Haven (13 page)

From as far away as across the side street and into the large fields surrounding the homes, more Infected were continuing to be spurred into action and were running in our direction. Through the throngs, I could see that those homes had windows broken and cars parked across their lawns, and I knew they hadn’t been spared. The mob moved with us, growing in size, until we reached a part of the fence lined with thick shrubs. There, they collected in a pile, squeezing, pressing the faces and bodies of those in front through the rungs until their cheeks were swollen and contorted. No, no sensitivity at all…We left them there, grappling to get at us and turned the corner to the back of the school. This was the delivery area where doors opened to the back of the kitchen and to the maintenance sheds. As my eyes swept the vicinity, I stopped abruptly, which alerted Harrison.

“What?” he asked, his shoulders visibly stiffening at my uncertainty while he shifted to search for what had spooked me.

He wouldn’t recognize it, though, unless he had hung out with Beverly.

“Her dad made it.”

He was about to ask “who” until it came to him, and his head swung back and along the single row of parking spots offered to the janitors and maintenance crews just beyond the gate. There were two pickup trucks – non-commercial, dented, and rusting. And then there was a Mercedes Benz, kissing Mr. Packard’s fence, its grill having slammed into several bars until they slanted slightly inward. It hadn’t left a hole, but it had been dangerously close to becoming one. Tire marks grazed the pavement behind it indicating that it had screeched to a stop. It was polished and pristine, and the driver’s side door was open. In the back part of my mind, I recognized that the interior light was not on, which meant the door had been ajar for a while, sapping the car of its battery.

Simply in the fact that Harrison’s shoulders remained rigid and his handsome face was hardened into a frown, I knew he had seen what I had. And I appreciated the fact that he didn’t try to make an attempt to comfort or reassure me. He knew as well as I did that my ex-friend’s father hadn’t made it safely inside and was in all likelihood dead, and Harrison wasn’t going to insult me by trying to cover it up. Instead, he gave me a long, close look, with those navy blue eyes that I was certain took in more detail than most others, before reassuring himself that I was all right. Only then did he turn. And that’s when it happened.

A gust of warm wind – the kind that carries thunderstorms to the Chicago area during summertime – drifted by us, although this one wasn’t carrying rain. I knew this when Harrison’s rigid shoulders rose several inches, and while I caught nothing from that gust other than that a storm was heading for us, I was certain he’d detected something else.

“Kennedy?” Harrison asked quietly, focusing his attention on the corner of the large trash dumpsters in front of us. “Do you still have your stars?”

I was already pulling them out. I realized then that I had the guard’s knife in my other hand.

“Harrison?” I said in a whisper, my heart beginning to pound quicker from the adrenaline. “Take the knife.”

But he shook his head, keeping his back to me, and never moving his sight from the corner where they’d landed. This was because he knew something I didn’t…That he didn’t have the time.

The man lunged out from behind the trash can, dragging his right leg behind him. He’d lost a shoe, and part of his foot. But it was the odd angle that he used to tow his leg which made his lunging wobbly. It had been broken, but he didn’t appear to notice the pain, apparently shutting off that part of his consciousness in order to reach us. Just like the others, his skin was sinking in and there was a vacancy in his eyes. He reached Harrison in seconds. Harrison’s wide hands grabbed the man’s head and threw him to the side. While this was effective in throwing the man off balance, it didn’t impede him, and I wondered what Harrison’s strategy might be. When Harrison stepped around him and slipped an arm around his neck, it came to me. He was going to break it. But I was already in the motion of drawing up the guard’s knife, eye-level with the man, and crossing the distance between us. As Harrison twisted the man’s head and the crack resounded across the delivery area, my hand was unable to stop its thrust and the knife landed perfectly in the center of the man’s temple. There was a brief moment of silence as we waited for the man to respond, to fight back, to continue his attack on us. But he did nothing, other than to slide down Harrison’s body until Harrison stepped back. From there, he fell the remainder of the way to the pavement.

