The Complex

by Courtney McPhail

  She held out the tray and he eyed it for a moment before he took it.

  “I want to apologize for lying about Glen,” he told her, “And also for talking to Audrey without your permission. I won’t ever do that again.”

  The sad way he looked at her and the earnestness in his eyes tore at her. She’d convinced this man that he had done something wrong simply by engaging with Audrey. He might have been wrong for hiding Glen but looking at him now, she knew that hadn’t been malicious on his part. He was just following orders.

  “You don’t have to apologize for any of it,” Veronica said, “And you can talk to Audrey. I’m glad that she was helping you. She likes to be helpful. You didn’t do anything wrong. I know that it wasn’t your choice to hide Glen.”

  That was all on Angela. She was clearly the one in charge here, at least when it came to Harold, Elaine and Nas. Just as the rest of the group deferred to Malcolm.

  “Thank you,’ Harold said, gesturing with to tray but she knew it was for more than the breakfast.

  He went back downstairs and she closed the door, not feeling much better than she did before she came here. Harold might have accepted her apology but her guilt hadn’t disappeared. Maybe that was the point. She’d made a mistake and this feeling was her punishment. She’d just have to suck it up and deal just like Audrey was doing with her punishment.

  While she had brought Harold’s breakfast Jackson had taken Hannah and Audrey out to the cliffs, promising to work Audrey hard as part of being grounded. He was serious about teaching her a lesson and Audrey had marched off to her doom without complaint.

  Veronica had to admire his commitment to the punishment. She would have thought that once his anger had faded, he would have let it slide. She hadn’t considered him a disciplinarian but he was surprising her. In more ways than one.

  When she had woken up this morning with Jackson curled around her, she had thought she had been dreaming. It had taken a moment for the memories of the night before to come back to her. She wanted to cringe at how needy she had been last night but she couldn’t find it in her when his warm breath was ghosting over her neck.

  For a few minutes as she lay there, watching the curtains flutter in the open window, Jackson’s arm heavy around her waist, she was at peace. It hadn’t lasted long before she felt Jackson stirring beside her.

  His eyes had opened and he looked at her through the golden strands of hair that had fallen across his face. He had blinked a few times, confusion there and then understanding dawned on him. She felt him grow tense, his fingers inadvertently tightening his grip on her waist and she had waited for him to freak out.

  But it never came. His muscles had relaxed and he had wished her good morning, his voice rough with sleep. They had rose and dressed in a comfortable silence, the two of them exchanging the occasional shy smile. She had been left rooted to the spot when Jackson had pressed a quick kiss to the corner of her mouth before he left to wake up the girls.

  She had known that admitting she had needed him last night had been a risk but she had been too raw to worry about it. She should have worried that she was pushing him too hard and too fast. He had told her he wasn’t certain he was ready for the next step but she had dragged him along. Thankfully things hadn’t been ruined between them.

  “You’re looking better.”

  She jumped, startled by Malcolm, who was leaning against the corner of the clinic. She looked around and didn’t see anyone else, realizing that Malcolm must have been waiting for her.

  “I’m feeling better,” she said, cautiously stepping down to the ground as Malcolm pushed himself off the building. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing, just thought I’d check in with you...after yesterday.” He hooked his thumbs in his belt loops, taking a casual pose but she wasn’t fooled. “Elaine said you brought Harold his breakfast.”

  “Figured it was a good peace offering,” she explained. “I had to apologize to him.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “He accepted my apology.”

  Malcolm nodded, running a hand over his chin. “That’s good, but we still have to talk about what happened yesterday.”

  “I figured.”

  “I’m not going to lecture you. I do that enough. You know you fucked up yesterday.”

  Her cheeks burned with shame but she knew that this was one of the consequences of her actions. She had to face the shame head on.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  He looked at her for a long moment. “Why don’t we head out to the point? Have a chat while we walk.”

  They cut a path beneath the canopy of leaves where it was a couple degrees cooler. The sun was barely up in the sky but it was already making the day hot. A steady breeze was coming from the north, keeping it from getting too humid but they would still have to be mindful while they worked. It would be easy to get sun stroke or dehydration today.

  She brushed the thoughts away as she focused on Malcolm. “I know I fucked up yesterday. I just lost it. I don’t have any other excuse and I want to promise I won’t do it again...”

  “But,” he said after she had let her words trail off into silence.

  “But I’m scared,” she admitted, “I’m scared that I can’t keep the promise. Yesterday, the others were trying to reason with me and I heard the things they said, I saw the logic, but I couldn’t stop myself. The fear took control and all I could think of was killing Harold. It was like tunnel vision. It was the only solution I could see.”

  She kept her eyes on her feet. The black lace on her right boot was fraying a bit in one place. She’d have to replace it. She knew her brain was trying to distract her, a coping mechanism so she didn’t have to say the truth.

