by McBain, Tim
With Lorraine still in bed, he felt alone on these dark mornings. In a good way. Like he was the only person up, the only mind tumbling thoughts in the half-light. But it wasn’t so.
The community never slept. The community was bigger than him, bigger than any of them, greater than the sum of its parts. Good people were embracing the idea that they needed each other to survive, that a hundred people are smarter than one, and a thousand (when they built to that point) would be smarter still. What they were building here, rebuilding from the ashes of a material society, might well last a thousand years or more. Anything was possible.
Even in this gray light a touch too early for the Sun itself, the hammers started their beat down in the valley, busy making something from nothing.
Erin
Presto, Pennsylvania
171 days after
Erin paced from one end of the cabin to the other.
Why couldn’t he just be dead?
“We have to help him,” Izzy said. She kept repeating it.
The scrape of Erin’s feet on the floorboards stopped. She thought of all the supplies tucked away above her head right now.
“We don’t have to do anything. There’s food in the loft. We could take it and go.”
Izzy’s mouth hung open through a brief pause. “And just leave him here?”
“Yes.”
“Erin!”
She blew a sigh out through one side of her mouth.
She hadn’t really meant it anyway. For starters, if they left him, he’d probably die. And there was no guarantee he wouldn’t come back.
The only way to prevent that would be to kill him first. And she didn’t think she could do that. Shooting a zombie was one thing. Shooting some kid, though… that was different.
“So what do we do?” Erin asked. She wasn’t necessarily addressing Izzy. More like the world.
“We take him with us.”
Erin gazed at Izzy, still squatting next to the half-dead lump in the sleeping bag.
“And how do you propose we do that? Are you going to carry him? Because I’m not.”
Izzy chewed at her lip.
“What about a sled?”
The soles of her boots beat out a steady rhythm as she started pacing again. A sled could work, she supposed. It would still be a lot of effort. A lot of expended energy.
Her feet stopped.
“Where’s your bike?”
“I hid it in the woods. Next to the driveway.”
“Come with me.”
“We’re not leaving him, are we?”
“No.”
“Do you promise?”
“Yes!”
Izzy sat on the handlebars, while Erin steered them back to where she’d left her bike. It was a wobbly ride, especially because Izzy wouldn’t hold still. Every few seconds she craned her neck around to face Erin.
“We have to go back.”
“We’re going back! But if you want to help him, I need my bike.”
Erin felt the sting of something cold on her nose. She blinked and looked out over the road. It was snowing again, in earnest now. Big fluffy flakes that floated slowly to the ground and landed without so much as a whisper. She had a feeling they were in for at least a few inches of accumulation.
“So this is where the food’s been coming from?” she asked.
Izzy didn’t answer at first. She seemed to be in some kind of daze, and Erin had to jerk the handlebars to get her attention.
“Huh? No,” Izzy said. “I never stole from Squirrelman.”
“But the corn. The creamed corn. That was you, right? You put it in the pantry.”
“Yeah. But it was from the brick house further up the hill. There’s more. I could only carry a little at a time.”
“More? There’s a house with more food?” Erin almost wasn’t sure she was hearing right.
“I’ll show you.”
Erin shook her head. First the half-dead guy’s supplies and now this. This was turning out to be her lucky day.
Well, except for the whole thing where Izzy’d been sneaking out to scavenge on her own. She’d kind of forgotten about that in all the excitement.
“How long?”
“What?”
“How long have you been sneaking out like this?”
Izzy gave a half-hearted shrug.
“A few weeks.”
“Jesus, Iz. What were you thinking?”
They reached the place where her footprints and tire tracks veered off the road and into the bush. She slowed the bike to a stop, putting her foot out for balance.
Izzy didn’t answer, didn’t even turn her head. Erin continued.
“Did you even consider how dangerous it was? What if something happened? What if you went into a house and one of those things was in there?”
Izzy hopped down from the handlebars then.
“What about you? You do the same thing. Go out by yourself. Why is that different?”
Erin dragged her bike and the attached carrier out from under a pile of leaves and deadfall.
“Because. The whole point is that if one of us goes, we’re not both in danger. If something happened to me-”
“Then I’d be left by myself.” They pedaled on, neither of them speaking. “Besides, something was already happening to you.”
Erin frowned at her, not knowing what she was talking about.
“You’re not eating.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Not enough. I can tell. You’re too skinny. And sometimes you forget things.”
Erin hadn’t thought she would notice. Not yet. She couldn’t really deny it, so she said nothing.
They coasted down the driveway, leaving a series of intertwining lines in the snow. Erin dragged the bike and trailer as close to the door as she could. If the carrier were a little narrower, she could have ridden the bike right into the cabin.
“Zip the bag up all the way and then grab a corner,” Erin said when they were back inside. She made sure the Glock was tucked securely into her belt before she stooped over. “We’re going to drag him to the bike.”
As she took a handful of the fabric into her hands, a red-brown smudge ran by in a blur. The fucking rat was back. There was no conscious decision to pull the gun free, it was just instinct. When she raised the barrel at the furry creature perched on the counter, it tittered at her. What the hell kind of rat tittered like that?
