“Home sweet home.” On the plush second-story corridor, Jamie stopped by a door with the number 25 stamped in shiny gold colored metal and pulled a key from her pocket. “I’ll get Andrew to make you a key tomorrow. It’s not like we have a lot of thieves around here, but it does keep people from walking in on you naked.”
I blushed despite myself and tried not to think about the time I’d walked in on Matt and Carla in the hotel shower. They’d been too ‘busy’ to notice, and I’d run back out in an instant, but the images remained burned into my mind.
A key sounds great.
The room was spacious, with two twin-size beds on opposite sides of the main area, a door on the left leading to a small bathroom. Decorated in knotty pine, the walls and ceiling reflected the golden light from the central ceiling fan with a cheery rustic glow. A soft gray carpet covered the floor, and two windows flanked a wooden door that led out onto the upper deck, white curtains pulled to either side of it for privacy. It smelled of oranges, likely from the scented candle that burned on a corner table, and one side of the room had much more of a mess than the other. Oily rags covered a desk, along with various hand tools and a bottle of gun cleaning solvent. Mismatched socks, a discarded pair of pants, and a stray tank top draped across the floor, and a poster on the wall sported some muscled professional boxer, his sleek torso gleaming with sweat as he threw a right hook at his opponent.
“Behold,” Jamie walked to the cluttered side and held up her arms like she was revealing a master artwork. “My glorious lair! The other side is all yours, so feel free to add to the decorum.”
I smiled, and crossed over to the other side, which was noticeably well-kempt, the bed made up in smooth cotton sheets and a blue blanket, with one fluffy white pillow. The wall had a white canvas with ‘Being yourself is beautiful’ scrawled across it in swirly script, and the scented candle burned merrily on the nightstand. A line of shoes stood arranged just-so beneath the bed, the desk at the foot of it clean of all debris, with a few decorations here and there like flowers and butterflies. “Wow. Did you do all this?”
Jamie kicked at a sock on the floor, and her shoulders sagged. “No, that’s Melissa’s side.”
So, you already have a roommate?
Frowning, I pulled back the hand I’d extended to touch one of the ornate decorations. “But when she comes back—”
“She won’t.”
Jamie almost whispered it, and the pain in her words hit me like a freight train.
My eyes widened.
Oh.
“Her patrol vanished a while ago.” Jamie tried to make a casual grin, but her green eyes glistened with the beginnings of tears that she quickly blinked away. “Once you’ve been missing for more than a week, there’s no point in looking. But, hey, forget about that. I’ll get you a towel so you can shower.”
While she stepped into the small bathroom, I pulled open the dresser at the foot of my new bed and felt my heart twinge at the rows of neatly folded shirts, khaki trousers, blue jeans, and socks. Melissa. The name rang through my head as I ran my fingertips over the various items, guilt pooling in my chest. It felt like grave robbing, a horrible violation of someone I didn’t know, but felt immensely sorry for, nonetheless.
Thunk.
An object struck one of the windows from outside, and I almost jumped out of my skin.
Thunk. Thunk.
My blood curdled, and I swallowed down a whimper. No, not an object. Something was on the other side of the curtains, tapping on the windowpanes from the outside. It didn’t strike me as human, not from the erratic pattern of its taps. But it knew I was in here. It was watching me.
Watching . . . and waiting.
I took a hesitant step forward, reached for the curtain, and my skinny white fingers shook like leaves in a thunderstorm.
Something brushed my shoulder, and I yelped in surprise.
“Whoa.” Jamie held up her hands, her face a mix between an amused smirk, and a worried stare. “Easy, it’s just me. Still jumpy, huh?”
“I-I heard something.” I pointed to the window, too worried to be embarrassed. “Out there, tapping on the glass.”
Jamie’s smirk evaporated, and she squinted hard at the door.
Thunk.
It came again, the noise from outside, and Jamie eased over to her bunk, tossing the towel she held onto her sheets.
Picking up her rifle, she edged toward the window, and pushed the safety lever down with a muted click.
I backed away, my heart pounding, and looked around for something I could use. There weren’t any other guns in sight, and I didn’t know how to use one anyway. Instead, I snatched a nearby lamp from the desk on my side of the room, and hefted it in one hand, ready to hurl it with all my might.
Her throat moved with a nervous swallow, and Jamie tip toed up to the window, pushing the curtain aside with the muzzle of her Kalashnikov.
She froze for a moment, and my heart skipped a beat.
“Ha!” Grabbing the curtain with her free hand, Jamie threw it aside to reveal the windows and door. “Caught you.”
Outside, perched on the exterior window ledge, sat a bird.
Or at least, it looked like a bird.
It had black feathers, and a body much like a crow, but where the head should have been rested a weathered cellphone, its touch screen cracked, the plastic case chipped. A tangle of strange metal cables and wires snaked from the back of the phone to the rest of the body like a spinal cord, flesh and metal melded together in a sea of greasy black sinews. The bird part of the body hopped, flapped, and moved like a regular bird, but the cellphone part swiveled all around without hindrance, its screen flashing a constant parade of fuzzy white static.
Ring-a-ling-a-ling.
It chimed with a generic default ringtone, and shuffled on the railing outside, before spreading both wings to swoop into the night sky. A nearby tree lit up with more ringtones, dozens of distant white squares flaring to life, and they soared into the sky in a horde of eerie off-tone chimes.
Clutching the lamp in my pale hands, I stared.
Am I seeing things?
Jamie relaxed and shook her head to herself with a chuckle. “Ringer-Heads. Annoying little freaks, and loud as all-get-out when they’re migrating. But they’re completely harmless, from what we’ve seen.”
