Dead Lost

by Flint Maxwell

  “It was my son’s favorite movie, too,” I say absentmindedly.

  “You have a son?” Lilly asks, her voice hopeful.

  “Had a son,” I say.

  She nods, looks down at her shoes. Understanding. I know that look, it’s the polite look of people who think they’ve overstepped their boundaries or offended you in someway.

  “I had a little brother,” she says. “And a mom and a dad and a boyfriend.”

  A silence falls over us. It’s near complete in the stillness of the road. All that can be heard is the chirping of bugs, the intermittent coos of birds dream-talking, the snorting breath of Bilbo. I stand up straight. “Anyway, back to Star Wars. I feel like you were about to make a point there, or something close to it.”

  “Right,” Lilliana says, nodding. “Star Wars. I was going to compare the District to the evil Empire. You know, the big bad people a plucky group of nobodies-turned-to-heroes has to defeat before all hope is entirely lost. Luke couldn’t defeat Vader and the Empire by himself. He needed Han and Leia. He needed Chewie, and those cute robots,” Lilly continues.

  “But they just come back in Episode VII,” I say flatly.

  She arches an eyebrow. “Didn’t see that one.”

  “Yep, back to Freeland you go,” I say. “Let someone else worry about bringing down the ‘Empire’.”

  “No,” she says.

  “Why?” I ask. It is a question I seem to be asking more so than usual. “Why me? You don’t even know me.”

  “Because I saw what you’re capable of. You may not be a good person—which I doubt—but you certainly know what you’re doing when it comes to taking down the District.”

  “It’s not about taking them down,” I say. We are still standing at this fork in the road. I am annoyed, frightened, shaken.

  “Then what’s it about?” Lilly puts her hands on her hips, cocks her head at me. The way she does it reminds me of Abby. She was the little sister I never had, the wise-cracking, know-it-all, who would be there for you no matter what. God, I miss her. God, I miss all of them. The thought of my family, of all who I’ve lost, makes my answer come out smooth and natural.

  “It’s about revenge. Simple as that.”

  “Now we’re talking,” Lilly says. “What better revenge than bringing them all down?”

  I look at her sternly. It’s hard not to picture her gutted, her organs hanging out, her heart no longer beating. All because of what? She wanted to follow me? I will not have her blood on my hands along with everyone else’s.

  Then again, Jack…what’s a little more blood to add to the mix?

  No.

  “Go home,” I say. “Go back to Freeland. Live out the rest of your life without anymore bloodshed.”

  “There’s always bloodshed.”

  “It’s out of your hands sometimes, yeah, but there’s less bloodshed when you don’t go out looking for danger.”

  “I’m not looking for danger,” she says.

  My eyes go wide, and my arms are out to the side. “What are you talking about? You want to overthrow an entire apocalyptic empire! If that’s not danger, then I don’t know what is.”

  She shakes her head.

  I hand her Bilbo’s reins. The horse is content with standing here, nose to the ground, tail swishing back and forth as sporadically as the hooting of owls in the nearby forests. “Take him back to Bill or Curly. Whatever the hell his name is.”

  “No,” she says, and she actually stamps her foot down. The echo of sole hitting asphalt rolls among the trees.

  Don’t have time for this.

  I’m not giving up. I just choose to end the argument. To the right, I go.

  I’m taking the horse with me.

  “Wait,” she says. There is a slight desperation in her voice. I sense it because I’ve heard this desperation in my own voice before.

  I stop, turn around, and look at her. She knows I can hop onto Bilbo and leave her in a cloud of dust. Will I do that?

  Probably not.

  They say chivalry died long before everyone else did, but I don’t believe that. Who would I be to leave a poor, defenseless woman to the dark? Not to mention the surrounding horde of zombies undoubtedly tracking our scent right now as we speak.

  I stare at Lilliana, waiting for her to say her argument, her last desperate attempt.

  And she does.

  “I have a working car,” she says.

