“Enough. I understand. Curiosity is natural,” Alan said. Vee and Shelly joined them all standing outside the bed of the truck. He eyed them all, and turned to Karen. “Who saw the body have a spasm, just the four of you in the back?”
“Yes. Donovan, Jane, Thomas and myself. Vee and Shelly were driving and navigating through the streets,” Karen said. Her back ached and she wanted to leave the truck bay and head to the call center to begin scanning camera feeds to find Paul. Standing here under Alan’s impromptu interrogation delayed that task. “Look, can we go? It’s been a long evening for everyone, and we should probably be working to smooth things over in Belleville.”
“I’m going to have the mayor work on that, but I’d like you four to accompany me to the observation room for a few more questions,” Alan said. “Vee and Shelly can begin cleaning out the rig.”
Vee and Shelly looked to Donovan with raised eyebrows. Donovan nodded, silently assenting to the task.
“Very well. Follow me. Could one of you push the cart? We’ll need the bodies.”
Karen reached for the handles as Alan began walking in the direction of the large bay door. Donovan grabbed the bars, and whispered, “I got it. He seems pissed.”
She watched Alan, his head down, shoulders forward and his hands clasped behind his back. Donovan was right, and the whole interaction with Jane felt extremely out of line, like a bully. She turned to Jane. “You okay?”
“Yes,” Jane’s jaw clenched shut and her eyes narrowed on Alan’s back.
Karen let her be and put her hand on Thomas’s shoulder. “You holding up?”
“A little calmer now, but still pretty freaked out,” Thomas said, stuffing his hands in his front pockets. “This is why I work the phones, so I don’t have to deal with this shit. Had too much of it during the Plague.”
“I think we’ll be done soon, and we can get to the Call Center.”
“I hope so, but this questioning doesn’t sound reassuring.”
Chapter 18
Sophie tapped at her keyboard to alternate between cameras throughout the city. The hum of the building’s heating system had turned to white noise while the street scenes blipped by. Foxer, Creedy, the Mill, Belleville. They all looked similar, and differed only by the number of working street lights that cast their white, green or orange glows below. Even Belleville with its strands of lights or Foxer with its neon signage, it all looked the same.
For the past several years, as more of Alan’s camera network came online, Sophie was the first to catalog the visuals and common occurrences streamed from their respective locations. Cars parked or driving by or people loitering or passing through. She fed the notes to Alan’s system, which he said would learn the behavior of the city.
She traced her necklace and circled the pendant resting above the cleft of her collarbone. She was grateful for him to take her in, shelter her, let her find her bearings and give her space to feel safe after all the fucked up running she did to survive. And he nurtured her curiosity in computers, teaching her programming and how to administer the infrastructure he was building.
“We’re building a new kind of city, or a fully realized city,” he said. He hired men and women to set up different facets of the system. They’d work in the office for weeks, maybe three months at a time performing a task and then disappear.
And they did disappear. Sophie looked up the records of a middle aged man with no hair and long fingers who did most of the data wrangling as Alan called it. The man, Kenneth, was sent to the Mill and drowned during an escape. Records of the other hires ceased to exist as if they were a glitch in the city’s growing base of code. While pangs of curiosity struck her, she never asked Alan about the people he shuffled in and out.
She had trusted him. Believed him. Accepted his words as honest truth.
He increased police patrols and cameras in Foxer, seeking any glimpse of the city’s equivalent to the Elephant Man. “How many people walk around with scars from third degree burns? They’d stick out like a modern day Elephant Man,” he said, while instructing her to program the additional surveillance algorithms.
“Who’s that?” she asked, unaware of the reference.
He raised his eyebrows and licked his lips, “Of course, of course. Before your time. Basically, he was a horribly disfigured man, whose face was blotted with tumors. It’s an insult, in a way for someone who’s ugly.”
She looked up the reference, and felt saddened by the real life basis for the insult.
