by Karpa, Boris
With that, they went into the house. Arthur did not follow – he knew his task, and his task was to stay in the car. The next few minutes passed in excruciating silence. As always when this happened, Arthur considered the possibilities. What if this was a trap? What if the old couple simply murdered Martin for his Medent – whatever a Medent was – and he never came out, with Arthur left outside here, waiting for hours and hours? And then, of course, he would need to avenge his partner.
Avenge his partner. He wasn't quite sure what this meant or what it entailed. People in films and books – police, soldiers, pilots – always avenged their partners. Was Martin his partner? They had known each other for 13 days. With every day, he became more accustomed to Martin's manner of talking and acting. He had been brief and firm most of the time – like on the roof of that office building in the city. The conversation at lunch was as verbose as the man was going to ever get, it seemed – and yet he'd also been kind in his own way. He'd certainly never insulted Arthur or humiliated him – not like the people at Camp Serenity.
- "Attention slackers!" – perhaps this had been the kindest word the drillmaster had used in reference to the group of youths now aligned in front of him. They wore grey sports suits, splattered all over with mud. There had been so much of it on their clothes after each work day, it seemed like it would never come off – they weren't allowed to use washing machines to wash it. Instead, it was given to whichever unfortunate 'cadets' (inmates would perhaps be a better word) that were tasked with the week's laundry. -"Attention slackers!" – the drillmaster called out again, passing along the ranks, patting his left hand with a long, black rubber baton. The baton was a tool of discipline that had been introduced After – or perhaps they used it Before, too. Arthur wasn't here Before.
- "Good morning, Mr. Arkham, Sir!" – two hundred throats bellowed at once.
- "Today I have brought a wonderful man to meet with you! His name is Martin Schmitt, and he is an advisor! This means that he's more useful to civilization than all of you slackers combined!"
Arthur felt tired – as tired as anybody would feel after four hours in the fields. But even to his tired eyes, it was obvious that Martin stood out. He was taller than the drillmaster, and less of a stocky build. Rather than the drab-brown uniforms that the staff of the Serenity Bay Facility for Troubled Youth affected, he was dressed in black from head to toe. Knives, guns, and tools that Arthur – back at the time – could not identify – hung from his chest, his belt, forearms. A pistol had been strapped to his hip just above the knee. Black gloves concealed his fingers. His eyes were concealed behind wraparound sunglasses, and his hair was raven-black.
- "That ginger kid." – he pointed a finger at Arthur – "What happened to his face?"
- "Oh that slacker? He's an animal." – the drillmaster replied – "He's an animal, that's just pure and simple. He bit me, can you believe that? He bit me on the shoulder, like a dog."
One could not tell how Martin felt about the drillmaster being bitten. He just said – "Why'd he bit you?"
- "Oh, slacker crap. One of the bitches here didn't want to turn out to work, said she was sick. Started being rude, insubordinate. So she was disciplined – nothing much, open hand, you know the drill."
- " I sure do." – the advisor sounded encouraging. He even smiled a little.
- "Well, and as we were doing that, this little rat flips out and jumps on me. Now, you understand, I couldn't just stand there and let me gnaw on my shoulder. Had to clock him a few before he went down."
- "And a few after, eh?" – Martin smirked.
- "Well, I was a bit pissed, you know. Had to put him in the cage after that for two weeks. He's only just out of there."
- "And it doesn't look like he's learned much. Look how he's looking at us."
- "That's what I'm saying. Kids were animals before this all started, and we've gotten the worst. Do you think they'll be acting any better now?"
- "That's true." – Martin didn't seem very enthusiastic – "So, can I... adopt that ginger kid? Does he have a name?"
- "If you're crazy enough? Hell, we're damn near close to paying you to get him out of our hands. That Bobcat you brought in will replace him quite handily."
