Rachel stepped through the door first, covering the area with her HK. Behind her followed Will and then Alec. He stumbled toward the railing; as he looked out across the farm, he began to cry.
“Thank you.”
“We don’t have any food to give you,” Rachel said, reality crashing down on them. One way or another, this world was going to get you.
“It’s OK. I’d rather die out here than live another second in there,” he said, tilting his head back toward the house.
“Besides,” he said. “I have food to give you.”
26
The land stretched flatly to the horizon in every direction, eternal and unforgiving. Once the farmhouse faded from view, they saw nothing and no one.
They walked.
They walked slowly in the rain, Rachel limping, Alec on legs that had atrophied during his time in captivity. He had to rest every few hundred yards to massage his quads and his calves, as though he were trying to jump start them.
“They said it made the meat easier to chew,” he said, and that had been the last he’d spoken of it.
It had been more than enough commentary on what they had been through, and it kept her up for hours, long after they’d pitched camp and packed it in for the night. She lay awake now, the faces of the people she’d killed hovering about her subconscious. Eddie and Millicent and the two people from the farm. It was the first time she’d ever taken such an inventory.
Initially, she’d been wary about sharing space with this stranger, because. But he had dropped into a deep sleep seconds after climbing inside his tent, his snoring loud and rattling her teeth. The man probably had years of PTSD-related insomnia ahead of him, but tonight, sleep would come first.
Beside her, Will snored. When she asked him how he was doing, he’d said he was fine. She didn’t know whether to believe him. The idea of Will lying to her was strange to her, alien, almost impossible to comprehend. Lying. That was how you learned your kid was his own person, that he wasn’t an extension of yourself, a dummy satellite floating through the ether, simply executing the same lines of code.
She crept out of the tent and sat cross-legged at its mouth, looking up at a sky pockmarked with glittering stars. She felt that old yearning again, the desire to be part of a community again. God, people. People. People had done nothing but grow worse, the masks society had forced upon them shattered like porcelain. People had been shitty, but the rules, the laws, had helped hide away what people had been really like.
Then the plague had come and wiped all that away in one fell swoop, returning the survivors to their default setting. That was the funniest part of all this. Recorded human civilization had lasted a few thousand years, and they had treated each other like shit for all but maybe six months of it. Without their gargantuan social construct, which had been nothing more than a house of cards, it had all come crashing down. Her Sunday school classes came back to her, the lesson that God had created man in His image. In His image? If God had created man in His image, then their God was a terrible one indeed. And given the events of the last thirteen years, it was difficult to conclude otherwise.
Yet here she was, longing for human contact all the same. Dangerous, unpredictable, potentially deadly human contact. She missed Charlotte. Now that had been a good woman to the end. And Charlotte was dead because of her, because she had been too weak to teach Will what this world was like, to do the job she was supposed to do. She had gambled on protecting him from the reality of the world, and it had blown up in her face.
Hell, sometimes she missed Eddie. The old Eddie, the one she’d first met. She missed how he’d felt close to her, how he’d felt inside her when sex had still been a regular thing between them, the way he smelled, how he’d slept. The Eddie before he’d taken off his mask.
The flutter of a zipper unzipping startled her; she glanced over to see Alec crawling out of his tent. Immediately, her mind went on red alert, her hand tensed on the HK. Her skin went tight, her muscles taut. What was he doing up? He was coming to rape her, to slit their throats, to cook them up himself because hell why not, it had worked for those monsters back at the farm.
“Hey,” he said. “Couldn’t sleep?”
She shook her head.
“Bad dream,” he said, taking a breath and letting it out slowly. “Took me a minute to remember I wasn’t down there anymore.”
Rachel relaxed, her muscles releasing.
Another problem with their world. This man had been subject to the worst horror imaginable and her first instinct had been to distrust him. That might have been how you survived in this world, but that didn’t mean it was good.
“Where are we going?”
“I live at a boarding school not far from here,” he said. “We’ve been there since it started.”
“How many of you?”
“Thirty-five, give or take.”
Rachel’s eyes widened in the dark.
“That many? How did you end up together?”
He laughed softly.
“I’m guessing this is going to be hard to believe.”
“What?”
“We were living there before the plague.”
Rachel looked for something to say, but words failed her.
“I know, it’s hard to believe.”
“You were all immune?”
“Oh, I doubt any of us were immune,” he said. “I think we got very lucky. The school is in a very remote area. There were about sixty of us there for summer school. Normally, there were about five hundred students. Gravy – he’s the headmaster – he quarantined us when the outbreak started getting bad. No one got sick, so we sheltered in place for a year. We had enough supplies, we had enough water. Eventually, our supplies started to run out, and we had to send someone on a supply run. It was either take a chance or starve to death. Gravy believed if the disease killed anyone who wasn’t immune, then there wasn’t anyone left who could transmit the disease.”
Not entirely true, but she understood their thinking.
“Gravy was the one to go.”
Alec laughed and his eyes filled with tears as he recounted the memory.
