“Barry? Is that you, Barry?”
The voice was coarse and the words rounded akin to a slur. Everyone’s attention turned to the top of the stairs. Betsy stood there, her face and hair splattered with blood. Her top was soaked. She leaned on the railing for balance, bony fingers gripping it as though her life depended on it.
Trick, having spun toward the interruption, swung around his rifle and raised it to fire. The movement was so fast, the side of the barrel hit Coop in the face, knocking him backward.
In that moment, Mike saw his chance. He already had the spear gun aimed at Trick. All he had to do was squeeze the trigger. He applied pressure and with a thunk, the spear launched from the gun. But unlike the last time he’d fired the spear gun at a man, the projectile wasn’t connected to the line. He’d separated them in the mudroom. There was no restriction on his range.
It made a whooshing sound and then a crack when it hit bone in Trick’s thigh. He wailed and buckled as he pulled the trigger on his bolt-action rifle.
The weapon cracked and kicked up, its shot sailing two feet above Betsy’s head. She ducked but held onto the railing. Mike saw her bone-white knuckles wrapped around the wrought iron.
Trick was on the floor, grasping at his leg. Barry took three deliberate steps around the island, yelling at his children to cover their eyes before he drilled three rounds into Trick’s body.
Brice had quickly closed the distance between himself and the stumbling Coop. By the time Coop caught his fall, Brice emptied his shotgun. Coop dropped his weapon and sank to his knees.
Kandy was on top of the children in an instant. She bounded from the kitchen and launched herself onto the sofa to cover both of them with her body. Smothering them, she hid them from the worst of the carnage.
Trick was on his back like a dung beetle. His legs twitching, he intermittently reached for the wounds at his gut and chest and the holster at his side. Barry stood over him and put a boot on Trick’s arm, pressing it flat against the tile floor.
Then he put the rifle against Trick’s forehead and pulled the trigger. The crack was deafening and seemed to echo in the house for a long time.
Mike’s ears rang from the repeated gunfire. He saw Brice talking to Kandy. Betsy was moving her mouth as she slinked down the stairs, but he couldn’t hear anything other than a high-pitched tone.
He dropped the spear gun and hurried to Miriam, almost sliding across the tile to reach her. She was on the floor, semiconscious.
Gently, Mike rolled her over onto her back and knelt next to her. He pulled her up so he could hold her against him. She had a large welt on her right cheek and her eye was swollen shut, her lower lip was split and bleeding, but she was alive. She groaned and tried to whisper to him. Mike lowered his face to hers and quieted her.
“I can’t hear anything,” he said. “But it’s okay. We’re okay.”
Groggily, Miriam tucked her lower lip, gashed and bleeding, underneath her top teeth and then thrust her tongue. At first, Mike didn’t understand. She repeated it over and again until Mike’s eyes went wide and he understood.
Phil.
He looked up and found Brice. “Where’s Phil?” he shouted.
Brice didn’t know or he didn’t understand.
Miriam reached up and put a hand on Mike’s chin. He looked at her again and she shifted her head toward the back windows. Almost imperceptibly she jutted her chin in that direction.
Phil was outside.
Mike waved over Brice. Together they helped Miriam onto the sofa, resting her comfortably on one side of it.
Around him, there was chaos. Betsy and Barry and the children. Mike could hear the muffled cries and groans even if he couldn’t understand what they were saying. He didn’t know if Betsy was wounded or if the Rorschach of blood painted across her face and chest belonged to someone else. The ringing was incessant in his head and when he tried to stand upright, he nearly lost his balance.
He promised Miriam he would be right back, unsure if she could hear him. He moved to Trick’s body and pulled the nine millimeter from his holster. He checked the magazine. The weapon wasn’t loaded, but there were enough cartridges for now.
Mike hurried through the kitchen, into the mudroom and out the side door. It was dark and it took a moment for his eyes to readjust as he walked east onto the dock. The adrenaline leaked from his body, leaving him heavy and unsteady on his feet. But there was enough left to carry him to the boat.
