“Maybe an aneurism or something, I always figured,” he said, gone from cheery to maudlin drunk in record time.
His farm community didn’t do grief well, and they had plenty of it. Shirts said it ended up feeling like he couldn’t breathe, so he stole away one night with a full backpack, thereafter falling into various ill-defined misadventures until he picked up one of the bulk-dropped pamphlets declaring the Columbus project underway. That was a week ago. He was only fifty miles from the City at the time.
Rather than jump at his turn, Laurance sat cross-legged, breathing thoughtfully. He then explained he was in an ashram when “shit got real” – except nobody knew it’d happened. A month went by for the self-imposed exiles, and then their guru had a stroke and died and then got up again a few minutes later and started biting people.
“An ashram isn’t exactly a place with a good arsenal,” he said.
Tom smirked at the younger man’s comedic tone, but it hung there uncomfortably as he detailed how others in the commune thought they’d witnessed something miraculous. Laurance stayed for the sake of a steady food supply, but the ashram became increasingly cult-like, the guru’s lieutenants taking control with a jealous zeal, forcing him to escape, him and his girlfriend and her girlfriend lost in the hills outside Sacramento and then falling into the clutch of a group of survivors – who in the telling at least – sounded like little much more than a gang of rapists. It didn’t go well for the girls – and maybe not for Laurance either. By implication, he left the girls behind and traveled east, hiding from Furies along the way, and then spending a year in a high school with a population of five hundred people who bunkered in after the early days of the crisis.
Laurance didn’t explain what happened to the others from the school. Instead, he turned expectant eyes on Tom, who was struck by the closest thing to stage fright for the first time since he was eight years old.
*
“THERE’S NOT MUCH of a story to tell,” Tom said. And for a moment he thought he might be able to get himself out of the spotlight, however slowly he’d felt the wheel turn towards him since their truth-telling, male-pattern bonding started.
“Everyone’s got a story,” Shirts said.
“If you’re alive, you’ve got a story,” Dkembe agreed.
“How did you keep your kids alive and in one piece through all of this?”
Laurance asked the question with false sincerity. Tom knew his type, dealing with too many photogenic professionals in his past lives.
“We were in the mountains when the shit hit the fan,” Tom said. “Their mom and I weren’t together still, then.”
“Together . . . still?”
“Their mom was with someone else,” Tom said. “They had a little girl, Jasmine. The father didn’t make it out of the city, out of Knoxville, but Mara found her way back to me.”
“You had your ex-wife and your kids together?” Shirts said. “Talk about apocalypse.”
He finished his drink and didn’t find any takers for a refill. Shirts topped up his drink from a cooler as Tom tried to edit his tale down to the bare essentials.
“Things were good in the mountains at first,” he said. “Then we took in some neighbors, and then some passers-by. But the moment an organized group found us, it just wasn’t defensible. We had to quit. Took to the road. Lost a few people.”
He added quietly, “Their mom was one of them.”
“The daughter?” Laurance asked. “The little girl?”
“She lived a while longer.”
Further questions hung in the air unvoiced, but Tom with his palms to his eyes showed clear enough they were on traumatic ground. Shirts downed the last of his booze, and utterly sozzled, gave a melancholy burp.
“And the meek shall inherit the Earth.”
No one had anything witty as a comeback and the Scotsman levered himself upright.
“This is where my night ends, lads,” he said.
Halfway to the front bedroom, he waved cheerily at Tom and then their erstwhile fellow lodgers.
“First in gets the bed, by the way.”
And he staggered away to the front room as the dull bells of Curfew rang out across the City.
*
LILIANNA HAD REORGANIZED the room so the mattress was on the floor and they could all bed down together in their usual way. Lucas was repositioned, sleeping blissfully, his sister propped beside him on one elbow with a bleary look as her father quietly let himself in.
He paused at the deadbolt and nodded to himself and clicked it into place.
“Dad, you should read this,” Lila said.
She tossed the folded-up newspaper closer to him on the floor. Tom dropped slowly to the carpet and started unbuckling his boots. It was practically dark except for the street life still lighting the curtainless window.
“You’re not going to give me a hard time for kicking you out of there?”
“I keep reminding you I’m sixteen, dad,” she said. “Four of those in zombie years. I get it.”
“That’s a relief to know.”
He unshucked the first boot and gave an unwitting groan. Lila checked on Lucas sleeping, the newspaper lying untouched between them.
“He’s worried,” she said.
“Yep,” Tom said.
“You too, huh?”
Tom removed the other boot, leaving on his grimy socks. It was somehow cold in the bedroom, but not so strange any more to be lying on the floor with a perfectly good single bed nearby. He picked up the newspaper and shuffled up onto the mattress, dragging across the blanket from his pack with Lucas between him and his daughter.
“It’s a big change,” he said. “It’ll take a lot to convince me we’re any safer here.”
Tom gave her a meaningful look and lay down.
“There’s a note in the paper calling for contributors.”
“Uh-huh.”
Tom lay his arm across his face as he melted in repose. Lila watched him for long enough to note the change in his breathing as sleep came like a rush. She eyed the dead-bolted door with her own signature worry and lay down behind her brother, the three of them huddled together like in the grave.
