Harden

by D. J. Molles

  Even though Sam knew the borders were secure, that the fences were high, built up higher, and topped with powerful electrical lines, he still never felt safe in the woods. Especially in the dark. During the day he could shrug it off, but when everything was shadows, every shadow felt like a threat.

  He never communicated this to anyone. It was his own personal problem to deal with.

  He was too old to be afraid of the dark. He was a soldier now, for chrissake.

  A soldier like Lee. And Lee wasn’t afraid of the dark.

  She led him into the clearing of McFayden Pond, and they skirted the edge of it, all the way around to the opposite bank, and then she began to descend the bank towards the water.

  “We goin’ swimming or something?” Sam said in a hushed tone. He stared at the shimmering dark waters and thought no fuckin’ way. Then thought that if Charlie started disrobing and getting in the water, he probably would too.

  “I hope not,” was Charlie’s only answer.

  They came to a small cement dam. A washway. Something to drain off the pond during heavy rain. Charlie negotiated herself over the slick concrete, and Sam followed. The dam was now between them and the pond. She kept descending. Into darkness.

  It wasn’t until he saw the big, black opening of the culvert that he came to a stop.

  Charlie halted at the mouth of it. It was huge. Her shadowy figure barely came to the halfway mark of its height. She looked back at him expectantly.

  “You want me to go in there?” Sam hissed.

  Charlie pulled something out of her pocket. It clicked. Light speared the darkness in the culvert. By the glow, Sam saw she was smiling. “It’s fine,” she said. “I’ve been through it before.”

  She shown the light down the length of the culvert. The darkness swallowed it. The beam never reached the end of the tunnel. She headed in, like the deep black tunnel was nothing more than a manicured path through a park.

  Sam looked over his shoulder. Compared to the tunnel, the rest of the night seemed well-lit by the moon and he realized that he would have preferred to skinny-dip in the pond. But he headed into the culvert, knowing it was too late to turn back now.

  And secretly, he didn’t want to lose the glow of Charlie’s flashlight.

  The culvert was long. It smelled of wet concrete and a sort of forgottenness that went with things that never saw sunlight.

  It had been a while since they’d had heavy rains, but still the bottom of it was wet. There was a layer of silt there, and he could see tracks in the silt. Charlie walked with a sort of bowlegged gait, straddling the little stream of murky water at the bottom of the tunnel, and Sam mimicked her to keep his shoes from getting wet.

  A few minutes into the culvert and he was wondering how much farther they would have to go. He looked behind him and couldn’t see the entrance of the culvert. He looked ahead of them and couldn’t see the exit.

  He wondered what would happen if her flashlight ran out of batteries.

  Another few minutes of walking. His hips were getting tired from the strange gait they were using. Up ahead, her flashlight finally flickered off of something.

  Twenty-five more yards and they reached it.

  It was a heavy drain gate. It covered the entire opening, but there was a section of it that was hinged, just big enough for a man to get through at a crouch. It was closed.

  Charlie shown her light on the opposite end of the hinges. The gate was held closed by nothing more than a little red carabiner. It looked like a new addition, and when he looked around at the bottom of the culvert, he saw the glimmer of a heavy padlock lying in the silty water. Its shackle had been cut through.

  “Why are you showing me this?”

  Charlie laughed like Sam was a child trying and utterly failing at understanding how the world works. She grabbed the carabiner, undid it, and pushed open the gate. “I’m not showing you the gate. We’re going through it.”

  “Are we on the outside?”

  She stepped out of the culvert, held the gate for him. Watched him expectantly. “Yes. We’re on the outside.”

  Sam didn’t move. “We don’t have guns.”

  Charlie reached down and grabbed the hem of the hoodie she was wearing, lifted it up to show her waistband. The handle of a revolver showed. “Speak for yourself.”

  He stepped one foot out of the gate and looked at her darkly. “Charlie, if you think one fucking revolver is gonna solve your problems if it comes down to it—”

  “I’ve been out before, you know. Not just out here. We came from out there. Remember? You’re not the only one that has a shitty past, Sam. I can fend for myself.” She raised her eyebrows. “Now are you coming or not?”

