Mary nods, tears rolling down her flushed cheeks.
I can’t tell if she believes me, but she has no other options.
29
I approach the door to Mother’s place. With one hand, I wave Abby and Lilly back. “You guys better hang here.”
Abby rolls her eyes. “Here we go again.”
I frown at her. “What does that mean?”
“Oh, Jack, I know you. I know how you think. You think this Mother character is the reincarnated Mother we once knew outside of D.C….right?”
I don’t answer.
“That’s ridiculous,” she scolds me. “This is just a coincidence, that’s all. She’s just another psycho trying to get attention.”
“Whatever,” I say, the obvious waving of the white flag. “Just hang back. I’ll let you know after I talk to her.”
I turn to Mary, who’s still clutching her son like someone’s going to steal the boy from her. Not here, though. Here, I think, we’re among friends. I try my best to give her a reassuring look. She seems to relax slightly.
I step into the woman’s hovel. It smells like burning candles and lavender. There’s not much light. I suddenly can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t walk any farther.
“Jack Jupiter,” a voice says, a voice that sounds so familiar.
I am frozen. This voice brings me back almost two decades.
There’s just no way it can be the same person, Mother of the village outside of D.C.
It’s impossible.
“Come forward, Jack Jupiter,” the woman says.
I do, but I don’t feel my legs moving. It’s like they’re moving on their own, like I’m no longer in control.
“I knew you would be here, my son. I knew it. I have seen it in the flames,” the voice says.
I’m losing my mind, it’s that simple.
It can’t be…can it?
The voice, the inflection, the way it rises and shakes. This can’t be the same woman I met outside of Washington D.C., the same woman who died in my arms, holding her husband’s ashes.
The voice is coming from behind a shabby curtain, patches of red and green stitched over it, hanging on a shower rod. It blows gently, as if there’s a breeze somewhere inside the hovel, but there’s not.
“Come in, my dear, come in!”
I hesitate, finally gaining control over my legs again. I know that if I go in there and I see the woman I knew all those years ago, I, too, will lose my mind. I don’t think I’m ready for that, to go completely crazy. Sure, I guess I’m already partially crazy. Anyone who’s survived as long as me has to be, right? But completely batshit? Not yet, and hopefully not ever.
“Don’t be shy, Jack. I won’t bite.” The woman laughs.
It’s a soft laugh that doesn’t stir up any feelings of remembrance in me. That’s a good sign, because I remember Mother’s laugh; it was the type of laugh you couldn’t forget, just how she was the type of person you couldn’t forget, either.
I reach out and move the curtain. The first thing I see beyond it freezes my body.
It’s a large wheel, the wheel of a wheelchair. Slowly, my eyes rise. I see the woman. She is not the Mother I once knew, but the resemblance isn’t far off. She’s sitting in the chair, weak and frail, a blanket covering her legs. She wears a red and white polka dot bandana tied around her head, much like Rosie the Riverter from the “We Can Do It!” poster of the 1940s. She is not nearly as old, perhaps in her sixties, and she’s white, so white one might mistake her for a vampire or ghost. Her hair is a brittle blonde, and though she is only somewhere in her sixth decade, her face is wrinkled and harsh, the kind of face you’d expect on a person who has lived a full and hard life.
She turns her chair away from the small window she’s looking out of. In the distance, you can see the Overlord’s tower.
“Here, sit down, friend. Get comfortable,” she says to me.
I sit in a chair opposite her. “Thank you…”
“Mother. They all call me Mother around here.”
“Mother,” I say, still not believing it. “You wanted to see me?”
“Yes. And it wouldn’t be the first time that I have seen you, either,” she replies.
My blood runs cold, heart drops. Going crazy, Jack, you’re losing it. I try to shake the feeling. “I’ve heard about your…visions,” I say.
“You don’t believe in them?” She smiles somberly, a grandmotherly smile if I’ve ever seen one.
“I do. This wouldn’t be the first time I’ve dealt with the idea of visions in the post-apocalyptic world. I mean, if zombies can rise from the dead, why can’t people see the future?”
