The Break Free Series Box Set [Books 1-3]

by Fitch, E. M.

  Maggie had pushed through a door at the end of the large room and the group was faced with a long, narrow hallway, made even more narrow by the rows of bookshelves that lined the walls. There were thousands of books. Kaylee instantly recognized the titles, mostly classics. Tom Sawyer, Pride and Prejudice, Alice in Wonderland. But farther up she saw medical journals, The Physician's Desk Reference, nursing textbooks.

  "He's quite a collector," Jack murmured. His comment made something click in Kaylee's brain. She hadn't quite placed it before, but that described Marsden perfectly. He didn't just have movies, televisions, and stereos. He had every kind of movie player, every kind and size of television. He had a diverse selection of movies. Plus he had games, video game consoles, ancient arcade games. Now there were books, of all kinds. And something else clicked in her head as well. Emma's eyes. They were green, rare even before the infection. Now, well, now she could have the last set of green eyes on the whole of the earth. Genetically speaking, she was unique. Marsden had noticed immediately.

  The realization made her incredibly uneasy, even more so than when they were being locked in the room. It made her look forward to getting out of this place, meeting up with Quinton.

  The hallway was two stories high, not as high as the cavernous media room, but still tall enough to hold an impressive amount of books on shelves that lined the wall completely. It was a quick walk through and even before they got to the end of the hall they could hear the clatter of dishes.

  They followed Maggie into a room that almost blinded Kaylee. Tall windows lined every wall, tall enough that they could have been doors. The bright sun shone through and reflected off the gleaming surfaces and the stainless steel appliances. And from the sink, arms sudsy with soapy water, an old woman looked up at them.

  "So, he's finally come to his senses," she remarked, blowing a tendril of gray hair out of her eyes.

  Chapter Six

  Rose was Cynthia's mother. Though how such a nice woman spawned that mess for a daughter, Kaylee would never know. They were polar opposites and Kaylee couldn't help but wonder what Cynthia's father had been like, to contribute to the hateful spite his daughter seemed to carry like a weight around her neck.

  Rose wasn't like that.

  She was very open and talkative, confiding to Kaylee and Emma that Cynthia was her youngest and most bossy child. Rose was thirty two when she had Cynthia which put her at eighty two now. She proudly exclaimed that she was the oldest person left alive, to which Emma added that she was the youngest and they both laughed over that. She had a wry sense of humor that she expressed most often with some kind of sarcasm, but her most predominant feature seemed to be an inane sense of fairness. More than once in the afternoon since they met her she commented on how her daughter and Marsden should be welcoming any healthy person they could find into the group.

  "We're all in this together, I'd say," she'd remark. "We have this great chance to start over, make society be whatever we want it to be, and we're squandering it with bickering and fights. Just plain stupid if you ask me, though no one does."

  It amazed Kaylee that Rose seemed so strong. Though she did notice that she'd tired easily. There was an old, beat up recliner chair in the corner of the kitchen. It looked well worn and Kaylee could tell that Rose needed to take breaks there often. She was more than happy to have the extra hands and Andrew, Emma, and Kaylee were recruited to help with dinner almost immediately.

  The kitchen they had walked into was a large room that seemed to have once been a cafeteria. Only a few tables remained, but Kaylee could see how there had probably once been more, enough for the large staff that probably ran the plant before the infection. There was a long, stainless steel counter, the kind that Kaylee had in her school, that had been used to slide trays along a buffet. The buffet was long gone but the counter stood center in the length of the room, opposite where several refrigerators and freezers, a couple ovens, and an industrial looking dishwasher lined the wall. The stainless steel appliances all caught the sun from different angles and scattered light throughout the large room.

  The Mill was a well run machine. Rose and Cynthia did most of the cooking, with Maggie and Paul's help. There was a well maintained garden out the back door of the kitchen. A lot was already dead and dried up for the season, just as the rooftop gardens that Kaylee and Emma maintained had been. Rose knew a lot about the plants, it was easy to see that. Even before the infection, she had been doing most of her cooking from scratch and not from boxes and cans. That did help nowadays.

