“Nope,” Steve said.
“I’m fine,” Ian said, raising his hands for emphasis. “We used brooms. Jamie got the brunt of it.”
“Which I still feel bad for,” Steve said, slapping an arm around Jamie’s shoulders.
“Don’t worry about it. It beats getting shot.”
“That it does.”
At that moment, Dakota couldn’t help but notice the scar on Steve’s arm.
It beats getting shot, he thought, but at least it’s a temporary pain.
Not sure what else to do, he seated himself beside Jamie and set a hand on his lower back.
His and Steve’s fingers touched.
“Did something happen down there?” Jamie asked, easing himself into bed.
“What do you mean?”
“With Steve. He got all quiet after I mentioned getting shot.”
“It’s…” Dakota sighed. “I guess you never talked to Steve about the Marines, have you?”
“No. He’s only ever mentioned getting discharged after being wounded in battle.”
“That scar on his arm? That’s the reason he was discharged. A bomb went off in front of him after he pushed another Marine away from it.”
“How’d he know it was there?”
“Someone saw the trip device in the back of the car. It was a decoy. The guy Steve pulled away from the car had just started to pull the door open before it exploded.”
“How’d he live?”
“He’s supposed to be dead,” Dakota sighed. “Everyone who’s met him said it’s a miracle he survived. His arm was broken—it nearly had to be amputated—but his doctor was a miracle worker, I guess.”
“Sounds like it,” Jamie said. “I wouldn’t have said what I did if I’d known.”
“I know. It’s a touchy subject. Steve came back and couldn’t tell me what happened for a month. He’s still not over it.”
“Not something you get over easily. Did he ever go to therapy?”
“Therapy?”
“For PTSD.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I know it doesn’t get rid of it completely, but at least it would’ve helped.”
“Steve’s bullheaded. It’s not in his character to ask someone else for help. He’s the helper, not the victim.”
“Oh well,” Jamie said. “Not much I can do about it now. Guess I’ll just apologize in the morning. I don’t want bad blood between us.”
“There wouldn’t be bad blood.”
“I know, but still. If you fucked up and can fix it, there’s no point not to.”
Sliding into bed, Dakota pulled the covers up over his shoulders and settled down onto the pillow.
Before he closed his eyes, he looked out the window and smiled at the wall that greeted him.
For the first time since everything began, he could finally call someplace home.
Dakota woke the following morning to the sound of cries and yells. Panicked, he jumped out of bed and tore the window open, desperately clawing at the safety locks and scrambling to push the curtains aside. One of the panels fell, followed by another, then a third, all of which knocked him aside or tore scratches across his face. Just when he thought that he wouldn’t be able to get through, he pushed his upper body forward and out the window.
He expected to see carnage—blood, destruction, the remaining two walls in ruins and his friends strewn across the front lawn. What he found, however, was a celebration.
“We did it!” Jamie cried, waving up at the window.
“You did what?” Dakota called back.
“We nearly finished the walls! We—” Jamie stopped. “What the fuck happened to your face?”
“The curtain panels,” he said. “I thought something bad was happening.”
Jamie reached up to run a hand over his face, then looked back at Ian and Steve, whose smiles simply widened as their shoulders rose, then fell. “You’re ok though,” Jamie said, “right?”
“Just a few scratches, that’s all.”
“Come on down here. We need to rig up a gate, but that’s pretty much all we need to do.”
“Give me a few minutes to get dressed,” Dakota smiled. “Good job, guys.”
“Thanks!” Steve called up.
“We’ve been at it since before dawn!” Ian added.
They’re crazy, Dakota thought, drawing back into the bedroom. Fucking crazy.
After dressing and checking to make sure that his face hadn’t been too horribly cut, Dakota left the room, made his way down the stairs, then out through the front door. He took notice of the gap on the south wall almost immediately. “I thought you said you were finished?”
“We are,” Jamie said, setting a hand on Dakota’s shoulder before he could continue any further. “The only problem we have now is devising a way to rig a gate up.”
“Can’t you just use hinges?”
“In case you haven’t noticed, there’s not many hinges that can hold a gate this big.”
“We were thinking about taking the hinges off the storage shed up the road,” Steve said, stepping forward to stand beside Jamie. “This way, we don’t have to risk going back into town yet.”
“We’ll have to go back into town anyway, Steve. We need supplies.”
“But we want to do it when we’re better coordinated, not when we’re dead-tired from working on our defenses.”
“If we can get the hinges off a shed, I don’t see why not,” Dakota said. He turned his eyes toward Jamie a moment later. “I thought you had this all planned out?”
“I did.”
“Then why do we need hinges?”
“I grabbed the wrong size.”
“What?”
“He grabbed the wrong hinges,” Steve chuckled. “It was an easy mistake.”
Jamie sighed. “Sometimes shit like this happens.”
“We can’t do much about it,” Dakota said.
“Other than get the hinges, no.”
Steve stared intently at a spot in the distance. He raised his hand to his eyes for a moment, shading the sun, then pointed. “Hey, someone’s coming.”
Dakota looked. Jamie’s fingers tightened around his shoulder as the vehicle came into view.
“It’s Kevin,” Jamie said.
“Who?” Steve asked.
Dakota’s heart sank as the vehicle crested the first turn at the tip of the road and continued forward.
“So,” Dakota mumbled. “They decided to come after all.”
“Eagle’s dead,” Kevin informed them. “And so is my Jessiah.”
They were in the living room, sharing a snack of soda and biscuits. The boys and Kevin were on one couch, Ian, Desmond and Steve on another. Dakota and Jamie remained standing with their hands in their pockets or at their sides, watching the man and his remaining two sons with eyes wary, yet concerned. It seemed unlikely that a father who’d once been so determined to remain at home with his children would travel hundreds of miles through zombie-infested territory to meet up with them, but if what he said was true, they’d suffered a terrible tragedy, one that had almost completely stripped away the former self of the man Dakota, Jamie and Desmond had met little more than a week before.
He’s so thin, Dakota thought, and his kids…they’re…
Sad? Angry? Dead? What word did you use to describe the sight of children so pale and white that they appeared nothing more than corpses freshly-pulled from the ground? With their raccoon eyes and their fleshy-pink lips, they appeared to be nothing more than animals, creatures taken from another world to show the current one how sad things could really be.
“What happened?” Jamie finally asked, as though unable to bear the silence any longer.
“Jessiah died in his sleep four-and-a-half days ago,” Kevin said, turning his head up to look directly at Jamie. “As for Eagle, we’d just left Minnesota and were staying in a World War Two memorabilia barn when we got jumped. One of them grabbed Arnold. Eagle pulled it off of him so he could get in the truck when he…” Kevin bowed his head, “when he got bit.”