by McBain, Tim
The days blurred by, strange things happening everywhere, inside and out. People flitting in all directions. His mind trying to get a grip on it.
And in a way, he became one of them. They all called him Jones and tipped their caps and clapped him on the shoulder, and he waved, and he nodded, and he smiled.
But he was dead on the inside.
Whenever he saw her, he could still imagine the blurred wings sprouting from her back, the way she looked when he first laid eyes on her among the George Foreman grills at the department store. Like an angel. She was much older than him, and the plastic surgery made her seem a little strange, her forehead and eyes lacking expression at all times, but she was attractive to him still. He couldn’t decide if it was from not being around women in so long or if he might have been attracted to her before all of this.
They sat in what used to be the mess hall of a campground but was now called the compound cafeteria. A smattering of others filled seats at the other tables. They had this one to themselves, and she sat across from him.
Canned and boxed food filled the compartments on his plastic tray. Macaroni and cheese. Green beans. Instant mashed potatoes smothered with gravy from a packet that was salty to an almost inedible degree. His fork speared noodle elbows while she talked.
“Well, you’ve been here a month or so. How are you settling in?”
He brought a cup of fruit punch to his lips and drank. So sweet it was like drinking candy, he thought.
“I’m doing well enough. It’s weird to be around people again, you know?”
She reached out, her hand clasping his. Her skin was so soft it was hard to comprehend. He felt like he had lizard flesh by comparison, scaly and dry.
“I’m glad we found you.”
He tried to stave off any excitement that would erupt from this woman being pleased to have him around, tried to stow it behind the door with the dead girl, but it was impossible. Electricity entered his flesh where she touched his hand and shot down his arm like a power line until tingles swirled in his chest.
“Ray and I have been talking about you, actually.”
He thought of the two of them together and shuddered a little. It was an open secret around the compound that they were in a relationship. She was the only person who ever called him Ray. Everyone else called him Dalton or the preacher. Fiona called him Father Dalton, of course, no matter how many times she was corrected.
“For real? I wonder what he could really have to say about me. We’ve never talked or anything.”
She unclasped his hand to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear.
“He’s quite busy as you can imagine, but he keeps up on everything and everyone in some way. The council keeps him posted on all the happenings, all of the new recruits, and he helps figure out who gets what assignment.”
He always smirked at any mention of the council, the group of women who helped Ray Dalton run things around here. All of them white and older and educated. He was like a pimp getting a bunch of soccer moms to do his bidding, Decker thought.
Another sip of fruit punch pooled in his mouth a moment before he swallowed it. It reminded him of drinking all of that Tang not so long ago.
“I see.”
“We think you’d be the perfect scavenger. I mean, I guess that’s how we met you, right? But you have experience with firearms and know how to handle yourself. Clearly.”
“Yeah, that makes sense to me.”
“Good. That’s great. It takes time to get things around, but we’ll get everything set up for you soon. I think you’re going to do great things for us. And always remember that that’s who you’re working for. All of us. That’s what Ray always says we were missing before. And that we can have it back if we believe it and hold it in our hearts.”
He nodded, and looking across the room, he spotted Ray Dalton sitting at the corner table, surrounded by women. Dalton’s lips moved and all of the ladies seated around him laughed, smiling and shaking their heads and leaning toward him.
He knew the same thing had just happened in his conversation with Lorraine. Her lips moved and the preacher’s words came out. He’d been assigned a job, a good one. Most of the men and quite a few of the women working in the garden or on cabin repair openly dreamed about scavenger duty. But he couldn’t help but feel a little bitter about it, about the way things worked in this place.
Decker tipped his head back and finished off his drink.
Erin
Presto, Pennsylvania
220 days after
The short days and long nights of winter passed slowly. They were snowbound for the most part, though Erin still had to trudge outside to split wood several times a day. A few times Izzy, Marcus, and Rocky went outside for fun, in an attempt to break the monotony. They made snow men and snow angels, and when they got a few drifts that were big enough, snow tunnels.
On one occasion, Izzy burst back into the house.
“You have to come see this!”
Erin jumped a little, feeling like she’d been caught. In a way, she had been caught. Just not by Marcus.
She crawled out of the pantry, moving the cans and boxes back into position, hiding the pile of lighter-weight goods she’d been setting aside all the way in the back.
She felt a little guilty as she followed Izzy to the door. She shouldn’t feel guilty. She would divide it evenly when the time came. She just wanted dibs on the best stuff for traveling.
At the door, Erin stooped to pull on her boots.
“Come on, come on!” Izzy said, clapping her hands.
She barely had time to slip her arms into her coat before Izzy was dragging her outside.
Marcus and Rocky stood in front of the army of miniature snow men they’d been amassing.
“OK,” Izzy said. “Go!”
Marcus scratched at the back of his head, screwing up his face.
“I don’t know…”
“Marcus!” Izzy whined.
He shrugged. “I never said I’d do it.”
Erin hadn’t put gloves on, and her fingers were starting to stiffen in the cold. She shoved her hands in her pockets.
