Supposedly, that’s one of the many reasons he doesn’t believe our government will keep everyone safe when the SHTF. Logically, there’s no way to promise safety on such a large scale. And a world with rule of law will inevitably lead to the sacrifice of some to protect the many. Pandemonium will be inescapable. But we should feel safe now, among the group of people sworn to protect us.
TOBYISMS FOR ACTION
4
I DON’T BELIEVE YOU
THE TOUCH OF Mom’s hand between my shoulder blades wakes me from a deep sleep. I must have dozed off in front of my laptop. The screen is dark, but the photos of my sisters are spread like a hand of cards below my dried-out bowl of macaroni and cheese.
“Where did you find these?” Mom picks up the age-progression photos, her mouth downturned more in sorrow than in anger.
I lean into my shoulder, wiping the sleep-drool from the corner of my mouth. “They fell out of a sketchbook you left under the pillows on the couch. Where did you get them?”
“Blake had them made. For my art. That’s why I hid them. I didn’t want you to think—”
“I don’t believe you.” When you go through hell with someone, you can tell when they’re lying.
“I showed you the start of my new painting.”
“And I saw the progress you’ve made on it since.”
She wrings her slender hands like they’re suddenly ice-cold. She’s lucid for the moment, but I can tell she wants to slip away to her studio or with the news on TV by the way her eyes are losing focus. Her bedroom door squeaks and I turn my head, expecting to see Banquo, but it’s Jonesy. Dressed for work in a black suit, but in need of a shave.
I snatch the age-progression photos out of Mom’s hand and wave them at him. “Why now?”
He’s slower to answer, shifting eyes to Mom that suggest regret. “I thought I had a lead, but I got it wrong. And before you go jumping down my throat for not telling you earlier, let me say I needed to check my sources before presenting something that might not pan out. Regardless, you should leave detective work to detectives.”
“Why? She’s not,” I tell him. “You think she’s painting fields of sunflowers in that studio or something?”
“What your mom does in her art studio is her business. That’s her private space and I respect that. What you’re doing on social media is different. It’s dangerous, Toby. You could end up spooking someone into further hiding, or prompt them to do something that puts your sisters in more danger. The case is cold, but we are still working on it.”
A familiar weight plummeted into my stomach when he said he had a lead but got it wrong, gutting me. You might think that news gets easier to take over time. I’m here to tell you it doesn’t.
“And still you guys have nothing,” I rage. “Mom and I have all our chips stacked on the table, but my sisters are the ones paying the price, so don’t ask me to stop looking, Jonesy, because I can’t. I won’t. Not until your last lead has you on your hands and knees digging up their bones.”
Mom walks out and heads for her studio like the whole conversation makes her feel more sinned against than sinning, as King Lear would say.
Jonesy hangs his head. He knows I’m right.
The stench of cigarettes enters the space around us. “She’s smoking again?”
Jonesy shrugs as if to say he can’t stop her. “She says it carries her back to a particular place in time while she’s painting.”
“I could do the same thing for her by popping out the fuses and taking them with me for the day.” I twist out of my seat so I don’t have to see his reaction to that truth. “I have to take a long hot shower and get to work. My spine is trashed from sleeping hunched over on the table. You gonna be around for dinner?”
That’s my way of apologizing to Jonesy.
He shakes his head. “Not tonight. I have some bad guys to catch, remember?”
I remember. The marrow in my bones remembers.
I’m halfway to the bathroom when he says, “Toby.” His tone asking for another second.
I spin, closing my eyes for a beat before shaking my head in that shallow way that says no but asks what? simultaneously.
“I just wanted to say I’m not gonna stop looking, either.”
* * *
The Nikko’s lunch crowd is dying down. I’m glad because I need to change the bandage on my arm. It aches a ton today, but I still have a second shift to get through before I can go back to my missing persons search. I do a quick walk-through of my section to check if anyone is looking for their check or a refill on a drink. There’s one table finishing up that I ask Brooke to keep an eye on.
