“What about provisions?” Hallam asked. “You expect us to provide you with water and food for this little searching expedition you’ve planned?”
“The way I figure it,” said Kieran, “your scouting party failed to bring in any more food or fuel.
Azazel and I can look for the grimoire and try to bring back some supplies. It’s a win-win for you, Hallam. Otherwise, we’re just here in your hair, eating your food anyway.”
Hallam sighed. “I just wish you were as concerned over the lives of the people who were captured as you are over that stupid magic book.”
“I am concerned,” I said. “But the orders said to sit tight and wait.”
“What if he kills them?”
“He won’t,” I said. But I wasn’t sure. Jason might. I didn’t know him nearly as well as I used to.
“Azazel, are you sure you can’t just use your power to—”
“No!” I said.
Hallam sighed again, more heavily. He shot a glance at Kieran, who shrugged.
“Maybe you should do it,” Kieran said. “It would make everything a lot easier.”
I wasn’t using magic. I wished everyone would stop asking me to do it. “I need the grimoire,” I said. “It will help.” Maybe lying could buy me some time. Once I had the book, and I’d purged all power from my body, then they could complain all they want, but it would be done. No one would ask this from me anymore.
“All right, then,” said Hallam. “Go try to find it.”
“Great,” I said. “Kieran and I will leave this afternoon.”
We packed sparingly, bringing some supplies for camping and a little water. Hopefully, we’d find some food in some of the abandoned houses. We thought about taking the car, but it seemed like a needless waste of gasoline. We needed the fuel to get back to Georgia, or wherever we’d be headed after this. Instead, we decided we’d be walking.
I wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of spending a few days alone with Kieran, because things were so weird between us. However, I trusted Kieran, and I knew him better than the others in the camp. I couldn’t ask Hallam to spare one of his own people to help me find the grimoire. Kieran had been assigned to help me with this mission. Kieran was the person I was taking.
We set off in the afternoon. The sun was still bright in the sky. It was warm, but not nearly as warm as it had been the day we arrived. The spring heat fluctuated. Tomorrow, it could be cold. I didn’t know how similar the climate of Kentucky was to West Virginia, where I’d grown up, but I knew back home it wasn’t unlikely for an occasional frost to happen at this point of the year. I hoped it wouldn’t get that cold. If it did, Kieran and I would have to snuggle for warmth. And somehow, I thought he would enjoy that more than I would.
We checked the houses that lined Polk Circle, but they were quite close to the church, and had probably already been raided. Sure enough, there was next to nothing there, and no sign of the grimoire. We thought, however, that the scouting party had probably been captured closer to town. After all, Jason’s people were camped out in the state park, which was right next to the river. Would they have spread out so far trying to find this scouting party?
We were trying to find supplies, but my first priority was the grimoire, so I insisted we search close first. Kieran and I decided it made sense to work in ever widening semicircles, branching out from the entrance to the state park. We searched until it got dark, but didn’t find the grimoire.
We did, however, find some canned food, which we stacked and left to gather up on our return trip. There was no reason to carry all that heavy stuff with us when we were coming back this way.
As the sun started to drag heavy in the horizon and the sky turned bright colors, we came to one last house, which we decided to check out before we made camp. If the house was suitable, we might even sleep there that night. The house was two stories, with a wide veranda-style porch on the front. It had white siding. It sat alone in a field. The grass was high. One lone straggly tree adorned its front yard. A swing hung from the branches. For the most part, the house looked inviting, if a little forlorn.
Kieran and I had to break in. The doors were locked, as if the people inside were just on an extended vacation. Kieran smashed out a window in the front door. We were able to unlock the door that way and get inside.
The house was stuffy inside. It didn’t smell good.
“We’re not sleeping in this stench,” Kieran said, and I agreed with him. I’d rather sleep outdoors than smell this.
“Let’s just check out the kitchen and get out of here,” I said.
“Go for it,” said Kieran. “I’m going to duck into the garage and see if there’s any gasoline or cars I can siphon.”
We parted ways. The kitchen was at the back of the house. I made my way through a messy living room. Used plates were still sitting on the coffee table. Articles of clothing were scattered over the floor. These people were slobs, I decided. The stench got worse as I got further into the house.
The kitchen had one of those swinging bar doors, like a saloon in the old west. I swung though it and was greeted with a disgusting sight.
A man sat at the kitchen table, clutching a shotgun. What was left of his head was slumped to the side of his lifeless body. His face was just gore—brain matter and blood. There were flies crawling all over his body. They made a sickening buzzing sound.
I wanted to throw up. I backed out of the kitchen, bumping against the swinging door on my way out. “Kieran!” I yelled.
I knew this kind of thing had happened. For some people, it had been too hard after the power outage. At first, we’d thought it was nothing. After all, sometimes, the power goes out. Hospitals had generators, so did many grocery and department stores. We were aware that it was massive and that transformers up and down the entire east coast of the U.S. had been knocked out. We knew that millions of people were without power. But… it was just a power outage. We expected to be up and running again by the end of the day. We didn’t understand that the transformers couldn’t be repaired. They had to be replaced. And we had neither replacement transformers nor the means to build new ones. Not without power.
