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

by Schow, Ryan

  Her nostrils flaring, her head nodding almost imperceptibly, she said, “I shouldn’t think this way, but…good.”

  “Thank you for all you’re doing for them both. They’re really good people. They didn’t deserve what happened to them.”

  “Just doing the Lord’s work,” she said with a caregiver’s smile.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Nick was back to work after a few days, but his head was elsewhere. Several times he found himself getting pissed off at Bailey for needing the closure she needed with her fiancée. Admittedly, he was neglectful, halfway cheating and no prize in the long run.

  So why did they come back? Why couldn’t she just let go? Move on?

  He never let her know he felt this way, and he never talked about it with any of the other group. It did fester in him, making him antsy, anxious, irritated. Instead of letting this anger rot inside him, he got it out while working with Marcus.

  When they were done for the night, he and Marcus would go on runs, doing sprints and jumping jacks and jump squats along the way. They stopped and they did push ups, they did planks, they did sit ups.

  Neither of them said anything on these runs.

  They didn’t have to.

  Both men had their demons and both were in the fight of their lives. On occasion, while he was running down the county roads, he would think that at least he had something he was working toward. He was trying to get home to Indigo.

  But what did Marcus have? Who held his heart? Who was he aching to be with?

  Twice he almost asked what motivated the man to work as hard as he did. He tried to think of how his friend would answer, but he knew. He wouldn’t say anything. He’d just pretend he didn’t hear and that would be his response.

  Marcus truly was an unanswered question.

  Day after day, they worked at a blistering pace together and they did so in silence. At night they slept under the stars next to Amber and Abigail, and they’d grown quiet, too. It wasn’t uncomfortable. Maybe it was a bit for the girls, but it was better to stay quiet than let them know what turmoil turned in the soil of their hearts.

  When Marcus would fall asleep early, Abigail would lay next to him and he’d sometimes wake up and put his arm around her. He never opened his eyes and no one ever said a thing. They didn’t have to. Marcus had his ties. Still, he was a restless soul.

  Like Nick.

  Twice Bailey had a few minor setbacks—a fever that held too long, and a yeast infection they were able to resolve.

  Ah, the joys of sickness.

  In the third week of their stay, Bailey returned to the land of the living. Jill said she wasn’t ready to move, but her body had gained back most of the weight, her face had its color back and she was looking the way Nick remembered her. Not the dolled up version of her, but the real version of her.

  All that hot, simmering rage started to melt away at the sight of her. They snuck off one night and made love in the woods and though it wasn’t a bed in a yacht, or a home, they needed the reconnection.

  She cried as he held her, her body shaking against his. The horrors they’d suffered at the hands of this cruel world exacted its pound of flesh and there was no easy recovery. Nick was as damaged as Bailey, but at least they had each other.

  As they stood in the trees, with the moonlight reflecting off the shine in their eyes, and illuminating their bodies, he said, “The whole time I was in there, I thought about Indigo, and how much I love her, that she’ll be okay if I die, and that we’ll probably die together.”

  A sob snuck up on him, hitched in his throat, stopped his words. Bailey clung to him, her arms letting him know he wasn’t alone, the sniffle in his ear proof she was equally affected.

  “But I didn’t want you to die,” he said. “I didn’t want to never see you again.”

  She sniffled in his ear again, turned her head into his, trying so hard to be closer to him event though their bodies were already pulled too close together.

  “I love you Bailey. I realized that in there. I tried to think about why I felt that way, you know, rationalize it, but love is irrational. You don’t choose it. You can’t fight it, not if you’re desperate for it, not if you’re clinging to it for dear life.”

  She turned her head just a little more, then pressed her lips to his neck and kissed him. He felt the warmth of her tears on his neck, knowing they’d survived something torturous and cruel. When you realize someone can just catch you, lock you away and let you die, it’s hard to ignore the fragility of life, how inconsequential you could be to someone. To those men, their lives had no value. They were just pieces of meat in a room, locked away, left behind.

  “I love you, too, Nick,” she said. “And it’s time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s time for us to go, I mean. We need to get you home to Indigo.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you still need to resolve your past?” he asked, hoping she’d say she was over that.

  “Yes.”

  He felt himself deflate. Part of him didn’t understand all the effort she was putting in to saying goodbye to a guy who had pictures of some other girl’s tits on his cell phone, a guy who let her wither inside their relationship, but he figured there would be a thousand other things he wouldn’t understand about her. He just knew from his experiences with Margot that if you love a woman, sometimes you don’t have to understand, you just need to be supportive and do it. So he’d suck it up, be the team player she needed. He’d go with her because this was important to her, so it was important to him.

  The next day, Jill offered to give them a ride to their truck, see if it was still at the checkpoint. “We took out the checkpoint,” she explained, “but I don’t think anyone would have a reason to do anything to the rig.”

  When Marcus went to Amber to tell them they were heading out, Amber looked at him a long time and with worlds of pain in her eyes. “We have to stay here, Marcus. These people…this is exactly the future we need.”

  “What about Corrine?” he asked, his voice level.

  “She’s watching Abigail. A girl like that, out in this world—you know what she survived, but these people don’t. She says she’s not afraid here. You can’t just take her and go, not when she’s been with us through all of this.”

