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

by Martuneac, Peter

  After a few minutes of mindless staring straight ahead, Abby realized this block looked familiar. She looked up to find herself leaning against her old apartment building, the very place where she’d first met Hiamovi. She slowly got to her feet and ambled inside. She ascended the stairs, up to the third floor. Trudging down the hallway, Abby counted off the doors until she reached the correct one, her old apartment. She knew it was empty, as Nora the landlady had been saving it for her eventual return.

  Abby pulled a small tool out of her pocket and picked the lock on the old door in just a few moments, then entered the dark apartment. Closing the door behind her, Abby headed for the kitchen. She scooted the step-stool over in front of the fridge so that she could reach the cupboard up above it. From this cupboard she retrieved a short, squat bottle of rum.

  Her hands trembling, she brought the bottle to her lips and chugged a not inconsiderable portion of the bottle right away. She stumbled towards the couch, sitting down and taking another deep draught of her medicine, and then another and another, trying to drown the screaming voices in her head.

  Before long the bottle was empty, and Abby staggered back into the kitchen, catching herself against the counter as she carefully stepped up on the step-stool again. Her hand searched in the open cupboard blindly, hoping to find more alcohol. After knocking over a couple of empty bottles, her hand finally found a tall bottle of whiskey that was about half full.

  She lost her footing as she stepped back and fell to the ground, still clutching the glass bottle in both hands. She tried to regain her feet but found that too difficult. Content to lay on her side, propped up on one arm, Abby began to pull from the whiskey bottle, drinking deeply. She cried as she lay there on the floor, ashamed of what she’d done, the lives she’d destroyed, and where she now found herself.

  This bottle too was soon emptied, and Abby managed to pull herself up to her feet and lean against the counter. Immediately she vomited into the sink, her stomach being filled with nothing but alcohol at this point. She hacked and coughed and sputtered, forming a pitiful picture of a woman at the end of her rope. A woman with nothing to tether her to this life.

  ***

  She must have blacked out for a time, for in the next moment Abby found herself laying on the kitchen floor again, though the apartment was no longer quite as dark. Abby checked her watch and saw that it was almost six in the morning. It was nearly dawn. With her head pounding, Abby carefully pushed herself up on to unsteady feet and sighed. The buzz of drunkenness was gone, replaced by the pounding hangover. What little solace she found in the bottom of those bottles was now gone.

  She didn’t want to lose that solace. She just wanted to find peace. And Abby knew exactly where she could find that peace.

  Abby left her apartment and headed up one level, heading towards Hector and Hiamovi’s old apartment. Knowing full well that no one would be there to answer, Abby knocked on the hard wood anyway.

  “Hiamovi?” she whispered into the still silence. Crying softly, she said, “It’s Abby.”

  Abby sunk to her knees as her strength left her. “I’m sorry, Hiamovi. I’m so sorry. This isn’t who I want to be, but I don’t know how to fix it.”

  A door at the end of the hallway opened, and Abby turned to see an older man appear. It was Bob. He looked surprised at first, seeing Abby on her knees before a closed door, but then he smiled at her, the same smile he gave every time someone spoke to him. Abby shook her head and rose to her feet, walking away from Bob to the other end of the hallway. She opened up the door to that stairwell and began to climb the stairs once more, heading for the roof.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The air was so still in these pre-dawn hours, Abby thought. Her feet dangled in the cool morning breeze as she sat on the edge of the roof, waiting for the sun. She’d made up her mind, and the only thing left that she wanted was to see one last sunrise. The occasional tear dropped from her eyes and fell between her feet, fifteen stories down to the street below, though she felt hardly capable of crying any longer.

  The door to the roof swung open on squeaky hinges, but Abby didn’t turn to see who it was. DAS agent or a tenant of the building, she didn’t care. A soft shuffling of feet across the concrete roof grew louder, until there was somebody standing right next to Abby. Glancing to her side, she saw a wizened, familiar face above her.

