The Darkest Place: A Surviving the Dead Novel (30 page)

My eyes tracked the rope across the room to where a portly, middle-aged man lay slumped against the wall. A shotgun lay at his feet, and he clutched a hunting knife in his left hand. A quick glance around the room told the story of what happened.

The infected woman’s bound hands were secured to an eyebolt driven into the floor. A short length of rope allowed her to move halfway toward the entrance, but no further. Flies buzzed on smears of blood and scraps of bones scattered across the bare plywood flooring.

There was a picture on the wall next to me of the two people when they were alive. It looked recent. They were standing on a pier, the bright sunny ocean behind them, holding cocktails and smiling at the camera, arms around each other’s shoulders.

“Let me guess,” Blake said behind me. “The wife got infected, and the husband was keeping her alive in here. Feeding her.”

“Feeding her what?” Dad asked.

I bent down and examined a few bones. I recognized the shoulder blade and leg bones of a wild pig. “Looks like he hunted for it.”

After poking around a little more, I moved aside a coyote skull and came across an adult human femur still connected to the hipbone by dried black tendons. Disgusted, I kicked it away. “And it looks like he wasn’t too discriminating about what he shot.”

My father looked across the room at the dead man, his filthy shirt dotted with at least a dozen bloody 5.56mm holes. From the look on his face, any pity he might have felt for the man had left town on its fastest horse. “Sick son of a bitch.”

“It gets worse,” Blake said, standing over the eyebolt. He reached down and picked up a frayed end of rope. “Looks like when he knew he was done for, he had just enough left in the tank to cut his wife loose.” Blake dropped the rope and stepped away. “He turned her loose on them.”

Dad looked down at Farrell. “Does that about cover what happened here?”

The young sergeant did not look up, just nodded, eyes fixed on the dead infected woman. Next to him, the bitten soldier held his arm to his chest, rocking slowly back and forth, face pale white, lips blue, eyes pressed together and streaming tears. A steady litany of whispered curses issued from his mouth, repeating to himself how fucked he was.

My father looked at the bitten man, then at Farrell, and then with the sudden, blinding speed he was capable of when roused to anger, he gripped the bigger man by the shoulders, lifted him to his feet, and slammed him against the wall.

“What the hell were you thinking letting your men drink, you idiot?” he roared. “What if they had been focused? What if they had been paying attention to what they were doing? None of this would have happened!”

Farrell’s face twisted in anger, the reptilian mercilessness I saw earlier returning, and he tried to struggle out of my father’s grip. His struggles quickly ceased when Dad’s fist slammed into his breadbasket with the force of a battering ram. Farrell let out a surprised
OOOF
and doubled over, giving my father the opening he needed to run him across the room and slam him head first into the opposite wall. The sergeant hit with enough impact to shatter the wood paneling, his legs going limp beneath him. Dad snatched his sidearm from its holster and reared back for a pistol whip, but I got to him first and lifted him bodily.

“Dad, no. For Christ’s sake, calm down before you kill somebody.” He went stiff as I carried him from the room, but offered no resistance. I put him down in the kitchen and held his shoulders while he took deep breaths, eyes closed, the redness in his face slowly receding.

“Sorry about that, son,” he said finally, holstering his pistol. “Kind of lost it for a minute there.”

“Yeah, you think?”

He laughed shakily and wiped a hand across the back of his neck. “Think he’s gonna be all right?”

“Farrell?”

“Yeah.”

I shrugged. “Probably. You should go back to the Humvee, though. Alvarado will be here any minute. Let me and Blake do the talking.”

Dad nodded. “Where’d Mike go?”

Just as he said it, the big Marine came through the front door with a couple of heavy-duty contractor trash bags. When he saw us looking at him, he said, “We still have a job to do. There’s food in that kitchen.”

