Campbell

by C. S. Starr

  “Hopefully not, anyway,” Cole said, throwing himself on the couch beside his sister. “I don’t think there’s anyone left to mess with us.”

  “We don’t know what’s going on out there,” Andrew reminded him. “Since there hasn’t been TV or radio for two weeks.”

  “The adults are all dead or otherwise occupied. No one gives a shit about what we did. He was as good as dead anyway. It was just a matter of time.” Lucy stroked Cole’s hair as he curled up on her lap. “And now we’re all together.”

  Andrew nodded, a smile on his face. “Just like Mom wanted.”

  Her older brother had been gone about an hour when a small knock on the back door got Lucy’s attention. She eased Cole’s head off her lap and peered through the dusty lace curtain at a girl, probably a couple of years younger than her. She looked familiar, Lucy thought to herself as she turned the deadbolt and opened it a crack.

  “What?” she said bluntly as she attempted to position herself as a grown-up the way she’d been practicing. “What do you want?”

  The girl’s dirty blonde hair was messy, and she wrung her hands in the doorway, obviously terrified. “My…my name’s Angela, and I’m hungry, and…I live down the road and we used to take the bus together, and I was wondering if you had any food?”

  Cole leaned in from the living room, still half asleep. “Who’s there?”

  “Some kid from the bus,” Lucy said, glaring at the tiny disheveled girl in the doorway. “Wants our food.”

  “Your parents are dead?” Cole asked, pushing the door open a little more when she nodded. “Come in.”

  “No,” Lucy said, shaking her head. “No one comes in.”

  “She’s hungry, Ce,” Cole said, frowning at his sister. “And she’s just a little kid, and she’s desperate or she wouldn’t have come here. Would you come here unless you had to, with him out there?”

  Lucy closed the door and shook her head at her brother. “So she goes and tells someone we’re here on our own, and then where are we?”

  “She’s got no one. We can help her.” Cole ignored the disapproving expression on his sister’s face and opened the door. “Come on in. We don’t have much, but we can share a little.”

  Angela Duncan came in, and ate as much as they offered her. She fell asleep on the couch that night, much to the chagrin of Lucy and Andrew. Cole though, couldn’t have been happier, because he remembered the little girl from the school bus and saw something incredible the others had missed.

  The potential in Angela Duncan.

  September 2012

  Somewhere south of Campbell

  Since Lucy was nearest the trunk lock, she made her move first. Unfortunately, it just put her in who Tal assumed was Ski-mask’s arms. He tossed her on the ground with ease, before reaching for Tal. Tal was right; he wasn’t tall. He was an ugly kid, with greasy hair, pocked skin and a bulbous nose, and a large body—not fat, but stocky. It was a dark night, the sky littered with stars, and they were on the edge of a scantly wooded area, just off a road.

  “I knew we should have checked on them! They’re all untaped,” the girl, tall, also with terrible skin, short red hair and a mass of shitty tattoos on her bare arms, shouted at Ski-mask. “Idiot!”

  “Fuck off,” he mumbled back, as he tossed Tal, disabled by his stiff limbs, onto the ground. “What the fuck is the smell in there?”

  “Those assholes pissed themselves,” she grumbled. “Great. Now we’re going to have to smell that all the way home.”

  Tal glanced at Lucy, seeing her entirely for the first time since this had started. She wasn’t just bruised on her head. Her arms were scratched and bloody, but she looked oddly contemplative as their two captors bickered back and forth in the darkest part of the night. She inched towards him and put her back to the trunk. He did the same.

  From their banter, it was obvious that their captors were amateurs. Strong, a little intimidating, but amateurs.

  Tal hadn’t noticed Lucy pull the tire iron out of the trunk in all their squirming, but she seemed to have it on her now. The scream as she hit Ski-mask in the knees with it at full force was monumental. He dropped to the ground, but the girl grabbed Lucy roughly pulling her to her feet and threw the tire iron on the ground before cuffing her across the face.

