by S T Branton
“I don’t know too many old guys with swords.” Luis shot me a quick, boyish grin.
“Neither did I before I met him. Beats me how he got it,” I said. “That’s a question you’d have to ask him, and he’s long gone now.”
Also untrue. You are filling this young warrior’s head with utter falsehoods, Victoria. Allow me to speak to him.
I grinned and ignored Marcus’s request.
Luis chuckled. “It looks like it can do some pretty cool, freaky stuff though, huh?”
“Yeah, if I’m having a good day.” That much wasn’t a lie. “It’s gotten me through a lot, I’ll tell you that much. The sword and my team. I kind of need them both.”
The kid grew reticent again for a few minutes, chewing idly on the edges of his nails. “I guess your team includes that suit who dug into me back there. I’m surprised he didn’t grill me about my damn family tree.”
“Deacon?” I smiled and shook my head. “Don’t let him get to you. He’s simply trying to make sure we all stay safe. Believe it or not, we haven’t met too many other people who packed much heat as you. I believe you’re an asset a hundred percent, but we can never be too careful.”
“He talks like he got a badge.”
“He’s FBI,” I said.
“Shit. Shit, man! That’s all I need, to get wrapped up with a spook.” Luis made a disappointed sound. “Figures he’s a cop. I’ve never met one who didn’t have it out for me.”
“Hey, c’mon.” I shot him a sidelong look. “I’m not trying to diminish your experiences here, but Deacon’s not a bad guy. He wasn’t asking questions because he’s in law enforcement. He wanted to know who you were and where you got that rifle before you got in the truck with one of us.”
Luis was unconvinced. “Yeah, sure. You say that ʼcause he’s nice to you, but I know they’re all the same, deep down. Got no empathy for anyone. No sympathy, either.” He sighed. “Do me a favor and watch my back, okay?”
“You watch mine, and you got yourself a deal.”
The quiet returned after he tried his hand at the radio, with similarly disappointing results. He chewed on his stubby nails and watched the countryside glide by. Autumn was out in full force, radiant and bright under the dome of an eggshell sky. The highway stretched out empty before us. Every now and then, crashed or abandoned cars marred the perfect loneliness. Barns and empty hay fields dotted the horizon.
“What do you think is gonna happen now?” Luis finally broke the silence with another question. This one was tense, betraying more than a hint of anxiety. Not that I could blame him.
“I don’t know.” In the face of heavier subjects, I decided to move back to total honesty. “But I can tell you the war is between humans and gods now. No more of this human versus human shit we’ve been doing. There’s no time for it. The lines have been redrawn. Every stupid thing that used to divide humanity is meaningless.”
“No.” Luis vehemently shook his head. “Doesn’t matter if the planet cracks in half tomorrow. People will fight each other all the way down to hell, you know? Those lines are permanent because no one wants to erase them. And that means you can never trust those you don’t know, even if they are still people in a world of fucked-up things.”
“It’s sort of ironic that you walked up and volunteered to help out a group of total strangers, then,” I said, smiling slightly.
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” he responded. “Also, she can help me get my hands on some damn food. I’m starving out here.”
I caught his eye in the rearview mirror, and we both cracked up. He was sort of shy at first, but soon, a belly laugh emerged and he held his stomach in the seat, his shoulders shaking. That was the moment I decided he was good for real, someone worth having on my side for as long as he would stay. Sure, he was a kid, and sure, he had some learning left to do, but I could tell how smart he was, how much he’d already learned about the roughness of the world back when it was still in one piece.
Plus, he looked so young when he laughed like that with all the gravity gone from his face. If nothing else, I wanted to try and protect those fleeting shreds of youth. It felt like the very least I could do.
Chapter Nine
The first exit sign marked with food, gas, and hotel logos took us to a stretch of country road that was as deserted as the highway we’d left. Whoever had once lived in the area had scattered to the four winds. I hoped they’d found someplace safe.
