A Place Outside The Wild

by Daniel Humphreys

  Ross handed each man a handful of drives and pocketed his own. “Stash those, Chief, Brian. And we’re on hold for maintenance.”

  “Well, shit,” Foraker said.

  The thumping of the helicopter’s rotors rose in volume as the Black Hawk got closer. At first, Miles felt tempted to watch it all the way in, but then he remembered the sentry on the 9th floor, and he began to scan the ground. He might as well have been looking down on a still photo for all that he saw. He leaned over the edge of the roof a bit to look down at the base of the building. If there had been one in here, there had to be others. The noise outside was sure to rouse them.

  Nothing.

  The helicopter passed between the admin and executive office buildings and flared as Cartwright pulled the nose up to slow down. Miles turned his head to watch. The Black Hawk was a bit larger than the helicopter the CEO had preferred, but there was still plenty of room around the helipad. With the wheels down, Cartwright cut the engines and the rotors began to slow. After a few moments, one of the side doors slid open. Castillo leaped out with a two-wheeled cart holding a pair of metal bottles. Miles frowned. “What’s that?”

  “Oxy-acetylene rig,” Foraker said as he stepped up beside Miles and made his own assessment of the ground. “Same one we used on the fire door up here.” The SEAL extracted a can of Skoal from a pocket on his vest and tamped it down. He offered it to Miles, who declined. Even if he felt inclined to partake, the writing on the can was so faded he wondered if the tobacco had any kick left to it. “Suit yourself,” Foraker chuckled and tucked a dip into his mouth.

  “Did you guys clear the executive building last time around?”

  The Chief shrugged. “Chopper didn’t land. Dropped us off, then picked us up after we radioed back in.” He grimaced as something seemed to occur to him. “Don’t know that they have another drop bar they can install. Then again, if the door starts to give way they can just take off.” He winked at Miles. “We ain’t got that luxury, ‘less you got a parachute in your ruck, there.”

  Miles shook his head. “Why, do you?”

  The Chief grinned. “Naw.”

  Miles jerked his chin at the ground below. “I don’t like that, for the record.”

  The older man looked down at the ground and sighed. “It is what it is. I’ll take a few moments of peace when I can get them, I suppose.”

  “Where do you think they went? North with the rest of the ones that we’ve seen lately?” Miles grimaced. “How good are your walls? They able to stand up against thousands, or tens of thousands?”

  “Doubt it.” Foraker shrugged. “And there’s not much I can do about it here.” He glanced over toward Janacek and Ross. The other men were digging rations out of their rucksacks and setting down for an early dinner. “Come on, kid, enjoy it while you can get it. Let’s grab a bite and take a load off.”

  Miles followed the big SEAL after a moment of hesitation. He couldn’t help a look back at the ground and the opposite rooftop, where the flare of the welding torch was visible despite the brightness of the late afternoon sun.

  At this point, Alex was so filthy that the extra mud he acquired crawling up the creek bank was moot. He paused near the top and eased his head up and over.

  Cara’s sense of direction was right on the money. The faded brick buildings in front of him weren’t familiar, but the weed-choked playground equipment was. He looked back and forth across the back of the school several times. Nothing stirred.

  He brought his head below the bank and looked down to where Cara and Twigs stood. The creek was narrower here, and there was no dry area to walk on, so they waited in water that came up to Twig’s knees. “It looks clear,” Alex whispered.

  They stared at each other in silence before Twigs shrugged and said, “Hey, we made it this far. Let’s quit wasting daylight and saddle up.” He scrambled up the bank and over the edge without so much as a look back.

  Cara looked at Alex and raised an eyebrow. “Saddle up?”

  Despite the seriousness of their situation, he grinned. “What can I say? The kid likes westerns.”

  Alex moved to follow Twigs. His second ascent was a bit steadier than his first, but every time he slipped, he couldn’t help but look at Cara out of the corner of his eye. She didn’t seem to have any problems as she clambered up the steep, slippery bank with a dancer’s grace. He felt awkward and clumsy in comparison. Halfway up, she noticed his glances and smirked at him.

