The In-Betweener (Between Life and Death) (S) (13 page)

Sam starts, gives a snarl, and then smacks himself with his bound hands again. I wait and eventually he points with his two hands toward the upper-right section of the building and says, “Da.”

Before I get Sam out of the car, I gear up. When I’m done, it looks like I’m costumed for a very bad action movie. I have a cut down neck brace around my neck, the thick foam a hopeful defense against in-betweeners and deaders alike. My jacket is stifling in the heat, its double layers reinforced with bits of plastic trimmed away from containers to deflect bites. Shin guards liberated from a police cruiser by mom—somewhere and sometime on one of her runs—are matched by a cut-down pair of the same shielding my calves.

As for weapons, well, I’ve got an unsilenced handgun at my side as a last-ditch weapon, a rifle slung across my back in a terribly awkward position, and my crossbow hanging from my shoulder in a good position for bringing it up to bear and firing. A big homemade quiver full of bolts doesn’t make the cut, which might be stupid, but I’ve got a whole slew of bolts jammed into loops I’ve sewn onto my “traveling pants,” as my mother called them. The loops make me look like I’ve got wide thighs since they line the outer parts of each pant leg, but I love these pants. Functionality completely rocks as the new fashion. To finish it off, I’ve got a sharpened folding limb saw—meant for pruning trees—sheathed at my waist, along with a small sledgehammer for crushing heads. The sledge is heavy as hell, but it’s the smallest one that’ll do the job right. It takes a few whacks, but I can do it fairly quickly and that’s the important part.

Sam watches me, managing to keep himself under control as I get ready. Nary a snarl comes from him and his jaws remain steadfastly unsnapping, but his hands twist against each other in their binding zip ties, so I know he’s agitated. I’m just not sure if it’s because he’s worried for the kids or because he wants to eat me.

We reverse the process we used to get him inside the car, with a few modifications, and he’s compliant to a fault. Once I have him at the other end of my dog-catching pole and in hand, he stumbles toward the door in rapid, unsteady steps. He’s been cooped up inside the back of this little car and it seems to take him a while to get his legs back under him comfortably.

The stench hits me like a punch to the face when I get to the building’s entrance. Sewage, rot, and old blood make a pungent scent so strong it should have a color, like in cartoons. Green and black. Sam doesn’t seem to notice it, and leads me up the stairs faster than I’m comfortable with. I do my best to clear everything to the sides and in front of me, but there’s no way to do that and still hang onto the dog-catcher.

It doesn’t seem necessary once I realize someone—probably Sam when he was still Sam—has chained every door leading off the stairwell on each floor. Bright, shiny locks stand out inside the loops of old chain. He must have been so careful for so long. It’s a lesson to me. Even someone with a PhD in Caution like me can wind up like Sam.

At the fifth floor, Sam appears to lose it a little. There’s no chain there, no lock, and the rim of the door is covered in bloody handprints and smears. This isn’t good. Sam looks at the door and keens a terrible, sad noise.

“
Shh!
” I order in a whisper and shove him forward, up the stairs.

He pushes back for the first time. He has the advantage of being two steps above me and he’s got about fifty pounds more body weight on top of that.

“Da! Da!” he urges, jabbing his purpling hands toward the door.

His zip ties are too tight and he’s going to lose the ability to use his hands if I don’t do something soon, but I’m not going to. His familiar face is my ticket inside, but I’m not at all sure what I’ll do with him after.

“I know,” I say calmly, even though I feel anything but calm. “I need both hands, so I’m going to secure you up there first. Okay?”

It takes him a second to understand me, but when he does, he rotates in his loop and eagerly takes the stairs up. He stops at the landing halfway between the floors and I push him into the corner, take the rope dangling from the handle of the dog-catcher, and tie him to the stout metal railing. He can’t get close enough to the rope to untie it—even if he were able to untie a knot with his hands like that—and he can’t get an angle sufficient to come down the stairs, but he can see the door and that should keep him quiet.

I don’t waste time, even though the blood worries me enormously. It could just be Sam’s, from when someone inside tended Sam when his “accident” occurred. Then again, it might not be.

