Two brothers who had been out photographing sandhill cranes found him inside their shed. He was crouched with his back resting against the wall. They snapped a few pictures and called their father—a forty-four-year-old liquor store owner named Colin Smythe—who killed the infected man with a .22 magnum round fired from an antique Smith & Wesson revolver. A few more pictures were snapped of the corpse. Then the Smythe family wrapped the body in a tarp and contacted the press. The rest is history.
Back then, the world needed heroes, and Colin Smythe became one.
You could say I became one, too, though not in any way I ever expected.
A whole ten years before Mr. Valentine’s diseased brain splashed across the wall of Mr. Smythe’s rickety shed—marking the end of what is now called the “Hunger Virus” threat—Melanie and I and the Hirscham family decided to make our way to Brightrock.
We spent three nights in her house in Peltham Park to convalesce before setting out for the mountains. Melanie divided that time between comforting her mother and sister and going over plans with Pete and me for our trip. At night, she slept beside her little sister, Sarah, to make sure the girl had someone to comfort her after a nightmare.
I’ll admit those nights were tough. I had nightmares of my own. All I wanted was to hold Melanie in my arms and dream of never letting go. That came later.
I went out alone on one more supply run to find gasoline with Pete. Melanie stayed behind with her family. The run was easier now that I had the truck and knew where to look. The Lubroline station gave me everything I needed. Pete and I stocked the back of the truck with the precious items—godly trinkets—that would help us gain admission to Brightrock, even though they didn’t require such a thing. We ended up donating all of it, anyway.
Brightrock was a tight-knit, heavily fortified religious community in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Every one of its sixty-two residents called themselves “New Light Protestants.” This came from their belief that the virus would someday die out, and the remaining survivors would rebuild civilization in God’s honor.
Melanie and I found a comforting element in their ideas—a kind of sturdy, incorruptible hope in mankind—that led her to convert and me to dedicate my life to their cause.
Our first few weeks in Brightrock were spent learning their ways, adjusting to a life full of chores, and gathering the materials we would need to build ourselves a shack in which Melanie and I could live with her mother and sister. We slept on the church’s dirt floor. Other villagers invited us to stay with them, but the shacks were too small, and none of us wanted to be a burden.
I enjoyed building our shack. Pete and I chose adjacent lots and worked so closely that it was like we were building two separate halves of the same building. All those days and weeks of cutting wood, laying boards, and hammering nails helped us grow close. He was the first person I told about my decision to propose to Melanie.
I was twenty-one, Melanie only a year younger, when our marriage took place on a bright August afternoon. Everyone in Brightrock was there. Melanie’s mother, Amy, made her wedding gown, a simple yet elegant dress of beige silks she had brought from home. The fabric and cut of the dress accentuated Melanie’s curves in a way that seemed out of place in such a religious community. Despite a few jokes and chuckles from the younger villagers, no one seemed to mind.
Amy also made a silk eye patch for my blind eye and a shirt to go with the finely tailored suit I had purchased from another villager. In exchange for the suit, I gave the man my combat knife. I couldn’t stand to look at it anyway. It resembled the one I had used on my father.
The day of our wedding, Melanie and I stood facing each other in the afternoon sunlight as Pete—or, in this case, Pastor Hirscham, the town’s newest clergy member—held a tattered Bible to his chest and spoke of love, loyalty, and the light of God. He managed to slip in a few words of wisdom from the Ranger Creed, which made me smile.
“Do you, Kevin Garrity,” he said, “take Melanie Reis to be your—”
Melanie and I kissed each other fiercely before he could finish. Everyone had a good laugh at that.
Our house was finished by then, except for the paint we had yet to mix and spread across its beams. I had built a bed frame and a mattress stuffed with duck feathers. Luckily for us, several of our wedding gifts had consisted of blankets and sheets—scarce in a community this rustic, and way more comfortable than the sleeping bags we had been using.
