I’m still following Caroline, but I’m not sure she is heading any place in particular. More like she’s just moving to move, hoping that she’ll dumb luck her way to somewhere safe.
She comes to a junction. There’s no more straight ahead, only right or left. The choice seems to have vexed her. We’ve stopped walking. I give her a moment.
“Hey!” It’s a shout from behind us. It’s Jason and the two guys who are with him.
I step around Caroline and go left. I run; she follows. We are bounding over the piles of concrete in big steps. There’s no time to run around them.
Jason shouts again, and there’s a crack as he takes a shot. Caroline doesn’t scream, so I assume that she’s OK. She sprints past me to confirm it. The aisle we are on makes another left turn ahead of us, and I watch her round the corner of a building that’s still standing. A moment later she’s back, diving behind a pile of concrete. Clouds of concrete and dust explode just behind her as bullets crash into the front of her pile.
I side step concrete that’s scattered in front of me, and Jason shouts something that I can’t understand. The crack from another gunshot bounces off what’s left of these storage units. I drop to the ground and slide behind the pile where Caroline has holed up.
I immediately get up on one knee and send a wild shot over the concrete in front of me, roughly in Jason’s direction.
“Willie’s coming up the other way,” Caroline says.
I send another wild shot in Willie’s direction, and for a moment everything is quiet. The impromptu ceasefire doesn’t last. Somebody from Jason’s side lets off a couple of shots that go high, but not by much. Caroline and I both brush concrete dust from our hair, and a shot comes from Willie’s side. It hits a metal overhead door behind us.
“This isn’t going to work!” Caroline shouts.
“No.” I confirm. “We are fighting on two fronts.”
“Cover me,” she says and stands up. She’s facing Jason and his team, shielded from Willie by a chunk of concrete roofing that’s fallen and landed vertically. It’s wide and tall like a tree trunk. That doesn’t keep him from firing, but she’s safe for now.
One of Jason’s friends stands, and I squeeze off a shot that’s not meant to hit him, only to sit him down. Caroline squirrels her face into a tight bunch, her mouth pinched into a tight knot and her eyes narrowed.
She brings her left hand up, palm facing the sky. The three-piece concrete bunker Jason and his team had been hiding behind lifts from the ground.
I look over and check on Willie. He’s taken a few steps outside of his hiding place. He’s in the open and approaching us. I take aim and fire. My shot is low. It hits the ground in front of him. He jump,s and the bullet skips wide. I fire again. He’s distracted by the first shot and this one catches him in the shoulder as he dives for more cover. The shot spins him a bit sideways and his gun clatters to the ground.
I turn back to Caroline. She the three large chunks of concrete a dozen feet off the ground now, and they are still rising. Jason and the other two are so stunned that they haven’t thought about firing at her.
Caroline stops the concrete’s ascent. She starts to spin her hand, and the concrete responds. It starts doing slow circles above Jason and his crew. They are mesmerized, but I know what’s coming next. I’ve seen her practice this too many times.
Jason is staring up at the concrete doing gymnastics above him, no idea what’s about to come. No idea that he’s staring at his own death.
Caroline turns her hand over, palm to the ground, and the concrete stops spinning. The she drops her hand.
I turn my head away just before Jason and his friends are turned into stains on the ground.
“Where’s Willie?” Caroline asks.
I point to a smaller pile of concrete that’s in front of us, and she begins the same trick. A moment later we can see Willie crawling on the ground. He’s trying to get back to his gun. I fire a shot that hits the concrete in front of him. I don’t want to kill him anymore, at least not yet. I want him to suffer.
He rolls to his back as the bullet passes in front of him. It explodes against the pile of concrete that his gun has come to rest near. He looks at us then at the concrete slowly climbing higher.
“Oh, darlin’,” he says. “How we could have used you around camp.”
Caroline isn’t paying him any attention. From what I can tell she can’t even hear him. Her face is pulled even tighter than before. All of her focus in on keeping the concrete aloft.
Willie slowly keeps pushing himself backward, never taking his eyes from the pile floating above him. He scrambles to his feet and grabs his gun from the ground. Then he turns and runs. He’s dodging concrete so he never gets to top speed.
Caroline raises the concrete a few feet higher then brings her arms down with a force that even I can feel. Everything goes flying toward Willie. The largest piece catches him in the back of the head. There’s a sickening thunk, and he goes down. He skids across the concrete and the chunk of rock that caught him in the head lands across his waist, crushing his legs. He lets out a soft groan, and the ground around him begins to go slowly red.
I’m not thinking about Willie, though. I’m thinking about Caroline, because she’s done it.
Projection.
NINE
This magic steals all of Caroline’s stamina. She’s spent and lying on the ground behind our little concrete bunker. She has one arm draped across her stomach, and I watch it rise and fall as she sucks wind.
