by Morris, Jacy
Tejada nodded. That was good enough for him.
Moseley finished his story as Tejada polished off a second bowl of stew. It was warm in the living room with all the bodies packed in there. Some of Tejada's men and Moseley's two relatives played cards at the dining room table, keeping their voices low so as not to disturb those that had already fallen asleep. Rudy leaned against the wall, D.J. and Hope snuggled under his arms. Amanda sat to his right. She wasn't asleep yet.
Tejada kneaded his toes on the carpet and stared into the crackling fire. "Do you have any word of what's up ahead?" he asked Moseley.
"No one's come from that direction in quite some time. I suspect the road is blocked. Otherwise, we probably would have seen some traffic, motorcycles, people on bikes. But no one's come through. We always have someone watching the highway. We know if trouble comes our way, the highway's where it's gonna come from."
"What about any other survivors? We had some friends that went before us. Two black men and three white women, you seen anything like that? This would have been at the end of the summer."
Moseley shook his head. "I was still in Idaho on the back of my horse at that time. You can ask Kristen if she ever wakes up."
Tejada shook his head. He understood that the odds of them seeing anyone was a "needle-in-a-haystack" proposition.
"What was Portland like?" Moseley finally asked him.
He had been avoiding the question for some time, realizing that for some reason, he wanted to dance around that story. Tejada realized it still carried with it a healthy dose of pain and the full weight of the ghosts of the soldiers he had lost. "It's not good," he said simply.
"How not good?"
"Total loss. Highways clogged. We lost a lot of soldiers. A lot of civilians, hell, almost all of the civilians. There were fires there, and the dead walked together by the hundreds like they were all part of the same great beast. It's a total dead zone."
"So, you're saying to stay away."
"I'm saying you should run away. That's what we're doing. Get some mountains between us and them because if the dead somehow find their way out here, they'll wash right over you, and they won't even leave your bodies behind, just soak you up in their tide and drag you and yours away."
Moseley sat back, but Tejada didn't let him break eye contact. "You're serious," Moseley said.
"It'll happen sooner or later."
"Don't you think they'll rot to pieces at some point?" Moseley asked.
"I ain't seen it yet, so I'm not going to count on it."
Tejada changed tacks then. Let them speak of happier things, commonalities. The night was long enough for nightmares. "Did you ever see a General out that way? Been wondering what happened to him after he left for Denver."
"A general?"
"General McCutcheon, whip-thin, the grayest hair, people love him."
Moseley shook his head. "Can't say as it rings a bell, but I skipped out after the President's announcement, so if he did show up, it would have been after I left."
"Well, it was worth a shot," he said, trying to imagine where General McCutcheon might be or if he had made it all. He was sure the general had made it. He was a tough son of a bitch. "You mind if I have more stew?" Tejada asked.
"Sure," Moseley said.
"You said you had a horse. Can we trade you for it? It could be handy for the little ones."
"Had a horse, but no longer." Moseley looked wistfully at the stew, and Tejada understood right away.
"I'm sorry to hear that," Tejada said, knowing now why the soldier hadn't taken a single bite of the meal.
"It's the way of things."
Tejada scooped up a spoonful of stew, blew on it, and then put it in his mouth. It didn't taste quite as good as it had at first, but he finished the entire bowl, out of respect.
****
Whiteside fumed under his breath. Walt… fucking Walt? What did that scrawny pissant have that he didn't have? He looked at the two cards he had been dealt. He suppressed a smile—pocket aces with another one on the table.
Across from him sat Brown who was always up for a game of cards. Despite all of his religiosity, Brown loved to gamble at some cards. Whiteside knew he was a crafty man; his pokerface game was on point. He examined the cards on the table, trying to figure out if there was anything out there that could beat him.
He decided there wasn't, and he slid his chips in to the middle when his turn came.
Brown regarded him with a side-eye, then he promptly folded. The other two men, one of them Moseley's brother and the other his son, looked at the pile of chips in the middle. The older man mucked his cards immediately, and then it was up to the son. He must have thought he had something because he called. Whiteside raised, and then the last card was dealt. He went all in, and the son did the same.
They showed their cards. It was not Whiteside's night. His three aces were beaten handily by the straight of the boy across the table. "Son of a fuckin' bitch."
The boy, who was really not much younger than Whiteside himself, pulled the chips across the table with a shit-eating grin.
"Y'all are cheatin' up in here," Whiteside said, though he knew that he had lost fair and square.
"That's just the luck of the cards," the older man said.
"Luck my ass. You got a system. I can tell."
The older man just laughed it off, and Whiteside began to secretly believe his own accusations.
"Whatchu guys do around here for fun?" he asked, to calm himself down more than anything.
"Ain't no fun no more," the boy said. "We just watch the road, look for deer. Haven't had any luck the last few weeks."
"Hunting's fun," Whiteside countered.
"It's only fun when you get something. Otherwise, it's just freezing your balls off," the old man said.
"Anyone else around here?" Brown asked.
