by Ryan Schow
It feels like it’s been forever since we’ve held each other like this. It’s almost like our bodies understand this and won’t let go. Then he steps away, leans forward and kisses me on the mouth and I swear it’s like something in my chest opens up again and I can breathe.
When our mouths come apart, I say, “Let me clean your cut, see if we need stitches.”
We head upstairs where there is a long hallway and three bedrooms. Rex and Macy are in rooms next to each other and we’re at the end of the hall. In the master.
I pop my head in Macy’s bedroom and she’s stretched out on a full-sized bed that’s taking up most of the space. There are posters of Japanese anime and a Fight Club poster, and the bed is gender neutral with stuffed animals that could either be for a boy or a girl. There’s also a small desk with papers and pencils out, and a Captain America action figure. It’s cute.
“You’re going to get the bed dirty,” I say, thinking about the comforter.
“It’s like being on clouds, Mom!” she replies.
“Pretty soon those clouds will just be pillows of dust if you’re not careful.”
Spinning over and burying her face in the sheets, she says, “They smell like summertime.”
Smiling, happy she’s no longer forced to sleep on a couch, I leave her to her room. Rex is further down the hall, at the end of the house where there’s a window facing Dirt Alley, and Indigo’s home. He’s standing at the window, his body relaxed but his mind working overtime for sure.
“Stalker to the end,” I say.
He doesn’t even flinch at the sound of my voice, at the subtle suggestion, or offense, depending on how he looks at it.
“If you were a guy,” he asks, not even turning around, “wouldn’t you be, too?”
I think about it and it doesn’t take long for me to answer.
“I suppose so.”
“Do you think I should be embarrassed for passing out after getting shot? I mean, is that normal?”
“Yes, and no. Well, maybe sometimes.”
He gives a defeated laugh that’s tortured by longing, or perhaps fatigue. He then turns around with this wondrous light in his eyes and says, “The way she just went to work on those guys, like it didn’t affect her one bit—and how she interrogated the blonde at Walgreen’s—it’s like we were two halves of a whole with perfect lines between us. Like we fit. Like she was that missing thing I didn’t know I wanted until I saw her in action and decided she was the one.”
“Little brother,” I hear myself saying, sad, careful not to wipe my feet on the platitudes of his mind, “you’re always falling in love with the wrong girls at the wrong time.”
His eyes clear, like his trance is momentarily broken. He licks his lips and says, “I saw a lot of terrible things overseas. We did some…some bad things.” He just stands there, silent and unmoving, the memories in his head having their way with him. “You can’t love anything over there. You don’t want to.”
I want to cross the room, wrap my arms around him. It’s not the right time, though. Whatever his brain is pulling from the past, however horrifying the memories might be, I’ve been around him long enough to let him be in them. His therapist said he needs to stay in them to be able to understand them, and to eventually let them go.
“So when I get back to the states,” he says, “and I see all these beautiful people just living their lives, not trying to kill you, not plotting to kill each other, I think that maybe it’s okay to relax, to put my guard down, and so I do just that.”
His eyes start to water, his features bending to the horrors. He’s looking at me, seeing me, yet that’s not exactly true. His eyes aren’t even focused. All he can see are the times and places that ruined him, and all those little traumas he can’t quite to bury.
Then something shifts and he begins to speak. “The second I let my guard down and kept it down, I began to see things differently, all the love that refused to…to…it just comes flooding forth at once. It’s honestly…a bit overpowering.”
The tears drip over and now I can see he’s seeing me. He wipes his eyes as the memories become physical pain.
Now it’s time.
Walking to him, pulling him into the safety of my arms, I tell him the things he needs to hear. “You’re not safe here, but you’re loved. You won’t ever forget those memories, because you can’t, because you won’t, but you’ll make new ones. Maybe they’ll be with us, maybe they will be with other people. But they’ll be new.”
“I like Indigo,” he says, sniffling.
“We all sort of do, but she’s just a girl we didn’t know a few hours ago. She’s cute, good with a bow and her girl balls are gigantic, but she’s damaged, Rex. Something’s not quite right about her.”
“She’s damaged like me,” he whispers.
“Yes.”
“That could be a good thing, right?” he asks with hopeful eyes. “I mean, we could relate to each other about…you know, the stuff in our lives that happened to us. The stuff we’ve done.”
“It could be the perfect match, or it could be dysfunctional to the point of catastrophic. People who have too much in common, especially when it comes to surviving traumatic events, sometimes they can either heal each other or end up wrecking each other.”
He moves away from me, fixes himself and says, “You’re right. It’s best not to take a chance.”
“There are no absolutes,” I tell him, leaving room for hope.
He doesn’t run with it. Instead, he turns and pulls the drapes shut and says, “You’re right. Best to just forget about her.”
“How bad do you think this thing is,” I ask, changing subjects.
“Bad,” he says, his voice flat, completely devoid of emotion. He starts to take off his boots. His socks are in good shape, but one of them has a small hole in the heel that’s bound to get a lot bigger depending on how much walking we’re going to be doing in the days ahead.
