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Chapter Text

They called it the Wasteland after the bombs fell.

1988 was a year of prominent hostility in old America. Mikhail Gorbachev was assigned a new and improved seat that very year following the death of Konstantin Chernenko, who’d served as the previous chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Gorbachev was voted to succeed Chernenko and to become the new head of state, promoting him from his position as one of the many politicians within the Communist’s Politburo hierarchy – the leading governing body of the Soviet Union within the main state of Russia.

Given that Gorbachev had been renowned as a vehement, loud anti-Stalinist - being that he was born under Stalin’s dictatorship and suffered under his reign whilst being born in a starving, destitute farming village of Privolnoye - the United States took no action, for once. No sudden regime changes in USSR controlled countries, no coups to oust him from the leading chair of Russia, no attacks on Russian military bases in nearby middle eastern territories. There was no need to further exercise the brute force of the American military, since there had been no hint of a signal that Gorbachev was going to order an assault on the United States. Initially, it seemed like peace was on its way, inklings maybe presenting itself in the stationary forces of the world, if only the Soviet Union would finally concave in on itself. Ronald Reagan was in his last year of sitting in the Oval Office after he’d served a double consecutive term, and the Republican and Democrat campaigns raged throughout the country, both promising to put an end to the Cold War. Reagan was busying himself by signing off on executive orders to drive up military spending and increasing the propaganda released to combat his acclaimed War on Drugs, deviating attention to domestic issues and away from his eight-year failed stint to peacefully address foreign policy in the eastern bloc. The USSR had been on a steady decline for years, anyway: both in public opinion from within Russia and in the Union-controlled countries – the propaganda was no longer working in places like Belarus, Estonia, Kazakhstan, as the Union had been quickly depleted of finances that caused a disruption in the force of their army and in the aid they could provide to their territories. Cuba was effectively a dud after the Missile Crisis ended with Kennedy and Khrushchev reaching an agreement that kept Communist nuclear warheads out of the country so long as the United States military backed off of invading, and it only established that the Union’s army was severely weakened.

People were still starving, and it was hard to control the hardened citizens who sought new revolutions through large, loud riots – it was, after all, the Bolsheviks who taught them that such a thing was the way to get things done. The bread lines stretched down whole streets, only for the people waiting in them to be turned away about halfway through, and the collapse of the Soviet Union was imminent. The radios said that Lithuania was the first to propose the dissolution as ‘88 led into ‘89 – the beginning of a new year, and perhaps the beginning of a new age for the eastern bloc.

Doomsayers had maddingly cried that it was the prophecy foretold in the Book of Revelations as they hobbled around outside of every rural gas station propped up in the middle of nowhere; harrassing every rushing victim in sight that just wanted to pay for gas before they drove to work, continuing on with their lives as normally as possible whilst the radios talked on and on about the threat of nuclear war. The doom-addled, capitalism-spurned citizens said that famine ravaged the world as wars unfolded in the name of conquest, and all that would come was death in the wake of it.

And as spring led into the heatwave-riddled summer of 1989, in a final act of desperation to keep Russia unionized and from America ousting the Soviets from the parliament in Russia, Gorbachev ordered the bombs to rain down on America.

There was no preventing it. It was impossible to shoot down dozens of planes hauling over Fat Man nuclear warheads before they entered the country; that fact of the matter having been reiterated by news channels over and over again as the years of the Cold War stretched on and the American government kept the states in perpetual fear of the rise of Communism. The only solution was to prevent the planes from taking off before they even left the Russian airspace, but insider intelligence either failed to pass on vital information with the plans in time, or there was never a concrete plan at all and Gorbachev ordered the assault on a whim. It didn’t matter how or why, in the end, because it devastated the United States all the same. America’s entire military-industrial complex was defeated in an unforeseen wave of innumerable weapons of mass destruction.

Thus, the Wasteland was born in a monstrous cacophony of ear-ringing explosions and skin-melting radiation. Thousands of people - all ranging between political figureheads and regular run-of-the-mill doomsday-preppers - sprinted right into the incomprehensible amount of bunkers that had been built across the country over the course of the Cold War’s forty-three-year lifespan as soon as the episode of Seinfeld was abruptly interrupted by a distressed yet still dolled-up newscaster saying that the first mushroom cloud had bloomed over Washington. Then there were at least two in California, the greater number unknown as it was still ongoing, then more reported in Colorado, and then the powerlines were blown out and the televisions switched to an everlasting screen of static just as the aghast, visibly terrified news channel hosts told the world of more bombs landing in Wyoming. More people were lost to the callous, unthinkable war crime than could be saved.

It was easy to cultivate the ‘last-person-on-earth’ mentality when every radio station was just a long stream of static noise. It was the only sound in the lonely bunker for years, aside from the shuffling of fabric upon changing into different dirty clothes and water in the sink that dwindled down to drips by the fifth year of solitude. Silence settled comfortably upon the earth in the immediate wake of the devastation.

The first incident occurred just a year after the bombs fell. The bunker door rattled and human voices filtered through the iron, pressurized blast door. The then-teenage girl jumped at the sound of voices, automatically thinking that her family had finally been able to leave whatever shelter they’d run off to and had come to reunite with her; to ensure that she herself had survived. She’d been waiting for so long for them to return, everyday she’d marked off on the calendar another strike into her dying hope, yet it all came back full-force just as soon as she heard life above ground. She waited at the ladder beneath the door, eager for them to call her name, to give any sign that it was really them. But the hammering began thudding through the iron, sounding like cracks of lightning with every clash of metal-against-metal. And she rushed to swipe the dusty small revolver from the cabinet inside of the small kitchen. The wheel that opened the door was inside, locked with a code that only she and her family knew the number key to, and so the presumed-looters resorted to breaking the door in.

In truth, she was more afraid of the fact that anyone had survived than she was of the possibility that they might be able to pry the door open. What had humanity turned to, after nukes obliterated every single city? Fat Man dropping onto Nagasaki and the following renewal project taught America that the most damaging radiation levels cleared just within weeks, but the following cancers and diseases that plagued the people lasted for at least six years before the reports started dissipating. Whether that was by the victims finally dropping dead or that the city had actually become radiologically safe, it was unclear. So how was it, after only a year, that people could leave their shelters and come out into the world again?

And their voices sounded gravelly, even if she couldn’t quite understand exactly what they were saying. But the tone was clear through the door, and indicated that they hadn’t been wearing gas masks. There was obviously something sinister about them if they’d resorted to attempting to break into a blast shelter – obviously something still wrong with the earth. They’d needed to plunder for supplies; food, weapons, the potential of a girl lying within. She did not indicate that there was any sign of life within, but they seemed to just know that a locked door meant something valuable was just beneath their grasp. Like it was inherent, like it was a hard-learned lesson through time.

The thudding soon stopped. She didn’t so much as breathe even when she heard a tool being tossed, the following clatter across the outside of her concrete ceiling.

“Alright,” shouted one voice, the agitation clear in his tone. She could only understand it because of how loud he’d gotten. “Fuck this, I’m out.”

“C’mon, Mick. Can’t give up now, y’know how mad the boss's gonna be if we show up empty-handed? Buyer wanted someone clean, obviously from a shelter.”

“Fuck you, I don’t give two shits. We’ll just grab some clothes outta the department store down the block and dress up a wastelander real good. This one’s a done deal, can’t break this fuckin’ thing open with a jackhammer if we tried.”

“Hey, jackhammer’s a real good idea.”

“You find a fuckin’ workin’ power source, then– fuckin’ jagoff.”

The sound of stomping, then one was gone. Weird shuffling through the concrete, and the other was gone, too.

And the then-teenage girl realized without any doubt that America was never going to be safe to roam. There had been some hope lingering before, that maybe the military would’ve been able to put effort into mass restoration projects, but if they ever tried, they’d clearly failed. She couldn’t imagine what everything must’ve looked like: the cities that were overgrown with ivy and weeds, the wild animals that must’ve been severely mutated with detrimental levels of radiation, the evil that spread from disorganized anarchy when laws no longer mattered. Buyer wanted someone clean, the looter had said.

So, the blast door did not open for anything. Not when the fruitless slamming and pounding on the door came back over the course of the next few years, not when she had to start rationing cans of food, not when the reservoir water began sinking and droplets would only come out of the kitchen sink. She’d survive, she just had to place a water bottle under the faucet overnight and wait until it could fill, and then she’d ration it out over the course of the next day. She would get used to a dry mouth and a growling, twisting, empty stomach. She would get used to the silence and the adrenaline rush that shook her hands when stomping could be heard above ground. She’d use the same flosser stick over and over again, wiping the plaque off with a towel, until the floss snapped and she could ration out the new ones out of the pack. She’d play Uno by herself - the only deck of cards in the small bunker - and she’d patiently wait for the static on the radio to crackle into a real, human voice.

She stopped looking at herself in the mirror above the bathroom sink so much when she noticed the lack of sun made her skin a pasty white and starvation hollowed out the skin around her eyes and made them look like purpled, cavernous holes. She was the same person every time she looked, being that it was so frequently, and when she timed it out to weeks instead of mere hours, she looked new – albeit more sickly, but she looked like a new person. It was almost a connection with another human. She read magazines out loud to herself for some sort of vocal stimulation, alternating between hoarse whispers and deep, rough voices that were not naturally her own. She read one of her dad’s manuals about how to clean the pistol revolver, and watched the small, box television roll waves of glitching static as she acted upon her new knowledge. She read a fashion magazine stashed away by her mother and traced the pages with her index finger, reminiscing about what could’ve been as she donned a ratty sweater during the distinct temperature shift between summer and fall.

As she laid on the full-sized mattress laid on the floor in the tiny bedroom, she drowned in reverie whilst curling up inside three layers of sleeping bags. She wore three pairs of sweatpants, two sweaters beneath a heavy trenchcoat, a fluffy pair of mittens and a hat overtop earmuffs as winter raged above ground. She learned that the generator had failed to do its job of producing heat when she read the scrawling, messy work of her dad’s handwriting on the piece of notebook paper taped to the wall above the switch three times over, telling her which of the electrical switches to turn off so that the main one would work, and yet none of the instructions wound up mattering in the end. She’d turned off everything to siphon power to the heat switch - every light, every radio, every television, the microwave and the toaster in the kitchen - to no avail. She wished that her parents could’ve been crowding around her, her little sister between; all generating heat with their bodies pressed together inside of the three sleeping bags. It would’ve been warm, and she would’ve had someone to talk to. But her parents had been at work when the bombs fell, her sister was probably viciously smashing crayons to a new page in her coloring book whilst she spent her day in elementary school, and so it was just the fifteen-year-old home at two in the afternoon after school when the television switched itself to a news broadcast and gave the news about Washington – just the teenager who had to lead herself down the basement steps and lock herself in the bunker, alone. And she waited, and waited, and waited – maybe they’d come back to the house, maybe they’d try to contact her through the ham radio or the handheld. They’d tell her to come to where they are; maybe there was an expansive vault they’d found with gardens and water and people. She was met with agonizing static.

So, she layered up, and her body shivered violently to compensate for the rest. And she learned to dread the winter in the coming years.

 

It was five years after the first attempted break-in that the boombox radio stuttered to life. And it was just in time too, because the toilet stopped flushing about a month beforehand from the lack of water being able to siphon into the tank, and the stench was starting to leak through the crack beneath the closed door. Granted, she didn’t use the bathroom a whole lot given the extreme malnourishment - of which she’d long-since tried convincing herself that it was only a diet - but it was starting to smell atrocious and it bled out into the main bunker. On top of that, she only had one can of cinnamon apples left, and dripping water overnight only filled about a quarter of a plastic water bottle. The overarching imminence of death crowded all around her, paranoia becoming a crippling forethought as she tootled around the bunker for something to do with only half a pop-tart in her stomach.

She rushed to the boombox settled on the coffee table in the living room when she heard the distinctive sound of a voice cut through between all of the static, bashing her ankle on the wooden foot of the mildewed sofa in the process. It was brief, only a split second of it between the static came through again, but she’d heard it. The sliver of a crackled voice gave way into a grand, open wound of bleeding hope. She fiddled with the antenna, moving it every which way with hard turns before she heard the voice again - a man’s, she was able to recognize - and she started slowly gesturing the antenna to the right.

“And before ya know it-“

The voice cut out again, and she gently, very gently, pushed the metal stick a little bit forward.

“Now, I know what-“

Her bottom lip was between her teeth, focused biting turning into gnawing as the antenna moved just the most miniscule, tiniest bit forward.

“-again, just in case some of you didn’t catch it: Somerville is the right place to be. North of New Salem, out in the ‘burbs just west of two-oh-two. If you hit the reservoir, you know you’ve gone too far. Got a nice barb-… -wall ‘round it, so you know that no raiders’re welcome. If you need a safe place to settle down in and yer willin’ to pull your own weight, we’ve got just the lifestyle for you. See ya there… Hey, how ‘bout we try gettin’ some tunes goin’ on this thing-”

The charismatic masculine voice cuts out, and in starts some 80’s pop music. The girl-turned-woman released her hold on the antenna, and the static stuttered back in. It might’ve only been her touch that had made the antenna work — as it always was with older boombox radios.

Somerville. North of New Salem, west of 202.

There were people still surviving, and they were normal. Homesteaders, by the sound of it — pull your own weight, she recalled him saying so vividly that his voice might as well have still been filtering through the speakers. And they’d managed to fix a radio tower to be able to send out the message of a real settlement.

She was desperate just to survive, and so resolve came easily. The radio broadcast was the first clear voice she’d heard in six years, and every word still fluttered around her head as she packed a backpack full of clothes, an extra pair of sneakers, and that last can of cinnamon apples. Miscellaneous tools: a screwdriver, a switchblade, a couple of kitchen utensils, and a can opener. Twelve boxes of ammo that had been in a dresser drawer were haphazardly tossed in, and then the plastic water bottle that had only a single drink left within was slid into the mesh side pocket. One of the ratty, blue sleeping bags was strapped to the top of the bag, adding to the hefty weight, but not enough for her to regret it.

She dressed in two pairs of sweatpants, despite the summer heat that she knew was waiting for her outside, because she needed to hide the curve of her hip bones that had begun shaping out when she grew into outright womanhood within the time she’d stepped into the bunker. She threw on an oversized grey hoodie that was likely her father’s, pulled her hair through the hole of the red and white baseball cap she put on over her head, then tied the hair that had grown disturbingly long into a ratty bun. Last came the knee-high, one size too-small black rain boots that she thought must’ve been her mother’s and had probably been thrown into the bunker when she ran out of space to store things in the house. The sleek, beige leather banded watch beeped once - another thing of her mother’s that she’d found, and the battery had miraculously survived in - signaling the turn of morning into noon.

She didn’t know if all of the extra clothes would really mask her femininity, given her soft face and small-ish stature, but if all else failed: she made sure to secure the holster belt around her waist and stuffed the revolver into it, nestling it safely just on her hip. She’d been practicing for at least three years pulling the bottom of her sweater up and whipping out the revolver, and she felt pretty confident about it — like the actors in the old mafia movies she used to watch during family-bonding nights. The decision went interchangeably every Friday: she’d always choose mafia films, her father would always choose black-and-white cowboy flicks, her mother would choose something with Audrey Hepburn in it, and her little sister would pick some comedy she’d heard a classmate talking about.

It was 1995, and she’d been thinking about those movie nights as she punched in the door code, climbed up the ladder and struggled to twist the wheel, and then finally opened the blast door for the first time in six long years.

Somerville. North of New Salem, west of 202.

Chapter Text

The first thing that Evangeline saw when she crawled out of the bunker was an overwhelmingly bright light that washed out everything surrounding her. She’d been squinting against the blinding white as she pushed against the door, eventually having to step up onto the first rung and push up with her back when it was too heavy for her weak arms. When she’d finally escaped from the bunker, she had to kneel down and cover her eyes with her palms.

Her breaths came in heavy huffs as she knelt on the concrete floor of her family house’s subfloor. Hardly five minutes out of the shelter and she was already wiped. It shouldn't have been so bright, either, given that she was still in the basement, but the slim slates of windows near the ceiling were void of blinds. She could remember vividly that when it comes at a certain time of day, the front of the house is bathed in sunlight whilst the back continues dangling a curtain of shadow over the yard. She used to sunbathe in her pale blue, ruffle-trimmed bikini as a childish act of attention-seeking in an attempt to garner the attention of the neighbor boy across the street as he, too, sought attention as he drove a lawnmower around his own front yard while shirtless. They were both young teenagers. They never spoke - never even knew each other’s names, because he’d been enrolled in a private Catholic school while she’d been in the public system - they just ogled each other. She’d seen him sitting on his rooftop with a bong once, just as she’d snuck out her window with a single cigarette she’d stolen from her mother’s pack. Evangeline is twenty-one now, and the neighbor boy probably never made it to sixteen.

Her palms pressed to her skull so tightly that when she pulled them away, she had to blink the black spots out of her vision. The light was just as bright, but she had to move past it.

Somerville. North of New Salem, west of 202.

Her stomach growled like an aching, starving monster of its own entity; its own thoughts and feelings about the larger body’s circumstances. She thought about ripping open her pack and just devouring the can of cinnamon apples immediately, but she fought the idea with every other thought. She didn’t know where exactly Somerville was, as it wasn’t even on the big paper map of all of Massachusetts that she’d tucked into the side pocket of her bag, but she knew New Salem like she’d etched the image of the small town on the map into the forefront of her brain. Her family’s home was further north near the border of Vermont, and it’d be a few hour’s walk to New Salem. If she hurried, she might even get there just after nightfall, as the sunrise dipped below the horizon and the sky was still a deep blue before it faded to inky blackness and the world became unseeable.

At least, she assumed that she had to walk. She hadn’t heard any sort of vehicle since the bombs fell. The bunker was at the front of the house and stretched out towards the street, so if anyone drove by, it’d probably rattle through the thick concrete walls. She thought that she might’ve heard some sort of plane or helicopter fly overhead some few years ago, but it was quickly fleeting, and she wasn’t going to go out and check just to sate her curiosity and then run back into the bunker. That would be foolish, and she’d been acting with scrupulous, persistent self-preservation for six years straight.

She finally came up off the floor after a bit and started up the basement stairs. The door at the top was already open, and she knew she wouldn’t have left it that way, but she also couldn’t count on both hands the amount of times that she’d heard looters pass through the empty house.

And it was, in fact, very empty. Agonizingly so: there used to always be a television or a radio on in the living room, the noise of her mother washing dishes in the kitchen, her father opening the liquor cabinet and pouring a glass of whiskey after a long day at the construction site; her little sister racing around the house with random bouts of pent-up energy and subsequently getting yelled at. It was dead silent when Evangeline came out of the basement. Just the rustling of fluttering weather-ragged, lacy curtains, the crunch of broken glass under her rain boots, and the deep, eery creaking as the house’s bones settled.

The family pictures on the wall were broken and faded. The liquor cabinet was empty. Rats had eaten holes in the emerald velvet sofa and cushion stuffing spilled out onto the floor. The rug beneath the sofa, the square laid out over the whole living room floor, had been soiled to the point that it was a dirty, dark brown. It used to be a bright cherry red, seemingly brighter when the sunlight would stream in through the windows and cast rectangular shapes upon the room’s floor. The leather recliner chair that her mother used to complain about because it didn’t match the sofa was turned over, and needles were tossed on the floor around it, along with a few empty beer bottles. The stand that the record player sat upon next to the box television was busted through and the turntable needle was missing; someone had kicked a hole in the base of the cabinet that it sat upon. Broken bits of ceramic were strewn about the floor, both from dishes someone had decided to smash and the flower vases her mother loved; vases that were passed down to her from her own mother. None of it mattered now. Everyone was gone.

And Evangeline’s heart shattered when she went into the kitchen and saw someone had graffitied a snake insignia on the fridge, on top of her little sister’s crayoned coloring pages that were still taped to the steel. The pages were marred with thick lines of red paint, unsalvageable. The carelessness of ruining something for no reason - just to ruin it - was stomach-turning. Her fingers brushed the edge of one, anyway, just to feel it. To encroach upon the idea of taking it and shoving it into her pack.

But the paper was too old to be moved, yellowed and worn by the elements that blew in easily through the broken windows and open doors, and she feared it would tear if she tried taking it down and folding it up. Evangeline moved past it: out of the kitchen, and out the front door. She needed to set out — to leave, and survive. She needed food and water and a bath, and Somerville sounded promising. She half wanted to dig the handheld radio out from her pack just to hear the message that had begun replaying between sets of disorganized music, boundless by genre. She moved her fingers up beneath her long sleeve and fiddled with her mother’s old watch, instead, because it was quieter; pressed her fingers over the pristine glass, smoothed the pad of her index around the tiny, circular clock.

But as she snuck around the side of the house, peering all around every other building in the suburbia and onward down the street, Evangeline silently promised that she’d come back. Looters probably stole everything of value: her mother’s jewelry, her father’s rifle on the wall above the living room television, the money in the safe inside the closet of her parent’s bedroom. But she wanted to go back for her lavender and maroon-flowered bed set so that she could imitate sleeping in her own bed again; the portrait on the wall above her parent’s bed that depicted a sunrise over the east coast, her Walkman and all of her cassette tapes that she’d collected from music stores and thieved from her parents’ own collections — and she wanted to dig through the cabinet stock-full of her little sister’s drawings and preserve her favorite ones. Maybe she’d find another one of Garfield that could replace the ruined one on the kitchen’s fridge.

Now, though, invisible hands pressed on Evangeline’s shoulders and shoved her forward, like helpful ghosts on her back. Onwards to Somerville.

 

The world was more ruined than she had initially realized.

She’d automatically eyed the dilapidation in the surrounding houses of her family’s home as soon as she came out onto the street, and even more-so the decrepitness of her own once-white and now grossly-grey home, but she couldn’t fathom the way that the sidings peeled off on the sides of the houses like they were unraveled at the seams, the crumbling brick at the base level; the roof concaves and the piles of black shingles laying next to fallen gutters. The grass was both overgrown and somehow yellow with decay, and the bushes in the flower boxes in the front of the homes were filled with thorns and ivy — wonkily shaped through years of unintentional neglect and abandonment.

And the street itself was riddled with potholes and broken chunks of cement; weeds growing in between the thousands of cracks in the pavement and stretching up towards the bright, cloudless sky, eager to finally live and exist in a world where they wouldn’t be driven over time and time again. The yellow dotted center lines were faded if not outright gone. As she walked down the broken road, she kicked a chunk of concrete down ahead of her. When she reached it again, she kicked it down once more, and then the process repeated. She was heading south down 78: the state route that started just over the border of Vermont but ended somewhere around the town of Orange. Evangeline never got the chance to learn how drive much, only ever having driven her father’s truck from the bonfire where they’d dumped firewood into and then back up into the front driveway, but she’d memorized her map well enough that she knew vaguely when she’d have to to cross over into the brush and set upon a new road. And that, she feared, was where the trouble would lie: she’d gone into Orange whenever her mother took her Christmas shopping or various other money-splurging trips, but that was before the bombs dropped. She didn’t know what she’d find in the larger towns that might not be so desolate as the rural suburbs or widespread farmsteads.

Before that, though, the first danger to pass quietly through would be Warwick; a small town that she had no choice but to go through, being that the only direct road that went through it was route 78 – and also the locale of her younger sister’s elementary school.

Her family’s home wasn’t far outside of Warwick, the small roundabout branching off of 78 just a couple of miles outside of the immediate district. The trip into the little town was about a five minute drive, and so her younger sister easily hitched a ride on the school bus every weekday to and from school. Evangeline, meanwhile, was left without a proper school when she graduated from fifth grade, and so either her mother or father would wake her up bright and early at five in the morning to drive an hour’s out to Athol, the large town just off of Orange, both connected by US route 202 – the same highway that would take her towards New Salem.

It was a much longer journey into Warwick when she was hiking down the road on foot. She passed by tall, long fields between abandoned farmsteads, the corn that used to stretch across miles of fields no longer planted and had turned to just meadows of weeds and wildflowers. The late summer heat burned through her clothes with an unimaginable blaze: Massachusetts summers used to be hot, but bearably so. It seemed that the nukes had burned through the protective Ozone layer and permitted the sun to boil the poor souls that had survived the warfare, and Evangeline was soaking through her clothes as she walked beneath. The thought of the fields potentially catching fire from the intensity of the heat latched onto her brain, and it wasn’t so egregious that she immediately dismissed it. She didn’t dare press her hand to the hot pavement just to test it: she might’ve melted her skin clean off the bone. Her tongue was as dry as a desert, severely parched, but she didn’t yet reach for her water bottle. She sated herself by occasionally licking away the sweat dripping down around her mouth, the cotton rim of the inside of her cap having become too drenched to be able to soak up anymore excreted, salty liquid. She remembered the winters she spent in the bunker, how frigidly cold she’d gotten even as her house kept her covered from the snow, and she wondered if the blasts had caused the country to experience harsher weather.

