Until We End (8 page)

Jesus. I pictured Coby, screaming, trapped inside a castle wall, and wished Brooks would shut up. I was trying to concentrate. And anyways, I still had both of my rooks. So did Lu.

“Look. Both of your knights and most of your pawns have been taken, but neither of your rooks. What does that mean?” Brooks asked. He didn't wait for me to answer. “You're sacrificing them for your family.”

“What it
means
is that I'm rusty,” I said, glaring at him.

Like I needed him to give me a psych evaluation. He wasn't telling me anything new.

I looked back at the board and my breath caught — my mental somersaults were paying off. I saw an opening. Well, an opening three moves down the line, but still it'd be an opening. I let my breath out as stealthily as possible and glanced up at Lu from under my eyelashes. She studied the chessboard, oblivious to me.

Parades marched in my head, all confetti and streamers and big bands with brass tubas. I could win this.

“What about the bishops?” I asked, desperate to keep Lu from noticing my impending victory, sure I was wearing it all over my face. My distraction worked. Lonnie giggled and Lu turned her head slowly to look at Brooks. He stared back at her.

“Bishops were the heads of the church. They represent faith,” Brooks said. “And love.”

I thought saw that in her — an emptiness where faith and love once lived. And, for a second, I saw something else: mourning. I'd sacrificed my knights to protect my rooks and Lu had done the same with her bishops. So how different did that make us, really?

“Bullshit,” Lu said, looking from Brooks to me. “Talk about the symbolism all you want. It doesn't matter. All that matters is the win.”

She was right. I broke Lu's gaze and blocked Brooks out, concentrating on lining up my trap. Every piece had to be in its perfect position. Lu couldn't resist flaunting her queen, so I gave her the chance to use it. I moved my rook, opening the move up for her. To let her take my queen.

It would be suicide in any other game. To do it on purpose? Unthinkable.

I kept my face carefully blank. Her queen was in just the right place, holding the middle of the board. Mine was tucked in a corner. It would've been a totally believable mistake for me to make. A snap misjudgment. But I knew
exactly
what I was doing.

Lu snatched the tip of her queen's crown and slid it diagonally across the length of the board to take mine. I swallowed a smile. I knew I'd won.

Brooks frowned. “Your queen,” he said, “is your most valuable and powerful piece on the board. In medieval times, a king without a queen would have no heirs, so without a queen the king's throne had no security. Chess mirrors that. If the queen is taken, the king is defenseless.”

I couldn't wait to throw my win in his face. I was
not
defenseless. “Will you please just shut up, Brooks?”

He let out his breath in a huff of exaggerated patience, like
I
was a student to be schooled. Asshat. “Each piece represents something, Cora, the queen included. The queen especially. What is your most valuable asset?”

A mighty dragon captures my queen in its claws. My king, arms hanging limply at his sides, watches it fly away.
What is your most valuable asset?

“I don't know,” I snapped. “What's yours?”

Brooks smiled. “My gun, of course.”

“Good luck getting it to give you any heirs,” I said.

Lonnie burst out laughing, hands covering his mouth; even Lu cracked a smile.

I turned back to the game and shifted my bishop one tile forward. Lu, still flush with what she thought was her victory, didn't see it coming. “Check,” I said.

Lu gripped the edge of the coffee table and bent to study the board for a full four minutes, just over an eternity in chess. Her eyes searched the board and I knew what she was seeing. Every move she could make to save her king ending in failure. The game lost.

Her head snapped up. If looks could kill, I would've been
so
dead.

Dad kept a full bookshelf of National Geographics at home. I'd read them all at least twice during the nine months I hadn't left home, so I knew a thing or two about animal behavior. Lions, wolves, even bears use eye contact to assert their dominance.

Lu didn't break her gaze. Neither did I.

Then she tipped her king over and sat back without a word. Better to fall on your own sword, I guess.

