Sleeping Dogs Lie

Chapter One

We squatted a block away from the Blood Flea House for about a week before we tripped and fell into it. That's standard. Sander has this pattern he likes to follow, and unless we get attacked and people start dying, you can set a timer by him like he's a weekly sitcom from before the Freeze.

There were about twenty of us then.

While Sander takes his four guards over to this new house to make sure it's safe, the rank-and-file among us know their jobs: pack up the old house and cram it into the CAT's trunk and Daniel's sled.

The guards' immediate objective is always to make sure that there are no Skulkers or ne'er-do-wells chilling out in the nooks and crannies. That there are no obvious signs of Blood Fleas.

And there are none of those things.

As soon as the guards come back with the "all clear," Sander sends Daniel and me out to work. Daniel drops our generator off behind the house before disappearing with the CAT into the white screen of the Freeze. Gone to ferret out more fuel resources.

While he is gone, I leave Freya with Gemma and this other guy, Sam. He's a guard who I suppose isn't on the same level of dastardly as the others.

Then I head over to the new house with Sander to look over appliances and the electrical situation. Let's see what we're working with.

Ever since I was an itty-bitty girl, I've been good with electrical things and computers, if I do say so myself. Daddy knew all about that stuff, so he taught both me and Hektor things no one else in the group ever got. Way back when the Freeze first hit, it caused all these electrical surges that whacked all the circuits halfway back to Babylon. Daddy showed us how to put it right when we hook new houses up to the generator. Hek and I were hacking the grid before I was even ten. He was almost three years older than me, but I was pretty good at keeping up with him. We reconfigured old appliances and every old computer we could find. Whenever we'd find a town or city with a grid, Daddy would set us up on the mainframes at the central station, and we'd play around with that stuff for hours... days... We were an awesome team till Hektor got infected last year.

Now it's just me.

Sander leads me into the house through the rolling garage door that the guards popped and propped during their earlier, brief recon. The ridiculous excess wealth of the people who once occupied this space is evidenced in the vehicles still parked there.

One is a shiny Mercedes sedan. Beige-tinted windows shield tawny leather seats, and a deep sienna dash of burled wood wraps the interior in luxury. I know if I were to hack the electric key on that baby and jack it, those seats would heat my hiney right up in a way the family room fireplace in this joint doesn't have a fairy tale's chance of doing.

Parked next to the Mercedes is the most disgustingly ostentatious yellow Hummer I've ever seen. I'm not a super tall girl, but I'm not super small, either. I'm perfectly average in every single way. But the tires on that beast are so huge they nearly reach my chin when I stand next to it. I hate asking Daniel any favors, but I'm sorely tempted to wheedle whatever gas out of him it'd take to get that stupid thing running so I can take it out for a joyride later on.

How ludicrous.

Parked next to those pompous autos is this town's customary chest freezer. I take a sledgehammer to the master lock that wants to keep me from its beefy treasure, and heave the top to have a look inside. There's enough frozen meat and veggies in there to last till the apocalypse. Which, in case you can't tell, has already come.

The veggies are no good. They hardly ever are. But Sander tells the guards to chuck the meat into the drifts behind the house. I don't know what people were thinking when they made those dumb electric freezers before the Freeze. Once Daniel and I get the electric running, if we send power to the freezer, its "freezing" temperature would actually start defrosting any food in there. Stupid to waste all that beef.

The guards have completed their preliminaries and are now conducting a more thorough sweep of the house. They go their way and I go mine as I look for electric.

My first order of business is the fuse box. Everything there has to be in working order and shut off before Daniel gets back and hooks up the generator. No sense in causing further surges. We send power in to different areas little by little and only use it where we need it. Mostly, that means watching TV reruns at night after Gemma's cooked dinner on the electric range.

The fuse box is in the basement, way back in the way-back of the house. I have to wade through piles of discarded life to get there.

A family lived in this house once and owned those hideous cars. Children grew up here.

Most times, I think I've forgotten how to feel things. Forgotten what a good, deep, belly laugh feels like. Or how it feels sad to truly weep. But after I flip the fuses off at the terminal, I sit for a while under the cool glow of my solar cell and look through some of that family's stuff.

And it reminds me of feeling.

There were two blond children who lived there once. A brother and sister. Every photo album I flip through spells this one thing out: although the parents had asinine cars and way too much money to know what to do with, they loved those kids. Big happy smiles. Arms wrapped around each other. Sure, there's plenty of stuff in the basement, but the photos I pore over aren't of stuff. They're of happy people doing things together in a world that used to be bathed in sunlight.

I watch them grow up together in the photos. The sister loses her chubbiness and becomes sleek and svelte and golden. And she never stops wrapping her long, pretty arms around the mother and father. The brother becomes a tall and muscular mirror image of his father. Before I reach the last album, he has a smiling, blond baby of his own on his knee.

The last photos in the last album have 2017 written on the back of them. That was a year before the Freeze happened. If my math is right – and it should be; even though I don't like to keep track of things, I am good at math – that was a little over a hundred years ago.

The blond family makes me sad. What happened to the brother and sister? Did they survive the Freeze and the Blood Fleas? What happened to that smiling baby boy in the last photos? Did he even have a chance to grow up big and strong? Did the sister ever have a family and children, too?

As I sit, huddled and intruding on the wealthy family's happy memories, the sound of Daniel's CAT shakes me out of my reverie.

I'm not usually a sentimental girl, but for some reason I can't explain, I slip a photo of them out of the album's protective covering and slide it into the pocket of my parka.

Something to remind me that the world hasn't always been covered in Freeze. Bitten by Blood Fleas.

It's not long before we have that house up and running. Gemma's grilling steaks in the kitchen. Laughter and light. And we're filling up the four bathtubs with snow, melting it down with water trough heaters I rewired a while back to run extra hot.

We settle down into that extra-large, comfy house. Get prepared to spend at least a week there, hooked up to the TV for movie nights. Living high on the hog in beef heaven. Sucking that baby dry.

Blood Fleas always change everything.