by Lori Whitwam
She glanced at me, and then back to Skip. “You don’t have to.”
“What…um, what?”
“I already know what I’m doing.” She sat up straighter and squared her shoulders before turning her head to look at me. “I’m going with you.”
I’d come out here prepared to discuss and dissect, examining every possibility, every pro and con, hoping to persuade Melissa to come with me if I were chosen, before I ultimately did whatever was best for her continued physical and emotional security. Somewhere along the line, I’d lost control of the conversation. “Honey, you…”
She gave her head a sharp shake, setting her long, dark hair swaying. “No, Ells, listen. Didn’t you hear what I said in there? We’re not safe, not really. Not here, not anywhere.”
I was relieved to hear more anger in her voice than fear or sorrow, but I hoped the anger wasn’t directed at me. I was still confused. “How does that translate into volunteering to go to a fallback location?”
She let her gaze drift out to the herd of goats, a small smile teasing at the corners of her mouth as she watched Wilhelm nudge one of the nannies away from a morning glory vine climbing the fence, claiming the snack for himself. “It might feel safe here, but it’s not. It might be safer than a lot of places, but there are too many of us. This was bound to happen, these people wanting to take what we have.” She turned back to me, and I saw a determination burning in her gray eyes. “One thing I do know is I am not…not…sitting here and waiting for a bunch of marauders to come try to kill us. Or worse. We’ll go somewhere they don’t know about, and we’ll make that place safe.”
I knew exactly what ‘or worse’ meant. I took her hand and gave it a squeeze. She surprised me by tugging me to her, and I wrapped her in a lopsided hug, squishing Skip in the process. He didn’t mind, wiggling between us and demanding to be included. “All right. We’ll go together in the morning.”
***
I knew Bethany wouldn’t like our decision, but even the next morning it still hurt to see her so upset.
“I can’t believe you’re all leaving me. We’ve been roommates ever since you…um, for almost two years now.” She unlatched the wire gate to the chicken enclosure and tossed in a handful of feed. The hens swarmed while the rooster stood to one side and scratched at the dirt, surveying his little kingdom.
I knew what she’d almost said, but it didn’t bother me like it used to. “I’m sorry, Beth, I really am. You know if Melissa wasn’t on board, I wouldn’t even consider it. But we have to do what we think is best, and so does Rebecca.” Wilhelm bumped me in the leg, hoping to get past me and reach the chicken feed, but I shoved him back, and he trotted off, his little tail twitching in what I felt was a very rude manner. “Besides, we might not all be chosen.”
Bethany snorted. “Of course you will. I know it. You and Rebecca are strong fighters, so if you’re willing to go, they’ll need you.”
“We’ll need fighters here too, for when the marauders come.”
She scattered a few more handfuls of grain for the chickens before replying. “Yes, but there are plenty of good fighters who have wives, kids…hell, a couple of them even have parents or grandparents here. They won’t leave. Unattached fighters willing to go colonize, or whatever this is, that’s a high demand thing.”
She was probably right. “But Melissa…” I began.
“Melissa is a perfect fit. She’s been working in the kitchens since the beginning. Feeding the people at the outposts, while they’re busy building and securing and patrolling, somebody has to do that. Plus, she’s some kind of animal whisperer.”
That was totally true. Her first words when she began recovering from her captivity were to Skip, and it soon became clear she had a special affinity for animals. Which was why we currently had seven adult goats and two kids gnawing the shrubbery to stubs. She often worked at the livestock enclosures, both inside and outside the Compound, and when there were goats to be had, she gleefully brought home as many as she thought she could get away with.
I felt pretty shitty about leaving Bethany behind, though I couldn’t change my decision. “I’m sorry.” It was the best I could offer.