The closer he got, the easier it was for him to see the outlines of shapes on the water. The boat was there, moored as it had been since they’d come ashore only two days earlier. Those two days felt like a lifetime ago. Two lifetimes.
Mike stopped when he noticed movement on the boat. He couldn’t make it out, but the boat shifted in the moonlight and there was a wash of shadow inside the Rising Star.
He lifted the gun and gripped it with both hands, as he’d seen men do in movies before the Scourge. He slowed his approach, careful to make less noise, even though he couldn’t hear anything beyond the ringing in his ears and the thick beat of his heart in his chest.
Mike considered calling out to Phil, making sure it was him and not the third intruder. He thought better of it given he couldn’t hear the response and might only be making himself an easy target.
He reached the end of the dock and stood in the shadows near the stern of the Rising Star. The interior cabin light was on and a flash of movement focused his attention. He took a cautious step toward the aft deck and held the gun at the end of his extended arms. Careful not to lock his elbows, he kept his finger on the trigger guard and inched closer.
He was about to step from the dock to the aft deck when he got a clear look at the person inside the boat. It confused him and he did a double take and glanced back at the house. Through the seamless glass windows, he saw Brice tending to Miriam. Barry and Betsy held each other, their children clinging to their legs. Dark speckles of blood painted the lower halves of two of the windows closest to where Coop fell and died.
Kandy wasn’t in the house. She was on the boat. Her hands were on her head, grabbing at her hair, while she paced. Her face was red; tears streaked her face. A long string of saliva bridged her gaping mouth.
Confused, Mike lowered the gun. He hurried across the aft deck and stepped into the salon. What he saw at Kandy’s feet stopped him cold.
He met her eyes. She met his. Her hands went to her mouth, covering it as they had when she’d seen the graves marked with paint stir sticks outside Grace Ward’s house. She dropped to her knees and sobbed.
Mike’s throat constricted and his vision blurred. Tears stung his eyes and he cried.
Phil was on his back. His eyes were open, his jaw hanging slack. He clutched a fishing net in one hand. The other, blood soaked, lay at his chest atop one of two bullet wounds. The other was to his gut. A dark stain marred the carpet under and around his body. Phil was dead.
Mike lowered himself to the deck and crawled next to Kandy. He reached out to her and she embraced him. Despite the ringing in his ears, he could hear her sobs. They resonated against his chest and his neck. Her body shook with grief and she grabbed at his shirt, tearing at it as if the act might ease the pain overwhelming her.
His own emotions surprised him. He was not one to cry. His father had scolded that out of him at an early age, but even that old Marine would have broken down at this.
The tears and difficulty breathing were about Phil, a gentle soul who counseled others and who worked hard to earn his keep. Despite his friendship with Barry, he’d never assumed anything was granted. If the apocalypse were filled only with men like Phil, it would be utopian. Now he was gone.
The tears were about Kandy’s loss. She’d survived the Scourge with the love of her life. A good man who treated her like a queen. Kandy’s other half was dead. She already struggled with this life after the world changed. How might she cope now?
The tears were about Miriam. He’d thought he’
d lost her. And now he was faced with the reality that one could lose a soul mate in the blink of an eye, for no good reason and with no consolation.
Mike was a different person than he’d been the day he’d seen his unrequited crush Ashley Pomerantz seize, convulse and die in front of him. He wasn’t afraid of confrontation. He didn’t slink from a challenge, content to subsist. He was a survivor with newfound resolve. His friends jokingly called him heroic. Mike believed in some small way he was a hero. Not a Captain America, Iron Man, Black Panther kind of hero, but the type who sacrificed for the greater good, who thought of others before himself. He understood that his transformation, while self-generated and as yet incomplete, was largely because of Miriam. Her love for him and his for her had pushed him to become the protector, the provider, the reasonable voice.
She too was heroic. She thought of others and worked to protect at her own expense. She was kind and thoughtful and beautifully intelligent.
