Dark Cloud

by Justin Bell

  “You have a place,” Brad whispered. “With us.”

  Greer nodded, and Rhonda could see a light glisten in his eyes. “I’m glad for that,” he replied. “You all have carried me over the past few months. Without you, I would have given up long ago.”

  “Without you, we never would have gotten this far,” Phil said.

  “I doubt that very much,” Clancy replied, smiling. He paused for a moment, looking down, then lifted his gaze again. “You are all in very capable hands these days. Rhonda. Phil. Agent Fields.”

  Rebecca flushed when he said that. “For the love of… call me Rebecca, you old codger.”

  Greer snickered. “Rebecca. Angel, too,” he looked straight at Angel, their eyes locking. There had been a time when they’d battled more often than they’d collaborated, but in recent weeks, they’d formed a surprisingly close bond in spite of their opposite places on the law enforcement spectrum.

  “Bah, you’re still a lousy cop,” Angel replied, smirking.

  “Says the guy who managed to get arrested without even committing a crime.”

  Angel shook his head at him. “That’s cold, bro… that’s real cold.”

  Greer scanned the room, looking at each of them in turn. “These last two months have been… well, insane,” he continued. “While I wholeheartedly lament the world we no longer have, I feel blessed to have shared the end of it along with all of you.” He cleared his throat, and the act of doing so threw him into a coughing fit. Rebecca moved toward him, but he held up a firm hand, shaking his head slowly. “I’m all right,” he whispered. “Well, that’s a lie. I’m not all right. I think most of you knew that.”

  Brad wrapped a second hand around Greer’s, clasping it with both of his own as if holding on extra tight might somehow negate whatever was going to be said next.

  “Bullet’s in too deep,” he said. “The damage is already done. Too much for them to even hope to carve out, even if they had the tools to do it.”

  “No,” Winnie said, shaking her head.

  “It’s all right, child,” Greer replied. “I’ve made my peace with it. All of you will, too. Given time you’ll appreciate not having to drag my sorry one-armed butt around.”

  “That’s bull and you know it,” Rhonda replied.

  He smiled back.

  “It’s time for me to go,” he whispered. “Honestly, it’s probably long past time, I’m apparently just as stubborn in death as I was in life. Betsy would have found that hilarious.”

  Brad lowered his head, pressing his face into the mattress. Angel lowered his, lips working into a soundless prayer. Rhonda separated from Phil and walked around the other side of the man, the man whose life she had saved, and the man who had saved hers. A certain bond forms with people you face down death with, and she’d long thought Greer would live forever.

  Clancy rested his head backwards, a peaceful smile separating his lips, a long, haggard breath drawing deep into his lungs, riddled with infection. The rattle down there seemed as if it might throw out another uncontrolled burst of coughing, but the older man held it back, firmed his shoulders, and remained silent.

  “Thank you for everything, Clancy,” Rhonda said quietly, squeezing his shoulder. Brad pressed his own fingers together, clamping Greer’s hand so hard it might have snapped knuckles. Max walked over to the other side of the bed with his mother, wrapping his arms around her waist as she held the man’s shoulder. Phil followed him and put his own arm around his wife’s shoulders. Rebecca slipped an arm around Angel’s waist as he stood in solemnity. Winnie and Tamar turned into each other and embraced while Brad’s shoulders shook with the force of his sobs.

  Clancy Greer did not speak again. He had nothing left to say. At some point in the night, his breathing stopped, and the EKG stuttered, shifting to a solid, shrill, interminable drone, the last audible throws of a life long lived.

  Chapter Six

  The orange globe of early morning sun stretched its arms among the pink embrace of cotton clouds, dark and thick in the post-dawn light. The Cleveland Clinic looked all at once impressive and imposing, looming tall and wide, window covered walls gleaming as the sun rose in the East. Rebecca drew in a swift breath upon seeing the clinic building in the natural light of morning, the impressive curved structure looking like a protective wall of sorts, windows lining every inch of viewable space on this side of the building.

