The Living Read online

  Beyond the fence was the inner perimeter, a long row of sandbags roughly twelve feet distant. Each corner of the compound was protected by a pair of .50-caliber machine guns, spoils of a long-ago raid on a National Guard armory north of Omaha. Beyond that, another wall of stone and brick, patched together over the years. Razor wire lined the tops like a deadly Mohawk.

  Dozens of dead tractor-trailers jutted out from the loading docks on the east side; they looked like extinct parasites that fed on the retail blood of this giant host before detaching and carrying newly acquired loads to faraway destinations. They were ghosts now, relics of what had once been. Sometimes Rachel would climb up into a cab and sit behind the wheel; she would think about where these trucks had been scheduled to go all those years ago before Medusa had cast her terrible judgment on the world. Cleveland or Des Moines or Detroit. She would think about those other cities, empty and decaying, and it would make her sad all over again, but it was important she become sad sometimes because otherwise it would mean forgetting about the old world. That didn’t seem right.

  Several loose shipping containers had been converted to living quarters. Lined with thick insulation and supplemented by heated rocks, these containers fought off the winter chill as good as anything else. Some of their occupants had been rather creative in decorating them; Romaine had turned hers into a shrine to Hello Kitty. It was a bit weird, but, hey, whatever floated your boat.

  There were thirty-six of them living here now, getting down to the bare minimum they needed to run the operation and protect the facility from the next attack. Because there would always be another attack. They were the housefly, and out there many flyswatters. One day, one of those flyswatters would come down hard on them. One day, they’d lose the warehouse. Tomorrow. Next month. Next year. It was going to happen. But what else could they do but plan and prepare and when the time came, fight. Fight as long as they could, as hard as they could until they could fight no longer.

  Rachel couldn’t believe they’d managed to hold the warehouse as long as they had. Six times they’d come under attack, and six times, they had been able to repel the threat. Under Harry Maynard’s eye, the Defense Committee worked nonstop shoring up the perimeter, fortifying their defenses, training, and stockpiling weapons and ammunition.

  A gust of wind blew across the campus, whistling in the corridors between the shipping containers, a ghostly howl that made everything seem quieter than it really was. A lone sentry patrolled the outer perimeter; maybe Oscar, but he was shrouded in the morning gloom. In the distance, beyond the perimeter fencing, she could just make out Interstate 80, still pocked with the dilapidated hulls of long-abandoned Corollas and Explorers and F-150 pickups. She took one last deep breath before the twelve-hour shift ahead, filling her lungs with fresh clean air, and then went inside.

  It was blessedly warmer inside, the building still holding the heat of an unexpected Indian summer the previous week, now largely faded. Sounds of a shift ending echoed through the warehouse’s cavernous corridors - a loud yawn, a violent stitch of laughter, folks happy to be headed home after a hard night’s work. Rachel was scheduled for perimeter duty today, so she would spend most of her time outside, alone, and that was fine with her. She’d largely kept to herself lately, the thing with Eddie draining her reserves of patience with people generally. Simply being was physically exhausting. Being Will’s mom. Being Adam’s daughter. Being with Eddie. Even when they weren’t fighting, weren’t arguing, his presence in her life was the hill at the end of the daily marathon.

  Despite the warmth, she kept her coat on as she made her way to the large office in the northeast corner of the warehouse. It was a long walk, taking her past the veggie aisle, the canned meats, past the access panel that led to the network of tunnels under the warehouse. Through the window, she could see Adam Fisher at the desk, working on something or another. He waved her in, his eyes down on his paperwork. As it always did, her heart twisted when she saw him. He was the great optical illusion in her life, looking like one thing while being something very different.

  “Come in if you’re coming,” he said.

  “Good morning,” she said, taking a seat in the threadbare modular chair across from Adam. He looked tired. A few lines in his face she hadn’t noticed before. A bit more gray in his hair. They were all getting older, fast. He’d be fifty-four now. Maybe fifty-five.

