"Church one, Grunt two, come in, this is Boss Team," Baby called into her com. "We've got the package, we are disengaging and returning to the nest. Over."
"I thought you were exaggerating about your own personal army, Alexis," Melinda called over the sound of the wind as we rushed down Milne Boulevard, away from the bikers and their sadistic base.
"I never exaggerate," I said, but I don't think she heard me. I could barely hear myself. The last few days were catching up to me fast; my head was swimming and the throbbing in my back was the only thing I could focus on. Both men were acting like they didn't know what to do with their hands. I sat squeezed between the two of them and they fluttered over me as if they didn't know if they could touch me.
With each bump and jolt, I winced until it became obvious I was in a lot of pain.
"Lex, Lex." I don’t know who was talking, my brain had become all fuzzy again and all I could hear was my name repeating over and over again. The wind rushed against my face and the slam of the truck over every pothole and bump were finally too much. I let the dizzy slide of pain wash over me and for the hundredth time this week I passed out.
BLAKE
"What did they do to her?" I asked the girl that Alexis had called friendly.
"What didn't they do," she answered.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Zach snarled.
“Exactly what I said.” To give her credit, the woman didn’t back down when we both glared at her. “Those men are monsters and they treat women no better than pets. She got us out of there. She killed three of them on the way out. I think the leader, Senior, beat her something terrible before we left. I heard him screaming at her and the sound of whatever he was hitting her with.”
I gingerly moved Alexis until she was lying over Zach’s lap and I pulled up her shirt. It was a mess of blood and open wounds. He must have hit her with a switch.
“Wrap her up,” I said to Zach, handing him a towel from my pack. He placed it over her frame. She looked so tiny and frail. I had never thought that about her before. She had always been a rock. Amazing. She could conquer anything you threw at her. The day I met her, she ruined me for all other females. There was no one like Alexis. And it wasn’t just her strength or her smarts. There was something about her, how she could look in the face of danger and crack a joke. How she could tear you to pieces with just a look. How she could also quantify your entire existence with a smile and a glance.
I had questioned my reason for being here, for existing, and everything about life when I came off of my second tour, probably fucked up with PTSD and anything else you could think of. I thought marrying Clara would even it out. It hadn’t. I thought going into business with Zach would give me purpose. It helped me a little, but not enough.
It wasn’t until the dead rose and tried to eat people that I finally found meaning in my life. And that meaning came in the form of a five foot ten brunette that decided to ram the levee protection gates and could swing a mean ax. And then I had to go and fucking ruin it. Just like I ruined everything else.
I couldn’t blame Zach. If I was in his shoes, I would have wanted to kill Clara too. But really his gun should be pointed at me. I was the one that brought her here. I was the one that left Alexis and brought Clara back, stirring the pot. It was my fault she had been beaten, probably raped…it was all me. I’d seen many soldiers broken beyond repair from what they’d seen during combat, or experienced. This was no different. Has Lex been broken?
If she lost that light in her eyes, that fire…I would never forgive myself. I was pretty sure that even if it did come back, I wouldn’t be able to let it go.
I looked over at her. Zach was cradling her gently against his chest. It’s where she belonged. Zach was always the better man. Alexis deserved the better man. That better man definitely wasn’t me.
ZACH
It took us three hours to make it back to the base. Three hours and Alexis never came to. We radioed ahead when we came into range and told them the situation. The gates were open and ready for us when we sped over the bridge.
Isaiah was waiting, black bag in hand, and took a look at her back before we even got out of the truck.
“She’ll need stitches for some, but it’s not that bad. It just looks really bad and she’s probably in shock. She’ll be fine.” He put a hand on my shoulder and I nodded.
“Can we do it at the house? I don’t want her to wake up in the infirmary,” I asked and he agreed.
“Hannah, take Clara and lock her up somewhere, I don’t want her roaming around the compound freely.” Blake motioned to Baby. He spotted Clara’s sister in the crowd and motioned her over. “Madison, this is Melinda, Heather Murphey and Alphonso Lopez, they are our guests. Please show them the barracks and supplies so they can get cleaned up and find a bunk.” She nodded and led them away.
Blake looked in my direction and the mask of the leader slipped away from his face, revealing nothing but sorrow and pain.
“Let’s drive her over to the house, break protocol for a change,” he said, alluding to the no driving around the island law that he had put in place when we first bought the land. Getting behind the wheel, he slowly pulled forward, worried that jostling her might cause her more pain. Alexis didn’t move though.
Isaiah sat next to her, watching her the whole time. I sat on the other side of her in the bed of the truck, it was the longest one-mile ride of my life.
“I didn’t see Martinez,” Isaiah said casually when we pulled up to the house.
“He didn’t make it.”
Isaiah looked down at Lex, lying broken in the back of the truck, and I knew he was processing this information. We hadn’t lost anyone in a long time, not since the beginning. We had gotten too used to our safety. We had gotten too comfortable.
But the only way we could really be safe would be to stay locked away in our compound.
That was unrealistic. We couldn’t cut ourselves off from the rest of the world. We needed things out in the world. Unfortunately, the world was a mess and in that mess people got hurt.
Isaiah had thought ahead and brought his emergency stretcher. We helped him get Alexis on it, facing her down on her stomach so we wouldn’t disturb her back. She stirred, but didn’t wake as we carted her through the house and laid her in the bed.
Isaiah set up an IV drip and ran a line to her vein.
