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Jerusalem
Key West Island
The Wharf Rats were going to cut south by the tiny Havana museum, using the buildings for cover, but they saw the van with the red cross painted on a blanket and watched it drive on the red brick road between the wrought iron fencing. Then, when they saw the two pickups that followed it, the Rats got low at the side of the building.
It happened nearly every afternoon—at some point each day, they would hear screams, or running, or gunshots, and they would go to investigate. The hard part was deciding who to help. Who were the good guys? This time it was easy, but it was also odd.
No one drove light anymore. The mere sound of a motor meant you were carrying enough heat to push through an ambush if someone tried to stop you. And who painted a cross on the side of a van? The hospital crews drove non-descript box trucks.
All questions for later. These were the Wharf Rats and this was their calling.
They pulled up the gray bandanas that had become their call sign.
“Face, get their attention.”
“On it,” he said, passing a squat glass jar to Lacewood and lighting a tiny brick of Black Cats.
The pickup trucks were emptying when the air around them suddenly filled with popping sounds and thick, wet smoke. The dogs growled impressively, and men took cover. The twins ran low up to the van and urged a driver and passenger back to the others. Lacewood had the shotgun ready with its last shell, while Thyroid and Hunter Grant readied their weapons.
When the twins reached the cover of the buildings, they ran, with Lacewood covering from the rear. They heard shouts, but no gunshots from the men by the van, and when they rounded the museum and restaurant, they looked out in all directions before giving the “all clear.”
Mallory Square looked almost like it did the day after the boats sank, with an empty red brick platform that faced the water and Sunset Key to the north, with its beachfront mansions. No more street performers, and no more food carts. Birds ran on the bricks and on the big piece of paper left with the names of those killed in the water when the boats challenged the naval blockade. The candles were gone. Those had become valuable.
The two people they’d saved this time were a little Indian man wearing a blue dress shirt and a red-and-gray-striped tie, and a man in his early twenties with brown, curly hair who was dressed like a bellhop.
“What was that?” said the Indian man, slightly out of breath.
“That was you getting jacked,” said Shawn, “and us coming to the rescue.”
Hunter stepped forward, taking charge. “Vera, get the dogs quiet. Billy, you’re lookout.”
Billy pointed to the nearby hotel balconies from the Weston. “Plenty of attention already.”
“I’m not worried about them yet. It’s still daylight. See if those guys are going to go after their score or not.”
“Is that what we are?” The Indian man spoke more evenly now, his voice smooth and precise. “Your score?”
“We’re the Wharf Rats, Mister. Not raiders.”
“But you still gotta pay,” Shawn chimed in.
“Shut up, Shawn.” Hunter turned back to the men. “We’ll get the two of you somewhere safe. Then we can talk about payment.”
“We can pay you,” the Indian man said calmly. “But we need what we came for and we need the van.”
“The van?”
“What on earth for?” said Lindsey MC with a laugh.
“Get us what we need and we will pay, and pay well.”
“I recognize a couple of these guys,” Billy called out. “One of them is Joseph Owen’s dad.”
Hunter looked at the others. He huffed and said, “All right, we get you back to the van and help you finish your run. Once you’re back at your base, we settle up.”
“Agreed.”
“Carter,” Hunter said, his hands wringing Defiance’s shaft. “You and Face circle right and cover us. Keep an eye on the shipwreck museum. I saw people up in the tower earlier. If our competition moves on us—” He nodded to Face. “—you toss one of the pipes, and we meet back where we slept last night.” He lifted the bat to his shoulder. “Everybody else with me.”
“You’re going to fight them?”
Hunter looked the little business man up and down. “For a car? Hell no.”
They jogged back to the edge of the building. Hunter leaned out and shouted, “Hey!” Through the last of the magnesium smoke, they could see a group of at least a dozen guys freeze in place where they’d been throwing cloths of some sort out of the back of the van. “This is our score now.”
One with stringy hair and a lion beard shouted back, “So what?”
“So we want the van too.”
The raiders looked at each other for long seconds. “What are you offering?”
“What do you want?”
“Bullets. Shells.”
Hunter loudly sounded his derision. “For a car? Like hell.”
A man came out of the back holding out two liquor bottles like trophies.
The Indian man jerked up. “I need those.”
Hunter called out, “We got a nail gun... pneumatic.”
“Caps?”
“Yeah.”
“How many?”
Billy shook Hunter’s shoulder. “Don’t give ’em all. Face needs ’em.”
Hunter pursed his lips and called out, “About fifty.”
“Deal,” came the hurried answer.
“Circle back to Carter and Face,” Hunter said to Billy. “Pull them back where they can see us. Get the nail gun from Face and meet back here.”
“Face won’t like it,” said Vera.
“No doubt,” Hunter answered his wife. Then, to the Indian, he said, “This better be good.”
“It will be.”
After Billy returned with the gun, Hunter held it high and walked forward.
The two pickups started back down the walking path to Whitehead Street.
Vera held Maximus ready as Hunter walked the trucks to the edge of the street and set the gun on a bench. Then he held two strips of firing caps high and set those down on top of the gun. This done, he ran back to the van, looked in the rear, and came back to the others with a question on his face.