  Sam realized his heart had begun to throttle up. He felt that threadiness in his lungs that told him they wanted to breathe harder, but he controlled it. He wanted badly to go back, but he was looking at Charlie, back in the moonlight, and he was remembering the kiss that she’d given him.

  He swung his other leg through, cleared the gate so that she could close it. It squeaked as she did, and she re-clasped the carabiner to keep it closed.

  “I wish you’d told me we were going outside the wire,” Sam whispered. “I would’ve brought a weapon.”

  “If I told you that, I don’t think you would have come.”

  “I would have come,” he insisted, though he knew it was a lie.

  She just shrugged. “Well, maybe next time.”

  The culvert emptied into a creek with steep banks. It took some working, but they got topside to the bank and found themselves in woods. Charlie began walking with purpose now. This wasn’t just a stroll in the woods. She knew where she was going.

  “So if the primals show up,” Sam kept his voice low. “I’m just supposed to hide behind you?”

  “What?” she said with a note of playfulness. “You have a problem with a girl protecting you?”

  He looked sidelong at her. “You wouldn’t have a problem with a boy hiding behind you?”

  “It doesn’t matter anyways. No one’s standing behind anyone if the primals show up. If the primals show up, we run.”

  She said it so casually. As though it were just that simple.

  He frowned at her. “You have seen a primal, right?”

  She looked uncomfortable. “I’ve dealt with the infected before.”

  Sam touched her arm, pulled them to a stop. “Charlie, I’m not talking about the regular fucking infected.”

  “Infected. Primals. Same thing.”

  “It’s not the same thing!” he snapped. “I’ve seen them. I’ve dealt with them. They attacked Camp Ryder when I was there.” He realized he was shaking his head and his eyes were growing wide with the memory of that terror. “They’re faster. They’re stronger. They’re smarter. These aren’t just crazy people like the other infected were. They…changed somehow. Adapted. Or…evolved.”

  Charlie was not pleased to have been stopped. She huffed and looked skyward.

  “I’m serious, Charlie. I’ve seen them climb fucking walls like spiders. I’ve seen them hurtle a six foot fence. Hey, look at me.”

  She looked at him with an expression of pure passive-aggression.

  Sam didn’t care. She needed to understand. “If the primals come, you’re not gonna outrun them.”

  “Well, then I guess we’ll just have to hope they don’t come.” Then she pulled away and kept walking. “Go back if you’re scared, Sam. I’ll give you my flashlight.”

  Sam wasn’t going to go back unless she was with him. And she knew that. She was just trying to get him to shut up.

  Sam was now angry, and the anger was helping to diffuse some of that fear. “No, I’m going with you. I just want you to understand.”

  “I understand fine.”

  You don’t understand shit.

  But they kept going.

  Luckily, not for long.

  Very suddenly, the woods ended, and Sam realized that they were standing in a ba
ckyard. To his right and left, there were more backyards. Houses. Neatly arranged on little quarter-acre lots. Defunct and abandoned. A few of them fire-gutted. It was hard to see the details of their demise in the moonlight, but Sam could infer based upon every other abandoned and looted neighborhood he’d seen.

  “See?” Charlie said, as though she had been vindicated. “We’re less than a hundred yards from the culvert. We can make it back quickly if anything bad happens. Or we can just stay here.”

  You can’t make it back, he thought, but didn’t say. Instead, he went with, “Where’s ‘here’?”

  She pointed between the two houses in front of them. Across the street was another house, this one facing them. And in the darkness, Sam thought he saw a slight glow coming from the windows. Not the heavy yellow glow from a house that had power and ceiling lights. But the pale glow from flashlights or lanterns, barely distinguishable from the moonlight itself.

  “There,” she said. “That’s where we’re going.”

  She began walking towards the house. Sam followed, but his eyes tracked to the other dark and abandoned places around them and he thought about dens.