*
Got something to offer? Contributors welcome
by Delroy Earle
The Columbus Herald welcomes volunteer contributors to help keep the City’s only newspaper running.
Operating out of The Mile, your City’s free press runs on the smell of an oily rag and all help is welcome.
Our back page advertisers support each edition so that we are free for you, the reader.
We’re here to keep us rolling on the great start we’ve made as a City.
And contributions to help us with our mission make it happen.
Got a story? Want to help us keep the lights on? Items to trade?
We are the City’s voice for you, it’s Citizens.
Limited staff positions are available, but if you have an offer, let us know.
*
EXHAUSTION WAS ENOUGH to give Tom five hours’ sleep, but after that, his many gnawing questions dispelled any chance for further rest. It was dark still, though he listened to the silence of the house and the street outside for a while before he was willing to quietly unlock the door and pad across the short hallway to the bathroom and more immediate relief. He left the toilet unflushed and peeked into the neighboring bathroom. The shower stall had seen better days and not much promise of hot water. He paused in the doorway to scan the living room and empty kitchen and noted Dkembe curled up in a sleeping bag in the apartment’s short front entrance hall.
Tom rebolted the bedroom door. It was too dark for anything, and he sat there drifting in and out of rest as he chewed through unconscious worries and impatiently outwaited the dawn. The inertia seemed wasteful, so he got up again quietly and did two hundred air squats in the corner of the room wearing just his dirty shorts and singlet. For nearly twenty minutes, there was nothing but the pepper-grinder sound of
Tom’s knees as he worked his way into the day.
Lucas woke just minutes before the sky lightened to the east and then Tom gently roused Lila and made a nonsensical signal with his fingers before his lips.
Lila’s eyes flashed with worry, Tom instantly regretting the signal and gesturing instead for her to stay calm.
“We just have to be quiet, OK?”
Tom motioned to their belongings and started rolling up his blanket.
“Pack all your stuff,” he whispered. “You can leave clothes, but bring anything you don’t want stolen with you. We can’t lock this place – and I’m starving.”
The admission conjured grins. Lilianna started emptying her backpack with gusto. Tom just as quickly stopped her arm.
“Bring your personal items with you,” he said.
“My toothbrush?”
“No,” he said. “Your underwear.”
Lila gave him a look.
“Seriously, dad?”
“We don’t know these guys,” Tom said. “You do remember The Library, right?”
Lila’s face flushed at once, expression shifting rapidly between hurt and silent resentment her father would suggest such a thing.
“I remember.”
“Richard died killing those two men to keep you safe when I couldn’t,” Tom said. “That was a hard lesson. I don’t need to be taught twice.”
“Me neither.”
“OK.”
“You’re being such a hardass,” Lila said.
“Please don’t fight, you two,” Luke said.
His sister sighed and retrieved her under-things and stuffed them back into her pack.
“Anyone would think you felt safer living out there on the road.”
Tom calmly folded the blanket, conscious of noises now outside.
“At least out there we could see the danger coming,” he said. “Here, there might not be much time to react.”
He swept out of the bedroom on that note, startling Laurance in the living room finally wearing all his clothes. The messianic-looking younger man gave the family a tight smile as he finished strapping on a carpenter’s belt that included a hatchet and a dangerous-looking chisel among his other tools. Dkembe had also risen, stuffing his sleeping bag into the cabinet under the kitchen sink.
“You should pack your stuff,” Tom said. “Where’s your friend?”
“Shirts is sleeping it off,” Laurance said.
“We had a deal for one night.”
“We’ve got to get to our crew before the transport rolls out,” Dkembe said.
“Yeah,” Laurance added. “We can sort it out after our shift, right?”
Dkembe entered the living room.
“You must have someone to be reporting too as well, huh?”
Tom shook his head in irritation and told them to wake Shirts up as he marched out of the apartment and stopped and motioned for his children to follow him down the flight of stairs to Dr Swarovsky’s door. But his knocking failed to summon the enigmatic woman.
The children stood looking back at Laurance on the landing halfway above them and Lucas tugged at his father’s still-torn jacket sleeve.
“What about eating?”
Tom sighed and waved vaguely up at Laurance.
“We’ll sort it out later,” he said. “But you’re good to go.”
The younger man nodded with less agreement than Tom would’ve liked, making a slow-motion retreat back up the stairs to the apartment Tom was violently conscious he could lose in just a few seconds. But his own growling stomach echoed with an eerie loudness in the stairwell.
*
TOM LED HIS children down the street to the Night Market, past more than thirty Citizens camped out in sleeping bags and blankets, old shopping trolleys and all sorts of crap on the edge of the street and the sidewalk, the few trampled corners of remaining public open space with tents on them too. It was early, but the prehistoric conditions when it came to natural light made every hour more valuable in the day, and the crowds closer to the First Gates quickly built to prove it. The Vaniceks found the market mostly shut down, with just a single vendor with an electric bulb to hawk his wares powered by bike pedals built into part of his booth. An older Asian man sat on a stool he occasionally peddled as he smoked a skinny cigarette and cooked eggs and traded barking laughter with a trio of bearded men in Kevlar vests, handguns visibly strapped to their legs.
