The Post

by Kevin A. Muñoz

  “Sam,” Marilyn says, in the tone she used at the tire store.

  “No. Think about it. Mikhail, your enclave never trades directly with Clarke County. You use us as a proxy because we have the better highway access. So they’ve never met you. And Marilyn, you were visible, but I don’t think they ever really noticed you. Not enough to remember your name or what you look like. But everyone on Ithering’s crew knows me. If I walk in there clear as day, and they’re part of Ravana’s organization, they’ll know immediately something’s wrong. They’ll know why I’m here. But you two can be travelers. You’ll get in, find out what you can, and we’ll meet back here tonight. Midnight. I’ll spend the time looking for another way in. If I find one, I’ll take a look around, but I’ll be careful. No heroics. I promise.”

  When my speech ends, Marilyn is quiet for a long moment. I can see the conflict in her face. I expect her to tell me again that I don’t need to prove anything to her, that I don’t have to be the one to save the world. But I’ve never been the sort to turn away just because something is dangerous.

  “Sam,” Marilyn says again. “Damn it. You’re right. Of course, you’re right.” Her shoulders drop as she resigns herself to my plan.

  I open a side panel on the HRV and retrieve the heavy-duty toolbox, one of the few things we didn’t discard when we packed in the diesel. Inside I find what I need: bolt cutters, a spool of wire, and insulated electrical gloves. I add these to my pack and accept the Remington when Barkov offers it.

  I take a deep breath, preparing myself. “If there’s any chance of you getting caught by Randall, by anyone, get the hell out. And I promise I won’t take any pointless risks, either.”

  Marilyn clutches me in an embrace, her cheek against mine. She brushes her lips across my face, then kisses me firmly and steps back. “Midnight,” she says. “We’ll be here.”

  I am momentarily charged by the kiss and the memories that surface from it. I want to linger, to be greedy for what I lost.

  “I’ll be here,” Marilyn says.

  I secure my pack and climb the ramp back onto the loop. I glance back briefly to see that Marilyn is watching me leave while Barkov gathers his own things. As I reach the main highway, my friends disappear from view, and I’m alone.

  I cross to the opposite lanes and move north along the shoulder, looking through the trees at a meandering fence line that we didn’t notice from the truck. It’s clearly a new construction, post-collapse, made from scraps and repurposed parts. Some sections are simple plank walls. This suggests to me that the community here may be much larger than the Little Five: we had more than enough chain link fencing and only a few sources to choose from. The Clarke County group may have run out and had to improvise.

  I walk until I cross a bridge over a small stream. Listening to the birds in the trees and the animals in the underbrush, I become acutely aware of my solitude. A pack of feral dogs rushes along the other side of the road, chasing a cat, barking loudly and making me worry about hollow-heads.

  I see none until I move farther into the trees and approach a section of fence that I can breach with the bolt cutters. A pair of hollow-heads move away from the fence and toward the sound of the dog pack. Both are male and scrawny, faces rotting from some mouth infection that may have taken a decade to get this bad, given the hollow-heads’ resistance to disease. Even from a distance, I can see rows of blackened teeth, lips pulled back as if to growl. But there is only silence.

  They see me immediately and turn to face me. I stop still and hold my breath, waiting for shrieks, but they don’t come. They stumble across the rough ground, one of them reaching out as if to clutch at my face.

  They are half a dozen yards off, no farther. At their speed, I might be able to cut my way through the fence, but I wouldn’t be able to secure it again quickly enough to prevent them from coming through. So I drop my pack and let the Remington gently down on the ground. I draw my knife and wait for the hollow-heads.

  They both look like they’ve been through fights before. Long cuts and scars dominate the skin of their bare arms. Someone foolish enough to fight unprepared at close quarters must have made those wounds and suffered the consequences.

  The first hollow-head comes into range, and I kick it hard in the chest, knocking it off balance and onto its back. As it rolls over to rise up, I take three quick steps forward. A hollow-head’s skull is as strong as anyone else’s, and a knife isn’t usually going to do the job. Even if it does penetrate, there’s not much left in there for it to destroy. So I plunge the knife deep into the second hollow-head’s neck, then dash back out of reach as it sputters and seizes from the gushing wound. My hand is covered with blood.

