The Barbarous Road: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survivor Thriller (The Last War Book 6)

by Ryan Schow

  “I did.”

  “So why are you preaching to us then?”

  “Because you can learn something before it’s too late,” he answers, the full weight of his being upon me. “I’ve learned this lesson by seeing things from both sides. You only know your ideology. You barely even know one side.”

  “Not anymore,” I say.

  “So you killed that guy then? Did you do it on purpose?”

  “Yes,” I say, finishing off the last of a Coors Light.

  “Would you do it again?” he asks.

  Without hesitation, I say, “Yes.”

  I say this knowing Marcus didn’t see what I saw, experience the things that monster did to us, kill Tyler the way he did. The cretin just let that boy starve to death because he didn’t want to eat the damned peaches. What kind of a behemoth does something like that?

  “If you’d do it again without thinking, then you didn’t learn anything,” he challenges.

  “What’s the lesson?” Corrine asks in a very small, very careful voice.

  Marcus looks at her, stares at her so long she becomes uncomfortable before finally looking away. Before he shut her down, her eyes held impossible questions to which told her with a stare he didn’t want to give her those answers. In the end, she didn’t leave and he didn’t relent.

  “There are people who can take a life for the right reason, like I’m sure you did. But to be at the point where you understand both the right and the wrong reasons from the inside, it’s already too late for you. By then you aren’t killing to survive, you’re killing because that’s what you do. That’s your nature. You’re a good person, Nick,” he says, looking away. Then: “I am not.”

  “Yes you are,” Corrine says under her breath, her face still turned away.

  “Not really,” he says, getting up. When he goes inside, we expect him to come back out, but he doesn’t.

  “What happened to you?” Bailey asks Corrine.

  “I found out what the face of true evil looks like and he saved me from it. For that, I owe him my life, not that he’ll take anything from me. He didn’t even want to bring me here.”

  “Why?”

  “He said his friends were gone, probably dead. That he didn’t want to take me where he was going because basically, people seemed to always be dying around him.”

  “What did he do to save you?” Bailey asks, quietly, just in case Marcus came back.

  “He basically killed their entire gang, saved about twenty-five girls from…the horrible things they were doing to us, then helped the girls without families stock up on food and weapons.”

  “Why didn’t you stay with them?”

  “You should have seen him,” she says, leaning forward. “He took them all out. There must have been twenty of them, and he killed them all.” Sitting back up, she says, “My chances of living with him are much greater than the chances of living with a bunch of broken girls like myself.”

  “You’re not broken,” I say.

  “Not yet.”

  When I think about what Bailey and I endured, and what Corrine and Marcus endured, I suddenly have a lot more respect for the man. It’s not the kind of respect you gain through admiration as much as it’s the kind of respect that’s born from fear.

  Chapter Seven

  Bailey didn’t know why she said what she said. It had just come out. She liked Nick, for sure, but when she got really drained, when she simply ran out of energy, the filter she usually kept in place tended to disappear. A big part of why they slept together in the same bed was not because they were a couple, but because they were lost in the same place together. Having the same nightmares. Sharing the same boogeyman. Clearly she wasn’t afraid to speak up and say what she wanted. Not with Nick. Not now that the world was falling apart. If she didn’t try to keep him close, she feared he’d eventually drift away from her. She didn’t want that. Not when she thought she saw something in him. It was something so pure and beautiful, something so selfless and so brave, it was that thing she couldn’t put it into words.

  It was that very thing she was missing in her life.

  As she lie there in bed next to him, listening to him breathe, feeling him near, he made her want to grow up and realize she was not a girl anymore and that he was dealing with problems and fears far greater than she imagined. She wasn’t a mother. And on the surface, she lived the storied life of today’s California woman: no husband (yet), no kids, a nice place, two jobs—both paying decent money—completely self-sufficient. But Nick? His wife left him for another man and his kid was eighteen. All alone in a city under attack. If he was scared for her, he kept his emotions pretty close to the vest. She could see the toll it was taking. The way he checked every phone he found and got more and more pissed off when none of them had a dial tone. She saw evidence of the burden, the fear he was carrying. She saw all this and knew that she had to change, to be bigger than the person she was, more responsible for others, not just herself.

  She turned and looked at him in the dark. Her mind would not fall still.

  Nick understood marriage and divorce. She only had failed relationships. Men she could leave if things went south. But Nick? He had a daughter, and now he was apart from her having to deal with distance, with the uncertainty of his own fate, a group of strangers relying upon him for survival, the life he took from The Warden.

  He was doing all this and still he found a way to let down his walls with her. To let her in. She shouldn’t have done that. Not while she was still in a relationship. To do what she did to him, to do what she was doing, it was selfish. She took something from him she shouldn’t have taken, and now the guilt was tunneling its way through her.

  As she lay there watching him, as she studied his profile in the dark and smelled the smells of him, it almost didn’t matter that technically she was devoted to another man.

  She wanted only Nick. Her true California unicorn.

