“Jobs?” Dax asked.
“We have to work?” I squeaked.
“Yeah. Gotta make yourselves useful. But first, decontamination.”
I stopped walking. Decontamination sounded especially ominous.
“Relax, Vibby,” Tony said, continuing his brisk pace. “It’s just a shower.”
CHAPTER TWO
After ten minutes of brisk walking, we arrived in a residential neighborhood full of stately townhouses and single-family homes. This area seemed relatively inhabited; the ash on the street was kept to a manageable level, and there were none of the broken-down cars I had grown used to seeing during our travels.
“Here’s our new digs,” Tony said. He was still limping from the gunshot wound he’d taken before we arrived in town, though I noted he walked on it much better than he had the last time I saw him. “I had zero choice in the color scheme.”
He brought us right up to a three-story blue condo in the middle of the block. The front lawn and bushes on this entire section of street had long since died, but no one had bothered cutting them away, instead leaving them as ghastly reminders of what the world used to look like. They did seem pretty strange next to the bright yellow shutters that adorned our new home away from home. If I’d seen it in a horror movie, I might not have told the heroes to run in the other direction, but I wouldn’t have encouraged them to set up shop there, either.
I craned my neck back and took in the two houses on either side of ours. The brown house on the left seemed empty, but I saw movement in the one on the right. Someone was watching us through the third-floor windows. Kids, maybe, with one taller person—the parent?—staring along with them. I smiled.
They didn’t smile back. If anything, they seemed suspicious. The kids were moved aside, and the parent snapped the drapes shut.
If I lived next door to Tony, I’d be suspicious, too. He seemed like the type to throw random keggers.
“Are the neighbors nice?” I asked.
“They don’t try to devour my flesh, so I’d say they’re okay,” Tony replied, digging into one of his pockets. “Don’t talk much, though.”
We stood out on the front stoop while he searched for the keys. “There’s not a lot you need to know right off the bat,” he said, finally extracting a keyring and turning slightly to look at us. “We’re in the suburbs, as you can see. The city’s pretty much divided itself into two classes—the military, and the civilians. Guess who’s in charge.”
I supposed the men with the big guns were running the joint. Camp Elderwood had operated the same way, though things had begun to coalesce into a more or less unified group by the time the three of us had left. But clearly Keller was a little more rank and file.
Tony slipped his key into the lock. “Take off your shoes inside,” he said. “There’s a cabinet for them to the right.”
“Fancy,” I said. “Do you have Grey Poupon, too?”
Dax snorted.
“I don’t want you tracking in more ash than you need to.” He turned the key, looked us over, and then said, “Brace yourselves.”
The door swung open.
A blob of bright golden fur zipped down the interior hallway and hurled itself at us. I briefly lost sense of time in a whirl of tongue, happy yelps, and tail-smacks, and somehow managed to crouch down with Dax to wrap my arms around Evie’s warm body. “Holy shit, you smell like blueberries,” I said.
“I gave her a bath,” Tony said. “Which you are currently undoing…I should have hosed you down at the brig.”
At least the dog was okay. I guess some part of me had figured Keller might eat her or something. But she was here, squirming all over the place, her tail slamming into the wall and my legs and my face.
Evie had given us good greetings before, but damn, I’d never seen this kind of production. I’d had cats growing up, and didn’t know much about dogs, but I could swear she’d missed us.
Once she had calmed down enough to let us inside, we removed our boots and stored them in the dark wooden cubby beside the door. Much to my surprise, the cubby matched the rest of the place’s immediate furniture; to our immediate left was a living room with a television set perched atop a beautiful entertainment center, and to our right was a dining room outfitted with an expensive-looking cherrywood table and chair set. Overall, not the sort of surroundings I’d expect from Tony McKnight, a decidedly outdoorsy former gun magazine editor.
“You have good taste in decor,” I said to Tony. “I figured you’d have more…I don’t know…gun racks.”
“This ain’t mine,” he snorted. “Place comes pre-furnished. And let me tell you, whoever designed it had real questionable taste in paint color.”
Point made. The dark wood was nice, but the pale orange wall in the living room seemed…off.
He led us past the living room and into the kitchen, which sported turquoise walls vibrant enough to make my eyes ache. The previous owner had furnished it with a table and chair set large enough to handle a family of five. They did have granite countertops, though, which I guess was pretty cool. My mother would have been thrilled—apocalypse or not, granite countertops were to be admired.
“First off, you two reek, so you need to shower up before anything else. There’s decent hot water, enough for ten minutes each.” Tony looked between the two of us. “So who’s it gonna be?”
Ten minutes of hot water? I’d died and gone to Shower Heaven.
“Ladies first,” Dax said.
“You’ve been bitching about a shower since we got here,” I said. “You go right ahead.”
Dax wavered, then looked at Tony.
“Second floor. Third room on the right. Your backpacks are in the hallway, but there’s fresh clothing in one of the cabinets. One of Keller’s outfitters gave them to us…I guessed at your sizes.”
Dax bolted up the stairs. Evie gleefully chased after him, her tail wagging with every step.
