The Last War Series Box Set [Books 1-7]

by Schow, Ryan

  So we pull up to this quaint little clapboard house painted tan with bleach white trim and dark gray accents. The two story has lots of windows and a very quiet look about it. I like it already. Of course, anything’s better than The Warden’s cot.

  Marcus pulls up on the sidewalk, cuts the engine. We all pile out, the three of us following Marcus up to the porch.

  Glancing down he says, “Yep, we’re good.”

  “What are you looking at?” Corrine asks.

  “Small stick against the door. If it’d been knocked off, that would mean someone came in, but the stick is there, so we’re good.”

  “What if the wind had blown it over?” Bailey asks.

  Marcus levels her with a stare.

  “Really?”

  “Sorry,” she replies, her cheeks turning bright red, “just asking.”

  Marcus kicks over a narrow white fence, goes around back and appears a few minutes later to open the front door from the inside. We walk in and immediately feel good inside the space. I look back and see Bailey taking in everything. Corrine is also looking around, cautiously absorbing the details of the modest space.

  “This is nice,” Bailey says. “Lots of light.”

  “Lots of entry points for someone who isn’t afraid to go through glass,” Marcus mumbles. “Then again, this was the one I was hoping would stay vacant. The entire center of the house is an open-air courtyard.”

  Beyond Marcus, there’s floor-to-ceiling glass with a view of a large outdoor patio. True to Marcus’s word, the patio is walled off on all four sides from the house. Hanging outdoor lights are strung around the open space; four chairs circle a decorative fire pit that looks like it must have cost a fortune. It’s one of those circular crystal-bedded numbers that produces a lake of flames inside a bejeweled fire pit.

  “There are two bedrooms on the other side of the house, although the smaller of the two has a bathroom out here. There’s a bedroom up front here, too. Smaller than the others, but it’s got its own bathroom. If you’re okay with that, Corrine, maybe you could stay there?”

  “It’s good,” she says. “I just want to…”

  “To what?” I ask.

  Corrine and Marcus exchange looks, then she says, “I’m good. I’ll be fine.”

  “Anyway, I’ll take the couch near Corrine’s room at the front of the house,” he says. “But Nick you’ve got to be aware if someone breaches the rear entrance.”

  “We can share a room,” Bailey offers, standing closer to me. If I tried to conceal my surprise, I know for sure I did a terrible job of it.

  Marcus looks from me to Bailey and then back to me.

  “Already?” he asks, surprised, but not surprised.

  “Stockholm Syndrome,” she jokes. “We slept in the same room for a few days, although he was in a cage and I was in a box. That’s an interesting story when you’ve got the time. But not interesting in an uplifting kind of way.”

  Marcus straightens up, lifts an eyebrow. The guy has no idea what we survived. Then again, I have no idea what he and Corrine survived. Maybe the gauge of who we will become in this nasty new world won’t be measured by what we’ve survived but in what we had to do to survive. I had to kill. It sounds like Marcus did as well. And Bailey? She was kidnapped, physically assaulted and her dignity was ripped from her. My dignity was a thing of the past, also. I was pissed on, beaten up, imprisoned, forced to play nice with a psycho…

  Looking around, happy to have a home, even if it was once someone else’s, I can’t help thinking this is humanity’s next awful adventure. Taking what you need when you need it. Survival by all means. Running, squatting, stealing, self-defense without limits.

  Back to Marcus.

  He’s looking at Bailey, curious about her statement. Wanting to know what we had to do to get us to this point. Or maybe he wants Bailey for himself and he’s wondering why she’s now offering to sleep with me. Guys can be like that: unpredictable with women.

  “We’ll have time to hear your story tonight over dinner,” Marcus says, now obviously intrigued, which is something I thought I’d never see in the man since showing interest in others doesn’t seem to be one of his strong suits. “Nick, you want to help me with the food and guns and the girls can get to know each other?”

  “Sure thing.”

