Chapter 11
Rosa had never met anyone quite like Lieutenant Lucas Walker.
That by itself was not so unusual – she had lived on campus for ten years – her jobs had been in the immediate local community – bartender and waitress – something sufficiently demeaning to subsist on, as she worked her way through school, and ran her student loans up into the National Debt. Rosa's contacts with the military had been drunken furloughs at the bars, trolling for women.
Either that or her forays into the third-world, cleaning up after them after they blew one town or another to bits.
Much to Rosa's irritation – and Jeremy's as well – Nurse Julie had been fawning over the handsome Lieutenant since the moment they'd led him down to their shattered shelter – with Lucas deliberately bouncing on his damaged foot as they descended the stairs. Julie had gone to work on his every scratch and abrasion.
Mildly amused, Lucas tolerated her indulgently.
The others had gathered 'round like cave-dwellers – Lucas was the first contact with the outside since it all began.
Rosa could see him taking professional note of the shell-shocked eyes staring back – the coffee-girl, Jamie, sat huddled, clutching her own knees to her chest like a stuffed animal – the young kid in the security badge showing way too much upper eye.
And of course at least one of them had to be pregnant – Rosa saw Lucas' eyes pause on Allison – just as Rosa's own had that very first day. This was followed by a quick appraisal of Bud, as the man looking after her.
Tactical assessment complete, he turned to Rosa, identifying her as tribal head.
“How long have you all been here?” he asked.
“Twelve days,” Rosa said. “Where the hell were you?”
Lucas raised an arched eyebrow, smiling dryly. “Jeez. You sound like my wife.”
“You're married?” Julie asked, crestfallen.
Lucas smiled gently. “Very,” he said.
Rosa glanced sternly at the young nurse. She, herself, had noticed his tagged ring-finger right away – something that came with experience – and certainly nothing to do with any reflexive attraction on her part – just as it was only as a medical professional that she had noticed the near-perfect physique of the almost quintessential alpha-male – muscles cut with a chisel – MMA-style tattoos sleeved down both arms. And even with two days beard-growth, he presented that cut of military cleanness – absent the sloppiness she always associated with frat guys.
There was also his blatantly chauvinist good-nature – Rosa was irritated to find herself responding to it, just like some bimbo-brained cheerleader.
She reminded herself, this was one of the ones she was mad at.
“Lieutenant Walker,” she began...
“Don't be so formal,” Lucas cut in. “You can call me 'sir'.”
He offered up a big, cheeky, excruciatingly-confident grin.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “Just once. I wanna hear how it sounds coming from you.”
For a moment, Rosa actually had the impulse to hit him – for all the nearly cauterized-emotional patience her job's discipline required, she actually felt her hands curling into fists.
Then she looked down at her own pampered doctor's hands next to his rocked-hide. As if she could hurt him with a baseball bat, let alone her knuckles.
Maybe she could stomp on his broken foot. Or yank out a couple of his stitches.
“Okay,” Rosa said, icily, “Sir...,”
Lucas’ brows raised.
“Brrrr,” he said. “That was pretty good. Scary.”
He learned forward as if with new interest.
“What was your name again, ma'am?”
“Rosa,” she said. “Call me Doctor Holland.”
Lucas grinned.
“So,” Rosa said, “where the hell have you people been?”
“Well,” Lucas said, sitting up attentively, “WE – and I'm using the royal 'WE' – have been in LA. And Chicago. And in New York. And personally, I've been right here.”
“Dropping bombs on us,” Rosa said. “So the military's plan was just to let us die?”
Lucas smiled patiently. “Ma'am, I don't think you understand. We lost in LA. And Chicago and New York. And in case you missed it, I got my ass kicked right here. And while we were trying to save all these places, a LOT of other spots – all full of people waiting to get rescued – all got left to burn.”
He tossed a piece of the surrounding rubble dismissively.
“Or got stomped flat.”
“San Fran,” he said, “got off easy. You had us right here on-site. And we still got our asses kicked.”
New York, Rosa thought – LA. and Chicago – those were questions she hadn't been asking yet.
While she was working up the nerve, Bud asked for her.
“What's been happening up there?”
Lucas eyed him seriously, and then the others.
“Don't ask if you don't really want to know.”
The group exchanged furtive glances, but Bud nodded for all of them.
Lucas shrugged. “Well,” he said, “what you see is what you get.” He tossed a thumb in the direction of the smashed-in ceiling and the devastated city beyond.
“This,” he said, “everywhere.”
There was a long, sober silence.
“Locally,” Lucas continued, “once things went south in L.A. and here in San Fran... well, we kinda had a lot of bases clustered right around here – and damned if they pretty much didn't get taken completely out.”
Rosa took quiet note of the word 'completely'.
Again, Bud asked the question she didn't want to.
“What's left?”
Lucas shrugged. “West Coast? Militarily, pretty much the land bases are gone. Fortunately, this was a big Navy area and we've managed to relocate off-shore. The anchor-point is just off Fort Hunter – about a hundred miles south.
“Other than that,” he continued, tapping a rim-shot on a smashed car-bumper, “it's all gone.”
