(Book 2)What Remains (31 page)

Sarah tapped on the glass to get my attention so
I’d see her waving me back. I walked back, the anger on my face had
to be obvious. She opened the door and handed me the bolt cutters.
“Good thing you bought these.” I took them, not saying anything
back. “Are the garbage cans empty? Why do you think your dad put
this up?”

I probably should have tried harder to keep my
frustration from misdirecting to her honest questions but I was too
irritated when I answered, “I don’t know why, Sarah. The whole
thing fucking pisses me off. Each one is filled partly with mud and
gravel. They are all heavy as hell. I’m sure he was trying to make
it hard for a stranger to turn down the road. But the chain? Jesus
Christ… give me a few minutes to free enough of them for us to get
through. I’ll wave you out if I need help moving the damn
things.”

“Okay, sweetie. Just calm down. Listen to me -
we are here
. We’re here so that’s all that matters. A couple
more minutes won’t make a difference when we’ll still be up to the
house before the sun goes down. Take a deep breath, calm down and
do what you do best.”

My eyebrow rose. “And what’s that?”

She smiled. I’m sure it was because she was well
aware of her talent for diffusing my anger. “Taking care of your
babies… all three of us.”

She gently closed the door as I set back towards
the noisy barrier. I paced back and forth along the line of
trashcans, trying to pick the best starting point. It was
frustrating knowing that if I were to cut the chains in too many
places then it would destroy the roadblock my dad had clearly
worked hard to create. Since we weren’t going anywhere for a while
we would need the security it provided. I concluded that the best
place to sever the line was on the inside of the can I’d opened,
the central point of it all. Then later I could come back out here
and re-secure the thing myself if I had to with another lock.

The rusty lid clanged loudly when I placed it to
the side. I gripped the chain in the center to test how much slack
was there. Raucous rattles sounded throughout each side in the
leftover six links. Any movement caused a loud reaction in the
entirety of this blockade.

It clicked then; I understood the full purpose
of the trashcans and their frustrating arrangement. Blocking the
road was an obvious objective; the noise was another. This was
meant to alert as much as it was meant to delay anything or anyone
that tried to access the road. It was a clever; I had to credit my
dad with that much,

Perhaps it was the rampant paranoia that had
fueled my brain for weeks beforehand, but I was suspicious of how
clever it actually was. My dad had always been a practical person.
I could see him blocking the road if push came to shove. He never
had any qualms with taking any justifiable means for the good of
our family. However, this setup had a level of strategic flair that
I didn’t see my dad bothering with. I told myself that I was being
ridiculous then centered the bolt cutters over the chain inside
then squeezed.

So many loud noises occurred simultaneously that
my brain struggled to process it all. After the click of the bolt
cutters’ bite the chain went limp on each side. It didn’t just fall
in place, but rather, the tension that existed on the line gave it
a little opposing yank. This caused a metallic grinding in every
hole cut through the side of the barrels as the two chain halves
moved a few inches towards the trees they were tied to. Finally the
chains did drop, they smashed against the inner wall, then loudly
slipped out of the center can to smack against the outside of the
two cans beside it.

This single action produced such an
instantaneous chorus of clattering metal that it hurt my ears. It
had the volume of a gunshot with a variable echo. A puff of smoke
caught my attention from the tree line on the other side of the
trashcans.

“What the fuck?” I mumbled.

Then I felt the pain, an intense pain that
overcame all other things. Searing fire radiated from my left arm
where seconds before I felt nothing. It felt like a hot poker had
jabbed into my shoulder. I wobbled on my feet, overcome with the
sudden injury and its unknown origin.

Did I hear a gunshot? The chain was so loud,
but was there a bang too?

A figure completely clad in black emerged from
behind the fading smoke cloud. He was tall, thin and had a very
antagonistic presence. This person pointed a rifle at my face. I
knew it was aimed at my face because I saw the perfect circle of
the gun’s barrel. The gun looked like a weapon carried only by a
SWAT team rushing into danger.

