Chapter 10 #2
I looked around, officially taking the room in for the first time. “I knew they said Woodhaven was nice, but this is penthouse-style luxury.”
He didn’t respond.
“Hey.” I took his hand, wiggled it a little. “You okay?”
“I never wanted this,” he said. “You know me, Tapley. You know that the last thing I would have ever wanted is to have you going through hell without me in the trenches next to you.”
“Dez—”
“Then, I got a copy of your work schedule. Do you know that you work one point seven times more hours than anyone else in Sanitation? And that didn’t make any sense to me. I mean, why overwork you specifically?”
“Dez…”
“I think someone here knows you from before. I think it’s someone whose case you prosecuted, and they’re trying to get their revenge this way.
I feel real sorry for them, though. Imagine how bad their luck must be to end up being killed by me instead of the fucking apocalypse?
All because they fucked with the wrong man’s girl. Or, in this case, the right one.”
“Dez, tell me the truth,” I blurted out. “You’re rambling. You never ramble. That means you’re trying not to tell me something.”
Sighing, he smoothed one hand down his face.
“It’s not avoidance. I’m trying to distract myself.
The whole time you were sick, I was focused on making sure that you got better.
Now that you’re on the mend, all this shit’s starting to sink in.
You were suffering. For weeks. I almost lost you.
The only reason I’m still in this bed right now is because you need me. ”
Something flashed across his face and sparked in his eyes. Then, he came closer, and it was becoming uncanny how he seemed to know what I wanted or was thinking.
I raised my hand to his jaw and searched his eyes, doing my best to decipher what was on his mind. But the phenomenon didn’t appear to work in reverse.
“Tapley, I have a proposal for you,” he said. “Would you, uh, marry me?”
My heart started racing at a pace that couldn’t be safe in my condition. “Will I or would I?” I asked. Then, before he could answer, I quickly added, “Can we even get married?”
“There’s a guy. His name’s Cerner. I don’t know if you know of him.”
I only knew what I’d heard from LaSalle.
“He’s one of the generals here, and he said that Totten wants to open up more opportunities for ‘fraternization’ amongst the survivors.”
“I can’t believe that would include me marrying you.”
“Why not? Because you’re too good for me? I can level up.”
“First of all, you’re using too much of my lingo,” I teased.
“Second, I have a hard time believing they would let me bypass all the social rungs between us and join you in the lap of luxury. And third, I can’t marry you if it means I’m turning my back on the people I’ve worked beside since I got here. ”
“Tapley, you’re not going back there.”
“What were the other options?” I asked. “Fraternization sounds like it comes with options.”
His jaw twitched. “The other option is that a Class One Elite can take a Sanitation worker as a mistress…or a whore. In conclusion, it’s all bullshit I’m not interested in when it comes to you.”
I grinned. “I could be a whore.”
“Don’t start.”
“I’m looking at pragmatic solutions. I have to.
I didn’t grow up in a world where it was intrinsically reinforced that I could disobey a system and be left unscathed.
Infiltrate and change it? Yes. Learn it to then dominate it?
Sure. But someone had to tell me that I held the world in the palm of my hand and that ‘someone’ wasn’t general society.
Dez, you want what you want, and I get that, but to meet our goals, we might have to operate within the system rather than try to bulldoze through it. ”
“I grew up homeless on the streets,” he argued. “No one told me that I held the world in the palm of my hand either.”
“But you saw it. All you had to do was open your eyes. I had to open textbooks and website links buried on the sixth and seventh pages of search engine results. Your default is brute force because, historically, when things fell, they weren’t on top of people like you.”
He fell silent for a moment.
I held my breath.
All I needed was for him to hear me.
“I hear you,” he said, finally. “I do. I’m not just saying that. But I can’t let you go back there.”
“Even if it meant that going back could be the ticket to taking this place down?”
“Yes. Tapley, how do you expect me to function knowing you went back to the place where I almost lost you? Actually, can I show you something?”
I didn’t have time to answer.
He left the bed, picked me up, and we went to the living room, where he sat me on the sofa. Then he returned for the covers, draped them over me, and closed all of the curtains.
