Sunrise (7 page)

“It’s no trouble, sir.”

Jamie waited, watching the boy round the table and offer each man his dinner. When Desmond set Wills’ food down in front of him, he waited, likely expecting some kind of lip. When none came, Desmond set Kirn’s food before him, then Dustin’s and Michael’s. When he finally came to Jamie, the boy set the food down with a smile. “Here you are, Corporal.”

“Thank you, sir,” Jamie nodded, offering the boy a smile.

With everyone served, Desmond seated himself at the very end of the table and began to eat. A few short moments of silence followed after the teenage cook finished making his rounds at the table, but the previous conversation quickly began to follow suit. Michael and Dustin continued debating over the ethics of the virus with the less-intelligent-than-average Kirn and Wills, while the sergeant, seated between the four men, ate in silence. Erik, always the unusually silent one, kept to himself, as did Desmond, who only occasionally looked upon the group.

This is a bit awkward,
Jamie thought, raising an eyebrow when Erik looked up at him. His friend merely shrugged, then dipped a biscuit into the canned beef stew.
I already knew not to expect you to talk to me, Erik, but the kid?

He’d been under the impression that Erik would bond with the boy, or, at the very least, give him a little attention. Then again, he couldn’t really expect Erik to do much of anything, especially with a kid whose very presence most likely dredged up bad memories.

Aaron died when we were fifteen,
he thought, looking down at his soup.
Which means it’s been…what? Eleven years?

It was hard to believe that Erik’s little brother had died so long ago. Afflicted with Leukemia, the seven-year-old had little chance of surviving infancy, let alone his toddler years. The fact that he’d made it so long had been a miracle. Everyone had expected him to beat the disease, or at least go into remission. All the treatment, all the chemo—

“Jamie?” Desmond asked. “Everything ok?”

“Everything’s fine,” Jamie said, shooting a glance at Erik, who offered him an indifferent look. “How about you?”

The boy nodded his head in agreement. “Is your food ok?”

“It’s great. You said you made the biscuits from scratch?”

“It wasn’t easy, but I did.” Desmond glanced down the end of the table, to where the sergeant sat between the still-debating civilians and police officers, then whispered, “It’s probably the only time I’m doing it though.”

“Too much work?” Jamie asked.

“No. Too much supplies.”

“But it’s only flour, sugar, shortening, stuff like that, right?”

“I wanted to get on the sergeant’s good side,” the boy said, “but I won’t get there if the stuff in the kitchen starts disappearing.”

“Good on you,” Jamie said, clapping the boy’s shoulder. He squeezed Desmond’s arm and returned his gaze to the rest of their small group. “You’ve done a good thing tonight, Desmond.”

“Sir?”

“If we’re really in this for the long haul,” Jamie said, “at least this will help us prepare for it.”

Though likely unsure of what to say, Desmond settled back into his seat.

When Jamie looked up, he caught a smile in the corner of the boy’s eyes.

The sight made him smile.

“Jamie,” Erik said. “Mind if I ask something?”

“Shoot,” Jamie said, leaning forward to unlace his boots.

“What was with the weird look you gave me at dinner?”

Jamie paused, fingers tangled within his bootlaces. “That.”

“That.” Erik braced his arm against the foot of his cot, fingers tightening around the metal rung to the point where his knuckles turned white. “Want to explain what was up?”

“I was wondering why you weren’t talking to Desmond.”

“What do you mean?”

“It just surprised me, that’s all. You got along with all those Chamorro kids from Guam so well.”

“Guam was different.”

“From what?”

“From this.” Erik sat down on his cot and ran his hands over his face. Like a child just woken from sleep, he rubbed his eyes with the tops of his fists, making it more than clear that he wasn’t going to speak any further.

“I miss Aaron too, Erik.”

“This isn’t about Aaron, Jamie.”

“Yeah it is. I’m not stupid, buddy. I can tell by the way you were acting that it was bringing up bad memories. All those kids back in Guam…you
hovered
over them like they were your own flesh and blood. The one boy was Desmond’s age.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“Just come out and say it, Erik—you were bothered that Desmond looks so much like your brother.”

“Fuck you,” Erik said, rolling onto his cot. “Aaron looked nothing like Desmond.”

“No, but he would’ve.”

To this, Erik had no reply. Instead, he laid an arm over his eyes and took a deep breath, first inhaling, then exhaling. His chest rose and fell as if he’d just risen from the water after not having a breath of air for several minutes. During this lapse of silence, Jamie watched his friend with sad eyes and a heavy heart. Had he misdiagnosed his friend’s behavior, Erik wouldn’t be acting like he was. He’d hit the nail on the head in exactly the right spot.

I shouldn’t have brought it up
. He caught the glimmer of a tear snaking its way down Erik’s face.
This was a really fucking bad idea.

