“I’ll change whatever I want, whenever I want.”
“Dammit, Denny. I thought you said we would be the foundation for a new world. You’re acting like we’re still living in the old one.”
“You know what?” Denny says. I see his fingers tighten on the ribbed, rubber handle of my knife. “Maybe I am.”
And then he buries the blade in Cage’s stomach, all the way up to the hilt. Cage bends forward. I see his back jerk as Denny gives the knife a thrust and a twist. Denny is laughing as he kills the man. It is the laughter of a madman. When Cage drops to the ground, Denny puts a boot on his chest and twists the knife until it comes out. Cage’s fingers go to the wound. It is the last thing he ever does. I have never seen a man kill another man before. I start to tremble.
Denny leans over Cage’s face. “New rule, Cage. We don’t have a place for people like you.”
Denny turns to me. He puts a bloody hand on my shoulder. I can feel his thumb turning small circles as he presses it onto me. “What about you? Can you make it back to the house, or do you want to spend the night out here with Bethany?”
“I’ll make it back.” I jerk my shoulder from his grip.
Denny laughs. Even in the night I can see the devil dancing in his eyes. “Good,” he says. “We’ve got a big day coming up.”
I can’t even imagine what that could be.
Denny leads me back up to the house. In the distance, I hear Bethany begging for help. It’s help that she is never going to get.
Eight
When we return, the tent village is a beehive of activity. People are talking and moving from tent to tent. The guitar man is running around the people who have returned asking about Cage. The ones who went off on the hunt—because that is exactly what they were doing as they hunted for me and Matt—tell him the last they saw of him he was with Denny. When he at last sees us walking towards the house, he runs in front of Denny and stops, facing him down. Denny does and says nothing.
“Sorry, Denny,” the guitar man says.
“What do you want, Dirks?”
“Where’s Cage?”
Denny points with my knife. It’s still stained with Cage’s blood. Dirks can see this. “He’s out there,” Denny says.
Dirks trembles. “In the pit?”
“You want to help him, you go on out there.”
Dirks looks at the knife and then at the gate. A man with an automatic rifle uses the barrel of the gun to swing the door shut. Denny shouts out to the man.
“Hold on there, Smitty,” Denny says. “We’ve got someone who wants to go out to the pit.”
“Now?” Smitty asks.
Denny looks at Dirks. “Well, Dirks, what’s it going to be?”
Dirks looks at both of us. I think he can see in my eyes that it would be pointless to go out there. He turns and goes back to his tent. Denny lets out a snort.
“Never mind,” he says. “Lock it up.”
I won’t be sleeping in my tent. Denny leads me to a pair of wooden cellar doors on the back of the house. He fumbles through his key chain and finds the one he needs to undo the padlock looped through a bolt and latch. He opens one of the doors and shines a small flashlight at the steps.
“Head on down,” he says.
I have no choice. I go. As soon as my head clears the entrance, he drops the wooden door behind me. What little light there was is gone. I can hear the snap of the latch and the click of the lock above me. I sit down heavily on the wooden steps. They creak.
“Who’s here?” a voice calls out of the dark. I jump, my breath caught in my mouth.
“Matt?” I ask.
“Watch your head,” he says. “Low beams down here. It’s a root cellar. Dirt floor.”
“You come to me,” I say. “You know the space better than I do.”
“Can’t. They’ve got me chained to the wall.”
“Oh. Hold on. Which side of the cellar are you on?”
“To your right. Be easier if you crawl.”
“All right.” I kneel down at the foot of the steps. My knees sink in the dirt. It smells sour down here. Everything is damp. After a few nerve-racking moments, my hand falls on one of Matt’s bare feet.
“Tag, I’m it,” Matt says. He laughs alone and it is filled with pain.
“They took your shoes?”
“Yeah, but I still have all my toes.”
I sidle up next to him. His arms are chained out to either side of his chest. I slide under his armpit and rest my hands on my bent knees.
“What’s going on here, Matt?” I ask.
