by Linda L Zern
The rusted truck loomed near the armory building, windows smashed out, boarded up with hunks of raw wood and sheet metal—weapons locked inside.
“We need guns. We’d have to search for the S-Line if it’s still there, if Colonel Kennedy survived. We'd be out there alone, for a while.” His eyebrows crashed down. He frowned over at her. “Why? What’s up with you? I thought you were okay with learning how to be a medic. Merritt isn’t much, but he’s got some training.”
Sudden curiosity sparked in his voice. No. No, she couldn’t have him turning his questions on her. She had to get away before he asked her anything else. She shrugged away from his questions. “Hey, I’m going to pee. I’ll be back.” She headed toward the latrine near the edge of the camp. Brittany waved as Darby walked by. The darkness swallowed Darby up. When she reached the corner of a tumbled down brick wall, someone grabbed the front of her jacket, her wrist. She got yanked further into the gloom.
“Shut up.” Hot breath fogged against her ear. Titus swung her around and into the tumble of fallen bricks. “What’s going on with you? I thought we’d come to an understanding. You do what I want.” His grip on her wrist tightened. “And I make sure that brother of yours and those sisters get the best of everything. Food. Medicine. Weapons. All the better to stay alive with. I stop giving them ammunition, and they’ll be fighting feral boars with six inch tusks with their pocket knives. Maybe your sisters need some of this too?”
His hand started to roam.
“You’re probably asking yourself, ‘Why is the great leader of this brave militia band bestowing his favors on me?’ Do you ever ask that?”
“Titus,” she said, turning her face into the bricks, welcoming the scratch of rock against her cheek. “I’ll do what you want. Don’t hurt them. Please.”
He snorted and then pushed her back into the wall. “I hate when you beg, Darby.”
It was always like this now, Titus threatening her family and then his disgust when she didn’t fight. Parrish was right; Titus was getting worse. Crazy, confused, cruel. At least he was leaving her alone that way, mostly.
“You be good, Darby, and they’ll be fine. I won’t even send your sisters on the more dangerous patrols. You know—the ones where kids don’t come back.”
Darby flattened her hands against the bricks, curled her fingers into the crumbling mortar.
He stepped back, became a voice in the night. “And, Darby. That old man on the edge of town you’ve been visiting like you're some kind of Little Red Riding Hood of the apocalypse—quit it.”
“He isn’t hurting anything.” Her mouth went dry.
“He eats, doesn’t he?”
“He’s one old man.”
“He’s one old man who hunts what we hunt and scrounges what we need.”
“Please, Titus. Let me warn him. He’ll move on. I know he will. Let me—”
“Shut up. And don’t go there again. Don’t.” His voice stopped, but she could still hear him breathing. She remained frozen, holding the air inside her chest until she thought the balloon would pop. He was still there—an invisible monster, panting in the dark. He would always be there.
***
Without the moon’s light, the trail to Mister Doc’s had disappeared. It made Darby have to shuffle her feet because the ground seemed oddly far away like it was playing tricks on her. It was taking too long, too long, to make the trip to the stack of stone tubes to find her friend. She hadn’t waited. She couldn’t. She’d left as soon as the boar’s bones had gleamed through the disappearing flesh. Full bellies would make the guys in the unit slow and sleepy. She needed to warn Mister Doc before they woke up, got ambitious. Titus had already fallen asleep, arrogant in his knowledge that the others would watch over him.
But it was taking so long, trying to make the journey in the pitch black. She missed her friend, the moon, and its light. At the big camphor tree with the low curved branch, she felt her way over a broken section of asphalt. Thirteenth Street had disappeared long before the moon’s light failed. It was a straight walk from here, more or less, straight to the blackberry patch. She sniffed the air, hoping to catch the scent of a small fire carefully made.
