"Do you want to talk about it?" I finally asked. It had been twenty minutes of silence - me following Drake along sidewalks, in between houses and over freeway walls.
We were slowly moving our way east through the b.u.mper-to-b.u.mper cars. The sun was already warming the day, and though I wasn"t sweating yet beneath my layers, I knew that by noon I would be. If I were still alive at noon.
"Do I look like I want to talk?" he grumbled without turning around.
"Hasn"t that happened to you before?"
I accidentally stepped on his foot as he abruptly stopped walking and whirled around to glare at me. "What did I say? Don"t."
Blinking up at him, I tried not to feel offended and nodded. We crossed the rest of the highway in silence, reaching the other side with our hands and knees dirty from crawling over the hoods of cars and trunks. With a final glance back at the vehicles before following Drake down the shoulder of an exit, I wondered how long it would take the cars to break down and rust. A lot longer than it would take their occupants to turn into skeletons. I shivered. The image wasn"t a pleasant one.
When the highway wall dipped down low enough to hoist ourselves over it, we landed feet first into the backyard of a private residence. The yard was an open and weed-filled lot with brown gra.s.s. In one of the corners, there was a large doghouse. Lying on its side, still attached to a thick and heavy looking chain was a dead dog. Something had eaten most of the soft organs out of the body, exposing the dried out ribcage and spine. The animal was so badly decomposed and disturbed that it was impossible to tell what color, s.e.x or breed of dog it had been. I yanked a starched and sun-bleached towel, rigid as a board, off a nearby clothesline and rested it on top of the corpse. After crying over the body, I joined Drake at the side gate, where he patiently waited with his hands in his pockets.
"Is there something wrong with me, that I feel worse for that d.a.m.n dog than I do the men that we killed yesterday?" I nearly sobbed.
Drake reached out and swiftly pulled me into a rough hug, releasing me almost as quickly as he grabbed me and planted a dry kiss onto the top of the head. It was a brotherly act and I sighed in thanks for the gesture.
"No. There"s nothing wrong with you," he said.
We walked through the quiet neighborhood. Me avoiding looking too closely at the yards that looked as if a pet had lived there, and Drake scanning every corner, peering into every window with caution. The warehouse was only two neighborhoods away, according to him.
Whispering so I could barely hear him, Drake pointed to the houses on the south side of the street, "Behind there is a newer apartment complex. It"s the one I told you about, the one they sort of took over. At least, that"s where they were. The warehouse is just on the other side, close to the shopping center. It"s new too. Or it was."
"Are we circling it?"
"Yeah. We"ll go all the way around, come up on the warehouse from the north side where the delivery docks are. I don"t think they"d expect that." He scratched at the side of his scruffy face, lost in thought.
It was a gamble. A risk - but then again there was no right or wrong anymore. Just survival of the fittest. Everything I had been was gone, not much of me would be left in the end. The way it should have been from the beginning. Why not risk what little was left?
Drake stopped just before a major intersection, stepping off the cracked sidewalk to lean against the wall of a three-story office building. I stood next to him in semi-baggy clothes that didn"t quite fit right, my hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. We stared across the street where dozens of medical tents stood, cordoned off from the street by a slew of haphazardly placed military vehicles. Even from hundreds of feet away I could hear the flap of plastic as the breeze moved through the tents with a lazy kind of lull. A separate area inside the barrier was partially obstructed from my view, but a single story tent with a white dome top had a rip down one of its long sides, exposing the contents to the elements.
Stacked on top of each other in tight rows were thousands of white body bags. Just iridescent enough that even from beyond the street and across the parking lot, I could make out the brunette, blonde and occasional redheaded bodies through their milky-colored plastic wraps. It wasn"t the first time I saw a medical quarantine zone but the sheer volume of people sickened me. The way each body, no matter the size, was piled neatly on top of the next, meant there was a system in place on how properly to store infected human remains. Someone with a t.i.tle wrote up a plan, pointed at a pile and said, "That one goes over there". It was depressing and sad and made me want to puke.
"Sure is something, isn"t it?" Drake said in a hushed tone. His eyes were glazed over, like he was looking through the death across the street, rather than at it.
I glanced between him with his stoic and faraway gaze and the parking lot turned military base with a numb feeling. It should hurt to see such a thing - thousands of dead people - hundreds of dead families. It should hurt every time, like a knife straight into the heart, seeing a body bag with a person half my size rotting inside. But it was only a detached and numb feeling. A feeling of "been there and seen that". A c.r.a.ppy feeling.
