by Anne, Melody
A tear rolled down her son's face before he turned and brushed it away. At ten years old, he was the oldest, and had grown up far too fast after losing his father at the tender age of six. His life had been rough — one day he was laughing in school, making friends, attending Boy Scout meetings, and the next he was running from an enemy he couldn’t begin to comprehend. Her heart ached for her son.
She passed out the very last of their food, taking only four of the precious nuts for herself. It was a few calories that would help her body function as she led the kids to a safer place.
She gazed at her eight-year-old daughter, Cathy, who slowly ate the handful of peanuts her mother had given her. She took her time, delicately taking each small nut in her mouth and chewing it all before adding the next. Her daughter was stunning with her big blue eyes and bright red hair. She’d certainly stand out in a crowd, something Elise didn’t want. She didn’t want the soldiers to take notice of her daughter or son, or the two orphans she was caring for.
They needed to keep their hands off her children. With that thought, her earlier musings of giving up evaporated. She’d do everything within her power to take these kids to a better life. They wouldn’t grow up only knowing despair, not while she had any breath left within her.
“We have to leave tonight. It’s no longer safe here. I've seen the soldiers prowling the neighborhood to the east of us, starting to go through home after home. I haven’t seen them to the north, where there are some nicer places. We’re going to go in that direction. All we need to do is get far enough away to be safe for a night — find a place that has a little food in it so we can refuel our bodies and hopefully get cleaned up a little,” she quietly told the kids.
“Can we go to McDonald's?” Cathy asked in her innocence. Elise had done far too good a job sheltering her kids from the true dangers outside the house. They knew when they were outside they had to stay quiet, lean on each other, and obey her without argument, but they didn’t know that the world was different now and would never be the same again.
“No, baby, I’m sorry, we can’t. There isn’t a McDonald's anymore. I’ll tell you what, though. We’ll find something even better soon, okay?” Elise forced a smile to her lips.
“What’s better than chicken nuggets?” Cathy asked.
Elise was surprised her daughter remembered what those were; it had been so many years since she’d had them. As if her son could read her thoughts, he jumped in.
“The little kids were getting scared because you were gone so long, so I was talking about different stuff. Food came up, and I asked what their favorite thing was. Mine was chicken nuggets,” he said with a defiant shrug. She hated the indifferent yet scared look in his hazel eyes. He truly needed a haircut too. The front of his brown hair was sliding over his eyebrows, making him have to push it back over and over again.
Just a few short years ago, Elise would’ve been horrified if she’d seen children in the condition her kids were in now. They were clearly neglected. She had to do something.
“There are lots of things better than nuggets, Cathy. After we get some food in our bellies and they don’t hurt so much, I’ll tell you all about them. I think it would just make us focus too much on our empty stomachs right now, though, okay?”
“Okay,” Cathy moaned as her stomach grumbled in the quiet room. The sound made Elise wince. She was a mother. If her children needed to be fed, she should be able to do it — not watch as they lost more and more weight. Feeling helpless wasn’t something she was good at.
With a resolve only a scared mother could fathom, Elise stood and started packing the kids’ clothing into their small bags. Her heart filled with foreboding thoughts that their lives had been reduced to nothing more than tiny backpacks that barely held together.
As she finished placing her daughter’s teddy bear inside the pack, a scratching sounded at the bedroom window. She stilled, sending a look toward the children, letting them know silently that all talking must cease immediately.
Straining her ears to listen, she hoped it was nothing more than a rodent trying to get in, or a branch pushing against the house in the wind. When there was a creaking noise, all her hopes were dashed. The noise was from a person — and the person was trying to get in.
Chapter Nine
*** Jayden ***
Wearily, Jayden’s group made their way back toward camp. Sitting in the passenger seat, Jayden fought the dread trying to weigh him down. He could feel the overwhelming depression of his team members, and he was fighting to hold them all together. There was only so much they could expect from him — he wasn’t perfect.
“I can’t keep doing this. Each life I take, each body we burn . . . It feels like another piece of my soul is stripped away,” Marcy whispered in a sob.
“The emotions you’re feeling are good. They’re letting you know that even in the midst of war, you are still human.”
“It just seems so pointless, Jayden. All of the killing — so many innocent lives taken before they had a chance to live. Maybe, if I could understand a reason . . .”
“There’s never a good reason for genocide. This war is nothing more than a power game of malicious forces joining together, fueled by hatred. Yes, Vyco is shouting in their ears — yes, he’s the puppet master behind the entire event, but if there weren’t people willing to listen to him, the war wouldn’t have started. Power changes people. I’ve watched it for centuries. It always starts as a small ripple in the water, but the longer that ripple is left untethered, the wider its reach.”
“Why don’t we just stop, then? If there’s no chance of this ending, why fight it? I’m tired. I can’t watch another body burn — I just can’t do it!”
“We continue because it has to be done.”
“What’s the worst that can happen if we go back to our cave, back to our hideout in the woods where they won’t find us?”
“The worst will happen — total annihilation of your home.”
