The In-Betweener (Between Life and Death) (S) (2 page)

It turns out that I don’t even get that. Before this freaking mess, I never feared firing a gun. It was a hobby, something my mother thought I might enjoy, something where I had all the control. Now? No way. The noise draws them like bees to a fresh patch of clover on a spring morning. Hearing is almost the last thing that goes, those little mechanical vibrations of tiny bones in the ears lasting longer than eyes that go gooey or dry out into little raisins.

Once the last sense goes, they mostly just stand around until they feel the vibration of something passing close by. Some wander, reaching out to touch things as they pass, tasting everything they touch. Without their senses, they have a hard time finding metal, not to mention animals. Animals, including humans, offer the best source of the nutrients they need. Most deaders are easy to get past now. Just walk quietly and don’t roll a heavy wagon or anything.

I used to see overturned wagons from time to time, back when we still left the complex. I would have liked to tell people, but really, people are more dangerous than the deaders. And my mom wouldn’t even entertain the notion of contacting other survivors. I painted warnings on a couple of signs, but that’s as far as she’d let me go.

Nowadays, hidden as I am out here, I don’t see people anymore and haven’t in months. But if I did, I wouldn’t tell them. I want to remain hidden because I’m alone and that has changed my views on the doing of neighborly deeds.

These days, I love silent weapons. Bows—particularly crossbows that I can actually draw—regular bows, big knives…you name it. I even had a bunch of those pistol crossbows for a while, but I ran out of bolts for them and left them behind when we abandoned the old law offices where we stayed for a long while. I liked the law offices. First off, no one loots a law office, and second, the couches and chairs were awesome for sleeping in.

My current favorites in the weapons department are handles—broom handles, rake handles, anything like that—with knives strapped to them using hose clamps. Lots of hose clamps. The big ones. I call these contraptions my bayonets. World War I redux. Total trench warfare, only without trenches.

I like silencers quite a lot, too, but they aren’t perfect. The sound they make isn’t a sweet little
thut
like in the movies, just a more muffled sort of roar. But finding what I need to make them is getting harder and harder. Plastic bottles outside the complex crumble in my hands after two years in the elements and most steel wool was cleaned out of stores a long time ago by people who must have had the same idea I did.

In my warehouse, there is exactly zero steel wool, but bottles I’ve got plenty of. And I’m no longer tempted by substitutions. They rarely work like the movies suggested they would. Forget using potatoes. What a mess that is! And anyway, if I had potatoes I’d eat them. And pillows? Yeah, they catch fire, which is super inconvenient. And I don’t even want to talk about what happened when I used the cotton batting left over in the sachet factory across from my home warehouse. Think floral-scented flames, burning in pretty colors that just seem
wrong
for fire, and you’ll start to get the idea.

Before we got here—the land of candy bars and plastic-bottled energy drinks—I scrounged for anything I could use to shoot more quietly at greater range than I could with a bow. I’m a shooter and my bow skills are ones I’ve picked up since all this happened. Without my mom and a training manual we found at the place where we got our first bows, I wouldn’t even have any bow skills at all. It’s strange to think this, but when we were first trying to learn how to use them, we had fun. Not having an arrow go up or to the side or simply fall down was a reason for high-fives and smiles. But quietly.

Crossbows are much easier. I like those. I still don’t like shooting things that look like people, though.

The worst part is that they aren’t all deaders. Deaders are a little easier to deal with. They look dead. They are clearly not there anymore, not thinking or really human. It’s the in-betweeners that bother the crap out of me.

Maybe they’re brain-dead and truly not themselves—not human—anymore, but their eyes are bright and moving, still blue or brown or green, and they focus when they see something. They still move with something like human grace, still seek something like shelter when they are cold or shade when they are hot. They avoid danger and run when I start firing arrows or bolts in their direction. And they scream when they get hit.

Sometimes, the in-betweeners make me cry.

