Chapter 1
Jonathan Foster lowered the binoculars and squinted to bring the distant scenery into focus. His target, a woman as far as he could tell, had become a dot to his naked eye. A tiny dot that had now just derailed his plan to hit the sack right after dinner.
“No way in hell,” he mumbled.
His round to secure the warehouse — the building he’d been calling home since the initial wave of the virus — was almost finished, albeit much earlier than usual. His end-of-day ritual had taken him to the roof last as always. This was where he listened for suspicious noises nearby and made the final determination on whether or not it was safe to call it a day. He was about to go back inside and lie down when movements at the top of the hill, east of the City, had tickled the corner of his right eye. No one had used that road in weeks; ignoring such a sighting was not an option.
“No way in this brand-new hell,” he said again, raising the binoculars this time.
The woman’s wheelchair seemed to disobey her commands to roll forward in a straight line. Her troubles grew as she gained speed after she pushed her wheels down the long steep hill that would take her to the south end of the City’s outskirt, not too far from where Jonathan lived.
It was the truth of her predicament he was questioning. She couldn’t have survived until then on her own, he thought. Not in a wheelchair. Not one that appeared to be such a dud, anyway.
He theorized the woman was used as bait, part of a scheme to rip poor saps of their belongings. Tapping into people’s good nature impulses had become an effective luring tactic as of late. Jonathan himself, though far from gullible, had walked head first into a similar trap three weeks earlier. In his case, the lead character in the setup had been a young boy feigning distress. A woman pretending to wrestle with a wheelchair wasn’t that much of a stretch.
But when the chair came to a brutal stop and then flipped, sending its occupant flying from her seat and onto the pavement, her fall erased many of his doubts. That tumble was as real as it was violent. No accomplices jumped out of the bushes to rush to her aid either. The woman took a moment to gather her wits. She then crawled across the road to recover parts of her chair, reattached them and pulled herself back up before resuming her descent.
Jonathan’s instincts defeated his common sense and he left the warehouse to go get a closer look. Sleep would have to wait a little while longer.
Venturing out there was always a rough proposition. If he had to, he preferred to do so wrapped in the safe blanket of darkness the night provided. There was still an hour of daylight left when he had first zoomed in on the woman. He calculated danger was multiplied by a factor of about ten.
After his encounter with the kid three weeks earlier, he had promised to himself he would never again try to help someone in need. He knew better now; he had paid, and he continued to pay, a hefty price for his latest attempt at kindness. These short minutes would haunt him for the rest of his life, however long that was going to be. He was certain of it.
The scene that had just played out in the distance had somehow lit a spark in his darkened sense of empathy.
Jonathan ran across the South Side Bridge. He zigzagged between the destroyed stores, the deserted office buildings and quite a few decaying bodies. He had combed the streets of this part of town often enough in the last eight weeks to know which ones would take him in a single piece to where he estimated the woman would arrive after her trip down the hill. Still, he paused every once in a while to listen. The silence in which the world had gone and plunged itself had become a great advantage to the mindful. The noises Jonathan heard could mean the difference between life and death. So did the ones he made.
He found a safe spot in a back alley and waited.
Coming from the adjacent main street, he soon recognized the unmistakable sounds the defective wheelchair made as it moved on the pavement’s rough surface. It was indeed a woman. When she appeared in his line of sight, between two buildings, he got his first close look at her. She was disheveled, dirty as can be and he could tell she had been wearing the same clothes for many days. The backpack she carried on her lap contained very little.
He took a step forward but stopped, making good on his own promise not to engage. He would play it safe and follow and observe her for the time being, nothing more. Easier said than done; Jonathan had never seen anything so compelling. The advanced state of decrepitude of the woman’s chair, as well as the injuries she had sustained in her fall earlier, made each yard she covered look like an Olympian exploit. She was also moving toward the hot zone, which gave Jonathan cause to worry. This main road on which she was traveling would eventually lead her to the worst elements the City had to offer. If she were to move too close to the downtown area, he thought, he would approach her and warn her of the dangers ahead. Much to his relief, she took a sharp right turn and opted instead to use the same alley from which he was spying on her.
