“We should have buried him. We would have a place to remember him. He would have liked that,” Aimes says. She is sullen, staring at the attempt of a marker.
“That’s a comfort for the living. The dead don’t really care if you come or not. They are dead,” Rhett says from behind us.
His voice doesn’t startle me. It does Aimes. She spins with his voice like it belongs to some dark fear of hers. Since it’s Rhett, it just might.
“What do you want?” Aimes asks like a fragile child. Her voice is sad and hopeful at the same time.
Rhett looks away from us scanning the area around us and says, “Nothing.” Everything about him says the opposite. “What are you two doing out here alone?” he asks, changing the subject.
“We were never really alone,” I tell him and earn a smile from the man with pride pulling at his lips. I have spent so long avoiding Rhett that I have learned to spot him a mile away. He has been following us since we entered the courtyard where he was mingling with the newly saved or doomed depending on your point of view. Some things haven’t changed for either of us. “Selma tell you I was looking for you?” I ask him and watch his smile freeze and become a different animal.
“Nope,” he says. He is daring me to call his bluff and I totally would if I was not already holding onto my own making me an easy target for him. “Have something you want to talk about?” he asks me, pushing the matter further.
“Yes, but not out here.” I tell him looking around fully aware of how exposed we are.
“Figures she wouldn’t tell you. For someone so secure in the fact that she owns you, she sure does do a lot to keep you under her thumb,” Aimes says. She crosses her arms glaring at Rhett. She has missed the innuendos and has chosen to take us down a much bumpier road. In her mind she hovers somewhere between a discarded friend and scorned lover. The bite behind her words proves it to be true.
“It’s not her thumb she keeps me under.” Rhett’s smile is genuine and it adds to the “ick” factor of it all. Didn’t I warn about calling the man’s bluff when wounded?
“Either way, you admit you are now her little bitch,” Aimes says, pressing the conversation forward. I mentally applaud her bravery because mentally is silently.
Rhett shrugs nonchalantly with the smile still stuck to his lips, but his hand twitches. It’s a small, sudden spasm and most would never have seen it, but I do. Aimes might have too if she wasn’t so lost in the turbulent storm of her emotions.
Rhett’s eyes focus past Aimes on the marker before floating down to the thin layer of snow. His eyes swirl deepening and lightening their shade with emotions, but his face stays the passive blank mask of their training.
“One might think that I am finally not someone’s little bitch,” he says and his eyes meet mine with private knowledge.
I’m starting to understand how Selma found his hidden buttons. It is starting to become clear how she was able to turn him from us. She just didn’t count on a few things in her equation. There is a comfort in shared pain and she can’t measure the meters Rhett and I have swum together. Nor can she compete with the many different life vests we have shared to keep us from drowning. No matter the depths of her passion shared with him at night, we have all learned the dawn always comes, leaving us vulnerable to the light of the sun. It’s when lovers can no longer ease your suffering, but only those who have shared the darkest hours of your life.
“He needs you,” I say, watching the life return to the set of eyes holding me captive. “He may not know it, but he does. I know it. Chapel knows it.”
He looks to Aimes when I leave her name from the list and her eyebrow arches as if a string had pulled it. She says, “I don’t know what she is talking about.”
“Do you need me?” Rhett asks her with a voice that would shatter into thin pieces if pressed too hard. It completely steals any fight from her, relaxing her posture.
“Didn’t concern you before.” Marxx’ voice does startle me. I was so lost in the domestic scene before me, I never heard him walk toward us. With his smile proudly displayed, that might have been his goal. “When will you learn to listen?” Marxx asks me. He boldly ignores the set of eyes watching him with unmasked hostility.
“When will you learn to keep her safe?” Rhett returns the question asked with an accusation of his own.
Marxx’ head turns slowly to the man behind him. He never turns his shoulders making sure that his back is kept to Rhett. It’s a screaming insult done silently without a single word needing to be said. “Last time I checked,” Marxx says in a voice deep with anger, “you made sure to let everyone know they weren’t your problem anymore.”