Dad went back to the vehicle while I stayed behind. Blake helped Farrell to his feet and escorted him outside, then grabbed a couple of volunteers to help him drag the dead body out of the kitchen and into the driveway. Just as they were wrapping him in a sheet, Alvarado stopped out front and practically flew from the driver’s side door.

He walked directly up to Farrell, who still looked a little dazed from the beating he had taken, and yelled, “What the fuck happened here?”

The sergeant explained. Alvarado listened quietly. His face slowly darkened until it was the color of stained mahogany. A single vein pulsed in his forehead. He lowered his voice and leaned in close to Farrell’s ear, and said, “I hope you’re happy, Sergeant. You were responsible for the safety of these men. For training them, for keeping them in line, for making sure they did their jobs they way they’re supposed to. But as always, you slacked off, and half-assed, and treated a dangerous task like it was some kind of a joke. Well, I bet it doesn’t seem very funny right now, does it? Not with one of your men dead and another dying.” Alvarado stepped back and spit on Farrell’s boot. “You’re a fucking disgrace.”

He turned to Blake and me. “You mind taking this piece of shit back to the convoy?”

“Not at all,” Blake said.

“Thanks. When you get there, ask around until you find Master Sergeant Heller and tell him what happened here. He’ll know what to do.”

Blake told him we would. He and I rode in the front while Dad rode in the back with Farrell. Mike stayed behind to help out, saying he would catch a ride back with Alvarado’s men.

No one spoke during the drive.

“So what’s going to happen to them?” Lola asked.

I took a bite of my rice and beans, washed it down with bleach-purified, charcoal-filtered water, and said, “I don’t know.”

For the first time since we had left Canyon Lake, my group was sharing a meal. We lounged in cloth camping chairs around a small fire, the convoy’s vehicles a broad, grimly patrolled circle around us.

Morgan had chosen an empty field about five miles from Boise City to strike camp for the night. The area around us was sparsely populated, and while we heard the occasional muffled crack from the suppressed carbines the guards carried, there were not many infected to bother us.

Dad and Mike had cooked the evening meal while the rest of us drank cheap Lipton tea and wondered how long it would be before such simple luxuries became a thing of the past. The sky above was bright and heavy with stars, the myriad campfires of the convoy helpless to drown out their brilliance.

“I talked to Captain Morgan,” Dad said, and for once, no one giggled. “He took a statement from me. You other three,” he pointed to Mike, Blake and me, “should expect to do the same tomorrow.”

“What did he want to know?” I asked.

“My version of what happened to Farrell’s squad.”

“What did you tell him?”

Dad looked across the fire at me. “The truth.”

Blake said, “What did he think of you beating down one of his squad leaders?”

Dad picked something off his spoon. “He said under the circumstances, he was willing to look the other way. This time. I told him that was fair enough.”

We ate in silence for a while after that, each person too focused on filling the emptiness in their stomach to bother with conversation. My eyes strayed often to Lauren, the dim orange gloom of the fire framing her against the night. She sat next to my father, but despite their proximity, the distance between them was vast. And growing.

Lauren’s face was pinched, the age lines deepened, new wrinkles showing around her eyes and mouth. She had lost weight. Her cheekbones stood out sharply beneath her skin. Her hair was lank and greasy. The circles under her eyes were black as new bruises, the skin puffy from too much crying. Next to her, Dad sat and ate with a desolate sadness lurking behind his confident veneer. There was a tension to his shoulders, he ate too quickly and bounced his left foot incessantly, and every so often, his right hand would twitch in Lauren’s direction, then ball into a fist, relax, and go back to holding his bowl of rice and beans. Seeing it, I felt as if someone had gripped my throat and started to squeeze.

I remembered the time before the Outbreak when our life had been normal, before the infected, and the fires, and the desperation I had adjusted to so quickly it scared me. I remembered our home on the outskirts of Houston, the kitchen, the bedrooms, the living room.

