We had an hour for lunch, but we scarfed down our MREs in record time and set out in search of adventure as soon as we could.
It took us a few minutes to orient ourselves with the city streets. Dax kept looking at me to direct him, but in reality I hadn’t visited Hastings for years, and even then my knowledge of it had been fleeting.
But a couple of questions asked of semi-friendly inhabitants soon had us on our way to the stadium. We moved slowly past gray buildings and the gray sky. It seemed there were two lunch shifts as well; Dax and I were part of the first, and we saw a number of other people walking around with their lunches or bottles of water.
Pastrami. Pastrami everywhere.
“Maybe there’s a black market for the good stuff,” Dax said. “You know. Like, ‘I’ll give you this pistol if you can find me a frozen McDouble somewhere.’”
“The apocalypse happened a few months ago,” I pointed out. “I’m betting they already raided the fast food joints.”
He frowned. “Then work your magic on Food Truck Guy again. Those sandwiches…”
I couldn’t help but flinch. Logan had seemed decent enough, but passing me top-secret sandwiches seemed like a great way to accidentally get us all into trouble. “I’m sure that was just a thank-you gift,” I said. “He was really glad he didn’t turn into a zombie.”
We hooked a right on Loring Street and passed some stores that were apparently still open, boasting nearly-new cold-weather gear and outrageously expensive camping equipment.
No one here smiled at us. Not that I made much of an effort to engage them in the first place. Talking to people just seemed like too much effort right now.
God, I was tired. I had never dealt with this many patients at once at Elderwood, not even after scouting parties went badly and ended in blood and bites. Even then, the bites had been pretty uniform. Oh, we saw some nasty shit, but eventually you got used to it.
This place…
I rubbed my hands together.
“We should be dead, shouldn’t we?” Dax asked.
“Dead?” I tried to picture us as revenants and decided we would not be very attractive.
“Yeah. Like…dead. No sunshine, all the bad air, we’re eating this crap food. We should be dead.”
Oh. He actually wanted to know how we were physically still alive. I shrugged. “Probably. But we’re not.”
“Yeah. Why?”
People had flung out a variety of answers to just that question—Dax was hardly the first to wonder. Tony said it was evil stardust that came with the meteors: whatever brought the dead back somehow kept the living, well, living, provided it didn’t kill them outright. There were more scientific answers, of course; Samuels had been fond of highlighting humanity’s determination to survive cataclysms like this before. He didn’t mean the living dead, of course—he kept talking about some volcano that blew its stop thousands of years prior and covered that part of the world in ash for a good long while. People survived then, he said. And we’ll survive now.
So we survived. For the time being, anyway.
“Who cares?” I asked. “We’re here.”
“We’re here,” Dax said, and seemed to accept it.
It’s too easy to get philosophical when shit like this goes down. You start to question everything you ever did, everything you’re ever going to do, and everything that mattered to you. If you sit there and think about it too long, you start to wonder if anything matters at all—and that’s when things get dangerous. That’s when you think you might as well let some ghoul chew on you, because not existing must be better than this.
I hadn’t fallen that far down the existential spiral yet, but I could see why others did.
We turned left on Vickers Street, and finally came up to Norwall Park.
The last time I’d seen it, Norwall had been a lush green field surrounded by brand-new bleachers. It had hosted football, baseball, and soccer games, and had a snack shack beloved by all the local players. The grass was dead and gone, and parts of the chain-link fence that surrounded the field had been patched by boards. A number of staggered bleachers had been brought in, essentially cutting off a portion of the outfield and creating a smaller, more enclosed space around what had been the baseball diamond and the infield.
“People here really like their sports,” I said. “You can fit a lot of people in these seats.”
“This field isn’t big enough for a soccer game,” Dax said.
I could count the number of soccer games I’d seen on one hand, so I decided he was probably right in that regard. “Maybe the lights in the outfield don’t work. So they closed it off, brought everything closer to the power source.”
I had no idea what I was talking about, and it showed.
“Maybe.” He sounded dubious.
He pulled open the gate and walked in. I glanced around, didn’t see anyone in the vicinity, and followed him.
The dirt had been kicked up and mashed down multiple times. Dax scuffed his boot along the edge of what had been the pitcher’s mound, then stomped down on it. “This place gets a lot of use,” he said. “Look at all these prints.”