They were always supposed to eat together, here, in this place. That was one of their unspoken rules, breaking bread together so the bonds of brotherhood and fellowship might remain strong in a world noticeably absent of both. That was the theory at least. Pleasantries were exchanged, heads nodded. And yet, it felt like another day of them becoming strangers to one another.
They were drifting apart, the bonds that had once connected them dissolving slowly. The graveyard shift, someone had called it. All of them, on the graveyard shift. Literally. One day, they would all punch out, and that would be it. A new day would dawn on planet Earth: Population, Zero. Maybe it was better this way. Maybe it was better to adapt to this kind of isolation now because things were only going to get worse. Not in a get-worse-before-they-get-better kind of way. No, in a get-worse-before-they-get-even-worse-and-then-worse-still kind of way.
Will grabbed their trays as they approached the buffet line. A handwritten sign taped to the sneeze guard announced tonight’s offering. Vienna sausages, canned broccoli, and some flatbread they had learned to make over the years. It was a bit dry, but if you soaked it in the runoff from the meal, it was tolerable. A protein, a vegetable and a starch. There were no other options, unless you counted going hungry an option.
She and Will went down the line, collecting their dinner, waiting as their names were checked off the list because there was always a list. Food was distributed based on a formula Adam had developed many years earlier. Rachel rated eleven hundred calories per day; Will got more to meet the needs of his growing body. Even so, it wasn’t enough. Sometimes at night while they sat and read or played with toys, the rumble of his stomach would tell her it wasn’t enough, or when they were at the cafeteria and he would vacuum his dinner and then look longingly at his mother’s plate and think she hadn’t seen him look. And then she would pretend she hadn’t seen him look because after all, she was hungry too, there was always room for a little more, always a little deficit that made things a bit uncomfortable. She was down a good thirty pounds from her pre-plague weight, the terrible irony that she finally fit in the clothes she never really cared about, except for the tiniest sliver.
Around them, the dining room bubbled to life with the sounds of clanking silverware and chit-chat. Despite all the problems they faced, she still liked seeing the group together, even if it was no longer the slightly optimistic bunch they’d been a decade ago. It made her feel like there was still a little hope left, that things would work out somehow. She didn’t know how they would work out exactly, but that was hope for you. Blind and dumb and hopped up mainlining optimism. A chewy bit of faith at the center of it.
No one joined them at their table, but that was par for the course, and she had gotten used to it. She understood. Besides, this gave her the opportunity to talk with him, about things he’d seen, things he’d learned, things he’d read.
“How come Dad didn’t come?” he said, his eyes flitting around the cafeteria for his father. She watched him do it, she watched those blue eyes scan the room, a constantly shifting brew of hope and wariness.
“He had some things to do, sweetie. He’s a busy guy, your old man,” she said, the lie eating at her like corrosive acid.
Always making excuses for him.
Will pushed his plate away.
“I’m not hungry,” he said, his voice cracking. He stared down at the worn tabletop.
“You know the rules, mister.”
It was one of Rachel Fisher’s non-negotiable edicts. You cleaned the plate in front of you, no matter what (and truth be told, Vienna sausage tasted a little like a melted meat Popsicle). There was too much uncertainty, too many unknown variables at play to be skipping a meal simply because you were pouting, no matter how justified the pouting was. Every meal, every bite of food was sacred now, never to be taken for granted. Ever. The next meal was never guaranteed, and that was why you always ate this meal.
“But I’m not-”
“Eat your dinner,” she snapped, a bit louder than she had intended, and suddenly it was quiet in the dining room and she could feel the others staring, watching her and judging. A stab of heat coursed up her back, and she felt guilty and angry and alone all at once. The moment passed, and the chit-chat resumed. But Rachel felt the prickly heat of being watched; she glanced up and saw her friend Erin Thompson, the next table over, still watching her. Erin was a few years older than Rachel, a petite but hard woman with hair that had gone gray before she turned thirty. They’d met about a month after the pandemic, while they were held captive by a man named Miles Chadwick. Once she’d been Rachel’s closest friend, now rapidly becoming another stranger. Twelve years earlier, her infant son, the first born in their community, had died of Medusa.
