by Justin Bell
Greer nodded. “Inevitable. Mall’s great and all, but we can’t stay here forever.”
Rhonda nodded, looking at the building that surrounded them. It had protected them for the past eight weeks. Helped them to stay alive and to heal, but Greer was right, as a home it was temporary… and there was Lydia. She couldn’t forget Lydia. They’d been in no shape to travel, no condition to venture deeper into the city which Liu said had been called the “wild, wild west” by one of the border guards so long ago. They couldn’t risk it.
Only, they had to risk it. Eventually they’d have to.
“You speak the truth like usual, Clancy,” Rhonda said, then reached out and patted his chest. “Heal up, okay? Get better. We need your eyes, your brain, and your trigger finger.”
Greer nodded as Rhonda turned to walk away.
Rounding a corner, she approached the front of the mall, seeing Max and Brad approach, walking from the entrance. Most of the front of the building sat boarded off with material stolen from a local home supply store. Eight weeks ago, in another life, they’d smashed a car through the front window and a helicopter had flown in, launching brackets of missiles, setting cars on fire and killing over a dozen men. A good chunk of the eight weeks since were spent cleaning up and salvaging the entrance, trying to prepare for any cold weather or any potential intruders. They’d left one door unblocked as an exit and entrance, but almost the entire rest of the front facing wall of windows was sheathed in plywood or planks.
“Morning, mom,” Max said as he approached.
“How long have you been awake?”
Max shrugged. “A while. We were talking to Dad and Winnie.”
“Winnie’s out there with him?”
Max nodded.
“So what you’re saying is, I’m the only one who slept in?”
Max shrugged. “You did get shot a couple months ago, mom.”
Rhonda looked at Brad. “Yeah, so did squirt here. And he’s up and at ‘em.”
“I’m good, Ms. Fraser,” he said.
“How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Rhonda. I’m good, Rhonda. Sorry,” Brad replied.
Rhonda smiled. “You know, Brad… if you want… you can call me ‘mom’.”
Brad’s smile faltered and his eyes pinched, just a little. He appeared speechless, and Rhonda wondered just how far she’d overstepped her bounds. It may have felt like a whole new life, but it was still only just over two months since his parents died in front of him. Like it or not, he may not be emotionally ready to call someone else “mom.” Not now, maybe not ever. She couldn’t help but remember the cold, impassive look on his face when he’d shot Bruce Cavendish to death. His lack of emotion, concern or regret during the event or after had left her worried about his mindset.
“I’m sorry, honey,” Rhonda said, bending low and placing a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. You can call me whatever you want, okay?”
Brad nodded, his smile starting to slice back on his face. “Okay,” he whispered.
Rhonda stood and patted him on the back. “You guys get breakfast yet?”
“Is there any breakfast to get?” Max asked. “Angel pulled out some nasty looking donuts. Please tell me we have something better than that.”
Rhonda shrugged. “We should talk about a supply run.”
“Count us in,” Max replied and he and Brad continued walking, deeper into the mall. Rhonda turned and looked at them, two pre-teen boys who were adults in all the ways it mattered. She would have been awful proud of them if she wasn’t so petrified of what the world was doing to them.
She looked out at the boarded planks and visualized Phil and Winnie out there in her mind. Father and daughter, two peas in a pod. Just like her and Lydia had always been before she’d left for college. Rhonda felt a swift pang in her gut, like someone reached inside and pinched her, the pain flowing, then blossoming to a hot bloom in her chest. Was it fear? Fear for her missing child? Or jealousy? Jealousy for the daughter still here who seemed to prefer her father’s company?
Rhonda shook it away and walked toward the entrance. There were enough problems in the world today without maternal angst getting in the way.
***
“Is that coffee? Tell me that’s coffee,” Phil said, looking over toward Winnie as she rounded the corner of the mall. Winnie glanced down at the cup in her hand, but shook her head.
