I imagine the grin on my face in those days is a lot like that of the District Soldiers. As soon as Abby’s bullet enters my skull, the spray of blood and brains—my blood and brains—is going to drench Gina and Mark, the sick bastards, and they’re going to enjoy it.
So I decide to close my eyes. What if there’s lingering brain activity once the bullet slices through my head? What if the last image my dying eyes see are these two sharks?
No, I don’t want that.
With my eyes closed, I muster up a family portrait in my mind. A picnic in Haven. The sun shining, the air smelling fresh. We are gathered around a tree with bright leaves. The backdrop is a clear blue sky. There, in this portrait, is Darlene, my son, Norm, Tim, Eve, Carmen, and yes, Abby before her own mind was destroyed.
I hold this image for as long as I can. It keeps the fear away, the sadness, replaces all of it with love and nostalgia.
In this peace, I accept my fate.
Thirty
The gun goes off once.
Twice.
I hear a scream. Is it Lilly’s? It must be, I can’t imagine I look too good with a bloody hole in my head.
But wait—
How can I hear a scream if I’m dead?
Unless…
My eyes shoot open. My heart is pounding fiercely, it’s like a running dinosaur in my chest. Thump-thump-thump-thump.
What I see first is a bright streak of red against the white walls. It drips slowly, pools on the nice carpet. My eyes follow it to the floor. There, a crumpled man lies, blood coming from his head.
What the fuck? is on my lips, ready to leave my mouth when I feel a tugging at my wrist.
“Don’t have much time,” Abby is saying. “They’ll come up and check pretty soon.”
I have no idea what’s going on.
My eyes flick to the other body. This one is closer to the door, hardly any blood comes from it. It’s Gina. Her gray hair is unmistakable. I only mention this because I’m currently wondering if I’ve imagined all of it. Because this is impossible. This is unreal.
I saw Abby’s eyes, saw how sinister they were. She meant business. The brainwashing was real.
Or was it?
My arms are free. I pull them up, sudden pain in my shoulder, the phantom biting of the binds on my wrist. Now, a tugging on my ankles, a tearing. I look down and see a hand and a claw working on the shiny duct tape methodically, carefully.
“Abby,” I say. “Abby.”
“Jack, not now. We can catch up as soon as we’re out of this shit-storm,” she replies from the floor. I look over to Lilly. Her mouth is hanging open. There’s tears in her eyes. She thought I was dead; I thought I was dead. “It’s gonna be hard enough to get into the garage without the whole fucking squadron breathing down our necks,” Abby continues.
It’s now that the crumpled body on the floor starts moving. Moaning. Gina is up on all fours. She looks back at us, a flash of hate and pain in her eyes.
“Abby!” I say.
“Shit!” Abby says.
Gina opens the door as Abby shoots.
Misses. A bullet sprays shards of wood in every direction. She aims again, but the door closes after Gina slips out into the hallway.
Abby runs past me.
It’s too late. There’s a painful groan, practically a scream, and then a thud on the wall out there that carries far and wide.
But not as far and wide as the sound of the alarm the dying District guard has just hit.
Thirty-One
I don’t let this put a damper on the fact that I’m still alive. I know my opportunities when I see them, and though my feet are not untied yet, I lean over and begin working on Lilly’s bound hands.
Outside, in the hall, another shot goes off and Abby storms back into the conference room. Blood dots the flesh on her neck and chest. In her clawed hand, she holds a knife. I’m guessing she took it off of Gina, who won’t be bothering us again. But the deed is done. The alarm has been raised and we’re on the clock, a very short clock. Soon, a stream of guards will start pouring into the room.
Abby slices through my duct tape and then does the same on Lilly’s.
“C’mon,” Abby says. “I can get us out of here in no time.”
I stand there on wobbly legs, smiling like a fool at her. Abby fuckin Cage. It has been too long. It’s almost like staring at a ghost. I was sure she was dead, but here she is.
“Close your mouth, Jack. You look like an idiot,” Abby says. “And a beard? C’mon, man, you cannot pull off a beard!”
I smile, tears in my eyes. This is a dream. It has to be. I’m imagining Abby and her voice like I’ve imagined Darlene’s and Junior’s.
She smiles back. For this moment, nothing exists but us. No alarm, no bodies on the floor, no zombies in Chicago or the world—just Abby Cage and Jack Jupiter. Reunited.
I can’t help myself. I lunge forward and hug her, mostly to make sure she is real. Her warm flesh against my own says she is.
“Blah,” she says. “Save the sappy shit for later…you know, like after we’re dead.”
“Gonna be sooner than later,” Lilly says. She points to the door. Outside in the hall, the unmistakable sounds of running footsteps and confused shouting echo.
“Let’s go!” Abby says. Something passes between us, a mutual understanding of mutual destruction. Part of the old gang is back. We’re both a little older, a little more broken, but we know you can never be too old or too broken to fuck shit up.
Thirty-Two
Three steps into our flight, we realize we aren’t getting out of here alive…at least not through the large double doors that lead out into the lobby. Now is a good time for action-hero Jack Jupiter to rear his ugly head, I think.
