Silence.
He nodded to himself in silent satisfaction and eased the door shut. Reaching inside of his jacket, he withdrew a Magic Marker from an inner pocket. He removed the cap and drew a large black circle on the door for Dalton and Corey’s reference. He’d hammered into them that his marks were not holy writ, so they’d still proceed with caution. But generally, such a mark indicated the room was clear for them to salvage.
After sitting so long, the cars they found were no longer drivable, but they did merit some attention. During salvage, they retrieved the vehicle registration forms from the vehicles and stored them.
Back home, a database of found vehicles provided a listing for potential repair parts. While it was rare to find an exact match, many manufacturers used common parts across product lines. The community's vehicles, for the most part, tended to be diesel as they could run on biofuels and oils. Those had been a minority before Z-Day, which made the ongoing search for parts critical. If they couldn’t find an exact match, they could usually make it work with shade tree engineering.
As needed, a specialized salvage crew would descend on garages and strip needed components. They relied on crews like Charlie's to catalog details. But most important, they depended on the teams to ensure that interior spaces were clear.
Once Charlie and his team stripped everything of value from the room, they’d slash an ‘X’ through the circle. This saved them the time of looking through rooms that were already scavenged.
He turned and gave the opposite door a cursory study. This door hinged outward, which called for a different clearance method. He wedged one boot in front of the door and eased it open. If anyone or anything attempted to rush out, his foot would stop the door and give him time to recover.
Nothing rushed him, and the flashlight revealed nothing save for a dry toilet bowl and a pedestal sink. He settled the beam on an opened package of Charmin on the floor between the two. He made a subtle, almost satisfied grunt. A tight house meant no mice or critters inside, which meant nothing digging through the goods. After eight years, toilet paper was a luxury like none other, right up there with tampons and ammo.
Door closed, circle.
He considered his next move. Some of the other teams, he knew, would consider the ground floor cleared and move on to the second. Charlie was more exacting. You never knew where a person would try and hide, especially if bitten. He’d once opened a pantry door to find a biter crammed inside, unable to escape. Rare, perhaps, but the margin for mistakes wasn’t what it had been in the old days.
So — kitchen it was.
Like the rest of the first floor, it was open-concept, with a single mass of tile across the kitchen and dining room. A desk sat in one corner with a halo of envelopes surrounding a closed and long-dormant notebook computer. Beneath the desk, Charlie took note of a ten-ream box of paper and grunted in satisfaction. Paper was always a good find. It was typical to find at least a few homeowners who had worked from home in these nicer additions. Pens, pencils, markers — all went into the totes and onto the bus. Their electrical grid was too inconsistent to run larger desktops, but Charlie and his men scrounged every laptop and tablet they found. They’d been doing this long enough that there was a plentiful stock of power adapters, so even if they couldn’t find every accessory there was a reasonable chance they’d be able to power the devices up. In a worst case scenario, laptops were still good for parts.
There were dirty dishes in the sink, but time and the dry air had reduced whatever had stained them into dust. Plates were too bulky and common to be a major need, so he ignored them as he went through the cabinets one-by-one. Salt, pepper, and spices were a highlight, as were a few bulk packs of Kraft macaroni and cheese still sealed in the plastic wrap. It tasted pretty awful with powdered milk and no butter, but the younger kids seemed to like it.
They aren’t old enough to know the difference.
As was typical, there wasn’t a huge stock in the kitchen. Too many people before Z-Day had made frequent trips to the grocery, with large stockpiles mocked as paranoid.
What was that show, about the preppers? Sheila . . .
His hand froze as he reached out to the next cabinet door. That was a bad mental window to look through during the best of times, never mind in the middle of a run. He spoke for the first time, and his voice was harsh in his ears, like two stones rubbing against one another. “Focus,” Charlie managed. The word came forth with a Herculean effort that testified to his reasoning for keeping quiet. Speaking was hard, it hurt, and he’d lost the capacity for whispering as well.
