By Hilden B. Lade
We're in the middle of summer. The sun sets latest on these days.
I wait for hours at the watchtower, gripping my rifle and peering through the scope, even after the sun has long set. Dreading that any second now, a shot will ring out and the town… my town will be overrun. No, not by what made us this way. Out here, it's not the infected that we have to worry about. Rather… it's ourselves that poses the greatest threat. It's a lesson that I learned personally the hard way. Years ago, before I settled down as the rare optimistic veteran, I witnessed firsthand my own goddamn family turn into the monsters we tried so hard to escape from. All in the name of what, survival? But what was worth surviving for in the manner we did?
The bandits grow bolder and bolder with each day. They know we'd let them join our settlement peacefully, like we have do so for many of the stragglers that make their way to this part of Wyoming. But these twenty years have warped us all. They want everything we built here, and they want it now without having to share it with us. Just the other day we lost two of our best to an ambush on the outskirts of the dam.
But this night, the shot is never fired and the mass of attackers never arrives. I force myself to leave the post and stagger back to my home. Push myself past the front door and underneath wrinkled, stained sheets. My eyes hang open in the lightless dim of the bedroom, both the rifle and pistol at grabbing distance. Maria has settled in quicker than me, already deep in sleep. How I wish it would be as easy to sleep as that.
Another day, another night. It's hard to go on in a world full of shit like this, but if there's one smart thing my brother told me these past couple of years, it's that no matter what shit goes down you keep finding things to fight for. I don't know about him, if he's even still alive or clicker food, but I found something worth fighting for. Even with the lights of twenty-first century civilization dimming more and more every day, the end hasn't come yet.
We can make things better.
Hell, we already have, even if it's just a scarce starting percentage of what we're going to do.
With that reassuring though, I drift to sleep at last.
But my dreams are not as uplifting.
Although they've been happening less and less since the first day we got the power running, I've still been having the nightmares often. Most of the time, I'm fortunate not enough to remember a thing about what happened in them when I wake up, but even if I can't remember what I dreamt about the memories of what really happened remain to plague me.
This particular nightmare is a recurring one. Not one that I've had the pleasure of forgetting. It starts as it always does. The first snows of winter are starting to fall. We had been drifting through the Deep South for years now, and the first thing we learned was that winter was always going to be the hardest. And to make it through to the thawing of spring, you had to be goddamn prepared with the right supplies. But sometimes, even if you scavenged every inch within the whole county, you couldn't find enough to support your whole group. And that's when Joel decided to start hunting for their supplies.
It wasn't the first time Joel did one of these raids. But it was my first time joining them hunting. Joel kept me out of the first couple of raids, letting me stay behind at camp to guard our stash of shit. Many of the raids were against other groups of survivors as heavily armed or even better than we were. I was the only kin Joel had left, as we never did find out what happened to our folks, and after burying Sarah I think it would've broken Joel completely to bury me as well. That fact was the only thing that encouraged me to tag along as the two of us decayed further. Our fellow survivors weren't too happy. They knew what a good shot I was. Sometimes Joel joked, back in the early days when he was still capable of joking, that ninety-nine percent of our group's infected kills came from my revolver. Questioned why the hell was I twiddling my thumbs back at camp while they did the risky hard work? After being accused of playing favorites and faced with mutiny, Joel forced to accompany him.
The plan Joel had was straight forward. These were the early days, when the prospect of being holed up within the Quarantine Zones was hell of a lot better than sticking it out on the outside, even after FEDRA began to mow down everyone trying to get in. And in the early days, it was more than just a handful of folks that could bring themselves to help a stranger in need. The road that we camped near eventually led to Baton Rouge. Everything was in place, just waiting to be set in motion.
The bus was long, dangling from the precipice of a hill. We had fastened a manner of objects such as rods with the ends sharpened to act as rams to the grille of the bus. There were four of us ready to push the bus, waiting for the signal. Aside from Joel, there were also two others who had drifted along with us named Eric and Arne. They both were dependable fellows, but we could never tell what thoughts lay in their heads, whether it was a Mets cap or bushy beard thoughts were hidden behind.
"How long is it?" Arne asked, looking at an imaginary watch.
"Soon." Eric told him.
"Joel… are you so sure we just can't trade with 'em? I mean, from all your other raids, we got plenty of surplus"
"In this world, Tommy, there ain't no goddamn thing as surplus."
