Running Red

by Jack Bates

  “I told you. It took the Guard so long to get to every little town around here that by the time they did arrive, people had gone nuts.”

  “Bat-house crazy.”

  Matt chuckles. “How frickin crazy is bat-house crazy?”

  “Something my dad used to say when he saw things like that on the news.”

  “Yeah. My dad said something close to that.”

  “You from here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where is your family?”

  Matt’s shoulder rises and falls. “Who knows? When the riot at Erickson’s started, everyone scattered. I think my dad might have been shot running to the woods. My dad was the only family I had. Denny was the only survivor in the Erickson house. A bunch of us that were in the truck fought back against the Guard when we saw them dragging Old Man Erickson out of the house.”

  “Why did you fight back?”

  “They were holding guns on us. We didn’t do anything. All we did was wait for them to come get us, and then they botched it. They shot flash-bang grenades at the house, took up a perimeter. We sat in the truck watching the little war erupt. We screamed for them to stop, to let one of us go and talk to Old Man Erickson. One of the guards hit me in the stomach with the heel of his rifle. That was when things went bat-house crazy.” He tries to laugh, but I hear the anguish in his voice.

  I put my head on Matt’s chest. I stroke his back. It shakes under his sobs. I let him flush it out of him. He shifts, pressing his chest against me.

  “I wish I could put my arms around you,” he says softly.

  I sit up and put my hands on his face. I slide my arms around his back and sit on his lap. “Is this okay?” I ask.

  He nods. I can’t be mad at him for the way he checked me out this afternoon, or for the disgusting, impromptu rap he sang about me as we walked through town. Like all of us, he’s had it tough. Even though I had a huge falling out with my folks, I miss the normalcy of our caustic lives. As tough as we try to appear, we’re both still frightened kids. Young adults. If we’re supposed to be rebuilding the world, we’re doing a pretty crappy job of it.

  “Don’t go getting the wrong idea,” I say. I can feel him pressing up through his pants. “This is all about keeping us from getting hypothermia tonight.”

  “Just sharing body heat?” He kind of laughs softly and shifts under me.

  “That’s all,” I say. I can’t really be sure. My face is near his. His breath is on my neck. “I’ve learned a thing or two all these months on the road by myself.”

  “So you’ve shared body heat with other guys?”

  “And a girl or two. And don’t even think about it, Matt. It’s strictly survival.”

  “You’re just lucky my arms are chained,” he says.

  I press the tip of my thumb into the soft flesh beneath his Adam’s apple. “Am I?” When I hear him gurgle for air, I release my thumb from his throat.

  “Man, Robbie, I was just having fun with you.”

  “If you knew what I’ve had to deal with being out on my own—” I stop. Heat or no heat, my body is as rigid as a two-by-four.

  “Hey, I’m sorry,” Matt says.

  I lay my head against his chest. “I know,” I say. My eyes burn with tears. “There’s a heavy loneliness in the world right now, Matt. Can you feel it? People are just desperate for companionship, to belong, to have someone. It’s why I travel with Yuki.”

  “Yuki? Who is he? Or she?”

  “She,” I say. My breath comes out heavy. I can’t protect her anymore while I’m locked in a root cellar. “She’s a dog.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “I don’t know. She attacked Scarecrow Jimmy tonight, then Aubrey shot her with my slingshot and she ran off. I hope she got away.”

  Matt lifts his head and presses his face down into my hair. “Aubrey can be a real dick,” he says. “He’s afraid of getting on Denny’s bad side, I guess.”

  “Why did he cut off your fingers?” I ask.

  “Seriously, Robbie? You have to ask that? People are crazy around here.”

  “Like Auntie Alice? I mean, what is up with her?”

  Matt’s shoulders rise and fall. He winces a little and I try rubbing his muscles. “She came in with a group of stragglers from over east. It was her, Cage, Dirks, and Shannon, with others. By then, we had taken up here. We felt safer in the town than on the outskirts. Plus, there were all the shops and we could get the food and supplies we needed. For a while, at least.”

  “How come she stays in the house with Denny?”

  “I guess he likes her. They had a bunch of long talks when she first got here. Things started to change once they hooked up.”

