Day 66: June 13th, Sunday

It was still dark when I woke up sweaty, naked, and with a pounding headache. I had a faint ringing on my right ear, probably from firing the weapons yesterday, though I couldn't do anything to alleviate it except take it for what it was. I grumbled out of bed, confused for a second whose house I was at, expecting to find myself in my own room back in Portland, only to be hit by the realization that I was in Hell.

How long did I sleep? An hour? Two? Five? It felt like I needed more, but there were so many things to do, so much to cover. Finally, I swung my feet off the bed and planted them firmly on the floor, and since I'd gone this far, I might as well wake up fully.

I strode toward the dresser where my new clothes were, sniffed the shirt once, and didn't smell the usual blood and guts since it had been stored safely in the closet since the beginning of the apocalypse. The jeans didn't see much action, either. I was happy to wear new clothes after what happened yesterday, mostly on what went down in the basement. I only managed to get my underwear and jeans on when a light knock sounded on my door.

I grabbed my gun and crept closer to the door, and pressed the barrel of the gun on the wall right next to the door, ready to fire. I had no idea who was behind the door or if the entire house was compromised while I was asleep, but it wouldn't hurt to be very careful. I waited for the other's next move.

There was another light knock.

"Hey, Bren. It's me. Open up."

It was Logan.

"I'm up. I'm up," I said and opened the door.

Logan had leaned his arms against the doorframe while waiting, his other hand on his hips, greeting me with his usual confident, laid-back swagger. He cleaned up pretty well, and I noticed instantly that he had shaved his beard off and cut some of his hair on the sides.

Stifling a smile, I said, "Wow. You shaved. Is that really you?"

"No, I'm Logan's twin brother, Rogan," he said impassively, but then he cracked that goofy, crooked smile of his. "You like it?" He asked, swiping a finger under his chin.

"Yeah. It's nice not having to talk to a Neanderthal werewolf but a well-cultured human being. And don't call yourself Rogan. You sound like a roided-up pornstar."

"Eh. I always put it as Plan D that if my career as a football player didn't pan out, I'd enter the adult industry." He waited for my response, but all I did was shrug as I put my gun back on the nightstand. Logan sighed, disappointed. "Get it? Plan D?"

"Dear lord," I muttered under my breath, letting Logan inside my room as he laughed at his own joke. "What are you doing here? Is it my turn for the watch?"

"What? No. I'm getting you for breakfast. Alfie fixed us some powdered eggs and oatmeal. Well, we can't really complain. Food is food."

"What are you talking about? It's still dark out." I looked around and stopped. All the windows were barricaded; sunlight was seeping through the narrow slits between the wooden boards. "Uh, what time is it?"

"Nine-thirty in the morning. You slept for nine hours, you know. We thought it best not to wake you up. I noticed that you didn't get enough sleep two nights in a row, and Pete agreed with me for the first time. Can you believe that?"

"Logan, you could have at least asked me first."

"That's...not what I was expecting."

"What were you expecting?"

"A thank you would be nice," he said innocently.

I chuckled. "Well, um, thank you. But I wanted to help out and let the others have their sleep, too."

"But Bren, have you seen yourself? You need sleep. As it turns out, we're doing fine." I put on my new shirt as Logan laid on the bed with a loud moan. "Ahh, bed. So comfy. So fluffy. I could sleep on it forever."

"You're more than welcome to. Where did you sleep, anyway?"

Logan frowned like a beaten puppy. "On the couch. There weren't enough beds."

"There are four bedrooms. How can there be not enough beds?"

"I was going to sleep in the child's room, but I can't fit on the bed. As it turns out, I'm a grown man," he said sarcastically. "I was cursed with being tall. You can fit on it, though. I measured."

"Is that your way of saying I should sleep in the child's room since I'm short?"

Logan smiled. "Hey, I didn't suggest that at all. Your words."

"Then you can sleep in here next time. It's a king-sized bed, so more room for both of us."

"Well...I was going to ask, but then you were already asleep and all naked, and I was just, wow, not for that kind of thing, you know?"

