by Sam Sisavath
The woman gave Freckles an almost cursory glance. If the girl’s age made any difference, Jocelyn didn’t let it show on her hardened face. She turned back to the table less than five seconds later. “Take her to Max.”
“Max?” Paul said. He stood next to Freckles with one giant paw holding her in place.
“Which word tripped you up?”
“Just wanted to be sure.”
“Are you sure now?”
“It’s just that, Max, he can get a little out of control. And she’s just a kid.”
“She killed two of my men. Two of your friends. She stopped being a kid after that.”
Paul didn’t move and Mason saw the conflicted look on his face, which prompted the thought, Who the hell is Max?
Finally, the big man said, “Maybe I can take a crack at her first—”
“Max,” Jocelyn said, cutting him off. “Take her to Max.” And this time she did look up at him. “Understood?”
Paul nodded, like a child who had just been scolded by a parent, and pulled Freckles to the door with him.
Mason looked after them, at the same time the teenager glanced over her shoulder, and right at him.
She hadn’t looked to Jocelyn, but to him.
Straight at him.
Mason recognized the fear. It was all over her face. Whatever façade she had put up in the walk to T10, then the ride over, it had slipped away and he only saw a scared fifteen (Sixteen? How old is she, anyway?) kid being dragged away to a fate that terrified her.
You’re barking up the wrong tree, kid. You brought this on yourself.
He expected her to fight, to start grabbing at anything to stay away from whoever this “Max” guy was, but she didn’t. Instead, she disappeared through the door with Paul.
“There she goes,” the voice said.
She’s not my problem anymore.
“Did I say she was?”
I’m not the one who’s going to be pulling the trigger.
“Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”
He turned back to Jocelyn. “What is it you expect her to tell you?”
“I won’t know until Max finishes with her,” Jocelyn said.
“So he’s an interrogator? Max?”
“Something like that.” Then, “You can go, too.”
“You don’t want to ask me any questions?”
“Paul already told me everything over the radio.”
“And you’re fine with it?”
She sighed and looked up at him. “Fine with it? No. I’m not fine with losing two men when I’m strapped for manpower. Or losing a technical. But I don’t have a choice. I have to make do with what I have—including you.”
“Nice to be wanted,” Mason smiled.
“Go get your shoulder properly looked at. You’re going back on patrol tomorrow.”
“I don’t get any rest after getting shot?”
“Are you going to die from that mosquito bite?”
“It’s more than that…”
“Leave.”
“What a bitch,” the voice said as Mason turned and left the room. “I didn’t say that out loud, did I?”
No, you’re safe.
“Oh, thank God. The woman scares me…”
FRECKLES WAS NOWHERE to be seen in the Sonic parking lot, but Paul was there chatting with a guy with a red goatee that was leaning out his open car window. Joe had also vanished, but you didn’t really need an alert machine gunner at base.
“Where’s the girl?” Mason asked Paul.
“Joe took her to Max,” Paul said.
“Who’s this Max, anyway? Jocelyn said he was some kind of interrogator?”
Paul and Goatee exchanged a silent look.
“What?” Mason said.
“She said he was an interrogator?” Paul asked.
“Something like that.”
“I guess you can call him that.”
“You didn’t sound like you approved of him.”
Paul sighed. “Max can be a little rough.”
“Who is he?”
Another quick look between the two men, before red goatee said, “When you hear screaming tonight, just ignore it. That’s just Max…working.”
SEVEN
THEY HAD PUT him up in the same bed-and-breakfast as all the other single male soldiers. His room was across from Lyle’s while Rummy’s was on the bottom floor where he didn’t have to climb up three flights of stairs each time.
“Being an old fart has its privileges,” Rummy had said when Mason asked him about the favorable placement.
Not that Mason minded the fourth floor too much. It allowed him to see a lot of the town from his window, and he didn’t have to worry about some idiot stomping around above him. Being jammed into the same B&B with other guys was a new experience; ever since the world ended, Mason had always been blessed with his choice of lodgings.
“Get used to it, we might be here awhile,” the voice had said when they first saw their accommodations.
After getting his wound looked at and receiving some fresh cleaning and bandages from T10’s resident doctor—a second-year veterinarian student named Tobey—Mason scored a handful of Tramadol. In addition to the painkillers he already had and the one from Freckles’s pack, he was fully loaded for anything that came his way.
“Expecting trouble?” the voice had asked.
Always be prepared. Just like in the Boy Scouts.
“Since when were we in the Boy Scouts?”
I read a brochure once…
The streets were already thinning out as he walked back to his building, the setting sun chasing everyone back home as if they were scared children. Despite the fact they didn’t have to fear the night anymore, it was human nature to seek shelter, just in case.
“Just in case of what?” the voice asked.
You know what.
“I want to hear you say it.”
Mason didn’t.
“Come on, you can say it. You know you want to say it.”
