“Nietzsche said ‘What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger,’” Jim said to me as we slogged along another trash-strewn roadside."
“Yeah, right,” I said. “How about radiation?”
Bob Marley came on the portable radio Cortez was carrying. I went over and stabbed the power button as that aching sadness ripped through me. Marley was one of Sophia’s favorites. Cortez looked at me funny, but didn’t say anything. They were all cutting me a wad of slack.
I’d loved Marley long before I met Soph. We used to play it during our high school poker games. That got me thinking of my folks, who put up with our loud late-night poker games in their basement, who had died in the water riots in Arizona. I turned the power back on. She couldn’t have Bob Marley.
Cracks of gunfire sounded in the distance, and a police siren. Or maybe an ambulance siren. It occurred to me that I couldn’t tell the difference. I looked around for Colin. The Winn-Dixie was getting close; I decided there wasn’t enough time to get into the nuances of sirens.
The Winn Dixie was almost empty. Cortez and Jim and I went in—they were less likely to refuse our business if there were only a few of us. The sole woman at the row of checkout counters looked agitated as we pushed open the electric doors, but she didn’t say anything. We set about shopping.
“Hey, what about these?” Cortez said, holding up a package of Oreos.
“We should stick to the list,”Jim said, closing his eyes as he spoke—a classic Jim mannerism. “We can’t afford to buy empty calories.”
Cortez tossed them back on the shelf, huffing. “We’ve got to enjoy ourselves a little, or we might as well be dead.”
A shrill voice up by the registers grabbed our attention. We hurried to the front of the aisle to see what was going on.
The checkout girl was tossing stuff into a cart, and she looked scared as hell.
“Stay!” she shouted, pointing at a woman standing near the entrance.“Don’t come in,just stay!” The woman looked like she was in excruciating pain—she was moaning and gasping for breath, weaving noticeably, her hands dangling loosely at her sides.
“Jesus, what’s wrong with her?” Cortez whispered.
“Here.” The checkout girl pushed the shopping cart toward the woman. It rattled along part of the way, then veered into a cake mix display, knocking boxes to the floor. “Just take it and leave!”
The woman took a flaccid, spastic step toward the cart, then another. It was horrible, the way she walked. Her teeth were gritted in pain, her cheeks wet. She latched onto the cart, used it to steady herself as she jerked slowly, slowly toward the door.
Cortez ran to get the door for her.
“Are you crazy?” checkout girl screamed. “Stay away from her!” Cortez’s sneakers screeched on the linoleum as he stopped short.
“What’s wrong with her?” he asked.
“Just get out of here before I call the police.”
“Fine, fine, we’re going,” I said. “But we need this stuff.” It wasn’t half of what we needed. “Just let us check out first.”
“Twenty bucks. Leave it on the counter and go,” she said without looking into the cart Jim was pushing. Cortez pulled a twenty out of the pocket of his jeans and dropped it on the counter. The checkout girl was looking off to one side, tears in her eyes, biting her bottom lip.
The rest of the tribe was resting in the shade of a Dollar Store.
“We need to get out of here,” Cortez said to them, running ahead of Jim and me. “There’s a virus here. A woman came in, she looked like a zombie—”
“Filthy gypsies! You did this.” A skinny man with long hair and a Confederate flag t-shirt appeared around the corner of the building, from the front lot. He had the same horribly loose walk and agonized expression as the woman in the grocery store. And he had a pistol. My bowels loosened as he lifted it, his hand trembling viciously. Someone screamed.
“Kill you all. Every fucking last…”
The gun dropped from his rubbery grip and clattered to the pavement. He cried out in frustration, glared at us like we were the devil. Then he bent to retrieve the pistol and collapsed. He lay cursing, his nose and cheek bloody from pavement burn.
We ran. Carrie had grown up in Vidalia, and led us out behind the Dollar Store, through a small patch of woods and into a neighborhood. A few streets away there was a railroad track that would get us out of sight in a hurry.
“What was that?” Jeannie said.
“They’re like zombies,” Cortez said. “I swear, they move like zombies in a George Romero film.”
“It’s some sort of neurological disease,” Jim said. “But a highly contagious neurological disease? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
Through the open window of a little yellow house, we heard screaming. They were screams of agony—mindless, full-throated howls.
“This way,” Carrie said, cutting between two houses. Weeds tugging at our ankles, we trotted, humping our packs, Colin and Jeannie bringing up the rear on the bikes.
Across the next street and down a ways was a little park crowded with a dozen people. They were wearing white masks and gloves, and they were filling a freshly dug hole with bodies wrapped in sheets. We cut straight across, running as fast as we could manage.
“Gypsies!” someone shouted from the park. Gunshots cracked. I heard that twanging ricochet sound you always hear in the movies. The railroad tracks were across the next street. We ran along the tracks, into the woods, glancing back and seeing no pursuit. We kept running until we were out of sight of the road.
We pitched camp below the track, then sat in a tight circle in the dark. Everyone was quiet, lost in their own thoughts. A siren keened in the distance.
“We have to stay out of towns as much as possible,” Jeannie said. “That other tribe we camped with out here, they were much better at living in the wilderness than we are. We need better survival skills.”
“That’s not our thing,” Cortez said. “We work the towns. We can’t sell energy to squirrels.”
“I don’t think we can do that much longer. Our contacts are drying up. I think Jeannie’s right,” Colin said.
“There are two worlds now, and that one isn’t ours,” I said. I felt a falling sensation in my stomach. It wasn’t ours any more. It really wasn’t.
“We have to stop buying all our food at 7-Elevens,” Jeannie said. “We have to start buying guns and fishing gear with the money we earn, not cell phone minutes.”
“I’m not paying for the phone,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “I just mean we have to get tougher.”
Tougher. I hated tough people. But she was right; if we didn’t change we were going to die.
It had been a long, shitty day. We climbed into our tents as soon as it was dark.
I felt so utterly alone in my tent, even with my tribe all around me. Sleeping in tents in the woods was so different from sleeping in tents in town. The wild was an alien creature; a stark, silent reminder that there was no one to take care of us, that we were living in a ruthless world that would think nothing of it if we all died tonight. The crickets outside sounded metallic. I wanted to call Sophia so, so badly.
I threw my blanket off and crawled outside. It was too dark to go for a walk, so I stood in the middle of our little camp, staring at the stars through the dark treetops.
“I wouldn’t want to be out there, dating again.” I started a little. Cortez was sitting ten feet away, on a fallen tree trunk at the edge of camp.
“It’s rough,” I said, not really wanting to talk about my dating life with Cortez. Still, I went over and stood near him, not wanting our conversation to wake the others.
“It’s not just that,” Cortez said. “I’ve got the white man’s curse.” He held his hand up, his fingers three inches apart. I didn’t understand. “I was always a nervous wreck the first time I had sex with a woman, because I wondered if she was laughing inside, when she first saw it.”