  Closing her eyes, turning away from him, she thought back to a few minutes ago, to when they were getting ready for bed. The moonlight flooded their room before they closed the drapes. She watched him undress, barely even blinked as he crawled into the bed they were sharing. At first blush, the sheets were cold but soft and clean, the mattress plush. But he didn’t scoot next to her, or cuddle with her the way he did yesterday. For a second, she wondered if he was for real. If this was not just a pretty boy act. The longer he stayed put, the more she was convinced he wasn’t the kind of guy to use a girl for sex.

  Then again, time was the greatest lie detector. Men always revealed their true colors. They couldn’t help it.

  Even if he did use her for sex, the truth was, she didn’t mind. The truth was, she didn’t care about sex right now as much as she cared about his character. This is why she wanted to be close to him. She hadn’t felt close to a man in years and for some reason, maybe because she felt like the skies were falling all around them, she needed this intimacy more than anything. When at last he spoke, she’d been so deep in her own head, she startled at the sound of him.

  “Who are you going back to see in Sacramento?” he asked in the darkness.

  She swallowed hard, a cold knot forming instantly in her gut, she said, “My fiancée,” then wondered in that second what Nick’s evaluation of her character would be.

  Would he think she was a slut? A two-timing seductress? Or would he be able to eventually see the real her: a woman desperate to be loved, to feel safe, to be cared about? Feeling the moment of honesty as empowerment, she felt relieved the truth was finally out there. But then the silence between them started to grow.

  And then she became intensely uncomfortable.

  “So you drew me into you to fix my intimacy problems,” he finally said, “a problem I gained because my wife cheated on me with another man, and now you make me into the other man?”

  “It’s not like that,” she tried to reason, even though it was exactly like that and she knew it.

  “Write me a differen
t story then, Bailey,” he said in a voice that left her feeling cold and selfish inside.

  “I live a loveless existence,” she said, her truth laid bare. “The only intimacy I get is the intimacy I put on the page. I started to write romance because I needed to know what it was like to live again, to feel cared for, maybe even adored again. It helped some. But this also left me looking at the gaping holes in my own romantic life. The page is a great place to fall in love, to control the outcome, to give yourself a happy ending. But as a writer with an unsatisfying life, I found reprieve there not out of fun but out of necessity. This only lasted awhile. Writing to save yourself from your life is not the answer, Nick. In the end, it was every bit as hollow as the rest of my world.”

  “Does he know this? Your fiancée? Does he know you feel this way?”

  “I told him, yes.”

  “But?”

  “But he’s a workaholic, a terrible listener, and a man’s man.”

  “Isn’t that what girls like these days?” he asked.

  “That’s the initial attraction. But when you see all the things these kinds of guys put before you, before the idea of building a life together, it gets depressing. Then it gets incredibly lonely.”

  “So you want to be in love again?”

  “That’s the first mile of any race, Nick. But it’s not the entire race. Things change, as I’m sure you know, and if you don’t change and grow together—as a couple—a natural separation occurs. Slowly at first. You stop doing so many things together. Your shared interests drift. You don’t make love as often as you should. Eventually someone ends up with someone else and everything falls apart from there.”

  “Someone always loses though,” he said.

  “I think that was me.”

  “But you’re still together,” he reasoned.

  “We are, but we aren’t. I saw him texting a girl just before I left to San Diego.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I couldn’t confront him about it. My heart was broken though.”

  “Could you have misread the situation? Guys text girls all the time and it has nothing to do with sex, or hookups or whatever.”

  “I was thinking that at first, but then a picture of a pair of tits came over the phone and he closed it right away. After that, I just…I think that maybe…I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do,” he said, nudging her forward. “Just say it.”

  “I don’t want to invest anymore effort in him anymore. I’m tired of feeling unloved. I think I deserve more from a relationship.”

  “So you hook up with me?”

  “If you’re thinking you’re the rebound guy, or the one night stand, maybe you’re right. But it’s not as empty as it sounds. I loved being with you. Seriously. But with everything going on, my intentions weren’t selfish, or driven by some ulterior motive, or whatever. We didn’t meet at bar, or through friends, or off Tinder or something. You saved my life about a dozen times,” she said, moving toward him. She reached for his hand, felt it, but then he pulled it away. She was losing him. “We were locked up by some fruit eating psychopath, Nick. We were held up at gunpoint and lost a yacht together. If they say tragedy ties two hearts together, then maybe that’s what happened to us. Maybe our hearts are fused.”

  “Do you really think that?” he asked, so much edge in his voice.

  “I think that’s the hopeless romantic in me,” she said, trying to offset his mood with optimism. She reached out to touch him again, and again he pulled away.

  “You should have told me.”

  “I know,” she responded, low, ashamed. “But what would you have done? Crawl back in that shell of yours?”

  “My shell is comfy,” he said, bitter.

  “Well to me it looked a bit lonely. We had sex, Nick. That was awesome. But then we made love and I felt you. I felt what it was like to really feel wanted. Needed almost. And that’s something I haven’t felt in a long time. Don’t you get it? There’s something about us. If this war hadn’t broken out, maybe we wouldn’t be together. But it did. And here we are. If we get caught up in labels and societal norms and all that shallow nonsense, we might just miss something important. Something right in front of our faces.”

