The In-Betweener (Between Life and Death Book 1) Page 9

  Then again, he went without feeding for most of the day and all night. Who knows how long it was before then that he ate. It’s possible that he’s just catching up. I’m being far too optimistic and I know it, but I really don’t want to get shot by some nervous kids.

  Sam finally finishes, goes through the same wiping process he did before, but he looks a lot less appalled by his actions this time. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.

  He stands up and at the sound of my feet on the drive, he turns. His fists clench, but he says, “Ya,” and glances down at the dog-catcher at my feet.

  I’m still not sure this is such a good idea. But when he sidles up and sticks his clenched fists through the gap between two rails in the gate, I move forward with my zip ties as if he’s the one in charge. With his wrists bound, he lets them fall to his waist. I stick the dog-catcher through the fence and slip the loop over his head.

  Now I have him. Useful for keeping an angry dog out of reach, the dog-catcher also works splendidly for deaders and now, in-betweeners.

  After a quick look around, I open the gate—carefully maneuvering the dog-catcher’s handle so that I can keep him away from me as I shift my grip—then lead Sam to the car. There’s a pull cord I’ve rigged up using some rope and I hook it up to the dog-catcher pole while I stand at the back of the car and wonder what the hell kind of stupidity this whole idea is.

  After that, I have my only moment of real vulnerability. The pull cord goes from the end of the dog-catcher into the back hatch of the car and through the dog fence, then trails out the driver’s side door. I have no idea if this will work. I reach down and grab the cord, pulling in the slack as fast as I can while keeping a good grip on the dog-catcher.

  It jerks Sam almost off his feet and toward the back of the car when I finally get the last of the slack out. He goes compliantly enough and doesn’t do more than wail softly when I yank on the cord to get the end of the pole through the dog fence. There’s no resistance from him and he goes into the hatch with only a few bumps and bangs. Tossing in the pull cord, I tie it to the seat just to make myself feel better.

  It takes every ounce of willpower I have to get in the driver’s seat. Sam’s face is pressed against the window behind my seat.

  “This is so stupid,” I say and get into the car.

  Thirteen Months Ago – Studying Death

  “Okay, time for school,” my mom says, hefting a three-pound sledgehammer and putting the handle through the loop at her belt. She’s got a deader hooked to the fence with a loop of wire, a length of pipe attached to the wire keeping it in place. This is what she’s using for show-and-tell today.

  We’ve been getting a surge of deaders in our area lately. Every morning when we make the rounds, there are at least a dozen of them at various points along the perimeter. And at the gate, there can be as many as a full dozen more. My mom has been adamant that I not do much in the way of dispatching the deaders, but the work is just too much for her to do alone anymore.

  “So, what stage would you put this one at? And what does this deader tell you about where it might have come from and how it came to be here?”

  “Mom, I don’t see why that’s important. I really don’t want to know anything about them. Let’s just get rid of them,” I say, gesturing with my own sledge at the corpse at the fence. It keeps reaching out for my mom with its one remaining hand, the fingers like animated sticks they’re so withered. It’s a really gross one and I don’t even want to get near it. I can’t tell her that, though. She’s finally going to teach me, let me be more than a passenger in this endless flight of ours.

  She sighs, deeply and with suppressed irritation, and shoots a level look my way that I take to mean I’m being difficult.

  “Emily. Ask yourself this question. Why are we suddenly getting more deaders here?” she asks, knocking down the deader’s reaching hand again.

  “I don’t know. Because it’s summer? Deaders are out of school and going on vacation?” I ask and shrug.

  When she answers, each word is clearly enunciated like I’m trying her patience. Which, I think I might be doing. “Because wherever they were before is no longer supporting them and they are seeking food. And look at the condition of them. Something is going on. Wouldn’t you say that’s something we might be more than a little curious about?”

  Ah, so this is important. I totally didn’t get that.

  “Alright, got it,” I say and turn to really look at the deader. For the most part, I try to avoid looking too carefully at their features or anything about them that might make me see remnants of their former humanity. It’s too hard to smash their heads if I start thinking of them that way.

  Swallowing, I look at the deader’s face. This one was female if the clothes are any indication. The ragged remains of a T-shirt emblazoned with a movie logo popular with the teen girl set hangs from its skinny frame. I was a huge fan of that series of books and movies, too, and it looks like this girl and I were both rooting for the same boy to get the girl in the end. The long hair sort of reinforces the notion of it being a girl, though now hunks of scalp are missing and what’s left of the hair is a snarled mess of leaves, twigs, and assorted debris I’d rather not know much about.

  She’s got no eyes, which is fairly normal for one this bad off, and her entire face from just below the nose to the chin is a raw and ragged mess from licking and sucking metal. She has no front teeth at all. The missing arm was torn off at the elbow and the wound hasn’t healed at all. The wound also looks very dry. My guess is that her arm got torn off after she went deader and the nanite repairs slowed down substantially.

  As far as what killed her? That’s obvious, even in the condition she’s in. The neat slice across her neck healed over after she was revived, with the typical weird, bumpy tissue the nanites stimulate the skin to develop.