  The first hollow-head, finally back on its feet, notices its dying companion. I could swear that the change is visible on its skin: muscles tighten, eyes bulge, the rictus of its mouth grows wider. This one is going to be harder to kill.

  It lunges at me, bringing its teeth to bear. I swing the knife up to catch it under the jaw, but I only succeed in shearing off its left ear and part of its cheek. It keeps moving, pushing me over before I can get my feet behind me. I land with a heavy thump against my pack, a spasm of pain in my back, and the wind knocked out of me.

  The hollow-head snaps at me, tearing part of my shirt. Its blood, pouring from its ear and cheek, spatters my chest. Getting clear with my knife arm, I stab the monster hard in the back of the neck, severing its spinal cord. The body goes limp, though the head continues to gnash away, and I grunt hard as I lift and roll the dying thing off me. I shiver like a child walking through a graveyard. The fetid smell of the hollow-head’s mouth nearly makes me retch.

  It was a foolish mistake. I should have risked firing two rounds. I could have moved another half mile down the road and tried another entry point, just in case anyone came to investigate the gunshots. Now I’m covered in blood, which will make it difficult for me if I run into anyone on the streets of Athens.

  I wait for twenty minutes, making sure that there are no hollow-heads or people nearby, then hide the Remington by the largest tree in the area. Quietly I cut open a small space in the fence and squeeze through. I replace the cut section and tie it back into the fence with the spool of wire.

  The ground slopes down to the edge of the stream, which I imagine must have been a river at one time and will be again once the last of us has been scoured off the planet and all the world’s dams crumble from disrepair. The water is greenish brown, murky. I consider crossing over, but it will be even harder to explain muddy and drenched pants than hollow-head blood on my shirt.

  A dirt road runs parallel between the stream and the fence. I follow it, staying in the trees and hugging the fence line, until it comes out on a major road. There is another gate here, but it appears to be unguarded. The fence line continues to follow the stream, but I’ve had enough of slinking around in the trees. I turn left onto the sidewalk. I am on the edge of the downtown part of Athens, surely: abandoned cars litter the streets and parking lots.

  I check my clothes. The blood is drying, darkening, but it’s still obviously the product of misadventure. My boots are muddy but that won’t be a problem for long. My pack is clean, except for a few grass stains. I look like a traveler. I don’t look like I belong here.

  I follow the sidewalk until it ends at the soft corner of Williams and Oconee Streets. Williams Street takes me southwest, past a university parking lot, to the Interim Medical Partnership Building. The grass and trees are as overgrown as any abandoned streets back in Atlanta. I’ve yet to see a living person. I wonder, almost aloud, why the fence extends this far if there’s no one to use the space.

  And then I see it: an apartment complex, just south of the university building. The parking spaces out front are empty, completely cleared of unused cars, and for the first time since leaving the Little Five I see a freshly cut lawn.

  A man in his late sixties works on a small garden plot in front of the nearest
apartment building, turning dirt and moving decorative plants from one hole to another. It’s an odd sight: back home, every sizable piece of arable land is used for growing food. The Clarke County community definitely has space to spare.

  Although I stay across the narrow street, next to a ramshackle toll booth that must have controlled access to the university’s lot, the man notices my observation and thumps his gloved hands against his thighs. He stands and wipes a light sheen of sweat off his forehead.

  “We got a breach?” he calls over.

  My clothes give away what I’ve been up to, but it seems that’s not necessarily unheard of. “Yeah,” I call back, “but I’ve fixed it.” I give my pack a light pat with one hand. The other hand I keep on my holstered P229.

  “Must’ve been a mess of ’em,” he says, pulling off his gloves. “Any of that blood yours?”

  “No,” I reply, surprised at the nonchalant manner of that question.

  “Well, I know it’s a long trek back to the post. If you want to clean up, I’ve got fresh water inside.” He beckons me over.