Every once in a while the woman paused to gaze at her hands and blow some cool air on them in an apparent attempt to ease the pain from her injuries. She tore open garbage bags and rummaged through all the bins she came across. At times, she would bring a find near her face to inspect it. After some hesitation she would either throw away the piece or shove it in her mouth. More often than not, she spat it back out and coughed in disgust.
It wasn’t a scheme. Jonathan was overwhelmed by her situation, the worst he had seen since the beginning of this mess back in April.
It always came down to food. Every survivor’s life had been reduced to a never-ending quest for something to eat. Water wasn’t a problem for anyone with some sort of a container and a functioning brain. Even this woman, obviously deprived of luck and all other necessities, took a bottle with some of the precious liquid out of her bag to sip on it at some point. Food was the constant worry. Going out to look for it was a gamble whether armed to the teeth and dressed in fatigues, like Jonathan was, or not. Finding it was equally perilous. Decency inevitably flew out the window at the sight of food. A kind and sweet old nun could kill the leader of a biker gang in his sleep for a bite of a dried out Pop-Tart if she ever saw it in his hand.
So the more Jonathan observed the woman in the wheelchair, the more he softened his position. Inside an hour, he had switched from keeping an eyeon herto keeping an eye outfor her. He would stay within earshot until sunrise. Then, he would try and make contact with her.
Night descended before she could go very far. The deserted alley was now lit by nothing but the half moon shining above the woman and her stalker. Plenty of darkness for some much-needed protection from a distance, but enough of a glow for Jonathan to still distinguish the tones of the woman’s clothes.
After her mealshe found room behind a dumpster, pulled the remains of a blanket from her bag and settled down for a nap.
Jonathan sat on the ground just shy of a hundred feet from her, his back against the brick wall of a structure that had perhaps once been a factory of some sort. Difficult to tell since most of the buildings had been ravaged — first by rioters, then by scavengers — after the virus had struck. He retrieved an army ration from his backpack, but thought better of it; such a feast would be inappropriate after what he had just witnessed. Even the energy bar he ate felt over the top.
Though his eyes were locked on his target, he allowed his mind to slowly drift toward his own situation. Less to what it had become and more to what it had once been. Getting lost inside a thick haze of memories was easy, especially at that hour. This stillness mixed with the kind of obscurity the night now imposed was a powerful agent of reflection. The virus, and the violence that had raged in its wake, had killed almost everyone in the City. More than six hundred thousand souls had gone silent there; the remaining few could finally hear themselves think.
He had Facetimed his mom and dad before all communications were cut off, so he knew they had made it through the first wave of infections. That was it. That was all he knew. If the virus hadn’t taken them in the second wave, the lawlessness that had ensued had surely claimed many of his loved ones. The woman he’d been following this evening had revived some of his hopes for them. If she had managed to survive this entire time, on her own and without the use of her legs, perhaps a few members of his family were still alive back home. And if he had lived closer to them, maybe he could have helped save a few more.
Or were they all gone already?
He was exhausted. At the time he had left his building earlier, he had been up for more than twenty-four hours. Wondering about those he once knew, and worrying about their fate, was far from reinvigorating. His inability to get to them was a heavy burden. The weight of these daunting perhapsand maybes found its way to his eyelids.
The moment he closed his eyes he thought of Kat, of course. No matter how hard he fought them, he couldn’t stop the images of her from flickering in his mind and hammering at his heart.
There she was, smiling, lying in bed and facing him, her soft, warm hand on his cheek. There she was again, leading the way as the two hiked along the punishing Skyway Trail. And there she was, standing in the kitchen, holding a grocery bag over the counter as though she was just about to set it down. Eyes wide opened, motionless, stiff as a rock and disfigured beyond recognition.
“Kat, gimme the bag, babe.”
“Kat, gimme the bag…”
“Gimme that bag, bitch.”
“Oh crap,” Jonathan muttered as he jumped to his feet. He had fallen asleep. Two thugs were now attacking the woman in the wheelchair, trying to rip her backpack from her hands. She was giving it her all to fight them back.