Bethany gave a sad smile as she latched the chicken enclosure. “I know, honey. I’ll miss you, but I understand. Anyway, I went and talked to Rich this morning. He said the West neighborhood is getting crowded, and they want to use the houses on Alder Court for some kind of manufacturing project. They were going to annex the next block, but we don’t have time to build more wall right now. So those people need new housing, and I’ll have roommates here. I won’t be alone.”
Melissa leaned out the back door. “Hey, Ells, time to go!”
I gave Bethany a quick hug and turned away, my eyes more than a little misty, and went out front to meet Melissa. She was on the sidewalk with Rebecca, who was vibrating with impatience.
It took about ten minutes to arrive at the council chamber. It was a grand name for a nondescript event room at the community building in the central neighborhood. What had once hosted birthday parties and baby showers was now the command post where our safety and survival were orchestrated.
We watched people come and go for a few minutes, speculating on who might be selected, and trying to guess the skills of the few people we didn’t know. Finally, we went inside and were directed to where the council members sat at a long table. We each went up to one who was currently unoccupied, gave our names, job skills, and training, and that was it. The council knew most of us personally, and they would meet that afternoon and evening and decide who was suited to the job and how to divide up the teams. We were to report back in the morning for the results.
There was too much to do to sit around dwelling on whether we would make the cut. Rebecca had a guard duty shift coming up, and Melissa was due in the kitchen. Many residents’ jobs didn’t allow them a lot of time to cook for themselves, or the time to garden or obtain enough food to be self-sufficient, and the communal kitchen filled that need. In addition, for the work we did for the community, everyone was entitled to eat there if they chose, or to receive portions of things like bread, pastries, or stews to supplement what they were able to provide for themselves. I wondered how we’d manage food preparation and distribution wherever we went.
If we were chosen.
I headed off to Liz’s house, still the main collecting point for books, documents, and information of all kinds. My current task was to help sort information the fallback teams might need, and make four sets. Sometimes I could allocate a whole book, if we had others containing the same information. Other times I had to use our dilapidated desktop copier to reproduce the material. As a former Library and Information Sciences major, this was right up my alley.
As I worked, I was grateful for the scavenging crews, who had obtained several good laptops, a few tablets, and some solar chargers. We normally used the generator at Liz’s to power the office equipment, but I didn’t know what the situation would be for the fallback locations. We’d include a couple of solar charges and alternate power sources with each information package, as well as some material Liz had saved to flash drives in the early days of the outbreak before internet function was lost.
With teams about to be chosen, I felt an increasing sense of urgency and worked late into the evening. When I arrived back at the house, everyone was there and every bit as exhausted as I was. We had dinner, then decided to watch a movie, not something we often did. But it had been sunny and was expected to remain so—according to our freakishly accurate weather prognosticators—and the batteries tied to our solar panels were fully charged.
Melissa hooked up the DVD player while Rebecca sorted our limited movie collection. “What should we watch?” Rebecca asked, gravitating toward cases with things blowing up or bleeding on the covers.
“Nothing violent or scary,” Bethany said decisively. “Too much of that already.”
“Fine,” Rebecca grumbled, “but I’m not watching some giggl
y chick thing, either.”
Melissa settled the discussion by choosing a goofy comedy. We managed to put aside the uncertainty and anxiety associated with the many ways our lives might soon change. We chatted and laughed and ate homemade potato chips—of which Skip had more than his share—before heading off to bed to await the coming day’s news.
***
Bethany had an early shift and was already gone when I awoke. I found Melissa and Rebecca in the kitchen, eating scrambled eggs and some of the leftover biscuits Melissa had brought home the day before. Melissa pointed to a plate she’d fixed for me. I grabbed it from the counter and sat at the table. Rebecca had even made us instant coffee. I wondered where she’d been hiding that particular luxury.
Melissa took a sip of her coffee, grimaced, and poured in a healthy dose of goat milk. Satisfied with the result, she dunked a piece of biscuit in it and popped it in her mouth. “What if they don’t pick us?” she asked, still chewing.
I shrugged. “Stay here and do our part, I imagine.”
