A New America Trilogy (Book 1): The Human Wilderness Page 2

  The town was just beginning to awaken. Eli trudged down the street as people emerged from their front doors, heading to the fields or the mill or the market, or to bring their kids to the school. Squirrel's wife, Lauren, he knew, would be just starting her morning. Eli dropped his head low, dreading the task ahead.

  She lived on Elm, a leafy street a couple blocks from Eli's. Hope was small, so it didn't take him long to reach her front step, but he wished it had taken longer. The house was set back in a cocoon of trees, with dark brown siding and its deep porch shrouded in shadow.

  Eli stood at the end of the stone path that led to the house as Lauren's shape appeared behind the porch's screen door. It opened with a creak and slam. She walked down the steps and the path toward Eli. He studied his feet.

  "What happened?" she said.

  He took a deep breath and tried to sound strong. "Two Parasites found us. He was infected." His voice came out stony, unfeeling.

  "And you weren't, I see." Lauren's voice shook with grief and anger. "Why didn't you save him?"

  Eli stared at his feet.

  "I couldn't, ma'am."

  Her bare feet scraped forward until her toes met the tip of his boots.

  "I'm sure you could've." An icy venom tinged her voice; it sliced away a piece of Eli's heart.

  Her feet disappeared, thudded up the steps, and the screen door slapped shut. Eli's throat tightened and he stood staring at her house for a minute, his feet too heavy with grief to move him forward. Eventually he turned back to the street and made his way home.

  Eli turned a corner onto his street and followed it to the quietest part of town, where the newest residents lived. A corner of town with no neighbors, since Eli was the last person to show up at the gate, three long years ago.

  They only let him in that day because he was dying, delirious, and bleeding from three bullet wounds. And what had he done since? He'd only earned suspicions for his secrets, contempt for his silence.

  There are just a handful of people left on this Earth, probably. People wonder when you can't get along.

  Eli's lonely house sat between a cornfield, a woodlot, the apple orchard, and the horse stables. He slogged up his front steps, crossed his porch, and walked into its gray coolness. He sank onto his couch and closed his eyes, saw the whites of Squirrel's eyes, blood pooling on leaves, steaming in the air. Squirrel, falling to the ground.

  He hated watching things die.

  For the last four hours of the day, Eli chopped firewood in the woodlot across from his house.

  Cracks echoed off the clouds, bounced over the town and beyond the wall. He threw the split pieces onto a pile and grabbed the next log. Sometime between dinner and dusk, a voice interrupted him.

  "What happened out there?" it said.

  Eli looked up from his task to find his friend Frank sitting on a log nearby, watching. Eli had no idea when he arrived. Frank's wrinkled face scrunched in concern.

  "Squirrel was infected." The bloodstained picture from that morning swam behind his eyes. He propped another chunk on the chopping block to chase the picture away.

  "How many were there?"

  Eli swung the ax. Crack.

  "Two. Killed both. But it was too late."

  "I'm sure you did everything you could."

  Eli shrugged off the kind words; he never did enough or the right thing.

  "At the very least, there's two less of those things out in the world, and that's something."

  Crack. A sharp echo pattered into the distance.

  "I think you've chopped enough —"

  Eli swung the ax again, cutting off Frank's words. He couldn't stop, not until the memory of Squirrel's death faded, not until the fear tugging at his chest vanished. So far, nothing had worked. Not changing his clothes or eating his breakfast. Not delivering wood like he did on any other Thursday. Not chopping wood until his body was tired and his sore wrist throbbed and sweat plastered his T-shirt to his armor-like muscles.

  Not even the pain cleansed or distracted him, as it usually did. The bare fact remained: He'd lost a friend that morning, and it was his fault.

  "How'd it happen?" Frank sat with legs splayed, pot belly flopped over his belt, rubbing a red beard speckled with gray.

  "Sneaked up on us." Swing and crack. Another chunk of wood. "Tracked us like prey."

  "Which we are." Frank paused.

  Swing and crack.

