by McBain, Tim
Lorraine
The Compound
279 days after
She rolled from her side to her back, and the bed creaked under her. Her cranium nestled into the pillow, but she couldn’t quite convince her eyelids to close. Not yet.
In the corner of her field of vision she saw Ray move to his bedside lantern. He placed his hands upon the glass dome, and shadows overtook the room where he blocked out the light. He hesitated there a moment.
“Should I put it out?” he said, his voice just above a whisper.
“Maybe not. I don’t think we’ll sleep much tonight.”
He nodded, released his grip on the lamp, and the shade receded. Something about the way the dark seemed to swoop out of the room reminded her of a bat flitting by.
He climbed into bed, and they lay so their arms touched. The mattress pressed its cool into her back. Soothing.
With the gunfire over, the quiet felt stark. Ominous. The night stretched out into a black void around them, a notable emptiness like the gaping socket where the extracted tooth once resided.
“How can you know for sure?” he said.
“Rick brought back a pregnancy test in one of his hauls. Because I asked him to look for one, I guess.”
He tilted his head a little.
“So you peed on the little stick and everything?”
She nodded.
“Wand.”
“What?”
“They call the sticks wands. Not that it matters.”
Ray rubbed at his eyes, the sides of his thumbs and index fingers working at the lids for a long while. Eventually, he pulled his hands away and blinked a few times. Even in the lantern light she could see how bloodshot the whites were.
“I’m sorry. Maybe I should have waited until tomorrow to tell you. I just-”
He turned and put a hand on her shoulder to interrupt her.
“Don’t say that. It’s good news. Exciting news. I’m distracted right now is all. My ears are still singing the high notes, you know?”
Her eyes closed, and she sighed, breath rolling out of her for a long time.
“I’m glad. I’m glad you think it’s good news. I do, too.”
He rolled onto his back, staring up at the ceiling as he answered.
“Under other circumstances, it’d be great news. It really would. We’re a little old for it, but we’re not quite old enough to make the Guinness Book of World Records just yet. It’s scary, too, of course. Look at what happened tonight. Our survival was no sure thing. Tough to bring a kid, a child, into… into this world.”
She looked upon him while he talked, and she couldn’t help but notice that he looked older, more tired and haggard, than he had ever looked before. Purple bags bulged under his eyes, and the nasolabial fold on the side facing her looked like a ravine etched into his tan skin. Almost craggy.
“It is scary,” she said. “But we have to try, don’t we? Tonight was scary, but we fought and we survived. The camp survived.”
He swallowed, and she saw the bulge in his throat bob up and down.
“Well… most of us survived,” he said. “Lumpy and Higgins didn’t make it. I wasn’t going to tell you until morning, didn’t figure that’d help you sleep at all, but then we might not be sleeping much anyway.”
Lumpy and Higgins. That didn’t seem possible. She wasn’t close to either of them, but Lumpy in particular was the kind of person you just felt like you knew well, even if you didn’t talk to him much. A big personality. Almost like the class clown at school, she thought, and that was an apt comparison on multiple levels. In most every respect – from his sense of humor to his undersized sleeveless t-shirts, to his swollen-bellied physique — he was like an overgrown child.
“Lumpy was such a sweetheart of a man,” she said, almost more to herself than to Ray.
They were quiet for a long moment, and then a choked sound came from his side of the bed. She looked over, expecting to find him in tears and instead finding him hacking something into his handkerchief. He still looked haggard, but he wasn’t going to cry after all. Maybe that made sense. A preacher, even a phony one, deals in life and death, funeral services and the like, until death becomes routine.
“Truth is, it could have been worse,” he said. “A lot worse. Two casualties and three or four damaged cabins, mostly cosmetic? We were lucky to get off like that. Real lucky. We’ll need to post guard towers and lock the perimeter down from now on.”
“It was a lesson learned, then.”
“More lessons than one, maybe. You know I love Louis, but he wasn’t much of a field general. He’s a good leader in work situations, maybe, but not so much in battle. That will be good to know going forward. Not everyone is cut out for that kind of thing, I suppose. Anyhow, it was Jones who saved us. He just about single-handedly saved the camp.”
“Jones,” she said.
“Yeah. Jones. You know, the Jones who-”
“I know who he is. Sorry, that wasn’t a question. I was just saying his name, I guess.”
“I see.”
Ray’s lip twitched like he was going to say something else, and she saw what looked like a flash of fear in his eyes just then, but it passed and he stayed silent.
They didn’t talk much after that, but they didn’t sleep, either. They just stared up at the way the lantern shined on the ceiling.
Baghead
Outside of Little Rock, Arkansas
9 years, 128 days after
“So you’ve dealt with this before?” Baghead said.
He bent a branch out of their way and held it while Ruthie and Delfino passed through the opening.
“It happens,” Delfino said. “I mean, I’ve never driven over a spike strip, but the car didn’t make it from 1974 to present without changing the tires quite a few times, right? Same goes for these last few years. I guess that’s the one good thing about the world being empty. Lotta car parts to salvage.”