“Did you just haul me out here to freeze my ass off, or was there something else?”
“See?” Marcus said, looking at Izzy but pointing at Erin. “She’s not interested.”
“Erin! Be interested!”
Erin opened her eyes a little wider and angled her face toward Izzy.
“Is this interested enough?”
Marcus crossed his arms.
“Just forget it.”
The cold air was making her nose run, and she sniffled. Forget it, indeed. She turned to leave.
“Alright, jerks. If you need me, I’ll be back inside where my snot doesn’t threaten to form into icicles.”
Izzy snatched at her coat.
“But you have to see Marcus’ sweet moves!”
Erin stopped.
“Oh yeah?” Erin said, trying not to laugh. “What kind of ‘sweet moves’ are we talking about?”
“Show her, Marcus!”
He shook his head.
“I can’t do it under this kind of pressure.”
“Aw, come on,” Erin said. “I wanna see.”
“So you can laugh?”
“I won’t laugh.”
Izzy tugged at her sleeve and whispered in her ear. “Say ‘please.’”
Erin sighed.
“Please can I see your sweet moves?”
He crossed his arms.
“I need music.”
“How am I supposed to-” she stopped, frowning. “Oh.”
“I can’t do it without music.”
She rolled her eyes. “What kind?”
“Something you can dance to.”
Erin wondered for a moment if this was all a trick to make her look like an idiot. And then she started to sing the first thing that popped into her head: “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen.
Erin wasn’t sure the k
id knew the song, but the bass line was simple enough that Izzy joined in.
Marcus lifted his arms, and they started to undulate. It was a move Erin associated with a breakdancing movie she saw when she was a kid. He made it look like a wave started at one outstretched hand, traveled up his arm, across his shoulders, down the other arm to his opposite hand, and then back again. The whole time he did this, Rocky stayed just ahead of the wave, scurrying from one end to the other.
By the end, there was a grin on her face, and she and Izzy stopped singing to applaud.
“Those were some pretty sweet moves,” Erin said.
Marcus looked a touch embarrassed.
“Thanks.”
Things seemed easier for a few days. There was less tension in the house. Marcus even finally succeeded in convincing Rocky that Izzy was trustworthy. The squirrel readily took food from her hand without running away now, but the biggest landmark was when she scurried up Izzy’s arm to sit on the kid’s shoulder.
She was beside herself with glee, squealing when the squirrel thrust a quaking nose into her hair.
“Her whiskers! They tickle!”
Erin was at the door, layering up. Marcus asked if she needed help, but she brushed him off.
“I got it,” she said and pulled the door closed behind her.
Back inside half an hour later, she added her load of fresh wood to the stove and went to get ready for bed. She was returning the basin she used to wash her face to its place next to the stove when she noticed Marcus was gone.
She heard a rhythmic thump from outside and recognized it as the sound of an axe striking wood.
She slid her boots on over her pajamas and marched outside.
The maul rose and fell in his hands, swinging in an arc from his hip up to shoulder and back down again. She shivered, waiting for him to acknowledge her. He kept chopping, the rise and fall of the axe almost as hypnotizing as a metronome. Her teeth started to chatter. She should have worn a coat.
Finally, without stopping or turning to look at her, he spoke.
“Need something?”
“Plenty. But not more firewood.”
“Pardon?”
“I already cut enough for tonight.”
There was a thunk as the sharpened metal edge of the axe head bit into the wood.
“No harm in cutting a little extra, is there?” There was a slight pause as he took his eyes from the wood to glance up at her. “Or is this Your Majesty’s Royal Axe?”
“Funny,” she said without smiling. “And technically it’s a splitting maul, not an axe.”
Her arms were crossed over her chest, and she hugged them a little tighter against the chill. “I just don’t know what you’re trying to prove.”
He chuckled a little and swung the splitter again.
“What?”
“You should try taking your own advice some time.”
“What advice?”
“You think I’m trying to prove something?” Marcus rolled a log from the pile and placed it in front of him for splitting. “I think all you do is try to prove how much you don’t need my help.”
Erin raised one eyebrow.
“I don’t need your help.”
He shook his head.
“Well, I’m not trying to prove anything either. Sometimes a guy splitting wood is just a guy splitting wood.”
“Fine. Whatever,” she said, waving her hands in front of her like she could shoo away her irritation. “You wanna freeze your dick off out here chopping more wood when we already have enough? Be my guest.”
He stopped working for the first time to execute a bow.
“I bid you a good evening-”
She held up a hand to cut him off.
“Don’t fucking say it, or I will lock you out of the house, and you can spend the night in the barn.”
“-Your Majesty.”
She spun around to the door, clenching her fists. She wouldn’t actually lock him out, of course. But she wanted to. As she pushed the door open, she wondered if he was always this obnoxious or if the end of the world had brought it out in him. And that jarred loose a memory. She stopped, hand on the door, and turned back to him.
“Who’s Nina?”
