“What are my ‘new duties’?”
Lila already had the thought They better be good, and something of that defiance shone on her face. The middle-aged man faltered.
“I’m not even sure we should discuss that until we get this other matter settled.”
“You can settle it right here though, right?”
At the last second, Lilianna opted for charm. It was a hard act to pull off with her thoughts still stuck on the damned wrist tag and her stewing fears at the look of subdued panic on Gwen Stacey’s face the previous day.
The Administration clerk softened slightly, but before he could say anything, Lilianna leaned forward.
“Is it just me, or do things feel pretty weird in the Bastion right now?”
The unexpected comment disarmed him. The man flustered his reply, unsettled by honesty and a pretty girl, and him all alone with her in the petty kingdom of his office.
“There’s . . . yes,” he said and broke eye contact. “It’s all hands on deck. I’m sorry you’ve been caught up in it.”
“I’m no longer needed in Communications. . . ?”
“The Council issued a new list of ‘priorities’ the day after the Incident.”
Lila smiled and took a breath.
“What’s your name?” she asked. “You never said.”
“Dwight,” he replied. Reluctant. Shy. “Dwight Holmgren.”
“Where were you from, before here?”
“Minnesota,” he said. “You?”
“That’s not on my file. . . ?”
She gave him a coy smile he appreciated.
“I barely remember that old life anyway,” Lila then said, honestly, faraway for a moment. “We were in the Smokies when it all went to hell.”
Dwight nodded at that, then rearranged the contents of Lila’s paperwork to refocus himself despite clear interest.
“I have you down here for the kitchens,” he said and met her eyes with a pained look. “I know, nothing too glorious about that kind of work. But it’s needed. Gotta ‘feed the troops,’ right?”
“Seriously, Dwight?”
Lila restrained her mockery for the sake of their lightweight rapport.
“I’m a crack shot, you know,” she said. “I helped the fire crews after the Incident, saved the dinner theater fire spreading across the whole sanctuary zone. I can be more useful than . . . peeling potatoes.”
“We have a priority list. . . .”
“Show me?”
“Oh,” Dwight said and smiled, flustered, eyes anxious. “I couldn’t do that.”
“Why not?” she replied. “Geez, Dwight . . . I know you want to be good at your job.”
It was as if the remark stung. Dwight looked up hard.
“How do you know that?”
Lila smirked playfully. “Tell me it isn’t otherwise?”
Dwight bowed his head, smirking slightly in return.
“You got me,” he said chuckled. “I’m not going to argue I don’t care. I think the work we’re doing here’s important. Working HR isn’t exactly saving the world either . . . Miss Vanicek –”
“Lila,” she said, then pushed it a little, adding, “My friends call me Lila.”
Dwight smiled, hands cradled on the desk and leaning forward across it now.
“Feeding the troops?” he asked.
“There’s gotta be something better than that,” Lila said. “What else is on your list?”
Dwight still looked uncomfortable, and Lilianna pounced on his telltale response even though she had no idea what it meant.
“Something the matter?”
He didn’t say anything. He withdrew the paperwork even further from sight.
“You know Carlotta Deschain is missing, right?”
Intuition drove home Lila’s question. Dwight momentarily crumpled, then he sat up ramrod straight in his chair and made a deliberate show of re-organizing her papers yet again.
“I can’t show you a list because it never actually came,” he said stiffly. “President Lowenstein’s office is cleared out . . . too.”
“Dana Lowenstein’s. . . ?”
“MIA,” Dwight said. “It is weird in here, at the moment.”
“What do you think’s going on?” Lila said, now outright leaning across the edge of the desk. “I know no one likes to gossip –”
“This place runs on gossip,” Dwight sniggered.
“Deschain was having an affair,” Lila said ultra-quietly. “Did you know about that?”
“People heard them arguing,” he replied in turn. “It’s been going on for weeks, though. Are you saying . . . you think the Councilor, Councilor Wilhelm, was involved?”
