The Darkest Place: A Surviving the Dead Novel (41 page)

Thinking it over, I understood why the military did not want civilians killing walkers. If they allowed it without restriction, anyone involved in a dispute could simply shoot their antagonist in the head and claim they were infected. Not the kind of thing that contributes to a peaceful society.

Last, he explained the rules and regulations all refugees were expected to follow, which boiled down to treating each other with respect, avoiding violence, not robbing, raping, or defrauding one another, and staying the hell out of the military’s way. All things I intended to do anyway.

Finished, he bid us good luck and retreated through the same door he had entered.

“Maybe it’s not as bad as we thought,” Sophia said, the light of hope in her eyes.

“Don’t say that,” Mike intoned. “You’ll jinx us. Bad luck is the last thing we need.”

I have never been superstitious, but in light of everything that happened after, I cannot help but wonder if Mike’s fear of bad luck had been well placed.

FORTY-EIGHT

A month later, on my way home from work, I stopped at the mouth of my street and stared blankly ahead and felt a black depression sink past the weariness in my bones.

The refugee camp had been a neighborhood, once. There had been houses, and cars, and families, and people who had not known what it was like to live without electricity or running water. People who cooked indoors, and greeted each other in the morning, and held block parties, and smiled at the sounds of children laughing in the streets. People who had never had to chop wood for cooking fires, or mark the days on their calendars when the waste truck would come around to collect stinking buckets of filth, or remember that only gray water and piss went into the latrines.

They could take a bath whenever they wanted, not just wipe themselves down with a damp cloth. They did not have to stockpile clean water because the municipal supply only allowed two gallons per person, per day. They did not have to stand at the head of their streets every morning with empty jugs and wait with the other grim, silent, stinking people for the water truck to come around. They did not have to buy their food from a government commissary, or go to sleep at night to the sounds of gunfire, artillery, and moans, or live with the constant fear that the hordes sweeping down from the north would someday overwhelm the soldiers holding the line.

Life had been better then, when the houses still stood.

But the houses were gone now, burned down during the fighting, most of their former occupants dead, the remains bulldozed aside to make room for the refugee camp. Only the foundations remained, flat gray squares like tombstones marking the graves of a more hopeful time.

I did not see much hope as I stood there, gazing down the rows of multi-colored shipping containers. I saw smoke, and dirty people in ragged clothes, and children with gaunt, wary faces, and outhouses made of scavenged plywood and corrugated tin. I saw mud where there had once been green lawns, squat metal boxes where there had once been Tudors and colonials, and empty driveways that would probably never see a car again. I saw thousands of dirty footprints overlapping one another on the pavement, some from shoes, some from bare feet.

I clutched the cold handle of my empty lunchbox and thought about the bland meal of flatbread, canned vegetables, and beans that waited for me in the rectangular blue box less than a hundred yards away. My stomach wanted building materials, but I was not sure if I could work up the energy for an activity as vigorous as chewing.

I knew if I didn’t, I probably would not have the strength to get up and go to work the next day. If I did not go to work, I wouldn’t earn the little paper markers I took to the commissary once a week to purchase food. If I did not buy the food, I would not have the strength to work for another slip of paper and another trip to the commissary so I could endure another day of brutally hard work and poor rest and bad food and another slip of paper and another shopping trip and more work and more eating and more wondering what the hell it was all for. 

Sophia. Do it for Sophia.

I put one foot in front of the other and trudged ahead.

*****

Where the shipping containers came from, I had no idea.

Like most of the materials and supplies that came into town they arrived with military convoys under heavy guard, the containers full of food, medical supplies, ammunition, building materials, and myriad other things. Once unloaded, they went to the camps where teams of workers installed modifications so people could live in them.

The box I called home boasted a metal ladder welded to one side, which led to the roof and a heavy steel hatch. The hatch had a rubber seal on the bottom that overlapped the edges of the hole to prevent flooding. A sturdy steel hinge connected it to the roof, and it could be locked from either inside or outside by use of a chain and padlock.

The two doors at the front of the container had steel brackets welded to them which, when secured with a heavy iron bar, prevented entry from ground level. The bar itself was also welded to the wall by a length of chain—ostensibly to keep us from losing it—the idea being if the infected attacked the camp, we could lock the front doors and climb in through the hatch, thus preventing the undead from reaching us. At least until we ran out of water. Then we were screwed.

Inside, at the back of the container, was a metal box with a grate on the bottom that functioned as a fireplace. Metal tubing ran upward through the roof, a little cone of sheet metal on top to keep the rain out and a stretch of wire mesh around the whole works to keep birds from nesting there.

Mike had found some freestanding metal shelves in the back of an abandoned restaurant, which we put up near the fireplace. We kept our food there, as well as the precious jugs that held our most valuable possession—clean water.

Our belongings occupied wooden boxes next to a pile of firewood. We slept on bedrolls. Our cleaning supplies consisted of one broom, no dustpan. Our only furniture was the folding lawn chairs we had brought with us. Sophia rigged a clothesline for the days when it was our turn to wash our clothes at the only working laundry facility in the city.

I was seriously considering trading my Beretta for a new pair of boots.

This was my life.

I had only been living this way for a month, but it felt like an eternity. I knew I had lived better once, with a family, a home, and a future. But when I remembered those days, it was like the memories happened to someone else. Someone dead.

So I walked down the street, eyes down, sweating in the heat, ignoring the bleak people shuffling around me, and turned into the empty driveway. The container sat atop a concrete slab that used to be someone’s home. A real home, not the dingy, rusty excuse for an abode in which I now dwelled. The front doors were open, which was not unusual, but what
was
unusual was the man sitting across from Mike. He held a cup of water in his hand and squatted on a three-legged camping stool.

