by Ryan Casey
“I’m not saying give up on Kerry, exactly,” Kesha said. “I mean, it’s hard. I know it’s hard. Not knowing what’s happened to the people back at Heathlock… that leaves a bitter taste. Really.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“The people here. They see you as a kind of leader.”
I scoffed.
“What? What’s so funny about that?”
“I’m not their leader.”
“Right now, you’re not being. You’re neglecting your duties.”
“My duties? I have a dog that rarely leaves my side after what happened to him in the woods. I have a daughter who got shot and only just survived.”
“Thanks to the people you’re supposed to be looking out for.”
I saw Kesha lower her head again like she’d regretted what she said. But similarly, I knew she was right. I was neglecting my duties. I wasn’t being the leader I had to be.
And really, it’s because deep down, I didn’t see the people at the barracks as my people, exactly.
My people were Kesha. Olivia. Bouncer. And Kerry, who was still out there somewhere.
“I know it’s hard to trust people sometimes,” Kesha said. “But just remember how we got to this point in the first place.”
She struggled away on her crutches, back towards the door leading down to the barracks.
There were so many things I wanted to say. So many things I wanted to apologise for.
But in the end, I just listened to her struggle off the roof of the barracks, and I stared out over the horizon again.
When I was sure Kesha was gone, I pulled out the A-Z map and started trying to figure out where my wife could possibly have gone again.
I couldn’t let go. Not as long as there was a chance.
And if that was to the detriment of the people at the barracks, then so be it.
CHAPTER SIX
I never failed to get a lump in my throat whenever I went to kiss my daughter goodnight.
Outside, the wind was howling up a storm. I thought of all the people who were worse off than us, trying to survive outside. I knew a thing or two about survival, but I still wouldn’t trade the comforts of the barracks for anywhere. We had a good thing going here. We’d been torn between moving everyone over to the village that Danny used to hold or just making this our homestead. In the end, there were far too many negative memories for the captives at Danny’s place. They needed a clean break. The barracks provided that. At least we knew we had a backup plan if something went down.
I thought about Heathlock a lot, too. The low-security prison up in Scotland where I’d first met Kesha. I hoped people were still alive there. I hoped they were thriving without us, and that they’d managed to escape the clutches of Danny’s people. I just hoped they were okay.
But I had my own responsibilities right in front of me, like my daughter.
Olivia looked up when I walked into her room. There was a little candle by the side of her bed. To be honest, she had one of the nicer rooms in the whole barracks. It wasn’t massive, but it was cosy and individual. The first few nights, I’d been reluctant to let her sleep here on her own, so I’d sat up with my back against the door and made sure I kept my eyes damned wide. I didn’t want to risk anything happening to my angel, not again.
She smiled at me. She was lying on her stomach on the single bed in this room so void of personality. Probably a room where one of the higher ranks used to stay. The majority of us were in dorms now, sleeping in bunk beds. There were traces of memorabilia and notepads with scrawled handwriting in this place. It didn’t feel like home. Anyone’s home, for that matter.
But that’s what it was, for now at least. And the realisation was growing inside me that “for now” was all there was ever going to be.
We just had to make the best of it.
Olivia had to make the best of it.
“You okay, pumpkin?”
Olivia frowned when I said that, curling her little nose, twiddling the one plastic earring she’d managed to keep in her ear. Apparently, her mum took the other one, so they could always be together. “Pumpkin?”
“What? What’s wrong with calling you pumpkin?”
She sighed dramatically, closing the cover of the book she was reading—a dictionary, of all things. Such were the joys of a world without electricity. “Dad, I’m a big girl now. You don’t have to call me little names. They don’t make me feel better.”
I squeezed her cheeks and pecked her on the forehead. “Well, it makes me feel better. What you up to, anyway?”
She put her chin on her hands and glanced at the dictionary. “Just trying to learn every word.”
I smirked a little. “Every world?”
“If I’m a big girl now, I’ve got to know big words. Do you know what ‘oscillate’ (she said it “osk-il-latte”) means?”
“Umm. Well, I guess I should, seeing as I’m a writer and all.”
Olivia looked at me, frowning like she was surprised her father wouldn’t know a word when he used to get paid for writing the damned things. “Yeah. You should. I reckon Mum…”
She stopped speaking then. Her voice trailed off, as it so often did when she spoke about her mother. When either of them spoke about Kerry, for that matter.
“I reckon Mum might’ve known what it meant too,” I said. And then I took a risk. I chanced something. “Maybe we’ll be able to ask her some day.”
When your eight-year-old daughter looks at you like you’re stupid, you know you’re probably genuinely stupid. “You really think you’ll find her?”
“I really do,” I said, my voice breaking. “And you should too.”
“But she’s…”
I didn’t know exactly what my daughter was planning on saying. I could take a guess. But the thought of Kerry being dead wasn’t a possibility I wanted to consider. Not after thinking she was dead once before, then finding she wasn’t… and then the same process happening all over again with Danny. “We don’t know where she is. Not exactly. But I have a few ideas. I—I have a map. And I’ve…”
I saw Olivia looking at me like I was stupid again, and I knew what she thought about all this.