  "You okay?"

  Another chunk of wood. Eli nodded.

  "Eli..." Frank said softly. "I can see in your face that you're lying."

  Eli stopped for a moment, let the ax fall to his side, and cursed himself for not being able to hide his emotions. But they always were written plain across his face — the pouty mouth; scowling forehead; crooked, twitching nose; the uncertain flick of his eyes.

  Frank read him like a father would.

  Eli gazed over the top of his friend's head at the lip of the wall, glowing dully in the light of the setting sun. "Huntin' animals is one thing. Killin' Parasites is another," he said. "Their screams —"

  "Don't humanize them. Think of them like zombies," Frank said.

  Eli took up his ax again. Many people called the creatures zombies, which made killing the infected humans easier. Not for him.

  "There's enough to feel bad about these days," Frank continued. "Don't worry yourself over that."

  "But I do worry," Eli said. "I don't want to kill things anymore."

  The words tumbled out of his mouth before he could stop them, but they were a long time coming. He was sick of being Eli the Parasite hunter. The brooding stranger who rarely spoke, revealed nothing, came from nowhere, spent too much time outside the walls. The man who killed for them.

  The man everyone feared.

  "I don't know that my fellow councilors will let you switch for something else," Frank said. "Not many people are willing to step outside that wall."

  Eli shook his head. He wanted to ask a favor but swallowed the words. He told himself he should be grateful for being allowed to stay in Hope and for his place. He propped another piece of wood on the stump and swung the ax. He did it again and again and again. The cracks snapped off the sky like firecrackers, but Eli still couldn't shake the Parasite's screams, its hot blood soaking his sleeve.

  He stopped and leaned on his ax, his chest heaving. "I can do more, help out in other ways." He steeled himself, forced the words out. "The sentries aren't keeping watch. I'd be a good at that."

  Frank smiled, and for a moment, so did Eli.

  "I agree. But we need hunters, too. And we need men out there to take down any of those damn zombies they see. You're doing something important, ugly as it is."

  Eli never strayed from his duty. He dug the ax blade into the soft ground and nodded with defeat. "Sure, sure."

  The sun dipped lower in the sky. The cold and dark brought out the bugs and they nipped at Eli's exposed, sweaty skin. On the other side of the wall, the Parasites began howling. Their voices, so much like the keening of coyotes, drifted over the walls and into the settlement. Eli and Frank turned their faces to the sound.

  "What do you think they're saying?" Frank asked.

  Eli sat up many nights listening to their voices, the sound both animal and human.

  "Give up and join us," he said.

  "Have to admit, sometimes that sounds pretty appealing. To be on the winning side." Frank stood and thwacked Eli on the arm. "Get some sleep."

  Eli watched Frank limp away, then walked his own tired body across the street. Eli thumped up his steps to the front porch, found his favorite rocking chair, and eased back into it with a groan.

  With dusk, the day's chores were done and the bustle and noise descended into silence. Eli preferred Hope this way. He closed his eyes and rocked, whistling a chickadee call, imagining the sprawling farm fields and dense forests of home, listening to the Parasites bang their filthy hands against the steel wall in the distance and their eerie, howling calls.


  Give up, join us...

  To be infected was to lose yourself, your humanity. There was nothing Eli feared more. But who had he become in these past six years? Was he the man who killed to earn his keep, or the one who wanted to protect the people around him?

  Eli imagined himself standing in one of those watchtowers, keeping the town safe, earning respect instead of fear. He wouldn't abandon his duty, because he'd never forget the threat. He'd been outside the walls too long.

  And he didn't want to go back.

  Eli shivered in his rocking chair. If the sentries weren't vigilant, someday the walls would come down. Eighty souls would become eighty more Parasites. The thought had crossed his mind before. And if the walls did protect them from the infection, other threats kept Eli up at night — another virulent sickness, dry wells, crop failure, hunger. They faced these threats alone; beyond their walls was nothing but lawless, empty land surrounding them for miles.