At the door, I try to listen, but Sam’s low keening sounds echo in the stairwell. It’s disorienting, the noise seeming to come from both above and below us simultaneously. I turn to him and put my finger to my lips. He lowers the volume but he doesn’t stop. I don’t think he can.

Sighing, I can only hope I don’t get a hole in my chest for my trouble. I position myself behind the steel door and push it open slowly. I really hope that those kids have someone on watch who saw me pull up with Sam. I made sure he was plainly visible by stopping in the street for a moment. After all, the note asked me to come and get them and here I am.

“I’m here because of the note. Please don’t shoot,” I call out into the antechamber beyond.

No sounds return to me aside from a bit of echo from the stairs. I wait for a moment, then call again. And again, nothing. When I push open the door enough to slip inside, all I see is a lobby with a stained carpet, closed elevator doors, and two doors each on both the left and right. I don’t know which one is the correct one for certain, but he looked right so I’m going for one of those.

There’s blood on the handle of the closest door, just like the door to the stairwell, only there’s even more of it here.

“Shit,” I say. “Shit, shit, shit.” I’m too late, I’m guessing. It seems so unlikely given how empty this place is, but what else can it be? In the back of my mind, I’m clinging to the hope that this is left over from someone tending Sam, or else dragging him out after what happened to him.

The door is unlocked. I crack it open and nearly vomit at the smell that greets me. The stench of decay isn’t enough to describe it. It’s the stink that must have covered Europe when the plague killed whole villages and the bodies were left to rot. Only there’s no wind to carry this away. It has been trapped inside this sealed apartment for who knows how long.

I should just walk away. Leave Sam where he is and go back. I should spare myself what I’m about to see. But, I can’t for some reason. I have to know.

Inside, I see just what I expected. The place has been wrecked, turned over, destroyed. I’d be tempted to say that it looks like it was looted, but the truth is bloodier than that. Someone or something has chased living things through the place, demolished impediments standing between them and their prey, and then proceeded to tear up the living things.

The ceilings, the walls, the sparse furnishings, even the bed sheets covering the windows are splattered with blood and gore. Underneath the dining table, chairs upended around it, is a round object about the size of someone’s head. A small someone.

I know there were five kids here. As horrible as it is, I have to count heads. I have to see if there is even a slim possibility that anyone survived and is out there, waiting for rescue—or turned in-betweener.

Going through the apartment, with its high ceilings that might have once made the rooms feel decadently spacious, is an exercise in horror. Despite searching everything, I can find only three heads. Two are missing. One of the heads—this one on top of the bed like a discarded doll—is heartbreakingly small and has a single unmatted, copper-colored curl standing out from it. That almost undoes me.

I can’t see any other place to look once I’ve checked the only bedroom. While the place is big, it has few rooms, sticking to the standard loft apartment dynamic of much space in the main room and few rooms outside of that. I cover the head on the bed with a towel still hanging over the rack in the bathroom, which smells revolting since they’ve been using buckets for a toilet and who knows how often they emptied them.

My deep breath sounds loud in the room now that I can’t hear Sam and I say to the little lump on the bed, “I’m sorry I didn’t get here in time. So very sorry.”

That’s when I hear a shuffling noise behind me. I turn quickly and bring up the crossbow, a reaction now as instinctive as breathing. There’s nothing there except a wall. Then I see the big grating where the air filter in a central air system goes. My heart lifts.

“Are you there? If you are, I’m Emily. I got your note. I came for you,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm, but knowing that the noise might well be nothing more than a rat seeking a noisome meal.

Nothing comes back to me. Rat, for sure. I lower the crossbow, my heart taking a rapid trip back downward into despair.

“Are you really alive?” asks a small voice, young, female, and terribly afraid.

I smile at the grate and say, “I am! And you must be, too.”

One Year Ago - You Can’t Plan for Everything

My mom is sick, as in
really
sick. We’ve been doing well and I thought staying away from people would mean that we wouldn’t catch anything. I thought that because my mom said that was so, but now she’s the one who is sick.