  “She’s been like this a while, I’d say. Someone cut her throat and I think that’s what killed her. So, it was a human who killed her or she did it herself. Her clothes aren’t practical for being on the run, so I’d guess she was killed while in hiding or very early on,” I say, checking my mother’s reactions to see how well I do.

  She nods at each one of my statements, a little smile on her face. “Excellent! I’d say the same thing. What else? Why is she here?”

  That’s much harder for me to guess at. I have no idea why we’re seeing so many of them. And why they’re coming at night is a mystery as well. The woods back up to this complex with the barrier of a wide field between us and the trees. They seem to be coming from that direction because they all cluster at the rear fence. The rest seem to be coming from town because they wind up at the gate. This one is on the back side of the fence, which means it came from the woods.

  “She’s barefoot but her feet aren’t torn up enough for her to have been outside for all this time,” I say, then think about what’s beyond the woods. “That big subdivision, the one right before the farms start, the one with all the big houses? Maybe she came from there.”

  My mom nods and says, “That’s what I was thinking. She’s not that much different from the deaders I’ve been seeing lately. And you’ll see the pattern when we get to the others.”

  She points to the clothes the deader is wearing and then waves a hand at a few others stuck to the fence a little farther down. “None of them are wearing discount clothes. Even the ones dressed for being outside are wearing good quality. And they’re all wearing clothes suited for summer, which makes me agree with you that these people turned early. And, I agree with you on their condition. They are a mess and haven’t been eating much in the way of fresh kills, but they aren’t torn up by the elements. I think they were trapped inside somewhere, probably the houses in that subdivision. So, why is she here?”

  As my mom speaks, it all sort of comes together for me. The amount of information we can get from a single deader is astounding, and I have a new appreciation for how thorough my mom is. I thought she was being a little
obsessive, but she’s kept us safe, always makes the right decision, and constantly seems one step ahead of what’s happening. That’s not the same kind of obsessive behavior as counting tiles on the floor or checking the locks over and over to no purpose. This is a different sort of obsessive, the good kind.

  This is using everything around her to create a picture that is more complete than the one someone less observant would have. This is attention to detail. It’s an edge.

  “Okay, yeah. So if they were inside somewhere and now they are suddenly out, then something happened to let them out,” I say, walking away to get a look at a few of the others. My mom says nothing and just lets me go and figure out what I can for myself.

  The next three deaders don’t just look like deaders to me now. They still don’t resonate with me as human, which is a relief. Instead, they’re puzzle pieces or clues to some mystery. And like the first deader, these are all barefoot, which is unusual. Shoes fall off, but running shoes and anything boot-like tends to stay on their feet pretty well, so long as they stay tied. And even if their shoes fall off, it’s fairly common to see deaders with a ring of material banding their ankles or calves left over after the bottoms of their socks wear away. It’s odd that there are no shoes or sock remains on any of these.

  And like the first one, these deaders are all extremely withered, wearing light clothes and sporting wounds that signal how they died. Two of them are men and both of them have bare patches of bumpy nanite-grown skin on the backs of their heads. If I had to guess, I’d say both of them were shot or bludgeoned. The other is another woman, though this one is older. Like the girl, she’s got a slit throat but unlike the others, she’s also sporting a pretty horrendous old bite wound. That one has scarred like a normal human’s skin would. I think I’m starting to get a picture of their ends.

  I don’t want to look at them anymore. The picture is a sad one and I don’t want to start thinking of them as humans, as they were when all this happened to them. I don’t want to think of the woman with the bite being tended by others, succumbing, and then turning.

  My mom is waiting for me, her eyes roaming the field and the woods beyond, ever watchful.

  “Well?” she asks when I near.

  “I think these people were trapped inside the houses at that subdivision and something has happened that is letting them out. Not a fire or anything because they aren’t burned. Looters?”

  She nods and says, “That’s what I think. Whoever is doing it either isn’t confident enough to take them out or doesn’t care that they wander afterward, which would mean they are pretty certain they can get out of the area once they’re done searching the houses. That’s looter behavior. And those are nice houses, so I’m guessing they aren’t only scavenging after food and such.”

  I laugh and say, “Like jewelry is worth anything anymore. How stupid is that!”

  She shrugs and says, “But it probably won’t always be like that. It could be a group so well organized that they’re planning for the future. We’d need to watch out for any group like that coming this way.”

  The way she says that, I know our night watches are going to shift to cover the full period of darkness instead of ending around midnight. I sigh, but I’m also glad that I know what I might be looking for.

  After this lesson, it’s down to business. I know how to take out a deader with a sledge. The whole brain has to go and chopping off heads is just cruel because the head will stay alive for a long time. Not to mention the whole body twitching even without a head. I have no idea how long that goes on, but my mom apparently kept track of one for a while and says it’s an unacceptably long time.

