I must be crazy, I thought, watching Amber spread out her sleeping bag on the floor of the abandoned pharmacy. I didn’t relish the idea of traveling with another person, even if Pittsburg was technically on my way, and even if her deal – if it was true- could be the difference between life and death. Food, clothing, weapons, medical supplies, she had promised.
I studied her. I put her age at 25 or so. She was small. She was maybe 5’4”, and I doubted she weighed very much, though she was dressed in bulky layers of clothes, so it was hard to tell. Her hands and feet were tiny. When she spoke, her words were flavored with a twangy undercurrent that I couldn’t place. It was southern, but not Texas. It was more eastern. Missouri, maybe, I thought. I shook my head, as if to clear the speculation about her away. I needed to stay focused. I should have told her to get lost, that I couldn’t help her, but I had almost 600 miles of open country to traverse, and the promise of supplies was too good to ignore, though. Having access to the caches her boss had squirreled away on this so-called “Ratline” would mean I wouldn’t have to smuggle and trade my way north. I could get there faster.
The last words my brother and I said to one another were ugly ones. The idea that I might never get the chance to set that right was heavy on my heart, and I had to get up north to find him. I knew he went to Boston with Marlene. I hoped he was still there. Or at least, that someone would know where I could find him. A heard Amber shiver.
“You cold?” I asked her. It was still relatively early fall, but the nights could get cool.
“No,” she said.
“You’re shaking.”
“It’s not the cold.”
“Then what?”
She looked at me for a long moment, sizing me up. I returned her gaze. She was pretty; but all the girls Paul used for drops were pretty.
“I’m scared,” she finally admitted.
“This place is fairly safe,” I told her. “All things considered.” She nodded, pulling her arms around herself. “Have you been in a QZ the whole time?”
“More or less, except from Chattanooga to Lexington.”
“And you’ve never been with this small of a group,” I surmised.
“No,” she admitted.
I nodded, leaning back against the wall next to where I’d spread out my own sleeping bag. Out of habit, I chewed on the inside of my lip, deciding what to do.
“This Ratline,” I asked her after a moment. “How does Paul get the supplies?”
“He knows someone on FEDRA’s procurement team, and the guy tips him off about caravans. Paul has guys on the outside who raid them, and he gets a cut in exchange for his intel.”
“All that is his cut?” I was incredulous, wondering why the QZ lived in such a constant state of shortages when it was clear that there was plenty available.
“Yeah, FEDRA moves tons of goods on a parallel route to the Ratline,” she said. “Most of it is earmarked for the ‘big wigs’, not the QZs, though. That’s how Paul justifies it. He says he’s robin hood, but he’s not giving anything away either, he’s hoarding and selling to smugglers who don’t distribute it either,” Amber said, and she pulled out an MRE from her pack. She opened it and offered me some. I shook my head, and watched her as she picked at it. It was clear she had no appetite but knew she needed to eat something. “Corruption on every side.”
“You said you’re good at logistics,” I prompted. “How so?”
“I’m good at math, really,” she said, chewing slowly. “Keeping the books, setting the prices, knowing what needed to go where, what we could trade outside the QZ.”
“How is it you got to be trusted with such intel?” I asked, suspicious. I didn’t know Paul well, only passing conversations when Tommy and I did business with him… Before Tommy left the QZ back in the spring… But he struck me as someone who thought of himself as a gangster, a criminal mastermind. He would be paranoid about who he trusted with his most important information.
“I’m really good at math,” Amber offered. “Paul’s shit at it, and he knows it.”
I gave her a sidelong glance.
“Why do you want to leave the QZ so badly you’d throw in with a complete stranger you never laid eyes on before?”
Amber lowered her gaze to the floor, and didn’t speak for a moment.
“I was… involved with a guy who… Liked to settle disagreements physically,” she said after a moment. “And I have to get away. I had to get away before he kills me.”
“You said Paul would kill you…” I said, the pieces falling together. “You’re with Paul.”
She looked uncomfortable.
“I asked you if he would come after you, and you said no.” I couldn’t keep the anger out of my voice. “You didn’t think to tell me that you’re his old lady?”
“He doesn’t care enough about me to come after me.”
“You seem pretty certain of that fact,” I said in disbelief. I looked over Amber again, trying to see her through objective eyes. Even before the world went to shit, she would have been a catch, but now she was a rare sort of beauty in a world that was mostly devoid of it. A man like Paul, who thought of himself as an underworld kingpin, probably wouldn’t want to let a beauty like her go without a fight.
