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It was subtle at first.
Clay didn’t think he’d ever felt quite as good as the morning they pulled up in front of the National Guard depot in Middleton, Connecticut. Jenny and Beth were standing outside, and Jensen damn near leapt out of the king cab they’d acquired along the way, rushing forward to sweep his sister and niece up in his arms.
“Oh, God, Jake!” Jenny cried, tears running down all their faces. “I can’t believe you guys are here!” She looked past him to the rest of the boys, frowning. “Where’s your friend? Aisha? She’s not…?”
Clay shrugged, though Aisha’s continued absence was starting to worry him. They’d texted her that they were headed up here, and she usually gravitated back to them, but maybe… “I don’t know,” he told her simply. “She struck out on her own a while ago.”
Hell, maybe she’d always been out on her own.
Jenny nodded silently, then looked back at her brother, the overprotective sister. “Jake, you look horrible. Do you eat ?” Funny how she said it like she wasn’t surprised. Clay had never noticed Jensen’s eating habits before the kid started starving himself to death in the middle of the apocalypse. Maybe it was a thing he just never knew.
“Some,” Jensen replied, put upon and loving it. “I’m starving right about now.”
Pooch grinned at that, but it was a little off, and Clay did notice that. “Hell, Jenny, you better feed the boy before he changes his mind.”
Jenny nodded and they went inside to meet Colonel Dalton, who ran the place and didn’t care that they were clearly unidentified military, and to get something to eat that was warm and fresh and home-cooked—something they hadn’t had since they came across that old farmhouse in North Carolina with the two old biddies and their gun-toting nephew.
They all revelled in safe for a while. In the fact that the whole town of Middleton was now a military base for all intents and purposes, run by National Guard and local Army and civilian survivors who were determined to survive. Jensen was more like Jensen every day.
And Pooch was less like Pooch.
Again, it was subtle, but Clay could see it clearly.
“Yeah, baby, I know.”
Pooch was talking to Jolene, again, as he sat on a crate of something outside the main barracks, trying for privacy in a place where there was none. Clay stayed hidden in the doorway and just watched. World gone to Hell or no, these were still his boys, and they were still his responsibility.
“Yeah. He’s doing better. Well, he’s…” He smiled. “No. Still crazy.” He dropped his chin down. “You should go then.”
Clay wasn’t surprised to see tears standing in the younger man’s eyes.
“Give him a kiss for me?” he chuckled wetly. “I’d kiss you, too, if I could…. Bye, baby. I love you.”
Pooch disconnected the call and brought his heels up on the bumper so he could put his head in his hands. Clay knew the guy well enough to know he was crying—and to know he needed to.
Damn it. He’d tried to get Steigler to requisition a flight from the NG airbase in Fresno, but so far, he’d been told resoundingly that there were no resources to be had for a “touchy-feely family reunion.”
A voice from the quad on the other side of the building drew his focus.
“Beth, that was not the hard drive I said you could borrow.” Jensen was irritated, but a little bit embarrassed, too, which made Clay wonder what the girl had found. With Jensen, it could be almost anything.
At least he was getting back to normal. Clay gave Pooch one more look and turned away, leaving him to his wallow. He set his shoulders.
His boys. His responsibility.
He hadn’t been able to do anything about Jensen and his family—missing was missing. But damn it, he was going to do something about this.
******
Christmas was a week away when Jensen walked up to him and smiled that smile. The one that said he’d put one over on The Man and was going to secretly rejoice in it. Clay had missed that look. He clapped the kid on the shoulder, glad to feel meat on his bones, finally, and walked out the door of the base gymnasium, looking for Colonel Dalton.
“All right,” Dalton was saying, a clipboard in his hand as he gave orders to a small group of soldiers. “The bridge on highway 6 is out. We need to reestablish that ASAP. Bring a transport for any survivors who happen along. The usual plan.” He signed the clipboard and handed it to the corporal in charge.
“Yes, sir,” the corporal said, giving him a sharp salute. “Okay, people! Move out!”
“You need something, Colonel Clay?” Dalton asked, watching the corporal and her people load into the transports and take off. Dalton was funny. Completely by the book as far as troop movements and paperwork, he didn’t seem to think that the apocalypse should get in the way of proper procedure. And yet, he was playing fast and loose with things like who, exactly, got to have a gun; how old you had to be to shoot a rifle; whether you technically needed to be considered alive by the US government to be afforded the rank of Colonel.
Clay liked him. And he was damn glad Jenny had found him.
“It appears you’re getting a shipment in tomorrow,” Clay said quietly. Pooch was over by the motor pool, dicking around with a jeep that probably hadn’t worked since World War II. His heart wasn’t in it, but there was a fifteen-year-old kid watching his every move, and he was clearly trying to teach the boy something.
“And this shipment is?” Dalton said, taking it in stride.
“More precious than you know,” Clay murmured. And then he grinned. “And you’re getting an ass-load of oranges and grapefruits, too.”
“Emergency citrus drop,” Dalton observed, nodding approvingly. “Okay. What should I do with the precious part of that?”
“That’ll take care of itself.”
