Die Hard fic for spook_me: To Every Thing There is a Season
Title: To Every Thing There is a Season
Author: persnickett
Fandom: Live Free or Die Hard
Pairing/Characters: John/Matt
Rating: PG-13
Creature: Zombies
Spoilers: nope.
Summary/Notes: Tricks and Treats. Zombie-pocalypse flavor. Written for spook_me 2015
To Every Thing There is a Season
by persnickett
The chill night air wafted in through the open door, raising the hair on John’s arms and flickering the flames in the living room grate.
John looked out over the shapes that moved through the streets, hurrying along under the dusk. It was habit by now, the way his eyes moved steadily over the endless flow of figures. Never lingering too long on one or the other, just taking in the crowd, scanning the gathering shadows for a movement that didn’t fit; a telltale shape that was less - or more, perhaps - than human.
But Matt only had eyes for those of the creature in front of him. Their gazes locked and he stood as if frozen; his hand halfway outstretched, reaching outward into the night-time chill. He leaned closer, transfixed. Studying the iridescent flicker of their fire reflecting off the slick, scaly skin, examining the places where the toothy snout was flecked with fleshy gore and daubs of half-dried blood.
“John?” Matt said, still unable to look away. “…Are you seeing this?”
“Yeah,” John responded, “cute. That’s great.”
“Cute? It’s unbelievable!” Matt says with a grin. “Your mom helped you with that I bet?” Matt beamed up at the parent standing behind the miniature monster and got a sheepishly proud smile in return.
“I did the green paint, and then she did the scales,” confirmed a small, muffled voice, from behind the admittedly impressive reptilian mask.
“She’s a dragon and I’m a gold coin!” A second little voice piped up from under the hood of what appeared to be an oversized mustard-yellow sweatshirt, stretched into a roughly circular shape at the sides with the help of some old coat hangers.
Matt’s grin split wide and bright, like John hadn’t seen in what felt like ages. “You’re a terrific gold coin!” he enthused. “John?” he prompted, as he ducked his head to rummage in the box at his feet, quickly coming up with an old Luke Skywalker figure for the dragon and nearly-new looking spaceship for the little one.
“Nice,” John agreed with a nod. Matt thought he wasn’t looking. He was looking. He just wasn’t looking at the kids. He was looking at Matt.
There was a bounce to all his movements, a quick energy John had been missing in him lately, and he was lit up grinning like he never did these days. …And he couldn’t help it if the way Matt bit at his bottom lip, to keep from saying inappropriate shit in front of the kids whenever John teased him, was even cuter than the costumes.
“We really gotta get you some kind of pet,” he muttered into Matt’s ear, as he leaned past him to offer the trick or treaters their pick from the plate of his grandmother’s sugar cookies.
John aimed a wink at the coin as Matt’s teeth found their target, just to show he didn’t mean it. The plucky little doubloon grinned and winked back - he was still too little to have yet mastered the art of closing one eye at a time, but John got the message, even if it was more of a long blink.
He flashed a quick smile from behind Matt’s back. John liked this costume. It kind of reminded him of what Halloween had been like back when he was a kid.
“Say ‘thank you’ to the Marshals now,” their mother admonished.
“Night,” John said, once they did, moving them along.
“Grinch,” Matt was muttering under his breath.
“Hey, I’m just tryin’ to help you avoid disappointing your customers.” John smiled to himself again over his mostly untouched plate of cookies, and gave a nod out at the rag-tag crowd beginning to mill about the driveway. Their house had already developed a reputation as the place that was handing out toys, along with the usual home-made treats. “You got a long lineup to get through by curfew,” he added. John looked up, eyeing the deepening twilight. “And we got first shift.”
Matt made a noise that sounded an awful lot like ‘humph’. But then his grin was outshining the moonlight as a pie-plate robot clanked its way up the stoop.
Robots were popular this year - as were space-aged princesses draped in white, with their hair wound into voluminous buns over each ear - most of the movies that they played at the Community Lodge when they got the generators fired up once a week had been a part of Matt’s collection once.
This was going to be the geekiest generation of Brooklyners in centuries.
***
The night was clear. One by one, the stars were beginning to appear above their heads, and Matt’s breath curled white against the dark as John watched him expertly set the string on his crossbow.
He turned his gaze out through the gates, scanning the horizon for movement. It was getting to be a rare thing now, to spot the hunched, distended shapes of the Howlers wandering this close to the barricades - but on a still night, sometimes you could hear the hoarse, wailing cry that earned them their name in the distance.