“He let my closest friend get beaten within an inch of her life, and then he beat her again for getting jumped, as if that was something she had any control over.” Amber said darkly. “And then he told me, nice as pie, to fill in for her on her drop this morning. If he cared about me at all, he would have sent protection with me to ensure I was safe. Or he wouldn’t have sent me at all. I’m disposable to him.”
“I…” I wasn’t sure what to say to that. I felt something tugging at my insides. Empathy, rage… Disgust, maybe. I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t something I was used to feeling, whatever it was. “I’m sorry,” I said after a while.
She shrugged, and climbed inside her sleeping bag, as if that could shield her from whatever fears plagued her mind.
“We’re leaving at first light, right?” she said softly.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Good,” she said, and she laid her head down on her arms, facing away from me. I sighed and settled back in my sleeping bag myself. I dozed, but didn’t sleep deeply. I kept an ear out for the telltale signs of trouble, but the night wore on, and eventually, the sound of birds greeting the morning pulled me from my catnap.
Amber was sitting up on her sleeping bag when I pushed myself upright.
“Good morning,” she said tentatively.
“Mm,” I grumbled. “You been up long?”
“Never really got to sleep,” she said after a while. I nodded.
“Yeah, I don’t think I did either. At least not for long.”
We gathered up our things and before we left the pharmacy, I caught her by the arm, and gave her a long hard look.
“It’s not too late to turn around and go back,” I told her. “Make up some excuse for Paul, and go back to your cushy life in the QZ. This is probably the last shelter you’ll see for a while, and once those MREs you packed run out, we’ll be living on whatever we can find.”
“I’d rather die than go back there,” she said.
“You might just, out here.” I said.
“I don’t care, I’m not going back there.”
I held her arm for another moment, looking down at her. She wasn’t going to survive this journey, I could see that just as clearly as I could see the sun shining through the smudged windows of the old pharmacy.
“It’s going to be dangerous,” I told her, but I released her arm.
“I can handle myself.”
I sighed.
“Fine,” I said, and we left the pharmacy together.
We walked along in silence for a while, the gravel crunching under our feet. She didn’t complain, even though I noticed her having trouble keeping up with my longer strides. I slowed my pace slightly so she could keep up better.
“You don’t have to slow down for me,” she said.
“You’re making more noise trying to keep up with me than if I just slowed down,” I said quietly. “There’s still infected roaming around out here.”
She didn’t reply, but I did notice the way she put her hand inside her pocket.
“You’re armed?”
“Just a knife,” she said. “Paul would have noticed if I took a gun.”
I pressed my lips together. I had several handguns on my person and in my pack, but I wasn’t quite ready to trust her with one. Assuming she even knew how to shoot.
We walked the rest of the morning without another exchange, and at midday, I moved off the road, beneath the shade of some old gum trees. I pulled my pack off my shoulder and sat on a fallen log. She sat down a few feet away from me on the other end of the log, mirroring my movements.
“Eat something, we’ll rest here for a little while, then we’ll go til dark,” I told her. She picked at some jerky she had stashed in her pack, and I ate a stale granola bar from mine. As I chewed, I pulled out my map and spread it out on the log.
“Where’s the first cache?” I asked her, gesturing to the map. She looked down at it, studying it for a while. She put her finger on Lexington, and then moved it along the red line that indicated the road we were following to approximately the spot where we now sat. I was impressed she was able to make that determination.
“If we’re here,” she said. “It’s right about there.” She slid her fingers along the red line, and then branched off from it right around where the interstate met a state highway, then pointed to a very small dot.
“Probably two, three days’ walk,” I surmised.
“Just about,” she confirmed. “This one is mostly weapons, and it’s the one that will be the most heavily guarded.”
I nodded.
“Any others close by?”
“Heading east, there’s another in West Virginia,” she said. “Just over the border.”
I nodded.
“It’ll take us about two weeks to get to Pittsburg,” I said. “We’ll stop for supplies in West Virginia, I’ll skip the weapons for now.” I handed her the map and pulled an old grease pencil from my pack. “Plot out where all the caches are that you know of between Lexington and Boston.”
She nodded, and made marks on the map every hundred miles or so.
“The Ratline moves pretty good through the whole east coast,” she said. “He’s got deals with people in and out of QZs.”
“He must have been pretty smart to get that off the ground.”
