by Jason Luthor
“You’re right. I won’t.”
“I want you to know that I’m grateful for what you did out there. I know the men and women think I can be a hard ass, but I care about every one of their lives. You brought them home. So, what I’m saying is, thank you for that.”
Jackie nods, but I can tell she’s embarrassed. “Yeah . . . Um, thanks, colonel, but your militia saved themselves. They’re pretty well trained.”
“Don’t play humble, Jackie. We both know what sort of situation was breaking out there. I’m not saying my people didn’t do the best they could, but you were a game changer. You shift the tide of war when you arrive.”
“I do what I can.”
Martin pauses for a long time before continuing. “I know you received fighting training in the Tower, and I know you were part of a Scavenging team. Tommy’s told us you trained in hand to hand combat and with firearms, so I acknowledge all that. What I’m wondering is, where did you get familiar with combat operations?”
“I don’t think I know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just saying it’s clear you’ve seen how combat units operate. You’re familiar with . . . with strategies, codes, terminology. Your friends say it was almost a year since they last saw you, so I couldn’t help but wonder if you’d encountered any other military forces out there.”
I roll my head over to him. “Martin . . .”
Jackie waves me off. “No, it’s fine. I really don’t want to talk too much about it, but I’m okay telling you that you’re not the only ones surviving out here. There are other people out besides you and your colonies. I’m not saying they’re doing as well as you are, but there are other survivors.”
That almost makes me laugh. “We’re doing well?”
“Compared to them?” She smiles, but it looks sad. “Yeah. You are.”
“Is there a chance you could connect us with them? You know we’re trying to develop even more colonies throughout the city. We’d like to push as far out into the Deadlands as we can. Having alliances with others might help us build lines of communication. We could work with them, supply them with food or medicine if they needed it.”
“Yeah. Yeah, uh, let me think about it. Some of them are pretty private, you know?”
“Of course. If you need details about what I’m thinking, just ask. I hope you realize that my biggest concern is helping people survive.”
Her smile comes back, and that does make me happy. “I know, Mr. President. I’ve seen that for myself, and I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t actually believe that.”
“I’m glad you realize it.”
She coughs into her fist before pointing at me. “I did kind of want to ask about the . . .” She frowns as she turns her head, looking at my uniform. “Is that a cape?”
For the first time, I realize what she’s talking about. I look down at my navy blue uniform framed by the white mantle draped around my shoulders. I tug at what she just called a cape and smile. “This is the Mantle Victoriam. It’s Central Freedom’s highest award for duties performed in combat. I’m not really a fan of it, but the generals like me to wear it when I’m representing the military.”
“I know they said you’d served in the militia. Guess I didn’t realize you were a war hero.”
I shake my head. “I wasn’t. The only heroes are the brave men and women who laid their lives down to give the rest of us a chance to see another day.”
Martin interrupts. “He’s right, but also, don’t let him undersell what he did out there. The president’s accomplished a lot in his time in Central, but he still talks about it like he just somehow had dumb luck push him into the presidency. He’s too humble.”
I look over at him. “We don’t really have to talk about it.”
And that’s when Jackie interrupts. “No, I . . . I mean, if you don’t mind.”
She doesn’t really explain why she wants to hear the story so badly, but staring at her from across the row between us, it clicks in my head that she’s not that much different from Tommy. She’s just a teenager, serving in the military, sort of, and I’m one of the old men in the car. I can see it in her eyes, even behind the mask, how much she wants to hear about it. “I’ll share, if you let me keep it brief.”
“Yeah. Just, however you want to tell the story.”
“It’s not that hard and it’s not that complicated. It’s actually a story that plenty of militia members can tell. We got hit, hard, while out there in the Deadlands.”
“By raiders?”
“The Creep. This was . . . Oh, nearly a decade ago, about the time we were evacuating some of the marinas. You see, we think a lot of the Creep in this area is controlled by what we know as the Northwest Creep Colony, situated maybe 30 or 40 miles northwest of Central. When it acts up, everything south of it turns into a living hell, with Creepers coming out of the woodworks. That’s exactly what happened, and it forced us to abandon some of our colonies out there. You see a lot of docks and ports out on the waterfront, on the other side of the river, that we used to use. Raiders pushed us out, but we’d been losing our footholds out there for some time, thanks to the Creep getting more and more aggravated. One of those colonies we lost to the Creep, well, I was part of the evacuation team.”
Her eyes are wide behind her helmet. “You went into it. Into the infestation.”
“Directly into it. Martin wasn’t a colonel at the time. I think he was a major, and he was actually coordinating a lot of the operation. Not from a command room, mind you. He was on the ground when all of this happened.”
Martin nods. “It was a shit show.”
“Now, he won’t tell you this, because he won’t even tell me this directly to my face, but he doesn’t think I make a good president.”
“Sir, that’s not . . .”
“It’s fine, Martin,” I tell him as I hold up a hand. “I get that you’re not sold on my approach to running Central.”
