by David Lucin
“So what can I do you for?” Ed asked. He wore a knitted black and yellow scarf, a match to Sophie’s. Odd, but also a little cute.
Sam gestured for Ed to follow him away from the truck. Ed raised an eyebrow toward his wife, who said, “Don’t look at me. I assumed Jansen was here to beg for her old job back.”
Jenn blew air through her nose. “Yeah, you wish.”
As Sam spoke quietly to Ed, Sophie spat to the side and asked, “Seriously, what’s this all about? If you’d somehow forgotten, an army of lunatics is inbound, and we have a nigh-endless amount of work to do in preparation for that inevitability. I appreciate unannounced visits from you and your fiancé—I truly do—but I would prefer they wait until after this crisis has well and truly passed.”
Should she tell Sophie or not? If she did, could Sophie keep a secret? Probably. Jenn didn’t take her for a gossip. But telling Sophie before she told Maria, Gary, or Allison seemed wrong, even if she’d eventually find out from Ed anyway.
Fortunately, she didn’t have to decide, as Ed beckoned her over with a flick of his wrist.
“Sorry,” she said to Sophie. “I’ll let you get back to work.”
Still tempted to skip, she joined Sam and Ed. Sam put his arm around her shoulder, so she wrapped hers around his waist. Ed asked, “You two are sure about this?”
“Yes,” they blurted out at the same time. “Can you do it?” Jenn added. “I don’t want you to wind up in the doghouse with Sophie. We know you’re busy.”
“She’ll be fine. If anything, she’ll be happy for you.” He crossed his arms, let his gaze drift, and clucked his tongue. Going through a mental checklist of some sort? “Okay, obviously there’s no paperwork to fill out because we have no one to submit it to. We should still have witnesses.”
Jenn hadn’t considered witnesses, but she picked out her maid-of-honor long ago. “I’ll run inside and get Allison. She should be in the press box.”
“Aren’t we trying to keep this a secret?” Sam asked.
“Allison can keep secrets just fine. You should be more worried I’ll blab about it.”
He chewed a fingernail. “All right. Be discreet when you see her. I don’t want my mom overhearing and crashing our party.”
Jenn grimaced at the thought. As she’d learned during her conversation with Dylan in New Mexico, acting discreet was not one of her strengths, so she should stay as far away from the press box as possible. “Actually, maybe you should go get her.”
“Probably a good idea.”
“What about you, Sam?” Ed asked. “Who’s your witness?”
Sam didn’t hesitate: “Carter.”
“That was quick,” Jenn said, unsurprised by the choice. Sam and Carter had grown close after working together at Minute Tire and then at the farm. In a way, Sam seemed to consider himself Carter’s older brother, even though Carter was twice his age.
“Yeah, kind of a no-brainer.” And then, to Ed, “Is that it? Are we good to go?”
Ed clucked his tongue again. “I’m assuming you don’t have rings.”
Rings. Of course. She hadn’t considered those, either. “Is that a problem?”
“Not at all.” Ed twisted and tugged at his own wedding ring, a plain stainless-steel thing that looked a lot like a washer, until it came loose. “Here, you can use mine.”
“You sure?” Sam asked as Ed dropped the ring in his open palm. “I don’t want to—”
“Don’t worry about it. They were only a few bucks each. I have a half dozen spares in my dresser at home. Soph wears the same one in a smaller size. I’ll get her to hand hers over.”
Seeing the ring doubled the number of butterflies in Jenn’s stomach. This was really happening. In a few minutes, she would become Mrs. Jenn Orr. Or would she stick with Jansen? Everyone knew her as Jansen already, so maybe she should hyphenate. Jansen-Orr. Orr-Jansen?
“Ed!” Sophie barked from the trucks, then made a show of tapping an invisible watch on her wrist.
“You better go get Allison,” Ed told Sam. “I’ll talk to Carter. And hurry. Looks like the boss is getting antsy.”
* * *
“We are gathered here today to witness the marriage of Jenn Jansen and Sam Orr,” Ed said from near the trunk of a spindly ponderosa pine, its needles white with a dusting of fresh snow. He’d led the wedding party to a copse of trees a few blocks away from the Skydome. It was quiet and private and perfect.
