Dark Advent

by Brian Hodge

  Pit Bull nodded without hesitation. “The arena?”

  “No. In battle. Right by my side.”

  Pit Bull grinned, his deep-set eyes shining with delight. This was something entirely new to him. He’d never been on a raid before. They saved him for the arena, for entertainment, because, frankly, they didn’t need him. Not when they had guns and explosives and superiority of numbers. As a group, as an army, they still didn’t need him. They didn’t. But Travis…?

  “Stick close by me, okay?” Travis said. “No matter what. Don’t let anything happen to me.”

  Pit Bull nodded emphatically. Gone was the delight of a moment before. Now he was all business. Good. He was taking this seriously. Just as Travis had meant it.

  Because Travis had seen the looks in the eyes of the others after he’d ranted and raved and smashed what he could in Brannigan’s. He’d seen those doubtful glances ricocheting from man to man; he’d seen their faith in him drop right there on the spot. Somehow the story of how Diane had gotten him had leaked out. He’d read the questions in their faces, and knew what it all meant.

  If anybody was planning a shift in leadership anytime soon, it wouldn’t be by democratic means. It would be bloody.

  Lucas was dead. Hagar had looked at him like he was some alien form of life. He wasn’t even sure he could count on Solomon’s protection anymore.

  “Dangerous tomorrow, huh?” Pit Bull said, pulling a pheasant bone from his mouth.

  Travis nodded. His brain felt wet and heavy and hot. Have to head for bed soon. “Could be,” he said, then clasped Pit Bull by the shoulder.

  “You’re the only one I trust anymore,” Travis said, and Pit Bull nodded slowly, as if this were taking some time to sink in. “You’re the only one these days.”

  He left the tequila bottle behind; sure didn’t need to pour any more of that down his throat. Things to do before catching his forty winks tonight. Let his troopers know what would be going down in the coming dawn.

  Travis was almost out of the store when Pit Bull called his name.

  “This is real, isn’t it?” Pit Bull solemnly asked.

  “What do you mean, real?”

  “This. Here. The arena. Tomorrow. It’s all real. Right?”

  Travis nodded wearily, bleary-eyed and numb and suddenly wanting only to hole up in bed for the night so the floor wouldn’t spin. “Hell yes, it’s all real.”

  Pit Bull nodded, considering this. “Used to be I was an actor. You know, when I wrestled. We were the worst actors in the world. But it wasn’t real, and that’s why I got in trouble.”

  Travis’s vision was swimming. He wondered if maybe he was what was wavering instead of everything else.

  “It’s all real now, buddy,” Travis said. “And it can’t get any more real than it’s gonna be tomorrow morning.”

  3

  The streets were desolate and dark, and Diane moved through them by herself. Slung on her shoulder was a small tote bag, flexible nylon, the kind jocks used. She’d found it back at the shipper’s.

  It was empty now. It wouldn’t stay that way.

  She had a feeling that this nocturnal visit to the abandoned stores of St. Louis would be her last. One way or another. Last time, so make it count for something.

  Alone on the rain-slick sidewalk, she ran through her head the last conversation she’d had with Erika, an hour before, a follow-up to their earlier talk in the rain.

  “What you told me earlier, about not leaving because of Travis,” Erika had said. “Does that still hold?”

  Diane had shut her eyes, feeling a terrible tug of war going on inside, wanting to take the easy way out but knowing she could never forgive herself for it.

  “I think I’ll have to stay,” she’d said.

  “When you told me that, you didn’t know Jason was coming. Neither one of us knew that we could get out of here safe tomorrow.”

  “After something like this morning,” she’d said, “you’d be surprised how little my own safety matters to me now.”

  Erika had begged for her to change her mind. And it was tough, tougher than walking into Union Station had ever been. She knew how badly the odds were stacked against her, especially if she tried to make it for very long on her own.

  But the toughest thing of all would be spending a lifetime in Texas, trying to convince herself that she was happy, that it wasn’t her fault Farrah was dead.

