by Morris, Kate
“Back gate,” Tristan said without pause at the man’s expiration from this world. He really was a cold, hard person. He simply removed the handcuffs and hooked them to his belt loop. “Two from there. Two from the front.”
“Yes, sir,” Abraham answered.
“We’ll take the back,” Roman volunteered. “I’m not sure Jane could scale the fence.”
“No, he’s right. I couldn’t. I’m not good at that sort of thing.”
Tristan actually smiled. “We gotta put some meat on those little chicken wings, kiddo.”
He whipped to the side and lightning-fast shot a night crawler nobody else had even heard coming. It was a headshot and taken at night in the dark. It was impressive, to say the least, and Roman was glad he was an ally. Then he turned back, the smile still there. Roman was even gladder Tristan wasn’t an enemy.
“Ready?”
“Y-yeah,” Roman answered.
They moved out, he and Jane going through the woods toward the back of the mansion’s property-line fence, Tristan and Abraham by the road.
“He’s kinda’ crazy,” she remarked in a whisper as the fence came into view.
Roman chuffed. “Yeah, no doubt, but he knows what he’s doing.”
The spotlights on the house were now out, presumably shut off by the owner. Roman paused just inside the tree line to observe before signaling they should keep going.
Jane spotted the gate, which was still standing open. However, Roman spotted a night crawler in the backyard, also moving toward the mansion. It was grunting and agitated. Then it took a sizable, decorative block from a retaining wall and sent it soaring through the rear patio doors.
“What the heck?” she whispered with the same shock he felt and stepped forward.
“No, Jane, wait.”
They held back a minute until it was gone, presumably through the broken glass door. Breaking the glass was one of the more advanced and physically coordinated skills he’d seen from them so far. Usually, they were a lot less cognitive and definitely never used reasoning skills or tools.
“This way,” he said, tugging her sleeve and slipping through the gate but staying in the darkest portion of the yard near the fence.
They circumvented the open yard and sprinted toward the same broken glass. Somewhere out front, gunfire erupted again.
“Crap,” she murmured. “Should we go that way?”
He paused a second, heard an engine rev, then a crash. Then he nodded. “Yeah, come on.”
He was mindful that the crawler could return to the yard, but Roman’s concern now was their friends. He only hoped his decision didn’t piss off Tristan that he was changing the plan.
When they came to the corner of the home, they squatted behind waist-high hedges and spied. Roman could see Abraham near the street behind the stone mailbox doing the same thing they were doing. Roman peeked more than once behind them and noticed that Jane did the same.
An expensive SUV was crashed into the entryway gates, and Tristan was shouting orders at whoever was driving it.
Her sharp inhale of breath let him know something was up, but before he could even get all the way turned, Jane fired off a round behind them. The infected man fell backward and hit the stucco house, leaving a red smear down the side of it.
“Good job,” he praised.
“Over there, Roman,” she said, pointing toward the garage.
There was a man lying facedown in the snow. That would have to be one of the brothers. The other one was likely in the SUV arguing with Tristan, or so it seemed. Finally, the driver’s side door opened, and the man got out. He was in pajamas and had a long dark ponytail and mustache.
They rushed forward with their guns raised as Tristan cuffed his hands behind his back and ushered him toward the house. He whistled for Abraham.
“Night crawler got in the house before we could,” Roman said and added, “Sorry. Then it snuck up on us, and Jane shot it.”
“No worries. Our friends were trying to make a hasty escape before we got to chat,” he said and shoved the man into the open garage bay.
When Abraham caught up, Tristan hit the button on the wall and made the door go back down.
“Find a light switch,” Tristan ordered, to which they fanned out. Jane found it first and turned it on. The garage illuminated, which felt way too bright for Roman’s eyes. Tristan dragged over a folding chair that was stacked against the wall with a matching table and three other chairs. He forced the man to sit.
