CHAPTER TWO
When I came to, however long later, my head was throbbing, and I was sitting in a moving truck. A quick glance to my left and right told me that I was sitting between two men. My head had been resting on the muscular shoulder of the man on my right, who was shaggy-haired and kind of grimy-looking, which was how my very brief first initial impression had struck me. The man to my left was generally a little cleaner-looking, my very brief first initial impression of him. I'd also gotten the impression that he was handsome, maybe even incredibly so. One second was all my brain had needed to take in and process a quick flash of strong jaw, golden brown stubble, and deep-set green eyes fringed with thick dark lashes.
I honestly didn't know what to do. Didn't have a clue. My knee-jerk reaction was to thrash and fight, demanding that the driver stop the truck immediately and let me out. However, as much as a rising sense of panic was making me want to shove and claw my possible captors, I didn't want the one driving to plow the truck into a tree as a result, possibly accidentally killing me in the process.
I also didn't want him to crash because on the chance that he and his buddy were rare "good guys" of the type I'd met in Ohio, I didn't want him and his buddy to be injured or killed, either. And, as much as I had a vague-yet-somehow-strong-at-the-same-time intuition that I was indeed some sort of a captive, I also had a secondary gut feeling that I hadn't come to any harm while I'd been passed out, and that these two men were somehow responsible for that being the case.
After all, no other part of my body besides my head hurt, and my head could be easily explained by me hitting it on the brick or whatever it had been when I'd been clothes-lined.
Within just a few seconds of me opening my eyes, lifting my head, and glancing around, the green-eyed man to my left, the one driving, glanced over at me and spoke. "Thought you might come around soon. How do you feel?"
I felt confused, and wary, and semi-panicked, and sort of angry and scared, all at the same time. Not knowing who I was dealing with, though, and not knowing whether or not they'd take enjoyment in my jumble of negative emotions, I just said I was fine.
"I would, however, like to know who the two of you are, and what's happened to me, please, if you don't mind."
Now that I was full-out looking at him, and had been for a time-span longer than a mere second, I could see that my first impression of the man to my left had been dead-on. He was incredibly handsome. Really, devastatingly handsome wouldn't have been far off the mark.
I guessed he was somewhere in his mid-thirties, handsome in a classic, masculine, rugged sort of way, but with high cheekbones that for some reason made me think of fine art, like a sculpture made by an Italian master centuries earlier. His longish, wavy dark hair, which was brushed straight back from his forehead, was the kind that might make a woman want to run her hands through it, tangling her fingers in the curls that rested against the nape of his neck. If that woman didn't have a sense that she was being held captive, that is.
In response to what I'd said about wanting to know who he and his buddy were and what had happened to me, he opened his mouth to speak but was cut off by his buddy, to my right, who spoke in a deep, decidedly gravelly sort of voice with a bit of a southern drawl, which his companion had as well.
"We'll ask the questions. You answer. That's how it's going to work. And if you're one of those female Borderliners sent up to try to infiltrate our group and spy on us, we'll find out real soon.
“We're heading to meet up with some of our people right now, and one of them is a woman who lived in Borderline not too long ago. She'll tell us if you're one of them. Even if you're new, she'll still be able to tell. She has a sixth sense for anyone who's bought into their bullshit."
Feeling incredibly defensive, even though I had no reason to be, I glared at the slightly-grimy man to my right. "Look. I have no clue what you're talking about. I've never been to 'Borderline.' I don't even know where it is. And I'm certainly no spy.
“Far from me trying to infiltrate anyone's group, you two have apparently abducted me. Which, if you want to talk about bullshit, there's some, but I'm not standing for it. I demand to be released right this second."
The slightly-grimy man to my right scoffed faintly. "Ain't gonna happen."
"Really. Well, how about if I-"
"Whatever you're thinking about, don't even try it." Glowering a bit, the slightly- grimy man looked me dead in the eyes. "Really."
With my anger and indignation possibly making me a little irrational, I'd been going to say how about if I just punch you upside the head and let myself on out of the truck, even though the latter action really wouldn't be to my benefit since the truck was still moving, doing fifty, at least, on a straight stretch of back country road.
Something in the slightly-grimy man's gray eyes when he'd said really had told me that I probably really shouldn't say anymore right then, so I didn't, turning my face forward to stare out the windshield.
No one spoke. With both cab windows partially rolled down, a spring-scented breeze continually rushed into the truck, making me think that it was probably the first or second week of April. Focused on my end goal of getting to Nashville, as always, I really hadn't been paying much attention to little things like buds opening on shrubs and trees in recent days, and it had been a while since I'd taken a glance at a calendar while raiding a farmhouse.
