Empire's End

Fourteen / Tripper

Boyish good looks could only get you so far. Tripper had gotten his hands dirty a few times, but he strove to live by the code he’d learned up north: honor the living and fuck the dead.

He pulled his tattered jacket around his thin frame and reclined in a broken couch, seated in a garishly-lit alley in deep downtown. Not even Meyer’s boys bothered coming around here. What was there to be gained? This district was a hovel for bums. Strange people. Tripper had known a guy with a CD player once. He had The Best of the Doors and that was all he had, played it incessantly. Humming to himself, Tripper fished a lighter from his pocket and patted himself down for a joint.

“People are strange, when you’re a stranger…”

Tripper was undocumented. He’d snuck across the Canadian border during Wall construction. As far as Gaylen was concerned, he didn’t exist. And he wasn’t the only one.

Strange people. Lots of ‘em.

It was a lot better to live off the grid, outside the system. Especially one as fucked as this. He wouldn’t be tied down when the ship started to sink. Honor the living… well, the people around here acted like they were already dead. He supposed they might as well be.

“Over here sweetie.”

Campbell led a small girl into the alleyway, closing a chain-link gate behind her. Tripper sat up and asked, “What’s the haps?”

“I found her a few blocks over,” Campbell said gravely. “I think she’s running from Meyer.”

“Shit.” Tripper beckoned to the girl. “It’s okay. We’re nice people. What’s your name?”

She wouldn’t speak. Tripper looked to Campbell, who nodded and knelt beside the child.

“My name’s Cam. Will you tell me your name?”

“Lily.” The girl looked up slightly, almost meeting Cam’s eyes. “I like your voice.”

“I’m from Australia,” Cam said with a smile. “Do you know where that is?”

Lily shook her head. Tripper got up off the couch and sat on a box beside his girlfriend. “Where are you from, kiddo?”

“Louisiana.”

“That’s a long ways away. Not as far as Australia, but still pretty far.”

“Where did you come from just now?” Cam asked. Lily’s eyes fell again.

“It’s okay,” Cam assured her. “We aren’t going to take you back.”

“I want to go home,” Lily said, lip trembling. “But I don’t have one.”

“Neither do we,” said Tripper. “But do you know what that means? It means bad people can’t find us.”

Cam put her hand on Lily’s back. The girl flinched a little, but quickly relaxed. “Where’s Australia?” she asked.

“It’s a really big island on the other side of the world,” Cam told her. “They’ve gotten rid of almost all the rotters over there. It’s a nice place.”

“Then why did you come here?”

Cam winked. “To kick zombie ass.”

It wasn’t far from the truth. She was a free spirit, to say the least. Working as a dancer in Adelaide, she’d seen the undead presence all but stamped out while reports were pouring in from around the world, all saying one thing: they were dying out there.

What could a twenty-four-year-old stripper do? As much as anyone else, she figured. Other countries were sending radio transmissions bouncing across the atmosphere begging for some kind of support — for anything. Were they simply going to ignore the cries? Was she somehow entitled to live in a world without the plague while everyone else suffered?

Her friends didn’t understand. They weren’t much for soul-searching. But they hadn’t lived her life either. She was a lot tougher than she looked.

The question was not just where to go, but how o get off Australia. It wasn’t as if planes and boats were leaving on a daily basis. No, the only people who were crazy enough to go out into no man’s land were the scientists.

She’d bought her way onto a ship bound for French Polynesia’s plague labs. From there, she caught another ship to the wasteland that was Mexico. And by the time she’d hacked her way to the southern U.S. border, there weren’t soldiers guarding it anymore.

She’d never felt more alive than she did among the undead. To live and die in Adelaide without so much as a whimper, that just wasn’t her style.

Settling here with Tripper hadn’t originally been part of the plan, but he had awakened her to humanity’s fatal flaws and the way they were manifest in these Great Cities. And, after he introduced her to a man named Thackeray in the badlands, she understood that, in order to defeat the plague once and for all, they first had to bring this system down.

Thackeray had told her about Cleveland, about how it was no longer part of the safe zone, even though the Senate claimed it was. Undesirables — criminals who wouldn’t bow to men like Meyer, or those who challenged the politics of the Great Cities, or those with communicable diseases — they were “relocated” to Cleveland, outside the Wall, and left for dead. And if Cam and Tripper were ever caught, the same would happen to them.

The same would likely happen to this little girl if she were ever recovered.

“We’ll take care of you,” Cam told Lily. Tripper nodded solemnly. Lily tried to smile, but something in her had broken and she couldn’t do it.