Along the Winding Road

by Marlee Pagels

  “Can’t help to check,” she repeated slowly, leaning back against the couch and shivering. “Do you get visitors often?”

  “Oh, no.” A steady rhythm of slices through something thick thumped beneath his words, but the kitchen wall hid both food and cook. “I haven’t seen anyone else in… probably two years now.” He leaned back so she could see his smiling face. “I’m really glad you’re staying for lunch.”

  She smiled back. “No problem.”

  He hovered there a moment longer before returning to the task at hand. “Did you bring anything that needs cooking, or can we throw it on a plate without any more fuss?”

  She unzipped her duffel. “I have protein bars and—Arthur, we have some more grapefruits, right?”

  “Er, yes.” He shuffled his backpack off his shoulders and pawed through its contents. “Seven.”

  “And they won’t keep for long, so—” she rubbed her hip “—should we go ahead and have one each?”

  “If you can eat that much.” Arthur pulled out the fruits and set them on the coffee table. After returning his backpack to its place, he gathered the food in his arms and walked to the dining room.

  “I’m sure we can handle it.” Charlotte listened as Hektor chopped up something smaller. “Do you like grapefruit at all, Hektor?”

  “Sure! Would you like me to stew them or anything?”

  She looked back at the others. Dalton was investigating a scratch on his sleeve, and Arthur didn’t open his mouth as he dumped the fruit on the dinner table.

  “You guys!” She pushed her bangs up with a loud sigh. “I know you’re tired, but there’s no need to act like this. We barged into his house, and he’s nice enough to feed us instead of booting us out. At least pretend to be grateful.”

  “Sorry,” Dalton started, shuffling past the couch into the dining room area. “I don’t care which way we eat the grapefruit.” He stood tiptoed to get closer to her ear. “I just have a bad feeling about him,” he muttered.

  “What, you don’t like guys who can grow a beard?” she whispered back, flicking his stubbly-at-best chin.

  Dalton rolled his eyes up. “Yeah, he could totally fit a small knife in there.” With an exhale, he took a step back, leaving her bemused as she agreed to help Arthur peel the grapefruit.

  How on earth was Hektor giving off bad vibes? There was that one comment about killing them, but one sentence worded in a weird way didn’t make him a threat. He had been alone for some time, but he seemed more together than Arthur had at first. Maybe he was a little smiley, but he finally had company; what was wrong about finding joy in that? The happiness even justified his being so quick to offer lunch. If she hadn’t seen another soul in years, she would want to host any visitors she saw.

  “So do you enjoy freezing your ears off, or did you break your thermostat?” Arthur started.

  She elbowed him.

  “What? I’m just trying to make conversation.”

  “Oh, it’s been broken for a long time now.” Hektor moved to the stovetop, where the others could see him. “It did manage to hold out until I couldn’t call anyone to fix it, though.” He laughed. “One winter, it got so bad Nikolas tried to… break open…” He trailed off with a sigh.

  Charlotte and Arthur exchanged a glance, but neither commented as they prepared the grapefruit.

  “But nothing worked,” Hektor finished, “so it’s always cold. On days like these I can’t mind, though.” He looked over his shoulder at them. “If you need any jackets, I have spares in the front closet, to the side of the couch.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll grab one in a minute.”

  With a nod, he smiled again and turned back to his work.

  Arthur tore away the last of his grapefruit peel and took a step back. “Here, let me fetch one for you.”

  “Thanks,” she called as he treaded into the living room.

  “I’ll get mine in a minute.” Dalton stepped over by her to peel the next grapefruit. Aside from one glance at Arthur when the closet door opened, he didn’t take his eyes off Hektor.

  ~*~

  It took more time to get lunch on the table than Charlotte would have normally liked, but today she didn’t mind having a good excuse to stay in one location. Hektor’s backyard water well didn’t hurt, either. No wonder he had stayed in this house for so long.

  At the head of the table, he started the bowl of beets around. Looking at the two at his right and one on his left, he smiled. “So where are you three headed?”