That had been the price, then – a small mini-tractor traded for a young man. Naturally, both sides believed that they've cheated the other one blind. Of course, Martin claimed that he never intended to hold Arthur as a slave – and he certainly acted like it. But what had been his actual intent – that was not clear. Right now, the young man had to confess to himself that he felt that Martin was not a master – that if something happened, he'd -
The front door opened suddenly. Martin walked down the driveway, grinning as if he had made the best purchase ever. Waving farewell to the Ashfords – no doubt still watching him from the house – he placed the small box of eggs in the trunk, and then returned to the driver's seat.
- "Rolex Executive Series, 2012. " – he said to Arthur, as if that was supposed to explain everything. The car began to move.
- "What's that good for?" – the young man looked at the advisor with some confusion.
- "You don't know what a Rolex is? The watch – " – he tapped against one of his many pockets – "Was worth more than this car was, when it was new. When this is over, it's going to buy me a new house. Or a new car."
- "When this is over? You still think -"
- "Which brings us to the next point of discussion. When you were at Serenity Bay, did you happen to hear any rumors about the Florentine Republic?"
- "No." – the only rumors they heard at Serenity Bay were of zombies taking up more and more cities, and of the Army coming to rescue them – any day now, of course.
- "Back before it was happened, a pair of microbrewers in the southern part of the city had this idea. They thought their neighborhood should secede. Form its own city, you understand. When this all went down, they seceded for real. Cut off the streets, shot down the shamblers, whole nine yards. It's just a few city blocks – shambler-free and self-sustained. I help them drill their own well just as it all went down. I visit them every two weeks, on a schedule."
- "Oh." – Arthur said.
- "It's marvelous. Ten city blocks of hippies – and just enough Army veterans to keep it all locked down tight. Street parties once a week – bartenders, dancers, and all. Like old times."
- "Street parties?"
- "Yeah, they've got a whole Decameron vibe going."
Arthur wasn't quite sure what a Decameron was, but he kept quiet. Martin didn't seem to mind. For a while there was silence. Martin removed one of his gloves, playing a his fingers across the dashboard screen. The navigation software still worked – it showed a map of the road they seemed to be traveling on, with the car as a tiny blue arrow moving along the road.
- "How does it still work?" – the sixteen-year-old asked. – "Aren't the cell phones down?"
- "It doesn't use them. Navigators like this use satellites – they are still up there. GPS and GLONASS." – the advisor fell silent again, as the car wheeled around a bend.
- "Won't they fall out of orbit eventually?" – Arthur asked after a while. He remembered reading a news report about a satellite falling out of orbit.
- "We have a few years." – Martin shrugged. For a brief moment, he held the wheel in place with his knees, reaching over to put the glove back on. A second – and the black-gloved hands gripped the wheel again. He seemed oblivious to Arthur shuddering at this gesture – it seemed like the most irresponsible thing in the world to do while driving after the apocalypse – or perhaps Martin was just that good.
Certainly Martin would never have dared to do this himself. Oh, he had driven a car (his uncle's car when his uncle wasn't looking) – but of course he'd never had a permit. Over the past twelve days the advisor had made the time to teach him the basics of many skills he'd never meant to learn Before – using a rifle and a pistol, handling a knife, lighting a fire. He was
not good at it, of course – it took people months to learn some of these things – but at least today, he could hit a shambler at a hundred yards, and help Martin out – even if it was just in a task where Martin needed an extra set of hands.
- "What did you do before... before?" – he asked, suddenly.
- "I was a teacher. " – Martin replied, his voice as emotionless as usual.
- "A teacher?" – Arthur looked at the older man with surprise. It was hard to imagine that – "What did you teach? Sports?" – in his mind, Martin made sense as a PT teacher. Tough as nails, of course, and probably trained in some kind of martial art.
- "Ha, that 's a funny joke. No, I taught English Lit. Shakespeare, Austen. This stuff." – Martin shrugged again.
- "That... is not what I thought."
- "Consider that a surprise." – Martin shrugged.
