by Ann Christy
The In-Betweener
Book One of the Between Life and Death Trilogy
by Ann Christy
Copyright © 2015 by Ann Christy
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, nor may it be stored in a database or private retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author, with the exception of brief quotations included in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses as permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, and events appearing or described in this work are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events, is purely coincidental and the product of a fevered imagination.
Dedication
For Gabe,
You are the one I would
want on my side
during the zombie apocalypse.
Totally.
Works by Ann Christy
The Silo 49 Series
Silo 49: Going Dark
Silo 49: Deep Dark
Silo 49: Dark Till Dawn
Silo 49: Flying Season for the Mis-Recorded
Novels
Strikers
The In-Betweener
Short Works
Yankari
Anthologies with Stories by Ann Christy
Wool Gathering: A Charity Anthology
Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel
The Robot Chronicles
One Month Ago - Recon
“Did you find food?” Veronica asks, her hands clutching at her belly.
It’s either an unconscious expression of hunger or simple anxiety, but Sam would bet it’s hunger. It’s been two days since any of them had a full belly.
Jon, his solemn, two-year-old face drawn and pinched, tucks himself into the girl’s side. As always, he is quiet—far too quiet for a child his age—but Sam can read the hunger etched there even without words.
Sam hands her the sack he’s holding. It’s woefully light, but he smiles anyway and says, “Enough for a few days.”
His smile is wide and bright, the smile of someone who doesn’t want anyone around him to be sad, but his eyes carry hints of the worry he keeps stuffed inside. Five faces watch him carefully, five young faces he loves.
Ranging in age from two-year-old Jon to the almost-grown Veronica, they watch without judgment, only hope. Sam wants nothing more than to have come home with too much food to carry, but it’s just not there to find anymore. He schools his expression in a way he hopes will appear as if there is food aplenty, just waiting to be found. They can’t know how bad it still is outside these safe walls. He won’t allow hope to be taken from them, too.
It’s almost all they have left.
Veronica opens the sack with eager hands and then gasps at the contents. Rice fills the bottom and packets of dry soup mix poke out of the top of the grains. “Can I cook it?” she asks, a little too eagerly.
“Of course! Let’s chow,” Sam answers, ruffling her hair.
Jeremy, the studious one, folds his book to his chest like a small professor disturbed during non-office hours. He clears his throat to get Sam’s attention.
Sam picks up Piper and she throws her arms around his neck. The simple pleasure she takes in giving and receiving affection is one of the only truly uncomplicated things in their lives.
“Yeah, Jeremy,” Sam says, and tickles Piper under her chin. Her eyes carry the typical cant of a Down’s syndrome child, and her words are sometimes a little blurry, but she’s always the bright light in his day and she’s managing things surprisingly well.
“Uh, did you see her?” Jeremy asks.
Shooting a glance Jeremy’s way to let him know that the time to talk about that would come later, he relents at the disappointed look on the boy’s face and gives him a single, tiny nod. That seems to be enough for Jeremy, because he grins and settles back down by the sliding glass door. The light streams through the thin sheet hung there and he can see to read. He has his books and favorite blankets there, almost like a nest that proclaims the area is his territory.
Penny, three years old and his little angel, bangs her blocks together and then knocks over the tower that she and Veronica had been building in the center of the main room. She laughs a high, pealing laugh and Sam puts Piper down to rush over to the spot where Penny is playing.
“Shh, baby girl. Remember the quiet rules?”
She hands him a blue block and puts her finger to her lips, her little-girl smile breaking out behind the stubby, dirty finger.
After the children are settled once more, the excitement of his return now passed, Sam goes to the kitchen to explain to Veronica what she must have already seen for herself. She’s bent over a cookie sheet and picking debris out of the grains of rice.
She looks up at his entrance and says, “That bad, huh?”
At fifteen, Veronica is nearly an adult. After two years during which she lost her family, found a new family in Sam and the other children, and become adept at hiding in silence, she is not easily fooled. He nods. She sighs, shakes her head and bends back to her task.
“Grab another cookie sheet and help if you want.”
Sam grins at her bowed head. Coming from anyone else, those words might sound like there was some option involved in the statement. When said by Veronica, he understands it for what it is.
If you’ve got time to stand there, you’ve got time to sort rice.
Jeremy’s shadow falls between their bowed heads and the cookie sheets a few minutes later. It’s no mystery to Sam what’s on Jeremy’s mind. The kid wants to talk about the strange girl at the warehouse. A girl who might be dangerous or who might be their salvation.
Jeremy, though only twelve, was on his own outside longer than Veronica and is at least as experienced in this new world as the teenager, if not more. But he is only twelve and it’s hard for Sam to decide how much he should share. How much uncertainty? How much fear? How much hope?
It seems to Sam he's always walking a fine line when discussing their situation. Sure, Veronica and Jeremy are old enough to have a voice in decisions. But he also wants to spare them whatever he can of the horrors waiting just outside their door. Most of the time, he winds up sharing more than he feels he should.
