“It’s kind of funny,” Rhett defends.
Lawless shrugs, wincing from his last chug from the bottle. He says, “It’s not like we killed them. They were already dead.”
“We just found a use for them,” Rhett adds. “Consider us the new neighborhood recycling program.”
He and Lawless smirk at each other, amused by their sense of wit, as they pass the bottle back and forth.
“Finding a use for that, too?” Peyton asks, as he leans on the doorway.
Once again, the two groups have naturally separated. Leigh, still not sure what to think about any of us, has taken the small office room on the bottom floor for herself. She has made her bed under the space of the desk as if still not comfortable being exposed after being secluded for so long. Her grey eyes watch us without any emotion from the curtains of her dark, black hair. The same empty-styled eyes that April uses to watch us.
The mood of the men around me shifts when Peyton appears, but the answer they give him is a shrug while they continue to pass the bottle around. They have been judged by better men and worse. I can almost hear the ghost of J.D. sucking his teeth from a far corner.
“You said we needed to talk?” Peyton tries again when he goes ignored.
Lawless does his normal quick sniff of agitation.
“About something you found at the school?” Peyton tries again.
Aimes and I both stare at each other. The men are staring at Lawless. Lawless stretches his neck side-to-side, trying to ease some of the tension from the room. His stiff movements only add to it.
“Maybe,” Law says. “What if I told you we might have a lead on someplace that is supposed to be safe?”
“What if you did?” Peyton asks in return.
“Interested?” Lawless asks.
“I thought the high school was supposed to be safe?” Peyton asks. He isn’t looking to the men, but to Paula.
Paula stares at him with a blank face and haunted eyes. “Nothing is safe forever,” she says.
She makes her point, and possible vote should it come down to that, with one sentence. Paula has lost faith. The realization shakes the room with a tremor of fear.
“Then why would we risk it?” Peyton asks, riding that tremor. “We have a good thing going here. If we don’t stay in one place long enough, those things can’t find us.” As if showing some presentation, he stretches his arms wide before adding, “Does anyone here really think we can add any more to this group at the rate we are going?”
I look across to Aimes and she meets my eyes with an eye roll before dramatically falling backward onto her sleeping bag. We both know it’s about to grow dank with the scent of ego.
“Leigh over there seems to be blending well,” Aimes says, rolling her head to look in the direction of the room across the hall.
“By blending you mean avoiding?” Peyton asks.
We are now staring across the hall to the woman whose eyes dart from face-to-face. Her face is still the empty mask, but the way her eyes keep increasing in speed, the panic is presented at being the sudden focal point of a conversation.
“Avoiding. Blending. Verbs of survival, my friend.” Aimes smiles at Peyton.
“I would prefer if we could eventually become one…” Peyton’s word trails off, but he has the courage to look to me with the suggestion.
“Me, too,” Paula almost whispers into the room.
Our heads turn to the woman who has become the very meaning of separate. Paula has gone from the woman in charge of feeding and nurturing a whole community to simply being a supporting figure in the background. She once used a wooden spoon like a warning when we were brave enough to step out of line around her, but now she simply watches with disinterest and unmovable eyes.
Her appearance, which she once took pride in with her slicked hairstyles and almost pressed clothes, has become rumpled and limp. I have concluded that she, like so many others, has come to the point of being ready to meet their creators. With how many they have lost, and this in-between, is just a waiting room for them. Until now, I thought I was just being bitter, but maybe I was right.
“Me, too,” Paula says, this time with a breath of more conviction.
As if her body is dust-covered and stiff, she slowly stands and looks around the room. Her eyes take each of us in, measuring us against some inner ruler of morality. Only I have the decency to look away. Unfortunately for me, it’s me she keeps staring at the longest.
“Me, too,” Paula whispers to herself one last time, before walking out of our area to climb the stairs where the other group has claimed the rooms as their own.
“What was that?” Aimes whispers. “Did the home team just lose a batter?”
