Evergreen

by Cox, Matthew S.

  Madison looked up from the dead screen, her face noticeably paler than usual—which said a lot. “I think he’s lying.”

  “Down,” said Cliff. He grabbed Jonathan by a fistful of jacket and dragged him to the right, taking cover behind parked cars in a lot across the street from the Hyundai place.

  In Harper’s mind, a pack of thugs grabbed Madison and carried her screaming into a dark place. No! She dashed left, toward the middle of the highway and took cover behind an abandoned police car. Bullets whizzed by from the distant thugs, though they seemed to be firing at Cliff—not a girl they wanted to grab. The hazy scene in front of her looked like something out of a zombie survival video game. Imaginary screams in Madison’s voice haunted the back of her mind. She rose up on her knees, lifting the shotgun and firing over the hood at the pack of men closer to her. The Mossberg hammered her shoulder, but she held her balance.

  Madison, who’d followed her, fell to her knees and screamed at the boom.

  Three of the thugs hit the ground; the one in the middle didn’t move again, but the two on either side of him writhed about, wailing in pain, covered in blood trails from stray pellets. Harper dropped down and scooted to the left as the other guys in that group all opened up on her with handguns. Clanks and cracks surrounded her from the barrage striking the car. A spray of red plastic fragments fell around her when a bullet hit the emergency lights. Hunkered against the rear wheel, she glanced over at Cliff, in the other parking lot about twenty feet away from her. He popped up, fired his hand cannon twice, and ducked a split second before return fire riddled the small orange SUV in front of him.

  Jonathan curled up in a ball next to Cliff, both hands over his head. Madison, sitting on the road beside Harper, kept poking the button of her iPhone, making angry faces at it for not turning on.

  “What are you doing?” rasped Harper. “Get down!”

  “I’m trying to call 911,” whispered Madison. “And I am down. I can’t get any more down without digging a hole.”

  “You goddamned bitch!” shrieked a man, sounding frighteningly close. “I’m gonna—”

  Harper sprang up, aiming over the trunk. She locked eyes with a twentysomething guy in a black leather jacket. His face warped with rage, he ran toward her as if intending to jump clear over the car. Imagining this guy tearing Madison out of her clothes destroyed hesitation. Harper squeezed the trigger. The Mossberg bucked into the tender spot it made on her shoulder; most of the man’s face disintegrated in a spray of red schlock and flying teeth. The body twisted into a fatal pirouette, collapsing mere feet away from the car.

  Another gang punk lay dead atop a rifle in the middle of the intersection, bleeding from the chest, Cliff’s first target. The others, all armed with a mixture of handguns, bats, and axes, had scattered to cover behind cars. One idiot tried to hide behind a decorative boulder at the edge of the Hyundai lot. Harper didn’t bother firing a shotgun at a guy thirty feet away, but within a second of her noticing him, a spritz of blood flew from his head along with a bang from Cliff’s direction.

  The remaining three guys focused on Harper threw a few more bullets her way, but nothing came closer than gouging the roof of the police cruiser. She fired twice; her second shot blew out the windshield of a blue car and sent the man hiding behind it running.

  Guess Dad was right. Shotguns scare people away.

  Madison let out a scream.

  Harper whirled, aiming at a scrawny man with a shaved head who had come out of nowhere behind them and grabbed Madison. She tried to point the gun at his head, but couldn’t bring herself to pull the trigger for fear of hitting her sister. The man grinned evilly at Harper while shielding his chest with the thrashing child. Madison screamed and flailed, pounding and kicking at him, but he largely ignored her, still holding a handgun to the side of her head. At the touch of metal to her temple, Madison went still.

  “Drop the cannon,” said the guy.

  “Not happening.” Harper kept the shotgun pointed at his face. “I drop this, we’re both as good as dead. How stupid do you think I am? Put her down now.”

  He hiked Madison higher, using her head to protect his face. “Go on, girlie. Shoot us both. You ain’t got the nerve. Scatter shot gonna kill your precious little kiddie, too.”

  Madison squirmed, both hands clutching the arm at her chest.

