It took Jenna’s eyes a moment to acclimate to the dim light of the warehouse after she’d been outside. The fluorescent lights were ballasted well enough that they didn’t flicker too badly and, here and there, a broken slat on one of the boarded up windows allowed streams of sunlight into the place. Dust hung dimly in the air and the pyromaniac inside wondered if it was close to the flash point that could make flour mills and creamer factories into powder kegs, just waiting for a spark to jump from particle to particle, releasing enough kinetic energy to blow the doors down. Impotence always made the pyromania burn brighter in her. Flame was never helpless…it was always deadly.
She was brought out of her reverie by the calculating eyes of a stocky man with salt and pepper hair. If flint had the oily sheen of both suspicion and greed, then his eyes would’ve been made of the stuff. To either side of him, standing amidst the boxes of odds and ends that hadn’t been cleared out, were two blonde headed body guards, one with a beard and one clean shaven. While both seemed competent, neither had the bearing of reapers about them. Reapers had a calculated and studied gaze that never left. It was similar to men who undressed you with their eyes, but reapers were disemboweling you with their gaze. In Jenna’s opinion, regardless of whether they took the oath or not, hiring them was like keeping tigers on leashes and expecting not to get eaten. Only the bloodborn were more feared…
“Who’s the bimbo, Fitch?” the man barked, his eyes appraising her as though he could see how much gold or, more appropriately, salt, she would bring in.
“Speak with a little respect, Rockland! She’s an associate of mine,” Nash stated tersely, nodding in her direction by way of introductions. “Whitmore, Rockland. Rockland, Whitmore!”
“Why’s she here?” But before Fitch could answer, Rockland continued, “Look I don’t care who you choose to spend your personal time with,” his leering expression giving Jenna all of the measure of his limited imagination, “you don’t bring them in to see my face!”
Jenna knew men like this, the people who puffed themselves up, determined to prove they were the alpha male through sheer bluster. In the old days, they wouldn’t have been too much to worry about, but, after the Fall, their desperate need for approval and compensation made them unpredictable. She knew this the hard way from her months of fending for herself on the road, and she winced back instinctively.
“Stop being so paranoid, Rockland,” Fitch returned irritably, his eyes narrowed. “She prepped the papers. I just brought her with us in case you needed anything touched up.”
Jenna caught her breath as she realized Fitch’s mistake before he did.
With a sick certainty, she saw a gleam in Rockland’s eyes. This was a man who was both more cunning and more ambitious that people gave him credit for. Of course, she now had to wonder if Fitch had made a slip up, or if it was a masterful move on his part to get rid of her without damaging morale in the town?
“You got the payment?” Fitch asked, clenching his jaw to remind everyone who was in charge here.
“Sure,” Rockland nodded, the calculating look never leaving his eyes. “You got the papers?”
“Of course,” Nash’ eyes narrowed. “This isn’t our first cherry. Payment!”
As Nash held out an expectant hand for the payment, Jenna saw a spark of manic joy go through the eyes and face of Rockland as he pulled up his right hand and snapped his fingers.
“Change of plans, boys,” Rockland barked, his two enforcers drawing their Berettas in unison. They might not be reapers, but they had been trained for precision and snap changes, a rarity in the Post-Fall world.
“What the hell is this, Rockland?” Fitch’s eyes glowed with fury and Jenna could almost believe that he hadn’t given away the information about her position intentionally. Almost. “Since when do you go rogue?”
Now that his men were covering Nash’ and Andre, Jenna could see the tension leave Rockland. He was now in control, at least in his own mind. But why would he be so confident? After all, he was only up an extra shooter, meanwhile the number of men Fitch had shot during his rise to power in the Fall with his custom 1911A1 pistol was legend, to say nothing of Flanagan’s prowess.
“That’s your problem, Fitch,” Rockland grinned, his chest puffing up with pride. “You never thought I had any ambition.”
The word sent shivers through Jenna’s spine, because she knew what the word meant from the lips of men like these.
“But I been thinking,” the man continued, his gestures becoming more expansive as he worked through his initial nerves by gloating. “There’s plenty of money to be made in forging and I’m tired of the middle man! You brought your golden goose here and I say, hey, it’s a sign…”
As he beat his chest in a tribal manner, Jenna caught a glimpse of movement behind him. As her eyes narrowed, she realized that he had an extra shooter hidden int he shadows at the rear of the warehouse. This one was taller and duskier than the two compact men that were near her. As she squinted, she could see that he was armed with a 12-gauge bitch that he was nervously fingering. Jenna wondered what he might be high on.
