by Amy Cross
"Go on!" Patricia continues, grinning. "Get through to the pantry and just say hi, thank him for letting you stay, and tell him food's on the table. He won't say much, but he'll probably appreciate it, deep down. And then, just come back through. You'll still be in one piece, I promise."
"If he doesn't get you first," Bridger says with a smile.
"Shut up," Patricia says, turning to him.
"What?" he replies, acting shocked. "It's true!" He turns to me. "I don't mean to scare you too much, but Toad's a bit of a monster. I mean, why else do you think we call him Toad? If the world was normal, there's no way any of us would be out here with him, but right now he's pretty useful. He's the kind of guy who really should just be alone. Totally, completely alone forever. He knows it, too. He doesn't like having people around. That's why he spends so long out foraging each day. The guy barely even talks to any of us."
"It's true," Erikson says from the other end of the table. "He's always been a bit odd. I'm not sure, but I think maybe there's something a bit loose in his head, if you know what I mean. He's not quite wired properly. I used to think maybe he was, like, partially autistic or something like that, but now I think it's something else. I don't know, though." He smiles. "I'm sorry, I guess I'm probably scaring you. There's no reason to be nervous. He's actually a real teddy bear."
"Go on," Patricia says, leaning over and nudging my elbow. "Don't let these ungrateful assholes put you off. Just go and introduce yourself."
Smiling awkwardly, I get to my feet. The floorboards creak as I walk around the table, and I can tell that everyone's watching me. I don't know exactly what's wrong with this Toad guy, but it's as if the others are setting me up for some big fall. I reach the door and look out into the gloomy hallway, and I can hear someone moving about in the pantry. Glancing back into the room, I see that the others are all still watching me, and with a sigh I turn and start walking along the hallway, hyper-aware that my every step is causing the wooden floor to creak and groan. Eventually, I reach the door that leads into the pantry, and I spot a figure in the shadows at the far end of the room, working on the contents of some kind of large bag. In this light, it's hard to make out much detail, and I feel as if I'm in danger of interrupting some private moment. Still, I figure I have to at least introduce myself.
"Hi," I say eventually.
He pauses for a moment, but he doesn't turn to me, and he doesn't say anything. After a few seconds, he gets back to work.
"I'm Elizabeth," I continue, trying not to sound scared. "Elizabeth Marter. I arrived earlier with Erikson and Shauna. I..." I pause, watching as Toad pulls some kind of dead animal from the bag and sets it on a nearby table. "I just wanted to thank you," I add, "for letting me stay."
He pulls another dead animal from his bag.
"The food was really nice," I say after a moment. "The others said to tell you that there's some waiting for you."
He pulls out a third dead animal.
"Okay," I continue eventually. "I don't want to disturb you, so -"
Before I can finish, Toad turns and carries his bag over to a nearby table, and finally I get a proper look at him. To my surprise, I see that he's young, maybe late twenties at most, and although he's covered in dirt and grime, and despite the fact that his dark hair is matted and unruly, there's something about him that immediately makes me feel as if I've been punched in the gut. His dark eyes glance at me briefly before he starts pulling some mushrooms out of his cloth bag and setting them in a bowl. As I watch him work, I can't help but notice that he seems quietly confident, and I stare at his hands as they start sorting through the mushrooms. Whereas everyone else here at the farmhouse seems out of place, this guy appears to be in his element, as if he belongs here.
"You're Toad, right?" I ask after a moment, worried that maybe I've made a mistake.
He glances at me for a moment, before getting on with his work, and it's clear that this is definitely the right guy.
"Do you mind if I ask..." I pause. "What's your real name?"
With the mushrooms sorted into two bowls, he takes the bag over to a nearby sink and finally he empties out a tumble of what appear to be blueberries. I already feel as if maybe I've made a mistake and insulted him, so I'm not sure what to do next. I guess I should just turn around and go back through to the others.
"You can come with me tomorrow," he says suddenly, his voice sounding dark and smoky.
