And Then We Had Chaos, Page 2

  “Last rule: We need full transparency with food and supplies. If we’re running short on something, speak up. There’s a whole city over there that we can go scavenge if we need it.”

  Everyone agreed to James’s rules and set about doing their own thing. Tracy started to tidy up the place, and Alysia took to the backyard with her sword, practicing old katas that she hadn’t done since her childhood. Jaime flipped on the television and put on a movie, a classic action film where zombies were swarming a city.

  “You’re such a sucker for irony, aren’t you?” Tracy said to him, and he nodded with a big smile on his face. “Well, you enjoy your terrible movie. I would so take zombies over the monsters we’re dealing with.”

  ~ * ~ * ~

  It was late afternoon on a Saturday; the clouds were few, and the sun was out in all its glory. The irony of a beautiful day during such a dark hour was not lost on the inhabitants of the junkers’ home, but it lifted the moods and Alysia decided that she and Jaime should go scavenging. James turned down his daughter’s offer to join them on their hike; he had made himself busy, looking at the engine of one of the old vehicles that sat in the yard.

  “What you doing?” Tracy said to him as she walked up to the car. He was bent over, looking inside the hood, and didn’t hear her come up on him.

  “Damn woman, you’re gonna get yourself shot messing around like that,” he whined to her, a bit annoyed, and she stuck her tongue out at him playfully.

  She was wearing some overalls she had found inside the house, and the sun shone on her exposed skin, revealing her muscular arms and shoulders, along with a number of scars that crisscrossed all over them. She was barefooted and her hair was up, and he wondered why she was so comfortable.

  “Where are the kids?” she asked, and he lifted his head to point with his chin as he always did.

  “Gone scavenging,” he said.

  “Do you think those two are—” she began.

  “Oh, hell no,” he said to her. “Don’t you even say it. He’s not her type, I’ll tell you that, and he ain’t confident enough to try it either way.” He was about to say more when Tracy walked up really close to him and put her hand on his arm. He tilted his head and looked at her with a question mirrored across his face. She bit her lip, looked off to the side, and then shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly.

  It was obvious what she wanted, and numerous things ran through his head: his protective daughter and this beautiful woman he had been trying to keep out of his mind since the day he met her. His physical urges made it hard, and he placed his large hands on her hips and brought her in for a kiss. Their lips touched and time froze in that sudden “finally” gust of surrender that comes when lovers that have held out from one another finally meet.

  Tracy parted those lips to allow their kiss to deepen, and he took her in as if his life depended on it. She tasted like silvery strawberries with a hint of almonds, and as their tongues touched and their hands roamed the mountains and valleys of sinew and flesh, they both silently begged fate to let them be; let them have the time to realize the things they had always wanted since that first bike ride they’d shared together.

  It was a beautiful, dirty, and lengthy union between them, and as the sun dimmed a bit from a sole grey cloud, they found themselves on the grass in front of the car, wrapped in each other’s arms and afraid to utter a word out of fear they would wake up from their beautiful dream.

  “What do we tell, Alysia?” Tracy finally said as she felt James’s large bicep flex beneath her head. She rolled into him to be more comfortable and propped herself up on her arm to look at him.

  “I’ll tell her in time, Trace. Don’t worry about it.”

  “You think she’s gonna be mad? Well, I know she will be, at me … but she loves you; you’re like her life. I think she will hate me for … I don’t know. I just don’t want there to be any problems between us. And I don’t want this to be our only time.”

  James took her head with his hand and gently brought her in to kiss her. He let it linger for a bit before they separated and then he simply answered. “It won’t.”

  When they had grown tired of lying in the tall grass, Tracy retreated into the house and James went back to working on the car’s engine. He noticed that the world felt different to him now that he had been with her, and where he had once only cared about his daughter’s wellbeing, he was now looking into a future where Tracy was always by his side.

