“What you think?” Charlie rumbled.
Larry lifted his hand and rubbed his forehead. “Head’s starting to hurt a bit. Our cook has got to be on the defensive now. If nothing else, maybe last night rattled him. He’s going to be off his game. Do a walk through the community with Pete, talk folks up. Go with your gut. See if somebody mentions someone, I don’t know, taking the day, for whatever reason. I doubt either of our culprits got any sleep last night.”
“See who’s yawning,” Vir said. This is the best we can do? He hadn’t done well enough to get the disappointment out of his tone; the other man reacted immediately.
“It’s all I’ve got, pal,” Larry insisted. “It’s not like I had a master’s class in this shit. I’m flying just as blind as you are here.”
Frustrated, Vir spread his arms wide. “Look, I understand you’re not a professional; neither am I. I’m a hell of a lot more comfortable standing on the wall or building something than I am with this Barney Fife act . . .”
“You’re free to go back on that wall,” Larry interjected. “I didn’t pick you, remember. That was Miles’ call, but if I tell him you need to go, how do you think he’s going to jump?”
“So what, you don’t know me, so I’m not good enough?” Vir stood up. The legs of his chair squawked against the linoleum as his motion shoved them back. “If you don’t want my help, that’s great. Say the word.”
Charlie stood as well and put a hand on Vir’s chest to cut him off. He turned to glance at Larry, and the man was sitting halfway up in his bed now, cords standing out on his neck. “That’s not what I’m saying,” Larry managed, his face going pale from the pain of his efforts. “But don’t come down on me because you don’t agree with my calls. Charlie, don’t waste your time playing peacekeeper, let him . . .”
“Shut . . . up.”
The group fell silent. The voice was weak and raspy. It was easily audible, though, because it belonged to a person a few feet to Vir’s right, in one of the other hospital beds.
Lizzie Johnson was well known around the community as the lady with a brilliant smile and great dimples. She was solidly-built — not overweight, but more muscular and athletic than curvaceous. She’d worked her way through college as a sous chef, and so working in the cafeteria came as a natural progression for her. When one of the deputies had found her unconscious with a pipe of meth in her hand, the fact that it was Lizzie was a shock. She didn’t fit the drug user stereotype, and she’d never been able to answer the most important question of all — why? — because she’d been unresponsive for so long.
She’d rebounded somewhat with the renewed supplies of IV fluids but still looked drawn and pale compared to her once vivacious self. Lizzie returned the stares of the three men from her own hospital bed and whispered, “Thanks. Can I get some . . . water?”
“Charlie,” Larry barked. “Get Tish. And get Lizzie some water.”
Charlie nodded and disappeared. Larry tried to keep holding himself up, but his arms were already shaking from that minimal effort. He settled back down into his own bed and kept looking at Lizzie. “Miss Johnson, how you feeling?”
She groaned. “Like hammered dog crap.” She raised a hand and rubbed at her eyes, then noticed the emaciated appearance of her hand and forearm. Lizzie choked. “God, how long have I been out?”
“It’s been a while,” Larry said. He glanced at Vir. “Have a seat, Vir,” he murmured. “My apologies.”
Nothing like a chiding from a coma patient to settle you down, Vir reflected. He nodded and retrieved his chair. As he sat, Tish hurried into the room and fussed over her patient with a stethoscope and a blood pressure monitor. Charlie followed right behind with a pair of water bottles.
Vir turned to Lizzie. “And I’m sorry to you, as well. Things have gotten a little crazy here, and I let my temper get the best of me.”
“I heard a bit,” she said. She accepted a bottle of water from Charlie and took a long swallow before speaking. “Shit. I should never have tried that stuff. It wasn’t like I did it all the time, somebody said it was a nice pick-me-up, and I figured, what the hell?” She gave a nervous laugh before taking another drink of water.
“Lizzie,” Vir said. “We’ve stopped several of the people involved in the production of the drugs. We also believe there are still a few people left in the community we need to locate and deal with. Could you, I don’t know, tell us who got you the stuff, so we could speak with them?”
