Anthony DeCosmo - Empire

“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.”

He shook his head, sorting through foggy memories.

“At first, we stayed in the center. We had snacks and stuff like that, even some games for the kids. It seemed like every couple of hours we had to hide. The streets in Wilmington got real bad.”

She said, “You stayed there as long as you could, hoping parents would come and get their kids.”

“It seemed the right thing to do. I think I told you already, for a while on that first day we got calls from parents. I mean, frantic calls. One little boy…his call from dad got cut off by…by…his dad being…”

She placed a hand on his shoulder and spared him the details.

“I understand.”

He struggled to hold back tears.

Nina told him, “Jim…let it go. All the years you worked so hard to keep these kids alive. Well guess what? You’ve crossed the finish line.”

“I hope…I hope that-man, I’m sorry,” he put his eyes in his hands.

“There’s still danger around,” she said. “I’m just saying, it isn’t all rosy. But you’ve got help now. We’ve got people who deal with this sort of thing. They’ll be coming here soon to help make arrangements.”

“What?” He pulled his eyes out of his hands. “You mean, for the kids?”

“If that’s what you want, yeah,” she said. “I can imagine the bond you have with them. But we’ve found orphans before and most of them are parts of families now.”

He closed his eyes tight.

“That’s good. That’s real good. Maybe I’ll be able to figure out my own life. That’s been sort of on hold for five years now.”

He let out a long exhale then said, “I have to tell you. I really admire you. I mean, the way you fight and how you’re not afraid. All these years of running and hiding, I’ve been scared shitless. I think of all the kids I lost. I wonder if I had been braver maybe more of them would have made it.”

Nina smiled; almost laughed.

“What?” He asked. “What’d I say?”

She paused, unsure how to say it. “It’s just that every guy I’ve met in the past four years is one of two types.”

“Yeah? What types are those?”

“The first is the guy that’s really gung-ho for the fighting and wants me to know how brave he is. Like he’s going to impress me with how tough he is. Usually they’re the types who go running head on at a Spider-Ant with nothing but a can of Raid and a fly swatter.”

The phrase was an inside-joke with the Dark Wolves but she figured he would understand the idea. He did.

“The second is the guy that puts on the brave front but is damn scared. He’s the one that that tells you he can arm-wrestle a Stick Ogre but then cut and runs at the site of a Chew-Cow.”

“A Chew Cow?”

“Think a big cow. Kind of harmless.”

“Oh. Well..?”

“But you,” she explained. “You just are who you are. That’s kid of refreshing.”

“Actually I’m the third type. I’m the guy that’s damn scared and isn’t afraid to admit it.”

“That’s what I mean. I admire that. It means people can count on you.”

“Huh?”

“It means you do things you have to do, even if it scares you.”

His brow crinkled in an expression of mild confusion as he pointed out, “But that’s what you do, isn’t it?”