They passed the wreckage of a gas station. The roof had caved in, and the only thing left of the building was its blackened ruins. The burned-out husks of several cars lay near the station. For the briefest flash of an instant it seemed that there were people walking through the ruins – but these were only shamblers. They've been here for a while, it seemed, their clothing blackened with soot. By the time they began moving towards the road, trying to intercept the car, it has already zipped passed them – and again, the highway was empty for a while.
There was, of course, the other side of the highway – the four lanes that had led outside the city. Months ago, this was the main avenue of the Big Flight – four lanes down which hundreds of thousands of citizens had attempted to make their way out of the City. They never had a chance, of course – the City's outdated highways, that strangled it in traffic snarls every morning just with the pressure of regular, peacetime traffic, could not withstand the human torrent. It did not help that civil defense guidelines had pointed all citizens to use the same few traffic arteries. Add a few accidents, a few shamblers on the road – and hundreds of thousands people had been trapped in their cars, unable to double back into the city, unable to even leave their cars and flee as the entire highway became a giant feast for the undead.
On contrast, the side of the highway that, in the time Before, had carried traffic into the city, had remained almost completely open. In part this was simply because very few people had wanted to enter the city during the Big Flight – but in part was, as many things about the Big Flight, a story of bad decisions. In particular, the decision of some City Hall officials to block off the "entry" side of the highway with concrete roadblocks. Nobody was quite sure what the motivation had been for this bright move. Perhaps they had hoped, to the last minute, that there would be rescue – hundreds of Army trucks and tanks rolling into the city, vanquishing the undead scourge, distributing aid and blankets.
Of course, a few people had made it past the roadblocks. The wiser ones simply used other escape routes – the highway had been far from the only road out of town. Those who hadn't followed the big crowds lived. Most of them, that is – Arthur shuddered as they passed the wreckage of a Land Rover, jack-knifed and turned on its side on the edge of the highway. The skeleton of a man was still trapped in one window of the vehicle. It had been picked clean – perhaps by rats and crows, perhaps by the shamblers. Neither were in sight as they passed them in the car. On the other side of the highway, meanwhile, there probably where shamblers aplenty – but the tall concrete wall that had separated the two traffic streams kept off them from the road.
“So.” – Arthur broke the silence – “How does an English teacher... know all this stuff?”
“What stuff?” – Martin's head turned ever so slightly towards the younger man.
“You know. Guns, knives, all of this Robinson stuff, that's not exactly on the English Studies curriculum.”
“Well, the better question is: why didn't anybody else know it?”
“What?”
“Why didn't anybody else know it? It's not like this is the first emergency in the world's history. Why did everybody let themselves get caught with their pants down?”
Arthur looked at the advisor. He expected Martin to say more, but of course Martin remained completely silent. For a few moments, Arthur waited for a reply, then asked:
“What do you mean?”
“I don't really know all that much stuff. I took some shooting classes, I knew some outdoor stuff. And after I survived the first few weeks, I learned more by trial and error. At first I just ran away when there were too many ghouls, so I didn't notice they were stopping for their fallen. One day I heard this rumor about it, and I decided I should check. I shot a ghoul from ambush, and saw two of its buddies get distracted with all the free meat. I drew my own conclusions. If you deal with ghouls often, you can learn a lot about killing them.”
“Oh”. – Arthur said. This was underwhelming. Secretly he had already begun to build up a mental image of Martin Schmitt being some kind of commando or hit man. An English Literature teacher with a penchant for the outdoors was somewhat less interesting.
Suddenly, Martin hit the brakes. Arthur was flung forward in his seat, the seat belt pulling tight against his chest and stomach. Had Martin not insisted on wearing seat belts (Traffic laws are gone. Newton's laws aren't), he'd have been flung out through the windshield. As it was, he only coughed with pain. “Sorry.” – Martin breathed out.
“What happened?” – Arthur replied, looking on in surprise as the older man unbuckled himself from his driver's seat.
“That right there.” – Martin replied in his usual clipped manner. – “Doesn't belong.”