  “Go away, Bob,” she whispered. “You don’t want to see this.”

  Bob shuffled forward and peered over the edge of the roof, then he turned his gaze on Abby.

  “And don’t try to talk me down, I’ve made up my mind,” Abby added. Then she chuckled and shook her head and said, “What the hell am I saying, it’s you. You can’t talk.”

  “Actually, I am fluent in three languages,” Bob said.

  Abby nearly fell off the building as she whipped her head around to stare at Bob, like she had just met a talking giraffe.

  “You can talk?!” she demanded.

  “I never said I could not.”

  Abby scoffed. “You never said anything!”

  “This is true,” Bob replied, nodding his head. “I took a vow of silence long ago, and have not spoken since.”

  “A vow of silence,” Abby repeated. “Who the hell does that anymore? Why? How long ago?”

  Bob laughed and said, “One question at a time, please. First, I do that. Second, I cannot remember why. And last…this too is hard to remember. It was such a long time ago. What year was the Berlin Wall torn down?”

  Abby’s mouth fell open. “You mean to tell me that you haven’t said a word in, like, thirty fucking years?”

  “Until now,” Bob said, smiling.

  “Yeah, and why now? I mean, you don’t speak for thirty years and just decide to go ahead and break your vow? Just like that?”

  “Oh, well,” Bob replied, seeming to blush a little. “It’s not easy maintaining a vow of silence. It’s been so long since I had a good conversation, and when I saw you coming up here, I guessed your purpose. And I thought I might have a good conversation with you first.”

  Abby shook her head and said, “You’re still not gonna talk me off the ledge.”

  “I would not dream of trying,” Bob insisted. “If nothing else in this world, you own yourself and your body, and you can do with them what you will. And if you believe it is your time to go, what right have I to stop you? I could try to guilt you into staying here, sure, but that would only be a delay in your plan, and before long you would be right back up here. No, dear Abby, if your life is going to be saved, it must be you who does the saving. No one else can.”

  Abby said nothing. She hadn’t been expecting an answer like that. Bob went on.

  “No, I am here for the reason I stated earlier: to have a good conversation. And I think you would also like to have one last good conversation, too.”

  “But your vow.”

  Bob looked over both shoulders in a comic way, as if fearful people would overhear them talking, and said, “The only people who know about this are you and me. I will not tell, and the dead do even less talking than me.”

  He gestured towards Abby at the end of that sentence and then laughed, a clear, ringing laugh, as if he’d made the funniest joke in the world. And, in spite of herself, Abby found herself chuckling along.

  “Fair point,” she replied. “Fine. You have ‘till sunrise to make your conversation.”

  “Excellent! So tell me what’s been going on with you,” Bob said as he took a seat next to Abby, kicking his feet through the open air as a small child might.

  Abby sighed, “You don’t want to know.”

  “I asked, did I not? I have not seen you in many months, and I am curious what you have done.”

  Abby looked Bob in the eyes and began to unload, the words flowing faster and faster as she spoke. “Well, recently I managed to betray a man I love by sleeping with another man and lying about it. Oh, and that other man? Yeah, he was my pretend boyfriend who I made fall i
n love with me only to betray him too. And you know what? Part of me really did love him. I love Hiamovi with everything I’ve got, but I was undercover for so long, and so rarely slipped back into the real me, that it really couldn’t be helped. I mean, what’s a girl to do, huh? Oh! You’re gonna love this, I also gunned down an innocent man in front of his family! That’s what I’ve been up to, Bob.”

  Bob nodded his head in understanding. “That is a lot to take in, Abby.”

  She laughed and said, “You’re telling me! And that’s just in the last week! I also killed a member of Hector’s group. I mean, the coward was gonna betray everybody if I didn’t, so he kinda had it coming, but my God, Bob! I did it so quick! I could never have fathomed doing something like that before!”

