A New America Trilogy (Book 1): The Human Wilderness

by S. H. Livernois

  "What should we do?" said a female voice.

  Eli peeled his eyes open to slits and pretended to sleep.

  "I don't know," a man answered. "What are our options?"

  Eli flicked his eyes toward the voices. He spied two hunched, shadowed shapes. A crossbow lay at the man's feet and a knife was sheathed at the woman's hip. Eli had found himself in this situation before, long ago: huddled in a house with strangers, waiting for the night to end. They realized the news reports were true and cities were emptying as the Parasites swallowed them whole. Herds spilled out into the countryside, chasing the survivors until they infected every last one. Eli had run from one of those cities, alone, and sheltered with the first people he met.

  He didn't remember the strangers' names, but their faces were still clear. After a night of stories, Eli woke to find them pointing his own gun at his head while they pocketed his weapons and emptied his pack.

  They were the first people he meant to kill.

  The man and woman continued to talk and Eli focused on the crossbow on the floor. While he feigned sleep, he slowly moved his right hand — the one they couldn't see — to his hip and found his knife still there. He clasped its hilt.

  He had a mission: the river, Inniswold, Simon. He needed that crossbow, their food. This was an opportunity. Eli eased the knife silently from its sheath when the last words Lily spoke to him burst into his head.

  Did you kill people?

  Eli had told her no, but it was a lie.

  I knew it. Eli could still see her smile and the dimples sprouting in her cheeks. I didn't think you would've killed anyone. You're too nice.

  Eli glanced at the strangers again. They huddled closely on a love seat, whispering. They'd left him with his weapons and saved his life. The real danger wasn't them.

  It was him.

  He slid the knife back into its sheath and dropped his hand onto the couch.

  "I think he's awake," said the female voice.

  Eli stared at floor and its dirty white carpet.

  A face appeared before him, lashed with fresh cuts and bruises. Eli stared at a gash on the man's chin. "What's your name? I'm Roger and that's Anna."

  Roger took Eli's left hand and put something cold and metallic into it, then something soft in his right. Food and water. He returned to the love seat and sat.

  "Would they keep looking, you think?" he said.

  "I bet they went back," the woman said. "They'll tell her a story, and she'll believe it."

  "We can only hope." The man sighed. "I should've planned this better. Where do we even go?"

  "I've only been east. It's full of infected." She paused. "Don't worry. We'll figure it out."

  As they talked, Eli realized he recognized their faces as the couple crouched behind a rock in the woods. He cleared the dust from his throat.

  "South is the park. It's pretty empty. There's a settlement, too, just north of it. Elsberry. They'll take you in."

  Anna smiled. "How many survivors are out there?"

  Her expressions reminded Eli of Timothy: desperate for answers, yet fearful.

  "Three settlements that I've seen."

  "Three?" Roger choked on the word.

  Eli couldn't tell if it was more than he expected or less.

  "You should eat." Anna pointed at the food and drink in Eli's hands.

  He nodded and ripped a corner off the bread they'd given him; it was stale but delicious. He softened it with a mouthful of water and swallowed. "Thank you." Eli glimpsed the stranger's wounds. "What happened to you?"

  Roger and Anna exchanged nervous glances. "We escaped a bad place," Roger said.

  "What kind of bad?"

  "Where one person controls everything and kills people who don't give her what she wants." A muscle twitched in Anna's jaw. "Any of the three places you've been like that?"

  Eli took another bite and swig and shook his head. "Elsberry's strict. The other place, Penelope, doesn't have much." He squeezed the rest of the bread in his fist. "Where I live, the people are good."

  "What's it called?" Roger said.

  "Hope."

  "That's promising."

  A smile tugged at Eli's mouth, but it quickly sank into a frown.

  "Why are you out here, Eli?" Anna said.

  She scowled, and wrinkles sprouted across her forehead and near her eyes. Her skin was tanned and leathery, her bottom lip split and caked with dried blood. Roger wore small glasses and tied his messy brown hair in a ponytail at the base of his neck, and a swelling, purple bruise encircled his eye. Eli stared into these unfamiliar faces and wanted to tell them everything.

