by Joshua Guess
“I’m surprised you didn’t get in trouble,” Carla, the attorney, said.
“Nearly did,” I explained. “The fact that three of them—the core group harassing me—cornered me in a laundromat with video surveillance helped keep me from being charged. The cops weren’t thrilled that I kicked the guy in the face a couple times after I broke his knee, but they let it slide on the understanding it was a situation where I couldn’t risk letting him back up. Not with two other people to deal with.”
Carla didn’t say anything. I wondered if the casual way I’d mentioned beating a man unconscious had unnerved her, but when I glanced over she had the look of every rabidly curious six-year-old I’d ever seen. She wanted gory details, to know every angle of the story, and suddenly I knew exactly what had driven her to become a lawyer. It was an unexpected insight into the way her brain worked, but so much like my own thought process I could only feel love for her just then.
“In case you’re wondering,” I said, “the other two were so caught off guard by me stomping a hole in their friend that they didn’t even try to help. They ran off before the cops got there. Never had any trouble with them after that.”
18
My symptoms didn’t stop all at once, instead dropping off slowly over time.
Two weeks after the world ended, I was no longer having seizures. Being stuck at home became almost maddeningly claustrophobic—ironic, given how rarely I left the house before the apocalypse happened—but I was mostly encouraged by my progress.
I never developed the jittery rage or any other psychological problems. Not any new ones, anyway. My brain was well stocked with neuroses to begin with. The muscle spasms and random contractions faded to bouts of tremors and shakes. The fevers subsided to mild hot flashes. I still didn’t want to put myself or anyone else at risk by being distracted at the wrong time, so instead I bent my back working on the many improvements Tony was laying out for the property.
I was a little jealous that he and Jem were getting so much done. The once-empty field around my house was now stacked with tons upon tons of construction supplies. They had raided our local superstore for every tarp and other waterproof covering that could be found to keep the pallets of lumber from getting soaked. There was no small amount of equipment, too. It’s easy to forget what a willingness to take and the lack of anyone to stop you can accomplish.
Almost every day was filled with trip after trip as the two of them rushed to hoard everything possible. Watching them do it was why I eventually annoyed Tony into giving me some work to do.
I was walking along behind the trencher, trying to keep it straight and follow the spray-painted line in the grass, when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned off the machine and wiped my hands on my shorts. Not because they were especially dirty or sweaty, but from the powerful vibrations running a digging machine sent through them. Every time I stopped using it, my fingers felt like they were going to rattle forever.
Carla walked over, Nikola lazily following behind. My dog had taken to the other woman, a fact I chalked up to the frequency with which she supplied him with table food. Traitor.
“What’s up?” I asked. I’d only been working for an hour.
She looked at the trencher appraisingly. “Watching you use that thing looks a little like you’re trying to murder the planet with a chainsaw.”
I laughed. It was true; the model I was using pretty much looked like a huge chainsaw on wheels. The long line of dirt piled up next to the trench could be thought of as the ground’s flesh, with a little imagination. “Did you come out here just to compliment me?”
“No,” Carla said. “Though the fact you consider it a compliment is pretty fucked up. The boys just called on the radio. They found some survivors and want to bring them in. Apparently they’ve been staying in one of the stores. They aren’t in great shape.”
I leaned on the trencher. “Okay. Uh, how many? And do we have the supplies for them?”
Carla pulled her little notebook out and flipped it open. “Tony said there are eight of them. Let’s see: the boys brought five twin mattresses day before yesterday. We have sleeping bags for anyone who doesn’t get a mattress. Plenty of blankets.”
“What about food?”
She flipped a few more pages. “I think we’re okay for the near future. The store where the boys found them was that new place just north of the county line, and it’s stocked. They’re hauling everything here in the box truck. But even without that, they’ve brought back food every day. Most of it’s canned stuff, and it might not be what we actually want to eat, but there’s a lot of it.”
I shrugged. “Sounds like you have it covered, then.” I turned back to the trencher, eager to finish at least one side of the perimeter line before I stopped for lunch.
“Ran,” Carla said. I looked back at her. “You’re saying to tell the boys yes?”
I frowned. “Yes to what?”
She gave me an exasperated sigh. “To bringing them here. We agreed you were in charge. This is your call.”
I stared at her for a few seconds until the words began to work together and make sense. “Yes, Carla. Bring them here. I thought the whole ‘I don’t want to condemn innocent people to death out there’ discussion made that clear. Even if we didn’t have the food and supplies to feed everyone, we’d just figure it out as we went.”
“I know, I know,” she replied, putting her hands up defensively. “But this is your place. I needed to make sure.”
“I understand,” I said with a nod. “As long as people agree they aren’t going to come here and start giving orders, I don’t have a problem. Can I get back to work now?”
Carla smiled and gave me a mocking bow. “Of course, my lady. At your service, as always.”
I rolled my eyes. “Blow it out your ass. And stop feeding my dog people food. He’s gonna get fat.”
