“Oh, I saw them,” Smith said.
“So why’d you ask about them?”
“Just wanted to know if you knew.”
“So what happened?”
“I killed them.”
“Why did you do that?”
“They were trying to kill me. It was self-defense.”
“Well, if it was self-defense…”
Peoples had resumed poking at the fire with his machete, though he wasn’t looking at what he was doing. His eyes were glued on Smith.
Like most people in the world, before or after The Purge, Peoples was right-handed. Smith knew that by the way he clutched his long knife. And, of course, his holstered Glock was on his right hip and so was the AR leaning about a foot away. To get to either weapon, he would need to drop the machete first.
“So what do you want?” Peoples asked.
“I came to see if the woman and her boy like being in your company,” Smith said.
“She does.”
“Why don’t we let her answer that?”
“Not necessary. She does. You know what they were eating when I found them? I saved their lives.”
“Did you, now?”
“It’s harsh out there. A woman and a boy alone…” Peoples shrugged. “I don’t know how long they would have lasted if I hadn’t come along.”
“You must be one of those Good Samaritans I’ve heard about.”
“You can call me whatever you want.”
“Why don’t I ask them anyway?” Smith said. He looked over at the woman. “Ma’am? You like being in this guy’s company?”
The woman opened her mouth to answer, but Peoples beat her to it. “She likes it fine. This is none of your business, remember?”
“It wasn’t, until tonight,” Smith said. He looked back at the woman. “Ma’am? You want to stay with this guy, or leave with me?”
“I said, she’s fine where she is,” Peoples said.
Smith sighed and turned back to the big man. “I’m only going to say this once: Interrupt her one more time, and I’ll shoot you where you sit. You understand me?”
Peoples narrowed his eyes back at him across the fire. The flames had gotten bigger and hotter because Peoples kept shoveling more tinder into them. “This is none of your business. You need to leave. Now.”
He’d said the now with great authority, as if he was used to giving orders.
And maybe he was, just not to someone like Smith. Which was to say, someone who didn’t give a flying goddamn what he wanted.
“One more time,” Smith said to Peoples. Then, turning to the woman, “Ma’am—”
Peoples went for his rifle.
That was a mistake, because in order to reach for it he had to drop the machete, twist around at the waist, and reach for the AR. He could have saved at least a full second by going for his holstered Glock instead.
As it stood, Peoples got both hands on the rifle before Smith, in no hurry, drew his SIG and shot the man in the left ear.
Peoples howled and let go of the AR, then tumbled backward and onto the ground on his back. Smith hadn’t expected that reaction, but he had to admit, it was pretty damn funny.
The only reason Smith hadn’t killed Peoples outright was because of the woman. She had suffered. He didn’t know how much, but it was enough. He had seen the thousand-yard stare on her too many times to mistake it for anything else. And because of that, Smith felt that Peoples needed to suffer a little bit before he could, finally, give up the ghost.
“This is what happens when you keep interrupting,” Smith said as he walked over.
The big man had drawn and was trying to raise his Glock even while he was still on his back. But in order to see Smith and shoot him, the man had to raise himself to line up a shot first. He was doing exactly that when Smith shot him again, this time in the right cheek. The bullet tore a healthy chunk of Peoples’s skin, muscle, and bone with it.
Peoples screamed again, but he was still trying to aim and get a shot off. Smith shot him a third time, this one in the right hand. Two of Peoples’s fingers flicked through the night air and landed somewhere behind him, while the gun dropped to the ground.
The big man rolled over and onto his knees. He grabbed at his mutilated right hand, even while blood dripped from his cheek and what was left of his left ear. All of a sudden he didn’t seem like such a tough guy anymore.
Smith holstered his SIG. “You shouldn’t have come back for me. I might have let you go if you hadn’t. But I guess we’ll never know for sure now, will we?”
Peoples looked up from his mangled fingers at Smith. “You fucker!”
“Relax. You still have eight perfectly good fingers left.”
“You fucker!” Peoples shouted again.
Smith had another witty comeback ready (something along the lines of “This conversation is boring me.”), but before he could say it, the woman stood up and ran over. Smith glanced in her direction, was about to yell at her to stop, when she picked up Peoples’s rifle and pointed it at its owner.
Peoples’s eyes seemed to bulge against their sockets as he raised his hands toward her. “Wait. Don’t. Don’t!”
But the woman didn’t wait, and she apparently knew her way around a rifle, because Smith heard the click! as the woman changed the fire selector on the weapon before she pulled the trigger.
Peoples’s body danced against the firelight as thirty bullets poured into him.
Smith thought it was a waste of perfectly good bullets, but he wasn’t about to tell the woman that. He had a feeling she wasn’t in any mood to listen anyway.
Four
Smith wasn’t looking for an instant family. If he were, he wouldn’t have gotten rid of Margo the first chance he got. Though, of course, he didn’t look at the situation with Margo as having “gotten rid” of her. More like he’d given her a better life since just about anything was better than wandering around the countryside the way he was doing. Aimless walking, with nothing to call home and no destination in mind, wasn’t any kind of life for a kid.
