The In-Betweener (Between Life and Death Book 1) Read online

  I finally see something that resembles my literary imaginings. Up ahead, at a corner where I have to either turn or not, are what looks like the tail ends of two demolished police cars, parked as if to block an oncoming vehicle, and the scorched remains of a semi-truck between them, clearly crashed. It doesn’t look like a trap so much as a law enforcement action gone awry, but I’m not taking chances and detour around the scene an extra two blocks.

  Aside from birds, I don’t see another living thing. Nothing. No cats, no dogs, not one single thing other than me and the in-betweener growling in the back of my car. There’s no noise either. I put my driver’s-side window down and ditch the AC because the smell is so incredibly bad, but all I hear are the sounds of the wind and startled birds.

  It might be strange for me to think this, but it’s actually sort of peaceful in a grim way. The way the blinds clatter inside broken windows, the sound of a rusty can rolling first one way and then another in the breeze, and how the birds swoop from building to building—it’s all oddly beautiful.

  During that first year, when the in-betweeners outnumbered the deaders and filled the world with their chaotic and destructive behavior, it felt like the chaos would never end. We grew so used to being quiet and careful that living in silence began to seem natural. For a while there, I wanted more than anything just to hear a person speak in a normal tone of voice.

  Now, another year has passed and far fewer humans remain alive, meaning fewer potential recruits to replenish the ranks of the in-betweeners. The in-betweeners out there are going deader and the deaders are descending into stillness from lack of food. So the chaos is sporadic and rare once again. That makes it almost peaceful. Almost.

  Once we enter the college area, things pick up a little. There’s more green space here. Untended parks in sore need of maintenance, big unmown swaths of grass where college kids used to lounge, and gardens gone to seed behind some of the swankier buildings provide habitat for animals. And animals mean food. Squirrels under siege, as it were.

  A few shambling deaders lurch about the area, heads turning in our direction just a few seconds too late. They don’t even have the energy left to hurry after us. In the distance, I hear the distinctive keening wail of an in-betweener. It’s brief and cuts off abruptly. It’s almost like a hunting call with them, some instinctive response to the sight of prey. At least, that’s what I used to think. Now that I’ve seen Sam doing it in what I can only describe as pain, I’m not so sure.

  Our college is old, as in venerably old. There’s a lot of wrought iron and dozens of old carriage stanchions left over as reminders of the more gracious days of horse-drawn carriages. No-longer-mobile deaders lie in piles around them, a few still moving sluggishly at the disturbance created by my passing car.

  What I see is encouraging. My mother said that the updates wouldn’t allow the nanites to last forever, no matter how persistent they made the nanites and their little nanite factories. Eventually, the systems would shut down, the host flesh too decayed to respond to the nanites' frantic need to repair the damage, while still securing materials for their own maintenance. There would be an ever-lowering response to an ever-increasing need.

  She said we just needed to hang on long enough for these things that used to be people to die off. And it looks like that’s happening. In my area, they’re hanging on better because there is more food in nature. Here, where the city displaces nature, they’re dying—for real.

  I don’t see any in-betweeners and I’ve heard only the one call. I wonder at that a little. They are mobile and use whatever of their brain is left to them. I imagine that most leave areas like this in their search for food. That might be why I see more of them where I live, being so close to the woods and the farms beyond. The rodents at old farms beyond my area are probably a good source of food for them.

  The streets narrow and the maze of one-way streets begins. Just the idea of trying to navigate my way around this place when I eventually started college used to intimidate me. I missed going to college by two years. At least I’ll never have to worry about paying back student loans or sending my mom into debt to pay tuition. And bonus—no traffic cops! I pay no attention to the one-way street signs and keep my eyes peeled for traps. Again, there is nothing. Just more devastation and decay.

  I find the block where the address is and Sam gets agitated again. The pole connected to his neck loop jerks around in the space between the two front seats, banging into the windshield with such force that I worry he’s going to break it.

