Alex was alive, just.

  Chapter 33

  There was no time to breathe.

  The man at the bottom of the concrete stairs had not stirred. Gathering together all of the medicine, Alex collected his box of supplies and stood at the top of the steps. Reaching underneath the coat, he removed the pistol from its hiding place and placed it on top of the IV bags and pills. More use there.

  Step by step, he descended. Without a free hand to carry a flashlight, he had to continue in the dark. The light from the broken window and the open door was enough to spot the man, lying prone in a pool of blood. Unerringly still.

  Staring at the body, Alex felt a way down the steps with his feet. It took a long time. Once at the bottom, he walked around the body and the expanding lake of blood. Saul, that’s what he’d called himself. And then something about Roque. Unfamiliar names.

  As Alex took a wide berth, the crack along the side of the man’s skull glared upwards at the world. Fractured, dark. The bald head did nothing to hide the bone.

  Just beneath the broken window, the fresh air seeped inside. The taste almost tickled the tongue, like an ice cube applied to an open wound. Numbing with its crispness. One item at a time, Alex lifted the drugs, the IV bags, and the pill boxes out into the alley. The gun he saved until last. Even the coat went ahead of it and the box was folded down to fit through the frame.

  Clambering out into the daylight, Alex heard sounds from the street. The gang members were stirring. The same shouts, muted with their morning hangover, had begun to pick up. From here, words were decipherable. Bellows about drink, food, and half-joking threats echoed from the other side of the drug store, down the main street by the bar.

  In time, they would discover that one of their number was missing. Whether they’d check down in the basement of a drug store, Alex didn’t know. If they discovered the body, they might even think that he died from an accidental fall down a dark set of stairs. Which was true, in a way, Alex reassured himself.

  Packing everything back into the box, volume was important. The sounds of people moving were audible now. On the street, men kicking stones as they went. Heavy boots on asphalt. Hand slapping, laughter. Alex worried as the clatter of the pills in their packets echoed through the alley.

  With the box, the walk back to the hideout was short. But with people all around, Alex was worried. Rather than walking in a straight line, he crossed the alley and waited. The drug store was one of a row of houses which ran parallel to the main street.

  From the rear, the yards and the buildings mixed together, the alley built up on either side with walls, hedges, and trees. It functioned like a tunnel, a secret street running analogous to the main road in the town.

  Carefully, Alex moved from shadow to shadow. From behind a tree trunk to a darkened doorway. Every time he heard a noise, he found a new hiding place, moving a few steps each time. As the sound of footsteps grew louder, he shrank farther and farther away from the alley, pushing himself and his box into a shadowy porch with a waist-high wall.

  It belonged to a house behind the drug store, which backed onto the same space. The footsteps were near. Alex bent down low, hiding from sight. The steps continued through the alley and then stopped.

  “Where the hell are you? Saul?” an unseen man shouted.

  Leaning against the porch, Alex noticed the door to the home was open. In the alley, the shouting man was scratching around, searching up and down. If he came up to the rear of this house, approached the wall, he would hear the sound of hidden breathing.

  “Hey, man, your brother’s looking for you. Boy, is he pissed.”

  Alex began to crawl toward the door, leaving the box filled with medical supplies behind. Moving along on his belly, his bare chest scratching on the floor, he reached the doorway.

  It was light and airy in the home. But Alex did not have time to stop and admire the décor. There was another sound now. A scratching. A whining. He’d heard it from the street before entering the drug store. Not loud enough to worry about, but loud enough to pique the curiosity.

  If the man heard the same, he’d investigate. The scratches seemed to be coming from behind a closed door, down the end of the hallway. The sounds shifted, the man moving up and down the alley. Searching for Saul. Still, there was that same scratching sound.

  Alex seized the moment. As quietly as he could, he ran to the end of the corridor and laid a hand on the door. It was closed. It seemed stuck, even as he turned the handle. Locked. Fiddling, finding a small dial to turn, his fingers worked fast. Finally, it sprang open and he ran inside.