  He nodded his head, his body still.

  Putting her hand to his cheek, she said, “You don’t know how important you are to us, do you?”

  His eyes fell and Nick saw what he was holding on to. He knew he couldn’t be her man, or Abigail’s father figure, but he’d hoped they could be friends. In that look, Nick saw that he’d been trying to exercise the hatred out of himself. He was trying to run from the man he was, from the terrible bastard his father had been, from the wounded bird his mother ended up as.

  He turned away, headed for Nick and Bailey, but she stopped him. She grabbed him by his arm, pulled him around and drew him into a fierce hug. Bailey took Nick’s hand into hers as they waited. They shouldn’t be watching the pair, but they needed this as much as Marcus did. Then, standing on her tippy-toes, Amber kissed him slowly on the mouth a little too long, then let go and came to us. She was already crying.

  “Please come back to us,” she said. Nick started to say something, but she put her finger to his lips and said, “Bring him back. Please. I just…I can’t risk Abigail’s and Corrine’s life like this. This world, this awful damned world…”

  Her body shook out a sadness Bailey understood. She liked Marcus. Didn’t think she could have him. But she needed him. They all did. They all needed each other, but there they were, splitting up, going their separate ways.

  Marcus was back again, his hand on Amber’s back. She turned into him once more, then said, “Come say good-bye to Abigail. And Corrine. They’ll want to—”

  “I can’t,” he said, interrupting her.

  “Why not?” she asked, pained. “You’re going to break their hea
rts.”

  “Because if I do, I won’t leave, and I have to get Nick to Indigo. Here at least you’re safe. Here at least you have people around you, a defended camp, food, water and shelter.”

  She leaned into him, stood on her toes and whispered something in his ear. Nick and Bailey watched as he slowly nodded his head. Then, without another word, he turned and said, “Let’s go.”

  Nick gave Amber a hug, a last good-bye.

  “Take care of him,” she said.

  “We’ll take care of each other,” he said, kissing her cheek. “Tell those girls they are the most beautiful thing in this crappy world. Tell them…tell them we’ll miss them.”

  Amber was a mess when he left her, but Nick’s heart broke most for Abigail and Corrine. He wanted to say good-bye to both, but Marcus was a force and Jill was in the truck waiting.

  “You sure you want to go?” Jill asked when they were all in the truck.

  “Don’t ask us that again,” Marcus said. “Just go.”

  She put the truck in gear and they went. It took about a half an hour to get back to the big rig, but they made it. He still had the key, and the truck still had gas, but the food and water were gone, as were the cache of weapons. The inside of the rig had been looted.

  Jill waved as she drove off, and it was a sad affair.

  “Not all people suck,” Bailey said, her words betraying her emotions. She wiped a tear, looked out the window. “But this town…”

  It took them forty minutes to get to Bailey’s house. She sat in the truck for a good five minutes before getting out. The front door was wide open, his car in the driveway. The car windows were broken, however, the vehicle itself vandalized.

  “You want me to come with you?” Nick asked.

  “Yes.”

  She finally got out of the truck, Nick on her heels. He walked with her up the driveway, inside the house and saw the mess of the place. It had been tossed. As in gone through by professional looters. In the upstairs media room, she found him. Her fiancée. He was sitting on the couch, a carton of beer next to him with five of the cans on the sofa, drained. There was a shotgun on his lap, the barrel pointed at the place his head should have been. Nick expected this to break her, but instead she walked past him into a room.

  “Help me, Nick,” she said. She was in a closet, looking at a clear bin on the shelf above her wardrobe.

  When he took it down, it was heavy, awkward. She opened it and he saw her take a thick manila folder out. She opened the folder next, pulled out a stack of pictures, then completely broke down. When Nick got close, he saw they were pictures of her mother and father, and of a young boy, her brother perhaps.

  He sat with her for a long time like that. When she finally stopped crying, she just sat with him and he didn’t say a word.

  “They died in a car accident. Drunk driver. It happened a few years ago. The suicide over there,” she said, refusing even to say her fiancée’s name, “was in charge of their assets. He administered their will. He knew I was rich like him. He said he wanted an independent girl, that way he knew she wasn’t after his money.”

  “So this was never about him?”

  “I’m sorry, Nick. If I told you, if I said I needed to come back to get my family, would you have come?”

  “Yes,” he said without hesitation.

  Looking up at him, holding her family photos against her breast, her heart, she held his eye and said, “I believe that now. And that’s how I know that in the midst of all this, we were destined for each other.”

  He kissed her hand, then said, “Is there anything else you need?”

  “Clothes.”

  “Okay, but only a few things.”

  “How would you feel about taking some of his clothes. You’re about the same size.”

  “These are fine,” he said about his awkward wardrobe of jeans, work boots and a long sleeved thermal.

  “That’s good. Okay,” she said. Standing up, she changed clothes, smiling as he watched. She got fresh underwear, a clean bra, jeans, cross trainers and a shirt and sweater. “This should do.”

  At that point, his emotions were soaring. He didn’t know what to say, but she seemed to know. He read it in her expression. And when they left the house, she didn’t even give her suicided ex-fiancé a second look.

