Allison Hewitt Is Trapped (16 page)

“They wanted to get citizens into the arena, to keep a safe, solid perimeter and have a central location for survivors to go to. That was a good step, a good idea. But then they set up that damn barricade right out front, right down the main artery. I’m sure they were thinking that a wall would keep the undead out. They were right, sort of, but it also kept citizens out. I don’t know if you can guess, but when you have panicking citizens with a barricade on one side and undead on the other … Well, now you have a problem because you have three times as many undead as you did before. That barricade is coming down and your perimeter has gone to hell.”

“So the police, they left? They just left those people there to die?”

“No,” he says, lowering the gun. “They died too.”

“So the flak jackets and the truck and the guns—those belonged to the cops?” I ask.

Collin nods, reloading the gun slowly so I can watch and then handing it to me. He seems to have returned to his former self, the man with the ready teacher’s smile and prodding eyes. The gun is warm from his grip.

“Finn served in the Royal Air Force, and so did I. It was a family tradition. I kept my uniforms around for, oh I don’t know, something like sentiment, a reminder of being a young man. The uniforms are just for peace of mind, for show. If you have a bunch of frightened people, desperate for help, nothing creates a little order like uniforms and assault rifles. Once you have order you can organize raids on the corner markets, on the libraries and the pharmacies and the ambulances, and once you have supplies you have happy people.”

“You did all that by yourself?”

“Finn helped.”

“Right. But you did it by yourself?”

“Of course,” he says, tapping my elbow. He’s impatient. He thinks I’ll make a good soldier if I can just learn to shoot without tensing up every time I squeeze the trigger. I can’t help it. I know that sound is coming, the explosion. “You don’t think in situations like this, Allison, you act. I think you know that already.”

“But you’re just so … so calm. How do you do that? How do you not just completely lose it?”

“Hold on,” he says, firmly pushing on my arms until the gun is pointed at the ground in front of us. “Did you lose someone? More than one person?”

“My mother,” I stammer, caught off guard. “I don’t … I don’t know where she is. We were supposed to meet up but she never showed.”

“I see. I lost my wife. I don’t know where she is either, but I can guess. I’m not invincible, Allison. I’m just doing the best I can. And really, that’s all I’m asking of you.”

Target practice goes badly. I can’t focus and I can’t stop thinking about my mom. I shouldn’t have told Collin about her, I should have just kept my mouth shut.

Ted doesn’t come back to the tent until very late. He’s been taking care of the Stocktons. He really likes them, especially their two young sons. Dapper is my only company as I wait up for Ted, and even the dog seems uninterested in my sulky mood. When Ted gets back he falls asleep right away, exhausted by a hard day’s work. I want him to stay up. I want to talk and joke, to tell him that I’m useless with a gun, and hear him laugh when I say that Collin thinks I’m a complete sissy. These days Ted’s unruly hair has all but colonized the surface of his glasses and he’s reduced to constantly pushing it out of his face just to see where he’s going. When he flops down on his sleeping bag his dark hair fans out around his head like a handful of daggers.

Collin has asked if I want to have a drink. Finn will be there because Collin wants his nephew to apologize. I’m sure he wants us all to get on. I remember that’s the phrase he uses, “Get on.” I politely tell him no, that I’m not interested, that I’m very tired.

Now I wish I had accepted the invitation because I’m sitting here reading what all of you have said. You’re alive. A few of you are doing more than surviving, and I can easily imagine your disdain for someone like me, someone who can do nothing but sit around and wallow and stare at my sleeping roommate like a creepy shut-in. I shouldn’t be alone like this. I should be having a whiskey with Collin and his nephew, I should be letting myself live.

But then again, every time I think of Collin, of his voice and how I looked to it on the radio for guidance and peace, I automatically think of Zack. After that catastrophic misstep, how can I trust my judgment? How can I trust myself?

Tomorrow, Collin wants me to meet the Stocktons. They’re a very nice family, he says. A real, whole family.

I miss you, Mom. If you’re reading this: I miss you.

COMMENTS

Rev. Brown says:

October 9, 2009 at 6:45 pm

We survivors know your soul, Allison. I read aloud from what you write in the Kingdom House here in Atlanta. And it was my Jamal, all of nine, who offered me both solutions to your moral problem.

