Life is a Fractured Fairytale
Winx Predatorri
Story Life is a Fractured Fairytale
- Thread starter Kathy in FL
- Start date
Life is a Fractured Fairytale
Winx Predatorri
Prologue
Hey You,
Don’t know if you’ll get this but maybe you will. Just don’t want anyone thinking … well, what they’re probably thinking already. Paula I swear I really didn’t know. I still don’t know if you believe me or not but there are enough people that don’t that I’m not going to assume that you do. It wasn’t a game. Of course I know that makes me too stupid for words but I really didn’t know. I had no idea that it was Tad on the other end of those emails.
You and Aunt Trudy told me it was ridiculous to get so hot and bothered by some guy that I’d never met face-to-face. You said he didn’t sound like he was my age from the words he used in our emails. You said if he’d really had all those experiences he was lying about his age. I didn’t want to believe you. You told me I was too young to be able to tell whether some old guy was being a pervert and trying to lure me … well you know what your mom thought the guy on the other end of the emails was. I get that now. Boy do I get that now. Wish I would have listened then.
You saw the emails. Heck, you hacked my computer to find and get them. You have to know that I didn’t know it was Tad. I know he told me afterwards it was just a joke but I would have never done that to you Paula. I know I was a pain and you thought I was just a kid but I never would have done anything like that to hurt you. I may have been a jerk but I was smart enough to know which side my bread was buttered on … even if I couldn’t remember all those times you held me while I threw a hissy about how unfair life is. Life is full of suckage but I wouldn’t make your life suck on purpose, not ever.
I’m still so freaked and ick’d out. I feel like a fool. I thought I’d found Prince Charming. Geez, what an ignoramus I was. I feel so bad. But that’s no excuse. Wish I could make up for it but I don’t think anything can fix it. But I do want to fix something that I didn’t do and should have. I want to say thanks for being family enough that when I was too much of an idiot to take your good advice that you and Aunt Trudy tried to protect me anyway.
He can claim I knew what was going on but I didn’t. I swear I didn’t. Hope I die if I’m lying I swear. He told me that it was just a joke on you to make you jealous and to show everyone what a goober I was underneath the “goth queen and crazy hair” and stuff. He wanted to show me I was nothing but a little fool. Well, he did that for sure. But he couldn’t have if I had known what he was doing to you. Maybe you caught that, I hope you did, but I guess it’s just as likely that you didn’t because of the things I heard you say to Aunt Trudy. I just hope one day you can forgive me for being such a brainless wonder.
And speaking of, I now know that running away from it all was just another dumb move in a long string of dumb moves. I don’t know if my next move is stupid or not but it’s obvious I can’t stay here. I already got blessed out by Mrs. Hotchkiss – the geranium lady from three doors down – from breaking into the house. Let me tell you, from the look of her you wouldn’t know she was that verbally creative. Relax, I didn’t break in; I used the hidden key. Aunt Trudy totally should have moved that thing by now, anyone could have found it in the flower pot. I moved it someplace safer … your old hiding spot so you should be able to find it when you come back. I came back because I found out you and Aunt Trudy had decided to evacuate to Uncle Beryl’s place. I mean that’s cool and all and I don’t blame you. Carol and Mace told me.
You might not be happy with what I did though; with why I came back after you left. I took all the frig and freezer food and a lot of the other stuff in the cabinets. I’ll save the jars for Aunt Trudy but I didn’t know what else to do. I spent all of my money renting a truck and I’ve already gotten all of my stuff out of the storage locker. I’m going to try and get out of town but since you know, they won’t like let me go where other people are I’m going to have to try and make it someplace else and it will take me some time to get set up. I don’t have any other choice. I got infected … but it turns out I’m an immune. But you know how everyone is … OMG, she got infected so now she needs to be kept away from the humanity for all time. Geez. Just to be on the safe side though I think I will stay away from the rest of humanity for a while, it seems safest of the few options I’ve got.
I don’t think I am the only one doing this. I think the reason Mrs. Hotchkiss made such a fuss is that she thought she could send her sons over and take the food out of the house for her family. While I was home a van of cops stopped at their place and said that they either left on their own or they’d be arrested and taken out. Mr. Hotchkiss was really bent; let’s just say she was showing her creative side again. The cops stopped here too but I acted all nice and stuff and said yes sir, no sir, that I was leaving sir just as soon as my daddy and big brothers got back, yes siree. They believed me and went on to the next house down the block that still had people living there. Guess they are really serious about that mandatory evacuation stuff.
What the cops don’t know is about the galvanized trash can behind the shed. And don’t you open it either. I used Liquid Nails to glue it shut and also put all that duct tape around it. Tommy Crane is in there. I guess you can tell his folks that he didn’t run off with that girl like they thought. Maybe they won’t be so mad or sad now. He was infected and was way beyond being helped by those drugs they are talking about on the radio.
Tommy was a sweet guy, maybe a goof but he was still sweet. Or at least he was until the plague got ahold of him. Good thing I’m immune I guess because he tried to attack me with a bat he picked up out of the Tindale’s backyard. I think he’d been sleeping in the big jungle gym where the Tindale kids used to play fort and he heard me or something. Anyway he bit my shoulder blade and managed to break the skin even through my t-shirt. The t-shirt was black … naturally … so the cops didn’t see the blood but it hurts like a son of a gun right now. It turned into a purple, pink, and blue rainbow mess even before I got a chance to take my shirt off and look.
I guess I’ll have to go get Carol and Mace to help me clean it; just because I’m immune from the plague doesn’t mean I can’t get some other gross junk from a human bite. But maybe Carol and Mace won’t help me. They are really still mad at me because of the whole situation. They don’t believe that I didn’t know it was Tad. I mean they don’t think Tad and I were doing the nasty thank goodness – OMG I need brain bleach stat – but they do think I was playing some kind of joke that got out of hand. They blame Tad mostly but they blame me too and not much less. Just like everyone else they said I should have known better. Maybe I should have, but I didn’t and I can’t change that.
They have taken over that bed and breakfast that Mace’s sister ran. I think with her dead Mace actually owns it so no one can throw them out. They are set up pretty good and hopefully will be able to hold out until they find some kind of cure for the plague.
I got a long way to go so I’ll stop writing here before I make things worse by putting my foot in my mouth somehow. Just felt I owed you … and Aunt Trudy … some kind of letter to let you know that I was sorry, that I don’t plan on ever being that stupid again, that I know it is way too late to change what happened but that if I could I would, and that I love you and know I never told you enough.
If you never see me or hear from me again, just let it go and figure I got what was coming to me. Stupid should hurt. Really stupid should really hurt. I’m finally beginning to realize how much of a jerk I’ve been. Maybe I would have outgrown it if there had been more time. I like to think I would have anyway. I also like to think I would have found some way to make it all up to you. But it doesn’t look like that is going to happen so this letter is going to have to be the best I can’t make it.
I learned stuff being on the street. Maybe it will be enough, maybe it won’t. But at least I’m not going to sit around having a pity party like I did after Mom and Dad and Shauna died. I’m so over living like that … I sure don’t want to die like that.
Your Cousin,
Winx
PS Tell Aunt Trudy I’m sorry. And that I appreciate all she tried to do for me. I should have been more grateful. She put up with a lot of crap from me she shouldn’t have had to. I wish I’d told her that when I should have and could have. I of all people should know that you never know what you have ‘til it’s gone.
Chapter 1
Dear Diary …
OK, completely and totally scratch that. I might be lonely and bored out of my gourd, but I am not going to write “Dear Diary” every time I start a new day in this journal. It sounds too hokey and like I’m only ten years old or something. Well, I’m not. I had my birthday in the hospital and I turned seventeen. Whoa, like I’m old. Not. LOL! I get it … I’m still a kid. But only kinda sorta. I’ve grown up a lot over the past year. At least it feels that way. Most of the time. Sort of. Anyway, I’m going to do this right which will be a nice change.
First off, introductions. My name is Azalea Predatorri. I know. I think it is ridiculous too, but Predatorri is from Dad’s side. He couldn’t help how the immigration officials at Ellis Island messed up his great something grandfather’s surname. Italian on one side and full-blood Cherokee on the other; what a combination. As for Azalea … what a load that is. Mom was set on having a bunch of kids and naming them all flowers and trees and stuff starting with the letter A. So I got stuck being Azalea. By the time Shauna came along Dad had pretty much talked Mom out of it otherwise she was going to be called Buttercup … or Borage if she had been a boy. I mean, can you imagine?! Azalea Predatorri is bad enough but Buttercup Predatorri? Now that would have been a serious nightmare leading to long-term counseling.
They’re all gone. Not their fault. And trying to find out who is at fault is mental illness inducing … trust me on that because I gave it a good try with predictable results. Mom went to the hospital to get her tubes tied when she and Dad suddenly up and decided to change their minds from “a bunch” to “two”. While she was in the hospital she caught MRSA. We didn’t know until it was too late; it got out of control before they even thought to check for it. It was a hard way to go and sent everyone into crazyland. We were leaving the hospital the last time and Dad really shouldn’t have been driving. Maybe if he had been more with it his defensive driving would have been better but I don’t blame him or anything like that. What happened was an old lady had a stroke while she was driving and her car hit another car that hit another car that hit us on the interstate. Dad and Shauna didn’t survive the night. Me … barely a scratch because I was on the other side of the car. Just one more example of the suckage of life.
So, I went to live with Aunt Trudy who is my mom’s sister. She’s actually kinda cool even though she is more of a “paleo hippy” than even my parents were. But no amount of cool is going to fix what I had wrong with me which was I am a teenager, and I was mad at the world … and depressed … and just mentally struggling to deal with everything. Aunt Trudy did all she could for me but let them stick me on antidepressants and crap like that. She said I was too young to scramble my developing brain with those kinds of drugs. She just accepted me for who I was and prayed I would grow out of it. Well, I have – or think I have – but a little late to apologize for being such a butt end all the time. More than a little late to change the strange that everything has turned me. Way on the other side of more than a little late to even think I can fix any of it.
You know this digging up the past gets old. Maybe I’ll feel like explaining more of it later but for now I want to leave the past as far in the past as I can. Gotta look forward. Gotta move forward. Learn from history, not repeat it. Or some motivational crap like that anyway.
Easier to explain why I’m sitting here where I am now. Which is bizarre considering where I’m sitting and what got me here. The Plague. I kinda got swept up into it because I wasn’t thinking. I got infected, swept into quarantine, I busted out of quarantine then thought I’d try my hand at running away again, this time from the people that were locking down the area after trying to grab enough stuff to live on. My plans were to leave the ‘burbs behind as well but I never made it out. Even if someone finds the letter I left for Paula and Aunt Trudy and it gets to them about half of what was in there will be completely useless or no longer apply even if by some miracle they are curious to find out what happened to me … they’ll be looking in the wrong direction. I gave it my best shot to try and get out, sneak out, escape … whatever you want to call what people were trying to do, but the military and National Guard had everything blocked off. I’d get in a line trying to get out, then my face, name, or prints would show up on someone’s list and they’d send me to another line where the same thing would happen. No one wants the risk of infection to escape quarantine. I don’t blame them now that I’ve had a chance to think it over but I was scared then and didn’t know what I was going to do.
Then to make it worse I got cut off trying to go back home … Aunt Trudy’s house anyway as it hadn’t been home for a long time. They were trying to enforce the mandatory quarantine and once you were out of an area they did what they had to to keep you from getting back in. They were arresting some people and I’d just escaped one type of prison and didn’t feel like exchanging it for another one.
Now here I am. Suppose it might be better than my original plan anyway. I mean what the heck do I really know about the mountains? Just because I lived in their shadows my whole life doesn’t mean I know diddly-squat about surviving in them. God, once I sat down and really thought about it I realized how lame it was. Who did I think I was? Some kind of uber goober girl scout on steroids or something? Give me a break. Sure I used to camp with the fam and grow a garden and stuff like that but what we did I wouldn’t exactly call roughing it. I had it rougher on the street but the concrete jungle is a lot different than a mountain forest. After exploring my options – not that I had any – I decided to go with what I did know. This place I definitely know.
After I ran away that first time I figured out pretty quick that I’d never make it on the city streets. It took me a while to get up the nerve to try and go home and face the music but eventually I did. I don’t know what I expected but it still hurt. Everyone was still so mad at me even after months of me being gone. I couldn’t handle it so didn’t even come out of the hedge to say hi. They say you never hear anything good about yourself when you eavesdrop. Gotta believe that for sure after what I heard. That’s when I hooked up with some kids from the neighborhood that thought I’d had the right idea. I told them how hard it was but I guess they wanted to try it for themselves … and with a group – what they call a family on the streets – things are supposed to be better. Yeah right. I mean they were better for a little bit but in other ways they only got harder.
When the kids from the neighborhood decided to follow me I at least got them talked out of hitting the streets right way. I told them they needed to get acclimated to it first so we flopped at the old Loudon House in the Old Town ‘burbs. That’s where we stayed until someone brought the infection in. Turns out a couple of my “friends” had gotten hooked on drugs while I was away and that is why they wanted to leave home … they’d gotten tired of their parental units being on their cases and interfering in their lives. Since no one was bit or got into a fight before the first infection I think it was Tommy and his girlfriend sharing needles with the wrong person. Who knows for sure? It was just really bad. I was one of the last to get sick but it didn’t kill me or make me crazy like it does to most people. Tommy, showing how mean the virus was on its way to making him, told me that it was because I was already crazy and looked half dead. I tried to laugh it off when he said it. I’m not laughing now.
Looks like I’m living here at the Loudon House again only for a better reason. Dang place is like a flaming castle; looks like one too. House is over a hundred years old and it’s all brick and stone from back when that kind of building was normal. It’s like Victorian … owned by some guy that made money through the railroad and then invested in oil and steel during the Industrial Revolution. According to the flyers and junk that were down in the caretaker’s cottage before I swiped them, Loudon was some kind of friend of the original old Rockefeller guy and that guy Carnegie too … or was bought out by them or something. I’m not absolutely sure not that it makes a difference. Some of the pages were rat eaten and not the easiest to read. But when you are bored you’ll resort to almost anything, including reading anything you can get your hands on no matter what it might be. Better than counting the mice in the walls.
The house was built when the first Mr. Loudon was flush and at the time it was a pretty nifty and important landmark and even appeared in architectural magazines and tourist maps of the area. These days most people just called it an eyesore before the historical society decided to try and save it … but they still hadn’t been able to change too many minds. The house sits in the middle of twenty acres of overgrown landscaping – biggest lot on this side of town that isn’t a park – that is surrounded by a tall brick and ironwork fence. Some of the fence is in bad shape so it was boarded up; but it is done “tastefully” so that the people that own places here in the historic district would stop flipping their switches and saying the place was bringing down property values.
Doesn’t matter these days. Everyone’s so-called property value is in the tank now and “tasteful” is pretty much gone; the best you can hope for is a good roof and solid doors and locks. The grass at the Loudon House is taller than I am in places. The windows are already boarded over thanks to the historical society and city fire codes. The historical society has also already done a lot of stuff to the old place on the inside but it still looks and feels like a haunted house, especially when it is storming like it is tonight.
It’s this storm and never-ending rain that has me bored out of my skull. After showering and washing my hair – got the free water so why not and the stripes are finally growing out - I decided to start a diary or whatever … like a journal for posterity and stuff. Anyway, this is it.
To get back on track this is what I’ve been doing since I decided this old place would work for what I needed. It took me a week and I nearly ran out of gas but by going the long way around I was able to bring in all of the stuff that I had been caching since going to Aunt Trudy’s. Then I finally got the bright idea to break into the gas tanks behind the county’s vehicle lot and I did even more salvaging, especially after I heard they had enlarged the buffer area around all of the quarantine zones.
The news people finally admitted that it would be months before anyone was going to be let back in and that they were going to have crews go in and turn off all of the electricity to “encourage” some of the people in the buffer areas to evacuate back across the river. This side of the river is “old” and the other side of the river is “new.” Old Town doesn’t necessarily mean poor though there is a lot of that too. In fact, there are some pretty rich people that have homes in the Old Town area and the news people made it seem like those people are really throwing hissy fits about their stuff and how the poor folks are going to trash their property. Got news for them, there’s rich kids that have done it too though there aren’t many of either type left around here these days. At least that is one less thing for me to worry about.
I haven’t met but a handful of uninfected people and most of them were like me – already bitten or infected in some other way so we are not allowed out of the contaminated areas on the off chance we are carriers. That’s why Mace and Carol weren’t allowed to evac with Aunt Trudy. Sounds stupid to explain it in my own diary – although since this is supposed to be for posterity I will. Carol is Aunt Trudy’s stepdaughter from one of her ex-husbands and Mace is Carol’s boyfriend. Carol is a nurse and got attacked by one of the earliest patients in the doctor’s office where she worked. She got sick but then got well, same as me. Her boyfriend Mace brought her home from the hospital and said he would quarantine with her. There was no way he could have gotten infected except by Carol. Long story short, Carol is a carrier; Mace survived his infection and is immune. Mace wouldn’t leave Carol even after that so here they are, only I don’t think they are as lovey-dovey as they were in the beginning. I tried to go by there three times and Carol was practically screaming at Mace each time. Last time she was throwing things at him. Totally weird when she used to be such a calm person.
Chapter 2
July 5th
I saw Preacher Guy again last night. He’s got a family of street people he looks after. I was still in the city the first time I ran into him. He scared me back then. He’s not harmless, that’s for sure, but I know now he isn’t so bad once you get passed the whole Freddy Kruger thing he has going on. Saw a bunch of sparklers on a roof yesterday. Didn’t get what they were doing until I finally put two and two together. Little kids, sparklers, date … he must have been trying to give them some normal good times. Good for him. I can’t imagine what it would to be a little kid and be bit and quarantined. Or maybe their parents got bit and didn’t have anyone to send them to outside of the quarantine areas. Or worst … maybe they are just forgotten by their families and Preacher Guy has been collecting them to take care of them or something. Whatever it is, that’s got to be tons of suckage.
Noticed that Preacher Guy has some man that acts like his LT now. I think he was in the military or something but he’s like young. Well sorta young, he’s 20 something I think. It’s hard to tell ‘cause he wears a patch over one eye. Today I got close enough to see that he has a scar that splits his eyebrow and disappears under the patch. He tried to use it to scare me but I just stuck my tongue out at him and kept on stuffing my cart with coffee and stuff from the office supply place he caught me salvaging in.
After a minute of not being able to put me in my place he sighed, “Geez you’re a real brat Kid. How old are you anyway? You shouldn’t be out here alone. No one should.”
“Old enough to know Preacher Guy wouldn’t put up with any pervs in his family. And smart enough to figure he probably even sent you after me to try and get me to join up with your group. He’s all save the little children and junk.”
That shut him up. Then he leaned back against the end cap and really looked at me. I could tell he was still alert for any sick people but he was determined. “His name is Dylan.”
I shrugged. He was gonna try and sell it to me since he couldn’t scare me into joining. Those people that ran the run-away shelters were the same way. Only then he surprised me by being different after all.
“You must have a good place if …”
He’d already aggravated me, his digging for information just aggravated me more. I told him, “Stop treating me like I’m stupid or something. Preacher Guy – or maybe you – already tracked me at least once. I can tell the diff between a well person and someone infected you know. The infected sound clumsy or run into things like they have a stigmatism.”
Trying to bluff and ignore that I’d caught him out he said, “Not all of them.”
“Yeah. All of them. Except for the Inbetweeners and there aren’t too many of those because usually when people get infected they go over real hard and fast, like in a couple of hours, max.”
He surprised me again by really listening to me instead of blowing me off. He asked, “How do you know this?”
Shrugging I explained, “The group I used to hang with got infected. I saw it all. Including an Inbetweener. His name was Tommy but even he eventually went all the way over to the dark side.”
Cautiously he asked, “You immune or a carrier?”
“Immune as far as I know. You’re the first person I’ve talked to since Tommy and by then he wasn’t really talking. I thought … anyway … I lied when I left a message for … just … just go away already. Tell Preacher Guy … Dylan or whatever he wants to be called … thanks for the invite but I don’t play well with others. Not to mention trouble follows me around whether I want it to or not.” It had been so long since I talked to someone that was halfway making sense that it took a while to stop the words from falling out of my mouth.
Finally, after he realized I was wound down he asked, “That why people call you Jinks?”
Rolling my eyes I told him, “Not Jinks … Winx … W – I – N – X. I’m not explaining it except to say my family started it because I was crazy about this cartoon about fairies when I was a little kid. Now leave me alone already. I’ve got work to do.”
He sighed. “Trust me, I would if I could … er … Winx. But Dylan …” He shook his head like he was as irritated as I was at the situation. “Why did he pick me to be your babysitter?!” He stopped, muttered something else I couldn’t hear and then said, “Look, you were spotted taking freezer food. Dylan doesn’t want you to get sick.”
“Oh geez,” I griped. “I’m not going to get sick.”
“Are you stupid? Because they’re going to turn the power off any day now. All of the meat is going to rot.”
I couldn’t decide whether he was yanking my chain or not. When he got a case of stuff off of a top shelf and started splitting it with me rather than just taking it like he could have I decided maybe it was no skin off my nose so I spilled the beans. “My mom and her sister grew up on their grandparents’ farm. They taught … look, you know what canning is?”
It was his turn to be surprised and I laughed when he accidentally pulled a case of candy over and he wound up wearing Swedish Fish. He looked disgusted for a second before shrugging and popping one into his mouth. “Yeah, I know what canning is. You know how to do that?”
“Yeah. Besides you know there’s no electric where I am.”
“There’s no …” He gave me a suspicious look. “You aren’t living at that bed and breakfast?”
Now I was confused. “Are you being silly to try and get information out of me?”
His face kind of closed off. “So you aren’t living there. Do you know who does live there?”
“Why?”
“Because they claim you are living there that’s why.”
“Well I know them but I don’t live with them. Why would they say I do … unless they were trying to protect me.” With that I pivoted and ran. I might have made it too if a stray infected hadn’t picked that moment to stumble through the automatic doors.
I pulled out my bang stick from animal control but it saw me and charged. He had me by the throat before I could get set. I didn’t even have time to be scared before Mr. Eye Patch pulled the guy off of me and scrambled the Infected’s brains with a letter opener through the base of the skull.
I was getting up and backing away but he said, “Help me disable the blasted doors. There’s more coming down the street.”
Sometimes you have to pick the lesser potential enemy. I asked, “How many?”
“Dozen at a quick count but there could be stragglers.”
“Well isn’t that just hunky dorey,” I said as I helped him use some broom sticks as braces to keep the doors from sliding open.
We moved deeper into the store because if they saw you a glass door wouldn’t stop them. He was quietly speaking on some walkie talkie thing while I pushed the nearly full cart to another section of the store.
Eye Patch hissed, “What are you doing?!”
“Trying not to waste time,” I told him calmly. “I’m not going to get as much done as I had wanted to obviously so I might as well get done what I can.”
“Get back here before they see you!”
“They can’t see me.”
“You can’t know that. That’s not one-way glass.”
Giving him the look I thought the comment deserved I told him, “Sure I can. I told you when people get sick … You know you act like you don’t know anything about Infecteds. How long have you been on the street? I mean you act like I’m the know nothing but you don’t exactly seem …”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
I gave him a thorough look over like I should have before. “Vet?”
He nodded.
“You were in a rehab center.”
Cautiously he nodded.
“For your eye?”
He was irritated at my questioning but nodded once again.
“So you probably weren’t in-patient. Didn’t have any place to go so wound up at one of the temporary Vet shelters. Where you met Prea … uh Dylan.”
He nodded even more cautiously.
“So you really were homeless, just not on the street.” It took a moment but he nodded one final time.
I shrugged and decided he might be OK after all. “That’s cool. At least you have a good reason. I did the stupid and ran away. Aunt Trudy was nice and everything but some crap happened and I was an idiot. Tried to go home once but couldn’t handle it. But it was too late by then anyway, one of the other kids from the pack I hung with had gotten the plague. I think he was sharing needles. It grew like Topsy from there.”
“It did what?”
“Grew like Topsy. My dad used to say that. It means it went fast and kinda crazy. At least I think that’s what it means. That’s what I mean anyway.”
He eyebrows lowered and he his lip before saying, “You don’t sound like a street kid.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, I got that a lot. Probably because I wasn’t one. I just thought I could be one and got smart before I got into drugs or turned into a hooker. But I’d burnt all the bridges I had and was stuck.”
He nodded. “That’s what Dylan thought. But back to your living arrangements.”
I huffed an irritated, “Not that again.”
“Yeah. ‘Fraid so. But knowing about the Infecteds I suppose takes precedent.”
Anything to keep him out of my business I thought. “You know that the virus or plague or whatever they’re calling it now affects the emotion part of the brain and makes someone crazy like they are manic depressive on steroids until everything burns out but anger?” He nodded. “Well to keep up with that amount of emotion without stroking out – though some of them do that too – Infecteds get hyper-focused … literally. It’s like they develop tunnel vision. That’s why they are clumsy; they are so wound up over what is right in front of them that they literally can’t see anything else. The docs where I was at said that it might be that the plague swells things up around the optic nerves too making figurative tunnel vision into literal tunnel vision. I didn’t hang around long enough to hear whether they proved that or not. I ran off when they started quarantining the immunes … by force if they had to.”
He thought about it then shrugged. “As good a theory as any I’ve heard.”
We both jumped when there was a howl and scream from outside. I knew what that meant and from the look on his face so did the guy in front of me. I rolled my eyes and went back to cherry picking supplies from around the store. Mr. Eye Patch sighed and spoke into his walkie talkie thingie again. “Forget coming to pick me up. We’ve got a couple of brawlers and they’ll draw stragglers from all over the area.”
A woman answered him and said, “I was just about to call you. We spotted three other groups between us and you.”
The guy got real quiet and then nodded to himself before replying, “Three?”
“Roger that.”
“Confirm. Three.”
I looked over and told him, “Ask her what direction they are coming from.”
After giving me a Spock eyebrow he spoke into his mic. “Got a direction coming or going?”
“Roger that. All moving towards the ‘burbs.”
At my less than patient eye roll he asked for clarification, “North, South, East, or West?”
I pulled a city map out of the pocket of the safari pants I was wearing and while listening to the woman’s irritated reply I held up the map with my squiggly drawings. He made a face and then told the radio, “Have D plot known points on the map.”
“What for?”
The guy sighed and replied, “Just have him do it. He’ll get the picture.”
He signed off while the Infecteds outside continued to brawl and draw in other Infecteds. I kept grabbing stuff off of the shelves and thought about how the Infecteds were gathering in larger and larger groups and how they were starting to explore outside of the areas they first showed up in.
Looking over at my temporary cell mate I asked him, “What’s your name? Since you saved my life it seems kinda snarky to keep thinking of you as Mr. Eye Patch.”
The guy snorted, shrugged and then chuffed a laugh. “You have a couple of screws loose.”
Shrugging I told him, “Maybe.”
He shook his head then sighed. “Westin.”
“First or last?”
“Mack Westin.”
“Lucky you. That’s a pretty decent name. Sure beats Mr. Eye Patch.”
He squinted his remaining eye at me in irritation but then said, “Fairs fair. You got my name, now I want yours. And don’t tell me it’s Winx … you already admitted that’s just a nickname.”
I shrugged. “Predatorri. My first name I’ve done my best to wipe from the annals of history so I ain’t telling you what it is. Call me Winx or Predatorri, preferably Winx”
“That bad?” he asked trying not to grin.
“You have no idea.”
I ignored his curious stare until he asked, “Is that your truck out back?”
“Yep. You looking for a ride home?” I shrugged when he got suspicious. “Relax. I saw the kids playing on the roof with sparklers the other night. It’s not like you guys have exactly been trying to hide where you are holed up.”
Thoughtfully he said, “So you can’t live too far away from the hotel.”
“Far enough. I thought a building had caught fire so I used binoculars.”
He looked at me like he was trying to envision something then he smiled. “You’re living some place in the historic district and there are only a couple that have a clear line of sight … can’t be the B-n-B ‘cause you said you weren’t living there and for some reason I believe you. The Loudon Place?”
I shrugged.
“Are you crazy? That place is a fire hazard and all boarded up. No telling …” He slowly realized that his first impression was likely the wrong one. He snorted and shook his head. “And it’s all professionally and securely boarded up and the exterior is built like a tank.” Thinking mostly to himself he added, “And was a flophouse until the historical society bought the building and cleaned it up.”
I shrugged again. “They ran the crack heads off but didn’t mess with the rest of us too much so long as we didn’t trash the place. It’s still Spartan but not too bad.”
“Spartan?!” he laughed, nearly choking on the bottle of water he’d just put to his lips.
“Yeah, Spartan. If you’re gonna start making fun of me you can walk home.”