I stare at him, worried that maybe I just imagined that sentence.
"You need to help out," he adds, sorting through some jars from a nearby cupboard instead of looking at me. "If you come with me, you can help carry, and maybe you'll learn something. No offense, but you don't strike me as someone who's already brimming with transferable skills. We need to get you up to speed as fast as possible."
I open my mouth to reply, but I'm not sure what to say.
"Or you can stay here and learn to shoot," he adds.
"I'll come with you," I tell him.
"Be out front at sunrise," he continues. "Should be about 7am." With that, he starts cleaning out some jars, and after a couple of minutes I realize that the conversation is over. Quietly, feeling a little stunned, I turn and head out of the room. I can hear the others talking and laughing in the kitchen at the other end of the house, and I guess I should go back and join them. Still, I can't help thinking about tomorrow, and about the idea of going out into the wilderness with this Toad guy. I pause for a moment, loitering in the hallway as I try to get my thoughts together, and then finally I take a deep breath and decide that tomorrow's another day and I'll deal with things as they come. Bracing myself for the inevitable jokes, I eventually, reluctantly, go back into the kitchen to join the others.
Chapter Eight
Missouri
"You're weak, boy," the guy says, watching as I continue to haul Joe's body across the forest floor. "A man shouldn't kill another man if he hasn't got the strength to haul the corpse to a proper grave. Then again, I don't suppose you're a man at all, are you? Not really. The modern world breeds infants and children, not proper men."
I want to turn and bash the bastard's head against a tree, but I manage to hold off. With that gun pointed at me, he'd have no trouble picking me off before I got near him, and I'm not going to give him the satisfaction of thinking God wanted me dead. For now, I just need to focus on the task at hand, which means getting Joe into the grave I spent five hours digging. So far, having tucked the tarpaulin around Joe's ankles, I've managed to get him this far without having to see his actual body. I guess it's probably a good idea to bury him, anyway; the last thing I want is for wild animals to start picking him apart.
"You ready?" the guy asks, sounding amused by the whole situation.
"There's not much to be ready for," I reply, as I reach the graveside and prepare to push Joe's body down into the pit. I guess there's not much point standing on ceremony, but I still feel as if I should do or say something to mark the moment. In the old days, there would've been a proper funeral, but over the past week it's seemed as if people are just dying and being left where they fell. No more funerals. No more priests or proper burials.
"Wait!" the guy calls out.
Sighing, I turn to him.
"It's not that simple, boy," he continues. "You have to look upon the truth of what you did. You have to be a man and face up to your responsibility." He pauses. "When I was a kid, I saw plenty of stuff that'd make your stomach churn. Turned me into the man I am today. So you're gonna pull that tarpaulin aside and take a proper look. That's what you're gonna do, whether you like it or not." He raises the gun, as if to remind me that he's got me in his sights. "Then, and only then, are you gonna bury your brother."
"No," I say, feeling a cold shiver pass through my body. "I'm not looking at him."
"You wanna join him in the grave?"
Turning back to face Joe's body, I realize that I've got no choice. I take a deep breath, before reaching down and pulling the tarpaulin
aside. When I finally see his face, shattered by the bullet I fired straight between his eyes, I immediately feel blank, before a strange kind of white anger starts to rise through my body. I want to rip the world apart for putting me in a position where I had to shoot my own brother. I stare at his broken skin and at the fragments of bone that are sticking out from beneath the flesh. His eyes, dead and unblinking, are looking straight back at me, and I can't help wondering if, at the last moment, he understood that I was sparing him from any further pain. I hope so. I hope he knew, right at the end, that I was a good brother.
"Okay," the guy calls out. "Let's get this show on the road."
"Give me a minute," I reply, unable to stop staring at Joe's broken face.
