Drawing in a deep breath, I paused to make sure the man was gone, really and truly gone. When I did, my muscles froze in place, preventing me from moving for a very long time. Nothing registered with me then, nothing but the familiarity of the man’s face.
“You know him, don’t you?” Harrison’s voice broke through the haze that seemed to surround me.
I blinked, regained my awareness, and nodded. “I didn’t recog…He didn’t look like this…I didn’t know…” I drew my stare up to Harrison, partly pleading with him, with fate for this not to have happened. But it had. It had happened. There was no turning back, no changing it. That sick, twisted rational side of me that my father had cultivated so well showed itself, and it said that this wasn’t my fault, that it was self-defense. He’d been ill with the disease, that damned disease. He’d been… It didn’t matter. I had done it and there was no way to undo it. “My God,” I whispered, and my stomach twisted painfully, reinforcing that I was still alive and this man wasn’t. “How do I…,” I stopped to swallow back the words, unsure I could actually say them. “How do I tell Beverly I just killed her father?”
Time seemed to move slowly for me then, while Harrison approached me and took my shoulders tenderly in his hands.
“We,” Harrison corrected. “We both did this, Kennedy, and it was necessary.”
“I know. He was…” I said, incapable of finishing my sentence. Stepping away from him, I struggled to grasp it all and began an inane effort to whisk away reality by pacing back and forth. It took me a few steps before realizing that, while I didn’t want to stay here, I was unable to go anywhere else.
“No,” Harrison countered me again, calmly working through my inner dialogue to help me see the light. “We did this man a favor, Kennedy. He can rest in peace now.” He tilted his head toward me. “Do you understand?”
In a daze, I nodded. I did. I really did. It was logical. My heart just wouldn’t allow me to accept it.
Harrison could sense this and stepped in front of me, again placing his hands tenderly on my cheeks and positioning my eyes away from Beverly’s father and back to him. Harrison’s woodsy scent enveloped me, helping to bring me back to earth. “He was a good man, right?”
“Yes, a very nice man.”
“And he was stuck inside that body, a body he could no longer control, doing things he wouldn’t want to do.”
I blinked long and hard, before feeling my heart open a little. “Yes, he was.”
Harrison ducked his head and caught my attention, making me listen. “He’s free from it now. He’s free, Kennedy.”
And for reasons beyond my understanding, my heart got it. And for the first time since this entire repugnant experience started, I accepted it, as Harrison had so clearly already done. The tears flowed then, pouring down my face like a flash flood, relieving me of the tension that had built up. Harrison pulled me against his chest and wrapped his thick, warm, strong arms around me. He held me against him, protecting me, giving me the time I needed to recover. It was during that time, pressed securely up against him, that I realized I wasn’t only crying because I’d participated in taking the life of Beverly’s father, or because I’d helped set him free, or even because the whole damn world had collapsed.
For the first time since my dad’s funeral, after twelve long months of simply existing, finally, I no longer felt alone.
~ 5 ~
I HAD NEVER CONSIDERED MYSELF A weak person. It didn’t fit me because my dad had ensured that fear, submission, and vulnerability had been trained out of me since I drew my first breath. In my family, weakness wasn’t an option. In fact, this state of mind was one of my strengths during track races. When my body had given all it thought it could and my legs felt like spaghetti and my lungs screamed at me, I refused to listen. It was entirely that adamant refusal to take into account what could hurt me that kept me going. And it was this reason that kept me from listening to my subconscious when it began churning up the memory of Harrison picking up Beverly’s dad’s scent.
Harrison held me in his arms for as long as it took for my bawling to subside. He then stepped away and allowed me the room to wipe my face clean. When I thanked him, he responded with a reassuring nod as if he were reiterating, “Don’t be unnerved by what just took place”, which I assumed included the attack by Beverly’s dad, our defense of him, his deliverance from evil, and my resulting breakdown into Harrison’s shoulder.
It was while my face was embedded in his chest, drawing in his comforting scent, when the back of my mind resisted me. As hard as I tried to ignore them, images of Harrison lifting his nose to the air, drawing in a breath, the contortion of his face as he recognized something in the wind, the entire sweeping motion of it kept creeping back to my consciousness. I tried to ignore the images, wanting to focus on the feel of Harrison’s muscles below my cheek and his consoling warmth against me, and yet the damn things lingered, popping back in like one of those Hit The Weevil On The Head games. Only this wasn’t a game. Calm, cool awareness is always your greatest asset in an emergency. People had died because they were too panicked to see what was right in front of them. So eventually, as Harrison and I finished our walk around the school, I had to acknowledge the fact that there was something off about what Harrison had done back there.
I’d already accepted that he had excellent hearing and a high threshold for pain. Now I could add an incredibly strong sense of smell to his growing resume of overtly strange abilities. The addition of another mysterious quirk should have concerned me. And it did, but for the wrong reason. Instead of sparking fear in me, it carried with it the apprehension that I hadn’t showered in two days, and I became acutely self-conscious and positioned myself downwind from him. Strangely, this new realization about him didn’t lessen my interest in him either. If anything, it made him more appealing, and became the first time that I could remember when my dad’s training actually backfired.