The little Indian man stood, brushed the dust off of his slacks, and said to his man, “Good. Now for the spice.”
“Spice?”
Lindsey made a noise. “Spice,” she said to Vera. “It’s another name for dope.”
The Indian man shook his head. “No. Spice. Spices. For food. We can’t just serve reconstituted powder without seasoning.”
Lindsey stared at the well-dressed lunatic. “What?”
“We have standards, young lady.”
“You have... what?”
The last part of the run took place in a Cuban restaurant attached to the museum. The Indian man and the bellhop took possession of a full crate of Caribbean spices from two women and an old man.
The Rats covered, and snarled to each other about the loss of the gun.
When they got to the van, Shawn lifted the blanket, held with ropes, which covered the side panels. “It’s cookies,” he said in wonder. “It’s a cookie truck.”
“It’s a hotel transport van with the back two rows removed,” said the prim little business man. “Now filled with five bottles of liquor, four boxes of confectionary chocolates, napkins, replacement dishes, and, thanks to your help, a crate of spices that should keep my cook happy for at least the rest of the month.”
Lindsey MC fixed him with the look of disbelief she’d carried since the moment she was told the run had nothing to do with drugs. “Why?” she said in a voice that was both question and accusation.
“Because, my dear. I have a hotel to run. Now,” he said, mopping his brow from the afternoon heat. “How do we get back to the Grand Key?”
“Dude,” said Shawn. “If your lips were purple this would make a lot more sense.”
“Shawn? Billy?” asked Hunter.
“Yeah,” said Billy. “The Grand Key still has people in it—bunch of kids with guns running the show inside.”
“Not exactly,” said Patel, “but you certainly have your ear to the ground.”
“Boss?” The bellhop looked frightened.
“I think our problem might be solved, William,” said the hotel manager.
“All right,” said Hunter, his voice weary. “As to moving the van across the island, the nail gun is out of play. Ideas?”
Lacewood and Face looked at each other, and Face turned a full circle. “Too many eyes on us.”
“I don’t know what’s happening in the shipwreck hall,” said Shawn, “but the Weston is bad. Whatever we do, we better get on it.”
“I can only think of one way that’s not going to get us jacked,” Face said, looking at Lacewood.
Lacewood shook his head. “This sucks.”
Billy and Shawn explained to the hotel manager that the best way to not get attacked was to look like you had nothing worth fighting for.
So the Wharf Rats took the painted blankets off of the vehicle, put the van in neutral, and pushed it from the far northeast side of the island, all the way down Southard Street, which was not closed off, then down White Street, which was. The boys took turns pushing it, while one of them ran alongside with the shotgun. They found out that everyone except the Indian man called the bellhop Will, that he spoke little, and that he did not have the stamina for much pushing.
The Rats pushed, thoroughly discouraged. It did suck, and for the last several days of nomadic wandering, it seemed that everything Wharf Rat had sucked—waking up each day after having slept on hard ground, never knowing what the day would bring, helping people who were ungrateful, or worse. They all felt a growing despair.
When they neared White Street, the Indian man walked to the back where Hunter and Thyroid were currently lurching the van forward, while Billy and Shawn were pushing from the sides and Lacewood walked offset, covering with the shotgun. The man placed one hand on the back of the van beside the boys.
“At this rate, we won’t be back before nightfall,” he said, not really pushing, and using his free hand to remove a handkerchief from a shirt pocket and pat at his neck. “My name is Sri Patel, by the way. I’m the hotel manager.”
Hunter nodded. “A pleasure. Don’t worry about the time. The south side should be okay. Once we clear Flagler, we can jump in the van and hightail it.”
“Your lady friends told me we are about to barter our way through a barricade.”
“They owe us,” said Hunter, straining to speak.
“And letting my van pass will compensate for this debt? You will want to add this to our tab, I assume.”
“That’d be nice.”
“May I ask what you are desiring for payment?”
“Our normal fee is one day of food supplies for the group, but I’d say we’ve gone over and above on this run. Wouldn’t you?”
“I have a counter offer,” said Patel, not fazed by the harsh tone of Hunter’s question—and still not pushing. “Not three days, or even four.... How about food every day for the duration of our confinement?”
At this Thyroid nearly slipped.
“And room, and board. I don’t mean a roof and walls. I mean electricity. I mean maid service. I mean air conditioning.”
“Sounds great,” Hunter barked out, fighting not to laugh. He didn’t buy the pitch.
“When I came here,” Sri Patel said, “there were seventy five hotels in operation on this island. The Double was not the only economy lodging on the island, not even the only place owned by the Best Western Corporation, but now it’s the only one left. The others are all abandoned.”
“Not exactly.”
“By the management, I meant. I know their conditions.”
“Bet you don’t.”
Patel looked a question, and Hunter explained, “Take the one back there, for instance. Used to be The Weston. Now it’s a bunch of nuts that paint their faces and go out every night hunting like they’re on a damn safari.”
“Good Lord.” Patel shook his head. “I’ve had to walk a fine line for the last nine weeks. Every day has been a challenge. When the power went out, I had to turn the hotel into an overflow site for the hospital to get a spot near the top of the failing electrical grid. In the absence of food trucks, I made deals with three different grocers, and over twenty different restaurants, to utilize the last of their stores.”