  Jonathan darted out from cover and sprinted across the street. A bullet or two pinged off the ground behind him. He charged in and leapt onto the man’s back, hitting the guy hard enough to make him stumble into a spin. Madison fought like a shrieking wildcat the instant the gun broke contact with her skin, wriggling loose from his grip and dropping to all fours. The guy grabbed Jonathan by the jacket, hauling him off his back and around in front of him. He bit the man’s wrist, drawing blood, clamping down with his teeth until the man lost his grip on the handgun, which clattered to the pavement.

  Cliff fired a few times rapidly, but he had his hands full from the rest of the gang peppering his cover with a steady hail of bullets.

  “Jonathan, get down!” yelled Harper, angling for a clear shot.

  The thug wrestled with the boy, trying to cling to the only reason he hadn’t eaten a face full of buckshot. Harper considered lunging in and walloping him with the butt, but didn’t want to risk having him grab the weapon and yank it away from her. He looked stronger than her by a good margin.

  Growling, Jonathan tried to kick him in the balls, but the guy saw it coming and twisted away, redirecting the hit to his hip. He backpedaled, seeming content to run off with Jonathan instead of Madison.

  Bang.

  A spurt of blood sprayed from the man’s side. He let off a wheeze and collapsed to one knee. The instant Jonathan wormed free of his grip, Harper blasted him near point blank. Buckshot slapped into his chest, flinging him into the pavement atop a spatter of crimson.

  Stunned, Harper glanced over at the source of the single shot.

  Madison stood in a wide stance, both hands clutching the thug’s dropped Glock. A wisp of smoke curled up from the barrel. She shifted her gaze to Harper. “Ow. This thing hurt my hand. And it’s too loud, not like Dad’s.”

  Cliff lunged to his feet and fired another shot. A groaning “Oof” replied from the distant haze along with the thump of a body hitting the ground. “Kid, you okay?”

  Madison stared at the gun, continuing to hold it in both hands, aimed forward. “What do I do with this? I can’t find the safety. I don’t wanna shoot myself.”

  “Get down!” Harper whirled to cover the street, but the only guys with blue sashes in sight lay dead where they’d fallen. The rest had run off either scared or wounded.

  Cliff jogged over and took the gun from Madison. She smiled, happy to be rid of it.

  “We gotta move. More will have heard that.” Cliff tucked the Glock in a side pocket of his backpack.

  “Yeah.” Harper hefted her shotgun in one hand and grabbed Madison by the wrist.

  Barely ten steps later, a man leapt out from behind a truck and charged at Harper with a hatchet. Cliff rushed sideways, intercepting the guy. Before Harper could even blink, Cliff had flipped him over onto the ash-covered ground and broken his arm. He yanked a knife from the thug’s belt and jammed it into his back with two precise thrusts that killed the man in seconds.

  Harper gawked. “Holy shit… are you like a Navy SEAL or something?”

  Cliff stood, waving them to keep going. “Nah. Army.”

  She trotted along after him, dragging Madison, who struggled to keep up. “Seriously? Army? Which part?”

  Cliff checked over the AR-15 he’d grabbed from one of the dead men. “My last tour was with the Seventy-Fifth Ranger Battalion.”

  “Oh.” Harper nodded out of reflex. That sounded pretty impressive, whatever it meant. “Cool. Kinda overkill for mall security, isn’t it?”

  “Hah.” He laughed. “Like I said, I saw enough crap to last a lifetime over there. Wanted something quiet.”

/>   “Sorry for shoplifting,” said Harper. “Thanks for letting me just go home.”

  “It’s okay, kid. Geez, you were scared shitless. You didn’t seem like the kinda kid who got off on stealing. I couldn’t do it to ya.” He chuckled. “Now those little punks with the bad attitudes, they needed the object lesson.”

  Warmth spread over Harper’s cheeks. Yeah, maybe she had been terrified. Probably why she never shoplifted again—or spoke to Denise after that. The girl dared her to steal as a ‘coolness test.’

  A faint thump came from behind, but Harper ignored it.

  “Harp! My phone!” yelled Madison. “I dropped it.”

  “It’s dead,” said Cliff. “Junk.”

  Madison burst into tears, wailing, “But Mom is gonna call me! An’ I don’t wanna miss it if Becca, Melissa, or Eva text me!”

  Harper kept going, grimacing at the heart-rending sobs coming from her little sister. The phone was junk. It would never work again. Even if it somehow came back to life, the whole cellular network had been fried.