Allison, you can’t know if what you did was a sin. You know you had righteous cause and you sought virtuous justice. Your manner may have lept towards malice—your soul may have blackened with a stain of mere, cruel vengeance—but God does not command that we forgive our enemies. Jesus Christ our Lord has demanded we treat others as we would be treated ourselves. And I know, just as I feel His spirit stir in your words, that His word would move you. If you stole a collective’s food, you’d demand your own hands be taken, just as our forebears demanded of thieves.

It’s all The Lord’s work.

Logan says:

October 9, 2009 at 7:09 pm

Took a while to find it, working internet. I’m using SNet, is that what you’re using too? Such a thing I used to take for granted, but you know the saying. See, where I’m at here in Colorado, we had warning. A few sparse broadcasts before They came. Most of us just meandered on with the daily routines, but some of us … Some of us knew that it wouldn’t stop before it got to us.

We, myself and a few others from the area where I work, took the two weeks of warning, and prepared. At least I thought we did. In retrospect there wasn’t much we really could have done to truly prepare for what was coming. A few of us even got arrested by the police for stealing before The Infected even showed up in … person. Not sure what happened to them, but lets take a look outside the window shall we? It’s not too terribly hard to guess. I guess the military taught me things I never really realized. Survival is not a right, but more something earned. Survival of the Fittest indeed.

God or not, keep up the good fight. There ARE others and we WILL “fix” this, even if that means putting a 9mm bullet or the blade of a sword or axe in between the eyes of every last one of Them.

Matthew H says:

October 9, 2009 at 7:36 pm

Dear Allison,

Your words give us so much hope. Just knowing that there are others who have made it is so very encouraging. I’m very sorry to hear about your friends who have passed. We have each lost loved ones here as well.

We found this yesterday via Blackberry (we have a charger(!), a working outlet just outside(!!), and the satellite Internet still works for now—I wonder for how long?). There are four of us staying in a storefront church on the north side of Las Vegas. You write of the “disdain” that we must have for you. Allison, nothing could be further from the truth. You have brought us into a network of the living—that gives hope, not resentment. Please continue to keep us posted. We’ll stay in touch. We are so very grateful that so many of you are alive.

In peace,
Matthew, Caroline, Jamie, Gideon

October 10, 2009—A Room With a View

“You kill zomblies too?”

“Yes, Evan,” I say, patting the little golden boy on his head. “Just like your mom and dad.”

Right away I can see why Ted admires the Stocktons. Corie and Ned make up a tall, attractive couple with the kind of vigorous likeability that seems to transcend the mire of depression and shock in the Village. Their two sons are extremely charming. Not in the disturbing, doped-up-on-Ritalin sort of way. They have energy and they’re talkative, but you can tell within a few seconds of knowing them that they’ve had a swell childhood full of climbed trees and captured dragonflies. Mikey, the older son, is ten and has the intense, dusky look of his olive-skinned, dark-haired mother. He’s more reserved than his younger brother and informs me in a discrete, adult whisper that his little brother is still “just a baby.” Evan is four, a scrapper, with the all-American J. Crew looks of his dad. Evan is still learning to talk. He travels only by shoulders, straddling his dad’s neck, perched up there like a guru on a mountaintop. Evan wins me over right away when the first words out of his mouth are:

“I don’t like the zomblies much. Dad says they’re bad. You kill zomblies too?”

It would be easy to underestimate Corie and Ned, and it’s tempting to write them off as a youngish yuppy couple who are prim and self-possessed on the outside while they hide a turbulent, hateful marriage. But they seem cool, legitimately cool, the kind of people you meet and think later on: I’d like to be like them someday. Corie’s the sort of woman you always dream of outclassing at a high school reunion. Then you get there, smug, educated, successful, only to discover that Corie is now a Pilates instructor and has only become more humble and sweet and that she’s aged gracefully—in fact, she’s more beautiful now in her thirties than she ever was as a teenager. And you might want to hate her, but then you see her now, in a confusing, shattered world where it’s easy to become numb and depressed and she’s still laughing for her kids, still a rock-solid mom.

Ned and I don’t hit it off immediately, but then, in a side conversation with Collin and me, he turns into someone I really, really want to know better. He and Corie lived in a suburb not far from Black Earth. When the undead arrived their neighborhood splintered. No one banded together, no one stayed to fight. One neighbor discovered that fire is a powerful weapon against the undead, but it also has a tendency to get out of control. Within an hour their entire cul-de-sac was in flames.

