Everyone Dies in the End #17

Cindy

The evening was cool, the sky as blue as she had seen since the missiles. She leaned back against the jeep’s windshield, almost relaxed. In fact, if it wasn’t for the shot gun cradled in her lap, the shotgun she had used to shred five Russian soldiers little more than six hours ago, the evening would have been downright peaceful. Well, unless you thought a little too hard about the soft orange glow on the horizon, the glow that was tens, if not hundreds of fires burning in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The men were clustered in groups of two or three, bent over small cookers, which looked more like Sterno cups than anything else to Cindy. Dixon had posted guards, listening posts, he called them, as soon as the M-113 had broken down, and then told the men to grab some chow. Now he moved from group to group, chatting encouragingly, ensuring his men had what they needed, that they would all be fed before he.

He was strong; there was no question about that. He moved easily, confidently, and when he spoke his men listened. She remembered the ambush. Dixon had done his best in what was an impossible situation, refusing to give up. She liked that strength. Maybe liked it a bit too much, she acknowledged.

Her Eddie was strong too. There was no doubt about that either. Violently strong. Not that he had ever hit her, but there was electricity about him, like a human electrostatic generator… or something like that. A sense of just-barely-contained energy. An energy that turned physical at the slightest provocation, provocations which she had witnessed herself. Her mind flicked back to another warm autumn night, a year hence, before this war, before the rumors of this war.

They were on their way to a party, Eddie loved parties. Eddie was driving his candy-apple red 5.0 liter Mustang, Eddie loved that mustang too. Eddie pulled into an ABC store to buy a fifth of Jack Daniels Black Label, and a trio of high-schoolers in a yellow convertible, thought to take the same parking spot that Eddie wanted. They cut him off, zipped into the spot, and piled out of the car laughing.

Eddie didn’t say a thing. He just smiled at her and pulled into a place on the other side of the convertible. Eddie didn’t go into the ABC store for his Jack Daniels. He waited for teenagers beside their car, hands in the pockets of his worn leather jacket, and when they came out there was no talk, no shouting or posturing. He pulled his hands from the pockets of the jacket, on each were brass knuckles, and he beat the teenagers senseless. He didn’t teach them a lesson, he didn’t smack them and let them run, he beat them until it was hard to tell where the blood and ripped tissue of their faces ended and the cold brass of Eddie’s knuckles began. It drew a crowd. Eddie ignored them, and the steel in his eyes kept them back. He left the teenagers lying in their car, blood staining the seats, and swung into the Mustang.

They drove in silence until Eddie pulled into the far corner of an almost-empty Wal-Mart parking lot and made love to her, his bloody hands exciting her like never before.