  And there it is. The building is not at all what I expected. Remembering the grand old houses divided up into apartments that are the bread and butter of the college apartment experience, that’s what I expected. Instead, in front of me stands a perfectly square block of loft apartments, meant to appear post-industrial but only managing to look pretentious.

  Recessed areas allowing for balconies tell me that there is one apartment to each side of the centerline on each floor. There’s probably the same setup on the back side. That would be twenty apartments. Too many. And there are businesses on the bottom floor, a coffee place and the usual pizza-slash-sandwich shop.

  “Coffee,” I whisper, then shake my head. No time for scavenging coffee beans, even if there are any to scavenge. But even the notion of going in and sniffing any empty bags that might still smell of beans is enough to make my heart beat a little faster.

  I look back at Sam. He’s pressed up against the window, looking at the building’s upper floors. When I follow his line of sight, it seems like he’s looking at the top floor or the one below. That makes sense. If it were me stuck in this area, I’d live on one of the top floors as well.

  “Well, there’s no time like the present,” I say, softly.

  Sam starts, gives a snarl, and then smacks himself with his bound hands again. I wait and eventually he points with his two hands toward the upper-right section of the building and says, “Da.”

  Before I get Sam out of the car, I gear up. When I’m done, it looks like I’m costumed for a very bad action movie. I have a cut down neck brace around my neck, the thick foam a hopeful defense against in-betweeners and deaders alike. My jacket is stifling in the heat, its double layers reinforced with bits of plastic trimmed away from containers to deflect bites. Shin guards liberated from a police cruiser by mom—somewhere and sometime on one of her runs—are matched by a cut-down pair of the same shielding my calves.

  As for weapons, well, I’ve got an unsilenced handgun at my side as a last-ditch weapon, a rifle slung across my back in a terribly awkward position, and my crossbow hanging from my shoulder in a good position for bringing it up to bear and firing. A big homemade quiver full of bolts doesn’t make the cut, which might be stupid, but I’ve got a whole slew of bolts jammed into loops I’ve sewn onto my “traveling pants,” as my mother called them. The loops make me look like I’ve got wide thighs since they line the outer parts of each pant leg, but I love these pants. Functionality completely rocks as the new fashion. To finish it off, I’ve got a sharpened folding limb saw—meant for pruning trees—sheathed at my waist, along with a small sledgehammer for crushing heads. The sledge is heavy as hell, but it’s the smallest one that’ll do the job right. It takes a few whacks, but I can do it fairly quickly and that’s the important part.

  Sam watches me, managing to keep himself under control as I get ready. Nary a snarl comes from him and his jaws remain steadfastly unsnapping, but his hands twist against each other in their binding zip ties, so I know he’s agitated. I’m just not sure if it’s because he’s worried for the kids or because he wants to eat me.

  We reverse the process we used to get him inside the car, with a few modifications, and he’s compliant to a fault. Once I have him at the other end of my dog-catching pole and in hand, he stumbles toward the door in rapid, unsteady steps. He’s been cooped up inside the back of this little car and it seems to take him a while to get his legs back under him comfortably.

 
; The stench hits me like a punch to the face when I get to the building’s entrance. Sewage, rot, and old blood make a pungent scent so strong it should have a color, like in cartoons. Green and black. Sam doesn’t seem to notice it, and leads me up the stairs faster than I’m comfortable with. I do my best to clear everything to the sides and in front of me, but there’s no way to do that and still hang onto the dog-catcher.

  It doesn’t seem necessary once I realize someone—probably Sam when he was still Sam—has chained every door leading off the stairwell on each floor. Bright, shiny locks stand out inside the loops of old chain. He must have been so careful for so long. It’s a lesson to me. Even someone with a PhD in Caution like me can wind up like Sam.

  At the fifth floor, Sam appears to lose it a little. There’s no chain there, no lock, and the rim of the door is covered in bloody handprints and smears. This isn’t good. Sam looks at the door and keens a terrible, sad noise.

