by Joshua Guess
After that point, things got distant. I’m told I disassociated somewhat, seemed to lose my sense of reality when people talked to me. I remember Len reeling back in agony, screaming above me. The sound of the gunshots that killed him, the last of the Reavers in the park still standing, are clear in my mind. I don’t remember being talked to by my team or Jem half-carrying me to the escape vehicle tucked safely away a few streets over.
I don’t remember getting home or falling asleep, which would turn into a coma lasting most of a week.
Dolly took care of me. In fact, she slept on a camp bed next to mine, dribbling water into my mouth carefully, day after day. I’m told I had no problem eating, other than her having to make sure she kept her fingers away from my mouth when she gave me food. Nero does weird shit to you, but it always makes sure it gets fed.
“You should be all bruises,” Dolly said to me an hour after I woke up. “That stab wound is already mostly healed. Maybe this thing isn’t all bad.”
I grimaced. “You say that now, but Radio Lovecraft is always broadcasting new and awful ways Nero fucks you up. I almost don’t want to ask Ellis what he’s heard since I’ve been out.”
Years of being a nurse, coping with bad news, gave Dolly a hell of a poker face. But the fact that I could tell she was putting one on was enough. “What is it?”
“Nothing too bad, health wise,” Dolly said quickly. “They’re saying the Shivers puts strain on the heart. Really, the whole cardiovascular system, but we already guessed that because of how much adrenaline it pumps into you.”
A fact I tried not to think about very hard or often—that the survival response created by the Nero on my system might also give me a massive coronary. “I’m not going to like this, am I?”
Dolly’s face hardened, lines forming at the edges of her mouth. “We won’t let them take you, Ran.”
I sat up, which was much easier than I’d have expected after a week on my back. “Take me? Who? Where?”
Arms crossed, Dolly met my gaze. “The man on the radio said squads of soldiers are being sent out to look for, well, people like you. Folks who don’t have any symptoms are common. That’s pretty much anyone who didn’t have a serious injury of some kind when all this madness started. But Reavers and folks like you, with partially active symptoms? They want to study you. Take you to one of their bases.”
I sat back against the wall. “They actually said this? That they’d take people against their wills?”
Dolly chuckled. “Of course not. Not in so many words. But it wasn’t hard to read between the lines.”
I thought about it for a second. “No. Nope. Not doing it.”
“Not doing what, kid?” Dolly asked, looking slightly confused.
I stood, stretching and finding my balance. “I’m not working myself up over this. I’ll think about it later, but I’m done with stressing myself crazy over stuff I can’t control. I’m going in that bathroom, cleaning myself up, and stepping outside to see how things are going. If someone wants to study me, they can ask nicely and I’ll think about it.”
Then I left.
It wasn’t avoidance—I promise! I just didn’t have it in me to obsess over yet another curve ball thrown at me by the end of the world. Though my fight with Len had been tough, it wasn’t the epic, knock-down drag out battle a lifetime of video game boss fights led me to expect. We tackled the problem of our local Reaver collective the way all problems should be handled, using minimal work to achieve maximum results. Jem had set up other traps, backup locations just in case, but the first was so effective they weren’t needed. There would certainly be other Reavers down the road. These were hardly the only ones on the planet. But we’d shown ourselves capable of knocking their advantages away from them without risking ourselves too much.
That mattered. That mindset mattered. We were flush with food and supplies, sure, but from here on out there was no civilization to supply new stuff. We were on our own. That would mean being frugal and clever and ruthlessly efficient.
Or just plain ruthless, if what Dolly heard on the radio was true.
“Well, you’ve been busy,” I said when I got a look at what used to be my yard. Jem grinned at me.
He waved a hand at the expanse before us. “Without having to worry about Reavers in big groups, we’ve been able to do a lot more looking around. We even went to their place and raided it for supplies.” I saw a flicker of shadow cross his face, and thought I knew why. That house had to have been a killing floor. My brain shied away from imagining the horrors within. “They were pack rats. Must have been hoarding everything they could find.”
I nodded at the oblong trailer sitting behind a rusted cab. “Including an entire fuel truck?”
Jem shook his head. “That, we scooped up out on the highway north of town. Though our dead pals did have a about twenty gas cans topped full of fuel.”
“What did you do with the house?” I asked, already sure of the answer.
Jem smiled darkly. “Burned to the ground. Considering the number of bodies inside, I almost consider it a cremation.”
Not wanting to talk about Reavers, I changed the subject. “Why are people moving the storage containers out of the way? Are we changing the shape of the enclosure? Doesn’t look like they’ll make a complete wall this way.”
Jem’s mouth twitched. “You could say that.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “Are you aware how much I hate cryptic bullshit like that? I would’ve thought my personality made that clear.”
Instead of answering, Jem put on a mysterious face and stroked an imaginary beard.
Trucks rumbled in the distance. I realized that I could only see a few people working, using purloined fork lifts—how they didn’t sink into the dirt, I have no clue—to move the shipping containers. The rest of the population was nowhere to be seen.
Then someone blew a loud, long blast on the horn of a large truck. Others echoed it.
