The Deadfall

by Lilly Black

  Aiden dropped his binoculars around his neck and picked up his knife, jumping down and quickly taking out the dead blocking the passenger side door. He reached in and grabbed their guns and some ammo, and as Jax followed, they fought their way past the corpses toward the barn, taking the long way to avoid the herd coming down the hill. Most of the dead were focused on the activity inside the fence, but Liana had already closed the gate. The corpses lined up along the perimeter as the group dispatched the ones on the inside, and Jax and Aiden caught up to the woman who released them.

  "Please don't hurt me!" she cried as she fell to her knees, looking down as if afraid to make eye contact.

  "We're not going to hurt you," Aiden said as Jax grabbed her arm and pulled her to her feet.

  "Why did you do that? Why did you release the dead on us?" Jax demanded.

  "I had no choice," she said, indicating the collar around her neck.

  "What is that?" Jax asked.

  "It looks like a shock collar," Aiden said. "For dogs."

  "It is," she said. "Please let me go. Please don't make me say anymore. If he finds out I talked to you, he'll hurt me."

  "No one's going to hurt you," Jax assured her. "Let's get this thing off you." He reached for the collar, and she jerked away.

  "It will explode!" she cried.

  "May I?" Aiden asked. "I won't take it off. I just want to look at it."

  She let him, and though he realized pretty quickly what was going on, they were interrupted before he could say anything.

  "Widow Six!" shouted an angry, male voice from a speaker attached to the woman's belt. "Widow Six! Where the fuck are you? Get your ass down to the gate and let the dead fucks take care of these assholes!"

  "Who's that?" Jax asked.

  "It's the boss. I have to go. He'll kill me!"

  "Unless he's a sniper, he's not going to kill you," Aiden said. "There are no explosives attached to this collar."

  "They're in the box," she insisted, pointing to a large, plastic cube on the back of it that had a small lock on the side.

  "That's the battery pack that shocks you," he said. "I've seen plenty of these collars. Trust me." Jax looked at him curiously, wondering why he knew so much about shock collars, but Aiden just winked at him as if to say he was stretching the truth for the woman's sake.

  "Are you sure?" Jax asked.

  "I'm willing to cut it off myself," he said. "If there's a bomb in there, I'll lose my hands, so yeah, I'm sure."

  "Do it," Jax said.

  "Hold her steady," Aiden instructed.

  "Widow Six!" the boss yelled through the speaker.

  "Please be careful," Widow begged, and Jax put his arms around her from behind, holding her hands against her chest. He was so warm, and she was so cold. Then Aiden slipped his knife between her neck and the collar.

  "Don't move," he warned her.

  "Just relax," Jax whispered in her ear, and she leaned her head back on his shoulder and held her breath while Aiden removed the collar that had forced her to live like a slave for more than a month now.

  "Done," Aiden said, and Widow let out a long exhale.

  "Now do you want to tell us what's going on around here?" Jax asked.

  "Widow Six!" the boss screamed.

  "Who is he?" Aiden demanded.

  "I don't know his name. Calls himself the Widowmaker, and he calls all us slaves Widows. He keeps our husbands tied up working in the drug rooms, and if we fuck up, he takes it out on us and them."

  "How many people are inside that building?" Jax asked.

  "Now that you killed the soldiers? Maybe twenty," she said, "but they're not dangerous. I mean, they will be because they think their collars are wired to kill them, but if you take out Widowmaker, none of the people down there will fight you."

  "Can you get us inside?"

  "Widow-Fucking-Six!!!" Widowmaker screeched on his end of the line.

  "Yeah, but I have to answer him first or he'll send more of the slaves out here."

  "Can all of the slaves hear him call you on that walkie?" Jax asked.

  "No. Everyone of us has a different one."

  "Well, that sucks," he said, then he paused for a moment, thinking of a new plan. "Okay. Tell the Widowmaker that his yelling drew the dead to you and you've been bitten. He'll send someone else up, right?"

