Evergreen (Book 5): The Nuclear Frontier

by Cox, Matthew S.

  “It’s over,” yelled Earl from inside. “Damn fools.”

  Harper followed Darnell through the door. The scent of gunpowder hung in the air along with a fair amount of smoke. She nearly tripped over Summer Vasquez, the young woman she and Cliff found running away from the Lawless gang, unconscious near the entrance, covered in gore. One man lay in more or less the center of the room, dead to multiple gunshots, including one in the forehead that blew out the back of his skull. A vast amount of blood pooled out on the floor beneath him. A second man sat slumped against the wall behind the table, seriously wounded, but alive. Three others crawled out from under a table covered in playing cards and coins. One bled from the leg, though didn’t appear to realize he’d been hit.

  A few people had guns out, but didn’t aim at anyone specifically.

  Leigh Preston ran in behind them, hand on her sidearm. “Heard shooting. What’s going on?”

  “Everyone chill,” said Darnell. “What happened?”

  Harper looked around the room. No one appeared particularly threatening at the moment, mostly freaked out, so she crouched to check on Summer, who didn’t appear to have any injuries. Bits of bloody matter resembling beige scrambled eggs covered in ketchup all over her had to have come from someone else. Based on the massive hole in the back of the dead man’s head, she figured the ‘scrambled eggs’ to be brain. Harper’s stomach did a backflip. She’d cored out a man’s head with the Mossberg once, but didn’t stoop to study the mess afterward.

  She must’ve fainted.

  “Jesse there”—Earl pointed at the badly wounded man—“accused the idiot, Larry, of cheating. Said idiot pulled a gun. The results are pretty damn obvious. Everyone else lit him up.”

  “Damn.” Darnell whistled. “Over a freakin’ card game? Seriously?”

  Earl pointed at the man who’d been grazed. “Randy, ya fool, yer hit in the leg.”

  “Aww crap. Didn’t even feel it.” Randy poked at his leg. “Hell.”

  Four guys grabbed Jesse and carried him out, likely heading for the medical center.

  Harper patted Summer on the cheek until she came to. The woman sat up, lurched to one side, and vomited bile. Hearing—and smelling—puke on top of looking at brain bits everywhere caused Harper to retch.

  “She was standin’ right behind Larry when his brains blew out the back of his head,” muttered a guy close by on the left. “Caught most of it straight in the face.”

  Summer puked harder.

  Harper bit her forearm, trying to stop herself from erupting as well.

  “A shootout in a bar over a card game,” muttered Leigh. “Wow. We really are in the Wild West.”

  “A little too wild,” said Darnell.

  Harper stood, cringing as a slimy nugget squished under her bare foot. It took her a second to swallow rising nausea so she could speak. “Hey, everyone… can we please save bullets for actual threats? If someone cheats at cards, just punch them, okay?”

  Most of the people around her chuckled.

  “You can go on back to the little one’s party.” Darnell nudged her. “Don’t want to be walking around in this mess without any shoes on.”

  “Already stepped in brain. I can stay if you need,” said Harper.

  Summer gagged.

  “Nah. Nothing really to do here except mop the floor.” Darnell clapped her on the shoulder. “Appreciate the backup.”

  “Thought we were being attacked again.” Harper slung the Mossberg over her shoulder. “Money doesn’t mean anything anymore. What kind of moron pulls a gun over a card game when there’s no real stakes?”

  Earl gestured at the body. “Like I said. An idiot.”

  “All right. Guess I’ll head back to the party.” Harper helped Summer up. “Are you okay?”

  “Physically? Yeah. Never had a dude’s head explode all over me before.” She shuddered. “At least it happened so fast I didn’t have time to scream.”

  “Huh?” asked Harper.

  “My mouth was closed. Nothing got in.” Summer heaved again but didn’t throw up.

  “Eww.” She wiped her foot off on the mat by the door. “C’mon, I’ll walk you home so you can clean up.”

  Summer followed her outside, trying not to touch anything. “This is so nasty. Hey, what did you mean by party?”

