Authors: Jesse Petersen
“Well, he’s likely right. Anyway, I see another car coming, gotta concentrate.” Smith turned away. “’Night, Sarah.”
“ ’Night.”
I made my way through Gate 2 and joined David. He gave me the same questioning look I’d seen from a distance.
“What up?”
I shook my head. “Smith said that others were talking about ‘different’ zombies. Maybe bionics?”
David rolled his eyes. “C’mon. We didn’t see anything
different
today. It’s just freaked-out talk. Hell, I wouldn’t put it past Jimmy and some of the others to even start that shit. It makes his goods more valuable if other people are too afraid to go out and find their own supplies.”
I nodded. That made sense, actually. Jimmy had been a grifter in his past life, why not now when it was so much easier?
“Maybe you’re right,” I said as we walked down a sloping hill past what were once parking garages but now were flattened, twisted hulks of concrete and wire. “And there’s always the fact that it’s been a few months since the initial outbreak and people naturally have to scare themselves all over again.”
“You’d think they’d have enough to be scared about,” Dave said, trailing off as we entered the half-collapsed stadium itself.
We’d been staying here on and off for over a month now, but every time we came in it gave us pause. The makeshift camp held about five hundred survivors. I have to say, it was pretty well organized for being one of the biggest camps we’d seen. Some other camps had become a study in the worst of the Old West, with gunmen running the show, crime out of control, and people too afraid to speak out for fear they’d be left to the zombies as “punishment” for nameless offenses.
But here in New Phoenix they had formed a semblance of a government, a system to distribute supplies, and a trade market where one could haggle with anything from extra rations to grandma’s silver (though rarely one’s
own
grandma’s silver). I guess that was all thanks to sensible people like Smith and some of the others who were in charge of this place.
We were lucky, but still, the stench of human sweat and waste was overpowering until the nose got used to it. And the people were tired, gaunt, and afraid, even if they tried to hide it. That was why we took our chances at least half the nights of the week and stayed outside the camp. It was just too hard to watch how low humanity had sunk in only a few months.
I blinked to keep sudden, always unexpected tears from falling and forced a smile. Someday this would get easier. It had to.
Didn’t it?
“Come on, let’s get dinner,” Dave said softly as he took my hand. We didn’t really talk about our feelings on the subject of the camps, but I knew him well enough to know it bugged him, too, no matter how jaded he pretended to be.
We weaved into the barracks area and grabbed some mismatched plates and cutlery before we got into line for chow. Swill. Whatever. Fresh food had vanished a long time ago, though you did sometimes scavenge your way into an orange grove or apple tree, which was always a nice surprise (and a valuable one here in camp).
Same thing with meat. Every blue moon you found a random cow or chicken you could actually catch to eat, though I guess that would end soon enough. Some History Channel thing about the end of the world had once said domesticated animals would die off pretty fast without people to make their lives easier (or harder). Stupid History Channel hadn’t said much about how long we
humans
would live in a similar scenario.
But for sure the convenient little plastic trays with farmed meat wrapped in Saran Wrap were already a thing of the past. In the camps, we had canned goods, dried things, and sometimes not a ton of that. The cook on duty shoveled some beans onto my plate and a stale Pop-Tart (blueberry from the looks of a fake azure icing) and motioned us on our way. I sighed as we took a seat in the cafeteria tent and started to pick at the grub listlessly.
I was pretty fully into my funk when I looked across
the way and saw a little girl, probably no more than five, who was eating her Pop-Tart with enough gusto to make me smile. She smiled back and revealed teeth tinted blue from the icing, then dug into her beans.
The woman who was with the child just ran her fork through her food. She looked drawn and tired. She was probably a “camp-y” as we called them, people who had only lucked into survival of the initial outbreak, but hadn’t actually learned to take care of themselves. Once camps were established, they stayed in them full-time and never ventured past the gates into the new outside world.
After such a long time of being penned in, they had a look about them. Actually, it was a lot like those cows the History Channel said were doomed.
The woman glanced down at the girl and her exhaustion seemed to fade as she smiled. They didn’t look much alike—in fact I doubted they were related. It was entirely possible they had just found each other in the camp and formed a makeshift family right here. It happened a lot.
I was about to offer the child some of my Pop-Tart when there was a ruckus on the other side of me. I glanced over to find three big guys sitting down at the bench down the way. They were all talking at once as they slammed warm bottles of beer down beside their trays.
“Bigger than normals,” one of them grunted. “With fangs.”
“Ha!” another one said with a shake of his head. “I hear they can eat a man’s head in two bites. If you think zombies are bad, they say these are worse. They might even be smart enough to storm the camp someday. Like a brainless army. Wipe us all out, that’s what they’ll do.”
I glanced at the little girl and found she had huddled
closer to her mother, turning her face into the woman’s chest, though the mother looked no less terrified by the overheard conversation.
“Hey!” I barked to the men. “You’re scaring the kid.”
The three glared at me for my interruption, but then one of them actually looked at the child and saw his foolishness was traumatizing. His expression softened and he shook his head.
“I’m sorry, honey,” he said to the little girl. “We’re just telling stories.”
She didn’t look convinced, nor did her mother as she gathered up their trays and moved off to a quieter corner.
“Smooth,” Dave grunted as he shoveled the last of his beans down his throat.
The guys had the sense to look a little chagrined, but then they slid down the bench across the table to be closer to us.
“You’re David and Sarah, right?” one of the younger men asked with a blush. “The Zombiebusters?”
David arched a brow my way as if to tell me, “I told you so,” and then he nodded. “That’s what the van says.”