“Anyone else in there?” he indicated toward the door to the house, to which the man shook his head. “Which one are you?”
He spat.
“Nice scar on your face, asshole,” Tristan said. “Looks like a girl probably bit you there.”
The man’s eyes widened almost ridiculously so. Tristan just chuckled. Roman assumed Tristan had knowledge of something they did not, something that Remmie girl told him.
“Right. She did, didn’t she? We know all about you, Jeff.”
“Uh…I’m not Jeff,” the man stammered. “I was just a guard here.”
Tristan sighed as if he were tired and annoyed and regarded Roman above the man’s head. “Why don’t you three take a walk? Check out the house. Be careful in case there’s any stragglers. See what we can salvage, if anything. Secure any open doors or windows and keep watch. Shitbird here and I are going to need some quality time alone.” Tristan took leather gloves out of his coat pocket and pulled them on.
“Got it,” Roman agreed and left with Jane and Abraham. They went through the attached garage into a pantry where he turned on just one switch so that their eyes could adjust. The windows were boarded, which was good.
The house was huge, so it took quite a while to scan it for more people. However, it was empty except for the man who kept crying out in pain in the garage. Roman didn’t care. He was a sick person. His time would end here tonight, of that he was sure, but Jeff deserved it for what he’d done to innocent young girls.
“Hey, wow,” Abraham said in the basement in the last room to be checked. “Guys! Check this out.”
Roman and Jane joined him from the theater room. Abraham was in a pantry full of bulk food and supply items like toilet paper and toiletries, in general. The room wasn’t particularly large, but there were shelving units and three aisles of supplies spanning about ten feet each. Every shelf was stocked full of food, non-perishables, and paper goods, some overflowing onto the floor.
“Where do you think they got all this?” Abraham asked.
Roman said, “We probably don’t want to know, but let’s not let it go to waste. I wonder if that SUV is still driveable.”
“I think so. Tristan made that man turn it off, so it was still running.”
“I’m going up to see and also to talk to Tristan. Abraham, why don’t you and Jane find something to block the back door so no more crawlers come through the broken glass.”
“Yeah, we can do that,” Jane said. “But, Roman, maybe we should just haul this all upstairs and give him a chance to do…stuff.”
“True,” he agreed with a grimace.
He and Abraham went upstairs, carried a long dining room table over to the broken patio door, and laid it on its side there. Then they stacked the matching eight chairs against it. At least it would make quite a lot of noise if a night crawler came through it. Then they carried load after load until Abraham said they should relay it a third of the way each and put Jane on the top floor so she didn’t have as much going up and down the stairs. He didn’t like them working on something with nobody watching their backs, especially Jane’s, but at least the makeshift barrier at the patio door would cause enough noise to get through it all that he and Abraham could join her in a moment’s notice.
The house was warm, the lights worked, which they turned on, at least enough to see what they were doing, and he didn’t see or hear a generator running. They’d gotten around to boarding up quite a few of the windows, too, so Jeff’s team was pr
obably tasked with that. Some windows were already covered in wrought iron grates, which Roman figured was more of an architectural esthetic than anything else. He was left to speculate why the electricity still worked when most of the county seemed out. Maybe they were on a different grid.
Every once in awhile, they’d hear Tristan raise his voice or the man cry. Roman even paused, feigning the need to use the bathroom, and went to check on the situation. He cracked the door to the garage open and peeked. Tristan’s hands were covered in rags that were blood-soaked, and the man’s left eye was swollen shut. When he looked up and noticed Roman, he pleaded to be let free. Tristan just lifted his chin an inch, and Roman retreated without saying a word. He was glad they had such an ally. Roman really wasn’t sure if he could do that to a person. Tristan seemed calm and capable, at home even, in this task.