  “You were not always so quick to pronounce death?”

  “Fuck no. And that right there is another thing. I didn’t use to swear either. Or try to drink myself to death like I did last night. Killing, drinking, smoking, cursing, I never did these things. Hell, I used to get Zach in trouble for cursing.”

  “Who is Zach?”

  Abby sighed, and another tear fell from her eyes. “Zach saved me from the zombies in the first days after The Crisis, took me in. And he was like a dad to me. I loved him.”

  There was a pause as Abby pursed her lips, then she said, “And then he left me, Bob. He threw away his own life to save mine.”

  “You wish he had not done so?”

  “Yes! I was just a kid, I’m still just a kid! How did he expect me to survive out there on my own? He could have managed just fine on his own, but me? He signed my death warrant out there! The only thing he did was extend my miserable existence by a couple agonizing years.”

  “But, Abby, you did survive on your own.”

  “Pure luck,” Abby muttered. “I killed him, Bob.”

  “But I thought you said he died to save you.”

  “Yeah, but he wouldn’t have had to if I was more competent, if I’d been able to handle myself.”

  Bob nodded his head thoughtfully. “It seems you are very conflicted on this, Abby. And very angry at yourself and Zach. But Zach made his choice, as we all do. You can’t blame yourself for things that other people do.”

  “Oh I can’t?” Abby replied, turning to look at Bob again. “Well, how about the time I convinced Zach not to kill a horrible, awful man who tried to rape me, who went on to help destroy our new home, who killed my friends? Are you really going to tell me I’m not to blame for those deaths?”

  “This man sounds evil indeed, if he did all these things. But those were his choices, not yours. Your decision to spare his life was one of mercy, and if all people had such capacity for mercy, we might not be here in this situation right now.”

  Abby just scoffed. Part of her was listening to Bob and agreeing with what he said, but the guilt still hung about her neck like chains. The grey sky was turning to color. Dawn was not far away.

  “I got my friend Emma killed too,” Abby whispered. “I let some asshole disarm me, and he chased us out of town, and Emma died.”

  “You gave him your gun?”

  “Yup.”

  “Because you wanted him to shoot you and your friend?”

  “No, the guy tricked me into it,” Abby said. She looked over at Bob, who was wearing his usual smile. “Yeah, yeah, I know. It was his decision.”

  “So you are understanding what I am hoping to teach? The decisions these people made are their own, Abby. There is no sense in heaping them upon yourself. Rather than trying to seek redemption for those choices, your time might be better spent amending the wrongs you have done.”

  Abby turned on Bob, growing suddenly defensive. “Hey, fuck you. You don’t understand the pressure I’ve been under. Yeah, I’ve made some mistakes, but it’s not my fault, okay?!”

  “But I thought you said you’ve killed men who perhaps did not deserve it, that you betrayed men you loved.”

  “Yeah, well… I just… ” Abby stammered, “I’m doing the best I can! I’m just a kid! And for the last seven years I’ve been surrounded by monsters and psychopaths, okay? I’m just trying to survive out here!”

  “And survival required betraying Hiamovi?”

  “What did they expect? They give me this undercover assignment and expect me to be a perfect church girl while masquerading as the girlfriend of this super hot and perfectly wonderful guy? Hell, he almost proposed to me, Bob!”

  Abby reached into her pocket and pulled out the ring box that’d fallen from Derrick’s pocket and held it up for Bob to see. She put it back in her pocket and said, “I’m doing the best I can! It’s their fault for trusting something so important to a kid! If Hiamovi didn’t want me to sleep with Derrick, he shouldn’t have agreed to me going on this mission to begin with. Frankly, he should be glad I held out this long.”

  “And the innocent man you killed?”

  “They said he had a gun, and I did what I was trained to do, alright? You can hardly blame me for being a little trigger happy, especially considering where I’ve been and what I’ve had to endure just to get here.”

