[2018] Reign of Queens

by Melissa Wright

  As a muscle-tank-shirted guy in the back of a truck waved the last car off, Mackenzie breathed a sigh of relief. But the drive only got worse from there. She began to see traffic. Mostly on foot, but a few bicycles or ATVs. People loitered in the streets, wandered across the lawns of burned and torn-down houses. A small girl with dirt-smeared face and stringy hair held up a sign begging for food. It was not her writing; it couldn’t have been. She looked no more than five or six years old. But she’d been left to stand there, alone and hungry. There was no question of her hunger. They all had that look. Not just for food. They wanted rescue. They wanted before.

  Hunter was quiet as she drove through the city’s outlying streets, winding her way closer and closer to Adamstown. Mackenzie assumed he was watching out the window, looking for more threats, but when she glanced at a cross street—where two young, rail-thin girls fought over an old twill jacket—she saw that his eyes were caught on the console beneath the dash. Where her driver’s license rested.

  There was nothing to hide there: brown hair, brown eyes, 1024 Oak Lane. But Hunter had that look again, the one he’d given her since she’d brought him through the iron gates of her house. He didn’t trust her. She’d lied to him.

  Mackenzie had made a habit of keeping everything inside since the death of her mother. But there was no need now. Riley was almost eighteen. The world was coming to an end. No social system could keep them apart now. Riley had done that himself when he’d decided to join the army.

  She could tell Hunter. She didn’t have to hide.

  His eyes flicked to hers, catching her, and she squinted back at the road. He hadn’t spoken, but an understanding had passed between them, both of them feeling the uncomfortable truth. They were strangers, despite what they’d been through. She needed him, more than he needed her. And Hunter might never trust her.

  She opened her mouth to speak, but the sound of gunfire in the distance stopped her cold.

  “Turn here,” Hunter said, gesturing toward a narrow side street a half-block ahead. “We’re close enough until morning.”

  Morning, she thought, glancing at the digital clock centering the Accord’s dash. More than twelve hours away.

  They pulled into the basement of a two-story parking garage, hiding the car behind a low wall leading the security office. It would be safe there, as long as no one had followed them in. Every other car in the area had been picked clean. Mackenzie grabbed her pack out of the back seat, and, after a final glance at the interior, took her driver’s license in case she were to need identification. The thought of tomorrow—of Riley and the army and finally, finally safety—made her chest ease, and when she straightened to find Hunter over the hood of the car, she knew he could see her relief.

  His head jerked, indicating the garage entrance. She followed him, tugging the pack tighter against her side, and the two of them slipped past the concrete pillars and into the light of day.

  Mackenzie felt cold, though the breeze was mild and the sun shining. The city seemed empty, abandoned, but violence and clashes echoed from downtown. She wasn’t sure how far the sound could carry, but there was no question it was gunfire, shouting. It was the kind of thing you watched on news channels from the safety of your couch, not the kind of thing you lived through.

  Not the kind of thing you dove into willingly.

  They walked around the block toward an apartment building, one of those expensive, orderly complexes that had had white picket fences and lawn sprinklers and rules. Had being the operative word. It was now a mass of shutterless windows and busted glass, shingles torn, pickets sprinkling the lawn like confetti.

  A group of teenage boys hovered outside the building, lingering in the shelter of an engraved block wall proclaiming it “Easton Estates.”

  “What’s in the bag?” One of them beckoned.

  “Yeah, we need chips,” another called out.

  “Dude, a cheeseburger,” someone groaned from the back.

  “Come on,” Hunter murmured, taking her by the elbow. “We need to get inside.”

  She kept her eyes on the group over her shoulder, watching as a tall boy in a baseball cap elbowed the skinny kid at his side. She could swear she saw a dark shape skitter across the side of the estate sign. The metal lip of the threshold caught Mackenzie’s foot and she put her head down, minding her step as she let Hunter lead her inside.

