by Ryan Casey
“She’s back at a barracks north of here. It’s… it’s quite a journey back. But it’s a safe place. I can take you back there. We can… we can…”
I stopped, then. Because I realised what I was trying to say. We can, what? Pick up the pieces? Make amends? The truth is, Kerry and I drifted before the world ended. We separated before things went to shit. I couldn’t rush things. We had to take things one step at a time.
“Will, I’m sorry,” Kerry said. “I mean, I love you. I’m so glad you’re here. But Stu. He’s… We’re…”
I nodded, then. It felt like an arrow to the chest, and I saw what this was. “Move on from Andy fast then?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Andy? How did you—”
“He’s the one who led me to Danny’s camp. Who you don’t have to worry about anymore, by the way. Sorry to say Andy didn’t make it. But he told me what happened there.”
I realised my “moved on fast” dig was distasteful. After all, we all had to find our own sources of security in this world.
We spoke some more, but it was all muted. It was one of those reunions where you feel like you have so much to say to the other person, but in the end, you just can’t speak at all.
After a while, it was Kerry who finally spoke the truth. “You’ve changed, Will. I don’t… I barely recognise you anymore.”
“Because I’m strong?”
“Because you didn’t give up.”
I nodded. I had to take that as a compliment. “And I won’t stop giving up.”
I stood up then and turned around.
“I’m with Stu now. You have to understand that. But… but I want to see Olivia again. I want to know she’s okay.”
“Then you come with me and—”
“No. Not alone. That’s not how it works. Not anymore.”
“Well, it is where I’m from.”
“And where’s that got you?”
I looked back at Kerry. I could see she was making the same digs everyone made at me. That I wasn’t trusting enough, and that I didn’t put enough faith in others. “What do you want? Me to just trust the man who put a bag over my head and locked me in here?”
“I’m asking you to take a chance.”
She walked closer to me.
“It’s a miracle that we’re back together, Will. A real miracle. But it’s not a total miracle until Olivia is with us, too.”
She put her hands on my chest.
“So I’m going to speak with Stu. I’m going to tell him you know where Olivia is. And then the pair of you are going to sit down, and you’re going to sort things out. Okay?”
I didn’t want to agree. My blood boiled at the thought of leading anyone who wasn’t immediately close to me back to the barracks.
But what choice did I have?
“Okay,” I said.
Kerry kissed me on the lips, and the reunion was completed.
But the taste was much more bitter, much more anticlimactic, than what I’d had in mind.
Chapter Thirty-Three
I sat opposite the man I couldn’t help hating, and every instinct in my body told me to kill him and be done with it.
I guess I really was a changed man.
It was bright in this room, something which my eyes were still getting used to after being in that dark, dingy room for as long as I was—however long that actually was. The room I was in was high up, one of the office blocks right up in one of the industrial units. The view of the winter’s day outside was nice. There was frost on the buildings, and the trees stretched on for miles. I knew there were horrors within those trees. I also knew there were positives within those trees. Good people just trying to get by.
But right now, all that mattered was the man sitting opposite me, and how we were going to come to some sort of agreement.
Stu.
Stu was sat right at the other side of a table to me. In front of each of us, there was a glass of water. I hadn’t touched mine. I didn’t want to take my chances with a man who’d surely find life much easier if I was out of the way.
Or maybe that was just my paranoia speaking all along.
I watched Stu lift his glass and sip it, keeping very focused and aware of my surroundings. I guess that hyper-awareness was something I’d picked up living out in the wild for so long. You grow used to looking over your shoulder, checking nobody more skilled than you is watching.
And hell. I’d seen some crazy enough shit to justify my worries; that was for certain. When you’ve dealt with a bunch of armed cannibals just a year into the blackout, you kind of learn to accept everything that comes your way. Reality really is often far stranger than the fiction that satirises it.
“So you want to take Kerry back to Olivia.”
Stu wasn’t asking a question. It was the first thing he’d said, and it sounded more like a statement. I appreciated that, at least. He was right.
“That’s the plan.”
He took another sip of his water, still studying me, while I looked back at him. “So you make your way down here. You somehow find where we are, and you find where your ex-wife is. And all that time, you leave your daughter back at home with… well, with who?”
I felt a twinge of guilt. After all, Stu was right. I had left my daughter, and as much as I trusted Kesha, it was a horrible thing to do. “I needed to know what happened to Kerry.”
“And now you know… now you see she’s safe… you want to break up everything she’s built? You want to destroy her new life just because you decided to show up?”
I tensed my fists. “I never said that.”
“Well,” Stu said, stretching out his arms and placing his hands on the table. “I’d say it sounds exactly like that. But hey. I guess that’s what happens when you’re sitting on different sides of the table sometimes, right? Things can really… take on different shapes. Perspective, and all that.”
“Something like that.”
Stu nodded and leaned forward. Outside, I heard the wind hit the window with force. The sunny day was threatening to turn sour anytime soon. “You see, I’m not totally comfortable with letting Kerry just walk off on her own with you.”