His voice carried, and from above, he heard a noise as something shifted in response to the stimulus.
The creak of the ceiling and his self-admonishment were more than enough to bring him back on track.
There you are. I wondered when you’d come say hello.
Charlie turned away from the kitchen and moved back to the living room. He turned to face the staircase and waited.
The noise came again as something moved above, the floor joists making their slow creak of complaint.
He waited across the space of a dozen heartbeats and then stepped forward to place his foot on the first step. He kept his foot on the outside edge. The treads should be tighter over the nail, quieting his steps. Charlie’s eyes remained on the landing. He cradled the pistol in a secure, two-handed grip and kept the barrel low with his finger off of the trigger. Survivors were rare, but they did find them from time to time. It wouldn’t do to shoot one in the darkness just because he thought they were something else.
Another step. The stair gave a squeak of complaint under his weight, and the rustling ahead grew more insistent. The pitch remained the same, though, as though it weren’t coming any closer. Charlie refused to let himself relax.
His head crested the landing. Gloom shrouded the second floor. There was a vague slice of light ahead of him, coming from an open door at the end of the hall. He could see just enough to give him the idea that he was looking into the master bedroom. Again, the noise, and this time he could tell that it originated from that room.
A few more steps and he stood on the landing. The short hallway ahead of him had closed doors on either side along with the open door. Based on the different color and decor he guessed they belonged to children of each gender.
He took a few steps forward, just in front of the closed doors and studied the entrance. With his eyes there, he tapped the doors on either side of the hallway with a knuckle.
On either side, silence. Ahead of him, noise.
Good enough.
Charlie stepped forward, quicker now. He raised the pistol as he went. The entrance to the master turned right. He eased inside and rotated, sweeping the bedroom in front of him with the pistol light.
Dust floated in the beams of light coming in through the cracked curtains. There was more than enough illumination for a quick study of the room. A skeleton in sweatpants and a white t-shirt lay on a king-sized bed in a corona of used tissues. He’d kicked the covers off before dying, and the remnants of his rot stained the sheets below him. All that otherwise remained were the bones and a faint, sharp stench.
The biter lay on the floor in front of the bed. She was wearing nurse’s scrubs, stained here and there with what might have been blood. Had she turned sometime after the man in the bed had died, and never left? Was she bitten at work, making it home only to die there? Charlie would never know the story of this house in full, though he could make guesses.
In undeath, she’d walked, across the width and breadth of the bedroom, from window to window. Whatever sounds she'd heard outside had drawn her, though she was unable to do anything but watch. A worn track in the carpet testified to the literal march of time. Finally, she’d collapsed when the unknown force that drove her limbs failed. She saw Charlie now, though, and reached for him.
They didn’t rot. They didn’t die, either, but without food they wasted away. This biter was little more than a skeleton c
overed in desiccated skin the gray color of a storm sky.
Darker, almost black traces of veins marked that skin here and there. Its remaining muscle tissue was enough for slight, vague jerks of its limbs, as it tried to rise, to hunt. To feed.
For Charlie, the eyes were the worst part. The cornea and pupil were gone; the entire sclera had turned a silvery-gray. It was as though someone had installed stainless steel ball bearings in her orbital sockets. Though Charlie couldn’t see where they were looking, he knew without a doubt that they focused on him with predatory intensity.
Charlie let the barrel of his pistol fall and flicked the switch to turn off the light. He regarded the figure on the floor for a moment, then sighed. He lay the pistol on the bed and moved to the side of the biter. Kneeling on the floor next to it, he placed a gentle hand on its forehead. The skin was cool and smooth, though dry. The thing tried to bite, but the strength of its neck muscles wasn't enough to drive past the gentle force Charlie applied to hold it to the ground. With his free hand, he slid his boot knife out of the scabbard and brought it forward. “I’m sorry,” he rumbled. His apology wasn’t for the punch of the blade into a skull that should have lain still long ago nor was it for the ransacking of a home. This apology was for someone who wasn’t even there. If there was anything left of the person that had been there before, perhaps she would understand, and carry that message with her, Charlie thought. If not, then no harm done. If in the end, it was for naught, perhaps it would be enough to help him sleep content in his own failings.