Drawing in a deep breath, I paused to make sure the man was gone, really and truly gone. When I did, my muscles froze in place, preventing me from moving for a very long time. Nothing registered with me then, nothing but the familiarity of the man’s face.

“You know him, don’t you?” Harrison’s voice broke through the haze that seemed to surround me.

I blinked, regained my awareness, and nodded. “I didn’t recog…He didn’t look like this…I didn’t know…” I drew my stare up to Harrison, partly pleading with him, with fate for this not to have happened. But it had. It had happened. There was no turning back, no changing it. That sick, twisted rational side of me that my father had cultivated so well showed itself, and it said that this wasn’t my fault, that it was self-defense. He’d been ill with the disease, that damned disease. He’d been… It didn’t matter. I had done it and there was no way to undo it. “My God,” I whispered, and my stomach twisted painfully, reinforcing that I was still alive and this man wasn’t. “How do I…,” I stopped to swallow back the words, unsure I could actually say them. “How do I tell Beverly I just killed her father?”

Time seemed to move slowly for me then, while Harrison approached me and took my shoulders tenderly in his hands.

“We,” Harrison corrected. “We both did this, Kennedy, and it was necessary.”

“I know. He was…” I said, incapable of finishing my sentence. Stepping away from him, I struggled to grasp it all and began an inane effort to whisk away reality by pacing back and forth. It took me a few steps before realizing that, while I didn’t want to stay here, I was unable to go anywhere else.

“No,” Harrison countered me again, calmly working through my inner dialogue to help me see the light. “We did this man a favor, Kennedy. He can rest in peace now.” He tilted his head toward me. “Do you understand?”

In a daze, I nodded. I did. I really did. It was logical. My heart just wouldn’t allow me to accept it.

Harrison could sense this and stepped in front of me, again placing his hands tenderly on my cheeks and positioning my eyes away from Beverly’s father and back to him. Harrison’s woodsy scent enveloped me, helping to bring me back to earth. “He was a good man, right?”

“Yes, a very nice man.”

“And he was stuck inside that body, a body he could no longer control, doing things he wouldn’t want to do.”

I blinked long and hard, before feeling my heart open a little. “Yes, he was.”

Harrison ducked his head and caught my attention, making me listen. “He’s free from it now. He’s free, Kennedy.”

And for reasons beyond my understanding, my heart got it. And for the first time since this entire repugnant experience started, I accepted it, as Harrison had so clearly already done. The tears flowed then, pouring down my face like a flash flood, relieving me of the tension that had built up. Harrison pulled me against his chest and wrapped his thick, warm, strong arms around me. He held me against him, protecting me, giving me the time I needed to recover. It was during that time, pressed securely up against him, that I realized I wasn’t only crying because I’d participated in taking the life of Beverly’s father, or because I’d helped set him free, or even because the whole damn world had collapsed.

For the first time since my dad’s funeral, after twelve long months of simply existing, finally, I no longer felt alone.

~ 5 ~

I
HAD NEVER CONSIDERED MYSELF A
weak person. It didn’t fit me because my dad had ensured that fear, submission, and vulnerability had been trained out of me since I drew my first breath. In my family, weakness wasn’t an option. In fact, this state of mind was one of my strengths during track races. When my body had given all it thought it could and my legs felt like spaghetti and my lungs screamed at me, I refused to listen. It was entirely that adamant refusal to take into account what could hurt me that kept me going. And it was this reason that kept me from listening to my subconscious when it began churning up the memory of Harrison picking up Beverly’s dad’s scent.

Harrison held me in his arms for as long as it took for my bawling to subside. He then stepped away and allowed me the room to wipe my face clean. When I thanked him, he responded with a reassuring nod as if he were reiterating, “Don’t be unnerved by what just took place”, which I assumed included the attack by Beverly’s dad, our defense of him, his deliverance from evil, and my resulting breakdown into Harrison’s shoulder.

