The Renegades (Book 4): Colony (16 page)

Jess was chatting with Rowan. None of them look panicked. They were speaking quietly among themselves. I heard one of them chuckle. I let out a slight groan as I tried to sit up.

“He’s awake.”

Jess was the first to come over. She took a seat beside me and placed her hand on my chest.

“Am I dead?”

“Not unless I am,” she replied with a smirk.

“Where are we?”

Annora stepped into my line of sight at the foot of the bed. “Home.”

A strange reply but I wasn’t ready to dig deeper. I stared around at the faces, wondering if this was some dream.

“Do you remember anything?”

I reached up and rubbed my eyes and breathed out hard. “I was in a jeep. Baja?”

“He’s around, still alive and still annoying,” Izzy said, coming up beside me on the left.

“Rest up, when you are ready I have some questions for you. The medication I’ve given you will probably make you drowsy for a while.”

Annora went to turn away.

“The Warden and Dr. Brenton. Where are they?” I asked.

She cast a glance over her shoulder. “That’s what I was going to ask you.”

T
rouble was never far
from us even when we thought we were safe.

At first it seemed logical. Hand myself over to get Jess back. I didn’t bank on them hurrying me into that lab and sticking needles up the ying yang. Could I have fought them and prevented it from happening? Maybe. Though I have to admit I thought the others would get there in time but that was just the stuff of movies.

Reality is much harsher.

I suffered on that island something I wouldn’t have wished on my worst enemy. Pain beyond description, a horror that would stay with me for the rest of my life, however short that might be.

Now I wanted to forget. Put it behind me.

After Rikers they took us to a beachfront home situated on ten acres in Southampton, Long Island, New York. I’d always heard about the houses there being extravagant and extremely expensive. This place was no different. It had twelve bedrooms, six garages, a moat around it, an indoor and outdoor pool, tennis courts, a guest house with five more bedrooms, and it sat on the edge of a small rocky cliff overlooking a private beach. Not that privacy mattered anymore. I came to learn that the resistance had contained sections of a large portion of the east end of Long Island. For years this place had drawn in the summer colonies of America. Now they would carve out a community that would exist for survivors. Its purpose: to heal and rebuild.

What happened to staying on Rikers?

Well, other than the fact the place was a shithole that shouldn’t have existed in the first place. For a while I didn’t know. Very little was told to me in those initial days. I saw a few doctors come and go; at least that’s what they called themselves. Later, Wren told me. Those in charge believed it would have been a big risk to stay there. It seemed the idea of staying on the island was thrown aside after the military learned that the place had been compromised. For the first few weeks I fully expected another assault. That military would track us down but that wasn’t the case. Apparently they had bigger fish to fry.

Still, the resistance weren’t taking any chances.

I gathered Annora was the one who oversaw all decisions. I was wrong; she was only one of many. I would soon come to know the rest.

In the meantime, the team hauled out medical equipment on the back of trucks and brought it to the community they had named Paradise which signified new beginnings.

Annora was going to continue her work and develop a cure that could be used if and when someone was bitten. They weren’t fooling themselves. It would take a long time to turn back the tide that had swept in and destroyed most of humanity.

By the time my body had healed, I was eager to know what they were going to do next. I’d overheard many things in my time there. Some of them were talking about taking new bases run by the government around the country; others talked about taking out a ship and leaving the mainland. To me it was all madness. Eventually though they seemed settled on the idea of creating a community on the east coast.

Three weeks passed and there was no sign of Hive security. Even the infected were kept at bay by a wall that was built using corrugated steel and posts pressed up against the sides. The resistance continued to hold underground bases within the city. Though these were mostly used to monitor military activity. Teams would go out, kill the infected so they could secure the community. The hope was eventually they could block off enough of Long Island that it would become a colony of survivors.

Outside on the balcony, I breathed in deeply the salty ocean air.

Further down the beach I saw kids splashing around in the frigid water. There was no snow but it was cold. Apparently for those who lived on the east coast it had been an unusually warm winter. Their pants legs were rolled up and they were darting in and out and seeing how long they could stay in the water. I chuckled to myself, thinking that was the way it was meant to be, kids acting crazy without the fear of being killed.

My eyes drifted along the beach. I was waiting. Wondering if it would happen again.

