by Schow, Ryan
“I hope so.”
Turning his neck, he kissed her and said, “That’s a bond only we can break.”
She laid on her back beside him, pulled the blankets over her. Turning on his side, he lifted the blanket again, just enough to see the circular shadow of an areola.
“I wasn’t done admiring you yet,” he teased.
She laughed, realized she was being silly, but after that, with the jealousy stripped away, he felt like he’d seen her hesitation for what it was—a rational fear based on solid facts and data.
It wasn’t a streak of jealousy that had her extra quiet the night before. It was the fear that he wouldn’t come back to her because he couldn’t come back. She was terrified something was going to happen to him.
That’s when he saw the goosebumps rising on her skin and decided it was more important to keep her warm than to fill his eyes with her.
“Here I am, the once badass leader of The Resistance, cowering in fear, praying her man will come back home, safe to her,” she finally said, confirming his original suspicions.
“For the record, I still think you’re a badass, and you being the former leader, it’s like I’m sleeping my way to the top.”
She laughed softly, but then she got extra quiet. He saw her trying not to cry. It didn’t work. He leaned in and kissed her tears away.
“This world is not nasty enough to swallow me whole,” he assured her. “I’m going to be back before you know it, I promise.”
“Don’t say that,” she said. “Don’t make promises, because the universe sometimes conspires to break them, just to keep things interesting.”
“I’m going to come home to you,” he said again, brushing the hair out of her eyes and taking in every last beautiful inch of her.
Later that morning, Noah showed up with his Geiger counter, his weapons and a go bag he could stuff into the back of the Jeep. Seeing him, Logan felt better. The man was old, rude, and funny when he wasn’t being crotchety, but he was also right enough in the head for what they were doing. Noah, a.k.a. Edward Scisserand, had seen combat and knew it well, even though his body hadn’t seen the more grisly days for decades. For whatever reason, the experience the man brought to the table was encouraging.
“Do you have your uniform in there?” Logan asked, the old man’s pack looking a bit light.
“They say the memory is first to go, but that’s not true,” he said, putting his things inside the Jeep. “It’s your pecker that’s first to go. Then the memory. And you know what?”
“Enlighten me,” Logan said, suppressing a grin.
“I got pills that keep them both active, so stop questioning my pack and get that dazed, post-coital look off your face.”
“It’s not post-coital,” Logan said.
“The hell it ain’t,” he groused. “Don’t you know you’re never supposed to have sex before battle? Are you thick?”
“I’ll get some shuteye on the way there,” he said, turning to look for Ryker and Skylar. “That’ll recharge the boosters.”
“Sure it will,” he said as he brushed by Logan. He popped him in the baby maker with a smack from his back knuckles, making Logan bend forward and grit his teeth.
“C’mon, Scissorhands,” he said. “That ain’t right.”
Noah climbed into the back of the Jeep and just sat there, waiting.
Before they left, Ryker and Skylar took the front seats while Logan joined Noah in the back. The only reason Logan was back there and not Skylar was because Noah said he was going to get frisky with Skylar when Ryker wasn’t looking. Everyone laughed in jest, but in truth, Logan knew he was more comfortable in the back seat with Logan. Besides, they’d become strange friends over the last few months.
Logan enjoyed the old man’s war stories, but Noah also provided relevant war time perspective. There was a deep well of tactical knowledge, not to mention life experience, that Logan could draw from, considering the circumstances.
After a few hours of driving, they arrived in Holbrook, now a nothing town that sat far enough north and was small enough that it wouldn’t warrant Chicom attention.
They pulled off the I5 and cruised onto Hornbrook Highway heading to a nearby place called The R Ranch. Cautiously cruising up to the entrance, ready with their guns, they appraised the campground and the cabins. Everyone visibly relaxed, however, because the grounds looked abandoned, certainly in disrepair.