  When they got out to the truck, however, Marcus was gone.

  “What the hell?” Nick mumbled.

  They looked up the street and down. The houses were mostly intact, but a few of them were burnt down. That’s when they saw him waving them over. Bailey put the manila envelop in the truck then they caught up with Marcus.

  “We can throw together some basic rations…” he said.

  He didn’t finish. We knew what he was trying to say. More important, we knew all the things he wasn’t saying. He wasn’t saying he missed Amber, Abigail and Corrine already.

  They got to work gathering up large pots, several glass jars to store water in, an old grate from a barbecue pit in back. When he rooted through the garage, Nick knew exactly what he was looking for. A hammer and a nail punch. A few minutes later Bailey found the hammer and Nick found a Phillips head screw driver, which was even better than a nail punch.

  At the water heaters, Marcus hammered holes into the structure while Nick held the pot. Bailey was in charge of the backup pot. When they were done, Marcus drove the truck up to the house and they loaded up the water. Unfortunately all they could find to eat in three houses was a jar of watercress.

  They took it anyway.

  The next day, in Davis, they went through two neighborhoods, looking for homes that weren’t looted. They found one particularly devastated city block and Marcus said, “This is it.”

  “How do you know?” Nick asked.

  “Because if I was a looter with time on my hands and plenty of homes to choose from, I wouldn’t come within a hundred yards of this block.”

  True to his word, they found more than enough food to last them the trip. Unfortunately someone else found them, too. The sound of someone pulling the hammer on a gun broke through the near silence.

  “You got that truck,” a smart mouth juvenile said. He could be either seventeen or twenty-three. Marcus hated the way he looked. “I like it.”

  “Yeah,” the other one said, just as ugly. “We both like it, so we both want it.”

  These two clowns were shaggy beards, clean looking clothes, unkempt hair. Marcus said, “It’s been stalling a lot in second.” He pulled the key from his pocket held the key out and started walking toward them. “This will work the ignition and the gas tank, but it takes diesel—”

  “Whoa man, stop!” the first guy said, bowing up fast.

  Nick was having flashbacks of the last scuffle Marcus got them in to, but he was powerless to speak because it was all happening so fast, and Marcus wasn’t being himself. He was being too congenial.

  “No man, it’s cool,” Marcus said. “We’re getting ready to drop roots.”

  The other guy put his gun up and was starting to pull the slide when Marcus literally launched himself at the two of them, ripping the guns from both of them. He smacked one across the face with the grip of one gun while spinning the other gun, catching it and putting a round into the other kid’s head.

  Bailey froze. It wasn’t over though. Instead, it was happening in slow motion. Marcus was on top of the kid, beating him relentlessly, beating him even after he was clearly dead. Nick reached down, grabbed for the gun, but Marcus was still going.

  “Marcus,” he said, reaching for his friend’s arm, but he shrugged Nick off.

  “Hey!” another voice said.

  Nick turned and saw two more guys that looked like the ones who drew on them. They had guns drawn and were trying in those invaluable fractions of a second to make sense of what they were seeing when Nick popped them both.

  He looked back at Bailey who was standing strong, but obviously rattled.

  Marcus fell back on his butt, dropped the g
un, drew his knees in and put his face into his hands. The sounds of the big man sobbing somehow seemed worse than all of this. They were in the middle of a bloodbath and Marcus was losing it.

  “Why didn’t she want to come with us?!” he finally barked out. His eyes were wet and red, and they were angry. “I didn’t even say good-bye. Why did I do that?!”

  It was Bailey who went to him. It was Bailey who sat down in the blood beside him and consoled him while he let go of all these demons inside himself.

  “She was in love with you,” Bailey said.

  “She wasn’t,” he said, sobbing, his nose stuffed.

  “A girl knows these things,” Bailey said, brushing his hair back. “She’s just scared for her daughter and for Corrine. We’re all scared, Marcus.”

  Finally he pulled himself together enough to load up the truck, apologize for acting the way he did, then give the big rig the start it needed. Working through the gears, they drove back to I80 heading west.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Gunderson couldn’t stop picking at the scab on his arm. As he was looking at how angry it was, how swollen the skin around it was, he couldn’t seem to pinpoint exactly how or when he’d first been cut or scraped or whatever. It had to have happened when the guys at the park roughed him up. But what made that cut? The curb? A boot with a sharp-edged sole?

  Oh well, he thought, it didn’t matter. The cut did spur an old memory though.

  When he was a kid at a junior high basketball game, on a Friday night in the metal bleachers, he’d stepped backwards wrong and ran his Achilles heel into the rugged edge the school bleacher. The sharp sting surprised him. Looking down, he’d torn back a flap of skin. It hurt like crazy, but he wasn’t a baby, so he didn’t do anything about it.

  Later that week he was playing in the waters of the bay and somehow the wound got infected. At first he felt uncomfortable in his shoe, but then the scab and the skin around it started to swell and he was walking with a limp. His mother forced him to go to the doctor. The doctor, brilliant as he was, said the best thing to do was pull the dime-sized scab off and let the wound empty itself out.