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

  Through the window, the day is blossoming brightly. I lose sight of the sky while I make my way out of the office up on the observation deck inside the warehouse I call home. The light dims at the bottom of the stairs, so I walk carefully across the dark expanse to the door. That door is the only one I can use with relative safety because it’s the only one with a window. A small square of glass set at just the right height to look out of, it’s embedded with wire and quite thick. I love a good wire-mesh window.

  Once the light leaking in from that small window is sufficient for me to see by, I walk with more care, trying to keep my footfalls light. That’s surprisingly easy for me. Part of that is practice and part is due to my gear. The boots I’m wearing were once a part of my mother’s military uniform. She broke them in until they reached a point of perfect comfort and now, they serve me well in my turn.

  She once told me that her boots were an excellent metaphor for life in general. At the time, I was pretty sure she meant to make me feel better about the awkwardness of growing up and my appearance. Then, I’d been growing boobs and I got frequent leg-aches from rapid growth. Plus all the other stuff that goes with growing up. I think she was trying to tell me that she thought I was beautiful, and that the awkwardness would pass.

  What she said was that when her boots were new, they looked perfect with her uniform but were painful to wear, pinching her toes when she put them on and bringing up blisters when she walked in them. By the time those new boots got old and needed replacing, they looked terrible. They caused senior officers to give her the occasional pointed look, but they were as comfortable as bare feet. While the rest of her might ache at the end of a long day, her feet felt just fine.

  In between those two states, her boots reached a point of perfection. She said that life was exactly the same. The beginning was hard to get through even though it looked like it should be smooth sailing. By the end, the person had long experience and had weathered the storms, but the appearance of things made it clear it was coming to an end. It’s the long, glorious middle part, she said, that makes life worth living.

  She’s been dead for over a year now, but I only figured out what she was trying to say when I started wearing her boots. The awkwardness is gone and I’m definitely not pretty, but I’ve grown comfortable in my skills and in my skin. I’m positive she didn’t mean this would happen before I turned nineteen—she was probably talking about middle age—but still, I understand it now. We grow into ourselves and eventually, if we just have some patience, we can feel comfortable as we are before we fade.

  It’s a nice thought and I hope—sometimes anyway—that I’ll reach middle age and share that bit of wisdom with someone else. For now, things need doing and the area beyond the window is clear. So, no more mom-style philosophical meanderings. The workday’s starting bell is ringing my tune.

  Yesterday - The Walking Man

  Why is it so hard to concentrate? Why does walking feel so awkward? Why does my body hurt so bad?

  The man tries to keep to the center of the street, where there is more room for his unsteady progress and not as much litter to bedevil him. Tripping over everything no longer seems like something he can stop himself from doing. And the road looks so strange to his eyes. He knows there is something wrong, but exactly what that might be is beyond him at the moment. The colors are off, either washed out or too vivid by turns.

  The sudden beat of nearby wings draws his attention. The urge inside him is immediate and utterly out of his control. He stumbles after the shape, his hands squeezing as if he already has it in hand, but it’s gone before he comes anywhere near it. The dark shape flits against the too-bright sky and he can’t seem to look away until the shape finally disappears into the trees.

  The car in front of him seems to rise up out of nowhere. He bangs into the side mirror hard enough to hear the splintering of plastic followed a microsecond later by the sickening, dull crack of his hip bone. When he looks down, he sees the car is dusty, its tires flat, and the gaps along the bottom choked with rotted leaves. It had been here the whole time.

  Am I really so out of it that I didn’t see a car? I must be sick.

  The pain in his hip grows sharp and his hand seeks the spot. Blood seeps through his jeans but then stops quickly. At least it seems to, but the light looks different, as if time has passed while he’s been standing there, one hand to his hip and his eyes following the leaves fluttering all over the street.

  He fumbles with his shirt, trying to see the spot, but his hands won’t cooperate. His fingers feel like sausages connected to his hands. And then he really sees his hands. They are covered in crusting blood, dry, dark flakes of it forming lines in the creases of his knuckles. And on his wrists, more blood. Some of it is brown and unlovely, but in other places it is an entrancing shade of red he can barely tear his eyes from. He feels his face and, for the first time, smells the scent of old blood there as well.

  He leans over and a loud keening breaks the silence around him. The sound bounces off the empty buildings before returning to him again. His fists finally decide to obey him and he beats them against his head.

  He remembers.

  The beating seems to help because he remembers something else, too. The memory of a young girl’s fearful face shoving a square of bright, white paper through a door slot breaks through his foggy confusion. He remembers her eyes, her tears. With his more-in-control fist, he pats his jeans pocket and hears the crackling sound there.

  Yes, that’s right.

  Find the girl. Find the girl. Find the girl.

  He keeps repeating the mantra in his head as he forces his eyes away from the distractions of the birds and walks on down the road.

  Today - Company at High Noon

  It’s a beautiful day outside, truly, epically beautiful. The sky is bright and clear blue, with just a few tiny streaks of cloud up high to make it look real. It rained last night for a good while, so everything has been washed clean. In the early light, lingering moisture glitters in shiny spots on the pavement.

