by David Kazzie
“I ain’t lying.”
“Good.”
Austin chuckled. He tilted his head to the side and looked over Rachel’s shoulder.
“You always let your bitch run the show?”
She turned to wrap her arms around Eddie’s waist before it was too late, but it was already too late. It unfolded in slow motion: Eddie putting the gun between the man’s eyes, Eddie pulling the trigger, the small dime-sized entry hole appearing in the man’s forehead. Austin’s head rocking backward from the impact, his body slumping over in the wagon, coming to rest in the lap of his dead traveling companion. The echo of the gunshot reverberated across the chilly land. The single report had seemed louder to Rachel than the gunplay that preceded it. It felt more final, more definitive. Her left ear was ringing and deadened, a sonic anesthetic mainlined into her eardrum. She touched a hand to her ear and it came away bloody. Eddie had ruptured her goddamn eardrum.
“You believe this asshole?” Eddie said, his voice shaky and small.
“Was it worth it?” she yelled. “Was it?”
The world sounded muffled and far away.
She walked away, leaving Eddie with the bodies of his victims and the wagon of supplies, the smell of coppery blood and smoke hanging in their air.
9
When all was said and done at the end of that fateful and terrible summer thirteen years earlier, nearly ninety-nine percent of the world’s population had perished in the viral holocaust. Of the seven billion humans alive and kicking on the day Medusa had been dispersed at Yankee Stadium, only about one hundred million were still around on Labor Day some four weeks later. In the years that followed, natural selection got in on the act, culling approximately one-third of those survivors in a variety of ways, either by accident or means most foul or, most cruelly, from random illness that would have been easily treated in the old days. Put another way, you did not want your appendix to flake out on you in this new world.
The population of the continental United States shrank to about four million, less than half the number of people living in pre-plague New York City. While Adam Fisher had trekked westward looking for Rachel in the months after the epidemic, the vast majority of the other survivors had had no such heroic quest. These survivors spent their time attending to far more mundane tasks. Staying alive. Not going completely insane. Food. Water. Shelter. Medicine. Self-defense. Survivors sheltered in place, remaining in their homes, venturing out only when necessary to obtain supplies, slowly coalescing to form small communities. PTSD was common. Many people turned to drugs and alcohol to cope with the disaster.
In Omaha, Nebraska, Medusa spared about three thousand people, nearly all of whom remained in and around the city after the epidemic ended. They were scattered from the inner city to the suburbs. When the outbreak began, the nation’s cupboards had been stocked with tens of millions of canned and dry goods, enough to meet the needs of a tiny population for a good while. For the first few years after the plague, there had been little need for commerce, as the supply of virtually everything had far outstripped the demand. Few communities formed in those early days, as the survivors were too scattered to find each other in large numbers, and many were too frightened to join with people they did not know.
Even after taking the warehouse, Rachel and the others scavenged the neighborhoods in the western Omaha suburbs. It never ceased to amaze her how many homes there were, how much food the average family had stockpiled. It could take a team of four a full day to clear five houses of their various and sundry supplies. They learned to make bread and hunt, until the crop failures began wreaking havoc on the wildlife. For a while, it seemed as if the food would never run out.
But time took its toll, both through consumption and spoilage, and exacerbated by the fact that virtually nothing new was growing. Eventually, shortages began to pop up, particularly of food and medicines. Rachel began noticing how many X’s they’d marked on their maps to note neighborhoods they had cleared. One day, they’d encountered another gaggle of survivors a bit farther east toward downtown, an encounter that briefly turned violent but ended with only one person wounded. Five thousand people in a city designed to hold many times that didn’t seem like much on paper, but she was surprised by how crowded it felt.
The story was that a group in east Omaha needed a stockpile of antibiotics after two of their members were badly injured in an accident. What they did have was fresh milk from a cow they had nursed back to health; they traded the milk for the medicine another small community had stockpiled, and lo and behold, capitalism was reborn.
A month later, as legend had it, the two parties to the initial trade met again, this time here, at the West Omaha Farmer’s Market, where a gallon of biofuel was swapped for a bottle of twenty-year-old Pappy Van Winkle bourbon whiskey. Word of the market began to spread across southern Nebraska, and each month brought a handful of new faces. A fight erupted at one Market about a year in, leaving four dead. That led to the Market Compact, which every trader was required to sign before participating. Any violation of the Compact was punished by immediate and permanent expulsion from the Market.
Every first Thursday of the month, the Market opened at dawn.
#
Rachel and Eddie left while everyone slept, or more specifically, slept fitfully, if at all. Whatever the case, the compound would be quiet today, as there were no more shifts to cover, no watches to keep, no more defenses to fortify. They were on vacation now, a brief pause before whatever lay ahead. She tried not to think about it, but her mind was pulling on it like a tractor beam, these thoughts of a terrible future now imminent.
She and Eddie set out on foot, planning to cover the six miles to Market in about two hours. There had been a brief discussion of cycling there, but Rachel preferred to walk. A bike left her feeling naked, exposed. It was too easy to let the world slip by. But on foot, she could keep her finger on the trigger, keep her wits about her, let her surroundings in slowly.