  “I think killing that sniper in Virginia affected me more than I wanted to admit,” she confessed. “I kept telling myself that he was a bad man. That I thought he had killed my brother just when I had found him again. I told myself he would have killed one of you guys if I hadn’t killed him. But I’m starting to think those are just excuses I came up with so I could believe that I had been noble for killing him. The truth is I just let the rage take over. I wasn’t thinking of protecting anyone. I just wanted vengeance. And that’s what I felt with Harold.”

  She finally lifted her eyes to look at Malcolm, expecting to see horror in his eyes but all she found was understanding.

  “There’s something that most people don’t understand about killing. It’s because most of them never find themselves in the position where they have to kill to survive. The truth about killing is that the first time is always the hardest. Once you’ve done it, it becomes easier the next time. That’s the scary thing about it.”

  She gave him a look. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  He laughed, giving a shake of his head as he slowed to a stop on the path. “That’s the thing about the truth, most of the time it doesn’t make us feel better. What you’re going through, you’re not the first soldier to feel like that.”

  “But I’m not a solider.”

  “In this world, we’re all soldiers.”

  It was true. This was a different world.

  She glanced down at the Glock on her hip, considering it. She had put the holster on her belt this morning without thought. It had become second nature to have the heavy weight riding her hip. Maybe that wasn’t a good thing. Malcolm called her a soldier and maybe that was her problem. Soldiers got checked out before they got put in the field. Maybe she was the kind of person who wasn’t meant for this. Maybe it would be safer if she took a step back.

  She unclipped her holster from her belt and held it out. “I think it’s better you keep this.”

  Malcolm looked down at the gun but didn’t make a move to take it. “Why?”

  “Because I think it would make everybody else more comfortable if I didn’t have it.”

  “That the real reason?”

  Smart man.

  “I crossed a line without hesita
tion. I’ve got to learn never to cross it. Until then, I don’t trust myself.”

  He nodded and took the gun from her. Her hip felt empty without the weight but it also felt right.

  “I think you should trust yourself a bit more. Doing this, that’s the first step.”

  She studied him, seeing something inside him that she recognized in herself. He had taken these steps himself. “So, what’s the next step?”

  “Realizing that every time you pull the trigger it taints a bit of your soul. You weigh that choice before you pull the trigger. Your soul is at risk and if you lose it, you put that on your loved ones. The more you are tainted, the more it taints them. You think about that every time you find yourself in that situation.”

  His words resonated with her. Her love for her family had sent her into that rage but she remembered the look on Audrey’s face when she had seen her with Harold. It had been fear, fear that she had put there. She had to keep that look in the forefront of her mind, to stop her from making the same mistakes again.

  “Come on,” Malcolm said, clapping a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s get to work.”

  Subject File # 756

  Subject: Do you know if there are any books on childbirth here?

  Administrator: I thought you delivered babies before.

  Subject: I did but it’s not my area of expertise. I want to study up a bit. Travis strikes me as a bit of a mother hen when it comes to Jenny. I want be ready in case he decides to give me a pop quiz.

  “Any pain?”

  “Not really, it’s just itchy.”

  Quinton nodded as he bent the fingers on Travis’ injured arm, testing their dexterity. “That’s to be expected, especially with a plaster cast. Bit old fashioned.”

  Travis grinned. “Raquel made it out of gauze and wall plaster they had in their garage.”

  “She did a good job,” Quinton said, pushing his wheeled stool away from the exam table. “It’s a shame it’s time to cut it off.”

  “Really?”

  Quinton nodded. “The bone should be healed. The muscles will be weak at first. It’s better for you to start working on strengthening them now.”

  “Alright, let’s do it.”

  Quinton went to get a pair of large scissors and a bowl of water and cloths. They had electric saws for the operating room but the cast was uneven in places and Quinton didn’t trust himself to use one. He’d have to wet the plaster and cut it off using plain old elbow grease. It would take longer but it would be safer.

  He returned to the room and draped the wet cloths over the cast, sitting back to wait for them to seep through the dried plaster.

  “So, from what I heard, you were travelling on the road almost a month behind us,” Quinton said. “What was it like out there?”

  “Empty,” Travis replied. “I’ve never lived in a big city so it’s not like I was used to crowds but even in a small town it’s not like you ever felt alone. Even if you don’t see people, you can feel them living there. That feeling was gone.”

  Quinton knew what he was talking about. He had felt it himself the times they’d passed through the empty towns.

  “But not every place was like that, at least I don’t think. We never got close enough to know for sure. There were small towns that had roadblocks and barricades on the roads leading up to them. Saw armed people guarding them so I like to think they had a lot of people there to protect.”

  Quinton nodded as he began to cut away at the damp cast. “We met some people like that. They’re over in Michigan, what’s left of the town living in the shopping mall behind some fences.”

  “Good people?”

  “Yeah, they are,” Quinton said. “That’s where we were just before you guys arrived. They traded us for the tower supplies. We’re going to go back in a month for another trade. They’ve got chickens.”

  “That’s good. Took a while but we eventually ran into some good people out on the road. We were foraging in a big box store when we ran across each other. A couple families. They had a little one with them, not even a year old, strapped to mom’s chest in one of those carriers. It was the only reason we didn’t shoot them dead the second we spotted them.”