  He hadn't talked to anyone but himself and Jane's ghost in days.

  "I was looking for someone." Eli stared at his palms, stained brown with dirt from digging Lily's grave. "A girl."

  "Did you find her?" Roger asked.

  Eli nodded. "Killed. She was twelve."

  "I'm so sorry," Anna whispered. "Who was she?"

  "Lily. She was like a niece to me." The word wasn't enough. Eli's throat burned and he coughed to clear his voice. "No. More like a daughter."

  "Do you know who killed her?"

  Eli nodded again, his fingers curling into shaking fists until the nails dug into his palms. "I think so. A man named Simon."

  Anna gasped sharply. She grabbed Roger's knee. Eli watched the pair, a dim excitement simmering in his chest. He propped his elbows on his knees.

  "What does he look like?" Anna asked.

  "Short, brown beard, scrawny."

  Anna thumped Roger on the arm. "Do you think?"

  "There's hardly anyone left alive, Anna. It's bound to be." Roger took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Then he turned to Eli. "He lives in our settlement, Grant's Hill. But he leaves a lot, for long periods of time. Seems nice."

  "Where does he go?"

  Both of them shrugged. "Everything is a secret there," Roger said.

  Eli kneaded his forehead and watched the flames dance. He thought of what Susan said, how Simon left as one man and came back another.

  "Why do think Simon killed your friend?" Roger asked.

  Eli leaned forward on his knees, hands joined, and pressed his thumbs between his eyes.

  "He stabbed her boyfriend to death. Kidnapped her." Eli's voice shook and he pressed harder. "We tracked him. Found he had friends. Found more missing girls."

  "My God," Anna breathed.

  "There's a guest house on Olive's property — she's the leader. Dozens of girls live there. And they're ..." Roger turned to Anna for a description.

  "Odd. Ethereal. Dress all in white," she said. "No one is allowed to talk to them and they don't talk to anyone."

  "But in the past few weeks, we've heard rumors there's more inside." Roger lowered his eyes. "Girls no one sees. That's all we know."

  More. Dread gnawed at Eli's belly. "Who are they?"

  "No one knows." Roger's thick eyebrows sprung up above his glasses. "The story is that they're orphans, taken in by Mrs. Grant for protection."

  "Do you believe that?"

  Roger snorted. "No one questions Mrs. Grant. They're too afraid or they don't care."

  The flames ebbed low and the air grew cold. Eli stood and threw on a couple more logs and stoked the fire, then sat down and rubbed his forehead again.

  Ethereal girls in white. Forbidden. Secret.

  An amazing place.

  It seemed he'd found the destination Lily was being dragged to — the place Simon lived. Eli clenched his fists and his teeth and took a deep breath as the prickles sprouted like fireworks all over his skull.

  "What can you tell me about Grant's Hill?"

  "Only to run in the opposite direction," Roger said. "You should come with us."

  Eli studied their kind faces. Roger sat with his hands on his thighs and Anna had slung one arm over the back of the couch. Both of them smiled.

  Girls no one sees.

  "What else?" Eli urged.

  Roger
nodded. "It's well secured. Double walls. Lookout posts, patrols a mile out. And they still have guns. Don't use 'em much, but still..."

  "How many people?"

  "Hundred and fifty," Roger said.

  "How you end up there?"

  "Now that's an unpleasant story." Roger shook his head. "Drifted there, just after. I lived up north in Sadler. Olive's husband took in lots of folks. Never let them forget what was owed, though. When he died, Olive took over." His eyes unfocused. "That's when it got really bad."

  Roger cut off his story. Eli raised his eyebrows at Anna.

  "Same thing," she said. "But I came later. Olive only let me stay because she found a use for me. That's the only way in."

  Anna pulled bottles of cloudy water from her pack and found a pot in the kitchen, then set it, half-full, over the flame to boil. A silence settled over the room. Eli tried to list what he could do: shoot a squirrel through the eye, repair a roof, chop wood, torture a man for answers. Would it be enough? He listened to rain thrashing the house, the occasional crackle of the fire, the sounds of Roger and Anna breathing and moving.

