Just then, his dad returned to tell April that her father was outside waiting for her.
Todd looked at her hopefully, looking for more, but the spell was already broken. Tomorrow, they would both return to the same building that defined their lives, and they would have no relationship. He felt like he had been given an unexpected gift, while at the same time cheated.
“Well, I’ll see you around, I guess,” April said.
“Good talking to you,” Todd said formally, meaning every word.
Months later, the game of high school ended with the Screaming. April was one of the majority that did not fall down. Todd still wonders sometimes what happened to her. He hopes she made out okay. She was one of the good ones.
The survivors drift away one by one. Wendy goes back to her room to clean her Glock and refill her magazines with bullets. Sarge wants to work up a sweat with some exercise. Ethan, drunk and slurring his words, scoops up two unopened bottles of wine and announces that he is going to his room to recharge his cell phone. Todd shows Steve and Ducky his crudely stitched forearm and asks them if they ever heard the story of how he got wounded. He asks them if they had to choose between a pistol with thirty rounds and a katana, which would they want to fight a zombie horde with?
The crew shake their heads in irritation and excuse themselves to check on the emergency generator, which they are supposed to shut down in fifteen minutes.
After they leave, Todd grows even more bored. He begins listing all of the things he misses the most. A big, fat, juicy steak, for starters. French fries. Buffalo wings. Anything cold to drink. His PC and his X-box game console. Friday nights at the hobby store. World of Warcraft. Warhammer 40,000.
“I wonder how much time we spend each day doing things and not actually knowing we’re alive,” Paul contemplates, draining the last of his wine.
“So what do you miss the most, Reverend?”
Paul grimaces, shaking his head, and leaves Todd to watch the crumbling, snowy image of the tired general by himself.
Sarge mentally counts his pushups—twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two—his shirt off and his thickly muscled torso slick with sweat. A medallion engraved with the image of Saint George, the patron saint of soldiers and Boy Scouts—and the victims of plague—dangles from his neck. He has been sitting reclined in the Bradley for over a week, which is like being forced to sit on a tiny couch playing a violent video game, one in which people actually die, for ten days straight. His brain is exhausted while his body has been going soft. Exercise will reboot both. Rest means refit.
His mind wanders to mountains looming over a sprawling base built of sandbag bunkers and huts and tents surrounded by timber walls and concertina wire. Chinook helicopters pound over the valley with their Apache escort. A patrol toils over distant hills. Soldiers laugh and clean their gear and piss into PVC tubes stuck into the ground. This is Afghanistan.
“Forget it,” he thinks aloud. “Just forget it.”
The first Chinook falls out of the sky and crashes into the mountain, breaking into pieces and spilling bodies as it rolls down into the valley.
He quickens the pace of his pushups. His heart is racing.
A knock on the door.
The soldiers at the base begin falling down onto the crushed stones.
“Not yet,” he says, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine—
The bodies are screaming.
The person knocks again.
He stops, panting. So close. He had come so close to forgetting.
“Come in,” he says.
The door opens and Wendy enters. She watches him wipe the sweat from his body with a towel. She seems particularly interested in the bear paw print tattoo on the left side of his chest. He looks away, suddenly feeling naked.
“Has Anne come back?” he says.
Wendy smiles and nods.
“Good,” he says.
She reaches into her mouth, extracts a chewed ball of Bazooka gum, and sticks it to the doorframe.
“Good,” she says, staring at him.
“So,” he adds, feeling awkward.
“So,” she says.
The cop takes a step towards him, holds his face in her hands, and kisses him gently on the mouth.
He forgets everything.
Ethan sits on his bed in the fluorescent light, watching his phone lying inert on the floor and drinking red wine out of a Dixie cup. The phone is connected to a power outlet. The power from the emergency generator will shut off in fifteen minutes and he wants to make sure he has his phone charged. It is starting to hit him that they are safe and that they will be living here for a while. Ever since he fled his home with nothing but a backpack, his every waking thought focused on staying away from the Infected when he could and killing them when he could not. After that: water, food, shelter. Now that all of his basic needs are being satisfied, his mind is already beginning to wander to other needs. New clothes and toiletries. Some DVDs to kill the time. Exercise equipment. Some art on the walls. And, perhaps most important, a project that will give him a sense of purpose, that will allow him to start living again instead of simply surviving. Rescuing other survivors, maybe. Starting a greenhouse. Anything to keep out the other emotions that continually threaten to invade his mind. For ten days, he has felt little other than fear, anxiety and panic. Now he is beginning to feel guilt, depression and boredom. A crushing sense of isolation and homesickness. He misses his wife. He misses his little girl. He misses his old life.
We were lucky, Carol, he thinks, his brain soggy with alcohol. We were stupid.
He takes another long sip of wine. It is a ridiculously expensive vintage but he has put down so much already that his taste buds right now could not tell the difference between a fine Bordeaux and Mad Dog.
Ethan takes out his backpack and carefully places a series of artifacts on the bed. A hairbrush with his wife’s hair still tangled in it, which no longer smells like her. A yellow rubber airplane, a promotion from an airline during a family vacation to Florida. Plastic piggy: Mary picked it up while playing in a park and would not part with it. Grimy little teddy bear that squeaks when squeezed; Mary used to make it talk back to her in a falsetto voice during pretend conversations. A hairclip. A card his wife gave him to express how glad she was that he had not been taken from her by the Screaming. Ethan knows the words, written in her fine handwriting, by heart. A wood spirit carving, the face of a bearded old man. A little blue Buddha on a keychain: Carol frequently toured spirituality but could not commit to religion. A photo of her from before Mary was born. Another of them smiling at their wedding, hastily ripped out of its frame before he fled the house. Several wallet photos of Mary when she turned one. The edges are worn from constant handling.
He has dozens of other photos but they are all on his computer at his house. He wants to think that he can go back there one day and get them. That someday the Infected are all going to drop dead or some scientist will invent a cure, and he can go home.
Sarge returns to consciousness with an intense sensation of butterflies in his heart. The beautiful cop is pulling away. He gazes after her sadly, wondering if he did something wrong.
But she says, “Will you hold me?”
“Yes,” he says, surprised at how relieved he feels that she is not leaving.
“Just hold me for a minute?”
“I would like that.”
Wendy guides him gently to the bed and pushes him down. She curls up next to him. They lie together on their sides, spooning, his large arm wrapped protectively around her stomach.