Dead Fall

by Joseph Xand

  "Fuck you, Reg," he said to it. Then he laid into it with the machete as he'd done the log before.

  He expected the voice to tease him.

  But it didn't.

  Long after the moon had disappeared behind the trees, leaving Turtleman in total blackness, blind to the gore and stench covering his body, he still chopped away.

  Chapter 8

  P RIVATE JODIE MEYERS SAT sweating in the darkness in the back of the police van. The only sliver of light slanted in from a small, barred window that used to be shuttered from the outside by a steel damper. She'd convinced them to leave it open and allow some air and light in. It provided very little of either, but it was an improvement.

  She and Travers were also no longer constantly bound. That was another improvement.

  And that's how Meyers measured her time as a hostage; by small improvements, biding her time until they gave her enough rope to formulate a plan.

  But today there was a bit of a setback.

  Meyers had been raped repeatedly every day for over two weeks, starting the day after the convoy left the baseball field. The traveling was slow-going, most of the roadways blocked. Sometimes they were forced to take longer routes to avoid running into large pockets of the dead.

  Near the end of each day's journey, a few hours after the convoy had stopped and the members of the group had had time to eat and get sloshed on liquor, they'd come for her.

  But today, for the first time, they'd come for Travers.

  When the doors to the back of the van opened, Meyers stood up and started towards them. But this time she'd been waved away. Phillips pointed at Travers and motioned for him to come forward. Travers shook his head.

  "What do you want him for?" she demanded to know.

  "Shut up, bitch. Get your fat ass out here, Travers."

  Travers continued to refuse. Eventually, three men came into the van and dragged him out kicking and crying while Phillips kept a rifle trained on Meyers. She'd screamed at them to leave Travers alone and to take her instead, but the men, for some reason, were determined.

  It threw a wrench into her plans. Every day that they took her, the men were growing more relaxed around her, and she'd been able to slowly recon the situation outside the van, look for weaknesses in the men's defenses, ready herself when an opportunity arose.

  This new development threw off everything.

  Just what the hell were they doing to him?

  Over the last several days since the window was opened, Meyers had determined they'd roughly been heading east. Other than that, the men had been tightlipped as to an actual destination or their reasons for the chosen direction.

  Right now the convoy was parked on a commercial street in some undetermined small town. The police van was curbed just outside a dry cleaners, which the men had disappeared into with Travers. Next to it, Meyers could see a McDonald's and a liquor store (no doubt the liquor store and the prospects of what might be inside is what had brought the convoy to a halt at this particular location), as well as the makings of a parking lot, possibly to a strip mall or something. She couldn't make out anything else. She'd hoped for a street name or maybe a business name that included the name of the town, but no such luck.

  Early on, the first couple of days they came for her, she'd tried to fight. That was a mistake, and it meant she'd forgotten some of what she'd learned about sexual abuse growing up.

  When her father would come for her. When her mother was either too weak or too high to care, before she was not there at all.

  Meyers had tried to fight her father off, too, as well as any young child could. This only translated into slaps, bites, and bruises. Then she'd tried to appeal to his sensitivities, crying and begging for him to stop, only to discover such an outward display of vulnerability only seemed to heighten his desires, making the experiences even more harsh and unendurable.

  Eventually, she'd learned to simply turn off— disconnect her mind from her body and go Somewhere Else. The Somewhere Else was a peaceful place, where kids could be happy. Where kids could be kids.

  She'd gotten so good at going to the Somewhere Else, sometimes she'd come back to herself and discover the night's activities were long complete, her father passed out drunk next to her or gone entirely.

  And somewhere within the eight years between when the abuse began and when a nurse at her school actually stopped believing Meyers's bullshit answers to questions of where she got all her bruises and called the police, Meyers became an expert of suffering the insufferable. Of going to the Somewhere Else.

  And after her father had been locked away, sentenced to a term that would likely last the rest of his natural life, and a while after being assigned to a foster family, her skills at detachment would again serve her well when her foster father, discovering the extent of Meyers's abusive past, concluded that any young teenage girl who'd withstood as much as she had must be able to give amazing blowjobs. The sick bastard decided to test that theory and more, often inviting her foster brothers to partake in the experiments.

  Through self-detachment, by going to the Somewhere Else, she endured, biding her time until her foster father was also discovered and locked away, she and her foster brothers separated and redistributed among orphanages around the country.

  Biding her time, just as she was doing now. Waiting for opportunities to escape. Knowing they'd eventually arise.

  Despite everything, the sexual abuse, the beatings, the torture (both mental and physical), and maybe even in spite of it, she always attended school, whether living with her father, in foster homes, or in orphanages, and always worked hard to keep up her grades. Again, biding her time.

  It paid off in the form of a full scholarship to Rice University, where she studied psychology. Finally, she was free.

  She'd planned to continue straight through college, earning her Doctor of Psychology degree and a license to open her own practice in hopes of teaching other children of abuse what she'd learned about coping. About biding their time. About the Somewhere Else and, eventually, survival and freedom.

