He puts his blood-slick hands up in a last-ditch gesture of surrender. No luck. Suzanna and her cavalry have pulled their triggers one last time. The succession of shots rips Bandit’s broad jaw line into pieces. He flies over the hood and lands in the duck pond with a splash, leaving a rain of blood on the Lincoln’s paint job.
A long silence follows this. Something great has just happened between these men and women. They have solidified their freedom. All I can think about while they wrap each other up in teary-eyed hugs is Abby.
She has been with me since the beginning. Together, we have taken down warlords and scores of zombies. Once, just outside of DC, Abby was bitten. I carried her in my arms, this sister I never had, to a place of safety where a man named Jacob performed an immediate and gruesome amputation. I remember how I felt when I thought I lost her that time, how I thought the world was ending. But she came through. In only about a day’s worth of time, she was almost back to her normal self. That’s Abby for you, tough as nails. Then the District attacked Haven and I lost my wife and son and sister-in-law and so many others, including Abby, and I really did think the world had ended…for real this time. An apocalypse after the apocalypse.
I heard her on the radio, and so did Lilly. I’m not crazy, I’m not hallucinating. Abby is all right; she’s alive, but why is she communicating to Bandit’s farm via District frequencies? This is the question burning up inside me as Lilly breaks away to my right and helps Suzanna drag their dead friend out of the grass and up to the concrete.
I can’t just stand here and not help.
I walk over there with them, help carry this bleeding man away.
Suzanna tells the man who had helped her take down Bandit to give the signal. This confuses me for a moment before the man raises his rifle into the air and shoots. One shot…two, three, four.
“Let’s hope they made out better than we did,” the man says. He looks at me, sees my arched eyebrow.
“Bob and the young ones,” the man says. He sticks his hand and we shake. His name is David. He introduces me to the other men and women. There is Marco, Daphne, and Malorie. Eric is the one who has been shot in the throat, resting eternally at our feet. When this somber moment ends, David says, “That was good shooting back there, taking out his tire like that.”
I shrug. I don’t need praised for doing the right thing. I only acted on instinct.
“Surprised you did,” Lilly adds, “with how spaced-out you looked. Still kind of do.” She looks at me warily. In this look, I can tell we have a secret. I’m grateful for her not bringing up the fact that I had a clipped conversation with someone over District airwaves. It would raise too many questions that I’m not prepared to answer. Lilly looks away and helps Suzanna off of her feet. With the battle over, with Bandit dead, this woman, who was a slave no less than an hour ago, looks exhausted and older than her actual age. The tan she wears from constantly being out in the sun pales. She’s crying silent tears.
“Yes,” Suzanna says. “Great shooting, Jack.” She musters up a slight smile. “I would have got him anyway.”
I chuckle. “I don’t know about that…” My tone is joking, but I’m really not. If it wasn’t for me, Suzanna would be roadkill.
“There they are,” the other man says, shielding his eyes from the waning sun. On the horizon, Bilbo walks, specks on his back, specks next to him. It’s the one-armed man and the children, back to the safety of this farm. Though how much longer this place will be safe, I have no idea. With the gunshots and the grenade explosion, it’s bound to draw unwanted attention—zombies or others.
We can’t worry about this yet.
I say, “If we start walking now, we’ll meet up with them about halfway, I think.”
“We aren’t going anywhere, Jack,” Suzanna says. “There is no safety out there.”
“No safety in here. With all that noise we made, a horde is bound to be on their way,” I argue. This shocking revelation is supposed to knock them off of their feet. It doesn’t.
“Let them come,” David says.
Daphne nods, fresh tears in her eyes. “We’ll be ready for them.”
“We have the weapons and we have the manpower. When they come, we will put them back in the ground where they belong,” Suzanna continues. “This is a good place. The soil grows and the water flows.”
“What about the District? They’re bound to show up sooner or later,” Lilly asks, honest fear in her voice.