“Dad, you need to start focusing (she said that word with a struggle) on the presents (I guessed she meant “present”).”
Hearing Olivia say those words she’d just learned in such broken English almost made me laugh. It might’ve made me laugh if the sentiment wasn’t so heartfelt.
My daughter—my eight-year-old daughter who’d been through so much—was at the point where she was telling me to give up on her mother because I believed in a fantasy.
My own daughter didn’t think I was doing the right thing, just like everyone else was doubting me, too.
I leaned over to Olivia then. I held her hand. I tried not to look at her shoulder. It pained me too much to think of the pain she must’ve gone through. The medics in Danny’s old group had done a good job, to their credit. I’d give them that. “Olivia, I want you to know something. No matter what, I’m going to look out for you, and I’m going to look out for Bouncer.”
“And Kesha?”
“And Kesha too.”
“And Phil and Mary and—”
“But as long as there’s a chance your mother’s alive… I can’t just give up on her. You have to know that.”
I kissed her again. We sat there in silence together. I teared up with the thought that this should be a beautiful moment. A rare moment where father and daughter sit side by side in silence and truly understand each other.
Instead, it was laced with thoughts of Kerry. Of where she might be. Of what she might be going through.
If she was even alive at all…
I scuffed Olivia’s hair. “You get some sleep. I’ll come wake you in the morning.”
“Maybe in the morning I’ll know what even more words mean. Like… ‘sea-men.’ What’s sea-men, Dad?”
I couldn’t stop myself from smirking. “I thi
nk that’s enough dictionary for one night.” I blew out the candle, tucked Olivia in, and then made my way to the door. “Sleep well, pumpkin.”
“Night, Dad. And don’t call me pumpkin anymore.”
I smiled as I shut her door.
When I stepped outside into the dark corridor, I wanted so much to honour her wishes and put all my focus into her.
But I felt that map weighing down my pocket, and I knew I had work to do…
CHAPTER SEVEN
Stu looked over the fences and listened to the rumbling thunder.
There was a storm brewing on the horizon, no doubt about it. He could taste it in the night air, that dampness to every breath that always preceded a torrential downpour. There had been several storms since the collapse of society. Nothing too major, but they were always a challenge. And often, Stu wondered just how long it’d be before a serious one came along. After all, there’d been floods in Kendal and the North a year or so before the fall. There had been news reports of an increased number of storms as global warming well and truly kicked in.
Of course, man couldn’t do the same damage now; they didn’t have the resources they used to have.
And because there simply weren’t as many people left to destroy the planet after all.
He squinted into the distance, through the trees. The community behind him was quiet. That was the beauty of his home, an old abandoned industrial unit at the edge of a motorway and with a load of woodland on the other side. There was real order there. It’d taken time to get to that point, of course. There had been lots of trial and error and lots of retrial and re-error involved.
But they’d got there. Slowly but surely, they’d built their community to a stable, sustainable thirty-two. And as far as Stu was concerned, he’d be happy for it to be at that number forever.
But there were always going to be tests of that insistence.
“What d’you think we should do about them?”
Stu was broken from his trance by Hailey. She stood at his side, a scoped rifle in her hands. Guns always were a rare commodity in Britain. But now the country had fallen, they were like gold dust. More common, sure, because people weren’t abiding by laws that meant they had to hide them anymore. And still, get your hands on one, and you were really onto something special. Kind of like a game of Capture the Flag. Suddenly, you were in the headlights, and everyone envied you.
This whole community was a flag. Stu had to do his damnedest to defend it.
Stu looked back over the walls and saw what Hailey was referring to. There were people heading their way. Just three of them. Men, by the looks of things. They didn’t look like they were armed, at least not from this distance. But there were already a lot of men living in their walls. That concerned Stu.
“They don’t look a threat,” Hailey said as if reading Stu’s mind.
Stu licked his lips as the thunder rumbled again somewhere far in the distance. “They never do look a threat. Not until they’re standing over your bed at night and ramming a knife through your neck.”
“Wow. You really are going all cynical, aren’t you?”
“It’s hard not to when you live in the world we live in.”
There was a pause. Stu could tell there was an argument coming.
“I’m just saying we should think before we…”
“I always think,” Stu said. “Don’t make out as if it’s an easy call for me.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I’m trying to do my best for this community. Trying to find the best way of maximising the supplies we have. Of making the most of our resources, both human and material.”
“More bodies could help bring in more supplies.”
“Or they could be a drain on the system.”
“Yeah. You definitely have gone cynical.”
There was another pause between them. It was a pause that Stu understood, straight up. Hailey knew what was going to have to happen if those people headed any closer towards this community. It couldn’t be easy for her, doing what she did. But it was, at the end of the day, her job. And everyone in this world had a job, whether they liked it or not.