  There was a good amount of chickens too, just as Maggie had mentioned. Those were her pets and her projects. Kaylee hadn't been out in the yard yet, not with having been roped immediately into kitchen duty, but she could see the coop in the yard through the large kitchen windows. And she spotted Maggie feeding them and talking to them after she took over washing the dishes that her group had used so far.

  Rose turned out to be an invaluable source of information. Cynthia had come and gone, and her absence seemed to flip a switch in her mother. She talked non stop, stories from before the infection, stories from after. They ran together, and to Rose at least, they didn't seem to be the dividing line that Kaylee felt it was. It wasn't before and after to her, it was one continuous stream of living, no division at all.

  It was weird, thinking about it like that. That life wasn't about what was before the infection and what came after, that they weren't separate, but just a continuous stream of reality. Kaylee tried to adjust to this perspective, but it wasn't easy. Her mind kept easily separating, moving backwards to include phrases like "if only this never happened," or "It would have been different if..."

  But maybe that's because her mother was a part of the before and after. Time seemed to divide for Kaylee to with Mom and without Mom. In one reality, Kaylee had a mother, in the next, she didn't.

  Rose had lost family as well, four children. At least she thinks she did. Communication went down before her two sons were reported dead, but Rose didn't seem to dwell on whether or not they could still be alive.

  "Either they are, or they aren't," she had said with a shrug, putting a tray of dough into the oven Emma held open for her, "I can't help them from here either way."

  She had been living with Cynthia, had just moved in with her in fact, right before the infection took hold. She continually rolled her eyes when she talked about her daughter, referred to her as bossy several times, and let it slip that although Cynthia calls herself a nurse, that she was really a nurses aid, having just begun to take night classes to be an LPN when the infection hit.

  Kaylee didn't think titles really mattered anymore regardless. Maybe Cynthia was just saying she was a nurse because she thought people would take her more seriously. Anna was a nurse, yet she was ready and prepared to do things on the level of most doctors. Again, it was the difference of before and after. Before, what Cynthia called herself would have mattered, now it simply didn't.

  Paul and Mario showed up later in the day, both easy mannered and comfortable. Paul was on the shorter side, still taller than Kaylee, but not by much. He looked to be in his early thirties but his easy gait and overall tone suggested he was an active man. He wore a light gray suit. Not just the pants or the jacket, but the whole deal, including a button down shirt that had probably once been white and was now closer to gray. The whole outfit was ridiculously worn. The edges were fraying and there was a fine layer of dirt that covered him. He caught Kaylee staring in surprise when he first walked in and he grinned at her. "I worked in an office, it's one of the only things I have left," was all he said. Bill overheard and snorted.

  "The suit was the first thing I chucked when this all happened," he said. Paul shrugged.

  What surprised Kaylee even more than Paul's choice in attire was that Mario didn't seem to speak a word of English. His eyes lit up when he saw Anna, whose Latino heritage was impossible to ignore with the tone of her skin. He rambled away immediately in rapid, fluent Spanish. Kaylee
watched as Anna froze, her eyes fixed on Mario. A grin spread slowly over Anna's features, and then words Kaylee had never heard come out of her mouth before, words she would never have needed to use in the English speaking firehouse, were firing quickly, interrupting Mario and speaking over him. The two gravitated closer together, drawn by commonality.

  The afternoon passed quickly and easily, the group getting to know each other slowly. Some of The Mill group peppering Anna with questions about Mario, who no one knew much about since no one else there spoke Spanish. Though it seemed that they got a lot of it right through miming and a limited amount of broken English. Mario had been a migrant worker, he told Anna he was working in tobacco fields when the infection first spread. After that he, like Quinton and Jack and Paul and many others, took to the woods to survive. He was positively beaming while he spoke with Anna, who seemed just as happy. There was a melodic quality to their conversation that Kaylee had never appreciated before and it made her stop and think. What other languages might she never hear again, maybe no one would ever hear again. Had Russian survived? Had Chinese? Certainly in those countries there must have been pockets of survivors, just like there was here. Would the countries ever connect again? Or maybe it would be a century from now that groups of humanity would find their way back to each other and have no means to communicate. It was sad to think that in her lifetime, she wouldn't know those answers.