But even as she sweated profusely, she was relaxed somewhat, being that she’d not seen a single living thing yet, and the earth carried a breeze through that smelled like trees and grass, the subtlety of flowers. She couldn’t hear any birds, but crickets chirped everlastingly throughout the fields, their charming song filtering through the tall grasses that stretched over her head and fueled nostalgic memories of summer's past. Frogs that lived within faraway creeks and ponds fed the same idea with their own calling. The road crumbled the further southbound she went, bits and pieces falling away into the overgrown ditches running along the side, murk trapped within twining wrappings of grass. Concrete gave way to the metal chunks of foundation in some parts of the road, and she carefully stepped over them. A plastic bag blew past a few feet ahead of her, getting trapped in a nearby pond settled just off the road that was brimming with long-accumulated algae and other miscellaneous bags of trash and gas cans. As she walked past the stagnant water, she was hit with the vicious smell that she could only think of as plague and death. It lingered in her nose even when she was long gone, the strength of it burned into her nasal cavities.

Warwick wasn’t much better. Despite its fairly miniature size, hardly just above what was considered a village, garbage was strewn about every corner she snuck around. It rotted under the heat with the deteriorated buildings that seemed to be actively crumbling away; the library in the center of town nearly dropped falling stones atop her head from the rooftop as she stood under an awning and peeked around the corner. She jumped back when she felt a touch on her shoulder, only realizing that it was just bits of rubble and dust when her head snapped around, hand on her revolver, before glancing down at her shoulder. She brushed away the dirt, a motion that wasn’t extremely necessary but helped calm her down, and then she moved on.

Every window was broken in: the houses, the library, the tire shop down the street. Even the diner that she’d gone to a few times over the years with her family had the glass of the doors scattered around the sidewalk and across the inner checkerboard tiled floors. It looked like a bomb had dropped on top of the ruinous town, but there was no crevice in the surrounding earth to signify such a disaster. She assumed that if a bomb had fallen upon the rural townscape, there would be nothing left standing in the immediate area. It would be laid to waste, only memories left in the ruins of broken concrete and stone.

But the broken windows made it easier to look through into the few convenience stores around the town, and she couldn’t help herself from rising just slightly as she crouched beside a gas station and peeked through the gap in the shattered glass, eyeing the tipped over shelves that scattered cheap packaged food and trucker gear across the dirty, chipped, linoleum-covered floor. She picked out a strawberry cheesecake from the freezers lining the back wall for her birthday one year while her mother waited at the counter for her, a fresh pack of cigarettes and a box of cheap wine already purchased and in hand.

It was both the memory of cheesecake and the fact that she’d spotted a bag of cheddar and sour cream flavored chips amidst the indiscernible mess on the floor that spurred her to rise from her crouch and enter the gas station, carefully stepping through the broken door and over top of the glass, not needing to actually open the door. Her stomach growled noisily as she tiptoed across the building, her gaze set upon the bag of chips laying like an angel in the rough, perfectly settled upon a fallen shelf laid overtop of a pile of rotting watermelons and other produce that had once been settled in the large, now broken bins behind the aisles.

She ripped open the bag as quietly as possible and devoured the contents with such a ferocity that the slivers of chips crumbled in her dirty hands, yet she still shoveled them into her mouth. When the biggest chips were choked down her dry throat, she shook the bag until the crumbled bits and dust lay in the corner, and then she lifted her arm and poured the rest directly into her mouth. They were stale despite being settled in a closed bag, but she ate them, anyway. Her hands shook and she felt a growing nausea with the sudden intake of food, but she continued scavenging around like a hungry monster for anything else – anything at all. She found a can of Pringles and ripped open the container before ever even looking at the flavor, slightly sweet barbeque dust landing on her tongue and further sullying the pads of her fingers. She dug out every single chip until her knuckles were dusted with red, and then she dug around for something else. A bag of Fritos went down the drying hatch, a can of Spam and its wet liquid aided in appeasing her dry mouth, and then another can of Pringles she’d pulled out from a pile of rubble that the fallen ceiling dropped onto the center of the gas station.

She opened a fridge in the back and then promptly let it fall closed as she took a couple of steps back, the overwhelming, sour stench of rotting dairy flooding out with a swiftness. The power had been out for six years, and in her starvation-induced state of madness, she’d forgotten that she wouldn’t be able to find a pristine cheesecake.

As she walked herself backwards away from the fridge, a presence decided to suddenly make itself known.

“Well, well, well,” called out a gritty, malicious, prideful voice. “Looky what we have here.”

Evangeline whipped her whole body around, hand flying to her revolver as she spotted a man dressed in rags. A rusty-colored Carhartt jacket billowed around his thin frame, soiled with what looked like car oil splatters over the tattered sleeves and open lapel, and he wore green cargo pants that were obviously a couple sizes too large: the legs rolled up around his combat boots, the waist cinched in ruffles around the belt. His black tee-shirt exposed a long neck and the red scratch marks riveting downward from underneath his jaw, likely self-inflicted, marring down the sickly pallid skin. His face was the most frightening, as his cheshire grin spilled up around a gummy smile and revealed a mouthful of rotting, blue and black teeth; aged wrinkles lining his jowls and the crow's feet on the thin skin around the black, cavernous, malevolent voids for irises. His greasy auburn hair was tied back in an oil-slicked bun at the nape of his neck, and there was dirt smeared across the bridge of his too small, upturned nose. His lips were pale, as if devoid of life and bloodflow; stretched to accommodate his nasty smile. He had a hatchet hanging from his belt, the steel, brown-stained blade peeking out from the openness of his jacket.

She hesitated in actually lifting her sweatshirt and reaching for her gun. Her elbow was bent, her hand lingered over the grey fabric, but she did not move. She was frozen, struck with fear as the first man she’d seen in six years steadily approached her. He had a gangly way of moving as his boots crunched over broken glass and the empty bags of food she’d left in her carnivorous daze; his legs carried him through the trash like he was still getting used to his bones. An odd shuffle to one leg while the other outright stomped. He didn’t seem alive, only carrying himself around the wasteland through the sheer force of hatred and malice.

“Don’t-” Evangeline finally spit, her voice croaked and tentative. “Don’t come any closer.”

Her hand finally dove beneath her hoodie, fingers wrapping around the handle of the revolver, but she did not pull it out yet. She didn’t know if she was even capable of shooting another person, of stripping the life away from one of the few living bodies that existed in the wasteland, and uncertainty raged in the same amount that fear surged through her quivering form. It seemed like a waste, but was it so much of a waste if he was obviously fueled by ill intentions?

She couldn’t wrap her head around it, couldn’t get a good grasp on an actual decision, and her eyebrows drew together with a mix of confusion and concern as the man burst out into a howl of laughter. It echoed off of the walls, throughout the whole gas station. Evil mirth crowded around her small form like a stifling shadow. And Evangeline could feel the nausea brewing into actual vomit as her mouth watered, preparing to spew. Whether it was due to the hasty gorging or the panic, she couldn’t tell anymore.

The man’s fit of laughter made him halt in walking toward her, though it only left a couple of feet of space between them. She thought, then, of a plan to run away, as the man calmed and spoke up again. “Ah, we both know you ain’t gonna do nothin’. Look at you: all clean teeth, smooth ‘n scarless skin, shakin’ with pure terror. You never shot nobody before– you think I don’t know a shelter-girl when I see one?”

She didn’t speak, didn’t give any response. Her lips quivered and her throat was closing. He spoke up again, “You must think I’m stupid or somethin’, eh? That I don't know what’s right in front of my eyes? Right? Makes me think you ought’a be punished. Can’t have a little girl thinkin’ she can get one over on me.”

In the same instant that he took another single step forward, Evangeline spun around and darted away. Stumbling over cartons of motor oil and coolant, tripping in her leap over a fallen shelf, through the aisleway filled with empty plastic water bottles, moldy containers of rotten cakes, and an array of rubble. The man rushed to the end of it, halting her escape.

He was hunched over, arms out like he was ready to grab her, and he threatened, “Think you can run from me now, shelter-girl?”

Evangeline turned on her heel and ran back down the path she came from. She rounded around every aisle, pushed through the wagon-bins of soggy, sweetly pungent fruit, and came around the dilapidated store in a wide berth. She was huffing, swallowing down vomit, and desperate tears formed in her waterline. Glass and foil crunched beneath her feet, and her bag thudded against her back with every hard footfall. Her skin was abuzz, sweat dripping down her hairline and tickling her cheekbone from overexertion and fright, blood pumping with adrenaline and the visceral need to just survive. She didn’t know what the man wanted, she didn’t know what her punishment was supposed to entail, but she knew that at the end of it only lied death. Maybe he’d drive his hatchet into the side of her skull and watch the blood pour out like a fountain; maybe he’d force the blade into her stomach and open her up, guts and entrails all on display. The vision of her own dying body spurred her burning legs forward, fleeing across the front of the store as her heavy footfalls rattled all the way to her hips.

Just as she began dashing across the big windows across the front wall, the man called out, “Hey, Eddie!” The confusion of who Eddie might be didn’t stunt her; she just kept sprinting towards the door. It was just right there, only a few feet away, just a couple more steps, just a couple more seconds. She needed to duck out, to race into greater Warwick; to bound across every alleyway, around every building and every abandoned home until she lost the man – until the man lost track of her and tired himself out. She’ll make the chase too difficult, and she’ll survive it. She’ll go to Somerville and she’d never see such visceral evil right in front of her face ever again. She’ll settle down in an old farmstead with a small garden in the front, make a couple of friends - maybe the charismatic man who’d made the message on the radio - and come back a few years down the line with one of those friends so that she can retrieve her bed sheets and her Walkman and her mother’s painting and her sister’s coloring pages.

She’ll escape. She’ll survive.

An arm broke through the window and wrapped around her neck, taking her into a chokehold and instantly putting an end to her escape. Her hands flew up as she was dragged through the open space, glass scraping through her layers and cutting a gash into the back of her thigh. Then she was brought to the ground, kicking and struggling; desperately pulling at the arm still around her neck. Her breath was strangled out of her as she was brought against a new stranger-man’s chest, writhing between his legs. Her fists pounded and grabbed and slapped and clawed manically on the arm around her neck; no thought to it, no decisive plan to escape, purely acting on the deep will to fight and live. Her backpack was squished between her and the stranger-man’s torso and she thought that it might be the can opener she tossed in that was digging into her spine. She was gasping for air, her face burning hot, and then she looked up and saw the man duck out through the gas station’s door, carefully avoiding the glass just as she had.

He walked up to her casually, smugness emanating from him in waves. His grin had somehow widened, disturbing in a way that prickled goosebumps all along her body; an ice-cold shiver tracking down her spine. She stopped struggling and wiggling so much so that she could release one of her hands from clawing at the fabric-covered arm holding her hostage and shakily grapple for her gun. She whipped the revolver out within seconds, pulled down the safety with her thumb as she raised it, but the stranger-man’s empty hand quickly snatched her wrist with a bruising tenacity and the shot rang out above her head, bullet shooting at the hazy sun overhead.

He shook her wrist violently, his nails digging into her skin, and the gun fell to the broken pavement of the parking lot. He kept hold of her arm as the man came to stand over her, looking down at her feebly fighting form from the bridge of his nose; chin upturned like she was worthless, and he just wanted to show how much stronger than her that he was. She’d started crying fully, pitiful sobs racking her body so powerfully that she was exhausted. She still wiggled and kicked, one clenched fist still pounding against the forearm tightened around her. It wasn’t moving, wasn’t loosening, and she could feel as her arms got weaker – slower. Her kicks at nothing had less vengeful strength, only serving to dig up gravel and loose stone under her heels; shredding the rubber of her boots.

“Pretty fun, eh? I’ve always liked when all you little things try to run. It’s always pointless, always get’cha in the end,” he said, vicious and gravelly and sniveling. He crouched down beside her, and the proximity of him hit her nose the same way the rotting, hot garbage had. He smelled like unadulterated body odor and mud, washes of stagnant water and mildew. So strong like it had seeped into his bones, permanently disfiguring any hope of getting clean.

He grabbed one of her legs tightly and forced it into stillness, fingers digging through the double layers of fabric and bruising her thigh. His other hand dove beneath her sweatshirt, feeling around until he could find the waistband of her pants, then tugged down. It caught around her hipbones, and he pulled again, then realized that the drawstring inhibited ease of access. His fingers fiddle around again, her stomach tensing up as his dirty hands sneak beneath the waistband and pull apart the bow-tied drawstring.

And Evangeline thought that she should’ve just stayed in the bunker. She should’ve allowed her body to starve, organs twisting up and cramping as she laid weightless atop the mattress. She should’ve just bore every thought being food, food, food until it drove her mad. She should’ve been fearless as she drifted into a deep slumber, boneless as she was carried into death. She would’ve been able to meet her family again. She wouldn't have had to ever suffer the hands of dirty men pulling her sweatpants down around her knees as she was held against her will in a ruined parking lot outside of an even more ruined gas station in an even more greatly ruined town.

But she chose her suffering.

The man shuffled on his knees to slide himself between her legs. Evangeline siphoned the last bit of willpower she had and brought up her free legs, kicking him in the stomach as he focused on sticking his hands under her boxer briefs and attempted to pull them down. He was effectively forced back on his heels as he released a choked grunt, spittle falling out of his mouth as his hands went from her and flew to his gut.

“You stupid fucking bitch,” he groaned, fury lining new wrinkles between his brows and around his frowning mouth as his eyes sharpened into daggers. His arm snapped out to punch her across the face, the strength of which she both felt and heard cracking the cartilage in her nose and the following immediate stream of blood that trickled down from the right nostril. She didn’t feel good by any means, but a spark of pride alit inside of her chest at the feat.

It stayed lit even when the stranger-man’s arm tightened around her neck, choking her to the point that she felt light-headed. She didn’t mind death at that moment, because black spots began spotting up her vision and her body had started going numb, so she couldn’t see nor really feel the man start moving toward her again, keeping his body far away as his strangely too-long arms reached out for her underwear.

Even as she was fading, the shot rang out, clear as day. The man instantly dropped like a swatted fly in front of her, and the shock caused the arm around her neck to immediately loosen. Then came a second shot, and the limb fell away from her completely. One hand immediately flung up to her throat as she crawled herself away from the men, the wielder of her captivity whose headshot from behind forced his body to slump over hers. Her pants were still bunched up around her knees and her boxers were tugged halfway down her right hip, skewed, but she needed to be away from the bodies so that she could breathe. She needed to get away from the gunshots that were clearly coming from behind.

A third shot never rang out. Evangeline knelt in the middle of the parking lot, nearer to the gas pumps she’d intended to hide behind, but she couldn’t move her body anymore to get to cover. Instinct melted away into the overwhelming exhaustion as she gasped and huffed, blinking rapidly to clear the spots from her vision.

She fell backwards, knees bent up; her arms flung out at her sides. She didn’t know if she was breathing so heavily with pathetic interval whines because of the fact that she’d been strangled or if she was suffering a panic attack. Anxiety surged through her body all the same, the extent of it weakening her limbs, and she couldn’t get up, not even to continue crawling away.

She couldn’t hear the new stranger-man’s steps, even as his boots hit the gravel and stepped over top of loose stones. But she could see him when he came into her vision, standing so far over her that he seemed like a looming mountain. And he was scary. A black curtain draped over his whole face, bleach stains like tears beneath the messily cut eye-holes; a militaristic helmet keeping it secured on his head, adorned with an upright binocular contraption of four monocular-like scopes. His bulletproof vest was as black as his long-sleeve, a satchel-pack secured over his ribcage and a handheld radio attached over the opposing left side of his chest. His military-fatigue pants held a beige color that contrasted heavily with the black holster-belt strapped tightly around his thigh and the inky darkness of his shin-high, worn but still shiny combat boots. The clothes were obviously meant to be loose, but the freakish bulk of his muscles made the fabric around his biceps and thighs form-fitting. The sleek steel bracers strapped around his forearms and shins shined beneath the sunlight, seeming like a lighter grey than they really were.

He looked intimidating, sure - frightening, even - but there was something in the pale, sky-blue of his big, exhaustion-rimmed eyes that made her feel like he wasn’t going to hurt her. It wasn’t kindness, friendliness, nor even just natural human warmth – more like a latent carelessness that told her he just didn’t really feel like blowing her brains out at that time.

He stood over her, silent as his cowl fluttered lightly around his neck with the breeze. His rifle was still held in both hands - one finger still lingering on the trigger while the other cradled the barrel - prepared to maneuver the weapon quickly in order to shoot. He looked down at the huffing woman, and after a long moment of them both just staring at each other, he lifted the rifle to rest against his upper arm, the barrel rising up his shoulder and meeting the side of his head, just barely not tapping against his helmet.

He pointed at her leg with a single gloved index, and Evangeline followed his gaze down. Her pants were still around her knees, the skin between the double layered fabric and the hem of her boxers exposed to the elements. “That is a bad cut,” military-man said, deadpan. She didn’t know what she was expecting, much less if she was expecting anything at all, but it was not the airy, lightness of his very accented voice. It was still deep, still obviously masculine, but there was a sort of boyishness that was latent throughout every word.

“It, uhm,” Evangeline stuttered, looking down at her leg. Her breathing had started calming, and she gave one last shaky sigh to clear it from her body. She shifted up, leaning back on her hands as she looked around the underside of her thigh. The gash was deep, still dripping blood onto the dark pavement, and she only really noticed then how gaping and open it was. She could feel her blood actively leaving the agitated flesh with a coldness, along with the quivering muscle that was nearly wounded from the depth of it and the way that it pulsed. It didn’t even really hurt, or at least she didn’t think so – it was just there and made itself obvious with its openness.

And she was heavy with the fact that she’d never seen a wound so severe, let alone on her own body. Sure, she used to like mafia movies, but it was always obvious, always in the back of her mind, that it was just special effects. Now, she could feel the blood draining from her leg, and her whole body went limp as she dropped back onto the pavement, slurring, “I’m go-ha pa-zz out.” Her back arched uncomfortably over the curve of her stuffed backpack, but she couldn’t bring herself to move.

She was loopy, but she wasn’t so out of it that she couldn’t realize when the military-man finally decided to move. She could hear his footsteps come around her body, the sound of him holstering his rifle on his back and going to the other side of her, and then when he crouched down beside her limply bent leg, her hip having fallen over to the side. She could hear his satchel snap open, and could feel the rough way that he handled her, as if she was a nuisance stealing time out of his otherwise busy day. He moved her leg by wrapping a hand around her calf - a hand that was so large that it encompassed all the way around, his middle finger touching his thumb - and pushed her leg just slightly to the side so that her body would shift and he could better look at the gash. She winced and whined when he poured a small travel-sized bottle of rubbing alcohol over it, uncomfortable with the way it fizzed and bubbled with her blood. He placed a large pad over the wound, pressed it there to keep more blood from pouring out, and then secured it with gauze that he wrapped around her thigh. He pulled the knot tight, maybe a little too tight, then dropped the roll of tape back into his satchel and stood.

“There you are,” he said, inklings of pride at his handiwork evident in his tone. German? she wondered, curiosity boiling over the brewing pot inside of her mind. She shifted up once more weakly, the muscles in her upper arms quivering as she rested back on her hands again. “You can look at it again. Feel free to thank me now.”

“Thank you,” she acquiesced in a murmur, shifting her leg so that she could look at the wrappings around her thigh. Red was already starting to spot through the gauze pad. Her eyes flickered up again, pushing through her fear of the black cowl and the formidable height that he stood at so that she could look at his face and genuinely say, “For, uhm, all of it.”

His hands were on his hips, shoulders back; his straightened posture making him seem more enormous while she was still on the ground. “I did not mean to save you,” he told her bluntly.

Befuddled surprise drew her eyebrows together, obvious confusion clear on her features. “Then… why…?” She couldn’t even finish her sentence, the words just simply refused to come to her tongue. Worry pierced through her chest like an icy, sharp knife.

“I like to kill weak men like those,” he informed her casually, as if the circumstances didn’t affect him at all – and they didn’t. “You… ehh, not so much. You have sad, pathetic eyes, like das Häschen. It makes it not so fun.”

She wished that her father could’ve thought to stash away a learning book of the German language. Her mother had a French guide somewhere, but it was lost somewhere in the house – probably sitting in a drawer and growing mold in the bind. No one ever bought Russian learning books for fear of being accused of being secret Communist spies.

He said it like it was an insult, that much was clear. “Like… what?” Evangeline questioned.

His head cocked to the side in a chastising way. Something fluttered inside of her stomach, faint and obscure, but she knew that it wasn’t lingering caution – though that was still very much present. “If I remembered the English word, then I would’ve just said that,” he condescended.

Evangeline gradually pulled herself into standing, leaning her weight onto her good leg when pain shot down from her thigh and into her toes on her left side. She pulled her pants up and secured the tie again - double knotted, this time, the issue of wanting to escape her pants herself in the very back of her mind - and appropriately discarded any inch of shame that arose from him feeling around the back of her upper thigh.

“Well,” she started, busying herself with dusting off the front of hoodie so that she wouldn’t have to look at him, “I appreciate-“

She saw in her peripheral his arm extend out, and she looked up to follow his pointed index towards the scene of the crime. “That is your tiny revolver, yes?” he asked, curiosity laced around the edges.

The stranger-men’s bodies lay dead, limp and bleeding out, the red pools spilling out from their respective concave head-wounds. The one that had held her captive was folded over forward, face-down in the pavement; blood staining the back of his dirty blond hair. The man that had chased her around the store was flattened backwards, glossy, open eyes unfocused and staring up at nothing — the bullet hole just past the corner of his right eye, sniped through his skull. It would’ve just been a graze, had military-man’s aim not been so flawless. She wondered if it had more to do with the work of the additive scopes secured on his helmet or the perfection of technique. She would wager on the latter, given the size of his arms — the muscle that was built to better absorb the sniper rifle's recoil.

She looked away as nausea settled at the base of her throat, incurred from the gore just a few feet away from her. “It is, yes,” she answered.

“And you did not shoot your own attackers. Why?”

“He knocked it-“

He interrupted, “Before that, then.”

Evangeline allowed a pause to settle over them as she thought. Nothing was particularly decisive; no excuse arose that was entirely accurate. Because in truth, she just couldn’t force herself to upholster the deadly weapon and slide her finger through the ring to press the trigger. Deciding to commit murder was a fickle thing, she thought, and the definitiveness of death was even more fickle.

“I was afraid to, I guess,” she answered, looking down at her wringing hands.

Almost agitated, “Afraid to, what? Put down your would-be rapist?”

“I guess, I don’t know. I don’t- I-…” She cuts herself off, allowing herself a moment to breathe and collect her thoughts. “I mean, I just don’t want to do something like that, like that’s so definitive. I don’t want to ruin myself, my own morality, like everything else is obviously ruined.”

He’s staring at her, she could feel it burning through her body, grazing her very soul, but she didn’t look up from her hands.

“A lot of excuses for someone who just simply hasn’t killed anyone yet,” he said after a moment. “You’re welcome, for being your savior in your moment of utter weakness.”

Her head snapped up, eyes narrowed as anger sparked. “I said ‘thank-you’ already.”

He waved his hand dismissively at her, lazy with his gesturing. “Well, if killing rapists is so damnable, then there is no amount of appreciation that can un-make the dooming of my soul, no?”

“I didn’t- I just couldn’t make myself do it, is all that I meant,” she argued. Embarrassment creeped a red, hot blush up her neck. At her own weakness, at the feeling that she wasn’t being heard, at the feeling that she wasn’t capable of expressing how truly grateful she was. The embarrassment fueled a growing irritation. “I don’t really have anything to give you, and I don’t have any money, but you can loot whatever you want out of the store and I’ll just continue on my way.”

“There is nothing inside of there.”

“There’s still some food that isn’t totally rotten.”

“None of that is edible,” he replied, a hint of inquiry in his tone. Then, “...Did you eat any of it?”

“It was sealed,” she said, panic rapidly rising, pitching her voice up.

Filled with roguish mirth: “Did you bump your little head coming out of your shelter, Häschen? Radiation easily seeps in through the plastic and glue, even the canned goods are only safe in very small amounts.”

She gasped a sharp, “What?” Her hands flew to her stomach, pressing like she might be able to squeeze out the poison. Unimaginably filled with distress, “Oh, what do I do? Am I done for? Should I try to throw up?”

“I would,” military-man deadpans, shrugging lightly. Casual and cool, as if he didn’t just lay out her imminent end.

Evangeline quickly hobbled toward the grassy edge between the street and the parking lot, careful about her damaged leg. She knelt down, one hand grasping the curb as she shook her sleeve up to her elbow and leaned over. Anxiety buzzed through her whole body, shaking her hand as she wiped her palm on her thigh before sticking her index down her throat. Trepidation was like claws around her stomach, and as she pushed back behind her tonsils and gagged, nothing would come up. Tears gathered in her waterline once more, and she might’ve been surprised that there was any water left inside of her body if she wasn’t so focused on trying to hurl up a surplus of radiation-poisoned chips that she so happily gorged herself on. She gagged and coughed against her finger, and her stomach lurched, but nothing would come up beyond strings of saliva that she promptly spat out. She paid no mind to the fact that military-man had approached her from behind, watching as she tried and failed to expel herself from the internal radiation.

