Chapter 11 #2
It takes me a moment to feel the difference—not the same pockets, because it’s not the same jacket.
I don’t know where my Kathmandu is, whether it’s folded and packed in his satchel, or gone back in the forest where he fucking attacked me.
But even if I found the parka, I wouldn’t find the cigarettes.
Those fell out.
I remember, faintly, my spine flattened to the hood of the car, numbness slowing me in my fight against him as he rummaged through my pockets.
Everything spilled out.
He ripped through every nook and cranny of that jacket—because Bee told him to find my inhaler—and I lost everything in my pockets.
So that really is the last of my cigarettes.
My mouth flattens into a line.
The cold one considers them a little longer.
The gold packaging is different to the ones from my pocket, those were menthols, smooth going down, but these ones are backups.
A faint frown touches his brow.
It echoes a memory through me; at the museum, those lovely marble sculptures with the finest details, the soft ripples of a skirt billowing.
He runs the pad of his thumb along the end of an exposed cigarette, luring it out of the packet. Another moment passes before he pinches it and brings it to his nose. He gives the faintest sniff—
And he hates it.
His face shutters for the quickest of moments, a blink-and-miss-it look before he chucks the packet aside.
It lands on the pile with the painkillers.
There’s more to rummage through.
My bag was packed to the brim.
Every pocket stuffed, every slot full, and his interest fades with each item.
Mostly cans of soda, packets of crisps, chocolate bars, all the crappy stuff that’s easily found in destroyed, looted stores.
He sets those ones down on the left, but the tinned food goes on the right, canned beans, chickpeas, spam (which I can hardly stomach, even on the verge of throwing up bile).
Maybe it’s the vegan in me, or maybe it’s that spam is so disgusting it should be internationally illegal.
I saw Ruby make a sandwich once—and it gave me permanent trauma.
She and the other girls crashed overnight at our place, mine and Bee’s, and in the morning she went out the shop, got a bunch of food to make a full English breakfast, and that was great, until she started making a little spam sandwich.
Just layers of processed meat, some cheese and brown sauce, and I retched as she bit a huge chunk out of it.
I couldn’t stop the retch.
I couldn’t look away.
Even now, the reminder of it, my gaze on the can of corned beef, it stirs that sickly feeling in my chest, and I have to rub and rub in hopes that it fucks off.
The cold warrior throws me a look—one that freezes me.
There’s no rage in it, no entire coldness either.
It’s a look I haven’t seen on him before.
Annoyance.
Literally, he glances at me tediously and gives a curt sigh, a huffed breath, before he continues through the bag.
I’m sorry, but am I getting on your nerves?
Like what the fuck?
I didn’t even do anything.
Just sitting here.
Asshole.
The next to join the pile on the right is a lighter, a flask of vodka that he spares a sniff before discarding it, and a headlight with a broken strap and a cracked LED case. It’s something I hung onto in case I ever discovered the secrets of repairing torches.
The miniature torch with the strap that comes to fasten around a wrist goes on the left pile.
Sinking back against the boulder, I drop my hand to my boot and pick at a frayed lace.
My interest is waning, drifting to the faces warped in the ribbons of steam.
Shark and Glass have scooted along the rocks and boulders to wedge together and pore over a scrap of parchment.
Glass’s pale lips move softly, silently, around words that don’t reach me over the murmurs of camp.
My shoulders slowly tug back, lifting my posture, my chin, and I try to get a better look at the face sketched onto the parchment they consider.
But I realise it isn’t parchment.
Beige, frayed, and ancient-looking, it’s an old piece of cloth, inked with the faint sketch of a face. A female’s face.
Shark lets his thumb shift over the faded portrait, a touch of longing, of affection.
Must be his lover…
His wife, maybe.
The thought startles me.
Do these beasts have wives? Do they know love?
The idea twists something inside of me, something dormant and ugly.
I drop my gaze to the hands of the cold one—and the black glossy screen that glimmers from his grip.
My phone.
Deader than those we’ve lost along the way.
I didn’t toss it.
Didn’t leave it behind.
Maybe I should have.
I carried the extra weight in my backpack, along with the portable charger the tugs out with it. That’s also drained.
Guess he doesn’t know what it is. The phone, the charger, the cords. He turns them over in his hands, that frown burrowed back into his brow, ripples of lovely marble.
