EYEHEARTZOMBIES

There wasn’t any more talk after the storm that night. Jonas had stepped out of the tent and watched Joseph edge his way to the flaps. He stood safely inside the canvas wall that held in the light and his freedom. The dark of the night, even interrupted by bolts of lightning and the few burning fires in the camp was too oppressive and foreign to him still. Jonas saw him slowly extend a hand and touch the darkness outside of the glowing triangle coming from the held-open flaps. The hand, lily white and trembling, felt of this darkness, this erotic blasphemy, for the space of three seconds, maybe five, then quickly withdrew, falling to his side again to rest against his leg. The fingers and palm were welcomed back into the fold of the light, and the Light.

The lightning and thunder led the way into the camp and the deluge followed just minutes behind. Joseph waved at Jonas when the quick, heavy drops began to fall, and called something into a thunderclap. Jonas didn’t catch the words, but he didn’t care. The rain would come hard and quick in just a few moments and he didn’t want to be caught in it. He wondered for a second if the boy would turn rabbit and run, then remembered the trembling hand from a few seconds ago. This one is cemented to us ’til morning at least, he thought. He waved a hand in return and took off at a jog toward his own tent. The jog quickly became a run, the rain chasing him back to his cramped den.

Even at a run, he ended up soaked. He stripped down to his long cotton underwear and hung the dripping shirt and trousers over his small wood stove. The drips and drops turned to steam and soon the tent was as humid as any sauna. The rain outside just added to it and it soon felt like it was raining inside, too. Jonas sighed and lay down on his cot, his underwear and skin damp but warming in the steamy room. What was he going to do about this boy?

He couldn’t send him away — he was too useful for information at this point. Could he really risk taking him into his flock? Would the boy risk his life for the other men? That was all that Jonas asked from his men: to be ready to die for each other, if needs be. He wasn’t so sure this one could live up to that agreement. And could I stand to lose Silas — or Cypher — or any of the others that he had come to know and love in his years of soldiering and leadership — for this runaway, lost man-child from the Light?

It wasn’t a question he wanted to try and answer to himself tonight. Not with the roof pressing down on him like a soaked rag. He sat up on his cot and reached across the tent to where his footlocker was. He rustled around inside, not really looking at what his hand was brushing against and moving out of the way, until his fingers curled around a familiar slick shape of metal and glass.

He pulled the framed picture out of the footlocker and let the top fall back down with a clang of wood on wood. He had no idea who the people in the image were; he had found it in an abandoned house in Kansas City. It had been sitting on a mantle in the house in an area that had been called the “suburbs”. A man smiled at him from the colorful paper behind the slightly cracked glass pane. Next to the man was a woman — his wife? — and between them, two children, both girls. Even though the family was white, and he black, he always thought of them as himself and his own family. He had a wife that he hadn’t seen in five years back in Detroit. She was taking care of their daughters — two of them, just like the picture — as best she could. Her mother was helping, if the old woman hadn’t died yet, so he was sure she was getting by just fine; his wife was a stone, a sturdy tree. She provided stability, care, and, above all else, an unending supply of herself. He wondered how his girls were doing? If they remembered their father’s face?

Tears pooled in his eyes and slowly rolled down his sweaty face. He loved the Legion, he loved the army, but he loved his wife and children more. His tour would be up in another three years. Maybe then he could go home, get a normal job, and take care of his family. If he survived until then, that was. The battles since Kansas City — Tulsa and Amarillo — had been vicious. He had lost a lot of men, both good and bad, and had had several close calls with his own neck. That sword in Tulsa; the grenade and land mine in Amarillo. Too many, too close together. One more reason to hold on the boy, he thought. Keep him a guest and I have the Devil by the toe if a fight comes.

Jonas moved to put the picture back in the footlocker, then decided against it and set it down on the cracked paint of the locker, folding out the velvet stand with his large fingers. He turned back around and lay down in his cot again, knees pulled up in a fetal position; odd for such a large man, he figured, but the Devil take ‘em if anyone cared. He looked at the family in the picture, their smiles barely faded even though the picture could be decades old. The two girls watched over him as he drifted off to sleep, the rain still plopping down above his head. A few drops wormed through the tent canvas and streaked their way down the picture, tracing a wet finger around the faces preserved there.