by Justin Bell
Winnie chuckled and reached across her body to punch her father in the chest. “Stop it, Dad.”
He glanced down at her. “You like him, though, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“And he’s nice to you?”
Winnie rolled her eyes, obviously not wanting any part of this conversation. “Yeah, he’s nice, Dad. So far, in the week that I’ve known him, he’s been nice.”
Had it only been a week? A week since their firefight with Ironclad at the parking garage in the outskirts of Chicago? A week since Clancy Greer was bravely volunteering to join the fight, even though he could only shoot one-handed? So much had changed in a week. The entire group had changed in a week.
“I’m still your father,” Phil said. “I’m obligated to ask these questions, you know.”
“Better you than Mom, I suppose.”
“Oh I’m sure she’ll be up next. She won’t listen to what I say about it, she’ll want to go straight to the source.”
“Wonderful.”
“How’s your brain?” Winnie asked, looking up at her father’s bandage.
“Dumb as a stone as usual. Bullet in the head didn’t change that.”
“The bullet didn’t actually go into your head, drama queen.”
“True, but the scar will look so much cooler if people think it did.”
Winnie laughed. “Your secret is safe with me.”
Scuffed footsteps sounded from the pavement behind them and Phil leaned around, looking to see who was approaching. He moved his arm from Winnie’s shoulder and cocked a quick wave.
“Morning, T-Dawg.”
Tamar smirked a crooked grin. “T-Dawg? What Maury Povich episode did you pull that from, Mr. Fraser?”
Winnie visibly brightened when she heard the voice, turning around and smiling broadly. “Morning,” she said.
Phil looked at the two of them and shook his head. “Once upon a time, she’d look at me like that when she saw me.”
“Yeah, when I was like nine, Dad. Come on.”
“Oh, sorry, right. I keep on forgetting you’re an adult now.”
Tamar and Winnie both laughed at Phil’s expense, and he couldn’t help but smirk a little as well, buoyed by the conversation, a sense of normalcy desperately wanted and needed after the events of the past twenty-four hours.
“How are you doin’?” Tamar asked Winnie, and she shrugged a response.
“Okay, I guess. Sucks about Clancy.”
Tamar nodded. “I didn’t know him real well, but he seemed like a solid dude.”
“He saved our lives more than once,” Phil said. “Caught the bullet that killed him doing it.”
“Things suck these days, huh?” Tamar said, shaking his head.
“That’s a good way to put it, young man. I like your vocabulary.”
“You are such a dork, Dad.”
“You said ‘dork’?” Tamar asked, drawing his head back. “Dang, white girl.”
Winnie laughed and punched him in the arm, her default response to male figures in her life.
Phil stood back, watching his daughter as she talked to Tamar and he smiled. It was a smile he’d never let her see, a look of pride at his young girl while simultaneously feeling a sense of loss and sadness, a final confirmation that his role in her life might be shifting. She was only fifteen years old, far too young for him to feel that way yet, but she was strong and powerful, that much was clear, and he trusted her to be her own girl. Her own woman. Independent. His feeling that she no longer needed him was not about the fact that there was another male figure in her life, but the fact that she had clearly grown in the past three months, grown beyond needing a direct father figure looming over her.
She was her own person, just as he always expected she would be, he just had never expected it would happen so soon.
***
Half in and half out of dreams, Rhonda once again thought of her parents. It seemed like every time she closed her eyes these days they were there. At the age of eighteen she’d managed to escape, to free herself of the physical bonds of their care, strike off and be her own person, but here she was, twenty years later, and once again chained to them. Not physically, but emotionally.
Emotionally was much worse, she decided.
Her sleep had been restless and fitful all night, the fierce emotions of Clancy’s death putting her subconscious into a tailspin, an emotional plane crash, barrel rolling and spiraling from the sky, smashing down onto the rocky terrain of reality.
But at some point she slept. At some point she fell into deep enough sleep that she dreamed, but her dreams were more memories than dreams. Memories of what brought her to where she was.
“Mom?” she asked into the phone, leaning against her kitchen counter, the cordless pressed tight between her shoulder and ear.
“Rhonda?” came the voice on the other end. “Good morning.”
“How are things going?” Her parents had announced to her that they were relocating, at least for the winters. They were growing older and needed to be somewhere warmer, so they had decided to head East, toward Florida. To be actual snow bunnies, living there in the winters, then returning to the familiar cabin during the summer. Rhonda had been stunned when they told her, considering this course of action to be a stark contrast to everything she ever knew about her parents. Forgoing the Colorado mountain wilderness winters for warm winter nights, community swimming pools and full-service mealtimes struck her as totally out of character.
But they’d done it.
“We’re doing fine, sweetheart,” Jodi Krueller replied. “Everything is good.”
“I’m glad.”
“Is everything okay with you?”
Rhonda thought for a moment, working out the conversation she’d been planning to have in her head, chewing over the question she’d wanted to ask. For two weeks she’d gone back and forth on it, and after two weeks she still hadn’t made up her mind. But it was now or never.
“I was thinking… with you guys in Florida, I was wondering if we could borrow the cabin over spring break?”
