Cruel World (18 page)

“I’m okay, mom; I’m okay.”

“Does anything hurt?” Quinn asked, his gaze beginning to run frantic over their forms, searching for a gaping cut or the hump of a broken bone. They were uninjured.

“I think we’re okay,” Alice said, swallowing. She coughed once and winced, holding her ribs. “Side hurts, though.”

“Can you walk?” Quinn said.

“Yeah.”

They climbed from the Tahoe, Ty from the opposite side since his door was jammed shut from the crash. The ringing hadn’t left Quinn’s head, and he shook it as he paced down the center of the sunlit road, cradling his rifle in both hands.

The truck ticked and pinged as the overheated metal cooled. Antifreeze and oil pooled beneath the hood, mixing into an evil, dark-orange puddle. He found the first body in the ditch. The man had struck the road and slid for a dozen yards before coming to a stop. Any features with which Quinn could’ve determined his age had been scraped away by the pavement. As he made to move past the corpse to the next body in the ditch, a rattling came from the cab of the pickup. Quinn moved closer and crouched beside the ruined vehicle.

Glass shards glittered everywhere on the roof of the truck. The driver’s face was a mask of blood, his body hanging in a hunched lump from the seatbelt.
At least he thought to put his on,
Quinn thought absently. The noise came again, definitely not from the driver but from behind him in the less-crushed rear seat.

A woman, her eyes wide with shock lay bound and gagged on the roof of the truck. A huge, purple bruise spanned the right side of her face.

When Quinn leaned in through the broken side window, her gaze found him, and she began to moan through the simple white cloth yanking her mouth into an obscene grin.

“Nahnahnah.” The woman shook her head as she tried to speak through the gag.

“It’s okay; you’re safe; you’re safe now,” Quinn said. He reached into the crushed cab, but she tried to inch away, her eyes flitting around the space searching for escape. “Here,” Quinn said, kneeling further down. He held out a hand, beckoning her closer. “I won’t hurt you. They were trying to kill us.”

The driver unfolded from his bloody cocoon, one hand holding a pistol, blistered eye sockets two red orbs.

Quinn grabbed the man’s arm and pushed it up, folding it over the rumpled door panel. The man’s finger squeezed the trigger, and the gun barked once, twice. The woman screamed against the cloth. Somewhere, Quinn heard Alice yelling his name. His free hand scrabbled at the holster near his side. The XDM was there, sliding free, pushing through the open window against the man’s temple.

He pulled the trigger.

He didn’t hear the report, but the man went slack, his struggling arm going limp in Quinn’s grasp. The pistol fell to the pavement, spinning once on its grip before falling still. He sat back and slid a few feet away from the truck, looking at the dark hole in the driver’s skull, not wanting to imagine the exit wound that was surely on the opposite side, but imagining it anyway. Then Alice was there. Her lips were moving, but there was no sound, just like the gunshot. She shook him, hard, and all his senses rushed back.

“Are you okay?” she said. Her face was so close to his, her hair tickling his cheek.

“Yes.”

“Can you stand?”

“I think so.”

Alice got him on his feet, and he avoided looking at the driver again. Instead he focused on the woman in the backseat. There was a little blood on her white t-shirt and blue jeans, but there was no way of telling if it was hers or not. She still regarded them with frantic eyes, shifting from Alice to him and back again.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Alice asked him again.

“Yeah, pretty—”

She slapped him full across the face.

The blow caught him completely off guard, and his eyes immediately watered, the imprint of her narrow palm like a whip on his cheek.

“You almost got us killed, my son, killed!” she yelled. She was pure fury, vibrating with it, and he took a step away from her.

“I’m sorry, it was the only thing I could think of.”

She opened her mouth to yell again and then closed it, her eyes running over him. The fire went out of them, and her head tilted forward. She still shook, but the anger was gone.

“I know,” she finally managed. He began to move to enfold her in his arms. Something that went against every instinct but was nonetheless powerful. She allowed him to pull her close. He could smell her blood, feel her warmth against him as if he were embracing a hearth. After a moment that could’ve been a lifetime, she stiffened and gently pushed him away. Alice glanced around the empty road as Ty made his way past the front end of the overturned truck.