"It's too late for regrets," the guy continues. "I'm just making you look at the consequences of what you've done. If that's really your brother, the only reason he's dead is because you put a gun in his face and pulled the trigger. To my way of thinking, that's a sin. Only God gets to decide when and how someone dies. Maybe God directed you and made you his agent, but somehow I think this was caused by your own foolishness. Still, at least I know that God witnessed what you did, so he'll undoubtedly deal with you when the time comes. It's going to get dark soon, though, so we need to get back to the house. Finish this mess up!"
I take a deep breath, refusing to answer.
"I said finish this mess up!" he shouts. "Or do I have to put a bullet in the back of your head and send you down there with your brother? Is that how you want to go?"
Reaching down, I grab Joe's shoulder and roll him into the pit. I watch as his body tumbles down to the soil deep below, and then I stand and stare for a moment. This is the last time I'm ever going to see him. All my life, Joe's been around, often bugging me but always a part of the world. Sure, he could be a total jerk, and there were times lately when I really came to hate him, but it's hard to believe that this is the end. I wish I could go back in time just a week and fix things, and make it so that he didn't have to die. If we'd never gone to Scottsville, and if we'd never met Clyde, things would have been different. Together, we might have stood a chance. As it stands, I have no idea where I'm going to go, even if I manage to get away from this gun-toting madman.
"That's enough standing around," the guy says after a moment. "Fill the grave back in. It'll be dark soon."
Without saying a word, I get to work. Every shovel's worth of dirt feels like it's weighed down, and at first I'm not even sure that I can finish the job. Eventually, however, I've managed to get most of the dirt back into the hole, and I'm left standing next to Joe's final resting place.
"I need to put a marker here," I say. "Something so that people know where he's buried."
"Forget it," the guy replies, "no-one cares. Get back to the house."
"There has to be a marker," I say, turning to him. "It's only right. I'll get some wood and make a cross."
"Waste of energy," the guy says. "Get walking."
"But -"
"Jesus Christ, kid," the guy continues, "are you gonna argue about every little decision? I'm the one holding the gun, so I'm the one who gets to say what happens, okay? It's called democracy, and you need to get used to it. One gun, one vote. It'd be a shame to kill you when a perfectly good grave's just been filled in, but I won't hold back. You're only useful to me if you keep your mouth shut and stop arguing. In case you didn't notice, I was getting on just fine before you showed up, so I can easily go back to how things used to be." He pauses. "Come on. Let's get going."
The journey back to the house is slow, especially since the chains around my ankles are only nine or ten inches long, preventing me from taking anything long than baby steps. I can't help looking over my shoulder every now and then, to check whether the guy still has his gun pointed at me, but of course he's far too wily to let his guard down, even for a second. It's pretty clear that I'm going to have to wait a while before I get a chance to make a break, but I'm determined to get the hell out of here. There's no way I'm going to let this bastard think that he's won. Even if it's the last thing I ever do, I'm going to make him regret the day he started treating me like this.
"Here," the guy says as we get into the kitchen. He grabs some stale bread and tosses it at me. "That's your dinner. There's a cup by the sink. Fill it with water and take it downstairs with you, and make sure you get some sleep. You'll be working again in the morning."
Sighing, I do as I'm told before heading down to the dark, fusty-smelling basement. I turn and watch as the door is slammed shut, and I hear him turning the key in the lock. Standing alone down here, I realize that I can't take this much longer. Bread isn't going to keep me going, so I figure the old man is planning to work me until I drop dead. As I listen to the sound of his footsteps in the room directly above the basement, I decide that there's no way I can wait a week to get out of here. I don't know how I'm going to do it yet, but I have to find a way out of here as soon as possible. Taking a deep breath, I figure I'm going to have to escape tomorrow. Either that, or I'll die trying.
Epilogue
The cough gets worse on the second day. Much worse.
Standing by the window, Joseph looks out at the playground near his apartment. It's getting late, but there are still some children playing on the swings. As he continues to cough, Joseph can't stop watching the children, wondering what they might have grown up to become. Politicians? Civic leaders? Inventors? Criminals? He figures they'd probably be a random mix, but there's a part of him that regrets taking any their chance to find out for themselves. Watching them, he realizes that they'll never be anything more than a group of children. They'll never grow up and have their own families. They'll never get old. In a way, they'll be frozen in time. He's never thought about the children before, but now he realizes that he's doomed them all.