  Bob began to laugh quietly. Abby turned on him and said, “And what the hell is so funny?”

  “I’m sorry,” Bob replied, “it is not funny. I’m simply confused. You have it all upside-down, Abby! You take all the blame for the choices that other people make, but you will not accept responsibility for your own decisions. Can’t you see how little sense that makes? The circumstances of your life are often outside of your control, but that does not make them valid excuses for the actions you take, the mistakes you make.”

  “Hey, I tried to take responsibility!” Abby retorted, growing red in the face. “I went to that guy’s wife and offered to let her kill me!”

  “And you did that purely for the sake of justice, or were you also hoping that she would handle this business for you?” Bob asked, gesturing out into the open air in front of them.

  “You know what, fuck you Bob!” Abby retorted. She spun around and stood up on the roof so that she could pace about. “You have no idea what I’ve gone through! The ‘circumstances of my life’ are so fucked up beyond belief, you wouldn’t be saying all this bullshit if you had the slightest inkling of what it’s like to be me! When was the last time someone you loved was killed on your account? When was the last time you lost sleep because you couldn’t stop seeing their face every time you closed your eyes, knowing goddamn well that if not for you they’d still be alive? Let’s hear it, Bob!”

  Bob did not say anything, but he turned around to face Abby now, who saw for the first time a tear in his dark eyes. And yet he still wore that smile on his face. He stood up and walked over to Abby and said, “Forgive me, Abby. I lied to you earlier. I remember exactly the time and day I swore my oath of silence, and I remember all too well why I did it.”

  Turning his back to Abby, Bob walked over to the edge of the roof and stood there with his hands clasped together behind him. “I am from Beijing,” he began, “my birthplace. My parents were traditional, proud Chinese people who had only one child. I never knew what it was like to have a brother, until I met Huo Yu.”

  “Both he and I were born into wealthy families, who put us in the best schools in Beijing. It was at school, at a young age, that we first met and discovered we shared the same two passions: reading books and practicing myongzi.”

  Bob rolled his hands into fists and threw two fast punches into the air, to demonstrate what he meant by ‘myongzi’. “We were brothers in all but blood, even into adulthood when we began attending university. But now we were young men, and no longer did we read only fairy tales and stories. Now we read political theory and philosophy. We began to see what was really going on in the world and in our very own country. And we did not like what we saw.”

  “Many other students felt the same. Thousands of us were discontented with the ruling Communist Party. Huo Yu and I would spend hours every day discussing what we called an illegitimate gove
rnment. I was fierce in my conviction that China needed another revolution to free us from the oppressors.”

  Bob paused and remained silent for several seconds. Then he turned around to face Abby and said, “Then came the summer of 1989. Talk turned to action, and thousands of people took to the streets, led by the students… but not me. For all my talk, I was terrified of what the Communists would do to people who protested openly. But Huo Yu had a fire in his belly, and he wanted to go. I begged him not to because I did not want to lose my brother. There are plenty of protestors already, I told him. One more or one less makes no difference.”

  “He must have pitied me, for he obeyed my request to stay away from the protests at first. But as the situation deteriorated, his passion to take action became too great. One morning in early June, we argued in my home. He called me a coward, and said being educated as we were gave us a responsibility to lead these protests. His words were true, but the truth only made me angry. I told him if he wanted to be free so bad, he was free to go get himself killed like a fool. In anger, he stormed out of my home.”

  “I knew that I was wrong, Abby, that all my arguments came not from logic but from fear, and that made me angrier. I was angry at Huo Yu for being right, for being a better man. Later in that same day, he returned. He knocked on my door, but I refused to answer. He spoke through the door anyway, told me he was sorry for the things he had said to me, and that he would be honored if I would go with him to the protests that day.”

  “I did not answer him because I was still angry. He asked again, telling me he knew I was home, and asked if I would at least come and greet him. I refused in silence. Without another word, Huo Yu left to join the protests… at Tianenman Square.”