He presses buttons along the sides.
Nothing happens.
No juice, no power. But more than that, the blackout just made everything… stop.
Cars, electricity, phones, it all stopped.
Even radios struggle to reach out further than a few miles of radius.
Gas works, whether it’s for a stove or to heat a water boiler.
I don’t understand that, I don’t know the difference between how gas works versus electricity, or the machinery of cars.
I just know I couldn’t let go of my phone.
Emily tossed hers a while back.
Bee lost hers somewhere along the way.
But I cherish mine.
Just in case.
Just in case there is a way in the future, a way to reconnect, a way to communicate in the blackout, or the blackout fades and we return to our old normal.
Or maybe I would find more portable chargers, fully juiced and magically working in the darkness, and then I’d get a moment longer with my old videos, photos, music.
Well, maybe not music.
I accessed that on subscription, so it needs internet, and we have no internet anymore.
I should have downloaded. If I had done that, and was lucky enough to find a charger somewhere, and the phone didn’t crap itself in the blackout, then I could maybe squeeze another song into my life.
That haunts me more than it should.
It haunts me more than most of the deaths I’ve seen.
The last time I listened to a song, I didn’t know it would be the last.
It was some hick shit, too. Not my thing.
I would go back to that time, turn off the radio, and find a way to put on Hotel California.
Over six minutes of pure bliss.
Funny, I don’t love the Eagles. But I got that album on vinyl, just for the album version of that piece of melancholic heaven.
That’s my ‘what would I save in a fire’ answer.
My records.
And if I had time, my insects. Framed, glass-protected butterflies and moths and dragonflies, mounted to my bedroom wall, forever preserved.
I would save those, too.
Bee hates them.
Creeps her out, I think. Usually doesn’t sit well with other people, my insect collecting hobby.
But my mum worked as a cleaner at the zoo when I was young, nightshift, and she brought me along with her when she couldn’t find a sitter.
It was there I found my first framed fake insect. I was about eight, maybe nine years old.
It stuck.
I would save those and my vinyls.
Everything else can burn.
The cold warrior apparently decides my phone is useless, or that I have no need for it, and he tosses it to the right pile.
My mouth thins on silenced words of protest.
As if sensing the temper swelling in me, his gaze cuts to me, and it’s harsh.
I glare out the corner of my eye at him, but only for a hot second before a deafening shriek spears through the hot springs.
A wince cuts sharp through my parted mouth.
I twist around, my spine aching, and throw my gaze to the next pool up.
There, I find the source of the shout.
A man, a captive, balances bowls on his arms, delivering the next lot of meals, but he’s hopping.
One leg hiked, his other bounces up and down, up and down; glitter sparkles all around him—and there’s a splash of crimson falling from his lifted foot.
It takes me a moment to understand what I’m seeing.
That man has a knife in his lifted foot. A knife like all the other blades sunken into the earth around where he stands…
He’s fighting the need to fall down, to hold his injured foot—and it clicks.
What he’s really fighting is the release of the bowls in his arms, dropping them to the rocks, letting food spill all over the boulders. So he hugs the bowls to himself as he hops and grunts against his searing pain.
The fae parked around the pool are split with grins, some of them rumbling with laughter.
A light-haired female strikes out a blade, and it’s fast followed by an arrow, released by a light-haired male.
Siblings, so alike in their sharp features, sandy hued hair, sawdust eyes—that they might even be twins.
Twins in nature, they torment the man.
Arrow after knife, knife after arrow, all aimed at his still-planted boot, as if trying to throw him off balance without actually making contact.
But a knife did make contact. And the wound spills hot crimson from his lifted boot.
The breath that sags me is exhausted.
I turn my back to the chaos, to the blood and torment, and stare down at my backpack still sat between the cold warrior’s boots.
Looks empty now.
Maybe there’s a stray stick of gum at the bottom or a wrapper tucked in a pocket somewhere, but the fae sorted through the bulk of it.
Now, he’s paused.
His forearms are rested on his thighs, his hands relaxed and without one of my possessions in them. But the two piles are left forgotten.
I chance a look up at him.
And I find he’s looking at me already.
His chin is lifted, proud, and there’s something studious about the way he considers me, searching my eyes, searching me too intently, but for what, I don’t know.
Oh.
The shout behind me.
The guy being tormented up at the other pool.