by Ryan Schow
For starters, she had a headache that just wouldn’t go away. The pain had started when the armed thug in the White House had grabbed her out of the powder room and threw her into the wall in the hallway. A fierce shudder ran through her at the thought of that attack. Forcing the images out of her mind, she started rubbing small circles in her temples with the pads of her thumbs. The circular pressure felt good, but the pain persisted, as she suspected it would until she could choke down a few hundred milligrams of ibuprofen.
Thinking about the prison bus getting hammered by Isaiah’s SUV—and that same SUV being blown up with her in the back seat—had yesterday’s fear boiling up in her all over again. At least the burns she’d suffered were not as bad as she thought. They were bad, though. So now she simply lay there, frozen with disbelief at what she survived. Worse still, she began to fear the road ahead.
Instead of more sleep, what she needed was direction, a plan, something to reach for. She sat up, turned her neck from side to side, and was rewarded with a sequence of small popping noises. The headache lessened a bit. She crawled down on the floor, careful not to wake the others, then stretched out her lower back, eventually popping enough vertebrae to feel everything loosen back up. When she tried to get up again, her body was still a bit cranky, but it was showing signs of cooperation.
She found Isaiah rooting around the kitchenette looking for food. There wasn’t much to look through and it didn’t seem like he’d found anything worthwhile—just a can of black beans, a small bag of Spanish rice, and some boxes of macaroni and cheese.
“Do you have any canned fruit in there?” she asked, hoping there might be cans of pears, mandarins, maybe even a can of pea—
“No, nothing,” he said. He stood up tall, his face hanging a bit on his bones. “How’d you sleep?”
“About as good as you,” she said.
“So, crappy then?”
She nodded.
“I’ll be back in a few,” she said.
She wandered back to the bathroom, closed the door, then let her eyes adjust to the dim light. There was only a small window for light, which funneled in too little light for her to see well. At least it wasn’t pitch black.
She felt around the tub, found a burned-down candle. Rooting through the drawers, she came across a lighter, and smiled. She gave it a shake, but it didn’t sound like there was any fluid in there. Rolling the flint wheel, she was blessed with a steady flame.
She lit the candle, looked at her face in the mirror, then reeled at what she was seeing. She ignored the shadows under her eyes, the bruising around her face, the rashy cuts on her chin. Instead, she fixed her hair as best as she could and told herself it was what it was.
A knock on the door startled her.
“I’m in here,” she said.
Isaiah replied, “I know. I just wanted to tell you the toilet doesn’t flush or fill. There’s no running water.”
“Okay,” she said, dragging the word out.
“If you see any water in the tank, leave it. We may have to boil it and drink it later, if we stay here.”
“Alright, no problem,” she said, even though she was starting to panic. She wasn’t in there just to fix herself up; she was in there to go to the bathroom.
“So if you have to…do your business,” Isaiah said, speaking cautiously, “let me know and I’ll find you a container to do it in.”
She swallowed hard, rolled her eyes, and took a big breath. “I have to go,” she said, unable to hide the embarrassment.
“Number one or number two?”
She hung her head in shame and closed her eyes. Dear God, will this ever end? “Number one, but that might trigger number two,” she said, her cheeks feeling bright and hot.
“Alright,” he said. “Give me a few.”
A few minutes later, he knocked lightly; she opened the door and took the tall stock pot he handed her. Inside the pot were two napkins and a Hershey’s kiss. She shook her head and stifled a laugh.
“Funny,” she said.
“It’s like a pillow mint, but different,” he said.
“Just when I think you’ve turned back into a lump on a log…”
He laughed, then said, “If you wrap a bath towel around the rim, you won’t have to squat so hard to do your thing—”
She shut and locked the door. “I got it,” she said, mortified.
“I’m just saying—”
“This is already hard enough, Isaiah,” she said through the door, “please just stop.”
“Yeah, okay.”
She ate the chocolate candy, then did her thing. Her thighs burned from squatting, her arms shaking while she held herself up over the stock pot. When she was done, she thoroughly wiped, then wondered what she was going to do about the nasty contents. She couldn’t just leave it there to stink up the whole place.
Taking a shallow breath, shaking her head at what they as a society were going to have to do to survive, she walked the pot out into the living room, gagged twice at the smell, then pushed aside one of the box-spring mattresses revealing the broken window. Below, she saw the man they threw out last night. He lay where he fell, the blood around him dried to a near-black. There were a few people out there, most of them just regular people trying to figure out what to do next. No one was even looking at the guy.
Closing her watering eyes, she dumped the contents onto the street below. The mess splashed everywhere, causing a few people to jump back. One person who was too close to the evacuation target stopped where she was, caught a whiff of the morning stew, then turned and started dry heaving.
“Sorry,” she said, not nearly loud enough.
“What are you doing?” Adi asked.
She spun around and saw him, unsure of what to say. Perhaps the truth would suit him best, if not now, in the long run. This was, after all, the new world—a world this young orphan would have to learn to survive.
“I’m emptying the toilet onto the dead guy below,” she said.
He went and looked out the window. When he turned back around, he said, “That’s gross.”
