Sometimes, you know the truth when you hear it. I let out a sigh, shook my head, and drew my pistol.

Briggs said, “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I’m sorry about your friend, and I’m sorry about your father. It shouldn’t have happened, none of it.” He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. He swallowed once and said, “Tell me, what did your father look like?”

I described him. Briggs wiped his good hand across his face, chains rattling. I watched tears fall down his cheeks. “I think it was me. In fact I’m sure it was.”

My face went cold. “What are you saying?”

“I’m the one who shot your father. He was firing at the far end of the building after he launched that grenade that took out Prater, the sharpshooter. Your father was too far back from cover, so I got a bead on him and fired a burst. I saw him flinch, saw the pain on his face. He was a tough man, though. He kept fighting. So like I said, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

Without a word, I raised the gun and squeezed the trigger until the slide locked open on an empty chamber.

*****

As the wagon creaked down the mountain on a switchback trail, I thought about Briggs, and his lieutenant, and Prater, and all the men I had killed in my life. Not even twenty years old yet and I had already racked up a body count to make a combat infantryman blush.

I began to doubt my actions. The cold fingers of regret slipped slowly into my chest, recriminations whispering in my ear. There had not been a lot of thinking involved except for how I was going to kill them. I did not take time to question my motives or the justice of my actions. From everything I had learned by talking to Briggs, the fight that killed Blake and Dad was nothing more than a misunderstanding that got horrifically out of hand. One man made a mistake, and it sent bloody ripples flowing outward across the great ocean of time and consequence. And now, all but two of them were dead.

Only at this moment, when it was too late, did I realize that Tyrel had been right. Revenge had availed me nothing. The deaths of those men would not return my lost family to me. I felt no satisfaction, no comfort, no sense of closure. Nothing had changed except a few more people who might have gone on to do good things with their lives were gone from the world. People who, when I thought about it, might not really have deserved to die.

I thought about when I first met Ryan Martin at that shitty bar in the refugee district. How when I told him I was looking for a friend and was disappointed Martin was not him, he offered a few comforting words, a pat on the shoulder. Physical contact and a sincere offering of sympathy for a stranger. Could a man capable of basic human goodness, even such a small gesture of it, really be irredeemable? Despite what he had done, what he had been a part of, I began to think perhaps not.

I knew, then, I would not pursue the last two deserters. There was no point. The man who killed my father was dead, and so was the man who killed Blake. That was enough. I had done too much killing, and I wanted no more of it.

I had hoped that seeing this thing through would put an end to this chapter of my existence, a chapter awash with grief and loss, and let me move on. But life does not happen in chapters. It happens in long, seemingly endless verses, like an epic poem, something Homer or Dante would have written. Maybe that is why their work remains compelling so long after their deaths. It has an undefinable resonance that we all understand instinctively, if not intellectually.

The first time I took another person’s life, when those two men attacked Lauren, I felt like I had crossed a line. There were people who had never killed, and people who had, and I was now one of the latter. And there was no going back. But then time passed, and I rationalized things, and I knew there had been no choice. My mind puzzled over the permutations of alternate courses I could have taken, and I decided I had done the best I could. Any other path would have resulted in further injury or death to both myself and Lauren. I did what I had to do.

So I went back to feeling like a good person. Then came the Outbreak, and Canyon Lake, and that crazy perverted bastard who thought screwing a ghoul was a good idea, and again I chose to pull the trigger. It was easier the second time, and the third, and the fourth, and all the deaths thereafter.

That’s the thing about crossing lines. It is only hard the first time. After that, it gets easier and easier until eventually you forget there was ever a line to begin with.

At the bottom of the mountain, we unrolled Briggs from a big blue tarp and left him in the open. His body was still warm, the blood not yet coagulated. Tyrel drew his pistol and fired a single round in the air.

“Won’t be long,” he said. “We need to move.”

I heard moans and hisses cut the air less than two-hundred yards away. We got in the wagon, Tyrel snapped the reins, and we took off at a brisk trot.

The infected would make it easy for us. They would dispose of the body neatly and effectively, leaving nothing to tie us to the dead man on the road. Disposing of bodies was one of the few things the undead were useful for.

I wished then, and still do now, that the infected could eat more than just flesh. I wish they could eat our demons. If people could reach into themselves and pull out their regrets, and anger, and the suffered indignities of the past, and feed them to the undead, those of us still alive might have a higher opinion of the pathetic creatures.

And the ghouls would be very, very well fed.

SIXTY-FOUR

There are two methods of being an effective drunkard in the new barter economy. Both depend on what commodity you are exchanging.

In my case, I had in storage a significant amount of the two principle types of trade goods: large items, and what I call divideables. The big stuff consisted of things like guns, furniture, generators, propane grills, propane tanks, mattresses, horses, cows—things that, generally speaking, cannot be easily broken down into smaller component parts. Well … except the horses and cows, of course. But hardly anyone butchers those kinds of animals unless they are desperately hungry. Draft animals are simply too useful for general consumption unless they are injured or too old to work. Then they are fair game. Especially cows.

Divideables are the opposite: cans of instant coffee, bags of sugar, boxes of ammunition, toilet paper, food, tampons, toothbrushes, etcetera. These are easy to trade, as just about anyone will accept a plastic bag filled with coffee, a few sugar packets, a handful of ammunition, or a couple of yards of toilet paper in exchange for a drink. You can even trade high-quality pre-Outbreak booze for large quantities of the poorly made, but very effective, post-Outbreak stuff. Sure, it might destroy your liver and make you go blind, but when the goal is to drink yourself to death a la Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, what difference does it make?

Which brings me back to the topic at hand: the two methods of being an effective drunk.

You see, large trade items, while valuable, are generally exchanged for other large items. So to keep yourself in booze, you trade the big stuff for commodities you can divide up. Venison jerky, for example. This is the first method of practical drunkery.

The second is to find an establishment that will let you buy drinks on credit, keep an honest ledger, and accept large trade items as down payments against future alcoholism. This method may seem like a good idea in theory, but in practice, it is difficult to pull off. The problem is finding an honest businessman.

Lucky for me, I knew one. His name was William. I have no idea what his last name was, as he never gave one, and I’m fairly certain William was not his real first name. I did not care. He ran an honest business, kept his books with thorough precision, and offered fair value for trade.