“We’ll go,” Rebecca said. Her matter-of-fact tone said if the council thought she was staying here, they had another think coming. And possibly a beat-down, if necessary.
Melissa clutched her mug in both hands, staring into its milky depths. After a moment, she took a deep breath and blew it out in a rush. “They have to let us go. I can’t stay here now.”
Rebecca looked as confused as I felt. “I gotta say, peanut, I didn’t think you’d want to go. I figured you’d be happier staying here, where things are at least familiar.”
Melissa tried to snort, but it caught in her throat. “Familiar.” She thumped her mug down on the table and gave the rest of her biscuit to Skip. “Familiar can be a big ol’ trap, but it feels so nice you don’t know it until it’s too late.”
I tried to apply this theory to my own life, but it didn’t quite fit. My pre-outbreak life had been familiar. And safe. I realized this was a very personal declaration about one particular event, something from Melissa’s experiences during the early days of the plague. I knew I had to tread carefully. “You might be right, but can you explain? I’m not sure I get what you mean.”
I shot a glance at Rebecca, who gave me a slight nod. She felt Melissa had something she wanted to say, too. We had to let her work her way up to it.
Melissa fed Skip half of another biscuit—that dog was going to get fat—before folding her hands in front of her on the table and looking at us. “Ells, you know Mason killed my mom, right? When he abducted me?”
I swallowed the lump forming in my throat. “I didn’t know for sure, but I guessed so, just from things he said, or maybe how he said them.” We had never, not in two years, discussed our captivity in any but the most general terms. I wasn’t sure this was a good idea, but Melissa seemed to feel it was important.
With a nod, Melissa said, “Well, let me back up a little. When things started happening and we figured out what was going on, my Aunt Jenny came to our house. We lived out of town, maybe five miles, but Aunt Jenny thought we needed to run, go somewhere harder to find, maybe up in the Smokies. She had this big motorhome.”
I thought that might have worked, but you would also cut yourself off from a lot of potential resources. And you never knew who else might be taking refuge in the mountains…if you could even get there.
“Mom wanted to go, but Dad said no, absolutely not. I wasn’t sure what the right thing to do was, but it scared me to hear them disagree about it.” Rebecca gestured for Melissa to give her the biscuit plate, and Melissa handed it over. “That word kept coming up—familiar. Dad thought we needed to stay in familiar territory, where we knew the area, the people. Familiar people. And he said nobody who wasn’t familiar with the area was likely to come out our road. Anybody looking to rob or hurt people would stay in town. They wouldn’t come to our house. It wasn’t familiar.” Every time she said the word, it had more bitterness in it.
“Melissa, nobody knew what to expect. Leaving might have been a good move, or it might not. We were all just guessing then.” I reached for her hand, but she curled her fingers into her palm and continued.
“Aunt Jenny left, and we stayed, because it was familiar. She said if she found a safe place, she’d come for us, and Dad said if things didn’t work out where she was going, she could come back. We’d be fine.” She almost choked on a sob, but held it back. “We were fine, for a few weeks, hiding. We saw some zombies, but we were quiet. If any came near the house, Dad killed them with his hatchet. But then someone did come. Mason and his gang.”
I felt sick now too. “He was sly, calculating,” I said. “He had the abandoned hotel set up within a couple of days of the first outbreak, almost like he’d been planning it.” Maybe he had. “Then he got the supplies he wanted by raiding the warehouse club.” And killing my brother in the process.
“Yeah,” Melissa said. “Guess he ran out of projects in town. So, they found us. Dad was out in the garage when they showed up, way off to one side of the house, getting some gas for our generator.” Her eyes pooled with the recollection. “One of the guys shot him on sight. I’d heard them drive up and was watching out the kitchen window. I saw it happen.”
“Shit, kid, that’s rough.” Soothing and comforting weren’t really Rebecca’s thing, but at least she was trying.
