Famine: The Quiet Apocalypse Read online

  “Once we get home, we’ll set her loose on the critters that keep chewing the power wires. Well, not the exact ones...I doubt she wants fried rodent. But you know what I mean.”

  I settled back with a chuckle, watching the dog in awe. I wished I was an animal, and could swing so completely from fear to happiness. She all but ignored me, but she stared at Sam like he was the most important person in the world. She gave him the deep brown gaze of a creature that would pledge undying loyalty, even if they had to cross oceans or walk through fire.

  And all over a bag of jerky and a bowl of water.

  I shook my head at the whole idea as Sam pulled the cart up to the double doors and pushed one aside. He held it open as he pulled the cart through. Once the door swung closed behind us, we were plunged into near-complete darkness except for the flashlight still in Sam’s free hand. We passed defunct elevators and turned a corner to reach a hallway filled with doors.

  This is a tall hotel. Lots of stairs. My leg already hurt in anticipation of all that climbing. No point in worrying about it right now.

  Sam pulled the cart to a stop near the closest open door, and peered in. He didn’t tell me what he saw there, but before I could catch a glimpse, he shook his head and resumed our journey down the hallway.

  “What?”

  “Let’s just keep moving.” After seeing the way his lips were pinched together, I decided to stop asking questions. I let him wheel us a couple doors down, where he took the crowbar out of his backpack and wedged it into the doorframe, pushing on the metal until door and frame separated with the sound of splintering wood. After peering in to make sure it would work, he took hold of the cart again and pulled us inside.

  I heaved myself up from the cart and limped further into the room. At least it was clean, albeit dusty. It had obviously been clean when the world went to crap, and thankfully stayed that way. Some hotels we’d visited didn’t have a single clean room. This one even had two beds.

  “I’m going to check a few rooms for food before we lose all the light.” Sam didn’t wait for my response before he whistled at the dog, who jumped down and ran to him. “Try to rest.” He paused as if he wanted to say something else, then seemed to think better of it and headed out of the room.

  Sighing, I walked to the bed closest to the window and let my backpack fall onto the off-white bedspread. A small puff of dust expanded into the air. Even closed rooms got dusty after a few months.

  I sat on the bed and pulled off my shoe. I’m such an idiot. Dr. Haroun wanted me to start wearing my brace again, but I forgot to bring it. This was why we needed Zena. She never forgot anything when it came to packing for our trips.

  After getting up just long enough to pull back the curtains and let me watch the light fade away from the sky, I leaned back against the pillows and gazed out the window.

  One more day. One more day of freedom, then it’s back to the bunker. So much for all that possibility, all that hope we’d felt the first few days after we got the egg shut off. Reality had quickly set in, and sometimes I felt we were no better off than we had been before. The regular people still couldn’t walk outside for more than an hour or two. While that time was gradually getting longer, it did so at a rate far too slow to do us much good. By the time they managed to repair whatever piece of equipment was malfunctioning, they’d be getting paranoid and irritable and had to go back inside to spend some of our precious water supply on a thorough shower and clean clothes.

  Sometimes I just wanted to walk away from it all. I could. I could just set off into the sunset...or any other direction, and worry about nobody but myself. Freedom, true freedom, was close enough to taste. The world was wide and empty and I was one of the few who could still walk amongst the ruins.

  But if I did, people would die. Men, women, children, they would soon starve to death...if thirst didn’t kill them first. They had no choice. Two hundred people, every one of them depending on me, Sam and Zena. I couldn’t just abandon them all. I would never forgive myself.

  I wrangled the bedspread out from under me and crawled beneath the sheets in my grungy clothes, feeling a little guilty as I pulled the smooth white fabric around me. It wasn’t like there were any housekeepers who’d have to clean up after me, but it still felt wrong. Like I was breaking the rules somehow.

  I was starting to drift off when a quiet creak brought me back to wakefulness. I sat up and cast my expectant gaze toward the door. “That was quick.” I’d been expecting Sam to be gone for a couple hours.

  No answer.

  Stomach tightening in anxiety, I threw the blankets back and pulled my knife out of my pocket. With a click, the blade extended. I grabbed the little LED lantern hanging from a carabiner on my backpack and pushed the button to turn it on. The light illuminated the space between me and the door, which was empty and silent.

  You’re being ridiculous, Deidre. There’s nobody here. Huffing with annoyance, I set the lantern on the side table and laid back down. The little lamp wouldn’t last long. We hadn’t been outside enough for the tiny solar panel on its side to charge it much. But it should stay on until Sam returned, and I could breathe a little easier.

  Creak.

  I sat bolt upright and grabbed the light. Was the door to the hallway open a tiny bit further than it had been? My heart sped up until it pounded in my ears.

  “Who’s there?” No answer. “Show yourself!”

  After a good minute of waiting, I was starting to feel ridiculous. Sometimes doors shift, Deidre. If someone was there, they wouldn’t just hang out on the other side of the door. This isn’t a horror movie; it’s real life. Calm the frick down.