“It’s so endearing to be coined a problem,” Aimes says rolling her eyes.
I guess when it is she and Rhett fighting that’s okay, but should anyone else argue it is annoying. Good thing no one ever asks me my take on it all. Far as I am concerned, they are all annoying and there are not enough “time out” corners in the whole place in which to put them.
“You know what I meant.” Marxx offers, but he doesn’t take his eyes from the man he is poking with a stick. He is willing to put his back to him, but only as long as he can keep tabs on Rhett. Interesting to know.
“You’re right,” Rhett says. “They aren’t.”
The shock of his words radiates out like a bomb dropped leaving us all wounded from the shrapnel. The vulnerable side we saw of him has passed. Now Aimes and I are the ones stripped bare in front of him with the aftermath leaving us gasping. I look away from the man, not willing to let the sting of his words be seen reflected in my eyes. Aimes takes a different route with her emotions.
“I hope she swallows you whole,” Aimes tells Rhett. Her voice is shaky with the damage from his words. “You and your stupid pride.”
“She swallows me every night and it brings me great pride.” Rhett leers with this words and I roll my eyes with how, once again, Aimes has been led into a pitfall of word play. It’s one of his best games.
“We really have to learn better insults.” Aimes concedes as she watches Rhett walk away.
“We? Don’t drag me into your fights.” I answer still staring into the forest border ignoring Marxx who is shuffling from amused to anger as he watches Rhett walk away and listening to our banter. “I stayed quiet.”
“Yeah, I noticed. Thanks for the back-up there, gal pal.”
“Anytime.”
“You mean anytime it doesn’t involve Rhett?”
“Exactly.”
“He really makes you that nervous, Hells?” Marxx is genuine in his interest but the up lifted corner of his mouth suggests that he is holding another emotion within. “You go toe-to-toe with those things but Rhett makes you nervous?”
I know what to expect from the Risen. Their motives and desires remain constant no matter where we encounter them. They want us dead. It’s rather simplistic.
Rhett’s motives, not so much. You never know at which station the mood swings of his crazy train will stop. Some days, he may just make a complete round trip in one conversation. Where as most times he isn’t plotting your death directly, but that is always up in the air, too. The Risen, I understand. Rhett, not at all.
As I watch Lilly run a jagged path in-between the tree line, I know it’s not just Rhett who confuses me with hidden desires. The dead seem to be just as twisted with their motives. They are not dead. They never were.
“Who is that?” Aimes whispers the question as her eyes squint to fight against the sun’s rays. It’s amazing how far a whisper will carry when every moment is now swathed with last minute dangers. Rhett pauses in his stride to see where Aimes is looking and when I follow their gaze, I’m shocked. Their eyes watch the apparition that stalks my mind play among the snow-hazed trees. I look to Marxx and see that he too is staring at her.
“You see her?” It’s my turn to whisper. I don’t do it out of fear of what I am seeing. I do it with the fears of what they are seeing. I know I’m one s
tumble from insanity if Aimes calls out to Lilly.
“Yeah, who is it?” Aimes squints her eyes harder trying to make out the damning details.
I am ready to answer her when Rhett curses under his breathe and answers for me. “It’s April, ” he says and I want to argue with him.
I want to tell him how I am not amused with his joke, but I don’t. See, I’m learning in leaps and bounds – whatever that means.
“When will you learn to keep her safe?” Marxx repeats the question that was asked of him and I can hear the smirk coating his words.
Speaking of “time out corners” I ask, “Who is April?” before I need to find a few.
“Selma’s daughter.” Marxx tells me still wearing his smile.
I understand now why his question is so satisfying to him. I don’t understand how a woman with such traits as she has could give birth to a blonde, ivory skinned child running amok in the woods but I admit that I might have slept through high school biology. Right now, I’m just satisfied that my personal ghosts are laying in wait to ambush me in the dark and not under the noon sun.
