The Book of a Few

by Rodgers, Austen

  Dana turned to lead the way further into the building, but paused to whisper something to Will. Will nodded shortly after, and Dana walked through the doors into the break room.

  “Go ahead,” Will said to Bruce, who walked past Will.

  After hearing the door to the break room open and close once more, Will began walking my way. He spotted me.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Dana says to go through the meeting rooms that link to the break room. Stay hidden and put a bead on the back of Bruce’s head. He’s got something up his sleeve, I think.”

  “What?” I was confused.

  “Just do it—I don’t know. I’m joining Dana.” Will waved his hands, shooing me away as he turned around.

  I got into position as quickly as I could. After reaching the door, I opened it as slowly as I could and took in the situation in the break room. Dana was already seated at one of the tables, facing me. A candy bar was lying on the table. It must have been pulled from one of the vending machines. Will stood off to the side of the table a-ways. More interestingly, just as Bruce walked up and began pulling his own chair out from under the table, across from Dana, Will pointed and exclaimed: “He’s armed!”

  Bruce quickly spun around. Dana seemed unsurprised when Bruce pulled a revolver from his rear waistband. Will was now at gunpoint, arms in the air. A three-way argument burst in the room between all of them. With everyone yelling at the same time, I couldn’t make out any of it. I raised my own gun to my shoulder and put its sights on Bruce.

  The room grew quiet, and Dana spoke in a calmer voice. “Bruce, why did you lie?” Bruce faced Dana, but kept his gun on Will. “How are we to make a deal if I can’t trust you?”

  “The gun stays with me,” Bruce said with shaking hands. The words rolled off his tongue with a forceful presence. “How can I trust you, huh?”

  “Bruce, I need that key,” Dana said steadily. “You don’t know the desperation I’m feeling right now. But you lied, and now I can’t trust you. You said you weren’t armed, Bruce. I need to know, right now, do you have the key?”

  What key? I thought to myself. I knew I missed an important part of the conversation while moving into my first hiding place.

  Bruce stood there, and I could tell he was thinking about what to say next because he had lost eye contact with Dana. A long moment passed.

  “Room and food first. The key is your payment. If you want it, you’ll give me what I want,” Bruce demanded.

  Dana laughed. “Bruce, I don’t even know if you have the key. Considering you’ve already lied once, I haven’t got any faith that you do.”

  Bruce let out an exasperated yell in his anger and shook his fists in the air, then turned his own gun to his chest and fumbled through his pocket with his free hand.

  Pulling out a brown key and holding it up, Bruce spoke, “I’ll fucking swallow it.” Bruce’s iron will was formidable, and it was easily apparent that this man was used to finagling his way into everything to get anything he wanted.

  Dana laughed again, amused. “That’s stupid, Bruce. I’ll just gut you when you’re dead.” Dana’s tone made it seem like he would enjoy doing such a deed himself. Hopefully it was just good acting.

  Bruce reached down to his leg and pulled his pants up, revealing a bloody gauze pad. He fiddled around with it, and finally tore it off his leg with a groan. A small piece of flesh was missing from the side of his calf.

  “There you go again, Bruce!” Dana exclaimed, throwing his hands in the air in disappointment.

  Yelling back, Bruce restated his threat, “I’ll do it! I’ll fucking eat the key and blow a hole in myself! How are you gonna get the key then, huh? Digging around in the intestines of a fucking zombie doesn’t sound too safe. I’ll come back and infect every one of you.”

  Bruce must not have known that the infection doesn’t spread by being bitten, nor does it reanimate the dead. By the look of his leg, the wound was pretty fresh. I would guess, based on his tale earlier, that his infected family had probably bitten him the night before. Dana stayed serious, even though we had already told him what Bella had told us about the infection.

  “So, what I’m seeing is even if we do give you a room and agree to all your terms, including you keeping your gun and giving you food, what’s keeping you here?” Dana looked straight into Bruce’s eyes.

  “You seem to threaten your own death like it’s no big deal, Bruce. And I’m going to tell you that it honestly isn’t. Are you planning on killing yourself, Bruce?” Dana paused, sniffling and wiping a finger under his nose. He didn’t speak for a moment, allowing the gravity of what he had just said to sink into Bruce. Bruce seemed astonished, but I could tell that this was a man who wanted to die.

  “You came here,” Dana said, “hoping to find some food and a quiet place to spend your last night. Wanting nothing more than to die with a full stomach. Turns out you were a business owner, which is something you should have kept to yourself. When you said you managed the sporting goods shop, I realized that you had something we desperately need. So I listened to your pleas and humored you. I even tried to strike a deal between us, Bruce. But you lied, and now I can’t trust you. You lied about two very big things. If there is any hope at all that you will get what you want tonight, it will start with you giving me the key.” Dana pointed a finger down on the table, intensifying his statement.

  Bruce took a moment to think. His hand holding his gun dropped slightly, then lowered to his side.

