by Linda L Zern
“I think you’ll try.” Britt nodded and glanced down at Tess’s hands on her shoulders.
“I said shut up.” But Britt was right, and Tess knew it; relaxing her grip, she let Britt go and stepped back.
Barker held out a bucket of dehydrated bananas. “We mushed some of them up with water. We liked them good enough, except for Tumble. But she ate them down, finally. We were hungry. Been hungry for a while.” The sweet odor of bananas on the air warred with ammonia and mildew. There was a leak somewhere in Grandfather’s secret bunker. If only he’d told them before the stroke had left him silent. They could have fixed it. They would fix it. Enough with secrets that came too late.
Britt reached for the can in the boy’s hand. “Good enough, then. Better than starving.” She waited until the kid had crawled his way to the surface. “Tess, the others will follow you right up until you get weak, and then they’ll turn. Do you want to bring your sisters home?” Britt looked around. “Even if home is a mole hole in the ground.” She scooped banana chips out of the number ten can, poured them into a fold of her shirt, and then passed it to Tess.
“You know I do.” She welcomed the sweet crunch of dehydrated bananas, hoping that adrenalin and fear and sugar would carry her through the rest of what they had to do.
“Then figure out who the bad guys are and sack up. This cache is a very good start.”
The siren drift of roasting meat filtered down into the bunker.
Britt lifted her head and sniffed like a dog, the same way Blockhead would have sniffed. Tess flashed back and saw Blockhead’s blood spreading out in a pool, like her friend’s blood. Dogs. They’d cut Jess T down like a dog. Britt was right: bad guys, good guys, and the worst of humanity. Sometimes the bad guys made it easy.
“Come on. Food and then sleep time,” Britt said. “I smell armadillo. Maybe it had a friend, and there are two. Hurry up before there’s nothing left.”
Parrish got why the invaders had burned it all down. He felt naked standing next to the hatch of Colonel Kennedy’s secret stash. The edge of the sky matched up to the black line of earth like two pieces of a worn puzzle. It was as if you could see for miles. It was easy to be spotted. He got why they sent the fire to announce their coming. Sure. The pirate army marched in the wake of a dragon’s destruction.
And it was easy to see where the bloody murderers had dragged ZeeZee, Jon Lane, and Stone away. Expert tracking not needed. They would use the prisoners somehow: leverage, terror, or despair. Tess’s father was with Jess T’s killers; they had to assume it. Although it was possible the man had simply wandered off again, finally and forever. Better to assume he was one of the captives—stay focused on the obvious.
Samuel managed to scrape together enough charcoal to bring a cast iron kettle of water to a boil. He cleaned the armadillo with efficient strokes of a razor knife while one of the Doe Kids helped him hold the carcass steady. A girl with a ponytail made up of snarls and sandspurs handed him a number ten can of vegetables for stew. Kilmer opened another can without a can opener, rubbing the top against the edge of a concrete slab next to the bunker. He squeezed the can open by kneeling on it. The top popped off and the smell of garlic filled the air. Dinner was shaping up. The bunker was full of buried treasure, like dehydrated garlic.
Parrish needed to make sure Tess ate and took a few minutes. She’d want to leave immediately. She had to learn that thinking things through paid off.
Britt charged up the ladder, openly sniffing the air. “Tell me there’s more than one pig in the pot.”
He shook his head, saw the way she avoided his eyes, and then she headed straight to the steaming armadillo stew, glancing back at the hole in the ground.
Turning, he saw Tess crawl out. The sun sent spikes of metallic sheen across the blackened dirt. Sunshine caught in her curls and dyed her skin gold. Her eyes caught the spark of fading light. He thought she looked fierce and brave and exhausted. If there was any way he could get her to stay put, let him go after ZeeZee alone, fight this battle for her, but even the thought of leaving her here to wait it out . . . He’d have to tie Tess up.
If nothing else she was going to sit down and eat. The children were eager enough for dinner, forming a semicircle around Chef Samuel. Britt’s squad segregated themselves close to a pile of charred palm trunks. Hostility hung over them all.