“God, he was so scared. He was supposed to be back a week later, but that came and went, no Gravy. We started to assume the worst. Then he comes back ten days later, still healthy, no symptoms. He’s quarantined for a week, never gets sick. We figured we were safe.”
“The babies still die from it, you know.”
He glanced at her, his eyebrows raised up.
“Oh?”
“No women at your school, I’m guessing.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “All boys. Men, I guess, now. I still think of us as kids. I was seventeen when it happened.”
“You have food there?”
“It’s rationed,” he said. “Not sure you’ll be able to stay very long, but you are welcome to my rations for the coming week.”
“That’s very generous of you.”
“Least I can do. As I said, I’d rather starve to death out here.”
#
“We’re almost there,” Alec said, pointing at a small sign bearing the school’s name, the arrow painted pointing east.
They picked up the pace as best they could, Rachel accelerating from a limp-walk to something resembling a slow jog. They turned right onto a narrow road that was passable but showing signs of decay. It took twenty minutes to cover the last half mile, Rachel’s ankle reaching the end of its usable life for the time being. Fatigue was setting in, the adrenaline firing her engines since they had fled Millicent’s clutches draining away rapidly. All she cared about was a decent meal and a good night’s sleep, a place to put her foot up for a while.
She was done, worn out. She had given all she could and needed time to recharge. If this all went badly and she and Will were walking into a trap, well, there was nothing she could do about that now. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, simply glad to be alive. That was a status increasingly di
fficult to maintain. Alive. Still kicking when so many others were not. If this was the end for them, then she was proud of what they had done.
They drew close to the school’s outer gate, which was manned by a lone sentry. He was too far away for Rachel to get a good look at him. He noticed them about fifty yards out, drew his weapon, pointed it at them.
“Stop right there!” he called out.
“Chung, it’s Alec!”
“Alec? Holy shit!”
Then he paused, the fact that Alec wasn’t alone suddenly registering with Chung. He held his firing stance as they approached the gate. Chung was a small man, not much taller than Rachel, but stoutly built. The gun looked like a child’s toy in his hand.
“Who are they?” he asked after Alec embraced him.
“It’s fine, they rescued me.”
“What the hell happened to you?”
“It’s a long story. Gravy around?”
Chung unhooked a small walkie-talkie from his belt and spoke into it, quickly summarizing the situation before him.
“Wait there,” came the reply. “We’ll send some backup.”
As they waited, she took in the campus. A cluster of dormitories to the west, a football field and other athletic fields to the east. The goalposts looked ominous in the moonlight. Three larger buildings sat in the middle of the campus.
As the minutes ticked by, panic fluttered inside her like a butterfly. Had she really thought this through? Putting her faith in this man Alec simply because she believed he owed her something? But she had to try. The risk of accepting his offer was high, but the cost of not taking it was even higher.
Things had been much easier in the salad days immediately after the plague (and the fact she was calling the days after humanity’s near-extinction the salad days really drove home how bad things had become). Food, medicine, and weapons were everywhere, like a benevolent deity had cracked open a giant piñata of survival supplies. Why hadn’t she socked more away? Hidden it away for a rainy day? She hadn’t taken the long view; she had looked at the world through blinders. That had been the first domino. God, there were no easy decisions anymore, not a one. The only way to calculate the wisdom of a decision was to still be alive after acting on it.
Oh, a bad choice?
Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200, You’re Dead.
The sound of footsteps broke her out of her trance, and she instinctively pulled Will against her. A trio of men approached them; she focused on the one in the middle, a tall, thin man wearing jeans and a black leather jacket. He was middle-aged, perhaps a few years older than she was. His hair was shorn close to his head, but a thick salt-and-pepper beard masked the lower half of his face. His eyes were big, uncomfortably so, like they had been installed on the wrong face.
He stared at Rachel for a few moments, long enough that it became uncomfortable before she broke the stare and glanced down at Will. When she looked back up, he had turned his attention to Alec.
“Welcome home, buddy,” Gravy said, giving the man a big hug.
He stepped back but kept his hands on Alec’s shoulders. The concern on his face was evident.
“Thought we’d lost you,” he said.
“Believe me, I thought the same thing.”
“Who are your friends?”
Alec stared at Rachel for a bit, and it occurred to her Alec didn’t know her name.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Rachel. This is Will.”
He turned back to Gravy.
“They helped me out of a very bad situation,” Alec said. His face darkened and he took a deep breath. “Very bad.”
Rachel’s stomach flipped.
“Thank you for bringing our boy home,” Gravy said. “Not many will stick their necks out like that anymore.”
“Well, here we are.”
“Indeed.”
Everyone stood quietly, the silence quickly becoming awkward.
Alec was the one to break it.
“I think we owe these people a good meal, a roof over their heads tonight.”
Gravy ignored him, keeping a wary eye on his guests. Long enough to make Rachel shift her weight from foot to foot, cough nervously in her hand, glance around at the others.
“Gravy?”
He blinked and turned to Alec.
“Dinner? A place to stay?”
He smiled.