It was quiet.
“Tonight went well,” John said, his tone soft but conversational, once Matt had shouldered his weapon and settled his stance. “You were right.”
Matt had gotten a lot of resistance at the Town Hall Meeting the night he suggested pushing curfew an hour past dark to let the kids have a ‘real’ Halloween.
Matt smiled in the darkness, but kept his eyeline set on the horizon. “Hey, y’know.” He shrugged modestly against the butt of his bow. “Rioting has been down ever since we got the generators running, and the Scavenge and Supply teams coming and going on the reg.” Matt flipped his free hand over in the air. He was the steadiest bow-hand in the settlement, but to this day had never learned to keep them still while he talked. “There hasn’t been a reported case of the strain in months…” His tone was light but John saw Matt’s fingers stop, smooth casually over bow’s tiller. Touch wood.
Matt turned to look at him. “It feels like it’s time,” he said simply.
John nodded. Time. To move forward. To stop surviving and get back to living.
They turned and looked back out the gates.
“Did you see that one kid?” Matt reminisced, chuckling softly. “With the crazy antennae, and he had those ridiculously huge cardboard-“
“We really gotta find you some company,” John interrupted, as he un-holstered, checked the release on his own weapon.
“Again with the dog,” Matt scoffed into the crystalline air.
“Never said ‘dog’,” John argued. “I was thinking…maybe a different kind of adoption,” he admitted. He finished up his check, re-holstered and risked a look sidelong at his partner. Matt wasn’t even looking at him.
“…You made a lot of kids happy tonight,” John said.
Matt turned. John couldn’t see his breath showing up against the frosty night, now. “Are you…?”
It wasn’t the first time they had talked about it, but before tonight the one to raise the topic had never been John.
There were still a lot of kids who hadn’t had costumes tonight. Kids who bedded down at the Lodge every night hoping that the next morning would be the one when the Scavengers came back with more survivors. But every week that went by the odds got slimmer, and even the littlest kids could do math that simple - as Matt had never been too shy to point out.
“Too bad you just gave away all your good toys,” John said.
“Collectibles,” Matt corrected on reflex. It was a long-running private tradition - although there was a quirk in the corner of Matt’s mouth when he said it now. “And there’s more where that came from.”
John raised an eyebrow out at what was left of the darkened, distant city skyline. “I ain’t organizing another salvage expedition just so we can go after the rest of your precious geek museum. We don’t have enough Rangers as it is.”
“I’ll go,” Matt replied, with another bow-shoulder shrug. “I’ll take the Land Rover.”
“Alone? Like hell you will.”
Matt cocked his head in an all-too-familiar display of annoyance. He set his safety catch and slung his bow on his back, the better for arguing. “Not alone. Brezekova would sit shotgun for me.”
“Brezekova wants in your pants.”
Matt gave a theatrical shudder that was definitely a commentary on the mental image, and not the evening’s temperature. Brezekova easily outweighed Matt by a hundred pounds, and John was pretty sure she had stopped shaving her legs long before razors had become a hot item on the commodities market.
But he recovered quick. “You think everyone wants in these pants,” Matt fired back, with another air-flipping gesture at his crotch. John let his eyes follow the direction of motion, and broke rank to take a step toward him.
“Stop,” Matt said, as John came forward. “Stop, stop…being distracting…” Matt gave in, laughing as they came together, but he put a hand up for the centre of John’s chest.
“I’m just saying.” John watched Matt’s features through the gloom, as they arranged themselves into something approximating seriousness. “Kids need toys. And we’re going to want them to have enough they don’t fight over them.”
It only came out the tiniest bit sly, but John gave him what he wanted like a sucker anyway, and took the bait.
“Wait, what?” He pretty well always took the bait, with Matt. “How many kids do you think we’re talking about here?” he asked, gruffly, as a hand came to rest on each of Matt’s slim hips.
“Uhhhh,” Matt said, like the answer was so obvious, he hadn’t been expecting the question. “Well. We’ll need a good mix, when they start training. You know, of cleaving and ranged weapons…”
“Matty,” John said, to stem the flow of chatter. “We’re going to be raising a family. Not an army.”
“Family,” Matt repeated. Even in this light John could see his eyes shining.
“…Yeah.”