“We’ll be ready for them, too,” Marco says. He is the youngest of the bunch, Hispanic, a man no more than twenty years old, fifteen of those years spent in an apocalyptic wasteland. I can’t help but wonder if he remembers what it was like before all of this happened.
Now the freed people stand shoulder to shoulder. On their faces, you can see this bond, this camaraderie. They are a family; what I once had all those years ago. They have found their Haven and there’s no taking it from them.
But I know what happens to family. It’s ripped apart in this wasteland. The evil always wins out and the good always die. Like I’ve said, it’s not easy to have a family when the dead walk and hunt us like animals.
There is no convincing them, though, and it’s not my job to do that, either.
“Well,” I say, “let’s get rid of these bodies before the others show up. The youngins don’t need any more scarring than they’ve already had.”
I can see Lilly smiling out of the corner of my eye.
“Thank you, Jack,” Suzanna says. She smiles, too. It is somber, melancholy. She sticks her hand out and I take it. She squeezes, grateful for my help. I pull my hand away. Can’t get sucked into another trap, of caring for people that will only end up dying.
The clean up begins. Each one of us is tired and hungry and—at least I am—afraid, but we drag the bodies to the back of the house. The District guards and the zombies go in one pile, while the other freed people who have lost their lives go elsewhere. They mean to bury them, and I mean to help. If anything, it’s a way to make up for the fact that I didn’t get this chance in Haven, a way to atone for that sin.
Marco, David, and I go around with knives and stab each corpse in the head, killing the brain even if they’ve already been shot somewhere close by. Better safe than sorry, we’re all thinking.
The rest start a large fire after this and the air fills with the sickeningly sweet smell of charred flesh with an undercurrent of burnt hair.
Daphne disappears into the barn and reappears with two shovels. Lilly and I offer to dig the holes as they rest. Well, mostly I offered and Lilly reluctantly agreed.
The night has come now, but it doesn’t seem like it with the large bonfire at our backs.
Bob and the children have made it here. The smell in the air is unmistakable, and they paid it no attention.
Bilbo roams free, comes over my way. I give him a reassuring nod he doesn’t understand then prances off like he doesn’t know me. Good, I think, let’s keep our relationship like that.
“He’s going to make some new friends,” Lilly says, leaning on her shovel. I follow Bilbo with my eyes, and sure enough, Lilly is right. The horse stops by the stables and examines the other two horses, who are sticking their heads out of the dark. Their ears move back and forth, along with their eyes. Somehow, I think this is their way of communication.
A boy of maybe thirteen guides Bilbo into an empty stable.
Then we’re back to digging graves for the freed people—our new friends.
It takes nearly another half-hour before the graves are dug. We took our time, or at least I have. When I got done digging my hole I began on the second, then Lilly came to help me out.
Suzanna and the rest come out of the house. They have washed up, put on better clothes. Some of the children wear oversized and baggy shirts and pants. Some of the women wear male sweatpants, tied over and over again at the waist to fit. Suzanna has scrubbed the dirt from her face, washed her hair. She looks stunning as only a woman of her age can
. Matured beauty.
Marco and I carry the wrapped bodies to the edge of the graves. Others offer to help, but I refuse them.
The funeral is as beautiful as a funeral can be. Many tears are shed and hands held. Hugs and kisses and all the usual stuff. I watch with dry eyes. It’s not that I’m not sad or not heartbroken for the lives lost today or anything like that, I’m just so used to death that I’ve become numb. The only thing that gets me these days is thinking of Darlene with her throat slit and my own son with a bullet in the back of his head, lying lifeless on the blood-soaked ground. I try not to think of these things. My brain doesn’t always comply.
Plus, I know this won’t be their last funeral. The funerals are constant in the wasteland.
We bury the bodies. Everyone helps with either shovel, spade, or their bare hands. These three dead men and women rest eternally by the small duck pond where the cause of all their pain and trouble lies at the bottom, half his face blown away courtesy of Suzanna.
After the dirt is packed and the crosses made from the ruined porch are planted, the crowd disperses.