Stu thought about letting them in. He thought about the day he’d first arrived here, his wife by his side. Then he remembered the sickness. The flu, or whatever it was, wiping most of this community out in a matter of days. Included in those people, his wife, Samantha.
He’d sat by her side and clutched her hand, and in a morbid kind of way, he’d hoped and prayed he’d catch whatever she had, too.
He hadn’t. He was spared. And he was left to rebuild this place.
He thought about that illness, and he knew that sometimes you didn’t have to be an active threat to pose a danger to others. Sometimes you didn’t even know you were the enemy when, in fact, you were, all along. The enemy was inside you, burrowed deep beneath your skin.
“I don’t want you to have to do this,” Stu said.
Hailey looked at Stu, and for a moment, she looked like she was going to contest him; like she was going to hand him the gun and make him do it himself.
But she didn’t.
Instead, she put her eye to the scope, squinted, held her breath and aimed the rifle.
Stu held his breath.
For a moment—a split second—he thought about intervening, telling Hailey not to shoot, to spare these people instead.
But then he heard the blast.
And then another blast.
And another.
When he looked over the wall, the three people were down.
They wouldn’t even have known what was coming. At least, not for long.
In a way, they’d been spared the extended cruelty of enduring this world for any longer.
The pair of them was quiet for a few moments. Stu figured he’d better be the one to break that silence, seeing as three more deaths were on him, at the hands of Hailey. “I’m sorry you had to—”
“Goodnight, Stu,” she said.
She didn’t even look at him. She just kept her focus over into the distance, into the night.
Stu wanted to say something else. Maybe an apology or something like that.
Instead, he just turned from the wall and walked away, back to his bedroom, back to his home.
Back to normality…
CHAPTER EIGHT
The scavenging missions were always the worst because I could only focus on one thing: abandoning the scavenging mission and venturing off on one of my potential Kerry routes.
It was a nicer day today, at least. The storm that seemed to be brewing last night had let up. There was some sun peeking through the trees. We were heading about ten miles to the west, where we knew of a small garden centre. Seeing as we were quite out of the way, we figured—hoped—that there were still some supplies left there, even though time had passed. A lot of people in the early days would’ve gone straight for the food without a second thought for the long-term survival of themselves and those around them. After all, who the hell thought this was going to be a long-term problem at all?
Back home at the barracks, they had a garden, where they’d been growing all sorts—carrots, asparagus, barley. They’d also managed to round up a few animals from nearby farms and used those for breeding and meat. Sure, they’d stolen a few animals too. After all, it wasn’t easy to make it in this world without a little conflict every now and then nowadays.
That was just a way of the world now.
“So are we actually going the direct route today, or is this another one of your little wild goose chases?”
I heard Martin just behind me, and his voice simply grated on me. Martin was a lanky guy with glasses that made his eyes pop out of his head. He might look a bit of a nerd at a glance, but he was actually one of the best scavengers. He put his knowledge of the post-apocalyptic landscape down to his interest in browsing Reddit subreddits before the fall, and often we had little knowledge showdowns, which of course, Martin always had to wi
n because he couldn’t face any kind of defeat. Honestly, he was the sort of guy who’d play a game of tennis with a five-year-old and not even let the poor bugger get as much as a point.
I didn’t particularly like him, but he was handy to have around.
“If we keep on heading west, we should come across the motorway soon. We cross there, and that’ll lead us towards the garden centre.”
“And that’s the most direct route?”
“It’s the route I’ve chosen.”
I saw the scepticism in Martin’s face then. Behind him, there were two others: Caitlin and Ahmed. They looked similarly unimpressed by this venture.
Clearly, they knew I wasn’t taking the most direct route after all. But hey. I had my reasons.
“I know what this is about,” Martin said, and instantly I rolled my eyes.
“Can we just get on with—”
“It’s about your wife again, ain’t it? One of the routes she might’ve gone, if she’d lived at all.”
“Martin, don’t,” Caitlin said. Not that she was sticking up for me exactly. More she was worried what I’d do if I flipped. She’d seen what little regard I had for her and the rest of the people from the barracks. She’d seen the look in my eyes, and I knew it.
There was no point pretending with her, and there was no point her pretending with me either. We knew how things were.
And still she chose to come along.
Martin, he was different. So I had to be different with him in turn.
“There’s a warehouse on the way down there,” I said. “A Macro.”
“And of course, a Macro is just going to be swimming in leftover food a year after the collapse.”
“There’s a chance,” I said. “There’s always a chance. It’s in a pretty derelict place. Sure, some things will be gone, but you’ve got to remember that 90% of the population are all for short-term survival. And 99% of those people are dead now. We’re the 1%.”
“And the rest of the remaining 1% will also have wandered along to Macro for bargain buckets of Harbio. Right? Come on, Will. Don’t bullshit us. We all know what this is.”
I realised then we were standing still. It was in these moments of being contested that I wished Bouncer or Olivia was by my side, simply because I knew they kept me grounded to my humanity. I didn’t want these people to challenge me. I certainly didn’t want them to test me.