Joan was shocked. Surely, she couldn't have been on Dez's list.
"I apologize for it all… except for Chad. I don't apologize for that. If he was here, I'd kill him again." She lowered her eyes and looked at Theresa. "Is that good enough for you?"
Theresa nodded, sniffling.
Dez moved around the firepit and retook her seat. She picked up her plate and sighed. "This is really good," Dez said.
With that, it was as if all of the pressure had been let out of a balloon. They each picked up their plates and began to eat again. The meat was cold now, but it was still amazing. It had been so long since Joan had eaten something fresh.
"We should make a pact," Katie said.
They spent their time around the fire, hammering out the words and making promises to each other. When the time came, Joan read the words on a scrap of paper Dez had found in the ranger station.
"The past is the past, and it no longer has a hold on me. I vow to survive and cause no harm to my fellow survivors."
It was a simple pact, but it covered everything they needed. When they all went to bed, to get away from the cold, they did so unburdened, and sleep came easily for most of them…
****
She stood in the snow, looking at the spot where the meat had been packed away. She felt a hunger that threatened to consume her. Her stomach was still full from the night's feast, but she wanted to eat more. A fierce heat pulsed in her shoulder, and in her mind, all she could do was picture the red blood on her plate as she had pressed on the bear meat with her knife. The bear had been overcooked. She squatted down in the snow, resisting what her body told her to do. No, I won't eat the meat raw. But the hunger told her differently.
Chapter 10: A Day to Remember
Walt awoke with a start. He didn't know why. His eyes snapped open, and he groped for his flashlight in the darkness of a storage unit among old furniture and crates full of photo albums. He had spent the evening before looking through the old photos, running his fingers over them, as if he could actually touch the pictures of a world that didn't exist any longer.
He saw birthday parties, smiling people, smiling children… cake. And he wanted to be there, so bad. He flipped through a photo album dedicated to someone's wedding, glossy 8x10s of someone else's life, everyone dressed to the nines. He had fallen asleep then, drifting into dreams inspired by the photos. He dreamed about a birthday party he was having, and then he was getting married. He had struggled to see his bride's face under her veil. It was too thick, the shadows in the church too dark. When the priest had asked, "Do you, Andy, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?" he had corrected the priest. "Walt," he said, and the priest repeated the line with the correct name.
He had said, "I do," and in the dream, he realized it was something that he had wanted to say for a long time. Just as he went to kiss the bride, as he was lifting the veil, his eyes had sprung open.
Now he was trying to recall if he had seen the woman's face, so he could be on the lookout for it in the future. But no, there was nothing. Then there was another sound, and he realized he had heard the sound before, that it was what had awakened him in the first place—a gunshot.
He bolted up from his sleeping bag. He shoved his boots on his feet unlaced and threw up the rolling door of the storage unit. He heard the same from other units. He stepped into the concrete hallway, and he saw a sleepy-eyed Tejada rubbing at the back of his head, trying to shake off sleep.
"You hear that?" Tejada asked him.
He nodded.
"Wake 'em up, Walt," Tejada said. Then he turned and went back into his storage unit to pack his shit.
Walt walked down the line of storage units, banging softly on the metal, loud enough to wake the occupants, but not loud enough to alert anything outside that they were inside the storage facility.
When he was done, all the doors had been raised, and people were scrambling to pack up all of their gear. Walt rushed back to his own unit, thoughts of a bride and her unseen face all but forgotten. He squatted down and rolled up his sleeping bag, rolling it as tight and compact as he could. He fastened it to his backpack, and then took the time to lace his boots, double knotting the laces so that they wouldn't come undone at an inopportune moment. He lifted his huge, heavy pack onto his back and let it settle in. His back was sore from the previous day. They had done some training in full gear throughout the fall months, but that pack had been lighter, and he hadn't carried it all day, the way he had yesterday.
As he tightened the straps of his backpack, he heard several more shots.
Tejada was already standing in the hallway when he stepped out.
"What do you think, sir?" Allen asked.
Tejada had given up on asking the soldiers to stop calling him sir. "I think we got gunshots out there, and we have to decide whether someone's in
