This Rotten World | Book 4 | Winter of Blood

by Morris, Jacy

  Inside the lighthouse, he waited and watched and listened. The police radio told him nothing. There was no chatter. No one talked at all. It was as if the cops had completely disappeared. No law. No order. Nothing. He began to think about his own safety. What would he do if survivors showed up at his doorstep? Would he let them in? What if they had children?

  He turned on the TV and watched it for an hour while he ate canned soup. Then his alarm went off again. He turned on the lamp at the top of the lighthouse and climbed the tower. He watched the ships in the distance. Did they know? Had anyone told them that the world had gone to shit? Would they try to dock in Astoria only to find themselves overrun by the dead?

  Rhodri stood with his back to the mirrored light as it spun its lazy circle. One look at the light and he would be blinded for half-an-hour. He inched his way around the observation deck to look back at the town. The line of cars was still there. It hadn't moved. It hadn't gone anywhere. Daytime running lights still glowed in the night. He watched them all night long, watching as they winked out one by one, the cars running out of gas or the batteries running out of juice. They didn't move, but occasionally, he would catch the shadow of a shape moving in front of the headlights, blocking them out for a moment, and then the light would be back.

  He wondered if they were drawn to light. The dead… they were actually fucking zombies. That's what the news had said. And they were here. Here in Seaside, of all the places in the world for them to be, why here?

  Over the next few months, the lighthouse keeper never found an answer for that question, and eventually, it faded away, replaced by other, more mundane concerns. He fell into a rhythm of waking up, eating, turning on the lamp, and watching the ships in the night. But when the power failed, he was forced to go back out into the world. It was either that or abandon the ships out there to their own fates. He had done something like that once before, with the family, and he had the nightmares that proved it. He wouldn't abandon people to their fate again, not if he could do something about it.

  In town, he scavenged long coils of wire that he struggled to carry up the back way to the lighthouse. He scavenged batteries from cars, staying away from the center of town, working so fast that his knuckles looked like hamburger from banging around inside the crowded, claustrophobic engines of modern cars. With his set of binoculars, he had been able to keep track of the movements of the dead, and they always seemed to wind up in the center of town. The places on the outskirts were less populated, so he had time to do the work he needed.

  Using the scavenged wire, he was able to keep the lamp running with a couple of rigged car batteries. That set up would keep the light going for an evening or two, and then he would have to find replacement batteries. Eventually, he began to run out of cars. It would be impossible to get a generator up to the lighthouse. The highway was impassible, too narrow for anything but a dirt bike to make it through, and as far as he knew, they didn't make generators that small, not any that would run the lamp, and he didn't want to risk the noise of a generator attracting the dead. If the lighthouse ever got surrounded, he would be up shit creek without a paddle... even worse, he didn't have a fucking boat.

  Eventually, Rhodri decided to use what the ancient lighthouse keepers had used… fire. He unfastened all of the mirrors and the supports at the top of the lighthouse, creating a flat surface he could build on. Then he lugged a manhole cover from the city, a thick piece of metal that wouldn't bend or melt under the heat of a fire. He lined the manhole cover with stones from the beach, saving him a trip into the city. It still had almost cost him a heart attack when one of the dead washed up onto the shore next to him, seaweed tangled in its hair and bits of kelp draped over its arms. It crawled to him, waterlogged and swollen.

  He used the revolver then, spending two precious bullets. His first shot was intentionally off. Rhodri fired at the creature's shoulder. It was too swollen and misshapen to be able to determine what sex the thing used to be. The bullet entered the body, tearing through the flesh of the shoulder, but it seemed to feel no pain. Still it came on, unable to stand with so much seawater in its body. He stood over it then and aimed the revolver at its head. He pulled the trigger, and the thing stopped crawling. He went back to collecting the rocks he would need to line his makeshift firepit, glancing over at the body as it was dragged out by the receding ocean, and then deposited back on the shore. He looked every time it came closer, sure that it would come back to life.