  Charlotte dipped out some onto her plate and passed the bowl on to Arthur. “Hunt. My little brother was—” she fingered her cup of water “—last seen there. You haven’t heard any news from the west, have you?”

  Hektor pressed the tip of his spoon to his mouth. “No, I don’t think so.” He passed the grapefruit slices to her and smiled. “You have a little brother?”

  Sliding the bowl in front of her plate, she crossed her legs. “And an older one, but he’s safe back home.” She exhaled, scooping out her share of slices before pushing the bowl to Arthur.

  “Ah, so we’re both middle siblings!” Hektor exclaimed before his gaze dropped to the table. “Or, were. I—”

  “I’m not going to make you talk about it,” she said quickly, taking the next dish he handed her.

  He frowned. “No, it’s all right. It’s been so long now I’d rather talk about their fates than not.” He paused, doling out some asparagus onto his plate. “It’s almost like… keeping them alive somehow, yeah?”

  “I guess,” she murmured, watching her plate and twirling a piece of hair around her finger.

  Arthur pounded his elbows onto the table and scowled at Hektor. “Well, write their stories down or tell it to yourself after we leave—there’s no reason for us to listen to it.”

  As Dalton took the plate of refrigerated meat, Charlotte squinted at Arthur. “Didn’t I just tell you not to be rude?” she whispered.

  “But you don’t want to hear more dead-siblings talk,” he whispered back, nearly spitting on her. “I’m just trying to…” Exhaling, he fiddled with his shirt collar and stabbed one of the beet slices. “Sorry.”

  She sighed, rubbing her forehead. She turned back towards Hektor, who looked like a little kid trying to make sense of an advanced calculus class. “Go ahead, if you want,” she said.

  “I’ll have to grow up and handle these things eventually,” she added too softly for the host to hear. Rubbing her forehead again, she took a drink of water.

  “Okay,” Hektor started slowly, sitting back up. “And you two don’t mind?” He smiled in such a sweet way Arthur thought he’d have better luck punching in that crooked nose than saying no.

  “Sure,” the archer deadpanned, not looking away from his food. Charlotte lifted an elbow to nudge him but gave up.

  Hektor looked to Dalton for a response but took his silence as a sign of approval.

  “Okay,” the homeowner said, exhaling in relief. He sent the last bowl of food around the table before beginning his story.

  20

  “It was a hot day, two years and seven months ago. Nikolas, Sophia, and I were going to check our game traps, a good walk away. Now, Nikolas—he was two years older than me. Tall. Jovial. Strong—although he had a bad limp from a run-in with a street gang a few months prior. And Sophia, she was a year younger than me. Looked just like Mother. Had a terrible determination.

  “A-anyway. On that day, we brought meals and a few bags’ worth of extra supplies, just to be safe. Nikolas volunteered to carry everything. I let him.”

  Exhaling, he stopped to chew on a forkful of beet. “We were still walking right next to the street when the sound of a diesel engine came towards us. It was from some kind of sports car, a beaten-down red convertible with the top down. Two people were inside, although I couldn’t see them well until the car stopped… about ten feet in front of us. A man and a woman, both with short, dark hair. The man was driving, with the woman squished in t
he backseat right behind him. Her irises were so light her eyes seemed entirely white when she turned her gun on us.

  “At first I thought there must have been infecteds nearby, but then I realized how stupid that sounded. Why would they waste bullets when they had a working car? Instead the ammo went flying for us, splintering the bark in front of me with crunching noises. It—it couldn’t have been more than seconds since the whole thing started. But it already felt much too late when I thought to check on my siblings. Sophia was right beside me, clinging to my upper arm—I couldn’t fathom how I hadn’t realized that before. I-I immediately thought Nikolas must have been on my other side. Um, he wasn’t.”

  Charlotte, twirling her hair, stabbed at a skinny slice of asparagus but just watched it sit on her fork. Arthur, glaring at Hektor, slid his elbow over the table to touch hers. She glanced at him and took another bite of her meal.

