by T. S. Ward
OTHER BOOKS BY TS WARD
In A Burning Room (The Fox Council Book #1)
EVERY DARK
LITTLE THING
THE BRIGHT DARK BOOK #1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by TS Ward
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced or used in any manner without written
permission of the copyright owner except for the use of
quotations in a book review.
First paperback/hardcover edition May 2021
Cover image by Frank Flores
Book design by TS Ward
ISBN #978-1-7774988-4-9 Hardcover
ISBN # 978-1-7774988-3-2 Paperback
ISBN # 978-1-7774988-5-6 E-Book
Published by Tristyn Ward
www.tswardauthor.com
YEAR ONE
Day One
Day one starts the moment I meet Soldier. It starts when I finally work up the courage to read the nausea-inducing number on my medical bill.
God fucking bless America.
The soldier is one of many stationed all across this floor. There’s one every few yards, and each of them eating up the money this government could be funneling into universal healthcare, but. This one, this particular little green army man, he stands outside the room I’ve spent the last year in.
The first time I speak to him, I’m on my way out. Finally discharged. I never once thought it worth my time, considering my personal political beliefs, but this time—this time it’s a fuck you kind of conversation, and if that ain’t my favourite kind.
“Hey,” I say, and he acts as if he’s never seen me marching up and down these halls every damn day. “You know where I can find one and a half million dollars?”
“No, ma’am,” he says.
I’m already a few steps past him, but I stop, double back. “I’m no ma’am, Soldier, but I will be by the time I pay this shit off. I’ll be a damn ghost.”
His smile is startling. They’ve been here half a year and none of these blockheads ever cracked a smile.
“Pandemic might knock that down for you.”
“Sure,” I mutter, and I walk away.
I walk away, and it should be the last time I see him. But then I make a detour on my way out. I stop at the little café with the small amount of cash I have left. This place will bleed me for every last drop I have, might as well get some shit ass coffee out of it.
There’s an unnecessarily long line that I curse myself for joining. None of these people seem to know what to order. Or how to count their own change. It’s three dollars, idiots. The line piles up behind me. It feels like a whole hour before I make it through.
“Next,” a crabby voice groans.
I step up to the counter and smile, talk as politely as I can. “Medium black coffee, please.”
“They’re all black, lady,” she snarls, hooks a thumb down the counter. “Modifiers are over there. Anything else?”
“Sure. No thanks, lady,” I say, handing over my change.
I did not miss human interaction.
She looks at the quarters in her palm, stares at them for a while, and then looks up at me from under lowered eyebrows. “You’re short twenty-five cents.”
I sigh, glance at her nametag. “It’s three dollars, Wanda.”
“And you’re short a quarter.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? Sorry I only have quarters, Wanda, but I’m pretty damn sure twelve of them makes three dollars.” Someone in line clears their throat, and that just pisses me off. I hold my hand out. “Fine. Whatever. Give me my money back.”
She raises her wiry eyebrows, sets a hand on her hip. “Don’t think you’re clever short changing me and giving me attitude, lady.”
Fuck this.
I lean forward, one hand on the counter and the other still waiting. I whisper, sharp eyed, “I said give me my money back.”
A hand reaches around me, drops a twenty on the counter, and places one in my outstretched hand. I blink, shocked, as he says to the woman, “Add a chamomile tea to her order. Keep the change.”
“Okey-dokey, sir,” she says cheerily. Just like that.
“Bitch,” I mutter.
“Redneck trash,” she mutters back, and I lurch forward, hands in fists and ready to knock her teeth in, but the man, the soldier who stood outside my room, grabs my elbow and pulls me down toward the modifiers the woman was so keen to point out.
I yank my arm away from him and hold out the crumpled twenty. “Take your goddamn money back.”
He shakes his head. “Few more of those and you’ll have your one and a half million.”
I snort. “Unless you’ve got seventy-five thousand more of them and you’re offering to be my sugar daddy, no thank you.”
“Quick math,” he laughs.
If I wasn’t already in a sour mood, I might have flaunted that what he considers quick math is far too simple for me and probably directly correlates to his chosen profession. But I’m bitter, and when darling Wanda sets the drinks down on the counter, I grab mine and walk away without another word.
I leave his twenty on the counter.
It should be the last time I see the soldier. It should be, and yet I walk out of the hospital and stop. I curse myself for leaving the cash instead of using it for a cab. And then I curse some more because I can’t even call one.
“Hey. Hey!” I call to the first person walking by. “You got a phone?”
He shakes his head, keeps walking.
The next few ignore me outright, and then a woman looks me in the eye.
“Hey, you got a phone I can use? Anyone? Anyone have a phone?”
No one answers. No one says anything. They all keep walking by. Walking by the redneck trash ghost in the hospital sweats. Of course. Of course. I don’t expect anything less.
I don’t expect the soldier to appear then, tea in hand.
