by P. J. Post
I laugh. “No shit? Maybe you should have been protecting me all this time?”
I can imagine her skipping around on the gymnastic mats, flipping round and round, swinging on the bars — controlled precision. That makes sense. And I’m reminded again of how much I missed out on by not knowing her when she was carefree — just another kid, well, I don’t think she was ever just another kid.
I smile, realizing that she would never have even acknowledged my existence back then. I was never Kyle Bledsoe. I was a stoner loser and she’s…she was something special — is something special.
“That was totally awesome,” Emily chimes in, interrupting my thoughts.
“It was, kid, it was,” I say as I stop and pull Feral around to face me. She dips one shoulder and cocks her hip, suddenly looking impatient, like she’s waiting for something. “About…” I begin.
She raises her hand to silence me. “Not yet, soon. Okay?”
I nod. I’m not sure which thing she’s talking about, or what she thinks I was about to say, but it sounds like we’re still on the same team, and that’s good enough for me.
“How long do you think we should stick around?” I ask, motioning toward the stables.
“Until we shouldn’t.”
“Thanks, Captain Obvious, it goes with the new look, though. So besides the ninja thing, you decided to be a superhero too?” I ask.
“You look like…a farmer.” She raises her goggles and winks at me.
A jolt races through me. Her eyes are comforting and…I’ve missed her so much even though it’s only been a few hours.
She’s acting like the whole scarf scene never happened.
“Hey, we should…” I start.
“Later. Come on,” she says to Emily and takes her hand, leading her back behind the U-Haul trailers that separate the women’s area.
“But,” I continue as I watch them disappear, “I think I…”
I need to talk to her because I’ve got my own brand of batshit crazy to deal with and she’s the only one that can help me. It hasn’t even been a full week. Not even a fucking week.
I remember the day she pulled that revolver on me, the defiance in her eyes, the fight in her, the goodness…and then the last week…
More bullshit rationalization.
The last week had nothing to do with it.
It all happened over the sights of her .38.
My swelling lip feels numb as I light another cigarette. I stare after her.
All I do is think about her, worry about her.
She’s got me all fucked up.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I know what this shit is…I love her.”
§§§§§
Cam finds me at the edge of the airfield watching the sunset and smoking, my hands stuffed in the pockets of my new wool lined jean jacket.
“I told you they weren’t going to let it go,” I say as he walks up to me with a grim look and a couple of beers.
“How do I rate beer? Special occasion?”
“Not really,” he says as he holds one out. “Nice haircut.” He winks and leans against the fence, tilting his bottle up and taking a long drink.
“Yeah, I noticed your hair’s plenty long.”
He lowers the bottle and grins. “Selective enforcement.”
“You suck. So what’s the story? Am I going to have to kill a few of your boys to settle this shit?”
He looks at me somberly.
I shake my head, blowing smoke. “I’m not really going to kill anyone, well, it’s reasonably unlikely anyway. What?”
“How long have you been on your own?” he asks seriously.
“Off and on since it started. Why?”
“I think I know the answer to this next one, but…have you killed? Hauser wants to…know about your past,” he says, but doesn’t meet my eyes.
“He wants to see how fucked up I am, huh? He needs to decide if I’m going to flip out and go postal? Are you going to put me down if I fail your little test here?”
“No tests.”
“Fine, I get it, but you first,” I say.
He stares off into the purple and yellow haze. “Just once, in the beginning,” and then almost as an afterthought, softly, “It stays with you.”
“I must have read you wrong. I pegged you for a stone cold killer.”
He laughs but it sounds hollow. “I’ll do what I have to. I’m not overly worried about my immortal soul.”
“Why’s that?”
“I already know my fate. Some things you can’t…you can’t confess your way into Heaven. Ain’t no short cuts.”
“I think you’re lying, Cam, to me or yourself, I can’t say, but I think you’ve got a shitload of notches on your belt, because you’re right, it does stay with you. That much I know.”
Cam laces his fingers through the chain-links and kicks at the fence, staring at the ground, but says nothing for a moment.
His eyes are filled with what looks like remorse and a deep smoldering anger. “I only think about the first one,” he repeats flatly. “So, how many?”
“How many what?”
“Have you killed?” he asks quietly.
“This is a pretty fucked up conversation, bro.”
He just stares at me.
I take a drag and hold it for a moment before blowing the smoke out my nose. “A lot.” I hold his gaze.
“What does that mean?”
“It means a lot.”
“Did they deserve it? I mean was it in self-defense or…?” he asks.
I keep staring at him and take another puff.
The sunset isn’t as pretty as yesterday’s, but maybe the company has something to do with it.
Cam picks up on my silence. “You could have hurt Craig, that’s Brad’s friend, the one who popped you, but you didn’t, well, you wounded his pride. But to be honest, I think your girlfriend bruised it more. That shows self-control. You didn’t panic.”
I nod and tongue my fat lip, running the girlfriend comment over in my mind. I like the sound of it and can’t help but grin, but the more I think about it, the more it sounds like Cam was asking a question or looking for confirmation, like, is she my girlfriend?
