by Jones, Isla
But most of all—through the panic and the cautious hope that filled me from head to toes; through the relief that washed over me when I realised Leo was safe outside, despite that I didn’t even like Leo—
Most of all…Through everything…
I remember him.
9.
The windchime above the door gave me away before my boot could connect with the concrete outside. Everyone’s gazes snapped to me immediately, including Leo’s disapproving stare. He had one arm slung around the muscular shoulder of a blond man—I remember him clearly. My first thought had been a cliché; he was an angel, sent to save us. But then he’d turned around, and I’d looked into those piercing eyes; green, like Leo’s, but so very different from the soft and deep pools of algae that I’d come to like. No, this man was different.
The moment he looked at me, the air had been punched from my lungs. There was no oxygen within me, I couldn’t breathe. His eyes were like blades of grass, sharp and bright—those eyes and the cruelty that simmered beneath them are what made me realise … he might have been an angel, but the kind who fell from heaven into hell.
The fallen angel patted Leo on the back once, then they pulled apart. I crashed back to reality when they both turned to face me standing in the doorway, knife in one hand, my bandaged shoulder holding the door open.
“I told you to wait inside,” said Leo. There was no trace of anger in his tone; he merely stated a fact.
“I did,” I replied weakly, my wide eyes darting from stranger to stranger. “And then I decided I didn’t want to, and came outside.”
The blond man raised his brows as his apple-green eyes pierced into my soul and froze it with the frostiness within him. My gaze locked with his; an icy chill trickled down my spine to my bum. Leo’s off-and-on intimidating nature paled in comparison to this man. I glanced around again, estimating an approximate twelve new faces. Some wore soldier gear, much like Leo, Adam and James. The three women I spotted were heavily armed, and had resumed chatting enthusiastically with Adam. James talked to two armed men, like they were old friends catching up.
The angel of death wore a grey t-shirt and a pair of army-trousers; he held a bloodied machete in one hand, and a pistol in the other.
“Winter,” said Leo. “Meet Castle.” He gestured to the man beside him.
As the sun shone down on them, I saw the ashy tones of his blond hair; for a moment, I thought his hair was dirty, but then I realised that his hair was the colour of freshly shaven sawdust, and it even curled like it too.
“Castle,” said Leo. “This is Winter, a survivor we picked up along the way. Santa Fe, we found her in—trapped in an alleyway.”
“Is this the rest of your group?” I asked, approaching him slowly. I didn’t have qualms about approaching Leo, but this Castle character unnerved me.
“The rest of your group,” repeated Castle icily. The piercing green eyes, very unlike Leo’s moss ones, raked over me from head to toe. My hands unconsciously swatted away crumbs of dirt from my ratty jeans—when had I gotten holes in them, I wondered.
Castle slewed his gaze to Leo. “How much does she know?”
Leo, unfazed by Castle’s threatening demeanour, laughed and tossed the car keys at me. “You’re driving,” was all he said before he and Castle stalked past me, back into the clinic to gather the supplies.
In the pick-up truck, I was alone in the cabin, driving. I remembered the route—down one exceedingly long dirt road, left after the town sign, up the gravel road, and wallah!
Yet, Leo, who sat with Castle in the cargo bed behind the cabin, exercised the need to repeatedly slide open the plastic window to give me directions.
“I’m not your fucking chauffeur,” I mumbled once. But when he’d asked me what I said — even though I’m certain he’d heard me — I said “Nothing.”
Adam and James had gone with the others to their camp. I couldn’t place my finger on it, but for whatever reason I hated the other part of the group. They hadn’t done anything to me, or even said anything unwelcoming, but I didn’t want to team up with them. Our group was fine the way it was. No Castle, no new camp, no additional authority figures; I had been content with that. Though, I was only just beginning to realise that. And how the hell had they found us? The meet-up point was a day away. It was too soon to join them. I had been robbed a whole day.