Her eyes scrunched down to slits in the dim light, taking in the pointed ears, the bushy tail that bobbed every time it chirped at her. The rodent wasn’t a rat at all. It was a squirrel.
“Erin!” Izzy pushed her arm down, forcing her to lower the pistol. “Don’t hurt it.”
“Well what the hell is that thing doing in here?”
“It’s his friend,” Izzy said, as if this were the most sensible thing in the world.
It was a beat before she realized that Izzy meant that the squirrel and the man in the sleeping bag were friends.
“Squirrelman?” Erin repeated the name, remembering suddenly that Izzy had called him that before.
Izzy nodded.
“Fuck me,” Erin said.
Decker
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
166 days after
Steam coiled from his mouth and nostrils. The bright of the snow sprawled everywhere around him, and the cold abraded the skin of his face, making the flesh under his eyes go tight and dry like when he got a little too vigorous with some exfoliating beads in the shower. He could imagine those tiny tears and cuts showing up if he had to be out here too long, his skin ripping and tattering and falling to pieces like paper.
It was a shocking cold, and it made his ribcage go taut and seize up for a moment as it cut through his coat to hug around him. A little gasp blurted from his lips. With no fire for the past several days, it was chilly inside. Out here, it was frigid. Painful.
He couldn’t help but breathe through his mouth. The frigid air twirled past his teeth, twist
ing into his lungs to chill him from the inside out. His body sucked in big, greedy breaths, almost panicking in response to the cold, which, of course, only made it worse. Despite the air temperature, the dryness burned in his throat, and that cold and burning combo made him queasy.
His eyes narrowed to little slivers of openings with black eyelashes thatched across them. That made everything a little blurry, a little soft. It wasn’t a sunny day, but the snow cast harsh light anyway, sending back everything the sky sent its way, and he was about to crawl right down in it.
The concrete step pressed its dimpled texture into his hands, the cold smarting, making him want to recoil, to retreat, but he powered through it. He lowered his legs from the kitchen floor to the back steps and crawled into the backyard, the pitcher still dangling from his mouth like he was a dog carrying his bowl around at dinner time. Part of him wanted to stop, to rest for a beat. But no. No use hesitating, prolonging anything in this cold, he thought. Just go.
His hands sunk halfway between wrist and elbow deep in the bank of snow along the porch, each fist punching a hole in the white and disappearing inside of it. The sleeves of his jacket caught on the edges of the openings and unsheathed much of his arms. The crusted snow scratched at his skin, and he regretted not bothering to scavenge a pair of gloves more than ever. He had never been forced to spend much time in the cold, always finding himself a couple of minutes at most away from furnace-heated comfort in a building or a car. He certainly never expected to be making his way through it on hands and knees. He’d taken much for granted from birth on, and even with everyone dead, that hadn’t changed much.
Everything went black as he pushed past the drift, his eyes snapping shut, unable to stay open in this endless white glare. He slowed his crawl and forced them open, fighting them a second as they fluttered, trying to close and seal themselves like windows painted shut.
His hands stung, his eyes stung, the cold air burned in his throat, but he kept going. He kept moving, hands and knees churning forward.
The pump rose up from the endless white in front of him, the pipe curving into the open mouth with a handle jutting out on the opposite side. Green paint adorned the steel, like this was the one plant that could survive the winter, hold onto its green while all of the other leaves and shoots died. It did represent life, he thought, at least for him. Drink water and live or don’t and die. Pretty straightforward. Life itself poured out of that gaping mouth.
His hands had gone numb now entirely, the wet of melted snow clinging to them with a sheen, the layer of moisture helping the cold sink to the bone. The corners of his mouth stung now, too, a sharp pain like paper cuts, probably the first part of his skin to chap and tear open, though he doubted they’d be the last.
But he moved on, only vaguely aware of these things, his eyes locked on that curved green thing up there. Nothing else was quite real. Not all the way. Just nagging little dreams that tried to draw him away from the only thing that mattered.
The pipe seemed to grow and grow as he got closer, filling more of his field of vision until he was right under it looking straight up the length of the thing. He rocked back on his knees, pulling angry red hands out of the white. Clumps of icy snow fell away from his fingers, sliding and dripping. He wiped his hands on the chest of his coat and drew them up into his sleeves. He found no warmth inside, though, so he pulled them back out.
He grabbed the steel tube with one hand and then the other, and he knew right away that this was the coldest object he’d touched yet. Cold blue fire savaged the nerves in his fingertips and shot a shock of frigid electricity down his arms to the elbow. All he could imagine were his hands stuck to this pipe, adhered there like that movie where the kid’s tongue gets stuck to the flagpole, layers of flesh peeling away if he forced it. He wanted to rip them away from the metal, but he didn’t. He bit down harder on the handle of the pitcher and kept working.
His legs fidgeted underneath him, moving from a kneeling position to a squat, getting his legs back under him. He closed his eyes and took a breath, bracing for whatever dizziness might assail him now.
When he reached a fully upright position, he felt the soggy ovals where melted snow soaked his pants. The cold seemed all too happy to touch the moist places, and his torso jerked and flailed, his jaw rattling like crazy. He wobbled a moment, quads twitching, hands still cinched around the pump like a throat.