The roads out there had seen better days, even before the gods invaded the world. The potholes pitting the street would never get fixed now. The route led to an abandoned town—a real ghost town. We weren’t anywhere near the West, but I half expected a tumbleweed to drift in front of the truck.
Luis stirred to life, pointing through the windshield at a neon sign two intersections ahead. “Hey, check that out up there. Looks like we’re in the bustling heart of downtown.”
He was joking about the handful of faded storefronts lining the town’s main street. It was a far cry from the towering buildings in Manhattan, but this had probably been the local hot spot back when there were still locals to fill the sidewalks.
With only a few stores, our choice of supplies would be limited. On the plus side, the town was so small, no one else had bothered to come through and scavenge the place.
“Cross your fingers that we find a parking space,” I said.
Luis glanced around the empty streets and laughed. “Yeah, I guess the apocalypse has its perks.”
I grinned. “What can I say? I’m a silver lining kind of girl.”
The traffic light was still working, and I stopped as it turned red.
He shot me a look. “I guess you really are optimistic if you think there’s still anyone around to stop for.”
I shrugged. “You never know. Looks can be deceiving, kid.”
“You can call me Luis,” he said. “I stopped being a kid once I shot my first centaur.”
I laughed. “Okay, then you can call me Vic.”
I pulled up alongside what looked to be a grocery store, and we spent a minute or two peering through the front windows, scoping it out. Nothing appeared to be broken at the outset—a decent sign.
I killed the engine without bothering to pull into the parking lot on the side. Then I hopped down to size things up. A stiff wind kicked up whirls of dust along the barren street, knocking the flickering street light back and forth on its wire. The two narrow lanes were littered with general debris—plastic bags, crumpled paper, bottles, and cans from abandoned receptacles. A shopping cart skittered across the lot and bumped the curb. Luis whipped around at the sound of a bark. He watched the stray dog slink by. It was skinny, with large, wary eyes.
“You thinking of adopting that little guy?” I asked.
Luis rubbed the back of his neck, pulling at his kerchief. “I was wondering who looks hungrier. Me or the dog.”
“With any luck, we’ll find some food in here,” I said.
His dark eyes scanned the surroundings, and then he took a deep breath. “Yeah, I hope so. I’d hate to have to find out what dog meat tastes like.”
I wrinkled my nose in disgust. “Ugh, please don’t ever say anything like that again. I’ll give you my rations before I let you eat someone’s pet.”
This young man is possessed of a true warrior’s mind, Marcus declared proudly. He is meant for greatness.
I rolled my eyes. Spoken like a guy who once attempted to eat my cat on sight.
The rumble of another engine cut through the silence, and I saw Deacon and Jules approach. They looked around uneasily as they rolled up. Their truck eased to a halt behind ours, and the agent whistled as he stepped out. The car doors slamming echoed in the empty streets.
She walked around the tailgate. “This place is too spooky. It feels like the world ended while we were driving and we’re only now finding out.”
I patted her shoulder. “You’re simply a big city girl. Anything less than a thousand peop
le on the sidewalk, and you think the place is abandoned.”
She shook her head. “I’m pretty glad there’s no one else around. Running into a bunch of gun-toting locals sounds like a bad way to start the day.”
Deacon nodded. “Yeah, we’re a little exposed out here. Who knows if there’s anyone watching? Let’s grab what we need and blow this joint.” He took stock of the other stores along the road. “There’s a hardware place and an outdoor supply store over there. Bet we can find some good camping gear. More tents, coolers, portable stoves, that kind of thing.”
“Good idea,” Jules said quickly. “I’ll come with you. Vic, you two can handle groceries, right?”
I nodded. “But if I find a bag of Doritos, I can’t promise it’ll make it back to the truck.”
“Dibs on any bear claws,” Luis said.
Deacon rolled his eyes. “Maybe you two should be on hardware duty.”
I shook my head. “No takebacks. I promise we’ll save some treats for everyone else.”
Deacon and Jules set off across the intersection, leaving Luis and me to our task. The automatic doors at the front of the store still worked, and so did the fluorescent lights overhead. Each of us grabbed a cart on our way through the entrance.