  Why don’t I feel guilty? he wondered as he worked, thinking he should be consumed with the memory of his wife. He didn’t feel anything but the light-headedness of a man in love, and while he wanted to be upset about it, he could do nothing but focus on what had happened.

  A few hours later Alysia and Jaime returned, toting a large bag of supplies they had looted from the neighboring homes.

  “See any action out there?” James said to them when they came through the gate and saw him.

  “Just a kreple with an attitude,” Jaime said, and James looked at his daughter, trying to read in her silence if she had noticed what had happened in her absence.

  “Yeah, he was a feisty one,” she said, and then dropped the sack near the car. “How are the repairs coming along, Dad?” she asked, and he saw her look down at the depression in the grass and then glance back at the house.

  “To be honest, I can’t tell you,” he said. “Everything is right where it needs to be, and it really isn’t that old. I’m just trying to pick up where the old man left off and see if I can get us some wheels to get us to the coast.”

  She smiled at him and slapped him on the back before picking up the sack and walking back to the house. Jaime followed behind her, but when he turned around and winked at James, he knew something had given him away. James looked around to see what it could have been and when he glanced down at the area near his feet, he saw that Tracy had left something behind when she hurriedly dressed to go back inside.

  The embarrassment was too much to take, and James feigned working on the car for another hour before picking up Tracy’s forgotten item and placing it in his pocket. He went inside and Tracy was in the kitchen making a sandwich. He could hear music coming from the garage and Alysia had her bedroom door closed, so he quickly crossed the threshold towards the kitchen.

  “What are they up to?” he asked when Tracy noticed him walking towards her.

  “CeeCee is taking a shower and Jaime found a carton of cigarettes so he’s in the garage listening to music and doing damage to his lungs. Did you see what they found?” Tracy said to him, and she looked genuinely happy as she held up a bag of fresh Granny Smith apples.

  “That’s one helluva haul,” he said with a grin. “But it’s probably nothing compared to this,” he said and he handed her a silky undergarment. She quickly tucked it away and stared at him with her eyes large and her face turning red. She smacked him hard on the chest and then scurried away into the master bedroom. He picked up the sandwich she was making, and then shook his head at the entire situation. If Alysia knew and wasn’t saying anything, why bother to hide it from her? he thought.

  He looked down at the bread, saw the black dirt from outside, and couldn’t believe he had neglected to wash his hands. “God made dirt, dirt don’t hurt,” he said aloud and then walked into his own room to get a shower.

  Chapter Two

  "Dad, did Donald ever tell you the history of this sword? I know it wasn’t originally a sword, but how did he do it?"

  "Growing attached to that thing, huh?" James asked his daughter while rubbing the area behind his neck. He sat on the old bed with his shoes off, and he seemed comfortable, despite the fact that they were squatting inside the home of an unfortunate victim.

  "I'm just going over it in my head. Why did it hurt the demon girl, and what makes it so special that she was so powerless against me?"

  James motioned for her to hand it to him, and she stood up, loosened the laces from the scabbard, a
nd handed it to him.

  "It's funny how different a killer can look from a copycat pretending to be one," he mumbled to himself as he moved his hand along its length, paying close attention to its imperfections.

  "What do you mean, Dad?"

  "I mean everything, sweetheart. Me, you, Tracy, Jaime, this piece of metal. We're the real thing. I know you don't like to hear that, but we are, baby girl. When they portray killers—the people who are forced to commit the ultimate sin—they hardly look like us. Their swords are always flawless, beautiful renditions of historical relics; not crude, wicked-looking blades like this one."

  He stopped talking and kept his hand running on the flat side of the sword. It was fashioned into the style of a Japanese katana—one edge curved and long—but forced into that form from something else. Not from a blacksmith—who could probably make it into a convincing sword—but from force. It was bent, chipped up, and ugly. James brought it up and smelled it, brought it close to his face and flicked the blade with his finger, and then put it up to his ear as if to listen to it.