  Everything about this feels wrong. It would have felt wrong fifteen years ago, unless I’d been living in some whitewashed rural midwestern town where no one locked their doors. And I’ve never lived in a place like that. Except the Little Five, I suppose. But we know what a stranger looks like.

  Yet if I refuse, he might become suspicious. He might raise an alarm, expanding the threat to include the whole community. If I have to, I can manage a single man. I doubt I could take on a whole town. So I shrug and accept the offer as noncommittally as I can, following him into the building. As we go up a flight of stairs, he makes small talk, perhaps to cover the slow, creaking speed with which he climbs. “Haven’t seen you out in this quadrant before. You just get rotated in?”

  “Yeah,” I say, wishing there were more I could offer. I feel like the worst spy in the world.

  The old man opens his apartment’s front door and ushers me within. The space looks clean, well-cared for, and I see evidence of at least two people living here. Two bookshelves with markedly different contents, a sofa with two collapsible dinner trays in front of it. Through a large sliding glass door, I notice a small generator on the balcony. This is what passes for luxury now, and I’m impressed. As if calling up an old instinct, I remove my mud-caked boots as soon as I step over the threshold.

  “Come on through,” he says, pointing to a hallway at the back of the main room. “Tyler, my roommate, he’s still asleep, so the bathroom’s all yours. There’s towels, and I’ll get you another shirt. Swear to God, that one you’ve got on is not getting out of here alive.” He chuckles and opens the bathroom door.

  I step in and shut the door behind me. I take an extra second to work the lock, then test it. The bathroom is as clean as the rest of the place, with an unused toilet and sink. The tub is filled almost to the top with clean water. Hanging on a hook on the tile above is a small plastic bucket shaped like a sandcastle.

  I hesitate. It’s entirely possible that the old man has now gone to get help from the real guards of Clarke County, and I’m waiting like a moron to be captured. But if that’s true, then I’m too obvious as it is. If I leave now, I’ll still look like I’ve been in a hollow-head fight, and I’ll stand out too much. I need to get clean, regardless.

  I drop my pack to the floor and peel off my coat, shirt, and bra. Soaked-through blood sticks to my skin. I look in the mirror and see a nightmare: my arms and chest are red, my neck and face look like they’ve been sprayed with paint.

  My pants aren’t much better. They’re covered in mud and grass stains, but I will be able to live with that. I remove them, so I can run a bit of water over them to get the worst of the road off. The gun in my holster clunks on the tile floor. My socks stink like cheese left out on a Louisiana stoop. I peel them off, too, hoping I can impose on the old man’s hospitality a little more.

  Feeling a bit sheepish about staining one of the sharply creased towels, I draw water out of the tub and start to wash the blood from my body. I pour a little bit of water through my hair as well, using my fingers as a comb.

  A knock at the bathroom door causes me to jump.

  “Just a minute, I’m not decent.” I laugh a little, staring at my haggard face.

  I hear a key entering the lock. The door handle moves. My heart pounds twice before I can recover my wits. As I reach down for my holster, the door crashes open and the old man jumps in, wielding a knife. He moves quickly, faster than I would have guessed from the way he climbed the stairs. Before I can retrieve my gun, his free forearm is across my shoulders and he is pushing me back against the bathroom wall.

  “Tyler!” he shouts. “We got one!”

  Another man enters the cramped space. He is younger than my attacker. Leaner, with a pretty face.

  With his knife arm, the older man cracks me across the cheekbone, using his elbow to deliver most of the hit. I see stars in my left eye, but I don’t think my jaw is broken. I curse myself for not keeping my shoes. I try to knee him in the groin, but he seems ready for it and hops out of the way.

  He is stronger by half than he has any right to be. I try to wrench myself clear, but it’s no use, and Tyler is blocking the door anyway. The old man grabs my wet hair and throws me past him, forcing my head down into the water-filled tub. Before I can adapt, I scream the air out of my lungs, counter to everything I ever learned in the Coast Guard.

