The old man gave Henry a sharp look. “Did you verify that? Seems suspicious that Delivery would send someone.”
The guard rolled his eyes. “Everyone’s short staffed right now. Still, if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll check.” The old man handed the guard an old cracked phone. The guard put it on speaker and dialed, each number sending a painful jolt of adrenaline racing up Henry’s back. It rang and Henry held his breath as his heart sank down into his lower guts.
It’s over,
he thought, but then Melissa’s voice came floating out of the phone toward him.
“Delivery, Melissa speaking.”
“Hey, this is Gruber over at the Barrier. Did you send a– what’s your name again?”
“Henry.”
“Did you send a Henry out to the scav teams with a truck to pick up surplus?”
“Um– Yeah,” came Melissa’s voice and Henry began breathing again, “is he there now?”
“Yep, but he’s got no weapon. We’re going to issue him one, rather than send him back there.”
“Sounds good. Listen, you tell him to get that truck back here in one piece, okay? No one– I mean no surplus is worth getting hurt for.”
“I hear you sister. We’ll outfit him real well, he and the truck will be back with the goods before you know it.”
The guard hung up. “Sound’s like she might be a little sweet on you,” he said with a grin and Henry blushed, humiliated and knowing exactly what Melissa had really meant. He was glad she had been quick enough to lie. He wasn’t sure if any of the others would have pulled that off so smoothly. The old man cleared his throat.
“You ever fire a gun before?” he asked. Henry shook his head. “I see,” grumbled the old man and hopped down off his stool. He rummaged around in the cage for a moment. He came back with a long green pack. “I’m not giving you a real gun,” said the old man with a challenging glare at the guard, “you’ll just end up shooting yourself or getting it taken from you along with the truck.” He opened the pack. “I put everything you need in here. If you run into one or two baddies, you got your stun gun here. You have to move fast and have a plan, it’s only going to knock someone down for a few seconds. It’s got three shots so be careful.” He pulled it out and Henry was surprised to see how closely it resembled a rifle. The old man showed him the charges and demonstrated how it worked. “I also put a knife in there too, cause you can always use a good knife, even when you aren’t in trouble. If you get in real trouble, there are two cans of tear gas. Start em, throw em out of the truck and keep moving. Even if you got to run somebody over. When you get to the scav team, you come back with them. Even if that means keeping the truck out longer. Delivery will be okay. The scav team can protect you. Got it?” he handed Henry the pack.
“Got it,” said Henry.
“I still think it’s stupid to send an inexperienced driver out there,” mumbled the old man. He pointed to a ledger for Henry to sign the weapons out.
“Henry’s going to be fine. Aren’t you?” asked the guard.
Henry grinned. “Sure, I’ll be careful, don’t worry.”
The old man shook his head and went back into the rear of the cage. Henry followed the guard back to the truck. Phil was still quiet and Henry was somewhat relieved. He got back into the truck, waved to the guard and rolled out of the gate, back into the decaying world.
Henry pulled over just past the top of the first large hill, where he and the others had stopped to look down at the City for the first time. He pulled the truck keys from the ignition, peeking around him as he did. The old man knew what he was talking about. Henry wasn’t going to risk being held up. He reluctantly got back into his bio-hazard suit, it stuck and skidded over his skin where sweat had clung. He thought about just leaving Phil in the back, not stopping, heading straight for the Lodge. He’d found it with Melissa on an old road map. But he didn’t want Phil to realize who he was just yet. If he found out too early, Henry would never find out what he’d done to Marnie. He pulled the face mask up over his nose and got the stun gun out of the pack. He had no idea if it would be effective, but he hoped Phil would believe that it was. He slid the knife up his sleeve just in case. He looked back down at the City, it’s Barrier a great spine of concrete curling in on itself. It was too bad. The whole thing. Waking up was bad, remembering was awful. The only way Henry could look with comfort, was forward. And the future just didn’t look that good in the City. He’d be safe, sure. But he’d have to live with being cheated and knocked down, with trudging through thankless job after thankless job, of never improving. Even his kids, if he ever had them, couldn’t hope to improve. They’d have the same trudging, cheated, second-hand life. And that was too bad for Henry to live with. He turned toward the truck doors. Out here he’d be in danger, constantly at risk of having it all taken from him, from his friends, under threat from other people and the natural world itself. But out here, there were no limits. He was no better and no worse than anybody else, no matter what he’d been. And out here, the things you did caught up with you. The way they were catching Phil now. The way they would someday catch up with Henry too.
