“He’s already learned quite a lot, Abby. He’s very inquisitive. I don’t think you’ll keep your secrets for long. At any rate, some of that information is necessary to his survival while he’s trapped here. It’ll be a few days before you can leave and after that it could take you a few weeks to get there, maybe even as long as a month.”
“Keep what you can anyway, Alex. I might not be able to send him back if he learns too much.”
“Do you care that much for him?” The phrase was soft and a little hurt, the voice of an abandoned lover. It was another little sliver of information and channel of intuition to file away and consider later, not that he felt she had any real concern for him, but that Pereneaux valued her so deeply.
She sighed, the weight of so many things escaping her with that breath. “I just don’t want to drag anyone else into this. I loved you, Alex. I haven’t loved anyone since, you know that.” She was running her fingers over his chin and lips, soothing him with her familiarity.
“Do I?” He touched her arm and kissed the palm of her hand reverently. ‘Why don’t you anymore?” His lids were closed over the wells where his eyes had once been, loss settling into the lines of his face as he listened and enjoyed her touch.
“What?” she said softly, knowing what he meant but not wanting to say it herself.
“Love me.” There was a note of pleading as he met her eyes with the blue glow that made up his own. “You’ve brought so many others through here, caught up in your missions, your intent to save others. Don’t you have any energy left for what you need? For what you want?”
She looked away, toward her blanket covered feet. “It just happened, Alex. Things were so crazy and still are. I lost sense of things. I had to rebuild…I’m someone else now. I have to save what little good there is left in this world and no one else needs to be eaten up by it like those of us who remain.”
“I don’t think that’s true. In fact, I know it isn’t. You’re never going to be able to change it all, never going to be able to outrun your own pain, Abby. Your pain and your guilt aren’t all that you are.”
“But it is true and there’s enough of both to make up a person. At least whatever of me that is left after everything else. That old me is dead.”
“Is it? Is it really? Or are you just too afraid to admit who you are? That you need anything, need anyone to be a part of your life?”
“And who is that, Alex? What is that? What am I?” Her eyes searched those glowing orbs for answers, her face guarded though it was clear that he mattered to her still.
“You’re Abby. My Abby.” His voice was quiet, pain and loss curling his face down into a frown.
She looked up at Pereneaux with heated eyes, anger flaming at the edges. “No, not your Abby. Not anyone’s Abby! I’m too dark and twisted for that.”
“You’re wrong!” It hurt him to speak it. Impossible tears drifting down from those eyes.
“You don’t know me anymore, Alex.” Her face was closed again, the walls going up, shutting even this man who meant so much out of her.
“Yes, I do! I have been here for you, I got here because of you.”
“And even if you did, how could you keep loving me? After everything that happened, after everything I failed to stop; all those people I failed to save, after what happened to our daughter and to your wife. I’m a monster and I will never make up for all that I have done.”
“Shh,” he soothed, easing himself behind her back so that he could hold her. “I know you and I love you.”
“But I don’t…I don’t think I can feel that way for anyone. I won’t let it happen! I kill everything I touch! I’m a burden, a terrible weight on everyone’s shoulders.”
Pereneaux swept a gentle hand over her cheek and kissed her forehead, his other arm wrapped around her ribs, careful not to press on her wounds. “Jared made you believe this, Abby,” he pleaded. It was an old argument, a well-travelled path he’d taken too many times in their life. It was clear that whatever else kept Abby from trusting and accepting others, her own walls and her own loss did the most to shut him out of her life.
“Maybe. But I also know it’s true.” Her eyes were distant, considering so many things as she lay against Pereneaux’s chest. This was the most genuine version of Abby Henry had seen thus far, the walls and the stubborn willfulness stripped away to reveal the woman within. She was a warrior, he didn’t doubt that with all she had been through in the time since he’d been found by her, but she was also human. This moment gave him pause, fresh eyes with which to see her.
Alex smiled resignedly and kissed her forehead. For a moment a sharp tension lay there as the two wished for something more. If love had passed, it still clung to them, binding them together.
‘I’ll come back later.”
Henry took this all in and realized too late that Alex had seen him at the door. A dark expression of embarrassment and intrusion lay behind the polite smile of greeting Pereneaux gave before leaving the tent.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t save your wife, Henry.” She was a calmer person than she had been before, softened by her conversation with Pereneaux and the medications she was taking. It also seemed clear that she hadn’t really understood how much he had seen before he’d been noticed.
“I’m not sure anyone could,” he said softly, turning to her. “I’m sorry I walked in on those last few words. There’s something between you two, isn’t there?”
The cold sternness of that first night returned to her face in a flash of sharp anger and embarrassment, turning her words into jabs. “You don’t need to know! You don’t need to know anything about me or this place! All you need to know is that you want to go home!”
Chastened, he changed the subject. “They said you’d be better in a few days, is that true?”
Calmer after she’d studied his face for a few minutes, she nodded. “We’ll leave as soon as I’m well. Alex and the others will stay here. There’s the hybrid births to be stopped and some healing needed before they move on.”
“You’re a hero here. Why?”