Her mother didn’t reply, there was just a blank silence on the other end of the phone, as if she’d been struck speechless by the question.
“What did you say, Rhonda?” she asked, sounding like the phone was pressed more tightly to her mouth.
Rhonda drew in a steadying breath. “I was just wondering if we could borrow the cabin over spring break. I thought maybe the kids would get a kick out of it.”
"I… I’ll have to talk to your father,” Jodi replied. “This is a little unexpected, Rhonda, I’ll be honest.”
“It’s fine,” Rhonda replied, her voice pinched as if she tasted something bitter. “Never mind.”
“Don’t be like that,” Jodi said, trying to calm her own voice. “We just have… arrangements. We’ll have to make some calls.”
“Forget I asked.”
“Rhonda. Stop. It’s fine. You can use the cabin for a week, okay? Don’t get all emotional.”
“For twenty years you’ve been giving me a hard time about throwing away everything you taught me. Now I finally feel like I might be ready to return to my childhood home and you’re acting like it’s a federal thing.”
“Well I can’t help but notice that you don’t want to return until your father and I are gone.”
“Mom, please don’t make this a big deal. I just thought the kids might like it, that’s all.”
“And I said it would be fine, honey, okay? Just let me talk to your dad. Please don’t overreact.”
Rhonda opened her mouth, but pulled her lips closed, deciding that discretion was the better part of valor. Part of her knew this would be the reaction, she had expected it, but a small part of her had hoped that maybe her mother would surprise her. When would she ever learn?
“All right,” Rhonda said. “That’s fine. Sorry, Mom. It… it was hard for me to ask this.”
“I know, honey. Trust me, okay? I know.�
�
Rhonda nodded. “Thanks, Mom.” She started to move the phone away from her ear, but a voice barked up from the receiver.
“Rhonda?” the voice said, low and echoing.
“Yes?” she asked, bringing the phone back.
“So, is… uh… is Lydia going with you?”
Rhonda screwed up her face at the phone. “No, she’s sticking around California, I think. It’s just me, Phil, Max and Winnie. Max might bring a friend with him.”
“Okay,” Jodi replied. “Sounds good. I hope you have a good week.”
“Say hi to Dad for me,” Rhonda said softly.
“He’ll be happy to hear that, dear.”
The phones clicked into silence, and deep within the land of her dreams, Rhonda had no idea that might be one of the last phone calls she’d ever make.
***
“You dreaming again?” the voice was low and faint, a foggy mumbling thick behind a curtain of waking.
“Phil?” Rhonda asked, pulling herself awake, forcing the slow climb into consciousness.
“Yeah. You were mumbling in your sleep. Sounded like a one-way conversation.”
“Huh,” she replied, sitting up in the hospital bed. Each of them had taken over an empty room in one of the patient wings, trying hard as they could to sleep off the emotional train wreck of the previous day. Running a hand through her hair, she blinked away the final remnants of sleep and coughed lightly.
“Not dreams, really,” she said. “Memories. More stupid memories.”
Phil eased himself down on the bed by her feet. “What kind of memories?”
Rhonda lowered her gaze, staring at the bland white pattern of the quilt pulled over her. A silver food tray was pushed off at an angle, medical equipment scattered throughout the small, square room.
“Conversations with my parents. I don’t know how I didn’t see it, Phil.”
“See what?”
“Who they were. What they were.”
“I don’t think we know what they are, Rhonda. All you have is what Cavendish and Green told you. I hardly count them as reputable sources.”
“They know Lydia,” Rhonda replied, looking at Phil, her narrow eyes pinning his. “They know my parents’ names. How would they know any of that if they weren’t somehow involved in this.”
“Involved in what?” Phil asked. “Look, I know there’s a lot of conspiracy talk going around, but as far as we’ve heard, this was North Korea, okay? I didn’t know this Orosco guy, we barely knew Brandon. How can we take what they said as gospel?”
“You were right there with Ironclad, Phil. You saw how well equipped they were. You’ve seen them in the news. If they’re involved to the level they seem to be, this goes high up the food chain, and not the North Korean food chain.”
“And you really think that Jodi and Gerard Krueller could be involved, too? Your sixty-something-year-old parents? The ones living in Florida and summering in the Colorado cabin? They’re some kind of insidious masterminds?”
“Think about it, Phil,” Rhonda said. “They moved further east. Something totally out of character for them. They had planned to move to Florida, one of the only places in the country not actively targeted by the suitcase nukes. They didn’t want us coming to the cabin at first and only relented when I threw a fit.”
Phil lowered his head. “I get it, Rhonda. I do.”
“Lance Cavendish was coming to the cabin to get supplies on the morning of the detonations. His brother Bruce was linked to Ironclad. The Cavendish family and my parents have been close for my entire life.”
“You’re beating yourself up.”
“No. No, I’m not, Phil. I don’t blame myself for any of this. I blame them. I just wish I’d seen it earlier.”
“How could you have?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I don’t know.”
Phil sat there on her bed as Rhonda swung her legs out from under the quilt and sat next to him, knees bent, both of their backs slightly hunched in exhaustion.
“Winnie and Tamar are getting pretty close,” Phil said quietly.
