by James Hunt
Sunlight blinded Charlie when they finally made it outside, and there he waited with the girl, her arms still raised and tears streaming down her cheeks, shaking her head.
“This isn’t what I wanted,” she said, choking the words out between hysterical breaths. “I never wanted to be here.”
“None of us did,” Charlie replied, his words surprising him.
The pair waited, frozen in time, stuck in the loop of her crying and Charlie keeping the rifle aimed at the woman’s head. The urge to kill her had passed, but he couldn’t shake the thought that she was one of them. One of the people that had come to his home and burned everything he had ever known to the ground. One of the same people that had murdered his father.
Charlie wasn’t sure how long they waited, but the sporadic gunfire was their only keeper of time, and he was relieved when Lieutenant Dixon marched out of the facility with his men in tow, the soldiers immediately spotting the woman.
“Holy shit, they brought women with them over here?” The voice’s surprise was matched by its overwhelming glee. “Smart bastards. Can’t tell you how many times I wished I had a woman on deployment.”
Looking at her now, Charlie noticed that the woman’s fear had glossed over into indifference, and the tears had dried along her cheeks.
Lieutenant Dixon sidled up next to Charlie. “Where the hell did you find her?’
“Hiding in one of the rooms,” Charlie answered. “She wasn’t armed.”
Dixon regarded the woman, the pair locking eyes with one another, and whatever fear the woman held melted away.
“You will not win this fight,” she said. “There are more, and they will come, bringing down the fist of God upon your heads.”
“Take a look around, lady!” A soldier shouted from behind them. “We killed all your man meat!”
Laughter erupted from the unit, and Dixon turned around, ending the boyish raucous laughter with a single glare. But when he turned around, the woman had only grown angrier.
She started talking in her native tongue, the words quiet and slow at first, but growing louder.
“What the hell is she saying?” Dixon asked.
But Charlie only shook his head, staring at the woman he pulled from the plant as she stared at Dixon. “I don’t know.”
Her voice grew even louder, and Dixon drew his weapon, taking a step forward as he aimed it at her head. “What the hell are you saying?”
The woman didn’t explain and the shouts only continued, echoing into the morning air.
“She’s calling her people!” A soldier yelled. “Fucking shoot her, man!”
There was a practiced anger in the woman’s words and a boldness that Charlie didn’t notice before. The speed of her speech increased and with every repeated syllable, the lieutenant’s anxiety worsened.
“Shut up!” Dixon shouted.
And while Charlie’s original instincts matched the same angered tone as the lieutenant’s, he suddenly wished for the woman to stop yelling or at the very least become quieter. But she wouldn’t.
The gunshot fired from somewhere behind Charlie, and he spun around just before the woman collapsed to the floor.
He saw the soldier who fired, standing out as every single head of his comrades looked at him. A mixture of excitement and horror appeared on the man’s face.
Charlie spun back around toward the woman who was now lifeless on the ground. With the shouting over and the ring of the gunshot faded, the silence that echoed in the air around them was deafening, which ended with the explosion in the plant.
15
Charlie couldn’t take his eyes off the woman. No one had touched her since the soldier had put a bullet through her gut. The only motion her body offered was the trickle of blood that had spread out over the grass, one final statement to the world.
The explosion had come from inside the power plant. The explosives had been rigged to an egg timer, and while the blast wasn’t powerful enough to collapse the structure, Charlie had heard the lieutenant speaking with one of his engineers that a few integral systems had been destroyed.
“Charlie!”
Charlie whipped his head around, still kneeling by the woman’s body.
Lieutenant Dixon hovered nearby, staring at Charlie like he’d been calling his name for the past twenty minutes. Dixon motioned for him to come over, and he did so, unaware of how slow he was moving. “You all right?”
“I’m fine,” Charlie answered.
Dixon’s stare lingered on Charlie for a minute longer, and it was the engineer with the lieutenant that finally restarted the conversation.
“We’ll need to check the rest of the building for structural damage, and unless I get some help, it’s going to take me weeks.” The engineer was a short man and sported a thick black mustache, which added years to the baby-faced cheeks on either side. His hair was the same jet-black color as his facial hair, and his broad shoulders only added to his squat features. “If this place is a priority for reconstruction, then I need the resources to bring it back online.”
Dixon nodded and then turned to Charlie. “Any of your boys in the area familiar with electrical engineering, or construction?”
Charlie circled the question, his lag in response time due to his thoughts still transfixed on the dead woman behind him. “I can ask some of the workers back at the orchard, but I don’t know if they’ll have the formal training you’re looking for.”
“So long as they’re competent with basic electronics, I can show them the rest,” the engineer said. “Anything would help.”
“You’re dismissed, Staff Sergeant.”
“Sir.”
Once the engineer was gone, Charlie returned his dazed and lifeless expression toward the dead woman. He never learned her name. Not that it mattered.
“I still can’t figure out why the hell she would have been inside,” Dixon said, staring at the woman. “It’s been all men up until this point. The fact that they’re bringing people who aren’t soldiers over here doesn’t sit well with me.”