“All right,” I said. “We need stuff that’ll keep for as long as possible. That means cans, dry food, cereal, pasta. Maybe some candy for the kids.”
He grinned at me. “Yeah, right. For the kids.”
I laughed. “Well, mostly for the kids. What can I say? I fight better when I’m all hopped up on sugar. But seriously, we should try to stay away from anything that doesn’t have nutritional value as a rule of thumb. I’ll be damned if I get fucking scurvy without getting to be a pirate first.”
Luis nodded. “Aye aye, captain. We splitting up or doing this together?”
I thought of the pharmacy and how the satyrs had all been clustered in the back. “Let’s go together. I might be paranoid, but we don’t know what’s in here yet.”
“Paranoid is good, considering the shit we’ve seen.”
All I heard was the faint hum of the standing freezers, but I knew better than to be lulled into a false sense of security.
We walked down the aisles side by side, a weird little almost-family on a shopping trip at the end of the world. Luis eyed the shelves for anything we could use. “Hey, Vic.”
“What’s up?” I asked. “You hear something?”
“No. I wanted to ask you, where’d you really get that sword?”
The question gave me pause. “What do you mean? I told you about it in the car, didn’t I?”
“Come on.” He gave me a knowing grin. “You got it from a friend who happens to be gone? That’s what I told my grandma when she found a pack of cigarettes in my dresser. They’re not mine. They’re a friend’s.”
“It’s true,” I insisted. A bewildered laugh issued from me. I hadn’t really expected him to challenge my version of the story, though now that I thought about it, maybe it did sound a little suspect. “What do you want me to say?”
“Tell me for real,” he said. “Where’d you find it? You want to build trust here, right? Well, you can trust me.” There was a definite glint of mischief in his eye, but also an open earnestness that made me want to play along, even if I thought he was being ridiculous.
I do not take back my previous compliments of his character. However, I see this boy is not yet free from the insolence of youth.
I found myself inclined to agree. “Fine, I’ll bite. A two-thousand-year-old Roman centurion fell from the sky like a meteor and handed me the mystical sword of the God-King Kronin.”
Luis laughed and shook his head. “Fine. Don’t tell me.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t find it; it found me. How’s that?”
“It found you, huh?” He smiled slyly. “That cop find you, too?”
I frowned sternly at him. “Were you listening in the truck at all? I told you, Deacon’s FBI. Why do you want to know, anyway?” The embarrassment growing in my chest made me incredibly uncomfortable. It was like our roles had been reversed. I was the kid now, teased by a parent about the guy I was definitely not interested in dating.
Luis chuckled. “You think I don’t see the way you look at each other? Seems pretty obvious to me.” He hesitated. “Listen, I know you see me as like, a teenager or whatever—”
“You are a teenager.”
“—but if you’re waiting around to do something about it, don’t. I learned that shit from experience. You’re gonna regret it later, a hundred percent.”
Ah. The wisdom of the young prevails.
I bit my tongue to keep from responding automatically to Marcus. Instead, I pushed my cart faster as I dumped toothpaste and mouthwash onto the heap already in the basket. “Noted. Let’s keep moving, shall we?”
“Right. Don’t want to keep him waiting.”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t make me leave you here.”
The rest of the shopping trip went surprisingly well. We didn’t run into any satyrs or bandits out of a Mad Max movie. The shelves were full of suitable food, and we loaded our carts until they were hard to maneuver.
We left the market as Deacon and Jules started to load up the bed of their truck. I saw guns, boxes of ammo, coats, boots, and sleeping bags. Nowhere near enough for a hundred people, but every little bit would help. The piles of provisions in our shopping carts felt like a mountain, but realistically, it would only last a week or so. I’d grabbed all the over-the-counter meds I could find, hoping it would be enough to last us until we found our next ghost town to scavenge.
