by Joshua Guess
Another pause. “Whatever. I’m dead either way.”
I nodded to Jem. “Uncuff him. Let him up.”
Jem shook his head. “Ran, this is nuts. You can’t—”
“It’s my goddamn house and my goddamn call,” I said. “Let him up.”
Jem grumbled, but he did it. Robert stood slowly, with the wary nerves of a cornered predator. I had seen him as unobtrusive once, almost vanilla in how little concern his pleasant features and calm manner worried me.
And the truth was that he didn’t look like a monster. I wouldn’t allow myself to give in to that all too human urge to strip away his own humanity. People did awful things. Heartless things.
“So how do we do this?” he asked, venom in the words.
I shrugged. “Come get me. At least this way you have a chance.”
He came to get me.
He did not have a chance.
I hadn’t been lying when listing out the weaknesses he could exploit, but I was neither dumb nor suicidal. Men like Robert, who shoot allies on a whim, rarely have the sort of mind that makes planning ahead much of an option. Me, on the other hand? I’m the proverbial spider waiting to catch the unsuspecting in my web.
He barreled toward me, relying on the brute power and other advantages in his possession to win the day. In return, I pivoted and placed a well-timed and relatively light kick into his kneecap. It wasn’t hard enough to hurt, much less incapacitate, but it ruined his balance.
Robert tripped over his own limbs and fell on his face. Again. I fell onto him, pulling the screwdriver I’d hidden beneath my own untucked shirt, and jammed it into his right kidney.
He tried to scream, but the funny thing about kidneys is that if you do them enough harm, the pain is so intense it can cause your throat to constrict. It’s a fact. Instead of a mighty bellow, his throat issued a feeble squeaking sucking noise. Like a vacuum cleaner hose against skin, the air trying to whistle past.
I leaned into the screwdriver as I put my mouth next to his ear.
“The last thing you’ll hear is my voice. Your last thought is that the woman you tried to kill killed you instead. Fuck you, Robert.”
I yanked the screwdriver out, grabbed his hair with my weak arm, and put the narrow shaft through his ear and into his brain. I spun it in a circle just to be safe. Which was a lot harder than I expected, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was having to muscle it through gray matter.
I left the tool there when I stood. I ignored the twitching body, still in the last throes of brain death, and sighed. “This is what happens to people who try to hurt you. It’s also what happens to anyone who tries to hurt me.”
The crowd was silent, and clearly disturbed by what they’d just witnessed.
I wanted to say something to reassure them, but I didn’t have it in me. Either they’d understand or they wouldn’t. I was on the tail end of several torturous weeks, and had more ahead of me as I recovered. Rather than try to explain the last few minutes as a culmination of all that pain, both physically and the trauma of betrayal, I went inside and let them work it out for themselves.
Nikola went with me. It was good to be home.
27
As it turned out, Jem and some others did a lot of explaining for me. Don’t get me wrong, the many strangers now occupying my home like an invading army kept their distance. They gave me looks ranging from reverent to bewildered when they thought I wasn’t looking. But they either got why I killed Robert myself and in such a personal way, or they chalked it up to the disaster of a world we now lived in.
Three people left rather than live in close proximity to a woman that could casually, ahem, screw a man to death. Everyone seemed pretty okay with it.
Ellis became something like an assistant to me as I continued to recover. A new arrival, a woman with a serious manner and a face like an old shovel, introduced herself as Dolly (yes, really) and examined my wound. Dolly was a surgical nurse in her former life. She had a dark and twisted sense of humor, a deeply analytical mind, and the gentle hands of a concert pianist. I liked her.
Four days after my show-stopping return, I found myself sitting in bed staring at the tray of breakfast Ellis had put in front of me. Someone had liberated chickens from a farm, so we had eggs. There was no bacon, obviously, but bread was something we could do. It was a low-ingredient flat bread, made the way villages across the world have done it for thousands of years, only this time baked on a makeshift oven made of stolen bricks.
