This Rotten World | Book 4 | Winter of Blood

by Morris, Jacy

  And that was it for snow for last year. There had been a couple of days of freezing rain that had fallen on the weekend, unfortunately, and then nothing else. This weather, this blizzard, was quite the shift. She wondered what was happening to the world. Was this weather a response to the fact that humans were now gone? Was this what weather had always been like before humans had covered the earth? Before man had changed the very composition of the air, had Portland always been covered in snow? Did the tribes that lived here spend the fall stocking up on supplies in order to make it through the inevitable blizzards. For a wild second, she felt like reaching for her cell phone and googling the question. But that time was over now. And so was the time of man. She felt sure of it. There was no way to come back from this.

  Man's time was up, and now mother nature was trying to finish the job that the Annies had started. But they weren't going to make it easy for her. If mother nature wanted to come after her, Amanda was going to go down swinging.

  They decided to rest at a storage facility. It was one of the strangest storage facilities she had ever seen. A wrought-iron fence surrounded a cube-shaped building. The building rose into the air, three-stories tall. The bottom story was windowless, but long, continuous glass windows ran down the side of the top two floors, and by the cold, gray light of the fading day, she could make out the bright orange doors of individual storage units.

  The gate was electric, so the only way in was to climb up and over the fence. The hardest part was getting Tejada over. The top of each wrought-iron bar was tipped with a spike that made them think twice about even attempting to break in, but, in the end, they couldn't ask for a better place than one with its own locked gate and a fence around the perimeter to keep the dead out.

  Allen and Epps clambered up the fence like two kids climbing a cyclone fence in their backyard. Then Masterson and Brown, the tallest of the soldiers, boosted Tejada up. Tejada grabbed the top of the fence, and Masterson and Brown spun his legs around so Epps and Allen could receive the weight of his lower body. They rotated his legs so that he was on the other side of the fence, and then they lowered him gently to the ground. All of this was done with quite a hefty bit of swearing and pained grunting on Tejada's part.

  With that accomplished, Rudy and Amanda were next. It was always that way. Amanda sort of resented the fact that the soldiers always made sure she and Rudy were out of harm's way first, but it was advantageous at times. As Rudy and Amanda dropped into the snow on the other side of the fence, the rest of the soldiers began to climb over, as the dead came within ten feet of their position.

  Masterson and Brown were the last ones over, and the dead pressed against the wrought-iron fence, trying to push their faces through the bars. They turned and headed to the storage facility, ignoring the grunts and groans behind them. Rudy tripped over a curb buried in the snow and tumbled to the ground. She couldn't help but laugh a bit. Better to stumble behind the safety of the fence than on the other side of it.

  She bent down and helped a blushing Rudy to his feet. Without warning, Whiteside took the butt of his rifle and bashed in the window that looked in on the main office of the storage facility. He vaulted through the window, and Amanda had the thought that Whiteside looked like a natural at breaking and entering.

  They watched as Whiteside shined his flashlight inside the building. It was abandoned and unoccupied. Whiteside bashed a large metal box on the wall repeatedly with the butt of his rifle. The small door swung open, and Whiteside's flashlight illuminated a row of keys.

  The other soldiers entered the small office while Tejada, Rudy, and Masterson had to wait outside. There wasn't room enough in the office for all of them.

  "What do you got there?" Tejada asked.

  "Keys," Whiteside said. "One of these oughta open up this door, and then we can get in inside."

  "Why don't we just shoot the fucker open?" Brown asked.

  "You kidding? With your aim?" Epps scoffed.

  "Just find the goddamn keys," Tejada said.

  "Here we go," Gregg said, pointing to a set of bolt cutters that leaned against the wall behind the tall counter in the office.

  Gregg lifted the bolt cutters up and into the air, regarding them with a smile on his face. "These ought to come in handy."

  It took some time for Whiteside to test each individual key in the door's lock. Behind them, the dead lined up at the fence, watching the short man struggle. By the time Whiteside found the right one, a line of Annies twenty-feet long pressed their faces against the fence, groaning.