It was while my face was embedded in his chest, drawing in his comforting scent, when the back of my mind resisted me. As hard as I tried to ignore them, images of Harrison lifting his nose to the air, drawing in a breath, the contortion of his face as he recognized something in the wind, the entire sweeping motion of it
kept
creeping back to my consciousness. I tried to ignore the images, wanting to focus on the feel of Harrison’s muscles below my cheek and his consoling warmth against me, and yet the damn things lingered, popping back in like one of those Hit The Weevil On The Head games. Only this wasn’t a game. Calm, cool awareness is always your greatest asset in an emergency. People had died because they were too panicked to see what was right in front of them. So eventually, as Harrison and I finished our walk around the school, I had to acknowledge the fact that there was something off about what Harrison had done back there.

I’d already accepted that he had excellent hearing and a high threshold for pain. Now I could add an incredibly strong sense of smell to his growing resume of overtly strange abilities. The addition of another mysterious quirk should have concerned me. And it did, but for the wrong reason. Instead of sparking fear in me, it carried with it the apprehension that I hadn’t showered in two days, and I became acutely self-conscious and positioned myself downwind from him. Strangely, this new realization about him didn’t lessen my interest in him either. If anything, it made him more appealing, and became the first time that I could remember when my dad’s training actually backfired.

When Harrison and I finished our inspection of the exterior of the school and were inside once again, we found the locker doors open starting from the entrance and reaching midway down on both sides of the main hallway where Beverly and Doc were standing.

Doc’s head was turned toward Beverly who was dropping an armful of sweatshirts into a large pile of clothes as we approached. They were arguing, which didn’t surprise me.

“How do you know where she lives?” Doc countered.

“She helped me with some projects last year. I had to drop her off at home a couple of times. She doesn’t own a car.” Beverly mentioned this last part as if it was a negative.

“So Mei tutored you,” he surmised flatly.

“Helped,” Beverly corrected, narrowing her eyes.

Doc looked away and shrugged. “Same thing.”

Her nostrils flared and she opened her mouth to retort, but Harrison stopped her. “All clear outside.”

I risked a look at him but he didn’t seem to notice.

With venom still on the tip of her tongue, Beverly directed it at Harrison. “Of course it is. You’re talking instead of trying to eat us.”

We ignored her, and I changed the subject. “Where’s Mei?”

“Bathroom,” Doc said just as she reappeared in the hallway. She met up with us at the piles Beverly and Doc were assembling, seemingly relieved that we’d made it back safely. I appreciated that.

“How are we looking on food?” Harrison asked when she’d reached us.

“We have months’ worth, but we’ll probably want to eat the perishables first, which means a lot of salads and veggie omelets.”

Doc’s lip turned up in disgust as he dropped a hoodie into the clothing pile. “We should throw in some meat with it, since they have so much.”

Harrison stiffened at the suggestion, but I believe I was the only one who caught it because all attention remained on Doc as he started to account for the lockers’ contents.

“You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff people leave here. Bags of weed, Playboy magazines. I mean important stuff! And they just leave it all at school!” He shook his head in amazement.

“Of course,” Beverly said, directing her sarcasm at Doc before turning to Harrison and me. “They also leave
other
things. We’re making piles to categorize what we’re finding.”

“Good idea,” Harrison commented.

“It was mine,” she replied loud enough for us to hear before bending down to point out the heaps. “Clothing, electronics, food, games, drugs, and weapons. We left the books in the lockers.”

Harrison and I moved with equal anticipation and enough speed toward the last pile, causing her to grumble about our audacity in ignoring the excellent job she was doing. Unfortunately, until she grew blades or a trigger, she would be of far less interest to us than what was on the ground. Bending down, I rattled off what I saw out loud, realizing that Mr. Packard had unfortunately been adept at keeping weapons out of his school.