by Tyler Lahey
Bennett stared wide-eyed; Leeroy was switching magazines. Bennett himself couldn’t pump the fore end again- it was jammed. Joseph couldn’t get a shot off, and the boyfriend wailed as his pistol clicked empty. Bennett looked to Elvis, who stood at an angle, his hands clutching his own rifle absent-mindedly. “TAKE THE SHOT!” Bennett roared in fury, but to no avail. Elvis made no move; his eyes were glassed over.
The infected child leapt up to the boyfriend’s neck and tore it out with primal fury. The blood continued to pump efficiently, spattering the road with scarlet. The bleeding fool fell to his knees to the grating accompaniment of his girlfriend’s screams.
Bennett heard Leeroy curse and flick his rifle to fully automatic. It rocked back rhythmically against his shoulder, each shell ejecting excitedly from the smoking port. The infected child fell along with her struggling prey, gurgling congealed blood ten feet from their firing line.
“YOU SHOT HIM!” The girl charged Leeroy and began striking him with frenzied fists. He bore the punishment with an admirable restraint, staring at her with tear-filled eyes. She tore his glasses off, far taller herself than the troll-like Leeroy. “Fuck you! FUCK YOU!” She screamed as her face reddened with pain and fury.
“He was gone! He was gone. He was bitten. They never come back,” Bennett said.
The girl jumped in the back of the truck, her fragile frame shuddering. Bennett laid his hand on Leeroy’s shoulder, and handed him back his glasses. The pudgy man re-settled them on his face with shaking hands, his normally methodical demeanor shattered. For once in the last two months, Bennett felt a touch of empathy. Then it was gone. He noticed Elvis regarding them with ambivalence. “Get in the fucking truck,” Bennett ordered.
Bennett pushed the truck to the limit on the ride back, furious. They had seen almost no infected for a week in their hometown, but the second they attempted to advance outside the valley, they were met with six of them.
The guard atop the school waved as he saw them, his dark figure cutting an outline against the brilliant blue sky. Bennett’s heart hammered. He saw Adira attempting to fit a saddle onto a horse in the circular drive way and grimaced. He pulled the truck into their makeshift garage, where several of the others were busy organizing cans of gasoline and trying to get several other trucks and ATVs to start. A crowd gathered around the Chevy and helped the girl dismount. She just pointed at Leeroy, who staggered off, alone.
Bennett dragged Elvis by the collar. He didn’t resist. They passed Jaxton and Liam, both of whom were testing out rifles in a makeshift range on the old turf football field. Bennett gave them a strained head jerk, and to his satisfaction they didn’t ask any questions.
Bennett stopped in the middle of the baseball fields, which had been roughly plowed and sown with cold-growth vegetables. A handful of survivors stalked around the lonely field in the crisp afternoon air, examining mostly failed crops of broccoli and carrots.
“What happened to you?” Bennett eyed the smaller man with a forced calm.
Elvis said nothing, staring him down with surprising intensity.
“Is this because of that girl you were infatuated with for a moment of time, Harley? Do you see me moping about Adira?” he challenged.
Elvis tried to pass him. Bennett cuffed him and threw him into the dirt. Wordlessly, Elvis rose and tried to pass again. Bennett shoved him violently in impatience. The earth stretched flat and unbroken around the two figures.
“You’re not leaving here till you talk to me.” Bennett’s breath could be seen faintly in the snappy breeze. He just wanted to eat. To sleep. He didn’t care about the Elvis. But he was good at pretending.
Elvis regarded him coolly, his elaborate haircut long gone. A poorly sheared replacement blew in the breeze instead, no doubt cut by one of the survivors. “Do you expect some sort of intervention?”
“Something like that. That stupid motherfucker died today because of you.”
Elvis shrugged, “He was a fool.”
“Yeah, but maybe that girl wasn’t. And now she’s guna be real fucked up. That’s on you.”
A tiny fire had been lit. Elvis peered. “Yeah. She’ll be fucked up for a while. But we’re all a bit fucked up, haven’t you heard?”
