His Name Was Zach (Book 2): Her Name Was Abby

by Martuneac, Peter

  The gathered Christians opened their songbooks and began to sing an old hymn: I Am Resolved.

  Abby was resolved, alright. She resolved to take her secret to her grave.

  ***

  Before returning to District 1, Abby went and got some coffee from the coffeehouse there. It really was good coffee, and it helped give her an alibi. She returned to District 1 and made her way to her barracks room, where Derrick still slept, but he woke when she closed the door behind her.

  “Coffee?” Abby asked, extending a steaming cup of coffee to Derrick, forcing a smile onto her face.

  “Sure, and good morning,” Derrick replied as he propped himself up on one elbow in Abby’s bed. “Where have you been?”

  “Getting coffee. There’s a place out in District 2 and, believe it or not, they make the best coffee in the city.”

  “Mmm, I believe it,” Derrick said as he took a sip of the beverage.

  Abby sat down on the small couch in her room and sipped her own coffee.

  “Did you have a good time last night?” Derrick finally asked.

  “Mhmm,” Abby replied, smiling. “It was quite the party.”

  “And after? You still good with everything?” Derrick probed.

  Abby pondered a moment before answering. “Yeah. I wasn’t planning on that… but I’m glad it happened,” she lied.

  “So am I,” Derrick replied. “We should do it again sometime.”

  “Oh, definitely,” Abby replied, thinking desperately for an excuse for why it shouldn’t happen again soon. “How about in a week or so?”

  “Why the wait?”

  “Well, it’s, uh… there’s a monthly occurrence that should be coming up any day now.”

  “Ohhh,” Derrick said, “I see. Well, good thing we had last night then, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Abby replied, that fake smile making an appearance again. For all the good things about him, Derrick could never tell when Abby was feigning happiness. Not like Hiamovi could.

  The next few days ran slow for Abby. She went along with her usual routine as a DAS agent, training and patrolling, but all the while anxious to find out what was on the files she downloaded for the ReFounding Fathers. She hoped it was a game-changer, that whatever it was would allow her to go back home to Hiamovi, and to leave this fake life in the DAS dead and buried. Living as Derrick’s girlfriend was torturous now, feeling the weight of her secret betrayal of Hiamovi, and anticipating the eventual betrayal of Derrick. This put her in an almost constant daze, like she was never fully present in a situation.

  ***

  Halfway across the city, in the basement of an abandoned home, Jay had quite the impressive computer. He’d always lived in this city, and even before The Crisis as a young teenager was something of a tech wizard. He kept his computer and all the hardware with it, which at the time was the most advanced, powerful technology money could buy, and moved it from his home to this secret location once he started hacking government computers.

  He had spent the five days since receiving Abby’s thumb drive from Hiamovi trying to decrypt the files on it. If there was one entity that had more powerful computers and programming than him, it was the US government. That made finding out what was in these files exceedingly difficult, even for Jay.

  But in the pre-dawn hours of the Friday after Abby’s mission, Jay finally did it.

  “Holy shit,” he whispered as he found that he now had access to all the files on the drive. “Haha! Jay wins again!”

  He began clicking through files, making several copies as he went. He wasn’t really reading the information because right now he was more concerned about ensuring its survival. But he was scanning through the files, and after a couple of minutes his subconscious started to notice there was something strange about these files. He stopped to read the current one.

  It seemed like he had been clicking through research notes from some government scientist. This particular entry mentioned frustration at continued failed experiments. Subjects injected with Project Tango would accept the virus, but with each tweaking of the project there was unintended consequences that manifested itself in the subject’s behavior.

  Despite his exhaustion, Jay’s eyes snapped open wide. “Oh, shit,” he muttered as he opened a new file, this one a video file, about two and a half minutes in length. He hit play. It appeared to be a laptop camera, recording the inside of what looked like a laboratory. An elderly man with greying hair looked into the camera, his face awash in fear. But what was he afraid of? The door at the end of the room opened, and a man wearing a fine suit entered, his face and voice unmistakable.