They searched each room and took other supplies like soap, shampoo, and more toilet paper. Jane found large reusable shopping bags in the kitchen under the sink, and they loaded as much as they could into them. He didn’t want to bother Tristan again, so he opened the front door, waited and listened, then dashed to the SUV. Sure enough, it fired right up despite the bent back bumper and broken taillight. Carefully, he maneuvered and backed it up to the front porch stoop, and he and the others loaded their loot into it after laying down the seats in the back.
Then it was wait time. The torture of the man in the other room seemed to drag on for hours. When they were done loading it all, they were all starving, so they ate granola bars and drank children’s juice boxes they’d found earlier. Time seemed to drag, and the sun finally began to rise in that slow, hesitant way. Jane dug out frozen breakfast items in the freezer and microwaved them each one. It tasted great, scrambled eggs, potatoes and sausage. It felt odd to have such a full belly. They sat in the living room overlooking the front yard since the glass patio door was broken and letting in cold air. They chatted with Abraham about his family. Roman sat in the chair that gave him the advantage of keeping an eye on that door. One night crawler coming through it in one day was enough.
“Hey,” Tristan said, startling them.
“Is he talking?” Jane asked first, standing at the same time.
He nodded, took a towel from the kitchen drawer behind him, and wiped his sweaty face. Then he attempted to wipe off his hands.
“The water is working if you want to clean up,” Jane offered, to which he nodded and went into the kitchen. They followed.
“I got it. I know where they are,” he said as he lathered up. “We’ll have to go later today.”
“We could go now,” Roman suggested.
“I need to go home first,” he told them.
Abraham said, “Are you sure? We’re already out. We even ate their food. We’re wired.”
“I was shot, so I’m gonna need some stitches before we go back out.”
Roman felt the blood drain from his face.
People thought because he was on the spectrum that it meant he was stupid. Some doctors said it was Autism, others Asperger’s. His mother didn’t want to hear their diagnoses and stopped taking him. Kids at school had made fun of him. He was glad school was done forever. His father hadn’t liked him, had been embarrassed by him, although his mother had tried to convince him it wasn’t true. He’d seen it, though. He knew what his father thought of him. And then he left them one day right before his seventh birthday and never came back. He hadn’t minded, though. He still had his mother, which was all he needed. Now, she needed him.
She was hurt, badly hurt. The safe zones hadn’t worked out, so they had struck out on their own. Staying in empty apartment buildings or even stores, they’d managed. But one morning, they’d gone out to look for food, and she’d fallen down a flight of snow-covered, slippery cement stairs. He was pretty sure her ankle was broken. He’d used his phone to look up how to treat a broken ankle bone and had foraged for the supplies to make her a cast. It was set perfectly, too. But that meant she couldn’t go out anymore. It was up to him to take care of them.
He didn’t have his license yet since he wasn’t quite fifteen, but he was managing anyway. Anything mechanical always came easy to him. Talking to people, making new friends, or any at all- not so much. They were driving south. He’d heard people in a grocery store when this all started talking about how it would be safer “out in the boonies,” so he’d searched “boonies near me” and came up with a destination: Carroll County. Surely, there’d be an abandoned boonies farm for him and his mother to settle. She’d taken care of him his whole life. Now, it was her turn to be taken care of.
Chapter Twenty-five
Wren
“Shit, I’m gonna puke,” she remarked as Alex did his best to sew a patch of Tristan’s skin back together. It was so disgusting.
“Twice in the same twenty-four-hour period?” Elijah joked, trying to keep things light. Then he said over his shoulder as he went back to the kitchen, “You’re not very tough.”
The group had shown up at dawn with the surly soldier seeping blood out of his side.
She sent Elijah a nasty look and held the flashlight on the wound, her only job in this.
“I can do that if you want,” Jane offered, to which she nodded and left the dining room where Tristan was lying on their table while Alex worked on him.
“I’ll get everyone some food,” she offered and went to the kitchen where Roman and Elijah had convened and were talking and drinking coffee.