When the increased patrols and surveillance failed to catch a glimpse, he escalated the usage of quad copter drones scavenged to hover the docks and known areas of vice. With each successive drone destroyed, Alan’s anger boiled over, erupting into a string expletives heard through out the building. Even at home he seethed, their one sided dialogue held hostage of thoughts about Nasher, while he paced the apartment back and forth with his hands behind his back.
Recently, he disappeared to his labs, working on “a newer, better drone.” Entire shipping logs for goods were missing and didn’t reconcile with the accounting books she cross referenced. Ed’s presence in Alan’s office became more frequent, as did Ed’s special missions outside the city for bodies. And her recent trip to Jonathan’s bar as an undercover pawn made her felt dirty and used, not just from the sticky counters or the asshole’s groping hands, but she believed she was bringing a criminal to justice.
Not his death.
When she watched the zombies tear Jonathan apart, the pangs of curiosity transformed into disgust and then doubt, doing everything she could not to betray her emotions in front of him, even when his fervor for control ordered the killing of the ZMTs.
The ZMTs. Her brother was one, and she stalked his Greenville life through surveillance footage. When the facial recognition software became integrated to the system, she could drop in like an invisible fly on the wall. Mostly, she made a habit after Alan disappeared to his lab, to pull the day’s footage with anything containing her brother. She knew his steady gait, his defensive stance while dispatching a roaming zombie with his hammer, or the way he buried his hands in his pockets regardless of how hot or cold it was.
Or how whenever Paul and Karen left their apartment together, his arm would be touching her back and he’d be walking closest to the sidewalk. He cared about her, obviously. They’d been together since he arrived. Could you tell if someone loved another just by watching them from afar? Sophie didn’t know it up close, aside from her mother and father. Middle school and high school boyfriends were driven by hormones and convenience, and during the Plague, dating and love were pushed aside for survival.
And earlier that evening, she could still see it in slow motion in her mind, Paul pushing, carrying Karen through the tea room doors to their own survival.
She pulled up Paul’s current location, walking down a deserted Foxer street. Puzzled as to why he’d be lost so deep in the rough neighborhood, opposite of the bridge back to this side of the city, she sighed. With her eyes tired from constantly scanning monitors, she blinked hard, stood up to stretch and walked across the hall to check on Alan and Ed.
Ed lay haphazardly sat in the office chair, his neck pink, and his head rolled at an unnatural angle. His chest did not rise and fall. Sophie gasped and ran back across the hall. She clicked at the keyboard to bring up the cameras in the ZMT bay. Alan led a group that contained Karen, Jane, and two other men she didn’t recognize. His head was bowed and his hands were clasped behind his back.
A sharp sense of urgency shot through her chest, and she went to work at the keyboard, summoning what courage she had to maybe keep Alan from killing.
Chapter 19
Amid the sounds of footsteps, the high-pitched ringing between his ears vibrated Paul’s aching body. His forehead throbbed, still warm and swollen from taking a motorcycle helmet to his temple. He tensed his lower back and shoulder muscles and groaned, imagining all the welts and bruises he’d wake up with tomorrow.
&
nbsp; If he made it to tomorrow.
“You awake, Paul?” a familiar female voice said.
Paul twisted his legs inward, opened his eyes, realizing he sat on a linoleum floor and had been propped up against stacked cases of limes. Rows of bright white LED lights bounced off stainless steel commercial kitchen appliances. The black-haired bartender named Molly stood over him. Her face looked older, maybe mid-fifties but aged well with wisps of wrinkles pinching the sides of her brown eyes. Her black tee shirt and jeans hugged her frame. He caught the outlines of a barb wire tattoo on the inside of her left wrists and a ring he’d seen before.
“Water,” his vocal chords rasped. “Yes, I’m awake now, but can I have water?” Paul said, stretching his arms. He looked at Molly. “Please?”
She removed a bottle of water from the refrigerator Bobby had attempted to knock over. “I’m really thankful you three didn’t knock over my cold case. They’re not easy to replace these days.”