I started pushing the cart to the loading area but he grabbed it. I was prepared to walk away empty handed – you learn to do that on the streets – but he said, “Don’t get your feelings hurt.”
“They’re not.”
“Then why the snit?”
“Because I don’t need whatever you’re selling. I just thought we could be civilized about it. But if you …”
Laughing again he asked, “What do you do all day? Sit around reading old romance novels?”
Well even if I do I’m sure not going to admit it to him. I started walking away again.
“Ok, Alright. Fine. Let’s start over. I’m Mack Westin. You’re Winx Predatorri. How do you do? Fine thank you. My boss has this thing about making sure kids get taken care of. Oh, you’re not a kid? I’ll let him know. And you are doing fine? Good, good. He’ll be happy to hear that. Would I like a ride home? Well, now that you mention it, assuming you’re serious, I’d appreciate it. I’ll even help load.”
He was such a ham I realized that the eye patch, scar, and uber scruffy look was probably the only thing that kept him from looking like a baby faced goofball. Sort of like Tommy used to look before he got hooked on the needles and then hooked by the plague.
I sighed theatrically and said, “I guess I did make the offer.”
We didn’t exactly sign a peace treaty but we did declare a temporary cease fire. He even helped me load a bunch of stuff into the truck. Things were tense and quiet as we locked up and left the store.
“What are you doing?!” he yelped as I aimed at and then jumped a curb behind the strip center with the 4x4.
“Sorry,” I muttered absentmindedly as I wrestled with the steering wheel. “Just didn’t want to go around front and face that bunch. It’s not quite a mob but there are more of them in one place than I’ve seen since I ran from the hospital.”
Thoughtfully he nodded. “Agreed. Little warning though next time you plan on going off road.”
“Back seat driver.”
He turned to say something snappy then saw I was grinning. He dropped the grump and merely warned, “Don’t poke the bear.”
I kept grinning and replied, “Don’t be the bear.”
We had to go the long … really long … way around because of the other groups of infecteds but I finally got him to the hotel and dropped him off.
It was weird. Mack Westin isn’t what I thought he was going to be. If he was playing me he did a bang up job of it. Whatever. He was nicer than I thought he was going to be and I’ll just let that opinion stand until I have reason not to. Not that I figure I’ll be seeing much of him if any at all. He doesn’t seem any more sociable than I am.
I got home – ha, might as well call it what it is after all – and by the time I finished unloading everything it was dark and I was starving. I opened a package of peanut butter crackers and a bag of granola that I’d picked up at the office supply place. Not the greatest but it beat eating burgers out of a dumpster. I’ve done that too and don’t want to do it no more. Although if I don’t start finding a decent amount of food to hold me over about the middle of winter those dumpster dives I used to take are going to be the stuff of my dreams.
I’m not the stupid kid I was. I know what really being hungry and cold means now. I hated going to the soup kitchens. I hated going to the safe houses. I mean they did their job and the people meant well but it didn’t make it any better that I was standing around waiting for a hand out. Some of those people took what little bit of dignity we had left, whether they meant to or not. But there aren’t any of those places left. I gotta make a plan and gotta do it fast. But I gotta watch out for the Infecteds and now apparently all the Do-Gooders Without Boundaries too. What a pain. Although the Infecteds are still worse.
As soon as the sun goes down and there isn’t any light the Infecteds pretty much flop wherever they are which reinforces the idea that they have bad eyesight; the dark makes it even harder for them to see. The night time would be better for scavenging but no way am I going to trip over an infected to see if that sets them off. I’ve heard they are pretty cranky if you mess with their nap time. So that means all the stuff I didn’t get today I need to do tomorrow. So I’m off to snooze. After I clean up my food mess. I so do not want to wake up to another meece brigade investigating my hair.
Chapter 3
I cannot believe Carol shot me!!!! It’s horrible!!!! Sorry for the excessive use of exclamation points but it really does suck so totally much I’m not sure how to write it all out.
Being shot was bad enough but the horrible part is why she shot me. All I was doing was leaving them a couple of boxes of food and a cooler of meat because I had a really, really good day. I found one of those warehouses in the commercial park that was some kind of fancy international food distributor.
Their walk-in coolers were still on, but the radio had said – not the radio but you know what I mean, one of the news programs on the radio – that they were starting to turn off parts of the area’s electricity so I decided to salvage while I could what was left in those coolers. Most of the fresh produce like greens were already on their last leg if not already completely gone over, but most of the fruits and meats were still ok. There were also vegetables like some fresh squash and junk like though it was approaching maximum storage life and I had to take care of it asap. Aunt Trudy used to call it that – maximum storage life – so did Mom. They were super into the idea of maximizing nutritional value and crud like that. I miss them but can’t think about that right no matter how much everything hurts or it will only make it harder. I got what I got and I can’t throw a fit about it since most of it is my own fault.
Anyway, back on track. There was a lot of junky-crappy type stuff in there too but some real treasure. Like these wheels of cheese; some were so big and heavy they were hard to move. The biggest were the hard kinds that keep even without refrigeration so long as you can keep them cool enough. The House gets really hot during the day still. I think it needs ventilation but I ain’t taking the boards off the windows that’s for dingety-dang sure. Crap on crackers. No way Jose’. So I got the idea to store the stuff I brought back down in the basement where it stays close to the same temperature year round and that temperature can be pretty dang cold.
That was fun … totally, totally not. First off it is freaking scary down there. Some of the more stupid guys used to bet each other how long they could stay down there alone. No one made it long because even if they were inclined there are things down there that aren’t scared of humans. Speaking of the devil meece, they pretty much ran the house until I put out like a gazillion snap traps and sticky boards. Which, by the way, have been totally disgusting to get rid of or clean out depending on what type they were. Rats and mice … oh my gosh. I think when there were other people here we used to make enough noise that the rodents stayed hidden but now, not so much. Hope they learn otherwise and go terrorize someone or someplace else. Or maybe not. I need to kill every one of the disgusting demons from Beelzebub’s lice-filled arm pits. None must live to reproduce. I mean … totally gross to think of devil meece and rats doing the nasty and making babies in the walls. The smell ain’t all that great either.
On the plus side there’s all sorts of cabinets and shelving down there. The floor plans show that one of the rooms was a wine cellar and a liquor kinda lock up thing. I guess even way back when this place was built you had to be careful to keep people out of your stash. The door into that room is like something out of bank or maybe a submarine. It’s metal and thick and instead of a doorknob it has one of those spinning handles. It also has one of those things that you put a hasp lock on. Between that room and my other idea, I think I have a decent solution to my problem.
On one of my early salvage expeditions I found a whole bunch of these expensive metal igloo coolers. I don’t want to meet the mouse or rat that could chew through one of those things. So that’s what I’m storing the perishables and soft sided containers in. I lined them up so I could start off organized and put labels on them so I would know what was in them without having to constantly open up each one until I find what I’m looking for. Pretty easy too. I just stuck a small, magnetized write on/wipe off board on each one. Found these coolio ones that were magnetized at some dollar store and gotta be one of the easiest hacks I’ve ever designed.
I also store all of the canned and hard-sided packaged stuff down in the basement … or maybe it is more proper to call it a cellar or whatever. Just like Mom and Aunt Trudy pounded into my head, I use a permanent marker and write what is on the can on the lid and what the expiration date is. It has been a lot of work but it will be worth it in the long run. I already have had some can labels fall off and one got eaten off before I could get everything stored. I’m not doing all of this work to give the rodents and creepy crawlies a place to buffet at but it isn’t easy keeping them out of stuff.
OK, this is a lot harder to write down than I thought it would be. I sound like I’ve got ADD like that dog in that Disney movie that would be talking and suddenly something would catch its attention and it would say, “Squirrel!” I used to love that movie just to watch that dog get its stupid on. That is how I feel too in a way. I keep trying to go forward, pick a direction, and suddenly … Squirrel!
That day I filled all the coolers I had brought with me and grabbed all the other kinds of food that would fit in two loads. It was back breaking work; harder than the few times, when I was first on the street, I could find a little back alley work so that I could eat something fresh instead of dumpster diving for dinner. I was ready to pack it in and come back the next day but there was still light left and despite being tired and sore I was feeling so good that I just thought I wanted to share it … and maybe that it would be my lucky day and Carol and Mace would be in the mood to forgive me. Of course bearing gifts might give me an edge too so I took the 4x4 – sans trailer – refilled it with some stuff, and then drove to the B-n-B.
I had two boxes of food and a cooler of meat on the big porch and was about to knock when Mace came around the house.
“Winx?!”
“Uh … hi Mace. I was just in the neighborhood and …”
Urgently he said, “You need to leave …”
“But …”
This time he snapped, “Now. Go.”
OK, I admit my feelings were hurt. I mean I knew I had really screwed up and everything but I didn’t think they’d just totally blow me off without letting me apologize.
“Mace, I just wanted to …”
“Are you deaf?! Get outta here. Right now!” He wasn’t yelling exactly but he was getting his point across.
Then I heard Carol scream. I tried to turn hero. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I yelled, “Mace … something has Carol! We have to …”
That’s when things entered the Twilight Zone. Mace shouted, “Run Winx! Go!”
A window that faced the porch exploded and so did the hanging basket that I had been standing next to. I think I screamed, I can’t remember for sure. I do remember Mace shouting at me to run but then I felt like someone slugged me so hard that I spun around so hard that I rolled down and off the porch steps. Then my left arm started to feel like it was on fire.
Mace ran passed me and into the house shouting, “Carol! Baby! You don’t want to do this!! No one is going to hurt you! I won’t let them!”
KABLAM!!
Carol screamed again and then after a brief, shock-filled silence started crying, “No. No, no, no.” Then she snarled and shouted, “I’m going to kill you for this!”
She ran out onto the porch and she was going to shoot me again. I accepted it and just lay there even though I couldn’t really figure out what was going on. But then a little red hole appeared in Carol’s chest above the edge of the tank top she had been wearing. She crumpled bonelessly.
How’s that for an adverb? Bonelessly. I’ve seen it in several of those Victorian novels that I’ve been reading. As in “she crumpled bonelessly into the arms of the ruthless rake.” I always imagined it was some beautiful and graceful faint. Wrong. It isn’t graceful. It isn’t beautiful. It looks like an old puppet that just had its strings cut.
One second Carol was standing there. Alive. The next second she dropped like a rock all in an ugly heap.
Forget it. I’m done in. I thought writing would help get my mind off of the pain but it isn’t. It’s only making everything hurt worse. I guess I’ll take one of those pills I snagged and just sleep.
Chapter 4
(About a week has gone by I think. I may have lost a day here or there. I don’t really bother keeping track anymore.)
Mace will make it if no infection sets in. The bullet cracked one of his ribs but the rib deflected the bullet so that it didn’t scramble his insides.
Dylan’s group has an EMT, a nurse, and even a Vet … animal doc not the vet that is a soldier. Gotta be careful because Dylan’s group has some of those too. Lucky for them all their regular medical people are immunes and not carriers. They have a guy that is a retired doctor but he is a carrier and he’s self-medicating with things like Klonopin, Rivotril, Valium, Clonazepam, Serax, Xanax, Zoloft, and Paxil. The kind of stuff that would have brought better-than-good money on the street not too long ago. Pretty much whatever he has been able to scrounge up. But that’s another story which means that it is a good thing Dylan’s group also has two pharmacists. As a matter of fact, they’ve got a lot of smart people that survived the initial outbreak but for whatever reason didn’t escape getting quarantined.
I guess if I’m going to use this notebook as a therapist I need to go back and explain things a little better.
First off, the person that shot Carol was a cop – or used to be a cop, or maybe still is just one that is quarantined with the rest of us. He heads up the security for Dylan’s group, not Mack like I thought. Though I wasn’t completely wrong; Mack used to be Dylan’s lieutenant but as the group has grown and started including regular people and not just street people the group’s hierarchy has changed.
Hierarchy. Another ten-dollar word. That’s what Mack called it when he explained the situation. The goober. I don’t need protecting. I sure don’t want someone to boss me around. But he would have stayed outside in the rain if I hadn’t shown him how to climb up and in. Goober. Who does he think he is? I’m not a kid. God he is such a goober. More on why he is a total goober when I get the other stuff explained.
I am coming to terms with Carol’s death. I hate that phrase. I hate having to “come to terms” with all the crap around me. But I guess you gotta just embrace the suck to make it out alive. I may have come to terms for whatever that is worth, but it doesn’t make me happy or relieved or anything like that. I don’t see it the way Dylan sees it; that she’s been released from her misery. I don’t see it the way Detective Rodney does either … Rodney Cash the cop. He says that Carol was a danger to herself and others and her actions left him no choice. He doesn’t think that she was a rabid animal or anything like that, just that she was such a danger that she wasn’t going to stop killing on her own, that she had to be stopped. I’d say he regretted shooting her except I’m not really sure that is true. But he isn’t bragging about it either which I suppose is something.
I don’t think like Mace does either. He thinks if he had just tried to hook up with Dylan’s group instead of running them off when they started to scare Carol that she could have been helped. He tried to live with and ignore her increasing anxiety and paranoia instead of addressing it and dealing with it. He also kinda blames me for setting Carol off that day. Actually there’s no “kinda” about it … he does blame me, absolutely and totally blames me. He got his dig in for sure when he spread my story to all of Dylan’s group. It was like I was suddenly this dirty thing that no one wanted to be near and they were all giving me the eye like I was contagious.
I was standing right there when Mace did it. He wanted to make good and sure that I knew he had done it. The look on his face was too satisfied for me not to get why. As a form of revenge it hurt worse than Carol shooting me had. I was ready to run all over again only a surprising thing happened. Mack and Chief Rodney all of a sudden started asking questions about Tad and it came out that he was almost forty years old … he’s thirteen years older than Paula.
Det. Rodney asks, “What the hell is a forty-year-old man doing fooling around with a teenager, even if it was supposed to be a joke?”
Well then most of the guys – especially the ones with daughters – changed their tune. Some of the women too; but enough were on the fence that I doubled down on my refusal to stay with Dylan’s group. I don’t need or want that kind of grief. I’ve accepted the consequences of what a fool I was and am learning to live with it. I don’t need or want the kinda grief I would get by trying to prove myself over and over and over every day just so a few people can feel righteous. When the hullabaloo settled down and everyone went off to their “apartments” – what they’ve turned the hotel rooms into – I snuck away from their “clinic” and came home after snagging a couple of Percocet for my arm.
I would have had to walk back to the 4x4 but Mack drove me back after he caught me a block from the hotel. He says that the group is so big now that it gives him heartburn and that he’s glad Det. Rodney took over security. That being responsible for that many people wasn’t what he had signed up for.
With a regretful kind of tone Mack explained, “Dylan tried to make me into something I’m not. It was driving me crazy. I’m tired of being told I’m not living up to my full potential.” But I didn’t’ find that part out until later. At first he just asked a bunch of questions about being alone and on the street.
It took me almost four days to deal with the meat and stuff from that haul and some of the meat nearly spoiled – should have done it first but I was trying to make soups and stews and a mix of things all together. I had to start by cleaning the ancient kitchen so I could set up the propane cooker in there. God, the stove looks like it belonged to the witch out of that Hansel and Gretel story. If I hadn’t packed all the food in those funky Styrofoam containers with the dry ice in them that had been in the walk in freezer where I found the meat half the stuff would have gone over and I would have wasted all that effort. Had to use the regular coolers for the non-meat stuff or it would have wound up useless too. I used the dry ice to try and save the bananas I found and they wound up such a mushy mess when they thawed that I was lucky to make banana preserves with them and a couple of banana fruit cakes that I put in cookie tins wrapped in booze soaked cheese cloth.
Yeah, I took the fancy booze that I found there too; and, regular booze that I’ve found other places. Maybe I shouldn’t but on the other hand I figure it might come in handy for something. It is hidden though, big time because I don’t want to make myself a target for anyone else that might try and flop here. I’ve been lucky so far but better safe than sorry.
But all the moving the canners and coolers around … geez. When the Percocet ran out I lived on Tylenol and Advil and Rolaids to deal with the acid upset and then as soon as the last canner was done I pretty much slept the clock around once and a piece. I woke up and had to run to the port-o-potty ‘cause the inside bathrooms don’t work. After some much needed relief I stepped out and nearly passed out when I opened the door and there stood Mack with an extremely annoyed look on his face. He had to stop in mid-lecture while I puked from hunger and then insisted that either I came with him to have my arm looked at or he’d knock me out and take me there anyway.
“Willing or unwilling. Don’t matter to me,” Mr. Crankypants snarled.
Geez. I was too weak to fight but was feeling just ornery enough that I gave it some thought before giving in. I let him drive me to the hotel after I decided I wasn’t averse to knowing whether my arm was going to fall off and take the rest of me with it.
Doctor Shepherd – the doc that is a carrier – was the guy on duty when I showed up and he told me, “You don’t deserve to be as healthy as you are.” Translation: I was ok and too lucky to be polite to. Fine. Whatever. Found something else out though and it explained the way Carol was acting a little bit.
I grumped to Mack, “I could have stayed home for what he dished out. What’s his damage? It’s not like I was asking for him to kiss it and make it all better.”
“Doc needs to adjust his meds again. Rodney is going to have to set someone to watch him I guess.”
“What? He’s got mental issues or something? PTSD?”
He was briefly surprised and said, “Well it seems I know something about the plague you don’t.”
Still smarting from the doc’s exam and words I snapped, “Well don’t just stand there looking all superior and junk. Fill me in already.”
Mack snorted then leaned against the wall of their clinic’s waiting room. “Carriers … they aren’t like immunes.”
“No kidding.”
“I’m not talking about them being able to infect other people although there is that. But as I understand it part of the reason why they can do that is because … carriers … they don’t really get well exactly. If they are medicated they can keep the symptoms to a minimum but every time the … the psych drugs stop working or they can’t take them on schedule … they deteriorate a little more … sometimes a lot more. The Doc … he self-medicates and is able to keep it mostly under control. And he’s sworn all the staff to keep an eye on him to make sure he takes his meds on time. But … he also made Rodney swear that if he gets to a certain point that he won’t stand in the way when or if the Doc wants to end it. And he’s made Rodney and a couple of other people promise that if he gets to be a danger to others and doesn’t end it himself that they’ll do it for him.”
Carefully I said, “I heard stuff at the hospital. People were … were signing orders to … to euthanize family members. Some of the staff offed themselves when they found out they were sick. It’s one of the reasons I was able to get away. Some orderly slit his own throat and the staff … Geez. That’s … that’s too bad about the carriers. I … I guess that’s what happened to Carol isn’t it.”
“Probably.” He hesitated before saying, “You couldn’t have helped Winx. She was getting too far gone. She could have been drugged to oblivion … I’ve seen it done but … I don’t know …”
“Mace wouldn’t have done that.”
“He’ll come around.”
I shook my head. I knew Carol and Mace. I was just fooling myself that they would have ever just up and let bygones be bygones. I wasted my time going over there with that food and got Carol killed in the process. I knew it. Mace knew it. Time to face the facts. “No, Mace will never come around or forgive me even. Carol was his life and while he might get over it enough to not need to blame me out loud, there’s going to be a part of him that will on the inside … a part of him that always will.”
Mack said, “Getting a little deep in here. Gonna need waders pretty soon. You’re obviously feeling sorry for yourself.”
I shook it off and said, “I don’t. I just have to be realistic. It is the only way to live without making a fool of yourself.”
I was about to tell him I wanted to leave when Det. Rodney found us and “asked” me to come with him. Det. Rodney is like all the cops I’ve met; they may “ask” but the truth is they are telling you what you will do. It turns out that he and several other people from Dylan’s group wanted to pick my brain about where I had been finding all the food, the canning equipment, and stuff like that.
Trying to stay out of trouble I told Det. Rodney that, “I’ve only taken stuff that would have spoiled or will spoil before people come back.”
Det. Rodney sneered and said, “Well we haven’t so stop acting holier than thou. This is a refugee situation and since we’ve been abandoned to our own resources but have a duty to protect and provide for the weaker among us. People can just lump it if they don’t like it. We take what we need.”
Wow. Interesting viewpoint for an authority figure. After I finally trusted that he wasn’t trying to entrap me or something like that I told them, “Houses give me the heebies. There are still enough people that I’m afraid I’m gonna get shot or something.” Someone snorted and said something rude about me having already been shot but I ignored it. “Grocery stores have pretty much been gutted. If they weren’t before the mandatory evacuation they sure as heck are now. Same for the big box stores although some of them have things like salt, seasonings, and cooking oil left. I’ve got all that stuff that I need so y’all can have at it.”
Det. Rodney sighed and said, “Stop and focus kid. You don’t need to justify it or explain how. What we want to know is where did you get the produce and meats in that truck you were driving?”
I shrugged trying to not irritate him any more than it looked like I was already doing. “Warehouses down in the commercial district. Some of it came from down at the docks. I figured stores and restaurants have to get their stuff from some place and it wasn’t going to be the grocery store like the rest of us.” I didn’t tell him that I’d already heard stuff through the homeless grapevine when I’d been on the street. When there are only so many dumpsters to dive through and you are trying to feed a bunch of friends you use all the creativity you can get ahold of. “I started hitting restaurants early on trying to figure it out, though most of those places have already been cleaned out of the obvious stuff. Then I saw this bulletin board over the desk of some mom and pop kinda place and there was a sales flyer for something called a restaurant and supply depot. I went to that address, hit pay dirt, and have been hunting and pecking ever since. Sometimes I get lucky, twice as often I don’t. It’s, you know, like whatever it takes.”
The lone woman in the group said, “What about what Mack said … you put stuff in jars.”
I gave Mack a dirty look and then stuck my tongue out at him just because I wanted to. Det. Rodney cleared his throat like I was getting on his last couple of nerves so I turned and told him, “My family kept a storage unit. They kept all their jars and stuff in there. Well, I took my mom’s share of it. My mom and Aunt Trudy were raised old-fashioned and when they grew up lived all-natural and organic and stuff. I wasn’t given a choice except to learn how to do that junk. It was like family tradition or responsibility or whatever you want to call it. Doesn’t anyone know how to do it in your group?”
“We’ve got books. And one of my helpers helped her mother when she was growing up. All we need is equipment.”
“Don’t look at me. I’m no crystal ball. Have you checked hardware stores, Walmart, or the Dollar Mart?”
Like there was no question she had the authority she told me, “You have to show us.”
I wasn’t feeling any love and started having visions of chains and cages. “No way. Forget it. I’m no trained monkey. You have more than I had when I started, at least you’ve got people to buddy up with and share the load.” I got gone as quick as I could after that though that took a few slick moves as it seems like no one wanted to let me get gone except for Mack who was going to give me a ride. At least he was before he found out all the vehicles were spoken for. He was going to get a crotch rocket next but they were all being serviced. His face said what I was thinking. Then he got called away because some kid got lost in the hotel someplace.
Not taking any chances I snuck out a service entrance and started putting one foot in front of the other. I wasn’t looking forward to the long walk home but then laughed in relief as I remembered where I’d seen a couple of bikes in a pawn shop about two miles from the hotel. A half hour later I climbed up the exterior service ladder and then dragged my tired butt up and over the second story window sill I had broken into last time I was there.
My arm was thumping again so I sat down and tried to wait it out. If I hadn’t I might not have heard them.
“I said we lost her.”
[radio noise]
“No. Didn’t hear an engine.”
[radio noise]
“Look, don’t blame us Mack. If you had done what Dylan and Rodney had told you to do we’d already know where the girl was staying and with who.”
[radio noise]
“Right back at you asshole. I don’t care what you think. If someone is in our territory we need to know. And they’re either for us or against us.”
[radio noise]
“Yeah well Dylan doesn’t make all the rules anymore does he? This is a democracy and he got out voted. He can take care of the spiritual stuff, the rest of us will take care of everything else.”
There was more radio noise but the two men had moved so that I could no longer hear them clearly. I forgot about my arm as I realized I was in serious trouble. I thought about what I’d heard and realized I knew three things.
1 – Mack meeting me wasn’t an accident. I was pretty sure about that already but now I knew for sure.
2 – Dylan wasn’t in complete control of the group anymore if he ever had been.
3 – Mack had lied. Not to me, but about me.
Points one and two bothered me but didn’t surprise me too much. Point three made me curious and that did freak me out.
Chapter 5
Gack! I am so tired.
Oh and by the way, “Gack!” is that involuntary sound you make when you are really tired and yawn so big something pops in the back of your throat. I’ve been gacking a lot lately.
Anyway …
I had to stop writing last night when the goober started hacking up a lung. Not so bad today but mostly because he finally gave in and slept. Goober. He better not die. I don’t want to have to drag his sorry butt down the stairs and throw his carcass out the window so I can bury him in the old rose garden. Especially if he might be a friend even if he is an ubergoober.
Back to the story … I left off where I was wondering why Mack would lie about knowing where I had set up camp. I knew there was a reason, I just didn’t know whether I was gonna think it was a good reason or not. I wasn’t sure whether I should give him the benefit of the doubt or not except that the other two points and stuff I’d heard made me inclined to lean in that direction.
I wanted to rush home and hide out but decided to wait and make sure they’d left the area. I had to pick a bike out anyway. I crept downstairs into the store part of the building and was passing the electronics section when one of those roll up solar chargers caught my eye. Then I saw an awesome solar lamp. It looked kinda like a light bulb. I snagged those two items and then started looking around for something to bring them home in and that’s when I started finding other odds and ends that I wanted.
I just recently got on a kick of finding as many solar things as I can after reading something in some hiking magazine I found in a dentist’s office where I had been looking for toothpaste, floss, and junk like that. I haven’t found many solar thingies so to find two in one location was pretty awesome. I also got a couple of machetes, some cool looking knives, and this honking big screwdriver. The thing is like a cross between a pry bar and a sword. I also found a beat up canvas satchel to put all the found stuff in. Wound up needing two satchels, a couple of bags, and a backpack to bring back everything I wanted.
I was loading up and then nearly wet myself when the roll down doors on the front of the store rattled really hard. “Dammit, don’t draw them this way!”
“They aren’t Infected you idiot. It’s that gang.”
“Maybe, maybe no. But they act as crazy as an un-medicated carrier. Let’s save us some trouble and call for a ride. The gang will probably get the girl. Maybe that’ll soften her up and make her more amendable to Rodney’s plan.”
I was thinking a rude gesture in their direction when I heard them call on their radio and start hoofing it to a pick up point. I hadn’t seen a “gang” around and thought I knew most of the groups still in the area. Gangs were bad news but what came through about five minutes later bee-lining for the hotel was more raggle-taggle than any gang I’d ever seen. That didn’t make them the Easter Bunny because even idiots can be dangerous if there are too many in one spot so I got outta there fast. It was not fun trying to load the bike, wear the backpack – that totally sucked needless to say – and then get on the bike and pedal without hitting a ditch and killing myself. My arm cussed me out almost the whole way. I finally made it back home and under cover and that is where I stayed even after seeing smoke rise from one wing of the hotel.
I was a little sorry but I was more worried when I saw helicopters fly into the area. You see them sometimes but I’d never seen them come in with a load of whatever that powder was they dropped. Found out since that it was some kind of fire suppressant, like a giant glob of fire extinguisher but it was freaky to see it happen when it did. I thought maybe they were snuffing out infecteds and taking everyone else out at the same time. The fire didn’t really go anywhere, not because of the powder they dropped, but because it started to rain again a couple of hours later and hasn’t really stopped. It was the night after the hotel caught fire that I looked outside to see Mack huddled near the shed looking as wet and miserable as a cat.
Chapter 6
(Another week … not doing too good writing in this thing but I’ve been busy. Trying to be company to Mr. Crankypants uses up all my energy too. I don’t know for sure what day it is but I think it is early August … I think it is anyway. I’ll go with that until I find out otherwise.)
Last couple of days have been clear and Mack’s chest cold has gotten a ton better. Aunt Trudy always said she’d rather deal with a man almost dead than she would one that is just a little sick. I’m beginning to see just how brilliant my aunt is. Geez talk about cranky.
On the other hand, Mack’s cranky is different than what I’m used to … instead of wanting lots of attention he wants to be left alone. I don’t think it is just the cold that has made him foul, it’s why he got a cold. He’s sleeping again but at least this time he said thank you for the chicken ramen soup I made.
I guess I should be cranky too but I’m not. It’s kinda … well, cool sounds stupid and calling it anything else sounds almost worse but basically Mack doing what he did .. Oh heck … why not … it’s supremely cool in my book.
What happened was Mack got real bent out of shape when he found out they – Dylan’s group – planned to “detain” me. Nice way of saying they planned on holding me prisoner and making me give them what they wanted.
I didn’t think much of their plan and said so. “Dumb move on their part. I can think of a half dozen ways in less seconds than that to cause them grief for trying to force me to do anything.”
