“Avery is going to be okay. Why do we have to rush?” Tish asked.
I pulled her aside, while keeping an eye on Avery, and told her what Tom had said before he turned or whatever happened to him. She told me I was acting crazy.
“William,” she said in a lowered voice. “Avery thinks he’s turning into a zombie, and you’re allowing him to.” She laughed while shaking her head. “I’m pretty sure, and I can’t believe I’m even saying this out loud, zombies don’t stab people. Christ, William, they’re not even real.” She paused for effect. “You’re making things worse all around.”
“What do you mean?”
In her moment of frustration, she blurted out mine and Titouan’s plan to deal with the Gray. Well, mostly Titouan’s. “You seriously told Titouan to stab the guy in the head?”
“It wasn’t my idea—”
Not letting me finish throwing Titouan under the bus, she yelled, “There are no fucking zombies.”
Shit.
Well, the secret was out of the bag. So much for hiding what Titouan did from Avery. “What’s done is done. I don’t believe he was, you know, a zombie, Tish,” I gave Avery a reassuring glance, “but I refuse to take chances right now.”
“But you are taking chances… with all our lives, and you’re doing it because of h…” She, for whatever reason, even though she had already inflicted the damage, saw fit to lower her voice as she pulled me a little farther away from Avery. “Because of Avery. Just be honest, William.”
In a total dick move, I said, “Were you thinking about everyone when you duct taped that woman’s mouth shut back at the house?”
She shot me a hard stare. I thought she was going to punch me, but she managed to calm herself after a few deep breaths. “There are moments when you sound like Titouan. What I did back there was for us and our sanity.”
“I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry,” I told her, putting my hand on her shoulder. She jerked away like I had Ebola or something. And I didn’t blame her, really.
Gunshots rang off in the distance. These weren’t the single shots we heard earlier. They were fired in rapid succession, from what appeared to be an automatic weapon, and from just down the street from us.
“That ain’t yer garden-variety feller with a huntin rifle. ’At’s gotta be military,” Sam said.
“That’s good, right?” Titouan asked.
“As long as they’re our guys, it’s great. The way things are goin, though, it might be the damn Japs or Jihadi fellers,” Sam said.
“There’re probably trucks full of soldiers. It’s got to be safer around them than it is in here,” Titouan said.
“Assuming we don’t get hit by a stray bullet or an antsy trigger finger,” I said, not feeling nearly as confident as Titouan.
“I say we go, too,” Tish said.
“Huh?” I said, not believing what I was hearing, especially considering how adamant she was about not going just a little while earlier.
“Who else would have weapons like that?”
Titouan liked what Tish was saying. He was gathering his things.
“You hear ’at?” Sam panted.
A revving engine could be heard, followed by a loud crash. “Yeah.”
After maybe ten seconds the roaring diesel faded, the void filled with a yet another round of intense automatic gunfire. After several minutes of that, there were three pops, followed by silence.
“That’s damn close ta Miley’s. Has ta be,” Sam said, trying to stand but struggling due to his injury.
“I say we go. If they’re there, they’re probably clearing that area,” Titouan said.
“I’m not sure how safe that’d be, walking into an area being cleared with gunfire —” I said, but stopping once I noticed Avery nodding off. I ran over to him and tried to shake him awake, but he was soundly asleep. I got within inches of his face and was yelling at him to wake up. Without warning, his eyes jerked open.
“How did the soldiers get here?” He asked.
“What?” I said, frustrated. “You scared me, dammit.”
Ignoring my terror, he repeated, “Where did the soldiers come from, and how did they get here? There are no land routes other than open tundra into Barrow. That diesel engine you heard almost certainly didn’t have anything to do with bringing those soldiers here.”
Titouan’s mind was made up. He didn’t care about Avery’s very valid point about how the military got there. He was ready to leave, and that was all there was to it.
Go figure. Avery and Titouan’s alliance was beginning to weaken.
I had serious doubts about leaving the maintenance building. Sure, if a group the size of the one that passed earlier had attacked, we would’ve been easy fodder for them inside the confines of the shack. But we were so banged up, especially Sam and his cut leg, that we were in no shape to run from the Grays, either. It boiled down to a single point. If more than one or two Grays attacked us, we would die, and it didn’t matter if we were inside the building or outside it. I made my decision based on a solitary reason. Keeping Avery up and awake.
The moment we left the building, I was assailed by the dark void that was Barrow. I felt like I was being watched from all directions. I was still having a hard time breathing. I was having a panic attack, so I did what I always had. I told myself what I was feeling wasn’t real. I felt in that instant almost exactly how I felt a good portion of my childhood and even in to my early adulthood: helpless.
I’ve never liked the dark. Much of this could be traced back to my youth, specifically to a camping trip with my friends. It was supposed to have been a great adventure, being that it was my first real excursion away from home. It was the first night I ever spent away from home, without family members, anyway.
We sat around the fire telling scary stories until deep into the night. When everyone had exhausted their repertoire of tales and was ready to go to sleep, my friends thought it would be funny if they made me sleep outside by myself. They knew I’d never spent the night with any of them, and that I was afraid of the dark to some extent, which is exactly why they did it. It was no fun otherwise.
I was so terrified, I didn’t sleep a wink that night. When they awoke the next morning, I was curled up into a ball just outside the tent, crying and having pissed my pants because I was afraid to get up and relieve myself. From then on out, I was Pee Pee Le Pew. I didn’t escape that nickname until I left Indiana. That pain I felt so many years ago seemed to reverberate that night, opening a well of emotions I’d repressed for so long.
Even before the camping trip, I was afraid of sleeping alone in my own house. My parents on numerous occasions awoke to find me on their bedroom floor. Not understanding what to do with me, they stopped me from sleeping in their room. They said I was too old to act like a baby. Maybe I was; after all, I was thirteen at the time.
A couple years later, my grandpa passed away. I didn’t really know him all that well, but what memories I had of him were good ones. So, I was excited to go stay a few weeks of my summer vacation with my grandma. The impetus of the trip was to allow me to get to know my grandma and help her cope with her loss. I was sure that another important part was to push me out of the nest for a bit of a test flight on my own. After all, my parents didn’t want to take care of me the rest of my life. They wanted me out of the house yesterday.