The Renegades (Book 5): United (6 page)

Jess wailed uncontrollably while several of his men kept a firm grip on her. I glanced up at Steadman and his face looked back with zero emotion. Cold, full of hate and unmoved by the death of innocence. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what had brought him to care so little about the lives of others.

As the cries turned to silence, Steadman bowed.

“Does that answer your question?” he paused. “That concludes our demonstration.”

S
tripped of our weapons
, we expected the same fate as Izzy. Instead, they released us with a message for the founders of Paradise. Concede or suffer. After seeing them, I couldn’t imagine they would attempt to take the colony. There were too many of us. However, it was possible there was more to this than what appeared. Why release us? Why not just kill us all and leave one alive to return with the message?

We kept looking over our shoulders as we returned to the truck. All of us were sure that they were playing some game. Release and capture perhaps? But that wasn’t the case. All of us were in a deep state of shock. We couldn’t believe what we had just witnessed. He massacred them all in front of us in the most brutal manner possible.

No one said a word as we filled the back of the truck and pulled away. Our eyes were swollen, red and our faces blackened by the smoke that came off the dead. She was gone. Just like that. One second she was breathing, the next no longer with us.

Life it seemed showed no preference. No matter what you believed in this world, bad shit happened to good people. As the truck rumbled its way back through the streets, my thoughts drifted back to when my mother was sick. She had spent much of her final days at home throwing up. On one particular morning, I sat out back, trying to block the sound of retching. I picked away at a few blades of grass when my father came out. I remembered that specific time in my life as clear as if it were yesterday. He was never one for showing emotion; neither did he have deep conversations with us. Our father was a standoffish man who felt that any amount of coddling people only seemed to weaken them. In his mind, it was his job to make us strong.

Though that morning, he didn’t attempt to give some spiel about how we would be stronger for it. I think even he was overcome by the injustice of it all. He sat down beside me out in our yard and stared at the pond. Water trickled down, a small waterfall that was then sucked back up again. Birds chirped and our dog gnawed on a bone.

“Why her?”
I asked my father
. “She has only ever been good to people.”

In my mind there were countless folks in the town that were good-for-nothings. If anyone deserved misfortune it was them. The world was full of mean-spirited people, those who would look down on others or find satisfaction in the misery of others. But our mother wasn’t like that. She was a good person; she didn’t deserve to have her life cut short.

I could smell the aroma of freshly cut grass. Ours still needed to be cut.

“You see how that section of grass over there flourishes. Every year, it’s greener than the rest.” He pointed it out. “Then there’s that part there which is barely green at all.” He reached down plucking a piece. “Doesn’t seem fair, does it? It all comes from the same place and yet some blades of grass grow tall and thick, while others brown in the hot sun. Perhaps there is something more to the picture than what we see. Some great plan that we have yet to understand. Or maybe, it is what it is. Some things thrive while others die before what we call their time. But there is no time. Death is death. People are people. Whether we believe they should get to live longer than the years they were given, it doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me. I don’t want her to die.”

“None of us do. Eventually she will. We just don’t want to live with the loss.”

“Is that so wrong? To want my mother to live.”

“No, Johnny, but there are some things in this life that are beyond our control. Call it what you will. I’m no religious man but I’m sure that we are only seeing a piece of what is before us. Like a patchwork quilt
,” he said remembering how our mother had created one for their bed.
“Unless we see it fully, and from above, our understanding is limited to the extent of what we can see.”

At that time, it meant very little to me. I was a young kid grieving for a mother who we would soon bury. I didn’t want a lecture; I just wanted things to remain the same. But they wouldn’t. My entire life had been in a constant state of change. It didn’t matter that I thought it was unfair. Life presented itself alongside death, as its equal. Giving and taking, they seemed at opposite ends of the spectrum and yet really they were one and the same.

When the truck pulled through the gates and swung around into a designated parking spot, we all hopped out the back and were greeted by Sebastian and several other soldiers. It was hard to tell who got to him first. We wanted someone to blame. While Rowan had been placed in charge, he was only following orders. The directive came from Sebastian.