“They told me they found Carlotta as a Fury, in some house outside the Enclave.”
“Bastion,” Dwight corrected her. “It was one of the booze houses, near The Mile.”
“The Dirty Vixen?”
“I don’t know.”
Lilianna’s face had an eyes-wide-apart expression the officer couldn’t miss.
“You . . . You know her?” he asked.
“She was assigned to my training in Comms.”
Footsteps echoed in the hall off the main foyer to still them both. Dwight wore a guilty look. He tidied up the manila folder.
“We’re down people in the kitchens, but also the motor pool, inventory control, and fuel supply. You don’t mind getting dirty?”
“Put me in inventory,” Lila said. “And I’ll find someone to vouch that I don’t need tags. Deal?”
The officer just looked glad to drop the gossip as if it bordered on some kind of treason. Again, the look on Gwen Stacey’s face came to Lila’s mind, the crowbar beside the door. Her plea for Lila to stay out of it all. Lilianna’s eyes raked over Dwight one last time as she stood, trying to read him in one final snapshot. But she held onto her subtle, flirtatious smile while she left the room with a pounding heart.
*
LILIANNA BOUNCED DOWN the front steps of the big building, trying to inhabit the character she was fashioning for herself of just another carefree and stolid Bastion lackey about her business. But jogging down and re-orienting herself, new paperwork in hand, towards the building home to the Bastion arms depot, for a moment she couldn’t even believe the fears so freshly stoked within her. Everything seemed calm, almost tranquil. Stacks of concrete slabs and the smell of fresh earth carried in the mid-thigh breeze. The violence of the earlier week seemed like an hallucination. But the metallic tang in the air remained from the post-Incident wildfires.
Lila spotted Beau marching with a comrade on a diagonal course and Lila halted, maintaining her sunny smile despite the wind which picked up, tugging at her jacket, fallen leaves and a sleeve of plastic shrink-wrap scurrying past her. Beau said something to his friend, handed over several clipped folders, then veered towards her with a smile like just another part of the act.
“Hey,” he said.
The other young staffer headed for the armory and left them to it. Just as swiftly, Beau’s expression blanked. He folded his arms as Lila tipped into him, unsure of her role and how much of it was still acting as she eventually settled for a kiss on Beau’s cheek, a hand remaining on his broad left shoulder. Sadness sapped the strength from her.
Six troopers in full battle gear jogged past them towards the gates and neither she nor Beau said anything until the quiet returned.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here, anymore,” Lila said.
“We’re –”
“No,” Lila cut in at once. “I mean, I’m out of a job.” She lifted the paper slip. “I’m working in the storage vault now, the lockers attached to the armory.”
Beau nodded as if he understood.
“They’ve doubled security around all the key sites outside the Bastion,” he said. “I’ve got a pass in and out. Looks like I’ll be pulling trooper patrol tonight.”
Lila had trouble taking that in. “Key sites?”
“The real Armory, ammo d
ump, the Depot, ethanol plant. . . .”
“Feels like the walls are closing in,” Lila said. “Maybe you can get out a message to my dad?”
Beau blinked.
“Why not just call him?”
Lilianna remembered the phone left from Ortega’s operation, not dissimilar to the one she’d just seen on Dwight’s desk in HR. But a look of consternation just as quickly stole across her face.
“But I’ve been dropped from Comms,” she said.
“Comms aren’t the only phones,” Beau chuckled, though without much real humor in it. “Come with me.”
Lila nodded, but Beau stood as if waiting for something. Her neck tingled at once, and she looked down, slowly holding up the palm she would’ve once all but forced on him. The performance in Dwight’s office was just a warm-up. Lilianna birthed another bright smile, chuckling despite the utter falsehood of it, and seized Beau’s hand and whipped it forward like they were about to skip away. Beau only frowned, perplexed further, and led her across to Building 3.
