by Ryan Schow
“Yes.”
“What about the children?” Amber asked.
“That’s what’s most important,” he said looking down at them. He smiled and some of them smiled back. “We need to make sure they’re taken care of either by their family, or if they don’t have family or willing guardians, we can take them back with us where we have a community to care for them.”
“We haven’t eaten in awhile and we don’t have water,” Amber said.
“Like I said, we’re going to get you taken care of. Here or at the encampment.”
“Where? The encampment, I mean?”
“Up highway 80, just east of the city. We can take you there, feed you, but you can’t stay permanently. We’re prepared to help you resettle though, if that’s what you want, or need.”
“Our friends are in here somewhere,” Amber said. “ I think…I think maybe they’re locked away. Or maybe they were killed, or sent away, we don’t—”
“It’s okay, we’ll look for them,” he said heading to the entrance of this warehouse-turned-detention center. “But first we have to go out front, take a headcount, see about these kids.”
“My daughter,” Amber said catching up to him, her voice betraying her emotions.
“A lot of people were separated from their families,” he said, not breaking stride.
“They told me it was so I wouldn’t give my daughter unfair treatment when the rest of the kids needed looking after,” Amber replied.
“I understand he logic, even though I don’t feel the same.”
Corrine took the man in. He was solid looking and no worse for wear considering he’d just survived a gunfight with armed soldiers. She didn’t find him attractive the way she found other guys attractive, but she did appreciate his strength, and the calmness he had with them and how he was handling Amber.
“Did you serve?” Amber asked. He had a military look about him. Most guys who survived so far had that look because the weak always died off first.
He said, “Sac PD. Me and a few of the guys here. One guy is Army, another National Guard. Most of the other guys here are dads and husbands and just overall good men.”
Corrine felt the tension she’d been holding inside dissipate. She watched Amber’s body language change as well. As the group made their way out of the warehouse and into the light, they saw the dead soldiers lying on the ground, bleeding out. Their guns were gone, stripped of them. It was a complete mop up of bad guys and their weapons.
Out front Amber saw Abigail and ran to her, leaving Corrine behind. She was thrilled to see her little girl, but a part of her felt sad, too. Corrine had no one. No family. At best, she’d always be some other family’s afterthought.
Catching up to the guy who rescued them, she said, “I need to find my friends. Will you help me?”
“I need to get things organized up front here, see what we’re working with. But then, yeah, I’ll help you.”
“I need to find them now,” she said, stern.
Stopping to look at her, taking her serious, he reached into his pocket, grabbed three sets of keys (all on key rings), handed her one and said, “I think all the keys to all the doors are here. Check to see if your friends are outside first, then head back inside. There are back rooms and bathrooms and outbuildings to check but we haven’t cleared them yet, so be careful.”
“Do you think anyone else is in there?” she asked.
“I don’t think so, but be careful. And when I’m done, I’ll find you and we’ll look together, okay?”
“Thank you,” she said, giving him an awkward hug.
She said hello to Abigail (who practically jumped in Corrine’s arms), then told Amber what she was doing.
“We’ll wait for you out here, okay?” Amber said. “I just don’t think I can go back in there.”
“I get it,” Corrine said. “I’ve got help inside, so it’s no big deal. I just have to know, you know?”
“Yeah,” Amber said. “Me, too.”
“I missed you,” Abigail said, big eyes looking up at Corrine. Now she felt loved, not so much of an afterthought. This was a good thought.
A comforting thought.
After moving through hundreds of people in search of Marcus, Nick and Bailey, Corrine headed inside where the men were piling up the bodies. Waves of dread tunneled through her, eating away at her hope.
One of the attacking force of men looked up from dragging a guard by the collar and said, “Everyone’s meeting out front.”
She said, “I’m looking for my friends. I checked out front just now, but I didn’t find any of them there.”
“Okay,” the guy said, “but be careful.”
She walked through the gigantic, empty warehouse, then headed back into a separate buildout. There were beds, some menial stores of food along an otherwise long wall of shelves, as well as blankets and pillows. It looked how she imagined a military bunker would look: sparse, unclean, uncared for.
She went to a door with the bathroom sign on it, but it was locked. She fished out the keys given to her, fumbled through a few of them before finding the one that fit. She opened the door and the smell of crap and urine wafted into her face. She turned away, gagged. She made another attempt at going in the bathroom, but her eyes were watering, and she felt like she was about to puke.
She looked back at the bathroom with the strange wall of floor-to-ceiling iron walls then decided otherwise. Her guts wouldn’t stop churning.
“No way I’m going in there,” she mumbled as she left to check out the rest of the sprawling warehouse.
She went though a number of different rooms, and several other bathrooms that were locked and smelled fine. One door she opened, she found a woman chained to a toilet. The woman was middle aged by the look of her. She was in her bra and underwear, and clearly beaten to death.
Her brown hair hung in her face, her skin mottled, gray.
Corrine’s breath caught.
Bailey?
Her chest shaking, her hands rocked by tremors, she crept forward, halting for a second against a new, more sickening stench: death. Dry heaving, holding her nose, she took the woman’s hair, lifted the head, saw Bailey.
