by Tarah Benner
Years of killing and watching people die have made Eli withdraw completely to protect himself from the pain. He’s bottled up every ounce of sadness and hope and love and told himself it was better that way. Then a ghost from his past returns, and none of what he’s told himself makes sense anymore.
“Can you untie me?” Owen asks, breaking the strained silence. “We shouldn’t stick around. More will come.” He glances down at the prone bodies of the men we shot, and I have to hold back a shudder.
This seems to shake Eli out of his stupor. His back is still to Owen, but I see an angry expression cloud his face. “No. You work for them.”
“Yeah. So? You work for them.”
By Owen’s tone, I can tell he means another “them” — the people in the compound. To him, that’s just as despicable.
“We should get out of here, Eli,” I say.
His eyes find mine for the first time in several minutes, and a heavy question passes between us.
In that instant, he isn’t in charge of the mission. He isn’t telling me what to do or trying to protect me. He’s asking me to tell him what to do.
I glance at Owen, suddenly uncomfortable that he’s watching our exchange.
“We should find out what he knows anyway,” I whisper.
“Oh, not you, too,” Owen groans, shooting me a look of naked disgust. His expression is wildly different from what I’m used to, but he looks so much like Eli that I recoil.
“Watch it!” Eli snaps. He jerks back into an upright position and spins around as though he might backhand his brother. “We do this on our terms or not at all.”
Owen lets out an irritated breath. “Fine.”
Now he looks and sounds just like Eli.
Eli swallows again, and when he finally gets the question out, his voice is low and husky. “Can we trust you?”
Owen looks a little shocked. “It’s me.”
That doesn’t seem to reassure Eli, but he takes a knife from his utility belt and cuts Owen’s ropes anyway.
When Owen stands, he’s only half an inch shorter than his brother. He’s wearing a charcoal-colored T-shirt, olive green cargo pants, and heavy boots that look as if they’d be good for kicking somebody’s head in. Side by side, their resemblance is uncanny.
For a moment, they just stare at each other. I think they might embrace or start throwing punches, but neither of them moves. Owen’s eyes are tight, but the emotion and history that passes between them is enough to steal my breath.
Finally, Eli seems to realize they have an audience. His eyes flit over to me, and Owen takes notice.
“Where should we go?” I ask, a little intimidated by both brothers.
“I know a place,” says Owen. “It’s not far . . . and no one will find us there.”
Eli looks as though he wants to protest, but we’ve already been here too long.
Since we don’t have a better plan, we follow Owen up the stairs and through the kitchen. He checks to make sure the coast is clear before he heads around every corner.
When Eli and I pull on our masks, he looks a little puzzled. Owen just walks outside — completely exposed — and I wonder again how he’s still alive. He doesn’t seem sick like any of the Recon workers who’ve had prolonged radiation exposure, but maybe he knows where the radiation levels are lowest.
We walk along the side of the road in alert silence. Eli hasn’t stopped watching his brother. He’s got one hand on his gun and the other pressed against his thigh, but if his leg is bothering him, he doesn’t show it on his face.
Owen is preoccupied scanning the road. It seems strange for him to be on high alert for drifters, but then I remember that the different gangs don’t get along.
I expect him to lead us back to the old motel where Eli and I hid or into one of the other abandoned buildings, but instead, he leads us off the main drag to a narrow road winding around an old warehouse.
Hidden behind that is a row of derelict houses. One of them looks as though the elements have taken hold of it completely. The roof is caved in, and gnarled desert bushes have twisted their way up the porch steps as though they plan to consume it. There’s also an adobe structure with all the windows broken in.
The house between them is weathered and neglected, but there doesn’t seem to be any structural damage. There are boards over the door and windows, but Owen leads us around to the back door — which isn’t boarded — and produces a key.
The door opens with a loud creak, and the floorboards give in a friendly way when we step inside.
It’s hot and dark in the house, but the faint light filtering through the boarded windows is enough to make out a kitchen with yellow-and-white wallpaper, outdated brown cabinets, and a small oak table.
I yank off the mask and deposit my rucksack onto the floor. Owen pushes past me to secure the house, and I follow in a trance.
The house is old but well cared for, and I wonder how Owen managed to find it. Whoever lived here is long gone now, but they left all the comforts of home: a worn paisley couch and matching recliners, creepy ceramic cat figurines, and thick shag carpeting that clashes brilliantly with the wood paneling.
As I’m exploring the living room, I feel a hand on my arm that makes me jump. It’s only Eli, but he’s got a wary look in his eyes.
“Stay close, all right?”
“Oh, relax,” says Owen. “If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead by now.”
“Don’t count on it,” growls Eli, turning one of the more aggressive cat figurines away from him on the shelf.
“I’m your brother! Why would I kill you?”
“I don’t know. Why did you run off and join the thugs that killed Mom and Dad?”
“I didn’t! And I thought you were dead!”
“I was around,” snarls Eli. “You can’t have been looking too hard.”
“Are we doing this now?” asks Owen. When he crosses his arms and glares at me, he looks so much like the big brother who wants to keep family business in the family.