  "Yeah, but they'll probably be sent to kill me since the fake bomb couldn't."

  "We'll protect you. Go ahead and tell him."

  Widow pressed the button to speak, saying just what had been scripted for her, and the Widowmaker's response was swift and heartless.

  "Rot in hell," he growled. Then her walkie talkie went dead, and she knew someone would be sent to kill her. Aiden dialed Liana to tell her what was going on, and since the group down the hill had already cleared the dead inside the fence, he asked her to get them to work on the dead on the outside instead of entering the building. Aiden didn't want Widowmaker to change his next move because at the moment, he was right where they wanted him.

  "We're on it, babe," Liana said.

  "Be safe, mon cœur."

  "Y tu," she whispered, wishing she could say she loved him. She was just too scared to be the first, and the last thing she needed right now as they faced potential death was to have him hesitate. But he wouldn't have, not for a second.

  A few minutes later, another woman in chains with a shock collar emerged from the barn, which contained an underground tunnel to the building on the solar farm. It wasn't a nice, well-lit, comfortable tunnel like those beneath Olivia's compound. It was cramped and dark, and the women had to crawl through it because its original purpose had been to allow the owners of the farm to escape in case of a drug raid. While Widowmaker may have been responsible for the meth lab, the grow rooms were preexisting.

  When the woman Widowmaker sent to kill Widow Six stepped out into the daylight, it blinded her because she hadn't seen it in weeks, but as soon as her eyes focused, she came for her former comrade, who stood alone by the barn while Jax and Aiden hid around the side.

  "I have to kill you," the new woman said, wielding a machete.

  "No, you don't."

  "If I don't bring him your head, he's going to activate my collar."

  "You mean, this collar?" Widow Six asked, holding up what was left of hers. "There's no bomb. It's just a battery pack."

  "Really?" she asked, her hand instinctively going straight for the box on the back of hers. Her designation was Widow Two, and she'd been a prisoner here since the first week of the apocalypse when Widowmaker and his friends killed the solar farm owners and took over. Her husband spent his life in the grow room tending the poppies and marijuana plants the original owners had started. Others worked in the meth lab, and all of the wives and girlfriends were forced to cook, clean, and service Widowmaker and the militia. The women used to be allowed to see their husbands for a few minutes each day, but it had been over a week since the last time. They had become convinced that some of the men were dead and that they were all being kept away so they wouldn't know which ones.

  "I can cut off your collar," Six said to Two, "but first I need you to go back down there one more time."

  "No! God, no!" she cried, ready to shed her collar and run for the hills.

  "Please. Listen to me. Your husband is alive. I heard Widowmaker talking about him when he sent me up here," she lied. "You can't just run off and leave him. I need you to go open the gate like he asked you. Then go back downstairs and let everyone know that their collars can only shock them. You'll have three minutes, then I'm going to lead these two men down there to kill Widowmaker." Aiden and Jax stepped into view.

  "Then we're free?" she asked.

  "Then you're free," Jax said, and she immediately hurried toward the gate. There were dozens of dead in her path, but she had become proficient at dodging them because, like Widow Six, she was often sent out on the missions to collect them. She knew how they moved, how they "thought", and how to slip thr
ough their grasp because her life and her husband's life depended upon it.

  She opened the gate to let the dead inside, and once she had returned to the barn and gone below, Widow Six led Aiden and Jax through the cramped, dank tunnel that exited into a basement room behind a bookshelf that swung open like a door.

  "This is strange," Widow Six said as they emerged to silence. Widowmaker should have been shouting out orders, and the others should have been running around following them, but instead, everything was quiet. When she led them to the room where Widowmaker had been sitting in his command chair watching the video feed from the farm, it was clear why. Widow Two didn't want to wait for the men with the guns to take out her tormentor. She wanted to do it herself.

  She had wrapped the chain he used to keep her tethered to the wall around his neck and strangled him, and when her shock collar wasn't enough to stop her, he used a taser on her, not realizing the chains would conduct the current into him as well. Now they were both corpses, bound together by metal links melted into the flesh of the short, stubby man who had controlled this place, and they were not alone. Down the hall a group of the dead feasted on one of the widows who was now too far gone to reanimate.