Jenn faced Sam, holding his hands, as Ed talked about love and commitment and the future. To her ears, it was all background noise. Her attention was solely on Sam: the feeling of his skin against hers, the little bump in his nose, those bright blue eyes, his lips. More than once, she caught herself bouncing on her toes, and her teeth chattered, even though she was too excited to feel cold. Had she ever been so giddy?
Allison sniffled and wiped her eye while Carter stood tall, spine straight. Ed had put him in charge of holding the rings, and he kept them secure in a tight fist at his side.
“Do you want to exchange vows?” Ed asked.
Vows, too? She really should have done some research on weddings or at least discussed the basics with Maria. “I don’t know. What are we supposed to say?”
“It depends. Most couples explain how they feel and make promises to each other.”
“Easy enough. I’m game. Sam?”
“Me too.” His thumbs traced the contours of her knuckles. “You want to go first?”
She ran her tongue along the inside of her teeth, struck by unexpected stage fright. What if she embarrassed herself? At the best of times, she struggled to express her feelings. How was she supposed to be so open in front of an audience? Now might be a good time to let her big mouth take the lead. “Sure, but don’t laugh if I say something stupid. I’m terrible at this stuff.”
“No laughing. Got it.”
After a long swallow, she held his hands tighter. What to say? That she promised to protect him and do everything in her power to help them survive? No, he knew this already, and she didn’t want to taint her wedding by thinking about the White Horde or the Great Khan. Maybe a story about their first real date, when they went for a drive in his Tesla? Too clichéd and too boring. She needed to come up with something meaningful, something he’d remember.
“I think about you all the time,” she began. “That sounds weird and kind of creepy, but it’s like you’re a part of me. You said in Payson that we were a team, and I didn’t realize you were right until I went to Phoenix on my own. We are a team. But we’re also more than that.” Tears burned her eyes. Blinking them away, she continued, her voice quiet and hoarse: “Without you, I’m not me anymore. I’d do anything for you, and I know you’d do anything for me. When the Major took me, all I wanted was to see you again, and then when I saw you running across the street . . .” Where was she going with this? Now that she was letting her thoughts spill out, she lost all direction. An encouraging smile from Sam put her back on track. “I promise we’ll always be together, even when we’re apart, okay?” What? “Sorry, I swear that made sense in my head.”
“It makes perfect sense,” Sam said, and Jenn noticed a sheen over his irises.
“Good.” She was clutching his hands so tightly she half expected him to cry out in pain. “No matter what happens, it’s me and you. Always. We’ll get through whatever the world tries to dump on us. I know we will.” There was more to say, so much more, but she wouldn’t be able to force it past the lump in her throat. “Okay, I think that’s it. That was really lame. I didn’t actually make any vows, just rambled.”
A honking sound came from Allison. Blushing bright red, she frantically wiped her nose with a handkerchief.
Jenn smiled to herself. Maybe her vows weren’t as bad as she thought. Then again, Allison had begun crying before the ceremony even started, so her waterworks might not mean very much.
The tendons in Sam’s neck bulged, and the skin around his mouth had gone taut. The sheen in his eyes gliste
ned, threatening to form into beads. “My turn?”
“Uh, yeah,” she said with a strained laugh. “But if you make me cry, I’m going to hit you later.”
“No promises.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, then back again. “If you think yours was creepy, that’s nothing compared to this: I fell in love with you as soon as you sat next to me in anthro. You were wearing sweatpants, you spent the whole class on your phone, and then when we went out for lunch, you had mustard all over your face. There was something about you. You were just so . . . you. I can’t describe it. It was like I’d known you forever. Then you asked me out. What are the chances of that?”
She remembered it all so vividly, as though it had happened this morning. Half the seats in the lecture hall were empty, but she sat next to Sam anyway. Somehow, she felt drawn to that seat, like she’d be making a life-altering mistake if she tried to sit anywhere else. It didn’t hurt that he was the best-looking guy in the class. Who better to ask for a week’s worth of notes?
