This We Will Defend

by C. A. Rudolph

  “So. Are you ready to explain yourself?” Michelle queried. She looked around and took in the scene. “Are you ready to explain all of this to me?”

  Lauren rolled her lips between her teeth and didn’t respond.

  “I swear, Lauren—it’s as if you’re going out of your way just to piss me off lately,” Michelle asserted. She sighed in disgust. “Dammit! What in the hell were you thinking? This stunt could’ve gotten you killed. Do you understand that? You could’ve been killed. Again. And this time, you could’ve gotten Megan killed.”

  Lauren looked down at the ground and then, after a moment, looked her mother dead in the eyes with a cold, detached stare.

  “I gotta tell you, Lauren Jane, I don’t know who I’m looking at right now,” said Michelle. “So tell me, please…who is this person? Who are you supposed to be?”

  Lauren huffed. “It’s funny that you’re asking me that.”

  “What? How is that funny? How is any of this funny?”

  “Because I’ve been trying desperately to find an answer to that question myself, Mom,” Lauren replied. “For about the past three hundred days.”

  “What?”

  “Take a look around you,” Lauren said tersely, putting emphasis on each word. “Really…take a good look. This is who I am now. This…is who I’ve become.”

  Michelle grabbed Lauren by her shoulders. “Damnit, L. I want you to tell me why you do this. Why do you make conscious choices that deliberately put you in harm’s way? Why in the hell can’t you just stay home? Why do you feel the need to constantly test yourself…and test me in the process?”

  Lauren aggressively jerked away from her mother. The one-sided conversation was over. “Because I’m not what you wanted me to be, Mom,” she barked. “I’ll never be who you wanted me to be!”

  “What?” Michelle asked incredulously. She shook her head in disbelief as her eyes narrowed with intensity.

  Lauren sighed and looked to the sky. Her voice filled with emotion, but she held back the tears for now. “I wish I could tell you everything. I wish I could explain all the feelings I have in my head and in my heart right now, but I can’t—I’ve tried. I’ve tried so hard, and I haven’t been able to decipher them. The only thing that I know is that for some reason, for some damn reason, Dad knew that this was going to happen. I don’t know how he knew, but he just did. And he also knew somehow that he wasn’t going to be around after it happened to protect us.” Lauren paused and turned her eyes to her mother. “He knew that we were going to have to figure out a way to do it on our own, Mom. And this…is my way.”

  Lauren took a couple of steps backward and slung her rifle over her shoulder, then folded her arms over her chest. Michelle, her face pale, said nothing in reply. Lauren continued.

  “My eyes are wide open now. I know exactly how ruthless the world’s become. And I know why Dad did the things he did. I mean any of us—you, Grace, John—any one of us—at any moment—could wind up dead. In the blink of an eye. Our lives have turned into an atrocious ongoing nightmare.”

  “Lauren, I—” Michelle began, trying her best to empathize.

  “No…just stop it,” Lauren interrupted. She’d never spoken to her mother this way, but the words had begun to spill out now and there was simply no way for her to stop them. “This world sucks, Mom. I hate it. I hate having to worry every day about who’s going to come and try to steal from us or kill us next. I hate the feeling that I could lose someone I love at any given moment. I mean—we’ve already lost Dad because of this. Isn’t that enough? Shouldn’t that be enough? I just want it all to end. I just wish I knew when all of this was going to end.”

  Lauren’s eyes began to well up with tears. As resilient as she’d become, as durable as she’d been trained to be, she still wore her emotions on her sleeve. There was no escaping them.

  Michelle finally yielded. She couldn’t find it in herself to be mad anymore, even if she wanted to. “L, I’m not trying to change you,” she said. “I just need to know what’s going on in that head of yours.”