“What is everyone doing? There’s no time to eat.’“ Tess adjusted the strap of a new AR on her shoulder, frowning at the ring of hungry children. “We need to go after them. Now. I can’t have her in that mob one more minute. I can’t.” She tossed a seven-year-old survival bar at him. It felt like a brick in his hand. He’d eaten worse, but not today. Tess took a step into the sun’s glare.
When she brushed past Parrish, he caught her around the waist and spun her back. “No, Tess, no.”
“Let go of me.”
The edge to her voice acted like a battle cry to the women waiting for Samuel’s stew. He saw them tense, saw their hands move to their weapons. Britt turned to glare at Parrish. He backed away, held up his hands, felt more than saw the women ease their defensive postures.
“Tess, we’ve got to regroup, plan, refuel. We’ve got to. Armies move on their stomachs.”
“Then you stay, but I’ve got to find them.” Her hands on the rifle were bloodless with strain. “I can’t sit here and have a picnic while they’re out there. Did you see what they did to that idiot dog?”
Did she know that she’d un-slung the rifle? He doubted it.
“Tess.”
“Who does that to a stupid dog? A blockheaded, stupid dog like that?” He saw the avalanche of grief begin when her mouth quivered. But no, she wouldn’t let herself go. Her hands curled to fists. “Forget it. Forget you. Britt will come with me, now that we’ve got the guns. I have to know.”
Britt stood slowly. She walked to stand in front of Tess, put her hand out to push the AR back on Tess’s shoulder. “Ease down, Soldier. Your sister’s fate is not in your hands. Not yet. It’s in her own, and she’ll sink or swim on her own wits.”
“Don’t forget Stone is with her, Tess, and Stone is a survivor before anything. She’s not alone.” Parrish stepped in front of his sister, took Tess’s face in his hands. “Eat. We’ll plan. Sit. These people need you too. If you haven’t noticed, it’s close to anarchy around here. Let’s not forget the Hawk Brothers, they’re still out there.”
A smile as fleeting as a butterfly touched her lips. The starch went out of her spine. He put his arms around her and pressed his lips to her forehead.
“We’ll find them, but we’ll do it right. Come on. Let’s plan. After stew.”
She moved into him.
“Kilmer could stay here with the children.” She thought for a moment. “But the Hawk Brothers are still out there,” she whispered against his cheek.
“Exactly.”
CHAPTER 42
The world smelled dead: burned to cracked bones, slime over filth, destoyed. ZeeZee could taste the smell in her throat. She could feel it on her skin. The advanced scouting party who’d found them at the bunker was covered in the stench and stain of traveling through this blighted world, as if they were dragging the edges of a massive, sucking black hole with them and were trying to cover the world with it. They were industriously seeking to shove everyone and everything into it.
Here comes a big, black sack of stink, and in they all would go.
Like the Doe Kids they’d left behind, ZeeZee felt like she’d been shoved into the open gullet of the underground bunker. She remembered them disappearing into blackness—gone. She hoped they stayed gone long enough for Tess to find them. She’d find them—sure—because Parrish would find Tess, and Jamie would get Ally the help she needed. She took a chance, looked back to try and see Stone or her father. She’d lost sight of them somewhere along the trail.
“Please help Tess find them.”
ZeeZee’s boot caught on the scorched remains of a palmetto stump. She tripp
ed, went down to her knee.
One of the men, Jess T’s blood and brains still on his boots, reached down to pull her to her feet.
“Shut up,” he growled. “You don’t get to talk. You don’t get to say nothing.” The man’s voice scratched out of his filthy, black beard.
ZeeZee looked into his face and laughed.
“Black Beard. I’ll call you Black Beard. That’s a fine pirate’s na—”
He slammed his fist into her gut. She dry heaved as another hand yanked at her hair, dragging her back and out of Black Beard’s reach.
“Shut up,” a voice demanded next to her ear. “You’re drawing attention to yourself. And it’s stupid. Don’t be an idiot.”
ZeeZee felt the sickening drag of her lungs as she fought for air.