“You should probably go get her. You know, earn you some pink points with Selma for later.” Aimes teases Rhett with her verbal jab, but her innuendo isn’t easy for her to accept or to say.
“We should go get her,” I say. At once, the three of them turn to me mirroring the same expression of shock from my proposal. “All of us.”
I don’t stand still waiting to listen to their outburst of bickering. I do what I always do when I know I have stirred the pot. I walk away. I walk, hiding from those behind me the grimace of pain it causes me. I focus on putting one foot in front of the other with silent prayers that this won’t become the time I am left to walk alone. Mostly, I’m just doing what I do best, chasing rabbits and making up stuff as I go.
CHAPTER 18
“April!” Rhett shouts into the forest with less than an ounce of concern for what may be lurking in it. The rest of us just hope with nervous, swaying eyes that his love affair with danger won’t catch up with us. It most likely will.
From where April has squatted to draw with a broken branch in the dusting of snow, she gives Rhett one glance over her shoulder before she is off like a startled deer. With the same lack of concern he displayed moments ago, Rhett is right behind her. He crashes through the trees trying to keep her in sight and we follow behind him, trying to keep him in sight. It’s the proverbial game of “follow the leader”. Since he “leader” is a scared little girl this might become the longest round of the game in my life.
The snow is thicker among the trees with their heavy branches blocking the sun’s warmth. It’s no longer the slippery mess but almost soft like a carpet under my boots. The vibrations from our running sends it cascading from above before the wind picks it up, swirling it like a snow globe around us. Quickly the icy breath of Mother Nature steals the air from our lungs, cramping our sides. I surrender to the pain of my stomach, slowing my speed until my attempt to run is nothing more than an unflattering jog. Between me with my wounds, Aimes with hers still healing and Marxx unwilling to risk leaving us behind, the gap between Rhett and us grows.
We rest against the tree trunks, our lungs aching from the extent we have pushed our bodies in the winter weather. I’m grateful for the several packs a day life style Marxx led before all of this. His panting is keeping him from saying the words his face is wearing as he stares at me.
To say that Rhett crashed through the forest before would be an under statement to the amount of noise he makes as he backtracks to us. “I lost her,” Rhett says and his hand does that same twitch from before.
“When you talked to this kid last,” Aimes says bent over to help reduce the cramp in her side as she pauses to take a few deep breaths before she can continue, “she didn’t happen to say meep meep at any time did she?”
Rhett wants to glare at her, but even his face is too tired to form the expression.
“It won’t be hard to find her. We’ll just track her in the snow,” Marxx says as he points to the trail we have left in our wake.
The relief his idea grants Rhett makes him exhale a long drawn out sound. Rhett’s shoulders sag with the release of his worry. For a brief exchange, the two men seem to bridge a crevice between them before they can remember which side of the line they now sit.
“We’ll find her,” Marxx tells him. He gives Rhett one solid pat on his chest when walking past. It’s a small thing, hardly even an event in another time, but right here it’s a miracle. Under the limbs of snow-hidden trees, it’s a start.
It doesn’t take Marxx long to discover her path. We zig and zag with her tiny footprints leading us along a twisting path. When we exit from our shelter of trees, my heart drops. All of our questions as to where the Risen had come from lie expanding before us. It was only a matter of when, not if, they would come to test the brick walls of the high school. It was built in their back yards. A masterpiece of a suburban maze sat behind us the whole time.
The wooden privacy fence that separated the neighborhood from the tree line has been torn down in places. The missing wooden slats are broken and splintered as if a battering ram was taken to it. Shards of the boards lay scattered around our side of the divide with ruptured chaos. In some spots of the wooden mile, tops of the boards show the proof of what has happened with the dried, darkening evidence still staining them. This place should be filled with the sounds of children playing in the yards and the homes being tended to, but instead there is just the crowing of the birds circling overhead.
