Followed by more silence. Barb kept working, her back to James and Meg.
Ten minutes passed.
Then twenty.
Finally, Barb stood up.
“It’s over,” she said, shaking her head.
She looked distraught. Her arms were drenched in blood up to her elbows.
Below her, the unknown and unnamed cop lay there, dead.
His chest didn’t rise and fall.
His heart wasn’t pumping.
His eyes were open, staring blankly at the gray sky.
Barb turned toward them, her face fading from distraught to nothing, to blankness.
James had seen that look somewhere before. He couldn’t remember exactly where, or on whom he’d seen it, but he’d always associated it with people who’d seen a lot. Too much.
Barb was one of those people. He’d kind of realized it before. But not totally. After all, she hid it well. Very well. But that’s the way it often was with people like that. They kept everything deep inside, often learning how to ignore it so that they could keep on coping.
“What do we do with him?” said Barb. “The ground’s going to be too hard to bury him.”
More silence.
But not for long.
Meg, who was growing quickly into the role of leader, the take-charge person, offered up a quick solution. “We’ll bury him in the snow,” she said.
“He’ll just be eaten. Animals will find the body there.”
“It’s the best we can do. Short of burning him.”
“Right. Makes sense. How about you go through his pockets? See if there’s anything there. Some kind of identification. I’d like to say a few words…. after all, the signs point to him having died in the line of duty…. I’d go for it myself but my hands are all bloody…. here, I’m going to try to wash them off in this snow.”
Barb bent down, immersing her bare hands and arms into the deep snow up to her elbows.
It must have been freezing cold, but Barb didn’t even wince once. She pulled her hands up, then plunged them down again. Next, she took snow in her bare hands and rubbed them together as if the bit of snow was a bar of soap.
Her actions left a trail of bright red blood in the snow, burrowing down toward the ground. It looked gruesome, somehow the contrast between the pure white snow and the rich red blood made it appear all the more horrific.
James, using his mind to push through the pain, managed to bend down, going through the cop’s pants pockets. Meg had already gone through the car for useful things.
“Here’s his wallet.”
“Open it up. Anything in there?”
“It’s weird he doesn’t have a badge on.”
“Maybe something happened to it.”
“Yeah… okay, here’s his driver’s license… Brandon Fisher.”
“Brandon Fisher?”
“That’s what it says.”‘
“The name sounds familiar.”
“Did you know him?”
“No, I’d remember…. no, I didn’t…”
“Maybe you’re thinking of Bobby Fisher, the chess player?”
Barb shrugged her shoulder “Maybe,” she said. Her hands were now clean and wet, and probably very cold. She was drying them on her shirt inside her jacket.
James kept going through the wallet, putting the ID into his own pocket.
Next, he came across photographs. He noticed right away that they were real photos, the little glossy squares that you used to see around a lot, but in general had been replaced with digital pictures on phones, or digital pictures that were printed out and never seemed to look as good as the old ones.
“What is it?” said Meg.
“Pictures.”
“Pictures of what?”
James held the pictures between the ends of his index finger and thumb, studying them carefully, his fingers shaking from the cold that cut right to the bone.
“I think it’s his wife.”
“That’s sad.”
“It looks like he had these pictures taken in like… a real photography studio or something.”
Meg had come up behind him. Now she was looking at the pictures over his shoulder. “Show me the other one.”
“Here you go.”
“She’s got a baby.”
“Yeah, she does.”
There were a few more pictures of the wife. She was a pretty woman, about the same age as the dead cop.
“I guess the baby’s recent…. the guy seems big on pictures…. I imagine he’d have a picture of the kid more grown up if it wasn’t a really recent picture.”
“You mean the baby’s still a baby, right?”
“Yeah. Basically.”
“Shit,” said Meg. “This isn’t good.”
“No. What’s going to happen to this woman and the baby?”
They fell into silence.
It was one thing to hypothesize about a dead man’s family, wondering if he had people who’d be waiting up at night for him to return. It was one thing to hear that someone had a wife and kids. And it seemed, it was quite another to stare at pictures of the man’s actual family members. It was almost as if the wife and baby were there with them.
But they weren’t. They weren’t there with James, Meg, and Barb. Instead, they were off at home, the wife waiting for her husband to return.
And he never would.
And what would happen to her and her nearly newborn baby?
“We’ve got to go get them,” said James, speaking before he thought it through. It was like an instinctive response. Something automatic.
“What?” snapped Meg. “Are you crazy?”
“I guess so. But don’t you think we should?”
“Morally, I guess. But…. we’re having trouble enough keeping ourselves alive. And this is just the beginning. We aren’t starving yet. We aren’t… I don’t know, but there’s a ton of horrible stuff that could easily happen to us. How are we going to take care of a woman and her newborn?”
“Is it a newborn, or just a baby?”
“What?”
