by Linda L Zern
“Jamie.” Ally’s voice was barely a sigh.
He watched a tear slip down the side of her face.
“She is awake then.” The Doctor finally looked at Jamie. “Not much thanks to you.”
“Whaa, what?” Slowly it dawned on him what she thought about the situation. “No. No, not mine.” Something in the way he said it must have registered for her.
She held up her hand. “Stop!” She collapsed her fingers into a fist. “I don’t want to know, and it doesn’t matter. The results are the same. I’m letting you stay inside with her because you’re hurt.” She pointed to the sling on his arm. “Otherwise you’d be in the barnyard with the others.”
“Others. You mean the men.”
She didn’t deny it. “Keep bathing her in the alcohol. Keep her cooled down.”
“Jamie.” Not a question, just his name. It was Ally’s voice.
He lost track of the rest of the doctor’s instructions. “Ally, I’m here.” He reached for her hand.
“I’m,” she said, “so tired.”
“She should rest now because she’s not out of the woods. Don’t you upset her.”
He nodded, understanding. He squeezed her hand and waited with quiet terror for Ally to ask him about what had happened to her babies.
CHAPTER 44
When a snarling Amazon the others called Glinda limped into the Marketplace infirmary, Doctor Midge sent Jamie out to get more water from the well. Gwen could see that he’d wanted to kick at the order.
Gwen overheard the doctor’s whispered advice. “Don’t make a fuss or you’ll be out in the men’s tent city before I can look at your shoulder. You’re hurt. Right?” She nodded over enthusiastically. “That’s your ticket inside the mall, for now. Understand? You want to be able to stay with your girl, right?” She pointed to where Ally slept easily for a change. “Play it up if someone asks. Go on. And remember! You’re working for me.” She shoved a bucket in his hands. He got it, not happily, but he got it.
He went without a fuss. The sight of him—tall, still gangly, and slump-shouldered—brought Gwen close to laughing. Glinda, who’d cussed her way through the doctor’s treatment, had looked a lot less funny, studying Gwen with looks that dripped with hate and suspicion. Smart to send Jamie on his way.
Gwen had to admire the doctor’s bedside manner when it came to heading off potential conflict. Being a doctor seemed to be a lot like being a mother or a prophetess around here, but then again it didn’t take a genius to see trouble coming between Jamie and the foul-mouthed woman. It was a relief when Glinda stumbled out of the infirmary. Watching Doctor Midge juggle the situation between Jamie and the angry resident of the Marketplace should have been upsetting. It wasn’t. It gave Gwen an incredible, lulling sense of security, not being the one in charge, the one people expected to see into the future, have all the answers.
Gwen went back to scrubbing what could be scrubbed. She sat on a stump—sanded and smoothed—a comfortable enough footstool. Cleaning was easy enough. Finding things that needed doing and then doing them. It kept your mind from creeping to places where the worry waited to strangle you to death.
She wondered about the bunker. Would they be able to start over there or would they be forced to retreat to this strange place, this uncomfortable mix of wounded warriors and helpless stragglers? She shut the worry away and scrubbed harder.
Overhead, they’d opened the wooden flaps covering the one hole in the roof over the infirmary to let the sunlight in when the weather was good—a poor man’s skylight. In bad weather they were forced to use the handmade candles. Not today. Not after the fire. The sun streamed down like a champ through the hole in the mall’s roof. The man’s shadow cut across the plywood tabletop that Gwen worked on.
The shadow shifted across the surface of the table but stayed silent.
Gwen focused on a stain that looked like Abraham Lincoln’s hat. “I know you’re there. I’m surprised.”
Roy Terry’s outline quivered. Gwen didn’t turn around.
“Why? Why did you use my husband’s name when you knew it would make me hope again?”
“Mrs. Dunn, I don’t have any real answers other than I wanted it to get people’s minds off of me. In the old world it was called a diversion.”
“This world too. It worked. Still, you knew my husband’s name. You knew what to say. How?”