Paul accepted the water. “Thank you.” Molly leaned against a counter and nodded in acceptance. “Bobby’s not always thinking things through,” he said, and took a long swig of water that he let swish over his tongue and in the crook of his jaw.
“That’s the truth,” she said, with an accent Paul couldn’t place. Southern but not antebellum genteel. “He’s not so much as reacting as always looking out for himself. That may be opportunity. That may be trouble. But it’s always looking out for himself. And sometimes things, or people, get caught up in what he’s looking at.”
Paul took a deeper swig, wishing it was a malty beer, and rolled his eyes.
“I take it you know what I mean,” Molly said, crossing her arms.
“I always knew he was a bit of an opportunist—”
“You can say selfish. You can call him an asshole. No need to prance around a pile a shit on my account.”
Paul let out a brief laugh. “Fine. He has selfish tendencies. But today’s the first time I’ve been caught up in them.”
“Like this thing with Clyde, or as you may know him, Nasher? You got caught up in something big.”
“How big?”
“Bigger than this city big. Bobby’s just a dumb tool for Clyde to get a smarter tool, like Julian. Julian’s got brains to help Clyde get rid of Alan. This whole job is a long, long con to take over the city.”
“Take over the city...” Paul repeated, glancing away to search the floor.
“You seemed shocked. Yes, Greenport proper.”
“And how do you know all this?”
“Clyde, he’s my brother.”
Paul placed the water down and massaged his temples. Anything to get the ringing and throbbing to stop so he could process all the events of the day, let alone the last few hours, in some sense of silence. By sheer chance he now was an accessory to a plot to overthrow the city government. But Molly said they wanted to take over the city by removing Alan, not Caroline, the mayor.
And here he was sitting in the back kitchen of a Foxer bar with the sister of Greenport’s notorious crime boss.
“Why are you telling me this?”
She smirked. “I watched you take a beating from that biker, and then unload five shots to his chin. Wanted to offer a little hospitality, and to figure out how tough you really are.”
“Tough,” Paul said, hushed. “Tough as anyone else who’s in Greenport, to survive to get here.”
“People survive in different ways. Most only fight when they need to, running, hiding, conserving, trying not to be noticed. Others will come right out, swinging their bats and hope for the best. But everyone had to lie to themselves to get here, to believe they’ll make it another day.”
“Then we’re all tough in different ways.”
“Maybe. Your side of the city, Alan’s little utopian experiment? Hardly.”
“They’re alive.”
Molly laughed and shook her head. “Yes, but if you threw them out beyond the walls without a ZMT crew, how quickly would they get back their survival mode?”
Paul traced the squares of the black and white linoleum with his eyes. He learned slowly during the outbreak how to live. With his father guarding he and his sister, Morgan, they avoided the worst of the chaos. Moving and scavenging during the day, hiding in abandoned suburban garages. They’d pull into a sprawl of houses at dusk and park in a driveway. His father would enter the house with a handgun, rarely needing to kill any zombies trapped within the house. Then, they would work as a team, opening the garage to the house and drive their vehicle in. If a car still sat inside, first, Paul and his father would siphon the vehicle’s gas for themselves, filling their spare fuel cans. Then, Morgan and Paul would take turns sitting in the driver’s seat to guide the car out of the garage while it rolled out in neutral.
He smiled.
“You’re smiling. Why’s that? Survival give you fuzzies?”
“No, no. I just remembered my sister. You said how quickly we’d relearn to survive out there. It made me think while we were out there surviving, how—” He hesitated. “How much she wanted to learn to drive. We’d hide out in these neighborhoods, and sometimes we’d drive these vehicles out of the garages. Some were your usual family cars, minivans, sedans, the occasional SUV. This one time, we came across a Ferrari. Banana yellow—Morgan’s favorite color. She begged and begged to be the one to drive it out. Naturally, we fought about it. My father, he made a decision: ‘Paul, your sister’s birthday is in two months. Consider this her cake and present, too.’”