  Something hit him hard in the stomach, knocking Alex backwards. He rolled to his left, his attacker rolling with him. Coming to a stop, Alex prepared to lift himself up. Ready to fight, again. A tongue licked his face. A long, excited lick which came again and again, accompanied by a whine. Two paws resting on his chest, Alex looked up.

  It was a dog. One of those police dogs. But younger. Not quite a puppy. He pushed it to the side, clambering to his feet, worried about the sound. The dog continued to lick his hands. Alex shut the door. Then he noticed. It smelled awful in here.

  Not like the morgue. It wasn’t the smell of death. It was much more… natural. Alex looked around the room; the dog must have been in here for days, if not more. A former family room, with a couch and a TV, it had been abandoned to the dog.

  A huge sack of dog food had been split open along the seam and laid at one end of the room, next to an open half barrel of water. There were scratches cut deep into the floorboards and the door. The smell, Alex realized now, was exactly what he’d expect from a dog spending a week inside a single room without an opportunity to go outside. The evidence was littered all in one corner.

  Still, the creature wasn’t quiet. The dog was licking any part of Alex he could find, whining with delight at the man who’d arrived to free him from his boring cage. But it needed to keep it down. There were people outside, probably searching. Finger to his lips, Alex shushed the dog.

  It sat. Right away, without hesitation, the dog fell instantly silent. Stunned by this adherence to authority, Alex patted the animal on the head. The tail wagged. But quietly. After so long with Timmy and Joan, he thought, it was nice to be listened to without any disagreements.

  Now, he could see the dog properly. It was about three feet long, nose to tail tip. A foot and a half high. Two ears pricked up constantly searched for any sound, moving independently of one another. It was the paws which betrayed the dog’s age. Long and growing, still outsized and wrapped in puppy fat.

  Growing up on the farm, there had always been dogs. Even before he thought about it, Alex knew that he wouldn’t be able to leave this animal behind. It wasn’t even a discussion. As long as the dog was quiet, they could get back to the house and–once they were there–Joan could tell him how terrible an idea it was.

  But, for now, the dog was coming. There was no question.

  The room had a window which looked out through the porch and onto the alley. Positioning himself to the side, Alex tried to spot the man who had been searching for his friend. The dog followed, sitting again beside the window, watching through the glass.

  “I guess you must have seen people coming and going,” Alex said under his breath. “Spotted me a few times, did you?”

  The tongue left a long, wet lick on Alex’s hand. There was the gang member. The man had similar tattoos to his dead friend, numerals and black ink scattered up and down his arms. This man had hair and was wearing heavier clothes. Still shouting and searching, the man was now passing the drug store, walking away down the street.

  Waiting for five minutes, Alex watched him go. After the man was out of sight and there were no other sounds, he crept back out to the porch and collected the box with the medical supplies. The dog followed, bending its head down below its haunches.

  It was a quick walk back to the hideout. Alex didn’t stop once on the way to the gate, didn’t duck into any shadows. The dog was tight on his heels, sniffing at everything they passed. Once they were behind the walls, the deadbolt back in place, Alex dropped to his knees. The dog licked his face. A sudden burst of delirious laughter punctured the silence and then stopped. This soundless world was never peaceful.

  Chapter 34

  The dog ran up the stairs and Alex followed. It needed a name. Heaving the box of medicine to the second floor, he knocked three times and waited. Movement on the other side. The shifting metal inside the locks. The door swung open and Joan stood there, staring.

  “What on earth is that?” she said, pointing at the dog.

  “I’ve got everything. I think. Can you check it?”

  Placing the box on the kitchen table, Alex began to search through the various bags and boxes from Castle Ratz. Finally, he found it. One of the ready meals. This was a big test. Unwrapping the food, removing the packaging, he placed it in a pile on the floor. The dog sniffed it out in a second, trotted over, and almost inhaled it all at once.

  By herself, Joan was checking through the box of medicine. First, she had to remove the pistol and she checked the bullet in the chamber, as she’d been taught.

