The sergeant explained. Alvarado listened quietly. His face slowly darkened until it was the color of stained mahogany. A single vein pulsed in his forehead. He lowered his voice and leaned in close to Farrell’s ear, and said, “I hope you’re happy, Sergeant. You were responsible for the safety of these men. For training them, for keeping them in line, for making sure they did their jobs they way they’re supposed to. But as always, you slacked off, and half-assed, and treated a dangerous task like it was some kind of a joke. Well, I bet it doesn’t seem very funny right now, does it? Not with one of your men dead and another dying.” Alvarado stepped back and spit on Farrell’s boot. “You’re a fucking disgrace.”

He turned to Blake and me. “You mind taking this piece of shit back to the convoy?”

“Not at all,” Blake said.

“Thanks. When you get there, ask around until you find Master Sergeant Heller and tell him what happened here. He’ll know what to do.”

Blake told him we would. He and I rode in the front while Dad rode in the back with Farrell. Mike stayed behind to help out, saying he would catch a ride back with Alvarado’s men.

No one spoke during the drive.

THIRTY-SEVEN

“So what’s going to happen to them?” Lola asked.

I took a bite of my rice and beans, washed it down with bleach-purified, charcoal-filtered water, and said, “I don’t know.”

For the first time since we had left Canyon Lake, my group was sharing a meal. We lounged in cloth camping chairs around a small fire, the convoy’s vehicles a broad, grimly patrolled circle around us.

Morgan had chosen an empty field about five miles from Boise City to strike camp for the night. The area around us was sparsely populated, and while we heard the occasional muffled crack from the suppressed carbines the guards carried, there were not many infected to bother us.

Dad and Mike had cooked the evening meal while the rest of us drank cheap Lipton tea and wondered how long it would be before such simple luxuries became a thing of the past. The sky above was bright and heavy with stars, the myriad campfires of the convoy helpless to drown out their brilliance.

“I talked to Captain Morgan,” Dad said, and for once, no one giggled. “He took a statement from me. You other three,” he pointed to Mike, Blake and me, “should expect to do the same tomorrow.”

“What did he want to know?” I asked.

“My version of what happened to Farrell’s squad.”

“What did you tell him?”

Dad looked across the fire at me. “The truth.”

Blake said, “What did he think of you beating down one of his squad leaders?”

Dad picked something off his spoon. “He said under the circumstances, he was willing to look the other way. This time. I told him that was fair enough.”

We ate in silence for a while after that, each person too focused on filling the emptiness in their stomach to bother with conversation. My eyes strayed often to Lauren, the dim orange gloom of the fire framing her against the night. She sat next to my father, but despite their proximity, the distance between them was vast. And growing.

Lauren’s face was pinched, the age lines deepened, new wrinkles showing around her eyes and mouth. She had lost weight. Her cheekbones stood out sharply beneath her skin. Her hair was lank and greasy. The circles under her eyes were black as new bruises, the skin puffy from too much crying. Next to her, Dad sat and ate with a desolate sadness lurking behind his confident veneer. There was a tension to his shoulders, he ate too quickly and bounced his left foot incessantly, and every so often, his right hand would twitch in Lauren’s direction, then ball into a fist, relax, and go back to holding his bowl of rice and beans. Seeing it, I felt as if someone had gripped my throat and started to squeeze.

I remembered the time before the Outbreak when our life had been normal, before the infected, and the fires, and the desperation I had adjusted to so quickly it scared me. I remembered our home on the outskirts of Houston, the kitchen, the bedrooms, the living room.

Dad had a recliner in the living room he declared as His Seat. And when he was home, only he was permitted to sit in it. If he caught me sitting in His Seat, he snapped his fingers, pointed a thumb at the ceiling, and said, “Up.”

That was my cue to relocate.

There was also a sofa next to the recliner, and between them, a small table complete with a lamp and coasters. Both ends of the sofa had built-in recliners, and the end closest to Dad’s Recliner was Lauren’s Seat. When Dad got home from work, after dinner, the two of them would watch some stupid reality show, usually involving people singing or dancing or both, and I would sit at the kitchen table, both parents within my line of sight, and read while they sat in Their Seats.

Sometimes I would take a break from my story and watch them. They smiled a lot, told jokes, made fun of each other, and occasionally Lauren would swat my father on the arm and rub the place she had hit, a sensuous gleam in her eyes. I always looked away when that happened, knowing I had at least an uncomfortable half-hour of stifled moans and creaking bedsprings to look forward to when the lights went out.

But that night, in the struggling luminescence of the small fire, the twitch in my father’s hand, the hesitation, was something entirely new. Instinctively, I understood it for what it was.

He wanted to reach out and put his hand on Lauren’s arm. He wanted to intertwine his fingers in hers as he had done a thousand times, but knew the gesture would not be welcome. So he resisted, and kept his eyes down, and did nothing to provoke my stepmother. I didn’t blame him. In those days, it did not take much to set her off. When she became argumentative for no apparent reason, or cried without explanation, or stormed off from normal conversation as if someone had said something horrifically offensive, part of me wanted to scream at her. But another, bigger part of me wanted to hold her, and cry, and beg her to snap out of it.

All men are little boys at their core. There is an enduring place for a mother and father—or at the very least a protector—in each of our hearts. We cling to whoever fills that void, and when the tenuous balance of family, in whatever form it takes, is disrupted, all we want is for everything to be set right again. But sometimes, in the jagged arena of the heart, children fall by the wayside. Especially the grown variety.

*****

Earlier in the day, I had spotted a camping trailer in the driveway of an abandoned house that appeared to be in good working order. The propane and fresh water tanks were both full, the chemical toilet had been emptied recently, and the treads on the tires had plenty of life left in them. Figuring it beat the hell out of sleeping on the ground, I hitched it up to Mike’s truck and brought it along.

It had enough room to fit four people comfortably, so Lauren, Dad, Sophia and I agreed to share it. Mike said he preferred to sleep outdoors, and Blake, ever the lady’s man, had caught the attention of a rather attractive female soldier and invited her to sleep in a tent he scrounged somewhere along to the way. She accepted.

After dinner, Tyrel and Lola went off somewhere to be alone, and Lance wandered over to the other side of camp. There was a forty-something widow he had taken an interest in among the people from the RV encampment. He advised us not to expect him back that night.

“So I guess you’re off for the night as well?” I asked Blake when his soldier friend, Tran according to her nametag, showed up at our camp and politely introduced herself. Her first name was Alice, she had grown up in Bakersfield California, first generation American, family originally from Vietnam, five years in the Army, and was a mechanic of some sort. When I shook her hand, it was strong, firm, and calloused from years of hard work. And she had very nice eyes.