“Do I get to keep the tip?” Her plum-stained mouth curves into a smile.
“Here’s a tip. The dad is here all the time. You won’t get more than five bucks out of him. But if you bus the table, it’s all yours.” I hand her their check.
I make a beeline for the kitchen, where we keep the first aid supplies. I grab the white plastic case off a wire shelf and knock down a pair of the elbow-length, heavy-duty gloves that make the dishwashers look more like falconers. I shove them back onto the shelf and head for the employee bathroom. I’m examining the shitty job I did patching myself up at home when Stavros fills the doorway.
“How you did this? Not here?”
“No, not here. I was climbing a fence.”
A gleam of satisfaction brightens his eyes. “You almost got caught, didn’ you?”
“You jinxed me.”
“Greeks don’ jinx. We curse or we give the Mati. Jinx eínai malakó. It’s soft. It’s for people who aren’t sure of themselves.”
I forgot about the Mati. “I’ll be sure to act with confidence next time one of your customers needs the evil eye.”
“Ha!” That’s the way Stavros laughs. He just says the word ha with force.
He grabs my arm at the wrist and peels off the butterfly stitches without warning.
“It’s just a cut.”
He tugs my arm over the bathroom sink, simultaneously grabbing the blue wound wash with his free hand. He squirts it over my wound and the brain-zapping sting makes me suck saliva-filled air through my clenched teeth.
“All right. I won’t give your customers the Mati. Stop torturing me.”
“Some people deserve it.” He opens the cabinet above the toilet and pats my arm with a clean towel then brings my arm closer to his face to examine the cut again. “You could have had one, maybe two stitches, but it’s okay. Eínai entáxei.”
Stavros takes out a new set of butterfly stitches and does a much better job than I did with one hand. He wraps the whole thing in the sticky gauze they use at the doctor’s office after they take your blood.
“Thank you. I mean, efharistó.”
“Very good. You welcome. Parakaló.”
When I return to the floor, Brooke tells me I have a new party at table six. “And that guy gave us five bucks, just like you said.”
“Far be it for me to say I told you so.”
Four guys in their thirties, dressed head to toe in camouflage, are seated at table six. That’s not unusual for San Diego. This is a military city with bases for the marines and the navy. Only these guys are giving me a civilian vibe. Their clothes are a little stiff, and they’re too old to be fresh recruits.
“How are you today? I’m Toby. I’ll be your server. Can I get you anything to drink? Maybe a starter? The dolmades and the flaming saganaki are excellent choices.”
“Flaming,” one guy says, laughing the same way as Stavros, only on him it comes across rude. “He must be talking to you, Greg. But what do I know? It’s all Greek to me.”
Oh, fucking shoot me now with this shit. I’m trying so hard not to roll my eyes.
“I’ll have a Coke,” the one named Greg says.
The passive-aggressive homophobe—whom I’m going to call Bob, for all intents and purposes, because I don’t care what his name is—asks for a pint of beer, and the other two foll
ow-along guys order the same.
“Are you in the military?” I ask. “The owner gives fifteen percent off for active duty.”
Bob looks momentarily confused then a light bulb goes off behind his eyes. “Oh, because of our clothes. No, man. We’re going hunting.”
“In San Diego?”
This I have to hear. We’re more of a harvest-mussels-and-spiny-lobsters town. The only thing people around here are hunting down is the best California burrito or craft beer.
“We’re heading east to the Inland Empire. There’s a place up there where you can book a guided tour to hunt deer, coyote, hogs. It’s gonna be epic. We figure, the way things are going with our government, it’s only a matter of time before the shit hits the fan and it’s the end of the world as we know it. We want to make sure we can feed our families off the land. Before people start resorting to cannibalism.”
“Hunt or be hunted,” one of the follow-along guys says.
“Right. The zombie apocalypse. Seems inevitable,” I tell them. “Probable, even. I’ll be right back with your drinks.”
I walk away to get their order, wondering if there’s something in the water making everyone act crazy.