The two guards looked less fazed about who came and went. Beau only gestured meaningfully to Lilianna, now understanding why they held hands, and then the happy couple hurried up the steps like a pair of horny teenagers, Beau diverting them for the basement once inside.
The third tenement was mostly trooper quarters. Dingy electric lights burnt downstairs with subdued brightness, the solar panels outside not quite keeping up with demand. Dropping the act now, Beau and Lilianna navigated down some metal stairs into the brick sub-basement housing rows and rows of old metal lockers, wire mesh divider fencing re-organized, and in some places just cut through by the building’s residents who’d long since made the place their own.
The open back of the sub-basement housed a few round tables, chairs, some benches and sinks, the makings of another speakeasy just for the troops. Pride of place against one of the exposed dark brick walls stood an old telephone booth. A ton of wires hung bandaged with tape and disappeared into a deep crack in the wall. A clipboard with a pen on a string hung beside it for messages. And there wasn’t anyone else around.
“What’s this place?”
“Just somewhere a lot of the Safety guys meet up,” Beau said. “I’m still in Councilor Wilhelm’s office, technically, but because of guys like Teddy and me . . . the training I showed you, came from guys here, so. . . .”
He didn’t know what else to say. Lilianna raised her eyebrow at his previous remark.
“What do you mean by ‘technically’ in Wilhelm’s office, still?”
“Like I said, a lot of us are taking shifts with Safety, by the looks of things . . . and the Councilor, he’s busy with meetings.”
“Isn’t that part of your job?”
“Closed meetings,” Beau said.
“Who with?”
“Lilianna.”
“Seriously, guy, I’m curious,” she said.
Her eyes trailed to the phone and back thinking about her dad. But she returned her attention to Beau and tried not to register the ever-lingering look of hurt on his face, the scarred wound between his legs like a retinal burn in Lilianna’s mind’s eye.
“Beau,” she said. “Have you seen Carlotta Deschain since you returned?”
His expression darkened.
“That was sad news,” he said. “You heard?”
“I heard some shit that doesn’t add up,” she told him. “She and your boss – her husband or whatever – they were arguing. She had an affair with the guy from The Dirty Vixen, and now they’re both dead.”
“She didn’t come back, Lila – not since the Incident.”
“Fuck,” Lila scoffed under her breath. “I wish everyone’d stop calling it that.”
“What’s got you rattled?”
Lilianna looked back at him, everything somehow reminiscent of her encounter with Dwight in Human Resources including her own dishonest performance. Now she scanned Beau up and down, fighting to soften her tense pose as she sighed, smiled, and patted his shoulder one last time.
Could she really trust him?
She’d imagined children one day and numerous sunsets with the man, and all that was gone now like a nuclear wave swept through to cruel those fantasies. Now Beau was a friend. Not family. Lila wished with sudden urgency she was home, her damned father correct once again. It wasn’t just Beau’s commitment to Wilhelm’s office. Micro-dosing with adrenalin and constant worry left her with a hard time keeping everything straight in her head. Wilhelm was a shitty, self-serving politician, but hardly a threat.
But the President was missing now too.
Lilianna didn’t need to wonder how her father would take the news.
She could ask him now herself.
“I need to check in on my dad and Lucas,” Lila said to Beau. “Thanks so much for this.”
Her friend nodded, still tasting the fact his question went unanswered as he drew off a distance, motioning back through the chain-fence warren to the locker rooms back the way they’d come.
“I’ll wait.”
But it turned out he didn’t have to wait long.
Lilianna knew the extension number, and the phone the Safety teams rigged independently still plugged into the City’s network.
No one answered at the other end.
*
THE LOOK ON Beau’s face took sullen resentment to new levels, but it wasn’t until he spoke that Lilianna felt able to relax. She felt steeped in mistrust like some diabolical hormone. Back outside, phone call a failure, her solemn friend motioned, not bothering with the charade of holding hands again as he turned to exit the building.