Narcotics were always a good thing to keep your men in blind servitude with. After the Fall, even more mixes of drug cocktails had come into use, all designed to promote alertness and reflex time, but all with certain drawbacks. Some of which, it was widely known, had been tweaked or engineered to kill the people addicted to them if they ever stopped taking it, a most effective way to assure a slave force that had an incentive to keep you alive. Perhaps the most deadly of the stuff, which was rumored to give any man the calculating natures of the reapers and the perception and endorphin rush of the bloodborn, was called Ketricel White. Clearly the designer had been a Trekkie for the drug’s name paid homage to a fictional drug in Roddenberry’s world used to keep a planet of of warriors enslaved. Like the sci-fi drug, this stuff was rumored to kill you in less than 72 hours if you stopped taking it.
As she returned to the conversation at hand, she realized that her worst fears were being confirmed.
“…She was getting ready to leave anyway,” Fitch was saying, looking speculatively at Jenna and then back at Rockland. “So I guess I lose nothing.”
Rockland began to relax as he saw that he was going to get what he wanted even as Jenna’s heart sank. At the same time, she raged against herself for giving a damn. After all, she wanted to die. There was no doubt this man would be the death of her. All she had to do was let him rape her and it would be all over. Of course, Fitch wouldn’t let him know ahead of time what it would do to her. No one pulled the wool over Nash Fitch’s eyes and got away with it. Jenna knew that for a fact. Golden goose was a good metaphor and this blowhard would kill it. Her.
“Except for the payment on these papers,” Fitch’s eyes narrowed as he moved closer to Rockland, eying him over a battered table that demarcated the room. “So you’re going to pay me what you owe me and we’ll call it a day, no blood bath.”
At this point, however, Fitch stepped forward and put his hands on the table, glaring daggers.
“But if you care to press your luck any further, my men will hunt you down like a dog.” The words were snarled between clenched teeth. “They know who I’m doing business with.”
For a moment, the force of Fitch’s vehemence seemed to physically push Rockland back a step and it was a moment before he regained his composure. With the begrudging attitude of a petulant child who thought he was going to get to keep all the marbles when he’s forced to surrender a few of them, the trader grabbed a pouch of assorted jewels and precious metals and hurled it at Fitch.
As the moonshiner caught the bag and put it into the pocket of his army coat, he turned to Jenna with something approaching sadness. Almost, as though he was talking to a lame horse he was going to have to put down…
“Jenna, I hope you understand…” He started to say, as he faced her. The numb realization that she was about to be turned over to Rockland finally was becoming real to her and it was threatening to choke the air from her lungs. So into her oneirism was she that she almost missed the flitting of Fitch’s eyes to Flanagan, who stood behind her, and then back to her. As she looked up at his gaze, his eyes flicked forcefully down.
In a second, she realized that, somehow, her suspicions had gone awry. That, regardless of what her future plans might be, this man wasn’t going to give her up without a fight. Barely had she come to this realization before he grabbed her by the shoulder in a spinning move that threw her to the ground where her padded gloves fortunately caught the ground. As her estimation of the world shattered in those few movements, it felt as though time slowed down until it was pouring around her like molten glass.
And suddenly, she remembered something she’d forgotten. She was back in the room she’d been captive in during that traumatic fight between her parents. There had been a music box in the room with a brass name plate that said, “The Moon Waltz.” She’d played it over and over to try and drown out the sounds of the yelling. That was why her parents voices had been so muffled.
As she stayed for a moment on the floor, letting the surreality of it all flow over her, it felt as though that strange musical melody wrapped around her like a cloak. Just as it had when she was a child, it muffled the sounds of anger and violence around her. The thundering roar of Fitch’s .45 above her sounded strangely far away, mixing with the music in her mind like some great bass drum. The twin reports of Flanagan’s Berrettas were like smaller drums, a tinniness to their sound that wasn’t altogether unpleasant.
As she pushed herself up and scrambled behind the table that Fitch had leaned on only moments ago, a wave of dust and debris flowed over her like effervescent smoke. Physics was a strange thing, she thought as she whipped her body around In the flying fragments of mortar, her hair appearing to drift through water to her accelerated senses. She remembered first learning about shock waves on Mr. Wizard as a kid…or was it MythBusters… Strange that she could recall some things with photographic accuracy, but not be quite sure where she’d left most of her memories from her childhood. She’d just wanted to put it behind her…to get on with being a grown up.
ADD mental rambling was again stifling any latent fear she might have had of a gunfight that could easily end her life. Of course, any death here would be mercifully brief in comparison to what Rockland’s actions would’ve caused.
