Every Dark Little Thing

by T. S. Ward

  It’s the fabric stores I don’t know shit about, but even so, when I lay it all out in front of Ezra, maps and itinerary and all with Viking and Fox behind me, he seems impressed.

  “You got this shit down to a science, huh?”

  He leans forward, inspects the route and the alternate routes, in case we can’t get through the main one. He sets a finger on an adjoining highway section on the way.

  “Think you can set up one of those things along here? Like you had when I found you. What do you need, fishing line?”

  I’m startled for a moment. “I, uh, yeah. Sure. A lot of biters over there, or…?”

  “Nevermind what’s over there, just get it done.”

  It’s the first time he uses that stern voice with me. The one that comes with a threat. It makes me uneasy. It makes me think he’s found out about Sadie, or has Soldier.

  “What do you want? Grenades? Road spikes? Depends on the environment, really, but could go shotguns. A warning or a full assault?” I’ve got no idea how I’m going to do this. I haven’t made a trap in so long, not since the grenades, and that was a one-off one-time spur of the moment kind of deal based on the fact that there were grenades.

  Ezra shakes his head and scratches his beard. “Honestly, whatever you come up with. I don’t know how your brain works through these things.”

  “Helps to know the target,” I say, “But I’ll figure it out.”

  He closes the map and itinerary and hands them over to Fox. He ushers us toward the door.

  Just as I’m about to go out after them, Ezra grabs my elbow, shuts the door, and leans a hand against it. He stands so close I can smell the whiskey on his breath.

  “You come back,” he warns. “This might be some smart shit, but it’s still dangerous. You don’t come back on time, I’ll be out there looking for you, whether you’re alive or dead or something else. Understood?”

  “Careful now,” I say, “Might start thinking you give a shit.”

  He reaches up, catches a piece of my hair between his fingers, and twists it around a knuckle. “Wouldn’t want that would we?”

  My heart’s pounding in my throat. No, I really don’t want that. Not at all. But I flash my best eyes, let him believe in something, and I slip out the door.

  Fox and Viking see the look on my face as soon as Ezra can’t see me, just a split second, and then it’s gone.

  —

  “What’s he got on you?” I hear Viking ask, vaguely, and I don’t even clue in that he’s talking to me for a while, until he turns to face the back of the truck. “Squirrel. What’s he got on you?”

  “The fuck you mean?” I grumble.

  We’ve been driving for a while now, Fox and Viking up front, and me sprawled out in the backseat.

  “I mean that no one sticks around because they want to. They stay because they’ve got something to lose. Including us. We’ve got families that at any minute, someone else who wants to keep their family alive might shoot point blank. I’ve got my husband. Fox has five kids, a wife, and a brother. Who do you have?”

  I shake my head. “What does it say about me if I don’t have anyone?”

  Fox laughs. “That’s bullshit.”

  “I guarantee you, it’s not.”

  “Then why haven’t you told anyone your name?” Viking asks, quietly, eyes squinting. “Is it because we’ve got a list of eight hundred people between all the compounds and you don’t want Ezra to know you recognize at least one?”

  I frown. “There’s a list?”

  “Yes, there’s a list,” Fox says.

  “How else do you think he keeps track of everyone?”

  I shrug, pull a leg up, and rest my ankle across my knee. “Right. So there’s this list, and right near the bottom it just says Squirrel. That’s nice.”

  “Actually, it’s right at the top,” Fox says. “Circled and underlined.”

  “And it doesn’t just say Squirrel. It says Squirrel-slash-Ghost,” Viking says, holding up a finger.

  “Because Ghost is my name. Squirrel’s just what he calls me.”

  He spreads his fingers then, like he wasn’t done talking, and then he continues. “And right beside Squirrel-slash-Ghost, underlined and circled, it says Ben Daniels with a question mark.”

  That catches me off guard. I almost choke on my own spit when he says it. I was ready to hear Sadie’s name, so worried about her that I forgot Soldier ever told Ezra his name, and then I’m just surprised that he remembered it. But then I’ve been quiet for too long, and that’s that, that’s that given up, given away.

