The Darkest Place: A Surviving the Dead Novel (51 page)

I arrived back at the cabin none too soon. Tyrel was low on food, and had been seriously considering putting a bullet in the head of Clayton Briggs—also known by his alias, Tom Dills—and leaving his body for the infected and heading back to town to look for me.

“You would have done that on foot?” I asked him.

He looked up from the outdoor fire pit where he was boiling water in a kettle and heating potatoes and canned vegetables in a skillet. The horse was picketed a few yards away, snuffling through the snow for bits of dead grass. Brilliant sunlight poured over the white mountain peaks, bathing the pines on the slopes in polished gold.

“Damn right,” Tyrel said. “I’ve hiked farther through harsher territory.”

I sat down next to him and opened a jar of instant coffee. “Well, the deeds are done.”

“You get all of them?”

“Yes.”

“Leave anything behind to tie it back to you?”

“No. I was careful. No witnesses, and the murder weapon is probably scattered all over the landfill by now.”

“What about your knife?”

“Cleaned it and soaked it in bleach. Even a forensics lab couldn’t get anything off of it.”

Tyrel nodded, satisfied. “So what do you do now?”

I thought about the interrogation of Clayton Briggs. How he had remained defiant until the second finger came off and the hot iron touched the stump. Then off came the third finger, and his resolve began to waver. When I severed his thumb, leaving only a pinky finger protruding from the blistered ruin of his right hand, he finally broke.

He told me there had been eleven of them, initially. They had all left together from the San Antonio quarantine in stolen Humvees and decided to hole up in Boise City. They knew it was abandoned, and it seemed like a good place to hide. A logical enough conclusion.

The retreat from San Antonio was so disastrous they did not think the Army would send anyone to look for them. For all the chain of command knew, they had been killed like most of the other soldiers holding the line. The horde that overran their defenses had been enormous. They figured they would not be missed in the confusion.

Things were all right the first few days, but then one of them, Sergeant Falcone, thought they should move on. Find some civilian clothes, grow their hair and beards, and head north. He had two supporters, but the rest disagreed. He said he wanted to take some supplies, weapons, and ammo, and leave the group. A lieutenant by the name of Guernsey, who had been in charge up to that point, said the men were free to leave, but they would not be taking any gear or weapons with them. Or food.

The next day, as they sat in an office building arguing over what they should do, one of them heard the unmistakable drone of Humvees approaching. All conversation stopped. They fell back on their training and took up defensive positions in separate rooms, close to the windows on the upper floors so they would have the high ground.

Then the Humvees came down the street along with a couple of civilian vehicles, all occupied by men in combat fatigues. They stopped and got out, moving like professionals, like Special Forces types. There was a girl with them, probably someone they rescued.

The lieutenant told everyone to stay low and quiet. There was a chance these people did not know about them. It could just be a coincidence. Hold your fire until I say otherwise.

Briggs did not know why the man who shot Blake, a sergeant named Prater, decided to open fire against orders. He had always been trigger happy, and sometimes had trouble keeping his cool in combat. He was his squad’s designated marksman, armed with an M-110, a high-powered semi-automatic sniper rifle.

I put myself in his place, staring through the crosshairs, heart racing, finger taking in the slack on the trigger, and then, out of nowhere,
CRACK
. A moment of shock, and then the realization that he had squeezed too hard. An accident.

But at that point, there was no turning back. The people in the streets returned fire, so the other deserters opened up on them. From then on, it was all yelling and fire and confusion and explosions. Lieutenant Guernsey had the presence of mind to send three men to take the civilian cars they had hidden in a garage nearby and cut off our escape route to the north. Those would be the cars I fired a grenade at, killing one of the soldiers.

I understood why Guernsey did it. He did not want us revealing their location to anyone if we escaped. Cold, but logical. Thankfully for us, it did not work. We got away, and they were left spitting, cursing, and trying to figure out what to do next.

In the aftermath of the fight, only eight of the original eleven deserters were left. The man who had shot Blake was one of the casualties. I took a small measure of comfort in that. The other two were the man I blasted with a grenade and Lieutenant Guernsey. The lieutenant caught a burst from our SAW that stitched him from neck to abdomen, killing him before he hit the ground. I did not know if it was me or Mike that killed him. Could have been either one of us. It did not matter. He was dead. That was the important thing.

