by A. M. Geever
The olfactory memory of Miranda puking her guts out almost the entire way to Seattle filled Doug’s nose. If they really were traveling with an old woman and not a strike force of assassins, they were all likely miserable to some degree. He wasn’t getting bad vibes, and they’d asked if he minded. As a rule, brigands didn’t ask. If he sent a seasick old lady packing, he’d feel bad about it, but he needed a better read on these people. With Mario and Tessa so ill, they were stuck here.
“Where are you headed?”
“San Jose,” the woman answered. “They have a vaccine for the zombie virus there.”
Doug chuffed a surprised laugh. “You better stay, then. You don’t want to go to San Jose. You want to go to Portland.”
Hussein turned out not to be a brigand, but a middle-aged man with a swarthy brown complexion, milk chocolate-brown eyes, and dark but graying hair. His mother’s name was Fatima. She resembled her son, just twenty-odd years older, and with an accent so rich it was as if she’d never left her native Turkey. She still looked a little green around the gills, and intensely grateful to be on land. They’d moved to the sidewalk by the restaurant to accommodate her, where she sat on a backpack. Fatima kept fussing with the tie on her headscarf, and Doug wondered if it was a nervous tick. Susie, Hussein’s daughter, seemed to be in her early thirties, with blue eyes, and was as American as her dad. She was wary, but not unfriendly.
“How do you know all this?” Hussein asked Doug, after he’d heard what Doug had to say.
“I’m from San Jose. We’re headed back there from Portland. They won’t give you the vaccine in San Jose. The people in charge are very serious about keeping it for themselves. It’s how they stay in charge. That’s why we went to Portland, to try and make it there. It won’t matter what they do in San Jose once word gets out about Portland.”
“God, people suck,” Susie said. “And the people in Portland… They’ll really share it?”
Doug nodded. “I’m one of those people. We’ve only just started manufacturing it, but if they’ve got enough, you can get vaccinated. You might have to wait a bit, but it’ll happen.”
Fatima called to her son. “Hussein, I’m tired.”
“Yes, anne,” he said. Then to Susie, “We should find a place for the night.”
“You can stay with us,” Doug said. “There’s nothing here on this island, except this restaurant, and it’s pretty rough inside. We’re just across the bay. I’ve got a rowboat so we don’t have to walk around. The thing is, two of my friends are sick. Pneumonia, we think, but we don’t know if it’s viral or bacterial.”
“How long have they been sick?” Hussein asked.
“About four days now.”
“Are they getting better or worse?”
“Worse,” Doug said. “Scaring me, actually. We’ve got some antibiotics, but—”
“I’m a doctor, Doug,” Hussein said, interrupting him. “Let us get our things, and I’ll take a look at them.”
“Really?” Doug couldn’t hide his surprise, nor the relief in his voice. “That would be great… That would be really great.”
Hussein nodded and hurried to their yacht to get his things.
“Thank you,” Doug said aloud, his prayer of thanksgiving heartfelt. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lord.”
“I’m just glad we got here when we did,” Hussein said to Doug.
Doug stood on the dock with Hussein, Fatima, and Susie. They were taking their leave after a week of Hussein tending to Mario and Tessa, but now were bound for Portland. Skye had said her farewells at the safe house. Mario and Tessa were still weak, forget fighting off zombies.
Hussein said, “I know you’re all anxious to get back on the road, but it takes months for the lungs to fully recover. It will be another month before they really feel well. Give it a week at least before you set out again. Whatever that bug was, it was a nasty one. It was just luck that I had something stronger than you were using. Another few days and Mario, certainly, might have died.”
Doug shook off the shiver that slithered down his spine. “I don’t know if you believe in anything, but I’ve been thanking God for you coming here.”
Hussein pressed his hands together in front of his heart and dipped his head. “Sometimes the mountain comes to Mohammed,” he said, his eyes sparkling.
