by A. P. Fuchs
So, what, am I just supposed to try and blend in? Though he was thankful for the safety of this place, he was also a little bored. Being alone, sure, he could handle that, but now with all that happened recently and spending time around people again, he was getting antsy to find out what his next move might be.
A girl walked past him and Joe only noticed her because she accidentally brushed against his arm as she squeezed past him and someone else who stood next to him a little too closely. She had black hair, wore a baggy and dirty gray sweat suit, and had a very familiar posture.
The realization struck Joe like a fist to the chest.
April.
“No way,” he said. The guy standing next to him gave him a weird look as if he thought Joe was talking to him. Joe didn’t reply, but instead followed the girl with the black hair along a catwalk, weaving his way past people, trying his best to keep up yet at the same time keep enough distance so whoever she was didn’t know she was being followed.
If it’s her . . . He didn’t know what he’d say or what he’d do. She meant so much to him, so much so that even after the Zombie Rain hit in his world, she was the first person he went to see to make sure she was okay. Not his parents, siblings or friends. Just her. No one else in the world mattered. And when he found her, she had already been changed and sat in her apartment eating human flesh. He’d never forget the vacancy in her eyes and the blood smeared around her mouth when she looked up at him.
But in this world . . . in this world April might still be alive. Another thought hit him: if indeed she was alive, was it possible there was also another him somewhere, even here in this secret place? Would he recognize himself? Probably, and would the other him recognize him as well? He shook the thought away. He’d look into that later if he had to.
The girl wasn’t too far ahead and had turned right down a hallway. The people traffic here was thinner. Joe kept his footfalls intentionally quieter as his heavy boots seemed to enjoy making a loud thwuck against the stone flooring.
The girl stopped at a door running off the hallway. She produced a key from her sweatpants’ pocket and stuck it into the door’s handle.
Joe got closer. The girl’s hair hid most of her face but the jaw line looked a lot like April’s, at least the way he remembered it.
The girl turned the key. The door unlocked.
Joe neared her until he was a couple feet away.
She turned toward him, her brown eyes conveying nothing but sheer confusion.
Heart aching, Joe said softly, “Sorry. I thought you were someone else.”
She stood there, glanced down at her hand holding the key, then back up at Joe. His mouthed moved as if about to say more, but there was nothing to say. He turned around and headed back the way he came. Behind, he heard the girl open her door then close it and the sound of the lock being reapplied.
A second later, he was shoved against the wall, the side of his head bouncing off it with a sharp smack.
“What do you think you were doing?” Tracy asked, gripping him by the shoulder of his coat, pushing him harder against the wall.
Joe shoved her away and rubbed his head. “Easy. I thought I saw someone.”
“Right. Everybody thinks they see someone here. Look, there is no one here that you know. Who’s here represents people from all over the country, even the continent, not just Winnipeg.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
It hit him. “I get it. You thought you saw someone once and it turned out it wasn’t them so now anyone who thinks they see someone they know is suddenly mistaken. Am I close?”
She walked past him, and said, “Shouldn’t have gone looking for you. You would have been better off embarrassing yourself on your own.”
Joe went after her. “Wouldn’t have mattered. Like you said, I don’t know anyone here.”
* * * *
It had to be late evening by now, maybe even late into the night. Billie didn’t know. She was tired, had a headache pressing behind her eyes, and she was so thirsty she couldn’t even produce enough spit to temporarily stave off the feeling.
Del hadn’t hurt her. He only threatened to. Instead, like before, he used August as leverage and told her the old man’s recovery would meet an abrupt end if she didn’t answer a few more questions.
It wasn’t until he asked his final question did she finally realize what all this was about.
He had asked about the man in the white coat.
He had asked about the angel.
8
Good Night
“You’ll be sleeping here,” Tracy told Joe as she stood in the doorway to a closet-sized room about four feet by ten. The walls were concrete, cracked, seeming to have been a rush-job than a proper application.
Even prison cells weren’t this small, Joe figured. “All right, I guess.”
“It’ll do,” she said.
“And you?”
“I have my own place.”
“Yeah, but where?”
“You need a night light? Afraid of the dark?”
“Okay, enough. Seriously. You brought me here. The least you can do is tell me where I can find you if something comes up.”
“Like?”
“So what is this? You pick guys off the street, take them here and dump them off?”
She pointed a finger in his face. “Watch it.”
“Fine. Whatever.” He turned away and went into the room. A small cot lay along the left side. A lone wooden chair sat in the far corner. The wall opposite the cot had a calendar and a couple of coat hooks with a dark green metal garbage can below. “Cozy.” He glanced up at Tracy. “Night.”
He went in, sat on the cot, then flopped onto his back and put a forearm over his eyes.
A few moments went by, then Tracy said, “Look, I’m heading out in the morning. Food run. If you want to come—”
Joe made like he didn’t hear her and instead just kept his eyes shut and tried to relax.