I lean against the bit of wall that’s still standing behind us. We recover in near silence for a moment. The only sound right now is Willie. He didn’t die.
He’s moaning and coughing. It goes on for a few minutes before Caroline asks what we are going to do now.
“About him?”
“Yeah, him.”
There’s silence again while we each wait for the other one to offer an idea, both avoiding the answer that we know is the right one.
“He can’t be in good shape,” I finally say.
“No,” Caroline agrees. “Think nature will just take care of itself?”
“Probably.”
Willie moans again, long and low. Caroline pushes herself up to a seated position. She looks me in the eye.
“Are you comfortable leaving it up to nature?”
“No.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
“OK.” I stand up and let out a deep sigh. “I’ll be right back.”
I don’t want to do this. I need to do this, but I don’t want to do it. There’s something that feels cold about it. Yes, I shot at him just a few moments earlier, but that was justifiable. It was self defense. The guy was shooting at me too. Now, though, as I’m walking toward him all I can see are feet coming out from under the chunk of concrete that landed on top of him. He’s the Wicked Witch of the East. Caroline is Dorothy Gale.
As I get closer, I can see Willie’s face. It’s raw and bloodied, taking the brunt of his fall. Sliding a few feet didn’t help. There’s debris embedded in his cheek. Blood has covered his left eye. As I get closer, he smiles. His mouth is full of red teeth, and blood slowly runs out of the corner.
“Hey, friend.” His voice is even harsher than normal.
“Willie.” I stop short. He looks grotesque, and I don’t know that I need to see him in any more detail than I already have.
“I don’t know that I thought how all of this would end up …” He coughs, the blood in the back of his throat bubbling and crackling. He stops then starts again. He pinches his eyes shut tight and pauses after it’s over then spits out a mouthful of blood-thickened mucus. Then he continues.
“I didn’t know how this would all end up, but I don’t know if I would have ever thought it’d be like this.”
I don’t respond. I don’t know what to say. There’s nothing about this life anymore that’s expected.
Willie’s gun lays loose on the palm of his outstretched hand. He slowl
y closes his fingers around the grip. His index finger rests lightly on the trigger.
It takes everything he has to begin to raise the gun in my direction. I bring my gun up as the barrel of his gets closer to pointing at my chest, but he doesn’t stop until his gun rests under his chin.
I turn away as he pulls the trigger. All I hear is the blast from the gun. The shot echoes quickly through the storage facility. Then everything is quiet. Silent. Still.
“Mac?” Caroline calls.
“Yeah.” I say back, confirming that I’m fine.
“You did it?”
I head back to her and our little spot. “No,” I say as I walk. “He did it.”
She doesn’t say it, but her nodding tells me that she’s glad. I am too. I sit again and lean back against the wall I’d been rested against earlier.
It’s getting late. They grey skies above us are turning darker, and we have no apartment to turn to for the night. We have to figure out where we are going to sleep. I look around us. There’s cover here from the fallen concrete. And there’s really only two areas we need to watch, the corridor Willie used and the corridor Jason used. Where we’re at is actually close to perfect.
I grab my pack and reach inside. I pull out the tarp and shake it open. Caroline grabs the other side and helps me hang it. We tie corners to open bits of metal and quickly have a cover over our heads. Caroline sits back under our little makeshift roof.
She nods. “This is good.”
And she’s right. It feels right, at least for now.
I wanted, maybe desperately, for a place like Willie’s to feel like home, but it didn’t, no matter what I may have been telling myself. I want community. I need it. But that’s not what that was. That was isolation. They were setting themselves up on an island away from everyone else. And, yes, it may have made them safe; it wasn’t going to make them happy. Eventually, they’d all have wandered off one by one and found their way to the wailer incubator and voluntarily made themselves monster food.
This church in Oklahoma, though. That’s the community I need. At least I hope that it is. I need to get there to find out.
Caroline is watching me get lost in my own head, I’m sure a common sight for her at this point.
“Done thinking?” she asks.
“For now.”
She lays back and settles her head onto her pack like it’s a pillow. She closes her eyes and says “Tell me a story, world traveler.”
I think for a moment and ask her “Mountain or sea?”
She considers her choices and says “Sea.”
“All along the southern coast of Italy,” I begin, “there are small fishing villages. Small boats fill the docks, and, if you’re nice enough and have the right smile, they’ll let an under-sized American traveler join the crew, at least for a day.”
I continue to tell Caroline about my adventures on the Mediterranean, most of it true. I tell her about struggling with a net when a wailer cries. A chorus of respondents follow, and, suddenly, my heart is racing.
Caroline sits up. “I’d almost forgotten about those.”
I nod. I had too. Either Willie’s plan had worked and the wailers had abandoned the area around his compound as over hunted, or we had become so secure in that apartment that we didn’t hear the wailers cries anymore, like you don’t hear the creaks and moans of an old house until you’re alone and in the dark.