  Her eyes traced the gentle curve of the front of the building, marveling at how it aligned with the circular pavilion and rounded roof of other attached buildings, the entire complex threatening to swallow her in wide, glass covered arms. For nearly two months, ever since she’d left Houston, everything she’d seen had been either rural roadways or cities under siege, and the serenity of this lone building with no people, no cars, and almost zero noise was a fascinating discovery to her, some kind of wonderful marriage between the constructs of civilization and the blessed peace of post apocalypse.

  Blessed peace. Is that what she’d called it? There had been nothing peaceful about the past eight weeks, almost nine. If there was any doubt about that, she only had to walk back into Emergency and take a look at Clancy Greer, lifeless from a gunshot wound. A gunshot wound that would have been minor and treatable three months ago, but was now devastating and fatal.

  “Building’s beautiful, eh, chica?” Angel asked, coming up behind her. She nodded without looking back. Yes, the building was beautiful, but what had happened inside of it last night was not. It was sometimes difficult to separate those two things.

  “What’s our plan now?” he followed up.

  “What’s our plan ever?” she replied.

  “Survival.”

  Fields nodded. Survival, indeed.

  Off in the distance, movement caught out of the corner of the former FBI agent’s eye and she followed it toward the main entrance of the hospital. Brad walked from the entrance across the sidewalk and approached the circular pavilion in the middle of the roundabout where people drove to drop off or pick up their loved ones. Catching her gaze, he kept walking and Max exited shortly after him, jogging to catch up. Rebecca and Angel watched them cross the road, walk over the small median, then continue walking, off toward one of the parking lots.

  “What do you think they’re up to?” she asked.

  Angel shrugged. “Best to let them have their time,” he replied. “Especially Brad. He was getting mighty close to Clancy. Guy had been a father figure to him, especially after what happened to his parents.”

  “Nobody really talks about them,” Rebecca said, turning toward him. “What’s the deal there?”

  Angel continued watching the two boys. “Brad was with the Frasers when this all started. Trip to their family cabin. We went through a lot to get him back to his parents in St. Louis, and we found them… just in time for Bruce Cavendish to drive by and gun them down in the streets. They died on top of Brad. In fact, he took a couple of bullets himself, though the injuries were minor.”

  “My word,” Rebecca replied. “I had no idea.”

  “Yeah. He is… a little messed up over it.”

  “I can see why,” she replied, watching the young boy as he turned and looked at Max. They seemed to be talking and having fun, but she couldn’t be sure. “It’s amazing he’s still functional.”

  “You know he was the one who put down Cavendish, right? Back at the mall?”

  Fields looked at him. “Really?”

  Angel nodded and pointed his finger in a pistol shape and pointed it at his own temple. “Pop. Right in the head.”

  “Dang.”

  “Greer was keeping him going. Keeping him straight and honest. I think we need to keep a close watch on him going forward, without Clancy looking over him.”

  “How old is he? Ten?”

  “Eleven. Eleven years old and already enough trauma to last him three lifetimes.”

  “Welcome to being a kid in the post-Armageddon era,” Rebecca said, watching as Brad and Max ran off t
oward the parking lot. She thought she heard the tail end of laughter riding the air.

  “How’s the shoulder?” Angel asked, gesturing toward her heavily wrapped upper arm.

  “Feels okay,” she replied. “Pain killers and a good suture. Does wonders.”

  They stood in silence for a bit, watching the slow progression of the sun as it crept up the pink sky toward morning.

  “We’re sticking with this, aren’t we?” Rebecca asked, without turning to look at him.

  “Sticking with what?”

  “This whole mission. Going to Philadelphia? Trying to stop whatever plan Ironclad and the others have cooked up?”

  Angel closed his eyes, letting a stiff, cool breeze curl around the curved edges of the building and blanket his body. “Well, I figured, yeah. You were the one gung-ho about truth and justice, right?”

  “I was.”