  Outside, Marcus looks at me and says, “I didn’t take you for much when we first met, but don’t take that personal. I was an asshole where I came from. Had to be. It was a condition of my unit, but an expectation, too. With what I did in the Army, I turned…callous, I guess. Basically when you met me, I hated everyone. Don’t take offense, but I still do.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I feel bad that Quentin’s dead, and I figured you and I would have more of a journey together. Then you didn’t come back. Bailey was gone. Now you’re back and you’re clearly together, and I guess I’m saying, I don’t want to hate everything so much anymore.”

  I’m looking up at the big man, at his ruffled beard, at the cuts on his face and the steely gaze in his eyes. What did he go through in the military? What did he survive? The thing about guys like Marcus is you only know what they’ll show you. The rest they keep private.

  “Are you saying you like us then?” I ask with a bit of lightness in my voice.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” he mumbles as he pulls open the truck’s door. “Grab the guns, I’ll get the ammo. Then we’ll come back for the perishables seeing as how the fridge might not work.”

  “Yeah, it’s not working,” Bailey says, popping her head out the front door.

  “Perishables first. Salad without dressing, green beans, got some hot dogs we can roast over those stupid ass crystals out back.”

  Looking at him, marveling at the things he’s saying, I say, “I didn’t take you for having a sense of humor, dark or otherwise.”

  “It’s a work in progress.”

  He hands me an eighteen pack of beef hot dogs, a bag of buns and some lettuce.

  “I’ll find the other stuff. I think there’s mustard, and maybe some tomatoes in here. And I know Corrine brought out the beans because I asked her to.”

  “What’s the deal with her anyway?”

  “She was in a bad way,” he says falling still. Looking at me, he says, “She needed someone to take care of her. Basically the guys that killed her dad tried to turn her into a…commodity.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do I need to spell it out for you?” he asks, bristling a touch.

  “I can’t read your mind, bro.”

  “A sex slave. Jesus man, I was pretty clear.”

  He wasn’t, but whatever. I get it now. “Good God,” I hear myself saying. “What the hell is wrong with these people?”

  “Sex trafficking is one of the biggest businesses in the world. It’s done in Hollywood, LA, Washington D.C.; it’s done worldwide, almost like a currency for the over-privileged elite. Instead of buying a foreign girl, or trafficking them over from places like Ukraine, or Taiwan, guys like the one’s she met—soulless opportunists—they just snatch them up, break them in then sell them off. It’s genius if you think about it from the criminal perspective. And you don’t have to be very bright to engage in such commerce. You only need to have connections, and it seems as though one of these guys did.”

  “But now they don’t.”

  “Now they don’t have their lives,” he grunts, going back to work. Then he stops. “I felt bad at first, doing what I did, because it was…not the way I wanted things to go. But then again, I didn’t know how I wanted them to go. I guess I just needed food and weapons for us, and they had them all. And along the way, I guess some girls got free.”

  “How’d you find them?”

  “Happenstance.”

  “You’re telling me this was fortuitous?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You doing God’s work now?” I ask half prodding, half curious about his mindset. />
  Looking right at me, stern and serious, almost like his stare has a measurable weight to it, he says, “Nothing I’ve ever done was God’s work. Let’s get that straight. Everything I’ve ever done was for Uncle Sam and Uncle Sam alone. God would never sanction the things I’ve done.”

  “You don’t need to sound so morose,” I say. “What you did was a good thing.”

  “Walk a day in my shoes, skater boy,” he retorts, snide.

  “I think we’re about to follow the same path, Lumberjack Jim. You don’t have to get your vag in a twist over every little thing.”

  Looking down on me from inside the truck—Marcus having a fifty pound weight advantage (most of it being lean muscle) and a good three or four inches in height, plus a crap ton of combat experience by the sound of it—I really feel the turmoil in this man’s spirit. He has that edge to him, most of it honed and sharpened and unnerving to more peaceful guys like me.