  In such a lonely wilderness, man did horrible things to survive. Eli knew that fact better than anyone.

  Chapter 3

  Eli woke to the same sound he heard every morning: The Parasites' shrill voices drowning out the birds' dawn chorus. He opened his eyes on a sky brightening outside his window; the light burned his dream away. It was the one he always had, of twisting hallways echoing with footsteps and screams.

  He rose and swept his feet to the floor, rubbed his toes on the cold wood and walked to his window to peer through the blinds. The world was still shrouded in night and a waning moon traced familiar sights — the apple orchard across the street, the pile of split wood, the rooftops beyond.

  A new day would start soon, but there would be no return to normalcy, no forgetting what happened the day before. The town was saying goodbye to Squirrel later that morning. Eli sighed and his breath fogged the window. He dropped the blinds and got dressed in the dark, crept down creaking stairs, slipped on his sneakers at the door, and stepped out onto his porch.

  Eli tried to make the morning feel like any other — by jogging Hope's quiet streets, checking every inch of the town and the wall, counting his way up to one hundred laps as he waited for the sun to rise — but the very air felt different.

  Grief and sadness and fear had warped the normal and routine into something unrecognizable.

  On Eli's sixtieth lap, the sun finally began to rise and cast a dim gray light over Hope's streets. He was jogging in a quiet part of town, along a sidewalk that ran parallel to the wall, absorbed in worry and dread about Squirrel's funeral, when a sound broke into his thoughts.

  He stopped and listened: a low grumble and grunt, a scraping sound. Eli pressed his ear against the wall, the steel cold and slick with dew under his palms. Someone yipped. Something soft thudded against the earth.

  Eli sprinted a dozen feet to a watchtower that had been abandoned a couple years ago. He climbed the rusted ladder to a landing built over the lip of the wall, scrambled to the top, and jogged along a gangway built over the buffer zone between the inner and outer walls.

  The watchtower faced the two towers framing the front gate. Four watchmen were crammed inside one of them, chatting. Eli scanned the landscape around Hope: wilderness that stretched in all directions, sliced by a road unfolding into the distance under a layer of debris and dirt. And in the distance, three Parasites strolling into the woods, their evening of taunting screams ended.

  Eli crossed the tower, grasped the railing, and leaned over.

  His every nerve flashed to life, and for a second he couldn't breathe.

  Parasites were clustered at the base of the wall below him. They grunted and yowled, called to each other in singsong voices without words. All three were hunched over something on the ground, tools clutched in their bony hands.

  They were digging a hole.

  "Hey!" Eli hollered.

  The Parasites stood. Small, sallow faces turned up at him, long, greasy hair swinging down across their backs. One brought dirt-stained hands to its mouth and hooted. To Eli, it sounded like they were bragging.

  "Get away from there!"

  It was a stupid thing to say. They didn't talk, and no one knew if they remembered or understood language. The Parasites gathered below him, bony arms reaching, feet pounding into the earth, earsplitting shrieks bursting from their mouths.

  He gazed beyond them at the hole. It was already half as deep as it needed to be. Soon they'd burrow under the outer wall and into the buffer zone.

  The guards should've seen it coming.

  Eli pushed back from the railing, marched to the other side of the tower, and squinted across to the main post at the gate. The watchmen now gazed north at an empty horizon, undisturbed by the shrieking Parasites.

  They hadn't seen it.

  Eli rushed from the tower, crossed the gangway, and descended the ladder. The morning light had turned from gray to gold, drawing people out of their homes and into the street. Their shapes blurred past Eli as he ran across town toward the main post.

  He climbed up to the other tower as laughter sounded above him. The thud of his boots on the gangway cut it short. Three faces turned to greet him.

  "Morning, newbie," said one, a watchman named Derek.

  "Good morning." Eli nodded to the others.

  "What do you want?"

  The men leered at him through narrowed eyes.

  "I saw something, just now, from the watchtower," Eli said.

