The Rising

by Eli Constant

  She smiled, and this smile was sincere without the agent hardness. It was almost as if she was realizing that it hadn’t occurred to her to make introductions either. “Amber June Murphy, but you can call me AJ.”

  “Juan.” I don’t remember much after muttering my name and letting my body fall against the crappy mattress and semi-comfortable bedding.

  PART II

  JUAN, SHERRY, MARTY, & AMBER

 

  (Corpus Christi, TX)

  AMBER

  (AJ, Border Patrol)

  “So, as far as a game plan, you guys don’t have one?” I poured a second cup of coffee, the instant stuff that I’d hated once upon a time. I didn’t mind it now. My job kept me on the road and it was a lot easier to tip a foil sleeve of insta-caffeine into a sun-warm water bottle than to brew a fresh pot while driving. I’d foraged quite a few things from the truck stop: jerky, No-doze pills, dry creamer. It was a banquet considering Mike and I had had nothing to eat but a stash of overly-sweet protein bars. The salty of the dried beef was good, bringing my taste buds to life. Unfortunately, it didn’t mix too well with the weak joe.

  I looked over at the woman named Sherry across from me, her fingers flexing around her own still-full mug. Sherry was a little heavy, soft featured, maybe a homemaker or in a low-stress, low-impact career. She was definitely out of her element, but then again most everyone was now.

  Even me.

  My job was to protect the border, send back illegal crossers among other things.

  Now, what was my job?

  Kill sick kids and be a roadside justice-server? I needed orders. I needed a direction.

  I needed my partner back.

  Sherry’s hair was mussed and she fidgeted with it every few minutes, running a hand down its length to smooth out the kinks. The motion never helped, but it comforted her. I could tell that much. Her eyes walked the line between hazel and brown. They seemed to shift back and forth as I watched her. More green one moment and more brown the next. She seemed to be doing better. Nothing like clean underwear, sweatpants, and proper feminine products, courtesy of my clothes stash. We even had the same shoe size, so she’d traded her broken heels for an extra pair of black sneakers I’d had buried in my rig. I think she’d have liked to shower, but the showers weren’t operating at the truck stop and the RV’s water tank was pretty much zapped.

  Shit, I would have liked to shower too. I was sweaty and dusty. I’d been dirty before the shoot out, but now I was filthy. Digging a grave for a giant man in the middle of the day during a hot Texas autumn will do that. I’d said a few words and put Mike’s favorite ball cap on the mound of dirt. I hadn’t had anything to use as a marker for the Rottie, but the little boy came out when I was finishing and placed a dog toy on the grave. It was a mallard duck that had been stuffed in a lower cabinet in the RV. He hadn’t said anything as he’d placed it on the joint grave. I didn’t say anything either. I just stood there while he cried, and when the tears were gone, he’d turned around and went back into the motor home. Kids crying gets me every time.

  Of course, I feel a little different now that child-sized monsters terrorized the country.

  Juan had tried to get up to help me dig once, but Sherry hadn’t let him. I only had one shovel I’d found in the store janitorial closet anyways. Juan had given into Sherry pretty quickly, rolling over and falling back into a fitful sleep. I could see that there was an attraction between them. Any idiot would have picked up on that. I just didn’t know how strong or how mutual it was.

  Surviving will do funny things to people. Live through one life-or-death scenario with a person and don’t be surprised if you end up in love. Or falling into a shadow of love. Relationships created via trauma have a high mortality rate. Just ask Sandra and Keanu. They sped their way right in and out of love. If you ask me, the sequel was a waste of money. I mean, the lead male replacement was like…Keanu lite.

  I’d drifted off into my thoughts, almost falling down into the dark hole that was thinking about my ex-fiancé. He was dead now. Not from the monsters, but from a drunk driving accident. He’d been the drunk. It wasn’t his first offense. The first time…God, it had been awful. I was grateful when Sherry spoke and pulled me back to reality even though reality was a total shit show.