Brooke hands me the two waters for the follow-along guys. “Did that guy just admit to going hunting in preparation for the zombie apocalypse?”
“Yep. Fear the Walking Dead.”
“We need to fear more pressing shit than that if those idiots are walking around with guns.”
Truer words have never been spoken.
IFAK
INDIVIDUAL FIRST AID KIT
THE NEWS ISN’T playing inside our house for the first time in weeks. This is what it will be like when the end of the world as we know it comes, times a million. We have a few solar lanterns in the kitchen, but real power won’t be back on for another seven hours. That’s fine by me. I could use some time in semidarkness to think before I venture out to meet Ansel.
I can’t assume he won’t be there based on his assignment to bug out. One of the rules of being in the coalition is if we make plans to meet somewhere, we assume the other party will show unless—after a reasonable amount of time has passed—they don’t. Then assume the worst and act accordingly.
I dig inside the oak cabinet where we keep commercialized medicine, looking for the ibuprofen bottle with the nearest expiration date. I don’t know if it’s the rush of what went down in the woods with Annalise, the loss of blood, or hunger, but I have a monstrous headache. I swallow two round tablets dry before opening the refrigerator to see what we have to drink. Goat’s milk, fresh-pressed apple juice, chicken stock. I pour myself some goat’s milk and chug it down to coat the pills in my stomach, wishing I had something stronger to combat the pain in my arm.
My stomach growls, nagging me that it’s past time to eat. Trust me, I don’t need the nudge. I’m figuratively starving right now. I start the fire in the wood-burning stove so we can get water boiling for the MREs, but it’s going to take time for the logs to burn and bring the cast iron up to heat. I could easily devour all the ready-to-eat Chili Mac meals myself, but I’ll have to make do with one and whatever we have in the fridge that will spoil after not having electricity for twelve hours.
The skin on my scalp prickles, letting me know Mother is watching my every move, trying to dissect what she thinks happened. “Take two more of those,” she says dully. “Eight hundred milligrams is the prescription dosage.”
I go back to the cabinet and do as directed, waiting for her to finish removing her mud-covered boots so she can examine my arm.
“Annalise shot Honey in the arm on purpose,” Birdie blurts as she pulls a few battery-operated lanterns out from under our galvanized farm sink. “Blue saw her.”
My eyes dash to my middle sister. She tucks one side of her dark hair behind her ear, tapping her temple with her index finger on the sly twice so I catch on she means saw her in the Blue way.
“I noticed your quick-thinking bandage,” Mother says. “Did you move into her sight line?”
I shake my head. “I think it was meant as a warning shot, but she got too close.”
Mother’s body stiffens. “Warning shot? For something you did, or for Dieter’s announcement yesterday?”
“Mostly Dieter’s announcement.” Removing Rémy from the equation isn’t about me being nice. It’s an act of self-preservation.
“How bad is it?” Mother asks.
I’m not woozy anymore so hopefully it’s not too bad. I unwrap the fabric covering the wound and it starts bleeding freely. “I need stitches.”
Mother throws me a clean kitchen towel, her face a quick-changing mask between Reactive anger and Responsible concern. The missing third R worries me most since I’m unsure what Mother is ready or willing to do about it. She goes to a cabinet to sort through her jars for supplies without saying another word about Annalise. She gets like this during conflict, debating whether creating an uproar would be worth the results, with us, with other people, strangers. I felt like that in the woods with Annalise. When I chose to bide my time and get my facts straight before giving up what I knew versus what I didn’t.
Mother turns to me with her IFAK and suture kit in hand. “Ready?”
Not really, but I uncover my arm so she can make her assessment.
“Birdie, bring one of the stronger lanterns over here. I want you to do some of the stitches.”
“No!” I protest.
“I’ll be watching her. She can do it. Get some gloves on, Birdie.”
“But it’s on part of my arm that will show in the summer. If I wanted a tattoo, I’d have Birdie handle that needle, no problem, but I’d rather wait for Blue to do this. Needle and thread are her thing.”