  "Oh, yeah? How'd that happen?" Derek sneered. "You're not a watchman. You shouldn't even be up there."

  Anger sparked in his chest, sudden and hot, like the strike of flint against steel. "I know. But I heard something strange. Found a couple of them digging a hole at base of the wall."

  Derek nodded with a grin; the other two rolled their eyes and turned away.

  "We know. Idiots have been working at it for a couple days," he said, chuckling. "They'll give up before they reach six feet."

  Eli's temper sparked again, caught fire, and spread to his neck with a prickle that warned of a burgeoning temper. "The hole's already there."

  Derek straightened his back, spread his chest, and advanced on Eli. "We've got it covered, newbie."

  "Hey, boss," said another watchman. He was pointing north with binoculars cupped to his eyes.

  Derek followed his comrade's finger. "Just a Parasite, kid."

  "I don't think so. No camps to the east. He's alone. And he's waving something."

  At the horizon, a tiny gray figure emerged from the tree line; he held up a small piece of white fabric that billowed in the wind.

  "No way…" Derek said in an awed voice.

  Everyone in the guard tower, stared, open-mouthed, at this hint of life in the outside world. Three years ago, it was Eli's bleeding figure that stumbled from the woods. He only remembered the pain, the arms of the men who found him holding him up, the steel walls flat and dull in the midday sun. And as they carried him into the settlement, the memory of what he'd just done struck him like lightning.

  "You need to get the hell out of here, newbie," Derek said.

  "The hole —"

  "What the fuck did I say?"

  For a moment, Eli stared at the man and his flared nostrils and flushed skin. His own fury slammed against his ribs; he took a deep breath to calm it and nodded.

  "Sorry." Eli backed away and thudded to the ladder. When he reached the bottom, Eli realized he was clenching his fists; his fingernails had imprinted half-moons in his palms.

  The outer gate screeched open. Men shouted. He paused, listened. Imagined the stranger being forced into the cabin to be sanitized. Behind him, the four watchmen in the tower stormed down the ladder and lined up on either side of the gate. They raised their weapons, waited. Eli backed up.

  The inner gate opened. The watchmen tensed.

  "Is this necessary?" said an unfamiliar voice.

  It struck Eli that he hadn't heard a new voice or seen a new face in three years. His heart skipped.

  Two security watchm
en burst through the gate. They pinioned a blindfolded man between them; he flinched and struggled against their binds as he was dragged inside Hope.

  "'Fraid so," Derek answered. He followed the group from behind. "Seeing as we don't know you."

  The stranger was led down the main street and people gaped at his unfamiliar face. They whispered to their neighbors or smiled, apparently curious. Others scowled in fright, their nervous voices tittering. The small group walked a couple blocks and turned left, toward the jail for quarantine. The crowed buzzed with tense excitement.

  Eli's heart thumped. Another survivor from a world he'd assumed to be dead and empty. It was a miracle. But with his arrival came unsettling questions.

  What did this stranger want?

  What stories did he have to tell?

  What did he do to survive?

  The dead were buried in a small graveyard in a leafy corner of town. The infected were honored with wooden plaques stacked on posts several feet high. The ground below them was empty.

  By late morning, Eli stood with Frank and his family — his wife and the three orphans they raised as their own — in front of the plaques as the townspeople slowly gathered behind them. Eli read the names of the lost, of people he never knew.

  Except one. The paint was fresh, the wood freshly cut.

  Allen James 'Squirrel' Toomie.

  Squirrel's widow stood next to her husband's plaque, their crying eight-month-old daughter bobbing on her hip. Her anger had melted to an empty sadness. Eli was desperate to fix what he'd done and make life easier for them somehow. He could fix their water pump, which Squirrel was always complaining about. Patch a leaking window he didn't know how to fix. Deliver Lauren's weekly groceries.

  Eli nodded to himself. It wasn't good enough, but he would do all those things.

  Lily, Frank's twelve-year-old daughter, nestled her small hand in his and sighed mournfully. Eli squeezed her small fingers.