“You’re a smart young man,” Mother says, still smiling.
“Young? Not so much anymore,” I say and return the smile.
I can’t imagine how I look to her, covered in dirt, grizzled, too-long hair, too-long beard.
Mother raises her eyebrows. “Why, yes. You’re very young, Jack. Compared to me, you’re a boy!”
“How old are you?”
She clicks her tongue. “Don’t you know it’s not polite to ask a lady her age? Didn’t your mother teach you that?”
“My mother didn’t teach me much of anything, if I’m being totally honest. She was kind of…crappy in the motherly department.”
The woman nods her head. “I see. I was joking anyhow. I am sixty-five years old. Old, but not yet ancient.”
“You don’t look a day over twenty,” I say.
“Ah, you must’ve developed flattery on your own then.” Mother laughs, a high, sweet sound. “I suppose we must get down to business, as grim as it may be. I see the District is aware of your being here already.”
“They took Ed Jameson.”
She nods gravely. “Poor thing,” she says.
“But I’m gonna get him back,” I say.
“You really are quite a hero, aren’t you?” Mother asks, still smiling.
“I don’t know about that. I’ve done my fair share of bad things.”
“Never without reason, I’m sure,” she says.
I nod. “Yeah, I guess I just try to do what’s right, even if it may seem…wrong.”
“Understandable.” Mother stands up and adjusts her blanket. I must seem surprised, because she’s chuckling. “No, I’m not confined to this wheelchair, but walking—movement in general—is murder on my joints.” She sits back down and rolls herself over to a hutch against the far wall. Her hands move gracefully as she pulls out a small blue and white bowl. “Come to the table,” she says.
“For what?”
“For a reading, Jack. If that’s okay.”
“Will it take long? I have to—”
“To get to Ed Jameson, I know,” Mother finishes for me. The expression on her face, the tired, worn eyes, the curled corner of her mouth, reminds me so much of the woman I knew outside of D.C. “Don’t worry. He will be fine. He will be hurt, but he will not die. Not before you get to him. That, I promise you. They need him alive. The Overlord knows you, I’m afraid, he knows you will want to do right by Mr. Jameson, so he will use the man as bait.”
I figured as much. Still, the thought of him being tortured and ridiculed at my expense doesn’t sit well with me. I pull my chair over to the table.
“This won’t take long, Jack, I promise. But I must know your fate—our fate.”
I swallow. It feels like there’s a rock in my throat. My fate? I’m not entirely sure I want to know that.
Can’t help it either way, little bro, Norm says. Whatever the outcome, it’ll happen anyway. And c’mon, let’s be real with each other here. You know you ain’t getting out of this alive. You’ve accepted that, haven’t you?
I nod slightly, like a crazy person talking to a fake voice inside his head would, but Mother doesn’t call me out on it. I’m glad. She probably has a few voices in her head, too.
“Now that you’re here, the connection I can make with the images broadcasted to my mind will be str
onger. It’s pertinent to know. It’ll save us time and help us prepare,” she says.
I shake my head, wave her away. “You don’t have to sell me on it,” I say. “I’m in this now for better or for worse. Any way I can help, I’ll do it.”
She closes her eyes and smiles, a woman at peace in a time of war. Then she opens them, takes the bowl, and places it between us. With a surprisingly smooth hand, she lifts the lid off of it and puts it on the table. It thuds; it’s heavy, well-made.
I peer inside the bowl. There are small pieces of coal, and it smells like lighter fluid. This is the fire, then, the flames she sees the future in.
She pulls a book of matches out from somewhere in her robes. She lights it, touches the match to the coals. They spark, sputter, and bloom with fire. She shakes the match out and tosses it on the dirt floor. There’s a bunch more discarded matches there, too. She must do this often, see into the future, see images.
I know if I could do it, I would, too.
“I need your hands, Jack,” she says, and I notice her voice has gotten deeper.
Goodbye, sweet old lady; hello, seer of the future.
