by James Cook
He put his sword down on the kitchen counter and drew a Sig Sauer pistol from his belt. “Let’s go.”
As expected, the door at the bottom was locked. I borrowed Rojas’ flashlight, stared at the lock a few seconds, and selected a couple of tools from my set of picks. It took me a while to line up the tumblers—this lock was much more robust than the one at the entrance—but finally, they clicked into place. I turned the knob.
“Take it easy, now,” Rojas said. “Sometimes we find booby traps.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, man. Lost a guy about a month ago. We were raiding this trailer park, right, and the guy, Simmons was his name, opens a door with a shotgun wired to it. Blew a hole in his guts the size of a grapefruit. Bled out before we could get help.”
I let the knob ease back. “Jesus.”
“No shit. So take your time, homes. No rush.”
Using the flashlight, I checked the door the way my father had trained me to, first going around the edges and looking for anything out of the ordinary like wires or electrical contacts. Just because the power was out did not mean there couldn’t be some kind of backup.
The seal looked normal, so I began easing the door open a centimeter at a time, hands sensitive to any resistance. Feeling none, I opened it wide enough to poke my head inside.
“Holy hell.”
“What?” Rojas asked.
Grinning, I opened the door the rest of the way. “Take a look.”
He grabbed the light and shined it into the room. “Holy hell.”
Beyond the threshold was what I could only describe as a survival bunker. The steel door I opened was one of two doors, the second looking like something taken from a bank vault. It was open, telling me whoever built this place was not expecting trouble when they left, however long ago that was. Which meant they had not been here since the Outbreak, or any time reasonably close to it.
The room was roughly thirty feet square, had shelves lining the walls all the way to the ceiling, a table, two chairs, a recliner, and a single bed. The furniture was arranged in the center, the shelves laden with boxes, crates, bottles, buckets, and every container in between. White stenciling on a green metal cabinet at the far end of the room read: ARMORY. Rojas and I looked at each other.
He said, “I’ll radio LaGrange.”
*****
“So here’s how we do it,” Rojas said. “You probably figured out by now the walkers hunt by sound. Right?”
I nodded.
“Right. So the way we get them out of here is to make them chase something, wait until they’re out of sight, and then we clean up. Simple enough?”
“In theory, yeah. I’m guessing the practical application is more complicated.”
He smiled in approval. “Yes, it is.”
I shifted, resettling my rifle in an effort to get comfortable, boots digging against asphalt shingles for purchase. After radioing LaGrange we had broken the lock from the gun cabinet, taken what we wanted, and stashed the weapons, ammo, and pilfered toilet paper in the attic. That done, we used Rojas’ sword to bust out a window and climb onto the roof.
“How are you going to draw them away?” I asked.
“Remember that Escalade in the garage?”
I turned my head and looked him in the eye. “You better make sure you have plenty of running room.”
“Don’t worry, new guy. This ain’t my first rodeo. Now here’s your part, man. If I run into any trouble I can’t get out of, I’ll fire three shots in the air. You hear that, you come running. Try to draw off the infected. That’s your job. Got it?”
“If I hear three shots, come running. Got it.”
“If you have trouble finding me, fire a shot in the air. Just one. I’ll fire again to lead you in. All right?”
“One shot. Understood.”
He climbed back through the broken window. A minute or two passed before I heard the Escalade roar to life and the sound of the garage door going up.
“Here we go,” I muttered.
The key now was to stay calm and be patient. I put my cheek against the M-4’s stock, dominant eye two inches from the scope’s rear aperture, finger off the trigger. The lines of the reticle were comfortably familiar as I scanned right to left, doing a mental count of the infected. There were dozens lurching toward us, drawn by the noise we had made climbing onto the roof and the sound of the Escalade idling in the garage.
“Go time, Rojas.”
The undead coalesced into a loose congregation, the least injured leading the way. Those with disabled legs moved slower, some crawling on hands and knees and some slithering on their bellies. Rojas backed the Escalade out to the street, cut the wheel, and began rolling slowly toward the undead. The sound of the engine was enough to keep their attention, but just for good measure, he laid on the horn. I wasn’t expecting it and jumped, nearly dropping my rifle.
The air filled with moans and screeches as the living dead emerged from yards, open doors, broken windows, and the hills surrounding the development. A few of them got close enough to slap at the Escalade’s windows, not a danger really, but worrisome enough Rojas increased his speed. When he reached the end of the street he cut through two front yards to get around the biggest knot of infected, then headed toward the street connecting the four quadrants of the neighborhood.
Twenty minutes later, he had made a full circuit of the development, visiting every street and laying on the horn to draw out the dead. I had to admire his work; he managed to congregate the infected in the central plaza without cutting off his own escape route. And he was patient about it, not hurrying or rushing, but taking his time and doing the job properly.
When it was clear he’d drawn out as many infected as were capable of following him, he angled toward the main road leading out of the neighborhood. I lost sight of him after that. My guess was he would take them back to the same stretch of highway our platoon had followed to get here, then double back. My intuition turned out to be correct when, an hour later, the Escalade sped back into the neighborhood. Only now, instead of just Rojas on board, it was filled with the men of first squad. I climbed down and went out the front door to the yard.