  “Lorelei’s seventh birthday. I’d say we have cake left, but I don’t think you’re too hungry.”

  “Ugh.” Summer closed her eyes. “If there’s anything that’ll make me consider eating ever again, it’s cake. Let me wash up and see how I feel.”

  Fortunately, Summer still lived close by, in the giant house she shared with Anne-Marie. Harper went inside with her, collected the brain-soaked dress after Summer peeled it off to take a shower, and carried the garment outside pinched between two fingers.

  “In the real world, I’d have thrown this right in the damn trash.” She dropped it on the street. “But we’re not in the real world anymore. Clothing is too valuable… gotta try to wash it. And what the heck is wrong with me? Why aren’t I throwing up all over the place? This is brain matter.”

  Harper sighed and headed back into the house to get a bucket of water for the dress.

  “Life is weird.”

  8

  Quiet Time

  Little happened in response to the shooting at the Brewery.

  Jesse died in the medical center less than an hour later. He’d suffered too much damage internally. Even in a fully operational modern hospital with all the technology and drugs available, he’d only have had about a twenty percent chance to pull through according to Tegan. These days, anyone taking five .45 bullets to the torso was pretty much doomed. Larry, the accused cheat, had the misfortune of catching a .44 magnum hollow point above the left eye, hence the mess everywhere.

  Somehow, Harper managed to return home and continue with the party as though she hadn’t seen a dead man or brain matter splattered all over Summer Vasquez. Honestly, she’d seen gorier deaths. Hell, she’d caused gorier deaths. Buckshot at close range didn’t do pretty things to a human skull. Also, she hadn’t watched the man die. He’d been dead already when she entered the Brewery.

  Still, a shootout over cards at a bar, like something straight out of the Old West, felt surreal.

  She couldn’t say most people carrying guns was a bad thing considering the real danger of attack from gangs like the Lawless, random marauders, or even bears. Ammo needed to be saved for actual emergencies. If Larry and Jessy had merely had a fistfight, the militia wouldn’t have even gotten involved.

  Walter Holman had long ago sent word around town confirming the militia didn’t have any intention of jailing anyone for more than a couple days while decisions happened. Sitting in a cell eating food other people worked to produce while doing nothing amounted to more of a vacation than a punishment. Anyone who shot or killed another resident of Evergreen over, as he put it, ‘bullshit,’ would end up in the ground or exiled unless they left town before justice found them. In the case of Jesse and Larry, the killer ended up dead before his victim. Five other people in the room at the time evidently agreed with Walter’s opinion that shooting a man for calling him a cheat at a zero-risk card game amounted to ‘bullshit.’

  Two weeks later on a Monday night, Harper slipped away with Logan for some private time.

  In the woods west of North Evergreen, well out of sight from town, they sat together in the dark, naked and out of breath from a rather spirited session. She didn’t quite want to call it ‘lovemaking’ since they hadn’t done the deed fully. At first, she’d been nervous about ‘hand stuff’, due to something Darci said about her idiot boyfriends thinking they were down there to ‘stuff a turkey’ and had no idea how to do things right.

  Harper had gone farther with Logan than with any other boyfriend—not difficult since she’d only ever kissed before. He’d been the first to see her fully naked, the first to touch her all over, the first to use his tongue… Logan was also the f
irst boy she ever went down on, a few weeks earlier. He didn’t complain, but she couldn’t help but feel she didn’t do it all that well. At least he didn’t laugh at first when she—clueless what to do—treated it like a popsicle and started licking. Not like she could hit the internet and do ‘research’ now. Her alter ego, Introvert Prime, hadn’t exactly been interested in steamy movies or porn. She also couldn’t quite bring herself to ask Darci for advice due to embarrassment. She believed Logan telling her he hadn’t done more than kiss any other girl, so what did it matter how good she was at any sex-type stuff? Neither one of them had any other experiences to compare to.

  The more she thought about being there with him, the more her fear faded away. Just sitting beside him like a pair of hippies naked in the woods made her feel like they did something simultaneously wonderful and against the rules.