  With a bag full of rocks, he hiked up the hill and back to the lighthouse. He noted the change in his body. It seemed leaner, more muscular, and it had been only a few weeks. He hadn't realized how soft he had become just sitting around in his lighthouse reading books and occasionally going for a pint at the U-Street Pub and Eatery. But now, he was changing.

  He had prepared his makeshift firepit at the apex of the lighthouse and lined it with tidepool rocks. All he needed was fuel. During normal times, the seaside beaches had been free of driftwood. People snatched up the smaller logs and branches for mementos when they washed up on the sand. If a particularly large log washed up, the public safety department would rush out, cut it up, and haul it away, lest some dumbass tourist became trapped underneath it when the log rolled over from them standing on top of it. But with the sudden lack of tourists, Rhodri had been able to find everything he needed on the beaches. He had been able to find more wood than he needed. There were great logs lying on the beach now. The only way he would be able to use those for fire would be to run a chainsaw, but he knew that would bring the dead. So far, the dead hadn't tried to use the back path up the side of the hill. The combination of having to climb over the rocks and wade through water seemed to keep them away, but he knew they would find their way to him eventually.

  The first night, with his driftwood collected and his improvised firepit ready for its inaugural burn, Rhodri sat on the steps, unable to move. His legs and arms burned from collecting driftwood and climbing the steep path to the lighthouse. He waited for the sun to go down, slumped on the steps, only his head sticking out into the cool ocean breeze.

  The final step to make everything ready had been an act that pained him, not physically, but pain all the same. He had busted out all of the windows at the top of the lighthouse in order to give the fire air to breathe. He had started by trying to disassemble the windows. Vents were built into them naturally to provide some airflow through the entirety of the lighthouse, but the airflow would not be enough, and the smoke would be trapped in the top of the tower if he didn't do anything. So, he had taken a sledgehammer to the glass panes. They were thick and heavy-duty, and he had pounded for fifteen minutes just to break out one of the panes. Then he sat, catching his breath, his hands and arms still ringing from the effort.

  There was more air, but it would not be enough to allow the smoke to clear. If only he could pop off the entire top of the lighthouse, like it was the lid to a Zippo lighter, that would be preferable. Unfortunately, the architects that had designed the lighthouse hadn't thought of that, so he picked up the sledgehammer again and continued his work until all of the windows were gone.

  As the sun went down, Rhodri lugged driftwood up the stairs a load at a time, tripping and stumbling up the steps, exhausted. He watched the sky turn orange, and then he lit his fire. It worked as he wanted it to. That night, he struggled to keep his eyes open–– to make sure that the fire didn't go out. The smell of smoke washed over him. On the ocean, as the sky darkened, he saw a couple of lights bobbing on the tides. A ship. He waved his hand at the ship and then sobbed for a world that was lost at sea.

  Chapter 1: The Snow Turns Red

  Time… time had seemed to slow to a crawl. The sky above was slate gray, like a giant slab of concrete hanging over them, ready to fall down and crush the Nike campus. Cold. Izzy Allen had been cold for what seemed like an eternity.

  He struggled to remember what sunshine felt like. Had it been a month straight? A month of gray skies and frozen ground.
The trampled grass of the compound crunched under his feet every time he walked the wall. He hated walking the wall. He could hear them moaning over there, the dead, doing their own parody of his walk, looking for a way inside.

  They hadn't had a breach yet, and the wall was holding up just fine, despite the fact that the dead ringed the wall ten-feet deep at spots. How many of them were there? A thousand, a hundred thousand? He shivered in his coat, an obscenely bright jacket that he had found abandoned and forgotten in an office closet in one of the buildings.

  The buildings were empty now, the dead cleared out months ago. It wasn't the dead they had to worry about. On cue, his stomach growled, as if mocking the moans of the dead. "It's alright, buddy. We'll get some grub soon," he told his stomach.