By the time Jonathan had risen, one of the thieves had hit her across the face with such force she had flown out of her seat and landed on the ground. His friend grabbed her chair, spun around and tossed it high in the air. When it crashed back to the earth, one of the rear wheels came off and rolled to the opposite side of the alley.
“All you had to do was let go of the damned bag, lady. Come on Bud, let’s get going,” one of the men said.
“We can’t leave her like that. That’s just mean. We should put her out of her misery,” the other one answered.
The woman looked down and appeared to whisper a few words. One of the two attackers walked up to her. The order came just as he was about to put his hand on her head.
“Don’t touch her.”
The bullies turned around at the sound of Jonathan’s voice. Though the light from the rising sun was quite dim, he could see the Oh Shit looks on both their faces. There was nothing impressive about his physique. He was thirty-four years old and of average built and height. It was the clothes he wore and the tool he held that signaled bad news to the two men. The chances of finding themselves at the wrong end of a silenced M4 pointed by a soldier in full army gear had been slim to none. Until that moment, that is.
Right then and there they knew. They knew were toast and that there was little they could do about it. If stealing from a woman in a wheelchair and killing her afterwards were offenses that now went unpunished, so was ending the pathetic lives of those willing to do these terrible things.
“Drop the bag,” a calm Jonathan said to the one holding it.
After the backpack hit the ground, he directed the men to walk toward the corner of the street from which he had just rushed.
“Now move this way.”
Cooperation was the culprits’ last hope of escaping this alive. The fact that the soldier hadn’t killed them on the spot had also given them a hint of comfort. But when the three men turned the corner, and Jonathan was certain they had disappeared from the woman’s view, he did the deed.
He couldn’t have allowed them to live. Letting them walk away was the equivalent of sentencing to death other people like that poor woman. Their kind never gave up, anyway; they would have come back for him. They always did. This lesson too, Jonathan had learned the hard way.
These guys now outnumbered the weak and the good by a depressing margin. Lack of decency, combined with the absence of law enforcement, had guaranteed the survival of so many of them. Laziness played its part too, of course. Doing the right thing required a lot of work and was often synonymous with danger. So why bother. The bad elements had become the strongest, not because they were big or they could lift massive weights. They were the strongest because they were just too lazy to give a damn.
Jonathan thought of them as nothing more than cowards who viewed the most vulnerable as low-hanging fruits. They showed no mercy and seemed to enjoy going out of their ways to act like assholes in the process. The woman was lucky; it was just a couple of losers this time. They usually traveled in well-armed groups of five to ten and attacked on sight.
This drive they had to refuse to walk away no matter how outgunned or outwitted they were made them unforgiving. It also made them unforgivable.
Jonathan returned to the woman. The left side of her face had started to swell from the beating she had received moments earlier. Her hands and forearms were bleeding after her two spectacular falls on the pavement within a few hours from each other. She was sitting up, holding against her chest the wheel that had come off her chair. He had never seen that expression on a person’s face before. Her eyes were fixated on the remains of her chair as though her entire world had just crumbled. Sure, her world looked even messier than Jonathan’s but it was hers. And now she couldn’t go anywhere in it.
“Bastards broke my, hum, my chair,” she said in a voice shattered by despair.
“Are they gone?” she asked.
“Yeah, they’re gone. They won’t bother you anymore. My name is Jonathan and I mean you no harm.”
“You understand we can’t stay here, right? All this commotion is bound to have alerted others. We have to go now,” he added while looking in all directions.
The urgency in Jonathan’s tone was justified. The curiosity that had plagued civilization prior to its recent demise had not been eradicated. When something out of the ordinary occurred, survivors would flock to the scene to see what had caused the ruckus. “Maybe there’s food there”was everybody’s first thought.
Still, a minute ago she had been assaulted by two jerks that had threatened to put her to death. And now, this man who had confronted them without blinking, was offering his help. Was she supposed to just trust him?
“I’ll get you a new chair. I promise.”
His words had escaped his control. He didn’t have a clue if or how he could ever live up to that pledge.
“Can you climb on my back? I’ll take you somewhere safe.”
The woman raised her head to try and get a better look at Jonathan. Everything was happening too fast and the blow to her face had rendered her vision blurry. All she could really see were his army fatigues. She did notice a deep gash above his left temple. It appeared fairly recent.