  Cheeks burning, Alex snapped his eyes back to the task at hand. Focus, dummy.

  They crested the top of the bank and joined Twigs.

  For a moment, the three of them froze, overtaken by the spectacle. To one of the adults, it might have been of little interest, but this was their first look at something from the world before that wasn’t contained within the safety of the fences.

  The rear of the school didn’t look as though it had been through a battle. Alex supposed that most of the action had taken place at the front, though he saw a few broken windows. For the most part, it just looked abandoned. The overgrown grass hid most of the facility, though the faded hulks of playground equipment sprouted up here and there. The expanse of blacktop was free of grass, though it had a multitude of weed-choked cracks.

  Tall, metal poles sprouted around the perimeter of the cracked blacktop. For a moment, Alex was unsure what they might be, but he realized after he examined them. At one time they’d supported chain link fencing, but the survivors had stripped it to use on their own fencing. He didn’t remember much if any of the playground, but he supposed that didn’t mean anything. He’d only been a few months into his preschool career before Z-Day.

  A pair of double doors led into the school off of the blacktop. A prone, skeletal corpse held one of the doors open. It was too big to be a kid; Alex supposed that was a small blessing. A dead kid was a bit too close to home. Don’t get too used to it. You know most of the kids didn’t make it.

  “Through or around?” Cara whispered. Alex jumped and turned to her. Before she’d spoken, he hadn’t realized that he’d been staring at the doors for so long. Maybe the body was a bigger deal than he wanted to admit to himself, though he wasn’t sure why. The creeps didn’t bother him, though it felt a heck of a lot safer when they were on the other side of the fence and he had a rifle. Alex reached up and pulled out his baseball bat, then turned back to look at the doors.

  He could see light through the windows in the twin doors. The hallway they opened into had an exit on the opposite side of the building. He glanced left, then, right. The wide, brick structure of the school was uneven. The school corporation had added rooms and wings over the years until the conglomeration of red brick stretched for hundreds of feet. It would save them time to go straight through, but . . .

  “Let’s just say no for now,” Alex muttered, then pointed to the portion of the building to his right. “Let’s go around that way. Fewer windows.”

  “Follow me,” Cara whispered, and stepped forward before the others could say a word. Twigs looked at Alex with a raised eyebrow. Alex just shrugged and waved his hand after her.

  Cara stepped on the edge of the blacktop, but she kept her attention on the knee-high grass surrounding the buildings. As Alex trotted along behind the other two, he kept his eyes on the grass as well. It stood uniformly tall, which he assumed was a good sign. Nothing seemed to hide in it, and nothing had been through recently. It wasn’t like he’d made an intense study of the behavior of long grass, but it was something Miss Val and some of the other teachers had stressed in lessons. ‘Always watch out for crawlers.’

  Don’t know why they bothered. It’s not like they ever let us go outside.

  Cara reached the end of the blacktop and turned right along a sidewalk paralleling the building. Alex stood back to let Twigs filter ahead, and assumed the final position in line. He tried to walk sideways, although it was awkward, to keep his eyes to their rear. The world was motionless around them save for the flutter of the groun
d cover in the wind.

  The sidewalk turned to follow the building, but Cara held them back at the corner. Alex imitated her and stuck his head around to study the side of the building. A parking lot half-full of faded, dusty cars sat on this end, and a sagging split-rail fence separated it from the sidewalk.

  Alex’s eyes followed the sidewalk to the T-intersection where it paralleled the road, across, and to the houses on the other side. His breath caught.

  The house across from the school was an unremarkable red brick, but it was the sight at the rear of the house that caught Alex’s attention. A tall board fence surrounded the backyard, and just over the top, he could see a faded play set supporting a yellow tube slide.

  His father’s face was as much a blur as that of his mother’s, but he remembered that slide. He remembered helping his dad build it — though he supposed that his help back then had consisted of getting in the way. But that was his house, he was sure of it!