  I narrow my eyes at her. Impossible. These days, the only cars you see driven are by the higher ranking District officers. Not even Brandon is that—was that, my apologies. And these days, I tell it like it is. No other way to do it. “Bullshit.”

  She raises her right hand. I get a glimpse of that gun she has on her belt again. “Honest to God,” she says. “There’s one catch, though.” She shrugs when she sees my expression.

  “Always a catch, huh?” I say.

  “It’s about twenty miles away and the man who owns it is one tough son of a bitch,” she says. “He’s got guns—a lot of guns—and soldiers willing to die for his cause.”

  I’m silent for a long moment.

  “Jack?” Lilly says in a soft voice that I barely hear, even in all the silence.

  I shake my head. I can’t believe I’m going to do this. But a car? Jesus Christ, that would make things so much easier.

  Safer, too.

  “It’s a working car, right? Not some piece of shit clunker?” I ask.

  Lilliana nods eagerly.

  For a moment, I’m transported back to a time where I watched one of the most famous safe havens crumble. Eden. The way we escaped was by stealing a beat-up van. A piece of shit clunker, if you will. That van lasted us longer than it should’ve. So maybe even a clunker is better than nothing at all.

  “It’s nice. I’ve seen it in action many times before,” Lilly says.

  “Whose is it?”

  “An officer’s.”

  “You mean a District officer’s?”

  She nods, her face going ashy. “He is not a very nice man.”

  “To become an officer in the District, one cannot be remotely close to nice,” I say. I try to picture this man. I’m having trouble, especially with the image of Brandon’s neck and face being torn away by chomping zombie teeth so fresh in my mind.

  “I was going to steal it myself,” she says.

  “Why don’t you?”

  She grins, but she hasn’t gotten the color back in her face. “Well,” she says, “like I said, Luke was nothing without Han, was he?”

  All I can do is shake my head. She just doesn’t understand.

  10

  The sun is coming up now. To a man like me, one who sleeps the day away and patrols the night because there’s less people about, this ungodly hour is hardly dinnertime. We have been taking turns riding Bilbo. Neither of us is comfortable enough to share the horse. I am content with walking.

  Lilly is in the saddle, dozing off. I could just leave her right now. I could save any future pain she might cause me. Whether that pain would be inflicted by losing her or by betrayal, time will only tell.

  But should I even risk this?

  I don’t know. The prospect of leaving her seems enticing, if only because it has been so long since I’ve been in the company of others on the road.

  Then again, I have to keep my number one goal right there where it belongs at the top. That, of course, is revenge. The longer it takes me to get to Ohio, my chances of revenge slip further away. Same goes for ever finding out what happened to my brother and Abby.

  Sometimes, I wish I would’ve found their bodies among the remains of the countless others slaughtered at Haven. At least then I would have known what happened to them. I would’ve been able to lay them to rest the way I had laid Darlene and Junior to rest.

  The unknown is so much worse than the known.

  Lilly mumbles something in her sleep. It sounds like ‘Momma.’

  My hand finds its way into my inside breast pocket.
For a moment, my insides go cold. The pocket is anything but empty. All of my important items are in here, but the most important item seemingly isn’t.

  That would be the locket, the one that contains the picture of my wife and son, that moment of perfection captured by a Polaroid.

  I stop in the road. Bilbo doesn’t, and since the broken reins are currently tied around my wrist, Bilbo’s force pulls me forward.

  “Damn it,” I say. “Hold on.”

  The horse listens.

  Lilly stirs in the saddle. She moans sleepily, then this moan turns into a deep yawn. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her stretching. Not for long, though, because I’m ripping my cloak off. The cool, fall air blasts me through my t-shirt, sending chills all up my spine.

  “Where is it?” I say, turning my cloak upside down and shaking everything in the pockets free.

  “Jack?” Lilly’s voice says. “Jack, are you okay?”

