by Jacy Morris
"The way I figure it, we got two days, maybe less to get that burned up bastard. After that, there's a chance he wakes up and sings."
"You want me to just go in there and kill him?"
"No, that would just piss 'em off."
"What then?" Reed asked, his mind trying to conjure ways to get into the trailer unseen to kill the man.
"I'm going to have to figure out a way to get the one with the broken leg out of there. The other one, she's easy. I've got her taking care of Dez, so once they're both out, we can take care of him."
"How are you going to get her out of there? She's got a broken leg."
"Let me think about that," Chad said. "In the meantime, I want you to go looking for the other black guy and the pregnant lady."
"You want me to do 'em both?"
"Definitely the guy, but the girl, if there's a way to manage it, see if you can bring her here. She is pregnant after all. We need as many humans as we can get. Besides, we don't want to get all inbred in here. You know what happens when brothers and sisters start fucking."
Reed nodded his head. Living in a trailer park, you tend to learn about the drawbacks of genetic homogeneity. "You get webbed feet and chinless weirdoes with two dicks."
Chad just looked at Reed and shook his head. "What goes on in that head of yours?"
"Speaking of which, what's my reward for this little caper of yours?"
"What do you want?"
"I want the one with the broken leg."
Chad just laughed. "What makes you think she's going to want you?"
"You let me worry about that," Reed said. "I just don't want you or any of the others muscling in on my action."
Chad patted him on the knee and then stood. "You won't have any competition from me, not that it would be much of a competition if I threw my hat into the ring. I'll pass the word along to the others to keep their hands off for now."
"For now?"
"Yeah, if you can't seal the deal, we can't very well let her field go unplanted."
"Fair enough."
Reed waited until Chad left, and then he went back to work. He thought of Dez's big belly, and her full breasts with the dark nipples. He bit his lower lip, and thought about killing and making love.
Chapter 13: It Was Nice While It Lasted
Tejada and the boys finally finished fishing all the corpses out of the lake. Their departure had been delayed indefinitely it seemed. Most of his men were without ammunition now, and besides that, he had some unfinished business on the Nike campus. In Tejada's mind, his men had been set up, and there was only one person on the campus who could have pulled it off... Nike.
Nike had been overjoyed to hear that they were going to stay. That was fine. Let him think that they had been won over. In reality, Tejada was just biding his time. He had a dead soldier to avenge. He looked over at the plot where they had buried Beacham and made a promise. He wondered if Beacham could hear it, or if he were just wasting his thoughts.
The bodies in the lake did not receive the honor of burial. There were too many of them. There had been quite a firefight here, and Tejada was confused as to where all that firepower had gone. The only guard he had seen was the one they had first encountered when they hopped over the wall. Wearing batting gloves they had found in the Ken Griffey Jr. building, they stacked the corpses into a pile as high as Tejada's head. When he gave the order, Masterson flicked a lit cigarette onto the gasoline-soaked pile.
He surveyed the field as black, noxious smoke drifted over the campus. He saw much. He saw Rudy and Amanda sticking with the soldiers. He saw Walt busting his ass, his face harder and more severe than when they had first met. His body was changing too. He was becoming hard, chiseled, in his heart and his body. He saw the residents of the Nike campus taking care of their own, digging with some shovels they had liberated from an unoccupied maintenance building. He saw that most of the other buildings were occupied. But most of all, he saw the cameras situated around the campus.
If all these buildings were running on solar power, there was a good chance that one of those cameras had captured video of whoever had broken the front door of that building. That meant there was proof somewhere, and now he just needed to find it.
"You need anything, sir?" Epps asked.
"Not right now, Epps. But why don't you see if you can buddy up to these people. find out who they are. I have a shitload of questions, and I need to have answers fast."
"What kind of questions, sir?"
