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There’s fresh dirt under his nails and across the planter from him Herc Hansen is sighing. Raleigh casts him a questioning look but doesn’t distract himself from where he’s tending the cucumber vines. Distractions there make for an hour or two of rubbing his thumbs together feeling phantom prickles from the small stem barbs.
“Never like it when it’s this quiet,” Hansen says. Raleigh nods in understanding, it's the only response Hansen is expecting. Raleigh doesn't speak to anyone, hasn't in so long (since Yancy) he doesn't even remember the sound of his own voice. Hansen is just concerned because his son went out with the raiding party. “Seventeen,” Hansen chuckles. “It’s like he owns the world.” Raleigh figures that it’s probably more a product of growing up too fast. The kid is thirteen and from what he’s heard Hansen’s wife had been around until a year ago. Raleigh doesn’t say anything though. He’s been with the group for almost nine months now. It’s better here in this abandoned shopping complex than it has been anywhere else in the past two years since the Creeps came.
***
Before Hansen, Raleigh had been with a few other groups.
The first group was straight out of their hometown, everyone had died before the six month apocalypse anniversary. Creeps coming out of the woods to eat them. A huge horde overrunning their defenses. Yancy had been a great big brother and a good protector, he had died doing just that. Raleigh can still see Yancy running into the road, a horde of Creeps behind him as he distanced himself from the tree he had forced Raleigh to climb up. Raleigh can still see the way the blood sprayed onto the sidewalk as the Creeps started tearing and biting. He can still hear the last words his brother had ever voiced, screaming loudly. Raleigh, Listen to me! You need to….
The second group had been an introduction into just how terrible humanity could be, even in an apocalypse situation. Former bikers with guns and tattoos and leather jackets. They had no clear leader, no supplies, no direction. They found Raleigh, three months after Yancy, hiding from the creeps in a garden shed when they were looking for a safe place to spend the night. He’d been allowed to stay in the shelter with them but only after each of them had fucked his mouth raw. They kept him with them and he’d stayed with them for almost two months as their bitch. He didn’t get away from them so much as he got traded by them to his third group for a few bottles of water and cans of beans.
He’d thought the bikers had been bad, the third group he had abandoned in the middle of a residential area during an attack only a month after he had arrived. The good preacher man trying to lead his flock to heaven thought the best way to do it was by cleansing the trash by sacrificing the trash to the Creeps. Turned out that in this scenario, Raleigh and an eight year old girl Japanese girl named Mako who spoke broken English had been the trash. Turned out after the fact that Mako served the same function as Raleigh had. Raleigh supposed, with the sudden determination to ‘cleanse’ the preacher’s proclivity for men and underaged girls had been found out by someone in his group. It took Mako almost three months to trust Raleigh not to hurt her. It was another month before the found Raleigh’s fourth group, Mako’s second.
They were more traditional survivalists. They had shelter and cars and were always on the move, Raleigh kept a wary eye on anyone wanting a piece of Mako and traded himself to the group’s leader for shelter, food and water for both of them. For Mako’s safety as well. She had looked at him more than once with her sad eyes older than her eight years. That one had lasted almost three whole months, until eventually, the survivalists came across the Mall and had thought they could flush out Hansen’s group. They had led a group of Creeps to the mall as a distraction. Raleigh had been shot in the side trying to keep Mako safe and hidden from the conflict under a blue Toyota hybrid.
Hansen had found them the next day when Mako had finally ventured out into the open for help.
***
From the way the others at the Mall tell it, the place had been crawling with creeps and Hansen, needing a safe place for his wife and kid and brother had stormed the structure single handed with just a k-bar and a 9 mil with one bullet, cleared the creeps out.
All while his brother laid up in the backseat of a beat up suburban, suicidal after the loss of his own wife and their unborn child. Hansen’s wife trying to follow her husband, convinced she was a widow and Hansen’s son holding a gun on both of them to keep them in the car until Hansen came out three days later.
Raleigh believes every word. Especially about the k-bar, and even more so about Chuck Hansen holding his uncle and mother at gunpoint for his father. That kid can be fucking scary.
***
The Hansen family, Australians on an American vacation and now stuck in the middle of America, cleaned up the mall, rescued a few stragglers still surviving in the town and started on making the one floor the place livable, defendable, Almost Paradise.
There are steel panels, taken from the hardware store, bolted over every door and window. The only way in or out is by the skylight window that runs down the middle of the mall. The access to skylight is guarded in pairs with two well stocked machine gun in four hour shifts. Raleigh’s only seen it once, he hasn’t been back out of the building since he entered. He has a hazy memory of someone bitching about lifting him up the ladder, someone else (maybe Herc himself) reminding that the ladder panel needed to be locked down but mostly he remembers the pain of being moved around with a gun shot (a through and through he’s told later, easy to stitch, luckily Scott Hansen knows he’s O-Neg, useful to have a universal donor in the group).
They patrol around the building once every four hours to inspect the fences. Barbed wire around the perimeter and then sharpened wooden fence poles at strategic locations around the inside of the parking lot. A lot of room for them to take out any Creeps that might linger or make it past the defenses. Enough space that they can see an attack coming.
Hansen, a military man through and through, has made an effort to think of everything. Besides the defenses, the skylight lets them grow food in The Garden, an old box store on the north end of the building. The glass panels carefully removed and stored for future repairs to let in the wind and the rain and the birds and the bugs.
Water recycles through the large centre fountain, refilled once every three months using a pump truck and the local lake. Solar panels installed on the roof keep the generators going as needed.
The box stores didn't get too messed up so there's clothes for everyone, some toys for the kids, food from the grocery store, booze. They had even, before Raleigh arrived, converted the pharmacy into a walk in clinic.
***.
The Garden needs constant watching and tending to keep everything healthy and growing and Mako makes a great physician’s assistant and nothing relieves Raleigh more that she is able to be a contributor to the group, keeping her busy keeps her safe. As a bonus, when the clinic isn’t busy she is in the Garden as well. Everyone is in the Garden or on patrol when they’re not taking care of their usual jobs. Raleigh is never on patrol. Everyone has assumed he’s mute and he might as well be after going so long without words. A mute has no business on patrol when they can’t call out a warning.
This place is nice with a roof over his head and food that is rationed but still plentiful with an entire store full of dried food and non-perishables and soon crops of fresh fruits and veggies growing strong. With only just over twenty people they're more than set up for foreseeable future.
***
Hansen dusts his hands off from where he was weeding the carrot patch and stands up, stretching his back.
“They’ll be back soon,” he says. “You go on and get cleaned up. Hopefully they bring back some fresh meat tonight." Raleigh shakes the soil off his hands carefully into the planter and stands up. Hansen's hands are on his shoulders pushing him back down again. "On second thought, I like you right where you are sweetheart, open up." He’s belonged to Herc Hansen’s since the day he woke up in the clinic. A lonely man, with a kind heart and a group of people dependent on him for their survival.
He keeps his head back, mouth opened, teeth covered and his hands tucked into the back pockets of his jeans. Hansen hates when Raleigh puts dirty hands on his pants.
/end