  The office door swung open, and they filed through, closing and locking the door behind them.

  Amanda had never been so grateful to be out of the wind. It felt like the wind had flayed the skin off her lips. Her nose was raw from wiping away dripping snot, and her fingers didn't even feel attached to her body anymore. They were just blocks of finger-shaped ice attached to the end of her wrists.

  "Alright, lights on," Tejada said.

  In the darkness of the hallway, their flashlight illuminated a row of orange rolling doors that ran for a good fifty yards.

  "Well, since we didn't have a real Christmas, this'll do. Let's open these fuckers up," Tejada said.

  Amanda could feel herself and the others smiling. Breaking into the storage units would be a hell of a lot more fun than slogging through two-and-a-half feet of snow.

  "Who's gonna be Santa?" Amanda asked.

  Everyone looked at Rudy, and she knew he was blushing in the darkness. "Just because I'm fat?" he whined. She gave him a friendly nudge with her elbow, and they all laughed quietly.

  "You think any of those keys work for these locks?" Allen asked.

  Gregg held up the bolt cutters and said, "I got your key right here."

  "Do the honors," Tejada said. "Let's see what Santa left us."

  Gregg walked to the nearest rolling door and squatted down. The door was secured by a heavy padlock secured to a metal loop set into the concrete floor. He spread the bolt cutters wide and then strained to shear the lock. He shook with the effort.

  "You got that?" Day asked his rat-like eyes nothing more than slits in the darkness.

  With a great groan, the bolt cutters finally bit through the loop of the padlock, and Gregg pulled it free. He lifted the rolling door, and it slid up on a well-oiled track, rattling like thunder.

  "Jesus Christ, Gregg. You trying to call every Annie in the whole damn state?" Masterson asked.

  "What are the odds they got cigarettes in there?" Whiteside asked.

  "You just got some from the store, man," Brown said.

  "You can never have too many smokes."

  Tejada ignored the byplay and clicked on his flashlight.

  The first thing they saw was a jet ski underneath a tarp.

  "Dibs," Masterson said.

  "What the fuck are you gonna do with a jet ski?" Walt asked.

  "Oh, I thought it was a snowmobile," he said, his dopey face looking crestfallen for a moment.

  The storage unit was filled with nothing more than weekend warrior garbage, the type of shit that someone with too much money and too much time would buy. Amanda would bet good money that the jet ski had been used maybe once or twice. They shut the door on the skis, and snowboards, and kayaks and headed to the next unit.

  "I got whatever's in this one," Gregg said before he cut the lock.

  Tejada sighed and said, "No one's calling dibs, dammit. This isn't a fucking game show."

  Under his breath, Gregg muttered, "I still called it." He tossed the sheared lock on the concrete with a clatter and slowly lifted the door this time. Amanda didn't think it made much difference. Those rolling doors were going to make noise no matter how fast or slow you opened them.

  Tejada shined the light on a pile of landscaping equipment. The unit was piled high with garbage bins, weedwhackers, lawnmowers, clippers, and gasoline bottles, along with a various assortment of rakes, shovels, and hoes.

  Day slapped Gregg on the sh
oulder and said, "It's all yours."

  "There is no goddamn dibs," Tejada said, though he didn't seem to be winning this battle.

  Day continued mocking Gregg. "What are you gonna do, Gregg? You gonna trim the Annies' grass?"

  "Fuck you," Gregg said good-naturedly. That was one thing that Amanda had noticed about Gregg. No matter how hard the other guys rode him or busted his balls, he never let it get to him. She liked him for that. He was easy to get along with, and while there was nothing particularly special about him, he was a good guy to have along.