  Chapter 9

  The main hall was lined with elevators, but Hunter walked toward the stairs. His fingers rested on Mackenzie’s elbow until he had to open the heavy steel door. He gave her a significant glance—there might be something dangerous inside—and turned the handle. The sound of metal passing frame reverberated up the stairwell, an off-white painted tunnel lit with actual full-strength electricity.

  Mackenzie bit her lip, suddenly desperate to push past him and run up the stairs and be away from all of… this. From everything.

  Hunter glanced back at her, gaze flicking to her lip, and then led the way up three flights of stairs.

  The halls were filled with trash. Not debris and storm damage like outside, but actual garbage. Electricity notwithstanding, the city had apparently forgone waste services. Black plastic bags had been torn and chewed, remnants of food packaging and plastic littering the walkway, scavenged by destitute dogs and cats left behind when their owners had fled. Mackenzie stepped over a gnarled shoe, its laces missing and insole torn aside. Where had all the people gone?

  Doors were open, apartments bare. Someone had tried to drag a couch into the hallway, its lavender striped backrest wedged in the threshold. Mackenzie could hear coughing through the stylishly papered walls, the rasp of a sick child.

  At the third door on the right, Hunter apparently found what he was looking for. The lock had been broken, but not badly enough it couldn’t be secured from the inside.

  He held a hand up to Mackenzie, asking without words for her to stay in the hall. She did, unable to even fidget as he checked the rooms within.

  When he finally returned for her, Mackenzie surveyed the space herself. She found a small bedroom, kitchenette, and bath, plus the master bedroom and living room, which split the outside wall. There was a crack in the bedroom window, the scents and sounds of outside curling on the breeze through the room. Its closet door was open, a sleeveless shirt and single beaded sandal strung across a silver-carpeted floor.

  She sighed, returning to the kitchen as Hunter finished securing the apartment door.

  He glanced up at her, backpack clinging tight to her side. “You can rest now. Might as well clean up, grab a bite to eat.” He stepped to the sink beside Mackenzie, turning the faucet to hot. “Good luck, I guess. Electricity and water at the same time.”

  She leaned across the counter in front of him, shutting off the tap. “Don’t. They said it was dangerous. Contaminated.”

  Hunter stared down at her, his eyes shining blue in the dim light. “They’re wrong. There’s nothing in the water.”

  Mackenzie only looked at him, the certainty of his voice sending a strange buzz down her spine. She believed him. She wouldn’t drink it and she wasn’t even sure she wanted a shower. But she believed him.

  Despite Hunter’s assurance, there was still the echo of gunfire outside, somewhere far away. With Riley. And there was still the unknown morning would bring.

  “Thanks,” she said, finally easing her grip on the pack. “I’m just going to…” Her voice trailed off, plans to sit down going sour when she noticed the retro-styled stools near the counter. Dark stains lined the vinyl, some could-be-blood color that had been spilled weeks prior, dried to a dull matte finish. It could have been food, juice of some sort; the whole kitchen smelled strange. But Mackenzie’s stomach had already turned.

  “I’m going to chill out in the bedroom,” she said, drawing herself and her pack away from the counter. “Let’s have some bottled water and figure out how far we are from the army command.”

  Hunter agreed, but she wasn’t certain ho
w much that had to do with the stains on the furniture and how much was due to the fact that the bedroom window had access to the fire escape ladder.

  She pulled a padded chair to the nightstand in the bedroom, flattening her map across the table’s surface. The paper was old and worn through in folds, but none of the street names mattered any more. She only needed the city’s layout.

  She ran a finger over the curving blue line of the river. “So, the marker outside says Easton Estates. If I remember correctly, that’s the complex of doctors’ offices and administration buildings for Adamstown Community Hospital…”

  Hunter stood at the window, staring out at a waning sun.

  She tapped the map with a short fingernail.

  “It’s there,” he said, not looking back. “Less than two miles northeast.”