I froze. Did he just say naked? "What?"

It must have registered something in his brain because his eyes went wide. "I didn't see anything. Thankfully, you were lying on your belly, so all I saw was your back and your—"

"Butt?"

"Hey, if it's any consolation, it's better than any girl I've ever seen. That's a compliment, by the way."

I shook my head, trying to hide the beet-red flush on my cheeks. From the corner of my eye, I saw Logan hiding a smirk, clearly enjoying my embarrassment. Well, two people could play this game. I turned around to face him. "What butts? Real ones or from your porn stash?"

Logan looked at me curiously, probably asking himself why I asked. "Um...both."

"So, instead of walking out of the room immediately, you stared at my butt long enough that you can perfectly compare it to every girl's ass you've ever seen, real and other."

Now it was his turn for his cheeks to flush red. "Hey now, I wasn't the one who didn't lock their door like a psychopath."

"You should have knocked."

"I..." he paused, and I discerned he did not do it. "Well, I learned my lesson then. That's why I knocked a minute ago to shield my eyes from stuff."

"You mean my junk."

Logan shot out of bed and strode out of the room. "I'll see you, uh, downstairs. Erm, breakfast. Lots of things to talk about," he said in a hurry.

"Ha! I'm sure we do."

Logan closed the door behind him while I laughed. Feeling victorious, I went into the bathroom to briefly wash my face and put a fresh band-aid over the small cut on my right brow.

Days after this conversation, I wasn't bothered that much knowing Logan saw me naked. Come to think of it, I didn't give a fuck at all, merely a funny, awkward anecdote in my life in the apocalypse. In this new world, there were a lot of things to be more worried about than nudity. I had fought off vectors and hostile people on my underwear...or nothing at all.

But that's a story for another time.

——

I went downstairs and ate two scoops of the powdered eggs, which surprisingly was very tasty than I anticipated. I then noticed that Alfie had put garlic and onion powder, paprika, and dried basil on it from the pantry to give the food an extra flavor. The real thing was not edible, even if the box it came from swore it was. Each of us also had a glass of dehydrated milk warmed up over the pot with water. Thankfully, the oatmeal already had brown sugar and dried maple mixed-in with it, and all we had to do was boil them all together.

Charlie was holed up in a bathroom on the second floor, eyes puffy and red, the stench of bile permeated the space. He didn't get much sleep last night. He used the bathtub as his bed with only a spare sleeping bag and a pillow for his comfort, and if he had any complaints, he had bottled it up long before I walked into the room. We gave him a bowl of food and a glass of milk, but he refused them. I threatened I would cut off his pinky finger and make him swallow it instead, so he emptied the entire plate in ten bites and even licked it dry.

Peter patted his head like a pet dog, but Charlie flinched away from his touch, though the former was merely amused by his reaction until I finally told Peter to stop screwing around with the poor fool. Peter wanted to kill Charlie and be done with it, but I had other plans, and about half of them involved using him as bait. If he survived, well, he had more balls in him than I gathered he had.

It took me about an hour wandering around the house, preparing myself for a scouting mission to the Alphas' base, when I noticed that we were missing one man.

"Where's Jun?" I asked around.

Alfie answered: "He was scouting the neighborhood, clearing the perimeter, he said. I saw him kill six vectors who wandered too close to the gates."

"Alone?"

"He said he worked better on his own."

"On foot?"

"Yes."

"And when was this?"

"Three hours ago, maybe four. It was very early in the morning," and Alfie turned white. He realized that it was too long for a recon. "Bren, it's probably nothing, and he's fine. I didn't think much of it, and I thought he knew what he was doing..."

I whirled around and grabbed my gear, pointing to Alfie to guard Charlie while I went looking for Jun. He could be trapped against vectors, or worse, captured by the Alphas. If he escaped, he could have led them to our location, and we would be compromised. They could be on our front doorstep right now! I marched toward the front windows and peeked outside, but the streets were still and quiet, filled only by the calls of songbirds, and saturated with the hot and humid breeze.