It was the perfect life for a guy like him, though.
So when he started walking and the mother and son decided to follow him, he was a little surprised. They stopped when he stopped and turned around, keeping about ten yards between them and him as if they didn’t quite trust him to get too close. Which, he guessed, he didn’t blame them after everything they had been through.
“You don’t have to follow me,” Smith said.
“What?” the woman said.
“You don’t have to follow me. You can go wherever you want. You’re free.”
“Free?” she said, as if she couldn’t comprehend the meaning of the word.
“Go wherever you want. Both of you.”
She stared at him, then at the boy. Then back at him.
The boy looked almost as confused as she was.
“You understand what I’m telling you?” he asked.
“We don’t know where to go,” she said.
“Where were you going when they found you?”
Just in case she didn’t understand the question, he nodded toward Peoples’s bloodied form, still on the ground next to the log. Smith could hardly tell what the man looked like because the woman had put all of the AR’s magazine into his face. Smith was fully prepared to tackle her and take the weapon from her if she tried to reload it, fearing she might turn it on him, but she had just dropped it like she didn’t know what it was doing in her hands in the first place.
She looked back at Peoples and lingered on his body for a moment. Maybe she hadn’t realized what she’d done until now, though Smith didn’t think so when she turned back to him and he didn’t see anything on her face that could even remotely be mistaken for regret.
Smith looked from her to the kid. He clung to his mother, both arms around hers, while peering back at Smith. The boy wasn’t very big and barely went up to her waist. He had short blond hair like his mother, and Smith didn’t have
to look very hard to see all the other resemblances. The kid was clearly born after The Purge, which meant this was the only world he knew. Smith wasn’t sure if he should feel sorry for the boy or not. After all, Smith knew all the things they’d lost when the creatures tried to end humanity, but this boy would never feel those losses.
“We were in a group,” the woman said. “They…found us a week ago. They killed everyone except us. They killed Aaron’s father.”
Aaron, Smith guessed, was the boy.
“Where were you headed?” Smith asked.
“Nowhere,” she said.
“Nowhere?”
She shook her head. “We weren’t going anywhere. We were just moving around. It’s easier that way.”
He was going to ask “Easier how?” but didn’t. Smith knew what she meant, because he was doing exactly the same thing. He kept moving around because it was easier. Once you put down roots, you had to commit to the place, to the people. The last time Smith did that was with Black Tide, and that hadn’t turned out very well.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Me?”
She nodded.
“North,” he said.
“What’s north?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m going up there. To find out.”
He wasn’t sure if she understood him, because she didn’t respond right away. It took a few seconds before she said, “Then we’re going north, too.”
“I’m not looking for companions.”
“Neither are we. You’re walking north, and so are we. Who says we have to go together?”
He gave her a wry smile. That was one way to put it.
“Yeah, okay,” Smith said, and turned back around and headed north.
He walked, and they followed.
Though not right away because they ran back to the makeshift camp and looted Peoples and, as it turned out, packs from the Accountant and Tall and Lanky, too. Peoples had confiscated both of his dead partners’ things after they no longer needed them.
Smith kept going, but he slowed down enough that mother and son didn’t completely lose sight of him until they had grabbed all they could. The woman, whose name he still didn’t know, carried two of the packs while the boy did his best to shoulder one of them. Eventually, though, they started ditching items from the bags to lighten their load. Smith pictured a long, jagged line of supplies connecting them all the way back to the campfire, which had started to fade slowly into the background.
He hadn’t wanted to stay at the camp for two reasons: Peoples’s faceless body being one, and the other was not wanting to press his luck when it came to ghouls. If he could spot the fire from two miles away, there was a very good chance others could as well.
Smith didn’t like taking chances if he could avoid it. This was one of those times when he could, so he did.
By the time the woman and Aaron had caught up to him again, she was only carrying one of the bags, and the boy was dragging his. Both of the remaining packs looked thinner than when Smith had seen them on the highway earlier yesterday, so he assumed they’d thrown away a healthy portion of the contents so they could keep up.
He felt a little bad about that.
Neither the woman nor the boy walked close enough to talk to him, which was fine with Smith. He could easily smell them back there, but it helped that the wind was at his back and carrying their scent. They were both sweating, and smelly, and every now and then he heard Aaron grunting and fumbling with his bag. But the kid was a trooper and never complained. Or if he did, Smith couldn’t hear them.
They walked through the night for a good two hours before Smith took pity on mother and son—and maybe on himself, too, if he were being honest—and decided to check an outcrop of boulders along the fields to his right. He’d avoided the highway since leaving Peoples’s camp behind, mostly because walking around in the open, even at night, was a good way to get shot. You could never tell who or what was lying in wait out there. Like, for instance, three assholes with guns looking for prey.
