The east coast has gone dark.
Nice way to put it. The most verdant, populous region of the country, home to over a hundred and fifty million people, had been overrun. Everything east of the Appalachians was now an infested, toxic, and in many places radioactive no man’s land.
Gone dark.
The Appalachians had not stopped them. The Mississippi River had not stopped them. The combined might of the U.S. Armed Forces had not stopped them. Nothing stopped them. Delayed them, maybe. Held them back for a while. But there was no stopping them. All we had done here was buy time, nothing more. A buffer zone, breathing room, enough space to get some rest and then move on.
I looked down at my rifle and wondered what it would be like to try to wipe out a swarm of mosquitos with it.
“I don’t know Dad,” I said. “As far as killing the infected goes, I’m not sure if we’ll ever be finished.”
THIRTY-THREE
Full dark, and the stars came out.
I lay on my bedroll, eyes open to the brilliance of the sky. Sophia was a warm, heavy weight next to me.
“I’ve never seen it like this,” she said. “The night sky.”
“You mean without a roof between you?”
She slapped my shoulder. “No, asshole. I mean bright. Like this.” She pointed a finger heavenward.
“It’s because the power is out,” I said. “No streetlights, no city lights, no light at all. Light pollution obscures the sky at night. Drowns out the stars. Must have been very disappointing for all those photons.”
“Disappointing?”
“To travel billions of years only to fizzle out in a smog-choked haze.”
“You say it like the stars actually care. Last I heard, they’re just big burning balls of plasma.”
“We’re made of them, you know. Human beings. The dust of stars given life.”
“What?”
“The fundamental elements, the components, the building blocks of life. All deposited on this planet by stars, flung across the universe as they died.”
Sophia was silent for a while, then said, “There’s a kind of beauty in that, I think. The lifeless given life.”
I turned my head and gazed over the edge of the white metal roof. The distant moans of infected drifted to my ears. “The lifeless given life. It supports the duality, I suppose.”
Sophia shuffled closer, lips brushing against my neck. “Now I understand why you don’t talk much. You don’t make a bit of fucking sense.”
There was something wildly erotic about the way she said it, our warmth nestled together under the coldness of an indifferent sky. “It’s beauty and corruption, Sophia. Light and dark. Life and death. For every point, a counterpoint. We, the human race, are the defiance. The struggle of sentience in an ocean of oblivion. Those things out there, they’re a corruption of us. An abomination of something beautiful.”
Another silence, then she said, “You really think people are beautiful? I mean, with all the things we’ve done to each other? War and murder and all the rest of it?”
“I think life is beauty, Sophia. And while there are as many tragedies as there are people in the world to live them, those tragedies don’t diminish the importance of our existence. Think of how far we’ve come. It wasn’t all that long ago we were lying on bare ground, fires burning next to us, wondering what all those bright spots in the big wide dark were all about. Now we know. Now we can draw their chemical components on computer diagrams and replicate their energy in small scale. Ever seen a plasma torch cut through two inches of steel in less time than it takes to say it?”
“No.”
“It’s a thing to see.”
I lay in the dark and tightened my arms around Sophia and wondered what was wrong with the night. The hot starkness of day no longer assaulted us; the warmth of the metal under my back had faded hours ago. There was a gentle breeze, a stirring of leaves flush with the green blessing of late spring. I listened, ears tuning out the moans, the booming snores of Mike and my father twenty yards distant, and the rumbling of a Humvee engine as a patrol checked on us. I closed my eyes against the brilliance of a searchlight playing over the rooftop, face turned into the sweetness of Sophia’s scent, and the answer came to me.
There were no crickets. The fires had sent them all away.
*****
Midnight.
Had to be. Otherwise the hand on my shoulder would not have been there.
“Rise and shine, lover boy,” Blake said. “We’re on the clock.”
I gently disentangled myself from Sophia’s arms and pushed aside the leg draped over my midsection. She stirred a little, then rolled over to her other side, heaved a deep breath, and continued snoring quietly.
Blake laid a steadying hand on my shoulder as I stood up and nearly toppled over. The scant two hours of sleep I’d managed were just enough to make me truly feel like shit.
“You all right?” Blake asked.
“Ask me again in five minutes.”
“Just make sure you keep your gun pointed away from me.”
“Hardy-har-har.”
“I’m not kidding.”
I left my pack where it lay, but donned my vest, belt, drop holster, and slung my rifle. One hastily chugged canteen of water later, I felt almost human.
“Okay,” I said. “Let the mid-watch begin.”
Blake smiled. He had not done much of that lately and it was good to see it again. “Look at it this way. It’s only four hours, then you can go back to sleep.”
“Lovely.”
“Your breath is wonderful, by the way.”
“Duly noted.”
After pissing over the edge of the roof with my eyes closed for the better part of a thousand years, I used the last splash of water in my canteen to wet my toothbrush, applied a minimum of paste, solved the problem, and spit the excess to the parking lot. To my surprise, it landed on the face of an infected wandering below the edge of the periphery. Looking around, I saw the shadows of dozens more stumbling and shambling in the light of the half-moon.
“Son of a bitch!”
“Yeah,” Blake said behind me. “They wandered in over the last hour.”
“Did anyone radio Captain Morgan?”
Blake snickered. “Captain Morgan. Man, I hope that guy gets promoted soon.”
“Well?”
“Yeah, Joe called it in. They’ll send the Bradleys around at daybreak. It’s nothing a twenty-five millimeter chain gun can’t take care of.”
I relaxed, comforted by the idea of armored cavalry. The infected may have been legion, but they were composed of flesh, after all. And in the battle of flesh versus high-velocity tungsten, I knew where I would be placing my bets.
We walked along the rooftop, staying well clear of the edge. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and wondered what the hell the point of posting a watch was anyway. There were over a hundred troops nearby, not to mention the fact we were thirty feet off the ground. I had posed this question to my father after being informed I had pulled the mid-watch, and his answer was a shrug and a simple, “You never know. Better safe than sorry.”
Hard to argue with that logic.
I looked down as we passed the shipping container and ladder we had used to ascend the brewery. A search of a nearby neighborhood had yielded the ladder, but it was too short for what we needed. So after the bucket-equipped HEMTT had cleared the permanently-dead infected from the parking lot, I talked the driver into bulldozing an empty shipping container next to the wall. After that, it was easy.
“So,” Blake said, breaking the silence. “You and Sophia.”