They walked on, pushing through tree limbs and wiry undergrowth where it sprouted up here and there, but mostly crunching over a flattened layer of dead leaves. Baghead’s heel landed on a stick which sounded like a bone fracture when it snapped. A wrist, maybe, he thought.
Delfino held up a hand, and everyone stopped. The quiet suddenly stimulated, seeming ominous in place of the beat and scrape of their footsteps grinding dried-out leaves into powder.
The driver turned his head back and forth, listening. His hand wavered a second, and then it lowered back to his side, and they pressed on.
The road seemed to float along to their right like a body of water just visible through the trees. It appeared to rise and fall as they crested small hills and dipped into mini-valleys, like waves of concrete and asphalt lapping at the edge of the woods.
In time, the fog in Baghead’s head lifted, and his thoughts cleared. A little jolt of anxiety flashed through him. If one of the assassins had set this trap, this situation was much worse than he’d grasped to this point. That would mean they knew he was on the road, knew the direction he was headed. That made some sense, he thought, being that one of the five had already encountered him on this road. Maybe just an educated guess on their part. Maybe word had gotten to them somehow, though he couldn’t imagine how. Then again, he had made some inquiries to acquire a driver, and even then Delfino already knew about the Hand of Death. He said people talk about that kind of thing.
More importantly, it meant whoever had done this was close by. They were likely waiting even now. Watching their likely path. For all he knew they’d found the car by now and were on their trail. If not, they would be soon.
“Should we actually go back?” he said, not realizing he was asking aloud until it was out.
“Go back?” Delfino said.
“We’re assuming that we drove into a trap, yes? Aren’t they — whoever did this — likely to wait for us at the car?”
Delfino stopped walking, turned to face him. The driver’s face seemed to redden all at once, his
eyes looking steely and scary and dead.
“We ain’t leaving the car. You got that?”
Bags’ stomach fluttered. A deep desire to end the conflict as quickly as possible surged in him then, made him want to nod, to agree with Delfino just to ease the tension. It tingled and throbbed in both sides of his neck and all along his ribcage, but he resisted the urge, fought it, saying nothing instead.
Muscles coiled along Delfino’s jaw, his bottom lip twitching just a little. The driver turned and stomped off.
Baghead locked eyes with Ruth, and the kid shrugged. She followed Delfino’s lead and Baghead followed hers.
Wind hissed through the leaves above them, tumbling the green bits over each other to make a sound that reminded Baghead of TV static from when he was a kid. The volume low, that chaotic mess of snow flashing on the screen, somehow looking like burbling liquid and popping popcorn at the same time. That had been a long time gone even before all of this, of course, with digital overtaking analog, flat screens wiping the boxy CRTs off of the face of the planet over the course of just a few years, taking TV snow along with them.
Not that he’d turn down either analog or digital now. Hell, he’d watch an hour of commercials in black and white if only to relive what it felt like to stare into that screen, to watch the images move like dreams broadcast into his home, into his living room.
“Here,” Delfino said, shaking Baghead back to reality. “We’ll take this exit.”
It took Bags a second to even see the ramp through the trees, but there it was, a coiled piece of road that would bend them under an overpass and into the city.
Stepping through the wall of green at the edge of the woods somehow felt more intense when exiting than it did entering. Some kind of vine, thin and leafy like ivy, had attached itself to everything here. It was like trying to walk through a net. Tangles of ropey bits clung to his arms, snared his ankles, wrapped themselves around his bagged head. The stuff seemed to adhere itself to everything it touched, not so much out of stickiness. More like it had little Velcro teeth it used to attach itself to fabric and flesh alike.
Ruthie seemed to be faring no better than Bags, the vines twisted up in her hair and refusing to let go. Lodged like stringy wads of spearmint bubble gum.
“Hold still a second,” he said, untangling and plucking the ivy from her hair.
Even against his finger tips it felt wrong, more insect-like than plant. It was almost like handling giant mantis forelegs, the ones that look folded in prayer right up until they tore another bug’s head off.
With her hair properly weeded, they thrashed through the last few steps together, her following just behind him in the opening his flailing arms cleared.
And then it was over. The sun surrounded him, lit up everything in warm, orange tones. Open air sprawled above. The empty expanse of blue up there made him feel small. The air felt different out here, too. Less damp. Less heavy.
Ruthie walked out from his shadow to stand beside him. They just stood for a moment, watching Delfino climb the slope of grass up to the asphalt. The girl followed the driver then, but Baghead lingered still.
He looked back at the gaping exit wounds they’d torn in the greenery. He could already picture the woods closing those spaces back up, like a time lapse video of the vines re-knitting themselves tighter and tighter until the net was taut once more.
“Way I see it, you start something, you better finish it. If it means something to you, anyway. Life is short as shit, and I’m all about doing the things I do with passion. Driving or whatever else.”
He paused a moment, making sure Ruthie was far enough ahead to be out of earshot before carrying on with his voice lower than before. She balanced along the edge of the ditch ahead of them.
“Like when you made the call to help the girl, you signed both of us up for life, man. Or at least until she gets situated somewhere long term, right? There’s no half-assin’ something like ‘at, man. You go full bore. Balls out. Head first. I’m talkin’ ready to walk through fire if that’s what it takes.”