  “Oh my God,” Jay said. But for the rest of the video, the things he saw on that file rendered him speechless.

  When it ended, Jay pushed himself away from his computer, rolling along the concrete floor in his chair, his hands resting limp in his lap. Even for a young man like Jay, it was a struggle to wrap his mind around what he had just seen. Finally, as if snapped out of a deep slumber, Jay leaped from his chair and said to himself, “I gotta find Hector!”

  ***

  But Abby was not yet aware of this revelation, and her Friday was feeling much more normal than Jay’s. Her squad was slated for a security patrol that morning out in District 2, for which Abby was thankful. It gave her a good chance to forget what she’d done last Saturday.

  Abby immersed herself wholly into the patrol, flipping on a switch ingrained in her during her time in DAS boot camp and all the training that followed. And for a short time, she wasn’t Abby, the heartbroken spy. No, she was Abby, government-trained shooter.

  She and her two comrades were coming towards the end of their patrol as they wandered through a market area, a place where civilians were usually rampant, and today was no exception. Though of course people always made way for DAS agents, and they penetrated crowds with an invisible bubble around them, forcing people back several feet.

  Downturned faces met the agents’ scanning eyes, no one daring to make eye contact with them, and a part of Abby realized she was going to miss this, this feeling of absolute authority, commanding fear and respect wherever she went. As a DAS agent, men like Isaiah, Edmund, and even Henry would have to bend the knee. They would fear Abby now, if they were still around. Why, if Henry was here now, Abby would-

  “Stop, thief!”

  Abby was shaken from her thoughts by a sudden cry, and all three agents turned to see who had yelled. An older man came dashing out of his little fresh fruit and vegetable shop, waving his arms and calling for help. Ahead of him, another man, slightly younger but surely past his fortieth birthday, was running.

  “Come on!” said the agent to Abby’s right as he began to run after the culprit.

  “Seriously? We do petty theft now?” Abby said to the other agent with her.

  That agent just shrugged and said, “It’s been a slow week.”

  Abby nodded and then gave chase herself. The thief must not have seen the DAS agents, else he would not have stolen at all or tried to run. He did not get far before all three had caught up to him.

  “Hands up!” Abby yelled, raising her rifle and aiming at the man. The two agents with her fanned out to either side of her so that three rifles were aimed at the man from three different directions.

  The thief halted, raising his hands as he slowly turned and realized the peril in which he’d found himself. His first expression betrayed his fear, but this was slowly replaced with one of righteous wrath.

  “Used to be the law enforcement around here wouldn’t begrudge a man trying to feed his family,” he said.

  “Fuck off, old man,” Abby barked. “Drop all the goods. Now!”

  The man hesitated, glaring at Abby. She met his gaze with a dangerous look of her own, hardened and lit with a fire from within her. The man’s resistance fractured, but did not crumble. He dropped a bundle that was in his arms, then pulled from his jacket a small loaf of bread and dropped this too.

  The bread
made Abby angry. The instant it hit the concrete she was transported to a time and place when her own mother had tried keeping a loaf of bread for her. It cost her mother her life, left Abby alone. But not for long, because then Zach found her. He saved her from those zombies, made her his daughter. And then, just like her mother, he left her alone too. Abby shook her head, hoping to erase her memories as easily as an image from an Etch-a-Sketch.

  A small crowd was forming around the spectacle. One of the other agents, the one who’d originally given chase, held his rifle up with one hand as he fumbled for some flex-cuffs with the other.

  Damn new guy, Abby thought. He couldn’t even remember where everything was in his kit. The other agent turned to the crowd, warning them to keep their distance. Abby kept her eyes and rifle on the thief, however. She scrutinized his face, and that stubborn streak of resistance she saw in his eyes. She knew he was hiding something.

  “I said all the goods,” Abby repeated to the man. The younger agent had finally located his flex-cuffs and moved forward with a slow hesitation to arrest the man. Abby sighed with annoyance and looked askance at her comrade, taking her eyes off the thief for a moment. It was the young agent’s first patrol, and he was being overly cautious.

