Annie shuddered. She was not going to ask what she saw when she and Hughes finally climbed out of the truck. Surely Carol would never forget it, but also she might never want to discuss it. She reached toward Carol, found her hand, and clasped it.
They lay like that for a while, two new friends holding hands in the darkness. It felt good. Annie felt better than she had all day. She even forgot, for a moment, that she was being held hostage by Roland and Lane.
But Roland and Lane seemed like the least of her problems after hearing Carol’s terrible road story. She couldn’t get those images out of her mind.
Carol eventually let her hand go. Annie could hear her trying to get comfortable on the floor. It was impossible, but they both had to try.
Annie missed home so much that she ached. She wanted nothing more than to return to South Carolina even if it was a smoldering ruin. People breathe differently, more deeply, when they’re in the place where they come from. Annie breathed differently in South Carolina. She breathed differently in the whole American South, not just in South Carolina. The South was home. She didn’t like everything about it, but it was the place that raised her. It fit like a dress made just for her. The Northwest felt a little bit off, and a little bit foreign, even before all this happened. Not because there was anything objectively wrong with the Northwest, but because it wasn’t home.
Maybe things weren’t as bad in South Carolina. The virus came from Russia—that’s what Kyle told her, anyway—and it entered the United States in Seattle. So maybe the eastern part of America had more time to prepare. Maybe there were more survivors out there. The government might still even function. It was possible, right? She couldn’t really see how, but she had to believe it was possible.
Annie finally drifted off into a frightening dream world.
She ran down Fifth Avenue in downtown Seattle alongside hundreds of other people with the sound of screams, gunshots, explosions, and sirens behind her. Cars crashed into each other ahead of her. People jumped out of windows and onto the street. Some of them jumped from so high, they were instantly killed when they landed.
She woke up gasping and sweating and felt Carol’s reassuring hand on her shoulder.
“It’s okay,” Carol said. “You were just having a dream.”
When Annie finally fell back asleep, she fled a pack of the infected through a forest.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Parker was pissed. He felt a deep, abiding hatred for just about everybody. He could not fucking believe Kyle had Bobby’s gun in his hand out on the street and didn’t take Roland out. This whole thing would be over by now if he had.
But, no. Kyle couldn’t man up. Nor could Annie, who obviously had a silly girl’s crush on the dolt, inspire him in any way whatsoever to do what any fool should have known had to be done. And now Lane had him and the others locked in the cooler. Kyle couldn’t even do the decent thing and give Parker some space.
“At least they’re down one,” Kyle said.
“No thanks to you,” Parker said.
Kyle said nothing.
Parker couldn’t see a damn thing. He idly wondered what Hughes and Frank were whispering about, but he didn’t actually care. He pulled his army jacket tight against him so he wouldn’t freeze to death on the floor.
“We only need to take one more of them out,” Parker said. “Preferably Lane, but taking that other asshole out would have worked too. You could have done that today.”
“Yes,” Kyle said. “I could have shot Roland. And told every one of those things for miles in every direction right where we are. The water main brought a pack down on our heads when it exploded. There’s no telling how many more surged into the area. And besides, you don’t know what Lane would do if he found himself the last one standing. He might just start shooting.”
“Then shoot back.” Parker wanted to smack Kyle upside his head, but it was dark and he had only a vague idea where Kyle’s head even was.
“Listen,” Kyle said. “We’d be out on the streets with nothing if it wasn’t for me. I was the one who talked Lane into letting us stay here by offering to take everybody up to the islands.”
So what?
“Sure,” Parker said. “We’d be out there and disarmed. Instead we’re
in here
and disarmed and being held hostage. This is better
how
, exactly?”
“At least we’re safe from those things. None of them can get us in here.”
“You hope.”
“I do. You should try it sometime.”
He’d need to do something about Kyle. What, he had no idea. But he had to do something.
He should also try being less of an asshole. Things could only end badly between him and Kyle if they couldn’t learn to get along, but things weren’t going to end any better if Kyle couldn’t get all of his shit in one sock.
