This Rotten World | Book 4 | Winter of Blood

by Morris, Jacy

  They passed the dead Annie lying in the road. Tejada tossed a glance back towards the kids. The boy looked on, no fear on his face. This was the world he was growing up in. This was all that he would know. But the girl, she refused to look. She refused to behold the horror of the dead Annie in the snow. She knew a different world. Perhaps she had even gone to pre-school. She could write after a fashion, and she seemed the more social of the two. For her, this world terrified her.

  Damn him and his soft heart. He almost made another vow to harden his heart, but he knew that wasn't who he was. He knew that's not who he would ever be. So, he knew there would be another Day, another Ramirez, or another Quigs. But he trucked on, putting one foot forward as the world thinned out around them, the buildings coming less often now, tall trees and open meadows taking their place.

  ****

  They had lost their tail simply enough, winding through another industrial complex on the edge of civilization. It was the last set of buildings in sight along the highway. None of them fancied camping out in the cold, so they had decided to end their day early. Besides, the children looked frozen, their skin pale and sickly. For his own part, Allen wished he had stopped and found some hand-warmers in the Fred Meyer they had raided.

  His hands felt like blocks of ice, and his feet felt like something colder than ice—like they weren't even there. Worst of all, his jacket hung heavy, soaked with cold rain, so he was more than happy to end their march though there were still a few hours of daylight.

  They decided to make camp inside an ale house in the hopes that they could find some food or drink to supplement their meager supplies. They spotted the bar from the highway, and then curled and wound their way through the industrial complex, losing Annies at every turn. As they approached the ale house, they sprinted, Allen outpacing everyone. He fired three quick shots at the glass door of the ABV Public House. They crawled through the bottom half of the door one by one.

  Once inside, they pulled tables and chairs over to the shattered door and created a barricade as quickly and as quietly as possible. Then they sat in silence, breathing into their hands and shrugging out of their wet clothes. This camp, as Allen liked to think of it, was not nearly as secure as the other camps they had made.

  The entire front of the bar was comprised of floor-to-ceiling windows of darkly tinted glass. The glass was so dark that it would be impossible to see inside unless they turned on lights. For this reason, they sat in darkness, catching their breath and trying to get warm.

  The public house looked as if it had been untouched since the dead began to walk. A set of coolers ran around the north and east walls of the bar. Inside, bottles sparkled in the darkness. Allen's mouth watered at the prospect of beer. It had been a while since he had tasted one. He hadn't had a beer since the summer when they had found an overturned beer truck and drank piss-warm beers as they walked down the street, a trail of Annies chasing after them. He found that it wasn't so much the feeling of being drunk that he was looking forward to, but the calories that the beer represented.

  His stomach had shrunk steadily over the last few months, but still, discipline kept him from ever actually feeling full with the portions of food that he ate. The beer ought to do it.

  "Stop admiring the goods and check out the back rooms," Tejada said.

  Allen nodded, and with a silently praying Brown at his side, they searched the backside of the pub. They went into the kitchen first. It was clean, spartan even. Though, a small layer of dust had settled onto the slick, silver surfaces. The floor was slippery with that same layer of dust. He checked the racks and cupboards for anything of use. There were some staples here, some foods that they could use. He opened the large, steel door of the freezer, and then slammed it shut as the smell of spoiled meat hit his nose.

  "What the fuck did you do that for?" Brown asked.

  "I don't know. I just wanted to see."

  "We're going to be smelling that shit all night."

  They left the kitchen, carrying the foodstuffs with them, some flour, some rice, and a jar of French's Crispy Fried Onions. Brown walked with an armload of seasonings and a couple bottles of hot sauce.

  "You gonna make condiment soup?" Allen asked him.

  Brown paused before pushing through the swinging door. "Hey, that's not a bad idea."

  Allen just shrugged. It couldn't be worse than some of the stuff they were already eating. They set their goods down on one of the tables.

  "Anything back there?" Tejada asked.

  "Just some spoiled meat. Don't open the freezer door if you value being able to smell."

  "Copy that," Tejada said.

