by William Oday
The same woman from the first meeting stood on a makeshift stage of stacked milk crates. “I told you he was coming tonight. Please, make way.”
“This is B.S.,” a man in the crowd said.
“Stuart, you’ve never believed. Tonight, you will have no choice.”
“No choice, huh? Doesn’t sound like America to me.”
She frowned. “Please shut up.” She stepped to the side as Elio stopped in front of the stage.
He turned and kissed Theresa’s cheek.
She wrapped her arms around him and whispered in his ear. “Do what you came to do.”
He nodded and stepped up onto the crates.
The cacophony of voices rose into a roar as everyone tried to shout down the opinion of those that disagreed.
“Quiet!” the woman shrieked.
All of the assertions and proclamations stuttered to silence.
“My name is Elio Lopez.”
“Louder,” someone shouted from the back.
Elio raised his voice. “My name is Elio Lopez.” He looked around at the shadowed faces. “And I’ve seen what’s happening up north.”
“They are treating prisoners like slaves. They are treating deltas like slaves. I know because I managed to escape.”
The room exploded with noise.
Voices in support. Questioning voices. Outraged voices. It eventually quieted and one voice spoke above the others.
“Why should we believe you?”
Elio rubbed his head bringing attention to the cuts. He lifted his coat and shirt to reveal the long, thin welts that crisscrossed his stomach. He turned to show more of the same on his back. He lowered his clothing and touched the cuts on his face.
The noise in the room trickled into silence.
“I was there. I was chained, and whipped, and beaten. We can’t ignore it anymore or pretend it isn’t true. It isn’t a rumor. It isn’t a story that somebody heard from somebody else.”
He went on to describe what he’d seen and survived over the past couple of days. After he recounted his late night encounter with one of the Brothers and how he ended up escaping, every eye in the place was either tinged with tears or narrowed with fury, or both.
“I’m telling you there is no law. There are no rights. The very people that this administration colludes with disregard the core liberties that every human innately deserves. And I get that we don’t know what to do with the deltas. But that doesn’t make it okay to work them, to beat them, and to kill them on a whim.”
A dozen side conversations broke out at once.
Theresa’s chest swelled with love, and respect.
Elio.
Her Elio.
Her confused, awkward high school crush had transformed into something else entirely right before her eyes.
Or maybe it had been happening for awhile, but she only now recognized it. Whatever the duration of the change, there was no doubt it had happened.
“Run!” a voice screamed from the back.
Several beams of light cut through the murk. One landed on Elio’s face lighting it up like a beacon.
A voice from the back shouted. “I don’t care about the rest. Get him!”
A cold stone lodged inside Theresa’s belly. She recognized the voice.
Police Chief Fowler.
The twisted snarl on his face promised horrible things if he got his hands on Elio.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
A wedge of armed officers bulldozed through the crowd heading for the stage. The Chief led the way swinging his heavy baton at anyone within reach. One of the brawny guys at his back blasted a woman in the face with pepper spray. The fire extinguisher-sized canister soaked her in noxious chemicals. She dropped to the floor screaming and choking. Bodies crumpled left and right as the invading force stampeded toward their target.
Toward Elio.
Elio grabbed Theresa’s hand and ran away from the approaching officers. They dodged through people running every which way. Blind panic driving most of them in no particular direction.
They raced through an open door in the back corner of the room and found themselves in a stairwell.
Not the exit they were hoping for.
But no time for a better option.
They sprinted up the stairs looking for an escape. The door to the second floor was locked. They continued up and found the third floor locked as well.
The hollow tones of wood batons banging against the iron railings echoed up the stairwell. Like gongs signaling the end of the performance.
The show was over. The curtain closed.
And what the public couldn’t see wouldn’t bother them.
Theresa’s heart thumped in her chest. An electric current wired from her brain to her legs urged them to go faster. She pulled ahead of Elio as he paused to peer down the open channel of air in the center of the stairwell.
The mad beat of batons banging the railing threatened to turn useful panic into frozen terror.
She rounded the fourth floor and almost screamed when she saw the steps ended there.
One last door.
She reached for it.
Her mind raced through a hundred reasons why it too would be locked. It tried to then play out the hundred scenarios that all ended in their capture, or worse.
She jiggled the lever handle and it didn’t move.
Locked.
Of course.
Trapped.
She grabbed the handle with both hands and wrenched down.
It creaked, slowly turned, and then gave way.
The handle hadn’t been touched in months. And like any system, the longer the period of inactivity, the greater the force required to return it into action.
Fortunately, her panic gave her muscles sufficient strength. She yanked the stubborn door open as Elio joined her side.
Her heart soared with the promise of escape.
And then it plummeted.
The roof.
They darted out onto the roof, scanning in every direction for a way down. Seeing nothing obvious, they ran to the edge only to find the street four stories below.
