Belize

Chapter Five

Billy stuck his hands in his pockets and walked with his head down. He wasn’t in a hurry exactly, but he didn’t have time to waste either. The walk from the apartment to the harbor was twenty-five minutes, and he rarely gave himself more than about half an hour to get there. One of these days, he was going to be late for work because of an unexpected detour, but he would deal with that when it happened. He simply couldn’t bring himself to wake up for work any earlier. He’d never been much of a morning person.

His life in Belize was far from perfect, but he had to remind himself that it could be much, much worse. He had a job and a place to live. The weather was nice. It was certainly preferable to rotting away in a prison cell for the rest of his life. But so much could have gone wrong, it almost amazed him that he was actually alive and free. He and Rebecca could have been detained at the border. They could have been killed during the outbreak and reanimated as undead things. Considering the alternatives, living here in Belize was a veritable paradise.

His thoughts, as usual, strayed to Rebecca. On the surface, they were a normal couple. Their neighbors probably didn’t think they were anything out of the ordinary, except for the fact that they were American. No one knew that they had experienced the events of Raccoon City first-hand, and both of them wanted to keep it that way. The last thing they wanted was to bring unwanted attention to themselves.

Billy didn’t even know his current legal status. His parents had not received any kind of notification of his death, but in the aftermath of Raccoon City’s destruction, it was possible that his name had simply slipped through the cracks. If he was legally dead, then in some ways it actually made his life easier. But technically, Billy shouldn’t be declared dead at all.

The Arklay Military Penitentiary, where Billy had been sentenced to spend the rest of his life, had not been destroyed by the nuclear missile that struck Raccoon City, as it was safely beyond the blast radius on the other side of the mountains. All of the inmates and prison staff had since been moved to another location due to fears of radiation exposure, but the compound was still standing.

Billy had never arrived at the penitentiary, but for some reason, no one seemed to have noticed. The two military police officers transporting him were dead – killed by the creature that used to be a man named James Marcus – but no one seemed to have noticed that either. It was hard to believe that no one had raised an alarm the moment he failed to arrive to serve out his sentence, but as far as Billy knew, no one was looking for him at all. His escape and the deaths of those two nameless officers had apparently been swept under the rug. And after the destruction of Raccoon City, they just became a few more victims of the terrifying epidemic, just a couple of additions to the already sky-high death toll.

From what Rebecca had told him afterward, the local police department had started an investigation into the events that took place in the woods that night and the following night, but the entire investigation had been a fraud. Rebecca said that the Chief of Police in Raccoon City was somehow involved in the outbreak and was secretly trying to cover it up. But even if that was the case, the military would still be looking for Billy. Even if they didn’t accuse him of murdering the two guards in his escape, they would still make him serve out his original sentence. And he had escaped custody several days before the epidemic in Raccoon City, so by then it was impossible that they had not been notified of his disappearance. Billy simply couldn’t understand how he had gotten away without the military even knowing about it.

Was he a fugitive? Did the government even know he had escaped? His parents had been told nothing. If he hadn’t contacted them, they might very well think he was still in prison. And if he wasn’t a wanted man, did that mean he could return to the United States? His family had gone to extreme lengths to get him fake documents so he could leave the country, but the urge to return home was a constant presence in his mind. The whole thing was enough to drive him crazy.

And then there was Rebecca. They’d been living together for six months now, but he still had trouble believing that she was serious about staying with him. Why would she throw her life away like that on someone she barely knew?

When they first arrived in Belize, he had no idea what they were going to do. He didn’t even know how he was going to make money. Rebecca had plenty of career options, but the only thing that Billy knew how to do was be a soldier, and he didn’t think the Belize army would be interested in hiring an American with a fake passport. His job prospects were sadly limited. Maybe he could find work as a security guard or a bar bouncer, but he had no degree and no real job skills aside from his military experience.

Sometimes he worried about his tattoo. His right arm, from his shoulder to his wrist, was covered in huge curving black letters spelling out the words “Mother Love.” He worried that it was too identifying, but the only option was to have it removed or altered, and they didn’t have the money for that. And in the warm tropical weather, he couldn’t wear long-sleeve shirts all the time without someone getting curious. The odds that anyone he knew would ever run into him in Belize were so incredibly low that he just left the tattoo alone and made vague plans to do something about it later.

A few days after they first settled into their apartment, he went down to the harbor and checked out all the docks and marinas and nearby businesses, looking for Help Wanted signs. There seemed to be plenty of work for day laborers helping unload boats, untangle fishing nets, and carry tourists’ luggage. Eventually he managed to talk to the supervisor of a private marina who wanted to hire some workers for the upcoming summer tourism season.

Out of sheer luck, Billy was exactly what the manager was looking for. He was big and strong, handsome and personable, and he spoke perfect American English. The manager immediately hired Billy to help do maintenance on the boats in the marina, load supplies and carry equipment back and forth, and do whatever other random jobs needed to be done. It wasn’t glamorous and it didn’t pay very well, but it was a job.

After a brisk twenty-four-minute walk, he reached the gate to the marina. One of his coworkers, a local boat mechanic named Manuel, was standing at the gate, smoking a cigarette.

“Hey, Rambo,” Manuel said as Billy walked by.

Billy had let slip that he’d been in the Army, and now some of the other marina workers called him Rambo as a joke. Billy didn’t find it that funny, but he smiled politely when they said it. He entered the marina and went to the front office to get his daily assignments from the manager, a portly man with graying hair named Santiago. They had a dry erase board in the office with the schedule for which boats needed inspections or other work, what maintenance had to be done, and the kind of work needed for the marina itself, repairing docks, replacing ropes and other equipment, painting and cleaning, and even scooping out trash in the water. Billy did most of those less-desirable jobs.