  “Somethin’ change?”

  “I don’t think so,” she replied. “But it’s pretty peaceful here. Quiet. Nobody trying to kill us.”

  “Give it ten minutes.”

  “For the first time since I left Houston, I feel like I’m at a place where I could stay. The mall wasn’t like that.”

  “Rebecca,” Angel said, shaking his head. “This is a hospital. We can’t live here. Who knows what Cleveland is like. It could be just as bad as Chicago or Toledo, we just don’t know it yet.”

  “I know.”

  “I think you’re just emotional. About last night.”

  She shook her head. “I barely knew the guy, Angel. You were all much closer to him than I was.”

  “I don’t believe that for a minute. I saw you guys talking. Talking your cop talk.”

  Fields chuckled quietly. Angel was right. She and Greer had found a common ground with their law enforcement background. They’d spent a few late nights on watch at the mall talking about old cases, dumb criminals, and the dynamic of being a cop in a small town versus a government agent in a big city. Turned out the jobs were more alike than one might think.

  Angel stepped close to her, hooking his fingers in hers and squeezing gently. Rebecca smiled, her cheeks flushing a light pink. She squeezed his fingers back.

  “You know we have to do it,” Angel said. “We have to go to Philadelphia. Make sure these people don’t do whatever they want to do. Make the world even worse off than it already is.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re not gonna ditch us? Ditch me?”

  Rebecca turned toward him, smirking. “Never.”

  He pulled their fingers free and wrapped his tattooed arm around her shoulders, pulling her into a tight, one-armed embrace, both of them looking out at the pale sun, wondering how many more beautiful sunrises they might have left.

  ***

  Brad’s fingers clenched around the contoured handle of his Ruger .380, caressing the rubber surface of the grip, index finger tracing the trigger guard.

  Trigger discipline! Trigger discipline!

  Standing near the entrance of Cleveland Clinic, he looked out into the rotunda outside, the makeshift cul-de-sac wrapping around a circular pavilion. Everything outside was a strange color under the early dawn light, green grass twinged by highlights of orange and pink. He looked down at his hands, both of them holding the Ruger, his mind thinking back to one of the countless hard lessons Clancy Greer had taught him. Waking him up in the pre-dawn hours, hammering him with question after question and lesson after lesson, the proper stance, arm placement, finger placement, everything he absolutely had to get right before he even tried to shoot at another human being. Turning over the pistol in his hands, he ran fingers over the smooth brushed metal, running up and down along the short barrel, only around two inches long, the perfect small pistol for his small hands.

  Small in size, but not in punch.

  Greer had told him that during the first lesson after they picked up the weapon at that abandoned weapons store outside St. Louis. St. Louis. A city forever ingrained in him, the buildings carved into his consciousness. Streets that he would remember as clearly as he remembered his parents’ faces would dovetail together, pieces of a single puzzle, lodged firmly in his brain for the rest of his life.

  “Whatcha doing?” Max asked as he came out into the main hallway. Brad looked back at him, walking slow, rubbing the last vestiges of sleep from his eyes with the back of his hand. Brad hadn’t slept at all last night and he wagered that Max had only gotten a couple of hours, which had grown more and more typical as the weeks wore on.

  “Nothing really,” Brad replied quietly.

  “What’s up with the gun?” Max asked, nodding toward the weapon Brad was holding.

  Brad shrugged.

  “Not thinking of doing anything stupid with it, are you?”

  “Nah,” Brad replied. “I was just thinking of a few things.”

  Max approached Brad, coming close and placing a hand on his shoulder. “Sorry, bro,” Max said. “I know Clancy meant a lot to you.”

  “He meant a lot to all of us.”

  Max nodded.

  Brad looked back down at the pistol in his hands. “I never did tell him, you know.”

  “Tell him what?”

  “About Cavendish. That I was the one who shot him.”

  “Does that matter?”

  Brad shrugged. “You remember we were talking about it ahead of time? Clancy was pretty pissed. He could tell what we were discussing, told me he’d better not hear of me doing anything.”