Drake cleared his throat to bring my attention back to him. "Warehouse is just over there," he nodded down the street, beyond the vacant office building.
I stared at the side of his head, wondering what the story was behind the closed hole in his earlobe. A random thought for a fractured mind, made sense.
"So, when do you want to do this?" I asked, still staring at the tiny hole in his ear where a piercing used to be.
"No time like the present." He grinned the wide Joker smile that creeped me out.
Sighing, I knelt to the ground in a small patch of brown gra.s.s, letting the moisture from the night before soak into the knee of my jeans. Mudding up my pants wasn"t a concern. Being dirty was a normal part of my new life. Besides, the jeans would be easy to replace when needed. Stain your clothes and break a shoelace? Pilfer new ones from the closest mall. Lose your brush and run out of shampoo? Pilfer more from the closest mall. Of course, that philosophy wouldn"t last forever. Eventually even the malls would dry out just like the bones from the bodies under the dome tent.
My pack was full of weapons, handguns, clips and knives of different shapes and sizes. Most of them pulled off the dead men from the day before. My own knife was strapped securely to my leg, just like Drake"s was. A gun was tucked into the back of my jeans, loaded and ready for action. The day before, I didn"t even bother to take one of the long-range rifles. My shoulder wouldn"t tolerate the kickback. Drake was the only one with a rifle draped across his torso like a pageantry ribbon.
All we needed was a little bit of greasy paint to streak our faces and those cool lace-up combat boots and we would fit right in with the thugs we were conspiring to kill. Well, maybe the camouflage paint was a bit much, but the idea struck me as a funny one and I imagined Drake"s face covered in hunter green, mine in black. The image of our thirty-something year old faces in paint was so appealing at that moment that I almost dragged my fingers through the mud and rubbed them under my eyes.
Instead I sighed, doing it over and over, filling my lungs with air as rapidly as possible. Sort of like a swimmer would, right before launching their body into the water for a race. When my head felt efficiently light-headed and cleared of all the gunk that lingered around in there like the day old smell of skunk, I tightened my pack straps and nodded at Drake that I was ready. Of course, all he had to do to prepare was. .h.i.tch his jeans up half an inch or so. Men were easy that way.
"Ready?" he asked, gun in hand, muscles taut and eager.
"Ready enough," I said with a smile. If we were going to die in five minutes, I wanted a smile to be the last expression we shared between us.
CHAPTER twenty-one.
Only one doubt went through my mind before we edged around the corner of the office complex and ran down the buckling sidewalk from tree to tree for cover: If I did die, will Zoey ever forgive me? I could have turned around right then, leaving my morbid and stupid curiosity right there on the street corner and fled out of the city, back south into San Diego. But I didn"t. The crazy inside me had been unleashed.
There was no sign of life outside the warehouse - not even the wind wanted to touch the squatty bushes lined around the building. The little things stood as still as rocks, rigid and dried out like an old skeleton. They seemed like shrubby versions of suspicious garden gnomes to me. I almost expected them to shudder and move out of the corner of my eye and end up five feet away from where I swore I last saw them. They didn"t of course.
We were only a few yards away when the first bullet took off a chunk of the tree I hid behind. Instantly a startled scream flew out of my mouth, taking a good deal of spit with it. I cursed so hard between my clenched jaws that it actually hurt my front teeth. They vibrated in their sockets like hummingbirds strung out on sugar water. My first coherent thought not related to the pain in my mouth was if the shooter had noticed Drake creeping up the street. Since no bullets were ricocheting off the dead cars or shattering the cloudy windshields, I a.s.sumed he was still out of sight.
"Stay the f.u.c.k back!" Someone yelled from the warehouse. The angry and guttural cry sounded like it came from above me, from somewhere up high. I risked a brief glance at the roof and snapped my head back behind the tree trunk after catching the glint of sunlight reflecting off of something shiny.
Another crack and more splinters flew by me. The tree was barely an inch wider than I was and wouldn"t serve to keep me covered for much longer. Something wet trickled down the side of my face, dripping slowly from my jaw. But I couldn"t reach up to feel what it was, or my arm would have been exposed, so I waited, trying to ignore the steady dripdripdripdripdrip sound of what had to be blood landing on the canvas shoulder strap of my pack.