Mason ignored it, and smiled instead at an attractive woman leaning out of her apartment window as he walked underneath. She had long blonde hair and delicate features and was lighting a candle on the windowsill next to her. He wondered if she had a big belly that he couldn’t see, because bucks to donuts she did. That was the tradeoff, after all: the cost of being safe from the darkness beyond the city limits.
Mason stopped on the sidewalk and was about to say something when the woman pulled back and closed the window, and the last he saw of her was the halo of her candle fading into the background. It wasn’t all that long ago that he could have had his choice of women, even if they were more genetically blessed than he was.
But that was then, and this was now.
“At least you won’t die a virgin,” the voice chuckled.
I won’t die in this place, either, that’s for goddamn sure.
“That’s it, sport; keep your eyes on the prize. We’ll be back on top sooner than you can say lickety-split.”
One step at a time.
“One step at a time,” the voice repeated. “All you have to do is not fuck it up.”
Fuck it up? What does that mean?
“You know what that means. The girl.”
What about her? Screw her. She knew what she was getting into.
“There you go. That’s my boy.”
He continued on to his apartment, the slight numbness in his left arm buzzing a bit against the growing cold. He tugged at his jacket and picked up his pace as the sun continued to dip in the horizon and night slowly crawled over T10.
HE WOKE up in the middle of the night to doors slamming up and down the hallway outside his room, and the sound of car engines revving in the street outside his window.
The hell?
Mason climbed out of bed and took ten seconds or so to pop another Tramadol into his mouth before padding in his boxers over to the window. He pulled aside the curtains and saw blackness surrounding the t
own like a great big blanket. He didn’t want to think about what was out there, even though he swore he could see something moving around in the shadows.
He glanced down at the streets, currently illuminated by bright car headlights. There were about six vehicles down there, all trucks with mounted MGs. Men in black uniforms were milling around, and he caught snippets of conversation. They sounded anxious and excited, like they were about to go on a hunt, but Mason was too far up to hear actual words. Either that, or he was just too groggy.
He tossed a quick look at the cheap plastic watch that he never took off: 2:16 a.m. He knew T10 woke up early, but this was too early.
He walked across his darkened room and opened the door and leaned out, just in time to glimpse two figures disappearing down the stairs at the other end of the hallway. They were both wearing their uniforms, and he could hear their heavy boots pounding against the wooden steps as they hurried down.
Mason slipped out and over to the room next to his. The door was open and Charles, the owner, was inside stuffing ammo and supplies into a tactical pack next to a bright LED lantern. Charles was in his thirties, an ex-cop from Dallas, and as far as Mason could glean in the short time he had been in T10, was one of Jocelyn’s more trusted lieutenants. Paul was another.
“What’s going on?” Mason asked.
Charles glanced over at him, then grinned at the sight of Mason’s Donald Duck boxers. “You’re not dressed.”
“Dressed for what?”
Charles zipped up, then slung his pack. “I guess that means you’re not going to Houston.”
“What’s happening in Houston?”
“Your guess’s as good as mine. Jocelyn’s sending about half of us, maybe more, over there.” Charles flicked off his lamp. “And she’s going too, so it’s gotta be pretty big.”
“Paul?”
“Dunno.” As Charles walked past him, the man chuckled and said, “Nice boxers,” then slid out into the hallway and hurried over to the stairs.
Mason watched him go, and thought, Houston? What’s so special about Houston?
A FEW MONTHS ago he would have known what was going on in Houston. They would have told him. Except he didn’t have them inside his head anymore (“Forget them; you have me,” the voice said) the way Jocelyn did. He was just another asshole at the bottom of the food chain, except even those guys, like Charles, got inside information, while he was left to watch them drive up the street in a caravan of technicals.
He wasn’t the only one outside—about half a dozen guys from the B&B were milling about while the rest leaned out their windows, either too sleepy or too lazy to leave their rooms. The civilians living around them were doing the same, but if Mason thought he was in the dark about what had just happened, the non-soldiers looked even more confused.
There were solar-powered lamps fastened to selected poles up and down the street to let him see with, but not nearly enough to light up the entire town. As a result, anyone moving around up and down the sidewalk more than ten feet from him were lost in the shadows.
“Nice boxers,” a voice said next to him.
Mason glanced over at Paul. The man was wearing long johns and thermal socks with sandals, holding an LED lamp that lit up his wardrobe for everyone to see, not that he seemed to care.
“You’re not going?” Mason asked.
“Can’t; she left me in charge of the place,” Paul said.
“You?”
Paul chuckled. “You don’t approve?”
Mason shrugged. “I don’t know you well enough.” He looked after the vehicles as they disappeared around a turn, the red beacons of their taillights vanishing one by one. “What’s going on in Houston?”
“Some kind of party.”
“They’re pretty heavily armed for a party.”
“It’s that kind of party.”
“Jocelyn didn’t tell you?”
“Nope. It must be big for her to take most of the guys along. I mean, we have enough to defend the town with, but I’m not sure about a direct assault if they come at us with those tanks. Or, God forbid, planes.”
