“Damn,” Ted said on their third trip to the truck. He knocked back a water bottle and belched. “Can we start the truck? Maybe move it or something?”
Zach stared at him for a moment, blinking, his face glistening with sweat. Dark stains seemed to emanate from the guns beneath his armpits. “Yeah, Ted,” he said, half-grinning and nodding. “Sure. But first we have to clear out all these pine trees, maybe cut a path all the way to 190.”
“I don’t know,” Ted said, shrugging. “I was just saying.”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay. Moving on. We need to load up what we can for now and come back tomorrow with the truck. We’ll get Seth to—”
Somewhere nearby, a dead thing howled, long and mournful.
“Aw, crap.” Ted said. “Where the hell is that coming from?”
“There,” Wayne said. Not far from where he’d encountered the first corpse of the day, another form stood. It howled again, louder and longer. There was urgency in the thing’s voice.
“Oh, shit,” Zach said. Here and there, the creature’s call was answered. “Not good. Run.”
They ran, their bats raised and ready. On either side of the interstate, the walking dead emerged from within the cool confines of the forest. Soon there was a chorus.
They overtook the howler. Not slowing, Ted took a swing at it. He missed, staggered, and almost fell, dropping the bat, and then the Jeep was in sight. Zach leaned against a tree, winded. Ted bent over, his hands on his knees, panting.
“You not going back for your bat?” Wayne asked, his back to the Jeep.
“Why the fuck would I do that? There’s like six more in the back of the Jeep,” Ted said, and Wayne shot him in the face, blowing away most of his jaw. Ted dropped, mewling and clutching at where his chin used to be. Blood poured between his fingers.
He should have shot Zach first—Zach was always more on the ball and now he was just gone, dropped from sight. “Shit,” Wayne said, and Zach appeared from behind a tree and started firing the Tauruses.
Wayne got the Jeep between himself and Zach. From all sides, the dead closed in.
You knew it was a real shit day when killing the class cat was the high point.
That was the first thing Sue did in the morning, and her mood had not improved. Mr. Stripestuff had been pretty sickly for a while, was probably fifteen years old and going blind, and there was no way anybody in the warehouse would take adequate care of him after she left. She hoped they’d have a little more compassion for the kids she’d be leaving behind, but deep down she doubted it.
She let him lick the scraps from a can of tuna mixed with a packet of old government-issue powdered creamer and a couple of crushed Tylenol PMs. Then she laid him in her lap and petted his head for a while, then she put a towel over his face, and a plastic bag over that. She thought not about how she should just set him free, but how slim his odds were out there. She was doing him a favor, but it wasn’t easy for either of them. She was gentle, gentle as she could be while getting the job done, and she laid him in his bed for the class to find.
They were on lockdown and Sue couldn’t get downstairs to the trash in the night. She had no place to stash Stripestuff in the couple of upstairs offices where the orphans lived every minute. In the daytime, the kids—the non-orphans at least—got into everything, even downstairs where they were supposedly not allowed. Might as well make the discovery foreseeable and respectful. Educational, too, she thought, wondering if maybe she was getting a little teacher in her after all. Then again, each and every one of these kids had already seen death firsthand in unimaginable manners and quantities. What could they learn from a cat? Her smile evaporated.
The class—such as it was, twenty kids spread over ages three to ten, being overseen by a clerk and a dental assistant, whose only qualifications were that they looked like teachers, both being middle-aged females—found him in his bed, having passed peacefully in the night when they assembled at eight. After a little death-lesson-cum-ceremony by Sue, they interred him by wrapping him in plastic sheeting and throwing him out one of the second-story windows into the piles of red earth of the unfinished construction site next door. The plastic came partly unraveled and the cat fell a little short of the dirt, landing on the warehouse’s own blacktop. What could you do but pull the shades? The kids mostly cried or moped, but not Jayson, which just confirmed everything Sue felt about him.
He was just lucky he wasn’t an orphan.
