The In-Betweener (Between Life and Death) (S) (12 page)

I don’t want to look at them anymore. The picture is a sad one and I don’t want to start thinking of them as humans, as they were when all this happened to them. I don’t want to think of the woman with the bite being tended by others, succumbing, and then turning.

My mom is waiting for me, her eyes roaming the field and the woods beyond, ever watchful.

“Well?” she asks when I near.

“I think these people were trapped inside the houses at that subdivision and something has happened that is letting them out. Not a fire or anything because they aren’t burned. Looters?”

She nods and says, “That’s what I think. Whoever is doing it either isn’t confident enough to take them out or doesn’t care that they wander afterward, which would mean they are pretty certain they can get out of the area once they’re done searching the houses. That’s looter behavior. And those are nice houses, so I’m guessing they aren’t only scavenging after food and such.”

I laugh and say, “Like jewelry is worth anything anymore. How stupid is that!”

She shrugs and says, “But it probably won’t always be like that. It could be a group so well organized that they’re planning for the future. We’d need to watch out for any group like that coming this way.”

The way she says that, I know our night watches are going to shift to cover the full period of darkness instead of ending around midnight. I sigh, but I’m also glad that I know what I might be looking for.

After this lesson, it’s down to business. I know how to take out a deader with a sledge. The whole brain has to go and chopping off heads is just cruel because the head will stay alive for a long time. Not to mention the whole body twitching even without a head. I have no idea how long that goes on, but my mom apparently kept track of one for a while and says it’s an unacceptably long time.

It’s hard work and my arms feel like spaghetti by the time we’re done dragging the last deader to the pile of them moldering in the field. I can see why my mom decided it’s time for me to help. And, surprisingly, I’m okay with doing this kind of work. I suppose it’s like anything else that’s essentially disgusting. You can get used to anything.

Today - Driving Without a License

With Sam inside the car, so close to me that I can smell his overpowering carrion stench, I almost panic and get out of the car again. The idea that I should take a nap and pretend none of this ever happened is a powerful one. Bathing in the smell of blood and whatever it is that he’s done in his pants is just driving the idea home with a little extra force. Even taking deep breaths to calm down isn’t an option because the smell is making me gag.

I absolutely have to turn on the AC—which is a big use of energy I’ll probably need—and blow as much air as I can away from me and toward him. I’ve drawn out a sketch of the streets I’ll need, along with lots of alternatives. I’m hopeful that most of my path will allow a skinny car like this one through.

The world didn’t go to hell entirely overnight. Most people at least had time to run out of gas somewhere or hole up for days. Or months. When my mom and I were looking for this place, we had very little trouble getting through the streets, though we did attract some attention that required a great deal of shooting on my mom’s part. I can’t imagine that it would be too much worse now on the roads. No one has been driving around to get stuck, that’s for sure.

It feels weird to be driving. Actually, I have to fight the impulse to look over my shoulder because I don’t have my license. It’s stupid, I know, but there it is.

Also, I’m a very bad driver.

There’s a sad and very forlorn look to the city as I get closer. I’m sticking to the main thoroughfare through town, which is no better than any other route. I could make an argument for there being people to see me on any stretch of road, really.

If I use a main street, I run the risk of being seen by survivors downtown, where the buildings are dense and the advantage lies with anyone who views me from above. Then again, there’s not much in the way of food left in town—I know because we had to leave the law offices once there was nothing left to scavenge—and smart survivors would have headed somewhere they could grow or find food.

On the other hand, if I take the long circuitous route to avoid downtown, I’ll go right past the suburbs where smart survivors would have gone and turned lawns into gardens. Lower density buildings but longer sightlines would make me just as visible to anyone with bad intentions who wants to interfere with me.

So, all things considered, the easiest and fastest route seems like the best choice. If I can get through quickly, then even if someone sees us, they might not have time to follow.

Those first miles are the longest of my life. I feel more tension and fright during that drive than I did walking alone to find medicine for my mother, more than when I went with her around our area to see how populated it was after we found the industrial park, more than that first day when we left our home forever. Sam is behind me, alternately mashing his face against the barrier as if he wants to get at me and huddling at the back, hitting himself and making noises.

It’s far more distracting than driving with a cell phone. Or texting. And those were both big no-no’s.

I pass the hulking wrecks of a grocery store, a strip mall, and assorted businesses, and then we’re downtown. Everything here is crammed together and on each succeeding block the buildings reach a little higher into the sky than the last. The apartments over the storefronts look ominous to me, the windows in shadow capable of hiding a multitude of peering faces.

At every point where I need to make a turn, I stop and look. I’ve read enough dark and gritty end-of-times fiction to know the drill. Bad guys always create a roadblock out of cars or something and then swarm you. That’s how it goes. But the breakdown of order has been different in some ways than in novels I’ve read.

For one thing, there aren’t that many abandoned cars in the roads. Most people went home and watched the news when it started. That shifted to staying home and hiding. At least it did for the people who were marginally smart. Very few went driving around once the in-betweeners started in.

Before the power went out for good and we could still pick up broadcasts, there were lots of images of people running around the streets, but it was always the same people who wind up looting or burning things when anything goes wrong. Those, plus the groups of people who seemed to think bashing in-betweeners was a game. Then those people inevitably became in-betweeners themselves because no matter how much fun they thought it would be to go bashing heads, it wasn’t a game.

It took time for things to get like they are now.

My mom and I cleared out of the suburbs and our house—with its expanses of easily broken glass—fast. Faster than most, for sure. We went to my grandparents’ little house near the lake, where Mom thought we would be safe with so few people and so much forest. My grandparents weren’t there, but I didn’t expect them to be. They were in their house up north for the summer. My mom watched for them every day, but they never showed. We never saw them again.

