There was nothing that would make this pill any easier going down.
“Mr Thurgood?” Steph’s voice was a pale copy of its usual self. “Sir?”
“Huh?” A few spatters hit the windshield. It wasn’t quite sleet or snow, a sloppy in-between mix. The Chevy slowed, brake lights brightening, and a green sign proclaiming they were ten miles from Evansboro hunched against the cold. At least they’d made it over Ole Miss.
“I got a question.” Soft, and tentative.
Well, obviously. Juju swallowed a sudden hot bite of irritation. Post-combat jitters made a soldier likely to bark, if not bite, but neither of the kids deserved a toothing. “Uh-huh?”
Steph cleared her throat, nervously, then jumped right in. “You think anyone else we come across is gonna shoot at us?”
Christ, you mean you think there’s a chance they won’t? “I ain’t sure,” he hedged. Scaring the young ’uns wasn’t any use, either. “But if they do, we gotta be ready.”
“It’s like in the movies.” Mark squeezed Steph tighter, and Juju forced himself to look away from the rearview and at the road in front of them. “First people die, then the survivors go crazy.”
The freeway dipped and rose gently as the slush receded from bare patches that would be ice come morning, and there was a four-car smashup looming on the horizon. Looked like it had been one of those damn checkpoints. Wouldn’t that have been a shit duty, waving cars past or checking them for sick ’uns? “I ain’t fixin to go crazy anytime soon, kid.” Juju watched as Lee’s truck swung wide, creeping around bleached bones of twisted metal.
Snow still lingered in the hollows and shadows, turning the wrecks—looked like one car had rammed another, then both had piled into a third, and the fourth who knew, maybe it had happened along later—into one of those farfetched modern art pieces. The checkpoint shack looked like something had beaten it with a hammer, frozen canvas flopping stiffly as the breeze rose. Its supports were all twisted, and he decided not to look too closely at the shapes inside.
At least those shapes weren’t moving.
“Well, I mean, nobody ever wants to go crazy.” Kasprak said it like he’d thought the matter over some.
A half-snort of laughter caught in the back of Juju’s throat. He coughed, and almost spat on the windshield. “Wellnow, Mark, let me tell you somethin. Most people were plumbdamn insane before this Pocalypse. This just lets ’em all the way loose, steada worrying about what the neighbors gonna think.”
Neither of them had anything to say to that, and it was just as well. Juju had some hard thinkin’ to do and wanted some quiet to get through it. He squinted at the sky again, and turned the wipers on.
Looked like it was deciding to snow instead of sleet.
Good Breeding
Evansboro was a good-sized town, clinging to the edges of “city.” Its building-bones hunched dark and dispirited under a pall of falling snow, just like Ginny huddled in the middle of the Chevy’s bench seat. Her hands hurt, because they kept balling up, trying to drive her fingernails into her palms. Her head hurt, too. Her shoulders, her teeth, her legs, all aching. Why? She’d only driven through a hail of bullets and several miles down a freeway before running a new RV into a jacknifed semi hunching over a concrete divider, the truck’s other half squatting on a red Dodge SUV that stood with all its doors open at the tail end of a clot of smashed glass and twisted metal from the opposite direction.
It had felt like she was going fifty, but the airbags hadn’t even deployed. She hadn’t been going very fast at all.
Lee made a soft sound, not quite a whistle, one of his driving-noises. The wipers went, back and forth, clumping up wet snow along the edges of the windshield. Brandon, big, blond, and bulky on her other side, stared out the window. A faint ghost of cologne still clung to his jacket. It wasn’t like Lee’s peppery aftershave; Brandon’s held an edge of sweat and expensive chemicals. Both of them had five o’clock shadows, though.
At least they had something in common.
She suspected it wasn’t enough to get them to work together, and she couldn’t figure out how to make them. A great exhaustion at the pointlessness settled over her whenever she thought about trying, too. It wasn’t worth it. Was anything?
That made twice in the recent past she’d been shot at. First by the Army in Cotton Crossing as they chased one of the…the things, the shuffling, chewing infected.
The zombies.
