Title: Home in the Dark
Summary:
"I remember my 8th birthday party at the KCC, with that giant cake and Aunt Evie showing up on leave to surprise everybody."
"By the deduction of death, infection and rank she has become their commanding officer. When she walks they walk and when she stops they stop. Fucking Hooah."
Or, Evie Grimes and the long road home.
AN: OK, a few things. First, any and all Army jargon/technical speak in this story is the result of google searches and no first-hand knowledge. For that reason I've tried to and will continue to avoid getting overly specific with anything of the sort because nothing will discredit the story like a bunch of bullshit that isn't accurate in any way.
Second, the idea for the story was born with Carl's letter to Rick. However, it was not fully developed until I was rewatching "Clear" and realized that the King County Café where Carl gets the picture of his family is the "KCC" he references in his story. The photo is even from the mentioned birthday party. Other people probably figured that out a long time ago but it just clicked for me and for whatever reason the seedlings of a story were planted. I was so intrigued by the mention of this Aunt Evie because very rarely do we get any inkling to the family out characters had before the outbreak, especially with the Grimes. We know that Rick had a grandfather who served in WW2 and now, that he or Lori had a sister who was also in the military. I felt like the mention of her was super specific which I know was to add to the authenticity of the letter but it also got me speculating on whether this Aunt Evie could appear someday. Sooo, I took it upon myself to delve into who she might be and how she might find her way back to her family. I mean if she's Rick's sister then anything is possible right?
I have no intentions for this story to be longer than 5 chapters but your feedback is very, very much appreciated.
The road is inky, a tunnel of black consuming black and if she stares too hard into the abyss of it little lights dance behind her eyes and a fluttery, light headed feeling spreads through her cerebrum.
All the roads are black and the woods groan; she leads and they follow.
She tells them they can use the Flint river as a guide south to Fort Benning. She tells them she's sure it will still be standing; the sign will beckon announcing 'The Home of the Infantry' and the cavalry will greet them with open arms and maybe just for one night they can rest. Get some chow and maybe a shower.
The words taste like a fairytale, like she's tucking them in with warm thoughts every time she says it. They believe her though, or at least they pretend to. There can't be much of a difference anymore. By the deduction of death, infection and rank she has become their commanding officer. When she walks they walk and when she stops they stop. Fucking Hooah.
After Dalton she told them Calhoun and after Calhoun she told them Gainesville and things worked there for a while; almost six months. Some Red Cross workers holed up in what was left of a FEMA post welcomed the extra hands. There was no more FEMA, no more supplies, but the gates had held. They tried for a while, to uphold the institution of the United States Army; brought people in, protected them. There were ten of them then and now…well now there's not.
She doesn't have a name for the road they've been trekking but based off the last time she looked at a map they might be somewhere near home. Home for her anyway, once upon a time. It would be selfish, to detour them just for the sake of finding the old bones of the place she'd always been so desperate to run away from.
Tonight isn't the night for the discussion.
"You know you reservists really dropped the ball here, this is your job, right? Protect shit at home when the rest of us are busy? We turn our backs to handle two shitty little wars and ya let the dead start eating people," they're passing a found Marlboro butt between them under the illumination of a still functioning head lamp and she smirks around her exhale and finishes the jab, "ya'll are fucking unreal."
"Christ Grimes," Leland grunts, "think we did about all we could."
Leland's tall and he's thin, his blonde buzzcut has grown into a little tuft of curls. There's a fresh scar across the plane of his forehead and a little chip in his right front tooth, just the right amount of not perfect. He's handsome, younger than her by three or four years. In another life he might have been the kind of guy she slept with but never dated; too sweet and too brave and the problem would have been how much he wasn't a problem at all.
He got bit six hours ago and it's taken this long to slow him down. She can see it now though, the sweat pooling above his upper lip and a yellow glow to the whites of his big brown eyes. His fingers move with tremors around the cigarette.
"Yea, I guess you did," she promises, "reservists and a girl but I guess we're all a bunch of bang-bangs now huh?"
Infantryman: never a title for the guard or a woman but fuck it, they've earned it. A little rag tag group of Alabama Reservists and a Specialist home on emergency leave from Afghanistan who happened upon each other on an overrun landing strip in Dalton, Georgia. Something like 5 months since there's been anywhere worth stopping for more than a week and all they've done is fight and kill and walk and stop and fight and kill and walk and stop.
"They'll write about us for sure," Tyson deadpans, "Misfit Company and the Battle for Fort Benning."
The boys chuckle and it's unspoken that this is where they'll stay until it's done. Right here on the side of a road between the last place they got fucked and the next place it'll happen again.
All roads lead to nothing.
Flick makes up a bed and Tyson, down the ways a bit, finds an old highway marker and uses his knife to carve into the blank side; Private Leland McCallister. They gather in a little huddle, crisscrossed legs on the concrete and there's no fire, not out on the open road like this.
Perez rations out some jerky and Leland's not offended when he isn't offered any. It's maybe midnight when he gets delirious, talks in circles about his mamma and some friend none of them ever knew or could have. There's cicadas in the trees and at their loudest their hum is almost unbearable and at their quietest just the same.
Perez is the most sensitive, had a baby and wife back in Alabama he never got back to. Leland begins to beg for an end, snot and bile in his throat and the veins in his neck thick and pulsating through his skin, and Perez walks away grinding the heels of his palms into his eye sockets and muttering to himself.
Flick takes Leland's shaking hands into his own and bows their foreheads together.
"Dear Heavenly Father, I know that you are holy and full of grace and love but our hearts are heavy because of a life that is leaving us. Death engulfs us Lord. Fear is waiting to take us down. But you know our pain, I know you do Father. You'll show us the way through this dark shadow. Take the hand of Leland and make yourself known to him, bring him home Father."
