"He is. He's guarding us."
Amo frowned, picking up on Cerulean's mood. "And you're worried."
"He doesn't fit. I don't know if it's anything, but he pulled a gun on us when we first met. I knocked him down. We haven't seen eye to eye since."
Amo raised an eyebrow. "Knocked him down? From the wheelchair?"
Cerulean shrugged. "I'm strong."
Amo nodded. "Olympic diver, OK. So we'll watch him. Enough?"
Cerulean shook his head. "There's more."
"Go ahead. I want to hear it."
So Cerulean told him; about Julio's need for respect, the infected heads on his Mustang fender, the threats, the naked need burning off him. When that was done, it seemed like there was more to say. Not everything, not yet, but the important things.
He told Amo about Matthew and the gun tower in Maine. Amo asked questions until he knew as much about it as Cerulean, and they were both tired of talking.
"Well," Amo just said at the end, then blinked and rubbed his eyes. "Things to think about. To manage. We can talk more tomorrow."
"Tomorrow?"
Amo nodded. "There's a schedule planned. Meetings. Discussions. Plans and maps, more cairns, restarting civilization, you know how it is. Of course there's a screening time for Ragnarok III too, mandatory for all survivors. It's full of good prepper tips."
"You've got it all planned out, huh?"
Amo grinned. "A plan, at least. I've no idea how it'll turn out."
Cerulean couldn't help but smile. There were things unsaid still, about his suicide in New York, about the gun tower in Maine and Matthew and his dive off the Empire State, but those could wait for another time. Now he needed Amo happy and proud, ready to lead these people forward into hope.
"We should sleep," he said.
"Agreed," said Amo. "We've got the rest of our lives to catch up."
17. PLANS
The next day passed like clockwork, much like Amo had predicted. He had plans, agendas and everything. There was a room for the meeting prepared, a duty roster for cleaning up the lobby, PowerPoint slides, maps, ideas.
Everyone gathered in the meeting hall in back of the Theater, where great natural light splashed through skylight windows across a big conference table, after a breakfast of leftovers. Amo led them through a short PowerPoint presentation he'd put together, outlining his plans for the future; a network of cairns spreading across the country was just the beginning.
He wanted to build LA into a truly sustainable community, with enough people to rebuild the human race. It was grand talk. To that end they'd need every survivor from the whole world, which meant cairn trails stretching to capital cities everywhere. New LA would have to become a shining beacon for them all.
Cerulean sat in the audience of seven feeling floored, while Anna fussed with her phone in her lap. There were cheers and rounds of rousing applause. When the last slide was done and Amo seemed to be finished for the moment, Julio stood.
Cerulean had been watching him; sitting there with a smug smile, biding his time.
"What about security?" he called in a loud voice.
Everyone turned to look at him.
"Security's a part of it," Amo said. "We talked about that."
Julio scoffed. "Do you think? Then who was watching the doors last night, while everyone got drunk and partied? Who stood guard while you all slept?"
The others shuffled uncomfortably.
"I did," said Julio. His eyes were burning now, with the same put-upon, neglected rage of before. Already these people were not respecting him enough. "I watched. How many people in here are armed? Just me? We're going to be soft meat when they come."
Amo cocked his head. Cerulean winced, hoping he'd handle it well.
"When who comes?"
"Whoever. Cannibals, rapists, gangs. You said your Don, he was raping the zombies? I know there are men like him out there. I've seen them. I killed one too."
This caused a silence.
"You killed a person?" Amo asked.
Cerulean noticed Lara inching a gun out of her waistband. Julio was too fixed on Amo to notice.
"Damn right I did. We've all got a history here, but nobody asked me about mine."
Cerulean knew for a fact that that wasn't true. He'd asked several times, as had Jake, Lara, even Amo himself. Perhaps he hadn't asked with enough respect.
"He came at me in the night, in Chicago, and tried to steal my radio. I was listening to music, I was asleep, and he came at me. It was only days after the apocalypse, when none of us knew what was happening."