Mack’s voice was tired and gravelly as he wheezed out, “Yeah, me too. I have a kid sister … I know … (cough, hack, sneeze, honk into the handkerchief) … what teenage girls can do if they get T’d off.”
“You got a sister? Where’s she at?”
“Living with my stepmom and her new husband. Well outside the quarantine zone. Shani is my half-sister.”
“Wow … real blended family stuff.”
“Yeah,” he said in a way that told me the subject was closed. “What about you?”
“My folks … aren’t around anymore. I went to live with my aunt.”
“OK … just one more question.”
“No. ‘Cause it’s gonna be about what Mace said and I don’t wanna talk about it.”
Mack shook his head. “Actually Winx I was just gonna ask if you’re looking to start a group.”
Cautiously I said, “Uh … no. Why? Are you?”
And that’s when he finally spit it all out.
“I’m tired of people.” I started to tell him to shove it sideways but he held up his hand to stop me. “I mean tired of the kind of people that always want something from me or expect me to change to suit them. You don’t seem to fall into that category. You just tell people to shove it if you don’t want what they are. I’m actually fine with that. It’s … honest I guess. What I’m trying to say is that when Dylan’s group was small and mainly … you know …”
“You aren’t going to offend me if you call a spade a spade. Street people or homeless. It is what it is.”
“Yeah … ok … when the group was small and made up of only homeless people. Most of them wanted to be left alone too so it was ok. We worked together but gave each other’s issues a lot of space too. It was even ok when he got on the save-the-kids thing.”
“For your info Dylan was always on the save-the-kids thing. I saw him in the city plenty of times preaching and trying to tell the kids to go to a couple of the local church shelters and get cleaned up.”
“Hmmm. I didn’t know that. Before my time. I first met him when they were still trying to figure out what was going on. He’d stop by the Vet center downtown where I was staying. He fit in. I’m pretty sure he was a Vet too but he never said. He was just accepted. He made sense too. Said it was probably something in the hooch or the drugs people were doing … and that’s even what the scientists started saying. At least until the plague started jumping to people that didn’t drink or do drug.”
“Yeah,” I said nodding. “I heard all that stuff too. In the group I was hanging with it probably started with someone sharing a needle. But I don’t do that crap and I still got sick so it may have started in the drugs but it didn’t stop there.”
“Sex?”
“Excuse me?!”
"Don’t blow a gasket, I mean was the guy you were sleeping with pass it to you that way.”
“I don’t know what flavor of crazy you think I am but I ain’t crazy enough to get pregnant on top of all of the other crap life has handed me.”
“Er. Uh … you saying … uh … no opportunity to get the plague as an STD?”
“Yeah so don’t get no funny ideas.”
“Don’t worry Sunshine. It ain’t that kind of thing; you’re jail bate. All I was doing was testing a theory. I still don’t know how I picked up the plague. That scratches that off the list.”
I shook my head. “Stop looking for one way for it to get passed around. For all we know it’s in the water and this is some giant experiment by people with more money than sense. It’s here now so all we can do is deal. And if you’re immune and I’m immune getting the plague is just one less thing we got to deal with. Everyone else will have to take care of their own pile of crap while we shovel ours.”
Mack gave me a serious look and then sort of relaxed. “Not bad Sunshine. But I won’t let no little kids …”
“Aw I ain’t heartless. I just mean … Look, case by case. I’m no bleeding heart do-gooder. I’m no Preacher Guy. I’m not drawn that way. I’m more the type that causes trouble than gets people out of it. I got too many issues. I don’t mind giving a hand every once in a while but only if I’m pretty sure my arm isn’t going to be chewed off up to the elbow while I’m doing it.”
Mack gave a tired chuckle. “Sounds about like I feel.”
“So we ain’t so different above the belt buckle after all. Back to why you were taking a rain bath and busted all up that night.”
“Yeah,” he muttered. “See, after a while kids weren’t enough for Dylan. I think he might have … I don’t know … maybe gotten a Messiah complex or something. He started taking in Normals to what he called his family. Heck most would be dead if he hadn’t. Eventually though the Normals started outnumbering the rest of us. And you could tell it bothered them to be hanging out with street people. They wanted things to look like they used to look and be run that way even though it didn’t work that way very well. The ‘family’ atmosphere changed and we were just a big group of people trying to survive. Which was still ok because we were all desperate and things were so insane. The street people taught the Normals and the Normals kinda gave the Streets some dignity. When the problems started was when the Normals wanted to run things as a democracy so they could feel like they had some say. Then some of the Normals started changing that to rule by committee – though not everyone has caught onto that yet – and things really started to suck."
I told him, "They didn't seem bad. A little pushy but not really bad. That one woman though … what was she? Like a prison matron or something?"
He snorted. “Mrs. Zigler used to be a PTA mom from what I heard. She’s not bad but bossy as hell that’s for sure. And stuck on having her own way or else. Most of them aren't really what you would call bad, but there are some Grade A jackasses in there. It is all ‘us’ and ‘them’ and if you aren't an 'us' you are the enemy and all enemies are the same level of threat, from the Infecteds to some curly headed kid that has a few screws loose."
Not minding the dig I nodded my understanding and asked, "So I was ... an enemy?"
"When you wouldn't play ball their way ... yeah. They think they own everything and everyone in what they mark as their territory. What they wouldn't listen to is that their so-called territory is just marks on a map, they don't control anything. It is just a boundary they use for salvaging in."
"But they think they control things."
"Pretty much Sunshine. By the way what is up with the tye dye hair anyway?"
I shrugged and then laughed. "I've got 'authority figure issues' according to some people. I didn't want to be in quarantine so I busted out but couldn't get through any of the road blocks. They had my name and picture on every list. I thought if I changed the way I looked ... but all I could find when I went back to my aunt's house the last time was my old permanent hair chalks. I was trying to ditch the whole ‘goth girl of death’ look. Let's just say I'm not sorry it is growing out ok?"
"Yeah. You kinda stand out."
"I tried to cover the mess I made with black dye but all it did was make me look like a psychedelic zebra. I thought about cutting it short but ..."
He shook his head. "Don't. Better a psychedelic zebra than a clown with mange."
I snorted. "Pretty much what I was thinking. So ... how'd you get separated from Dylan's group."
"Isn't really Dylan's anymore and I only hung around for his sake. He still thinks of it as his but … he’s tripping. I think he’s been self-medicating a little bit lately. A bunch of them found a huge pot stash last month. Rodney told the ones starting to make noise about it to shut up and so long as they do it on their time and it doesn’t cause any problems that he ain’t wasting his time busting people for toking when there are bigger problems that have priority. But what he would say for the self-medders was the opposite of what he said about anyone thinking of … being disloyal.”
“Meaning anyone getting tired of the way things are who wanted out.”
“Yeah. I'd been looking for a way to make a graceful exit and a place to ... uh ..." He stopped like he’d gotten ahead of himself and that let me know what was going through his head.
It took me all of two seconds to decide. "Sure, why not? This place is big enough."
I'd caught him off guard. "Huh?"
"You were casing the places up here. That's how you knew so much about Old Town. That first day I mean. It's how you figured out so fast where I was staying after you found out it wasn't the B-n-B."
I really had surprised him. "Damn you're slick."
"I might not have been too smart to run away in the first place but I ain’t completely dumb and learned stuff on the street. You have to put two and two together fast if you want to stay out of trouble and away from troublemakers. You don't seem to like trouble any more than I do and you aren't a trouble maker. Let me guess, Det. Rodney must have set someone to keep an eye on you and they caught you trying to exit while that gang or whatever created a distraction. Am I right?"
Hesitantly he said, "Yeah."
"Good to finally be right about something. And you don't seem like you are really a people person ... or at least you need your space if you are going to stay human enough to deal with people when you have to. Am I right?"
Another hesitant, "Yeah."
"Are you here to boss me?"
"Don't want the hassle Sunshine."
"Good. Though if we're both honest you'll probably try and boss me some. You keep it to a minimum and I won't grow horns and a tail over it. I'll make you another deal, you help me get rid of the meece in the walls and I’ll even volunteer to do most of the cooking."
He snorted a surprised laugh that turned into a cough that sounded like the last of the nasty crap was exiting his lungs. When he finally could draw a breath I could see he needed to sack out some more and after promising to “work out the details” when he got up – yeah, like he was getting up anytime soon while he still sounded like a wheezy radiator – he crashed and burned and I went off to figure how much more stuff I would need since it was going to be two instead of one.
Chapter 7
Bottom line is Mack is going to flop here at the Loudon House too and we're going to set this place up good before we have to worry about winter. Scratch that and inhale the realism along with the rainbows and skittles. We are going to set it up as good as we can for as long as we can. Starting with working fast and getting creative.
Mack was finally up to looking around and getting a feel for the inside of the House. We’d already had a discussion about what he called the “exterior defenses” and now we were onto the “interior defenses”; only he got a little sidetracked with what he called supplies and logistics. When we came up from the cellar Mack stood there for a moment catching his breath and looking gobsmacked then finally asked, “Where the hell did you get all the propane?!”
“Commercial district,” I told him smugly. “But I think I got most of it. There was this truck behind one of the warehouses, but it had all flat tires sooooo I figured it I couldn’t get the truck to me I’d get containers to go to it. My aunt’s stove was propane and … well I went through a gory-death-phase thing and liked to imagine all the ways we could die. Aunt Trudy had a way of busting my bubble though and instead of imagining how we were all going to blow up or suffocate or something she made me stand there and catch a lecture from the propane guy who not only told me I was being a knot-head but showed me how all the valves and hoses and gizmos on his truck worked. And how to fill up smaller propane tanks from big ones. So … ta da! Aren’t I brilliant?”
Mack shook his head. “For a goth chick you’re awful damn cheerful.”
“Former goth chick. The clothes are now just camouflage. Besides I doubt anyone would recognize me if I dressed any other way.”
Mack snorted but gave a grin. “Shani would have been all over the stores picking out new clothes if she were here.” Then he lost the grin and said, “But I’m glad she isn’t. One less thing for me to worry about. But we are going to have to do something about your … er … uniform there. Too much black for the color scheme around here. And in the winter you’ll stand out like pepper on snow.”
“Maybe. I’ll think about it,” I told him having already thought about it … I just hadn’t gotten around to actually doing anything about it. Instead I said, “I knew I would go through a lot of propane canning so I got what I could while I could. I was also thinking of trying to heat with it but that’s out. I found some kerosene but I’d rather not use it in this place.”
“Yeah, I saw you’ve got fire extinguishers all over the place like crazy Christmas decorations,” he said.
Knowing that I’d likely catch it if I didn’t explain I asked him, “You remember those homeless kids who died last year when the house they were flopping in burned down?”
“Yeah, someone was cooking some dope.”
“No they weren’t. They were trying to cook up some heat. The dope thing was just a rumor that the papers took off with because it made better headlines than a kerosene heater turned over.”
“And how do you know this?”
“I was in that house.”
“What?!”
“We had temporarily been kicked out of here and … it got cold. One of the old dudes … anyway it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal if there hadn’t been a panic and if there had been fire extinguishers. The ones that died had gotten stuck upstairs in the boarded up rooms. I was sleeping in the old kitchen and went out through the window over the sink when there was a pile up at the door. I ain’t ever going through that again.”
Surprised he asked, “Were you hurt?”
“A few cuts and stuff but nothing like the others. I was barely sixteen and if the cops had got ahold of me they would have made me go back. I wasn’t ready to then and by the time I was it was too late. But I’m alive and I mean to stay that way. So I don’t care if the fire extinguishers clash with the Victorian décor … they’re staying. And so are the smoke alarms in the kitchen and the ones up here. Non-negotiable.”
“Uh huh,” he said scratching his chine. Then completely ignoring the stink I was ready to make he asked, “Anything else down in this commercial district worth the effort?”
Nothing like preparing for an argument and not getting one. I got comfortable for the long conversation he was apparently ready for by grabbing a tin that I had stored an open box of cookies in and bringing them over to the ginormous butcher block and jumping up on it to sit. I held the cookies out to him and while he ate a couple I told him, “Probably but let’s leave it to Dylan and the other folks to fight over. I have some other places in mind to hunt and peck through. Closer and less dangerous. There are a lot of Infecteds between here and there. Unless you want to go down there for some reason.”
Mack said he’d rather avoid coming into conflict with any other groups – especially the one he just escaped – if it was avoidable so instead of giving me grief Mack actually listened to my ideas. He thought about it for a moment then nodded, “All those ethnic stores. Yeah, you could be right that there would be things in there worth taking.”
“I know there are. It won’t be big hauls like I got from those warehouses but there is enough stuff in there worth the effort to get. And it will be stuff that we don’t have to refrigerate. And then there are the schools.”
“Schools?”
“Yeah. They evac’d lots of kids early on but didn’t clean out the schools. The rumor was that kids were germ machines so no one else went raiding the school cafeterias and store rooms either. There and the stores along that strip of stores near the uptown area were next on my hit list. Even if they don’t have any cans of stuff I bet they have things like salt and pepper and paper trays and junk like that. And the daycare centers probably have diaper wipes and all sorts of things I haven’t thought of.”
Mack nodded and started making notes. “Daycare centers might even have baby food and diapers that could make good barter merchandise down the road. Have a feeling it is going to come to that if we stay cut off. Have you been to the Vet center or any places like that?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I gave him the look such a stupid question deserved. “Because I don’t feel like getting gang raped. Not all the street people are as harmless as the ones that Dylan picked up. There are some sick people out there. I may be crazy and occasionally reckless but I hope I’ve started to dump the stupid I was carrying around with me.”
He stopped scribbling and just stared at me then nodded. “Right. Look, I need to know. Do you know how to use a gun?”
“Yeah. But I’ve never pulled the trigger on a large caliber, only 22 hand guns or 22 rifles. I … I used to go hunting with my dad. Hey … guess what I can do.”
Unsure of my mood he carefully said, “No telling so why don’t you just say it and save us some time.”
“Bow hunt.”
“Bow hunt … like bow and arrows.”
“Yep. I can use a long bow but I’m better with a crossbow or compound bow. I was in a sporting goods store …”
“Why were you in a sporting goods store?”
Sigh. “Where do you think all the Gatorade came from that you’ve been drinking? All the mini marts are trashed. For a while there I was living on energy bars but the carbs were killer on my butt. I’d eat the protein bars but they kill your kidneys if you can’t drink enough water and that is the one thing I’ve been having trouble with.”
“Hold that thought because I can do something about that. Just get back to the playing Indian thing.”
“I wasn’t playing Indian … that’s rude.”
“Who are you? The PC police?”
“Hardly. I’m just a quarter Cherokee and grew up around the PC police,” I told him with a grin. My grin faded when he said I didn’t look it. “Yeah, I know. My dad did though and … and I had a little sister … she looked a lot like Dad.”
“She’s … not around … either?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“You can borrow Shani though the two of you would probably drive each other crazy. Or maybe wind up ruling the world. Both ideas give me an ulcer.”
“Uh …” I wasn’t sure how to take him sacrificing his sister like that.
“Don’t sweat it Sunshine. Get back to your story.”
“Ok … sure … anyway I was there looking for camping stuff and things like that …”
“Dammit!” He yelled it so loud I jumped and nearly fell backwards off the butcher block. He shook his head after grabbing my hand to catch me. “One of these days I’m going to find my brain. Damn. Camping equipment. Why didn’t I think of that? As far as I know none of Dylan’s group even brought that up.”
“Relax already. Geez give me a heart attack why don’t you.” I shook my head. “From what I saw you had a bunch that thought roughing it was staying at the local Holiday Inn. I could have thought of better places to stay than that hotel, man it was starting to reek in the stairwells. Not nearly enough ventilation, especially on the upper floors where you couldn’t open the windows. Can’t imagine what it is going to be like in the winter. If you can figure out the water sitch then that’s worth a sporting goods store, a Chinese restaurant, AND I’ll even throw in a couple of pawn shops. And if you’re extra special good I’ll even tell you that if you scrounge around in the pawn shops long enough and find the address of the owner and then if that address is in the quarantine zone … you can usually find really interesting things in basements and closets of those places.”
“Why you little …” he said shaking his head. “I thought you said houses gave you the Heebies. And do I want to know where you learned all this stuff?”
“They do give me the Heebies; but, I didn’t say that the Heebies stopped me though. And I learned it on the street. There are a lot of crazy people that live on the street but some of them are crazy for a good reason. If you’re careful and just sit still and keep your mouth shut, you even hear them talking to each other and can get ideas. I would have thought Dylan would have had the inside track on that sort of thing.”
“Dylan could be strange. He was … detached … yet hyper focused. After he started taking in the kids nothing else seemed to register. And he was strict about guns. He didn’t want his family turning into a gang so everyone played pacifist except for a couple of us who were in charge of …”
He slowed down trying to figure out how to explain it to me so since I already had a good idea I finished for him. “Making sure that all of the bad stuff was kept out so they could stay pacifists?”
He nodded and said cynically, “Yeah, pretty much.”
“It’s not just homeless people that are like that. A lot of my aunt’s friends were like that. They screamed and yelled about the eeeeevvviilllllll guns in the world but they were some of the first that always called the cops and expected them to kill whatever was scaring them. Lucky for me Aunt Trudy was more practical.”
“Lucky for me too,” he said on a sigh. “So about the bow and arrows.”
I grinned. “You’re all right. Most people hate the way I talk.”
“You’re squirrely … but it’s tolerable.”
Chapter 8
“What is this thing?” Mack asked catching something as it almost fell out of the boxes we were packing into the back of the 4x4 and trailer.
I told him, “It’s a dough squasher thingamajig. You make tortillas with it. If I can’t figure out how to get that monster oven to stop smoking I won’t be able to make regular bread … or biscuits or cookies or cakes or anything else that has to rise. I swear I nearly hacked up a lung last night. My hair still stinks too. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to make crackers for all that soup I canned if I can’t figure what I’m doing wrong. That means that I’ll have to fry stuff on that propane griddle we grabbed in the camping section … or at least figure out how to make stuff in a skillet. Tortillas are about the easiest thing I can think of to take the place of loaf bread.”
“You weren’t fooling about being able to cook,” Mack said. “Gotta say Sunshine, you’re full of surprises. But I can do my share. My ol’ man was a short order cook. There’s a lot more things you can fix in a skillet or on a griddle than you’d think. The problem is going to be,” he said hefting another bag of rice to take it deeper into the trailer. “Having the right ingredients. I like rice as much as the next guy but if I have to eat a steady diet of it I’d like to at least get a break every now and then.”
Feeling the same way but more willing to accept the possibility of a monotonous diet I told Mack, “We’re getting stuff to do that with and that cellar is cool enough that everything will last for a good while.” I nearly shrieked when I racked my shin yet again. “Ouch! I swear I am going to wrap a pillow around that trailer hitch!”
“Keep your voice down Sunshine,” Mack said like he’d had to warn me one too many times.
“Oh. Yeah. Sorry. Uh … anyway,” I said going back to whispering. “Getting the stuff isn’t going to be the problem, at least not right now. All that stuff in the Urban Market we got this morning is people grade. The problem is storing it.”
Mack nodded, understanding the problem after he’d helped me load the traps and reset them a couple of times. “Those galvanized trash cans at the hardware store should help. Gonna take more than I expected though. We barely have enough room for what we took this morning. Now you are wanting all this stuff packaged in plastic and cardboard. I’ve found a couple of places where the rats were trying to gnaw through latches and the little bit of plastic that is down there.”
I nodded. “I know. I hope all that poison and stuff you found at that do-it-yourself pest control store really works.”
“Oh it’ll work. But we have to be careful that they don’t just crawl off in some place too hard to dig them out of and stink up the place worse than they already try and do.”
“You ain’t kidding. As for storage, I think I’ve got enough jars to take care of some bulk junk like spices and seasoning. Those will also help with making the rice taste different instead of it being the same bland thing every time. And as we empty those tins of soda crackers we can store stuff in them. Shame about some of this stuff in here though. A couple of weeks back I would have killed for these nachos. I had the munchies so bad. Oh my gosh … chips and queso dip … mmmmmmmm.”
“You … uh … toke up?”
“Huh? Me? No. I don’t do medicinals unless I need ‘em. No I just … er …” I stopped suddenly embarrassed with what I had been blathering about. Mack can be too easy to talk to.
“Oh. Shani’s thing is chocolate. My step dad swears he’s going to kiss Mr. Hershey if they ever meet in Heaven because he’s saved his life more than a few times.”
I had to bite my lips to keep from laughing. Paula is the same way and it was the one exception that Aunt Trudy made on the junk food rules. Usually all we were allowed was just carob powder or homemade, all natural stuff. Processed sugar items were labeled with a skull and cross bones normally. But when you are PMSing and jonesing for some chocolate … well there are just some things that there is no substitute for.
Looking around I said, “I still don’t get what the deal is. I thought they were going to start turning off the power. It seems like about half the quarantine zone still has ‘lectric and water. I was hoping that cutting off the utilities might make it easier to avoid infected people. As it is I’m wondering if it is infected people that trashed that store we were going to pick over instead of rioters. It’s gotta mean something.”
Mack looked troubled at that. “I’m sure it means something, the question is what. As it is it might mean nothing, or might mean plenty. One of Rodney’s hand-picked guys worked for the utility company. He said it wasn’t going to be as easy as they made it out to be to cut power to the quarantine zone because some of the lines running through it are attached to hospitals and schools and things like that on the outside. They are going to have to run lines around the quarantine zone before they can turn it off here and then boot it up to places outside. Then there is the big electrical hub over in the commercial warehouse district. I was listening to the radio last night after you crashed and there was some chatter that there are helicopters coming in at night and hovering over the power station down at the docks. We see anyone like that … we do not engage them in any way. Got it?”
“You mean like uber military types? Do I look crazy? Don’t get smart; I can see it behind your eyes.” Mack rolled his eyes at my mediocre comedy routine. Then I gave it a little more brain space and said, “Seriously though. I may play at stupid on some days but that’s only playing. I try not and actually do the stupid these days. Besides, do I look like a member of a Seal Team or any other kind of mercenary?”
He gave me a look over. “You actually aren’t too bad. Flexible, creative, fast on your feet … you’d do all right assuming you learned to control your mouth and attitude.”
I had to stop myself from laughing. “Yeah right … bet that whole questioning authority thing would pretty much keep me in hot water wouldn’t it.”
He snorted, “Oh, you could say that.” He heaved a sigh as he fit the last bag of rice in and I slid in the last case of sodas. “Like your pop do you?”
“If you can have a blissful reaction to all of the coffee we find then I can snag the sodas. And no, I’m not going to drink all of this beer either, it’s for making bread and stuff like that … assuming I can get the oven to cough up the hairball or whatever is making it smoke.”
“The sodas are going to give you zits.”
“You must be a fun big brother.”
“Not so much, at least not according to Shani.”
“Maybe she just doesn’t appreciate what she has. I’m walking proof that humans make that error way too often. You only really get it when it’s too late.”
I tried to walk away but he stopped me by gently grabbing my arm. “We all have regrets Sunshine. Don’t let it stop you from … from …”
I sighed. “I get it Mack. Move forward. Make the best of things. Survive. Don’t make the same mistakes again. Still sucks though. Especially when I know I can’t take back all the stupid stuff and the nasty things that I said.”
He nodded. “Yeah it does. Just remember you aren’t the only one that has done it and don’t let people like Mace think that it is ok if they rub your face in it.”
After a minute I patted his hand so he’d let go. I told him, “Shani needs her head examined. I never had a brother and even I can see you don’t do too bad at this.”
Mack shook his head. “You’re not the only one with regrets Sunshine. I’ve made mistakes I don’t want to make any more of either. So what say we head over to the Chinese market before all of this special sharing gives us both indigestion and throws us off schedule?”
“Race you,” I told him by way of agreement with both what he said and the sentiment.
Chapter 9
“Black glutinous rice … Mmmm, mmm, mmm … just like momma used to make. And what the hell is ghee?” Mack said with a nauseated look on his face.
“It’s not that bad,” I told him with a laugh. “Better than dumpster dining.”
“Uh …”
I turned to look at him. He looked like he wanted to say something but wasn’t sure what. I told him, “Yeah. I’ve done it. Not fun. Don’t want to do it again but … better than starving to death. You think that rice is something get a load of this bag of dried sea cucumber.”
“Yum, yum,” he said nearly gagging. “You … uh … don’t plan …”
I grinned wickedly trying to yank his chain. Then I shook my head and said, “Nope. Not my thing. But it would be kinda funny to load this up and leave it for some people we both know. I mean if they are going to be pigs and brag all over about what they are hauling then they probably deserve a nice little treat like this.”
Mack shook his head in severe irritation. “Idiots. Rodney will have their heads when he finds out how badly they’ve compromised security. They are supposed to use rotating codes to communicate on the radios. If this isn’t some stupid plan to lure a gang over to give them some pay back … I cannot believe they’d really be that stupid.”
“I can. I hate to say it Mack but your old group’s so-called security sucked. I got away really easy both times and it was just out an open door. Now stop having heartburn over it, they aren’t your responsibility anymore.”
He sighed and then gave me a small grin. “You’re right Sunshine. Let’s just be thankful they are making our jobs easier. At least we know if they are scrounging around in the commercial district we will pretty much have free rein around here … barring complications.”
We worked quickly and silently after that, both of us having gotten talked out. We were also in a hurry to get as much as we could and get back to the House before the sun started setting. We didn’t even stop for lunch but just sort of grazed on stuff as we got hungry or got curious about what some things were.
I was starting to feel about noodles about the same way that Mack was feeling about rice when all of a sudden he grabbed me and fell to the ground. I would have had a thing or three to say to him if he hadn’t had his hand over my mouth and looking out through the front glass of the store. I nodded my head so that he’d understand I got the message.
Men were coming down the street in loose formation. I don’t know why the term popped into my head except that I used to read all of these end of the world type books and the authors used to write about things happening like I was seeing. It was like falling into a book I had liked to read but had never meant to live out. Talk about your freak-out-o-rama.
Mack was still covering me and getting heavy … and so was his breathing on the back of my neck. I shivered but I think he must have thought I was scared or something because he patted my shoulder and whispered in my ear, “It’s ok Sunshine. Those aren’t regular military but I’d like to know where they got the stuff to play dress up with. They’re spread too thin in some places and packed together in others … both mistakes making them perfect targets. I just hope they don’t have anyone on the back side of this building. As soon as they pass by we are going to grab our bags and boogie. I think we’ve used up our luck around here.”
I nodded but it was a tense-filled minute before they got far enough away that Mack would let me up. We duck-walked to the back of the store and I grabbed as much as I could as I went … teas, candies, ramen, and shelf stable tofu is what I got in my bag. Mack hefted the big canvas tote that had the last of the millet, barley, and tapioca and still holding the gun opened the back door carefully before we both ran out and climbed in.
Mack said, “You’ll have to drive Sunshine so I can cover our exit; they’re on my blind side. Can you do that?”
My snark comes out at the worst times. I played drama queen and sighed, “My hero! Save me from those nasty, horrible EBRs!”
We climbed into the 4x4 and I was able to use the back alleys we’d already mapped to get us out of the area and heading to the House without the men even figuring out where the vehicle noise was coming from. It was close however as we heard them shouting for the first few minutes, their voices echoing the same as the sound from the motor on the 4x4.
We didn’t exactly relax but it wasn’t like a Mad Max parade either. Mack finally asked, “OK, so what the hell does EBR stand for?”
“Huh? Oh … it is something Aunt Trudy used to … well … she was kinda making fun of some of the people in the crowd she hung around with. Some of them … just wow. Anyway it stands for ‘evil black rifle.’ My dad used to say people killed people, guns didn’t kill people. He loved Mom and liked Aunt Trudy but some of their friends … not so much. He said they were bad hypocrites because at least half of them owned guns themselves … they just didn’t want anyone they didn’t personally approve of to own guns.”
“You’re family … they sound … uh …”
“Yeah. Pretty much. But it wasn’t a bad way to grow up.”
“Oh. And you’re just so ancient now right?” he said with the first smile he’d given since he’d thrown me to the floor.
“I’m older than I was then. Some days I feel a lot older. I’d give a lot for a few do-overs but that ain’t happening. I’d ask about your family but … I kinda get the feeling that it’s a sore subject.”
He was silent for a moment then said, “Not sore. Just … I sound like an idiot.”
“Oh yeah? So I have to share how big of an idiot I was but you don’t? That’s fair right there.”
He shook his head. “You had a reason. Lotsa psychological trauma at just the wrong point in life. I … I grew up with every advantage. My ol’ man … my bio dad … I told you he was a short order cook but the truth is that while he started that way he ended by owning the restaurant though he still did his share of the cooking just because he liked to. He was a real workaholic but still a good dad even though he used to forget every special occasion … because he was always too busy making sure everyone else could celebrate their special occasion.”