  “Shh!” I order in a whisper and shove him forward, up the stairs.

  He pushes back for the first time. He has the advantage of being two steps above me and he’s got about fifty pounds more body weight on top of that.

  “Da! Da!” he urges, jabbing his purpling hands toward the door.

  His zip ties are too tight and he’s going to lose the ability to use his hands if I don’t do something soon, but I’m not going to. His familiar face is my ticket inside, but I’m not at all sure what I’ll do with him after.

  “I know,” I say calmly, even though I feel anything but calm. “I need both hands, so I’m going to secure you up there first. Okay?”

  It takes him a second to understand me, but when he does, he rotates in his loop and eagerly takes the stairs up. He stops at the landing halfway between the floors and I push him into the corner, take the rope dangling from the handle of the dog-catcher, and tie him to the stout metal railing. He can’t get close enough to the rope to untie it—even if he were able to untie a knot with his hands like that—and he can’t get an angle sufficient to come down the stairs, but he can see the door and that should keep him quiet.

  I don’t waste time, even though the blood worries me enormously. It could just be Sam’s, from when someone inside tended Sam when his “accident” occurred. Then again, it might not be.

  At the door, I try to listen, but Sam’s low keening sounds echo in the stairwell. It’s disorienting, the noise seeming to come from both above and below us simultaneously. I turn to him and put my finger to my lips. He lowers the volume but he doesn’t stop. I don’t think he can.

  Sighing, I can only hope I don’t get a hole in my chest for my trouble. I position myself behind the steel door and push it open slowly. I really hope that those kids have someone on watch who saw me pull up with Sam. I made sure he was plainly visible by stopping in the street for a moment. After all, the note asked me to come and get them and here I am.

  “I’m here because of the note. Please don’t shoot,” I call out into the antechamber beyond.

  No sounds return to me aside from a bit of echo from the stairs. I wait for a moment, then call again. And again, nothing. When I push open the door enough to slip inside, all I see is a lobby with a stained carpet, closed elevator doors, and two doors each on both the left and right. I don’t know which one is the correct one for certain, but he looked right so I’m going for one of those.

  There’s blood on the handle of the closest door, just like the door to the stairwell, only there’s even more of it here.

  “Shit,” I say. “Shit, shit, shit.” I’m too late, I’m guessing. It seems so unlikely given how empty this place is, but what else can it be? In the back of my mind, I’m clinging to the hope that this is left over from someone tending Sam, or else dragging him out after what happened to him.

  The door is unlocked. I crack it open and nearly vomit at the smell that greets me. The stench of decay isn’t enough to describe it. It’s the stink that must have covered Europe when the plague killed whole villages and the bodies were left to rot. Only there’s no wind to carry this away. It has been trapped inside this sealed apartment for who knows how long.

  I should just walk away. Leave Sam where he is and go back. I should spare myself what I’m about to see. But, I can’t for some reason. I have to know.

  Inside, I see just what I expected. The place has been wrecked, turned over, destroyed. I’d be tempted to say that it looks like it was looted, but the truth is bloodier than that. Someone or something has chased living things through the place, demolished impediments standing between them and their prey, and then proceeded to tear up the living things.

  The ceilings, the walls, the sparse furnishings, even the bed sheets covering the windows are splattered with blood and gore. Underneath the dining table, chairs upended around it, is a round object about the size of someone’s head. A small someone.

  I know there were five kids here. As horrible as it is, I have to count heads. I have to see if there is even a slim possibility that anyone survived and is out there, waiting for rescue—or turned in-betweener.

  Going through the apartment, with its high ceilings that might have once made the rooms feel decadently spacious, is an exercise in horror. Despite searching everything, I can find only three heads. Two are missing. One of the heads—this one on top of the bed like a discarded doll—is heartbreakingly small and has a single unmatted, copper-colored curl standing out from it. That almost undoes me.