“Jesus Christ,” I mutter. “You some sort of demon I invited in just by talking to you, or what?”
“You figured me out that quick, huh?” He smiles, holds out a phone to me. “I can drive you where you need to go, if you want.”
I stare at my feet and breathe out between my teeth for a moment. And then I take the phone from him. I type in the first number I remember. No answer. Try another number. No answer. Try my brother, my dad, even my uncle—the reason why I’m here. No one answers. I try them all again, and again.
No one answers. No one would.
I clamp my teeth together as I hold the phone out to the soldier. “Fine.”
“What’s that?”
“I said fine. Drive me where I need to go.”
He nods, slips the phone back into his pocket, and then starts walking toward the parking lot. “Come on then.”
It really should be the last time I see the guy. It really should be. I also shouldn’t be following this guy to his truck, getting in, and telling him my address. But I do, and it’s the stupidest goddamn shit I’ve ever done in my life.
It should only take an hour to get there.
But nothing is ever as it should be lately.
—
There’s so much traffic leaving the city. It’s ridiculous. It takes ten minutes to get out of this damn parking lot, and then seeing the streets—I groan. People are driving up the wrong side of the road just to get ahead, turning the wrong way on one-way streets, and causing general chaos.
I feel like I’ve mi
ssed a lot.
“What happened to the stay home orders?” I ask, mostly as a joke, but this all seems like it’s so much more than disobeying pandemic rules.
It feels ominous. It makes my stomach knot.
Soldier glances at me briefly, and then takes a right turn against the traffic. This way is clear, except for the few who try to break ahead. He sticks to the far lane and drives slowly.
“It’s spreading faster than we can handle. Faster than we can contain it. The cities aren’t being evacuated but… I do think it’s smart to get out, but not like this. This is dangerous.”
I rest my elbow on the door, rest my chin on my hand. I frown at a group of people dressed in riot clothes—all black, ski masks, hoodies, gloves, backpacks—as they swing bats against storefront windows. Others on the streets walk around carrying guns. It’s nothing unusual, until I see a man raise his gun and point it at someone.
He pulls the trigger with a cracking bang.
I sit forward and try to twist, following the scene with my eyes as we pass by, but pain stiffens my spine.
“What the fuck?” I look back at the soldier. “Did you see that?”
He doesn’t say anything. Just drives a little faster.
The entire city is fucked. It’s the same thing block after block, and even though we’re going the wrong way, it feels better just getting out.
I’m nervous about what I’ll find back home, if this guy whose truck I’ve climbed into doesn’t lose his shit like what I’m seeing on the streets. That thought makes me more nervous.
“Hey, you don’t plan on killing me, do you? Not like these idiots?” My voice wavers. I hear it. I feel it in my chest. But I can’t stop talking. “I mean, it wouldn’t be my first time, someone trying to kill me, you know? But I at least would like a little warning.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” he says, and then reaches his left hand over to me. “Ben Daniels, former army.”
I raise an eyebrow, but shake his hand awkwardly anyway. “Didn’t look very former in the hospital.”
“Just decided.”
“Isn’t that a crime, or…?”
He nods slowly. “Yeah. Kind of. Not that I think it’ll matter with everything that’s going down.”
I turn toward him, if only to keep my eyes off the streets and the violence and the never-ending traffic. To stop paying attention to the army tanks rolling up the side streets. To focus on this smaller part of the army instead. “What made you decide that, Soldier?”
“I can’t morally support some of the things they’re doing,” he says, his hand moving to the door lock as he’s forced to drive slower. Something hits the door behind me, but I don’t look. I don’t want to. “I especially can’t support a government that extorts its civilians for millions of dollars in medical bills.”
I snort at that. “I’ve been told I’m a bad influence, but damn. Making criminals out of both of us.”
“What did you do to make you a criminal?”
“I didn’t pay my fines for my near-death experience.” That gets a laugh from him, but then I sigh, shake my head. “No, that is my own fault, really. Could have pressed charges. Could have had it all paid for me and then some, but… implications. Complications. What that lady said is true. Redneck trash. Not much good and pure about this ghost.”
“I’m sure that last bit isn’t true,” he says, but I don’t answer after that. Too caught up in my own stupidity.
I could have pressed charges. I could have fixed it all with money.
We’re out of the city before I know it, but we still have to find a way to get around to the back roads. All of this to get me home. And by the time we find a road it’s already backed up and moving slowly.
“I think this is as good as it gets,” Soldier tells me.
He tries to turn on the radio, but it just comes up with static, so we sit in silence.
“You live with family?”
I shrug.
“I’ve got no damn clue if they even still live there,” I say. Last time I saw anyone, it was my uncle getting the last kick in after his friends busted my spine, when he left me for dead.
I’m sure that’s what he thinks, anyway. That I’m dead. That he told my dad I am. Maybe that was why no one came looking for a whole damn year.
