“Yeah. Me and Sophia.”
“You know that girl done had a crush on you for years now, right?”
“So she says.”
“You never seen it?”
“She never gave me the time of day, Blake.”
He bobbed his head from side to side. “She always did get quiet when you were around. Then again, you did the same thing. Never tried to flirt with her. Probably what got her interested. All those boys coming after her all the time, and you barely paying her any attention. Kind of thing makes a girl curious.”
“I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know much about girls, Blake.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret.” He leaned in close and lowered his voice. “No one does. Not even them. It’s how they keep us off balance.”
I laughed, and gently slapped him on the arm. Blake was the kind of guy it was hard not to laugh around. He was always quick with a smile or a joke, or if needed, a word of encouragement. When I was about eleven or twelve, I asked him why he was so happy all the time. He sat me down and told me what it was like for him growing up.
He was from New Orleans, originally. His father died in an accident at work when he was only three, leaving his mother to raise him alone. She worked two jobs, sometimes three, to make ends meet. They used food stamps to buy groceries, bought clothes at Goodwill and the Salvation Army, and because he was black, and poor, and the child of a single mother, he was stigmatized everywhere he went.
The neighborhood he grew up in was rough. Drugs were endemic. If you were not a dealer, someone you knew or were related to was. The cops were an ever-present evil, looming over everything and everyone. Walking down the street was reason enough to get thrown up against a wall and searched, and if you mouthed off, dragged into an alley and beaten.
Blake knew. It had happened to him many times.
His early impressions of life were of white faces buying drugs down the street from his house, and white faces snarled with hate swinging a baton at his head, and white faces looking at him with fear and contempt at every turn, the whispers, the snide comments, the subtext of every interaction the same.
You are a thug, and I don’t trust you.
But there was one problem.
They were wrong.
He dressed the part. He acted the part. Every young man in the neighborhood did because they had to. Failure to conform was punished harshly. You did not want to be seen as non-complicit. Savage beatings on a daily basis were a very real possibility for those who did not tow the line with the drug gangs. One did not have to participate, but you sure as hell better not get in the way or give any indication of disapproval. To do so was to invite disaster.
So Blake walked the line. He stayed out of trouble at school, quietly keeping his grades up. He steered clear of the gangs, being careful not to get on their bad side. Which is not to say he never broke the law—he did what he had to do to survive—but he was careful about it.
Then came graduation, and the recruiter’s office, and the Army, and his tearful, dutiful mother telling him to shake the dust from his feet and write as soon as he got the chance.
She died a few years later from a stroke. Blake had been sending her money every month, hoping that between the two of them they could save enough for her to move to a better neighborhood. She never spent a dime of the money.
“I had a choice to make,” Blake said. “I could succumb to hate, and anger, and spend the rest of my life being bitter, or I could do what my momma always told me to do when things were bad.”
He looked at me then, tears in his dark, thoughtful eyes. “She said to me, ‘Baby, you just got to smile. No matter what the world throws at you, you just got to smile.’ So that’s what I do. No matter what the world throws at me, I just keep right on smiling. I used to see it as revenge, but then I got older and realized that’s a foolish way to look at things. Revenge never did no good for anybody. The world ain’t got nothing against me. What happened, happened. I just got to rise above it and move on. And that’s what I do.”
“So where you see this going, the two of you?” Blake asked, interrupting my thoughts.
“Hell if I know, man. I’m just taking it a day at a time.”
He looked out toward the hotel and the dim orange dots of campfires in the parking lot. Humvees patrolled and rifles cracked in the distance as the troops on watch kept the infected at bay. His customary smile faded, replaced by a fearful solemnity that hurt me to see on his jovial face. “Guess that’s all anybody can do right now, things being the way they are.”
We walked in the dark for a while, each in his own thoughts. As we passed by Sophia’s sleeping form, I stopped to watch her. Blake stopped as well, back turned, giving me a moment to myself. He was good that way. Perceptive. The kind of guy who understood things without needing someone to say it outright.
“What’s going to happen to us, do you think?” I asked.
I heard Blake’s boot scrape the metal roof as he turned and walked over to me. His hand was warm on my shoulder as he stood beside me, voice close to my ear. “Caleb, I don’t know. You’re a grown man now, so I ain’t gonna bullshit you. Things are bad. Real bad. Worst I ever seen.”
“I know that much.”
“I know you do. What I’m saying is, I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I think we’re in the early stages of something long, and dark, and terrible. If we want to get through it, we got to be strong. We got to stick together like family. You understand?”
I nodded, and did.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s keep moving. Best lesson I ever learned—when in doubt, keep moving.”
The half-moon was clear the next few hours. No clouds obscured its shine on an oasis of green in a sea of charred black. At four in the morning, after an impossibly long watch, I woke Mike and Lance and waited while they cleared their heads and armed themselves. Afterward, I ambled back to my bedroll, back to Sophia. She stirred as I lay down and draped an arm around her.
“Hey,” she muttered. “Ev’thing okay?”
I kissed her cheek. “Everything’s fine, pretty lady. Go back to sleep.”
She smiled. I closed my eyes to the stars and the moon and languished in her sweet, humid, feminine warmth.
Even the gunshots and roar of engines could not keep me awake.
THIRTY-FOUR
“Come on,” Dad said, shaking my arm. “Spear practice.”
I sat up and blinked against the early light of dawn. To the east, the sun was an angry scarlet eye peeking over the hills in the distance. Low banks of clouds rolled overhead in varying shades of red, orange, pale yellow, and finally blue that darkened to steel gray in the west. The air was cool, but heavy with humidity and the promise of higher temperatures to come.
Sophia had rolled away from me in the night and lay curled up under her thin blanket. I brushed the hair from her face and kissed her cheek. She stirred, sighed, and smiled. I kissed her again before I left.
Dad had set up a fast-rope descent to the parking lot. When I arrived, he slid down it like the practiced expert he was, then tossed his harness up to me. Although I was quite a bit taller than him, we were about the same through the hips. The harness fit me just fine. I repeated the process, albeit without quite the same grace and fluidity.
The bucket-equipped HEMTT was already on site, breaking the infected’s bodies by crushing them, then scraping them into a pile in the middle of the pavement. It was gruesome work, but effective. The parking lot was almost clear. Two Bradleys circled the operation, big chain-guns aimed at the thicker knots of undead.
“Let’s find someplace a bit more peaceful,” Dad said. I nodded in agreement and followed him to one of the Humvees. We drove back to 281 and pulled into the parking lot of the hotel where the rest of the soldiers and civilians had spent the night. Evidently, none of them were awake yet except for the guards on patrol. The place was quiet, only a few bleary-eyed troops and roving vehicles on hand to disturb the early morning silence.