I give her my hands. With a strong grip, she guides them over the flames. I wince, expecting pain.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “It won’t hurt.”
She’s right. I feel no heat, no pain; if anything, I feel a slight tingling.
“Am I going to see, too?”
“You may,” she answers. “It depends on your perceptibility. Are you open-minded, Jack?”
“I don’t think I have much of a choice these days.”
She smiles. Her teeth are all hers, no dentures…slightly yellowed by age, but in much better condition than most of the people I see out on the road. The world goes to shit, and everyone thinks of it as an excuse to quit brushing and flossing. Toothpaste everywhere, too.
Anyway, I digress.
“Good, good,” she says. “Now close your eyes. Close them and feel.”
“Feel what?”
“Feel.”
I close my eyes and I feel, whatever the hell that means. I feel the chair beneath me, the hardwood, the old woman’s smooth hands in my own, the pumping of my heartbeat, my slow respiration, the air filling and leaving my lungs, the tickle of the heatless flames.
Mother starts murmuring. I open an eye and see hers are both rolled back, the whites exposed and jittering.
Okay, this is getting weird.
But just as I’m about to let go of her hands and stand up, something happens. Images rush my brain.
I see a laboratory, I see men and women in large test tubes, I see blood on the floor, I see utensils, blades, syringes, saws.
Then, brooding in the background, his one eye smoldering like the coals beneath my hand, I see the Overlord.
The scenery changes. We’re in an office with wood paneling, a large desk. I see that he feels threatened, that he is close to being beaten. I am standing in front of him, and I hear the snarling voices of zombies, kept at bay by the walls around us—
Mother screams. She grips my hand so hard, I feel the knuckles crack and grind together. She jumps, and because of this jump, the table bangs and the flaming bowl spills over the edge, going out as it hits the dirt.
“Whoa,” I say, “are you okay?”
She takes a deep breath. For a moment, I think she’s about to have a heart attack or a stroke, and I don’t know what I’m going to do.
Should I go get Abby and Lilly outside? Maybe Mary has some experience with this type of thing?
“I’m okay,” Mother says. Her face is flustered, pale skin now a dark red.
“You saw something?” It’s a pointless question, I know, because I saw something, too. That wasn’t my imagination.
Gravely, she nods. “I did.”
“What was it? I saw the Overlord in in an office or something like that. He was angry. I think I was going to kill him.”
She offers me that somber smile again, but this time it doesn’t feel genuine.
“What? What did you see?”
She shakes her head. “Perhaps it’s best we don’t discuss that right now.” In her chair, she rolls away from the table. I see a bit of sweat on her face, beads sparkling in the low candlelight.
“Mother,” I say, “you can tell me. I can take it. The worst that could happen is that I die, and I think I’m ready for that, that I’m okay, at peace with it, just as long as I can take the Overlord down with me.”
“You are a great man, Jack Jupiter. I shall tell you what I saw.”
“I can take it,” I say again.
She nods. “Jack Jupiter, success is within your reach. What you aim to do can be done, but it will not be easy.”
“That’s all?” I stand up and look directly into this woman’s eyes.
She shakes her head. “No, that’s not all.” She takes a breath before continuing. “If you do what you aim to do, your life will be forfeit.”
“I’ll die?”
She nods solemnly, her eyes full of sadness. “Yes, Jack, you will die.”
The words echo in my head. Surprisingly, they don’t feel as heavy as they once did. Like I said, I’ve come to accept the fact of my death. My fate. We all die eventually, right? And after I kill the Overlord, there won’t be anything left for me here.
Before I go back outside, Mother says, “Tell Mary and the boy to come in and stay with me. I shall protect them.” She touches my face with her smooth, warm hand.
This gesture almost feels like an apology.
30
“Well?” Lilly asks me. She’s hung up on this mind-reading, psychic stuff.
Abby, on the other hand, isn’t. She’s leaning against Mother’s hovel, smoking a cigarette.
In a low voice, I say to Lilly, “Nothing worth mentioning.”
