The Hunger Chronicles: A collection of shorts

by Hilaire, Tes

“It was my job. You know that.” Unsaid was that where was moot.

  “Your job was to abandon your family? Your job was to disappear when your family needed you most?”

  “It. Was. My. Job.”

  He looked tired. Gray had seeped into his hair along his temples, craggy lines framed his eyes, and deep furrows marred his once smooth brow and bracketed his mouth. Not from laughing.

  Well I hadn’t been laughing either. Not for over a year. The z-virus had started somewhere in lower Central America and consumed like wildfire from there. Like spokes on a wheel, spreading out along the lines of greatest population, it hadn’t taken long to cover the lower half of the Americas. When Josh had up and disappeared, only a quick note telling me he’d be back in a week or so, San Diego had just fallen. Everyone was scared. People were sticking close to home. No traveling. No large get-togethers. Home, work, grocery store as needed. Isolation from all but those you loved most.

  God, I’d needed him then. And he hadn’t been here.

  “Your job.” I nodded my head. I knew all about the job. “Soldiers. Brothers. Wheels up. Go save the world. Very honorable.” My gaze settled on his, demanding contact. “But you weren’t here to save them.” Weren’t here to save me.

  There was a flicker of something, but his eyes remained open as he answered. “I know.”

  “Tell me,” I demanded. “Tell me what was so fucking important that it was worth their lives?”

  He cut his gaze away. For long minutes, his hands became the most interesting thing in the room as they folded, laced, unfolded between his bent knees, until finally, “Any other mission, I wouldn’t have gone. A bullshit political assignment, a chump babysitting job, hell, even for Osama Bin Laden himself, I would have said no.”

  He looked up from his hands, his eyes intense as he held my gaze. “But I thought it was the mission. The one to turn the tide. We all did. Over five hundred containers of an ingestible vaccine. We were to infuse it in the water supply systems of all the towns between here and LA. Stop the advance of the virus up the coast. I thought I was saving California. I thought I could save them. All of you.”

  I shook my head. “But the virus that swept through San Francisco didn’t come up the coast from L.A. It originated in—”

  “Montara. Our first stop.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The vaccine was based off the live virus. Preliminary trials were good. Desperation high. They thought they’d eliminated all but the least worrisome symptoms of the pandemic. They were wrong; they’d just… delayed them. It wasn’t until we were mixing in the last container in Simi Valley that word of an outbreak came across the airwaves.”

  I sat up straighter, my hand landing on his forearm. “Wait, wait. The vaccine. It’s not the same one rumored to be in the labs at Alcatraz, is it?”

  He didn’t answer. Didn’t have to. The knowledge and misery were all there for me to see, plain as day in every feature of his face.

  “Oh my God.” Our last hope, our last chance… gone. The only thing that would save us now was more blood, sweat, and tears. Even then…

  “No. There is no God.” His words fell like a hatchet in the silent room.

  I watched the clenching and unclenching of his jaw. He truly believed that. But that wasn’t the man I’d known. While together, Josh had been the one to poke me in the ribs, dragging me from our sinful pre-marriage bed to church every Sunday. He’d also been the one who’d insisted on holding hands and offering up a prayer before we ate. Just as he’d worn a cross on the same chain as his dog tags. For God and country. Those were the words Josh had lived by. God was his strength and duty for his country the compass that set his path. I, his fiancé, a third place incentive far below first and second.

  “What happened?” I asked. Even at the lowest of the low—the death of his parents, his brother David’s loss of limb during combat—Josh had been strong. He’d believed.

  “As soon as I heard about the possible outbreak, I went AWOL. I rushed back as fast as I could, but by then they were closing off all the roadways, locking down the cities.” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Over a fucking year. It took me nine months to get back into the city. By then your parents were dead, David, Kathy and the kids…”

  He choked back a sob. His eyes settled on mine. Pain, such pain. My breast bone ached with it.

  “I couldn’t find you. I prayed. I searched. Thirteen long months of not knowing if you lived. Not knowing if you’d been infected. Not knowing that if even by some miracle you were okay, if you’d ever forgive me for going on that damn mission. Please, Amy, say you’ll forgive me.”