The sun bounced off of a crumpled soda can, causing me to squint against the glare. If it was only a foot closer, I could have kicked it away, toward the gutter. The more I tried to ignore it, the brighter the glare seemed to become and though only seconds had pa.s.sed with it in my peripheral vision, I was sure I would end up blind. With my cheek pressed firmly against the cool, rough bark, there was nothing to do but ignore it.
Struggling to fight the compulsion to step out from behind my tree and launch the can as far from me as my spindly leg could propel it, I heard a hiss from the street and turned my head in time to catch Drake"s hand signal. With my gun out, I nodded and angled it around the tree, firing toward the warehouse, hoping it was distracting enough to keep the guy on the roof from looking down at us. One, two, three, four, five shots rang through the air - cracking through the silence with a deafening thunder that echoed down the street and bounced back around me like a hug. It was just enough time for Drake to disappear from my view, hopefully making it to the next set of cars before more rifle shots pocked the tree. He didn"t hold back. So many rounds had been fired that I was sure half of the tree was blown away. I could feel each bullet as it struck into the trunk, like a knock on the other side. A deceivingly subtle let me in sort of knock.
"Not by the hair of my chiny-chin-chin," I laughed. The sound was foreign. I immediately swallowed what I could of it, chastising my rapid loss of sanity before firing again, stopping only to reload with a full clip.
"Come out, come out, wherever you are," I yelled in the most annoying singsong voice I could.
The answer came in the form of more cursing from the rooftop and another round of bullets into the tree. I started to giggle, that last bit of reason slipping away from my mind. I was in a John Wayne movie, dusty, dirty, and shooting at the bad-guys. John Wayne would have a horse though. I had a horse, but I lost it.
The image of Sunny"s remains came to me. Drake had taken me back to see her when I was able to walk without a.s.sistance but not much of Connor"s horse was left. The birds and something with canine teeth sharper than mine had made a mess out of the beautiful and sweet palomino. Tearing her flesh away and scattering her ribcage in a twenty-foot radius around her downed body. My eyes filled with hot tears that stung and p.r.i.c.kled at my eyeb.a.l.l.s like thousands of tiny needles. That was it - the image of Sunny dead on the overgrown golf course that shoved me over the edge of what was left of my reality.
Brazenly, but still mindful enough to use what little speed I had, I bolted from behind the tree, firing wilding at the rooftop through my blurry vision. I ran up the sidewalk toward the waist high utility box that was nearly twenty-five feet away, pausing only slightly to kick the d.a.m.n soda can as hard as I could into the street.
I never did hear it fall.
Kneeling behind the utility box, I was finally able to touch my face. Just as I expected, my hand came back sticky with bright red blood. It p.i.s.sed me off even more, and I popped up to fire the gun, catching just a glimpse of Drake closing in on the side of the building. He was crouched down, running full speed and slammed into the wall with enough force that his feet slid out beneath him and he landed on his a.s.s.
It was the last time I saw him outside. Ten painfully long minutes of cursing, yelling and name-calling, that reminded me of playground bullies, and random rounds of back and forth gunfire went by until my legs began to cramp from the squatting and kneeling. Plus, by then I was bleeding from more than my head.
After a long moment of silence, I screamed myself hoa.r.s.e, letting the wind take my voice up and away from me. "Did you give up already, a.s.sholes?!" No one answered. No shots, no attempts to debase my s.e.x or slurs of frustration carried down to the sidewalk. With a quick look above me, the roof seemed momentarily still - vacant. And then the sound of m.u.f.fled gunshots sang again.
Drake was inside.
I believe there are only a handful of reasons to run so fast that your knees come higher than your hips: when you are running from something bigger and meaner than yourself, or when a gold medal is at stake, of course. But there"s another reason - when you need to get somewhere so fast that you know your heels can"t afford the split second of time it takes for them to roll off the ground. So you sprint with only your toes gripping and moving you forward. That"s how I ran the rest of the way down the sidewalk. Not even slowing down, before my shoulder slammed into the door Drake went through.
The door opened with a bang and inside I flew, but I wasn"t expecting my feet to instantly lose traction. After sliding across a puddle of something slippery, I crashed face first into a chain-link wall. Bouncing into it with such force that I was flung backwards like a deployed rubber band into the sticky mess again, my feet failing me, slipping out and to the side. My a.s.s will never forgive me for how hard it hit the ground.
"Unf," I exhaled, coming to a stop after spinning clockwise on my backside. The pistol was gone, catapulted somewhere away from me during my ungraceful entrance.