Or he's probably dead on a ditch somewhere, gnawed at by monsters: so many scenarios, so many things to go wrong at once. We decided to wait an hour if he would show up, confident and giving Jun the benefit of the doubt that he would be alright given how much of a fighter he was, but when ten AM became eleven, I had enough of waiting.

Logan volunteered to go with me. We both went down to the ground floor to get to the truck. Then, something landed on the backyard, rolled over the golden-brown, unwatered grass, and I quickly saw the fletchings of arrows sticking behind the man's back. Jun treaded toward us like a panther, his footsteps soft on the ground, until he reached the sliding doors and opened them. Blood streaked his face, and it was clear he had been in a fight.

"Monsters," he said. "Er, vectors."

"How many?"

"Thirty. All dead."

I nodded. This neighborhood was too close to the ruined high school, which was probably still burning down as we spoke and surrounded by many of the town's vectors, drawn by the chaos and the smell. When he opened the doors, there was a distinct whiff of campfire and burnt rubber, but they were faint. Jun told me the fire was too far away to reach us, and if it did, we would be gone by then.

Logan asked: "What took you so long? Dude, we were worried."

Jun flicked his gaze at us, pausing for a beat, and then pulled out a thick pad of paper, which he slowly unfolded to reveal a tourist map of the town. It was mine, the same one I got from the resort, and Jun stole it from me--or borrowed. He added more stuff on it, a bunch of Xs and circles in red and blue markers.

Jun pointed at the southern tip of town and said, "Mall." He then pointed at a red circle with an X west of the mall. "Second school." But Jun wasn't done. He pulled out his smartphone and turned it on, and to my surprise, it was working.

"How?"

"Portable batteries," he said. "The warehouse has a lot of them stored."

"Does the internet works?" Logan asked.

"No."

Logan frowned. "Oh."

Jun flipped the phone and handed it to me. He had opened it to his photos gallery, and my mouth dropped open. Jun had taken dozens of pictures of the mall.

"You scouted it?" I asked.

Jun merely nodded as if it was the most obvious thing. In the photos, dawn had barely broken, the skies turning faded black to a misty blue, and then the sun rose, showing more of the surrounding buildings and the various guards' patrols. He had even gotten closer to their makeshift walls of plywood and stacked vehicles; some were closer to one building. It took me a moment to realize Jun must have observed them for hours, far longer than Alfie estimated, though I had no idea where he hid out of their sight. I handed the phone back to him.

"You should have waited for us. It could have gone ugly," I said.

"Running out of time," he said. "Dawn is the perfect time to go check. Fewer guards, fewer eyes."

Well, he had a point, but I didn't want anyone to go out there without a backup in case things turned sideways, and those turned up without a moment's notice. I had some close calls before, so I knew what that was like.

We went up the stairs to the kitchen where the others were waiting, who started patting Jun's shoulders for making it back in one piece. Jun didn't waste any time telling us what he had found. He grabbed a paper from the printer and started drawing the layout of the strip mall. The entire property was made out of nine buildings total, four of which were arranged together in a semi-circular, moon-shaped fashion, facing the massive parking lot east of their facade. Four buildings jutted out straight from each of the first four, like rays of the sun, but the last building was the smallest one, separated by the rest at the northwestern corner, overlooking the highway up on a shallow hill.

Most of their makeshift walls surrounded the parking lot, which the Alphas had used the space to build tents and parked trailer homes in. The wall, made out of plywood, vehicles, and other odds and ends, stacked at around eight feet high, and the only two entrances were from its southern end with a proper working gate made for vehicle entry, and at the northern tip, a converted school bus, which their soldiers used in and out. About a dozen guards were at each entrance.

"So we can't go through that," Peter said. "What about the rest?"

"A chain-linked fence surrounded the entire perimeter—barbed wires at the top, double-coiled. Like the high school," Jun answered.

Everyone groaned. Alfie said, "We can cut through the wires. There are bolt cutters in the garage the last time I looked."

"We're gonna get spotted quickly," Peter said. "How wide are the space between the fence and the nearest buildings?"

"Less than thirty meters."

Logan looked at Jun, confused. "Um, non-metric, please?"