Still, he wondered, was it better that he’d done it now instead of later? He was well aware of Erik’s random mood swings and his past dependency on drugs. After Aaron had died, Jamie had frequently seen random bottles of pills lying amidst the piles of dirty underwear and girly mags, the latter of which he’d stolen from his father, the former the subject of depression and bad habits. He’d only seen Erik’s room in that state a few times over the years, but the times he had were enough to assure him that his friend had fallen low during that crucial time in his life.

“Are you taking pills?” Jamie finally started to ask.

“What?”

“I asked if you were taking pills,” Jamie said, dropping his boots to the floor.

“No,” Erik laughed. “Why would I?”

“Because you used to do it.”

“I got out of that habit when I was sixteen. You know that.”

“Not really. You could’ve picked it back up.”

“I assure you, I didn’t. Even if I did, what business would it be to you?”

“You’re my friend. I’m worried about you.”

“Just because I’m being visited by my little brother’s ghost doesn’t mean I’m going off the deep end.”

“It’s not that hard to get there nowadays.”

“What about you?” Erik asked. “You still think about Jake?”

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Jamie said, setting his head on the pillow.

“But you—”

“I said I didn’t want to talk about it. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” Erik said, rolling onto his side.

Jamie closed his eyes.

The past was the past. He had to keep telling himself that.

A knock came at the door at four-thirty a.m. Roused from sleep by both the sound and the idea that something was coming to get him, Jamie rolled out of bed and quickly crossed the room. When he reached the door, he started to peer out it, but stopped when Erik lifted his head. When he mouthed ‘
Who is it?’,
Jamie shook his head, then peered out the peephole. Desmond stood outside, hands in his pockets. “It’s Desmond,” he said.

“Desmond?” Erik frowned. “What’s he doing here?”

Jamie opened the door. “What’s up, buddy?” he asked, leaning an arm against the doorjamb.

“Can I come in?”

“Sure. Of course you can.”

“I’m not dressed,” Erik said.

“I don’t care,” Desmond replied. Jamie closed the door and Erik pulled the sheet up over his waist. “Sorry for bothering you guys.”

“No problem,” Jamie said, locking the door behind them. “What’s the matter? Why’re you here, especially so late at night?”

“I’ve been sleeping on the floor.” Desmond paused to reconsider his words. “Sergeant put me up in the kitchen,” he continued. “Said we needed to keep the rooms open just in case more refugees come in.”

“That’s bullshit,” Jamie growled, heading for the door. “I’m gonna up there and give him a piece of my mind.”

“Please, don’t,” Erik moaned. “This is exactly why no one used to tell you anything back in high school.”

“You went to school together?” Desmond asked.

“We grew up in the same neighborhood. Next door to each other, actually.”

“Can we cut the pleasantries?” Jamie asked. “This is
bullshit.”

“Yes, Jamie, you’ve made that more than clear.”

“It doesn’t really matter,” Desmond said, looking down at his feet. “I was just wondering if I could bum a place on your couch.”

“Go ahead,” Erik said.

“Desmond,” Jamie started.

The boy made his way toward the couch. “Really, sir, it’s ok. I…I just don’t like being alone, that’s all.”

“What’ve you been sleeping on for the past two nights?”

“A mattress.”

“So at least you haven’t been completely uncomfortable,” Erik said, rolling onto his stomach.

“You can stay here,” Jamie said. “You want to sleep in my bed?”

“I’ll sleep on the couch,” the boy said. “Thank you, Jamie.”

Desmond stepped forward and wrapped his arms around Jamie’s chest.

When the boy set his head against his shoulder, Jamie wrapped his arms around him.

If his life amounted to nothing more than helping this boy, that was enough for him.

CHAPTER 3

“Fuck,” Dakota breathed. “It’s hot.”

“What do you expect?” Steve asked. “It just rained.”

“We shouldn’t be getting warm fronts in September.”

“We’ve been getting a lot of things we shouldn’t’ve.” Steve stopped in the middle of the road. He raised his hand and shielded his eyes to peer down the street to their east.

“What?” Dakota asked.

“I’m trying to figure out where to go.”

“We’re not going to get anywhere without a car.”

“Huh?”

Dakota shot his friend a dirty look. “You heard me.”

“Don’t start.”

“You’re the one who didn’t want to take the bus. We were perfectly capable of taking them just down the road, but
no.
You
said it would draw too much attention.”

“It would!”

“At least we’d be high up. They couldn’t break the windows.”

“And if we got stuck? They’d swarm the bus and we’d still be dead.”

“That’s not the point, Steve.”

“Then what is the point?”

“Never mind.” Dakota turned and started up the road.

“Where are you going?”

“To find something that’ll help us!” Dakota said, turning to face his friend. He spread his arms and continued walking backward, flushing his fingers to gesture Steve along. “Are you coming, or are you just going to stand there like an idiot? We can argue all day and still get nothing done, Steve, so we might as well just—”

“DUCK!”