“What?” Rachel asked Erin.
“I guess everyone has their own parenting style,” Erin said, her fingers tented in front of her face.
Across from her, Will looked down at his plate and began eating, painfully aware of his place in the community.
“Why don’t you mind your own goddamn business?” Rachel said.
The dining room went quiet again as the others’ ears perked up, ready for a little dinner theater. Erin stood up and collected her plate. Rachel’s skin flushed with anger, the red splotch creeping up her chest. Her cheeks felt hot.
“I guess some people don’t know how good they have it.”
She stormed away to dispose of her dinnerware, leaving Rachel seething. The crowd resumed its chatter a second time, and Rachel watched Will eat, turning over the events of the last few minutes in her head.
Will picked at his food, each bite swallowed under protest, and now he was mad at her to boot, like she had committed some terrible crime in making sure he had food in his belly. Because that was parenting. Snipping the correct wire and the bomb blowing up anyway. Eventually, the plate was empty, because he was a growing boy, after all, and he’d been hungry.
They got up wordlessly and left.
The trailer was empty when they made it back. Behind them, the last bit of daylight had evaporated and darkness sank across the land, as though some bored deity had tired of his game and extinguished the light in his room. Will flopped down on the ratty old sofa and reached for a Spider-Man comic book.
“Not so fast, buddy,” she said. “Time for bed.”
“When’s Dad coming back?” he asked.
Again, the question twisted in her gut like a knife.
“I don’t know, sweetie,” she answered. “After you’re asleep probably.”
He moped through his bedtime ritual, the brushing of his teeth, the changing into his pajamas. It probably took him thirty minutes to accomplish the task that should have taken three. Finally, he was done, and she tucked him into his bed, a twin mattress lying on the floor, and kissed his forehead.
The room was small, a typical boy’s room, peppered with toys and gadgets he’d accumulated over the years. Transition, there was always a transition in progress, from these toys to those, from these clothes to those, from this book to that. His current favorite was his G.I. Joe collection, requisitioned from a Toys R Us up in Omaha. He had dozens of the action figures, all the vehicles and playsets, because, after all, there had to be perks that came along with being born after the apocalypse.
“Good night, Spoon.”
“Night.”
After Will was in bed, Rachel sat on the couch in the small pool of light spilling from the lantern with an old Stephen King novel, Under the Dome, in her lap. Tonight, the book held little interest for her. She went out to the front stoop for a cigarette. It tasted old and hot and dry. The glowing orange tip bobbed in the darkness, a lonely craft in an ocean of blackness. Eddie hated it when she smoked, which made her enjoy it even more. The next morning, he’d make some comment about it, about how it made her smell like an ashtray in a New York City cab, and it would give her a secret little thrill.
Around her the complex was dark. Good metaphor for her life. For all their lives.
You could only see what was right there in front of you, no more. The years since the plague had shrunk the world down, leaving her in this small cocoon.
She pitched the half-smoked butt and went back inside.
3
Rachel sat on the edge of the sofa, lacing up her heavy work boots, shaking the thin sleep out of her eyes. It was a little past six and the trailer was quiet. Will was asleep, having stayed up late the night before reading the first Harry Potter novel. She had picked it up at a library in an unincorporated community a mile outside the town limits. He had never heard of the boy wizard, of course, his world devoid of even the slightest glimmer of pop culture. Wizards and Quidditch and butterbeer and dragons. All good things for a boy of eleven.
Eddie snored in their bedroom; at least the son of a bitch was here, hadn’t left her deciding whether she should leave Will sleeping alone. She had done it, God forgive her, she had left him alone and asleep on the nights Eddie hadn’t made it home on time and there had been no one else to ask.