“I’m hungry!” the little animal yelled, and Sue nearly lost it right there. Everyone in the warehouse had eaten carefully meted crackers and peanuts for lunch, for Christ, and this little fatty was the only one bitching about it. One of the oldest kids in the group but stupider than the youngest by half.
Sue took a breath and, clutching it inside her, strode past the other children to grab Jayson by his filthy collar and hiss in his face, “You. Are. Not. A good. Child.” That made her smile a little bit, and she set him down.
“I hate you!” he shrieked, with his horrible little nubby teeth and his filthy face. “I’m telling my dad!”
That made her smile even more. She reached down and pinched his cheek hard, harder, keeping in the thing that she wanted to growl, that Jayson’s father was part of the reason Jayson was hungry. Every time that asshole went out on runs, the truck came back half-stuffed with liquor, and all the guys cheered, not considering that a few cases of saltines and applesauce only went so far.
Another child said it. “I’m hungry.”
Sue turned, feeling revived. “I told you, Leticia, there’s no food yet. We’re waiting for the supply run to come back.”
“When are they gonna be here?”
Sue looked to Patty, the dental assistant, the other woman who passed for an elementary-grade teacher in the upper-level conference room of this welding and steam-fitting warehouse. In truth they were babysitters at best. Patty was at least slightly more experienced, having had a daughter until the outbreak. She had a dozen new lines on her face this week and seemed a little stoned, with her eyelids not quite reaching the tops of her broad pupils.
“Well,” Sue said, leaving Patty staring at the wall, “they were supposed to have been back a little while ago. For lunch.” It was quarter past one. “My guess is, they found a really nice grocery store or something, and they took their time, and they’re almost back now with a truck full of cookies and spaghetti and tuna. How does that sound?”
Some of the younger kids gave out a little “yay” chorus. Then they were all back to doodling on their math sheets or punching at their board games.
Sue hated them. Most of them. Wayne said there was only room for eight people on the Jeep, a couple more if the kids were little.
Sue had eight orphans in her class and eleven children of other adults holed up in the warehouse. She didn’t have to worry about the eleven, but with her and Patty not minding them during the day or sleeping on pissy mattresses with them in the classroom at night, the orphans were as good as dead.
Pushing it, pushing it, she and Patty could maybe bring five kids. That meant she had to eliminate three.
Obviously, she should have done this before noon but her hangover was still wearing off then.
She scanned the pitiful crowd. It was easy enough to gravitate toward the younger students, the kindergarteners whom life hadn’t yet broken, but that just made them a liability. It meant Sue would have to be the one to watch or assist the breaking.
Devon, a four-year-old black kid, gave out a horrible snorking cough, the apparent culmination of some symptoms that had been dribbling out of him all day and a validation ticket for some thoughts Sue had been having on the subject. She sighed thanks. Goodbye, Devon.
Sue sidled over to Patty and whispered. “I’m thinking we take Leticia, Morgan, Shawn, and Greg. They’re all over six…for the last one, it’s between Sophia, Sarah, and Avery. What do you think? Sarah’s youngest but she’s got it together, listens well.”
Patty grunted.
&
nbsp; “That’s all we can take. Five is a lot even for two of us to wrangle, out…on the road. Christ, Patty, say something, we have to—”
“Wha?”
“You have to pick: Do you want Sophia, Sarah, or Avery? Devon’s got that horrible cough. It seems serious. All we need is for the kids to all get sick.”
“I can’t do it.”
“Yes, you can, Wayne and Ian have it all planned out. We can’t stay here forever.”
“I can’t pick them, I’m not going.”
“You’re not making sense. We’ve been talking about it for a week. Christ, we’ve all been thinking about it for a month, ever since Ian said Seth wanted to quit doing rescue runs and stick to supplies. You can do this. We have to do it. The warehouse is a dead-end situation. Picking the kids—that’s all hypothetical anyway, if Wayne can come back with hard proof that Zach and Ted are murderers, then maybe Seth will see that we all have to go.”
