Behind Our Walls (13 page)

She could hear the voices of everyone converging and questioning. Clive just told them to shut up and get back in the vans. When Sophie walked into the receiving dock, she climbed into the van that he wasn't driving, somewhat put out that none of the group had come after her to make sure she was okay. She hoped that Clive had at least told them that.

To her credit, Nairi looked concerned as Sophie sat down, asking the question with her expression. Sophie shook her head.

"I'm fine," she said as she slammed the doors behind her, barely in time for the driver to pull away and keep up with Clive. Apparently, the instructions to make sure that everyone stayed together had slipped his mind. It didn't matter anymore, she would just have to take it up with Lot. Clive was one of his people after all. She put her feet up on one of the stacks of canned soup and let her head loll back against the mountain of toilet paper.

She fell asleep almost immediately.

-31-

Sophie snapped awake as the van jerked to a halt. She shook her head to the sound of car doors slamming all around her and wiped the sleep out of her eyes. Rowen and Lot stood by the far wall, Clive already talking to them. If he wanted to play it that way, it was fine with her. Clive glanced back over his shoulder as she approached but walked off before she got there. Rowen patted him on the shoulder as he left, saying something that she couldn't quite make out.

"I need to talk to the two of you," she said.

Rowen nodded and crossed his arms over the clipboard he held. "I understand we had a bit of a nutty back there?"

"A nutty? Is that how he described it? Did he even tell you what he did?"

"He said that he was trying to protect—"

"Rowen, he killed three people in cold blood. Just shot them. No warning, no attempt to talk them down, just three bullets to the head."

Rowen nodded but didn't offer any defense. Sophie took a step back and looked the both of them up and down.

"Tell me you aren't okay with this."

"Well, I—"

"
Please
tell me that this isn't what you want out of this community. Is that what we're here for? So we can act as badly as the people we're trying to get away from?"

"Sophie—"

"What do we even need the stadium for anyway? We're just a big gang, like the rovers out there. Let's go and get us some bikes and ride around, killing people and taking whatever the hell we want."

"I understand why you're upset."

"You understand why I'm upset. That's great. I just had to watch three people die in front of me, but at least you get why I'm upset. I've got blood soaked into my fucking clothes but hey, you understand."

"It's not like you haven't seen anything like that before."

"Okay. But in those cases, there was an equal threat involved, like,
other people shooting at us
. We weren't sneaking up on people armed only with a baseball bat, and capping them in the head without even pausing to talk."

Lot finally joined the conversation "Sophie, you need to understand. We have to start re-thinking how we live our lives and how we deal with people."

"I am so fucking tired of people telling me about what I
need
to understand," Sophie said, and looked around the room, suddenly aware of everyone pretending to not be listening. She lowered her voice and tried to reign in her emotions. "I get what you're saying. I understand that we need to protect ourselves. But if we aren't careful, we're going to end up no different than the rest of the world out there, just with some big walls around us." She paused as she suddenly started playing back in her mind the expression on Rowen's face as he spoke to Clive. Almost as if he had been expecting a report back on something.

"Was Clive running a special errand for you?" she asked.

Rowen looked uncomfortable for the first time as he shifted his gaze from side to side before answering.

"Rowen?" she asked again. In the end, Lot was the one who answered.

"I told him to bring back as many guns and ammo as he could get his hands on. He did that."

There were so many different things that she wanted to say, but couldn't even place them in the proper order in her head. "What did you...
why
did you...how did I not notice him loading all this shit up into the van? I guess I know why he peeled off out of the store without waiting for me to catch up." She turned away from Lot to look directly at Rowen. "What the hell were you thinking?"

"You're kidding, right?" Rowen looked taken aback by the question.

"No. What were you thinking? You think guns are the answer to all our problems? What's going to stop someone from going bat-shit crazy in here, dipping into the gun closet and blowing everyone away?"

In her periphery, she could see Lot shaking his head. "The guns will be locked up. We aren't going to just let anyone waltz in and take them."

"Well if they're locked up, what good would they do us anyway?"

"The way Daniel is planning on getting the outer walls set up, we should have enough warning time to get armed up if there's trouble," Lot said. "We're going to start picking out people to be cleared to handle the weapons, preferably those with previous experience. And we'll be running drills to make sure that they can get to the guns quickly, if needed."

Sophie shook her head and began to pace back and forth in front of Rowen before she realized that she was pulling on her own hair, a nervous habit from childhood. She forced herself to stop. She focused on her breathing, let her hands drop to her sides and flexed them in an effort to relax.

"We're supposed to be better than the people out there. We're supposed to be..." She didn't even know what to say to them anymore. Fatigue was creeping in on her and slowing down her train of thought. Rowen looked at her with what looked like pity, but the sight of it made her anger flare up again and her fists clenched involuntarily. "What?" she asked.

"Sophie, I just hope you aren't setting the bar so high, that we'll never be able to come even close to clearing it."

"I don't even know what that means."

"It means that as normal as you may want it to feel in here, the fact is that everything has changed. You may not like it, but the world is as different in here as it is out there, and we have to be able to deal with that. We have to be safe, and it's more dangerous to just sit around, hoping that nothing bad will ever happen to us because of our virtue."

He wasn't completely wrong but it still felt like they were betraying the very foundation of what had brought them together in the first place. They had found a relatively safe place in this stadium, but did that make them entitled to anything more than everyone else?