“I mean technically speaking…”
“Who cares? What’s the difference? A baby’s a baby. That’s it.”
James nodded. “We should go get them,” he said again.
The more he said the words, the more he seemed to believe in them.
It was funny, in a way. He’d started off when this whole thing had begun just thinking that he needed to get the hell out of the area and down to Florida. Now, all he could do was hope that his family down there was okay. He knew he wasn’t getting to Florida. Maybe the concern for his family was displaced somehow, making him think that they needed to rescue others.
“There are so many in dangerous positions,” said Meg. “We can’t go around saving everyone. We just don’t have the resources…. like I said, we’re barely going to stay alive ourselves… I don’t even know how we’re going to manage here…. what are we going to do, for instance, once we run out of food? What are we going to do once we’ve raided all the other houses? We’re going to be fighting against the other survivors, that’s what we’re going to be doing… and there are only so many battles that someone can win before they die.”
“Come help me with this, would you?” called out Barb. Her hands were now clean and dry. But she looked very cold.
“What about doing it later?”
“I want to get it out of sight,” said Barb. “I’ve always heard it’s bad luck to leave bodies lying around.”
“I’ve never really been around dead bodies before,” said James.
“Not until you saw my dad’s.”
“That’s a story for another time,” he said.
The two of them, along with Barb, began dragging the body of the police officer through the snow.
Where the snow was deeper, away from the road, they found a decent spot. The snow was nearly up to their waists as they dug with their bare hands.
It didn’t take long to dig out an area big e
nough for the body. By the time they were done, James’s hands were so numb he couldn’t feel the cold with them. He fumbled at the body, his fingers horribly clumsy, checking one last time to see if there was anything useful in the pockets.
“A knife,” he said, finding what appeared to be a high-quality folding knife clipped to the inside of the dead man’s waistband. It took James several attempts to get it, but eventually he did, only to find himself dropping it deep in the snow, where he had to dig it out.
“I’ll say a few words,” said Barb when James was finished.
She started to speak, and James found himself spellbound.
It was not so much the individual words that were important, but the overall message was what was moving. Barb obviously had done this before. Or if she hadn’t, she obviously had great faculty with words, for saying the right thing that had the right impact.
She spoke of all sorts of things. She spoke of this young man who had a family, and she spoke of the honor he must have had to join the force, and the bravery and courage it would have taken to get himself into whatever situation it was that eventually killed him.
When she was done, when all the words were spoken, she stood there silently for a few long moments. There were tears in Meg’s eyes, and although James would never have admitted it to anyone, there might have been a drop or two of liquid in his own eyes.
“Well,” said Barb. “Time to bury him.”
It didn’t take long for the three of them to get the snow packed down well over top of his body.
They stood there in silence for a few moments.
But soon enough, the cold drove them back inside Barb’s house.
They needed to warm up before figuring out what the next step was, before they figured out what to do with the squad car, among other things.
It had cooled down somewhat inside, but it still felt quite warm to them. They kept their jackets on and sat huddled together, all three of them, on the worn-out, threadbare couch that had seen better days, not that any of them cared about something as trivial as the furnishings of the room at this point. There were other things on their minds and James doubted whether the type of couch or chair would ever factor into anyone’s mind again. Those who survived would be thankful to have something to sit on, and most of the time they probably wouldn’t even be able to expect that much.
As they warmed up, the conversation turned once again to the cop and his family, and how their own long-term plans looked.
As the conversation dragged on, Barb and Meg dominated and James fell silent. Meg had definitely become the leader and she was talking almost as if it were she and she alone who was going to make the final decision.
“I really don’t think we should stay here,” she was saying. “After all, look, my prediction was right. The smoke brought someone here.”
“You don’t think the cop would have shown up here if it hadn’t been for that fire and the smoke?”
“Definitely not,” said Meg. “I know this is a rural area and there aren’t exactly a lot of other houses around, but, I mean, look, it attracted the cop, didn’t it? He was injured, and he saw the smoke.”
“I guess,” said James. “But does that mean others will come?”
“We don’t know. But…”
“What?”
“I’m not sure this place is going to work for us anyway.”
“What’s wrong with it?” said Barb, sounding almost offended.
“It’s small.”
“It’s not too small for the three of us, is it?”
“No, but what if there were more of us?”
“More of us?” said James and Barb together, in unison. They exchanged a look with each other. Then they looked at Meg.
“What are you saying?” said Barb.
“Yeah,” said James. “What do you mean? ‘More of us’?”
“Well,” said Meg, speaking slowly, as if she was still putting her thoughts together herself. “Look, first it was just me and my dad. Then he died. Then I met James. And that was all crazy. We figured it’d just be the two of us against the world…. you know how it is…. and then we met you, Barb.”‘
Barb nodded. “That’s what happens,” she said. “I can’t count the number of times I’ve been somewhere in some extreme situation, when some government is falling in some remote corner of the world… you end up making the strangest connections and friendships…. not that you two are strange!” She added the last part as if she were afraid she’d offended them.
