by McBain, Tim
“What?”
“My tush! It’s sore as heck.”
Erin laughed, shaking her head.
“We’ll take a break in a minute. Mine kinda hurts, too.”
Erin gestured ahead at the shell of a busted up convenience store. Bike tires crunched gravel into asphalt as they rolled into the parking lot. It was pocked with water-filled potholes large enough to qualify as small ponds. They steered around them, taking a serpentine path through the lot.
“Might as well check and see if there’s anything good left. You wait here until it’s clear.”
Izzy hopped off the bike.
“Just like old times,” she said.
Erin stopped and smiled, nodding.
“Just like old times.”
Izzy watched her disappear into the shadows of the store, gun drawn. Erin had a tendency to hunch forward when she entered a new building. The way her back arched always reminded Izzy of a turtle’s shell.
Izzy walked along the edge of the curb, arms extended for better balance like a tightrope walker in the circus. She didn’t like that they’d left Marcus and Rocky. It didn’t make sense to split up. What if they got lost? What if they never saw each other again? She was wishing for a way to communicate over long distances when Erin poked her head through the glass-less door.
“It’s all clear, Captain Underpants.”
Izzy teetered to one side and dismounted from the curb.
“Why am I Captain Underpants?”
Erin crooked at a finger at her, and Izzy had to swivel around to get a look at her back’s reflection in the lone intact window on the whole building. Her shirt and jacket were tucked into the back of her pants, with a half-inch sliver of underwear elastic visible.
“Hey!”
Izzy twisted and yanked, righting her wardrobe like a chicken smoothing it’s ruffled feathers.
“You’re the one walking around with a Do-It-Yourself Wedgie.”
“You could have told me.”
“I just did.”
Inside, the store looked like someone had taken a baseball bat to its remains. The shelves that had contained anything worthwhile were empty, some overturned. Wads of paper and packaging material littered the floor. A box of Twinkies lay flattened like roadkill on the gray tile.
Izzy’s toe collided with a piece of Styrofoam, and it swooshed across the floor with an eerie screech. She kicked it again, and the noise sent goose bumps crawling over her arms.
“Izzy, quit. It’s like nails on a chalkboard.”
Izzy stopped, pivoted, changed direction. She came to a clump of plastic shrink wrap. She lifted it with her foot and it fluttered back to the ground like a jellyfish. With her next step, Izzy nudged an empty beer can, and it skittered over the floor with a metallic tinkle.
She wondered if Marcus and Rocky had started out yet. Would the squirrel ride on his shoulder? Or would Marcus tuck the animal in the pocket of his hoodie? Sometimes Rocky liked to sleep there. Marcus said that was where he carried her around when she was still a baby and had a hurt leg.
Izzy pictured them zooming right past the store, missing their bikes outside. She turned and looked out the window, but the road was empty. What if they got lost or made a wrong turn somewhere?
She wished there was some way she could leave markers for them.
She shoved her hands in her pockets, feeling a wad of Mall Mania money she’d tucked there for safe keeping.
Izzy froze.
“We have to go back.”
Erin’s head popped up from behind a shelf of wiper fluid.
“What?”
“We have to go back to the house. We left something important.”
“I told you, Marcus and-”
“No! It’s not that. We left the game! Mall Mania! I can’t just leave it behind.”
Erin shoved her hands in her pockets, looking annoyed.
“I brought it.”
“You did not.”
“I did! It was going to be a surprise. When we found somewhere to camp out tonight.”
“Oh,” Izzy said, then grinned. “I’ll still act surprised.”
Erin rolled her eyes.
“Right.”
Izzy hopped this way and that, kicking pieces of garbage as she went, enjoying the varying sounds and movements of the different materials. There was a chest freezer next to the cashier’s counter, and Izzy rested her arms on the glass top and gazed inside. Past her reflection, she surveyed the formerly frozen novelties.
She couldn’t reach the bottom of the case without anchoring her hip on the edge and leaning her upper body into the freezer. Her feet kicked in the air, maintaining her balance, and keeping her from tipping all the way in. She scooped one of the packages and extricated herself from the freezer. She held it in her hand, tipping it this way and that, a plastic pouch filled with red sugar water. The popsicle stick floated in the middle like a broken ship’s mast.
Izzy tossed the melted popsicle back into the freezer. It crinkled and splatted when it hit the bottom.
Four paces from where she stood, a cardboard box squatted on the floor. She took the four steps, then wound up for a good kick. She expected the box to swish across the linoleum like a hovercraft. Instead, her foot collided with the side with a thud and the box barely moved an inch.
This box wasn’t empty.
Ray
The Compound
279 days after
Jones bounded through the woods like a lion closing on some injured antelope. He burst past the pocked place where the pile of grenades had performed open leg surgery, accelerating and closing the gap between him and the shorter raider.
Watching them run almost felt like watching two different species racing, Ray thought. The raider’s stubby little legs twittered over the ground, thick quadriceps all twitchy like a squirrel’s movements. His torso leaned forward so his head was actually ahead of his knees. Jones leaned back, his spine straight and rigid. Each of his movements seemed effortless, graceful. His strides spanned incredible distances. It looked like he was jogging and catching up to a man working three or four times as hard.