Like I said, I couldn’t pin-point a precise reason for my aggravation. But driving Castle back to the farmhouse was certainly one of them. He exuded arrogance, hostility, and cruelty. Perhaps I was concerned that he would demote me from the RV to a crappy car; perhaps I feared for the balance he would shift; and, maybe, I worried he would convince Leo I’m untrustworthy, or disapprove of Cleo. Who knows what would happen then. I could only let my mind fill in the blanks, and that was never beneficial for my paranoia or anxiety.
*
Gravel crunched beneath the rolling tyres of the truck as I turned left after the white sign. Leo slid open the small rectangular window again.
“Good work,” he praised, but my stony eyes didn’t meet his gaze in the rear-view mirror. I continued to drive, and stare, ahead. “Park next to the RV.”
“Yes, your majesty,” I droned.
“What was that?” asked Leo. I could almost hear the grin in his voice.
“I said ‘which one’?”
“Whichever one you like,” he said with a laugh. “And I know that’s not what you said.”
“Then why ask?” I snapped.
“She is rather bold for a survivor,” said Castle, stiffly. The judgement in frosty tone bristled me.
“Feisty when it suits her,” said Leo. “Isn’t that right, Winter?”
I stretched and bent my good arm to reach the window behind me. I clumsily slid it shut, driving with my knees. Leo got the message, but I could still hear his laughter echo into the cabin.
Driving up the line of parked vehicles, I stopped at the first RV I reached; the restricted one. My boot hit the brakes suddenly. Castle and Leo slammed against the metal cabin.
“My bad,” I shouted back at them. I hopped out the truck, leaving the keys in the ignition, and swung the creaky door shut behind me.
“Castle?”
I turned around. Vicki was frozen a few metres ahead, Cleo at her feet, shock slacking her round face.
“Castle!”
Vicki sprang at us, then raced towards the blond-angel.
Well, I thought, dirty-blond, but whatever.
Castle jumped off the cargo bed. Vicki lunged at him, her arms wrapping around him firmly. But Castle only patted her awkwardly on the back once. He was uncomfortable, I observed. Mac was right behind Vicki and joined the awkward embrace.
Scowling, I plucked Cleo from the grass and watched.
“Mac,” said Leo.
Mac and Vicki untangled themselves from the stiff soldier. Castle swatted away the residue of them from his t-shirt, as if they’d sullied him with too much affection and he simply had to get it off.
Leo handed Vicki the bags of supplies. “Gather everyone on the porch. We leave in ten minutes, no exceptions—we have to get there before the sun sets.”
Mac nodded and left, Vicki on his heels. She smiled at me as she went.
“You still have the cargo,” said Castle, his gaze dragging over the restricted RV.
Hands in his pockets, Leo said with a touch of arrogance; “Of course.”
“What cargo?” I asked. Leo raised his brows at me, but said nothing. He swung open the door to the second caravan—the one that wasn’t restricted—and disappeared inside, leaving the door open behind him.
Castle, as though only just realising I was there, flickered his stare to me. Slowly, his eyes lowered to Cleo huddled in my arms, lapping at my chin. “You have a dog.”
The sneer in his voice bristled me; I raised my chin and squared my shoulders—well, I squared one of my shoulders, the other was still healing. “Is that a problem?” I asked.
Castle’s judgemental stare lingered before he turned and entered the RV. I followed. We were leaving in ten minutes, and I wanted to call dibs on my favourite bench seat before Vicki returned. I swung the door shut behind me.
Castle, standing in the kitchenette with Leo, spun around at the sound. His frosty green eyes—like little green apples frozen over in the snow—moved from me to Cleo, then back up again. Finally, he said with a touch of indifference to his tone; “She travels in the RV?”
Even today, I’m still unsure whether this was a question or a statement.
Leaning back against the cabinets, Leo grinned and lit himself a cigarette. “Relax,” he said before inhaling deeply. Clouds of smoke masked his tanned face, but not his added words; “You’ll find a bit has changed since we’ve last seen one other. We have a lot to catch up on.”