  "Good God almighty, she's singing," he whispered, then stood up suddenly and sheathed the sword gracefully as if he was at the end of a Japanese Iaido kata.

  "I didn't think you still cared for that sort of thing, Dad," Alysia said when she saw him, and she smiled with pride as it brought her back to the days when they would spend hours together inside of his dojo.

  "A warrior never forgets his discipline, CeeCee. I know you know this, but don't write your old man off yet. I may prefer the weapons of my age, but under all of this bone and flesh you see here lies a focused spirit."

  "A focused spirit with a thing for police women?" she said to him, slitting her eyes to show her disapproval.

  James turned in such a slow, graceful way that it caught her off guard and he looked at her intently. He shifted his hips so that the sword clicked as it rested perfectly into its sheath. "We've been through this, CeeCee. I'm not going to defend her every time you decide Tracy isn't good enough for me. The world is ending, let's stay focused on that."

  Alysia rolled her eyes and took back her sword, tying the ribbons around her waist and positioning it where she could feel it against her hip. James moved in to take her down in a sudden attack, and she fell with his motion, rolling away smoothly and coming back to her feet with her hand on the hilt of the sword, ready to defend herself. Her father smiled when he saw this and she nodded at him. Always be ready, he used to say, and it was a lesson that had made itself into her very being.

  "There's silver in that weapon," he said to her. "Old Donald must have taken it from something other than what he told me, but that blade definitely has silver in it. When you cut into one of them, it will sing for you, CeeCee, but beyond that – I think it tells us that silver hurts them."

  "Just like werewolves," Alysia said as she walked over to sit on the bed next to him.

  "So, we will need to make some modified silver ammunition for our guns," he said.

  "That sounds like a pain in the butt, Dad. You should just get a sword; actually, three swords. One for Tracy and one for Jaime, too."

  "That won't work; they don't know how to use them," he said. "No, we need to make some silver bullets. We’ll restrict them to being used on the big ones, major ones like that thing in the bunker. The rest of them die easily enough from our regular shots. So I think we have a good plan with that."

  “Okay, Dad, I will keep that in mind the next time we’re near a silver mine and a place that will allow us to make bullets,” she said as he shoved her gently away from him. She looked at him, laughed, and then hugged him closely.

  “You know, your mother always thought we had the strangest relationship,” he said to her as she leaned in on him.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Well, we Knights aren’t the most affectionate people, you know, and while people can see the love we have for one another, we don’t always show it.”

  “Well, Dad, we shouldn’t have to. That’s why we’re family.”

  “Yeah, you said it, baby girl, you said it.”

  Alysia got up and walked into the living room where Jaime was sitting back, watching his movie. She picked up a pillow from the couch, threw it at him, and then looked into the kitchen where Tracy was doing her laundry in the sink.

  “Tracy, why don’t you sit down?” she asked. “You haven’t taken a break since we set up here and it’s been like two days.”

  Tracy waved her off and kept on washing. Alysia sat down on a loveseat to watch the zombies swarm a frightened police officer who was shooting and missing every one of them.

  “Hey Tracy, I think you might want to see this,” Jaime shouted. “One of your fellow officers is about to be turned into the living dead.” Tracy came out of the kitchen in a long blue robe, and walked up behind Jaime and smacked him in the head.

  “Hey, that’s like police brutality. You saw that right, CeeCee?”

  “No, I was so engrossed in this stupid movie that I missed it, Jaime,” Alysia lied.

  She tried to pay attention to the movie and let it take her mind off their situation but she just couldn’t concentrate. Her mind drifted to happier times, when she would return home from college to smell her mother’s cooking. Kendra was an ace in the kitchen, and it was always the smell that she associated with home. She remembered the smell of her faux fried chicken, baked with breadcrumbs to give the illusion, but it was all healthy with mashed cauliflower instead of potatoes and some sort of smoothie for the drink.