The four of them piled out, moved through a couple of the buildings. What they found sickened them to the core. Perhaps it was because they’d been out of the chaos long enough to get some of their perspective back. Or maybe they were no longer numb to the horrors of war.
Still, Logan’s sensibilities were being tested once more.
From one rental cabin to the next, he and Noah found bullet holes, dead bodies—corpses left to rot, each of them looking like big slabs of beef jerky. These were men, women, children, entire families. Outside, he and Noah wandered about, found some horse carcasses, both of them shaking their heads in dismay.
“These cruel bastards,” Noah said.
Noah had a t-shirt on that said, I TOLD MYSELF THAT I SHOULD STOP DRINKING, BUT I’M NOT ABOUT TO LISTEN TO A DRUNK WHO TALKS TO HIMSELF.
In that moment, Logan would have given anything for a drink, for a chance to be drunk. He looked at the shirt again, wanted to feel something.
A grin, a chuckle, a hearty laugh.
Anything.
This t-shirt was the grouchy old cow’s personality coming through and in that moment it was surreal. He couldn’t stop thinking about how far he’d come from squatting in that dingy apartment. He’d been terrified by the Chicoms, and enraged by them, and he was going to Krav class on the sly, and wanting Skylar so freaking bad and not having her. Thinking back to those times, he didn’t know how to feel.
Then he saw Ryker and Skylar walking over to a nearby row of ATVs. He hated that Ryker was with her, that she’d chosen him.
“This place is fifty-one hundred acres,” Noah said, looking at a dirty pamphlet. “Looked nice once upon a time.”
Logan wanted to respond, but he was lost in the past, held hostage by the horrors of the present. Thinking of Skylar, he couldn’t stop wondering why he still felt the things he felt.
“Whatchu doing, boy?” Noah asked.
“Just thinking.”
Skylar Madigan was his unanswered question. His Bridges of Madison County. The one that got away, or perhaps the one who wasn’t meant to be. He realized Ryker and Skylar were walking back his way.
His eyes cleared.
Ryker said, “They’ve been shot.”
At first Logan wondered who had been shot, but then he realized Skylar’s bright and shiny flame was talking about the ATVs. He frowned, shook his head, then started back to the Jeep without a word.
“This place is a graveyard,” Noah said.
He was right.
There was nothing there for them.
Or perhaps Logan was thinking of his and Skylar’s relationship. He wondered if Skylar told Ryker about them. He didn’t think so, based on how cool Ryker had been.
Heading across the dead lawn to the Jeep, he realized he didn’t need the man’s approval. Still, he wanted it. He hated that he did, but it was true. He just didn’t want to feel less than. But as long as Ryker was there, shagging Skylar and making her happy, he represented Logan’s every personal failure.
“You alright, man?” Ryker asked.
“Yeah,” Logan said. “No radiation, according to grumpy over there.”
“Did you expect any?” Skylar asked.
“Drift, maybe, if it was nuclear.”
The four of them got back in the Jeep and headed south on I5, not stopping until they got to Redding. The city was like something out of hell. Most of the buildings were leveled.
“Slow down,” Noah said from the back seat. He brought out his Geiger counter, waited for the readout. Then: “Nothing.”
They traveled a
suitable route off the interstate and stopped when they found their path deeper into the city was blocked by spilled rubble and smashed-together cars. It was as if hell itself had crawled out of the belly of the earth and died.
They were sitting in the Jeep in a ghost town, an abandoned war zone, each of them reverent, all staring in awe when a gunshot rang out.
All of them ducked at once.
In that same second, something smacked the windshield, leaving a small spider web pattern in the glass. Ryker slapped the Jeep in gear and tore out of there with no further incident.
They headed through the outskirts of downtown, unable to get past all the dust and rubble. The farther in they got, the shorter the original buildings had been. That meant they could travel the roads. Some of them.