I turned to him. "Almost the length of a football field."

"Ah. Got it."

"How many guards?"

"I counted a dozen men patrolling the parking lot, a dozen more up the roof. A dozen more scattered around to do a perimeter check once every hour. They never missed a beat."

"We're gonna have to do it in the dark, then."

"Yes, but I don't think we can wait that long. I'm worried what they will do to Haskell and the others," Peter said. "If I were them, I'd slit their throats for revenge and throw their bodies over the walls as a warning to us."

I flinched and regarded Jun once again. I had feared the Alphas' retaliation since last night after we killed too many of their own. From what Charlie had told me, Carl, their leader, was furious after losing his men. I hoped they hadn't resorted to all the horrible things I imagined in my head to Haskell, Yousef, and Miguel. There would be a reckoning if they did.

"You didn't see anything else, did you?" I asked.

"No. There was none of that. But there were a lot of people wandering around the parking lot. I thought they were vectors at first, but they all wore the same thing, a white armband wrapped on their right arm. They were picking and hauling boxes onto trucks."

"We never encountered anyone wearing those. How many did you see?"

"About fifty or so."

I tried zooming in on the photos, but the phone wouldn't let me see up close to recognize any of the men with the white armbands. They were merely like silhouettes, smudges on the screen.

"One of our group is middle-eastern, skinny, close to my height, and wounded. If they patched him up, they would have a bandage around his shoulder."

"Yeah, I saw him. He sticks out from the rest since he's the only one who looks like that."

A collective gasp and sigh reverberated across the room. I smiled at Logan and said, "Yousef's alive."

"One is Black while the other's Hispanic. Did you see them, too?" Alfie asked.

Jun paused for a long moment, shifting on his spot. I sensed he was uncomfortable at what he saw. "Most of them weren't White, so it's hard to tell."

A chill crawled up my spine. Since yesterday, I had wondered why they placed all of us in separate trucks. The one we were in could fit the others perfectly, though it turned out they had a motive behind it. I just found one.

"Bring Charlie down here," I ordered. "Let's see what he has to say."

Peter brought Charlie down to the kitchen without his wrists bound, and I gave Peter a stern look. Though he might have chucked the boy as harmless and weak, it was not an excuse to be careless. Weak or strong, anyone could gain an advantage. I kept my mouth shut and pointed the boy to Jun's drawing of the mall's layout.

——

It took almost an hour of discussion, and I was glad I didn't have to wrestle the information out of Charlie because he gave them up like Girl Scout cookies during the holiday season. We might have broken him too well, and I realized he had no love for the Alphas as much as us as I perceived. After all, the same organization killed his parents a few weeks ago, and he was forced to join them as one of their "green" recruits. Still, I could afford to be cautious, taking his words with a grain of salt. Alfie wrote everything down on several sheets of paper.

About eighty armed men guarded the mall's perimeter day and night, but only about half had years of training in handling weapons; some of them were even cops. The other half merely consisted of spuds, their term for non-fighting civilians, who only stood guard at safer spots as a warning bell for their fighters. I made Charlie point out to us where these spud locations were along their walls, thinking perhaps we could go through them. He also mentioned that the single lone building on the northwestern area served as their HQ, or their castle, as it sat on a shallow hill, overlooking the highway next to it and the rest of the mall. That was where Carl and his seven lieutenants would be.

"You killed one of them already," Charlie said, and he looked down on the floor. "So, there's only six you have to worry about."

Ah. Bean. "That means I'm at the top of Carl's shit-list then."

"He probably knew you have us, or you already tortured one of us. He's gonna buff up his defenses, and he might send out his best fighters to come after you."

I caught a hint that Charlie was trying to intimidate me a little, but I let it roll off my shoulder. "Let them come. Let's see how long they last."

"How well-equipped are they?" Peter asked.

"A hell of a lot more than you do, that's for sure," Charlie said. "Most of the weapons we have were wrangled off the CRA and the army, including from nearby towns we raided: guns, food, trucks, equipment, hell, everything."

"Explain to me the men with the white armbands," I said.