“Sure,” Lizzie rasped before guzzling the last of her water. “Ah, that’s so good. I thought she was a friend, but I don’t see any cards or flowers, so I guess she wasn’t. I got it from Melanie Clement.”
Larry cursed and Vir’s heart sank. Melanie had been one of Buck’s crew in the warehouse, so it made sense that she’d be in the pipeline. “Well,” he said. “She has a good excuse to not be here. Melanie died earlier this week.”
“Oh, Lord,” Lizzie said. “I always wondered why she still went on salvage runs. I guess . . . it caught up with her?”
“In a way,” Vir admitted. He turned back to Larry. “I guess we need to do as you suggested.”
“No,” Charlie grumbled. Vir turned to him, confused. Charlie favored him with a crooked smile and said, “Boyfriend.”
A smile dawned across Larry’s face as he got it. “Well, well, well. What do you think, Vir? Still got better things to do?”
Vir stared at him. The man’s got a point. If I walk away now, how can I look myself in the mirror if I didn’t take the opportunity to make a difference? “No, I don’t. I’d like to see this through if that’s all right with you.”
“So get to it.”
It had been his own home for as long as he could remember, and part of his family for generations, but Pete still felt awkward coming into the house that Miles and Tish had made their own. It wasn’t anything they had done; rather, it was his own perception that he himself no longer fit here. But once again he found himself abandoning the Crow’s nest in favor of the ground.
Pete’s old bedroom was largely unchanged from the time when he’d been medically discharged, right down to the gun safe that occupied the entire breadth of one side of the closet. The room was dim, but he’d set up a few battery powered lanterns in the closet and on the bed.
The cache of weapons Vir and Charlie had discovered was laid out in a neat row on his bed. Even as he studied them, he debated his decision to not turn them over to Jim Piper for storage in the central armory.
In the end, it came down to trust.
There’d been too much stashed in Buck’s cabin. Yeah, maybe he’d been packing it away for years or buying it with other things he’d concealed from the community. The fact remained that Jim and the rest of the people working in the warehouse should have picked up on the fact that Buck’s crew was shorting them. For it to have gone unnoticed for so long meant that not only had Buck’s entire team been complicit in the pilfering — Pete was willing to extend the benefit of the doubt that their involvement in the drug ring hadn’t been widespread until facts showed him otherwise — but it also meant that the warehouse people were either involved or inept. Pete wasn’t about to hand over this type of firepower to see it turned against his friends if the investigation bore fruit.
It was treacherous ground. For all the respect he carried in the community, his position wasn’t even as official as, say, Charlie’s. But with Larry laid up and Miles gone, there was no one left with any experience. Vir was a solid dude, but he wasn’t ready to handle this on his own.
He put his hands on his hips and sighed as he studied Buck’s arsenal. It was enough of a mixed bag that Pete felt certain that it came from multiple sources, though he could guess what those might have been. The trio of M4 variants had likely come from a SWAT armory. They showed none of the signs of exposure to the elements, as they would have had they been the former arms of lost Guardsmen. Same went for the pair of collapsible-stock MP5s. Pete hated the things with a passion. The de
sign was over-engineered and the trigger sucked, but police departments seemed to love the things.
More interesting was the WWII-era M1 Thompson. He’d thought most of the collectors in the area had been through Larry’s shop from time to time, but he couldn’t remember hearing about anyone owning one in the local area. He grinned. Maybe Grandpa had stashed it up in the attic for the last 80 years or so.
Of course, the entire collection just emphasized again that Buck had been an idiot. Not one of the weapons had suppressors, and for that matter alone Pete was stashing them. He could make use of the cans of ammunition and magazines, but no way was he going to start handing out unsuppressed fully-automatic weapons. It would be like ringing a dinner bell. He thought about their friends to the south and shuddered.