Lilly and I don’t move for a minute. Me, because my head is somewhere else, deep in thought over Abby’s voice. I still can’t believe it. Was it really her? Lilly doesn’t move because of how troubled I am, I think.
I look at her, see a question on her lips.
“What is it?” I ask, beating her to the punch.
“Are you— Are you District, Jack?”
I snort with laughter, but there’s hardly any humor in the sound. “Me, District? You gotta be kidding. Did you not see what I did? Did you forget about all the Districters I killed today?”
She weighs her words carefully before speaking them. “I don’t know…the District is crazy enough to do something like that.”
I shake my head. “Ridiculous. I know you don’t really believe that.”
“Maybe I don’t.” Lilly leans closer. “But I’m confused, Jack. When Bandit escaped and knocked me down, I heard you talking on the radio. I heard the woman’s voice on the other end replying to you as if…as if she knew you.”
“She does.”
Lilly squints. “Who is she? Why is she District?”
“I—”
Suzanna’s voice cuts me off. We turn around to see her on the slanted steps, waving us closer. “Jack! Lilly! Come inside.”
I take this opportunity to put Lilly’s question on the back burner. I walk to the house, the Black Towers and Abby on my mind.
The truth is, I don’t know why Abby is in the District or how she’s even alive. After two years of not hearing her voice, of believing her to be dead, I’m still not sure if it was real, even if Lilly heard it, too.
Twenty-Two
The inside of the house has been hastily cleaned up. A wonderful smell drifts down the hallway. It’s the smell of cooking food.
Suzanna puts a hand on my shoulder, guides me inside. I have to duck so I don’t bang my head on the caved-in porch roof.
“You aren’t trying to leave us, are you?” David asks.
Lilly speaks over me. “No, why?”
“We’re having a feast. Broke into Bandit’s storeroom. There’s more food in there than a damn Walmart,” David answers.
“Come on,” Suzanna says.
She leads us to a large dining room. A table stretching the entire length of the house, I swear, sits in the middle. The carpet is a burnt orange and the wallpaper looks freshly and professionally hung. The others sit at this table.
Lilly and I take seats near the end, next to the one-armed man.
“Thank you,” he says to me, crying.
I shake my head. “It’s nothing. Don’t thank me.” And I’m not trying to sound like some cocky asshole who knows it was definitely something. Nothing like that.
“Yes, it is. It’s more than you know,” Bob, the one-armed man, says.
A little boy looks up at me with big eyes and says, “Thanks, mister.” The other children join in as the adults smile at them, proud of their manners. These are kids who have known nothing but the apocalypse. They’ve grown up in a world where there are no manners yet they somehow have them.
I smile back. “Really, it’s—”
Lilly hits me on the shoulder, like Abby would’ve, and says, “Just take the compliment, Jack.”
I nod. “It’s what my wife would’ve done,” I whisper.
“Is she your wife, mister?” the same boy asks.
Lilly and I chuckle awkwardly, but a throb of pain seizes my heart, a throb of pain for Darlene. “No,” Lilly says, then leans over to a teenaged girl and whispers all-too-loudly, “but he wishes.”
The girl giggles.
“What happened to your wife?” the boy asks.
“Now, Tommy, leave Mister Jack alone,” Bob says.
Tommy mutters an apology. By this time, the first rounds of food start arriving on the table, brought in by Suzanna, Marco, Malorie, and Daphne. There’s a pan of steaming bread, a dish of cheesy macaroni, canned vegetables with a spoon in them—green beans, corn, tomatoes. Powdered milk and glasses, water with ice cubes, and even a few dusty cans of Coca-Cola. It’s not much when you look at it, but as you bring the first forkful of macaroni up to your mouth and take a bite, you realize it’s everything you’ve ever wanted and more.
We eat and laugh and get to know each other.
The one armed man’s name is Robert, but he prefers Bob because, he says, “It makes me feel younger than I am.” He lost his arm in Iraq, long before the zombies came. He’s been living with this particular handicap for a good amount of time and now he hardly notices it, though he’ll more often than not feel that phantom arm like it’s still there. “Itches like crazy. That’s something, huh? An arm that isn’t there, itching.”
