I slowly backed away from the corner.

“Maria,” I said. “Get back, come here.”

The thing moved in the corner again. The shadow. Had they locked us in here with one of the infected?

“Huh?” Maria mumbled. “Why?”

No. It wasn’t an infected person, I thought. It would’ve attacked us already.

I grabbed Maria and Jack by the shoulders and pulled them away from the corner, towards the opposite side of the vault.

“What the hell are you doing?” Jack asked.

My eyes continued adjusting to the dark.

And then I could see.

It was a man. There’s no way he was infected. Or if he was, he certainly hadn’t turned yet.

I could just make out the man looking at me, studying me. He was sitting there on one of the pallets of cash, perfectly still, perfectly calm. He was wearing a cowboy hat. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like he tipped his hat as he greeted us.

“Evening strangers,” he said.

And as soon as he spoke, Maria let out a scream.

The strange voice scared the hell out of the guys too. Or maybe it was Maria’s scream that scared them.

Anyway, as soon as Daniel and Kenji realized we weren’t alone, they once again stepped forward, protecting the rest of us. I wonder if they were so used to putting their lives on the line it had become an automatic reflex for them.

Jack picked up a glow stick and started waving it back and forth, like a lamp, trying to see into the dark corner. “Who’s there?”

Maria and I kept our distance.

“Who are you?” Kenji asked.

The man slowly shifted his gaze from me to Kenji. He then stared at him for what felt like hours. I couldn’t see clearly but this guy looked huge. He had wide shoulders and big arms. I couldn’t see how tall he was because he was sitting down on the pallet of cash, against the wall.

“Well,” Kenji said. “Who the hell are you?”

The man chuckled. “What’s it to you?”

“Look, this is no time for games.”

“I agree. Games are pointless. Especially now that the world has gone straight to hell. So, to answer your question, it doesn’t matter who I am. Only what I am.”

“And what are you?”

“I’m a man.”

“Yeah, very funny,” Daniel interjected. “So you’re a prisoner, just like us.”

“Bingo was his name-O.”

“Speaking of names,” Kenji said. “You got a name?”

“Do you?” he fired back.

Kenji was fed up. “Look, are you infected or not? Are you a threat to us?”

“No. I’m not infected.”

“Do you know who these people are?”

“Yeah, I know who these people are. I know exactly who they are.”

“So who are they?”

“They’re your worst goddamn nightmare.”

“Excuse me?”

“They’re you. Me. They’re just like us. They’re regular folk trying to make the best of a bad situation.”

“Are you on drugs?” Maria asked.

“I wish.”

“Where are you from?” I asked

“Doesn’t matter where I’m from. The only thing that matters is where I’m going.”

“And where are you going?”

“Straight to hell.”

It was then I noticed his hands and fingers were stained with blood. His skin had been ripped and grazed at the knuckles. I then looked at the walls; a few of the safety deposit boxes were dented and bent out of shape.

He must’ve seen me staring at his hands because he then held them up slightly. “Don’t mind these. Just a few grazes.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Got into a fight with some of the people upstairs.”

I looked at the safety deposit boxes again. I wondered what would happen to a person if he hit them with that kind of force.

“Did you kill any of them?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Don’t really care. But they know they’ve been in a fight. That’s for damn sure. Morons tried to handcuff me. Blindfold me. I don’t think they’ll make that mistake again.”

“Um, how’d they get you down here?” Jack asked.

“They had to ask me the hard way.”

“What does that mean?”

He pulled his shirt collar down and to the side, exposing his shoulder. Jack held his glow stick closer. The man’s skin was pockmarked with little black cuts and holes.

“The preacher man unloaded on me with a shotgun,” he said. “Clipped me in the shoulder.”

“Preacher man?”

“Yeah. The priest. The guy in charge of these people.”

“Do you know how many people are up there?” Daniel asked.

“Don’t know. I’ve only seen a couple. But there’s gotta be more. Maybe fifteen or so.”

“Fifteen?” Jack said. “That’s too many.”

“Too many for what?” the man asked.