Dad had a recliner in the living room he declared as His Seat. And when he was home, only he was permitted to sit in it. If he caught me sitting in His Seat, he snapped his fingers, pointed a thumb at the ceiling, and said, “Up.”

That was my cue to relocate.

There was also a sofa next to the recliner, and between them, a small table complete with a lamp and coasters. Both ends of the sofa had built-in recliners, and the end closest to Dad’s Recliner was Lauren’s Seat. When Dad got home from work, after dinner, the two of them would watch some stupid reality show, usually involving people singing or dancing or both, and I would sit at the kitchen table, both parents within my line of sight, and read while they sat in Their Seats.

Sometimes I would take a break from my story and watch them. They smiled a lot, told jokes, made fun of each other, and occasionally Lauren would swat my father on the arm and rub the place she had hit, a sensuous gleam in her eyes. I always looked away when that happened, knowing I had at least an uncomfortable half-hour of stifled moans and creaking bedsprings to look forward to when the lights went out.

But that night, in the struggling luminescence of the small fire, the twitch in my father’s hand, the hesitation, was something entirely new. Instinctively, I understood it for what it was.

He wanted to reach out and put his hand on Lauren’s arm. He wanted to intertwine his fingers in hers as he had done a thousand times, but knew the gesture would not be welcome. So he resisted, and kept his eyes down, and did nothing to provoke my stepmother. I didn’t blame him. In those days, it did not take much to set her off. When she became argumentative for no apparent reason, or cried without explanation, or stormed off from normal conversation as if someone had said something horrifically offensive, part of me wanted to scream at her. But another, bigger part of me wanted to hold her, and cry, and beg her to snap out of it.

All men are little boys at their core. There is an enduring place for a mother and father—or at the very least a protector—in each of our hearts. We cling to whoever fills that void, and when the tenuous balance of family, in whatever form it takes, is disrupted, all we want is for everything to be set right again. But sometimes, in the jagged arena of the heart, children fall by the wayside. Especially the grown variety.

*****

Earlier in the day, I had spotted a camping trailer in the driveway of an abandoned house that appeared to be in good working order. The propane and fresh water tanks were both full, the chemical toilet had been emptied recently, and the treads on the tires had plenty of life left in them. Figuring it beat the hell out of sleeping on the ground, I hitched it up to Mike’s truck and brought it along.

It had enough room to fit four people comfortably, so Lauren, Dad, Sophia and I agreed to share it. Mike said he preferred to sleep outdoors, and Blake, ever the lady’s man, had caught the attention of a rather attractive female soldier and invited her to sleep in a tent he scrounged somewhere along to the way. She accepted.

After dinner, Tyrel and Lola went off somewhere to be alone, and Lance wandered over to the other side of camp. There was a forty-something widow he had taken an interest in among the people from the RV encampment. He advised us not to expect him back that night.

“So I guess you’re off for the night as well?” I asked Blake when his soldier friend, Tran according to her nametag, showed up at our camp and politely introduced herself. Her first name was Alice, she had grown up in Bakersfield California, first generation American, family originally from Vietnam, five years in the Army, and was a mechanic of some sort. When I shook her hand, it was strong, firm, and calloused from years of hard work. And she had very nice eyes.

“Yeah, I’ll see y’all in the morning.” Blake gave me a little wink as he stood up and put an arm around Alice Tran’s shoulders. As they walked away into the night, I shook my head and shared a knowing glance with my father.

Shortly thereafter, an aging warrant officer stopped by our camp. In his right hand, he held a large metal clipboard. “Name’s Grohl,” he said, not bothering with military formalities. “I was wondering if you folks might be willing to help out with a few things around camp tonight.”

We shared a round of looks, then Dad said, “What did you have in mind?”

He looked at the clipboard. “We’re short a few people for the patrols, the supply folks could use a few extra hands doing inventory, and … let’s see …” He flipped couple of pages before pointing at Mike. “I understand you were a sniper in the Marines. That correct?”