  “And here I thought you and I were going to get along,” I say, seeing his mean side.

  “I haven’t shot you yet,” he says, turning back to the truck to grab a twenty-four pack of water. Handing it to me, he says, “That’s something, right?”

  “Is this your version of friendship?” I grouse, trying to hold everything.

  “I’ll slap your back in a minute and we’ll share a beer. Hell, we’ll even travel the same roads, try to protect our women, and eventually get you home to see Indigo. Now if I can do all that and not die, kill you or lose anyone to the kinds of human trash now roaming the streets, we’ll revisit the idea then.”

  “You know I’m not vested in being your friend, don’t you?” I ask, tapping into a darker side of myself.

  “No one ever is,” he replies.

  We sit around the crystal fire pit talking about this and that, and then Marcus says, “So what happened to you guys? I mean, that idiot who shot Quentin and took you, he’s what happened, right?”

  Bailey looks at me and says, “Do you want to tell it?”

  I swallow hard, avert my eyes for a second, then take a deep breath and say, “Yeah. I guess.”

  Looking at Marcus, thinking if he can save this girl from sex slavery and maybe kill some people for a higher cause, then I can talk about peaches and me saving people from the wrath of The Warden. For a second I look at the fire we made on top of the crystal fire pit on account of no gas, then my eyes clear and I come back around.

  “Basically the lunatic was obsessed with punishing people for stealing from his mother’s neighborhood. His mother was the woman with the Botox and the fake tits we first met when we got to the island. Anyway, he wanted to punish Bailey for stealing and he just got a bit carried away.”

  To Bailey, Marcus said, “He took you at gunpoint, cracked you over the head with a gun a couple of times, tased you…”

  “Yeah, all that I can deal with,” she says.

  “Then he took her clothes and locked her in a box feeding her only peaches,” I add.

  “What the hell?” Corrine says.

  “Tyler and I got stopped by some surfer degenerates who took the shotgun, beat the hell out of me then maced me.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Bailey says.

  “We went door to door looking for the white panel van until someone finally told us where the guy lived. I knocked on his front door, and crazy at it sounds, he wanted to help me with my mace burns—”

  “You just waltzed right up to his house?” Marcus asks, almost like he’s impressed.

  “He put a cloth soaked with whole milk over my face, which felt amazing because everything was burning, and then he wrapped his belt around my throat and choked me out. I woke up in a cage with three other men. Bailey was around the corner locked in a box.”

  “So how’d you get out?” he asks me.

  “I ate peaches.”

  “You ate peaches?” Corrine asks.

  “He had a thing with them. I’m leaving out the really grisly details, like cage fights and urine battles and blowing mud in a bucket in the middle of the room before being hosed down and shot.”

  “You were shot?” Marcus asks.

  “I thought you’d be more interested in me being peed on, but yes. I was shot twice.”

  I lift the front of my shirt, show him the big bruise on my chest where the bean bag hit me, then turn and show him what must be a gigantic bruise on my back.

  “Good Lord,” he says.

  “Did it hurt?” Corrine asks.

  Corrine is a pretty girl with the wear of this war all over her face. Her spirit restrained, she’s got all her energy drawn inward, like she’s trying hide in plain sight. She yawns pretty deep a couple of times and her body is sort of slumping forward, like she’s dead on her feet. I have the feeling she’s dying to retreat to her room and go to sleep, but maybe she doesn’t want to be alone either.

  I’m not going to pretend to understand what she survived because she hasn’t shared, nor do I expect her to, but just seeing the effects on her person, my heart aches for her. Maybe this is me being a sympathetic person, but maybe it’s also me thinking of Indigo, wondering if the war has touched her, too. If she’s survived.

  “Yeah, it hurt,” I admit. “It felt like I was drilled with a sledgehammer.”

  “I bet,” she says, her voice quiet as a mouse’s.