The old man shook his head. "We're not necessarily sticking our neck out, but I think we'd know if there was. You'd see fires. No one's surviving out in this cold without fire. Saw a few at the beginning of winter. We thought about checking them out, but by the time we went to find them, all we found were a few old campsites. Didn't feel like tracking the people."
"Y'all gonna stick around here then?" Whiteside asked, still amazed that some people were still tied to their homes and their land. He himself couldn't wait to leave home when he'd been younger. His shitty, drunk parents were nothing to him, and his brothers had been worse than that. But he supposed things were different now.
"Where else would we go?" the son asked.
"Someplace with more women would be a start," Whiteside said.
The old man laughed. "Yeah, that would be nice."
The son shuffled the cards, and Whiteside watched him carefully, just in case he was actually cheating. The boy finished shuffling and dealt the cards, and that's when they heard it, the faint sound of clinking outside.
The son stopped dealing, and they paused to see if they could hear the sound again. Everyone went quiet. The sound came again.
Whiteside reached for his rifle, propped up against the wall next to all his gear. He didn't trust these fuckers to not steal his shit, even if they did seem like genuinely nice folks.
The old man and the son stood up.
"Let's go see what we got," the old man said.
"You be careful out there," Moseley said, halting his conversation with Tejada briefly before returning to it.
They exited the house, flashlights in their hands. The son carried a big lantern, and they walked through the remains of the snow. There was less of it now, but what remained had a crunchy surface, frozen by the night's kiss. Whiteside saw his breath steaming in the glow of the lantern light.
They crept forward in the night. Then they heard the growls and the grunts. One of the Annies was hung up in the fence, trying clumsily to force its way through the barbed wire.
"You want the honors?" the old man asked Whiteside.
"Nah, I've killed en
ough of these things."
The old man held a wooden club, his own rifle slung over his shoulder. That was smart. The sound of a rifle shot carried loudly out here over the rolling fields. He watched as the old man knocked the shit out of the Annie, its head snapping to the side. It took two or three such blows to fully bash its brains in, but it fell to the ground eventually.
The old man turned to head inside. "Ain't you gonna check its pockets?" Whiteside asked.
"Be my guest," the old man said. "I'm freezing my ass off. Gonna head back inside."
Whiteside knelt down and looked at the dead Annie. It had been a man once. Large, rough hands. It wore a pair of bloodstained overalls. He began fishing in the man's pockets, coming away with nothing more than a wallet and bunch of folded-up dollar bills. He kept the dollar bills and put the wallet back in its pocket. He didn't want to know who the man was, didn't need to put a name to the man's face. That would make him sadder than he already was.
He stood and trudged inside, hoping that his luck would change.
****
In the morning, they said their goodbyes, leaving behind the family. Allen didn't care so much. He was ready to move. He was ready to get to the beach and be done with all this bullshit. Maybe he could find himself a fishing rod and become a master fisherman. Hell, maybe he could become a sailor.
Either way, he was looking forward to getting to the destination.
The two groups wished each other well, and then they were back on the road. He walked next to Walt, who was unusually quiet. Internally, Allen smiled.
"You missing your girl already?" he asked Walt.
"That obvious?" Walt asked.
"Shoot, we all been there. Was that your first time?"
Walt nodded, looking around sheepishly.
"Don't worry. If you can get it once, you can get it again."
The boy did not respond.
"She ask you to stay?"
He nodded again.
"What did you tell her?"
He chewed on the inside of his lip and then said, "I told her you guys needed my help and that I couldn't leave until we got to where we were going."
Allen laughed quietly. "You dog. You promised her you'd come back, didn't you?"
Walt shrugged his shoulders. "Didn't seem like it would be wrong to just tell her that."
They walked on, crunching through the snow, the sun shining down on them.
"Are you gonna come back for her?"
Walt laughed. "If I got nothing better to do, why the hell not?"
"Spoken like a true libertine," Allen said.
"What's a libertine?"
"Never you mind," Allen said. He slapped Walt on his shoulder and hurried to catch up with Brown.
Chapter 19: Into the Snake Pit
Tejada smiled. The going had been easier on the mountain roads, and the weather had improved somewhat. They had walked twenty miles in three days. He figured they were almost at the halfway point to the coast.
His calves burned with every step, and his hip still ached, but he could walk on his own now, though he wouldn't be running any races any time soon. The snow, combined with the steady, gradual rise in elevation, had slowed their pace a bit. But the lack of Annies crawling all over the place more than made up for it.
The nights had been painful, though. Every night, about an hour before sundown, they stopped to make camp in the middle of the road, clearing out snow and pitching their tents in a circle around the campfire's flames.
The men spent that last hour of daylight foraging as much wood as they could find and chopping down branches for kindling. Then they took turns trying to light the fire in the howling wind of the mountain.
Once the fire was going, they would huddle around it, trying to warm their bones. He didn't know if anyone else was able to ever get warm from the fire, but he knew for himself that he always felt the ache of chill in his body. Whatever side was facing away from the fire would inevitably fall back into freezing, forcing him to alternate between standing with his back to the fire and standing with his face to the fire.