“And your mom?”
“I don’t remember my mother. She got sick a couple of weeks after I was born and had some kind of seizure or something. She was in this nursing home for a long time and then she just … died. My step mother – she is my mom and was a friend of my mother’s. She has two kids older than me and had just gone through a bad divorce and needed a place to stay. She and my mother had worked out the details but … anyway Dad told her she could go ahead and stay until she got back on her feet if she’d keep an eye on me. She and Dad just sort of … they kinda just threw in together. She once explained it to me by saying they weren’t in love but they were head over heels in like and respect and at that time of their lives that’s what they wanted … and apparently needed. They only got married because one of my dad’s sisters started making noise when Bea – that’s my step mom’s name – got pregnant with Shani. And then one day my dad didn’t come home from work. He’d had a heart attack counting the night’s receipts. I was still pretty young and then Bea met Ralph and … anyway he’s not the typical pain in the ass step dad. He’s actually a good guy. I feel like crap dumping on him like I did. It was actually one of his kids that I couldn’t get along with and Ralph just got caught between us fighting. I started feeling sorry for myself and … basically I got involved with some crap and to keep me from screwing up my life completely they sent me off to Ralph’s brother who was in charge of this boot camp type school. It was only after I graduated and joined the army that they found out how tough the place really was as Bea had a kid with Ralph and they sent him to the school thinking it would shape him up.”
“Ok, did I miss the part where you had a silver spoon shoved some place ‘cause I must have missed it. Just sounds kinda … normal-ish to me.”
“Normal-ish?” he chuckled. “Maybe, but between my Dad’s estate, Bea’s real estate job, and Ralph’s accounting firm money was never a problem and I never really had to work for what I wanted growing up. At least not until the economy really crashed for real and by then I was rucking around in the crap at Fort Leonard Wood getting my ass trained off so that it would hump me along on its own even if I was too done in to move.”
“Now that’s what I call getting trained.”
“You better believe it Sunshine.”
“So were you one of those uber soldiers? Is that how … you know … your eye?”
“Uh … no. I was just your regular kind of soldier though I’d … I’d been giving some consideration to … anyway I was over in Africa and some idiot was too stressed out to wait until his break to take a smoke. He lights up right on the tarmac … within a few feet of where the plane I was in was getting refueled. You can guess the rest of the story.”
“There … there was fire?”
Something must have showed on my face because Mack leaned over and put his hand on the steering wheel. “Whoa Sunshine, if you’re gonna puke pull over first.”
I just kept seeing the people that died in the house fire and when I realized I might really puke after all I did pull over and tell him, “Maybe you better drive.”
Chapter 10
“Wake up Sunshine! C’mon! Breathe … there you go. Let me see those amber colored marbles you have rolling around in your head.”
I came all the way awake when I took a flying leap at the window and nearly knocked myself out. “Argh!”
“That’s twice you did that. Damn … let me see if you broke something.”
“Get off me!”
“I’ll sit on you if you don’t settle down and let me look at that arm,” he replied calmly while he grabbed for the lantern and turned it up. He didn’t stop until he pulled a splinter out of my wrist and used an alcohol wipe to clean the scratches I had given myself. “Damn, that’s gonna bruise for sure.”
“Shut up,” I growled.
“Well you’re in a mood.” And instead of backing off like ninety-nine point nine percent of the human race would he got closer and basically pinned me into the corner of the room completely disrupting my personal space. But I was too busy shaking and trying not to hurl to notice.
“Wanna talk about it?” he asked me after I finally wound down.
“Not particularly.”
“OK. On one condition.”
“And that is?” I asked almost afraid to know.
“When I get the sweats and wake up trying to do something along the lines of what you just did you won’t make me drag it out and look at it either.”
I looked at him and he was serious so I told him, “Looks like I’m not the only one that has a few screws loose.”
“Nope,” he told me like I had no business being surprised by that fact. He did want to know, “Does it happen often?”
“No,” I told him honestly. “This is the first time in like weeks and weeks. I thought I was all done with it.”
“Hits me that way too sometimes. It’s been almost two years since I lost the eye but sometimes it feels like yesterday. Especially if I’m feeling particularly pissy about something coming at me on my blind side. It was probably my story that set you off. Shoulda kept my mouth shut.”
“No. It actually made me feel like less of a freak. What time is it anyway? The air feels …funny. And … and what’s that noise?”
“It’s 0-300. Funny is the last thing it is. And that noise is helicopters … CH-54’s to be precise. And I’m pretty sure what they’re unloading is going to be a royal bitch to deal with.”
“What’s a CH45 and what does it carry?”
“Ch-54 and it carries anything it wants to Sunshine. Their nickname is the Sky Crane. Usually they carry things like tanks and other large equipment, sometimes even mobile hospitals. These are carrying shipping containers. The doors are closed when they set the boxes down but when they lift off they’re open and empty.”
“So there’s something in the boxes.”
“Yep.”
“Do we want to know what is in the boxes?”
“Need to know? Yes. Likely to be happy with what we find out? I doubt it. You ok now?”
“Yeah. Heebies over and under control. Does this mean we aren’t going to do any salvaging today like you wanted to?”
“I have a feeling …” He petered off and stared off at like he was seeing something I couldn’t.
He was silent so long I had to prompt him. “What do you feel?”
He shook his head. “Might not be doing anymore salvaging Sunshine. At least not too far afield.”
“Why? You think there are supplies in those containers?”
“No … no I don’t. I …” He got a little out of my space, turned the lantern down, and leaned against the wall of the room I was using as my bedroom. “What if they missed inspecting all the people that came out of the quarantine zone … and what if in the process they missed some evacuees that were already infected?”
“But I heard everyone was going to have to go into a temporary camp … to prevent something like that from happening.”
“Well, I heard the same thing but verification would be nice. For the sake of argument let’s just run with mistakes happening accidentally or – with the right color money – accidentally on purpose. What if they found some infecteds on the wrong side of the concertina wire and suddenly people are scared? What if they’ve started finding free-roaming cases of infection outside of the quarantine zone?”
“But that would be in the news. There hasn’t been anything about that at all on the radio.”
“Sunshine, it wouldn’t be that difficult to build a cover up. The news is all bought and paid for anyway. You are probably too young to remember the big ebola scare and how the family got quarantined. Well not all that was in the news was the truth according to some guards I knew that were on the squad that made sure that the family stayed in quarantine. And all you would need to do is disappear people and then when or if someone notices say they’ve been taken in for questioning regarding possible contact with people in the quarantine zone. Or they voluntarily moved out of the area to avoid contamination. It is called misdirection, like what they doing with the QZ. The way it sounds on the radio right now they’ve got people believing that there aren’t any sane people left over here.”
“Yeah, come to think of it they don’t even talk about immunes or carriers anymore … only about people far gone into the infection.”
“I’d noticed that too. It’s recent but noticeable. Which makes me think that things are getting serious on the outside.”
“You … you don’t think there’s like elite commandos in those shipping containers and they’re going to go all Rambo on us do you?”
“Man, what have you been reading in those books?!” he laughed glancing over at the stack of secondhand paperbacks I’ve been collecting. “First off, there aren’t really all that many ‘elite commandos’ these days. Thank your government for starting to get scared of the people they train. Second, there’s been way too many drops for that and … there goes another one,” he said as we heard an audible bang as a shipping container was set down less than gently. “No one is going to set troops down like that. Too much chance of injury. But they wouldn’t be so careful if the container was full of Infecteds.”
I forgot to breathe long enough that when I started back up I could feel it in my head. “That’s …”
“You gonna panic on me?”
“No,” I told him with attitude. Then I calmed back down and said, “But … that’s … that’s bad. There’s already enough Infecteds around here. If … if they get desperate and hungry what will they turn into? And what about the rest of us?”
“No clue Winx but plan for the worst and hope for the best and you can’t go wrong. Which is why we are going to stick here for at least today and try and get some facts to measure my hypothesis by. So, you up for getting some coffee going while I get some gear together and get set to start watching from the tower room?”
“You gonna express yourself up there?”
“Huh?”
“When people used to try and tell Aunt Trudy that she shouldn’t allow me to express myself the way I was she’d tell them that she’d rather me express myself by dressing in black and wearing black makeup than with a rifle up in a church tower.”
Mack snorted but only said, “Cute. But the last thing I want to have to do is ‘express myself’ and give our position away so make sure you don’t do anything to draw attention either. And speaking of, we need to start securing our water sources and camouflaging a few things against aerial observation. It’s not enough just to put the four-by and trailer in that shed. Should have thought of this stuff first thing but … I was …”
“Mack, I’m a lot better off than before you came along but you can’t think of everything … and shouldn’t have had to. You just do your soldier–planning–logistic stuff or whatever you want to call it. You’re good at that. I’ll handle kitchen junk and check to make sure all the downstairs exits are still secure. I can take that as my job to be good at. I know it was a pain to run that ramp to the second floor and then haul the supplies down two flights of stairs but it’s better than taking all of that wood off the exterior doors. Lucky for me we got everything in and put in storage containers last night so while the coffee is brewing I’ll bring in all the water and then use the dolly to move the emptied water barrels upstairs and then … do something with the ramp, I’m not sure what.”
“Ok,” Mack said with a nod after thinking it over. “But if you hear anything unusual or out of place you get under cover a-sap. We may have some aerial reconnaissance by drone during the day. As quiet as the new urban battlefield drones are, as maneuverable as they’ve become … Just be careful. And I think before I go up to the tower I’ll walk the fence line and make sure all those places we reinforced it don’t need something more.”
Chapter 11
It is turning into one of the dank, ugly days that always depress me. September is normally the time of year when things start cooling off and getting nicer but the weather has just been kind of ratty with lots of off and on rain and the kind of humidity that just settles in and is bothersome. It isn’t hot, it isn’t cold, it’s just nasty mediocre with a side of wet. Right before the sun came up you could feel the weather deciding to be yucky again and sure enough visibility dropped to next to nothing irritating Mack and me both. It took a long time for the heavy morning mist to burn off and while it lasted Mack encouraged me to use it as cover to get the outside work done.
The only good thing is that Mack said, “With weather like this I doubt they’ll have the drones flying.”
“Lower visibility will also keep the Infecteds from being able to organize and congregate in any number,” I reminded him.
He gave me a look for using words that reveal I have at least some education but didn’t rag on me which was a relief. “So two good things,” he said nodding. “That’s still not getting us any closer to knowing what is going on. They can’t see us, but we can’t see them … or whatever they dropped off … either.”
“Don’t be so depressing. Someone might think you’re goth,” I said, teasing him a bit just because I could. “Everything is all packed up and packed in. The fence is good. All the water barrels are in. I was able to dismantle and pull the ramp up and in without making a lot of noise. C’mon … find something good Mr. Grumpy Pants.”
With a straight face he said, “The roof don’t leak.”
“See?! I knew you could do it.”
Mack sighed. “Look, I know you are trying to drop the Goth Girl persona, but don’t strain yourself going too far in the other direction. Sunshine is fine. Being blinded by rainbows and unicorn farts not so much, so knock off the happy, happy routine. It is starting to wear on my nerves.”
I deflated and leaned against the wall of the stairwell that went up to the tower’s top floor. “Yeah. Mine too. Just ignore me, I have a hard time being cooped up.”
“Place is too damn big for you to feel cooped up. If you got the fidgets run the halls and stairs, just don’t fall and don’t make a lot of noise. Work off the squirrelies and then find something constructive to do until I call for you. Now scram.”
If it had been the old days I would have gotten totally snarky and laid into Mack for daring to tell me what to do. But it isn’t the old days. It isn’t the newer old days. It’s today and it is a whole new ballgame, one I’m not sure what the rules are yet. Which sucks. I’ve never been one to follow the old rules. How am I supposed to follow the new rules and maybe the old and new rules at the same time?
Instead of running the halls and stuff I started rechecking all of the boarded over windows and doors. The historical society had removed what glass that was salvageable out of the windows … it was “leaded” or something like that and worth a lot of money. In place of that they had put in these heavy plywood covers that had ventilation holes at the top. There were bolts that ran through the plywood and into 2 x 4’s on the inside. Those wooden covers didn’t rattle even in the worst wind and they wouldn’t be able to break through whether from the outside in or from the inside out. The big honking doors downstairs were all covered the same way as well except for two of them; the kitchen door and this side door that used to open onto what looked like a person sized dumb waiter that went down into the cellar area. I think that is where they used to bring in the household supplies.
The dumbwaiter thing is currently out of commission though I found the plans and materials for rebuilding it. I’d done what I could to bolt that door and then camouflage it from the outside. Mack had added a couple of cross pieces and then helped me to do the same thing to the kitchen entry. The second-floor entrance we’d used at the top of the ramp was an old French door that opened into what looked like some kind of dance hall or roller rink area. As a matter of fact us homeless kids had used it as a roller rink a few times until the historical society people threatened to toss us out because we’d kept messing up where they were trying to reinforce the floor. When they finished the floor work it was too much trouble to use the skates again and then the plague hit and that’s all she wrote. I might start skating again if I get to feeling too “squirrely” this winter. It was an idea worth thinking about anyway. Assuming I could find skates.
With the windows and doors checked for the leventy-dozenth time I looked for something else to do to keep me from getting the heebies. I went down to the cellar and double checked to make sure that no traps needed emptying and that none of our containers were getting meece attacked. I put a paper mask on and swept up some of the meece and rat droppings that I found and was glad to see that there were hardly any compared to what I used to have to sweep up on a daily basis. Mice and rat turds are small and fairly non-squishy but they are still turds and the idea of walking around in them was just so not appealing.
I checked over the food containers as I swept and all was hunky dory. Then I switched over to one of the areas and threw a little extra borax on the shelves as I saw a couple of silverfish crawling along where we’d started storing some books we’d been finding. Mack had said storing too many books upstairs would be inviting disaster so we started putting them in one of the lockable vault areas. The shelves in there were metal and the door was just about as “bank-like” as the one for the old wine and liquor cellar. The old floor plans called it a medicinal closet so it was probably like the house pharmacy or something back in the old days. It wouldn’t hold a library of books but it was working for the books we were really against the meece making a mess of. We also stored the poisons and junk in there that we didn’t want near the food in case the meece were stupid enough to chomp on them.
The wind up lamp I was using was starting to wind down so I went back upstairs to the kitchen. I figured if I was going to be constructive I might as well start figuring out why the stupid Wicked Witch’s oven wanted to smoke us out.
I'll shut up now as I know you are probably a whole lot busier than I am.)
Chapter 12
“You’re a mess.”
I looked at Mack and let him know just how much I appreciated his observation, which is to say I didn’t. “Thanks. Tell me something all of this soot and crap all over me and the kitchen hasn’t.”
“What happened?” he asked as he picked up one of the brooms and started to brush me off.
“The big pipe thingy … the flue or whatever you call it … was clogged. Someone shoved some waded up rags and junk in there like a gazillion years ago. There was some kind of back up and when I pulled the rags out all of this soot comes crashing down.”
I pointed in the general direction of the mess I had spent almost an hour trying to get unwedged where it had been stuck and Mack said, “Those aren’t rags, it looks like the remains of some kind of filter.”
“Filter schmilter,” I said before I started coughing and sneezing and causing another dust storm – soot storm – to fly around. “Crap!”
“You need a bath.”
“No kidding but I need to see if Big Bertha here is going to fire up smoke-free before I do. If I have to keep cleaning the pipes, a bath is just going to be a waste of water.”
“Speaking of … how is the water storage level?”
“All of the barrels are full. I wish …” I stopped and shook my head sending more soot cascading.
Calmly Mack just started with the broom again as he asked me, “Wish what?”
I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter if we can’t do any more salvaging.”
Mack kind of just hmmm’d and said, “Say we can what were you wishing for?”
“More barrels. More metal trash cans. More tins and metal coolers. Things that I wish I would have gotten more of before now.”
“Mice problems?”
“No. The meece actually seem like they are getting under control. I don’t even hear them in the walls anymore.”
“Some of that is probably the owls that have taken roost around here but tell me why you want what you want and we’ll consider whether it is worth going hunting for.”
Mack was pretty cool about that sort of stuff. He at least listens even if he doesn’t always agree. “More water can’t hurt. It can’t keep raining forever and if we are going to get stuck here … and not just here but stuck inside … more water might be exactly what we need. Plus we aren’t going to be able to keep filling the ones we have as full as they are because cold weather is going to mean some of the water will freeze and that could mean broken barrels.”
Thoughtfully Mack looked at me and then asked, “And the trash cans?”
“Storage.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. Stuff. Just in case. Maybe we don’t go salvaging for more food, maybe we do. Maybe we find stuff, maybe we don’t. Maybe if we do go salvaging and it isn’t food but maybe other stuff we need like clothes and … you know … stuff. Stuff we don’t want the meece and moths and other gross crap like that to get to. We’ve got mothballs and cedar crap but nothing to use it on yet. But if we do, we still need something to put the crap in to keep the varmints out.”
Mack made to sit in a chair then decided against it when he realized it was coated in soot. “Tell you what, let’s see if the monster there has stopped smoking. If it has then this can be cleaned up, then you can clean up, then we’ll talk about what other kind of stuff and crap you think might be useful to focus on salvaging.”
“Uh … what about the tower and the watching and the not expressing yourself and junk like that?”
“The last CH-54 drop was about an hour ago. The drops are apparently over for the day and as far as I can tell all is quiet … for now. We’ll keep the radio on just in case someone else figures this out before we do but I can’t stay up there all day and leave you down here to do all the work. Look at the mess you get into.”
I almost slung some snark at him until I saw he was grinning. “Ha ha, too funny.”
So that’s what we did. Bertha worked. We cleaned the kitchen and then we both needed to bathe. It was a little freaky feeling but the warm water we heated on Bertha kinda offset that.
When we got clean I realized how dirty I had been. “I feel about 20 pounds lighter,” I said to make noise to cover how embarrassed I was about a guy getting naked on the other side of the screen we’d set up near the stove for the warmth.
The only response I got was a grunt and then a sigh as he stepped into his own warm bath.
I got the fidgets and then fled the scene before my curiosity got the better of me. An hour later Mack found me doing the stupid. Which stupid would that be? I was trying to do something with my hair.
“Any luck?” he asked making me jump.
“Make some noise or something. Don’t appreciate the potential heart attack from your sneaky feet.”
Mack nodded then knocked on the room door and asked, “Is her highness in residence?”
I gave him a grade A eye roll that would have even impressed my aunt and said, “Knock it off. Trying to deal with the fact that you’re right … again.”
“Explain.” I could tell he was in somewhat of a good mood – getting clean will do that. He was a little more relaxed than normal when I expected to be a little jacked up from everything else that had been going on. I know I was feeling jacked up and irritated despite getting clean. Like I said, Mack being right – again – was just one right too many for me to stomach at that moment.
But instead of handing him a load of snark I decided to practice my humanity and just explain. “I stand out too much. The hair. The clothes. If we have problems … or maybe if we don’t today but the problems are coming tomorrow or the next day … then the old me needs to be given a dirt bath and find a new me that isn’t quite so … so … stand out ish.”
“What brought this on?”
“My heebies.” When I saw he was waiting for more words I turned away from the mirror and sat on the floor facing him. “Look, I get it. I … I can’t stay a kidlet forever. Gotta do more than tell everyone that the street made me grow up. Gotta actually do the growing up and practice my adulting skills. I already admitted that Goth Girl had to go and I did get rid of some of her. And I hear what you’re saying as far as the clothes making me stand out. And I admit that some of it was … is … camouflage. But … but like the season is changing. I don’t mean to get all metaphorical and junk but … look, it’s just time.”
“And?”
“And I was trying to remember what my real hair color is under all the shades of the rainbow it is currently wearing … only I can’t. Geezzzz, gotta be a total idiot when you can’t even remember your own hair color. And just go away and don’t worry about it. I’ve got the heebies.”
I turned away and picked up yet another box of hair color trying to remember if that was the right color brown or not. I thought Mack had taken a hike when he startled me yet again by coming over and sitting on the floor not far from me using the wall to lean against.
“Define heebies.”
Chapter 13
“Define heebies,” Mack told me.
I shrugged. “You know … heebies. Skin crawling. Something just out of your line of sight but you know it’s there. The feeling of lightning in the air that makes your hair stand on end. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. Brain wanting to go too many directions at once and getting nowhere. Not enough to do to keep it all under control. Just … heebies.”
“That’s some description Sunshine. Do you have any idea what it’s from?”
I looked at him to see if he was yanking my chain. “Why do you care? Most people just think it is my crazy coming on and ignore me.”
“Look Winx, I was around too many truly crazy people not to be able to tell the difference. And, while you may be squirrely you aren’t crazy in the traditional sense. And I’ve been around you enough to know that if people had just paid attention they could have figured out your squirrely was usually caused by something specific at any given time it happened.”
“I don’t need to be psychoanalyzed.”
“Nope ‘cause you aren’t crazy. But whatever it is you have you need to pay attention to it and you need me to see if it is worth noticing this time. So give. Something is bothering you. For now I have the patience for it, might not have it in a few minutes so take advantage of the free while it is available.”
I looked at Mack to see if he was on the up and up and since he was as far as I could tell I decided I’d give this new thing a try.
“I know I need to change but I don’t want to change into someone I don’t recognize. That means some things go and some things stay. What needs to go is the camouflage because now instead of letting me disappear in a crowd it is going to make me stand out and get knocked down. But … but that’s not the heebies, it’s just what made me notice the heebies underneath what you call my normal squirrely-ness.”
Mack just looked at me, giving me time to get some place with my words.
“But change isn’t easy and … and I’m worried that changing the wrong way is gonna make me … make me … maybe not be able to … to stay free and independent. So I thought about it and then thought tough crap because I knew I could stay free and independent on my own, that it wasn’t me losing my free and independent so much as someone taking it from me.”
“Am I crimping your space?”
I sighed. “No. I gave it a thought to make sure but then decided it wasn’t even worth the thought I put into it because you feel the same way. You need out from under, and you need your free and independent, just for different reasons than me.”
“This going someplace?”
“Yeah. But like with just about everything else in my brain it takes the long way around to get there.” Feeling a little on the stupid side I finally got to it. “Look, for whatever reason all those other thoughts got me thinking about last night. Those containers. The military – or at least military vehicles – doing the dropping. Coming in with something but not leaving with anything. The fact that they are watching us … and them putting the fire out at the hotel is probably the most obvious example but there are bound to be others. Yesterday with the Commando Joe’s playing their games … whatever that could be. Look, something isn’t adding up and when I try to do the sum I just come up with gobbledygook. Problem is some of the gobbledygook is scary as crap. I don’t know if I’m reading too much into it … you know like you were saying with all the books I was reading … or if there really is a big bad wolf out there planning on eating us.”
“Us?”
“Yeah. It don’t feel personal as if your old group had a grudge on and coming after me. This … this feels bigger than them. It feels … icky big.”
“Icky big. Sunshine, you need to …”
“Look, you don’t want my explanation then don’t ask.” I hate it when someone asks for something and then complains when I give it to them. I got up to leave but he reached over and grabbed my arm.
“Stop running away. It didn’t work the first time and it isn’t going to help this time around either. I’m not riding you to be a bastard. I need some input if I am going to figure out if this needs to be addressed.”
I wanted to throw something at him and nearly did but he finally let go of my arm and I vacated to the other side of the room. A girl should be allowed to exert her space needs when she needs them but apparently Mack hasn’t figured that out yet and pretty much blocked me in like he did the night of the nightmares.
“Enough. Explain it. I’ll try and understand it the way you explain it but you’re going to need to meet me half way and at least try and explain it so I can understand.”
“Did that even make any sense what so ever?”
He just looked at me like he had the patience of … of … well nothing I’ve ever seen so I decided to let loose my brain on him and see what he made of it. “Fine. How’s this? Those stupid containers and what they might have been carrying scares me. It makes me want to hide like a meece in the wall. At the same time, it makes me want to double down on our salvaging because something tells me it is now or never. But … but I know we have to be careful. We need to creep around like the meece and not get seen because someone might not be too happy with what we’re doing or they might take it into their heads that we’re a threat or who knows what they’ll think … or do. Because they might feel they have to do something about us if we catch their attention and that would mean at a bare minimum losing our free and independent. And probably a whole lot worse. So the hiding is fighting with the gotta get out and do something. And either way I can’t go around looking like I was the loser in a game of Color War. The hair needs to get quiet and so does the rest of me. Only I might be able to get the outside me quiet but it is pretty impossible to get the inside me quiet.”
Mack was quiet for a few minutes before nodding before surprising me by saying, “Got it. And … you’re right.”
I was so surprised that if my butt hadn’t already been on the floor I would have probably fallen down. “Huh? I am?”
“Yeah. You need to tone down your … er … old camouflage and create some new that works for you in a different way for a different reason. As for the rest? We can’t change what has already happened. We can’t change what is currently happening. More than likely we can’t even change what is coming down the road. However, we can be proactive and not just reactive. Let’s make a modified inventory, try and plan out how long it will last, and then build a plan to address any holes we find and … and some type of continuity plan.”
“Continuity? You mean like how to make do when the salvage runs out?”
“Yes,” he answered surprised that I went right for the jugular of the problem.
Chapter 14
Hours later we both needed another bath but for a good reason rather than a stupid one like an antique stove upchucking soot all over everything.
Obviously aggravated Mack said, “We need more.”
“More what?”
“More everything. Despite all the work we’ve been doing there isn’t as much as I thought. Damn. Getting rid of all the packaging was a good idea but it sure did shrink things down.”
“Okay, but we’ve got enough to last through the end of the year at least … so long as there are no disasters or additions to our group of two. Probably longer than that if you don’t mind eating the same thing a lot and maybe some weird combinations. That’s more than we could say when you first got here and way more than I could say before that.”
“Winx …”
Now that I’d crawled up out of my funk – at least temporarily – I decided I wasn’t going to stand by and let Mack fall back down into his.
“I get it Mack. I’m not just being all stupid-kid and junk. All I’m saying is that we are way better off than we were … better off than I thought we were before we really went through things even though it isn’t as good as I was wanting it to be. I was kinda hoping that I was just being a sour puss but it is what it is. Yes, we need more. More of a lot of stuff and not just food. Well, now that we know let’s do that planning thing you were talking about. Let’s figure out how to get more and what to do when more runs out in case we can’t get more now.”
Mack rubbed his head like it hurt. Which it probably did because a couple of coolers fell on it when we tried to move too many at one time.
“Kid … Winx … look, if the Quarantine Zone is being used as a storage facility for every infected that is found on the outside, salvaging is going to get more dangerous than it has ever been.”
“Well, one, we don’t know if that is what is happening … that’s our worst-case and based on a lot of assumptions at that. So far we haven’t heard anyone complaining any more than normal about the number of infecteds they are seeing. Two, it’s always been dangerous. Take those yahoos with the EBRs we almost ran into.”
As Aunt Trudy would have said, Mack was starting to show his stress level. “Yeah, let’s take those men. Are they new additions or are they a group that is just getting organized? Or have they been here all along, well-organized, and we just got lucky and ran across them for the first time because they’ve got better security sense than the group I was in? Is their leadership better trained or do they even have any leadership? And if they do is it inside or outside the QZ.”
“Does it matter?”
“It might. What were they doing dammit?”
“They weren’t ‘doing’ anything really but walking down the road acting all large and in charge. Except you said they weren’t even doing that right. And I didn’t see a trailer for hauling stuff off if they were salvaging. I didn’t even see them really taking notice of what was in the stores. I didn’t see them going into stores to see what might be in there worth taking at a later date. They just looked – you know – like in the movies where they were clearing an area only they didn’t seem to see that there wasn’t any one to clear except us … and we cleared out before they could make us. They tried to look all big and bad and scary only they missed the mark. All in all, they didn’t look like they were doing anything too constructive but maybe practicing.”
My last sentence brought Mack’s head up and he looked at me hard. “Practicing. That’s exactly what they looked like they were doing. Let’s hope that’s all they do long enough for us to get done what we need to do.”
“Huh?”
“C’mon Sunshine. We need a list and a plan. Pronto.”
We took our notes back upstairs to the kitchen and sat down at the old trestle table that was in there. I grabbed a can of crackers, a slab of cheese, and one of those fancy summer sausages before we locked up the storage rooms and then put them on the table along with a knife to sliced things up with.
“You mind this for now? If you’re hungry later I’ll …”
“No, this is good. I can’t think on a full stomach; at least not about what we need to be thinking about. And too many carbs will put me out since we didn’t get much sleep last night. Protein is good.”
Aunt Trudy used to say the same kind of thing so I understood where he was coming from. I felt the same way and I’d learned on the street that carbs could be a killer when you needed to stay awake to stay safe.