Alone after Ellis left the room, I scooped up some egg into my bread and made to eat it. My hand slowed, then froze. My vision fuzzed.
I burst into tears. Loud, ugly, wet sobs.
How long I spent in this state, I can’t say. I know at some point a big arm went around my shoulders, and I leaned in and ruined a perfectly good shirt with my wet face. There were the standard comforting murmurs, and someone petting my hair the way a parent would for an inconsolable child.
“It finally hit you, huh?” Jem said.
Of course it was him. Who else would it be?
“I was getting ready to eat and it just hit me that Robert would never eat anything again. Because I killed him. I was so angry, and now…”
He pulled back from me, angling himself so we could look at each other. “Now you’ve had a few days to decompress and you don’t feel that anger anymore. Once the moment passed you started to question yourself. Wonder if there was another way, or if you were being needlessly cruel.”
I snorted, ran a hand across my face. “I was. Being cruel, I mean. I wanted to hurt him in every way possible.”
Jem leaned back, propping himself up with his hands. “Yeah, it was brutal. It wasn’t what I would have done. But the guy deserved to die, and we can’t exactly take chances with people like him. There aren’t enough of us left in these parts.” He sat forward and put a hand on mine, gripping it firmly. “I never had to kill anyone in the line of duty, but when I was a patrol officer I did have to shoot someone. He lived, thank god. I guess there’s a difference between killing your first zombie and killing your first person.”
I’ll say this for Jem; the man was a born investigator. He had a natural talent for spotting things that didn’t add up, or stood out, or just plain didn’t make sense. I don’t know if it was the fractional second I paused, the darting look away from him, or what. But he saw it and immediately knew.
“You’ve killed someone before,” he said, not asking a question. “Before all this.”
I nodded. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Jem frowned thoughtfully. “Maybe that’s a good reason you should.”
I swear I thought about it before shaking my head. “That was a long, long time ago.”
“Okay,” Jem said simply. “If you ever want to talk about it, I’m always happy to listen.”
I eyed him suspiciously. “You gave up on that too easily. You’re just hoping I’ll fall into your arms again, aren’t you?”
He laughed. “No, I’m just afraid of what you’ll do to me if I push too hard.”
I winced theatrically. “Oh, ouch. Too soon.”
Though Ellis was perfectly capable of physical labor, no one seemed to want to actually ask him to. He didn’t protest much, and as someone with a wide streak of inherent laziness when it came to boring manual exertion, I sympathized.
Instead he spent a day and a half after my outburst putting together a report. While reading it I commented aloud that he would have made an excellent research editor.
The shipping containers spread around the property in a rough circle were full of stuff. That was the biggest takeaway I got in terms of importance. The metal boxes formed a decent, if incomplete, perimeter, and contained huge volumes of supplies.
“Where did they come from?” I asked him, taking my eyes away from the small notebook he’d used to write everything down in. “We don’t have a big shipping hub here. The distribution place we have is just big enough for local suppliers
to ship things out.”
Ellis sat on the foot of the bed with his legs tucked beneath him. He didn’t have the flexibility to fold them into the familiar bent pretzel configuration. “Jem and some others went out to look at the highways to see how bad the roads out there are. Apparently there was a long line of trucks heading toward a distribution center for a big retailer, all abandoned. So they checked them and made a few trips to bring them back here.”
The lists of their contents were impressive. Two were full of canned goods—an obvious choice. The rest were mixtures of clothing, tools, and all the stuff you could find at your local low-price leader. The cataloging was in the early stages, the daring rescue having taken place only a few days before I came back.
It was going to take forever because the more immediate work of living in a world without modern convenience ate up a lot of time. I was okay with that; the overview of contents was more than adequate to give me some hope.
