Forever Between (Between Life and Death Book 2) (7 page)

We don’t take any breaks at all. There’s no place either of us feel is safe to do so. We do see some things that make us decide we should come back and take a look if at all possible. There’s a feed and hardware store that looks fairly pristine. For sure, the rodents would have gotten any feed corn or oats that people didn’t, but salt licks are something we would be very interested in. We also pass a row of silos, rusting and covered in kudzu, but still of interest. They might have something edible inside. Tons of soybeans, or corn, or anything edible would be a huge prize. It would be nice to find so much food that the logistics of carrying it home became our main problem.

By the time the sun takes its late afternoon dip, I’m exhausted to the bones and I can tell Charlie is too from the breathy shortness of his already abbreviated responses. His body moves from side to side with each push on the bike’s pedals just like mine does.

I push myself hard for a minute so that I can ride next to him, then ask, “Find a spot?”

He nods, but his face is grim. He’s the one with the map in his head, but the last sign we passed indicated the military base was still more than thirty miles out. To get around it to the hospital complex—which is also where the dental unit, regular medical unit and the base services like shopping are at—we have to travel all the way around the base and then go a little further out. We may have made our forty miles today, but not by much. I know Charlie was hoping we would be able to get much more, so that delays by the base wouldn’t be catastrophic.

We’ve passed the only town of any significance between us and the hospital, so we’re going to have to scope out one of these rural properties for a place to stay tonight. Charlie starts watching them with greater care, his eyes cataloging everything. I do too, but all I see is ruin. I don’t trust that though. From a moving bike and fighting fatigue, I could easily miss some small, but vital, clue. My butt bones hurt enough for me to make a bad decision and I know it.

An old three-story house—or two-story with a very tall attic—sits alone behind a huge field of skeletal cotton. There’s not much in the way of spontaneous crop seeding, just tall weeds. A few barns for equipment sit even further back on the property. We both slow at the same time, liking the way this house looks. Alone, tall and with nothing inviting about it, it’s just right for us.

“What do you think?” I ask, stopping my bike when Charlie does. I let out a groan of relief when I lift my butt from the seat. It’s like someone’s had my hips in a vice trying to bend my pelvis into a bow shape. When the pressure is relieved, it’s painful but in a different way. I do not want to get back on that seat.

Charlie seems completely normal, his body unaffected by the long ride. Still, he arches his back and groans a little as he stands astraddle his bike. That makes me feel a little less like a wimp. He considers the house and then looks around. This is an area thick with kudzu, though it’s still confined to the trees and the areas just beyond the trees. That leaves this house and the majority of the fields around it relatively open, but aside from the road—which is also slowly being consumed—we are in an island of trees and kudzu. No one could walk through those woods without being in real danger of winding up as kudzu food. It is late spring after all, and the vines are going crazy.

I can tell he’s going to say yes before he does and I have to resist the impulse to throw a fist pump, I’m so glad.

“Might as well,” he says, a little glumly. I’m not too worried about his disappointment at us not making more miles today. I’ve got cinnamon-sugar and a couple of pieces of Savannah’s delicious flatbread in my pack as a surprise. He’ll cheer up.

We circle the house in a wide loop, watching the windows for any sign of movement and checking the barns from a distance. There are the bones of some sort of large animal, many of them actually, in a pen by one of the barns, but no people or things that used to be people. There’s an air of disuse, of a place long abandoned and left alone.

Charlie and I share a nod and we move closer to the house, taking care to ride slowly and carefully, yet primed to take off down the rutted drive and back toward the highway at the slightest hint of danger.

The paint on the back porch railings is well on its way to peeling away, the gray of old wood peeking out from behind the once white coating. The steps are brick and the porch floorboards still a remarkably bright green, as if to defy the decay surrounding them as the house succumbs to the elements. Drifts of last year’s leaves, or maybe the year before or the year before, are piled up in the corners and against the quaint porch furniture. Just looking at the twin rockers set side by side is enough to bring up a smile. I didn’t know people still did such things. Did they use them or were they just for show?