“Baby girl, the water…you’ll have to boil it better, strain it first,” she says between wretches.

She’s leaking from both ends and so dehydrated she’s shriveling. I nod and toss the water I have onto the cement as I go. She needs more and if I have to do that, I’ll need to hurry. If she gets any more dehydrated I may not be able to get her back.

The barrels are full. We’ve had so much rain that it cascades from the downspouts in waterfalls and we’ve got a barrel or four under each one. Set up on pallets and concrete blocks, their heights are staggered so that I’ll get a continuous flow from one barrel to the next. I fill up a bucket and inspect it. It looks like water to me, but she’s probably right. Something bad lurks inside the innocent-looking liquid.

I don’t have sand or anything like that to strain it with, but there’s a boat-load of stuff I can rig together—fish filters, air filters, gravel from the decorative beds at the front of the complex, cotton batting—so I do, using charcoal filters for now. We haven’t been great about boiling it, mostly just doing it in batches and letting it set until we need it, but clearly we’ve got something nasty somewhere.

I’m not sick, but it’s only a matter of time if the water is the source of our problem. I boil up a smaller batch than we have been, using a smaller pot and letting it come to a full rolling boil. Five minutes of that, then I take the pot off. Rather than pour it into containers—which might have been the source of the problem for all I know—I bring the whole pot over and set it on the concrete to cool.

“I’ve got more, Mom. Just hang on,” I say, going for a soothing tone, like she used to do for me. She’s pulled into a fetal position on the concrete and jerking with spasms. She twists like she needs to rise, but her bowels let go before she can and a stinking stream of brown water comes out of her. That’s disgusting, but it’s also very bad. It’s just colored water now.

“So sorry,” she groans and then folds into herself even tighter.

I clean up the mess as best I can, tossing my gloves afterward. I’m running low on them and have no idea what I’ll do after I use the last of them. Maybe I can wash them somehow. When I lean over to wipe her sweating face, she opens her eyes and jerks backward at the sight of my bare hands.

“No, don’t touch me. Be safe,” she says weakly. I drop the cloth on the floor and she takes it to wipe her face. She’s in her respite stage. After she has a bout of puking and crapping, she feels better for a few minutes before it starts again.

“What do I do, Mom?” I ask.

“Nothing,” she answers. “No. Something.” She turns her head and points with her eyes toward the other end of the warehouse.

“No,” I say, turning the word into an absolute refusal.

“Yes,” she whispers, and closes her eyes.

I look at the dark corner and see the shadows of the chain link even from where I am. It’s one of the reasons we chose to stay here after we had to leave the lawyer’s office where we hid out for a while. Aside from the fact that there was a warehouse of food that had barely been touched—these distribution hubs aren’t usually so close to towns and this was a smaller one—it had more bonuses than I can count. There were the wide views, the flat landscape, the lack of traffic or reasons for traffic, the fence—and then that chain link-surrounded room. A sort of safe room for us if we needed it.

If the place ever
did
get overrun, we had a floor-to-ceiling box of sturdy chain link that we could lock ourselves into and still shoot out of. Once a holding section for the smaller, higher value goods like anti-aging creams and perfume, we emptied it and filled it with food and necessities for a long stay. At first, we slept in there every night, finally feeling like there was enough between us and the deaders to sleep deeply. Now, we prefer the office for its metal-meshed window just outside the door.

That room has another benefit. You can lock someone inside it. Someone sick who might die.

“Please, no,” I plead.

It’s a step too far, locking her up. It’s like an admission that I’ll be alone and she’s going to become one of them. She’s more than likely infected. She’s fought too many of them, bathed in too much of their fluids, for her not to be. If she dies…well.

“Yes,” she repeats, and tries to get to her feet.

*****

Inside the cage—behind the warehoused rows of boxed-up Asian sauces, bags of tortilla flour, and packaged Indian food—she seems to feel better. Maybe because from her point of view, she’s got one less worry if the worst happens. When I bring her another fresh pot of water, she rallies enough to talk to me.

“I think this is dysentery,” she says. “Classic, huh?” She almost laughs. Almost.