She carried the lantern to the kitchen, where she opened an energy gel pack and sucked out the viscous concoction. She winced at the chemical flavor that had been injected into the package more than a decade ago. Blueberry, my ass. Probably tasted the same the day it had been sealed shut, unaware of its fate as one of the last of its kind. Because there were no more blueberry-flavored energy gels rolling off assembly lines in Milwaukee or Joliet or Texarkana or wherever this packet had been born.
One day, someone would eat the very last one, and that would be it. Extinct. She was lucky they had food at all, but that old sensation of not wanting anything here, atavistic, ancient, welled up inside her. What she wouldn’t have given for some orange chicken from China Dragon right then and there, what she wouldn’t have given. Even now, barely six in the morning, her mouth watered at the thought of the crisp battered chicken, its tanginess filling her mouth and look at her daydream take over there and run away like the dish with the spoon.
Rachel grabbed her gun, the M4 rifle her dad had given to her many years ago. It had once belonged to Sarah Wells, the late love of her father’s life, brought together by chance or fate or karma in the unhinged days immediately after the plague. Using a book she found in an Omaha library, she taught herself how to care for it, maintain it, clean it, so it would always be that loyal friend she needed in this brave not-so-new-anymore world. She practiced with it religiously, and it had saved her life on more than one occasion. They all did. Weapons training was gospel around here.
After loading her pack and pulling on her coat and gloves, she locked the door and headed out into the morning mist. She hadn’t always locked the door when she left, and she didn’t quite remember when she had started doing it again, but it put her mind at ease. It couldn’t have been a good sign that she was reverting to the old ways of distrust and suspicion. Walls were going up among them. Perhaps the others had started locking their doors and had been locking them all along and she hadn’t known it, any more than the others would know she was locking hers now.
It was chilly outside, her exhalations drifting away in vaporous clouds in the pre-dawn gloom. She followed the familiar path to the warehouse. How many times had she made this trip? God might know; she did not. She liked leaving early for the morning shift - it gave her time to think, to clear her head, before embarking on the important but dull work of defending and maintaining the warehouse.
Her father lived alone in the next trailer over. Next to him lived Erin and her common-law husband Harry Maynard, a refugee from the original town of Evergreen and their community’s constable. A little bit farther up, light glowed softly in Max Gilmartin’s trailer as she drifted by, and she could see his silhouette moving to and fro inside. Max. It was weird to think of him as an adult now, as she still remembered the gangly, pimple-pocked teenager she’d met long ago. Her father had found him in a grocery store in the aftermath of the plague, a terrified teenager, and he had been with him as Adam crossed America looking for Rachel. He was huge now, well over six feet tall and two-hundred and forty pounds. TWO-FORTY! as he enjoyed yelling when he’d had a bit too much to drink. Now that was a guy they had a hard time feeding.
Their trailer sat in the northwest corner of this distribution warehouse complex, a few miles southwest of Omaha, Nebraska. The trailer wasn’t much, a corrugated aluminum singlewide, once an office for some long-dead middle manager, now split into three rooms, one for Will, one for her and Eddie, and the tiny sitting room where they had played their game. They’d lived here for more than ten years now, ever since they had abandoned the Caballero Ranch after the crop failures and migrated north to Omaha. Making the best of a bad situation, that’s what Adam had called it. They’d been unbelievably lucky to find this place, luckier still to have taken it with minimal losses. Three of them had died in the battle to take it, and tragic as those losses had been, they had not been in vain.
Now had it been three or four?
She couldn’t remember exactly, but that’s the way it was. People died all the time now. Death was part of life, really part of it, not like in the old days when people said it but really they meant, oh, did you hear about Bob in Finance, he had a heart attack or a guy blowing through a stop sign and hitting a minivan carrying Andrea and three kids, you know, the one from the PTA. Sure those things had happened, but not that often, which was what had made them so remarkable, their relative rarity. Nowadays, people died young and violently and that’s just the way it was.
