Commodity

  “I don’t know how you could even think after being shot,” Katrina says, shaking her head.

  “I had to get back to her.” I look up at Katrina for a moment, wanting her to understand. “I knew they were heading for her and that they were going to hurt her. She was depending on me to keep her safe. I had to get back there. So I grabbed a bottle of alcohol and poured it over the wound, which made it hurt even worse. My hands were shaking, and it was hard to get the thread through the needle, but I eventually got it. I almost passed out after the first stitch though.”

  “You stitched yourself up?”

  “I didn’t have a lot of options. I was bleeding too much. Even if I could get the bleeding stopped with pressure, it would have started again as soon as I started walking. I didn’t know if the bullet had hit an artery or a major organ or anything or if I was going to just keep bleeding internally. I knew I couldn’t actually perform surgery on myself, and I did what I had to do to get myself moving.”

  “Shit.” Katrina wraps her arms around her legs and lays her chin on her knees. “That had to have hurt so much.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever had anything hurt more,” I say. “It was a big wound, and I had to use one hand to pull the skin together so I could get the needle through. I barely made it. Nineteen stitches total.”

  “Wow.”

  “Once those were done, I tried to reach around to the wound at my back, but there was no way. It wasn’t bleeding as bad as the exit point, so I found some Dermabond and did my best to spread it around.”

  “Dermabond?”

  “Glue.”

  “Glue?”

  “Surgical adhesive, yeah. It’s like superglue for skin. It’s better for smaller cuts, but I couldn’t stitch myself in the back, so it was the next best thing. I held it closed as much as I could, and spread the adhesive over it. After that, I got it covered with gauze and taped up both of the wounds.”

  I turned a little and lifted my shirt again. I can’t quite see it myself, but I’ve looked at it in the mirror a few times. The scar is round and still a little red where tissue grew over the hole. It’s ugly, no doubt about that.

  “I tried to get up then,” I tell her. “All I could think about was Hannah. I wasn’t really sure how long I had been gone, and I was still a good five hundred yards from where I’d left her, and the whole area was covered in rubble. As soon as I tried to stand, I fell again.”

  “Because of your leg?”

  “Yeah. Honestly, the belly-wound had me distracted enough I hadn’t thought about my leg. When I looked at it, it wasn’t bleeding much. The bullet grazed my leg pretty deep but didn’t really penetrate. It burned and itched, but I didn’t have time to stitch it up. I applied more glue, a bunch of surgical tape, and wrapped it as tight as I could. Wrapping it that tight made it hurt worse, but I could put some pressure on my leg then.”

  I rub at the spot on my thigh.

  “Does it still hurt?” Katrina nods toward my hand on my leg.

  “Sometimes.” I take in a long breath and take down another long gulp of vodka. “Once it was taped up, I still couldn’t walk well, but I was moving. However, I was stumbling and falling every couple of steps, which jarred every wound. At that point, I didn’t care about the pain. I was just pissed it was taking so long to get anywhere, and I needed to move faster.”

  “I found a crutch in the rubble. There was only one of them, and the end of it was broken. It wasn’t long enough to use properly, but it was enough for me to pick my way through the rest of the rubble. I made it outside, and I could see the parking garage where I’d left Hannah, but I didn’t see her anywhere.

  “I kept telling myself that she was hiding inside the garage somewhere, that she had taken shelter in one of the abandoned cars. I was screaming her name over and over again, but I didn’t get an answer.”

  I stop. I can hear my own voice echoing in my head, crying out for her and getting no response. I can feel the sense of dread and panic as it threatened to overwhelm me.

  “Are you okay?” Katrina’s voice pulls me back to the present.

  “Yeah.” I grip the top of the bottle but don’t drink. I need to keep going. “Then I looked out into the street, and I saw these grocery bags. They looked weird just lying there, right in the middle of the concrete. I didn’t think they had been there before, so I made my way over to them and found some canned food inside. I also saw some other bags near a body, and I think they belonged to the guy lying there. The stuff that had gone bad was left beside him, but the good stuff was what I found in the street. I figured Hannah had seen the bags and went to see if there was anything useful in them. That’s when I saw…”

  I have to stop again as the memory floods my head: the broken branches, the crushed grass, and all the footprints near the row of hedges. I remember the blood on the ground and the lingering smell of semen.

  “There had…had been a struggle. I was too late. They already had her. There were footprints coming from the back parking lot of a different building, but they only led back to an alley. They must have left by the road, and there wasn’t any sign of them to follow.”

  Katrina nods but says nothing.

  “I looked everywhere. For weeks, I barely slept. I searched anywhere and everywhere, finding more survivors than I ever expected to find, but I never found a trace of her. Every group I talked to was nothing but men, and none of them had even seen another woman since the attack. It wasn’t until the second month that I found someone who thought he knew who Caesar was. In the end, he didn’t have any idea where to look for him, though. I’ve found similar leads since then, but they all end up going nowhere.”

  “You’re still looking,” Katrina says.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s hard to track someone after that much time.”