“She came with her brother,” Charlie said. “Said that she wanted to start a new life here with her family.”
“Christ.” Lieutenant Dixon shook his head, his voice a mixture of awe and disgust. “They think they’d just start killing us and then they could carve out something for themselves and everything would be fine?”
But as Charlie stared at the dead woman, that’s exactly what he thought she believed. It was madness, but it was also convicted madness that refused to be denied and would overcome whatever obstacles that were thrown in its way.
“Did you find your dad?” Dixon asked.
Charlie nodded.
Dixon reciprocated the motion at Charlie’s extended silence. “I’m sorry.”
“If I could have a ride back, I’d appreciate it,” Charlie said.
“Do you need help with the body?”
Again, Charlie nodded.
“I’ll have some of my guys come over in a second.”
“Thanks.”
After the lieutenant left, Charlie lingered there alone for a while, and then two men appeared, guns still strapped over their shoulders, one of their uniforms speckled in blood. They didn’t speak, and Charlie didn’t mind, as he led them over to the hospital.
The pair of soldiers made a few comments about the stench inside the hospital, but they shut up when they saw Harold Decker in the hospital room where Charlie had found and then left him.
“We could probably put him on one of the carts,” one soldier said.
“Yeah,” Charlie replied.
Charlie didn’t help the pair of soldiers carry his father down the steps, and neither of them asked for it. They covered Harold Decker’s body with a sheet, and one of the soldiers pointed at Doug’s body.
“What about him?”
Charlie grimaced. “He stays.”
Charlie led them down, opening doors for them, and shoving bodies out of the way to help make their tre
k down easier.
The soldiers loaded Harold in the Humvee, and then Charlie climbed into the backseat and the soldiers hopped into the front. He wasn’t sure what the pair talked about on the way to the orchard, and Charlie didn’t even remember telling them where to go, but he arrived back home at his destination nonetheless.
All Charlie could focus on during the drive back to the orchard was how he was supposed to tell his mother that his father was dead. He ran through the strings of words in his head, rearranging the order of them a thousand times over, and then a thousand times again, but none of it sounded right.
It was like he had been thrust into a bad dream, and no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t wake up.
“Hey,” the soldier said, turning around in his seat up front. “This it?”
Charlie glanced out the window to the smoldering wreckage that was his home and nodded.
Doors opened and the soldiers pulled Harold Decker from the back of the Humvee, keeping him on the cot which they placed on the asphalt.
“Do you need help carrying him up to—”
“No,” Charlie said.
The soldiers nodded and then simply returned to the vehicle, turned around, and headed back toward Mayfield, leaving Charlie with his father on the hospital cart with a sheet draped over him in the middle of the road.
Charlie stood there, frozen, long after the Humvee faded on the horizon. He lingered, wallowing in the dead silence that he had always enjoyed his entire life. But it was tainted now, soured by the death that offered it to him as a tool to help him grieve.
He didn’t want silence now. He would have taken anything but silence. He wanted to hear his father’s boisterous laugh again. He wanted another story about his youth and the struggles he endured building the orchard. He wanted his father’s advice on what to do next, but above all, he wanted the opportunity to speak. He wanted to apologize for what he said the night before when the pair had exploded at one another.
But he’d never have that opportunity.
“Charlie!”
His heartrate spiked at his mother’s voice, and he turned to find her stumbling through the ash and blackened, skeletal remains of the trees that had gone up in smoke the night before. Even at a distance, he could see the red in her eyes and the flush in her cheeks. She brought her fingertips to her quivering lips, her attention focused on the body on the cot.
Martha shook her head, jogging forward as she worked her mouth, but found that she couldn’t speak the words that struggled to be set free.
Charlie walked toward her, meeting her in the middle of the orchard, and wrapped his arms around her before she could walk past.
“Let me see him,” Martha said, blurting out the words, her tone strife with grief. “I want to see him.” She lunged forward, but her small frame was no match for Charlie’s strength, who easily held her back. “I want to see him!”
“No, Mom,” Charlie said, taking the screams and the fists she beat against his chest and arms. “You don’t need to see him like that.”
Sobbing, Martha collapsed into the dirt, her hands still clawing at Charlie’s legs, who dropped with her. He held his mother tight, letting her howls fly up into the air.
And then, one by one, the rest of the people emerged from the orchard, staring at Charlie, then at the cot still on the road, then back to Charlie. It took a while for the sight to register on some of their faces, but when it finally did, everyone began to cry.
But Charlie’s eyes searched for only one face among the gathering crowd, and he found her standing front and center of them all.
Liz covered her mouth when she saw Harold on the cot. And then her shoulders bobbed up and down as she sobbed.
Mario and a few of the workers brought Harold to Doc, who started to clean and dress the wounds. His mother ignored Charlie’s orders to stay away, a stoic expression on her face as she watched Doc sew up the wounds and clean away the blood. But Charlie could have never guessed at how much that sight would haunt his mother in the months to come.
Charlie found a spot in the middle of the east fields where the burnt carnage was the worst. Every square inch of greenery had been stripped from the field, leaving behind only blackened and brittle skeletons in its wake.