“Please let Mister Doc be home.” Her prayer might have been for God if there still was one, or maybe it was for the angels behind the stars. Darby tripped over a moldy log. Her hand hit a snag of blackberries. They tore at her hand. The trail was here, somewhere, hidden under his smart system of blackberry bramble camouflage tied up with ropes and pulleys. It was so dark.
“Mister Doc!” It was close to a shout. “I can’t find the trail. Are you home? Please.”
There was the rustle of small night walking animals. She’d disturbed them. They chattered softly to each other: a family of raccoons. Darby squatted low to the ground. Wading through the mass of brambles surrounding Mister Doc’s culvert was a dismal thought. “Woo hoo, the house.” She gave it another try. Silence. If he wasn’t home, she would wait. She had to. They would come for him. Soon. She couldn’t let Titus hurt him.
“Mister Do—” A hand snagged at the collar of her jacket, pulled her back onto her bottom, and across the torn asphalt. Darby thrashed and twisted. She reached back and scratched, hit skin.
“Darby, stop it. It’s me. It’s Parrish.” He shook her harder.
“Stop dragging me around, and I’ll stop.”
“You stop.”
“No, you stop.”
He laughed and let go. “How old are we? And what are you doing this far out?”
What could she tell him that wouldn’t get someone killed? Maybe him? Maybe Brittany and Ella.
“Looking for chickens. You know I hunt up the chickens for our flocks. They just don’t wander into the camp you know.”
“No. You’re not just looking for chickens. You always wander the countryside on the full moon, but you were on a mission tonight. And you were calling for someone. Who?” His whisper rose. “Who’s out here? Darby?”
It flooded out of her.
“A man. His name is Mister Doc. I was stealing his chickens, and then I fell out of a tree, and then he told me I had a concussion but that I’d be okay and he’s been my friend, and I don’t want him to get hurt. And he might. He might . . . if we don’t tell him—He is worse. Titus. He’s,” she said, trying to tell him, everything, but her throat closed around the words that would destroy them all. Hadn’t Titus warned her what would happen?
Parrish sat next to her on a chunk of broken curb. “Who? You’re friend. Is he your friend?”
“Yes. He’s just an old man, and Titus knows about him and now . . .” she said, gulping. “Now, Titus is going to hurt him.”
She could almost hear her brother thinking. A dog howled near the old power plant, its cry faint and quivery. It sounded hurt or dying or old and alone.
“Titus is crazy. I know that. Darby, I won’t let him hurt the old man. I won’t. And I can’t let him hurt the new kids, the puppies. Give me some time to sort it out.”
“How? When? Titus, he won't listen. He is worse. You said it, and I know it.” How much worse she hadn’t been able to tell him—not yet.
A whippoorwill hooted out its funny namesake call, and another one answered, reminding Darby that the end of the power grid had been a curse for some but a godsend for others, the endangered animals flourishing in the return of the wilderness.
“Come on, kid, he’s not here, this imaginary friend of yours, and besides, I won't let Titus hurt him.”
“He’s not made up. How can you protect him if he's imaginary?”
Parrish laughed, was laughing at her, a big brother teasing a little sister.
“He’s not imaginary.” It came out squeaky and silly, more like a little kid’s whine than the way a cool, tough member of the Junior Militia should sound. She tried again. “He is not.”
“I know,” he said, sounding a little bit sorry. She could feel him searching for her hand in the dark. She turned her hand over. He graspe
d it tight. “I was just teasing.” She could hear the smile in his voice. The woods around them settled and shifted and got soggy with the damp mist of the coming morning.
“I can’t find his place. It’s hidden. It’s a secret place. It’s just so dark without the moon. I need to warn him.”
“We will. We’ll find him and warn him. I’ll bring you back, and we’ll talk to him in the daytime.”
“What if he’s hurt and can’t answer me.”
“He’s been out here for a while on his own. He knows what he’s doing.” Parrish sounded confident.
"Parrish?" She felt more than saw her brother stretch up to his full height next to her. He waited for her to join him. She stayed put, reluctant to give up. “Ryan?”