  “So, what’s he to you, then?” Viking wonders.

  “Nothing. Not anymore.”

  Fox whistles. “Sounds like Squirrel’s got herself a beau.”

  “What I had was someone who sold me out.” I say it defensively, but I don’t entirely believe that. The problem is that he might have, and because he might have, it terrifies me to think that I might look him in the eye again one day. It terrifies me more that I might not.

  Or that he won’t look at me the same.

  “Don’t worry, Squirrel,” Viking says. “There’s no Ben Daniels in any of the compounds. I checked.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “Why’d you go and do that?”

  “Because we aren’t all psychopaths.”

  “Not by choice.”

  “Self preservation trumps morals and ethics,” I mutter, “And it is self preservation, by the way, if you’re doing it for someone else. Saving just one doesn’t make the guilt go away. Just makes you selfish enough to try to fix it.”

  They’re both quiet for a moment, and then Fox snorts. “Aren’t you full of wisdom?”

  “No wisdom here, man,” I say, and I stretch my arms up to rest my knuckles against the window above me. “Just an idiot with a mouth and someone else’s words.”

  Day Two Hundred and Four

  The fabric shop is the first on the list.

  We pull up outside in an empty parking lot, and for some reason today is hot as hell. Sweat drips down everyone’s foreheads and soaks our shirts.

  “Fuck this,” I mutter.

  I mean, really, of course it’s hot as hell. It’s summer now. It’s just that the last few days were a hell of a lot cooler than this.

  “Why don’t you take the jacket off?” Viking asks, pulling at my sleeve. “Leather’s going to make it worse, Squirrel.”

  I shake my head. “Don’t want to risk losing it.”

  “Leave it in the truck.”

  “Yeah. I won’t let anyone near this thing, kid.” Fox slaps his hand against the outside of the door, leaning out the window.

  I sigh, give in, shrug it off, and throw it at Fox. The air does feel nice with just a sweaty ass tank top on, but I’m fully aware of all the scars on my arms. Two bites. Scratches from glass, from chain link fence. Memories of a past far behind me. Memories of Soldier’s hands soft against them.

  And good god, that’s so vivid it makes me flinch a good few feet back when Viking touches a finger to my arm. To one of the bite marks.

  “You go swimming in barbed wire?” Fox asks, trying to be lighthearted about it.

  “That looks like—”

  “Nevermind what it looks like,” I snap. I turn around and stomp over to the door.

  I’ve got a few picks stuck in my back pocket that I pull when the door doesn’t budge. The lock cracks easily, and then I shove the door open and find something to keep it open. It would have been a lot faster just to smash the thing, but just in case we need to come back. Just in case we need more and the undead have found their way in to hide in the fabric.

  Viking goes straight for the giant rolls of fabric in the back, flashlight scanning over the too-close racks, while I grab a basket for scissors and needles and thread and thimbles.

  Everything here is so crowded and cramped. Dust fills more of this place than air does. I can see it swirling thick where Viking wandered through.

  All I know about fabr
ic and sewing came from sewing the patch onto the back of my jacket, so many years ago. A skull with a halo. And it took me ages to get all the words around that. Even The Saints Once Sinned.

  I didn’t even have a clue about what that meant, just that it sounded cool.

  I leave the basket outside the door when it’s full, and go back to find Viking. It’s almost hard to breathe for the heat that’s trapped in here, with all the dust and fibres floating around.

  Viking is at a long table, cutting the fabric down to manageable sizes rather than lugging the whole roll out, and he’s got everything on the list ready to go, so I stand and wait. Hold my knife as I watch the store.

  Something shifts on one of the racks. A slight shuffle sound.

  “Viking,” I whisper, nodding toward it.

  He pauses, looks back, and nods.