  “She seems too old for him.”

  “Oh, they’re not together like that. That’s why Denny has the wives.”

  “You mean Leslie and Bethany and Tessa?”

  “Yeah.” Matt leans his head next to mine. I can feel his breath of my neck. I squirm on his lap, then feel kind of guilty about it. I put one hand on his chest and I slip the other around his back. “I thought he wanted to make you a wife.”

  I shudder. “Ew. No thanks.”

  “Yeah, well, you don’t have to worry about that anymore.”

  “Why? Because I tried to run away?”

  “It’s not that,” Matt says. He has something he wants to say, but he holds it back.

  “What is it then?” I sit up.

  Matt doesn’t say anything for a long time. “We should get some sleep,” he finally says. “I think we’re going to have a rough couple of days.”

  “Why do you say that?” He shakes his head. I lean back from him. “Matt? What is it?”

  “Please. Let’s just slip off to sleep for a while, okay? I’m really beat.”

  I tell him it’s all right and cuddle against him again. I do it, I tell him, because it’s chilly in the cellar and we have no coats or blankets. I want to conserve the body heat we have. At least these are things I tell myself. It’s only been a day, but I feel like I’ve lived an eternity in it. It was shocking enough to see one boy close to my age, but now, to be with a second, it’s as if certain norms remain constant, even in a screwed up world of fungus infected zombies and paramilitary paranoia. I don’t know if Matt ever sleeps, but I certainly do.

  At least I think I do. Even the nightmarish world I live in doesn’t reveal as sinister moments as those I dream. My subconscious returns me to the safety of my bedroom once more. I must have really liked living in my parents’ home, because I’m there again, and Lane is in my bedroom again, only he’s not making pancakes. He’s sitting in the old-fashioned rocking chair I painted red one summer. Lane rocks back and forth, his hands squeezing his knees. He’s sitting in front of the window. It’s that twilight time of day. Something keeps bobbing in front of the light as he rocks. His eyes are black spots, and I don’t know if he’s watching me. I know something is, though, because I can feel the eyes on me. In me.

  Then I see what I think is a helium balloon tied around Lane’s neck, floating above his head. It’s not a balloon. It’s a spore bulb covered in a billion little eyes.

  “Hey, watch this,” Lane says. He pushes his thumb into his mouth and puffs out his cheeks. An air bubble shoots up out of Lane’s head and slides up the stalk to the spore bulb. It explodes. A billion little eyes float around my room on tiny, white, fluffy fronds.

  Even in my sleep, I am haunted.

  Nine

  There is a little bit of sunlight shining in through the window. Matt shifts under me and I crawl off of him. I can only imagine how his arms must feel. Tingly? Numb? They have been stretched out to either side all night. Thinking I might make him feel better, I rub them for a few minutes.

  “They’ll be coming in soon,” he says. “Go sit over there.”

  In the dim light of morning I can see what a craphole we are in. The foundation is a little deeper than a crawl space beneath the house. I can walk if I stoop way over. Matt w
ants me to sit on some old burlap sacks piled in a corner. They are a bit lumpy. I don’t really want to know what’s beneath them. When I sit down, I see the carcass of a dead field mouse. It has a chute growing out of its head. A tangle of roots hangs at the end of the stalk. When the zombie ants were first spotted, they also had some sort of growth jutting out of their skulls.

  I pinch the tail of the mouse and hold it up. I show it to Matt.

  “Ever wonder why runners didn’t get the spore stalk like the other animals?” I ask.

  “I always thought it was because our brains were bigger,” Matt says. “The fungus gets in, but there’s so much to explore in our heads that maybe it grows inside of our heads instead of growing out like a periscope.”

  It wasn’t such an outlandish theory. “What do you think it would find in Denny’s head?” I toss the mouse off to the side.

  “Nightmares,” Matt says. We laugh. “But what do I know, right? I was using the online high school to get my GED.”

  “I was going to night school to get my prerequisites out of the way.”

  “What were you going to be?” he asks.

  I shrug. “I don’t know. A year ago I thought I could take my time and let school kind of figure it out for me.”