“I love you, Jenn Jansen,” he continued. “Even when you’re being a Jennifer.” Jennifer. Her mean, wound-up alter ego. No one but Sam could love her. “I could stand here and make a bunch of promises, like I’ll always fight by your side or I’ll learn to pick up my laundry off the bedroom floor, but the only promise that really matters is I’ll never stop loving you.” He let out his own strained laugh. “Speaking of lame, I think I got you beat.”
“It’s not lame,” she managed to sneak past that lump in her throat. “Yours was way better than mine.” Her gaze moved from his eyes, settling on his lips. She wanted to jump up and kiss him, but they hadn’t exchanged rings yet. Soon.
Now Carter sniffed, and Allison blew her nose again. Ed, a real pro, kept his composure. “Okay, Jenn, do you take Sam to be your lawfully wedded husband? To have and to hold in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad, keeping yourself unto him for as long as you both shall live?”
When she tried to say “I do,” nothing came out. She settled for a firm nod instead.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” Ed turned to Sam. “And, Sam, do you take Jenn to be your lawfully wedded wife? To have and to hold in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad, keeping yourself unto her for as long as you both shall live?”
He wiggled his eyebrows and shot her a smirk. “I do.”
Ed gestured to Carter. “You got the rings, buddy?”
Dutifully, Carter stepped up and held out his hand. In his open palm lay a pair of plain metal rings. Jenn reached for the bigger of the two, while Sam took the other.
“I normally do a preamble about what rings mean,” Ed said, “but to be honest with you, I want to skip to the good part. So you can go ahead and put them on each other’s fingers.”
Jenn held up her left hand, and Sam slipped the ring on her finger. It fit perfectly, and she quickly forgot it had belonged to Sophie Beaumont of all people.
She reminded herself to exhale as she maneuvered Sam’s ring into place. When she was finished, he flexed his fingers a few times. “I could get used to this. Too bad we have to take them off when we head back.”
Her heart sank. “Maybe we could keep them on and nobody would notice. Or we could always just tell everyone we got married. We’ll have to tell Gary and Maria eventually, anyway.”
“And risk my mom finding out? No thanks.”
“Fair enough. Hearing about this secret wedding might give her a brain aneurysm.”
Sam took her hands once more. Clearly, she didn’t know the first thing about weddings, but she knew what came next. The good part, as Ed had called it. They were so close. She hadn’t realized how much a formal commitment meant to her. Why had she waited so long to marry this man? She should have proposed to him months ago, the second her heart chose him as the one.
“Jenn and Sam,” Ed began, and she shifted her weight to the balls of her feet, ready to pounce, “before these witnesses today, you have pledged to be joined in marriage.”
Her focus returned to his lips. Those lips. She’d seen them almost every day for the past two years, so why couldn’t she stop staring at them?
Heat rushed through her body. She felt woozy, weak-kneed, borderline drunk. With each passing second, more of her inhibition evaporated. She ached for Sam in a way she didn’t think possible. If he didn’t kiss her soon, she’d have to take matters into her own hands.
Cool it, Jenn. Don’t do anything stupid.
“By the authority vested in me by the state of . . .” Ed trailed off, hummed to himself, and started over. “By the authority vested in me by the City of Flagstaff, I now pronounce you husband and wife. Sam, you may ki—”
Before Jenn could tell herself to stop, she leaped forward and kissed him, hard. So hard, in fact, that she knocked him off balance. Yelping into her mouth, he fell backward, into the snow. They landed with a thud that forced the wind from her lungs and banged their teeth together with a clink, but she didn’t care. She was married to Sam, and no force in this world could break them apart, not even the Great Khan. Especially not the Great Khan.
“Bride,” Ed finished as Allison and Carter clapped and cheered.
After a few seconds, Jenn pulled her face away from Sam’s. Snow had made it into his beard, and his hat had fallen off. He blinked up at her and pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “Hey, wife.”
She kissed him again and breathed, for the first time, “Hey, husband.”
18
Saying goodbye to Sam hurt like a sword through the chest. Jenn wished he could have come with her and been at her side, where he belonged, particularly after she went on about how they were a team in her vows, but he’d be safe at the Skydome. Well, safer. If Jenn and the Militia did their job today on I-40, the threat of the White Horde shouldn’t reach him.
