by Joe McKinney
The shouting was growing very loud. “Ah, shit,” he said, and dropped the rifle and turned and ran through the woods.
He ran parallel to the streambed for about a hundred yards, then dropped behind a tree and sank to his knees in a thick blanket of rotten leaves. Nate could hear voices coming toward him. “You see him?” “Clear over here.” “You two cross back over the streambed, see if he doubled back on us.”
They’ve lost me, he thought. But he couldn’t run anymore. Years earlier, long before the outbreak, he’d shattered his ankle running from the police, and now the ankle was starting to pulse. Any more movement and that pulsing would turn to unbearable waves of pain.
The leaves beneath him felt deep. He tested it by jamming a hand down until he touched bottom, maybe six inches.
Good enough, he thought, and hurriedly buried himself.
Two of the soldiers passed inches from his left shoulder and then stopped near his feet.
“He couldn’t walk through that stuff down there without leaving tracks,” one of the men said.
“Yeah,” agreed the other. “Back up that way.”
Please oh please, I need a break.
Flat on his stomach, peering out at a little patch of thicket from the cover of the leaves, Nate listened as the soldiers moved away. He let out a long breath and waited, straining his ears for the sound of voices and breaking twigs.
“What do I do, Doc?” he muttered.
Kellogg knelt beside him. “Shhh. Don’t move. Don’t speak. They’re moving away.”
And from the sounds of their voices, Nate knew it was true. They were a good ways off, and moving farther away with every passing second.
He closed his eyes and laughed, then winced at the sharp pain in his ribs. But it felt good to know he had saved himself. The pain aside, it felt good to know that he was still alive, and he laughed again.
But it was a considerably more subdued Nate Royal who, later that evening, found himself within sight of the Mississippi River without any food or fresh water or blankets under which to sleep. His headache, his aches, his fever chills—they were all returning now in spades, repaying him for the exertions of the morning and the all-day walking. With his vision turning soupy at the edges, he stumbled toward the water, figuring he would drink and take his chances. Rivers that ran through cities had bad water, he had learned, but he was desperate.
Ahead of him, the water was plum-colored in the pale light of the setting sun. It seemed as flat and calm as a sheet of cooled lead. He saw a pair of white birds gliding over the water, and it seemed very peaceful until the quiet was broken by the giggling of a pair of young girls.
He stopped dead in his tracks.
They crossed the trail in front of him, maybe ten feet away, completely unaware of his presence. He only caught a glimpse of them; a young girl of about eight, and an older one, a teenager, about thirteen or fourteen. They were both dressed in simple white dresses, and they were carrying baskets filled with blackberries and wild corn.
“Wait,” he said, stumbling after them, though his mouth and throat were so dry only a gasp of air escaped.
“Nate, no,” Kellogg pleaded with him. “Don’t. Watch them first.”
But Nate wasn’t listening. He hurt everywhere. The ringing in his ears had grown painful beyond the point that he could stand. He just wanted to fall over and drink some water before he passed out.
He turned down a thin side trail and caught a second glimpse of the girls as they entered a clearing. Nate smelled the faint tinge of wood smoke and heard other voices talking, laughing. Crashing down the side trail, he staggered into a clearing and found himself standing in the midst of a camp, half a dozen people staring at him.
It took a moment before anybody could react.
Two young men in their twenties grabbed shotguns and pointed them at Nate. He looked from one barrel to the other, swaying on his feet, and blinked.
“Don’t shoot me,” he muttered, but wasn’t sure if the sound came out or not.
The others just stared at him. Everyone was on their feet now. He saw an older woman in her late fifties put her arms around the two little girls and pull them back. A younger boy, who looked about five and was holding a thick stick blackened at one end, stared at Nate with wide, terrified eyes. There was a pile of fresh tinder smoking and popping in the fire pit in front of him.
Nate looked at one of the men holding a shotgun. The man adjusted his grip on the weapon.
“I’m not infected,” Nate said, and coughed. “Please. Help me.”
“Turn around,” the man said. He raised the shotgun to his shoulder and squinted one eye down the length of the barrel. “Do it now.”
With effort, Nate raised both hands and showed the men his palms. He could barely keep his head up. He turned slowly, clumsily, and stopped with his back to the men.
“Run, Nate,” Kellogg said. “Run while you’ve still got the chance.”
“I can’t,” he said.
“You can’t what?” one of the men said.
Nate lowered his hands slightly. “I can’t run,” he said.
“You just stay right there,” the man said. Then, to the other man, he said, “You see anything?”
“No. Hey, man, you bit anyplace?”
“No,” Nate said.
“What’s that?”
“No,” he said again, straining to be heard. “I’m thirsty.”
The older woman said, “He’s sick, Jason. It looks like he’s got the flu.”
“It looks like he came out of the back end of a goat is what it looks like. Eddie, what do you think?”
“Hell, I don’t know. I can’t see any bite marks on him.”
“I’m not bit,” Nate said.
“I know what you said,” a voice said. It sounded like Eddie’s voice, but Nate was still turned around and couldn’t see them. “Just stay there.” Then Eddie lowered his voice a little and said, “Go down there and tell Dad we got a sick man up here. Ask him what he wants us to do.”
