ALIVE: The Aftermath Chronicles (Book 1)

Chapter 2 - EYES IN THE SKY

Four Months Earlier

Calloused hands massage one another. They ache in the knuckles from the settling pressure of coming rain. On Doyle's fingers, he can still smell the residue from the rifles he cleaned earlier. A smell, no amount of scrubbing could erase.

Unlike the civilians of this district, he had a job that meant life or death for himself and the living souls that resided here. His hands needed to be as quick as his eyes at all times, no matter how old he was getting and how harsh his arthritis set in.

Three hundred and eighty-five days passed behind the barbed wire, with no promise to ever return home.

No longer did there exist a printed calendar to cover the year, the months, the days. These were the years of starvation, disease, and endless bloodshed.

Nothing belonged to him here. Nothing counted in the tally of empty days that passed.
The sniper rifle at his side, the scope gave him an extended sight to do the one thing in this life he'd ever been good at—to kill.

His existence counts in notable events since the carrion virus took an unknown patient zero, then spread across countries from new host to new host.

First: the emergency news broadcast came, where he got the call for him to return to his duty. Second: searching for her. Third: when the country divided, even within states, and drew territory lines. Fourth: Never finding her. Fifth: when the first district, then the next, fell victim to the infected. Sixth: when the districts began turning on one another. And now, there was the seventh event in James Doyle's life. This day. The day they found another survivor.
She'd been out there, after all this time, on her own.

Rumors abound, Doyle listens to the chatter over the radios. From the rooftop of his designated building, he watches the boxy military truck roll through the emptied streets.

He lifts his rifle, his scope lining the cross-hair over the vehicle. Aiming it, he tries to spy on the newcomer that kept the district buzzing with new life.

Hope, awe, excitement—each civilian face he scans beams a rediscovered light. His scope travels over the buildings, finding hope that not all is lost out there beyond the district fences.

Nothing this exciting happened these days in District 1, dissociated from the rest of the surviving world, the boredom could onset madness. Ironic, really, with the dead abound beyond the wires of their home, starving to rip them all apart.

"Can you see her?" One of the soldiers asked from the radio device planted in his ear.

"No. You?" Doyle replies, his cross trailing the boxy vehicle till it passed out of sight behind another stretch of tall buildings.

"How did she make it out there?" Another soldier's voice chimes in over the frequency.

Static—it's the soundtrack to their thoughts. Doyle's own unspoken cage rattles among the men and women from all Army units and ranks. Never again could they take leave, could they retire. Forever indebted to his service, it gave Doyle purpose. In this purpose, however, it brought the constant waking nightmares triggered by the slightest of things.

The blowing of dust on the breeze would do it. Or, a tantrum scream from a child, or even the sight of stretching fire—whatever time his subconscious thought it best to rehash his troubled past reminded him at all times that he'd never escape all he'd seen and done.

Though they can't see him at his post, Doyle shrugs to the last rhetorical question voiced by another soldier.

Across the way, he watches the figures in matching camouflage on each of their rooftops. It's a familiar sight, one that should by every right trigger him too, but it offers him nothing but comfort. It's in seeing their distant figures that he knows he's not entirely alone.