by James Cook
In its own way, these places were as exclusive as the country clubs and boardrooms of the well-heeled. If you were from here, you were one of them, love you or hate you. You had a pass. You could come and go at your leisure.
Outsiders, not so much.
I watched through the dusty window as the Humvee rumbled through the trailer park’s confines, rifle between my knees, eyes searching for movement. Radio chatter rattled in my ears. Alvarado’s squad cleared trailers and hastily stacked food in yards for later pickup, while Farrell’s men took their sweet time ransacking the place for anything valuable and gathering non-perishables as an afterthought.
An hour passed. Since we had a surplus of fuel, we kept the AC running. Mike’s bulk occupied enough space in the gunner’s hatch he kept us from losing too much cool air. I pitied the Army grunts for not having a climate control option in their vehicles. When they rolled, they were forced to sweat it out under the merciless Oklahoma sun. But they rarely complained. I respected that, even though I felt no guilt whatsoever at not sharing in their misery.
After a while, I got bored. The trailers all looked the same, the junked vehicles on blocks looked like a waste of good scrap metal, the chatter was repetitive. We passed Alvarado’s team, and though they were sweating in the heat and visibly tired, they moved quickly and remained focused on their mission. Farther down the road, Farrell’s squad was a study in contrasts.
They had found a trailer with a generator and several gallons of fuel, and had used it to fire up the air conditioner. We heard the sounds of motors shattering the silence from over a hundred yards away and moved in to investigate. After knocking on the door, Dad and I entered the trailer to find them lounging in a cool living room drinking whiskey from a hodge-podge of collected shot glasses. The roar of the AC in the window reminded me of the dinosaur cartoons I used to watch as a child. It amazed me the soldiers were able to carry on their ribald conversations over its incessant din. Upon closer inspection, I saw they had cranked it up to its highest setting.
“Taking a break?” my father asked, not bothering to hide the disdain in his voice. Sgt. Farrell grinned and took another shot from a bottle of Bushmills.
“Yes, we are, civilian. Now kindly fuck off until the professionals are ready to resume their work.” He held up a shot glass full of yellow liquor and tossed it back. My dad’s flat brown eyes looked on blankly, then after a few seconds, he shrugged. “Have it your way.” He motioned for me to leave with him. I cast a final contemptuous look around the room and followed.
Dad marched purposefully toward the Humvee, threw it into gear, and roared away to the other side of the trailer park. He stopped where Alvarado and his men were working and got out. I stepped out as well, curiosity piqued.
“You might want to check on your boy Farrell,” he said. “Last I checked, drinking on duty was a serious offense.”
Alvarado made a disgusted noise and tossed down a box he was holding, eyes squinting westward. He wiped a sleeve across his sweaty brow and said, “All right. I’ll take care of it. Sergeant Gomez, you’re in charge until I get back.”
“Got it,” Gomez replied.
A few minutes later, we made another pass through the neighborhood and saw Alvarado follow Farrell and his men out of the trailer. I couldn’t hear what he was saying to them, but it was, by all appearances, forceful, one-sided, and involved a lot of gesticulating.
Farrell’s squad ducked their heads and trundled down the steps. Alvarado stood them at attention and spent a few more minutes with his finger inches from each man’s face in turn, ending with Farrell. For Farrell’s part, the speech only deepened the condescending smirk on his face.
Finished, or at least with no further time to waste chewing asses, Alvarado got back in his Humvee and drove to the other side of the trailer park. Farrell motioned to his men, and they turned in the direction of another trailer, forming up for a room entry through the front door.
One of them hefted a sledgehammer, lifted it to shoulder height, and brought it down on the flimsy door handle. The handle shattered, and the men backed off, waiting to see if any infected would emerge. None did, so they poured in.
Before following his men, Farrell looked in our direction and glared for a long moment. Gone was the smirk, and the smugness, and the devil-may-care attitude. His gaze was flat and cold and utterly emotionless. I’ve seen hungry reptiles with more life in their eyes. I stared back, not daring to look away. Some instinct, some hairy-knuckled, slope-browed leftover in the deeper portions of my lizard brain warned me that to look away was to show weakness, and I was staring at a creature who would perceive any weakness as an invitation to attack.
