but she only allowed herself to breathe in slowly, rather than gulp the air like she wanted.
Up the ladder.
She climbed. Her eyes went across to the office door.
It remained closed.
No one on the main floor noticed her.
She cleared the top and rolled onto the roof. Gulped air. Heaved it out. All that hot carbon dioxide stinging her lung tissue, being purged and replaced with the cold winter air. She lay there listening for a long moment, but nothing seemed to change down inside the Camp Ryder building. No one had noticed her.
She stood up cautiously, looking in all directions to see what was visible to her. There was a trickle of firelight coming up over the lip of the roof, but no people. From her position on the roof she couldn’t see Shantytown.
She took a deep breath, let it out slow.
There was nothing else but to do it.
Hope and fear, making her teeth clamp together. Hope that, against all odds, this idea of hers would pan out. And of course there was the fear—always the fear. Fear of being caught. Fear of having her hopes destroyed. Fear that there were indeed people watching her, but that they were the wrong ones.
She edged towards the side of the roof, just close enough to see the trees beyond the fence, and not much farther. She pulled a flashlight from her back pocket and held it up, facing north. Then she clicked it on and clicked it off, slowly and steadily, in the pattern of the only Morse code she knew.
Dot-dot-dot…dash-dash-dash…dot-dot-dot.
SOS
She couldn’t even remember how she knew it. Some scene came to mind, her and her father back in the times when she was three feet tall with pigtails, sitting on the couch and watching some old, black-and-white movie about naval warfare in the South Pacific. Some ruggedly handsome characters with their sailors hats standing about some sort of spotlight contraption and signaling to neighboring ships.
Maybe that’s where she knew it from.
She repeated the sequence five times, very deliberately.
And then she waited.
Breathlessly.
Wondering if she remembered the sequence wrong. Then realizing that it really didn’t matter. If there was anyone from Old Man Hughes’ group that had eyes on Camp Ryder, she didn’t think he would need a solid understanding of Morse code to know that someone was on the roof, trying to send a signal. And you don’t send signals like that unless shit has gone bad.
She got antsy, staring out into the dark woods and wondering if she was going to get a response. She didn’t want to miss it by turning away too soon. She desperately wanted to try the other two sides—the only other two that faced woods where an observer might possibly be. Because she was so sure that Old Man Hughes would have sent someone to recon Camp Ryder, to see what was happening. And he would do it cautiously, not wanting to rush into a bad situation. And a good observer would sit there a while, and get a solid idea of what was going on before he reported back.
Maybe he didn’t send someone.
Maybe he did, but they’ve already left.
Maybe they haven’t got here yet.
Maybe they died on the way.
What if the infected got them?
What if Jerry got them?
She forced herself to turn to the next side. She tried to calm herself, but it wasn’t easy. The thoughts were pressing, obsessive, the taste of something so near, but so unattainable. It made her want to curse out loud. Bury her head in the blankets. Forget the whole thing. Give in.
At the western facing edge, she repeated the sequence.
Waited. Heart sinking slowly. Gut feeling sludgy.
This time a full minute went by, staring into the darkness that surrounded Camp Ryder. Huddled around it. The concrete building and the fires like a tiny island of humanity in a sea of wild.
“Come on,” she whispered to no one in particular.
She turned to the last roof edge—south—and once again repeated her little light signal.
Dot-dot-dot…dash-dash-dash…dot-dot-dot.
Three times. Slow and deliberate.
Waited like someone at a slot-machine. Waiting for the wheels to stop spinning. Disappointment every time. Always expecting that this time will be the time. It had to be this time. She’d signaled into the woods in every direction that anyone could be watching them from. If she didn’t get an answer, then no one was watching them—or at least no one that she wanted to be watching her.
Maybe some bandits are watching me right now.
“What the fuck is this bitch doing?”
“What an idiot.”
“Who gives a shit? I call dibs on her ass.”
She breathed heavy. Stood for a while longer. For a moment, the cold breeze hit her and she forgot about the bandits and Jerry and Greg and the plan to try to get in contact with Old Man Hughes that was quickly circling the drain. For a moment the wind seemed strong enough to lift her up off the roof and she thought about flying off that edge and felt a sense of peace.
The feeling crashed, just like she would if she stepped off the edge.
Crash and die.
She stepped back towards the center of the roof. Flashlight hanging in her hands. A useless prop. She thought about Lee, tried to bolster herself up by taking inspiration from the memory of him coming through those gates after Smithfield, and every big fight he’d been in since then. The hitch in his leg from where he’d fallen down that elevator shaft, covering the retreat of her sister and her patients. The missing tooth. The scars that kept on collecting on him from every wound that had been delivered to him but hadn’t been able to stop him.
He never stopped.
What would he do in this situation?
And then the thought occurred to her, sneakily, like it was whispered to her from someone else to undermine her. Like a weed poking up in the middle of a flower bed—obstinate, divisive.
He’s dead.
Lee was dead.
They’d stopped him.
He’d finally lost a battle, and now he wasn’t coming back. All that “never surrender” bullshit hadn’t gotten him anywhere. He ended up the same as everyone else in this world: dead. Fucking dead. Missing and unaccounted for, actually, but nowadays it was the same damn difference.
; She turned her mind away from him, like you turn away from a gravestone.
Her thoughts went to the new worry: how to get down from the roof without being caught. Although now, she supposed she could just say “I was just trying to get some fresh air and be alone for a bit,” and she supposed that would be fairly close to the truth, since that was pretty much all she had accomplished.
She stepped to the square opening in the roof with the ladder rungs curving up and out of it and looked down. The coast looked clear below her. She put a hand on the ladder, and just by chance, she glanced up, towards the northern woodline. And there in the darkness between the trees a light flashed.
***
Angela stood near the cookfire, sharing it with another family that lived on her same row of shanties—a middle-aged couple with a ten year old boy. They were reserved, and Angela knew that they were two of Jerry’s supporters. They didn’t speak, but instead offered a quiet nod when Angela had approached with her little pot with rice and water in it.
Sam and Abby huddled near the fire, warming themselves by it. They were quiet as well, as though they understood that the people they shared their fire with were neither friends nor enemies. Or perhaps a little of both.
Angela looked at them by firelight. The way it glowed on their faces, and the way the shadows accented every crease in their young faces. There were far too many creases for children their age. In Abby’s face, it was all around the eyes. A darkness and a brooding that she’d been harboring since the death of her father. Since this all began, really.
With Sam, the wear of all those negative emotions began to bleed through to other parts of his face. His mouth. The wrinkles around his nose. His lips were constantly compressed, as though trying to keep something in. The dark line of them always in a slight downward curve. A permanent frown.
Angela knelt in front of her pot of rice, elbows resting on her knees, chin resting on her hands. She regarded those two young people and felt a sorrow so overwhelming she thought she might break down right there in public, with the other family watching. It hurt so bad, she almost didn’t care. Everything hurt.