A deadfall tree tripped the raider. Not enough to knock him over, but enough to slow him enough for the predator to catch him.
Jones lowered his shoulder and drove full force into the smaller man’s back. The raider’s neck whipped back like a test dummy’s on the way to the ground. They struggled for a moment, and then the shots rang out. Two of them.
Jones still pinned the body to the ground, sitting on it, his back to the cabins. The raiders legs remained motionless below.
Ray realized his mouth was agape, so he closed it. The sound around him seemed to turn back on all at once. The men whooped and chattered, excitement in their voices, in the air around them. He could hear Fiona’s voice above the rest.
“Atta boy, Jonesy! That’s how it’s done.”
Ray didn’t join the celebration, though. He watched the figure out there still straddling the ribcage of the raider’s corpse, waiting to see his next move. Who the hell was this guy? He’d just saved the camp, potentially saved all of their lives, but something about it was off.
He felt the cold numb of shock in both of his hands, a tingle of frigidity that roiled in his palms, and the ice climbed up into the muscles of his forearms, making them tremble.
The dark figure rose then, and the posture seemed to change. All of that animal confidence drained from its body language, and its shoulders sloped, head hanging down. This seemed to break whatever spell Ray had been under.
It was nothing. Nothing at all. Maybe he’d let Lorraine’s warnings get into his head. That was probably all it was. The kid was a damn hero for Christ’s sake.
Still, he watched Jones mosey back to the camp, his eyes trained on the ground.
Everyone clambered down from their windowed perches to cluster around the kid once he got within fifteen feet of the cabins. Fiona tousled his hair while most of the rest patted him on t
he back. The words of encouragement tangled over each other to create a wordless harmony. That was the sound of victory, Ray thought, men babbling together in just the right tone.
Apart from smiles and blinks, the kid responded to none of the chatter. He just shuffled forward. It didn’t look like he had any particular destination in mind to Ray. Just looked like his legs were in the mood to keep moving, and so they did.
Ray hopped down when the crowd got close, and Jones locked eyes with him as he approached, blinking a little faster, or so Ray thought.
“It was crazy to run out there when you knew we were gunning for those guys,” the preacher said. “How’d you know we’d see you in time to lay off?”
Jones’ eyes went a little wide as though he hadn’t considered this reality until just now.
“I guess I didn’t. I wasn’t thinking much, I guess.”
The two men looked at each other for a long moment.
“Hell of a throw,” the preacher said. “Did you know you were going to nail them like that or was it dumb luck?”
“I don’t know. It felt good off my fingertips.”
The whole group seemed to slow outside of the cabin where the grenade had gone off. They fell into a semi-circle facing it, and everyone fell quiet. The smoke smell hung in the air here. The odor reminded Ray a little of setting off fireworks as a kid, a concentrated version of that particular black smoke stench.
Black streaked away from the perimeter of the window frame like soot around a chimney, and more black stared back from the pieces of the ceiling and walls Ray could see, a matte black like charcoal.
“Who?” he said, wheeling to search the faces around him. Most wouldn’t meet his eyes, though Jones stared right at him.
“Higgins, I think,” a voice said somewhere to his left. “Lumpy, too.”
“Yeah,” another voice said. “Lumpy, too.”
Some of the others nodded, and hushed voices murmured condolences to those considered closest to the fallen.
Ray climbed the two steps to take a peek into the cabin. He didn’t know why. He just had to see them for himself, to be absolutely certain that there was nothing to be done. None of the others moved, which surprised him. He thought a couple more would come take a look, for better or worse.
One body occupied each back corner of the cabin. The bigger one — Lumpy, he thought — was draped over a cot, his head slumped into the corner and out of view. That was probably for the best. The rest of him was pretty tattered, patches of red opened up everywhere along his legs and torso.
Higgins looked worse. He slouched in the corner, belly up. One arm was gone from the elbow down, and it looked like he had just about been decapitated as well, the blackened remnant of a face and head bent too far back, strung to his body by sinewy threads of connective tissue.
He must have picked it up, Ray thought, tried to throw it out the window and didn’t quite get it off in time.
He only looked on them for a few seconds, but it felt like much longer.
His eyes stayed on the semi-circle of open grass in front of the crowd as he walked back down the steps. Many watched him, but none of them got any closer. Maybe that was for the best. He had to see it, had to, had to look the worst in the face, to hold the worst things in his head and understand them so he could protect the people he cared about from them. That was his nature, but what good would it do any of them? What good comes from gazing into that abyss?
There was something visceral about moving directly from celebrating with Jones to mourning in front of this blown out cabin, Ray thought, something that didn’t just stab him in the heart but twisted the blade for good measure. Based on the body language around him, he suspected the others felt the same way. The victory felt hollow now, felt pointless and small in the face of the loss incurred.
And he knew he should say something, something that would put this pain into some perspective.
He put up a hand and the whispers cut out right away.
“We lost good men today,” Ray said, lifting his voice to speak to all of them at once. “Good men. But Lumpy and Higgins did not die in vain. We’re still here. We lost two brothers, but the family persists, the family carries on. Never forget that as you mourn them. We’re still here.”