“Rumor, a word passed down from someone who knew something once about that mythic place. A place named for broken shells and seaweed. Strandline.” The shadow collapsed as Mister Terry squatted next to Gwen. She forgot to wipe at Lincoln’s hat.
“How can that be? No one knew outside the family. When you said his name, I remembered a man who doesn’t exist anymore, even if he is by some miracle still alive. Because the face I see is from seven years ago. He’d gone to work.” The memories swirled like a flock of unhappy birds. “He’d said something about the solar storms, and that they were going to fiddle with stuff at the Cape to lock down the equipment—all the computers, electronics.” Gwen began to twist the rag. “I only heard solar and storms and called Colonel Kennedy.”
Terry stepped forward. His shadow was back. The man’s shadow nodded.
“He’d been distracted, you know. Didn’t kiss me goodbye, the way you do, because there was always going to be tomorrow.”
The man’s voice was reserved, controlled, when he finally answered her. “Yeah, I know. I had no idea about any of it. I was living on the coast with some others. It was a good enough life. We had contacts at NASA, me and my friends. Chances to go deep-sea fishing, excellent dinners out, my work, and it was never going to end. Then a woman came after the grid failed, offered a way off the mainland, away from the slaughter. We took it.”
“We?”
He flinched. “I’m sure you have regrets . . .” He took a deep breath and held it, only exhaling when he said, “Colon, my cousin, he’d come to live with me after other wars, old wars, old horrors had scared him. There’d been medication for him, and therapy: all the true luxuries of the modern world and they were instantly gone.”
It was Gwen’s turn to shiver as she wrestled the damp cloth. “Why did you go? And how are you here? Why aren’t you still with that woman?”
“Because the nightmares became the reality, and I wanted to find something that wasn’t nightmarish. The people outside the gates, that swarm, are emptied out, hollow. And I should know. They follow Myra. The woman outside the gate has my cousin with her. She’s turned him into something I don’t recognize. She saved us once, but not now.”
Gwen could feel his glance when he looked down the row of bedrolls to where the doctor sat with Ally Lane. He’d had a family—a cousin who breathed fire and threat outside their walls with a woman who’d been a savior—once. Had the woman always had butchery in her soul?
“I know how you feel. I do,” he said.
“No, I don’t think you do know.” She spun on her stool, grabbed him by the shoulders. “I was distracted then too. I told my husband about the S-Line, the ranch, about Colonel Kennedy’s invitation. We fought about it. I gave the Colonel money every month to put supplies aside for us, so we wouldn’t be complete dead weights if something happened, when it happened. Bruce and I fought. He thought I was ridiculous, paranoid. He didn’t want to spend the money on crazy preparations.”
“I hardly think—”
“Shut up. You don’t understand. I only told Bruce about the money, and when he forbid me from handing over more money, I did it anyway. I never told him.” She squeezed his shoulders. “I never told him how to find us. I never told him where we would be if something happened. I let the boys think that he was on his way—for seven years—I let them believe it. But he couldn’t have been coming to us, because I was angry, and I never told him how to find the S-Line Ranch.”
Roy Terry reached up and covered her hands on his shoulders with his own. She shook her head.
“I don’t know why I told you that. You
started it all again, saying his name.” She frowned. “I’ve never told anyone. Not the doctor, not the Colonel. No one.”
He patted her hands.
“Gwen, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I ever used him. I am. I wanted you to know that and to let you know that sometimes it’s better when they don’t find you. It is.” His shoulders sagged as he turned and started to walk away from her. “Miss Gwen?” He walked back to her.
She refused to look at him, ashamed of tears in front of this stranger. He lifted her chin with the tip of his finger.
“Do you know what I remember most about those days right after? I wasn’t like you. There’d been no plan, no place to go.” He paused. “I remember the silence afterward. No buzzing. No humming. No wheels turning. No engine sounds. No jets overhead. Do you remember? So much silence until the screaming started.”
Gwen lifted her eyes. “I do. It was as if the whole world had fallen asleep and taken a nap until bad dreams woke us up.”