  “Fuck, you two. Could you be any more of a pain in the ass?” she said calmly, before smacking Lucy again. “Chup, get up.”

  Ski-mask groaned, and as he collected himself, Tal realized that he’d been given an out; an opportunity to run, with the girl wailing on Lucy while she primitively fought back. Instinct took over, and he did something he regretted instantly.

  He scrambled to his feet and took off over the edge of a small bank and into the woods.

  “Go and get him!” the girl screamed, with what he assumed was Lucy-induced pain. “He’s getting away!”

  It was too dark for Tal to see much, and as he ran, he found his socks wet and his face scratched constantly by brambles and thorns. He ran until it was quiet, and then he collapsed behind what he hoped was a tree. It was incredibly dark out there, and every creak and crack put Tal on edge. He’d never been one for nature.

  He couldn’t leave her there. He knew that. It wasn’t that they were close, or that he was greatly invested in her survival; it was common human decency that pushed him back. As he crept silently through the trees, Tal could almost imagine the conversation he’d have with Connor about how great it would be if she wasn’t around, but out here, he and Lucy weren’t on separate sides, and there was a good chance that they would have been allied if they’d had a few more days to talk things out. Saving her now, if he could pull it off, would go a long way in building their relationship. If he ran off and left her, and she managed to survive, he’d be forever viewed as a coward; not only by others, but also by himself. He didn’t even have to think about it. The bottom line was that despite their differing political ideologies, Lucy didn’t deserve whatever was happening to her.

  Running back was excruciating in every way. He was hungry, tired, in pain in so many places he’d lost count, and spent those long minutes contemplating how cruel it really was to grab someone when they were in bed without proper footwear on. The only thing that helped him find his way was the brush he’d cut on the way there, which seemed to lead him in a relatively straight line. Crows squawked overhead. Things rustled in the bushes. He hoped they hadn’t deemed him scavenge-worthy.

  The evening was slowly turning to dawn when he approached the edge of the woods and could see the scene he’d fled from. He was grateful for the light, because he hoped it would allow him to better understand the landscape and how to work it to his advantage.

  “Just finish her,” the female voice said, exasperated and cruel from the far side of the car, out of Tal’s vision. “I want to get out of here.”

  “Fuck you,” Ski-mask groaned, in a tone that made the bile in Tal’s stomach rise up his throat. “I’ll finish when I finish. Bitch is going to pay.”

  He didn’t hear so much as a squeak from Lucy.

  Tal stopped moving, and surveyed the scene from his position in the ditch. He mentally bemoaned the shortage of suitable pain-inducing sticks amongst the shrubs, but then caught the gleam of something so perfect it almost felt too good to be true.

  The tire iron.

  He didn’t question how it had arrived at his feet, but he picked it up, felt the weight of it in his hands, and when he heard a ragged sob that he knew wasn’t coming from either of his captors, something he’d never experienced before took over.

  Blind rage.

  He ran and swung, and eventually the swings started making contact. At that point, he started directing them a little more, and with the element of surprise on his side, he was quite successful in beating down their female captor into a crumpled heap on the ground with very little damage on his end, besides a few cuts to his arms that he hadn’t felt as they were happening from whatever she’d had in hand.

 
; What was surprising was how disconnected he felt from the blood, and the obvious feeling of his reach attached to the tire iron hitting her skull. He’d never killed anyone before. It felt too easy. He found it curious that he was unaffected in a real way by what he’d done, but he wasn’t, plain and simple. He was more concerned about what was next.

  The element of surprise he’d created seemed to give what was left of Lucy Campbell a fighting chance with Ski-mask, and as Tal took a step back from his victim, he heard a blood curdling scream coming from the other side of the vehicle, which he could now see was a Lincoln Town Car in fair condition. A few strides put him in front of the most disturbing scene he’d ever encountered, and he dropped the tire iron and took a step back, as he tried to mentally process what he was seeing.