Just the mention of planes made Mason glance up to check the skies—except of course he couldn’t see anything up there except darkness. But at least there were no telltale signs of an approaching aircraft.
Good enough. Probably.
Paul had turned around and was heading back into the building.
Mason didn’t feel like standing out here in his boxers, so he followed the big man inside. “So you’re in charge now?”
“Until Jocelyn gets back,” Paul nodded.
There were a few more guys inside the B&B’s lobby, talking among themselves. Like Mason, they were trying to figure out what was happening, and a few weren’t taking being left behind very well. Paul ignored their questioning looks and went up the stairs.
“You used to be in charge of a place, right?” Paul asked.
I used to be in charge of more than that, Mason thought, but said, “Yeah, something like that. Why?”
“I could use some help from time to time. Figured to make use of your experiences.”
“If I have so much experience, why didn’t Jocelyn put me in charge?”
“You’ll have to ask her when she gets back. But if I had to guess, it’s probably because she doesn’t like you very much.”
“Well, he’s not beating around the bush,” the voice laughed.
“Feeling’s mutual,” Mason said.
“Ah, she’s not so bad. A little stressed these days, but who isn’t?”
“If you say so.”
“Anyway, was the town you were running as big as this one?” Paul asked.
“Have you always been here?”
“I was at another place with Jocelyn and a few others before this one. Why?”
“Because if you think T10 is ‘big,’ you have no idea.”
Paul shot him a surprised look. “No shit?”
“Weren’t you at the camps? Before they started relocating people to the towns?”
“What camps?”
Guess not, Mason thought, and said, “Before they made us settle in towns, we were in the camps. There were thousands of people in each one. Some had tens of thousands.”
“Damn.”
“So if you’ve never been in the camps, how’d you get here?”
“Not much to say. One day I was asleep, the next I wasn’t. Some guys shoved me into a truck and brought me to another place about thirty miles from here. A few days later, someone with a gun came over and asked if I wanted to volunteer.”
“And of course you said yes.”
“When he said what it involved, and what I’d get out of it, it was a no-brainer. I mean, I may look like it, but I’m not an idiot. You too, right?”
Mason smiled. “More or less.”
They were almost on the third floor when Mason thought Paul was going to say something else, but for some reason he didn’t.
Mason decided to help him out: “What’s on your mind?”
“You did this before, run a town…”
“Uh huh. What’s the question?”
“Are they gonna keep out? The black eyes? Jocelyn usually keeps them out of town. But with her gone…”
“She never told you?” Mason asked.
“Told me what?”
“It’s not Jocelyn who keeps them out. It’s the blue eyes.”
“How the hell they do that?”
“I don’t know,” Mason said, “and I never asked. They just do.”
“So you’re saying they’ll stay out?”
“Yeah. They’ll stay out.”
Until the blue eyes tell them not to, he thought, but decided that was better left unsaid. Right now he needed Paul on his side, and the best way to do that was to assure the man, to prove his worth. He needed allies if he was going to survive T10 or climb back up the rungs of command.
“One step at a time,” the voice said.
One step at a tim
e…
They continued up the stairs and finally onto the fourth-floor hallway.
“So what happens to us while Jocelyn’s out there doing whatever she’s doing in Houston?” Mason asked.
“Get back to work, I guess,” Paul said.
“What about me?”
“What about you?”
“Jocelyn said I should rest until my shoulder’s better.”
“Then I guess you should rest until your shoulder’s better,” Paul said.
Mason smiled. He had a feeling he was going to like Paul’s reign more than he ever did Jocelyn’s.
HE WENT BACK TO SLEEP. Or tried to.
About an hour after he laid his head down on his pillow and closed his eyes, he heard her screaming.
At first he thought it was one of the chickens or ducks that the town had in their farm—really, a small fenced-in section on the north side of T10 that housed, at most, three dozen different species.
But it wasn’t.
It wasn’t an animal, but a person.
A girl.
“It’s not Ange, remember?” the voice said. “Go back to sleep.”
Why is she screaming?
“Who cares. Go back to sleep.”
But why is she screaming?
“Go back to sleep!”
Mason turned over on his side and tried to block out the sound. It was very faint, but against the absence of a thriving world it was loud and clear. It didn’t help that he had left the window open, and Mason, ignoring the voice (“Stay in bed, you dummy. What are you doing?”), got up and trudged the short distance over to close it.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he stood at the open window and listened to her faint cries. They seemed to be coming from somewhere up the block. If he could hear it, the others could, too. The ones with their windows up anyway. And he was right, because lights had come on in a couple of the civilian apartments up the street, and Mason spotted a silhouetted figure appearing at one of the windows.
The figure—the shape belonged to a tall woman—stood at the window, head turned in the direction of where the screams were coming from. The woman then looked around, as if wondering if anyone else had heard it. Mason was sure she couldn’t see him, because although his window was up and the curtains were blowing, he hadn’t turned on the LED lantern on the nightstand next to him.