Following the Strandline

by Linda L Zern

  Sam wasn’t sure they were wrong. Maybe that’s why he was having such a hard time convincing them: he wasn’t sure he bought it. He wondered what had happened to his mom’s place—a house on stilts at the edge of a curve in the Saint John’s where the river faded off into the soft, boggy arm of an endless marsh—Grandpa Cotton’s house. Mom had always been proud of her Seminole Indian heritage and the house on the water. Maybe it had escaped the fire?

  He called down into the booming hollow of the bunker.

  “Soft shells. It’s turtle soup night. Bring up a can of soup stock.”

  From the direction of the Marketplace, gunfire echoed like the soft pops of fireworks. He tried to remember how old he’d been when he’d last seen the dazzle and lace of fireworks in the Central Florida sky. Not old. But old enough to remember. The gunshots stopped.

  Myra’s men. They had scattered and terrorized and continued to die. He worried for ZeeZee. Hopefully, it would all settle down, and they’d find her.

  The wind must be right to be able to hear the gunfire this far away.

  Maybe the Doe Kids had a point. Wouldn’t the fort become a flashpoint for violence? Hadn’t it already?

  Parrish retreated to the top of the wall where the world outside the Marketplace, what was left of it, was easy to watch. If he were honest, he was up here to avoid the look in Tess’s eyes when she talked about ZeeZee, about her father. They’d brought Jon Lane back, wrapped in a bloodied blanket, along with El.

  He’d have to tell Tess, sooner or later, what he’d seen, hanging on that cross like so much vulture bait. The man who’d refused to help him, leaving him powerless. It had been a long time since he had felt the sheer weight of that kind of helplessness—being completely at the mercy of his enemies.

  He forced himself to concentrate on the stinging pain in his wrists, his feet, on torn flesh and raw wounds, trying to bury the feeling of being the victim while she fought for him, for all of them. What must she think of his allowing it to happen? Guilt, that old familiar ache, settled over him.

  Honesty. It might be overrated, but Tess made a big deal of it.

  They were going to have bury his sister and Tess’s father soon: a big enough deal, also a distraction. They should have buried them the first day, but they’d had to leave it for two days, and now Tess was going to have to settle the logistics of it. Being pinned down inside the fort made burial details a major complication they didn’t need.

  They’d wrapped El’s body in the thick plastic of a mattress cover, someone’s donation, but still the condition of her body . . .

  Jon’s body waited, rolled up tight in a length of tent canvas.

  Outside the wall, Amazons abandoned the corpses that littered the ground, expecting them to attract scavengers. Here was hoping that the big cats and bears made things a lot more complicated for the marauders roaming the countryside. There were too many dead ones to bury.

  From the top of the wall, Parrish searched the horizon for puffs of dust, a sure sign that someone was coming or going or fighting. Nothing. He’d sent Stone back to tell Tess not to worry.

  How was he going to tell Tess about the man who’d taken ZeeZee, and the fact that they might never get her back?

  There was nowhere inside the fortress to bury the dead. For a while, the Fortix family had buried their people in the potholes of the old parking lot, until being dead had become a lot more common than being alive for the butchering slave traders. Potholes fill up fast when everyone’s gunning for you. It was time for a new plan.

  But trying to bury the Amazon leader and her father in the tiny cemetery outside the walls was going to be a production, and that was going to be a family decision. Tess was going to insist on it.

  She found Britt alone, sitting in a forgotten supply closet, whose drywall curled and peeled under a weight of mildew. The door had no door handle, but it still closed. Here was a private place or close to it.

  Tess pushed open the door to see Britt huddled against the far wall, dry-eyed and silent.

  “We need you.”

  Britt turned her bleary eyes on Tess. “I thought El had fixed all that when she decided you were the one to try to carry on after her.”

  No one had to point out the ironic emphasis Britt put on the word try.

  “Listen, I still don’t know what she thought she was doing, but that’s not why I’m here. We need to talk about your sister’s funeral. You are family, and there’s precious little of that to be found these days.”