A few of the abandoned and destroyed cars were not easy to shove out of the way, even with a nudge from the Jeep, but they managed to get through. Before long, the sidewalks became inaccessible, and then they saw a few people hiding out here and there, surprising all of them.
Eventually they came to a place where most buildings lay crumbled, their guts spilled out everywhere, not a spark of life to be found. There were, however, plenty of corpses in the streets. The dead were everywhere. Sadly, Logan was becoming numb to it once more. Almost like, “Hey, there’s another one,” as if you were spotting an old VW Bug, or a hawk sitting on a utility wire rather than a dead body.
“You want to take a look?” Ryker asked the group, pulling over in front of a run of commercial buildings not completely damaged by the bombing.
“Yeah, my sweaty balls are officially stuck to my thighs,” Noah said, getting out. Skylar laughed. When she looked at Logan, she caught him staring at her.
“You okay?” she asked.
He smiled, then said, “Yeah.”
She saw that something in him he didn’t want seen. The part of him that lamented the loss of her. It bothered him that he felt this way, but it bothered him even more that he knew she’d seen it.
He got out of the Jeep, walked past Ryker, kicked in the front door of the nearest building with his gun drawn. When he went into the store, he charged in blind, thinking there was no reason for anyone to be squatting there.
Walking past a ripped open cash register, he pulled a bunch of garbage off the counter, not caring if it scattered all over the floor.
Noah was looking at him from the door.
Light flooded the small space. It also shone a light on the staircase. Logan trudged up the stairs where he found a lounge and a break room. He pulled the drapes back, saw a shriveled woman lying on a couch, her arm just two bones and a branch of fingers flopped over the couch. On the floor under the skeletal hand was a revolver.
He picked it up, released the cylinder, counted three rounds, then slapped it shut and spun it like the Wheel of Fortune. Before it stopped, he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. The dry click had him breathing heavy.
I guess God still wants you here, he thought to himself.
He briefly heard Skylar downstairs, then he thought of Harper at home. She was expecting him back. He told her he’d come back. If he didn’t keep his word, if a round had fired, he wouldn’t be alive enough to feel bad.
He pocketed the revolver, dug around in the small room, found a joint and a box of .45 rounds. He slid the rounds in his front pocket, slid the fatty behind his ear. It crumbled, raining dried bud and wrapping paper bits all over his shoulder.
“So you’ll let me live, but you won’t let me enjoy life,” he said to God.
Of course, you’re enjoying life.
He reminded himself he had a beautiful girlfriend, a healthy body once more, a community he was part of, peace once again. A peace like he’d never known.
Is that the problem? Peace? The fog of war kept him preoccupied. In the distractions, he could hide all his biggest disappointments in life.
He tramped downstairs, showed Noah the gun, then caught up with Ryker and Skylar, who were now breaking into a hardware store across the street.
It went on like that all day, just the four of them finding what buildings or homes still stood, looting them, seeing if there was anything of value, anything to make their efforts worthwhile. That’s when they heard the sound of a helicopter overhead. Shading their eyes, the four of them looked up. The chopper was flying too high to tell if it was Chicom, SAA or something else.
That’s when it banked hard, dropped down and headed back their way. The four of them ducked into the closest building, Logan going to the nearest window, craning his head to look up. The bird dipped down, ducked below the flight deck, then flew over their location before picking up altitude and returning to its original course.
“What the hell was that?” he asked Noah. The man’s breath was like someone was storing farts in there.
“Not sure,” Noah said. “Haven’t seen a chopper in months, and that was SAA.”
“If this place is a wasteland, then why the eyes overhead?”
He shrugged his shoulders, tried to make sense of it.
“That was SAA, right?” Logan said.
Noah nodded.
When the helo was out of sight, the four of them met back in the street, at the Jeep.
“What the balls?” Skylar asked.
“We were just wondering the same thing,” Logan replied.
“It was mostly tracking the interstate, I think,” Ryker said. “What do you say we head that way? Not after it, but back where it was coming from?”
