by T A Williams
Malcolm jogged down the road towards the tattooed man. He stopped in front of him, clearly out of breath. “What…what are they doing?”
The man answered in his deep voice. “Inspection.”
Malcolm glanced frantically at the men making their ways into the nearby houses but said nothing.
Alec heard the front door open and froze.
He could hear Beverly’s voice coming from downstairs. “What do you want?”
The man either didn’t hear or just ignored her as there was no response.
Alec glanced around the dusty attic looking for some kind of weapon. His eyes were met with nothing more than open boxes that were filled with photo albums and old trinkets. He wasn’t willing to crawl over to the far side boxes for fear the floor would creak giving his position away.
Then he realized that while a weapon might buy him a few minutes it would damn the town. If he was able to take out the man then he wouldn’t return to the truck and when that happened his absence would surely be missed. He didn’t want to think of what would happen then.
A few minutes passed, which felt more like hours, and then he heard the front door open and a few seconds later the man walked out of Beverly’s house and towards the next house.
Alec sat back and let out a sigh of relief. This feeling only lasted a moment before he heard shouting coming from the street. When he looked out of the window his stomach dropped. On the far side of the street one of the men had Vincent in a head lock and was dragging him towards the tattooed man. Malcolm started to walk towards him but stopped himself.
The man released Vincent from the head lock and pushed him to the ground. Even before Vincent fell face first onto the ground he appeared beaten and bloodied.
“I found a hidden space in the floor filled with food.” The man told their apparent leader.
The tattooed man looked to Malcolm.
The old man looked at him and then back to Vincent. “Revis, it’s not what you thin-“
“What am I supposed to think?” The tattooed man, Revis, stepped forward a single step. “Our agreement isn’t complicated. We show up from time to time and you provide us with food, and in return we let you be. Is that too much to ask?”
Malcolm dropped his head and shook it no. On the ground Vincent began to cry.
“Have we ever taken all of your food?” Again Malcolm shook his head no. “Then why do you believe you need to hide food from us?”
Malcolm said nothing.
The rest of the men came out from the houses and stood in the street watching the scene unfold. Alec felt his body relax just slightly when he realized that the men had not found Trevor and Jamie.
“I gave you all the benefit of the doubt. I trusted that you would be honest with us and you weren’t. That’s my mistake.” Revis walked over to the Vincent who was still kneeling down. “And it’s one I will not make again.” In one swift motion Revis pulled a pistol from his side, aimed it at the back of Vincent’s head, and pulled the trigger.
The sound reverberated through the silent town.
Malcolm took a couple of steps away from Vincent’s body and slowly kneeled down and fell over.
With the gun still in his hand Revis casually walked towards Malcolm. There was a shout from down the street and Alec saw Margie running down the street towards them.
Alec couldn’t sit back and watch anymore. He got to his feet, jumped down the stairs and was heading towards the door when Beverly jumped in front of him.
She put both her hands on his chest. “Don’t.”
Alec met her eyes and saw the tears running down her cheeks.
“They will kill you all. You can’t help them.”
He started to push his way past her but he knew she was telling the truth. They had killed the man who was hiding food. If they found out the town had been hiding him then there would be more deaths.
Alec swore under his breath, took a second to compose himself, than peeked through the curtains.
Margie was lying over Malcolm attempting to cover him with her body. Revis stood above them, emotionless.
“What do you believe this will do?” The man asked her. “Do you believe that by throwing yourself over him you will protect him? Do you believe my moral code allows for the shooting of hoarding old men but not worthless women?”
“Please,” Malcolm said and held up a hand. “Please Revis, we’re sorry. Vincent and I did store additional food. It was stupid. We did it because we didn’t trust you and I know you haven’t done anything to cause us not to trust you.”
Revis stood there for a moment and then glanced back at his men and shook his head. A couple of them laughed.
“You all are not long for this world. You’re weak. The world has changed and this new world has no place for the weak. It’s only because of us that you have made it this long.”
“You’re right, we’re sor-“
“Shut up. From now on your food quota has doubled. If you have enough food to hide in the floors then you have more then you need.”
Revis grabbed Margie by the shoulders and she let out a scream. With almost no effort he threw her to the side and she fell to the road hitting her head. She squirmed and let out a low moan.
Revis then grabbed Malcolm by the collar and lifted him up so they were face to face. “If we come back and you’re short, even if it’s just a single apple short I will take the life of one of your people. This will continue until your population has reached a level where you produce more then you consume. Do you understand?”
Malcolm nodded his head, not meeting the man’s eyes.
Revis let go and Malcolm fell roughly to his knees and rolled onto his side.
The tattooed man turned towards the houses on the side of the roadway and addressed the town. “I know you all are hiding in your homes, like vermin. Understand this. We are either going to be your salvation, or your damnation. The choice is yours.”