“Of course I’ll go if we all go. But if he doesn’t, if Seth wants to stay, I’m not just…I’m not just going to leave, it’s too dangerous. I’ll stay here with the kids. There’s food—”
“No there isn’t!”
“Usually, usually there is. There’s protection…” Patty said. “Seth keeps things running here pretty well.”
Sue rubbed her face. “Ohhh, my god. You really believe that, you’d really rather stay.”
“It doesn’t matter, I can’t leave any kids. None of them… none of them deserve that.”
“Shhh!” So that was it. It was a goddamned mother thing. Sue stole a look out the window; no Jeep yet. “Sweetie, Brandy’s gone, you can’t help her. Let me put it to you this way: What would Brandy want you to do? She’d want you to do the thing that was best for everyone, right? Well, staying isn’t good for anyone. This is a place for dying. Think about Plaquemines Parish. Did you ever take Brandy down to Port Sulphur? Did she like it? Well, it’s great, that area, you can grow just about anything, fish, shrimp, it’s breezy…. Think about the kids that are here.”
“I am.”
“Think about them growing up here, in this building. They’re not even going to last long enough to grow up. They’re going to starve here.”
“No…they’re exploring I-55, there’ll be something up there.”
“Bullshit. There’s fewer men practically every week to do that, and you know why. You want to do something good for these kids, pick which ones we can take and let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Now Patty was weeping. Jesus, what a drama queen. “You don’t have to take any, if you want. I know you don’t really—”
“All right, all right.” She squeezed Patty’s shoulder and peeked out the window again. “I’m taking the four I said I’d take, and then Sarah, with or without your sorry ass.” She smiled as she said this, realizing that some kids’ eyes were on her.
That woke Patty up. “You can’t. You can’t possibly manage five kids…”
“I can and I will.” Her face was getting warm but she anchored the smile. “Watch me. I’m making this shit happen. I’ll be goddamned if I’m gonna stay here and rot—”
“Sarah’s too little, leave her—” and then Sue stopped hearing. She must have been hyperventilating, because her head felt hot but her mouth felt cold. She ran her fingers through her hair and left the room, went for the stairs. She looked down into the main warehouse area, fully lit now by the afternoon sun through the skylights.
Wayne was downstairs. How did he get here so quietly? She didn’t see a Jeep. He was already talking with Seth, who had on his stained pink shirt and striped tie, like he was still middle management.
Sue ran down the rattling iron stairs.
“…both of them,” Wayne was saying.
Seth nodded gravely and looked up at Sue. She had her mouth open but something in Wayne’s eyes told her to shut it.
“Bad news, Sue: Zach and Ted are dead. Call everyone around.”
The manager’s office bathroom was the only real private room in the warehouse. That’s where Sue waited for Wayne after the meeting, drinking a long-hoarded Abita beer, playing with the candles on the rust-stained toilet that could no longer be used, fixing herself up as best she could in the mirror. Finally, he came in.
“What happened out there? Where’s the Jeep?”
“Shh,” he said.
“They tried to kill you, didn’t they? Why didn’t you tell Seth?”
“I…not really. Maybe they were going to.”
“Maybe? What did Seth say? Will they come?”
“I didn’t put it to them, I don’t think that’s wise.” Wayne put his hand on the wall behind Sue.
“What, we’re just going? Just us, no caravan?”
He dropped his arm. “Seth can’t be trusted.”
She stamped her foot. “How are we going to make it anywhere without that kind of backup, Wayne?”
“Do you hear me? I don’t trust Seth anymore. I don’t think Zach and Ted were acting alone. I think it came from higher up.”
Sue leaned back against the wall. “They did try to kill you.”
“Well, they didn’t get a chance.”
“The dead got them first.”
“I got…you know, I went ahead and shot them.”
“Oh, Christ.”
“I was scared, I kept thinking about the plan, I don’t even know if we were right anymore. I panicked.”