The faint spell came on as expected then, a sizzle in his head like TV static, like that buzz and zap of mosquitoes flying into the blue light over and over. He held on as it grew more intense, focusing only on his grip on that metal, teeth gritting into that plastic pitcher so hard that he was sure it must have canine marks embedded in it by now.
The swirl in his skull faded a touch, and he pounced into action. With one hand remaining on the pipe for balance, the other moved toward the handle. He balled the fingers into a fist and released them a couple of times, trying to work out a little stiffness before he got down to business.
The handle stuck a second, and then the pump squawked like a dying bird as he cranked it up and then down for the first time. The movement felt awkward, a hitch seeming to inhibit the swing of his shoulder. He lacked the usual articulation in his motor skills, and the shivering fouled things up all the more, but he could make this work, he thought.
The squawk evened out some as he pumped. He thought maybe he’d get a little warmth out of this manual labor, but no. Instead violent chills wormed up and down the trunk of his body, vibrating up one side of him and then the other. He couldn’t help but picture the flesh around his ribcage going blue, though he knew it was ridiculous.
The pump’s mouth showed no signs of life. The idea wriggled up his spine: Was it possible for these things to freeze? He knew the ground water wouldn’t, but it was at least plausible that ice could clog things somewhere between here and there.
Still, he had no choice. He pumped. The handle squeaked and clanked. Steam vented from his mouth and wreathed around the green metal. Pain swelled in his shoulder and elbow and wrist, escalating from a dull ache into stabs as sharp as skewers.
God, he wanted to give up. He wanted to quit. More than he’d ever wanted to quit anything, he wanted to stop doing this, stop trying, stop pumping this stupid thing, let his hand fall away from this hunk of metal, let it dangle at his side, let his body fall to a heap in the snow and sleep. Just drift off into the cold and never return to consciousness.
But he kept going. He kept fighting. Not fighting the cold or the pump or the sickness. Fighting himself. Pushing himself. Thrashing against that weakness inside. Pain or no, frozen or no, he would pump this fucker until water came out or his arm fell off. And if the latter happened first, he’d have a go with his other arm.
The pump handle rose and fell. He focused on the clank at the bottom of its journey, metal striking metal, the collision loud and regular like someone ringing a dinner bell in an old movie. When he focused on the sound and rhythm, the pain in his arm seemed to fade to the background. One more swing always seemed easy, seemed necessary to keep the beat alive.
Little puffs of breath fluttered in and out of him now, whistling between his teeth and gasping in his throat, strange, involuntary noises like when an old man does that wheezing laugh that’s almost silent. His lip curled into a grimace, and the cold air touched his front teeth and the gums above them.
And the pump gurgled and belched, and water erupted from its mouth. Choppy spurts of fluid spewed out, pocked with air bubbles and hissing bursts of air. It slapped into the snow, wearing divots into it. He kept pumping until more water than air came out, loosening the grip on his opposite hand as he prepared to make the pitcher exchange.
His arm pivoted to move the pitcher into the stream of water, overshooting it a little and getting the wrist of his coat sleeve doused before he found the sweet spot. The sound of the water changed from the slap of landing in the snow to the burble of water-hitting-water in the pitcher, the pitch raising
as the container filled.
This was it. He did it.
When the pitcher was full, he drank, chugging a bunch down even though the cold sapped his thirst quite a bit. The water replenished everything in his mouth, wiping away much of the grime and sludge, making his tongue and cheeks and the roof of his mouth feel like themselves again. Even his eyes felt better within a few seconds, that stinging, glassy feeling fading.
He drank close to half the pitcher and refilled it, throat clicking as he swallowed, a rivulet dribbling down the side of his chin. His mind cleared as his system processed the water, the fog lifting from his brain. He could think enough to map out the immediate future now. He’d go in, rest, and drink the rest of the water. Then he’d get the bucket and fill that. There was still a lot to worry about it, but he’d survive the day.
It was a start.
Deirdre
The Compound
9 years, 23 days after
She entered the cemetery, passing through the rusted wrought iron gates that someone must have scavenged at great cost and effort some years before. She couldn’t help but think about that every time she laid eyes on the rusty thing. Someone lugged this worn hunk of metal many miles for no practical reason. The gate leaned forward just a little, as though it weren’t installed deeply enough.
Her heart thumped in her chest. It seemed to have picked up speed throughout her walk. Her eyes scanned the edge of the woods up ahead and found no sign of Shelly. Her left eyelid twitched along with her pulse. God, she just wanted this to be over.
She adjusted her grip on the duffel bag at her side, feeling that tingle of sweat and adrenaline in the places where her fingers touched the strap. She pictured its contents and then pushed them out of her mind right away as though someone might be able to pluck the image from her brain if she left it there.
Her eyes danced over a few fresh mounds of dirt and the crappy wooden grave markers made out of sticks rising above them. In the distance she saw the bigger monuments, stone sculptures of angels and chiseled granite blocks over a handful of graves. More objects scavenged and brought here by order of the wealthy families or those high up in Father’s ranks.