The first truck to appear was festooned with people. More of them than I’d seen in one place since all this began. A few faces were familiar, but most weren’t.
“How are we going to feed them all?” I wondered out loud.
“They’re farmers,” Jem said. “They’re going to work the land here and teach us how to do it. When we’re done, the inside of our wall will feed a damn army. Until then, those will help us out.”
He pointed to the trucks following the flatbed stacked with people. I craned my neck and saw a line of them stretching down the road. I stopped counting at eight. “You sent them to the distribution center,” I guessed.
Grinning, Jem slapped me on the shoulder. “Damn right we did. I went and scouted it the day after we sorted out the Reavers. It’s not just one center, either. It’s a distribution hub. Used to serve everything between Indianapolis and Louisville. Couldn’t count the buildings, there were so many. It’s more food than we could eat in ten years, even if we could bring it all here.”
“And that’s all food?” I asked, nodding at the trucks.
“Yep,” Jem said. “Made sure they knew to take their time and do it right.”
It was surprisingly calming to know we would have such abundant supplies. More than I would have expected, until I realized that my brain had done some mental jiu-jitsu and transferred all the worries I used to have about being able to pay bills and taxes and dealing with other people onto the basic needs of everyday life.
I watched Ellis step gingerly from the passenger seat of the lead truck and direct the flow of traffic. I saw the shape and size of our new home resolve. It was going to be huge, not to mention remarkably flexible. We could move containers as new ones were brought in to add more space to the interior. You might think it strange that the idea moved me, but it did. I found peace in the hard facts of it. Not in and of themselves, but what those facts represented.
Safety. Protection not just for me and my dog, or the people I’d begun to think of as the close friends I had never had before. But for everyone we f
ound. A chunk of land where the ills of the world would have to work to get at us.
I’ve spent much of my life afraid of people. That comes with seeing what they can do at their worst. And I won’t bullshit you and say that the strangers around me had done much to impress me, other than survive. I didn’t feel that sense of connection to them, not yet.
But I found I didn’t care. The antipathy I normally felt for faceless crowds was, if not gone, eerily silent. These weren’t vapid gaggles of people at a mall, yammering on about the merits of that outfit or which actor was dating what musician while all the time ignoring the darkness in the world and the people it touched.
These were survivors. All pretense was stripped from them, leaving behind their truest selves. Yeah, that’s a little flowery for my taste, but it was true. You find out exactly what you’re made of at your core when bad things happen, and this was the end of human civilization. Except for what we saved of it.
It doesn’t get much worse than that, yet they—and I—didn’t break. Didn’t become cruel and violent for the sake of cruelty and violence.
And that was remarkable. Something I could respect, and that’s the foundation you want to build on. There in front of me, they were already building. Literally building. Friendships formed before my eyes, blooming like summer flowers as people did the work together.
I smiled. “That’s a hell of a thing.”
After
“Sure you want to do this?” Jem asked in a low, husky whisper.
I grinned at him crookedly. “Why? Getting cold feet? Afraid I’m going to put you to shame, or be disappointed?”
He snorted. “Neither. I’m confident in my skills, I just don’t know how experienced you are.”
“Y’all, this is a fucking poker game,” Ellis said. “Don’t make me get the hose.”
Carla shuffled her chips. “The double meanings were getting a little thick, I grant you.”
Tony lounged back in his chair and smiled. “Well, I’m turned on right now. I don’t know about anyone else.”
It was the end of a long month for us. In the thirty days since waking, a lot had changed in our little corner of Louis county. The wall of cargo containers was in place. Low rows of potato sprouts, tomato plants, and assorted other foods filled much of the space. We’d even gone on a grand theft auto spree, filling a solid acre with recreational vehicles for people not in love with sleeping in the communal space in the bunker. There was even talk of raiding the trailer dealership two towns over and bringing some more double-wides in for housing. We were still trying to work out the logistics on that, since none of us had the first idea how it was done.
Not most important, but definitely good for our sense of community, was that someone had given the place a name. No one claimed to be the one to come up with it, but it stuck. We couldn’t really keep saying it was my place, or refer to it as the trailer. Like old southern plantations, it was more than just a dwelling. People lived here, worked here, made things. It was a town in miniature.
They called it Bastion. Hell, I did too.
“I’ll deal,” Carla said, manipulating the deck with a magician’s grace.
I took a sip of my drink, savoring the rum and Coke. Eventually the soda would expire, but for now the sweetness was a little piece of the old world.
“Need to deal with the housing situation soon,” Tony said. “People are getting antsy for privacy. Toilets are going to be a problem, too.”
Carla frowned at him. “No shop talk. We agreed. Besides, I’m working on it. I have people looking for—”
She caught herself and blushed. “No shop talk,” she said again, as if emphasizing it for her own benefit.
There were nearly fifty people inside the walls. That number was actually lower than it had been; about twenty opted to rotate in and out of local farms for a few days at a time. There were a bunch of good reasons, from taking advantage of crops that had been planted before the disaster to easing the strain on the little infrastructure we had. Even with hands to do the work, improving our lot was slow and laborious.