“Of course. Where are my manners? I hope you’ll consider staying here a couple of days. We are rationing our supplies, but the day I don’t open my home to folks in need… well, that’s a day I don’t want to see.”
Will’s stomach rumbled, loud enough for everyone to hear.
She couldn’t decline the offer now.
“I’m sorry we can’t offer you more than a brief respite.”
“It’s OK,” Rachel said. “We’d be happy to stay for a bit. We could use some time off the road.”
He clapped his hands together, a smile digging its way out of his beard.
“Wonderful!”
“Chung, please show our guests to Tuttle. It’s nice and quiet.”
“Thank you.”
“We’ll have some food and water brought over. Again, I’m sorry it’s not much.”
“We’re grateful for anything you can spare.”
Gravy clasped his hands together, quickly bowed his head in reply. This little meet-and-greet was in its death throes now, everyone running out of things to say.
As Rachel and Will followed Chung, she was reminded of boring cocktail parties at Caltech, when she’d find herself trapped in an interminable conversation with a socially awkward professor.
He led them to a dormitory near the center of campus. It looked Jeffersonian, white columns against brick that resembled a skull of a mysterious desert creature. The name Tuttle was carved into the stone header above the portico. They went inside.
It was dank and cold in the foyer, the air musty and sharp in her nostrils. A bulletin board was mounted on the wall next to the stairwell, still bearing the flyers and notes from before the plague. The pages had yellowed with age, the corners curled around the rusty thumbtacks holding them in place. One flyer for a math tutor SEE JUSTIN TUTTLE 143. Another for club soccer tryouts starting August 17.
August 17.
A Tuesday.
Her mother had died that very day, August 17, as the sun set, the thin high clouds above the dying city of San Diego turning fiery red. Nina Kershaw had been the first to come down with it, early that morning. The three of them, Rachel, her mom, Jerry, had stayed up late into the night, glued to the television, watching coverage of the outbreak. They sat three wide on the sofa, under a blanket, the table covered with vitamins and antiviral pills Jerry had ordered online. They alternated between CNN and MSNBC and Fox News on the new seventy-inch television her mom had bought Jerry for his birthday in May.
Thinking back on it now, it had been horrible to watch the news on that monstrous screen, the colors and sounds of this riot in Denver, of that plane crash in Norfolk, of this burning hospital in Albuquerque, so bright and alive it felt like they were right there.
Rachel had nodded off around four. An hour later, the heat radiating from her mother’s feverish body woke her up, the left side of her body drenched. As she swam to the surface of wakefulness, she couldn’t figure out why she was so hot.
“Mom,” she’d whispered, as if waking her up gently would help her escape the disease’s clutches. No response.
“Mom!” she was yelling now, waking up Jerry.
Nina had come around, barely, her fever spiking, you could feel her baking, how could someone be so hot? Rachel collected all the kitchen towels, soaking them under the faucet, plastering them to her mom’s broiling arms and legs and forehead. She didn’t bother taking her temperature; you didn’t need a weather forecast to know it was raining.
“Bring in the parakeet!” her mother had said, delirium setting in.
Jerry came absolutely unglued.
“Jerry, the fucking parakeet!”
They rushed her upstairs to the bedroom, tucked her into bed, closed the door. Jerry insisted on quarantining her, even taking a “decontamination shower,” as he called it, even though she didn’t know how it differed from a regular shower. Jerry barred Rachel from the room, which to be honest, she hadn’t objected to that much – she was reluctantly conscious of the fact that deep down, her primal urge to survive was firing up.
First was the pointless call to 911, which had stopped taking calls days earlier. But Jerry insisted, and they spent thirty minutes listening to the hold music, a bizarre instrumental version of a Taylor Swift song.
“Please bring me the parakeet!” she called out.
And then she wailed.
“Jerry, they’re not answering,” Rachel had said, pushing her mother’s plaintive cries out of her head. She was trying to remain calm because she figured someone needed to, but truth be told, the fear inside her had been gargantuan, hot and choking, as she waited to start baking with fever.
He looked at her, began nodding his head, and then uncorked his iPhone into the wall; it blew apart into a hundred pieces. She supposed the remains of the phone still lay on the floor of their tony living room in that fancy San Diego subdivision.
Second came Jerry’s ill-advised decision to try and make it to the hospital, despite the ticker on the bottom of the screen announcing that San Diego-area hospitals were no longer taking any new patients. They made it two blocks before encountering a massive traffic jam on Spotswood Avenue, the cars abandoned, no way through.
It was over. They had lost, and sometime in the next few hours, she would heat up like a brick oven and die at the age of nineteen before she had done anything in her life.
As they drove home, Rachel in the backseat with her mother, she caught a glimpse of Jerry in the rearview mirror. He was crying. She never forgot that. Tears streaming silently down his face, his eyes wide open. Back at the house, Jerry carried Nina to the front porch; he sat with his wife of four years on the swinging bench and rocked back and forth, whispering to her. Rachel stood on the porch and watched, glad Jerry was taking the lead here.
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