Then, shot at again…God, why? Why would anyone who survived the past few weeks want to shoot anyone else? At least, anyone presumably healthy enough to drive?
Trying to guess why people acted the way they did was useless too, at least at this juncture. Ginny shut her eyes. Every time she did, though, she heard the little popping noises of bullets hitting thin metal and fiberglass, and felt the RV jerk under her hands. Her eyelids flew open again, and she shuddered, her shoulder bumping Brandon’s.
“Hey.” Brandon’s large gloved mitts swallowed her right hand. The bruised left side of his face looked like it hurt. “Loosen up a little, huh?”
I can’t. “Sorry,” she managed. Her throat was raw-dry. Tea sounded good. Water sounded better. A hot bath and crawling into a bed, any bed, as long as the room was dark and quiet, sounded best of all. God, what she wouldn’t give to be in her own house right now.
Except the power was out all over Cotton Crossing, and on the other side of the wall separating her half of the duplex from her neighbors’, there were the bodies. An entire family, gone. An entire town gone. Coast to coast, the man on public television had said.
The mind boggled. Except her problem was it didn’t boggle, she could imagine it all too vividly. “Sorry,” she mumbled again, forgetting she’d already apologized. The truck bumped over ridges of snow melted, compacted, refrozen, and melted again. Chains bit deep and Lee exhaled again, concentrating on keeping them on the road.
“Don’t be.” Brandon considered her hand for a second, then stripped his right glove off, pulling on the fingertips with his teeth. With that done, he got her glove off as well, which meant she had to spread her fingers. They kept wanting to curl back up, but he patiently undid them each time. After a little while he got her left glove off too, and his own. His skin was warm, and he stretched her fingers out, rubbed between them. “My mom had arthritis,” he said, finally, blue eyes half-lidded. “I used to help her, massage her fingers and stuff. We weren’t supposed to, but she said it felt good.” His head dropped forward. With his chin down and the longer top of his blond hair falling across his forehead, he looked very young. The puffing and bruising from Lee’s punch would take a while to go down. “Dad said she just wanted a young man to hold her hand.”
A faint, ghostly smile touched Ginny’s lips. “They sound nice.” Unlike the twisted, jumbled car wrecks Lee was piloting them through. They were everywhere.
“Yeah.” Brandon spread her left-hand fingers, gently manipulated her thumb. “They were. Until…”
“Until.” Another shudder went through her, less intense. Her teeth didn’t hurt quite so much—she hadn’t even realized how hard she was clenching her jaw. Dental care was likely to be nonexistent for the foreseeable future. “My mom called. Before all this. I couldn’t get to the phone.” She swallowed, heard a dry click from her own throat. “I wish I had.”
“Where exactly are your parents?” For once, Brandon’s tone was quiet, without any bluster. He didn’t look at her, gazing at her fingers as if they were the most interesting thing in the world. “I mean, I know you said New York, but what part of the city?”
“Oh.” She shut her eyes again, and this time the pock-pock of bullets and the metallic taste of terror didn’t replay in her head. Instead, she felt him working on her hands, rubbing gently, stretching her fingers with careful pressure. The darkness behind her lids was calmer, now. “No, they’re upstate. Near Saratoga Springs.”
“Oh. I thought you meant the city itself.” A short pause. He rubbed at the pad
under her thumb. Maybe his hands weren’t scorching, maybe it was that she was cold all over. “That’s a long way from here.”
“I would have gone by myself, but Lee said no.” She darted a quick glance at Lee. He leaned forward a little, hazel eyes a few shades paler than usual, peering through the windshield; his own capable hands gentle on the wheel. He might as well have been alone in here, for all the attention he was paying to either of them. His profile was set, and he wasn’t pale or upset-looking at all. It was like getting shot at was normal, for him.
She was grateful for his calm, but at the same time…it was disturbing.
Everything about this was disturbing. She’d thought she was holding up well, but now…
“Well, of course he did.” Brandon didn’t bother looking at Lee. Instead, he kept watching Ginny’s hands. His fingers had cooled down, or hers had warmed up. “A gentleman doesn’t let a lady go off through a zombie-infested wilderness all on her own.”