The contest dragged on until one of his men shouted for him. Looking startled, Farrell ducked into the trailer, rifle at the low ready. Seconds later, the boom of a shotgun thundered from a room near the far end of the trailer followed by shouting and the staccato rattle of M-4s firing in a confined space.
“Shit,” Dad said, accelerating toward the trailer.
More gunfire sounded, and as we skidded to a halt near the front door, a high, agonized scream came from within the trailer. Someone shouted, “Get it off him! Get that fucking thing off him!”
I entered the house behind my father. Mike and Blake were behind us. We turned left and headed toward the shouting at the end of a far hallway. The trailer was laid out like many others I had seen: the front door opened into the living room, to the right was a bedroom, bathroom, and laundry room, the kitchen was separated from the living room by a low island counter, and to my left was a long hallway with more bedrooms and another bathroom. The commotion came from the far bedroom at the end of the hallway. The four of us took a few brief moments to clear the rooms on our right—the doors were closed and Farrell’s men had not used their orange spray paint to mark them as clear—then pushed on to see what the shouting was about.
On the way, we heard a guttural growling and snarling beneath the continuing high-pitched screams of one of Farrell’s men. I had never heard a scream like that in my life, and hoped I never would again.
Fate, sadly, did not conspire to grant that wish.
A soldier’s dead body lay in the entrance to the bedroom, no doubt the victim of the shotgun blast from a few moments earlier. The shot had taken him in the chest and splattered blood, flesh, and chunks of bone in a wide cone-like pattern halfway down the length of the hallway. Mike seized him by the handle on the back of his vest and dragged him into the kitchen, out of the way. Once there, he grabbed a blanket from one of the bedrooms and draped it over him.
The room the rest of us walked into was small, crowded with soldiers, and so thick with foul odor the smell nearly made me gag. A combination of body odor, rotting meat, spent cordite, and vomit hung suspended in the thick air. There was a final crack of a rifle, deafeningly loud in the confined space, and the shouting stopped. The men in front of us went still, eyes looking down at something we could not see past them.
“All right, clear the goddamn room,” my father shouted. So firm was his tone of command, no one questioned him. They simply turned and filed out, gathering in the hallway. “Go on,” Dad said, shooing them along. “Wait outside.”
They did as ordered, faces stunned, muttering among themselves. Farrell remained behind, squatting next to a bleeding soldier and trying to bandage a massive wound on the stricken man’s forearm. A few feet away, a naked woman, mid-forties by the look of her, lay on the ground with a gaping exit wound in the back of her head. Her hands were tied behind her back, a rope trailing behind her toward the wall. By her mottled skin and milky white eyes—not to mention the gore smeared around her mouth—it was obvious she was one of the infected.
My eyes tracked the rope across the room to where a portly, middle-aged man lay slumped against the wall. A shotgun lay at his feet, and he clutched a hunting knife in his left hand. A quick glance around the room told the story of what happened.
The infected woman’s bound h
ands were secured to an eyebolt driven into the floor. A short length of rope allowed her to move halfway toward the entrance, but no further. Flies buzzed on smears of blood and scraps of bones scattered across the bare plywood flooring.
There was a picture on the wall next to me of the two people when they were alive. It looked recent. They were standing on a pier, the bright sunny ocean behind them, holding cocktails and smiling at the camera, arms around each other’s shoulders.
“Let me guess,” Blake said behind me. “The wife got infected, and the husband was keeping her alive in here. Feeding her.”
“Feeding her what?” Dad asked.
I bent down and examined a few bones. I recognized the shoulder blade and leg bones of a wild pig. “Looks like he hunted for it.”
After poking around a little more, I moved aside a coyote skull and came across an adult human femur still connected to the hipbone by dried black tendons. Disgusted, I kicked it away. “And it looks like he wasn’t too discriminating about what he shot.”