“What is a bunch of crows called, again?” Aimes is staring at the same ominous sign as I am that something bad has happened here. Not that we need the birds to tell us what we have come to expect.
“A murder.” Marxx says answering her question with half-interest. His eyes are scanning for the lost trail of April’s. Under the shelter of the trees, her little feet made perfect impressions where the snow was like white carpet. Now under the sun’s assault, the melting ice crystals are not deep enough to fully impact a print into.
“Well with that comfort-inspiring fact from Marxxipedia, who wants to go first?” Aimes asks.
I’m not shocked when her head turns to me first. Annoyed, but I’m not shocked.
It’s Rhett who steps up to the fence first, calling over his shoulder, “I will. She’s my responsibility.”
We don’t argue with him. Perhaps I would have if I wasn’t fighting to cover the fact my legs are weak from the burning-like pain of my stomach. Its fire-laced aching is an agonizing remembrance of the dangers that might be waiting for us. It’s robs me of the self-confidence I once had and replaces my mind with causations that never lingered there before.
With the first step through the splintered mess I am nervous. I can feel my shoulders cramping with tension from the imagined pictures in my mind. The only sounds around us are the birds and the ice giving under our feet. I have learned that silence is sometimes more frightening than a thousand screams. Screaming lets you know where the danger is waiting. It warns you, where as silence keeps her secrets guarded until you are the one screaming.
“Here,” Marxx calls out. It seems to be his own scream with how it violates the stillness, making even Rhett twitch with the abruptness of it. “She went this way.” Marxx has somehow found the lost trail that went unseen by the rest of us. It is just indentions in the slush, but when looking at the whole area, it is easy to see how they line up to lead off in the direction of one of the backyards. It’s like one of those pictures where you have to stare just right for the image to appear and Marxx has. He is still staring when he says, “She skipped past the first three homes and went for the one at the front of the cul-de-sac.”
“Why?” Aimes asks as if the melted mess holds that answer as well.
It doesn’t and the look Marxx gives her confirms it.
“Let’s go find out.” Rhett doesn’t leave time to stand around to form a plan. In his mind, the pl
an has been made. We find her and we go back. It seems simple enough and just how he likes plans to be. Apparently, I am not the only one who takes a while to learn things.
Every window we pass is blacked out with some material. The lower windows have boards nailed across them. Doors hold wooden beams of varying size and thickness like children playing at building forts. Wooden decks have been destroyed to supply the wooden hopes of protections and to help slow anything from making its way to the back doors. This was a group effort fulfilled by those who stood their ground here. These people went on with their lives in a fragile attempt of waiting this out. Now, the same people who once fortified these homes are either lying dead inside or worse. They may be the ones we burned. The Risen don’t roam like cattle with mindless actions. It’s only when something stimulates them to action do they travel. It would only make sense the ones that once stood like Death’s army would come from a place so near. With April leading us behind enemy lines, I hope their numbers have been decreased.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Marxx mumbles his disbelief, pulling my focus back to the house in front of us.
“Still leading the way?” Aimes asks Rhett. She is daring him as we stare at what only the sickest of minds could recreate.
The home is a sprawling one story of pastel blue vinyl and red accent bricks. Streamers hang from the open back doorway alternating between faded shades of pink and yellowing white. The back yard is littered with brightly patterned paper. The pink gingham tablecloth is still sitting on the picnic table. It waves in the soft wind like a last attempt to call for help from someone dying before going still. Like one of the discarded bows wrapping all around the scene lays the half snow-buried dead. The children stare out at us with animal-scavenged skin and torn body cavities. Some still wear their pointed paper hats of pink and white.
The vinyl wears the smears from the attacks showing the escape path of those who tried to make it. In the middle of a celebration of life, Death came. It came with clawing hands and tearing teeth. It came and stole its victory, leaving the proof of its act to be witnessed for years to come and we haven’t even gone inside yet.
The Risen (Book 4): Courage Page 14