“Poor Brandon, he’s the big guy you put on the ground — nearly pissed himself,” Cam continues, laughing gently. He’s misunderstanding my grin, but that’s okay.
I feel bad for… for Brandon, I guess his name is. “I didn’t mean, hey…they needed to…”
Cam interrupts, “Have the shit scared out of them?”
“I was going to say teach them a lesson, but I guess they’re the same thing in the end.”
He sighs. “I get it…and you’re right. You may have noticed, they don’t get out much. They’re generally nice fellas, hard workers, but they’re like Will…Brad’s dad.” He pushes away from the fence. “I should never have let him talk me into letting them out to scavenge; he’s just not wired like that. Neither are his kids. They’re better than us.”
I nod. “Most of them are.”
Cam stares out at the horizon, lost in thought. “They need us.”
The light catches his eyes from the side, glowing them like cat eyes, and I can see the pain he’s working so hard to deny. He looks as young as Emily.
His voice grows softer. “They’ll never accept us. Never fully trust us; never feel completely safe around us. They’ll never forgive us — never love…”
Cam’s as fucked up as I am.
His voice gets even softer. “They hesitate. I think it’s normal to…and that…”
“Gets them killed,” I finish for him. “Yeah, you’re right, they do need us and you may be right about the love thing, I don’t know.”
I hope to hell he’s wrong.
“Bullshit. You know, you know…it’s in the eyes, how they look at you, we’re marked, all of us, but you and me, we’re marked like fucking Cain…you’ve seen it…” His voice trails off and he takes a drink.
I wish this
was the drunk talking, but it’s not.
“Cain or not, we still need to be there for them — they don’t have anyone else,” I say gently, trying not to think about how Feral stared at me on the edge of that soccer field. I decide to change the subject. “Speaking of which, Tammy looks like she needs you, like really, really needs you. She looks like she wants to wipe her love all over you, if you know what I mean. Does that count?”
Cam laughs sourly. “You’re probably not too far off the mark, but Tammy’s a kid. It’s just a crush, it’ll pass. Even then, if she really knew…but, hey, you’re a kid, maybe you can hide it better, she’s all yours.” He tips his beer to me.
“No, that isn’t what I meant…”
“Your friend is something, though, mysterious, she’s…”
So much for the girlfriend, now Feral’s just my fucking friend?
“She’s a kid too, and I don’t want to talk about her if it’s all the same,” I say flatly.
I need to keep an eye on this dude.
Cam gives me an odd look and then nods. “Maybe you and I are more alike than we want to admit.”
“Except you’re already old,” I joke.
Cam spits and stares off across the field at the crash site, unamused. “We’re all old.” He pauses, like he’s thinking, reliving something — some when. “What do you know?”
The first stars are coming out, or are they planets? I think they might be Mars and Venus. What an omen, love or war? Shit, it could be the Dog Star for all I know, and that pretty much fucks up my omen drama.
I guess that means shit is what we make of it.
I laugh. I wish I’d just go crazy and be done with it.
“I’m curious, is this a soft interrogation, get close and bond and shit before taking me out back and beating the shit out of me?” I ask.
“No, just trying to figure out what’s going on out there. I told you, you’re safe here, all of you. No one is going to beat anyone.”
I glance at him and show him my fat lip.
“Anyone else, okay?” He smiles. He has one of those charismatic smiles that lights up his whole face like a kid on Christmas morning, but there’s that split second before the grin comes when his eyes are distant and cold, and he looks like he’s going to snap. It’s been a long time since summer for him too. He can’t pretend with me.
He needs something good to happen, something to hang his hat on.
I grind my smoke into the gravel roadside and then shake his shoulder until he looks over. We stare at each other for a moment and something passes between us. His eyes are glassy, like he knows I can see through him — I understand.
He’s not alone.
He sniffs and jerks his Budweiser hat off and slaps it against his leg. His hair catches the breeze.
“Give me one of those goddamned cigarettes,” he says and wipes his eyes.
“So what do you want to know?” I ask as I pull a couple more smokes out.
He lights it with my Zippo, takes a drag and then holds the cigarette out between his index finger and thumb and studies it. He exhales through a grin and leans back against the fence. “Like I said, what’s out there, anything and everything?”
“Crayton. I assume you know about them,” I say and join him against the fence.
“Yeah. So far, we’ve managed to either avoid them or negotiate safe passage. So far…we’ve had the bigger army, more bullets, but they have better training. We’ve been lucky, haven’t had to run against them.”
“You will soon enough. Are you ready for it?”
“We’ll be ready.”
“I mean are you ready to bury Will, Craig or Tammy? That’s what’s coming, Cam. You need to be ready.” I poke his chest. “In here.”
“What about electronics, have you found…”
“Jesus, Cam. Get it together, dude.” I sigh. He doesn’t want to hear what I’ve got to say, not this part anyway. I take another swig. “Gadgets? I’d let that one go. The EMPs fried everything, and I haven’t seen a single car since this started. The old ones should work, but who knows who has them and where they’re hiding them. Same goes for motorcycles.”