  “Woulda-shoulda-coulda,” Matt says. “Me? I was going to work down at Sal’s Collision.”

  “Grease monkey?”

  “Nah. Detailer. Customizer. Like that guy the pawnshop dudes take the junkers they get to so he can fix them up. I always wanted to get an El Camino and fix it up. Sparkly green, spinners, top-of-the-line sound system. Then I’d drive it in the Dream Cruise. Show it off. Pretty solid, huh?”

  I shake my head. “What’s an El Camino?”

  Matt laughs. “You don’t know what an El Camino is? Man, you girls.”

  “Educate me, professor.”

  “The El Camino was a Chevy. Kind of looked like a Malibu.” I shake my head again and give Matt a blank, doe-eyed stare. “Man, you’re making this difficult. Think of a pickup truck. Now drop it down to look like a car with only a front seat and a long bed in the back.”

  “That’s your dream car?”

  “One of them. I wanted a ’72 Turbo 396 with a 350-horsepower block. Man, that would have been sweet.” Matt thinks about it for a second. I can tell by the look on his face he wants me to appreciate it.

  “Sounds great,” I say. I’m trying to generate the kind of enthusiasm a guy wants to hear.

  “What about you, Robbie?”

  “What about me?”

  He shrugs. There’s a little wince of pain in his eyes. I wish I could take his arms down from their shackles. “What were your dreams?”

  “I wanted to be on my own,” I say. “Be careful of what you wish for.”

  The cellar door opens and a pair of skinny legs descends. It’s Leslie. She has a tray of food. Behind her comes Tessa. She remains on the lower step so she doesn’t have to stoop. Leslie stops in front of me and offers me a bowl of some kind of broth. It smells awful, but I can’t afford not to eat. I take one. She offers the second bowl to Matt.

  “Now how am I going to eat that, Les?” he asks her.

  “Set it on the ground,” Tessa says. “That bitch can feed it to him.”

  Ever obedient, Leslie does as she is told. She leaves without saying anything to either of us, or to Tessa. Tessa remains for a moment staring at me. I can tell that if I were chained up like Matt, she might come over and kick the bowl of smelly broth out of my hands. Not that I would fight her in this circumstance. She’d almost be saving me.

  Tessa goes up and drops the door. It slams into place. The chain is pulled back through the handles. The lock clicks into place.

  “So how long are we condemned to this circle of hell?” I ask. I decide the best way to get the gruel into my stomach is to pound it down in as few swallows as possible. I drink quickly. It’s fishy. There are crunchy things in the soup.

  “Got another night down here with me. Can you handle it?”

  I smile. “Only if there’s no more talk about cars,” I say. I crawl over and hold the bowl to Matt’s lips.

  Leslie returns two more times. Lunch is a little better. We are given muffins pre-smeared with jam. There are two bottles of water. Tessa drops them at my feet. When Leslie returns at dinnertime, she brings Aubrey. Like Tessa before him, he stands on the lower step as Leslie serves us fresh bowls of what appears to be straight-up, warmed tomato sauce. Aubrey wraps his hands around a pipe running under the floor joists. He leans forward and flexes his arms. “Look at me,” he seems to be saying.

  “How you two doing?” he asks.

  “Be better if I could take my arms down for a bit,” Matt says.

  “Why? Your fingers getting tingly?” Aubrey laughs. When no one else does, he spits into the dirt floor.

  “Just let him out of the chains for a while,” I say.

  “Can’t,” Aubrey says. “I don’t have the key. But if you want to come out and stretch, I can let you do that.”

  “No thanks,” I say. “I’m doing fine.”

  Leslie has been stooped over in front of me the whole time. She’s staring at me.

  “You ready to go, freak?” Aubrey asks.

  Leslie looks at my bowl. She takes her tray out of the cellar. Now it’s Aubrey who stares at me. His eyes are sad. He checks to see if Leslie or anyone is nearby before he leans as far in as he can and says, “I’m covering my own ass,” he says.

  “Because you don’t want to end up like Matt?” I ask.

  “Or worse,” Aubrey says. If it can get worse than what Matt is experiencing, it’s time for me to leave. I will have to wait for the opportunity to escape.