  But after awhile, through her studies, she'd been able to recognize her own symptoms (lack of friends, fear of crowds, a hyper-arousal when approached by strangers, sleeplessness, mood swings) and diagnosed herself with post-traumatic stress disorder. She decided to take action. But not by seeking psychiatric help and drowning herself in anti-depressants, antipsychotics, and mood stabilizers.

  Rather she took her bachelor's degree and continued her studies in the male-dominated military. The move allowed her to face her fears head-on while helping other victims of PTSD, though their disorder usually came from different types of traumas entirely.

  Basic training, with men constantly screaming in her face, stretched her fears and anxieties to the limits. And finding herself in a position where detachment and withdrawal from the world around her (where going to the Somewhere Else) was not an option (would, in fact, be akin to failure), she nearly succumbed to the pressure.

  In a world that required total immersion of self and complete awareness of her surroundings, she experienced a level of panic and horror not unlike what she'd experienced in the early days of her initial sexual abuses, abuses long blocked out until now.

  Still, she faced it all, and endured, finding strength she never knew she had.

  On the day of graduation from basic, when a man she barely knew pinned a medal to her uniform dangerously close to her left breast, she was able to look him in the eyes and smile, her elation genuine instead of contrived.

  She was stationed to the psych ward of the V.A. hospital in Dallas. Six months after that, people all along the East Coast began getting sick following the sinking of a luxury cruise liner. She was reassigned to aid in evacuation and containment efforts in Baltimore. Eventually, once Baltimore was beyond saving, she was transferred to a re-supply regiment in Michigan.

  When she first reported for duty with the regiment, she wasn't the only female soldier. Private Sharon Kau
fman was also there, to Meyers's relief. The two of them roomed together, of course, the first few days of the mission on their way south out of Michigan.

  But whereas Meyers was reserved around the other men, Kaufman was flirtatious, sometimes sickeningly so.

  At one point, Kaufman asked Meyers is she could bring one of the guys into their tent for a few hours, forcing Meyers to come off prudish when she refused the request. But Kaufman was actually understanding and went to his tent instead. Meyers never found out exactly which of the guys Kaufman had had a fling with.

  Despite Kaufman's easy-going attitude towards the guys, Meyers and Kaufman really connected. Kaufman's past wasn't exactly squeaky clean, having married a much older man when she was way too young. She became his punching bag anytime he drank too much. She even lost a child to miscarriage after one such beating. Her husband became infected early on in the ZD plague, and Kaufman had the pleasure of putting a bullet in his head just after he died.

  "Or at least I think he was dead," Kaufman had offered when she shared her past with Meyers, cracking a sly grin. "You know, I don't exactly remember."

  After he was out of her life, Kaufman no longer felt trapped. While trying to figure out what to do with her life, afraid of being alone in a world quickly deteriorating around her, she found soldiers posting fliers in her neighborhood advertising the need for emergency personnel, and she signed up then and there, glad to have found some direction.

  When it came Meyers's turn to share her own past, she didn't go into any great detail and often wasn't entirely truthful. She said that her mother died when she was young and that CPS had taken her from her drug-addicted father shortly after that. She told Kaufman that she'd bounced between foster families and had to deal with some abuse along the way, although stopped short of telling Kaufman what sort of abuse she'd meant and how much she'd endured.

  All in all, both women acknowledged one another's scars, mostly at the hands of the men in their lives, and a quick fondness for one another developed, like that of sorority sisters.

  But whereas Meyers's abuse saw her keep men at a distance, Kaufman drew them in, as if in an attempt to catch up, perhaps. Before her husband's death, she'd never been with anyone else.

  Or maybe she'd hoped to prove that not all men were as deranged as her late husband. If only Kaufman had lived long enough (had she not been killed a week into the mission during a run in with the dead) to see what so many of the men in the regiment was capable of, her overall perception of the human male might not have been so optimistic.

  Kaufman's death hit Meyers pretty hard. Not only had she lost a trusted friend, but she'd also lost her buffer between herself and the sex-starved men in the unit. One of the soldiers, an older, African-American man by the name of Keene who was second in command to Colonel Moss, seemed to notice Meyers's distress and tried on a couple of occasions to talk to her, but she'd always shied away.

  Then one night while sitting around a campfire, several of the men got drunk and started making snide, sexual comments to her. She rose from her stoop to retire to her tent and let them have their fun. Cadagon and Phillips stood up with her and blocked her path. They laughed and pushed her backward, away from her tent, every time she tried to maneuver around them.

  Then Beechum came up behind her. She froze when she felt his hand on her waist, his chest against her back, his erection growing against her bottom.

  "Just relax, Meyers," he told her, sliding his hands up slowly towards her breasts, "and you might like this."

  Meyers closed her eyes. A tear streamed down her cheek as his hands cupped her breasts through her uniform.

  And then suddenly, he was gone.

  "Hey!" Phillips yelled. She opened her eyes and turned around to see Beechum on the ground, Keene standing between him and her. A trickle of blood slid down Beechum's forehead from the tree he'd just been tossed against.

  Keene stared down at him, his hand resting on his sidearm. "Even with the world like it is, Beechum, you can't just take what's not yours."