The fifth time that she stuck her finger down her throat and came up with nothing beyond her own saliva soaking her hand and dribbling down her forearm, she heard military-man sigh a deep, heavy, and exhaustive breath. She heaved, her lungs working around her borderline self-inflicted asphyxiation, and she heard both the sound of metal and weighted fabric clatter to the pavement. He crouched beside her, close enough to be hunched over her - she was all too aware of the way that his knee pressed into the side of her right thigh - and then his hand was on the back of her throat. She noticed, when he grabbed her hand and pulled it away from her mouth, that his other hand was now bare – pale skin riddled with scars and callouses, rough as his fingers circled her wrist.

“Here I am, rescuing you again,” he bemoaned, and then he was shoving his middle finger into her mouth, the length of the digit easily going past her tonsils and down into her throat. “Obendrein mache ich das verdammt noch mal umsonst. Nutzlose, schwache, hirnlose, hübsche Hure.”

She gagged again around his digit, but he didn’t pull out of the depths of her throat. His other fingers were locked around her mouth so that he could push as far as possible, the pads digging into her supple flesh. He was staring at her, and she could feel it, but she refused to even spare him a glance. Her gaze was locked on the grass that had become wet with her spit. One of her hands flew up to hold his wrist, not to attempt to pull him away, but rather just for stabilization. She held him gently, tenderly – careful not to latch on so firm as to press her fingers into his skin. He was comfortingly warm.

“Ich habe das noch nie für jemanden tun müssen, ich habe noch nie eine so dumme Frau getroffen. Du solltest mich dich ficken lassen, um dafür zu bezahlen.”

His German mutterings were sharp in her ear, wrapping around her soft brain like pretty, white ribbons, despite the sheer impatient vexation dripping like venom from every word. His hand was still on the back of her neck, keeping her head still, and she could feel the bile rising as her body lurched forward so hard that she thought she might fall.

“Da bist du ja. Nimm es, schluck es, dein Hals zieht sich so sanft zusammen. Ich frage mich, ob du weißt, wie sehr mich das erregt. Ich frage mich, ob du mich dich noch ficken lassen würdest, wenn du wüsstest, was ich gerade sage.”

His hand ripped out from her mouth as she gagged one last time and the vomit finally crept up and out from her throat. She didn’t necessarily spew it out, but as she hunched over even further and her eyes rolled back into her skull, it was a decent amount of acidic bile that he forced her to puke up. She heaved heavily, her stomach still twisting and churning, urging her to throw up a little more despite the fact that there was nothing left inside of her. She felt like she’d just experienced an exorcism.

At her side, military-man shook his hand, flinging off and air-drying the slightest bit of vomit amidst the wetness of her saliva that had soaked the limb. As she blinked away the tears and swallowed the remaining pool of saliva underneath her tongue, he bent to retrieve his glove and wrist guard, pulling the leather back on before strapping the steel back around his forearm.

As he watched her catch her breath, “Now, what is the polite-”

“Thank you, holy fuck,” she breathed, expelling it out in a single exhale. She was a little tired of reiterating it over and over again, and her throat was worn ragged from the corrosive stomach acid. It felt like she was speaking around swallowed rocks, jagged on every corner.

“You’re welcome,” he replied smugly. She could hear the loathsome grin in his voice. “Where are you off to next, Häschen?”

“Uhm–” She hesitated, caution prevailing in the wake of his rough aid. He did help her, but he also just murdered two people - albeit very bad people - and obviously felt little guilt for it, if any at all. What would happen if she told him of her journey and he decided that the people of Somerville were ill-suited for this world? He was dressed in military gear and obviously possessed the skill of a clean, accurate shot, but she couldn’t say with any sort of confidence that he wasn’t one of those raiders that the man had spoken about in the radio message. He could’ve gotten that gear from any of the abandoned military bases scattered across the country.
But then again, he did go through all of the effort of rescuing her from would-be rapists (unintentionally, so he claimed,) and helping her puke up radiation chips. She probably should tell him about Somerville, if she had any hope of repaying the debts she’d accidentally accumulated. Maybe he’d like it there – maybe he’d like a domestic life of using his big arms and strong back to be the town’s designated local lumberjack, or the resident suburban butcher.

She wiped her mouth with her sleeve, ridding herself of the last of her bile.

“It’s this place called Somerville?” she answered, her voice giving way to insecure uncertainty. She looked up at him, watching as he fastened the leather straps of the steel guard around his wrist, the way that he pulled it taut. He was experienced with it, and never once did his eyes leave her knelt form to glance at his arm and make sure that what he was doing was precise.

“From the radio?” he inquired, genuine interest perking up his tone. He sounded even more boyish, and it came to her ears sort of charmingly.

“Yeah. It sounds… good.”

He hummed thoughtfully, dropping his arm back to his side when everything was secure. “Sounded like a trap, to me. I will go with you.”

Evangeline sputtered with shock, rising up to her feet. Nervously, “I mean, I wasn’t suggesting anything, you don’t have to– really, I can take care of myself. It was just this hiccup here-”

“I don’t care,” he interrupted, not kind but neither was it palpably harsh. “I should like to see what they’ve done with the little town. The other settlements around the state are ugly and run by awful sorts.”

Other settlements?

“Why with me?” she asked, bewilderment sinking into plain, unadulterated perplexity. She recalled when she’d heard some sort of aircraft fly over the bunker, and how fear of the outside kept her in place. She’d suffered worse now, and she sought an answer.

Military-man shrugged casually. “Trouble clearly follows you, and I would like the ease of target-practice without having to go out of my way to find it. Und ich will die Scheiße aus dir herausficken. Very simple stuff, even your little brain can grasp it.”

Evangeline’s eyes narrow, sending a distinctive glare up at the man that was well-more than a foot taller than her. Even as she stands before him, the top of her head hardly reaches his shoulder. “If you’re going to insult me, at least have the gall to do it fully in a language that I can understand.”

“Nein, das macht viel mehr Spaß. Wir sollten wie die Kaninchen ficken und im Alleingang die Erde neu bevölkern,” was his incomputable, impish reply.

She blew air out of her cheeks, petulant as a child. She knew at least that nein was a hard no. She dug her fingers beneath both of the thick backpack straps and clung to them tightly in a huff. “Whatever,” she breathed her defeat. “Do whatever you want.”

At least he’s good with a rifle.

“Wunderbar!” he exclaimed positively. He had a bounce to his step as he turned around, then started walking off. He didn’t tell her to follow, just expected it. And she did, after running over to retrieve her revolver and keeping a few paces behind him. “We will stop at my safehouse first, then we can set out.”

She trailed after him, but dully complained, “Well, I wanted to get there before the day’s through-”

“Don’t worry yourself, Häschen. I will make sure that you make it there without your brain leaking out of your ears.”

“...Thanks, I think,” she muttered, her face lined with concern as she watched the way his shoulders contorted and moved as he walked. He was built like a mountain; all broad muscles and bones forming together into an intimidatingly large shape. He walked with a militaristic step: a confidence in his stride, like he knew that everyone was beneath him. Suddenly, a bright light emerged inside of her head and she asked, “Hey, what do I call you?”

“König,” he answered amenably.

“And that’s… German, right?”

“I am from Austria, but yes, Germanic.” A pause, then, “Do you intend to learn?”

“No, I was– you’re military, right?”

He hummed. “You have a good eye, Häschen.”

“It’s Evangeline,” she told him, having picked up on the nickname. To what it meant, that was still to be discovered.

“I like Häschen for you better,” he said simply.

And that was the extent of their conversation as they trekked down the road. Stepping over the loose stone, dodging potholes and broken foundation, and together they headed south through Warwick. In the end, despite the incident and König’s proposed slight deviation, she was still on the right track for Somerville.

Now, she’s only picked up a slightly deranged ex-soldier and new traumatic knowledge of the Wasteland.

Survivability ticked up a notch.

Chapter Text

“You said there are other settlements?”

“Ja.”

“Where?”

“All over.” A rustle of fabric as an undershirt is stuffed into a large military backpack. König cleared his throat, then continued, “Inner Boston has the largest one, some people are holed up around Cambridge, and that thing in Quincy. There are others still, but those are the main ones. All are military governed.”

“But you’re military.” (Which had been the very reason she’d started asking questions as soon as he led her underground.)

He waved his hand dismissively at her as he turned his back toward her, walking around the main room of the bunker to collect a grey wool sweater from the back of a fabric-covered, comfortably-cushioned reclining chair. “I gave up on that when the world ended.”

“It can’t be so damned,” Evangeline plainly argued, crossing her arms over her chest as she stood under the archway. “I mean, if the military is still around then that would imply that there’s something left worth fixing.”

“You wouldn’t understand, you do not know. They’re too- ehh–” He paused as he thought, holding the sweater midair over top of the backpack that he’d settled atop the corner of the sofa, his shoulders hunched forward as he leaned over the pack. “Controlling, I suppose?”

“Dictatorial?” she offered.

“Yes, yes– that,” he affirmed, then continued packing. The pack was getting full, an innumerable amount of boxes of ammo he’d swiped off of the coffee table already dumped in the front pocket. They bulged from the camouflage-beige thick fabric in sharp edges.

“But isn’t that better?” she questioned, watching him as he went around the room. It seemed like he already knew distinctly where everything was - potentially used to packing everything up and preparing to leave - while she’d caught herself multiple times pausing in the middle of rooms as she thought about where something was, what else she’d need. “Like, to protect civilians from raiders or whatever, I’d think that the ‘soldier’ stuff would help keep people safe.”

“They come from spoiled stock,” König told her.

Confused, “What does that mean?”

He sighed, standing up straighter and rolling his head around in a swivel as turned on his heel to face her. “You ask so many questions, Hase.”

“Well, that was just really cryptic,” she stated her defense, shrugging.

One hand went up under the long, shadowy curtain covering his face, and she thought that he must’ve been adjusting his helmet strap by the way the solid, black kevlar helm slightly moved atop his head. Looking straight at her, ocean-blue eyes more luminous beneath the white track lights along the far side of the ceiling, he asked, “Did you honestly believe that the Soviets could drop thousands of bombs on the Americas without intelligence knowing?”

It felt like another bomb dropped right on top of her. A dawning of a new age; an epiphany.

In truth, she never really questioned it – and that might’ve been why they got away with it to begin with. People were too busy with their jobs, with school, with their families to ask how the Cold War had been going on for so long and why they still hadn’t come to a resolution. A peace treaty, an accord; anything to calm the civilians down.

She instantly doubted König’s information, despite the certainty he spoke with, the conviction that rolled off of his body in waves. She gave a nervous, airy laugh, then said, “That can’t be true, the news stations said that it was impulse–”

“Ohh, well if the news stations said it, then it must be true,” he mocked, smug mirth lacing every word.

“Well, what does that mean, then? That the government was outplayed, that everything was compromised?”

“Since Kennedy was shot in the back of his head in the shiny convertible, yes,” König stated bluntly, swiftly going back to his packing. He spoke with the same ease that he moved with; naturally relaxed, like nothing mattered. Like Evangeline’s world wasn’t promptly turned upside down. Like the life she’d lived and all of the dreams she’d had up until she was fifteen hadn’t been shattered by the fact that the country had been doomed since that fateful afternoon in ‘63, eleven years before she was ever even born.

“That still doesn’t make any sense,” Evangeline argued, her thoughts a terrible, whirring storm – a new set of words joining together like a confusing tossed salad every second. She could’ve pressed her ear to an actively grinding blender and it still wouldn’t have been as loud as her mess of a mind. “I still don’t understand. How do you know all of this? Like, yeah, West Germany was occupied by the allied forces, but why are you here and not still there? What did you do to get sent over here? What were you supposed to do here, if not protect civilian interests? Or was the mission just to watch the bombs fall?”

König groans a loud, long, exhaustive noise as he rises from the bag and slightly leans his body backward, head tilted back. “You ask so many questions, it makes my head hurt,” he bemoaned, standing up straighter and cupping one of his palms over his cloth-covered right ear. He uses his other hand to wave at her, limply shooing her away. “Go upstairs and find something else to do, stop tormenting me.”

Evangeline remained standing there for a few seconds, staring plainly at him as he gave a fake, dramatic, pathetic whine and massaged the side of his head underneath the helmet, and then she finally turned and walked back up the cement steps out of the bunker.

She was surprised that when they left Warwick and went down the road, König soon turned into the driveway of a crumbling church. The simplistic, humbly architectural Protestant building was hidden between a row of overgrown fields and an expansive, dense forest on the opposite side of the street across from it. The large cross nailed to the center of the building above the wooden double doors was like a light in the shadows as the 6-foot-tall grassy fields surrounding it brushed up against the pale building, attempting to puncture and spread their invasiveness into the very bones of the walls. The inner space of the church was just as run-down: some tipped over wooden pews, one bench split in half; moldy, unreadable bibles and scripture packets thrown all around the floor. König led her past a fully decayed corpse on the stage, a pile of bones untouched and laid out inside of a lump of rotting black fabric, like someone had just laid down to die on the floor – and brought her through a single door on the left side of the wall behind the stage and down a spiral stairwell. The finished basement was just one large room: a kitchen off to the side, then what seemed to be a dining and lounge area in the main space. A pink box of rotting donuts sat abandoned on the counter, not even flies daring to touch it any longer, and the long dining table was covered in a thick layer of dust, the matching dark oak chairs around it either tipped over or laid broken on the floor with either the seat fallen out or suffered a missing leg.

Further down the staircase, settled at the very base, laid the steel door to the bunker. When Evangeline asked why it was even there, König explained something along the lines of how Protestants had been the most prominent doomsday-preppers, and they built relatively sturdy blast shelters in fear of the sickness that was supposed to spread across the earth before the rapture would burst the heavens wide open and bring the believers up past the skies. She said that it didn’t make much sense, asking why they were afraid when they wanted to meet God, and König simply replied that there were plenty of mindless things that people do, stupidly great lengths that they’ll go to, when they’re afraid of death itself. And Evangeline couldn’t argue with that given her own circumstances that led her to that point, so she quietly followed him down through the door and into the bunker.

She noticed immediately that he’d kept it pretty clean. She didn't know how long he’d been there, but with the various clothing items strewn about the place, she’d wager that it had been a pretty long while. The walls were still white and pristine, only a few cobwebs in the corner. A punching bag was nestled safely in the corner of the living room, out of the way. There were clean plates stacked up beside the corner in the kitchen - of which was a whole separate, walled-off room, as opposed to her own bunker in which both the kitchen and the lounge room was smashed into one big room - and that signaled to her that there was running water. She didn’t ask before she waltzed over to the sink, stuck her head beneath the faucet, and drank from the pouring fountain like she was dehydrated in a desert and had just spotted a sprawling oasis. He said nothing about it, just walked past the entryway and began packing. When she came out after what felt like seconds but was probably over the course of a few minutes, she lingered in the doorway and started badgering him with questions.

Thus, Evangeline was soon kicked out of the bunker, and she took to wandering around the church. She crouched over the dead man and wondered for a while if he’d finally got his wish granted and had entered the heavens, then she stood and aimlessly passed through every aisle between the pews, reminiscing about a similar looking Evangelical church that her mother used to drag her family to every Sunday. Evangeline used to stare up at the big wooden cross above the arch of the raised platform as the pastor recited scripture and droned on about war and famine as people of faith both wept and nodded along, and she couldn’t help but drown in the fact that she couldn’t feel anything for it. She’d always preferred the visceral displays of Catholic and Orthodox iconographies, the gritty and palpably disturbing crucifixes with Christ’s body melted onto the cross and the anguished paintings of Mother Mary; the fear of God that was instilled into the onlookers of their art. Newer religions just couldn’t seem to face the death that was intrinsic to fate inscribed into every facet of the bible. Humility was the claim for the simple wooden depictions and icons, but it just felt like the lack of dirtiness and pain buoyed a fear of sincerity. It was too simplistic and clean. Evangeline was always drawn towards despair.

Getting bored, she walked out through the double doors and exited the church. It was getting too hot and stuffy inside of the building, anyway — the only air flow being the steady breeze carrying through the shattered windows.

It was hard to appreciate the beauty of foliage when it’s allowed to grow to its full extent when it seemed so outwardly wrong. Great, billowing Elm trees reach towards the clouds, the egregious broadening growth of green leaves and thick, old trunks hardly allowing for space for a body to squeeze between; making the Pitch-Pines seem tiny in comparison as they attempt to grow along the border and stretch through the wide branchings of the Elms. The smaller trees’ spindly limbs almost look like thin, aged fingers as they claw their way through the larger branches for any bare space of sunlight, far too naked when the sun can’t quite reach them and grow fuller leaves upon them. Bright green Sassafras plants and thorny blackberry bushes sprout along every square-inch of the soil, aiding in shadowing the forest even further than what the overhead of trees already covet. There were no longer any lumbering facilities to keep the overgrowth in check, and the trees were so livened by it that they just grew and grew, overpopulating and spreading seeds into the surrounding fields.

And with the lack of purposeful planting, the wild foliage did indeed expand out into the fields. Small trees made themselves obvious as they sprouted up just slightly up above the tall yellowed grasses, rising above the rest of the vegetation to be able to stretch up towards the sun. The grasses sway with the wind, like waves upon the water, and Evangeline is washed with the scent of wildflowers and vague pestilence – perhaps residual radiation. It was metallic and something she could only think of as electrical - sharp - and it did not belong amidst trees and flowers. It wasn’t naturally occurring.

She listened to the cacophony of songs waged by crickets rubbing their legs, chirping frogs, and buzzing cicadas as she went down the three steps of the concrete platform and wandered around the church. There wasn’t very much space between the outer wall and the grasses that she feared stepping into lest she still had to worry about snakes and ticks, but there was a path stomped down around the sidewall. Curious and bored, she followed it, and found that a water trough sat at the end, perfectly settled beneath the faucet attached to the wall. Plastic blue walls, deep enough that the top of the rim came to about the height of her hip. It looked like something that was used to feed farm animals, but the inside was fairly clean; the only dirt was around the outside, the bottom of the plastic likely muddied from heavy enough rainfall.

Evangeline tried the tap, twisting the spigot just to see. Something hitched inside the wall with a loud rumble, and then there was a grating sound. Finally, after all of the ugly sounds, water began pouring out with such a force that it initially sprayed everywhere before easing into a heavy, easy stream, creating a pool at the bottom of the tank. She quickly turned it off, afraid of being caught messing around and wasting water. She sighed, then left it alone. She spotted a cabinet on the ground, sat against the wall on the other side of the trough. She rounded the bright blue plastic, grass nudging her back, and just stared at the cabinet for a moment. Painted metal that was chipped away with rust around every corner; a veneered chestnut topside. She glanced around, ensuring that she was really and truly alone, and she was met with only the sound of fluttering bugs, brushing leaves, and grasses waving at her.

She wrapped her fingers around the metal handle of one of the doors and tugged, opening it much more slowly when rust scraped against metal, and she found only little travel-sized bottles of various soaps – shampoo, conditioner, body wash. She picked up a still-packaged bar of soap from the top second shelf and read the label, seeing that it was scented as cinnamon and vanilla, with hints of lavender.

Her eyebrows stitched together with confusion – she’d thought that it was a basin just for washing clothes, or something. She dug around some more, read a few more labels. Ivory, unscented; sandalwood and bourbon; shea butter and rose. The hair washes and conditioners were either flowery, unscented, or coconut scented.

And, as she grabbed the flowery scented ones - specifically plucking out the cinnamon, vanilla, and lavender-hinted bar - she wished that, whenever they had been in close enough proximity, she could’ve thought to gather what König chose to smell like. She couldn’t decisively guess, it could’ve gone either way. Maybe he didn’t want the aroma of faux scents at all, or maybe he chose the muskier ones just to boast his already overwhelming masculinity. Maybe he chose the flowery, feminine ones simply because they were easier on the nose. Maybe the cabinet was so filled with variety because he didn’t really like to bathe at all – and Evangeline had no room to judge, being that there hadn’t been enough water in the reservoir in the bunker for her to even fill a water bottle for a good few months. She’d been worried about getting sick if too much sweat and grime clustered on her skin, so she hardly moved from the sofa. She’d been sitting there for so long that the cushion wouldn’t fill back out even weeks after she’d moved into the bedroom.

She turned the spigot back on, didn’t jump at the cranking noise in the wall, and undressed as she waited for the trough to fill. She pulled her backpack off first, setting it carefully on the ground in front of the cabinet. Next was her ballcap, setting it carefully on top of her bag. She tugged out her hair-tie and let the locks fall down - though, being that it was unwashed, it didn’t really uncurl from the bun she’d tied it into; rather just fell loose - and set the black scrunchie on the rim of her cap. She pulled off her hoodie in the same motion that took off her shirt, then folded them together and set them on the flat surface of the cabinet’s topside. She struggled with pulling apart the double-knot of her sweatpants, but when she’d finally gotten it undone, she folded both pairs and set them on top of her hoodie, leaving room so that the bottles of soaps wouldn’t be knocked over. She kicked off her boots and rid herself of her sweat-soaked socks - thick and calf-high, so that she wouldn’t blister with all of her walking. The precaution didn’t really do much, because it just made her boots a size too small and her toes had been crushed for at least the past two hours.

She hesitated when it came down to stripping herself of her bra and boxers. She lingered around the basin, glancing every which way; peeking through the high windows that, if he really tried, he might be able to press hard enough on the glass that he could see her in the nude straight below.

But she really wanted a bath. She hadn’t realized how desperately she craved being clean until the opportunity arose – having convinced herself that she didn’t really need it, that there were other issues she needed to focus on, like eating and drinking and keeping the bathroom door locked tight.

She reached behind her back to unhook her bralette, letting the thin straps fall down her shoulders. The white, flower-laced fabric used to be tight against her chest, but with her long starvation stint, her chest had decreased rapidly in fat first. She was never especially gifted, but as she looked down at herself as she threw the bra overtop of her other clothes, she reminded herself of a pubescent boy. The proclamation lingered as she kicked off her boxers and instantly crawled into the bath, withholding a whine when she found that the water was freezing. It had risen to around her hips - the bones of which protruded with a horrific violence below her waist - and she leaned away from the pouring tap so that it wouldn’t spit on her arm.

The nuclear holocaust had taken its toll and Evangeline looked like a violently malnourished prisoner during World War II. She shivered in the water as it brushed against her lower waist, her stomach tensing up immediately. She rested her arms around the basin, up above the water as she clenched and attempted to get used to the coldness.

Finally, she grabbed a hold of her own petulance and strangled it by shifting her body forward, bending her knees, and dunking herself fully in. She shivered like ice had wrapped around her bones, but she remained under. She reached her arms up and dragged her fingers through her knotted hair, soaking the thick strands completely through. She scrubbed her face with her palms, carefully avoiding the bruise around her nose. When her lungs couldn’t hold any longer, she slid up above the water once more. The water had risen to just below her breasts, and she blinked the water out of her eyes to be able to find the spigot and turn it off. Her eyes burned, the grime turned back into liquid form as it sunk into the organs, and she rubbed and rubbed until it soothed just enough that she could reach behind her for the sleeve of her hoodie and dry them again. Afterwards, they still hurt, but she could keep her eyes open again, so she let her hoodie fall to the grass beside the basin and retrieved the shampoo.

Despite the cold, the experience was otherworldly. She hadn’t realized how truly disgusting she’d been until she pulled her hands away from her hair and the suds had been brown. She could feel the bits of dirt as she scrubbed at her scalp. She dunked her head again, washed away the soap, and then started the whole process over for a second time. The water was filled with bubbles and dirt fell to the bottom of the bath beneath her. After the second round of shampoo, her hair had become too tangled and brittle to go for a third round, so she retrieved the conditioner instead.

Lavender and the sweet aroma of vanilla floated all around her as she dragged her fingers through her hair, the ability possible with the strands softened by the conditioner. The brands couldn’t have been anything good - likely just stuff stolen from a hotel or something - but it worked well enough. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been able to drag her fingers through her hair, nor the last time the tresses felt soft. She pulled a lock over her shoulder, wanting to actually see the way that her newly-clean fingers could drag through the shiny, dark-chocolate shaded tresses. She thought of the way that her mother used to bathe her as a child, how she used to drag her manicured nails across her scalp in such a soothing manner that the girl would nearly fall asleep amidst the steam and boiling-hot water. Evangeline used to always be jealous of her mother’s naturally long nails, how they weren’t brittle and were strong enough to not be weakened by being steeped in water. Her own used to always break every chance they got. And even post-apocalypse, she’d bite at them until they’d bleed, ignoring the dirt caked beneath because she was hungry and she could gnaw at herself when she’d finished the last can of pork-and-beans and needed to preserve the other various cans for the coming weeks.

Her mother used to always smell like cake. Evangeline remembered how she used to sneakily use the expensive vanilla-scented bodywash in the shared shower, covering up the overwhelming scent of it by washing her hair with the pungent flowery soaps. But she could smell the cake on her skin when she stepped out, still dripping water, and it smelled like the warmest thing in the world. When she was younger, she used to sit on the end of her mother’s bed, side-by-side with her then-toddler sister, and watched as their mother would get dressed in the most elegant, sleek-black dress and donn a necklace of pearls as prepared for a date night with her father. She’d spray a rosey perfume on her wrists and the back of her neck, bending down to spray the back of her knees and inside her ankles. Then she’d turn around and spritz the children’s necks before stowing away the bottle again in the glass tray atop her vanity. There would be a box of chicken nuggets waiting for the children in the freezer, bought in preparation for Evangeline’s night of babysitting.