Her squad, along with Yannick’s Third Squad, waited in a townhouse unit south of the interstate. From what she could tell, it had been vacant for years, but all the appliances were new, the dark laminate flooring pristine, the paint unblemished. It looked like a show home. Maybe the owners had renovated but weren’t able to sell when the economy crashed in the forties.
Since midnight, she’d been waiting in here without a fire or a battery-powered space heater. Not exactly the romantic wedding night she had in mind. Oh well. Thank God for their janitor’s closet. She and Sam practically sprinted there after the ceremony.
She rubbed her thumb along her empty ring finger. Before leaving the Skydome, she gave him both of her rings. If anything happened to her today, she wanted him to have something to remember her by, something to remind him of what they shared.
Don’t think like that, she scolded herself and tucked her hands between her thighs to keep them warm.
Coughing came from the far side of the room, where Wyatt and Tanis sat against the wall, sharing a blanket. Tanis’s head rested on his lap, and his arm was draped across her midsection. Both appeared to be sleeping. Freddie sat next to a gas fireplace and wrote in his notebook. He still looked more like a zombie than a living human being, but she didn’t ask him to stay behind. The Militia needed everyone for this fight, and Freddie wouldn’t have missed it for the world. She admired his commitment. It was hard to believe he once considered himself a coward. Now Jenn would count him as one of the bravest people she’d ever met.
Beside Freddie, Kaydence Brown, a new addition to Freddie’s team, sat cross-legged, cleaning a handgun, the parts laid out neatly on the floor in front of him. He was the youngest in the platoon, only eighteen in December. On account of the bombs, he hadn’t even finished high school. In summer, when Gary first formed the Militia, Kaydence, Jenn had heard, tried to join by lying about his age. He got through two weeks of training before anyone caught on. His stubble-free face, round cheeks, wavy hair, and boyishly high voice made him seem like a kid, not a soldier, but he approached his work with all the seriousness of a Guard NCO, and Jenn respected him for that.
Quinn came over
, nibbling on a piece of crunchy bread. Bundled up in her jacket, she plopped herself down next to Jenn. As usual, she wore her cream-colored beanie with the floppy pom-pom on top. “You sleep at all last night?”
It took most of Jenn’s willpower not to scream, No, but I got married! She didn’t see the harm in telling Quinn; even if word spread around the Militia—and it would, in a matter of hours—Barbara likely wouldn’t hear. Yet Jenn liked the idea of keeping the wedding a secret for now. It felt more intimate that way, more meaningful. “Not a wink. You?”
“Half hour, maybe.” Quinn let out a long yawn. “What time is it?”
Jenn turned over her wrist to see her watch. “Just after ten.”
Quinn hummed in reply. “So they should be showing up at, what, like one? Two?”
They. The White Horde. Jenn did some quick math in her head. A drone had shown the horde leaving Holbrook at sunrise. If it continued traveling at its usual pace, yes, it would arrive in Flagstaff around 1:30 p.m. An eternity, but also the blink of an eye. “Something like that, yeah.”
“So a couple hours.” Quinn offered her bread to Jenn. “You want some of this?”
Jenn held up a hand. “No, thanks. I don’t know how you can eat right now. I’d just puke it up.”
“Fair enough.” Quinn pulled her beanie farther over her ears, the pom-pom jiggling. “Hey, you ever heard what Dylan calls beanies?”
“No, why? Does he have some weird Canadian name for them?”
“So weird. He calls them tuques.”
“Tuque? Like, tuke?”
“Yeah, tuque. A while back, he was like, ‘That furry thing on top of your tuque looks like a polar bear testicle.’ I was laughing so hard I started crying.”
“Because he called your hat a tuque or because he compared this”—Jenn flicked the pom-pom with her finger—“to polar bear genitals?”
“Both, probably, now that you mention it.”
“Tuque,” Jenn mused. “I’m definitely calling them that from now on.”
Quinn had another bite of bread. “Oh, absolutely.”
