I don’t know what’s worse—feeling left out because nobody told me, or feeling stupid for needing months to make sense of the things that now are all too obvious for me to ignore. While I feel irritated, I’m also immensely glad. I knew we were doing a good job establishing our town here, but ever since Nate and the guys left, I’ve felt vulnerable and exposed. Knowing that he left a kind of legacy with us does away with that unease now. I wonder if the people from Utah are in on it? Or maybe they simply saw they had a prepared partner in us and were happy to join because of it.
All that does nothing to alleviate my emotional anguish, but at least the worst of the numbness has passed. I wish it had happened a day sooner so I could have done more than hug the guys and sob against their shoulders. Really, I should have handled this better, but first Chris and now Bree—it’s too much to handle on a good day, and my hormones are definitely messing with me. I keep telling myself that this must be the absolute rock-bottom point, and it can only get better from here on out.
Of course, hours after I tell myself that, Kevin proves me otherwise. I’m just about done for the day and wrapping things up at the triage station—Tanisha is out at the ever-expanding wall that we are building because there was an accident earlier—when he steps in, and after making sure I’m alone, he pulls me aside. “I have bad news,” he mutters, keeping his voice low even though there’s no one around to hear. “Women are disappearing from all over the settlements.” He does one of those pauses that makes me want to wring his neck. “Pregnant women.”
I quickly cycle from alarmed to panicked to relieved—I have an answer for that. “They must be traveling to the sanctuary cities,” I explain, repeating what Tanisha has told me.
Only that as soon as I’m done, he shakes his head. “I just got off the radio with Sylvie. She’s the one who told me. They are not asking to be brought anywhere, and they are not arriving at any of those places. Remember, she’s coordinating between the settlements and the army. She’d know.”
Icy fingers wrap around my soul but still, I protest. “Maybe they just ran away. Or, you know, got dragged off by assholes like those we had to kill, doing unspeakable things that should get them, well, killed.” Part of me is still horrified I’m saying this with conviction, but, really, the end of the world has a way of shifting priorities. Not getting raped and killed: definitely a priority.
Kevin shakes his head. “I’m not saying that’s not happening, although I think the female traders are more at risk there. The settlements do take care of their own. I offered the exact same arguments, but Sylvie still doesn’t buy it. Here’s a list with where it happened—that she knows of. There’s some clustering happening, and she suspects foul play. Most of the girls that disappeared weren’t just normal settlers, but…”
He pauses, looking conflicted. If I had a dollar for every time I get that look, I’d... Not be able to buy myself anything from it, so it doesn’t matter. “They’re whores?” I cheerfully suggest. They don’t call it the oldest trade in the world for nothing—and while I may have personal, biased reservations, I know what some of the women who’ve come to our town of late do that keeps them up all night so they hit the sack after breakfast when the rest of us head to work.
Kevin inclines his head only a fraction, as if that would change the facts. “Anyway, some girls disappeared, and nobody knows what happened to them. We do know a few decided to hitch to other towns, or get inked and stay with a group. Sylvie has someone at Dispatch checking again, but there are more than twenty names that friends and family have confirmed went missing without a cause.”
And, just like that, the fragile hope flickering inside of me gets crushed again. Not completely, but it’s one more damper I really could have done without. Again, I ask myself why I haven’t told my parents yet, but something keeps holding me back. Maybe a talk with Sylvie will help. “Do you mind if I hitch a ride with you?” I ask Kevin, quickly explaining my predicament.
“You likely won’t reach her for a while,” Kevin lets me know. “She mentioned something about needing to look after her daughter. But she should be back next week.”
I rationally know that a week more or less won’t make a difference. And it’s not like I intend to do anything right now, anyway, but that does nothing to lessen the anxiety that is taking hold of me. I thank Kevin and head to get some tea so I can check the list he just gave me. The names of the settlements aren’t sounding familiar, but so many new towns have joined the network that I’m not surprised. With the traders afraid and the scavengers ready to lay low for now, even small enclaves are likely to blow up into towns by the end of the summer—and if that’s the true consequence of whatever is going on out there, I’m glad. More towns mean more places for people to be safe, and right now is the season for heading out and getting what those people will need to make it through the next winter. I’ve heard more than one tale of people saying they only made it through by sheer luck and some last-minute efforts. Really, we shouldn’t be at each other’s throats but instead collecting and fortifying, and for once all stand behind a common goal: survival.