I lowered my lamp, feeling both foolish, and more than a bit shaken. “That thing had a cellphone for a head.”
“It’s a techno.” Jamie switched her rifle safety back on and leaned the oiled weapon in one corner. “A cross between machine and animal. Like I said, they’re harmless. Probably saw some of our light and got curious.”
I sat down on my bed to steady my quaking knees, tight anxiety welling in my chest, threatening to close my airway. “I . . . I don’t feel good.”
At my voice reaching a cracking point, Jamie crossed the room to sit next to me. “It’s okay. Believe me, the first time I saw what was going on, I didn’t sleep for three nights in a row. But you’ll get used to it.”
Outside, the ringing of the strange birds reverberated in the night, and I shivered. “And if I don’t? Jamie, I really appreciate all this but . . . what if I’m not ready? I don’t want to go back out there.”
Hanging my head, I avoided what I assumed would be a look of disappointment.
Jamie rose to her feet, walked to her own cluttered desk, and picked up something from the mass of papers and books. “Last October, we lost a ranger to the Breach. Few of us knew what we were dealing with, so we blamed the girl who was with him. She tried to tell us the truth, begged us to listen, but no one believed her. Poor thing was so heartbroken that she went out one night to prove the monsters were real . . . and she disappeared too.”
In the distance, thunder rumbled, as though the world knew this story better than the humans who lived it, and Jamie walked over to yank the curtains shut once more. “Everything went wrong after that. Night after night, more freaks began appearing, attacking people, animals, anything they could devour. It was like the Breach had been holding back, and now, it was hitting us with everything it had. Plants became mutants, and scrapyard junk turned into monsters. Nowhere was safe.”
Jamie turned to hold up a picture frame in her hand, though I couldn’t see its face yet, and her own expression twisted into a furious snarl of loathing. “When we pleaded for help, the sheriff turned on us. Wurnauw came with dozens and dozens of ELSAR soldiers, sending the freaks right into us in waves. We fought for hours just to hold them back. I drove one of our war machines on the front line. Bill drove the other.”
Sinking down on the bedside next to me, Jamie placed the photo in my lap. It showed her in a New Wilderness uniform next to a smiling man with a long surfer-dude haircut, who’s facial features were eerily similar to Jamie’s.
I held it, and though it couldn’t have weighed more than a dozen ounces at best, I felt as though a ton of bricks had fallen onto my shoulders.
Watching the photo in my hands as if its memories were still fresh, Jamie grinned with a smile that held no joy. “After our parents died in a car wreck, Bill dropped out of college to raise me. He could have played professional football, moved to some big city high-rise, and ate steak dinners every night, but he chose to work at the quarry, rent a trailer, and eat ramen noodles so that I wouldn’t be alone. When prom came, and my jerk of a boyfriend dumped me for Patty Newsom, Bill went with me so I had someone to dance with. He was my superhero, my best friend, the only family I had left. When it came time for us to face the Birch Crawlers, Bill led the way.”
Outside, another deep rumble echoed in the distance, and a slight tremor shook the floor, rattling the glass in the windows. I had no idea what would cause something like that, but a part of me didn’t want to know, especially since Jamie didn’t react to it at all.
Tears pooled in her eyes, and Jamie’s voice began to rasp against painful emotions. “They tore him apart. I couldn’t stop them, couldn’t reach him in time, so I just sat there and puked until Bill stopped screaming over the radio. Everyone has lost someone but losing my brother . . . that’s a hurt I didn’t know was possible.”
My veins pulsed, and I shoved a guilty lump in my throat down. I didn’t know what to say. All through high school I’d complained about how much my life sucked, being an only child, being single, being plain, being ‘poor’ though I’d never been able to explain why I thought we were. But this shattered everything I’d whined about before, a destitute feeling that made me wish I could go back in time and slap my past-self for all the negative comments at the dinner table.
I had a nice home in the suburbs, with mom, and dad, and loaded chili hotdogs, and . . . and Jamie had none of those things.
She wiped at her face, and Jamie shut her eyes, forcing herself to calm down. “Thousands of people have died since then. ELSAR controls most of the north and the entire outer border, making escape impossible. The fact that your friends made it out at all means they either got lucky twice or are already being tracked. The mercs specialize in hunting people down, so my guess is you’re safer in here than your friends are out there.”
Ashamed of myself, I dug my thumbnail into my palm. “I’m sorry, I . . . I didn’t know.”
“Don’t be.” Jamie nudged my shoulder with hers and did her best to smile, though it seemed strained, like a painted face on a china doll. “Like I said, no use dwelling on all that. But there’s nothing wrong with being scared, alright? Everyone here is. All that you can control, all that you can be sure of, all that matters, are your choices.”
Taking the picture back, Jamie replaced it on her desk, where she drew the handgun from her belt, and began to disassemble it. “You should get cleaned up and try to sleep. Sunrise will come sooner than you think, and we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. I’ll be here if you need anything.”
She went to work cleaning the pistol, and I gathered some of Jamie’s dead roommate’s clothes so I could duck into the bathroom. Outside, more ringing echoed against the dark sky, along with shrieks, caws, croaks, and roars that hissed in my ears like static. The tremors had quieted down, but something deep inside my brain told me they weren’t gone forever. Despite the coolness of the lodge’s air conditioning, my skin wriggled, and a tension worked itself into my chest that no number of sore ribs could account for.
Leaving the soft, homey glow of the room behind, I dove into the shower, in hopes that the water could wake me from the nightmare I’d fallen into.