She shrugged noncommittally and closed her eyes, signaling the end of their conversation. “I am whatever I am, nothing more.”
He didn’t need her to say anything more to know that she wasn’t going to be willing to talk over anything else. With that, and the clear exhaustion on her face, he decided that now was as good a time as any to leave her alone for a while. Just what he would do away from here was another problem altogether. Now that she was better and awake he found that he was reticent to be away from her. “I’ll be going then. Um, I hope you’re well soon.”
She didn’t respond, ruminating.
Henry left the tent. He’d spotted her backpack in a corner of the tent, but he didn’t take it, the timing was wrong, and Abby, or her post-apocalyptic companions, might come after him for it. Anyway, for now he’d let the questions go.
As he left the tent he saw that the others were gathered in the center of the village, food cooking on the fire as they talked. One of the women motioned for him to join them and he did. Alex gave him another polite smile and then began to speak to the group.
“Henry will be leaving with Abby when she is well, until then I want you to help him learn our ways here so that he might be of greater help to her when they travel. Allisa, you’ll help him learn to defend himself.” The woman he gestured toward didn’t surprise him, it was the Zombie Mother. “Hannah, you’ll teach him how to hunt and prepare a meal.” This was a middle-aged woman with brown hair and soft grey eyes. “Aaron, you’ll teach him how to listen for the creatures here.” And this last was the boy he’d noticed in their group before arriving here.
“And I will teach him some of the more basic medicines,” declared Benjamin.
“Abby might not approve,” Alex said with an expression that was as much about caution as wry amusement. He knew well enough that Benjamin wasn’t a man you could argue with no matter what the subject was.
“Abby’s will be damned. He needs to know it so at least one of them survives the trip.” His eyes were alight with humor, daring Pereneaux to try him, and laughing that he already knew the outcome.
“Very well then,” Pereneaux said as he looked at Henry. “Benjamin will teach you some healing skills. I hope you will do well here, Henry, and we wish you a safe journey home when the time comes.”
Henry didn’t miss the edge of doubt in that statement or what it meant.
Chapter Six:
Until She Comes
The next few days were, for all their uneventfulness, quite busy. Each of his teachers had taken him to learn various exercises throughout the day, making each of them count for all they were worth.
The first lesson, and most necessary, was that of listening. When he’d first been told about it, he’d laughed. Aaron, his teacher, had watched him with cool blank eyes until he finally stopped, clearly having missed the memo on its importance. He’d stood on the edge of the encampment for a full afternoon with Aaron, a teenager not much younger than his daughter, and had it all explained to him in great detail. Listening, of course, came to everyone by nature, but this was a more advanced form of it, a very important form of focus which had saved many lives in this world. One could hear their environment easily enough, but how would he know if it was a bird or an impending threat he heard if he didn’t know the differences? The learning process included a small conversation on what noises to avoid and which were actually relatively harmless; there were very few of the latter. It had also contained a short questioning session between the two, with Henry being curious as to what it had been like to grow up here and the boy curious as to how it was to live in a less violent world. Henry decided the boy might have made a fair boyfriend for his daughter if they had ever met.
The second lesson was that of self-defense and battle strategy. Allisa taught this making a makeshift dummy from burlap and driving the various attacks into it before allowing Henry his chance at them. When she decided he’d practiced enough, or more likely, grown tired of his ineptitude, she insisted he try various attacks on her. The resulting taunts and feeble charges had sent the woman off in disgust. He-man, Henry wasn’t, and it took the full week Abby rested for him to get most of the movements and stances down. Though Aaron’s listening lessons did speed the learning, he often heard her rushing through ground growth early enough that he could make a jab at tripping or flipping her. Most of his problem seemed to be a lack of coordination and reflex control which combined to make his movements clumsy at best. He was markedly better by the end of the week, but still beneath Alissa’s stern requirements.
Benjamin also grew impatient with him. Henry’s brand of healing had nothing to do with magic and herb harvesting and therefore he resisted it and really didn’t quite understand it at all. The fact that they’d only had a week helped Henry even less; frustrated but understanding, the healer eventually gave him a few books and a leather backpack to carry them in, calling it his post-apocalyptic survival kit.
It was Benjamin he brought the details of his dream to after mulling it over for a few days. He’d been there in the beginning, he could feel it, and so Henry thought the dream might have some meaning to him.
The look in the healer’s eyes was that of shock, but it was there only briefly. “On your part, the bit about your wife, that was guilt and a little threat mixed together. The rest, well, the rest doesn’t mean anything.” Henry could tell that this was a bit of misdirection, the steady eyes drifting back and forth as Benjamin looked at him, doing his best not to show the misgivings these other details gave him.
“You’re lying.” Henry said, annoyed at being put off, especially by a man who had been so vocal about how silly and potentially harmful Abby’s silence was.
“And if I am?” Benjamin smiled coyly. “There’s just some things we want to forget. It’s been a long while; there’s a lot to be forgotten, and somehow there’s just more of it every day. There are just some memories that you’ll never get, Henry. Be glad that you’ve been spared them.”