“Which doesn’t mean I don’t realize you were a damn good militiaman.”
Jackie looks at him and then over to me. “Mr. President, what did you do?”
Martin doesn’t let me continue. “The president was one of the only people able to keep his head together in the middle of all that hell. I’m sure we’re all aware of what the Creep does when it gets riled up. Hallucinations, paranoia, fear. In the middle of the evac, everything broke down. The colony we were evacing was big, a few city blocks big and filled with thousands of residents, and the president was part of the first wave in. Everyone around him panicked. The president didn’t.”
I shake my head. “Like I said, I really didn’t do anything. I just kept my cool when people higher up the chain lost it. We had Creepers on the ground swarming the area at the same time that our commanding officers were losing it, abandoning their men and hiding in the surrounding buildings. Martin was trying to coordinate everything from a safer position a few blocks away, which is exactly what he was supposed to do. It was a big force we had on the ground, and a lot of men and women just lost their commanding officers to the fear. That left a bunch of soldiers on the ground without any organization, a lot of loose guns and nobody to tell the troops where to point them.”
“The president took command of the people around him and got some semblance of a defense set up toward the north, where the main rush was coming from. Had them on the high ground to at least stall the invasion that was happening. You’ve seen the Creep, Jackie. You’ve seen what it does to people.”
She nods. “Plenty of times.”
“Have you ever seen what it does to companies of soldiers that are highly armed, without a commanding officer, and in a blind, hallucinating panic?”
“No.”
“They start turning the world into a shooting gallery. You could hear the screaming over the comms, men and women shouting at each other before they turned their weapons on themselves. Mass panic in the streets. Bloodshed.”
I nod.
“It was a massacre.”
“Almost,” Martin says as he raises a finger. “The president braved friendly fire, over and over again, as he ran block by block, trying to get our troops to fall in line. That’s something else we found out that day. In the middle of one of those panics, if you have just one, levelheaded individual to assert control, it can break that wave of hysteria. It’s why we don’t give anyone significant command these days who hasn’t actually proven themselves in the Creep.”
Jackie looks over at me. “So you just . . . You took over?”
I nod. “I suppose. You can’t really take over groups that large on your own. You’ve got to find who should be in command, get them to reassert control. I just went group by group, finding whoever should have been in charge and getting them back to their senses. Well, beating the senses back into them, if I had to. I took more than my fair share of wounds that day, but everything got easier once the first company calmed down. There was a kind of ripple effect that went through our people on the ground, which didn’t mean I stopped doing what I was doing. Not until we’d restored some order in the ranks. Anyway, it saved the lives of a lot of good people, both our troops on the ground and the civilians that were depending on us.”
Her eyes shift over to my cloak. “And that’s why they gave you the Mantle Victoriam. You helped save hundreds of lives, even though you didn’t even have any powers.” She looks up at me, and there’s just a little bit of amazement in those eyes. “You must be really proud of it.”
“Of this?” I ask her as I lift the edge of the mantle again. “No. I’m proud of the people who are still alive, building families and preparing another generation for the future. I mourn the lives of the ones we lost.” For a second she just stares at me, the two of us looking at one another from across the vehicle. “We do what we can, for the living. For the people. It’s the same motto I’ve tried to live by during my presidency. There is nothing worth doing if it’s done for selfish reasons. Power eats at you, makes you feel as if you’re special, more important than everyone else. You’re not. As a long dead language says, ‘Memento Mori.’”
“What’s that mean?”
“Remember that you, too, will die. All of our deeds, all of our actions . . . We do it all in the service of others. We won’t hear the praise of the people in our graves. We won’t bear our medals into the afterlife. But, if there’s one thing I want to know on my deathbed, it’s that I made the world a better place for the people around me and the generation to come. I want to have the memory of their smiles and their shining faces when my time comes, not wrap myself in this mantle. The honors mean nothing without the people. I’m frightened by anyone with power who doesn’t share that sentiment.”
Mike’s Recording 13
I can see Dodger frowning out of the corner of my eye. When I follow her eyes, I spot Tasha Bouley and Rosy Quintana standing at the stairs into St. Patrick’s, a crowd around them and asking questions. Cynthia and Mandy see the same thing, and it’s a little like we have a group frown as we stare at them. Eventually, it’s Cynthia who waves us off. “Today isn’t the day for this,” she tells us as she pushes us down the sidewalk. “Not after a church service.”
As she’s turning us away, we bump right into Father O’Connor, who almost falls back before Dodger grabs him. “Careful there, father,” she tells him as she keeps him upright. “Your congregation probably doesn’t want you breaking a hip because of us.”
“You’re probably right,” he says with a laugh. Collects himself for a second before giving Dodger another look. “I’m not sure I’ve seen you around here before.”
“I wouldn’t call myself the religious type.”
“Neither was Michael here, at first. And with people like Tasha and Rosy around, I can understand why. They don’t exactly make appearances because they have extraordinary faith.”