“And the cargo?” asked Castle; he perched himself on the edge of the bench table, his back to me. I suddenly felt excluded.
“I have the others on rotating rosters on the cargo,” he said. “There is always a guard on the RV. Mac will transport it to your camp.”
Castle nodded, but he didn’t ask any more questions. I had no doubt in my mind that he remained silent due to my presence.
*
We were in transit to the other camp, apparently twenty miles east at a fenced farm. Vicki sat across me at the bench, which surprised me. I’d assumed she would travel with Mac in the second RV. But he had taken on that assignment alone. Usually, they did everything together. At the front of the RV, Castle drove, and Leo smoked in the passenger seat. They didn’t talk, but I suspected that the silence was because Vicki and I were crammed into the caravan with them, and could catch the slightest whisper of words between them.
Cleo barked at the faded yellow tennis ball lodged beneath the bar fridge. I leaned over the bench table towards Vicki, who was gazing out the window at the passing scenery.
“Psst.” I tried to catch her attention. She looked at me, a blankness in her blue eyes; she wasn’t too excited, I realised, to return to the rest of the group. “Why aren’t you with Mac?” I asked.
“He’s in the restricted RV.”
“But why aren’t you in there with him?”
“No one’s allowed in there.” I barely heard her over Cleo’s incessant yapping. Vicki added, “Other than them, obviously.”
I knew she meant the ‘soldiers’. But they weren’t soldiers, were they? Leo had said as much. Then, what were they? And what was their precious shipment …?
I voiced my questions: “What’s in there?” My voice was a whisper, barely making it over Cleo’s yaps. “In the other RV?”
Vicki, bewildered, blinked at me. She cocked her head to the side and said, in a hushed voice, “I don’t know. But I know one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I know better than to ask questions about that RV.”
“But why not? What’s so secret about a caravan? What’s so special about it? Do we have the president in there?” I’d been joking, of course; but the thought still gave me the shivers—there was no president anymore, no law, no government. We were truly a free country now … and it was awful.
“It’s what’s in it that’s special,” she said.
I gave her an exhausted look. “If you say Mac, I’m going to barf.”
Vicki’s lips spread into a grin as she laughed. “Well, yes.” She smiled, leaning forward. “Mac is special, but I don’t mean him.”
“You know what’s in there, don’t you?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Mac tells me everything, normally. Everything except anything to do with that RV.”
“Wh—”
“Shut that dog up!” shouted Castle from the driver’s seat.
Anxiety jolted through my body, and my face fell immediately. Cleo’s yapping didn’t bother me, but I forgot that it grated on most others. So long spent isolated from people had affected me that way—my sense of courtesy was a little rusty. Castle had a way of unearthing that anxiety around people, now. I didn’t like him. I wanted things to go back to the way they were before he came to the door of DR. Hollow’s Clinic.
“Sorry,” I said, shimmying off the seat. I shuffled over to Cleo and dropped to my knees. After a few moments, I managed to retrieve the tennis ball from beneath the fridge. “Here, girl,” I said, rolling the ball down the aisle. Cleo, happy as ever, sprang after it joyfully.
Vicki offered me sympathy with her gaze and thinned lips. I shrugged and played fetch with Cleo the rest of the way.
10.
Sometime over an hour later, we had arrived after minimal obstacles. We had to stop twice to push abandoned vehicles off the road, and once more to refuel the supply van. Apparently, some idiot failed to put gas in it before we left. That idiot was Rose. Due to that error, Leo was angry with her, which brightened my mood considerably. Rose’s pain was my joy. Not literally, of course, because that would make me a monster. In saying that, I admit to having taken a slice of smug pleasure from witnessing him yell at her. But that’s beside the point.
The vehicles crept up the brown dirt driveway to the farm ahead. Cleo snoozed on my lap as my eyes focused on the window. Partly, I could see my reflection—lifeless brown eyes staring back at me from a woman smeared with filth, whose tangled hair hung in limp curtains of peach around her sun-touched face.