Revis turned, got into his truck and pulled away from the town. The rest of his men followed. Once they were gone Alec ran outside and stopped.
He could see Vincent’s body from where he was. The man was slumped over not moving and his brain matter was scattered all over the roadway. The man’s blood was pooled all around him and for a second Alec’s mind flashed to his father. He could see him lying there in a pool of his own blood saying goodbye.
“Help my daughter, help Margie.” Malcolm yelled to Alec snapping him out of his dark memory.
He ran to Margie and gently lifted her head. She had a large gash on the side of her face that was bleeding heavily but she was still breathing.
“It’s going to be okay. Just rest, it’s going to be okay.” Alec sat there with her head in his lap repeating this statement. A statement he knew was a lie but a necessary one.
Trevor came up beside him. “I’ve got her Alec, go check on Malcolm.”
Alec scooted over and sat on the hot pavement of the roadway. Malcolm was sitting as well staring at what was left of Vincent and crying.
Things were not going to be okay.
Alec
“They will kill you all if you stay.” Alec said bluntly.
Margie, Malcolm, Trevor, Jamie, and Beverly all stood around the make-shift grave of Vincent; none of them said anything.
“I’m going back home, it is safe there. I have already invited Trevor and Jamie, the rest of this town is invited as well.”
Margie shook her head; the gash of the side of it had been stitched up by Trevor but was still red. “We have food here, we have shelter.”
“My home is surrounded by hundreds of empty acres. You all can plant trees, gardens, farms, whatever you need.”
“We can’t start all over Alec.”
“If you don’t, you’ll die.” Trevor said meeting Margie’s gaze. “They will take until you don’t have anything else. Slowly but surely they will kill you all, either directly or indirectly.”
“You all can build a new town on our land.
We will learn to protect each other and stop something like this from ever happening again.”
“I’m sorry,” Margie laid her head on Malcolm’s shoulder. “This is our home.”
Alec didn’t try to hide his frustration. He had grown up in several different places as a child so the idea of one single place being home to him was a foreign idea. Some of those places did hold great memories but he wasn’t willing to die for any of them.
“No, it is not.” Malcolm’s voice was devoid of emotion. “It stopped being our home when they came and took over.”
Margie sat up in shock. “We’ve lived her all our lives. This is where mom di-“
“We haven’t lived here all our lives, not yet. And I don’t intend on this being the place where I die.” Malcolm ran a hand through Margie’s hair. “I’m not going to lose you to these people.” He turned to Alec. “What do you need?”
Everything he thought.
“Food, gas, and transportation.”
“We have a truck that can fit four or five people in the truck and another four or five in the bed.” Trevor offered.
“We still have a couple of cars that we hid from them. At least three that are reliable enough.” Malcolm thought for a moment. “We can probably gather up enough cars, and food isn’t an issue. Gas on the other hand…”
“My old farm.” Beverly’s voice was soft and she was still staring at the make-shift grave. Malcolm said she had been particularly close to Vincent. When no one said anything she looked up and met their gazes. “I have a 500 gallon tank on my property. We-I used it for the farm equipment before everything happened. It’s not full but should have a couple hundred gallons at least.”
Malcolm nodded and for the first time life seemed to return to his eyes. “That’s a start. I know a couple other abandoned farms on the outskirts that might have similar tanks.”
Trevor turned to Alec. “We’re with you.”
“I’m with you.” Beverly said while turning her attention back to the grave.
Margie walked up to Alec and gave him a warm hug. “We’re with you.”
Alec returned the hug and stepped back. “Let’s get started.”
Jess
The starlight was the only thing holding back the inky darkness in the night sky. They sat on the front porch of Gruff’s log cabin staring off at the stars and enjoying the brief respite from the humid days. Jess and Gruff sat in on opposite sides of the porch in old rickety rocking chairs while Ally lay asleep in between them with the puppy fast asleep on her chest.
It had been a month since they had found the injured animal and its wounds had healed and it had become a member of their thrown together family. Ally named him Tiger despite the very clear explanations from both Jess and Gruff in regards to the difference between dogs and cats. As with most things once the girl had made up her mind about something that was the end of the story.
Things finally seemed like they were starting to come together. Every morning Jess and Ally would complete their daily duties at the military camp and each afternoon they would sneak out and meet up with Gruff until nightfall. Several times Wash had offered them a spot at one of their newly set up refugee camps and each time they turned him down. They had found their new home here.
Gruff sat in his chair rocking slowly back and forth with a peaceful look on his face.
Her relationship with this man was odd. He was old enough to be her father but she didn’t feel like he was a father figure to her, he was more of a trusted friend. He was her pillar to rest on when the world got to be too much for her, and he had helped Ally fully come out of the shell she had built around herself after everything that had happened.