*******
Pooch heard the transport coming before anyone else did. A pilot’s ears were always trained on the sky, and there were damn few planes flying these days anyway. They’d had a personnel dump from upstate via helicopter the week he and the Losers had driven into town, but the skies had been silent in the two weeks since.
Cougar walked out of the barracks, probably drawn by the sound of the engine. Big ass engine, Pooch thought dully, not bothering to look up. Old, too. Maybe a C-141? He didn’t really care.
He was being a whiny ass, he knew, but he couldn’t help it. Every time he saw Jensen with his sister or his niece, all he could think was that he got to have his family, and the Pooch got squat. Which was a totally unfair way of looking at it, seeing as how Pooch had always known Jolene and Jimmy were safe and protected and Jensen had gone through months of hell figuring his family were so many drooling zoms—or at least dead, which was no longer the worst thing that could happen to a person.
But there it was. He was so damn jealous. And sad. And damn it…
“Hey Pooch? Did you hear anything about a transport?” Jensen called, joining Cougar in the walk toward the runway.
“What do I look like, air traffic control?” he bit back, regretting it instantly. This wasn’t J’s fault, it was just J’s contentment that made him so damned discontent. Fuck it. The transport could land without him gawking at it. He needed to talk to Jolene.
Pooch ducked back into the main building, far enough away that the plane—and it was the C-141 he’d thought it was, he saw—didn’t completely drown out the phone.
The first call didn’t go through, and Pooch fought not to panic. No problem. No problem . He didn’t always get through, after all. Sometimes they didn’t talk for a whole day. He hated those days more than he could say. When he’d been out in the field, before the world fell apart, he could go a month without talking to her, and it was okay. But nothing was okay now, and as the plane finally shut off its engines on the tarmac outside, he dialed again and prayed.
“Hey baby!” Jolene greeted him. There was a ton of noise on her end and he wondered where she was. Sounded like she was outside at the airfield. Fresno was busier than Middleton—more air traffic in California since more people had survived there. “How you doing?”
Pooch was tired of pretending. “I miss you, Jolene,” he said quietly. Jimmy cried in the background, and Pooch groaned. “God, I miss both of you.” He looked at the ceiling and just let the tears come. “Damn it, girl, it’s Christmas ! You should be baking cookies and we should be stuffing our faces with junk food and watching bad Christmas movies and... Together.” He sat hard on the chair behind him. “World’s so God damn messed up.”
“At least one part of it isn’t anymore.”
Jolene had tears in her voice... and that voice wasn’t coming through the phone.
Pooch looked up at the doorway and dropped that phone, sure he was hallucinating. Jolene stood there—thinner and tired and windblown and worn. Jimmy—and he was big !—squirmed in her arms, staring at the crazy man crying in the middle of the room.
“Jolene?” Pooch whispered.
“Oh God, Linwood. I missed you, too.” Jolene sniffled in that way that had made him think she was the sweetest, cutest, hottest girl in high school. “I thought…”
Pooch was up and across the room and has Jolene and Jimmy in his arms before she could say another word. “I’m okay, Baby. I’m here,” he whispered, kissing her softly and laughing for the sheer joy of being able to do it. “God, and you’re here!”
He looked over her shoulder to see his team; shit-eating grins on every one of them. “How’d you do this?” he asked, barely able to make the words. Jimmy wriggled between his parents and Pooch pulled back a little to take the boy into his arms. He hadn’t held him since he was three days old, and here he was, a whole fucking year old…
“Well,” Jensen explained. “I really, really needed some oranges—did you know that scurvy makes your teeth fall out?” Pooch chuckled and Jensen took offense. “No seriously, your teeth , man!”
Cougar was watching Jimmy play with the chain around Pooch’s neck, a smile on his face that said everything he wouldn’t. Pooch stared at Clay, who looked as satisfied as a team leader could look. “Thank you, sir,” Pooch murmured. He smiled big, taking the trio in. “Thank all of you idiots.”
“Linwood, language,” Jolene scolded.
“Oh forget language, Jolene,” Jensen told her. “It’s a lost cause. They’re like sponges. By the time she was three, Bethy knew half the curse words I do.”
Which wasn’t saying much, considering how bad Bethy’s first three years of life were.
“Gaawaaa!” cried Jimmy, a tiny fist hitting Pooch’s face. Pooch looked at his wife in confusion and she laughed at him.
“You’re pathetic, Linwood,” she told him. “Look on your face is sheer terror and all the boy wants is to eat.”
“I’m supposed to get that from ‘Gaawaa’?” Pooch asked incredulously, taking the hint and leading his wife toward the mess hall.
“You’re the one who wanted kids,” Clay said, clapping Pooch on the back and reaching out to offer his finger to the little man. Jimmy took it in his fist, tethering Clay to the two of them. “Now you gotta figure out how to raise one.”
Pooch looked down at his son, then back up at his wife; across at the men who flanked them. Here. Whole. Family…
“I can do that, sir.”
“I know you can.” Clay rescued his finger from the baby.
“Merry Christmas, Colonel,” Pooch said quietly.
“Merry Christmas, loser.”
*****
the end