Add to that the changes in my absence, and things looked pretty good. Carla had taken my earlier worries to heart, and had put people to work building things we would need to survive. Stoves were easy enough. All you really needed was some stone in the right shape and a fire. Water was more complicated, but even there people had done the work. Rather than rely only on the small creek in the woods behind the house, they’d set up half a dozen large tarps to catch rain and funnel it into several large agricultural water tanks surely pilfered from a local farm.
Ellis was smiling crookedly. I cocked my head at him. “What?”
“I can see you thinking,” he said. “Working out the angles. You look happy.”
I tapped the notebook against my chin. “I am, I guess. It’s great that everyone has been working so hard to make this place able to handle, what, twenty people now?”
“Twenty-four,” Ellis corrected.
I turned that over in my head. “More bodies is better. I’m a little concerned about personality clashes and power struggles. The kind of shit people do when they’re forced together.”
Ellis burst into laughter. “I think that might be the last worry you should have. I mean, you lived here for the most part, so you don’t know what it’s like out in the world. I do. We were on the run since the first day. Hungry, thirsty, smelling like someone shit on a bunch of dirty feet. You have toilet paper here, dozens of packages of it. Two weeks in, my dad would have killed anyone of your choice for a roll. Those people out there have a safe place to sleep and don’t have to live that way anymore. Between that and what you did with that Robert guy, you’re good.”
I very much didn’t want to talk about Robert, so I changed the subject. “Where did they all come from?”
Ellis shrugged. “That I don’t know. Not specifics. Some of them are local, I think. I know Jem found three on the road on the trip where they ran across the trucks.”
I was curious, though, so I went looking for Carla to ask her about it.
I found her in the bunker, situated in front of several stacks of paper and using my workbench as a desk. Padding up behind her, I peeked over her shoulder and looked at her work. One stack was a menu, with sticky notes attached all around with scribbled lists of things we had on hand. Another page was a surprisingly comprehensive list of skills. I didn’t know most of the names there, but was surprised at some of the weird, esoteric things people claimed to know how to do.
Someone had listed ‘bedazzling’ as a skill, and I laughed.
Carla jumped, let out a squawk, and belted me in the face with a backhand.
“Oh, shit, Ran,” she said, shooting to her feet and putting a hand on my back. I was bent over with hands on knees. “I’m so sorry! You scared me.”
I straightened, and I was laughing my ass off. “You sounded like a chicken just then. Oh, man. I’m gonna scare you more often. That’s comedy gold.”
She scowled at me, which was adorable rather than terrifying. “I hit you in the face! Is the part of your brain that connects negative results with bad behavior just missing or something?”
“Lost it in the war,” I said. “I wanted to ask you where all these new people came from, but I think maybe you need a minute. You look kinda frazzled.”
Mumbling curses at me—possibly actual curses, like a medieval sorcerer—she went back to the bench and shuffled through a bunch of papers. “Here,” she said, thrusting a page at me. “We wrote it all down. We write everything down now.”
I raised an eyebrow. “How is that different from before?”
“Because now we have to do it all by hand,” Carla said. “Jem wanted to keep a map of every encounter with people, zombies, even Reavers. So we could start to work out patterns.”
“Have you had time to make the map yet?”
Carla shook her head. “Just the information. We have a local map, though. Or rather, you do. I found it in one of your filing cabinets.”
I stared at the page, my brain racing. “Give me all the data. I’ll do it. Dolly won’t be letting me out to do anything interesting for a while anyway.”
Carla gathered up everything she had and handed it over. She stepped up and leaned across the pile of paperwork and gave me a peck on the cheek she’d walloped. “I want to sit down and hang out. We’ve barely seen each other since you go back.”
I gave her a warm smile and shifted the papers to keep the map from sliding off. “You’ve been busy. I’ve been recovering. My feelings aren’t hurt. If Dolly says it’s okay, we’ll have a drink later. Okay?”
There was laughter in her eyes. A merry glint, even. “Are my ears failing? Did I just hear you say you’re waiting on permission to do something?”
