“What is it?”
“I have to go back,” he said.
“Back?”
“To the . . . Confederates.”
“To the people who hurt you?” Lucas said in outrage.
Dkembe came out of his bedroom in alarm, noted the tone, and disappeared again.
“When, dad?”
“The day after tomorrow,” Tom said. “Early.”
“You can’t travel like that.”
“I have a ride.”
Lila huffed.
“Isn’t anyone going with you?”
“That depends,” he said. “One way or the other, I have to do what I promised.”
Tom sighed.
“And I owe them a horse.”
“You said the horse threw you when the biter came at it,” Lucas said. “Man, I wish I’d been there.”
“Are you serious?”
His son didn’t say anything – as much an admission as anyone needed.
Tom closed his eyes a moment and Lucas drifted off to the back room. Lilianna shuffled closer to her father.
“They’ve asked me to stay tonight at the Enclave,” she said. “For induction.”
“It’s getting dark already.”
“You only just got home,” Lila said. “It’s OK, right?”
“You really want to do it?”
His daughter blushed and looked askance, clutching her hands.
“It means I get to spend more time with Beau,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” Tom said. “Are you saying you’re staying the night with him?”
“No,” she replied. “They have bunk rooms there. There’s a lecture and everything.”
“So you want a job in the Enclave, or do you just want to be closer to Beau?”
Lilianna avoided his eyes and shrugged.
“Both?” she said. “They told me I could get my bow back, and there’s a rifle range. It means I can practice again.”
“And the Orphanage?”
Lila looked away and shrugged once more, a true teenager. She didn’t have an answer and Tom couldn’t blame her, wondering what he even intended with such a question. It wasn’t like he wanted his daughter serving anyone but herself.
Tom cleared his throat, pushing the tiredness from his face.
“I thought . . . I wondered if all that time alone here, you and Dkembe. . . ?”
“Jeez dad, I don’t think so,” Lila said and laughed, pitching her voice low. “You scare the shit out of him too much anyway.”
“OK.”
“But with Beau. . . .”
“Hmmm. . . ?”
If Lilianna lowered her eyes before, now they were on the floor. She gave a disarmingly girlish laugh, flushing bright red.
“I know it’s weird and everything,” she said. “But I think I love him.”
“What?” Tom blinked. “You’ve been here five minutes and you’ve never known any boy other than your brother.”
The outburst turned Lila off as sure as slapping her face. The girl’s eyes widened, a kaleidoscope of emotions hissing down into a pinprick of rage.
“Fucking hell, dad.”
She stood and stormed to the bedroom, too disciplined to slam the door. Her brother was inside with her anyway. Tom heard Luke’s muffled protest, which then fell quiet.
Tom slowly exhaled, dropping his head into his hand until he caught himself doing it. He shook it instead, arose with a grunt, and walked to the bedroom door as if submitting to a dare. He knocked loudly, then opened it with his solitary working hand.
“I’m not going to argue any further on that other stuff,” he said blindly into the room. “Pack your things. I’ll walk you down there.”
*
THE MOMENT THEY were walking – if Tom’s pained shuffle could be called that – he said sorry to his daughter for his shitty response. Rightly or wrongly (and mostly the latter), he knew his own feelings getting in the way of her stuff just wasn’t helpful – and didn’t work anyway.
“I know I don’t know Beau well,” Lilianna said as they walked.
“I said we could drop it.”
“I’m not leaving you and Lucas.”
“Jeez, babe, I don’t think that’s. . . .”
“I don’t even know if he likes me.”
Tom went to offer some kind of reassurance, but shut his goddamned mouth instead. Making a muffled noise of encouragement, Tom drew a deep breath in through his nose, acknowledging his secret hope the whole thing fell into a hole so he didn’t have to add his daughter’s nascent love life to all the other challenges of the moment.
“He barely talks,” Lila said. “What does that mean?”
“What does he do at the Enclave?”
“Administration,” she said. “He runs messages a lot.”
Tom chose not to speculate about the merits of his daughter’s love interest. They passed through thinning crowds, crossed The Mile, and started down the guarded street to the Enclave.
Lila’s face was drawn, her thoughts hard at work inside her forehead looking so serious all of a sudden.
“He saw my arm,” she said at last.
“Beau saw your arm?”
“Where the Fury got me.”
She stopped at the last turn before the checkpoint guarding the Enclave proper, easing back her jacket to show the scar peeking out from the edge of the compression sleeve she wore day and night. The sleeve was helpful, at least back in her archery days. Clearly she hadn’t made the jump since reaching the City, and Tom could’ve slapped himself for failing to see the sports band was just a handy excuse to cover the stretch of her upper arm mauled by one of the biters.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last.
“Dad,” Lila replied. “You’re meant to make me feel better.”
“Everyone’s got scars,” Tom said without hesitation, then met her eye.
“Have you seen his?” he asked. “Not everyone’s scars are visible.”
Lila stared back at him, the blank look just a cover as she wrestled between frustration and her love for her father.
“Make me feel better, dad, not worse,” she said and turned to leave him for the Enclave guard post.
“Be back tomorrow,” he called after her.
“I will.”
