by Morris, Jacy
Once Tejada was done educating her about her new rifle, they pulled cans of soup from their backpacks and heated them over the propane camp stove, placing the opened cans directly over the flames and stirring their contents until steam rose from them. With a t-shirt wrapped around his hand, Rudy pulled the cans free and set them on the concrete floor until they were cool enough to handle.
Amanda savored the saltiness of the soup. It wasn't bad, and she was glad to have it. She would kill for some chicken carbonara, but Progresso Italian Wedding Soup would do just fine. It had little meatballs in it, and while it wasn't like actual fresh meat, it did taste about as good as anything she had eaten in the last month.
When they were done, they tossed their cans in the corner with no concern for the storage facility's owner. He wouldn't be coming back. All the world's bills were overdue, and anyone still alive had the right of ownership. The entire world operated under the ancient law of finders-keepers now.
After they finished up their meal, they popped the locks of the other storage units, just out of curiosity. Amanda was pretty sure that Tejada just wanted to make sure that there weren't any RPG rockets stashed in one of the other units. When Gregg asked if they wanted to search the upstairs units, Tejada shot down the idea, saying that there were windows upstairs, and they would just draw more of the dead.
With their bellies full and their backpacks full of ammunition, they all chose a storage unit to sleep in, pulling the rolling doors down behind them for some privacy, a rarity in a world where survival meant sticking together and watching each other's backs. Rudy and Amanda shared a unit together, unfurling their sleeping bags on the cold concrete floor. They huddled together, trying to keep warm.
****
"Do you think they made it to the beach?" Rudy asked.
"I don't know," Amanda said. He asked this question at least once every other day. She lapsed into silence for a brief moment and then said, "It was probably easier for them. Cars still worked, and the world wasn't covered in snow. They probably had a better time of it than we're having."
"But do you think they made it?"
Amanda was silent. "I don't know. I hope so."
"What do you think the beach is like? Do you think there are people there?"
"Well, there's people here, so there must be people there."
"Yeah, I guess you're right."
Rudy tried to think of something else to say, but the thoughts wouldn't come. Amanda rolled over and kissed him on the lips, and for a while, he didn't need to think of anything to say. When they finished, Amanda rolled over, and before he could think of something else to ask, her breathing became deep and regular, and he knew that she had nodded off.
Rudy lay with his eyes open, trying to see anything in the darkness of the storage unit. Usually, after he had sex with Amanda, he would fall asleep immediately, but tonight was different. He couldn't stop replaying his whole adventure over and over in his mind, walking over each individual moment that had brought him to be sleeping on a concrete floor in a storage unit next to the love of his life.
He was happy, perhaps for the first time in his pitiful existence. But he couldn't get over the feeling that it could all go away. He had seen how fast life could end. All it took was one bite, one slip, one broken leg. That had never been more apparent than when he and Amanda had been forced to carry Sergeant Tejada after he had injured his hip. If a man like Tejada could basically become an invalid because of a slip in some snow, what chance did he and Amanda have?
He chewed on the inside of his lip, trying to find some way free from the vicious circle of his thoughts. But none would come. In the end, he focused on the deep breathing of Amanda, listening to her soft breath as she inhaled and exhaled. He timed his breathing up with hers, and for a few minutes, they breathed as one.
His eyes finally drifted shut, and he fell into a dream of the old world, the world where he had been afraid of being alone for every day of his life. It seemed like he had only been asleep for a few minutes when he was awakened by the sound of gunshots.
Chapter 9: Raw Nerves and Meat
Mort startled awake. He sat up, his eyes going big in his face. There was movement and sound. He had been alone so long that these two things were enough to put him in a full panic. His heart thumped in his chest as it dawned on him that he had no cause for alarm.
The voices he heard belonged to Joan and Katie. The movement came from Katie as she walked around the room. She looked better now, her eyes not so hollowed out. Her complexion looked healthier—as if she hadn't been lying on the bed unconscious the evening before.
He smiled and sat up. "You're awake," he said gleefully.
Katie turned and smiled at him. "How could I sleep with all that snoring?" she joked.
A joke? When was the last time he had heard Katie make a joke? Maybe never.
He stood, groaning as his overtaxed muscles screeched in pain. His shoulder felt like it wasn't even there. He tried to loosen it, ignoring the waves of pain that washed over him.
"It's good to see you," he said to Katie.
She nodded at him and gave him the barest glimpse of a smile.
He looked at the corner of the room where he had bundled up his weapons and his backpack. "They want me to go get some meat," he said.
"Who does?" Joan asked.
"Them other ones. The ones out front. They wasn't gonna let me in unless I promised to go get them some meat. I shot a bear out in the woods. It should still be good."
"You can't go out there. You just got here," Joan said.
Mort shrugged his shoulders. "I gave 'em my word, and I think we could probably use the food."
"Screw those bitches," Katie said, and Mort smiled to hear the old Katie come back. She was the one that he knew, not the other one, the one that had mumbled through the night about kids and soccer practice.