Nate turned slightly and saw the little boy throw down the stick and run off toward the river. He also saw the one named Eddie bring up his shotgun again.
“Just stay there, mister.”
“Can I sit down?” Nate said.
“Nope. Just stay where you’re at.”
A moment later the little boy ran back into the camp. “Daddy said to bring him on down. He wants to look at him.”
“Alright,” Eddie said. “Come on, mister. Turn around real slow.”
Nate did as the man asked and Eddie motioned him down toward the river with the barrel of the shotgun. The path led him down to the bank and around a stand of willows. There was a man there, lying on his side, a fishing pole in his hands. He was a thin man, his high, oddly square-shaped head going bald on top, and the little hair he had left was as soft and white as powder snow. He was smiling when he turned around, but the smile slipped a little as he took in the sight of Nate standing before him.
“Good lord,” he muttered.
The man planted his hands palm down in the witchgrass and struggled up from the bank like an animal that has had its back legs run over by a car and is now pulling itself out of the road. It was an ungainly motion, one that Nate found disgusting. Only then did Nate notice that the man’s legs were tied together with loose, yellowed bandages that seemed to have soaked through from underneath.
“This is wrong, Nate,” Kellogg said. “This is all wrong. Get up and run.”
“What happened to you, son?”
“I was running,” Nate said, “through the woods.”
“What from?”
Kellogg leaned into his ear. “Don’t say a word, Nate. Not a word.”
But the man was waiting, looking him in the eye. Nate found it hard to look at him. The injuries to his legs had an unnatural look that turned Nate’s stomach.
“What were you running from, son? Was it zombies?”
“I dunno,” Nate said. “Could
have been. Could have been wild hogs, I dunno. I hid in some leaves.”
“Well, hopefully you didn’t pick up any ticks. Last thing you want is to get sick with Lyme disease. You probably wouldn’t survive it.”
Nate said nothing.
“What other symptoms do you have?” the man said.
“Huh?”
“You running a fever? I heard you coughing just a bit ago. You feel congested—sneezing at all—achy?”
“Yeah, all that.”
“How long you been sick?”
“Couple of days. I’m real thirty, mister.”
“I bet. It’s alright, son. My name’s Don Fisher. I’m a doctor. You already met the rest of my family, I guess.”
Nate just looked at him. His head was swimming so badly he wasn’t catching but every other word. “Could I have some water?” he said.
The man nodded. “Eddie, can you do that for me, please? Get him some water—and bring me a package of Tamiflu.” Eddie nodded and started to walk off, but Fisher called out to him. “And Eddie, better bring me a package of Zithromax, too. Just in case.” Nate was feeling like he needed to throw up. It was getting harder and harder to stand. Fisher, recognizing the look, said, “Go ahead and sit down, son. Sit down before you fall down.”
“You’re not gonna hurt me, are you?”
Fisher gave him a curious look. “No, son. I’m a doctor. Sit down. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
Nate tried to sit, but what he actually did was closer to falling. He looked over at Fisher, and the man nodded. Then he planted his palms in the grass again and pulled himself over to where Nate sat.
Nate, for his part, tried unsuccessfully not to flinch. It was like watching a poisonous snake inch closer and closer.
Fisher pulled himself up alongside Nate and felt his forehead. “Yeah, you’re burning up. We need to get that fever down. Ah, good—here’s Eddie.”
Eddie handed Nate a Mason jar full of water. The water looked clear and clean, but Nate would have drunk it all down even if it had come straight up from the river. Nate took a sip of the water. His cracked lips hurt on the rim of the jar, and his throat felt like it had broken glass stuffed down it, but he went on drinking.
“When was the last time you ate, son?”
“I dunno.”
The man nodded to himself. “Well, this won’t hurt your stomach even without food.” He had two shiny tinfoil cards with blister packs of pills on them. “These white and yellow pills—these are Tamiflu—take one in the morning and one at night. These pink ones are Zithromax—an antibiotic—you take this once a day. You understand?”
Nate didn’t, but he nodded like he did.
“Let’s get you started right away.” Fisher popped the pills from the blister pack and handed them to Nate. Nate swallowed both with the remainder of the water in the jar. “You want some more water?” Fisher said, watching him closely.
Nate nodded, his eyes closed. His throat was killing him.
Eddie brought another jar of water, and Nate took it gratefully, but he passed out before he had a chance to finish it.
When he woke it was dark. The river was an immense sheet of black stretching far off into the distance. Nate could hear a soft murmur of mosquitoes in the tall weeds at the water’s edge, and somewhere, out on the water, the muffled plunk of a fish breaking the surface.
He rolled over and saw the campfire had worked itself down to a flickering bed of embers, glowing softly in the darkness, its orange light casting a faint glow over the sleeping faces of Fisher’s wife and her two youngest children.
He couldn’t see the two younger men or the teenage girl.
“Are you awake?”
Fisher’s voice, coming from behind him, startled Nate. He rolled over and looked at the man.
“How you feeling?”
Nate coughed. “Still hurting.”