“Then why do they come here?”
“You can’t see for yourself?” he replies with a smirk, nodding toward the crowds. “It keeps them popular with the people. That’s sort of important for anyone that wants to get reelected.”
“It’s pretty scummy to take advantage of people’s faith like that.”
“Well, we can only hope that we reach them at some point. Get them to have a change of heart.”
Dodger frown at the two representatives, her arms folding across her chest. “What would that even look like?”
“Like Michael, Cynthia, and little Mandy here,” he says as he squeezes Mandy’s shoulder. “They commit a lot of time to our volunteer efforts. In a world like ours, we need more of that.”
“So, do you have to be a . . . I guess you would call it a believer . . . Do you have to be a believer to do all of that volunteer stuff?”
“Of course not. If you have a heart to serve, I doubt God is going to take any issue with you helping the poor and the outcast. Why? Did you want to join us with some of the care packages we put together here?”
Dodger’s frown just gets deeper, and her hands tighten more on her arms as she closes up, not saying anything as she tries to think through her answer. Cynthia must notice, because she reaches out and brushes Dodger’s arm before looking at O’Connor. “Dodger’s had a lot on her mind lately. She’s been trying to think of ways of giving back to the community that doesn’t involve being in the militia.”
O’Connor nods as he looks over at Dodger. “I understand that most people will never believe there could be a higher power, not in a world like this,” he says as he motions to the city. “The Creep, the death, all of it. It is difficult to have faith in such times.”
Dodger shakes her head. “It’s not just that. Where I came from, the whole point of the one religion we had was to keep people in line, waiting for help that never came and just doing what we were told instead of ever making our lives better.”
“Ah, that is a good reason to doubt religion, I’ll give you that. I’m not going to stand here and tell you that you must believe what I believe. Of course, I’d always be willing to make my case for faith. But, I would rather that you follow what your heart is telling you. If it’s telling you that you should give back to the needy people of the Deadlands, well, love and charity is at the very heart of faith. No person is going to refuse food and medicine based on whether you’re a believer, and no good believer is going to say no to anyone who has the heart to serve.”
She frowns and looks away for a really long second before turning back to him. “I’m Dodger, by the way.”
“Father O’Connor.”
“I probably won’t ever come back to one of these services again but . . . helping put together those care packages sounds pretty good. I’d do that.”
“Wonderful,” he says with a gesture toward Cynthia. “Cynthia here has been helping us since almost the day she arrived in Central, on top of all the work she does at her clinic. I’m sure she’ll be happy to put together some days and times for you to join us. Now, if you’ll allow me to say a goodbye,” he says with a wink as he nods to the crowds, “There’s quite a lot of handshaking that has to get done after services, otherwise someone will be spreading gossip about me next week, telling their friends I ignored them after service.” He laughs. “I’m joking, but only a little. I’ll see you during our next volunteer event.”
He takes a second to shake all of our hands before disappearing into the crowds. Mandy must notice Dodger frowning as O’Connor steps away, because she shrugs and says, “I didn’t like him at first either. People who are that nice are usually suspicious.”
“They can be,” she says, still looking uncomfortable.
“He actually is pretty nice though. You should come help us sometime. It’s . . . fun. Most times.”
Dodger rolls her eyes and smiles at Mandy. “Alright, alright. I’ll come by. Soon,” she says as she look up at Cynthia. “You’ll let me know about that and everything, right? All the deets.”
Cynthia flashes that big smile of hers. “Of course, Dodger. It’s go
ing to be amazing having you help us.”
“Alright. Just as long as you’re there, because I don’t know how well I can do all this,” she says with a spin of her finger, “Church stuff without you around.”
“I understand.”
“Great. Well, I’m going to retreat to my lair for a while. I’ve got stuff to do with Yazzie, so . . .” She holds up a hand as she backs away into the crowds, “See you back at the apartment.”
We all wave goodbye as she gets swallowed up in the crowd, and I just look over at Cynthia. “And then there were three.”
“Some private time for our little family,” she says with a smile. “Good. Mandy actually has something for you,” she tells me, and Mandy takes a step up to me. “It was her idea.”
The kid actually looks a little nervous as she looks up at me before reaching her hands into that oversized jacket of hers. She fumbles around inside of it for a second, her fingers grabbing at something before she hauls it out. When she does, she just holds onto it for a second, staring at it as she’s standing there. Cynthia puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes, and poor kid just looks up at me and holds her hand out. Inside her fingers is a box. Like, a small jewelry box. Mandy breathes hard as she holds it there. “It . . . it belonged to dad. He always used to wear it.”
“Always used to wear it?” I drop to a knee and look her straight in the eye for a second before taking the box. Then I look up at Cynthia, but she just smiles and nods at me. So, ‘course I take it and open it up. When I do, I just stare for a second at this little silver cross on a chain that’s sitting inside.