by Kate L. Mary
“Meggy!”
Emotionally, she didn’t seem her age most of the time. The nine-year-old Margot we’d lost seemed to be trapped inside the body of this eighteen-year-old almost woman, but she was happy and healthy and free, so we were counting our blessing instead of trying to fix what very well could have been unfixable. She might never mature or get married and have kids, but she was here and that was what was important to all of us.
“You’re back,” she said when she stopped in front of me. She was out of breath and her cheeks were pink from exertion, but her brown eyes sparkled. “We’re playing tag. Come play with us.”
The little boy squirmed in her arms, and when she set him down he darted off, back to the yard they’d just vacated.
“In a little bit,” I said, patting my sister on the shoulder. “I want to check on Donaghy first.”
She wrinkled her nose. “All he does is work.”
I laughed. “He’s trying to fix our house, Margot.”
My sister shrugged once before turning away. She called out greetings to our parents as she ran past, and like me they watched her run off with a combination of awe and amusement in their expressions. Despite her bad moments, Margot seemed to be determined to enjoy every second of her new life and I loved her for it more than I ever had before.
Angus was already on the porch when I walked up, sitting next to his daughter while he smoked. She was asking him about New Atlanta, but since I wasn’t interested in hearing a recap of what we’d just seen, I headed inside.
The downstairs had been transformed since the first time I’d visited this house. Since it had never been finished, no one had ever lived in it, and for the past twenty years it had been mostly used for storing supplies, as well as the zombies in the basement. They were gone now, and thanks to the combined efforts of our group, the walls were now up and the kitchen had cabinets. There was a man in the settlement who had once been a plumber, and he’d been more than willing to help Dad get the sinks, bathtubs, and toilets up and working. The place was really starting to look like a home, which was what all the work had been about. Making a home for my newly reunited family.
I could hear the scrape of feet against the floor upstairs, and I followed the sound. The four bedrooms were already packed with furniture even though the floors were nothing but plywood, but none of us cared. Mom and Dad had one, Angus another, and Glitter and Margot shared the master. The fourth was all mine, though. Well, not all mine. I shared it with Donaghy.
That was where I found him now, standing in our room with a can of paint on the floor at his feet. It was blue and in my opinion totally pointless—I didn’t care what color the walls were as long as we were together—but he’d insisted, saying that he wanted the room to look as much like a home as it could. I got it in a way. How he wanted to feel not just like we were moving forward, but like some of the old world was coming back. Like with the destruction of the zombies and the CDC, we were able to go back in time. It was impossible, but a nice idea all the same.
“Looks good,” I said when I stopped in the doorway.
He stumbled back, barely missing the can of paint, and let out a low curse before turning to face me. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Sorry,” I said with a laugh. “I thought you heard me.”
He laughed too, and then shook his head as he set the paintbrush down. When we stepped back and surveyed his work, he nodded. “I like it.”
“I do too,” I said, crossing the room to him. “You were right.”
He smiled and grabbed my hand so he could pull me against him. “I’m glad you like it, but you know this arrangement isn’t always going to work. One day our little family will expand and we’re going to need our own house.”
“Are you trying to tell me you’re pregnant?” I asked, lifting my eyebrows.
“No,” he said, laughing. “Although, with all the miracles going around lately, nothing would surprise me.”
He leaned down and kissed me, and the second his mouth was on mine everything that had happened inside the walls of New Atlanta vanished. With it gone, there was nothing scary or twisted in the world. There was just Donaghy and me. Together. As a family.
I stood up on the tips of my toes and grasped his face between my hands so I could kiss him back. My fingers threaded through his hair, which had grown so much over the last seven weeks that I’d almost forgotten how short it had been when we’d met. How he’d had to shave when he was inside DC, how he had at one time been a prisoner there.
Since I didn’t want to spoil the mood, I pushed the thoughts aside and focused on the moment. On sliding my tongue over his. On pressing my body against his chest.
He broke the kiss so he could whisper, “You know what happened the last time we decided to have sex in the middle of the day.”
I laughed when I remembered my mom walking in on us in the bathroom. “She should have knocked.”
“Or we should have taken that as our cue to find our own place.”
He was half-joking, but I also knew there was some seriousness there. We’d had this discussion more than once, and even though I got where he was coming from and there had definitely been more than a few awkward moments over the last several weeks, I wasn’t ready to leave home yet. Not when I finally had my family back, and for now I wanted to enjoy it.
“We will. After they take down the wall. I promise.”
Donaghy smiled and gave me a small peck before turning back to the can of paint. “I’m almost done here. Give me an hour tops.”
“You don’t want help?”
He shook his head and said over his shoulder, “I’m good.”
I headed back down the stairs, thinking about DC and knowing I’d have to tell him about it. It was hard to say how he’d react. The prison colony had been a hole from everything I’d heard, and his time there hadn’t been fun. He’d only gotten out by winning fights, which was how he’d ended up here to begin with. But the people in there had still been people, and if he hadn’t been out on the prison release program when everything went down in New Atlanta, he would have been inside DC when The Church released that virus. Meaning he would be dead now too. It was bound to shake a person up.