“So what happened?” Thyroid asked bitterly.
“What do you mean?”
“The van,” said Hunter, his tone harsh. “Nobody rolls light anymore, the hospital guys least of all. Those guys are armed to the teeth. Nobody messes with them. You’d have to have been living in a cave to think this would have worked.”
“Hunter—”
“No,” said Patel, holding up a hand to stop Thyroid. “Your friend is right. We were using the hospital personnel to get what we needed. All of my remaining people stayed on our property. But now the hospital teams are both out of commission.”
Both boys looked at Patel, wide-eyed.
“One of their crews was attacked—viciously—last week,” he said, now looking at one boy, then turning back to the other. “They’ve suspended all collection operations until they can track the hostiles. I have one of their survivors recovering right now in our patient wing.”
“Holy shit,” Thyroid said.
Patel sighed. “That’s why I had to go out myself. I can’t rely on their collection teams for the moment. Of course, you both have understood the situation correctly. I don’t know what all has been happening outside of my hotel.” Then his eyes lit up. “That’s why I need a collection crew of my own. I can’t keep up. Just providing for our current registry is more than I can manage.” At this, he took both hands off of the van and began to gesture passionately. “We hear stories, rumors. I know things are changing quickly. It’s like a different country, full of different customs every week, so I have to have my own team—full-time, room and board and any amenities that we can still provide.”
“I wish,” said Hunter, shaking his head. “Mr. Patel, you have no idea how much I wish, but we’ve been on the move ever since we freed the prisoners from the Annex.”
“Hunter,” Thyroid said. “You got to be careful throwing that around.”
Shawn scoffed from the side of where he was pushing. “What’s the point anymore?”
Sri Patel stopped in his tracks, and watched as the van moved away from him.
Hunter turned his sweaty brow to his friend. “Might as well tell him. Somebody would tell him eventually, after they found out we helped him. Too bad. Vera would kill for a shower right about now.”
Mr. Patel appeared between them again, his hands in his pockets while he walked. “You’ll pardon my doubts, but you are telling me that your group bombed the Truman Annex?”
“Bombs make you nervous?” Thyroid asked. “Then you might want to ask the guy with the blue backpack to get out of your van. He’s got four pipe bombs in it.”
“Pipe,” Patel said to himself. “My God, you’re only children.”
“Yeah, well, we kind of had to cancel the whole adolescence thing.”
“I heard those explosions. We heard rumors about what happened. Who would have ever thought,” Patel said to himself.
“So you can see why we can’t settle down.”
“No,” he said with the light of a dawning realization on his face. “No, I can’t.” His excitement started to build. “You’re more... let’s just say resourceful than I had thought, but that makes sense in the current environment. You’re still exactly what I’m looking for. You can move around the island, gGet things done, and you have... you have a sense of honor and won’t take advantage of a favorable position. One day’s food. Daily bread. No, no, no. We have to make this work, and there’s no reason why it can’t. You don’t come in with the van. You sneak in at night. I’ll be waiting. You all look distinctive—most of you. We give you a shave, a little hair gel, a change of clothes. The boy with the facial scars needs to grow out his beard. All of you need to keep those bandanas in your pockets. We can do this. We have to do this!”
Hunter looked past Sri Patel to Thyroid as they approached the White Street barricade. “What do you think?”
“Well....” Thyroid shrugged as he pushed. “At least it’s not a boat.”
Their laughter started as a chuckle, then built like a log fire until they had to stop pushing. Thyroid seemed to laugh because Hunter was laughing, a sound none of them had heard before.
Vera and Lindsey MC appeared in the Van’s rear window.
Lacewood walked up close, shotgun in hand, concern on his face.
That night, when they crawled over the car-wall that surrounded the grounds and walked through the doors under the awning, which had a huge red cross painted above them, they were met at the reception desk by an attractive brunette.
“Mr. Grant,” she said. “Welcome to the DoubleTree Resort at Key West.”
Shawn smiled at Billy. “A fucking hotel. Man, we have to. It would be so epic.”
Vera fixed them with a sideways look. “You two morons better not even think about tearing out the walls.”
For the next three days, the Wharf Rats found ways to make themselves useful, and Sri Patel could not have been happier with the new arrangement. In three days of runs, they’d traded for much of Sri’s “needs,” and the twins, hitting the streets at night, had scavenged for nearly all the rest. The hotel manager’s list of needed items was now down to a single page, with several already crossed through: Face had fixed the pump to the swimming pool, Lindsey MC helped with the nurses, Vera and her dogs played with the children who were at her table every morning at the hotel’s little breakfast asking when Cleo would come down.
Thyroid loved to cook and helped in the kitchen, which is where he was on the third day when the men dressed in police uniforms came to dinner. They had been there the first night while the Rats were still settling in, and were absent the next. Tonight they were back, and when Vera came and told Thyroid what they were doing, he dropped the large metal fork he’d been using to stir the reconstituted potatoes, told her to get Lindsey MC, and ran to Sri’s office.
