“I mean I sold out. I started, and—I don’t know—it was too competitive or too long. I didn’t want to change adult diapers. I met Dante, and I just wanted to get there, you know? Get married, get settled, have kids. I just fell into the medical billing bullshit. A job I hated that paid the bills so I could live the personal life I wanted.”
“I know how that goes. I just enlisted for the college money. Never thought we would be at war so long. Never thought I would get stop-lossed more than once. Just tried to suffer through to get to that magic place.”
“In the end, it doesn’t get better; it just keeps going. We are granted seconds of perfect happiness, and we never notice them because we are too busy fixating on getting ‘there’. There is no there. We only get now.” All those moments I took for granted. All the times I got spun up over stupid shit. “Dante’s father used to say, ‘Sometimes you have to enjoy the ride to the bottom because that’s all you have.’ I don’t think I ever appreciated what that meant until now, until it was really all just gone.”
“That’s the bitch of it, isn’t it? Nothing new. We never figure it out until it’s too fucking late.”
“Apparently. Now I just have regrets.”
“Survivors always do.”
He wrapped his arms tighter around himself and shuttered a bit. I walked around the small fire and crouched down beside him, putting my hand to his face. I pressed the back of my hand to his forehead, then my palm to his cheek.
“You’re warm,” I said.
“I’m fine.”
“Probably your body just reacting to the trauma. That was one hell of a fall. I wasn’t sure if I was going to lose you, too.”
“Not that easy, Parker.”
I smiled and settled down beside him, handing him a can of baked beans.
“Beans? You must really be feeling guilty.”
“Shut it.”
I woke up in the morning not cold but nestled against him just the same. His arm encircled my waist, sword still held fast at the end. I peered up at his sleeping face and let my fingertips gently find his forehead. Cool again. The fever had passed in the night. He would not turn green before my eyes and seize his way into my last grave.
I shifted to sit up, yet he restrained me down with him.
“Where are you going?” he mumbled, eyes still closed.
“Just to piss.”
I moved to stand again, and he continued to hold me, but I could hear the hesitance in his breathing.
“Don’t strain yourself, now,” I said, taking his arm and placing it at his side. “You’ll be worthless to me.”
The remains of the city were far enough behind us now. Again, it appeared as the illusion of a skyline in the distance. This far away, I could not make out the damage. It was just promising shapes teasing the space with possibility.
“I think we should camp here a couple days,” I said. “Let you recover a bit.”
“We never camp more than one night.”
“I know, but you also never had cracked ribs.”
“We don’t know this area.”
“We haven’t known any of these areas.”
“We need to continue west.”
“West? What’s with you and west? What do you think is out there?”
“Do you know how you felt about that city? Like you just had to go, had to see. That’s how I feel about going west.”
“Yeah and look how that turned out.”
“We have to try. I have to know.”
“Fine. We’ll go west. Only if we rest for a day or two.”
“Westward, ho,” he smiled.
16
For an unprecedented day, we camped. We did not flee by the smoke of dying embers in the fire. We did not march. He laid his head on my leg and napped as I lounged against a large rock. And just sat. It felt as if I had not sat down since the first news report flickered across our living room.
Dante held a cookie suspended in front of his mouth, milk dripping back into the glass in his hand. Jordi galloped on his knees as he guided a toy monster truck over the unruly terrain of the carpet. Eli tried to swim on his belly across the floor, planting his face down and shrieking when his muscles failed to comply. I let the magazine slip from my fingers and tumble into a pile at my feet as horror started infiltrating our home.
Marcus did insist that we could not simply curl up and nap together; one of us had to remain somewhat vigilant. I doubted we would see many here, in the fallen-out desert stretching out from a crater of a city. Not enough resources to stay and survive, even for the uncivilized and savage. But if they were teeming around what was left of Vegas—if anything Uriah had uttered was to be believed—we couldn’t take the risk of fully letting our guard down.
That mistake had just nearly gotten us killed already.
I let my hand rest gently near his injured ribs, which had started to show purple on his skin overnight, perpetually gauging his breathing. I felt his side inflate up against his soiled shirt and tell me what I needed to know. He was still flinching and hobbling around, though he tried to disguise it from me. There was no mistaking the lack of upright rigidity in his stance.
I had never watched him sleep before. He always waited me out, until exhaustion pulled me under, or hid under the dark veil of the night between us. Even beneath his sunglasses, I could see the expressions surfacing on his face. His cheeks and mouth twitched in his dreams. Was he seeing our savagery? Was he still seeing Iraq? Was he seeing her? There was an ample menu of traumas from which to choose.
The stubble had run rampant on his face since the last time he had hacked it back with his freshly sharpened knife. An entire lifetime had sprung up to distract him. More had happened since that fateful moment in prepper hell than in all the time since the world fell. Dirt traced out the wrinkles gradually wearing into his face. I wondered what he had looked like crisp, clean, and crew cut in the last life.