  So it looked like she’d be hanging around a while longer, and it wouldn’t hurt to have a little extra firepower on her side. Hence the shopping trip. Guns she already had, and bullets. Nonetheless, her first stop was a sporting goods store. Entry was easy, as looters had already visited, and they’d taken a lot. But what she wanted was still here, left in low cabinets behind the main counter: large cans of loose gunpowder. She took four, along with a coil of waterproof wick.

  Her next stop was another two blocks away: a hardware store. She’d long since been preceded here too, but plumbing supplies had been untouched.

  Short lengths of pipe, that’s the ticket. An inch and a half in diameter, threaded at both ends, with matching steel caps in a nearby bin. From elsewhere, she gathered a hammer, a metal punch, quick-drying epoxy, a roll of black electrician’s tape, and a few boxes of carpet tacks.

  All the ingredients for pipe bombs deluxe, a simple recipe. She decided to build them right there on the counter, by flashlight.

  Diane capped one end of each pipe, then used a funnel to fill them to the brims with black powder. She took the remaining caps and used the hammer and metal awl to punch a single hole through the center of each. With scissors, she snipped lengths of fuse, which she poked down into the packed pipes. Then she fed the tops of the fuses through the holes and the caps, and screwed these onto the free ends. A little epoxy to seal the fuses tight in their channels.

  After an hour she had more than twenty of them. They looked complete as is.

  But the coup de grace was still to come.

  Next, Diane unrolled long strips of electrician’s tape and studded them with carpet tacks at one-inch intervals, poking the shafts through the sticky side. She took each strip of tape and wrapped it around each pipe bomb, winding it in tight loops and leaving just enough space at the bottom to serve as a handle. When she’d finished, the bombs lay bristling like porcupines.

  Multipurpose, these tacks. It wasn’t just for the extra shrapnel when the bombs blew. Even before they exploded, the tacks would make it a lot tougher for an enemy to snatch one up and pitch it elsewhere. And if hurled directly at someone, they’d hurt like hell, maybe even stick. She could hope.

  Diane stuffed them into her bag and slung it over her shoulder. Then grabbed one last thing before leaving, the most important item of all:

  A butane lighter.

  * *

  They had a room of their own, a gift from the rest. Solitude was scarce in this new hideaway, but if anyone deserved it, the rest said, Jason deserved some alone time with Erika.

  Despite the five months apart, they undressed each other with surprising slowness, then stretched out on a pair of sleeping bags. They embraced, they kissed, they explored and reacquainted. Erika fretted over his newer scars, still tender and crosshatched with stitch marks from Molly’s sewing. Jason shushed her complaints with a single finger, then with his lips. And finally they met, totally, urging one another on and guiding one another toward common ends.

  “Welcome back,” she whispered in his ear after her breathing had slowed.

  Be great once we get a place of our own, he thought. We won’t have to act like our parents are in the next room.

  “Do me a favor?” he asked.

  She propped her chin on his chest. “Name it.”

  “No matter how much I beg and plead,” he said, tweaking her nose, “hold out on me for the rest of the night. I really do ne
ed some sleep.”

  Erika relaxed and laid her head comfortably so she could gaze directly at him, her eyes just inches from his. “If you insist.” She lightly ran fingertips along his throat, jawline. “Do I look older to you?”

  “Older?”

  “Mmm hmm.”

  He was taken aback by the question, not the sort of thing he expected on their first night of reunion.

  “Well, no,” he finally said. “It’s not even been half a year.”

  Her silence was full of unspoken meaning.

  “Oh. I look older to you, then.”

  Erika nodded. “Yeah. You do. You really do. I noticed it right off, under the Arch.” Her voice sounded faintly sad, as if despite the fact that he’d found something to benefit them all, he’d lost something in the process, something of himself that he could never get back.

  “I’m still me,” he said, and she nodded. “I wrote you letters during most of the trip. In a notebook.”

  Erika brightened and raised her head. “Really? That was sweet. Where are they?”

