Anthony DeCosmo - Empire

“Yes?”

“Hi,” he caught his breath. “Sorry, I spotted your cars and I didn’t want you to leave without getting a chance to thank you.”

Nina squinted and examined him. Probably in his early thirties, maybe a little thin but otherwise in decent shape.

“I remember you,” she said. “You were with the kids, right?”

“Jim Brock,” he extended his hand. “And thank you, Miss..?”

“ Captain,” Nina corrected. “Captain Forest.”

His smile faltered and a little red shot to his cheeks.

She reconsidered her harsh tone and said, “Had we found out about it sooner maybe we could have got there before your two friends were killed.”

Brock’s soft features hardened and his eyes cast to his feet.

“Yeah, well, I mean, I can still…I can still…”

“You can still hear the screams,” she knew. “That’s what Mutants do; they like to hear people scream. It’s how they’re wired, I guess.”

He said, “At least all of the children made it out safe. Maybe, in some way, their deaths bought time for you to get there.”

“I guess that’s one way to look at it.”

Her driver-a smile on his face-slid behind the wheel and turned the ignition key. The Humvee rumbled to life.

Nina asked Jim Brock, “What were you doing with all those kids? I mean, the guy said something about them being a part of your orphanage or something.”

“Before the world went to hell I was at a day care center. You wouldn’t believe how many people went to work on the day of the Apocalypse. The parents never came to get their kids. You know, dead or injured. Maybe just trapped. We got a couple of phone calls. At least some of the children had a chance to speak to their moms or dads one more time. But the parents never came.”

“Oh.”

It seemed to her there were a million stories of that day, a million angles and new perspectives. She had never thought about the day cares or schools. Probably because she had no children or close friends with kids.

Or any friends in those days, Nina thought.

“Well done,” she told him.

“What’s that?”

“When all this started, I was heavily armed, with a group of trained police officers, and, honestly, I barely survived the first day. I’m guessing that instead of machine guns and grenades, you had diapers and juice boxes. I’m just saying, you did a good job.”

“All of it would have ended if it weren’t for you. We were not getting out alive. No matter what. Those things, they wanted to kill the kids. It would have happened eventually. They want to kill every living thing that was on this earth before they got here.”

And we want to kill everything that wasn’t here before then, Nina chewed on the irony.

“Well, good luck and all. See you ‘round, Jim.”

“Nice meeting you, Captain.”

She nodded to the driver and as the Humvee pulled away, she told Jim Brock, “That’s Nina.”

Half an hour later, the Humvee parked outside of City Hall. A minute after Nina and her driver exited the vehicle, a corner of the canvass tarp covering crates in the Humvee’s cargo bed lifted and a pair of young eyes peeked out.

The overcast weather hovering over Wilmington for several days had moved off, painting the cityscape in warm, gold rays and giving the air a fresh, almost spring-like flavor but a flavor that-to the little girl’s nose-was drown out by the overriding smell of beef jerky radiating from one of the crates she hid among.

Denise Cannon slipped out of the vehicle quietly, crouching near the rear bumper. She wore torn blue jeans, a dirty t-shirt, and one-size-too-big sneakers she had found in an empty motel room two months ago.

She prepared to cross to the sidewalk but stopped when voices neared.

Two men dressed in grease-stained overalls approached one of the many trucks parked along the curb. They opened the hood of one and mumbled something about a fuel pump.

As she waited, Denise surveyed her surroundings.

To her left across the street she saw a fancy, modern building about two-stories tall with windows and glass being the primary design element, all of which were now shattered. That modern building warped and sagged to the point that she guessed the next strong wind might cause it to collapse.

To her right stood a thin, long building painted white with four tall pillars in front. Scruffy green lawn surrounded the place, as well as decorative trees that had been nearly picked clean of leaves, probably the work of Sloths. She also saw a statue of somebody holding his or her arm aloft.

City Hall.

She spotted a pair of nasty-looking dogs sitting at the top of the flight of stone stairs leading to the main entrance. She spied two more under a covered porch at the side entrance to the building.

She used parked cars-some belonging to the new military force in town, others long-abandoned-as cover to work her way down the street until finding a safe route to cross the sidewalk and slip onto the grounds behind City Hall.

There she found a first floor window with a hole in it just large enough for a petite eleven-year-old girl to slip through.

Despite serving as the army’s base, few people walked the corridors of City Hall. In fact, Denise saw more dogs than she saw people. She avoided both, although she figured the dogs must have caught her scent but because she was human, they did not pay her any particular attention, despite the lingering odor of the beef jerky she had stowed away with.

The musty smell of the place might have helped, too. City Hall looked and felt like a museum with exhibits, memorials, and even a theater.

Denise stepped softly as she followed voices echoing through the halls. One of those voices sounded like it belonged to the woman. She eventually tracked the conversation to a small group of soldiers gathered around a table in a large, long room.

A sign at the door said that the chamber once hosted press conferences and town hall meetings as called by Wilmington’s long-gone city governors. Row upon row of mostly knocked-over chairs lined the rectangular room.

The soldiers conversed around a crescent-shaped table at the front of that room on a raised platform covered in red carpet. Three large windows behind the table allowed the sun to streak in.

Denise peeked but knew she could not stay at the entrance, so she withdrew and followed a cramped stairwell to a small mezzanine level. A wooden banister offered Denise cover as she crouched low and listened in on the meeting from above.

She was there, the woman with the ponytail. The one who outfought that beastly thing at Airlie Gardens. The one who shouted orders to men and who was not afraid of the nightmares.

Her ear caught bits and pieces of the conversation.

“…they swept through Pine Valley Estates and killed a bunch of Gremmies…”

“…the track out there is operational, just needs…”

“…Intelligence places them about a hundred miles northwest of here…”

“…HQ says no re-supply on those for the rest of the week…”

Another solider dressed in black ran into the meeting hall panting and shouting with a German shepherd on his heels

“Captain! Captain Forest,” the newcomer sounded panicked.

“What? Whatchya got?”

“Sh-Shadow-”

All of the soldiers around the table grew rigid, as if tensing for battle.

“Now? Where?”

“No,” the man, still out of breath, reported. “Not here, not now. But we found something. Had to be a Shadow. Right down the damn street.”

The woman named Captain Forest grabbed a mean-looking rifle from the table.

“Show me.”

Denise stayed still as the group marched out of the room beneath her. As they moved, the little girl noticed that Captain Forest still possessed the sword she had won from the big-mouthed ugly thing. She carried it in a scabbard strapped to her leg.