The rocks were hard and big enough that Smith decided to use them as a temporary shelter. There was also nothing within sight of them—not for miles in any direction. They’d left the prairie of grass and goldenrods behind and replaced them with gray, hard earth. He couldn’t see the paved highway from here, not even standing on the tallest boulder. With the distance and combination of night, he felt good about getting an interrupted night’s sleep.
Of course, he’d felt the same under the elm tree, and that hadn’t worked out as he’d planned.
Smith tossed his pack and leaned his rifle against a boulder when he realized he was alone. The woman and Aaron hadn’t joined him. He pulled out his poncho as he looked back at them, standing tentatively about twenty yards away.
“Come on, then,” Smith said.
That was all the invitation they needed, and mother and son walked over and claimed a spot across the outcrop from him. She opened her pack and took out a small blanket covered with what looked like a yellow sponge. Or a person in the form of a yellow sponge, complete with holes and a white hat on top.
When she caught him staring, the woman said, “It’s not theirs. It’s Aaron’s. They took it from him. I just took it back.”
Smith nodded. He wasn’t entirely sure what he was thinking—maybe that ol’ Peoples had a soft side that he didn’t want people to know about. That sounded ridiculous now that he knew the truth.
He was going to ask her “What else did Peoples and the others take from you and the boy?” but he had a feeling he already knew half of that answer. Or close enough to feel uncomfortable asking it.
He said instead, “What’s your name?”
“Mary,” she said, even as she put the blanket over Aaron, who had laid down on the ground.
The boy yawned and rolled over onto his side, his back to Smith, while clutching the blanket. He had closed his eyes almost right away, and Smith wondered how long it’d been since he’d slept.
“What’s yours?” Mary asked him.
“Smith,” he said.
“Just Smith?”
“Just Smith is good enough.”
“I guess.” She paused for a moment. Then, “That’s not your real name, is it?”
“No,” he said, and tucked the poncho around his frame. It wasn’t too cold, but there was a slight chill in the air. His right hand was next to him, close enough to the holstered SIG that he could draw it without too much trouble.
Mary sat next to her son and didn’t say anything else. She seemed preoccupied with scanning the darkness around them, as if she expected an attack any second now. After everything she’d been through, he couldn’t really blame her.
But that didn’t mean he had to indulge in her paranoia. Peoples’s attack earlier had ruined Smith’s sleep, so he was more tired than he thought as he closed his eyes.
“Thank you,” Mary said after a while.
Smith opened his eyes back up. He wasn’t sure if he was surprised to hear her say that or if he was just glad they were getting it out of the way. Not that he wanted to hear it or anything. Smith had given up caring what other people thought of him, even ones that he might have saved from a fate worse than death. In his opinion, it just didn’t pay to have too much faith in humanity anymore, even if “humanity” tonight was a woman and her son.
“You’re welcome,” he said, not because he thought he deserved her gratitude but because it was the best answer to nip this conversation in the bud so he could go back to trying to sleep.
“Why are you so good at it?” Mary asked.
I guess I’m not going back to sleep.
He sat up and looked across at her. She was still wide awake, but the boy was snoring loudly next to her.
“Why am I so good at what?” Smith said.
“Killing. The way you shot that man back there… Why are you so good at it?”
Smith stared at her for a moment, trying to decide if he should be ins
ulted by her insinuation that he was good at “it.”
The truth was, he was good at it. He was a natural, in fact. His mentor had said the same thing to him.
“I don’t know,” Smith said. “I just am.”
She nodded, apparently accepting his answer. He thought she would continue talking, trying to get to the real him, but maybe she knew, just as Smith did, that there was no “real” him.
This was him. It’d always been. Just as it had with Peoples and his pals, The Purge had finally allowed the real him to come up for air.
Smith pulled the poncho tighter around his body. “Get some sleep. It’s been a long day.”
He closed his eyes and spent the next few minutes listening to the crickets in the land around them. There were less of them out there, but only because they’d left the grassy fields behind. There were no other sounds of humanity beyond the outcrop, which was the important part.
Mary, despite Smith’s encouragement, remained wide awake. He knew that because she kept moving around. Not loudly, but loud enough. He had a feeling she wasn’t going to close her eyes in peace for a while, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t.
Five
“What’s your real name?”
“Smith is my real name.”
“You already told me last night that it wasn’t.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
It took about ten seconds before she asked again. “So what’s your real name?”
“John,” he said.
“John Smith?”
“That’s right.”
“John Smith?”
“It’s going to be the same answer even if you say it a third time.”
“John Smith…” she said.
“That’s my name, don’t wear it out.”
She’d had that familiar and incredulous look on her face that he always got from people when he told them his name. Or the name he was going by these days. It always made him wonder what the poor bastard whose real name was John Smith had to suffer through daily. Surely there would be some John Smiths still around now, even after The Purge decimated the globe. Not that Smith had ever encountered one of them, but there had to be at least one, right?
After The Purge, AKA John Smith (Book 2): Run or Fight Page 3