Parker was supremely annoyed with just about everyone, but he needed them to survive. He knew that, and he knew it consciously, but he still yearned for freedom from his dumb companions. He especially yearned to be free of Kyle. At the same time he feared dying violently and alone. Out there on his own? He’d be torn to pieces in the howling darkness for sure. He had to figure out a way to connect with these people. He had to.
Sometimes he felt twinges of envy for Kyle’s naiveté. How nice it must be to feel hope in this world, to believe all they had to do to build a new life is sail north. Did Kyle not understand that a person could die now from a toothache? A person could fucking well die from it. The infection could spread to the brain. Sure, they could raid pharmacies for antibiotics, but all the medicine in the world would expire eventually and most of the pharmacies had been looted already. Primitive man’s life expectancy was about thirty. Parker was pushing forty.
He huffed, lay on his back, willed himself to get tired, and failed. He could not switch his brain off. As usual when he could not switch his brain off, he thought about Holly.
He’d been married once. Met his future wife at a trendy café named Spinoza’s in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. It was the kind of place Parker always hated, not only because he didn’t fit in there but because it attracted the kinds of people he wished never colonized his neighborhood to begin with—the young, the hip, the beautiful, and the moneyed. Ballard used to be an honest and slightly gritty place for men who worked the docks, the ship locks, and who made things with their hands. It was never intended for soft people who lived in undeserved luxury and made boatloads of cash clicking away on their laptops.
The only reason he went into Spinoza’s that day at all was because he needed the bathroom. But when he saw a young woman sitting there by herself with her newspaper and a latte, he couldn’t help himself. He decided to order one too and see if he could gin up the nerve to take the empty table next to her.
There was something about her, though he couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Not even after they married could he figure out what it was. She was attractive, sure, but not the most attractive he’d ever seen. She seemed friendly and approachable enough, though he had no idea why he would think that since she was just sitting there reading the paper. There was just something … gravitational about her, like she’d been engineered just for him.
He ordered awkwardly at the counter. He’d never had a latte, a cappuccino, or an Americano. He didn’t even know what they were. But he couldn’t just say “I’ll have a coffee.” They didn’t have regular coffee in those kinds of places.
The pretty woman with the newspaper sat far enough from the counter that she couldn’t hear him fumble his order, and thank heaven for that or he wouldn’t have sat next to her. She looked so peaceful and content, so at ease in the world as she flipped strands of her brown hair over her ear.
He didn’t intend to hit on her or ask her out for a date. He just wanted to enjoy the pleasure of her attention even if it only lasted a couple of seconds.
She sat by herself at a table for two. He sat next to her at another table for two and placed his drink in front of him. It looked like a dessert. He expected it to taste like one too, like a coffee meringue pie or something. Normally he drank plain old coffee, black, but the creamy and bitter whipped goodness in his mug, despite being foofy and gay, was outstanding. Wow, he thought. This
exists
?
“This coffee is extraordinary,” he said.
“Isn’t it?” the woman next to him said. The corners of her eyes crinkled up when she smiled over her mug.
God, Parker thought. I love this woman. He didn’t know why. He just did.
Her name was Holly and she was a regular at Spinoza’s. She had gone to school with the café owners. He told her he was new to fancy coffee and she seemed delighted to explain all the options.
They were so very different, but they were married in less than a year.
He built cabinets for a living. She worked in an office downtown as a paralegal. His friends were working class. Hers were professional. He loved the outdoors. She enjoyed fancy meals out. He drank beer. She liked red wine. Once in a while he embarrassed her when they went out with her friends, and he knew he seemed a little rough around the edges in mixed company, but she loved him and he couldn’t imagine living without her. She had a soft and gentle soul and seemed to appreciate his brusque masculine qualities—she was genetically hard-wired to do so, after all—until one day he hit her.
He didn’t mean to. Really, he didn’t. It just happened. They were arguing about money, which was a stupid because they both made plenty. He wanted a motorcycle and could afford it. She wanted to spend the money on granite kitchen counters instead.
