by McBain, Tim
He was still looking at the boy when the gunshot rang out.
Erin
Moundsville, West Virginia
266 days after
Erin tried to open her eyes, but the best she could manage was a fluttering of the eyelids before a wave of dizziness came over her. She saw enough to register that it was night. Or maybe a dark room. Wherever she was, there wasn’t a lot of light.
The ground beneath her was cold and hard. And smooth. Cement?
She sensed that her thoughts weren’t quite right. They seemed slow. Hazy. She couldn’t remember where she was or how she’d gotten there. Couldn’t get her short term memory in order.
She decided to lay still. Let the floaty, lightheaded feelings pass.
Her consciousness seemed to ebb and flow. There was a steady dripping sound coming from somewhere to her left, and like the beat of a metronome, it lulled her into a trance. How much time passed then, she didn’t know.
The sound of something scraping on the floor near her feet jolted her out of the daze. She came fully awake and the panic hit. She still wasn’t sure what she was panicking over, but she had more of a sense that something bad had happened.
Izzy. Where was Izzy?
Her eyes snapped open, but now it was darker than before. Almost pitch black. Another sound, this time something like breathing near her ear, caused her to jump. Something brushed against her cheek, and she inhaled sharply.
The darkness moved, and she realized that the room wasn’t pitch black like she thought. Something had been between her and the light, blocking it from her view.
No, she thought, as she heard the breathing sound again and felt a rough finger stroke the side of her face.
Not something.
Someone.
Lorraine
Outskirts of Washington D.C.
360 days after
A few screams followed just after the gunfire, shrill and harsh. And then the rest of the crowd erupted all at once. They thrashed toward the mouth of the tent, over a thousand people trying to funnel out of a gap about ten feet wide.
Lorraine stood motionless amidst them. She looked past the human wreckage to the stage. The boy climbed down from the bed and disappeared. She couldn’t see Ray.
Her heart beat hard enough that it seemed to shake her left eyelid with every thud. She wouldn’t let herself think the worst, even the remote possibility was off limits to the part of her brain that formed pictures. She would just go see. No fear. No anticipation of any result. She would just look and worry about the rest after.
She realized that she could still hear the gunshot, now a high pitched wail, a ringing in her ears as though they insisted on holding onto the sound. The gunshot. Singular. Maybe that was another reason for hope. She needed to move. The thought seemed to dislodge her feet from the floor.
The crowd pushed and pulled itself every direction at once. People pumped their knees and elbows to knife through the swell of humanity. Some were pulled underneath the raging mess and trampled. Hopefully just bruised and not broken, Lorraine thought.
She fought against the stream now, trying to get to the stage rather than away from it. Every step forward pressed her person into the sweaty mass of limbs and torsos. Hips and shoulders bumped her, glancing blows that slowed her, knocked her off balance. The people all seemed to be falling the opposite direction, pulled by the weight of everyone else instead of taking steps and choosing their path. They rolled by like the tide surging up onto the beach, and she pressed against the current, heading out to sea.
A fat man lowered his shoulder to try to bulldoze right through her. She tried to step around him, but there was no room for it. The corner of his collarbone ground into her sternum like the claw of a hammer. The force knocked her legs out from under her right away. In any other situation, she’d have been planted flat on her back, but her shoulder blades collided into the people behind her, which propped her up long enough to get her balance. The crowd itself held her upright, and she got her footing back.
Without thinking she threw an uppercut that clobbered him in the throat, hips unwinding into one big right hand that dropped him on his belly before her. He bounced back up, choking, fingers scrabbling at his Adam’s apple. Before she could wonder whether he was OK or not, he was gone, disappearing into the waves of people crashing the other way.
Something cracked then, the distinct sound of wood splintering, and movement caught her eye. One of Louis’s makeshift support poles got knocked out, and a section of tent collapsed to the left of the stage. The canvas drifted down in slow motion like someone changing the sheets on a bed. People scurried like rodents, clambering out from under it as though it would smother them, metal chairs tumbling along with them.
She shuffled forward, slowly but surely. The contact was still pretty constant, like navigating a mosh pit, but it seemed to be clearing. She stayed low to keep her balance and looked out toward her destination. The stage was a little closer. Still, she scanned the area and couldn’t see Ray. Nothing moved up there.
She felt the heat in her face now, the wet hot warmth that filled her cheeks. That scared her somehow. The panic was like a wave in the air, a flash of fever that slicked them all with sweat, made all of them twitter and jabber and scramble. And now it had gotten to her, too.
She advanced a few more steps, squeezed between two younger guys she recognized from the camp, and the fervor around her let up. Suddenly the people between her and the stage were docile. Nearly motionless. Just standing and staring. These were the quiet ones who stayed back, stayed patient — either too smart or too scared to charge into the melee. Maybe some of both. And yet, they weren’t much easier to deal with. It was like weaving through a herd of cows that didn’t want to move.