  Phillips, off to the side, began to slowly slide his hunting knife out of its sheath. Without looking at him, his eyes steady on Beechum, Keene popped the snap on his holster.

  "Careful, Phillips," Keene said, "I've been doing this shit a lot longer than you have."

  Phillips dropped the knife back into the sheath with a plop.

  "You boys head back to your tents and sleep it off. Maybe I forget to tell the Colonel about this little incident."

  "Fuck you, Keene," Beechum said, staggering to his feet, his backside covered in dirt.

  Keene tightened his grip around the butt of his gun. "That was a direct order, soldiers. Now move!"

  The three of them stumbled off. Beechum spat blood at Keene's feet as he passed.

  Keene turned to Meyers but didn't say anything. Their eyes studied one another briefly before Meyers dropped hers to the ground. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Eventually, she turned and ducked into her tent. She didn't hear Keene leave, but when she glanced out her tent's flap a few minutes later, he was gone.

  It was two days before she worked up the courage to offer Keene the slightest of thank yous. He smiled and nodded and went about his business.

  Two days after that, the morning duty rotation saw Keene and Meyers working together inventorying the company's personal ammunition stockpile, which Moss had placed Keene in charge of completely. As they worked, Meyers suddenly realized she felt comfortable around him, to her surprise. She had the urge to open up to him, to get to know him.

  But Keene was the one who opened up to her first.

  "My daughter would have been about your age," he told her out of the blue while they counted boxes of AK-47 shells.

  And that's how it started.

  Anyone who's ever heard someone tell a story that starts out declaring what would, could, or might have been knows the story about to unfold is destined to be tragic, hard to hear.

  Keene's was no different.

  Meyers didn't need to reciprocate with the obligatory, "What do you mean, 'Would have been'?" After all, in the world as it was, it was expected that everyone had lost someone they'd loved.

  But Keene's story started along a different path and he revealed himself to be a man who'd been dealing with the death of his only child more than a decade before the dead began walking again.

  He'd been on a mission in Cambodia when a drunk driver jumped the curb and killed his eight-year-old daughter while she played in their front yard. Keene wasn't told about her death until after she was buried, his superiors not wanting his sorrow to get in the way of the mission; something that, although it would sound heartless to the average citizen, Keene had understood and accepted.

  "That's terrible," Meyers told him.

  "That's protocol," Keene responded.

  She thought on that for a moment. "Was the mission a success?" she asked.

  Keene shook his head. "Some pencil pusher in Washington got cold feet and pulled us out at the last minute. Thousands more kids probably died because we weren't allowed to locate our target and pull a trigger."

  "Is that protocol, too?" she asked.

  It was his turn to think. Then he nodded. "Far too often."

  His story went on from there. He left the S.E.A.L.S. shortly after that to be with his wife, but eventually lost her to depression. She sliced her wrists on glass broken out of a picture frame that held a smiling portrait of their daughter.

  The military had trained him how to get into people's heads as a way to gain the trust of his enemy and extract information or gain some advantage. But all the training in the world couldn't teach him how to deal with a heartbroken mother.

  With his wife's death, Keene kept going with only one thought in mind: killing the man who destroyed his family. The drunk driver had been sentenced to seven years in prison for manslaughter, and Keene decided to be waiting for him once he emerged.

  But when Keene finally confronted him ye
ars later, he didn't find a man happy to be out of prison with his whole life ahead of him. Instead, Keene found a broken, shell-of-a-man anguished and tormented over the young life he'd ended. Keene guessed the man would probably spend the rest of his life in a prison of his own making.

  Keene left him to it.

  Keene worked odd jobs after that before finally joining the Coast Guard and putting his unique skills to some use. After the world started to collapse, the military proper was only too glad to have him back. He was already in Michigan at the time, his Coast Guard duties centered around the Great Lakes area, and Moss requested Keene be his second-in-command for Operation Outreach, well-trained military personnel being in such short supply.

  Keene's story told, Meyers felt it was her turn to share. When she started, Keene stopped her and told her she shouldn't feel any obligation to tell him anything she wasn't comfortable in sharing just because he'd had occasion to do so.

  But after hearing Keene's story, Meyers not only believed she should tell him about her troubled past, but wanted to tell him. She'd never felt more comfortable in the presence of a man before and she thought—no, she knew—opening up to him was something she had to do.

  She told him everything.

  She didn't alter her story or leave out details as she'd done with Kaufman. She knew she didn't need to.

  When she finished she was crying uncontrollably, a vulnerability she kept locked away for a long time. Even Keene, with all his training and his rugged exterior, seemed to be fighting back tears.

  Keene reached out a hand to her gingerly, and she surprised herself again by taking it into her own.

  "As long as I'm alive," he promised her, "no one will ever hurt you again."

  And he kept his promise.

  Several times in the weeks leading up to the mutiny, Keene had to come between Meyers and any number of the other men in the regiment when they made rude or condescending passes towards her or seemed to threaten her physically.

  Keene saw in Meyers the daughter he might have had, who he hadn't been able to protect from the other side of the world where he was stationed. In Keene, Meyers finally found the father she'd always been denied as a child.