“It won’t be as clear as if it was nighttime, but…” He retrieved a flashlight from a drawer and aimed it at a map on the wall. “This is what I’ve been doing since they split us up.”
The map lit up with a constellation of markings—dots, Xs, circles, lines.
Yet, none of the markings were in the Sanitation area.
This man believed that my skills were so vital to a survival effort that he hadn’t been able to fathom that I would be sent to work in a forced labor camp.
The cluster of markings around the structures labeled Administration and Operations seemed to confirm exactly that.
“This is everywhere I searched for you,” he explained.
“I searched for you on active duty and on all my days off. I was trying to think...where would they put you with your skill set? That’s why Admin has so many marks.
I checked every floor, every room. Then I checked Aspen, Hawthorne, and Juniper.
Juniper made the most sense because that’s where Dr. Lin lives.
The way I saw it was, if they put all the brilliant professionals there, then that’s where I’d find you. ”
I had no words.
I’d assumed he’d forgotten about me. However, by the looks of things, this man never once stopped thinking about me.
“I checked the central warehouse, the infirmary annex. I even checked Distribution.” He went closer and tapped an image that resembled circuit board components.
“This part, they call it Generator Block. They have engineers there. Totten’s been in the works for a while, and its main power source is still active.
The concept for Totten was to create a residential community that’s more like a small town, so it was the best choice for a survivors’ camp.
” He moved his finger due east. “This is the Education building, and I could see you as a teacher. But after that was a bust, my next stops were Intake and Security. If none of these had panned out, only then would I have considered Sanitation.”
Still, I had no words.
“But you probably already knew all these areas,” he added.
“No, not really,” I said. “I didn’t realize Totten was this big. What’s that large area in the middle?”
He frowned. “Eden Square.”
“What’s Eden Square?”
“You’ve never been there?”
“Never even heard of it.”
“It’s where I first started, but it was easy to clear.”
He walked over, picked me up again, took me to a different set of windows, and drew back the curtains.
What I saw punched me in the gut.
There was a park and a market—an entire plaza with people mulling about, carrying what looked like paper shopping bags. The area was pristine, with trees, paved walkways, and green lawns. I even spotted a yoga class underway in one far corner.
“Has this existed the entire time?”
“You didn’t know?”
“No, I didn’t know. I’ve never even heard of…” I closed my eyes and pressed my thumb between my brows. “Can we go back to the sofa?”
He shut the curtains and returned to the couch. Instead of setting me down, he took a seat and set me on his lap. Things had already been bad enough, but seeing that destroyed something inside me.
“I’m sorry,” he offered.
I shook my head. “You didn’t know.”
“What’s going through your mind?”
“The willfulness of it all. Keeping us away from civilization and planning our routes to the point that we wouldn’t know that a life like that,” I gestured toward the window, “exists. What they were doing was already cruel, but this…”
I trailed off.
“Seeing this makes you realize how calculated they were in creating all these physical barriers to prevent you from thinking life could be different,” he finished.
“It’s like…facilitated despair. I mean, why fight, right?
As far as you know, the outside world is filled with uncertain dangers, the likes of which we’ve never seen.
To live inside a so-called safe haven? They want you to see it as a privilege.
You could be out there with the ‘savages,’ and therefore, you should be grateful you have access to some food and shelter. ”
“Right.”
He drew me close with a tenderness that momentarily assuaged every ache, wrapping me up until my body was completely swallowed by his.
“This reminds me of one of my first assignments after I was recruited onto a ghost unit from the SEALs,” he said. “I’ve told you about that, right?”
I settled against him. “Yeah, we’ve talked about it. I don’t mind hearing more.”
“Well, when we first started out, one of our assignments was to provide security for what was called a protected ‘Green Zone.’ It was this walled-off area where they housed intelligence officials, high-value assets…you know the type. The walls, they said, were built to protect the people who, just outside them, were destitute. But we knew the truth. Paradise looks different for everyone. Some people want riches. Others want a comfortable life where they don’t have to worry about stuff like money, food, and healthcare. ”
“But, without those walls, paradise starts to look the same for everyone,” I said. “Instead of a dream, it becomes a tangible target.”