Like Phil and Kandy, they were each other’s better halves. Their whole was greater than the sum of their parts. He could not imagine what he would be without her in this forsaken world, a world worse off without Phil living in it.
As he held Kandy, doing what he could to ease her racking pain, Mike wondered what was next. Where would they go from here and how would they get there? The question, without an answer, was both figurative and very literal.
CHAPTER 23
MARCH 14, 2033
SCOURGE +164 DAYS
MERRITT ISLAND, FLORIDA
It was after midnight when Dickie reached the island. His wounded arm throbbed with pain, but the bleeding had stopped, as best he could tell. He stopped at the foot of the bridge and leaned on a barricade. There were no guards here. There were no laughing gulls. Only the moon on its descent to the west and the loud rush of the river’s current provided company.
The insides of his thighs screamed. They were raw and blistered, as were his heels and the arches of his feet. His twisted knee pulsed. The soreness in both ankles was acute. His body was a festering wound from which Dickie could get no relief.
Leaning his weight against the concrete and wiping sweat from his eyes, he looked toward the sky and told himself he deserved the pain. He’d nearly killed a woman in her bed. If she hadn’t turned on the light in her room, blinding him and sending his shot wide, he’d have orphaned two children for the contents of a pantry and an oceanfront view.
He closed his eyes and replayed the series of events in his mind. He’d already gone over it countless times in the strained walk from the house to this point. It was a penance, he thought, to do it again.
He’d opened her door with the thin key Cooper had tossed to him and stepped into a dark room. He stood in the doorway. A shaft of dim light from the hallway angled across the room and outlined his shadow while illuminating the frame of a large footboard. He held the rifle against his shoulder, his finger light on the trigger.
As his eyes adjusted, he moved farther into the room and, with his heel, closed the door behind him. His eyes widened to let in the dim light and he saw her. She was in her bed on her back. Under the covers up to her chin, she almost looked dead. The shades to a pair of open windows billowed against a light breeze and diffused the faint moonlight to his right. A large piece of furniture, a dresser or armoire, filled the wall to his left.
He stepped softly across the room to the bed and was feet away when her arm shot from underneath the cover and hit a light switch on the wall next to the headboard, flooding the room with bright light.
Frightened, he moved to cover his eyes, but his finger stuck inside the trigger guard and the gun fired. The blast went wide. He heard a scream, loud and piercing. He squeezed his eyes shut and lifted a hand to cover the ear closest to the woman’s banshee-like screech.
Then a loud pop filled the air in the room. His ears rang as a second and third gunshot cracked close by.
He was hit. He felt it in his arm. The searing heat and radiating burn told him the woman had struck him at least once. Dickie stumbled over the foot of the bed. The woman cried and moaned. He saw her sweep the room with a gun, tracking him and he dove to the floor. The lights went out; there was a thud; the woman grunted and fell silent.
Dickie crawled toward a window. He lifted himself up and heaved himself through the opening. He crashed through the screen and fell to the ground fifteen feet below, landing in a thick Ligustrum hedge that bordered the front of the house.
At first, Dickie was sure he was dead. He was numb. The pain in his arm was nonexistent and he couldn’t breathe. Above him the woman was silent. Seconds later, he sucked in a gulp of air and a thick, incapacitating pain coursed from his ankles, through his legs, into his back and concentrated at the bullet wound in his arm.
Seconds later, he heard footsteps. People were coming. Three or four of them. The people from the bridge? Dickie wasn’t sure, but he didn’t move.
He hid in the hedges for what felt like an eternity. He took off his socks, knotted them and tied them above the wound in his arm to staunch the bleeding. Then he listened. His ear pressed to the front door, he heard the arguing. He heard Cooper and Trick. Then gunshots. Silence. Voices he didn’t recognize.
Dickie worked his way to a window that showed the family room. He pressed his bloody hands against the glass and stood on his toes until he could see inside and past the furniture. He saw two bodies on the floor. No matter how he repositioned himself against the glass, he couldn’t see who they were, but he knew. The strangers, the people from the bridge, were alive. They were hugging and crying.