“Whatever you have to say to me, you can say in front of Harper,” says Eli.
The sudden warmth that surges through my limbs is doused by Owen’s harsh gaze. He’s scrutinizing me carefully, as though trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing here. “You his girlfriend?”
“No!”
Eli looks a little nervous. “She’s my . . . cadet,” he says lamely.
Owen rolls his eyes and sinks down into one of the worn recliners. “Yeah, whatever. You want to talk? Let’s talk.”
I glance at Eli, who’s still standing, ready for a fight. I’m sure he’s imagined seeing his brother again a million times, but he clearly didn’t picture it going like this.
I sink down onto the sagging couch, and Eli follows suit. He looks over at Owen, studying him as if he can’t quite believe his eyes.
“How are you alive? So many people I know died of radiation poisoning. How are the rest of you doing it?”
Owen shrugs. “I just don’t get sick. Most of us don’t. As long as we stay out of the hot zones . . . we seem to be surviving.”
“Who’s we?”
“Nuclear Nation.”
“A gang.”
Owen frowns. “Just some guys. They took me in after . . . after that night. They calmed me down, fed me, and I’ve been with them ever since.”
“Those thugs who tried to kill you?”
“No,” says Owen in a testy voice. “But Nuclear Nation has been taken over by the Desperados. It hasn’t been pretty, but with the cities pretty much gone, everything’s a fight for territory.” He drags an agitated hand through his short hair, as though it still makes him angry to think about it. “We lost.”
“Where do you live?”
“Around. When Jackson has business near the compounds, I stay here. But normally I stay in a nearby settlement.”
“A city?”
Owen shakes his head. “The cities are not where you want to be. That’s where the ra
diation is the worst. Little towns like this . . . They got the fallout, but they’re in much better shape.”
“Why do you stay with those people?”
Owen’s mouth becomes a hard line, and I can tell Eli is treading in dangerous territory. “Where else was I supposed to go? I was thirteen. I’d lost my family, Eli. They took me in. It wasn’t a hard decision.”
“Yeah. I thought I lost my family, too.” He glances away, resentment hanging in the air between the brothers.
“And you went straight to the compounds?”
“No.” Eli swallows, and I know what comes next is hard for him to admit. “I just bummed around the city, stealing food when I could . . . sleeping in old buildings.”
He launches into the story of his time in the gang, leaving out the part about killing the man.
As he talks, Owen drops his guard a little, and I can see the pain Eli’s story causes him. It’s not much different from his adolescence, and I know he’s thinking about what it might have been like if he and Eli hadn’t gotten separated. Maybe he thinks he failed him as an older brother.
When Eli gets to the part about being tested and brought into the compound, Owen sits up a little straighter, listening with rapt attention.
“I’d heard they were experimenting with bringing people in from the outside, but I never believed it!”
“Believe it,” I say. “They brought me and my parents in, too.”
Owen grows thoughtful, turning this information over in his mind.
Then Eli’s face becomes grave, and I can tell there’s a question that’s weighing on him even more than his family’s past. “Why are your men encroaching into compound territory?”
Owen’s eyes tighten. “The compounds are what’s killing us, Eli. You have to understand that. I know you live there, but . . . they have to be stopped.”
Eli lets out a cold laugh. “You can’t stop the compounds.”
“Well, they aren’t gonna go on like this forever. They’ve been killing our people for decades, but we’re organized now — stronger.”
“And you think a bunch of drifters can bring down the compounds?”
“That’s what you call us?” He throws his head back in exasperation. “Fucking unbelievable. Some of those ‘drifters’ your people have been killing are innocent families, you know. These people take shelter wherever they can while you guys pick them off one by one. Your waste has been contaminating the groundwater, which makes it damn near impossible for anybody to live out here. It’s wrong. It’s wrong for the minority to make the rest of us suffer.”
“You can’t destroy the compounds,” says Eli. “And even if you could . . . the people can’t survive out here. The radiation would kill them.”
“It’s killing everyone, Eli. It’s just doing it slowly. Why should some people get to live like that when the rest of us live like this?”
Eli lets out a worried breath and leans forward. “We don’t really have the option of dying slowly.”
“What are you talking about?”
Eli glances at me and then seems to decide there’s no point not telling his brother. “There are people in the compound who want us dead. They sent us to find the Desperados’ location and report back.”
“The compound is looking for the Desperados?”
Eli nods. “One of your men broke into the cleared zone.”
“The perimeter?” Owen grimaces. “I knew it. I knew when he didn’t come back . . .”
A look of intense distress flits across his face, and then his eyes widen in horror as the realization hits him. “Did you kill Emmett?”
Eli stares at his brother, his hand clenched on his bad leg. “One of your men shot me. What was I supposed to do?”
Owen bows his head and puts a hand over his mouth. “You killed him, didn’t you?”
Eli clenches his jaw. “Yeah. I did.”
There’s a long pause. As they stare at each other, I’m overcome with sadness for Eli. He’s still in shock, unable to accept that the brother he thought was dead is sitting right in front of him.