  Travis sighed, his eyes dark. “Not long before that we had run into some men who...well, they were the furthest thing from good people, so we were a bit trigger happy. Glad we saw that baby there because God knows what would have happened if we hadn’t.”

  Quinton could see that the near miss still haunted the man.

  “Anyway, we got to talking, sharing what we knew. They’d been neighbours in Louisville and were making their way to the Dakotas. They’d heard on the radio that there was some refugee camp.”

  “We heard about it too. There’s some fancy radio setup out there and Elaine talks to some people on it. Word is that it’s the NATO base but I doubt they’d be taking in civilians out there.”

  “That’s too bad,” Travis said. “Still, at least where they are heading has a low population. Probably easier in the fly over states.”

  “Did you see many freaks out there?” Quinton asked.

  Travis nodded his head. “It got to be you could tell if people had been around by how many freaks were out in the open. If people had been around making noise, stirring them up, they’d be out in the streets like they were in Marysville. If you didn’t see any around, place was either empty or what freaks were there were holed up inside somewhere.”

  “Did you notice any strange behaviour in them?”

  “You mean that they like to hunt us?” Well, that answered that question. “Yeah, we saw that. Had a few close calls where we had to outrun them. We figured out that it was safer to travel at night and stay holed up in the day. They seemed to do the same. I figured it had to do with their eyesight. It’s hard enough for us to see in the dark, their messed up eyes probably don’t make it any easier.”

  Quinton filed that away to share with Harold later. Not that it was very important considering the island was now officially freak free. But it would help to understand the behaviour of the freaks. The more they understood, the safer they would be the next time they had to head to the mainland.

  Quinton cut through the last piece of the cast and Travis let out a sigh of relief as he pulled it off. His arm was filthy and gave off a putrid stench. Quinton put the cast in a plastic bag and sealed it up before grabbing up a small basin and a cloth. He began to wash Travis’ arm while examining it. There were no lesions or bruises on his arm and he tested the bend of his elbow.

  “That feel okay?”

  “Yeah, feels good,” Travis said.

  “It looks good. You should be back to 100 percent soon enough.”

  Quinton had him rotate his arm so he could check the shoulder joint. “Let me know if you feel any pain or twinges. Unfortunately, we don’t have any x-rays here so I can’t be sure everything is back to normal. Sorry about that.”

  “No need to be sorry. Being here feels like a dream.”

  Quinton knew exactly how he felt. There were still some mornings he woke up, thinking he was back out on the road and the island had been a figment of his imagination. “It’s an impressive place, isn’t it?”

  “When Malcolm first told us about it, I was thinking it was some bunker situation. I didn’t expect this.” Travis looked around the exam room and then his eyes lit on Quinton, narrowing slightly. “I know you were a surgeon but before that, you would have done training in other medical fields, right?”

  “Yeah, they had us log clinic hours in our internship. Is something else bothering you?”

  Travis shook his head. “Not me. Did you ever deliver a baby?”

  Ah, so that’s what this was about.

  “I did.”

  “Was everything okay? I mean, mother and baby were fine, right?”

  Quinton nodded. “They were emergency C-sections and I never once lost anyone.”

  Travis chewed on his bottom lip. “Did you ever deal with pregnant women lea
ding up to their C-sections?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, do you know what to look for if she gets sick or is having trouble? I know that there are lots of complications with pregnancies. Like eclampsia or diabetes.”

  Someone must have been reading up about pregnancies at some point. Maybe a bit over the line for an uncle-to-be but Quinton wasn’t about to call him out on it.

  “Lorraine and I have been monitoring Jenny closely. She and the baby are healthy, there’s nothing to worry about,” Quinton reassured him.

  “Good,” Travis said. “Her and the baby have to make it.”

  Quinton saw the love in the man’s eyes and he wanted to feel sorry for him. Janet had told him long ago about the consensus that Travis had been in love with Jenny. He had thought it was sad that a man would burn himself like that, to fall in love with his brother’s wife, a woman he could never have. Now he thought that the man was lucky. He’d never been hurt the way Quinton had been hurt. He could have hope that maybe one day things could change between them.

  Quinton shook off the thoughts, refusing to let himself wallow in the maudlin. He was stronger than this.

  “Might as well head out to the cliffs and help,” Quinton said. “We’ll see what you can do with that arm.”

  Subject File #749

  Administrator: You’ve spent time with Raquel. What are your thoughts on her?

  Subject: I like her...I feel a connection to her, I guess.

  Administrator: What kind of connection?

  Subject: She’s a mother just doing whatever she can to protect her kids. It’s hard to try and hold your family together when you are going through what we’re going through. We’ve got that in common.

  Janet let out a groan as she stood up, her lower back protesting being stuck in a crouch for so long. She needed to make one of those padded supports for her knees like the old ladies had for their gardens. Thankfully there hadn’t been that many weeds that had taken root in the soil but it was important to get rid of them. They couldn't have them stealing valuable nutrients from the plants. They’d need them to produce as many vegetables as they could this year.