  “He was going to kill my mom,” Max said. “You saved her life.”

  “He was just standing there,” Brad replied. “His back was to me. I could have done a lot of different things. I pointed my gun straight at his head and shot, no hesitation. Didn’t even think about trying to wound him.”

  “That was the right move,” Max said. “Say you shoot him to wound, only you don’t hurt him as much as you think. He shoots Mom, then turns on you. It could have happened. You did what you had to.”

  “You think Clancy would have seen it that way?”

  Max shrugged. “If he’d given you a hard time, Mom would have set him straight. You can believe that.”

  Brad nodded half-heartedly.

  “Hey, you know what we should do?” Max asked. “This is a hospital, right? Lots of doctors worked here.”

  “Yeah? So what?”

  “So I bet a lot of them left their cars in employee parking. I saw a map, it’s right across the pavilion over that way.” He nodded out the front door past the roundabout.

  “Big deal,” Brad said. “What do we care about cars?”

  “Dude. Have you ever seen the cars that doctors drive? Jaguars, bro. Porsches. All sorts of crazy expensive sports cars! We should go check ‘em out.”

  “Man, how cool with that be? Take a Ferrari for a spin?”

  “You read my mind,” Max said, laughing. “Straight out there, I’ll race ya!”

  Brad spun and bolted out the entrance first with Max hot on his heels, then they charged over the turnaround and barreled over the road, heading toward employee parking.

  ***

  Winnie had never been a morning person. Even as young as twelve years old, she would close her door at night when she was supposed to be asleep and pull the covers up over her head so she could watch YouTube on her cellphone or chat with her friends, sometimes staying up until midnight, even on school nights. The evenings always felt more like her time than the mornings.

  That had changed over the past few months. When she worked herself to physical and mental exhaustion just in the act of survival day after day, her body learned to crash as early as humanly possible, and when there weren’t those addictions on a cellphone, it became less and less appealing for her to stay up past her bedtime. Not that such a novel concept like bedtime even existed once the nuclear bombs detonated. Every hour started to blend together when there wasn’t school or work or even regularly scheduled meals to worry about.

  Now, she stood, looking up at
the early morning sky, the fog of restless sleep thick in her head to match the caked crust of dried tears. The world was quiet, or at least the Cleveland Clinic was, the tall and wide curved structure of glass and metal looking over them like a protective barrier, sheltering them from the realities of this new life. At this time of day, surrounded by this structure and the pervasive peace and quiet, it was easy to think things just might turn out okay.

  Winnie knew differently. She knew it was likely the combination of fitful sleep and emotional damage from the events of last night trying to tell her that somehow things were different this morning than they had been yesterday.

  Things were different. They would forever be different. As if the world at large wasn’t different enough, the sudden and unexpected removal of Clancy Greer from their lives was something that left a void, even for Winnie who wasn’t nearly as close to him as Brad or Max or even Angel.

  She couldn’t figure out why this was having such an impact on her. They’d lost plenty of friends along the way down this brutal, violent path. Wasn’t Greer just another name in a long list of them?

  “You’re up early.”

  Winnie turned toward the voice, already recognizing it even before looking.

  “Morning, Dad,” she said quietly. Phil took a few steps toward her, his stapled forehead covered with a narrow square of gauze, taped down over his right eye.

  “How you holding up, Win?” he asked, close enough for a hug, and he wrapped his arm around her shoulder. She allowed him to embrace her, but didn’t return the expression, just shrugged her shoulders and leaned into him.

  “I’m all right,” she replied in a low whisper.

  “Tough night.”

  She nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  Phil looked around as he stood there, his arm wrapped around her narrow shoulders, feeling for the first time in a long time that they were just father and daughter again. Not survivors, not soldiers in the same war, but just a father and his daughter.

  “So… tell me about this Tamar kid. He’s a little too close for comfort. You want me to rough him up a little for you?”