After we escaped, the deserters knew they could not stay in Boise City. Sergeant Falcone took over and they headed north for Colorado Springs. True to his plan, they ditched their uniforms and tactical gear, searched around until they found serviceable civilian weapons, and set about the task of blending in.

“So let’s do the math here,” I said to Tyrel. “We killed three of them in Boise City, leaving eight. I killed five of them in the Springs, and there’s one more in that cabin over there who won’t live to see another day. That makes nine dead. They started out with eleven.”

Tyrel looked at me. “Two left.”

I drew my knife and walked into the cabin.

Briggs looked resigned. He knew he would not leave this room alive.

“There’s something I forgot to ask you about,” I said.

He did not look up. “What?”

“I’ve only accounted for nine of your group. Where are the other two?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know where they are, and that’s the truth. They didn’t like the Springs, didn’t want to take a civilian job, and left a couple of weeks after we got here. I haven’t heard from them since.”

“What if I don’t believe you?”

He turned his face up, eyes tired, empty, and devoid of fear. “You can torture me all you want. I can’t tell you something I don’t know.”

Sometimes, you know the truth when you hear it. I let out a sigh, shook my head, and drew my pistol.

Briggs said, “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I’m sorry about your friend, and I’m sorry about your father. It shouldn’t have happened, none of it.” He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. He swallowed once and said, “Tell me, what did your father look like?”

I described him. Briggs wiped his good hand across his face, chains rattling. I watched tears fall down his cheeks. “I think it was me. In fact I’m sure it was.”

My face went cold. “What are you saying?”

“I’m the one who shot your father. He was firing at the far end of the building after he launched that grenade that took out Prater, the sharpshooter. Your father was too far back from cover, so I got a bead on him and fired a burst. I saw him flinch, saw the pain on his face. He was a tough man, though. He kept fighting. So like I said, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

Without a word, I raised the gun and squeezed the trigger until the slide locked open on an empty chamber.

*****

As the wagon creaked down the mountain on a switchback trail, I thought about Briggs, and his lieutenant, and Prater, and all the men I had killed in my life. Not even twenty years old yet and I had already racked up a body count to make a combat infantryman blush.

I began to doubt my actions. The cold fingers of regret slipped slowly into my chest, recriminations whispering in my ear. There had not been a lot of thinking involved except for how I was going to kill them. I did not take time to question my motives or the justice of my actions. From everything I had learned by talking to Briggs, the fight that killed Blake and Dad was nothing more than a misunderstanding that got horrifically out of hand. One man made a mistake, and it sent bloody ripples flowing outward across the great ocean of time and consequence. And now, all but two of them were dead.

Only at this moment, when it was too late, did I realize that Tyrel had been right. Revenge had availed me nothing. The deaths of those men would not return my lost family to me. I felt no satisfaction, no comfort, no sense of closure. Nothing had changed except a few more people who might have gone on to do good things with their lives were gone from the world. People who, when I thought about it, might not really have deserved to die.

I thought about when I first met Ryan Martin at that shitty bar in the refugee district. How when I told him I was looking for a friend and was disappointed Martin was not him, he offered a few comforting words, a pat on the shoulder. Physical contact and a sincere offering of sympathy for a stranger. Could a man capable of basic human goodness, even such a small gesture of it, really be irredeemable? Despite what he had done, what he had been a part of, I began to think perhaps not.

I knew, then, I would not pursue the last two deserters. There was no point. The man who killed my father was dead, and so was the man who killed Blake. That was enough. I had done too much killing, and I wanted no more of it.

I had hoped that seeing this thing through would put an end to this chapter of my existence, a chapter awash with grief and loss, and let me move on. But life does not happen in chapters. It happens in long, seemingly endless verses, like an epic poem, something Homer or Dante would have written. Maybe that is why their work remains compelling so long after their deaths. It has an undefinable resonance that we all understand instinctively, if not intellectually.

The first time I took another person’s life, when those two men attacked Lauren, I felt like I had crossed a line. There were people who had never killed, and people who had, and I was now one of the latter. And there was no going back. But then time passed, and I rationalized things, and I knew there had been no choice. My mind puzzled over the permutations of alternate courses I could have taken, and I decided I had done the best I could. Any other path would have resulted in further injury or death to both myself and Lauren. I did what I had to do.