Lonnie gave a delighted
whoop,
jumping in his chair,and I couldn't hide my smile. I turned to Brooks, wanting to gloat over my win, and my jaw dropped. The grin he gave me lit up his face and the whole room, too. It wasn't a predator's smile, or a killer smile, or a smirk. It was just real. It made
him
real.

“The king—“ Brooks began.

I cut him off. “I know who the king is.”

“Oh yeah?” He arched his eyebrows. Still giving me that smile.

“Of course.” It was obvious.

I picked up the black king and held it between my index finger and thumb. My king without a queen, pawns or knights; victorious and alone except for two solemn bishops and his castle.

“I am.”

Those granola bars were the best things I'd ever eaten. I made short work of them and then asked Lu to bring up what she promised me for lunch, too. She sent Jackson outside to get the food, and when he walked out in a snit, I watched him carefully, noting that he turned left out of the warehouse.

Jackson carried a full tub of peanut butter, a can of pineapple, and a packet of tuna in his arms when he came back. It was like he'd tried to pick the most disgusting combination of food he could imagine, but the joke was on him because it tasted awesome. I'd stuffed my face, Lonnie making gagging noises the whole time from where he lay sprawled on the floor.

“You're coming with us today,” Lu said to me from the couch. That sounded ominous.

“Where are we going?”

Brooks kicked the footrest of his armchair down with a
snap
. “Out on the town, sweetheart.” He gave me a version of his cocky smirk, but there was something off about it. Like his mind was someplace else.

“No way,” I said. It was out of the question for me to stay there with them. I didn't have time to waste — Coby had been gone for almost a full day and my guts ached at the thought of what he might be going through. “Y'all took the food from my house. I won the chess match. I want the information I came here for and then I want to leave.” I sat back and crossed my arms. “I'm not going anywhere with you.”

Brooks stood from his recliner and stretched, revealing a strip of tan skin above where his boxers peeked from his jeans. Red plaid. Again my mind flashed to the day before. To his body pressed against mine.

I pushed the image down.

“Yes,” Brooks' arms fell to his sides, “you are. We're not going anywhere near the government for at least a few days, and neither are you. Unless you want to get yourself killed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You think the military won't notice that patrol is missing? They'll search. You'll have to wait a couple days for things to die down.” His eyebrow cocked as he looked at me. “Unless that's what you're hoping for? A suicide mission?”

I sighed. “Of course not.” I hated to admit it, but he had a point. That woman that I killed... Someone would miss her. Maybe even find her body. My stomach clenched. Did Brooks and the brigade hide the bodies after I passed out?

I didn't ask. Didn't want to know.

Lonnie stood from where he was lying and gave me a Cheshire grin. “Cheer up, Janie! It won't be that bad.” His eyes lit up. “Hey, I've got an idea. Maybe you can ask the people we'll see if they've heard anything about your brother?”

“People?” I asked. “What people?”

Jackson and Lu stood from the couch as one, giving new meaning to the phrase
joined at the hip.
The matching blond hair made them even creepier.“People who might know what's going on with the military, why the sudden increase in activity,” Lu said.

“You're saying this is weird?” I asked them. “What happened yesterday with the helicopter and the patrol?”

“It wouldn't have been weird if it happened six months ago,” Brooks said. “The patrols were much more aggressive then. I haven't seen anything like what happened yesterday — both a patrol and helicopter — in a while. We were beginning to think they'd been scaled down.”

“So what makes you think anyone else knows what's going on?”

“It's always good to have more than one set of eyes on a problem,” Lu said mildly, stepping around the coffee table and walking toward the front of the warehouse — where, instead of the SUV, a camouflaged Hummer sat. I closed my eyes. Of course. The SUV was destroyed, and they needed a replacement... and the soldiers wouldn't need their Hummer anymore.

Jackson and Brooks followed Lu immediately, but I hung back. Lonnie paused next to me and slung an arm around my shoulder. “Don't sweat it, honey,” he said, leaning his head against mine and walking us toward the hummer. A strand of his white blond fell into my line of vision.

“Lonnie,” I said. “What's with the matching hair?”