It was going to be a dank, chilly day. They walked briskly, with purpose, heading north to I-80 and then swinging east toward the city proper. Eddie carried the silver briefcase, the mysterious valise swinging to and fro as they made their way toward the city.
They were living through the end of the world again, this time writ small. Rachel had slept little since the attack, her nights spent on the floor of Will’s room, waiting for something, anything, what, she didn’t know. It was all going bad, even faster than she had anticipated. The night of the funerals, fifty cans of food had disappeared. Twenty-four suspects in the theft and not a one was talking. Tina Fortune had been assigned to guard the supplies, and she claimed someone had cold-cocked her when she wasn’t looking. She had the head wound to go with it, but even that hadn’t been good enough to dissuade the conspiracy theorists.
She stole it!
She smacked herself in the head to make it look good!
String her up!
Someone had suggested torturing her to confess, but that discussion deteriorated into another bitter argument, and another fight broke out. Then two nights ago, a drunken Mark Covington attacked Harry Maynard with a broken bottle in the cafeteria, and Harry had taken a shard of glass in the arm. Harry had shot Covington, killing him.
It was all going south in a hurry.
She hadn’t wanted to leave Will behind today, but Eddie had forced her hand. Despite her pleas, he would not stay with the boy, and she didn’t trust Eddie to pull this exchange off himself. She had pleaded with Will to stay in his room, the curtains drawn, to not answer the door for anyone. She promised Will the moon if he could do this one thing for Mommy. The benefit outweighed the potential risk, she had decided. Her next step would depend on what, if anything, they’d be able to get for the case.
What if someone comes inside?
Then you hide under the bed, sweetheart.
What if? What if? What if?
He peppered her with questions until she told him to shut up, she had actua
lly used those words, and he had cried, and then she had felt even worse. But that had taken the fight right out of him and he agreed to do what his mother asked, his big eyes wet with tears.
As they made their way along the highway, she kept seeing those eyes, the image burned on her brain. Beside her, Eddie whistled softly while they walked, a tune she found familiar but couldn’t quite place. It nagged her to her core, the name of the song right there on the tip of her brain but she couldn’t come up with it. She didn’t want to ask Eddie what song it was because that meant interacting with him.
It was hard to believe that once upon a time, they had been a happy little family. That was the thing people didn’t understand about relationships. They didn’t always fall apart all at once, with an affair or a punch of the face or blowing it all on the Patriots. Sometimes they died a little bit at a time. A chip in the wall here, a crack there, wounds that were never repaired. Enough of those and even the Great Wall of China would come tumbling down.
Strange though, they had spent more time together since the attack than they probably had in the year preceding it. It didn’t change things between them, not a bit; it was more of a reminder of all that had gone wrong between them over the years. Winding down.
An hour out from the warehouse and signs of urbanization greeted them under a gloomy sunrise. The sky lightened to the east as they passed an old vintage movie theater that had played second-run movies for ninety-nine cents, the marquee still announcing a Captain America movie. A hint of indigo bled on the horizon, a glimmer of the day to come. Cornfields gave way to small squat buildings in this industrial section of Omaha. Once comforting to Rachel in their familiarity, they now seemed ominous, dead, harbingers of things to come.
She lit a cigarette.
“You gotta smoke those goddamn things?” Eddie asked.
“Shut up.”
As the development grew denser, they began moving with more care, keeping an eye out on the dark corners, on alleyways, up to the rooftops. They were in neutral territory, largely because there wasn’t anything worth fighting over here anymore. That said, you could never be too careful. Mankind hadn’t exactly been on its best behavior in the absence of civilization. After pitching the half-smoked cigarette, she curled her finger around the trigger of the M4, the strap set snugly around her neck.
In the east, the dead skyline of Nebraska’s biggest city rose before them, well into its second decade of disrepair. The buildings were dirty, many of them sporting a greenish coating of mildew. Virtually all the windows were blown out, victims of vandalism and weather and time. To the north, grain silos reaching skyward like outstretched fingers broke the up the flat horizon.
“How much farther is it?”
She ignored the whininess of his query; he sounded like a child complaining to his parents on a long road trip.
“Two miles. Maybe three.”
Forty minutes later, they arrived at the outskirts of the Market, which had been set up in a city park, the previous home to a farmer’s market that had been popular with Omahans before the plague. Here and there, people milled about, chatting, arguing, dealing. An old FEMA banner hung limply from the outer fence. The agency had set up a processing center here during the outbreak, including a series of trailers that had been conscripted into service for the Market. The banner had faded but you could just make out the lettering that read QUARANTINE IN EFFECT.
Rachel focused on a middle-aged woman, frightfully thin, standing outside the gates. Her clothes hung loosely on her frame. Even from where she stood, Rachel could see the sunken eyes, the hollow in the woman’s cheeks. She stopped each person who passed through the gates, begging for a handout, but no one paid her any mind. Eventually, a Market security guard came by to talk with her. He spoke for a few seconds, and the woman shook her head vehemently. Rachel knew what the man was telling her. The woman did have something to sell, yes, indeedy. It would be a matter of whether she had reached that line.