  “Next time,” said Harper before she changed her mind, “if you wanna do it like all the way, I think I’m ready.”

  Logan put an arm around her. “I’d love that, if it’s what you want.”

  “Yeah. It is. But… I’m not ready to get pregnant.”

  “I’ll do everything I can to avoid it, but without a… umm, condom… it’s a coin toss. Can’t promise it won’t happen.” Logan leaned his head against hers. “It’s fine if you want to wait until you’re open to the idea of maybe ending up pregnant.”

  Harper leaned against him, adoring the warmth of his chest, smiling.

  “Gee… all the stuff we’ve scavenged.” Logan chuckled. “No one thought of those things.”

  “They’re not essential to survival.” She laughed. “Actually, they’re kinda an impediment to survival if you think in terms of humanity as a species.”

  Logan kissed her for a wonderful few minutes, then stared lovingly into her eyes. “If some genie showed up and gave me the choice between putting the world back the way it was or staying here with you, I’m not sure I could save all those people.”

  “I know you would. You care too much. Then, since you went back in time and would remember me, you could go to Lakewood, find me, and I’d fall in love all over again.” She brushed her fingers down his chest. “I was pretty much broken up with my last boyfriend when the war happened.”

  “Maybe… though we’d also have to find Lorelei and kick her birth mother’s ass. Not literally. I mean get CPS on her, not physically kick her.”

  “Yeah. It would be difficult to find her. Lore doesn’t know what her last name was, and I’m still not exactly sure where she lived.” Harper snuggled closer to him. “Doesn’t matter. Genies and wishes aren’t real.”

  “Alas,” said Logan. “Sorry if I sound like an idiot right now. Still trying to process you saying you want to go all the way. You’re really sure?”

  “I am. Virginity is such a stupid concept. I guess like everyone else, I had this whole big faerie-tale idea of what it would be like to lose it. You know, there I am in this super special Hallmark romantic moment. Now, I’m scared I’ll keep waiting and waiting for everything to be so perfect it’ll never happen.”

  He gently lifted her head by a finger under the chin, kissed her, and smiled. “Perfect moments don’t just happen. We have to make them. Even in this messed up half-burnt world, being with you makes me feel like it’s still possible to be happy.”

  “I feel the same way about you.” She threaded her arms around him. “After my parents, then the whole Tyler thing, I was ready to give up on feeling any emotions other than fear and sadness ever again.”

  Logan tossed a hunk of wood off into the trees. “I’m still not sure I’ve really accepted losing my parents and Luisa. Everyone says Colorado Springs got vaporized, so at least they didn’t suffer… or even know what happened.”

  There goes the mood. “Whoever hit the button, I hope they died in a really painful way.”

  “They’re probably still living in a luxurious bunker.” Logan frowned. “The evil ones never seem to suffer consequences for what they do.”

  “Yeah.” Harper let go of him. She stretched out on her back, pulling him down to lay beside her and gazing up past the branches at the indigo-blue haze overhead. “Thank you for showing me it’s okay to be happy in this smashed-up world.”

  “I keep waiting to wake up. Being with you is like the nightmare went way off script. Bad dreams aren’t supposed to have amazing parts.”

  She grinned to herself. “Look. The sky’s starting to clear enough to let the stars out.”

  Logan stared skyward. “Your eyes are better than mine. I still only see fallout.”

  “It’s not fallout. At least, it’s not fallout until it comes back down. Just dirt thrown up into the sky by the explosions. The fallout’s already gone.” Harper scooted closer to him. “Are we really just hanging out naked in the forest like a pair of nymphs?”

  “We are. No one’s going to find us here. Even if they did, we won’t get in trouble. Not like anyone’s going to send a cop to bang on the window of the car and chase us away from lover’s point.”

  She snickered.

  “I want to spend all my time with you. It doesn’t matter what we’re doing, but this is nice.”

  “Who got the bright idea people needed to wear clothes, anyway?” Harper fake rolled her eyes. “This is really comfortable… except for that twig poking me in the butt.”

  He reached over and tickled her stomach.