The chain inside the room rattled loudly, taking nearly a full minute before the links stopped jiggling. By then I had mostly caught my breath, the labored sound being the only thing that whispered through the dark room. It was some sort of utility s.p.a.ce or a side office - I wasn"t sure. But the blood was fresh; it was still warm and uncongealed. An enormous amount. A fatal amount. Enough blood that no one could"ve walked away and lived more than a mere handful of seconds.
The rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire snapped my head up and to the right, through an open doorway that led into a much larger - and darker room. Crawling in an awkward slipping motion on my hands and knees, I slid to a stop just before the doorframe, my knife in my right hand. Craning my head cautiously into the next room, there was only a shadowy aisle upon aisle of bulky boxes and pallets. And a shoe. My wet, left hand stuck to the linoleum floor as I crawled, using the knuckles of my other hand to balance myself. The shoe was connected to a foot, a leg, a body. It wasn"t Drake.
Not realizing I was holding my breath, a gust of air whistled out between my lips. There was a slash across the man"s throat and several b.l.o.o.d.y holes dotted across his torso. Drake was using his knife, stealthily making his way through the building. Just as planned. The image of him with a b.l.o.o.d.y bandana tied around his forehead, his face streaked with mud and paint, came back into my mind and before I knew what I was doing, I dragged four of my b.l.o.o.d.y fingers across both cheeks - one finger down my chin and neck and wiped my hand dry on the thigh of my jeans.
It was war, d.a.m.n it. Why not look like a f.u.c.king warrior?
Two more bodies - both slashed with a blade. Several more bursts of rifle fire, handguns, screams, shouts, lots and lots of cursing. I followed the trail, sneaking glances up and down the aisles, looking for a sign of life. Looking for the women. Drake said they were kept there.
My daughter hated to wear shoes. Everywhere she went she had naked, dirty feet. The sound of her walking across our house would slapslapslapslap against the hard floors. It was an organic sounding step I always recognized as purely hers. So, when a similar slapping of bare feet reverberated in the darkness, I knew whoever was running toward me was barefoot, which was odd.
I quickly ducked down the nearest aisle with my blade held out in front of me like a flashlight and waited. The slapping sound slowed then stopped completely. Whoever it was, they knew I was close. The blade glinted from the pale reflection of something and I tilted it, struggling to find the source. Peering at the knife with my head down, I almost didn"t notice the air change as something long and metallic whooshed over the top of my head and slammed into the metal frame of the aisle. The shelves beside me throbbed loudly from the impact and I scuttled backwards, tripping over a large box and landed on my backside for the second time in five minutes.
The barefoot slapping resumed, this time running away from me - toward the side door. After scrambling to my feet, I darted around the aisle corner just in time to see the shadow of a young girl with flowing hair dart into the entry room, disappearing into the light. Freedom.
The warehouse - a behemoth of a structure creaked and groaned as if preparing to swallow me in its gut as I pushed deeper and deeper into the shadows. It never occurred to me to pull out my flashlight. An animal instinct in me took over, bending my spine forward so I crouched, curling my hands so they looked and felt like claws instead of fingers. The smallest refractions of light gave my eyes all they needed to see into the dingy s.p.a.ce around me.
Like a bloodthirsty animal, I hunted. Following the sounds of grunts and moans and discovering nothing but a handful of freshly killed men. Until I found it. In the corner of the warehouse was a walled off room - most likely used once upon a time as a break room. A lamp from within glowed softly but the s.p.a.ce seemed quiet - almost too quiet.
The door was ajar just enough to slip my body silently inside without disturbing it. The narrow room was long - stretching a good hundred feet from the doorway. Lining the furthest corner was a row of twin mattresses. Some with ruffled sheets, some naked so that they exposed the dark stains that spread out along the diamond pattern of the beds. The sharp odor of urine and feces made me gag. And the hot, iron smell of blood. Thin sprays of blood decorated the walls, still dripping downward in places. I gaped in shock at the bottom of the furthest wall where a woman with matted hair, that might or might not have once been blonde, lay in a crumpled heap of chopped up limbs - intestines and brain matter spilling out around her like a gutted fish.
My stomach lurched but didn"t have time to do more than that before gangly arms jumped out from behind the door and slimy fingers coiled around my neck. Creative curses words flew out of my mouth as the knife clattered to the ground and spun across the room. We struggled against one another, falling to the scuffed linoleum and rolling around until we were fused together - a tangled mess of scratched, bleeding and trembling limbs.