  Masterson and Gregg appeared from a door that led to the area behind the beer coolers, a green bucket dangling from Gregg's hand.

  "What the hell is that?" Tejada asked.

  "A pickle bucket," Gregg said triumphantly.

  "This fucking thing is filled with pickles. You think they're still good to eat?" Masterson pulled the lid off the bucket. They shined their lights down into the briny water. Allen looked inside to see the dark shape of pickles floating in the water like underwater slugs.

  Tejada shrugged his shoulders. "Only one way to find out. Whiteside, you're up."

  It was no coincidence that Tejada picked Whiteside to be the food-taster. Coming from a long line of backwoods chefs, Whiteside had eaten everything that could be eaten. His diatribes on the flavor of squirrel and possum were notorious among the men. There wasn't anything that he wouldn't eat, and he claimed he had a cast-iron stomach. He also boasted about the fact that he hadn't gotten the shits in over a decade.

  "Oh, don't eat that, man. You're gonna be spraying mud all over the place," Epps said.

  "Spraying mud?" D.J. asked.

  "Don't worry about it," Rudy said to the boy.

  Tejada cleared his throat and said, "Maybe he's right. Can't very well march very fast if you have to slow down to…" Tejada glanced over at the children and changed what he was about to say, "… to make a poopy every five minutes."

  Without warning, Whiteside plunged his hand into the water and pulled out a pickle. He looked at it, sniffed it, and then took a great bite out of it. He chewed slowly, and then he smiled. He gave a thumbs-up, his hand still dripping with pickle juice, and he said, "It's good."

  "Too bad you dipped your whole shit mitt in the pickles. I'm not eating that shit now," Masterson said.

  "What?" Whiteside asked, confused by Masterson's response.

  "Your dirty hand, man. You could have used some tongs or something, but you threw your whole damn hand in there, and don't get me wrong, I ain't sayin' you're dirty or nothing, but you ain't the cleanest motherfucker on the planet."

  "Come on!" Whiteside said, looking for support. "It's just a hand!"

  Allen shook his head. There was no way he was going to eat one of those pickles now.

  Tejada clapped Whiteside on the shoulder. "Look at it this way. On the bright side of things, you got all those pickles to yourself. On the bad side, that's all you're getting tonight. The rice, the rest of our shit, none of it for you."

  "You're serious?" Whiteside asked.

  Tejada's smile dropped from his face, and he stepped up to Whiteside. They were of comparable height, but Whiteside's slender shape seemed dwarfed by Tejada's boxy form. "Whiteside, I'm gonna need you to think a little more out here. You may have an iron gut, but the rest of us can't afford to get sick. You see any doctors around here? If one of us gets sick because you put your dirty ass hand in our food, that could be the end of one of us. So, yes, I'm serious. Deadly serious. Is that a problem?"

  "No, sir."

  "Good. Now enjoy your pickles." Tejada turned his back on him then, and so did the rest of the soldiers. Rudy and Amanda hustled the children over to a corner, and they sat together, trying to keep warm.

  Though the inside of the pub was somewhat warmer than being outside, it wasn't really all that warm. Allen moved to the area behind the bar, rolling up
the slip mats behind the counter and throwing them in a corner. He placed his backpack on the ground and pulled his sleeping bag free. He unrolled it, pleased to find that it was completely dry. He draped it around his shoulders like a cape, and then he moved over to the beer coolers.

  "Don't go getting shitfaced," Tejada said from behind him. "We still gotta walk tomorrow."

  Allen nodded without turning around. He pulled open the door of the cooler. Outside, the first Annie appeared, stumbling past the windows. He wished they had something to cover the windows so that he could turn on a light. The labels of the beers were hard to read in the darkness of the pub, but a flashlight would give away their position. He grabbed an armload of nondescript beers and carried them into the kitchen area where there were no windows.

  Once in the kitchen, he set the beers on the counter and then shined his flashlight on the bottles. He had brought six beers with him. Their labels were bright and colorful, the color of the beer inside hidden by the brown glass of the bottles. He stood soaking in the labels, artistry on display, marketing design at its height. He smirked at one of the labels on the beer, Audrey Hopburn Belgian IPA.