An image took shape in her head of her pushing one over — cow-tipping, essentially — and watching it knock a single file line of others over like dominoes, creating a perfect pathway to the stage. Instead she elbowed past them and turned sideways to squeeze between others.
Finally she hit a clearing and ran the last few steps, bouncing up onto the platform. The stage was empty save for the vacant hospital bed. For a second that made her breath hitch in her throat, but no. It was a good thing, probably. If he were shot, Ray would probably still be lying here, wouldn’t he?
She turned, rushed toward the smaller slit in the canvas that led into the backstage area and pushed through it.
Bright light blinded her as she navigated the gap between the big tent and the smaller one. The sunlight attacked her eyeballs, forcing her eyelids down to the narrowest of slits. And then the light changed again as she pushed through another opening into the smaller tent.
Shade surrounded her again. Pink blotches filled the air where the light had burned shapes into her retinas. They floated around her, filling in all of the places she tried to look.
Ray slowly came into focus, the boy next to him.
“Everyone OK?” she said.
“We’re fine,” the preacher said. “Not looking too good on the milkshake, though.”
A choked chuckle gurgled out of her even as she rolled her eyes at the joke, but more than anything, she felt relief.
Erin
Moundsville, West Virginia
266 days after
She tried to get up, but she was reclined in an awkward position with her arms stretched over her head for some reason. This had caused her arms and hands to go asleep. They were so numb she couldn’t feel them.
She pushed with both legs, forgetting her injury. White hot pain shot through her leg, and she fell backward against what felt like a large pipe. A wave of nausea hit her so hard she dry-heaved.
Tears blurred her vision, and she tried to blink the moisture away from her lashes while she caught her breath. It was coming back to her now. Running after Izzy and stepping in the trap. And then the man came, and she supposed he must have knocked her out and brought her here. Wherever “here” was.
Her eyes
began to adjust to the low light. He was crouched in front of a door, watching her, mouth open.
She tried to move away from him, being more careful of her injured leg this time, and found that the reason she couldn’t feel her arms was because they’d been chained to the large pipe above her. With a bit of awkward wriggling, she was able to scoot backward, dragging the handcuffs along the pipe, until her back rested against the wall.
There was a hitch in the man’s breath, a throaty little click, but she couldn’t tell if it was fear or amusement or just a random mouthbreather noise.
She tried to figure the situation in such a way that she wasn’t completely fucked.
She assumed it was his trap she’d fallen into. His hole filled with sharpened sticks.
OK. So he was trying to trap things. That seemed pretty bad. If they were out in the country where he could catch a deer or something, it might make sense. But in the middle of a city?
Yep. She was fucked.
Unless… maybe they were zombie traps.
And maybe it was just an accident that he’d caught a live girl.
So maybe he brought her back here to help her.
But then why the handcuffs?
She started to panic again and had to work to calm herself down.
Well, maybe he was as scared of her as she was of him. If she’d had a pair of cuffs, would she have restrained Marcus when they’d first found him? Maybe. Probably. Definitely.
But then why the creepy dungeon-like room? However little she trusted Marcus early on, she wouldn’t have brought him here. Into this mildewy cell.
God, what was wrong with her? She was sitting there in some psycho’s torture lair, and she was having this long-ass internal monologue with herself while the creep sat three feet away from her. He must have fucked her up when he hit her in the head.
What were you supposed to do for a concussion? Had she read that in the emergency first aid book? She couldn’t remember just now.
Fuck. She was doing it again. Getting lost in her thoughts.
OK.
She needed to do something. Should she talk to him? Was that what he was waiting for?
She licked her lips, tasting blood where she must have bit into her lip at some point.
“What do you want?”
There it was again. That hitch in the breath. She waited for a response. What she got instead was not what she’d been expecting.
He laughed. A wheezing chuckle.
The hair on the back of her neck stood out, and a little shiver of fear went through her. And that made her angry.
“I asked you a question, you fucking creep! What do you want?”
He stopped laughing and came toward her. Despite herself, she flinched, pressing herself further into the corner, shrinking away from him, unable to hide her terror.
He squatted close, hand outstretched. She got a whiff of him and almost gagged. He smelled like blood and death and rot. Like one of them. But he wasn’t. He breathed and laughed and whistled.
The tips of his fingers brushed against her hair and then grazed her throat. But instead of choking her like she’d anticipated, his hand paused there, pressing gently into the flesh.
It dawned on her that he was feeling her pulse. And something about that frightened her most of all. She used her chin to nudge his hand away and kicked her good leg at him. She only managed a glancing blow, and he wheezed out a laugh again and patted her head.
Then he stood and went to the door, looking back once on the prey he’d chained to the pipe, before he passed over the threshold and closed the door behind him.
