“Jack,” Abby says. “Are you all right?”
I figure there’s no point in lying.
“No,” I say. “I’m not.”
“Me, either,” she answers. “I think this is a way out. Let’s go.”
Thirty-Three
Abby is right. There is a door up here—or what’s left of a door. It is not easy to open.
“We’re gonna have to kick it,” I say.
“What if there’s District out there?”
I smile at her. “Then we’re gonna have to kick them, too.”
She nods.
“Together on three,” I say and then I count.
On ‘three’, both of us swing our legs out and hammer the metal emergency exit. The door opens slightly wider, but it’s wide enough for us both to fit if we turn sideways. We don’t immediately go out, though. We wait about two minutes, watching for either District or zombies. They would’ve heard the noise we made.
None arrive.
We slide through the opening and come upon what looks like a city dump. There are piles of debris and garbage…at least upon first glance. The truth is that this isn’t a dump; this is just part of a city that was hit by the nuclear bomb.
We walk on slowly. From beneath a pile of cars, a pair of shoes stick out. I’m reminded of The Wizard of Oz, when the house lands on the witch. Connected to these shoes are bones. There is hardly any meat on them, and I wonder if that was the blast or the zombies.
Probably a little of both. The thought makes me shudder.
Abby says, “I know. It’s bad. Don’t look… Looking just makes it worse.”
“Makes the imagination run wild,” I agree.
She nods. “Now what? We’re here, so what do we do?”
“We get the rest of them out.”
It takes us a solid fifteen minutes to find what resembles a street. The ground beneath us is fractured, faded away to nothing in some parts. Semblances of civilization are all around us: broken street lamps, cars flipped over or blown to metallic husks, traffic lights without their colored glass, looking at me like a face without eyes, burned clothes with their former inhabitant’s ash marks on what was once sidewalks.
We circle the block.
In an alleyway, tucked behind trash and piles of debris, we hear voices. Abby grabs me and pulls me down to the ground between what’s left of two tall buildings. Ahead of us, the shadows of District soldiers dance high upon the brick walls. They are talking, laughing, generally shooting the shit.
Once they disappear from the mouth of the alleyway and their voices fade, Abby whispers, “This place is crawling with District assholes.”
“Such an eloquent way of putting it,” I say.
We crouch-walk to the end of the alley. The soldiers are walking up a dirt road that looks well patted down by traveling feet. They are heading into the heart of the diseased city, where jagged buildings jut up to the sky like broken gravestones, glowing with that eerie green light of radioactivity.
Across the way is a different dirt road, heading to the east. Beyond that are gates, what was once the subway entrance that would lead you into the heart of the city, but is now the entrance to the underground prisons and torture chamber.
We have circled back. The two figures are still out there. They hold guns. My eyes are not good enough to see if it’s the same men, the one with the beard and the younger fellow, but it doesn’t matter. Whoever they are, they will have to be disposed of quickly, before they can alert the other District soldiers in the area.
The problem is an obvious one: we don’t have weapons. Not to mention we’re pretty injured, banged up and beaten.
“You go left, I’ll go right,” I say. “On my mark, we take them down at the same time.”
“What could go wrong?” Abby says sarcastically.
Behind them now, I can hear what they’re saying.
“Fucking psychos,” the bearded one says. “I hope they rip that Jack Jupiter apart. That would be funny, huh?”
The other guard mumbles his consent.
“You all right, Cameron?” the bearded one asks.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Making you uneasy, huh?”
Cameron says, “I don’t like it. They never made all that damn noise before; I think something’s up.”
“Nothing’s up,” the bearded one says with a chuckle. “That damn place is sealed tight. Even if they could get out, they’d never see the surface. All those damn tunnels will get you turned around. On top of that, there’s over a hundred deadheads roaming around in there, and they’re hungry. Starved.”
“Not so much after Helga, eh, Bry?” Cameron says. I hear the humor in his voice.
