I forcefully pushed my mind to think about something else… anything else.
A dainty hand on my back was the only reason that thinking about something else was possible. The silent, still air down here provided no safety and even less reprieve from the constant swirling of my consciousness. If I’d been able to relax enough to sleep, I knew that would have been the only release from this nightmare I would get.
But I couldn’t sleep. I could barely close my eyes without reliving the plaguing memories of Page’s attack just a few feet from me while I’d been incapable and powerless to help her or protect her.
“How’s she today?” Linley asked in a gentle voice.
Her touch seemed out of place, but I wasn’t going to draw attention to it. If she meant it to bother me, she succeeded. Except I would never tell her that. And if she meant it to be comforting, I couldn’t find the strength to tell her to step away.
In a word, I was broken.
“Same.” My voice was a husk I barely recognized. “She feels hotter than ever, but it’s impossible to judge that accurately.”
Linley stretched over my shoulder and laid the back of her hand against Page’s forehead. She held it there until my skin started to crawl and my insides flipped and churned with the gross distinction that she should not be touching Page.
Not ever.
“She does feel a bit warmer,” Linley finally agreed. Then she took a step back and I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
I closed my eyes at her consistent-with-mine diagnosis and didn’t even try to hold back the rush of despair.
“Shh, now,” Linley comforted. “It doesn’t mean anything. You’re right. It’s impossible to tell. And besides, her wound looks much better today.”
She was lying. The open gash had been discharging more than usual and the inside of it had turned a sickly shade of green.
I turned around, finally realizing that my knees ached from the concrete and my calves had gone numb. I stretched out my legs in front of me and reached back so that I could rest one of my arms against the back of Page’s knees.
Linley turned with me and sat right down on the floor as if we were best friends about to share secrets. Kane slept across the small space. It was sometime in the middle of the day, but he took turns with his mother and apparently it was her turn to watch over me.
His long body tangled in the rough Army blanket and wrinkled sheets. His face turned toward us and his full lips parted so he could snore softly. He was shirtless and pants-less, as he preferred to sleep in just his boxers. His tousled hair covered his only exposed eye and the tip of his ear.
He was so innocent and non-threatening at that moment I wanted to unravel his legs and tuck him in. The internal argument started all over again. I loathed myself and all my thousands of misplaced and wrong feelings more than ever.
Somewhere since Kane’s captivity I’d started to hate myself and these moments only fed the raging fire of insecurity and worthlessness.
Linley started talking again and I decided this would be a good time to listen to her. I was tired of these games my heart and mind liked to play with each other, exhausted by yet another trip down the dark, depressing circuit that looped in the same, never-ending circle.
“I remember a time when Kane was a little boy and was nearly this sick.” She looked at the boy-man we were talking about and sighed with a sound that revealed how desperately nervous she’d been for him. “Of course, he hadn’t been bitten by a Zombie and we had access to modern medicine, but his fever was so high and his body so lethargic that they had to admit him to a hospital in Little Rock. I remember sitting by his bed and doing nothing else, but praying for my little boy to get better, to heal, to just open his eyes and let me see him just one last time.” Emotion coated her lilting voice and out of the corner of my eye I watched her swipe at her cheek with the back of her hand. “I pleaded with God not to take my son. I needed him; couldn’t God see that? It didn’t make any sense that I would be forced to face losing my child. He was my son. I couldn’t imagine losing something I loved so deeply and completely. I just knew I would die right along with him. And lord, Matthias. I have never seen a man so deeply battered. It was as though his soul couldn’t bear the weight of the possibility of something happening to his son.”
She abruptly stopped when the memory grew too painful. I wondered what Kane had come down with that made him so sick, or how he recovered. But I didn’t ask. I wouldn’t let myself get more involved with this family and especially not with Kane.
Linley didn’t need my participation to continue though. She moved on with her story as though I were as eager to hear it as she was for companionship at the moment. “The doctors never did figure out what he had. Some auto-immune thing, they said. I think they were more surprised than we were though. One day they came in to tell us to start saying our goodbyes, and the next he blinked his eyes open and said, ‘Mama, I’m thirsty.’ Like, he’d just been asleep the whole time. Like we were at home and he’d called out to me in the night. I will always believe that his recovery was a miracle, that God’s hand touched my son and gave him the rest of his days.” She paused for some inward reflection and when she finally continued, it was with more conviction than ever. “Matthias believes Kane was handed a purpose that day. That God had considered taking our son, but had looked to the future and the desolation that would come to our world and decided that Kane was needed here.” She pointed a once-manicured finger to the concrete floor and clicked her nail on the rough surface for emphasis. “Matthias still believes that. Kane is his favorite out of all the kids. I think they all know it. It’s hard for Matthias to take the other two seriously with the way they’ve acted out over the years. Meanwhile, Kane has always been desperate to please his daddy. And he’s always done a damn fine job of it. Kane knows the gift he was given, too. He knows his life was meant for something incredible, something world-changing. He’s taken up his call and I could not be a prouder mother.”
I sighed, exhausted by the Allens and their higher calling crap. “Manifest destiny!” I cheered sarcastically.