Now, hours later, he was little more than halfway back to the houses in Rockledge. He wasn’t sure he could make it. If he didn’t know better, he’d think he was in shock. Truth was, whether it was clinically true or not, Dickie was in shock.
He couldn’t believe the reality of what had happened. Trick McQuarry was his hero. Even when Trick didn’t treat him with respect or acted as though he was a nuisance, Dickie wanted to be like Trick.
He didn’t like Cooper. The guy was arrogant and weird. He didn’t trust him as far as he could throw him and Dickie couldn’t throw a sandbag, let alone a grown man. Still, he didn’t want Cooper dead.
Dickie winced and put weight on both legs. He maneuvered around the barricade and began the hike to the end of the checkpoint. His tender ankle made the turning a challenge, but he managed.
He didn’t want to be the one to tell the others that Cooper and Trick were dead. They’d blame him. Or worse, they wouldn’t believe him. How had he survived? How had the strong, self-reliant leaders of their group died and the overweight weakling made it out alive?
Nausea swelled in his gut as he considered the reactions from the others. He wanted to cry. He forged ahead and willed himself to the houses in Rockledge, rehearsing how he would reveal the news.
He tried a dozen different versions. By the earliest strains of daylight, in the coldest hours of the day, he walked up the driveway to the first of the houses, dragging a foot behind him. He wheezed and coughed, his mouth thick with dried saliva.
The door opened as he reached it and Winter stood there in front of him. Before he could open his mouth, she spoke, not making room for him to come in the house.
“They’re dead, ain’t they? I know it. I feel it in my gut. They’re dead.”
Dickie sucked in a halting breath and slumped against the brick wall next to the door. “Yes,” he said, looking at the ground. “They’re gone. I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I—”
Winter raised a hand to stop him. Then she reached out and put the hand on his shoulder. “It ain’t your fault, Dickie. They had it coming, I’m sure.”
Dickie lifted his chin and studied her face. He wasn’t sure if it was the dehydration, blood loss, or exhaustion, but he thought he saw the faintest flicker of a smile on her face.
She waved him inside. He limped across the threshold and into the house. Beyond the foyer and in the family room where they’d
had dinner a little more than a day ago, candlelight flickered across the walls. The room was otherwise empty.
Winter slid into a chair at the dining table and motioned for Dickie to join her. She kicked out the adjacent chair to make room for him. He struggled across the room, using the wall where he could to keep his balance and essentially collapsed into the chair. It struggled against his weight but held.
There was a votive candle in the center of the table. The light cast a warm glow on Winter’s face. It made her look younger, less hardened. It also revealed the glisten of tears underneath her eyes and on her cheeks.
She ran her fingers along the table and stared absently at them as she spoke. Her voice was soft and almost feminine. “I loved Trick. He wasn’t a good man, but he was good to me. Understood me. Accepted me for who I am. I accepted him too, for all of his stupidity.”
Dickie didn’t know what to say. Winter thumbed away the wetness around her eyes.
“That’s why I said he had it coming. It’s not that he deserved it any more than most. It’s that he was a moron. All gut, no common sense. I knew he would buy it sooner than later. How did it happen?”
She looked up and focused on Dickie. He wanted water but wasn’t about to ask for anything to drink. Her reaction surprised him. It was a relief. Part of him thought she might kill him. He licked his dry lips.
“We came across some people on the causeway, the 520 bridge. We found out where they lived and figured their house was empty. We went to Cocoa Beach and found the house.”
Winter leaned back in her chair and put one leg up on the table. “It wasn’t empty. There were people there.”
“Right,” said Dickie. “We found one outside. He was on a boat. I guess he heard us trying to jimmy a lock. Trick went to the boat and shot him twice. Guy never had a chance.”
“Then what?”
The Scourge (Book 2): Adrift Page 24