Dakota threw himself forward.

Steve fired his gun.

A moment later, the telltale signs of a corpse falling to the ground echoed throughout Dakota’s ears.
“Fuck!”

“What?” Steve asked, falling to his side.

“Nothing! I’m ok! I’m ok!” Dakota cried, pushing himself to his knees. His throbbing elbows dripped fresh blood onto the rocky road below him. “Shit. It hurts.”

“Let’s get you away from there,” Steve said, pulling Dakota to his feet. “You didn’t get any blood on you, right?”

“No. You shot it pretty far back.”

“Doesn’t matter. You can still get blood on you.”

“I didn’t.” Grimacing, Dakota brushed the rocks and dirt off his elbows as best as he could. “Sorry for being such an asshole.”

“Happens to the best of us.”

“What’re we gonna do, Steve?”

“I honestly have no idea,” Steve said, setting a hand at his side. “Right about now, your bus idea is sounding like a good one.”

“So why not do it?”

“I’m just not too sure about anything right now.”

“Look,” Dakota said, taking hold of his friend’s arms, “I get where you’re coming from, Steve, I really do. But there’s nothing here for us anymore. We’ve been walking the streets all morning and we haven’t seen a single person, we’ve had to dodge around or avoid at least ten zombies, all the stores are raided and most of the buildings that were probably safe aren’t anymore. There’s nothing left for us here.”

“Nothing,” Steve mumbled. “Nothing at all.”

“Exactly! Which is why I say we go for it now, while we still have a chance. We’ve got supplies, we know where the bus depot is, we can get supplies from the store across the street. Let’s go for it. We’ve got nothing to lose, right?”

“I guess not,” Steve sighed. He turned to face the direction they’d just come from. “Let’s go.”

“Let’s go,” Dakota agreed, “and get the hell out of this town.”

After procuring supplies from the hardware store, Dakota and Steve cut the lock on the bus depot’s gate and stole into the parking lot. Once inside, they broke into the garage and went to work on the highest bus they could find—an ice-blue, five-aisle vehicle that appeared to have made its way from one of the bigger cities only to be left behind.

“Big fucker,” Steve said, pulling himself out from under the hood.

“Yeah,” Dakota said. “It is.”

He looked at the machine and imagined it wrapped in barbed wire. A beast, it would be, were its sides equipped to eviscerate the bodies of the undead, as would its grill if it bore fangs, but such enhancements would only serve to further complicate its purpose. The bus need not take hold of its enemies and rip them apart—it need only push them aside should they get too close.

“Hey, Koda? What’re you thinking about?”

“How much barbwire we should put on the side. I think we should stick to putting it under the windows and along the underside.”

“What if the wire comes loose and pops one of the tires?”

I didn’t think of that.
Dakota frowned. “Good point,” he said.

“I think the wire under the windows is a good idea,” Steve said, slamming the hood into place. “I also think it might be good if we put some metal mesh over the windows.”

“Can we get that here?”

“I don’t see why not. Then again, it might not be the best thing for the front window. Might want to stick to something rubber for that. Don’t want it caving in and hitting one of us in the face.”

“I can’t drive this thing. It’s a boat.”

“It’s actually a bus,” Steve laughed. “Why can’t you drive it?”

“Because I haven’t been in anything bigger than a town car before. Put me behind the wheel of this and I’ll probably plow into a house.”

“It’d probably survive it.”

“Still, we don’t want to find out.”

Chuckling, Steve slapped Dakota’s back and circled the vehicle, checking any nooks and crannies he found that might be detrimental to their process. Once, he stopped and peered at something so closely that Dakota thought he might actually sink into it, but Steve rose shortly after and continued checking the tires. While he did this, Dakota pulled the door open and stepped into the vehicle, sighing when he took note of the leather seats and the welcome, inviting interior.

Won’t ride one of these to town.
He settled down in the driver’s seat and ran his hand over the steering wheel, only briefly looking up when he saw Steve’s head pass across the back window in the rearview mirror.
Ah well. Can’t do much about it.

“Hey, Steve!” he called. “What all do we need to do?”

“Start pounding the nails in. We’re gonna lace some wire.”

When night fell, along with their worries, chains snarled below windows and sweat marked the passage of their effort, snaking its way down their faces, tracing the curve of their cheeks and crossing the bridge of their noses. The silence whispered that all was well, that nothing was unaccounted for and that nothing would disturb them in the depths of their sleepy hollow. Even once, when a bird cried out bloody murder as something outside startled, then ate it alive, neither of them jumped. Instead, they slept blissfully in the cold aftermath of a day’s work, silently dreaming of things that wished them no ill and a world where the dead did not walk.

A bead of sweat ran down Dakota’s face, jumping his cheek and the sharp curve of his jaw, and the young man had one brief moment to sigh before it hit his hand.