  “GUN! GUN!” the young man yelled suddenly, stumbling backwards as he fired his rifle clumsily with one hand.

  Abby responded instinctually. Her eyes snapped back to the target as adrenaline flooded her veins. The thief had crouched suddenly and drawn a small, black handgun from his ankle.

  BANG BANG…BANG!

  It was over before the thief could even bring his gun up, so quick was Abby’s reaction. She fired a hammer pair from her rifle, two rounds in rapid succession, into the man’s chest cavity, followed by a short pause as she took aim at his head and fired once more. A failure-to-stop drill, as this shooting pattern was called. It was a textbook reaction to an armed and hostile detainee. The other, younger agent had continued firing, his bullets striking the man as he fell.

  The growing crowd gasped as the body of the thief crumbled to the ground, his gun falling from his limp fingers. Curiously, it did not hit the ground like a handgun would when dropped. With the threat neutralized, Abby turned her attention to the weapon.

  “Oh shit,” she muttered. A small, dark object indeed lay on the ground, but it was not a gun.

  It was a bar of chocolate.

  The man must have been hiding it in his sock, which would explain why he had crouched down and lifted his pant leg up. The weight of what she’d done crashed down on Abby like a collapsed tower. She’d killed a man over a piece of candy.

  Abby turned on the young agent who’d yelled ‘gun’ and took four swift, angry steps towards him.

  “I—” he began to say, but he was cut off when Abby slammed the buttstock of her rifle into his face, knocking him to the ground.

  “Does that look like a fucking gun to you, you fucking idiot?!” she screamed, pointing to the bar of chocolate. The man hesitated to reply, but he was again interrupted, this time by a loud scream from behind them.

  Abby turned and saw a young girl wearing an old, raggedy baseball cap break from the crowd and go running up to the dead man, collapsing to her knees and sobbing over him. She was joined by a woman who was likely the man’s wife, holding a toddler. Even the DAS agents couldn’t find it in their hearts to stop the grieving family. And as if this wasn’t bad enough for Abby, she realized suddenly that she recognized the hat the girl was wearing.

  It was her hat.

  The hat she received from Zach so long ago.

  The hat she gave to a young girl and her starving family when she first arrived in the city.

  As if sensing the guilt and shame that was piling on Abby and wanting to add just one more heap, the girl looked up at Abby, her bright blue eyes blurred by tears. A look of recognition spread across her face, followed by confusion. “Why?” she begged.

  Abby had no words, nothing to say in response. The man’s wife now looked at her, and she too seemed to remember Abby’s face.

  “We need to go,” Abby said to the other agents.

  The other agents needed no convincing, and all three of them made a hasty retreat, leaving the family and the locals to take care of the man’s body. Every step back to District 1 was pure agony for Abby, and she never knew where she found the composure to make it all the way back to the barracks without a single tear or outburst, but she did. She turned in her rifle, marched up to her room, and dropped her gear and changed into regular clothes.

  And then she lost control.

  Abby buried her face in her pillow to muffle her cries of anguish and sobbing. It felt like every part of her life was unraveling before her. Worse, she seemed to have no idea at all who she was anymore. Who was this woman who valued life so cheaply? The old Abby would never have been so quick to pull the trigger on even the worst of people, least of all a petty burglar.

  What had these people done to her? What kind of person had the DAS created in her? Or maybe this was Zach’s doing. For all his character and honor, Zach had ice in his veins, and killing came as naturally to him as walking. He influenced her, and then he left her. This was his fault, Abby told herself.

  A knock came at the door, followed by a voice.

  “Abby? Everything okay in there?” Derrick asked, a note of concern in his voice.

  “Go away,” Abby replied. She didn’t want to see anyone at all right now, least of all the man she was soon to betray.

  “Um, okay,” Derrick replied through the door. “I’m not doing anything this weekend, if you need anything.”