  “So do I,” Lauren said. “Some days, I feel like a petrified little girl. But then other days, I…” She trailed off as her eyes darted around. “I want things to be normal again, Mom, but I know it’s not that simple anymore. I know this is our new reality. I know we can’t go back.” She paused. “And because of that, I can’t go back. If we want to survive this, we must stop being conventional. I have to stop being conventional. I have to be this person I’m becoming. I have to join the fight now. And I’m sorry, Mom, I really am. I’m sorry if it hurts you.”

  Michelle looked over Lauren’s shoulder at Fred, who had his arm wrapped tightly around Megan as they examined the carnage together, both occasionally displaying smiles on their faces. In the distance, Michelle spotted Grace and Christian trifling with each other, both with readied rifles in their hands. She recalled the impromptu elaborate dinner at the Masons, and her earlier discussion with Sarah. Everyone in their own way was trying to find a place of normalcy now, despite the dangerous reality that loomed around them. Surrounded by tragedy and doom, they strived to maintain a positive state of mind. In a life as fragile as the one they were all now living, maybe that was all that mattered.

  “Watching you grow into this…whatever this is, isn’t an easy thing for me to understand, L,” Michelle said. “I know you and your dad spent a lot of time together away from me…I guess now I have a clue what the two of you were up to.”

  Lauren looked deep into her mother’s eyes and wiped what remained of her tears away from her own. “I can give you all the details sometime if you want,” she said. “But right now, I need you to trust me, Mom. I need you to believe in me. I need you to let me be who I am—even if it’s not who you wanted me to be.”

  Michelle nodded, even though every part of her being was fighting this. She took a close, contemplative look at her daughter and did her best to allow her protective instincts to fall by the wayside for the moment. Lauren was her baby bird—and at some point, every mother had to allow her baby bird to test her wings and fly. It didn’t matter how much Lauren had grown and developed in the past year since the world changed—Michelle wasn’t ready to let her go just yet. Somehow, somewhere along the way, her daughter had become a soldier in this new world. Even though it wasn’t what Michelle wanted, it was what fate had intended. It was what her husband had intended. Damn you, Alan, she thought. Damn you…and…I guess, thank you. But you better come home to me, you son of a bitch.

  “I want you to hear me out for a second,” Michelle said resolutely. “It won’t take long…I just think it’ll help you understand my side of things a little better.”

  Lauren’s posture softened. “Okay.”

  Michelle sighed. “When you were two years old, you fell off a toy play slide in your bedroom and broke your arm. You were probably too young to remember—”

  “I remember the pictures.”

  “Well, it was some of the toughest days of my life as a young mother,” Michelle said. “I took you to the emergency room, and they misread your x-ray and sent you home with me after putting your arm in a sling. When your dad got home, he didn’t know what to think, but I just had a feeling it was broken. I ended up taking you back to the hospital, and I raised holy hell with the ER doctor about it to get a second opinion. They re-examined your x-ray and determined that you had a compound fracture in your elbow.”

  “No doubt due to me being double-jointed,” Lauren said with a smirk.

  “That had a lot to do with it,” said Michelle. “They called in a specialist, but he didn’t want to treat it because of how young you were. They wanted to send you to UVA initially, but we got lucky and found a local doctor who offered to do it. The hardest part of all of it was that they wouldn’t let me in the room with you when they anesthetized you, set the bones, and put your arm in a cast. It was the longest three hours of my life. I’ve never been so worried about you before—that is, apart from last week
, and maybe today.”

  Lauren nodded and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She was starting to feel the pain in her ankle return.

  “You screamed for me, cried for me, and ended up raising so much hell in the recovery room after you woke up that they made an exception and brought me back to you,” Michelle explained. “I’ve never felt like that before. You were then—and still are my baby. It was my job to protect you, and I was helpless to do my job.” Michelle paused and smiled. “And I let those hussies at the hospital know just how mad I was, too.”

  Lauren smiled. “I have no doubt.”

  Michelle sighed. “Lauren, you…are…irreplaceable. Out of everything else I have left in this world, I cannot—I absolutely cannot lose you. I’m willing to let you be this person you’ve become and give you the space you need…but you need to understand why I feel the way I do about you. One day, you’ll be a mother too. You’ll get it.”