There was a crawler with one leg torn in half and the other totally missing dragging itself toward me across the street. It was an older white man, dressed only in a shredded black terry-cloth robe. The torn remnants of his thighs fluttered behind him, writhing like snakes in the long grass. He arched up and reached a clawed hand in my direction, gnashing his teeth and snarling. The milky eyes were red-rimmed, the face twisted with hunger and blind, unreasoning rage. I held out my carbine one-handed, put the barrel a few inches from his forehead, and pulled the trigger. A red mist erupted across his back. He gave a shudder and collapsed.
“Rest easy.”
Behind me, I heard LaGrange say, “If only they were all so easy to kill.”
I turned and began walking toward him. His men were already out of the Cadillac, two of them with ratchets and heavy-duty bolt cutters hard at work removing the seats.
“Nice work, new guy.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t do much. Just killed a few walkers. Rojas did the hard work.”
“He told me you’re pretty handy with a lock pick.”
“Product of a misspent youth.”
He grinned. “Tyrel said you’d be useful. Looks like he was right.”
A croak split the air to my left. I leaned around the SUV and spotted a walker with a broken leg rounding the corner, maybe sixty yards away. Casually, I raised my rifle and cracked off a single shot. The walker dropped.
“Tyrel also said you could shoot at least as well as him. I didn’t believe it. Looks like I was wrong.”
“So did I pass the interview?”
The smile widened. “Consider it a probationary offer. Don’t fuck up too bad for the next thirty days, and I’ll sign you on as a full member.”
I held out a hand. “Good enough for me.”
We s
hook on it.
FIFTY-THREE
Tyrel was right. Sophia got over it.
Which is not to say she was happy with the situation—she was not. But when I showed up from my first salvage run with a trash bag full of toilet paper, a few guns and some ammo to sell, and a voucher for my share of the profits, her disapproval cooled.
Our new prosperity made the hardships of pregnancy, always difficult for a woman even under the best of circumstances, easier to bear. She still suffered from morning sickness, strange cravings, fatigue, tenderness and swelling in the breasts, and the burden of a next-to-clueless significant other, but at least she did so with comfortable furniture.
I did as much of the housework as she would let me and strictly forbade her from heavy lifting, but other than that, I was at a loss. The fact she was carrying my baby made me treat her like she was made out of porcelain, much to her irritation. Consequently, she spent a good deal of those months barking at me for fussing over her and insisting she did not need me following her around with a pillow and a worried face. It didn’t do her any good.
Through incessant doting, I finally convinced her to quit her job on the cleanup crew and stay home. I don’t think she really wanted to, she just wanted me to shut up about it.
By the seven-month mark, her belly had swollen noticeably, as had her ankles, a fact she bemoaned constantly. She also complained her joints felt loose in their sockets and the swelling in her stomach made her feel like she had to pee every ten minutes. I nodded in sympathy, made comforting noises, and fervently thanked whatever deities rule the universe that I was born male.
The concept of a baby and the very real fact I would soon be raising one finally jelled the first time I felt the baby move. It was past midnight on a Tuesday, no lamps burning, dark as the bottom of the ocean. The wind howled over the containers lining our street, vibrating the metal and making eerie keening sounds in the wintry night. A rustling like windblown sand grated against the steel walls, but I knew it was snow, not sand, torn from the high shoveled banks piled in the spaces between lots. Sophia was sleeping quietly, her breathing inaudible against the ruckus outside. I lay behind her on our new bed, the fabric of her shirt soft against my bare skin, the two of us nestled deep, deep beneath a comforter that had cost me a jar of unopened peanut butter and a roll of paper towels. Her hair smelled of floral-scented shampoo, a rare luxury item I had found on my last salvage run.
The roundness of her stomach was warm under my hand as sleep began to pull me under, the wisps of dreams dancing at the edges of consciousness. I had almost gone beneath the waves when I felt something press against my palm.
I snapped awake.
For a long space of heartbeats, I thought I had imagined it. But then I felt it again, a little bump, the impression of something sliding under skin and muscle, and then it was gone. Sophia mumbled something and stirred, but did not wake. I waited and waited, but nothing else happened. Finally, I let my head sink back onto the pillow and lay in the darkness, smiling.
Those were good months. I spent a lot of time away from home, but I did my best to make up for it when I was around. We lived better than most of our neighbors, a fact that rankled with more than a few of them, but I didn’t care. They knew who I ran with, and they knew to stay out of my way.
I thought we were cruising. I thought after all the universe had thrown at me, the pain and loss and bloodshed, things had finally balanced out. The lives of my old family were gone, but there was a new life on the way. Sophia and I would be our own family soon, and who knew, maybe we would not stop at one child. Maybe we would have two, or three, or however many we wanted. I thought about coming home from work to the smell of food cooking, and the patter of children’s feet running around the neighborhood, and going to sleep at night surrounded by my wife and kids, and I pulled Sophia closer to me.
My woman. My life. My world. Maybe it was God’s apology for taking Dad, Lauren, and Blake away from me. Maybe He wanted to fill the void with something new and bright and good. Maybe after all the suffering He had allowed to befall me, He was trying to set things right. If that were the case, then apology accepted.