“I know,” she said.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” he confessed.
“One or two?”
“One.”
“Just stand on the windowsill and piss out into the street,” she said. “I’ll hold you by the shirt so you don’t fall.”
“I don’t want to pee on someone,” he said.
Worried about glass in the window, she pulled up the nightstand, snugged it to the wall, then said, “Aim for the dead guy. I’m pretty sure he won’t care.”
He got on the edge of the table when he was sure she wouldn’t let him go. He unzipped himself, then started to pee.
“What are you doing?” Kennicot asked. Marley quickly glanced back at the woman. She looked like hell hit her in the face with a shovel.
“Bathroom break,” Marley said.
“Don’t look!” Adi said.
“I’m not looking,” Kennicot replied, turning around.
“Will you hold me next?” Isaiah teased.
“Shut up,” she said.
“So you don’t want me to tell you what I found to eat?” he asked. Before she could answer, Isaiah addressed Kennicot. “Let’s go Prez, pop a squat at the kitchen table. You get your choice of blueberry or strawberry Pop-Tarts while hashtag pissgate is going on at the window.”
“Whatever you’re eating,” Marley said, “you’d better save us some.”
“I’m done,” Adi said. “Pull me in.”
She pulled him down and all four of them sat around a small table eating stale Pop-Tarts. After that, Isaiah said, “We need to get out of the city.”
“We can’t just walk out of here,” Marley said. “And even if we could, where would we go? Who would even take us in?”
Isaiah turned and said, “We’re going to figure it out, both of us.”
“What about me and the kid?” Kennicot asked.
“You stay h
ere until we figure a way to get you both out of D.C.,” Isaiah said. “Besides, I’ve got some contacts, people I need to reach out to before we go.”
“What about his house?” Kennicot asked. To the kid, she said, “Where do you live?”
“Seattle.”
She frowned, then looked up at Marley and Isaiah. “Promise you won’t just leave us here just to save your own asses,” Kennicot said, fear laying naked in her eyes.
“We haven’t been in Washington D.C. long enough to betray our allies,” Isaiah said.
“That’s not true,” Kennicot replied. “Especially with you, Isaiah. You’ve been in D.C. a couple of years now, right?”
“I don’t betray my allies,” he said.
“That’s what every one of you says,” Kennicot replied, this time looking at Marley and not Isaiah.
“Are you really this jaded?” Marley asked. “Or is this just another act?”
She leveled Marley with a pitiful smile. “Spend enough time in the viper’s pit and you become a viper to survive. I only know it’s possible because it’s possible with me.”
“Well, that’s something honest,” Marley said. She turned to Isaiah. “I’m ready when you are.”
She wasn’t really prepared to go back out there, but she didn’t want to stay with Kennicot anymore. There was something about the woman she just didn’t like or trust.
Outside, with the cool morning upon them and more people wandering around than she was comfortable with, Isaiah said, “You need to open your awareness, Marley. Pay attention to your peripheral vision and don’t ignore the things your ears are hearing.”
“I know that,” she said.
“You know this was a planned assault, right?” he asked. “The one-two punch like the guy who face-planted on the sidewalk said.”
“I’d say it’s pretty clear by now,” she said.
“I’m not talking about just the EMP,” he said. “This was an insurgency based not only on planning, but opportunity.”
“You don’t say,” Marley chided. “Give me a little credit, will you?”
“Do you think the EMP was the first strike?”
“Oh my gosh, Isaiah, really?” Marley asked. He looked at her, cocked an eyebrow. “Okay, buddy. Here it is. The Hayseed Rebellion was funded by an anti-American global consortium. They infiltrated left- and right-wing movements, shutting down both sides of the political spectrum. Next they fueled race issues, squashed real movements, looted and destroyed property, indiscriminately rioted, and basically manufactured fear throughout the country.”
“I don’t need the blow-by-blow,” Isaiah said.
“No? Okay, here’s the thousand-foot view. The communists have infiltrated the country over the last forty years, the Hayseed Rebellion has become their official ground force, COVID killed the economy and the EMP will kill whatever’s left of us over the next year. That’s the boil down, but it’s not the end. Whoever did this to us is going to wait out the mass die-off, then they’re going to do whatever it is they want to do to us or what’s left of this country. Does that about cover it?”
“More or less,” he said.
She nodded.
“And you knew because you overheard Killian?”
“That’s what I said.”
“I can’t believe you slept with that guy,” he said.
She answered him with a dismissive wave, then said, “Don’t remind me.”
“I’m not judging…much.”
They walked a few blocks down, passed a bunch of people looking desolate, afraid, some of them injured, a few lying dead on the streets from where the mob had came through.
“Speaking of Killian,” she continued as they stepped into the street to walk around a small crowd, “it sounded like he and his foreign-born homies were planning on something big, an event so big Killian was prepared to bug out for a year or two afterward.”
Awareness passed through his eyes and he smiled. “That explains why you put your head down at the exact moment the EMP went off.”