“No, sorry, Dad,” she said. “Just water. Only cups I could find were coffee cups.”
Phil blew out a long, exasperated sigh. “Shoulda known.”
“In case you don’t remember, Dad, we have no power. How exactly would we make coffee? Chew up some beans and spit ‘em out in cold water? Gross.”
“At this point I just might take a sip.”
“You’re nasty.” Winnie extended her arm, offering the cup of water and her father accepted it, smirking.
“Thanks, hon. Mom still sleeping?”
“She was when I saw her last,” Winnie said.
Phil took a sip of the lukewarm water and lowered the cup. “You could just set a fire, you know?”
“What?” Winnie asked, looking at him.
“Set a fire, boil water, put the grounds through a filter?”
“How has this never come up in eight weeks?”
“That’s what I’m saying!”
“Are you complaining about coffee again?” Rhonda asked, squeezing through the narrow door left uncovered at the front of the mall. Phil looked over at her.
“Of course. If I wasn’t complaining, you’d think something was wrong with me.”
“Eh, I already think something’s wrong with you,” Rhonda replied. Winnie snorted.
“Ah, we’ve got two comedians here now. Great. Just what we need. Most people in America are dead, and the ones still alive all think they’re hilarious.”
“Well, didn’t we wake up on the wrong side of the sidewalk this morning,” Rhonda said, laughing.
She looked out over their makeshift kingdom, castle Lakeview sitting wide and flat behind her, a sprawling complex of plaster, glass, and concrete, a tribute to the last century’s brutal, ugly consumerism. Back in the day when having options to shop meant building a multi-million-dollar complex, not sitting at a keyboard. All of a sudden it occurred to her that this might just be the future of consumerism. Just as the infrastructure had died, for all intents and purposes, online shopping had died, petering out into that vague and strange “cloud” like a rainstorm that had brewed but never fallen. The parking lot was wide and sparse ahead of her, the front approach still filled with the large, metal beast that was the Augusta Westland AW139 transport helicopter that had been used to transport Orosco and Fields up to their rescue. Now it sat there in the parking lot, cold, hard, and useless. Empty fuel tanks, empty rocket pods, and with no pilot to fly it, it might as well have been an ornately carved metal statue, and some days she saw it as such, until the wind blew just right and one of the rotors moved in the warm air.
The burnt-out skeletons of the van and two cars were still tangled and ravaged near the front entrance, a strange testimonial to the fiery combat that had “won” the Frasers their stake at Lakeview. The combat that had taken Liu, Orosco, and Harrison, and had killed Bruce Cavendish. A lot happened between the walls of Lakeview, and Rhonda preferred not to be reminded of it, but there was little they could do about the cars. It had been tough enough to pull the front of one of them out of the windows of the mall so they could be boarded up. Even thinking about trying to move the others would be difficult to say the least.
Not difficult. Impossible. A chore that required heavy equipment they didn’t have or manpower she wasn’t sure even existed at this stage of the game. People were a commodity in the months after Armageddon, an increasingly valuable and necessary commodity. Every time they started to stock some of that capital, something happened to burn it all away. Burn it away or blow it up, one or the other.
“How’s the shoulder this m
orning, Win?” Rhonda asked.
Winnie rotated it halfway, grimaced, then moved it back the other way. “Rebecca took the stitches out. Seems to be healing okay, just a little sore.”
Rhonda nodded and smiled, proud of her daughter’s apparent resilience while also feeling saddened that her little girl now knew what it was like to recover from a bullet wound. She looked over to Phil. “So I take it things were peaceful last night?”
Phil nodded his reply. “Heard some racket a little before dawn,” he said. “It was far away, but something definitely went up in flames.”
“From the direction of the city?” Rhonda asked.
Phil shook his head. “Nope. South. Toward Peoria.”
Following the direction of his words, she turned and looked that way, as if she might see something if she looked hard enough.
“Think it was by the barricades?” she asked.
Phil shrugged. “Couldn’t really tell.”