“Do you think there’s a fix?”
“A nuclear EMP isn’t a temporary situation,” he says. He wipes his eyes. He’s almost back to normal. “It basically fries the grid and just about anything with a computer chip in it.”
“Pretty much everything has a chip in it these days.”
“Exactly.”
He pulls off his shirt and I turn because I can’t look at all the scars. It only serves to remind me of what happened to him. How he was taken hostage and beaten daily to within an inch of his life.
“I should really look at your head.”
“I’ve been feeling it and it’s mostly just a knot,” he says. “It won’t need stitches.”
“I should really clean it and see for myself,” I tell him.
“When you’re ready.”
A few minutes later I return. He’s laying in bed with the covers over him and his clothes folded in a neat stack on the floor. His shoes are placed beside them, neat, organized.
I take a look at where the thugs from the field hit him and it’s indeed a pretty nasty knot. But the cut isn’t deep or wide. I wipe the effected area with a damp cloth, dry it, then spritz the wound with the little brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide Indigo gave me.
I know it stings, but he doesn’t move.
Blowing on it will help, but he won’t speak to that either. The clear liquid mixes with a bit of blood and I dab the pink tears it’s making with a square of gauze from the suture kit. On closer inspection, the cut seems to be doing fine.
It just needs to breathe.
I lean forward, kiss the top of his head, then give the wound a hearty smack because that’s how they do it in the military. He grabs his head and fires me a look.
“Love you little brother.”
“Love you too, sis.”
Stanton is waiting for me when I get in the room. Immediately I walk into a space darkened by blackout drapes that are pulled shut. There is a flickering of light though, from a pair of candles burning on the night stands flanking the queen sized be
d. There’s plenty of daylight outside, but in here, there’s only mood lighting. My mind is suddenly divided between this hell we’re doing our damnest to survive and a romantic interlude with my husband—something neither of us have seen in the better part of a year.
“What’s this?” I ask.
I’m thinking maybe he hit his head a little harder than I realized if what he’s trying to do in the apocalypse is get laid. He hasn’t really been himself, though, not since the old lady. Perhaps he’s finally pulling out of it. Perhaps this will help.
Stanton is sitting in bed. Beside the bed is a pile of his dirty clothes. With an anticipatory look on his face , one side of the bed’s comforters are pulled open like an invitation.
“Lock the door,” he says.
I do.
“Take off your clothes,” he says.
I take them off, not too slowly, but not in a rush either.
“I’m filthy,” I say, feeling the gunk in my hair, the dryness of my skin, specifically around my eyes and across my forehead.
“That’s the girl I know and love,” he says with a grin.
“No, I mean like, I’m dirty.”
“So we’ll have dirty sex and then we’ll wash each other later. I have two bottles of water with your name on them.”
Yeah, I think with a grin, my husband is coming back.
“Did you save one for yourself?” I ask, playful.
“I did.”
He pats the bed, telling me to come.
As exhausted as I am, as overwhelmed as this day has left me—as these last weeks have left me—I see the man I fell in love with and I don’t want him to go away again.
So I go to him.
I slide into a the bed where the sheets are cool, but luxurious and soft. The soft cooing that escapes me is the linen’s doing, and the mattress’s doing. But after that, all the little noises I make, all the powerful exultations, that’s purely Stanton’s doing.
When we’re done, we just hold each other until it’s time to bathe and maybe try to find something to eat.
Stanton washes me in the tub; I wash him as well. We dry each other off, then try to find some clothes in a closet that’s not ours. There are clothes that are clean, but they’re a bit big. Whatever. We don’t care. At least I don’t care. There was no way I was getting back into the heap of an outfit I left on the floor beside the bed.
Downstairs, we all meet for an early dinner. It’s tuna and soda crackers. It’s warm Sprite with a freshly opened pack of Oreo’s for dessert.
We don’t say much, other than Macy telling us she loves her room and Rex asking if there are more clean clothes where ours came from.
“Of course,” Stanton says.
“Go pick out an outfit, if you want,” I tell Rex. He seems a bit down, but that’s because he’s still brooding over deciding to let Indigo go.
He’ll see her again, though, and maybe he’ll go back to trying to get her, or perhaps he’s not going to engage in the chase. Either way, this side of Rex is as hard to watch as the side of him that’s overly optimistic.
That night I have a hard time sleeping. It’s too quiet. For the last few weeks I’ve loved the quiet, but only because this soft reverence, this burst of peacefulness, was what followed the bombing runs that had been going on all day long almost non-stop.
Now it’s only stillness, and silence.
It’s too eerie.
“What do you think we should do with this world?” I ask Stanton in the dark. It must be nearly ten when I ask this.
He mumbles something, then rolls over taking a bit of the covers with him. His head wound wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but it did require stitches. I touch the area around the wound, the area I cleaned and stitched up. Laying my hand flat on this head, I move my fingers into his hair.
“I think we should try to restore it,” I say.
“Me, too,” he says, groggy.
