“Six?” Ethan sat up the rest of the way with great effort. “Heads are gonna roll for this. They weren’t zombies… They weren’t-”
“A gang?” Keith didn’t agree. “Damn right, they’re a cult. They had no right to attack Sabrina and Tammy, and you know that. No matter what, Kenly and a large majority of the citizens want them run out of town. You’re probably gonna have to drive them out about as far as Rolla with orders to shoot on sight if they come back. We’re gonna leave them out there unarmed too. They’re too great of a threat to leave guns with. They’d undoubtedly use them against us.”
Ethan sighed, “Whatever. Just, get me out of here so I can go home.”
“Well, if you can stand, you can leave.” Keith offered.
Ethan tried, but it didn’t work. He settled for a wheel chair just long enough to make it to the room Tammy was resting in. Sabrina’s eyes lit up when he rolled in. She got off the bed where she’d been reading a book to Tammy, who couldn’t look down because of a neck brace, and almost tackled Ethan off his chair.
“It’s good to see you two are okay.” He laughed, hoping the wheelchair didn’t tip backwards. He didn’t want a second concussion.
“Fuck yeah we are.” Tammy said, pulling the part of the brace that constricted her jaw down a little. “Those motherfuckers were gonna kill us, Ethan. You and your friends saved us.”
“I wonder if Bass’s kids think the same thing.” Ethan rested his head in his hands.
“Those kids are a lost cause.” Sabrina sat back in her chair, sorry she had to admit this in public. “My little sister was the same way, an evangelical zealot. She didn’t want to hear there was another way of life, she just wanted everyone to be just like her so she didn’t have to think too hard and consider abstract thought. Some people just can’t accept that love is unconditional.”
“Are you two armed? Those Old T’s have supporters almost everywhere.”
“Yeah.” Sabrina motioned behind her seat. Ethan could make out the shadow of her M9 under a jacket. “Hospital or no, I don’t think we’ll ever be unarmed again.”
After another hug Ethan wheeled back to his room where Mary had fallen asleep reading the book she’d brought, which was understandable. Ethan didn’t figure Mary to be the type to like science fiction. The book was probably terribly boring to her. Setting the breaks on the chair, Ethan hauled himself into the bed. At first he tried to sleep, but found he couldn’t. And why would he be able to?, he’d been asleep for more than twenty four hours. Instead he found himself continuously drawn to the woman who was going to have his child. Watching her sleep was better than if the room’s TV had still worked. She was so peaceful, so beautiful. Absolutely serene when she slept.
Ethan had always wanted children. He and Nicole had planned everything from the names to where they would attend college and how to save money for the future. Then Iraq happened, Ethan was lured out of the National Guard to the Regular Army by a massive sign-on bonus for Soldiers dumb enough to get caught up in the Bush Reich’s “Surge” at the end of the fifth year of Halliburton’s plundering of the national treasury. After that Ethan went from potentially a better parent than even his had been to the kind of person kids grow up later hating like so many alcoholics produced by Vietnam. He carried so much weight, kept secret things he didn’t know should be told, harbored hate for men who’d probably been eaten alive long ago. Part of Ethan hoped that before St. Peter pulled the lever and dropped him into Hell, he’d at least get to say his peace and protest the guilty being let into the Kingdom of God.
Of course, guilt was an inevitable feeling. Guilt over Nicole mostly, but guilt that not only had he taken away Mary’s life with the Texas Marines, probably the best thing anyone had going for them these days, but now he was helping her to bring an innocent child into the shitty world where no one could expect any more than a short, brutal existence and a hopefully permanent death. As much as Ethan enjoyed his personal freedom, not having to deal with the day to day of a fast paced, uncaring society, he also wished his child could grow up with the plenty he’d taken for granted. Brand new, name brand toys, an endless supply of snacks and model airplanes and entire television channels dedicated to children’s entertainment. Getting up early on Saturday morning to watch cartoons in the days before the airwaves were saturated by Japanese trash-anime shows the Japanese thought were too stupid to be marketable in their own country. After Pokémon made it’s hideous debut getting up early was pointless to say the least. Mary and her child deserved a fraction of the world they knew. He had to defend that hope, and her.
