Feint

by Bernard Wilkerson

The zombie-like private threw up twice while Derek tried to get enough food and water into him. Between water damage from the tsunami wave, the beer and V8 party someone had had, and all of their vomit, the house must have reeked. It wasn’t livable.

  But they lived in it anyway, sleeping on the couches in the living room, trying to drink enough and not eat too much. Derek felt like he was living the way he always imagined junkies lived.

  In frustration, he started exercising after a few days. The private, Jordan, told him he was crazy.

  “We have to rebuild our strength,” Derek replied.

  “If I never have to do another minute of PT, I’ll die a happy man,” Jordan said while he lounged on a couch. The Marines had cycled around to a decades old form of PT, or Physical Training, known as High Intensity Tactical Training.

  “Remote devices have made you soft,” the drill sergeants would yell and Derek and other trainees would do wind sprints, stair climbs, ammo can deadlifts, and a myriad of other strength, agility, endurance, and power building exercises. Everyone complained, Derek complained, but he liked how he felt after ninety days of the intense workouts. He tried to keep them up after basic.

  He went outside and ran around the house a few times, feeling quickly winded. He knew it would take time to recover from severe dehydration, but he didn’t know how much time. He probably should be seen by a doctor, but what would a doctor tell him? Rest, rehydrate, exercise to rebuild your strength.

  That’s what Derek was doing.

  When he had some energy, but not enough to exercise, he explored the large house. Someone had fouled one of upstairs toilets, trying to use it without water, and with a little gagging and several buckets of water from the pump house, they got it to flush down. They opened all the upstairs windows and eventually it smelled better than the main level or the basement. They each moved into a bedroom, Derek taking what must have been the master bedroom and Jordan taking a guest room. Another bedroom looked like it belonged to a teenaged girl and a fourth had office stuff in it as well as a bed.

  Neither of them could figure out why the plumbing in the main house didn’t work, so they relied on retrieving buckets of water from the pump house. Derek made sure they always had several jars of emergency water in case they had to prime the pump again.

  On the fourth day of their recovery, he found a bolt action, single shot rifle in a box of memorabilia under the bed in the office room. Fifty shells came with it.

  He cleaned the rifle the best he could, then took a few shells outside with him and tested it. It fired. He adjusted the sights and found he could hit a target reasonably well at a couple of hundred yards. He put the rifle and ammunition in the bedroom he had claimed.

  Further searching yielded a Beretta P4 compact, something like what a person would carry concealed. It had a box of twenty shells with it, and Jordan took those. He fired a couple to test out the weapon also.

  Derek felt a little better that both of them were now armed.

  Eventually they were strong enough to move on. Derek had given a lot of thought to his next move; Jordan none, or at least, nothing he mentioned.

  They patrolled the highway occasionally but never saw signs of life. The alien induced tsunami had wiped out most of the coastal residences, and without power most of the occupants of the rest had probably fled for more civilized territory. Derek wondered if anyone ever found it.

  After he finished PT one morning, he called Jordan into his room.

  “We need to pack up today and leave tomorrow morning,” he told the young private.

  “It’s about time. There is absolutely nothing to do in this place.”

  Derek paused, gauging Jordan’s reaction. He might as well just say what he’d been thinking.

  “I think we should split up.”

  “What? Why? That’s stupid. Splitting up is what gets people killed. I’d be dead if we hadn’t been together.”

  “Did you want to be a Marine, soldier?” Derek asked, trying to sound a little like a drill sergeant.

  “Sure, I mean...Hey, what’s that got to do with it?”

  “I’m going to go fight aliens.”

  “With that relic?” Jordan said, pointing at Derek’s old rifle. “Good luck.”

  “Look,” Derek explained. “Tanks can’t do anything against them. Planes and choppers are useless. I don’t know where any missiles are. But I’ve got a rifle. With a rifle I can start shooting, and if bullets will kill them, I’ll take some with me.”

  “What if they won’t? What if they have some sort of personal shield, like in the movies?”

  “Then we’re all dead anyway,” Derek replied.

  Jordan ran his hands through his blonde hair, straining his brain to come up with an argument.

  “Why?” is all he managed.

  “I wanted to be a soldier,” Derek said. He left out that he had also wanted to prove himself to his good for nothing father and older brothers. “I need to be a soldier.”

  “I’m a soldier, too.”

  “But you don’t want to be.”

  The private had no response.

  “Listen to me, Jordan. You and I both know I’m probably gonna get killed if I head back. But I’m gonna do it anyway. I need to. Someone needs to.” He jabbed his finger at the private. His eyes felt hot and moist. “But someone needs to live. Someone needs to tell others about what happened. That we tried. That the United States Marine Corp fought and died on the Pacific Coast Highway. You need to tell them. You need to make sure everyone knows what we did.”

  The boy snapped to attention and saluted. Derek saluted back, not just a little surprised that the rhetoric worked. He didn’t really think the boy would succeed, but he wasn’t a soldier. He would be a liability, someone Derek would have to watch out for, someone Derek couldn’t trust. He remembered the way the boy had panicked when they tried to escape the sunken M1A1. He would be useless in a firefight.

  And Derek legitimately wanted the boy to find safety, some secure place to go. Such places had to exist. The whole world hadn’t ended just because a few hundred million people had died. Even if it were a couple of billion, Earth would survive. They just had to fight back.

  “Look, I’m gonna head back north. Not on the highway, but through the foothills. I’ll come up behind Hearst Castle and if there’re aliens hiding out there, I’ll start taking ‘em out until I run out of ammo. From a distance, like a sniper, you know.”

  The boy nodded.

  “You keep going up this highway. It’s bound to lead to some towns or something. Find a group of people and tell them you’re a Marine and volunteer to help with security. Be trustworthy. Then you find yourself a girl and marry her and have a million babies, enough for both of us, enough for everyone who died out on that highway.”

  Jordan started to cry.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t call me sir, son. My parents were married,” Derek replied automatically.

  Jordan laughed through his tears. “I never got that joke,” he said.

  “Me neither,” Derek confessed.

  They parted ways the next morning, both with backpacks full of food and water, leaving two sealed jars of water next to the pump, marked ‘For priming’ on them. Jordan continued east on the highway, Derek north into the hills.

  Jordan would be dead in two days, shot by a young woman who took his backpack and pistol and belatedly realized he was kind of cute and maybe she should have talked to him first. Derek would never know this, resolutely hiking through the Santa Lucia Mountains, looking for aliens at Hearst Castle and hoping he didn’t get lost on the way.

  Now was the not the time for that, he thought bitterly. Now was the not the time to get lost.

  Now was the time to fight.

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