by Jones, K. J.
“But what’s right?” Tyler asked.
“Um. No one can say.”
“What’s the point then?”
“Um. It’s important for human beings to believe in something beyond the material or physical world that we are in, um, right now. Did you know, the first humans to bury their dead, and thus show a belief in the afterlife, were Neandertals? They decorated their dead, too. Then, when anatomically modern Homo sapiens appeared, a-k-a, Cro-Magnon, as some call this, they were so spiritual they painted in cave walls, even in really difficult places to reach, which makes the caves rather like a church.”
The kid blinked with a blank face.
Peter bit his lip, trying not to laugh. Phebe had conducted deflection through nerdom.
“Really?” Brandon said. “You went there? Nice.”
Emily hit him with a pillow.
“What?”
“Gimme my pillow back.”
“Oh. You have the energy to hit me with it but not to retrieve it.”
“Just gimme it.”
“But what about God?” Tyler persisted.
“Um,” said Phebe. “Matt would probably be the better one to ask.”
“He’s busy with Jayce freaking out.”
“When he’s done with that, talk with him. I don’t want to, ya know, misrepresent.”
“You don’t believe in God?”
“I, um, believe there’s something out there. Something more than us.”
“Ghosts?”
“Well, um, yeah, kind of, lately. Seems like people can come back, sort of.”
“I believe in ghosts,” Tyler stated.
“Good.”
“Like Eric’s ghosts?” Brandon asked.
Emily scrunched down under the covers, feeling tired.
Tyler shrugged at Brandon’s question. “I don’t know. But I saw ghosts in Charleston. And I get dreams about my friends. Especially Brian. But he was real religious like Jayce is. Do you have to be real religious to be a ghost?”
“I don’t think so,” answered Brandon.
“You believe in ghosts?” Emily mumbled against the pillow.
“Yeah,” Brandon answered. “Nowadays, definitely. You, Sul?”
“I have always believed. And in ancestors coming back to warn us and shit. Mine will haunt me if I vote wrong.”
Tyler asked him, “Does your brother?”
Peter abruptly stopped rocking. “How do you know about my brother?”
Tyler shrugged. “Don’t know.”
Peter shot a look at Phebe, who shrugged, she had never told Tyler.
“Um, well, it’s complicated with my brother, Ty.”
“How so?”
“I wasn’t sober when I’ve seen him.”
“Oh. You were high.”
“Yeah, kind of.”
“My mom used to yell at my dad when she was high, sometimes.”
“Yeah.”
“He wasn’t there. But he wasn’t dead. At least, I don’t think he was.” Tyler shrugged. “Could’ve been.”
The four adults looked at the kid with sympathy for his lost childhood.
“I’m sorry, hon,” Phebe said. “I wish I could take that stuff away.”
Tyler shrugged. “It’s okay.” He sat on an old wooden chest at the end of the bed. “Even if Chris is right and we’re the bad people and that’s why we got left here with the demons in the zoms, it’s okay. I got y’all.” He smiled at them.
“You do have us,” said Peter.
Peter stood, which took a second or two, walked over to the kid, and did the unspeakable towards a boy his age by dad-figure. He hugged him.
“Aw, c’mon, stop that,” Tyler wailed.
“You’re our little boy!”
“Get off me.”
The others laughed.
“My little boy.”
“Would you quit!”
Peter repeatedly kissed the top of Tyler’s buzzed stubbly bald head. “Right, Mother? Our own little boy?”
“That’s right, Paw,” Phebe said. “Our very own baby boy.”
Tyler squirmed out of Peter’s arms and backed away. “Don’t you do that no more.”
Chapter Two
1.
“Shit,” Eric blurted out. He looked at his emails.
“What is it?” Mullen craned his neck to see Eric’s screen.
“It’s getting worse,” Eric whispered. “They need us there now.”
“How does she know we are receiving this?” Mullen whispered.
“I haven’t responded. She doesn’t. Look, Ben’s on this too. And, um, Sully. I guess all the email addresses she has.”