  I gulped in a few deep breaths, and forced my racing mind to slow down. No matter how hard I stared at the door, it wasn’t moving. There was no shadowy figure peering through the cracks. No more sounds.

  This time I didn’t put the lantern back on the table. I kept it pointed at the door and laid down facing the hallway. If something was out there, I’d see it before it saw me as anything more than a body-sized lump on the bed.

  ***

  Someone’s in the room! I’m being attacked! Heart racing, I bolted upright, my knife hand waving in the semi-darkness. I sought a target, any target, particularly the one that just touched my shoulder. “Get back! I have a knife!”

  “Damn it, Deidre, it’s just me!” Sam’s voice issued from a few feet away. Something moved in the darkness, and a flashlight went from the floor to a hand that brought it up to shine on Sam’s face. “I’m glad you’ve got a good reaction time, but damn if you didn’t almost take my head off.”

  “Holy crap.” The words issued from Sam’s mouth just before he sat down next to me on the bed, and I jumped again as the black dog leapt up behind him. “Sam...I’m sorry.”

  “What’s got you so jumpy?” He rubbed his arm, and I gasped when I saw the cut.

  “Oh, no. I cut you. Oh...Sam…”

  He reached out and grabbed my hand. “Don’t worry about it. I shouldn’t have touched your shoulder. I knew better.” He squeezed my hand. “But you aren’t normally like this.”

  “No.” I swallowed back my anxiety and closed my eyes for a second to try and get my heart to slow down. “I kept hearing a noise. At first I thought it was you, but it wasn’t. I’m sure I just imagined it, but…”

  “I don’t think you did.” Sam still had his flashlight shining at his face, which made him look gaunt and frightening. I fished through the blankets for the lantern, which filled the room with a soft glow once I found it and set it on the table.

  “That’s not reassuring.” I tried to ignore the way my stomach dropped.

  “I didn’t see anybody, but someone’s been here recently. I found half-eaten food that hadn’t spoiled since it was opened. Honey Badger growled once, but I couldn’t see anything. Someone’s here, but they don’t want us to see them.”

  I passed a weary hand over my face. “Can we blame them? Would you trust other people in a world
where only the crazy survived?”

  Sam’s heard my argument so many times he no longer bothered to correct me on the “crazy” part. “Still, we need to be careful.”

  “Do you think we should just move on? We don’t want to make them starve.”

  He shook his head. “No. We’ll take most of the food and leave them some. Then we put up notes telling them how to find the bunker. It’s a long walk, but it has to beat living in fear and isolation forever.”

  I was filled with deep sadness as I contemplated the concept. Honey Badger whined and put her head on my knee. Without thinking I put my hand on her head and stroked the black fur. Despite her fierce and weathered exterior, she’d really just been looking for someone to love her. Just like the rest of us, really.

  3: Gimpy Limps

  I woke to the sun’s first rays spilling between the two tall casinos across the street. Turning over, I found Sam asleep on the other bed with the dog curled up against his back.

  What’s different? Something about this morning was unusual, but I couldn’t place it. Perhaps it was the fact I felt so unusually refreshed, despite our worries about the hotel having another inhabitant.

  Sam. My jaw dropped a little as I looked at him. As if the dog sensed my gaze, she raised her head to look at me and the tip of her tail thumped on the bed. He didn’t wake me up with his nightmares. It had been weeks. The nightmares had subsided for a while after we shut off the spores’ production, but lately they’d come back. At this point, I just expected him to wake me up around three every morning. We hardly bothered talking about it anymore. I knew why, he knew why, but there was nothing we could do to stop his subconscious brain from tormenting him. It was a wonder he was ever able to sleep at all.

  Not wanting to wake him, I grabbed my knife and folded the blade back down before stuffing it in my pocket. Then I moved around the room as silently as possible, gathering up all the little things we could use at the bunker. The pens, the little notepads, it all went in a pillowcase along with the toilet paper, kleenex box and the little toiletry bottles. I even dug the batteries out of the remote. Every little bit counted.

  Honey Badger watched me the whole time, her gaze interested but neither hostile nor fearful. It amazed me how quickly she could accept us and trust us. Maybe dogs had some deeper way of determining who was trustworthy and who wasn’t.

  I wonder what she’d have thought of Dalen.

  ***

  The rest of that day passed with little incident despite my growing frustration over how few supplies we found. The stairs were just as bad as I’d feared, and it wasn’t even noon when I was on the verge of tears from the pain in my leg.

  We made it through five floors before a misstep broke the rest of my resolve and I sank to the floor, sobbing. Honey Badger whined and licked at my face, but I pushed her away.

  “Deidre, what’s wrong?”

  “I can’t do this anymore!” My anxiety was messing with my head, and the pain in my leg was messing with my body. I was exhausted, despite a decent night’s sleep.

  “We can go back to the van…”

  “No, I mean this!” I swept my arm out to encompass something like the millionth empty hotel room we’d raided. “Five minutes per room, for what? A couple bottles of water and enough shampoo for one shower, if we’re lucky?”