  “Honestly, the marina was our plan. Well, my plan…and Juan went along with it. When that went to hell, we just started driving. And you know why we stopped here.” Sherry, her hands steady, lifted the chipped blue mug to her mouth and took a long drink of coffee. The stuff was hot, but she didn’t seem to mind. I was going to have to let mine cool for a while. I wasn’t a fan of scorching my taste buds. Besides, in my line of work, coffee gone cold was pretty much typical.

  Of course, nothing was typical now. Nothing. I wondered if Mike’s wife and kids were alive. We’d been on our way to get them. What would I tell Lane when I saw her? She used to have nightmares that Mike wouldn’t come home from the job. Now those nightmares would be reality.

  Sherry shifted in her seat and she pulled her blouse down. She kept fidgeting, messing with the collar and making sure her chest was covered. The skirt was long gone, tossed into the trash as soon as she’d changed. I’d seen victims do that—throw away anything associated with an assault. One of the things my training hadn’t prepared me for was how many women would be trying to get across. Women that were battered and abused and running. Sometimes, they had kids with them.

  “Sherry, are you sure you don’t want to talk about it? Have you been through anything like that before?” I reached across the table and lightly touched the other woman’s hand. She’d set her coffee down but she still held the cup like a security blanket.

  “AJ…do you really prefer being called that? Amber’s a pretty name.” Sherry seemed to stop in the middle of saying something important to focus on something unimportant. It always boggled AJ’s mind how people could do that.

  “I’m not a fan of Amber. Besides, in my line of work, it’s better not to sound or look too feminine.” I took a sip of weak amber liquid. The dry cream had helped, but I’d kill for a little sugar. Even a fake sweetener, although I loathed the aftertaste.

  Sherry snorted and then regained her composure quickly. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “About?” And I really didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “AJ, you’re about as feminine as a woman comes. Not only that, but you’re exotic-looking too. Exotic in a ‘just got back from the Caribbean and picked up a perfect tan’ way.” A look passed over Sherry’s face as she spoke, as if the distinction between looking the ‘right’ sort of exotic was something she, or someone she loved, knew keenly.

  “My family was really surprised when I decided on this way of life.” I motioned down my body when I spoke. “Believe it or not, I used to model and do pageants. I was the runner up for Miss Texas five years ago. They worked hard, three and four jobs between them at a time, to pay for entrance fees and gowns.”

  “Oh, I believe it.” Sherry couldn’t seem to stop the flash of jealousy that shot through her eyes. She looked down at the floor, her cheeks flushing with pink. “So what made you choose this,” she pointed at my uniform, “over makeup and easy-living?”

  I didn’t like the way she said easy-living. I still had enough pageant queen left in me to want to enlighten her on the torture that was evening wear. Wearing a dress so tight you couldn’t breathe just to sparkle for a few moments under hot lights—easy. So easy. And the sacrifices my parents had made, it wasn’t easy for them and it wasn’t easy for me to watch them run themselves ragged. “My ex, he was in a drunk driving accident across the border. He killed an entire family walking through the Juarez marketplace.”

  “I don’t understand.” Sherry played with her cup of coffee, not drinking it. I wondered momentarily if she was one of those coffee snob types who must have fresh brew and seasonally appropriate to-go cups around Christmas time.

  “Most people don’t
.” I took a deep breath and drank another sip of cool poor-excuse-for-coffee coffee. “A lot of people who become border agents do it to protect our country, our rules, our laws. I do it because…because every person has rights. If I’m the one that finds a crosser, I’m going to make sure they’re treated fairly. You know what punishment my ex got? A slap on the wrist because he’s a U.S. Senator’s son. He comes from a family of money and the people he killed could barely afford food. Four people dead and he didn’t do any time.”

  “That’s awful,” Sherry murmured. “Are you part Mexican?”

  I felt my eyes tighten around the corners. I hated that question, not because there was anything wrong with Hispanic heritage, but because people always assumed that I had empathy for crossers because of a shared background. I’m human. They’re fucking human. I don’t have to be a blood relation or a cultural relation, to treat another human with respect.