My father looked across the room at the dead man, his filthy shirt dotted with at least a dozen bloody 5.56mm holes. From the look on his face, any pity he might have felt for the man had left town on its fastest horse. “Sick son of a bitch.”
“It gets worse,” Blake said, standing over the eyebolt. He reached down and picked up a frayed end of rope. “Looks like when he knew he was done for, he had just enough left in the tank to cut his wife loose.” Blake dropped the rope and stepped away. “He turned her loose on them.”
Dad looked down at Farrell. “Does that about cover what happened here?”
The young sergeant did not look up, just nodded, eyes fixed on the dead infected woman. Next to him, the bitten soldier held his arm to his chest, rocking slowly back and forth, face pale white, lips blue, eyes pressed together and streaming tears. A steady litany of whispered curses issued from his mouth, repeating to himself how fucked he was.
My father looked at the bitten man, then at Farrell, and then with the sudden, blinding speed he was capable of when roused to anger, he gripped the bigger man by the shoulders, lifted him to his feet, and slammed him against the wall.
“What the hell were you thinking letting your men drink, you idiot?” he roared. “What if they had been focused? What if they had been paying attention to what they were doing? None of this would have happened!”
Farrell’s face twisted in anger, the reptilian mercilessness I saw earlier returning, and he tried to struggle out of my father’s grip. His struggles quickly ceased when Dad’s fist slammed into his breadbasket with the force of a battering ram. Farrell let out a surprised OOOF and doubled over, giving my father the opening he needed to run him across the room and slam him head first into the opposite wall. The sergeant hit with enough impact to shatter the wood paneling, his legs going limp beneath him. Dad snatched his sidearm from its holster and reared back for a pistol whip, but I got to him first and lifted him bodily.
“Dad, no. For Christ’s sake, calm down before you kill somebody.” He went stiff as I carried him from the room, but offered no resistance. I put him down in the kitchen and held his shoulders while he took deep breaths, eyes closed, the redness in his face slowly receding.
“Sorry about that, son,” he said finally, holstering his pistol. “Kind of lost it for a minute there.”
“Yeah, you think?”
He laughed shakily and wiped a hand across the back of his neck. “Think he’s gonna be all right?”
“Farrell?”
“Yeah.”
I shrugged. “Probably. You should go back to the Humvee, though. Alvarado will be here any minute. Let me and Blake do the talking.”
Dad nodded. “Where’d Mike go?”
Just as he said it, the big Marine came through the front door with a couple of heavy-duty contractor trash bags. When he saw us looking at him, he said, “We still have a job to do. There’s food in that kitchen.”
Dad went back to the vehicle while I stayed behind. Blake helped Farrell to his feet and escorted him outside, then grabbed a couple of volunteers to help him drag the dead body out of the kitchen and into the driveway. Just as they were wrapping him in a sheet, Alvarado stopped out front and practically flew from the driver’s side door.
He walked directly up to Farrell, who still looked a little dazed from the beating he had taken, and yelled, “What the fuck happened here?”
The sergeant explained. Alvarado listened quietly. His face slowly darkened until it was the color of stained mahogany. A single vein pulsed in his forehead. He lowered his voice and leaned in close to Farrell’s ear, and said, “I hope you’re happy, Sergeant. You were responsible for the safety of these men. For training them, for keeping them in line, for making sure they did their jobs they way they’re supposed to. But as always, you slacked off, and half-assed, and treated a dangerous task like it was some kind of a joke. Well, I bet it doesn’t seem very funny right now, does it? Not with one of your men dead and another dying.” Alvarado stepped back and spit on Farrell’s boot. “You’re a fucking disgrace.”
He turned to Blake and me. “You mind taking this piece of shit back to the convoy?”
“Not at all,” Blake said.
“Thanks. When you get there, ask around until you find Master Sergeant Heller and tell him what happened here. He’ll know what to do.”
Blake told him we would. He and I rode in the front while Dad rode in the back with Farrell. Mike stayed behind to help out, saying he would catch a ride back with Alvarado’s men.
No one spoke during the drive.
THIRTY-SEVEN
“So what’s going to happen to them?” Lola asked.
