The Survivors (Book 2): Autumn

by Dreyer, V. L.

  Michael nodded his agreement. With another terrible clang, he drove the head of the crowbar into the gap between the hasp and the wall, and I added my strength to his.

  “Brace yourself,” he warned, though it was pretty much unnecessary. Both of us knew all about the terrible infections we could catch if we were to fall and cut ourselves in a filthy place like this.

  “So much for taking it easy, huh?” I commented. Michael chuckled and nodded his agreement. He planted his feet wide and leaned his weight against the crowbar; once again I pulled with him. The door groaned in protest, but I could feel it moving. We released after a moment, and he shifted the bar to a slightly different point.

  “And again,” he instructed. I joined him, pulling with all my strength. The door was definitely moving now; I could see it arching and I heard the whine of old metal protesting that it had been left untended for far too long. Then, with a violent cracking sound, the left side of the door came free, with what was left of the hasp still clinging to a shattered segment of the door frame.

  Suction kept the door from falling in on us, though. Michael braced himself against it to keep it in place while I took the bar and loosened it around the edges. It creaked and whinged as I chipped away at a decade’s worth of rust until, with one last shriek, the entire door came away from the frame.

  I lent my strength to help him shift the heavy door to one side, leaving both of us breathless but feeling victorious.

  “How’s that for teamwork?” he gloated. He grabbed me and gave me a quick kiss, then we turned our attention towards finally discovering what our prize actually was.

  I was the first one through the doorway, so when I skidded to a halt without warning, Michael just about bowled me over. Then he saw what I saw and we both froze with shock.

  When we finally regained our senses, Michael reached up to scratch his scruffy chin. “You know, all of a sudden I feel this overwhelming urge to arrest someone.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Hell, yes!” I laughed with glee, and broke out my best impression of the Snoopy Dance.

  “This shouldn’t be here,” Michael mumbled to himself, his expression one of intense concern. “This really, really shouldn’t be here.”

  “It shouldn’t, but it is,” I pointed out happily, bouncing around him like an over-excited toddler on a sugar rush. “And whoever used to own it must be dead, so now it’s ours!” There was still a locked grill between me and our findings, but I didn’t mind. We had all the time in the world to figure out how to get into that cage, and I was pretty sure I knew exactly where I could find just the right tools for the job.

  “You’re entirely too happy about this.” Michael shot a stern glance at me, then he grabbed my hand and drew me into a protective embrace. “You do realise how dangerous this is, right?”

  “Take a second to consider who you’re talking to, then ask that question again,” I answered dryly, and gave him a long look in return. A faint flash of annoyance rose in my breast at his tone of voice, but I shoved it back down. He was just trying to protect me, and everyone that we held dear. “Of course, I know. I know better than anyone – but I also know exactly how useful this will be for keeping our family safe.”

  Michael looked at the cage and heaved a long sigh. “I suppose you’re right, but I worry. There’s military-grade hardware in there, Sandy. Just imagine what could have happened if those thugs that attacked us had been armed with one of those instead of a couple of air rifles. We’d probably all be dead.”

  He had a point, and that calmed me down. I stared at the cage, where a half-dozen semi-automatic assault rifles of various makes glinted ominously in the half-light, flanked by an assortment of handguns. As much as I had longed for a real gun to defend myself with, he was right – any weapon could be used against its owner.

  “We should still take them,” I said, then looked back at him. “We can’t leave them here now. Let’s hide them instead, somewhere that only we can get at them. If those mutants come south, they could save our lives one day.”

  Michael nodded thoughtfully, his dark eyes distant as he mulled over the idea. Finally, he nodded again, more firmly this time. “Okay. That makes sense. Like you said, we can’t just leave them here – anyone could grab them.”

  “Go fetch the others to help us carry things back,” I instructed, reaching over to give his hand a gentle squeeze. “Bring boxes or crates, anything that we can hide stuff in so no one knows what we’ve found except our group.”