He probably won’t even remember this conversation, and I won’t blame him. I kind of want to do something for this city. Try to put it back together. Try to make it my home despite the many dangers of living here. But not tonight.
That will be tomorrow.
In the morning, we’ll figure out what to do, how to survive in this place. And if we can do that without killing anyone, well then, that will just be fantabulous.
Chapter Forty-Three
It was time. Outside the sun was setting, and already the temperature dropped a few degrees. Rider checked his hair, his teeth and his weapon, and then he took a deep breath and walked down the hall to Sarah’s room.
At her door, he knocked lightly. She opened it a minute later and he drew an involuntary breath.
“Yes?” she asked, clearly pleased by his reaction.
“Wow.” He froze, then realized what he was doing. He was staring. “I mean, you look nice, doc.”
“Sarah,” she said.
She wore a knit hat pulled loosely on a head of sandy brown hair, an attractive mid-length coat, tight jeans and ankle boots. This wasn’t exactly walking wear, but she was just about as beautiful as he’d ever seen.
He smiled, reached for her hand. She took it, closing and locking the door behind her. It was strange holding her hand, but he wanted to and she didn’t grow tense under his grip. He looked at her as they strolled through the dimly lit halls, then she looked up at him and said, “I like the way you look, too, Rider. How are your wounds?”
“They feel amazing,” he replied with a grin.
“There’s something about a tough guy I find…curious.”
“I’m not a tough guy,” he said. “Just someone trying to survive this mess long enough to see what’s on the other side.”
When they arrived at the door leading outside, Rider opened it, held it for her. He didn’t care what anyone said, chivalry wasn’t dead. At least, it wasn’t dying on his watch.
“Thank you.”
Outside, she took his hand this time, which thrilled him. He didn’t realize just how alone he felt until he found himself in the casual company of a new woman. Looking at her in the setting sun, a burning glow in the smoky eastern skies, he realized he was inexplicably drawn to her.
“What if there’s nothing on the other side of this?” she asked. “What if this is it?”
He stayed with this thought for a minute. He’d been wondering the same thing, especially after the lights went out and the power died. The EMP strike sacrificed the grid to take out the immediate threat. Did they have a new plan for restoring power, or was this simply a reactionary strike?
He assumed he already knew the answer. He could be wrong, though. He’d been wrong before and he’d certainly be wrong again.
“I guess we make do with what we have,” he said, the pain in his leg trying to get the best of him.
“Just like that?”
“I spent some time in country,” he said.
“Which country?”
“Not this one,” he replied. “You can’t predict what’s going to happen when you’re deep in enemy territory, or caught in a firefight with no way out. You just look around and make do with what you have. The guy next to you gets shot, you tell yourself he’s the lucky one, and then you dig in. You get captured, or shot, or trapped, you dig in long enough and hard enough to find an exit.”
“Did you always find an exit?”
This question spurred so many memories. When they were in the field, if they didn’t have a way out, more often than not they made one. They went through a door, a person, a village. If they didn’t have an escape route, they kicked a hole in whatever stood in their way knowing they were on their own and that the US government would disavow them if they were caught.
“Yes,” he answered, “we always found an exit.”
“Do you see one here?”
He held her eye and said, “Yes.”
“Where?”
They came up on one of the two guard posts, which was just a guy in the back of another truc
k with weapons enough to handle a small army.
“Evening,” the guard said with a subtle nod. He acknowledged Rider, but his eyes went directly to Sarah.
Rider thought the watchman’s name was Sal, but he couldn’t be sure. “How is it out there?”
Barely tearing his eyes off Sarah, he said, “Quiet.”
“On the street?”
The guy nodded and said, “On the street and in the air. You armed?”
“Of course,” he said.
They didn’t know each other yet, because the group inside the college was growing well into the dozens and he wasn’t the social type, but there would be plenty of time in the future to remedy that. Still, he didn’t have to stare. Then again, the man had a sturdy look about him. Like he had no problem going to knuckles in a tussle. So maybe he looked at Sarah a bit too long, and maybe he liked what he saw.
Rider smiled, didn’t blame the guy. The penance for dating a good looking woman was that other men would always see in her what he’d first seen. She was beautiful. So beautiful and young to the world, in fact, that girls with looks and a body like hers would always draw the eye of many an aggressive man.
“Sarah,” the guard said with a polite nod.
“Sal,” she answered with a grin.
Rider pumped her hand lightly, prompting her to look at him. With bright eyes and an ease about her, she said, “Lead the way.”
“Be careful out there,” Sal warned. “Things can turn on a dime.”
“Don’t I know it,” Rider said.
Sarah and Rider walked up Ashbury Street, marveling at the canopy of telephone wires and the three and four story homes that looked like they all had a fresh face lift before this.
Rider was intensely aware of her, of her smells, the feel of her, how her hair was long and straight and he wanted to touch it, to brush it back from her face and tuck it behind one ear so he could better see her features—
Sarah turned and softened her eyes at him, and for the briefest moment, he realized she saw him. She saw his expression and she knew…
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Oh, this and that,” he said, playing coy.