Not only that, but the bullet ricocheted. It must have hit the back wall and bounced off, because a can of green beans spun across the cement floor and rolled over and over. There was a hole in it, and water leaked out on the ground in little gurgles.
Noelle screamed too, and held her hands over her ears. “CRAIG, STOP IT!”
She sounded like she was a thousand feet away.
Craig cocked the lever and ejected the shell. I saw it bounce on the cement, but I couldn’t hear it.
He looked down at Jon through the haze of smoke in the air. Jon had flinched when the shot went off, but he was back to staring at Craig again.
“I guess I do know how to shoot it, huh?” Craig asked, a little too loudly. I guess he couldn’t hear too good, either, over the ringing in his own ears.
“You fucking idiot!” I yelled.
Craig looked down at me, murder in his eyes.
“You could have killed us!” I shouted, and pointed at the leaking can. “The bullet ricocheted – you could have hit me, or Jon, or Noelle – ”
“I don’t really give a fuck about you, asshole,” Craig snapped, then looked at Jon. “And I’m starting to get pretty pissed off at my ‘friend’ here, too.”
“Craig…stop,” Noelle said. She sounded broken, just tired out and not able to keep it together anymore. “Please…I just want this to stop…please stop it…I just want it all to stop…”
She started sobbing into her hands.
Craig looked at me and Jon a few minutes more, then he went over beside his girlfriend and tried to comfort her.
Nobody said anything else for hours.
I just counted the supplies.
20 cans of soup. 33 cans of vegetables. No more cans of fruit. 3 cans of tuna fish. 68 liters of water.
49
The days dragged on.
The food was running incredibly low now. The fruit was all gone, the tuna fish was all gone. Spaghetti and meatballs…long gone. Now all we had was soup and vegetables. 17 cans of soup, 30 cans of vegetables...14 cans of soup, 27 cans of vegetables…11 cans of soup and 25 cans of vegetables…
You would think that as the food ran down, they’d start to eat less. That it would be like an hourglass, and they’d start to see their time was running out, and finally they’d start making some changes.
Not exactly.
Yeah, Jon and Noelle and I ate less…but it wasn’t because we decided it would be a good idea to stretch our supplies as long as we could.
No, it was because Craig took over the food.
With the gun, he could pretty much do whatever the fuck he wanted. So he would eat as much as before. But he only gave me and Jon a can per meal.
Noelle, he gave her two cans…but she would only eat one, and barely even that. Maybe in the beginning it was to protest what Craig was doing, that he was starving me and Jon while he ate like a hog. But mostly I think she just gave up. It was like she stopped caring. More and more she started to remind me of Violet, and that scared me.
Not as much as I hated Craig, though.
Jon brought up the food the first time Craig skimped on us.
“Hey…you’re eating two cans.”
“That’s cause I’ve got to keep my strength up. Got to keep the rest of you fuckers safe.”
“I’d rather you just gave me my fair share.”
“That’s too bad,” Craig said, and shifted the rifle in his arms as he continued to eat his can of chicken noodle soup.
The message was clear: I got the gun, so shut the fuck up.
Jon didn’t mention the food or the gun again.
As far as the gun went, Craig started to get paranoid about it. He kept his hands on it all the time so neither of us could get it while he wasn’t looking. And the food – he was paranoid about that, too. He would march us out of the bunker and be the last one out in the morning, then he was the first one in at night. Just to make sure we couldn’t steal any of his precious food.
Between the gun and the food, he kept his eye on us more than he watched the bugs.
Noelle was like a zombie. She didn’t look at any of us too much, just spent a lot of time crouched with her head resting on her knees, or staring off into the distance.
Except when Craig would drag her off to the bunker, leaving me and Jon up on the top of the RV by ourselves. She would usually try to hold him off and swat him away, but he kept on insisting and tugging at her. I think eventually she gave in just so he would leave her alone.
Every time he did it I wanted to kill him even more.
The only good part about it was that I didn’t hear her screaming or moaning anymore. They would go in, and it would be silent. Then they would come out. Noelle would look pretty much the same way she looked going in: dazed, tired, not wanting to go on.
She looked the way I felt.
50
Three days after Kristin died we had the conversation.
Everybody was on top of a new RV. The old one had Kristin’s blood dried all over the roof, and nobody wanted to see that again, so we went over to Dale’s RV. His was close by, and he had a ladder, too. Craig made me go up and get the shelter off of Grams and Pop’s RV, and then carry the pieces up onto Dale’s roof and set it up again. Then he hogged the shade the whole time while he sat with the gun in his lap.
We had just finished lunch (3 cans of soup left, 11 cans of vegetables, 42 liters of water) when Craig started pestering Noelle. After a minute or two she gave in. I guess she didn’t have the energy to even try to say no anymore. They climbed down the ladder and walked over to the bunker. I stared after them as they went inside.
“Craig’s got to go,” Jon said, his voice flat. He might as well have said, “It’s really hot out today.”
I looked over at him. He still had Kristin’s blood on him, though it had mostly dried and flaked off his face except for a few spots here and there. His clothes were rust brown where Craig had pinned him against the RV roof and he’d flopped around in the puddle.