“Just so long as we have enough gas to get back,” Logan said. “We’re on the dangerous side of whatever gas we can salvage being bad gas.”
Ryker nodded in agreement. “We’ll turn around at the halfway hash on the gas gauge. This, plus the gas in the can, will guarantee us enough fuel for the return.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that bird won’t buzz over us again, maybe feed us an ample helping of death by lead poisoning.”
It was a real concern.
“Logan, you have eyes on the sky, since Noah can’t even see his own pecker,” Ryker said.
Ryker and Noah didn’t really get along, but they weren’t at each other’s throats either. The banter was normal. It’s what Noah asked for from the guys he decided to hang with.
“He reminds me of the Army,” he’d said when someone asked why he and Ryker didn’t like each other, “back when real men grew big beards and killed things for a living. We were always knocking the guys we respected.”
Now he was an old man clinging to the life he once lived, the life he’d never again live.
Logan had seen a picture of him at his house a few months back. It was a military picture. Him and his platoon. He’d been a beast of a man back then. Big muscles on a five foot ten inch frame, comfortable with a carbine in his hands, a doo-rag on his head and a fat cigar in his mouth.
The Noah of that day would have terrified the life out of Logan in his prime.
Chapter Twelve
The last leg of Felicity’s journey was nothing like the first leg. She ran into problems in Medford. She heard the vehicles coming, but she was caught on a long stretch of highway that had no exit. A pair of Chicom Jeeps followed by a troop transport and another Jeep were fast approaching her, giving her no choice but to pedal as hard as she could and hope she didn’t have to jump off the small bridge she was on if they attacked her.
Could she even jump?
She didn’t have time to stop and look over the edge.
If she did this, she’d break some bones for sure! Maybe a foot, a wrist, or worse…an arm or a leg.
Felicity put on that extra burst of speed, much to the complaints of her legs and lungs. Sweating, huffing and puffing, she glanced over her shoulder and knew she wasn’t going to make it. The end of the low level bridge and a suitable place to get off the interstate was too far away.
That’s when the lead Jeep swerved into the bike lane.
The son’s of whores were going to run her over
! She couldn’t jump yet! She didn’t have the courage!
She squeezed the hand brakes, the back wheel locking up, the tire skidding to a stop. She scrambled off the bike, prepared herself to jump. The Jeep barreled down on her and she looked over the edge. What was that? A twenty foot drop? Thirty?
She was about to hop over when the Jeep swerved at that last minute, something flying out of the vehicle and just missing her. The other Jeep, the transport and the third Jeep blew by her without threat.
In the back of the trailing Jeep, however, a soldier was aiming his rifle at her. He had a scope on it from what she could tell. Meaning if he decided, she was dead. She did the only thing she could think of, considering she was about to be shot. She flashed her chest at the man, nipples and all.
She did this for her life.
The rifle came down and he pumped a fist her way, the sight of him becoming quickly distant. When she was sufficiently out of harm’s way, she sat down on the side of the road, her heart pounding out of her chest, her vision pulsing around the edges.
“Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod!” she wheezed.
Sweat drained from her hairline down her temples and cheeks. Her armpits were damp, as was her entire back, and the cut on her thigh was pulsing hard.
Sitting there on the dirty asphalt, all but hyperventilating, her eyes drifting down to the spot where she’d sliced open her leg. A wet circle of blood seeped through the dried pig blood, a warning to her that her attempt to take care of the wound had failed.
She put her hand on it, drew back splotches of red.
Wiping her hand on her pants, she stood, got on her bike and continued on, her leg hurting now more than ever. A few miles later, she finally stopped, fetched a couple tablets of Advil out of her pack. She gulped them down, praying the painkillers would kick in sooner rather than later.
A few miles ahead, she spotted a group of people gathered in the highway. There was a small gathering blocking the interstate. A few dozen of them for sure, maybe more.
She slowed the bike, not sure what to do.