  And there are birds everywhere. Nests seem to be tucked into every single nook and cranny of the buildings around me. The birds flit about in the course of their errands, far more energetic than I am this morning. I’m guessing they sleep much more easily than I do at night.

  The rain-washed air feels good in my lungs. I inhale a measured breath and try to envision that I’m breathing in the gorgeous day, staving off depression and loneliness by sucking in sunshine.

  “Good morning, birds,” I say, cheerfully.

  I like to try to use my voice each day. I don’t want to become one of those muttering weirdoes, but I don’t want to lose my ability to speak properly either.

  The birds squawk back at me, a few of them resting on the roof just above me flapping their wings indignantly and giving me the hairy eyeball. I just wave and start my rounds.

  It’s a bit of an irony, really. Birds are making a comeback the likes of which I doubt any book I read before all this happened ever addressed. Like almost every teenager in the country, I devoured those kinds of books before it all became real. I read zombie books. I read post-apocalyptic books where things went to hell because of electromagnetic pulses, wars, crazy politics, pandemics, and every other improbable situation you can imagine.

  In those books, and in movies and television, all the animals make a comeback or else everything dies. There’s never a middle ground. Reality, it turns out, is way different, with some clear winners and many, many losers. Birds are the winners. Squirrels, dogs, cats, and every other ground animal that I can think of offhand are the big losers.

  And now, those winning birds create a daily cacophony that wakes me in the morning, accompanies me throughout the day, and warns me of approaching danger. Then, as if trying to be polite, they go quiet by degrees as the light fades so I can try to sleep.

  If a deader or an in-betweener happens by during the night, individual avian voices rise and follow the movement. S
harp and insistent, those warnings wake me so that I can wait, quiet yet alert, until the danger passes. Or, if it doesn’t, the birdcalls tell me exactly which way I need to go to take care of the problem.

  They have it made, those birds. Not only do they sleep up high, out of reach of the metal- and blood-seeking deaders, but also because their other predators have succumbed. Cats can jump high and slink quietly, so I still see them now and again, but when they have babies they are easy targets. And a howling tomcat on the prowl is like dangling bait. You’d think the cats would have learned to be quieter when they get their groove on by now. I’ve not seen a kitten even once since all this happened.

  I don’t think it will be long before cats are gone as well. Then the birds will have this part of the world to themselves. Maybe they’ll have the whole thing. I’m long past betting on humans making it to the end of this.

  The complex of warehouses and light industrial buildings I live in is bordered by a fence, both strong and tall. That’s why I live here, why we stopped here in the first place. It’s chain link, so it provides no real attraction to the deaders. It’s the wrong kind of metal, or rather, it’s an alloy in which their favorite kind isn’t dominant in the mix. They might attach themselves to it for a while, give it a little taste, but it doesn’t seem to hold their interest for long.

  Unlike the fence, some of the buildings are steel, which does attract them if they get within range. For this reason I tend to the fences with care, dragging off the deaders that I send into true death so they don’t pile up against the fence and ruin my sightlines. A walk of the perimeter is always my first task and today is no exception.

  A few deaders straggle along the length of my fence. All of them are in bad shape, far beyond sensing in any conventional way. One does lift its head—some dim reflex from a time when it was sighted perhaps—when I stumble on a crumbling bit of concrete and slap my boot down a little harder than I should. Its jaw moves up and down, a slow-motion mastication of air, as the nanites inside it seek to spread to a new host.

  They’re not easy to dispatch, but I do have a system. A quick shot with the crossbow, the thunk of the bolt hitting home at the base of the skull through the throat, then that stutter-step weirdness as the spinal cord is severed and the nanites try to fix things they can no longer truly fix.

  That doesn’t kill the deaders—even though they’re dead anyway—like it does in the movies. That sort of pisses me off. By the time all this became real and fiction fell away, I was under the mistaken belief that any well-struck blow to the head would knock a deader into a less corporeal form of afterlife. I made a good many of them look like freaking porcupines I shot so many bolts into them, but still, they stutter-stepped along.

  But it's all bull, and here's why. The nanites that keep the deaders ambulatory do require that the host have a functioning brain and nervous system. But only the barest, teensiest sliver of brain is actually needed. So long as some fraction of the host’s mind remains connected to its body, that host will keep on moving. Even if the head and body are separated, each part will continue to survive and—if I had to guess—at least the head part will continue to suffer, for a long time.

  The nanites, in carrying out their simple machine directive, maintain the host in something resembling a living state. But that same directive also requires that the nanites maintain themselves. To do this, they must keep building new nanites to replace those that fail or otherwise become inoperative. It's an endless, vicious circle. The nanites keep the host "alive" and craving the materials the little machines use to maintain both host and themselves. But all of it works so poorly that the result is a world gone haywire, swarming with ravenous in-betweeners and decaying deaders.