“Ben? Can we talk to Ben?”
Eric shrugged. “We don’t know if he’s receiving … or alive.”
“Try it anyway. Email Ben. Email her back, too.”
“What do I tell her? We don’t have an E-T-A. We don’t know if this will even work. We could end up in jail.”
“You’re the one who started this. Now you’re having second thoughts?”
“I didn’t say that. It’s just a possibility.”
“We are not ….” Mullen looked around to see if anyone could make out what they whispered. Satisfied. “We are not going into their zom war. Period.”
“I know, I know.”
2.
Mount Weather. Ben stood in the corridor.
“What are you doing –”
“Listen.” Ben cut Mazy off and pulled her to the side. “I checked my emails. My personal ones.”
“Can we do that?”
“Listen, please. Luciana, Julio’s wife, and his kids are in danger. I got an email from Eric Wong, too.”
“Eric?” Her voice excited.
“He’s in Colorado.”
“Are y’all supposed to be sharing so much –”
“I gotta go.”
“Go … um, where?”
“I owe it to Julio to protect his family.”
“Um, Running Elk, you would go AWOL? From here no less?”
“Maybe I can get leave, legally.”
“Does leave happen in this situation?”
“I don’t know.” Ben sighed and ran his fingers through his hair, which was not long enough to do such an action to
“I’ve been summonsed here.” Mazy held up her chunky military tablet.
“So have I.” He pulled up his.
“Really? I wonder what fresh hell this’ll be.”
“We’re gonna find out.”
Their escort approached, a man in a dark suit. He wore an earpiece. Mazy and Ben exchanged a glance. The guy looked Secret Service.
“Lieutenant Baptiste, Gunnery Sergeant Raven, I am your escort to the Presidential Suite.”
Their jaws dropped.
“There’s gotta be a mistake,” Mazy said.
“No, ma’am. The President requested you both.”
They looked at each other. Fear and dread in their shared expression.
“Who’s the President?” Ben whispered in her ear.
The Secret Service guy had to do the biometrics scan on a panel to get the elevator button to illuminate for access to a Big Wig floor. Approved, the elevator button lit up and the doors slid shut.
Mazy whispered to Ben the name she had read in the POTUS brief. “Didn’t you get the memo?”
“Um,” Ben whispered. “Guess I should’ve read that, yeah.”
“Nice.”
A camera globe on the ceiling. Mazy stepped further away from Ben. No fraternization between officer and NCO.
She smoothed her ZBDUs. Meeting the President, even an acting one, she felt underdressed. In times of war, though, they wore BDUs.
BDUs during wartime, even when meeting the highest of their chain of command, the Commander in Chief himself.
Mazy thought it through. Yes, it was a him. Gender pronoun correct. The new one was male.
Her stomach tightly bound in knots. She prayed she did nothing embarrassing, like say
something stupid or an involuntary fart loudly.
“Smooth your uniform, sniper.”
“Huh?”
“Your uniform, Gunny.”
“Oh.” Ben looked down at himself. “Okay.” He barely did anything.
Mud on his boots. Wonderful impression. She hoped the acting POTUS wouldn’t be offended by Ben’s appearance, since he was called in from the field and not told to smarten up in his appearance.
Why didn’t they tell him?
No one told her anything either. Just pack a bag.
The elevator binged. Doors split, revealing a floor that looked like none other. There were even plants and wall décor.
Stepping out, they were frisked. Mazy’s officer sidearm was taken off of her. A metal detector ran over them. It beeped at their dog tags and belt buckles. Secret Service guards flanked the doorway ahead. More devices came at them. Temperatures taken. Hands scan, presumably to make sure it was them. Some other full-body scanning device never seen before.
A bead of sweat trickled down the side of Ben’s face, revealing how nervous he felt. Mazy smirked at seeing it. Her sweat remained more discrete and lady-like, coming down her sides beneath her uniform.