  “I hope I live that long.”

  “You will,” Michelle said as she pulled Lauren in close to her. “And I’ll do whatever I can to make sure of it.”

  Chapter 13

  Devil’s Hole Mountain

  George Washington National Forest

  Hardy County, West Virginia

  Saturday, October 16th (Present day)

  Her rifle swinging in her arms in sequence with her pace, Grace managed to catch up with Christian, whose rapid gait indicated his desired level of urgency. These people had senselessly attacked the people he now considered to be his friends and family, and he had no intention of letting any of them live after such an atrocious act. As he neared the wreckage of the overturned pickup truck along the muddy gravel road, he turned around and spotted Grace when he became aware of her approach.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he admonished. “Get back with the others.”

  “The others are fine,” replied an out of breath Grace. “I wanted to back you up.”

  “I don’t need backup, Grace,” he said gruffly. “I need you to listen and do as I tell you. This is serious.”

  “I know it is, Christian. I just want to help. I’ll be careful.”

  Christian gestured his disapproval. “Stay behind me, then—and I mean directly behind me,” he ordered. “If something happens, you get the hell out of the way and let me handle it, understand?”

  Grace’s eyes narrowed. She nodded and moved herself in between Christian and the wrecked pickup truck not far away. She wasn’t much on being told what to do and absolutely despised being patronized, but she had to admit to herself that she appreciated Christian being so protective of her and the others. It was endearing. Lately, she’d caught him displaying sentimentalities she didn’t think he was capable of.

  Grace peered past his right side to view the scene in spite of his instruction to remain parallel with him and the danger area to his twelve o’clock. Christian approached the wreckage with his rifle shouldered and scanned the area for threats. Grace watched him closely and mimicked his actions, bringing her AR-15’s buttstock against her cheek, careful not to allow the muzzle to sweep her companion. She looked left to right, right to left, just as he did. Christian lowered his non-shooting hand to just below his waist and waved back to her, which she took to indicate that he wanted her to hang back. Grace stopped walking and got down on one knee, and when Christian noticed, he nodded his approval.

  Christian examined the exterior of the truck before paying close attention to the interior. The expelled rounds from Lauren’s rifle had turned the windshield into crystalline Swiss cheese, and the distorted bodies of three men who were very much deceased lay inside, their bodies tied together in a tangled mess. All of them had sustained numerous gunshot wounds to their upper bodies and one had been shot in the face and through his eye socket. Christian smiled cunningly, assuming this was Lauren’s work. Good job, he thought. He walked around to the back of the truck as his rifle led the way. Another body was in the middle of the road not far away and Christian hustled over to it, only to find that the man had expired. His body was motionless in a pool of blood and muddy gravel, and the back of his head was missing. Christian’s nerves began to settle. He was getting ready to call the scene clear, until he spotted motion in the woods.

  “Contact left!” he barked.

  When Grace saw Christian take off in the direction of the woods, she jumped up from her crouched position and gave chase. Once there, her eyes caught sight of a man that was pulling himself through the scrub with his hands, his bloodied legs showing signs of significant injury. When the man became aware of Christian and Grace’s presence, he stopped tugging on the foliage and rolled himself over to face them. He glared at Christian and at the suppressed rifle muzzle pointed directly at him. When he turned to look at Grace, his expression changed. He gritted his teeth and pointed an index finger covered in dried blood at her. His body began to tremble.

  “You…you’re the one! You’re the one who shot at us!” the man angrily gasped, his chest stuck in a cycle of rapid expansions and contractions.

  Christian held up a hand, trying to keep Grace from interacting with the man, but he wasn’t fast enough.

  “What?” inquired Grace.

  “You’re the one who shot at us!” He coughed. “You did this to me. You killed my friends!” He coughed again. “All my friends are all dead thanks to you! You—bitch. You fucking bitch!”