  “Still in my old car, I guess. That’s where they were when we wrecked.” Jason curled in closer to her side, at the moment a safer haven than Heywood, Texas, could ever be. “It was the only thing I could think of doing to keep you close to me.”

  His eyes grew heavy as she held him, cradled him. Jason let himself drift into her, surrendering and letting the aches in his head and body flow away. He felt so very tired, knew only her lips at his cheek, his shoulder, his back.

  “You like kids, don’t you?” she said.

  Into her skin he murmured that he did.

  “I could tell, by the way I remember you with the kids here after you came. You were good with them.”

  Jason pulled his head away from her so he could speak more clearly. “I had a camera once. I used to like taking pictures of kids. Especially when they didn’t know I was doing it. It was like getting to look into a world you’d forgotten about.”

  “I’d like to see them someday.”

  “All back in my old apartment,” he said. Along with everything else that tied me to the past, and showed what I used to be.

  “You think it’s wrong to want the same things out of life now as I did before? Do you think that’s wrong?”

  “No. No, I don’t. Some things may be harder now, but how could they ever be wrong?” Even in the wan light he could see the crease appear between her eyes. “What is it you want?”

  “Just someplace to call my very own. Someone to call my own. And one or two kids to call our own.” It sounded so simple, so commonplace. And yet so elusive in the here and now.

  “That’s doable.” Jason pushed her hair behind her ears, back from her face. “It really is. Just wait’ll you see this town, and you’ll know it is.”

  Jason watched the delicate spot between her eyes smooth out, felt her relax in his arms. Shared the faith that out there somewhere you could still work to make a few dreams come true and protect them from harm. She wanted it, he wanted it, and it was there for the taking if they worked at it together. He saw the fire within her, read it all in a glance.

  “I hope they have your eyes,” Jason said. “No kid could ever tell a lie if he had your eyes.”

  They clung to one another as sleep closed in, and as it overtook him, strains of their earlier conversation with Rich and Jack came back to haunt: the realization that Travis and Solomon and the rest would know where to find them. At their leisure.

  Could he ever lead a truly happy and peaceful life with Erika, knowing that it might be shattered tomorrow?

  I wish we could have it out with them once and for all. Just so I’d know we were safe.

  Just so he could live free of fear…or not at all.

  4

  Once again, the coming of dawn meant leaving St. Louis. This time, though, would be the last, and Jason couldn’t wait to see it turn into a speck in his rearview mirror.

  Erika woke him with a flurry of kisses. She had morning breath, but if that was the biggest complaint the day would dump on him, bring it on.

  She rolled up their sleeping bags while he slipped on a pair of jeans and wandered out into the reception office, his shirt dangling from one hand. He wiped the residue of sleep from his eyes and watched the activities of everyone else, few of whom looked more awake than he felt. Jack and Rich were overseeing it all, cups of instant coffee clenched in their fists.

  “Need some of this?” Rich asked him, holding his cup higher.

  “Please.” He stretched, muscles loosening under protest. If only he could stand under a hot shower for two minutes, he would ask no more of life this morning. Jeez, I feel scuzzy.

  “We let you two sleep a little longer,” Rich said, looking embarrassed. Jason had long ago decided that his relationship with Erika was about the same as his own had been with Kelly: a substitute father. Only in this case it was complicated by a father’s awkwardness with a daughter who was no longer a girl. “Hope it helped.”

  “Did me a world of good, Rich.”

  “Better get your shoes on, bud,” Jack called over to him. “We’ll be out of here in twenty minutes, tops.”

  Jason felt the last traces of sleep subside at this prospect. He’d finished an 800-mile journey yesterday by the seat of his pants, but that already seemed long ago, in the distant past. He shot Jack a thumbs-up.

  Rich explained the travel arrangements to him. They had just enough vehicles to do it the way he wanted. Their numbers were down to twenty-one now. Three would ride in each of the two pickups, the rest divided among the three cars and one jeep. As far as fuel was concerned, it would’ve been more efficient to pack the vehicles tighter, but both he and Jack found this way more practical. In case of a breakdown, they could easily abandon a vehicle and distribute its passengers among the others.

