“No.”

“It’s a thing to see.”

I lay in the dark and tightened my arms around Sophia and wondered what was wrong with the night. The hot starkness of day no longer assaulted us; the warmth of the metal under my back had faded hours ago. There was a gentle breeze, a stirring of leaves flush with the green blessing of late spring. I listened, ears tuning out the moans, the booming snores of Mike and my father twenty yards distant, and the rumbling of a Humvee engine as a patrol checked on us. I closed my eyes against the brilliance of a searchlight playing over the rooftop, face turned into the sweetness of Sophia’s scent, and the answer came to me.

There were no crickets. The fires had sent them all away.

*****

Midnight.

Had to be. Otherwise the hand on my shoulder would not have been there.

“Rise and shine, lover boy,” Blake said. “We’re on the clock.”

I gently disentangled myself from Sophia’s arms and pushed aside the leg draped over my midsection. She stirred a little, then rolled over to her other side, heaved a deep breath, and continued snoring quietly.

Blake laid a steadying hand on my shoulder as I stood up and nearly toppled over. The scant two hours of sleep I’d managed were just enough to make me truly feel like shit.

“You all right?” Blake asked.

“Ask me again in five minutes.”

“Just make sure you keep your gun pointed away from me.”

“Hardy-har-har.”

“I’m not kidding.”

I left my pack where it lay, but donned my vest, belt, drop holster, and slung my rifle. One hastily chugged canteen of water later, I felt almost human.

“Okay,” I said. “Let the mid-watch begin.”

Blake smiled. He had not done much of that lately and it was good to see it again. “Look at it this way. It’s only four hours, then you can go back to sleep.”

“Lovely.”

“Your breath is wonderful, by the way.”

“Duly noted.”

After pissing over the edge of the roof with my eyes closed for the better part of a thousand years, I used the last splash of water in my canteen to wet my toothbrush, applied a minimum of paste, solved the problem, and spit the excess to the parking lot. To my surprise, it landed on the face of an infected wandering below the edge of the periphery. Looking around, I saw the shadows of dozens more stumbling and shambling in the light of the half-moon.

“Son of a bitch!”

“Yeah,” Blake said behind me. “They wandered in over the last hour.”

“Did anyone radio Captain Morgan?”

Blake snickered. “Captain Morgan. Man, I hope that guy gets promoted soon.”

“Well?”

“Yeah, Joe called it in. They’ll send the Bradleys around at daybreak. It’s nothing a twenty-five millimeter chain gun can’t take care of.”

I relaxed, comforted by the idea of armored cavalry. The infected may have been legion, but they were composed of flesh, after all. And in the battle of flesh versus high-velocity tungsten, I knew where I would be placing my bets.

We walked along the rooftop, staying well clear of the edge. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and wondered what the hell the point of posting a watch was anyway. There were over a hundred troops nearby, not to mention the fact we were thirty feet off the ground. I had posed this question to my father after being informed I had pulled the mid-watch, and his answer was a shrug and a simple, “You never know. Better safe than sorry.”

Hard to argue with that logic.

I looked down as we passed the shipping container and ladder we had used to ascend the brewery. A search of a nearby neighborhood had yielded the ladder, but it was too short for what we needed. So after the bucket-equipped HEMTT had cleared the permanently-dead infected from the parking lot, I talked the driver into bulldozing an empty shipping container next to the wall. After that, it was easy.

“So,” Blake said, breaking the silence. “You and Sophia.”

“Yeah. Me and Sophia.”

“You know that girl done had a crush on you for years now, right?”

“So she says.”

“You never seen it?”

“She never gave me the time of day, Blake.”

He bobbed his head from side to side. “She always did get quiet when you were around. Then again, you did the same thing. Never tried to flirt with her. Probably what got her interested. All those boys coming after her all the time, and you barely paying her any attention. Kind of thing makes a girl curious.”

“I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know much about girls, Blake.”

“I’ll let you in on a secret.” He leaned in close and lowered his voice. “No one does. Not even them. It’s how they keep us off balance.”

I laughed, and gently slapped him on the arm. Blake was the kind of guy it was hard not to laugh around. He was always quick with a smile or a joke, or if needed, a word of encouragement. When I was about eleven or twelve, I asked him why he was so happy all the time. He sat me down and told me what it was like for him growing up.

He was from New Orleans, originally. His father died in an accident at work when he was only three, leaving his mother to raise him alone. She worked two jobs, sometimes three, to make ends meet. They used food stamps to buy groceries, bought clothes at Goodwill and the Salvation Army, and because he was black, and poor, and the child of a single mother, he was stigmatized everywhere he went.

The neighborhood he grew up in was rough. Drugs were endemic. If you were not a dealer, someone you knew or were related to was. The cops were an ever-present evil, looming over everything and everyone. Walking down the street was reason enough to get thrown up against a wall and searched, and if you mouthed off, dragged into an alley and beaten.

Blake knew. It had happened to him many times.

His early impressions of life were of white faces buying drugs down the street from his house, and white faces snarled with hate swinging a baton at his head, and white faces looking at him with fear and contempt at every turn, the whispers, the snide comments, the subtext of every interaction the same.

You are a thug, and I don’t trust you.

But there was one problem.

They were wrong.

He dressed the part. He acted the part. Every young man in the neighborhood did because they had to. Failure to conform was punished harshly. You did not want to be seen as non-complicit. Savage beatings on a daily basis were a very real possibility for those who did not tow the line with the drug gangs. One did not have to participate, but you sure as hell better not get in the way or give any indication of disapproval. To do so was to invite disaster.

So Blake walked the line. He stayed out of trouble at school, quietly keeping his grades up. He steered clear of the gangs, being careful not to get on their bad side. Which is not to say he never broke the law—he did what he had to do to survive—but he was careful about it.

Then came graduation, and the recruiter’s office, and the Army, and his tearful, dutiful mother telling him to shake the dust from his feet and write as soon as he got the chance.

She died a few years later from a stroke. Blake had been sending her money every month, hoping that between the two of them they could save enough for her to move to a better neighborhood. She never spent a dime of the money.

“I had a choice to make,” Blake said. “I could succumb to hate, and anger, and spend the rest of my life being bitter, or I could do what my momma always told me to do when things were bad.”

He looked at me then, tears in his dark, thoughtful eyes. “She said to me, ‘Baby, you just got to smile. No matter what the world throws at you, you just got to smile.’ So that’s what I do. No matter what the world throws at me, I just keep right on smiling. I used to see it as revenge, but then I got older and realized that’s a foolish way to look at things. Revenge never did no good for anybody. The world ain’t got nothing against me. What happened, happened. I just got to rise above it and move on. And that’s what I do.”