“If only I could stop caring. If I could learn to look at the enemy as nothing more than empty bodies, maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much when I watch life drain before my eyes.”
“The day you can look at a dying man — even your enemy — and feel nothing but an empty void is the day you should walk away. Your humanity is too high a price to pay for survival. Because if you give that up, you’ve fallen to the dark side.”
The truck went silent again as Marcy contemplated his words. What if her soul was already gone? Maybe it was too late for her.
“It’s not too late, Marcy. I can feel the warm glow surrounding you. You’ll accomplish great things — in this life and in the next. Don’t give up,” Jayden said as he turned to face her, their eyes connecting.
Marcy looked away, knowing she was a fool. Over the months as she’d fought side by side with Jayden, she’d begun to fall in love with him. It was just one more road in the many highways she’d traveled in the last few years that would end in disaster. She knew he and Phoenix belonged together. Everyone knew that. He was a good man — a very good man. And they were incredibly hard to find these days.
With a grave heart, she leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes, willing her mind to shut down so she could rest for the remaining miles they needed to travel that day. When she finally saw the base, her muscles eased. She needed to be alone.
They arrived at the gate and the guards let them in while openly looking into the beds of the trucks, trying to see what the team had brought back. Scavenging missions were important for their survival. They had to have a constant supply of food and household items coming in, or they couldn’t accommodate all the new refugees. With no new products being produced in factories, they had to rely on what was in the abandoned stores and empty houses.
While out scavenging for products, the teams also eliminated rotting food and products that were causing the constant foul odor permanently residing in the air. By doing this, it helped to
control the infestation of rodents and bugs before it got too far out of control.
Smog might be a thing of the past, but Jayden would take smog any day over the smell of trash-filled streets and rotting bodies with rodents and insects crawling all over them — not to mention the hordes of feces coating the inside of buildings.
People who had been killed in the first attack had long ago turned into nothing but skeletons, leaving the job of burying their remains easy. Food, on the other hand, didn’t disappear so easily when it was enclosed in sealed spaces. No one wanted to open refrigerators, cringing when they did. Luckily, their team had military facemasks that blocked the stench. Otherwise, none of them would be able to dispose of the spoiled food or mangled humans.
They still found freshly slaughtered bodies each time they left the base as the enemy soldiers were actively looking for new victims to torture and kill. None of them ever grew immune to the horrors they constantly found.
“I see team kill is back,” Miranda snarled as Jayden stepped from the truck. He’d picked up the annoying mortal custom of rolling his eyes, a maddening habit he wasn't happy about and fought against doing, though around Miranda, he couldn’t seem to stop.
Miranda was in her early forties, a pre-war teacher, and angry at the world. She was under the misguided impression that they could peacefully work it out with the enemy. Jayden didn’t know what she expected, but he knew they weren’t all going to be sitting around a burn pile singing campfire songs anytime soon.
She was anti-guns and anti-war. Jayden wasn’t thrilled with the war, but the bottom line was they were in one, and they could either sit still for their enemy to come and wipe them out, or they could fight back, make an aggressive stand and take back their country. He chose the latter.
“Good morning, Miranda. I hope you’ve had a pleasant night,” Jayden said, ignoring her name-calling as he attempted to stroll past her. He hadn’t seen Phoenix in days and that was his sole purpose at the moment.
He could feel Miranda’s irritation rolling off her in waves. Her friends gathered around, quickly forming a circle while glaring at Jayden and the rest of his team. They often made it known they thought he was the cause of all the deaths — if he wasn’t so gung ho on destroying the soldiers, maybe they’d stop attacking. They were living in a fantasy world, but he understood their hope of peace.
“Of course I didn’t have a pleasant night, Jayden. How could I possibly sleep, knowing you and the others were out slaughtering innocent bystanders?” she snapped. Her group muttered their agreement with their self-voted leader.
“I’m sorry you had a hard night, Miranda, I truly am. But we don’t go out there wanting to kill anyone. We go out looking for supplies, trying to fix what we can to make our lives better, and to find more refugees. When we are attacked, we have no choice but to defend ourselves. Would you rather we sat down and let them shoot us? What else do you expect us to do?” he asked, genuinely curious about her answer. He was surprised he’d never asked the question before.
“If you weren’t there with your weapons drawn, looking like a threat, they wouldn’t start shooting.”
“Miranda, where were you before you found our group?”
“I . . . well, I was in hiding,” she answered cautiously.
“Why were you in hiding?”
“I had to protect my people,” she answered defensively.
“Who were you protecting them from?” He could see she was trying to find a way out of answering his questions, but her group members were listening. If he’d been shouting, rude, or sarcastic, they could easily take him as being arrogant and walk away, but because he sounded reasonable, they were interested in what he had to say.
“I don’t know. I was just told to run — to hide. I didn’t think to argue. Then, after years of being afraid, of slinking from one hideout to the next, of losing some of my dear friends, I knew enough was enough. I decided to talk to the soldiers, just me. The men I ran into turned out to be evil men, who did unspeakable things to me, but that doesn’t mean all of them are evil. Even though they violated my body, they still let me go. They didn’t kill me,” she answered defensively.