Deacon tossed me a bundle of bungee cords as soon as I got close enough. “Keep these handy,” he said. “In case we happen to accumulate anything while we’ve still got the trucks. I don’t want to limit space with a cover for the beds, but it’d be nice to be able to secure things somehow.”
“Good thinking.” We spent the next twenty minutes or so packing the food away, shoving in coolers full of ice and the few perishable items, and filling every available space with cans and bags of trail mix and jerky. When we were done, I stood back to admire the stuffed truck, its doors and tailgate still open.
“It’s not enough,” I said out loud.
“It’ll have to do.” Jules squeezed my shoulder. “Don’t be hard on yourself, Vic. We’re doing the best we can.”
“There could be more if we keep looking,” Luis suggested. “This town doesn’t look that small.”
Deacon nodded. “I was going to say the same thing. Couldn’t hurt to investigate. We’ll take point this time if you want.”
“Be my guest,” I said.
The four of us got back in our respective trucks. I waited for them to pull around us, and our miniature caravan got underway. More dust rose from beneath the treads of our heavy tires amid the crunch and crackle of the junk in the street.
Luis shook his head. “Man, this really isn’t right.”
“Hm?” I glanced at him, half thinking he was still hung up on Deacon and me.
He gestured to the empty town in front of us. “All this nothing. It doesn’t make sense. I guarantee you there were people holed up in practically every building we passed in New York. No one I know would’ve been down to simply leave unless someone forced them to. We’re used to defending our shit, even if it kills us. We don’t up and split like this.”
“Could be a lot of dead,” I said. The statement was too casual, and it didn’t even really faze either of us. Our reality operated on a whole new set of parameters.
“Nah. We would’ve seen ʼem by now. Or at least there would’ve been blood.” He rolled the window down and leaned out into the wind. “No rotting corpse smell, either.” Luis sat back in the seat, troubled. “And if people left, that store should have been looted to hell. All those stores. That’s the first thing that happens in a situation like this. Hell, any time a hurricane rolls through, people clean that shit out.”
The young so
ldier’s insight is powerful. It might behoove you to heed his words.
I agreed, and I felt strangely impressed that he had the presence of mind to give voice to the unease we’d all experienced upon arrival. There wasn’t enough evidence that chaos had ensued before we got there, unlike the hamlet that was destroyed in Washington. It was more like this whole community had simply evaporated.
Again, Rocca crossed my mind and how she’d recruited humans, and not without success. I sat up a little straighter behind the wheel and kept my eyes peeled. “Don’t let your guard down,” I told my companion.
“I never do,” he said.
A strip mall came into view up ahead, featuring the broad sign of a drug store in the middle. Deacon’s brake lights went on, and he turned into the long, narrow lot. I noticed he put the hazards on by force of habit before jumping out. That little detail made me smile. “Looks like you were right,” I told Luis as we followed suit.
He was a lot more cautious there as if he worried that voicing his concerns aloud had jinxed us. Standing in that open lot did make me feel a little too vulnerable. Jules and Deacon clearly felt it too, judging by the way their heads never stopped turning.
“Where is everyone?” she asked. “I know everything is terrible, but I can’t shake the feeling that we ought to have seen at least one person by now.”
“We were just talking about that,” I said. “Something’s fishy.”
“Wait!” Her head snapped to a flash of movement along the side of the building. “I think I saw someone moving.” Her eyes were laser-focused on the spot.
“There was a dog earlier,” I said, but she had already moved away from us, commanded by her desire to help. I trailed behind her, my hand on the sword. The shadow of movement passed again, then emerged from around the corner.
As it turned out, I saw it was a person. The man stared at us for a moment, his eyes glazed and unseeing. Something about his demeanor put me off, and Jules, too. She stopped in her tracks and glanced back at me. Then she said, “Sir, do you need help?”
He didn’t answer. A deathly pallor colored his skin, different from the grimy gray of the vamps. It struck a chord of familiarity in me that didn’t truly hit home until he started moving forward. The shuffling, hitching gait was unmistakable. His lower jaw wobbled, uncannily slack.