As he dozed, I leaned back and allowed my mind the rare permission to wander. I thought of him lifting me up and slamming me into that forgotten office wall. I felt the reciprocity in my desire; I felt the anxious relief in his hands. He had wanted me, too. I thought about him following me into that fallen out city. He had known what we would find; he had known what I was risking. Yet he pursued me anyway, protected me in my ignorance. I thought about catching up to his broken form outside the building, smited for my stupidity. The enormity of the fact that, for all the times he saved me, I nearly got him killed bloomed heavily on my chest. I reached down and let my hand rest on his head.
Now it was not that I wanted him. Now it was that I loved him.
“It’s creepy to watch someone sleep, you know,” he mumbled from my lap.
“You’re supposed to be resting.”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Talking shit.”
“I can do that and rest.”
“How are the ribs?”
“I’m fine.”
“Okay. Now seriously, how are the ribs?” I started to softly press my hand against his side. He grunted and shifted.
“Little tender still.”
“Maybe we should camp another day.”
“No. We can’t. Today is enough of a risk. Back at it at dawn.”
The sun steadily climbed the sky over us, perpetually reducing our oasis of shade. It warmed my boots first, spreading heat over toes wriggling in filmy socks. I could feel the warmth rising from the dirt around us, throbbing in the air. I had never cared for the desert, in this life or the last. I had never seen the beauty in desolation. I could only be thankful that it was not summer.
It was strange to do nothing after an endless blur of relentless activity—walking, fighting, searching, mourning. My body told me it had been years in the faded way it failed to even resemble its former form, in the perpetual cries of the depleted and strained muscles. My heart told me it had been yesterday and decades simultaneously, both too close and too far from all I had lost.
/>
As we basked in foreign laziness, in the distance, we heard a shift in the sand, a scuff against a rock. Not the randomness of nature, something deliberate. He snapped up then silently faltered, grimacing as he cradled his ribs.
I snatched up his sword before he could reach for it and crawled beside him, angrily signaling for him to lie back down. I knew he was glaring at me from behind his lenses as he reluctantly complied. I clutched his sword and eased around the rock.
Just once, let it be a fucking deer.
I pressed my back against the rock as I raised the sword to the ready. My heart pounded in my chest, priming my body and my muscles for the fight. I took a calming breath and mentally shoved aside all thoughts. I brought my brain to focus and swung around to look over the rock.
It was a fucking deer.
The large mule deer glimpsed me as I saw him. We both froze, locked in a cautious stare. He brought his neck up slowly, holding my gaze, until his antlers reached into the sky above him. I let the sword gently lower in front of me, still in my grip, still prepared. A long, silent moment wafted between us. We did not move; we did not breathe. We both studied each other and waited. The sun dug into the knobs of his antlers and cast grotesque shadows against the sand. I could hear the animal's heartbeat; I could feel his heat. I felt myself surge in the presence of one living thing that did not want to kill me.
And I did not want to kill him.
I let a long, slow breath spill out of my lips. The deer blinked and jerked its neck. Then, in an instant, he leapt over the nearest rock and bounded across the sand. I lowered the sword to my side as I watched him go, kicking up sand with each graceful leap. Without a strike, I eased back to the ground and guided Marcus back to my lap.
“So a medical claims billing specialist and a cop. How did that happen?” he said, randomly piercing our silence.
“In a bar. Where most things in my young life happened. When I was in school and he was in the academy.”
“And you just said, ‘Fuck it. I don’t want to be a nurse anymore’?”
“I just loved him. He was all I wanted. I forgot about wanting other things for myself.”
“Sounds healthy. How’d that work out for you?”
“He wasn’t a piece of shit, so not bad. I still loved him, loved our family. Just not my job. Happens when you sell out. Let me guess. Was your wife a stripper true to her name, right off the base?”
“No,” he huffed. “She was a cocktail waitress at a strip club right off the base. But not for long after I met her.”
The memory was rising in me; I couldn’t fight it off. Even having him in my lap, talking about his wife cocktailing in a strip club, could not dissuade the ghosts.
The pub was a seething mass of bodies, pulsating and moving as an organism. Above the dull roar of drunken chatter, I could hear the splash of another drink meeting its demise on the floor, no doubt all over more than one person. A particularly inebriated woman cackled in my ear before nearly swiping across my face to playfully slap her date's shoulder. The sea of people foamed in green. Not one body was unadorned by the color. Shamrocks plagued the scene. I kept my elbows tucked in and my dark pint of beer against my chest as I shimmied and slunk through the wobbling crowd. Until a sharp impact sent me lurching forward and my precious drink colliding with the floor. “You stupid bitch,” I muttered as I brushed off my hands and turned to face the asshole who had nearly knocked me off my feet. Dante's young face met me with a wide, white smile splitting his dark cheeks. I felt the anger evaporate out of the back of my skull. “I'm so sorry,” he said, stepping closer to me. I felt the air between us charge. “Let me buy you a new beer.”
A single tear rolled from my cheek and splashed down on the lens of his sunglasses.
“Peace time is treacherous,” he said from my lap. “It’s easy to stay distracted, stay on mission with your head in the fight. But when it gets quiet, when you have the time to think about all you’ve seen and all you’ve done, that’s when all the noncombat events run rampant. The suicides, the ‘accidental discharges’ in each other’s heads. Without an enemy, we turn on ourselves.”