Tyson's headlamp is bathing them both in a dull glow and through the prayer Leland begins to seize but Flick holds him through it, finishes with a breathy Amen and slowly sits back on his heels. Flick's young too, short and red-headed and the kind of wholesome farm boy who still believes in the love of God in a world where his dead friend will try to bite his throat out in the next ten to sixty minutes.
She's certain the sigh from Tyson's lips is irritated, impatient. He's already unsheathed the heavy Ka-Bar knife he took off a dead marine in Calhoun. Tyson's uncouth, intolerant, older than the other guys and almost always annoyed. He was a fireman and he had an ex-wife named Faith and he swears if she's turned he'll still be able to recognize her because she wouldn't look any different than the day they got married; "an ugly, sagging bitch."
Tyson's probably her favorite if she had to pick, reminds her most of the guys she left back in the desert. Spits venom but hand carves grave markers and takes on the task of finishing the job not because he likes it but because he doesn't want the boys to have to handle it.
He slides the knife in behind Leland's right ear. He's still handsome, even now.
Days ago they worked together taking the inventory of a gas station store room and he'd smirked at her, made a remark about how if he'd met her before all this shit, then he would have gotten her to fall in love with him.
He was right, she knew he was right. She'd just snorted, told him how thank God for her that she hadn't met him before all this shit.
Rick used to say she ate nice guys alive, which is ironic now.
She stands, retrieves the retractable shovel from her pack and whistles low enough for Perez to hear it down the road but hopefully no one else.
"C'mon, Lottie, Dottie everybody. We got a grave to dig."
The practice is quick, practiced, efficient. Afterwards they sleep in twos, in two-hour intervals.
Ass to ass with Flick, above Leland with a foot of soil between them, she dreams the same dream as always.
It's a memory really, not a dream. But like clockwork, every time her eyes fall shut to exhaustion she snaps awake in her subconscious on an airplane bound for Atlanta.
She came to with a start the moment she felt the jolt of the airliner touching Earth. She didn't have time to blink away the sleep before the white noise of panicked voices speaking over one another rushed both ears. There was a lady crying, maybe more than one.
"What's happening?"
The man beside her was worrying a coin between the thumb and pointer finger of his left hand.
"Emergency landing," he supplied as if she should already know. She'd flown from Afghanistan to Berlin then Berlin to New York before boarding the last flight and she'd taken an Ambien after bunkering down in her seat.
"What? Why? Was there engine trouble?"
She'd sat forward, looking for a flight attendant.
"No," the man sounded sick, "no, no. It's whatever's happening, that flu. No more flights into Atlanta, that's all they'll say. Nobody can fly into Atlanta. We're in Dalton, they landed us on a little air strip in Dalton Georgia."
"No," she heard herself arguing with the man, "no, no that doesn't work. I need to be in Atlanta."
She needed to be in Atlanta in a cab to King County.
She'd heard about the flu, whatever it was. There was a quiet but constant presence of something the superiors had been holding back for the last week. Then in the airport, in Berlin, folks in face masks and the ticker on the cable news screens reporting an outbreak in South America, maybe Africa.
She hadn't had time to consume any of it. Lori's voice was playing over and over in her ear drums from their conversation two nights before, heavy static on the satellite phone and she'd had to ask her to repeat it.
"Evie, Rick's in the hospital. He was shot. He's…he's in a coma right now, they don't know…"
A flight attendant appeared at the end of the isle, trying to beckon everyone's attention.
"Excuse me, excuse me!" Her mouth was set in a tight line and her eyes were rimmed red, a tremble in her words. "As you know we've made an emergency landing in Dalton, Georgia. We're going to begin exiting the plane shortly and I need everyone to remain calm and orderly while we do so."
"And then what?" a man hollered from the back row, "where are we supposed to go? We don't even know this place. This isn't even a commercial airport."
The flight attendant was ashen but now, in context of what she knew that they did not, the woman was incredibly strong.
"The United States National Guard has set up a temporary shelter in place facility inside, everyone will be welcome and accommodated and I believe they'll have answers to all of our questions."
Terrorists, there was no other reasonable explanation. There had to have been an attack, probably in Atlanta. The plane felt incredibly restricting all the sudden.
"You know anything about this?" the man beside her inquired suddenly, his eyes on her uniform.
"No sir," she assured and glanced out into the darkness of the night. It was a miracle they were even able to land on such a small strip. Lights lined the air strip and about half a mile back a thick brush of woods began. Off in the distance Evie was sure she saw movement at the tree line but then the deboarding process was beginning and she was anxious to get to the Guardsmen inside.
She'd known they'd have answers for her, at least a way for her to get contact to Lori. And then she'd do what she could, whatever they needed of her. She was fighting the war a world away and if it had come to her front door then she'd fight it here just as well.
It was a slow process and she had to contain the urge to push her way towards the front.
She'd watched friends die, seen them blown to pieces and spread across a desert. She'd pointed an M4 automatic rifle in the face of a woman holding a child on her hip. None of it prepared her for the night the world ended.
The tree line had come alive, dozens of forms moving through the night; a stench filled the air and the grind of teeth snapping together was undeniable.
The first scream was horrific, the kind of blood curdling that could only be explained by flesh being torn from the bone of a living human being.
"Grimes, let's go your two's up."
Tyson's shaking her by the shoulder and rousing her from the recollection, muttering something about how he needs his beauty rest just as much as she does.
A lot of the landing strip is a blur but she remembers it was him in the back of the armored MRAP truck pressing a weapon into her hand.
"What the hell was that?" she'd hissed.
Tyson had just shrugged.
"That's the enemy, solider. Just make sure you aim for the fucking brain."