“Good morning, sir,” he said as he went into the office.

Santiago was on the phone. He nodded briefly and waved at the board. Billy stuck his hands in his pockets and took a long look. They had more than fifty boats docked at the marina, and each one of them needed regular inspections to make sure everything was in good working order. The people who owned the boats normally called in the day before if they planned on taking their boats out for a sail, but sometimes they just showed up unannounced. Especially at this time of year, they had to be prepared to get every single boat in the marina ready to go in a very short time. Today’s schedule was pretty ordinary, and Billy made a mental note of the boats he was supposed to check on and the jobs that needed doing.

He waited until his boss was off the phone and asked, “Sir, I know this is last minute, but would it be all right if I left work early today, maybe at noon?”

“Leave work?” Santiago asked. “Why, you got somewhere else you got to be?”

“It’s my girlfriend,” Billy said. “We … well, we had a bit of a fight this morning, and I wanted to meet her at her job and surprise her with flowers or something. I mean, it’s okay if you can’t let me go early, but I thought I would ask.”

Santiago put his hands on his hips and cleared his throat as he examined the schedule. “You just been here a couple months. Normally, you got to give me a week notice for stuff like that.”

“I understand, sir.”

“Tell you what.” He grunted and came to a decision. “You and Ricky finish clearing out the big green supply shed and reorganizing all that stuff, and I’ll let you leave early. But I want everything out, the whole place cleaned, and everything put back before noon. Think you can pull that off?”

“Absolutely, sir. Thank you.”

“Don’t ask me for a favor like this again, though,” Santiago said. “You work hard and I like you, but I can’t be letting guys leave early. I’m trying to run a business here.”

“I promise this is just a one-time thing. I won’t do it again.”

“Good.” As Billy began to walk away, Santiago added, “And if you and your girl make up tonight, I want to hear all the details tomorrow.”

That made Billy laugh. “Sure thing, sir. All the dirty details.”

Santiago winked at him. “All right, get out of here.”

Billy left the office and walked to the farthest dock at the back of the marina, which was where they tied up the long-term ships which had not been taken out very recently. A few of the boats had been docked in the marina for two or three years. Whoever owned them kept paying the marina fees, but their boats basically collected dust. Billy couldn’t imagine owning a sail boat and just letting it float in a marina for years at a time. If he owned a boat like that, he’d take it out every day.

At the end of the dock was a storage building full of spare fishing equipment, life preservers, ropes and pulleys, tools, and tons of other items that were just stacked haphazardly. They even had a power washer, a portable gasoline generator, and a lawn mower in there, but they were buried in the back. Billy’s mission for the day was to clean it out and reorganize everything.

His job wasn’t so bad, and it would get better if he kept working there for a year or two and was no longer the low man on the totem pole, but it wasn’t exactly a career. Billy didn’t want to be stuck working as a dock hand for the rest of his life, but he didn’t know what his other options were. The few jobs he was qualified for were service jobs, working in restaurants or stores or other businesses catering to the constant stream of tourists visiting Belize. He supposed he might look for work doing some kind of customer service, but he didn’t think that kind of job would suit him.

Rebecca was always going to make more money. Billy didn’t necessarily care about that, but he wondered how Rebecca felt about it. She had never brought it up, and seemed content that both of them had found jobs relatively quickly, but what about a few years down the road? If Billy was still doing low-paying labor jobs, would that change how she felt about him? Their relationship was already unbalanced in a lot of ways. If Rebecca went on to become successful and Billy was stuck working dead-end jobs, it would inevitably put pressure on them.

He still couldn’t quite wrap his head around their relationship. He had tried to convince her go back to Raccoon City after they escaped the events at the abandoned chemical plant. He told her that it would never work out between them. He was a convict and a fugitive with no future, and she was a police officer with a great life ahead of her. The smart thing to do was to go their separate ways and never see each other again. But Rebecca simply refused to do that.

And now after six months together, he sometimes joked to himself that their honeymoon was over. The initial thrill of moving to Belize had slowly been replaced by the normal day-to-day grind of their respective jobs, and the exciting first few weeks of their relationship had faded away to reveal the little annoyances that everyone saw in their partners. Rebecca was a morning person, and he was not. She was also a bit of a slob, and their apartment was a mess despite his best efforts otherwise. But Billy had never actually lived with any of his former girlfriends, so being with someone was a new experience for him anyway.

The fact that they were thousands of miles away from their families, in a strange foreign country, trying to live together when they still didn’t really know each other, just made everything more complicated. He still didn’t even know if they were compatible people. Did they have the same political views? The same religion? The same taste in music? When they arrived in Belize City, everything had been up in the air. Things had settled down a little bit, and if he had to be honest with himself, he thought things were going pretty well. But how long could it really last?

They had been through some extremely traumatic events. They had risked their lives together and saved each others’ lives. They had a connection that even Billy couldn’t deny. But was it enough to really base a relationship on?

What was going to happen if Rebecca got homesick and wanted to go back to the United States? Billy couldn’t risk going back, not until he got his hands on better documentation. What if she tired of their life on the run? What could Billy say to convince her to stay with him? Or more importantly: Did Billy really want to convince her to stay at all? Deep down, he still believed that she was better off without him.

And even deeper down, a terrible part of him wanted her to leave.

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