  “I don’t want to fight anymore,” Bruce said somberly as a tear escaped the corner of his eye. He wiped the water from his face and locked eyes with Dana. “You better come through.” He tossed the key on the table.

  A sigh of relief came from Dana as he tucked the key into his pocket.

  “Bruce, what was your kid’s name?” Dana asked.

  “Amy,” Bruce replied faintly. “She was twelve.”

  Dana nodded and looked down at his hands for a moment, then back at Bruce. “Think of her, okay?”

  Dana winked to me, and I fired a bullet into Bruce’s skull without thought or hesitation. It was just done in a moment’s notice—wink-pull-boom. Bruce hit the floor convulsing as his brain fired every last synaptic connection still intact. I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time, and I let another man control my actions. I regret this.

  He didn’t have to die, at least not now and by our hands. If the man wanted to die on his own terms, why did we deny him? It wouldn’t have held us back or put us at any risk of starvation if we just gave the man a meal and a room to do his business in. Maybe I’m just clinging to the ethical side of myself and it really isn’t that big of a deal, but I’m having difficulty accepting my own actions.

  I have no qualms killing people who pose a threat to my well-being, or that of my friends. But on the other hand, innocent souls who did not deserve death are completely different. I don’t think I can kill like that again. I feel guilt like I never have before.

  I occasionally like to think that I already am a survivor. I have imagined myself as a grizzled, battle-hardened man and all my kills are my means toward a bigger goal. The goal of being one of the few still alive standing atop a mountain in all of my vicious blood-soaked glory. Shouting out that I had bested everything that the world sought to take me down with. I’ve come to find that my personal mountain, due to my morals that increase its height, reaches up into the heavens. I have no hope of making it to the top.

  Sacrifices I’ve made so far seem so trivial right now; smoking, good food, technology in general, relationships with distant friends, and even a lover pale in comparison to what I now realize is ahead of me. If I really want to survive this and endure the ages, I have to throw out a whole lot more. I have to be willing to sacrifice friends, partners, and homes. There will always be blood on my hands, no matter where I go.

  Dana laughed over Bruce’s twitching body and said, “You think I’m going to feed you just so you can blow your brains ou
t?”

  Shortly after the gunshot, Branden and Taylor burst into the break room. They immediately asked what had happened, and Dana and Will told the tale while I stood quietly. As Dana finished reciting, I interjected.

  “I…I don’t think we had to kill him.” I stuttered, nervous that there would be repercussions. “We could have just given him a room, and let him…let him do his thing. It wouldn’t have hurt us at all.”

  Dana looked at me, bewildered. “He was a risk, Chester. He straight out lied multiple times. The way I see it and the way you should see it is that, for all we know, he could have popped us all in the night.” Dana stomped his way around Bruce’s corpse and over to Will’s side while glaring at me.

  “Unlike you,” he said, “I look after my friends. The only concern I have is the safety of those already with me. If someone wants to be one of the pack, even if just for a night, so be it. But you don’t do it like that.” Dana pointed down at Bruce.

  At that point, I felt it was meaningless to argue further. I shook my head and kept quiet; I’m a pacifist at heart.

  Dana handed the key to Will and said, “Go get the locks off those guns you told me about. I don’t know where they are.”

  “Who’s getting them?” Branden asked.

  “We’ll work from the ground up. Will can have the handgun, and Taylor can have the other one. That way we’ll all be armed with something semi-decent.”

  Dana bent over and examined all of Bruce’s pockets. He retrieved a handful of ammo from one of them and his wallet from another. He also took the gun Bruce snuck in.

  Lisa rushed into the room, panicked. “What happened? I heard gunfire.” Then she noticed Bruce’s body and began looking between the three of us, waiting for one of us to speak.

  Dana looked up from his crouched position and said, “This guy just came in and wanted to do some business. Nothing wrong with that, but before we walked him in, I asked him if he was armed; he said no. Turned out he lied and started making threats if we didn’t give him what he wanted. He couldn’t be trusted, so we had to do away with him.”

  “What did he want?” Lisa asked.

  “Food and a place to stay,” Branden said.

  Lisa hummed to herself and said, “That’s sad, truly.”

  We all worked together to get the body out and clean up the break room after Dana reminded us of today’s planned guests. Dr. Bella and company were supposed to show up sometime and we didn’t want to scare them off. We burned his body out in the far corner of the parking lot after figuring that the smoke wouldn’t attract any infected.

  I suppose we did gain three firearms out of the whole ordeal. It will be nice not having to worry about security as much. While we aren’t a formidable force, we are a small band of armed men with the strong desire to live. Still, I know that everyone here has his own agenda. Branden wants to find his kid someday. Lisa, Taylor, and Will just seem to want to live, and I couldn’t tell you shit about what Dana wants. With a hodgepodge group like this, it’s only a matter of time before someone decides to put his or her own interests first.

