The Last War Box Set, Vol. 2 [Books 5-7]

by Schow, Ryan

  Then again, time was the greatest lie detector. Men always revealed their true colors. They couldn’t help it.

  Even if he did use her for sex, the truth was, she didn’t mind. The truth was, she didn’t care about sex right now as much as she cared about his character. This is why she wanted to be close to him. She hadn’t felt close to a man in years and for some reason, maybe because she felt like the skies were falling all around them, she needed this intimacy more than anything. When at last he spoke, she’d been so deep in her own head, she startled at the sound of him.

  “Who are you going back to see in Sacramento?” he asked in the darkness.

  She swallowed hard, a cold knot forming instantly in her gut. “My fiancée,” she said. And then she wondered in that second what Nick’s evaluation of her character would be.

  Would he think she was a slut? A two-timing seductress? Or would he be able to eventually see the real her: a woman desperate to be loved, to feel safe, to be cared about? Feeling the moment of honesty as empowerment, she felt relieved the truth was finally out there. But then the silence between them started to grow. And then she became intensely uncomfortable.

  “So you drew me into you to fix my intimacy problems,” he finally said, “a problem I gained because my wife cheated on me with another man, and now you make me into the other man?”

  “It’s not like that,” she reasoned, even though it was exactly like that and she knew it.

  “Write me a different story then, Bailey,” he said in a voice that left her feeling cold and selfish inside.

  “I live a loveless existence,” she said, her truth laid bare. “The only intimacy I get is the intimacy I put on the page. I started to write romance because I needed to know what it was like to live again, to feel cared for, maybe even adored again. It helped some. But this also left me looking at the gaping holes in my own romantic life. The page is a great place to fall in love, to control the outcome, to give yourself a happy ending. But as a writer with an unsatisfying life, I found reprieve there not out of fun but out of necessity. This only lasted awhile. Writing to save yourself from your life is not the answer, Nick. In the end, it was every bit as hollow as the rest of my world.”

  “Does he know this? Your fiancée? Does he know you feel this way?”

  “I told him, yes.”

  “But?”

  “But he’s a workaholic, a terrible listener, and a man’s man.”

  “Isn’t that what girls like these days?” he asked.

  “That’s the initial attraction. But when you see all the things these kinds of guys put before you, before the idea of building a life together, it gets depressing. Then it gets incredibly lonely.”

  “So you want to be in love again?”

  “That’s the first mile of any race, Nick. But it’s not the marathon. Things change, as I’m sure you know, and if you don’t change and grow together—as a couple—a natural separation occurs. Slowly at first. You stop doing so many things together. Your shared interests drift. You don’t make love as often as you should. Eventually someone ends up with someone else and everything falls apart from there.”

  “Someone always loses though,” he said.

  “I think that was me.”

  “But you’re still together,” he reasoned.

  “We are, but we aren’t. I saw him texting a girl just before I left to San Diego.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I couldn’t confront him about it. My heart was broken though.”

  “Could you have misread the situation? Guys text girls all the time and it has nothing to do with sex, or hookups or whatever.”

  “I was telling myself that at first, but then a picture of a pair of tits came over the phone and he closed it right away. After that, I just…I think that maybe…I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do,” he said, nudging her forward. “Just say it.”

  “At that point, I refused to invest anymore effort in him. I’m tired of feeling unloved. I think I deserve more from a relationship than what he’s given me.”

  “So you hook up with me?”

  “If you’re thinking you’re the rebound guy, or the one night stand, maybe you’re right. But it’s not as empty as it sounds. I love being with you. Seriously. But with everything going on, my intentions aren’t selfish, or driven by some ulterior motive, or whatever. You and I didn’t meet at bar, or through friends, or off Tinder or something. You saved my life about a dozen times,” she said, moving toward him.

  She reached for his hand, felt it, but then he pulled it away.

  She was losing him.

  “We were locked up by some fruit eating psychopath, Nick. We were held up at gunpoint and lost a yacht together. If they say tragedy ties two hearts together, then maybe that’s what happened to us. Maybe our hearts are fused.”

  “Do you really think that?” he asked, so much edge in his voice.

  “I think that’s the hopeless romantic in me,” she said, trying to offset his mood with optimism. She reached out to touch him again, and again he pulled away.

  “You should have told me,” he said, his mood dark.

  “I know,” she responded, low, ashamed. “But what would you have done? Crawl back in that shell of yours?”

  “My shell is comfy.”

  “Well to me it looked a bit lonely. We had sex, Nick. That was awesome. But then we made love and I felt you. I felt what it was like to really feel wanted. Needed almost. And that’s something I haven’t felt in a long time. Don’t you get it? There’s something about us. If this war hadn’t broken out, maybe we wouldn’t be together. But it did. And here we are. If we get caught up in labels and societal norms and all that shallow nonsense, we might just miss something important. Something right in front of our faces.”

  “We’re not together, Bailey. We’re just two people hanging on to the same life preserver in the same rough seas.”

  “Don’t marginalize this,” she said, sitting up. “It was more than that to me, and I know it was more than that for you, too.”

  “I’m just being a baby,” he mumbled.