  “Has anyone cleared these houses?”

  “If there were infected here, we would’ve heard from them already.”

  Sam frowned. “How many times have you been out here? And who’s in the house?”

  “We’ve been out here a few times. And they’re friends.”

  They walked up the front steps of the house. To either side, the lawn was a sprawl of brown, waist-high weeds that had died and fallen over in the winter. New growth writhing up between the old stalks. At the front stoop, two massively overgrown boxwoods crowded the front door.

  Charlie slipped between their grasping branches and knocked.

  No special knock. Just a few quick raps with her knuckles. Quiet.

  The door opened almost instantly.

  Claire Staley stood there in the doorway, smiling at Charlie. “Hey…” Then she trailed off as her eyes caught Sam, and the smile fell off her face.

  Charlie swooped through the door, gave Claire’s stiff body an embrace, and said, “It’s okay, Claire. He’s with me.”

  Claire extricated herself brusquely and stuck her head out of the front door, looking around, then thrust herself into Sam’s face. “The fuck are you doing here?”

  Sam was taken aback. He didn’t really know Claire that well. He saw her around. Knew that she was Angela’s assistant. They traded small talk every once in a while. “What the hell are you doing here?” was the only thing he could come up with.

  Charlie inserted herself between them with a hand on Claire’s shoulders. “Claire. I said it’s cool. He’s with me. Everything’s cool.”

  Claire looked at her. “He’s a soldier.”

  Charlie nodded. “And you’re the colonel’s daughter. What’s your point?”

  Claire held her ground for another moment, then stepped back into the door, leaving the space open for them to enter the house. “Wish you would’ve run this by me.”

  “Didn’t know I had to,” Charlie replied. “He’s just here to hang out.”

  Claire made a small, dissatisfied noise, then waved them in. “Come on then.”

  Charlie stepped inside, then looked back at Sam and gestured him in with her head. “Come on, Sam. Don’t hang out in the fucking doorway.”

  Not seeing another option at that moment, he stepped into the house, and Claire closed the door behind them.

  They were in an old living room that looked like it had been preserved from the time before everything went to shit. It was dimly lit by the light of a few battery-operated lanterns posted on a few end tables, and by their pale LED glow, Sam saw furniture that stood, as normal as could be, centered around a dead TV.

  The house smelled musty, but that was it.

  There were perhaps a dozen people inside. All of them young, but they ranged from teenagers to people in their early twenties, like Claire.

  Charlie sauntered in, comfortably. Sam trailed her, self-consciously. Feeling everyone’s gaze on him as they paused their quiet conversations to greet Charlie, and then look at him like the outsider that he was.

  Charlie found a boy that was probably twenty years old, sitting on the end of one of the sofas, beside a girl that stared off like she wasn’t sure any of it was real. Sam recognized the guy from around Fort Bragg, but didn’t know his name. Just one of the many survivors that had come to stay inside the Safe Zone.

  He smiled when Charlie approached, and gave Sam nothing but a sideways glance before refocusing on Charlie. Sam watched the guy. Didn’t like the way he looked at Charlie.

  “Hey Ben,” Charlie said in a lighthearted tone. She reach out and gave him a playful nudge on the arm.

  Ben caught her in a light grip, held the tips of her fingers. “Hey, Charlie-girl. What you up to tonight?”

  Sam stared at their fingers, touching, and his mind lit on fire. Felt his face flush up. Wanted very abruptly to murder him. But he was the stranger in a strange land here, so he just stood there stiffly and did nothing.

  The girl with the far-off eyes turned languidly to behold Charlie and Ben’s exchange, but gave no indication that she cared. Sam thought she was sitting awfully snug with Ben. Thought that maybe they were an item or something. But Ben seemed to have forgotten the girl in Charlie’s presence, and neither Charlie nor the girl seemed to give a shit about the other.

  “You bring anything for us today?” Charlie asked.

  Ben leaned back in his seat, looking mock-offended. “Is that all I am to you, Charlie? Just the guy who brings the good stuff?”