Bennett sputtered, spit flying. “Oh spare me the cinematics. Don’t you dare hide behind that bullshit.”
“Where did your family go? Any idea? They’re probably dead.”
Bennett clenched his teeth. “Deny your own cowardice and come at me. Good one, Elvis. Admirable.”
“My family…dead. Your family…dead. Everyone, no chance in hell against those things.” He looked over the fields, listening to the crack of Jaxton’s rifle far away. “God they’re so fast. How can they be so fast?” His voice trembled slightly.
Bennett sniffled, his nose dripping. They all had colds, all the time. “You don’t know your family’s dead.”
Elvis chuckled darkly. “The thing is, you see, I do. I do know they’re dead.”
Bennett clamped his mouth shut, knowing he was getting somewhere. He waited. He needed Elvis on his side.
“I know they’re dead, because I saw them die.” His beady eyes snuck to the horizon, where the sun was creeping closer to the western ridge. “I told everyone I got separated from my parents at the checkpoint in Delaware. That I lost them in the crush of people and the army forced everyone to keep moving, so I went on and continued after agreeing we would meet here. That’s not what happened.” Elvis took a seat in the dirt and crossed his legs, rubbing his muddy jeans with his hands repetitively.
He stared at the ground as he continued, voice… quivering, “We were crossing the bridge on foot. Mom was exhausted, she’s almost 65 you know, we had been walking for hours. There was an army convoy heading north, they shoved all the civilians off the road, forced us into this huge field off the highway…pretty much just gave us a bunch of blankets and water and said you have to wait till morning to continue. There was a summer thunderstorm. Just drenched the place. By the middle of the night my mom had a fever. Dad was no better.”
He massaged the bridge of his nose, again and again. “The infected overran the army’s defensive positions in the night, and surged into the camp. Imagine four thousand people, screaming and fighting to clamber over one another in a swamp. We made it onto the highway. Running. The infected were biting people, turning them in less than a minute. My mom stopped running, said she couldn’t go on. Dad demanded I help her move. We don’t go unless we go together, he said. I could see them coming. They were ripping peoples throats out. More and more of them. I stopped helping her. My father cursed me. I ran. I ran and left them there. He was screaming at me as I ran, calling me a coward. Last time I looked back, they were swept under the wave. Gone. Dead. Spent the next three days and nights in a house, crying and drinking some stupid fucker’s liquor cabinet away, trying to kill myself. I failed there too. Now, there is a constant throbbing in my mind, a memory that refuses to go away. It’s the first thing on my mind when I wake, the last thing on my mind before I slip into some tormented sleep. I can’t think clearly, it’s weight is so heavy.”
Bennett was stricken into silence by the matter of fact retelling; he could see tears welling in the broken man’s eyes. He sat down beside him, and felt his own hands fiddling with a brown cabbage plant. The planters hadn’t mastered their art yet. “Who else knows?”
“You only.”
“Two things then. I want to thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for telling me. Second, I want to confirm your worst suspicion. You are a coward.” Each word fell like a hammer blow, but Elvis only grimaced, nodding fervently.
Bennett forced himself to continue, trying to imagine what he would want, and need, to hear in Elvis’ shoes. “You can stop asking yourself that question. Trying to justify it. You are a coward.”
“I know.”
“Suicide would be even more cowardly. We need every man and woman. You’re ready to move on because we need you.”
“And because you are a coward, you have absolutely nothing to lose. Don’t assume your life is worth cherishing. You have nothing to lose out there, when you meet the foe again. Next time, fight.”
Bennett rose and trudged away, hoping with all his heart he had picked the right words. He needed more practice, if he was to lead men against Jaxton one day. Though he couldn’t see it, Elvis kneaded the dirt with his hands as a rage was born.
Chapter Two
The night air was cool as it kissed their skin. He could see the goose-bumps rising on her lower arms as she gazed out at what they had created, and it excited him. Jaxton saw the American flag snapping lazily in the breeze behind him; he would have it taken down. The government was gone. As far as they could tell from the refugees, the infection had taken over most of the continent in four months.
