His head jerked up and he let out a cry of surprise. Sarah tried to open the door and escape the truck, but he grabbed a fistful of her long blond hair and yanked her toward him. She screamed again and he shoved open the passenger-side door and dragged her out of the truck. He was unarmed, but he wrapped a hand around her throat, and his fingers felt like thin bars of steel against it.
He pulled her down the street away from the pizza joint, trying to find somewhere to hide with his hostage.
A gunshot rang out in the night behind them. This one came from outside of the building.
The bandit spun around, holding Sarah in front of him.
Noah stood outside the hole in the wall and advanced along the street toward the two of them, his M16 raised and pointed at the bandit's head.
The bandit stumbled backward, keeping a tight vice grip against her throat.
"Stay back!" he yelled. "I'll snap her fucking neck!" His hand squeezed tighter as his other one wrapped under her arm in a half-nelson and grabbed a big handful of her hair on the back of her head, holding her in place.
Noah continued to advance down the street, completely cool. Wayne stepped out of the hole in the wall behind him and stood watching. Some of the men from Noah's Ark came out too and looked at Wayne for instructions, but he just waved them off and watched.
"Sarah," Noah said, "don't worry, you're fine."
The bandit opened his mouth to say something else, but Noah already pulled the trigger, sending a bullet flying a couple inches next to Sarah's head and sinking into the bandit's forehead just above the eyebrows.
He fell to the ground, his lifeless arms dragging Sarah with him. He cushioned her fall and she rolled out of his grasp and scrambled away.
Noah ran up to her and wrapped his arms around her, holding her tight. She began sobbing and buried her head into his shoulder. He just stroked the back of her head and told her everything would be okay. When she calmed down, Noah briefly convened with Wayne and Kenny and made sure everyone was accounted for.
They took the plans they found and carried their dead with them as they all traced their way back along the woods to Noah's Ark.
The half moon watched overhead as the only witness to the carnage in the night that all the residents of Noah's Ark had missed in their deep and peaceful slumbers.
2
A Rising Tide
"So as we remember the lives of Tom Ettinger and Rick Sampson, we remember all that they were as men, as friends, and as the compatriots they were to us and our cause. While today's a sad day, don't let their sacrifice muddy our vision. They gave their lives for our freedom and to protect the way of life that we're carving out in this new, cruel world. As this ceremony draws to a close, I ask each of you to take a moment and reflect upon what these two men meant to you and to all of us. I know that's all they would ever ask of you. And we ask of God to see these men through safely to the kingdom awaiting them on the other side, so that they may be rewarded for their service and can assist us in our mission from Heaven up above. Amen."
"Amen," the residents of Noah's Ark said in reply. Nearly the entire population of the camp was out next to the cemetery behind the main building, sitting on the hodgepodge collection of chairs that were available or standing.
Noah stepped down off the platform and moved next to Wayne who stood solemnly to the side for the service. The resident doctor of Noah's Ark had advised Wayne to get some rest and let his broken ribs heal, but he refused to miss the service of two men who fought alongside him.
Two graves had been dug at the edge of the cemetery with two caskets propped up on planks of wood stretching over each hole. Four men stood at each grave, two on either side, each with the end of a strap in his hands. They lifted the caskets a few inches into the air as two people removed the planks underneath and they slowly lowered the caskets into the holes. When they came to rest on the dirt below, the ceremony was over, and everyone got up and milled around to talk to each other.
Sarah leaned against the building behind everyone and watched the service. When some people started to clear out, she made her way up to the front toward Noah. She wanted to talk to him about what happened the night before. She didn't really know what there was for him to say, but she felt uneasy about it all morning and just wanted some kind of comfort. Even though she didn't see most of it sitting in the cab of the truck, the events of the previous night stuck with her. She thought that confronting her fears about the bandits would put her mind at ease, but it just seemed to make things worse.
Wayne said goodbye to Noah as she approached and he nodded at her as he passed and disappeared into the building. Just as she was about to say hi to Noah, another resident came up and began speaking with him. She waited patiently, but a line began to form next to him, waiting to tell him how much they appreciated his speech.
Eventually Sarah just turned around and went back to the building. She would talk to him another time. She felt weird all morning, like a restless phantom floating around without any purpose.
She entered the building through the back door next to the cemetery and made her way up to the second floor. She passed by the lavatories and then the dormitories and finally came to the lounge. Some people had already gone back inside and went about their day, and the lounge was half-full with people sitting and reading, talking, and some sipping their morning coffee or tea.
She spotted Jenny and Mark sitting by the windows looking out at the wall separating Noah's Ark from the rest of Durham. They chatted over their coffee and Sarah sauntered next to them and pulled up a chair.
"Good morning," Jenny said with a smile.
"Morning," Sarah said. "Did you catch the service? I didn't see you there."
"No," Jenny said. "We were going to go, but Jake was restless and Sam got a tummy ache, so we didn't want to make her go. They can be a handful sometimes." She looked over at her and Mark's kids who were playing in the toy area in the corner of the lounge.
