by Justin Bell
Rhonda couldn’t get her bearings. She wasn’t sure where she was or how she’d gotten there or why she could barely hear the sound of her own voice above the constant ringing deep within not just her ears but her skull.
“MAX?” she screamed again, her own voice yelling back at her in faint mumbles.
No reply. She coughed, hacked, and spat, the result a dark hunk of soot spattering on the once polished floor. Making her way towards the broken and shattered wall, she managed to find a part that was whole and used it to bring herself to a shaky standing position, barely able to maintain some kind of upright posture, her stomach twisting and diving, her head and ears screaming in confusion. Everywhere she looked was destruction. Had she dreamed that they all survived a nuclear holocaust? Was she in the middle of it, right there and then?
She didn’t even see the figure at first. She felt the arm grab her and pull her, spin her, then push her, slamming her back first against another section of unbroken wall. Blinking away smoke and tears, she looked through streaked vision into the face of Bruce Cavendish who glared at her, his eyes narrow and wicked, his lips curled into a vicious, victorious sneer.
“Ah, they found my trap, did they?” he asked. “I knew they would. So predictable those scumball feds. So. Predictable.”
“What…what did you do?” Rhonda mumbled, not even hearing her own voice.
“I won. That’s what I did. Lured them right into my trap and now I’ve got just you and me and my brother to talk about.”
Rhonda’s head swam, wading on the edge of unconsciousness, dog paddling in an ocean of confusion and almost at shore, but the riptide was pulling her ever closer into murky depths.
“I don’t…I can’t,” she murmured, trying to decipher what had just happened but unable to.
“Don’t worry yourself,” Bruce hissed. “In a minute, none of it will matter.” He brought a knife to her throat and pressed the thin, sharp blade tight to her flesh. “Just close your eyes and it will all be over.”
“Lydia,” Rhonda mumbled. “You said you had Lydia.”
Bruce shook his head. “Never said I had her. Said I knew where she was. She was sent to Grandma…she’s not even here anymore.”
Rhonda shook her head, certain she didn’t hear him right. “Sent to who?”
“You truly don’t understand, do you? You still don’t get it. What’s really going on here?”
Rhonda looked at him with vacant, roaming eyes.
“This whole thing,” Bruce whispered. “All of it. The militia movements working together…North Korea gaining access to the border. Security systems at the barricade, the quick escalation of martial law. All of it was arranged far in advance of any nuclear explosion. This was all expected. All coordinated. It all went according to plan. Well, except for you showing up. Except for you killing my brother. That was not part of the plan.”
“Plan?” Rhonda asked.
Bruce chuckled. “Oh yeah. The plan. And why you do think dear old Lance was going to your folks’ place that day? Why did he think he’d find some supplies there? Why do you think that is?”
Rhonda shook her head.
“You know, it’s too bad you never found Lydia. Too bad you never thought to try to reach out to your folks. Maybe this would all make a little more sense. I mean, the Kruellers…they’re famous in militia circles. Didn’t know that, did you?”
Rhonda shook her head. Her ears still rang with a constant, barely muffled din.
“Oh yeah. They have a lot of influence. They were able to bring lots of us together.”
“My parents?” Rhonda asked, her eyes roaming around. “They did this?”
Bruce smirked. “This was bigger than any one person. Any one group. But they certainly played their part.”
She couldn’t think. She could barely hear. Her world, which had already turned sideways, now threatened to topple over and spill off the edge of reality. Nothing made sense.
Everything made sense.
She’d grown up in that house. Trained by those people. Indoctrinated. Recruited. Fed and fueled their pack of lies. It had been relentless, but she had resisted. At the end of the day she had—
“Lydia!” she shouted, her eyes widening, the fog in her head suddenly clearing. “They asked for Lydia? They have her?”
Bruce smiled. “Not your problem. Not anymore.”
“Where? Where is she?”
The knife pressed harder to her throat, to the point where she could feel the skin just starting to split under its pressure. A swift prick unlocked a thread of dark blood, spilling down her neck.
“I’ll give her your love,” Bruce hissed in a quiet whisper and he pressed down on the knife.
Rhonda felt herself swimming backwards into darkness, felt the pain increasing, the blood starting, then the swift, sudden bang of a gunshot.
***
Rhonda’s eyes flew open at the sound just as Bruce Cavendish stumbled, his fingers opening, his knife falling from her throat. She turned and looked at him, bloody foam gurgling to his lips, his eyes empty and roaming, first looking at her, then looking past her, off into wherever he was going.
She jerked her head around and saw him there. Brad was standing, a perfect firing stance, feet set, elbows locked, holding his Ruger .380 firmly in two hands. Tears streamed down his cheeks, their trail the same width as the wisp of smoke rising up from the barrel of his pistol.
Behind him fire raged and smoke engulfed the world.
***
“You’ve made your choice.” Rhonda’s voice was cool and firm, like a freshly frozen ice cube.
“Mom, please don’t make this hard on me,” Lydia said, speaking to her from memory.
“You’re making it pretty darn hard on me, sweetheart.”
Lydia dropped her head. “It’s my life, mom. I’d like it to be my choice.”