A female in our group, Shannon I think her name was, hidden behind a cluster of cars driven off the road into the forest. There were more of our group down there, waiting with their guns and killing devices fastened together from bottles or nails. And eventually, two pickup trucks came along. There was a small cluster of survivors riding in the back along the edges, supplies clustered in between them. They didn't seem to be carrying anything as heavy as us. With Eric's rifle, the toughest thing I could spot was a ten millimeter in a survivor's bandaged hand.
Shannon stumbled out from behind the cars. She had put behind several layers of rags underneath her shirt to give off the illusion she was pregnant. She stumbled forward with a fake limp, as if she was being chased from something and was badly wounded.
The first truck screeched to a stop. And that's when Shannon whipped out her shorty. And the others popped out from their hiding places. We saw the glass of the front window shatter accompanied by a symphony of screaming. The driver of the second truck pushed down the pedal hard. And then we pushed the bus down the hill.
"Oh my god…" I recall muttering. A man clad from head to toe in body armor trying to usher two of the children away from the ambush met a fiery grave as one of our people flung a Molotov. Their screams in my nightmare, especially the kids, remain as vivid and loud as I remember.
"Pleasepleaseplease" One of their survivors was trying to crawl away from Joel. His legs had been shot to shit. His arms frantically clawing for a weapon. "Youcantdothisyoucantdothis"
"I sure as hell am." Joel advanced on him.
"Kidsbacktherewehavekidsbackthere… please!" The man kept shouting at Joel, begging for their lives. "Take it, take everything! Just let us out of here! I have a fucking daughter, for God's sake!"
"Yeah? Well, tough luck. So did I." Joel raised his machete and the man's scream was cut short as his neck was split in half.
"God damn it, Joel." I cursed underneath my breath. I ran towards him, dodging bullets and obscenities.
"Ohmigod you monster!" A redhaired woman, holding a cowering little girl in her arms, cried at him as tears streamed down their cheeks. "You killed him! You killed him!"
Joel stood over them. He kicked the woman's pistol from her hands. She screamed. I could hear the bones break even from my distance.
"Please…" She pleaded with Joel. I was at his side now. There was scant space between the barrel of his shotgun and the two of them. She gave him the look. It was a look that I was to become accustomed to more with every raid that Joel brought me on. The last desperate gleam of the eyes before the head is smashed in.
Joel pondered their words, looking at the kid once. Then he opened his mouth. "You'll just come after us."
"Jesus Christ!" I cried out loud as he pulled the trigger and their blood splattered over our clothes.
"You bastards!" Shots. Joel and I both dove for cover behind an abandoned Toyota. Another one of the body-armor clad survivors, his right eye covered by a black eyepatch. "You killed us all, you fucking bastards!"
With another shot, I heard Joel grunt. A bullet caught him in the side. Eyepatch Man was getting closer. I hadn't killed anyone at all during the raid. Had I known, would I have still done it? But Joel had not become the monster of the story yet. He was still my big brother. The man who kept me alive. I still clung onto his words about survival. And right now there was a man out there trying to take out me and my family.
The shot hit him square in his other eye.
The man in the eyepatch lay sprawled on the bloodied road.
"Nice shootin', Eastwood." Joel tells me.
"Yeah, whatever. Try not to bleed out on me, Joel..."
"Hell. It's nothing a pair of pliers and anesthetic won't fix. They all dead, Tommy?"
"Yeah."
"Good. Let's see what they were carrying."
"Whatever you say, Joel." As I carry Joel up, I look around. Absolute fucking chaos. And worst of all, I felt that I was the only person here that was disturbed by the it all, from the burning shells of the pick-ups to the bullet-riddled bodies of children.
"Good work, Texans. Shit we got is sure to last us through January." Eric patted me on the back as he and Arne walked past, carrying bundles of stripped clothing with them.
"Are you sure that was goddamn necessary? All of this?" I scream at Joel as we carried boxes of looted goods back to camp. I point at the bandages on his torso. The blood on our clothes. The emptied cartridges. I glance back at the carnage one last time.
"It's your first hunt, Tommy. You'll get used to it."
"Fucking kids, Joel. We murdered fucking kids. For what? An extra can of tomato soup?"
"We're doing them a favor, Tommy. This world ain't a place for fucking kids anymore."
"Jesus Christ, Joel. You just blew them away without a bit of hesitation. What the hell are you thinking? Sarah would"
Without warning, Joel set down his crate.
Then he decked me. I dropped my box, shaking it open. Cans of soup rolled out as I forced myself up. I rubbed my cheek. I could taste blood, and I would probably get a canker sore, but no teeth were loose at least. I looked up at Joel. His eyes were downright murderous, full of rage and grief I hadn't seen since the day we buried Sarah.