  Day called dibs on the next one. The darkness made her like him better. He was still her least favorite person in the group, though. No matter how much she tried, she couldn't stop thinking of Day as a rat. Even his voice was annoying. He talked as if his mouth was always full of extra spit. He sounded like Donald Duck if you took the cartoon character's voice down a couple of levels of silliness. She didn't know if he had shifty eyes because of his personality, or he had developed the personality over the years in response to the way he looked. She found him to be somewhat whiny, in a way that grated on her nerves. The thing she couldn't figure out was if her reaction to him was a response to his looks or reality. Either way, she didn't care for the guy at all. They had probably spoken a grand total of three times in the months that they had spent together.

  The next door went up, and despite what Tejada had said about this not being a game show, she couldn't help but think in her mind, in her best mental approximation of a game show voice, Let's see what's behind door number three!

  As Tejada shined a light over the unit, they all let out a collective sigh. This wasn't going so well. They moved into the unit to open the boxes and binders. It was filled with someone's memorabilia collection. Binders full of sports cards sat on the table, along with autographed jerseys in frames, signed hockey sticks, and baseball bats.

  "What a bunch of junk," Day said, swiping a few of the binders onto the ground.

  Amanda walked over to one of the baseball bats. She grabbed it, and the muscles in her arms strained from giving it a test swing.

  "You thinking about playing some baseball?" Rudy asked her.

  "Eh, it's better than nothing."

  "Can you even swing that thing?"

  They stepped into the hallway, and Amanda gave the bat a swing.

  Rudy laughed at her. "You look ridiculous."

  "What?" Amanda asked, wondering what exactly was so ridiculous about the way she swung a bat.

  "You're doing it all wrong. Here, gimme that."

  She handed the bat over to him, and he showed her how to hold it. She had been holding the handle too high, which made it more balanced and easier to swing. Rudy went into some lecture about physics, and how if you held the bat lower, your arc would be greater, and this would generate more force when contact was made.

  Amanda was somewhat annoyed by his explanation. It fell short of mansplaining, but not far off. She snatched the bat back from him and said, "You could have just said hold the bat lower. I didn't need a damn physics lesson." Rudy shrugged his shoulders.

  Amanda practiced her swings with the bat. From in the unit, she heard someone say, "Holy shit, a Mickey Mantle card. Do you know how much this is worth?" By the slobbery sound of the voice, she knew it was Day.

  Allen answered Day's question, saying, "It ain't worth shit, Day. Sports is dead. In a hundred years, no one's gonna know who the fuck Mickey Mantle was."

  By the light of Tejada's flashlight, she saw Day's face fall. He really was an idiot.

  "I'm gonna take it anyway," Day said. "I still remember."

  Brown scoffed at Day. "You weren't even alive when he played, numbnuts."

  Day didn't care. He pulled a wallet from his back pocket and stuffed the card in it.

  That Day still owned a wallet let her know everything she needed to know about him. He was clueless as hell. She remembered the days of lugging around a purse everywhere she went, filled with her cell phone, make-up, money, her bank cards, and her driver's license… all things that were completely useless now.

  Her new purse was a hellaciously heavy backpack filled with eating utensils, her canteen, her sleeping bag, and cans of food, everything she needed to survive. She felt like she had been walking stooped over for days instead of mere hours. But that's what the world was now. If you couldn't carry it, you didn't need it, which was why she found Day's wallet to be completely superfluous.

  Maybe he had important shit in there, like pictures of his family or his dog. She tried seeing the positive side of Day, but it was hard. She swung the bat a few more times, getting the feel of swinging it the way Rudy had shown her.

  Tejada strolled up and said, "Let me see that."

  Oh, great, another man telling her how to swing a bat. If they don't leave me alone, they're gonna see how well I can swing this fucker. She handed the bat to Tejada anyway, biting her annoyance between her teeth.

  He held it out with one hand, shining his flashlight along the barrel of the wooden bat. The beam of his flashlight traced a scrawl on the end of the bat. "Babe Ruth!" he said, showing more emotion than he generally showed in a week's worth of time. He handed the bat back to her and said, "Boy, you sure know how to pick 'em."