I had finished the first leg of the trench and started on the second by the time the box truck trundled up the driveway. I wished I could get a bird’s eye view of the lines I was excavating. They were the first step in building a wall, and Tony assured me there would be a huge volume of space inside it. I was less sure how that was going to get done, but worked with enthusiasm anyway. What little girl doesn’t dream of one day having her own castle?
Look, I know my trailer doesn’t qualify, but it was a work in progress.
I watched the truck pass, and made my way to the house. My heart fluttered a little, my chest tightened. Fighting was easy. Meeting new people, now, that was a challenge I never seemed able to meet with confidence.
By the time I made it to the house, Jem was already helping people out of the open back of the truck. Years of training in threat assessment, combined with my suspicious nature, made me automatically assess the new arrivals.
Three adult women. One girl in her late teens. One young boy, maybe seven. Three adult men. The ladies of the group I scanned and found no problems with. They radiated relief in an almost palpable aura. The young woman, to my surprise, picked up the boy and smiled at him as if her were her own as she hugged him. Brother and sister, maybe.
The men didn’t strike me as immediately dangerous, though anyone who had made it this far was neither stupid or cowardly. Even staying locked in a store meant keeping quiet enough to avoid detection, and enduring the sounds of the world falling apart around them without utterly losing it. Where the women seemed thrilled to be here, the men looked wary. Made sense to me. When a thing looks too good to be true, it should always be viewed with healthy skepticism.
Pushing down the part of my brain screaming for me to go hide under my blankets rather than talk to people, I walked up to the biggest of the men and put out a hand. “Hi. I’m Ran. Welcome to my place.”
The guy was pretty large, maybe six three. He had dark hair and deeply tan skin, though it wasn’t obvious if this was due to genetics or sunlight. “I’m Robert,” he said in an even baritone. He jerked his chin toward the
man on his left, who was average size with light blond hair. “That’s Shane. The redhead is Gregory.”
I half-expected Robert to be corrected, because honestly, who the fuck chooses to go by Gregory? But no, this was apparently what they slight man went by. Okay, then.
“You guys hungry?” I asked the group.
Robert shook his head. “We ate not an hour before your friends found us. But I wouldn’t say no to a shower, if that’s possible.”
“We still have water pressure,” I said. “No reason everyone can’t clean up, though the water heater won’t last for long. If you don’t mind staggering them out a bit, I can make sure you at least all get to clean up some. Why don’t the ladies come with me, and Jem can take you fellas to the guest bathroom.”
Jem, who was standing behind the group, caught my eye. His raised eyebrow was a question, and I narrowed my eyes back at him just enough to get the point across. Don’t say anything out loud, just do it.
“Sure,” Jem said. “I’ll update you on our haul once the guys are settled in.”
I shot him a grin. “Sounds good.”
The group of women, the youngest still carrying the boy on her hip in a display of strength and stamina impressively close to lifting a car off someone, followed me into the house. I led them to my bedroom and closed the door behind us, gesturing to the adjoining bathroom before taking a seat on the edge of the bed.
“I kind of lied,” I said, pointing at the bathroom. “Since we still have power, this bathroom won’t run out of hot water. It has an on-demand water heater. So please, take your time.”
The oldest of them, a black woman who looked to be in her early fifties by her salt-and-pepper hair, touched the girl on her shoulder. “You go ahead, Sandy. Take Connor in there and both of you clean up. We can wait.”
The girl—Sandy, apparently—bobbed her head and rushed into the bathroom. Nearly gave the kid whiplash when she did it, too.
“Like I said, I’m Ran.” I put out my hand to the older woman. She took it with both of hers and squeezed.
“I’m Maria,” she said. “Thank you for taking us in.”
“I’m planning to make you all work for it,” I said with a smile. “But I’ll be right there next to you.”
The other two introduced themselves to me.
“I’m Grace,” said one of them, a thin white woman in her thirties with shoulder-length brown hair. “God, I’m so glad we’re out of that store. The food was okay, but man, it was so stuffy and dark. We had to be quiet all the time, and stuck in there with those guys.”
I frowned. “Were they a problem?”
“No,” said the third woman, Lisa. “Not really. It was just really cramped. I mean, you don’t really have much in the way of sleeping arrangements in a grocery store. All of us,” she said, sweeping a hand around the room, “slept in the office. The guys crashed in the break room.”
We chatted until Jem tapped on the door a few minutes later. I made sure to point out the entrance to the bunker before leaving the room. “There are clean clothes down there. We made sure to grab a little bit of everything.”
Closing the door behind me, I motioned for Jem to step away from my room. We walked through the back door and stood together on the tiny porch.
“Why did you want to separate them?” he asked. “Did you see something I missed?”
I shook my head. “Just wanted to double check and make sure everything was kosher. Also, splitting up the group is a good way to make sure they don’t set themselves up as an insular tribe within a tribe.”
Jem blinked at me. “Really? You thought about that ahead of time?”
“You would have to, if you had to edit a textbook and five drafts of a doctoral thesis on group dynamics,” I said. “I also didn’t want to let the men down into the bunker before I had a chance to make sure the weapons were all under lock and key.”
