“Just open it, you dummy.”
Stone turned it upside down, and the books fell out onto his lap. The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, and Spider-Man: Birth of Venom. Stone’s entire face brightened. I mean, he looked fifteen years younger.
“Bro.”
“Yep,” I said.
“Bro.”
“Uh-huh.”
“How? How in the world did you manage this?”
I shrugged. “Just put in a good word with the right people. There’s a bunch more in the library. Ayden told me The Dark Knight Returns is pretty good. I can’t speak on that. I’ve read my fair share of comics, but normally just whatever they had at the Giant Eagle by my house—and those weren’t always of the utmost quality.”
Stone sat up, pulled himself to the side. On shaky but stronger than normal legs, he stood, wrapped his arms around me, and squeezed tightly. I couldn’t even raise my own arms. He had really been hitting the weights hard.
“Dude, thank you so much!”
“Don’t thank me,” I struggled to say. “It was all the Scavs.” He let go, and I gasped. The rush of sweet air filling my lungs had never felt better.
“Shit, dude, now I can start my comic book club.”
“Exactly!”
“Would you like to be the Vice President?”
“Hell yeah.”
“Too bad, spot’s taken.”
“What? By who?”
Stone turned toward Chewy, who couldn’t resist wagging his stubby tail. “Should I tell him, or do you want to, buddy?”
Chewy let out a little bark.
I laughed. “All right, well, I can’t be mad about that.”
“First Lady is still up for grabs. You want that one?”
I flipped him off. “Whatever, that’s fine. Just as long as I get to read and discuss comic books with my best friend.”
“Ay, we’re more than best friends, Grady. We’re brothers.”
I nodded. “Brothers.”
I said this was where things started to get bad, and I wasn’t lying. Maybe I’m stalling a bit, but that’s because I don’t want to remind myself of what happened. It’s hard, you know, reminding myself of the pain and anguish we all went through. Hadn’t we gone through enough already?
But, as you know, I pride myself on telling the truth, so the truth is what I shall tell you.
It happened the very next night after I’d given Stone the comics, before we even had the inaugural comic book club meeting. He and I were both on watch duty, and we were working together. The prior weeks on the job had been uneventful. I hadn’t been on my guard. I hadn’t expected to see what I saw, and that was bad. I remember thinking I must’ve fallen asleep, that I was in a nightmare.
Oh, how I wish…how I wish.
The sad thing is Stone wasn’t even scheduled to work that night. He was covering for Lee, who apparently had come down with some sort of bug. The “Hangover Flu,” most likely. Whatever. I wasn’t mad about it. I got to spend more time with my oldest friend, and time spent together always went by in a blur.
We were hanging out, talking Spider-Man and Batman, playing cards, occasionally glancing at the monitors. Overall, a good time—until the third hour came about.
Although I’d thought I might’ve fallen asleep, I knew that wasn’t true. I wasn’t tired, distracted, or two steps away from crazy. I’d slept a full six hours the night before and had a hearty nap prior to my shift. Plus my thermos was full of hot coffee and I’d been sipping it steadily.
I shot out of my chair and pointed at the screen. “Whoa! What was that?”
Stone stopped paging through the Spider-Man comic and dropped it. It fluttered to the floor, where it absorbed some of the melted snow near the space heater. “What? You saw something? No lie?”
“I think so.” I leaned closer and set my coffee down with a trembling hand. “What the hell? I swear—” The quality wasn’t great, but when all you saw was a sea of white, you didn’t need high-def resolution.
The snow was falling in droves, making the already shoddy picture worse, but I knew I was seeing something. I had gotten so used to the unblemished views on the cameras, the undisturbed plateaus of white, that anything out of the ordinary would catch my attention as easily as a string of firecrackers going off in a silent library.
“Wraith?” Stone whispered.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I mean, it could be.”
That’s what we always had to assume. My rational mind thought otherwise. I said, “The lights are too strong. They wouldn’t be able to get this close—”
That was when I saw it again.
A shadowy figure erupted out of the snow, and a cloud of white quickly swallowed it up. This made our view worse, but once the wind took hold of the snow-cloud and blew it away, what the figure was became clearer.
Who it was.
High-def wasn’t necessary to see the fear written on this woman’s face…or to see that she was running for her life.
3
New Arrival
The woman flailed her arms as she drove through the mounds of white. Stumbling and then regaining her balance, stumbling and then regaining her balance—
The watchtower phone was patched directly to Nick Rider’s pager—yes, pager. Rudimentary tech like that made a comeback during the apocalypse. Nick would most likely respond quickly from his office—because it seemed he was always in his office—but on the off-chance he wasn’t there, he would know to get to a telephone or a walkie-talkie as soon as he could. A call from the watchtower was serious business. We had the military to thank for this communication system. Most of the soldiers were dead and gone, but their genius and ingenuity lingered around the City and, for the most part, kept it afloat.
“We’re not crazy, right?” I asked Stone.
He was staring blankly at the monitor.
“That’s a person, is it not?” I said.
“I-I think so.”
“I should call it in.” But what if we were wrong? What if we were hallucinating, going crazy like Paul Ellis, the man whose own sanity began slipping before he