  Eli sparked conversation again — about life before the world ended. Roger was at school and helped usher his students into the gym, where they all turned within minutes. Anna was a dentist with three kids. She had no idea what happened to them and said no more.

  "What about you?" Roger said as he threw a couple more sticks into the fire. He sat back down to listen.

  Eli stared at the logs, their bark curling white at the flames' touch. He waited a minute or two, trying to remember. He smelled smoke. Sweat. Blood. Screams pierced his ears — of men turning and infected being shot.

  The words poured out of him.

  "I was far from home, stationed north with my platoon to fight 'em. I killed hundreds in one day. Just kept shooting. The last one was a boy, maybe eight. I shot him in the chest."

  Eli poked his own chest, hard, at the exact spot beneath the collarbone, where his bullet had struck the child. The boy's face was round and dirt-stained, eyes red-rimmed with bright blue irises.

  "He cried for his mom before he died. He wasn't infected. I still wonder how many like him I killed that day." Eli glanced at Roger and Anna to see how their faces changed, knowing what he did. "I'm sorry. You don't wanna hear that ..."

  They recited comforting words in soft, kind tones, but their voices faded in the thrashing rain and rush of blood in Eli's ears. He began to feel sick from the heat and the talking and stood, stumbling through the dark house and into the kitchen, where he found a back door. He opened it and stepped out into pitch black and onto a porch he couldn't see but felt beneath his feet.

  The air was cold and rain pelted his skin through his thin shirt. He rested his head against the house and focused on the sounds of raindrops, owls hooting, the rustle of wind. He stood there an hour or more, until his stomach stopped roiling and the images retreated. Until he knew Roger and Anna would be asleep.

  When he went back inside, they were snoring together on the couch, weapons and packs at their feet. They weren't afraid or distrustful of him. It was an honor he didn't deserve. Eli put another log into the fire then lay on the couch. The dead boy's blue irises were waiting for him when he closed his eyes.

  For the first time in days, he fell asleep to the sound of another human breathing nearby.

  Eli woke with a start, expecting to find an arrow inches from his face and Roger with his finger on the trigger.

  But he was alone.

  The fire was dead and the room was quiet, the love seat empty. Strong midday sunlight peeked around the edges of the barred windows, and he saw the house for the first time: plain, cookie-cutter, cozy.

  Eli's hand shot to his hip — his knife was still there. Frank's ax was on the floor next to the couch and so was his pack. In the middle of the room, between the couch and the fireplace, was a small pile of wrapped packages. A piece of paper lay on top.

  He slid off the couch and crawled to the pile. The packages were food. The paper was a letter, written in pencil in narrow, slanted handwriting.

  Eli knelt on cushy carpet and read.

  Eli,

  Sorry, but we had to leave before sunrise.

  We meant what we said about Grant's Hill. Stay away. There's nothing you can do there. Stay safe. Stay alive. There aren't many of us left.

  Hope to see you in Elsberry,

  Best of luck,

  Roger and Anna

  Eli ran his hands over the words carved into the paper. He wanted to keep it, but decided it wasn't wise for where he was going.

  He packed the food and checked the house for anything else useful. In the kitchen, he found another knife, which he tucked into his sock; a box of matches; a pair of warm shirts in an upstairs closet; and a bottle of expired burn cream in a bathroom. He packed these away, too, then spread the map out on the dusty kitchen counter.

  With a dirt-stained finger, Eli retraced his steps across the map. He spotted Inniswold and "home" scrawled beneath it: that was Grant's Hill. And it was a dozen miles away. He could make it before sunset.

  He sprung to his feet, folded his map, shouldered his pack, slipped on his gear, and grabbed Frank's ax. He marched to the door with purpose and quietly pulled it open.

  The sun shone bright and high, the charred frame of a house across the street stark against the blue. Eli plodded down the sidewalk, looked left and right down the meandering street. Nothing stirred. He turned left, heading back the way he'd stumbled the day before: north.

  Jane had vanished, Frank and Lily were dead, Roger and Anna gone. Eli imagined the house the strangers spoke of and the girls inside and knew no one else was looking for them. He remembered a cold room with a hard linoleum floor and the women's pained screams. The men, laughing and hooting.

