We’d been in the camp only a couple of weeks. Of the fifty or so people there, ours was the only family. Everybody else was a widow, a widower, an orphan. The last ones standing in their family, strangers before coming to the camp. The oldest was probably in his sixties. Sammy was the youngest, but there were seven other kids, none except me older than fourteen.
The camp lay twenty miles east of where we lived, hacked out of the woods during the 3rd Wave to build a field hospital after the ones in town had reached full capacity. The buildings were slapped together, made out of hand-sawed lumber and salvaged tin, one main ward for the infected and a smaller shack for the two doctors who tended the dying before they, too, were sucked down by the Red Tsunami. There was a summer garden and a system that captured rainwater for washing and bathing and drinking.
We ate and slept in the big building. Between five and six hundred people had bled out in there, but the floor and walls had been bleached and the cots they died on had been burned. It still smelled faintly of the Pestilence (a little like soured milk), and the bleach hadn’t removed all the bloodstains. There were patterns of tiny spots covering the walls and long, sickle-shaped stains on the floor. It was like living in a 3-D abstract painting.
The shack was a combination storehouse and weapons cache. Canned vegetables, packaged meats, dry goods, and staples, like salt. Shotguns, pistols, semiautomatics, even a couple of flare guns. Every man walked around armed to the teeth; it was the Wild West all over again.
A shallow pit had been dug a few hundred yards into the woods behind the compound. The pit was for burning bodies. We weren’t allowed to go back there, so of course me and some of the older kids did. There was this one creep they called Crisco, I guess because of his long, greased-back hair. Crisco was thirteen and a trophy hunter. He’d actually wade into the ashes to scavenge for jewelry and coins and anything else he might find valuable or “interesting.” He swore he didn’t do it because he was a sicko.
“This is the difference now,” he would say, chortling, sorting through his latest haul with crud-encrusted fingernails, his hands gloved in the gray dust of human remains.
The difference between what?
“Between being the Man or not. The barter system is back, baby!” Holding up a diamond necklace. “And when it’s all over except for the shouting, the people with the good stuff are going to call the shots.”
The idea that they wanted to kill all of us still wasn’t something that had occurred to anyone, even the adults. Crisco saw himself as one of the Native Americans who sold Manhattan for a handful of beads, not as a dodo bird, which was a lot closer to the truth.
Dad had heard about the camp a few weeks back, when Mom started showing early symptoms of the Pestilence. He tried to get Mom to go, but she knew there was nothing anyone could do. If she was going to die, she wanted to do it in her own home, not in some bogus hospice in the middle of the woods. Then later, as she was entering the final hours, the rumor came around that the hospital had been turned into a rendezvous point, a kind of survivor safe house, far enough from town to be reasonably safe in the next wave, whatever that was going to be (though the smart money was on some kind of aerial bombardment), but close enough for the People in Charge to find when they came to rescue us—if there were People in Charge and if they came.
The unofficial boss of the camp was a retired marine named Hutchfield. He was a human LEGO person: square hands, square head, square jaw. Wore the same muscle tee every day, stained with something that might have been blood, though his black boots always sported a mirror finish. He shaved his head (though not his chest or back, which he really should have considered). He was covered in tattoos. And he liked guns. Two on his hip, one tucked behind his back, another slung over his shoulder. No one carried more guns than Hutchfield. Maybe that had something to do with his being the unofficial boss.
Sentries had spotted us coming, and when we reached the dirt road that led into the woods to the camp, Hutchfield was there with another guy named Brogden. I’m pretty sure we were supposed to notice the firepower draped all over their bodies. Hutchfield ordered us to split up. He was going to talk to Dad; Brogden got me and Sams. I told Hutchfield what I thought about that idea. You know, like where exactly on his tattooed behind he could stick it.
I’d just lost one parent. I wasn’t too keen on the idea of losing another.
“It’s all right, Cassie,” my father said.
“We don’t know these guys,” I argued with him. “They could be just another bunch of Twigs, Dad.” Twigs was street for “thugs with guns,” the murderers, rapists, black marketers, kidnappers, and just your general punks who showed up midway through the 3rd Wave, the reason people barricaded their houses and stockpiled food and weapons. It wasn’t the aliens that first made us gear up for war; it was our fellow humans.
“They’re just being careful,” Dad argued back. “I’d do the same thing in their position.” He patted me. I was like, Damn it, old man, if you give me that g.d. condescending little pat one more time… “It’ll be fine, Cassie.”
He went off with Hutchfield, out of earshot but still in sight. That made me feel a little better. I hauled Sammy onto my hip and did my best to answer Brogden’s questions without popping him with my free hand.
What were our names?
Where were we from?
Was anyone in our party infected?
Was there anything we could tell him about what was going on?
What had we seen?
What had we heard?
Why were we here?
“You mean here at this camp, or are you being existential?” I asked.
His eyebrows drew together into a single harsh line, and he said, “Huh?”
“If you’d asked me that before all this shit happened, I’d have said something like, ‘We’re here to serve our fellow man or contribute to society.’ If I wanted to be a smartass, I’d say, ‘Because if we weren’t here, we’d be somewhere else.’ But since all this shit has happened, I’m going to say it’s because we’re just dumb lucky.”
He squinted at me for a second before saying snarkily, “You are a smartass.”
I don’t know how Dad answered that question, but apparently it passed inspection, because we were allowed into camp with full privileges, which meant Dad (not me, though) was allowed to have his pick of weapons from the cache. Dad had a thing about guns. Never liked them. Said guns might not kill people, but they sure made it easier. Now he didn’t think they were dangerous so much as he thought they were ridiculously lame.
“How effective do you think our guns are going to be against a technology thousands, if not millions, of years ahead of ours?” he asked Hutchfield. “It’s like using a club and stones against a tactical missile.”
The argument was lost on Hutchfield. He was a marine, for God’s sake. His rifle was his best friend, his most trusted companion, the answer to every possible question.
I didn’t get that back then. I get it now.
IN GOOD WEATHER, everyone stayed outside until it was time to go to bed. That ramshackle building had a bad vibe. Because of why it was built. Why it existed. What had brought it—and us—into these woods. Some nights the mood was light, almost like a summer camp where by some miracle everybody liked one another. Someone would say they heard the sound of a helicopter that afternoon, which would set off a round of hopeful speculation that the People in Charge were getting their acts together and preparing for the counterpunch.