He handed me a piece of paper. “Here. Make a list of things you know you are going to need. And don’t go all stupid on me like you did downstairs when I opened that trunk. You’re female. You need female stuff. So put it on the list. We have to be legitimate about this.”
“Fine,” I growled. “Just get over it already. I’m not used to living with guys who don’t turn the female reality into a big joke every chance they get.”
“Lived with many guys?”
I shrugged. “Shared space with a few … wait … okay, stop being nasty. No I didn’t have wild, monkey sex while on the street. Last freaking thing I needed was to get knocked up on top of all the other …”
“Hey … not what I was thinking,” he said after popping me in the head with the hat he’d put on to keep the dust out of his hair down in the cellar. “I just meant … oh hell, I don’t know what I meant Winx.”
It was my turn to grab his arm when he went to stand up and try and walk away. “You thinking about your sister? You thinking that maybe she isn’t as safe from this stuff as you thought? Cause if that is it, I’m worried about my family too. The difference is that you know your family is worried about you right back. Mine is … mine is … well, better off without me. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care what happens to them even if I can’t do anything about it.”
Mack finally stopped being so stiff and sat back down. I let go of his arm when he said, “New agreement … we don’t psychobabble each other into a real case of the crazies.”
Smiling I said, “Deal. So … girl stuff on the list.” I scribbled it down quickly before things got icky again. “We already talked about containers to store stuff in. And we also need stuff to keep the stink at bay too … deodorant, soap, mouthwash, all that kind of happy crap.”
“If possible we need to stick to unscented types.”
“Yeah, the smelly kinds attract bugs.”
Mack nodded but also added, “More than bugs, what it could attract are other people. If everything stinks and suddenly there’s something or someone that doesn’t, it will stand out.”
“Like in the movies where the bad guys always seemed to give themselves away with cigarette smoke?”
A snort was my only answer until Mack nodded. “Yeah. Something like that but in real life that doesn’t happen hardly ever. It is more basic hygiene items that will do it … or really bad BO that stands out if you are tracking in the woods.”
“You got trained a lot in that stuff?” I said referring to some of the things he’d said since I’d met him.
“Not especially any more than the next soldier but I was considering applying for additional training opportunities. Now let’s stay on track.”
“I sorta am. I told you I know I need a new me … could you … you know … teach me some of that stuff? The tracking and the … the other stuff?”
“Why?” he asked suspiciously, like I might be making fun of him.
“Because. More people means putting the extra effort in. More infecteds means putting the extra effort in. Better me means putting the extra effort in.”
Mack gave it some thought and said, “We’ll see. For now let’s focus on the list.
Chapter 15
Been about a week since we began work on the list and then trying to make it happen. We’re having to work the opposite side of town which limits our options but what is going on in the parts of town we were working would limit our options even more. Mack calls listening to the radio an “exercise in frustration” but we have managed to figure a few things out.
First off, there is no more “Dylan’s Group.” It isn’t even Detective Cash’s group, or any kind of autonomous group. They’ve been … absorbed I guess you could say; or maybe taken over, it’s hard to tell. Maybe absorbed with prejudice or some junk like that. By this para-military survivor group that don’t even bother calling themselves a name. We just call them “Them”.
A funny thing. Mack and I have similar tastes when it comes to movies. The Grade B movies from the 1950s are the absolute best. There was this one movie about a nuclear test out in the desert and it causes ants to grow ginormous. The movie was called “Them!”. It was weird … not the movie although I suppose some people would think it was … no, what was weird was finding out that Mack and I had it in common. And, that we both thought of the movie about the giant ants when we were trying to come up with a code name for the new group. Now Mack is trying to figure a way to hook up a computer so we can use the DVD drive to watch some movies … and maybe type up our lists instead of writing our fingers down to the middle knuckle.
Yeah, the list has become The List … like all caps and stuff. It gets longer a lot easier and faster than it gets any shorter.
Anyway, the reason we are working the other side of the QZ is because of “Them.” Okay, so maybe it is kind of stupid to call them giant ants but that’s about the size of it. Oh for … never mind, too many puns. They are cleaning out and gathering up all of the stuff on that side of town and creating like a centralized something or other. Mack calls it a centralized base of operations and supply depot but the way people are moving in and out carrying stuff makes it look like an ant mound. They are super uber organized from what little we’ve seen – through these high-powered binoculars we found in a kids’ room of all places.
They’ve also got a lot of people over there. We don’t know who the “queen” is yet. But it has to be somebody big and from outside the QZ or why would the military be involved? I’m not sure it matters either way. We just need to get our share before they ransack the entire QZ area and hog it all. We are also worried that if we see what Mac calls the strategic advantages of our current location that the other guys will too and try and take it over which would likely mean we’d be pushed out in the process ‘cause no way either one of us would want to be “absorbed” like Mack’s former group has been.
Secondly, we saw what was in the containers. And it depends on where they dump the shipping container out. If they dump it in the stadium they’re Infecteds. There’s not a lot of them but given there shouldn’t be any Infecteds coming in it is super creepy and worrying as heck. If they dump the storage container out in this other area that’s been fenced off then the people aren’t full-blown Infecteds but they gotta be something because most of them are coming in wearing hospital gowns or some kind of skimpy scrubs. Too soon to tell what it means but at least we aren’t completely blind to what is going on. But we don’t spend all day worrying about it; too much to do. All we can do is be grateful the contents weren’t as bad as the worst-case scenarios was that we were imagining.
We aren’t doing too badly under the circumstances. It takes more time going house to house and going through the few, small businesses there are but we are getting a decent haul. Longer doesn’t always mean less over all. Containers to hold the stuff is still a problem we are dealing with. We are having to use wooden containers for some things – like for the barter cigs and cigars that Mack insisted on bringing back from this one shop – and we are using plastic to hold a few of the non-perishable items like matches, lighters, and batteries. I find at least one or two aluminum tins and metal canisters in every house, and surprisingly quite a few ceramic cookie jars too but not too many big containers like trunks to hold bulkier items like clothes. We fixed that problem by bringing back a couple of cedar chests that we put mothballs in to hopefully drive off any infestations or whatever you want to call that sort of thing. Regardless of what it is properly called we don’t want it happening.
We also have a couple of those chests for blankets, towels, and other kinds of linens. I was getting irritated at the mess until in this one travel and luggage store I spotted those space-saver bags that you can squish the air out of so that like this big pile of clothes and junk squish down into this really tight, hard thin slab. That saved a ton of room so now I’m also on the lookout for more of those types of storage bags to squish down everything before it gets stored in another container.
Plastic wrap, aluminum foil, waxed paper, Ziploc bags, parchment paper, muffin cups, writing tablets, pens and pencils, pins, manual can openers, bottle openers, cork screws, and the list goes on and on. I’ve stopped asking Mack why he wants so many of every item. The only answer I really get is, “Two is one and one is none.” I finally figured out what he meant but we’ve got way more than two of most everything. I won’t hassle him about it though because he’s been agreeable about me scrambling through attic areas and sheds looking for more solar powered items and manual tools.
Mack is also going through any of the valuables that got left behind accidentally or because there wasn’t anyone to claim them. I don’t like it, it feels bogus. I never did it even on the street. But Mack said we aren’t stealing, we’re and I quote “securing assets.” He dumps the best of the best stuff that he finds into these big, fat envelopes that he then writes the address on that the stuff came from and tapes it shut. He’s got a couple of reasons for doing it. One, if there isn’t anything for “Them” to come salvaging for maybe they’ll avoid this area as a waste of time. Two, maybe at some point we can “leverage” what we find so that the owners that are outside of the QZ will give us a hand to get their stuff back.
“That sounds like blackmail,” I told him after he explained it the first time.
“Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t but every little bit could help.”
Well at least he is being honest about it. I still leave it to him to handle that stuff. Mack says that might be best anyway so that one of us has plausible deniability. And isn’t that a hunk of junk to wrap you brain around.
Now away from the icky thoughts and back to the list and the plan. Both Mack and I have pretty much found all we need for cold weather gear, assuming a normal winter. I spent last winter on the street; didn’t want to do it again but looks like that is exactly what is going to happen. I know how cold this big ol’ barn of a house can get but Mack is figuring on a way to maximize our personal BTUs … whatever the heck that means. All of the cocoa and coffee and teas we’ve found will help with that as long as I can get water and heat it up.
What has been hit or miss is actual food. We’ve found some junk, some booze, but real food hasn’t been as easy to find when we were hitting stores though there has been some. This one house had all sorts of stuff in it. Lots of canned specialty stuff, none of it I had ever seen on the shelf of a grocery store that I can remember. Mack said it was all international foods. It was organized that way too … every couple of cabinets had a different type of food in there … Spanish, Caribbean, stuff from the UK, Greek food, Asian, and some really weird stuff too. I can handle weird, beats dumpster diving. Besides, nothing beats the weirdness of eating bugs. Yes bugs. That’s what Mack told me about. We were basically trying to out gross each other.
“Oh yes I have too eaten snake.”
“Suuuure you have Sunshine.”
“Okay, what part of my dad being mostly Cherokee and liking to hunt and do all that other stuff did you not understand?”
“Used to having it freak out your aunt’s friends are you?”
He caught on too quick and I slumped in defeat. “Fine. Yeah, I used to like to freak the geeks. But I really have eaten snake. Dad dared me to and well …” I was smiling at the memories then they started to hurt too bad.
“Grubs.”
“Uh … wha?”
“I had to hunt and eat grubs on one of my wilderness training exercises. They were this putrid almost transparent white and they were fat and …”
“Ew. Stop! That’s … that’s disgusting!”
I wound up laughing again and he grinned. I don’t know if he thought it was funny so much as he was just glad I wasn’t going to go all depressed and goth on him. I still have those days. I try to get over myself using all those so-called behavioral techniques Aunt Trudy insisted on trying to teach me, but it doesn’t always work. Maybe with practice.
Chapter 16
Whatever the trouble is it might be growing. They’ve increased the number of CH54’s … those helicopter cranes or crane helicopters. Whatever. Those flying container holders. Mack also says they have “beefed up their sec around the ones in hospital garb.” Yeah, he totally used the words “beefed” and “sec” which I gotta tell you was irritating in and of itself. His attitude when he said it wasn’t exactly great either. It took him a day to relax enough that he agreed he couldn’t keep me under house arrest. It isn’t that I don’t appreciate his total guy-ness but it isn’t the easiest thing to live with on a day to day, you know?
We can’t watch what is going on over there 24/7. It would be impossible and still get the stuff done we need to do. That means I’m not sure why they’ve “beefed up security” around a bunch of people that look too wasted to be much trouble for anyone. I don’t understand why they even have them caged up. I mean yeah, they look pretty groady in a I’ve-been-in-the-hospital-way-too-long-under-the-thumb-of-Mengele kind of way but I didn’t look all that great when I was wandering around in quarantine trying to keep the back of my paper gown from flying open and mooning the world either.
Mack said to stop worrying it to death and focus on what we can do something about right now. So that’s what I’m going to do. Stop freaking and start focusing on the here and now. Which I gotta admit is getting scary in its own way too. Having to do all this moving around in the dark. Worried I’m going to run into a bunch of infecteds who have bedded down until they can see again. Barely able to see more than few feet in front of us ourselves unless we are wearing the night vision goggles.
Oh yeah, about those goggles. Found them in this house that was just full of not-approved-for-public-consumption type stuff. I mean whoever lived there must have been on a permanent vacation to Fantasyland even before he took a permanent sharp turn into Crazyland. Now I’m not talking about your run of the mill crazy. Oh no my friend. I am talking about what Aunt Trudy would call someone that needed a check up from the neck up … a full blown, out the whazoo, off the hook, kook. I know that doesn’t sound too bad but for my aunt to call someone a kook they had to basically be nucking futs and you shouldn’t have too much trouble figuring out what I mean by that.
Why do I think that about the property owner? Okay, how about a freaking bazooka in the bathroom? And that isn’t all but it is the only one that I can say with certainty that I got the name of correct … or close to correct. Of course Mack knew what all of the hardware was but he told me it was a waste of time for me to try and memorize all of the designations. Trust me, that thing may have had some official letters and numbers for the uber military geeks but to us civilians it was a bazooka … and I ain’t talking about the gum. Besides, Mack said most of it was inoperable.
“What?! But … this place looks like … I don’t know what … like a military museum slash a ufologists wet dream!”
He gave me a look that I was stepping a little close to my flavor of crazy and told me, “I’m sure I don’t want to know what a ufologist is but you can relax, they’re just props Sunshine.” Of course, about that moment is when he tossed the grenade to me and I about wet myself … and worse … while I tossed it around like I was juggling the darn thing as if our lives depended on it.
Heck of a time for Mack to find his sense of humor bone. He couldn’t stop laughing, not even after I hit him with a sofa pillow a bunch of times. He took me down at the knees and still kept chuckling but I was so mad I nearly went totally girl on him. The only thing that stopped me from crying is that I caught the giggles from him not being able to stop laughing which was adding to the whole twilight zone experience. I still punched him a couple of times but it didn’t seem to phase him.
Having had enough of being laughed at I told him, “Paybacks are absolute hell. You got that?!”
“Yeah, yeah. Bring it Princess Pain-in-the-Ass. You’re not so much.”
“Ah, but you only think you know me. You actually only know the relatively new and improved me. You don’t know what I was like before. I could be totally evil and hormonal.”
He stopped and gave it some consideration before standing up and pulling me up. “Eh, you’re not so bad. Pain in the ass yes. Evil and hormonal … nah. Trust me, my ex was evil and hormonal and you got a long way to go before you even come close to that level of bitchiness.”
Of course my brain would take that moment to go “Squirrel!” and I completely dropped the just-had-a-fake-grenade-thrown-at-me incident in favor of something more immediately interesting.
“Wait. You have an ex?! What the heck?! You never told me you had an ex. Spill it!”
That’s when we heard something. The something was something we shouldn’t have been hearing. And we certainly shouldn’t have heard the something coming from inside the house. As was our habit – which basically means Mack insists and never forgets even when I sometimes do – we had checked the house top to bottom before we started salvaging. See, the something sounded like talking only the talking wasn’t making a whole lot of sense. And it was coming from the next room.
Down I went onto the sofa cushions strewn all over the floor courtesy of our recent “pillow fight.” Of course I didn’t really go down without a little help. I wanted to tell Mack that I was ducking already but it kinda wasn’t the moment to get into that argument. Especially not with the guy covering me with his own body. It was a cross between annoying and oh-my-gawd-there-is-a-hot-guy-on-me-trying-to-protect-me kinda thing. I had to force the feelings to stop taking up room in my brain so I would have room to think about more immediate dangers.
Mack finally got off of me and belly crawled towards the entrance to the room the sound was coming from. I followed as his back up. Or at least that’s what I call what I was doing. Mostly I refused to be left behind. Mack had his gun out and I had out my mini-cross bow. Mack made fun of my crossbow until that day. That’s when I showed him that even if it was designed to be a sort of toy, it still had 80 lbs. of pressure and could throw an aluminum dart that could do some damage. The fact that it had the body of a pistol and was self-cocking were bonuses in my opinion. That and that it was nearly silent so long as I kept all the moving parts greased and that I was accurate to almost 100 yards after a few adjustments and reasonable amount of practice. And no I’m not bragging … just saying, you know?
There wasn’t much light in that room so it took a while for us to figure out what the guy was doing. Took a few moments to figure out it was a guy but I’ll get to that part. Talk about bizarre. He was taking chewing gum out of wrappers, tossing the Wrigley Spearmint in the garbage and then gluing the aluminum wrapper to the windows and walls like papier-mâché. It was totally like being inside a half-finished aluminum piñata.
Then the guy started mumbling again. “Yeah buddy. Hit paydirt this time. Don’t have to settle for using rolls. Nope. Got enough to get the overlap just right. Keep ‘em out. Oh yeah. They aren’t going to be able to make it through this layer design. Not like last time. Uh uh.” Then he starts humming Wizards in Winter by Trans-Siberian Railroad beneath his breath.
Now both Mack and I have experience dealing with your average crazy type person; the streets and half-way houses are full of folks like that. Usually it is just a matter of avoiding setting off the nuclear brain melt downs some of them have and letting the rest of them be who they are so long as they aren’t dangerous. But something about this guy was just icking us both.
The gluing and the singing were bad enough but this guy was dressed up as Squirrel Girl’s sidekick Monkey Joe. Please don’t ask me how I knew what the get up the guy was wearing was supposed to be. It is more than embarrassing. Let’s just say that sometimes you think you’ve found a normal friend and when you get to know them you find they are at least one or two fries short of a happy meal and you wind up getting dragged all too willingly into their psychosis for a while.
The squirrel costume was pretty realistic; looked like a custom fit job too … and no, I don’t want to have to explain it and deal with all the nut puns. Mack’s later remarks are already too much of a skid mark in my memory banks.
All in all Mack and I would have considered the guy a non-threat and removed ourselves from his place but then we got a good look at his eyes. I knew right away what we were looking at. An Inbetweener … and one that was starting to tilt into the violent side of the equation. Mack and I are both immune to the virus but an Infected can still cause us damage. Being immune doesn’t make you stainless steel for cripes sake.
The reason why I am trying to emphasize that is because when someone that is infected takes it into their head to get violent they can rip stuff apart … seriously rip stuff apart … including rip people apart. I’ve seen it. It’s not the least pleasant. I used to carry this prod around that Animal Control would use on freaked out animals to take them down. It worked pretty well on an Infected; short circuited their immediate need to beat the crap out of whatever was in front of them, namely me. Unfortunately, it ran out of juice and I still haven’t figured out how to get it back up and running. The bang sticks that use pressurized air canisters are good to use too but they make a lot of noise. The point being is to not have to get up close and personal while making as little noise as possible so you don’t draw more of them. Not the easiest goal to attain.
I guess I’m writing all of this trying to rationalize or justify … or avoid … what went down. Infecteds aren’t zombies; they are living, breathing people. They’re just dangerous, violent, permanently brain damaged people. You can try to avoid them for the most part, but you still have to be prepared in case you can’t. When you do something to them to make them leave you alone you are doing it to a real live human being and not some spook from a scary movie or a character in a vid game. Their blood is just as real and important to their life as it is for an uninfected. Oxygen is just as necessary for them. And when they die they don’t get up and wander around looking for their next victim to snack on. There is fantasy and then there is reality. Zombies are fantasy. Infecteds are reality … they’re real, live humans and all that that means.
I still don’t know what gave us away. He hadn’t paid any attention to us when we were wrestling around near the sofa. Why did that not draw his attention and instead when we were silent, didn’t have on any kind of smelly stuff, it totally sparked his notice? Whatever it was the guy suddenly flipped his switch and jerked around and got super hyper focused.
I wasn’t even sure if he could see us because his eyes already had that weird kind of glaucoma sheen to them when they are hit by light. The house was dim and we were down low to the floor; somehow though he knew we were there. Then it is like he leapt at us making some kind of chittering noise. Seriously. Like a squirrel … maybe a rabid squirrel but definitely a squirrel.
I’m good with a bow. It was a gag between my dad and I. Him being half Cherokee and the stereotypes and all that. Yes, he really did teach me to hunt with a bow but the practicing to be good was really about being able to freak out some of Mom’s weirder friends with our stunt shooting. I know what my limitations are for bow hunting … for using a bow in general. Bows can be deadly but usually only if you aim at the right spot to hit something vital. I’d gotten used to Mack being large and in charge with his gun but something went snafu on us. Mack shooting the crazy guy should have stopped him cold but all it did was hack him off more. They were solid body shots too. When the Inbetweener got back up – yes, that completely freaked me out – and started that rabid squirrel act I … I just did what I did. I shot the guy with my crossbow. The dart went deep into his eye socket and into his brain. The frontal lobotomy took the guy down, the resulting shock took him out.
I’d like to say I felt something about it but at the time I didn’t. I mean I did but it was kinda far off and other stuff was in the way of it reaching me. Maybe my own shock had set in.
“Winx … hey Winx. Show me those amber marbles Sunshine.”
“Stop Mack. I’ll deal. Just don’t treat me like a kid and junk.”
After a moment Mack said, “Okay. I still want you to look at me.” When I did he said, “The guy would have hurt one or both of us … maybe killed one or both of us. He was infected.”
“He was an Inbetweener.”
“Maybe so but he was going downhill fast.”
“We were in his territory. We said we’d avoid that kind of sitch when possible.”
“Yes we were and yes we did, but he wasn’t around when we checked. That’s not why he attacked us.”
I sighed. “Yeah. I get it.”
“Do you?”
“What you’re saying is that I had two choices. One, let him get back up and attack us again. Or two, neutralize him. I picked number two and you don’t want me to come unglued about it because it was about survival and only about survival.”
“That’s right Winx. Just try and focus on that and don’t beat yourself to shit. Doesn’t change things and it sure as hell doesn’t help anything. Got it?”
“Yeah. Got it.”
“Still feel like shit?”
Trying to be honest I admitted, “Pretty much.”
Mac gave me a one-armed hug surprising the heck out of me. “You will for a while. That’s what makes us different from the Infecteds. Just don’t let those feelings take over and eat you alive.”
Curiously I asked, “Experience talking?”
“Some.” After a moment he asked, “You up for salvaging or you want to head back?”
I thought about it. “Let’s keep going. I can’t run and hide every time something bad comes along.”
“No you can’t Winx. Now stay frosty. I need to see how he got in without us noticing.” Yeah, he actually said frosty. I could have hit him with the sofa pillow again.
Chapter 17
Turns out the guy didn’t get in, he was already in; he’d just come out of the place he was in. He had an honest to gawd panic room like in the movies and crap. Mack wouldn’t let either one of us go in until he’d jammed the door open. Since we didn’t know the trick, and it wasn’t obvious, we decided not to take the chance of getting locked in.
Now I can totally get behind the idea of having a safe room that is full of stuff that helps your survival. But whatever was this guy’s problem it went way beyond what you might call a normal anxiety level. Talk about your serious case of paranoia. Where the stuff in the house proper was mostly fake, none of the stuff in the panic room was anything other than way too real. Mack kept telling me, “Don’t touch that. Or that. No, don’t touch that either.” Ugh. You know it isn’t like I wasn’t on my own for a while, knew nothing about guns, or whatever. I certainly wasn’t suddenly going to start playing tiddly winks with the knives or hot potato with the high explosives. I do have some commonsense, and occasionally even use it.
Anyway, while he was trying to figure out if there were any booby traps I decided to go through the boxes and baskets piled high and deep on the far end of the room.
“Might know why we are finding so little food.”
“Huh?” Mack responded finally paying attention to something other than the ammo dump in the opposite corner from what I was doing.
“Monkey Joe must have been salvaging from the beginning.”
“Who?” That’s when I had to explain the whole costume thing only Mack said, “Forget it. Explain the head case to me later. Right now we got us a problem to figure out.”
“I don’t think it will be all that hard to haul back. I mean it will take more than one trip but that’s not a problem.”
Mack just stood and looked at me before shaking his head. “The weapons Winx, not the food and other supplies. If we leave them we take the chance of two things … ‘Them’ finding the whole lot and using the weapons against us or some of this stuff going off accidentally and starting a fire that would raze Old Town down taking us with it.”
“Er … so take the junk with us?”
“And put them where?”
“Hmmmm. Well there is one of those locking rooms under the caretaker’s cottage. We could put the most danger …”
“Whoa whoa whoa … there’s a what where?” So I explained. Then he got grumpy and asked, “And why didn’t I know about this?”
“Geez, I don’t know. It just wasn’t important. I stay out of the place because the building is still infested with meece … or maybe was since I don’t know for absolutely certain at the moment. I threw a bunch of poison in there and I haven’t checked since you and I decided to throw in together. The building is a mess and the place is unlivable.”
Mack looked like he wanted to get mad but decided to be mad some other time and started getting all the details. Basically, it was a smaller version of the room we were storing most of our supplies in. The door was just as secure just not as ornate (thank you Mr. Thesaurus since I’m tired of using the word fancy). The stairs down to the room were seriously crappy as they were rotten and covered in meece turds last time I checked.
“So you didn’t check it over completely.”
“Yeah I did. I got stuck down there during a storm and if you plan on going down there at night in the dark you’ll be doing it on your own. One nightmare per location is my limit.”
He turned on his heel and started ignoring me which told me he was pretty hacked off and trying to control it. Fine, maybe I should have mentioned the caretaker’s place at some point but it just hadn’t come up. I wasn’t ignoring it on purpose. I didn’t camouflage it or anything, he could see the building where it stood and must have walked by it I don’t know how many times doing his fence checking thing.
I went back to looking at the supplies and trying to prioritize what we should bring back first. I was deep into it when a hand on my arm nearly caused me a heart attack.
“Geez Mack. I swear I am going to get like bells or something for your sneaky feet.”
“Gotta catch me first,” he replied letting me know he wasn’t as hacked off as he had been earlier. “Look, any more hidey holes like that one?”
“The caretaker cottage? No … well yeah but they’re pretty obvious.”
“Humor me and tell me.”
“Well, remember when I said that sometimes finding the home of the pawn shop owners could be interesting? Two that I found had places down in their basements. Not historical like we have but like put in after the place was built. Once I figured out what I was looking for it was pretty easy to find them by matching inside to outside walls. The thing is they are rooms … sorta like this one though not as uber fancy. They aren’t safes; but, that still counts as a hidey hole in my book. And some of them do have safes in them; some I was able to get into and some I wasn’t. And if I found two rooms like that then there are probably others but they might be locked up and stuff.”
“Let’s go with the ones you did find.”
“Why?”
“Caching some of these explosives.”
“Why not use it?”
“For what?”
“I don’t know, making ‘Them’ leave us alone.”
“First off we don’t know if ‘Them’ even know about us. They could, but they don’t consider us enough of a threat to take action against. I don’t think we are in a position to become a threat that needs to be noticed.”
“Uh … I … I guess. Okay fine, I get it, this isn’t a war movie. So what do you want to do with the stuff that goes boom?”
“Secure it just in case we need it but in such a way that has to lower the risk of having it. We want to maintain access to it as it is a possible resource but we want to store it in a bunker like setting to minimize any danger to our current position.”
And that’s what we’ve done. Well we did with a little help from the Bomb Squad’s box for splodey things.
Chapter 18
I knew where the bomb squad kept their equipment because we’d had a bomb scare at school and we all got a long lecture on blah, blah, blah. About the only thing I remember besides wanting to know how adults could be fooled by some hotdogs with a playdough watch wrapped around them, is essentially it makes everyone really cranky to be fooled by an art project and don’t let it happen again. It wasn’t my art project but someone tried to claim I was in on it and there was one more stink in a long line of stinks and maybe it wasn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back but it sure didn’t help things.
Anyway, we were going to have to hold a fundraiser to pay for the false alarm since they had to bring their equipment in from their old rickety warehouse which was a major hassle for them yada, yada, yada. I ran away not too long after that but curiosity eventually won over boredom – you would not believe how boring being homeless can be – so one day I just went looking for the warehouse and wonder of wonders it was right where the civics teacher had said it was … in the old volunteer fire department’s Old Town station in the heart of the historic district. Which if you think about it is way beyond stupid. Who wants splodey things in the historic district where all the tourists are? That’s not all we found there and Mack was scratching his head trying to figure out why it hadn’t already been ransacked.
“Well, most people think it is just a museum.”
It was one of our first night runs with the goggles and other night vision crap Monkey Joe had in his place. Traveling at night makes Mack cranky. If you think a person with two good eyes has a hard time adjusting to that gear just imagine how rough it is on him. I make double sure that I stay out of his blind side.
Anyway, there were other gadgets and gizmos and equipment that made Mack drool and it all came back to the Loudon place. The other thing that came back is stuff from all of the bistros and tourist traps on the street that bisects the historic district. Yeah, I used the word bisect … bite me. Mr. Thesaurus has become a regular companion when I take the time to sit down and write. The deal is I’m trying to follow through on some inside self-improvement, and not just the exterior stuff. Not sure how much good it is going to do but … boredom and me should not exist in the same dimension any more than absolutely necessary. Monkey Joe’s stash isn’t the only splodey thing when Winx gets bored for too long.
We didn’t just salvage the obvious spots; there were a couple of high-end boutiques and vintage shops that Mack didn’t have a problem with me gathering stuff out of since I was using it to keep the stuff he took from some of the restaurants in the area from clinking. There were a couple of antique malls down that way as well that has some nifty neato old crap in it like books, tools, dishes, and I’m not going to sit down and list it all. Why would we take junk like that when we never had before?
“Sunshine, we’re gonna need something to take care of the squirrely feelings when winter shuts us in.”
“Okay, maybe the idea of playing dress up doesn’t totally bug me but what’s with all the stuff you are grabbing? There’s only two of us. Why take all those dishes? Especially all that expensive stuff? And why take the paint and fix-it-up stuff?”