“Yeah, well, oh-eight-hundred I’ll be passing by your door. If you want to come . . .” The door squeaked on its hinges then sealed with a loud ka-thoom.
Joe took his forearm off his eyes and squinted against the rich yellow glow coming off a small light covered in a cage just beside the door. He couldn’t see a light switch. He got off the bed and searched the room high and low for one. Even went so far as opening the door and checking the walls beside it in the hallway, half-expecting Tracy to be out there, arms crossed, watching him be the brunt of the joke of “trying to find the light switch.” But she wasn’t out there.
A guy, who looked around fifteen, walked past.
“Hey, kid,” Joe said.
The guy stopped, cheeks dirty, and furrowed his brow. “What?”
“Where’s the light switch in here?” Joe thumbed over his shoulder to the room behind him.
“You’re kiddin’, right?”
Joe eyed him squarely.
“You must be new,” the young guy said. “No light switches. There’s a master switch around here and a couple backups. Lights stay on. The dead somehow get down here, the last thing we want is to be caught with them in the dark.” The teen walked on.
Joe stood in the hallway, staring at his feet. He’d have to make do.
* * * *
August lay on an old mattress, upper body bandaged up. Opening his eyes all the way was difficult. He didn’t like the dark. Not here. Even all those nights alone up at the cabin were almost comfortable compared to this. Even that night when he first came to the city and spent it in a bank vault. Here . . . here there was an uncomfortable openness, that hospital feeling where you sensed that’s where you were even with your eyes closed or just coming out of sleep. A certain sterility. Yet, he knew, this place was not sterile. No place was anymore. There was a coldness and distance Del and May exuded that August hadn’t encountered in anyone in a long time. They seemed detached from things. It was certainly possible their detachment came from
being holed up here in this place, or having only spent the past year or so with very little company.
Even after having been away from the city for a year, August remembered how hard it was to adjust to having people around him again.
His shoulder throbbed, but it felt more intact now than it did before. Though he couldn’t see it, he felt the wound bound up good and tight. He hadn’t been conscious when May did whatever she did to fix him up, but whatever she’d done, it seemed to have worked. He just hoped recovery time wouldn’t be for months on end. In a world like this, you needed all the strength you could muster. Besides, he didn’t know what kind of strength he’d need right now nor how long they would be here for.
“Hope you’re okay, Billie,” he said softly. God, watch over her. “These people.” They rescue us, mistreat us, shoot me, then fix me. Billie’s . . . “I don’t know.” Hurt? He hoped nothing worse than a few shouts were directed her way. Was she beaten? Raped? His heart ached at the thought. She was just a young girl. She hadn’t done anything wrong.
Joe. Del had asked about Joe. What did they want with him? Why did they care if he survived or not? August prayed he had, but if that meant Joe would now have to be on the run from these guys, he wasn’t so sure death would have been a bad option after all.
Drowsiness soon took over and August caught his thoughts drifting and mixing in with scattered dreams. Some of Joe and Billie. Others of Des. Most of his wife and the family he had been forced to kill after they’d been turned into zombies.
At one point between all the drifting in and out of consciousness, August thought he heard Billie scream from somewhere beyond his door.
9
Morning
Sleeping with that blasted light was more difficult than Joe anticipated. Falling asleep with an arm over his eyes was the easy part. Waking up throughout the night having moved the arm, meant being caught in that place between being awake and asleep, knowing something was wrong but not knowing how to fix it. A few times simply rolling over and burying his face in the worn-out pillow worked. Other times, when he yearned to be on his back but got pins and needles every time he put an arm over his eyes, well, he just had to tough it out laying face-first into the pillow, taking shallow breaths, and trying not to think of anything so he’d quickly fall asleep.
Joe woke up with a headache, not sure what time it was.
Something about Tracy nagged at the back of his mind.
Right. Oh-eight-hundred. Eight o’clock. Eight o’clock. Right. He sat at the edge of the cot, face in his hands, and rubbed his eyes. “Wants me to meet her, but I don’t have a clock.” He lifted his head, blinked several times against the light, and surveyed the room. “And neither does this room.”
Yawning, he stood, stretched, checked his holster making sure the X-09 was where it should be, poked through the sheets on the cot to make sure nothing had fallen out of his pockets while he slept, then headed for the door. He tugged at his coat and realized then how tired he must have been last night for not even having bothered to take it off.
Another yawn, then he opened the door and stepped into the hallway.
* * * *
Billie barely slept. Each dip into unconsciousness was filled with images of August, his blood, the man in the white coat, marked by a headache each time she opened her eyes.
She was in a room with dirty white-tiled walls, and a cement floor, with a drain in the middle of it. The smell of foul meat hung on the air. There was no light, only that which came from the hallway outside her door and faintly shone through the small rectangular window in the middle of it.