John could see Matt’s breath come again in the blackness between them. They had another ten minutes or so before the next shift was due along, and then they could move the conversation somewhere private. Maybe the rug in front of the fireplace. But for now, John took his moment, chasing the little wisp of cloud with his own lips and closing the little distance between them in a kiss - firm but slow - like saying a vow.
John’s hand bumped Matt’s bow as it moved up his back, but he slid it up under the strap, and curled his palm into the long hair at Matt’s nape. Matt made a small but happy little sound against John’s mouth, and the hand at his chest fisted tightly in the fabric of his vest… And then they heard it.
A sharp whistle cut through the moonlit air.
It was closely followed by an approving whoop. “Hey! Get a room, Marshals! No booty on duty, McClane. Wasn’t that your rule…?”
Matt made a less happy noise, and reluctantly, John released his hold on him. Apparently the next shift had arrived early.
Though maybe not early enough. The sound broke from the north-east, sounding at first almost like an echo of the approaching shift’s wolf-whistle from moments before, but in a second there was no mistaking the long, drawn-out wail of Howlers.
And then, further off and to the south, the eerie call was answered by another.
“Guess we’re not getting that room just yet,” Matt muttered, as the two new Marshals hurried up to meet them. His weapon was already at his shoulder.
“Dammit Kosloski!” John swore.
“…Sorry Chief,” Kosloski apologized shamefacedly.
John waved it off. “Clemens, you head back to Central and put in a Code Yellow, then come back here and join Numbnuts here for the rest of your shift. Bring the night vision gear.”
“Sir, yes sir,” Clemens sounded off, before turning and jogging away into the night.
“I don’t know how many times I gotta tell him he doesn’t have to call me that…” John muttered. “Alright,” he told a grinning Kosloski. “Farrell’s with me, we’ll take the Jeep and make the circuit to all the outposts and have ‘em double the guard. You and Clemens stay here and try not to be such assholes.”
“Sir, yes sir!” Kosloski agreed, with a mocking salute and an even wider grin.
***
“Maybe we should start with a girl,” Matt was musing aloud, as he stared out the side of the Jeep and into the night as they bumped along. “They say girls are easier…”
John tried not to give him a reaction, but he must have made some sort of a movement or sound, because Matt shot him a suspicious sideways glance.
“What? They’re sure as hell smarter,“ he said, with a little more conviction. “I think I’ll train her to use my katana. She’ll be Howler-proof, and look super badass. Kill Bill style.” John didn’t know what the hell that was supposed to mean, but Matt squirmed around in his seat and made some karate-chopping moves with his hands, so he could only assume it used to be some nerdy Kung Fu thing.
“Yeah, that’s normal,” John grumbled. “At least it’ll keep the boys away…”
Matt threw him another sideways glance, but this time there should have been some trace of a smile in it. There wasn’t.
“John…” Matt’s voice was almost too quiet to hear over the noise of the road and the cold night air whipping past the Jeep’s windscreen. Matt stopped talking and watched him for a minute. John watched the road, and waited for him to find his voice. “You’re serious about this?” Matt said finally. “After everything…”
John could feel a sigh suddenly, sitting tightly in his chest like it was trapped there. He had a pretty good guess what Matt was thinking about.
Matt told John a long time ago that everybody who ever met him used to laugh at Warlock’s End-of-the-World Insurance plan; all the shitty, outdated machinery, the cheesy 66.6 frequency. But no matter how much ridicule he took from various online cronies - and numerous alleged virtual dates, although John had his doubts - he never got rid of any of it. He would have open communication with the world outside - whether they be Zombies or not, he’d said. Well, it looked like Freddy had got the last laugh.
Thanks to the Warlock’s shitty, outdated system, they had been able to make contact with a few other colonies after the virus struck. They even found Jack - he was a Deputy, last John heard, running Security and Salvage at a settlement north of Poughkeepsie.
But Lucy…
Back when the outbreak started looking serious, the West went first. When cross-country communication was starting to get spotty, Lucy, being her father’s daughter, decided to take one of the last flights out to the coast, determined to find Holly. Being her father’s daughter, she also knew if she had told him her plan, John never would have let her go. Checking all the flight manifests in the JTTF database was the only way he had found out where she had gone.
They were working all the time on widening the Warlock’s range, but finding the towers and repairing the damage caused by the firebombing the Federal Government had hoped would control the outbreak was a long process, and there was the risk of running into a Howler-pack every time they sent out a team. The fires had raged all through the cornfields of the Midwest and Canadian forest land. It could be years before they had any news from the west coast.