Her parents would return in the dead of night, drunk off cocktails and vodka shots; holding each other up as they stumbled up the stairs. And Evangeline would be watching from her spot on the sofa, her little sister’s head on her lap as she slept; stewing with jealousy. She loved them, and she knew that they loved her, but she wanted to be loved like her father loved her mother; like her mother loved her father. She felt it so deeply that her stomach twisted and her teeth ached from clenching her jaw so hard. She wanted someone to fall in love with her vanilla scented skin, wanted someone to taste her and feel her and know her. She wanted someone who would understand her jealousy that felt so disgusting, desperate, and violent. She always wanted more, more, more.

But she could only prance out to the front of the house in her pale blue bikini and pray for the eyes of the neighbor boy. She thought that eventually he would come up and talk to her, ask her out to the diner in Warwick. She thought that he might take her in his ‘75 sky-blue Dodge Ram and drive her out to the reservoir that all of the other teenagers snuck off to past curfew, drunk and swimming in love. She was a child, and she thought that she had a whole lifetime ahead of her, so she just waited for him to come to her.

She let the conditioner soak in her hair as she grabbed the bar of soap off of the cabinet. She unwrapped the waxy paper from it, tossing it over into the grass, and then she dunked the bar in the water and slid it along her arms. Her limbs slickened, she bent her knees up to drag the bar along her legs, avoiding the soaked gauze still wrapped around her thighs. She’ll have to ask König to replace it, lest she risk nearly passing out again. She’d bothered him with questions to the point that he kicked her out of the bunker, but she didn’t think she could test his patience even further than when he stuck his finger down her throat and helped her throw up. He felt tender, in a back-and-forth, hot-and-cold way.

It was odd the way that her body tensed when she dragged the bar around from her back and to her stomach. She could feel that stranger-man’s hands on her again with such vividness that he could’ve still been touching her. She didn't care about it around her knees, despite the way that she remembered his knuckles brushing down her inner thighs as he tugged her pants down. But the memory was only recalled when she touched her stomach.

She abandoned the bar and scrubbed at her skin, washing away the dirt over her arms. The white suds turned as murky as the water had become. She washed her legs, her back, around her neck and face again. She didn’t touch her stomach. She couldn’t rid herself of the ache in her chest, despite how nothing had ever even truly happened. Still, even just the memory dredged up the sheer petrification she’d felt just hours prior. She wanted it gone, she wanted to be clean of it, but even as the soap rinsed all of the grime from her body, she couldn’t stop feeling dirty.

She slid down and dunked her full body under the water again, only her pale knees peeking up to show that anyone was in the trough at all. She listened to the water as it sloshed around her head like the champagne in the flute she’d been given at Christmas dinner after she turned fifteen, jostled with her movements. She couldn’t shake the dull ache from her chest, the blood that streamed from it and twined with the surrounding liquid. She wondered if she could reach in and rip her bones out of her body through the hole in her thigh and wash those clean, too, so that she might get rid of the dirtiness. The filth was inescapable and stifling.

”Evie?”

And she thought of her mother. As her dark locks swarmed all around her heat, soft and weightless within the water, she envisioned her mother’s bleached blonde, cropped and perfectly styled hair. It contrasted with her dark eyes, the same color that Evangeline had inherited, while her little sister and father sported chestnut stresses and hazel eyes. The girl used to sit in the empty barber’s chair as her mother sat beside her, beneath the toiling hands that touched up her dark roots. She used to love that Evangeline looked just like her, boasting how pretty the girl was at friends’ summer barbecues or holiday dinners with the extended family as she brushed perfectly manicured fingers over Evangeline’s soft nose and cherub cheeks. She wondered what her mother would think if she saw her so emaciated now; sunken face and exhausted eyes, the perpetual redness on the tip of her nose – the purple bruise blooming across the bridge of her nose.

”Evie!”

When her little sister was still too young to really from proper sentences, Evangeline insisted that she call her Evie, speaking it in little hushed tones even just as the baby turned and cooed in her pale pink swaddle, laid in her crib with the spinning fairy mobile over her head. Evangeline wasn’t supposed to be in the room, she was supposed to let the baby nap, but her mother was busy outside on the porch, smoking a cigarette as she chatted with her friend through the landline phone; the swirling green cord closed between the door and the frame. The nickname caught on with her mother and long after her sister had started speaking and reading fuller sentences, but her father still always said either her full name or Eve, saying it was because she was the first girl he’d had. It had been his choice, after all, to name her.

”Verdammt noch mal– scheiße, please don’t make me try to say your full name.”

German. She recognized it, and it didn’t belong in her dream, and she rattled out of the daze she’d accidentally fallen into. Her body shot up with a heaved gasp, her arms instantly crossing over her chest for some lame attempt at covering herself. She wasn’t even sure if he could see anything below her neck over the rim of the tub from his point all the way at the end of the path, just past the corner of the church – but she did it anyway, knowing how she must’ve looked like a risen corpse in a coffin. Her wet hair spilled down her back, water streaming down her spine and all down her face.

She blinked through the water and ignored the uncomfortable way her hair was sticking to her face, and hastily questioned, “What? What happened?”

“We can set out now, if you’re all done trying to drown yourself,” he told her. He stood idly at the end of the path, relaxed.

“I wasn’t– okay.” She cut the argument off before it ever really started, not wanting to sully her freshly clean face with harsh words. König looked at her for a moment longer, his gaze dancing all around her face, down her neck and across her bare shoulders, then promptly turned and disappeared back behind the wall. A blush had bloomed all the way up from her collarbones and to her cheeks, burning violently. He was observing a girl in the bath – nothing inherently intimate about his gaze. And the simplicity of that indisputable fact flushed all throughout her body.

 

“These are way too big– no offense.”

“None taken. Would you prefer letting dirt get through the big hole in your other pants and risk infection?”

Evangeline stood in front of König in the main aisle between the church pews leading up to the platform. She was dressed in just her ratty, too-large, grey Indianapolis 500 tee that she’d stolen from her father’s trip to the Nascar raceway back in ‘88, paired with her even rattier, freshly torn sweatpants – having used her hoodie to dry her hair and body. König offered her a pair of untorn, black joggers, but when she held them up, she didn’t think she could roll them up enough, let alone bunch the drawstring up without severely scrunching the inner lining. Granted, the sweats she’d adorned up until that point were oversized, but her father wasn’t more than a foot taller than her – likely only a few inches, if she could remember exactly the way she’d looked up to him. They also weren’t egregiously loose: she’s sure that she would get the black fabric caught on something without looking and tear a hole in the pristine, new pants, anyway.

“Just stuff the legs into your boots,” he continued, gesturing towards her feet.

“I just think they’re just too big to even do that,” Evangeline muttered, holding up the pants again. The ankles only brushed around the floor when the waistband was up at her chest. They were meant to be baggy, even around his large frame. But the fabric was comfortably thick, the tag boasted 100% cotton – and were worn enough to feel even softer than they were whenever he’d gotten them. She also didn’t particularly want to wear the same pants that she’d nearly been raped in again - that being the same reason that she’d discarded her boxers - but she only had jeans stuffed into her backpack and she no longer had a belt with a hole punctured far enough in that would keep them up.

Thus, she finally embarrassingly acquiesced, “Fine, turn around. I’m not wearing underwear.”

König stared at her for a moment that went on just slightly too long, his gaze burning holes into her face as her cheeks heated up with every passing second. She’d blame it on the summer dryness. He was silent - too silent - as he slowly turned on his heel and faced the bible stand atop the platform. Her cheeks could’ve caught fire with how hot they burned as she kicked her boots off in the same rapid movement that she pulled her drawstring loose. She wanted it to be fast, over and done with so that she wouldn’t have to suffer being naked in his presence for the second time within the span of fifteen minutes, and she hopped around on one foot to tug off her pants as quickly as possible. She kicked the second leg away from her, then hastily pulled his sweatpants up her legs so roughly that her nails scraped up the sides of her legs.

She cinched up the drawstring, the fabric punching around her waist, then said, “Okay, you can look again,” as she bent down to try and roll up the legs in a way that won’t suffocate her calves when she put on her boots again.

“See?” She looked up as he reached out towards her, his flattened, pressed fingers pointing to her body. “Not so bad, you look great. Schönes, hübsches Mädchen.”

“I don’t know what that means,” she stated the obvious in an offhand manner, looking down again to smooth out the folds around her ankles.

He moved around, retrieving her boot that she’d flung out beneath one of the benches while she stepped into the other. “It means you should say ’thank-you,’ ” he said, bending to place her boot up right in front of her foot.

She gave a displeased grunt, her face instantly scrunching up as she stepped into the second boot, forcing her way into it when the pool of fabric around her ankles fought against the rubber. Her blatant chagrin relaxed back into plainness when the expression hurt the tender skin around her nose. “Thank you,” she wound up obliging, annoyance still clear in her tone.

After she was standing up straight again, he took another step closer to her, crossing whatever boundary that had kept them at least a few feet apart since the gas station. When he was directly in front of her, just inches apart, her breath hitched inside of her chest as he reached out to cup her jaw and tilt her chin upward.

He hummed, seemingly uncaring for the proximity, as his thumb brushed the flesh around her nose. Even through the leather, he felt hot. He was gentle, but the touch still sent shockwaves deep into her skull, the pain within her nose thrumming even more painfully. “Du siehst aus wie eine Puppe,” he said in a quiet murmur, then asked, “Does it hurt?” She stared up into his eyes, searching for any inkling of some sort of greater meaning, but his focus was settled down on her nose.

“Yeah, kind of a lot,” she answered, her voice low but not as soft.

“Does it feel broken?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never broken it before. It just hurts.”

He hummed again, then pulled back so that he could start unstrapping the steel brace from his wrist. Evangeline watched, stunted as he expertly unbuckled the first leather strap and pulled it undone. Her fingers twitched, hung limply at her side. The warm aroma of general musk emanated from his close body – sandalwood and something like fresh rain; pine, but real pine, like he’d been in the woods, and vaguely the slightest hint of cinnamon. There was a smidge of something metallic and sharp, maybe radiation, maybe gunpowder — she thought it could be blood, more likely. She breathed it in quietly. Then, she took it upon herself to lift her hands and start tugging at the leather around his fingers, gently aiding him in removing his glove as he focused on the bracer. She heard him sigh, soft and soothed. Watched as it rose from his chest and was breathed from his nose, just barely noticeable, if she hadn’t been paying such diligent attention to everything about his body as he loomed over her.

She slid the glove off easily as he loosed the second leather strap, and then she was holding both items so that his hands would be free to touch her face. One hand held around her jaw again, tender, while his bare hand pressed along her face again, able to feel the bruise without the barrier of leather. He pressed in on the flesh surrounding her nose bridge, and she siphoned a great deal of effort into not jolting away. He felt along her nose, observing; calculating.

“Noses are all soft bones– cartilage,” he commented. “Very easy to break. Probably the easiest in the whole body.”

Pain ricocheted around her entire skull when he roughly pinched around the bridge of her nose and pushed to the right. Everything snapped: the bones, the flesh, she thought something might’ve popped up near her forehead. She couldn’t withhold the immediate pained cry that ripped out of her mouth as she instantly pulled away from him – out from his hands, stepping backwards a couple of steps. She dropped the glove and piece of sleek steel as her hands flew to her face – not touching, just covering. Her eyes darted up to him, her brows drawn together so fiercely that it tensed her forehead.

“What the hell?” she cried out – angry, bewildered, and very much in pain. “What was that for?”

He was calm as he bent down to retrieve his glove and bracer. “I set it for you. Now it can heal properly, and you won’t lose the nice, smooth slope.”

She breathed, the pain still thudding around the entire front of her face; across every single feature. It felt worse than it had before, and she thought she might’ve been willing to gain a bump in the bridge of her nose if she didn’t have to feel like she’d just gotten cracked in the face again.

But then she might’ve lost her resemblance to her mother. If she just looked in a mirror, she wouldn’t forget her face, even if time should pass so far as to exceed the amount of time she’d spent without her mother than with.

“Oh,” she breathed, hushed as a mouse. She cleared her throat and rolled back her hunched shoulders just as König was fixing the second leather strap of his bracer. “Thank you, I guess.”

He waved her off before turning, retrieving his pack from where he’d left it on the pew. It looked heavy: adorned with little satchels and a dark grey sleeping bag strapped to the bottom. A pistol was nestled in a holster on the side above the pocket holding a steel canteen - a glock, she thought, if she could recall everything she’d read in the weapons magazine she’d reread over a hundred times over whilst trapped in the bunker - and the black metal glinted in the sunlight as he passed through the dusty, glittering streams to walk back to her. His rifle was hung on his back, the narrow barrel of which that pointed up beside his head. A double-barrel shotgun was smaller, but the barrels’ steel still rose above his opposite shoulder.

“Suppose we’ll leave now, then?” he asked. She hadn’t realized just how true the saying of ’the eyes are the windows to the soul’ really was until he looked at her.

She stuck her thumbs beneath her backpack straps, weighed down just over the wings of her collarbones. “Yeah, sure,” she said, then spun around to begin walking back down the aisle. She abandoned her old tattered sweatpants on the floor, never even passing the pile of discarded fabric a second glance.

Intuition bloomed, and she thought she might’ve felt his stare steady on her back, but she didn't give voice to the idea. It was promptly dismissed from her mind as she pushed out of the double doors and walked down the steps. They leave the church behind, backs to the large cross above the doorway without a single thought given to it.

The sun was high overhead, hours wasted now from the journey she’d intended to accomplish within the day. Far beyond the forest, lying even higher above than what the trees could touch, dark, puffy clouds rolled in from the east.

Chapter Text

“When I’m far from home – Don’t call me on the phone, to tell me you’re alo–one–”

Evangeline fiddled with her handheld radio, spinning the antenna receiver around to configure the perfect spot to rid the radio of the static and glitchiness that cut off the Billy Idol song quietly humming through the speaker. The twinkling, magical sound of early ‘80’s techno filled the silence around her, drifting around easily throughout the surrounding noise of wildlife and breezes through the passing fields; drums and Billy Idol’s richly deep and velvety voice singing through the whinging guitar and the steadily thumping beat amidst her soft footsteps atop the pavement and König’s crushing, stomping footfalls in front of her. It was set to the same station that her boombox in the bunker was, and she waited for the message about Somerville to repeat in between the music sets. She didn’t know where the frequency was precisely coming from, but as they walked down route 78 and headed further towards the town of Orange, there was less static filtering through than there was when she was in the shelter. The full song came through now, albeit in a glitchy manner – rather than how entire sentences would get lost in bouts of white electricity when she was further up near the border of Vermont.

“It’s eas–sy to deceive – It’s easy t-t-t- tease, but hard to get release–”

She didn’t pay attention to where she was walking. She could see her feet well enough in her peripheral vision beyond the radio, so she could avoid the larger rocks, step around the potholes in the road, and still devote all of her focus onto the antenna. She’d tripped over a car battery at one point and severely stubbed each of her toes even through her thick boots and thicker socks, but that was the extent of her fumbling. König walked a few paces ahead of her, holding open her map in both his hands and observed the lined path she’d marked in red pen from Warwick down to New Salem. Down 78, cutting briefly to the right onto west main street when it came into Orange, then straight down 122 that fed into highway 202 through the center of the town. She’d circled a point north of New Salem, two question marks beside it – right where she assumed Somerville must be. North of New Salem, west of 202 was scrawled around the text over the town, Reservoir too far, written in the empty green space indicating a forest between the Quabbin Reservoir and the greyly represented town.

”–(Les yeux sans visage) Eyes without a face – Got no human grace – You're eyes without a face–”

Finally, she twisted the receiving antenna sound to the perfect spot, and the music was uninterrupted as it came through the speaker. She ripped a bite from the jerky stick that König had given her after they’d first set out, the dry, seasoned beef flavoring the pooling saliva beneath her tongue as she chewed before swallowing. When she asked how it was safe after he had wordlessly handed it to her, he informed her that he found it with a stash of other air-dried snacks in an abandoned bunker underneath a military base. She’s since devoured two long sticks within the hour between leaving the church and encroaching upon Orange, and her stomach only hungered for more, not giving way to nausea.

“When you hear the music, you make a dip – Into someone else's pocket, then make a slip – Steal a car and go to Las Vegas – Ooh, the gigolo pool – Hanging out by the state line – Turning holy water into wine – Drinking it down–”

The beat turned up a notch, rougher, and the voice followed it in tune. It was more upbeat, and with the success of tuning the radio so perfectly, a slight bounce filtered into Evangeline’s step. The overall silence that the world had fallen to was gone with the piped music, and it was no longer so disorienting. She was born being used to the sounds of cars rumbling down the road outside of her bedroom window and planes flying overhead; people walking down the street and filling up diner seats, the shouting and talking always echoing throughout her school. Everything had gone quiet after the bombs blew through the country, and only the white noise of buzzing insects remained. It seemed deafened.
She took another bite from the beef stick as a tiny, proud smile just barely twitched up the corners of her lips. It was wobbly and uncomfortable, the muscles having gotten so used to constant frowning that they refused to truly lift. Still, the joy didn’t let up. Reverie and mellow nostalgia was cast upon her mind, the memory of when her mother would dance with Evangeline and her sister around the kitchen as the same song played from the stereo in between the station hosts giving repetitive, dull speeches about the stagnant war. Nothing new had progressed, but the hosts wanted to sound profound and intelligent, like they were the only people keeping the listeners up to date on recent politics, so they slightly morphed the interval talks before setting forth a new stream of upbeat pop music that bid the listeners to forget whatever had been said.

“Say your prayers, say your prayers, say your prayers – ooh–”

“Not sure if we should go through the city, Häschen,” König suddenly stated, his warm, thickly accented voice cutting through the stream of music. He began folding the map back up and continued, “Might be safer to go around, through the woods.”

Evangeline looked up from her radio and to his back, finishing chewing as she watched the way his back subtly contorted on the other sides of his backpack; the lift of his shoulders shifting as he moved his hands to carefully fold the map at his front. She swallowed, then said, “It’s just a town. It looks bigger on the map.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he told her. “Any cluster of buildings will hide raiders inside.”

“Can’t you just snipe them down beforehand, or something?”

He sighed like he was reminiscing a fond memory, “A very enticing idea.” He turned slightly to hand her the map again, never halting his steps. She took it back, crushing together both the neatly folded map and the radio in one hand so that she could keep her other hand wrapped around the jerky stick. “Unfortunately, I am not the greatest sniper, and I do not especially feel like barreling through an uncountable gang of raiders right now.”

Perplexed, “Huh? What about the gas station?”

“Luck,” he said simply, shrugging as he fully twisted straight forward again. “The army did not think me suitable for it, but now I can do whatever I like. You are very lucky that the bullet just barely missed the back of your skull and shot through the side of the man’s head instead. I was practicing.”

Evangeline couldn’t fight back the immediate, instinctual shiver that tracked a chill from the bottom of her spine and up to the base of her skull. “I thought that was intentional, it seemed precise,” she muttered.

“Nein. I was aiming for the space between his eyes, and then he moved. I pulled the trigger on impulse.” Evangeline stayed quiet, percolating the prospect that she’d just narrowly evaded death simply because of an advantageous fluke, and König took the heavy silence as an opportunity to continue, “I do not regret what happened, of course. I just wish it was a cleaner kill.”

Evangeline crumpled up the newly emptied plastic wrap and shoved it into her pocket with the other trash, still unwilling to litter even when it didn’t really make a difference anymore amidst all of the plastic water bottles and gas cans already carelessly strewn all along the road; the bags trapped by tall grass in the ditch.

“Well, thanks anyway, I guess,” she said bitterly, reaching back to stuff the radio in the small side pocket of her pack, keeping the volume up just enough so that she could still hear the quiet music. She kept hold of the map, just in case. Paul McCartney's airy, easily recognizable vocals began, the soft rock beat of Here, There, and Everywhere soon starting. She remembered how obsessed her father used to be with the entirety of The Beatles discography; Revolver always being placed in the record player and softly echoing around the entirety of the house on tranquil weekends in.

She reached forward to tug on the zip of König’s bag for the fourth time in their journey down the road, digging around to free another beef stick. He hasn’t fought her on her semi-selfish, craven plundering once, just continuing on his way forward as she zipped the pocket closed again. Peeling the plastic back, she asked, “Wouldn’t it be better to go through the town, though? I imagine it’s a lot easier to get lost in the woods, and we won’t be able to really gauge if anyone’s around.”

“It’s a risk, but I am very good with navigation and sight. It is why I wanted to do recon sniping when I joined the military. Hearing, also — the other song: that was French, yes?”

He wasn’t lying, evidently: the volume on the handheld was only up so far as to allow Evangeline to discern the dull beat beneath the quiet voices. The music should’ve been equivalent to hushed whispers as he walked ahead of her. “Yeah,” she answered, “I think it was just repeating the English phrase in the chorus.” Visage was easy to understand the meaning of, but the other words were vaguely understood as blurred garble she tried to recall her mother’s French language book.

“It is,” König affirmed bluntly.

“You speak French too, now?”

“Only enough to understand what is being said, I cannot string together sentences. The French were in Austria for a very long time even after the country was independent, and then obviously still in the west of Deutschland and Berlin when I joined the army.”

As the sun beat down on them, slight clouds inching across the sky from the east, Evangeline asked, “What was it like?”

“Austria?” he inquired, and she gave an affirming mhm as confirmation. She stared at his back, the way his pack jostled with every step forward as he stayed quiet for a moment. “...Hungry,” was his blunt answer. It was brusque and simple. Somehow, that made it even more difficult to fully reconcile; the direct clarity piercing through her chest.

She remembered sitting up high on the staircase one night, eavesdropping on her parents as they listened to the radio and discussed the world’s events. Before Austria was established as a sovereign state entirely disassociated from both Germany and the Union, the constant deliberations and arguments from figureheads on both sides as the people starved, relying heavily on foreign aid as the farms struggled to produce anything and the economy withered from the money drained into reparations for World War II. Even when Austria was finally pulled out from both Soviet and the ally’s occupation way back in ‘55, they’d yet to fully bounce back. The farms continued suffering from a produce shortage, and the state treaty still provided the USSR with collectivized control over the oil refineries and agriculture, courtesy of the accord’s base being the Moscow Declarations that iterated ongoing financial contributions for its participation in Hitlerite Germany. Austria was still the same backwards serfdom whilst Russia was devoting all of its focus into keeping industrialization steady — Khrushchev and the later Gorbachev keeping the country busy with slave labor both in the Union countries and its own gulags, despite both leaders denouncing of the predecessor who had built that economic reliance. Thirty-four years down the line, the United States was washed with atomic waste spanning across the entire country, and all information coming in from the eastern bloc was cut off at the bone.

She wondered if that was the reason why he didn’t protest when she kept stealing snacks out of his bag.

A question bloomed in the bright light inside of her mind. “Have you been able to reach anyone outside of here?”

“All communications stopped after the first year, even from the inside,” König said. His voice was sort of distant, like he’d already reconciled defeat but it still laid heavy. She saw his arm raise, his hand reaching up to lightly adjust his helmet; a nervous twitch, if she had to guess, considering the way that the touch never achieved much of anything aside from easing his discomfort with idle fiddling. “Even if I could find a working radio tower, the frequency wouldn’t stretch far enough.”

Controlling is what he’d called the current state of the military. Dictatorial is what he’d agreed to consider it. She silently pondered the idea of the two statements coinciding in some way, but didn’t outwardly voice it. It sounded like he’d been abandoned somewhere down the line, if not directly spurned from whatever order remained of the military – but she withheld the desire to pry when König suddenly stopped walking. It was so instantaneous that Evangeline bumped into him, her face smashing against his backpack. She’d just barely managed to turn her head just in time before her nose was smushed with her cheek against the sharp ammo boxes he’d stuffed into the front pocket.

“Wh-“

“Turn off your radio.”

Evangeline listened as she stepped up to his side, reaching back to press the switch down and promptly cutting off Space Oddity from playing for the sixth time that hour. She thought that whoever was messing around with the mix at the radio station wasn’t very good at their job as she looked up at König, then turned her head to try and find whatever he was looking at. Somewhere in the distance came the sound of gunfire, a fight happening within the depth of the closely-knit, crumbling buildings, everything coated in a thin layer of dust from falling rubble. Even the painted buildings looked dull as it peeled up, unable to weather the harsh weather for too long without consistent touch-ups, and revealed the plaster beneath. Even that was chipping away and falling to the dirty, trash-ridden streets, minuscule particles picking up with the breeze and getting caught around the buildings. Multiple chapels throughout the town pointed upwards towards the barred heavens, rising above the other buildings with a sad sort of decaying determination.

Her gaze met the forest curling around the left side of the town, down across Millers River. From their place at the top of the hill, they had the perfect view of the sparse trees that were burnt and thin, leafless and crippled as they lingered around the gaping crevice in the center of the forest; bent in odd shapes and the bark stripped and peeling clean off from the nuclear blast that had charred the immediate location, leaving only soil and ash in its wake. The explosion-made hole was so deep that she couldn’t even spot the center, but she could see splintered chunks of silver, soot-coated metal sparsely thrown around the devastation. The nearest line of buildings were completely wrecked, fallen apart into both large pieces of stone and smaller bits of rubble when the blast shook the earth with enough violence that it ripped the homes and diners and apartment buildings apart by the foundation – and the utter ruination gradually faded out into the larger part of the town that looked far less dilapidated in comparison. When a breeze pulled through, she knew without a doubt that the odd metallic smell was radiation, and that it came solely from the blast site.