He unlocked the truck door and opened them, his muscles tensed and ready to leap backward if Phil came flying at him. But the big man was stretched out on the truck bed, his arms underneath his head as a pillow, snoring in the dark.
“Wake up,” Henry snarled. Now that he was alone with Phil, he wanted to keep him on edge, wanted him to be in constant panic of infection, like he had been. The fact that he was sleeping during their escape enraged Henry. Phil sat up and rubbed his eyes.
“Are we out?” he yawned.
“You said you’d tell me where this camp was.”
“Oh yeah,” Phil stood up and began moving toward the truck doors. Henry held up the stun gun.
“You can stay right there.”
“Woah, relax. I have to see where we are to know where we have to go.”
Henry tossed a small notebook and a pencil onto the truck bed. “We’re at the top of the hill in front of the gate. Just draw me a map. I don’t want to risk getting infected.”
Phil held up his hands and gave Henry a smarmy grin. “Okay, okay, don’t get your panties in a bunch. I’m not gonna hurt you. We’re a team, you and me, remember?” He sat down and began drawing in the notepad. Henry watched him, the thick plastic of his suit itching him and the pressure of a breeze on his back, taunting him, unable to cool him through the suit.
“Damn,” said Phil, looking up from the notepad after a minute, “it was pussy wasn’t it?”
“What?”
“I pegged you for a Nancy, but you’re a pussy man ain’t you?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“When I told you we could make a deal in the graveyard. You said I had nothing you want. But I bet if I offered you pussy you would have changed your mind, right?”
“No,” said Henry, his lips tightening in disgust behind his mask.
Phil laughed and nodded. “Yeah you would have. That’s why you been asking if I had a woman. Not that it matters,” he continued, turning back to the notepad, “It’s not like I got any on tap, if you know what I mean. Not since that little bitch and her zombie army.”
Henry bit the side of his cheek. He waited a second for his breathing to slow and then said as casually as he could, “Yeah, you never finished telling me what happened to your camp.”
Phil shrugged, still looking at the notepad. “Everyone died. What more is there to tell?”
“You caught the kid that did it?”
Phil looked up suddenly and stared at him. “Yeah,” he said at last, “caught her myself when she was trying to run.” He rubbed the thick scar on his jaw with one hand and tossed Henry the notepad with the other. He suddenly grinned, more like a wild animal baring its teeth or a dog gone bad than any true humor. “But why you asking about her, Henry? You like em young, yeah? She
was
too. Little thing, not more’n thirteen or so. Nobody left to look out for her, teach her the way a lady ought to act. That’s why she did what she did. So her uncle Phil taught her–”
“Shut up!” snapped Henry, “I don’t want to hear any more about what you did to that little girl.” He started to shut the truck doors, but Phil’s thick hand slid out and stopped him. He leaned his face into the crack.
“I don’t believe you. I think you want to hear every last, little detail. But that can wait until our next rest stop.” He released the door and Henry slammed it closed and locked it. He opened the driver side door and threw everything in. Then he stripped off the plastic suit and paced for a few minutes in the warm afternoon air. He didn’t know if he could stand knowing Phil was back there sleeping or imagining Marnie or just breathing for the hours it would take to get to the Lodge. He didn’t know if he’d even be able to get there before dark. The thought of sleeping with him in the truck made him feel even sicker. He paced back and forth next to the truck, retreading the conversation too, in his head. He got in the truck, still undecided. Maybe he should kill Phil right there. Take the truck back to the City and pretend nothing happened. Maybe he should just run away. Leave Phil to die in the hot dark of the metal truck without food, without water, the way Phil had left him for eight years. Henry thought of the shed. The filthy, plastic entombed shed. His eyes slid over to the notepad. Instead of the small map Henry had expected, a few words were scrawled across the page, the letters so dark that Henry was surprised the pencil hadn’t broken. It said, “You think I’m stupid. But I know who you are, Henry. I’ve known all this time.”
Henry found the keys and started the engine. The dark maw of the empty shed filled all the unoccupied space in his mind.
Forty-four
The road flashed by for over an hour before Henry calmed down enough to actually pay attention to it. Phil was silent in the back, but Henry knew he must be plotting. He had to know now that Henry planned to kill him. The next time Henry opened those doors, Phil was going to try to fight back. Phil was bigger and stronger. Healthier. Henry was in real trouble, and he knew it.
