by Tyler Lahey
“What’s wrong with you? I have to babysit you twice in two days?”
“Thank god. The king has arrived,” Terrence cooed.
“Someone chain this fucking dog,” Liam ventured, his voice higher than he had wanted.
“The young lovers seem to have a problem with my allocation of resources.”
Harley shoved her way through the crowd. “He took almost all the heavy drugs for his crew,” she said, to the group’s amusement.
Duke and Wilder jostled in, making sure to flank Jaxton. They looked to him expectantly, prepared to hang on every word even if they did not realize it.
“Did you not, in your wisdom, ask me to put together a team after our little…altercation in the gym yesterday… and scavenge the houses in town for canned food?” Terrence demanded.
Liam saw Jaxton bristle. “I did.”
“Which I have done.” Terrence said, gesturing to the twenty or so men and women that had now gathered. “And I had to risk my life to do it. I had to kill six of those fuckers, our there, beyond these walls. So if I want my team to have the best drugs, so what?”
“Everyone does their part,” Liam snapped as he massaged his neck.
Terrence chuckled. “Some more than others! Why shouldn’t those who risk their flesh outside this citadel get the better share of the spoils?!”
The crowd responded. Those who fought outside with Terrence jeered their approval. Others, whom he had stolen from, leered at, or attacked remained silent or grimaced.
“That’s not for you to decide,” Harley growled.
“Then who is it for to decide?”
Bennett, who had been wavering on the fringes, now dove in. “This is the kind of thing that’s going to get us all killed. We can barely govern ourselves, let alone fight the infected.” The crowd jeered again with an even mixture of approval and displeasure.
“How far out are they? This other group.” Jaxton queried intensely.
Bennett stared straight ahead. “Two days, now.”
Without thinking, Terrence snatched up his assault rifle, one of the few in their care. “You again. Your eye looks a little messed up. You need a woman to fix you up.”
“I think it looks good on me,” Bennett countered, drawing the laughs of several in the boisterous crowd.
“Ahhh, I had forgotten. I hear you had a woman, and then our king Jax took him from you.” Terrence spat. “I don’t blame him. You’re weak.”
Terrence shoved his way through the onlookers, taking six or seven others with him. The rest of the crowd remained silent, taut as a bowstring, their eyes flipping between Bennett and Jaxton.
“If you don’t do something about him, I will.” Bennett sputtered, his face ruby red.
…
“I thought I’d find you in here.” The beauty stalked in, one foot placed lightly over the other, like a cat.
Jaxton didn’t turn, but smiled appreciatively, already anticipating the warm touch of dancing fingers. “I did ask you to find me, didn’t I?”
Miniature pillars of black smoke hustled skywards from the flickering wax columns. His map spread to each corner of the heavy wooden table. Adira laid her long fingers down on the heavy art-paper, stitched together meticulously. Here were the ridges of the valley, protecting the town on all sides like earthen walls. He had drawn out every street, every unique building. Certain areas were marked with green tape, where she knew teams had already searched for food and supplies. Red areas were untouched.
“May I enter the lord’s chamber?”
He smiled, his chiseled face newly shaven. “You may.”
“How does it feel? Playing King of the Castle?”
Jaxton chuckled. “I suppose I should say something like, it’s overrated, right? Isn’t that what would I should say?”
She inhaled the smoke in the room, and felt a dozen memories of summer bonfires sweep into her.
“You should say what you feel,” she said seriously.
He frowned. “Well, I love it.”
She nodded, approvingly. “Go on.”
“Do you know how many miles it is from the Western Ridge, to the Eastern one?” He continued, gesturing over his map. “Twelve miles. And we exist as we decide. We are bound by no one’s laws but our own.”
“So you enjoy the power? I like that you do, but you have some work to do. Terrence. Bennett. They threaten the Kingdom.” Her dark eyes smiled, teasing.
“You know I wasn’t always Superman.”
“No? How could that be?”