As much as I try to be patient, I manage barely a day before I crack and start asking around if anyone just so happens to know someone from one of the settlements on the list. I’m well aware of what a pretty girl with a nice smile can accomplish—positive and negative, so I’m not heartbroken when, two minutes into chatting up the newly-arrived scavengers, I find Moore plastered to my side. I get a warning glance from him but he doesn’t hold me back, instead finishes the conversations that I start—just two bored and curious townspeople mingling with the newcomers.
That is, until I get to a guy named Rick—who is way more interested in my cleavage than talking to me—and suddenly, a different guy inserts himself into our conversation, perfectly scowling down his hawklike nose. “Why the fuck are you so damn interested in Bennings?” That would be the eleventh town on my list.
I’ve had enough time to memorize not just the town names, so I give this a try. “Do you perhaps know Mary Alexander? She’s a friend—”
The guy’s scowl deepens, making me shut up.
“What do you want with her?” he asks, and I’m sure that if Moore wasn’t slowly inching his way in front of me, I’d already have found myself pressed against the wall a few feet at my back.
My stomach seizes up, but I’m doing my best to let my forced smile appear real. “Just checking up on her, is all. It’s so hard to stay connected across such a long distance.”
He doesn’t buy it. “Where do you know her from? College?”
I quickly nod. “That’s right. We—”
His smirk is nasty enough that I feel like I really should end this conversation. “Well, too bad she didn’t go to college, so I know for a fact that you’re lying, Missy. I’ll give you one last chance. How do you know her?”
Moore looks ready to step in, but I take a moment to signal him to stay down. Exhaling slowly to calm my nerves, I turn back to the scavenger, doing my best to compose myself. “You’re right. I don’t personally know her. But I know people who have been trying to help her, and they’ve lost contact. I’m worried because…” I trail off, not sure what or how much to say, but when I see the guy’s scowl soften, I decide to take a small risk. “She and I, we may have something in common. I’d like to talk to her, that’s all.”
I know I’ve hit pay dirt when his gaze drops down my body, but the way he considers my chest is very different from that sleazebag earlier. Dusk is settling over the town and it’s too dark to really make out details, and since I’ve taken to dressing even more conservatively than before, I doubt he’ll get any visual clues from me. When I dress, I can’t deny to myself any longer that my belly is definitely rounding and growing, but to someone else I’d—at best—look slightly bloated. His reaction makes me guess he hasn’t just heard of that town but knows the woman I’m asking about—and he just confirmed that she’s pregnant, too.
Finally no
ticing that his behavior must be scaring me, the guy eases up further, stepping out of my personal space and going as far as offering a small, apologizing nod. “She’s my sister,” he explains gruffly, then clears his throat as if to smooth his tone. “I haven’t been able to contact her for over a month now. I’m worried, because that’s so unlike her. When my friends and I set out to go looting, she stayed behind and made me promise to check in with her at least once a week. It makes no sense that she’d leave without telling me first.”
“Why didn’t you head over there instead of here?” I ask, realizing too late that he could take it the wrong way.
He doesn’t, chuckling under his breath. “Yeah, we thought of doing just that, but the settlement is just twenty miles south of one of the army bases. If what people are saying is right and the army is coming after us, we’d endanger our friends. If it’s all the crapload of bullshit that it sounds like, they’ll take pains to ensure nothing happens to the settlement, now more than before. We’ve left messages with our people there to tell us which way things are going, and we might head back there once the coast is clear. Then again, there we are the outsiders, and here your mayor has invited us to not just stay but build houses for ourselves if we want to.” I can tell that he has realized that Mom’s offer is to ensure they won’t just bail the second things get dire, but like many others he doesn’t seem to care, enjoying fair treatment over empty promises.
“We’re happy to have you here,” I assure him, rolling out the politician side of me that I’ve been unaware I’ve inherited since very recently. “May I ask you another question? A more personal one?” He nods. “Is it possible that, maybe, Mary is pregnant?” I try to talk evenly like I’m not whispering, but I’m surprised he understands.