Get to it, he told himself. Pete started transferring the weapons from the bed to his safe. He’d been woolgathering for far too long — he needed to find Charlie and Vir. They didn’t know it yet, but they had a new partner.
Cara was full of surprises.
If Alex had any doubts that she’d planned to go with them all along, they ended when she shouldered a backpack lying on the ground at the base of the fence. “Let’s get moving,” she barked as she climbed the chain link.
He shared a glance with Twigs. A grin flashed across the face of the younger boy, and he said, “Race you to the other side!”
Alex growled in frustration as Twigs sprinted toward the fence before he could react. The little twerp was short and scrawny, but he climbed like a freaking monkey. By the time Alex was halfway up, Twigs had already dropped to the ground on the other side. He beamed. Alex just shook his head and kept climbing.
As Alex crested the top, he heard a light smack of impact. He forced himself to focus on the climb. When he landed lightly on the ground, he turned to see Twigs rubbing his arm while Cara shook her finger under his nose.
“Keep quiet,” she muttered. “If you can’t get that through your head, climb back on over.”
“All right, all right,” Twigs whined. “You don’t have to hit me.”
“Suck it up, buttercup,” Cara hissed. “Let’s move!” She stepped to the edge of the creek and urged them over.
Twigs moved right over, but Alex hesitated at the fence. The other two turned and looked at him with quizzical expressions. “We sure about this, guys?” Alex said finally.
“Aw, man, don’t get cold feet now,” Twigs whispered. Cara stuck an elbow into his side and he clenched his lips.
“What are you thinking, Alex?”
“I just . . . I don’t want you guys to get hurt or worse because of me wanting a stupid picture. I don’t know.”
“It’s all right to be scared,” Cara said. She met his eyes and didn’t look away. “I’m scared. But at some point, we’ve got to do this, right? This will be our world someday. Are we just going to hide behind the fences the adults put up for the rest of our lives, or are we going to take it back?”
Alex considered her words. “If they didn’t want us to do it, why teach us how to fight? Why teach us how to stay safe, how to avoid getting infected?”
“Exactly. If not now, when?”
“Now,” Alex nodded, and she smiled. He joined them at the edge and began the climb down. The mud of the bank wasn’t too wet, but clods still stuck to Alex’s boots and stained his jeans.
The creek was running low despite the rains they’d had that week. A mixture of sand and mud formed a strip as wide as Alex was tall from the base of the bank to the edge of the sluggish water. Cara unslung her backpack and knelt there. Before she could say anything, Alex elbowed Twigs and whispered, “Keep an eye out.” He followed his own instructions and stared in the opposite direction. After a moment of hesitation, he pulled the baseball bat out of his backpack. It was more awkward to carry it, but it was also better to have it close at hand.
Metal clicked and Cara announced, “Done.” Alex turned and blinked at the sight of the suppressed carbine she cradled in her arms. “It’s just a .22,” she explained with a sigh. “Any loners, you take them with the bat, okay, Alex?”
What was he supposed to say? No, you go ahead and shoot them? Alex swallowed and said, “Sure.”
Cara turned to Twigs and said, “You see more than one, you try the slingshot. You any good with it?”
Twigs stiffened and grumbled, “I bullseye cans all day long.”
Cara glanced at Alex, who shrugged. “He’s fine,” he promised her. Twigs glanced at Alex with something akin to relief on his face.
“Fair enough,” she said. “This thing is quiet, but it’s not that quiet. I’d like to keep from using it unless it’s an emergency.” She pointed the barrel to the west. “Let’s get going.”
They walked, three abreast in the sand. Here and there the strip narrowed to the point that one of them had to fall behind. In others the mud became so thick that they had to move in single-file, close to the bank, to avoid the slurping mess.
Their passage wasn’t entirely silent, but Alex judged that it might not matter. Despite the distance from the settlement, they could still hear the sounds of society now and again. The distance muted the sound of raised voices and running footsteps on the paved road. The realization that the survivors weren’t as quiet as they believed was disconcerting to Alex, and he licked his lips up and raised his head to look over the top edge of the bank. He could just see the top of the fence, and he couldn’t help but wonder if it was truly enough.