“They’re back again,” he said, his anxiety running the words together.
“Who? Oh....” Patel sighed. “Let’s do our best to be gracious, and hope they leave soon.”
“They’re sitting next to that reporter, giving her a hard time. The way they’re acting—”
“I’ll apologize to Ms. Sanchez myself when they are gone.”
Thyroid shook his head in disbelief. How could anyone so good at giving people what they wanted miss something so obvious?
“You, you don’t understand. Hunter is going out there. They’re all going out there.”
His thick eyebrows tensed as Sri started to rise. “I don’t want any trouble with these men. I brought your group here to assist with deliveries, not to start a row with a group of heavily armed officers on my back patio. I would have thought that was clear.”
Thyroid shook his head. “He’s not like other men, Mr. Patel.”
“Who?”
“Hunter. He’s not. He’s got this line. He thinks different than you. You want to treat everyone special and just get along, and that’s fine as long as no one crosses his line.” His laugh was pained. “But they’ve crossed it. It’s over. There’s nothing anyone can say to stop what’s about to happen.”
Patel managed to finally get to his feet. He looked past Thyroid in the general direction of the patio full of guests. “What are you saying?”
“I’m sorry. I really am.”
“Christopher, what do you intend?”
“Mr. Patel, if you could just go out there. If you could just maybe distract them for a few minutes until we bring out their food... but then you need to leave us. It’ll be over quick. I think I can make it end real quick, but that’s the best I can do. It’s going to end one way or the other. This way it ends fast.”
Chris Thyroid Meyers had never killed anyone who was not infected before, let alone seven police officers. He grew up soft, the son of a corporate attorney who believed that masculinity was a sort of condition that had to be treated so that the patient could recover into something fully human. His mother divorced Chris’s father and dominated his now stepfather, Jeffrey. She told her son that she wanted him to explore his identity, but every time his exploration uncovered something male-like, she was never pleased.
His mother let him play console games, but she didn’t like it. It could be tolerated because it was not real. The only real thing he ever found enjoyment in that pleased his mother was cooking. He could watch the Food Network and make meals with his mother close by, and feel a tiny measure of purpose and creative satisfaction. It was something.
He wanted to play sports. By the sixth grade, he was 5’8’’ and stronger than any boy in his class—too strong. His mother would not let him play football and baseball, saying that they were dangerous, but soccer and basketball were acceptable. He would have liked to play basketball in middle school, but his body was all wrong; he stopped getting taller, and by then all of his growth seemed to be horizontal, especially in his hips and thighs, which became comically wide, like his puffy lips and generally swollen facial features.
His classmates made fun of him, and if he ever stood up to the jeers, his mother’s wrath was extraordinary. He didn’t even have to fight; he could simply raise his voice—or even just scowl—and if she saw or found out, she would yell things meant to shame him, and concoct humiliating punishments. He had used force, and intimidated them, and he needed to know how that felt. He had to put himself in their shoes. He had to feel what they were feeling. He had to see the world through their eyes.
At first he just cried, but then, one day, he did it. Almost.
Chris, his mom, and Jeffrey were driving back down from Sandspur Beach on Highway 1, with its beautiful views and its two crowded lanes, and he was sitting in back of their Infiniti staring at the Prius just a few feet off of their back bumper. He thought about what it would be like to be inside that driver’s body, to be looking forward at lumpy Chris Meyers, who could not do anything right, who would never amount to anything. What did failure look like? And for a split second, it happened. Chris felt dizzy. He saw his mother’s car from the outside. His vision drifted to the Prius and he saw—he was sure—through eyes that gazed out of a front windshield, beyond a steering wheel, with a man’s hands at the ten-and-two.
It ended as soon as the shock of surprise hit him. He tried it again and again, but could never make it happen. He had not imagined it. He was sure of that. Yet even though he could not place his consciousness inside another host, the mere consideration of the thing gave him a remarkably different perspective.
He began to truly believe that he could feel what they felt. He began to understand the people around him. He realized that his mother had been hurt and had come to think of manhood as a universal evil because it was men who had hurt her. He understood that Jeffrey let his wife control him because doing so made her happy, and so he got to taste what it was like to please a strong woman by simply by giving in to his own passivity, something that came naturally to him. Chris understood his classmates too, and he tried to share what he learned with a few of them, but none would listen. He was too strange. He had no friends. Why should any of them care what he thought? Even the other rejects rejected Chris Meyers. He had nothing they needed.
Until the day that Hunter Grant came to his house.
His mother had refused to leave when the news spoke of a new and frightening disease. “You never give in to fear,” she had said. She was working from home, on a conference call, when the bridge blew. After that, in less than a week, she went from a woman who asserted her will over everything in her path, to a wife who gave her husband a lethal overdose of Percocet, and believed she had killed her son the same way, before she crawled into her own bed for the last time.
Chris almost died with them. For five days the city had turned into a cage full of wild animals. At the grocery store, his mother had yelled and screamed and demanded, and in the end she only made it back to the house with a few cans, a packet of chicken breasts, and a deep purple bruise on her left cheek. They sheltered in place as well as they could, while she called every phone number belonging to people that she expected to help. The last day, after the phones had gone dead, she never came out of the bathroom. Screaming had kept the first of the looters away, but one fired a bullet through the front door, and another shattered the dining room window with a chunk of cement.