  She knew from the way he said it that she was supposed to know who Babe Ruth was, but all she could think of was the candy bar. She shrugged her shoulders, and the soldiers moved on to pop the next unit.

  No one called dibs this time, and she could tell that everyone now thought they were just wasting their time. She found it fascinating that she could read the mood of the group. It was like that now. They had spent so much time together, that oftentimes they didn't even need to say anything to know what the others were thinking or feeling.

  This must have been what it was like to be in the army. Does that make me a soldier? She laughed internally at the idea.

  As the door of the next unit went up, Epps let out a low whistle.

  "I think we hit the jackpot," Gregg said.

  Amanda moved to look inside the unit. It was a goddamn arsenal.

  "Oh, thank Christ," Tejada said. "I was starting to feel naked with thirty rounds in my pocket.

  "I guess the fourth time's the charm," Allen said.

  Amanda helped the soldiers pull the boxes out of the unit, and they spread the gear on the ground. There was a lot of ammunition in there, all arranged in boxes of cardboard or plastic. She liked the look of the bullets in the plastic cases. The individual bullets hanging looked like test tubes in a rack to her.

  As Tejada sorted through all the ammunition, he began to mutter swear words under his breath.

  "What is it?" Walt asked.

  Tejada waved his hands to encompass all of the ammunition, "We don't have any rounds for our rifles."

  "So?"

  "So, we either lug extra rifles around with us, or we go fully loud when we run out of ammo for what we got."

  Walt unslung his bowling ball from his back, waving it back and forth. "I'm ready either way," he said, all cocky bravado.

  For a second, it looked like Tejada was going to lay into the boy, but he let the comment slide. "The other option is we ditch the rifles we got and take some of these hunters' deals. They're unsilenced and loud as shit, but they'll get the job done."

  "I like getting the job done," Brown called as he set a big heavy box down on the concrete floor.

  "What's in there?" Tejada asked.

  "Don't know. Haven't opened it yet."

  Tejada stood and limped over to the box. He squatted down to his knees and ran his hands over the case. "This one's for papa," he said to no one in particular. It was large, about the size of an old steamer trunk. He undid the latches on the black, plastic case and lifted the lid. He reached inside and pulled out a long tube.

  To her left, Rudy spoke in a poor German accent, "Now I have an RPG. Ho, ho, ho."

  The other soldiers laughed, but as was frequently the case around all of the boys, she had n
o idea what they were laughing about. She would be glad when they found other women. Men were just… different—and not always in a good way.

  Tejada handed the tube off to Epps. The other soldiers shined their flashlights on it, treating it like it was a long-lost treasure. Tejada put his arms back in the case and fumbled around as if looking for something. "Fuck," he said, leaning back on his haunches.

  "What?" she asked.

  "There's no goddamn rockets for it."

  And just like that, the RPG turned into just another defunct piece of metal with no purpose in the zombie apocalypse. Epps handed the tube back to Tejada, and he plunked the thing back into the case without ceremony. Where before, they had handled it like it was the holy grail, now, they treated it like a piece of trash with no more significance than the cut padlocks littering the floor of the storage facility.

  In the end, most of the men ditched their silenced rifles. Allen, the best shot in the group, held onto his, and the soldiers gave him all of their ammunition. He had close to 200 rounds in his backpack when they were all consolidated. He would be their sniper if there was ever a need for such a thing.

  The rest picked out a various assortment of rifles, matching them with the correct ammunition and stuffing as much as they could in their backpacks. There was still plenty left over, and Tejada handed her a rifle. While the other soldiers ate, he showed her how her new weapon worked. He showed her how to load it, turn the safety on, and where to point the sight to kill an Annie.

  Amanda groaned at the thought of having to carry more weight on her back, but she knew she would be an idiot to pass up the chance at having a rifle and some ammunition. She wasn't the greatest shot out there, but she had done her time with the other soldiers at the makeshift shooting range back on the Nike Campus. She thought she could do some damage if she needed to.