Face-Slapping14 min read
A Hidden Aisle, A Teacher's Mask
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I remember the first sentence Hernando said in the doorway as if it still had the dust of that morning on it.
"Elijah, I heard you have a car—can we borrow it?"
I closed the glass door before his second breath, and the word came out hard and polite: "Sorry. Fuel is scarce. We don't lend the car."
Hernando put a hand to the glass and did not pull away. He looked too thin to be lying.
"It's not renting a car. It's an alliance," he said. "There's a little market hidden in the Lishui complex. No signboard, no license, just a small shop for residents. It hasn't been swept clean. It's far. We'll need a car to haul things back. I can lead. You take most. Give me a little, that's all."
He spoke like a man who had rehearsed his voice but not his expression. It fit together—he and his wife were new in a building, he said, and they were overlooked in the first wave. "We only took valuables when we fled. We thought the shelter would be… different."
Beckett stared down the little jar of chili sauce on our makeshift table. "Where's this hidden place?" he asked bluntly. Beckett wasn't polite. He didn't pretend to be.
Hernando's answer was steady. "It's under my building. No sign. Just for residents. When the mobilization call came, everyone's building leader was outside. My wife and I just moved in. We missed the notice."
I looked at Forrest. Forrest had been a sergeant, not a philosopher. He chewed his instant noodles, judging the man.
"Forrest, you okay?" I asked.
"For once in my life, I'm okay with going somewhere," Forrest said. "We leave at dawn."
I let him have it. If Hernando wanted to trick us, he could not get away with much in the shelter. There were eyes, mouths, and a ledger of favors. We let him in.
He set the jar on our table—the table was the board ripped from the front counter—and smiled like a man relieved. "Thank you," he said a dozen times, each one smaller than the last.
We introduced ourselves. "I'm Elijah Crosby. You can call me Elijah."
"Hernando Carlier. Teacher," he said, pushing his glasses up. "I used to teach."
"Forrest Gilbert," Forrest said, and spat a mouthful of noodles. "Veteran."
"Beckett Durand," Beckett added, "ADC in Ionia, used to pretend to aim."
Ursula poked her head in from the back and offered a sour look. "Spare me the theatrics."
Beckett wiggled his fingers. "Heard you found a stash. Good for you, Hernando."
Hernando flinched only a little and then launched into small, precise sentences about how to get there, which stairwell, what hours zombies are slow, what they'd taken before the world burned. He said it all like a man pointing out diagrams.
"Let's go at dawn," I said. "We pack light. We go in, get what we can, and get back."
"Forrest and I," I added, because we both had something the shelter respected: muscle and a sense of measure.
Hernando's eyes brightened. "Thank you. My wife—Jaqueline—she's waiting. She can't walk far."
"So she will stay," I said. "We'll bring back food."
There were other things I noticed that night. The shelter had a generator rumor. People took fights and favors and currency in poker cards. The big discovery that slept below the surface was the improvised generator system. Hernando pointed it out without theatrics. "They used cars and exercise bikes. The professors rigged it. It runs mostly on human work now."
Beckett snorted. "Human-powered electricity? Sounds like a circus."
Hernando smiled, tired. "It keeps the lights on. It keeps people sane."
That was the shelter's edge: a mirage of order. The generator lights made people sleep with fewer nightmares. It made them grateful. And gratitude got traded for obedience.
Outside, a muscle man leaned against the sweet shop's display, flexing like it bought him courage.
"Hey, Hernando," he sneered. "You found a little helper, huh? You little white-face, better kneel and beg, then maybe I'll let you keep your wife."
His jokes were not accidental. His name was Parker Gauthier. He flexed a meaningless chain tattoo and grinned. Men around him laughed.
Forrest's jaw tightened. "Don't start trouble."
Parker laughed louder. "Why not? We're all friends here."
"I don't like bullies," I said. "And I don't like their jokes."
Parker's grin widened until it was ugly. "Oh? Who's going to stop us? You?"
I didn't wait. The world by then had taught me quick hands and the value of a longer breath. I walked forward and said, "Give him back his dignity."