A big foam mat comprised of interlocking jigsaw pieces took up the corner of the room. Wooden shelves built into the walls displayed a host of toys and games to keep the kids preoccupied. Jake was playing with a couple of old Hot Wheels cars on a bent stretch of orange track and Sam was dressing up her dolls in the dollhouse she always liked. They were both enthralled in their toys and neither one of them paid any attention to Sarah. She had become good friends with Jenny and Mark and their kids since she came here, being one of the first families to welcome her so warmly.
"Couldn't you just dump the kids on Mark?" Sarah joked.
They both laughed. "Are you kidding?" Mark asked. "Doing all the work is Jenny's job."
Jenny gave him an indignant smirk and jabbed him in the ribs.
"So how was it today?" Mark asked Sarah.
"It was sad," she said. "I didn't even know them very well and it wasn't easy on me. I guess all of this just gets to everyone after a while. Don't you ever feel like that?"
"Sure," Mark said. "I heard you went along with them last night. I can't imagine that made things any easier."
"I was just waiting outside and watching," she said. I didn't get close to any of it to see what was actually happening; I just heard gunshots until it was over." No one on the operation the night before shared the part where she got grabbed by a bandit, and she hadn't been in any hurry to tell anyone that detail either.
She watched Sam and Jake play. "How do they hold up with all this?"
Jenny looked at her kids and measured the blissful innocence in both of them. "Better than you might think. At least that's the impression they give. We try not to tell them too much, but they also know what's going on for the most part. I think they just don't have to think about it so much because they're still kids, but as they get older they'll have to learn. That's the part that I'm afraid of."
Mark ran a hand through his short black hair. "Yeah, they're still too young to really understand the full impact of everything that's going on. I know what you mean though
, Sarah; sometimes it feels like were losing people faster than we can get them. And sometimes I don't really see an end to this. I don't mean to knock Noah or what everyone's doing here, but I guess sometimes I just can't see how we can return things back to the way they were. If it was just the zombies, maybe, but when you've got all these bad people out there, there's just no end in sight. Not that I can see, anyway."
"And we just don't know how to teach the kids that," Jenny said. "I mean, Sam and Jake were both born before all this happened, but they were too young to remember any of it. We've been here for five years now, and we just kind of hope that they don't remember the hard times we had getting here before that, but I don't know what they remember. They don't really talk about it, even if we try to get it out of them. I just don't know what kind of life we can leave them. I'm afraid that we're just going to be stuck in here living out our lives until we die."
The words stung Sarah. She remembered David saying them to her about staying in the townhouses. Things would often remind her of her son and the bad times they endured, and it gave her such a tremendous sense of anxiety over her loss that she still couldn't cope with.
"Yeah," Sarah said. "I, uh... I have to get going. Sorry to run on you like this." She got up and walked quickly out of the lounge back toward the dormitories as Jenny and Mark watched her go with concerned looks on their faces.
Tears flooded her eyes as she walked down the hallway, everything in it becoming a blurry mess to her. She still couldn't get over David's death, or learn to live with it, or whatever it was that a parent was supposed to do when they lost a child. Not even close.
She disappeared through a doorway to her right into one of the ladies' dormitories. It was a long room with two rows of beds stretching down the entire length on either side. Each bed had a curtain that could be drawn around it for privacy, just like in a hospital. It certainly didn't offer the niceties of a hotel, but it was the best that could be done for Noah's Ark's slowly expanding population. The single women had dormitories to themselves, as did the men, and there were also family dormitories for husbands and wives to share beds with their kids.
The room was mostly empty with only a few women sitting on their beds and sleeping or reading, some out in the open and others behind drawn curtains.
Sarah sat down on her bed near the middle of the room and pulled her curtain shut. She sat up against the headboard and hiked her feet up to her butt. She pressed her palms to her eyes as tears flowed out. She quietly sobbed, trying not to make too much noise. She felt the beads of the necklace that David made for her rubbing against the flesh of her neck as her body gently shook.
The necklace made its presence known all the time now, and it always felt like the beads were digging into her skin, trying to worm their way into her. Sometimes they felt red-hot, like they had been in a fire and were branding her. Today it felt like the nylon cord was constricting and strangling her, trying to squeeze the life out of her. She'd always refused to take it off, feeling like that would be betraying her son's memory or his sacrifice, but she couldn't take it anymore.
She reached around the back of her neck, unclasped the hook and pulled the necklace off. Such a tremendous weight was lifted off of her and she felt like she could breathe for the first time in months. Then the guilt set in and every feeling she ever had that told her she was a terrible mother, and always had been, came back to her.
"Are you okay in there?"
Sarah looked up at the curtain separating her from the bed next to her. She stifled a sob and started wiping her tears away with her sleeve. "Um, yeah, I'm okay."
"Do you want to talk?"
"Um..." She hesitated. What she really wanted to do was crawl under all her covers and keep digging into her bed, deeper and deeper, into a strange fantasy void where no one could find her. But instead, she leaned over and slid the curtain open.