The boards creak, so we stop and wait for any response from inside. I think I hear the faint scritching of claws, but they are small claws, like those of a mouse. I’m not worried about a mouse.

After a few very long minutes standing still while my sit bones ache and complain, Charlie nudges me with his elbow and whispers, “I think we can try to go in. Ready?”

I nod, reseat my crossbow in my arms, feel for my bolts and take a deep breath. We have a system for clearing, so I know what to do. The catch is that unless we’re in a subdivision with only a set number of house models, each place will be different and until we’re actually inside, we can’t know exactly what steps will need to be taken.

Of course, we also have to have an unlocked door. Which, in this case, we do not.

We look at each other and then at the offending doorknob. It’s not like we haven’t had it happen before, but most places we go through have been looted at least once, or were checked and abandoned. Half the time the doors are hanging off their hinges or simply standing open. This orderly locking business is unusual.

“Windows?” I ask with a shrug.

We each move to one side of the door toward the windows framing it. At my window, old-fashioned lacy curtains obstruct the view, but only partially. Inside is a cheery room, a table covered by a runner bright with some sort of yellow flowers, a milk jug centered on it filled with brown stems. The kitchen beyond the table seems neat and un-ransacked, the cabinets all closed. There’s even a little dish towel folded neatly over the sink.

I look at Charlie and after a moment, he looks at me and whispers, “Nothing. Want to go in?”

We try the windows all around the first floor, but they’re all locked. The front door, which we would normally avoid because it’s visible from the highway, is also locked. For some reason, the idea of busting a window bothers me. This house seems intact—at least for the moment—and I hate the idea of messing that up just so I can get some rest.

Some impulse makes me pick up the flower pots set on the stairs, a pair on each step of the front stairs. Under the second one, I find a key. It’s been there so long the outline of the key has eroded into the step.

I scoop it up, and say, “Bingo!”

“
Shh
,” Charlie hisses, but he’s grinning at the find all the same.

Inside, the house smells liked cooked dust and very old decay, as in a body. We both tense at the smell and shift back into a more alert mode. We turn back to back and clear the open spaces to either side of us. Nothing greets us and there are no tell-tale deader sounds.

The bottom floor is almost one big ring of rooms around a typical old farmhouse staircase to the second floor. Through the front room, we pass into another big room that might have once been closed off as a bedroom, but is now a family room. Beyond that, to the right behind the enclosed stairwell, a door to the basement is latched from the outside, but not in any particularly alarming way, just a normal latch. Then to the right again, there’s the kitchen, which is huge, and beyond that, the dining room up front.

That’s it. Everything is neat and well-tended, though covered by enough dust to tell me that this house hasn’t had anyone bustling about inside for a long time. At the bottom of the stairs we look up and listen, but there’s nothing.

Charlie goes up first, the old stairs creaking a song so loud it’s wince-worthy. The smell is stronger at the top of the stairs, but not fresh at all. Old death smells a lot different than new death. It’s no less noticeable, but it doesn’t cause that instinctive retching a week-old body in summer will.

Five doors surround a big square open hallway, all of them closed. But again, nothing is out of place really. Even the little rug on the central hallway floor is still straight. The first room is a bedroom turned office, farm paperwork and an old computer on top of a desk, along with a couple of chairs with brightly patterned cushions on the seats. At the second door, I know we’re in the right spot as soon as the door cracks open.

The scent billows out into our faces as we ease the door open. The master bedroom clearly, it is still occupied by its former masters. Curled up on the bed, I can see the back of a man spooning a smaller figure. He’s been there a long time, at least a couple of years.

When we move toward the end of the bed, I see who he is spooning. It must have been his wife, though she has no head to speak of. The towel covering what is left of the head is stained brown and almost flat, the lumps underneath very small. I can guess it’s his wife by the primly tucked nightgown and the plain, gold wedding band between the large knuckles on the remains of one hand.