  “You didn’t run into trouble, then? Just found a friend.”

  “Not quite. I’ll tell you later. Is Timmy all right?”

  Nodding, she searched through the loot. IV bags were unpacked, about fifty packets of pills. The packaging could be removed and they could be slipped into side pockets before they left. But space was becoming a problem, especially with three people. And a dog, Alex reminded himself.

  “You’ve got everything. Everything from the list.”

  “Good. That’s good, right?”

  “You did well.”

  There was something in her tone. Not the complete affirmation and positivity Alex had expected. And this was before she learned about his encounters with the gang members. On the floor, the dog had finished his meal and began to desperately inspect every inch of the kitchen and the house at large.

  “There’s something wrong?”

  “Not wrong. We should have enough medicine for Timmy. More than enough, really.”

  “But?”

  “But what about you?”

  “Me?”

  “I’ve been sick. Timmy has been sick. But you haven’t.”

  “I’ve been lucky.”

  “You haven’t seen what this virus does to people, Alex. You haven’t seen it like I have.”

  Immediately, the stench of the morgue raced through the mind. Everybody from the past two weeks loomed large in his imagination.

  “I’ve seen things,” Alex insisted. “I’ve seen plenty.”

  “I’ve seen my whole town decimated. Not even decimated. Beyond that. So many people. Do you know how lucky you’ve been? It’s extraordinary. You haven’t been paying any attention and Timmy hasn’t either. By rights, you should both be dead.”

  “I…” Alex began. There was no real way to respond to the remark.

  “Obviously I don’t wish that you were dead. But you need to face the idea of what is really happening here. This isn’t some adventure, some fun quirky story to tell your friends one day. They’ll all be dead.”

  They were just words, but they hit hard. Any left-over adrenaline in Alex’s body evaporated in an instant, replaced by a sudden sense of dread.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t want you to do anything. Just… Just acknowledge the seriousness of what’s happening here. Your life has changed. Your world has changed. You can’t go back. This isn’t a vacation. You can’t just…waltz in here with a dog and ride off into the sunset on your motorcycle.”

  “It’s just a dog.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s everything. I sat in that morgue and tried to keep people alive. I watched them die all around me. And they blamed me! They tried to say it was my fault. Like I’d brought this plague into the town.”

  Joan was still sorting through the medical supplies. But she had already checked everything. Turning away from Alex, her shoulders were twitching.

  “We just don’t know anything,” she continued. “Can’t think, can’t plan, can’t guard ourselves. And you’re bringing a dog into this? It’s not the dog. I don’t care about the dog. It’s the cavalier approach. This is a matter of life and death, Alex. Have you even looked at Timmy’s eye lately? Or you just assumed he’s getting better? This disease is real and we don’t know anything and you’re… You’re not able to admit it. This is all just fun and games for you. I wish you’d just take a moment to admit it.”

  Joan broke into tears. Sitting at the table, head in her hands, she waved away Alex as he stepped toward her.

  “No, no. Don’t. Please. Just. Sorry. It’s all just… Everything has changed so quickly. Too quickly. And I see you dealing with this and I don’t know how. It’s like you don’t care. Like none of this matters.”

  Alex joined her at the table, pushing the piles of medicine to the other side. He held her hand.

  “I don’t know what to say. It’s not that I don’t care.” Plucking the words from inside his mind was difficult.

  “I don’t even know what I’m doing here. I guess… I’m lucky. Or not. I don’t know why I’m not sick. I don’t know why you or Timmy got sick. I don’t know why you survived. I don’t know why any of this is happening. Or what it means. I’m just trying to survive. Which is sort of the same as before.”

  “I know you care.” Joan released his hand, her voice settling into a familiar pattern. “You just don’t seem to show it. You don’t show any emotion. It’s unsettling. It makes me feel like I’m wrong, somehow.”