  An hour or so had passed, and everyone grew tired of waiting around. Card games took up a majority of that time, but I didn’t feel the desire to play. I did stand close enough to hear most of what everyone said during the games, however. They all told tales of their lives before the Silence and the battles they had fought to survive up until they had joined this little group.

  Branden told his first, all known to me and previously stated in this logbook. He told the others how he was a husband and a father despite his young age. He explained to Will and Dana that before the Silence he had worked at this Warehouse with me and would occasionally see Taylor. Eventually he got around to describing what had happened to both his wife and child, and ended his story by expressing the desire to look around for his son tomorrow.

  Next, Will told his story. I was interested in hearing a second time to be sure that no little details in his story had changed. He spoke of how his roommate and brother had died in the car seats in front of him. He was the only one buckled when infected rushed out onto the street to greet them. You can guess the rest. So he was left abandoned away from home—turns out he actually lives up north in Minneapolis—and wandered around a while. After some time, he found himself in the employ of the doctors at the hospital. One of the men he was assigned to work with came up with the idea of turning men, but it backfired when we came around.

  Taylor had lost contact with his family, just as the rest of us had. He held tight in his apartment for a few days, but without expecting it, his father showed up to take him home. While the two of them were gathering up some of Taylor’s things, a frenzied gunman who had just seen his first infected ended up in a scuffle with his father. They both fell from the third floor deck. Taylor then set out to the police station, which was the closest source of help to him. They turned him down; they said their hands were full enough already and were unable to help him. Probably because of the newly emerging plague, I’d imagine. He was on his way home when one of Will’s men clubbed him in the back of his head.

  I was surprised at how easy it was for Taylor to tell his story. He explained what Will had done to him like it was no big deal. When Will seemed remorseful after hearing the tale, Taylor laughed and said, “No, it’s not a big deal; I’d have done it, too.”

  Taylor is by far the most generous and forgiving person I know. He is also probably the closest friend I have right now. We were great friends before the Silence, and I now notice that we don’t really talk as much. I should try to fix that.

  I had been eagerly awaiting Dana’s turn and made sure to pay special attention to remember what was said.

  “Well, you probably aren’t gonna be surprised at all when I say this, but…” Dana said in a chipper tone. “Uh… my name’s Dana, and I am still alive.” He paused for a moment, letting it sink in. The others chuckled a bit, and yes, I may have grinned.

  “Uh… I was at home playing on my computer when I first ran into the dead. Well, I wasn’t playing—I was checking to see if the Internet was working again. My roommate came home and was coughing a lot, you know. I asked him how he was and he said he was fine. Then he went into the bathroom, preceded by another fit of coughs.” He paused a moment to think. “When he came back out, which was a long fucking time after he first went in there, he was one of them, simply put.”

  I took a moment to ponder what he said. In mid-sentence, I interrupted, “Wait. Did you just say he changed in a few hours?”

  “Yeah…” Dana realized the point I was making based on his expression. “How did he…” Dana trailed off in his thoughts.

  “Yeah, I was gonna say, that doesn’t seem right,” Will added to the conversation. “How could he have become feral in a matter of hours? We’ve all been bitten and scratched, and in Taylor’s case it was days ago.”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Dana said, “but I think we will know in the near future.” He motioned toward the room where the body was. Let me add as well that the body wasn’t getting any fresher in the past few days.

  Honking came from outside, almost as if on cue. The card players got up and went out to greet our expected guests and I followed behind. They weren’t in an ambulance like I had expected; it was a military-style truck. It looked big, heavy, and full. Five people emerged from the vehicle upon our waving them in, two of whom were easily recognizable: Thomson and Dr. Hillman. There was also three other men with them, one of whom I felt looked familiar, but I could not associate a name with the face.

  Bella smiled her wonderful smile, and I waved to her. She then turned her attention to two armed guards that had come with her and told one of them to stay with the truck. The other looked a bit tattered, and by far appeared to be the worst equipped. Then the fifth person emerged from the rear end of the truck; a shorter Indian man who was dressed in a white gown much like Bella’s.

  The strangers came up with Bella and introduced themselve
s to us. The ragbag soldier, Michael, shook hands with all of us first, greeting us all with a simple “It’s a pleasure.” Bella’s Indian counterpart is named Dr. Milaka, but I couldn’t really tell much of what he said because his accent is pretty thick.

  I noticed as we were all introducing ourselves to one another that Thomson’s eyes were lingering out across the parking lot and off into the distance. Bruce’s body was still smoldering, and the wind carried the faint smell of cooking flesh to us. He seemed distraught and more preoccupied by his surroundings than the people around him.

  “We should get this over with,” he finally spoke, and his eyes met Bella’s. “Haven’t got a lot of light left in the day.”

  He almost looked as though a sense of intense caution or fear had settled in him. Maybe the burning corpse outside wasn’t a very welcoming sight. I wondered if he was now concerned for the well-being of his men and the doctors, or afraid that this was an elaborate ruse. I understand his worry completely, as I, too, am often paranoid of being stabbed in the back by one of the men I surround myself with.