“But now there’s something to listen to again. This place.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. Because we’re waking up and the world is starting to hum again.”
CHAPTER 45
Having to wait for the cover of darkness was almost more than Tess could bear. They’d tracked through the night, but the sun had caught them. Parrish insisted they rest until darkness fell again. Britt had agreed.
Small flickering lights ringed the fortress wall like stumpy stars fallen from the sky. Twilight tricked the eye, turning the sky and ground the same filmy gray. Parrish counted campfires. The fires of Myra’s invaders were not much more than spits of flame and heat, flickering lumps across the bare ground. Firewood, animal habitats, cover, and shade were gone. There was nowhere to hide.
It was El’s wall that made it a siege, hardly a subtle style of warfare in any age.
Everyone knew where to find the opposing sides; it wasn’t confusing.
There’d been no confusion when it came to tracking ZeeZee, Jon, and Stone. There’d been signs of those three—hints and clues—a shoe track smaller than a grown man’s, a strip of ZeeZee’s bandana, and once the jumble of tracks and marks when they stopped with the captives. Maybe a scuffle or worse, but nobody wanted to fill in that blank. No one dared.
Parrish listened as Britt and Tess discussed options.
“The overpass. It’s close to the Marketplace. There are places where the bridges and ramps could be used as cover, but we’ll have to swing way out to pick up the old Greenway,” Britt said. She resembled the ground they walked on; everyone was coated in black dust.
“That’ll take too long.” Parrish watched Tess rub at the end of her nose. “We don’t have days. We use what’s left of the town. Most of those old buildings were built of fired brick. We hit them now, right from the town. Tonight. Use the dark. We can’t wait.”
Britt forced a laugh. “Too soon and the ruins aren’t close enough. They’ll see us coming a mile away. They may not have expected El’s wall, but they’re not desperate yet. Plenty of water. Just the food they could carry. We wait. This may resolve itself when they run out of supplies. We could wait them out. Pick them off as they retreat.”
“Have you forgotten that my sister is in that, with those—?” Tess stumbled to a stop, her jaw clenching. “I’m not sitting here while she, while they . . .” Words failed her again. Her voice became a growl. “We have to go now. We’ve got the weapons. We’ll have surprise on our side.”
Parrish knew he was walking on black ice, but he wasn’t ready to watch Tess smash herself to death on her terror. Screw the warrior women and their hang-ups. Screw Britt. He straightened his shoulders and waded in. A thin mutter erupted from Britt’s squad.
“Not enough cover for all of us to do anything together. If we go tonight and fail, we might as well send a marching band. If we wait too long it won’t be a rescue, it’ll be a recovery, and then maybe not even that. Divide up. Diversion. Attack and divert and we get them out tonight.”
“Who diverts? Who attacks? How do we coordinate?” Samuel stepped into the circle, searching faces. He held the AR-15 in his hand like a fishing pole. “And how do we trust them?” He glanced at Parrish and then beyond to the circle of women who waited for orders, watching and listening with narrowing eyes and deepening frowns.
Britt tipped her head at him.
There’d been surprise all around when Samuel had volunteered to go back to the fort, to leave the bunker and the children; Parrish suspected that Sammy Holt was in a fighting mood.
“You have another option tucked away some place? Some secret tiger pit big enough for a mob of raping butchers?” Britt’s tone was close to a sneer.
“No. It was just my mom and me until that fort of yours.”
Parrish made a note of the way Sam’s fist tightened around the rifle.
“Now it’s just me. I don’t have any secret weapons.”
Something there—between Britt and Samuel? Something more than outrage about a murdered Doe Kid?
Tess shifted forward, stepped on Parrish’s unspoken questions. Later. He’d ask her later what she knew about Samuel’s anger. “We don’t have time for this,” Tess said. “Too bad you don’t have a village of trained riot police tucked away, Sam. But I’m pretty sure you don’t.”
Parrish stared each of them in the face, got their attention, and said, “We’re going to work at this together.” He kept his voice even, controlled. There was too much tension already, too many undercurrents. They’d be lucky to get out of this without shooting each other. “Tess? Sam and I will go in to get the family back. Small is better for what we need to do. Me and Samuel. That’s it.”