I gaped at her in mock surprise. “I’m a perfectly behaved angel, Carla, and your unkind words simply sting.” I glanced around to make sure no one was within earshot, a lot harder to do in the bunker than you’d think. The place was dim and enormous. “She’s a little concerned about my gunshot wound. The virus is doing weird things to it. So I don’t know if drinking is wise. If she says it’s okay, though, it’s on like Donkey Kong.”
I saw the flicker of worry appear and vanish despite how hard Carla tried to hide it. Put on a brave face, don’t make the other person’s own worry amplify in resonance with your own. I understood the impulse. I learned those lessons young.
But no degree of false bravery would make a difference. I was home, and at peace with whatever came.
Couldn’t do much about it anyway.
28
By the time Carla made it to my room, I was halfway drunk. I had asked Dolly about whether this was a good idea, ignored her advice, and proceeded to drown my worries.
We were not alone. Ellis sprawled on the bench built into the bay window. Jem lounged in a folding camp chair. Tony was on the bed with me. I was shamelessly using him to prop up my legs, and I was getting a foot rub out of it.
Carla paused at the top of the steps to take in the scene. It was a little weird, seeing just the top three quarters of her sticking up from out of the floor.
“You guys look pretty relaxed,” Carla said. “If this is about to devolve into an orgy, I’m gonna need to stretch first.”
Ellis, who was carefully sipping at a glass of rum, choked.
I gave her a high-five. “Well done. Your timing was perfect. Eight of ten.”
She settled onto the floor, swirling her skirt expertly so it draped across her knees. “So. We’re drinking. Are we celebrating?”
“Commiserating,” Jem said, tossing her a folded map. “Check that out.”
Carla spread the laminated paper out in front of her. The marks I’d put on it were concise, clean. I included a legend explaining the different colors and shapes. Everyone in the room knew exactly when she figured it out, because she took in a sharp breath and her eyes narrowed.
The map showed the county, and the tale it told was simple. Signs of Reaver activity were spread out evenly, from the most distant edges to the middle of town. No more than a mile separated any two
points.
Except a wide circle centered around the trailer. It was glaring when you looked at it from a purely visual data point of view. The Reavers, presumably the band led by Len, were deliberately avoiding coming within a mile of the place.
“Well, that’s a hell of a thing,” Carla said. “This can’t be because they’re afraid of us, can it?”
Ellis, recovered from his inhalation of fine spirits, cleared his throat. “I listened to radio Lovecraft for about two hours today. The reports are getting so detailed they can’t do them every hour. Now they host them at the top of every third hour.” I twirled a finger at him in a move-it-along gesture. “Sorry. Anyway, from what the research is showing the scientists at that base, I don’t think it’s even possible for Reavers to be afraid. They still have human intelligence, but the way Nero alters their brains is progressive.”
Jem frowned at the younger man. “How so? Is it going to kill them?”
“No,” Ellis said.
Of course not! That would be too easy. You could almost feel the disappointment in the room.
Ellis gave them a second to mourn, then pushed on. “The disease is changing the way their brains function. Like, stripping away fear while increasing aggression. It happens slowly and speeds up toward the end of the process, apparently. So they aren’t afraid of what we’ll do to them.”
Tony’s hands froze. Not literally, obviously, because cold hands on my feet would have prompted a near instinctive kick. They just stopped.
A look of sheer horror contorted his features. “We’re livestock. They’re leaving us alone because people keep showing up here. We’re making the herd bigger.”
Jem ran a hand over his face. “That’s just really fucking disturbing. What do we do about it? It’s not like we’re a bunch of trained soldiers here. People will defend themselves, but I don’t see the group pulling off a planned assault.”
I flexed my left arm, rolled it around in a nearly unconscious reaction. I’d done it a lot since being shot, a small reassurance I could still use it. “Yeah. I don’t see that working out for us. But we can’t just sit back forever. Eventually they’re going to start picking us off. We got lucky when they went after us before. With Robert and Gregory.”