He had only managed to get out the word, “Where…” when both Elijah and Baja plowed hard into him. They began beating him while the soldiers around us tried to pull them back.

“She would still be alive if it wasn’t for you,” Elijah bellowed as he lashed out.

Jess was in a complete state of shock. She hadn’t even got out of the back of the truck. Rowan and Wren were doing their best to try and hold back all of us who were fighting our own men. Fists were thrown as threats were made.

We wanted someone to suffer for what shouldn’t have happened, but it had and no amount of arguing would change it. Like my mother, father and brother — Izzy and the others were gone.

I pulled myself up into the truck and approached Jess. Her gaze was fixed on the floor ahead of her.

“Jess.”

She didn’t reply. Lost in a state of shock, there was no anger, just emptiness.

“I’ll take her,” Wren offered.

When the fighting died down and we dispersed our separate ways, Sebastian nursed a cut lip and one hell of a shiner. Someone would pay for that. While I hadn’t seen anyone punished in the community, I knew that it would only be a matter of time before they brought some law into effect.

I returned to Baja’s home that day, all of us did except Jess, Wren and Rowan. I don’t think any of us wanted to be alone. Not that I think it mattered, as from the moment we entered each of us reached for alcohol. Ben grabbed up a bottle of scotch and disappeared into the study, Elijah’s choice was rum, Baja lay out on the bar and consumed everything and anything that was within reach.

I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply as I wandered up to the roof. A wave of sadness washed over me as I thought about Izzy’s words, her acts of kindness, her gags and banter with Baja. Tears rolled down my face as my chest felt the weight of it all. Leaning up against the wall I looked out over the ocean. How had it come to this? At least the undead didn’t know what they were doing. What on earth was to be gained through such a senseless act? Why had they released us? None of it made sense.

I’m not sure how long I was on that roof before Baja appeared. Thirty minutes, maybe an hour. When he emerged he had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in one hand and a bottle of Heineken in the other.

“Johnny B. Goode. Go, Johnny, go, go,” he slurred in a drunken state as he staggered across the roof and collapsed onto the white outdoor sofa. I watched him swig back on the bottle before raising it in the air.

“To the girl who never knew how beautiful she was. To the one that made every sunrise and sunset worthwhile. To you, Izzy,” he swigged his drink and closed his eyes. “I loved her, Johnny.”

“We all did, brother.”

“No. I really loved her and now she’ll never know.”

I studied his face feeling his pain. There were no words to describe the loss that all of us felt.

“She’ll know. I have to believe that she is still with us in one form or another.”

He swung his legs around. “You were right, Johnny. None of this matters. We were never safe. It was all just an illusion.” He let out a chuckle before tossing his empty bottle at the wall. It exploded and glass scattered.

“All I wanted was to…” he trailed off unable to even form words in his sorrow.

“We’ll get them,” a voice said from behind us. It was Rowan.

Baja starred at him. “Get out of here.”

“What?”

“If you hadn’t charged in there…”

Rowan’s eyes darted between us as if somehow he thought I was going to intervene. I knew it wasn’t his fault. Wet behind the ears or not, he was just following orders.

“Look, I’m sorry, Baja.”

Baja rose to his feet, grabbing up another bottle. “You’re sorry?” he chuckled looking at me. “He’s sorry, Johnny.” One swipe of his hand and the bottle smashed against the table leaving just the neck end in Baja’s hand. He jabbed it out in front of him.

“I should fucking cut you from ear to ear.”

“Baja,” I muttered but he didn’t hear me.

“Or perhaps…” he trailed off bringing the broken bottle up to his own throat.

“No, no.” I moved forward knowing that all it would take was one smooth motion and his jugular would be sliced.

Tears streaked his face. “I don’t want to deal with this anymore, Johnny.”

Keeping my hands in front of me I felt as if I was on a tightrope hundreds of miles up in the air, knowing that even the slightest movement could mean certain death. I inched my way forward.