“Shit,” Evangeline uttered.

“Scheiße,” König mimicked in his mother tongue, frustration quickly seeping from his form. He then turned around, facing her to slide the map from her hand and open it once more. “Maybe between, less buildings to hide in around there– fucking Flughafen.”

“Between Orange and Athol?” Evangeline questioned, idling up beside him and cocking her head to the side to look down at the map. Neither of them pulled away when her shoulder pressed up against his arm, just above his elbow. Half-covered by her oversized tee, she could feel the soft mix of nylon and wool of his dark long-sleeve; the Austrian flag patch on his upper arm catching strands of her loose, still-drying hair floating around with the wind. “That’s probably fine. It’ll take longer, and there's a couple of things down main street, but it wraps around far enough away from the thick of the town. We could go down the other side of the highway and still wind up back on two-oh-two.” She still remembered traveling around the twin towns, how together they would make a pretty, old-looking city on the river, yet remained separated.

“Yes, were it not for the fucking airport right there,” he replies, his tone rough all around the edges. He smacked the back of his hand to the map, hard enough to dent the paper but not to puncture it, and Evangeline took the thin sheet back.

As she watched him take a few steps away from her in order to freely pace around with his hands on his hips, she began folding the map back up. “What’s wrong with the airport?” she asked, innocent concern written across both her face and her words as he fitfully stomped around.

“Crawling with raiders,” he informed her brusquely. His eyes were deadset focused on the road below him. She could almost hear the gears spinning and grinding inside of his head, smoking as they were pushed past their limits. He walked a few steps, spun on his heel, walked it back, then spun around again – and repeated it.

“We’re only going past it,” Evangeline tried to soothe. If the Herculean man in front of her was throwing a fit worrying about it, then it must be a really rough area. “The side road’s pretty far away from it.”

“Yeah,” he sighed, passing his erratic pacing as he lifted his hand up beneath his long cowl and presumably pinched the bridge of his nose, attempting to ease his own distress. Evangeline could catch a glimpse of the way his eyes closed through the moving ragged cuts in the fabric for eye-holes. “Okay, yeah. Just… make sure your hands are open to grab your revolver if you need it.”

Evangeline stuffs the map back into the side of her pack, shoving it haphazardly around the handheld radio, then raises her palms out to him. She shakes her hands a little bit, dramatically displaying their freedom as a small smile tweaks up the corners of her lips. “All free,” she says.

König tipped his head down the slightest centimeter, his bright cerulean eyes settled warmly on her face, and he praised, “Good Häschen.”

She couldn’t fight off the blush that heated her cheeks. She still didn’t really know what the nickname really meant, but he spoke it like it was endearing, soft — as opposed to the way it was almost addled with venom every other time he’d referred to her with it. He turned to start walking back towards Orange, and she diligently followed behind, busying her trembling hands by shoving her fingers underneath her backpack straps and clinging to the dense fabric.

He turned his head, glancing at her from over his shoulder as he lifted his arm and beckoned her forward. “And walk beside me. We are a pair, I am not your protector.”

Evangeline hastened forward, falling in-step with him as he slowed his pace to accommodate her much shorter legs. “You said you’d help me get to Somerville without my head blown to smithereens,” she lightly contended.

“Yes, but the raiders don’t know that. We’ll seem as regular wastelanders to the guards that will likely be swarming around the compound.”

“What’s got you so worried? I thought you wanted trouble.”

“I may have… ehh,” he took a brief pause, cocking his head to the side further away from her. “…Killed some of them, but it was a very long time ago.”

“How long ago is that supposed to be?”

“Maybe more over the years, maybe it was a lot of them — maybe a few of the gang leaders. I might have been very drunk for most of it. I do not recall many details.”

Steadily growing more agitated, her head snapped to the side to send him a glare. “And you decided you’d lead me right through them?”

“Not intentionally— verdammt.” He shrugged off her irritation like it was an annoyance to him, rolling his shoulders back. He kept his gaze strictly on the road ahead of them. “I forgot about the bomb, I’ve seen too many of them, and everywhere. It was years ago I had last seen it, I kept to the other side of the town when I left Boston.”

Boston? she’d wanted to question; to dig into all of the gritty details of what that could possibly all mean — to pry it out from the depths of him with her fingers lodged into his chest. He’d said that it was military-governed, which would make sense when considering his own past, but what exactly had happened with it was still left in a deluge.

Instead, she says, “Well, it’s not like you’re super recognizable, or anything.”

He snorted a laugh; humored like it was instinctive. “No,” he added to her joke, “Not at all.”

 

The delve of the town is more rundown than what it appeared like from the top of the hill. They remained along the outskirts, passing by a bronze revolutionary war statue that had turned green and dull from oxidization; the uniformed man, pointed hat and all, riding a powerfully bucking stallion. It stood proudly at the entrance to the town just past the bridge over the water, a brick and concrete formation with Orange intricately carved into the center, since 1746 in smaller letters below it just on the other side of the statue. There was another similar statue situated in one of the parks depicting a soldier and a boy, erected in memory of the men who’d served in World War I. She remembered visiting it with her family as a sort of history lesson before going to lunch one afternoon, and Evangeline could recall the growling of her stomach and how irritable she’d been because she just wanted to eat. The mountain-like hill rose up high beside the road to the left of them like a towering border wall, keeping the passersby closed onto the road lest they be pushed over the river on the opposite side and into the inner town.

A cacophony of gun fire echoed around the span of the buildings, growing louder after they’d passed the sprawling Walmart laid out on the right side of the street, the wide space given for the plain architecture when the river briefly curled inward before winding back up and stretching straight towards Athol. There were still abandoned cars in the parking lot, some with the hoods stood up, stripped for parts – the guts haphazardly ripped out from the wires; some few that had crashed into each other in the alleys between spaces, likely due to people rushing to find shelter as the bombs fell. The people accidentally killed themselves before ever even suffering the blast billowing through the forest reserve hardly ten miles away, and Evangeline wondered if that might’ve been a blessing.

Between the hill crawling with too-tall trees and the river bordering the other side of the road, Evangeline felt suffocated. König walked beside her, blocking her from both the river and the town, and that felt stifling, too. Everything was crowding all around her. And the gunfire was still cracking throughout the town, resounding like flashes of lightning amongst raucous shouts and manic laughter the closer she and König encroached upon the airport.

After about a half an hour of walking at a decently consistent pace down main street - likely just a bit slower when Evangeline started slowing down but König wanted to keep at her side - he lightly tapped her arm with the backs of his fingers and guided her into a disheveled dive bar off to the side of the highway they were supposed to turn down. Entering through the door he held open for her, she immediately noticed that a hole was blasted through the wall on the side, bricks bursted through the center and rubble piled up in the opening, dust covering the booths and tables that had fallen over from the blast. The explosion in itself was unnecessary when the door worked just fine; a pointless, ignorant display of the inherent power within possessing the ability to destroy without consequences.

König stood in front of the bar counter, hidden away from the glass door and array of windows, while Evangeline immediately plopped herself down in one of the booths, her bones aching from walking for so long. They felt like they were falling apart by the joints and were actively dissolving into her bloodstream. She propped her elbow up on the table and nestled her chin on the palm of her hand as she looked out the window, her gaze landing on the curve of the airport. From her point of view, she could spot a few of the raggedy occupants: guards, by the look of their stolen camouflage, sandy beige bulletproof vests and muddy baseball uniform kneepads above heavily worn combat boots. Three in total, she guessed; one with a shotgun, another with a submachine gun, and the last with some sort of handheld weapon; all held ready to fire within their hands.

And fire they did, albeit at their own man — taking potshots at one of their comrades on the outskirts of the closed chainlink gate. The unsteadily built guard towers stood on front of either side of the gate, the wood swaying with the wind on shaky, thin stilts. Flags fraying around the edges fluttered with the breeze as they were nailed to the front of either tower, the red fabric lifting up and flapping around against the wood. She couldn’t see what the exact logo printed over the front was, but she could see hints of curving stitches sewn through the back of the flags.

Evangeline watched the guard hop around out of the way of bullets flying at his feet, a spray of fire from the rapid submachine gun passing all along just in front of his shoes. Villainous laughter cackled all down the road, filtering up at the bend where the dive bar sat. König busied himself with unbuckling and removing his helmet, then went on to lift the cowl up and off of his head. It unveiled only the black balaclava covering the majority of his face, but exposed more than what the draping fabric had. She turned her head to glance over at him when she heard the rustle of fabric, and was frozen by the vision of the lack of covering across the space around his eyes. She could see the way that she could see the roman arch of his nose bridge; could glaze her eyes over that perfectly smooth, arching curve through the thin nylon that stretched across the majority of the feature. His eyebrows were uncovered, and she noticed the boldness in the not-thin but not-thick, mostly straight lines – indicating deep brunette tresses that must lie atop his head. The shadowy shade contrasted heavily with the paleness of his eyes just below, making the blue seem brighter; more oceanic and pure. She could see the extent of the exhausted, dark purplish color of the immediately surrounding skin in the shallow hollows, and when he blinked as he folded up the cowl, longish, dark lashes brushed like butterfly kisses along the lower tired hollows.

And she realized that he was young, probably around her own age, when she noticed that his skin was devoid of aged wrinkles — not even the stress of being a soldier having worn on him; not even the ripples from having been a child of a war and poverty-stricken country upon his supple, pale skin.

She turned her head away again when she spotted the edge of a deep, still-pink scar curving up his sharp cheekbone that neared the outer corner of his eye. The rest of the crevice-like marring remained hidden beneath the balaclava curving around his lower face. It felt like something she shouldn’t have seen, despite the way he’d removed the cowl himself. She knew that facial wounds healed far better than any other part of the body, and if his injury left that deep of a scar, she couldn’t imagine what could've caused it – couldn’t imagine how bad it would have looked when it first happened.

Evangeline focused on the guards, attempting to deviate her attention from interloping thoughts. The victim-guard was shouting insults at the other two geared guards while they laughed in his face, then one raised their pistol again and landed a shot right between his feet. “Why would they torment their own guy?” she questioned in a low mutter, her words slightly muffled by the way her chin was settled in the palm of her hand. Her fingers tapped against her cheek in a slow rhythm.

“They are jumped up on meth,” König answered appeasingly, approaching her and using her much-less stuffed bag as the temporary placeholder for his mask, reaching behind her to tug open the main pocket and shove the bundle of fabric inside. “They huff petrol to strengthen the high, or they’re smoking PCP with it. All they do is rage and seek danger. It is all brainless, there is no sense you will find with raiders.”

“Is that why you’re disguising yourself?” she asked, looking up at him as he pulled away from her.

As he met her gaze, “As much as I can. I will not remove the vest, though. There will be confrontation so long as they remain out there, even if they don’t recognize me at all— whether it is with gunfire or just threats of it.”

He offered his hand out to her, helping pull her tired body up and out of the seat after she accepted it by curling her fingers around the side of his palm. Her shoulders were hunched forward as she walked with him out of the plundered bar, her body slightly slumped as her boots crunched over piles of broken glass with her heavy footfalls. He kept his weapons slung over his back, maintaining an air of innocence around them as they began winding down the road. Evangeline looked like a regular scavenger, perhaps coming down from a particularly hard, long high — while König gave off the impression that he was a hardened mercenary escort. He walked on her left, remaining on the side that the raiders were.

The airport had a short driveway leading down to the entrance gates, but it wasn’t long enough to keep the ‘wastelanders’ far enough out of view.

“You guys are a bunch of fuckin’ douchebags, I’m getting real sick of this bullshit.”

Still knee-deep in a tiff, the victim-guard had his back turned to the other two guards, standing on opposite sides of the gate: one on the left, one on the right. The one on the left seemed to be a woman, her long, ratty, dishwater-blonde hair tied in twin braids laid over her shoulders. Her jeans seemed like they were a size too small, the black, distressed fabric squeezing all up and down her legs; the cuffs only reaching just above the length of her boots. She was the only one of the three who didn’t have knee-guards, but she was the only one who wore an olive green army helm, its large size causing it to wobble as she adjusted her submachine gun in her arms. The woman looked smug as she smirked at the victimized-raider, who donned a full army uniform: green and yellow camouflage all across his body, the matching cap tight atop his head. A wooden sledgehammer was grasped in his hand, his fist squeezing around the long handle as the metal hammerhead dangled near his red sneaker-adorned feet. He wasn’t wearing as much armor as he should’ve been if he were a close-combat fighter, and Evangeline briefly wondered, as she made the mistake of shifting her eyes from the road and over to the group, if he was undergoing a humiliation ritual for initiation into the gang.

All of them looked dirty: grime and grease either smeared across their faces or all over their clothes. Track lines bruised at the woman’s elbows; the same marks obvious on the righthand guard’s neck, of whom looked like he was about two silent seconds away from nodding off as he swayed whilst standing still, his eyes half-lidded. Uniformed-guard was shaking and jittery with teeming energy as he bounced around in front of them, throwing his hands up in the air so harshly that he nearly dropped his own sledgehammer on his head.

The woman barked a laugh, her black teeth showing in her wide, awful grin. “You ain’t gotta be here if ya don’t wanna— hey, what the fuck?”

They were just finishing passing by the driveway when they were spotted. Both of them turned in synch, Evangeline idling up beside König when she realized that they weren’t going to escape without a few words with the raiders as they turned their bodies fully to face the gang.

The uniformed raider turns his head back just to glance at the newcomers, then fully jumps around in fear, walking backwards towards the raiders and nearly tripping over his own two feet. “Jesus-fucking-Christ,” he shouted, lifting his sledgehammer and holding it up with both hands. Despite seemingly preparing himself for a brawl, he lingered between his two compatriots, just in front of the gate. “Am I trippin’ balls, or what? Guy’s a fucking behemoth.”

“No way,” the woman laughed, her mirth filled to the brim with ill-intent. “Holy fuck, imagine the dick on that dude.”

The immediate diversion to careless raunchiness in their commentary made Evangeline blush, and the guards had taken notice.

As the woman continued cackling, the raider on the far right used his sawed-off shotgun to point at Evangeline, the barrel brushing up against his baggy, rust-orange cargo pants when he brought it up from where it was lax at his side. He was lazily grinning and she could see how his teeth were absurdly sharp, as if he had filed each of them into points. His voice was slow and dragged; airily slurred as he pointed out, “Hey, get a load’a the gal, too, Carmie. No way she’s takin’ all’at.”

“Quit fuckin’ pointin’ out the obvious, Rocky, ‘less you want me to fuckin’ blow your brains out right here,” the woman - Carmie - snapped at her companion, turning her head to shoot a dagger-like glare before diverting back to the ‘wastelanders.’ “So? Answer, girl. What is it? You can take all that?”

Evangeline’s face had gotten so red that she feared her head might explode. They must’ve gotten bored of tormenting the new recruit and decided to harass a couple of passersby, instead. She shifted uncomfortably, the gravel scuffing beneath her boots when she gave into a tiny, miniscule shuffle. The moment stretched out into a couple of seconds, and she couldn’t say anything. Her mouth wouldn’t open, lips stuck together like they’d been glued shut, and the raider was quickly growing more agitated — her wrinkled, sun-burnt skin pinching up lines in her face as her frown sunk deeper and her brows cinched together.

“She can,” König decidedly answered, stepping up to the plate when she couldn’t— and Jesus Christ, that was even more humiliating.

Carmie had instantly become completely irate, barking out, “Did I fucking ask you, you fucking m-“

“Yo, wait… a sec,” the slurring man - Rocky - interrupted, whatever drugs he’d consumed making his high take a much more soothing effect than whatever Carmie had taken. He didn’t seem anything other than visibly relaxed, even when Carmie looked at him like she was about to crack-out. “Wha’s that accent ya got? Tha’s an awful-ly familiar soundin’… sound.”

New-blood finally jumped in, commenting, “Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I ain’t heard it, but the boss was sayin’ somethin’ ‘bout like… French, right?”

“That Russian is always sayin’ somethin’ about the French ‘cause of the war, fuckin’ dummy,” Carmie cut in, jostling her gun around in her arms. She was aching to shoot something, and her gaze was deadset on König. “Remember those guys, said they were from Norway, or some shit?”

“Yeaaaah. We had those fuckers strung up for weeks out by the tarmac.”

New-blood piped up, “Was that those guys on the meat hooks, had all their guts pulled out of their asses?” Rocky smiled and nodded his silent affirmation, and he laughed as he continued, “That was evil shit, man. Rock on, brother.”

Carmie shook her head, annoyed by the banter, and looked back at König to order, “Yo, big man. Answer him.”

König stayed silent. Evangeline stayed silent. The raiders stayed silent, only the crunching of gravel as the new-blood kept shifting around on his feet. Something rattled inside of the submachine gun as Carmie adjusted the gun in her grip again. Rocky sighed, blinking long and hard. He swayed so far forward that he almost fell. Evangeline’s heart was pounding at the base of her throat, ready to pump and pump and leap right out of her mouth, but König didn’t say a word.

His hands twitched at his sides. Carmie opened her mouth and raised her gun, and Evangeline decided to start coughing.

Big, throat-shredding coughs; powerful enough to squeeze her lungs and stutter her breath intake. She doubled over, hands on her knees to increase the fraught scene. Her brows were creased together — false, pained tension all over her face. She gasped once inwardly, then coughed again. It was overly dramatic, but each of the raiders jumped an inch further back, the uniformed one bumping against the chain link fence and rattling the metal. Even the overly blitzed raider suddenly looked sober and awake.

“Whoa,whoa,whoa,” Carmie started, “What the fuck is that?”

Nodding-raider slowly questioned, “Iss-at the, uh… the- uhh…”

“That’s the fuckin’ AIDS I was talkin’ about!” cried the new-blood. “None of you bullshitters believed me, and now look! Rad-AIDS, crazier ‘cause of whatever the fuck was in the nukes— right in front of our eyes!”

His hand shook as he pointed at Evangeline, seen through her teary eyes as she glanced up just to truly check if her distraction was working. She was getting nauseous as she hacked up nothing, but she kept pushing. She gagged on air and reeled forward, then steadied herself and continued coughing again; every push of air like jagged rocks scraping up her throat.

Carmie’s gravelly voice rang out amidst the sound of sickness. “Well, I’ll just fuckin’ shoot ‘em then—“

“No, you fuckin’ moron! She-she’ll blow, like the bombs, then we’re all sick.”

“No way that’s fuckin’ real, yo.”

“Fuck you, I ain’t riskin’ gettin’ it. Fine- get-get the fuck outta here, you sick freaks! Go on— git!”

Carmie shooed them off, her outstretched hand manically waving around as König immediately wrapped an arm around Evangeline’s torso and carted her off.

She kept the act up as her feet dangled below her in tune with König’s fast-paced powerwalking, her heels bashing against his shins as she made herself limp. She covered her sputtering in the crux of her elbow all along the passing airport, encroaching faster upon the curve that wound into 202.

He set her down after they breached beneath the bridged overpass, the v-shape of the conjoining highways within sight as they stood in the middle of the road, a tavern off to the left and a gap of trees to their right — the airport a mile down backwards. She hadn’t stopped coughing, but she had slowed it down up until the overpass just in case the sound traveled far enough. She’d gotten very into character, to the point that she only stopped her hacking when König placed her back on the asphalt.

She was grinning manically as she dropped her arm, and she could tell that he was similarly impishly overjoyed by the way his eyes squinted and the blue of his irises almost glittered and shined — and especially when he spun her around with one hand on her shoulder and cupped her face in both hands.

Bent down to lean over her, he all but directly applauded as he praised, “You are a genius. I cannot believe how fantastically that worked— you are crazy, Häschen.” He lightly shook her head as he said it, completely buzzing with excessive energy, and she swayed her whole body with it.

“I know, I know,” she said through a big, proud smile. “That was my own lucky impulsive shot in the dark.”

“Nein, that was truly a smart decision, whim or no. You would’ve made a great undercover agent in the military.”

He was close enough that she only needed to press up on the tips of her toes to press her mouth over his beneath the mask — he only needed to bend just a few inches more to kiss her through the fabric. She was too aware of how free her hands were, and how easy it would be for her to gently graze her fingers along the masculine angularity of his jawline. He was crowding her with just his lumbering form, taking up all of her space, and she could only think of him.

And she wanted to. She wanted him to do more like a desperate, roaring hunger had possessed her. She wondered about the raiders' salacious harassment; what truths might’ve fallen out of their mouths like spittle.

Evangeline bashfully looked away. “I don’t know about that,” she giggled. “I’d probably already be dead.”

He backed off of her, a chill taking her body just as soon as his hands left her face. He walked backwards a step, arms raised out to his sides, and said, “That is why I am here. We make a good team.”

She nodded as her gaze drifted over to him again, incapable of saying anything else. He looked like a statue — not one of the revolutionary ones, but one she’d see in a museum in Rome; a statue of a great ancient god of war. Power and strength were carved into every line of his body, created by the very hands of God through devoted time and effort.

And all she did was pretend to be sick, not even prematurely knowing that denizens of the wasteland had already feared a devastating illness, yet he was worshipping her.

He started walking forward again, heading down the highway, and Evangeline followed. South towards Somerville: the place she sought, and that he decided to tag along for. A mutual following of each other through the haggard wasteland.

Chapter Text

The thunder began not long after reaching the long stretch of highway 202. It was quiet at first, rumbling somewhere far off in the distance; merely the precipitation of a storm. Being so gradual, it gave just the right amount of time for König and Evangeline to hurry on down the road, past the dull fields as the puffy, darkly-undersided clouds rolled over the muted skies, and skirt into the gravelled driveway of an old farmhouse.

The roof was caved in overhead the second floor, thus leaving the wooden, peeling white staircase coated in a thin layer of slick grime, but the floor itself granted a sturdy ceiling to the first floor. The rain sounded louder when it began falling down, being that there was only a thin layer of wood keeping it from dumping atop their heads — but it was a veil of protection, nevertheless. Neither was the storm entirely deafening, either: the downstairs room was still vaguely furnished, having a rotting sofa in the jutting sunroom with a television set across from it, a kitchen separated off across the way, and a dingy mattress in the corner of the main room — and all of it attempted to absorb the noisy rain, not allowing it to completely echo around the lower of the house. Evangeline ignored both the gross sofa and the grosser mattress, fearing getting sick from either copious amounts of mold or bedbugs, and laid out her sleeping bag on the hardwood floor in the center of the room after König dared trespass directly into the unwavering storm and search for wood to build a fire.

She snuck more beef sticks out of his bag that he’d left behind, pulling it intentionally next to her as she sat atop her sleeping bag just for that reason alone, and fiddled with her radio as she munched. She’d found a box of tea candles sitting in one of the lower cabinets beneath the kitchen counter, and used her lighter to set each of the twelve wicks ablaze after she’d placed them in groups of four around her little setup. The low glow provided a decent enough amount of warm, orange-toned light as the sun sank below the gloomy horizon, darkness having been exacerbated by the hastily encroaching rain. König’s rifle and shotgun were stood up against the wall next to the wall that dipped into the alcove with the sofa, the blackened steel glimmering in the orange light. Thunder thrummed out in the near distance, giving way to the instant crack of lightning that was so close that it rattled the weak homestead. It lit up the darkened sky like a spark that didn’t catch, as swift as it was fleeting. Evangeline jumped and released an instinctual frightened squeal, looking up from the handheld radio to glance around the room and ensure that nothing was on fire. She soon shifted to slide her legs underneath the weighted nylon as fear only left her with a chill in the aftermath. She gave up on the radio and beef stick momentarily, reaching over to her other side to pull open her own bag and pull out her hoodie. Once the oversized fabric was comfortably settled on her torso and slumped down to her hands, she diverted her attention back to the radio whilst borderline inhaling the stolen snack. The sweater still smelled like her bath, vanilla and lavender, along with the smell of petrichor, wafting throughout her senses as she sat.

She laid the radio down in her lap once the music began softly playing through the speakers without being fizzled with static, and she found that she missed watching tv. Movie nights with her family, even if they were rewatching her sister’s favorite cartoon movie for the third time she’d gotten to choose — even if it was when she was alone in her room on a weekend because she didn’t have many friends, still awake at midnight, and the only thing that wasn’t a rerun of something she’d already seen were old, overly dramatic Night Court episodes.

She missed going through her dad’s entire collection of Robert Redford movies for whole weekends at a time, strewn about on opposite ends of the couch with their own personal bowls of popcorn in their laps; her mother and sister already gone upstairs because they thought it was a bore. The only thing she could bond with her mother over watching was Magnum, P.I., and God, did she miss watching Tom Selleck.

The television opposite to the sofa in the lone farmstead was powerless, stuck on a permanently black screen, and Evangeline could only suffer the pitter-patter of rain and the low tunes coming from her radio.