  I looked away, unable to bare the naked desperation in his gaze. It tugged at something I’d thought long dead within me. Forgive him?

  I glanced down at my scary Linda Hamilton arms, my flat Kate Moss chest. I’d once been soft and curvy. I’d once wiled away the afternoon with my soon to be sister-in-law and her twins in their backyard by the pool, thumbing through magazines with fairytale wedding pictures in them. I’d once…

  My fingers trailed over my stomach, feeling the concave dip.

  “Amy.” Calloused fingers touched my chin, tipping my head up toward him. His touch scorched my skin. Like an ice cube suddenly exposed to high heat I felt cracks forming, radiating through my body, widening a fissure down below my breast.

  I closed my eyes. Too much, too much, too much. I couldn’t break. If I broke, there would be no fixing me this time. I needed to stay strong. Needed to get back out there. Back to my unit.

  God, Richards. And I didn’t even know what had happened to Sanchez and Penski. Please let them be okay, please let them be okay.

  Sobs echoed in the room. I wanted to see who was crying, but Josh was holding me too tight. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. I was drowning in his salty wet tee shirt.

  Tears. Mine. They seemed as foreign to me as a smile or a laugh. I realized that, until now, I’d forgotten how to cry. It was like something in me had been shut off, and rusted closed.

  But Josh had opened it. Simply with his touch.

  All of a sudden I didn’t want to keep things bottled up, didn’t want my secrets to remain buried. My tears had washed away the covering on my deepest pain, exposing it, red and raw.

  “Riley’s dead.”

  Josh stiffened, the hands that had been stroking my back stilling into fists upon my spine.

  “Who…” he cleared his throat. “Who is Riley?”

  “Our baby,” I whispered. I didn’t know if it would have been a girl or boy. I hadn’t been far enough along when the pandemic had spread through the city. I’d had to run, then fight, and when I miscarried my baby at three and a half months, I’d had to dig deep within to find my steel core, put the memories aside, and go on.

  Josh remained stiff and unmoving against me. I peeked up. Light caught, casting rainbows on the pool of liquid collecting on the bottom lids of his eyes.

  “God. Amy. My God.” His voice was hoarse, like he was having to drag it out through a throat swollen shut with pain. “I’m so sorry.”

  That was all he said. All he needed to say. The ragged words covered enough. We cried. Josh, with all his strength, me, with all my steel. Until neither of us could weep anymore. Until my body was too tired to shake. And then we just sat there, clinging together in the silence.

  Time passed. I might have been content to drift in that quasi world forever, but a thump sounded from outside our safe-room in the outer shop.

  My blood trail. Of course some of them would follow. Tenacious bastards.

  I glanced at the walls decorated with guns and magazines, the ham radio. We might or might not die trying to get out of here, but regardless, it was going to be one hell of a messy fight.

  More thudding around, then a thump on the door, and another. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Shit.

  In an intimate gesture that no longer seemed wrong, Josh kissed the top of my head, then said, “Y
ou must hate me.”

  Strange. I didn’t, not anymore. For the first time in over a year I felt at peace. Not angry. Not numb. Just… fine. I was going to be okay—zombies be damned. But one look at Josh’s crumpled features told me he was far from all right. Too many regrets, not the least of which probably included that he’d become distracted and hadn’t gone out there to clean up the we-are-in-here arrow my blood had left behind.

  I reached up, touching the side of his scraggly cheek. I could say I didn’t blame him. I could say I forgave him, but I thought there was enough of my Josh left to know that wouldn’t absolve him. Only he could to that.

  “It’s okay. You’re here now. You have the rest of my life to make it up to me.”

  “Your life?” He lifted a cynical brow, as if affronted that I’d suggest I might die before him.

  “Or your whole life,” I conceded. Given the sizable racket outside the door, it wasn’t going to be long for either of us.

  He nodded thoughtfully. “I have a lot to make up for.”

  “You should get started, then.” I gave him a smile. It almost hurt. The muscles were so unused.