“It’s the only way,” she’d said. “Men are men, and now there’s no one to keep them under control. Death is so much easier,” she’d said to her son while running her fingers through his hair, and as he swallowed the pills. “You can’t become like them. Now you won’t have to.”
But Chris Meyers didn’t want to die. His life had been a failure, and if he died, he would die a failure.
His mother wanted it to end. She couldn’t imagine living in a world that took away all of her imagined strength, and which would use her badly.
Chris had considered the way things were becoming and wondered what it would be like to survive in such a world.
While he lay in bed, he heard his mother crying. A few minutes later, he could hear her snoring. His vision got blurry, and his eyes wanted to close, but each time he fought them back open. As the snoring had grown softer, he had the thought, clear through the fuzz in his brain, that his mother had not given him enough, and the reason she had not given him enough was that she didn’t realize how much he weighed. She never thought of him as a man. She could not make her mind conceive of a son whose body weighed 220 pounds. He was bigger than she’d thought, and stronger too.
He’d thrown off the covers, and ran to the medicine cabinet to look for something to make himself vomit. Finally, he stuck his fingers down his throat and threw up into the sink. Then he cried, as he so often did. He was alone, with not the slightest idea what to do next. He was still crying, still trying to clean up the bits of vomit on the sink, embarrassed of the mess he’d made, when the doorbell rang and the familiar voice called inside.
They didn’t want him—not Face and Lacewood. He knew this just like he knew that Lacewood was terrified of being alone, and that Face needed a girl to tell him he was not ugly in the worst possible way. It was the other one, Hunter Grant, who’d said it.
“He’s coming. We need him.”
They need me.
Chris had heard the words, and felt the same sort of unconscious distance he’d felt that day coming home from the beach. They need me. But did they? Really? Hunter Grant didn’t know him. How could he know that Chris Thyroid Meyers could be any kind of missing piece to his survival puzzle? Then Chris reached out. Already on the outskirts of his own body, he looked into Hunter’s eyes and felt for the answer, and two images melded together. He was looking at Hunter Grant looking at Chris Meyers— – wide-bodied, thick-lipped, eyes like an animal staring at a flashlight.
Chris the fighter was born in a single heartbeat of realization. They need me.
The others wanted to be a part of the group. Chris Meyers needed it—needed it so completely that he would gladly die just to keep their good opinion. Hunter wanted him to be a man, and even though it felt alien, he tried to understand what it was they wanted from him, and then to give it to them. Sometimes he made mistakes, and sometimes they still made fun of him, but he would do anything for them. Sometimes they knew it. Sometimes they even appreciated it. If they ever gamed as a group again, they wouldn’t send him out alone to die. He was a Wharf Rat, full-fledged, and now the other Rats were in danger. It was up to Chris Thyroid Meyers to make that danger go away.
Vera had gone to see if the wounded hospital commando could help. Back in the kitchen, Lindsey MC found the things Thyroid would need while he crushed precious garlic cloves and added them to the potatoes to mask the taste of the poison.
At 6:00 in the evening, the DoubleTree Resort would serve dinner to every one of its nearly five hundred guests. By 5:00, all the chairs were taken. By 5:30, people covered the lawn all the way to the wooden slat fence that separated the hotel grounds from the townhomes and the grassy field north of the airport runway. They even waded out into the pool and sat on the little center island with its trees and waterfall. At 6:00 sharp, they got in line for one plate of food, the only thing they would eat all day, except for the breakfast of cereal, or oatmeal, and sometimes a piece of fruit. Almost none of them wore facemasks, and all the adults talked about the future while their children ran and swam and played.
The officers had only started coming a couple of weeks before. Sri Patel had tried his best to make them happy; then he found out they were not with the ones at Trumbo Point. At first, his patrons had crowded around them while they ate in sullen quiet, seated at a large table on the patio directly in front of the rear doors. Today, as on all days, the food line formed close by, but these men would not stand in line; their plates had to be brought to them—always at least two plates each.
The guests had quickly learned not to ask these men for help, as it had become immediately apparent that any service these men rendered for one of the beleaguered guests would come at a terrible price. The next time the Republic men came with the dried food, Sri Patel had asked, but he already knew what these men were—they were the dregs, the ones who exploited the chaos for themselves. The leader of the food run listened with interest. He’d been looking for these men, particularly the one named Dial, and promised that, as soon as the food distribution was running, he would come back with a group of his own men to lay in wait for the rogue officers. That day had not yet come, and now it never would.
Marcella Sanchez had been covering the riots for one of Miami’s local news affiliates before the plague, but now she and her crew were trapped with the rest of them. Her hair was no longer strawberry blonde, and she no longer wore the smart pant suits that had made her look more like a professional delivering news that she well understood, and less like a former swimsuit model reading lines off of cards, but she still thought of herself as press. Up until tonight, that meant that she and her crew interviewed the people living inside the DoubleTree Resort. Tonight, it meant that when one of Dial’s men grabbed a thirteen-year-old girl wearing only a bathing suit and a t-shirt, she had to intervene.