He yelled at me, though I couldn’t tell what he
was shouting over the numbness that filled my senses. My eyes
drifted to the spot that hurt. A mess of blood flowed from my
shoulder dripping all the way down the bolt cutters I still held.
More yelling came. The man yelled but so did Sarah. She appeared on
my other side with the shotgun raised.

“What is this? What’s happened?”

I think I spoke out loud this time. Waves of
dizziness became hard to fight.

“
PUT THE FUCKING GUN DOWN!
” Sarah
yelled.

“Afraid I can’t do that, ma’am!” he barked
back.

Something about this was so familiar. The
voices, the shouts, all of it - I knew it in some way. I told
myself I had become delirious. The lightheadedness took me off my
feet. When I tumbled over my head caught the side of the third
trashcan. Everything went black for a few seconds.

A voice cut through the darkness that enveloped
me. “
NATHAN?
”

The world lit up again as I regained some degree
of consciousness. My name hadn’t come out of Sarah’s mouth; it came
from the man that had shot me. “Holy shit! Nathan!” he exclaimed as
he fell to his knees beside me.

Sarah stood above the man holding the
twelve-gauge shotgun to his head while screaming something. I could
feel another blackout coming and struggled to remain conscious.
Then I looked at his face. Instantly I assumed I was fully
delirious.

“Lance?”

From Sarah’s stance she appeared to be seconds
away from blowing his head off yet he didn’t flinch. When I said
the name aloud she froze, undoubtedly feeling a similar shock. Then
he ripped a section of cloth off one of his black coverings. He
balled it up, pressing it painfully against my bullet wound. “It’s
me, buddy. Stay with me now. You’re lucky I’m a bit rusty with long
range shots.”

Lance looked towards Sarah. She’d dropped the
shotgun to her side, an expression of confused disbelief written
all over her face.

The man smiled with a hint of his notorious
southern charm. “‘Bout time you all got here.”

Sunlight streamed in through the open curtains
across from us. We were on the second floor because every window on
the first was so boarded up that our morning meeting would have
been by candle light. Considering that few clouds were in the sky
on this mid-December day, sitting in the dark would have been a
waste of rare sunlight. Both of us lounged in a pair of old plush
leather armchairs.

I reached for one of the mugs of coffee. The
ambient temperature in the room was low so both mugs had an
oversized plume of rising steam that made them so much more
inviting. My old friend swatted my hand away, tipped a worn silver
flask carefully over each cup, and then passed one to me. One sip
warmed my core magnificently.

“I think this was his office,” Lance explained
while tipping his head towards the little corner desk. Framed
photographs dotted the walls of the medium-sized room. Each photo
was of a young couple from another era. “Don’t think I’ll take the
pictures down any time soon. Doesn’t feel right when this was their
house. I started to check the desk drawers. That’s when I found our
shiny friend here.”

In the first few days after our arrival
everything was explained to us. Apparently, Lance reached his wife,
Della, the very same day that he and I separated on the outskirts
of the university campus inside Richmond. Their reunion was almost
exactly two days past that night when the thirty-third mutation of
the virus ended the world. I was glad that he didn’t need to spend
a night on a cold railroad bridge as I did. We had yet to speak
about our individual experiences after we split, but time was
finally on our side so I suppose we eventually would.

Lance and Della arrived at my parents’ farm the
next day, ten days before the afternoon he sent a bullet through my
shoulder. Lance, Della and my parents retold the story of their
meeting like it was an enjoyable distant memory, regardless of how
little time had actually passed. Apparently, my dad had stopped
Lance at the end of a shotgun when he came knocking. Lance’s muscle
memory that was ingrained by years of training countered Dad’s
hostile greeting in kind. I’m sure a gunfight was mere seconds away
when Della thought to shout, “Nathan told us to come here!” My name
was the code word to safe haven, who would have guessed?

