How long could beer last? He had never been in a position to see. What was the shelf life of a beer? Hell, what was the shelf life of himself? He didn't like the way his thoughts were going, so he tilted the bottle back and took another pug off of it, feeling the burn of the carbonation in his throat.
He felt his eyes begin to water, and he couldn't figure out why. His body trembled, and the glass bottle rattled on the steel prep table as he set it down. He grabbed the edge of the table to keep himself from shaking, and he felt the water in his eyes turn to tears. The back of his throat stung now, but not from the beer. Allen didn't know what was wrong. His head spun, and he let out a big gasp of air.
Then the door to the kitchen swung open, and Brown and Epps were piling in with beers in their hands. Allen swiped at his eyes, embarrassed about… about what? He didn't know. He didn't know what was going on.
"You find anything good?" Epps asked him.
He couldn't answer without giving away his strange emotional state, so he took another swig from the bottle instead. Brown clicked on his flashlight and shined it at his face.
"You alright, Izzy?"
Allen squinted against the light, putting a hand up to either block the light from hitting him in the eyes or to keep Brown from seeing his face. He didn't know which. He took a shuddering breath, and he felt himself fall back into place, into the hollow he had made inside himself where he kept his emotions and feelings locked away. It was a small place that he didn't let others know about. In it, he kept the sadness that the world gave him. The sadness from knowing that his parents were probably dead, the sadness from knowing that the woman he had spent the last few months with wanted him dead, the sadness of being unable to save D.J. and Hope's mother.
"Yeah, I'm good."
Epps gave him a friendly tap on the shoulder, and Brown and Epps let it drop. He knew they would. That's what they had been trained to do. Let it drop. Let it slide off of you. Even when you had a woman's head in your sights, you still had to pull the trigger and find some way to let it go.
Whiteside came in, one arm full of beers and a pickle in his other hand. "Let's see what we got. Hope they got some Budweiser in here. I ain't for all that fancy IPA bullshit like old Izzy over there."
Epps popped the top off of a bottle and held it into the air. "This one's for Day."
Brown opened a bottle and held it up as well. Allen clinked beer bottles with the other two soldiers, his friends, and they drank in silence.
****
Masterson couldn't sleep. He was cold and tired, but his mind wouldn't stop running. He had always suffered from insomnia, but since they had left the dubious safety of the Nike campus and its wall, he had struggled to sleep at all.
His brain worked hard, flitting from subject to subject, but it always came back to one thing. He was sure that he was going to die. They were out in the open, the dead all around them, and he knew that at any moment, he could be gone, just like Day. The others had tolerated Day, but Masterson had known him better than any of the others, and he sorely felt his loss.
Day had always rubbed people the wrong way, but if you ignored his abrasive qualities, you'd find one of the nicest, most loyal people he had ever had the pleasure of knowing. And now he was gone. Dead. Permanently.
He watched the shadows through the dark windows. Annies milled about just outside, quietly, but for the crunch of their feet in the slush. The rain continued to fall, the sound of it infiltrating the interior of the pub. The others slumbered fitfully. He heard a fart come from the area where Allen slept. Gregg snored softly to his right, not loud enough to alert the Annies, but that was always a danger. Earlier in the night, he had poked Gregg in the ribs once to get him to stop snoring. The Annies outside hadn't seemed to notice, or if they did, they couldn't tell where the sound was coming from.
He had tried drinking a beer with the rest of the boys, but it hadn't sat right with him. Why should he be here drinking beer when Day was dead? He couldn't handle the guilt, so he had eaten his meal and climbed into his sleeping bag, vowing to get a good night's sleep for the first time since they had left the security of the wall. But it hadn't happened. Instead, his mind had bombarded him with images of his own death, always bloody, always accidental.
His body quaked with fear, and he knew that he was losing it, that he wasn't cut out for this any longer. He wanted to scream. He wanted to grab his hatchet and run out of the pub and get it over with. He was tired of living in fear, exhausted, actually.
In the mirror of the pub's bathroom, he had stared at himself for a good ten minutes, examining his face. It was gaunt now. Even with the beard covering