  “Yes, but why?”

  Rolling over in the dark he said, “Because I made this into a fairy tale taking place in the middle of hell and it wasn’t that. It isn’t. You’re someone else’s promise. A girl with another guy. I wanted to believe otherwise, I did, but now…now I just…I feel like sleeping on the couch.”

  “With Marcus?”

  “Yeah, with Marcus,” he said, getting up and leaving.

  For a long time she just laid there, crying for what she’d lost in her own life, for what she was losing in this one. She wanted to get back home, see if Jason was still alive. But then what? Who would she be now? She was wondering this when her body finally shut down and she slid into a dark and restless sleep. Twice she woke up and twice she wondered, who am I?

  Who am I?

  When I left Bailey in the bedroom, honestly, I wanted to break something. But I kept my hands to myself, and my temper on a tight leash. Losing my cool would do no good. Besides, I don’t have the energy stores to just waste on lies and failed expectations.

  Out on the couch, I see Marcus settling in. “Fight, or you finally coming out here because you missed me?” he asked.

  “Your sense of humor sucks.”

  “Told you. It’s a work in progress.”

  “If you want to take the other room,” I muttered, standing there with a pillow, “I’ll take first watch.”

  “Ah,” he said, getting up, “trouble in paradise.”

  “You show me something that resembles paradise and I’ll stir up some trouble.”

  “I can do that on my own,” he answered, dragging his blanket and pillow back to the room next to Bailey’s.

  So now I’m stretched out on this stupid couch, left only with a million conflicting thoughts. These days, getting my mind to slow down is an act of dogged perseverance. My eyes are feeling it though. They’re bloodshot,
swollen and hangdog. I feel old as hell and beaten down and I can’t stop thinking of Indigo. And this couch? I won’t lie. It’s more attractive than it is comfortable. Kind of like Bailey, I think to myself, souring at the cruel comparison.

  After lying here, stewing, being righteously pissed off about Bailey’s truth, my mood breaks and I’m left here feeling sour. Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on her. She’s like any of us trying to survive—we’re all just trying to get the things we need in life.

  A couple hours later, I hear bare feet padding across the carpet toward me. Bailey kneels down, sits next to me.

  “I’m sorry, Nick,” she says, facing me. “I should’ve told you. But you wouldn’t have been with me and you have to admit, beyond your kid and my douchebag of a fiancée, we are a nice fit.”

  “You can’t know that,” I say.

  “Why, because of our circumstances? Did you know most people can’t travel together without falling apart? Why is it my fiancée has this beautiful, talented girlfriend who has to go to bed alone each night, not feeling loved, having to resort to writing to find romance? Why is this happening to us now? You are my first indiscretion, Nick. My only indiscretion—or whatever you think this is. It was spontaneous for sure, but it sort of wasn’t either. I know what I like, Nick. When it comes to men, I know what I want. And it’s usually the opposite of what I get.”

  “So now you want romance in hell?”

  “I want you, dummy,” she says, taking my hand. I let her this time. “In whatever conditions they are—heaven, hell, every day life—I want you, Nick.”

  “You don’t know me well enough to say that,” I tell her, even though what she’s saying is definitely thawing the ice I’d quickly formed around my thoughts of her.

  “Yes, but this is how it starts,” she says. “No one ever looks across the room and seriously says, ‘That’s my soul mate.’ But they do look at a person and know they’re going to be with them. When I first saw you, Nick, I knew that I had to have you.”

  “But you’re still going back to Sacramento.”

  She hesitates, then says, “I have to make sure he’s alive.”

  “Then what?”

  “I need to tell him I can’t be with him. He was nearly intolerable in his neglect before all this happened. I can’t see him stepping up his game for the apocalypse. I mean Jesus, Nick, this isn’t exactly nirvana! We were almost killed half a dozen times. And this still isn’t over.”

  “Are you trying to be romantic right now? Because the things you’re saying are coming through, but the picture you’re painting about the foreseeable future is pretty glum.”

  She nods her head, slowly, contemplating my point.

  “If I pull back the blanket, can you fit on both me and the couch?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she says, renewed.

  I pull back the blanket. She slides in, straddles me, then pulls down my borrowed briefs. I guess I made this decision. No going back.

  Afterwards, as we’re cuddling in the dark and falling into slumber, something tears me from my sleep. My eyes feel swollen shut with exhaustion, my body in massive amounts of pain from the depletion of war and sex. I look over in the darkness of night and see someone standing over me.

  I’m not sure if I’m awake or asleep, but I jump inside, enough to feel Bailey’s body half draped over mine and half tucked into the couch. I’m about to shove her off and do something, but the person standing over me is not an adult.

  As I try to clear my eyes, I see this is a child.

  “Are you lost?” I whisper at the shadow.

  I try to focus, to see the details, but all I see is this shadow. The child says nothing. He just stands there.

  “What’s your name?” I hear myself asking.

  Then the boy opens his mouth and says, “Tyler.”

  The world comes spiraling into me and I jolt again, this time I’m awake for real and sweating, breathing heavy. Bailey is still on top of me, lightly snoring. The blankets have shifted, her naked bottom peeking out from the covers. I pull the blanket back over us, try to relax, try to fall back asleep, but I can’t. All I can think about is Tyler. What he must have gone through in his final hours of life.