I scanned the now nearly finished downstairs as I passed through. The living room had several dingy couches shoved into it that were a hell of a lot more comfortable than they looked, but what was supposed to be the dining room had been enclosed so Parvarti could have a room in our house as well. The dining room table we’d found in an abandoned house outside the walls of Senoia looked cramped in the corner of the room, but when all of us were gathered around the thing it was more homey than suffocating. These days, it felt like a totally different life than the one I’d been living only a few months ago.
I went out the back door and found Margot no longer playing tag but instead being pushed on the swing by Glitter. Charlie sat on the grass at their side, watching the two with an expression on her face that was almost serene. Dad had put the swing up only last week, and since then my sister had spent hours upon hours on it, sometimes refusing to come into the house until long after the sun had set.
A few of my other family members were gathered in the backyard as well. Dad was arranging logs in the fire pit while mom and Lila shucked corn. She, Al, and Charlie had taken a small apartment above what used to be a coffee shop, but they still spent most of their waking hours here. Since zombie slayers were a thing of the past, Luke had taken up permanent residence with Kelly, much to his mother’s delight. I had a feeling she was counting down the days until she found out that she was going to be a grandmother, although I doubted that starting a family was on Luke or Kelly’s mind at the moment.
“Where’s your boy?” Angus asked when I stopped next to him. He was watching dad build the fire, smoking as usual but missing his normal partner, Parv.
“Finishing up painting the bedroom,” I said. “Where’s Parv?”
My uncle got an amused expression
on his face. “Just got back from huntin’.”
“Bet you wish you could have gone with her,” I said.
He snorted. “Anything woulda been better than what we did today.”
He wasn’t exaggerating about that.
It wasn’t long before Al and Luke showed up with my aunt in tow, as well as a big chunk of meat. Courtesy of Parv. She must have gotten it a few hours ago since it had already been butchered and divided up between the families in the settlement. It was the normal way things were handled for now, any food that was found or hunted was passed out to as many people as it would feed, but there always seemed to be more than enough for us. At least for the time being.
Dad already had the fire going, so he focused on the meat while Parv took her usual place at Angus’s side. He had a cigarette ready for her, which she took from him wordlessly. This had become a common sight, the two of them side by side, and even though no one had mentioned it yet, I knew I wasn’t the only one watching to see what would happen. They’d both been burned in love, more than once from what I’d heard, but since my uncle’s return it seemed like he felt more comfortable in Parv’s presence than in anyone else’s, even Dad’s, and I felt like it was only a matter of time before something developed between them.
Kelly showed up for dinner shortly before the meat was done, and she had a couple surprise guests with her. Jim and Jada.
Unlike Luke, Jim hadn’t settled into post-zombie life easily. After two weeks of being stuck in Senoia, he’d volunteered to join a group heading out of state to release the bacteria near another settlement. Jada had taken it all in stride, and even though I’d expected her to volunteer for the trip as well, she hadn’t. I hadn’t really understood it at first, but now that Jim was back and I saw them together, I got it. She hadn’t wanted to chase him away, which was what she would have been doing if she’d followed him uninvited. So she’d let him go and had waited here, hoping he’d return on his own. And he had. Even more, his entire attitude toward her seemed to have changed. He stood closer than he had before, reached out and touched her when they talked. And he smiled, which was something I’d never seen before, and as a result she seemed happier too.
When Donaghy finally came out of the house to join us, I couldn’t help laughing. “You have paint on your nose,” I said, reaching up to flick the blue speck away.
He grinned down at me. “Did you get it?”
“I got it.”
“Good,” he said, and then gave me a quick kiss.
Dragon was the only one missing from our group, but we all knew we’d see him later. He’d liberated every salvageable thing from his bar inside the walls of New Atlanta so he could open one here in Senoia. It had taken him some time to get it going since he’d had to brew the ale and make the moonshine, but he’d finally had enough stocked up to open the week before and business had been booming. Of course, with The Church taking over New Atlanta and the old government gone, currency was questionable at the moment. He was still taking credits when people had them, as were most businesses, but he was also taking trade. We all knew that soon we would have to figure out a new currency system, but at the moment we’d decided to let it go. There was still more than enough to scavenge and with the zombies gone it was going to be easier than ever.
Of course, after our visit to New Atlanta today, Mom, Dad, Angus, and I knew that scavenging would soon be the only way for us to get supplies. Something everyone else was about to learn.
Even though I knew the others had to be dying to find out what was happening inside the walls of the city, they didn’t ask and Dad waited until we’d all finished eating to bring it up. Once we were settled around the fire, he told everyone what we’d seen. The red robes on everyone, the bodies outside the temple, the baptism. Then he told them what the High Priestess had said.
“No trading at all?” Lila looked around at everyone else. “So we’re totally on our own?”
“Better than bein’ in there,” Angus muttered.