The spring-scented breeze couldn't entirely mask all other scents in the cab of the truck, though, and those scents were the scents of my two muscular captors. Woodsy and entirely masculine, both faint scents were somewhat similar, though the scent of the green-eyed man to my left was just somehow cleaner, with maybe just a trace of soap.
His scent was essentially just like his appearance, rugged and masculine though not entirely without clues that pointed to recent bathing. The faint scent I was picking up from my right was far muskier, earthier. Yet, I had to concede that it wasn't the scent of outright body odor.
It was just a heavier type of scent, one that a man with an incredibly nice natural scent might get after not showering for a few days.
I couldn't deny that I actually found this scent kind of enjoyable or appealing in some deep, primal way, and I also found the green-eyed man's scent pleasant, to say the least.
I didn't want to be having these thoughts. I really did not want to be having these thoughts. They smell like scum, I told myself. They smell like the sick freaks that they probably are.
After maybe a minute or so, the green-eyed man to my left spoke while steering the truck around a slight bend with one hand. "You have a name?"
I thought for a moment before responding. "My name is Evangeline, but friends call me Eva. So, you can call me Evangeline." I turned my head just a fraction to glance at the man to my right. "Same goes for you."
Just out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw the green-eyed man's full lips twitch with just a hint of amusement before he responded.
"Well...Evangeline...you can call me Nick. My full name is Nicholas Hardwick, but friends call me Nick...and you can, too."
"I'll call you Nicholas Hardwick."
Again, I thought I saw his lips just faintly twitching.
"All right...fair enough. The man on your right is Blaine Miller, but you can call him GM if you're ever so inclined. That's kind of a nickname some of us call him sometimes. Stands for Grease Monkey. We call him that because he's the most mechanically inclined of our group...keeps all our cars and bikes in good working order."
"Well, good for him, but I think Grease Monkey is a perfectly horrible nickname, and I'll be calling the man on my right Blaine Miller. If I ever call him anything at all."
After a quiet snort, Blaine spoke in his low, gravelly voice. "You gotta lighten up."
Indignant, I turned my face to look at him. "Excuse me?"
"You heard me."
To my left, Nick cleared his throat. "If you're not a Borderliner, what community do you come from, Evangeline?"
Now it was Nick's turn to receive an indignant look from me.
"Who said I come from any community at all?"
He lifted his broad shoulders in a slight shrug. "You're too clean not to have come from a community...too well-groomed. Maybe you didn't leave a community in the past few days, but sometime in the recent past, you-"
"I'm well-groomed because I've made it a daily priority to be, no matter what."
It was true. During my slow march south, I'd always made keeping up on my hygiene and grooming an absolute priority, even though it wasn't always easy. For some reason, it had felt so important to me. Crucial to my survival, somehow. This wasn't to say that I'd been walking around in the woods with a full face of makeup on or anything, or even any makeup at all, but as for basic hygiene and bodily upkeep, I hadn't been neglectful.
Not even when I'd realized that keeping up with my daily grooming routine was probably costing me a couple of hours a week, hours I could have been marching toward my goal. That didn't matter, though. I'd felt too strongly that staying clean and kept-up was helping me move toward my goal, was giving me strength somehow, even though time-wise, it was slowing me down.
Maybe it was a dignity thing. Maybe it made me feel like I was still a human being that my sisters would be glad to see, and not some wild animal stalking through the woods.
I'd seen travelers, both men and women, who did look wild animal-like. Some people had just clearly given up, too focused on daily survival to give any thought to bathing, combing hair, or washing clothes. I'd met one thirty-something woman traveling with a half-dozen male relatives of various ages, and she'd had dried food all over her face. She'd also had at least a hundred burrs tangled in her matted brown hair, literally.
And I'd had a feeling that her light brown shirt was once pale tan or white. Her family members had been in similar shape. The woman had told me that two of them were former attorneys. She herself had used to be a fashion designer in New York City.
I felt for people who were so focused on daily survival that they couldn't wash, and I understood the temptation and thinking. Grooming was just one more thing to worry about when you were constantly fighting for your very life, having to deal with Huskers and groups of dangerous men, both.
I got the mindset. I also wouldn't have been surprised if the woman I'd met had thought that her unkempt appearance might deter men with minds bent on violation, even though I didn't think that body odor and dirt would deter these types of men. But I got the thinking.
Additionally, I thought it likely that a fair amount of depression probably factored into some travelers' grooming standards, or the lack thereof. And I’d definitely experienced depression over the past nearly two years. I just hadn't allowed myself to fully feel it, if that made any sense. I really hadn't allowed myself to feel much of anything. I had the idea that doing so might somehow throw me off my goal, the same way that I felt my daily grooming kept me on it.