  She’d taken his eye, as Tal suggested, hours earlier. It was in her hand. Her determination was kind of overwhelming, and left him unsure of what his role in her counterattack against her much larger, mostly naked assailant should be. Ski-mask was bleeding profusely from his eye, and as Tal scanned the scene, he realized that wasn’t the only place. Tal had imagined eye wounds being at the top of his list of disturbing injuries, but Ski-mask had changed his opinion of that.

  “Make sure the other one’s dead,” she snapped, glancing at Tal, the look in her eye fairly far from human. “Go!”

  “She’s dead,” he replied quietly, glancing down at what had to be grey matter on the front of his already bloodstained t-shirt. “Really dead.”

  Tal found himself thrown to the ground by someone unexpected, smaller and more prepared.

  “Oh,” he muttered, momentarily looking up at the small guy standing over him before the tire iron connected with his head and he dropped on top of Tal, Lucy replacing him in his line of vision. She looked terrible, Tal thought briefly, as she staggered back, and leaned against the car.

  “We have to burn everything,” she hissed, moving back to the sobbing mess to Tal’s left. “Make sure that one’s really dead. Put the bodies in the hole.”

  Tal scrambled to his feet. The day was becoming much lighter, illuminating the blood and gore around them, the streaks of various things brownish red on the ground. He’d lead a sheltered life growing up, and until that moment, had really and truly thought he’d seen the worst of what people were capable of.

  That was before he’d beat a woman he hardly knew to death with a tire iron.

  Now that he had a few minutes to think, he determined from the rapid changes in light that he hadn’t been gone for all that long, but in that time, Lucy Campbell had held her own in a way he wouldn’t have been able to. She’d been enough of a problem for them to forget all about his escape. She stood up and took in the scene as well, pausing for a long moment at her attacker, who was now entirely blind and sobbing like a baby.

  “I don’t know if I want to kill you,” she said quietly, her tone ice cold as she sat just out of his reach. “I don’t know if that’s the worst thing that could happen to you, if it’s what you deserve. What do you think?”

  “I think you’re a fucking psychopath,” he groaned, clutching at his face. “And you’re going to get yours.”

  ***

  Lucy mulled things over, her ankles crossed in front of her. She’d won at no small cost to her dignity, but everything she’d done had been voluntary and premeditated. A few seconds of acting for the result she needed. It wasn’t her preferred way of doing things, not by a long shot, but she was alive. She scooped one of his eyes off the ground and looked at it, ignoring his statement, which she believed was factual in every way. “I made myself a promise when I was ten that I’d never, ever let myself be used again like you tried to use me tonight. That I’d die before I let that happen. You almost made me let myself down.”

  “Just kill him, Lucy,” a firm voice from behind her said. “Kill him so we can get the fuck out of here.”

  She looked up to see Tal standing there, arms crossed, looking exhausted. His expression wasn’t one she’d seen before and was almost as dark as she felt inside.

  “I want to hurt him,” she said quietly, her words disconnected from all the parts of herself that she liked. “I think…I’ll feel better.”

  “You already hurt him. He’s not worth any more effort. There’s food in the car. Water. Please,” he said, with a small grin. “It’s been a really long day, and there are better things to do with being alive than wasting more energy on him.”

  The Vice President of West handed her the tire iron.

  “He...” she glanced up at him, for the first time in many, many years broken enough to look to someone else for answers. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Tal knelt down, careful not to touch her, obviously concerned about how she’d respond. She’d always been self-aware, and in that moment she knew she closely resembled a caged animal. “Let me?” he asked.

  She paused, then nodded, handing him back the tire iron. He examined it for a moment, debating the fastest way to end the waste of life in front of him.

  After some silent deliberation, he opted for the same method he’d used for Ski-mask’s female companion.

  “How did you get the upper hand?” Tal pondered out loud, as Lucy stood on weak legs and moved to his side.

  “I hurt him with the tire iron before, and then I think I broke his leg, and then I really hurt him,” she mumbled.