They’re clumsy, he reminded himself. Pay attention.
Twigs cried out abruptly. He restrained the sound, but it was a laugh of wonder and joy. “Look guys! A turtle!”
Alex followed his friend’s pointing finger, and sure enough, a small box turtle had plopped off of a high spot and paddled through the water. He’d seen frogs and snakes before, and deer, but never a turtle.
I haven’t been outside for a long time. The fact that the realization hit him so hard was strange in one aspect; it was such a fact of life that he shouldn’t have given it a second thought. At the same time, though, he looked back over what his life had been and wondered what he’d missed. What had kids his age done back before Z-Day?
Cara drew to a halt, and Twigs and Alex followed suit. They turned to her in expectation, and she said, “Okay, the creek forks here and heads northwest, to the school.”
Alex followed eyes and looked further down their path. A few yards ahead, the bank gave away to a shadowed alcove supported by concrete pillars. Piles of branches and other debris had collected around the pillars, several feet deep in some places.
Twigs made a face. “We got to walk through that?”
Cara shrugged. “You can always head home, short stuff.”
Alex grinned. He knew he should have been just a little mad that his expedition had been co-opted, but he found that he was enjoying the experience. Maybe it was the fact that he wasn’t the oldest. The burden of responsibility for Twigs still fell upon his shoulders, but it was one that he shared with someone close to his own age. “Let’s go,” he said and continued down the bank. He thought he heard Twigs curse under his breath, but the others caught up with him quickly.
Holding the baseball bat out to his front with one hand, Alex leaned forward and tried to make sense out of the shadows under the bridge. It was low; he and Cara would likely have to stoop over to pass through. The bed of sticks must have collected over years of runoff. The area under the bridge was full of all sorts of junk, from plastic, scraps of cloth, and . . .
He flinched backward, raising the bat higher as he went.
“Hey, watch out,” Twigs complained, then caught sight of the look on Alex’s face. “What?”
He couldn’t speak. Alex raised a trembling finger and indicated the mess of debris under the bridge.
It was easy to identify the exact moment that Twigs and Cara understood what had shaken him so; Cara took a deep breath and straightened, and Twigs emitted a string of curses that would have put any of the adul
ts in the compound to shame.
Nestled in the collection of debris under the bridge were countless numbers of creeps. Alex could tell they were still . . . Well, not alive, because dozens of pairs of eyes stared out at him from their homes in the mess.
In the shadows, details were difficult to make out, but the fact that none of them moved toward the children was easily understood. Most lay under or within their cocoons of trash, but those who weren’t all shared the same characteristic — none had arms or legs. Despite that, the creeps arched their necks, trying to bring their heads close enough to bite.
“Screw this,” Twigs whispered. “I ain’t walking through that. No way.”
“Wait,” Alex drew out. He stepped sideways and cocked his head to one side. “We can make it through.”
Twigs snorted in disdain, but Cara just said, “How?”
“They must have washed up over the years when the creek was high. None of them are close to where the water’s running now. We’ll get wet, but we can just walk through the creek.”
Cara stepped closer to Alex, and he gulped as she steadied her balance with a hand on his arm to make the same study. “Maybe so,” she thought out loud. “What if we have Twigs take them out?”
Alex shook his head even before she’d finished asking the question. “No way. We’re too close to the gate, and those bearings make a hell of a racket. It’ll echo like crazy under there.” He fingered his belt and winced. “You have a knife?” He’d neglected to bring one of his own.
She reached down and slide a blackened knife out from a sheath inside her knee-high boots. Alex laughed nervously as she handed it over. Of course she has a knife. She’s making me look like a little kid.
He slid the baseball bat into his backpack and stepped into the water. Coldness rushed in over the tops of his boots, and he wished he’d brought some spare socks. The current pushed at the backs of his calves and threatened to topple him. Somehow, he kept his balance.
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