  Batteries and pill bottles clatter off the road, bouncing up and down, rolling to the ditch. Band-Aids float lazily toward my feet, caught on the morning breeze. There’s a pocket knife, well-used, that cartwheels out of my line of sight. Bullets, clips, rifle attachments such as red-dot sights, ACOG scopes, and a homemade silencer that is anything but silent.

  Lilly gets off the horse now.

  “Jack? You’re kinda freaking me out here, man,” she says.

  “Where is it?” I’m mumbling, my head completely and totally someplace else.

  “Where’s what?”

  Tears are on the verge. I can feel them. I don’t want to cry in front of this woman, this stranger, but I can’t help myself. Besides the memories, that picture is all I have left of Darlene and Junior—and my memories are not solid like the picture is; they’re fading, fading, fading…

  “Is it this?” Lilly says, but I’m almost too lost in this current nightmare to hear her. By some desperation, I look up and see her in the grass off of the side of the road. She holds something small between her thumb and index finger. It glimmers, catches the early sunshine.

  Relief floods me.

  I spring up, still forgetting that Bilbo’s reins are tied to me. Naturally, the horse is heavy and though I’m stronger than I was fifteen years ago, I’m nothing compared to the beast whose hooves are planted firmly on the asphalt. I fall backward, landing on a minefield of batteries, bullets, and every sharp thing in the world.

  Should hurt, but the adrenaline is pumping and I hardly feel it. I will later.

  Scrambling up, trying to break free of the sliced reins—and I’m so anxious to get the one piece of my old life back I consider ripping my arm off and shambling at this strange woman like a mutilated zombie.

  “Don’t open—” I shout.

  It’s too late. Lilly puts her long nail into the crack and the locket glides smoothly open.

  I finally get free of Bilbo’s reins and I’m running at Lilly faster than I’d run from a horde of the dead. I snatch the locket out of her hands. In my palm, the pendant feels so right. I look at that perfect moment, the picture, and the tears that were on the verge spill over. They ride the lines in my face only to get lost in my beard. I turn away so Lilly doesn’t see me cry, but the noises betray me. I’m sniffling, trying to swallow down hitching sobs.

  She says nothing. All is still in the countryside except for me. Even Bilbo watches me curiously for a moment before he realizes his leash has been unhooked and he’s free to graze on the crabgrass nearby. Which he does greedily.

  I want to jump through the photo back to that moment. I want to hug my wife and son one more time before they’re gone forever. I have so many regrets. I would’ve never yelled at Junior. I would’ve let him watch all the scary movies he wanted to watch despite him being much too young for those types of gory and frightening films. I would’ve let him stay at his friends and ditch the schooling Laura Harkinson taught the youngsters Monday through Friday. I would never have argued with Darlene. I would take her into my arms and never let her go. I would’ve told her how beautiful she was every chance I got. I would’ve read those trashy romance novels she liked so much just so I could talk to her about them into the wee hours of the night. I would’ve done all of this and more.

  But it’s too late.

  They’re gone. Gone for good.

  And it’s my fault, and all I have left of them is this little rectangular picture, so small I can hardly see the color of Darlene’s eyes or my son’s gap-toothed smile. What if I forget those things? What if I forget that Darlene’s favorite shampoo was strawberry scented, that Junior’s last baby tooth was his front one and he didn’t lose it until he was accidentally elbowed by his friend Joey while shooting hoops.

  I can’t take this. I can’t take it any longer.

  “Jack?” Lilly’s voice drifts through the heavy sadness clouding my thoughts. “Jack, are you okay?”

  I’m not okay. I’m anything but okay.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Just thought I lost it,” I lie.

  “Jack, it’s okay. I understand,” she says. She stands over me now, her hand out and resting on my shoulder. “Here, let me help you.” She bends down and begins picking up all the little knick-knacks that were in my cloak.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  After everything is picked up, Lilly reaches back behind her neck and takes her own necklace off. It has a small crucifix on it. She slides the pendant off, her eyes narrowed in concentration as her fingers work. Once the pendant is free, she hands me the chain. It’s thin, sterling silver. “Here,” she says. “So you don’t lose it again.”

