by Jack Hunt
“Why thank you,” Anna said heading in with a spring in her step.
“Attending high school seems like a world away, and yet it was only a few years ago. Strange, isn’t it — you, know how things change so quickly? One day you’re a little kid being dropped off at a school with strangers and the next you’re on the road fighting for your life. You think the world will ever go back to the way it was?”
“God, I hope so,” she said looking around. There were a number of tables positioned beyond a counter where the secretary would have sat. Anna hopped over and started rooting through the drawers. Chase entered the principal’s office. A few minutes later he emerged with a bottle of alcohol in his hand. “Well get a load of this. Seems Principal Maloney was sipping on the hard stuff while on the clock. I bet he was probably banging his secretary as well,” he said with a chuckle.
Anna rolled her eyes. “Here, let’s have a drop of that.”
She reached for it and he pulled it back. “Ohhh, hold your horses.”
“I thought it was ladies before gents?”
Chase paused with the bottle inches away from his mouth, then handed it to her. She winked and tossed it back then winced hard. “Damn. That is strong.”
Chase snorted as he took it back. “He probably sneaked a little into his morning coffee.”
They wandered around the office pulling out files and tossing them on the floor.
Anna perched herself on the edge of a table and flipped through folder after folder of student files. Chase was lighting pieces of paper and tossing them into a steel wastepaper basket.
“Have you ever thought about what is the point of it all?” she asked.
“Of what?” he replied without taking his eyes off the flickering flame before him.
“Life. I mean, we’re born into a world, shuffled into education so we can get a job that provides us with enough money to survive, only to have a few wild days in between and then we die. Seems a bit meaningless to me.”
“Depends,” Chase said.
“On?” Anna asked.
“How you view life.” He twisted the piece of paper in his hand and lit another corner then dropped it into the flaming basket. Smoke spiraled up and he moved on to the next batch of papers, stopping every now and again to take a swig from the bottle.
“You’re not going to go all religious on me, are you?”
“Religion has nothing to do with it.”
Anna closed the folders and strolled over to him. “Go on then.”
“Well I mean, you can look at it like you are some victim being shuffled along the conveyor belt of life without any choices only to die at the end of it all. You can buy into some belief system and convince yourself that your meaning comes from some invisible deity and maybe it does but what if it all boils down to something else?” He paused and looked up at her. “When you cut through all the shit, and the stories we tell ourselves. And believe me, humanity has told each other some whoppers. For me it’s really a case of what do you want from life?”
“You’ve lost me,” she said.
Chase shifted from leaning across the table and turned in his chair.
“For instance. Why did you choose to take psychology?”
“Because I’m interested in the human mind. How we tick. Why we do the things we do.”
“Right, so you’re a thinker. You’re not satisfied with just sucking down what someone else has given you. You like to explore and figure it out for yourself. Or do you?”
“Or do I what?”
“If you could get paid to do anything in this world. Would you still want to be a therapist?”
Her brow pinched. She really hadn’t given it much thought. Up until that point she didn’t even think she had a say in it. “Um.”
“You hesitated, why?”
“I need a second to think about it.”
“Why?” Chase asked.
“Because that’s how my brain works.”
“Or is it because you’re wondering what your mother, or your grandfather would say?”
She smiled. “Well that as well.”
“So would it be fair to say you’re taking psychology because of them. Not because you want it?”
She frowned. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
He nodded. “No, you do know. Deep down you know.” He stared back at her. “Answer this. Does it bring you alive?”
“Psychology?”
“Yeah,” Chase said.
Anna shrugged.
Chase shifted a little in his seat. “Okay, outside of what you study. What do you enjoy?”
“Playing music.”
“You see, you didn’t hesitate that time around because that’s what you really want.”
“Yeah but you can’t make a living from that.”
“People do it all the time.”
“And people fail more times than they succeed.”
“And so do people starting a therapist business.” He shrugged. “What’s the difference?”
Anna frowned, she could tell he was trying to say that the reason she was studying psychology was because of someone else. “All right. Let’s go with that line of thinking for a second. How are you any different to me? You’re there because your mother wants you to carry on the family business. Do you want to do that?”
“No,” he replied.
“Then how is that any different to me?”
“I can admit it.”
She narrowed her eyes.
He continued. “You see, I came to this revelation after my first class. It’s not what I’m going to do.”
“So why haven’t you dropped out?”
“Because it’s all paid for. The way I see it. Why waste something that might be useful later in life?”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It makes perfect sense. It’s called hedging your bets. I could drop out quite easily and go off and become a director. My mother would get pissed but she’d soon get over it. But this way I get the best of both worlds. An education that I can fall back on if what I want to do doesn’t pan out, and an experience that I wouldn’t have had, had I chosen to drop out.”
“But then you’ve wasted years studying something you won’t use.”