  The group at The Mill, at least this new group that Kaylee was getting to know and like throughout the afternoon, accepted them easily. Kaylee thought it was pretty obvious that her group didn't offer any threat; a few kids, their fathers, and one petite woman. Maybe that was why it seemed easy for Paul and Mario, Maggie and Rose to welcome them into their power plant home. Or maybe it was because, out of every possible scenario for the end of the world, this group had the best set up Kaylee could imagine. It should have taken generations to have access to electricity like this, years and years after the infection had been cleaned up. But here it was, just as Andrew had once said it could be. There was electricity and showers, a fantastic kitchen, good food, security, and for the most part, friendly people.

  Marsden, Cynthia, and Danny hadn't made an appearance yet; it was getting dark. Everyone else was gathered in the kitchen. Paul and Mario had a collection of fish waiting to be cleaned and Nick was quick to offer his services. Kaylee, Andrew and Emma perched on folding chairs set by one of the aluminum tables, next to where Rose rested in her recliner. Most of the dinner had been prepared already. The rolls were baked and waiting in a basket on the counter, and there were frozen spinach leaves warming slowly on the stove. Anna and Mario sat near each other on the counter top while Paul lingered close by. Jack was still unsettled and took to pacing in the back of the room. He drifted back and forth past the large windows, his eyes darting restlessly towards the tree line.

  Anna eventually asked about Marsden and the rest, wondering at their whereabouts, but Rose waved her off from the recliner. "There's a couple of sheds on the other side of the dam, Marsden holes up in there all the time, Cyn too. Though what she's doing in the maintenance shed, I'll never know."

  "Or care," Paul smirked, grinning at Anna. "They squirrel away all the time. I think the old man can't handle the actual labor, you know like me and Mario do." Paul gestured as he spoke, miming. It looked like he was shoveling dirt. Kaylee assumed this was for Mario's sake.

  "Él es débil y no demasiado inteligente," Mario offered, nodding. Anna bit back a grin.

  "You mean with the gardening?" Emma asked, watching Paul.

  "That yes, but most of what we do is keep the bodies off the power lines," Paul answered, no longer smiling. "Danny helps too. That's how he found you guys. If any of the infected get tangled in it, it pulls the lines down. They can be heavy, lifting them off the fence."

  "It kills them?" Kaylee asked. Paul shook his head.

  "No, nothing but a blow to the head seems to do that, but it keeps them out. Actually, sometimes, it well... it kind of fries them. You know what I mean?" As he spoke, his shook his body, looking like he was being electrocuted. It must be second nature for him, to constantly act out his speech for Mario's benefit.

  "Los cocina," Mario added.

  Kaylee saw even Emma's face twist with disgust and knew her expression must mirror that. But that's how the days were spent here, peeling charred and snapping bodies off high voltage electrical lines. As long as the infection persisted, no matter how nice a place may appear, there would still be aspects of daily life that were just plain awful.

  "It's not so bad on most days," Paul continued, obviously seeing the girls reactions. "On some days there are no bodies at all, but there are hoards of them out there, in the woods-"

  "A lot of them?" Jack interrupted, and Kaylee knew he'd be thinking of Quinton.

  "Yeah, more than I would have thought at first. It's not very populated out here, so it's usually not too bad, but sometimes we get these crowds that must have drifted in from the city-"

  "Or that hospital over the hill," Rose interrupted, nodding sagely. "Bet there was lots of them there."

  "Right, could be from St. Raphael's too," Paul agreed. "You know how it was, when things first got out of control."

  Kaylee did know. The hospitals were over run so quickly, and not just by infection, but by people looking for cures and vaccines, by loved ones trying to get help for their sickly friends and relatives. There were mobs of people lining the streets and filling the parking lots. Some of the hospitals had tents set up outside, triage locations. It would make sense that hoards of the infected would be roaming close to the hospital.

  "So you patrol the lines?" Jack asked, his eyes darting past the windows and to the tree line. "See much recently?"