“I’m not arguing that point,” my aunt countered. “I’m just thinking about some of the things we got inside that are going to be impossible to find out here. Flour for one, sugar for another. We can grow food and hunt, but I don’t know the first things about grinding wheat to make bread.”
“She’s right,” Mom said. “This is going to be a much more drastic change than we realize.”
“There are other ways of getting things,” Jim said.
“How’s that?” Dad asked.
“Raiding the supply trucks. People living outside the city have been doing it since the beginning of Star’s reign, and there’s no reason to stop now.”
He had his hand on Jada’s knee, which I didn’t even think he realized. She did though, despite the tension in the air, she had a look of contentment on her face that made her look like a different person.
“That’s all well and good,” Dad said. “Except that if she finds out, she could decide to cut our power off.”
“I don’t want to go back to not having power,” Lila said with a groan. “Remember how awful that was?”
“We need to put solar panels up.” Al leaned back so he could gaze up at the roof of the house. “Someone here has to know how to do it.”
“That’d help, assuming we could find some,” Dad muttered.
The discussion went on and on, people pointing out issues we were going to face, as well as what we could do. It felt too familiar, too much like the first couple days here when all we did was plan and talk about what obstacles we were going to have to overcome. I hated it. Hated knowing that our idyllic life had once again taken a wrong turn.
“I think it’s strange that no one has brought up the most obvious question,” Jada said, speaking up for the first time since we started discussing the whole thing. “What are we going to do about it? I mean, we are going to try to put a stop to this. Aren’t we? We just risked everything to get rid of one dictator. We can’t just sit back let another one take control.”
Silence settled over the group.
It was something we hadn’t discussed after leaving New Atlanta, and something I had never even considered. Was Jada right? Could we do something about what was happening inside the city? Should we?
“I’m tired.” Angus was the first to break the silence, and his words were followed by a deep sigh. “If everybody else wants to go to war again, I’ll do it, but I ain’t gonna lie. I’m beat.”
He looked around, and the exhaustion he’d just spoken of seemed to etch lines into his face right before my very eyes. It wasn’t just him either. I could see it in Mom and Dad’s expressions too, in Parv’s. The weariness, the emotional scars left behind by all the wars they’d fought in the past. I’d heard about them all, more recently than ever before, and I knew it wasn’t like my family to walk away from something like this. But I also knew they were getting older. Not old, I couldn’t see my parents as old, especially when they suddenly had so much more life to live, but older. Tired like Angus had said.
“I just can’t do it again,” Mom said. “I don’t think I have it in me.” She reached out and took Dad’s hand even as her gaze moved across the yard to where Margot sat. “As selfish as it sounds, I can’t risk losing what I just got back.”
“Me neither,” Parv whispered, her gaze on the ground. “We’ve given up too much already. Let someone else take this battle.”
Jada frowned and looked around at the people gathered in our backyard. Al and Lila were nodding, as was Dad. Even Jim seemed to silently agree with Mom and Parv.
“So you’re saying we do nothing?” Jada asked, turning her gaze on Jim.
He grabbed her hand. “I’m saying we need to think of ourselves for once.”
I had to agree with him. It wasn’t fair that my family, who had already been put through so much, should have to take responsibility for the world yet again. We’d fought and clawed our way here, and for once we were together and whole. I wasn’t ready to sacrifice that. Not so soo
n after getting it. And we’d be risking so much more this time, because we were still hiding the existence of both Glitter and Margot from The Church. Starting a war with them would put all of that at risk, and with as twisted as their teachings were, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what they would do if they found out about my sister and cousin.
“We can’t,” I said, drawing Jada’s gaze my way. “If the High Priestess finds a reason to come here she could find out about Margot and Glitter. What do you think will happen then?”
Glitter, who was sitting at my uncle’s side, scooted closer to her father.
“No,” he growled, as he pulled her against him. “That ain’t gonna happen. We gotta stay out of it this time. It’s for the best.”
“They said they planned to be peaceful,” Mom pointed out. “That all they wanted to do was live in their new paradise. Who are we to stop that?”
Jada’s determination wavered, but she still shook her head like she had a hard time wrapping her brain around it.
The discussion went back and forth, but the original sentiment Angus had expressed seemed to be echoed in the words of everyone around me. They were tired. This was one fight they couldn’t take responsibility for no matter how guilty it made them feel. They had no steam left.
No longer interested in a debate that was totally devoid of a satisfactory solution, I eventually got up and went over to the swing where Margot still sat. She was staring at the dirt, pushing herself back and forth with a shove of her toes against the ground, but she lifted her head when I walked up and smiled.
“Meggy.” Hearing my name on her lips still gave me goose bumps, but I was getting more and more used to it every day.
“You want me to push you?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. I was just thinking.”
“What about?”
When I knelt at her side, she was forced to look down at me. Her face scrunched up the way it did when she was thinking something through, which always reminded me of how Dad pressed his lips together when he was thinking, and then she shook her head.