She might have talked him into it, too, but instead she said she was tired of being a slave to his lower-class lifestyle.
He’d never hit anybody before. He looked like the type of guy who had been in a couple of fights, but he hadn’t.
He didn’t hit her too hard. It was really more like a slap. He didn’t strike her with a closed fist, didn’t break any bones, didn’t make her bleed, didn’t even leave a mark that lasted more than five minutes. But he did strike her cheek, and he’d never forget the sound or the look on her face when he did it.
Her entire life shattered in one instant.
She’d never forgive him, not in her heart, and he knew it.
He could not have been sorrier. That slap hurt him more than it hurt her. It sounded ludicrous when he said so, and she screamed that it was the most outrageous thing she ever heard, but it was true. It changed him as a person. It sentenced him to be a different kind of man for the rest of his life, the kind of man who hit women. A domestic abuser.
A wife-beater
. He never did it again, nor would he ever—no, really, he wouldn’t—but he would spend the rest of his days as a man who had once smacked a woman.
Eventually she could look at him again, and a little while later she could talk to him again, and eventually she even had sex with him one last time, but it ended in tears, and at that moment he knew it was over. She never slept with him again. Never even hugged him again. She left a few months later and said she was sorry but she wouldn’t be back. She cried when she left and she even said that she’d miss him, but she was true to her word. She never came back.
That was two years ago. Parker thought about her every day since. After the plague swept the world, he worried about her so hard he vomited.
What happened to her? Was she alive? Did she get bitten? Was a distorted version of her out there somewhere, diseased and warped beyond recognition? What would he do if she came at him on the street baring her teeth? Would he shoot her? Would he smash in her skull with a crowbar?
Would he smash in her face if he had to?
* * *
Kyle was stuck. He didn’t regret anything, didn’t feel like he’d done anything wrong, but at the same time Parker did have a point. Kyle had to admit it. If he’d taken out Roland when he had the chance, they would not be locked up. There was no way Lane could subdue everyone if both his cohorts were dead and Kyle had Bobby’s gun.
Some of those things would likely have heard the gunshot. Kyle and his crew might have to barricade themselves in the store or flee in the truck. But at least they’d be free of Lane.
But then Parker or Hughes or Annie—Annie!—would blame him for bringing those things down on their heads when he knew perfectly well that there were more in the area now due to the explosion down the street. Sure, they could flee in the truck, but they couldn’t take the truck all the way to Olympia. The roads were all snarled. So where would they go? Just drive a few miles, get out and walk, and hope for the best?
So yeah, Parker was right in a way, but at the same time, he wasn’t. Kyle didn’t actually know what he should have done or what he should do next.
He wasn’t one for confrontation and never had been, not even when he was picked on in school. It’s not like he ever
had
to fight back. Only two other kids ever bothered him much. Kyle wasn’t an outcast, but almost everybody got picked on by somebody in school.
A kid named Tim was the first. Tim wasn’t a bully. He wasn’t even all that big or intimidating. Kyle never did figure out why, but Tim just wanted to fight somebody, and he apparently picked Kyle because Kyle didn’t look threatening. Kyle had no fight in him at all and that came across.
So Tim just walked up to him one day between classes out in the hall and punched him in the shoulder. Not hard enough to get himself suspended for assault or for fighting, but hard enough to piss off Kyle and get his attention.
“Meet me behind the gym,” Tim said and narrowed his eyes, “after school’s out today.”
Kyle rubbed his shoulder. It didn’t hurt all that bad. The rubbing was an instinctive response. Kyle realized it made him look weak, so he stopped.
“What for?” Kyle said.
“So I can kick your ass.”
Tim was serious. Kyle could tell. Kyle was baffled. And of course he didn’t show behind the gym.
The next day Tim approached Kyle again in the hallway between classes, but this time he didn’t start swinging. “So, you’re afraid to fight me, eh?”