  He continued with the paperwork as she sat there, content with letting her direct the conversation. She wondered if he found their interactions as awkward as she did. All these years living side by side had pushed them farther apart like two magnetic filings.

  “How was the night shift?”

  “Uneventful,” he said. “That’s my favorite word, you know. Uneventful.”

  “Good, good.”

  They sat in silence a bit longer, long enough for it to become awkward. All at once, she became aware how superficial their relationship was. Talk about the warehouse, about the night shift, about the day shift, about inventory and supply runs. Talk about anything but their relationship.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Shoot,” he said, exhaling with what sounded like relief she had broken the silence.

  “You ever wonder about it?”

  “About what?”

  “You. Me. Will.”

  She held her breath. It was a question she had never asked before, but Erin’s comment, a week old now, had eaten at her. She did have it good; what she didn’t understand was why she had it good. In all the years since the plague, no one in their community had ever met two surviving generations from a single family, let alone three. It nagged at them, gnawed at them, the itch eternally out of reach. It was discussed late at night, over drinks, in bed after sex, whispered at the cafeteria. The answer was right there and not, like they were chasing nothing but shadows.

  They all wondered about the Fisher family tree’s resistance to the Medusa virus, they wondered if the key to the lock was right here, walking among them buried somewhere deep in their DNA. If they could just figure it out. It drove them all a bit batty, of that much she was aware. It was an extra burden to bear, the very act of knowing Will was possible in a world where it otherwise seemed impossible, where Medusa continued to be the horrible gift that kept on giving.

  Erin’s baby had been the first one born in Evergreen, about five months after Rachel, Erin and some of the other women had had escaped from Miles Chadwick, the man who had started the plague. The future, wide open. Nothing settled. She remembered sitting with her dad, sipping whiskey with him in the hours after the baby’s birth, and it was the last time she had been truly happy. It was the last time any of them had been, she supposed.

  Cole Thompson began showing symptoms of Medusa thirty-six hours after he was born. The fever came first, followed by the coughing and the internal hemorrhaging, and topped off with a symphony of the telltale seizures that accompanied end-stage Medusa infection. Little Cole died fifty-two hours after he was born, and the impact of his death on their infant society had been nothing short of cataclysmic. Then Max Gilmartin told the others about Caroline, another survivor, whose baby had perished shortly after his birth and who had taken her own life in the wake of losing her baby.

  It proved to be a very dark chapter in their lives. The next three babies born in the community succumbed to Medusa as well, and just like that, any hope of a bright future had gone up in smoke. Then a year later, she’d become pregnant, the result of a drunken dalliance with Eddie Callahan, that snake charmer. She couldn’t really write it off to a simple dalliance, though, much as she would have liked to. She had loved him, he revved her engine in ways she hadn’t thought possible, and she kept it secret as long as she could, hell-bent on seeing it through, unwilling to accept that it would be for nothing. Four babies weren’t a big enough sample size to reach any conclusions, right? But her pregnancy turned into a deathwatch all the same.

  People avoided her because they didn’t want to get to
o close, get their hopes up. How many times do you try for the cheese on the electrified plate before you finally learn your lesson? They weren’t going through it again with Rachel and her baby. She’d gone into labor virtually alone on a raw, rainy October morning. With Max helping, Adam had delivered the baby, and they began to wait. She held him nonstop, waiting for him to develop the fever, the terrible cough, waiting for Medusa to make its appearance. As she held him and fed him in those terrible minutes and hours, she fell for him in a way that didn’t seem humanly possible, a flash burn of endless love scarring her forever, and she waited for him to die.

  But he didn’t.

  A week went by.

  No Medusa.

  A month.

  No Medusa.

  A year.

  No Medusa.

  And how they rejoiced.

  The curse was broken. Bad luck, that’s all it had been.