I took a bite of my rice and beans, washed it down with bleach-purified, charcoal-filtered water, and said, “I don’t know.”
For the first time since we had left Canyon Lake, my group was sharing a meal. We lounged in cloth camping chairs around a small fire, the convoy’s vehicles a broad, grimly patrolled circle around us.
Morgan had chosen an empty field about five miles from Boise City to strike camp for the night. The area around us was sparsely populated, and while we heard the occasional muffled crack from the suppressed carbines the guards carried, there were not many infected to bother us.
Dad and Mike had cooked the evening meal while the rest of us drank cheap Lipton tea and wondered how long it would be before such simple luxuries became a thing of the past. The sky above was bright and heavy with stars, the myriad campfires of the convoy helpless to drown out their brilliance.
“I talked to Captain Morgan,” Dad said, and for once, no one giggled. “He took a statement from me. You other three,” he pointed to Mike, Blake and me, “should expect to do the same tomorrow.”
“What did he want to know?” I asked.
“My version of what happened to Farrell’s squad.”
“What did you tell him?”
Dad looked across the fire at me. “The truth.”
Blake said, “What did he think of you beating down one of his squad leaders?”
Dad picked something off his spoon. “He said under the circumstances, he was willing to look the other way. This time. I told him that was fair enough.”
We ate in silence for a while after that, each person too focused on filling the emptiness in their stomach to bother with conversation. My eyes strayed often to Lauren, the dim orange gloom of the fire framing her against the night. She sat next to my father, but despite their proximity, the distance between them was vast. And growing.
Lauren’s face was pinched, the age lines deepened, new wrinkles showing around her eyes and mouth. She had lost weight. Her cheekbones stood out sharply beneath her skin. Her hair was lank and greasy. The circles under her eyes were black as new bruises, the skin puffy from too much crying. Next to her, Dad sat and ate with a desolate sadness lurking behind his confident veneer. There was a tension to his shoulders, he ate too quickly and bounced his left foot incessantly, and ev
ery so often, his right hand would twitch in Lauren’s direction, then ball into a fist, relax, and go back to holding his bowl of rice and beans. Seeing it, I felt as if someone had gripped my throat and started to squeeze.
I remembered the time before the Outbreak when our life had been normal, before the infected, and the fires, and the desperation I had adjusted to so quickly it scared me. I remembered our home on the outskirts of Houston, the kitchen, the bedrooms, the living room.
Dad had a recliner in the living room he declared as His Seat. And when he was home, only he was permitted to sit in it. If he caught me sitting in His Seat, he snapped his fingers, pointed a thumb at the ceiling, and said, “Up.”
That was my cue to relocate.
There was also a sofa next to the recliner, and between them, a small table complete with a lamp and coasters. Both ends of the sofa had built-in recliners, and the end closest to Dad’s Recliner was Lauren’s Seat. When Dad got home from work, after dinner, the two of them would watch some stupid reality show, usually involving people singing or dancing or both, and I would sit at the kitchen table, both parents within my line of sight, and read while they sat in Their Seats.
Sometimes I would take a break from my story and watch them. They smiled a lot, told jokes, made fun of each other, and occasionally Lauren would swat my father on the arm and rub the place she had hit, a sensuous gleam in her eyes. I always looked away when that happened, knowing I had at least an uncomfortable half-hour of stifled moans and creaking bedsprings to look forward to when the lights went out.
But that night, in the struggling luminescence of the small fire, the twitch in my father’s hand, the hesitation, was something entirely new. Instinctively, I understood it for what it was.
He wanted to reach out and put his hand on Lauren’s arm. He wanted to intertwine his fingers in hers as he had done a thousand times, but knew the gesture would not be welcome. So he resisted, and kept his eyes down, and did nothing to provoke my stepmother. I didn’t blame him. In those days, it did not take much to set her off. When she became argumentative for no apparent reason, or cried without explanation, or stormed off from normal conversation as if someone had said something horrifically offensive, part of me wanted to scream at her. But another, bigger part of me wanted to hold her, and cry, and beg her to snap out of it.