  Charlie grinned. “You know what they say. Don’t bring it if you didn’t bring enough for everybody.”

  Ben shrugged, sat forward, and took hold of a mason jar filled with clear liquid. A stack of paper cups next to it. “Alright. You got me.” He pulled two cups off the stack, started to fill one from the mason jar. He glanced up at Sam. “What about this guy?” he said, as though Sam wasn’t there and couldn’t answer for himself. “Does he drink?”

  Charlie gave Sam a pointed look. “Yeah. He does.”

  Ben nodded and poured a second cup. Then handed them both to Charlie. Once again ignoring Sam. Charlie handed one of the cups to Sam. Took a sip from her own.

  Sam took the cup with stiff fingers. Out of place. Awkward. Angry. And, to be honest, a little frightened. He brought the cup to his face, looked in it, smelled it. Harsh alcohol vapors tingled his sinuses.

  “This moonshine?” Sam asked.

  It wasn’t exactly illegal in Fort Bragg, but it was an unwritten rule that, in their current state of supplies, they couldn’t waste anything to make alcohol. The corn to make moonshine, the fruit to make wine—they could all be used in better ways, either directly as food for humans, or as food for the animals that would become food for humans later on.

  But there were still plenty of people that felt that alcohol made the strict rationing more bearable.

  Ben planted his elbows on his knees and finally deigned to look at Sam with a frown. “Why? You gonna report me?”

  Sam looked back at him over the top of the paper cup, the moonshine stink enveloping his face. There was a part of him that was still a scared teenager, out of place in a new crowd, and wanting to please, wanting to be friends, wanting to get that terrible scrutiny off of him.

  There was also another part of him, the part that had killed and fought and aged far beyond anything his years could show, and that part of him thought about throwing the alcohol in Ben’s eyes to momentarily blind him, and then strangling the man to death. Or beating his head against the sharp corner of the coffee table until the skull cracked like a split pumpkin and the twitching stopped…

  “Of course not, Ben,” Sam replied. He forced a smile, but the words came out wooden, and he knew that the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m just here to hang out.”

  Ben watched him for a moment, calculating.
>
  “Cheers, then,” he finally said, and he drew his eyes away from Sam, and they went back to Charlie, and Ben smiled again, back to being smarmy and semi-flirtatious.

  Then all three of them drank.

  They made quiet small talk for a few minutes—or at least Charlie and Ben did. Sam just stood there, the silence seeming to compel him to drink from his cup faster than he had intended to. He kept looking at the girl sitting next to Ben, who had apparently had too much already. She looked on the verge of nodding off.

  After a painful time of Sam wishing he was someplace else, Charlie finally disengaged from Ben and dragged Sam towards another end of the dim house. But as he was being dragged away, Sam saw Ben reach his arm around the girl that was falling asleep next to him.

  Saw his hand fondle her small breast.

  Ben turned. Saw Sam watching him.

  Sam’s heart did a double-step, thinking Ben was going to get mad and defensive.

  But instead, Ben simply smiled with all his teeth, and winked one eye.

  Then he turned back to the half-conscious girl in his arms.

  ***

  Angela arrived home just before eight o’clock at night. It’d been a long day, and her body was feeling it. She was supposed to be taking it easy, but that apparently wasn’t in the cards for her today.

  Besides, she was dealing with the issues surrounding Lee, his team, and his single message to them. And she couldn’t help but push herself when she thought about them, out in unknown territory, with no support, and dead friends.

  Nate’s gone, she reminded herself.

  She didn’t know him well. Only through Lee. But still. She knew him. And that never stopped hurting her. No matter how many times she experienced it, it seemed like she would never build up a callous to it. Like a rock in your shoe that you can never get out.

  She wished she could be more like Julia.

  Then she proceeded to scoff at herself. She was a grown woman. In charge of the UES. She was who she was. And she had her own strengths, even if they sometimes escaped her own recollection. Strengths that others saw. Which is why they’d foisted this ridiculous, massive responsibility on her.