Then I saw them, Jess with him. I glanced at the clock. It was the twelfth day in a row that I had seen them together. Something had changed in her. I don’t know what it was or when it occurred. Perhaps it started the moment I placed her on that chopper. Maybe it would have happened anyway. But over the past three weeks she had become distant.

I wasn’t an idiot. I saw it happening. I felt it.

It was strange, Wren came in to see me more than her. At first I thought that was the reason but I soon came to find out from Baja that she had been spending more time with Rowan. I was bedridden for most of those weeks, and the only time I did get up, I would go out on to the balcony and look down over the rocks, so it wasn’t like I could even talk to her about it.

The few times she showed up, she was with Izzy. I think she knew that if she came alone I would have said something. Conversation never once touched on her relationship with Rowan.

But something had changed between us.

I gripped the dark black metal railing, watching her near the water with Rowan. She laughed and smiled and my eyes dropped. She smiled just the way she used to do when I was with her. What could I say; I had connected with someone back at the fortress. Though, I had never told her that. I had been bedridden. It wasn’t like she was any different. Perhaps her feelings had changed? I tried to reason it out in my mind.

Even in an apocalypse life continues and so does the way we feel. Feelings came and went. People changed. Connections became lost. Love once felt became cold and for others new sparks ignited.

As I looked to the horizon a deep orange sun melted into the ocean. I felt a warm breeze brush across my cheek. Behind me the door opened and Wren came in. She was wearing a pair of dark jeans, a white shirt, knee-length boots and a light jacket. Her hair was up in a tangled mess behind her. Of course I never said it was a mess, to me it looked good every day she showed up.

“Hey you, I brought you a beer.”

“Where are you getting these?”

“It’s the Hamptons. These rich bastards had stockpiles of alcohol.”

She handed one off to me and I grimaced a little as I took a seat in a wicker chair on the balcony.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, it’s still a little sore.”

She sat down across from me and gazed out spotting Jess and Rowan. She glanced back at me as if to gauge my reaction. A warm band of light fell on her face, casting shadows that danced on her features. She cupped a hand above her eye and smirked. There was something very disarming about her smile and those green eyes.

“You know, it’s not always a bad thing,” she said.

She took a sip of her drink.

“What isn’t?”

She looked back at out at them and gestured with her head. I snorted a little and beer came out of my nose.

“How is that not a bad thing?” I asked. “It’s your brother.”

“Okay, maybe a little, but…” she flashed her pearly whites. “Seasons change.”

“Is that your answer for how relationships go to shit?”

She scoffed. “I just think that we put so much pressure on ourselves to hold tightly to people we meet and if there’s anything that this apocalypse has taught me, it’s not worth it. You’ve got to live in the moment.”

“Live in the moment. So fuck it all and fuck everyone?”

“Ah, I didn’t say fuck everyone.”

“But you’re implying it, right?”

She waved her finger at me. “Now you’re twisting my words. I’m saying. Life changes, and we have to deal with that.”

We sat there in the silence of the sunset. Neither of us felt the need to speak.

I hesitated before I spoke again. “Why do you come in and see me every day, Wren?”

“I can stop if you want?”

“No, I’m… just curious.”

She leaned forward, rolling the bottle around in her hands. “What can I say? Your company is riveting.”

I laughed. She eyed me over the top of her bottle with a playful smile.

“Look, I don’t think I do anything anyone else doesn’t.”

I swallowed some beer. “No, even Baja, Ben, and Elijah only swing by every couple of days.”

“And Izzy?” she asked.

“Yeah, but she’s a worrywart. She has this mothering thing about her. But you…”

She ran a finger up the side of the bottle, catching beads of condensation. “Well, maybe I don’t want you to become a recluse.”

“Recluse?”

“Yeah, that beard of yours is becoming real fierce.”

I ran a hand over it. “True.”

I hadn’t shaved in weeks.

“Hey listen. Um, when you’re ready, I want to introduce you to some of the other members of the group. I think you’ll be pleased to see what they’re planning to build here.”

I put my feet up on a table and soaked in the view. “And what’s that?”

“Something that’s better than what’s out there.”

“Aren’t they worried about the Warden returning?”

She shook her head. “No, Annora thinks they got whatever they needed. At least that’s what we hope. There is…”

“What?” I asked.