So I went back to feeling like a good person. Then came the Outbreak, and Canyon Lake, and that crazy perverted bastard who thought screwing a ghoul was a good idea, and again I chose to pull the trigger. It was easier the second time, and the third, and the fourth, and all the deaths thereafter.

That’s the thing about crossing lines. It is only hard the first time. After that, it gets easier and easier until eventually you forget there was ever a line to begin with.

At the bottom of the mountain, we unrolled Briggs from a big blue tarp and left him in the open. His body was still warm, the blood not yet coagulated. Tyrel drew his pistol and fired a single round in the air.

“Won’t be long,” he said. “We need to move.”

I heard moans and hisses cut the air less than two-hundred yards away. We got in the wagon, Tyrel snapped the reins, and we took off at a brisk trot.

The infected would make it easy for us. They would dispose of the body neatly and effectively, leaving nothing to tie us to the dead man on the road. Disposing of bodies was one of the few things the undead were useful for.

I wished then, and still do now, that the infected could eat more than just flesh. I wish they could eat our demons. If people could reach into themselves and pull out their regrets, and anger, and the suffered indignities of the past, and feed them to the undead, those of us still alive might have a higher opinion of the pathetic creatures.

And the ghouls would be very, very well fed.

There are two methods of being an effective drunkard in the new barter economy. Both depend on what commodity you are exchanging.

In my case, I had in storage a significant amount of the two principle types of trade goods: large items, and what I call divideables. The big stuff consisted of things like guns, furniture, generators, propane grills, propane tanks, mattresses, horses, cows—things that, generally speaking, cannot be easily broken down into smaller component parts. Well … except the horses and cows, of course. But hardly anyone butchers those kinds of animals unless they are desperately hungry. Draft animals are simply too useful for general consumption unless they are injured or too old to work. Then they are fair game. Especially cows.

Divideables are the opposite: cans of instant coffee, bags of sugar, boxes of ammunition, toilet paper, food, tampons, toothbrushes, etcetera. These are easy to trade, as just about anyone will accept a plastic bag filled with coffee, a few sugar packets, a handful of ammunition, or a couple of yards of toilet paper in exchange for a drink. You can even trade high-quality pre-Outbreak booze for large quantities of the poorly made, but very effective, post-Outbreak stuff. Sure, it might destroy your liver and make you go blind, but when the goal is to drink yourself to death a la Nicolas Cage in
Leaving Las Vegas
, what difference does it make?

Which brings me back to the topic at hand: the two methods of being an effective drunk.

You see, large trade items, while valuable, are generally exchanged for other large items. So to keep yourself in booze, you trade the big stuff for commodities you can divide up. Venison jerky, for example. This is the first method of practical drunkery.

The second is to find an establishment that will let you buy drinks on credit, keep an honest ledger, and accept large trade items as down payments against future alcoholism. This method may seem like a good idea in theory, but in practice, it is difficult to pull off. The problem is finding an honest businessman.

Lucky for me, I knew one. His name was William. I have no idea what his last name was, as he never gave one, and I’m fairly certain William was not his real first name. I did not care. He ran an honest business, kept his books with thorough precision, and offered fair value for trade.

And that is as much as I remember from that period of my life.

My next clear memory is of waking up in a jail cell feeling like I had just been run over by a truck made of hatred and knives. I tried to sit up on my cot, but my ribs screamed at me and demanded I lay back down. I complied.

Lying there, I decided that someone needed to come up with a stronger word for hangovers. The hangovers I woke up to, especially that morning, were much too powerful for the common definition to suffice. They should be called death-overs, or annihilation-overs, or I-just-got-eaten-and-shit-out-by-a-tyrannosaurus-overs, or something.

Turning my head, I thought something was wrong with my vision, but then I raised a hand to my face and understood the problem—one of my eyes was swollen shut. The rest of my mug was not in much better shape.

Then came the headache, the nausea, the shakes, the clenched bowels, and the
thump, thump, thump
of my pounding heart. The usual suspects.