I didn’t recognise myself. Do you know what that’s like? I can’t describe it. I feel as though I’d been in a coma since I was young, in my teens even. Then, one day I woke up and looked in the mirror—and what stared back at me wasn’t me. It was a greying, wrinkled version of myself, and I suddenly realised that I don’t know who I am anymore.
There was so much dirt on my skin—there was so much that it buried the freckles I wore. I don’t recall sullying my face at any point, but that seemed to occur often of late. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even washed. It could’ve been a week before with baby wipes, but I couldn’t be sure. I only knew that I looked like I’d crawled through dirt for years, only to reach the end of the world…
But that is exactly what had happened.
Farther up the driveway, my eyes grew glassy in the reflection.
Piles of charred bodies were stacked up on the side of the road, only black charcoal left in what appeared to be remnants of mothers, fathers, and children; the piles were old, at least by a few weeks.
When my gaze drifted to a child-seat, I wrenched my eyes away. One became accustomed to such sites—the bloodied prams, tiny limbs, forgotten milk bottles—but it never got any easier to see them.
I wonder who burned them and why. Were they rotters, had they died nearby and someone had burned them by means of a ceremony?
I would burn Summer. If she’d died and I was alone; My strength and poor shoulder weren’t capable of digging holes for graves—I would burn her and pretend that it was Viking Ceremony, one for a warrior.
Another mile or so up the road, we parked. As the window faced to the right of the property, I couldn’t see the farm. To peek through the windshield, I shimmied off the bench seat and placed Cleo on the table. The first word that passed through my dazed mind—underwhelmed.
The rickety brown structure loomed ahead, two levels, with a shabby—likely unsafe—porch, and a three-step stoop. A woman, in her late fifties, sat on the stoop, wielding needles and yarn in determined patterns effortlessly. The way she flicked and snapped the needles caused a gentle smile to tug at my lips. She was fierce; that I could tell from her knitting skills alone. I could imagine her stabbing one of those long silvery needles right through an infectees eyeball, killing the creature without breaking a sweat. There must’ve been some truth to my fleeting fantasy, otherwise she wouldn’t have been alive.
On the moulded brown porch was an equally as rotten rocking chair. An armed soldier swayed back and forth on it, and it took me a few seconds to realise that the soldier was Adam, cleaning his AK-47 on his lap. Despite the
merciless sun above, the porch was dusted with shade. Two children, twins I think, played cross-legged by the cheap swing door, a game of cards I could tell, but their laughter sent chills down my spine. How long will they last? Will their mother have to witness their untimely death? Will I? Children in the apocalypse were the worst. For nothing was more haunting or traumatising than watching them fall.
Cleo yapped at my feet, pulling me from my trance. I muttered apologies to the Chihuahua and gathered my bag. Vicki had already left the RV, I realised. Leo waited by the open door for me; and Castle waited for him, his arms crossed over the muscles on his chest, his fierce stare piercing into me.
“Whenever you’re ready,” said Leo.
I barely heard him as I jumped down the steps. Cleo teetered beside me—I couldn’t carry her, like I would normally do, as my shoulder was still all strapped up in browning fabric. When Vicki had put the sling on me, it had been white.
A loud groan echoed from the distance. I whipped around, frantic, to face the danger. But there was no danger. It was merely James closing a metal waist-high gate behind us. All other vehicles had parked behind another twelve, including two vans and one RV. My pounding heart began to slow itself, and I scoffed at my own paranoia. Or was it simply a smart reaction to have in these times?
I turned and walked a few steps behind Vicki and Mac. The satisfying sound of my boots crunching against the gravelly dirt filled my ears as I scanned the rest of the farm. There was an open barn, painted red, with glassless windows. To the far left, set up in front of the red barn, was a camp. At least twenty tents were assembled in a jagged circle, centred around a campfire, laundry dangling from posts and wires. Laughter came from the camp, but it sounded hollow to me. It was the polite laugh one did when a co-worker jested in the workplace; empty, void of genuine amusement, telling of distant thoughts.