  Harper squealed, curling up and grabbing his arm. “Stop!”

  He stole a kiss.

  She collapsed half on top of him, trying not to laugh so loud someone heard and came to investigate. Maybe it won’t scare the crap out of me if I get pregnant. If it does happen, they’ll definitely not send me out of town on a mission. Might not even let me patrol until the baby’s a year old. Having so much time to spend with Madison while she’s still young might actually be worth rolling the dice. Just have to live through giving birth first. She huffed. What the heck is wrong with me? Who seriously considers having a baby at eighteen on purpose? Does he even want kids? Having one might help him deal with the loss of his family. Everyone says Springs was vaporized but no one’s gone there to look. Denver got hammered pretty bad, and we made it. She bit her lip, thinking about his two older siblings, a brother in the Navy and a sister who’d gone out of state to college.

  “What’s on your mind? You look kinda sad or worried. Hope you’re not regretting…”

  “No.” She swished her feet side to side. “Sitting out here like this and not being mortified about it is making me wonder if society’s going to slip back to primitivism. Little by little, technology, all the little modern conveniences we’ve salvaged are going to stop working, break, or disappear. Renee and them are doing kinda okay making clothing, but it’s not going to come out looking like anything we got at the mall.”

  “Yeah. We’ll all be cosplaying peasants from Lord of the Rings.” Logan chuckled. “Might as well since we’ll be carrying swords again when the bullets run out.”

  “Okay, I’m lying.” Harper rolled onto her side, head propped up on her hand, and stared into his eyes. “I just thought of that primitivism thing to not say what really made me feel sad because I didn’t want to make you sad, too. I shouldn’t play word games or lie to you. If we’re going to do this for real, we’ve gotta be fully open with each other.”

  “Uh oh.”

  She smiled. “Relax, it’s not too bad. But… I don’t want to get in the habit of not being completely honest with you. I was really wondering how bad it really was in Springs, and what happened to your older siblings.”

  “Oh.” He nodded once. “Never really let myself hope Springs might not be completely gone. It’s kinda far to walk or even ride a bike. Too dangerous to just go there on a whim. The place could still be full of deadly radiation or who knows what kind of gangs. Not sure I could handle finding my old house gone. Or worse, finding it with bones inside.”

  “Sorry.”

  He laced his fingers behind his hea
d, staring up at the sky again. “You don’t have to apologize. As for Luis and Ana? I dunno. Last I heard, Luis was out at sea. Doesn’t seem likely anyone could nuke a Navy ship, but there might have been more combat than nuclear missiles. Ana… there’s no cars or planes anymore. She’s so far away, Florida might as well be on another planet. It would take us months to walk there, and we’d have no idea where to even start looking if we survived the trip.”

  Harper rested her head on his shoulder, lying beside him in silence for a while. Someone far off to the east, back in town, shouting for ‘Julio’ to move his ass startled her into realizing she still hadn’t gotten dressed. “What’s going to happen to us?”

  “Well, hopefully… we have a long, happy life together.”

  “I’d like that.” She bit her lip. “But I meant us with a capital u, as in humanity. Like… there’s no more insulin. Diabetes is a death sentence.”

  “True, but we’re also not eating processed sugar in everything now.”

  “Diabetes happened a long time ago, too. Maybe not as often, but it happened. There are no more vaccines, no advanced medicine. In forty-five minutes, or however long it took the nukes to stop blowing up, we lost centuries of progress.”

  Logan sat up, legs crossed. “True. We don’t have advanced medicine or vaccines anymore, but humans existed for centuries before them once already and didn’t die off.”

  “Ugh.” Harper also sat up, grabbing her head in both hands, elbows on her knees. “Yeah, but before vaccines, lots of people died.”

  “Yeah. Back then, people had to have twelve kids hoping three made it to adulthood.”

  She gave him side eye. “Please tell me you’re making an observation about the past and not a suggestion. My uterus just quivered at the thought.”

  “Well…” Logan chuckled. “Totally up to you. If you even want to have kids, your body’s going to be doing ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the work, so it’s whatever you’re willing to put up with.”