Enough of that. Enough thinking. I can’t go down that well. That’s the way I think of it. When I start dwelling on things, it feels like I’m going down a well and the circle of light at the top gets smaller and smaller until it’s like I won’t be able to climb back out. I know it’s really depression and if there’s a shrink left in this world, I’m pretty sure that shrink would tell me I have every reason to be depressed. Alas, depression does not help with survival, so I don’t have time for it.

I need to make a supply run to the other buildings and do my daily rounds, so I shrug on my best scavenged backpack and grab another one to fit over my front. I can’t work a bow—or a crossbow or anything else—with a full backpack hanging off my chest, so I put that one on last, with the straps on top, so that I can drop it quickly should the need arise. I don’t expect trouble, but I’m always ready for it should it arrive. My head is full of aches and fog this morning, so I pop a couple of my dwindling supply of ibuprofen before going out into the light.

Through the window, the day is blossoming brightly. I lose sight of the sky while I make my way out of the office up on the observation deck inside the warehouse I call home. The light dims at the bottom of the stairs, so I walk carefully across the dark expanse to the door. That door is the only one I can use with relative safety because it’s the only one with a window. A small square of glass set at just the right height to look out of, it’s embedded with wire and quite thick. I love a good wire-mesh window.

Once the light leaking in from that small window is sufficient for me to see by, I walk with more care, trying to keep my footfalls light. That’s surprisingly easy for me. Part of that is practice and part is due to my gear. The boots I’m wearing were once a part of my mother’s military uniform. She broke them in until they reached a point of perfect comfort and now, they serve me well in my turn.

She once told me that her boots were an excellent metaphor for life in general. At the time, I was pretty sure she meant to make me feel better about the awkwardness of growing up and my appearance. Then, I’d been growing boobs and I got frequent leg-aches from rapid growth. Plus all the other stuff that goes with growing up. I think she was trying to tell me that she thought I was beautiful, and that the awkwardness would pass.

What she said was that when her boots were new, they looked perfect with her uniform but were painful to wear, pinching her toes when she put them on and bringing up blisters when she walked in them. By the time those new boots got old and needed replacing, they looked terrible. They caused senior officers to give her the occasional pointed look, but they were as comfortable as bare feet. While the rest of her might ache at the end of a long day, her feet felt just fine.

In between those two states, her boots reached a point of perfection. She said that life was exactly the same. The beginning was hard to get through even though it looked like it should be smooth sailing. By the end, the person had long experience and had weathered the storms, but the appearance of things made it clear it was coming to an end. It’s the long, glorious middle part, she said, that makes life worth living.

She’s been dead for over a year now, but I only figured out what she was trying to say when I started wearing her boots. The awkwardness is gone and I’m definitely not pretty, but I’ve grown comfortable in my skills and in my skin. I’m positive she didn’t mean this would happen before I turned nineteen—she was probably talking about middle age—but still, I understand it now. We grow into ourselves and eventually, if we just have some patience, we can feel comfortable as we are before we fade.

It’s a nice thought and I hope—sometimes anyway—that I’ll reach middle age and share that bit of wisdom with someone else. For now, things need doing and the area beyond the window is clear. So, no more mom-style philosophical meanderings. The workday’s starting bell is ringing my tune.

Yesterday - The Walking Man

Why is it so hard to concentrate? Why does walking feel so awkward? Why does my body hurt so bad?

The man tries to keep to the center of the street, where there is more room for his unsteady progress and not as much litter to bedevil him. Tripping over everything no longer seems like something he can stop himself from doing. And the road looks so strange to his eyes. He knows there is something wrong, but exactly what that might be is beyond him at the moment. The colors are off, either washed out or too vivid by turns.

The sudden beat of nearby wings draws his attention. The urge inside him is immediate and utterly out of his control. He stumbles after the shape, his hands squeezing as if he already has it in hand, but it’s gone before he comes anywhere near it. The dark shape flits against the too-bright sky and he can’t seem to look away until the shape finally disappears into the trees.