  Allen's boots crunched through a patch of snow that still clung stubbornly to the ground, hidden in the shade of the wall. He looked up at the sky, at its gray fullness, and a small dot of white fluttered down and landed on the tip of his nose. "Fuck you," he said to the cloud, fully aware that he had started talking to things that weren't alive a whole lot more than he used to. Another dozen flakes sifted down out of the sky, and then they appeared everywhere, falling on the skin of his neck and causing him to pull his bright, orange jacket tighter.

  He gripped his rifle tighter as a shape approached him. It walked like a person, not like one of the dead, but tensions had been high in the compound. He had heard the whispers. They weren't needed anymore. The Nike residents had completed their training and had made it through the clearing of the compound with few casualties. Tejada had trained them well. Now they thought they knew it all. They didn't want Allen and the other soldiers around. Even if he hadn't heard the whispers, all he had to do was look them in the eyes to see what they thought. "Go away," those eyes said. "Fuck off," those eyes said. He nodded at the man as he passed, but the man didn't acknowledge him.

  Allen kept his guard up, even after he passed the man who was doing his own circuit of the wall in the opposite direction. He listened for a pause in the man's gait, a cessation of crunching as he stopped and turned to level his rifle at Allen's back. But there was nothing. The man kept walking, and the snowflakes fell harder, the wind picking up. The wind momentarily drowned out the skittering of fleshless fingertips on the other side of the wall.

  He continued his circuit through the forest at the edge of the compound and over the hills and hummocks on its southern edge. He passed by the pond, frozen and cold, until he was on the backside of the campus, the tall, dark, office buildings looming into the sky. By the time he made it around again, the ground glowed white with fresh snow. His boots crunched through the powder, compacting it and making a slick slush that would be frozen completely by the time Allen came back around. Circuit after circuit he walked, catching the skittering of fingertips only when the wind lulled for a brief moment before picking up and howling through the buildings and trees of the compound.

  How long could they last? How long could they keep the peace here? They should have gone when they had the chance, before the cold had moved in, before the snows had fallen. The Nike people said that the winter had been unusually cold, that they seldom saw snow of this magnitude. Perhaps Mother Nature herself had joined in to try and kill the rest of humanity as it clung stubbornly to life. He wouldn't put it past the bitch.

  As time wound on and the snow piled up, he passed the man again and again. Each time he nodded. Each time, the man ignored him. And every time Allen passed the man, he felt an itch between his shoulder blades, as if the man were aiming at him through the scope of his rifle. But the gunshot never came, and his hunger grew, and by the time his shift was over, his boots were soaked and wet, his feet felt like two blocks of ice, and the beard on his face was heavy with the frost of his own cooled sweat.

  Relieved by Day, a basic sort of man, Allen stepped into the security building, the place that he and the other men called home. He found Epps and Brown playing cards in the lobby. They never left the lobby of their building unguarded now.

  "Pull up a chair?" Brown queried. Allen shook his head. He wasn't in the mood. He moved past the men. They were literally playing for peanuts. That phrase used to mean playing for nothing, but now it meant everything. With food scarce, that pile of peanuts, packed with calories and energy, was worth a fortune these days. But he had never been good at poker. He had always been shit at it, in fact. He wasn't good at bluffing. He wore his cards on his face as Brown had told him once.

  As he pulled his jacket off, Epps called out, "Your girlfriend came looking for you."

  He knew who they were talking about, though "girlfriend" wouldn't be the term that he used for Diana. Diversion maybe, a lie definitely. He didn't know why he kept fucking her. She didn't care for him, and he didn't really care for her, but they spent their time together. He suspected Diana slept with him to prevent her from losing influence with her people. It was as simple as that. She was in charge and didn't want to share power with anyone. Allen offered no threat in that respect. He was a soldier, an outsider, and no one from the Nike side of things would ever allow him to be anything but, especially not now that they thought they could handle themselves.

  Diana would be left for another day. His gear was too cold to enjoy the experience anyway. He nodded his head at Rudy and Amanda as he passed them in the hallway. He liked seeing them. They reminded him of the way things used to be, just a young boy and girl falling in love, not that he was much older than them.