Amber chuckled bitterly.
“Paul didn’t set it up, he just took control of it.”
Well, that made a certain amount of sense based on what Amber had mentioned about him so far. I took the map back, looking at the marks she had made. I put the map back in my pack and took another bite of the granola bar, chewing slowly.
“What did you do before the world went to shit?” Amber asked.
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.
“I told you,” I said. “No small talk, we aren’t friends. This is a business transaction.”
She didn’t speak again for the rest of the afternoon.
That evening, we found a spot a short distance from the road, and made camp. It was cooler than it had been the night before, and I saw Amber pull out an extra pair of socks from her pack and put them on her hands.
“We can’t risk a fire,” I told her.
“I didn’t ask you to,” came her short reply. I unrolled my sleeping back and situated myself on it before digging a small ration pack out of my bag and eating it. Amber picked at some more jerky. I couldn’t quite read the expression on her face, something between sorrow and fear. I felt another tug deep inside.
“I was a contractor,” I heard myself saying before I realized the words were coming from my own mouth.
“What?”
“Before the world went to shit,” I explained. “You asked what I did. I was a contractor… Some light carpentry work, residential stuff.”
She nodded.
“Makes sense,” she said softly, her gaze traveling from the top of my head to the toe of my boots.
“How’s that?”
“You’re.. Strong. Capable looking. I figured it was blue collar.” Capable looking, I echoed in my head, wondering what that meant, exactly.
“What about you?” I asked, again before I realized the words were mine.
A faint tinge of pink colored her cheeks.
“You’ll laugh,” she said.
“What? Why?” I raised my eyebrows. “Were you a birthday clown or something?”
“No,” she said, and a rueful huff of laughter escaped between her lips. “No… I was a dancer.”
“Like a Ballerina?”
“Exoctic,” she said. I wasn’t sure what I expected, but it certainly wasn’t that admission. I tried to process it for a moment.
“Oh,” was all I could manage to say. “Like… in a club?”
“Yeah, I worked a couple of different ones in Chattanooga.”
I wasn’t sure what to say.
“Why would I laugh at that?” I finally managed.
“I dunno, people generally do… Like it’s absurd that someone would do that… Or cop to it, now that the world’s what it is. I should probably lie to people, say I used to be a kindergarten teacher or something… But I’m a shit liar.”
I pondered this.
“How old are you?” she asked me after a long silence passed between us.
“Forty-one.”
“Practically a grandpa,” she said, and there was a teasing edge to her voice. I rolled my eyes.
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-two.”
That surprised me… She looked younger, which was the opposite of most people these days. The end of the world has a way of aging you. That I could personally attest to. I probably did look like a grandpa to her.
“You uh… seem younger,” I finally managed.
She shrugged, and went back to picking at her jerky.
“You got anyone out there? Family? Partner?” she asked.
“Just a brother,” I said with a pang. “Everyone else is gone.”
“Oh, I’m sorry for your loss,” she said, and her voice was thick, as if she not only meant it, but that she understood what I wasn’t saying.
“You?”
“No one anymore,” she said. “Couple friends back in the QZ but no… No family.”
I nodded. Neither of us were willing to volunteer more, so another silence fell between us.
Amber eventually crawled inside her sleeping bag again.
“Good night,” she said as she did.
“Good night,” I returned. I sat up for a while, watching the moon drift across the sky. Eventually I fell asleep, but as usual, it wasn’t a restful one. Memories I refused to let myself see during the day roamed unchecked through my mind while I slept, and I relieved the worst moments of my life over and over again as the night drew on.
The sound of gunfire woke me. I sat up, blinking in the bright morning light, ready to run before I realized the noise had been in my dreams. I looked around the small thicket where Amber and I had bedded down for the night, and saw that her sleeping bag was empty. My hand unconsciously went to my gun, and I stood up, looking around for her.
“Amber?” I hissed.
“What?”
“Jesus fuck,” I spun around. “Where were you?”
“I had to pee,” she replied, looking at me with a mixture of amusement and concern.
“I thought maybe you got carried off by infected.”
“Sorry, I was only gone a minute. I didn’t think you’d be up before I got back.” She knelt next to her sleeping bag, and started to roll it up. “You were dreaming pretty deep.”
“What?”
“I dunno, you were mumbling in your sleep, I thought you were dreaming.”
I didn’t reply, I only tossed her a granola bar, and we ate quickly before setting off down the road again.