Baghead laughed without sound, a few puffs of air from his nostrils.
“We might have to walk through fire if we keep heading toward Little Rock,” he said.
“Heh. True enough. But I figure we can walk around the perimeter of the city, stay out of the fire zone. Shouldn’t take long to find four decent tires, and then we’ll skedaddle.”
“Maybe,” Baghead said. “Do you run across that many tires in good shape these days? I see a lot of flats, a lot of cars stripped of anything useful.”
“It can’t be that hard. We’re heading into a city for Christ’s sake.”
“Yeah, a city that’s on fire at the moment.”
For a split second Baghead thought he heard something rustling in the wooded area to their right, but it ended just as quickly as it happened. Maybe a squirrel or groundhog or something, he thought. But when he turned to find wrinkles etched deep into Delfino’s forehead, he knew it was something else.
Delfino stopped. His posture went as rigid as a hunting dog pointing at something with his head angled at the ground, eyes staring off at nothing. He raised a fist.
“Stop,” he said. “Stop walking.”
They listened to the silence for a long moment, the wind shimmying branches and leaves. Then a voice called out from somewhere behind them.
“Hey!”
A shaggy looking man gave a wave and hobbled toward them, covered in soot. His bare feet slapped over the asphalt.
“Don’t fucking move!” Delfino said, raising the shotgun and pointing it in the vague direction of the man’s face and head.
His voice came out deep and gravelly, and the tone of it somehow suggested violence. Not just the threat. The real thing. It made the hair on Baghead’s arms stand up right away. Ruth cowered from the driver as well, just a little flinch, a momentary shrinking away like a scared puppy.
The man stopped short, his arms going straight up. He was scrawny, sticks for arms and legs, all of him draped in clothing that looked more like a big greasy rag with holes in the appropriate places than a shirt and pants. He had light hair that shagged down into his eyes.
In contrast to Delfino’s growl, the man’s voice was reedy. Thin. It sounded dry.
“I’m unarmed,” he said. “Please. I lost everything in the fire. Even my shoes. I couldn’t help but overhear. You need tires. I can help with that. Everything in the city has been picked clean, but there’s a place that has what you need. I just require a little help getting out of here in return. A ride. A ride to pretty much anywhere but here.”
Delfino’s teeth gritted, the grinding sound loud enough that Baghead could hear it standing a few feet away from him. His shotgun wavered, lowered part of the way.
The man’s arms stayed up. His expression shifted a bit, eyes going wide. It occurred to Baghead that the man’s eyes appeared extra bright, extra clean, next to his skin and clothes all smudged with black. They looked eerie. The palest blue. Almost fake.
“You know where we can get tires, you said? Close by?” Delfino said.
“I do. It’s not far.”
Delfino turned to Baghead and spoke just above a whisper.
“What do you think?”
“He doesn’t seem like an assassin, but… I don’t know. Getting out of here as fast as possible sounds good to me. I guess you’d know better than I would.”
“You might think so.”
Delfino let a hand drift away from the shotgun long enough to rub the heel of it against his chin, the stubble scraping his palm with a sound like a wire brush working at a metal fixture. Then his arm twitched, and his fingers were right back on the weapon.
“So how far is not far?” Delfino said, raising his voice again.
Teddy
Moundsville, West Virginia
261 days after
He struggled to sit still. Twitching fingers led to fidgeting feet led to standing and walking from one end of the hou
se to the other. The floorboards groaned in the off beats between his steps, the grain of the wood stretched to the point of whining in protest.
Restless. The word popped into his head as though beamed there from outside of him, some satellite tuned to the frequency of his brain. He didn’t know where it could have come from. He was sure he’d never uttered the word aloud in his life. Still, he knew it now, knew what it meant, knew it was the perfect word to describe him at the moment.
He walked back down the hallway to where he started, the pound of more footsteps thundering below. His teeth grit against each other, jaw muscles clenching and releasing, the flesh along his nose wrinkling like a snarling dog’s and relaxing.
The girls didn’t keep in the heat. The most recent one, still sprawled in his room downstairs, was starting to smell. He’d need to dispose of it, probably today.
That was his problem, he thought. They didn’t last, couldn’t last. It wasn’t fair. He could get what he wanted, but it couldn’t be his for long.
But maybe it was more than that. Maybe the real thing wasn’t as good as he thought it’d be. Maybe the fantasy would always be better.
He paced from the kitchen to the living room and back a few times, tumbling those thoughts around in his head like they were rocks to be polished. Nothing lasted. It just wasn’t fair.
Without thinking, he found himself pushing through the doorway and down the front steps. It was early to check his traps, he knew, and there was nothing more frustrating than finding them empty, but he couldn’t help it.
He bounded down the sidewalk, his arms gesturing frantically as though he were ranting, but he spoke no words. His feet pounded the concrete. His left eyelid twitched.
The restlessness seemed to swell inside his skull, a building pressure just behind his forehead as though his brain itself were inflating, expanding, quivering out of frustration.