Mack didn’t answer for a minute, almost to the point I didn’t think he was going to. Then he said something that got my own brain working. “Different kind of dress up I guess. I’ve been looking around that old house and wondering what it was like before it was let go to crap. No way can we take it back to what it used to be but …” He shrugged. “It isn’t hurting anything to see what it could be like. Plus, filling up some of the empty spaces will help hold the heat in when it gets cold. I’m getting tired of camping out … we start with the kitchen then … ”
“Then what?”
“That room that is between where we sleep. We …” He sputtered to a stop and I got suspicious.
“Come on Mack, give on the ideas already. Remember, it is a really good thing to keep the squirrelys at bay, especially my squirrelys that could go rabid on your squirrelys and then we’d wind up making a mess we don’t need to.”
Mack just looked at me before sighing and saying, “We could set that middle room up with some furniture, get us up off the floor. The fireplace works in there and the flue is clean. I’ve checked it out but we can have as many extinguishers in there as you want.”
“Uh … okay. And I know the fireplaces that are open work and the ones that have those decorative boards covering them up don’t. That was one of the things they did during the temporary eviction … that and gut some of the bathrooms; excuuuuse me dahling, the wahter closets.”
“Winx …”
“Sorry. Interruption over.”
“Hmmm,” he said eyeing me like he didn’t believe I could keep my mouth shut for long. Which … well … yeah, whatever. Mack decided to take a chance anyway and asked, “Remember that furniture store off of Main St.?”
“Yeah, the one that looked like a cross between Ikea and Scandanavian Designs?”
“Uh … the one that had the furniture you have to build yourself.”
“Yep, that’s the store. Some of Aunt Trudy’s hypocrite friends go uber crazy for that stuff.”
“I know I’m going to regret asking …”
“Why are they hypocrites?” At Mack’s nod I told him, “Because they were all like save the planet and junk but when I suggested they get furniture at the thrift store or consignment shop they’d get all snotty about it and then go spend money on the very things they were complaining about. That kind of stuff used to drive Aunt Trudy buggy too.”
“Let’s not turn this into crap like that. I mentioned that store because the furniture in the back is in boxes that we can take back to the house and put together ourselves. Easier to transport and haul up those damn stairs than if we were grabbing stuff already built.”
“Oh. Well yeah, that’s a good thing I guess.” I gave it some thought and added, “We probably won’t even get in trouble over all the stuff we are moving around. The radio said the insurance companies are writing off Old Town as a total loss.”
“What the hell do you know about insurance?” Mack laughed.
“My Aunt Trudy worked in one … I mean an insurance office. And yeah, I know you expected that she worked in some kind of hippy flower-child, crystals-and-tarot cards type place but don’t forget I also told you she had a practical side. It is why Dad had made her …” Then it just wasn’t funny anymore.
“Sunshine? Winx?”
“I heard Mom and Dad arguing about it one time. Mom wanted her brother Uncle Kirk to be our guardian if anything happened to them and Dad said no and wanted Aunt Trudy. I mean most people would have thought it would have been the opposite ‘cause Uncle Kirk was super straight.”
“First I’m hearing about any other family.”
“That’s because no other family really wanted anything to do with me. I was angry all the time. Said some nasty things. Basically was an uber jerk that everyone else thought belonged in a special school for troubled girls. Aunt Trudy is the only one that believed I would come out of it and look how I treated her and … and I don’t want to talk about it. I’m gonna go get that box of whatever it was that you said you wanted and …”
Mack let me walk off and I was glad. It sucks remembering all the stupid things I’ve done and knowing there is no way to fix it.
Chapter 19
“Can’t sleep?”
“One of these days I’m going to do something about those sneaky feet,” I mumbled as I tried to stop shaking.
“I’m not the one sneaking around. What the hell is up with you wandering around in the damn house? We agreed we were taking a night off. You know what time it is?”
“Sorry. I was trying to be quiet. I’ll stay out of your hair.”
I guess he didn’t like that I had turned to go someplace else because he grabbed my arm and with my luck he grabbed right where the worst bruise was and I near about passed out. For a one-eyed man Mack is pretty slick. He had his head lamp on so he could see what the problem was. When he saw it he snapped, “What the hell … when did this happen?!”
“When did what happen?” I answered trying to play it off. Yeah, I know that was an idiot move but it was all I had at the time.
“Winx … dammit. You told me those guys didn’t … Come here so I can turn on the lantern and have more light.”
“No!”
There was a tussle and then I don’t remember much for a while.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We couldn’t stay lucky forever. It would have been against the laws of nature or karma or some crap like that. It really wasn’t anyone’s fault. Not even mine, for once. We were just minding our own business, doing what we were doing, which that night was trying to salvage in an area almost to the backside of the quarantine zone … and do it without being seen. It was a moonless night and the guards that patrolled the fence in that area couldn’t see beyond their spotlights. Only they weren’t your regular spotlights, but were some kind of weird green to keep from giving the Infecteds something to see by. It was also pretty dang cold, though it is getting that every night is pretty dang cold.
We do almost all of our salvaging at night these days. Not that there is all that many places left to salvage from. Sure, we make small finds of food a couple of times a week but most of the stuff we bring back now is stuff no one else seems to have thought about salvaging … or so we thought.
We’d changed from working in a grid plan to working in a spiral pattern. Sometimes the spirals were big and sometimes just barely neighborhood-sized. It all depended on what we found and how early in the night we found it. We’d started doing it like that after we’d finished up with Main St. and the ritzy parts of Old Town to keep from being too predictable. That night our stop was the big Methodist Church. Mack and I had avoided churches up to that point because frankly it gave us both the heebies.
“Okay Sunshine, we go in, take a quick look, then get out and go on as fast as possible. You ever been inside this one?”
“Not to flop. About once a month some mission that advertised they were from this church would come downtown and hand out sandwiches and bottles of water. Sometimes they’d change it up and they’d have soup or spaghetti they’d serve out of the back of a food truck. They’d want you to listen to their spiel, hook you up with social services, try and sign you up for counseling or job training or something along those lines, but all they really made you do is put your trash into recycling bins. They did have this food bank though that if you came to the church – it was only for families that hadn’t hit the streets yet – they’d give you a box of food that would last about a week if you were careful.”
I sensed rather than saw Mack nod. “Dylan had us hit a couple of food banks when things first started going downhill. This place might already be picked over.”
I agreed having the same feeling and told him, “Maybe. But we’ve got nothing else planned for tonight, might as well give it a look see. Something might have been overlooked … toilet paper, napkins, cleaning junk, stuff like that. Can never have too much TP and cleaning junk.”
Mack nodded and we made our way carefully around to the back, near the church offices. We turned the corner and suddenly something leaned out a window and tapped Mack hard and down he went. At the same time something grabbed my ankles and down I went. And before I could even think about screaming I was pulled through a church basement window and the night vision goggles got ripped off my face and something else got slapped across my face.
From that point the fight was on. I finally figured out that we hadn’t stumbled onto a nest of Infecteds. They were too quiet and too … purposeful, like they still had more than half a working brain. They were focused but not like an Infected after whatever it wanted to tear into. Besides, they started cussing when some of my moves worked. I grabbed one guy by his … er … well I didn’t mean to but sometimes you get lucky. Not that I felt lucky or that the guy was going to get lucky but I did put him out of commission for a few minutes with a serious hurt. I ripped the bag off of my head and tried to get my real night vision online.
What I saw by the light of a flashlight that had rolled away, was that there were three guys and they had on some kind of night goggles too. I started making it my mission to take theirs away since they’d taken mine. I kept fighting by kicking and wiggling even when one of them finally pinned my arms behind my back while another one gut punched me. If my mouth hadn’t been covered with duct tape I’m sure I would have puked.
I seriously hacked them off, especially the guy whose boy parts I had tried to mangle. They let me know they were going to teach me a lesson I wouldn’t forget. I was still bent over from the stomach pain when they knocked my feet from under me. I face planted and it knocked the wind out of me nearly as much as the gut punch had. I felt my jeans being dragged off and really started fighting. I wasn’t going to make it easy on them. That’s when I felt it.
No, not that though I did and it makes me want to hurl. No it was that the guy was lying on me trying to hold me still rather than just sitting on me. My arms were pinned behind me but my hands on those arms could still move. And the idiot had it in his waist band. A gun. I just grabbed it and then pulled the trigger.
It made a weird “whump” noise rather than an actual bang. I think the guy’s body must have acted almost like a silencer. All I know for certain is that the other two guys didn’t seem to have a clue what had just happened. They found out real quick though when I rolled enough to get the guy off of me and sit up with the gun aimed at them. They were too hopped up with adrenaline or something even though they weren’t Infected. They weren’t going to stop. They both reached for me and the stupid gun dry clicked. That stopped them but only so they could snicker at my predicament but they didn’t snicker for long. Just because a gun dry clicks once doesn’t mean it doesn’t still have bullets … Dad taught me that when he explained about the problems if ammo wasn’t properly reloaded. I pulled the trigger and this time the gun went off. The first one I shot looked at his chest like he couldn’t believe his reality. The last guy was practically in my face when the gun finally fired after a few more dry clicks. He died so fast he didn’t even have time to think about what a jerk he was.
I tore the tape off of my mouth – my lips are still tender where I took some skin off at the same time – and must have looked pretty spastic as I keep spinning and looking to make sure there were no more men. That’s when I heard a brawl outside.
It isn’t that I hadn’t wondered about Mack it is just I was too busy surviving to give it my full consideration. But I was starting to. I climbed back out the window – at least I think it was the same one – that I had been pulled through and could just make out three guys going at it. Using my rusty logic skills I knew that if Mack was one of those three and I wasn’t one of those three it was a two against one fight. My skills of observation told me however that though it was two against one, the two were getting their butts kicked.
Even knowing that I decided to join in and did so by grabbing a paver out of the flower bed and used it on Guy 1 since he was the one of the three that was too short and thick to be Mack. Once Guy 3 didn’t have to split his attention it took him only two moves to put Guy 2 down. Guy 3 was still full of adrenaline though so I stayed way back until Mack calmed down.
“The others?” he bit off before spitting what I eventually learned was blood into the bushes.
“Down. Not getting up. Ever.”
“Go around the side of the building Winx. Now.”
“No. I’m not made of glass and this is … just stop trying to protect me already and …”
We both heard a radio crackle at the same time and faded into the underbrush that had grown up over the summer and Autumn.
“Over here,” we heard a tinny voice say.
A group of five guys … Mack said they were organized in squad fashion whatever that means … made their way across the church parking lot. I could hear Mack’s teeth grinding though I got the wrong reason for it.
“Request a disposal,” the guy said who was the Squad Leader.
A guy that was carrying a honking big walkie talkie looking thing spoke into it and said some mumbo jumbo kind of stuff and then tacked on, “Requesting a disposal order for two.”
The radio answered, “Disposal not capture?”
“That is correct. Disposal order only.”
There was a moment of silence and then, “Disposal order granted. Standard protocol.”
I was still figuring out the mumbo part of the jumbo speak when I nearly jumped into Mack’s arms when the squad leader point-blank shot Guy 1 and Guy 2 execution style right before saying, “Bag and tag.”
I was pretty much in shock and started shaking. Mack let me hold onto him even though it couldn’t have been fun worrying whether I was going to freak out and give our position away but I knew to be quiet. This was how it was sometimes on the street. Sometimes you were the trap and sometimes you were the meece. At that moment I was feeling pretty meece-y and wished for a hole to crawl into.
Chapter 20
The squad leader sent two of his men into the basement after they’d taken a look through the window and spotted the three men down there. One of the team, squad, whatever … one of the men … jumped down through the window then crawled back out after a moment. “No need to call for disposal orders. Three bodies, all male, already dead … very recent based on lack of rigor and blood coagulation.”
One of the other men said, “Saw this bunch mouthing off to Kilgore. Knew they were going to be trouble because they were bitching about the curfew and having to turn over the required percentage to get a salvaging permit. Looks like they couldn’t even get along with each other.”
The squad leader was silent then said, “Bag ‘em. My report will say what it always does. They weren’t back before curfew. Search and rescue operation found them to have fought amongst themselves.”
“Think they have a salvaging stash? Commander might give us a percentage as a finder’s fee if we bring it back.”
“Doubt it. This is primarily a residential area and it was cleaned out at the beginning of the quarantine and evacuation operations. This whole side of Old Town was according to the reports from locals who went through here.”
Another guy added, “Wasn’t time for them to get much and not worth our time. We’re already going to have to cart these waste bags four blocks to the pick up point.”
They fell silent after that and eventually loaded the “bagged and tagged” dead men and headed off into the night. Thankfully opposite of the direction we needed to go.
My body picked that moment to realize it was out of get up and go. I was practically asleep in Mack’s arms. “Hey … hey Kid. Kid?” He cursed and then picked me up and carried me to the other side of the building. “Okay Winx, look at me Kid. Don’t force me to take unpleasant measures to bring you around.”
“S’ok. I … I’m okay. Turn a loose.”
“You sound drunk. You take a hit to the head?”
I was moving, trying to shake off whatever was happening. “No. Don’t think so.”
“What are you feeling? Are you hurt?”
“Don’t think so. Feels like a carb crash.”
“A carb what?”
“Crash. You know, you eat a candy bar and thirty minutes later you need a nap. A carb crash.”
“Got it,” he said finally understanding. “Adrenaline crash is probably what you’re feeling but I want you to stick close until we get back to …”
That did help wake me up more. “Wait. We came all this way, let’s check this place out first. Some reason those dummies were here.”
It only took Mack a moment to think about it. “You sure? We can head back right now. No harm, no foul.”
“I’m fine.” And that’s when he finally gets a good look at the state my clothes are in.
“Winx?”
“I said I’m fine.” He just kept checking me out without trying to check out too much of what was hanging out. I backed away a couple of steps and said, “They came, they saw, they tried to conquer … they failed. Law of the jungle turned out to be on my side for once.”
“Kid, don’t BS me. I was out, don’t know for how long. Was it long enough?”
“Uh uh. Like I said, they tried. They failed. Don’t want to go over all the blasted details if you don’t mind.”
“I do mind. But …” he sighed. “But I’ve run into enough females to know it’s gonna be useless to push you. You are already hot-wired to be contrary as hell.”
“Gee. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Just stay behind me in case.”
“In case what?”
He looked at me to see if my question was a serious one then just shook his head. “In case there are more where they came from.”
“Oh.”
I wasn’t trying to be Wonder Woman, Super Girl, She-ra, She-Hulk, or She-anything like that. I didn’t need to be the strongest or the toughest. I just didn’t want to be the weakest. I know. Sounds stupid. Does to me too. Now it does anyway. Then it was just the thought train I was on. I could not runaway. It wasn’t an option. I just couldn’t … I don’t know … I just couldn’t let them win. A jerk had already egged me on to ruining my life in the first place. Tad. Yeah it was my mistake but at the same time … oh I give up. All I know for sure is that my brain was getting what Tad did mixed up with what those guys tried to do. If I let those guys make me run it would be like what had happened to put me on the street to begin with.
Crawling back in through the basement window took a lot of whatever was keeping me on my feet but I didn’t let Mack know. I wanted to brush passed the blood on the floor and the drag marks that smeared it around but had to stop when my partner in crime wanted to investigate. He stopped after a couple of minutes, shook his head, and said in disgust, “I’m not a damn CSI. They’re dead. Good riddance. C’mon Sunshine let’s get you out of here.”
I appreciated the sentiment I guess but the hovering he did for the rest of the time we were in the building was hard to not make a fuss about. The only reason I managed to control the snark is because I was too busy trying to stay on my feet. The wobbles wanted to get me way too much. The wobbles my body was feeling and the wobbles my brain was going through.
In a back room in the basement we found their “camp”. Looked more like they were aiming for the Hilton type set up than Motel 6 basic economy class. Each guy had taken what was probably some kind of classroom and put some effort into fixing it up. They each had a sleeping bag, like you would expect, but they were just rolled up and tossed in a corner of each room. They’d found metal cots from some place and put mattresses on them – maybe like something out of a homeless shelter – but they’d dressed them up with what looked (and felt) like expensive sheets. I think one set was even satin. Weird.
Each room also held … well it was stuff. Electronics like computers, TVs, and stereos as well as the miscellaneous kind of crap that goes along with it … headphones, speakers, wires, yada, yada. Poking through things we found each guy had a little fire safe and Mack set those aside to take back with us. Each guy had a stash of clothes, hygiene garbage, high end cologne, and other odds and ends. They’d personalized each space in other ways too … posters (adventure types stuff like climbing or cars or guy-movies), pictures (personal and of the girly with no clothes variety), their favorite brand of booze and cigs if they used them … some pot in there as well.
After looking in each room Mack said, “These guys have used this location before. No way did they set this up in less than 24 hours.”
“They could have taken it over from someone that came before them,” I responded.
Mack looked at me and I could tell he was taking me seriously. “Possibly but one of the guys I was fighting said something like ‘you’re not the first to try and take our place and you’re gonna regret being the next’ which doesn’t make much sense unless …”
“Unless they’ve used this place for a while. Okay, I’ll buy your theory being better than mine. But what does it mean? If this was their place … maybe even part of a territory they claimed … why would they need the permission of whoever the heck the Commander is and why would they have to pay protection money, or percentage of their haul, just to go about doing what they’d obviously been doing before now?”
“Good question Sunshine. Ask another. Let’s finish up here. I don’t want to be around if those guys had been hit enough times that they were old hats at defending things. It could mean that as soon as word gets out, more people are going to show up.”
“Maybe. But think on this. What did those guys have that other people wanted so bad? Tons of buildings around here. The junk I’m seeing isn’t worth anything with no electric to run it. You don’t want to make a bunch of noise anyway because it could attract the wrong kind of attention.”
“Infecteds or the gangs.”
“Exactly. What could they have, out here in the middle of no-man’s-land, an area that apparently the big dogs think has already been picked over, that would still make people jealous enough that they’d fight to take it away?”
Slowly Mack nodded like he was thinking. “Not too many reasons or things could make people act like that. That is assuming that their … whatever it is …”
“Treasure. Whatever it is was or is something that your average person stuck in the QZ would consider treasure.”
“Fine, we’ll call it treasure,” he said obviously humoring me. “It is possible that they had a treasure but it got taken from them and that might be why … aw hell, let’s just look around and then get gone. We can talk it out back at Base.”
We hit the most obvious places first … kitchen, church nursery, church offices. Nada. After looking at a couple of more spots we were about to give it up when, while in the Sanctuary looking in the room behind the choir loft Mack spots something on the opposite wall. He just keeps looking and then nods for me to follow him. I’m still trying to figure out what he has spotted when he gets to the back of the sanctuary then looks up the back wall. That’s when I finally spot what he’d seen. It looked like the lens of a big movie camera stuck out of a gap designed for it.
Mack may have spotted the camera but I’m the one that found the hidden stairwell that led up to what turns out to be the church’s AV room and it was there we found the best of the stashes of “treasure” we found.
Food. At least up in that room. But only half of it was grocery type food … cans, boxes, plastic packages, that sort of thing. There were several cases of cooking oil, giant bottles of olive oil, cases of canned meats, lots of pastas and rice mixes, cases of dried and canned milk, cans of solid shortening, jars upon jars of jelly to go with the cases upon cases of peanut butter, and then all the canned veggies that you can imagine. There was a little coffee and tea, small bags of white sugar, bags of hard candies and boxes of cookies and crackers, lots of juice boxes, packets of drink mixes, rounds of salt, etc. Best guess is this is the stuff from the church’s food pantry. It’s the other stuff that made us go hmmmm but Mack thinks he has it figured out, or at least to the best of our ability to do so … or so says him.
He asked me if there was a Mormon church in the area and I thought about it and then said it wasn’t next door but there was one that would have been in the QZ if it hadn’t burned down. His response was that maybe it had been burned down on purpose. I shrugged since I’d never given it enough thought one way or the other.
Basically the reason for his question was that the food didn’t have fancy labels but was called something like “Provident Pantry” and was in these big honking #10 cans. Wasn’t regular grocery stuff either but was dried stuff like beans, carrots, wheat, oats, potato flakes, rice and macaroni, apple slices. There was even canned flour and canned sugar.
It was a bodacious haul but that wasn’t all. When I said these guys were sitting on a treasure they really were. There was a room off near where the preacher had his office if the plaque on the door is to be believed, which is where we found all of the hunting stuff. The problem is there is no hunting here in the QZ, at least not the animal kind so the cache of guns and stuff was kinda freaky. In the church secretary’s little cubbyhole we found the keys to the closet that held a bunch of hygiene stuff … in particular stuff for babies and females. We found where they normally kept the church money and maybe that was some of what was in there but not all … unless people had been sticking jewelry, loose gems, coins, and bars of precious metals in the offertory plate as it went by. Last but not least, in another room or office or whatever there were stacks and stacks of … Mack said they were industrial batteries or something called a “deep cycle” battery. Whatever. Mack got a charge out of finding them. Ha, ha, ha. Bad pun. Shows my brain is in disintegration mode I guess.
Anywho, by the time we’d hauled everything back to the Loudon House in several trips and my wobble, that had temporarily gone away because of the excitement of the finds, had come back. Lucky for me Mack was so tired he just thought I was too. He declared we’d rest and then take a night off of salvaging so we could rest and organize the haul and combine it in with the “treasure” we already had. Problem is my heebies and wobbles were conspiring against me and there was no way I could sleep.
Chapter 21
I tried to be quiet but within hours Mack had caught me up and around and trying to deal with my heebies. It’s not like I asked him to get into my business or anything. They’re my heebies, no one else’s. But I guess if you have to share space with someone sometimes you have to deal with their heebies plus your own.
I am not recording the beginning of that particular conversation for posterity because one, it was pointless and embarrassing; and two, because to be honest I can’t remember much of it.
Basically I spazzed for a while and wound up acting like I was completely jacked up. But Mack is persistent when in sheep dog mode, I’ll give him that. The worst of it was that he saw me crying. I haven’t cried in a long, long time but for some reason I couldn’t help it. Then we fell asleep. Together. I woke up twice, both times the arm he was holding me with tightened and he wouldn’t let go. One of the times he even mumbled in his sleep, “’S okay. Nothing is going to happen. I’m here.” And then I went back to sleep. Dumb huh. The third time I was alone. Well, not alone just Mack wasn’t with me.
I didn’t want to get up. I didn’t want to remember. It was like this after the fire. I didn’t want anyone to see me like this. But I also didn’t want to be alone. So, I got up and before I had to go looking for him he was just there and he had soup and crackers.
“Winx?”
“I’ll live.”
“Good. Just hope you feel the same after you eat this soup.”
I was still wobbly and looked away rather than risk Mack seeing me auditioning for the total-girl-idiot meme. Lucky for me Mack has gotten as good at reading my moods as I think I’ve gotten at reading his. Instead of him being too gentle or too rough he was “just right” and ate his own bowl of soup as I ate mine.
“Um …”
“Um what?”
I sighed. “I don’t want to talk it to death. But I also … look … thanks doesn’t even start to cover it. But I don’t know any better words that don’t make me sound completely pathetic. So … thanks. A bunch.”
He was quiet then said, “Your welcome Sunshine.”
We both finished eating and then I took the bowls down to the kitchen and he let me without making a fuss. Score one for me. I cleaned the bowls and then decided I needed cleaning. But when he saw me taking a bucket of water he said, “Can … er … can that wait? Until tonight? We need to get organized so we don’t have to use more pest control than usual.”
“Gawd yes,” I said deciding the bath could wait. “Do not want to ring the dinner bell for the meece. We are barely winning the war as it is.”
We spent the rest of the day organizing what we’d brought in. Normally it wasn’t that big of a deal. This time it really was. We started with the #10 cans since they were the bulkiest and took up the most shelf space. For freeze dried meats we have ground beef, diced chicken, meatballs, sausage crumbles, and dried roast beef. There are a couple of cans of fake bacon bits and a couple of cases of real canned bacon. I thought Mack was going to hug one of the cans so hard it was going to pop open. I mean I like my bacon as much as the next vegan indoctrinated gal I suppose, but Mack looked like he had found a long lost pal of some flavor … bacon-flavor of course. Doh.
On the other end of the spectrum are all the dried fruits and veggies and the super cool soup mixes: potato soup mix, green beans, corn, freeze dried tomatoes, broccoli, green peas, carots, tomato powder, spinach, mixed veggie dices, corn, hash browns, onion flakes, potato dices, dried cauliflower and celery (much to Mack’s disgust), potato flakes, green peppers, sweet potatoes, tomato bisque, potato chowder, dried refried beans, diced onions, and mushrooms, cream of chicken soup. There are dried raspberries, applesauce, strawberries, peaches, apple slices, blueberries, pineapple bits, banana slices, mixed berries, mango chunks, grapes, and several cans of fruit and yogurt drops. There were bags of freeze-dried slices of citrus like orange, lemon, and limes.
In our dairy aisle we have MRE squeeze cheese (something else that Mack did a weird snoopy dance about), buttermilk powder, yogurt powder, stuff they labeled powdered butter, powdered cheese (think the orange powder of death from cheap macaroni and cheese). Freeze dried cheeses like mozzarella and cheddar. Dried milk, powdered whey in different flavors like chocolate, strawberry, and orange creamsicle. Commercial size bags of powdered drinks like Tang and other fruit drinks …some in really weird flavors like pineapple-orange and strawberry-kiwi. We also added grains galore … wheat, rice, millet, and all of the fancy stuff Aunt Trudy used to buy by the truckload when she could get it on sale at the bulk food warehouse. Add to that oatmeal and cream of wheat in the biggest doggone sizes I’ve ever seen.
There were silly things like food powders in quantity that told me someone had knocked over one of those smoothie joints because most normal people don’t have twenty-pound bags of powdered beet or powdered pomegranate in ye ol’ kitchen. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what was in the green smoothie powdered after I read that one of the ingredients was kale. There was also freeze-dried cheesecake bites and freeze dried ice cream like they said the astronauts used to take to space with them. Then there were the expensive all-in-one meals. In Mountain House cans there was chicken fried rice, chicken and dumplings, beef stroganoff with noodles, beef stew, and chili mac.
And speaking of knocking over a health food store they even had stuff like Paula used to take to work like Palisade freeze dried paleo meals (pineapple mango pecan flaxseed breakfast was her favorite), the Peak Refuel freeze dried meals like you could find in the fancy camping sections, and freeze dried and packaged up vegan meals for the hipster crowd. There’s also a freaking freakton of salt and other stuff like pepper, bay leaves, curry, cinnamon, and all the rest of that kind of jazz.
I’m too zonked to list out the rest of the non-food items; let’s just say we need more galvanized trash cans only I’m not sure where to get any. Mac said that we need to go back to the furniture place as they had some useful stuff there and also said something about school lockers maybe but I kinda know I’m gonna need to make myself go if we do. I’m over whatever gave me the heebies but I can feel them lurking waiting to pounce like Monkey Joe … like those creeps did.
All I know is that we managed to organize the mess and get it under control, but we are really running out of storage space in the protected rooms. We can’t let that stop us from salvaging. Mac says he has some ideas, but my idea maker seems to be on the fritz. Not good.
Chapter 22 - 1
Haven’t had much time to doodle in this journal. Been busting my butt trying to keep up with Mack’s heebies. Or maybe not his heebies exactly, but how he deals with his heebies. And how does Mack deal with his heebies? By making a plan and sticking to it, even if it is at the cost of my desired amount of slumber time. Being on the street I learned to not need your standard eight hours of slumber. You can’t sleep until the predators are done for the night and you have to be up and away before the street sweepers and other cranky, early-morning commuters are moving around. But even I need more than I’ve been getting, and I can tell it is the same for Mack. We are both getting burnt and crispy around the edges.
We’ve been salvaging superheroes. Need to make matching camouflage t-shirts for us with giant, black, sparkly S’s on the chest. The look on Mack’s face when I handed it to him would be worth losing a couple more hours of sleep to pull it off. I could make matching capes too. Or not. I’ve got enough work to do. Did I mention we’re burnt and crispy around the edges?
Every night for the past three weeks we’ve been hitting specific locations on this list Mack has made by combing through a business yellow pages book he found at one of our earlier salvage locations. When we hit one of the places, we bring back everything that he thinks might be useful and that usually takes all night. Instead of getting up at the buttcrack of dawn, that’s when we are going to sleep. Or one of us is. We take turns and while one of us gets to hit the hay, the other one takes “first rotation” and does the guard thing to make sure no one followed us back.
The furniture store was the top of Mack’s list. So were a couple of restaurant supply locations we hadn’t hit up yet because they were in different areas we hadn’t gone into yet. Mack added several pool supply places to the list too. Office supply stores as well. We’ve also started grabbing more clothes as we find them. Something Mack cursed we hadn’t been doing before now. I mean we have a bit, but he was talking about serious clothes shopping. Right now all we have are in our sizes (mostly) but next week Mack wants to start adding other sizes. So far that hasn’t been a thing to happen but it is a thing – one of many – to worry about. Hence even though Winx is burnt and crispy she keeps chugging rather than throw a flaming hissy fit.
