She pressed on it and it pried away from the bottom-left corner by a foot or two. She wiggled her way out of it and stood up on the tall grass on the other side. She turned around and looked up at the wall which towered above her, then she turned and looked at the field and the woods next to her.
She was out. And while everyone had been incredibly welcoming and sheltering for her entire stay, she couldn't help but feel that she was free. Free from the coming bloodshed that would doom them all. It had been a mistake to come here. It cost her everything, and there was nothing she could do about it; there was no turning back time, and the only thing she could do was go forward.
As she stood there staring all around her with a new sense of freedom and possibility, she tried to decide which direction forward was.
4
Faith
The tall grass brushed around her legs as a gust of wind picked up and fluttered through the narrow space between the wall of the compound and the woods next to her. The wind was chilly and made her shiver. It reminded her that wherever she went, not only would she be by herself, but she would have to face the coming winter alone. And while winters in North Carolina didn't usually get too cold, it would make everything in her already hard life just a little harder.
She glanced up at the top of the wall to see if any guards could see her, but the coast was clear. She took a few strides into the woods and made her way over the uneven ground through the trees. Her shoes crunched over dead leaves and she brushed her fingers along each tree as she passed, staring out into the expanse of them. She walked through the woods for a few more paces then stopped. She was suddenly struck with the same nagging question again: where would she go? Even if she exited the woods on the other side, she would still be in Durham. She couldn't just wander in a random direction; she needed to decide on a location. Somewhere like the townhouses where she could grow her own food and be self-sufficient.
She turned around and left the woods where she entered and walked along the tall metal wall toward the south side of Noah's Ark. She kept close to the wall to stay out of sight from the guards on top, and she stopped at the back of the camp, surveying the empty field in front of her. She tried to visualize a map of the city in her head. Hopelessness started to set in as she realized she couldn't come up with anywhere to go. Even if she could safely get all the way back to Roanoke and live in the same townhouses that her and David did, why would she want to? He had been the only reason in her life that gave her the purpose to stay alive.
Another gust of cold wind blew through the narrow corridor and her teeth chattered. She didn't know what she was going to do, but she knew the answer wouldn't come to her standing there.
She went back to the loose piece of metal and pried it open, squeezing through the gap and crawling back into the shed. She replaced the panel and screwed it in, then she stepped back and dragged the tall shelf against the wall.
"What are you doing in here?"
She spun around and almost jumped on the spot at the unexpected voice behind her.
Noah stared at her with concern.
"Oh," she started, "I was just grabbing some gardening gloves for Barry... I'm helping him plant some things in the greenhouse."
Noah didn't say anything. He nodded his head to himself and looked down at his feet.
She stood nervously on the spot, looking around for gloves and finally spotting a pair draped over the rung of a ladder leaning against the wall.
"Oh, there they are," she said. She started to walk over to them as Noah spoke.
"Sarah..."
She stopped and looked at him.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
"What do you mean?"
"It's pretty obvious that something's wrong," he said. "I know you've been through a lot since you got here, but you haven't been yourself lately. I've been keeping an eye on you, and you've seemed upset all morning."
She sighed. "It's just... I'm not sure if I want to stay here," she said. She waited for him to react in shock, but he just held his steady gaze.
He stared at her for a while, then slowly started to nod. "Is this about what happened today?" he asked.
"Well, not entirely," she said.
"...what happened last night?"
"I don't know," she said. "I've been wanting to talk to you about those things, and about a lot of things, I guess. I don't really know where to start. I'm afraid of what happened today, and I was terrified about what happened last night."
He walked up to her and took her hands in his. "I've been wanting to talk to you too," he said. "I am so sorry for what happened last night. It was a mistake to leave you all alone like that... I should've never done that."
"But you can't protect me forever," she said. "At the end of the day, I'm responsible for myself. I'm responsible for what path I want to take. And I've been thinking more and more that this path you're on isn't the same one I want."
"Come on," he said, starting to lead her outside of the shed, "why don't we talk about this in my office where it's a little warmer? I can already see you aren't doing well in this cold."
"Is it that obvious?"
"Well, your teeth are chattering, for one."
She laughed and placed her fingers on her teeth to feel them.
They left the shed and made their way up the stairs leading to the hallway on the second floor. They went through the door and took a left into his office. Everyone in Noah's Ark had gotten back to their day, but there was still an air of tension with what happened to Kenny and the gossip about it that spread like wildfire.
Noah shut the office door behind them and offered Sarah a seat.
"Here, I want you to look at this," he said, pointing to the map laid out on the table that they'd taken from the bandits.
She wheeled over to his desk in her chair and inspected it.
He pointed to a series of circles marked around different locations on the map. "You see these?"
"Yeah."