A Secret Service guy pushed the screen of his tablet, then nodded to the others.
“This way,” their escort said.
Cameras everywhere. In the corners. In globes midway along ceilings. Mazy wondered if the strange full-body scanner had some way of identifying them on camera, and they were being followed by security with their name labels attached. At least it was like that in the movies.
Various desks and people busily working at them. Mazy wondered how many of these people had fully auto pistols on them, including the secretaries. The bulges under the Secret Service people’s arms were large. Fully auto pistols were in the movies. People whipped them out and death blossomed everything. If they were bad guys, they hit no one. Then the good guys shot once or twice and killed all the bad guys.
The pair were led by their escort to double wooden doors. The wooden doors alone an oddity in the Cold War bunker.
“He’s ready to see them,” a secretary-type person at a desk by the door said.
The escort opened one side of the double doors. A glance between them, Mazy and Ben were going in, be brave.
A nice carpet, something else never seen under the mountain. More plants – the ceiling must have UV grow lights. A big wooden desk. The US flag on a pole. The Presidential Seal on the wall behind a man standing at the desk. Was he the POTUS, aka the Secretary of State?
Mazy snapped into a smart salute, so Ben figured he must be the guy and followed suit.
“At east, Lieutenant, Gunnery Sergeant.”
President Freling came around the desk and presented his hand.
Could they shake the hand of POTUS?
Both of them glanced at the V-shaped torso guys in ZBDUs flanking the desk. If either did something wrong, undoubtedly one of those guys would tackle them to the floor.
The pair of muscular guys looked vaguely familiar, though.
“Sir, it is an honor to meet you.” Mazy shook Freling’s hand.
“Oh, no. The honor is all mine.” He shook Ben’s hand. “To survive so much, absolutely amazing.”
Okay, so he knew them. Their jackets had proceeded them. Made sense. But they hardly had a clue about him, Ben the least of which since he hadn’t even read the brief on his tablet.
“Please, sit,” acting POTUS said. “Coffee, tea, water?”
“Water would be good,” Mazy said to a civilian guy lingering around.
The guy nodded and looked to Ben for an answer.
Ben cleared his dry throat. “Water, thank you.”
They followed the acting President to a pair of identical loveseats, facing each other, similar to the pictures of the Oval Office. A coffee table stood center. It had no cup rings unlike the one in her parents’ house.
“I’m afraid I have to ask a lot of you two,” said President Freling.
He made himself comfortable on the loveseat across from them. Adjusting his tie like a normal human being, he crossed his leg over the other leg’s knee, revealing black socks and hairy legs.
“We’re changing things up from how they were before. Things aren’t going well for our great nation. We currently have trains filled with food and supplies, under military guard, traveling the east coast for the survivors. Is that a good move?”
Startled they’d be asked, a glance between them, and Mazy rubbed the palms of her hands along her thighs.
“Sir, yes,” she said. “It would be a very good move.”
“I thought so. Trains are the easiest way to move food and supplies, I believe. I consulted with Brigadier General Napier on this. He recommended I speak with you two as having the longest first-hand experience in this. You’ve been in this since North Carolina, the earliest outbreaks?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Both of you were police officers at the time?”
“Yes, sir,” they both responded.
“I’ve read the briefs on the group you were with and watched your video debriefs. Impressive. My deepest condolences on your friends. A horrible tragedy.”
“Thank you, sir,” they said, slightly out of sync.
Day 8
Chapter One
1.
They had to dig holes at o’dark thirty, which was always fun. Mullen’s assignment had him digging next to Alden the Younger.
“I lost my parents, too,” Kyle Alden said. “During the outbreak. Fucked up shit, man. I wasn’t with ‘em. I was in North Charleston. My brother came for me.”
“Why did you become a white supremacist? I gotta ask, dude.”
Kyle shrugged. “My brother. I went where he had things arranged. Some old guys wanted him because he was in the Army and he also knew survivalist stuff.”
“Are you saying you’re not really a racist?”