A smile crept across Ethan’s face as he thought about his favorite cartoons. Ren & Stimpy, a demented creation unfit for children’s television even under the best of circumstances had captured Ethan’s heart from an early age. He’d have to find and horde a DVD player and as many copies of his favorite shows as he could so he wouldn’t have to imagine his child growing up not idolizing The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or Batman & Superman, and eventually the good stuff like American Dad, Family Guy and Ugly Americans. For a moment he thought about collecting all the seasons of King of the Hill too, but that show had been Nicole’s thing. Personally, Ethan didn’t find the cartoon funny enough to take up a four panel slot in the Sunday Post comic section. It was more an eery reflection of normal Midwestern life than anything outright humorous. Then again, maybe it was the funniest cartoon ever made and Ethan just didn’t have a sense of humor. Either way, the joke was still lost on him.
“What are you smiling about?” Mary interrupted Ethan’s trip through memory lane. She opened her eyes all the way.
“Just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Warping our child’s fragile little mind with Ren & Stimpy.”
Mary’s brow furrowed. “No.”
“I’ve heard that before.” There was a moment of silence before Mary seemed to have more to say. Whatever it was, it wasn’t easy for her to ask.
“Have you ever killed anyone before?” Mary asked. Marines weren’t known for beating around the bush, or for their compassion to anyone. It was an awkward question out of the blue for sure.
“Why? Have you?”
Mary nodded silently. “Fifteen, five that were at those storage units. After the first two, a survivor and his girlfriend that thought a lose Marine was a tempting target, what with all of the five MRE crackers and half a canteen I had on me at the time. They charged me with swords. Swords, Ethan. I mean, what the fuck? I shot them both dead before I even thought about giving them a warning.”
“They probably wouldn’t have stopped anyhow, and you might be dead.”
“That’s how Master Gunny Judge saw it. I might have felt nothing if I didn’t pick their swords up afterwords. They were just those cheap display swords you can get anywhere at a mall or online. One of my rounds shattered the girl’s blade and went right through her. That was when I realized I’d just killed two starving children who probably had no idea the tools that had probably kept them alive this long were just toys. Play things in a fight with a tool of death.”
“I always thought I’d kill someone in Iraq.” Ethan rolled to face the sealing. “Never thought I’d shoot another American who wasn’t breaking into my house.” Mary was still silent. She let him go on. “I don’t know for sure if I took anyone’s life before Vincent Bass. I’d rather suspect I didn’t. Zombies yes, some armadillos and a couple opossums for sure, but I don’t think any living people.”
“What about the Bloods thing?” Mary asked. She didn’t know the truth for sure, she wasn’t there, and was trying to avoid acting like scuttlebutt was fact.
“I guess word gets around.”
“It’s one of the first things someone told me when I got dropped off here. Some cook at the truck stop. Said you and Keith and Allen took down some gangbangers.”
“It wasn’t like that.” Ethan let his focus go a thousand yards. He wasn’t angry at her, but at how facts had gotten distor
ted with so few people to distort them. “These poor bastards, Bloods though they might have been, rolled up on a pile of Zims we’d been stacking all night, a fresh wave of them from a fallen checkpoint. Their Cadillac Escalade - that burned out looking hulk on the side of the road you’ve seen-” Mary nodded, she’d seen it. “Got stuck on the rotting bodies with those stupid twenty four inch rims… Sure, they shot at us first, but we got to them without firing a shot. We went down there trying to help them. I didn’t even know Allen then, but his brother had been in the Army and used to teach him and their younger brother what he knew, so Allen got in the turret with the M240… And things were going good, they were calming down and cooperating. There were seven of them.” Ethan swallowed hard, “One deputy put down a Zim that was about to bite him, I think, and I guess these people had had such a rough time of it out there that they panicked and shot at us again.” He didn’t have to go any farther with the story. Mary already know Allen had turned them all into hamburger in a matter of seconds. She also understood that it was probably because of this incident that Keith and Ethan treated a boy almost ten years younger than them like an equal. There was no more childhood for Allen Broadwick or the children of his generation. They were arguably robbed the worst of any generation. To just barely begin to know a world and have it end before you can truly join it would be like building a home, and then the day before you moved in it burns to the ground.