"Oh, you know, do those cameras work? Where do they feed to? How can we see what's on them? Who wanted to set us up? You know, the usual." Epps just nodded and pulled his gloves from his hands. Tejada watched as he tapped Allen on the shoulder and whispered in his ear. Allen nodded his head, popped a peek at Tejada, and then stripped his own gloves off.
"Rudy! Come here. I want to talk to you for a second."
Rudy bumbled his way over, hiking up his pants as he came. "Yes, uh, sir?"
"You don't have to call me that. You're not a soldier. Just call me Tejada, everyone else does."
Rudy nodded, his awkwardness still present despite all that they had all gone through together. "What do you think of this place, Rudy?"
Rudy gave the question some consideration before he answered. "I think that it's a good set-up. But I also think that there's something not quite right about it."
"How so?"
"I mean, how the hell did they get all these people locked up in those buildings? Where are all the people that killed all of the corpses we found, and why are the people here so damn secretive?"
It was a good analysis, as good as any that had been kicking around in Tejada's head anyway. Tejada put a hand on the man's shoulder and brought him in close. "Those are good questions, Rudy. If we're going to stay here, we need answers to those questions, and we needed them yesterday." From the corner of his eye, he saw Nike's head of security step outside. "I want you to find those answers for us. As far as these people can tell, you're not one of us. They don't trust us; they don't even seem to want us here."
"They were glad you were here last night."
Tejada nodded. "Yeah, I noticed. A little convenient if you ask me. Anyway, I want you to pal around with these people, ask the questions that need to be asked, but quietly. We don't want anyone to get suspicious, you know what I mean?" Rudy nodded. "Good. Now, as much as I appreciate your help, why don't you make yourself scarce until you've found some stuff out. And, if you need to badmouth me or the other men to give yourself a little more credibility, it ain't gonna hurt my feelings none."
Rudy nodded and then walked away from Tejada. He whispered into Amanda's ear, and then they peeled away from the soldiers. Nike's head of security watched them go, and Tejada watched him without looking like he was. The smoke blotted out the sun, the smell clinging to everything in sight. You never got used to the smell of burning human flesh, but once you smelled it, you'd recognize it wherever you went. He stared at the Nike people. They looked like mice, cowed and scared. They were going to have to get over that shit, and fast, if they ever wanted to stop inhaling that stench.
****
In a back room, where blood still dried on the walls, Rudy told Amanda what Tejada wanted from them. He told her how they had to befriend the Nike people and figure out what was going on. He told her how they were to distance themselves from the soldiers.
"It's like we're spies," Amanda said.
"I think it's exactly like that," Rudy said. "Who knows? Maybe there isn't even anything to find. Maybe it was all just one big accident."
Amanda laughed. "I don't believe that any more than you do." They lapsed into silence. "Do you think we're putting ourselves in danger?"
"I think that no matter what we do, we're in danger. At least this way, we're doing something about it."
Amanda nodded again, then took him by the hand. With a smile that made his heart feel like it was going to erupt, she dragged him from the small side room and said, "C
ome on. Let's go make some friends."
****
As they stepped outside, Amanda marveled at what the world had become. The feeling of having been magically transported to a completely different world didn't come to her often, but when it did, it hit her like a hammer to the sternum. Here they were, standing on the campus of one of the most powerful companies in the world, and on its lawn, piles of bodies were burning in great, big, smoky heaps. The employees of that company were now either dead and trapped inside buildings or on the lawn digging graves for those that had died in last night's attack.
She walked with Rudy across the lawn. "Just do what I do," she said. She knew that Rudy wasn't the right choice to infiltrate a group of people. He had all the social grace of a hobo covered in horse shit, but she could make up for his deficiencies, and if he just followed her lead, perhaps they could figure out what was going on.
Amanda walked up to a man who was covered in sweat and dirt. His shirt was soaked with perspiration, and she could tell that he was exhausted. "Can we help?" Amanda asked. The man looked at Amanda, and though he seemed dubious as to Amanda's ability to actually help, he willingly parted with his shovel. His hands were red and blistered from his work. Amanda grabbed the shovel, and Rudy walked off to find someone else's burden to relieve.
