He’d never seen a woman pack her shit and leave a man that fast. It had to be a world record.
He continued to drink and glare at the walls.
Occasionally someone would tap on the door and ask him if he needed anything. He’d growl…and they’d leave. Sometimes they left a tray of food, which he ignored. Once, he ate some crackers because he’d switched to tequila and he knew he needed something in his stomach if he was going to keep that shit down.
He blinked his eyes open and he woke to the sound of the generator humming outside his room and the air conditioner blowing cool, fresh air on his sweaty skin. He glanced over and saw a new tray of food. Someone had been there, checking on him again.
He would’ve been flattered if he gave a fuck.
Even one fuck.
But he had no more fucks to give.
The midday light of yet another day filtered through the partially closed blinds. Trevor thought of her again. Of Rebel. He groaned and rolled over to his side. Shit, he was half sober. He remembered running for the toilet late last night, throwing up everything he had, again and again, a burning spectacle of dishonor and indignity. He leaned over, groping for a fresh bottle.
A pounding on the bedroom door set off a series of painful explosions across his forehead.
“Trevor, we’re coming in,” a voice shouted. “This is day three. That’s enough, man. Enough.”
Adam.
He could hear a second muffled voice.
Christian?
“Unlock the fucking door or I’m going to bust it down. Do you hear me? Get off your drunk ass and let us in or we’re going to break this door down.”
He must’ve locked it last night. Trevor sat up slowly, like the oldest man alive. He creaked his body across the room and opened the door. They were both there, in the doorway, staring at him accusingly. Adam looked him up and down. “Rachel said it was bad, but shit, Trevor, I didn’t realize it was this bad. You look like roadkill. Jesus, man, have some pride.”
Adam brushed past him and stalked into the room. Christian wrinkled his nose.
Trevor closed his eyes and leaned against the doorjamb, unable to take any of this shit right now.
“Listen.” He heard Adam’s voice. “This is it. You had three days to throw your pity party. It’s over. We’re here to dry you out and get you showered. No more alcohol. The women are scared for you, and Josie keeps asking where you are. There are people who care about you here. It’s time to stop wallowing in your misery and rejoin the real world.”
Trevor dropped his chin into his chest, eyes still closed. All he knew was that he felt like shit and Adam’s words weren’t helping one damn bit.
He felt a hand on his arm.
He didn’t shrug it off, just accepted it.
“Come on,” Christian said. “Let’s get you into the shower.”
“We’re getting you cleaned up because one day soon you’re going to be ready, ready to go get that girl back. You hear me?” Adam said.
Trevor lifted his head, which felt like a ten-pound weight, and opened his bleary eyes. “Not happening,” he croaked.
“That’s what you think,” Christian said, soft but firm.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“We’re going to need to go back and visit sometimes, you know. These eggs we’re eating for breakfast and this fruit all came from your friends back at the farm. They gave us a care package of perishable food on our way out the door,” Kati said.
“That was nice of them,” Rebel answered softly. Luckily her morning sickness seemed to have subsided temporarily. She picked at her food, eating slowly, but without worrying whether it would come up or not. This was an improvement.
Kati fixed breakfast while Tiana served coffee. Krissy and Justin sat at the kitchen table with her. She’d been in this kitchen many times now, but this morning she actually saw it, noticing it was large, well-lit with morning light, and comfortable. The house wasn’t brand new, but the kitchen seemed to have been recently remodeled with dark granite countertops and cream cabinets and white subway-tile backsplash. The kitchen table was situated in front of a large window that let in the morning light and offered a view of a backyard with a green pool and yellowed landscaping sorely in need of attention.
“So.” Justin swallowed a bite of egg. “Are you ladies coming back with Rebel and me to Carmel?”
Krissy shrugged and picked up a cup of coffee. “Wasn’t sure if we were invited.”
Rebel rolled her eyes. “Don’t start. Of course you’re invited, all of you are. Wait a sec, you don’t want to stay there, do you? That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”
“Well…while you were sick, the others at the farm showed me the measures they were taking in case of acid rain,” Krissy said.
Justin raised his eyebrows.
“Yeah,” Rebel confirmed. “They said it was a matter of time before all the nuclear power plants worldwide melted down, like Chernobyl. Trevor said…” She stumbled to a halt. Everyone stared at her. “Um, they said that out in Carmel we should be safe, that it might be far enough away, but he wasn’t sure. They thought it might be a good idea for us to rethink where we were living and move farther away.”
“Yeah, they told me the same thing,” Tiana said from the kitchen. “I was going to say something to you two, advise you not to go back. I’m happy you brought it up first. They were really nice and gave us a tour of what they’re doing to stay safe too. Adam said that all the nuclear power plants in the world are dangerous, not just the ones near us, because the radioactive clouds will drift into the atmosphere and float wherever and come down randomly as acid rain. We won’t know it’s happening either until it’s too late. We can’t ever go back to LA, you know. We need to keep the exclusion zone wider than in Chernobyl or Fukushima because you have to remember that there are no humans there doing clean-up. There won’t be a sarcophagus around the reactor core keeping the worst of it contained. It will just spew like an open wound. When they blow, radioactive debris can float into the atmosphere and land who knows where.”