But it wasn’t her.
She was so terrified that this woman was Bailey she’d momentarily started hallucinating. Lowering the woman’s head, she turned and staggered out of there. Bent over, she dry heaved, tears and anxiety and fear leaving her. Somewhere along the way she started crying. What kind of people would do that to a woman?
“Are you all right, Miss?”
Corrine jumped at first, then stood and pointed at the room the dead woman was in. A man she recognized from inside slid around her and went in. He came out a moment later looking a little green.
“You need to get out front with the others so we can help you resettle,” he said.
She nodded her head in resignation, wiped her mouth and eyes with her hands, then cleaned her nose with her shirt. She smelled so bad. Not like death. Different. It was hard to even look at these men saving everyone. They looked clean while people like Corrine and Amber and the kids looked and smelled like something you’d scrape out of the gutter after a damp rain.
She left there, heading for the front of the building when that nagging feeling hit her. She had to go back. She had to go back to that bathroom. It stunk to high hell, and her stomach couldn’t take much more, but these were her friends and she had to tie off every possibility. This was the last possibility. The poop room.
“I’ll be there in a second,” she told the man, veering off.
She told herself the stench of the woman’s death was worse than feces. That it had far sorrier implications than the smells of squalor. Poop and urine were wet scents, foul scents that got in your nose and triggered your eyes, but they were human scents, alive scents. Death had a pregnancy to it you couldn’t forget. A foul, decaying permanency that camped out in your nostrils long enough to roil your insides and make you wish curiosity hadn’t gotten the best
of you.
And her brain? Oh, God, it wouldn’t stop!
The dead woman occupied Corrine’s thoughts as insistently as the smell of her corpse occupied the girl’s nostrils. The memory was too fresh. It was still burning itself into her brain second by nauseating second.
Corrine couldn’t stop seeing the woman. She was just a dirty bra and panties that no longer fit; she was skin pulled taught against the bones; she was hair as dry as straw; she was lips that looked like old meat.
How long had she been dead? Corrine told herself to pull it together. She couldn’t think about things like that.
Shaking the angst from her hands, whimpering and looking for every excuse to turn back, she forced herself inside the bathroom and immediately regretted it. The stink hung in the air like old piss mixed with wet farts.
Gagging, plugging her nose, she wiped her eyes and spotted four separate cells—connected cells that looked like iron boxes with locked doors and small air vents on each. After a few tries and some serious stomach churning, she found a key that worked.
She opened the first door, found it empty.
The rot kicked its way around her organs, twisting and pushing and punching her insides until she couldn’t take it anymore.
I can’t do this, she told herself.
She walked out, took a deep breath of fresh air, then hurried back inside and opened the next cell. That’s where she saw him. Nick. She almost didn’t recognize him.
He looked shrunken, not quite inhuman, but close.
“Nick?” she said to the body on the floor. He was curled around a toilet, his long hair unkempt, rashes on his skin. She started to cry. “Nick?”
He began to move, turned slowly but covered his eyes.
“Corrine?” he said.
Now she broke down, shaky hands, unable to even fathom what she was looking at. He was damn near skeletal.
“I’m here, Nick. We’ve been rescued. The guys holding us here, they’re dead.”
Nick tried to point, and he said something, although it was weak.
“Marcus,” he said. “Bailey.”
Nodding her head, now knowing what the other two cages held, she knew she had to open them, but she didn’t want to see what was inside. If Nick was this bad, would the other two be dead? Not Marcus, but Bailey?
She opened the next cage, found Marcus sitting upright, looking half his original size with a hand over his eyes.
“Marcus?” she said.
“Hi, Corrine,” he replied, the light too bright even though the room was still very dim, lit only by a single window that had been painted over with a light coat of white. Then: “Check on Bailey.”
“Marcus, are you—?”
“I’m okay. Haven’t heard a peep from Bailey, though.”
When she opened the door, Bailey was curled on her side, naked. Ankle bones, knees, hip bones, ribs and shoulders.
“Oh, my God,” she said, whimpering, unable to stop the rush of tears.
Her body looked like it hadn’t survived the incarceration. She didn’t make it. Corrine put her hand on the woman’s ankle. She didn’t move. Suddenly there were people in the bathroom with her—a man and a woman from the rescue team.
“Sweetheart?” the woman said to Corrine in that voice, the one full of manufactured sympathy.
“She was my friend,” Corrine said, snuffling.
“Bailey?” Nick called out, panicked, his voice a scratchy, hoarse whisper he forced out of a throat that was about as ragged as you could imagine.
“Easy, sir,” the male equivalent of the rescue team said. “Don’t try to stand, I’ll help.”
There was some bumping around, but Nick was apparently trying to get to Bailey.
“No,” Corrine warned through wet eyes and a lump in her throat.
“Bailey, please,” Nick said again, his words straining for hope, his haggard voice on the edge of a sob.
Nick pushed past the man, stumbling, shading his eyes as he tripped and staggered toward the last cell. When he was there, he stood over Bailey, broke into a sob that literally tore Corrine’s heart in two.
