“Sophia?”

She adjusted the light on a wind-up lantern. “Right here.”

I stepped inside. My possessions were exactly where I had left them. I wanted to talk, but I didn’t have time for another argument, so I said, “I just came to get my things.”

She gestured to an old wooden crate containing my weapons and tactical gear. “It’s right there.”

The M-4 was still clean and well oiled. The spare ammo in the P-mags had not left the pouches on my MOLLE vest. I detached the holster for my Beretta, regretting I’d had to trade it away. The knife, multi-tool, crowbar, hatchet, and all my other equipment were in their places. I suited up, put on my hat, hung a pair of goggles from my vest, and wound a scarf around my neck.

Sophia kept her attention on the tiny pot and small frying pan on top of the fireplace. I turned to leave, hesitated, and said, “Should I find another place to stay?”

She did not look up. “Do you want to?”

“No.”

“Then come home.”

A breeze could have knocked me over. “I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. Probably overnight at least.”

“I’ll be here.”

Not wanting to push my luck, I walked toward the door. As I pushed it open, I heard Sophia say, “Caleb?”

I turned to look at her.

“Be careful.”

“Always.”

I left.

*****

It was not until I exited the north gate that I realized I had not been outside the wall since arriving in Colorado Springs.

It was cathartic, in a way. I had been so constrained by my limited, miserable existence, scraping and breaking my back and struggling to get by from one day to the next, I had nearly forgotten there was a world out there. A dangerous world, granted. A world not possessed of the relative safety and security of life behind the wall, but one with open spaces, salvage free for the taking, and no one to stop you and challenge you if you were out past curfew. The only curfew in the wastelands was nightfall, enforced by the dead, and if you were quick and smart and handy with your weapons, you could challenge that authority without reprisal. For a while, anyway.

On the way out, we passed a column of men marching in identical orange coveralls, their ankles tethered together with leg irons. Two policemen on horseback armed with shotguns watched them trudge wearily away from the gate. I nudged Tyrel on the arm and said, “That what I think it is?”

He glanced toward the prisoners. “Yep. Going out to work on the west side of the wall. Poor bastards.”

“Takes something serious to be sentenced to hard labor, right?”

He shrugged. “Serious is a relative term. I know a fella got ten months for stealing a sack of potatoes. Just depends on what mood the judge is in, I guess. Show up on the wrong day, and you might find yourself looking at a few years. Best to stay on the right side of the law around here.”

I watched one of the men stumble and fall, then roll onto his back and stare at the sky. His chest heaved, eyes closed, mouth hanging open like a tired dog. One of the cops gestured with his shotgun and shouted something I could not hear. The man behind the fallen prisoner reached down and hauled him to his feet. The cop snarled something else, nudged the prisoner in the back with the barrel of his gun, and the column started moving again.

“Seems like a shitty thing to do to a man, regardless of his offense.”

“Maybe,” Tyrel said, “But you don’t see too many repeat offenders.”

I lingered a moment more, watching the prisoners march westward. Everyone in town knew what happened to people who ran afoul of the law. There was too much work to be done and too little food to allow convicts to languish in prison cells, so they were forced to work on the wall from sunup to sundown, fed once a day, and given barely enough water to stay alive. No one liked it, but it made for a hell of a criminal deterrent.

Before that moment, I had harbored a vague, self-centered disregard for the suffering of the convicted. But there is a difference between hearing about a thing and seeing it for yourself. The suffering of others loses its abstract distance when you add a human face. It bothered me.

“Come on,” Tyrel said over his shoulder. “Long walk ahead of us.”

Our destination was a neighborhood on the outskirts of Monument, about twenty miles to the north. One of the squad leaders in Tyrel’s platoon had scouted it a few weeks ago, and after deliberation, Tyrel and the platoon commander, a man named LaGrange, decided it was worth investigating.

LaGrange was short, stocky, had a face like a frying pan, and a nose that had been broken no less than five times. And that’s being conservative. He ran first squad, Tyrel second, while third and fourth were headed up by a couple of hard-cases named Henning and Caraway.

Rather than march single file, we spread out at squad strength over an area roughly half a mile long. One of the earliest lessons Tyrel and LaGrange had learned was it was better to disperse their lines than congregate in one place. Keeping the squads separated meant if a squad found themselves surrounded by infected, they could radio for help from one of the others. The best way to deal with hordes was to give them multiple targets to pursue, break them up, and once divided, run far away. But to do that, we had to maintain a minimum distance.

Additionally, spreading out distributes searching eyes farther afield, increasing our chances of finding salvage worth carrying back to town. We were not above saving the trip to Monument for another day if we found easier pickings.

Tyrel’s squad—me included—pulled ‘rabbit’ duty, which meant scouting ahead and setting the pace for the rest of the platoon. We covered eighteen miles before sundown, making me grateful for all the long, hard days spent working on the wall. It might have been hellish work, but it kept me in shape.

We stopped at the now-abandoned Air Force Academy and made camp on the rooftop of a service building. The building itself had been stripped long ago by the Army, along with the rest of the academy. First squad joined us a short time later, while third and fourth made camp on the other side of the campus.

The sun slid low behind the peaks of the Rampart Range behind me, painting the sky in blues and reds. The colors were richer and darker than I had ever seen them, and there was a sharp chill in the air. I thought about reports I’d heard of a nuclear exchange in the Middle East and wondered what color the sky was in Pakistan.

“Gonna be a cold winter,” one of Tyrel’s men said. Billings was his name. Late thirties, average height, lean build, brown hair and eyes, a well-tended beard. By the way he ran his fingers over it, I knew he was proud of that beard.

“You from around here?” I asked.

“Pretty close, yeah. Grew up down in Pueblo.”

“No shit?” Tyrel said. “I lived there ‘til I was eleven.”

Billings grunted. “Small world.”

Being the new guy, it was my job to prepare the evening meal. I boiled rice and dried venison over a small propane stove and served it on cold pre-made flatbread. The men in the squad were quiet as they ate, worn out by the day’s long hike. When we finished, I wiped the plastic dishes and aluminum cookware with a wad of boiled cloth and put them away. The other men bedded down for the night, but since I had the first watch, I took a few minutes to fix my suppressor to my rifle and attach my night vision scope. The man on watch with me, a short Mexican named Rojas, eyed my gear jealously.

“You could get a good price for that silencer,” he said.

“Suppressor. And it’s not for sale.”

He smiled like he knew something I didn’t. “Sooner or later, kid, everything’s for sale.”

The first two hours passed mostly in silence. Rojas held a crossbow in one hand and rested the other on a quiver of bolts hanging from his belt. A few times, he began singing softly to himself in Spanish, then stopped and shook his head ruefully, calling himself a few not-so-nice words in his native language. He seemed like a man trying to break a bad habit. Or not a bad habit, necessarily, but definitely a dangerous and unwise one.