Tess started to sputter, “We said that we wouldn’t split up again—”
He wanted to cut her off. Britt beat him to it.
“How else can we make it work? He can’t come with us.” She pointed to Samuel. “Either one of them.” Britt shrugged away any more discussion. “You want guns blazing? Okay. We’re the diversion. We come at them from the Red Bug Road side, the left and draw their attention. It’ll take us at least an hour. At least that much time to get in position. We’ll take out those goons on the fringes, less likely to kill non-combatants that way.” Britt wiped a smear of mud from the AR-15 in her hand.
“We’ll move out but not all the way to the main road, just to the overpass closest to the wall. With any luck, we’ll give you enough time and distraction, and let El know that we’re still alive at the same time. She won’t be threatened by anything they do, any grand gestures of public gang rape or whatever mayhem Myra is planning. El will hold steady. She won’t fire on you until she knows the score.”
Parrish nodded and said, “Okay. We’re trusting your word on that. Just make a big enough noise to give us a chance to locate the captives.”
“Non-combatants. Captives . . .” There were tears in Tess’s voice.
He almost told her that it was time to buck up when Britt’s voice came as a snarl in the dark. “You cry, and I’ll punch you right here, right now. Geez. I can’t have her poisoning my squad with fear. Let’s move, Princess. Moving, it helps. It’s the only thing that does.”
Silence. And then Tess’s voice. “You don’t worry about me. You just do your job.”
Samuel grunted. Britt marched away to join her squad.
“Give me a minute, Sam. Get another count on the fires and then multiply by four. Let’s try to get a better headcount.” Parrish waited until they were alone.
“This is where we split up,” he said. Tess took him by the hand.
Tess slung her rifle over her shoulder. She curled her hands in the front of Parrish’s shirt, trying to postpone the split. He held her close in his arms, face to face in the dark. There was just enough starlight to make out his features. They stood in the crumpled corner of a demolished gas station, alone now. She’d pulled him there while Britt prepared her squad.
“I promised myself after I’d lost you that I wouldn�
��t let you go so easily again. So much for that.” She tightened her grip, pulled him closer.
His soft laugh vibrated through him and into her.
“I mean it,” she said.
“Tess, I can’t go with that band of man haters. They’d as soon shoot me as the invaders, and I would never let Samuel go with them. They’d eat him before he crossed the highway. You go. I know what I’m doing.” He pressed his lips to the corner of her mouth. “I’ll get them back.”
“Not knowing what is happening to them is a nightmare. Britt said to turn it off, but I’m no good at it. ZeeZee.” Her sister’s name was all she trusted herself to say.
Putting his finger under her chin, he made her look at him. “What we need is a rally point. Tomorrow, we’ll meet at the church, the big one on the hill.”
“Behind enemy lines?”
“Maybe. Let’s hope not. That would mean this Myra has a much larger force than we’ll be able to handle, even with decent weapons. Okay, not the church. The old Jackson Height’s school. Straight out of town—east. Tomorrow. Dump that mob. I’ll bring ZeeZee and the rest. Wait for a day, but that’s all. After that, we head south and then west, and then we’ll be able to figure out how to get Jamie and Ally and the rest, the kids at the bunker. We’ll start over.”
Tess couldn’t listen to any more of it—the ifs or the maybes or the what-might-happens. She pushed him against the scorched brick wall. He understood, making it easy for her. With an easy tug, he reversed their positions, pressing his body against hers. There was so much hunger in his kiss that it stung and eased and thrilled all at the same time. This was the only “what if” that mattered. She let her head fall back.
“I wasn’t going to let you go again.”
He kissed his way down her neck. “I will find you. But if—” His breath fell warm against her skin. “But if not, I want you to know—”
“Don’t.” She wanted to memorize the feel of him under her hands.
“Tess, I’ll get them for you, and then I’ll find you. I. Will. Find. You.”