Weeks passed. No power. Hospitals couldn’t function. Battery operated appliances couldn’t be recharged. Cell phones stopped working. It was October—neither too hot nor too cold, so people weren’t dying yet from exposure, but people were dying in hospitals. People were starting to panic. That’s when the riots started and the looting. And then things just kept getting worse and worse.
Some people couldn’t handle it. Some people killed themselves. Apparently, that’s what this guy had done.
“Kieran!” I yelled again.
And that’s when I heard it. Wailing. From upstairs.
It was a baby.
I ran up the steps as quick as I could. At the top, there was a bathroom and three bedrooms. I looked in each, looking for the source of the crying. In the first, two children, maybe six or seven were lying on their beds. They’d both been shot. I closed my eyes and backed out of the room.
Oh my God. What had this man done? Had he shot his entire family and then shot himself?
It certainly looked like it. The second room contained a woman, also lying on her bed, shot through the head.
Jesus.
I could still hear the crying. I opened the door to the third bedroom. It was a baby’s room. The walls were yellow, with a strip of wallpaper around the middle. Little zoo animals marched around the walls—chubby elephants and wide-eyed zebras. There was a crib on the far wall. The mobile over the crib was zoo animals as well. I walked to the crib and looked down into it. The baby was squalling as loud as he could. I thought he was a little boy. He was wearing a blue onesie with trains on it. What had happened? Had the man saved the baby for last? Hadn’t he been able to shoot the baby? But how could he bear to leave the baby alive to starve to death?
Certainly, that was crueler than a shot to the head. I shuddered, wondering how long t
he baby had been here by himself.
He was still screaming as I lifted him out of the crib. I pulled him close, cradling his head against my shoulder and sliding my hand under his bottom. I began to walk around the room and bounce him gently, cooing to him.
Kieran appeared in the door to the bedroom. “Holy crap!” he said.
I looked at him helplessly. “Will you look through the kitchen for some formula?” I yelled over the baby’s cries.
Chapter Five
The baby was sleeping. I’d found some diapers and changed him. He had a heck of a diaper rash.
(And that had been the grossest diaper I’d ever changed.) I was cradling him in my arms. His little mouth had gone slack against the bottle I was holding.
Kieran was watching me with interest. “You sure do know how to take care of babies,” he said.
“I helped with my niece a lot,” I said.
“Huh,” he said. Mercifully, he didn’t ask any more questions. There was nothing I wanted to tell him about little Jenna. I never wanted to talk about that. Ever.
We were sitting in the living room. The sun was going down. It was dark. God. It was always dark. I missed electricity. “I don’t want to stay in here with all these dead bodies,” I said.
“Okay,” said Kieran. “But what are we going to do about this baby?”
“Take him with us,” I said. “We’ll have to go back to camp. We can come back and look for the grimoire later.”
“But do we need to pack up baby supplies?”
He was right. We didn’t get our tent pitched until it was very dark outside. I let Kieran work on building a fire while I tried to get the baby supplies into the packs we’d brought with us. I was sure that there wasn’t anything we could use back at the church. I didn’t know if there were supplies to be raided in the nearby convenience store or not, but I knew that we needed to get all the formula, bottles, diapers, and baby clothes we could. Of everything, the diapers were the bulkiest. Kieran wanted to leave them behind, but I wouldn’t. He said that people used cloth diapers before the advent of disposable ones and considering there was a finite supply of them, we might as well get used to that. I told him that he could wash the cloth diapers if he felt that way. He caved and let me bring the disposables.
With a fire built, Kieran and I heated up some cans of chili and ate next to our tent. The baby was snoozing inside. I’d made him a little bed of blankets away from our own sleeping bags. The last thing I wanted to do was roll over on the baby and kill it. This happened more often than people thought.
I watched Kieran eat, the fire dancing on his face, lighting up his long hair. He was a good looking guy. He was nice, too. Decent. If I were really going to have a baby, he wasn’t the worst pick for a father ever. I didn’t think he’d run off or leave me in the lurch or anything. I thought he was a pretty stand-up guy. Still, the whole idea felt too foreign to really wrap my head around.
I couldn’t believe that there could actually be a tiny being growing inside my body.
Actually, it sounded kind of gross. If I were pregnant, wasn’t I supposed to be releasing hormones that would help me bond with the little creature? Maybe that came later. I stared down at my flat stomach and willed it to stay flat. I was only a week late. My period would come.
Maybe it was stress. Maybe I’d lost too much weight. There were lots of things that could be going on.
Inside the tent, the baby woke up and started fussing. I left my chili and went in to get him. I didn’t know if he needed another bottle already. It hadn’t been that long since I fed him. Sure enough, he quieted as soon as he was in my arms.
He was lonely, poor guy. How many days had he lain by himself in that house, his family rotting around him? It made me feel sick. I tickled his tummy, and he gave me a huge toothless grin.
Kieran came around the fire and sat next to me, peering at the baby.
“Did you see his name anywhere?” he asked me.
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“He’s very cute.”
“Yes,” I cooed to the baby, “this little guy is adorable.”