“To fight our way out if we need to. I mean, how the hell are we gonna get out of this? We’re outnumbered. They took our weapons.”

“You ain’t getting out of this.”

“But we have to,” Jack said. “You don’t understand. We need to get out of here.”

The man stared at Jack suspiciously, and I felt like telling Jack to shut the hell up. Our agreement was that we weren’t going to tell anyone about Maria. Not until we knew we could trust them. Not until we knew we had no choice.

We didn’t know anything about this guy. Now was not the time to go around spilling our secrets.

The man shrugged his shoulders. “The way I see it, this is probably the safest place you kids have been in months. You shouldn’t be worried about fighting your way out. You’ve got shelter, protection. That’s more than a lot of people ever had. If anything, you should be fighting to take this place over.”

“No,” Jack said. “We need to keep moving. You don’t understand. We need to get to…”

I kicked Jack in the back of the leg to shut him up.

“Hey,” he said surprised. “What?”

Jack looked at me like I was crazy. But then Maria squeezed his hand and shook her head slightly. I think he finally got the hint.

“Maybe we don’t have to fight our way out,” I said. “Maybe they’re just locking us up as a precaution. You know, to make sure they can trust us or something. To make sure we’re not infected. That’s what I’d do.”

“Yeah,” Maria said. “We talked about this. About trust. Remember the note we found at the farmhouse. People were starting to take the law into their own hands. They were starting to form violent gangs. These people probably experienced that first hand. I’m guessing the priest is keeping these people together. Keeping them sane. As soon as they realize we’re not a threat, that we’re not dangerous or violent, they’ll let us out. Let’s not forget they saved our lives.”

The man laughed again. “You don’t get it, do ya kid? They didn’t save your life. And there is no getting out of this. There is no trust. Not anymore.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“This is a new world, with new rules,” he said as he picked up a handful of cash. “You see this? This is all over. It’s all useless. The plague has changed everything. It has changed everyone.” He threw the cash in the air. “The empire of man is falling.”

“You’re wrong,” Jack said. “We can still stop this. We can still fix it.”

Again, I wanted to kick Jack in the shin, and tell him to shut up. But I didn’t need to.

“You think I’m wrong?” the stranger said.

“Yeah,” Jack answered. “I think you’re unbelievably wrong.”

“You wanna know why the only survivors you’ve seen in months want to blindfold you and lock you up? It’s simple really. It’s so simple; I can’t believe I have to say it out loud. The reason you ain’t getting out of here alive, is because this plague, this pandemic, or whatever it is, it ain’t gonna blow over. This ain’t some little natural disaster. There will be no relief effort. There will be no charity concert to raise funds for the rebuilding process. This is big. And we’re right in the middle of it. If we were lucky we would’ve been killed in the initial outbreak. But we survived. And now we’re walking through hell on earth. Those people up there? They don’t give a damn about us. They don’t give a damn that we might be some of the only people left alive. All they care about is eating their next meal. Staying alive. All they care about is themselves. They will do whatever it takes. They will lie and they will cheat and they will steal. They will spill the blood of anyone who gets in their way. And they will damn the consequences, they will say, to hell with the consequences.”

“No,” I said louder than I intended to and suddenly felt the piercing gaze of the stranger on me. “No. People aren’t like that. People aren’t just evil.”

“The instant the Oz virus took over,” the stranger continued. “The very second the military lost control, our civilization crumbled. We were sent back to the dark ages. Old Testament. Eye for an eye. This is the bad old days. The all or nothing days. You wanna live? You better be ready to fight. You better be ready for war.”

I was about to say something about how there’s no way people would just lose their humanity so easily and so quickly.

But then the vault door clicked as it was unlocked. It slowly swung open. A large bottle of water was thrown in. It slid along the floor and came to rest against the far wall.

And then, as is to confirm everything the stranger had just said in his little speech of doom, two men shuffled in, carrying something between them. Something long and heavy.

It was a body.

They dumped it unceremoniously just inside the door.

The two men then left in a hurry, slamming the vault door shut.

The body, it was the woman from earlier. Her hands and feet had been bound, half her face was missing. Her dreadlocked hair was stained with blood.