Those chefs accepted the slimy green bounty and then carefully layered the seaweed over the hot stones.
“We’re not eating the seaweed. Right? Seriously, Jim, right?”
His poker face broke, he laughed, and admitted, “Hey, where’s that tough survival-girl? No, we’re not eating seaweed. More like Yellow Fin Tuna and Marlin, or whatever else they caught today.”
Smoke rose from the pit.
She said, “Fresh seafood. I remember when you paid top dollar in restaurants for that.”
“No other way for us,” he told her. “We can’t really store any of it, so we eat tonight what we caught this afternoon. Some times the fishermen come back empty handed. In the early days, that meant eating canned soup or camping food; stuff we scavenged. The last year, well, it usually meant eating nothing at all. Are things going to be a lot better now? Now that you’re here?”
She enjoyed a swig of water and answered, “Me? No, I just kill the monsters.”
“You know what I mean. Now that your ‘Empire’ is here.”
“Not my Empire, Jim. Yours now, too. You’re a part of it. If the fishermen had come back without a catch today, you’d still have something to eat.” She considered. “Well, probably. I mean, today, yes. That’s doesn’t mean there aren’t hard times ahead.”
They stood at the edge of the patio deck looking out across the tangled gardens and the white sand toward the steady roll and splash of the surf. Darkness crept up from the horizon but they still had time before the sun set.
Behind Nina and Jim, dozens of people who had spent years hiding in the old resorts along the beach celebrated their liberation from the horrors that had invaded Wilmington five years ago. Music played from a tape recorder, a couple of people danced at the bottom of an empty swimming pool, and little kids chased one another around a veranda.
“What’s it like?” He asked. “What’s it like everywhere else?”
“It’s not like the old days, before ‘all this’, if that’s what you’re wondering. I mean, things aren’t easy. Food is always in short supply, so are medical supplies, and things like shoes and toothbrushes. Towns and villages and stuff are scattered around and the roads in between are pretty dangerous. People still do a lot of scavenging through vacant houses and buildings to find stuff to trade or that can be recycled into something useful. Of course, people who do that don’t live as long as those who stay in town; there are still lots of bad things out there.”
He told her, “I’m just happy that we’re not hiding anymore. Let the monsters do that for a while now, I’m sick of it.”
“Yeah, well, that’s my job, right? I have to admit, it’s nice to hang around for a bit to see what good comes of it.”
“What do you mean?”
She said, “I move fast. My unit and I, we’re usually on to the next mission a couple of hours after the last one is done. I don’t normally get to meet the people we help. All the hanging out I’ve done around here this week is usually the stuff civilian administrators do. I’m a field operative. This sort of thing is, well, kind of unusual for me.”
“That sets up a really good question I want to ask you.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“Who are you, Nina Forest?”
“That’s a heck of a question.”
“I’ll bet it is.”
“Just your average girl,” Nina told him. “Let’s see, where to start…well, before all this I flew choppers for the National Guard while I wasn’t fighting bad guys with the Philly SWAT team.”
He laughed. “Seriously? I mean, before all the aliens came, you were already doing the soldier thing?”
“Yeah,” her eyes glazed over. “Since I can remember, it’s always been a part of me.”
“That must be tough.”
“There were times, yeah, when I didn’t quite fit in.”
“And what about nowadays?”
“Nowadays…” she pondered. “I’m still just a soldier. I’m fighting to free people. People like you and Denise.”
“And if I haven’t thanked you in the last five minutes let me do that again now.”
She told him, “You don’t need to thank me. It’s my job.”
Brock said, “I don’t think it’s part of your job to take care of an eleven year old girl overnight; to spend time with her like you did yesterday. That’s above and beyond, I think.”
Nina felt a twinge of embarrassment. She tried to brush aside his words. “Yeah, well, I was a little girl once, too. But what about you? What were you doing before all this?”
Jim leaned against the railing.
“Me? Well I sure wasn’t with any SWAT teams, I’ll tell you that. I wanted to be a teacher. Elementary school. Couldn’t find any teaching jobs so I did the next best thing: worked in day care. A start, you know?”
She nodded.
“I thought it was just a stepping stone until something opened up in the district. Man, was I right. I did step up.”
A flock of Earth-born sea birds passed overhead. The smell of the smoldering pit had drawn their attention.
“What did you step up to?” Nina asked.
“Den father, I suppose.”
“Or maybe just ‘father’?”
He nodded. “Sort of. In a way. Yeah.”
“Guess you didn’t have your own children.”
Brock shook his head. “No, I was just a kid myself. My whole life ahead of me,” he drifted away for a moment, perhaps revisiting those visions of the future; visions that evaporated in the fire of Armageddon. “I was living the high life. You know, young and single. Nice apartment. No responsibilities.”
“Then came fatherhood,” she said.
“Yeah,” Brock laughed. “Instant family. At first, it was just me and one other older lady, Mildred. Something…something got her on that first day while we were hunkered down in the center hoping parents would start showing up.”
“They never did,” Nina knew.
“Started off with fifteen kids.”
Nina glanced toward Denise and the group of children running around the patio deck. She counted eight of them and did the math, totaling a casualty rate of nearly fifty percent.
Jim told her, “Five of them weren’t even two yet. A couple of the kids were from the center’s day camp, so they were older. You know how I ended up with them? The two counselors in charge of the day camp took off when things went to hell. They told the kids to stay put and they walked out of the room and took off.”
“You have got to be shitting me.”
She saw a red glow in his cheeks, no doubt a memory of the rage he felt when he understood responsible ‘adults’ had abandoned their young charges.
“They left them there. Just left them.”
Nina said, “So you inherited even more. Wow, that must have been almost impossible.”
“It didn’t feel that way at the time because I didn’t have a chance to think about it. I mean, watching over a bunch of children like that is hard enough when the world is running a-okay. Between juice cups and diapers and making sure they’re not pummeling each other, well, I probably was about the last person to realize the world was falling apart.”
“And when you did realize it?”
“It was difficult to believe the stuff on TV. Then when it was outside the door, man, I mean, your survival instincts really take over. Sometimes those kids, no matter how much you yell, they just can’t be quiet for two seconds. But man, we were all huddled up in the cloakroom with a couple of big things walking around the center with, like, axes or something. We stayed real quiet for almost an hour. Even the really little kids, it’s like they knew their life depended on being quiet.”