“Shh, it’s okay.” She put a hand on his chest. “You were right, you were right, just like we planned, just a little different. And it’s good you told Seth and all that they were killed by the dead, that’s fine cover, you did good.”
“I don’t know…I worry that they, that Ted or Zach, might…”
“What?”
“Might wander back here, I don’t know. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“You didn’t finish them?”
“I don’t know!”
“Christ, Wayne. You’re unbelievable, that could really be—”
“Shut…just, be quiet. Listen.” He held her wrists to her chest but she didn’t like the maneuver and pushed back away from him. “Go talk to Patty, get the kids’ stuff ready so we can go. I’ll talk to Ian.”
“Ugh. Where’s the Jeep, anyway? How are we leaving?”
“It’s four blocks from here, loaded up with MREs and water.” Her eyes went wide. “Don’t freak out, just get the shit ready, tell Patty so we can go.”
“We’ll have to walk?”
“A little ways, yes. It’s no real problem.”
She swallowed then, leaned against his chest and whispered, “Can we just go now, forget the kids?”
“No. The kids.” Now he pushed her away. “The kids are half the damn point, Sue.”
“What do you care. You don’t even know their names,” she said. “Patty’s not coming.”
He sighed. “Whatever. Just get everything together, keep it quiet, don’t spook anyone. Give me that beer. We’re leaving at daybreak. Get some sleep.”
She left the bathroom and headed upstairs, shaking and wondering if she could sleep: tomorrow would start no better than today had. In the classroom/orphan bedroom, she stepped over the mattresses in the dark and just grabbed clothes from unwashed piles as she passed, stuffing them into a backpack, trying to get things for the ones she’d decided on but just not entirely sure, in the dark, with this pitiful flashlight. Children slept like the dead. Patty was asleep on the floor. Devon breathed and it sounded like a greasy drain gurgling. The shoes: she had to be sure of the shoes. She put the correct pair next to each child’s head. Morgan, Leticia, Greg, Shawn, Sarah. These were the ones; she could help these ones.
Sue had just fallen asleep when Wayne woke her up to say the dead had found the warehouse.
The sun vanished, and others like him emerged from the forest. They shambled by, paying him little mind, some marred and broken and beautiful beyond expression, others as plain and dull and ugly as the laughing ones with the roaring m
etal things and the wheels.
The night was cool and damp. When he tried to breathe, the air felt empty and used up. It had nothing to give him. Fortunately, he needed nothing right then—nothing physical, at least. He could just sit there, oblivious and unknowing.
Unknowing, but not unthinking. His mind was a blur of images and feelings—people and places and things, and all the emotions they evoked in him. Several times in the long night, he clutched at his head and rocked back and forth, moaning, because the thoughts hurt him.
It wasn’t that they were all images of violence or terror—very few of them were, in fact. The pain was from the cacophony of his mind, for all the images and feelings came at him without order, logic, or connection. He could not choose what he would think, or even pick from among a certain set: he could not call forth thoughts—he was only assailed and bombarded by them, and the assault seemed as painful as any kind of physical torture.
He lacked words for most everything that passed through his mind, and that contributed more to his mental anguish. Without labels or categories, even pleasant feelings seemed disorienting and disappointing, for he could not understand or explain his pleasure. And this pain was increased by his inability to hold on to anything, or to anticipate what thought or feeling might come next. Instead, he was constantly subject to the whim of some unknown force inside or outside himself.
When he could calm himself enough to observe and not be tormented by his mind, he noted that one person appeared repeatedly in his thoughts: a young girl with blond hair and fair skin. Her age and looks varied in his different thoughts of her, but he recognized her as the same girl. She was surrounded by different people, in various clothes, often outside among trees and flowers; in many thoughts she was making a happy sound with her mouth that he tried to duplicate, but could not, but the memory of it still gave him joy and contentment. But his contentment was disturbed, because he could not understand her connection to him or why he should think so much of her. He did not know her name. His inability to articulate or specify who she was increasingly oppressed and confounded him, till he let out his second loudest and longest moan of what seemed an endless night.
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