No fire escape on this side.
They whirled around knowing it had to be on one of the three remaining sides that they hadn’t been lucky enough to choose first.
One of the larger officers came out of the access door and ran at them with his baton raised.
Just before he arrived, Elio shouldered her aside.
Not expecting it, Theresa stumbled sideways out of the way.
The downward swing of the baton missed its mark and thundered down through the empty space between. The pole cracked into the low perimeter wall surrounding the roof and snapped. The reverberation of the blow ripped the remaining piece out of the officer’s hands.
He grabbed Elio by the neck with two enormous hands. Thick fingers locked down like a vice, squeezing tighter.
The Chief and several other officers emerged from the door. An evil smile spread across his face as he saw the life being choked out of Elio.
“Got him, Chief!” Elio’s attacker yelled as he lifted Elio so that all the weight of his body rested on the choked airspace in his neck.
Theresa pushed herself up and something jabbed into her palm.
The splintered baton. Long and sharp.
The Chief and the other cops stopped in front of them. He howled victory like a hyena cornering prey.
Elio’s eyes bulged as he struggled with the unbreakable grip around his throat.
The Chief leaned in until his eyes were inches from Elio’s. The manic triumph in them echoed in reverse by the dark terror in Elio’s. “You never fuck with Chief Fowler! Never! This is what you get!”
He slammed the end of his baton into Elio’s gut.
The veins in Elio’s neck bulged out under the skin.
They were killing him.
Before her eyes.
Theresa screamed. It came out like the shrill wail of a nightmare banshee come
to curse the dreams of mortal men.
A tiny voice inside her told her it was pointless. Useless to resist. That to fight was only to prolong the agony of the inevitable.
Fuck that.
She gripped the sharp baton and swung it into the thigh of the officer strangling Elio.
It pierced through the pants and punched into thick muscle. It didn’t stop until the tip banged into bone.
The officer released Elio instantly. He howled in pain looking at the ten inches of wood sticking out of his leg.
Elio dropped to the ground, holding his throat and coughing.
The Chief’s eyes opened wide.
The injured man spun to Theresa and grabbed her by the neck. “You bitch!” He lifted her until only the tips of her toes touched and squeezed as tight as he could.
Tendons popped and creaked as the delicate tissue in her neck gave way.
Theresa lashed out. A wild kick that came from a burning will to survive rather than any training or technique. It caught him in the groin.
Dead on.
His snarl gargled into something less focused. The strength of the grip crushing her throat weakened.
She clawed at the fingers, but they wouldn’t yield.
Theresa glanced at Elio and their eyes met.
An instant that stretched into infinity.
A recognition of the inevitable. An understanding that their connection would continue, even if the bodies that anchored it did not.
A mournful goodbye for all that might have been.
And then an inferno raged in Elio’s eyes.
The likes of which she’d seen just once before.
Elio hammered the end of the baton stuck in her attacker’s leg.
The Chief and the others stood rooted to the spot like a spellbound audience watching a performance play out.
The grip around Theresa’s throat weakened and this time her fingers found space between them and her skin. She grabbed a finger and wrenched it away with a satisfying snap.
She wriggled free as Elio jumped up and slammed a shoulder into the guy’s back. His smaller body drove through the much larger man.
The man pitched forward with his arms flailing around.
And he tripped and fell over the edge.
Theresa and Elio both grabbed the perimeter wall and looked over just as the body hit the street forty feet below.
The sound of the impact would’ve proven his fate even if the blood on the street didn’t.
The wet crack of bones breaking and organs bursting.
Theresa’s legs went numb. The strength holding her upright vanished and she slumped only to find a new strength holding her up.
Elio with an arm around her.
“Arrest them both for murder.”
They turned to see the Chief staring at them. Malice twisted his face. It slowly morphed into glee.
Which was even more frightening.
“They’ll be executed for this.”
CHAPTER FORTY
BETH wasn’t sure who was leaning on whom more, but there was definitely lots of support both needed and being given on both sides. She wrapped her arm around Mason’s torso and helped steady him as they climbed the steps toward their makeshift home.
It wasn’t that it was a bad house.
It was a good house.
Two months ago, it would’ve cost millions of dollars to own.
It just wasn’t their home.
It wasn’t the cozy space where her family had shared so many happy memories.
Looking up at the face of the house and all the houses packed together on either side, she wondered if it would ever feel like home.
Or if she wanted it to.
Maybe that was the bigger question.
Would anyplace, anywhere, for anyone, ever feel like home again?
She had her doubts.
At least for people her age or older.
Thirty-four wasn’t ancient, even if the past two months had multiplied the emotional mileage far beyond what the numerical years might indicate. It was more that she’d lived so many years on the other side of the apocalypse.