  I can’t see any other place to look once I’ve checked the only bedroom. While the place is big, it has few rooms, sticking to the standard loft apartment dynamic of much space in the main room and few rooms outside of that. I cover the head on the bed with a towel still hanging over the rack in the bathroom, which smells revolting since they’ve been using buckets for a toilet and who knows how often they emptied them.

  My deep breath sounds loud in the room now that I can’t hear Sam and I say to the little lump on the bed, “I’m sorry I didn’t get here in time. So very sorry.”

  That’s when I hear a shuffling noise behind me. I turn quickly and bring up the crossbow, a reaction now as instinctive as breathing. There’s nothing there except a wall. Then I see the big grating where the air filter in a central air system goes. My heart lifts.

  “Are you there? If you are, I’m Emily. I got your note. I came for you,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm, but knowing that the noise might well be nothing more than a rat seeking a noisome meal.

  Nothing comes back to me. Rat, for sure. I lower the crossbow, my heart taking a rapid trip back downward into despair.

  “Are you really alive?” asks a small voice, young, female, and terribly afraid.

  I smile at the grate and say, “I am! And you must be, too.”

  One Year Ago - You Can’t Plan for Everything

  My mom is sick, as in really sick. We’ve been doing well and I thought staying away from people would mean that we wouldn’t catch anything. I thought that because my mom said that was so, but now she’s the one who is sick.

  “Baby girl, the water…you’ll have to boil it better, strain it first,” she says between wretches.

  She’s leaking from both ends and so dehydrated she’s shriveling. I nod and toss the water I have onto the cement as I go. She needs more and if I have to do that, I’ll need to hurry. If she gets any more dehydrated I may not be able to get her back.

  The barrels are full. We’ve had so much rain that it cascades from the downspouts in waterfalls and we’ve got a barrel or four under each one. Set up on pallets and concrete blocks, their heights are staggered so that I’ll get a continuous flow from one barrel to the next. I fill up a bucket and inspect it. It looks like water to me, but she’s probably right. Something bad lurks inside the innocent-looking liquid.

  I don’t have sand or anything like that to strain it with, but there’s a boat-load of stuff I can rig together—fish filters, air filters, gravel from the decorative beds at the front of the complex, cotton batting—so I
do, using charcoal filters for now. We haven’t been great about boiling it, mostly just doing it in batches and letting it set until we need it, but clearly we’ve got something nasty somewhere.

  I’m not sick, but it’s only a matter of time if the water is the source of our problem. I boil up a smaller batch than we have been, using a smaller pot and letting it come to a full rolling boil. Five minutes of that, then I take the pot off. Rather than pour it into containers—which might have been the source of the problem for all I know—I bring the whole pot over and set it on the concrete to cool.

  “I’ve got more, Mom. Just hang on,” I say, going for a soothing tone, like she used to do for me. She’s pulled into a fetal position on the concrete and jerking with spasms. She twists like she needs to rise, but her bowels let go before she can and a stinking stream of brown water comes out of her. That’s disgusting, but it’s also very bad. It’s just colored water now.

  “So sorry,” she groans and then folds into herself even tighter.

  I clean up the mess as best I can, tossing my gloves afterward. I’m running low on them and have no idea what I’ll do after I use the last of them. Maybe I can wash them somehow. When I lean over to wipe her sweating face, she opens her eyes and jerks backward at the sight of my bare hands.

  “No, don’t touch me. Be safe,” she says weakly. I drop the cloth on the floor and she takes it to wipe her face. She’s in her respite stage. After she has a bout of puking and crapping, she feels better for a few minutes before it starts again.

  “What do I do, Mom?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” she answers. “No. Something.” She turns her head and points with her eyes toward the other end of the warehouse.

  “No,” I say, turning the word into an absolute refusal.

  “Yes,” she whispers, and closes her eyes.