Not just that; he laughs at my question. “I’d be surprised if she wasn’t,” he grunts, but does so with a slow smile. When he sees my confusion, he snorts. “I love my sister, but she’s… how shall I put this? She’s easy on the eye and even more easily charmed by someone being nice to her, and she insists that the entire fucking apocalypse is a sign from the Lord that we need to go back to the old ways and stop polluting our bodies with chemical poisons.”
I give him a quick “got it” nod—she’s having sex with half of the soldiers from the base, and not taking any hormonal contraceptives. I don’t ask if it’s possible that one of them married her and she’s living on the base now since that sounds like the very first thing he would have mentioned. I also don’t ask whether she’d be the kind of sister to lie to her brother because she’s afraid he’d come over and drag her out of her lover’s bed because he didn’t agree with her choices. At least if she’s on the base, she’ll have access to better medical supplies and at least a medic, or maybe even doctors and nurses.
I don’t consider the alternative, but thoughts of it won’t leave me alone even hours after I’ve thanked the guy for the information and made my way back to the safety and isolation of my bed.
Days pass, and there’s enough to do to keep me busy and make them bearable. It’s not like I can suddenly forget about why my heart is heavy, but the bustle of activity all around is contagious—and loud enough to drown out my morose thoughts. Then, something happens at the gates, and I follow the throng of people streaming there to check on the newcomers. As it turns out, they are from the Utah settlement, bringing tools and wares that we’ve been lacking—and a pleasant, if somewhat bittersweet surprise: they are the scavengers who met up with our guys for a week before they got caught in the trap that killed three of them. Jason, their leader, is a tall, loud, boastful guy with a talent for turning what could have been a five-minute recount into a grand, epic tale of battle and triumph that easily entertains half our town all evening long. I have to admit, I get along better with his second-in-command, Charlie, who uses a quiet moment when Jason grabs another beer someone is quick to hand him to tell me he’s sorry for our loss, and that Bree, Cho, and Bailey were great people. I feel really daft when it takes me five minutes of his careful asking about Martinez to make the connection.
“You two… hit if off?” I venture what feels like a—belatedly—informed guess.
Charlie smiles, a tad bashfully—or how bashful a guy who has chosen to make a living going out there and bashing in zombie skulls can get. “We’ll see what comes of that.” His gaze drifts to where Jason has finished his beer and resumes his tale, a little more animated now. “It’s hard sometimes to read between the lines when you spend half the time either running for your life or high on adrenaline from having made it. And it’s not like I can be too choosy about casual hookups, either, although that’s more the boss’s thing.”
My heart gives a twinge as I remember the conversation between Burns and Chris that led to me acting like a stupid little girl for weeks—weeks that I will never get back, and will regret having lost forever. Our scavengers here are a rowdy bunch but I know they are trying to behave themselves—also because Dad, more than once, explicitly warned them about what would happen if they gave him cause for more than a simple slap on the wrist. Dispatch, from what I’ve heard, is a very different place. I’m afraid to ask, but I’m curious—and it is another possible place for me to go, if the need arises.
Charlie cracks a smile at my less than subtle probing but is happy to elaborate when prompted. “It’s less about the services offered,” he says with a conspiratorial eye roll. “It’s more about having a place where you don’t have to watch your back, and where you don’t feel judged.” He glances at the town around us. “You’re doing a good job here being open and welcoming, and at home they treat us like we belong, but most settlements see us as the untrustworthy assholes that the propaganda is making us out to be. At first I thought it hit us hard because our group’s all guys, but then I saw how the townspeople treated your people, and I realized, it’s universal. I sadly never got the chance to get to know Bree well, but even so I could tell how angry the way they treated us made her. I could tell that it cost her a lot to be diplomatic and get us a better deal than they offered us—in exchange for liberating their town from what would have soon been their death sentence. I’ve never seen so many undead in one place. I didn’t think their walls would have held up much longer.”
I can’t help but laugh at his assessment. “Just how bad did it get that Bree was the voice of reason? She’s not—” I have to halt and correct myself there, swallowing hard. “She wasn’t exactly what I’d call diplomatic.”