“Someone’s been clearing the highway,” Jem said casually. “Pushing cars off to the side of the road to clear lanes.”
“How?” Ellis asked. “It’d take a big ass truck to do that, wouldn’t it?”
Jem shrugged. “I guess. I’m more concerned with who. If it’s the military, that brings its own problems.”
Silence followed. Radio Lovecraft had become increasingly clear that the remains of the US military was trying to establish order. Without the ability to communicate with anyone outside our own walls, there was no way to know how other groups of survivors were taking the news. But based on our own reactions, we could guess.
“We’ll feed ’em if they show up,” I said. “Give them a place to rest if they need it.”
Everyone nodded by rote, agreeing not just with those words but with the unspoken third part—that despite those courtesies, we wouldn’t give up one of our own against their will. This had been the subject of long discussion and more than one town hall gathering.
I wasn’t alone in being the only partially immune person in camp. That’s what they called us, on the radio—partially immune. I had no doubt some nickname or shorthand would replace the name before long. One of the newer arrivals, a youngish guy who rotated out to the farms, also suffered from the Shivers. He did everything he could to prevent attacks, keeping his stress level low. He was a gentle kid.
I would never give him up to save myself trouble, but what I had never spoken out loud was that I would not resist being taken myself if it meant keeping everyone in Bastion safe. The general population, mostly still strangers to me, didn’t know me all that well.
The people sitting around the card table certainly knew better. Them, I spoke with. Shared my thoughts with. They had seen me throw myself into the fray time and again. I didn’t have to say it with them; they knew.
And in return I knew they’d try to stop me if it came to it.
“Deal,” I said, tapping the table. Carla dealt.
“We really gonna do this every week?” Ellis asked. “Seems like a lot of scheduling just to get all of us in one place.”
“Yeah, it’s a headache,” Carla said as she fed us our hole cards. “But it’s not optional. Everyone has to have some down time. Without some kind of recreation to blow off stress, we’ll go crazy.”
That, and we were friends. Ellis had folded into the group as if he’d always belonged there. From the first day I brought him home, he’d been comfortable around the others. Maybe it was a function of me being comfortable with them, a kind of shared trust. What sealed the deal was the funeral we’d given his family.
By the time we got there, not much was left but bones. Even some of those were gone, taken by scavengers. Ellis, to his credit, didn’t try to macho his way through it. I encouraged him to let us do the physical work while he sorted through everything he could find. My hope was that he’d come up with a keepsake, something to remember them by. A tactile reminder of years of love and laughter.
I think he knew how important, how rare, those years are. Mine ended early. I considered him lucky.
The five of us stood around a bier of wood, the sad remains of Ellis’s family arranged on top. We said words, and held his hands as he wept for them, and felt the heat as the fire took them. In a way, it was a funeral for all of us. I know I put some of my own loss into those ashes.
Not specific people, though. Or more accurately, not close friends or family. Those had long been things left behind for me. No, what I mourned that day was the world itself. You can be put off by people, even dislike them, and still love them. Still hold dear the potential in their lives and weep for its passing.
I mourned for the familiar faces whose names I didn’t know. It seemed silly at the time, to say a silent prayer for the mailman who joked about the odd boxes delivered by my clients. Or for the skinny but handsome boy at the grocery store whose crush on me c
ompelled him to help me load bags into my car. The cute girl barista who always remembered my preferred drink, who I’d considered asking on a date.
It’s natural to mourn the passing of those we know, the ones who matter to us. But I felt a kinship for those background players, the less obvious threads in the fabric of our lives. Wasn’t I one of them, after all? The quiet girl who avoided crowds, always dancing just at the edges of your vision.
Only now I was front and center. I didn’t know how to feel about it. The people in Bastion saw me in ways alien to my experience. I don’t have the ego to say I was anything like famous to them, but it was a fact that every one of them knew who I was.
Strange to think I’d once been the girl locked away from everyone, all things considered.
“I’m taking on a deputy,” Jem said as we began eyeing each other and thinking about bets. “Best to start training replacements in case of trips away from home, or more of these poker games.”
He didn’t say ‘in case we die,’ but we all heard it anyway.
“No shop talk,” Tony said, winking. He was already training people, of course. Everyone wanted to learn construction, because everyone had a mad idea that they could build their own place with a little privacy with a few short lessons.
“Nah, it’s a good point,” I said. “Redundancy will save us a lot of headaches. I’d like everyone to learn a little bit of everything, if we can manage it.”
“Not everyone is you, Ran,” Carla said with a smile. “We can’t all mainline skills and information like they’re drugs. You’re kind of an information junkie.”
“I can stop any time I want,” I said.
“I agree, though,” Tony added. “Even if it’s just stuff like first aid and maybe some fighting. Everyone should round out their skills.”
It was that easy. We knew the risks and dangers ahead—had already dealt with some pretty bad ones—and the lesson was burned into us. Be prepared. The Boy Scouts knew their shit. You internalize what you need to know to survive, and for us that meant agreeing when logic dictated. One of the first things to pass along with human society was a tolerance for bullshit.