“It’ll take you a while to get better—a few days at least. You’re gonna need to get yourself cleaned up before you head off again—it’ll do your morale some good to cut your hair and get rid of that beard. You could stand a new set of clothes while you’re at it.”
Nate closed his eyes and tried to make the world stop spinning. “How am I gonna do all that?” he said.
“You’re about Eddie’s size—we’ll give you what you need.”
Nate opened his eyes, then narrowed them at Fisher, trying to see the man’s motives in his face. “Why?”
Fisher just smiled. “Why not?”
“You don’t know me. Why are you doing this?”
“That’s true—I don’t know you—what’s your name?”
Warning lights flashed in Nate’s brain. This was exactly the thing Kellogg had warned him about. We can learn to like other people, Kellogg had said, even love them, but we can’t ever truly know them, and so we remain isolated. The words played through his head like they’d been spoken only yesterday, though in reality it had been, what, six years ago? Seven?
“Don’t want to tell me, huh?”
Nate shook his head slightly.
“That’s okay. But listen, son, there is going to come a day when you will have to trust somebody. You can’t survive in this world without trust. Look at how hard it is—look at all the things you have to do for yourself if you’re the only one you trust. You’ll probably be dead before you’re forty if you don’t learn to spread some of the labor around. It’s the helping each other that gives the world meaning, son—gives us a sense that we belong to something.”
But that’s a lie, Nate thought, once again remembering the words Kellogg had spoken to him all those years ago. We’re not allowed to know why life has meaning, not for sure anyway, and yet we feel compelled to create some sort of answer. It’s an absurd downward spiral of impossible things, and yet it is our lives.
“I’m okay for now,” Nate said.
Fisher looked him over with a doubtful expression on his face. “Well, at least one of us is. Excuse me for a second.”
“Huh?” Nate turned at a sound behind him. One of Fisher’s sons—not Eddie, but the other one, whose name Nate had forgotten—was coming down the path with a large syringe in his hand. He walked right past Nate and handed the syringe over to his father.
“Thanks, Jason.”
The young man leaned down and kissed Fisher on the top of his bald head. “Susan’s on the way. She’s getting the water.”
Fisher nodded. Nate sat there, watching the syringe closely.
“Don’t worry,” Fisher said, smiling warmly. “It’s not for you.”
Nate didn’t reply. Fisher’s oldest daughter was coming down the path carrying a white tray. On the tray Nate saw a glass measuring cup with a little bit of water in the bottom, some kind of stove burner, a couple of red and white packets of Fleischmann’s yeast, and a single slice of bread.
The girl put the tray down next to her father. “Good night, Daddy. I’m going to turn in.”
“Okay, sweetheart. I’ll come check on you later.”
She bent down and kissed Fisher, just as her brother had done, and then went back up to the campsite.
“Do you see what I mean?” Fisher said. He was setting up the stove, turning on the gas and lighting it with a match he struck on the side of his shoe. “Being with other people—Sartre was wrong—it’s anything but hell. It’s our connection to them that makes us strong. That’s what gives our lives meaning.”
Nate kept his silence. Perhaps Fisher hadn’t intended for him to respond, because he went immediately to work setting the glass measuring cup on a small metal rack over the burner’s low flame. Both men watched it work in silence, and after a few minutes Fisher reached into his pocket and removed a thermometer from his shirt pocket. “The yeast needs the water at a hundred and five degrees.” He dunked the thermometer into the measuring cup and watched the mercury rise. “Takes a few minutes,” he said.
He looked at Nate and smiled.
Nate listened to the mosquitoes buzzing a s
hort distance off. Somewhere out in the woods an owl hooted.
“There it is,” Fisher said. He removed the thermometer and poured in the yeast and swirled the measuring cup around to distribute the mixture. Then he took the syringe and squirted the thick, reddish liquid inside into the yeast mixture. “Stuff tastes horrible without the yeast,” he said. Then he poured the liquid onto the slice of bread and ate it, wincing at the taste. “Of course, it tastes horrible with it, too—but it won’t work without it.”
Then Fisher pushed the plate away and rolled over on his back, staring up at the stars. Nate did the same. There were no clouds, and very little breeze; a pleasant night. It had been a long time since Nate had looked at the stars, really looked at them, and he was amazed at how many there were. They filled the sky, and for the first time in his life he realized how people could see patterns up there.
“You don’t talk much, do you, Nate?”
Nate turned his head. Fisher was still looking at the stars, his hands laced together behind his head.
“Not really, no,” Nate said.
“How about a family? Mom? Dad?”
“My mom died when I was little. My dad was going with his girlfriend to pick up her parents when the outbreak hit Martindale. I don’t know what happened to him. I guess he’s dead.”
“So it’s just you?”
Nate rubbed the flash drive through his shirt. “Yeah, just me.”
There was a flash of movement as Fisher flipped over onto his belly and pushed himself up with his hands. He dragged himself toward the path that led up to the rest of the campsite, then stopped and turned around.
“I hope you find what you’re looking for, son—and I hope you find it soon. It’s a big lonely world out there without other people.”
Nate watched him go in silence; and when he was out of sight, Nate rolled over onto his back again and watched the stars until he fell asleep.
