by Tim McBain
Shit.
They must have changed the protocol. Added more volunteers or nurses so they could rotate breaks or something. And whoever was inside was in the back section of the tent, right where I needed to go.
Underneath the talking I couldn’t quite understand, there was another sound. A strange sort of sloshing noise.Somehow both liquid and metallic at the same time. Almost like waves splashing against the hull of an aluminum fishing boat.
I decided to abandon my plan and try again the next night. I didn’t really have another option.
I slunk back around the corner and almost plowed someone over in the dark. I managed to stifle the scream that rose in my throat. And then I saw how small the person was.
Izzy.
“What are you doing?” I hissed.
“You snuck out of the tent,” she said, making no attempt to be quiet.
I shushed her, worried that whoever was inside the tent would catch us out here. Then we’d both be in deep shit.
“That doesn’t mean you’re supposed to follow me!”
Still not whispering, she said, “How come you’re allowed to sneak out, but I’m not?”
“Be quiet, or I’ll tell Sgt. Foressi that you were out after bedtime.”
“I’ll just tell her I was following you!”
“You little shit.”
Izzy’s mouth opened in a way that told me she was about to screech some kind of angry retort, so I clapped a hand over her mouth.
And then I smelled it.
Gasoline.
Before I could react there was a sort of whoompf! sound that was really more a feeling in my eardrums than a noise. And then blinding orange flames shot up from the center of the tent. Izzy gasped. I stared at the fire, not believing it was real.
I blinked tears from my eyes, not from crying, but from the sting of the fumes and the smoke already billowing in a thick cloud around us.
Something tugged at me. It was Izzy. She had her fingers around my wrist, and she was trying to pull me away from the tent.
“We have to get away from it!”
She was right, I knew she was. I could feel the heat from the flames on my skin. But my mom was in there.
“Erin!”
I didn’t actually hear the last syllable of my name because it was drowned out by a loud pop! that sounded like a canon firing. Izzy and I both instinctively hit the ground.
Two seconds later, another bone-rattling boom.
The oxygen tanks. How many were inside? Dozens, I thought.
I lifted Izzy to her feet and together we ran back toward the main camp. Several more explosions rang out behind us. It sounded like a fireworks show, but it was a lot less pretty to watch.
Drawn out by the noise, people from camp were just starting to notice the flames.
Someone shouted off to my right:
“Lord, Jesus! It’s the plague tent!”
When we reached the Kids Tent, Sgt. Foressi was just outside the door, trying to wrangle all the panicked children. Maybe in all the commotion, I thought, she hadn’t noticed we were gone.
But as soon as those evil dragon eyes fell on me, I knew we were busted. The Dragon Lady misses nothing.
“Where the hell were you?”
“I had to go to the bath—”
“Don’t lie to me,” she snarled. “You think I’m an idiot, don’t you? That I won’t notice you sneaking out in the middle of the night? Your mother might have been too stupid to figure you out, but I’m not her.”
My molars ground together so hard my jaw shook.
“Don’t talk about my mom.”
A bitter little smile spread over the Dragon Lady’s mouth, and her eyes narrowed to slits. She crooked a finger at the flames now engulfing the entire quarantine tent.
“Don’t you get it? Your mom is gone,” she said and took a step closer. “You’re my problem now.”
This might sound dumb, but it wasn’t until she said it that I put it all together.
My mom was dead.
Erin
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
15 days after
Last night still doesn’t feel real. But then the wind kicks up, and I get a whiff of smoke, and I know it all actually happened.
I guess it’s a good thing the quarantine tent was situated so far from the rest of camp, or the whole place probably would have gone up in flames. I don’t think they even tried to stop it. They just let it burn itself out. I suppose there’s only so much you can do with manual water pumps and buckets.
The rumor around camp is that the fire started because a candle got left too close to the tent wall. I don’t know if they found evidence of that, or if it’s just speculation. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
What’s done is done.
Speaking of the camp rumor mill, King Bennett’s first decree has been to ramp up rationing. That means one meal a day.
This only applies to civilians, of course. The National Guard still gets two meals a day, because they’re doing all the “important work.”
Believe it or not, everyone seems more agitated about the food situation than the quarantine tent disaster. Every conversation I’ve overheard so far today has been a group whine-fest about how unfair the new one-meal-a-day plan is, and that they’re sure the National Guard is having a free-for-all and hoarding supplies.
An entire tent full of people burned alive last night, but we’re all more concerned about who’s getting an extra helping of chipped beef.
I have been sentenced to sit in the Time-Out chair for the whole day as punishment for sneaking out last night. I suppose she thinks it will embarrass me, but what do I care?
Of course, it didn’t end there. When one of the really little kids wet their pants earlier, I got sent to clean the urine-soaked clothes in the river.
You should have seen the pleased look on her lizard face as she thrust the piss-stained corduroy at me. But the joke is on her, because being away from that tent and away from her is a blessing.