Found a couple of unexpected bonus stops in places that were being used as babysitting central or some kind of daycare facility. But we’ve been skipping houses because according to Mack we are trying to “maximize our time with places more likely to have provender and components we need.” That’s a quote just in case you missed it. I tell you when Mack gets in the mood to talk supply and logistics I have to give up on the idea of him speaking English because everything winds up in military-eeze. The one time I poked the bear about how he changes when his heebies get in the driver’s seat he responded, “Don’t talk Sunshine. At least I make sense the first time around. The sooner we get our needs taken care of the better. Then we can go back to your ‘heebies’ driving me up a wall with hair dyes, eating stuff I’ve never heard of, and weird ass word circles.” So yeah, Mack’s a little crankier than normal but since it is still at tolerable levels I’ve decided he can live.
Trying to prove I do have a few mature bones in my brain I told him, “I don’t want either one of us having the heebies. We got enough to deal with with the ever-loving infected and their zookeepers settling in for winter.” Then I let it go and got back to my homework assignment of listing out things I needed and wanted and where we might be able to find them around the QZ. Mack is doing his own homework and some of the stuff on his list is weird even by my standards.
Need? Food and clothes I get as a need. Warm clothes anyway though we’ve got what I think is plenty. Bedding, stuff to keep the meece from taking over the world, all that stuff I also understand. But Mack has us bringing back lots of stuff we don’t need, like duplicates and triplicates and more of all the tools and junk he’s already been collecting. One of the corners in the basement looks like a frelling hardware store. And should since we swiped a lot of shelving, peg board and hooks from one just to keep that stuff organized. The other corner has more camping gear in it than a couple of ArmyNavy Stores combined. We’ve got enough rope and chains to keep Gulliver tied down. And lots of wire and electronic parts that are all the colors my hair used to be. Don’t get me started on car parts and all the gooshy stuff that keeps parts moving the way they are supposed to.
We got more cookware and dish sets than you’d need to feed an army with. All different kinds, from cheap-o plastic crap up to real, honest to God China still in the box or zipped up in these quilted storage containers. To go with that frou-frou we have utensils from plastic sporks to grade A sterling silver dinner ware sets in these expensive wooden storage boxes. Every once in a while we’ll add some jewelry and crap but not so much since we’ve stopped going into the houses. The pawn shops we’ve hit were already cleaned out so sparklies are no longer high-pri dots on the map.
We do still high-pri things we stay on the look out for and will go out of our way to salvage. We’ve been hitting places that have what Mack says are “marine batteries.” I thought he meant like the military and crap and I thought the guy was going to mess himself he was trying so hard not to laugh.
“No Sunshine. Batteries like they use for boats, or batteries like they use in some warehouse equipment such as forklifts. They’re also called deep cycle batteries.”
“Fine, I’ll bite,” I told him trying not to feel like biting him. “What’s with the sudden battery fetish?”
“Thinking about your solar doodad hobby gave me some ideas. But it will have to wait until there is more down time. And from the look of things we may be coming up on it soon.”
What Mack meant is that he’s trying to doodle some way to get us some real light down in the basement and sub-basement since both can be like the inside of a black cat. Seriously. And while I do have a lot of “solar doodads” I don’t have enough to make it like daylight down there all the time. When we forget to set them to charge during the day while we sleep, or if the weather makes it so they don’t charge all the way, it means that we can’t get as much organizing done and the work starts piling up. We have a couple of big lanterns but some of them run on fuel and some of them on batteries and I’d rather not have to use them until we have to. It wasn’t fun getting that fuel early on and as far as I can tell there is no more where it came from. When it is gone it is going to be gone and we haven’t even started chopping wood yet which both Mack and I know is a mistake but one we can’t do anything about yet except drag back the occasional fallen limb and stack it off to the side while trying not to make it look like an obvious pile that needs investigating.
We did find some things that have helped with the whole working-our-butts-off thing except all it has meant is that we can work our butts off harder. Since we can’t drive the 4x4 and trailer around these nights, getting things back to Base has been what you might call challenging. Too many spooky dudes on the move these days and for some weird freaking reason, even though they have the big guns, they still go around at night getting in our way. Moving the little stuff is just a matter of putting in our packs and walking it back. The heavy stuff was going to have to stay where it was until we had the time to bring it back a piece at a time. These things we found do it for us now. They are like electric hand carts. Mack calls them a souped up dolly and says they used to use them to move crap around in the military. I don’t care what anyone calls them, I call them providential. Yeah, yeah. So I borrowed a word I heard the people working the missions use. It is the way I feel so get over it. Mack was worried my squirrelies were getting out of hand when he heard me say it and I told him to get over too. Those carts were a crazy good find in a place that should have been, but hadn’t been, salvaged. Every place around that warehouse had been broken into and trashed. But not that one and it was a bodacious haul. What else would you call it?
The other things we found in that warehouse are pretty dang grand too but what Mack has done to them is wild. They are solar-powered golf carts. I know, crazy huh? The problem is that we have to leave them out during the day so they can recharge. They aren’t what you would call a perfect solution because, depending on how far away we are salvaging from Base, we might only get one supply run with them. Mack has it so that we take an extra charged battery with each cart so we don’t get stuck having to walk away from it and maybe not being able to get it back. He has also painted the carts in what he calls an urban camouflage design. Same thing with the hand carts and the trailers we found to hitch to the golf carts. All the leaves off of the trees around the house both helps and causes problems. More sunlight to charge the toys. Less able to hide the toys because fewer leaves.
There was a different kind of golf cart in the warehouse too only Mack said it wasn’t a golf cart but a cargo cart, something maintenance workers drive around. Kinda looked like a mini dump truck and worked the same way too. Problem is that, while they’re electric and has what Mack calls more torque so they can move more and heavier loads, it takes a couple of days to charge them back up after we use them. So use one night and then for a couple of nights they are out of commission. If we had more batteries that we could keep in rotation it wouldn’t be like that … so looking for those batteries is at the top of Mack’s Anti-Heebie Wish List. Plus, a way to charge the batteries is another thing and that was in that warehouse too.
Get this … solar shingles. Seriously. Mack has been replacing the shingles on the shed a few at a time and running the wires and crap down into the shed to make like this charging station set up. I can tell just by watching him that it is a stressful project. I told him if it was as bad as he was making it out to be just to give it up, we were getting by on what we already had. That was a fight I still don’t really understand. I mean I do … in theory. But Mack thinks I don’t think big enough or long enough.
“Sunshine, you need to think ahead.”
“I do think ahead.”
“About more than food and water.”
“Hey, who is your partner in crime Buddy? I’m out there with you every night salvaging stuff to bring back to base.”
“But do you understand why we are doing it?”
“Yeah. It calms your heebies and we are finding useful stuff.”
He threw the screwdriver hard enough it stuck in a tree and then growled because I wouldn’t fetch it for him. If he threw it he could go pick it up … or pick it out of the tree ow whatever. “Winx …”
“Look, you don’t think I understand that you’re basically creating a trading post kinda thing here.”
I surprised him and I’m pretty sure that I should be insulted but big whoop.
“But I’m not seeing things setting up for anything other than the fact we are on our own. Not too sure I ever want to be anything other than on my own but I’m willing to … to compromise if that’s not how you feel. We’re a team. I’m just not seeing things panning out your way.”
“Then why the hell are you helping?!”
“Don’t yell!” I yelled at him. “I haven’t done anything wrong for once. That should count for something!”
Little more snarking back and forth and we finally just left each other alone until it was time to go out salvaging. I probably should have been insulted again at how surprised he was when I showed up on time and suited up for the latest in a long line of nighttime creeps.
“You’re coming.”
I didn’t know whether it was a statement or question. My answer was equally as ambivalent. “Duh.”
That was the end of the argument and nothing else has been said. But I do get it. Some of it. It might be a guy thing that there is no completely understanding. Whatever. I think maybe he needs a goal, a path through and back to … something. Civilization maybe? I don’t know. I’m pretty sure my give-a-damn is broken in that area of my life. I have nothing to go back to. And there’s not much to look forward to. I’m not sure any goal I ever have will lead to whatever it is that Mack is trying to do. And I’m pretty sure any goal I set is going to wind up screwed up just like all of the other things in my life. Civilization may just have to carry on without Winx Predatorri to kick around. Might be all the better for it if I stay away from it.
But taking a step away from the pity train, I suppose I’m just going to keep on helping Mack deal with his heebies. With luck Mack won’t fall off the ladder of hope into the stinky armpits of despair. I got enough troubles keeping myself on track, don’t know what I would do if Mack really crashes and burns. Since I don’t want to think about that I’ll keep going with what I was writing about before. There are a lot more of those shingles to go – Mack figures he can do most of the roof with them – but he only has time to do a few at a time plus we are trying not to draw attention. Hard to tell to be honest. No one has come knocking and we want to keep it that way. Or at least keep it that way until we are ready for it to happen.
The carts stay in the shed when not in use which is a good thing, or it would start to look like a used car lot on the Loudon House grounds. We are pretty sure that someone is using drones … trying to use drones. Might not be the military but could be those commando guys.
Chapter 22-2
The drone thing has always been on Mack’s list of stuff to worry about. It’s why we do things the way we do them. Slinking around at night and stuff. We found one of those freaky delivery drones crashed, but it was way on the other side of the QZ, no where near “our” part of Old Town. Thank gawd for that or the top of Mack’s head might have stayed lit for the duration. As it is, between one thing and another including fighting with me because I refuse to sign on to his goal in any other way than helping him attain it but not really knowing if I want to be a part of it, he no longer believes in being casual about what we are doing. We’ve got a list and we’re sticking to it no matter how cold it is getting or even in the rain. That includes me trying to give up the run on sentences but that’s more challenging than the weather has been.
The only reason we aren’t out salvaging tonight is because it is snowing and Mack doesn’t want to leave tracks for someone to follow us back here to Base. We are also all but maxed out for storage. Mack is building another storage room which is a relief. It is also a relief to have some space for myself. Not that I necessarily want the space, but I need the space to convince my brain to keep my furry little paws to myself.
Since I’m kinda thinking Mack might be feeling the same way … that he wants me to keep my furry paws to myself … I’m going to let him alone for a bit. He’s up in the tower doing the watching thing while he still has some light and then he said he wants to work on the storage room … alone. According to him, having me cut my hand again, even with gloves on, is more than his nerves are up to. Fine. But that metal sheeting, the stuff he calls flashing, is possessed and is cutting me on purpose. It’s the only explanation.
I’m trying to figure out if that storage space Mack is building is going to be full before it is even finished. He’s nailing metal flashing inside one of the storage rooms down here … the not-currently-meece-proofed ones … and on top of that he is going to put cedar paneling. That is going to be where we store things like clothes and linens. Maybe some of the bulkier paper products like all that commercial TP that can double as sandpaper.
And I found a way to store all the feminine hygiene products but I swear Mack didn’t know whether to laugh or pull a total guy fit. The other night I caught a meece munching on a package of pads from a load we hadn’t put into the storage rooms yet. Man, I just about flipped and finally got the little beastie with a rubber mallet. It was a disgusting mess to clean up but every heave was worth it. So was Mack’s angry lecture on the amount of noise I made. I didn’t let him off Scott free though.
“I’ll be making some noise if I run out of the stuff that shall remain unnamed! In case you haven’t noticed I’m a girl and there’s just some things I need that you don’t. And there isn’t much of that we’re finding now we aren’t going into houses anymore.”
Mack opened and closed his mouth a couple of times before saying, “Winx I’ll try and work it back into the schedule but there’s no guarantee … I mean if you can try to start conserving ... er ...”. I don’t know why I bothered letting him off the hook, but I did. That was a stupid guy comment if ever there was one.
“I get it Mack. Why do you think I was hacked at the meece?”
Another blow up averted but it got me thinking about what I needed to do to keep the meece out of my hygiene stuff. And then it came to me. Some kind of chest. Only all the storage chests we have are in use. All the metal coolers too. All the metal trash cans. All the large glass jars. Space isn’t the only thing we are running out of. But then I remembered the cookie jars. I have a crapton of them but some of them are already in use. One of the houses not too far from here had a collection of fancy cookie jars all lined up on the top of the cabinets in a kitchen that looked more for show than actual use. It wasn’t easy with Mack complaining about the extra weight and work for something like cookie jars, but I now bring home cookie jars when I find them. And not for putting cookies in.
To stay out of his way I keep them in the kitchen and then wash them and fill them and take them down to the basement. Well the other night Mack gets the munchies; and see cookie jar think cookies. Only nope. He stares inside and then just keeps opening cookie jars and … yep … the shock did finally wear off, but he says he may be scarred for life. Poor baby. I am just so sympathetic. Not.
Anyway, there may be a silver lining to the horror story of cookie jars that don’t have cookies in them. And that would be that I’m not sure how much longer the meece are going to be a problem like they are now. Two nights ago I found two of the little devils frozen near one of the downstairs fireplaces. It was kinda pathetic to tell the truth but I’m also relieved that maybe this cold is doing something more than freezing my butt off and making it harder on us to take care of Mack’s daily to do list.
I’ve been surprised to find the supplies that we have. Lots more salvaging crews out there that’s for sure. Maybe we just got lucky. There has to be some luck in there given all of the crews we’ve nearly run into. Or Mack thinks they may be the same crews just with rotating crew members. Maybe it is a good thing we got lucky because if it keeps snowing we aren’t going to be able to be able to salvage anymore, or at least not regularly like we have been. Mack mentioned the possibility before, but we were doing okay until the snow.
The furniture store stuff is in one of the big rooms on the first floor. What a pain it was to bring it all here to the Loudon House. We’ve been moving it a mile or so at a time. Not even the carts have helped that go very fast because the weight runs the batteries down faster. We found a couple of flatbeds and every night we would make a couple of runs from the furniture store to a stopping point. Then the next night we would move that stuff closer and then move a load of new stuff from the furniture stuff into the now empty hiding spot. So far no one has found our stuff before we can move it all the way but Mack is realistic – or pessimistic – enough to think something like that is inevitable.
On the other hand, it seems that the salvagers aren’t looking for the same things we are. At least not so much and the same way, and not for the same reason we are. They were hitting businesses but mostly now it looks like they are hitting houses. Another reason why we don’t. The less overlap between us and them the better. I think people are paying them to get their stuff out of the QZ, or they are ransoming people’s stuff to get it out of the QZ. That’s what Mack and I came up with after we did some talking after overhearing two groups fighting.
“Look numbnuts, this is our street. We paid for it.”
“Free country. We have a salvaging permit.”
“Bull. Carlson says one team per street and your street is on your permit. Let me see your salvaging license.”
“No. Not showing it to you or anyone. You’ll just take it and we’ll have no proof. It’s you who has to be wrong.”
That’s when they started fighting. Someone musta pushed the panic button because out of the blue one of those Uber-goober goon squads shows up and starts busting heads and doesn’t care which group they belong to. All of them got hauled off but the one in charge says the group with the fake permit is going to have more than just a little ‘splaining to do to XO Cash.
I notice that Mack got a thoughtful look on his face. “Yoo-hoo … Mack.”
He absentmindedly pats me on the head – yeah, it is irritating – and finally says real slow like he’s still thinking, “Looks like Rodney may have found his niche.”
“Whooo … wait … you mean that detective? Okay, same last name but it might not be him.”
“Might not … have a feeling that it is. And that makes me wonder something.”
“Okay, I’ll bite.”
“None of the people we’ve seen have been wearing protective gear. It’s like … they have no fear of getting infected.”
I musta stood there with my mouth hanging open long enough that my brain finally got back on track. “They’re all immune or carriers. All of them. That’s why they’re here. But … but they …. I mean there are so many.”
“Yeah, there are. There are so many they have to pay for the privilege of salvaging. This is going to take some thinking about.”
The drone thing has always been on Mack’s list of stuff to worry about. It’s why we do things the way we do them. Slinking around at night and stuff. We found one of those freaky delivery drones crashed, but it was way on the other side of the QZ, no where near “our” part of Old Town. Thank gawd for that or the top of Mack’s head might have stayed lit for the duration. As it is, between one thing and another including fighting with me because I refuse to sign on to his goal in any other way than helping him attain it but not really knowing if I want to be a part of it, he no longer believes in being casual about what we are doing. We’ve got a list and we’re sticking to it no matter how cold it is getting or even in the rain. That includes me trying to give up the run on sentences but that’s more challenging than the weather has been.
The only reason we aren’t out salvaging tonight is because it is snowing and Mack doesn’t want to leave tracks for someone to follow us back here to Base. We are also all but maxed out for storage. Mack is building another storage room which is a relief. It is also a relief to have some space for myself. Not that I necessarily want the space, but I need the space to convince my brain to keep my furry little paws to myself.
Since I’m kinda thinking Mack might be feeling the same way … that he wants me to keep my furry paws to myself … I’m going to let him alone for a bit. He’s up in the tower doing the watching thing while he still has some light and then he said he wants to work on the storage room … alone. According to him, having me cut my hand again, even with gloves on, is more than his nerves are up to. Fine. But that metal sheeting, the stuff he calls flashing, is possessed and is cutting me on purpose. It’s the only explanation.
I’m trying to figure out if that storage space Mack is building is going to be full before it is even finished. He’s nailing metal flashing inside one of the storage rooms down here … the not-currently-meece-proofed ones … and on top of that he is going to put cedar paneling. That is going to be where we store things like clothes and linens. Maybe some of the bulkier paper products like all that commercial TP that can double as sandpaper.
And I found a way to store all the feminine hygiene products but I swear Mack didn’t know whether to laugh or pull a total guy fit. The other night I caught a meece munching on a package of pads from a load we hadn’t put into the storage rooms yet. Man, I just about flipped and finally got the little beastie with a rubber mallet. It was a disgusting mess to clean up but every heave was worth it. So was Mack’s angry lecture on the amount of noise I made. I didn’t let him off Scott free though.
“I’ll be making some noise if I run out of the stuff that shall remain unnamed! In case you haven’t noticed I’m a girl and there’s just some things I need that you don’t. And there isn’t much of that we’re finding now we aren’t going into houses anymore.”
Mack opened and closed his mouth a couple of times before saying, “Winx I’ll try and work it back into the schedule but there’s no guarantee … I mean if you can try to start conserving ... er ...”. I don’t know why I bothered letting him off the hook, but I did. That was a stupid guy comment if ever there was one.
“I get it Mack. Why do you think I was hacked at the meece?”
Another blow up averted but it got me thinking about what I needed to do to keep the meece out of my hygiene stuff. And then it came to me. Some kind of chest. Only all the storage chests we have are in use. All the metal coolers too. All the metal trash cans. All the large glass jars. Space isn’t the only thing we are running out of. But then I remembered the cookie jars. I have a crapton of them but some of them are already in use. One of the houses not too far from here had a collection of fancy cookie jars all lined up on the top of the cabinets in a kitchen that looked more for show than actual use. It wasn’t easy with Mack complaining about the extra weight and work for something like cookie jars, but I now bring home cookie jars when I find them. And not for putting cookies in.
To stay out of his way I keep them in the kitchen and then wash them and fill them and take them down to the basement. Well the other night Mack gets the munchies; and see cookie jar think cookies. Only nope. He stares inside and then just keeps opening cookie jars and … yep … the shock did finally wear off, but he says he may be scarred for life. Poor baby. I am just so sympathetic. Not.
Anyway, there may be a silver lining to the horror story of cookie jars that don’t have cookies in them. And that would be that I’m not sure how much longer the meece are going to be a problem like they are now. Two nights ago I found two of the little devils frozen near one of the downstairs fireplaces. It was kinda pathetic to tell the truth but I’m also relieved that maybe this cold is doing something more than freezing my butt off and making it harder on us to take care of Mack’s daily to do list.
I’ve been surprised to find the supplies that we have. Lots more salvaging crews out there that’s for sure. Maybe we just got lucky. There has to be some luck in there given all of the crews we’ve nearly run into. Or Mack thinks they may be the same crews just with rotating crew members. Maybe it is a good thing we got lucky because if it keeps snowing we aren’t going to be able to be able to salvage anymore, or at least not regularly like we have been. Mack mentioned the possibility before, but we were doing okay until the snow.
The furniture store stuff is in one of the big rooms on the first floor. What a pain it was to bring it all here to the Loudon House. We’ve been moving it a mile or so at a time. Not even the carts have helped that go very fast because the weight runs the batteries down faster. We found a couple of flatbeds and every night we would make a couple of runs from the furniture store to a stopping point. Then the next night we would move that stuff closer and then move a load of new stuff from the furniture stuff into the now empty hiding spot. So far no one has found our stuff before we can move it all the way but Mack is realistic – or pessimistic – enough to think something like that is inevitable.
On the other hand, it seems that the salvagers aren’t looking for the same things we are. At least not so much and the same way, and not for the same reason we are. They were hitting businesses but mostly now it looks like they are hitting houses. Another reason why we don’t. The less overlap between us and them the better. I think people are paying them to get their stuff out of the QZ, or they are ransoming people’s stuff to get it out of the QZ. That’s what Mack and I came up with after we did some talking after overhearing two groups fighting.
“Look numbnuts, this is our street. We paid for it.”
“Free country. We have a salvaging permit.”
“Bull. Carlson says one team per street and your street is on your permit. Let me see your salvaging license.”
“No. Not showing it to you or anyone. You’ll just take it and we’ll have no proof. It’s you who has to be wrong.”
That’s when they started fighting. Someone musta pushed the panic button because out of the blue one of those Uber-goober goon squads shows up and starts busting heads and doesn’t care which group they belong to. All of them got hauled off but the one in charge says the group with the fake permit is going to have more than just a little ‘splaining to do to XO Cash.
I notice that Mack got a thoughtful look on his face. “Yoo-hoo … Mack.”
He absentmindedly pats me on the head – yeah, it is irritating – and finally says real slow like he’s still thinking, “Looks like Rodney may have found his niche.”
“Whooo … wait … you mean that detective? Okay, same last name but it might not be him.”
“Might not … have a feeling that it is. And that makes me wonder something.”
“Okay, I’ll bite.”
“None of the people we’ve seen have been wearing protective gear. It’s like … they have no fear of getting infected.”
I musta stood there with my mouth hanging open long enough that my brain finally got back on track. “They’re all immune or carriers. All of them. That’s why they’re here. But … but they …. I mean there are so many.”
“Yeah, there are. There are so many they have to pay for the privilege of salvaging. This is going to take some thinking about.”
Chapter 23-1
I felt bad for the guy. I really did. But there wasn’t a thing we, or anyone else, could do for him. He was on a slow train out. Mack almost refused to stop but our humanity kicked in just in time, and a good thing too. We brought him back to base while he was unconscious but not into the house. We used the caretaker’s cottage and kept the curtains drawn on the windows so he wouldn’t be able to figure out where he was, not that he asked; he was beyond caring by that point. Better start someplace or things will make even less sense to me than they do right now.
#####
When Mack finally climbed out of the tub of hot water I’d heated for him to clean up in he was finally completely sober.
“Thanks Sunshine.”
“No prob. Feel like eating yet?”
It took a moment, but he nodded and I dipped some chili out of the pot I had been keeping warm on the big kitchen stove. I have to be careful to only cook at night so no one sees the smoke.
He ate and I worked on The List and The Inventory between taking things down to the basement to store them. About my fourth trip back up Mack reaches out and stops me with a hand on my arm. I look at him and he says, “Thanks.” He meant for more than the bath water.
I shrugged. “Sure. You did it for me. Um …”
Before I could finish my reply he said, “Next time I grab a bottle and don’t stop on my own … you stop me. With a hammer if you have to.”
No way would I do that. “Sounds crazy but maybe you needed to um … cut loose some. You finally got some sleep anyway.”
Looking away and sounding shamed like only a guy can he said, “Sunshine … Winx … I’m a not a good drunk. I … didn’t hurt you did I?”
“No. I didn’t know what was going on until I got a load of your breath. I thought you just wanted … comfort or something … like you did for me after … you know.”
He was silent for a moment then said, “What I want and what is common sense aren’t the same thing this time. You might not be a kid, but you aren’t … I shouldn’t be … dammit I screwed all of this up. I always screw things up.”
Self-loathing was in the air and it was thick. And since I’d been trying to clean up my act I wasn’t going to let him take all the blame he was feeling. “Hey, going a little far there. So maybe we almost did something that wasn’t smart. But you … um … weren’t forcing me. And drunk or not you still found some brain cells and moved off. Just don’t …” Then I said the thing that I’d been worried about. “Don’t leave Mack. I know you are feeling like that … but don’t. If I’m not running away because I figured out it’s not me you want … and I’m okay with figuring it out … then you don’t have any reason to run off either. I get it okay? You’re an adult male, you don’t see me the same way, so something needs to give. I agree not to use you for a scratching post. Can’t we at least still be a team?”
He was quiet so long that I thought I was the one that had screwed things up. “Winx, let’s assume I could get passed the fact that you aren’t much more than a kid. Let’s assume I could even get passed some crap I’m still carrying around and how shitty it would be to use you to help me feel better about it. Right now we got too much going on. You heard Dylan the same as I did. We got some serious shit to figure out and come to terms with. And we got some serious as hell decisions to make. What … what I might want just isn’t good for either one of us right now.”
“Okay.”
I’d surprised him. “Can you live with that?”
“I’ve been living with it,” I told him.
“Yeah well it came at me from my blind side. Hey Sunshine, look at me. I … don’t want to leave. No way in hell. But … but I can’t play at it. Never have been good at that. So, it is either something that is on or off … and right now it needs to be off. Too many things that can go wrong.”
I looked at him and I swear something hit me like those stupid women in those romance books I used to read. He said for right now. But I also saw he meant it about needing to have that particular switch toggled in the off position. I decided I could live with it. “I can do that. Maybe I need it off right now too. Just … I’ve gotten use to being part of a team. Just … promise me … if you need to leave, for whatever reason, just give me some warning so I can … I don’t know … prepare myself or something. Don’t do to me what … what I did to my family … even if I deserve it.”
He patted my arm but it felt like it was a hard thing for him to do. “Don’t want to break up the team either. Just can’t add the other. Lots of reasons but mostly … shit … this mess is a lot bigger than we’ve been thinking, even in our worst-case. And I thought I’d figured a way through it. Only there is no through. Or around. Or over or under.”
And that’s when we both started thinking about what we’d learned.
It was the middle of November and after that first snow we hadn’t had anymore. It was almost like an Indian Summer and Mack and I really put it to use. Add to that we found someone’s cache and it was nearly as good as what we’d found at the church, and we were flying high and feeling six feet tall and bullet proof, or as good as. Then all in a day things crashed.
We came back from bringing the last of the cache back to Base and since it was my turn to guard, Mack laid down to get some sleep. He’d gotten to where he trusted me enough that he didn’t even lay the ground rules out anymore. I took the rifle and went up to the tower. What we didn’t have were the little handheld radios because for some reason the base station wasn’t working. It was on our to do list to repair or replace.
I was tired but was also a little wired. There were packages of freeze-dried meatballs in the cache and all I could think about was making some baked ziti. I was craving it. With homemade garlic biscuits. I was planning the entire meal out when I spotted something that looked way out of place.
We’d never had a goon squad come near Base. Don’t know why, we just hadn’t. Sure the place looked like a haunted house with rabies but I still would have at least given it a sniff had I been the boss of Them. Whoever was the boss of Them sure didn’t think much of our side of Old Town. I’m more than glad that I never told Mace and Carol where I was flopping, especially now. The thing is I wasn’t seeing just one goon squad, I counted five. They were coming up all the main drags and they were obviously looking for something … or as it turned out someone. I kept telling myself if they crossed Main Street I’d go wake Mack. But it wasn’t that that caused me to wake him up. About fifteen minutes after I noticed the goon squads I noticed it was getting colder. Twenty minutes after that I see some guy tear out of a building right before a goon squad went in it and he started hauling butt … sorta. He wasn’t in great shape. Using the binoculars, I could see he was holding his side and limping. He was still moving fast enough however that he avoided the squads … almost. The last group furthest away from Base spotted him and I nearly freaked when someone took a shot at the guy … and hit him but not bad enough to stop his forward motion.
Out of the blue there was this blast of icy wind. It was bad enough that it stole my breath, bad enough that when it reached the street the goon squads were on that it knocked a couple of them down. It was blowing trash and crap all over the place. Crap I hadn’t felt anything that cold for a long time. And it was wet, and I knew what that meant. So did whoever was in charge of the goon squads because they started pulling back, giving up on the guy they’d been after. Good thing they did too as it started to sleet even before they’d made it back to the big truck they climbed into.