He taped another green tab to the map, just under The Cathedral. “When I was still in high school, in these halls, I was obsessed with making sure people didn’t think I was a coward. That’s where my boldness came from, I think. It was born of my being frightened. Fear of shame. Rather than be paralyzed by inaction, I trained myself to do. Just do without thinking. As long as it meant I didn’t freeze up.”
“I can’t even imagine you frozen by fear.”
“One time I was slapped in the face, at lunch. Scrawny little me didn’t do a thing, in front of fifty kids, all staring at me. Gave them something to talk about for a few weeks. Told myself I took the high road. Don’t accelerate the fight. I was being the bigger man.” Jaxton sighed, his tired eyes wrinkling slightly. “That’s bullshit. Cowards don’t strike back. Cowards don’t act.”
“One slap when you were 14 doesn’t mean a thing.”
Jaxton kept talking as he moved his pieces around the map. “But that was the problem with our generation. Our parents were obsessed with pacifism, and lawsuits. They were the kids that grew up in the 70s. Don’t. Hit. Back, they said. That’s what I grew up believing.”
“So you started fighting back…” Adira said expectantly.
“Of course not! I’d have been sued, or expelled. Kids fought wars with words, dripping with sarcasm and insensitivity. I was never good at that. I would stumble over my words in shame. They were never very sharp. Never very cunning. My instinct, suppressed of course, was to answer physically. Society suppressed my instincts, and I suffered for it.”
“Your greatest fear. It’s shame?”
He looked at her, nodding with his green eyes sharp in the soft firelight.
“That’s why I love this place. This time. Because the rules that forced me to use cunning or hold my fists at my sides are gone. Because I never have to confront that shame. I’m good at doing things with my body. If someone insults me, I hit them.”
“I don’t understand it. But I love you.”
Jaxton pressed her hips against the table, sure in that moment he felt as she did. He didn’t say it, though. In the back of his mind, he knew it could change so quickly. He had been here before. But it didn’t matter. Not now.
He broke off their kiss. “2003 was a great year for music.”
Adira laughed, confused. “What the hell are you talking about?”
He held up a finger, and drew something out from under the oaken table.
“Oh my god! Where did you find that?!” Her fingers explored the vintage boom-box system, marveling at something they wouldn’t have given a second look six months ago. “But we ran out of batteries in August didn’t we?”
“I found it in one the houses.” He popped open the back. “Yeah, unfortunately you need six of those big batteries.”
Without another word Jaxton dropped a handful into her hands.
She counted them. “There’s six here.” He smiled. She stuffed them into the ports eagerly; she hadn’t heard music since before the fall of man. “But it takes CDs!”
Jaxton drew a single case out of his jacket pocket. “Perhaps you thought I had forgotten what you told me in June, when we both got far too drunk off that $200 whiskey. You told me about that instrumental music you used to listen to, the songs that could almost move you to tears if you let them.”
“I still think about it, and how much I miss hearing it…but this is it… you found it.”
He rose and shut the si
ngle door. The candles continued to flicker. He sat close to her, so she could feel the heat radiating from him. Aside from that, they didn’t touch, but it was enough. Adira let the volume roll over her, taking her to another time and place entire. Her mind raced and swayed, so long had it been bereft of dreaming. She gorged on it, feeling her heart sweeping as the music played. In an instant she remembered all the times she had been moved by a song, by a film, by a vista, by a touch. She opened her eyes slightly in a final moment of self-consciousness, to peer at Jaxton. His eyes were clamped shut, and he clenched her hand. Overjoyed, she closed her eyes once more. The music had never been more pure, more powerful. Her spine tingled its excited retort, and she felt overjoyed. Never in her whole life, had her own heart been more stirred.
Chapter Five
Tessa sized Adira up as she approached. The girl had a dark leather jacket on, and like the rest of them had shin guards and rough gloves on to protect against any bites. There was a knife strapped to her thigh, and she had a rifle slung across her back. The two of them had begun a strong, if mildly awkward, friendship. A younger man, Wilder, hurried along at Adira’s side. His gait was not casual in the slightest, though he aimed for it to be. There was a light dusting of hair growing along his chin-line.