Rhonda didn’t reply. There were times that Phil’s lack of attention to detail bothered her, but he’d been awake all night, and had been running shifts more often than not, so how could she get mad if he couldn’t quite remember every last detail? Would she expect herself to if she were in his place?
“You talk to Greer lately?” Phil asked.
Rhonda nodded. “This morning for a minute.”
“How’s he feeling?”
It was Phil’s way of asking when he might dial back these crazy night watch sessions, and Rhonda knew that, and she felt bad for him. He’d volunteered, but that was several weeks ago, and none of them had expected his shifts to drag on quite this long. Angel, Fields, and Rhonda filled in from time to time, and had to turn away the kids from doing the same, but Phil knew Rhonda needed to rest. She was still two months removed from a bullet wound that had narrowly missed her clavicle, and although she had survived with little to no side effects, she still needed more rest than he did. Honestly, she’d been feeling better, and part of her wondered if Phil purposefully took her shifts to make himself feel better about his place in their relationship, which had become far more passive than it once was. Rhonda had always been more aggressive and more forthcoming, but as the majority breadwinner, Phil had maintained a certain sense of being the lead in the relationship. He kept them afloat.
Money no longer mattered, and Phil’s skill set didn’t translate. He’d come a long way since the incident, learning some basic firearms tactics, and rudimentary hand-to-hand combat training, but it had been slow going and meanwhile Rhonda had emerged as the true leader of their little crew. Not only that, but she was a wizard with the trigger and had some fighting skills to boot. Things that Phil had never known about until that fateful day at her parents’ cabin. The day she’d killed Lance Cavendish.
The day everything began.
Phil looked over at Rhonda as her eyes scanned the parking lot, and he couldn’t help but feel thankful for her. Her skills had saved them on several occasions since this all started and he tried very hard not to be resentful of her new place in the family hierarchy. It was a different world now with different priorities.
Still, he had to do what he could do to maintain some semblance of usefulness in the new family dynamic, even if it was just literally acting as a set of open eyes at ungodly hours in the morning.
“Greer seems to be okay,” Rhonda replied. “He fought off that infection from the gunshot wound, and he seems to be fighting this off, even if it took three pharmacy’s worth of antibiotics. He’s a tough old cuss.” Rhonda felt like she was lying even as she said it. Greer put up a strong fight and refused to show weakness in front of the others, but in truth, she could see him struggling.
Phil nodded, taking another pained sip of tepid water.
“Is he okay enough to… you know?” Winnie asked.
“What?” Rhonda replied, turning toward her daughter.
“Well, we’ve been stuck here for a while. I know we’ve been waiting for him to get healthy. But it feels like we’ve settled here. Are we?”
“Are we what? Settling here?” Rhonda wasn’t sure how to approach this question. She didn’t know what answer Winnie wanted to hear. In the end, she told the truth. “No. We’re not settling here. We’re going to find your sister.”
Winnie nodded firmly.
“Any leads on that front?” Phil asked.
A low clatter emerged from the helicopter sitting in the parking lot several yards away. Rhonda turned toward it, then back at Phil, gesturing back at the aircraft with a thumb.
“It’s in her hands at this point.”
Phil’s face twisted into a look she didn’t recognize. A mixture of hesitation and mistrust. The realization that the future of their family may lay in the hands of a rogue FBI Agent from deep in the heart of Texas that they hadn’t even met before eight weeks ago.
“You read my mind,” Rhonda said, her eyes fixated on the helicopter. She remained standing where she was, facing the rising sun with her husband and youngest daughter.
As she stared at the pale globe making its way up the dawn sky, she wondered if Lydia was out there somewhere looking at the same sight. Was she out there? Was she out there with her parents? And if she was, was she there voluntarily?
Rhonda’s whole existence felt like a very different place now than it had eight weeks ago, the foundation of the last five years of her life shaken. Not crumbled, not yet, but significantly weakened to the point of being fragile. Dangerously fragile.