I stopped and stared, watching the man as he kept his voice low and punctuated his speech with open hand gestures. His hair was shaved down to a quarter-inch of stubble, as was his beard. Considering how expensive razors had become, seeing any man clean-shaven was enough to make people stare. He was dressed in work clothes that may have had color once, but sweat, dirt, and not enough cleaning had turned them dull brown. His boots were muddy, his hands were the color of pecan shells, and his face could have been carved out of wood. He noticed me standing there and turned his head. That was when I saw his eyes.

A person can do a lot to change their appearance, but the eyes always stay the same. For the first time in weeks, I smiled.

“Tyrel.”

He grinned and stood up. “It’s good to see you, kid.”

I walked past his outstretched hand and pulled him into a hug. He laughed and patted me on the back. “All right, all right, knock it off.”

I released him and slapped him on the shoulder. “Where have you been? Where’s Lola and Lance?”

His smile faded. “Why don’t you sit down, huh? We’ll talk.”

I grabbed a chair, unfolded it, and sat down. Mike poured a small amount of water into a metal cup and handed it to me. “Ty was just telling me the convoy got here four days after we left.”

“Run into any trouble on the way?” I asked.

Ty looked down and sighed, his expression troubled. After a pause, he said, “No. The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful.”

I almost said,
Well that’s good
, but then a gear turned over in my head and the thoughts of my father, Blake, and Lauren that I had kept tightly under wraps all this time finally broke free. My feet went numb. A weight pressed against my chest as if to smother me. Someone could have poured ice down my back and I would not have noticed. I placed the cup on the ground in front of me so my shaking hand would not spill the precious water.

I said, “Is that right?”

“Yeah.”

My ears rang. The same ringing I had heard when I found Lauren’s cold body. The ringing I heard after the firefight that claimed Dad and Blake. The ringing that stayed in my ears for days after Mike and Sophia pulled enough shrapnel out of me to cover a dinner plate.

“Mike, did you tell him?”

The big man nodded. “Yeah. I told him.”

The shaking spread from my hands to my arms and onward to the rest of me. I could hear each individual heartbeat, the pressure building to a crescendo behind my eyes. I felt like a ship tied loosely to a dock that finally slipped its moorings and began drifting inexorably out to sea.

I looked at Tyrel. “So if we’d just stayed with the convoy …”

He spread his hands and said nothing.

I started laughing. I don’t know why. It grew louder and louder until I fell out of my chair and lay on the ground rolling back and forth, holding my sides, tears pouring down the edges of my face. Mike stood up and closed the front doors.

Tyrel got his hands under me and tried to sit me down, but I shoved him away and walked over to a little square mirror mounted to the wall. I put my hands on either side of the glass and looked at the man staring back. He had a blond beard, hair flopping down in greasy strings over bloodshot eyes, grin like a skull, livid red scars marring the left side of his face, and I hated every inch of him.

I raised a fist and smashed the mirror once, twice, three times, and then strong hands hauled me to the ground and held me there until I screamed and thrashed myself to stillness. Someone dragged my boots off, laid me on something soft, and put a blanket over me. I stared at the roof of the container, voices speaking close to me but at a great distance, like an echo across an ocean. Some part of me told me I should respond, but I could not work up the willpower.

Later, when the darkness came, it was overwhelming, and complete, and I welcomed it and let it take me under and begged it to never let me wake up.

*****

Morning.

It was Sunday, my day off. I pushed my blankets aside, sat up, and looked around. Sophia was asleep beside me.

Mike had charged his windup survival lantern and sat in front of his pack, weapons and equipment laid out before him in neat rows, hands busy in the hazy white light. I got up, grabbed a chair, and took a seat across from him.

“Sorry about yesterday,” I said.

“How’s your hand?”

Puzzled, I looked down. There was a swath of gauze wrapped around my knuckles like a boxer’s fist wraps. I flexed my fingers a few times, wincing at the pain. “How bad is it?”

“You bruised your knuckles pretty good, and there were a few cuts. Nothing that needed stitches, though. Sophia cleaned the wounds and wrapped your hands.”

I looked at her. “I’ll have to thank her when she wakes up.”

Mike grunted. We sat in silence for a while, the big Marine packing his rucksack and me watching him, until I asked, “You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

He stopped and put his hands in his lap. “Yes.”

“Oregon?”

A nod. “I hate to leave you kids, but …”

“You need to find your wife.”

Another nod.

“It’s okay, Mike.”

He looked up at me. “Is it? I mean, after what happened yesterday … are you sure you’re gonna be all right?”

“I think it’s out of my system now. Besides, now that Tyrel knows where we live, I figure he’ll look in on us from time to time.”

He looked relieved. “I was thinking the same thing.”

“So when are you heading out?”

“There’s a caravan leaving tomorrow morning. Salvage merchants. I signed on as a guard. They’re headed north to Wyoming, then west across Idaho.”

“Isn’t that the same path as the Oregon Trail?”

“Close to it, yeah.”

I heard a rustling to my right and turned to see Sophia sitting up in her bedroll, hair tousled, face puffy with sleep. “What time is it?” she asked.

I glanced at my watch. “Just after eight.”

Her eyes scanned the two of us in the gloom, then settled on Mike’s belongings arranged on the floor. A few still seconds passed before she stood up, stepped around us, and opened the front doors. I winced at the invasion of harsh yellow light.

She said, “I’ll make breakfast.”