In addition to the cold, Tejada didn't think there was an inch of his body that wasn't chapped. If he had it to do all over again, he would have sent one of the men to find all the Chap-Stick they could when they had run through the last grocery store. His hands bled in his gloves; his lips were cracked in several places. He even felt like the small wrinkles around his eyes were chapped. He didn't want to think about what would happen if he killed an Annie and got their blood in one of the cracks on his hands. He didn't know if that was enough to turn someone, but even the idea of finding out one day added an extra chill to his already frozen body.
All they had seen so far in their mountain journey had been a handful of Annies and a couple of ransacked gas stations and abandoned houses. Some of the houses showed signs of not actually being abandoned, footsteps in the snow, sections of porch suspiciously swept clean. They avoided those houses. If the people living there didn't want to make themselves known, then he wasn't going to force the issue. You could get a man killed knocking on a door out here, and he wasn't in the mood for any of that shit. The gas stations had been looted down to the SPAM long ago.
At night, two men stood watch, just in case any Annies came out of the woodwork. Night duty was the worst part of the trip besides the cold. You had to stand with your back to the fire to preserve your night vision, standing in the snow in the middle of a road, watching for any signs of movement in the dark. And there was movement. That was the crazy thing. Deer skirted their camp every night and other things. One night, while he had taken his turn on watch, he had heard the distinct growl and snuffling of something large in the woods. Tejada didn't think it was anything that his rifle couldn't have handled, but in the dark, it made him feel a little less confident. The sergeant had toyed with the idea of breaking out his night vision, but he figured he would save the batteries on that for when it mattered. He assumed it was a bear, maybe a bobcat.
For now, they trudged up a steep hill that ended with the road curving to the right.
Behind him, he heard the cough of Hope. She had developed a hacking cough at some point over the last two days. At first, it had just been a cough, but as they went on, it had become more and more frequent. He worried about the girl. There wasn't much they could do for her at the moment. They either kept moving, or they risked dying. To try and stay in the mountains for any length of time would be a disaster. Their food stores were dwindling, and as far as he could tell, unless they shot some game, they would be out of food in a week or two. With nothing to scavenge in the immediate vicinity, that would put them in a bad situation. Unless they liked boiling pine needles and tree bark, they couldn't spare the time to let the little girl rest and get better. It was a hard truth, but one that he had shared with Rudy when the boy had addressed his concerns about the little girl's health.
"I don't like it any better than you do," he said. "But we knew this whole trip was going to be a risk."
"But she's just a little girl," he whispered in the darkness, away from the campfire.
"Age doesn't have nothing to do with it. We got a lot of people here, and all our lives matter. We wait for her, we're putting everyone's life in jeopardy."
Rudy hadn't liked that conversation, but it was one that had to be had. Tejada still hated himself for saying the words, but hell, no one ever said that being a leader was going to be easy.
They took turns carrying the little girl. If she walked on her own, she had a heck of a time catching her breath. Up and up they rose, sweating in the cold air. It must have been 29-degrees that day, the wind only slightly like a knife cutting across his face.
When they reached the top of the hill, they stood gasping, looking at what lay ahead of them… another damn hill.
"Jesus Christ, where does it end?" Gregg said, falling to the ground.
"Alright, let's take a break," Tejada said. He flopped to the ground as well, sitting in the snow, his
knees pulled up and his head down as he gasped for air. They melted water with the camp stove, putting snow into a pot and letting it warm to the point of being disgusting, but they drank it down warm and hot, letting the warmth spread through their bodies as they caught their wind. It would have been nice if they had some hot chocolate to put in it, maybe even some instant coffee. But these things were luxuries, and they couldn't devote the limited space in their packs to luxuries.
When they stood up to move on, the little girl didn't get to her feet.
"Come on, Hope. We gotta get moving," Amanda said.
"I can't," the little girl said.
Tejada watched with dread as Amanda squatted down next to the girl and put a hand to her forehead. She was dying. Tejada knew that. Everyone knew it. They had watched her energy dwindle without remarking upon it.
Amanda picked the girl up in her arms. She was bundled from head to toe, wrapped in a blanket. Tejada didn't know how long Amanda could carry the girl like that, but he supposed they could take turns.
They trudged forward, the road less pitched. They rounded a tall rock outcropping, and they beheld the jagged tear where the road had been. A hundred-yard gap split the road in half. It was impossible to pass. To their right, a rock cliff rose upwards, maybe thirty or forty feet, but Tejada had no intention of taking all these people mountain climbing.
He walked to his left, knowing that there were only two directions they could go, down the side of the cliff or back towards Portland. At the edge of the cliff, he looked down. He saw the rock face slope downward. It was not steep, and there was enough of a grade so that they could plant their feet against the cliff as they descended. The bottom of the cliff face disappeared among the treetops, but they could do it. The only problem… Did they have enough rope?
****
The soldiers stood looking down at the pile of rope. Allen had knotted together what they had, making knots every five feet or so. He double-checked his work, knowing that if anyone fell, it would be because he hadn't done his shit properly. They had four lengths of rope among them, all of the lightweight, nylon variety.