They all faced her. Two open liquor bottles sat on the table, and each of them had a glass. She stood with a note pad, looking down at the seven men. Some wore police uniform pants and shirts, some just the pants, and one wore a Kevlar vest over a black t-shirt. She looked back at the pad, then back at the men, who laughed at her while waiting for their food. She would have to stay. They wouldn’t let her leave—she knew this, just as she knew that when they were done eating, they would take her inside and rape her.
This is what they were.
Her hands shook as she pretended to write.
Out of the corner of her vision, she saw a group of teenage boys descending on a table nearby. One of them whispered in a guest’s ear, after which everyone at the table got up and left. These boys were new. She had only seen them for the last couple of days, and she had seen Sri talking to them, but she didn’t know much about them—who they were, what they did—only their names, which she’d learned from Sri.
The boys sat down, and she turned, her neck moving in slow degrees until she gazed down at four teenagers. Three of them stared at the tabletop. The one looking back at her did so with the most serious expression Marcella Sanchez had ever seen.
When Dial and his men noticed that they had lost the pretty woman’s attention, they turned as well. One of them took his sidearm out of its holster and set it on the table. Dial started to laugh, but stopped when the boy looked at him. He set his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers. Michael Dial easily towered over the boys, and even the other officers, six-foot-six with a scrabbled beard just like his men. His unbuttoned uniform shirt flapped lightly as he set down his whiskey glass.
Dial’s face turned dark. “You don’t stare at the poh-leese, boy.”
“He’s not poh-leese,” said the one they called Hunter Grant, one of his fingers leaving the other police to point at the one with dark curly hair wearing a badly stained green work shirt, along with police pants and a Sam Browne belt, seated at the table’s end. “At least he wasn’t a few months ago when I saw him locked up in the detention center.”
Dial sat up straight. “Who the fuck are you?”
“I’m hungry. That’s who I am.”
Two of the others with Dial started to say something, but at that moment Sri Patel emerged from the hotel doors, his hands worrying in front of his abdomen as he walked to the officers’ table.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” he said. “We have a lovely meal for you tonight.”
“None of that government shit,” said the one in the dirty work shirt.
“No, no, no. Island wild chicken caught fresh just yesterday, in a delicate marinade, garlic potatoes, and a fresh vegetable medley.” Sri talked to them about their drinks, the food, and the wild chickens that could no longer be heard in the streets of Old Town every morning.
Marcella began to take short steps backwards, and the officers didn’t seem to notice. She turned to the boy, who shook his head. She started to take another step, but the serious face shook furiously, and she stopped. He turned his chin, motioning her over, and she looked back at the officers before taking two tentative steps.
Then something strange happened. A bright green bird fluttered down onto Sri’s shoulder. The manager startled at the clearly unexpected visit. The bird squawked loudly at being shooed away and landed on the officers’ table.
The men recoiled as it ran back and forth. Some stood, and others waved at it.
Marcella hurriedly walked over to where the boy was seated.
Dial and the others waved the bird away and it flew up in the air.
They saw her while they watched the bird but were distracted talking to Sri about the strange parrot, and then one of them lifted a bottle, and soon they were talking about more drinks. They would demand her back in moments, she knew.
Marcella watched the bird as well, as she stepped over to the boys. It landed on the boy’s table, but they paid it no attention. When she was in arm’s reach, the boy grabbed her pad away from her and motioned for the pen.
“I’m going to tell about what it’s really like here,” Hunter Grant said. “And I’m going to write a couple notes so there’s no... you know... confusion.”
He started to talk about high school and getting arrested, while he did something to her pad. Then he handed it back as he continued on about his incarceration.
Marcella looked down.
MOVE EVERYONE AWAY.
Below that, he’d drawn a rough picture of the officers’ table, with a cone drawn in the opposite direction from the boy’s table, with a large X in the middle of the cone.
She peered over the officers’ table as two waiters brought their food. On the other side of their table, the chow line was well into its late stages, but still full of people. She looked back at the pad, then back up. She would have to move about twenty guests and at least three servers. Would the officers let her do this? And why did they need to move? Was she really going to act on a drawing that included stick figures? What was about to happen?
Oh, dear God.
Slowly, she moved her gaze over the men and their plates, then down to the three boys in front of her. To her right, she could see the slender one wearing a jacket, and could see that he had held out two fingers of his left hand. The bird jumped onto the two fingers like a familiar perch. The boy moved the fingers of his left hand, without looking up, to the far side of a napkin caddie and turned the fingers sideways for the bird to drop back onto the table. She saw why he didn’t move his right hand, and why he was wearing a jacket in the summer heat. Her eyes froze on the barrel of the shotgun beneath his jacket. Opposite the slender boy sat one with long hair and a Slayer shirt. He kept his hands below the table, as did the one with his back turned to the officers, with the backpack down at his feet. That one also didn’t look up, just sitting with both his hands cradling an object that she couldn’t see.
The officers had started eating, and Sri had started to remove himself, but the men didn’t let him go until he promised to return with another liquor bottle. It was then that Marcella noticed the serious boy seemed to have forgotten her.