  “It doesn’t matter. She was depending on me. I was supposed to keep her safe. I won’t give up on her now.”

  “Well, what do you know for sure?”

  “Only where she isn’t. Groups are becoming less informative all the time, which makes me think they’re protecting him now. Either that or everyone is becoming more paranoid of strangers. A lot of them seem to know who I am and what I’m going to ask before I say anything.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because Caesar’s got what they want—a woman. He may even have more than one now. They’ll protect him so they can…”

  I can’t finish the thought. Lifting the bottle to my lips, I take a gulp and swallow past the lump forming in my throat. The fact is, I haven’t had anything that even remotely resembles a lead in months. The only thing that makes me think Hannah is still in the area is the lack of cooperation from the few people I have found.

  “I’m pretty good at putting puzzles together,” Katrina suddenly says.

  I glare at her. The vodka is definitely hitting my head now. Everything is a bit swimmy, but her babbling pisses me off. I don’t want to hear about her fucking hobbies.

  “Well, if we come across a jigsaw, you’ll be the first to know.” I rub my temples with my fingers.

  “I meant,” she says, “maybe I can help you find her.”

  I stare at her, trying to figure out where she’s going with this. I can’t think of any way this young woman could help me unless she already knows something.

  “How?” My suspicions are raised, but I haven’t seen any signs that she’s tried to deceive me so far, so what could she be thinking?

  “We did some trading with groups in the area,” she says. “Well, my brother did, anyway. I always had to stay out of sight. Seth was afraid if they saw me…well, you know.”

  “Yeah, I do. Do you think he talked to someone who might know where I can find Hannah?”

  “I don’t know,” she says with a shake of her head, “but my brother kept records. He took notes on every group he came across when he was trading. He’s got names, locations—everything.”

  For the first time since I dragg
ed myself back to the parking garage of the hospital to find her gone, I feel hope.

  Chapter 3

  We wait until morning to leave, but I sleep very little. The thought of finally having a direction—somewhere to at least look for a clue—has my adrenaline pumping. By the time Katrina climbs out of the small bed, I’ve been up for an hour.

  Katrina takes me to a ranch house on a flood plain right next to a river. The river itself is barely a trickle now, but the house is well sheltered by the valley and trees and seems to be in good shape.

  I follow her up two steps to the front door and then inside. It’s not a big place. It has that seventies energy-conservation vibe—small, compact rooms and windows barely large enough to crawl out of if you needed to. She goes straight to a desk in the main living area and pulls out a thick, spiral-bound notebook.

  She’s right—there are a lot of notes in her brother’s journal. I glance through the first few dozen pages, and I’m amazed at the level of detail.

  “How did he know to collect all this information?”

  “Learned from my dad,” she says with a shrug. “We were a big hunting and fishing family. Dad could track anything and taught us a lot about being quiet and on the lookout. Seth would stalk the camps for days before approaching them. He’d get to know everyone’s names and what they did for the group, if anything. He didn’t meet them in person unless he was sure they’d be open to trade and that they would have something we needed.”

  “What did you have to trade?” I ask.

  “Recipes.”

  “What?” I look at her sharply. I couldn’t have heard that right.

  “Recipes,” she says again. “You wouldn’t believe how many of these guys are just eating beans out of a can for every meal. They have no idea how to put foods together without a cookbook, and no one seems to be collecting those, but I do.”

  “You traded cookbooks?”

  “Not the books themselves,” she says. “I’d write down the recipes that use only things that are pretty easy to find. I found one that was from the Great Depression. All the recipes were geared toward rationing and such. I looked for ones that only included dry goods and ingredients that don’t spoil. I kept the books to help me come up with new things to cook.”

  “And people want them?”

  “They eat them up.” She laughs at her own joke. “We could get batteries, lanterns, and propane for just a handful of them. The problem is, there are only so many. We had to keep finding new groups to trade with.”

  “And they’re all in here?” I hold up the notebook.

  “Should be.”

  I sit on the loveseat and start paging through the notebook, still impressed by the level of detail. It’s the same kind of information someone would gather on a scouting mission in a warzone. There are hand-drawn maps with landmarks, names of the people in the group, and their relationships to each other. There’s information on what supplies they have on hand, what seems to be in surplus, and what they might be interested in obtaining.

  There are several notes in the margins of the pages about a larger, hidden group somewhere on the west side of town. Many of the people Seth talked with alluded to its existence, but there’s nothing to indicate that he found it.

  More than halfway through the book, a paragraph catches my eye.

  It’s a small group—only five altogether—and one is a woman. She seems to know what she’s doing around a cooking fire. There’s a guy with her who I think is her husband. He’s got a wild red tip on the end of his beard. Passing this group up—they won’t be interested in trading.

  Chuck.

  It has to be.

  I go back to the previous page and check Seth’s map of the area. If I’m right, and it is Chuck and Christine, they haven’t moved far from where we were originally. They may have some idea where Caesar and Brett have ended up.

  They could know where Hannah is.

  “I have to go.”

  “You found something?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, let’s go!”

  “No.” I shake my head. “Stay here.”