  On Will’s first birthday, they threw him a party. Harry drove to a party supply store in Omaha and got paper plates and napkins and cups with little airplanes and trains and cars. Charlotte made him a cake that actually tasted pretty good. They built a big bonfire and stayed up all night drinking warm beer and eating stale potato chips. They sang a simple song Sophie had written, a tune that sounded great in front of three chords.

  It had been a long time since they had sung the song, and most of the lyrics had faded from Rachel’s memory. All she could remember was a swatch of it, a little piece of a picture that had once been beautiful.

  Slide away darkness,

  Slide away now…

  Three more women were pregnant by the turn of the year, the third New Year’s Day since the plague, and they faced the year with new hope, new dreams. Little Ella was born in June, Victoria in July and Lenore came in October. Ella died a few minutes after birth. Victoria and Lenore, both born in the morning, were gone before the sun set on their first day of life.

  And that had been that.

  There would be a pregnancy every year or so, because people still did the thing they were biologically programmed to do. Human DNA didn’t know or care what would become of those babies. Life, eventually, would find a way. Right? It had to.

  But it didn’t.

  In all the years since his birth, William Fisher Callahan was the only post-plague baby to see his first birthday, to see any birthdays. And instead of becoming a symbol of the future and the promise it held, Will had become nothing but a cruel taunt.

  Adam leaned back in his chair and blew out a noisy sigh.

  “Sometimes,” he said. “Not as much as I used to, to be perfectly honest.”

  She didn’t think he was being perfectly honest with her, but at least she’d gotten him talking. Will’s survival had perplexed him as much as the deaths of the other children. He had drawn blood from Rachel, from Will, even from himself, comparing it to the samples he’d drawn from the other women who’d lost their post-plague babies to Medusa. But with no electricity, with no viable gasoline to power the generators, the technology hadn’t been there to help him identify the anomaly that had protected three generations of his family from the greatest killer the world had ever known.

  “I wish I knew why,” she said.

  “Luck,” he snapped, smacking the desk with the flat of his hand. “Genetic chance. Believe me, Will is not the only child to have survived since the plague. Where there is one, there are others. It’s how life works.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She wondered if he believed what he was saying or if he was trying to maintain a positive outlook for all their sakes. “No one else has seen-”

  “Have you ever heard of the Toba super-eruption?” he asked, interrupting her.

  “No.”

  “No? The original apocalypse?”

  She shook her head.

  Adam put his reading glasses back on, which added significantly to his professorial air.

  “About seventy thousand years ago, the Toba volcano in Indonesia erupted and plunged Earth into a volcanic winter. You think we’ve had it tough? Our little plague was nothing compared to that. Anyway, years of nuclear winter, blah, blah, blah. Way worse than what we’ve had to deal with.”

  Rachel glanced out the window behind Adam’s head, more reflexively than intentionally, at the gloomy skies and shivered, thinking they’d had it pretty damn bad, when you got right down to it. Some said it was because of the nukes that had been launched during civilization’s death throes. In those terrible final days, China had vaporized Moscow and much of Eastern Europe, Israel had hit Iran, and those were only the ones she had heard about before the news reports stopped. Others claimed it was due to the environment having to process seven billion human corpses in the span of a few weeks.

  The cause was irrelevant. The real problem was the effect. In the years since Medusa, the global climate had undergone a massive paradigm shift. The winters were longer and harsher. The summers, shorter and cooler. It was cloudy more often than sunny and it rained constantly. And the effect on agriculture had been catastrophic.

  The crop failures started that first spring at the ranch, around the time Cole Thompson had died. The early vegetables, the lettuces and green onions and early peas did well, but the summer harvest was terrible. Rachel walked the growing fields in July, bucket in hand, and studied with alarm the anemic plants that should’ve been bursting with tomatoes and squash and cucumbers and eggplant and peppers but were thin and pale like terminally ill patients. Above her, the weak sun had shimmered upon their little corner of the world, just enough to pump the summertime temperatures into the mid-sixties. And those were the good days. Even in the dead of summer, they were occasionally greeted with chilly days better suited for jackets and visits to a pumpkin patch.