He looked at one of the waiters, another teenage boy, refilling water glasses with a pitcher. The two made subtle facial gestures back and forth. The serious one seemed to be getting frustrated as the officers inhaled the food that had been set in front of them.
For another minute, this continued—the waiter filling glasses and looking over when the officers looked down at their plates, the serious boy motioning, the officers eating but no longer talking to each other.
Then it happened.
One of the policemen in full uniform dropped his fork. He took a drink of water, and his eyes popped open in surprise. He took another gulp, but stopped and backed his chair away from the table, then shook with a spasm and dropped down to his knees. The men on either side went to him, and all of them stood but one. That one held his neck, and streams of red seeped through his fingers. Behind him, a girl waiter holding a thin dagger smiled as if she’d just heard a joke.
The boys moved. One of the officers came up with a rifle, but the boy in the jacket fired first.
Sound.... It should have deafened her, but Marcella heard it as if someone said the word ‘bang’ in her ear.
In a second, the serious one jumped up, lifting the table and holding it above the others with powerful arms as he moved forward in front of them, then lowering it in like an enormous shield and charging. Table impacted table, plates flew, glasses shattered.
More gunshots rang out, followed by screaming. The other boys charged, and one raised his hand high, holding a hammer of some kind, which he brought down... again and again.
The melee lasted for what Marcella knew was mere seconds, but it felt like so much longer.
Officer Michael Dial, his uniform shirt ripped, kicked free and backed up to the hotel’s glass doors while firing a single shot from his pistol into the fray.
The teenagers jumped to cover each other with their own bodies.
Dial turned to run inside.
When her mind came back to her, two of the boys had started for the door after the rogue officer. The rest of Dial’s men all lay sprawled on the ground, surrounded by the other hotel guests. Some were being kicked, but none were moving. Marcella started toward them when a panel of glass from the back of the patio exploded onto the patio, showering them all with bits of glass.
Dial lay on his back, swinging his gun up toward the young man in a bath robe now on top of him, lifting Dial and punching him.
Marcella froze on the man in the robe. His image burned itself into her mind. Certainly he had just gotten out of bed, but with his Tarzan-like physique visible through the open robe, his beautiful face, and his thick dark hair, he looked like a movie actor that a makeup crew had just spent an hour on, making him look as if he’d just gotten out of bed. And his face... as if some unbearable sorrow had put him in that bed, and only the need to save them all, to save her, had roused him out of his misery.
The sad, lovely man’s blow caught Dial before the pistol came to bear, and his head was driving down into the cement with piston force—again, again, again. Blood spurted out of the back of his skull. Marcella’s hand went to her mouth as, in a single fluid movement the man in the robe pivoted his body around what was left of Michael Dial’s head, and came up with the officer’s pistol in a both hands.
The serious boy, the one called Hunter Grant, pointed a pistol back at the man in the robe, and Marcella flinched, unable to watch anymore. A long second later, she looked back to see the two still pointing the guns. The other teens came up next to the serious one, weapons at the ready, seemingly unsure of what to do.
A girl appeared in the broken glass.
“Reagan?” said the serious boy with the gun.
“God damn it,” growled the one with the robe opened and a bandage covering half of a perfect set of abdominal muscles. “Freaking Hunter Grant.”
Then he left silently. He simply looked down at the man he’d just killed with a sort of embarrassment, lowered his gun, turned, and walked back inside the hotel, right through the glass panel he’d just destroyed.
The girl looked as if she’d just seen him for the first time, her eyes back and forth between this one and the other boy with the gun.
At some point Marcella Sanchez, alive, unharmed, surrounded by broken glass, overturned tables, dead bodies, and a drama played out to its fateful conclusion, remembered to breathe.
Sri Patel took the Rats into his office and yelled at them until his lungs emptied like sails in calm weather. Seven dead. Even if they hadn’t been real police officers, it was a shock to the guests. And one of those guests had been shot! Yes, he knew it was only in the leg. Was that supposed to make it all right? When Face told him the guests were not upset, that over a dozen of them had rushed in to help and even finished off a couple of the rogue officers, Patel found a bit of second wind.
Shot!
These were not simple hotel patrons anymore. Many of them were locals coming for food and protection. Even with the day-to-day appearance that the hotel managed to maintain, almost all of them understood the true nature of their situation. They remembered the day the raiders came, and even though the guests had hardly any weapons among them, a group of children—one of which had taken his father’s pistol and was ‘patrolling’ the grounds—had shot one of the raiders dead. The others had left, and Sri told the patrons that they were probably not willing to fight a group of feral children. Since that day, they’d collected a set of toys and fake guns, and had a child militia that knew where to go and what noises to make if the raiders came back. Now the children would follow Hunter Grant like some post-apocalyptic piper, and all Sri Patel could do was raise his voice. But no matter how many children followed Hunter around, it was still Sri’s hotel, and they better damn well remember that!
They went up to Reagan’s room that night.