“You really think you’ll be better off in this new QZ than Lexington?” I asked her.
“Anything’s better than where I was.”
“What made you decide to leave now?” It was going to be winter soon, not exactly a great time to travel… But I already had the sense that Paul was no prince, and her comments were painting a very bleak picture. I heard her take a deep breath.
“I think the last straw was my cat,” she said.
“Your… cat?”
“Well, he wasn’t my cat… He was this old stray that I would see around the building. Mangey thing. Missing an eye. Tail looked like it had been chewed up by something. Maybe a coyote.” She kicked a piece of gravel and it went skittering down the road. “I used to feed it. Nothing fancy, just a scrap off my plate. Paul has more rations than he could eat in three lifetimes hidden away, but he used to get mad that I would give that cat a scrap of something.”
She paused, and when she spoke again, there was a cold detachment to her voice that hadn’t been there before.
“I stopped seeing the cat last week. I figured he was out wandering, like old tomcats do… But this nagging little voice in the back of my head made me go look for him. I found him. He’d been shot.” She swallowed hard. “I confronted Paul about it. He copped to it. Then he punched me in the gut so hard I couldn’t get my breath back for a while.”
“He hit you?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“He shot your cat?”
“Yeah,” her voice was thicker now, and I could sense she was holding back tears. “He was just a cat, you know? But… We got along. He would let me pet him, but he hissed at everyone else.”
“What a piece of shit,” I muttered. “Paul, I mean.”
“I assumed you weren’t talking about Merton.”
“Merton?”
“Yeah… The cat made this little “merrrt” noise. I dunno. Merton.”
“Merton,” I repeated, shaking my head. It reminded me that Sarah had named her goldfishes Glob and Glub. Sarah… I thought with a pang. I pushed the thoughts from my mind and turned back to look at Amber over my shoulder. She looked sad, but it was the kind of sad that’s tinged with fondness.
“What kind of cat?” I heard myself asking. I wasn’t sure why. I’d never liked cats very much, I’d always been more of a dog person.
“Orange with white feet. Sweet in his way.”
“Well, I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, unsure of what else to say.
“I love animals,” Amber went on. “All kinds… I’m less so about the creepy crawlies, but I recognize they are important. I’m an absolute sucker for your small mammals though.”
“Small… Mammals?”
“Cats, dogs, squirrels, bunnies, chinchillas…”
“Chinchillas?”
“We had one as a class pet in my elementary school. Turns out my teacher was an exootic pet collector and wanted to write it off on her taxes, but still. They are fuckin’ soft.”
I let out a snort of laughter despite myself.
“You really do say whatever comes to mind, don’t you?”
“Life’s too short not to.”
“Is it?”
“I mean, would you want to go out with things left unsaid?”
“I doubt I’ll have a choice.”
“You’re a glass half empty kind of guy, aren’t you?”
I was incredulous.
“Look around you… Aren’t you?”
“I’m breathing fresh air, rapidly on my way to being hundreds of miles away from the biggest mistake I ever made in my life – and that is saying something – so yeah, my glass is half full.”
“I wish I had your optimism,” I said, but I couldn’t keep a bitter edge out of my voice when I spoke.
“You think I’m silly.”
“Not silly, exactly… Just… Maybe naive.”
She turned to me then and raised her eyebrows.
“Naive?” She chuckled. “I’ve been called a lot of things, but I think that’s a first. I generally don’t think of myself as naive.”
“I don’t think most naive people are generally that self aware, kinda goes hand in hand.”
“Does it?” She asked. “How am I naive, exactly?”
“It’s the way you talk… Like… Like you think something good is coming, any minute. Like this trip we’re on isn’t dangerous. Like-”
“I know it’s dangerous. I know there are raiders, slavers, and worse. I know there are infected. I’ve seen the very worst parts of human nature, Joel. You don’t have a monopoly on that.”
“I wasn’t trying to say-”
“I don’t really care what you were trying to say. Let’s get one thing straight: I’m tough. I’ve seen a lot of shit, too. I’ve been through hell; I saw one QZ fall to infected, and I almost saw another fall to gangsters, and I’ve survived all of it. And I saw an awful lot of shitty behavior from people before the world went to shit, too.” She looked at me with an intensity I wasn’t used to. “Call me a cock eyed optimist if you want, call me a dreamer, but don’t you dare imply that I don’t understand how fucked up this world is, okay?”
