Everyone Dies in the End #47

Cindy

“Why Philadelphia?” Zak asked.

They were sitting on the sill of the broken front window, the bloody, ruined Charlotte Best Buy to their backs. The street had been cleaned, “policed,” as Zak called it, Cindy remembered. Zak’s men had drug the bodies away. Where Cindy didn’t know, but a new plume of smoke rose a couple of blocks over, and Cindy was glad the evening breeze carried the smoke away from her nose.

Zak made sure his soldiers were fed, his dead buried, and his wounded tended to. Now the soldiers rested in the shade of the remaining M-113, while Zak and Cindy ate their MREs sitting on the windowsill.

Cindy shrugged. “There’s something I need to check on.”

Zak took a bite of mushy potatoes. “A thing?”

Cindy swallowed, feeling a bit like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “A person, a friend.”

Zak nodded, chewing his Salisbury steak. 

Cindy knew more needed to be said, but didn’t know how to say it. Zak spoke before she could sort it out.

“How are you getting there?”

She thought for a moment while she scrapped up the last of her stewed apples. “Car, I guess.”

“What about that…that…thing you do?” Zak stumbled on the words.

Cindy laughed. “That thing doesn’t work unless I know a specific place I want to go. As far as I know, it doesn’t work unless I can visualize the destination.”

“You’ve seen pictures,” Zak answered.

Cindy licked her fork. “Yeah, but I don’t trust what I’ve seen in pictures. It all could have changed. I don’t fancy the idea of materializing in the middle of a street under ten feet of rubble.

Zak bobbed his head. “Yeah, that might hurt.” He stood, holding out his hand for her MRE dish. She watched as he walked the two plastic meal holders to the M-113, and threw them in the same trash bag that he had made his soldiers use. Made them use despite the rubbled, littered street. She hadn’t told him just how far her powers could reach. She didn’t know herself, but she did know those powers let her come back to save these men, and she knew they were men well worth saving. She watched as Zak chatted with the soldiers, easy, friendly, quick to laugh.

A moment later he returned. “So, looks like you need a car.”

“Yeah.”

“You need some help?”

She looked at his face, open and eager. “No, Zak, this is something I have to do alone.”

He used the toe of his boot to smooth a pile of dirt. “I know that, Cindy. We couldn’t go with you if we wanted. My orders are to patrol North Carolina, but I can take you as far as Durham. What do you say?”

“I’d say I’d like that.”

             Ten minutes later Cindy, Zak, and the soldiers she had saved, were rolling towards Durham, North Carolina.