“You have a weapon, right?”
Lilianna glanced back, but only laughed as she sashayed away.
“Of course she has a fucking weapon,” Tom growled to himself and gently wept with an awful mix of love, pride, and terror.
*
DARKFALL CREPT IN along with a squally breeze as Tom returned home, good hand stuffed into the pocket of his new coat, the unfamiliar feeling of gentle rainfall in the grimy streets like a translocation to another time, rain in the city the memory of a past life like barista-made coffee or the back seat of a cab.
It was cool and dark in the apartment foyer. No one had lit a candle just like no one had added a thing to the charity basket in recent days. Even in the City, the business of survival didn’t leave much time for such niceties. Mrs Uganda craned her head down from upstairs, and Tom lingered in the naked doorway with his eyes playing over the ground-floor apartments and the muffled sounds of the dysfunctional lives within their walls.
Iwa Swarovsky surprised him coming into the foyer from the rear service door she’d shown him the previous week – and surprised him further still with her hands filthy to the elbows and one cheek fetchingly streaked with dirt.
“Hi, Tom,” she said. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“I could say that to you.”
He smiled, eyed her up and down to let the moment draw out, then tucked a fall of her thick black hair behind one ear.
“I should wash my hands,” she said. “It’s time to change those dressings and I want to check on your ribs. How’s the mouth?”
“Ready for action.”
She laughed. Tom dropped his gaze to those dirty hands.
“Hiding the bodies?”
It might not normally work as a joke, but Iwa grinned, retucking her hair as if he hadn’t done a good enough job, then turning to lead him back the way she’d come.
“You should see,” she said. “Dkembe and I are becoming fast friends.”
The nocturnal setting didn’t do much to help his appreciation, but Tom saw at once the break in the small courtyard’s brick wall was now partly refilled and sealed with a metal sheet. Even better, the carpenter had crafted a wire mesh enclosure over their heads, caging the whole courtyard. The extra security gave Iwa Swarovsky the chance to dig up all of the paving bricks except for a cross-shaped path, and now she was halfway through the process of turning the cleared areas into raised beds.
“Tomatoes,” she said.
“Yes?”
“I was thinking, after our . . . conversation . . . even if we could only do one thing, we should do that, right?”
“For sure.”
“So I figured I would try and grow tomatoes.”
“OK,” he said. “Watch out for thieves.”
It was meant to be another funny comment, but the good doctor only sighed.
“If I could get the neighbors out of the building, I would,” she said. “But someone else would only move in.”
“They’re brewing hooch in there?”
He motioned behind them to the lower flats he’d eyeballed earlier, thinking of the miscreant Hairball’s intel.
“We don’t exactly have a building code,” Iwa answered him. “A building code, a health code, health and safety regulations . . . I suppose hooch is a cottage industry.”
Tom hummed to himself and pondered the dying man thrown into their building the week before – and then remembered that he had a beautiful woman in his presence and at least one child out of his hair for the night. A weird shiver went through him like an inversion of the fear he’d felt just before.
“I thought we could . . . eat something.”
“Yes,” Iwa replied matter-of-factly. “After I’ve checked you over.”
*
IWA SWAROVSKY WAS true to her word. Iwa excused herself to clean up in her apartment’s small bathroom and Tom stood in the kitchen-cum-living space and wondered how to play it, wearing the focused frown of a man with no idea chemistry and the colliding atoms of the cosmos were more in charge of him than any future he thought under his control.
Iwa returned from the bathroom, face and hands scrubbed, her checkered shirt unbuttoned to show her wearing nothing else as she lead him into the bedroom and gently helped Tom lie down. Then she did as she’d said, taking the next half hour to check or change his bandages, probing taped ribs, the grazes on his chest and knees, the stitches on the Fury bite – even dosing him with one of the ibuprofen from her personal supply. Then she straddled the bed beside him to make a closer inspection of the wounds to Tom’s face, a line of tape along his temple framing a mask of purple bruises, the stitches in his lip yellow with antiseptic. She traced his hairline, smiled, and then Tom pulled her into him.
He wasn’t keen to play invalid when it’d been such a long time since he was with a woman. Iwa’s shirt came off easily, and Tom enjoyed using his one good hand to caress her, trying not to wince as they kissed, propping himself on his elbow, Iwa’s knee nudging into his bandaged right arm.
Apart from the scar running down one quadrant of her face, Iwa’s pale skin was undisturbed, her breasts lively, the only lightly-trimmed black pubis like a flashback to the centerfolds of his teenage years, and just as willingly he buried his face in her, forcing a groan from the porcelain woman as he conceded defeat with reckless abandon, wrestling his arm from its sling. Though it wasn’t much good to him, Tom’s carnal hunger demanded the sacrifice, and he lowered himself onto and into her and the doctor’s lithe legs surrounded him.
Iwa turned her face away, and it was only when they were finished, an hour later, that her tears came – and then seemingly wouldn’t stop.
Tom fought off his own discomfort and embarrassment to sit with her until she could turn back into him, an arm around his waist, and he slid further down in the bed and pulled her close to him and Iwa dragged the covers over them both.