A layer of ash covered the rich black soil that had been the feeding ground for all the life that had once been around him. He stuck his fingertips into the silky grey, feeling the difference between what was dead and the thick soil beneath the ash.
He rubbed the ash between his fingertips, watching the small particles of grey float back toward the ground or be kicked up in a hazy cloud from a gust of wind.
The ash and dirt mixed with the blood still staining his hands. His father’s blood.
“Hey.”
Charlie didn’t turn around at Liz’s voice, and he didn’t look her way when she sat next to him in the field of ash and death.
“Doc finished with your dad,” Liz said. “People want to know when you want the burial to take place. I asked your mom, but she hasn’t said a word. She hasn’t even left your dad’s side.”
Charlie didn’t answer. He stared at the grey silk he sat upon, wondering if he’d ever be able to get something to grow again. And if he even wanted to try.
“Charlie, you need to—”
“I told him he was a failure,” Charlie said. “Those were the last words I said to my father. That’s what he heard come from the lips of his only child’s mouth. The child he raised, and nurtured, and provided all of the opportunities that he never had growing up.”
“But that’s not how you really felt, and he knew that,” Liz said. “I know I didn’t know him very well, but—”
“No, you didn’t.” The words tasted bitter on Charlie’s tongue, and judging by the way Liz retracted her hand from his shoulder, she felt the sting in them too.
After a moment, Charlie shook his head. “I’m sorry.” He looked at her, struggling to hold back the tears that wanted to break free.
“It’s okay,” Liz said, softly. “It’s true.” She shrugged. “I mean I’ve been here for what? A few days? We just met, and all of the shit that’s happened since Seattle…” She trailed off, looking around at the dead trees. “We haven’t had a moment to process any of it.”
Charlie smiled. “He liked you. My dad.”
Liz’s mouth twitched and she wiped her nose, sniffling in the same motion. “I liked him too.”
Charlie gestured to the landscape. “Look at this. We have nothing. No food. God knows if our water pump works. The house is gone.” He ran his hands through his hair, rewetting the dried blood from his sweat, leaving streaks of red along the sides of his head. “I know what people want from me back there, but I don’t know how to give it to them.”
Liz frowned. “What do you think they want?”
“Someone to tell them what to do next,” Charlie answered. “For someone to give them hope and let them know that it’s going to be all right, and that we’ll get through this if we just pull together.” Charlie clinched his fists and rattled them, then let the tension in them relax. “But I don’t have the answers, Liz. I don’t think I ever did.”
“You get lost in your own head too much, you know that?” Liz asked. “You don’t even give people a chance to actually have them tell you what they need before you let them decide for them.” Liz reached for Charlie’s face and pulled it toward her own until they touched noses. “The only thing that people want to do right now is grieve with you.” She gave him a gentle shake. “Let yourself feel it. Because if you don’t, I promise you, it will break you in a way that you can’t be fixed.”
She kissed him, and while her touch helped pull him out of the darkened corner where he sulked in his mind, he wasn’t sure if he could follow her advice. But he knew that he couldn’t sit in the dirt forever.
Slowly, Charlie pushed himself off the ground, and even though Liz was still recovering from her gunshot wound, she helped keep him steady when he
stumbled on his shaky legs. It was almost like learning to walk again.
The pair passed the burned-down house, and Charlie kept his eyes forward, knowing that staring into the wreckage of his childhood home would only slow him down. And right now, he needed to keep moving. His very life depended upon it. His future depended upon it.
They moved through the west fields, toward the well where Charlie’s father had been placed and where his mother still stood by his side, motionless and void of emotion.
“I need to talk to her,” Charlie said, stopping both him and Liz. “Alone.”
Liz nodded and kissed his cheek before letting him go.
Charlie shuffled toward his mother, who had her back turned toward him, staring down at his father, holding his hand, barely able to wrap her hands around Harold’s big paws.
Charlie remained silent, and his mother said nothing even when he stood next to her.
Doc had done a good job cleaning Harold up, making him presentable for burial, especially considering the limited resources.
The color in Harold’s cheeks had already started to fade, but Charlie was glad his father’s eyes were closed. There was something unsettling about a pair of lifeless eyes. They were soulless, and eyes without souls tried to collect what didn’t belong to them.
“I wish we could put him in a suit,” Martha said, her tone surprisingly casual despite the stoic mask she wore as she spoke. “I doubt anything survived the fire, though.”
Wanting to ease whatever pain his mother was going through, Charlie nodded. “I can look to see if anything made it.”
“You should say something when we bury him,” Martha said, keeping her attention on Harold. “I don’t want anyone else speaking. Not the workers, no one else.”
“Of course,” Charlie answered.
Martha then gently lowered her head and kissed Harold’s forehead, then placed his hand onto his stomach, folding them together. She stared at her husband, a man who she’d been married for over forty years, someone who she woke up with every morning during that time frame, and someone she laid her head next to at night. Charlie couldn’t fathom what losing something like that was like.
