After poking around a little more, I moved aside a coyote skull and came across an adult human femur still connected to the hipbone by dried black tendons. Disgusted, I kicked it away. “And it looks like he wasn’t too discriminating about what he shot.”
My father looked across the room at the dead man, his filthy shirt dotted with at least a dozen bloody 5.56mm holes. From the look on his face, any pity he might have felt for the man had left town on its fastest horse. “Sick son of a bitch.”
“It gets worse,” Blake said, standing over the eyebolt. He reached down and picked up a frayed end of rope. “Looks like when he knew he was done for, he had just enough left in the tank to cut his wife loose.” Blake dropped the rope and stepped away. “He turned her loose on them.”
Dad looked down at Farrell. “Does that about cover what happened here?”
The young sergeant did not look up, just nodded, eyes fixed on the dead infected woman. Next to him, the bitten soldier held his arm to his chest, rocking slowly back and forth, face pale white, lips blue, eyes pressed together and streaming tears. A steady litany of whispered curses issued from his mouth, repeating to himself how fucked he was.
My father looked at the bitten man, then at Farrell, and then with the sudden, blinding speed he was capable of when roused to anger, he gripped the bigger man by the shoulders, lifted him to his feet, and slammed him against the wall.
“What the hell were you thinking letting your men drink, you idiot?” he roared. “What if they had been focused? What if they had been paying attention to what they were doing? None of this would have happened!”
Farrell’s face twisted in anger, the reptilian mercilessness I saw earlier returning, and he tried to struggle out of my father’s grip. His struggles quickly ceased when Dad’s fist slammed into his breadbasket with the force of a battering ram. Farrell let out a surprised OOOF and doubled over, giving my father the opening he needed to run him across the room and slam him head first into the opposite wall. The sergeant hit with enough impact to shatter the wood paneling, his legs going limp beneath him. Dad snatched his sidearm from its holster and reared back for a pistol whip, but I got to him first and lifted him bodily.
“Dad, no. For Christ’s sake, calm down before you kill somebody.” He went stiff as I carried him from the room, but offered no resistance. I put him down in the kitchen and held his shoulders while he took deep breaths, eyes closed, the redness in his face slowly receding.
“Sorry about that, son,” he said finally, holstering his pistol. “Kind of lost it for a minute there.”
“Yeah, you think?”
He laughed shakily and wiped a hand across the back of his neck. “Think he’s gonna be all right?”
“Farrell?”
“Yeah.”
I shrugged. “Probably. You should go back to the Humvee, though. Alvarado will be here any minute. Let me and Blake do the talking.”
Dad nodded. “Where’d Mike go?”
Just as he said it, the big Marine came through the front door with a couple of heavy-duty contractor trash bags. When he saw us looking at him, he said, “We still have a job to do. There’s food in that kitchen.”
Dad went back to the vehicle while I stayed behind. Blake helped Farrell to his feet and escorted him outside, then grabbed a couple of volunteers to help him drag the dead body out of the kitchen and into the driveway. Just as they were wrapping him in a sheet, Alvarado stopped out front and practically flew from the driver’s side door.
He walked directly up to Farrell, who still looked a little dazed from the beating he had taken, and yelled, “What the fuck happened here?”
The sergeant explained. Alvarado listened quietly. His face slowly darkened until it was the color of stained mahogany. A single vein pulsed in his forehead. He lowered his voice and leaned in close to Farrell’s ear, and said, “I hope you’re happy, Sergeant. You were responsible for the safety of these men. For training them, for keeping them in line, for making sure they did their jobs they way they’re supposed to. But as always, you slacked off, and half-assed, and treated a dangerous task like it was some kind of a joke. Well, I bet it doesn’t seem very funny right now, does it? Not with one of your men dead and another dying.” Alvarado stepped back and spit on Farrell’s boot. “You’re a fucking disgrace.”
He turned to Blake and me. “You mind taking this piece of shit back to the convoy?”
“Not at all,” Blake said.
“Thanks. When you get there, ask around until you find Master Sergeant Heller and tell him what happened here. He’ll know what to do.”
Blake told him we would. He and I rode in the front while Dad rode in the back with Farrell. Mike stayed behind to help out, saying he would catch a ride back with Alvarado’s men.
No one spoke during the drive.
THIRTY-SEVEN
“So what’s going to happen to them?” Lola asked.
I took a bite of my rice and beans, washed it down with bleach-purified, charcoal-filtered water, and said, “I don’t know.”
For the first time since we had left Canyon Lake, my group was sharing a meal. We lounged in cloth camping chairs around a small fire, the convoy’s vehicles a broad, grimly patrolled circle around us.
Morgan had chosen an empty field about five miles from Boise City to strike camp for the night. The area around us was sparsely populated, and while we heard the occasional muffled crack from the suppressed carbines the guards carried, there were not many infected to bother us.
Dad and Mike had cooked the evening meal while the rest of us drank cheap Lipton tea and wondered how long it would be before such simple luxuries became a thing of the past. The sky above was bright and heavy with stars, the myriad campfires of the convoy helpless to drown out their brilliance.
“I talked to Captain Morgan,” Dad said, and for once, no one giggled. “He took a statement from me. You other three,” he pointed to Mike, Blake and me, “should expect to do the same tomorrow.”
“What did he want to know?” I asked.
“My version of what happened to Farrell’s squad.”
“What did you tell him?”
Dad looked across the fire at me. “The truth.”
Blake said, “What did he think of you beating down one of his squad leaders?”
Dad picked something off his spoon. “He said under the circumstances, he was willing to look the other way. This time. I told him that was fair enough.”
We ate in silence for a while after that, each person too focused on filling the emptiness in their stomach to bother with conversation. My eyes strayed often to Lauren, the dim orange gloom of the fire framing her against the night. She sat next to my father, but despite their proximity, the distance between them was vast. And growing.
Lauren’s face was pinched, the age lines deepened, new wrinkles showing around her eyes and mouth. She had lost weight. Her cheekbones stood out sharply beneath her skin. Her hair was lank and greasy. The circles under her eyes were black as new bruises, the skin puffy from too much crying. Next to her, Dad sat and ate with a desolate sadness lurking behind his confident veneer. There was a tension to his shoulders, he ate too quickly and bounced his left foot incessantly, and every so often, his right hand would twitch in Lauren’s direction, then ball into a fist, relax, and go back to holding his bowl of rice and beans. Seeing it, I felt as if someone had gripped my throat and started to squeeze.
I remembered the time before the Outbreak when our life had been normal, before the infected, and the fires, and the desperation I had adjusted to so quickly it scared me. I remembered our home on the outskirts of Houston, the kitchen, the bedrooms, the living room.
Dad had a recliner in the living room he declared as His Seat. And when he was home, only he was permitted to sit in it. If he caught me sitting in His Seat, he snapped his fingers, pointed a thumb at the ceiling, and said, “Up.”