Basically, he looked crazy. But the scary part was he didn’t get angry anymore.
Ever since Kristin died – actually, ever since his fight with Craig after it happened – Jon had just sort of shut down. He didn’t get angry, he didn’t get excited, he just got…cold.
Noelle was a zombie. She acted tired, like she was only putting one foot in front of the other because she couldn’t think of anything else to do.
Jon was different. He was in there, all right – the lights were on and somebody was home. But the somebody part never reacted anymore. It seemed like he was waiting for something.
I guess killing Craig was it.
“You mean…?” I asked without finishing the question. If this was some sort of fucked-up test, and he was planning to rat me out to Craig so he could have my extra can of food, then fuck him.
But if he was serious…
He sure looked serious. “I mean kill him.”
My chest tightened up a little bit.
This was everything I’d been dreaming of the last couple of days, ever since Craig had kicked the shit out of me. Ever since he had humiliated me in front of Noelle.
For a while there, my daydreams about killing him had been the only thing that kept me going.
But now…to hear somebody say it out loud…
It made me a little scared, truth to tell.
And I still wasn’t 100 percent convinced that this wasn’t some sort of fucked-up test.
“Do you mean, do I want to kill Craig or…do you want me to help you kill Craig?”
“I already know you want to kill him. If you didn’t want to kill him before he beat you up, you definitely wanted to kill him after.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You’re in love with her,” Jon said.
“No,” I blurted out.
Jon gave me a look like Give me a break. “Quit fucking around, Ben. You’d have to be crazy – or gay – not to be in love with her. Hell, I wanted her. Hi
t on her a few times before she and Craig started going out, but she didn’t go for it. Don’t get me wrong, I really liked Kristin. Fuck, maybe I loved her. Before all this happened, I was thinking of moving in with her. But then you see Noelle and it makes you…”
He blew out all his breath. After a minute he went on.
“She might be the last woman on earth, Ben. Think about that for a second. The four of us…we might be the last people alive on earth.”
I thought about it. It was hard to believe at first…but then you stared out at the miles and miles of empty desert, and it got a whole lot easier to believe.
“And you’re never going to have a shot at her as long as Craig is alive,” Jon said.
My stomach clenched, and all the shame and humiliation and pain from when Craig beat me up came roaring back.
All the anger.
All the hate.
I didn’t say anything for a minute. Then I got to thinking.
“What about you?” I asked. “You just said you liked her, too.”
Jon squinted out at the desert, and his voice went cold. “You can have her. I just want him dead for what he did to Kristin.”
I looked over at Jon. He kept staring out at the desert.
I got a weird feeling in my stomach. Here I was, up on top of the RV, having a nice little chat about killing somebody in cold blood.
First off, Jon’s reason for wanting to kill Craig was pretty shitty, truth be told.
Craig had tried to save Kristin. I watched him. He grabbed her arm and tried to pull her up. He only kicked her off the roof because a bug was about to get up there and kill us all. Not only that, Kristin was already good as dead when he kicked her off the roof.
Craig had actually saved us. Much as I hated to admit it, that was the God’s honest truth. We’d all be dead right now if Craig hadn’t kicked her off.
Jon either didn’t see any of that, or he didn’t want to see it, even though it was as clear as day to me.
That’s what gave me the weird feeling: I couldn’t tell if Jon was batshit insane or not.
I wasn’t about to tell him that, though.
Second off, I was the one Craig had beat up. I was the one he’d humiliated. If anybody should want to kill him, it was me.
But when it came down to it – now that we were talking about it, I mean seriously considering it – I didn’t know if I could.
Kill him, I mean.
I felt like a pussy. Like a worthless excuse for a man.
What kind of a guy gets humiliated in front of the woman he loves, and can’t pull the trigger on the asshole who did it? Especially when there’s no cops to throw him in jail, no prison to go to?
A man without any balls, that’s what kind of a guy.
I coulda just lied to myself and said, No, it’s wrong. You know it’s wrong and that’s why you can’t do it.
But that shit wasn’t the truth.
I didn’t care whether it was right or wrong.
I was just afraid.
That bothered me almost as much as sitting on a roof with a crazy person.
So I didn’t say anything. I just kept quiet.
Jon must have known he hadn’t convinced me yet, so he started talking again. “We can’t keep going like this. He’s hogging the food. At this rate, we’ll be dead way before he is. He doesn’t give a shit about us, he only wants to keep himself alive. In fact, he’s killing us now, he’s just taking a longer time to do it. But he’s definitely killing us, just the same as if he pointed the gun at us and pulled the trigger. When we get down to the end, do you think he’s going to give us any of the last cans of food? Or any water? We have to do something before we’re too weak to fight back.”
That much was true. Craig was killing us, slowly and surely.
Maybe Jon wasn’t so batshit insane after all.
Or maybe he just figured out a way to make me give him what he wanted.
Suddenly I flashed back to Craig kicking me on the bunker floor, over and over and over.