  “Listen, Joan. You know what happened when all of this started? Right after the President came on TV? I sat there, with Timmy, watching. And it was just the same. Same news articles. Same stories. It all just played out on the screen. And then it hit me. Virginia. That’s why we had to go. To get to the farm.”

  “Because you watched TV?”

  “Because it’s the last place where I felt safe.” Alex could almost taste the earnestness in his voice. “Truly safe. Where I felt happy. I don’t know why I’m telling you this now, but it’s true. We’ve got a goal. That helps.”

  “A goal?”

  “Something to work toward. I suppose I haven’t really sat down and processed all this. How I won’t be going into work again or how whatever was in my bank account doesn’t really matter. Because, well, what’s the difference? I wasn’t happy then, so why would I be now? As soon as I saw it on TV, I knew I had to go back home.”

  “That’s really very stupid.”

  “But it’s worked. Timmy came along, God knows why. Sometimes it helps to leave everything behind. I watched a man die today. Not from disease. He tried to kill me, fell down some stairs.”

  “Oh, Alex, you didn’t—”

  “I didn’t die. I didn’t catch the disease, I didn’t get stabbed, I didn’t want to leave the dog behind. This isn’t part of some huge plan, Joan. I’m just trying to get to Virginia. And, right now, I feel pretty good about that. And I want you to come, too. And Timmy. And that dog. It just feels right.”

  The sound of laughter came from the other room. Together, they stood up and investigated. Timmy was in bed, the dog licking his face, tangling itself in and around the drip plugged into his forearm. As the dog crawled all over her patient, Joan leaned into Alex and whispered in his ear.

  “Just promise me. It won’t stop at Virginia. We’ll try to find something. A reason for carrying on. Promise me.”

  Alex nodded. There was nothing left to say.

  * * *

  The next night, Alex sat again in the bay window of the abandoned home, watching the gang members. There was a difference. They were not drunk. They were not shouting. Having drunk the bar dry, they were rallying together. Every store in town had already been looted and they found nothing else to their liking. Now, they were searching through the streets, calling out for Saul.

  “With any luck,” Alex reasoned, “they’ll think he’s just holed up in some basement. Junkie stuff. Or the virus got him.”

  It might have been a handwave, but it was enough to settle the others’ nerves.

  Eventually, they packed together their possessions, hopped into their cumbersome vehicles, and drove out of town. It was quiet again in Rockton. At least, the main street was empty. In the distance, the sounds of gunfire and shouting still surrounded the town. Go out at night and they could be heard in all directions. Either them or someone else.

  Their departure brought with it a moment of clarity for Alex. The bikes were not enough. With Timmy barely strong enough to stand, let alone ride, one heavily pregnant woman, and now a dog, trying to fit everything together on two motorcycles was impossible.

  The solution was not simple. Joan told the others that she had a car. One they didn’t have to steal. An SUV, sort of. A low-slung 4X4 with mud flaps and soft suspension. A car for soccer moms, as Timmy described it. But they could work with it. Even in bed, he demanded to be brought pencils and paper and began to sketch out his plans for Joan’s car.

  Alex had to execute the idea. Taking a rifle, he walked out to Joan’s old house and found the vehicle. It was a blue Ford with cushioned seats and more cup holders than anyone would ever need. Slowly, watching all around, he drove it back to the hideout and hid it in a tumble-down unit behind the church, the place where the janitor kept his tools. Then they went to work.

  With Timmy watching from the sides, Alex ripped out all the unnecessary weight. Bits of bodywork from outside and inside went flying, torn apart with pliers, saws, and snips.

  Whoever had been working on the church had plenty of tools, it seemed, but they weren’t really designed to rip apart a road car. Plus, without any power, the more serious options were limited.

  Once the vehicle was lighter, Timmy insisted it needed to be stronger. That meant making a skeleton. It also meant learning how to weld. Alex found a welding kit on a construction site, heaved it onto the back of one of the bikes and rode it home. Using scaffolding poles, heavy as they were, they attached a roll cage along the roof and the delicate parts of the car.

 

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