When Harrison and I finished our inspection of the exterior of the school and were inside once again, we found the locker doors open starting from the entrance and reaching midway down on both sides of the main hallway where Beverly and Doc were standing.
Doc’s head was turned toward Beverly who was dropping an armful of sweatshirts into a large pile of clothes as we approached. They were arguing, which didn’t surprise me.
“How do you know where she lives?” Doc countered.
“She helped me with some projects last year. I had to drop her off at home a couple of times. She doesn’t own a car.” Beverly mentioned this last part as if it was a negative.
“So Mei tutored you,” he surmised flatly.
“Helped,” Beverly corrected, narrowing her eyes.
Doc looked away and shrugged. “Same thing.”
Her nostrils flared and she opened her mouth to retort, but Harrison stopped her. “All clear outside.”
I risked a look at him but he didn’t seem to notice.
With venom still on the tip of her tongue, Beverly directed it at Harrison. “Of course it is. You’re talking instead of trying to eat us.”
We ignored her, and I changed the subject. “Where’s Mei?”
“Bathroom,” Doc said just as she reappeared in the hallway. She met up with us at the piles Beverly and Doc were assembling, seemingly relieved that we’d made it back safely. I appreciated that.
“How are we looking on food?” Harrison asked when she’d reached us.
“We have months’ worth, but we’ll probably want to eat the perishables first, which means a lot of salads and veggie omelets.”
Doc’s lip turned up in disgust as he dropped a hoodie into the clothing pile. “We should throw in some meat with it, since they have so much.”
Harrison stiffened at the suggestion, but I believe I was the only one who caught it because all attention remained on Doc as he started to account for the lockers’ contents.
“You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff people leave here. Bags of weed, P
layboy magazines. I mean important stuff! And they just leave it all at school!” He shook his head in amazement.
“Of course,” Beverly said, directing her sarcasm at Doc before turning to Harrison and me. “They also leave other things. We’re making piles to categorize what we’re finding.”
“Good idea,” Harrison commented.
“It was mine,” she replied loud enough for us to hear before bending down to point out the heaps. “Clothing, electronics, food, games, drugs, and weapons. We left the books in the lockers.”
Harrison and I moved with equal anticipation and enough speed toward the last pile, causing her to grumble about our audacity in ignoring the excellent job she was doing. Unfortunately, until she grew blades or a trigger, she would be of far less interest to us than what was on the ground. Bending down, I rattled off what I saw out loud, realizing that Mr. Packard had unfortunately been adept at keeping weapons out of his school.
“A Swiss Army pocket knife, two Leathermans, and a few pairs of scissors.”
Harrison could hear the disappointment in my tone and mentioned, “There are two thousand lockers to go, Kennedy.”
“Right…right…,” I said trying to convince myself it was worth it to hope for more. Either way, I appreciated Harrison’s effort to boast my hope.
The food pile consisted mostly of junk food: Cheetos, Oreos, Twinkies, a few bags of M&Ms, a couple cans of soda. There was also a half-eaten sandwich wrapped in a wad of plastic cellophane, which would find its way into the garbage shortly.
The games were limited to a traveling magnetic chess set and several decks of cards, which were prohibited on school grounds to prevent gambling. Since there were over twenty sets, it seemed that this wasn’t widely known or the owners simply hadn’t cared.
The clothing pile was mostly hoodies, hats, and gym clothes that hadn’t made it home and into the washing machine. But there was a black leather jacket that might come in handy against the Infecteds’ teeth, if we should ever get close enough to them again to allow them the opportunity.
Both prescription and over-the-counter drugs had been found so far. Most of these were aspirin, birth control pills, Claritin. There were a few highly suspect orange bottles with their white pharmacy labels torn off, which would also be tossed out.
The electronics pile was humbling. I didn’t own anything other than an outdated iPhone, which I had lost sometime over the last two days, while others in the student body had the most recent tablets, cell phones, and handheld game consoles. Of course, they weren’t much help without their chargers, of which there were none. If anyone wanted to use them, they’d need to do it quickly before their juice ran out. There was one little treasure that might be of value though. It was a small, portable AM/FM radio, the kind you’d buy at a drugstore and stow in your boat for fishing. I picked it up, turned it on, and scrolled the dial along the band, but all it picked up was static. Turning it off, I put it back on the ground thinking it would be a good idea to cruise the channels every once in a while…just in case.
A small pile of makeup had been assembled off to the side just below Beverly’s assigned locker. Apparently, Beverly had laid claim to them already. This was fine. I wouldn’t be complaining about it, and I doubted Mei would either. Looking good for the end of the world was far more important to Beverly than either of us.
As Beverly huffed under her breath, it caught our attention and we found her standing at an open locker two sections down. She turned to us, shook a piece of paper at us, and announced irritably, “These were the answers to the test I took last week. He had them and didn’t even share them with me…” She huffed again, uttered a curse word, and scowled at “his” locker before snatching a bag of pork rinds from inside it and returning to drop it in the food pile.