  Eli couldn't let it happen again. He couldn't let the Simons of the world do as they pleased.

  He followed the street to its end at a crossroad, framed along the opposite shoulder by a stretch of woods; he stepped into the trees. He'd go back to the river, find a way to cross, march up to their walls, and make himself useful.

  This is what Jane would've wanted and what Eli needed. The only way was to go forward. To rescue, and maybe redemption and atonement.

  When I said you're different, I meant you're a good man. Truly good. You want to save everyone.

  Eli did his best to believe Jane's words, and he let them carry him all the way back to the river.

  Chapter 24

  Eli crouched behind a bush atop a grassy, tree-covered hill as the sun sank in the western sky. His hiding place overlooked a flat expanse of empty land stretching into a haze in the north; behind him, to the south, a ridge of low, green mountains loomed in the gathering dark.

  In the middle was Grant's Hill.

  Its double walls were three feet taller than Hope's, with four guard towers posted on both the inner and outer barriers. Eli spied a man in each one, watching the world outside and the smaller, protected one within.

  A road from the west led inside, a pale gray ribbon slicing through a buffer of open land pocked with tree stumps. Five armored men marched down this road; from Eli's lofty post, they stood only a foot tall. The gate screeched open and they vanished inside. Ten minutes later, five more headed out.

  Eli had spied on the walled settlement all day.

  Everyone was armed. Roger and Anna were right — they not only carried spears, axes, and crossbows, but guns. Eli saw himself in the men now strolling along the road and into the wilderness: their stiff-backed posture, their formation marching down the road, how they held their weapons. Such men would shoot him on sight, the way he would've done at the Commander's order.

  The five armored men disappeared down the western road. Was their mission to kill Parasites, collect passersby, or await the newest stock of girls? Or had they already arrived? Eli wondered how the people in Grant's Hill would feel about one of those girls being murdered. Would the criminals who kidn
apped her care? Did one girl matter? Heat burned in Eli's chest at the thought of Lily, lying on the forest floor, forgotten, and Simon standing over her. He yearned for revenge but took a deep breath to chase it away. That wasn't his mission.

  There would be no justice for Lily, in a world where crimes were easy to commit and easier to run from. But he could get answers for her, and rescue those who could still be saved.

  Eli emerged from his hiding place and crept to the edge of the grassy hill. He craned his neck to gaze over the walls but spied only the roofs of a few houses inside, sprawling and massive, like mansions. The first challenge was getting inside. The second was proving himself useful, as Roger and Anna warned. After that, his plan seemed impossible: rescue an unknown number of captive girls.

  Alone.

  Eli took one last look at the guard towers and the strong walls and trudged down the opposite side of the grassy hill, down into thick, quiet woods and his camp, hidden in a cove of trees. Darkness fell quickly. Eli didn't light a fire, but he lay curled and cold on a bed of pine boughs. He gazed up at the stars shimmering above the forest canopy, the reality of the next day an animal crouching in the dark beside him.

  What would he say to the strangers in Grant's Hill? Would they let him in? Let him stay? These questions carried Eli into a shallow, drifting sleep. Every hour, he opened his eyes to the stars crossing the sky overhead, until eventually the lights extinguished and birdsong stirred him awake.

  While it was still dark, he gathered his things, crept out of his camp and away from the hill. When pink light snaked up the horizon, he jogged to the roadside. The night patrol had returned just after dawn the day before, so Eli hid in a ditch, waiting for the same changing of the guard.

  A few minutes later, distant boot steps thumped on asphalt, the sound growing louder as they approached. He hunched down and glanced upward, his eyes level with the road. The men passed on their way back to the settlement, their mouths covered and bodies armored, handguns holstered at their right hips.

  When they were clear, Eli leaned out of his ditch and watched the formation disappear around a bend. Eli waited a few minutes, then sprung from the trees and marched down the road in the same direction, heart thudding to the rhythm of his boots. His intention was to meet the day patrol while assuming the role of a wandering survivor, a harmless nobody in search of food and shelter.