  “What?”

  “You should stay here where it’s safe,” I tell her. “If people see you, there’s no telling what kind of fight I’ll have on my hands.”

  “You really think I’m safer here alone than I am with you?”

  “I know it’s more dangerous out in the open. They aren’t as frequent now, but I saw the ships in the sky just three days ago.”

  “I can’t live out the rest of my life being sheltered away!” Katrina snaps.

  Her words sound so much like something Hannah would say, I’m caught a little off-guard. My muscles tighten, and I’m torn between giving in—like I always did with Hannah—or insisting Katrina stay out of harm’s way.

  What’s she going to do here?

  If it is Chuck and Christine, and I’m almost certain it is, she might be better off staying with them. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen them, but they were good people—I knew that from the day they joined us.

  “I might not be able to protect you,” I tell her.

  “I didn’t ask you to.” She stands with her hands on her hips.

  “Fine.”

  *****

  Following Seth’s map, I find the location fairly easily. It is right next to Freedom Parkway and the Carter Center. There is a large stone wall separating the park from the road, and much of it is still intact, providing ideal protection. On the other side, one of the round buildings is still standing. There’s also lots of tree cover and a lake nearby for water.

  Nestled between the building and the lake, there’s an area that looks almost identical to the common area shared by our original group. There’s a fire pit in the center, cooking pots all around it, a lean-to full of kitchen items and a tub for washing, and lawn chairs scattered about. Despite the familiarity of the scene, I hang back and out of sight.

  “What’s wrong?” Katrina asks.

  “Shh.” I hold my hand up to keep her back and out of sight. “Just want to watch a minute.”

  She crouches behind me and looks over my shoulder into the distance. Someone has appeared near the edge of the common area, holding a compound bow. Even before I see the red beard, I know Chuck’s stature. He moves around to the fire and sets a couple of dead animals near it. I think they might be rabbits. I snicker softly.

  “What is it?” Katrina asks.

  “Never mind.” I shake my head and smile.

  A moment later, Christine appears. She immediately starts yelling at him.

  “Get those nasty things away from my pots!”

  “We need the protein, babe!”

  “And I said if you were going to cook them, you’re also going to clean them!”

  “That’s what I was gonna do!”

  “Not by my cooking pots, you aren’t!”

  They continue to squabble as Marco and Sam appear on bicycles. They ride up the sidewalk and then into the grass, propping the bikes up against the trunk of a tree. They both have backpacks and start to empty their contents into large plastic containers close to the building.

  “I hope you found toilet paper!” Christine says.

  “No such luck,” Marco calls out, “but I got extra paper towels. They’re the soft kind!”

  “The skin of my ass is already falling off from the last batch you said was soft!” she yells back at him.

  “Stop cooking so many beans,” Chuck suggests, and Christine chases him and his rabbits off with a spoon.

  Marco and Sam take a few additional supplies and duck inside one of the buildings.

  “Hang back here,” I tell Katrina. “I’m going to make sure everything’s okay, then I’ll call you down if it’s safe.”

  “I thought you knew all these people.”

  “Not taking chances,” I say with a stern look. “You stay put.”

  “Fine.” She drops onto her ass and glares at me.

  I make
my way down the hill and around the side of the building. I stay at the corner, watching Christine for a moment, and then walk up to the fire. Christine is focused on her work but sees me a minute later.

  “Falk?” Christine walks out from around the cooking fire, wiping her hands on a towel. “Holy fuck, that is you!”

  She runs over and wraps her arms around my neck, practically choking me. I freeze for a moment, not sure what to do, then wrap one arm around her back and give her a quick hug. She pulls back, leaving her hands on my shoulders as she looks me over.

  “Where’s Hannah?”

  I actually feel my organs drop lower into my body when I hear her question. I close my eyes for a moment and try to keep myself together.

  “Shit, Falk,” Christine whispers. “Is she dead?”

  “I don’t know.” I take a step back, disengaging myself from her embrace. “I was hoping you might have some idea.”

  “I haven’t heard anything about either of you since you left,” she says. “Honestly, I thought you were both dead.

  “Ho-lee shit!” Chuck jogs over to us and smacks me on the shoulder. “Never thought I’d see you again.”

  “You hungry?” Christine asks. “Dinner will be ready pretty soon. Let me get you something to drink.”

  She runs over to the kitchen area and Chuck looks me over.

  “You look like shit, man.”

  “Thanks.”

  “They went after you, didn’t they?” he asks.

  I nod.

  “What happened back at our original camp?” I ask.

  “Well, when you two split,” Chuck says, “Caesar and Brett said they were going after you. Said they were concerned for your welfare and all, but I called bullshit. Brett was pissed at you, and there was no way he could have given a rat’s ass about your well-being.”

  “Good call.”

  “Caesar got all defensive, so I let it drop, but sometimes you just have a bad feeling, ya know?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “They’d been gone a couple of days, and shit, we didn’t know what happened to y’all. They came back, then left again. All those times, they kept getting together in little groups and talking all hush-hush like. That shit made me nervous.”