“That’s not the full story,” Marley said, marveling at how quiet the city was without traffic, the hustle and bustle of people shuffling to work, or restaurateurs cooking food or peddling their culinary delights from sidewalk tables and booths. “I got a message from this girl. The whole thing was very strange, and it still bothers me.”
“What did she say?”
They passed a group of people surrounding a woman who was hurt. Her head was bleeding, and she was crying. The sight of her hurt Marley’s soul. At least she was being attended to by someone who looked proficient in medicine.
“It wasn’t what she said,” Marley answered a few minutes later, “it was how she said it. There was something about the tenor of her voice, and she was so beautiful it made me angry to see her. Like how you see a painting that touches you so deeply, and inspires such emotion, you think you have to destroy it just to be okay with it.”
“That’s a strange thing to say,” he replied.
“Seeing her was like waking up to my own life and knowing it will never be that perfect. She actually looked…perfect, Isaiah.”
“And that bothered you?”
“What bothered me was that I didn’t know who she was. Now I feel like I have to know her, yet I never will. Not now. Still, why did she contact me? How did she even know about all of this?” And why is she asking me to kill people?
The names ran through her head: Killian O’Brien, Farol Walsh, Jerica Picklesmeyer, Rhett Jensen.
“Your guess is as good as mine, but you know hackers. They have access to every conceivable thing, if they want it.”
For some reason, Marley thought of the guard in the back of the first prison bus on the White House grounds. She had shot him in the head, point blank. Swallowing a wave of revulsion, she thought about the boy, Adelard Schmidt.
“She told me to save Adelard,” Marley said. “I’d never even met him before.”
“So how would she know him then?” Isaiah asked.
“He and his parents were on a White House tour. I watched the guards kill his mom and dad, and though seeing that haunts me even now, I can’t stop wondering how a girl I never met knew I would meet this boy and need to save him.”
Isaiah gave a flip of his hand and said, “Why does it matter now? We need to get the hell out of here, and fast.”
She shook her head and said, “I don’t know, Isaiah. It’s just…this is all too much to process. Then you throw something like hackers in the mix and my brain starts walking down unexpected roads. Fixating on Savannah Swann just happens to be one of them.”
“Yeah, well, take a U-Turn,” he said. “We’re about to meet with a local group. I don’t know if they can help, or if enough of them even survived yesterday’s attacks.”
“Fine, I’ll be quiet,” she said.
“Don’t be like that,” he replied when he saw her sulking. “I need you to think tactically and bury your emotions as well as your curiosities.”
They were halfway back to the White House—almost to Pennsylvania Avenue itself—when he took her arm and pulled her off the street. The alleyway they ducked into wasn’t clean, but it wasn’t filthy either. It was just concealed by four- and five-story buildings on either side.
“We’re here,” he said as he walked them to a nondescript door.
The building they stood before was unnamed and unmarked, which was about half the downtown buildings in D.C. after the catastrophic failure that was the COVID shutdowns.
Isaiah knocked on the door in a specific sequence, waited a beat, then reversed the sequence of knocking and waited. Locks were thrown and the door opened. The man inside looked at Isaiah and smiled, but then he frowned when he saw Marley.
“Who’s the white bitch?” he said.
“You’re white too, moron,” Marley said.
He frowned even deeper. “It’s a descriptor, not a recrimination.”
Isaiah pushed the door open and said, “Get out of the
way. Let’s figure this out inside.”
The man moved. Isaiah walked inside with Marley following. The two of them found themselves in a large, dim room that was outfitted like some sort of militia command center.
To Isaiah, Marley turned and said, “These idiots are your big idea?”
“All of us idiots are that idea,” a man said, walking out of the darkness and into the dusting of light.
“What have you got?” Isaiah asked the man.
He looked at Marley and said, “Not her. You want info by yourself, fine. But her? Yeah, she goes bye-bye.”
Isaiah turned and said, “Out you go.”
Marley let out a defeated huff at the betrayal.
Isaiah walked her to the door, unclasped something from his side, then slide it into her hand and said, “Wait outside. Use this if you need to.”
She looked down at a small, sheathed knife that was shaped like a T. She knew what this was. It was a punch dagger.
“I won’t say anything,” she said. “Tell him you trust me.”
The guy who first answered the door said, “You heard him, cracker bitch. Go guard the gutter.”
She walked up to him and said, “You’re white, too!”
The man snickered at her, his breath hostile and wrong. She shoved him so hard, he fell on his ass, causing everyone else to laugh. On that note, she turned and stormed through the door, immediately shading her eyes from the glare of the overhead sun.
“Sounds like you were all the fun inside,” a man said. He was leaning against a wall and smoking a cigarette. He offered her a smoke, but she shook her head.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“I’m like them,” the mystery guy replied, “but I’m also not like them.”
“Thanks for clearing things up.”
“It’s what I do,” he said with a cute smile.
Seeing him reminded her of Killian. She glanced up, caught his eye, and thought, This is a gorgeous snake, just like the other.
“Really, though…what’s your deal?” she asked.
“I’m a patriot. Here to stand for the nation against the scumbags willing to turn us over to evil.” She laughed, but he scoffed at the outburst and said, “I’m serious.”