  Cara grabbed his arm as he moved out from behind the corner of the building. “Slow down,” she hissed. “We haven’t come this far to blow it now.”

  His heart pounding, Alex paused, then nodded. She was right. He knelt down and did his best to contain his excitement. After a few nerve-racking moments of silent study, Cara whispered, “I don’t see anything.”

  Alex didn’t figure he had a right to chime in after what he’d almost done, but Twigs felt no such compunction. “Me, either.”

  Cara cocked an eyebrow at Alex. “Okay,” he said.

  She smiled. “Let’s do this, but like a team, all right?” Cara stood and crept down the sidewalk, leaning over to duck under the windows. A few of the windows had brownish smears that Alex assumed were blood, but nothing stirred inside as they moved forward.

  At the next corner, Cara peered around and pulled back. “Nothing,” she said, though there was a strange tone to her voice.

  “What, you disappointed?” Alex joked.

  She didn’t return his smile. “This is weird. Shouldn’t we see something?”

  “Some of the adults have been saying they haven’t seen as many creeps,” Twigs chimed in. “Maybe they’re all gone.”

  “Maybe,” Cara replied, but she didn’t sound convinced.

  “We’re not going to accomplish anything talking about it,” Alex murmured. “Let’s get this over with and worry about where they went when we’re back home.”

  Cara nodded. “Right. Slow and easy, stop at that sign, okay?” She pointed to a large decorative sign in the middle of some landscaping at the center of the entrance to Alex’s old neighborhood. Dead weeds choked the sign, but he could still make out the letters that read ‘Stone Creek Farms.’

  As the trio trotted across the road, Alex realized that the further they got away from home, the tighter they clustered. He couldn’t speak for the others, but he knew that the knowledge that he wasn’t alone in the Wild helped a lot. It was funny. Just the other day, he’d thought that he was alone in the community, and here he had two friends who were willing to put their lives at risk just so he could get some pictures. Three, if you counted Trina. He stepped up to the sign and crouched down.

  “This is your house,” Cara whispered in his ear. “You make the call.”

  Alex swallowed and tried to look at everything except his house. The other houses along the street were much like the school – choked with weeds and fading. Here and there, cars sat on flat tires in driveways. The most vibrant thing he saw, besides, were the bright swipes of spray paint on the front doors of the houses and on the sides of the cars. The sun had faded most of the marks, but some on the cars were brighter, where mechanics had recently scavenged parts to keep community vehicles running.

  All was silent and still. He turned to look at his front door, and the sight of the spray-painted X inside of the circle elicited a lump in his throat. A place where he’d once felt safe and happy reduced to nothing more than a repository of survival goods. What, he wondered, had they been able to take from there? He thought that he remembered his mother cooking almost every day. Had his mother’s pantry provided supplies of food to help feed the survivors that had taken in her son?

  “Okay,” he found himself saying, and he soft-stepped across the road, up his driveway, and onto his front porch. His palms were sweaty on the tape-wrapped grip of the baseball bat, and he forced himself to take a deep breath.

  Alex peered in through the shrouded front windows. Shadows cloaked much of the room, but enough light trickled in from the windows around the perimeter of the house that he recognized his living room. Sudden tears welled in his eyes, and he scrubbed at them with the back of his hand.

  He took hold of the doorknob and tested it. It turned without resistance, and the door came open with a faint scuffing sound as the door and weather stripping separated. He listened for a moment, then stepped inside.

  A fine sheen of dust coated everything, and if not for that, Alex thought he might have been able to make himself believe that nothing had changed. But as he looked, he could see the sagging tape in the seams of the ceiling panels and the stains of water leaks down the walls. His first home was succumbing to entropy.

  There were a few toys on the floor, coated with dust like the rest of the interior. For a moment he turned back and forth in an internal debate on what to do with his baseball bat, but Twigs came up beside him and took it away with a gentle care that seemed far beyond his years. “Get what you need,” Twigs whispered. “We’re here if you need us.”