"I just wish the two of you hadn't gone off and made the decision on your own. We should have talked it over first."

"I honestly didn't think you would object," Lot said. "I know you don't like guns, but I thought you had accepted why they were necessary."

Sophie wasn't sure if he had really expected her to go along with all of this, or if it was just easier to ask forgiveness after the fact. Besides, deep down she suspected that most people would want something like this anyway, would prefer being able to defend themselves. It would be naive to assume that they would never run into trouble, even after the walls went up.

"I know this is a step," Rowen said as he put a hand on her shoulder to get her attention. "I understand that it makes you nervous, but the fact is that we need to be able to handle as many threats from out there as possible. Just because we've made it harder for people to get in here doesn't mean that we can't stop thinking about that."

Sophie nodded and turned away from them. She wasn't convinced, but at some point she had to trust their judgment. Rowen seemed to sense that she was done with the conversation and walked off to help unload the vans.

"What are we doing about lighting down here?" she asked Lot. So far they had been leaving the garage door open to let the daylight in, but it was a risk to not have it closed.

"We got a bunch of hand-cranked flashlights. That'll have to do for now," Lot said. "Daniel can work on it. When the walls are finished, maybe we can get some juice running through this place and get something better set up, but for now..." he trailed off and shrugged as Sophie looked at him. She nodded and turned to head for the corridor.

She found Corrine in the food court upstairs, taking a seat next to her and putting her head down on her arms.

"You okay?" Corrine asked.

"Long, shitty day. Are you settling in all right?"

Corrine nodded. The two of them had chosen adjacent suites but most nights, Corrine was making her way over to Sophie's room, still not comfortable being alone while she slept.

"I just miss them," Corrine said. Sophie nodded.

"I know. Me too. I still catch myself hoping that he'll be proud of me."

"Yeah."

They sat there alone in the silence of the crowd, trying to not focus too much on what they had lost, on the quagmire of things loved, now gone forever.

-32-

Work on the drywall exteriors was done in about a week. They weren't impenetrable, but just having that much of a barrier against the outside world was already starting to make people feel better. The darkness of the building was unsettling though, as they had closed off most of the available outside light. To get them by, everyone had been issued flashlights. That, combined with the minimal amount of light coming in from the field itself was doing the job for the most part. Daniel added large panels of mirrors to the growing list, with the idea that they could take better advantage of what natural light they had and extend it out into the darker areas.

"We can start layering the concrete onto the drywall," Daniel said. "We've had people scavenging through stores for most of this week, and I think I have enough material to get it done. It's not going to look pretty, but it isn't like we're going for the cover of Better Homes & Gardens."

"It's really great work," Lot said as he walked up and down the wall.

"As long as people stay away, it makes no difference to me how it looks," Rowen said.

"How long do you think the rest will take?" Lot asked.

Daniel looked up at the wall, seeming to be calculating in his head. "With everyone pitching in like this, I should be able to get it done in a day or two. It's been raining quite a bit, and the collectors are nearly overflowing, so as long as people don't mind taking it easy on their water consumption for a little while, we should be able to get it done pretty quick."

It was the safest that Sophie had felt since this all started. While the offerings of food were pathetic for now, rice and beans on most days, they still had shelter, some protection and comforts that most people out there only dreamed of anymore. During a recent supply run, one of the married couples stopped at a nearby mall and cleaned out several of the stores. Now, a cluster of offices on the second floor were filled with books for the adults, games and toys for the children. She laughed at the irony that it took the end of the world for them to find what might have ended up being the perfect society. They worked to support and protect each other and had enough of what they needed to make life bearable.

Sophie happened to look up and saw Fiona and Nairi making their way up the ramp, back towards their suite. Nairi had done what she could to help, but Fiona was definitely in the minority of people who just didn't seem to get it. She kept to herself most of the time, and if you caught her on a good day she would just act shy and uncomfortable. If it wasn't a good day, you were bound to be on the receiving end of anything from sarcasm and sneering, to open hostility. Sophie always caught a whiff of something brewing there under the surface, a resentment which would never be shown the light of day but would also never be given a chance to heal. She was torn with how to deal with it. On one hand she wanted to reach out to Fiona and try to be understanding. But she also felt obligated to the community as a whole who, for whatever reason, seemed to be looking to her, among others for leadership.

It had been several days since Meredith told them about the push to establish a committee. Not a governing body, but a select few members that could help in making decisions, keeping thing organized and safe. Sophie rejected the idea but after enough people prodded her to go along, she agreed, and joined the committee along with Meredith, Lot, Rowen and Daniel. She still felt uncomfortable walking around the place, catching glances from people, acting as if she was now supposed to have all the answers.

For now, things seemed to be falling into place. There had been very little trouble, hardly any sign of traffic on the road and what people did pass by took no notice of them. Still, it was hard to not feel the hints of panic, like they sat on the precipice of something much worse and were fooling themselves into thinking that they would ever be safe here.

-33-

Sophie still found it hard to believe that it was already summer, but the sight of the kids playing outside made it impossible to deny. Half the field was now taken up by the community gardens, which were already producing nearly enough food for everyone, albeit in small amounts. During a recent supply run, they had found some goats and chickens, and while she wasn't wild about the smell, it was also nice to occasionally have fresh milk and eggs. Daniel was still working on the electricity, but was confident that they would eventually get there.