  Without hesitation and without moving his feet from where they were planted, Christian transferred his rifle into one hand and fired a three-round burst of shots into the man’s face at point-blank range. Blood exploded into a vapor in the air and splattered onto the ground as the slugs impacted his head. Fragments of the man’s deflated skull peppered the area around and beneath him.

  “Jesus Christ!” Grace screamed. She jumped, almost tripping backward over her own feet. Her reaction was instantaneous.

  Christian turned nonchalantly to her, his expression questioning and unsympathetic, as if he had done nothing out of the ordinary. “What?” he asked, his voice drawn-out, his expression fuddled at her reaction. “He shouldn’t have said that to you.”

  Grace’s heart was beating out of her chest. “For God’s sake, Christian…warn somebody! Say something…anything before you do something like that,” she pleaded, her voice dripping with exasperation.

  Christian nodded and grinned embarrassingly. “Oh…yeah. Sorry about that.”

  “Sorry? Are you sorry for the heart attack you just gave me?”

  As Grace prepared herself to further chastise Christian for his deliberateness, her eyes caught a glimpse of movement from behind a tree several yards away. She gripped her rifle and brought it close to her, and when Christian noticed, he snapped to attention. He pulled his rifle to his shoulder and aimed it into the woods in the direction Grace’s eyes indicated. As he did so, a slender young female in torn, dirty clothing darted off in the opposite direction, her long braided ponytail flinging behind her.

  “Stop!” Christian yelled.

  The girl sprinted through the woods as if she were running for her life. Christian started to advance and chase her down, but Grace grabbed him by his arm. He turned to her, confused.

  “Don’t…just leave her alone,” she requested.

  Christian’s mouth dropped open, his expression displeased, but even more so when Grace called out to the girl.

  “Honey, wait! We don’t mean any harm! You don’t need to run!”

  “Grace,” Christian said, his voice succinct, “she could be one of them.”

  “We don’t know that,” Grace argued.

  “Yeah? How don’t we?”

  “She’s a kid, Christian. Look at her. You think she came along quietly with the rest of those hoodlums back there? Give me a break. Why is she running?” Grace stepped away from him defiantly. “Where’s her gun?”

  Christian threw his arms up in surrender. They were standing in an unsecured, rarely-traveled area several miles from home, investigating the after
math of a successful ambush set by their enemies—that their side had barely managed to fight their way out of. This was not one of those times to begin arbitrarily trusting random people.

  Grace began walking carefully into the woods in the direction where she’d last seen the girl. She turned back to Christian, who was preparing to go along.

  “Stay here,” Grace whispered. “If you follow, you’ll only frighten her.”

  “Dammit…I don’t like this,” said Christian. “Not one damn bit.”

  “Word on the street is you’re a pretty good shot,” Grace said coyly. “You can cover me from back here.”

  “Fine. Have it your way—but if she does anything threatening and I get a clean shot, she’s as dead as a doornail.”

  Grace continued into the woods, but didn’t see any signs of the girl. After she’d gotten about twenty yards away from Christian, a young voice called to her.

  “Don’t come any closer,” the girl said. “I have a weapon and I’ll kill you if you do.”

  Grace halted her advance. “You don’t have to kill me…I’m not here to hurt you,” she said calmly. “Were you with those men?”

  The girl didn’t offer a forthwith response. “Yes,” she said after a moment.

  “Are they your family?”

  “Yes,” the girl said timidly. Her voice sounded as if she was intentionally lowering it to sound more grown-up. She only looked about fifteen or sixteen years old.

  Grace lifted her rifle to her shoulder. “Okay. Then I’m sorry to say we have a problem.” She paused. “You need to understand if that’s the case, in our position, after what’s happened today, we can’t leave anyone alive. It’s…for our own protection. Your family tried to kill my sister and her friend today.” Grace paused to ready herself. “So come out, okay? So we can get this over with.”

  A pause, and then, “It wasn’t me,” the girl said, her voice less muffled than before. “I didn’t try to kill anyone.”