"If you count the blessings of Allah, never will you be able to count them,” Fatima said, laying her hand on Doug’s arm. “But that medicine to keep me from getting seasick is one of them.”
“It’s nothing,” Doug said. “Especially compared to what you did for us. Avoid assassin squads if you can,” he added, and Fatima, in particular, laughed. “I’m sure you’re formidable when you need to be, Fatima, but I’m glad you weren’t looking for an opportunity to kill us.”
She looked at Doug with a fondness he reciprocated. He’d enjoyed Fatima’s company, especially her sense of humor. Once it was clear Mario and Tessa were on the mend, he’d been able to enjoy getting to know all of the Sadik family.
Susie gave Doug a hug. “We’ll give your message to Miranda. Take care.”
“You too.”
A few minutes later, they cast off. Doug watched their yacht until it rounded the bend and slipped out of sight. Loneliness stole through him like a chilly breeze, now that they’d gone. He wasn’t worried that Mario and Tessa would get worse. Hussein said they’d get better and Doug had no reason to doubt him, especially after how quickly they’d improved under his care. It was just that good people were hard to come by, and more important than ever. Even as he said a silent prayer for their safe journey, to a place where he knew more good people would welcome them, he hated to see them go.
Eight days after the departure of the Sadik family, Mario and Tessa had improved to the point that Mario had begun a campaign to leave as soon as possible. Doug empathized with Mario’s frustration at the delay; they’d been in Eureka over two weeks already, but neither he nor Tessa were yet fit to travel.
Doug stretched his arms high over his head, groaning a little as he twisted onto his side inside his sleeping bag, and pulled at the zipper. The air in this bedroom of the little beach house was chilly—cool, but not enough to raise goosebumps. He smoothed his hair back as he disentangled his long legs and reached for his boots. Skye’s crumpled sleeping bag lay on the floor beside him. Doug hadn’t realized how accustomed he’d become to sleeping with Skye beside him until they’d needed to split nurse duty and night watches between them.
He found Skye, Mario, and Tessa sitting at the kitchen table when he entered. The kitchen faced the bay, with lots of windows that gave it a nice view. Skye’s feet were propped on the lone empty chair. She looked up from the book she was reading.
“Hey you,” she said, smiling.
Mario and Tessa looked up from their game of cards. Both were much improved, though still pale and coughing. Tessa seemed to be rebounding more quickly than Mario, but Mario was far more annoying about wanting to leave.
“Good morning, beautiful,” Doug said, pecking Skye on the cheek. To Mario and Tessa, he added, “How are you two feeling?”
“Good,” they said in unison. Then Tessa added, “We could leave today, I think.”
“Nope,” Doug said, shaking his head. He rooted in the small bag of food on the bare kitchen counter, chose an apple, then nudged Skye’s feet from the empty chair to sit beside her. “Hussein said a week at least. Skye and I are going to see if we can find more meds today. Then we can talk about when to leave.” He bit into the apple, breaking its skin with a crisp snap.
“We have plenty of meds,” Tessa said.
“We can always use more,” Doug said cheerfully. Mario stayed silent. Doug hadn’t missed that Mario left it to Tessa to argue for their departure. He squinted at Skye. “What are you reading?”
She looked up from a faded fat paperback that had either been well-loved in the days before zombies, or had not fared well since.
“Little House on the P
rairie. It’s as good as I remember from when I read it as a kid. And a lot more racist.”
“They had different standards for what was considered broad-minded when those were written,” Doug said.
Skye snorted, then resumed reading.
“Think you can manage while Skye and I take a look around for a few hours?” he said to Mario and Tessa.