  It’s hard work and my arms feel like spaghetti by the time we’re done dragging the last deader to the pile of them moldering in the field. I can see why my mom decided it’s time for me to help. And, surprisingly, I’m okay with doing this kind of work. I suppose it’s like anything else that’s essentially disgusting. You can get used to anything.

  Today - Driving Without a License

  With Sam inside the car, so close to me that I can smell his overpowering carrion stench, I almost panic and get out of the car again. The idea that I should take a nap and pretend none of this ever happened is a powerful one. Bathing in the smell of blood and whatever it is that he’s done in his pants is just driving the idea home with a little extra force. Even taking deep breaths to calm down isn’t an option because the smell is making me gag.

  I absolutely have to turn on the AC—which is a big use of energy I’ll probably need—and blow as much air as I can away from me and toward him. I’ve drawn out a sketch of the streets I’ll need, along with lots of alternatives. I’m hopeful that most of my path will allow a skinny car like this one through.

  The world didn’t go to hell entirely overnight. Most people at least had time to run out of gas somewhere or hole up for days. Or months. When my mom and I were looking for this place, we had very little trouble getting through the streets, though we did attract some attention that required a great deal of shooting on my mom’s part. I can’t imagine that it would be too much worse now on the roads. No one has been driving around to get stuck, that’s for sure.

  It feels weird to be driving. Actually, I have to fight the impulse to look over my shoulder because I don’t have my license. It’s stupid, I know, but there it is.

  Also, I’m a very bad driver.

  There’s a sad and very forlorn look to the city as I get closer. I’m sticking to the main thoroughfare through town, which is no better than any other route. I could make an argument for there being people to see me on any stretch of road, really.

  If I use a main street, I run the risk of being seen by survivors downtown, where the buildings are dense and the advantage lies with anyone who views me from above. Then again, there’s not much in the way of food left in town—I know because we had to leave the law offices once there was nothing left to scavenge—and smart survivors would have headed somewhere they could grow or find food.

  On the other hand, if I take the long circuitous route to avoid downtown, I’ll go right past the suburbs where smart survivors would have gone and turned lawns into gardens. Lower density buildings but longer sightlines would make me just as visible to anyone with bad intentions who wants to interfere with me.

  So, all things considered, the easiest and fastest route seems like the best choice. If I can get through quickly, then even if someone sees us, they might not have time to follow.

  Those first miles are the longest of my life. I feel more tension and fright during that drive than I did walking alone to find medicine for my mother, more than when I went with her around our area to see how populated it was after we found the industrial park, more than that first day when we left our home forever. Sam is behind me, alternately mashing his face against the barrier as if he wants to get at me and huddling at the back, hitting himself and making noises.

  It’s far more distracting than driving with a cell phone. Or texting. And those were both big no-no’s.

  I pass the hulking wrecks of a grocery store, a strip mall, and assorted businesses, and then we’re downtown. Everything here is crammed together and on each succeeding block the buildings reach a little higher into the sky than the last. The apartments over the storefronts look ominous to me, the windows in shadow capable of hiding a multitude of peering faces.

  At every point where I need to make a turn, I stop and look. I’ve read enough dark and gritty end-of-times fiction to know the drill. Bad guys always create a roadblock out of cars or something and then swarm you. That’s how it goes. But the breakdown of order has been different in some ways than in novels I’ve read.

  For one thing, there aren’t that many abandoned cars in the roads. Most people went home and watched the news when it started. That shifted to staying home and hiding. At least it did for the people who were marginally smart. Very few went driving around once the in-betweeners started in.

  Before the power w
ent out for good and we could still pick up broadcasts, there were lots of images of people running around the streets, but it was always the same people who wind up looting or burning things when anything goes wrong. Those, plus the groups of people who seemed to think bashing in-betweeners was a game. Then those people inevitably became in-betweeners themselves because no matter how much fun they thought it would be to go bashing heads, it wasn’t a game.

  It took time for things to get like they are now.

  My mom and I cleared out of the suburbs and our house—with its expanses of easily broken glass—fast. Faster than most, for sure. We went to my grandparents’ little house near the lake, where Mom thought we would be safe with so few people and so much forest. My grandparents weren’t there, but I didn’t expect them to be. They were in their house up north for the summer. My mom watched for them every day, but they never showed. We never saw them again.

  It was safe there by the lake for a while. But eventually, the in-betweeners followed the food and the wildlife, as did the humans who eventually flooded into the lake area. By the time we headed back into the suburbs, only to find our house burned along with the rest of the homes on our street, the world was like this. Not exactly like this, because back then there were uncountable in-betweeners and far fewer deaders, but this hellish landscape is what we returned to.

  It's not hard to picture what caused much of the carnage we pass. Little wagons meant to carry children at play lay turned over, their ruined contents spilled around them. Trash cans have been tossed about, as if to slow down a pursuer. And, as always, the picked over remains of people are everywhere I look. There are always lots and lots of those, but there aren’t any fresh ones and that is an encouraging sign. And to top it all off, two years’ worth of trash has been blown out of all the broken windows and scattered everywhere, just to make things especially untidy looking.