Footsteps up to the door on the front porch, weighted, and her gaze snapped up to watch as the wood nearly swung off of its hinges as König kicked his way through, hardly struggling closing it again with another strong kick whilst his arms were full of both miniscule twigs and half-split logs. He had to bend as he entered, his helmet still just barely scraping against the top of the frame.

He came through the foyer and into the open space dripping water, wet prints left on the dusty floor by his boots. He dumped all of it into a noisy clatter a few paces away from Evangeline’s sleeping bag; some twigs snapping with the harsh weight of the fallen logs on top of them, some pieces rolling hardly a few inches away from him and knocking into the sidewall separating the room from the kitchen.

He groaned when he finally stood up straight, the eight-foot ceiling a grace granted by the heavens — which was a shock in itself, being that the homestead had to have been built in the earlier part of the century, when men couldn’t fathom the feat that was König’s height. He tilted his head back, rolled his shoulders, then slumped entirely down to a kneel. Evangeline bit another piece of meat off of the stick and chewed as she watched him begin to prop the logs into a proper pile, nearer to the miniature, windowed cove of the sunroom.

“Where’d you find chopped wood?” she questioned, lazily watching him build up an indoor firepit. She couldn’t imagine the smoke that would fill the room, black and choking — and yet the logs didn’t seem particularly wet.

Her suspicions were abetted when he told her, “There is a shed back by the trees. There was more, but I didn’t want to carry so much back here in the rain. And I am too tired.”

“Is the smoke gonna be bad?”

“I’m going to put it out after I cook our food,” he answered, devoted entirely to stacking up the wood properly. He spared her a single glance when he felt her staring, observed her cynical expression, and he amusingly offered, “The night will not get so cold that you’ll freeze to death, Häschen. Don't worry inside of your pretty little head.”

She huffed, pouting as she replied, “I’m already cold.”

“Get over it then, she-devil,” he brusquely returned, placing another piece of wood atop the layer of twigs and finagling it so it wouldn’t promptly roll away. He diverted his focus just briefly to wave over at her general area, offhandedly saying, “Grab the sweater from my bag, the wool will keep you warm,” before he went back to his tedious ministrations.

She watched him for a moment longer, fixated on the way that his hands could maneuver the logs so easily - fixated on the way that he still clearly cared about her wants and needs whilst being overtly mean about it - before she tore her eyes away and diverted towards the oversized tactical backpack.

It felt like prying, in a way, as she tugged the zipper to the main middle pocket up, over, and down to allow the fabric to open. She’d taken it upon herself to non-sneakily open up the small outermost pouch to thieve snacks from, but the main section of the bag was filled with tokens of his life. It wasn’t hers to rifle through. And yet, he’d so genially offered it up to her, and she wasn’t regretful as she reached inside and dragged out the grey woolen sweater she’d seen him pull off of the back of the recliner inside of the bunker beneath the church. He’d folded it neatly, along with every other item of clothing he’d stuffed inside, and it came out easily. It was clean, and didn’t smell like mildew – unlike her own clothing that she had balled up and haphazardly shoved inside of her own backpack when she was leaving in a rush.

She tugged the sweater over her head and it billowed down her torso, pooling at her waist. The excess fabric flowing past her hands must’ve been nearly a foot in length, and rolled up to weighty, annoyingly thick cuffs when she folded them around her wrists. She pulled her hood out from underneath, laying it down again flat, and the sweater felt like a more forming blanket around her. It was just as warm as if it were one of her mother’s old itchy, crocheted afghan blankets – and despite its size, she was instantly grateful for it. She shivered with the immediate consolidated heat it provided, the chill leaving her spine but remaining in her feet. That could never be accommodated, though, and she was used to the constant freezing feeling in her lower half.

König finished setting up the wood and leaned back on his haunches to dig around in his pants pockets. He eventually procured a box of matches, surprisingly not dampened despite his clothing still outwardly seeming soaked. Fearing him getting a chill himself, Evangeline took it upon herself to further shuffle through his bag and pull out a dry pair of what looked like the exact same tactical pants he was wearing, only a different color, along with an equally black hoodie. She realized, as she tossed the items down on the end of her makeshift bed for the night, that the grey sweater was likely the only non-dark piece of clothing he owned.

Feeling like she needed to do something in return, she further went on to unbuckle the straps on the underside of the bag and free his sleeping bag — the nylon of which, as she shuffled a few paces from her own and rolled it out, laid just as significantly large as he was. It wasn’t so surprising - his size needed to be accommodated by all of his things - but it was large enough to fit a queen-sized bed, yet he managed to roll it up in such a tight way that it could even be strapped onto his bag. It had to have been time-consuming to even do, and she realized then that there wasn’t a single lazy thing about him. He didn’t have a particularly overarching flaw; even if he spoke with a sort of idle disregard towards her and perhaps held that low esteem to the whole of the human race, there wasn’t anything he did that he didn’t siphon a poignant amount of care into. He was profoundly disciplined without lacking distinguishable tenderness.

It was endearing, in the gut-wrenching way. She wondered how much of it had to do with him being a soldier.

After she settled back down atop her sleeping bag and the twigs beneath the logs sparked alight, she decided to ask, “How old were you when you joined the army?”

He grunted as he sat back, resting on his arms as he watched the twigs flicker into a blaze. He answered, “Seventeen— or eighteen. Training camp during war times is paced quicker, and I turned eighteen within the three weeks.”

His cowl draped further over his shoulder as he tilted his head to the side, entirely fixated on observing the fire coming to life. Thus, he couldn’t see the way that her nose scrunched up briefly upon hearing how he’d been so young. She couldn’t imagine making such a fierce decision whilst being a teenager. She couldn’t even force herself out of her bunker after the bombs fell.

The idea goaded her to question, “Why’d you want to join up?”

He sighed, thoughtful and vaguely forlorn. “Meine Mutter had been sick for a very long time, and I wanted enough money for her to receive the care she needed, if I could move her to Berlin. I came home during my second leave in the third year I’d served and her neighbor told me that she had died the month before. She would always write me letters, but I was deployed in Kazakhstan, so they took too many months to deliver.” A pause, and then he quietly breathed, “I did not know.”

She stared at him, steeped in pity; a crease between her brows. He never broke his gaze from the fire, watching as the flames from the tossed match grew to lick the twigs. Fascinated by the concept of what could be built to destroy. The hot orange flames were small, but the air in the room was still enough that they could only move taller up into the larger logs, rather than spreading out into the home. The smoke was just as low, and was driven outward towards the windows where there was movement.

Something jolted back to life within him, the dejected hollowness fleeting so quickly that she could’ve just imagined it was ever there at all, and he suddenly moved to stand. “And now I am here, in this crumbling wasteland, putting up with you,” he said, overtaking the few steps forward needed until he stood in front of her. He loomed over top of her, bent slightly at the hips so he could just barely imposingly lean; orange candlelight flickering across his form, hardly doing anything to make him appear as something other than a nightmarish beast that had slipped out from beneath her bed in the night.

It wasn’t as frightening as it might’ve been hours before — not after she learned that he was a mama’s boy who threw his life away to be able to take care of her in her ill state; not after he permitted her to dress in his clothes to ensure she was as warm and comfortable as possible. Not after he went out into the torrential rainstorm alone to gather wood for a fire that he intended to cook for the both of them upon.

So, she silently grabbed up the clothes she’d set on the end of her sorry bed, and raised the bundle up to him. “You should be warm, too,” she said.

She could feel the air of confliction emanating all around him, as ripe as the smoke from the fire growing beside the sofa, a few feet away from them. With a choked sort of confusion, “I will dry, and be fine.”

“They’ll dry faster if you lay them out by the fire,” she argued, full of heart but without the anger. The more pressing part was when she raised her arms a little bit higher, offering his own clothes to him — emphasizing that she wanted him to be warm and dry.

He finally took the clothes after a moment and she wished she could’ve seen his expression as he did so. He was too quiet, and she couldn’t guess what he must’ve been feeling, why he eventually gave in. Maybe because she was being kind, maybe because he knew she was right in the fact his clothes would, in fact, dry quicker if he laid them out by the fire. An even speedier resort would be if the skies were clear and he could lay them over the railing on the front porch – and she recalled the days that her mother would refuse to use the machine dryer and instead hang the family’s laundry and blankets out along their front railings, clothes lining all across the porch like a curtain. She had said that it was cleaner and wouldn’t waste electricity; that the clothes smelled better afterwards, only that she’d sometimes forget to bring the laundry in and they’d take another day to dry after returning to dampness from the night’s cool air and morning dew.

König removed his helmet, sliding the straps out from the holes in his cowl, and dumped the heavy kevlar into Evangeline’s lap. Then went the t-shirt-turned-cowl itself, also dumped carelessly into her lap, and then he was shedding himself of the heavy duty vest – which found itself in the same growing pile. The bracers were dropped down and she realized how strong he truly was to be able to wear all of it as it laid heavy atop her stretched legs, on top of lugging around his bag. It was visible too, when she glanced up and saw him without all of the excess gear: his arm muscles like firm pillows twice down his upper arms, the impossible width of his chest that expanded out into broad shoulders; his torso, thick with muscle, and a waist that narrowed ever so slightly down to his hips. She focused her gaze singularly down on the helmet when he tugged the bottom of his shirt up from its tucked place within his waistband and she caught a glimpse of the smooth skin of his v-line and the sparse dark hair that trailed a pretty line up his stomach – yet he continued undressing in front of her like he hadn’t cared that she might’ve been uncomfortable.

But, as she heard him kick off his boots and unbuckle his belt, she realized that he might’ve simply been used to changing in front of other people whilst being stuck in the barracks – and he just didn’t notice that she was not such a compatriot, and forgot that she pointedly had him turn around when she changed out of her pants in the church. She used to have to bathe her sister on occasion when her parents were out and the tiny toddler was still too young to do it herself, but that wasn’t near the same as watching a grown man strip down just a foot away from her. She nervously fiddled with the strap on his helmet, her frown wobbly and weird, as she listened to him dress. Thumps on the floor as he hopped around to tug the pants up his legs; a shuffle of fabric as he pulled the hoodie overtop his balaclava-covered head.

“You can look now,” he said, his grin clear in his tone as she watched his gloved hands come into view, taking the array of items from her lap. She’d stacked them into a nice pile inside of the tipped-over helmet as she fiddled in wait, and it was easy for him to retrieve.

It was odd to see him in such casual wear, void of the bulletproof vest, grenades and satchels belted on; shiny vambraces gone from his wrists and his socked feet removed from heavy boots that prevented his usual thundering steps as he walked over to his sleeping bag and dropped his helmet beside it. He felt similarly, bluntly voicing, “I feel naked,” as he went back to his bag, crouching down opposite to Evangeline.

She snorted a laugh, then agreed, “You look stripped down. Less ‘soldier’ and more ‘wastelander.’ ”

There was evident disgust in his voice as he said, “I would never allow myself to get so dirty.” He sifted through the larger pockets, setting two cans of corn beef hash on the floor, then continued digging around. He was being honest, too, congruent with the fact that the clean scent of pine and lavender detergent wafted from the sweater and settled pleasantly in her senses. He eventually gave up on digging around in his bag and asked her if she had a can-opener, of which she instantly turned and retrieved from her own supply of what she had once thought was going to be useless miscellaneous items.

They fell into a steady bout of silence as he returned to the fire, twisted open the cans, and placed them both atop the logs he’d placed in a grill-like pattern atop the flaming twigs. The fire crackled as König went around and arranged his discarded clothes to drape down the sofa seats, stretched out and flat so that they could be as close to the fire as possible without being completely on the dusty floor, and further sullied. He muttered complaints about the fabric smelling like mold in the morning, but delicately continued with the task, anyway. She was struck with the idea that he seemed domesticated, and even more striking was that she was permitted to witness it, for whatever reason. He padded around the first floor of the house in his socks, his bulky form having an air of warmth and softness around him – setting his clothes out to dry like a motherly maid and wandering back to the fire to crouch down and check the food. Roy Rogers was playing from the radio lain beside her, the music constant without interruption as the night grew late; Don’t Fence Me In streaming gently through the speakers.

The song, ironic as it was in terms of what she thought of König, gave way to the wondering of what he would look like in Somerville. As she watched him dawdle over the fire and grumble about his potentially dirty clothes, she envisioned him as the sort of man who wouldn’t consider the house chores as ‘wifely’ duties, like it was demeaning to his masculinity if he were to wash dishes or fold laundry. It sounded like it had only been him and his mother back home, so it made sense that he would be willing to take on the feminine side of idle chores. Being raised by a single mother wouldn’t necessarily make him emasculated, but she could see the way that it might’ve made him more reasonable towards house upkeep rather than finding it too trite and boring.

Maybe he was just a control freak. Maybe his mother’s sickness made him fear dirt and thus the illnesses that came from it entirely.

She still saw him as a mean, oppressingly dominating figure, but he was granting her access to the dimension that forged the stretching aspects of his personality, and she was reveling in it. She didn’t have a television, so she could only watch him as he wandered around the house as the rain poured down outside.

She also reveled in the fact that the man could perfectly heat up a can of corn beef hash, because she couldn’t taste a single thing wrong with the food when she shoveled it into her mouth using the bent tin lid like a spoon. It was warm all the way through, probably still too warm as it sizzled atop her tongue, but it wasn’t burnt – despite the flames having licked the bottom of the can for a good few minutes straight. She’d gotten used to having to cook dinner for her sister when her parents were out of the house, but it had been more than six years since she’d been able to do so, and around three years since the stovetop in the bunker had stopped working. She wasn’t sure if she could step back into the role of makeshift chef instantly, like riding a bike after a while, or if she’d have to relearn all of the self-learned tricks to it.

And she was so into the dinner that she didn’t even think about looking to the side to see how he would’ve lifted his mask in order to expose his mouth.

Nevertheless, with warm food in her belly for the first time in years, she wound up sleeping like a baby. Despite the hard floor beneath her and hardly any cushioning provided by the thick fabric of her sleeping bag, she cuddled down into the nylon, tugging it over her head as she listened to König put out the fire. She turned her radio off, saving at least some of its battery life, and it became only the harsh scraping of the man shoving the sofa up against the front door filtering through. Soon, it was him rustling around, laying himself down to rest inside of his own poor bed.

Then, it was only the storm raging overhead. It was tranquil, despite the apocalypse that raged outside of the shattered windows.

 

The skies were clear as Evangeline waited on the front porch while König remained inside of the old farmhouse, securing the last of his things together. They split the last can she had of cinnamon apples together earlier that morning, both sitting cross-legged on the porch as the sun broke above the horizon — the pre-sliced fruits cold when he couldn’t get the fire going and he’d kicked the wood apart only once in the petulant fit of anger, twigs turned into coal sullying the wall. Again, she never glanced at him as they passed the can back and forth, her gaze devoted strictly to the rising sun. Clouds scraped across the lightning blue, thinly veiled and stretched as taut as a pulled-apart cotton ball. The gauze wrapped tightly around her thigh was fresh, tied by his hands after breakfast when she fell back onto her sleeping bag upon peeling up the scabbed pad from the wound and new blood started trickling out of her leg again. It was about the kindest thing he could force himself to do after the fire failed.

“I pray to whatever forsaken gods that are still listening that there will be something for me to kill out there,” König stated as he slammed the door shut behind him and walked out onto the porch. Evangeline looked back at him and observed the bright red, angry energy seeping from his entire body. She casually turned away and went down the steps. He trailed after her, the frail wood shaking and creaking beneath his hard stomps; items on his ballistic vest and inside of his bag rattling with every movement. “I need to crack skulls,” he went on, “Turn your radio on and blare it. Let them hear and come to me. Even if it’s just rabid dogs, I will not complain.”

“I’m not going to do that,” Evangeline replied, calm as ever. He threw his head back and released a groan, childish, and she continued, “Just don’t let it be me suffering your wrath when nothing crops up.”

“It will never be you,” he grumbled. It was still riddled with irritation, but poignantly stalwart.

“What are you even mad about?”

“The fire, and my fucking clothes are still wet. You lied and said they would dry faster. I should’ve just kept wearing them instead of letting them fucking mold on the couch. Now they’re just spreading it onto all of my other things in the bag.” She rolled her eyes in the midst of his dramatics. Irate, he threatened, “I’m going to reave through that town if they don’t have purified water.”

“Don’t even think about it,” she frowned, not fearing for her own safety but definitely garnering concern for the other poor sods. She kicked a stone down the road, watching it roll down until it fell into a pothole. “There’s a reservoir not too far from New Salem proper, if I remember right.”

“Purified, I said,” he returned — like a crotchety, qualmy old woman. “It won’t be clean if it’s radiated water from out in the open. I don’t want to get sick, and you shouldn’t, either.”

“I’ll ask them about it when we get there,” she appeased, then immediately continued as she turned her head to the side to look at him as he pouted with his whole body hunched forward, “And let me do all of the talking. It’s not going to do either of us any favors if you cut in and be all abrasive like this.”

“You were going to do all of the talking anyway. I never took to it, killing is much easier.”

“You talk to me just fine, and you talked with the raiders- kind of.”

“I had to talk to the raiders, is the difference. And that didn’t work very well, if you remember. I was going to blow their heads wide open before you cut in,” he said. “And you’re… I don’t know. Easier.”

“Easier?” she asked, genuinely inquisitive. He never turned his head, never took his gaze off of the road ahead of him to even pass her a side-glance.

He sounded sheepish as he hesitantly half-elaborated, “…Of a sort. Comfortable. You have a calm air.”

Evangeline couldn’t help but smile, small and bashful. She joked, “I’m just being nice because I’m a little bit afraid of you.”

Matching her lightness, “Only a little bit?”

“The slightest bit,” she answered unseriously, adjusting the straps of her bag over her shoulders. It was a can less heavy, but nevertheless weighed on her whole body the further she walked on. “It’s lessening the longer you’re with me. You’re surprisingly human.”

“Surprisingly?”

“Like how soldiers lose it sometimes, know what I mean? With all of the killing.” She saw him nod in her peripheral, silent with his agreement, and she said, “My grandfather was in Vietnam, and I remember my dad talking about how he used to be all fun and big grins, but that he’d come back in ‘75 and he was just a shell of a person, completely someone else. Numb and quiet, started drinking heavily — all that. My parents wouldn’t let him watch me alone because of it, I guess.”

“Good men shouldn’t be sent to war,” König stated simply in response. There was a deep resoluteness to his words; a rich fierceness to the firm belief.

“But it was the right fit for you?” she asked.

“It was the only path for me,” he answered, “I’ve always been good at fighting— the only thing that I’m good at. The army made me an insertion specialist because of it.”

“What does that mean?”

“’Human battering ram,’ they called me — and that’s exactly what it was. Barreling into buildings and up-close slaughtering. Sometimes it was just guarding other officers during foreign affairs, like much of what it was in Kazakhstan, but my company was always very happy with me.”

“Well,” she said, bumping her shoulder into his — or, rather just his arm, “You’re also very good with keeping tidy.”

He laughed at that, boyish and gleeful, and she grinned as she glanced up at him, satisfied with the way that his eyes crinkled and the blue of his irises sparkled with amusement. He seemed soothed the longer that they spoke, his anger flitted out of him like a vicious swarm of bees that gave up on the fight and had retreated back to the hive, stingers gone.

“Yes,” he replied, an easy smile present within his tone. “Meine Mama taught me well.”

Chapter Text

Halfway through New Salem lies Somerville, a vertically placed wood-planked wall surrounding the newly instated town within the overarching wasteland. The reservoir stretching across the east; Mount Toby standing tall in the west, laden with sprawling knolls and forests – Connecticut River trailing through on the other side of it. Aside from the gapless wall, of which was supported by large semi-tires, thick stripped logs and had twining barbed wire tracked over the top, Evangeline would’ve considered that the main source of the town’s protection were the massive forests and old wildlife preserves flanking either side, expanding an impossible amount of miles outwards. Somerville was in the middle of nowhere, hours from any city. That was likely its greatest route towards survival as much as it was its greatest hindrance, being that it was only the radio station that could’ve brought forth any other wastelanders, because it would’ve been infeasible to simply stumble upon it – and the radio satellite could only reach so far. And yet, the noise of bustling people lay behind the wall: people talking, children shouting; a ball bouncing on the asphalt, footsteps on pavement. Wheels from maybe a wheelbarrow or a cart creaking and rolling down the dilapidated road stretching onwards through.

The gate was closed when Evangeline and König came upon the town, cast in shadow by the shoddy twelve-foot wall. She didn’t know how long it had been since the town was formed, but it was obviously powered with electricity: towers standing beyond the wall, cables and wires attached, lines stretching outwards like entrails; string lights draped across portions of the outer wall and steel turrets sitting atop tall platforms just behind the wood, sputtering hefty mechanical breaths and twisting as the twin barrels searched the area until they could be directed towards hostiles.

Really, it was already looking better than what Evangeline expected. And that made her sickly nervous as she hesitated to touch anything on the separated boxy keypad standing atop a small wooden post outside of the gate. It had a little antenna poking out of the top and a dulled light just beside it, glass broken until it was only the bulb. Dual speakers were on either side of the metal box, indicating that she’d have to speak aloud to a machine as if she was in a shitty restaurant drive-through.

She stared down at the box, its keypad with numbers 1-10 going all down and across it, and mumbled, “Which one do I press?”

“Why would you ask me? I don’t know,” König mumbled back, shifting awkwardly beside her. “Just press any of them. Each will give a response, probably.”

“But what if it’s wrong and I mess it up?”

“That won’t happen, I don’t think.”

Slightly annoyed and frowning, she turned her head towards him. “Saying ‘probably’ and ‘I don’t know’ isn’t gathering any sort of confidence. Why don’t you press one of them?”

“I’m not doing it,” he argued, “You said you would talk.”

“I will, but I don’t want to press the button.”

“Well, neither do I. This is your adventure, just do it.”

“I don’t want to break it.”

As she drowned in self-hindering hesitation, he only steadily grew more agitated — his accent somehow getting even thicker the more irritated he got, his eyes narrowing with it. “I don’t either. Stop being a baby and press one of the fucking buttons.”

“You said you’d help me-”

“I never said that I’d fucking coddle-”

“Just letting ya’ll know, the speakers activate by proximity.”

The box crackled to life, a man’s low voice filtering through, and Evangeline nearly leapt out of her skin as she instinctively jumped sideways, her body knocking into König’s. His hands dropped onto her shoulders, warm and solid, and kept her near – as if also by instinct. The years of isolation had made her different from who she was before the bombs fell, but she did not forget the comfort that came from large hands pressing down on her shoulders, pulling her gently into soothed pacification.

It was easier to lean down a little closer to the speakers - feeling more and more like she was ordering an awful, cheap burger - and siphon false confidence into her tone as she said, “Oh! S-sorry, I was worried I was going to break something and prematurely ruin everything I hoped to find here.” She laughed, nervous and loud; sickness churning at the bottom of her stomach.

“Yeah, nah, you’re doing better already than the one guy that came through and slammed his fist down on that light there, thinkin’ it was a button. ‘S why it doesn’t light up anymore to let ya know we’re listenin’.”

He had the same twang shortening his words and drawling his cadence that reminded her of the man on the radio message, and she instantly gauged that they were one in the same. Already recognizing him, somewhat knowing who he was, her laugh came out far more pleasantly before she replied, “Yeah, that’s kind of exactly what I didn’t want to do.”

“Well, it does heighten my opinion of ya already, so good on you. What is it you’re hopin’ to find here?”

“Uhm-” She paused, thinking; her gaze drifting down from the box and to the crumbling road. She found the pothole near her feet, the cement falling to pieces into the grassy, overgrown ditch. Down the way, she saw the ruins of New Salem: a red brick building half-way in pieces down into the gravel alley beside it, roof caved in completely; a diner that was so crushed that the piles of rubble inside made it unwalkable, unsalvageable. Abandoned cars, rusted out completely, were tucked between buildings in parking lots; left to rot in ruined driveways. She felt König’s hands still resting on her shoulders, the comforting heat that he naturally exuded strong enough to warm her back that just barely brushed against his vest, and she answered to the man through the speaker, “...Home, I guess.”

“That is a mighty good answer, my friend. Say, why don’t I come out there and we can chat some more while I show ya’ll ‘round?”

She gave a slightly exasperated, more-so grateful, yes, please, and the speakers crackled before shutting down. She heaved a deep sigh, exhaling her relief – and she realized that König’s hands were still atop her shoulders, his touch lighter but nevertheless there. With that came the recollection of his adamant forthrightness that she would be the one speaking to whoever they came upon in Somerville, and how he distinctly made clear that he did not like talking to people.

And that, perhaps, the touching was more for his own comfort than hers, whilst he kept her body slotted between himself and the speakers.

She pulled out from beneath him, his hands dropping away from her body without protest, and she turned to face him – inquisitiveness written within her squinted eyes as she stared up at him, observing. His own eyes were blank, clear and bright as the skies above; nothing within betraying his private sanctity.

“You don’t just not like talking to people,” she began, mirth quirking up the corners of her lips. “You’re afraid of it.”

Instantly, he bit back, “Am not,” as his eyes lowered into a predatory sort of look down at her.

“You so are– you’re even defensive about it.”

“That means nothing, I’m defensive because you accuse me of something weak.”