“You don’t have to be. It’s her choice.”
“And I don’t think you understand just how much she has here. Just how happy she is here.”
“We’ll let her be the judge of—”
“You said you had a place. Where you came from. What’s it like?”
“I never said that.”
Stu smiled. “Everyone has a place. And I’m guessing if you think your daughter’s safe there, then it’s a pretty decent place.”
I gritted my teeth together. I didn’t want to open up to Stu. Truth be told, I didn’t trust him.
Maybe it was time to start trusting.
“It’s a barracks,” I said. “Well maintained. Twenty of us. Plenty of supplies. Should be good to last another three months just on munitions and scavenging potential alone, and we’ve got farming opportunities, and there’s plenty of good hunters and scavengers there, too.”
“And arms?”
“There are weapons, yeah.”
Stu tilted his head as if considering it. He leaned back in his chair. “Sounds like a good place.”
“It is.”
He grabbed his glass, but this time he didn’t lift it. He just tilted it from side to side, the water tipping to the edges. “See, I have to let you in on a secret. A big secret. I’m telling it to you because… well, if Kerry trusts you, I guess I do too. But this place isn’t going to last for as long as I’d like with the current numbers we have. The walls aren’t in their best state. Supplies are low. And we’re too far away from any decent scavenging locations as it stands. Most of York has been rinsed dry. I’m starting to think it’s time we… moved on. How many people did you say this barracks could accommodate again?”
“I didn’t.”
“Hypothetically. How many?”
I shook my head. Again, my instinct tol
d me not to divulge this information. It told me to leap over the table, strangle Stu, and then get my family out of here.
But I had family at stake. And that was the problem.
“There’s room for twenty more. Possibly more.”
“And the supplies would split between those twenty extra?”
“Not ideal. We’d go through them quicker. But like I say. There’s opportunities near us. And there’s good people.”
“Hmm,” Stu said. He leaned back. “So we right here have about one month left, at our current rate of consumption and numbers. You have… three months worth. Twenty extra mouths bring that down to a month and a half. But ten extra. Ten at your place, ten here. That extends the longevity of both places, especially if we work together.”
I could see where Stu was going with this now. “So you want supplies from us. What can you offer in return?”
“An ally,” Stu said, smiling. “You never know when exactly you might need one. And of course, any ‘opportunities’ of our own we find, we’ll be willing to share.”
“Sounds a little unbalanced if you ask me.”
“Hey,” Stu said, raising his arms and smiling as he stood up. “Maybe it does. But what other options do you have? Really?”
I realised then that this was a thinly veiled threat. I had to play my cards right.
“I mean,” Stu said, getting closer. “I’d hate for something to happen to you before you showed us exactly where this barracks is. Because that’d mean you’d never get back to your daughter. And none of us would know where she was, either. Olivia would effectively be an orphan, and it’d be your doing. Not ideal, is it?”
I tensed my fists and resisted every urge to beat Stu’s face to a bloodied mess.
He leaned in close. “But if you shake my hand. If you agree to take us to these barracks of yours. Not only are you all reunited. But we have a new allegiance. And after all, what is more important in this fractured world than an allegiance?”
I looked up into Stu’s eyes. I didn’t like him. I didn’t trust him. I wanted to spit at him. I wanted to kill him…
But instead, I swallowed a lump in my throat, and I took his hand.
He tightened his grip on mine. A little smile twitched at the corners of his lips. “So we have a deal? You’ll take me, Kerry and eight other of my people to this home of yours?”
I studied him a little longer. I tried to find a way to back out of the deal.
But in the end, I just heard all those voices telling me that my lack of trust was going to catch up with me someday.
“We have a deal,” I said.
Stu smiled and released my hand. “Good. Then let’s get ready to leave.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Stu watched Will walk alongside Kerry and felt every single muscle in his body tense.
Carter walked up beside him, as they looked out into the distance, readying for the journey ahead. It was going to be a long journey. But it was going to be worth it. Stu just had to be patient.
“What’re we going to do about him, Stu?” Carter asked.
Stu saw Kerry laugh. She saw Will smiling. She saw their happiness together, and it made him sick to the stomach.
“We’re going to stick to our promise,” Stu said. “We’re going to let Will take us home. We’re going to reunite his family.”
“And then?”
There was a pause. A pause, where Stu turned and looked Carter in the eye.
“And then we’re going to take his home for ourselves and take Will out before he can cause any problems.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Two days later, and life felt like a fantasy.
The walking was difficult. It always had been and always would be. My feet were still chapped and blistered from getting soaked in the storm a few days ago. Fortunately, the rain had held off, and instead, we were being treated to a long stretch of winter sun. I hoped it would keep up for a long time, mostly because it seemed to be keeping spirits high, too.
The high spirits were particularly interesting to me. In all honesty, Stu’s people seemed… well, okay. There was Hannah, Alex, Bets, Rosanna, Jamie, Khunal, Sabz. And sure, Stu and Carter were quiet and didn’t say much, but I couldn’t exactly blame them for being serious. This was a serious journey, and we had to stay on guard at all times.