Here Julio hawked and spat, right on the floor. "Goddamn looters. I fought, of course. I didn't have a gun then, so I had to club in his brains. Do you know what that feels like, to get brains on your fists?"
He was getting heated. His face was flushed. Cerulean wanted to say,'What living human would want to steal your radio?' but he held it back. Instead he listened as the conversation devolved into Julio demanding more attention be given to building up a silo of weapons, more effort diverted to establishing defenses and keeping watch like a military camp, more manpower assigned to running patrols.
And once he got running, the truth came out. By and large, his vision was the opposite of Amo's. He wanted to retrench and tear the existing cairns down, or at worst send newly arrived survivors to some neutral screening area, like a refugee camp. "We shouldn't be giving out our home location," he said. "Have you any idea how lucky we are to be here, and not one psycho amongst us?"
Lara exchanged a meaningful glance with Cerulean.
That was enough. Anna was frowning in his lap, listening to Julio's anger with a frown.
"Come on, you," he said, and rolled out of the conference room.
18. ANYTHING RASH
When they came back from a long, winding walk along the shore things were moving at the Theater. Amo and Lara had clipboards, while Jake, Masako, Cynthia and even Julio were setting about various tasks.
"He's going to gather munitions and set up a war room," Amo said to Cerulean through gritted teeth, pulling him to one side. "And see if he can find a tank."
Cerulean raised an eyebrow, not sure if he should laugh or be worried. "A tank?"
Amo nodded. "He's a prize, that one. What are we going to do with a tank?"
"Stage a coup d'état? Damn. So he'll have all the guns?"
"Not by a long shot. Lara and I are armed. You are?" Cerulean shook his head. "You should be. Look, take this."
Amo reached into one of his cargo pockets and palmed a black pistol into Cerulean's lap. "Tuck it down the side or something."
"What am I going to do with this?"
"Shoot him, if you have to," Amo said. "I've told the others too. But I'm sure it won't come to that."
Then Amo was away, coordinating an effort to fetch and bring a gas tanker around so they'd save time on the run for fuel. Lara strode over as Cerulean tucked the black gun down beside his withered thigh. Anna was still standing by his side, holding to the armrest.
"Hey, Anna," Lara said. "Are you game for some coloring in?"
Anna beamed. "Yes, Lara, I'd love that," she said, like a good little girl, with none of her customary cheekiness. Cerulean snorted. She still had Amo and Lara up on a pedestal.
"Why don't we do that, so Cerulean can get on with gathering supplies?"
"You should call him Daddy," she said. "He's my Daddy now."
Cerulean flushed and his eyes welled up. Lara grinned and winked, then took Anna's waiting hand. "Give you a break, Daddy," she mouthed.
"Thanks," he mouthed back. Anna waved as she was led away.
Daddy?
* * *
For two days they worked.
They erected a water tower, which didn't work, so they erected another which did, using a crane Amo found to set it in position atop the Chinese Theater's roof. They sourced more air conditioners and wired them to generators, set up fridges in one of the theaters to serve as a communal mess ha
ll, gathered a wide range of canned food while Cynthia drove up to the nearest green space, a golf course off Federation Drive, and started plowing it with Amo's JCB, rigged with a makeshift tiller.
"Potatoes," she said afterwards, covered in smeared dirt and sweat, staggering with Masako's help back into the Theater lobby as dusk fell. "Two hundred of the little bastards, root and eye, best calorie source there is in nature."
Cerulean had just got back from an arduous day re-fuelling and driving cars and trucks and semis off the roads they planned to use, lining them up in barricades to steer the ocean away.
"We're not short of calories," he said, weary himself. "All of Los Angeles' bounty is at our fingertips."
"Fresh food," Cynthia sneered, though there was no vitriol in it. Probably she was too tired. "Vitamins and minerals. Tomorrow I'm planting salads."