“Where’s the other one?” Alice asked.

They found him farther down the street in the ditch. He’d landed in a slough of sand runoff. He lay on his back, face to the reaching branches above. In another life, he could’ve been called handsome with his regal nose and strong jaw, but his injuries now rendered him a sculpture of pain. His bald head was slick with blood, and the barest goatee of blond hair was stippled with gore. His ring and pinkie finger were missing from his left hand, their stumps oozing blood over ragged bone. When they approached and stopped at his side, his eyes were the only thing that moved to follow them.

“You sonofabitch,” Alice said. And before Quinn could do anything, she wound back a kick and delivered it to the prone man’s ribs. The solid whump of her foot connecting made Quinn flinch. The man barked a cough and clenched his jaw. As he did, his bloodied lips parted, and Quinn saw that half his upper teeth were missing.

“What the fuck, you bastard!” Alice tried to kick the man again, but Quinn pulled her back, gently, and released her when she shot him a look.

“He’s dying; leave him be.”

“Then we should help speed up the process,” she said, bringing up her rifle.

A gurgling cough came from the bald man, and it took Quinn a second to realize he was laughing.

“Oh, it’s funny? No, what’s funny is you’re gonna lie here and suffer, you bald fuck,” Alice said, and punctuated her sentence by spitting on his face.

“Come on,” Quinn said, moving back up to the road where Ty waited. “You okay, buddy?” Quinn asked him as he knelt down to the boy’s level.

“I’m fine. A little scared.”

“Then you’re doing better than I am.”

Ty held his hands in front of his pants and kept moving from side to side. “Mom,” he finally said, and Alice bent beside him. He whispered something to her and she nodded, bringing him to the opposite side of the road. Quinn made his way back to the truck and crouched before the rear window opening. The woman’s eyes were glazed now, and she didn’t look at him when he reached in and touched her shoulder.

“We’re going to get you out now, okay?” he said, but she gave no indication she’d heard him. As carefully as he could, he drew her out through the broken window until she lay on the pavement, her face slack and pale. Alice appeared beside him and glanced down at the woman.

“What’s wrong with her?”

“I don’t know. I think she’s in shock. She doesn’t seem to be hurt, other than what they did to her.”

“Cut her loose and then we should go.”

“I’m not sure she’ll be able to walk,” Quinn said, still looking down.

Alice regarded him. “She’s not coming with us.”

He glanced up. “What? What do you mean? We can’t just leave her here. What if there’s more of them back in Belford? What if they show up here and find her?”

“What if they show up and find us? We need to go. Now.”

“We’re not leaving her. She’s innocent.”

“How do you know? She could be with them and had a falling out with her beaus here and is being punished.”

“If it were you, would you want me to leave you behind?” he said, moving closer to her. Alice hesitated and began to form a reply, but he cut her off. “If it were Ty?”

She closed her mouth and breathed out a long sigh through her nose before whispering to him. “My son wet his pants during this ordeal because he was so scared, and you know what he was worried about? He was worried about you seeing.”

Quinn frowned. “Why?”

“Because he’s a six-year-old blind boy that still thinks the world is magical and that you’re our savior.”

Quinn glanced over her shoulder to where Ty sat on the side of the road. His head was tilted back, and he was listening to the sound of the light breeze hushing in the branches. In his hands, he turned the wooden dowel over and over.

Quinn blinked and gazed down at his boots.

“He is my life, and I’ll sacrifice anyone, including you and me, to keep him safe,” Alice said. She threw another look at the woman near their feet. “We leave her as soon as she’s well enough.”

“Fine.”

Quinn brought the woman to her feet and cut her bindings away. He untied the gag and gazed into her eyes, looking for some sign that she saw him also, but there was nothing but a profound haze on her features as thick as the fog that sometimes came in off the Atlantic.

“You’re safe,” Quinn said, leading her to the Tahoe. Alice was already in the backseat beside Ty, a handgun pointed near her feet.

“She can ride shotgun. And if she tries anything, she’s dead. Hear me, sleeping beauty?” Alice said.