  “I know. But we can’t just give up.”

  Lowering my hands, I glared at Sam where he knelt in front of me, my eyes blurred by tears. “Why not? We’re only prolonging their misery. We’re not making any progress. All we’re doing is surviving. What happens when all of Vegas runs out of supplies, or the vehicles run out of gas, or we don’t have any more wires to get the power going again? What then? All we’ve done is give them a couple more weeks of fear and misery just to let them starve to death after all. What’s the point?”

  “Because.” He sighed, and lowered himself to sit next to me. Honey Badger panted happily, then plopped herself across his lap as her tail thumped the floor. “Because we’re giving them time...whether it’s time until the spores disappear, or until someone comes to save us. Anything could happen. We just have to be patient.”

  “I’m tired of being patient.” I met his eyes, and he reached out to cradle my cheek in his hand.

  “I know. We all are. But the alternative is to give up, which would be disastrous.”

  He lowered his hand, and I had the sudden urge to kiss him, but the dog was in the way. It was probably for the better. We’d already had a few awkward moments and conversations about having to place strict boundaries on our relationship in a world where things like birth control were limited resources, and pregnancies could be devastating to our survival efforts.

  It seemed like such a silly, faraway concern in the moments when our world consisted of the two of us and the kind of longing born of traumas that had forged the kind of deep bonds many other people could only dream of. Despite only having known Sam for a couple months, we worked together as well as if we’d been lifelong friends. If I trusted anybody in the world, it was him, and I was the only one who got to see him when he was vulnerable.

  Without further protest, I allowed him to help me to my feet, then he bent down to grab my cane and pressed it in my hand. Honey Badger sat on her haunches and watched us, her pink tongue hanging out as she panted.

  “Right. Come on. The faster we work, the sooner we can head home.” Sam took my free hand and led me forward, with the dog following right on our heels.

  ***

  The sun headed down toward the western horizon as we drove the last few miles toward the bunkers. Honey Badger perched on a box shoved between the two front seats, her elegant head alert as she peered out the windows. I had my foot up on the dashboard again, and leaned against my window as I tried to ignore the pain.

  I felt horrible for giving up, but about halfway through the hotel, my leg just refused to carry me anymore. Sam had helped me down to the ground floor, and left Honey Badger with me in case the hotel’s other mysterious occupant decided to be threatening. Every time he couldn’t carry anything else, he’d tote it all down to me, mostly stuck in pillowcases and sheets, and I’d sort it into a more organized form and load it in the van.

  He’d hit the jackpot in one of the restaurants, and Asian buffet, which appeared to have gotten a food delivery right before everything went down. The back of the van was filled to the brim with what we’d gathered, including about a dozen huge bags of rice, flour and flats of things like canned lychees and Jello powder. It might not be the most nutritious, but it was food and it would last a lot longer than the energy bars and chips we usually found.

  “You okay?”

  I just nodded, not taking my eyes off of the arid landscape rolling past the window. “I’ll be fine. Maybe they’ll give us a couple days this time before they start fussing about more supplies.”

  Sam’s hand landed on my arm, and Honey Badger started wriggling as if she thought he was trying to pet her. “If they don’t, I’ll talk to them. They need to understand that if they drive you and Zena into the ground, you won’t be able to help them. I’m used to it...but I can’t do it all alone either.”

  I touched his hand for just a moment before he withdrew it. I sat up as we rumbled onto the gravel road that would lead us from the pavement to the bunker. I could already see the top of it in the distance.

  When we drove up onto the concrete pad, Zena was already waiting for us. The teen was wearing her favorite hoodie, which was a violent shade of purple, and her hair stood out in a crazy black halo around her head.

  As I opened the door and stepped down, Zena grinned and ran to meet me.n“You smell bad.”

  I laughed. I returned her hug almost as enthusiastically as it was given. “That happens when you don’t shower for a week.”

  Zena’s nose wrinkled. When she released me, her gaze fixed on something over my shoulder and her eyes went wide.

  “Oh my gosh! You found a dog! What’s its name? Does i
t bite? Where did you find it? How…”

  “Slow down. We found her in a hotel. Her name’s Honey Badger, and she hasn’t bitten us, but I would take it slow.”

  Honey Badger jumped down onto the pavement beside me and Zena knelt with a hand outstretched. I watched them closely, but all the dog did was sit on my foot and look up at me in confusion. I chuckled and stroked the shiny black head. “It’s okay. Zena’s good people.” The dog thumped her tail on the concrete in reply, but didn’t make any move toward the teenager who was making smooching noises at her. “Hey, let’s give her a chance to get settled in. I’m sure she’ll be happy to introduce herself to everybody once she knows what’s going on.”

  Zena nodded, though there was disappointment in her eyes. “I guess I’d better go get the guys.”

  I tried to communicate my sympathy through my gentle smile. “That’s a good idea.”