Charlie shares my sad smile. “Maybe I should have said, diplomatic compared to the others, although I think they were putting on a display for the townspeople to better sell them the offered bargain. Their behavior changed a lot when it was just us, and we all had a blast celebrating together in Dispatch. Just shows you what great company can do.” He chuckles under his breath. “I think even your people were surprised your other woman—forgot her name—would let down her guard like that, but we all saw her walk out the boss’s tent in the morning. Sure made me feel foolish for getting all sneaky half an hour earlier.”
I’m too stunned to answer to that saucy little detail he dropped right at the end there. “What other woman?”
He seems surprised I need to ask. “Tall, blonde. A real hard-ass?”
I’m still gulping like a fish. “Are you seriously telling me that Pia hooked up with Jason?” It comes out as a hoarse whisper, because I’m pretty much babbling blasphemy.
Charlie still doesn’t get it, giving me a weird look now. “Yeah, I think that’s her name? Why, is she married to someone here?” He scrunches up his nose. “Am I supposed to keep this a secret? She seemed pretty relaxed about it.”
I shake my head, still stunned. “No, she’s not. But she’s—” She’s Pia, which is all the explanation I really have.
Charlie chuckles under his breath. “The boss can be quite the charmer. Better not tell him he managed to do something remarkable there or it will go straight to his head. It was probably more of a spur-of-the-mo
ment thing. Everyone was quite in high spirits. Literally, too.” He flashes me a dazzling smile. “I heard your guys dropped by here last week? Did they tell you they all got matching tats? The tattooers almost refused because most of them were too drunk to stand straight anymore by that time, but eventually dropped the point when it became apparent that none of them would take no for an answer.”
I shake my head. “No, they didn’t tell me. They barely mentioned that they went to Dispatch at all. I think the pain and loss was too fresh. Too raw.”
Charlie nods. “I get that. We lost two in our joint mission, but at least it was to those undead fuckers, not alive humans.”
I can tell that he pauses to give me a chance to switch topics, but I’m done grieving for tonight, now that I’ve found someone to share a few warm memories with instead. “So, they got inked?”
“Yeah, a thirteen in a circle—their unit insignia, if you want to call it that. All but Bree got it at the top of their spine just underneath the X marks, or between the shoulder blades, but Miller tried to forbid Lewis to get hers anywhere that was easily visible, so she said, ‘you mean, like a tramp stamp?’ and subsequently referred to it as a ‘rape stamp’ since that would be about the only instance anyone would see it, but she agreed to a lower back tattoo.” Charlie winces as he says that, then laughs at his own behavior. “I know how that sounds now but trust me, she was laughing so hard, she was almost falling off the bench where she was supposed to lie on so the poor tattooer could do her thing. Miller and Burns had to hold her down so she would hold still enough. That did not help at all.”
In spite of the pain twisting in my heart I can’t help but grin. “That sounds exactly like what she’d say. I have zero problems picturing it.”
Charlie nods, still smiling at the memory. “How’s Miller taking it? When we met up with them, I at first thought she was just his driver, and they didn’t exactly keep close to each other. But the next morning—after what was a truly grueling workout for everyone—I saw them standing together, dripping wet from having ended up in the lake, and he was smiling down at her and pushing wet hair sticking to her cheek away, and let me tell you, nobody looks at a casual hookup like they were looking at each other. Losing her less than two weeks after that… shit, I’m not sure I’d be holding it together if that happened to me, and he’s not me.” When he catches my raised brows, he shrugs. “Your people have a certain reputation, and their leader even more than others. We asked around a little in Dispatch since there were a lot of former army people there, too, and the stories people tell each other…” He snorts. “I’m sure you’ve heard them all and you know that less than ten percent of them can even be true, but I’d be lying if I doubted that the entire scavenger community is holding its collective breath right now, waiting to see what will happen next. Whether the rumors of people disappearing are true or not, many are scared and pissed off, and just waiting for someone to point them in the direction of where to let off some steam. You’re doing a great job here reminding them that it would be much better to instead work hard on establishing a new civilization where things like that can’t happen.”
Beyond Green Fields | Book 4 | The Ballad of Sadie & Bates [A Post-Apocalyptic Anthology] Page 13