Her face felt strange. Funny and tight, her cheeks bunching up a little. She realized she was trying to smile, but it didn’t feel like her expression at all, wooden and false. “Is that Southern charm?”
“Nah. It’s just good breeding.” A crooked smile, and Brandon glanced at her. Outside his window, the light was failing, dusk creeping between wrecks and rising buildings. “Better?”
She nodded, stretching her fingers. They didn’t want to immediately curl up again. It was a relief, and her shoulders were not quite as tense. “Thanks. I just…”
“You saved everyone’s life.” It was a little awkward, him holding her wrist like that while he shook out her glove. He pulled it back on for her, snugging between the fingers with a quick combing motion. “That was some real stunt driving.”
“It was accidental.” There. It was out. It was said. If anyone complimented her on saving them, she would have to start screaming. “I couldn’t think of what else to do. We’re lucky the RV could get over on the shoulder. If it couldn’t—”
“You did right,” Lee said, a little too loudly. His eyes had lightened again, a yellowish glare. Maybe he wasn’t as calm as he looked. “No good to second-guess it.”
Ginny nodded. But oh, she didn’t believe it. A few tendrils of her hair had escaped the morning’s braid, falling into her face, and she fought the urge to bend over, rest her head on the dashboard, and cover her ears. Shutting the rest of the world out sounded wonderfully enticing.
Brandon got her other glove on. “He’s right.” He patted her hand, a quick one-two tap. “There you go. Better, right?”
“Yeah.” Her shoulders relaxed a little, then a little more. “Thanks, Brandon.”
“Anytime, Ginny.” His grin was lopsided, probably because one side of his face hurt. His left eye was almost puffed shut, and the bruise was glaring. Lee certainly hadn’t held back.
Lee hit the turn signal, and they drifted slowly into the sloppy, icy wasteland of a Marriott parking lot. The hotel, a large white bulk, towered over them, its ranks of windows gazing blankly out at a world that had spun all the way off its axis. “Miss Virginia.” Harshly. “You gonna stay in the truck while we sweep the place?”
Was he angry at her? Or just worried? Here she was, all shaky, while he had to drive and find them a place for the night. Jeez. “Of course.”
“Good,” he said, and the silence inside the cab thickened like the snow.
Getting Along
“Mr Thurgood?” Steph, her arms full, peered over the top of a brown paper bag. Wispy, neatly pinned braids crossed the back of her head in imitation of Ginny’s—they were too short to make a crown—and it suited her. The pink in her cheeks from up and down staircases did too. “Where you want this?”
Juju pointed at the room he and Lee would be sleeping in, its door propped open. A lantern glowed, set carefully on the pink and green carpet, lighting up the brass numbers on every door. “Right over there. Thanks.” He glanced down the hall, and irritation rasped down his back. “What in God’s name is that idjit doin?”
Brandon French stood near the stairs, his big shoulders set and his thumbs in his jean pockets, studying the wall like there was art hung on it or something. The door bumped, and Steph swung her flashlight on her hurried way back to push it wide for Mark, laden with a box of ammo French should have been helping to carry. The boy tripped on his way through, another lantern set on the landing below casting crazy shadows on the ceiling as he teetered on the edge of collapse. Steph grabbed at the other side of the box, trying to hold the stairwell door with one hip at the same time, and Juju strode down the hall, his boots mashing carpet thicker than the stuff in his living room at home.
If he still had a home. Tip’s body was upstairs in a bedroom over the state line, and Juju was left to deal with this pile of shit. No reason to stay in the Crossing with Tip gone and Lee haring off, but he hadn’t signed up for this.
Well, there was what you signed up for, and what you got, and Juju’s sainted grandmother had known the difference. What was more, she taught it to her Jujube-boy, and Christ knew she was the only one who’d cared enough when he was below six feet tall.
Son of a bitch. He got his hands under the edge of the box, and Mark let out a whooshing breath. The boy looked about ready to faint, bright crimson dotting his cheeks. His acne was clearing up wonderfully, though. The end of the world agreed with him. “Careful,” Mark gasped. “It’s heavy.”