Chapter 3
From above, the influence of civilization on the landscape of the world was undeniable. The lines of roads and bridges and the checkerboard patterns of fields and lawns were still evident. But the years of neglect weighed heavy, and the wild reigned.
The last vestiges of mankind's final harvests lay choked in weeds or grasses. In the first year, unchecked by the hand of man, the deer population had exploded. In the years after, that population crashed. This came both from the loss of the surplus food supply and the ferocious culling conducted by their natural predators, who had experienced a population boom of their own.
That boom led to the migration of species that might not have happened in a world steered by the hand of man. For the first time in centuries, the wolf spread from the southern reaches of Canada and the northern rust belt and strode the ground of the Midwestern United States. The deer weren’t as close to being extinct as mankind, but they huddled deep in the expanding forests all the same. Their freedom of movement saved them; with few left to care for them, mankind’s herd populations starved to death in their pens, or provided easy meat for the resurgent predators.
Roads buckled and cracked, undone by the heat of summer, the cold of winter, and the methodical spread of tree roots. Bridges fell — washed out or collapsing under their own weight as support structures rusted.
Here and there, mankind endured. But more often than not, civilization was reduced to areas that could support walls.
Like the pioneers before them, they faced a world outside their door that was neither of their own creation nor friendly to their continued survival.
The southern fence wasn’t much to look at compared to the rest of the perimeter. It consisted of cemented, eight-foot steel posts placed at regular intervals. It had taken two layers of chain link to span the entire height. A stabilizing bar interleaved the upper and lower sections, and twisted wire every few inches kept the assembly together. It looked impressive, but it wasn’t the community’s first line of defense.
The real defense was in the creek.
After centuries of ongoing erosion, the creek sat eight feet below the surrounding pasture. The banks held a near-vertical slope, and only intermittent growths of weeds sprouted from the damp earth. Footing was uncertain at the best of times, and chunks of the bank slipped into the creek with every rain. The rock formations that had given Stone Creek its name were long quarried. All that remained was thick, viscous clay.
Alex Worthington knew none of these facts on an intellectual level. His understanding was one that came from long hours of contemplation and consideration. The fence sat far enough from the edge of the creek that it wasn’t susceptible to ongoing erosion. This created a viewing angle that blocked any inspection of either bank from ground level. All he got from his position behind the fence was the vague sense of a slight depression in the ground.
To the east and west, the creek meandered back and forth. This provided scant glances down into the depths when he chose to make the study. Once or twice he’d had the urge to scale the fence for a closer look, but he’d been able to resist it. His current position was familiar and comfortable. The wall guards would see him in short order on top of the fence, though that was a reason he’d never admit to himself. Teenage bravado refused to allow it.
He was short for 12-going-on-13; skinny, dark of hair, and tanned beechnut brown. He wore dark brown hiking boots, a pair of often-patched jeans, and a faded Captain America T-shirt. The stock of the .22-caliber rifle lying across his legs was just a bit less worn than its owner. Despite the wear, the rifle was well-tended and completely functional.
Defiant of the slight chill in the air, Alex sat with crossed legs on the ground just behind the fence. He conducted a silent assessment of the pasture on the other side. The only clue to his focus was the restless motion of his eyes as they flickered back and forth in a narrow arc. The grass around him stirred in the wind.
At once, a new, almost furtive sound came from across the creek. It was different enough from the whisper of grass on grass to bring a smirk of recognition to Alex’s face. He stuck a pair of fingers in his mouth and whistled. The noise shifted in response, moving from a slow whisk-whisk to a rapid shuffle.
One could almost say that the noise sounded excited.