"These are all of the locations where the bandits are in the city. We sent out some scouts this morning to confirm, and they're all current locations in use."
She stared at it for a moment, then slowly looked over at him. "So... what are you planning on doing?"
"Sarah, we can prepare a simultaneous strike on all these locations and wipe the bandits out entirely in this city!"
"But what about Rick and Tom?" she asked. "How many men are you going to lose if you do that?"
"If I had my way, we wouldn't lose anyone, but that's not realistic. Regardless, we just have to focus on planning this well and the execution will follow through on its own. If we do this, the bandits won't have a single foothold in this city anymore. When that happens, there will be no point for them to keep their perimeter and close it in. Any remaining bandits will scatter."
"But what about Zed and Delroy?" she asked. "How are you going to take out the bandits if you have to fight them off, too?"
"We can definitely take out the bandits... but we may have to hold off on that for now until we deal with this other situation," he admitted.
"But can we even survive against them?" she asked. "I've seen the way Kenny operates out in the field and for Zed to be able to ambush him like that..."
Noah's face fell a little in resignation. Since she came to Noah's Ark, he'd always been an unshakable leader, but now, even if only for a moment, his mask slipped. For the first time, he seemed unsure.
"I'm not going to pretend they're not formidable," he said. "And I can't guarantee that we're going to come out of this one—I wish I could say that, but I can't. I don't want to lie to you or anyone, and I have to be realistic about this. I still haven't addressed what happened this morning to everyone here." He leaned back in his chair and it gave a loud squeak. "To be honest, I'm not really sure how to break the news. If everyone loses faith in what we're doing, in our chances of succeeding, then we've already lost."
"Is there any hope at all?" she asked.
"Ther
e is," he said. "Wayne, Kenny and I started formulating a plan this morning. It's still in the early stages, but I think we can do it."
"So who are Zed and Delroy exactly?" she asked. "Barry said you used to know them."
"I did," he admitted. He spun in his chair and gazed out the window. "I actually went to college with both of them, as a matter of fact. We all went to Duke University right here in the city. The three of us majored in political science, and we roomed together in our first year. We were pretty close back then, but our schedules began to differ over the years and we didn't see too much of each other anymore. After college, I'd forgotten all about them for years and years until the zombie virus spread and we ran into each other by chance. The three of us were still alive and still in Durham, and we put our good schooling to use and tried to rally our local communities to stand up together and fight to change our world back to the way it used to be. When we realized all three of us were doing this, we talked about working on a joint venture and creating a single community together. It went okay for the first six months, but cracks started to appear in the foundation. I don't know what happened to them, but time changed them.
"Our camp was growing rapidly," Noah continued. "We recruited all the right people and resources to round ourselves out and survive, but then one day there was a disagreement: someone in our camp started to dissent against what we were doing. He was only fifteen years old, and he couldn't quite grasp our goals or what we were working toward. I didn't have a problem with it, because I wanted everyone to have a say in what we were doing, but Zed didn't take it quite the same way. We were standing around this security wall we were building around the camp, just talking to this kid. Zed got all worked up and—I'll never forget this—he picked up a hammer and started breaking the kid's fingers with it. He kept asking the kid over and over again if he still thought the same way, and the poor kid couldn't even say anything, he was crying so hard. Then Zed turned the hammer around and started pulling out some of his teeth. I tried to stop him, but he hit me right in the side of the throat with the hammer and I fell to the ground. I started seeing stars and thought I was going to suffocate. And Delroy just stood there and watched. He had a smile on his face that I'll never forget. When Zed got done pulling out the kid's teeth, he started in on his face and killed him, then he dragged the body into the middle of camp and told everyone what the kid had done as a warning to anyone else who wanted to speak out.
"I left the camp that night," Noah continued. "There was nothing I could do from the inside, not with the brutality that the two of them were willing to commit. I knew that the only way I could stop them was to start a community on my own and do everything a little better and a little smarter than them. I started to attract all the good, righteous people to my group, and they attracted all the savage degenerates to theirs."
Sarah felt sick to her stomach. If this is what these men were like, she couldn't imagine what would happen if they overran Noah's Ark. It seemed like the bandits all over again.
"If they were on the same page," she asked, "why did they split up into their own camps? Why don't they join with the bandits? They all seem the same anyway."