  Abby didn’t reply. She barely even heard him. All she could hear was the three gunshots that had ended that man’s life today and the sobs of his family that followed.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  That night was one of the worst nights Abby could remember. She was low, and guilt pressed down on her like a great block of granite. Sleep never came to her, not even for a moment. Haunting images from the previous day kept her up, and they were soon joined by the ghosts of her past, the demons she thought Hiamovi and then Derrick had conquered for her. Emma, Amber and Al, Diana and Ross, that woman whose name she’d never learned, her mother, and Zach all came to her, demanding answers for their deaths. Why did these stronger, smarter, far more capable people have to die so she could live? What kind of life is that?

  The breaking of dawn finally banished these phantoms, though it made no difference to Abby by now. After thinking on it all night, she knew there was only one thing to be done, one thing that might bring her some peace.

  Abby struggled to get out of bed, her strength having completely abandoned her. She was still dressed from yesterday, even wearing her boots still. All she had to do was grab her Sig Saeur sidearm and leave. Abby crept out of her room quietly, careful not to make too much noise. She didn’t know if Derrick was up yet, and she didn’t want to talk to him. He might try to follow her, or find out where she was going. And she couldn’t allow that. Best for everyone that she went out on this mission herself, in secret.

  The walk to the gate, to District 2, was the longest walk of Abby’s life up to that point. She wound her way through the streets in plain clothes, hoping to blend in, hoping no one would recognize her. In her hands she carried a slip of paper, the same paper given to her years ago by the man she’d just killed. The address of his family was scrawled on it, and Abby hoped that she could still find them there.

  And then she saw her. The young girl to whom Abby gave her hat. She wasn’t wearing it anymore, and who could blame her? The girl saw Abby coming and brought her hands up to her mouth. She began to cry and darted inside a dilapidated house.

  Abby turned towards the house and knocked on the door. No answer. She knocked again. Still no answer.

  “I’m here to turn myself in,” Abby called through the closed door. She waited a minute longer, and finally she heard approaching footsteps. The door was unlocked and pulled slowly open
by the little girl’s mother. Her eyes were red from crying yet ablaze with anger.

  Abby dropped her gaze to the floor and muttered, “May I come in?”

  The woman stepped aside without a word, and Abby went inside, allowing the door to be closed behind her. Abby stood in the shabby hallway, and she could hear the young girl still crying in the main room.

  “It’d probably be best if your kids were upstairs for this,” Abby whispered, still unable to meet the woman’s eyes.

  “Emily, take Casey to your room,” the woman called. Abby heard the hurried thumping of tiny feet across the floor and then up an unseen flight of stairs, followed by the closing of a door.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” the woman said. The sudden sound of her voice startled Abby and she lifted her head.

  “I’m here to offer you justice,” Abby whispered, looking the woman in the eye. “I’m DAS, there won’t be an inquiry or investigation, no trial or punishment. No judge will give you justice for what I did. So I’m here to make you my judge, my jury, and my… executioner, if you think it necessary.”

  The woman furrowed her brow, looking perplexed. Abby pulled her pistol out from its holster in the back of her pants and handed it to the woman, who took it reluctantly, looking at it like she’d never seen a firearm before.

  “There’s a round in the chamber,” Abby told her. “A life for a life sounds fair to me, and if that’s the judgment you make, then I accept it. But before you do, I just want you to know how sorry I am. And I know that means nothing, but it’s all I’ve got. I’m sorry.”

  The woman was silent as she handled the gun in both hands, staring at it with a grim determination. She looked up at Abby and said, “You took my husband from me. You took a father from his children. You deserve to die.”

  Abby nodded once, a tear escaping from her eyes as she did. This was it. She was going to get what she deserved.

  The woman lifted the gun and pointed it at Abby’s face, holding it there for several seconds. Abby looked directly into the barrel, refusing to close her eyes. She deserved to be forced to watch her execution, to be blinded by the muzzle flash in the last moment of her life.