  Aiden and Jax raised their rifles and mowed them all down.

  "We only gave her a three minute head start," Widow Six said, shocked.

  "I've seen it happen myself," Jax consoled her. "It spread through my tour bus so fast, I shouldn't even be alive."

  "Oh, my God, you're Jax Bonham!" she cried.

  "That was a different lifetime," he said dismissively. "Where are the rest of your people?"

  "Down here," she said, motioning for them to follow her into the hallway, but as they checked room after room, they found only corpses. In the end, five men and two boys who had been locked up in the meth lab and the grow room had survived. Counting Widow Six, there were eight of them, and when her husband was not among them, she realized she had been right. He was already dead before this group even showed up.

  Aiden called Liana to tell them they had taken the building, and outside, their group had finished off the dead. There was nothing to do now but break down and load the solar panels, and Liana asked Aiden to come up and oversee it while she joined Jax in the bowels of the drug operation. She knew Olivia would want every last drug in the place brought back to the Deadfall, but she also knew it had to be done secretly.

  While Aiden salvaged the guns and tactical gear of the militia, Liana put the former slaves to work carrying up all of their food and water and loading it on the trucks, and once that was cleaned out, she turned all but Widow Six over to Aiden to help with the solar panels while she and Jax stayed below to "dispose of the drugs so they didn't fall into the wrong hands." That was a lie, and as soon as the caravan drove away with their haul, they began loading the two vehicles Aiden left for them. They harvested all of the pot they could and loaded up nearly everything else - the lights, the meth, a large stash of pills and IV narcotics, as well as a small crop of poppies and their yield.

  "Widow Six," Liana called out to her as they stuffed the pot plants they couldn't transport into a massive incinerator the original owners had installed in case they needed to destroy evidence in a hurry.

  "Just Widow now," she said, looking up from her work. "The others are all dead."

  "Wouldn't you rather we use your real name?" Jax asked.

  "Nothing matters anymore," she whispered sadly.

  "I'm so sorry," he said, putting his hand on her shoulder, feeling partly responsible for the loss of her friends.

  "None of this was your fault, any of you," she said. "It was the motherfuckers who made slaves of us in the first place."

  "Widowmaker?" Liana asked.

  "No. He just ran this place. My husband and I were brought here by the same group of assholes that comes every week to take the drugs we scavenge and produce. They bring us food, water, and more slaves."

  "When are they due back?"

  "Couple of days, I think. Why? You gonna kill them too?" Widow asked.

  "If we have to, but for now, I just don't want to run into them on our way out of here," she said.

  "You won't. Their base is pretty far away. We were in the trunk of a car for hours when they brought us here," she explained, and when the thought of her lost husband hit her like an ice pick to the heart, she forced his image out of her mind and changed the subject. "So, what are you guys going to do with all these drugs?"

  "I don't know. Maybe we can use them to barter or something."

  "We're going to smoke the weed," Jax said with a wink.

  "Yeah, we'll probably smoke the weed," Liana agreed, laughing, but she didn't mean herself. She was too much of a control freak to let go like that. Still, it wouldn't be bad for a lot of the people at the compound to be able to take the edge off once in a while.

  Before they left for home, Liana and Jax collected the bodies of Neil, the Greyhawk player who had fallen, and Widow's friends. As they solemnly placed each of them in the incinerator one at a time, Liana began to tell Widow what she was walking into back at the compound. The new people who left with the caravan earlier would be blindfolded for the trip so they would have the option to leave if they didn't like it, but Widow already knew too much because she had helped with the drugs.

  "I'm afraid it's a one way ticket," Liana said, "but I promise you won't ever want to leave."

  "If I could just find a place where no one beats or rapes me, it'll be paradise," she said.

  "No one will ever hurt you there," Jax assured her.