“It was your choice. And you chose Boulder.”
“No, you chose Boulder. It was your idea to apply to the University of Colorado, not mine.”
Rhonda turned, throwing up her hands. “You went along with it, Lydia! We talked about this last year!”
“I changed my mind,” her daughter replied. Rhonda turned and looked at her, realizing, not for the first time, that her daughter was much less a daughter now and much more a grown, capable woman who she had happened to give birth to. She was tall, taller than Rhonda, with straight, dark hair and a firm jawline. It was set closed now, rigid and unmoving. “I am entitled to change my mind.”
“UCLA?” Rhonda asked. “I don’t understand.”
“Mom, I need to become my own person. I can’t do that when I’m an hour’s drive away. For crying out loud, Max’s private school is farther away!”
Rhonda took a step towards her daughter, placing a hand on her arm. “Lydia, I love you. You were my first child. We’ve always been so close. I guess I just thought we’d always be that close.”
Lydia smiled and stepped towards Rhonda, giving her a soft kiss on the cheek. “Mom, just because I’m going to L.A. doesn’t mean I don’t love you. Or dad. I’m just feeling more drawn to California right now.”
“You’ve spent the last three years railing against the corporate consumer machine, though,” Rhonda said. “Los Angeles…that’s like the hub of all of what you hate.”
Lydia smiled. Looking back at it, it was a strange, thin, calm smile. A matter-of-fact response to a volatile situation. “Sometimes you need to surround yourself with things you hate to discover how to find yourself.”
Rhonda’s eyes narrowed, in her mind, and in reality as she puzzled over the strange philosophical statement.
“I don’t understand, honey,” Rhonda said. “This country was built on those things, and—”
Lydia shook her head. “You’re just like the rest of them, mom,” she said. “Losing sight of what our country was really built on. If the founding fathers saw what their creation had become…”
Rhonda shook her head, already knowing
she’d be giving in. Lydia, somehow, always got what she wanted. Rhonda had ruled her house with an iron fist, something that had driven Winnie and Max endlessly crazy. But somehow, being the oldest and being the closest to her, Lydia had slipped past the dictatorship.
Her mother regretted that. Even as she stood in the living room, nodding to Lydia, telling her she could do what she felt was right, promising to her she’d miss her and trusted her, and she’d fly out whenever she was needed. Even as she did all of those things, a part of her shriveled up inside and buried itself deep away, this bond between mother and daughter broken.
Worst of all, she hadn’t broken it. Lydia had.
***
The dull, rusted ringing in her ears had subsided, but Rhonda still felt a strange, cotton wad thickness in her head; a dull, drowning ache that reached into every empty cavity and filled it like insulation foam. Her eyes were open, staring off towards nothing as she sat on the curb of the narrow sidewalk which ran the perimeter of the shopping mall. Arms hung low between bent knees, the world around her was shifting colors, a flex of lights and darks, shapeless forms with no definition.
“She going to be okay?” Phil asked. Agent Fields was on her knees next to Winnie, who lay on her side, the shirt she had been wearing soaked almost through with dark crimson.
“Blood stopped,” Fields replied, her voice a flat plane. Going through the motions. “If we can get her stitched up, she’ll probably be all right.”
“How about you?” Phil asked. Fields looked up at him with blank, vacant eyes.
They were all feeling it. That sudden, devastating explosion had done more than taken lives, it had carved out a significant chunk of their souls.
“I’m alive,” she whispered. “More than I can say for Orosco and Liu.”
Phil dropped his head. He hadn’t known Ricky Orosco, but he’d felt like Liu was an important part of their team. A family member. He’d helped them get behind the barricade, he’d likely saved all their lives, and something about him made Phil feel like he was an important piece of the puzzle that was the new world order.
He knew things.
But he was dead. Blown off his feet and into a shelf, his skull fractured and lungs collapsed. When they’d seen him several yards away from the blast, they’d been hopeful, but as Fields had turned him over, searching for a pulse, it had become clear he had breathed his last breath. His eyes were open and staring, his chest a broad replica of a human chest, with no breath in its lungs.
Harrison. Orosco. Liu. The FBI and CBP had lost much in the fight, Phil was certain…and something told him that civilization as a whole had lost it, too. One thing had become clear during that battle…the militia guys were well resourced. Some men they’d fought off were wearing tactical gear with government issued automatic weapons. They’d seemed legitimately surprised to see FBI agents fighting against them.
Were there government connections at play?
Phil’s head ached. He hadn’t even been out back when the explosion went off, but he’d run there immediately afterwards and the carnage had been…it was something he was not soon to forget.
“Have you seen mom?” Max asked, wandering into the candy store. He had a smear of dirt across his left cheek but looked intact, which was more than they could say for others.
“She’s outside,” Phil replied. “I tried talking to her, but she wasn’t interested.”
“I’m going to go check on Greer,” Fields said as she stood up from where she’d been looking at Winnie. She only had the most rudimentary medical training as a part of her FBI indoctrination, but she was more qualified than anyone else in the building.