  “I stopped—I didn’t even know I was running until then—and tripped over Sophia when I turned around. Nikolas was running towards us, but he was still close to where we started, and I-I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. I would have remembered his limp in another minute. B-but once the red started spraying from his side, I couldn’t make sense of much of anything anymore.”

  Shivering, he rested his chin in his hands. “He was wearing his brown button-up shirt. It already had some faded bloodstains, but the red blooming onto the fabric was much more vibrant. It didn’t seem like as much as I expected—I only saw three bullet holes in his shirt. But he s-still started stumbling and hit the ground face-first, about ten feet away from us. A little poof of dirt came up when he hit, mucking up the blood. H-he scrabbled at the ground, struggling to push himself up, but he couldn’t.”

  Charlotte closed her eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath. Hektor rubbed the table with one hand and went through another forkful of beet in little time.

  “I had forgotten about the gun at that point. I ran towards him—there had to be some way I could drag him to safety, plug the wounds, and he’d be okay. W-we had made it so far, fought so many raiders—h-how could he not pull through this, too?

  “My first lunge was strong enough to drag Sophia with me. She shouted for me to stop, but I knew Nikolas was still breathing; I saw his shoulders moving. The bullets were landing outside the path I was taking, so I didn’t notice them. I couldn’t hear anything but my own pulse, and—and a raspy breathing, from at least one of us. But I did hear Sophia’s last time screaming my name as I knelt by Nikolas and pulled him up by the shoulders.

  “Blood welled up in my mouth, and suddenly I was drooling it. Sophia was screaming, tugging me back towards the trees. She pulled both of us a bit before I started to feel the hole in my cheek, right by my lip.” He prodded the area with his finger, but Charlotte couldn’t make out whatever scar remained beneath all the hair.

  “I could finally hear the gun firing all around us. Already sick from the blood going down my throat, I cast a glance back. The man was still ready to drive off, one hand on the wheel. The woman had come out of the car and approached us, step by step, shot by shot. I put my arms under Nikolas’s armpits and backed up, trying to keep an eye on both of my siblings. At some point, Sophia slipped between me and the shooter. She took a bullet before I even saw where she was.

  “Nikolas had a hole through his head by the time Sophia gasped and clutched her arm. I must have known that he was probably dead, but it didn’t keep me from trying to drag him farther away. I-I had to be able to save him, you know? And Sophia would make it, too—it was only a shot to the arm, after all. She wasn’t screaming, I thought, so it couldn’t have been bad. I don’t know why I told myself that when Nikolas was dead right there without ever having screamed. I don’t know why I was thinking half the things I was thinking. Just all the adrenaline, all the blood running down my chin, the breeze dying down…

  “I kept dragging Nikolas’s body as the shooter stayed after us. Since she was only carrying a gun and bullets, she was covering more ground than me. Sophia helped with h-her oldest brother’s dead weight, but we hadn’t made it back to the trees before she shouted and fell into me. I could just feel the raze of a bullet across the front of my chest. But there was more blood on my sleeve than where my wound was, a-and then Sophia was coughing. It was normal-sounding at first, but on the—” he faltered “—the third cough… I think it was…” Trembling at the thought of forgetting one piece of the story, he took a deep breath.

  “That’s when I could hear the blood c-coming up from her lungs. Finally I panicked. Here I was, trying to drag my dead sibling to safety while my living sibling tried to shield me from the bullets, probably at the cost of her life.”

  Charlotte rubbed her knuckles as he shook his head. “Sophia growled something and managed to shake my hands off Nikolas. We picked up the pace towards the trees. The shooter either let us get there or had to reload. Everything was happening so fast, or slow, or something, that I can’t say which sounds more realistic.

  “I remember Sophia looking back, tears running down her face. Sophia—she never cried, but there was definitely something to cry about, a-and…” Shaking, he took another sip of water. “And I found myself looking back, too. The shooter woman came right up to Nikolas and started pulling the bags off him. Then—then she gave up and just hauled the entire corpse back to the car. I couldn’t see much through the branches, but it was still a miracle the woman didn’t turn and see us. I guess she thought we had made it out of her range by then.