“And then yesterday… It was just like being there again.” Ethan broke down some, his composure slipping.
“Yesterday was nothing like the Bloods.” Mary put her hand on Ethan’s arm. Her hand was warm and soft, Ethan was almost surprised how warm. “In a way those people might have been innocent, scared of everyone and wanted by no one. Their reaction might almost be forgivable, in time, but the other day the worst of humanity butted heads with the best of it and lost. I don’t care how many of them you had to kill, or how many you went to school with, or how many were your best friends. When they chose to try to stone Tammy and Sabrina to death like this was the ‘Stan, regardless of the reason, they crossed a line we can’t let ourselves be on the wrong side of. You’ve never forgotten who we really are, or what it means to crown thy good with brotherhood…” Mary laughed. “I’m not a poet, I swear, but it really fits.”
“Yeah… I wonder if a jury will see it that way.” Ethan gripped Mary’s hand.
“Ethan, c’mon, there’s not going to be a trial.”
“How do you know? Just because they were fanatics doesn’t mean they don’t have friends in the community. Hell, one of them was the head honcho of security at the trading post.” Ethan didn’t seem to want to believe he wouldn’t be crucified for the event. If the dead hadn’t wiped out most of the living, he probably would have.
Mary smiled and leaned back in her chair. “There’s not going to be a trial, Ethan. I know because I made sure there wouldn’t be.”
“What did you do, put a gun to someone’s head?” Ethan laughed.
“Mayor Kenly’s, actually.”
“You didn’t.” Ethan sat straight up. Though he barely knew Mary, he well understood she wouldn’t have had a second’s pause about doing something like that.
“Well, the gun never left my holster, but yes. I strongly implied the that I could not raise this child on my own, and if he was going to do anything short of reinstate you after we toss those Dark Age throwbacks out of town I’d shoot him in his sleep.” Mary’s icy blue/green eyes betrayed no sense of falsehood to her statement. Of course, Ethan would have to fact check, but he didn’t expect to be disappointed.
Before Ethan drifted off to sleep again when the next course of pain meds was delivered, he asked Mary something that had been bothering him. “If we weren’t already having a child… I mean, like if things were the way they were before… Would you even give me a second glance?”
“Nope.” Mary smiled, answering much quicker than Ethan had expected. “My normal type was the ‘Shallow Hal.’ You know, the type that only cared how my ass looked, was habitually broke, usually cheating or doing stupid shit in general. Real assholes. I would have put you in the friend zone so damn quick. Probably would even have asked to borrow money just days after payday.”
“Uh… Thanks?”
Mary laughed at herself, and at the look on Ethan’s face. “Look, Ethan, you can stop questioning my motives anytime now. I had my way with you in a hotel room because we both needed it. You needed someone besides yourself to care about as much as I needed someone to care about me, and that was the only way I thought I could show you...” Mary put her head in Ethan’s lap. “Life is extremely nigh these days. As if the Apoc’ hadn’t already taught us that. Surviving the Plague made me feel invincible, but now… I know I haven’t lived my life the way I should. Relationships with morons, running away to the Marines to escape my completely reasonable middle class parents and our stiflingly perfect and normal home all just before the Panic…” For the first time Mary actually seemed upset. She’d seen the blood and guts of her closest friends and barely said a word. How much more could she take, how much more was bottled inside, left unsaid? An entire generation of people who may never be able to put a voice to the horror of watching their world fall to the undead was only just beginning. Grabbing Mary out of her chair Ethan pulled her into the bed with him. She lost all composure. She cried for over an hour, but never said a word. They fell asleep together and waited for the dawn.