He moved closer to Adira, wrapping his arms around her from behind. She relaxed into his frame subconsciously, her mind churning. “I don’t think we’ll ever see our families again.”
“Don’t say that, not yet. We don’t know how bad it is out there, beyond the walls of our valley.”
The wind whipped her long black hair as she turned to face him. “We heard what Duke and Wilder had to say. The infected are everywhere. They never sleep, and all through the day and night they hunt. Civilization is dead.”
“And yet here we stand, right?” Jaxton surveyed the land around the high school. The town stretched in all directions from the three-storied structure. Its crowning feature was an arched clock-tower, long since fallen into disrepair. He leaned over the sides and noted with satisfaction that all the double doors on the first level were boarded up, their rusted frames blockaded with plywood and beams.
“Here we are. But some of them are restless. Bennett has been stirring them, motivating them to break out and make for the west.”
Jaxton frowned in the darkness. “Its because of you. He’s hated me ever since we told him, that night in June. That awful night in June.” His heart quickened as he saw a figure pacing on the roof a hundred feet away. He exhaled; it was just one of the night guards, armed with a hunting rifle.
“It shouldn’t have happened that way. But it had to be said. He was obsessed.” She turned to face him, the soft starlight painting her face a ghostly white.
Jaxton’s mind drifted back to the first time they had spent the night together, before the chill of fall settled in the valley. No matter where he was, he could always recall the ecstasy of her skin. But it had come at a cost. A deep cost, driving a fiendish wedge between the survivors. The walls of the valley rose at the horizon in every direction, black masses of turf and forest stretching up several hundred feet, leaving the little town in a little sanctuary.
“Did the dam work?”
She grinned. If they had brought a torch up, he would have seen a flush of excitement run across her face. “Better than we could have hoped. The bed we dug out was already filling with water when night fell. Overflow sections too, for when it storms. The water will funnel over those sections and hopefully the dam wont break. And then we can fish.” She finished sheepishly.
He smiled. “Well, next spring.”
“You don’t fancy me an ice fisher?”
He chuckled, but then his bearded face turned grim. “You may have to be. We’re running out of canned food. And the hunters, they barely ever bring anything back of size.”
“They will. The deer population has to rebound, its just going to take some time.”
Jaxton frowned. “Yet more people come every week, it seems. Straggling in. More mouths to feed.”
Adira pressed herself against his bulky body, feeling deliciously warm against the brisk wind. As always, she struggled to reconcile whispers of guilt inside her. But there had been no denying it. The man she held now was giddily kinetic, and never shied from doing what he believed was necessary. It was why most of the others followed his lead. It was why she was standing here, now.
“C’mon, the others are probably taking all the good food.”
They descended from the roof of the high school through a maintenance hatch, leaving three poor guards to wander the roof ceaselessly in the cold night.
Adira watched the way Jaxton walked, as they moved through the hallways, steeped in nostalgia. Rows of empty lockers stretched on endlessly. Just as she suspected, there was a feast in the old cafeteria. Four dozen men and women indulging greedily in canned foods jostled amicably. Adira surveyed the room, noticing their ragged gear. Most had abandoned tennis shoes weeks ago. They were outfitted with more hardy boots and jeans, with weathered jackets stolen from the empty houses that surrounded them. There were great piles of valuables and now useless items scattered around the cafeteria. In the first weeks, many of the survivors had collected things that once held great worth: TVs and game systems, expensive toys and appliances. It had all come to the high school in an orgy of kleptomania as the survivors realized no one was ever coming home to claim them.
Liam was straddling a bench, his bushy black beard looking decidedly ferocious, and absurd. He tinkered with a hand radio. There were great piles of batteries next to him; they would last through the winter. The crackle of static carried across the tiled space. Occasionally they picked up other survivors, and urged them to make the trek to Cold Spring. Adira spotted Harley walking among a little town of neatly organized piles, her clothes hugging her hips tightly. She moved among flashlights, medical supplies, clothing, camelbacks, tents, blankets; there were guns, ammunition, axes, spades, shovels, and building equipment of all kinds. The pillagers spent hours outside the school at a time, foraging in little armed bands and trekking back with their hauls in wheelbarrows.