As soon as I was sure the truck was heading back toward what we’d labeled the Them Base, I tore off downstairs to get Mack. He was hacked I hadn’t woken him earlier but I told him I couldn’t leave until I made sure no one was going to climb the garden walls. By the time Mack and I got back up the tower it was sleeting for real and not just kinda sorta. Visibility was disappearing fast. The brief Indian Summer was over; winter had arrived like a bat outta hell. It was so cold we couldn’t stay in the tower. It got so cold we had to light a fire even though it was daylight. We stayed huddled around it for two days before the ice storm finally stopped. Things got interesting a couple of times while we huddled but I don’t want to think about that right now.
The night after the ice storm was not what you would call optimal but both Mack and I needed to get out of the house and clear our brains. For obvious reasons. But also because we needed to check and see if the storm had caused any property damage or damage around town.
No damage to the wall. One pipe to our back up water storage did crack but the pipe was frozen clean through and acted like a cork so we didn’t lose any water. The water in the tank was complete slush despite the tank being wrapped in a buttload of black, thermal insulation tape inside the shed it was hidden in. We got lucky this time, might not next time. As a result Mack wanted to go back to the automotive store and get all of that fancy insulation and stuff we’d left behind. And we couldn’t do it with the carts because the cold weather was discharging the batteries too fast. Instead we took the biggest packs we had and a collapsible game cart.
It was miserable work but we made it to the shop and started stripping the shelves of all the junk we’d come for. We work silent. I used to talk too much to fill the space between my ears. I don’t do that anymore. It’s just better that way. So when we heard this hissing whisper it brought us to alert fast.
“Mmmmaaaackkk.”
I looked at Mack and he at me and we both dropped to the frosty-cold concrete floor fast.
“Mmmmmmaaaaaacckkk. Hhhhhelp mmmmmeee.”
After hesitating, Mack started making his way towards the voice. He soundlessly ordered me to stay hidden. Not five seconds later I hear him snap, “Shit! Winx, need an assist.”
I was still cautious as I hurried over just in case, and because it was so dark it took me a moment to make sense of what I was seeing.
“Is that … ?”
“Yeah. He’s a mess. Looks to be shot twice. Lost a lot of blood.”
It was Dylan. I looked at Mack to see what he wanted to do. I could see the war going on behind his eyes and I was right there with him. Then something changed. Without even talking about it we loaded him onto the game cart and got him back to our Base. But when I would have taken him into the Loudon house, Mack nixed that and pulled him over to the Caretaker’s cottage. He did let me go get a cot for him and a couple of blankets. We took all that stuff away afterwards, over near where it looked like someone had tried to cut the QZ fence. We’d noticed there weren’t as many guards on the fence but didn’t know why. Something about the fence repair had always bothered us too and now we know why.
I’m not going to record the next 48 hours. Suffice it to say that between frost bite, exposure, and what we think might have been the beginning of gangrene Dylan already had a punched ticket on an outbound train when we found him. We found out that before being shot the second time he’d already been on the run from the Brigade for over a week. He’d escaped from their holding pen when he came out of his fugue of self-medication to find they weren’t doing anything to help prisoners survive the cold. He got beat on twice, but it didn’t stop him. What stopped him was when he got beat on by the others in the pen with him. Doesn’t make sense but if we are going to believe Dylan about some things, we have to believe him about that part too.
That was a hard two days. The man was in a lot of pain and we didn’t have anything that could touch it. Whether the pain was more physical or mental was debatable. We did what we could for him, but it wasn’t much. Towards the last couple of hours he did a lot of screaming, or tried to. We had to cover his mouth to keep the sound from rolling out. Had to tie him down to keep him from bowing up and throwing himself off the cot. I don’t think any of that will ever leave me even if I find the holy grail of brain bleach. What we learned before he completely went off his rocker was worth a scream or two in my nightmares.
The QZ is a lot bigger than we knew. And we aren’t the only QZ in the US. We aren’t even the only QZ in the world. They’ve lost “containment” several times, but it looks like they expanded all of the QZs big enough this time to catch a break and give the people working on a vaccine some breathing room.
QZs are like targets. There’s the original bullseye in the center and a no man’s land buffer zone as an outer ring. How many rings between the bullseye and the buffer zone on the outside depends on how many times it was expanded since the original outbreak. All actively infected people are dumped into the “bullseye” in a compound run by an organization known as the Brigade. The Brigade is made up of immunes that have volunteered to sacrifice themselves for the good of country to control what goes on inside the QZ since it is too risky for people outside the QZ to really handle that stuff. The Brigade may be set up quasi-military style but it isn’t military at all. There may be a few military in there because once infected you lose your “active” status, are involuntarily removed from duty, and unless you want your family to lose the benefits they are used to, you cooperate and hope that you fit in with the Brigade that is running the particular QZ you are dumped into. Assuming you survive your initial quarantine period that is.
Chapter 23-2
The Brigade controls what goes on in the QZs but they don’t exactly get a lot of help from people outside the QZs. What they’ve been given permission to do is salvage what is inside the QZs, or make money off of the “quarantined assets” somehow. And from the sound of it that sounds like the quarantined people too. Mack and I were right, they have started making a business of “ransoming” the contents of the houses that are inside the QZ. There’s a lot more red-tape to it than that, but essentially the Brigade as an organization is to prevent rioting and they are to control Infecteds and the quarantined people stuck in the QZ with them. They are NOT allowed to control them by killing them … you can still be convicted of murder unless it was a clear and recorded case of self-defense, and not self-defense that was instigated.
How some of it works is the Brigade feeds people in the QZ on a point system … work points, trade points for salvage, extra points based on skills, etc. The food itself comes from what can be salvaged and/or grown in the QZs. Some QZs are more organized than others. The QZ we live in is more organized than most but has a smaller land mass than most to salvage so isn’t as powerful as it could be.
That’s the other thing. The QZs are – in their own way – becoming more powerful than the uninfected populations around them. It’s starting to freak some people in the free zones out more than just a little. Part of that is that to be a survivor you have to be tough, ruthless, or both. You also need skills to work your way up the hierarchy or you’ll never be anything but a worker drone, assuming you survive the initial quarantine phase.
I’ve mentioned the quarantine phase twice now so I guess it is time to explain it. The original flight of CH54s occurred right after they realized that the original quarantine and evacuation orders had failed; pretty much just like Mack had thought. What I hadn’t thought was just how far they would go from that point forward to control the number of Infected. It is now a death-by-firing-squad offense to get caught not reporting infections and potential infections. Those firing squads used to be televised but there are so few of them they no longer bother. People are scared spitless and follow the rules whether they like them or not. A second reason why they no longer have to use the firing squads so much is that all trials for such incidences occur in one of the QZ levels. So even if you are found innocent or given a reprieve of sentence you’ll still never be going home because of your infection exposure. Most people are reportedly grateful to get shot dead because by then most of them are already feeling the infection set in.
That is what it is and I can’t do anything about it. It’s a nightmare, but it isn’t my nightmare. What is my nightmare is that Uncle Beryl’s place is now part of a QZ buffer. I don’t know what that means for my family. I could get through the day not worrying that I was going to one day run into them as Infecteds because I thought they were safe and well outside the QZ. As much as this stuff has spread, I can’t say that anymore. And neither can Mack. His step-parents’ place is caught tight between two buffer zones in an area that is only still open because it is a high-priority, east/west travel corridor. If their area is absorbed the distance people are going to have to travel would quadruple at the very least … that is how large the QZs have grown.
Some people might say then just move or fly or something like that. Forget it. Now that the entire world is involved there are a lot of grounded flights and even if they weren’t grounded, a lot of fuel pipes, oil fields, and oil processing plants are smack in the middle of QZs. You beginning to see why the Brigade is so important? And growing so powerful?
Dylan’s condition made him too incoherent for some questions Mack had but we got enough that we can assume some things. Dylan also swiped some pretty important computer files that I was able to break into … yay me … that gave the bigger picture. For now though we are mostly concerned for us. See one of the things that Dylan said was that the Brigade is complaining that the Outside is shipping in too many Infecteds. They’ve run out of room in those holding pins. Get too many infecteds together in one spot and too many brawlers develop. Too many brawlers and you wind up with a dangerous mess. They’ve tried to control some of that by pumping Fluoxetine through the water and food the Infecteds receive. That has its own dangers including that the Infecteds eventually become immune to its therapeutic effects and it kills some of those that already have health problems. Of course the infection does too. And just because you become Infected doesn’t mean your other health problems go away. People with high blood pressure – from kids to old folks – are usually the first ones to die once they are full blown Infected. Not always but usually. It’s the nature of the disease.
What tore Dylan up the most and caused him to self-medicate in the first place was when kids would get infected. It turns out that if a kid survives the initial infection they usually all wind up immune, not always but most of the time. The ratio slowly diminishes until by about twenty-five if you get infected you can nearly guarantee you’ll go over all the way. But most kids don’t survive the initial infection phase. The younger they are the most likely they are to die before even getting to the violent stage. That balances out mid-teens when they wind up having about the same chance as an adult of surviving the initial infection, but if they do survive they are more likely to be immune than crazy.
He told us a few things about Mack’s old group and some of it is surprising and some isn’t. Det. Cash has “risen in the ranks” and now calls a lot of shots, but not all of them. Mace … I have a hard time wrapping my head around it so I’m not going to think about that bit of knowledge right now. A lot of the others have disappeared into the belly of the beast or so Dylan said. Mack says he meant that they have gone to the dark side in different ways and those that haven’t are probably dead or wish they were. I snapped at that and told Dylan to lay off the metaphorical crap and just tell it straight up so we could understand. I’m sorry to say he did. I think I would have preferred, at least for a little while, to stay not understanding.
This is where Dylan asked if we wanted the good news first or the bad news. Before we could choose he essentially told us the infection is getting worse and moving faster in the human body so all of the other things he told us were relative.
“What the hell does that mean?” Mack snarled impatiently, finding he wasn’t any happier with some of Dylan’s explanations than I had been.
“Means that the infection is getting worse. Once you get it, it moves faster. Hardly any inbetweeners these days. You’re infected and within 24 hours you are raging and insane … or you are immune or a carrier but physically weak … like you need to be in the hospital with lots of care but hardly anyone gets that these days. So if the infection doesn’t get you, you can be so weak you can’t take care of yourself yet. Doesn’t matter, they still throw you in the holding pens until they see which way you are going to go. And if you do survive the original infection, and you do survive through recovery in the pens, there’s more carriers than straight immunes. Most of the original carriers have already lost it and gone all the way over.”
“The doc?”
“Yeah. He didn’t even have to do for himself. He OD’d on the meds more on accident than purpose. And the other first tier carriers we knew of? None of them are left in this QZ. Most carriers now last for three to four months and then they are put into the Infected holding pens because the meds don’t work no more. Around here there’s a lottery for the Carriers.”
“Lottery?”
“Yeah. You survive but get typed as a Carrier and there’s a good chance that you get tossed in the Infected holding pens immediately. They say it is an issue of resources. Only see some carriers get out; depends on what kind of skills and stuff they had pre-infection. Or maybe how much their family can pay to keep them out of the pens.”
“Sounds like this Brigade or whatever they call it is full of unmedicated carriers themselves.”
Dylan wheezed and said, “You might want to keep those kind of statements to yourself. The ones that I’ve heard say it tend to disappear for questioning and never get seen again.”
After that is when Dylan started really rolling downhill. Every hour that passed he went faster. We did what we could, but it was brutal for everyone. When he finally flatlined blood was coming from his nose, eyes, ears, and mouth. We figure something blew in his head. It was a mess to clean up. Before we were finished I saw some really evil looking meece slinking around, trying to get through the sheets we’d wound around the body. There was no way to put it off, no way to give ourselves time, we had to bury the body and fast. Mack wouldn’t do it on Base.
“A couple of reasons Sunshine,” Mack muttered, as exhausted as I was. “First some animal might come looking and that’s a nightmare I don’t want in my memory banks. Burying Dylan once is going to be enough. Two, a grave might show up on an overhead drone pass … even a satellite pass.”
Trying to have a sensitive bone since I knew that at one point Mack had really respected Dylan I suggested, “Then how about a … a playground or something like that. There were a couple behind the daycare centers we salvaged. The one I’m thinking about had all that tire mulch. We rake it back, dig the hole to put him in, and then when we’re done we rake the mulch back over. It’ll hide we’ve been digging. Nothing grows in that stuff so we don’t have to worry that the grass or whatever suddenly gets super green from the extra fertilizer.”
Mack just raised his head and looked at me. I nearly got up and walked away but he pulled me back down and then surprised me by pulling me closer. “Thanks.”
“For what?”
“Not giving me a lot of drama to deal with. You sure you’re up for this?”
I shrugged. “He may have been crazy but that didn’t make him a bad guy. He cared enough for whatever his reasons were that he sent you to check on me. So … in a way … without him there wouldn’t be an us … I mean a team. So yeah … for that I’ll give him what I can. And if it is going to happen tonight, we better start soon or it will be daylight before we can get back. The ground … you know …”
So that’s what we did and we got lucky that the tire mulch kept the ground from freezing. It still wasn’t an easy job and the rats … we were fighting them off even as we were trying to fill the hole back up. Mack threw in some poison … to try and keep them from doing you can guess what. The sheets and cot he put in the building and let the rats take care of that evidence. If anyone does find them, hopefully they’ll assume the rats … never mind. I have enough nightmares without dreaming up new ones.
Mack was quiet but I figured he had cause. When we got back to Base I was needing to change clothes so bad that I didn’t notice that his quiet had changed. It was too cold for a bath unless I wanted to get sick, but I did scrub myself pretty hard. Mack did too but then he went off and I thought it was to work in the basement to deal with some heebies.
The weather was getting bad again and my rotation up in the tour was up. No Mack. I came down and found him in the kitchen with a glass and bottle. When he saw me he screwed the cap back on and put the glass in the dish pan. I’ve seen Mack take a drink. It doesn’t shock me or anything else. I’ve tried the wine he offers me if we’ve cooked something fancy like stroganoff or rehydrated steak medallions. Meh. Some of the red stuff isn’t bad but some of it tastes like llama spit so I’m cautious. I also didn’t realize the bottle he'd had a glass of wasn’t the first bottle. After I told him that I was gonna crash and burn because the weather was getting bad again he said, “You do that.” He reopened the bottle after I went upstairs.
I shouldn’t have left him alone. The metaphorical sign he was holding said “I need space.” But the way he was acting I should have cornered him and got him to talk, the way he’s done me. Being exhausted is no excuse. If I’d been a better friend maybe the rest of it wouldn’t have happened. But … I don’t really regret what happened either. Not sure that makes me a better friend, or worse.
It was so cold that I lit a fire in the fireplace and fell asleep where we’d huddled during the ice storm. Maybe in the back of my mind I was hoping for more of the same. I’ve finally admitted that I liked Mack and that’s as far as I had taken it. I liked Mack. I’d liked the attention he’d paid me. I’d liked that he’d liked what I tried to do in return. And I liked the idea that maybe we could do more of that. And that’s all I’d been thinking and that’s pretty much why people get in trouble. They only think up to a point and don’t think about what comes after that point.
I’m not going to embarrass myself by writing what happened because really, in the grand scheme of things nothing had. Mack sobered up before anything happened. But if it had been summer instead of winter, and there’d been fewer clothes between us, something might have happened because it wasn’t until he couldn’t operate the buttons on my shirt that his brain kicked in enough that he climbed out of the blankets and let the cold air hit his head and clear it.
Yeah, it hurt to realize he’d only gone where we’d gone because he was drunk. And some of the things he said while he was trying to be not-drunk hurt too. But I could tell they hurt him more, so I made him stop before we both hurt too much and got him to go to sleep. Then I went off to lick my wounds.
I was mad for about an hour but then I realized he wasn’t Tad. That he was going to feel bad about “leading me on” or whatever he wound up thinking. Then I thought about running away for the hour after that only I decided not to do the stupid because just like with Aunt Trudy and the rest of them it was only going to make Mack hurt worse and I wasn’t going to feel all that great either. For a long while I worried that it was going to be Mack who ran off. Towards the end of him trying to be not-drunk he seemed to seriously be leaning in that direction. So, I tried to think about what to do to keep him from running off.
I had water heated when he stumbled down the stairs looking for me but not really wanting to find me. I pointed to the screen and the buckets and he nodded like he didn’t know if what was going on was real or not. After he washed off the drunk and dried off and dressed in the clean clothes I got for him things got a little easier. It still hurts but its better than losing a friend. And that’s what Mack is and what he’s gonna have to stay. For his sake more than mine. How I feel is just going to have to stay hidden … camouflaged. I’ve got lots of practice with that. The more I think about it the more convinced I am that the “for now” is just Mack trying to be nice and he really means “for ever.” I can live with it. I can. I just need to figure out how.
The Brigade controls what goes on in the QZs but they don’t exactly get a lot of help from people outside the QZs. What they’ve been given permission to do is salvage what is inside the QZs, or make money off of the “quarantined assets” somehow. And from the sound of it that sounds like the quarantined people too. Mack and I were right, they have started making a business of “ransoming” the contents of the houses that are inside the QZ. There’s a lot more red-tape to it than that, but essentially the Brigade as an organization is to prevent rioting and they are to control Infecteds and the quarantined people stuck in the QZ with them. They are NOT allowed to control them by killing them … you can still be convicted of murder unless it was a clear and recorded case of self-defense, and not self-defense that was instigated.
How some of it works is the Brigade feeds people in the QZ on a point system … work points, trade points for salvage, extra points based on skills, etc. The food itself comes from what can be salvaged and/or grown in the QZs. Some QZs are more organized than others. The QZ we live in is more organized than most but has a smaller land mass than most to salvage so isn’t as powerful as it could be.
That’s the other thing. The QZs are – in their own way – becoming more powerful than the uninfected populations around them. It’s starting to freak some people in the free zones out more than just a little. Part of that is that to be a survivor you have to be tough, ruthless, or both. You also need skills to work your way up the hierarchy or you’ll never be anything but a worker drone, assuming you survive the initial quarantine phase.
I’ve mentioned the quarantine phase twice now so I guess it is time to explain it. The original flight of CH54s occurred right after they realized that the original quarantine and evacuation orders had failed; pretty much just like Mack had thought. What I hadn’t thought was just how far they would go from that point forward to control the number of Infected. It is now a death-by-firing-squad offense to get caught not reporting infections and potential infections. Those firing squads used to be televised but there are so few of them they no longer bother. People are scared spitless and follow the rules whether they like them or not. A second reason why they no longer have to use the firing squads so much is that all trials for such incidences occur in one of the QZ levels. So even if you are found innocent or given a reprieve of sentence you’ll still never be going home because of your infection exposure. Most people are reportedly grateful to get shot dead because by then most of them are already feeling the infection set in.
That is what it is and I can’t do anything about it. It’s a nightmare, but it isn’t my nightmare. What is my nightmare is that Uncle Beryl’s place is now part of a QZ buffer. I don’t know what that means for my family. I could get through the day not worrying that I was going to one day run into them as Infecteds because I thought they were safe and well outside the QZ. As much as this stuff has spread, I can’t say that anymore. And neither can Mack. His step-parents’ place is caught tight between two buffer zones in an area that is only still open because it is a high-priority, east/west travel corridor. If their area is absorbed the distance people are going to have to travel would quadruple at the very least … that is how large the QZs have grown.
Some people might say then just move or fly or something like that. Forget it. Now that the entire world is involved there are a lot of grounded flights and even if they weren’t grounded, a lot of fuel pipes, oil fields, and oil processing plants are smack in the middle of QZs. You beginning to see why the Brigade is so important? And growing so powerful?
Dylan’s condition made him too incoherent for some questions Mack had but we got enough that we can assume some things. Dylan also swiped some pretty important computer files that I was able to break into … yay me … that gave the bigger picture. For now though we are mostly concerned for us. See one of the things that Dylan said was that the Brigade is complaining that the Outside is shipping in too many Infecteds. They’ve run out of room in those holding pins. Get too many infecteds together in one spot and too many brawlers develop. Too many brawlers and you wind up with a dangerous mess. They’ve tried to control some of that by pumping Fluoxetine through the water and food the Infecteds receive. That has its own dangers including that the Infecteds eventually become immune to its therapeutic effects and it kills some of those that already have health problems. Of course the infection does too. And just because you become Infected doesn’t mean your other health problems go away. People with high blood pressure – from kids to old folks – are usually the first ones to die once they are full blown Infected. Not always but usually. It’s the nature of the disease.
What tore Dylan up the most and caused him to self-medicate in the first place was when kids would get infected. It turns out that if a kid survives the initial infection they usually all wind up immune, not always but most of the time. The ratio slowly diminishes until by about twenty-five if you get infected you can nearly guarantee you’ll go over all the way. But most kids don’t survive the initial infection phase. The younger they are the most likely they are to die before even getting to the violent stage. That balances out mid-teens when they wind up having about the same chance as an adult of surviving the initial infection, but if they do survive they are more likely to be immune than crazy.
He told us a few things about Mack’s old group and some of it is surprising and some isn’t. Det. Cash has “risen in the ranks” and now calls a lot of shots, but not all of them. Mace … I have a hard time wrapping my head around it so I’m not going to think about that bit of knowledge right now. A lot of the others have disappeared into the belly of the beast or so Dylan said. Mack says he meant that they have gone to the dark side in different ways and those that haven’t are probably dead or wish they were. I snapped at that and told Dylan to lay off the metaphorical crap and just tell it straight up so we could understand. I’m sorry to say he did. I think I would have preferred, at least for a little while, to stay not understanding.
This is where Dylan asked if we wanted the good news first or the bad news. Before we could choose he essentially told us the infection is getting worse and moving faster in the human body so all of the other things he told us were relative.
“What the hell does that mean?” Mack snarled impatiently, finding he wasn’t any happier with some of Dylan’s explanations than I had been.
“Means that the infection is getting worse. Once you get it, it moves faster. Hardly any inbetweeners these days. You’re infected and within 24 hours you are raging and insane … or you are immune or a carrier but physically weak … like you need to be in the hospital with lots of care but hardly anyone gets that these days. So if the infection doesn’t get you, you can be so weak you can’t take care of yourself yet. Doesn’t matter, they still throw you in the holding pens until they see which way you are going to go. And if you do survive the original infection, and you do survive through recovery in the pens, there’s more carriers than straight immunes. Most of the original carriers have already lost it and gone all the way over.”
“The doc?”
“Yeah. He didn’t even have to do for himself. He OD’d on the meds more on accident than purpose. And the other first tier carriers we knew of? None of them are left in this QZ. Most carriers now last for three to four months and then they are put into the Infected holding pens because the meds don’t work no more. Around here there’s a lottery for the Carriers.”
“Lottery?”
“Yeah. You survive but get typed as a Carrier and there’s a good chance that you get tossed in the Infected holding pens immediately. They say it is an issue of resources. Only see some carriers get out; depends on what kind of skills and stuff they had pre-infection. Or maybe how much their family can pay to keep them out of the pens.”
“Sounds like this Brigade or whatever they call it is full of unmedicated carriers themselves.”
Dylan wheezed and said, “You might want to keep those kind of statements to yourself. The ones that I’ve heard say it tend to disappear for questioning and never get seen again.”
After that is when Dylan started really rolling downhill. Every hour that passed he went faster. We did what we could, but it was brutal for everyone. When he finally flatlined blood was coming from his nose, eyes, ears, and mouth. We figure something blew in his head. It was a mess to clean up. Before we were finished I saw some really evil looking meece slinking around, trying to get through the sheets we’d wound around the body. There was no way to put it off, no way to give ourselves time, we had to bury the body and fast. Mack wouldn’t do it on Base.
“A couple of reasons Sunshine,” Mack muttered, as exhausted as I was. “First some animal might come looking and that’s a nightmare I don’t want in my memory banks. Burying Dylan once is going to be enough. Two, a grave might show up on an overhead drone pass … even a satellite pass.”
Trying to have a sensitive bone since I knew that at one point Mack had really respected Dylan I suggested, “Then how about a … a playground or something like that. There were a couple behind the daycare centers we salvaged. The one I’m thinking about had all that tire mulch. We rake it back, dig the hole to put him in, and then when we’re done we rake the mulch back over. It’ll hide we’ve been digging. Nothing grows in that stuff so we don’t have to worry that the grass or whatever suddenly gets super green from the extra fertilizer.”
Mack just raised his head and looked at me. I nearly got up and walked away but he pulled me back down and then surprised me by pulling me closer. “Thanks.”
“For what?”
“Not giving me a lot of drama to deal with. You sure you’re up for this?”
I shrugged. “He may have been crazy but that didn’t make him a bad guy. He cared enough for whatever his reasons were that he sent you to check on me. So … in a way … without him there wouldn’t be an us … I mean a team. So yeah … for that I’ll give him what I can. And if it is going to happen tonight, we better start soon or it will be daylight before we can get back. The ground … you know …”
So that’s what we did and we got lucky that the tire mulch kept the ground from freezing. It still wasn’t an easy job and the rats … we were fighting them off even as we were trying to fill the hole back up. Mack threw in some poison … to try and keep them from doing you can guess what. The sheets and cot he put in the building and let the rats take care of that evidence. If anyone does find them, hopefully they’ll assume the rats … never mind. I have enough nightmares without dreaming up new ones.
Mack was quiet but I figured he had cause. When we got back to Base I was needing to change clothes so bad that I didn’t notice that his quiet had changed. It was too cold for a bath unless I wanted to get sick, but I did scrub myself pretty hard. Mack did too but then he went off and I thought it was to work in the basement to deal with some heebies.
The weather was getting bad again and my rotation up in the tour was up. No Mack. I came down and found him in the kitchen with a glass and bottle. When he saw me he screwed the cap back on and put the glass in the dish pan. I’ve seen Mack take a drink. It doesn’t shock me or anything else. I’ve tried the wine he offers me if we’ve cooked something fancy like stroganoff or rehydrated steak medallions. Meh. Some of the red stuff isn’t bad but some of it tastes like llama spit so I’m cautious. I also didn’t realize the bottle he'd had a glass of wasn’t the first bottle. After I told him that I was gonna crash and burn because the weather was getting bad again he said, “You do that.” He reopened the bottle after I went upstairs.
I shouldn’t have left him alone. The metaphorical sign he was holding said “I need space.” But the way he was acting I should have cornered him and got him to talk, the way he’s done me. Being exhausted is no excuse. If I’d been a better friend maybe the rest of it wouldn’t have happened. But … I don’t really regret what happened either. Not sure that makes me a better friend, or worse.
It was so cold that I lit a fire in the fireplace and fell asleep where we’d huddled during the ice storm. Maybe in the back of my mind I was hoping for more of the same. I’ve finally admitted that I liked Mack and that’s as far as I had taken it. I liked Mack. I’d liked the attention he’d paid me. I’d liked that he’d liked what I tried to do in return. And I liked the idea that maybe we could do more of that. And that’s all I’d been thinking and that’s pretty much why people get in trouble. They only think up to a point and don’t think about what comes after that point.
I’m not going to embarrass myself by writing what happened because really, in the grand scheme of things nothing had. Mack sobered up before anything happened. But if it had been summer instead of winter, and there’d been fewer clothes between us, something might have happened because it wasn’t until he couldn’t operate the buttons on my shirt that his brain kicked in enough that he climbed out of the blankets and let the cold air hit his head and clear it.
Yeah, it hurt to realize he’d only gone where we’d gone because he was drunk. And some of the things he said while he was trying to be not-drunk hurt too. But I could tell they hurt him more, so I made him stop before we both hurt too much and got him to go to sleep. Then I went off to lick my wounds.
I was mad for about an hour but then I realized he wasn’t Tad. That he was going to feel bad about “leading me on” or whatever he wound up thinking. Then I thought about running away for the hour after that only I decided not to do the stupid because just like with Aunt Trudy and the rest of them it was only going to make Mack hurt worse and I wasn’t going to feel all that great either. For a long while I worried that it was going to be Mack who ran off. Towards the end of him trying to be not-drunk he seemed to seriously be leaning in that direction. So, I tried to think about what to do to keep him from running off.
I had water heated when he stumbled down the stairs looking for me but not really wanting to find me. I pointed to the screen and the buckets and he nodded like he didn’t know if what was going on was real or not. After he washed off the drunk and dried off and dressed in the clean clothes I got for him things got a little easier. It still hurts but its better than losing a friend. And that’s what Mack is and what he’s gonna have to stay. For his sake more than mine. How I feel is just going to have to stay hidden … camouflaged. I’ve got lots of practice with that. The more I think about it the more convinced I am that the “for now” is just Mack trying to be nice and he really means “for ever.” I can live with it. I can. I just need to figure out how.