“How long were you there?” Soldier asks.
“A year. Two months in a coma, rest was healing and physio. That’s four thousand dollars a day and then some, for added expenses, in case you were trying to work that out. I learned how to walk again and never saw a single familiar face other than you and the nurses and the doctors.”
It almost hurts saying it out loud, but my whole life is this: being forgotten, being the punching bag when they do remember me. It shouldn’t bother me anymore. I shouldn’t let it. It’s not like I really need anything of them, and all they’ve ever done is put me in soul crushing debt.
“You never talked to me until today.”
“Neither did you, Soldier.”
“You never told me your name.”
I shrug. “Why? You won’t remember. Not like it matters anyway. I’m only a ghost.”
“Try me,” he says. Ben Daniels. That’s what he said his name was.
“Ben short for something?” I ask. “Benjamin? Benito? Benvolio? Bencutio?”
“Benjamin,” he answers. “What’s yours?”
“See, now that would ruin the mystery of the paranormal.” It’s not so much that I don’t want to tell him. It’s that I hate it, that the association makes me ill. The name is my uncle’s and my father’s and my grandfather’s. I might use my mother’s last name if she were any better but, well. My sister lives with my brother for a reason.
He nods. “Alright. Ghost.”
“Soldier.”
He laughs, and he drums his hands on the steering wheel. “You know, I like you. You’re fun.”
Funny.
I look behind us at the cars piled back out on the highway. The entire interstate is backed up. We’re crawling forward at barely ten miles per hour. He better like me if he wants to be stuck with me for another two hours. Maybe more.
“That’s something I’ve never heard before. It’s always shut up, Ghost, you’re annoying as hell, Ghost.”
“Other people call you Ghost?”
“No,” I say. “They call me asshole, bitch, redneck trash, libtard, hillbilly, slut…”
“All that and more, huh? I’m not sure I’d use any of those.” He seems too comfortable with this. No one ever spends this long with me and enjoys it. Even that damn lady in the café took every opportunity to hate me.
I don’t say anything more about it. Instead, “I’ve never seen this many cars up this way. We always speed down here.”
“You’re saying that to someone who was going to be a cop.”
“About an actual cop.”
He glances at me. “Surely you don’t mean you.”
“Wouldn’t that be something?”
I look out the window at the farms, the fields all yellowed and brown with the season. It feels good to be out here, out of the stark chemical scents and constant electric lights, but there’s no green. There’s no green left anywhere, and I wish there was. It would have been nice. To leave something bleak and come out to life and colour. Instead, it’s panic induced travel, people looting shops, standing in the streets shooting their guns at other people.
“No, not me,” I tell him after a while. “My brother.”
“Your brother is a cop and he never visited? Did anyone even know you were there?” When I don’t answer, he shakes his head and sighs. “A year and no one reported you missing. I can’t imagine that. I… Put your number in my phone.”
I blink. “Excuse me?”
“I mean,” he says quickly, staring hard at the road ahead, “Text yourself so you have my number, and the next time, if there is a next time, use me as your emergency contact.”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” I mutter, �
�And what’ll you do from jail, former army?”
He grows quiet as he checks the rear-view. It seems impossible for there to be more cars, but there are, and now others from up ahead are turning around in an attempt to find some other way. I’m certain if there wasn’t a steep ditch between the road and the fields there would be cars driving across there too.
“You want some honesty?” He says quietly, looks at me as the truck inches forward.
“What, were you actually planning on murdering me and now the entire state has conspired to interrupt?” You saw some guy shoot some other guy. What would stop him with all these witnesses?
He shakes his head. “No. I mean about all this.”
“You really asking my consent to offer information about this bullshit? What a gentleman!”
“Some people don’t like hearing the truth,” he defends himself, and then his hands are drumming on the steering wheel again. After a moment he stops. “It’s worse than they’re letting on. All the infected. The numbers are cut in half. It’s completely out of control. We can’t contain it. And… they aren’t just infected, either.
“They die. They’re declared brain dead. But the cells mutate and the infection spreads in unpredictable ways, entirely foreign to anything we’ve experienced in known history. They attack anything that moves.”
I don’t say anything. I’m trying not to. It would be goddamn rude and inconsiderate for the dead and their families if I said what I was thinking.
Stop it, stop it, stop it, don’t say it—I press the back of my hand to my mouth as I try to stifle the snort-laugh that erupts from me. “You’re telling me this is actually, legitimately a z—”
“Don’t even say it,” he says, but I can hear the laugh in his voice behind the seriousness. “That’s not what it is. It… Okay, yeah, the similarities are striking and the country is collapsing and there won’t be any jails or injury fines to pay. But I think we can be a little more creative with what we call this. Them.”
It sounds like a long-winded joke, but when I look at him there’s seriousness in the furrow of his brow, beads of sweat at his temples, his eyes twitching around to all of our surroundings.