None of us knew exactly how to respond, so no one did.
“We need to hang signs,” Harrison stated. “I was thinking the art rooms might have something we can use.”
Doc’s head shot up. “I can help with that.”
“Me too,” Mei offered.
Doc smiled, almost shyly, and said, “Thanks, that-that would be great.”
Harrison’s eyebrows dipped at Doc’s response and I figured he’d picked up on something between Doc and Mei, but I didn’t bother to ask. A far more important mission needed to be addressed, so I headed for the next opened, un-pillaged locker and began searching for anything that might be of value. Harrison came up beside me, I noticed, and started on another locker, and I recognized that even his presence next to me was a nice distraction from encountering filthy books and moldy food. Over for the next few hours, as Beverly opened the lockers and Harrison and I looted them, I felt rather than saw Harrison’s attention on me. As we passed each other, carrying objects to their respective piles, our eyes met. When a locker door became jammed on me, he was instantly by my side to heave it open for me. Beverly didn’t acknowledge us and only stopped once every hour to send a text. Her cell phone battery would be dead soon, which was a strong motivator for her to open the rest of the lockers. Because I’d spent so much time with her before my dad passed, I knew exactly what she was thinking…Without a recharger she couldn’t reach her dad and if she couldn’t do that she was as good as dead, stuck here with G.I. Jane, the Lone Ranger, The Hulk, and the Whiz Kid. I’d never seen her work ethic so strong. And I’d never felt more guilty in my life.
Doc and Mei showed up around late afternoon, hauling several signs, which looked sturdy and visible from a good distance.
“We found some tarps with grommets,” Doc said dropping the large plastic rolls at our feet and snapping one end so that they unrolled down the hallway. “And we found rope in a custodian’s closet.”
As we stood over the signs, inspecting them, Mei mentioned awkwardly, “Doc did the painting.”
Insisting on giving her credit, he shook his head. “Not all of it.”
“You did most of it,” she admitted. “You have a good hand for it.”
His head jerked back at the compliment, but a content grin slipped across his face as he re-rolled the tarps.
“They all have the same message…SOS,” Mei explained. “And the paint is dried, so we’re ready to hang them.”
“Good,” Beverly muttered from down the hallway with her head ducked into a Vogue magazine she’d taken from one of the lockers. As if it wasn’t already evident, she added, “I could use a break.”
“Well, you’re needed, unless you want to give up the keys,” Harrison said.
She made a disgusted noise, set down the magazine, and gave no sign that the keys would be handed over. “Which way to the roof?”
Harrison, who evidently had already been up there on his nightly rounds, led the way. Doc carried the tarps and Mei brought the rope. It required climbing a ladder from the maintenance room, which didn’t leave Beverly enthusiastic about agreeing to come. She baulked about it and the scuffing of her good heels until Harrison suggested she give him the keys so that she could head back to the hallway, alone. She shut up after that.
With our school being two stories it didn’t tower over the tall buildings across the skyline of downtown Chicago, but it gave us enough elevation over the houses and retail businesses that immediately surrounded us that we could see a good distance. We collected at the edge of the roof, lining up to look out over the city. If it weren’t for the smoke plumes curling up between the trees and rooftops from unattended fires, it would have looked serene and untainted, even idyllic.
“The trees cover a lot,” Doc reflected in a mumble, referring to what we couldn’t see but knew was happening on the ground.
Almost in unison, our heads lowered and we looked out across one of the school’s parking lots below us where bodies were still strewn across the pavement and cars were left abandoned, and those who had done this to them were weaving mindlessly, carefree between them.
“Let’s get these signs hung,” Harrison suggested, shifting our focus to something positive.
The rest of us nodded in agreement and for the next couple of hours we draped them over the edges of the roof and down the sides of the buildings from several different spots. Since our school’s footprint wasn’t a perfect square, we used more than one sign on each side of the property. And because our school’s design had an opened quad area in the center, we had to walk around the roofs of the connecting buildings to reach the opposite sides. By the time we were done it was dusk and we were exhausted.
The storm that had stirred the draft that had carried the aroma of Beverly’s dad to Harrison’s nose, finally arrived, just as we finished scraping SOS into the gravel on the school’s roof. It was the end of summer and the storm seemed to be making up for time lost, rolling in with fury. After the sun went down, the clouds hovered on the horizon, coloring the sky with bolts of lightning every few seconds. Claps of thunder sounded in the midst of them, forceful enough to rattle the metal exhaust vents around us. Since it didn’t carry in any rain and the humid heat of the day lingered with it, the five of us stood there on the roof, watching.
Gradually, the street lights began blinking on one-by-one. This was likely caused by an automatic, remote-controlled timer as they registered dusk approaching. They seemed like a quiet reference to how much our lives had been pre-planned, made to be simple, in control. It was a surreal façade to the world we knew. There were no sirens, no wails or screams, no people running for their lives. It wasn’t hard to imagine that it was just another day and that some of these houses might have a dad, just home from work, turning on the BBQ for a late summer dinner in the backyard.
Haven (Apocalypse Chronicles Part 1) Page 10