“What about the war?”
“There was shelling or bombing back near Pittsburg a few days ago. I thought it was getting closer, but I haven’t heard anything since. It was big and lasted for a long time around dawn, whatever it was.”
“Who did this?” he asks almost absently. I wonder if he’s being rhetorical.
“You mean who started the war?”
“Yeah.”
“The Chinese with help from Mexico seems to be the favorite rumor, but I haven’t actually seen any armies or battlefields.”
“I have.”
“What…”
“Whoever did this has a huge low-tech army, like World War Two stuff, but turns out we do too. I’ve only seen a few battlefields, but they were all the same, everything black, dead. The fighting is desperate.”
“Where?”
“A line from Pensacola up through Georgia.”
“So no aliens?”
Cam laughs. “No, no aliens, just dead guys, lots and lots of dead guys. The bad guys were wearing light blue helmets, like United Nation peacekeepers.”
“No way.”
“It’s what I saw.”
“The United Nations launched a sneak attack on America? Bullshit.”
“Yeah, I never bought that one either; blue paint is easy enough to come by. It doesn’t matter in the end.”
“Are we losing?” I ask.
“Losing? Look around, dude. We’ve already lost.”
“I guess so.” He’s right. Whatever America was, it’s gone for good. I hope Feral gets her chance to write her memoirs or interviews or memories or whatever she calls them. I think that’s going to be important someday.
But we have to make it through first.
“What about the other…bad guys?” I ask.
“You mean like the zombies in the Midwest.”
I laugh. “Yeah, I heard that one too.”
“Do you believe it?”
“Three months ago I wouldn’t have believed this shit, so yeah, it’s possible, or something like zombies that are scary as fuck — yeah, I believe that.”
“Scary as fuck, I like that one.” Cam laughs.
“There’s tens of millions of people still out here, in camps, scavenging, killing all of the wildlife, each other — how many people can survive this way before we all start starving? We’ve missed planting season, so that’s…”
“A year away, I know. Doesn’t sound like you know much more than I do?”
“There is one thing.” I take a deep breath and look around, worried I’m going to accidentally summon them. “Have you heard of the Cart People?”
§§§§§
My canned chili and crackers taste like a gourmet brunch at some five fucking star restaurant, whatever food at a five fucking star restaurant tastes like. I lick the small container clean and then my plastic spoon before dropping them into my pocket to return later. Recycling is kind of a thing around here.
Cam split, saying he needed to report to Hauser and I haven’t seen Feral or Emily. Part of me is worried, but the other part is convinced it’s paranoia and everything is fine.
Some guys are talking down the way from the entrance to the main warehouse, but I can’t see them. I’m still not used to how dark it gets without electricity. It’s inky velvet out there. When it’s cloudy or there’s a new moon it’s like being blind. There’s nothing in the distance, just more nothing. It’s unnerving.
At night we smoke inside, which is where I’m heading when I hear it.
Music.
It’s unmistakable.
And then I remember what Cam said about having plans tonight.
I slip back inside past the guards and follow the sound across the cold concrete floor. I drop my recyclables at the supply depot and continue toward the center of the warehouse. Canvases and blan
kets are hanging, one atop the other from a pipe framework, forming a curtain that’s bunching up on the floor.
I find a seam and push it open.
Fires are lit around the edges. The curtain of blankets must be there to keep the lights dimmed and to cut down on the sound distribution.
I guess they don’t want unwanted attention, but aren’t willing to give up living just to survive. I appreciate the sentiment, but it’s probably going to get them killed.
Several guys are playing guitars and a few more are playing congas and other hand drums.
It’s a goddamned party, a quiet one, but a party nevertheless.
And that — is cool as fuck.
I look around but don’t see any of the few people I know here, which, considering, isn’t a bad thing.
I can’t place the tune they’re playing, but I think it was popular last summer. Everyone is tapping their feet and a few couples are dancing. As dangerous as it is, it’s…uplifting, I guess, to see people letting go and just being in the moment for a change.
As great as this is, I still need to find Feral and Emily. I haven’t seen them since the fight earlier this afternoon.
I slowly make my way back around the circle on the way out when I see Feral and Cam slipping through the curtain on the far side of the circle.
They’re close to each other.
She’s wearing a blue scarf and a long blue coat, maybe denim, it’s hard to tell from here. She looks…
She looks pretty.
She looks happy.
She looks happy with Cam.
I’m suddenly anxious.
We flirted, well, I flirted, and I told her about my devotion, my goddamned vow, and I’m pretty sure I remember her telling me to get fucked. I…I got…nothing.
Who sucker punched me this time?
I feel like crawling out of my skin.
I want to fucking break something.
This isn’t right…how can I hurt this much…so suddenly?
I remind myself with some urgency that I can’t kill Cam.
This is fucking stupid.
I pull out a smoke and light it. I’m sure he was just talking to her like he did me earlier, just trying to gather information. It’s not like he’d hit on her, not after everything we talked about.