I told her that, and she whispered some vague threat about sending me away again if I tried anything funny. I didn’t think she meant it before, but now I’m not so sure. She’s more evil than I gave her credit for.
As I walked through the barracks, I crossed paths with Jimbo. He gave me a polite little nod, and a second after we passed one another, I got a whiff of something. At first I thought it was pot smoke, but that wasn’t right. For whatever reason, it made me think of summertime as a kid. A hot day on the lake, at my grandparents’ cottage. My dad used to fire up their speedboat, and drag us around on an innertube for hours, remember? That engine smell of the boats has always reminded me of that.
I thought about what that burnt gasoline smell would be from. The generators, I guess. Or one of the big trucks. I’m assuming they’re still trying to get more of that stuff working.
I think Sgt. Foressi was disappointed when I returned from my task unbroken, because she wouldn’t let me go to dinner. Or whatever it is now that it’s the sole meal of the day. Brelunchner?
If she thinks she’s going to take me down with a pair of pee-pants, she’s got another thing coming.
Your BFF, who will not break no matter how loud her stomach growls,
Erin
Erin
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
16 days after
Izzy, that devilish little munchkin, managed to sneak me some food from the mess tent last night. It wasn’t until after lights out, when we were snuggled in our cots, that she tossed over the box of raisins.
Even after those tender morsels, my stomach continued to rumble and growl all night. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed that I was with you. We were in a big mansion with animal heads on the walls and a giant fancy staircase. Your whole family was there, and we knew your mom was making mashed potatoes for dinner, but the place was so huge, we kept getting lost trying to find the dining room. We weren’t scared or worried, though. It felt like an adventure.
; Waking up to discover none of it was real was a disappointment, to say the least. Heartbreaking is more like it.
Anyway, I skipped over something important. The real reason I started writing this morning.
In the midst of my tossing and turning last night, I thought of summers on the lake again. And I suddenly remembered this time something was wrong with the boat. My dad and grandpa were tinkering with the engine, and when they fired it up to test it out, it started spewing all this black smoke.
Over the chugging sound of the motor, my grandpa bellowed, “It’s burning up oil!”
They shut the engine down, and then he and my dad had this long debate about the proper way to mix gas and oil for a two-stroke engine.
I don’t know why, but suddenly I tied the smell on Jimbo to the fire in the quarantine tent.
But that’s crazy, isn’t it?
It could be anything. No one would have actually set that fire on purpose, would they?
The more I try to deny it, the more it seems possible. And I’m going to get to the bottom of it.
King Bennett has called a camp meeting today, just before the morning meal. Anytime Sgt. Foressi has to wrangle all thirteen kids at once, chaos ensues. It’ll be easy to slip away from her so I can investigate.
I’ll be in big trouble with the Dragon Lady when I return. Maybe she’ll try to drive me out to the boonies and dump me.
But I have to do it. I have to know.
Delfino
Outside of New Bern, North Carolina
4 years, 50 days after
I woke to the sound of gunfire. Three shots.
And then the screaming started.
I jerked upright, slid on some pants, grabbed my gun and ran out of the cabin. Confused. Groggy.
My footsteps sang the song of my half-asleep state, bare feet pounding at the ground like a pair of sledgehammers, legs all stiff and heavy.
The sunlight stung my eyes like cigarette smoke. Late in the morning, I figured, judging by the brightness.
My head throbbed. I’d huffed more gas to help me sleep, and now I was paying the price via what felt like knitting needles puncturing my frontal lobe.
Holes.
That’s what huffing eventually causes. Holes in the brain.
More screams brought the situation back into focus. Shrill. Ragged. I was pretty sure where they were coming from.
I sprinted toward the Hellickson mansion. It would have taken a hell of a lot more than brain holes to stop me.
I thought for sure that the screams I heard must be Linda’s, but Dan Hellickson came storming out of the house as I got close. I wouldn’t have believed it was him but I could see the harsh shrieks pouring out of his mouth in violent bursts. A strange falsetto whistle seeming to match his regular voice, a banshee screaming along with his every syllable.
His hands clutched at his neck, and rivulets of blood gushed through the gaps between his fingers. So much blood. He wouldn’t make it more than a few minutes.
I guess I had stopped running by this time — maybe I was in shock or something like that. I didn’t realize that I was just standing there until his head snapped toward me.
He looked at me, his eyes wild. Terrified. Feral.
And he stopped screaming, and the silence was goddamn everywhere all at once. Just an awful quiet after all that screaming. And I heard a single wave slap the sand and roll up the beach somewhere off behind the house.
I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a sense of dread like I did right then.
I knew somehow that they were all dead.
The Hellicksons. They were gone. Dan bleeding out on the front walk to finish it.