  The chain hangs over her fingers like a strand of a spider’s web.

  “I think it’ll fit,” she says.

  “No—I can’t.”

  “Jack. Just take it.”

  “But it’s your necklace,” I say. “You need it.”

  She chuckles, holds the small cross up to her eyes. Unlike the chain, I don’t believe the pendant is real. It looks cheaply made. Of course, I know that doesn’t matter if it’s important to her. Importance is all about perspective, not how much something’s worth.

  “I’m not even religious,” she says. “This cross—I only wear it because I thought it was cool.”

  “That’s reason enough to keep it,” I say, but I can see plainly on her face that she doesn’t believe me.

  “Like I said,” she continues, ignoring me, “I’m not religious. Not anymore, anyway.” She spins around, sweeping her hands out to the landscape. “Once I believed in God and Jesus Christ and the Bible and all that stuff, but—” She points to a nearby house up the road. There, a dilapidated fence and overgrown grass and dead crops stare back at us. “But what kind of God would let this happen to the world?”

  I say nothing, only look at her with a mixture of contempt and admiration. She is growing on me, and I don’t like that. I’m a lone warrior. No more partners, no more people who’ll just die—

  “Really, I’m not,” Lilly says, knocking me off my line of thought. “Plus, there’s more crucifixes than there are zombies. That’s a guess. Not a fact.” She smiles and takes the cross into her closed fist, cocks her arm back, and launches the pendant as far as she can throw it. My jaw drops as I follow its trajectory. For a long moment, it hangs in the air. A shard of silver against the orange sky. Then I lose sight of it. It lands somewhere among the weeds, lost forever.

  I turn to face Lilly. She holds the chain out to me again.

  “Believe me now?” she asks.

  Still, I’m hesitant to take it.

  She rolls her eyes and tosses it at me. My natural reaction is to catch it. I do.

  Not outwardly happy, I thread the chain through the pendant. The length of the chain is longer than the one it was on before, but I don’t care. When I clasp the necklace, I look down and see the pendant is closer to my heart than it was before.

  And that just feels right, but I remind myself not to get attached to this woman, not to let her become a friend.


  We are back to walking again. Neither of us are on Bilbo. Lilly suggested that the horse needed a break, too, and I agreed with her. I still don’t know how I feel having her on this journey with me. We’ve only been traveling for about half a day, largely in silence.

  And I don’t like the silence because all I can do is think about Darlene and Junior. So I break it.

  “A car,” I say.

  “Yep,” Lilly says.

  “I haven’t seen a car in two years,” I say.

  “Not many around here. Where were you two years ago?” she asks, honest curiosity in her voice.

  I know if I take too long to answer her question, she’ll know I’m coming up with a lie. I’m not the best at lying.

  So I answer Lilly honestly.

  “Haven,” I say.

  Lilly stops walking, and Bilbo does with her.

  Before I look at Lilly I already know what her face will look like. Her eyes as wide and round as the noon sun is above our heads. Her fingers touching either her chest, unconsciously clutching the cotton over her heart, or the same fingers resting on her parted lips.

  Sure enough, as I turn, I’m wrong.

  Instead of a look of surprise, I’d say she looks to be filled with contempt, as if I’ve somehow insulted her by mentioning Haven. Her arms are crossed over her breasts and she rolls her eyes as she says, “Haven? Okay, Jack. Funny.”

  “What?” I say.

  “You expect me to believe that you were all the way up in San Francisco at one of the best—if not the best—communities left in America and you somehow traveled by foot across all these states without a scratch to show for it?”

  My heart breaks a little more. She’s right. Haven was the best. I made damn sure of it. Along with the help of so many wonderful people, people willing to sacrifice so many amenities for the greater good of the community, we made Haven great. Others came from all over the world to seek out that stretch of land, to have a chance at being helped or even saved. And Lilly is also right in thinking this task of travel is impossible. I do, however, have a little more than a few scratches to show for it.