  "Not in the past couple of days," Paul answered. "You've got another friend out there, don't you? I saw Danny heading out alone last night, wouldn't say what he was doing, but we don't normally go out at night."

  "Yeah, we do," Jack answered, but he didn't offer any more than that.

  "It's okay, I get it," Paul said, noticing Jack's tension. "It pays to be cautious these days. I was too, back before I decided to stay here."

  "So when do you think we get to meet your friend?" Marsden's voice, though quiet, made Kaylee jump. She didn't realize he had been there, listening to them from around the corner. Rose immediately got up from her recliner and busied herself at the stove, pulling a frying pan from a cabinet and taking the fish from Nick.

  Jack didn't answer right away, he stopped pacing and looked at Marsden. The shotgun was still in Marsden's hands. It seemed he really didn't go anywhere without it.

  "I'll have to talk to him, see if he wants to join us in here," Jack said, speaking directly to Marsden and staring at him. Marsden shifted but didn't break eye contact.

  "I wouldn't mind talking with him myself, see if I want to invite him in," Marsden answered. Jack nodded.

  "Hopefully we'll make it soon then."

  Kaylee watched as Rose bristled at the stove, but she didn't say anything. No one did. The easy conversation and friendly atmosphere evaporated with Marsden's presence. He stalked into the room, eyeing each of the occupants slowly. He must have taken interest in Anna and Mario, stopping in front of them and staring. It wasn't until Mario spoke, Kaylee presumed he was asking what Marsden wanted, and Anna answered in a murmur of Spanish that Marsden reacted in any way at all.

  "Are you Mexican?" he asked Anna.

  Anna stiffened, glancing briefly at Mario before she spoke. "My parents were from Puerto Rico," she answered, her voice loaded with hesitancy. Kaylee felt a spasm of irritation spark in her. What did any of that matter? Who cared where anyone hailed from? Kaylee's mother used to joke that Kaylee and Emma were mutts. A little Irish, some French, some German, and way back there was some Icelandic. It never really mattered to Kaylee then and it certainly didn't now. Why was Marsden even asking?

  Mario recognized Anna's answer and he gestured to himself, rapid Sp
anish flying from his mouth again. Anna grinned, nodding along.

  "Him too?" Marsden asked, pointing at Mario. Anna nodded and silence fell again. Marsden stalked away, coming to rest in the middle of the room, leaning against the stainless steel counter. "What about you?" he said, nodding towards Jack.

  "Capricorn," Jack muttered, sparing Marsden one look before he continued his pacing.

  "I would guess Italian," Marsden answered, watching Jack.

  "Greek," Jack countered gruffly. "Why do you care anyway?"

  "I find it interesting," Marsden answered shrugging. "For instance, genetically speaking, there's several sets of brown eyes, multiple brunettes, but there's only one blonde in the room. She may be the last blonde on the face of the earth. Don't you find that interesting?"

  Kaylee stiffened, her hand unconsciously flit to her hair.

  "And?" Jack asked forcefully. "What difference does it make?"

  "No difference," Marsden insisted. "I just like to know. You may never meet another person with the same color skin as you."

  Jack's features twisted in irritation and he dropped the conversation, but he stopped his pacing, moving to behind Kaylee instead. Kaylee felt her seat rock slightly when he gripped the back of her chair. Nick had stayed quiet throughout the conversation, but he drifted closer to his girls as well. Emma kept her eyes lowered and Kaylee knew she was feeling the same, on display after Marsden had pointed out her green eyes yesterday.

  "Dinner's up," Rose announced softly, just as Cynthia and Danny joined them.

  Eating was uncomfortable, even though Kaylee sat as far from Marsden as possible in the closed area. He ate with Cynthia, Danny, and Rose, the latter's eyes kept drifting over to Kaylee, she thought possibly in apology. Paul, Mario, Maggie and Anna sat at another round table, close to the rest which all sat with Kaylee. She sat between her father and Jack and it felt like she was being guarded. Jack's eyes never met hers, they rotated easily between his meal and Marsden.