Tessa nodded, while Mario mumbled something that almost sounded like an affirmative. They were all anxious to get underway, but there was an urgency to Mario’s impatience that was different from the rest of them. The pinched expression, the tightness around his eyes and in his jaw, could not be put down to his illness. He rarely mentioned his brother Dominic, who had tried to kill not just Mario, but Miranda and Doug as well. Dominic’s plan had succeeded in killing other people—good people, who’d given them the benefit of the doubt when they had no reason to and who’d helped them achieve their goal of developing a new vaccine for the zombie virus. People who’d become friends after giving them shelter and aid. Mario never mentioned his brother and the destruction he’d rained down on people Mario held dear, including the woman he loved, but Doug caught glimpses of the fury and heartache that his brother’s plan had wrought. Combined with the rawness of his and Miranda’s breakup, Mario was not in a good place. Doug found himself worried for his friend, and helpless to ease his suffering.
Doug pushed his worry aside and nudged Skye’s foot. She nudged his foot back, a grin tugging at the corner of her mouth, her eyes never leaving the page in front of her.
“Leave once I’ve brushed my teeth?” he said.
“Let me finish this chapter. Mister Edwards is visiting. He always tells the best stories.”
“It never stops being eerie.”
Doug nodded. He knew exactly what Skye meant, for Eureka was a ghost town.
There were lots of human skeletons, falling down buildings, and disintegrating roads in varied stages of reabsorption by the natural world, but so far, very few zombies. They’d seen foxes, bald eagles, a pack of wolves that had melted back into the trees, and even a fleeting glimpse of a mountain lion. Doug half expected to cross paths with a grizzly bear. Before the zombie apocalypse, grizzlies had been extinct in California for over a hundred years, their existence acknowledged only by their inclusion on California’s State Seal. Doug knew that grizzlies had reclaimed their place in California, even though they were not the same subspecies. He’d never seen one himself. This far north, he reckoned his chances were higher. He also hoped that if it happened, it would be at a distance.
“Should we keep going or call it quits?”
“I don’t know,” Skye said, squinting up at the clear sky, then back to him. “We’ve been gone a good three hours, and we lucked out at the hospital.”
“Yeah,” Doug said. “It was weird there were hardly any zombies, and all those meds.”
Skye’s eyes held a warning. “Don’t look a gift horse and all that. You’re lucky I agreed to check out the hospital in the first place.” She paused, then said, “The animals we’ve seen haven’t seemed spooked by anything but us. Let’s go a little farther.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t press our luck.”
She smiled at him, the make-his-heart-flutter-in-his-chest smile. “You love pressing your luck.”
Doug shrugged, unable to refute it, but also knowing that this truth didn’t fit him quite as well as when they’d met. He had loved to push the envelope, to balance on the edge of what was prudent and what was foolhardy, even dangerous, for as long as he could remember. He still did. But he didn’t enjoy it with the same abandon as before, when it had just been him. Skye could handle herself. No one survived this long who couldn’t. They were good together beyond the protective walls that sheltered what was left of the human race. Not like he and Miranda, who were almost one organism after the years they’d spent partnering on missions and patrols, but that would come in time. He could tell already. They anticipated one another’s moves, noticed what the other overlooked, instinctively understood when the risk was worth it and when it wasn’t.
But the idea of returning to the world before Skye, to a life that had felt so full until—abruptly—it hadn’t, that had become gray and flat until she breathed life into it with her laugh and resilience and the way she moved, tempered the thrill. He didn’t know how to tell her this, didn’t have the language to parse this feeling of temperance, to distinguish it from hovering or lack of confidence in her capabilities. Maybe one day he would, but not today. Today he had to live with the emotional dissonance and trust in them both. He had to take that leap of faith.
“You know me too well,” he said. “Let’s give it another hour and head back.”
They continued south, continually scanning the wide, flat street, buildings, and parking lots. After a few minutes, Skye stopped in front of what had once been a charming, green cottage turned dentist’s office but now was a ruin.
“Maybe we should go back,” she said. “It’s just going to be more of the same, and you’re right. We’ve already found a lo—”
Doug’s mind raced as he tried to identify the threat that had caused her to stop speaking mid-word. His heart jumped into this throat for a moment when he didn’t see her, before he realized she’d crouched down. It looked like she was pretending to tie her bootlace.
