Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse

They ate dinner in silence, the way they did practically everything in silence, the last week or so-formerly, Wayne had been a talker of epic proportions, the kind of person you don’t start a conversation with unless you’ve got, say, three days to spare, which Jackie had found mostly charming, because a lot of what he had to say was funny and interesting, and if she rolled her eyes, it was only when he started talking about whatever comic book he was currently infatuated with, which he could and would do in microscopic, mind-numbing detail-comics never had interested her, the secret exploits of men playing dress-up in what was essentially a consequence-free arena just hadn’t appealed; although the length and depth of description and analysis Wayne lavished on them prompted her to second-guess herself once in a while; now, she wished she had read some of the titles Wayne had rhapsodized about (The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One [but not The Dark Knight Strikes Again, that was so much overpriced crap] and The Sandman and Johnny the Homicidal Maniac [whose title she wished she found funnier]) or at least paid better attention to his lectures on them, because they might have helped her understand what had happened to Wayne in the last month, since the bottom had dropped out of the world, the least manifestation of which was the drying up of the torrent of words that poured from his mouth, and the most dramatic example of which was… was crazy, then cleaned the guns one at a time, Wayne stripping each of the pistols in turn while Jackie trained the rifle on the rope barrier, then the rifle as Jackie aimed the policeman’s automatic-she could have broken each of the weapons down, cleaned and greased them, herself: Wayne had insisted she learn in case anything happened to him (which was a joke: did he really imagine that, at this stage, big and awkward as she was, she’d get anywhere without him? it was almost funny: the hugely pregnant woman, a smoking gun in either hand, fighting off the Pack), but the thick smell of the grease nauseated her, so she stood (reclined, actually) guard and let Wayne do things the way he not-so-secretly wanted to and settled down for the night to wait and sleep, him taking the first watch, her the second-after she’d unrolled her sleeping bag and used her feet to push off her sandals, she looked at Wayne, sitting on the other side of the fire (to which he’d added even more wood, keeping it hot and bright), and asked, "When will they be here?" to which Wayne answered, "Hard to tell. If we’re lucky, late morning, early afternoon," which surprised her: ambush or not, last stand or not, she would have expected that, if the Pack hadn’t put in an appearance by first light, maybe a little later, the two of them would abandon their position, which, for all its advantages in terms of height ("Control the high ground": how often had Wayne repeated that?) was a dead-end: if the Pack made it through whatever Wayne had prepared for them on the Bridge, not to mention his improvised web, and surged up the road till they reached the path to the ledge, she and Wayne would be trapped (violating another of his mantras, "Always have a way out"); better, she thought, to keep their options open and retreat, trust Wayne’s ingenuity to thin the Pack further-all of which she said to him, and none of which made a difference: "This is our best chance," he said, and while she argued, appealing to her mantra, "He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day," Wayne was unmovable, and anyway her eyelids were sliding down, so she abandoned her argument until daylight and slid into her sleeping bag.

Jackie’s sleep was light, troubled because sleeping soundly was impossible at this stage of pregnancy; not on a rock shelf in a sleeping bag, at least; and because her dreams were vivid and disturbing; no surprise, so What to Expect assured her: pregnant women were subject to all kinds of anxiety dreams, a tendency compounded on her part by the last month’s events, the long struggle to keep on the move and ahead of the Pack, which had given her unconscious a whole new vocabulary of unease and terror-