He jumped; his knee collided with the dash.

Steve burst from sleep, sat up quickly, and hit his head on the bar connecting the overhead mirror.
“Fuck,”
he groaned.

“My bad,” Dakota said, looking down at his hand.

“What happened?”

“Woke up.”

“Bad dream?”

“No. I thought something touched my hand.”

“Did something?”

“It was just sweat.”

“Ah,” Steve chuckled, leaning back and rubbing his forehead. “I see.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s ok. I’ll just have a bruise in the morning.”

“You’re an asshole,” Dakota laughed, punching his friend’s arm.

“But you love me anyway.”

Smiling and unable to control himself, Dakota wrapped an arm around his friend’s shoulder and leaned into his side. Ahead of them, nearly hidden by a storage shelf and the contents within it, a window offered a faint glimpse of the buildings across from them. Illuminated by moonlight and sharpened by reflection, their images cut a hole in Dakota’s mind and sent shivers down his spine.

“You ok?” Steve asked.

“Just a little nervous, that’s all.”

“About what?”

“Leaving.”

“Me too,” Steve said, setting an arm across Dakota’s back. “Trust me, buddy, I am too.”

Not sure what else to say, Dakota simply sat there, reveling in the closeness they shared. It took him less than a minute to turn his head, lean forward, and plant a brief kiss on his friend’s cheek. “Thank you,” he whispered.

“For what?” Steve asked.

“For coming back for me.”

Neither of them spoke.

They simply listened to the birds.

Morning came with a crisp lining of rain. Drizzle running down the window and a chill creeping into the garage, Steve and Dakota rose from their place in the bus and continued work on their modifications. Dakota hammered down the nails protruding into the bus and capped them with a protective lining, while Steve crawled onto the hood of the vehicle and strung rubber mesh across the windshield. Throughout this process, the weather continued to worsen. Rain sprinkled the street in five-minute bouts and fog threatened to overwhelm the city with its lingering presence, though whenever the weather seemed to get worse, it always cleared, offering a brief glimmer of hope in the form of sunshine.  In a way, the sporadic work of Mother Nature reflected upon their current situation, almost to the point where it made Dakota uncomfortable.

You’re just being paranoid.
His wandering mind nearly made him smash the hammer down on his fingers.
Concentrate!

“Hey, Dakota?”

“What?” he called back.

“How close are you to being done with the nails?”

“Almost done with this side.”

“This weather’s starting to make me nervous.”

“You’re not worried about floods, are you?”

“How can you not be? We’ve had problems with flooding for the past four years.”

You’ve got a point,
he thought, then sighed. He hammered down the last nail, then turned to work on the other side. “How soon can you be finished with the windows?” he asked.

“I can do a quick and dirty and just string one line of mesh across all the windows on both sides, but I guess it depends on what you think is safest.”

“Do
you
think it’s safer?”

“I’m not sure. I mean, we could hammer nails in above and below each window, like we did with the barbed wire.”

“Can we use the nails that we used on the barbed wire to secure the mesh?”

“We’d have to take the barbwire down.”

“That’s not going to happen. Do whatever you think is best. I’ll keep hammering these nails down.”

“But I…” Steve trailed off. Dakota leaned out into the aisle to look at his friend, offering a quizzical look out to the front of the bus. “Nevermind. I just realized we could hammer nails in on the sides of the windows, since they’re separated a few inches apart.”

“Whatever works best!” Dakota called out.

He slammed a nail down on the second nail on the left side.

An explosion sounded throughout the garage.

Frowning, Dakota looked down at his hammer, then offered the third nail a blunt slam to the side of the head. The sound it produced was nothing compared to the explosion that happened just a moment before.

“Dakota?” Steve’s asked, his voice’s strength wavering. “That wasn’t you, was it?”

Dakota gulped. He leaned into the aisle and shook his head. “No. It wasn’t me.”

Both men turned to look at the window.

A red truck sat across from the street, four living men and a dead body in front of it.

“Shit,” Steve breathed. “Get down, Dakota. Get down!”

Dakota fell to the floor and waited for the sound of Steve’s footsteps to echo across the garage floor. When they didn’t, his first reaction was to peek over the top of the seats and look for him, but instinct took hold. Instead, he bit his lower lip and closed his eyes, tension rocketing through his veins like harsh drugs in an addict.

Tell me you didn’t just flatten yourself against the hood,
he thought.
By God, Steve, don’t tell me you did that.

Something dropped onto the garage floor.

Dakota sighed.

Someone cried out and a gunshot ripped into the garage.

“Fuck fuck fuck!” Steve screamed, throwing himself into the vehicle just as another shot rang out.
“FUCK!”

“ARE YOU OK?”
Dakota screamed.

“No I’m not fucking ok! They’re shooting at me!”