“What is it?” he said, keeping his voice low.
Never raising her eyes, she said, “Don’t look or I think he’ll bolt.”
“What? Who will bolt?”
“The kid on that balcony.”
Doug felt his eyes go wide but stayed still. “Where?”
“The building on the corner behind you, same side as this one.” She pointed to the green cottage, the movement of her arm casual, then looked up at him. “Gray, with blue gutters. Looks like apartments on the second floor.”
Irrationally, Doug felt eyes on the back of his neck when the moment before he hadn’t. “What the hell is a kid doing out here?”
Skye shifted onto her other knee and raised her foot that had been tucked behind her. She began to fiddle with its shoelace, too. “Doesn’t look well cared for.”
“Feral?”
“Only one way to find out.”
Doug held his hand out to her. “Kiss me. We’ll hold hands and keep walking so he won’t figure out that we’ve seen him.”
Skye took his hand, a grin splitting her face as he helped her up and pulled her to him. He could feel her distraction while they kissed in the tilt of her head, the angle not quite right since she was trying to peek over his shoulder. When they parted, she kept hold of his hand.
He kept his gaze straight as they continued down the road, but held his head a little higher. The building Skye had described was so near that they reached it in seconds. Darkness framed by the jagged edges of broken plate glass windows lined the building’s lower story. Rusting cars were parked, bumpers touching, parallel to the building’s edifice to reinforce the entrance. In the periphery of his vision Doug saw the balcony, which ran the length of the long building. Tucked in the corner at the near end, the top of the boy’s head peeked over the solid wall of the balcony. His tight, curly hair looked matted and ratty, and his face was covered in dirt. Even though he only caught a glimpse, Doug thought the kid looked too thin.
“What about that blue building down there?” Skye said, her voice raised. She pointed to a building farther down the road. “That pharmacy.”
“Okay,” Doug said.
It really was a pharmacy, but half burned down. Between the pharmacy and the building where the boy was hiding sat a large parking lot.
Dropping his voice again, he said to Skye, “The balcony stairs are on the end, by the parking lot. Dash over when we reach them?”
“Yeah.”
A few moments later, a door slammed. They looked at one another, then dashed for the stairs. Skye pulled ahead, both of them knowing by unspoken agreement that a woman might be perceived as less threatening. Doug
took the steps three at a time. He turned onto the balcony a few seconds behind Skye. She was already halfway to the other end.
“Wait for me, Skye!”
“We don’t have time. We spooked him.”
A muffled whimper stopped Doug in his tracks. Skye whirled around to face him.
“Did you hear that?” she asked, only mouthing the words.
Another whimper, louder and more distressed than the last. They crept along the balcony toward the end, where they’d seen the boy. At the second to last apartment, a loud groan was followed by a body slamming against the closed door; definitely a zombie there. They reached the last apartment, the zombie next door moaning and snarling as it thrashed and pounded. Underneath the noise made by the zombie, Doug could hear whimpers.
Skye looked over to him, her eyes excited. He nodded and she turned the knob.
The door didn’t open. From its other side came an anguished cry.
“Bun Bun!”
Doug kicked the door open. Two voices, one crying, were coming from one of the bedrooms. They raced to the back of the apartment. Doug reached a bedroom door just as two small, dark hands let go of the windowsill.
“Wait!” Skye cried.
A lower roof extended from the back of the building about eight feet below the window. Two small figures ran across it, the larger of the two pulling a smaller, howling figure along.
“I’ve got this,” Skye said, already halfway out the window. “Go around!”
Before Doug could answer, Skye disappeared. Racing from the apartment, he sprinted down the balcony. He leaped down the staircase in three soaring strides that left him stumbling on the uneven concrete walk, but the tactical soles of his boots found purchase. He sprinted alongside the building’s short end, skidding around the corner. A burst of adrenalized energy propelled him forward to Skye’s calming voice that was competing with high-pitched screams.