“Shit!” Lilly says. “What the hell do we do?”
Tensions are somehow running higher than before. Quickly, I scan the room for anything I can use. I’ve already picked up Mark’s assault rifle, it’s currently over my shoulder, the grip firmly in my clenched hand. Wish I had my sword. Might not do me much good in this particular situation, but the cold steel has a calming effect.
The room is pretty bare. We need something to hold the doors closed while we figure out what to do next. I reach down—maybe a belt. Fuck, I never wear belts. Too uncomfortable.
“Abby, give me your belt!” I say.
She looks at me like I’m crazy.
“Just give it to me.”
“Well, if I knew it was going to be like that…” Lilly says.
We both turn to her and shout, “Shut up!”
Abby takes her belt off, hands it to me. I slide it through the door handles and tie the tightest knot I’ve ever tied. Again, Norm would be proud.
We are backing up toward the window as the first thud hits the doors, jolts it in the middle where the two meet. Another pummel and the hinges scream like living things.
“Now what?” Lilly asks.
“We fight,” Abby says with confidence. “I’ve done some fucked-up things over the last couple years and nothing can atone for them, but I’m glad I’m going out on a good note. Glad I’m going out fighting.”
I take her right hand with my left and I squeeze.
“And I’m glad I got to see you again,” she says. This emotion stuns me. Abby has always been the last to show it. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll never admit I said that.”
“It’s not over,” I say. My back is up against the window. I turn around and look down—another mistake, never look down. We’re about fifteen to twenty stories up. I’m no expert, but I think that amounts to nearly two hundred feet and that’s a long drop.
As I turn back to the door, which is probably two good hits away from buckling in, I see something out of the corner of my eye.
My breath catches, heart skips a couple beats.
What I see is hope, and it’s hope in the form of a scaffold, one of those suspended scaffolds the window washers used to use. Another minor, negative detail of the apocalypse�
��dirty windows. Whatever skyscraper we’re in right now could use a good washing.
“Look!” I say, pointing.
Abby wastes no time in looking. Lilly, on the other hand, says, “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s—” But she’s looking now, and her face goes pale beneath her mask of dried blood. “You gotta be kidding me. I’m not—”
“It’s either that or we get tortured and killed by the District!” I say.
“Jack, that thing hasn’t been used in fifteen years and it’s not even on our level. We’ll have to jump—” Lilly is saying.
“That’s a risk we’re gonna have to take. I’ll go first and see if I can get it any closer,” I say.
“Jack, you’re going to kill yourself,” Lilly says.
I shrug, trying to mask the fear that is close to consuming me. As hard as I’ve become that fear is always there. I can’t let it stay, though. I have to be the leader, I have to step up.
“Stand back,” I say.
Reluctantly, Lilly and Abby do.
“Open up!” a guard yells.
“You’re dead!” another echoes.
I don’t bother aiming, I just pull the trigger. A burst of shots shatter the large window. The glass falls for seemingly forever. A blast of wind musses up my hair and then tries to pull us to our death with a roaring whoosh. We resist it as much as we can.
“Jack!” Lilly says, but I’m already on the edge of the window, crouching, ready to jump.
Don’t look down don’t look down don’t look down
I do.
The glass is still falling. The waning sun catches on the shards as they tumble over and over. Lilly is still shouting my name, the door is still being pounded on, but I can barely hear it over the wind.
Wind. So much wind.
No more thinking, Jack. Just do it! Norm would do it. So can you.
You can do this, Jack. It’s Darlene’s voice and it’s exactly what I need to hear right now.
I jump, and for the split second I’m suspended over thin air, over nothingness, my heart stops beating, my blood stops pumping, and my brain shorts out.
Then my hands close over steel, cold steel, and my fall is cut short. The scaffold groans under my weight. I’m screaming, or am I? Who the hell knows? Everything is lost in the wind.
Somehow, I manage to pull myself up, and as much as I just want to lie here and catch my breath or never fucking move again, I can’t.
Seeing that the controls on the scaffold are rusted to the point of me not being able to press the buttons, I try anyway.
Nothing but drifting flakes of rust to show for it.
“Abby!” I shout.
A sudden queasiness stirs my guts. What if I’m too late? What if they’re taken already?
But Lilly’s head pokes out of the window, then Abby’s right above her.
“You have to jump!” I yell, voice lost in the wind.
I see Abby and Lilly exchange a glance, worried, scared expressions on their pale faces. Words pass over Lilly’s lips. I don’t hear them, but I’m adept enough at lip reading that I get the gist.
Fuck it, is what she says.
And fuck it is right. Lilly springs forward. She gets good air under her and makes the jump much easier than I did. I help pull her up, putting the sudden dip on the scaffold that nearly knocked me over the edge to the back of my mind. Can’t let that fear consume me.
“Wooo! Holy shit!” Lilly says.
“Come on, Ab!” I shout once Lilly is safely behind me.
Abby shakes her head. Fuck it, on her lips, too. She jumps. Everything moves in slow motion. She seems to float for much longer than she actually is. The metal hook sending sparkles through the air, her arms and legs swimming.