“I don’t know.” Kyle stopped and wiped his sweating brow. He looked around at others digging holes. “Do you think they would have accepted me in? Taken my back?”
“Who?”
“Your buddies over there.”
“They had white people in their tribe.”
“I don’t know.” Kyle resumed digging. “All I know is my brother’s gotta still be alive. I gotta believe that. Don’t you feel that about your group?”
“No idea what I feel,” said Mullen.
“He’d come to me in a dream. That’s what I believe. My mom did. I dreamed about her the day she died. Kevin would do it too.”
“Whoa. That’s pretty heavy, dude. Your family can do stuff like that?”
“Well, I don’t know if it’s just us. People can. You never heard about the dead coming to say goodbye?”
“Um, not really. I guess. But I never thought about it really. Everybody thought Charleston was haunted. We all had weird dreams of walking around with the whole place going.”
“Yeah. We did too.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. A huge amount of people abruptly died, that’s gonna leave something behind. I don’t know. Maybe with all the electricity gone, we can tap in better.”
“That’s what you believe?” Mullen stopped and looked at him with surprise and perplexion. This level of depth wasn’t what he expected from a guy in the white supremacist tribe.
“Yeah. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know what I believe in.”
“I believe in an afterlife. I’ll see my family again. And my girlfriend. She got infected. My brother, um, had to, ya know. I couldn’t. I locked her in the bedroom and she tore it up.”
“Wow. That’s like what Eric went through. But he had to actually do, you know, it.”
“Really?” Kyle looked over at slender, shirtless Eric digging a hole. “He did his … what?”
“Parents.”
“Holy shit, man, for real?”
“To protect his sisters.”
“
Damn. That’s something.”
“Yeah. Then his sisters died and he went insane.”
“Yeah, I would too. I mean if I had sisters and had to do my parents and all. Damn. Gotta respect a man’s strength in doing all that. Doing what needs to be done.”
“He’s better now. He was seeing ghosts everywhere. Some Chinese hungry ghost thing.”
“I’ve heard of that.”
Another surprise for Mullen. This guy, who was near his own age, maybe younger, was nothing Mullen had assumed.
“So, um, you’re brother’s the racist?” Mullen asked.
“I guess. Well, okay, yeah. He is. I started dating a black girl. He beat the hell outta me.”
“Um, yeah, that would qualify as a full-blown racist.”
“She was beautiful too. You know her.”
“I do?”
“She’s here. Kanesha.”
Mullen stopped digging. “You dated Kanesha?”
“Yeah. For a little while. A couple of dates. Until Kevin. I mean, she’s beautiful. Smart. Funny. Church-going, which my parents would approve of, since they were, too. But after Kevin … I didn’t want her to get hurt.”
“He’d hurt her?”
“Have one of the girls do it. I swear half of them were dykes in the closet. Way too butch. I don’t know. Kevin’s always kind of been like that. We have a brother in prison. He’s Aryan Brotherhood. So that’s a lot of shit going on. I wonder if he’s alive. He wouldn’t come to me, I don’t think.”
“Two older brothers who are racists and then you, trying to date Kanesha?”
“Yeah.” Kyle chuckled. “Fucked up, huh? I guess I’m the black sheep of the family. So to speak.” He laughed, then resumed digging.
“That must have been an interesting life.”
“I’m more like my mom, they always said. ‘Sensitive,’ they call it, the assholes. Always trying to toughen me up to not feel anything, ya know.”
“That sucks,” said Mullen.
“Totally. Mom and me and my grandpa, too, always could tell stuff.”
“Oh, sensitive as in like, empath, I think it’s called.”
“Yeah.”
“Whoa, dude, that’s cool as shit.”
“Not so much in the fucking apocalypse. You feel all the death and anguish and shit. Bombarded by it constantly. I had to just tune everything out. I wasn’t very good in the tribe. If it wasn’t for Kevin, I would have left. Or the rest killed me. The shit was just too … something.”