He pauses to cough again.
When he was a child, Joseph had plenty of friends. The problem was that they were all idiots, at least as far as he was concerned. He used to play with them only because he knew it was expected of him, and because he didn't want to let anyone know that he hated other people. Even at a young age, he had a strong streak of self-preservation, and he was fully aware that the slightest hint of weirdness would most likely lead to him being booked in for counseling sessions. He'd known a boy named Bobby who, after going to various sessions, had been pulled from school and sent off to some special academy for 'troubled' children. Joseph most certainly didn't want to meet the same fate, so he'd learned to be a chameleon and blend in. For many years now, it had been a successful strategy.
The only problem, in the old days, was his family. There weren't many of them, but they definitely seemed to suspect that something was wrong with him, even if they never came right out and said anything. He'd notice them occasionally, glancing at him as if they expected him to be doing something strange or unusual. Over the years, these moments had merely reinforced Joseph's belief that he was 'weird' and 'special'. He'd tried to keep out of their way as much as possible, even though he knew that this, in itself, probably reinforced their suspicions. Eventually, he just gave up caring what they thought, and he accepted that he and his family would never get along. Now, on the brink of his greatest victory, he pauses to imagine what they'd all think if they could see him now, if they knew that he would be the man who'd bring the world to its knees and then force it to be reborn in a powerful new form.
Coughing again, he looks at his hand and sees a few specks of blood. He'd never expected to be affected like this, but he's still sure that the virus won't kill him. After all, viruses don't tend to cannibalize their own kind. He figures the virus is adapting and learning, and that it'll take a little while before it recognizes its master. In a day or two, his symptoms will clear up, just as everyone else is getting worse and worse, and that's how he'll finally be certain that his plan has worked. He's already looking forward to the moment of victory, and he knows it'll taste all the sweeter if it comes after a period of suffering. Letti
ng out another cough, he can't help but laugh as he thinks of the virus spreading across the world, carrying its unique genetic make-up everywhere it goes. Never before, in the history of mankind, has such an empire been built; never before, he reasons, has one man been in control of such a powerful army. Most other would-be rulers tried to gather men to fight for them; Joseph, on the other hand, came up with a much better idea, and he's seeing the fruits of his work right now. They're everywhere.
He watches as the children turn and head inside. He hopes that their last night of life will be something particularly enjoyable, although he figures that they'll just waste their time with video games and other pointless activities. He knows, deep down, that while he might enjoy pretending that these children would grow up to be something great, the reality is that they'd most likely drift through life on a cloud of distaste and boredom. Although he's keen not to award himself too many accolades, he can't help but feel that in a way he's improving the world by ridding it of all these pointless people. He knows that his victims will never see it that way, but he remains convinced that eventually, after a few weeks, maybe a month or two, the transformation will be complete. Once the main phase is over, he'll be able to pick off the survivors, and then he'll be able to step back and admire his proud new world.
Turning from the window, he walks slowly across the gloomy apartment, stopping eventually to look at the silent TV screen. A news show is reporting on some kind of car crash on the interstate, and for a moment Joseph is dazzled by the images. The camera shows twisted metal frames being lifted by cranes, while police and fire officers stand around. There are a few ambulances parked nearby, and a strap-line along the bottom of the screen notes that three people have already died in the accident while another two have been taken to hospital. Seconds later, the image changes to become a shot of the news anchor, and Joseph leans closer to the TV, examining the pixels that constitute the man's mouth. Slowly, almost without thinking about what he's doing, Joseph starts to mouth the words he imagines the news anchor saying. Placing his eye as close to the screen as possible, he eventually sees the pixels for what they really are: little dancing patches of light, like a virus heaving and throbbing as it changes and grows. Eventually, a smile starts to spread across Joseph's face.