"Listen. I know I don't have to. I know that if we wanted to, we could go out there and kill those ladies and probably have enough food to last the winter out here, but everyone here is pregnant. Now I don't know much about that, but I know if you're growing a baby, you need all the food you can get, and them babies is the future, whether we like it or not. So, I'm gonna go. Not because I have to or because anyone's making me, but because it's the right thing to do."
It was probably more words than he had ever said at once in his life, but they felt right, and he was glad to get them out. He had made his decision, and there wasn't anything that anyone could say that would change his mind.
Katie sat up on the bed and put her feet on the floor. "Then I'm going with you."
"No," Joan said. "I don't know what's wrong with you, but clearly, overexertion has something to do with it. You go out there with Mort, and you're liable to get both of yourselves killed or worse."
"I'll go with you," a voice said from the doorway.
It was the woman whom he thought might have been pretty at one point. Her eyes were two dark pools of crazy. He'd seen those eyes before, under the bridges where ex-soldiers sometimes lived, trapped in the memories of their past, operating the only way they could, in survival mode. He didn't want the woman going along with him. His past experience told him she would be dangerous, unreliable. "I can do it by myself. And besides, you're pregnant. There's no sense in you risking the baby."
The woman looked at him, and he couldn't tell if she was laughing at him or just picturing him dead. "This old thing?" she asked, patting roughly on her pregnant stomach. "I don't give a shit if it lives or dies. And besides, you ever gutted a bear before?"
Mort shook his head. "No, but I can figure it out."
"You ever carried the meat from a bear? It's hundreds of pounds of meat if you do it right. That means multiple trips out there. And from the way you're carrying that shoulder, I know you can't carry all of that yourself."
Mort didn't have any smart answers for that. He was not one for smart answers.
"So you're not stupid," she said in response to
his tacit silence. "That's good. So don't be stubborn. I'll go with you."
"Maybe we should all go," Katie said.
Joan shook her head. "We can't. We leave here, and we're never getting back in."
"Why is that?" Mort said, though he had an inkling of the answer.
"Those ladies out there aren't the biggest fans of ours. The only reason we're not dead or out on our own is that they need me, and I can't go walking out in the woods right now," she said, pointing to her leg.
Mort sighed. He wished Katie was well enough to go with him. He knew her and trusted her. But that's not the way it was meant to be. "Okay. It is what it is."
He walked over to the crazy woman and held out his hand. "My name's Mort."
She shook his hand, and he was surprised at the strength in her grip. "Name's Dez." She smiled at him as they let their hands drop. "I never shook hands with death before."
"Huh?" Mort asked.
"Your name. It's Latin for dead."
He'd heard it before, from maudlin old-timers underneath the freeway bridges. Deep in their wine, they would tell him that he was dead. Truth be told, he had always felt that way, like a ghost walking through the world trying never to be seen. But he didn't feel that way now. He knew he had friends to come back to. He knew that he was seen and appreciated. "Well, I'm not dead, and I hope to keep it that way," he said, putting on his best smile.
Dez nodded at him at smiled.
He didn't know what that smile meant. You never did with crazy people.
****
Before they could go, Mort helped the ladies he didn't know clear out the dead from around the trailers. He didn't enjoy the feeling of killing the dead. He thought it was undignified, but it was something that had to be done.
The snow had continued to fall overnight, and the dead stood mid-thigh in the snow, banging on the chain-link fence or pounding on the walls of the trailers. He jabbed the spear downward, careful not to overbalance and tumble off the top of the slick trailer roof. The snow on top of the trailers was thick. At the bottom of that snow, there was a thin layer of ice that made the roof slippery. This, in turn, made plunging the spear downward a dangerous proposition.
But they were able to clear the dead in no time with no accidents. The bird-like woman, Tammy, opened the gate for him and Dez, and they strode out into the snow, dragging the bodies of the dead away from the trailers.
Tammy slammed the gate shut behind them, and he heard the chain rattle as she locked it up tight. Throughout the whole process of clearing the compound, the two groups had shared hardly a word. Dez didn't say a single thing, and from the way she glared at the other women, he assumed she probably wanted to kill them. Maybe he'd ask her about it once they got away from camp, or maybe he'd just leave it alone.
With the bodies dragged away, they began to move towards the road. Mort was armed with a spear now, but his hammer hung at his waist. The spear was better for his shoulder, but he wasn't practiced with it. "You have any practice with these things?" he asked Dez.
"Things?" she asked.
"The dead."
She shook her head. "I've mostly been tied to a bed for this entire thing. I didn't get free until a month ago."
"Tied to a bed? Why was you tied to a bed?"
"You sure you want to hear this story? It's not anything good."
Mort thought for a second. Maybe he didn't want to hear it. He tried to think of all the reasons someone might tie another person to a bed for months at a time, but he couldn't think of one, so in the end, his curiosity got the better of him. "Sure," he said.
Dez told him of her relationship with Chad, how at first, he had been a true gentleman, wooing her with flowers and furtive glances as he worked on her father's farm. Her father hadn't been blind. He had told her in no uncertain terms to stay away from the man, that there was something not quite right with him. He also mentioned that his brother was a no-good junkie, and that meant that weakness ran in his veins. He had been right, but Dez was young and stupid and vain. She liked the attention. That her father didn't want her to have anything to do with Chad only made him more attractive to her.