  "Unless you have trouble keeping secrets," Liana added to impress upon Widow how serious it would be taken if she told anyone anything about the treasure they were bringing back. "If you can't keep your mouth shut about these drugs, our..." she paused, not sure what word to use to describe Olivia. Leader seemed too innocuous after these people had served the Widowmaker, and so did every other modern word she could think of - mayor...governor...president. She realized there was only one word that fit, even though it pained her to use it.

  "...our queen," she said finally, "Oblivia, the Bloody Queen, will have you killed for treason." Her words were serious, but then she softened because if she painted Olivia as a crazy tyrant, the whole story would fall apart once she met her. "Don't get me wrong. She's kind and fair, and she comes off like a fucking angel. She'll keep you safe, sheltered, and fed. But if you cross her or put her subjects in danger, you'll find out that she's actually depraved and merciless." As she spoke, Jax knew words like depraved and queen did not describe Olivia at all, but he also knew that based on the group they encountered today, Olivia had to be a ruthless dictator, even if it was just hype.

  "It's true," he added. "And the queen won't just shoot you, either. She'll crucify you...slowly."

  Widow's eyes grew wide. Death didn't scare her, but death by crucifixion was a different thing entirely. Later, as they made their way back to the compound, she saw the cross Jobe once hung upon still erected by the main road, the ground beneath still stained in blood, and she looked over at Jax from the passenger seat, feeling like she had jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire.

  "Welcome to the Deadfall, m'lady," he said as he stopped the car, waiting for Liana to open the lower gate.

  "The Deadfall?" she asked.

  "It's where the living rise, and the dead fall," he said, and Widow swallowed hard, visions of the beautiful and terrifying angel Liana said ruled this place swirling around in her head as she stared at the cross in fear and awe. And it was in that moment that the legend of Bloody Queen Oblivia was truly born.

  Dani was sitting on the porch of the lodge waiting when Jax finally drove up the gravel path from the inner gate, and she nearly tripped over her own feet chasing after his vehicle as Liana led him around the lodge toward the backdoor that went directly to Olivia's private residence. They had waited until after dark to return, and they planned to leave the cars locked with blankets over their contents until mos
t of the compound's residents were sleeping. But even though Liana had ten pounds of weed in her passenger seat, the only thing that caught Dani's attention was the woman in Jax's.

  "Who's that?" she demanded immediately before even hugging him.

  "Are you Queen Oblivia?" Widow asked, and with his back to her, Jax quickly held one finger to his lips to silence Dani.

  "This," he said, grabbing her and pulling her tight against him, "is my queen." And suddenly she cared much less about Widow than before.

  Aiden had been waiting for Liana as well, and he walked straight for her. He stared at her beautiful face, expecting to see it marred by scratches from the glass window that broke beside her, but there were none. She was perfect, and he pulled her to him, giving her a long, intense kiss.

  "Never make me leave you behind again," he breathed, and they heard Widow's wistful sigh from where she stood beside Jax's car. It made Liana feel guilty.

  "She just found out that her husband is dead," she explained to Aiden.

  "We'll finish this in private," he said with a glare that promised a night of sheet-gripping passion , then he left her to take Widow to join the other new members in the guarded hunting cabin not far from the back gate.

  Once inside, Widow learned that she was the only one who had been told anything about their new captors beyond the fact that they would be safe and fed here, and while she shared what she knew of Bloody Queen Oblivia, Liana went straight to the queen herself to let her know what she had become.

  Olivia was in her office with Alek, and she was not happy about the news.

  "You have got to be fucking kidding me!" she hissed, not sure if she was more offended by the name Oblivia, the ghoulish prefix, or the fact that despite her wishes, she had been named queen.

  "Queen Olivia doesn't sound very threatening, now does it?" Liana countered.

  "Oh, but Queen Oblivious. That'll get your knees knocking," Olivia scoffed with a roll of her eyes.

  "Not oblivious - oblivion. Like if you piss her off, that's the end of you," Liana explained.