She jammed the blade of the shovel into the hole that the man had been digging. He sat down roughly on the grass, too exhausted to keep himself from standing. There had been a lot of graves to dig that day. On the grass, to her left, there was a body. A bullet hole had punctured the forehead of a middle-aged woman. The dead had fed upon her left arm until it was nothing more than bone highlighted by a few stubborn tendons and blobs of flesh. Her skin was gray. Her dead eyes stared up at the smoky sky.
"Did you know her?" Amanda asked as she tossed a shovelful of dirt off to the side. The man nodded, still too tired to even speak.
"I knew most of them," he said. Tears came to his eyes, and he pulled his glasses off to wipe them away. Amanda dug in silence from then on out. It was hard work, and after ten shovelfuls, she could feel her hands revolting at their ill use. The webbing between her thumb and forefinger was red and already protesting.
She looked up to see Rudy taking the shovel from a sobbing woman. He patted her on the shoulder, and the woman collapsed in his arms, tears streaming down her face. He gently lowered her to the ground and began digging. Boy, we're going to be one hell of a pair tonight.
"You came here with the soldiers, right?" the man asked.
Amanda nodded.
"I haven't had a chance to thank them, but then again, how do you thank someone for being in the right place at the right time? It just seems ill-conceived."
"Oh, I don't know about that," Amanda said. "There's always room to show your appreciation, especially if you get to breathe another day."
"That's the thing," the man said. "I don't even know if I want to be alive... I don't know if I should be thanking those men or cursing them."
Amanda hopped into the hole she had created. It came up to her shin now. "Hey, you might feel that way now, but think about the future... what did you say your name was?"
The man pulled his glasses off and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand again. The soot smeared away along with the tears, and he looked like a man who had gone sunbathing and forgotten to take his sunglasses off. "They call me Ceres, but my real name is Nathan. Stupid Nike had us all choose new names when this all went down."
"Yeah, what's with all the names?" Amanda asked.
"He says that the old world is dead, and that we are the new world. Nike says that the people we were are gone, and that we're all new people with new names, but I don't know, I just liked being called Nathan." He wiped a drip of snot from his hawkish beak and said, "Hell, I've been called Nathan all my life. It seems stupid to go changing it now."
"Well, Nathan, on the issue of thank-yous, you might not feel it now, but sooner or later, there's going to come a time when something comes along that makes you happy." She looked at Rudy sweating in the murky light of the smoke-filled afternoon. "And when that happens, you're going to feel like saying thank you, but by then, if you haven't said it already, it's going to sound fake as shit, and you're going to feel like an asshole. But if you do it now, and you get it out, maybe even if you don't mean it, then everything is going to be alright."
The man nodded, his eyes crawling over the corpse on the ground. "I knew her, you know? She was a real sweet lady. She worked in the payroll department. She always smiled and said hello. I saw her here every day for the last ten years, and every day she had that damn smile on, even if I didn't. It didn't matter to her, you know?"
Amanda just let the man talk. She chopped through an ancient tree root with her shovel, slicing it in half and digging around it.
"Funny thing though. Until this all happened, I never even asked her name. I didn't know who she was until the entire world had died. She didn't smile so much then. She had a family and all. Here she was kind of lost."
Amanda felt like the man himself was getting lost, talking about nonsense that didn't matter anymore. But maybe that's exactly what he needed to do. Maybe he needed to unburden himself of these thoughts, these memories. Maybe he needed a clean slate, even if it was just for a few minutes. She hacked some more at a stubborn root, stomping on the shovel with her heel until the blade sliced through it completely.
"Hell, I think we're all kind of lost. Did you know this is the first time that the majority of us have been outside this building in weeks?"