“You ever turn?”
“A little. Nothing too serious. I did the normal, stupid shit. Smoked like a chimney, pounded energy drinks until my heart might explode, hauled ass in vehicles. Small rebellious acts of self-destruction, trying to convince myself I controlled my life and my death. Not the IEDs on the ground or the mortars in the air. I always got low in down time. I thought about her, compared the man she married to the sad son of a bitch who would leave Iraq. If I was that lucky. Smitty always made sure to pull me out of it, though. Another reason you always need a good battle buddy.”
“Unless they get you thrown off a building.”
“Unless they get you thrown off a building.”
I smiled at the levity of it, but guilt hung on the corners of my mouth, pulled down on my features. The sensation weighed my shoulders, heavied my head. I could not shake or ignore that I had nearly gotten him killed. After all he had managed to survive.
“Was there anything worth seeing in Iraq?” I asked.
“Iraq was a shit hole. Smelled like shit and fireworks. They burned their trash and their shit. If you fell into a canal, you had to get like a hundred shots. Rats’ nest of an electrical system that never stayed up in the heat and that electrocuted gunners left and right. I would never choose to go back, if it’s even still there, but there’s always something to see.”
“Like?”
“Sunsets. There was so much sand and dirt in the air that it would literally rain mud, but it would also create these crazy colored sunsets. Sun looked like it was on fire; clouds shifted between so many different colors. And the oil refineries burning off at night while I was looking out the window of a Blackhawk. The city lights were a mix of electric and actual fire, depending on the part of Baghdad. Then there were these stacks at the refineries, burning above the rest like huge candles.”
“A little girl sitting next to an IED?”
“Yeah. In a weird, saved-my-ass sort of way, that might have been the most beautiful thing I saw.”
He paused for a moment. I had no doubt he saw her little visage in front of him right now, sand-streaked and windblown. She haunted me, and I had never laid eyes on her at all.
“What was the best thing about having kids?” He shifted the subject.
“That’s a painful question.”
“Aren’t they all now? Don’t worry; the answer will hurt me as much as it hurts you.”
I didn't want to think about it. I didn't want to remember one good thing, though my mind was always brimming with the memories of all I buried. My past life was a swollen flood waiting for the smallest leak to surge into my present. It wanted to pour over me; it wanted to drown me. As much as I would have happily suffocated to feel any of those moments once more, my survivalist went to great lengths to keep it locked back, bound and gagged in the black corner of my tortured brain. I was its victim, and it was mine. I choked on the question for a moment longer, while the survivor in me battled back the gaping emotional vacancy in my heart; then I breathed slowly before I could look back without being consumed.
“I could say everything, but that wouldn’t be true. Everyone always says everything. But it’s not; a lot of it is hard, and a lot of it sucks. There are these moments where you think, what the fuck have I done? The best part is that they’re totally worth it, that you would go through all the pain again for them even knowing it was coming. You love them so much it completes your life and breaks your heart at the same time. They show you what it’s like to be amazed by the world again.”
“Yep.” He closed his eyes and pressed his head back against my thigh. “Hurt like hell.”
“Tell me about it. You would have been a good father, though, Marcus.”
“Don't say that,” he breathed. “I would have gotten it killed.”
“You can't say that. You can't know that.”
“I got Xavier killed. What more is there to know?”
“No, you didn’t. They killed him. I failed to protect him on my own fucking chest.”
“I led you in killing his parents. I led Uriah into our camp and led them to us. I killed him.”
“It’s not that simple. Did I get my babies and my husband killed? Was there really any way we could have protected them in a world like this?”
He did not respond. I knew he did not want to hear what I had said. No words from my lips could dissuade him from persecuting and blaming himself. He was briefly falling away from me in my own lap, abandoning his body to not deal with it. I felt his head grow heavier as he stared up at the sky past me. I did not waste anymore words; I simply waited.
“Why do you ask me about Iraq all the time?” he finally asked.
“I don’t know. Curious, I guess.”
In my life, I had seen two worlds—my one before and this one now. He had seen somewhere different before the fall. It was something unfathomable to me, and like all things foreign and mysterious, it quietly beckoned my interest. It was not here now, and it was not then that solicited my suicide. It was just a dream in someone else's memories. It was somewhere else.
“People were always curious," he said. "Wanted to know all the gory details. How many people did you kill? Did you see anyone die? It sounds like you consider it the savagery baseline, some kind of proof for how you think.”
“Wouldn’t that be what war is?”
“Not that simple. Especially in this effects-based, non-kinetic wartime approach.”
“I have no idea what you just said.”
“Neither do I.”
He laughed softly. We let the conversation blow across the desert day. The sun was softly cooking me, enticing sweat across my skin. I would have shed some layers, but I did not want to jostle him. For once, I felt at peace in the quiet; the silence seemed comfortable. With so much of his mind poured out between us, he was no longer a mocking enigma. With our bodies touching, he was no longer forbidden. I let him wallow in my lap for a few lazy moments; then I had to ask. It was time to know.
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