“Really uppin the douche-factor there, Wilder. With those chin straps, I mean.” Tessa teased, walking across the little bridge towards them.
Wilder beamed, and aimed to manufacture a cocky manner. “I’d say it’s more prominent than Duke’s, which, is all that matters.”
Duke shouted from the opposite bank, his chubby form heaving as he loaded another boulder into a wheelbarrow. “I’m standing, literally right here. I can actually hear everything you’re saying, just so you’re aware.”
Wilder waved his hand, shifting his own rifle to a scarred hand with mottled flesh. The burn marks extended up his arm, and disappeared under his own heavy shirt. Tessa felt a wave of empathy sweep through her chest.
“The leaves are dying.” Adira said mournfully, eyeing the streaks of reds and browns that surrounded them. Dead leaves crunched beneath their feet. Tessa had sunk into a deep depression of sorts for a few days when she learned Jaxton had been with the dark-eyed girl standing before her, but to her own surprise it had evaporated swiftly. In its place, she felt relief. There was no one to impress. Who fucking cared? And little by little, Tessa began to regret she had ever cared in the first place.
“C’mon, we’re not doing this today. I found something, and I need all your help to bring it back here,” Tessa beamed.
The four of them crossed the river on the new footbridge, a series of wooden beams and logs rammed into the riverbed in front of the dam. The river gurgled and bubbled a strong course through the rock dam. Looking over her shoulder, Tessa could spy the old Field House through the foliage. The fishing pond was a short distance from the school itself. She bounded across the footbridge, noting with pleasure the four feet of water that was building up behind their dam. As they leapt over a colonial style fence into an overgrown backyard, Tessa eyed the burn marks again.
“Wilder, will you tell us about your arm?”
“That’s a fairly private question,” he said, eyeing the collage of autumn colors around them warily.
“Have we not all bonded over the last three weeks, day in and day out building that god damn dam?”
Wilder chuckled lightly, and then indicated his buddy, Duke. “He can tell you.”
Duke cringed behind them and shrugged elaborately. Tessa liked him, because he never complained, and he never lost his cool. “I certainly can, but it’s not the type of story you want to hear over a meal.” Duke hefted a hatchet in his right hand, something he always had on him.
“Luckily I don’t see any food.”
“Very well. As you wish,” he chuckled. He cleared his throat elaborately, as Tessa and Adira hurried him along, impatient.
“Wilder here and me, well we had just made it across the Bridge.”
“The GW? Out of New York?”
“Same one. Before they blew it. You probably saw it on TV. There were thousands of people. I mean, it was beyond anything I had ever seen. Packed like seething animals, for miles in any direction, struggling in the dark. They had abandoned their cars in all directions, and most of them didn’t even work because of that EMP. The Army was sending us south in trucks, so we boarded up, made it to Camden. They had a massive refugee camp set up in these warehouses outside the city, and for a few days everything was dandy.”
Duke paused to kick a lawn ornament at a house. He raised his arms in triumph as it crashed through a window.
“Its good! But anyways then the infected broke through the Guard’s lines in Jersey. There was some huge rout, all along the Delaware. A bunch of refugee camps were overwhelmed because of it, I learned after. Anyways, the army totally panicked. Abandoned the center. Rushed tons of troops back across the Delaware. Left us behind. The first time me and Wilder saw them was crossing the bridges into Philly. The crowd started to swell and press. People got trampled, just a screaming, pushing mass of bodies. Bodies all over the road. We were trampling on them. No one cared. Me and Wilder jumped into the river. Made it to the other side and watched. There were hundreds of them, just a wall of the infected eating their way through the crowd. The people could barely move, so they were eaten to death where they stood. And the ones that survived, well they started to turn too. That’s when we ran. The Air force, I guess, started dropping firebombs.”
Duke picked a brown apple off the long grass and took a bite. Shrugging, he continued. “Young Wilder’s got the burns all up that one side of his body. We were in a subway station. The flames still came down the manholes.” He nodded his head, pleased with the fruity meal. He jumped atop an abandoned Honda Civic that had crashed against a telephone pole.