It really did not belong. It was a long pickup-truck with an enclosed bed, stopped at the edge of the highway. It was facing in the same direction as the car they were riding – facing into the city. The doors on both sides were flung open, with neither driver nor passenger in sight. No dead bodies slumped against the steering wheel, no ghouls shambling around the car. But what stood out even more was the symbol on its polished, light green side: a stylized drawing of a sun rising from the sea, or perhaps settling into the waves, and under it, the words: SERENITY BAY.
Martin's body flowed into a new posture. His legs were half-bent – he moved in a half-crouch, preparing to make a sharp movement at the slightest notice. With his right hand ready to draw his pistol, he walked towards the car. His tall, heavy boots trod on the tarmac without a sound. With his left hand, he beckoned Arthur to follow him.
Arthur unbuckled the seat belt with shaking fingers. In a few seconds, he was out of the car, his rifle at the ready. He slammed the door closed behind him – there was likely a living person somewhere here, and there was no knowing how they were inclined. What if they sneaked up on then and stole the car?
They moved around the pickup – Martin from one side, Arthur from the other. They had rehearsed such movements at Martin's house – each man slowly closing a broad semi-circle around the vehicle to reduce their exposure to whatever threat might have been hiding on the other side. This was called “slicing the pie”, Arthur had learned.
There was no threat. Nobody stood crouched on the other side of the truck, waiting to leap towards them. Moreover – the truck's engine had still been running. A shotgun had been fixed between the driver's seat and the passenger's. Even the keys had been left in the ignition.
- “What kind of moron...” – Arthur started. Martin pressed his finger to his lip, and pointed to the side of the road.
On the sand, where the tarmac ended, two sets of tracks were heading away from the highway, through the bushes that sprung up wild along the road. The driver and his passenger were out of sight.
“Oh.” – Arthur whispered – “You think they just left for a few minutes? They'll be back.”
Martin nodded. – “We best go back to the car.”
The riddle had an easy solution, then. The people in the car had simply gone off the road for some reason of their own – a reason that held no interest for Mar
tin or his apprentice. Perhaps they had buried a stash – which was their own, or perhaps they had some secret affair to discuss and feared the car was bugged – Arthur had met some pretty paranoid people Before and did not doubt they existed After. Certainly people at Serenity Bay had good grounds for being paranoid. Or perhaps they were just conducting a secret affair. Either way, they had no reason to be here.
They returned to the car. In a few seconds, they were in their places again, their seat belts buckled. Martin closed the door. This was when they heard the scream.
It was a loud, desperate scream, of a man who was clearly in great physical pain and fear. It carried from the bushes and over the road – clearly from the very direction the two people from the Serenity Bay truck had gone.
Martin swung the door on his side open in the blink of an eye. Arthur followed – although he wasn't sure if he wanted to risk his life for someone who worked at Serenity Bay. He had no doubts, on the other hand, about helping Martin.
They ran off the highway. There was no talking about stealth now. The heavy boots thudded against the tarmac, crunched against fallen branches and leaves. The bolt of Arthur's rifle clanged as he pulled it back on the run, turning the selector switch all the way. In front of him, Martin pulled out his pistol on the move, racking the slide.
The bushes slowed down their movement, the thin branches slashing and whipping at their faces. They kept running, with Martin's broad shoulders plowing straight through, breaking branches as he went on. Slimmer – and weaker – Arthur followed into the breach the advisor left behind him. This did not make his run completely free of obstacles – but at least it was somewhat easier.
Invisible through the thick brush, the man began to scream again, this time in earnest.
10:30
The bushes ended suddenly, Martin and Arthur bursting out into the open. Cuts and bruises covered their faces as they emerged from the brush. The growth ended here, only a dozen yards or so from the road, giving way to the beginning of a desert plain. Somewhere during the breakneck run, Martin had lost his wraparound sunglasses, and a long, ugly cut now graced the side of his face. It was difficult to stop – their very momentum carried them over the side of a small shallow. Down at its bottom, the source of the screams was now in full view.