“I…then things get weird, like fuzzy and missing bits. They kicked in the back door, and Mom fought them. I tried to run…she kept screaming at me to run. Run, Melissa. And I ran. I kicked one guy in the knee, and he fell, and I ran.”
This time I grabbed her hand, whether she wanted me to or not. Her voice was becoming more childlike, she was repeating herself, and I was afraid she was going to become so upset, reliving this, that she might revert to some level of her former voiceless, trance-like state.
“Honey, no. You don’t have to tell us. We can imagine…” Honestly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it.
She shook her head, and I saw her force herself to refocus. Definitely not the broken little girl she’d been. “No, Ells, I’m okay. I have to say it all, this one time. If we’re going to leave here, you have to know why it’s what I want, and why we can’t stay.” I nodded, and she went on. “Another guy caught me, and Mason said not to let me go, I think. Something like that. But he wouldn’t let them, um, do anything to me. Said he was saving me for something special.”
When she was quiet for a few seconds, Rebecca guessed the next part. “But not your mom?”
“No,” Melissa confirmed. “Not my mom. Mason said maybe he’d keep her, but he had to check the merchandise. He…he ripped her shirt, ripped it right off. Kept tearing until her shirt and bra were on the floor. Something cut her, a strap or hook, or maybe his nails. She was bleeding, up on her shoulder by the neck.”
Rebecca had been part of the rescue team, the ones who found out about us and rescued us from Mason and his men. The look in her eyes clearly said she was glad she’d gotten to kill some of them, and would happily kill them all over again.
“He touched her,” Melissa said, her voice shifting back to anger. Sick as it was, I took this as a good sign. “He…put his hands all over her, smearing the blood around like finger paint. And he laughed, said maybe she wasn’t bad for an old lady, but he wasn’t sure. He said she’d have to show him what she could do, and I could watch because I’d need a lesson on what to expect later.”
“You couldn’t have stopped him,” I said gently. I was familiar with Mason’s sadistic nature and penchant for blood. I’d been his damned bloody canvas too many times.
“I know that now,” Melissa replied, “but I didn’t then. I started struggling, and the guy hit me. Mom started screaming again and fought like crazy. She caught Mason a good one in the face, and he lost it. He hit her, and she fell. Then…” She swallowed and looked back and forth between Rebecca and me, not speaking until we raised our eyes to hers. “Then he cut her. He took that butterfly knife of his, and he cut her throat.”
&nb
sp; Rebecca uttered a soft fuck and stood, moving stiffly to the kitchen window.
I couldn’t help it. I was crying, tears silently burning down my cheeks, even if Melissa’s eyes were dry. I flashed back to Mason shooting Matt in the warehouse, and his body sliding to the floor. It was…too much.
“So that’s it,” Melissa said. “We stayed where it was familiar, like as long as we were quiet and patient nothing bad would find us. You can’t get hung up on familiar. You have to think about changing, even if you don’t want to, before you decide what to do. Falling back on familiar just because it feels safe is a sure way to get killed.”
We both stood up then, and I pulled her to me in a tight hug. And finally, she cried. Rebecca stood stiffly a short distance away, looking very much like she needed to kill something. Or several somethings.
Once the tears subsided and faces were mopped, I said, “I get it now, honey. I see why you’re willing to go, and I know how hard it was for you to make that decision.”
Rebecca grabbed her sword sheath and strapped it over her back. She gave Melissa a hearty slap on the shoulder—again, comforting wasn’t really in her skill set—and said, “Well, chicks, it’s about that time. Let’s go find out if we’re hittin’ the road.”
Fifteen minutes later we had our answer. We were leaving the Compound. We were all officially part of fallback team three.
Time for a post-apocalyptic road trip.
CHAPTER FOUR
The four fallback teams were instructed to assemble in different locations around the Compound to meet with their team leaders. Our group was sent to an open area near the east gate. Once used as a stockpile for wall-building supplies, it was now empty enough to easily accommodate us.