The crest of a balding head rose up behind a hillock on the opposite bank. Many of the bald patches went to the bone, and all was the gray of dirty dishwater rather than the expected white.
The grown-ups had all sorts of names for the gray people surrounding them, but Alex preferred his own. He’d been too young for zombie movies on Z-Day. Biter had just never made sense to him, so he went with his own appellation.
Alex opened his mouth and called out, “Come and get it, creep! Bring any friends?”
The noise struck the creep like a lightning bolt. He wasn’t a moaner, which was too bad. That made sense; as he crested the rise Alex spotted the torn-out gouges in the thing’s neck. It was a wonder it was still up and at it given the size of that freaking hole. Alex marveled at the dimensions of it. Anything the creep swallowed had a better than 50-50 shot of just plopping out onto the ground. And, he noted, as the thing came into view, there were — whew! — still a vestige of pants on it, though exposure to the elements had left them shredded and rotten. Looking at creep junk was pretty much the only thing that made him feel in any way queasy.
Alex shouldered the .22 and lined up the sights on the creep’s forehead. It was an easy shot, maybe 30 feet, but the rounds were small and took just the right placement to do the deed. He forced his excitement down and squeezed the trigger.
The .22 cracked, and almost immediately a slash opened up on the creep’s left cheek. There was no blood, but the wound revealed whitish-gray bone and a few upper teeth. Faint, silvery lines coated the revealed flesh. There was no blood, but then again, he hadn’t expected any.
“Damn it!” he hissed, quick and under his breath. Despite the adolescent thrill that ran through him at the use of the forbidden word, he still couldn’t bring himself to use a normal speaking tone.
He adjusted his aim, compensating for the slight jerk of the creep’s head with each step. It must have been stumbling forward on a broken ankle. It walked like the drunks that spilled out of Tom Oliver’s pub every night at closing time. Another crack and this time there was a solid pock of impact. The creep’s head jerked again, and then again and again as the 40-grain bullet did a rico
chet jitterbug inside of its skull and pulverized the remnants of its brain. Strings cut, it collapsed to one side.
Lowering the rifle, Alex stifled a grin and cocked his head to one side, listening. All was quiet save for the whisper of grass. “Damn it,” he muttered again. It must have been a loner. If there had been any others, the cracks of the gunshots would have brought them in. He settled down and prepared for the wait.
Behind him came a slow, soft clapping. Alex jerked to his feet and just avoided tangling his legs up in the rifle. He spun around.
As his luck would have it, Larry Vance and Miles Matthews were strolling up the path from the gravel road that paralleled the fence. The older, bigger man had a half-smile on his face as he headed in Alex’s direction. The younger man – the town marshal, he reminded himself, whatever the hell that was – looked more serious, and had his hands tucked into the pockets of his Carhartt jacket.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, Mister Worthington,” Larry boomed, “but isn’t today a school day?”
Alex shrugged. Mr. Vance was a larger than life figure in the eyes of the youngest members of the community. One of the earliest memories Alex had was of Mr. Vance and his friends making their way into the school and taking Miss McKee and the children to safety out of the classroom the teacher had barricaded them in. He couldn’t remember his mom and dad, but he remembered Larry Vance shooting anything and everything that staggered toward his preschool class.
It had been like, well, Captain America saving the day.
Then again, superheroes weren’t real, were they? The monsters had been and still were.
“It’s stupid,” Alex said finally. He turned back to the fence and waved his hand. “What does algebra have to do with this?” He looked back at the men and tried not to sneer.
Larry glanced at Miles and shrugged. “You have any input, son? Can’t say math was ever my strong suit.”
Miles grimaced, and Alex watched the town marshal study him for a long moment. “Maybe you’re right, kid,” he said, and Alex’s jaw dropped in surprise. “They don’t care about algebra if I had to make a guess. Don’t care about much of anything, if they even have any concept of the notion. But that’s not the point.”
A Place Outside The Wild Page 4