He rose like a man ready to throw a wall. Then Beckett made a face and Forrest's hand reached for his strap, and a flash of metal appeared at my throat. Things that teach you to hold others in line look small until you really need them.
I pressed the knife into the gap between his sternum and the collarbone. He went still as a dry branch.
"You owe an apology," I said calm, letting my fingers feel the tremor in his breath. "And you owe it to the man you mocked."
His whole face changed—pride to panic, sneer to a mouth trembling. He blurted out what I forced him to say. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I—I'm a garbage man. I'm worthless rubbish." Heaving, he kept going until the performance bent into humiliation. I cut him off.
"To Li—Hernando," I said, meaning his friend. "Now."
He turned his bow and stuttered out apologies. He was loud. He was bawdy. He was small after. People watched and either sneered or softened. Humiliation is a blunt blade. It cuts where horns can't.
He crawled away. The crowd buzzed. That night, I slept with my hand near my knife.
At dawn, we drove. Hernando showed us the gate, the broken barrier, the spoiled estates. The Lishui complex should have been still and ordered. Instead, it smelled of rot and the kind of silence animals leave when they're gone.
The shop on the block looked dead. And then, like a secret kept in a safe, Hernando led us to a service door beneath a staircase and turned a key.
The little market inside was tidy, impossible in a world of looters. Shelves bowed with canned food. Leftover boxes had been dropped into a locked storeroom. Someone had the sense to hide a reserve before the world exploded.
Forrest whistled. "We hit a vein."
We packed methodically—case by case, crate by crate—until three trips would barely do. We lashed the load to the car, to the roof, to a makeshift sled. We worked with the quiet a thief uses: no waste, no shouting.
On the drive back, Hernando leaned forward. "Elijah, we should join the official search teams. They pay two hundred poker cards a day. They have veterans, black-market people, professors. They recruit the able. You should join."
I watched his lips. "Why you want us in?" I asked. "Why include us?"
His voice softened. "Because we need talented people. Because you move well. Because you care."
I saw the praise like a hook. We came back with things people hadn't seen in weeks. The shelter looked. Bryson Duffy—the man they called "teacher"—saw us.
Bryson was a big man dressed in a yellow jacket embroidered with a dragon. He walked like a man who had practiced being calm in a mirror. He stepped into the light and did not hide his pleasure.
"Excellent," he said with a slow smile. "You are the first to bring back this scale of goods in one haul."
He did not look at Hernando. He looked at me.
"Elijah Crosby," he said. "Would you and your friend join the search squad? We pick the best."
"Forrest and I?" Forrest said. He wanted to spit but didn't.
"Of course." Bryson's smile curved as if he had eaten something salty. "We can pay very well."
Hernando's face glowed like a man hoping to get past the gate.
We agreed. Joining the search team then felt like boarding a ship that promised warm rooms. People clapped and whispered. Parker strutted in like a man who already owned the route.
That night we stowed supplies in the shop. People filed by, eyes bright with the small currency of hope. Hernando's wife—Jaqueline—brought warm boxes. "Eat," she said. "My hands can still cook."
Ursula rolled her eyes, then helped the children. Beckett poked into the boxes like a fat sparrow. Forrest kept an eye on the windows.
Then a new voice in the doorway announced a schedule.
"Twelve hours," Parker said, and his throat bellowed. "Search convoy will meet at the hall. Bring weapons. No chicken-** excuses."
People traded glances. Bryson set a projector on the wall and a map lit the room. He drew routes with a pointer. His tone shifted from father to commander.
"Two trucks," he said. "We go west to a warehouse. Its radios say about fifty survivors. We bring one truck back with people, one back with goods. We have the manpower."
Forrest leaned to me and whispered, "Does that sound humanitarian?"
I heard the plan behind the line: "We go in force. Take what we like. Take survivors if they matter." The math of it was wrong. Bryson's words had the cadence of someone who had rehearsed taking things that were not his.
"Why two trucks?" I asked aloud.
Bryson's smile did not crack. "Efficiency."