“A blunt needle,” Birdie says. “What are you so afraid of, Honey? It’s not like I would stitch the word MOM on your arm in all caps or anything. I mean, I could if you wanted. Then you’d really look the part of a high school outcast, even when you buy their castoffs to dress just like them.”
I stab her with my best sarcastic sneer. Having MOM on my arm is the least of my worries. Birdie would definitely stitch something far worse and think it was hilarious.
Blue rushes inside a few seconds later, letting the screen door slam behind her as she pushes back her hood. “I brought in some blue potatoes from the root cellar and the chicken eggs you asked me to put aside for Dieter. You might have to take the ones I collected earlier to have enough. I thought we could wrap the potatoes in aluminum foil and tuck them in beside the burning logs to have with the MREs, but I wouldn’t mind if we had popcorn.”
“I could eat my body weight in popcorn right now,” I tell her.
We have blue popcorn seeds just for her. We can’t grow blue corn in Washington, but Mother bartered for it in town for Blue’s last birthday. Good thinking on the potatoes, though. I should throw a few russets for Ansel’s black eye in my EDC before I leave.
Mother stops what she’s doing and stares at us. Her deeply hooded hazel eyes are as blank as those of someone peering into the hadal zone, observing creatures she’s never seen before.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
Her focus returns. “You girls have grown up so fast. You’re old enough now to fend for yourselves if I wasn’t around.”
She pulls on latex gloves and lays out a curved needle, suture thread, needle holder, forceps, chlorhexidine solution, liquid lidocaine, and a hypodermic needle on a metal tray layered with clean paper towels.
She’s waiting for us to protest and say we’ll always need her. The truth is, if we had to, my sisters and I could take care of everything on this homestead ourselves.
After a few seconds without a reaction from us, she says, “I don’t think bringing this accident to Dieter’s attention will help. The best course of action is to keep doing what’s needed to ensure our safety and survival, which means keeping peace in The Nest so we can stay on here.”
I don’t say I’m not sure Magda and Annalise
want us to stay, so I just say, “Okay.”
“Tell me about the rattlesnake you brought back from your hunt.”
“It was the only thing available.”
“Annalise told her to shoot it,” Blue says.
“No, she didn’t.”
“Yes,” Blue says. “She did.”
“That’s not how I remember it, but even if she did, it doesn’t matter. We were running out of time. I needed to bring back something as my kill.”
“Oh, you don’t remember it like that?” Birdie quips.
I know what she’s implying, but it’s not the same. I was losing blood and daylight. I did what I needed to do.
“But you decided to throw the snake at Dieter’s feet yourself?” Mother asks.
“My arm was throbbing. Dieter was reprimanding us. So, yeah. I guess so. I was mad. It happened kind of fast.”
I lock eyes with Birdie as that last sentence travels from my brain out my mouth. Her eyebrows go up, but it’s not the same. Everything happens fast in training. That’s the point. I’m not lying.
Mother rearranges her supplies with pursed lips, trying to understand my behavior. She’s become more secretive in the past few months, holding her cards closer to her chest. I have to believe it’s because of her increasing closeness to Dieter Ackerman.
“Maybe you should step down from your leadership role if it’s already causing backlash for us,” Birdie squawks at Mother.
“It’s not a bad idea,” I admit. “Magda and Annalise might back off if they think they’re in a position of power.”
“Nepotism never benefits the greater good. Look at what’s become of our country. The greed. The recklessness with people’s lives. Things are not going to get better. We need to think about the group as a whole. Our survival is paramount, and that includes documenting and creating emergency medical practices for all situations when prescription and over-the-counter medicines aren’t available. There’s more to what we’re trying to ensure than you girls understand.”
Birdie’s mouth slants as she shoots me a side-eyed I-told-you-Mother-is-banging-the-leader-of-The-Burrow look, and I’m starting to believe it’s true. Apparently, love makes you do stupid things at any age. But maybe it makes you do more desperate things as you get older, when your options become limited.
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