She had a complicated relationship with Gerald and Jodi Krueller, a relationship she had valued in recent weeks, tapping into much of the training she endured while growing up in their household. But it was a life so different from her own. Completely different from what she believed in, and at the time, she thought they’d supported her independence. They’d backed her desire to find her own identity apart from that remote cabin in the rural Colorado wilderness, finding a place she belonged.
But it was becoming more and more clear that while they were buying Lydia expensive gifts and inviting her out to their cabin for the summer, they were sowing some seeds. Putting some things in place to help sever her relationship with her mother and draw her toward their cause.
Some things her parents did while she was growing up drove her crazy, and in fact, played a role in driving her away, but she’d never considered them evil, bad people before. Just misguided. Would those same misguided people try to peel their own family apart?
And if so, why?
Rhonda had no idea, and if she was honest with herself, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
***
Rebecca Fields knelt on the hard, metal grate of the floor of the helicopter, leaning back on her heels, pressing closed fists to her hips, glaring at the pile of mixed papers splayed out on the floor in front of her. Her red hair was pulled back tight into a ponytail, as it usually was, draped lightly over her left shoulder, plastered to her pale face with early morning summer sweat.
“Ricky, Ricky, Ricky,” she muttered, thinking back to Agent Orosco and the time she’d spent serving with him. A life that felt like forever ago, but was only about ninety days in the past. Her time at the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been short, and she had been a trailblazer of sorts, getting accepted onto the FBI SWAT division out of Houston, a rare honor for a female agent. With the back of her hand she pushed aside a thick swath of her hair from the gentle slope of her forehead, blowing out a long, exhausted breath. In front of her, the pile of papers looked at once familiar and alien, a similar set of files she’d looked through a dozen times already in the past eight weeks, combing through them sheet by sheet. Glaring at the paper cuts on her fingers, she shook her head with exasperation, wondering just what she was expecting to find on her thirteenth run through that she hadn’t found in the previous twelve.
Ricky Orosco had brought a bunch of bankers boxes with them, though he’d never explained to her why, even during the seven hour trek from Texas to Chicago. They’d spen
t the time talking about Liu’s investigation, and about the ties between domestic militia and high-level government agency leaders, but all of their conversation had been hypothetical and non-specific. She’d suspected he had some kind of solid proof, but he’d offered nothing.
As she stared down at the papers in front of her, she wondered if he’d actually had proof, or maybe just some wild conspiratorial theories. Theories that had been born from Liu’s brain, theories that had gotten them both—and Harrison—killed. She hoped that wasn’t true, and knowing Orosco as she did, she suspected it wasn’t. He was too good of an agent to be pulled into vague conspiracy, and too thorough to believe any ham-fisted theory that was pitched to him. She could see it with Liu. She could see that kind of thing spinning out from his over-analytical brain, a mind potentially damaged by coming face to face with potential death and destruction itself. Had being within a foot of a potential nuclear detonation broken him somehow? Becky had no idea, and at this point she wasn’t equipped to find out. Liu was dead alongside Orosco and she was left to pick up the pieces.
So that’s what she’d been doing. But it felt like she was putting together a complex jigsaw puzzle with only half the pieces. She could make the edge and start to see the hint of a picture, but the most important pieces were missing, leaving her with a strange conglomeration of random colors and shapes, none of which made sense individually. Leaning forward she scooped up the paper, shuffling it around and starting to reorganize it based on record number and date. When Orosco had brought the bankers boxes along, he’d evidently just tossed paper records back in there with no sense of order, and Fields was fighting that every step of the way.
The light scuff of a shoe on pavement echoed behind her and she whirled toward the open cargo door on the side of the helicopter, reaching for the rifle lying on the floor nearby.
“Who is it?” she asked.
Angel peeked out from behind the wall of the aircraft, looking through the open door. “Just me,” Angel replied, snapping off a mock salute.