My attention was drawn to a young man who was pulling carrots from the dark soil in the garden and passing them off to a few children that were running them back and forth to our food storage to be canned. We had found a way to work together. A way to make the best of the hand we’d all been dealt. All of them were worth protecting. Every single one of us.
“Better be careful,” Kyle said with a stern voice.
“Careful about what?”
Pausing for a moment, but still leaning back and staring at the sky, he said, “You don’t want to get a beard-tan.”
Listening to him chuckle under his breath, I couldn’t help but let a long smile grow across my face. He was clearly trying to calm my nerves. At the moment, I really needed the laugh.
“What are you two jerk-offs laughing about?” Mr. Rodgers asked as he walked up behind us. He’d been outside checking on his “little pets” as he liked to call them. Otherwise known as the creatures in the Dead Shed.
Neither of us responded, not wanting to let him in on the joke.
“Fine, don’t give a shit anyway,” he finally sniffed before pulling a lever on his weapon and inspecting the inside of the barrel.
Rodgers had traveled on his own across the landscape for months before he wound up at Avalon. He’d seen many atrocities out there and had stories that we could only half believe most of the time. He often spoke about his daring escapes, from climbing through a series of trees to move above a group of Zs to hiding in a gutter while in the inner city. He’d done it all… or at least said he had.
Anyway we looked at it, he was a hard bastard, having survived on his own for so long, and we respected him for it.
We’d met up with him on a scavenging run. When we found him, he was half-drunk, sitting on the roof of a supermarket. When we first saw him, he was making a game out of throwing empty beer bottles at the creatures below. I heard him calling out the number seventeen when we found him, seventeen being the number of Zs he’d nailed in the head.
With all his problems, we still felt damn lucky to have him with us. He, Kyle, and I had been making these runs together for months, and he was clearly added value to the team. Like a thick callus on a set of worn hands, the crazy bastard grew on us over time, forming a solid layer of protection that we grew to trust. Looking up from his gun, he asked, “Is it just the three of us?”
“Nope, we’re waiting on one more,” Kyle replied, still not turning his face from the sun.
“Who is it?”
Before Kyle could reply, we heard a cough and turned around to see Avalon’s leader, Jarvis, standing behind us. Dressed in the same black body armor that we were wearing—from the original fallen soldiers of Avalon—he held a metal spear in one hand and had an AR-15 semi-automatic machine gun in a sling around his back.
“Here he is,” Kyle finally said as he pulled his face down from the sun’s perch.
Jarvis reached over and shook hands with Kyle. They had become close in the past months, relying on each other to keep the people going. His background continued to remain somewhat of a mystery to all of us. When asked what he did before the end of the world, he would always respond with the same coy answer: “Remind me to tell you later.”
I had often wondered if he ever let Kyle in on his little secret. If he had, Kyle never shared it with me.
When Jarvis first started heading out beyond the wall with us, I questioned his actions. After all, he was our leader. I questioned it in the same way one would question why Captain Kirk would leave his ship to head out on the most dangerous missions when he could easily have sent someone in a red shirt.
Looking back at it, what I’ve finally realized is that our best leaders don’t sit in an ivory tower putting the weight of the world on their people. Our best leaders lead through example, and Jarvis would be the greatest leader Avalon would ever see.
It made perfect sense for the other three to be the ones to head out into the world, scavenging and doing recon. Most of them had some sort of badass military training. All I’d ever done was simply survive. However, I have to say that it suited me. After all, prior to the end of the world, all I was good at was talking on the phone and giving presentations in meetings. Being a superstar in the corporate world doesn’t exactly prepare one for greatness in the world of the dead. It was the blue-collar worker’s skills that reigned supreme. I couldn’t build shit, and I couldn’t cook shit… hell, in this new world, all I was really good for was cleaning shit—and that wasn’t the gig I wanted.
“Listen boys, I need you to know something. We spotted a Jeep across the field yesterday. There were three men in it,” Jarvis said as he pointed out toward the field beyond the concrete walls.
It wasn’t the first-time people had found us. There were survivors out there. However, more often than not, they weren’t stopping by to ask for a cup of sugar.
Looking back at it, humans must have been the first population in the history of any planet where the terms “survival of the fittest” and “natural selection” did not apply. We took care of the weak, designing ways to support those who couldn’t support themselves. The fat got fatter, the lazy got lazier, and the politicians got plenty of votes to ensure the cycle continued.
In most ecosystems, a population will self-correct. They’ll run out of resources, or some sort of a disease will kick in. It was Mother Nature’s little way of keeping things under control.
Man was notably amazing at coming up with ways to dodge these checks and balances. Sure, early on we had our Black Plagues. However, once we got smart enough, we invented medicine and cheap ways to manufacture and deliver food, which kept our seemingly perfect little society on life support for far longer than it ever should have lasted.
In the end, and despite Man’s best efforts, there simply wasn’t anything stopping Mother Nature from doing what she does best; skimming the fat off of the top of the population line. She always seems to have the final say over how many of any species the world will sustain… including Man.
One thing was for absolute sure. She must have been pretty pissed, because that line got knocked almost all the way down to the bottom. Who knows, maybe from the Earth’s perspective, one could argue that Man was the plague infecting the world, and she simply gave herself a nice healthy shot of penicillin.
Either way, in the wake of the apocalypse, she reduced our species to just two types of people. The first were the scared and the feeble who were either lucky enough or smart enough to hunker down and hide. People who fought every day to hold onto the morals and the ways of a society pushed to the brink of extinction.
The second were the psychos and the marauders. People who would do anything it took to make it, no matter what the cost to those around them. They survived by killing and taking, long abandoning any semblance to what made us human in the first place.
The inhabitants of Avalon fell squarely into that first category, and we were in a constant state of alert from all that lived… or didn’t, outside our walls. The undeniable truth was that the term “survival of the fittest” was suddenly back in vogue.
Jarvis continued, “This group has me nervous, boys. It’s been a while since we saw someone just driving around outside our gates. A little too fearless, like they were testing us to see what we’d do.”
“How close did they come?” Kyle asked.
“They stayed on the far side of the field, but they just drove around while we watched them from the tower. Didn’t even try to hide, which is what’s got us nervous,” Jarvis said, turning toward Kyle.