Nick loved her. Corrine knew that now. He loved this woman and now she was dead.
“Bailey,” he said, looking down at her as he held on the iron wall for support.
His legs were shaking, his body wavering. Corrine helped lower him to his knees before Bailey. Only a sliver of light entered the cell, but he moved inside. It was so small, barely big enough for the both of them.
“Bailey,” he said, sniffling and crying. “Bailey, it’s time to go. Baby you have to get up now.”
The woman beside Corrine, the stranger, her eyes started to shine and now Corrine couldn’t stop her own tears. Bailey died in here, in the dark. Alone.
She died and they didn’t even know it.
She turned and saw Marcus walk out of the cell into the dimly lit room. She turned and went to him. When she hugged him, he hugged her back. She was sobbing into his weakened frame, not caring how bad she smelled or how bad he smelled. It was all she could think about these last two months, what happened to him. Now she knew.
“I was so scared, Marcus.”
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
She couldn’t get Nick’s tortured voice out of her mind, and she couldn’t stop thinking of Bailey. As if all of this wasn’t hell enough for Nick, now he was dealing with something a million times worse.
They all were.
Chapter Seven
The former President stood on Pennsylvania Avenue with the smoke colored pit bull at his side. It had taken Ben and Daisy two months to get here, not because they walked that long, but because they were in no rush to get there. Now that he looked at the White House, how the lawns were overgrown, how the ivory fascia of the executive mansion had been tagged and retagged with a smattering of graffiti, he felt deeply saddened. The east wing was completely gone. It sat in rubble. And the west wing? Aside from some obvious damage to the colonnade, and more graffiti, it appeared to be moderately intact.
He’d have to see the inside. He shuddered at the thought of what he might find.
He and Daisy heard the man coming up on him, but Ben could tell by the caution in this stranger’s gait that he was more concerned with Ben than Ben was of him. And since Daisy didn’t seem worried, he told himself it wasn’t worth the concern.
“Sort of reminiscent of the state of the union,” the man said, stepping up beside him, but not too close.
Ben gave the stranger the quick once over, then smiled. The man returned the gesture. Ben kept the bill of his hat pulled low, left his glasses on and felt comfortable enough thinking the hat, the glasses and the beard would sufficiently conceal his true identity.
The truth was, he looked more like an operator—someone from special forces—than he did the former President of the United States. Those guys, spec-ops as they were somewhat crudely called, could intimidate the average Joe just by standing still and looking at them. They were no joke. These guys could probably gut you before you could squeak out one fearful whimper. He was one of these guys once upon a time, but maybe not so much anymore. He wasn’t trying to mimic the persona. What he craved most these days was anonymity.
“Do you know the west wing used to be a network of greenhouses back in the late eighteen hundreds?” Ben asked, eyes glued to the dilapidated structure.
“No,” the stranger said.
“Teddy Roosevelt had them replaced with the west wing in 1902,” he said, feeling like he was in another world, one altogether different even than this one. One where the White House would not survive, let alone America.
He had an instantaneous vision of the Presidential home one hundred years from now, a vision that shook him to the core. He saw overgrown fields, a structure browned and decayed with time and neglect, a crumbling edifice whose only significance was to mark the fall of the civilized world.
A soft breeze blew over them. It smelled damp with earthy smells, like we
t ground cover, or pungent summer brush.
Rattled by the vision, dragged under by a sense of encroaching dread because all this happened under his presidency, he said, “The west wing was only supposed to be a temporary structure, but here we are, almost one hundred and twenty years later.”
“Why would he do that?” the man asked. He felt the man turn to look at him, but Ben did not return the gesture, and neither did Daisy. “I mean, why get rid of the greenhouses?”
Ben finally turned and gave the stranger a longer glance. People hadn’t been this friendly in weeks. They’d been slaughtering each other for more than a month now. It was lawlessness of every sort. A free-for-all where a walk down Main Street, Anywhere USA could be a death sentence, or it could just be you walking past dozens of dead bodies.
At a glance, the guy looked to be Ben’s age, gray hair but in decent shape and surprisingly clean shaven. He could be pushing fifty, same as Ben, but it also looked like his years weren’t grueling. Ben got the feeling he’d made a decent life for himself, but not so good a life that he missed the struggle or lamented the past.
He decided that if he was going to kill him, the neck was available. He could slice him open with his blade, or strike him with a ridge hand enough to wobble him. Thinking he’d be faster with the ridge hand, he’d catch him just right then take out the man’s knee, crippling him. After that he could use the knife.
Ben turned away from him, but kept him in his peripheral.
What had this world come to where to properly greet a man, you had know all the ways you’d kill him before even getting his name?
Ben took a breath, looked down at Daisy who was taking in the White House for the first time. “Teddy changed a few things,” he said, scratching Daisy behind the ears. “Among several significant renovations, in 1901 he officially coined the name The White House.”
“That was him?” the man said, surprised by this fact.
“Good old Teddy.”
“What was it called before?” he asked.
“A few names. The Presidential Palace, or the President’s House. The Executive Mansion was always my favorite. Saying it like that always made it feel smaller, less daunting, you know?”