“Fucking bitch,” Bry, the bearded one, says a little lower. “Glad that dyke threw her over the edge, she deserved it. Can’t stand them Black Knights. Can’t stand them at all. Almost as bad as the jack-offs in the cells themselves. Except for that Mandy bitch. Remember what I did to her?”
Cameron twists his face up in disgust. He shakes his head. “I remember.”
“Never thought a bitch that big would be so tight,” Bry says. “Best damn prison pussy I ever had.”
Disgust roils in my stomach, but I barely feel it over the hate I have for this man. I have to hold myself back from storming out there and ripping Bry’s head off.
“I can’t stand the Black Knights, either,” Cameron says, obviously trying to avoid talking more about what Bry did to Mandy. “They think they’re all hot shit because they get to drive around and look for traitors to the District, but we all know they’re just sitting on their asses doing nothing most of the time. Sure they get lucky here and there, but who doesn’t?”
“You got a good head on your shoulders, kid,” Bry says. “Maybe one day you and me will be running this place. What do you say to that?”
“I say,” Cameron says, “that you’re full of shit, Bry.”
Bry laughs heartily.
“But if you’re serious, then we should go in there and kill all those motherfuckers ourselves. Cut ‘em up and feed them to the zombs.”
“I like the way you’re thinking,” Bry says. “But we have to bide our time. You wanna start a revolution, you have to do it from the inside. Think about an infection, the way it spreads.”
“You talking that old-world shit to me again, Bry? You know I don’t remember that.”
“Right, right,” Bry says. “But just because you don’t remember it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
Across the way, Abby and I catch eyes. I give her a nod. That’s partly my signal, and partly the telepathy we share from surviving together for so many years. She picks up the lid of a trash can and bangs it against the concrete. On my side, both guards whip their heads in the direction of the sound.
“What was that?” Bry asks.
Cameron replies with, “I don’t like this.” He clutches his gun to his chest. His finger no longer hovers on the trigger guard. It is now on the trigger.
I have to be careful, I know.
“I’m gonna check it out,” he says.
Bry chuckles. “So wet behind the ears, son.”
“What the hell does that mean? You insulting me?”
The bearded guard sighs and shakes his head. “Never mind. All I’m saying is you don’t split up to check a suspicious noise. We go together, got it?”
“What, you scared?” Cameron asks. He grins. His teeth are the color of nicotine stains, nearly brown in their appearance.
“I ain’t scared. I’m just smart. How do you expect to take over an empire being a damned fool?”
Cameron’s smile disappears.
I give Abby the signal again. These two bitch and moan like an old married couple, but I’m no match for them together. We have to separate them.
Abby slams the trashcan lid on the ground harder. This time, Bry jumps. I think he was lying when he said he wasn’t scared, and that’s all right. He should be.
“Okay, somet
hing’s really up,” Cameron says.
I whistle, and that’s another sign.
Cameron whirls around, so does Bry, and there’s Abby waiting for them.
She says, “Boo!”
Before Cameron can raise his weapon, Abby throws the garbage lid at him like a Frisbee. He’s not fast enough to dodge it, and the sound it makes as it whirls through the air and crunches against his nose is vomit-inducing—at least to those not used to violence. For me, it’s music, a sweet melody in my ears.
Cameron cries out. I think his gun’s about to go off, but it doesn’t. Instead, he drops it and uses both hands to clutch the bleeding pulp that was once his nose. The rifle clatters on the ground, and Abby dives for it just as Bry levels his in her direction.
“BITCH!” he shouts. And that’s the last word he ever speaks.
I’m on him in an instant. I grab him under the scruff of his beard and twist. His neck doesn’t break on the first go-around. In the old movies, those relics of the world before this one, the action hero always broke the bad guy’s neck the first time. Then, of course, a barrage of bullets would bounce off his sweaty and muscular chest as if he was made of iron. But this isn’t the movies; I am no action hero.
