In proximity, the soldier looked nothing like Jack had imagined. A kinder face. Three-day beard. Thoughtful eyes. Curls of black hair that slipped out from under the bandana. His fatigues weren’t black as Jack had first thought, but some pattern of night camouflage comprised of dark blues.
Might have been Jack’s age, perhaps a year or two younger.
He stared at Jack while he smoked, handgun resting on his leg, trained on Jack’s stomach.
“Is Dee alive?”
Jack didn’t respond.
“Where’s your family, Jack?”
A twinge of curiosity cut through the fear.
“How do you know my name?”
The man smiled, Jack feeling the eerie prickling of recognition.
He said, “Kiernan.”
“I saw her name all over this square, and it didn’t even click with me until I was walking away.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Me and some Guard unit buddies from Albuquerque defected. We’ve been heading north, just like you, killing and fucking and ravaging and just causing all sorts of mayhem. Time of my life. Are you expecting Dee and the family? Because we can wait. I’d be totally up for that.”
“I haven’t seen them in days.”
“You got separated?”
Jack nodded.
“Where?”
“Wyoming. Where’s your family, Kiernan? I seem to remember Dee telling me you had children.”
Kiernan took another drag. “Rotting in our backyard back in New Mexico.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I killed them.”
Jack could feel, even in the light of everything he’d seen, a new horror at the registration of this.
Kiernan smiled. “Smoke?”
“Not in years.”
He tugged a crumpled pack of Marlboro Reds out of an inner pocket, offered it to Jack. “Treat yourself. I don’t think it really matters anymore. Do you, Jack?”
Jack’s hands shook. He plucked a crooked cigarette from the pack along with the lighter. Four attempts to fire the tobacco sprigs hanging out of the end. Kiernan got another cigarette for himself.
“So why are you here, Jack?” he asked. “In this square out of all the places in the wild wild west?”
Jack said nothing, just pulled the smoke into his lungs. It was sweet and it burned.
“You think Dee’s going to find you here. That it?”
Jack exhaled, felt the nicotine hit and drag him a few steps deeper into himself, like sliding a filter between this moment and his perception of it. A dulling of the fear.
“Can I ask you something?” Jack said.
“As long as your cigarette’s still burning.”
“When you’re trying to fall asleep at night, do you see the faces of your wife and children?”
“Sometimes.”
“How do you not kill yourself?”
“That you could even ask that is a perfect demonstration of why you’re all being slaughtered. Now answer my question. Why are you here?”
The idea of lunging at Kiernan occurred to Jack, and with it a monster dose of weakness and fear that slashed through his nicotine rush.
Kiernan smirked. “You’d never pull it off. Not on your best day and my worst. Answer my fucking question.”
“I’m here because this is where I ran out of gas.”
“Why do you want to make me angry?”
Jack smoked.
“In all my travels north,” Kiernan said, “I was always looking for your green Land Rover. Always chasing you and Dee, even though I never expected to actually find you.”
“What is it like?” Jack said.
“What is what like?”
“To have become. . .whatever you are now.”
“All our life, Jack, we spend wondering, you know? Now, it’s all about knowing.”
“You were blind but now you see?”
“Something like that.”
“What do you know now that you didn’t before?”
“You taught philosophy, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So you know. . .words just fuck up true meaning. Even if I could make you understand, I wouldn’t.”
“Why’s that?”
“You didn’t see the lights. Just so I’m clear. . .you have no way to contact Dee, but you think she’s going to show up here. Why? Was it prearranged in the event you two were—”
“I’ve been here three days. She’s not coming.”
“She could be dead.”
“It’s all I think about. How many children did you have?”
“Three.”
Jack flicked off the ash.
“Did you look in their eyes while you murdered them?”
“I was crying. They were crying, asking what they’d done. My wife screaming. Horrible day. I need to know why you’re here before your cigarette’s gone. The curiosity will eat at me.”
“I told you. I ran out of gas.”
Kiernan shook his head. “You’re going to make me threaten you. Aren’t you?”
“Fuck your lights and fuck you.”
Kiernan let his cigarette slip out of his hand, hiss out in the snow. He stood, lifting his shirt so Jack could see the sheathed Ka-Bar combat knife.
“When I open you up and start pulling stuff out and feeding it to you, you will talk. You will tell me everything I want to know and more. You’ll curse Naomi and Cole with your last breath and beg me to do the same to them.”
Still had an inch of tobacco to go, but Jack threw his cigarette into the pool.
“You can’t touch it, and you know it, and it kills you, doesn’t it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Even if I could make you understand, I wouldn’t.”
Kiernan unsnapped the sheath, holstered his pistol, and drew the Ka-Bar.
“One last thing,” Jack said. “You and your batshit-crazy friends have fucked up our world, but you’ve also made me a better father, and you made me love my wife again, and for that I thank you.”
Jack stared down into the pool.
The ice melted and the water turned clear and the fountain began to rain. He looked up. The sky now a bright, almost painful blue. Midday in the square. A dozen people eating lunch in the blinding fall sunshine.
Jack sat with an iced coffee, ten minutes left on his lunch break.
She sat at that same table fifteen feet away, engrossed in a textbook, a tray of half-eaten salad pushed aside. Third day in a row she’d eaten lunch in the plaza. Third day in a row he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
He’d walked up to strange women before and asked for a date. No big deal. He was good-looking and tall. Confident. But something about this girl put him off his game. She was gorgeous, sure, but it was more than that—maybe the white lab coat fucking with him (already fantasized about that), maybe the intensity with which she read—never moving except to turn the page or brush away a strand of loose, auburn hair that contained honest-to-God strands of gold.
Yesterday, he’d spent the whole hour building up the nerve. Finally he stood with five minutes left, shaky, his mouth completely dry as he approached, caught a whiff of something—shampoo or body wash—and he knew he’d only make a fool of himself. Walked right on past into the Wells Fargo bank and just stood watching her through the tinted glass until she finally packed her book into a tattered Eastpak and went on her way.
Now there were five minutes left in this hour. A repeat of yesterday. He’d fucked around and put himself in the same position.
He stood quickly and started toward her table, trying to get there before he had the chance to talk himself out of it. He was three feet away from her, wholly uncommitted to any of this, when the tip of his sneaker caught on the lip of a concrete slap.
Jack went down hard and fast, and when he looked up from the ground he was staring at the rivulets of his iced coffee running down her leg and dripping off the hem of her lab coat.
“Oh my God,” he said, picking himself up. “Oh my God.” As he got back onto his feet, he saw that he’d somehow managed to dump his entire coffee on her book, her white coat, skirt, even in her hair—maximum damage inflicted with half a cup of iced coffee.