We all shrug. All of us, but Peyton. Peyton is watching her mount each step with a mixture of amusement and curiosity. Is each step taking her from us and closer to them? Or, has she finally just overfilled her ‘I’m over it’ meter for the night with how the men keep poking each other?
I watch her until she slips from view. I know who is up there. A teen who just gained the same scars I wear like a crown. A man who is so lost in his past it provides slim hopes for his future. A man who mentally replays the death of his son a thousand times searching for a different outcome. A woman who has lost her very sense of self, but she keeps attempting to reinvent it each time we move. A group of people with nothing more in common than a common theme – loss. Maybe, that’s what keeps them close. There are no chapters of a back-story to cloud their feelings for one another. Everything is shiny and new; blood-covered and open-mouthed screaming, but new. Maybe that is exactly what Paula is looking for right now. A new suffering to escape from the one we won’t name – Chapel.
Marxx’s deep voice pulls us all back to the room, “What would be the benefit of blending? We still share everything. We still watch your backs.” He pauses from the remarkably interesting grime he seems to have discovered under his nails to look up at Peyton. “Seems to me, perhaps it’s your group which needs to work on this so-called blending you want. We find the supplies. We fight those things. We seem to be doing just fine.”
There it is. There’s the ego Aimes and I knew would creep into the room to suffocate us all. To suffocate not only us, but any hope of ever stepping over the lines that have been drawn to declare the war zones, keeping us forever stuck in the trenches with verbal gunfire constantly coming from all around us, pinning us and defining us.
“When have you asked for help?” Peyton counters, not hiding the annoyance in his voice. “Helena storms off. You follow. Danger ensues and then you want to be petty about ‘where were we’? We're here. Holding things down when everyone left us.”
Aimes snorts. She literally snorts with her laugh. Aimes’ loyalty lines zigzag. Everything is a war zone with her, and she likes to be the one with the grenade launcher.
When she feels their stares, she answers, “What? He has a point. You can’t sit here and do the martyr dance when you don’t let anyone else carry the cross.”
“Chapel carried our crosses. Look where that got him,” Rhett mumbles.
“Oh, so you won’t let them help because you’re what? Protecting them?” Aimes asks. “Thought you saved that for religious hookers and orphaned children?”
“We know how to get things done,” Marxx states, quickly changing the argument Aimes is attempting to fuel. “They would slow us down.”
“Yeah, but what would it be like to get things done without a body count?” Aimes ponders.
“Ask Hells. Her count is higher than any of ours,” Rhett says.
Rhett meant it as a joke. He wasn’t far from the truth, though.
“Boring,” I reply quickly. “What exactly do we even know about this ‘safe place’?” I ask, attempting to change the topic.
The silent until now, Lawless, pulls the ramblings of a demented teen from under his sleeping bag. He tosses it into the middle of the space between us all. It serves as some style of invitation to Peyton and h
e finally steps over the line. Luckily, this time, it wasn’t rigged.
“It’s some island up the coast,” Dolph offers, as Peyton leans into the space to look at what has been presented. “It claims there is some kind of settlement there. The logic seems to be that the water keeps the things away, allowing the people there to live life without anyone having to live in constant fear or always moving.”
“And you think that works?” Peyton isn’t asking anyone specific. He’s mostly musing out loud the revelations being presented.
“Those things only come when motivated. If the water keeps the distance from them and people, they wouldn’t have a reason to cross it,” Lawless says. “Out of sight. Out of mind.”
“So, we should try for it?” Peyton muses out loud again.
“We should, but there is one problem,” Lawless says, twisting his neck to peer up at Peyton. “How are we going to get there?”
“You signal for the boat.”
The soft voice is like a scream amid all the chatter. Leigh is no longer under her version of a sanctuary. She’s sitting with her back supporting the arch of the open doorway. Unlike Peyton, she’s still kept to her lines.
“You signal,” she says again, still peeking from behind that thick curtain of hair.