It takes me two twists of the neck before I hear a slight crack, and even then Bry’s resisting me. He has a thick neck. It’s not easy to break, but when I’m determined, I can get a lot done—
Crack.
He falls to the ground in a heap.
I take his gun and aim down at Cameron. The blood is pouring down his face, gushing. He’s not as stupid as I originally thought, because he takes his hands away from his nose and raises them in the air.
“No, please,” he says.
Abby stands behind him with Cameron’s rifle. She shakes her head emphatically, telling me to pull the trigger.
I sigh. “Are you brainwashed?” I ask him.
“Huh?”
I look at Abby. “Is he brainwashed? You’d know.”
“Turn around,” she orders him. “Look at me.”
Cameron stifles a sob, turns.
She says, “The last of the living will never survive. If you want to make it, you have to…”
“What?” Cameron says. “What are you talking about?”
“He’s not brainwashed,” Abby says.
“What? How do you know?” I ask.
“I know,” she says. “There’s a saying, like a trigger. He doesn’t know the saying. Do you?”
Cameron turns around and looks at me. “What? What’s going on?”
“He’s just a follower,” Abby says. “Scum like the rest of them. Are you going to let him live? Are you really going to let him live, Jack?”
I don’t answer verbally, but I lower the rifle. That’s answer enough.
Abby says, “Don’t you remember Froggy? Don’t you remember what he did to Mother’s village? Don’t you remember what happened to Darlene after that?”
“I remember,” I say. “How could I forget? I remember it all too well.”
“Please,” Cameron says. “If you’re going to kill me, do it now. Don’t make me wait.”
I point into the night, where, just faintly, the bridge into this city is barely visible. Through the haze I can see its repaired towers, its long, taut cables. “That is where you are going to go,” I tell him. “You are going to cross that bridge and you are going to get out of this city and away from the District. Do you understand?”
Cameron says nothing.
“You get out of the District. It’s no place for a kid like you. You have a chance to lead a normal life—as normal a life as it can be now. You go west and you settle down in a place where there’s no District.”
“They’re e-everywhere,” he says. Tears streak down his face, get lost amongst the dirt.
“No,” I say. “They’re not.”
“They’ll take over the country. They already have jets,” he says.
I shake my head. “I won’t let them.”
“Who are you?” he asks.
I know he’s not asking my name. He already knows, but I tell him anyway. “I’m Jack Jupiter. Remember that name. That’s the man who let you walk out of here alive. You want to take over the world, you aren’t gonna do it with the District, I’ll tell you that.”
Cameron looks at me with a mixture of hate and understanding. I don’t blame him.
I remember being young, I remember being conflicted all the time, like he is now. I hope he lives long and I hope he changes his ways, and when he’s sitting under the light of the full moon, maybe with a wife who loves him and children of his own sleeping behind strong walls, he’ll remember the man who spared him.
The guard drops his hands, turns, and runs toward the bridge.
Abby and I watch him as he disappears over the horizon, getting smaller and smaller.
“I hope you don’t regret that later, Jack,” she says.
“I’m past the point of regrets. Whatever happens, happens. But I don’t have to kill if it’s not merited.”
Abby points to the dead guard at my feet, the one whose neck I snapped. She flips him over with the toe of her boot, cords standing out on her neck with the effort. The bearded man—Bry, Brian, whatever—is big.
He stares up at me with blank eyes. His head lolls flaccidly, the bones severed, out of place.
“What about him? Was his death merited?” Abby asks with a smirk.
She’s always trying to get a rise out of me. I think she enjoys it, but if I pressed her about it, she’d tell me she’s just playing devil’s advocate. Abby has never had any qualms about killing, not even that first night in Woodhaven, when she and I were the only ones who escaped the recreation center, and she certainly doesn’t have them now, though we’re the only ones of our original group who haven’t died—besides Norm.