She outright grinned, cheshire and evil, as she rolled her eyes and lifted her hands up to begin fixing her hair, smoothing it down and tucking it behind her ears to prepare herself to look presentable. She already looked like a dunce otherwise, with König’s big sweater that nearly fell down to her knees, the equally oversized sweatpants that were also his, tucked into her rainboots. “I never said it was a bad thing,” she cooed, saccharine and soft. “I think that I enjoy learning these quiet things about you.”

“You make a hobby out of prying,” he said, “I don’t like it.”

“Yet you answer so compliantly.”

He made a show of reaching out to ruffle her hair, messing up what she’d just fixed, continuing to dart out even as she batted at his hands and whined. “Compliant–” he complained, “You are a brat.”

“Stop—“ she grunted, light smacks resounding around them as she used one hand to bat at his arms whilst the other attempted to fix what continued mussing. “Leave- me-“

A loud, ground-rumbling rattle as the heavy, wood-planked gate shook, then began creaking open. König instantly grabbed a hold of the back of Evangeline’s sweater, fisting the fabric to lurch her backwards as the double doors opened outward. She stumbled back into him, boots scuffing up even more dirt than the doors did as they gradually unfolded, exposing the suburbs within; the white chapel with peeling paint that peeled to the stripped pale yellow wood, the brick schoolhouse just past it that was obviously missing one of the four columns on the open concrete deck. Houses lining the streets, unmatching planks of wood that were nailed to the walls and jutting from the roofs to fix the disrepair years of neglect left them with.

And in between the doors stood a tall-ish man – not particularly lanky, but neither did he seem very muscular beneath the red flannel shirt and dusty denim jeans. His hair was a dark blonde, streaked with aged grey strands; cropped and swept back away from his face, obviously using his fingers. He didn’t appear incredibly old, though his forehead, jowls and eyes were defined by tiny lines – along with a thick mustache over his upper lip. A revolver pistol gleamed on his hip, the hem of his shirt tucked into the holster to allow the weapon to be visible. His low-heeled cowboy boots clicked against the asphalt as he stepped into the opening after the doors had swung out, a pleasant smile stretched upon his thin lips. He had the sort of warmth in his green eyes that felt welcoming, almost reminiscent of a father, and Evangeline breathed another quiet sigh as her own smile lifted her mouth.

“Danny Marsden,” the man introduced himself, extending his hand out to Evangeline first, likely because she was both the one who’d obviously spoken to him and because König had - yet again - placed her conveniently in front of himself.

She stepped forward to shake his hand, König going with her, his hand still bunched up in the back of her sweater. She reasoned that his brain was a mess of ideas pertaining to warfare, and caution would always prevail within every scenario, bloody or not. He could easily pull her back and away from the man - Danny - if he had to, just as he had promised.

She told him her name as his hand encompassed her much thinner one, his warm, calloused palm pressing against hers. “Like that one story, from way back,” Danny commented as her hand fell back to her side whilst his went to his hip.

“A Tale of Acadie, yeah. My dad loved that story, he was really big on reading, and stuff.”

“Well, we are in need of some more art ‘round here,” he replied easily, then deviated his attention to the man at her back; raising his hand once more. “And what do I call you, big guy?”

There wasn’t much hesitation before König raised his hand to politely return the gesture, stating his name in a gruff, ineffable voice – like he wanted his voice to be just as scary and imposing as his body was. Actively brooding, dark sullenness rolled off of him in waves. Danny looked confused for a second, thinking before he outright asked the question likely everyone in America had inquired: “And that’s…?”

“He’s Austrian,” Evangeline answered, fearing that König had too smart of a retort lined up. “It’s Germanic.”

“Oh,” Danny mumbled, stepping back towards the gate. “Well– German, Austrian – don’t mention that to ol’ John. He’s a World War II vet, was a resistance fighter in Italy— part’a that… eh, Brigade, or whatever. Matter’a fact: maybe pretend to be mute in front of him.” He then clapped his hands together, then angled them to point towards Evangeline and König. “Right. Now, to business. Either of you got any relation to any raider factions?”

They both shook their heads, a silent mutual understanding to not mention any of the incidents the day before.

“Any mercenary factions? Gunners, ‘n whatnot?”

They shook their heads again, firm but silent ‘no’s.

Danny pointed his hands deliberately to König at her side, focusing his questioning on the lumbering man. “You, my friend, look oddly militaristic. We got vets, an’ I was a cop back in the day, but Somerville is pretty off the grid here, and we’re avoidin’ havin’ anythin’ to do with the army.”

“Defected,” Evangeline cut in, and Danny’s analytical eyes snapped to her face. “Ex-military, years past – he’s just still armed to the teeth. No communications with anyone.”

Danny’s hands fell from the gesture, going to his hips as he observed the both of them. A silent few seconds passed, then he turned on his heel. “Right on, fellas,” his voice applauded. “Well, why don’t I show you’s around our fine settlement?”

It was still within the wasteland, and she knew it, but walking behind Danny Marsden and down the road into Somerville felt like passing through the front door of her house outside of Warwick for the first time. They’d moved when she was around five, her little sister had still been a baby, and it was foreign – but the curtains were drawn, warm sunlight heating the floor in warped rectangles, and she was led through by her father; her mother holding the baby on her hip right behind Evangeline. It was somewhere that she knew they would make into home. She could see her mother sitting on the stoop, cigarette in her hand; her father pouring a glass of whiskey in the kitchen. The furniture had already been delivered via boxtruck, and much of the knick-knacks and personal items were still in cardboard boxes stacked in various rooms, waiting to be opened again like presents on Christmas day.

And Somerville waited for her like the house had. The sun shone overhead, warming the town; drying the ground from the past night’s rainfall. The trees were browning, courtesy of the dying summer, and fallen leaves crunched underfoot – the same leaves of which coated some house’s porches, swept away with brooms wielded by ladies donning ratty dresses, fabric dulled by wear and the inability to purchase dye to bring life back into the clothes. Some waved to Danny as they passed by, stunned to varying degrees when they noticed Evangeline and König behind him – König, of whom had since dropped her sweater but still walked so closely next to her that their shoulders occasionally brushed, who likely held the majority of the townsfolk curiosity.

A two-headed mule turned down the road ahead of them, being walked towards the group by a man wearing a straw hat – cart hitched to the saddle on the animal’s back, filled with what looked like various kinds of melons. One of the heads on the mule was severely deformed - aside from the fact that it was deformed in itself - the face being on the side, grey tongue hanging out of the mouth; eyes dull and dead. The animal walked fine, and it was clearly well-fed: the initial head faced forward, bobbing with each clicking step along the road.

Some children no older than eight kicked a semi-deflated soccer ball around in the small parking lot between the school and the church, and each of the three’s tiny faces looked up as Danny waved his hand at the schoolhouse. “We’re still using the upper floor as a school since we’ve got some kids around now, but the main floor’s basically our city hall. ‘S got a stage, n’ such, so we can hold meetings, ‘n check how everyone’s holdin’ up – see how they’re likin’ the guards, harvest, each other – whatnot.”

“Sounds like you’re really dedicated to fostering community,” Evangeline commented.

“Very. ‘S not just me wantin’ to keep up, though. Everyone chips in – Mother Abigail basically has run of the chapel, ‘n she’s the one that got our economy rollin’ by reccomendin’ we sell the majority of the garden’s produce to our townsfolk and the traders that come through. ‘Course, the gardeners get to keep one’a each for free. Fruits of their labor, ‘n all that.”

Idly confused, “What do you need the money for?”

“We buy steel ‘n copper from the traders, sometimes they’ll have health stimulants we stock the back of the church with. Occasionally get deals on sugar an’ clothes. We send out patrols of our guards to loot outside of town for whatever else we need – tools, weapons.” He trailed off as he spun around, walking backwards down the street in order to look at König. “You, my friend, look like someone we could use on the guard.”

Then, the revelation came as König casually responded, “I only plan to stay for the night, if you would allow it.”

Evangeline’s head snapped to the side, bewildered. They hadn’t discussed the real particulars of their deal, and he had said that he only wanted to check out the settlement, but she had just assumed that he might’ve seen the calm place and decided to stay. She’d gotten used to him being her shadow, standing within his, and especially after she’d slept beside him and she woke up fine in the morning, the same ache in her leg – the only lasting wound she’d received that he’d saved from being any worse. She hadn’t thought about him leaving her behind. It hit like a punch to her gut, twisting.

Danny, ignorant, amusingly inquired, “What? You ain’t one for settlin’ down?”

König shrugged nonchalantly. “Not really.”

“Well,” Danny started, turning back forward, “Gotta say, it’s a real loss you don’t wanna stay, big guy. Won’t spite ya a night here, though. Not gonna stop tryin’ to keep you, neither: we always hold a li’l get-together when someone shows up an’ decides to take up here - introductions to be made, ‘n all - an’ the same is gonna go for you, miss Evie.” He waved a hand, backwards gesturing back at Evangeline. “Maybe tonight’ll change yer mind, fella. We’re good folks.”

Danny turned a corner, going down a new gravelled street, and the two followed behind – the silence suddenly thick as ash-littered smoke. He crossed the street, houses lining either side, and stopped in front of the driveway of a pale blue two-story, the paint weathered and chipping. He settled his hands on his hips, a happy smile stretched wide on his lips, and stared up at the house. Evangeline came up beside him, and stared up at the house with him.

A rusty old mailbox was out front, standing at the end of the short driveway going up to the side of the house, a rooftop jutting out for a covered parking space. A sidewalk-like path came up from the curb on the side of the road and lined straight towards the front porch, one of the squares split through the middle. The deck was covered, columns holding it up along the outer siding-covered low wall caging it in, but the roof of it was punctured through further to the left – a substantial hole giving way to the small amount of rubble in a pile beneath it, shingles sticking out from the dust and splinters of wood. The house itself looked nice: the windows were missing glass, but white shutters shook with the coming breeze, indicating they weren’t just decorative and could be used properly. Overall, it was the same square-ish suburban house that dotted the street, though each one still held a vaguely unique shape and paint, along with fresh wooden planks that fixed some holes in the roofs and the outer walls.

She thought, as she observed the pointing rooftops and the way that the small turret curled round to make a victorian-esque room on the left side of the house, that she never would have ever been able to live in such a house if the world hadn’t ended. It made her stomach clench, how wrong it all was.

“Looks like you’re gettin’ the two-bed to yourself for now, miss Evie,” Danny stated, a twinkle in his eye as he looked down at her. “Lot’s of us have to share houses, so that may change in the future when we get more newcomers. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

Danny eventually walked off after telling Evangeline that she’d have to talk to Mother Abigail in the morning for a job, but that he’d leave her alone until evening drew in and she should head over to the schoolhouse. She watched him as he went with her whole body, shifting on her feet; her hands tightly clinging to her backpack straps. König stood beside her, swivelling with her like the twin turrets on either side of the gates.

When Danny went back onto the main road, his boots clicking in the distance until they could no longer be heard, Evangeline turned away and began encroaching upon the house. She walked in the grass, shortcutting her way up to the porch. The wooden steps creaked beneath her boots as she went up four slats, as if they hadn’t been walked upon for a long while, and the heavy, dark oak door ached similarly on the hinges as she pulled it open; the screen door just as well. Peeled open, her hand lingered against the doors before König came up behind her, taking the task for himself; his hand high above hers.

She stepped through and her footsteps echoed throughout the foyer. The house was agonizingly hollow, waiting patiently for someone to love it again. The front door opened immediately into what would’ve been the living room, curtainless windows pouring sunlight into the room that had only a red brick fireplace opposite to the old sofa against the inner wall, its soft green fabric turned ratty. The staircase created a short hallway that led into the kitchen, the bannister posts carved flowers within, leading up to the jutting thin square that the knob rested atop of.

Evangeline’s feet took her down the hallway and into the kitchen, wherein she found the smallish kitchen, the counters lining one wall; the glass of the oven beneath the stove broken, refrigerator with the broken hinge as the door swung inches away from the box – equally useless. A small dining table stood within the large space to the other side, four chairs around it; one of the seats missing from the chair that sat closer to the small curving rotunda. A bench used to sit within, she figured, if the screws sticking out of the walls beneath the windows were any indication.

She tugged her backpack straps from her shoulders and set her bag on the table, eager for the weight to be off of her back, and she slumped down in one of the chairs. She watched as König wandered around: grazed his hand along the counters, observed the dust that came up on his gloves; tried kicking the door of the refrigerator shut before it swung lazily back out, resting even further open.

“It’ll probably get cold, but at least you have a fireplace,” he commented, his praise lazy and lacking any real heart. He turned around, looking at her as he went on, “And that church lady will likely help you with your leg, if you still cannot dress it yourself. The best nurses we could find when we were injured during deployment were nuns.”

Evangeline nodded, her gaze drifting down to her bag. The air felt inherently melancholic, and she didn’t know what to do with herself. She leaned forward and lifted her hands onto the table, playing with a loose thread on the strap. Possessing no words to speak, but needing to do something with the ill feeling in her body. Hunger rolled turmoil around her stomach, aching and yearning for gratification, but there was nothing to give it.

She heard him as he shifted on his feet, boot scuffing against the wood as he stepped forward towards her. She glanced up, meeting his cool gaze, and he said, “You are quiet. Why?”

She didn’t say that she didn’t like the fact that he was leaving – couldn’t admit it. “I’m nervous about meeting people, I guess. Everything’s happening too quickly,” she replied instead.

It wasn’t completely a lie, either. She’d left the bunker only yesterday, after all. And aside from the general apocalypse of the wasteland, König had been the constant that remained since what was really the beginning of her travels. She didn’t want him to go: she wanted at least one comfort as she found herself a home in Somerville, and she found him oddly comfortable to be around. She wanted to go out to the party, to meet with Mother Abigail in the morning, and come back to the house to find him there. She wanted him to sleep in the room across from hers, so that he’d wake up and retrieve her if something had gone dangerously wrong – because she trusted him to do as much.

“Oh, right,” he said, removing his bag and dropping it to the floor before tugging out one of the chairs and slumping down with her. He stretched his legs out beneath the table, casually sighing before he told her, “Yeah, I’m not going to that.”

Sharply, and very confused, “What?”

“What?” he returned, blatant and unaffected. “Why should I? I don’t need to meet any of these people. I’d be miserable. They’re probably all country bumpkins, like the one at the gate.”

“He’s not a bumpkin,” she defended. “And you can’t just leave me to fend for myself, that’s not fair.”

He crossed his arms over his chest, as physically staunch and firm as his words. “How is it not fair? I took care of you up until now, that is all I swore to do.”

“Well-” she trailed off, stunted by the fact he was right, before sputtering again, “It’s just not right, is all. I want you there-”

“Ohhh,” he breathed, “Well, if the princess wants me there, then I suppose I should forgo all of my own needs and tasks so that I can whisk you around, cradle you like a helpless little baby.”

“Fuck off,” she petulantly huffed, the feet of her chair squeaking against the wood floor as she hastily stood up from her chair. She swiped her bag off of the table, each of her movements dripping with vitriol as she passed around him and stomped into the living room. She heard his own chair scrape against the floor as he stood and followed her. “You’re an asshole,” she called out as she made for the stairs, refusing to look back at him. “I just wanted you there with me.”

He seemed amused by her anger, childishly asking as he remained at the base of the staircase, “Really?”

She whipped around as she stood at the platform before the stairs curved to the right, staring down at him. He towered still, somehow – his height exacerbated by the wickedness of his personality, making him even more dangerous and awful as he laid one hand on the knob atop the post. His eyes were slightly squinted, and she could only imagine that he was grinning.

He questioned further, voice sweet and entrapping as honey, “And why do you want me there, Häschen?”

Evangeline frowned, and she thought that she was going to have awful jowls if she could live to age so far. She remembered how he had said that she had a nice air, that she was comfortable enough to be around that he felt he could speak more easily. And through gritted teeth, she answered, “Because I thought that you were nice to be around.”

“Aww,” he cooed, tilting his head to the side; taunting. He gave no appreciation for the way that his own sentiment was returned, instead choosing to take it and crush it like bones in his hands. “You say it in past tense, like it is no more. Have I ruined myself for you, Häschen? My heart may break.”

“You are awful,” she returned, retreating up the stairs once more.

“I’m going to see if there is a bath somewhere around here. Don’t miss me while I am gone, yes? Do you need a goodbye kiss before I go?”

She answered by slamming the door shut of the first bedroom she waltzed into, wood snapping against the frame, the force of it shuttering through the whole house. And she missed him, despite having closed the door on him. She breathed and the air in the room tasted like abandonment.

A dark oak dresser stood at the opposite end of the wooden footboard of the bed, the third topmost drawer missing. A wide mirror, curved overtop, sat atop the flat top of it. A full-sized mattress laid within the bedframe, the box spring just as dingy as the mattress itself — but the sodden, beiged coloring didn’t stop her from dumping her bag on top of it and spreading out her sleeping bag across the cushioned bed. The pale blue of the nylon effectively covered up the soiled mattress, fit to size, and she went on to begin unpacking her bag. Clothes folded up and neatly placed into the dresser, to be cleaned at another time; the miscellaneous tools stuck into the nightstand, ammo boxes and her pistol on top of the dresser.

A breeze came through the broken, jagged shards within the single window on the wall beside the bed. The room was small, rectangular in shape, and Evangeline could hardly fit between the dresser and the bed — but she preferred it that way. The miniscule space felt safe, and she could see every dark corner when she sat on the bed, soles of her boots pressed to the floor. She thought about lacy white curtains over the window, replacing the rod to be able to do so; her own lilac flowery blankets that she could cover the mattress with, if she would be able to go and retrieve what she wanted from her home.

She’d be able to hang her sister's drawings up around the house along with her mother’s paintings, and set her boombox radio from the bunker up on top of the nightstand. As she sat there and thought, the loneliness of the house settled into her bones. She shifted to sit cross-legged on the bed, and looked out the window. Voices drifted through as two women stood on the porch of the house across the street and chatted, occasionally pointing and looking at what was now Evangeline’s house; the creaking of a rocking chair on the deck of the house beside theirs as an elderly man rocked back and forth, radio on the small metal patio table playing softly. He had an acoustic guitar beside him, standing up on the wall. A woman sat in the front yard of a green house, soft in color; a baby sat in front of her that was babbling away. Her dark hair fluttered around her, skin glowing like melted caramel beneath the sunlight.

Evangeline glanced at her watch, saw the tiny arm pointing towards four, and she laid down. Her days had been filled with walking, and lethargy was easy to succumb to underneath the hot sun. She had long-since taken off both König’s sweater and her hoodie, but it did little to help the tired heat. She drifted between dream and consciousness as she listened to the gentle chatter, summer birds, and buzzing cicadas. It ached, as nostalgia must.

 

She awoke first to thundering stomps coming up the staircase, lumbering along the few feet between the landing and her door, then jolted upwards when her door swung open.

With one hand on the frame as he bent to enter, König lingered just in front of the doorway. His helmet was replaced by a plain black baseball cap, and his t-shirt cowl was gone, leaving behind only the simple balaclava that clung so nicely to his face and neck. The rest was mostly the same as what he’d been wearing before: black hoodie void of the ballistic vest; black tactical pants tucked into his steel-toed boots; knee-guards belted to his knees. He was missing his gloves and forearm bracers, and he nearly looked like a normal human being. The only weapon on him was the pistol strapped to his bulky thigh, fabric just barely pillowing around the tightened straps securing the holster. He worked his body until he was all bulk and brawn, and yet still didn’t feel protected enough unless he had a gun on him.

“Why do you look like that?” she immediately grumbled, twisting to stand up as she brought her hand up to rub her sleepy eyes.

He tapped his fingers against the doorframe, gaze shifting everywhere except for Evangeline as he answered, “I figured that I should not look so scary in front of the children at the event.”

She jumped up at that, tiredness fleeting like a hasty headrush; a smile growing on her lips as she approached him. He seemed to stand up straighter the closer she got, inching away from her – but it did not stunt her genial ask, “You’re going, then?”

“Yes,” he sighed, hesitantly confirming. “Two of the boys helped me fill up the reservoir behind the house with water, and asked that I do. There was a girl that hung back at the front of the house, and the boy said that she was too afraid to approach.”

“So… you’ll go when some kids you just met asked you to, but not me?”

“No,” he shook his head, “It’s mostly because I’ve filled up my flask with vodka I found in the basement.”

“I think you just have a soft spot for children,” she said quietly, reaching up to adjust his hat. He bent down for her like it was an automatic response, staring at her with a sort of softness he didn’t seem to know how to contend with. He smelled clean: like the sweet muskiness of wisteria. She was reminded of the drooping willow behind her home outside Warwick. Naturally honeyed.

“They said I looked cool,” he mumbled sheepishly, “Like their toy soldiers.”

He allowed her to pull the cap further over his forehead and smooth out the fabric covering his face. It wasn't an action she really thought about before proceeding upon, and the urge came to her with the same mindless tenderness that used to spur her to adjust her sister’s ball cap and uniform before the family set off to watch the child’s little league baseball games. Unlike her sister, he didn’t throw a fit about being dusted off and fretted over, and complied with bashful awkwardness, as if he wasn’t used to being cared for. She was genetically adhered towards intimacy, and he seemed the direct opposite – perhaps the inherent difference between being raised in a single-parent, single-child home versus her fairly full and connected family. She wondered briefly how long his mother was sick for before she truly wasted away, and if she had ever tutted at him about the way he wore his army uniform; if she’d ever stitched the tears in the seams or adjusted the fittings for the fabric to conform to his absurd body.

“Well, you look nice now, too,” Evangeline kindly offered, then dropped her hands. She liked standing beneath him, and she liked the way that he looked down at her — like she mattered, in some way. He possessed a natural predatory essence that she was drawn towards, like a lamb to the butcher.

He moved sideways to allow her to pass through the doorway, then followed her back down the stairs.

She checked the time on her watch as she stepped down to the bottom landing, and saw that it was five minutes to six o’clock. Before she laid a hand on the door handle, she turned and made a grabby motion at König, requesting his flask. He conceded without hesitancy, wordlessly taking the steel out of his hoodie pocket and handed it over.

She took too large of a swig, and nearly spat it right out as she took the flask away from her mouth. Her face scrunched up as it sat in her mouth, burning, and König was laughing as he reached out to take the flask from her before she spilled it – laying his other hand on her shoulder. He gently told her to swallow, swallow, liebling, between chuckles and she did so, albeit harshly and with much jolting protest. She shivered violently, waved her hands around as a silent plea for water - for anything - and he was giggling like a schoolgirl as she jumped from one foot to the other. She was gasping water, please, please, and he told her that he’d left his canteen upstairs, the same as she had done, and so she had to suffer – his pats on her shoulder the only comfort.

“I haven’t had liquor since I ran out of whiskey last winter,” she told him as he followed her down the porch steps, her body still tensed up like it was going to force another shudder. As the sun stooped below the horizon and dusk hung dimly over the wasteland, the nighttime air immediately brought a chill about that nipped at her exposed lower arms.

“Kept you warm?” he asked, one hand in his hoodie pocket and the other mindlessly finding the hem of Evangeline’s t-shirt, gently holding onto her as they came out onto the gravel road; clinging in such a miniscule way, as if he wanted to remain detached from the minor solace he sought. She was unopposed to it, finding a subtle, serene intimacy in it.

She nodded, walking on with him. The gravel crunched underfoot until it didn’t, and they were on the flat asphalt road, riddled with weeds betwixt the cracks and dirt. “I found out that the heat didn’t work in the bunker during the first year. Also found out that winters are the worst.”

“They’re worse above ground,” he told her. She looked at him as he brought his hand out of his pocket, folded it sideways and propped it up against his hip. “The worst of the snow was up to here– in April, I think it was.”

She gritted her teeth and made a face, seeing how it would’ve been about mid-waist on her – woefully unwalkable. April should’ve been when it was starting to slow down, too, before the bombs fell. April used to have relatively sporadic snowfall, being that she was located fairly inland from the grand rivers and the Atlantic that bordered eastern Massachusetts, and April had more of the rain – perfectly in tune with the changing of seasons on the calendar.

She’s felt the scorching summer heat now, and facing the true frigidness of winter head-on was a chilling concept. She didn’t have compressed protectiveness that the bomb shelter provided any longer, standing out in the open.

His knuckles brushed her hip with every step forward she took towards the schoolhouse. There were lanterns lit along the path coming around the side of the building, candles melting against the cement on the short stoop up to the side doors. The heavy double-doors were propped wide open, allowing them free passage through the hallway lined with lockers and closed, dark classrooms, then the next set of doors that opened up to the gymnasium. Children raced around the widespread main floor, the buckles of their raggedy overalls jangling around as they chased each other between the adults. Long, plastic, white tables were set up around the room with matching folding chairs; what seemed to be some bowls of soup set out on one of the tables, filled red-solo cups for the taking — a cherry pie in a tin container on the end, only three slices left in it. Some of the children had red smeared across their mouths as they ran around, and she noted them as the most probable suspects. Nabbed quickly by little hands, she expected, whilst the adults nursed respective paper plates in one hand and a plastic cup in the other; the cups pulled away to reveal red-stained lips, and Evangeline could only figure that it was wine they drank — regular juice, likely, in the separate set of cups off to the side for the few children that played about. She wondered if it was hand-crafted, recalling what Danny had mentioned about the harvests, or if they’d found a surviving cooler of preserved fruit juice somewhere.

