The Last War Box Set, Vol. 2 [Books 5-7]

by Schow, Ryan

  “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 had a measurable weight to it, he said, “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 b
ig 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 name 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.

  “What happened to you?” Bailey asks Corrine.

  “I found out what the face of true evil looks like and he saved me from it. For that, I owe him my life, not that he’ll take anything from me. He didn’t even want to bring me here.”

  “Why?”

  “He said his friends were gone, probably dead. That he didn’t want to take me where he was going because basically, people seemed to always be dying around him.”

  “What did he do to save you?” Bailey asks, quietly, just in case Marcus came back.

  “He basically killed their entire gang, saved about twenty-five of us girls from…the horrible things they were doing to us.”

  “Why didn’t you stay with your friends?”

  “We didn’t know each other. We were basically captives together.”

  “Wow,” I say.

  “You should have seen him,” she says, leaning forward. “He took them all out. There must have been twenty of them, and he killed them all like it was nothing.” Sitting back up, she says, “My chances of living with him are much greater than the chances of living with a bunch of broken girls like myself.”

  “You’re not broken,” I say.

  “Not yet.”

  When I think about what Bailey and I endured, and what Corrine and Marcus endured, I suddenly have a lot more respect for the man. It’s not the kind of respect you gain through admiration as much as it’s the kind of respect that’s born from fear.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Bailey didn’t know why she said what she said. It had just come out. She liked Nick, for sure, but when she got really drained, when she simply ran out of energy, the filter she usually kept in place tended to disappear.

  A big part of why they slept together in the same bed was not because they were a couple, but because they were lost in the same place together. Having the same nightmares. Sharing the same boogeyman.

  Clearly she wasn’t afraid to speak up and say what she wanted. Not with Nick. Not now that the world was falling apart. If she didn’t try to keep him close, she feared he’d eventually drift away from her. She didn’t want that. Not when she thought she saw something in him. It was something so pure and beautiful, something so selfless and so brave, it was that thing she couldn’t put it into words.

  I
t was that very thing she was missing in her life.

  As she lie there in bed next to him, listening to him breathe, feeling him near, he made her want to grow up and realize she was not a girl anymore and that he was dealing with problems and fears far greater than she imagined.

  On the surface, she lived the storied life of today’s California woman: no husband (yet), no kids, a nice place, two jobs—both paying decent money—completely self-sufficient.

  But Nick?

  His wife left him for another man and his kid was eighteen. All alone in a city under attack. If he was scared for her, he kept his emotions pretty close to the vest. She could see the toll it was taking, though. She saw it in the way he checked every phone he found. In the way he got more and more pissed off when none of them had a dial tone.

  She saw evidence of the burden, of the fear he was carrying. She saw all this and knew that she had to change, to be bigger than the person she was, more responsible for others, not just herself. She turned and looked at him in the dark.

  Her mind would not fall still.

  Nick understood marriage and divorce. She only understood failed relationships. Men she could leave if things went south. Nick had a daughter, though—a constant obligation. This was an obligation he wanted, an obligation he protected. But now he was apart from her, having to deal with distance, with the uncertainty of his own fate, with a long journey ahead.

  He was doing all this and still he found a way to let down his walls with her. To let her in. She shouldn’t have done that. Not while she was still in a relationship. To do what she did to him, to do what she was doing, was selfish. She took something from him she shouldn’t have taken, and now the guilt was tunneling its way through her.

  As she lay there watching him, as she studied his profile in the dark and smelled the smells of him, it almost didn’t matter that technically she was devoted to another man.

  She wanted only Nick. Her true California unicorn.

  Closing her eyes, turning away from him, she thought back to a few minutes ago, to when they were getting ready for bed. The moonlight flooded their room before they closed the drapes. She watched him undress, barely even blinked as he crawled into the bed they were sharing. At first blush, the sheets were cold but soft and clean, the mattress plush. But he didn’t scoot next to her, or cuddle with her the way he did yesterday. For a second, she wondered if he was for real. If this was not just a pretty boy act. The longer he stayed put, the more she was convinced he wasn’t the kind of guy to use a girl for sex.