Quinn helped the woman inside the SUV and shut the door, pausing as he rounded the crushed rear hatch.

In the distance, the sound of an engine revved. Then again. Closer.

He hurried to the driver’s side and climbed in. In a moment, they were barreling down the road, the wind humming through the vehicle the only sound.

Chapter 16

Respite and Rain

They drove through the rest of the morning and into the afternoon.

Quinn took random turns at first, going south, then west, then east, then west again. After they stopped near a cornfield that would never see a new crop, and heard no sound of pursuit, they continued on a turnpike, making better time than they had on the back roads. The woman stared out of the passenger window for hours and finally drifted off to sleep, her head craned back, snoring softly.

In a clearing containing a housing development like some kind of engineered mold against the land, a group of stilts milled around a small brick building. Quinn quit counting when he reached sixteen. Just before the herd was out of sight, two of them wrenched the building’s steel door from its hinges and plunged inside. He thought he saw the flash of gunfire, but couldn’t be sure.

In late afternoon, he pulled off on an exit and circumvented a small suburb that promised food, fuel, and hotels. On its opposite side, he followed a curving road that led past a gravel drive traveling up through a stand of trees. He waited and glanced over his shoulder at Alice who cradled Ty’s head and shoulders in her lap, his eyes shut with one hand cupped to his cheek. She looked at the drive and then shrugged.
Good as any,
her look seemed to say.

The driveway wound to an opening that held a narrow, stone house. Its two stories stared down at them with dark windows but nothing moved behind them. A child’s plastic pedal-bike was overturned on the greening lawn, some kind of colorful Frisbee lay beside it.

Quinn carried his rifle up the short steps and tried the knob. It held fast in his hand. As he turned, Alice bent and removed a patio block from beside the house’s landscaping. Beneath it rested a rusted key, which she plucked from the rock and tossed to him.

“Pretty common hiding place,” was all she said before returning to the Tahoe.

The rotting fish smell met him in the little foyer like an angry host. He pushed past it, moving carefully and without sound deeper into the house. On the left was a sitting room, ahead a spacious kitchen and dining room. A dark bathroom met him off a hallway before a compacted set of steps rose to the second floor.

There he found the previous occupants, or what was left of them.

The smell that pervaded the house came from the two bedrooms. The right one held a sleigh bed and bright red and green throw pillows that were scattered on the floor like fallen leaves. The center of the mattress was stained with the clear, jelly-like substance. It seemed to move as he watched it, and after a moment, he realized it wasn’t his imagination. It was spreading out, soaking into the fabric.

They had just died. Maybe only hours ago.

The second room was undeniably a child’s. A boy’s by the look of it. Superhero posters papered the walls. GI-Joe’s and a dozen X-Box games littered the floor. A handmade quilt, threadbare and tattered at the edges, covered the bed, its middle soaked in a short outline of a body.

Their child had died, and there hadn’t been a thing they could do about it. They watched it happen, and when it was done, they went in the other room and curled up together to join him. Despite the smell, Quinn stood there, staring at the old quilt covering the boy’s bed. A boy that would never grow up, never have a chance to see the world or have children of his own. He found himself wondering who had made the quilt for him, its incongruency blaring in the small room. Probably a grandparent who was gone now too.

Quinn’s legs wobbled as he neared the hallway, and he had to brace himself on the bannister. After a long minute of breathing slowly, he steeled himself and returned to the parents’ room, stripping the bed of its sheets and blankets. He carried the armload downstairs and hauled it outside, depositing it in a garbage can near the driveway. Alice had Ty in her arms and was gazing at the house.

“It’s clear. They’re gone, but only a little while ago so the smell is pretty bad.” She nodded and went inside. The woman slept on in the passenger seat, her head against the window, each breath fogging a circle of glass. Quinn went inside the house, checking the lights when he stepped into the foyer. They worked. Alice had laid Ty on a loveseat in the sitting room and was covering him with a blanket when he entered.

“We have power,” he said in a low voice.

“That’s a plus. We all need a bath.”