I started to slide into one of the seats by the kitchen door. Tony shook his head. “Nuh-uh,” he said. “You can just stand there. Right there. And don’t lean on anything.”
“Excuse me?”
“Look, this place is too frou-frou for me by far, but it’s kinda nice not being surrounded by dirt and ash and dead people, so if you can avoid spreading those molecules around…that would be great.”
I studied my new surroundings, and pointed at the cabinets. “Do we have food?”
“No. They drop off MREs for breakfast and we pick up more MREs in the afternoon and evening.” He looked at the cabinets with something approaching resignation. “What were they feeding you in there?”
I had to think about it. “Packaged oatmeal in the mornings, I think. And Spam. And random canned stuff.”
Was that envy I saw in his eyes? “Not bad. You just played cards all day?”
“And did push-ups and sit-ups.” I lifted up my arm and flexed to prove it. “Seriously, my biceps have never looked better.”
There was a soft rumble in the walls, followed by a steady pounding. It took me a moment to connect that pounding with the sound of running water. Goddamn, when had I last heard a real shower? It couldn’t have been all that long ago—I’d showered at Elderwood on a semi-regular basis—but listening to water running through pipes in a house was something else entirely.
Tony folded his arms across his chest and looked at me, seemingly waiting.
“Thanks,” I said. “For getting us out.”
“My pleasure.”
This gave me an opening to angle toward: “How’d you do it? Or did he just want Gloria?”
“I’ve been trying to figure that out,” he admitted. He glanced at the kitchen walls, his eyes narrowing as he took in the gaudy shade of the wall. “Hastings has a lot going on, and much as he wanted to interrogate her, he had to tend to other matters first. Once the doctor made it clear she needed you, you sort of became our bargaining chip.”
I did not like the sound of that. “What doctor?”
Of course they needed medics. Everyone needs medics after the zombie apocalypse. If you don’t fall apart under pressure and you can stitch up a wound without making it gangrenous, then your career value shoots upward once big giant rocks fall out of the sky and dead men stick their hands out of the earth. I spent years slogging away at a tiring, underpaid position at Rock Weekly before things went bad, with no real upward prospects and nowhere to go if the magazine tanked. But now? Well, I was still underpaid—actually, I wasn’t getting paid at all—but my prospects looked pretty good. Steady employment no matter where I went, and maybe some insulation from the shit show that tended to surround local governments.
I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “So I’m going to be working at the medical facility again.”
“Yeah, something like that.”
Dax started singing. I couldn’t quite understand him through the walls and the sound of the pipes, but it was probably something his old band, the Blood Nuts, had composed.
Tony pinched the bridge of his nose. “God, he sucks. I thought he was in a band?”
“He didn’t sing. Not that the actual singer was much better.” The Blood Nuts had wasted my last evening on the old earth, and I was still a little pissed about that.
Tony perched on the edge of the counter and continued to study me.
“And how are things here?” I asked, hoping I managed to load my tone without enough meaning for him to get the real question. “Have they dealt with…you know…”
“With everyone’s favorite religious whack job?” Tony glanced around the kitchen, as if gauging how much he should tell me. We hadn’t thought much of Malachi after we first ran into him right after things went to hell—he seemed like your regular weirdo, made even weirder by the endtimes. Unfortunately, we’d discovered that weirdo had managed to cobble together some power over the next few months, and even the people of Hastings, safe behind a very impressive new wall, knew who he was.
Tony shrugged. “Keller talks about him like he’s some sort of military faction, but it sounds like he just lords over the brigands now. I think we inadvertently did a lot of damage to his cause when we took out his buddies.”
I was pretty sure I’d reviewed an album called Lord of the Brigands at some point, and had maybe not enjoyed it.
“I haven’t pried much out of Keller otherwise,” Tony said. He chuckled. “He doesn’t trust me.”
“Can’t imagine why.”
All this talk of Keller and Malachi highlighted a growing fear that I had, up to now, been reluctant to acknowledge. The living dead were one thing; they were scary and stinky and they ate people, but aside from a terrifying handful, most seemed outright stupid, running on some primal instinct rather than thought. People could think. Could plan. Could turn against you and throw you in jail, or much worse. Maybe we’d been paying too much attention to the dead and not enough to the living.
I shuddered, then locked the thought away. “So what else do I need to know about this place?” I asked.
“About thirty thousand people are still here. The eastern side of the city is overrun; the revenants seem to keep to themselves as long as they don’t see people wandering around near that area. Keller runs a tight enough ship. I haven’t seen a whole lot of problems.” He paused, his gaze again wandering to the turquoise paint job. “They haven’t heard from Elderwood at all.”
That was bad.
That was very bad.
“But,” I said, “they weren’t really answering Elderwood before, were they? Are they trying? Is the radio broken?”
Tony rolled his eyes. “I don’t know.” He sounded dubious. “Could be a busted radio. Again, Keller won’t say much to me. But it’s more likely Hammond and everyone else got gobbled up after we left.”