“Might not use,” he said correcting her. “I might not use it in ten years in a business sense but chances are it will come in handy in everyday life. Dealing with people. Dealing with situations, dealing with marriage, kids and so on. The experience is never wasted.” He breathed in deeply. “It all comes down to how you view life.”
Anna thought about the experience she’d gone through with her father leaving and the situation they were now in. She didn’t want any of it, but maybe through it she would gain something that would help her.
Chase returned to burning another piece of paper without giving it another thought.
She tapped him on the shoulder. “We should get back.”
Jeremy reversed the derby car back into the tree line and switched off the engine. Under the cover of darkness he’d watched them enter the school hall, he had seen how many there were and already his mind was beginning to hatch a plan to make them suffer.
EIGHTEEN - THE WOMAN
Pockets of fires lit up the darkness. Sam had walked the perimeter before he scaled up the side of the building and looked out across Oneida to see the state of things. It wasn’t good. For as far as the eye could see, fires burned out of control. What had been a calm world three days ago was now full of peril. He’d anticipated it getting worse and expected people to resort to looting and house invasions. The fact was society had been teetering on the edge of the abyss for quite some time. Had it not been for the military and law enforcement, anarchy would have dominated. Of course there would be those who would say that humans would stand together and maybe some would, but they were far and few between. Sam was lost in his thoughts when he heard a shuffle behind him. He turned and squinted into a flashlight’s beam.
“I thought I
saw you climb up here,” Mason said. “Don’t you ever rest?”
“I’ll rest when I’m in Colorado.”
Mason dropped down onto his ass on the ridge of the roof and pulled out a pack of smokes. He slipped one into his lips and cupped a hand around it while he lit it. “This place. Breckenridge. How long are we staying?”
“Depends.”
“On?”
“What infrastructure is in place or lack thereof,” Sam said.
Mason blew out smoke from the corner of his mouth and squinted at him. “You say that as if you think things will still be running.”
“If my ex-wife’s father is still alive, you can bet they will.”
“What? Is he some hotshot prepper?”
Sam chuckled. “Far from it.” He rubbed his fingers together. “The guy has money — a lot of it, and strong connections in the community with law enforcement and the city. He would have funneled every cent he had into staying alive.”
“Ah I see, so you and him are tight.”
“Far from it,” Sam said. “He was the reason my marriage fell apart. Well, let me rephrase that. To be fair to him, my career in the SEALs put a strain on our marriage, her father just knew how to leverage it. The guy is a master at manipulating people.”
“So what happened?” Mason asked.
“What didn’t? Anytime he could throw a wrench in the works, he did. Throwing seeds of doubt into Helen’s mind. Using his position in the community to make my life difficult.”
“In what way?” Mason asked tapping off ash.
“Like making her believe that I had cheated on her.”
“Did you?”
Sam tossed him a look as if to suggest he must be out of his mind. His thoughts went back to that night. The night she told him to leave, the night of the argument, the night that forever remained seared in his memory.
Mason adjusted his position on the roof to get comfortable. Seeing that Sam wasn’t going to answer that, he changed the topic.
“So what do you make of this Bobby guy? Seems a little strange, don’t you think?”
Sam never responded. He was looking off into the distance seeing a vehicle swerve all over the road. He brought up a pair of night vision binoculars to get a better look. He watched as the light blue sedan disappeared out of view. Mason peered around him. “I figure we’ll be seeing a lot of that over the coming days.”
Sam nodded. Both of them were about to leave when the car reappeared, this time it turned into the high school parking lot and crashed into several parked vehicles. Sam brought up the binoculars surveying the surrounding area.
“C’mon, we should go down and check it out,” Mason said.
Sam placed a hand on his shoulder. “No, wait. Not yet.”
Mason furrowed his brow. “What are you on about?”
He scanned his field of vision looking for potential threats, then his gaze went back to the vehicle that had collided with multiple vehicles. Steam poured out from underneath the hood, only to be enveloped by a few small flames. He squinted into the binoculars and saw the driver slumped over the wheel.
“Sam. We can’t just stand by and do nothing.”
He gave one final check of the surrounding area before nodding and they made their way down. Once their boots hit the ground they scrambled to the front of the building and over to the midsized sedan. Sam raked his rifle, watching his back while Mason attempted to get the driver out.
“I need your help. She’s unconscious,” Mason said.
Sam cast a glance over his shoulder and then swung the rifle around his back and moved in to pull her out. They had dragged her about forty feet from the car when the engine erupted, the hood soared into the air, and the front of the car was engulfed in fire. They hit the ground and looked back at the fireball before glancing at the woman. She had short blond hair, and a petite face, she was wearing a white tank top, tight cream-colored pants and flats.