The woman who had been Sarah's caretaker when she first arrived sat on her bed on the other side of the open curtain with her feet dangling off the edge. Her name was Delilah, and Sarah had gotten to know her a little better during her stay, but she mostly kept to herself and took care of odds and ends around the camp. She had a smile on her face, but there was concern in her eyes. "What's going on?" she asked.
Sarah shook her head. "Nothing. It's just that..."
She looked down at the necklace in her hand as a flurry of powerful emotions ran through her. She didn't know what to think of it; part of her wanted to put it back on and another part wanted to throw it in a fire and never think about it again. After David died, she wanted to wear it indefinitely as a testament to him, but all it ever felt like was a prison shackle.
"Thinking about your boy, huh?" Delilah asked.
Sarah nodded.
"It's going to be hard forever," Delilah said. "It gets a little easier over time, but it never goes away. Just know that someday when we pass on from this crazy world, we'll get to see our families again."
"I know," Sarah said. "But I just can't cope with it at all. It still feels like he died yesterday, and I don't know what to do with myself. I thought that having a purpose here would help with things, maybe help take my mind off of it, but I don't even know what I'm doing anymore. Most of the time I just think it would be better for everyone if I just checked out now. Maybe I would get to see him again. Who knows..."
"You know what?" Delilah said. "A lot of people wouldn't tell you this, but I think the best thing you can do is forget about your son."
Sarah looked at her as if she had just been slapped.
"Just for a little while," Delilah explained. "When my family died, I went through the same thing as you. It never got any easier for me, but then one day I realized that I was thinking about them every minute of every day. And no matter how much I loved them—no matter how much I wanted to hang on to them—they were gone, and nothing I could do would bring them back. I knew that I had to let them go for a while. Not forever, but just long enough so I could focus on myself again, so I could get myself back on track and figure out what I was doing. You'd be surprised how easy it is to get through grief when you simply just stop thinking about it. And don't worry about what your son would think—he would understand. Maybe you oughta try it out for a while. Just put that necklace away and let it sit. You can pick it up and wear it later when you've sorted yourself out, but you need to work on yourself now. You have to let it go."
Sarah's eyes softened as Delilah talked. At first it was such a radical thought that she could never even conceive of, but it made sense. More than that, she felt a desperate yearning in her body screaming out that that was the answer.
She weighed the necklace in her hand, twirling the beads with her thumb.
"You think about it," Delilah said. She smiled and got up and walked out of the dormitory, leaving Sarah to herself and her thoughts.
She looked at the necklace and then at the bedside table next to her. She pulled open the drawer and put the necklace in and stared at it. She gazed at it as if it were sentient and she were waiting to hear an objection from it. When there was none, she slid the drawer shut and breathed a sigh of relief. She wiped the last remnants of her tears away from her face, and when she felt ready to face the rest of the world again, she got up and walked as far away from the drawer as she could. With each step, her heart felt lighter and lighter, the tension squeezing her body subsiding. Her first instinct was to let the guilt take hold of her again, but she refused. She forced other thoughts into her mind, no matter what they were. She didn't want to, but she would try to forget about David.
She came out into the hallway and walked along the tile toward the front of the building. She passed the lounge and saw that Jenny, Mark and their kids had gotten up and left, and she came to Noah's office, which was situated in the corner at the end of the hallway before it bent to the left and led to the infirmary and the door leading to the catwalk and stairs outside.
She leaned her head in. Noah was leaning against a table w
ith both of his hands stretched to the sides of the map that they had taken from the bandits' hideout. Wayne stood next to him, lifting his shirt and checking the bandages around his ribs.
"Do you think they would really be that stupid?" Wayne asked Noah.
Noah pored over the map again, then he opened his hands to the sides and let out a breath in a gesture of uncertainty. "I wouldn't put it past them," he said.
They both started laughing, and then Wayne's laughs sputtered into a cough and he winced as he placed a hand gingerly against his ribs.
Noah looked at him and made a motion like he was about to jab him in the ribs, to which he raised a clenched fist.
They laughed again and Sarah knocked on the door.
They turned to her and saw her standing there. The sun came through the wide window overlooking the front of the camp and fell on Noah's face. His wavy brown hair shined and the sun glinted off his blue eyes. She stared into them and forgot what she was going to say.
"What is it, Sarah?" he asked.
She knew she had wanted to talk to him about the night before, but she couldn't remember the words that she meant to say. She opened her mouth and it just hung there stupidly as she became embarrassed.
He smiled. "Is there something you—"
Gunshots rang out in the distance. Everyone's head snapped toward the window. The sounds were coming from somewhere to the north. They continued for several seconds, punctuated by intermittent screams.
"Let's go!" Wayne shouted, and he and Noah bolted out of the room. Sarah followed them as they made their way through the door at the end of the hallway and out onto the catwalk outside. They clomped down the metal steps and Noah headed for the front gates while Wayne paused in the middle of the lawn and cupped his hands around his mouth, tilting his head toward the sky. "Full squad!" he shouted. "Full squad!"
A Rising Tide (Zombie Apocalypse Series Book 2) Page 2