“No, man,” Roman said. “I’m good. I’m ready. I’ll go with you guys. We can send Jane and Tristan home and get going as soon as you’re ready.”
“Okay, yeah, that’ll work.”
“Go where?” she asked them.
“To raid the semi-trucks and wrecked cars Alex and Tristan found yesterday,” Elijah told her.
“I’m in,” she said.
“You sure?” Roman asked and sipped from his steaming mug.
“Yeah,” she returned in a testy tone. “I’m sure. I just don’t like blood. Apparently.” Which was something she hadn’t known until yesterday with that deer.
“That’s no big deal,” Elijah told her and reached out to touch her forearm. “You have other skills that are more valuable to staying alive than gutting deer and sewing people back together, although I still think we should’ve run him up to the hospital.”
Roman shook his head. “No, Tristan would still kick our asses, even shot. Besides, your bro’ said the bullet went straight through the fatty tissue.”
Elijah looked skeptical. “Yeah, right. I don’t think he has any fat on him. But…man, I don’t know. What if it hit an organ?”
“It didn’t penetrate that far in,” Wren said. “It was basically slightly more than a graze. He said a .22 round.”
“Yeah, I guess you’d know more about this stuff than me,” Elijah said.
That comment caught Roman’s interest, and he was already an overly curious boy, in her opinion.
“What’s that mean?” he asked.
“Nothin’,” Elijah said quickly, too quickly.
“I was thinking about some places up in the city that we were going to hit and didn’t get time to,” Wren redirected. She glanced at Roman and watched his mouth twitch at one corner as if he knew she was dodging him and found it humorous. “Anyway, that rec center, the school, lots of places our group planned on hitting but ran out of time before we had to leave.”
“I think anything that wasn’t already raided, has been by now,” Roman said and took a sip of his steaming coffee.
“We just left up there. A lot of places still had stuff,” Elijah told him.
“We could think about it,” he said. “This coffee’s great, man, thanks.”
“Want some breakfast before we go?” Elijah offered.
“We have eggs,” she suggested. “Avery sent us home with a few dozen the other day.”
Elijah immediately said, “You know I’m always down to eat. We could throw some of the deer meat in
, scramble it together.”
“Sure,” she agreed, although that sounded gross.
“Abraham, Jane, and I ate at that guy’s house. There was a lot of food and stuff. Plus, the electric was working.”
“Really?” Wren asked. “Wasn’t here.”
He just shrugged as if he didn’t know, either.
Elijah helped while Roman checked on the patient. By the time she had a dozen eggs scrambled up with tiny pieces of deer meat and diced canned potatoes, Elijah had stoked the fire in the basement and was filling a pitcher with cold well water for everyone.
“I think I got it all cleaned in there,” Jane said. “Abraham helped. Tristan’s in the bathroom cleaning up, too.”
“Good thing the power’s back on this morning,” Elijah remarked.
They ate a quick breakfast, and Tristan gave the orders for the day as he ate and also drank a coffee. It wasn’t quite seven a.m. yet, so she hoped the streets were still empty. Most people didn’t come out from dusk until dawn, or even a little after the sun had come up. Everyone lived in fear now of what the night shrouded in shadowy corners.
“Be careful out there,” Tristan warned. “Remember, people like that asshole last night and his type are out there among the sick people. Some of his group left. That doesn’t mean they suddenly found Jesus or anything. Anyone approaches? Assume they mean you harm, mean to rob you, or mean to kill you. Don’t take any chances. Work together.”
“Yes, sir,” Roman said.
“I’d feel better if I was going with you,” Alex said.
His brother responded, “I’m fine. We’ll be careful. There’s just too much to do around here to get us more prepared for when the electric goes out like it does. That’s the stuff I can’t do.”
“I know,” his brother said with a concerned expression.
Although Wren didn’t like Alex very well, she did appreciate how much he loved Elijah and how much he’d sacrificed for his little brother. She also appreciated his skills, especially from being in the military.