"They basically are the same," he said. "The difference is that Zed and Delroy, as repugnant as they are, are much smarter and more clever than the bandits. But yeah, you can think of the bandits as their own faction. The reason why they're all separate is because when you have a bunch of sociopaths vying for power, they all want absolute power—they all want to be the number one ruler over the land. So what you're left with is a bunch of lunatics savagely murdering everyone else to get that power. The reason why Zed and Delroy are each much better organized and equipped than the bandits is because they're far smarter than them. At the end of the day, the content of each faction is painted by the brushstrokes of whoever is in charge. But I'm smarter than both of them, and I'll figure something out. It might get rocky for a while, but we'll all get through it. If you think of us as Noah's ark sailing on the floodwaters, trying to turn the waves in our favor to carry us to a new world, you can think of them as the waves rushing against us—a rising tide trying to capsize us and sink us to the depths. But God is on our side, Sarah. If you don't believe in that, just think of it this way: good always triumphs over evil. It will be no different here."
"But you keep saying that we're going to make it through all of this," she said, "and that we're going to be the saviors of humanity and rebuild the world, but what happens if we do make it through this, and Zed and Delroy are gone, and so are the bandits? How many of us will even be left after that? And if we survive, we're no closer to rebuilding the world than we were before. What about the ninety-nine percent of the population that are zombies? How do you even begin to deal with that?"
Noah drummed his fingers on the desk. She was hitting him with some hard questions, and he didn't have all the answers for her.
"Honestly?" he said, "I don't really have a plan for the zombies. What can you really do? When we come across them, we kill them. But ever since I started this camp, we've lost about a dozen people to the zombies, and most of that was before we had that wall built," he said, pointing out the window at it. "And how many zombies have we killed? I couldn't even tell you the number, it's so high. My point is, as long as we're careful, eventually the number of zombies will go down, and the number of humans will go up. And if we're doing this now in our community, how many other good people are doing the exact same thing in their communities? What we have to focus on right now is cleaning up our own mess here, and then we can reach out to other people in other areas doing the same thing. When that happens, a network will begin to form, and then you'll see the basic infrastructure of humanity start to rebuild itself."
Sarah nodded. "I guess that's all we can do." She felt so disappointed in his answers, and she didn't know if she was disappointed in Noah or herself; she was so sure that he would always know what to do, but most of what he just said sounded like platitudes. When she didn't think there was anything else he could say, she stood up and started to turn for the door. "Thanks for your time," she said. "I know you have a lot to get back to."
"Sarah, wait."
She stopped in the doorway.
A smile came over his face and she was taken aback by the unexpectedness of it. He stood up and walked across the room to her, then took her by the hands and led her back toward the windows. He stood, gently stroking the backs of her hands with his thumbs as he stared into her eyes. She looked up at him and for the first moment all day, she felt that overwhelming sureness that she was longing to feel. His eyes were so intense and passionate that she felt her tension wash away and her whole body relaxed.
"I know you were probably expecting more from me," he said, "and I know I don't have all the answers and I can't guarantee you anything, but what I'm telling you is that you have to have faith."
"Faith?"
"It's what drives me every day. And if you're looking for purpose in this world, you have to let it drive you too. No one can predict the future, and I certainly can't snap my fingers and make my ideal vision for the world come to life, but if you have faith in the goodness of what we're doing, we'll get there. Because the only way this world is going to be saved is by good people fighting to make it that way. We may not even succeed, but if you don't have faith that we will, then we've already lost—all of this is for nothing. But it doesn't have to be."
He let go of her hands and walked over to a metal cabinet across the room. He opened it and pulled out a small vase filled with water and a single red rose standing in it. He strode back and gave it to her.
She slowly took the vase and marveled at the rose. "Where did you find this?" she asked.
"It was growing in the garden of an old house. It's the first one I've seen in years. I picked it just for you to show you that there's still good left in this world. All you have to do is cultivate it and it will flourish."
Sarah smiled from ear to ear. "That's so sweet. I can't
believe you did that for me."
"It was my pleasure," he said. He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. "Listen, I'm going to scout out Zed's camp tomorrow and see what he's up to. You should come with me and we can find out what we're up against."
"I might just do that," she said. She felt herself blush and started to leave his office. She gave him one last smile when she was in the doorway and he smiled back.
His simple message of having faith really struck a chord with her, and she was surprised to find herself already feeling much better about everything. Her cheek tingled from his kiss, and as she walked down the hall, grinning like she hadn't done since she was a schoolgirl, she felt a tension fill her body. But it wasn't anxiety like before: it was butterflies.
5
Zed
The sun was out the next day and the wind wasn't as biting as it was the day before. The miserable gray sky had opened up to hues of pale blue that marked a new beginning for Sarah. She and Noah geared up and left in the early afternoon for Zed's camp, Noah with an M16 and a Sig Sauer on his hip, and Sarah with just a pistol. He assured her that he would be by her side the entire time and that her safety was his safety. He wanted to spy on Zed and get an idea of his movements. If there was any hope of coming out on top in all of this, he had to study his enemy very carefully, and he wanted to judge the information with his own eyes.
A Rising Tide (Zombie Apocalypse Series Book 2) Page 4