  “What are you going to do?” He raised a brow and looked at me.

  I gave him an impish smile, and flexed my fingers dramatically. “I’m going to get that cage open.”

  ***

  I’m nothing if not efficient. By the time Michael returned with the doctor and Skylar in tow, I’d just about finished with my task. The cage was held closed by a small padlock, so I had simply taken a pair of bolt cutters to it. Problem solved. The lock hit the ground with a heavy clang just moments before my family arrived to join me.

  “My goodness!” the doctor exclaimed, adjusting his scratched spectacles to get a better look at our find. “I thought you were kidding, but I see you were very serious.”

  “Wow.” Skylar stared at the guns with enormous eyes. “That’s a lot of guns.”

  “No kidding,” I agreed, shooting her an amused look. “Do me a favour and check out the rest of this place while we’re getting this ready to shift?”

  “Sure,” Skye agreed readily. She turned and vanished through a doorway nearby, while Michael and I began carefully lifting down each weapon and inspecting it. I wasn’t exactly an expert on guns, but I’d learned through trial and error how to disassemble and clean a handgun, and I definitely knew how to shoot one.

  Michael seemed to know what he was doing better than any of us. He took each gun I handed to him and lifted it to his eye, carefully sighting down along the barrel. One by one, he inspected them, then either nodded or shook his head when he handed it back to me. Those he judged salvageable, I carefully packed into a crate they’d brought for that purpose. Those that were not, I set aside to be stripped down for parts. Everything would be useful, one way or another.

  When we were done with the rifles, we moved on to the handguns, then to the boxes of ammunition stacked in neat columns beneath the weapon display. That was the most dangerous part, but we were lucky. Everything had been safely stored all those years ago, so nothing exploded in our hands.

  “Sandy, come and look at this,” Skye called through the doorway. I exchanged a glance with the others, then handed the box of ammunition I was inspecting to Michael and went off to see what my sister had found.

  The doorway opened up into a tiny, single-room flat, with a decrepit old bed against one wall, and a kitchenette against the other. The entire living quarters was probably no larger than the stockroom where the guns were kept. My sister was bent over staring at something on a dusty old desk at the foot of the bed, but she looked up as I approached.

  “This is a radio, right? One of those old-school things they used before cell phones?” She reached out to brush some dust from it, a look of intense curiosity on her face.

  “I think so.” I shrugged helplessly. “I couldn’t tell you for sure, though – you know how I was about communication before I met up with you guys.”

  Skye heaved a long-suffering sigh, then called over her shoulder towards the door. “Doc? Michael? Do either of you know anything about radios?”

  “Indeed, I do.” The doctor responded to her cry for help, and came trundling over to peer at the object of our interest, absently adjusting his spectacles. “Well, now. If I am not mistaken, that’s a shortwave ham radio kit.”

  “Ham radio,” I echoed, rubbing my bruised wrist absently. “I remember that term. That was amateur radio, the two-way kind – right?”

  “Indeed,” the doctor agreed, then suddenly lashed out and smacked the back of my hand lightly. “Stop scratching!”

 
; I yelped and danced out of his reach, while my lovely little sister laughed at my misfortune. The sound of my cry attracted Michael’s attention, and he stuck his head into the room as well.

  “What’s going on in here?” he demanded.

  “The doctor’s beating me,” I whined, retreating to the relative protection of his embrace – or at least, I tried to, but he knew me better than that.

  “Well, stop scratching then,” he teased me mercilessly, and left me pouting to go examine our find. “A radio? That’ll be useful. Look, it’s even hand-cranked – no batteries required. Good find. Skye, can you gather up all the pieces and take it back with us? Look around and see if you can find any spare components, too.”

  “Okay,” Skylar answered agreeably and set about doing just that, while the men filtered back out to the guns. As soon as their backs were turned, she promptly stuck her tongue out at me and whispered, “Who’s finding the cool stuff now?”