Though he was ordered to stay away, Ethan found himself unable to be elsewhere when the sixty four remaining members of the Church of the Old Testament were escorted out of town by the Cavalry. It was understood this wasn’t the law, or the government attacking religion, but the other way around. Almost everyone in town claimed some denomination of Christianity, yet no one protested the expulsion of the extremist church that had started a riot on Main Street and nearly killed two innocent women and as many lawmen. They were loaded into the back of a number of pickup trucks from the massive lot of abandoned vehicles refugees had dumped in almost every field outside the airport, and driven out of sight down Westbound 44.
“What’s the likelihood they’ll be back?” Mary said mostly to herself, leaning on Ethan’s shoulders from the top of the Ten Million Dollar Bridge to Nowhere (a bridge the town had built with Stimulus money a few years back that literally led to nowhere. It was pretty to look at though.) He could see through the railing on the bridge as the trucks were driven away, a Humvee escorting from the front and rear, that this was a morally absent thing to do. Expelling trouble makers from one group or another was a time honored human tradition, but this time expulsion without anything but a few pistols and hunting rifles was undoubtedly a death sentence.
“It’s a certainty.” Kenly grumbled, hawking a massive wad of snot onto the ground. A flu was making its rounds of the town, so far they had plenty of meds, but it was taking its toll on productivity and emergency stores. “They all but promised it the day we arrested them.”
“Don’t be so sure, Sir. Those are the registered members. A lot of folks are sympathizers. They have friends and business ties all over town. This is a shit-storm that won’t go away any time soon.” Lee leaned against the railing of the bridge they stood on. “We downloaded and took a look at those pictures you and the pilots took in Hillsboro, Ethan.”
Ethan looked up at Lee, a view he wasn’t used to. “And?”
“I’ve been on the radio with the CO at Labadie, Major Donovan. He says he can’t spare the Marines because they’re dealing with gang threats to the North West. However, he agrees that whoever this is, they’re a real threat.” Kenly’s sausage fingers wrapped white knuckled around the bars of the fence, listening to the stupidity Major Donovan spewed out repeated by Lee. “We’ve been ‘given clearance’ to deal with it.”
“Since when did we start taking orders from Texas? Or asking their permission.” Keith narrowed his eyes. “This is a slippery slope, Lee.”
“Brewer, shut the
fuck up.” Kenly adjusted his belt as the convoy disappeared over a hill. “We didn’t ask their permission for shit. I said we are going to take these sadistic fuckers out, and I only asked if they would come along. And last time I checked, they’re as close to a government as this land has, save us, so it would behoove us to cooperate- in my humble opinion. Not to mention they supply our power and, I think, would come to our defense if threatened by a force we couldn’t deal with.”
“Forgive me if I find your faith misplaced.” Ethan stood, albeit slowly, and stretched. “Granted, Texas kept its shit together when the federal government couldn’t, but that doesn’t mean they don’t suffer from the same pointless, strangling bureaucracy that crippled our nation for almost two decades before the first signs of the plague ever started. We could be trading random gangs for an empire.”
“Texas has upheld the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.” Mary interrupted. “We might be taking a hard stance on dissidents right now, but Texas isn’t the bad guy here.” Ethan noticed that she still referred to the Texans as “we”, although he was guilty of the same thing when speaking of the few happy memories he had from the Army. “So this one time, we all…” began almost every story.
“So what now?” Keith asked. Someone had to.
“Let’s do something positive for a change.” Ethan would get to the murders, but after he’d recovered. Until then, and without television, he’d have to find something to occupy his time. “Maybe we should draft a new Constitution for the town, like a State’s Constitution, not something that replaces, but adds to the real one that is relevant in the here and now.”
“Absolutely. I’m thinking pure let it be stance on everything from Economics to Adam marrying Steve.” Kenly stopped at the corner at the bottom of the bridge as the group began to separate. “I know this is a real stretch into an uncertain future, but if the dead keep rotting they vast majority of them will be too decayed to function by this time next year. If we really are the only town left in Missouri then the state belongs to us. We’re the stewards, we’re the law of the land. Let’s do it right this time.”
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