  When Britt pushed to her feet, she teetered, and fell and had to put her hand out to steady herself. A bottle rattled against the cement floor, someone’s version of homemade beer.

  “Seriously, you’ve been drinking?”

  She put a finger to her lips and shushed Tess. “Don’t tell. El doesn’t like it when we aren’t focused. Oh, wait. Who are you going to tell? Yourself?” Britt huffed out a stinking puff of air.

  Tess fought back a cough.

  “I know that he’s never told you about Darby, not really, and you should understand that he promised. He promised he’d protect her. She was so young when Mom and Dad died. We took care of her—the three of us. But Ryan. It was Ryan who swore that she’d be okay. He swore.”

  “Brittany.”

  Tess turned and recognized the agony in Parrish’s face.

  Britt picked up the bottle and saluted him with it. “You swore.”

  “And I see her in my dreams.” He squatted so that he could look Britt square in the eye.

  “When we got free, came back to the squad that first time, she’d been raped . . . turned up pregnant.”

  “Jamie killed Titus.”

  “But it was too late.”

  He hung his head. “Yes.”

  “And you weren’t there. When she needed you. When we needed you, and she was screaming—another whole day after you left.”

  He lifted his eyes. “Is that what you think happened?” He reached out to grab Britt’s free hand, threading his fingers through hers.

  “Stop,” she said, but didn’t pull away from him.

  “She sent me to find a man, said that he was a doctor. Said that she’d found him on one of her nighttime trips to gather up the chickens, people’s chickens—Darby’s eggs. You remember? She told me that he was across the bridge toward the old power plant. She begged me to go. I thought you knew.”

  “You weren’t there.”

  “I don’t know why she sent me. I never found him. I don’t know why she didn’t tell you. And when I got back she was . . .” His mouth went dry.

  Britt turned bleak, green eyes to him.

  “Why would she do that?”

  “I ask her every time she comes to me in my dreams.”

  Britt shook her head, slapping at the tears on her face. “They’re gone, Ryan. And I left you to Myra.”

  Tess stepped out of the closet, leaning against the doorjamb. She turned to listen to the sounds of life that ran through the building around her like air through lungs. Closing her eyes, she wondered when those noises had become so familiar.

  When Parrish whispered something to Britt, Tess opened her eyes as Britt nodded.

  Tessla Lane pulled herself to her full height and faced them. “You know what? Darby is gone. El is gone. I’m not any more convinced than any of you that El was even in her right mind when she picked me, but this much I know: We need to do our best by her. Period. She went out there, knowing that she wasn’t ever coming back—to you—to the rest. It was one of the bravest things I’ve ever been a part of, but it wasn’t me. It was all Ella Summerlin. Even dead she was fighting back. Brittany, you get moving, Soldier.” Britt shot to her feet and wobbled.

  Tess grabbed Britt’s elbow, waiting for the punch. But it didn’t come.

  “Hey!” Britt gave her the quirky smile of the mildly drunk. “Just then. I might have seen—”

  “What?” Tess pulled Britt out of the closet while Parrish dragged himself to his feet.


  Britt burped. “I don’t know. Something. For a second you sounded like Darby.”

  “I appreciate that; but, no, I am like my mother and my father, Jon Lane. The man we’ll be burying next to your sister. You’re not the only one who lost big in all this.”

  CHAPTER 58

  By the time Tess finished pinning Britt and Parrish down to talk about El’s burial, the sun had started to drop away. She hated having to press them on it, but there wasn’t any more time to waste. She blocked out the thought of her father’s body stiff and broken. El was a big deal, but Tess’s father . . . He was just another crazy old man—just another pointless victim of a world drowning in malice. She shook the gloom away.

  “What’s the discussion? We take a squad out to the muck fields on the south side, and we bury her. Locked and loaded. Let them try to bother us.” Britt examined the back of her hand, never looking at her brother. They sat at El’s tiny bedside table, their knees close to touching.