"Don't you ever fucking dare use Sarah against me like that again."
The nightmare then jumps ahead of time, a fast-forward montage of my downward spiral as I accompanied Joel. I never got used to the hunting, contrary to what Joel said. It just wasn't right. They were just people trying to eke their way in a world that no longer made sense. Despite everything Joel said about we being goddamn survivors just like them, I knew things were different. We were the bad guys in this story. And even as a kid, I never wanted to be the robber in the game. But I tried to stomach it. Joel was doing it for me, wasn't he? The two of us, brothers to the end, sticking it out. But what were we sticking it out for? It wasn't just me that was troubled about the hunting. Shannon killed herself, along with three others.
I should've done it too. But I still couldn't leave behind Joel, even if he started to act weary of my presence with each raid…
And one day, when spring came around, I encountered them while scouting for infected. We had heard about them on the emergency radio as the cities fell under the cloak of quarantine. Joel had spat as he heard about them. Called them a pack of butterfly chasers that were all bound to end up riddled with holes or chewed up by a clicker. But as I set my gun down, surrounded by rifle tips, and stood amazed before the woman I would come to know as Marlene I knew that I had found another thing that Joel was full of shit about.
These were people that had come together and were going to try to make things good again.
And what did Joel do? He was just a fucking nihilist at this point. Wading from raid to raid through a sea of dead bodies, unfeeling and uncaring who he dragged to the bottom of hell with him. This wasn't the big brother I knew. Not the one who I spent the best summers of my childhood with reenacting the latest summer blockbuster in the backyard with or the caring hardworking father I went camping with. Joel had become just as bad as the military who shot down his daughter and the infected who had made hell a place on Earth.
In that instant, I knew what I was to do. I could redeem myself.
I announced to the group I was leaving them for the Fireflies.
Joel didn't take the announcement well. We argued back and forth. He called me an idiot, that I was dead to him if I joined the Fireflies. We were in a stand-off, both of us willing to shed the blood of family in that moment. I begged him to come with me. That I could redeem the two of us of everything we did. The world could be brought back to the way it was. Joel snapped back, saying that there was nothing to be redeemed. The world he knew was never coming back, and even if it did, it wouldn't be the same. And in the end, I decided that I finally put up with enough of his fucking nihilism and his fucking hunting.
"I don't ever want to see your goddamned face again."
With that, I begin to walk off.
But I then hear Joel say something. "You can bet your ass on that, Tommy."
And the last thing I hear is the shotgun fire.
I wake up sweating. For a moment, I am gripped with the most purest of frights. My entire body is paralyzed. My nerves are panting but I can't get my legs or arms to move. But I continue to push. I tell myself that it was just a nightmare. I haven't see Joel in so many goddamned years and he never considered firing on me, even when I told him to go to hell. And with a breath of relief, I push my neck up. The dark of the room is strangely reassuring. Maria continues to silently sleep away next to me.
I walk out of the house, putting on my jacket and strapping on my revolver. I look at what we have built, Maria and the rest of us. Joel said it could never be done, but here it is. A seed of the old world blossoming again. One day, it shall be safe. The bandits will be fought back for good, the power will never go out again. I've got a long day of work, no scratch that, probably long months of work ahead of me, but it will be done. I look forward to it. Perhaps when I finish the job, I will have finally redeemed myself and maybe then these nightmares will finally stop.
Then I find myself thinking of Joel. I think about the photograph I keep in a room at the dam. A portrait of a more innocent world, a grain of sand trapped in the middle of the hourglass. A smiling father with a triumphant little girl in his arms. A world that was taken from us piece by piece. My thoughts linger on my niece. Joel blamed himself entirely. But I was also my fault, I could have been faster, but he would never take my word.
Another thing that separated the two of us comes to mind. I could never stay mad at anyone, even him, long.
I find that I wish that both of them were here with me right now. But I don't think I'll ever be seeing Joel again. That he really will never show his goddamned face to me again. We headed in opposite directions. I still wonder what became of him and the group when I have nothing else to think about.
What's become of Joel is a coin toss. What happens to the last of us in this world goes only two ways. But I know Joel better than anyone else. And if I had to make my guess, he's still finding something to survive for, no matter how decrepit it may be.
But if he's dead…
I hope that if there is a heaven, and if he couldn't get in, they'd at least let him say hello to her once more.