“You think Izzy would want this?” Rowan asked.

“Screw you. You don’t get to have a say in what she would have wanted,” he replied.

“Baja, it’s not his fault. If anyone’s to blame, it’s Sebastian.”

“I don’t care anymore. It’s all gone, Johnny. What little hope is gone. Hope…” he chuckled. “There’s no hope, no future, no nothing.”

Dear god, please don’t slice,
I repeated over in my mind as if I could will him to not do it.

“Drop it, man,” I said. “Don’t. This isn’t the way.”

“It isn’t? What is this then? Because all I see around me is loss. Maybe today we live but tomorrow someone else will be gone. I don’t think I can handle that, Johnny.”

Baja for the most part had always been the one that had held it together. He found hope through making light of every situation. At least that’s what I thought. Others just thought he had a few screws loose but that wasn’t the case. He used humor as a way to mask all the shit he dealt with underneath. In some ways we all did.

I was a few feet from him. I could see him pressing the glass into his neck. It was already beginning to cause blood to trickle down.

“There’s no honor in this, Baja. I know what it feels to lose someone so close you can barely breathe without them. But she wouldn’t want this. Izzy wouldn’t want you to harm yourself.”

“But it would be all over, Johnny. All the pain gone.”

His words held some truth. It wasn’t like I hadn’t contemplated it myself. We all had if we were honest. It was strange how easy it was to fight for others but for ourselves we would give up so easily.

“Maybe you’re right. Yeah. It would all be over but then you wouldn’t see the look on that guy’s face when you put a bullet in his head. You won’t be there when we see Specs again. You won’t be there when this hellish nightmare is over.”

“It will never be over,” he shot back.

Standing directly in front of him I lifted my hand to his wrist and clasped it slowly. As I began to pull down, there was little resistance. He dropped the glass and I pulled him in gripping the back of his neck.

“It’s going to be okay, man.”

There was a shuffle from behind. I glanced over my shoulder to see Wren. She motioned for Rowan to join her downstairs. He backed away with a look of embarrassment, confusion, possibly regret. I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking. Baja had unloaded all that he’d been holding in; all the tears hidden behind laughter, fear that he had masked with jokes turned to sadness.

An hour later, in the silence of the noonday sun we sat smoking cigarettes, leaning against the stone wall talking about anything but Izzy. For over twelve months each of us had lived separate and in that time all of us had been slowly unraveling for different reasons. The truth be told, there was no psychologist that could have worked through all the shit we had experienced. We had to do it in our own way. As hard as it was, the loss of Izzy had snapped us out of the apathetic state that we’d been living in. Whether that was lying to ourselves that life was fine within the walls, or that we could live out our lives in quietness by ourselves. I don’t know if it was self-denial or what but we had bought into it. But the fight wasn’t over.

“He said he wanted the community to concede or suffer. Concede to who? Them? There are far more of us than them.”

“I’m not sure that’s exactly what he was referring to. If overtaking the community was in the cards, they could have used the fire the other night as an opportunity to get their men in the gate. Instead, they bolted.” I paused to take a long drag. The end singed orange and I tapped off some ash.

“We need to talk to Ethan. Alone.”

My mind turned to all the questions that I had for Ethan.

“You think Sebastian is behind it?”

“I don’t know right now. But one thing’s for sure. Someone is going to have to be accountable for the lives that were lost.”

Baja ran a hand over his face. “I feel like an idiot.”

“Why?”

“You know, the whole bottle thing.”

“Dude, there isn’t a handbook on dealing with grief.”

“I’m sure Specs would differ,” he replied.

I snorted taking another swig of my beer. “No, I mean, of course everyone has their opinions and I’m sure some overpaid psychologist somewhere has some seven-step formula but it’s all bullshit. The only way you come out the end is by trudging through it, one step and one day at a time. Eventually, and hopefully, things are better at the end.”

“I really hope so, man, because…” he trailed off lost again in thought.