“Shut up and breathe.” The hand in ZeeZee’s hair tugged her backward, spun her around, and forced her to look up at him. She stared into a pair of stony, golden brown eyes. This one smelled too, but he’d managed to scrape his face smooth enough. Couldn’t call this one by his beard. His dirty hair shagged down to his shoulders. He looked as solid and hard as some of the burned-out tree trunks they passed. Most of the others were stick thin, their skin sunken into shallow pits, but not this guy; this one looked like he ate first and often—a lion in his prime. Why had she thought that? It was his eyes, golden brown and filled with warm light.
“You were talking out loud. It’s shock or worse. Sometimes the brain cracks wide open, and all the jelly spills out. You’re not crazy, are you?” He gave her hair another quick tug—not hard, but enough to get her attention.
ZeeZee managed to drag a bubble of air into her chest.
She spluttered and shook and tried to make a coherent sound. Nothing. He would think she was crazy; maybe she should let him.
He shoved her behind his back. Black Beard scowled but didn’t bother to get up any real heat for a fight over her. There was an air of command about this beardless guy with the massive shoulders, or maybe it was threat. Black Beard didn’t seem overly anxious to test out either possibility.
Somewhere up ahead she could hear Stone shouting her name, the wet smack of someone’s fist shutting him up.
Lion Eyes marched off, leaving her doubled over, still gasping. One look at the others, their eyes full of speculation and lust, was enough. ZeeZee straightened up, her hand pressed flat across her gut as she staggered after her protector.
CHAPTER 43
In the morning, a shrieking howl marked the arrival of Myra’s army, a fairly decent indication that El’s women and the residents of the Marketplace had managed to surprise Myra and her ragtag soldiers. The screaming sound of rage and frustration made El smile.
“Eat mud,” El muttered. “That’s about all that you’ve got left, Myra, with your little firestorm.”
“It’s siege warfare, and she didn’t expect it. You’ve managed something pretty remarkable here,” Roy Terry observed.
El smirked and pressed a hand against her forehead. “Am I supposed to be flattered?”
He wasn’t surprised by the woman’s venom. She was in pain. She was surrounded, and she was worried about her missing sister and the squad of women that had disappeared into the still smoking countryside. They’d gone after Tess, and now Tess’s sister, Ally, was here, inside the walls of the Marketplace Fortress, and the Dunn boys, the redheaded boy, and the woman Gwen Dunn.
In a crazy twist, El had sent Tess out and gotten the pregnant one back instead. Well, maybe not so pregnant. The Dunn woman had been too worried and too focused on the sick girl to have bothered with Roy Terry. He hoped it stayed that way.
Avoiding Gwen Dunn was cowardice, and he knew it. That fine moment of drama that he’d orchestrated at the S-Line about her husband was not his finest moment. Sure, he’d heard the name Bruce Dunn, and a lot more besides. You heard a lot of stuff, traveling up and down the coast. You heard rumors and gossip and flat-out urban legends about the gangs, the scavengers, the mercenaries, the tribes, and warlords, not to mention the colony of scientists and engineers that had barricaded themselves inside the vehicle assembly building at the Cape. Brains versus brawn versus brutality and every man or woman for themselves. Sure. Which made Roy Terry into a man who couldn’t help but wonder why El of the Marketplace Fortress would ever trust him with her counsel, let alone her secrets.
What was she planning? What could she be planning as sick as she was, and pretending to trust him? A sick guilt for his part in her suffering settled more deeply over him, into him. What could she be thinking?
It was the pain; pain did strange things to people. He’d seen it. It made people foolish and rash.
Together El and Mister Terry stood in the mall parking lot behind the big front gate, listening to the howling of the mad woman outside the fort, just out of rifle range.
“What is that sound?” Gwen said.
“I think the bad guys have arrived,” Doctor Midge explained.
Together they kept a watch over the assorted injured and sick. Jamie sat next to Ally, his head in his hands. Gwen thought about trying to get him to eat something. He was going to be flat on a cot if they weren’t careful.
She hadn’t seen Roy Terry since they’d first arrived. He’d faded into the rabble of men camped out in the parking lot. Faded, now that was the right word. He’d joined the crowd and disappeared, just like Ally was disappearing. The way Tess and Parrish had disappeared.