  As I struggle beneath the water, my chest starting to burn, the old man’s rough hand slides across my back. His fingers hook into my underwear, and he pulls them down. I buck once, then come to my resolve.

  It’s been a while, but I’m trained for this. I go limp. With any luck Tyler and his partner will think I’ve passed out: most people have no idea just how long it actually takes to drown. And even without air in my lungs, I can hold my breath longer than most.

  I can hear them talking. The old man’s body is pressed against mine, wanting release, but suddenly timid. They don’t want me dead. As soon as I feel the added grip on my hair, I know what’s coming. The old man pulls me out of the water and as he does, I rotate my whole body and deliver a solid roundhouse punch. Not to his face, as he did to me. That won’t help. His skull is a lot stronger than my knuckles.

  I punch him hard in the throat.

  I feel his trachea compressing, crunching. He screams raggedly, the sound of a dog trying to retch up vomit. He stumbles back, lifting himself up, crashing against the sink and the mirror. He’s bent backwards across the sink now, his pants down around his ankles, and his engorged penis quickly losing interest.

  I punch him in the balls. He yelps with more pain, losing air he can’t replace. Tyler backs away and I lunge at him, my wet, naked body clobbering him against the hallway wall. I slam a clenched fist into his right eye.

  As the two men roll around in pain, the old man suffocating on his own cartilage, I scramble to recover my pants and holster. With one eye watching the men, I throw open a hallway closet until I find what must be one of Tyler’s shirts. I dress from top to bottom as I move toward the front door, hopping into my pants as if I were in a sack race.

  Tyler barrels into me from behind and I nearly lose my own eye on the edge of a TV tray table. My forehead takes most of the hit. There’s going to be a nasty bruise later.

  I can’t care about it. Tyler’s knees are on my back. But he’s stupid and can’t see my gun side. I draw, move my arm around in an arc to get position, and shoot off the right side of his face without looking.

  Tyler topples off me and I climb to my feet. The old man, wheezing out the last of his breath, careens from the bathroom and stumbles toward me. But I’m done with this place. I jump down the stairs four at a time and break across the street, toward the university building’s parking lot. I crouch down behind the toll booth to catch my breath.

  I forgot my boots and coat. I consider going back to get them, but the old man is out
in the yard now. He drops face down in the grass. I can’t get close: with my luck, someone will see.

  I forgot my pack, too. So no bolt cutters, no wire. No flashlight, no food. No ammunition except for the rounds I have in the P229 and the four in the Remington beyond the fence.

  I bang the back of my head against the toll booth, humiliated by my gullibility. The old man knew I was a stranger. That was why he took me in.

  DAY FIFTEEN, 12:00 P.M.

  At least I escaped. But in order to do so, I had to shoot one man in the face and kill another with my bare hands. As I rest against the toll booth in my borrowed clothes and bare feet, I start to shake from adrenaline. Though my fist struck mostly flesh and cartilage, my knuckles still hurt, a reminder of the force of my blow. I search out the sensation of regret and discover that I don’t feel it. I am more bothered by its absence than I am by what I’ve had to do.

  I’ve had friends, at the academy and after, who were raped. Some more than once. It was a hell I never suffered. Even through the worst of my adolescence, that, at least, never came for me. But relief at having escaped, and my near satisfaction at the method, only adds to my frustration. I’m an adult with training and experience. Phoebe is a child.

  I stand, check my holster and the gun. It’s time to get moving again.

  I head west under a dilapidated railroad bridge made of wood and rusted metal. At the sound of a police siren—strange to my ears after a decade without them— I hide behind the bridge’s wooden beams, watching as the campus cop car passes, its electric engine running silent. Someone must have seen the dead man and alerted the city’s police. There will be a search; I need to be as far away from this area as I can, as soon as humanly possible.

  As I hurry to the intersection and hook a left down East Campus Road, I wonder how the police received the message so quickly. Perhaps they’re using shortwave radios here for local communication. Or they’ve found a way to get the telephones working again. Either way, the emergency response speaks to an infrastructure much better established than anything the Little Five has put together, despite the work of Braithwaite, Vargas, and the power company.