"Yeah?”
"Mister Doc is a doctor, a real one."
"Then we really need to make sure he's safe. Don't we? We'll come back when we've got light." He pulled Darby to her feet. “Come on, let’s have some of your hen’s eggs for breakfast.”
***
Tucked in a clump of scrub oak the man with the name Jacob on his coveralls listened to Darby talk to her brother in the darkness. It had been a matter of time, those child soldiers finding him. A desperate government had turned children as young as eight into members of the junior militia, and he knew they didn’t have the discipline to wait much longer before they came to pick his bones. He’d known that all along. That was how the new world order operated. The first wave of conquerors gave way to the next and the next and the next until all that was left were the crows that stripped the dead. Poor kid. He hoped she didn’t wind up bones for crows to argue over. Maybe later, maybe he’d find a way to let her know where to find him, for when the baby came. Maybe. But for now, it was time to find a new hole to hide in, away from here.
He wished her well, and whispered into the darkness as he listened to them march away. "Thank you, Darby, for the warning."
***
At the next full moon, Parrish kept his word and brought her back, but her Mister Doc was gone, and the culvert was empty; it was nothing more than a hollow cement tube. No chickens tittered in the elephant ear tree. No coals glowed. Mister Doc’s footprints were all that was left of the man himself. Boot prints flattened a semi-circle at the mouth of the culvert, and a single metal pot with a lid rested on a stump inside the space.
Parrish watched as Darby pulled the lid from the saucepan.
It was filled with candied lemon rind. Mister Doc, her missing friend, had remembered. It meant that he was okay and that he’d known: somehow, he’d known that he’d become a problem for her, for all of them.
“What is that?” Parrish came to stare over her shoulder into the pot.
“Candy. He left me candy. He makes it. It’s an old family recipe.”
“Well, don’t tell the others, or you won’t have it long.”
She sighed, closed her eyes, and slipped a piece of sugary lemon into her mouth. “Don’t worry. I won’t. I’m pretty good at keeping secrets.”
He nodded and started to walk back to the trail.
“Promise me something, before we go back. Okay?” She shoved handfuls of the lemon into her jacket pockets.
“You sound pretty serious.”
It was her turn to nod. “I am. Promise me, that we’ll find a way to go to that place, that S-Line place. Soon. Please. Promise me. All of us, me, you, Britt and El.” She hadn’t been able to keep the tears out of her voice, not this time.
He put his arm around her shoulders. “Hey now. What’s this?”
“Please, promise me.”
“Okay, Darby,” he said, patting her head. “I guess your friend high-tailing it out of here has got you pretty upset. I’m sorry for that. I’ll track him down if you want me to. I will. I think I can find one old man—”
She shook her head. “No. That’s not it.”
Silence fell between them. “Maybe you should tell me what it is then?”
“Nothing too important, not really.” She pulled a piece of lemon out of her pocket and popped it in his mouth. His eyes widened as he chewed. “I just bet that S-Line family has sugar, if they prepped the way you said they did, sugar for cookies. I just bet. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“Yeah. That would be nice, Darby.” He patted her head again. “Okay, we’ll go. Let me work on it.”
She started to hand him another piece of candy.
“No. You keep it. I’ll have cookies when we find Colonel Kennedy. We will.”
“Okay, Ryan. I believe you.”
***
Thank you for taking the time to read this Strandline Short Story: Darby’s Chickens. If you enjoyed it, please consider telling your friends and posting a review on amazon.com/author/lindazern or other online sites. Word-of-mouth referrals are an author’s best friend and much appreciated.
The Strandline Series
by Linda L. Zern
Before the Strandline: Darby’s Chickens
Copyright 2017 Linda L. Zern
All Rights Reserved
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the authors imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or events, is entirely coincidental.
Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this story may be reproduced, stored into or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (Electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author.
For more information, please contact:
Linda L. Zern
zippityzerns.com
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