Worse, there was always a delay after I woke up, just long enough to make me feel like I had become inured to the abuse I was heaping upon my body. But then the package would arrive and detonate on my proverbial doorstep, and I would be reduced to a moaning ball of agony. Most mornings, the best I could do was crawl to the nearest bottle and pour it down my throat and wait for the symptoms to abate. Repeat as necessary.

There were no windows in the cell, so I had no idea what time it was. I also had no idea why I was in my own cell and not in the tank with the rest of the drunks. Whatever the reason, I had a feeling I was not going to like it.

I searched my hazy memory, trying to remember what happened to me the night before, but mostly drew a blank. I remembered waking up in my own bed the previous morning—a rare occurrence in those days—having my first five or six drinks, and then stumbling down the street to The Amber House, the establishment ran by William No-Last-Name, owner and proprietor. But that was all. Meaning I had, as usual, blacked out.

Not for the first time, I wondered at the fact I was still alive.

An agonizing eternity passed, which was probably not more than an hour, and then a voice spoke to me through the bars of my cell.

“You awake in there?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” I croaked.
Christ my throat is dry.

“Then get up, Caleb.”

Jeez, I’ve been here enough times I’m on a first name basis?
I turned my head to see a uniformed sheriff’s deputy standing at the door. I did not recognize him.

“I’m not sure if I can, officer.”

A shake of the head. He looked both ways down the corridor to make sure no one was coming, then unlocked my cell and stepped inside. From his jacket pocket, he produced a small flask. “Here. This’ll help get you moving.”

“God bless you, you beautiful man.”

It was grog, but did not taste half bad. The deputy helped me sit up far enough I would not choke on it. I took two long pulls and felt the old familiar burn in my stomach, a delightful comfort only those who have endured severe alcohol addiction can fully appreciate.

“Thanks,” I said, sitting up the rest of the way. “I think I can move now.”

“Good. The judge wants to see you right away.”

I looked at the deputy, and the expression on his face was not a happy one. “Oh shit,” I said. “What did I do?”

“You don’t remember?”

I shook my aching head.

“Don’t worry. You’ll find out soon enough.”

*****

The Honorable Judge Jack MacGregor was not what I was expecting.

When you hear a name like Jack MacGregor you think of a stern old Irishman with silver hair, eyes the color of the sea, and a South Boston accent. But that was not what I saw when I stepped into the large office that served as one of the building’s courtrooms.

For starters, Jack MacGregor was neither old nor white, but a smallish black woman. I guessed Jack must have been short for Jaqueline or some other similar name. She was sitting down, not on a platform like you see in the movies, but behind an ordinary-looking desk. She was, however, wearing the black robe of her office.

I could tell she was sturdy of build, pretty in a severe sort of way, and could have been anywhere between thirty to fifty years of age. A pair of intelligent brown eyes peered out from behind wire rimmed glasses. She did not smile. The eyes appraised me coldly and thoroughly, peeling away my defenses and laying the entirety of my existence bare with one sweeping glance. My legs felt weak, but I met her gaze anyway.

Hers were the eyes of someone who had seen and heard too much, of a woman who understands the dark motivations of the human heart and can no longer be dismayed. There would be no lying to this woman, and no talking my way out of whatever trouble I was in.

In a calm, even voice dripping with authority, she said, “Sit down, Mr. Hicks.”

I complied. The deputy had put me in irons before bringing me to see the judge, making sitting uncomfortable. But I did not dare complain. Not in front of this woman. A young man who I assumed by his demeanor to be my public defender was already seated to my left. An older man with graying hair, a patrician nose, and a hard flat line of a mouth sat to my right. He did not look at me.

“Do you know why you’re here, Mr. Hicks?”

“I’m afraid not, Your Honor,” I said. “I don’t remember much from yesterday.”

The eyes flicked down to a piece of paper, and I realized she was wearing bifocals. “According to those who witnessed the incident, at approximately 10:30 pm last night, March the 24
th
, you had a verbal altercation with a man named Alex Cannon. The argument took place in a tavern registered under the name The Amber House. The argument between the two of you escalated until the owner of the establishment had his security personnel escort the both of you from the premises.” She looked up again. “Any of this ring a bell?”

I swallowed. “I’m sorry, Your Honor. I don’t remember any of that.”