His ever-present grin died. “I hope you never find out.”

We piled inside and got on the road. I refused to let myself wonder if I was sitting in the same seat as the woman I killed — thinking about it made me nauseous.

Jackson was driving, Lu rode shotgun and I was sitting between Lonnie and Brooks in the back, my arm pressed against Brooks' shoulder to elbow. I kept my hands clasped tightly in my lap, trying to focus all my attention on the back of Lu's headrest, but I was still hyperconscious of Brooks. When he leaned forward to whisper directions in Jackson's ear, I jumped about a mile in my seat.

Jackson snapped at him for being a backseat driver, and Brooks sat back down. But as he did, his gaze lingered on me a second too long. He'd seen my reaction. I closed my eyes and forced myself to calm down with a deep breath.

I turned to stare out Lonnie's window. Savannah was almost unrecognizable. This time last year,
the sidewalks would have been full of shoppers and joggers, the grassy squares packed with couples lounging on blankets in the summer sun.

But the cobblestone sidewalks I was looking at were deserted. There were no twisted hills of bodies, thank God, but it was still a ghost town. Even pre-TEOTWAWKI, people said Savannah was the most haunted city in America. Now its ghosts probably numbered in the thousands.

Townhouses in the downtown district had gone from grand and regal to dilapidated and overgrown with vines. With no gardeners to attend them, the arms of the live oaks in the squares twisted and stretched beyond their plots of land
.
Their limbs seemed to say
this land is mine now.

The oaks had a better claim to the city than we did. They'd been here for hundreds years, through every occupation and destruction, reclamation and restoration, serving as silent witnesses to the city's story. Now, we were the invaders.

I tore my gaze away from the landscape as Jackson brought the SUV to a stop.

“Let's start up Jones Street and make our way toward the cathedral,” Lu said. She and Jackson hopped out and started walking up the street without looking back. Lonnie wasn't too far behind them, but I hesitated. I didn't like the idea of being out in the open with no barrier between me and the world, fair game for any predator that might roam by.

Brooks waited for me. He didn't seem like he was in a hurry.

I tried my best not to stare at the semi-automatic strapped to his back or the ammo draped over his shoulders or the handgun holstered at his hip. I felt silly and outclassed with my hot pink backpack and my one pistol and wished I would've thought to grab something else out of the gun cabinet before I left home. Something hefty and threatening, like a double-barreled shotgun or a machete.

Or anything, really, instead of a freaking
hot pink
backpack.

The sun was already harsh and bright in the early morning, the air thick with humidity. Brooks' baggy black clothes worked like a furnace to keep all my body-heat in, his shirt sticking to my back and the denim of his jeans rubbing the skin on my thighs raw. I gripped the straps of my backpack and bumped it a notch higher, hoping to get some air to my sweat-drenched skin. It didn't help.

“Who,” I panted, “exactly, are we going to see?”

“Whoever we meet,” Brooks said. A bead of sweat rolled down his sun-bronzed skin from temple to jaw and my fingers itched to reach up and wipe it away.

I clenched the straps of my backpack instead. “What kind of people are out here?”

Brooks definitely didn't want to talk to me. “Gangs. Factions.” His jaw muscles twitched. I tried not to fixate on the way his Adam's apple moved up and down in his throat.
Focus, Cora.

“But I haven't seen anyone other than us,” I pressed.

Brooks shook his head and stared at the sky. For a second, I thought he wasn't going to answer me. Then he said, “You wouldn't. If anyone sees a car, they hide. All the gas disappeared months ago. No civilian has it anymore.”

“Then how do y'all have gas?”

He looked at me funny. “How does your truck?”
Touché.

Still, the thought of adding another group to my social sphere wasn't comforting.

Lu and the others turned down Washington Street, which ran parallel to the river, and we followed them.

Being inside the Hummer had given me a sense of security. As long as I was inside that big metal box, I was separate from the environment. I could make myself a casual observer of the world around me; I could tell myself it wasn't real.

Walking down the middle of the street, I felt naked.