  “The shooter t-took Nikolas away, out of my sight, and I turned back towards Sophia, to check her wounds. Tears were still dripping off her chin, but her face was red with anger. Before I could clear my head enough to tell her anything, she had a knife drawn. She only cast one tearful look back at me before she jumped over the bushes and charged ahead. I fumbled with the undergrowth, barely able to stop myself from shouting her name.

  “Sophia ran for the car, which was behind me now. The shooter threw Nikolas in the passenger seat without looking back. The man was already giving the car gas before either of them noticed my sister. I finally ran after her, yelling for her to stop and take cover. But she grabbed a closed car door and flung herself inside, smacking her heel into the woman’s face on the way in. The driver didn’t stop, but why would he? Sophia was already h-half-drowning in blood. Even when she started stabbing the woman, it only took one shot before she fell down in the floor. And then the car just drove away.”

  Hektor looked around the table for a moment before turning back towards his plate and finishing off his asparagus.

  Arthur eyed Charlotte. She was still corkscrewing a lock of hair, but she kept eating quietly. Her breaths were shaky, but she had never reached a point where he had to stop Hektor in the middle of the story. Maybe because most of it was about the older sibling rather than the younger.

  With a glare at Hektor, who had somehow managed to tell the whole story without crying, he gnawed on the last of his meat. Charlotte put food in her mouth, chewing like a kid being forced to eat her vegetables. Dalton had already finished his plate.

  “So that’s—” Hektor rubbed the edge of his plate “—that story. Is there anything you guys want to share?” He smiled. “If I’m going to dump my troubles on you, I have to be ready to accept the reverse.”

  Dalton folded his hands. “Thanks, but I don’t have much of a story compared to yours.”

  “I have no idea how my family’s doing,” Arthur said, cheek smushing against his hand as he leaned on it. Like Dalton, he didn’t meet Hektor’s gaze when he spoke.

  “My older brother’s still fine,” Charlotte started. Her voice was softer than usual, but otherwise not alarming. “I’m trying to find my younger brother now, so there’s no telling.” She managed to smile at Hektor. “There’s a good enough chance to chase after, you know?”

  “Ah.” Hektor kept smiling. “That’s wonderful. I’m glad you have a chance to see him again.”

  “Me
, too.” With one last twirl, she let go of her hair and scooped up her last slice of grapefruit.

  ~*~

  Once the dishes were clean, Charlotte walked back into the living room. Dalton stood gripping the doorknob of the coat closet. Arthur, looking ready to throttle Hektor once he had an excuse, crouched on the sofa.

  “Thanks for everything.” Charlotte smiled over her shoulder at the host. “But we should get going now.”

  “Already?” Hektor positioned himself in front of the door quickly enough to draw Dalton’s attention. “But it’s so hot today—surely it would be a better idea to rest for a while longer.”

  Charlotte took a step back. He was right; it was still afternoon, and the glare peeping through the blinds hadn’t eased up. She had every intention of holing up in the next empty house for a few more hours. It would almost certainly be less comfortable, but she could survive that if it meant getting the boys to stop baring their teeth like upset bulldogs.

  “Maybe,” she said, “but I’d hate to overstay my welcome.”

  “No, don’t worry about that!” Hektor put his hands on her shoulders. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you need to, okay? All of you.”

  “Thanks.” She shrugged him off and cast a look behind her. “Arthur, stop growling, will you?”

  Arthur thumped his shoulders against the couch back without moving his rear from the edge of the seat. Charlotte hesitated for a second before sitting next to him. Dalton stepped towards them, but Hektor scurried over to take the last seat by his guests. Looking at Dalton, he invited him to pull up a chair.

  “You’re the host; you pull up a chair.” Arthur crinkled his nose in disgust. Charlotte elbowed him, but he didn’t stop glaring.

  “Oh.” Stroking his beard, Hektor shifted in his seat. “I guess I—”

  “Hold that thought.” Charlotte stood up and yanked on Arthur’s arm, bringing him stumbling onto his feet. Looking back at Hektor, she continued, “You can stay there for now. Do you mind if we step into one of the other rooms for a second?”