Forrest scoffed. "And if they resist?"
Bryson blinked, slow. "And if they resist? We have men. We are the shelter's muscle. We take. We keep."
The room's atmosphere shifted. Some people nodded. Others swallowed hard. The sound in my chest was a small drum: we were in a shelter that had turned order into ownership.
For the first time since the outbreak, I felt the edges of that shelter's bright roof curl into a trap.
We met before dawn in the hall. A dozen or so men took seats. The projector showed a route. Hands gripped rifles in the dim. Bryson's yellow jacket gleamed.
"Forrest," Bryson said, "you lead the breach. Elijah—"
He hesitated as if choosing which coin to flip. "Elijah, you will go with softness. You will help bring people back who are not fighters."
He meant my face would be a marketing tool. He had watched my temper at Parker and decided I would serve as a showpiece—the man who had humbled a bully and so could convince others to follow.
The convoy truck's engine coughed awake. We drove. We left the shelter's walls and the glow of the improvised generator behind. The city lay like a skin flayed from bones. We rolled past burned cars and collapsed banners and a broken world.
At the warehouse, the plan fell into cruel shape. Bryson's voice was a calm metronome. We surrounded the building. Forrest and I led the entry team. The warehouse was a warren of cartons, of children smaller than my hand, of elderly stooped men who looked at us like strangers had come in with bad manners.
"They begged for food," Bryson said to a woman who had the look of someone whose hands had made bread.
"Forrest, open that door," Bryson clipped.
We did. Men shuffled out—thin, frightened, and trusting. Bryson's men checked pockets and weighed faces. He spoke to them like a landlord.
"We'll take you to a place with lights," he promised. "We will provide. But you give—half of what you brought. We must share work."
A child looked up at me with a bowl of rice. He blurted, "They will take it."
I felt something hot and old in my chest.
After the warehouse we loaded people and goods. On the ride back the air in the trucks was thick with the smell of someone else's hope. Someone in the back whispered, "They said we'd be safe."
By the time we rolled into the shelter, the air had cooled into a boa of expectation. People gathered. Bryson handed out the narrative: they'd freed people from a warehouse and they brought them home. He did not bring back the whole truth.
That truth waited like a coiled wire in my pocket.
That night, I found the ledger. Hernando had showed me the shelter's accounting earlier when he nervously counted cards. He had trusted me enough to let me see how thin things were, and in a back room with a sleeping Jaqueline, I thumbed pages and found notes that didn't add up.
There were names crossed off. There were poker cards owed as wages that never rose. There were search reports with a blank line where "people returned" should have been filled in. There were notes—different handwriting—counting currency hidden in walls.
I kept thinking of the warehouse's faces. I kept hearing Bryson's voice offering "efficiency" as if it were a kindness.
I could have kept quiet. I could have joined the complacency. I did not.
I stood in the hall the next morning and asked for the projector.
"People have a right to know," I said. I wanted to pitch my voice low, steady, but it shook.
Bryson's smile thinned. He did not say anything. He watched me like a man watching a small flame.
I clicked the slides. The ledger pages rolled up on the screen. Photos Hernando had taken—secret photographs of store rooms with crates marked "shelter reserves"—showed numbers and names. In the photos, Bryson signed ledgers where columns were crossed out. People in the hall murmured. The screen showed a ledger ledger line with a name, then a dash: taken.
"You call it shelter," I said. "You call it sharing. But you use the idea of shelter to take. You kept the best. You pay those who fight and make the rest barter for scraps. You send out our people on dangerous runs and keep their gains for your private stores."
Bryson's eyes narrowed. "You accuse me of theft?" he said, voice soft.
"Of a system," I answered. "Of hoarding. Of turning the search teams into a private army. Of calling murdered routes 'efficiency.' These names—these people—are missing. We have complaints. We have wallets that couldn't be traced because they were listed as 'found by team.' We have witnesses."
Beckett's hand found mine. Forrest's face was like stone.
The room shifted. Men who had cheered Bryson a day before now looked at him as if they were watching the weather turn.