The Vanicek family moved into the market’s undercover area, jostling their way out of the increasing street life. Tom halted Lucas leading the way, their father glancing back at the flow of pedestrian traffic so close to where they lived, noting more than a few passers-by going armed, despite whatever the rulebook said. Resident security personnel were a big part of that number, but more curious to Tom’s trained eye were the other civilians, some with barely-concealed sidearms, others bearing handheld weapons like axes and machetes in their belts. A balding black guy passed by, leading the way like imitating a blind man with his quarterstaff. A swarthy woman went in the other direction with an old cavalry saber scabbarded at a jaunty angle across the small of her back.
“Something to eat?”
The vendor’s call came with a yellowed smile designed to encourage the children over, forcing their dad to follow. Tom pulled out his ration book in a perfectly good imitation of a man with no idea of what he was doing, causing the egg chef to immediately made a face.
“Aw, don’t wave that thing around here,” he said. “No credit.”
Tom scanned the stall’s metal cake dishes containing shaved meat, whole eggs, spring onions, peppers, and something tantalizingly close to bacon all prepped and ready to go onto a well-oiled, electric-lit hotplate.
“My children need something to eat.”
“Bullets? Tobacco?” the stallholder replied. “What you got to offer?”
“This is how y’all do it, here?” Tom asked with a sneer of disbelief.
“How’d you think it’s going to work?”
“I read something in the newspaper about currency. . . ?”
“It’ll be a long time before it comes to that,” the Asian man said. “If you want breakfast for you and your little kidlets, show me what you got. I’ll be gentle. You got the dust of the road on you still, pal, but you got cute kids.”
It took Tom a second to parse the man’s clipped speech, and when his face got the frozen signal to relax and he stammered his thanks, the vendor gestured at Tom’s backpack.
“Cute kids,” he said. “They don’t have the look yet, you know? A lot of damaged kids in this place. Watch your stuff. They’ll do almost anything.”
“Yeah,” Tom said and smiled, appreciating the warning. “Like a Dickens novel.”
“It’s not nothing like a fucking Dickens novel, you douche,” the vendor said and seemed to retract all his previous goodwill with an air of sudden, overwhelming disdain.
Tom thought to say something. It was one of those cases where he instantly understood how he’d been misunderstood and now looked like a naïve cretin rather than a hungry father trying his best to be a good dude. Instead, he swung the backpack around and unlaced the cover knowing there was almost nothing of value within.
“They took our guns and ammunition,” Tom growled.
“Oh well, say goodbye to all that.”
“They said our weapons would be logged and the details recorded.”
“Promised you a hot shower too, I bet.”
The Asian guy chuckled, more interested in trying to scope the impossible view into Tom’s bag than any actual conversation. Tom stood like a nervous magician knowing he couldn’t pull a rabbit from this particular hat. The vendor gave an irritated grunt.
“No yummy breakfast for you,” he said. “Sorry kidlets.”
He got off the stool and moved to the water-filled trough corralling his stall. He retrieved the first in a collection of decent-looking plates he started drying with a cloth. Tom looked at his children. Lila was already sorting
through her pack, kneeling in front of the stallfront as the electric light started to dim.
Lucas tugged again on Tom’s sleeve.
“I know, buddy.”
“No, dad,” Lucas said.
He pointed to the bike pedals.
“I could do that.”
Tom stood a moment trying to work out why that wasn’t a brilliant idea. Lila stood, huffing wisps of blonde hair from her face. She shook her head at Tom’s look.
“He might want more than a few minutes of your time,” Tom said.
“I can stay here with Luke while you do your reporting thing,” Lila said. “If I have to.”
“I’ll pedal all fucking morning if it gets us something to eat.”
“Watch your language,” Tom said to Lucas. “But I concur.”
He turned back to the vendor.
“Buddy,” he said. “How about my son powers your generator for an hour?”
The offer had the Asian guy’s attention. He drifted closer, drying another plate.
“How much you want to eat?”
“Breakfast for all three of us,” Luke blurted.
“Oh, that’s a lot of eggs,” the vendor said. “And I got some cheese too. Don’t ask from what.”
“It better not be cheese made from . . . rats or something,” Lilianna said.
“You can’t make cheese from rats,” the vendor said. “They have tiny nipples.”
The children burst out laughing and Tom was tempted to soften too, but the wily vendor shot him a wink and Tom wasn’t sure if that made him feel better or worse.
“My name’s Einstein,” the Asian guy said. “On account that I’m so smart.”
“Obviously,” Lila said.
Einstein looked the girl up and down as if judging her old enough to warrant a retort.
“I don’t see you in charge of any fucking eggs, girlie.”
“Hey watch your language,” Tom said.
“He started it,” Einstein said and pointed at Lucas. Again the children tittered.
“Fucking hell,” Tom muttered for added effect. “I hope all this revelry means you’re not going to have my kid riding your bicycle for the whole day. What’s it going to cost us?”
After The Apocalypse Season 1 Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 8