“I can only medicate her with a local right now. I can’t risk overmedicating her, you’ll have to hold her down,” he explained.
Blake and I hovered as he cut off her shirt and pants, revealing that she wore nothing underneath. She had lost even more weight than I thought and her back looked atrocious. Isaiah directed us here and there, boil water, grab towels, grab this and that and we did as he asked us to do.
Grace showed up during the middle of it and pulled Blake away for a little while. She tried to grab me but I wasn’t moving. I knew I was pacing and making Isaiah nervous, but I had to stay.
When he began to work on her back, Alexis came to and began shouting. She flailed and punched and bit and I had to hold her down. She got in a few good licks before Isaiah managed to inject her and knock her out. Her wounds were bleeding and I had to look away as Isaiah began fastidiously to stitch into her skin. No one should have to witness something like this.
When he was finally done, both of us sighed in relief. The wounds were jagged and nasty, but they weren’t that deep. She needed to be cleaned and I was ready to take care of it, but Grace forced her way back in.
“I’ll take care of cleaning her,” she bullied me out of the room. Claiming it was inappropriate and Lex wouldn’t like me to see her this way and a girl knew things and a whole bunch of bullshit. I left reluctantly.
Cole was in the kitchen with Blake. The Peters tag team at work.
It looked like he had brought over a liquid coping method as a bottle of gin sat on the counter and Blake clutched a glass with clear liquid in it. He poured me a glass and offered one to Isaiah who turned it down.
“I gotta get back to the barracks. I need to clean my instruments. I’ll drive the truck back, Blake.” He took the keys from the counter and left us alone.
When the silence got unbearable, Cole said simply, “Martinez.” And all we could do was nod. In my line of work, losing a team member was unbearable, but it happened and unfortunately, it happened too often. In this world, the same rules applied, except now it wasn’t a bunch of religious fanatics, it was our own people turned into zombies that were taking us down.
I swallowed my glass down in one gulp. It was only a few shots in the glass, I don’t play around.
“He went out good?” Cole asked, looking at Blake and then at me.
“No.” I slammed my hand down on the counter. “He was bitten by a fucking zombie school girl, it turned him in minutes. There is nothing good about that.”
Blake pinched the bridge of his nose, hiding how emotional his reaction was to my words. They hurt. But Martinez’s death was a farce. The Major had led us right into a shit show. He had paid with his own life, but the guy fucked all of us. There wasn’t supposed to be students, it was the goddamn summer, what high school is up and running during the summer?
“But you got Lex out, that’s gotta mean something. He died saving her, Zach, no matter how he died, his death had meaning.” Cole and his fucking unicorn sprinkle mentality. I grabbed the bottle and poured another clear. I gulped it down and was rewarded with a warm fuzzy feeling that settled over my body. Blake followed suit and from the look of the bottle this wasn’t his second.
“Yeah, we got Lex out,” I said under my breath. We had. But she lay in our bed hurt beyond belief.
I looked up to see Grace coming down the hallway, smiling as always. She kissed her husband and her smile finally faltered when she took in our morose energy.
“She’ll be fine. The doc has her on a light painkiller, antibiotic cocktail. She’ll sleep for a day or two and wake up. She’s still the same Lex. Don’t treat her any different.”
Neither Blake nor I responded and Grace shifted on her feet uneasily.
“I’ll come back tomorrow and check on everyone,” Cole said and I nodded, acknowledging his statement. “Well, then, we’ll be going.” He put his arm around his wife and led her out of the house.
I reached for the gin and poured the rest of the bottle into my glass.
“We got more of this shit?” I asked Blake. He went to the pantry and pulled out another bottle.
“Plenty.”
“Good, ‘cause I’m going to get ripped. You game?”
BLAKE
Zach was true to his word. I’d never seen him like this. He was usually so tight-assed. I wasn’t trying to pace him, but I wasn’t far behind. I could still feel my fingertips, that was a good thing. Or was it?
The same shit that was haunting Zach was clanging around in my head too.
“You know,” he said sitting down hard on the sofa, “I didn’t want to really say it out loud, but I think, this world, I kind of like it. Well, I liked it, now I don’t like it much.”
“You enjoying the apocalypse, Zach?” I laughed, and it was the first laugh in a long time that was actually fueled by amusement.
What the hell was he talking about?
“I got this island. I got her, a crazy compound of people working together. No drama, no government breathing down our backs, no worrying about what stupid fucking reality star was doing what. It was just a group of people working together to live. You know what I mean? It was real.” He sighed and took a sip of his drink, at least he had stopped chugging them.
“I never took you for an anarchist.” I poured out a couple more fingers of gin into my glass.
“Libertarian, close. But it ain’t that. It was just more like freedom. Real freedom. I didn’t have to worry about fucking taxes. If I need something, I take it, or we grew it, or we make it. Yeah, there are fucking dead people trying to eat me, but nothing is perfect…and then Lex.” He giggled like a fucking kid, it was ridiculous, Zach shouldn’t giggle. I threw a shoe at him. I don’t even know where the shoe came from, but it was useful. He ducked just in time.
“You still have Lex, you douche, and you still got your tax-free living, you just realized that it’s a bit more fucked up than you had imagined. Why don’t you grow a pair?”
“You should fucking grow a pair, sniveling like an emo teen over leaving every five minutes.” He stood, knocking over half the stuff on the coffee table. “It’s all my fault,” he mocked in some stupid falsetto voice.