  Mackenzie moved to the window beside him, unable to spot the telltale sign that he evidently had. There was a moment of pleasure at the sight of a purpling sky streaked with orange and blue, and then her eyes caught on an incongruous spike on the horizon, graying white and metal and—if it wasn’t on its side—familiarly shaped. She blinked. Pointed. “Is that a plane?”

  Hunter turned from the window, the tinted light blushing his skin. “You don’t have to go, Mackenzie. There will be worse things, so much worse than today.”

  She’d known as much. She’d tried to keep Riley with her, both of them hiding in the basement. It wasn’t safe otherwise. People were scared. The system was breaking down; civilization was going to go primal. And the heavily populated areas would be the worst possible places to try to survive. “Have you been there?” she asked. “Have you seen it?”

  He shook his head. “Not Adamstown.”

  They were standing close, the heat of the sun-streaked window pane at odds with the cool air through the broken glass at its corner, and Mackenzie had the queerest urge to reach out to him. A stranger.

  She shook her head, moving back to the improvised workstation. It was so unlike her. She’d never been boy-crazy, needy. “Blame it on the end of the world,” she muttered.

  Digging in her pack for bottled water, she spotted the green and white papered bandages. “How’s your side?”

  The question seemed to catch him off guard, but he patted his side, moved to her. “Fine.” He glanced at a cockeyed painting on the far wall. “Thank you.”

  Mackenzie popped a stale cracker into her mouth, felt her eyebrow go similarly askew. “What’s with you? I thought you said it was safe here?”

  Hunter sat on the edge of the bed, his long legs mirroring hers in front of the nightstand. “You can go back home.” They sat silent for a moment, his words hurting Mackenzie in a way that she could never explain. There was no more home. Not ever again.

  He might not have grasped the scope of her pain, but Hunter guessed the expression. “Someday, Mackenzie. It won’t be like this forever. Someday you’ll have a place to call home.”

  “No. Not without Riley.” Her fingers slid over the rumpled surface of the map. “This is all I have left, Hunter. I have to finish it.”

  He nodded, letting his weight sink into the mattress, and braced a palm over his knee. “All right, Mackenzie. I’ll help you finish it.”

  Finish it. That was what she was planning to do. Nineteen-year-old Mackenzie Scott was going to singlehandedly save the world.

  Brilliant.

  But what else could she do?

  The two of them sat alone in the empty apartment as the sky’s blush faded away. The artificial heat died, but Mackenzie didn’t want to block the cracked window, because it was the only thing keeping out the scent of stale apartment and hallway trash. When the chill became too much, she kicked off her boots and climbed onto the bed beside Hunter, leaning back against a leather padded headboard.

  It wasn’t weird until the lights went off.

  Their disappearance was only preceded by a strange buzz and the brief pop of static from a digital clock atop the dresser, but was followed quickly by Mackenzie’s nervous attempt to fill the void with chatter—a personality trait she’d never known she had until that moment.

  It isn’t weird, she thought. This was the guy who had saved her life. He was more than just a way out, the key to help her get the authorities to listen. He’d been near death himself, and he’d somehow managed to get to that bridge and drag her up to safety. She could still see his skin, cold and clammy, pale as a ghost. Looking at him now, she understood just how bad a shape he’d been in, how close he’d come.

  Either of them could have died that day. Yesterday? No. Two days…

  Mackenzie realized Hunter was looking at her. Hunter might have been a stranger, but she was grateful for him. She was lonely, and part of her wouldn’t stop thinking, What’s your problem? It’s the end of the world, go ahead. Kiss him. He did have a great mouth. But it was obvious he was not at all thinking along the same lines.

  “What?” she whispered, praying it was not some horrible thing he wanted to say. Not that he’d lost his young wife or all of his family or that he planned on leaving because this was all too much and he couldn’t risk heading to the riots and fighting downtown just so she could see if there was any chance to be of help.

  She didn’t think they had already been told. She never once questioned that. Because, if the authorities had known where the crack in the sky was, they’d have come. They would have done something.