Ray
The Compound
1 year, 7 days after
Ray was pleased. In a certain way, he was glad for the assassination attempt. It put a scare in him, of course. Looking at the evidence later, however, revealed that the bullet hole in the tent’s canvas was so far off the mark that it probably wasn’t a legitimate assassination attempt at all. An accident? A prank? He didn’t know, but he got over the notion of any real threat to himself quickly.
He was glad for it, though, because it was the push they needed to secure the camp a little more. People could have their guns outside of the perimeter, but they needed to check them into the armory upon re-entry. The so-called assassination attempt made the necessity of that plain for everyone to see.
Of course, there’d still been grumbling. Cataloging the weapons had been a huge endeavor, and then every cabin was searched and cleared as well. Nobody was happy about armed strangers digging through their things, though only a handful left camp over the ordeal.
The shooting did nothing to deter the spike in their recruiting efforts. Ray figured it might have even helped, given some sense of urgency to the word of mouth. More people poured into camp. The number of newcomers hadn’t dipped below three figures in the twelve days since the last healing.
The circus tent filled much of the field to the south now, and many of the refugees slept there for the time being. The ones without blankets huddled against each other in the dead of night when the wet chill filled the air.
The council wanted more.
“We’ve been brainstorming where to take the show next,” Phyllis had said at the last meeting. “We’ve heard about groups in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.”
Ray was already shaking his head. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Growing too fast will do more harm than good.”
Phyllis squirmed in her chair, eyes blinking rapidly.
“You’re not suggesting we postpone the next show? Obviously we should strike again while we have the momentum going.”
There were murmurs of agreement from the other women.
Ray sighed. “We’re already over capacity. We need to build up the infrastructure and get organized before the next road trip.”
“But-” Phyllis started but he held up a hand to interrupt.
“Let’s put a pin in that for the time being. I can do a couple shows here on the grounds. We’ll get the next round of construction planned and under way. And then, when the time is right, we’ll go back out.”
“Maybe we should take a vote,” Phyllis said.
Another councilwoman seconded that.
“Yes. A vote.”
Ray had folded his hands in his lap and leaned back in his seat.
“That’s fine,” he said. Phyllis beamed and sat up a little straighter, but he wasn’t finished.
“That is, so long as you all can figure out a way to physically drag me there. Force me to put on the show. Somehow compel me to perform fake miracles. If so, you’re welcome to take your little vote, and do as you like. Otherwise, we’ll wait.”
And that was the end of it. For now, anyway.
The council was becoming a problem. He needed to change that.
Ray and Lorraine walked the trail behind the house up on the hill. The dirt path sliced a brown line through the woods and tall grass here. This was one of the few places that they could be outside and have some privacy with four-figures-worth of people living in camp, and so it had become part of their morning ritual.
The air was still thick from the humidity that saturated it in the night. Ray could tell it was going to be hot today, muggy and miserable. It wasn’t yet, though. The humidity actually seemed to make it feel cool for the moment — like a fall evening in the bleachers, waiting for a high school football game to kick off.
Ray looked upon Lorraine, trying to figure the right words to ask her for what he wanted. She was showing now, her belly fuller and rounder than it’d been before. She was self-conscious about it of late, complaining that the way her navel protruded made it look like she was carrying around a roast turkey with a pop-up timer button.
“Seems like heads have finally cooled as far as the gun thing,” Ray said. “It just makes sense, though. We’re all safe inside the perimeter. No reason to have guns around here with all the new faces. Don’t know why I’m telling you. Guess I’ve just got the excuse locked
and loaded with so many people nagging me about it lately.”
“Phyllis and the search team found two more concealed today,” Lorraine said.
“Handguns?”
“Yeah. Just small stuff. Nothing too drastic, but yeah. One in the floorboards. Another one nestled in the ashes of a wood burning stove. Seems the most popular hiding spot for whatever reason.”
“And we’re still not punishing anyone for violations, right?”
“Technically, we’re not.”
“Technically?”
“Publicly, their punishment is pending. We want to leave that hanging over their heads, you know? If everyone knows there’s no punishment, then there may as well be no rule. But privately, we’re consenting to your wish for total clemency. For now.”
Ray nodded. He didn’t like the idea of Phyllis and friends going door to door to ravage cabins like the Gestapo, but he also didn’t like the idea of getting shot much, either.
“You think she enjoys it?”
“Who? Phyllis?”
“Seems like she gets a charge out of it to me, banging on the doors and rummaging through people’s things. Seems like she gets off on the authority, the power.”
He scratched his chin before he completed the thought.
“She does it with a grin is all, like a sadistic gym teacher making kids run laps until they puke.”
“I wouldn’t… I mean… It’s not that… What I’m trying to say is that it’s better her than us.”
“How’s that?”
“If we were the ones carrying out the searches, it could hurt us. It could hurt morale around camp, you know? Especially if it were you. Everyone admires you, looks up to you. Maybe that fades if you’re invading their space and confiscating their weapons. You follow me?”