He waved his hand slowly, as if wiping it all away.
“Everything,” he said.
The little circle stared back, blinking in the dark. Julie's eyes were wide and mollified. Bud reflexively pulled Allison close. Jamie squeezed herself tighter into her little ball. Even Jeremy paused in his incessant pacing.
So,” Lucas said, slapping his hands with by-rote, gung-ho optimism, “that's the score as it stands. Obviously, that's a number we're going to try and improve on.”
He hiked his wounded leg up on to the rubble like an easy chair and reclined, as if dismissing the subject altogether, and ready to simply settle down for a nap.
Rosa cleared her voice.
“Well, Lieutenant Walker,” she said, “what's the military's master-plan now?”
Now Lucas grinned. “That's classified. I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.”
Rosa felt her knuckles curling again.
“Okay,” she said patently, “what's YOUR master-plan?”
“Well,” he said, waggling his injured foot, “as soon I can get along a little better, I'm taking us all out of here, and we're gonna reconnect with my base just a hop south of here.”
“Define 'a hop'.”
“Fort Hunter. Like I said. A hundred miles or so.” Lucas tapped his bum leg. “That's why I want my foot working better.”
“And you expect us to just follow you through a hundred miles of monster-infested war-zone?”
Lucas shrugged, then nodded.
“Best not to linger,” he said. He made as if to check his watch. “My wife's probably already expecting me. And she gets really testy when I'm late and don't call.” He offered Rosa a confidential wink. “You know how women are.”
“I do,” Rosa said.
Lucas reached for his wallet. “Here,” he said. “This is her.”
He pulled out a well-worn photograph and handed it over.
Suitably gorgeous, Rosa thought – a bo
mbshell in a boob-shirt and a thong – a perfect complement to Lucas' own chiseled musculature.
The kind of woman that even Rosa – who could turn heads in her doctor's fatigues – reflexively hated.
“She won that wet t-shirt-contest, by the way,” Lucas informed her, as if baiting her with her own just-finished thought – while she sat there with two-weeks of hairy pits, furry legs, and no bath.
Lucas was briefly lost in his own moment – smiling to himself as he took back his photograph – holding it with the care of a fragile antique.
“This was the very first day we met,” he said, “We were just kids. I was just out of boot. Met her on the beach.”
When he looked back up, his eyes were, for the first time, unguarded, and just a little bit wistful.
“I like photographs,” he said. “We always fight about that – my wife, she's gone one-hundred percent digital.” Lucas held up his own cellphone. “But this stupid thing hasn't worked once since all this shit started.”
He held up the worn Polaroid. “I still got this.”
Then he paused, considering. “You know, if I told her that, it'd piss her off, just for my being right.”
Rosa said nothing. But she could see that happening.
Lucas very carefully folded the picture back into his wallet.
“And speaking of that,” he said, making another show of checking his watch, “all this shit going down and I haven't called? I know she's already fixing to kill me.”
He held up his forehead to the light. “I was out late on poker-night with the boys once. Tried to sneak into bed after curfew. She gave me this, with her ring finger.”
Just at his hairline, was the scar from a row of stitches – the kind of injury that might be caused by a knuckled-up diamond.
Despite herself, Rosa smiled – okay, now she was beginning to like her – maybe she could forgive the thong-bikini.
“What's her name?” Rosa asked.
“Naomi,” Lucas said.
And then, with just a slight puff of his chest, “MRS. Naomi Walker.”
Chapter 12
As it happened, Lieutenant Walker was right on both counts – at that very moment, Mrs. Naomi Walker was at once swearing violence and cursing his name.
After twelve days alone with her up in his cabin, Jonah was beginning to fear for the guy if she ever found him.
They hadn't been bothered by the beasts – not this high up – not this remote. But the radio reports had not sounded good – and even those had not lasted for long.
Naomi had been marking each day off on the kitchen wall-calendar – it was a point of irritation for her that the days accumulated with no word from her husband – and she didn't care if it wasn't coming from her dead cell-phone, the defunct post-office, or singing goddamned telegram – all she knew was that he was very goddamn late and she was getting pretty goddamn mad.
“This sort of thing is just like him,” she said, glaring at Jonah, as if he were in on it.
Jonah gritted his teeth – not for the first time or the hundredth. He had learned that was her way.
In the last couple of weeks, he had learned a lot about Mrs. Naomi Walker – who still sometimes thought of herself as Naomi Kathryn Anderson – a military brat – raised on bases – valedictorian of her high-school class, but never went to college – met her soon-to-be husband while partying on her twenty-first birthday.
Jonah knew this about her – he had learned a lot about her. Among other things, he learned she had high-standards – standards that he wasn't near living up to.
She had been utterly appalled at his cabin: “You live here? Are you a transient, or an alcoholic or something?”
It also turned out Jonah shared a lot of her husband's faults – 'man-faults', she called them – but apparently none of his virtues. Or if he did, she hadn't mentioned one yet.