I remembered the way Noelle wouldn’t look at me when I was lying there, bloody and fucked up, with my limp dick hanging out of my pants.
Hell, I wanted the exact same thing Jon wanted…just for different reasons.
I made my decision.
“How would we kill him?” I asked.
51
“I’ve been thinking about that. You got any ideas?”
“With the gun?” I asked.
“Probably not,” Jon said. “He’s pretty fucking paranoid about it. If we get the chance to take it away from him, great, but I don’t think we should count on that.”
“What, should we jump him then?”
Jon looked over at me. “No offense, but you’re not the best in a fight.”
I gritted my teeth. I knew he was telling the truth, but it still pissed me off to hear it.
“And me…well, Craig’s already got the best of me a couple of times,” Jon added. “And now we’re both weaker because we haven’t been eating as much. But he has. So I’m not sure we can take him, even together.”
That took a little of the sting out of what he said.
A little.
“How, then? Do we…do we wait until he falls asleep?”
I don’t know why, but the more I talked about this, the more nervous I got. I kept watching the bunker to make sure Craig didn’t walk out.
Like it was even possible he could ever hear us from a hundred feet away…but still…
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. If he wakes up and catches us, he’ll kill us. Plus, if you don’t want Noelle to hate you, I think we should make it look like an accident.”
“An accident,” I repeated.
Jon nodded.
“You mean…the bugs,” I realized.
Jon looked around the RV park. “What’s the most dangerous spot around here?”
Besides the whole world? I answered inside my head. Then I took a second to think about it.
“Well, outside at night, probably.”
“Why would Craig go outside at night?”
Actually, he wouldn’t. He couldn’t even get outside, not with a dozen of the little fuckers whipping their tails through the bunker doors. “He wouldn’t.”
“Okay, so what else?”
“Inside the RVs.”
“Inside all of them, or just some of them? Or is there one in particular?”
I thought back to Lisa and Bob Crossin’s trailer and the bug that had taken a hunk out of my leg.
I’d killed that one, but if he’d already chewed his way into the fridge and made himself a home, it was a good bet another one had moved in after him.
At least I hoped so.
“Probably a lot of them are dangerous, but I think I know one good one for sure.”
“Okay…you’ve already told us that it’s dangerous to go in the RVs. So why would Craig go inside?”
“…gas?”
“You said there wasn’t any left.”
“I could lie.”
“They wouldn’t have gas inside an RV, would they?”
“No,” I admitted.
“It’s gotta be something he’ll believe or he’ll get suspicious.”
“…food. We need more food.”
“I thought you got everything.”
“Not all of it. I mean, most of it, yeah, but it’s dangerous, so I got what was easy to find.”
“That might work,” Jon said. “What about beer? Or wine, or Jack Daniels, or vodka?”
“Yeah, probably.”
“That’ll work. What about weed? Did anybody have any weed?”
“You mean…marijuana?” I asked, a little shocked.
Jon looked at me the way you might look at a goody-goody who didn’t want to watch a PG movie because of the cussing. Like, Are you for real? “Yeah. Marijuana.”
Most of the folks in the RV park were old. I knew what marijuana was like – Mom used to smoke it sometimes back in L.A. – b
ut I’d never seen or smelled it here. Dale was probably the guy who would have been most likely to use it, but he just liked getting shitfaced with booze.
“No. Why?”
“We haven’t had any weed since…well, since everything went to shit. Me and Craig used to smoke out a lot.” Jon looked like he was thinking. “Noelle used to hate that he did it. They got in some big fights about it.”
“Well, I don’t think there’s any here.”
“Doesn’t matter – that’s a lie he’ll believe. Now, where’s this RV?”
I stood up and pointed it out. It was on the other end of the park, with seven or eight other trailers between us. In fact, from here we could only see the roof.
“Perfect,” Jon said, and smiled. “Perfect.”
Then he told me how we were going to play it.
52
As soon as Craig and Noelle came out of the bunker, Jon and I went down the ladder and met them halfway. My heart was beating so hard inside my chest I thought I might have a heart attack.
Noelle frowned a little when she saw us walking towards them. “What are you guys doing?”
“You going gay on me, Jon? Gonna take Ben into the bunker and turn him into your prison bitch?” Craig laughed.
I glared at him. Any guilt I still had about the plan immediately went away.
But my heart kept hammering inside my chest. If Craig didn’t believe us…or if he guessed what we were up to…
“We have something we wanted to run past you,” Jon said, then looked at Noelle. “Go on up to the RV, we’ll be there in a second.”
She crossed her arms. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. Just something I want to talk to Craig about.”
“Well then you can talk to me about it, too,” she scowled.
Jon looked at Craig. “Craig…?” he said, and tipped his head like, Tell her to go away.
Craig looked back and forth between them, then kind of leaned back a little with the rifle in his arms. “Just spit it out, Jon.”
Jon shrugged like Whatever. “Ben says he knows where there’s some weed.”
From the way Craig’s eyes lit up, I knew we had him. Hook, line and sinker.
Noelle’s face got dark. “NO. Unh-unh.”
I was amazed. It was the most life she'd shown in days.
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