The men exchanged glances, apparently impressed. And I admit, my chest puffed out a little at the attention. I guess on some level I
was
more Paris Hilton than Maggie Gyllenhaal. So sue me!
“What have
you
heard about the special ones?” the same guy who had apologized to the little girl asked, but this time in a lower tone.
“C’mon.” Dave rolled his eyes. “You guys are too old for fairy tales.”
“They aren’t fairy tales, man!” one of the men insisted. “This shit is real!”
Dave shook his head. “So I guess one of you has actually
seen
something out there beyond the normal, average zombies? Yourself, I mean.”
That stopped them. They exchanged looks between their group and then the biggest one shrugged. “Uh, no.”
“Let me guess. The people who told you this shit are the same ones who talk about the Midwest Wall and the government operatives who are coming to save us all just any old day now?”
I blinked at his harsh, sarcastic tone. These guys deserved his censure, don’t get me wrong, but Dave had become pretty cynical since the outbreak. He’d gone from happy-go-lucky gamer to a hardened fighter.
He no longer believed anything anyone said about a place that was still safe or that anyone was eventually coming to fix this plague. And he didn’t just dismiss pumped-up assholes like the ones sitting across from us now. Even if
I
mentioned the possibility of such stuff, he cut me off with a wave of his hand and a brusque change of subject.
But I have to tell you, even though I’d seen the same things he’d seen, been through the same shit he’d been through… I still held on to the slender reed of hope he’d managed to kill in himself.
I mean, it was
possible
They (whoever They were)
had
built a wall to separate the West from the East, a way to protect half the population from the outbreak, and if
They
had made the virus, or whatever it was that had started this nightmare, that
They
could fix it someday.
Right?
“Or maybe the ones who told you about ‘different’ zombies were the same ones who go on and on about
cures and scientists?” Dave continued with a humorless laugh.
“I heard there really
are
some scientists working on the cure,” the medium build of the three guys said, though he sounded less certain than he had when they all sat down. “Maybe even in protected labs right here in the West.”
Dave let his fork hit his plate with a clatter. “Pipe dreams, boys. You should know better by now. What we can trust are the things we can see. Weapons, the camps, a vehicle that still has half a tank of fuel. That shit is real. Everything else…” He waved his hand in the air. “Illusion. Like Santa and the Tooth Fairy.”
The men shifted uncomfortably and Dave returned his attention to my plate.
“Done?” he asked.
I ate the last few bites and nodded. “Yeah.”
“I’m beat. Let’s find a tent and call it good.” He grabbed my plate and my hand, gave the now silent and sullen men a quick nod, and we took off toward the exit.
As he set our dishes into an overflowing tray, I gave him a side look. “You know, there
may
still be some good in the world. I wish you wouldn’t give up on that idea entirely.”
He didn’t answer as we entered the tent city area of the camp. A few hundred tents, scavenged and traded by survivors, were set up in long rows that repeated and repeated out in front of us. There were everything from small child-sized ones with Dora the Explorer’s tattered, stained face on the outside, to orange ones a family probably once took out into the mountains for a weekend, to military-grade outfits that slept ten or twelve people.
Dave paused as he scanned a sign-up sheet by the sleeping area for a tent that had two cots available. Once
he had found one and had marked it as taken, he began steering me in that direction.
I figured he wasn’t going to respond to what I’d said, but as we ducked into the tent he’d signed us up for (a four-man sleeper), he turned toward me.
“Look, it’s not that I have no hope. I believe there’s plenty of ‘good’ right here. And we’re doing okay, right? The infected are a lot less active toward us now, and we’ve got a pretty fucking good system for killing them. We’re together and that’s what matters to me.”
He hesitated and here came the
but
.
“
But
I have no illusions that all that bullshit about a future without these monsters is going to happen. They wiped out the entire West in about two weeks, Sarah. There’s no way they could be stopped. Not by a wall or a scientist toiling in some borderline cartoon lab. I just can’t waste too much energy praying and looking for it.”
I stared at him, uncertain how to respond when he laid out a future for us that held nothing but faint reassurance that we’d survive, but never get back to any kind of normal life.
Luckily, I didn’t have to answer, because at that moment another couple entered the tent to claim the other two cots in the room. I forced a smile because we knew the two of them a little and liked them even more.
Josh and Drea, who had found each other a few weeks after the outbreak (though they were so perfect together that you’d never know they hadn’t been together for ten years). They were about our age and shared a similar and rather snarky sense of humor with us. We had exchanged some zombie-killing stories that had left us sobbing with laughter.
“Hi guys,” Josh said with a broad smile you hardly ever saw on a survivor. But his good humor was somehow still intact even after the hell of infection and death. “We saw your names on the sheet and figured we’d share a tent tonight.”
Dave forced a quick smile, but I thought I saw a little relief in his eyes. Like he didn’t really want to talk to me about the unknown future anymore.
“So you guys hear anything new?” Dave asked as he took off the backpack he’d grabbed from our van and started laying out our blankets and inflatable pillows for the night.
Drea shrugged as she smoothed pieces of her pixie-cut blond hair out of her pretty face. “Naw. Just the usual. Death, maiming, destruction, killing the walking dead. You know. Same old, same old.”
“Well, TGIF, right?” I laughed.
“Is it Friday?” Josh asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I lost track months ago.”
We all grinned, even Dave, and then Drea asked, “Did you see you have a message on the board?”
I looked at Dave. Normally we checked the big tack board in the center of the camp as soon as we got in, but tonight we’d both been distracted.