So be it,
he thought, the better, saner part of him rising for a moment,
if he kills me, I won’t have to live with what I’m about to do. Maybe it’s better that way.
But deep down he knew that there was no going back. Even if Phil did kill him, Henry’s heart would still be full of murder. It was too late. It had been too late the minute Vincent had told him that Phil was alive.
Why couldn’t he have let me go look for her?
He thought,
I would have found an empty camp. It would have been done.
He’d expected to find out that Marnie was dead. Even in the confusion and rage of the Plague he had understood what it meant for her when she released him. Even if she had escaped, her existence in the past several months must have been one of suffering, starvation, loneliness. But Phil made it sound even worse. Henry remembered the way she’d woken him the night Phil had shown up. How terrified she’d been to see that face leering into her window. Neither of them had known what he could do back then. The fear must have been so much worse when he caught her in the aftermath of the camp battle. Try as he might, Henry couldn’t picture her as the courageous, defiant thirteen year old that she’d been the last time he saw her. He could only see the five-year-old’s face shining out of the dark, holding her light up bear. He didn’t want to know how she died.
He might be lying,
whispered his interior voice,
he knows who you are. He must know what you want, too. He can say anything he wants about Marnie, he knows you can’t tell what the truth is. He may never have found her.
But Henry knew the scar on his jaw didn’t get there on its own. Still, he hoped there was more to the story. That Marnie fought back or found a way to escape. The thought calmed him.
He realized the sun was beginning to set, he’d have to turn the lights on or stop soon. Melissa’s map had been simple and the roads had been easy, large ones that hadn’t decayed too badly. But now the roads began to peter out, get narrower, choked with new forest growth or just crumbling away under the tires after years of frost and rain. Henry turned off the highway and onto the back roads and began to see the remains of homes and farms. It was easy to pretend on the highway. There were never any signs of life on the big road, it could cut through whole cities without any of them being visible. Even the shoddy state of the broken tar didn’t bother Henry so much. But now he could see the world rotting away around him and it was a shock he’d been unprepared for. He’d been with the others last time, they’d seen empty houses and caved in, ransacked stores, but they’d been together. Each of them had been warm, living proof to the others that the world was not completely dead. Henry had no friends this time. And he had only seen a few last time, little glimpses, like seeing where a disaster hit. The City had been like a return to normalcy after a storm. The truck moved much faster, much farther than a starved man on a rusty bike. It sank in that there was no City waiting at the other end of this. That there was no end of it. It started like a slow drip that built up. It was easy to ignore at first. The buildings that had slumped or fallen over were not very common. It’d only been eight years and most of the houses still had roofs that didn’t leak too badly. A few had burnt, probably early on, when there was still electricity but no more fire department. A few had windows like broken teeth, jagged and hanging from their frames, if they had been looted. But most of the buildings were intact. It was the little bits of wrongness that added up in Henry’s head. The little cues that screamed “empty” to anyone that could see. The color had faded, gone gray, like a permanent fog sat on the structures as the paint wore down and puffed into chalk or slid down the surface with each passing rain. They looked washed out, like old photographs that had sat too long in the sunshine, while the world around them took on extra greens and golds in the evening light. Downed trees lay over cracked driveways, shattered in storms and long naked of leaves, already crumbling into red sawdust. The humps of mailboxes just poked through the long grass that choked front yards or had open mouths filled with nests, themselves long abandoned. Nothing moved. Nothing struggled. Humanity just got swallowed up by the creeping, relentless trees and grass and rain. Henry yearned to see a freshly mowed lawn. Or smell grass cuttings warm and sweet in the last light of day. The sun was almost completely gone when the truck rolled into the town where Wyatt’s store had stood so long ago. The light was just a pale smudge on the tips of the trees and Henry had to decide what he was going to do. He parked in the lot in front of the store. The asphalt was thickly covered in last year’s leaves, they piled up in drifts against the building, clinging to the roof like rotten icicles. He waited to see if the noise of the truck would bring anybody, but the only thing that happened was that Phil banged on the wall of the truck after a minute or two and shouted, “We there yet? I have to piss like a racehorse.” Henry ignored him but took the stun gun and the keys, just in case. He slid the knife into his pocket before he got out of the truck. He turned the headlights on so they shone inside the broken glass of the store’s front door, ignoring the truck’s warning buzzer.