Her head snapped my direction in the classic Linley way that was one-part horrified by my brazenness and two-parts disgusted by my disbelief. I didn’t bother sparing her a glance. I comprehended Matthias’s sick, twisted views on reviving our country as it decayed right along with the Feeders.
But I didn’t agree with it.
They should understand that by now.
“You joke, Reagan, but you do not see the big picture. Kane is asking you not to be by his side during tumultuous times, but to lead with him. He’s asking you to bring a country together and unite us again. He’s asking you to pull us out of this Feeder hellhole and restore our once great nation. You’ve been given a calling, too. Kane heard his and grasped it with both hands. Do you really hate the innocent so much that you would turn your back on them for your own selfish desires?”
“I don’t have the energy to answer that pretty box of manipulation.” Not with Page so close to death behind me. Not with Kane across the room in nothing but his underwear.
“You’re a real piece of work,” she mumbled. “Don’t worry, Darlin,' this country will survive without you. We’ll still find a way to save the blameless and protect the vulnerable. At least I hope so.”
At that moment, I thought maybe I had an aneurysm, or maybe a cluster of blood vessels burst in my head. Honestly, probably nothing exploded but my sanity… but it felt physical, it felt like something irreversible happened inside my body.
I jumped up to standing and whirled on Linley. “How dare you! How dare you sit by me and try to talk to me and accuse me of abandoning some huge people group that I don’t even know! You can sit up on your high horse and judge me all you want, but you are out of your damn mind to tell me I’m at fault for people dying! Do you understand that you kidnapped me? You took me from my home and people I loved and you didn’t just involve me. No. You had to go and drag Page in
to this! She is eight years old! Eight! And because we were here, because you and your golden child had her locked up in that room, she was attacked! Talk about saving the innocent, you all but dangled her in the woods like a goddamn piece of bait. And now she is battling for her life because of you! And because of him!” My arm swung wide and pointed in the general vicinity of Kane. I vaguely noted that he had woken up and was propped up on his elbow, taking me in with a very serious expression. “Your Colony, your answer to the infection, is to treat women like pieces of property, to treat them as if they have no will and they mean nothing more than what you can use them for. You abuse your own children, emotionally and verbally. And you let your husband physically abuse them in the worst ways. Kane hasn’t heard the call to some greater destiny, he’s been brainwashed by your psychopathic husband and indoctrinated by you! No wonder Kane didn’t know how to approach a relationship with me! He’s never seen a healthy one to compare with! No wonder Kane kidnapped me and uses his ingrained-bully tactics to all but beat me into submission! He’s watched you his entire life, watched how you give in to your husband’s sick delusions and support his abuse of all the innocent people you claim to want to save. And your children! He’s not only witnessed your abuse but experienced it! You are not rebuilding this country; you’re destroying whatever’s left of it. And I will never be a part of your vision. Never. You, your husband and your son are out of your minds. And that you would think I want any part of this sickness proves my point.”
She had stood up by now and her entire body shook with self-righteous rage. She looked crazed in the yellow lantern light. Her eyes were black in the gloom and her hair was wild and untamed from our days and nights down here. Her face was streaked with dirt, her frame thinner than I’d ever remembered seeing her before and her top lip curled back in a snarl reminiscent of a mangy dog.
She raised a shaking hand to strike me. She pulled it back slowly, as if it were attached to the string of a bow and her hand would be the arrow that pierced me. I tilted my chin defiantly and dared her to hit me.
Prove my point, I thought. Show me how deep the desire to hurt runs.
“How dare you!” She hissed at me. I saw her eyes light with excitement as she readied herself to slap me. I tensed, readying myself for it.
“Mama, don’t you touch her,” Kane commanded simply. He didn’t raise his voice or deepen his tone. He simply told his mother what to do and expected her to obey. “You will not hit her.”
She broke her staring contest with me and shot him a beseeching glare. I glanced over, too, and watched him shake his head with a perfectly composed expression. She winced once, a petulant whine that sounded worse than anything I’d ever heard from Page or the boys.
“No, Mama,” he reiterated.
She stomped her foot and took off for the bathroom. The door slammed shut behind her and if we were in anything else but a whole in the ground, the force of it would have rattled the walls.
Kane made a sound in the back of his throat and shook his head. He avoided eye contact with me while he climbed to his feet and pulled his clothes on from where they lay at the end of the bed. I didn’t even make an effort not to watch him.
The corded muscles in his back ripped with every tug or yank and his biceps bulged throughout the process. His hair went from tousled to wild as soon as his head popped through his t-shirt. He looked around for his socks with jerking, frustrated movements. A foul word slipped from his mouth and he picked up his heavy boot and chucked it as hard as he could against the back wall. It bounced off and landed with a thud.
“It wouldn’t have mattered if she had hit me or not,” I told him in as calm a voice as I could. Linley Allen could do her worst to me and I couldn’t care less. Honestly, with her it was all sticks and stones… But Kane stomping around the small space in a fit of rage unnerved me. I could feel his negative energy as if he were eating up all the oxygen down here, as if he were filling the room from floor to ceiling and if I didn’t find a way to escape I would drown in it.
In him.