  It was quiet to begin with, but now there’s absolutely no sound. Everything is muffled and lost in the folds of cottons and polyesters. I move slowly toward the movement, not even sure if it’s something or just the aftermath of Viking moving things around, but either way, I’m not about to let anything sneak up on us.

  I crouch down low and try to see under all the hanging fabric. Darkness. I whistle softly to Viking and make what I hope comes across as a signal for his flashlight. He frowns, but then he understands, tossing it to me over the table.

  I scan the light under the racks, slowly, searching for feet.

  The light cuts across a rotting face with perfect, gnashing teeth just a foot away from me. I jump, scrambling back, trying to get on my feet again, but this thing drags itself across the floor on its forearms. It moves much faster than I could ever think to run as a living person.

  I catch its mouth with a forearm—I’m not wearing my jacket.

  I sink the knife into its skull and push it aside, climbing back onto my feet.

  “Fuck’s sake, Squirrel,” Viking huffs, gesturing to my arm.

  A pair of dentures are still clamped onto me, bits of rotted gum stuck to the backs. My skin is already bruised and slightly broken under them. I shake the things off.

  “I ain’t doing this jump-scare horror movie type shit,” I sigh, grabbing some of his cut fabric as I start hauling ass for the door. “Let’s go. Before another one crawls up on—oh, for fuck—”

  A hand grabs my ankle, pulls me back to the ground, and drags itself closer to me. I shove a foot against its forehead as it tries to bite my leg, dropping the fabric as I slash the knife into the thing several times before it finally drops dead.

  “Viking!”

  He’s already coming after me, the fabric tucked under one arm and a gun in the other hand. I scoop up the shit I dropped, and then he grabs my arm and pushes me forward. I leave some of it behind, but I’ve got most of what matters.

  I can hear more teeth clacking together, a wet shuffling sound.

  We’re almost at the door when they catch up to us. Viking shoots one while I put my boot through the skull of the other one. I get a better look at them with the daylight coming through. Their legs are all black up to the base of the spine, all mush and shriveled. They left snail trails of melted fat and fluids behind them.

  “Squirrel!” Viking hisses at me.

  I look away, following him outside. I grab the basket on the way.

  “You good?”

  You good? I hear it in Soldier’s voice. I hear it for every time he ever said it. And it makes my stomach turn. Makes everything hurt. So I just nod, climb into the truck bed rather than the back, and sit with my back against the windows.

  “Squirrel,” Viking says, dumping the fabric next to me. “You aren’t bit?”

  I shake my head. “No, I ain’t bit.”

  “You’re acting like you’ve never seen one before.”

  I shake my head again. “No. I’m good. Just warm.”

  He hesitates, but then he shrugs and gets in the truck. Just in time, too, because these goddamn tears won’t hold back and they start flowing freely and I’m fighting my own body to keep from shuddering with sobs.

  I swear to fuck, I’m not a damn crier, but that man—he gets under my skin, even now. Even though I haven’t seen him in months. Even though I probably never will again.

  Holy fuck, I miss him. I miss his stupid face.

  Miss that house and that wood stove and how lovely it all was before we found my damn brother. I miss how comfortable I was, unlike now, when every muscle is on high alert for something that might happen. Never calm, never breathing, never sleeping.

  I am a grenade with the pin pulled, ready to throw myself at every dark little thing to come out of the shadows.

  Remembering Soldier makes me see that. It makes me realize how badly I want to leap into the deep end of an ice-cold pool just to be back with him.

  But it isn’t that easy. It won’t ever be that easy. It can’t be, because every dark little thing is another that wants to kill me, or Sadie, or him. And there’s no way in hell I’d ever let that happen.

  Day Two Hundred and Five

  The highway is only a two-lane bridge and there’s nothing coming to me. There’s no grand plan, no grand vision, and it’s pissing me off to no end.

  I pace back and forth across it, my hands making a mess of my hair, with Fox and Viking watching me in confusion.

  I must be losing it. I must finally be lost in the marsh if this one thing isn’t coming to me. I hold the fishing line, wrap it around one finger, and undo it, over and over. Completely lost it.