He banged a fist against his chest as he said those last words, and he hesitated a moment before he went on. In that pause, he couldn’t help but relate this to his prior speaking engagements. This was nothing like them. Before he told people what they wanted to hear, smiling forever and always. Now he looked into their faces, and he told them that he felt their pain, and he meant it.
“There will be more battles to come. Some of them violent like tonight’s, some of them battles of the mind and battles of the spirit. We will be tested over and over, pushed to our limits by these harsh times, and more of our brothers and sisters will fall along the way. But as a group, we will survive so long as we fight for each other, so long as the bravest few are willing to risk everything for each other. Believe that. Hold it in your heart every day.”
Erin
Avella, Pennsylvania
260 days after
As they set back out onto the road, all Erin could think was: of course. In their first scavenging foray of the trip, of course they’d find an entire case of bubble gum. Devoid of nutrition, with just enough sugar to increase your cavity count.
Izzy was happy. Erin caught a glimpse of her chomping away out of the corner of her eye. The kid pursed her lips and exhaled, inflating a sugary pink orb that shuddered in the wind for a few moments before it popped. The deflated gum wrinkled and flattened against Izzy’s cheek. A strand of her hair just missed the sticky mess.
Erin could already see where this was headed.
“No bubbles while you’re riding!”
“What? That’s no fun!”
“If you get gum in your hair, then it’s coming out with scissors. We don’t have time for an emergency of the gum-in-hair variety.”
Izzy made a face, wrinkling her nose in something like a snarl.
They pedaled on, passing a few wrecked cars at a turn-off, but mostly seeing only the road and the trees and the marbled sky. To their left the road cut through the side of a hill, exposing the layers of rock beneath, each stripe marking a different era in time.
Erin heard the telltale shriek of Izzy’s brakes. She didn’t need to turn her head to know the metallic clang that followed was the kid slapping her hand against the green and white road sign notifying them that the next town was 14 miles ahead. It was about the tenth time she’d done it since they’d left the convenience store. A new boredom-busting travel game? Like when you try to collect license plates from all fifty states on the cars you pass on a road trip. Or a superstitious compulsion? Like holding your breath when you pass a graveyard? Erin wasn’t sure. Knowing nine-year-olds, it was probably a little of both.
Erin resisted the urge to turn and look behind her again, at the point on the horizon where the two parallel lines of the road seemed to meet. She tried to tell herself the tightness in her chest was homesickness. And maybe that was part of it. Even though they’d only actually lived there for half a year, it had been their safe haven. It really had felt like home.
But if she were being honest with herself, there was something else making her feel this way. Guilt. Guilt for leaving Marcus and that damned rodent. And every time she looked back the way they’d come, she half-expected to see them there. An angry dot in the distance, gaining ground.
There was nothing there now, just as there had been nothing the last dozen times she found herself looking. Just more road and trees and mottled sky.
They arrived in Avella in the late afternoon, when the sun began to sink toward the horizon. It was a tiny old rail stop, with bumpy brick streets in the oldest parts of town.
Erin slowed her bike and came to a halt next to a spray-painted sign advertising “Wing Nite” next to the fire station.
“I think we’ll stay her
e for the night,” Erin said.
“At the fire station? Is there a pole? Can I slide down it?”
Erin point to a bungalow on the corner.
“I meant the house across the street.”
“Boo,” Izzy said, but Erin wasn’t listening. Something caught her eye at the fire station. Orange and metallic, glinting in the low sun. She slid off her bike and hobbled toward a Coke machine out front. Man, she was sore from riding all day.
She had to crouch down and extend one arm behind the machine to reach. Someone had pried the vending machine open, probably with a crowbar, taking the money and the soda. But they’d missed one.
The can scraped against the ground as she pulled it free. She spun the aluminum cylinder in her hand. Orange Fanta.
“Holy heck! I want some,” Izzy said, making grabby hands at the can.
Erin cracked the top and let the kid have the first swig.
“How is it?”
“Warm,” Izzy said between gulps. “But good.”
Even after all that riding, and a mind-numbing game of Mall Mania, Erin had trouble falling asleep. Even with her eyes shut, she knew it wasn’t home. It smelled wrong, musty and uninhabited. Their house smelled like food and fire.
And then there were the noises. She knew the sounds of their house. The crackle of the fire. The drips melting off the icicles on the gutter outside their bedroom window.
A scurry of feet in the attic above them caused her eyes to snap open. Rats, most likely. But it made her think of the squirrel and Marcus.
The guilt crept in again, and she fought it. She’d made the right choice. Izzy was her responsibility, but that’s because she was a kid. Marcus could take care of himself. She didn’t owe him anything. She’d been more than generous, really. First in saving him, and second in letting him stay, and finally in leaving him a supply of food that should last him at least a month. And he wasn’t alone. He had Rocky.
She closed her eyes again. She had nothing to feel guilty about. She’d been fair with Marcus.
But when her mind finally drifted into a dream, Marcus was there, and he was angry. Izzy, too. They refused to talk to her, turning away when she spoke. Even the squirrel wouldn’t acknowledge her.