Her row with Erin was still chewing on her a bit; they hadn’t spoken since. It was tough to let it go, no matter how much she empathized with the woman, no matter how often she told herself it was Erin’s misery talking. Grief knew no timetable. She missed her son. Didn’t matter that he had perished like countless billions. He was still dead, and she was still his mother. But sometimes Rachel wanted to snap back, yell it from the rooftops that it wasn’t exactly sunshine and puppy breath, this thing she was going through. Mothering the only child known to have survived infancy since the plague was not an easy crown to wear. But she could never say a thing like that because it would sound ungrateful. It would sound like she didn’t know how good she had it.
Beyond the fence was the inner perimeter, a long row of sandbags roughly twelve feet distant. Each corner of the compound was protected by a pair of .50-caliber machine guns, spoils of a long-ago raid on a National Guard armory north of Omaha. Beyond that, another wall of stone and brick, patched together over the years. Razor wire lined the tops like a deadly Mohawk.
Dozens of dead tractor-trailers jutted out from the loading docks on the east side; they looked like extinct parasites that fed on the retail blood of this giant host before detaching and carrying newly acquired loads to faraway destinations. They were ghosts now, relics of what had once been. Sometimes Rachel would climb up into a cab and sit behind the wheel; she would think about where these trucks had been scheduled to go all those years ago before Medusa had cast her terrible judgment on the world. Cleveland or Des Moines or Detroit. She would think about those other cities, empty and decaying, and it would make her sad all over again, but it was important she become sad sometimes because otherwise it would mean forgetting about the old world. That didn’t seem right.
Several loose shipping containers had been converted to living quarters. Lined with thick insulation and supplemented by heated rocks, these containers fought off the winter chill as good as anything else. Some of their occupants had been rather creative in decorating them; Romaine had turned hers into a shrine to Hello Kitty. It was a bit weird, but, hey, whatever floated your boat.
There were thirty-six of them living here now, getting down to the bare minimum they needed to run the operation and protect the facility from the next attack. Because there would always be another attack. They were the housefly, and out there many flyswatters. One day, one of those flyswatters would come down hard on them. One day, they’d lose the warehouse. Tomorrow. Next month. Next year. It was goi
ng to happen. But what else could they do but plan and prepare and when the time came, fight. Fight as long as they could, as hard as they could until they could fight no longer.
Rachel couldn’t believe they’d managed to hold the warehouse as long as they had. Six times they’d come under attack, and six times, they had been able to repel the threat. Under Harry Maynard’s eye, the Defense Committee worked nonstop shoring up the perimeter, fortifying their defenses, training, and stockpiling weapons and ammunition.
A gust of wind blew across the campus, whistling in the corridors between the shipping containers, a ghostly howl that made everything seem quieter than it really was. A lone sentry patrolled the outer perimeter; maybe Oscar, but he was shrouded in the morning gloom. In the distance, beyond the perimeter fencing, she could just make out Interstate 80, still pocked with the dilapidated hulls of long-abandoned Corollas and Explorers and F-150 pickups. She took one last deep breath before the twelve-hour shift ahead, filling her lungs with fresh clean air, and then went inside.
It was blessedly warmer inside, the building still holding the heat of an unexpected Indian summer the previous week, now largely faded. Sounds of a shift ending echoed through the warehouse’s cavernous corridors - a loud yawn, a violent stitch of laughter, folks happy to be headed home after a hard night’s work. Rachel was scheduled for perimeter duty today, so she would spend most of her time outside, alone, and that was fine with her. She’d largely kept to herself lately, the thing with Eddie draining her reserves of patience with people generally. Simply being was physically exhausting. Being Will’s mom. Being Adam’s daughter. Being with Eddie. Even when they weren’t fighting, weren’t arguing, his presence in her life was the hill at the end of the daily marathon.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 56