He spun around and stalked over to me. Afraid of his intensity, I backed up until I bumped against the rolling ammo chest behind me. I steadied my heart and tipped my chin to look up at him. I wouldn’t let him see me shake.
His fingers skimmed over my cheek. “I know you’re stronger than my mother, Reagan. She could never hurt you. At least not in a way that would matter.” He took a step into me and let his chest brush up against mine. He continued to fill up the room, his presence growing denser and denser and denser until it was a sentient, palpable force that I could feel on every inch of my skin. “That’s not why I’m upset.”
My breathing grew shaky in my chest. “Then what’s with the attitude, Allen?”
Joking around was not going to work with him.
“Thirty minutes after I had you in my car, I realized this was the wrong thing to do.”
“What?” My question came out in a whisper of fear, doubt and something ashamedly like hope.
“I knew I’d made a mistake taking you… taking Page. I knew it was wrong. But I had already committed and it wasn’t as though I could just drop you back off and apologize to your keepers.”
“I don’t have keepers,” I interrupted.
His eyes narrowed and a bitter sound came out of his mouth, something like a laugh but utterly humorless. “You know what I mean, Reagan. Hendrix and his brothers would have shot me the second I pulled up. And if I went back home without you, my dad would have shot me for failing. I’d made my bed and I knew I had to lie in it.” He paused and moved in closer. His hands went to my hips and he moved me to the side and kept walking back. By the time I hit the wall again, it was smooth concrete and more comfortable. His body closed the space between us and I felt every hard plane of him as he pressed into me.
“So you’re saying, you kidnapped me to save your own life?”
“I’m saying what I did was wrong. I know that. You know that. And we both know there are consequences to pay for my actions. I didn’t mean for Page to get hurt. And I can’t tell you how grateful I am that she just happens to be immune, but don’t think for a second I don’t understand how lucky that is.” I swallowed the big lump in my throat and let the tears prick at my eyes. I couldn’t stop them. He was right. And for some reason that made my heart feel like someone was trying to rip it in two. He continued with a slower drawl that heated my belly. “My parents believe we are the second coming, I swear. You weren’t far off when you called it manifest destiny. Their intentions aren’t all wrong, but I can see it from your perspective. I can see why we appear so evil. Why you hate us so much.”
I shook my head and the tears escaped down my cheeks.
“No?” he laughed and this time he actually sounded amused. “You don’t want me to die a very painful, excruciating death at least a hundred different times?”
“No,” I cried. “Maybe,” I amended. A sob hitched in my throat. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I want for you.”
“Or for us?” he asked sounding incredibly vulnerable. His thumb rubbed along my bottom lip and his head dropped an inch closer. “My days are numbered, Reagan. And the ones before these, I have messed up relentlessly. I see that now.”
“What are you going to do?” My heart hammered louder than the fire that had raged above us for the first two days down here.
“I’m going to spend the rest of my time here, however long that is, doing what I should have done all along.” His eyes sparkled black in this lighting and all I wanted to do was wrap my arms around him and hold him, comfort him in the same way he had so many times with me.
“Kane,” I whimpered. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to spend this time love-”
Just as my breath hitched and my fingers clutched his t-shirt in a way that I couldn’t tell if I was pulling him closer or pushing him away, an elaborate knocking sound pounded on the hatch.
My heart pulsed in my chest i
n a whole new, frantic rhythm. People.
Only people could knock like that.
Kane and I glanced up at the exact same time. I didn’t know whether to be excited that I wasn’t going to die down here or fearful of whom exactly had come to rescue us.
Kane’s mouth turned into a wary frown and when he looked back at me, his expression had grown guarded again.
Slowly I remembered that he had been on the verge of confessing something… and that I had been on the cusp of accepting it.
I shook my head and pushed him away. Either way, whether the bad guys or good guys had shown up to save us, I would be out of this bubble of Kane. I would be free of his constant presence and overwhelming emotions.
He climbed up the ladder and started opening the hatch door. Over his shoulder he called out, “Mama, the cavalry has arrived.”
Someone from the other side helped swing the door open and we immediately blinked up at the blaring sunlight. The bathroom door swung open and I felt Linley enter the room again.
“Shit,” Kane muttered just as a face came into view. “That’s the wrong cavalry.”
Hendrix lowered the muzzle of his gun through the opening. He had looked back and forth between us before he said, “You might finally be right about something, Allen.”
Chapter Two
“Reagan, get Page and get up here,” Hendrix barked. “Allen, put your hands on your head and drop to your knees. You too, lady.”
Kane eyed the wall of weapons directly to his left but sighed resignedly and obeyed. I should have noticed how compliant he behaved, how easily subdued he suddenly became. I should have noticed and I should have demanded an answer right then and there.
I would remember this single moment for the rest of my life and never be able to answer all the questions I should have asked. This moment and the painful ones to come would haunt me.
Forever.
But as it happened, my thoughts were everywhere else than where they should have been. Clearly this wasn’t the happy reunion I’d imagined. Obviously, Hendrix would be too keyed up to do the whole hugging and weeping thing that I wanted. That made sense if I looked at this scenario without emotion and completely detached from this place.