I'd need to get all new hygiene supplies now, since I assumed that my duffel bag and backpack were back in the field. In my duffel bag, I'd had a smaller bag containing soap, shampoo, a washcloth, a small bottle of laundry detergent, tweezers, a compact mirror, a razor, lotion, tampons, a hairbrush, a tube of toothpaste, a toothbrush, and floss, and several other items that I considered hygiene essentials.
For days when I didn't come across any fresh water sources to bathe in, I carried a large package of thick baby wipes that I'd use for quick, all-over cleaning. In my backpack, I'd had a similar grooming kit, though smaller, with travel sizes of everything. The purpose of this mini-kit had been to hold me in an emergency for a few days if I ever became parted from my duffel bag. Being parted from both my bags at once had kind of been my doomsday scenario.
I realized that I was now without a crumb of my own food now, too, which pained me, not least of all because I'd recently stocked up at an abandoned farmhouse that somehow hadn't been pillaged yet, probably because it had been absolutely in the middle of nowhere, and the variety of food available had been nothing short of incredible.
I'd stuffed my duffel bag with canned chicken, albacore tuna, and jars of home-canned peeled grapefruit segments, which were so delicious I'd eaten half a jar right off the bat. I hadn't even yet sampled a small bag of coffee-flavored hard candies I'd found. I'd been saving them for a time when I needed a little extra boost to keep putting one foot in front of the other on my trek.
The only thing I'd found good about the new, ugly, post-apocalyptic world I'd been living in, if anything could really be considered good, had actually been food. With no championships or Olympics to train for, for the first time in my life since about age eight, I'd been able to eat whatever I wanted with reckless abandon – when food was readily available in great quantity, anyway, which wasn't often, but I'd found it in great quantity enough times to enjoy a few really satisfying all-out binges.
One time, after breaking into a boarded up pharmacy, I'd sat in a darkened aisle and ate an entire twelve-count sleeve of only-slightly-stale chocolate sandwich cookies, washing them down with two bottles of cherry cola. I literally hadn't tasted pop or full-sugar cookies in years. Before the apocalypse, I'd allowed myself to bake cookies on occasion, but only ones sweetened with applesauce, banana, and calorie-free stevia sweetener. They were never very good.
Even when food wasn't in plentiful supply and I had to be a bit mindful of rationing, I still ate a little something when I was hungry, which I'd never allowed myself to do before. While in training, which I'd been in pretty much been my entire life, once I'd consumed the fairly meager allotment of calories I'd decided to allow myself that day, based on what the scale had said that morning, that was it. I was done eating for the day, whether I was still hungry or not.
It didn't matter that I was an athlete, working my muscles to exhaustion all day long. I just could never risk losing my extremely willowy figure. I knew the judges loved it and took it into consideration when determining my artistic marks. I'd heard that, among themselves, they often admiringly described my figure as "European."
In the farmhouse with the canned grapefruit, I'd stepped on a dusty scale and had been stunned to see that I'd gained a full twenty pounds in the nearly two years since the Husk virus had first hit. I really shouldn't have been stunned, though. Though still slim, I had breasts and hips now, and fairly full ones. My rear had also become pretty round, I'd noticed when surveying my reflection from the side in a dusty full-length mirror in the farmhouse's bathroom.
As much as I'd been appreciating food as of late, though, the loss of my own wasn't the biggest reason I lamented being parted with my bags. Inside my duffel, I'd had my Olympic bronze medal, and in my backpack, I'd had an envelope of family photos and a few other very sentimental items I'd grabbed before leaving my apartment and hitting the road.
While those items and the pictures were precious to me, I really wasn't even entirely sure why I'd grabbed my medal. It had just seemed like an important, precious item a person should grab, though in my travels, there had been a few times when, while looking at it, I'd been tempted to toss it in a ditch.
For the sake of my pictures and other precious sentimental items, I just hoped that maybe Blaine and Nick had grabbed my bags and thrown them in the bed of the truck or something after whatever had happened back in the field had happened. I realized I could turn around and look right then, but I just didn't want to
for some reason, maybe because I felt like doing so would reveal vulnerability or weakness or something in front of Blaine and Nick, by showing them that I was anxious about my bags and their contents.
In response to what I'd said about being well-groomed because I'd made it a priority to be, Nick said nothing, but gave me a little sidelong glance that made me think that he still believed I'd come directly from some nearby community.