“Once outside,” she continued dryly, “you and Mr. Cannon engaged in a fistfight. Several witnesses reported that despite Cannon being significantly larger than you, you managed to get the better of the altercation, although you did suffer a few minor injuries.” She flicked a hand to indicate my battered face. “Mr. Cannon’s injuries, however, were not so minor.”

My heart sank. The room was cool, but sweat broke out on my forehead anyway. I looked down and closed my one good eye. “What did I do to him, Your Honor?”

A shuffle of papers. “One crushed left orbital socket, four missing teeth, a jaw broken in two places, several fractured ribs, and a dislocated right shoulder.” She put the paper down and glared sternly. “And he will most likely lose his left eye.”

I groaned. I wanted to sink down through the floor. I wanted lightning to strike from the sky and burn me to cinders. I wanted to climb down a hole and pull it in after me. It was bad enough what I was doing to myself, but now, I had ruined someone else, maimed him for life. I thought about my first day with the militia, and the prison labor detail, and the man who fell to the ground exhausted and gasping like a fish, and I imagined his face as mine. I hung my head and said nothing.

The judge gathered the papers in front of her, tapped them on the desktop a few times to straighten them, and returned them to a manila folder. She set the folder aside. “To be honest, Mr. Hicks, Alex Cannon was no better than you. But he wasn’t any worse, either. According to your record, you’re simply a useless drunk who occasionally urinates in places where such actions are forbidden by city ordinance. A nuisance to be sure, but until now, a mostly harmless one.”

I could find no fault with her assessment, so I stayed quiet.

“Cannon, for his part, is simply a man who lost his job as an engineer for the Civilian Construction Corps and decided to drown himself in a bottle, much as you have been doing. However, despite his current low station in life, he comes from a rather prominent family within the community. His father, who is very angry over his son’s injuries, is a member of the new city council.” At this, she leaned forward and pointed at the older man seated to my right. “And a friend of District Attorney John Crouch.”

My guts turned to water as I looked to my right. The DA’s face was impassive, his eyes focused on the judge. I did not want him to look at me, so I followed his example.

“Let me make this as clear and simple as I can, Mr. Hicks,” Judge MacGregor said. “There are three ways we can handle this. Only one of them is to your benefit.” She held up a finger. “One, you plead guilty to aggravated assault and resisting arrest, face six months of hard labor, and forfeit all of your registered salvage as restitution.” She held up another finger. “Two, you plead not guilty, we go to trial, and you wind up facing a
year
of hard labor, and we seize
all
of your property.”

She paused to let the words sink in. A year of hard labor. I had once met a man who had spent only four months in one of the prison camps. He had been a broken, hollow-eyed, starved thing. A shadow of a man. I shuddered.

“Or,” she went on, putting her hand down, “you enlist in the United States Army for a period of no less than four years. If you serve out your time and receive an honorable discharge, the charges against you will be dropped. If you do not serve the full term of the enlistment and are subsequently apprehended, you will be brought back into this courtroom, and if that happens, there will be no more deals. As it is, you’re lucky our docket is overly full and the Army so desperately in need of personnel, otherwise the court would not even be offering you this opportunity.”

The judge sat back and rested her hands on the arms of her chair. “So what’s it going to be, Mr. Hicks?”

I looked over at my defender, who had not said a word. He looked back at me and shrugged. “I’ve seen what happens to guys in the prison camps,” he said. “I’d take door number three if I were you.”

I stared at the floor for a long moment. The two swigs of liquor I had drunk earlier were wearing off. My hands shook, but not from fear. I knew I would not survive a year of hard labor in a prison camp. Death no longer had the power to frighten me, but deep down in a place I had forgotten existed, I felt a spark of something. A stirring I had not felt for so long it took me a few moments to identify it.

Hope.

It’s a hell of a carrot, hope. Put it on a stick and dangle it in front of someone, even someone as low as I was, and you can walk them for miles. My dad served in the Army. So did Blake. They had never talked about it much, but how bad could it be?

I looked up and said, “Your Honor, is there a recruiter in the building?”

*****

The Army could not take me in my current condition, so the judge ordered me into a treatment program. And by treatment, I mean they locked me in a cell, fed me two Xanax a day—one in the morning and one at night—to deal with the withdrawal symptoms, and an Ambien in the evening to help me sleep. This went on for five days.