Chapter Twenty-Two #2
I find Bama’s gaze, and she winks, so I pull her up onto a stool, right in front of the now-decapitated bunny.
Clara watches as her parents hastily prepare the kitchen for cooking.
Sling lights the gas stove with a match while Bama hoists herself onto the counter and unhooks a pot from the ceiling rack.
They weave between one another with chaos and urgency, but somehow don’t stumble or knock into each other once.
The couple is helter-skelter, certainly, but they’re a well-oiled machine.
If their food is as good as their coordination, they’d have been great on Chopped.
“Clara, elbows OFF the counter!”
“What can we do to help?” Jasper asks, coming to stand beside me.
We.
If all I am is a hostage to him, why does he treat me as an equal—as someone he actually cares about?
More importantly, why do I care how he sees me?
“Oh, nothing, nothing,” Bama says. “You’ve already done too much—bringing us meat and an effervescent date!” Did she learn that word today? “Why don’t you two go wash up in the creek out back? There’s a bar of soap on the big rock next to the dog statue.”
I follow Jasper out the door Clara burst through, and whoa, she wasn’t kidding about the dog statue. Sitting three feet tall is a near-perfect-condition stone statue of a Great Dane.
“That’s Darcy,” Jasper says, grabbing a half-dissolved bar of soap off the rock. “Well, Darcy’s buried underneath.” I jump back. Jasper laughs. “Don’t worry. She’s dead dead.”
“How’d they build this statue?”
“They didn’t build it, that’s how. Sling comes out sometimes with me and Greeley. Found it in a vintage store. We were looking for building materials. He convinced us it was imperative to bring it home for Bama. For her birthday.”
“That’s . . . sweet, I guess.”
“And a stupid waste of resources. Could’ve fit a whole deer in its place.”
“Love makes people do crazy things.”
Jasper shakes his head. “I don’t think it was an act of love. He needed some semblance of normalcy. Needed to feel he had control over his surroundings.”
“Or maybe he just wanted to make this house a home.”
Jasper shrugs, and I follow him to the small babbling creek behind the house. Two of the two homes I’ve been to have a creek? How did the Egal side of the Split get so unlucky? We only get fresh water once a week, and the Macs get to go apeshit with it?
My thoughts dissipate as I dip my hand into the cold water.
Chills run through my body. I suck in a breath through my teeth, determined not to miss this opportunity to get clean.
The smell of the wild boar clings to my skin and lingers in my nostrils.
An image of the bloated beast’s inert body sticks in the space behind my eyes.
I blink as Jasper jumps into the shallow depths, spraying me with icy water.
“Seriously?” But he can’t hear me below the surface. For a while, he doesn’t come up for air. Damn, his lung capacity is impressive.
My toes curl as I submerge my feet in the creek.
I use an exposed root to scrape off crusty dirt, and when I move to scrub the dried blood off my hands, I get a twisted satisfaction from picking it out from under my fingernails.
The apocalypse broke my nail-biting habit.
Before, I’d nip Grandma’s rose-colored nail polish from the third shelf in her bathroom cabinet to paint my nails.
Lovely, she’d say. Now don’t ruin them with that nasty mouth of yours.
And then, I’d ruin them, mere hours later. Every. Single. Time.
Nowadays, my nails are painted with blood; they’re chipped and jagged without the involvement of my hungry mouth. I’ll always be hungry, won’t I? Nails, food, water, or brains, I’ll never be satisfied.
Jasper comes up for air, shaking the water out of his hair like a wet dog.
“Dude. Can you not?”
“Dude. You’re sitting at the edge of the creek.
What do you expect?” He hoists himself up and sits down next to me.
Then he throws his work boots into the creek and watches as they fill with water before sinking to the bottom.
When he pulls his sopping boots out and slings them on the ground, the water washes onto my legs.
“Seriously, enough with the water!”
“Just helping you clean up. You’ve got some guts there.” He points to my shoe. “And some blood there.” His finger shifts to my shoulder. “And a spot of dirt there.”
He boops my nose, and I swat his hand away, glaring. Jasper’s growing casualness toward me is clear as day, but I refuse to give in.
You are not my friend.
I dip my hand in water and rub the apparent dirt off my nose. The water doesn’t feel cold anymore, but my fingers have turned a shade of purple. “So, who are Sling and Bama? How’d you meet?”
“You don’t know Sling?”
“Should I?”
“He was a big-time newscaster back in the day. On WYFF4—the Greenville Daily Report.”
I look down at my knees. “I only ever watched national broadcasts,” I admit. “Grandma never watched the news before Jenkins was elected president. She preferred Wheel of Fortune.”
“Well,” Jasper says, “I interned for WYFF4 in college. Not that I wanted to be a producer, but Mom and Dad banned me from art school, and making shit graphics for the broadcasts seemed easy. That’s to say, I knew Sling before Z Day.
We stumbled into one another a couple weeks after finding the Split and sort of stuck together once the community divided into Egal and Macoby.
Sling’s a kick-ass butcher, so I share meat in exchange for his services. ”
“You don’t ever bring him human meat, do you?”
“Kota, we’re not cannibals.”
Right. Not cannibals. I can trust these people, can’t I? Why is giving in so hard?
Another thought comes to mind. “If Sling was a newscaster, does he know what happened to Jenkins? You know, after he and his psychotic followers blew everything up?”
“Whoa, slow down,” Jasper says. “Just before everything went dark, Sling got word that Jenkins is hiding out in California—that there’s a safe haven in Los Angeles.”
“Seriously?” This is huge. This information could change everything. I could take Bunny and Grandma and we could—
“Before you get too excited,” Jasper says, reading my mind, “I’ve already considered it.
There’s no way to get to California alive.
You think downtown’s bad? Now imagine traveling through cities four times the size of Greenville.
Imagine the zombies. Imagine traveling through the wilderness—coming face-to-face with zombie lions and tigers and bears. ”
“Oh my.”
Jasper smirks. “Fell into that one, didn’t I?” He rakes a hand down his stubbled jaw. “In all seriousness, think about the zoos that were destroyed on Z Day and the thousands of animals that escaped as a result. They’re roaming across the country in zombie form now.”
I never considered that. “What do you think is worse—zombie chimpanzees or zombie crocodiles? Wait, no. Zombie Komodo dragons. Zomodo dragons. Dear lord.”
Jasper ignores my comment. Doesn’t even entertain me for one second. The nerve. “There are actual cannibals out there, Kota. Now imagine traveling across the country with your sister and grandmother.”
I imagine it. It’s not a pretty sight.
“So, then.” I sigh. “There really is no hope, is there? We’re stuck here, in the Split, forever.”
Jasper sticks his hand in the stream, swirling the dirty water like paint. We sit there for a minute, lingering in the silence.
After a beat, Jasper opens his mouth to speak. “I know what I said, but . . . I will never lose hope. A better world exists for us; we just have to find it. If we’re patient and resourceful—and if we refuse to give up—we will find it.”
“Or maybe,” I whisper, “we’ll create this better world for ourselves.”
Jasper turns to me. His soft brown eyes find mine.
I study his face: his strong brows, thick lashes, Roman nose.
If Z Day never happened, would Jasper still be at the news station?
Or would he have eventually defied his parents to pursue his dream?
I like to think that Jasper would have taken his life into his own hands.
That if things were different, he’d be painting right now.
“Jasper.” I stick my own hand into the cold water and squeeze his. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your story with me. Thank you for helping me see our limited existence differently. Thank you for opening my eyes. “I’m really glad you’re not a cannibal.”
Jasper smiles. By the way his hand squeezes mine back, he seems to understand what my words actually mean.