  After the two of them dumped Ski-mask in the hole that had been dug for themselves much earlier that morning, and devoured all the food that was left in the cooler, they collapsed onto the ground, both of them a mess in their respective ways.

  Panic set in for Lucy as soon as her mind switched from surviving to processing. She was flooded with images, a disgusting assortment from the last hour or so interspersed with her childhood. She felt like she was being assaulted all over again, like there were hands, rough hands, touching her everywhere.

  “I need to have a shower,” she whispered, her tone pained. “I need to do that before anything else.”

  “I don’t know where—”

  “You need to drive,” she said, standing. “We need to find somewhere.”

  He stood, brushing the dirt off his beyond-salvageable pants. “We don’t know where we are.”

  Lucy shoved him roughly against the car. “I need to find a lake, or a river, or a goddamn mud puddle, okay? I need to clean up or I’m going to lose my mind.”

  Tal looked down at her, frowning. “I just killed two people,” he snapped. “I’m not exactly the picture of sanity right now either, but let’s think about this here, before we drive off in a car belonging to people who were going to kill us. There’s some sort of water out in the woods. My feet are fucking soaked from walking through it.”

  Lucy stared at him hard, her hands still tightly wrapped around the top of his disgusting t-shirt. “Okay,” she finally replied, dropping her hands and wrapping them around her waist. “Let’s go find your water.”

  As the sun peeked over the horizon and the morning turned into midday, Lucy was grateful that Tal didn’t comment on the fact that she was crying. It wasn’t the kind of crying that you commented on, she decided. It was the type that you did on your own, the kind that comforting did nothing to help. She wiped her cheeks a few times on their walk, and tried to think of happier things, but everything took her back to the fact that Cole was gone, and because of it, her life was in shambles. She didn’t care so much about what had occurred that morning. It was an accumulation of things. She’d done what she had to do, and felt nothing but pleased with herself over it, even if she was simultaneously disgusted.

  “We’re going to need some new clothes,” she whispered, as they came to the tiny stream Tal had stumbled into earlier. “I don’t know where we’ll get them.”

  “We can wash ours a bit, maybe?” He tugged his t-shirt off, feeling much more himself without it touching him. “But yeah, we need something new.”

  “I need more water than this,” she muttered, looking in t
he other direction as Tal stripped down to his boxers. “Don’t take your clothes off.”

  “Relax,” he mumbled, reveling in the freedom from his sticky clothing. “I think we’re a bit beyond modesty at this point. If you think I’d…” He cringed. “You’re one sick fuck.” He folded his stiff pants and t-shirt into a pile, which he tucked under his arm. “Let’s follow the stream and see if it gets wider.”

  “Where are the shoes from?” Lucy asked, when they started walking.

  “The third kid, who seemed to just appear.” He looked down at the pristine oversized white gym sneakers he’d taken off him. “I don’t think his clothes would have fit, but these aren’t too bad.”

  “Why are men so fucking stupid?” she asked.

  “I don’t think we’re all stupid, but proportionally, it’s not a good ratio sometimes,” he acknowledged.

  “When you do…that, you leave yourself open for all sorts of attacks. It’s not an effective way of gaining power. What did he think? I was just going to lie there while his weak evolutionary characteristics dripped into me? Fuck that,” she spat, her voice wavering. “Fuck.”

  “I’m sorry I left,” Tal replied under his breath. “I…It just seemed like the thing to do.”

  “It was the thing to do.” She said with a shrug. “And you came back. Even if you hadn’t known you’d come back, you did, which balances out your earlier cowardice. For the record,” she stated, her eyes hard, “I would have killed you if you hadn’t.”

  “Great,” he replied dryly, then nodded ahead. “The river seems to open up here, wherever here is.”

  The stream fed into a rocky lake with a few shrub covered islands dotting it. Sitting at the edge of it would have been nice, if not for the circumstances. It was a beautiful sunny day, and the water was clear and relatively clean. Tal set his clothes on a rock and started in until he was submerged to the waist.