Rising to their feet, Sam looped an arm around the woman and assisted Mason in carrying her in. At the rear of the building Sam banged on the door and yelled for them to open up. A minute or so passed and Bobby pushed the door wide and stood back as they brought her in, her feet dragging behind her. Anna, Chase and Lisa gawked as they brought her into the main gym area. “Anna, grab me something to elevate her feet, and see if you can find any blankets in the school,” Sam said laying her down on a cushioned mat. He loosened the woman’s belt around her waist and then began checking her body for any obvious wounds and made sure she was breathing. She had a gnarly gash to the forehead but from what he could tell there were no noticeable signs of bone injuries, though it was possible something was broken, but they wouldn’t know until she woke or her body showed signs of swelling. Because she was unconscious, Sam turned her onto her side to prevent the possibility of choking if she started to vomit.
“Mason. I need you back up on that roof,” he said.
“But…”
“We need eyes on the perimeter,” Sam said, working away on stopping her forehead from bleeding. “Chase, get me the first-aid kit.” As they didn’t have anything on hand, he’d torn a piece of the woman’s plaid shirt and was using it to apply pressure to the wound. He’d have to hold it there for a good ten to fifteen minutes. Over the course of the next half an hour he made sure the wound was cleaned, bandaged up and that she was comfortable. He checked her pockets for an ID but there was nothing in them. She was a good-looking woman in her late thirties.
“You think she’ll be okay?” Anna asked.
“We’ll see.” From what he could tell after having witnessed all manner of injuries over the course of his career, she looked as if she was fine but there was no way to know for sure if there was internal bleeding beyond watching for some of the symptoms like confusion, clammy skin, dizziness, paleness, rapid pulse and shortness of breath.
“Anything I can do?” Chase asked.
“Head up to the roof and keep an eye out for trouble.”
Chase grimaced. “The roof?”
“Yeah. Problem with that?”
“Well no, but uh… it’s a little high, isn’t it?”
Sam shook his head and yelled over to Bobby. “You scared of heights, old man?”
Bobby scoffed. “You younglings, so full of yourselves.”
“Mason is up top. Maybe you can join him. Four eyes are better than two. Just be careful. I don’t want to be picking up your bones.”
Bobby gave him the finger and shuffled away. While Sam and Anna sat there waiting for the woman to wake up, Anna ran a cold, damp cloth across her face. Every now and again she would take a water bottle and wet it before reapplying.
“Is it true?” Anna asked as if expecting Sam was capable of reading minds.
“Is what true?”
“Did you cheat on mom?”
Sam took his eyes off the woman and looked at her. “I loved your mother.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
“No. Not once in the six years we were married did I cheat on her.”
“Not even while you were overseas?”
He shook his head.
“Then who is Elizabeth Myers?” Anna asked.
He hadn’t heard that name in a long time. Sam knew the conversation would eventually come up, he just didn’t think his daughter would be the one to ask. His thoughts drifted back to that night many moons ago. Drinking alone in a bar in Breckenridge, Elizabeth’s arrival, her coming over and striking up a conversation — innocent laughter, good conversation, and then the rest of the night going horribly wrong.
“An old school friend,” he said.
“Just a friend?”
He was about to reply when the woman’s eyes blinked open, she gasped and shot upright crying out someone’s name. “David!”
NINETEEN - ALONE
The woman started hyperventilating, then her eyes rolled back in her head.
“Steady,” Sam said. “You’ve been in an accident.” He applied mod
erate pressure on her shoulders to hold her down as every few seconds she would lash out. Over and over she muttered the name David. Anna hurried off to get some more water while Sam stayed with her.
The third time the woman’s eyes snapped open she swung at Sam missing his chin by a few inches. He pressed her arms down and yelled, “You’re safe. It’s okay.”
Anna returned and unscrewed the lid of the bottle and handed it over. Sam offered it to the woman and she glanced nervously at Anna then looked around.
“Where am I?”
“Oneida High School. The gymnasium,” he replied.
“Who are you?”
“Just people passing through,” Sam said. “I saw your vehicle swerve into the parking lot before you barreled into another car.”
“What? Where’s David?”
She appeared still dazed and confused.
“Who?” Sam asked.
“My fiancé.”
Sam looked at Anna for a second before replying. “There was no one else in the car. You were alone.”
“No, he said he would meet me at the school.”
“David?”
She nodded.
“Is it just you two?” Sam asked.
“Yeah, we were attacked by a group of men. Things have got out of control real fast. We managed to escape and get to the car but they began beating on the vehicle trying to get at us.” She looked past Sam, her eyes glazing over as if she was back there, in that moment. She reached up and touched her head.
“It’s cut,” Sam said. “I bandaged it up.”
She nodded. “They came after us, and forced us off the road. David wanted to get out and deal with them. He wouldn’t listen to me. He told me to keep going and said he would meet up at the school.”
Sam motioned to Anna to go and tell Mason to be on the lookout for a male.
“I need to go and find him,” she said trying to get up.
“You’re in no state to be going anywhere.” Sam tried to keep her in a seated position. “Friends of mine will lookout for him.”
“But—”
“What’s your name?”
She frowned as if struggling to remember, then said, “Amanda Baker.”