“Well, there is the possibility they escaped when we attacked the island. The remaining choppers were already gone. So, Annora believes they were in them. And being as we haven’t heard anything over the radio, we’re pretty confident they got what they wanted.”

I nodded and contemplated what would happen if she were wrong. What if they didn’t get what they were extracting?

We continued to sit and talk about everything and anything that came to mind over the next couple of hours. Conversation flowed freely. We laughed and for the first time in a while I felt myself relaxing. I looked out again at Jess. As much as I didn’t want to say that it bothered me, it did. Seeing her out there with Rowan. It niggled me to no end. In fact, I don’t know why I even showed up every day on that balcony. Watching them together was tough. It had been over a week since Jess had been in. It was to be expected. New feelings brought with them a desire to spend more time with a person. Maybe it was the same for others. I glanced over at Wren.

A
few more days passed before
I was ready to venture out. To be honest, I could have left a week ago but the seclusion was peaceful. I took a shower and shaved off the fuzz around my face that had grown out of control. I could barely recognize myself once it was all gone. I slipped on some clean clothes that looked like they had been nabbed from some Harvard preppy school dorm. The door creaked open and I found myself on the top floor. It was quiet in the home. I looked over some of the photos on the walls. There was one of a family; a bearded man with an attractive blonde and three teenagers, no doubt the original owners. Were they still alive? I heard a grandfather clock chime on the hour.

The walls were cream, the floors a deep, rich red hardwood that went down winding stairs. There were lights on the sides of the stairs every second step. What you could do with money, I thought. When I reached the bottom I turned to my left towards a living area. All the furniture inside was white. The owners obviously didn’t have a dog as this place would have been fucked up real good. It had a very open concept to the entire house. I gazed down at the zebra skin rug in the hallway. Directly in front of me was a huge painting of a family that covered the entire wall. Large windows let in lots of natural light. It smelled like pine and polish in the home. Everything about the place made you feel at ease. After spending such a long time on the road it was quite something to live in the lap of luxury.

Just off from the lounge through a pair of French doors was a burgundy colored dining area with a huge table and twelve red and cream striped chairs. Two giant chandeliers hung low over it. As I passed by I saw a Glock 22 on a side table. I picked it up, checked the magazine. Cast a glance around and then pushed it into the small of my back.

“Hello?” I called out, thinking that someone would hear me. My voice echoed slightly off the walls. There was no response. I continued walking through the maze of corridors and rooms until I spotted people outside in the backyard. It was a strange sight. While they were all relaxing, their assault rifles weren’t far from them. There would always be an ever-present sense of danger.

“Johnny,” Wren called out. They were sitting around a pool that had been drained of water. Some of them were messing around with flotation devices, while others removed empty beer cans from the bottom of the pool.

My eyes flitted over to Jess who was in the middle of being tackled by Rowan. She let out a laugh. It had been a week since I’d seen her. An “oh fuck” look came over her face. Perhaps she didn’t expect to see me again. I don’t know.

“Johnny B. Goode,” Baja called out. “You have risen. Now get your gizzard around this.” He tossed me a can of Budweiser. Ben came over and wrapped his hand around my neck.

“How you doing, bud?”

“Yeah, good, Ben.”

“You are going to love this place.”

Again my eyes drifted over to Jess who now looked as if she was conducting herself in a manner that at least registered that I was there. Rowan lit a cigarette, gave me a nod, said something to Jess, and walked off. She smiled at him. I think the only other one who noticed was Izzy. Her eyes darted between Jess and me, no smile came across her face. Her lips were pursed together. However, she did come over and give me a hug.

Jess opened her mouth as though she was about to say something then closed it. Before she made her way over, Wren pulled me away to introduce me to someone. I glanced back over my shoulder at her. Her eyes dropped a little. I blew my cheeks out feeling awkward. Wren led me into a guesthouse that doubled as a place for meetings. She knocked on a thick wooden door and a man’s voice came from beyond it.

“Come in.”

Upon opening the door, I was greeted immediately by the sight of wood-paneled walls and two large brown leather couches. There was a carved historic fireplace on one side, with tapestry rugs all over the floor including a small one on the coffee table in the middle. Off to my right was a business table with two massive tusks either side. It was very odd. Seated behind the desk was a man dressed in an impeccable suit. No dirt, scratches, or signs that he had missed sleep.