  The next year was worse. One crop failure after another, so complete and total they hadn’t even bothered with the fall planting. The time, it was decided, would be better spent scavenging for the food supplies that were out there. They couldn’t wait, because the other survivors would soon be doing the same if they weren’t already. That fall, the group abandoned the farm and moved north toward Omaha, where they found the warehouse that would become their home.

  “Some scholars,” Adam went on, “believed the total human population dropped to a few thousand people. At most. That there were only a few dozen women of childbearing age left on the planet. We got through that. We’ll get through this.”

  He was wide-eyed, a bit manic; it seemed very important to him that she agree with him, that she see things his way. But she couldn’t share his optimism, dim as it already was. For years, they had been on alert, looking and listening for news of another child somewhere. But there hadn’t been. Not once. Not one time.

  She looked up at the clock over his head. It was the silhouette of a black cat, the timepiece set in the center of its stomach, its oversized eyes shifting from side to side with each tick, its tail oscillating in time with the beat. It was one minute to seven.

  “But you haven’t seen any little ones,” she said. “Even when you went back to Richmond.”

  Several years earlier, Adam had made a long trip back to Richmond, Virginia, where he had lived before the pandemic. The purpose of the journey had been to get the lay of the land, find out how the world was faring a decade after the plague, figure out what people were doing to survive. Find out if there were other children.

  “That doesn’t mean they weren’t there,” Adam said. “We don’t advertise Will’s presence either. They may not hide the women anymore, but I bet they hide the children.”

  “Maybe,” Rachel said, but not really believing it.

  “I’d better get on it, then,” she said, wiping her hands on her pants.

  “I’ll swing by and see Will later-”

  A sound caught her ear, the staccato burst of small-arms fire in the distance.

  She froze. Her father’s face turned to stone a second later, the slight delay owing possibly to ears two decades older than hers.


  “What was that?” she whispered rhetorically, even while knowing damn well what it was.

  Then an enormous blast rocked the building, shaking to her very core, and bits of plaster and dust rained down upon them like snowflakes. She heard a grunt (maybe from herself, who knew). It was the loudest sound she had heard since the bomb that had destroyed the Citadel, the place Adam had rescued her from years earlier, the place where the plague had been born. That had been different though, watching from a distance, waiting for it, hoping for it and dreading it, the conflagration that would be their absolution.

  Today, the calculus was much simpler.

  They were under attack.

  4

  Rachel unslung the M4 rifle as Adam drew his Glock 19 pistol from his shoulder holster and grabbed a set of binoculars from the desk drawer. In tandem, they moved toward the door of the office, Rachel checking the pockets of her barn jacket for spare magazines. Her fingers ticked off four, two in each pocket. Her hands were steady, but it was difficult to breathe. It never got easier. Never.

  Her thoughts zeroed in on Will and Eddie, hoping beyond hope they would stick to their emergency plan, the one they had drilled over and over. The tunnels. They would hide him in the tunnels, under the kitchen, until it was over. Right now, they should be on their way, covering the fifty meters to the cafeteria, around the back to the kitchen, down through the hatch that led to the tunnels.

  Would he know what was happening? Would he be afraid? Would he die today?

  She and Adam moved down the dark aisle, making their way to the closest exit, about fifty yards away, on the east side in this section of the warehouse. The shelves were barren here now, the canned goods moved, rotated, and consolidated as the years had drifted by. Eventually, all the shelves would be empty, she knew that, they all did, and they would have to deal with that. They had even identified their last meal, cans of chili and beef barley soup, southwestern corn, delicacies in a universe of blandness. But right here and now, they had a couple years’ worth of food left, and that was worth fighting for, worth dying for.