Jem pursed his lips. “You don’t trust them.”
I goggled at him. “Do you? I don’t know them, Jem. At all. They’re complete strangers. I’m happy to give them somewhere to sleep and food to eat, but I’d be a complete fucking moron to assume they’re wonderful people who would never do anything wrong. Because people are never known to react badly in shitty situations, right?”
Fact: people are well-known for reacting badly in shitty situations.
19
The core group—me, Jem, Carla, and Tony—made the decision to keep my illness from the others. There wasn’t any sinister motive beyond not scaring anyone and my desire for privacy. I’d have told them if it mattered, but since the symptoms grew weaker every day, there didn’t seem to be any point.
Two days after the boys brought in the new arrivals, we had a zombie attack. By that I don’t mean one or two wandered across the property since that happened every other day or so. No, this was a largish herd of them. I guess they got tired of being hungry in town when all the easy prey dried up. It wasn’t much of a surprise they’d managed to find us. They seemed unnaturally talented at locating people.
I’d run inside a few minutes earlier, feeling a fit coming on. Carla had explained my occasional absences away as kidney problems, though I found out later from Maria that she’d said I had a spastic bladder, and while I wasn’t thrilled to have my fictional difficulties with urination a topic of discussion, it did give me cover to go sit in the tub and twitch freely.
I actually did go to the bathroom when it was over, and I was just rubbing some sanitizer on my hands when the alarm sounded. The alarm in question was Nikola, who could smell zombies coming long before we could see or hear them. The weird way my house sat back off the road and the screen of trees in the distance made it just as hard for us to see out as it made it hard for others to see in.
Grabbing my holstered Springfield from the edge of the sink, I only slowed for a second in the bedroom to throw my motorcycle jacket on. It wasn’t armor, but the hard plastic plates and dense nylon offered decent protection.
I stood by the front door as everyone streamed in. We were all working on construction projects of one kind or another. I’d been helping put together raised beds for food with Maria and the other women.
When the last of them came inside, Nikola followed. He stood on the scuffed linoleum, body tense and curly tail wagging. I closed the door—now with the same bars on its window as every other window in the house—and pointed at it. “Stand guard,” I ordered.
Nik backed up and sat down facing the door, his eyes locked on it intently. Everyone but Carla, who was surely working down in the bunker, looked confused.
“What’s a dog going to do?” Shane asked as he pulled off his work gloves.
“He gave you warning,” I said lightly. “So there’s that. Also, if something manages to get through that door, which is unlikely unless zombies have somehow managed to learn to work together in the use of a battering ram, he’ll kill it. Or die trying.” The thought of my dog dying bothered me way more than I would ever admit out loud, but in this case I wasn’t fussed. Zombies were strong, and they scratched and bit a lot, but Nikola was a hundred and twenty pounds of predator designed by nature to fuck up the day of anything human size or smaller. He was fast, strong, and a few bites would only piss him off.
I grabbed the weird baseball bat we’d picked up at the police station and threw it over my shoulder. “You guys hang tight. I’m gonna go take a look at what we’re dealing with. I’ll call Jem and Tony back if we need the help.”
This elicited a collection of reactions ranging from stark disbelief to, in the case of little Connor, outright awe. I shot the boy a wink before disappearing into what had once been the storage closet between the common bathroom and the guest bedroom.
Tony had installed roof access and a ladder here, which meant he cut a big-ass hole in my roof. In fairness, it was a pretty good job; the homemade hatch locked from the inside and was sealed tight against the weather. Score one for living in a flat-topped trailer.
The scene ou
tside was not ideal.
“What’s it look like?” a muffled voice asked through the closed hatch.
I sighed and shouted back, “Pretty bad.”
Though it was hard to count since I could only make the zombies out through the screen of trees separating my property from the road, there had to be thirty of them at least. They were clearly not on a flyby, either. Every one of them had turned toward the house and was trying to make their way through the trees.
I hefted the bat, feeling the reassuring mass of it resist my muscles. I could slip down the ladder and into some protective gear. Getting back outside would be easy. I was certainly well-rested, and I figured I could swing the thing a hundred times before it started to wear me out. The last few days of working outside proved my endurance wasn’t too damaged by my illness.
The thought appealed to me the more it lingered. I fell into a sort of quasi-catatonia as I imagined the feeling of my gloved hands sliding along the grip, the tension in my wrists traveling up my arms as I flexed to swing. I wanted very much to say fuck it and jump down right then. The visual of wading into the crowd and breaking heads was intoxicating.
“Ran? Are you okay up there?”
Even through the hatch I could discern Carla’s voice. The worried tone was clear. I snapped out of my reverie and shook my head to banish the suicidally dangerous thoughts.
“Yeah, I’m good,” I said, watching the zombies filter through the trees and onto the property. “I’m coming down.”
“What are we going to do?” Maria asked. It was a matter-of-fact question, not at all panicked. The other women had varied reactions, though the only one who looked afraid was Sandy. Given the way she was clutching Connor, I suspected it was more out of fear for his safety than her own.