The boy started bouncing up and down in his chair. “Yeah, lots of ways! I wanna sink the posts in concrete, and double up on the chain link, and uh, and uh, we could ’lectrify it if we had some solar panels, and there’s barbed wire-”
He stopped suddenly, which wasn’t strange for Simon. Sometimes he just stopped talking and that was it. He would be silent for the rest of the day. Sometimes it was just a pause while he worked something out in his head.
This time he started screaming.
Vance was still winding the crank. You had to pull hard to get water out of the little trickle of the creek, and sometimes pebbles got in the pipe and you had to crank even harder. This time Vance was really working it, his arm flashing around and around. He’d been too preoccupied to notice why he had to work so hard. Something was in the pipe, something bigger than a pebble.
When he heard Simon scream, he stopped cranking-and then everybody saw what set Simon off. A human finger was sticking out of the top of the pipe, gray and mottled and topped with a broken yellow nail.
“Don’t throw up. Don’t do it,” I said, rubbing Finster’s back. When your entire food supply is comprised of tin cans you scavenge out of abandoned dollar stores, you can’t afford to waste a meal. Finster was looking green and starting to double over. Slowly he straightened up and started breathing deeply.
“Thanks. I just-ulp.” He closed his eyes and turned away.
Simon kept screaming. Sometimes when he got that way he wouldn’t stop for hours. This was a kid who used to freak out when his father couldn’t find the right brand of chicken tenders for his dinner. The new world was full of triggers, and not a lot of comfort.
Vance grabbed the finger out of the pipe and shoved it in his pocket so nobody would have to see it. “Mike, Joe, I want this system taken apart and all the parts boiled until it’s sterile,” he said. The two men he’d named rushed over to the water fountain to start disassembling it. They were good people and they didn’t wait until things had calmed down to get to work.
“You okay now?” I asked Finster. He’d gotten some of his color back.
“Yeah. But-”
“What?” I asked.
“That thing. That-finger. It means-”
Bruce shook his head. “It doesn’t necessarily mean anything. The creek out back flows all the way from Tucson,” he insisted. “Some dead guy just lost his finger off the side of a bridge, that’s all.”
“-or it could mean there’s a horde of them downstream, splashing around in our water supply,” Finster said.
Everyone looked at Vance. Even Simon stopped screaming long enough to hear what our intrepid leader would say.
He glanced around the room, making eye contact with each of us. Then he shrugged. “We can’t afford not to know for sure. So we check it out.”
One of Vance’s rules was that nobody ever went outside alone. When he decided to form a search party to go check out the stream, he took almost everybody with him. There were miles of canyons and gullies to check out, washes that could hide hundreds of the dead from view that had to be explored. In the end he left only a handful of us behind. Finster and myself, to stand watch and to coordinate the search via radio. Simon, whose wheelchair couldn’t make the trip. And, of course, Candy. Candy never left my side.
The morning they left he had me do a radio check for him. Simon had rigged up a solar charger for a set of walkie-talkies we found in an overrun police station, and the radios had gotten us out of some pretty tight spots. We depended on them, but we didn’t trust them-you couldn’t really trust any technology from Before that relied on electricity. So Vance went up to the top of a hill about a quarter-mile from the hotel, while I went behind the motel’s detached laundry building and waited for him to call.
“Are you getting this?” he asked, and I confirmed. “How about now? Good. So we should be back in three days. If it takes longer, I’ll let you know.”
“I’ll be listening,” I told him.
“I don’t think we’re going to find anything. If that’s the case, it’s still a good excuse to do some foraging, turn up some more cans of food. You sound worried.”
“Do I?” I asked. I was surprised. I’d been keeping my voice very carefully casual. “I guess I’m always going to be concerned, when we split up like this.” That was one of the first things I’d learned, when this all began: Stay together. Let other people watch your back-you’re going to be busy enough watching your front. People who could work together, good people who cared about each other, stayed alive. People who couldn’t get along or who wanted to go it alone got weeded out pretty fast.
“Don’t be. We’ll take the guns, and there’ll be enough of us to take care of just about anything. You know I wouldn’t put any of us at risk unnecessarily.”
“I know.”
“I have to say I’m glad you’ll be back here, safe. Though, listen-Finster has said some things, when you weren’t around. Well, a lot of the guys have. But when you’re alone with him, he might try to take advantage of that fact.”
“I’m not following,” I said.
“I know you can take care of yourself, but… he might… offer his services, if you catch my drift.”
I laughed out loud. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed. “Well,” I said, “in the absence of a better offer, maybe I’ll take him up on that.”
Vance laughed then, too. “Okay. Just make sure one of you is always watching the fence.”
The conversation ended there because we didn’t want to drain the radio batteries.
An hour later, the search party left, heading out through the big gate in the fence while Finster and I waved from the roof of the reception building, both of us covering their exit. Vance and his group took all of our guns, but I had my bow. I watched them go for hours, winding in single file down the road that ran alongside the creek, Vance marching along tirelessly at their fore.
“When are they coming back, Mommy?” Candy asked. I had her in a makeshift papoose on my back.
“Real soon.”
“We caught a couple of them today, working their way up the creek,” Vance said over the radio. “They were eating weeds and cactus, anything they could find.” He sounded tired. He’d been gone for only a day but already he’d covered ten square miles. He was pushing himself and his people hard, which made me nervous. “Honestly, Darcy, I didn’t expect to see even one out here. But I’m worried these might just be stragglers from a larger group.”
“How so?” I asked. I spooned cold baked beans onto a plate for Candy, the walkie-talkie cradled between my ear and my shoulder.
“One of them was wearing a business suit. One sleeve was torn off but his tie was still knotted around his neck. He didn’t look like a rancher or a tourist. He looked like somebody who belonged in a big city. I’m worried that we’re seeing people from Tucson.”
I stopped what I was doing and put down the spoon, careful not to spill any food. “That-would be bad,” I said.
When it happened, when the dead came back to life, most people in this part of the country lived in the big cities. There were millions of them packed into small geographical areas. That just meant that when the end of the world came, there was more food for the dead. They rarely ventured out into the desert, which is why we had made our home there. But we had always considered the possibility that the city dead would eventually exhaust their food supply and start wandering out into the country looking for more. The dead are always hungry, and they don’t sleep.
“It’s too soon to start panicking,” Vance told me. “How are things back on the home front?”
“Fine,” I said, steeling myself. He was right, there was no need to get worried-yet. “Finster’s been a perfect gentleman. Simon took apart the cash register and now it’s in pieces all over your office. He says he wants to build an electric water heater so we can have hot showers.”