  “No. Greek on my mother’s side. But only one-quarter.” I know my voice sounded cold and dismissive. Even if I hadn’t heard it myself, I could see it on Sherry’s face.

  “I’m sorry if I offended you,” Sherry said the words softly. “My best friend, she was teased pretty brutally growing up. God, even after she was grown up, her husband made it clear that her looks bothered him. She wasn’t even Hispanic, just dark-haired and she tanned well.”

  “People can be narrow-minded.” The way I said it, I knew I still hadn’t forgiven her, even though she wasn’t the first, or likely the last, to ask the question she did.

  Sherry swallowed, and the sound was loud and nervous. “You know, I’ve not properly thanked you for saving me.”

  “You don’t have to thank me for that.”

  “Yes, I do. As a woman to a woman, I do.” Sherry’s eyes pled with me, and they’d gone to that more green hue, even though they still hold the touch of brown. My eyes are pure green, not even flecks of gold to break up the grassiness.

  “I’m glad we were here.”

  “Even though it meant losing your partner?”

  I just nodded at her.

  “You asked if we had a plan. Did you two? I mean, where were you headed or…where are you guys coming from?” Sherry stopped pretending like she was going to drink the coffee.

  “We were both on temporary assignment, assigned to the Tex-Mex border south of El Paso when it all went south. There’s a mission-type hospital across the border run by a bunch of nuns. They deal mostly with children, trying to keep them healthy. Administering vaccines and making sure they’re properly fed, that sort of thing. We didn’t even know there was a problem, until we ran into a bunch of children coming across the border. Thought it was some new scam by the coyotes to distract our attention from the real illegal crossings. We had another team with us, regulars from the area. Mike and I were about a half a klick away when we saw them overrun through our spotting scopes.”

  “They were killed?” Sherry dug into the jerky bag in front of me and took a small chunk. She stuck it in her mouth, but she didn’t try chewing it immediately. If you’ve eaten real, hard-as-leather, jerky then you know biting a piece off is nearly impossible to begin with. It made me like her a little more. If she’d had real jerky before, then she might not be a total survival throw-away. Still soft, still possibly a homebody, but someone who had a little more to her than met the eye.

  “Ravaged would be a better description. It was like a bunch of piranha hit them. George got out of their Suburban to shoo them back over the fence. Still some places where the big wall isn’t complete and we just happened to be at one of those places. The kids didn’t turn tail…they attacked. It didn’t take long, a few minutes at the most. We watched it like a horror movie. I’ve never seen anything like it, ever. The agents didn’t even get a shot off. They didn’t even scream.”

  “God, that’s horrible. So you headed this way afterwards? Why?” Sherry’s eyelids were parted wide, listening to my personal piece of the horror like it was fresh entertainment to take away the memories of the nightmares she’d faced herself.

  I took another sip of my coffee. It was almost completely cold and I debated tossing it in the RV’s microwave to warm. In the end, I decided there were a lot of things worse than cold joe. Like a cold body. Like a dead body.

  “Coming here wasn’t in the plan at all, it just worked out that way. We didn’t know what to do, you know? We watched the other agents be murdered, but their attackers…some of them were barely past toddler age. They moved like bobcats, but they still looked like kids. If we knew then what we know now, we would have shot them. We wouldn’t have hesitated. But in the moment? When we didn’t know what the fuck was going on? I couldn’t put a bullet in a four-year-old’s head, not on the off chance they were hyped up on drugs or something fixable. We got our asses back in our rig as fast as we could and we hightailed it to Carrizo Springs. There was a temporary HQ there.”

  Sherry didn’t say anything, she just stared at me in that ‘little old lady watching her favorite soap opera’ way, so I kept talking.

  “To make a long story short, the outbreak had hit there also and most everyone was already dead. We got as many supplies as we could load into our Yukon and headed out. Since then, we’ve been hitting every military base, police station, and government building we can think of to find somebody, anybody, who could give us some intel or instructions. It’s total anarchy out there and we’ve not had any sort of communication with anyone. The only reason we stopped here was that the Yukon was overheating and we were low on gas. Just lucky timing for you folks.” I lifted my mug and tipped it to my lips, continuing to heighten the angle until I’d swallowed every last drop of instant coffee. When I sat the mug down, I pointed at Sherry’s unfinished drink. “You want that?”