  The Knights are a healthy family, was what her mother used to say, and she prided herself on keeping their eating clean. James kept them punching, kicking, and running, and Kendra baked her chicken, made black bean brownies, and a number of other healthy variants to popular foods. Being inside this house made Alysia miss her, and she wondered if her father missed her cooking as much as she did.

  She hadn’t realized that she’d fallen asleep as she sat there. The long trek along the road to scavenge abandoned buildings had taken a lot out of her. They were under the beaming sun the whole time, and when she had wanted to call it quits and return home with their booty, Jaime had pushed them to go inside another building.

  She dreamt of happy times, children laughing in parks, rain showing up unexpectedly to ruin a picnic, and dates with boys inside of the University’s social center. It was so bizarre to remember these things in their new world of survival; it almost felt as if she were imagining fantasy.

  The only thing she worried about in those days was whether or not she could maintain her grade point average, meet a boy her dad would approve of, and marry before the age of twenty-five. Now she couldn’t even think of a future. What sort of future had demons and giants in it? No, these days she had to take things one day at a time.

  ~ * ~ * ~

  The sound of something tinkling woke her up, and she opened her eyes to find that she was alone. The front door and the back door were open, and a light breeze blew the evening air into the house, causing the curtains to dance like apparitions.

  Alysia hopped up and crept to the front door. She checked to see if she still had her sword at her waist, and touched the hilt reassuringly. The tinkling of the bell sounded again, and she looked outside to find her father working on the fence. She breathed a sigh of relief and then walked back through the house towards the back door. When she got there, she saw Jaime cleaning his gun.

  “Finally awake huh, sleeping beauty?” he said, and she sat on the ground across from him, choosing not to reply.

  “You and your dad do that a lot, you know that?” he said.

  “Do what a lot?”

  “You sort of choose not to answer people when you think they say something stupid,” he said.

  “I don’t think that’s true; we talk with our facial expressions. It’s not that we think people are stupid, it’s just that some things are rhetorical … they don’t require an answer.”r />
  “Oh, bull, whatever. You ignore people. I guess it’s a Knight thing, or part of that warrior’s code your family lives by. Alysia Ninja has taken the vow of secrecy by Grandmaster Daddy Knight. She must not answer the lowly plebes, for they are below her and not worth a warrior’s breath.”

  She rolled her eyes at him and looked up at the darkening sky. “Do you ever shut up?” she asked.

  “Whoa, did you see that?” Jaime asked, and he pointed to the sky where a long, shooting star was moving across the sky.

  “Now that is cool!” Alysia exclaimed as two more stars shot up at the same time. “Cool … and a bit odd. Why are there so many stars doing that?” she asked.

  "I’ll tell you why,” Jaime said. “Do you remember the Mars project?"

  "I remember the Moon project," Alysia said, smiling to herself since she knew he wouldn’t like the fact that she’d corrected him.

  "I guess you're a little behind on your news then, smart ass, but the Moon project preceded Mars."

  "So, what about it?" Alysia asked, not quite convinced that there really was a Mars project.

  "You know how they took volunteers up and we thought those people were crazy, right? What if they weren't? Crazy, I mean. What if they have cities up there, and vacation spots where, like, the rich and powerful can go." Alysia made to stop him before he got too deep into his conspiracy theory, but Jaime put up a hand and continued. "No, you need to hear this because I feel it in my gut; I feel it in my gut, CeeCee. This crap with the demons? They saw it coming. All of our governments saw it coming, and they set up Arks to fly off of here and leave us to die."

  "Because we are poor?" Alysia asked, eyeing him intently, hoping he would burst into fits of laughter or admit to joking. But he held her gaze without budging.

  "You act like you don't believe me but let me ask you this. Why send us into bunkers that just happened to be built, ready to take in millions of people? Don't you find that odd?"

  "With the amount of wars the United States has been in for the last century, Jaime, those were probably built to keep us safe in case we got bombed ... or something."