Above her, Flanagan pulled his guns together and fired them both in asynchronous progression, as the reports were followed by the sucking sound of flesh being pierced and the falling of a body, she thought about guns. Her two protectors bore guns that had been military standards for most of the 20th century. The 1911, which Nash brandished, had been introduced by Colt in 1911 AD PF and it had been the sidearm for most of the U.S. military until 1986 when the Beretta M9, two of which Andre used, had replaced it. It was decided that it was better to throw more lead down range than to fire a few more powerful bullets. The 9mm Beretta could carry three times as many bullets in a magazine as a .45.
A shotgun blast went off behind her and she realized that it wasn’t the first time she’d heard it. This one actually left her head ringing as debris rained down around her. To her shell-shocked ears, it sounded as though the manual ejection of the shell was a ratchet. She could visualize the smoke streaming from the spent cartridge.
Suddenly, she wasn’t alone behind the table, as both Fitch and Flanagan hunkered down beside her. Fitch glanced at her to make sure she was fine and then, with a glance at Andre, rose to fire his gun, ducking back down as soon as he fired it. An explosion ripped a hole in the plaster wall by the door as a bullet narrowly missed him. With the gunman distracted by Fitch, he wouldn’t be ready for the tag team as Flanagan rose up and fired two staccato rounds into his chest and throat. Jenna thought she heard the sound of blood splurting out and wondered if he’d nicked the jugular.
At that moment, the strung out thug with the shotgun fired again, his home-packed buckshot flying slightly wide so as to hit Flanagan on the shoulder. As Flanagan spun with the momentum and his opponent chambered another round, Jenna saw her bodyguard get off one more shot. It must’ve scored because, when the shotgun went off again, it didn’t tear through Flanagan, but blasted into the ceiling raining a molten cloud of debris over everything. Jenna closed her eyes as the debris settled.
Only as she concentrated on her hearing once more did she hear the sound of Rockland firing one last volley from his gun before making a run for it. She looked up but Fitch was already preparing to charge him, waiting until he was no longer firing to do so. Like a linebacker, Fitch launched himself at his foe, knocking him into a wall of half filled cardboard boxes covered with a dusty sheet. The impact shook loose the gun from Rockland’s hand and more debris loose from the damaged ceiling.
As Fitch attempted to pull his 1911 in to gut Rockland with one of the .45 slugs, Rockland whipped out a bowie knife he’d had tucked in his belt, the blade whistling out as the hilt caught Fitch’s wrist and forced his shot wide, knocking the gun from his hand. Now it had become a knife on fist fight, which, for someone who had less experience in the backwoods of Kentucky than Nash Fitch, might’ve meant instant death. However, Fitch was used to being under armed and had quick reflexes that would’ve killed most men.
Rockland’s blade became a glittering arc as it scythed toward Fitch, but Fitch’s dancing feet kept him just outside of its reach, while allowing him to throw punches back at Rockland. The deadly dance was strangely mesmerizing to Jenna.
As she saw Fitch risking his life for her, something in Jenna started to finally unlock. The Glock that she kept hidden on her at all times was pressed hard into her spine, a fact that she became much more cognizant of as the world grew more lucid. She reached for the weapon and slowly drew it up. She knew it shouldn’t take any effort to bring the gun fully to bear, but, for some reason, she felt as the gun had grown so heavy that it took all her effort just to hold it up, much less aim it.
As she wrestled with the gun’s strange gravitas, Jenna heard a sound…so subtle that she realized it had probably gone unnoticed before. The crackle of interference and a mumbled voice in the distance. Then it grew slowly louder, until finally, the word it spoke was apparent:
“…Jenna…”
She knew the word and knew the voice. This was another memory one that she’d tried to forget. The last time she’d heard Gavin’s voice. An interference laden message he’d left three days before the Fall. Apparently it had arrived on one of her drop phones right before she’d shut off the service. However, it had downloaded the message into its internal drive so, when she’d gone to throw it away the next day, there was the message…waiting for her.
All she had remembered from the message was that, after he frantically told her that he’d figured out when the Fall was going to happen and that she had to download two pictures before it did, he’d said the words that had hung in her consciousness like a dagger in her soul, “You betrayed me…” The hurt in his voice had been unmistakeable. Even then she knew it was true. Even if he’d been wrong about everything, her traitorous spirit had allowed her to turn her back on the one man who had given a damn about her. It was all back to that room as a child, when she swore she would never be trapped again. Relationships were traps, so when they got uncomfortable, she’d run. Gavin’s grief left her torn up inside. It was just easier to avoid him or send him some drop box money when she could, rather than join him on his crazy dark dreamer crusade. It was easier to think of him as delusional than to admit that she was the closest thing to family he had left and might need her.