  Alex gave him a thankful smile and crouched down on the floor. His nose twitched at the cloud of dust as he picked up one of the toys and brushed it off. If he was looking for any sort of meaning in it, it failed him. The toy was a stuffed orb, gone squishy with damp, with a stylized bird’s face embroidered on the front. The bird was snarling and heavy lines over its eyes gave it a fierce look. It had to have been his, but Alex couldn’t remember it.

  This wasn’t what I came for, he reminded himself. He stood up and searched the walls. The only decoration in the living room was an art print of some fruit in a basket. Alex turned away and moved further into the house.

  The dining room and kitchen showed the most signs of the salvage team. The cabinet doors hung open and empty, and a ransacked desk sat in one corner by the dining table. For a moment, he felt the urge to frown at the invasion, but he pushed the feeling away. Maybe what the crews did wasn’t kosher by the standards of the old world, but they did what they had to, to keep the community going.

  There was a chalkboard on one wall of the kitchen, and a rack that held decorative plates on the opposite side. If there’d been any writing on the chalkboard before Z-Day, the passage of time had rendered it illegible. There were no pictures, and Alex pushed down his sense of rising panic and headed down the hallway toward the rear of the house. He had only a vague sense of Cara and Twigs following in his wake; his focus was on what lay before him.

  The first room he checked was a bathroom, empty and scavenged save for some moldering bath toys. The next was a small laundry room, and he forced himself to remain calm. There were more doors, he hadn’t gone through the entire house yet.

  The next-to-last door had the standard circle-with-an-X that he’d come to expect, but it boasted some neat lettering as well. He stared at it and tried to wish away the lump in his throat.

  The letters read ‘BITER-KIA’, and he didn’t have to think for long to discern what the notation meant.

  Alex realized then that knowing your parents were dead and finding actual physical evidence of it were two different things. His mom was behind that door, where she’d been on Z-Day until one of the men from the salvage crews had stilled her. He stared at the doorknob and tried to force himself to raise an arm to open it.

  His hand trembled, but he couldn’t do it.

  Check the other room, he thought. If there’s nothing there, then check this one.

  Miss Val made sure that all the children attended frequent church services. As such
, Alex was not completely unfamiliar with the concept of prayer. He’d prayed for lots of things, in his life, and none of those prayers had ever been answered. In an adult that might have inculcated a reluctance for prayer, but Alex took a more pragmatic view. God wasn’t a wish-granting genie. No matter how many times he prayed for his mom and dad to show up at the gates and take him home, it wasn’t going to happen. He’d known that even as he prayed for it to happen. Those prayers had come from sadness and angst, and out of a child’s desire for there to be magic in a world that was far too frightening.

  Please, Lord, he prayed. I don’t want to have to see her like that.

  Alex opened the door to his bedroom. Even with the passage of time, the barrage of bright colors assaulted his eyes. The frame of the child-sized bed was a stylized, bright-red fire truck, and shelves full of toys lined the other walls. A desk with an angled chalkboard for a surface sat in one corner. This room was sufficiently free of dust that Alex could read his own name upon it, rendered in a child’s hand with a backward ‘L’. Despite himself, he laughed. And then, on top of the shelf closest to the fire truck bed, he saw it.

  Large, multicolored letters decorated the front of the picture frame and read ‘FAMILY.’ Alex recognized a much younger version of himself sandwiched between the hug of two smiling adults. As he saw them, he felt an overwhelming sense that was both relief and a realization that he hadn’t truly forgotten their faces. He just needed a reminder of who they were, and this did that for him. Of course, that’s my mom, Alex thought. And I would know my dad anywhere. A weight lifted from his shoulders as the guilt he hadn’t realized he felt dissipated. He rubbed his thumbs across the smooth glass of the picture frame and favored the image of his parents with a wistful smile.

  He unzipped his backpack and tucked the picture frame inside. He took one final look around the room. None of these things, even what little he recognized, meant a fraction of the treasure he now held. He turned around. Twigs and Cara stood outside of the door, as though they were afraid to violate what had once been his sanctuary. He gave them a content smile. “I’m good,” Alex declared. “Let’s go home.”