Before the outbreak, she would’ve reasonably believed that she’d lived less than half her life to that point. Sixty-eight wasn’t so old in the modern day. She vaguely remembered some article that said women on average in the United States lived to over eighty years old.
What would the average be after so many people had died so horribly?
And what about the new average, in the new world?
With so much uncertainty, and so little stability, eighty years seemed like a wildly optimistic forecast.
More, it seemed foolish.
“Spill the beans,” Mason said as he stared into her eyes.
“You’re not the boss of me,” she replied with a grim smile.
“Wouldn’t presume to be, Mrs. West. Now, help me inside.”
She poked him in the ribs. “Don’t push it, or you’ll be taking care of yourself.”
“I’m not afraid of taking care of myself. I did it every day as a teenager. Sometimes several times a day.”
An image of her husband taking care of himself leapt into her mind. She slapped his butt. “If this is an attempt at seduction, you’re not remotely on target.”
That wasn’t totally true.
How could his butt still be so firm after so many years together?
He definitely wasn’t the type to let it all go after tying the knot. Besides, his chosen career would never allow him to become slovenly. Not the way Mason approached it, at least.
He shrugged. “Hey, I’m beat up and not thinking straight.” He slipped a hand around her backside and squeezed. “I still deserve some A for effort.”
She opened the door and helped him inside.
It was still early in the morning and the house was quiet with everyone sleeping. Maybe she could get an hour of sleep before the usual noise and activity of the day began.
An hour that might be utilized in other ways.
It had been awhile. Maybe a week since their last time together. In the old world, a week would’ve been the max duration of inactivity and that usually would’ve centered around her time of the month.
In the new world, who knew what the new patterns would be?
Everything was new and different. And much of it not for the better.
She kissed his cheek and nipped his ear. “You need some rest. After that, we’ll discuss what you deserve.”
She helped him out of his coat. “A patrol team came by the house yesterday asking if we’d seen anyone suspicious around. Did that have something to do with what happened at the 101 security checkpoint? ”
Mason groaned as he pulled his arms out. “Yeah. Whoever it was smashed through the Golden Gate and 101 stations and then disappeared. He or she is still at large.”
“Should we be worried?”
Mason chewed his lip. “Probably best to stay home until the police locate the person or persons involved.”
“Want to lay down on the couch?”
“Have to hit the backyard first.”
The house had a small deck and a patch of grass in the back. Patch of grass was decidedly accurate, too. A six by ten foot rectangle of yard that was likely once the pride and joy of the building’s previous owners. None of the current residents had yet spent much time back there or done much to keep it up.
“Why?” she asked.
“I have to pee and it’s going to be awhile before I get close to another toilet.”
“You okay on your own?”
He hobbled toward the kitchen and the backdoor beyond. “I’ll be fine.”
“I’m going to check on the girls.”
The girls, with an s at the end.
Such a strange and yet normal way of thinking about their expanded family. Noor and Iridia had become a part of the family. Beth had become something like a mother to them.
She went downstairs and stopped at the door to Theresa’
s bedroom. She listened for a moment and didn’t hear anything. Not that she expected to. Theresa wasn’t the snoring or loud breathing type. Not since they’d had her adenoids removed when she was a little girl.
Beth eased the door open and peeked inside. The light from the hallway cast a sliver across the carpet and her bed.
Her empty bed.
Beth pushed the door open and stepped inside. She glanced around. No Theresa. She walked back out and saw the downstairs bathroom was also empty.
The alarm bells ringing on the fringes of her consciousness seemed like an overreaction. She heard them but figured it was more due to raw nerves than anything real. What did she expect?
Her husband nearly got his ass literally blown off. She was going to be jumpy for awhile.
Even so, she headed upstairs to the main floor and then again upstairs to check in Iridia’s room. The girls had probably decided to sleep close by each other after Beth had called to say she wouldn’t be home until late last night.
She didn’t think there was any way they could know the true danger that Mason had been in, but the break in routine probably didn’t reassure them.
Surprises these days weren’t good things.
She was about to throw open the door to Iridia’s room when Mason called to her from downstairs.
“Beth! Oh my God. Beth!”
The alarm bells broke from the edges and clanged wildly through her nervous system.
She ran downstairs to find Mason staring at his phone.
He looked up at her and his expression stopped her heart. She’d seen the emotion countless times in recent months, just never on him.
Fear.
With trembling fingers, he turned the screen toward her.
It was a picture of Theresa and Elio. Elio’s head was shaved and he looked terrible.
Both wore orange jumpsuits.
Behind bars.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Text below the image said Emergency Broadcast Alert. Please Standby…
The three little dots at the end blinked on and off.
Like a heartbeat waiting to be cut short.
Beth clutched her chest.
Mason stared at the screen, his brows knitted together in confusion.
It couldn’t be real.