“No offense taken,” said Meg.
“I know what you mean,” said James.
“Now,” said Meg. “Barb, in your experience, does that always happen, where you band together to survive?”
“Not always,” said Barb. “There have been plenty of times when I’ve been in some horrible situation… some natural disaster, for instance… and I don’t speak the local language and I can’t meet up with anyone…”
“Is that harder?”
“Much,” said Barb.
“So it’s easier to survive with others?”
“Definitely. That’s one of the reasons I’m glad I met you two.”
Meg was silent for a few moments. James, who had gotten used to her facial expressions over the last few days, could tell that she was deep in thought.
“Well,” said Meg. “Here’s the thing…. the three of us aren’t going to be able to help that woman and her baby.”
“No?”
“No,” said Meg. “There’s just no way. It’s not realistic. Maybe it’s us wanting to help… maybe that’s a good thing… it’s altruistic… but good intentions have never kept anyone alive.” She looked at James for support.
He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “After what the two of us saw… together and independently… I just don’t think it’s going to shake out to where all of us live…. and that’s just fighting…. when it comes to food and everything like that, that’s a whole different ball game. I mean, we have two working guns now. And one non-working gun.”
“You mean my shotgun?” said Barb. “That’s not really any good, is it?”
“Not really. But we could pretend.”
“You mean threaten someone with it.”
“Yeah. And if we have time, maybe we could get it working, provided we find some ammo somewhere.”
“That’s kind of a long shot,” said Meg. “We’re better off just trying to find more firearms. More weapons in general. Knives are good. Machetes. But guns are best, of course.”
It was clear they were all very tired, judging from the way they were conversing with one another. But they all still managed to get the point across. The cold outdoors had, in a way, kept them alert and awake. Now that they were a little warmer, the natural tendency of their bodies was to drift into sleep.
“We’ll try for both,” said James. “Collecting ammunition and firearms alike. The more weapons, the better. Anyway, back to what you were saying, Meg.”
“Yeah,” said Meg. “We’ll need more weapons. But what I’m also thinking is that we need more people too.”
“More people?” said Barb.
“More people?” said James.
He was stunned. What did she mean?
“Yeah,” said Meg. “I’m exhausted, or I’d be able to get my thoughts out better. But this is what I’m trying to drive at. We’re stronger now that the three of us are together. Stronger than if we were on our own, right?”
“Right.”
“Yeah. Of course.”
“So what if there were more of us?”
“Well, for one thing, that means there are more people to feed. More people to worry about. More people to house.”
“Yeah,” said Meg. “That’s definitely true. But at the same time, there are more people to scrounge for food, more people to take watch shifts, more people to work gardens when the weather gets warmer. And maybe most important, more people means better defenses against intruders.”
“Okay,” sai
d James. “You’ve got my attention.”
“Mine too,” said Barb.
“Imagine this,” said Meg. “We go get one of those big vacation houses.”
“I know where they are,” said Barb.
“Good. Now imagine this, we start looking around for honest people. Hard workers. People with good morals. People with strong work ethics…”
“They’ll be hard to find these days,” said James.
“Yeah,” said Meg. “That’s true. And sometimes it definitely seems as if there aren’t any good people left. As if they’re all bad apples…. just look at what happened to my dad…. people who should have been on our side turned on us in the most obvious and blatant way possible…. they were just looking out for themselves, and they were willing to do whatever it took, no matter if it meant killing and hurting others.”
“But you’re saying that there are good people out there?”
“Yeah,” said Meg. “There have to be. And if we get enough of them together, I think it’ll actually increase our chances of survival.”
She seemed to be done talking. She’d made her point, and now she was waiting, looking back and forth between Barb and James.
“Well,” Meg finally added. “What do you two say?”
“I’m in,” said James. He didn’t really have to think about it. It just made sense. After all, what would have happened to him if he hadn’t found Meg?
He’d probably be dead. That’s where he’d be. Frozen in some ditch somewhere. Just another body on the side of the road.
“Me too,” said Barb.
“Okay,” said Meg, clapping her hands together. “Now that we’re in agreement, we’ve got to plan…. and there’s one more thing…. this might be a harder sell...”
“The family of the cop?”
“Brandon? Yeah. That’s what I was thinking of. How’d you know?”
“I was thinking of them too.”
“Yeah,” said Meg. “If we can, we’ve got to try…. that’s one of the advantages of having a big group of people… of course, we can’t be taking everyone in.”
“No,” said Barb. “Most of the people will need to be useful…. most of them need to be able to fight. The thing is, there are plenty of unexpected ways a new mother might be useful. Things that we’re not thinking of. She might know something we don’t, for instance. For all we know, she was a nurse for years…”
Constant Danger (Book 2): Defeat The Anarchy Page 9