  Every part of the host body teems with nanites. And true to their original designs, they can repair a lot of damage. When the host’s brain or spinal cord takes a hit, the nanites go into overdrive to fix it. I’ve cracked heads on the driest and nastiest deaders and seen a nice, moist brain inside. That’s what the nanites focus on when all else fails—the brain.

  Eventually, that fails too if the host doesn’t feed. Preservation of the host is the nanite directive, and just look at the mess that bit of simple computer code has brought us.

  While they are busy fixing the spinal cord, it’s a simple matter of walking up to the fence and poking them in enough places that they’re no longer mobile. It’s very messy work. If I were in medical school, I’d ace the test on where the ligaments and muscles that tie a human body together are located. Too bad for me that I wanted to be an architect and build beautiful buildings that would last the ages.

  What a joke. I’m laughing. Really.

  What I really need to do is smash their heads, which is very efficient and very final. Efficiency is good. Poking through the chain link fence is not efficient, so I just feed through a loop of wire, let it pop open, hook each deader around the neck, and tighten the loop. After that, I let the piece of pipe attached to each wire keep them stuck to the fence until I can get to them.

  Once I get closer to the gate I hear the soft shuffling sounds of a larger group. It’s an unmistakably creepy sound that I wouldn’t have thought twice about in the past. It’s probably no different from the sound of a bunch of people waiting in line at a movie theater, shuffling their feet and impatient for that weekend’s blockbuster to take away their everyday worries.

  The difference is that those shuffling feet always had other human sounds to cover them in the world I grew up in. Amusement-park music drowning out the sounds of the hour-long wait in line. Excited chatter and giggles covering up the pre-movie foot noises. Our crowd sounds muffled the presence of the crowd itself.

  Now, it’s just the birds and they are up high, avoiding contact with deaders and in-betweeners alike, exposing the sounds for what they are. And what those sounds are is a danger in a form that only vaguely reminds me of their former human selves.

  I’d like to just avoid this area altogether, but so much noise attracts in-betweeners. That means this spot more than any other is one I’ve got to keep clear. The chain link fence that surrounds this industrial complex ends at the front, where the impression needed to be a little less prison-like back when the world was normal. Along the wedge-shaped front of the complex, the chain link shifts to wrought iron fencing, the kind with fancy spikes along the top and brick pillars breaking it up every so often.

  It’s actually quite pretty, but unfortunately, it’s also bare metal of the most attractive kind. Iron. Not cheap knock-off aluminum, not alloy, but old-school, painted wrought iron. There must be some sort of coating on it that keeps the rust at bay, but on the gate that’s eroded away, leaving a rusty and attractive span of iron for the deaders to attach themselves to.

  There’s a good crowd of them today, at least twenty. That’s a lot these days, two years into the nightmare that is our world. In the beginning, there were thousands—no, tens and hundreds of thousands—of them running around, but deaders don’t last forever and they are truly, finally, dying off in droves.

  I can’t handle twenty by myself, but they are on the other side of the gate and most of them are in just as bad a shape as the ones from the perimeter sweep. It’s almost funny, the way they look. Gross, but funny. Whatever is left of their mouths is wrapped around a rung of wrought iron, gumming away at it like teething babies with frozen teething rings.

  If they sensed me nearby, they’d switch their attention to me in a heartbeat, but so long as I’m careful—and don’t trip again—I should be fine with deaders this far gone. They don’t speak, groan, or do any of that business. The only sounds that come from them are occasional clangs from something hitting the fence, the gooey sounds of their mouths sliding along the posts, and that ever-present soft shuffling of their feet across the pavement.

  I stand there watching them a while, trying to accurately gauge the condition of each deader. Mistakes are deadly so I do try very hard not to make them.

  People us
ed to say that nobody is perfect, but I now think of that as an excuse for not being careful. Carefulness breeds perfection. I’m not perfect yet, as demonstrated by my tripping this morning, but I come closer each day. If there were a PhD for carefulness, I would have earned one.

  Doctor Careful, thank you very much.

  Something at the outer periphery of the little crowd draws my attention. It’s not anything big or obvious, but there’s purpose somewhere there in the movements. An in-betweener? Two steps backward brings me even with the back of a truck. It’s parked neatly along the side of the access road where it has been since that first bad day. Orderly stacks of orange cones meant to alert motorists fill the bed of the truck, still waiting patiently for someone to arrange them on a street somewhere. They make for even better cover.

  I duck behind the truck, but slowly and without sudden movements that could attract even the dimmest-sighted deader. Peering from between the pointed barriers of the stacked cones, I examine each head carefully. I can’t see past the deaders particularly well, but I’m patient and eventually I’m rewarded for my patience.

  The in-betweener is a newly minted one. The only part of him that I can really see is from the forehead up, but the neat haircut and the general shape of his head tells me he’s a man, one who joined the ranks of in-betweeners very recently.

  After a long while listening to their gushy licking noises, the in-betweener finally makes an appearance by moving to the side, away from the gate. He walks toward the area where the brick bottom and pillars make reaching the iron more difficult for the deaders. He’s tall and very close to living, his color only pale and not any of the more colorful shades the deaders progress through over time.