  “We’re going to march two hundred and thirty-nine people out to the field and cover their retreat inside the walls should that become necessary? Sounds like a good way to lose the advantage of having the walls up in the first place.” Parrish had washed up. He’d tied his damp hair back with a strip of leather and changed into a shirt with sleeves long enough to cover the raw flesh at his wrists.

  “Whatever we do, El wanted everyone there. She wanted the letter read. The one she gave me.” Tess ran her fingers through her tangled curls.

  “Who says?” Britt’s suspicions were almost physical. She had cleaned up too. Her eyes were still red-rimmed but her hands were steady enough and her clothes were clean.

  “Mister Terry. She brought him into her plans. I don’t think you understand how much your sister thought about this moment, and as far as I can tell, it was her only request.” Tess made sure they each met her gaze. “She wanted this a certain way: a public display, an event. She deserves that, but I don’t think we need to open our gates or our home—and yes, I’m going to use that word, and you can’t stop me—to open our home to make this work. I don’t want to do that.”

  Tess turned to Parrish, took his hand, squeezed and felt the slight edge of panic when he didn’t squeeze back. With her other hand, she curled his fingers around hers. “Where are you from? I mean your family? Your genealogy?”

  Britt and Parrish were both surprised by the question.

  “What?” Britt snapped.

  “Heritage. Where did your family begin? Russia? France? Ireland? Where? You weren’t born under a cabbage patch.” It was the kind of thing no one thought about anymore. Family history. The solar flares had burned away more than the grid. They’d burned away the stories that families were built on.

  “No. We’re Scandinavian. Danes. Erikson’s. You know? Like Leif Erikson. Right, Britt?” It was the first time Parrish had looked directly at his older sister since Tess had sat them down to talk.

  Britt gave them a brief nod. “I guess.” It was hard to tell if she was even listening.

  “Okay. Then this is what I propose.” Tess reached for Parrish’s other hand. “No more burying in the ground. No more having to dig holes so deep the animals can’t smell the bodies and run the risk of having our people dug up by the coyotes. You’re Danes. Vikings. We send her off the way her ancestors would have. We have a funeral pyre.”

  “We burn her body? And your father? And then how do we visit them, bring flowers, remember?” Britt sounded curious rather than angry.

  “The wall. We start a wall of remembrance. We could ask the others for suggestions.”

  Parrish pulled his hands out of Tess’s but didn’t turn away. He reached out and ran the back of one hand down the curve of her cheek. She wanted to grab him, hold his hand against her face, but she let the moment slide away, knowing, somehow, he didn’t want her clinging.

  “What do you say, Britt? If we had a boat with a dragon’s head, we’d send her out on that, and it would almost be worthy of her.”

  “Almost,” she said.

  They both looked at Tess and nodded.

  Parrish caught Tess’s eye. “And for your father too.”

  Parrish walked to the far end of the mall, the solid end where more walls remained upright and the roof leaked less, past the rows of quilted and blanketed doorways. Behind the blankets women murmured to small children, ragtag utensils clinked against wooden bowls, and someone’s baby cried. Parrish froze at the sound of the baby’s wail. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard such an ordinary, everyday sound; it was the music of a people with a future, and here he was inside the big building, a man walking through the women’s area. The Amazons were too distracted to worry over him, and the others had probably heard he was El’s brother. It almost had the power to make him smile.

  The hallway dog-legged into what was left of the retail store—once the Parisian; it was stuffed to the rafters with stockpiles of food: number ten cans and small canned goods, dried and smoked meats, piles of potatoes, trade goods and supplies. “Bring on the siege,” he thought as someone shushed the baby, and another child started to hum a song he didn’t recognize.

  Tess found him there.

  “There’s nothing left to burn. How could I be so stupid?” Tess walked past him to stare into the labyrinth of the old store. He doubted that she’d heard the baby crying or noticed the hush that had fallen over this part of the building.

  “And you let me go on about heritage and all the rest. Your sister’s funeral—some grand gesture. Why? Why did you let me? I need you to be smart. I need you to help me. If we don’t figure this out we’re going to have to slink out and bury them at night.”