  His mouth curved into a tentative smile of his own. It looked funny on him, too, and I almost went three for three of re-firsts and laughed. But then he was leaning down, that mouth drawing closer. Almost there, his breath soft and warm on my lips. Then… contact.

  Wow.

  I don’t know how long we kissed. Only that by the time he was done there was no ice left. Not even a sliver coating the most extreme part of my personage. It was the pure lack of air that forced us to part. The need to expand our chests, suck down the life giving nectar, drink in the whirlpool of emotions in each others’ gaze.

  When I could talk again, I said, “Good start.”

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  My head jerked toward the door. I’d almost forgotten about our unwanted guests. The rhythmic pounding had become background, a counterpart to my own thudding heart.

  He followed my gaze, then touched my chin, pulling my attention back, those brown eyes latching onto mine.

  “I can do better,” he said, sliding something cold and metallic into my hand. “Given enough time.”

  Thump.

  I looked down at my reloaded gun, then back up to where he was strapping on enough firepower to support an army—or at least an army named Josh.

  “Well, good thing you have our whole lives.” I smiled and moved to flank the door.

  END OF THE ROPE

  The rope drops to the floor with a solid thud, loud in the hollow silence of another morning that always comes too soon. Wish I had some music to help wake me up. Some Evanescence or Nine Inch Nails. But my iPod has long ago run out of juice. The laptop smashed during the attack. The charging base stripped of its wire for other purposes.

  Besides, there is no electricity anyway.

  I rub sleep from my eyes, flick on my flashlight. Though it is light outside, gentle rays filtering in through windows coated with grime, there are shadows within. There, in the corner of the great room where the eve of the loft hangs over. There, in the hall leading to the back door. Can’t even see the kitchen. Just have to hope the alarms I set would’ve woken me if anything had gotten in.

  I take off one of my shoes, working the thick toe through the railing. Swing, swing, toss. It thumps on the floor in the kitchen archway. I listen. Silence.

  Satisfied, or at least as much as one can be in this world, I move over to where the stairs used to be and begin lowering myself down the knotted cotton rope. As soon as my head is beneath the lip of the loft, I stop, scanning the room, straining to hold the flashlight and rope as I shine it down the hall.

  Back door appears to be closed still. The wide reflective tape strung across it, frame to frame. A zombie might close the door, but it won’t bother to string back up the tape.

  I descend the rest of the way, avoiding the sawed timber from the ladder at the bottom, and grab my shoe, tugging it back on. I have a lot to do today and if my internal clock is right, I’ve already slept in. My tummy rumbles, but I don’t bother to head into the kitchen. Need to restock the shelves before I can eat. Instead I pick up my bow, the hated bow, and go out via the front door.

  The cabin is toward the top of the ridge and most of the small game is downhill. Down the long overgrown drive. The thought of killing something, anything, makes me nauseous. Music taste aside, I’m not a violent person. I like butterflies and kittens. I like to sing show tunes as I scrapbook with my best friend. I like fluffy bunnies hopping through the forest and documentaries on the amazing dolphins that might just be as smart as we are.

  I like pink.

  I look down at my faded t-shirt, the frayed hem of my jeans, the well worn tennis shoes that are already soaked from the dewy crabgrass carpeting the lane. The t-shirt used to be pink. Now it’s a tie-dye blend of bleached cotton, oxygenated blood stains, and a sad attempt at dyeing it red with a can of beets I’d found in the pantry during one of those first mind-numbing days. A week later, after the failed experiment, I was wishing I had the beets back. I suppose there is some irony there; the girl who had vehemently refused to ever touch the vile red tubers my mother canned would have done anything to have the sugared beets back. But I am way beyond finding life ironic.

  God, Mom, I miss you so much. I blink, refusing to cry. Just as I refuse to look over at the two lone crosses, the two long lumps of raised ground as I pass by them. Life went on. They’d want me to push forward. Survive. No matter how hard, no matter how hopeless it seems at times.