The man is as rotted as his wife, but his white hair still clings to his clothing and the pillow under his skull. He’s wearing overalls. Honest to goodness overalls.

“I don’t even want to know,” Charlie says.

“I think we can guess,” I reply, and flip my bow to my back. I walk out, quickly check a door that I’d guess is the bathroom—it is—and look in the tall cabinets. There’s a neat stack of ironed sheets and I take one back to the bedroom.

When Charlie just stands there looking at the people, I say, “A little help here, please.”

He starts, shaking out of whatever dark thoughts had him there for a minute, and we lay the sheet carefully over the two people in the bed. I take the woman’s side and I can tell by the way the towel is laid that someone smashed her head to a pulp. I can guess what happened. There’s a bottle of pills on a nightstand on the man’s side of the bed.

“What were those?” I ask, nodding toward the bottle.

He tosses it to me over the two bodies. I give him a look, but he’s already turning away. Sleeping pills. Yes, I can guess what went on here and I feel terrible that this man had to do what he did, and I understand why he decided sleeping forever was the better option after having done the deed. The name on the bottle reads, John Farmer. It’s almost too much of a cliché, but it’s real, and that just makes it sad.

Unless we want to bury the couple, there’s not much we can do for them anymore. And, even if we had the time, I don’t think it would be a kindness to take them from this bed where they’ve been together all this time. We leave the room, closing the door behind us as if to respect their privacy while embraced in the intimacy of death.

Such delicacy doesn’t last long for me though. The first thing I want to do after hearing the click of the latch on their door is to search their house for anything I can take to help me on my trip. There is a shotgun in the office closet, but no other weapons that I can find and there’s no ammunition at all. There’s also not a scrap of food in the house except a single can of beans in a cupboard with a note.

One last can of food. It’s not much, but if you really need it, I hope it will help you survive another day. If you don’t really need it, save it for someone who might. God bless you. J.F.

Tears well in my eyes to see that note, written in the hand of an old man, schooled during a time when handwriting was graded and judged, the fine loops and curls eroded by aging joints. I place the can back inside the cupboard carefully, ensuring the note is under the can exactly as it was before.

We decide to take the attic and use the latticed vents as our place to watch from. They have screens, which is good, because at least the mosquitoes won’t bedevil us all night. Without saying anything, we move to the side of the attic that isn’t over top of the bodies in the bedroom below to lay out our sleeping bags. Charlie keeps watch, moving from vent to vent to get a good initial view of our surroundings while I get dinner ready. Charlie turns as the scent of flatbread hits him and he finally smiles again, the strained lines from what we found below easing some.

By the time we’re done eating and the sunset is glowing red and orange, we’re okay again. Farmer John—John Farmer, doesn’t bother me so much anymore. What a strange world we live in where that could be true.

Seven Months Ago - A Bite or Two

“These look pretty good, Emily,” I say, dabbing at her various scratches and bites with a cloth dipped in vodka while she lays belly down on a sleeping bag. None of us is really sure if vodka is any good for disinfecting, but they always use booze in the movies so we figure there must be some truth to it.

“I almost wish they would get infected,” Savannah murmurs as she peers at the deep bite on Emily’s lower back. I give her a look, which makes her blush and look away. “I just mean that then we could be sure there weren’t any of those things inside her.”

Emily pulls her shirt down, giving all the signs that she’s losing patience with my tending, so I hurry and dab at the bite on her ankle before she can sit up and pull her legs away. She does just that and I keep making jabs at it while she moves away like I’m the mom and she’s an unruly child unhappy with the stinging.

“It’s fine, V. I’m fine!” she insists, batting away my hand.

Savannah and I share a look but I don’t know her well enough to be sure what her looks mean. What does that particular look mean in her lexicon? It looked like an “Oh, well, what can you do?” look, but it might have been a “Stop pestering her already” look.

“Fine,” I say and start packing up the medical kit, putting aside the cloths to be cleaned and boiled.