The Future Without Hope by Nazarea Andrews Page B

there is nothing left. Until the walls fall
and the hordes take every last uninfected life on the continent. You know it’s
coming—fuck, you told us about this shit.” Omar is glaring at me, and I
straighten, away from the wall I’m leaning against.
    Holly,
sitting next to Omar, stiffens, a little, and I smirk at her. Little apocalypse
baby can keep on thinking she’s fucking big enough to hurt me.
    Nurrin,
miraculously, stays quiet at my side.
    “We
can’t do this, Omar. You know its suicide. We fought this war before—it’s not
our fight anymore. It’s no one’s fight.”
    “We
never should have conceded the battle,” he snarls.
    I
remember the day I heard we were conceding—the day Buchman took us aside and
told me and Kelsey we were pulling out of the East.
    Fast
and clean. That’s what we were told. The evac would be flawless—trains were
being specially designed, and we’d move out en masse. Without leaving anything
for the zombies to chase, we had a chance to contain it.
    Some
would wander into Wide Open territory near the Havens. We expected that. What
was left of the Marines—and by then, that was a handful of a once strong
force—were tasked with keeping the unofficial border.
    It
was a crazy plan. After ten years, and hundreds of thousands dead, to leave it
all behind—to say, “Fuck it. We can’t win this one.”
    It
was the only option, and I hated Buchman for taking it. Because it was the
coward’s way out, and the politicians’. They didn’t lose men on the field. They
didn’t watch friends get bitten, and eat a bullet because they refused to
change. They didn’t clear dead towns, torching preschools of infected children,
monstrous in their fury and hunger.
    They
didn’t fight the fucking war. They tallied the numbers and when it swung too
wildly out of our favor, they said, “Fuck it. Come home.”
    And
like mindless sheep, we did.
    It was clean, for the most part. The
promise to extract quick and easy was kept—it was possibly the only time in
history that the military did something efficiently.
    There
were two places the evac didn’t go as planned—a small foothold in Tennessee was
overrun a few hours before their planned extraction.
    And
Columbus.
    Nurrin
shifts next to me, and I blink, focusing on Omar. Pushing my memories and my
dead into the past where they belong.
    “Nothing
has changed, Omar,” I say, evenly. “There are too many of them and too few of
us. We can’t secure the land we clear. It’s the same problem we faced ten years
ago.”
    Omar
glances at Holly and she shifts, opening a small computer.
    Before
the world changed, they were common—everyday accessories that everyone used.
And then the world fell apart, and we lost that.
    We
lost so fucking much.
    She
twists the computer, and I stare at the screen.
    “For
the past two years, we’ve been sending in small parties—units of three or five
black priests—to monitor.” She clicks a few keys and the map changes, narrowing
in on the west coast—the Havens.
    “The
red shows the uninfected. The black are zombies,” she says.
    It’s
slightly terrifying, watching the black masses moving outside the Haven walls,
not pushing. Not threatening.
    In
small groups they aren’t. But they never stay in small groups. That’s where the
trouble always comes.
    “This,”
Holly says, “is the East.”
    The
coast is almost empty. A few small, black clusters near New York and scattered
in the south. Enough that they would need to be dealt with. A surprisingly
large red cluster in Florida. But not the widespread horde I expected. I stare,
and then I glance at Omar.
    “What
happened?”
    Omar
smiles, coldly triumphant. “They died.”
    Nurrin
pushes off the wall, and I can feel her vibrating with suppressed emotion. I
give her a sharp look, and her lips thin, furiously. Then I refocus on Omar.
“They’re already dead, Omar. That’s their defining characteristic.”
    “But
they don’t stay dead, right? They