“Definitely.” He searched the room as if the words he wanted might appear on the walls. “About back there…” His voice trailed off as Alice looked up at him. Those blue eyes, always so piercing, like being skewered no matter where he stood. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t leave her behind. I know you don’t agree, but if there’s not people out there willing to help one another, then what are we looking for? If that’s all gone, what’s the point?”

Alice gazed at him as if she were peering into the workings of some machine she’d never encountered before.

“The only thing I’m looking for is a safe place for my son. To still be here. For both of us to be immune. It’s…” she shrugged. “I’ve never deserved him, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to give him up for someone else.” She glanced out the window and then back to him. “I know why you did what you did, Captain America, but that’s what separates you and I.”

Quinn nodded. “I’ll go wake her.” He moved from the sitting room to the hallway and out the door, his stomach a ball of knots. Why did he think he needed to explain himself to her? What was there to gain? Her trust? She’d already said he had that, whether he believed her or not. It was something else, some unsaid notion that rose and fell in the back of his mind, distant and then near all at once. He shook his head and jogged down the steps, stopping before the beaten Tahoe’s open passenger door.

The woman was gone.

He spun, bringing up the rifle, and scanned the small yard. The trees were still and silent, nothing hid behind them and the air smelled clean, untouched by blood or decay. Quinn circumvented the vehicle, checking the backseat and rear hatch. The woman was nowhere to be seen. He ran back up the steps, meeting Alice in the hallway.

“She’s gone,” he said, shooting a look past her deeper into the house.

“What? Where could she go?”

“I don’t know. The door was open, and she was gone.”

“Fuck,” Alice said, drawing her handgun. “We have to find her.”

They searched the first floor in a matter of minutes; there weren’t many places for a grown woman to hide. Quinn glanced at the yard again before climbing the stairs.

The woman was standing in the boy’s bedroom with her back to the door. In one arm she clutched a stuffed lion while in her opposite hand, the putrid jelly dripped from a closed fist.

“Ma’am?” Quinn said, as he entered the room. Alice stepped in behind him, her handgun aimed at the other woman’s back. “Are you okay?” He edged forward until he could see her face. She was looking straight ahead out the window. The jelly continued to drip from between her fingers, and her mouth hung open enough for him to see her tongue moving. She was talking to herself.

“Hey, you shouldn’t be up here,” Alice said. She’d lowered the handgun, but still held it ready at her side.

“Come downstairs for a minute, will you?” Quinn said, putting his fingertips on the woman’s arm. She jerked away and turned, really seeing him for the first time since the overturned truck. Her lips moved soundlessly, and she slowly opened her hand to let the rest of the boy’s remains drool out of her palm.

“Gone,” the woman finally said, her voice barely a whisper.

~

They ate in the kitchen of the strange house, their presence there somehow a violation. But, Quinn thought as he chewed the strange pasty mix that tasted of beans and celery, where would we feel welcome now in this world?

The woman had come with them after saying her one word. She’d allowed them to lead her down to the kitchen table, and Quinn had washed her hands of the foul fluid. When that was done, he heated the contents of an MRE and set it before her. She’d eaten in a trance, her motions robotic and continuous until the plate was clean. Then she’d set her fork down and picked up the stuffed lion, staring into its golden, plastic eyes.

They’d put her to bed early in the parents’ room. Quinn had removed the sodden mattress and brought it to the backyard, spraying it down with a can of mineral spirits he’d found in a closet off the foyer to kill the odor. When he’d returned, Alice had made a bed for the woman out of a sleeping bag on the floor. With their urging, she lay down on it and fell asleep in a matter of minutes, the stuffed lion still tucked beneath one arm. On their way out, Alice had insisted on securing the door somehow, so Quinn reversed the knob using a screwdriver so that the locking portion faced into the hall.

Ty swallowed the last bite of his meal and belched, the sound loud and long in the hushed kitchen. A surprised look crossed his face, and he clapped his hands to his mouth.

“Excuse me.”

“You’re dang right, excuse you,” Alice said, pinching Ty’s cheek with two fingers. Quinn laughed as quietly as he could, but he thought he saw Ty shoot a furtive grin in his direction.