Another wailer screams, this one a shrill, high-pitched cry that seems to go on for minutes. Caroline’s eyes dart to the right then the left. Her back stiffens, and she sites up straighter.
“Relax,” I tell her. “I’ll take first shift.”
+++++
I wake to the smell of coffee. It’s Heaven. We haven’t had coffee since we left Fair Park, and the scent is a comfort. I lay on the ground with my eyes closed and luxuriate in the memories that this is bringing back, of mornings in the mountains. Someone I’ve been camping with has stoked up a not-dead fire from the night before just enough to get a pot of stream water boiling. We pour the hot water over instant grounds--they pack easier--and drink bad coffee as the sun comes up.
Caroline is taking a long drink from a chipped mug when I roll over and open my eyes.
“Good morning.” She hands me a mug, and I grab it with both hands.
“It may not be hot anymore.” She pouts out her bottom lip as a form of apology.
It’s not really, but that’s fine. It’s still delicious.
“Where’d you find this?”
She points around the corner. “A unit over there.”
“You breaking and entering again?”
She shakes her head. “Nature did that for me.”
She’s built a fire with a busted up end table that I assume also came from a storage unit. It’s small, but it cooks the coffee and warms me from the morning chill.
She pours herself a second cup, and we drink in silence for a moment before I say something that’s been on my mind all night.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“This.” I point to Willie, to Jason. “I encouraged our little distraction. I shouldn’t have. We should have thanked Willie for his help and kept moving forward. Kept heading north.”
“This isn’t your fault.” She lifts the pot to pour me another cup. The sides of the mug warm my hands as she fills it to near the top. “Besides, it’s not all a loss. We’ve got this now.” She holds up the coffee pot.
“A bit of a steep price to pay, don’t you think?”
“I like coffee.”
But, she’s right. Not about the coffee pot.
“We do know more than we did before,” I say. “And there’s value to that.”
“How do you mean?” She finishes her cup and sets it to the side.
“We know there are people like Willie now with camps like his. We know that these people aren’t necessarily happy that others are doing what the two of us are doing. We know to keep away.”
“Or to try to.”
“Sure. But stay on the highway and we should be fine. Or in a better position.”
I almost tell Caroline about the wailers nursery that Willie showed me, but I change my mind. I don’t know that that’s information she needs. Besides, if I tell her about it she’ll just want to see it, and there’s no reason to backtrack now.
I finish my second cup of coffee and start to pull down the tarp. Caroline stands to help.
“I’m ready to see my sister.”
“I’m ready to get you there.”
“Then let’s go,” she says.
We finish packing in silence and head out the same way we came in. Caroline diverts her eyes as we pass Jason and his team. I don’t, and the scene is brutal. Their faces and the tops of their heads are crushed, gone.
We did that, and I wish I could say I was sorry. Maybe another day, after some time has passed, but I doubt it. Something inside of me is different now. Unalterably different. I’m capable of things that I never thought I’d be. No, I didn’t crush them with those rocks, but that’s only because I wasn’t blessed with the abilities that Caroline has. If I had been I would have spun the rocks twice as high, let them hit them twice as hard. They’d have been pulp on the concrete.
The wind has picked up, and it hits us as we step out of the storage facility and back out onto the streets. Branches rattle in the breeze. Those that have fallen snap under our feet.
Somehow the world is changed. Like I’ve learned its secrets, and I’m seeing it in a new way. There was this life that it was leading that it kept hidden, and now, knowing about it, I am rethinking everything that I knew. I’m replaying conversations. I’m thinking back over everything that it’s ever said to me or anything I’ve seen it do, and I’m reconsidering with this new information.
I just assumed everyone was on the same side. It was us versus the wailers and whoever or whatever sent them. I never considered that there’d be sides among us. That there’d be others who saw f
ellow humans as something to be purged for the greater good. We’d only be the greater if we were united.
But now that I do know that not everyone agrees with me, there’s a different tint to the world and a different tilt to what I see.
Caroline is still ahead of me, and past her is the highway. We can see the bridge silhouetted against the brown-cloud sky. As we get closer, I can see that it’s somehow still intact. The boulders didn’t take it out. The wailers didn’t tear it down. For some reason that makes me smile.
Caroline looks back to me and the grin across my face.
“What’s that all about?”
I point to the bridge. “That,” I say. “It just makes me happy.”
She looks at the bridge. “Yeah. Me too.”
We pass underneath its unbroken shade and turn to climb the ramp back onto the highway. Back onto the road north.
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OTHER BOOKS BY JARRETT RUSH
The New Eden Series
Chasing Filthy Lucre
Finding Faded Light
Digi City
The Freak Police Series
Reunion
Scouts
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Rubble & Ruin (Book 2): The Road North Page 8