Parker stood, his face gone cold. "You can't—"
"I can," I said. "Because you make me do it."
One by one, victims came forward. Jaqueline's voice trembled as she told a story of a neighbor's daughter who refused to hand over her medicine and then vanished. Hernando—Hernando had his own pages: receipts showing the shelter took from those who had fled earlier. He spoke with a teacher's small cadence, but the words were heavy.
Bryson's reaction went through stages.
At first, he laughed like a man who thought laughter could close doors. "So you present lists," he said. "This is human history. Survival is about choices."
Then he barked, "You try to divide my shelter—"
Then denial: "These are lies. These are accusations by those who want to be free to hoard."
When the projector showed a ledger with Bryson's own handwriting—his signature next to the word "reserve"—his composure cracked.
"No." He said it like a child.
"Yes," said Hernando softly. "You signed this. You ordered half of the goods to the leader reserves."
Bryson's face drained. He looked at the men around him—those he'd made feel powerful—and for the first time, he seemed to count the cost. Their faces did not look the same.
A murmur started. Some people cheered; some wept. Parker felt the eyes and turned to act.
"He's lying!" Parker shouted. "You all know me. He—"
"Shut up," Forrest said. Forrest had never used that tone in months. It reverberated.
People in the crowd recorded. Phones—precious, rare—were pulled out. Someone shouted, "Put it on the wall! Put it on the big screen!"
They did.
The punishment that followed was not simple theater. It was a series of exposures that stripped masks off in different ways because one method would have been too small for what they had done.
First: the ledger and public accounting.
I read aloud entries from Bryson's ledger. Each line peeled away a story. Names were called. People in the crowd stood and told short, direct stories about what they'd lost because of "search team efficiency." One woman said a quiet sentence: "They took my husband's pills and gave me a blank prayer." The room went cold.
Bryson shifted from angry to pale. He tried to justify: "We took what was necessary." The phrase fell like a clothesline.
Second: the witness testimony.
Hernando and Jaqueline brought forward a woman who had been rescued from a caravan of men Bryson had hired. She had bruises and a clear, steady voice. "They promised food," she said. "They took brasswares, a radio, then they left my child tied to a post." Her eyes did not tremble. Her words did.
Third: the demonstrative unmasking.
I asked to be allowed to take Bryson's jacket. "You dress like a leader because others see you as such," I said. "Take it off."
He refused. I told two men to help. One of them was Parker, who had been humiliated before by me. He thought he would back Bryson. He did not.
Forrest stepped forward and, with steady hands, unzipped Bryson's embroidered jacket. The crowd hissed. The jacket was a sign. It came off like a crown. Bryson's face burned.
Fourth: the barricade of betrayal.
A stack of cards—poker cards—was brought. They were the currency. Bryson had used them to pay favor and create loyalty. I asked the crowd to look. Each card had marks: tiny identifications that matched ledgers where Bryson had paid men for "runs." Those men stood and admitted they had taken money and done what they were told. Several of them, seeing the ledger, stepped aside and put their hands on Bryson's shoulders—not to protect him but to show they'd been paid and now were witnesses. It was small, and it was public, and it made the betrayal more human.
Fifth: physical humiliation and public renunciation.
Parker moved like a live wire. He first tried to stop the exposure, then he stopped trying. His chest puffed up as if to show he was still the muscle. But he had been seen in the ledger receiving cards and then delivering businesses to the leader's reserve. The crowd had memories.
They made him kneel—public humiliation for the man who would humiliate others. I stepped forward and asked him to recite his apologies for the things he'd done, not as a forced speech but as questions asked by people he had harmed.
He sank to his knees and then the shape of his face changed: arrogance to shame. "I'm sorry," he stammered. "I was a coward. I helped take—I'm sorry." The crowd's reaction varied: some spat, some nodded. The ritual swallowed him.
Bryson's change was different. He had to lose power in public terms. The worst punishment for a man like him was not a beating; it was a stripping of authority and trust.