  If I were a puppy, I’d have had my sad face on for a second there – sometimes sisters were not the coolest thing in the world. Then Michael called my name, and I forgot all about pretending to be the injured party as I hurried back out to join him.

  ***

  It took us a while and a good amount of muscle power to get all of our new toys back to base. When the guns were in their crate it proved to be too heavy for one person to lift, so we each took a side and man-handled it back the way we’d come. A few more trips later, we finally had everything safely hidden in one of the downstairs storage rooms, beneath a mound of old clothing and behind a couple of huge sacks of rice.

  There was some argument about what we should do with the guns now that we had them. Skylar argued that if we had them then we should use them, while the doctor joined the rest of us on the cautious side of the fence.

  In the end, it was decided that we would train everyone to use them but only in the case of an actual emergency. Skye wasn’t happy, of course, but she grudgingly accepted our more experienced judgement. She was too young to understand the concept that violence begets violence, but she did understand that we would make ourselves targets if we waved around something so valuable.

  The radio was a whole other story. Radios had not been that common before the plague hit; by that stage, they were already outdated and had been replaced by the internet and mobile phones. Now, ten years later, our wonderful modern technology had more or less failed us, which turned a radio into something precious.

  Skylar had found an instruction manual squirrelled away in the closet of the person who had once owned the ham radio. She was intensely fascinated by the idea of communicating with people outside of our own group, and roped all of us into helping with her project. We took turns assisting her with setting the radio up and learning to work it, which also gave us an opportunity to help her improve her reading as well.

  We spent the next week or so keeping to ourselves. Michael and I divided our time between learning to use our new weapons, resting our injuries, and exploring the bounds of our new romance. Needless to say, we spent a lot of time in bed. And in the shower. And in any other interesting place we could get away with. Call it an experimental phase.

  I’d missed out on that phase in my early twenties. Now that I was almost thirty, I felt like I deserved it – we both did.

  Skye spent most of her time hunched over her radio, scanning the frequencies for any signs of life. Despite her reading difficulties, she picked up the basics of ham radio swiftly. After the first few hurdles, she only came to us for help on a rare occasion. However, she discovered that there just wasn’t much to be heard on the airwaves anymore. I encouraged her to keep trying. After all, anyone on the other end was just another human being. They had to eat, sleep and forage for survival just like the rest of us, so they were unlikely to be sitting there all day waiting for her to contact them.

  It was getting late in the season. Summer was almost over, and autumn well and truly on its way. The wind blew cold on occasion, but the sunshine was still warm. Over the course of the week, the weather cleared up. On one sunny morning, Michael and I lay contentedly on the roof, basking in the sun while we could. We’d finished assembling the railing around the edge, and had even added a small shelter at one end, in case we decided to position a guard up there one day. All in all, it was a ratty piece of work but it was functional.

  I heaved a long sigh and folded my hands beneath my head, letting the warm tiles soothe me. The sky was a beautiful shade of azure adorned with delicate, fluffy clouds, and the sun shone down with just the right degree of heat – enough to warm, but not to burn. The breeze was crisp but not chilly, cooling us when the sun got a bit much, but not enough to make us shiver. Our bellies were full, our home was secure, and our family was safe. All in all, it was a perfect day as far as I was concerned.

  Beside me, Michael made a contented sound and stretched out languidly, then turned his head and looked at me. “We should probably be doing something constructive.”

  “Nah.” I flapped a hand to brush away the idea. “We’ve done plenty of constructive things. We deserve a rest.”

  “I like the way you think,” he agreed amiably. Apparently, he was in too good a mood to fight over something as inconsequential as being useful. It was a beautiful day, too beautiful to waste on work. Winter would be here all too soon, and then we’d be trapped inside, dreaming about days like today.

  So we loitered for a while, sunbathing, as useless as a pair of statues. I wasn’t sure how much time passed, and I really didn’t care. One of the few benefits of watching civilization fail was that we stopped having to count the time.