Ah, there was the good-natured pessimist we all knew and loved. If you want your good news soured, it’s always a good bet to let Tony deliver it. He could make a child’s birthday seem like a catastrophic event.
I hadn’t expected good news from Elderwood, either, though I’d thought if anyone could keep shit together after a seemingly joint assault by the undead and biker gangs, it was General Hammond. The man had appeared damn unstoppable during our time with him, making Elderwood one of two strongholds left in the Midlands Cluster. I inwardly ran through the list of nearby cities whose fates I knew of: Franklin had fallen several weeks before we left camp, followed shortly thereafter by Muldoon. Harkin had suffered several direct hits in the meteor shower and never stood a chance. Astra had burned shortly afterward.
That left Hastings and Captain Keller.
The shower turned off. Dax stopped singing.
Tony pointed at the ceiling. “Give it ten minutes or so to refill. Then you should be good to go, too.”
Dax started up again. I imagined him belting away as he toweled off his hair.
“Is that Journey?” I asked, trying to make out the words.
Tony cocked his head to the side, and a sly grin slipped across his face. “Streetlight peeeeoplleeeeee…”
After a lukewarm shower and a careful examination of the available clothing, I settled on pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt to sleep in. The house apparently came equipped with a functioning heater, but Tony was loathe to turn it on, claiming some sort of energy monitoring. We each had our own bedroom on the second floor, along with plenty of blankets, so I figured we’d cope in the chill.
Someone had lived here before—that much was obvious. The place was clean and the sheets were fresh, but all this nice furniture, the garish paint job—who had owned this townhouse? From what I’d seen so far, Hastings seemed relatively untouched. Why had they left it?
They left it because things fell apart, idiot.
The twin-sized bed was small, but it beat the tiny, stinky mattress from the brig—and there was something so relaxing about not having a zombie staring at me while I tried to catch some shut-eye. I kept opening my eyes, expecting to see his milky orbs staring at me, but there was only the darkness of the room, and the occasional settling of the house.
After months of sharing a tent or cell with someone else, an entire bedroom of my own was weird.
Really, really weird.
The dog might have made it easier to bear, but our traitorous golden wench had opted to sleep with Dax, leaving me alone with my frayed nerves and a lot of uneasy thoughts.
I rolled from one side of the bed to another, trying not to get lost in the jumble of memories that kept threatening to surface. I’d become shockingly good at compartmentalizing—at tucking my hopes, my sorrows, and all my various fears into a little box and ignoring it while I tried to survive. That was easy enough to do when we were running from the undead or getting chased by crazy religious guys or irradiated biker gangs, when I was focused on survival alone. But alone in a tiny bed, in a quiet house?
Killer, man. Killer.
I had almost managed to nod off when the soft rumble slipped in through my windows.
It took me a few moments to figure out exactly what I was hearing. You get used to certain sounds when things go bad. The wail of the hungry undead. The screams of the terrified living. The crush of falling buildings and the low grumble of the land, still shifting after it took that battering.
This sounded like people, but they weren’t screaming.
Nor did they sound terrified.
They sounded…happy?
Even joyous.
I sat up in bed, knocking aside some of the covers. The chill air swept around me, and I forced myself to climb out, my sock-covered feet moving slowly across the carpet.
Yes. People were yelling. Cheering. It took me a few seconds
to place that sort of enthusiasm; not a concert…no, I was listening to some sort of far-off sporting event, a rejuvenated baseball team, maybe, or the return of college football.
Hastings used to have a lot of sports fields. When I worked my way through college as an EMT we came out here semi-frequently, treating broken bones, handling asthma or pulled muscles or the occasional panic attack from the dance moms. It wasn’t entirely inconceivable that someone would put one of those fields to work—shit, Hastings was basically a military town now. All those young soldiers needed some way to work off energy when they weren’t fighting zombies, right?
The crowd whooped.
Baseball, maybe? Football? I couldn’t line up the rhythm of the cheering to the cadence of any particular sport, but then again, I hadn’t been much into sports back in the old days.
Maybe I just hadn’t heard happy people in too long. After shit goes down and the world as you know it ends, you get used to the screams, to the sadness, to all the bad stuff, and you forget what the good sounds like. When you finally do hear real glee, it’s jarring.
The event or movie or whatever it was went on for quite some time. I curled up in bed, focusing on it, hearing it as static noise instead of a lively event. People, somewhere, in this time or some previous one, were happy. And that was a fine thing to hear.
CHAPTER THREE
I will always fondly remember Doctor Brenda Lattimore for attempting to explain the living dead to the frightened residents of the Midlands Cluster.
Gloria Fey had been operating out of Hastings right after the meteors fell—during the waning days of broadcast television, if you want to be specific—and had gone to Lattimore when it became clear that those who had started biting everyone in sight weren’t just sick, they were freaking undead. Lattimore had been placed in the unenviable position of educator, surgeon general, and deliverer of bad news.
And now she would be my new boss.
“Lattimore is running the joint?” I squeaked as the three of us walked through several neighborhoods. Tony had told us we’d be going to work at the medical center, but he’d held who we’d be reporting to in reserve.
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