  Why didn’t he just eat the peaches? He’d still be alive if he at the peaches.

  My mind is suddenly traveling down dozens of roads at once. I’m thinking of the men in The Warden’s prison: the one who got shot, the one who hung himself. Then I’m thinking of the one I might have beaten to death in the middle of the night. And then I think about The Warden and how I know for certain that, in him, I’d seen true malevolence. He touched something in me. A live wire. I didn’t have to kill him. I could have broken his arms and legs. I could have let him starve to death. Would I do it all different now? Would I?

  That’s the real question, isn’t it?

  The truth is, I don’t know.

  Having analyzed and overanalyzed my behavior a hundred times since that moment, each time I wondered if I’d do anything different. Each time, however, I come to the same conclusion: the world is a better place without that lunatic in it.

  Tyler shouldn’t have had to pay that price, though.

  He didn’t deserve to die.

  My mind is turning away from him because the pain of his absence is starting to tear at me. My thoughts go to the drones. To Indigo. To Margot even. I don’t wish anything bad on her or Tad. Well, maybe Tad. He was a selfish prick when he ripped apart our family, and he deserves a few bad things for sure, things that would really scrape the crap off his soul. But maybe not too much. If he lost his Tesla, that would be good. If he didn’t have a job to feed that gigantic ego of his, that would be even better.

  Speaking of Tad, when you strip down today’s men, they’re seldom defined by who they are, what their moral compass is or how much good they do in the world. This is the sad truth. Instead, where I’m from, we’re measured by our job, our income, all our precious little things. Times are changing though. When all of these material things are stripped away from Tad, who will he really be? Most likely, he wouldn’t be the man Margot thought.

  That’s my conclusion. My belief.

  Bailey shifts off my chest, sliding down my side a bit, her body fitting nicely into the back of the couch. Would she really leave her fiancée? Come with me if I ask? Do I want to bring her home with me? I do. I really want her to come home with me. But how do I introduce her to Indigo?

  The worry I carry around for my daughter is like an extra piece of luggage. One that’s loaded with bricks rather than clothes. I’m so scared for her. When this finally becomes too much, I feel the warm sting of tears hitting my bloodshot eyes. Boiling over, they trickle down my cheeks and I don’t care. I let them flow. Right then Bailey takes a deep breath, then opens her eyes and looks up at me. She touches my face, feels my sadness.

  “Are you okay?” she asks, brows furrowing.

  “I am.”

  “Are you asleep?”

  “No,” I reply. “I can’t sleep.”

  “Bad dreams?” she asks, yawning and shifting off of me, pulling the blankets around her body like she’s about to head to the bathroom.

  “Something like that,” I answer, wiping my eyes.

  She finally crawls over me, smashing my thigh, almost crushing one of my nuts. She successfully works her way off the couch then shuffles into the nearest bathroom and shuts the door. I can’t help listening to her going pee. The house is small. Intimate.

  When I first met her, I had no idea we’d would spend this kind of time together, that she would actually draw down my defenses. Or help me set the worst parts of myself free. Yet here we are. Together.

  When she returns, I say, “Your panties are on the floor.”

  “I was about to get them,” she says, working them up while trying to keep the blanket on.

  “I’ve already see you a few times, you know.”

  “Yes, but there are no waxing centers or estheticians available, so…hon
estly, I hope you have a thing for seventies porn.”

  I laugh, then she laughs, and then she drops the towel and wiggles her panties back into place before settling down beside me.

  “You can sleep in the bedroom,” I tell her. “I’m just taking first watch.”

  “It’s too lonely in there. Besides, I want to be next to you.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The next morning Marcus and I head into town while the girls make breakfast. It wasn’t our idea, it was theirs. Bailey told me she wanted some time to get to know Corrine. She said they needed some girl time for sure.

  “How do you know she wants girl time with you?” I ask.

  “You wouldn’t get it.”

  “Four sets of eyes are better than two when it comes to a scavenger hunt,” I tell her.

  “She’s been through an ordeal, Nick. She needs this.”

  “We’ve all been through an ideal.”

  “She was raped,” she says to me, and yeah, I get it. I just don’t like thinking about it because it makes me worry about Indigo. Which I’ve now become obsessed with, but not in a good way.

  So Marcus and I set out on foot going from house to house looking for keys. Not to the house, or the family car. We’re looking for keys to a boat.

  Any boat.

  “The houses we choose, you knock and if there’s no answer, I’ll go around back and kick open the door. Or break a window. Or do whatever I have to do to get inside.”

  “Break a window?”

  “Try not to, but yeah,” he says. “Don’t overthink it, just know we have to get in. And be quiet because I’ve already been put on warning earlier.”

  I have a Glock, like Marcus, but I pray I don’t have to use it. The things I did getting us out of The Warden’s prison gave me nightmares. I didn’t use a gun on him, but I would have. I should have. These last couple of days, in the early mornings, as I’m drawing up out of a deeper sleep, I think I hear the sounds of him gurgling to death.