“That freaks me out,” said Krissy.
“Sounds like I missed a lot while I was out.” Justin looked out the window, quiet for a second. “I knew about the nuclear plants on the coast and I thought we were far enough away, but yeah, maybe we weren’t. No need to risk our lives by staying too close. There are plenty of places to live that are safer.”
“Like here,” Kati offered as she walked to the table and sat down with her own plate of food. “You could always stay here, with us.”
Rebel locked her gaze with Krissy. Her jaw clenched. “This was your plan all along, wasn’t it?”
Krissy shrugged.
“Well, it is a good idea,” Tiana offered. “We could all live here. Why not? We could go looking for more survivors but use this house as our base and return here eventually.”
Rebel looked down at her plate. Why not? Well, because…
“No,” Justin answered for her. “It’s too close, to the others.”
Kati sighed. “It’s only”—she lowered her voice—“Trevor,” she whispered. “The rest of them at the farm are really nice. I liked them, and Josie is there…”
Tiana gestured at Justin, waving her fork in the air. “You didn’t get a chance to know them, Justin, because you were out of it, you were only awake at the end to see the drama. We were there for four days and I’m telling you, they were nice.”
“No, I know,” he said. “They took care of me, remember? I got to know Christian. He was there in the RV when Rebel wasn’t. And Sebastian too. I appreciate that. It’s just, I’m worried if we’re so close and easily reachable that Trevor will try something.”
Rebel’s brow furrowed. “What? Try what?”
“I don’t know, but he looked desperate.”
“He’ll probably end up here, under your window, holding a boombox,” Krissy muttered.
“What is she talking about?” Kati said contrarily.
“Probably some eighties movie,” Tiana answered. “It’s all she talks about.”
Krissy bumped a slice of peach around on her plate with her fork. “I miss that new girl, Rachel. Now she knows her movies. She understood me.”
Justin snorted. “Let’s not romanticize this situation.” He looked at Rebel. “Remember, you’ve only known Trevor for a short time, and you didn’t know him before the end. The ten days you spent together were probably like a honeymoon where he showed you the good side of himself and hid his other side. You need to know this, all of you need to know this…the men in those Aryan prison gangs are more animal than men. They’ve lost their humanity. They spent all of their time trying to find ways to kill members of rival gangs in and out of the prison walls. They worked on ways to send coded messages to the outside and on how to receive small stashes of drugs through the mail. If they could hurt or humiliate a guard in the process, all the better. I’m telling you, Rebel, that was all those men did. Trevor was in for murder, so he was a lifer. He spent his time behind bars scheming on how to hurt other people, and he lifted weights and worked out. That’s it. That was his life. Before that, he was doing the same thing, but on the streets and on a larger scale.”
“I can’t believe I stood there and listened to him us out that day when we first met. He called us out.” Tiana snorted. “What a joke.”
“You’re saying you think he’s still dangerous? He didn’t seem like that at the farm, he—” Krissy offered.
“He was lying to all of you. Like Kati said, members of the Aryan Brotherhood only accept heterosexual Caucasians into their little world. Everyone else is the enemy. If he didn’t tip his hand and let you see that yet, it was only a matter of time until he did.”
This was the man she had trusted? The man she had started to love? The man she’d told her secrets to and had been intimate with?
Rebel felt the bile rise in her throat. She raced to the bathroom and made it just in time to lose her breakfast in the toilet.
She sat on the tile floor in the bathroom, taking deep breaths, the door partially open. She could hear them whispering in the hallway.
“We can’t go back to Carmel, we can’t stay here, what should we do?” Tiana’s distinctive voice said.
“I think we still need to travel some more, scout out new areas. We can do what they’re doing, staying close to the mountains, but we can go north. Maybe we’ll luck out and find more men,” Krissy said.
“Okay, that sounds like a decent plan.”
“I think we should put a timeline on it though,” Justin said. “I don’t want us to end up nomads. We travel for, say, a week or two, and then we find a place to settle. Can we all agree on that?”
She could hear Krissy take a deep breath. “Yeah, okay.”
“Kati, Tiana. Are you in on that? Not more than two weeks?”
“That’s perfect,” a soft female voice said.
“Yeah, that’s good. I like it,” Tiana answered. “This one here will go hog wild if you let her. I mean, I want to find a man too, but I get tired, you know? So yes, two weeks, we travel north, and then we find a place. Sounds good.”
“Rebel?” Krissy raised her voice from the hall. “What do you think of that? Are you okay with that plan?”
“Yeah,” she answered flatly. Tears ran down her cheeks. “That’s fine. Whatever.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Trevor walked into the dining room at lunch time. He’d showered and brushed his teeth. He wore clean clothes and trimmed his beard. The headache was still there, aching quietly at his temples, but the painkillers helped. Every damn bottle of liquor was out of his room, all the empties, all the half-full bottles, the unopened ones…all gone. He was dry now and brutally wide awake.
Awake and ready to do what needed to be done in order to start fresh. For real this time. None of this half-assed business he’d done before where he lied about himself. Lied to these people, lied to Rebel. Obviously that wasn’t working. It had to end now.