One day later they moved into apartments in the Wellville hotel, Cerulean's choice, with nice wide corridors for his chair, ramps everywhere, and a great central courtyard with pool. He took a duplex with a granny flat built in, for Anna. It was only noon and everyone was out somewhere, but he was exhausted. He had kept up the same pace as the rest of them, shifting bricks for reinforcements, gathering paints and other equipment on Amo's shopping list for future cairns, but it was wearing on him hard.
The chair gave him limits. He used his arms for everything, to move and to lift and to drive and now they were shooting with sharp pains.
"This is yours," he told Anna, showing her into her room. It was all pink, scrubbed of the personal effects of the previous little girl who'd lived there.
She looked it over, gave no reaction, then looked up at him. "You should rest," she told him. "You look like a floater."
He couldn't argue.
"Don't go anywhere, OK," he said. Seconds later his head hit the pillow and he was out.
* * *
When he woke Anna was gone.
He was hot, bleary and sticky, and the ache in his arms and shoulders had become a painful crick in his neck. He went to check on Anna but she wasn't in her room. He opened the outer door and called her name, but no answer came. She wasn't by the pool or out on the Walk or anywhere.
He tamped down the rising panic and brought up his walkie-talkie; they all carried them now, scavenged from the Long Beach Police Department, and opened a frequency.
"Amo, have you seen Anna?"
It took a few seconds for Amo to reply, seconds in which worry plummeted into Cerulean's belly like a bag of curdling milk.
"She's here with Lara. It's all right, she's fine, but you better come over. We're in the conference room."
He was there in minutes, sweating from the exertion of rolling at full speed down the street and over the courtyard. Amo met him at the conference room door.
"Where's Anna?"
Amo pointed. At the conference table Lara and Anna were playing fruit-chopping games on a tablet computer.
"She's OK?"
Amo nodded. "I think so. But you won't like what I'm going to tell you. Promise you won't do anything rash."
Cerulean stared. Already he was guessing. "I promise. Just tell me."
Amo lowered his voice. "Julio threatened Anna." He raised his hands, palms out and soothing. "But calm down, Cerulean, it's not like that. It was a joke, or possibly a joke, you know he's got no sense of humor. We need to talk to him."
He was seeing red already. "Talk to him?"
"Things are too delicate for anything else. Yes, he may have said some possibly sexual things, but he didn't actually do anything, and how certain can we be of any of it?"
"Possibly sexual?"
Amo winced. "Apparently he told her there was only one rule now, you do what you want? The weak and the strong, all that. And he told her to put her finger inside the rifle barrel… I know, yes, it doesn't sound good. And it's true he made her cry, and yes, he did scare her, but-"
Cerulean's jaw was tight. Rage bubbled up inside him like he'd never felt before in his life, consuming everything in its path. Anna had called him Daddy. This was his child now, and his responsibility, and Julio had done what? Nothing else mattered.
"I warned him," he said through gritted teeth. "That bastard. I warned him plenty."
Amo touched Cerulean's shoulder tentatively. "You promised, Cerulean, remember? Nothing rash. I'm handling it."
He broke the promise at once.
19. JULIO
Cerulean charged into screen 3 like a stampeding bull.
Screen 3 was Julio's workshop, where he'd set up drills, files, a lathe, a table saw and other tools on a few scavenged desks at the front, in the open space between the seats and the screen. All manner of shotguns, rifles, pistols and rocket launchers lay around him, resting on ammo crates and held up on sawhorse frames. Here he was attaching a scope, here he was sawing off a shotgun barrel. The air smelled of sawdust, grease and gunpowder.
Julio stood behind his workbench, scattered over with bits of tubing, trigger guards, emptied magazines and many gauges of bullet. He smiled confidently at Cerulean, showing gleaming white teeth.
"I wondered when you'd pay me a visit," he said.
Cerulean didn't reply, too furious for words, and raced down the sloping theater floor. Julio put a large Beretta on the desk in front of him with a heavy clank and a warning look, but Cerulean didn't care. He rounded the banks of seats and propelled himself at the work desk, to Julio's amusement.