The man noticed her staring at him and smiled. “Sorry, just taking in the night.”
“I don’t think I ever really thanked you for being there for us.”
“That’s because there is no need to. All I did is give you all someone to hang out with and I get just as much out of that as you do.”
“Have you always lived out here all by yourself?”
The peaceful look fled the man’s face. “No, not always.”
Jess didn’t know if she should push him. There were still things in her past she had not been able to face, and every time Gruff had asked about her past she deliberately steered the conversation in a different direction. If she wanted the man to share his past then she owed him the same. “When the power went off I found shelter with a group of people and for a while things were good like this.”
“What happened?”
She had been with a family and their neighbor, he had been a plumber, she didn’t know why she remembered that about him, but she did. The others had come in the night. The father tried to fight back and she watched them crush his skull in with a baseball bat. They killed the former plumber next, a single shot through the head. The mother tried to run away with her son but the man known as V caught her in the side of the head with the bat. She had survived but was never really the same after that, though Jess wasn’t sure if that was due to the injury, what they did to her son, or because of what they did to her afterwards. She had been in the cage next to her with Ally’s father came; she wouldn’t move and Jess had left her there.
“You don’t have to talk about it.” Gruff said softly.
“No, it’s okay. They were the same men who killed Ally’s family.” She looked out at the stars but could only see the past. “They killed the ones I was with and took me.”
Jess could have added more details; she could have explained what it felt like to lay in a cage with nothing more than dank hay to keep you warm while winter’s cold winds blew through their shelter’s cracks and seemed to burn her skin. She could have told him about the abuse, about how the men used her and the mother. About what it felt like to be nothing more than a piece of meat and how scarily easy it was for her to escape into her own mind. If he had pushed her she could have told him that part of her was still curled up in a ball in a corner of that cage waiting for the next man to come.
The silence stretched out before them as Jess fought back the past.
“I had a daughter.” Gruff stared off at nothing in particular. “My wife and I never really got along all that well. She left us when Gail was just a few years old so it was just the two of us. To be honest I liked it that way and never really got around to trying to find anyone else to take her place. Gail was smart, don’t really know where she got that from. No disrespect to her mother but that woman wasn’t a scholar and I’m certainly not the sharpest tool in the shed, yet somewhere she got some smarts and went to college.” Gruff took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “It was a drunk driver that took her from me.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Gruff wiped his eyes. “After that I moved out here and this is where I have been for a good fifteen years since. The world has turned to shit since everything went dark but to be honest I always thought it was shitty with the power on.”
Jess thought back to her absentee mother and emotionally absentee father and couldn’t disagree with him. “This is nice though.”
The man smiled and nodded his head. “Sure as hell is.”
They sat there listening to the crickets and the frogs. Since they had made it to the military camp her life had been as stable as it had ever been. “Do you think things will go back to the way they were?”
“If you had asked me that a year ago I would have laughed at you, but now, now with all the lights over at the camp I think they just might. Things seem stable, the camp seems to have plenty of supplies, it looks like the government is going to get everything back up and running. Now I don’t know if that means things will go back to how they were before.”
Jess didn’t want things to go back to how they were. She liked how simple things were now. When things returned to normal what would that mean for Ally? The girl wasn’t hers, would that even matter?
“Regardless of how things turn out you all will always have a place here.
”
The tension that Jess hadn’t realized had built up in her shoulders disappeared and she let out a laugh. “I think we’d both like that.”
“Looks like midget is asleep, you all still going to try and head back tonight?”
Jess watched Ally’s chest rise and fall a couple of times. “No I think we’ll just try to sneak in right before the sun rises.”
“Well in that case I’ll get your beds ready.”
As he started to get up Jess stopped him. “I was serious before when I said thank you.”
The man chuckled. “I was serious as well. I needed this just as much, if not more, than you.”
Jess
The arrow cut through the air and struck the squirrel squarely in the middle with a satisfying thump; the force of the arrow threw the small animal from the tree and onto the ground where it laid unmoving.
The little girl turned to Jess and held her head up high. “Told you I was getting good.”
Jess was speechless as she realized she was watching this young girl grow up in front of her very eyes.
Gruff ran over and grabbed the squirrel before Tiger had a chance to snatch it. The dejected animal trotted over to Ally’s side and the girl gave him a quick pat on the head.
“I’m sorry for doubting you Ally, that is amazing.”
The little girl flashed Gruff a smile.
“Together we’re going to be able to catch some tasty meals in the future, imp.”
Ally stuck her tongue out at the man and then ran up and gave Jess a tight hug. Jess closed her eyes and squeezed her right back.
This is what it is like to have a family Jess realized.
“Alright midget stay close by but see if you and Tiger can catch something else for dinner tonight.”