We hadn’t run into any real trouble, though, which sweetened the deal even more. And when we’d had minor accidents, I’d been the first to show my value to the group, whether it was teaching how to make weapons or beds, I was the first one there.
I was just finishing making a water filter—using an empty Coca-Cola bottle, some cotton, gravel, sand and a coffee filter—when I caught Kerry smiling at me, stroking Bouncer.
“What?” I asked.
She shook her head. “You spend all those years writing about this stuff. I just didn’t actually believe you were capable of doing it.”
“Well, you were wrong to doubt me,” I said.
“What happened to you, Will?”
I narrowed my eyes, sipping some of the filtered water. It didn’t taste amazing. I was missing a few core ingredients to my setup like some activated charcoal. In an ideal world, you cut off the bottom of the drinks bottle, put the mouth side into a catch container—anything will do. Then, take some clean cotton and stuff it into the bottom of the bottle, giving the water a final clean. Then you lay out the ideal filter materials, charcoal first, then sand, and then gravel. You keep on ordering like that until you reach the top and then put the coffee filter on the very top. Simple as that.
“In what sense?” I asked.
Kerry shook her head. “You just… You never used to fight. You used to give in way too easily. What happened to change that?”
I wanted to tell Kerry the truth. She changed it. Olivia changed it. My family and my dog changed it.
Instead, I just smiled back at her and handed her the water. “Drink it quick. Tastes a bit shit, but it’s the freshest water we’ll be having for a while now.”
I watched Kerry drink the water. She squinted as she drank it, and then gasped. “God. That’s worse than the stuff you made me drink at the top of Scafell that time.”
“Oh wow, you remember that?”
“Course I remember that. Four hours climbing in treacherous winter conditions. Get to the top, all nice and ready for a brew, when it turns out you’ve—”
“—Only brought my water purification tablets out. Well, I wanted to test them.”
“You tested them in a stream that sheep probably shat in. Tasted that way, anyway.”
“Hey. A little sheep shit never did anyone any harm.”
Kerry smiled. We caught eye contact again. And for a moment—just a split second—it felt like the pair of us were truly together, and that everything was going to be okay.
Then I caught Stu glancing at us in the distance.
There was jealousy in his eyes. Anger in his eyes. No doubt about that.
“Your creepy boyfriend’s watching us again.”
Kerry turned around. “Don’t call him that.”
“Well, it’s true. He is watching. And he’s—”
“He’s a good man, Will. After what happened with Danny’s group, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever…”
She stumbled on her words. She lowered her head. I realised then that we could never be the same again because we’d both been through so much, Kerry more than I had.
I put my hand on her shoulder, lifted her chin with my other hand. “It’s okay. I’m sorry. I guess I just… I dunno. It’s weird to get used to. But I will get used to it. We all will.”
Kerry nodded. She smiled. Then she moved closer to me, and she held me.
In the distance, I saw Stu watching, keeping an eye on us.
“I won’t leave you. Not ever again.”
“Promise?” Kerry asked.
But I couldn’t.
I couldn’t because I knew what I had to do if I wanted my daught
er and my ex-wife to be safe now.
I knew there was only one way we could all stay alive.
I wasn’t an idiot.
And I wasn’t going to let Stu take me for one.
I knew what I had to do.
“Promise,” I said.
Chapter Thirty-Six
A day later, we were home.
I felt nervous as we approached the barracks. I knew I was the most cynical in the barracks group about other people, but it would certainly look odd seeing me walk up to the gates with a bunch of outsiders that’d never laid foot here before.
But mostly, I just felt relieved. Relieved to be home again. Back to Olivia. And with Kerry by my side.
I saw Roger standing above the barracks wall. At first, he narrowed his eyes, looking at me and then at the people around me like he didn’t quite recognise them at first.
Then he looked back at me and to my wife and back again. “Shit. Get the gates open.”
“What’s up?” a voice from beneath muttered.
“Will’s back.”
There was a pause as we stood and waited for the gates to open. I could sense the nervousness amongst us.
I looked at Kerry. I could tell she was both excited and terrified at the prospect of a reunion with Olivia after all this time. She was fearful that something could still go wrong. I couldn’t blame her.
There were Stu and his people, too. Stu was keeping a close eye on me.
“One wrong move,” he muttered. “That’s all it takes. One single wrong—”
“Don’t worry,” I interrupted. “They’ll let you inside. But likewise. Don’t make a wrong move.”
I could see his eyes narrowing, and I knew he wasn’t happy to be receiving orders from me—or from anyone else for that matter. How Kerry couldn’t see this controlling prick for what he really was hurt me, to be honest.
Or maybe that was just my judgemental nature clouding any true options. Maybe Stu really was just a good guy looking out for his people.
I guess we’d find out.
The gates opened up slowly. I felt my body tense. I didn’t know when we’d see Olivia, and I didn’t know how she’d react to my return considering I’d pretty much abandoned her.