That shit-eating smile would soon be gone. The complacency would be gone. Cerulean was stronger than Julio had imagined; at his peak he'd been the only person he knew capable of performing an inward arm-stand dive without cracking his head open on the platform edge. He'd been strong then and he was stronger now.
A yard ahead of the desk Cerulean clicked the chair's brakes on, punched his hands off the armrests like he was doing the arm-stand dive of his life, and took off.
The air caught him and pulled him on; milliseconds of flight passed as he soared up and over the desk. A thunk and a slight change in his angle told him his trailing legs had smacked off the desk edge, but it didn't slow him enough. Julio's face changed as he flew right at him, downshifting from arrogance to fear, and Cerulean wanted to shout at him, 'You idiot, we've been through this before!'
But still Julio wasn't ready and Cerulean hit him like a two hundred pound linebacker wiping out the quarterback. He was bigger, he was stronger, and now Julio would know it.
They fell just like they had before; the air crushed out of Julio's lungs, but this time Cerulean didn't stop at that. Time sped up and now his fists rose and fell, hammering Julio in his face again and again, one hand on the floor to support himself and the other hammering like a jack-drill. The meaty crunch of knuckles on bone and flesh rang out, there was the crunch of Julio's nose breaking, his teeth coming dislodged, while he just struggled to get his hands up and protect himself. Blood was everywhere and Julio's features were already torn and swollen.
Then there were stamping feet nearby, and Amo and Jake were on him. They gasped as they pulled him away, seeing what he'd done. He let it happen and the fight went out of him as Julio's bloody face receded.
"You remember this, you bastard," Cerulean snarled back at him. "You don't forget it."
"Shit, oh shit," Jake muttered.
"Robert, get the hell out of here," Amo said.
They dumped him back into his wheelchair and Jake rolled him away.
* * *
Amo and Cerulean sat on a pier, far away from the others. Jake was gone now; it was just him and Amo watching the sea, with the sun only a few fingerwidths away from falling into the water.
What he'd done back in screen 3 seemed very far away now. His knuckles hurt a lot. He turned them over in his lap, crusted with blood, some of it his own, no doubt about that. He'd need stitches too.
Amo stood at the railing looking out over the water. Thinking, probably, what to say to his best friend. How to make this play. Cerulean just sat and waited, like a
kid outside the principal's office, looking down at his blood-slathered arms. Evidence everywhere.
It was a warm and humid California evening three days after their arrival.
Eventually Amo spoke. "I wouldn't have told you if I'd known you'd react like that."
Cerulean grunted. "You should've done it yourself."
Amo shuffled, plainly uncomfortable. "Beaten him half to death? You can't do that kind of thing, Robert. You'd go to jail for that. It sends a shitty signal."
Cerulean looked up, defiant now. "It sends a signal. I don't know that it's bad. And he'd go to jail for what he said, or be put on some kind of register."
Amo sighed and threw up his hands.
"He threatened Anna, Amo!" Cerulean went on. "What did he say? 'This is how the world is now, you do what you have to to survive?' What's that supposed to mean when you say it to a little girl? Then getting her to put her finger in a gun tube? It's perverted. Do you honestly think, if it was just him and her without any of us around, he'd have any qualms about doing whatever he wanted to her?"
"All right," Amo said. "I see that, of course I do, but let's keep some perspective shall we? They were all just words. And we are all here, aren't we? He's not going to get the chance to do anything."
Cerulean shook his head, holding eye contact. "Not good enough. He's shown his character, and that's it for me. He's a cancer and we can't watch him all the time. I should never have let him come."
"He's lost," Amo countered. "You see that, I know, because you saw it at the start. He's put himself outside the loop, yes, and he's feeling it now. But none of us has made a big effort to bring him in, have we? So he makes threats to a little girl to feel big. It's pathetic, deplorable I agree, but I don't know that it's the same as actually committing the abuse."
Cerulean looked him in the eye. "Who knows where it might have gone, if she hadn't told you. What if she hadn't?"
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