  She shook her head. “No. I sort of hate instant coffee.”

  I smiled. “I got that impression.”

  She chuckled, but the sound was half-hollow, like someone had punctured a coconut, but only poured out part of the sweet liquid inside. “Yeah, I’m all lattes and cappuccinos and fancy frozen shit with whipped cream.” She laughed again, but this time, the low sound dissolved and several tears escaped her eyes.

  I watched as Sherry digested and accepted the severity of the situation we were in. The situation the whole world was in. I don’t sugar coat anything for anyone as a general rule. That’s one of the reasons Mike, God bless his soul, liked me. But these were exceptional times. And, in a situation like this, giving hope to an individual who had none was just plain the right thing to do. Sometimes, I felt like a walking contradiction. God, I wrote poetry in my free time, but I always had to be tougher than the guy next to me too.

  “Anyway,” I started, fumbling for words which isn’t something I normally do, “now that I’m here and we’ve got some control of the situation we might as well come up with a game plan. This,” I pointed in an arc above my head to indicate the RV, “is the perfect vehicle to keep us alive and has the range we need to get to safety. Be nice if the windshield wasn’t busted to hell, but that’s manageable. It sort of smells like death warmed up, but that won’t kill us. There are enough supplies in the convenience store to keep us comfortable, although it’s a lot of junk food and soda. We’re going to be fine.”

  “You know,” Sherry wiped away the tears that were slowly rolling down her face, “I thought maybe it was just us. Maybe this wasn’t everywhere. It wasn’t happening to everyone. When we got to the marina, I thought we were going to be safe. We’d go somewhere else, a place where this couldn’t touch us. But it’s everywhere, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know, Sherry. I don’t know about Europe or Africa or any place else. What I do know is that here, here in Texas and I think the U.S., we’re in trouble. And we have to be smart and be careful.”

  “Yeah.” Sherry sighed and ran a small, pale hand down the side of her face. “Juan was talking in his sleep. Nonsense stuff mostly, but he said something that scared me.”

  “What was that?”r />
  “He said the monsters could heal.” Sherry seemed to hate saying it, like she’d been convincing herself that it wasn’t true, that it was just Juan having a bad dream.

  I wished I could tell her something other than what I was about to. “I think he might be right.”

  Her face went even more white than it was naturally. Alabaster instead of ivory. “You think…you think he might be right?”

  “One of the buildings we stopped at…a small FEMA operation…was a nest for fifteen or so of the monster kids and probably double that in adults. I shot one of the kids in the face, a little girl. It blew out her right cheek. I could see her jaw bone peeking out from the mangled flesh. She…she went up to one of the adults and started gnawing at his arm. When she looked at me afterwards, the cheek was knitting itself back together. It wasn’t perfect, but it was as close to healed as I’d expect of some walking corpse.”

  “Oh, Jesus. God.” Sherry shook her head. “How the fuck do you kill something that can heal itself like that?”

  “I don’t know, Sherry.” I suddenly couldn’t drink the rest of the cold coffee in Sherry’s mug. My stomach felt queasy, nausea creeping up my throat. I needed to change the subject. I had to, before I tossed chunks all over the motor home. “Albuquerque Station, not too far from Kirkland Air Force Base, that should be far enough away to have had ample time to prepare. They’ll be able to help us.”

  “Do you really think it’ll be safe there?” Sherry spoke like someone walking to the gallows, like she wasn’t going to count on the king’s mercy to save her before the axe started swinging.

  “Should be, the DHS station there is pretty well outfitted and has a significant manpower presence. Kirkland has fighter squadrons and they do some special forces training there. It’s also pretty much in the middle of nowhere so I’m guessing they’re doing okay.” I was trying to convince her as well as myself that this plan was our best chance. If I was being honest, I’d say everything’s a gamble and there’s no sure thing.