“Sure, fine, sorry,” I mumbled, averting my eyes from her steely gaze. Silence washed back over us as we walked. I had to give Amber credit: She didn’t complain. Not about her feet hurting, not about being tired, or hungry or thirsty. Not even about being bored when the conversation between us lapsed.
Finally, again at midday, we found some shade for a rest and a meal. It was then that Amber said:
“Where are you from?”
I swallowed my food before I answered.
“Texas. Austin.”
“Yeah, I hear that in your voice,” she said with a nod.
“What about you?”
“Virginia. But not the DC part. Further west. The Appalachia part.” The twang, I realized. That’s what it was. Appalachian.
“How’d you wind up in Lexington?”
“When everything happened…I was living in Chattanooga. Wound up in the Chattanooga QZ. Met Paul about a year after getting there.” She dug through her pack as she spoke. “It was nice at first. He had a way with people, especially FEDRA shitbags. He told me that he was a lawyer before everything fell apart, but I don’t believe that. I think he was most likely a con man. He’s got a silver tongue, though. Anyway… He convinced me that we needed to get out of Chattanooga, that he had connections further west. A couple days later, a bunch of infected were spotted inside the QZ and it all went to shit from there.” She paused. “I’ve always wondered if he orchestrated that somehow. But I don’t know why he would. The timing was curious, though.” She paused, taking a deep breath. “How’d you wind up in Lexington?”
“My brother and I were on our own in the wilds for a while, and he met up with some… Revolutionaries, I guess. Rebels? Anarchists… I dunno what the proper term is for them, but they call themselves The Fireflies.”
“I’ve heard of ‘em,” Amber said, nodding. “Paul does some business with them.”
“Anyway, he liked what they were sayin’ and I didn’t, so we parted ways… He’s up north in Boston now… As for why Lexington, I dunno, it was the closest spot to where I was when we split up. I was good at smuggling, so I got into that. But I dunno… I just worry about my brother… He’s… Impulsive. Easily convinced to do things.”
Amber was easy to talk to. She looked at me as I spoke, with a rapt attention that made me want to keep talking, even though I normally would be loath to give up much information about myself to a relative stranger.
“Anyway…” I said. “I guess I’m getting sentimental in my old age. I wanted to make sure he’s all right. I haven’t gotten a return response from him on the radio.” I shrugged.
Amber nodded. She was still digging in her pack, and for a split second, a vaguely panicked look crossed her face, but then just as quickly she relaxed.
“Something wrong?”
“Just thought I’d lost something for a second, but it’s here,” she said, zipping her pack back up.
The day was warmer than the ones before, and Amber stripped off several of the layers she was wearing, rolling them up and tucking them into her pack. She stood up and bent backwards slightly, stretching her back. Before I could stop myself, my eyes traveled over the length of her body, taking in the way it curved. I averted my eyes after a moment, feeling a shameful heat creeping up my neck. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d checked out a woman so blatantly. Sure, Amber was attractive, but I wasn’t a pig. I didn’t need to drool over her like she was a piece of meat.
“Do you think it’ll get cold again tonight?” She asked as I stood up.
“Hard to say,” I said, squinting as I looked up at the sky. “I’d plan on it just in case.”
“Maybe we should keep an eye out for shelter,” she said. “Old barn or something.”
“Maybe,” I relented. The road looked pretty empty and desolate in either direction, but if we found a shelter, I wouldn’t say no to it.
We resumed walking, heading north east along the old interstate. Here and there, we’d bump into a cluster of cars that had been abandoned. Every now and then, Amber would stop and rummage through whatever was left behind. She found a few things worth keeping: A first aid kit, a few water purifying tablets, some camping gear. She looked at a box for a brand new tent that was in one of the trunks.
“Why not a tent?” Amber asked.
“What do you mean?”
“All the stuff you got from Paul… No tent?”
“Just more weight to carry… And it’s hard to keep watch from inside a tent… But it’s easy to spot a tent from a distance away. Just safer without one.”
“Makes sense,” she said after a moment. “Bummer though, it would be nice to have a shelter wherever we go.”
“If you want to lug a tent around, be my guest.”
“You wouldn’t lug it for me?”
“No.”
“Rude,” she teased lightly, but she left the tent and fell back into step beside me. I couldn’t help but turn my head slightly to look at her; she had a tiny smile on her face, her eyes taking in the landscape on either side of the road. I felt a smile of my own creeping across my face.