“Well, that’s what we’ll call him, then,” said Kieran.
“What?”
“Guy. You said he was a little guy. Guy’s a good name. It’s very masculine.”
I laughed. I brushed his nose with my forefinger. He grabbed at my finger with his tiny hand.
“You like that, Guy? Is that a good name?”
He gurgled and smiled.
Kieran reached in and tickled his chin. “I think he likes it.” Guy grasped Kieran’s finger. It was crazy, how big Kieran’s fingers looked next to Guy’s tiny ones. Kieran smiled at me over the baby. “He’s got quite a grip.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Babies go through a stage where they love to grab stuff.”
“Cool,” said Kieran, looking at Guy again. He gazed at the baby. “Very cool.” Guy and Kieran made gurgling noises at each other for a bit. The two of them were fun to watch, I had to admit.
“We could do this,” Kieran said.
He caught my eyes.
“Kieran, we don’t even know if—”
“We could, though, I mean, don’t you think?”
I sighed heavily. “There’s way more to babies than diapers and formula and finger grabbing.”
“Sure, I know that,” said Kieran. “Can I hold him?”
I handed the baby to Kieran, who look a little terrified at first. He wasn’t sure where to put his hands. After I assured him that he wasn’t going to break the baby, he relaxed a little bit. The warm light from the fire lit up the angles of his face and the swell of the muscles on his arms. He was a big guy, but he held Guy so tenderly. I had to admit that I kind of liked the way it looked, Kieran holding the baby by the fire like that. It was comforting. I hugged my knees to my chest and took the sight in. Kieran would be a good dad. Definitely.
“So,” said Kieran. “What else is there to babies?”
“Come on,” I said, “are you serious?”
“Totally. You have to feed them and change them, right? And once I get to be okay with washing dirty diapers, that’s not going to be much of a problem.”
“Feeding them,” I reminded.
“Well, not to be crass, but doesn’t nature sort of cover that part? I mean, you’re going to be equipped to feed the baby once it’s born with your—”
“Stop,” I said. I was not entirely comfortable with Kieran discussing my breasts as a food source.
Okay, sure, that’s what they were actually for and everything, but… “I guess you’re right, but that whole idea makes me feel sort of ooky.”
“How come? It’s totally natural.”
“Well, of course, you think it’s neat. You’re a guy.”
He shrugged. “Okay, then, we’ll find formula. We work for the government. Shouldn’t be a problem. What else?”
“That’s a problem,” I said. “The fact that we work for the government. How am I supposed to take care of a baby when I’m gallivanting all over the U.S. trying to gather up fuel?”
“I guess you’d have to take maternity leave.”
“Do you think they’d let the chick with the nifty magical powers take maternity leave? And besides, it’s not like the baby will be able to take care of itself right away. There aren’t schools anymore, exactly, or day care centers. This is a full time job for at least fifteen years.”
He laughed. “It’s not ideal. But we could do it.”
Another horrifying thought occurred to me. “There aren’t hospitals, anymore, Kieran. How would I have a baby without a hospital?”
“It seems to me that babies predate hospitals.” Kieran shifted Guy in his arms.
“Yeah, and there used to be a huge infant mortality rate,” I said.
“Whatever,” said Kieran. “I think the delivering mother is doing most of the work there.
Somebody just needs to be around to catch.”
“And to make sure the
baby’s not breach and that there’s no umbilical cord wrapped around its neck and to administer the epidural—oh, God. There are no more epidurals. Or heart rate monitors. Or—” I broke off. God. I couldn’t be pregnant. I just couldn’t be.
Kieran was quiet for a few minutes, and then he said gently, “Azazel, if you’re pregnant, there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Right, I thought bitterly. No more abortions either.
“If we have to make it work, we will,” he said. “We can.”
I shook my head.
“I’m just saying, whatever you need from me, whatever I can do, I want to do.”
“Look, let’s just wait, because maybe it’s all a false alarm. Maybe I’m not pregnant.” Please, don’t let me be pregnant. Please.
Kieran looked into the fire. The dancing flames illuminated all the hollows in his face. He looked older and more serious than he usually did. “I lost my family right after the lights went out. After that happened, I was kind of destroyed, you know? I, um, I just didn’t want to ever care that much about other people again. It hurt too much.”
Should I touch him? To comfort him? Or would he think that meant something else? I knew how he felt. I’d lost my family too.
Kieran kept talking. “Back in Georgia, before we left, Thomas said something to me. He was teasing me because he said I was watching you a lot.”
“Kieran, you don’t have to—”
“No, I want to tell you this. If there’s a baby, that’s scary. It’s really scary. But, it might be nice to have someone to take care of. I kind of miss feeling that about another person.” He looked up at me. “I think I might feel that about you.”
“Kieran, I’m not—”
“Yeah, it’s okay,” he said. “I’m not pledging my everlasting love or something. And you don’t have to feel anything for me at all. I just wanted you to know that I’m here, and I’m going to try to take care of you. That’s it.”
I chewed on my lip and didn’t say anything. That was sweet, so why did it make me feel awful?
V.J. Chambers - Jason&Azazel Apocalypse 01 Page 6