  “What’s this whole deal about, anyway?” Viking asks.

  I stop for a second, get low to the ground, and look under the cars that are dead on either side of the road. They’re on a slope. There’s enough room between either side to drive a car down, or for a large herd to funnel through.

  There’s an idea rattling around inside my empty skull now.

  I go back to the truck and start rooting through the shit Ezra had prepared, just in case I needed it here. I look up at the guys, holding up some clay-looking bricks. “This is C4, right? How does it work?”

  Fox comes over and roots through a bag for a few small devices. “It detonates through extreme heat, or with detonators. C4 is pretty stable. You can shape it to change the direction of the explosion, here—like this. But be careful with the detonator—and we can’t stick around to wait for whatever Ezra’s expecting.”

  “We won’t need to,” I say, gathering up as much as I can. I pause, squinting. “Were you military?”

  He nods. “Two tours in Afghanistan.”

  I look down at the road for a second. “I used to hate the military.”

  “Like me that much, kid?” He laughs. “I changed your mind?”

  “Not you, no.”

  “Ben Daniels.”

  I walk away without answering him. Fox follows after me with duct tape as I go to each of the cars, crawl up under them, and tape the putty where it won’t be visible. Neither of them say much about it, until I pull a marble out of my pocket.

  “What’s that for?” Viking calls over.

  I shush him and lie down in front of a car that’s in the middle of the bridge and let the marble roll from a tire to the bumper of the next car where I catch it again. I check both wheels, make sure the road doesn’t lift too high on one side that the car won’t go straight. It will.

  There’s a tow truck with tire blocks a bit further up the road. I grab them, tie line around them, and shove them under the wheels of my detonator car. The other end of the line gets tied to the wheel of a car on the opposite side.

  I put the car in neutral and make sure the blocks will hold before taping the detonator on the bumper of the car in front of it.

  “Alright. Get back in the truck, before we get blown to smithereens,” I say, waving Fox back.

  As soon as they turn around, I pull my knife and cut the line, slip it back into its sheath. Viking looks back then. I pretend to take care stepping over it, even though it’s loose on the ground.


  Cutting the line won’t make it safe. Those blocks might not hold. It’ll put off a fantastic show, something exhilarating to say the least, but my mind’s still on Soldier, still thinking—what if it’s him, walking through here?

  In the truck, the guys won’t shut the hell up.

  “You’re Ezra’s favourite because you do shit like that?”

  “So, something or someone is going to waltz through there minding their own business and get blown to shit because of your little trap?”

  “I was never good at math, but you just used a marble—”

  “What the fuck’s with the marble?”

  I clear my throat and lean forward between the two seats. “Listen, children. When I was a youth like y’all, I used to spend hours setting up these contraptions in my house just for the sole purpose of pissing people off. I have spent years honing my ability to be the most annoying little brat you could ever imagine, and now it’s just evolved. Now it ends in explosions. Sometimes it’s grenades, or fireworks, or it’s not an explosion and it’s just some live bait and a few sharp ass sticks to impale the undead, but. None have failed.”

  “I almost want to stick around to see it,” Viking laughs.

  Fox taps the map Viking holds. “Unfortunately, we have a hardware store to get to, and if we’re going to make time, we need to hit the gas.”

  —

  Fox does hit the gas, but we’re hardly close to the place when he slams on the breaks.

  A horde is gathered around a car alarm, and with the moonlight shining on their heads and shoulders, and the headlights cutting across their midsections, it reminds me of that big fucker Soldier and I ran into. I get fidgety at the thought.

  “I… I have a question,” Viking says cautiously.

  “Here we go,” Fox mutters.

  “Oh, yeah, yeah. A serious question.” He looks behind us quickly as the car starts reversing slowly, and then frowns at the horde again, only I notice that he’s looking more to the side of it. At something on the edge of the road. He points to it. “What the fuck am I looking at?”