Stringy hair caught in my mouth and I spat out the sour strands in a panic before they became stuck in my throat. One of us kicked at the table that held the battery operated camping lantern. When it crashed to the ground, it rolled away from me, stretching the light in waves over the walls, letting in the shadows. When a pale face came close to mine, I jerked my forehead into it, feeling something crack and my attacker screamed - a high-pitched cry that only a woman can make. Wiggling a knee between us, the greasy hands left my neck. I kicked at the girl"s soft midsection, sending her flying into the blood-streaked wall, landing just inches away from a severed hand.
Scrambling from her, I pushed myself back until my shoulder blades. .h.i.t a metal filing cabinet. My left shoe had come off and my backpack was lying on its side by the door, one of the straps ripped.
"Jesus," I muttered, sucking in air, pressing my back as far into the cabinet as my skin would allow.
She moaned - the crazy lady. When she stirred I flinched as if struck, denting the metal drawer behind me with my head. Instead of getting up for another attack, she curled into a ball and began to sob. It was an eerie sound in a s.p.a.ce as large as the warehouse. The cries drifted in and out of the aisles with a strange kind of ebb and flow, like the building itself was breathing her sorrow.
The smell hit me again. It was the scent of dirty living bodies, s.h.i.t and urine mingling with fresh and rotten blood. This was where they were kept - the women. In a dungeon, in squalor - left to rot, die, and be used however the men saw fit.
Raising a shaky and bleeding hand in front of me, and speaking as soothingly as my damaged throat would allow, I said to her, "I"m not here to hurt you." The simple statement was absurd even to me, especially after punching, slapping, scratching and kicking the small yet surprisingly wily woman clear across the room.
A holler boomed outside, sounding faraway but dangerously close at the same time, and the woman"s sobs cut off abruptly. We both stayed frozen like that. The girl curled in a tight ball, hands clamped around her mouth, me with my arm projected in front of my body, fingers splayed open to reveal an empty palm. We waited. Listening to each other"s hushed and erratic breathing.
"Riley!" Drake"s voice boomed again.
"Drake!" I squeaked, causing the woman to jerk. "In here," my voice wavered. "Drake!"
Every muscle in my body protested as I dragged myself toward the door, flinging it all the way open to look out into the darkness. Something rustled behind me and I braced for the woman"s hands on my body again but instead she had retreated deeper into the room, hiding in the shadows.
"Where are you?" Drake hollered, his voice closer but still not close enough.
"Here, the far corner...over here!"
He found me resting on my forearms, my hand freely bleeding from a bite wound, my face b.l.o.o.d.y and my arm leaking a dark amber color. My clothes were soaked with the blood of the first man Drake had killed.
"Holy f.u.c.k!" he breathed, dropping down to his knees to pull me into his arms. His face was splattered with red droplets, his dark clothes soaked in the same wet sprinkles.
"Fine," I mumbled, "I"m okay."
"Like h.e.l.l," he lifted me to my feet and snaked an arm around my waist to hold me up.
"My shoe," I said.
"Huh?"
"I lost...my shoe."
He blinked, his eyes watering. And then his chest heaved into mine as he began to laugh. "You lost a f.u.c.king shoe? That"s it. That"s all you have to say?"
My body swayed in his grasp as I looked down. That"s when my mind finally broke, when I took in the pathetic sight of that white, socked foot. Not many people remember that moment - the very second when their reality finally leaves them and the hysteria walks in - loud and proud to be there.
I laughed so hard it hurt. So hard in fact, that tears flowed down my face, leaving clear tracks through my sticky finger painting. I laughed until the only pain I felt was a sharp st.i.tch in my side that threatened to separate my muscles from my ribs. Drake held onto me as if he feared I would run away and we laughed and bled against each other until a scared voice interrupted from just behind us.
"Riley...is it really you?"
CHAPTER twenty-two.
It wasn"t supposed to happen. I mean, not really. Finding Mariah was a dream; a fantasy I clutched to in order to stomp some of the survival guilt back down my throat. Yet, there she was standing before me. Battered, used up and broken - but alive.
We stared at each other in the poor light, recognizing only our voices. Drake"s arm was still wrapped tightly around my waist but even with the support, my knees threatened to buckle beneath the weight of my body. It was actually her.
"Mariah?" I squeaked.