“I didn’t say, ‘We’re staying, this is our house and we’re staying no matter what.’ Screw that. I knew we had to go. There wasn’t going to be anything left. I knew it. I could feel the house coming down around us and Evan was just screaming. They were coming up the yard, up the drive, everywhere. So I said: honey, make sure the boys are with you, get them up. We’re getting out of here. I didn’t know where we would go. It didn’t matter.”

(Not that exciting, I know, but this next bit is when I just about nominated him for Village president.)

“And so I lit the PT Cruiser on fire and pushed it down the driveway.”

Collin and I share a glance at this, both of us realizing then and there that Ned is going to fit in just fine around here. He and Collin then discover that they’re both ex-military. Ned was an engineer for the U.S. Army in his twenties. This is enough to make them long-lost brothers and they’re soon pounding each other on the back like real compadres. It’s my freshman year of undergrad all over again, when even the most general, tenuous connection helped you befriend strangers. You’re lonely and unsure and scared, so any shared interest at all is enough to forge a lifelong bond—“You like peas? No way!
I
like peas. Wanna get drunk?”

That’s Ned and Collin—two camouflaged peas in a pod. Maybe they should be the new Hollianted—Nollin? Cod? Christ. Never mind.

I have a feeling this means I’ll see a lot less of Collin and a lot more of Corie and the kids. So after listening to Evan’s spirited, broken recount of their journey to the arena, I join Collin and Ned for target practice. Ned hasn’t shot a gun in years, but the way he picks it back up again tells you he’s a natural. Right away he picks a soda can off of a distant fence and then a baseball tossed into the air. He makes me look like a blind old porch-sitter taking potshots at squirrels. It’s hard not to be impressed, hard not to be swept up by Ned’s tornadolike vortex of affability and well,
cool
.

Sadly, I’ve barely seen Ted at all today. He’s become so busy with the nurses and patients at the med tent that I’m beginning to wonder if he’s actively avoiding me. I hope that’s not it. I miss having him around.

In happier news, Dapper is thrilled that Evan and Mikey have entered his life. The two boys are enamored of the mutt and I think it’s safe to say that the feeling is mutual. And yet with all of this, all this new stuff, I worry a little about Corie. It’s not that she’s fragile, the opposite really, but I know she’ll have a harder time fitting in. The Black Earth Wives have already begun to swarm, cunningly asking for her advice on motherly things when clearly no advice is needed. They’re trying to lure her into their twisted little Tupperware club and I’m afraid it might happen. Collin thinks they’re harmless, that it’s good they try to keep themselves busy instead of letting loss rule their lives.

Subtle, Collin. Reeeal subtle.

I’ve been thinking about the nature of potential, about how all of us maybe have the potential to be what Zack was. I know there is a kind of ugliness inside of me—a violence that I never knew existed, that I never had occasion to encourage until I focused all that ugliness on Zack. I try to push that part of me down but then I remember how often it’s saved me and saved Ted. I think that ugliness is in Ted too. He might be a disheveled, good-hearted boy scout on the outside, but inside … inside I think he might be like me. Cold. It hurts to think that I might steal and kill, or that if I’m bitten, infected, I too will become one of those horrible things. All of these potential outcomes are locked away inside of me but now, one by one, they’re beginning to emerge. I wish I had the key. I wish I knew the combination to the lock. I’d close it up forever.

Collin asks me again if I want to join him and Finn for a drink and this time I accept. I thought maybe he wouldn’t ask me again, but it cheers me up considerably to find that he hasn’t written me off completely. It’s pleasant. So pleasant, in fact, that there’s almost nothing to say about it. Finn is even more fiery and blasphemous when he’s drunk, a whirlwind of curse words and bawdy stories and ginger hair. And Collin? He seems to be one of those people that are simply immune to alcohol. He might have gotten a little rosier, but he stays, as always, a bit of a mystery—reserved and tucked away from us, hiding behind his serenely handsome face. It’s something he’s very good at, I think, presenting the illusion of openness while really concealing most of his personality. I don’t think he has anything to hide. He just prefers to sit behind a shroud of secrecy, silently and comfortably apart.