  He smiled at the stupid pun and grabbed the beer. He put the edge of the cap against the steel prep table, and then he slapped his palm down on the bottle cap. It came free with a hiss. By the light of his flashlight, he saw a small wisp of carbonated fog escape the bottle, coalescing for a moment before dissipating into the air.

  He held the beer in his hand, admiring the label. He tilted the bottle back, and the cold liquid splashed into his mouth. It was more bitter than he had expected, but damn did it taste good. He stood in the darkness, holding the bottle close and wondering if Diana would have liked the beer. There hadn't been any on the Nike campus, or if there was, they hadn't been in a sharing mood.

  How long could beer last? He had never been in a position to see. What was the shelf life of a beer? Hell, what was the shelf life of himself? He didn't like the way his thoughts were going, so he tilted the bottle back and took another pug off of it, feeling the burn of the carbonation in his throat.

  He felt his eyes begin to water, and he couldn't figure out why. His body trembled, and the glass bottle rattled on the steel prep table as he set it down. He grabbed the edge of the table to keep himself from shaking, and he felt the water in his eyes turn to tears. The back of his throat stung now, but not from the beer. Allen didn't know what was wrong. His head spun, and he let out a big gasp of air.

  Then the door to the kitchen swung open, and Brown and Epps were piling in with beers in their hands. Allen swiped at his eyes, embarrassed about… about what? He didn't know. He didn't know what was going on.

  "You find anything good?" Epps asked him.

  He couldn't answer without giving away his strange emotional state, so he took another swig from the bottle instead. Brown clicked on his flashlight and shined it at his face.

  "You alright, Izzy?"

  Allen squinted against the light, putting a hand up to either block the light from hitting him in the eyes or to keep Brown from seeing his face. He didn't know which. He took a shuddering breath, and he felt himself fall back into place, into the hollow he had made inside himself where he kept his emotions and feelings locked away. It was a small place that he didn't let others know about. In it, he kept the sadness that the world gave him. The sadness from knowing that his parents were probably dead, the sadness from knowing that the woman he had spent the last few months with wanted him dead, the sadness of being unable to save D.J. and Hope's mother.

  "Yeah, I'm good."

  Epps gave him a friendly tap on the shoulder, and Brown and Epps let it drop. He knew they would. That's what they had been trained to do. Let it drop. Let it slide off of you. Even when you had a woman's head in your sights, you still had to pull the trigger and find some way to let it go.

  Whiteside came in, one arm full of beers and a pickle in his other hand. "Let's see what we got. Hope they got some Budweiser in here. I ain't for all that fancy IPA bullshit like old Izzy over there."

  Epps popped the top off of a bottle and held it into the air. "This one's for Day."

  Brown opened a bottle and held it up as well. Allen clinked beer bottles with the other two soldiers, his friends, and they drank in silence.

  ****

  Masterson couldn't sleep. He was cold and tired, but his mind wouldn't stop running. He had always suffered from insomnia, but since they had left the dubious safety of the Nike campus and its wall, he had struggled to sleep at all.

  His brain worked hard, flitting from subject to subject, but it always came back to one thing. He was sure that he was going to die. They were out in the open, the dead all around them, and he knew that at any moment, he could be gone, just like Day. The others had tolerated Day, but Masterson had known him better than any of the others, and he sorely felt his loss.

  Day had always rubbed people the wrong way, but if you ignored his abrasive qualities, you'd find one of the nicest, most loyal people he had ever had the pleasure of knowing. And now he was gone. Dead. Permanently.

  He watched the shadows through the dark windows. Annies milled about just outside, quietly, but for the crunch of their feet in the slush. The rain continued to fall, the sound of it infiltrating the interior of the pub. The others slumbered fitfully. He heard a fart come from the area where Allen slept. Gregg snored softly to his right, not loud enough to alert the Annies, but that was always a danger. Earlier in the night, he had poked Gregg in the ribs once to get him to stop snoring. The Annies outside hadn't seemed to notice, or if they did, they couldn't tell where the sound was coming from.