Wanting to disabuse him of this notion, I told him that I hadn't. "I've very briefly stayed in camps here and there, for very short periods of time, but I've never been a part of any community, and I definitely didn't just come from one. I've been on my own. And if you don't believe that, well, I'm sorry, but I don't know what else to tell you."
Again, Nick said nothing, but instead of giving me another little sidelong glance, he just stared straight ahead, which gave me a bit of satisfaction for some reason.
He didn't speak again for maybe a minute. "You been on the road long?"
"How long has it been since the Bloodsucker apocalypse started?"
Still staring straight ahead at the open road, he expressed possible slight surprise with a slight widening of his eyes. "Oh...that long. Most of us hit the road about that time, too. Most of us come from different places in the south, though, and I can tell by your accent you're not from around here. So, where did you start out from?"
"That's none of your business."
"Well...maybe, maybe not. But I would like to know. Just curious."
While speaking, Nick had glanced over at me with an expression that for some reason made me feel a bizarre little flash of something like sympathy for him. Or, maybe sympathy wasn't even the exact right word.
Maybe the little flash I'd felt had been something closer to regret about having spoken to him so sharply. I really wasn't sure. But whatever feeling it was that some look in his jewel-green eyes had caused me to feel, it was also making me feel compelled to answer his initial question, though I was going to do so briefly.
"I'm from Detroit."
To my right, Blaine snorted faintly. "Detroit seems too rough-and-tumble for an uptight girl like you."
Shooting daggers from my eyes I was sure, I looked at him. "Well, it wasn't."
He just grunted in response, a little dubiously I thought, and I glared at him even harder.
"I don't deny that Detroit was rough-and-tumble, but it wasn't too rough-and-tumble for an uptight girl like me. I managed just fine."
He grunted again, though this grunt sounded like it might have been a grunt of amusement. "You just admitted you're an uptight girl."
Face immediately warming, I thought about what I'd just said moments earlier and realized he was right. "Well, that was just a slip of the tongue."
"Freudian slip, maybe."
I just looked at Blaine for a long moment. It seemed odd that a "grease monkey" like him would know the meaning of the phrase Freudian slip. Not that knowing the meaning indicated genius-level intellect or anything, but I wondered if he was as much of a Neanderthal as he'd immediately seemed to me. At any rate, I didn't appreciate him pointing out my slip, regardless of what kind it had been, and I once again narrowed my eyes at him.
"I didn't mean to say that. I didn't mean to say uptight girl; I just meant to say I'm a girl. And, actually, I didn't mean to repeat even that part of what you said, because it's not true. I'm not a girl, like I'm twelve years old or something; I'm a woman."
Expression unreadable, Blaine gave me a quick once over, scanning my body from my face to my tennis shoes and back up again. "You can say that again."
Getting his meaning of course, my face warmed for the second time, and I pulled my gaze away from Blaine's gray eyes. Though not before catching just a glimpse of what I thought was a bit of color rising to his own face as well. This struck me as odd, that his comment might have embarrassed even him.
It also made me further embarrassed in a really strange sort of way, which made me feel the need to say something, something that was about anything other than the comment he'd just made. However, I still couldn't look at him while I spoke.
"You may not realize this, but you have five distinct smudges of dirt on your face. At least, I hope it's dirt."
"So?"
Now I looked at him again. "So, you don't even care to wipe them off, now that you've been informed?"
"No."
Snorting, I moved my gaze to the windshield and the open road again. "Figures. Perfectly in keeping with your gross nickname, I suppose. Except they shouldn't call you Grease Monkey; they should call you something even more apt. Something like...well...."
I didn't even know what. I didn't even know why I was still talking. I wanted everyone to just stop talking and just be quiet all of a sudden, but to my left, Nick piped up.
"Something like what? What should we call him?"
Snorting again, I shrugged, still staring straight ahead. "Well, I'm not used to thinking up distasteful nicknames, so I really don't know. Something like...Dirt Face, I guess. Or maybe like...like, something that evokes a grimy, muddy...like, Mud Bucket."
Startling me, Nick suddenly let loose with a fairly loud chuckle. "What do you think, GM? You've now been dubbed Mud Bucket. There's something about the nickname I kind of like."
Blaine just grunted, and Nick continued.
"And how about me, Evangeline? What would you like to nickname me?"
I didn't want to say out loud, because the first nicknames that had popped into my head were Handsome Strong Jaw, and Long, Strong Fingers On Steering Wheel.
Fortunately, I was soon spared from having to think of an alternate response when Nick put his foot on the brake suddenly and fairly hard.
"Trouble."
Being that we'd been rounding a gentle curve, at first I couldn't see what he was referring to, but within a moment, I did. And the sight made me gasp, horrified.