“How much do you know?”
“Nothing. Except that from the time you and Aubrey brought me here I’ve been drugged, chased, and accused of working for the Guard, whatever the hell that is.”
“Rogue soldiers from up north of here. From the old base.”
“Why would I be with the Guard?”
And Matt tells me all about how there used to be a National Guard training facility in the northwest of the state. It was undermanned from the start of the evacuations. By the time the Guard got around to Kawkawlin, there were even fewer soldiers. Most of the people in town had left on their own. Those that didn’t go hunkered down and turned their basements and root cellars into bunkers, if they didn’t already have one in their backyard. When the Guard arrived, the left-behinds refused to go.
“It was kind of tense for a few days,” Matt says. “And then there was the scuffle out at Erickson’s farm.”
“Is that where the truck sits in the field?” I ask.
“Yeah. Old Man Erickson didn’t want to leave. He boarded up his house, put out some homemade bobby traps he’d read about online. Took some of the barbed wire he had and put it around the house. Like I said, the Guard finally arrived to take us all to the Safety Zone Transportation Center, and when Erickson wouldn’t come out, some of the Guard went up to the house. Three of them died instantly when they stepped on a trip wire. Coffee cans full of nails and gunpowder exploded out of the tree branches. It got crazy after that. Erickson and his kids started firing on them. They had a stockpile of automatic weapons.”
“What the hell? Didn’t they know they just wanted to rescue them?”
“I told you. It took the Guard so long to get to every little town around here that by the time they did arrive, people had gone nuts.”
“Bat-house crazy.”
Matt chuckles. “How frickin crazy is bat-house crazy?”
“Something my dad used to say when he saw things like that on the news.”
“Yeah. My dad said something close to that.”
“You from here?”
“Yeah.”
“Where is your family?”
Matt’s shoulder rises and falls. “Who knows? When the riot at Erickson’s started, everyone scattered. I think my dad might have been shot running to the woods. My dad was the only family I had. Denny was the only survivor in the Erickson house. A bunch of us that were in the truck fought back against the Guard when we saw them dragging Old Man Erickson out of the house.”
“Why did you fight back?”
“They were holding guns on us. We didn’t do anything. All we did was wait for them to come get us, and then they botched it. They shot flash-bang grenades at the house, took up a perimeter. We sat in the truck watching the little war erupt. We screamed for them to stop, to let one of us go and talk to Old Man Erickson. One of the guards hit me in the stomach with the heel of his rifle. That was when things went bat-house crazy.” He tries to laugh, but I hear the anguish in his voice.
I put my head on Matt’s chest. I stroke his back. It shakes under his sobs. I let him flush it out of him. He shifts, pressing his chest against me.
“I wish I could put my arms around you,” he says softly.
I sit up and put my hands on his face. I slide my arms around his back and sit on his lap. “Is this okay?” I ask.
He nods. I can’t be mad at him for the way he checked me out this afternoon, or for the disgusting, impromptu rap he sang about me as we walked through town. Like all of us, he’s had it tough. Even though I had a huge falling out with my folks, I miss the normalcy of our caustic lives. As tough as we try to appear, we’re both still frightened kids. Young adults. If we’re supposed to be rebuilding the world, we’re doing a pretty crappy job of it.
“Don’t go getting the wrong idea,” I say. I can feel him pressing up through his pants. “This is all about keeping us from getting hypothermia tonight.”
“Just sharing body heat?” He kind of laughs softly and shifts under me.
“That’s all,” I say. I can’t really be sure. My face is near his. His breath is on my neck. “I’ve learned a thing or two all these months on the road by myself.”
“So you’ve shared body heat with other guys?”
“And a girl or two. And don’t even think about it, Matt. It’s strictly survival.”
“You’re just lucky my arms are chained,” he says.
I press the tip of my thumb into the soft flesh beneath his Adam’s apple. “Am I?” When I hear him gurgle for air, I release my thumb from his throat.