Adira approached her two friends with a confident smile, and noticed the way Liam rubbed Harley’s back as she counted batteries.
Adira smiled; the two had become inseparable over the previous months. Harley seemed to delight in the big bear’s easy humor and protective nature. For his part, it was not difficult to tell he was crazy about her too, despite all the young bucks that had collected in the school over the previous months.
Adira heard a roar of laughter from another table. A dozen newer arrivals were gathered around two makeshift torches, which burned greedily in the dark room. They were betting. Betting with thousands of dollars. The money, which had been surprisingly abundant in the abandoned town, was now worthless. She saw a ruffian slap down two thousand dollars on a wager over his capacity to drink. Without hesitation he snatched a bottle from the six-dozen behind him and set to work fiendishly.
“Still pledging a vow of celibacy?”
Adira turned, and was met with a wave of alcoholic scent. She gagged. The man in front of her was grinning giddily, his eyes floating in a haze. He was big, and strong. But revulsion occupied her, down to the fibers of her bones.
“Shut up, Terrence.” She hated him. He was one of the new ones.
“So you don’t drink, and you don’t fuck. And you follow that one around like a lost puppy…” He raised a huge hand up to indicate Jaxton, across the room. Terrence belched loudly, his body odor mixing with the stench. Most of them bathed in the river to the south when it was warm, where they were constructing a dam. Not this one.
“Someone will teach you some manners soon, maybe when you’re sleeping, or maybe when you’re taking a shit, when you least expect it,” Adira spat.
“Who would dare?!” He chortled, fingering the .357 magnum tucked into his belt.
Adira raged inside. “It wouldn’t be worth my time.” Another arm crossed her shoulders, drawing her into a sloppy embrace. A girl in her mid twenties kissed her cheek. “Why don’t you ever drink with us? Hmmm?”
Adira extricated herself carefully, making sure to smile as the others drew in around her. “Someone has to make sure the booze keeps coming, don’t they.”
Terrence cheered loudly, proposing another toast. Th
e others obliged with zeal. Adira peeled away and went to put out one of the torches. The smoke was hanging in the air near the ceiling. As she replaced it with a much smaller candle, a gunshot went off behind her, acoustically trapped in the low hanging cafeteria. She saw Jaxton spin around, and his face settled into a mask of rage. Terrence had fired his pistol into the ceiling, to the delight of the small crowd.
Elvis stood on the table uneasily, his swagger long since gone. He cut a more pathetic figure in the new world. His rugged gear fit him awkwardly, and he still tried to coif his once glorious pompadour. Adira knew he had no place here, yet. She saw his drunken eyes drift to Harley across the room, where his goofy smile vanished. He raised a glass of sloshing clear brown liquid. “I’m still standing here, alive! And that’s worth drinking to.” The crowd of revelers roared their approval.
“We need to talk.” Jaxton was standing in front of his pathetic friend, and immediately became the focal point of the group. Terrence laughed loudly and slung an arm over the smaller man Adira knew she was in love with. Jaxton bristled at his touch.
“Myself. I wouldn’t have run like you pussies. I would have killed them to the last one.” Terrence glanced down at Jaxton, a wicked smile crossing his lips in subtle challenge. For a single moment, Adira saw rage ignite in Jaxton’s speckled brown eyes. Then it disappeared.
“And where were you, when I was dragging back two sacks of canned food? I believe that very bottle of whiskey is one I snatched up. I expect a little more gratitude.”
“You get what you deserve.” Terrence bellowed loudly with an un-amused clap on the back, far too hard. He turned away and drew his pistol. “Let’s have a competition.”
Jaxton snatched Elvis from the congregation and dragged him away, as the others lined up to practice shooting bottles.