Rhonda smirked. “You okay with that, Dad? She is a daddy’s girl, after all.”
Phil chuckled softly. “I think I am, actually. He seems like a good kid.”
“Did you actually leave them alone this morning?”
“Yeah, against my better judgement. I had to come check on you, make sure you weren’t going to sleep the whole day away.”
“How lovely would that be?”
“Hey, we’ve been pretty lucky. The mattress store in the mall, now hospital beds. We’ve had it pretty darn good compared to some people.”
“Yeah, we have a lot to be thankful for.”
Phil couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic, but decided to drop the rhetoric, just in case. “What’s the Philly game plan?” he asked. “Does what happened with Clancy change anything?”
Rhonda shook her head. “Why would it?”
“One less gun on our side? I don’t know.”
“Clancy is a loss. In more ways than one,” she paused for a moment, her breath hitching. Surprisingly, she thought, Greer hadn’t appeared in her dreams, and in fact until that moment, she hadn’t thought of him, but now that she did, the full strength of her emotions pressed up against her from the inside and she had to stop speaking for a moment to catch her breath.
“It’s okay, Rhonda,” Phil said, pressing her to him with a gentle squeeze. For a quick second, Rhonda thought she might tear up, she thought the dam might break, but she drew in a breath, clamped her jaw, and kept herself straight, forcing back the tears and driving her sadness deep down within. There’d be time for that later.
Would there be? Would there ever be again?
“I’m fine, Phil,” she said, harsher than she intended, and she stood up from the bed, breaking away from his single arm embrace. He narrowed his eyes at her back as she stepped away, wrapping her own arms around her as if her embrace might somehow be more comforting than his. He wasn’t sure how to take that.
Footsteps clapped against the smooth tile floor out in the hallway, and the familiar face of the blonde-haired nurse poked around into the opened door.
“Hey,” she said in a whisper. “You guys all right?”
They both nodded.
“Good.” She worked her way into the room, taking a few short steps around the door frame until she stood before them. “Listen,” she said. “I didn’t want to bring this up last night, it seemed too early and… well… there was a lot going on.”
“What?” asked Rhonda, her heart quickening.
The woman seemed to steel herself, tensing her shoulders for what was bound to be a difficult conversation. “I know you all saw Toledo on your way through.”
“Tough to miss,” Phil replied.
“From what we understand,” the nurse said, “that’s the front line of this conflict. This East versus West civil war that’s going on.”
“Civil war seems a little extreme,” Rhonda replied. “It’s one city. For all we know it’s—”
“You don’t know,” the nurse replied, harshly. “You drove through. You don’t live here. Okay? You don’t understand.”
“What are you saying? That the United States is in full-blown civil war? One side against the other?” Phil stood from the bed.
“It’s not nearly that simple,” the blonde woman replied. “There aren’t only two sides. But rest assured, there are active combat operations happening in the United States. Toledo is not an exception.”
Phil and Rhonda looked at each other.
“There are health centers scattered in and around Toledo that are reportedly getting dangerously overrun. We’ve been warned that we’re a fallback, and we can expect to start seeing casualties from these conflicts any time now.”
“And things could get dangerous here.”
She nodded, her eyes heavy. “No ‘could’ about it. Things will be getting dangerous here. There is no doubt
about it.”
“So no more comfortable hospital beds.”
The blonde doctor shook her head. “You should move. Sooner rather than later. Do you have a functional vehicle?”
“Our van should still work, we just may need to refuel.”
“There should be plenty of cars in the parking lot,” the woman replied. “Help yourselves, but please make yourselves scarce. While you still can.”
“You heard the woman, Phil,” Rhonda said, turning toward her husband. “Time to hit the road.” Just saying the words added an extra layer of pure exhaustion to her already weary mind. For the swiftest moment she'd allowed herself to think, just to consider, that maybe they'd found a place to truly rest and recuperate. To build their strength as they planned their next move. She was wrong, as she often was when she dared think such things, and now, barely rested and far from recuperated, it was already time to move on.
***
The main building of the Cleveland Clinic curved away from the two boys as they moved soundlessly through the employee parking lot. Brad’s heart rammed in his chest as he dropped down toward the pavement, pressing his back to the warm metal of the two-door sports car, gliding gracefully to his right, making his way to the squat, sloped trunk. He stopped for a moment, listening, hearing nothing but the cool breeze off Lake Eerie, rolling over the rounded metal roofs of the vehicles that remained in the lot.
Employee parking hadn’t been as exciting as they thought, filled mostly with Honda’s, Toyota’s, and Ford’s with just a scant smattering of Acura’s, BMW’s, and one Porsche. Not nearly the Italian sports car haven that Brad had thought it might be based on Max’s excited suggestions.
Leaning forward, propping himself up on one hand, Brad curled around the trunk of the car and eased around it, moving step by step as quiet as he could, his ears listening for noise. He heard the swift scuff of feet on pavement and pushed himself up, circling back, but too late as Max came around the other end and slapped him on the back with a flat palm.
“Tag! Gotcha, slow poke.”
“Man, I’m younger and smaller than you are. Have mercy.”