Time for a real fresh start.
The truth would finally set him free.
Everyone at the table stopped eating, went quiet and stared at him.
He looked at all of them. One by one. Even meeting Josie’s gaze and smiling.
“Sit down,” Rachel urged. “Join us, Trevor.” She pointed at his empty chair.
He shook his head and cleared his throat. It was time to clear the air. Time to come clean. It fucking sucked, but he had to do it. It needed to be done.
“No, not yet. I…” He swallowed. “I need to tell everyone something. I need to make sure you all know about me, everything about me. Even Josie.” He looked at the sweet little girl sitting in the midst of all the adults, the only child left on the planet. “Even you, Josie. I need all of you to know everything about my past.”
“You don’t have to do this,” Christian said. “We accept you as you are, Trevor. We always have.”
Trevor’s gaze clashed with his. “You accept me because I’ve been lying to you and not telling you about me. I lied to you, Christian. I lied to all of you.”
They were all quiet again. He saw Christian’s eyes narrow and his jaw tick. Trevor sighed and rubbed the back of his neck.
“What did you lie about?” Rachel whispered.
“I wasn’t a small-time crook who ended up in a country club prison. I told you that when I first met all of you because I wasn’t ready to tell you the truth. I figured my appearance enough was enough for you to handle and you wouldn’t be able to handle the rest.” He pointed at the tats on his neck. “Justin was right about me. I was a gang member, part of the Aryan Brotherhood. I’ve been a member for most of my adult life. My dad was in the Brotherhood too. I learned from him. That’s what this tat of the swastika means, it’s a right of passage, showing I’m part of the Brotherhood. And this one”—he pointed at the four-leaf clover—“this one means I killed a man in prison to signify my allegiance to the Brotherhood. I had to do that or I would be killed myself. Prison is brutal. You have to belong to a gang and prove yourself. Kill or be killed. After I did that they all left me alone. The reason why I was in prison and on death row was because I killed a man. I was in prison for murder. That’s what you don’t know. I murdered the man who was responsible for the gang rape of my sister. The man who sat back and let it all happen right in front of him. I killed my father. I fought with him, killed him, and went to prison for it.”
Again, the whole table was quiet.
“Fuck me,” Adam mumbled.
“I think I’m going to take Josie to the garden to help me pick some tomatoes,” Phoebe said brightly as she stood up with Josie’s hand in hers. “Come on, sweetie, let’s go outside for a bit.”
“But, Phoebe, I don’t wanna go. I want to listen to Trevor.”
“You can listen to him later. We have to get going now.”
“Sorry,” Trevor muttered.
“No worries.” Phoebe threw a smile over her shoulder as she pulled the complaining Josie with her out the back door.
The door shut behind them and the room returned to silence again.
Trevor shoved his hands in his pockets and looked down at the floor.
“Jesus, your own men gang raped your sister, and your Dad watched? Did they kill her?” Adam asked.
“No.” Trevor shook his head. “The virus did that.”
“Your dad ordered them to rape her?” Sebastian said.
“He brought his asshole friends over to my house when I was out on a job. The men in our gang who were the most notorious for their abuse of women. Dad passed out drunk and left them alone in my house…” His voice caught. He swallowed and kept going. “…left them alone in my house to do whatever they wanted to my sixteen-year-old sister. All five of them. My mom had run away from my dad ten years before and moved across the country to try and keep my sister safe from him and his shit. But she was sixteen and angry and thought my mom was keeping her from seeing her dad. She’d be
en back only two weeks. I was on the verge of getting her on a plane and back to Florida with my mom where she belonged when it happened.”
“Oh my god,” Rachel breathed. “I’m so sorry, Trevor. So sorry.”
He nodded. His lips pressed together.
“I lost my mind,” he admitted. “Didn’t try to hide what I did. And actually, I would’ve killed them all if they’d still been there, or if I’d been given more time to track them down. My dad was the first one I saw after, and I blamed him most of all. First, I’d taken my sister to the hospital, got her on a plane to Florida. And then I shot my dad one day in the front yard of my house when he came over to talk to me like nothing had fucking happened. Like he hadn’t let those motherfuckers gang rape his own daughter. I shot his ass dead and just sat on the front porch and waited for the cops to come and take me away.”
He took a deep breath. “I pleaded guilty and went to prison. That was okay with me. Worth it all to see him dead. I ratted out those motherfuckers, giving them up to the Feds. But I had plenty of years ahead of me before Ruyigi hit and all the guards died. When the end came I was sitting in a prison cell. When there was only a handful of prisoners left alive, the last two guards there opened all the cells. And I walked out. Just like that. I walked out of Avenal State Prison, a free man.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Three days later, Rebel, Justin, her cousin Krissy and her two new friends, Kati and Tiana started on their exploratory journey of north-eastern California.
They had maps.
They had a new minivan with plenty of room and supplies.
Justin had spoken with Adam on the radio, letting him know about their whereabouts and the fact that they would take a day or two longer than expected to pick up the RV. They couldn’t travel too far without the RV, they needed it as backup in case they went somewhere that didn’t have a safe, clean, place to sleep.
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