  “Harp! Please!” Madison set her heels, her sneakers plowing trenches in the ash layer. “My phone.”

  It was pointless, but… it did make her feel better. Harper slowed to a stop. “Okay. Hurry up.”

  Cliff spun, raising the rifle to cover the rear as Madison sprinted back for the gleaming patch of black glass embedded in the moonlike fluff. Harper ran after her, refusing to let her sister get more than an arm’s length away.

  A handful of people in blue sashes, likely attracted to the gunfire from earlier, came running out of the smoke on the left. One charged straight at what he must’ve thought an easy grab of a child, and about shit himself when Harper shoved Madison aside and raised the Mossberg. The other two fired down the street toward Cliff.

  Harper squeezed the trigger. Madison clamped her hands over her ears and fell on top of her phone, cringing from the deafening boom. The guy who’d come running at her lurched to a halt as his chest erupted in a ripple of red spots. Harper fired again, reducing his face to a ruin of flesh. In her blurry awareness of the world behind him, the other two thugs collapsed dead on the steps of the building they’d come from.

  She glanced back at Cliff who must’ve taken them out with the rifle.

  Harper grabbed for Madison’s arm. The girl swiped her phone from the road, still sobbing, and darted away from her toward Cliff. Harper raced after her.

  “I’m sorry!” wailed Madison. She flew into a hug, wrapping her arms around Cliff and bawling, her face buried against his chest.

  Harper slowed to a nervous jog when she noticed the blood running down his arm.

  “Just a through-and-through,” said Cliff. “Keep going.”

  She looked down.

  “It’s fine.” Cliff patted Harper’s shoulder and muttered, “Kid needs it.”

  Madison let go of Cliff and pounce-hugged Harper, sniffling.

  “C’mon, Termite. We gotta get out of here before more bad guys show up.”

  “’Kay.” Madison took Harper’s hand.

  They walked for hours, following the highway, mercifully free of contact with any more hostile idiots. One guy at the edge of visibility in the haze waved at them, but made no move to approach or flee. For much of their journey, they passed by lines of abandoned cars left in place when the EMP washed over everything. By early evening, they walked along where scrub brush dotted the ground on both sides of the pavement, and the air had become noticeably less hazy.

  Cliff guided them to a spot where they could rest and shrugged off his backpack. While Jonathan and Madison wandered off in different directions to pee, he dug a small box out of the backpack and handed it to Harper. Next, he unpacked a glass bottle of clear liquid.

  She looked down at it. “Sewing kit?”

  “Yeah. There’s tweezers in there too.” Cliff pulled his sleeve up, exposing a bullet wound on his bicep. “Gonna need you to dig the slug out and sew the sucker closed. Toss a splash of this in the hole after the slug’s gone.”

  “What is it?”

  “Everclear.”

  “Booze?”

  He nodded. “Almost pure alcohol.”

  She squirmed. “You want me to like sew you?”

  Cliff leaned closer, giving her a flat look. “Cellular plans are getting expensive these days.”

  “Sorry.” Harper bit her lip. “I know it’s broken, but I couldn’t make her—”

  “Yeah, I get it. No harm, no foul. Just do the thing.”

  Jonathan, evidently aware of what went on with the needle-and-thread, occupied Madison a safe distance away so she wouldn’t see the amateur surgery. The two of them practiced a few dance moves, which appeared to pull Madison out of her shell at least for a little while.

  Cringing every step of the way, Harper knelt beside Cliff and picked at the wound with the tweezers until she unearthed a deformed pistol slug. Though he grimaced plenty and turned bright red, the man barely made a sound the whole time, even as she splashed Everclear into the hole and stitched it up.

  Watching him withstand pain like that got her hands shaking. “You’re like the terminator of mall security.”

  He forced a chuckle. “Is that my cue to say something cheesy like ‘I’ll be back’?”

  “I don’t wanna go back there.” Harper squinted into the wind, staring over her shoulder in the direction of the foggy mess that used to be Lakewood. “It’s not my home anymore. There’s nothing there but bad memories.” She let out a long breath. “So, umm. Now what?”

  “Now…” Cliff snagged the bottle of Everclear. Much to Harper’s surprise, he capped it rather than drank. “We head on up to Evergreen and hope what you heard was right. If not, maybe we keep going until we find some place better than that mall. Too damn many of those shitheads out there, and it’s only going to get worse.”