They had carried on in secret for months. Chad would always tell her he loved her, but she could never quite say the words. Instead, she would say, "I know you do." This drove Chad wild, and he only seemed to want her more.
She often wondered what would happen if she ever said the words back. Part of her thought that he would just disappear once he got what he wanted. Oh, she still gave him some of the things he wanted, but only because she wanted them too. But she had never seen any future with him. He was just a plaything for her.
Then came the day that Chad and his fucked-up brother had shown up at their farm, back when the dead had started rising. Her father had been watching the news, scoffing at the reports. Dez had felt safe with her father and mother on the farm. They hadn't seen any of the dead, and her father kept talking about how it was probably some sort of War of the Worlds situation, a hoax. When she said she didn't know what that meant, he explained how back in the day people had actually believed aliens were coming to attack the earth because they had heard a reading of War of the Worlds on the radio.
She had wanted to believe her father when he muttered the words "fake news," but she noticed that he had cleaned his shotgun and set it right by the front door. "Better safe than sorry," he had said when she asked him about it.
In the end, he hadn't been safe enough. Dez knew that Chad Mauer would come for her. She just didn't know how he would do it. That morning, the day the world broke, he had appeared over the rise at the far end of the field, walking through the red clover.
She watched him approach from her upstairs room, biting her fingernails. She didn't want to go with him, and she cursed herself for leading him on. Her father called to her mother. He had seen Chad approaching as well. Dez knew that her father would not allow her to go with Chad, and she felt comfortable he would protect her.
All of that changed when she heard the gunshot.
She had scrambled downstairs, and then there was another gunshot, and then she was standing at the door crying. Chad had killed her parents, and there was nothing that she could do about it. She was barely conscious of Chad wrapping her in his arms, his smell wafting over her. He always had a strong smell, a smell she associated with the smell of hard work, but at that moment, the smell sickened her.
Then her parents had risen, and Chad and her brother killed them again. She was frightened. She didn't know what to say or do, and she wished that Chad and Reed would just go away. They took her silence for shock, but the truth was she was afraid to cross Chad. He had always been kept in check by her father's presence, and now her father was dead. She was at his mercy, and she could either go along with him or risk the alternative. If they could kill her parents, who knew what they would do to her? So, she had gone along with the two brothers, trudging back to the trailer park.
"I didn't even get a chance to bury the bodies," Dez said.
"What happened after that?" Mort asked.
"We went to the trailer park. We were there for maybe a day or two. Reed got high, Chad got drunk, and I just sat in their trailer, toying with the idea of snatching Chad's rifle and killing them both. But I wasn't a killer. I was just a scared girl stuck in a shitty situation with nowhere to go."
They climbed over a fallen tree trunk, its diameter too wide to simply step over. "I tried calling my cousin. He lived the next town over, but I couldn't get through. Reed must have told on me, because Chad kicked down the bathroom door, snatched my phone, and broke it into pieces."
"He must have felt bad because he held me and cried afterward. It made me sick to see him sobbing like that. When he said, 'I love you,' this time I said it back. I knew it was a mistake as soon as I said it."
"I was sitting outside, chain-smoking cigarettes with Tammy when Reed announced his plan. We were going to move everyone up to the ranger station. I didn't want to go. I fig
ured maybe there was a chance one of my cousins or my uncle or aunt would stop by the farm and see my parents lying dead out front. Maybe they would come looking for me. But if we moved to the ranger station, that would never happen. To this day, I'm pretty sure that Chad worried that someone would come looking for me, and that's why he brought us all up here."
"Once it all happened, it moved quick. We packed the trailers and trucked them all up here. This is before the roads went to shit. We were up here for about a month when Chad announced his plan to have all the women get pregnant, and there wasn't no one at the station that wasn't wrapped around Chad's pinky finger. He had that way about him."
She sighed, her breath pluming into the cold air. The dead were thin today. They couldn't hear any of them moving anywhere as they stepped out onto the backroad that led to the washout.
"I told him I didn't want to get pregnant. He couldn't understand that. In his mind, if you were a woman, and you loved someone, then you would automatically want to have their baby. But this world isn't right for a baby."
Mort just nodded at her words. He didn't know what to say. He didn't think that she was even talking to him. She seemed to be talking to herself, lost in her own thoughts.
"He didn't care. He told me I could either have a baby, or I could get out. 'Get out where?' I asked. Where the hell was I going to go? There was no place to go. So, I let him…" Her voice catches and hangs in the chill air. "I let him impregnate me."
Dez stopped walking, her eyes darting from side to side as she accessed her memories. "When I missed my first period, my first thought was that I should hang myself." She turned and looked at Mort, a hard look on her face. "I wasn't crazy. I'm not crazy. I just didn't think that there was any point to anything anymore. I didn't want Chad's monster child growing inside of me. I didn't want anything to do with him anymore. The thought of Chad being able to raise a child and warp it to make it like himself sickened me. I knew I was overreacting. Maybe I wasn't thinking straight, so I talked to the only person in camp that I trusted… Theresa. That bitch told on me, and next thing I know, I'm tied up in a bed for months."