It wasn’t a grand gathering by any means, and that consolidated the warm atmosphere of the room — almost like a family reunion. Like they were bygone cousins that hadn’t been seen in a number of years, she and König lingered in the doorway, hesitant on strolling in as if they were part of it. Surrounding them was chatter, boisterous laughter and giddy giggles of children; echoing through the walls as much as the soft 50’s music playing from the jukebox on the farside of the room was. Inwardly, she wanted to seem confident — both for herself and König, given that he nearly skipped out on the event entirely with the claim that it was unnecessary, but Evangeline quietly suspected that he just didn’t want to make a fool of himself in front of too many people. Instead, she was also afraid of making a fool of herself, and she took to fumbling around at her lower hip, wrapping her hand around his wrist where he still clung to the edge of her shirt. Securing him as much as he secured her, and satisfied with the weird connection, she looked around the room for Danny. As she did so, she counted about fifteen adults and four children - one of both being the baby sat in the same girl’s lap that she’d spotted lounging in the yard of the green house earlier in the afternoon - and she found the blonde man near the far side of the room, standing in front of a jukebox with an older woman donning nun’s robes.

One step forward, then another, and then she was effectively dragging König across the gymnasium, winding between loitering adults and dodging graceless children, both simultaneously grateful and pitiful that heads had turned and watched him rather than her. He noticed, gravely so – evident by the way that he shook her grip off of his wrist so that he could instead slide his hand into hers, interlocking their fingers as she approached Danny.

He was still wearing the same cowboy-esque, rugged outfit, but had now further matched it by adding a beige soft-leathered cowboy hat atop his head. He turned his head as she came up to him, his smile widening as he spread his arms out and called out, “Miss Eve, and big guy!”

His southern twang apparently didn’t allow him to pronounce König’s name, and he wasn’t going to attempt it – but he was nevertheless welcoming as he clapped both figures on their respective shoulders, light and warm. “Glad you could make it,” he expressed, stepping back again so he could properly observe them both, idling up beside the nun. Evangeline tucked hers and König’s conjoined hands behind her back, hiding their shared cowardice, and further wrapped her other hand around his wrist again. “Or, should say wanted, considerin’ our lack of real widespread property ‘round here. Would be hard to avoid us.”

“I think it’s fairly substantial,” Evangeline commented, “I haven’t seen what other settlements look like though, either.”

“Really? Never been to Quincy, or nothin’?”

She shook her head. “I left my bunker yesterday.”

Danny’s eyes nearly bulged out of his head. “Seriously?” he exasperated, and she nodded, a slight flush beginning to warm her cheeks. Apparently, she’d been the odd one out the past six years. “Well, no wonder you look like you been starvin’. That’s even longer than miss Val lasted–” He pointed vaguely towards the tables, and her eyes followed to find the girl with the baby, sitting lonely together on one of the seats on the lowest line along the plastic bleachers; the baby’s tiny hand wrapped around her forefinger as she cooed down at it. “Valerie, I mean. She came ‘round last summer, ‘bout. Baby was just past birth, ‘n she was bunkered down in Athol, I think.”

“A lot of raiders there,” König commented distantly, having followed Evangeline’s gaze before they both looked again at Danny. She remembered the group in the Orange airport with a gritty, gross feeling.

“Yeah, half of why she wanted to come here, I guess,” the cop-turned-cowboy responded. “ ‘parently they kept comin’ out, knockin’ around on the shelter door. She didn’t have a good life down there, neither– but don’t mention I said nothin’.”

Evangeline nodded, remembering the first of many times people above ground came to her door – how frightened she was as she stood with her revolver below the ladder each and every time. It had only kept her inside, but Valerie found courage in it, apparently. She chanced a glance at the girl again - who looked as young as she - and found her dark brown eyes already settled on her, a gentle smile ghosting across her lips. Evangeline smiled back, her hands comfortingly occupied and indisposed to give the kind wave she was urged towards.

“You look to be around the same age,” came a richly feminine yet deep voice, and Evangeline turned her head back and set her sights on the nun beside Danny. The nun, whose hands were grasped behind her back, bent slightly forward to nod her greeting. “I’m Abigail, since Danny is so excited that he forgets his manners.”

Danny looked down and away, sheepishly busying himself with twirling the ends of his mustache, and Evangeline gave the same nodding gesture as she introduced herself – elbowing König in the ribs so that he’d grant the woman his own name and give a slight wave with his empty hand. The woman smiled in a way that warmly met her eyes, her aged wrinkles turning up around her eyes and mouth. Genuine and motherly – right for a nun. Her pearl and red beaded rosary hung delicately from her neck, wooden crucifix prominent below her chest.

Abigail devoted her warm gaze to König, saying, “I’d once embarked on a humanitarian aid trip to Austria, when I was much younger in my convent. Danny mentioned you’re from there, and I remembered how rich the community there was.”

König nodded, “Every other person you’d meet was a Catholic– meine Mutter was, also.”

Evangeline looked up at him, staring as he spoke – compelled like a moth to a flame as she watched his jaw move beneath the cover of the mask. His eyes were just as warm as Abigail’s while he spoke to her, as if finding comfort in the aged woman as he would back home.

Kind with her curiosity, “And you?” Abigail asked.

There was a slight twitch in his jaw, clenched; a hitch as he hesitated to answer. Then, “I have seen the places where God is not, and know how my Mutter died alone, despite her devotion to the end. No, I am not religious.”

Abigail stood up a little straighter, unoffended – perhaps even satisfied by his answer, somehow, as she kept her pleasantness present on her face. The crucifix swayed against her black scapular with the movement. There was a strong defiance about her as she said, “And yet, you still walk your path.”

The lull of music; chatter, words indiscernible around the old gymnasium, lit by string lights overhead and lanterns in the small windows high up on the walls. And it felt silent, despite the jukebox standing feet away from them, as settlers drank and children ran amuck.

Suddenly, Danny cut in before anyone else could break the strange rhythm of tense quietude between the three, commenting, “Hey, y’do look ‘round the same age as Val. How old’re you, anyhow, Eve?”

Grateful for his interruption, the air feeling a tad heavy after König’s admission and Mother Abigail’s unabashed retort, she answered simply in an exhaled breath, “Twenty-one.”

Danny looked to the herculean man beside her then, silently requesting his answer, and König obliged Danny’s searching eyes after a beat: “Twenty-seven.”

“Well, hey!” Danny clapped his hands together once, then laid a hand on Evangeline’s shoulder, making to turn her sideways – her hands dropping away from König’s single one with the forced shifting. “I know you ain’t find our little place satisfyin’, big guy, but since you’re both connected at the hip – why don’t ya’ll go make friends with lonely li’l Valerie o’er there. She’ll be happy to know she isn’t the youngest lady here anymore, her twenty-two’s just past.”

“Right, yes,” she whispered, mostly to assure herself as she started the odd shuffle over the wide gymnasium floor, scattered with tables and people.

König was just a hair’s breadth behind her, looming like a cathedral overhead as he just barely brushed his arm against the back of her shoulder — and he whispered back, “Yes, sure— Valerie,” just as loosely confident.

“I’m not very good at this,” she muttered, her expression weird and clearly afraid.

“You’re alright. Do not ask her to help you puke.”

Evangeline made a scoffing noise as he grabbed the back of her shirt, nudging with his fist to goad her forward. It hastened her pace, and she got the idea that he wanted everything to be over and done with. His other hand was dug into his hoodie pocket, likely debating when he should take out his flask and swig — a desperate act of self-soothing that would expose his pitiful mental state.

Valerie was a fair young woman, dressed in a beige and black plaid skirt and a soft lavender cardigan; her baby, a girl, Evangeline guessed — wearing soft pink cotton pants and a severely stained crème colored sweater, a red ribbon tying up her black short tresses, the shade of which that matched her mother’s. Valerie’s hair was loose, and her short bangs jostled across her forehead as she bounced the baby on her knee. The child looked fussy, her tiny face twisted up in a less-than pleased way. Valerie’s attention was devoted to her until Evangeline and König steadily approached, to which her expression just barely lit up as she was faced with the newcomers.

“Hi,” she breathed, and her voice was quiet and sweet. The baby was silent as she looked up only at König, observing his enormity in the curious way that babies do. Evangeline was simply not interesting enough.

“Hi,” Evangeline returned, then introduced both herself and the man at her back, gesturing her hand over to him as she did — not necessarily meaning to hit her hand against his torso, though neither flinched back at the touch. (She ignored the way she could feel his stomach tense through the fabric - the way his whole body seemed to go frigid - even if her barest touch was so brief.)

“I heard,” Valerie said, a smile on her face as she adjusted the baby to sit properly in her lap. She seemed soft around each and every corner of her face; the way that she held herself, as if to make herself small. “Word runs quickly through here; Danny wouldn’t ever admit it, but he passes information along like gossip, and everyone else clings to it.”

Evangeline grinned as she made to sit beside her; König followed along like a lost puppy, pushing up the backrest and dropping down in the seat next to her own. “I used to live outside of Warwick - maybe, like, eighty people maximum in that town. There wasn’t a whole lot to do besides talk. My mom would sit outside with the landline and pretend to be on the phone whenever she heard our neighbors arguing.”

“God. I was in Athol, and you couldn’t get peace and quiet at all. I would’ve killed for that.” Valerie shook her head, rolling her eyes before casting her gaze back out to the small crowd. “It feels like the bombs dropped now and the sound of it still rattles, lingering- kind of.”

Evangeline bit her bottom lip, searching for something else to say. She used to be good at talking to people, she used to be the student council President. She used to be kind to people, small talk had been easy, and she’d applied for a job at the diner in Warwick — thinking that she’d be good at asking people for their orders, at delivering platters of food and midday lemonades with a happy-go-lucky smile plastered on her lips.

Instead, she leaned back in her seat and reached into König’s pocket, taking his flask for herself. She uncapped the steel and took a swig, just as large as the last but no less painful, and kept it in hand as she choked the liquid down with a flinch. It settled more constantly than the first drink had, and also served to kick the initial swig into first gear, easing her body into a lackadaisical limpish state and hazing her mind. Valerie was staring at her as she drank, and Evangeline offered up the flask — to which the dark-haired girl took with minor hesitancy. She winced upon taking her light drink, and Evangeline lightly smiled at the twist of her face as Valerie handed the steel back with a small, thanks. The flask was returned to König, his gloveless fingers brushing hers as he took the cap from her — his knuckles worn with white scars, more jagged, hardly raised lines scattered sparsely on the back of his hands. She noticed that his nails were clean but bitten down, the skin surrounding the nail beds still red and agitated.

Valerie returned to watching the people, a couple catching her attention as they twirled together in front of the tables, music entwining them together. Meanwhile, a hushed shuffle of fabric caused Evangeline’s head to turn, giving her view of König lifting his mask up above his neck to just barely expose his mouth, granting himself access to the swift drink of liquor from the flask. It was a minimal sight, but she could see the way that what she could only assume was the same scar that marred his cheekbone carved downwards across his chin, ending just below the curved bone. The dull red line was awfully visible against his otherwise fair skin — facial hair shaven away, hiding nothing. He had only his mask as the veil, burying the fact that he’d blundered so badly at some point that half of his face had been split open.

He leaned back in his seat as he tucked the flask away, sighing as he spread his thighs apart, his knee pressing into Evangeline’s. The leg away from her bounced restlessly, his heel tapping the floor in a quick rhythm. He threw his arm over the backrest of her seat and she tried not to lean back, despite instinctively wanting to. She remembered how her father’s arm would always be on the back of her mother’s chair, whether they be beside each other at the dinner table or lounging on the sofa — and how he’d twirl her mother’s hair around his finger, mindlessly playing with the need to touch her. She wondered if König might do the same, were they given enough time together.

The baby was staring at him too, she realized after he’d tucked the hem of his mask back below his collar. She leaned forward in her mother’s lap, big eyes watching his hands as he twisted the cap back onto the flask and returned the steel to his pocket, and continued staring wide-eyed like he was some sort of mystical being even after he relaxed back in his seat. Evangeline smiled at the child, content with the fact that she was just too plain, and asked Valerie, “How old is she?”

Valerie’s gaze slipped back down from the people and to her baby, answering, “She’ll be a year in October. Her name’s Ellie, after my mother— Elizabeth.” Love warmed her tone as she spoke, and it was clearly swirling within her eyes as she looked down at her baby, who could only stare with wonder at the big man across Evangeline.

The child did not return the loving gaze though, and leaned further as her little arms reached across Evangeline and stretched out for König. Valerie giggled as she settled her hands on Ellie’s waist, lifting her. The baby whined as Valerie looked at the man and asked, “Would you hold her? She likes being high up, I think she wants to be tall.”

König seemed mildly uncomfortable, but not any more-so than he’d already been. He glanced between Evangeline and Valerie, who were both eyeing him with mixtures of hope and enjoyment, and then to the baby, who whined and gasped nearly to the point of tears; chubby fingers making desperate grabby motions at him. He wound up appeasing everyone with a sigh heaved from his chest, his arms coming in front of Evangeline so that Valerie could pass Ellie to him.

Valerie started explaining to him how he should hold her so as to not drop her, and he interrupted by hubristically claiming, “I had cousins who had children. They all fled the country, but I’d held the babies before they went.”

He proved his expertise by maneuvering Ellie onto his waist as he stood without dropping her, seating her on his bent arm, holding her still by her leg. She smiled around the thumb she’d stuck in her mouth, staring down at her mother as König wandered the two steps over to linger in front of both the women. Evangeline leaned forward whilst Valerie slumped back in her seat, watching with a lazy smile as Evangeline pulled the baby’s thick sock further up her foot when it had slid down amidst the moving.

“You seem like you had siblings,” Valerie commented as Evangeline gladly fussed over the sock.

“I had a little sister,” she responded, shaking the little foot teasingly after the menial task. Ellie giggled, bashfully grinning behind her hand. Casually, “She was at elementary school when the bombs fell.”

Valerie, sounding a little slurred, moaned sympathetically. “Mother Abigail wants me to get Ellie into the school for a few hours during the day so she can be read to and play with the puzzles, get used to being away from me, and whatever— but raiders had thrown grenades over the wall a few months ago, and one went through one of the school’s windows and killed Maggie’s son. I’ve been terrified of letting her out of my sight ever since, even if it means she’s not properly socialized. I don’t want her to be without me.”

“They killed children?” Evangeline gasped, her head turning towards the woman; hands drifting limply back down to her lap.

Valerie’s eyebrows were drawn together with self-pity as she nodded. “They’ll kill anyone, they don’t care. That’s why I wanted to come here to begin with, it’s just not safe out there. I wouldn’t be able to get anywhere out by Boston. People go missing along the way all the time, and no one ever knows where they went.”

“People go missing in Boston too, anyway,” König said. “The guards don’t search for them, they know where they’re being taken. It doesn’t matter to them.”

Evangeline looked up at him, distress lacing her features. “Why won’t they look for them?”

“Because they let people be taken,” he answered, his tone low with disdain. “It keeps the peace with the raider gangs. The raiders get slaves, and they don’t directly attack the cities— and the guards don’t have to waste ammunition and men on gunning them down.” He swayed a little bit, keeping the baby happy by moving her; petting the loose dark strands back away from her small forehead, the size of his hand almost comical in comparison to the child. “Children shouldn’t be sacrificed in men’s wars.”

“Careless collateral,” Valerie spoke, then sighed. A few of the kids had run up then - a girl and a boy - and crowded around König to coo over the baby, reaching up to fiddle with her tiny limbs and make playful faces at her, boisterous laughter spilling from Ellie’s mouth while Valerie watched with a content smile on her face. König focused on keeping the baby still atop his arm as she jostled around whilst Evangeline’s gaze slowly dragged out back to the crowd.

Someone had spilled their drink across the floor - whether it was juice or wine, she couldn’t tell - and the adults carefully wandered around it, making wide berths so as to not endanger themselves. An older woman had come in with her arm around an equally older man’s waist, keeping him stable; an acoustic guitar grasped in her other hand. Evangeline thought she recognized him as the man who she glimpsed sitting on his front porch earlier that day, spying through her window. The woman settled him down in one of the plastic folding chairs at the end of one of the long tables, and he dropped onto the seat with a heaved breath and a grunt. The chair was shifted, and he was facing Evangeline, albeit from across the room. The woman chatted with Abigail when the nun had approached, then the jukebox music was turned down courtesy of Danny, though it didn’t help much when the sound of idle chatter still echoed around the hollow gymnasium. The guitar was settled into his lap and he gave a few slow strums, the tune melancholic and dull in tone, then Valerie was quietly commenting, “Looks like John’s come to serenade us.”

She felt like she was drunk, then. She wanted to stitch the very feeling, the scene, into her flesh. As if she could remain in the seat at the gymnasium forever, surrounded by people who weren’t terribly crazy – not like the raiders outside who injected their veins with PCP and threw grenades into schools without a care that there might’ve been children inside, only knowing that anarchy ran the wasteland, that corruption came out of the soil like worms on a rainy day, and they wanted to destroy what was still good. And still, the room was filled with lives ripe with experiences that she had yet to grasp herself. She was a highschooler who’d been forced underground, and had grown into a woman who only knew the corners of a bunker. She didn’t know anything. She didn’t even really know what true danger was like, because König had sheltered her when she was faced with it – his shield as encompassing and strong as the concrete walls underground had been. That wasn’t a generosity that was given en masse in the wasteland.

She might’ve felt lonely, singular, were he not standing in front of her, ever steady with his constant presence. He’d rip himself away from her soon, she knew, and her heart sunk down to the bellows of her stomach, hollowed out.

And he was kind to children, who also didn’t know much of anything. He was riddled with scars and memories of battlefields, had been shredded - gutted - by the places where God was not, but he refused to allow them to strip him of his soul, of his overarchingly gentle heart. That ability to cling to grace was probably stronger than any blow from his fist. He settled the baby gently on the floor when Valerie permitted it with a nod of her head, and the older children crawled around Ellie; the boy brought a pack of cards out of the chest pocket of his overalls and started up a game of Old Maid. Then he drank from his flask again, offered it to Evangeline as the chords of John’s guitar began making a familiar tune – soon figuring it to be Harvest Moon as soon as the words began. She remembered hearing the song occasionally whenever her family would visit her grandparent’s farmhouse out by Connecticut River, played on a cassette tape inside the radio as they sat together on sofas in the living room; as crickets sang a cacophony beyond the windows, frogs chirped by the river down below the knolls.

But it was sweeter in person, she thought. Hopeful in tone, and a few of the adults swayed together, smiling at each other – the woman who’d helped John walk in had her hands on the back of his chair and tilted her head to each side, caught with the music twining through the air. The song felt like a hug; the room cradled by the tune. And as the summer night stretched on, König tucked the flask back into his pocket, then took her hand off of her lap and tugged her into standing, asking, “Dance with me?”

Maybe it was because of the liquor, maybe because the song was so warm and gentle, but she complied with a small, shy smile. She wanted to complain that she didn’t dance, to say that she didn’t really know how and she was much too tipsy to learn right then, but she allowed him to take her smaller hand into his and pull her a little further along so that they wouldn’t knock into the gathering of kids.

It was slow. He said it was part of a traditional German dance when he stepped to the side of her and locked her arm with his, walking in a slow circle; staring down at her with the sort of gaze she could’ve mistaken as yearning. Then he raised her hand and twirled her around as she laughed, taking her into him with his hands on her waist afterwards. It was a nice swaying as a song full of love gleaned the air around them. Dust wavered around her head that she imagined were pixies. The yellow lights shone on him, dimming his eyes to the deep color of the Atlantic along the Boston coast. And she thought that his soul must’ve wavered in shades of blue: a sort of melancholy emanating from him, seeping from his scars, that she saw as sapphiric — the ranges that his eyes took, mostly the tone of the sky’s reflection from the earth’s water. It was a deep and rich color — and she thought of him as much of the same.

She ached as her fingers felt along the nylon fabric around his neck. He had hunched down towards her, giving her easier access to him. She felt safe, he looked like he would keep her so, but the knowledge that he was leaving sat discontents at the forefront of her mind — swirled inside of her stomach with such a turbulent force that she was nearly nauseous.

She wasn’t happy when they left the school after saying their goodbyes. There was a deep sense of loss as she stepped into the house, not so dissimilar to when she first left the bunker and found her home in ruins, empty. She was mourning, she realized, as he went into his room and she quietly fled into hers. The door clicked shut and she turned around, facing the sweater she’d laid at the end of her bed; the pants that were also not hers still around her legs. She stumbled as she took off the sweatpants, kicking them away so that she could dig through her freshly folded clothes she’d stuffed into the dresser and clothe herself again in a pair of boxers. Then she folded up the pants and the sweater, stacked them atop one another at the end of her bed, and stared.

Minutes passed by — the watch pinged the birth of a new new hour. She wanted to keep them, selfishly. Like she wanted to keep her mother’s paintings, her sister’s drawings, her father’s cassette tapes. She wanted physical remnants of König to be able to touch when his presence would no longer linger. She wanted him to stay so that she wouldn’t be left alone again.

The mirror above the dresser reflected a deformed version of her mother, pathetic and lithe. The difference was the years of being alone written on her pale features. Her mother never knew abandonment, manic with the way she used to claw to keep the family whole. Evangeline squared her shoulders.

The desperate force of want raged through her, and it was humiliating, but it threatened to burst from her body in a terrible wave of tears — and she wasn’t going to be a sniveling coward, alone in her new bedroom. She used to speak to herself, talking aloud, because she was so afraid of the quiet — she wasn’t going to suddenly conform to it now. And if he wasn’t going to stay, then she’d never see him again, and speaking her mind wouldn’t matter.

She grabbed up the clothes, exited her room, and stood in front of his door like a ghost. Haunting the hallway, she hesitated. The house creaked like old bones, the streets outside were hushed, and she could only hear her own breathing. She sighed, then knocked twice — hardly tapping. There was nothing beyond the door, and she nearly knocked again - louder - until the doorknob turned and she was met with the mountain of a man once more.

He was still wearing the balaclava, she noticed first. She wondered if he slept in it, always masked in some sort of way. But she also noticed that the pale skin of his arms shone in the moonlight coming through the window behind him, and he was only dressed in a black t-shirt and red plaid boxers — similarly to her.

She didn’t stare too hard, refusing to embarrass herself even more if he saw her gazing at him like a dehydrated harlot.

“I have- uhm, your clothes,” she choked out, looking down to the small pile in her arms. She shifted uncomfortably on her feet, her soft sock sliding easily across the floor.

“…Thank you,” he said after a long, cautious moment. She felt his gaze on the top of her head like the sun, but she did not tilt back up. “I did not think about it, I don’t really care if you keep them. You could've just given them back in the morning, if you wanted to.”

“Well, I might have forgotten,” she excused, shoving the pile into his torso so that he was forced to take it. “Now neither of us will.”

His fingers brushed hers as he took the clothes much more gently than how she had initially thrust the bundle towards him. She lingered in the doorway as he turned around, walking back into the bedroom to lay the pile atop the dresser just opposite to the door.

She watched him as he did so, tried not to look too long at the exposed thick muscles on his legs, and quiveringly stated, “I wish you’d stay.”

His hands hovered above the clothes, briefly stunted. He turned and stared at her for a moment, then sighed as one hand came up to pull at the fabric around his neck. He embodied awkwardness as he muttered, “I’m glad I drank before this,” and went to sit down on the edge of his bed. He fidgeted weirdly: first laying his hands on his knees, then taking them up so that he could massage his thumb over his other palm. He was slumped for all of it. Tepid, “I only promised that I’d escort you here.”

Timidly, “I know,” she responded.

“I am not the settling kind.”

Quieter, “I know.”

He sighed again as she crossed the threshold and sat down on the bed beside him, not close enough to touch but not so far away, either. She picked at a hangnail on her ring finger, pulling the skin until it bled — drawing the stinging pain out of her body and into physicality.

“I haven’t lived in a place longer than six months since I was seventeen,” he told her. “I haven’t known home in ten years.”

“I thought I’d feel it immediately here,” she said, watching her own fingers fiddle with each other. “Or at least feel hope for it. I was more comfortable in that farmhouse we stayed in, to be honest.”

With genuine wonderment, “Because I was there?”

A pregnant pause as she thought about it, then she nodded. “It was safe,” she told him in a mumble.

Her shoulders had lost their confidence, slouched forward as soon as she crossed into his temporary room. König sighed again, sounding more and more exasperated with each chest-deep breath he gave, and then flopped back on the mattress, the sleek nylon of the sleeping bag rustling beneath him. Evangeline shuffled back a bit, then dropped down with him, level with his head. Her palms faced upwards, bared to the ceiling at her sides. He reached for her without much quiet deliberation, wrapping his hand around her forearm; gently holding, but not in a way that she could return it. It was so specific that she felt sick.

“I’m not the settling kind,” he told her once more.

Her fist clenched around the fabric, not finding any comfort. There were cobwebs in the corner of the ceiling, hanging tauntingly. A miniscule crack split through the center beside the ceiling light that would never shine again.

She breathed, “Alright,” defeated and sick with it.

The wind whistled through the broken windows, cold and unwanted.