  I turn off what is left of the rutted drive and press into the cool shade of the woods, my eyes and ears open, my hands clenched on the hated bow. The bow hadn’t saved us that night. We’d come here, to this isolated summer cabin when the first word of the outbreak had come. We would hole up here. There were no neighbors in a ten mile radius but one, and that cabin normally empty. My parents, too anxious to comfort me, waited for word. Some sort of news. Good or bad.

  News never arrived. Instead came the normally absent neighbor. A man, carrying his vacant-eyed, drooling wife. “You have to help us, you have to help her!”

  Didn’t take long to figure out what was wrong. They’d come from a small town on the California coast. Both were infected with the slow strain, she was just further along than he. My father mercifully used a knife. First her throat. She doesn’t die. While she’s choking, immobile, he shoves the blade into her brain. Of course the husband went ballistic. Perhaps if he hadn’t been infected, wasn’t already losing control of his reasoning, he would have understood the necessity of the act. Then again, maybe not.

  I still remember the feeling of helplessness. Up in the loft where my father had sent me, the bow I’d grabbed out of their closet in hand. And I can’t pull it to save my life. I threw it down, but too late. The man was already dead. My father killed him. But not before he was bitten. Not before my mother was torn to shreds by the man’s violent attack. My dad looks up at me. Looks at the knife in his hand. “You know what to do,” he says, and then slits his own throat. His eyes are still open, his mouth gaping, when five minutes later I finally gain enough stomach to drive the blade into his eye socket.

  Killer and orphan, in an instant.

  I wonder if there is any forgiveness for that. Wonder if there is anyone left to forgive me.

  A face. An easy smile.

  That’s right. I had a brother. Older. Still might have one. But for all intents and purposes I am without family. Alone. He was a Marine. Stationed in Yuma, and most likely sent to San Francisco when the State Side outbreak first occurred. Not many made it out again.

  So scared. Afraid I’d never see that smile again. We’d been waiting to hear. Hoping, praying the news would be good. No news came. Just the man, and his wife.

  Not fair. The world is not fair.

  My stomach twists, knocking on my spine. No food. No family. But with anger to fuel me, I pick my way through the forest. It’s
beautiful this time of year, but I don’t care. I am seventeen. It’s May. I should be thinking about what dress I’m going to wear to my junior prom. How I want to combat my blazing red hair. If I should go with the nice kid—Robert, was it? Or Goth boy, What’s-His-Face, who likes the same music as me. Instead I’m going out in the woods to check the snares I rigged. They’re not great snares. Don’t work half the time. But they are better than nothing.

  Took me two weeks of Del Monte peaches and Campbell’s chicken corn chowder before desperation set in. A week later I’d learned to rig one of the elaborate designs I’d found in the cabin’s survival guide. It was a month yet, and a lot more protein later, to became strong enough to pull my father’s bow. Another month of practice before I could hit a reasonably large target at a relatively short distance.

  I’d never get food that way. Still it is a weapon.

  I’ve never had to use the bow to save my life, hope I never have to, but the mere presence of it in my hand makes me feel better. As much as I hate the thing, with this bow, I feel I have a chance.

  We just have to hold out. We, as in humankind, that is. Zombies can’t make babies. Eventually they will die off. As long as the young schmucks like me can keep out of their reach. Which means staying isolated. Always aware. Always ready to fight, run, hide. Preferably in reverse order.

  ‘Course, staying isolated is kind of anti-long-haul-strategy. If none of the survivors ever get together, there won’t be many chances for baby making on our side either. Then we’ll all die off. Zombies and humans. Leave the world to the other critters.

  Might be a good thing. We’ve fucked the world up enough as it is.

  Speaking of critters… I frown down at the empty snare I’d placed at the edge of this small clearing. Sprung, but no meal. Did I really expect any less? My stomach rumbles a yes.

  Kneeling down, I begin to restring the wire, wondering all the while what I can use as bait. Out of canned cherries. No carrots either. My dried berries from last summer are gone and it will be a while yet before new ones can be found. Anything else I have is typically passed up for the fresh spring clover that’s abundant at the moment.