And then, when it turned out that he hadn’t even been crazy…that he’d been right…a part of her couldn’t forgive herself. It was in that moment that she’d most wanted to die. Maybe that’s why she’d done all the things that had allowed her to survive…all the things that shamed her in the light. She deserved the shame and the horror. Death was too good for her.
As the waves of nausea flowed over her, the uncontested weight of her gun caused it to dip a moment. And in that moment, unbidden, more of the message unlocked itself from grief-clogged recesses of her photographic memory. It was as though a tape was rewinding itself in her mind, tracking to parts that she needed to rediscover.
“…you still have a part to play in all of this…”
Now that they replayed themselves in her mind, she dimly recalled hearing them before. It hadn’t been so important until she had so truly wanted to die. Until she had so truly believed that she was supposed to die in the Fall. If there was anyone who wasn’t supposed to survive the end of the world, it was her. But maybe, if Gavin was right, she was still alive because she needed to be.
“…look past your shame…”
 That was another part of the message. Again, it meant something to her now, but was meaningless then.
How had he known that shame would rule her life after the Fall? Had it been due to his prophetic gifts? But, even as she thought it, she realized it was foolish. He knew her. No prophecy was needed to know that she would brutalize herself from the inside out after her treatment of him.
The words were short and, to anyone else, cryptic. But to Jenna, who had spent so much time working with Gavin on code breaking and forging, they made all the sense in the world. Sometimes, it only took the smallest fragment of hope to get a person to make one more step forward and sometimes that one step changes everything. For Jenna, she knew that a forest fire could be started with a single spark. The notion of a spark from this long-“dead” ember spoke to her.
As it did so, she felt her muscles coming back under her control and the gun lightening in her grasp, so that she could site her gun. It was a long shot for someone who usually killed people at extremely close range, but she took a deep breath to steady her shot.
As she began to pull the trigger, she felt a nagging uncertainty. Men were inherently untrustworthy. If Nash was killed, she could kill Rockland from cover if she waited. If Rockland was killed, perhaps Nash was just protecting her because he didn’t let anyone cheat him. Maybe she would need to kill him first.
As Fitch blocked a thrust from Rockland’s knife and Rockland knocked him into the wall with a roundhouse punch, Jenna realized that if she was going to intervene, it was now or never.
“…trust…”
Another part of the forgotten message. The ending to the previous sentence. She remembered the full sentence then:
“There are those who will protect you…but you must look past your shame to trust.”
With that, the moment passed, her finger fully depressed the trigger and the world froze for just a moment as the bullet flew from the gun, the shell whipping out of the chamber. As the brass was ejected, she noticed the odd looking smoke that plumed from the cartridge. The cartridge must’ve been a reload. She’d thought she’d purchased new bullets, but, with all the repacking going on, it was impossible to be sure. As the reliability of most reloads was highly questionable, she’d never willingly shoot anything that wasn’t new or that she hadn’t loaded herself.
Sure enough, as her horrified mind accelerated still faster, she could watch the bullet drift to the left of her target, away from Rockland and more toward Nash. She held her breath until the bullet slammed into the wall of boxes between Fitch and Rockland, missing Fitch by just a foot. Rockland turned toward her, startled, clearly unaware that she had armed, and, as she held his gaze, slowly breathing once more, she heard a last encouragement from Gavin: “Embrace your visions.”
As the words replayed in her mind, she knew that she’d spent too much time denying what she was. The Dark Dreamers that Gavin had spoken of weren’t just other people. It was her too. She’d ignored her visions in the past, only heeding them at all after the Fall. The notion that she must embrace them was as novel as the notion that she still had a part to play. However, somehow, it made sense.
In the moments in which Rockland was distracted, Fitch recovered from his blow and managed to pull his own bowie knife out, stepped in with surgical precision to plunge the knife into Rockland’s belly.
With a gasp, his opponent dropped to the concrete floor of the warehouse, his own knife clattering to the ground from dead fingers while his other hand clutched his bleeding wound. A gut stab in a world without technology and modern medicine was death. As the blood dripped through Rockland’s fingers, Nash bent beside him, dropping a white cloth on his thigh.
Jenna knew the cloth immediately. It was used by those who embraced the Code of the Traveller and chose to remember the humanity of those who had to be killed. For those, it was considered honorable to kill with a knife, so that the act was fully committed to. A gun was a detached weapon allowing the wielder to psychologically move away from his target as he pulls the trigger, while a knife requires its user to move physically and personally into his target.