  When Hunter finally spoke, there was a question in his words. “You have disowned your father’s name.” An implied reminder of Riley, that Hunter knew her family was important to her.

  It wasn’t what she’d been planning to talk about. In fact, Mackenzie had never told anyone the story. Never. Not the doctors, not the school counselors, not the assigned therapists.

  It had been a moment that had broken her; it had changed everything that ever was, everything that ever would be.

  But she wasn’t a child anymore. She wasn’t nine and in pigtails and Riley wasn’t relying on her to be strong for both of them. Riley was gone. Their world was ending. None of her reasons could possibly matter now.

  She shrugged. “It was a car accident.” Her palms didn’t sweat. No bile rose to her throat. They were just words. “We were in the backseat, fighting.” She stared at the bedspread beneath her feet. She’d not expected the ease with which the story came free, the honesty that seemed to spill out of its own accord. “I was picking on Riley, calling him a dorkfish and making pucker faces—just stupid kid stuff—when Dad turned around to tell us to stop. He wasn’t even yelling at us, not really. Just why couldn’t we stop? Why couldn’t we sit still for one blessed second and just behave? That’s when he slammed into the other car. He crossed the center line and crashed, head-on, into a sedan filled with women.

  “They were just three friends, heading to the city for a church social, and they died. All of them. Three innocent women… and my mom.” Mackenzie’s chest squeezed, but not with the pain that had always been there. This was different. This was letting go. “After my mom was gone, he couldn’t even look at us. For a long time, I thought it was me, that he blamed us. I can see now that wasn’t it at all. It was his own guilt, eating at him. But it doesn’t change things.”

  Mackenzie’s eyes met Hunter’s squarely. “He left us, Hunter. He abandoned his children at the hardest moment of their lives. I might have moved on. But I won’t forgive him.”

  That man wasn’t her father, not anymore. Eleven-year-old Mackenzie might have used her mother’s maiden name for spite, but now it was plain old principle. As far as she was concerned, she was Mackenzie Scott. She was not her father’s daughter. She hadn’t even seen him in years.

  Hunter stared at her. But Mackenzie could see that he understood. It made her wonder what had happened between Hunter and his own father.

  A woman’s humming, low and sweet, came from the floor below them. The tone was sad, so incongruous with its melody—a happy birthday tune of all things—and Mackenzie had the image
of a mother holding her small, sick child, the one who had coughed perhaps. Mackenzie had the flicker of memory, of her own mother’s habit of running a hand over her cheek, how she would murmur a sweet, “Kenzie. You’re so pretty.” But the truth of that story below might have been anything.

  She cleared her throat, sitting up. “So, what time do we leave?”

  Chapter 10

  Mackenzie had known what human blood looked like. In the accident, red had engulfed everything. It hadn’t all been her mother’s. The bitter metallic taste in her memories would have been Mackenzie’s own blood. There had been numerous stitches. She still had the scar.

  That was how she knew it was a dream. The scar was gone. Every bit of her was covered in blood, strange dark burgundy that flowed too slowly over her skin. And her scars were gone.

  All she’d felt was blissful as she leaned against the handsome stranger with unsettling blue eyes. She’d pressed into him, stretching upward for a kiss, and he’d stopped her. And his eyes had changed. They were suddenly lit with gold, his brow widening into a thick, low ridge as his lashes darkened to black, pupils going into cat-like slits.

  He was the monster. He was the monster and he was holding her, his claws ripping into her flesh, tearing bits of her free as she screamed, warm, wet blood seeping over them both, coating her fingers so she could not get a grip to push him away. He was huge, his bare chest and wide shoulders blocking everything else out of the scene. There was only him—this monster, his claws—and blood.

  She woke slapping at Hunter, his hand covering her mouth to muffle her sobs, his urgent hushing and her hoarse throat indication of exactly how loud and how long she’d screamed.

  “I’m sorry,” she rasped, trembling. “I’m sorry.”