“…and you know this how?” Aimes, our ever-skeptical pixie, asks.
Leigh doesn’t answer at first. Her eyes are doing that dance again, bouncing to some tempo only she can hear as she flutters from person-to-person. Pulling her knees to her chest, she finally speaks. “It’s my home.”
She says this as if we should have known. She says this as if had we just asked, she could have told us all about it and answered any riddles the discovery held. She says this with no eagerness to return or fear to, either. It’s just a fact. A fact that not even Aimes’ grenade launcher could top, despite her efforts to try.
“Good thing you didn’t kill her for your body count,” Aimes says towards me with a smile.
I don’t smile. There should be some feelings of hope when rescued and discover your rescuers are going to take you home. There should be more details forthcoming, some excitement over being reunited with your family, whoever that may be. There’s not.
I watch as she just sits there. She holds no interest if we vote to go or to stay. She’s not trying to influence the vote either way with further explanations of the location or the logic of why we should go there.
Her eyes sway to mine when she feels me staring at her. We watch one another for a shared moment. I can feel her gaze settling deeper in my consciousness than a casual glance should.
“Yeah. Good thing,” I whisper to the room.
Trepidation tiptoes into the room. She stalks the dark shadows around me. She’s hiding the hand I want her to show me. Her movements are gliding, and she dances all around me now, taunting me with what she knows and with what I do not. She mocks me with what she is holding behind her dangerous back. She taunts me with what she knows is hiding behind those grey eyes and blank stares and as those eyes slowly close, her dance swallows my soul.
Chapter 16
“So, we are taking them?” Marxx asks. His voice trembles somewhere between a whisper and rage. Whispers are good. Rage is becoming more comfortable, though.
“What would you have us do?” Lawless asks. His voice is steady. He’s refusing to give over to the angst Marxx now wears like a warning label, bold and highlighted with a lot of fine print.
We are standing in what was once a very expensive kitchen. Everything matches from the tiles on the backsplash to the granite counters with their swirls of shades. Now it’s covered in fine dust, which clings to the corners and the once pristine, white grout work.
They have been doing this tit-for-tat debate since the sun finally peeked over the trees. Her bright rays may have chased away the shadows, but they are doing nothing to shake the gloom from the men around me.
For once, Rhett just watches. Whatever verbal volley he is having, he is having it mentally. The only hints to his opinions are the random facial expressions that leak through his detachment. Dolph has nothing to add, either. He’s either picked a side already and is refusing to admit it or is simply waiting to be asked who’s side he is on. I lean against the kitchen counter watching them. The male volley is quickly becoming boring.
“Why are you so against it?” I ask Marxx, throwing the first flint to his sparks.
“We have no ties to them,” he begins, but quickly stops, hearing what he’s said about the giant elephant in the house. “You know what I mean.” He tries to recover ground, but all he’s done is left a bigger hole. “You’ve hated that man for as long as I can remember. Now you want to convince me to save him?”
“It’s not about him,” I begin, adopting the elephant we’ve all been avoiding. “It’s about the fact he, and the rest of them, are living people and deserve a chance just as much as we do. Besides, it’s not our place. We can’t keep it to ourselves. Who knows, maybe it’s big enough we can all go our separate ways once we are there.”
He’s right, though; I have railed against the man I know as my father. I have wished for his death a thousand times, and in contrast, a thousand times I have wished for his love. Why should I defend him now? Why should I campaign for his safety? He’s never cared for my life. That hope wilted a long time ago in a white kitchen and I’ve been searching for my white knight to rescue me from him ever since. Maybe it’s because of all that I’ve lost, or because of the very little I have left, but either way, a part of me still lives in that dream, giggling with a man who once smiled back.