*
IT TOOK HIM several seconds to recognize the words, and Tom frowned twice, the second time in surprise to hear the fluent Czech.
“God, I can’t remember anything,” he said. “Sorry. I thought you were Russian?”
“I’m American,” Iwa said softly. “Only the surname is Russian. My family was from Prague.”
“My grandfather,” Tom said and had a brief flashback to his conversation with Akira, adding thoughtfully, “We lost the language when I was young.”
“How?”
“My mother left,” he said. “She was the only one fluent. Dad was born in Philly.”
With the blanket still covering most of them, Tom flexed his left arm as best as he could to curl Iwa’s warm female flesh into him, Iwa tracing her hand across the only patch of his chest not swaddled with dressings. There was nothing between them to leave Tom with the misbelief they’d shared something other than a moment’s comfort. Her tears were like some kind of offering to the past, memories of a land he wasn’t ready to trek into with her just yet.
“Do you ever think about leaving?” she asked.
Tom’s gentle laugh was almost a snigger.
“All the time.”
“Then. . . ?”
“My children.”
The doctor made a noise of understanding, though her question lingered in the air like the smell of sex – a rhetorical question, too, if Tom guessed right.
“You . . . think about leaving?” he asked.
“Not really . . . but yes.”
Tom had to catch himself with a hitching breath, sparked at thought of losing the delicious, kind-hearted, yet austere woman already, knowing it was too soon and idiotic anyway to develop any sort of attachment. Iwa brought her own brand of clinicism to any hint of romance between them. She’d tested him, and probably tested others who failed. Given the challenges of the life now available to them, he doubted testing his fitness would or really could ever end. It wasn’t the most heartening of thoughts.
Iwa nestled into him, the hour growing late, the delicious warmth of her disquieted by the utter strangeness to be co-sleeping again – and then, as the time passed and he felt her soften and relax, her breaths easing more gently, Tom inhaled the smell of her hair and thought about the unlikelihood of his two parents meeting in America when both hailed from the same country – and just as strange that he and Iwa should do the same.
The mysteries of how people unwittingly conspire with the universe in their own downfalls kept him awake and thinking endlessly much later than he would’ve liked. The rain came again. He felt the psychic distance between himself and his daughter a mere half-dozen City blocks away. And for a little while, he thought of Maya too, and then other women from his distant past. When the carousel of sleep took him towards Anna, his “work wife” from back in his early days as a reporter, Tom longed for unconsciousness to save him from wondering what ever became of her, and if she and any of the others still lived, and whether that was even possible.
But sleep wouldn’t come. In the end, he went through all of it, surreal as it was, to wallow in the misery of loves lost or never even lived – all the while comforted by the naked woman’s presence beside him. It almost felt disrespectful – not just to her, but to survival itself. And that feeling stayed with him right until Iwa turned over in her sleep taking the bulk of the covers with her.
It was a little after two o’clock when Tom eased himself from the bed and slowly dressed. The doctor’s eyes followed him as she stirred and Tom hobbled to retrieve boots he merely carried with him to the doorway. But rather than exchange further farewells, Iwa offered a brief, tender smile so unlike the woman he knew that he barely knew, and then she rolled back over and surrendered to her exhaustion and Tom left her in peace.
*
NEITHER LUCAS NOR Dkembe said anything when Tom emerged from his own bedroom and busied himself at the kitchen sink, ravenous, setting water to boil for his diminishing coffee supply, the majority of the cache now traded and long gone. Everything was four times as hard to do with his arm in the sling and not for the first time, he longed to go without it.
“Do we have anything like milk?” he asked irritably.
“Yeah, but we need to do something about refrigeration,” Dkembe said. “What do you think?”
“Sounds expensive, but if you want to look into it, we could do with a solution,” Tom said. “I saw your handiwork down in the courtyard, too. That’s great.”
“We’re going to plant tomatoes,” Lucas said.
“You and the . . . doctor?” Tom asked.
“Yeah,” the boy said. “She’s one of us now, right?”
Dkembe was game enough to shoot Tom a meaningful smirk and Tom was uncomfortable enough to feel abashed by it.
“Sort of,” he said to Lucas. “Yeah. Are you going to classes today? I need some fresh air. I’ll walk with you.”
It was just another ordinary morning, tucking the cut-down revolver into the back of his pants to walk his son to school.
*
THE COLUMBUS HERALD kept a modest office inside a squat brick two-story house reclaimed from the City just a block from The Mile, though it was barricaded by parked camper vans which’d long since become part of the street. Unlike many of the formerly relaxed Ohio properties, the building had a low brick wall to protect its tiny yard. They’d built a complex shelving system of old packing crates along the outside wall, watched over by an ornery-looking, one-legged old survivor cradling a crossbow from his position on a stool at the front step as Citizens came and went, checking messages on scrawled notes filed in the various pigeon holes protected by a series of tarpaulins also throwing shade across the entrance.
Tom squeezed his way past them and up to the door, semi-permanently ajar, and the dude with the crossbow eyed him with a graven face, eyes flicking to Tom’s arm in a sling, a pained expression etched into Tom’s face adding to the illusion he was unarmed.
After The Apocalypse Season 1 Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 49