The swing of the maul stopped mid-air, falling back to his waist. His face hardened, and he met her eyes with an icy stare. She’d never seen that coldness in him before. “How do you know that name?”
Now Erin was the one that looked away, breaking eye contact. Submitting. She was sorry she’d brought it up now, but it was too late.
“You kept calling out for her when your fever got really bad.”
His eyebrows furrowed.
“It’s nobody. Forget about it.”
He angled away from her then, ending the conversation by turning his back.
Erin went inside, and when she passed the door on the way to her room a few minutes later, he was still there, staring out at the barren, snow-covered fields that looked blue in the twilight.
Lorraine
Rural Maryland
279 days after
She needed to tell him. But when? Now?
The car banked around a sharp curve, and the centrifugal force pulled her a little toward the passenger door. She cupped a hand to her belly and looped the other through the door handle.
“Wasn’t there something you wanted to talk to me about?” he said.
Should she just blurt it out? The tip of her tongue flicked along the edge of her incisors, but the words that came out next weren’t the ones she wanted. Not yet.
“Do you think we’ll have electricity any time soon? People keep asking.”
He shook his head.
“I told you, the generators were all surely fried,” Ray said. “Even the small ones had too big of a coil to survive the EMP. The pulse would’ve built up massive voltage in those and cooked ‘em pretty good, just like the damn power lines. Truth is, we could probably build our own at this point, though it’d take a tremendous amount of time and effort to figure that out and execute it. It’s a moot point, though. The bottleneck in that plan is fuel. We don’t have enough gasoline to consider it. Not enough to power everyone for long, anyway.”
He chuckled to himself.
“Seems like the kind of thing someone should come along and fix, doesn’t it? Like there should be people we don’t think twice about who make the whole world go, make all of our conveniences so routine that we take them for granted right up until they’re gone for good.”
“Yeah, it’s weird that things used to work that way.”
“When people ask, tell them we’re working on it. Electricity remains a luxury for now. We need the gas for the vehicles, to make runs for food and medicine. There’s not a feasible way to get everyone in camp power, and there might not be for a while. And that’s OK. We’ve got access to water. We’ve stockpiled enough to feed ourselves for a few months, at least. And we’re gathering more. Louis managed to salvage an operational chainsaw, so we’re much further ahead of the game in terms of fire wood.”
She looked at his hands perched on the steering wheel. Memories of blisters took shape on his fingers. Felling the trees with handsaws had been doable, though a lot of work. It was chopping hundred-foot trees into manageable lengths and then quartering those chunks so they could be split with an axe that was the back-breaking part. The chainsaw would make that process quick, perhaps requiring 10% as much time and effort. Maybe less. Well worth the cost of the fuel.
“Louis is a good man,” Lorraine said. “The crew doing maintenance and chopping wood? They work hard as hell for him. Even Lumpy listens when Louis gives an order.”
Saying his name made the image of the man jump into her head. Lumpy. Weird guy. He could be difficult, but there was a slow warmth to him. A dim charm. Everyone seemed to like him, though none of them knew exactly why. The nickname, she assumed, had to do with the man’s build. Stick arms and legs poked out of an abdomen swaddled in fat. His limbs looked extra spi
ndly coming out of that lumpy middle. He was spider-bodied. The fact that he exclusively wore sleeveless t-shirts only highlighted this fact.
“What’s up with Lumpy?” Ray said.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. What’s his story?”
“He’s from Kentucky, I think. Lived up in the mountains or something. He’s a funny guy. Kind of like a big kid. Well, maybe he’s not funny, exactly, but he laughs a lot. This hissing laugh through his clenched teeth. It’s infectious, I think. Everyone ends up laughing when Lumpy’s around. He can be a pain. Sometimes he doesn’t want to listen, but no one really holds it against him. I don’t know. Feels like he doesn’t know any better more than he’s trying to be difficult.”
Ray nodded once, and they fell silent. The car banged and juddered over a pothole.
“What’s Lumpy’s real name? Do you know?” he said.
“No idea. He’s just Lumpy.”
They were almost home now. She needed to tell him. If not now, when? It needed to be soon.
Once again her words disobeyed her wishes.
“Jones,” she said. “That’s the one.”
“What about him?”
“He’s the only one I don’t trust. Out of all the people we’ve welcomed here, he’s the one who makes my skin crawl.”
“Really? I thought you two were friendly. I saw you speaking to him in the mess hall.”
“I wanted to be the one to tell him that we’ll be moving him to scavenger duty soon. Almost like keeping tabs on him, I guess. If there was a wolf among us, you’d keep a close eye on it, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, I’d probably shoot the son-bitch in the face, but I take your meaning.”
Lorraine laughed. She always did when he spat out his two syllable version of “son of a bitch.” Son-bitch. It happened to be one of his least used swear words, she realized. Maybe that was why it stayed funny.
Her laughter seemed to lull them out of the conversation. Would now be a good time to say it? Maybe. Maybe not. It still didn’t feel quite right, so she waited.