  “So how’d you get away then?” Marcus asks me. “I mean, it can’t be from just eating peaches.”

  “The peaches were me appreciating what he appreciated. It was common ground. Plus he never knew I was with you guys, so for him I was just an unfortunate guy who fell on unfortunate circumstances. That’s why I chanced walking up to the house.”

  “So is he alive still or what?” Marcus asks, taking a long pull on a canned beer.

  “He’s not,” Bailey says, quick to take this one.

  “How’d he die?” Corrine asks, looking at me now. Suddenly she’s all ears. Suddenly she’s awake and wanting to hear about another struggle like hers, another struggle where the bad guy loses.

  “He died because of Tyler,” I say, looking at Corrine. “He was the boy I was with. Tyler died because he didn’t like peaches. The Warden died because he did.”

  “So you killed him?” Corrine asks, like murder is as easy to talk about as a movie, or clothes, or Friday night dates.

  “Actually he choked on a peach,” I say.

  “Dare I ask?” Marcus says, a half-smirk on his face like he expects something good.

  “Best not to,” I reply because I don’t want to relive what I did.

  Having to put all the rage of how I got to the point of killing that sadistic swamp donkey into words, trying to describe what I did and how I rationalized it when I was clearly out of my mind with grief, feels impossible. I can’t. Honestly, I just can’t.

  The three of them see the struggle on my face, how I’m wanting to say something but at the same point holding back because of what my actions will say about me.

  “Did he deserve what he got?” Corrine asks, her eyes lasered in on me, her body leaning slightly forward in anticipation of my answer.

  “Yes,” Bailey and I say at the exact same time.

  “Well then good,” she says, resolute, her countenance settling once more.

  “What do you mean, good?” I ask, curious as to how this girl’s mind works.

  “I mean, if someone is going to use a really bad situation, like an attack or a war, to try to take advantage of a person, if it’s that bad, then I say an eye for an eye.”

  “We were never meant to be the judge, the jury and the executioner all at once,” Marcus cautions, which surprises me.

  “We were never meant to be attacked on our own soil by our own military either,” I say, “but here we are, dealing with it.”

  “I’m just saying, no life is wasted, or meaningless,” he responds. “If we are all God’s creatures, then who are we to decide whether or not one should live or die?”

  “Did you kill people in the nam
e of God and country?” I ask, having had a few too many beers at this point and just speaking to speak.

  “I did.”

  “So why are you preaching to us then?”

  “Because you can learn something before it’s too late,” he answers, the full weight of his being upon me. “I’ve learned this lesson by seeing things from both sides. You only know your ideology. You barely even know one side.”

  “Not anymore,” I say.

  “So you killed that guy then? Did you do it on purpose?”

  “Yes,” I say, finishing off the last of a Coors Light.

  “Would you do it again?” he asks.

  Without hesitation, I say, “Yes.”

  I say this knowing Marcus didn’t see what I saw, experience the things that monster did to us, kill Tyler the way he did. The cretin just let that boy starve to death because he didn’t want to eat the damned peaches. What kind of a behemoth does something like that?

  “If you’d do it again without thinking, then you didn’t learn anything,” he challenges.

  “What’s the lesson?” Corrine asks in a very small, very careful voice.

  Marcus looks at her, stares at her so long she becomes uncomfortable before finally looking away. Before he shut her down, her eyes held impossible questions to which told her with a stare he didn’t want to give her those answers. In the end, she didn’t leave and he didn’t relent.

  “There are people who can take a life for the right reason, like I’m sure you did. But to be at the point where you understand both the right and the wrong reasons from the inside, it’s already too late for you. By then you aren’t killing to survive, you’re killing because that’s what you do. That’s your nature. You’re a good person, Nick,” he says, looking away. Then: “I am not.”

  “Yes you are,” Corrine says under her breath, her face still turned away.

  “Not really,” he says, getting up. When he goes inside, we expect him to come back out, but he doesn’t.