We took his ledgers and pinned them to the wall. We put his embroidered jacket in a box and placed it next to the projector as an exhibit. We announced that the shelter's council would be rearranged. We named new stewards—people the community trusted. We voted on sharing the incoming goods.
Bryson moved from laughter to denial, from denial to a slow, wide-eyed horror. The worst moment came when Jaqueline stepped forward to speak in a voice small but full.
"You built a shelter," she told him, "and you built a jail of hearts. You made a market where we should have had a home."
Bryson's face twisted. Tears did not come. He snapped, "You can't—"
"You used fear as a currency," I said. "You chose profit over people."
He tried to bargain. "I kept order. I kept the place safe."
"At the price of people," Forrest said. "You send others to die and call it security."
At that moment something shifted inside his men. He had recruited muscle and teachers and scholars with words like "stability" and "order" and "efficiency." They had been paid for the work. They had been coaxed into doing terrible things. But public affront is like a mirror: you cannot stand being what others see on it.
Parker's apology on his knees was one punishment. Another man, who had been fond of words, was asked to scream apologies into the open so the words could leave their mouths and be heard. People recorded it. They put the recordings on the projector. The whole shelter listened to him confessing where they'd taken goods and where they'd left the ill.
But the main punishment—what I wanted—was the undoing of the structure Bryson had built. He had counted that he could control money and fear. He hadn't counted on the ledger and the projector and the shame of being seen.
Bryson's reaction went through more steps. After denial, there was surprise: the room he had expected to nod instead looked at him and asked questions. After surprise came disbelief: he kept saying, "You can't—this wasn't meant." Next came bargaining: "I'll give you goods. I'll resign." He tried to bargain his way out because bargaining lets men who have lost the game hold on to something. Then came anger: he lunged. Forrest and I held him back. His face snapped between fury and the wet, small sound of a man trying to keep from breaking.
Then, when he realized no spine in the shelter would protect him anymore, he crumpled into silent, obscene pleading. He begged for mercy.
"Please," he said, voice thin. "Please, I—"
The crowd was not merciful. They were tired. Tiredness is a natural judge.
We expelled him from leadership. We put him under watch. The community took the goods he had reserved, cataloged them, and distributed them fairly. We set up a council of survivors—old women, a former teacher, a veteran—people who had no illusions about being gods.
Bryson left in the night, not in a blaze but in a small, broken departure: his jacket left behind, his hands empty.
The spectacle had weight. Men who had been proud were humbled. The muscleman had to eat his words and say them in public. The ledger lay open for everyone to read.
The punishment was public; the reactions were fierce: some cheered, others cried; some filmed, some spat. They all watched as Bryson's mask fell. He had gone from smug to furious to pleading to hollow. People who had once obeyed him now turned their backs. That is a kind of death worse than being dragged out: it's seeing your power become a memory.
After the verdict, people came to talk about rebuilding the rules.
Hernando and Jaqueline took turns teaching how to read the ledger. Forrest taught drills—not for domination but for protection. Beckett taught younger ones to haul and pack. Ursula and a woman named Fisher—she tended small wounds. We shared how to ration. We set up shifts at the generator where no one man or woman had control.
The shelter's lights stayed on. But their glow had changed. It was no longer the glaze of a governor's lamp. It was a circle of hands.
That evening, in the little shop where we'd once argued about borrowing a car, Hernando found me and said quietly, "You did the brave thing."
I looked at him, at Jaqueline putting a pot over a small fire, at Beckett fussing with the packed cans. "We did what was right."
He nodded. "You could have joined them," he said. "You could have been paid."
I thought of the ledger people who had lost things, of Parker gulping on his knees, of Bryson's slow collapse. "I don't like bullies," I said simply. "And I don't want to live in a place that trades bodies for coins."
He smiled a tired smile. "Then we keep the light on, Elijah."
I ran my thumb along the edge of the projector's crashed holder. "No more teacher masks," I said.
Beckett rolled his eyes and laughed. "As long as we keep the jar of chili."
Ursula laughed too. Jaqueline set bowls on the table and said, "Eat."
We did. For the first time in a long time, we ate with both hands free from fear.
The End
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