A thud.
Me screaming with joy and fear and confusion.
Abby holds on to the railing with her good right hand while Lilly and I each have a fistful of her jacket. The seams rip. I can almost hear them.
Heaving, we pull her over.
I hug her fiercely. But during this hug, the scaffold dips a whole floor. Now we’re face to face with the dirty window to the left and below the window we just came from. We have to get off this fucking thing before we fall to our death, or before the District starts picking us off with their rifles.
“Controls don’t work,” I say.
“Doesn’t matter,” Abby says, her hair blowing wildly. She points to the cables. They’re fraying, twanging as each twine unravels under our combined weight and its years of neglected maintenance.
Thinking fast, I aim the gun at the window in front of us, seeing our warped reflections. It looks like I’m sticking up a grizzled old man with a graying beard and his two girl friends.
Then I pull the trigger and the reflection explodes inward.
“Go! Go!” I shout, guiding them to the open window. Upstairs, unmistakable even over the roar of the wind, are gunshots. The guards have given up on the idea of busting the door down and have shot it instead. About time.
I jump in and Abby is telling me to shoot the cables. I don’t think about this, I just do it. It’s only when the gun clicks after my last two rounds send the scaffold to the surface nineteen stories below that I realize what she has just done.
She’s bought us time. The guards will think the scaffold gave out…with us on it. Either that or we’ve somehow sprouted wings and flown away. Judging by their relative slowness of shooting the door open, they won’t think we’ve found our way back into the building. I think.
It’s crazy enough that it might just work.
Abby leads us out of the door to an empty corridor. If any guards we’re on this level, they’re gone because of the blaring alarm—which still blares, by the way. I’m thankful for that because it probably has masked my gunshots.
We hit the stairs.
So many steps later, Abby leads us through another door. At this point, I’m practically gasping for air.
Lilly is doing fine, so is Abby. Old man Jack Jupiter hates cardio, even when his life depends on it. Through this door is a glass tunnel leading to an attached parking deck. A guard runs through it and toward us, and I nearly trip over my own feet. He’s snarling like a rabid dog, but when he sees Abby, he stops and salutes.
“The alarm,” he says with an urgency that he’s trying to control.
“Prisoners have escaped on level 19,” Abby says. “I’m going to cut them off on the ground. Is my truck filled up?”
The guard looks confused here. “Miss Cage,” he says, “I don’t—”
But Abby swings her pistol and knocks the guard out cold. She looks at me, shrugs. “Still got it,” she says.
“That was…awesome!” Lilly screeches.
Smiling, Abby turns and jogs to the door the guard has just come out of. I step over the guard and follow.
In the parking deck is an array of cars. Really, all types of vehicles, and there’s a pretty good chance that they all work.
Abby honks the alarm on a Ford truck. It’s a mammoth, four doors and huge tires. “Say hello to Sheila.”
I laugh. I can’t help myself. This is madness. “Sheila like—” I begin to say, but Abby cuts me off.
“Like Norm’s old Jeep,” she says.
Lilly looks at us. “You guys are weird.”
“Oh, you’ll soon join in on the weirdness,” Abby says as she opens the door. “It’s inevitable.” Then she motions to me. “Want to drive?”
“God, yes,” I say.
“Too bad,” Abby replies.
All I can do is shake my head. Maybe it’s not such a good idea that I drive. Didn’t work out to well for me last time I was behind the wheel.
We get in the truck and she starts it up. It purrs to life smoothly, almost soundlessly. She doesn’t turn the lights off. A few others are in the garage now, getting into their own rides—armored Chryslers, trucks on tires as tall as me, vans with spikes on their bumpers—all to go catch the escaped prisoners.
Abby le
ts them pull out, their tires screaming on the asphalt, then she pulls forward as normal as day, as if nothing’s happened.
We are back on the road. She turns right when everyone else turns left, leaving the District’s Black Towers and downtown Chicago behind.
Hopefully forever.
In front of us, I see the shimmering lake, and a road of possibilities beyond.
Thirty-Three
“My first question,” I say to Abby as we get on a stretch of open road, “is how?”
“How what?” Abby replies.
Lilly is in the backseat. She has this big, goofy smile on her face, as she should. We did just escape death three times back there. Nothing new for the old Jack Jupiter, though.
“How did you un-brainwash yourself?” Part of my mind, that old writer in me, knows Abby is smart, smart enough to not get brainwashed, but that newer Jack who’s lost all hope can’t believe it. I’ll just have to find a middle ground.
Abby laughs.
“I was never brainwashed.”
I run a hand through my beard. “Never brainwashed.” So the old Jack was right. Maybe I need to start trusting him more often.
Abby shakes her head. The truck thunders by a group of zombies, their dead heads turning in our direction. We are nearing the entrance to Highway 41. Pretty soon we’ll pass Soldier Field without any traffic. Coming up on our right would be my old apartment building, Pathfinder Pointe. I try to put this to the back of my mind, to focus on Abby’s story, but I can’t.
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