The truth—if Sam is honest with himself—is that he feels even less prepared for this world than he supposes these two kids must be. At twenty-four, he had lived in his first apartment alone (this apartment). He’d been in the second year of his first job (teaching at Piper’s school). His biggest worry had been how to manage his laundry (once his mom stopped doing it for him). Now, he has five kids in a world in which there is nothing except deadheads and the as-yet-not-quite-dead afflicted. And the six of them. And now, the girl at the warehouse.
“So, you saw her?” Jeremy asks without preamble.
Picking out something that looks suspiciously like a mouse turd from the rice, Sam flicks it into the waste bucket between him and Veronica. Without looking up, he says, “I did. She’s still there. I’m pretty sure she’s living there alone.”
“Hmm,” Jeremy hmms. He isn’t satisfied. That little hmm says it all.
Putting aside the tray, Sam sighs and says, “Okay. I’m pretty sure she lives alone and I’m pretty sure that warehouse has food in it because she looks good.”
Veronica gives him a sidelong glance, the barest hint of a sly smile on her face. “Good, huh?”
“Gah, you’re disgusting. I mean she looks well fed.”
“Do you think it’s safe to talk to her?” Jeremy asks. The crease between his eyes is so constant that he’s getting a permanent line there. He’s had more bad experiences with people—the living kind—since the world went to crap than the rest of them put together. He’s desperate for safety, yet desperately afraid of meeting new people. And meeting more people is the only path to the safety Jeremy craves—which sort of puts them all in a bind.
Sam considers the question. Do we stay quiet and keep to ourselves while we starve, or make contact with new people who might turn on us and kill us? What a choice.
During this last trip, he’d watched her for a full day and stayed close enough to observe the general area all night. He wanted to get all the information he could on this trip, because he intended it to be the last one. The next time he came to the warehouses where the girl lived, he would be bringing the kids with him. So, it was worth the long time away from the kids to watch her and be sure about her. With binoculars his only tool, and settled in the dubious comfort of a tree, he’d worried about the kids through the night. What he saw had confused him. He’d watched her plenty of times before and thought he had her figured out. But when evening came, she did something that threw him for a loop. Now, he wasn’t so sure about her.
She’d gone about her day in the exact same way she’d gone about her days when he watched her before. Her routine was consistent, which actually wasn’t a good thing. Developing habits wasn’t wise. If he could predict her routine, then people with less benign motives that came upon her could do the same.
Habits aside, the girl was an enigma to him. The way she did things was so clinical, as if it were nothing more than another day doing a job, like accounting or some other profession that didn’t involve smashing up the unquiet dead. Every morning, rain or shine, she walked her perimeter and poked the heck out of the deadheads on her fence, looping wire over their necks and gesticulating extravagantly as she spoke to them.
Sometimes she whistled a tune while she did it.
Then, without fail, she went outside the fence and bashed all the deadheads in the brains over and over until they had no heads at all. And she whistled then, too. Or sang. Or talked to the birds.
But yesterday, well, that had been a little different. In the evening, before the sun had fully set, at the exact moment the sky shifted to an amazing pink and orange blaze, she had dragged out a blanket-wrapped figure. She’d been crying—he could see that much through his binoculars—her oddly off-kilter eye red, swollen, and wandering, the scar on her head a vivid white under her black ponytail. She’d cried the whole way outside the fence to the place where she dumped the bodies of all the deadheads.
Then she’d unwrapped the blanket and Sam had trained his glasses on the body, thinking it might be another person, but it had been a deadhead more shriveled than any he’d seen. It looked like a human raisin. The head was smashed to a pulp, so that was no help in figuring out anything more about the deadhead, but the girl had hugged the deadhead. Really hugged it. She’d wept and straightened its clothes and talked to it, though Sam couldn’t hear her words from his spot in the trees.
But despite all the emotional outpouring, in the end, as the light faded, she’d left it there and gone back inside her fence to her warehouse.
After that strange sight, Sam hadn’t felt as sure about her. Up to that point, she’d seemed weird, but anyone who’d survived to this point had become a little odd. It was understandable. He was weird in his way, too. They all were. But, after that scene of hers, with her mummy-like deader and her tears, what did he think of her now? Those were more the actions of someone gone well past odd and directly into crazy territory.
So, Sam doesn’t know how he should answer Jeremy’s question at all. Is it safe to approach her? Do they have the leisure any longer to worry whether it is or isn’t entirely safe? Sam looks at the mouse droppings and grit mixed in with the small bit of rice he was able to gather from the bottom of a long-since-looted cabinet.
No, their options are dwindling with each day that passes. So, he decides to go with the truth.
“I have no idea if it’s safe or not. But at this point, I don’t think we have a choice. This area is picked clean and we’ve got to get someplace where we can eat,” Sam says.
“And grow food,” Veronica adds.
“Yeah, and that, too.”
“So, we go?” Jeremy asks, his fingers working at the book, displaying his nervousness in spite of his calm voice.