Tessa looked to Adira, who stared in concern, her mouth open in shock.
“That pretty much cover it, Wilder?” Duke tossed the apple and jumped down.
“That pretty much covers it, Duke.” Wilder stared at the ground as he walked.
“Why did you come here, to Pennsylvania?” Adira asked.
“Had to get west. We saw that signal fire one night. Bennett’s.”
“Where are your families?”
Duke shrugged, “laying up on a beach in Cancun, or dead. I spend a little time every day working to forget them.”
“Admirable.” Tessa said, pausing to rummage through a pile of luggage left on someone’s front lawn, long overdue for a proper mowing.
Adira shot a glance back to Wilder, who’s juvenile confidence was all gone.
“They’re just ahead,” Tessa whispered, breaking into a trot across a field lined with maple trees.
“They?” The others followed, curious.
A giant barn sat in the midst of the field, tall grass masking it from the road. The paint was peeling off its rusted doors. Duke grinned, “oh boy.”
When Tessa slid open the door, it screeched in protest. A wave of decay hit them like a wall.
Among the stalls and open bays, there were massive piles of rotting hay. Five horses lounged about, munching on it and standing in piles of their own excrement. Their coats were shaggy and overgrown, and their eyes were wild. Tessa herded them to the rear of the stables, where there was another door. Nodding, she flung it open and the horses burst out, neighing in a frenzy. The beasts broke into excited gallops, feeling the cool wind kissing their matted hair. When one of them approached the wooden fence enclosing them in the space, it balked and turned, eager to charge across the open ground to the other side. In the distance, one of the ridges surrounding the town rose high, coated in an unbroken collage of fierce reds, proud yellows, and somber browns. Against this background, the horses charged across the field with glee in their hearts such as they had never imagined, extending their proud muscles until they swelled with blood. Duke mounted the wooden fence and whooped crazily, cheering the scene. Tessa smiled, and
saw Adira marveling as well. She looked to Wilder, who stood with trembling lips. His proud eyes welled with tears, and he smiled.
….
“I’m getting a team together, and we’re going. Spare me the chivalry.”
Jaxton sputtered. “I’m being selfish. Let the other team go. Is it so crazy I don’t want to sit here and wonder if you’re going to be ambushed? The infected are still in the valley. The runners find them on almost every mission. It won’t be safe till we clear it and control the gorges.”
Adira buckled the backpack on, feeling it tight across her boyish chest. “We’re going past the old factory, through the Cathedral, down into the Backwoods.”
Jaxton tapped a finger on the massive map that lay sprawled out on the table in front of him. It had been drawn on giant sheets, reflective of buildings that had already been inspected. “That area hasn’t been swept yet. Choose another.”
“Of course it hasn’t been swept yet. It’s the only area we haven’t raided. There’s no more food, is there?”
Jaxton grimaced, thumping the oak lightly with his dry knuckles, “We’re running low, yes.”
Adira crossed to him and touched his hand, softening her gaze. “Then that’s where I have to go.”
He stood straight. “I’ll come with.”
She laughed softly, and shook her head. “No, you won’t. I haven’t done one of these in the 4 months we’ve been here. I’ve got a team, and I’m taking them in and out.”
Jaxton exhaled sharply, feeling his stomach grumble. Two cans of cubed ham rumble around in his belly. He knew he was losing weight.
Already knowing the decision had been made, he drew her close. “We still have some batteries left.” A heavy, military grade hand-radio was placed into her slender grip. “Do not hesitate to call. I’ll be ready.”
…
Adira stalked out into the makeshift garage area outside the brick science wing, where the others had gathered. Wilder and Duke grasped their rifles nervously, making sure to nod when they saw her. She restrained herself from responding too vigorously. She was in command here. Of them all, Tessa looked the most relaxed. The girl squatted atop an ATV, filing her nails with a worn sniper rifle slung across her back. Elvis stared straight ahead. Adira’s eyes lingered on his shotgun. It was Bennett’s, she knew.