I look to April who sits happily munching away on whatever dry food Rhett has found for her at a large, wooden table. Her little feet sway back-and-forth with her limited height. She almost bounces as she eats having not a care, or concern, for the conversation flowing around her. Her blonde hair is pulled back in a high ponytail that swishes with her movements. I wonder when she grows older if she will have the same ghosts of parents haunting her with her ‘what ifs’ as I do.
Rhett chooses now to end his silent role in the room. “Where are they?” he asks.
Having watched my steady gaze on April, he asks the same question I have been asked by many people – where are the Hawthorn Angels? He’s going to get the same answer.
“Dead,” I respond.
“Obviously,” Rhett says.
“Obviously,” I copy, tone included. “Where they are isn’t important. I’m just saying I’m not leaving any more behind to die.”
I hadn’t meant my words to provide so many clues. I was just attempting to end the debate. I can feel the heavy gaze of their eyes. They are waiting for me to explain, giving me the space to explain. I won’t. April glances up at me amid the sudden silence, and for a moment, those brown eyes are awfully blue. They bring me right back to a hall with purple doors and a music box of horrors.
“Dead,” I whisper again, stuck in my own mental revolving slideshow of hell.
“Where did you leave them, Hells?” Rhett asks. He’s the only one brave enough to ask it, but even his bravery affords him nothing more than a slight whisper.
Time has stopped. It’s just me, and my memories, revolving around their constant merry-go-round of tormented images. The battered and demented horses grow more antagonistic each time we do this.
They blare their images like a war flag of failures, waving it in the air with the bold colors of murder and destruction. Despite the many months, which have sunk me into deeper horrors, the original horrors hold their texture like no other. The scents of the gore seem to still cling to me. The lambs’ bodies clash with the bright red colors sprayed across their black and white backgrounds. The blood still feels hot on my hands, which cramped from holding the knife so tight, but those eyes peering through the curtains of blonde hair, the eyes that never looked away, holding on to mine to guide her through the unspeakable things which were about to happen to her, they still tear my heart from my throat.
I feel the moan. I feel it from my soul. I feel it shred the strength in my legs. My whole body begins to shake with the truths I’ve locked away in the many dark rooms of my mind. Just as my last dam begins to crumble, forcing me to not only accept which I have hidden so deep but also admit it, it’s refortified when I hear his voice from behind me.
“Where, Helen? Where are they?” he whispers.
Collin’s voice is like a hiss. The whisper slides up my back and inch-by-inch I feel it straighten. Others in the room may have been stirred by the hint of remorse, a hint of mourning behind his hushed syllables. I’m stirred. Let me assure you, I’m very stirred.
Turning to him, much in the same way Ashley turned to me, peering through a dark curtain instead of blonde, I ask him, “I’m sorry?”
Maybe it was my tone that confused him. Maybe, it was some soft shade of green still lingering in my eyes he mistook as some invitation to touch me. When he placed that palm on my shoulder, peering at me with their eye color, the lost cherubs’ eye color, it was my fist that cleared everything up for him. It sends him to the ground, shocked and angry with my conclusion to his question.
It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t even instinct. It was because I wanted to and when I connected with his perfectly shaped jaw, all doors and dams sealed tight.
“What the fuck?” he shouts his question through his hand holding his face.
I drop to my knees so I may place my lips near to his ear. I see the fear in those eyes as I lean close. The flinch which used to bruise my ego so deeply, now fills it with a fire. The same fire that I have been fighting to keep ablaze as it threatened to become embers.
Now, it’s engulfed and the warmth of those fanning flames dances with my self-destruction like well-timed lovers, a phoenix of agony and torment. I place my lips so close to his ear I know he can feel the heat, as well.
“What the fuck is exactly what I have been asking myself every day since this started. What the fuck is exactly what I mutter to myself when I dare to ponder where our perfect father was that morning. What the fuck is everything I feel when I think of you letting your children die when you ran off to find your past fuck buddy and what the fuck is what I’m going to think every time from now on when I wonder why I ever let you matter so much to me.”
The Risen Series | Book 5 | Defiance Page 11