“Are you telling me that you think what they did to you was okay?” Jayden asked in shock.
“No. Don’t twist my words. I didn’t say it was okay. I just said they didn’t kill me. I decided to wait a while longer before going out again. I made it back to my group and a month later some of your scouts found us and brought us here. I’m not saying all of the soldiers are good men. I’m saying you don’t need to go out there looking for a fight.”
“I wish it was as easy as that, Miranda. If you’d seen a fraction of what’s out there, I think you’d feel a lot differently about your convictions. The prison camps, the bodies strewn in the streets, left to rot in their own blood and waste. I’m not only speaking of men — but women and children as well. My intent in saying this isn’t to hurt you. I’m trying to help you understand why we do what we do. We have to go out beyond these fences — to gather food and supplies — and also to bring more survivors here. We want to rescue as many people as we can while also starting to take back our home. Do you really want to stay locked behind these walls forever?”
“Just give up, Miranda. He doesn’t hear you. He’s made up his own reality and won’t be happy until the rest of us are brainwashed,” one of her followers said as she stepped forward and wrapped an arm around Miranda.
Jayden clenched his teeth, feeling anger begin to boil inside him. Phoenix had greatly helped to calm him, had pushed the dark forces deep down inside him, but they were still there, still simmering, easily waiting to boil over. When he was pushed, as he was being pushed right then, he had to mentally talk himself down from wanting to strike out.
“You’re right. We’re leaving,” Miranda huffed as she turned and started stalking away. Her friends sent more stink-eye glares in Jayden’s direction before faithfully following her. Jayden watched them go, realizing his fists were clenched at his sides. He let out a relieved breath as they disappeared.
He felt better knowing he was about to see Phoenix. The dark thoughts disappeared as he continued in the direction of Phoenix’s room with rising anticipation.
“Don’t let her get to you. She’s just scared,” John said as he patted Jayden’s shoulder. “You know the rest of the base is more than grateful for what we do. Don’t let a few bad apples spoil the pride we feel in helping others.”
“I know. I just want to see Phoenix right now. I can’t think of anything else,” Jayden said, not even wanting to stop long enough to speak to John.
“I understand. Cassidy is back. I can feel her. I’ll see you tonight,” John said as he left. Jayden was right behind him for a few yards, before they split off and went in separate directions.
Jayden felt Phoenix’s heartbeat and sensed her unique warmth. She was close. Without realizing it, his feet lifted from the floor and he moved the last several yards to her door without touching the ground.
Chapter Ten
*** Phoenix ***
We’ve been having strange weather. I know that sounds like the beginning of an awkward dinner conversation when you have nothing else to say to the person you’re sitting across the table from, but honestly, it’s been increasingly worse.
Both western Oregon and Washington are known for their rain — it seems to rain ninety percent of the year — but that’s not what I mean when I say the weather has been strange.
The ground trembled as if we could possibly have an earthquake, and the ocean has been surging. I’ve overheard the elders talking about a possible tsunami. They worry we can’t stay here long, that we’re sitting ducks on this island.
On top of the unusual weather, there’s been dissension on the base. A woman who joined us a few months ago seems to think we’re the bad guys. My father told her that she and her followers were welcome to stay or go, we weren’t trying to hold them against
their will, but they haven’t left yet.
Dad has guards secretly keeping an eye on them because he thinks they might be dangerous. Miranda is their ringleader, and she’s a really small woman, but my father says it’s not your size that counts, but the power behind your words that can cause untold damage. For now, we just wait and watch.
Waiting around seems to be the theme of my life. I’m constantly waiting to see what happens next. Jayden tells me to have faith, but there are days I don’t know what to have faith in. The nightmares still come, making me afraid to close my eyes, but having Jayden, John, and Sadie with me helps. I just wish Jayden and John weren’t gone so much.
Jayden promises it will get better. I have to believe him, because if I sink into this miserable train of thought that our lives will never change, I don’t want to get out of bed in the mornings. That doesn’t help anyone. So for now, I wait . . .
Phoenix jumped as her door was thrust open. Fright turned to joy in a millisecond as she watched Jayden float into the room, the sight of him so beautiful it took her breath away. She decided immediately not to tell him about the shooting incident on her raid with Cassidy. If he found out she’d almost been shot, he’d come unglued, and she didn’t want to focus on that or hear the lecture she’d receive about how important her safety was and why she shouldn’t leave the base. Right now, she just wanted to be alone with him.
“I missed you,” she whispered at his approach.
“Ah . . . you have no idea how much I’ve longed for you these past days,” Jayden groaned as he pulled her into his arms.
Phoenix’s heart sang as his head dropped and their lips connected, sparking magic all the way through her. Each time he touched her, fire ignited inside her body and she couldn’t get close enough. She’d never understood the desire for adults to have sex, but the longer she was in Jayden’s arms, the more she thought about lovemaking. She knew she wasn’t ready, but oh, the thought of lying in his arms night after night . . .