Only two properties connected to the long gravel
drive where the roadblock was erected. The farm was close to a
mile’s drive up while another house sat a quarter of a mile into
the woods. Fencing guarded the property line where my parents lived
then a dense mixture of trees and creeks sufficiently cushioned the
entire area around them both. Mom said she regretted not being down
here enough before the epidemic to get acquainted with the old
couple living in the first house. During the times they did travel
here, there was too much to do preparing for a longer stay to ever
properly introduce themselves. Dad humored her, although I knew he
didn’t share the same sentiments. She’d always been the sweet,
neighborly one in the family.

After three days in the guesthouse that was
intended for my clan, Lance had the idea of securing the other
house off the access road. On the fourth day Della, Lance, and my
dad worked to clear out the dearly departed neighbors then the rest
of the area. They said the old man in the house must have turned in
the first wave and made a messy snack out of his wife. During the
initial entry, the withered blood-caked ghoul had lunged at my dad.
Lance’s quick reaction greeted the lunge with the end of the same
shovel that he had taken from the equipment shed inside the Cary
Street Field. In the commotion the walkie-talkie was somehow
knocked from my dad’s belt into a puddle of gore and had ceased to
work from then on.

Once the second house was clear, Lance and Della
decided to move there. Our meeting over spiked coffee took place on
the seized property. It was the first time we’d both been away from
the others for any extended period. I wondered why they decided to
take over another house rather than make long term arrangements on
the farm. From what I could tell, staying on the immediate property
had worked out and it kept everyone closer together.

“Why the move?” I asked. “I’m sure we could have
worked out everything on the farm.”

“Della and me, well, we felt terrible sleeping
in the guest house,” Lance explained in his suppressed Texas twang.
“It never felt right to stay there. Your folks were more welcoming
than anyone else on the damn planet would be. But every day I knew
they didn’t want us in that house. Truth was, it wasn’t our place -
it was yours. We got to hear about you and the kids over every
meal. I’ll admit, I started to doubt that you’d show. Almost two
weeks is a helluva long time with the shit going on out there. To
them, though, it didn’t matter one bit. They knew you’d get here no
matter what.”

They had worked together to make the two
properties safer as a whole. The trashcan wall was Lance’s
idea.

“I tried to make it a hassle for anyone to get
past. I filled the cans with gravel from the creeks. I wasn’t going
to have a gust of wind knock them over. Or, if some random dead
asshole bumped into it then he’d keep on movin’ instead of pushing
past,” he boasted.

“Why the chain, though?” I complained. “Those
things were heavy enough as it was. Did you have to chain them
together too?”

“It wasn’t meant to hold them up, dummy. Each
trashcan had a good sixty pounds of gravel and mud in it. The chain
was supposed to make it noisy. If someone tries to get in here I’ll
be damned if they do it without me knowing.” His boisterous
confidence hadn’t changed one bit in the two weeks we’d been
apart.

“Taking bolt cutters to the middle of the line
was a dick move, man,” Lance said dryly.

“Shooting me in the fucking shoulder was a dick
move!”

He roared with laughter. “You’re never going to
let me live that down, are you?”

“How would you feel if I shot
you
?” I
pointed accusingly, forgetting the ache in my arm that my mom had
stitched with a sewing needle.

“Fine, you’ve made your point. Honestly, I
didn’t recognize you,” Lance teased. “That scruff on your face
popped up fast enough that you’ll be a Sasquatch by Christmas. You
also lost a lot of weight in a short time. Where did the fat ass
that I abandoned my post with disappear to?”

Our laughter shifted towards melancholy. For me,
and I assumed for Lance, the last part of his joke unearthed
memories of our first sin on a dreadfully long list of wrongs. I
thought about what became of the people we abandoned at police
headquarters often, always wondering if any of them had made it out
alive or if the sealed building became the tomb we feared it would
be. If not for the draw the location, and the people inside, had
for the city’s newly infected populace, I highly doubt we could
have made it out. So many of the undead were pulled towards the
place that we saw a fraction of what otherwise would have roamed
the campus grounds.

We sipped from our mugs in silence for several
minutes.