It was arrogant thinking, of course. It is easy to bask in the warm glow of the things you value in life and think you are somehow special. That the rules do not apply to you, that you have something the others don’t, that you are smarter, tougher, more resilient than the rest. If you survive enough bad things, enough injuries and emotional trauma, it can make you dumb enough to think that nothing can knock you down.
We are all the heroes of our own stories. We all think we are the exception. And all too often, by the time we realize that there are no exceptions, it is too late.
God may give, and God may take away, but one thing He never does is apologize.
FIFTY-FOUR
Disasters always happen in threes.
I’m jumping ahead by stating that, but in this case, it’s warranted. The universe may be vicious and fickle, and life often seems like a random confluence of uncorrelated events, but there are some patterns too obvious to ignore.
When Sophia hit the seven-month mark, a few of the women from her old job conspired to throw her a baby shower. In keeping with tradition, my presence, while not expressly forbidden, was strongly discouraged. The platoon was not scheduled to go on another salvage run for two weeks, the baby shower falling squarely in the middle of this timeframe. So I stopped by Tyrel’s place a few days before and asked if he was up to a little freelance work. Being just as bored as I was, he readily agreed and suggested I see if Rojas wanted to come along.
Rojas and I had grown close during that time. We were LaGrange’s go-to point men, and after months of working together, had developed a kind of non-verbal shorthand that allowed us to operate quietly, efficiently, and most importantly, profitably.
I wrote a brief note on a wooden slat, wood being far cheaper to come by than paper, and paid a courier to deliver it to Rojas’ apartment. He sent it back that afternoon with a note on the back that read, succinctly, FUCK YEAH.
So the morning of the baby shower I woke up early, made myself a cup of instant coffee, and took a moment to admire my most recent purchase: the custom-forged spear I still carry to this day. Made from a length of hickory and a half-inch-thick piece of spring steel, it is sharp, perfectly balanced, and by that point in time, had already split the skulls of quite a few infected. It hung from a set of hooks over the fireplace, proudly displayed when not in use. I took it down, passed a stone across the blade even through it was not necessary, and slipped it into its harness.
“Where are you going,” Sophia asked sleepily. She sat halfway up in bed, her blonde hair falling across her eyes.
“Up into the mountains,” I replied. “Toward Woodland Park.”
“That’s pretty far. How are you getting there?”
“Tyrel hired a wagon to take us as far as Cascade. We’ll hike the rest of the way.”
“Isn’t Woodland Park still overrun?”
“Last I heard, yeah.”
She frowned. “Then why are you going there?”
“LaGrange knows a guy pretty high up in the Army. Feeds him info in exchange for a cut of our profits. His informant says they’re sending three whole companies to Woodland Park next month to clear the place out.”
“And you want to raid it before they get a chance?”
“Won’t be much salvage left if we don’t. I respect what the troops do, but they’re like fucking locusts. Take anything not nailed down and half the shit that is.”
“I thought they weren’t supposed to do that.”
I barked out a laugh. “They’re not. Doesn’t stop them.”
She put her head back on the pillow and sighed. “So when will you be back?”
“Tomorrow most likely. Maybe the day after.”
“I hate it when you leave. I like having you at home.”
I leaned down and kissed her. “I know. But the salvage isn’t going to c
ome to me, and I’m not going back to being broke.”
“Be careful out there.”
“I love you, pretty lady. Enjoy the shower.”
She groaned and pulled the blanket over her head.
*****
Raiding Woodland Park was something we never would have attempted during the warmer months. There were just too many infected. However, by then we had learned how the cold slowed the infected down, and if the temperature got low enough, stopped them altogether. The icy chill and deep snowdrifts of winter made the raid feasible.
It was sunny and bright that morning, a cloudless blue sky stretching from horizon to horizon, the ambient temperature at just over thirty-two Fahrenheit. Not cold enough to freeze the ghouls, but enough to slow them to a crawl.
Tall snowbanks lined U.S. 24 leading out of the Springs, shoveled aside by snowplows commandeered by the federal government. They had opened the road as far as Cascade, which the Army had cleared out and thoroughly looted months ago. Beyond that, the road was impassable except on foot.
The wagon we rode in was one of a very few transportation options available to civilians. The months since the Outbreak had seen gasoline supplies dwindle, then grow increasingly unreliable as the untreated fuel civilians once consumed expired. The military seemed to have ample quantities available, trucked in from places unknown, but troops were not allowed to use it for trade. Of course, as with most rules imposed on military personnel, the moratorium against said activity did nothing to curb its occurrence.
As the road stretched under the wagon’s wheels, I stared at the mountains rising up on either side of us, snow-capped peaks ascending majestically, pine forests marching up the slopes in loosely-ordered rows. I thought if a man could find a flat spot near a source of water and wild game, a little space where he could grow vegetables in the summer, he could make a go of it out there. From what I had seen, the infected generally stuck to the lowlands, that being the path of least resistance. It was rare to hear of them climbing to the higher elevations except in pursuit of prey. Nothing a sturdy palisade wall around one’s home couldn’t fix.