“Rockland,” Fitch said sadly.
“Fitch…” Rockland gasped, still in shock.
“What is the Code of the Traveller?” Fitch asked the question. The question you never wanted to hear in a situation like this.
“Come in peace…” Rockland admitted haggardly.
“Unless…?” Fitch continued the mantra.
“Unless you intend to spill blood…” Rockland nodded.
“And if blood is spilled?” Fitch concluded.
Rockland smiled softly, knowing that he was admitting his guilt for his death sentence and embracing its merciful end in comparison to the agony of bleeding out this way.
“Spill…every…drop.” As he spoke, he lifted his right hand to Fitch’s face, as though touching the face of a friend. It was hauntingly human to Jenna’s eyes. A reminder that anyone could embrace the darkness and find themselves someone who they didn’t recognize.
“Precisely.” Fitch’s voice hardened with resolve as the code was completed and the judgment proclaimed.
Despite his judiciary manner, his movement was surprisingly gentle as he slid his knife up and into Rockland’s heart. The gentle sucking sound was all that proclaimed that a man’s life was draining out as the damage to his heart caused it to stop beating and the blood to quietly pool down his shirt. Rockland’s eyes glazed over as his breathing stopped and Fitch closed the eyes before wiping the knife on the ceremonial cloth. Later, if Fitch stayed true to the form Jenna now expected, he would burn the cloth in memory. In a world where bodies were seen as too valuable to waste on burial or cremation, the burning of a cloth wiped in a man’s life blood was a reminder that he had lived…and maybe, no matter how evil his path had been, there had been something in his blood that had not been corrupt. It all came down to the blood…
As Jenna slowly got to her feet, she saw that Flanagan had already managed to get up and make his way to his boss. The damage to his shoulder was hard to make out, since the blood was soaking into his dark trench coat, but Jenna guessed from the way he was favoring it that it would take some work from the town medic and some recuperation for him to be back in action again.
“What do you want me to do with the bodies?” Flanagan asked, as he walked up to Fitch, who was still absorbed in private reverie.
“We’ll strip ‘em later,” Nash said, looking up to his body guard and nodding toward the wounded shoulder. Stripping bodies had a different meaning these days, so it took a lot longer than it had before. “Get in the truck so we can have that looked at.”
“Alright,” Flanagan nodded and then headed through the battered door out into the dying day.
As he walked out, Fitch’s eyes again glanced down at the corpse at his feet. It was clear that it troubled him to have to end a life, even someone who he should have been happy to kill. How this could be found in a man with Fitch’s reputation left Jenna even more confused.
“Well I guess we won’t need those papers, after all,” Nash chuckled darkly, smiling softly to her.
“I don’t understand,” Jenna blurted out, her words stumbling through thick lips. “Why did you risk yours and Flanagan’s life? Why didn’t you just let him take me?”
As she spoke, the sadness and weariness grew more etched on his face.
The look caused her to nearly choke on her words as she concluded with, “It was the right business decision!”
“It may have been the right business decision,” Nash gave her a snaggle-toothed smile, “but it wasn’t one I was willing to make.”
In response to the lack of understanding that she knew was growing more evident in her face, he continued on, “See, Jenna, you see the evil in people, and I’m not about to say that there haven’t been a lot of evil things done since the Fall. However, some of us feel that they need to stop.”
With that he shrugged, “Now I may not be happy about you leaving, but I’ll be damned if I let you be taken into slavery on my watch.” With that, he retrieved his pistol, rechambered a round, and walked past her to retrieve her belongings.
She stood there, the shock of the day washing over her, exposed both to her past and, through the kindness of a man she’d chosen to distrust, to the possibility of a future. A future where perhaps she could follow Gavin’s admonishment to see past the self-loathing that her betrayal had caused her and to see past the bitterness she had learned so intimately on the road. Maybe there was something in humanity that was worth saving…at least, potentially. If so, then perhaps choosing to find out if she had something still to accomplish was worth while.
Whatever the case, she’d finally decided one thing for sure. Fitch—or, as she was starting to think of him subtly, Nash—deserved to hear the truth about why she was leaving. Embracing her visions was too new a notion for her to speak of them just yet, but perhaps there was another way.
 The END
(for now)
To read more exciting stories from World of Depleted, check future issues of DarkestGoth Magazine or go to the World of Depleted website! To see the film adaptation of Day 419, starring Kat Carney, Eric Henninger, Tim Smith, and David Haney, go to the DarkestGoth YouTube page!