“Come on,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”
Lilianna trailed after him, slowly packing her anxieties away as they farewelled the guards and headed at Beau’s insistent pace across the courtyard territories to their divided home, greeting a few familiar faces coming in and out of the lobby before turning at Beau’s lead for the nearest carpeted stairs. The dull décor of the upper floors crept in, and at the third landing, he led them down the musty hall to the corner lot where his bedroom stood adjacent to the third floor private kitchens. A man and woman cooked a pot of soup on a hotplate, hips and shoulders close. Glimpsing them while Beau unlocked his door, Lilianna felt a pang of resentment course through her seeing the lovers contended through the kitchen doorway.
“I never understood why we have these kitchens when the mess hall serves all the food,” she said quietly under her breath.
Criticism helped bolster her nerves. Beau’s bedroom had lain in her future like the mythical realm where she’d one day acquire her true womanhood or some such foolish gump. Now she traded a fey smile with him, glum and pained at the same time.
Lila couldn’t see any reason not to trust him, yet for one clammy moment, she imagined Beau choosing this final moment to overpower her, to kill her, seeking revenge, the venting of his own fury at the madness of the world. She shuddered at the image, and Beau gave her a look as if thinking her cold.
“You have that look again,” Beau said. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”
“What?”
“Come in.”
He entered the spotless room, filtered daylight falling through thin drapes onto the two neatly-made metal beds with wooden trunks at their ends.
“You can trust me, Lila,” he said.
Lilianna nodded as if to say “Of course” – and entered.
Fears aside – and they weren’t aside, try as she might, though the nausea clawing its way through her spoke more of past trauma than any immediate risk – considering this was a moment she’d long imagined, now entering her paramour’s boudoir, she felt more like a visiting in-law than anything else. Life was a lot less like the DVD of Enchanted she’d watched a thousand times before the power finally failed.
“Lila, Jesus!” Beau’s voice was thick with despair as he drank in her warring reluctance. “Come in, please.”
He moved away to sit heavily on the
farthest bed.
Lilianna shut the door behind her, moving only partway into the room.
“What’s got into you?” Beau asked.
“People are missing,” she said cautiously. “And not all because of the ‘Incident’, Beau. Miss Deschain, she came back to the Enclave before she died. I’m positive.”
“How do you know this?”
“From my father.”
“He didn’t pick up the phone?”
“No one picked up the phone,” she said.
“You’re getting yourself agitated over nothing,” Beau told her. “After what we’ve all been through, though, I understand. It’s hard to adjust. The City’s mission. . . .”
“Yes,” Lila asked him. “What is that, now? I’m wondering.”
“It’s only going to get harder, Lil.”
Beau was the only one who called her that, and the only one she tolerated to do so. But she wasn’t in a mood for tolerating much else.
“You work for Wilhelm,” she said quietly. “I don’t expect you to go against him. Just ask him what happened to the Council President, next time you’re in the same room.”
Beau looked slapped.
“What are you saying?” he asked. “Something happened to Lowenstein too?”
“She’s had her office cleared out, just like Comms.”
“No,” Beau said and shook his head defiant. “The President and Councilor Wilhelm are working together closely –”
“Is she in those meetings you mentioned?”
“Well, no. . . .”
“You’d think she’d be involved though, right?”
“I’m not sure the President wants to . . . get her hands dirty,” Beau said.
“Far out Beau, what the hell does that mean?”
The young man went on the defense.
“The Councilor’s trying to bed down a potential crisis, Lilianna.”
“A ‘potential’ crisis?” she replied. “Do you mean other than the one we’re already having?”
“You weren’t here last year,” Beau told her. “Lil, if we don’t have some kind of law and order, some kind of agreement, before the snow comes . . . Last year, people raided each other’s homes. It got brutal. They don’t mention it on that intro tape they play you at the checkpoints, right, because no one wants to admit the toll.”
After The Apocalypse Season 2 Box Set [Books 4-6] Page 40