  The days flowed in an endless stream, with no calendars to tell us what date it was. I didn’t know what day of the week it was, or even what month. I guessed from the weather that it was around the middle of March, but more than that was a mystery. We had a vague idea of the year from counting the summers that had passed since we last saw our loved ones, but it really didn’t matter anymore.

  The days of counting the minutes between work or school and home were no more. Gone was the daily grind. The watchful eye of society, that had once told me where to be and when, had gone to sleep forever. None of it mattered now. These were our days, and only we dictated how we spent our time.

  Once the necessities of survival were taken care of, nobody could complain if we spent our days wisely or not. No one cared if we spent hours lost in books, exploring or even indulging in casual love-making, because there was no society left to judge us.

  There was a strange kind of freedom that came with losing everyone and everything that used to matter. Without the shackles of social and moral guidance, each person had only his or her will to guide her actions. I used to hate having no goal or purpose; now that I had others to enjoy it with, the freedom had actually begun to be enjoyable.

  I’d always been the type of person that went out of my way to keep myself busy. If I had nothing to do, then I usually ended up getting bored and inventing tasks for myself. I’d done it so often over the years that it had become second nature. Skylar once commented that I was the most proactive person she’d ever seen, but the truth was that I had just gotten really good at keeping myself busy, to avoid having to confront the reality of my world. When you spend a decade alone, you get very good at that. Now, my new family was teaching me the joys of laziness, and I found the process to be quite pleasurable.

  The sun was still only halfway to its midday apex when the sound of a distant engine stirred me from my doze. For a moment, I thought the sound was in my head, but when I opened my eyes to check I spotted a small figure bouncing along the trail from the west on the back of a farm bike.

  I nudged Michael. He grunted in displeasure at being woken, but his annoyed expression faded into curiosity when he heard the engine as well.

  “Trouble?” he wondered out loud, and glanced at me.

  “Nah.” I shook my head and stretched, feeling no great sense of urgency. “Looks like Hemi. He
’s probably just coming to chat up Skye.”

  Michael chuckled and flopped back down on the warm tiles, draping an arm over his eyes. “Ah, puppy love.”

  “If that’s puppy love, what do we have, then?” I laughed, stretching up a little taller to wave at the kid on the motorcycle.

  “Well, clearly we have an extremely mature relationship based on mutual friendship and respect,” he answered dryly. His joke made me laugh even louder; the only time ‘maturity’ belonged in the same sentence as our names was with a thick slathering of sarcasm on top.

  Our playful jousting was cut short when Hemi cruised into range, his little motorcycle bouncing under the weight of a heavy basket on the back. The bike swerved as it came to a halt, but Hemi knew what he was doing; he’d been riding that thing since childhood. The young man shielded his eyes against the sun and peered up at us curiously.

  “Haere mai,” I called down, and waved to him. Although I didn’t speak as much Maori as Michael did, I knew a few phrases, and considered it respectful to use them where I could. Our neighbours seemed to appreciate the effort, even if they spoke English as fluently as I did.

  Hemi grinned and waved back at me. “Kia ora, mate! What are you doing up there, eh?”

  “Sunbathing,” I called back. “What are you doing down there?”

  “Mum sent me to check on you guys.” He grinned even wider and jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Plus, we were hoping to do some trading. You game?”

  “Sure. I’ll be right down,” I agreed. I leaned over to nudge Michael and see if he was awake. He grunted and flapped a hand at me, so I let him be. I was happy enough to talk to Hemi on my own. In my mind, the kid had already moved from the ‘stranger danger’ category into the ‘can be trusted… more or less’ category. That was a big leap for someone was naturally paranoid as I am. There was also the fact that I was three inches taller than him, which probably helped my confidence.

  I crawled across the roof and swung myself onto the ladder, then scampered down to the ground with light-footed ease. I had always been fit and agile, but over the last few weeks I’d spent more time running up and down ladders than the rest of my life combined.