This place might have been a hospital at one point, probably a military one given its location. It might have even once been used as an outpost during the battle with the undead until humanity lost. Perhaps there was equipment here she could use to radio for help.
“I need to get out of here.” She had said it out loud intentionally, the speaking of it giving it more purpose than just a mere thought. “I need to save August, too.” Except, she didn’t know where he was.
It was hard to say what the hour was, but she was usually pretty good at sensing the passage of time, and it must have been at least six or seven hours since she put her head down to sleep, despite her waking on and off throughout the night. A safe estimate would be around seven or eight in the morning, if indeed it had been past midnight when she fell asleep.
Mental note: get a watch when one can be found, she told herself. It was one supply she was surprised she didn’t have. The last watch she had was broken in a zombie scuffle just outside the Haven a couple of months ago. She never got around to fixing it, but instead relied on the clock on her computer.
Even now in this room she smiled to herself, thankful for her old system. She was even more thankful that the power was still on in parts of the city. That meant that despite the zombie uprising, a survivor or two were still minding the hydro plant and doing with it the best they could. It was probably a safe place to be, as well. Perhaps that was where she and August should go if they survived this.
Billie sat on the edge of her bed, trying to will her legs to get moving and take a peek out the door’s window.
A moment later, a jolt shot through her appendages when the door squeaked as someone turned the handle.
* * * *
Joe stood out in the hallway. It was empty, though he was able to hear a few voices coming from a corridor up on his right.
A buzzer sounded and a cool, automated voice filled the air. “It is now six o’clock.” The buzzer sounded again. “It is now six o’clock.”
Joe licked his lips and leaned up against the wall beside his door. No wonder I’m so tired. He went back in his room, closed the door and sat on the cot. Hopefully that thing sounds every hour. But he didn’t remember hearing the buzzer the night before. Maybe it was a morning-only thing and six o’clock was wake-up time.
Not sure what to do, he decided to lay back on the cot and listen for footsteps outside his door to see if anyone else was awake.
Instead, he fell asleep.
When he awoke, he shot to his feet and bolted out the door, nearly running over a middle-aged woman with blonde hair as she passed by.
“Sorry,” Joe said and scanned up and down the hallway looking for Tracy. Another man walked past. “Excuse me,” he said to him.
“Yeah?”
“Know what time it is?”
“’Bout twenty after eight.”
Crap. “Thanks.”
The man nodded and went on his way.
I can only assume Tracy would have gone out the way we came in. “Which is where?”
He took off down the hallway, seeking direction from a teen girl with short jet-black hair and heavy eye shadow. Once done, he thanked her and tried his best to follow what she said, all the lefts and rights she gave him becoming something of a jumble. Joe was relieved when he emerged from a hallway and saw the tunnel that would lead to the ladder that would take him to the surface. He debated whether to hang around a few minutes in case Tracy was running late, or just head outside and maybe run into her there.
No. She’d be uniform about things. She’d be on time. He would have been the same if he had a way to tell time. He decided to pursue her to the surface, but not before once more checking over the X-09, making sure it was ready.
He didn’t know what he might encounter out there.
10
Outside
The familiar sense of stepping out into the unknown welcomed Joe like an old friend. The air was thick with the stench of the dead, just like always, the sky above like coffee with a hint of gray paint. Any trees that once lined the city streets were mere skeletons, each having died long ago thanks to the absence of rain.
Joe got the X-09 ready and kissed its barrel. He had to remind himself this was a different model than the one he invented and, unlike the other one, did not need constant cocking. The bullets were now in a reloadable clip that plugged into the handle. T
he bullets were the same as before, and of those he had plenty. He checked the clip currently in place. He had six shots. Gun at the ready, he made his way from the Hub and kept close to building walls, ears ever alert for the groans of the dead. The low and crushing booms of giant dead feet rocked the pavement every now and then. Other times they were only heard. Joe wondered where the giants got their food from. If they ate people on top of terrorizing them, he could only imagine how many folks it would take to make their bellies full. Like sharks trying to make a meal out of minnows.
The building upon which Joe leaned was old, the stone muddy and gray, mould from many years prior growing in between the bricks. He was careful not to breathe it in. What does it matter? he thought. The disease in the air . . . it’s especially thick in this world. The air, I mean. Seems far more dense than what I’m used to. One could only wonder how many lungfuls of this stuff will do a person in. He stopped walking. Guess it’ll only be a matter of time regardless of how you want to look at it. The dead will win. If they don’t eat you, their very presence will be enough to kill you. Back in his world, the bulk of the undead remained within the city limits. The Haven, though infested, had a sparse undead population compared to other areas, especially downtown. Though disease carried on the air, comparatively speaking, the air in the Haven was much lighter than that of downtown. Even when the dead began moving out from the city and spreading into the burbs, they hadn’t been present long enough for the atmosphere to have changed.