She nods, but I think she knows I’m full of shit. I just don’t see the point in worrying her and Abby—well, I don’t think Abby would be too worried. She’s an expert at not worrying.
I turn to Abby now. “Smoking again?”
If I recall correctly, she took up smoking for a bit back in San Francisco. Her husband didn’t approve of it, though.
“I was offered a smoke, so I took the fellow up on it. Rude not to, right?” she answers.
The tobacco smell is strong. This isn’t a stale Marlboro someone saved since before the end; this is the kind of hand-rolled smoke someone grows in their backyard. Looking around this place, this maze of hovels and huts, the piles of garbage, half-burned and stinking, this doesn’t look like the kind of place that could grow much of anything.
Mary walks up the walkway with Nick. She looks worried. She’ll look this way as long as her husband is in the hands of the Overlord. I know this.
“I found a way,” she says.
“What?” I ask.
“Inside the lab,” she says.
Abby takes a last drag on her smoke and flicks it down in the dirt, steps on it. It reminds me of the matches Mother used to light the coals.
“How?” I ask.
This is good. I didn’t have a plan on how to get there. I was just going to run up to the front door and start shooting, that usually works for me. I don’t know how far it would get me here, where there’s men and women all over the ruins of my old hometown, with guns that make my rifle and handgun look like toys, but I was willing to find out.
I’m going to die, I know, but I don’t think I’m going to get shot down on my way there. If I do, I won’t die. Not yet.
“One of my friends on the south side of the compound said they’re collecting,” Mary answers.
“Collecting?” Lilly repeats.
“Yes. The Black Knights came through and took Ed, right?” Mary says.
Black Knights. Capitalized. There they are again. I wonder if Mason Storm is still part of the team, or if he was killed in the uprising back at the radioactive city.
Lilly nods. “Right.”
“Well, the Black Kn
ights get free reign of the place. They don’t deal with any of the laws or consequences. They killed three people just last week,” Mary says. “And more after they took Ed.” Her eyes glisten with tears. She shakes her head and rubs at them with her free hand.
More dead people. Because of me. It never ends. Truly.
“It’s okay,” Lilly says. “You’re safe, your little boy’s safe, and soon your husband will be safe. Trust me, he helped us. Without him, we would’ve been dead meat.”
“I am worrying,” Mary says.
“That’s pretty understandable,” Abby says. “Okay, so they’re collecting on the south side. That means what, exactly? Longer we hang around, the smaller our chances get.”
“They’re picking up the bodies. They’re gonna take them to their lab and do all these unholy things to them,” Mary answers. The boy in her arms is drifting toward sleep. His eyes flutter, and his head looks like it weighs more than his neck can handle.
“Okay,” I say, “this is good. We can sneak onto their vehicle. Or at the very least, follow them.”
“When the time comes, we can take them out,” Abby agrees. Color rises to her cheeks. She’s ready for the kill already, can smell the blood like a shark.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” I say.
“I want to come,” Mary says, stepping forward.
She is much shorter than me. In the weak light from the torches lining the main strip of the community, I see how serious she is. I also see how pretty she is. Tired and stressed, too. Rings under her eyes, pale skin. She needs to rest, she needs to relax, she needs to be there for her son. A lot of people have died because of me, whether directly by my hand or indirectly because of who I am and the things I’ve done in the past—I accept that, but I can’t accept being responsible for a toddler’s loss of his mother.
I shake my head. “It’s too dangerous. We can’t risk—”
“I can handle myself,” Mary argues. Her bottom lip quivers. The tears that have built up around her eyes spill over and roll down her cheeks.
Lilly approaches, puts her hands on Mary’s shoulders, and bends down slightly to look directly into her eyes. “Mary, you need to stay here. You’ll be safer. Nicky needs you.” The boy looks up at Lilly sleepily, unaware of what’s going on. “We’ll get your husband back. I promise.”
Dead Last: A Zombie Novel (Jack Zombie Book 8) Page 12