“Where are we at?” Ty asked, wiping his mouth with his arm.

“You mean besides in a house?”

“Yeah, mom, like what state?”

“Somewhere in New York, I think,” Alice said. “Though with all the back roads we took, I’m not sure.”

“How far are we from Iowa?”

“A few days, I think, unless we have anything else hold us up,” Alice answered, standing to clear their plates away.

“You mean if we almost don’t die again,” Ty said, setting his dowel onto the table before him. Alice shot him a look and then turned her gaze to Quinn.

“We didn’t almost die,” Quinn said.

“They were shooting at us,” Ty said, his unfocused eyes turning toward his voice.

“Yes, they were, but they didn’t get us. We’re safe now.” Alice watched him for a moment and then turned away to the sink where she opened the tap. Ty tilted his head forward and rolled the dowel across the table. Back and forth, back and forth. Quinn opened his mouth to say something else but instead a bright collection of shapes caught his eye on the front of the refrigerator. He stood and gathered them from where they hung, suspended by the magnets in their backs, and placed them on the table before Ty. The boy heard the clatter of the plastic pieces and sat forward.

“What’s that?”

“Different shapes with magnets on their backs.”

“Cool.” Delight filled Ty’s face. “I know what a square is.”

“Yeah? What is it?”

“It’s got four sides like this.” Ty drew a square on the tabletop with his finger.

“You got it. Can you find the square that’s mixed with all the other shapes?” Quinn asked. Ty tipped his head to one side, his eyes looking off to the corner of the ceiling as his hands began to roam over the shapes. Within seconds he’d found the square magnet, tracing it with his fingers.

“Here it is.”

“You got it! How about a triangle? Do you know what that one is?”

“Yep, it’s a lazy square with three sides instead of four.”

Quinn laughed. “That’s right.” Ty sorted through the shapes, producing the triangle correctly. They went through the rest of the magnets, Quinn quizzing him on the shapes he knew and explaining the ones he didn’t. All the while he could feel Alice’s gaze on him like heat from a fire. After Ty had memorized the shapes that he didn’t know, Quinn showed him how the magnets would attract one another if slid close together. Ty giggled each time the plastic pieces snapped together, glancing in Quinn’s direction, his smile as radiant as his mother’s.

“Okay, buddy, that’s enough for one night,” Alice said after a time.

“Oh mom, we just started.”

“I know, but you need a bath. You’re smelly.”

“Mom, I’m not smelly. I had a bath, I can’t remember, but it was maybe only yesterday.”

“Yeah, that’s why you’re not in charge of planning your baths.”

“What’s after bath?”

“After bath is bedtime.”

“But I’m not tired.”

“You always say that, and you’re always asleep in under a minute,” Alice said, picking Ty up from his place at the table.

“Can you tuck me in, Quinn?” Ty asked as Alice began carrying him away. Quinn blinked, shifting his eyes from the boy to Alice who stared at him and then gave a curt nod.

“Sure can, buddy.”

“Yay!” Ty exclaimed, as Alice turned and brought him toward the bathroom.

Quinn sat in the kitchen, his gaze roaming around the room. Dirty dishes rested beside the sink, a magazine was folded open to an article on the counter, three marbles lay beneath a chair. He let out a sigh and stood, grabbing his AR-15 from where it leaned near the doorway before heading outside.

The yard was fading into darkness, the last light of the day cool and gray through gathering clouds on the western horizon. The wood surrounding the house was a vast trove of dead leaves and tendrils of green poking through them. Quinn moved down the driveway, pausing every dozen yards to listen. No cars, no planes, nothing. He stopped short of the road running past the driveway and waited. The sun continued its descent, and shadows began to grow like dark mildew across the ground. He returned to the house and went past the bathroom, where Ty was singing something too soft for him to hear, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. He put his ear against the master bedroom door and waited, but there was no sound from behind it. The woman was exhausted and probably still in shock. Maybe tomorrow they’d be able to coax her out of her stupor and learn more about where she was from. Alice would hate it, but if the woman could tell them where her home was, they would have to make sure she got there safely.