Now that he knows Owen is alive, he can’t just be overjoyed that the last member of his family is sitting before him. He’s marred in a cloud of suspicion, and Owen is still trying to process the fact that his brother is the enemy.
As Owen recovers, I have the sudden urge to run out of the room and leave the two of them alone to work out their issues. If Eli is intimidating, the older Parker brother is downright terrifying.
There’s a darkness around him I recognized in Eli, only it’s been magnified by a decade of running and killing to survive. Eli probably would have turned out the same, had he lived out his teenage years on the Fringe.
“Listen, I need your help,” says Eli. “I need you to tell me where the Desperados are based.”
Owen’s eyes grow dark with fury. “I’m not going to help you help them.”
“You’ve got to give me something,” he says, teetering on the edge of desperation. “If we go back with no information, I don’t know if they’ll bother sending us out again. They may just decide to kill us and be done with it.”
Owen stares at Eli, caught between the urge to protect his brother and his hatred of the compound.
“Something,” says Eli. “Give me something I can tell them.”
“I can give you the location of one of the old rendezvous points. We don’t use it anymore, but it will keep your people occupied for a while.”
Eli hesitates and glances at me. We both know the risk of sending Jayden on a wild-goose chase — particularly when it could be us doing the chasing — but it’s better than returning to the compound empty-handed.
Finally, Eli nods.
Owen stands up and crosses to an old desk in the corner of the room. He returns with a map and spreads it out on the coffee table in front of us.
“This is where we are,” he says, pointing on the map. “If you follow the highway north for twenty miles, you’ll reach Fort Sol.”
He sits up, and Eli stares at him expectantly. “That’s it?”
“How would you know the exact location? Just tell your people you heard of a safe house in Fort Sol. That’s reasonable.”
“You haven’t met our commander.”
“I’m sorry,” says Owen. “I’m not going to hand over the Desperados and make it easier for your people to kill off every survivor in the area.”
The way the brothers are staring at each other, I can tell they’ve reached a stalemate. Owen storms into the kitchen to fix us something to eat, leaving me and Eli alone.
“I don’t like this,” he whispers, leaning closer and glancing over his shoulder to make sure his brother is out of earshot.
“What? Not having anything to go on when we report back to Jayden?”
“No. This. Being in this house. My brother —” He stops abruptly, staring at the doorway Owen disappeared through as if he can make him reappear as the boy he grew up with.
His eyebrows knit together, and a muscle works in his jaw as he fights to contain the turmoil raging inside him.
Without thinking, I reach out and touch his knee. He drags in a sharp breath, but I leave it there.
“Eli. You found him . . . the brother you thought was dead. This is a good thing.”
“Is it?” His eyes widen. “I’m just not sure.”
“What do you mean?”
He drags a hand through his hair, conflict burning in his eyes. “We shouldn’t even be here, Harper. What the fuck was I thinking? We’re in a drifter’s house.”
“We’re in your brother’s house,” I correct him.
Eli doesn’t answer right away, but he jiggles his foot nervously.
“You don’t trust him?”
For the first time since I’ve known him, Eli looks genuinely flustered. “How can I? I haven’t seen him in thirteen years! I don’t even know who he is anymore!”
“He’s still your brother.”
His jaw tightens. “No
,” he says with a note of finality. “My brother died with my parents that night.”
A creaking sound behind us makes me jump, and I whip around to see Owen standing in the doorway. His face is completely blank — a familiar Lieutenant Parker poker face — but I can tell he heard everything Eli just said.
“Food’s almost ready,” he says in a harsh voice. “You guys must be hungry.”
I turn back to Eli and see him wearing an identical emotionless expression. It’s the most inappropriate reaction, but I can’t quite kill the smile that’s working its way over my face.
I guess being emotionally closed off is a trait the Parker men share.
I get up to follow Owen back into the kitchen and try to gear myself up for the most awkward dinner of my life.
nineteen
Eli
Sitting across the table from Owen is nothing like being back home. A strained silence hangs over us, and the only sound comes from the clang of our spoons against the bowls and the steady tick of the creepy cat clock hanging on the wall.
Harper is sitting between us, looking almost as uncomfortable as I feel. I glance around at the outdated kitchen to distract myself, but the tacky yellow wallpaper and cat-themed accents are almost as disturbing as sitting at the table with Harper and my brother.
Owen’s made some kind of rehydrated stew, and he crushes his crackers in the palm of his enormous hand the same way he did when we were kids. He looks as I always imagined I’d look when I got older, except maybe a little meaner.
We eat quickly so we won’t have to talk to each other, but after a few minutes, Owen drops his spoon and shoves his chair away from the table.
“Fuck it,” he mutters.
When he stands, it strikes me just how big he is compared to the last time I saw him. Harper goes rigid in her chair, and I grip my knee to keep my hand from going to the gun in my holster.
It’s Owen, I tell myself. He’s not one of them.
Except he is. I’m just in denial. My brother is a drifter.
Owen rummages around in the highest cabinet and pulls out a bottle with a faded black label coated in decades of dust. He slams it onto the counter and pulls out three glasses, tipping about an inch of amber liquid into each.