Suzanna was a librarian many years ago. She stayed in her branch for nearly six months after the government decided to tell us all to fuck off. They were doing a local food drive and the break room had a microwave and a good amount of bottled water. A backup generator, too. She survived more or less by herself, reading every book in the library once in that span of time. It was all she could do, she said, to take my mind away from the horrors happening all around us.
“Did you ever read The Deadslayer?” I ask.
She looks to be deep in thought. After a moment she nods. “Wasn’t a favorite of mine, but as far as zombie books go, it was fun.” She looks at me crookedly, a slight smile on her face. In those eyes, I can tell she knows. “Why?”
“Because I wrote it, along with a handful of other B-grade horror books,” I answer.
“Jack Jupiter,” she says softly. “I thought I knew that name.”
“Funny how things turn out, huh?” I say.
She laughs and like most laughs you hear nowadays, the sound is humorless.
Lilly tells her own sad stories. How she was taken from her hometown when it first started by the military, how their base was attacked, completely obliterated. She escaped. She doesn’t mention her pregnancy, and I’m glad. I don’t think I can handle listening to that story again. Besides, the youngins look to be deep inside of their own minds, but I remember being that age, remember playing grownups for fools, listening when I probably shouldn’t have been. I think Lilly senses this, too. Then again, these kids probably have their own messed up stories. I was a kid when the world had order. Things are different now. Much different.
After these stories are shared, a silence falls over the group. It’s a comfortable silence, the silence of friends who don’t need to fill the void with unnecessary conversation. And after all that has happened today, many of us probably don’t feel like talking much more.
We eat a dessert of green Jell-O. It doesn’t taste as sweet as I remember, but it hits the spot nonetheless. Everyone’s lips, teeth, and tongues turn green. The kids get a pretty big kick out of this. Seeing them laugh and point at each other breaks my heart. I think of Junior, I think of how he’d act and this thought stabs my he
art with icicles of sadness. I’ll never be over losing them.
Lilly puts a hand on my forearm. It startles me out of my thoughts. “Jack, you look exhausted,” she says.
I nod. I am.
“Why don’t you get to bed?” Lilly asks.
The idea of sleeping here hasn’t really occurred to me. I know if I stay to long, I’ll get attached. Can’t let that happen.
Looming in the back of my mind are the Black Towers, and Abby trapped at the top of one of them, waiting for me to come rescue her. Still, much needs to be done before I can travel to Chicago. I have to change the tire on the Lincoln, have to load up on ammo, have to figure out a way to let Lilly know I’m leaving her behind on this farm with these nice people at a place where I believe she’ll be safe, where Bilbo can roam and eat and be taken care of without running, because a life on the run is no life at all.
Suzanna gets up, her chair’s legs brushing against the carpet. The rest follow suit. I begin to gather up the dishes and the crumpled napkins. Bob tells me to quit it, to go get some rest. “Don’t worry about the mess. We’ll handle it.”
“I don’t mind,” I say. “It’s the least I can do after you all cooked for me.”
Bob looks at me with serious intensity. It almost makes me shift my eyes elsewhere. “Mr. Jupiter,” he says and as he speaks he grabs my hand. His own hand is arthritic and gnarled and covered with rough calluses, looking much older than this man actually is. He squeezes. “I didn’t expect to sleep anywhere with a roof over my head that doesn’t leak. I didn’t expect to have covers or food besides old bread and rusty water. Look at me now—look at all of us. We’re sitting here like kings and queens, all because of you and your bravery.”
I nod, resisting the urge to say it wasn’t a big deal. Lilly grabs my other hand and says, “C’mon, hero. We need to talk.”
We leave the smiling faces of the freed people and go out to the living room. Once we’re out here, I can’t help but keep looking at the radio. Part of me wishes Abby would call my name again while the other part of me plainly sees that the radio has been unplugged and pushed up against the wall. No voices will be coming from that box, that’s for sure.
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