  She walked off, running her hand along a row of out-of-date soup cans.

  Parrish heard the frustration in her voice. He folded his arms and waited for her to turn to him.

  “What are you doing in here anyway?” She swung around, angry energy radiating up and off of her like the heat that rose up from the old patches of asphalt along the highways. Parrish could feel the explosion building. She didn’t wait for him to answer. “Why are you hiding away down here?”

  Instead of trying to answer, he tipped his head to listen.

  “The Funeral. I wanted to make it safe and keep everyone inside the walls until we can make it safe outside. But how am I supposed to do it? Bring the Amazons together with the men they despise? Make things normal?”

  She marched over to him, twisted her hands in his shirt. “We’ll go back to the S-Line, rebuild, use the bunker as a base. We could . . . We could do it. The children have been safe enough. Those ditches out there make pretty good cover. We could take care of Myra’s leftovers by ourselves. Let the people here sort it out. Please? Let’s get out of here.”

  She reached down and snatched at his wrist. He focused on the pain, tried not to flinch when her fingers hit the wounds. Failed. He sucked in a hissing, hard breath. She gasped.

  “I’m so sorry. I hurt you.” Her face crumbled under the weight of her fears and regrets. She stepped away from him and balled up her fists. “It’s just a lot.”

  How much of this was his fault, after having to see him hanging like a rag doll, having her father murdered at her feet?

  “I couldn’t even stop Britt from leaving you, and that’s on me. What they did to you and my father—”

  “Tess.” He reached for her arm, pulled her to his side, pried open one fist, and pressed her palm against the rope marks on his arm. “And I couldn’t stop them from taking me or tying me to a cross or making me watch while she shot you in front of my eyes.” He let his hand fall to the bandage he knew she hid under her sleeve, pressed until she sucked in her breath. “It’s on both of us. It’s called losing, and it’s not my first taste of it.”

  She plowed over his words. “But then I was here, inside, those women dragged me here, and I had to wait,” she began, stopped and swallowed, “while they talked and made plans, and I wanted to tear down the gate and smash Myra
to dust—” Her voice rose.

  He put his hands on her waist. “Listen to me, because you need to understand that out there, what happened, it made me remember—” He pulled her against him, put his face in her hair. “It forced me to remember why—why I didn’t want this, want you, in the first place and why I was wrong. This place has got to stand. We have to make it work, or what’s the point of struggling?”

  Across the walk, two chubby girls peeked out from behind a sagging denim curtain, staring with round eyes. The smaller one stuck her thumb in her mouth, settling in to be entertained by the grownups in front of her doorway. Parrish pulled Tess farther into the jumbled stacks of the old department store.

  Tess bristled, fighting his hold on her, shaking her head. Emotion flushed her cheeks, made her look miserable. The gloom of shelves plunged her in shadows. There were expiration dates on the cans that still had labels.

  “No, don’t pull away. Listen, to me. I won’t say it again. I didn’t want you. I didn’t want any of this. The way you don’t want the responsibility of it now. Because it’s so heartbreaking when it fails.” He focused on the hint of color staining her cheeks in the dark. “Up there on that cross, having to watch it play out. I remembered the heartbreak.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  He gave her a gentle shake. “Shhhh! Don’t be upset. I saw them shoot you and thought you were dead and then Samuel came. And it all came back, the terror, not of what they were trying to do to me, but the agony of not being able to do anything about protecting the people I love.”

  “What? You can’t let a girl save you? It was a rescue.”

  A hint of humor had snuck into her voice along with a flashing smirk. Someone coughed from behind another quilt in the main hall. He pulled her farther away from the light of the open walkway. The baby started to cry again.

  “You listen to me.” She was hardly more than a shape and a texture and the soft sound of breathing in the gloom. “I swore I wouldn’t do it again—love anyone or anything—not like that. My sisters, Ella and Brittany and Darby, I loved them, wanted to keep them from the world.” She smelled of homemade soap. “You need to know about Darby.”