“Soon,” Sam says, and goes back to picking mouse turds out of their rice.
Today - Emily
The report of a gun is one of my favorite sounds. It’s so powerful, so dangerous, yet perversely, it’s also the sound of safety. I figured that in the unlikely event the world really did end, I’d at least have that. I could shoot all day long, make all the biggest, blasting shotgun sounds I wanted.
It turns out that I don’t even get that. Before this freaking mess, I never feared firing a gun. It was a hobby, something my mother thought I might enjoy, something where I had all the control. Now? No way. The noise draws them like bees to a fresh patch of clover on a spring morning. Hearing is almost the last thing that goes, those little mechanical vibrations of tiny bones in the ears lasting longer than eyes that go gooey or dry out into little raisins.
Once the last sense goes, they mostly just stand around until they feel the vibration of something passing close by. Some wander, reaching out to touch things as they pass, tasting everything they touch. Without their senses, they have a hard time finding metal, not to mention animals. Animals, including humans, offer the best source of the nutrients they need. Most deaders are easy to get past now. Just walk quietly and don’t roll a heavy wagon or anything.
I used to see overturned wagons from time to time, back when we still left the complex. I would have liked to tell people, but really, people are more dangerous than the deaders. And my mom wouldn’t even entertain the notion of contacting other survivors. I painted warnings on a couple of signs, but that’s as far as she’d let me go.
Nowadays, hidden as I am out here, I don’t see people anymore and haven’t in months. But if I did, I wouldn’t tell them. I want to remain hidden because I’m alone and that has changed my views on the doing of neighborly deeds.
These days, I love silent weapons. Bows—particularly crossbows that I can actually draw—regular bows, big knives…you name it. I even had a bunch of those pistol crossbows for a while, but I ran out of bolts for them and left them behind when we abandoned the old law offices where we stayed for a long while. I liked the law offices. First off, no one loots a law office, and second, the couches and chairs were awesome for sleeping in.
My current favorites in the weapons department are handles—broom handles, rake handles, anything like that—with knives strapped to them using hose clamps. Lots of hose clamps. The big ones. I call these contraptions my bayonets. World War I redux. Total trench warfare, only without trenches.
I like silencers quite a lot, too, but they aren’t perfect. The sound they make isn’t a sweet little thut like in the movies, just a more muffled sort of roar. But finding what I need to make them is getting harder and harder. Plastic bottles outside the complex crumble in my hands after two years in the elements and most steel wool was cleaned out of stores a long time ago by people who must have had the same idea I did.
In my warehouse, there is exactly zero steel wool, but bottles I’ve got plenty of. And I’m no longer tempted by substitutions. They rarely work like the movies suggested they would. Forget using potatoes. What a mess that is! And anyway, if I had potatoes I’d eat them. And pillows? Yeah, they catch fire, which is super inconvenient. And I don’t even want to talk about what happened when I used the cotton batting left over in the sachet factory across from my home warehouse. Think floral-scented flames, burning in pretty colors that just seem wrong for fire, and you’ll start to
get the idea.
Before we got here—the land of candy bars and plastic-bottled energy drinks—I scrounged for anything I could use to shoot more quietly at greater range than I could with a bow. I’m a shooter and my bow skills are ones I’ve picked up since all this happened. Without my mom and a training manual we found at the place where we got our first bows, I wouldn’t even have any bow skills at all. It’s strange to think this, but when we were first trying to learn how to use them, we had fun. Not having an arrow go up or to the side or simply fall down was a reason for high-fives and smiles. But quietly.
Crossbows are much easier. I like those. I still don’t like shooting things that look like people, though.
The worst part is that they aren’t all deaders. Deaders are a little easier to deal with. They look dead. They are clearly not there anymore, not thinking or really human. It’s the in-betweeners that bother the crap out of me.
Maybe they’re brain-dead and truly not themselves—not human—anymore, but their eyes are bright and moving, still blue or brown or green, and they focus when they see something. They still move with something like human grace, still seek something like shelter when they are cold or shade when they are hot. They avoid danger and run when I start firing arrows or bolts in their direction. And they scream when they get hit.
Sometimes, the in-betweeners make me cry.
Enough of that. Enough thinking. I can’t go down that well. That’s the way I think of it. When I start dwelling on things, it feels like I’m going down a well and the circle of light at the top gets smaller and smaller until it’s like I won’t be able to climb back out. I know it’s really depression and if there’s a shrink left in this world, I’m pretty sure that shrink would tell me I have every reason to be depressed. Alas, depression does not help with survival, so I don’t have time for it.
I need to make a supply run to the other buildings and do my daily rounds, so I shrug on my best scavenged backpack and grab another one to fit over my front. I can’t work a bow—or a crossbow or anything else—with a full backpack hanging off my chest, so I put that one on last, with the straps on top, so that I can drop it quickly should the need arise. I don’t expect trouble, but I’m always ready for it should it arrive. My head is full of aches and fog this morning, so I pop a couple of my dwindling supply of ibuprofen before going out into the light.