  A few minutes later, after Jason had slipped on his shoes and shirt and was hauling his and Erika’s sleeping bags out to one of the trucks, Jason crossed paths with Diane. She was lugging a cardboard box filled with canned food. Their eyes met, and she was the first to look away.

  “Hey,” he said softly. “Are you coming with us?”

  Diane loaded her box. Behind her, through the open door of the garage, the first pink fingers of dawn were beginning to touch the sky. She wandered to the edge of the doorway and stared out, ran a hand through her tendrils of blond hair.

  “I think I’ll have to pass,” she finally said.

  “Erika told me what you said last night, about staying.” Jason eased closer to her, closer, and stared at her from the side until she broke down and looked at him. Those eyes weren’t so tough, he decided. Just hurt, and scared. “She told me what you did for her. Thank you for that. You did what nobody else here could do.”

  Jason wanted to hug her, but found himself afraid to. Too dangerous, getting close to someone he might never see again.

  “You would’ve done the same thing…gone after her.”

  “Yeah, but I probably wouldn’t have gotten away with it.” The sky beyond had lightened to bluish-lavender, free of clouds. “I owe you a lot now. You brought back my future. That means everything to me. So I hate the thought of leaving you behind. There’s nothing here. Nothing.”

  “I’ve got my reasons.”

  He nodded. “I know you do.” He shut his eyes, trying not to imagine Farrah’s fate and whatever horrors Travis had subjected her to. “And I understand them. Believe me, I do. I’m probably the person here who’s got the best idea of how you’re feeling.”

  Diane gave him one of her looks then, and it was hard to read with any degree of certainty. Loosely translated, though: Oh yeah? Prove it.

  “You know what my back looks like. Well, down in Heywood we caught the guy that did it. He told me about my friend Tomahawk, and how he’d died. How they’d killed him. And I knew
it was my fault, because if he’d never fallen in with me, it never would have happened.” This, at least, she seemed to identify with. “I left this next part out last night when I was telling everyone about the last few months. I haven’t even told Erika. But I took that guy apart. I just lost it. Everything inside I ever hated, I saw in him. I won’t tell you what I did to him, that’s not the important part. The thing is, that after he was lying there in pieces, I didn’t feel any better. I just didn’t feel. At all. It didn’t bring Tomahawk to life again. Didn’t fix my back. It didn’t do shit.”

  Diane kept her eyes leveled on him, and he thought he saw them soften.

  “There’s a lot waiting for us down there. Please don’t throw it all away for shit. Shit like Travis.”

  Her mind was seesawing. He watched the swing of the pendulum behind her eyes, saw its balance tipping.

  “Give it a chance, at least. Please? If you get down there and still feel this way after a while, you can head back here. I’ll drive you myself.”

  He watched her wall of resolve crumble and fall away, leaving behind only the Diane who was little different from the Erika to whom he’d returned. It was the Diane who wanted to love and be loved, the Diane who needed to be needed. The Diane who thought of the future and hoped it would be worth living. The Diane who reached out to Jason and hugged him when he’d been afraid to do the same.

  “Damn you,” she whispered into his shoulder, crying. “Damn you anyway.”

  He hugged her back, not afraid anymore. Because it wasn’t dangerous now. In fifteen or so minutes, when they rolled out of here, she would be with them. He’d have her ride with him, too, in the yellow Sunbird he’d picked out last night for the journey. Erika would share the front with him, and Diane and Caleb would hold down the back. That’s how he wanted to leave here: with the people who’d come to mean the most to him.

  And when the moment came, he was happy to see that Diane didn’t look back.

  Only forward.

  * *

  At sunrise, the same thirty men who had stormed Brannigan’s with him met on the Union Station parking lot. The air felt cool and damp to the skin, although it held the promise of misery once the morning heated up. Travis’s soldiers shuffled about, checking and rechecking weapons, muttering among themselves as to why Pit Bull was coming along. The big bald freak was sticking like glue to Travis’s side, keeping that club of his at the ready, like he couldn’t wait to use it.