Looking back into Bry’s glassy eyes, I say, “Didn’t you hear him? What he said he said he did to Mandy makes me sick. And he did call you a bitch… If that’s not a good enough reason to snap his neck, I don’t know what is.”
Abby’s smirk spreads into a full-fledged smile. When she smiles, she looks a decade younger, like she hasn’t lived all her adult life in the apocalypse.
It’s nice to see her smile.
“Touché, Jack Jupiter. Touché,” she says.
I bend down. The pain in my ankle is almost nonexistent now. That’s the adrenaline again. By the time it wears off, I think I’ll need a wheelchair. Don’t even get me started on tomorrow. I’ll need to be electrocuted just to get up—that is if I ever get to sleep. I’d bet some good batteries and old pain pills on the chances of me not getting to bed tonight.
Gently, I use my fingertips to close Bry’s eyelids, so he’s not staring up at me like a stuffed deer mounted above someone’s fireplace.
“He said he raped Mandy. Pieces of shit like him should die.”
Abby nods, then bends down and takes a knife from Bry’s belt. “He won’t be needing this.”
“No, he won’t. The gun, either. Come on, let’s go bust our friends out of prison.”
As Abby and I are dragging Bry’s body into the alley we came from, and covering him up with some of the loose debris and trash, she says, “What if the younger one goes on and notifies the other soldiers? Well, not really ‘what if’. More like ‘when’.”
“You really need to work on your views of the human race.”
She shrugs. “Can you blame me?”
“No…I guess not. People suck.”
“That’s a drastic understatement,” she says. She lays a burned piece of cardboard, its edges crisped and singed, over Bry’s face. She pats it twice. “Sleep tight, B-ry.”
We walk to the mouth of the alley. The gates to the subway entrance are only about twenty feet from us, on the corner of what is left of this street.
As we’re walking, I say, “If he lets the guards know about our escape, you get to say ‘I told you so,’ but it doesn’t matter much. They’ll
know about us sooner rather than later, I think.”
“That’s reassuring.”
I reach out and take the cold bars of the gate into my hands. Slowly, I pull them open. They whine and scrape the concrete. Someone really isn’t keeping up with the maintenance around this particular District stronghold. I don’t worry about anyone hearing the noise; if they didn’t hear our scuffle with the guards, they won’t hear this. I am glad, however, that our scuffle didn’t turn into a firefight. That would’ve really sucked. It was a big risk, doing what we did, I know, but like I said earlier: I’m past the point of regrets.
Down the steps we go for the second time. It’s a little better this go-around because we aren’t being escorted by the Beard and the Brat. We’re moving on our own free will, and we’re going to save our little band of rebellions.
The first walkthrough was a pretty nice precursor. Now we know where to go, how to get out, what knobs to turn, what doors to push.
“Ladies first,” I say to Abby, and make a sweeping gesture toward the ladder that leads to the hatch.
“No, I insist.”
“I should’ve known,” I say. “Chivalry may not be dead, but it’s certainly dead for Abby Cage.”
She nods, bends down and picks up some rope. “Here.” She hands it to me. “We may need this.”
I go up the ladder and push the hatch open. It doesn’t squeak as loudly as the gate on the surface did. As soon as the hatch opens, the constant drone of zombie noises assaults my ears, just as their smell assaults my nostrils. But this is put on the back-burner after what I see right in front of me.
A skinny man, as big and as intimidating as a scarecrow, wears his lips peeled back in a bloodless grin, his fists held high above him. He means to crush my face into dust.
I recognize this as Roland. Mandy probably threw him up to the platform so they could attack the guards when they returned. A silly plan, but no sillier than the one I embarked on an hour ago, going on the confidence of the hobgoblin lady. But hey, that plan worked so why couldn’t theirs?
“Wait!” I shout. “Don’t!”
The whoosh of wind as his fist whistles through the air brushes past my cheek. I nearly lose my footing and fall down the steps. That would do wonders for my ankle, wouldn’t it?
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