At first, only the Grants went, Hunter and Vera. They brought him his dinner, and Vera took the room’s single oversized chair in the corner while her husband sat at the foot of the bed and talked. Reagan had been a part of the hospital crew, and he’d been hurt, badly. But there was something else. At first, Vera thought it might have been fear of the disease. He’d been exposed, with open wounds, and had immediately jumped into a swimming pool after the infected one had gotten away, but he still had to wait until one of the hospital doctors told him he was clear. Then her husband told him he could test his memory, since the two of them had worked together for somebody called Momma Chic in the earliest days of the quarantine. At that moment, Vera realized this man was losing hope.
He remembered the time before his injuries with a nostalgia that made him smile. The two of them laughed about some drug dealer who’d tried to set himself up as a mafia boss after the bridge blew, and some tough old broad no one had considered a threat.
This made Vera happy too, and soon she was laughing with them, even as the stories turned to killings and reprisals and bodies dumped off the ruined bridge. She’d never heard her husband talk about his life before the Rats. She’d asked a few times about his family, and he’d always answered with a single word, a sentence at most. He didn’t want to talk about it—not with her—but with this man who’d just killed with his bare hands, Hunter went on about the people he was with when they threw everyone out of the jail. Vera listened like a child, thrilling at every detail.
Hunter found his family gone. They’d not tried to contact him in the jail, hadn’t even left a message where they were going. He must have felt so alone. At the start, he was with two others from the jail that lived in a conch cabin on the south end of Stock Island. One of them was infected, but they didn’t know it when they first met Momma’s boys.
Hunter stood up and told the man named Reagan that he would come to check on him tomorrow. He thanked him for downstairs, told him that he owed him one, and then they left.
Vera felt like Granny had just closed a book, right before coming to the best part, and told her to go to sleep. When they went down to the room on the first floor, and to their dogs, she asked him if he had noticed how sad Reagan seemed, and how talking had seemed to cheer him up. Her husband’s face crinkled at the suggestion of going back, and she wondered if he was jealous, so she said that maybe they should introduce him to Lindsey, and maybe she could talk to him. At this, he looked positively mystified, but he agreed.
In the end—after Lindsey MC changed into a tank top and shorts that barely covered her rear, and put on makeup—the entire Rats group, and all three dogs, crowded into Reagan’s room.
“Better watch out,” Reagan said to the scantily-clad girl sitting next to him. “I won’t be tested all clear for a couple more days.”
“Well, if you’re not diseased now,” Shawn drolled, “you will be when she gets done with you.”
It took time for Vera to steer the conversation back to the past. Maximus jumped up onto the bed, and Reagan sat up and scratched behind his ears. Terrance lay content in Vera’s arms, while Cleo pushed the plate around the floor with a tongue licking for the last little bits of Reagan’s dinner.
The boys wanted to talk group business. The Rats could keep all the police weapons and equipment, as Reagan didn’t want any of it, including the pistol on the nightstand, which he’d taken from Dial.
Face and Thyroid started to argue over the fight on the patio and how Thyroid had messed up the plan.
“Nobody told me the plan.”
“We were kinda busy,” said Shawn. “I could have got every one of them with the acid bomb if your fat ass hadn’t gotten in the way.”
“I’d have gone with the poison,” said Reagan. “Clean, efficient... wait, did you just say acid?”
“Our regular bombs are too messy,” said Face. “We figured the bottle of battery acid that I boiled down could shatter on the table and splash all of them.”
“Risky,” Reagan mused. “Also full-on psycho.” He nodded. “I like it. Our regular bombs. Geez, Hunter, where’d you find these guys?”
Hunter smiled, and the conversation turned to their plans.
Lacewood said the next order of business was to put the twins to work finding and looting the rogue officers’ hideout, but Reagan said that was a bad idea. When Lacewood asked why, Reagan shook his head and started to look sad again.
Vera seized her chance. “Sweetie, maybe we should talk about how the two of you crossed the channel.”
“The channel? You want to talk about walking across Cow?” asked Billy.
“Boca Chica, you goof. They crossed it.”
“Three times,” Hunter mused to himself. “We made this raft covered in mangrove branches, used to wade across while some of us dumped bodies off of the end of the highway to keep the navy’s attention. But it’s no good now. They’ve got that whole area covered with spotters and drones. We’re safer here.”
Reagan’s laugh sounded filled with bitter, ironic, pain. “What do you want to bet? You didn’t see what I saw.”
“What’d you see?” asked Lacewood.
Hunter answered for him. “A navy SEAL turned zombie. It shot him and everything.”
“Holy shit.”
“You don’t know if that’s what it was,” said Vera, trying to be reasonable.
“I keep having this dream,” said Regan. “I go outside and they’re all like him, like that’s what they were all turning into in the first place, and they’ve changed... mutated into things like him. All of them. Smart. Fast.”
Lindsey chuckled and smiled while sitting next to him, gently rubbing his shoulder. She continued the story. “And it’s like they’re not zombies anymore. It’s like they’re ants and they have this big mound in the middle of the island, and if you fight one of them, they all start swarming like insects.”
“Freaking A.”
“C’mon, Lindsey.”
Reagan stared at the girl. “How did you know that?” He then looked over at Hunter with a kind of fascinated alarm. “That’s it. That’s the dream.”