Bruce, her husband, had been the first one to take on ‘missing, presumed dead’ status. Hadn’t she learned to live with it, the not knowing, the never knowing what had happened after she and the boys had escaped to the Strandline. Colonel Kennedy’s S-Line Ranch, named for that ribbon of seaweed and shells left after high tide on the beach. It was like the line of trash left on the miles of sand at Cape Canaveral where her husband had worked: the beaches, the lonely swamps, the gator holes; all ruled over by the mighty rocket launches of the great United States.
Gwen had to laugh at the irony of it. Even the Strandline Ranch had disappeared now, and all that was left on this particular beach was this crowded, stinking wreck of a building full of broken shells.
“You’re thinking pretty hard over there. Tell me something,” the doctor said, making it sound suspiciously like an order.
She probably didn’t mean for it to sound like that, but it did. Girl talk? Really?
Gwen shrugged off her annoyance. “I was just thinking about my husband, and how he’d have laughed about this place—before. This situation. He never believed in the possibility of flood tide. Not really. You know? How it might all come crashing down.”
“Talking about the way it was before. We don’t do that much around here, tends to make people morose. Yeah, flood tide, that’s a good way to describe it.” The doctor peeled back the cloth bandage from a burn on a child’s thigh. The bandage stuck. The kid, a boy with bucked teeth, tensed but didn’t yell. “Not allowed to talk about it, not really. And then you people show up and it feels important to explain about us.”
She looked over at Gwen. “Tell me.” Another command. “About your husband.”
“There’s nothing to tell. He was at the Cape when the solar flares came down. They needed him to secure the site. Protocol. We’ve been waiting for him to get off work for seven years.” Gwen picked up a pile of clean, white cloth strips.
“A long time.”
“The whole time.” Gwen started to fold bandages. “We’d talked about it, you know: the ‘what if’ scenarios. But he didn’t believe it could ever happen. We argued. He refused to believe. He’s a scientist, one of the true believers in all things technology, even though he should have understood better than most how vulnerable it all was. He refused to be ready.”
The doctor dabbed at the boy’s leg. The room smelled faintly of witch hazel and boiled linen.
“Not ready? But here you sit, alive,” she said, glancing at Ally and Jamie, “mostly whole.”
“Only because I knew a man.
” Gwen smiled at the memory of Colonel Kennedy asking for a lollipop after his semiannual teeth cleaning. He’d been a sucker for suckers. She’d always laughed, reminding him that he was at the dentist and suckers were frowned on. “A smart man, a good man, who saved us. Well, me and the boys and that’s, that’s most of us.”
Gwen saw the doctor’s hands still; her stare faded to middle distance. “Boys. You have children. Alive?” Doc Midge continued to look at nothing.
“Two.”
“How? How did that happen for you? To save them both?”
“A very smart man. He was a client, one of my patients.”
Gwen saw the questions flaring in Doctor Midge’s eyes at the word patients. “No, nothing like you. I was a dental hygienist. I cleaned a man’s teeth, and he helped me save my children.”
The doctor ripped the last corner of the bandage free. The kid yelped, finally. “Lucky. Lucky for you, I guess.”
Jamie watched the sheet over Ally’s chest, not her face. Her face frightened him; it was so white he could see the blood moving in her neck. He watched every twitch or tremble of the patchwork sheet. As long as it moved she was breathing—and alive.
The people had sealed the gate behind them, right after they’d dragged her through, but Jamie barely noticed the panicked scrambling. Someone might have been screaming at them to hurry. He shook off the vague impression of it. What did it matter, if she died? What did any of this matter?
Her fingers fluttered on a square of bleached muslin.
“Hey. Hey. I think she’s waking up! I think.” He touched her cheek, half expecting for it to be cold under his fingers. Warm, still feverish. Her hand twitched.
The woman doctor pushed around him. She checked the dressing between Ally’s legs, ignoring Jamie. Without warning, she pressed down on Ally’s middle—hard—as if she was kneading a tough loaf of bread. Ally gasped and tried to push the Doctor’s hands away.
“Oh, girlie, you’re about as fierce as a kitten,” she said, and then checked the pad again. “Come on; there isn’t much more we can do. It’s up to you some too.”