A lot of it was certainly cabin-pressure, but Jonah wondered if this was how she always handled her husband's absence during deployment – talking aloud to him as if he was right in the room – actually getting angry over things he would do if he was – and then seemed to hold it against him that he wasn't.
Or maybe she was simply nuts.
Either way, those were conversations Jonah had learned not to get involved in.
You might have thought just by looking at her that, if you had to be trapped for an extended period in an isolated cabin, it might as well be with her.
You would have been wrong. It was actually a good deal worse than being stuck up there alone. Jonah had never experienced cabin-fever in his life, before two weeks ago – this place had been his refuge.
They hadn't gotten off to a good start – as he had let her into his single-bedroom dwelling, she had set that boundary immediately.
“Look,” she said, “I'm married. Don't be getting any ideas.”
In light of current circumstances, that had knocked Jonah's nose just a little out of joint.
“Little presumptuous? I didn't exactly slip you a roofie to get you here, you know.”
She smirked. “Please. You're a guy. I look like this.” She eyed him knowingly. “I saw you eyeballing me back at the store.”
Jonah colored briefly – he'd thought he'd been more subtle.
“I'm not that type of guy,” he said.
She gave him another one of her appraising up-and-downs.
“No,” she agreed, “probably not. Forget I brought it up.”
That one almost sparked his temper. She knew how to touch a nerve.
Did girls just sense it, he wondered? Did they just instinctively know how to twist that knife in just the appropriate way to really dig?
Jonah almost said it to her – see, there were guys who would nail your wife, and those who wouldn't. And just because you weren't a rat-bastard, didn't make you a fuckin' beta-male.
He wasn't that type of guy because he HATED that guy.
His marriage had ended over THAT guy.
A wife of ten years – who he had married young, and expected to be with for the rest of his life.
He remembered very clearly the moment that he knew.
He also remembered thinking some very dark thoughts about THAT guy – and he understood very clearly crimes of passion.
'Anger' was not even the word – it was more primal than that – it just sort of melted over him, like lava meeting ice – the ugly, black, choking anger of a cuckold – pretty much the same instinctive/chemical response you got all down the animal phylums – it didn't matter whether you were a man or a wolf – if you mess with thy neighbor's wife, you better expect some teeth in your ass.
They had been living in Portland then, and Jonah remembered loading up his rifle and climbing calmly into his Bronco – and he had found himself wondering how many men had felt just like this throughout human history – all the way back to the caveman marching purposely out of his cave, armed with a wooden club. He seemed to be moving on autopilot – acting out an almost involuntary, socio-evolutionary response – cause and effect.
He had driven to the end of his street... and then, instead of driving into town, he had turned south, gotten on the highway, and come out to this very cabin.
And he had never really come back.
When he got there, he had sent that one text he had ever sent in his life.
“I want a divorce.”
Poking out one painstaking button at a time – it took him another two minutes to figure out how to send it.
He never saw her again – he never spoke her name – the proceedings all got handled through the lawyers. No contest with any of the property. Her new guy had money.
She had eventually called him – after she and new-guy had split.
Jonah hadn't answered.
That had been ten years ago.
Naomi's from-the-hip judgment lanced a lot of old wounds.
“You don't have to worry about me,” Jonah told her. “Once bitten, twice shy.”
The subtly of the
ir dynamic was not improved by the fact of the man she did have – not just a 'man', but a MAN. It wasn't overt – or even intentional, Jonah believed – but she could not help but look at Jonah, himself, with a touch of contempt for what he wasn't.
And Jonah, for his part, couldn't help but acknowledge the comparison. He'd met a few fighter pilots during the course of getting his own license, and they were all ripped arms and cage-fighter tattoos – cut with military discipline.
From her point of view, he could understand her lack of enthusiasm at being stuck with him.
He was embarrassed even to tell her he was a pilot – he hadn't even brought it up until she found one of his business cards, which read simply, 'Jonah Kirkland Charters'.
“Captain Kirkland?” she had asked doubtfully.
She was even less impressed after she saw the little buckets he flew – one archaic old chopper and a single-engine plane.
And truth to tell, he was even a little afraid to fly those. He simply didn't have the nerve or coordination to handle something like a fighter-jet.
He'd watched those guys practice – half-a-dozen planes, separated by a meter in formation, at twelve-hundred miles an hour – that kind of precision. It actually gave him the shudders.
Jonah had wanted to learn to fly since he was young – enough to pursue it to a license – but it had never been like he'd pictured as a kid – it wasn't soaring like a bird – it was like driving a big, heavy truck – tons of weight going at high-speed.
The thought of taking that up to super-sonic – and then only a couple feet apart?
It was flat beyond his ability – he was simply a lower-grade model.
Neither did he particularly aspire to be any kind of hero – certainly, he had spent the last decade hiding himself away – he'd gotten unacknowledged communications from his ex-wife that said so.
Although, as it turned out, that had saved his life.
Living well was the best revenge – or in this case, just living.
He almost smiled before remembering how literal that was, and felt a little ashamed.
Jonah hadn't spoken to his wife in years, but he knew her phone number, e-mail, where she worked, and where she lived.
Now he wondered if she was still alive.
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