  “We’re not together, Bailey. We’re just two people hanging on to the same life preserver in the same rough seas.”

  “Don’t marginalize this,” she said, sitting up. “It was more than that to me, and I know it was more than that for you, too.”

  “I’m just being a baby,” he mumbled.

  “Yes, but why?”

  Rolling over in the dark he said, “Because I made this into a fairy tale taking place in the middle of hell and it wasn’t that. It isn’t. You’re someone else’s promise. A girl with another guy. I wanted to believe otherwise, I did, but now…now I just…I feel like sleeping on the couch.”

  “With Marcus?”

  “Yeah, with Marcus,” he said, getting up and leaving.

  For a long time she just laid there, crying for what she lost in her own life, for what she was losing in this one. She wanted to get back home, see if Jason was still alive. But then what? Who would she be now? She was wondering this when her body finally shut down and she slid into a dark and restless sleep. Twice she woke up and twice she wondered, who am I?

  Who am I?

  When I left Bailey in the bedroom, honestly, I wanted to break something. I kept my hands to myself though, and my temper reigned in. Losing my cool would do no good. Besides, I don’t have the energy stores to just waste on lies and failed expectations.

  Out on the couch, I see Marcus settling in. “Fight, or you finally coming out here because you missed me?” he asked.

  “Your sense of humor sucks.”

  “It’s a work in progress.”

  “If you want to take the other room,” I muttered, standing there with a pillow, “I’ll take first watch.”

  “Ah,” he said, getting up, “trouble in paradise.”

  “You show me something that resembles paradise and I’ll stir up some trouble.”

  “I can do that on my own,” he answered, dragging his blanket and pillow back to the room next to Bailey’s.

  So now I’m stretched out on this stupid couch, left only with a million conflicting thoughts. These days, getting my mind to slow down is an act of dogged perseverance. My eyes are feeling it though. They’re bloodshot, swollen and hangdog. I feel old as hell and beaten down and I can’t stop thinking of Indigo. And this couch? I won’t lie. It’s more attractive than it is comfortable. Kind of like Bailey, I think to myself, souring at the comparison.

  After lying here, stewing, being righteously pissed off about Bailey’s truth, my mood breaks and I’m left here feeling sour. Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on her. She’s like any of us trying to survive—we’re all just trying to get the things we need in life.

  A couple hours later, the door opens and I hear bare feet padding across the carpet toward me. Bailey kneels down, sits next to me.

  “I’m sorry, Nick,” she says, facing me. “I should’ve told you. But you wouldn’t have been with me and you have to admit, beyond your kid and my douchebag of a fiancée, we are a nice fit.”

  “You can’t know that,” I say.

  “Why, because of our circumstances? Did you know most people can’t travel together without falling apart? Why is it my fiancée has this beautiful, talented girlfriend who has to go to bed alone each night, not feeling loved, having to resort to writing to find romance? Why is this happening to us now? You are my first indiscretion, Nick. My only indiscretion—or whatever you think this is. It was spontaneous for sure, but it sort of wasn’t either. I know what I like, Nick. When it comes to men, I know what I want. And it’s usually the opposite of what I get.”

  “So now you want romance in hell?”

  “I want you, dummy,” she says, taking my hand. I let her this time. “In whatever conditions they are—heaven, hell, every day life—I want you, Nic
k.”

  “You don’t know me well enough to say that,” I tell her, even though what she’s saying is definitely thawing the ice I’d quickly formed around my thoughts of her.

  “Yes, but this is how it starts,” she says. “No one ever looks across the room and seriously says, ‘That’s my soul mate.’ But they do look at a person and know they’re going to be with them. When I first saw you, Nick, I knew that I had to have you.”

  “But you’re still going back to Sacramento.”

  She hesitates, then says, “I have to make sure he’s alive.”

  “Then what?”

  “I need to tell him I can’t be with him. He was nearly intolerable in his neglect before all this happened. I can’t see him stepping up his game for the apocalypse. I mean Jesus, Nick, this isn’t exactly nirvana! We were almost killed a dozen times. This still isn’t over.”

  “Are you trying to be romantic right now? Because the things you’re saying are coming through, but the picture you’re painting about the foreseeable future is pretty glum.”

  She nods her head, slowly, contemplating my point.

  “If I pull back the blanket, can you fit on both me and the couch?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she says, renewed.

  I pull back the blanket. She slides in, straddles me, then pulls down my borrowed briefs. I guess I made this decision. No going back.

  Afterwards, as we’re cuddling in the dark and falling into slumber, something tears me from my sleep. My eyes feel swollen shut with exhaustion, my body in massive amounts of pain from the depletion of war and sex. I look over in the darkness of night and see someone standing over me.

  I’m not sure if I’m awake or asleep, but I jump inside, enough to feel Bailey’s body half draped over mine and half tucked into the couch. I’m about to shove her off and…do something, but the person standing over me is not an adult. As I try to clear my eyes, I see this is a child.

  “Are you lost?” I whisper at the shadow. I try to focus, to see the details, but all I see is this shadow. The child says nothing. He just stands there. “What’s your name?” I hear myself asking.