He didn’t bring it up again, but of course he hadn’t really let it go. He had to know, needed to know. He just didn’t talk about it.
After these other lessons, he learned the basics of hunting and cooking. He was far better at cooking than hunting, but he did manage to have a few catches in the learning, primarily through the use of snares. He wasn’t a terrible shot, but it soon came to be apparent that fear was a stronger motivator for his aim than hunger ever would be. While he had grazed a few of the rabbits and winged a bird with the guns he used, he only ever did serious harm when the animals seemed to be coming straight at him.
When all was said and done, Henry had to say that the listening was what he’d been better at than anything else. While this gave him a few misgivings, he also understood that unless something terrible came up or she was away, Abby was apt to be the one to hunt and slay anything that came their way. He was always going to be a backup, not the front runner, and he made peace with that fairly readily after that. Time was likely to give him more experience too; hopefully that would be enough to carry the day until he got better. Abby was something he had come to depend on here, something he knew that he could when he got down to it.
Of course, he was more than a little in the dark when it came to his travelling companion, if he were to be honest. He hadn’t been to see Abby since that second day in the camp. When he asked himself why that was, he cut it down to the idea he felt there was nothing new that could be said between them at this point, or maybe he was afraid he’d be caught walking into another of Pereneaux and Abby’s tete a tetes on most days. When he dug deeper on other days he also had to admit it could be true that he was afraid of whatever emotions he’d begun to find warring within himself when he had too much time to think, or that his fears about the things he didn’t know rose as he truly started to understand how dangerous this world was. His mind was always very active, and his concerns made up a great deal of what he considered even before he came to be here, but he thought he knew what her reactions would be to any of these things if he brought them up to her too. Anger, ambivalence, and possibly some of that old animosity and sarcasm he got when they first met didn’t exactly seem as if they would help him cope.
Besides, if there was one thing he knew Abby really wanted him to avoid, it was thinking about the backpack and the story within. She wasn’t likely to be very happy if she interpreted his interest in that direction to be the real intent behind any visits, though he knew that was part of why he would feel the pull to see her too. He also thought that if he stayed away for a while, let his interest seem to wane, that the backpack might somehow come to be within his reach that much easier. She might ease her guard maybe, or ask him to carry it long enough that he could catch a peek.
That was part of the trouble; for all of the awkward emotions and upheaval that pulled at him, the strongest thing was his curiosity about this place. The book and whatever contents might lie within entered his mind more often than anything else since he’d lost his wife. It blazed there like the flaming dreams of some wondrous and beautiful woman, touching him at the oddest moments and whispering promises of revelation.
***
Today, after a long week of crash course education, Abby was well enough to leave with him, a fact that still boggled his mind after the clear trauma of their last misadventure. All the same she stood on the camp’s edge ready to go, Henry’s object of curiosity slung unimportantly onto her back as always. Her weapons stood out from all sides of her too, clear proof of her strength and ability to defend herself. The katana was in a back harness that had been made for her, the guns bulging from holsters sewed into the pockets of her backpack, a sleeve in her boot, and the shoulder harness she wore over the t-shirt she had on. This was how she showed her strength and hid her vulnerability, though both showed through now that Henry had truly started to see her. The softness was in her eyes, just under the icy contempt in her
stance, just below the defiance, and in her mouth, which was so often pressed thin by determined bitterness. A certain sense of anticipation underlined much of her body language. Abby was anything but weak, but she was also very exposed, her emotional state always just below the surface, beneath the walls that protected her and sealed her in.
If he were to really consider it, Henry had never been someone who understood strong women; he’d seen most women as weaker and more dependent creatures all his life. This was not a viewpoint that came from ignorance as much as bald perspective; it had been true of his mother, and in some ways, Rachel too, so he had never really thought to challenge that perspective, to see something more in them than what he got at first blush. This previously held viewpoint wasn’t true of Abby, though there was that vulnerability, it made her stronger somehow. He couldn’t explain why it seemed this way, only that it was. And for the first time he wondered at it, was drawn toward it as if somehow this was the thing he sought. Why would he feel pulled in such a way? Why now? Why Abby, who had started out as more of an antagonist than anything like an attractive figure for him?
An edge of guilt touched him then, a pain in the stomach and an ache in the heart- it was guilt over Rachel’s death. For all the secrets this place held, there was also enough real world knowledge to have changed Henry deeply in the past several days; he’d lost some of his hardened edges without having really been consciously aware of it. These changes meant that he was stronger in many ways, more aware, more truly in tune with how different life was from the way he’d perceived it before and these were all good things. The hell of it was that it also meant he saw how much damage he’d done while he held onto that old perspective, the harm it did to not only his family, but himself, and even the people he met every day. He felt badly about his relationship with Rachel now; their marriage had been complicated, yes, but he hadn’t needed to throw so much of the guilt and responsibility in her lap over the years. He should have taken up some of the work and helped her to get better when she’d had her breakdown. He’d only seen his own costs in the past, the mistakes she made eating him up while he worked so hard to give them the lives they had. The truth was that Rachel had given as much and more only to have it all come crashing down on her face.
Other Dangers: Slipped Through Page 6