  Allen walked to his room and set his rifle down gingerly on his sleeping bag, hung his jacket on the wall, and untied his boots. When he was finished, he climbed under his blankets and shut his eyes, too tired to make himself some food. Sleep first, then food. He could still hear the skittering of bone on the wall's compound, though, in reality, it was dead quiet in his room.

  The feeling was starting to come back to his feet when someone knocked on the door. He sunk deeper into his blankets and tried to pretend that he didn't hear it, but the knock came louder, followed by a command from the powerful, no-nonsense voice of Sergeant Tejada. "Open the fucking door."

  Tejada had the type of voice that would have you reaching to pull your handgun before you realized that the man had just commanded you to kill yourself. Needless to say, Allen threw back his blankets and hopped across the floor in his bare feet. He pulled the door open, and Tejada's square head greeted him.

  "Report," he said bluntly.

  "Nothing to report, other than it's cold outside."

  Tejada smiled and said, "That's it? Just cold? No fancy metaphor?"

  "Sorry. It's fucking cold outside."

  Tejada laughed then. "No fuck I ever had has been cold."

  Thinking of Diana, Allen laughed, "Then you're lucky."

  "Put your boots on. There's a meeting in the armory." Tejada turned to walk away then, even his hairline on the back of his neck was square.

  Allen turned around and put on his boots, slipping his poor, tortured feet into damp, cold boots. The chill of the boots made it feel like he was slipping literal pain onto his feet. He bent over to tie the laces, and when he stood upright, Diana was standing there. Oh, shit.

  "Who let you in?" he managed to say without sounding too surprised.

  "I'm here for the meeting," she said, her eyes boring through him.

  He didn't know what she wanted. She was like a book written in a different language. He knew she made sense, but he didn't have the skills to decode what she was all about. "The meeting?" he asked, feeling sluggish and slow. Diana was not the sort of person you wanted to feel sluggish and slow around. She could pounce like a jaguar at any moment.

  "With Tejada."

  There it was. She did it again. She had made him feel stupid. She had a way of doing that without even trying. It was her superpower, making him feel like an asshole. "Well, let's not keep the man waiting," he said. Whiteside and Gregg filed by him; Gregg's eyebrow arched. The other guys had tried to seek out relationships among the Nike p
eople, but had found it slow going. They were constantly amused by his relationship with Diana, a relationship that he put no real energy into. He wouldn't mind if it died on the vine. The other men loved watching him squirm, though he knew any of them would be willing to trade positions with him in a heartbeat.

  "You coming, Loverboy?" Gregg called in a singsong voice as he climbed the stairs to the top floor of the security building.

  Diana smiled at him. She knew exactly what she was doing, which was one of the reasons he would be happy when he was away from her. Without warning, she swooped in and nibbled on his ear, her breath hot and warm. "Will I see you after the meeting?"

  It was the warmth, more than anything else, that made him want to say yes. He was so damn sick of being cold. "Maybe," he responded.

  She stepped back from him and gave him a death-ray regard with her eyes. Then the corner of her lip quirked in a small smile. "That's a yes." She said this with a quiet confidence that he couldn't argue with.

  She turned and walked away from him, and even under winter clothing, the way her body moved was like… like… he was too tired to come up with anything poetic to say. It just looked good. He followed her up the stairwell to the top floor. At the top of the landing, bunkbeds sat abandoned and unused. A few of the mattresses were missing, dragged off to other rooms in the building. No one wanted anything to do with the place where the previous occupants had been slaughtered. They walked past half of the bunk beds and entered a doorway set right in the middle of the bunkhouse. The room inside was functional and nondescript. A plain, wooden counter sat empty in the middle of the room. Whiteside and Gregg were there already. So was Walt, his heavy, orange bowling ball hanging from a rope harness over his shoulder. He and the boys had taken to calling it American Express, because he never left home without it.