The car in front of him seems to rise up out of nowhere. He bangs into the side mirror hard enough to hear the splintering of plastic followed a microsecond later by the sickening, dull crack of his hip bone. When he looks down, he sees the car is dusty, its tires flat, and the gaps along the bottom choked with rotted leaves. It had been here the whole time.

Am I really so out of it that I didn’t see a car? I must be sick.

The pain in his hip grows sharp and his hand seeks the spot. Blood seeps through his jeans but then stops quickly. At least it seems to, but the light looks different, as if time has passed while he’s been standing there, one hand to his hip and his eyes following the leaves fluttering all over the street.

He fumbles with his shirt, trying to see the spot, but his hands won’t cooperate. His fingers feel like sausages connected to his hands. And then he really sees his hands. They are covered in crusting blood, dry, dark flakes of it forming lines in the creases of his knuckles. And on his wrists, more blood. Some of it is brown and unlovely, but in other places it is an entrancing shade of red he can barely tear his eyes from. He feels his face and, for the first time, smells the scent of old blood there as well.

He leans over and a loud keening breaks the silence around him. The sound bounces off the empty buildings before returning to him again. His fists finally decide to obey him and he beats them against his head.

He remembers.

The beating seems to help because he remembers something else, too. The memory of a young girl’s fearful face shoving a square of bright, white paper through a door slot breaks through his foggy confusion. He remembers her eyes, her tears. With his more-in-control fist, he pats his jeans pocket and hears the crackling sound there.

Yes, that’s right.

Find the girl. Find the girl. Find the girl.

He keeps repeating the mantra in his head as he forces his eyes away from the distractions of the birds and walks on down the road.

Today - Company at High Noon

It’s a beautiful day outside, truly, epically beautiful. The sky is bright and clear blue, with just a few tiny streaks of cloud up high to make it look real. It rained last night for a good while, so everything has been washed clean. In the early light, lingering moisture glitters in shiny spots on the pavement.

And there are birds everywhere. Nests seem to be tucked into every single nook and cranny of the buildings around me. The birds flit about in the course of their errands, far more energetic than I am this morning. I’m guessing they sleep much more easily than I do at night.

The rain-washed air feels good in my lungs. I inhale a measured breath and try to envision that I’m breathing in the gorgeous day, staving off depression and loneliness by sucking in sunshine.

“Good morning, birds,” I say, cheerfully.

I like to try to use my voice each day. I don’t want to become one of those muttering weirdoes, but I don’t want to lose my ability to speak properly either.

The birds squawk back at me, a few of them resting on the roof just above me flapping their wings indignantly and giving me the hairy eyeball. I just wave and start my rounds.

It’s a bit of an irony, really. Birds are making a comeback the likes of which I doubt any book I read before all this happened ever addressed. Like almost every teenager in the country, I devoured
those
kinds of books before it all became real. I read zombie books. I read post-apocalyptic books where things went to hell because of electromagnetic pulses, wars, crazy politics, pandemics, and every other improbable situation you can imagine.

In those books, and in movies and television, all the animals make a comeback or else everything dies. There’s never a middle ground. Reality, it turns out, is way different, with some clear winners and many, many losers. Birds are the winners. Squirrels, dogs, cats, and every other ground animal that I can think of offhand are the big losers.

And now, those winning birds create a daily cacophony that wakes me in the morning, accompanies me throughout the day, and warns me of approaching danger. Then, as if trying to be polite, they go quiet by degrees as the light fades so I can try to sleep.

If a deader or an in-betweener happens by during the night, individual avian voices rise and follow the movement. Sharp and insistent, those warnings wake me so that I can wait, quiet yet alert, until the danger passes. Or, if it doesn’t, the birdcalls tell me exactly which way I need to go to take care of the problem.

They have it made, those birds. Not only do they sleep up high, out of reach of the metal- and blood-seeking deaders, but also because their other predators have succumbed. Cats can jump high and slink quietly, so I still see them now and again, but when they have babies they are easy targets. And a howling tomcat on the prowl is like dangling bait. You’d think the cats would have learned to be quieter when they get their groove on by now. I’ve not seen a kitten even once since all this happened.