“Man, Robbie, I was just having fun with you.”
“If you knew what I’ve had to deal with being out on my own—” I stop. Heat or no heat, my body is as rigid as a two-by-four.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” Matt says.
I lay my head against his chest. “I know,” I say. My eyes burn with tears. “There’s a heavy loneliness in the world right now, Matt. Can you feel it? People are just desperate for companionship, to belong, to have someone. It’s why I travel with Yuki.”
“Yuki? Who is he? Or she?”
“She,” I say. My breath comes out heavy. I can’t protect her anymore while I’m locked in a root cellar. “She’s a dog.”
“Where is she now?”
“I don’t know. She attacked Scarecrow Jimmy tonight, then Aubrey shot her with my slingshot and she ran off. I hope she got away.”
Matt lifts his head and presses his face down into my hair. “Aubrey can be a real dick,” he says. “He’s afraid of getting on Denny’s bad side, I guess.”
“Why did he cut off your fingers?” I ask.
“Seriously, Robbie? You have to ask that? People are crazy around here.”
“Like Auntie Alice? I mean, what is up with her?”
Matt’s shoulders rise and fall. He winces a little and I try rubbing his muscles. “She came in with a group of stragglers from over east. It was her, Cage, Dirks, and Shannon, with others. By then, we had taken up here. We felt safer in the town than on the outskirts. Plus, there were all the shops and we could get the food and supplies we needed. For a while, at least.”
“How come she stays in the house with Denny?”
“I guess he likes her. They had a bunch of long talks when she first got here. Things started to change once they hooked up.”
“She seems too old for him.”
“Oh, they’re not together like that. That’s why Denny has the wives.”
“You mean Leslie and Bethany and Tessa?”
“Yeah.” Matt leans his head next to mine. I can feel his breath of my neck. I squirm on his lap, then feel kind of guilty about it. I put one hand on his chest and I slip the other around his back. “I thought he wanted to make you a wife.”
I shudder. “Ew. No thanks.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t have to worry about that anymore.”
“Why? Because I tried to run away?”
“It’s not that,” Matt says. He has something he wants to say, but he holds it back.
“What is it then?” I sit up.
Matt doesn’t say anything for a long time. “We should get some sleep,” he finally says. “I think we’re going to have a rough couple of days.”
“Why do you say that?” He shakes his head. I lean back from him. “Matt? What is it?”
“Please. Let’s just slip off to sleep for a while, okay? I’m really beat.”
I tell him it’s all right and cuddle against him again. I do it, I tell him, because it’s chilly in the cellar and we have no coats or blankets. I want to conserve the body heat we have. At least these are things I tell myself. It’s only been a day, but I feel like I’ve lived an eternity in it. It was shocking enough to see one boy close to my age, but now, to be with a second, it’s as if certain norms remain constant, even in a screwed up world of fungus infected zombies and paramilitary paranoia. I don’t know if Matt ever sleeps, but I certainly do.
At least I think I do. Even the nightmarish world I live in doesn’t reveal as sinister moments as those I dream. My subconscious returns me to the safety of my bedroom once more. I must have really liked living in my parents’ home, because I’m there again, and Lane is in my bedroom again, only he’s not making pancakes. He’s sitting in the old-fashioned rocking chair I painted red one summer. Lane rocks back and forth, his hands squeezing his knees. He’s sitting in front of the window. It’s that twilight time of day. Something keeps bobbing in front of the light as he rocks. His eyes are black spots, and I don’t know if he’s watching me. I know something is, though, because I can feel the eyes on me. In me.
Then I see what I think is a helium balloon tied around Lane’s neck, floating above his head. It’s not a balloon. It’s a spore bulb covered in a billion little eyes.
“Hey, watch this,” Lane says. He pushes his thumb into his mouth and puffs out his cheeks. An air bubble shoots up out of Lane’s head and slides up the stalk to the spore bulb. It explodes. A billion little eyes float around my room on tiny, white, fluffy fronds.