Leaving the candy store, she angled left towards the pretzel shop, immediately seeing Clancy Greer laying on the counter, his knee bent and his head turned away. She could see the ragged stump of his left arm, torn off below the elbow and currently secured with Field’s belt, tied as tightly as it could be. Surprisingly, the cut had been clean enough that the severed arteries withdrew back within the limb and the free flow of red blood had slowed to a gentle ooze. Even with that, Greer was in and out of consciousness, and she suspected he would be touch and go for some time.
“Miss Fields?” She turned towards the center aisle and saw Brad walking towards her with two white plastic bags in his hands. “Found an old pharmacy,” he said between hoarse breaths. It was obvious he’d run as fast as he could to get where he’d needed to go. Fields moved towards him and peeled open one of the bags, working in slow motion, digging out some gauze and ace bandages inside.
“Good man,” she whispered to Brad, and he smiled. She hooked a bag around her wrist and swiped aside a lock of her red hair, then turned back, facing the pretzel shop and walked towards the prone form of Greer, who was moving on the counter, a quiet groan coming from pursed lips.
Brad walked over towards Max, coming up behind him.
“How’s Winnie?” he asked.
“I think she’s okay,” Max replied. His voice was faint and distant, a soft echo in the distance.
“You okay?” Brad asked.
Max nodded. “I think so. That was…I’ve never…”
“I know.”
Brad looked at his hands. He pictured the pistol there and remembered the look on Bruce Cavendish’s face when he’d shot him. It hadn’t been pain or even fear. It had been…surprise. Like the fact he was being shot stunned him. It was an event that had not even once occurred to him.
Brad had fixed that. And somewhat surprisingly, he didn’t even feel bad about it. Quite the opposite, in fact. He’d felt a sense of strange empowerment, as if he now had this innate ability to begin or end a life. It was a scary thought, but one that filled him with a strange sense of purpose. Even after the explosion he’d felt this sense of calm, an even-keeled acceptance of what he was and what he could do. His new mission in life. A protector of sorts. He couldn’t explain it, but the feeling was there, just under the surface, a constant presence throughout his new everyday life.
He turned to talk to Max, but Max was no longer there. He was wandering towards the entrance to the mall where smashed and still smoldering vehicles lay scattered across pavement and sidewalks, and even spewed up into the mall itself. Strewn bodies were still visible outside as well, the fallen forms of the enemies who had come after them.
The enemies they’d killed. They’d deserved it, though. All of them.
Max walked around the curved semi-circle of sidewalk, seeing his mother sitting a short way down, still looking out into nothing. He put a soft hand on her shoulder and lowered himself down next to her, his eyes following hers, glancing out into the parking lot.
“You okay, mom?” he asked.
Rhonda nodded. “I’m okay, sweetie.”
They sat in silence for a moment. The sun had risen, drifting the cloudless sky in a highlight of pink, the onset of dark clouds making their way across the horizon. From the sidewalk all they could see was urban sprawl, strip malls, stores, and restaurants, the roads empty and civilization a complete and utter afterthought. It was hard to see the bright side from where they sat. Hard to find anything to trust or believe in. The world looked wide, empty, and directionless, centuries spent building up an infrastructure obliterated within weeks, humanity reduced to empty husks of capitalism. Buildings that no longer served a purpose beyond a blemish on the once green earth.
“What are we going to do?” Max asked.
Rhonda lowered her eyes and shook her head. “I’m not sure, honey.”
“Dad said you don’t think Lydia is still here.”
His mother shook her head softly and sadly.
“Do you know where she is?”
She looked at her son, tears brimming in her eyes. “I’m not sure where she is, but I know who she’s with,” she said quietly.
“Who?” Max asked.
Rhonda looked away from him again, her lips not able to form the words her brain was thinking. Not able to form the words…and not wanting t
o.
Maxed sensed the hesitation and decided to change tact. “So what’s next?”
Rhonda drew in a deep breath and looked back towards the shopping mall. “Survival,” she replied. “Just…survival.”
“We can’t give up,” Max said.
Rhonda looked at him and smiled. “Oh, sweetheart. We haven’t given up. We won’t give up.” She turned and looked back towards the sky, her fists clenched against her thighs.
“Where will we go?” Max asked.
Rhonda pushed herself up into a standing position, then extended her hand towards Max, who took it and allowed himself to be pulled up next to her. They turned towards the mall just as Angel came around the backside, cocking a wave in their direction.
“We got cars back there,” he said. “Three of them. I think they’ll run okay.”
Rhonda nodded. “Thanks, Angel.”
“De nada.”
They walked around to the front of the mall, the sun’s baking glow warming their skin as they rounded the corner, walking towards the entrance. They navigated around the smashed vehicles, Rhonda, Max, and Angel making their way into the mall, through the shattered windows and into the lobby. It was quiet inside—the heavy, solid silence of a post-battle atmosphere—as they set about tending to the wounded and mourning the fallen.
Ricky Orosco and Brandon Liu were both dead, along with Agent Harrison. Clancy and Winnie had been injured. They’d taken down Cavendish and the majority of the West Plains Militia, but Lydia wasn’t there…
…and Grandma sent for her?