Our first night as a married couple, Amy and Sarah stayed with a friend so Melanie and I could have the house to ourselves. We were slightly drunk from an evening spent sipping moonshine with a few friends around a campfire. Stinking of booze and burning logs, we crashed through the door and into the bedroom, already kissing and stripping each other of our wedding attire. We were in the best shape of our lives from all the outdoor work we had been doing and from a diet consisting mainly of vegetables, berries, and lake trout.
When we saw each other naked for the first time, standing in the wash of moonlight falling through the window of our bedroom, we were both stunned. Our bodies were covered in a layer of hard muscle. It was something we had taken for granted the past few years, when survival had been our only concern.
Our hands roamed across each other’s chests, bellies, and arms like we were touching statues in a museum where that’s strictly forbidden. Melanie ran her fingers across the cords of muscle wrapping my midsection. She gripped my arms and squeezed. I slid my palms around her slender waist, then made my way up to cup her breasts. We were like Adam and Eve discovering human nakedness for the first time.
Melanie reached up and touched my eye patch.
“All of it comes off,” she said, peeling it away and tossing it to the floor.
I dove in for a kiss, but she held me back.
“Slowly,” she said. “I want tonight to last forever.”
“It already has,” I said.
She smiled at my stupid joke and took a step back.
I watched, heart jumping, as she released her hair from its elaborate, ceremonial bun and shook it. Thick auburn tresses spilled across her shoulders, hiding her breasts only enough to leave their soft undersides exposed. Her belly flexed rapidly with each nervous breath.
“To think I almost shot you,” she said, breathless.
I shook my head in amazement. “To think I ever walked by you in school without saying anything. And now you’re my wife.”
“Say that again.”
“You’re my wife.”
“Kip…”
“Come here. Now.”
We lunged at each other. For minutes, our kiss never broke, even as I grabbed her buttocks, lifted her off the ground, and pressed her against the wall. Her legs curled around my waist and tightened. Sweat poured off our bodies, fragrant in the night’s humid air. Melanie dug her nails into my back at one point, cutting my skin, and I retaliated with a bite against a nipple that made her gasp.
“The bed,” she told me.
I spun us away from the window.
Crossed the two feet of space to the mattress.
And landed as a shotgun blast tore through the nearest wall.
That’s how it sounded, anyway. It turned out to be the pinewood bed, which had collapsed. Nothing to panic about. But a minute later, a group of our fellow townspeople burst into the bedroom, led by a worried Pete Hirscham.
They carried flashlights and pistols, though I only know that from what Pete told me the following day. When he realized what was happening, he quickly ushered everyone out. I didn’t see it for myself, but I imagine he was wearing what my father liked to call “a shit-eating grin” and silently thanking the Almighty for one hell of a story. He would tell it regularly for many years to come.
I don’t blame him. You see, none of those things—the bed breaking, our neighbors bursting in—was enough to get our attention. Having made it to the mattress, Melanie and I just kept going. We didn’t stop until sunrise.
My father had a saying I always liked:
“Nobody lives forever.”
EPILOGUE
Excerpt from The Clean World Gazette, Raleigh, North Carolina
August 24, 2030
SURVIVALIST “HERO COUPLE” GIVE BIRTH…AGAIN!
Only weeks after their ten-year wedding anniversary, famed survivalist couple Kevin “Kip” Garrity, 31, and Melanie Reis-Garrity, 30, will add a healthy baby boy to their growing family. Known for their bloody escapades in the early days of the Hunger Virus epidemic, the lovebirds already have an eight-year-old son, Max, and two daughters, Alice and Sarah, aged six and four, respectively. They declined to comment on whether they saw any more children in their family’s future.
The couple gained fame and notoriety after a radio interview in which they described a harrowing supply run into their hometown of Peltham Park…
~
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Denoncourt is also the author of Savant, Trainland, and Ascendant. He studied literature and political philosophy at Colgate University and received an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. At the age of 26, he moved to Cartagena, Colombia for two years to finish Ascendant, the epic novel that took him almost a decade to write.
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Outbreak: A Survival Thriller Page 14
