Once he heard a furious firefight in the near distance, explosions and automatic weapons. Foolishly, perhaps, he ran in that direction, hoping to make contact. It was over before he got there, with only a burning vehicle and a fresh mangled corpse to mark the site.
The first body he’d seen was still fresh in his mind. It was his first day on foot in the suburbs bordering the city, moving south through the bedroom communities that, at first glance, seemed largely untouched by the war. Then he’d seen the corpse, stretched awkwardly across the curb, head in the gutter. A black man, his body stripped of everything but tattered jeans, covered in flies and just starting to bloat in the sun. The smell, he knew now, was but the merest shadow of what it would become, but still he’d vomited right there, on the sidewalk, untold eyes in the surrounding houses watching him.
Since then he’d seen dozens more bodies, some so decomposed they were hardly recognizable as human. Hardly recognizable as bodies. What shocked him was how they’d just been left there, lying where they fell. Was there no one to recover the bodies? No family members, no police? Were things that bad even in the suburbs, hundreds of miles from anything approximating a front line? Apparently. The smell was constant, always in his mouth and nose, even when he slept. The air tasted of smoke as well, acrid stuff, even though what fires he saw were small and scattered. He supposed what he was smelling were the burned-out houses. There were a handful on every block, even in the more intact neighborhoods. No fire departments meant fires were left to burn themselves out.
At first the suburban neighborhoods he was walking through—for he didn’t dare the main roads, not with a rifle in his hands—seemed fine. Sure, most of the lawns were a foot tall or more, but who could afford gasoline just for a lawn mower? He’d seen more than one homemade scythe at work in the past few years. Then he began realizing just how many of the intact houses were vacant. Saw that the windows weren’t crystal clear, they weren’t windows, just empty frames. He wondered if perhaps he should be walking at night and holing up during the day, but he didn’t know where he was going, and needed to talk to people. Plus, to be honest, the neighborhoods had started to feel like graveyards to him, the houses tombstones. He wasn’t about to go walking through them at night. Whatever kind of courage that took, he didn’t have it.
Finally, after five days in the suburbs, his food and water and spirits running low, he’d stumbled across a heavily barricaded residential subdivision. The old men guarding the place looked so hostile, staring down at him from the wall of junked cars blocking the street, that he hesitated even speaking to them. They had no visible weapons, but he wasn’t so naïve as to think someone didn’t have him in their sights, and he kept his rifle slung. It was one of the residents, leaving the place, who pointed him in the right direction. The woman, who was skinny as a stick, had seen him lurking nearby, trying to work his nerve up to talk to the hard-looking men. She’d taken one look at his young face and guessed immediately what he was after. She’d given him remarkably precise directions and in twenty minutes he was knocking at the door of a small house, nervously checking over his shoulder.
The woman who’d opened that door was now busy toiling over her little cookstove just outside the back door. It was soup in the small pot, and the smell had his shrunken stomach rumbling. He’d thought he’d brought along more than enough food—homemade horse jerky, mostly—but even eating it sparingly he was almost out, and was borderline dehydrated to boot, thanks to the unrelenting heat and humidity.
She looked like a grandmother—short, with dark hair halfway gone to grey. Her clothes were thin and faded, as tired looking as her cramped little pillbox house, stuffy and filled with derelict furniture. She’d invited him in and offered him water and crusty homemade bread, but had very little to say. He’d waited, and waited, expecting her to make a call, or go out to find someone. Finally he said as much. She gave a sad, patronizing little laugh.
“Oh no, dearie, I don’t know how to contact them.”
“You can’t call?”
“On the phone?” She laughed, but not unkindly. “Where did you come from? There haven’t been working phones down here in years. Sometimes I miss it. Most times I don’t. No, they show up unannounced. Safer that way, you know.”
“When?” he’d asked impatiently. He’d already been there an hour. She shrugged.
“Could be today, could be tomorrow, might not be ’til next month. You’re welcome to wait as long as you like, but I don’t have any more food for you. That bread was all I could spare.” Colleen, she said her name was. Jason didn’t much care for her, but he was out of alternatives. At least the homemade bread had been delicious. Nothing seasons like hunger, as his mom used to say.
The two men had appeared silently, one knocking softly at the front door while the other checked around behind the house. Jason had spent the night on the lumpy couch, troubled by nightmares, and had waited out the length of the day badly, in an ever-darkening mood. The house was cooler than the yard, but not by much. He’d finished the last of the food in his pack, wondering where he was going to get more, and was eyeing the woman’s kitchen cabinets when the knock came.
Colleen had puttered around the house all day, but doing what he had no idea. He was distracted by his own thoughts, his head filled with images of his journey south. At the knock she jumped up from the battered chair where she was reading a two-week-old copy of the Times. The idea of an underground newspaper printed on actual paper was so old-fashioned it seemed absurd, but with the power out to the area and all the airwaves and internet controlled and patrolled by the government, there were only so many options. He’d seen issues of the underground newspaper fluttering around the streets, but had no idea where people were picking them up. Or who was printing them. Or if the stories in it were true.
“Saw your signal,” the man on the porch said.
“Got someone here who’s been looking for you fellas,” Colleen said.
Jason had had certain expectations even before he’d begun his trek south, but after a week of bodies, fires, burned out buildings and distant gunshots, he just knew that these men who lived and fought in this hellhole had to be something special, had to be.
Ed was tall, maybe six-two, but looked like an accountant. A tired accountant old enough to be Jason’s father, and who needed a shave. Skinny, with a sharp nose and receding hairline, he even wore glasses to complete the picture of a complete and total elderly nerd. Jason’s sense of disillusionment was nearly complete; only the man’s equipment gave Jason some comfort—a military-style rifle, a pistol high on his thigh, and a small tactical backpack. He wasn’t wearing camouflage clothing, though—behind all the gear he had on a simple brown small-check plaid button-down shirt over khaki cargo pants.