Rachel watched her and her heart broke, but not from any sense of empathy. She was the woman; the woman was her.
No.
That wouldn’t be her. She was strong where this woman was weak. She would find a way. Today was the first step toward that.
She pulled her focus back from this a microcosm of misery and took in the forest rather than the trees. It had been a while since she had come to Market, at least four months, maybe six. The sight of so many people always shocked her a bit; you forgot how many different faces you used to see every day in the old world. Faces of people you’d see once and never see again. Faces at the gas station, at a stoplight, standing in line at the bank, sitting next to you at your favorite pizza place. And then all those faces had vanished, all at once, and you’d go weeks or months without seeing a new face, and then you would forget there were still other people in the world. Then you came to Market, and it was sensory overload, even though when you got right down to it, there really weren’t that many people here at all.
Rachel liked seeing new faces, it gave her a little thrill to see other people again. Young people, old people, white faces, black faces, Asian faces, Hispanic faces, faces that might look like one ethnicity or another, but you really couldn’t tell at all.
She and Eddie fell into the queue, which was starting to thicken ahead of the Market’s opening at dawn. As they waited, she scanned the crowd, considering how to play it. Was someone here waiting for the briefcase? Had someone already spotted it? It wasn’t lost on her that they might already be in terrible danger, that the last moments of their lives might already be sluicing away, the last few grains of sands whirlpooling toward their date with gravity.
At dawn, a bell clanged, and the Market opened.
#
A band had struck up the music as they entered the gates. The smell of meat cooking on a fire somewhere wafted through the air, the aroma making her mouth water. She pushed it out of her head, knowing the price for such a treat would be too rich for what they could afford to pay. As they wandered the grounds, the Market revved to life, people setting up tents and tables, dragging coolers and crates of goods to sell. Everything would be for sale, food, medicine, weapons, ammunition, even sex.
There would be dice and gambling and prostitution and sport, probably a fight at dusk, when someone would build a big bonfire, and two pugilists would whale away on each other to the delight of the crowd. It was loud and boisterous and sometimes a bit frightening. She found herself drifting to their usual spot, where they normally set up their table. They didn’t have their table today, but she felt safer here nonetheless.
“Morning,” said their neighbor, a middle-aged fireplug of a man named Andy. He was a thickly built man, balding but for two strips of bushy gray hair flanking each side of his dome. His face bore a long scar beginning above his eyebrow and curling upward to his hairline. He had an astonishing array of guns and ammunition at his disposal, which he usually traded for food. He fancied himself the pit boss of the market, in no small part due to his arsenal. He always came solo and never spoke of anyone else; his background was a bit of a mystery.
“Andy,” Rachel said sweetly. Ordinarily, she detested making small talk, especially with Andy, but today she would have to, and she would have to do it well. He often doled out nuggets of gossip he picked up along the midway. People were afraid of Andy, and probably with good reason. Best to curry favor with him and stay apprised of the comings and goings of the post-apocalyptic plains states.
“The love of my life,” he said. “You still with this jerkoff?” Andy asked, nodding toward Eddie. The two men did not get along, and Andy was not afraid to express his disdain toward Eddie. He had taken a shine to Rachel, though, and he had always been fair with them. He was their primary ammunition vendor.
Eddie stepped toward the man, his chest puffed out.
“What’d you say to me, asshole?”
Andy shoved him aside like a child pushing away a boring toy.
“I’ll let that one
go,” Andy said. “My way of paying my respects.”
“What are you talking about?” Eddie asked stupidly.
She nodded. Andy knew about the battle for the warehouse. She didn’t reply, wondering where he would take this conversation. He liked to talk, that was for sure, hated empty silences.
“Sorry about your pop,” Andy said, turning his attention back to Rachel. “Kind of a legend, that man.”
Adam was well known at the Market, having run a medical clinic there for years. Few doctors had appeared at the Market, and his services were frequently in high demand. There was simply no escaping the man’s shadow.
“Anyway, lotta folks talkin’ about your warehouse,” he went on. “Biggest one in months. Probably the way things is gonna be from now on. Y’all ain’t the only ones running out. Food’s getting expensive.”
“Any idea who hit us?”
“No.”
Rachel eyed him, trying to decide if he were telling the truth.
“There’s more out there,” Eddie said. “We’ll find it.”
“If there were more, it’d have shown up here,” Andy replied. “Population around here’s been getting bigger every year. People abandoning the coasts.”
“Why?” Rachel asked.
“The big cities, they’re death traps,” Andy said. “Controlled by warlords. That’s where the worst of the worst set up shop. They went in, scooped up all the food and supplies. Now the food is running low. People starting to stream to the middle. It’s no secret there are tons of warehouses and distribution centers in the Midwest, near the Mississippi. Like a funnel. It’s only going to get worse.
“You know what happens when there’s a shortage of a vital resource?”