It was safe there by the lake for a while. But eventually, the in-betweeners followed the food and the wildlife, as did the humans who eventually flooded into the lake area. By the time we headed back into the suburbs, only to find our house burned along with the rest of the homes on our street, the world was like this. Not exactly like this, because back then there were uncountable in-betweeners and far fewer deaders, but this hellish landscape is what we returned to.

It's not hard to picture what caused much of the carnage we pass. Little wagons meant to carry children at play lay turned over, their ruined contents spilled around them. Trash cans have been tossed about, as if to slow down a pursuer. And, as always, the picked over remains of people are everywhere I look. There are always lots and lots of those, but there aren’t any fresh ones and that is an encouraging sign. And to top it all off, two years’ worth of trash has been blown out of all the broken windows and scattered everywhere, just to make things especially untidy looking.

I finally see something that resembles my literary imaginings. Up ahead, at a corner where I have to either turn or not, are what looks like the tail ends of two demolished police cars, parked as if to block an oncoming vehicle, and the scorched remains of a semi-truck between them, clearly crashed. It doesn’t look like a trap so much as a law enforcement action gone awry, but I’m not taking chances and detour around the scene an extra two blocks.

Aside from birds, I don’t see another living thing. Nothing. No cats, no dogs, not one single thing other than me and the in-betweener growling in the back of my car. There’s no noise either. I put my driver’s-side window down and ditch the AC because the smell is so incredibly bad, but all I hear are the sounds of the wind and startled birds.

It might be strange for me to think this, but it’s actually sort of peaceful in a grim way. The way the blinds clatter inside broken windows, the sound of a rusty can rolling first one way and then another in the breeze, and how the birds swoop from building to building—it’s all oddly beautiful.

During that first year, when the in-betweeners outnumbered the deaders and filled the world with their chaotic and destructive behavior, it felt like the chaos would never end. We grew so used to being quiet and careful that living in silence began to seem natural. For a while there, I wanted more than anything just to hear a person speak in a normal tone of voice.

Now, another year has passed and far fewer humans remain alive, meaning fewer potential recruits to replenish the ranks of the in-betweeners. The in-betweeners out there are going deader and the deaders are descending into stillness from lack of food. So the chaos is sporadic and rare once again. That makes it almost peaceful. Almost.

Once we enter the college area, things pick up a little. There’s more green space here. Untended parks in sore need of maintenance, big unmown swaths of grass where college kids used to lounge, and gardens gone to seed behind some of the swankier buildings provide habitat for animals. And animals mean food. Squirrels under siege, as it were.

A few shambling deaders lurch about the area, heads turning in our direction just a few seconds too late. They don’t even have the energy left to hurry after us. In the distance, I hear the distinctive keening wail of an in-betweener. It’s brief and cuts off abruptly. It’s almost like a hunting call with them, some instinctive response to the sight of prey. At least, that’s what I used to think. Now that I’ve seen Sam doing it in what I can only describe as pain, I’m not so sure.

Our college is old, as in
venerably
old. There’s a lot of wrought iron and dozens of old carriage stanchions left over as reminders of the more gracious days of horse-drawn carriages. No-longer-mobile deaders lie in piles around them, a few still moving sluggishly at the disturbance created by my passing car.

What I see is encouraging. My mother said that the updates wouldn’t allow the nanites to last forever, no matter how persistent they made the nanites and their little nanite factories. Eventually, the systems would shut down, the host flesh too decayed to respond to the nanites' frantic need to repair the damage, while still securing materials for their own maintenance. There would be an ever-lowering response to an ever-increasing need.

She said we just needed to hang on long enough for these things that used to be people to die off. And it looks like that’s happening. In my area, they’re hanging on better because there is more food in nature. Here, where the city displaces nature, they’re dying—for real.

I don’t see any in-betweeners and I’ve heard only the one call. I wonder at that a little. They are mobile and use whatever of their brain is left to them. I imagine that most leave areas like this in their search for food. That might be why I see more of them where I live, being so close to the woods and the farms beyond. The rodents at old farms beyond my area are probably a good source of food for them.

The streets narrow and the maze of one-way streets begins. Just the idea of trying to navigate my way around this place when I eventually started college used to intimidate me. I missed going to college by two years. At least I’ll never have to worry about paying back student loans or sending my mom into debt to pay tuition. And bonus—no traffic cops! I pay no attention to the one-way street signs and keep my eyes peeled for traps. Again, there is nothing. Just more devastation and decay.

I find the block where the address is and Sam gets agitated again. The pole connected to his neck loop jerks around in the space between the two front seats, banging into the windshield with such force that I worry he’s going to break it.

And there it is. The building is not at all what I expected. Remembering the grand old houses divided up into apartments that are the bread and butter of the college apartment experience, that’s what I expected. Instead, in front of me stands a perfectly square block of loft apartments, meant to appear post-industrial but only managing to look pretentious.

Recessed areas allowing for balconies tell me that there is one apartment to each side of the centerline on each floor. There’s probably the same setup on the back side. That would be twenty apartments. Too many. And there are businesses on the bottom floor, a coffee place and the usual pizza-slash-sandwich shop.

“Coffee,” I whisper, then shake my head. No time for scavenging coffee beans, even if there are any to scavenge. But even the notion of going in and sniffing any empty bags that might still smell of beans is enough to make my heart beat a little faster.

I look back at Sam. He’s pressed up against the window, looking at the building’s upper floors. When I follow his line of sight, it seems like he’s looking at the top floor or the one below. That makes sense. If it were me stuck in this area, I’d live on one of the top floors as well.

“Well, there’s no time like the present,” I say, softly.