Sweat dripped down Amanda's back, taking a ride all the way down the crack of her ass. "Yeah, why is that?"
"Oh, that's how Nike wants it." Nathan plucked at a handful of grass, ripped it free from the soil and then tossed it on the ground, something Amanda bet would have never happened before the dead had started living.
"I thought it was because of all the dead in the buildings."
"No, no. They can't get out. That's bulletproof, shatterproof glass. Do you know the amount of security we had around here before this whole thing happened? Hell, you couldn't jog the track around the perimeter without a badge for more than two minutes before security guards showed up. We had a lot of movers and shakers in here. It wouldn't do for one of them to take a bullet. That's not good P.R."
Nathan said this last as if it were a well-worn company mantra, the type of thing that would be appended to every memo ever sent. "So then why was everyone staying inside?"
Nathan just shrugged, his eyes wandering over to the dead woman's body again. His eyes clouded over, and Amanda continued to dig. He lapsed into silence, his eyes tracking the smoke of the burn pile. Amanda jammed the shovel deep into the dirt, cranking the blade back and forth, lifting it up over her shoulder, and depositing the soil on the grass. This was going to take a while.
****
Rudy had never been one for physical labor, not because he hated it or anything, but because he had never needed to. Foster parents occasionally asked him to take out the trash or clean his room, but they seldom asked him to do more than that. They had never loved him enough to want him to do those things. He was at fault for that; he knew that now. He had been thinking a lot about the person that he used to be before all this.
The end conclusion? He had been an asshole. Somehow, it had taken Amanda's unconditional acceptance of him to realize this. He had been offered olive branch after olive branch by one person or another during the entirety of his childhood, and he had spit in the face of every single one of them. Why? Because he was afraid he would be left again. But Amanda hadn't left. Even when he was lying unconscious on the Burnside Bridge, she had fought for them to take him along.
He doubted she would ever leave. He looked over at her, lost in conversation with a sad-eyed man who had the face of an accountant. No, maybe his face was more lawyer-ish. Not the type of lawyer that would stand in the middle of the courtroom and piss fire in the judge's face, but the type of lawyer who would
know what to do with a stack of unfiled folders. Hopefully, she was getting some good information. The woman he had relieved just sat on the ground, lost in her own sorrow. He might as well be invisible.
The prospective tenant of the grave he dug reclined on the grass. Flies crawled over the flesh caught in the man's teeth. One flew to the bullet hole in the man's temple, crawled in for a peek, and then crawled back out. The whole scene gave him the chills.
He rested the handle of the shovel against his shoulder and wiped his brow for the hundredth time. He looked at his dirty hands, trying to find what was making them hurt so bad, but all he saw was red skin. He went back to work, lost in his own thoughts and regrets, wondering just who he would have been if he had let people into his heart when he was younger.
"Want some water?" a man asked. It was Nike. Immediately he blushed, as if he had been caught masturbating in his bedroom.
"Uh, sure. Thanks," he said, reaching out for the proffered glass of water.
"Don't worry," Nike said. "It's purified."
"From the lake?" Rudy asked doubtfully.
Nike laughed like a good-natured grandfather. "Of course not. It'll be a long time before that water is ever potable again. It's from some rain barrels we keep on the roof. Once fall hits, we should never have to worry about water again. Which is good, because once the sodas and the energy drinks and the Gatorade run out, we're all going to be mighty thirsty."
"Cheers," Rudy said as he upended the water into his mouth. Water had never tasted so good. It was cool, fresh.
Nike squatted at the edge of the grave Rudy was digging. "I want to thank you for all that you've done."
At this Rudy had to laugh. "I haven't done anything."
"You're doing something now."
"Yeah, well, a lot of good it's going to do."
Nike blinked at Rudy, as if he wasn't used to anyone voicing a real thought in his presence. "What do you mean? We're safe. The threat is taken care of. We have water. We can plant crops in the spring. We have a wall that keeps us safe."