  He had tried drinking a beer with the rest of the boys, but it hadn't sat right with him. Why should he be here drinking beer when Day was dead? He couldn't handle the guilt, so he had eaten his meal and climbed into his sleeping bag, vowing to get a good night's sleep for the first time since they had left the security of the wall. But it hadn't happened. Instead, his mind had bombarded him with images of his own death, always bloody, always accidental.

  His body quaked with fear, and he knew that he was losing it, that he wasn't cut out for this any longer. He wanted to scream. He wanted to grab his hatchet and run out of the pub and get it over with. He was tired of living in fear, exhausted, actually.

  In the mirror of the pub's bathroom, he had stared at himself for a good ten minutes, examining his face. It was gaunt now. Even with the beard covering his jaw, he could see how his flesh had seemed to melt off of him. His eyes were ringed by baggy pouches that made it look like he hadn't slept in a week, though it had only been a couple of days.

  He was so tired. Even thinking had become a chore, so he sat with his eyes closed, trying to will himself to sleep. An image of himself walking across a bridge as it collapsed popped into his head. He imagined the terror he would feel as his body went weightless, falling, looking for anything to grab onto. Then he hit the water below, his body broken by slamming into the surface of the water. A piece of the bridge landed across his ribs, and he was dragged to the bottom of the river, gasping for air. On the bottom of the river, he died, pinned down by a chunk of asphalt too heavy to lift, choking on river water. But it wasn't a permanent death. His eyes opened once more, though he didn't breathe. He reached out for the shapes in the dark, the fish swimming by, always out of his clumsy, dead reach.

  Masterson floated through the realm of half-sleep, his nightmares passing by him, until he jerked awake, the threat of sleep fleeing from him like smoke in the wind. He opened his eyes, though it stung to do so. He saw the shadows outside, and the cycle repeated itself. When the morning came, his limbs felt like they weighed three times their normal weight, and he shuffled through the interior of the pub, eating and gathering his things with only one thought on his mind. Is this the day? Is this the day that I die?

  He watched Allen scrawl a message for the kids' parents, giving them directions on how to find them. Headed west, stopping in six mi
les, off the highway. D.J. and Hope. It was a hopeless message, meant for people that were never coming. Somehow, out of all the terrible things that he had witnessed, this was the worst one. Lying to the children made him feel sick to his stomach. He couldn't even look at them, so he packed his gear and settled his pack on his back. It weighed more than one person could possibly carry, but when he stood, he was still there, and he found that he could indeed make his feet move, and so his nightmare would continue. Until it ended.

  Chapter 16: The Gypsy Drifter

  Rhodri Williams sat on his couch, staring at the TV. The screen was blank. His long hair hung in tatters from his scalp. His beard itched something fierce. He stared off into space. Months. It had been months since he had talked to anyone—since anyone had talked to him. At first, he had taken solace in knowing that he was helping people, that he still had a purpose in a world gone dark. He could make the light, and he could keep it going.

  Every day, he descended down his hidden path to the beach. Every day, he lugged wood up the hill to keep the lighthouse fire going, clearing the beach of any and all driftwood small enough to carry.

  The beach was not as safe as it had been at the beginning of the ordeal. He didn't know where they came from, but the dead frequently washed up on the shore these days. He had spent all the bullets in his revolver over the last few months as he combed the beach for wood to keep the lighthouse going. Now when he went to the beach, he took a hammer with him. It was small enough to not hamper his movement as he climbed the steep path that led to the back of the lighthouse, but it was heavy enough to crack their skulls if he wanted to. He never wanted to. Watching their soggy forms wash up on the beach always set his stomach turning. The feel of their skin as he steadied their sodden bodies and delivered the killing blow gave him nightmares. He would dream of great dark shapes blotting out the sun, hovering over him, dripping seawater that smelled of rot down onto him like freakish clouds. He would pound at them in his dreams, their flesh squishing like sponges, releasing volumes of rotten ichor upon him, drenching him until he shook from the chill of it all.