Mike nodded. “Trained at Quantico.”

“Heard that’s a tough one.”

“It is.”

“Mind taking a shift on overwatch tonight? It’d only be for three hours.”

“Which post?”

Grohl pointed at a telescoping tower rising up from the back of a HEMTT. “Northwest. Shift starts at 2200 hours.”

Mike glanced at his watch. “That gives me forty-five minutes to get ready. Yeah, I’ll help you out.”

“Much appreciated.”

Sophia raised a hand. “I might be able to help your supply people.”

“You have any experience managing inventory?”

“I do, actually. I was an assistant manager at a pharmacy before all this happened. Can’t imagine it’s all that different.”

Grohl wrote something on his clipboard. “Fair enough. Gotta head that way myself here in a minute, so I’ll walk you to ‘em. What about you two,” he wiggled a finger between Dad and me. “Think you can take one of the patrols? I know you’ve had a long day, but even just a couple of hours would be a big help.”

“What do you think?” Dad said, shifting his attention to me. “Ten to midnight be okay?”

I shrugged. “Works for me.”

Grohl made another notation. “Excellent. Come see me at the command tent fifteen minutes prior and I’ll show you where to go.”

“Will do,” Dad replied.

Grohl then glanced at Lauren, eyes flicking up and down, taking in her general state, and said, “Well that should about do it. I really appreciate it, folks.” He turned to Sophia. “If you’ll follow me, ma’am?”

“Sure thing.” She gave me a quick peck on the cheek as she got up. “See you later tonight.”

“Be careful,” I said. “Keep your gun handy.”

She patted the Smith and Wesson on her hip. “I’ll be fine. Worry about yourself.”

“Thanks again,” Grohl said as he turned to leave.

“Glad to be of service,” Dad replied, and watched the two of them walk away.

“Are you going to be okay here by yourself until we get back?” I asked Lauren.

She nodded slowly, eyes never leaving the fire. “I’ll be fine.”

“Come on, son,” my father patted me on the shoulder as he stood up. “Let’s get this mess cleaned up and get ready for watch.”

I cast one last worried look at Lauren and said, “Yeah, sure.”

*****

According to the satellite feed on Grohl’s ruggedized tablet, the area of Oklahoma we were in was a massive, near-perfect grid of interconnected farm land. Many of the squares on the grid were filled with perfect geometric circles that touched the gridlines, but left curving triangles of excess land at the corners. They looked like round pegs in square holes. When I asked Grohl what the circles were, he explained they were from pivot irrigation systems—machines that run on electricity, roll on massive wheels, and spread water from a central point in the field.

Our camp was located in one such field, much larger than the square inch or so it represented on the tablet. The problem Grohl and his troops faced was they had a large area of terrain to keep watch over and not enough people to cover it all while still allowing everyone to get at least a few hours’ sleep.

“I need you to set up here in this area on the southern end of the perimeter,” Grohl said, “patrol between these two points here and here. It’s a lot of ground to cover, so you’ll have to stay sharp.”

“Nothing we can’t handle,” Dad said.

“Do you need radios?”

“Got our own.”

“You good on weapons and ammo?”

Dad patted his rifle and spare magazines. “Good to go.”

“We only have enough NVGs to issue you one set. As for suppressors, let me see here ...” He began to thumb through an inventory log.

“Don’t worry about it,” Dad interrupted. “We have our own.”

“NVGs or suppressors?”

“Both.”

Grohl raised an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

“Yep. I used to work for a company called Black Wolf Tactical. Ever heard of it?”

“It rings a bell. One of those outfits like the Gunsite Academy in Arizona, right?”

“Along the same lines, yeah.”

Grohl scratched at his day’s growth of stubble. “Well that explains a lot. You need anything else from me?”

“Nope,” Dad said. “I believe we’re all set.”

“Very well. Stay sharp out there fellas.”

“Will do.”