  She nodded, then leaned in to rest her head on his un-shot shoulder. “If Evergreen’s what I’m hoping it is, are you gonna stay with us?”

  “Hmm.” He patted her back. “Yeah. Maybe I can do that. You don’t seem like the ‘alone type.’”

  Harper smiled, watching her sister and Jonathan dancing about and grinning at each other. The two of them looked well on their way to being close. Madison had always been slow to make friends, hence only having three—but she made close friends. Despite him being the only other kid her age around, she warmed to him abnormally fast. Guess I’m not the only one who’s changed. She took a couple shells from her purse and stuffed them into the Mossberg. “I used to be so shy and timid.”

  “Used to?” asked Cliff. “Got over it?”

  She pulled back the side handle to chamber a shell, then stuffed one more into it. “Yeah. Stupid nuclear war.”

  Cliff laughed. “Ready to get going?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  He rolled his left arm around at the shoulder. “Hurts like hell, but I’ll deal with it.”

  “Cool. I guess we should keep walking. Evergreen or bust.”

  Cliff groaned as he stood and pulled the backpack on. “Never say that. The ‘or bust’ part. Don’t taunt luck.”

  “Sorry.” She waved for the kids to come back over. “After you.”

  Cliff led the way down the road. Harper followed a step behind and a little to the right, scanning their surroundings for any sign of danger. She couldn’t figure out exactly at what point she had gone from being afraid to leave home for college to roaming a highway with a loaded shotgun. The world had plunged into utter chaos, but she’d do whatever it took to protect her little sister.

  Her lips curled in a furtive smile at Cliff and Jonathan.

  She even wanted to protect the new family she’d found. Harper teased her finger at the trigger guard. She’d killed someone. Several someones. While she took no joy in it, that she didn’t feel crushing guilt over it worried her. Maybe it would hit her some night soon and she’d wake up in tears. For the moment, shooting those thugs had no more impact than killing enemies in
a video game.

  “Can we stop at Starbucks?” asked Madison, her voice somewhat muffled under the face mask.

  “I’ll think about it,” said Cliff. “All that sugar’s bad for your health.”

  The kids laughed.

  As did Harper.

  12

  Interstate 70

  Cliff advanced at a cautious pace, opting for quiet. The roughly two-inch-deep ash layer padded their footsteps, but it also made it possible for anyone to sneak up on them.

  They walked for barely an hour before Madison asked for a bathroom break. She didn’t like it when Cliff stopped right on the road and said, “Okay.” She liked it even less when Harper pointed out the lack of a toilet anywhere nearby. Reluctantly, she wandered a few steps off the road. Everyone turned their back.

  “So, we’re gonna take Route 70 until it splits to 74, which’ll go right into Evergreen.” Cliff pointed ahead.

  “How far is it?” Harper looked around at the hint of a residential neighborhood south of the highway. They hadn’t gotten too far away from the mall yet, but the haze killed any sense of familiarity the area might’ve had.

  “On foot? Probably somewhere between six to eight hours depending on pace. No reason to bust our asses though.” Cliff bounced his backpack up a little higher. “You almost done, kiddo?”

  “I can’t start. It’s too cold. Don’t look!”

  “Think about a waterfall,” said Jonathan. “All that water pouring over a cliff and falling down.”

  “Aww, dammit,” muttered Cliff. “Gimme a sec.”

  He walked over to the opposite side of the road from Madison. Jonathan laughed, but shrugged and went over to stand next to him. Harper sighed—deliberately not thinking about waterfalls. She figured it would be pretty difficult to get lost. Following a highway composed of two three-lane roads separated by a dirt median had to be one of the simpler things she’d ever done. Of course, the hard part came in not being shot or kidnapped.

  She contemplated history before the modern sense of morality developed. The society she’d grown accustomed to didn’t exactly treat women and girls well, but it had been way better than ancient times or even some foreign countries. Without the courts and police, only the shotgun in her hands stood between her and whatever men wanted to do to her. Of course, she didn’t expect every man to be like that—Cliff certainly wouldn’t treat her like an object—but it would only take one bad guy. And Lakewood sure seemed to have a ton of them. Had they all lost their minds after the blast? What could’ve driven reasonably normal people to becoming a roving gang like that?