  Outside, Leslie calls for him. Aubrey leaves the cellar. The shadows are blending in with the night. I drink down my tomato sauce the same way I drank the fish broth earlier.

  “What’s on the bottom of your bowl?” Matt asks.

  I lift it over my head. There’s a piece of folded paper taped to the bottom. I unfold it and read the note. “Gumm tomorrow be reddy” is all it says. It doesn’t make any sense, and not just because the writer can’t spell. It must be from Leslie, I think.

  “What’s it say?” Matt asks.

  “Is Leslie a little slow?”

  “I don’t really know her. Why?”

  “I think she’s sneaking us a treat tomorrow.”

  I don’t recall having dreams, but when I’m awakened in the morning, I am thinking of Lane. I don’t have much time to put it together though, because Aubrey is shaking me. I open my eyes. Behind Aubrey there is a thin line of blue and a thinner one of pinkish-orange in the sky. A few stars continue to twinkle. The sun hasn’t completely risen.

  “Come on. Come on,” Aubrey says. He’s pulling me by the arm.

  “What about Matt?”

  “I don’t have the key. Come on.”

  But I don’t want to leave Matt. “No. I’m staying here with him.”

  “You can’t,” Aubrey says.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s Race Day,” Matt says.

  “Race Day?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” Matt says. “And I’m the rabbit.”

  Ten

  “Where are you taking me?” I ask.

  Aubrey has me by the arm. He’s basically pulling me around the side of the house. Dirks, the guitar guy, is sitting on his upside down milk crate. He looks like he hasn’t slept all night. His guitar lies across his lap, string side down. He drums his fingers on the back. His tent neighbors stare at him and whisper amongst themselves.

  “Aubrey, stop.” I yank my arm away.

  “Denny wants to see you,” Aubrey says. “Now.”

  I take a step towards Dirks. Aubrey tells me not to, but I ignore him. I know what happened to Cage. I can see that it’s tearing Dirks apart. I want him to stop worrying. When I get close to him, Dirks looks up and sneers at me.

  “You stay away from me,” he says.

  �
��I know what happened to your friend,” I say.

  “I know you do. You just stay away from me.”

  “But Dirks—”

  Gripping the guitar by the neck, Dirks jumps to his feet. He holds the guitar like he might swing it at me. He points a finger at me. “You know my name. You know what happened to Cage. What else do you know about us? How much does the Guard know about us?”

  Dirks’ rant shakes me. I look around at the pained faces full of fear and suspicion. Sledge leans against his trunk in the tree house. Scarecrow sits with his legs dangling over the edge; his right hand is bandaged and in a sling. A withered looking woman holds a fussy baby in her arms. I wonder when it was born.

  Dirks is breathing heavily. He still holds his guitar defensively. The woman with the baby tries to calm Dirks. He waves her away and carries his guitar to the rear of the yard. He smashes it on the corner of the detached garage. It takes a couple of hefty swings to break it.

  These people are all bat-house crazy. I can’t survive here. The urge to run is filling me to the point that I wonder if I am infected. Is this the first stage? The unbearable desire to flee?

  And then I realize I probably can’t survive anywhere.

  Aubrey whispers in my ear. “Come on.” He takes my hand. I barely try to pull away.

  The inside of the house smells like fresh coffee. Aubrey takes me into the kitchen. Auntie Alice, Denny, Leslie, and Tessa sit at a round table. Denny sits with his back to me. They each have a mug of steaming coffee and a place setting consisting of a red plastic plate and clear, plastic flatware. There is a plate of biscuits, a jar of jam. My stomach rumbles.

  Denny is in the middle of sipping his coffee when he realizes the women at the table are looking at me. He finishes his drink, sets the mug down, and stares at the wall behind Leslie.

  “Sleep well, Sunshine?” Denny asks. He doesn’t look at me.

  I don’t say anything.

  “All right, ladies,” Auntie Alice says. “Take her upstairs and get her ready.”

  “Ready for what?” I ask.

  “Big day, Sunshine,” Denny says. He turns around and drapes an arm over the back of his chair. “Think you might enjoy it.”