“This is your resident card,” she tells him, explaining that he will use it to obtain his rations, access the showers and medical services, and apply for other government help. “This is your information packet. In it you will find a recap of your orientation—a map of the camp, the rules you are expected to follow here, and a list of services and where to find them. There is currently a small surplus in shelters so you do not have to build your own; your allotment is marked in yellow highlighter. This is your claim ticket so you can pick up the property you brought into the camp with you. And finally, here are two flea collars. Put one around each ankle. Keeps the lice away.”
“Gross!” Todd says. “I mean, thanks.”
“Do you have any questions?”
“Just one. Do you have stores or anything like that?”
“There are six outdoor markets. Four are where people sell pretty much anything. Another is for produce grown in the camp, and the last is for meat.”
“What’s the accepted currency?” he presses. “Is it a barter system, or is the dollar—”
The woman glances over his shoulder and yells, “Twenty-one!”
Todd stands, trying to think of something biting, but a family approaches, wild-eyed and holding out their cardboard number to the woman like an offering, and he tells himself she is not worth it. She is not going to get me down. I survived out there weeks while she was in here sitting on her ass filling out index cards. I have fought and killed to survive.
He has a sudden flashback to Sarge standing in front of the hospital, spitting tongues of flame and smoke with his AK47 in the dark. He remembers throwing a Molotov into a mob of the Infected. The Bradley smashed through the parked cars, its gun booming. He smiles.
“Ha,” he says, and walks away to find Ethan standing near one of the tables, wringing his hands. He asks the man how the search is going.
“Slow,” Ethan says with a sad smile, but he appears happy to be trying, and this is something, Todd realizes. At least there is that.
“Where’s everybody else?”
“The Army took Sarge and Steve away for debriefing. Wendy got a job as a cop and is heading to where they told her she could live. She gets priority housing being a cop. And Paul is on his way to one of the food distribution centers. He got a job there passing out food.”
“Well,” Todd says, feeling awkward.
“How about you? You going back to school? They offer that here, you know.”
“I don’t really see the advantage of learning calculus,” Todd says before catching himself. “Oh, sorry, man.”
Ethan nods sadly. “It’s okay. I don’t see the point in teaching it anymore, either.”
“I’ve got big plans, Ethan. I’ve got this stash—”
“One hundred and eight!” a voice cries from one of the tables.
Ethan perks up. “That’s me.”
“Well,” Todd says, frowning. “I guess I’ll be seeing you around.”
“Right,” Ethan says vacantly. “Take care of yourself, Todd.”
Todd collects his duffel bag, weapon and ammunition in another room and walks outside into hazy sunlight, feeling tickled and breathless with excitement.
I’m here, he thinks. I made it.
The street in front of the school is filled with activity. A group of bored soldiers glances at him, sweating in their helmets, and then go back to talking among themselves. They barely look a day older than him, just beefy kids. Several children sit on the cracked sidewalk, drawing with pieces of colored chalk. Another group of kids, orphans of Infection quickly going feral, pull a red wagon filled with empty plastic jugs and bottles. Whatever grass might have grown here is now gone, trampled into dried dirt that floats in the air as dust. A military five-ton truck rolls down the street, ignoring a stop sign, beeping at the lazy crowds. Several men are working on a large machine, their tools and parts laid out neatly on a filthy white blanket. Dogs are barking inside a mom and pop shop across the street converted into housing. A loudspeaker attached to an old telephone pole, dangling a tangle of wires, squawks instructions on how to avoid cholera, followed by an ear-splitting screech. A moment later, a Britney Spears song begins playing, tinny and offering more nostalgia than entertainment in this time and place.
Todd is irritated at the other survivors. They could not even stick around to stay goodbye. You’re on your own again, Todd old man, he tells himself. You were doing just fine before joining up with them. You were ninja, surviving on your own, as you’ve always done. You will do it again. The improbable umbilical cord was not meant to last. It had been a relationship born of necessity, nothing more. Now it is time to be a nation of one again.
He consults his map, a virtual city carefully drawn in madman scrawl, his to explore. He identifies the school, situated on a road that forms one of the camp’s major arteries used for motorized transport between the central hub and the distribution and health centers. He finds his new home, a speck in one of the endless shanty towns, revealed by a blotch of highlighter. Then he locates the nearest general market, where he intends to launch his career as a trader.
The other survivors are haggard, tired, broken. Just look at Sarge, he thinks, the man who fought a horde of screaming Infected by himself and saved our lives: damaged goods. Todd is young and taut and mentally flexible and much, much more resilient than he looks. If anything, the apocalypse has been almost kind to him. Already lean, he is starting to put on a little muscle and with it, more confidence. He feels powerful. He looks at the kids running by in packs and the soldiers passing around a cigarette and thinks: My generation will survive this. Will be defined by it. And we will define the age in turn.
Paul hitches a ride hanging onto the side of a garbage truck as it grinds down one of the camp’s main arteries, raising a choking cloud of dust. The truck has been assigned to collect the dead for disposal. Its sides are decorated with crowded layers of outlandish graffiti, much of it incorporating grotesquely painted skulls and bones. He let the driver bum a cigarette and in return found out why the dead are burned in pits outside the city. The reason, he was told, goes back to the camp’s origins, when many people, raised on horror films, postulated that the Infected were zombies—hungry things that rose from the dead. Although it has been disproven, the practice stuck. Even if the people here want to bury the dead now, they cannot. There is simply not enough space.
A rock glances off of the side of the truck with a metallic boom, making Paul flinch. Another sails by close to his head, almost making him fall into the dust. The cab’s passenger-side window rolls down and a rifle protrudes, carefully sighting on a target among the tents.
No more rocks are thrown at the vehicle.
The truck lurches over the potholes, trembling in its metal skin. It makes three stops to pick up bodies lying stiff in the sun, their faces pale and their skin flaccid and waxy under sheets of plastic. For years, Americans sanitized death. Few people actually saw the dead in their natural state, bloated and drawing flies with their stench. They saw them laid out on velvet in fine caskets, dressed up in their best clothes, preserved like Egyptians.
The truck finally slows in front of a large wood church. A hand reaches out of the window and points to the front doors.
Paul jumps off, pounds the side of the truck to signal the driver that he can go, and waves. The hand waves back and the truck continues down the road.
Free of the truck’s exhaust, the camp’s ever-present smells of cooking, wood smoke and sewage return with a vengeance.
He breathes deep, figuring he might as well start getting used to it.