“It sure is.” Steph flattened herself against the wall, trying to get out of the way and hold the heavy fire door at the same time. “Why we gotta carry this up every night anyway?”
“So we have it if the critters come walkin on up to our bedrooms,” Juju said, shortly, and heavy cardboard dug into his forearms. Mark’s feet tangled again—the kid couldn’t see where he was going, plus the door kept trying to close on him and Steph, scooting both of them into the hall—and Juju stepped sideways as the box shifted, trying to get under it.
“Makes sen—oops!” Steph’s hip banged the door again, and the box tipped dangerously. One corner poked Juju hard in the shoulder, and he pitched back and to the side, trying to get under the damn weight again. If you could just get the right angle, all sorts of things could be carried.
Unfortunately, though, the movement dumped him right into Brandon French’s back. Later, Juju would think maybe he hadn’t quite tried to stop himself, and maybe it was satisfying to hear the man hit the wall.
“Sonofabitch!” Juju barked. Bad language in front of the kids; his conscience pinched, there was no help for it. They probably heard worse at school anyway.
No more school for them. Well, unless you counted God’s own academy of Real Life. Juju figured they were all in college now, and the grading was a regular old bitchkitty.
Mark bolstered the other side of the damn box, and between the two of them they got the sagging cardboard wrestled into the room and onto the closest bed’s rose-colored duvet. The heavy corrugated fiber was damp, and the entire thing needed repacking in something sturdier if they could find it.
Now wasn’t that a metaphor for current events.
Steph trailed in their wake, stray wisps of hair working free of her braids, all but wringing her small, fine-boned hands. Juju shook his head while he straightened, rubbing at his lower back like an old woman, and turned to find Brandon French filling up the door, shoulders wide and the same sullen look on his bruised face Juju had seen on a thousand other crackers.
“What the fuck did you say to me?” Brandon barked. The last of the dying winter evening sent a few faint gleams through the room’s French door, and yet another Coleman on the nightstand glowed comfortingly.
“I didn’t say nothin.” Juju shook out his hands, loose and ready, tiny hairs on his nape tingling as they tried to rise. “What you doin just standin around? Even the kids is workin.” He didn’t add you asshole to the end of the last sentence only through sheer force of will. Sweat collected on the curve of his lower back and the first jolt of the day??
?s adrenaline was coming back, sour metal filling his mouth and his heart settling into a gallop.
Mark, bent over trying to catch his breath with his hands on the box, looked very young, peering at Brandon and hunching his skinny shoulders even further. No help there, and Steph, bless her heart, wasn’t any either. Juju braced himself.
“I was thinking,” Brandon retorted. “Someone around here has to.” A ratlike gleam filled his good blue eye, and the one puffed shut held a matching spark. “You help them, boy.”
There it was, that hateful little syllable. Boy. Juju’s hands ached, and the thought—got me a rifle, and this motherfucker needs a lesson—was quite natural. His hand dropped to his sidearm instead, and Steph gasped.
“You gonna shoot me?” Brandon’s smile wasn’t nice at all, shadows filling the dips and hollows of his sneer. “You gonna, huh, Juju?” Drawing out each syllable. Juuuuuujuuuuuu. “That what you gonna do, boy?”
Oh, I’d sure like to. “Ain’t worth the bullet, Brandon.”
Steph’s hands flew to her mouth, two tiny birds looking for shelter. Mark, his cheeks now ugly brick-red instead of crimson with effort, stared at the box on the double bed, its corners mashed and its bulk making the mattress sag. They weren’t gonna be any damn help, but Juju was past the point of caring.
Or so he told himself.
“You better ’pologize.” Brandon’s face suffused with plum-colored hate. “For runnin into me.”
Oh, hell no. “Soon’s you ’pologize to the kids for leavin them to hassle everything up alone.” A little voice that bore a suspicious likeness to his grandmother’s was trying to tell Juju to calm down, to drop his gaze, to get along.
Well, the world wasn’t what it had been, and Juju was sick of gettin along.
“I’m sorry,” Steph Meacham squeaked, through shaking fingers. Her blue eyes were the size of saucers, and her slim hands worked at each other, an unconscious washing motion. “I bumped him into you, Mr French.”