Hellickon’s lips twitched, some small sound crackling from his throat. Stuttering little snaps like when a campfire eats up a pile of sticks real fast. He was going to say something to me, I think, but he never got the chance.
The dead came spilling out of the front door of the Hellickson mansion in droves. At least fifteen of them, all bumping into each other but managing close enough to a single file that some detached part of me couldn’t help but think of a clown car watching them arrive.
They were on him before either of us had time to react.
These were unlike any of the dead I’ve seen before. Haggard rotten things that obviously had spent time in the water. Blackened and bloated and strangely sheening like some clear gel had been smeared over all of them.
The writhing bodies swarmed over him, tipped him to the ground. Biting and clawing and ripping at him. The wounded animal they’d make their meal.
I raised the gun. Felt it quiver at the end of my arm. But it would be pointless. There were too many.
He screamed like a woman.
Erin
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
16 days after
Kelly-
I don’t know how long this candle will last, so I am writing as quickly as my fingers will allow. Pardon my handwriting.
I did it just like I said. Right in the middle of helping Sgt. Foressi get the kids up in the morning — trooping them back and forth from the porta-potties, making sure teeth are brushed — I slipped away, zig-zagging between tents until I was on the far side of camp.
When I reached the stretch of open grass that led to the former site of the quarantine tent, I glanced over my shoulder, suddenly almost paranoid I was being followed. There was no one there.
I took the well-worn path up to the scorched rectangle of land. The steel support structure still stood, but the outer fabric had melted and re-hardened into puddles around the perimeter. There was debris everywhere, and all of it was coated in a layer of black soot. I hovered at the edge for several minutes, hesitant to take that last step from green grass to charred earth. I guess maybe I was aware that this was now a graveyard, and I didn’t want to disturb the dead.
But I wouldn’t find anything standing outside. I had to go in. I inhaled, held my breath, and crossed over the threshold.
The sky darkened and the restless spirits of those who had died called out in tormented moans.
Just kidding.
Nothing unusual happened at all.
In fact, the only thing out of the ordinary was how silent and still everything was. When I’d been in the quarantine tent before, there was almost always something going on. Nurses pulling on latex gloves, volunteers chatting together as they washed their hands at the utility sinks, the wind rustling against the canvas walls.
I moved farther in, eyes roaming over singed sheets and gurneys blackened with charcoal dust.
With each step, ashes rose in little clouds, clinging to my shoes and staining the leather gray.
What was I looking for? I didn’t know. Anything, I guess.
I found myself standing roughly where my mother’s bed had been, and I spun around in a slow circle.
It was unbelievable how little was left. How totally and completely the fire had obliterated every sign that there had been fifty-some people here. Living beings that were just… gone.
My throat got thick. A thought rang clearly in my head: I shouldn’t have come here.
I turned back, anxious to be away from this place. As I made my way across the span of the tent, still kicking through the remains, my toe collided with something.
It went skittering over the ground, and for a moment, some part of it caught the sunlight like a glittering jewel.
I stooped to pick it up, wondering at the weight of it. And suddenly all these things from the past few weeks all kind of fell together like matching pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
The big jug of lighters in Max and Bennett’s tent, and Max talking about what a pyro Bennett is. How he set someone’s hair on fire once as a joke.
Bennett telling me we were wasting our time on the people in the quarantine tent. That killing them would be a mercy.
The voices I’d heard in the tent the night of the fire and the strange sloshing sound.
The burnt petroleum smell on Jimbo.
I ran my thumb over the polished metal surface, clearing away the cinders.
The enamel was gone, but the outline of the grinning, winking devil was still there. It was Bennett’s phony Kurt Cobain lighter.
I just stood there and stared at it for a good minute or two. And then I looked up, gazing across the field toward the main camp. I had to tell Max. Or Sgt. Foressi. Or whoever I could find.
I sprinted back and found a crowd of people waiting to get into the mess tent for Bennett’s big meeting.
I scanned the mob for Max but didn’t see him. Even more people were already inside, so I joined the throng. When I finally made it through the partition, I scooted sideways against the wall, head swiveling back and forth in hopes I’d catch sight of someone familiar.
Halfway back, Sgt. Foressi was directing her flock to seat themselves at one of the larger tables. Her back was to me as I approached.
“Sgt. Foressi,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”
She whirled around at my voice.
“You are so done, you little brat.”
She lurched at me, grabbing for my sleeve, but I was already stumbling away.I should have known better than to go to her for help. I didn’t care about her threats anymore. I had to find Max. Or someone who would listen to me.
I scrambled back to the bottleneck at the door. My progress was slow, like a dying salmon fighting upstream.
A large man in a pair of denim overalls bumped against me, and then I was face to face with Breanne. I saw confusion in her eyes for a beat.
“Breanne! Thank God. I have to talk to you.”
I reached for her sleeve, wanting to pull her aside. But already the puzzled look had turned to one of loathing.
“Get away from me!”