When she put a hand on his shoulder, a gesture of resignation so much more than one of assent, Jonathan also saw in her eyes she had accepted there was a distinct possibility he might end up being the one to kill her later. Her situation was that dire; this faint chance to keep on living, if only for a few more minutes plagued by uncertainty, was all she had left and she was willing to go for it.
The sun was peeking above the horizon and they had a walk long of at least an hour ahead of them. The woman, who had obviously been deprived of food for some time, was light as a feather but Jonathan had to use both hands to secure her legs. Being unable to hold his weapon added to his anxiety.
At the halfway mark, he announced he needed a break. There was a familiar building nearby, he told the woman, one he knew would make a good place to lay low. What he really had in mind was to better assess the health of his cargo.
“Is this where you, hum, you live?” the woman inquired.
“No. But I’ve been here before. We should be safe while we rest a bit and regroup.”
It then dawned on him he hadn’t asked for her name yet.
“Anna,” she answered.
“Are you hungry, Anna?”
She averted her eyes, as if in shame, and nodded. Jonathan retrieved an energy bar from his backpack. Before he handed it to her, he made Anna promise to eat it one small bite at a time. She agreed, but before he could stop her she had shoved the entire bar in her mouth and could barely breathe.
He took a bottle of water out of his bag, poured some of its contents on a piece of cloth and brought it near her face so he could wash off some of the dirt. Her reaction was one of retreat, but after she looked at him in silence for a moment, she accepted his help and leaned forward.
Anna was scared and in excruciating pain, but it was the feeling of fresh water revealing clean patches of her skin added to the sweet taste of proper food that turned out to be too much to bear. As Jonathan saw his first real look at her face, he also saw her first tears.
The longer they stayed stationary, the greater danger grew. Jonathan cleared the space of all traces of their interlude and took Anna on his back again. This time, they would walk straight to his building.
“It doesn’t look like much on the outside, but I assure you it’s quite comfy inside. Ready?”
Anna no longer had the strength, nor the will, to answer. She was now just going with the flow. Jonathan, understanding her state of mind, didn’t repeat his question. It couldn’t have been later than six in the morning but the exact hour was irrelevant. Jonathan hated being out there during the day, period. In his opinion, only the bad or the stupid went out in daylight. He had time to waste with neither of them.
About a block away from the bridge they had to cross to reach his hideout, he got on one knee and instructed Anna to hold her breath, to keep silent. He wanted to listen for signs of activity in the vicinity of his quarters. When he felt confident enough, he ran over the bridge and proceeded toward a red brick warehouse that had been severely damaged by fire.
He walked along the building and stopped in front of a dumpster on wheels near the back corner. He pushed it to the side. A wide entrance door attached to the dumpster followed the motion.
“Didn’t see that coming,” Anna whispered.
Her reaction drew a laugh from Jonathan, though he asked Anna to remain quiet. Once inside, he sat her on the ground, slid the door back into position and locked it. The place was now dark as night. Jonathan fired up his flashlight, which blinded Anna.
From the little she could see, it was smaller than it looked on the outside. And it was in complete shambles.
She began to fear she had been deceived. Panic was about to grab a hold of her when Jonathan walked to a second dumpster filled with junk like rusted metal and burnt wood. He pushed this one too, this time to reveal a set of stairs.
He took a nervous Anna in his arms and went up to the top floor. Upon reaching the last step, he opened an iron gate and flipped a switch, a surprising move since power had gone out a week after the first wave of the virus.
Anna surveyed the room. It wasn’t a mansion, far from it, but it was a home and she agreed; it did seem comfortable. Jonathan sat her on a gigantic vintage leather couch and went down again to camouflage the stairwell. After he came back up, he tried to get Anna to relax by offering her some filtered water.
“Maybe I’ll just stay, hum, stay until I get a new chair. Then I’ll be out of, hum, of your way.”
“You’re my guest, Anna. Not my prisoner. How about we just take it one day at a time?” Jonathan replied.
Her second sip of water was interrupted by cries only a very small animal could voice. Jonathan looked at a cardboard box in the left corner of the room.
“Right. The Fur Ball,” he said.