Molly laughed.
“So we found the keys, and she drove it out. The owners left a little gas in the tank, enough to drive down the street and back. Anyways, we crank it up, she’s in the seat, and my dad shows her how to rev the engine. We took a chance with the noise. Morgan laughed, squealed as it roared to life. The thing was a stick, and teaching her how to change gears would take too long, so we put it in gear and let her go down the block. She tried to go faster but the engine died at the end of the street.”
“You and your dad are good people, and it sounded like she loved it.”
“All night long she joked about how she got to drive a Ferrari as a piece of cake.”
“Is she here in Greenport, now?”
“No.”
“No?”
“She’s dead. Or I think she is.”
“You think she is?”
“She ran away after I shot our father.”
Paul paused but didn’t look to see her reaction. “I’m pretty sure she saw me do it, even though Dad and I walked quite a ways away to do it.”
Molly stepped away from the wall and reached for a red steel foot stool and sat down, folding her arms across her knees. “He asked you to do it, didn’t he?”
Paul hung his head and looked up to the ceiling, eyes watering. “One night, early one, one of the first nights, Morgan went to sleep, he took me aside. He said, ‘Son, if I get bit, don’t let me become one of them,’ as if he’d become evil personified.”
“Would you have wanted to let him become one of those things, ambling for unadulterated killing?”
“What? No, of course not. But the concept of mercy killing my own father...” Paul wiped his eyes. “It was stupid how it happened, how he got attacked. We found an unfinished neighborhood, with houses that looked like they were just made of really large matchsticks. Some had siding, others just a tarp blowing in the wind. There were only a half dozen finished, and they all looked the same, except for their paint job and window placements.”
Molly nodded.
“Construction equipment littered the place. Hammers, nails, power tools, generators, you name it. We cruise around, not seeing any zombies milling about, and my dad thinks we should try to check out one of the generators, and see about taking it. We stop in front of this one house, black and blue tarps flapping in the breeze and there’s a generator sitting right out front where a living room window would be. And he trips over a buried two-by-four, tumbles over and reaches for a tarp
. The tarp falls and a pair of zombies are just standing there. They go for him immediately. Morgan’s shrieking and I’m looking around for anything to bash them away, picking up the fucking two-by-four he tripped over, and I killed them, swinging it like a baseball bat.”
“Jesus. How horrible. But your father survived? He was bitten?”
“Right on the shoulder by his neck. We didn’t know how long he had. We’d never seen anyone turn, you know. My father got up, got the rifle, calmed Morgan down by giving her a task of gathering wood for a fire.”
“So your sister didn’t know he was bitten?”
“No, I don’t think so. The attack happened quickly. He then orders me to come with him to clear the rest of the area of any random zombies nearby. We walked to a park area with bushes and trees just over a hill near by the more finished part of the neighborhood. All this time, I’m in shock. Completely numb at what I’m about to do. What he had told me I had to do if he was ever bit. Would I be able to do it? Would I be able to pull the trigger on my own father?”
Paul sighed. “He hands me the gun, and says ‘I love you and your sister. Take care of her.’ Those were his last words. I didn’t hug him or say anything in return. I just gripped the rifle as he sits in front of a maple tree and nods, to give me the okay to his own execution.”
“But if you hadn’t—”
“If I hadn’t, I don’t know. Maybe Morgan would still be alive? I walked back in a daze. Everything was silent. I forgot I was even carrying the rifle. I don’t remember how I got back to our wagon. And Morgan was gone. I never even had the chance to do what my father asked. To. Take. Care. Of. Her.”
Molly inched the foot stool closer to Paul, and rested her hand on his knee. “I bet you searched high and low for Morgan.”
“Anywhere and everywhere. Empty fields, stores, houses, crowds of survivors. Every time I encountered other people I held up her eighth grade picture to them, asking if she was or had been with them or had seen her.”
Survivor Response Page 18