Maybe never.
Matt was still watching him, as they moved along through the night. If he was worried about John, he didn’t need to be. John had had more than enough time these past few years since the outbreak to regret not getting the chance to say goodbye to his little girl. Not spending those last few days with her, instead of running around the city helping set up road blocks and barricades. He had had plenty of opportunities to lament all the time he wasted when he did have his kids close by; sleeping in the room just down the hall, but he was always out too late helping set up barricades and chasing around after psychos and dirtbags to kiss ‘em goodnight.
Who could say if John had learned enough in all of his deep-thinking time not to make the same old mistakes over again. But this time at least he was smart enough to know they were mistakes.
All the stars were out now. John could look up through the open roof and see them, silver pinpoints in the thousands of millions, encircling them in a bright dome from the Big Dipper straight overhead, right down to the horizon all around. They had always been there - thousands of years - though you could never see them from Brooklyn in the days of noisy, smoggy traffic and never-sleeping city lights. They would be there thousands of years more, whether anybody down here was around to see them or not. Just exactly the same. Constant. Eternal.
John looked back over at Matt, watching him with a look in his eyes like he was trying hard to keep the hope out of them. Matt, who - come literal hell, or high water - was always there next to him, riding shotgun with his long, dark hair blowing in the rushing night flowing endlessly past them. Matt who brought so much joy tonight to so many kids who got so little of it these days…
He was sure.
Matt was still watching him. Waiting.
“Yeah,” John said, and gave him a smile that he hoped somehow showed that, yeah, he knew that he’d done a lot of things in his time that he couldn’t be sure were the right ones - but this, was definitely not one of them.
“Yeah," he said again. "It feels like it’s time.”
.
Author: persnickett
Fandom: Live Free or Die Hard
Pairing/Characters: John/Matt
Rating: PG-13
Creature: Zombies
Spoilers: nope.
Summary/Notes: Tricks and Treats. Zombie-pocalypse flavor. Written for spook_me 2015
To Every Thing There is a Season
by persnickett
The chill night air wafted in through the open door, raising the hair on John’s arms and flickering the flames in the living room grate.
John looked out over the shapes that moved through the streets, hurrying along under the dusk. It was habit by now, the way his eyes moved steadily over the endless flow of figures. Never lingering too long on one or the other, just taking in the crowd, scanning the gathering shadows for a movement that didn’t fit; a telltale shape that was less - or more, perhaps - than human.
But Matt only had eyes for those of the creature in front of him. Their gazes locked and he stood as if frozen; his hand halfway outstretched, reaching outward into the night-time chill. He leaned closer, transfixed. Studying the iridescent flicker of their fire reflecting off the slick, scaly skin, examining the places where the toothy snout was flecked with fleshy gore and daubs of half-dried blood.
“John?” Matt said, still unable to look away. “…Are you seeing this?”
“Yeah,” John responded, “cute. That’s great.”
“Cute? It’s unbelievable!” Matt says with a grin. “Your mom helped you with that I bet?” Matt beamed up at the parent standing behind the miniature monster and got a sheepishly proud smile in return.
“I did the green paint, and then she did the scales,” confirmed a small, muffled voice, from behind the admittedly impressive reptilian mask.
“She’s a dragon and I’m a gold coin!” A second little voice piped up from under the hood of what appeared to be an oversized mustard-yellow sweatshirt, stretched into a roughly circular shape at the sides with the help of some old coat hangers.
Matt’s grin split wide and bright, like John hadn’t seen in what felt like ages. “You’re a terrific gold coin!” he enthused. “John?” he prompted, as he ducked his head to rummage in the box at his feet, quickly coming up with an old Luke Skywalker figure for the dragon and nearly-new looking spaceship for the little one.
“Nice,” John agreed with a nod. Matt thought he wasn’t looking. He was looking. He just wasn’t looking at the kids. He was looking at Matt.
There was a bounce to all his movements, a quick energy John had been missing in him lately, and he was lit up grinning like he never did these days. …And he couldn’t help it if the way Matt bit at his bottom lip, to keep from saying inappropriate shit in front of the kids whenever John teased him, was even cuter than the costumes.
“We really gotta get you some kind of pet,” he muttered into Matt’s ear, as he leaned past him to offer the trick or treaters their pick from the plate of his grandmother’s sugar cookies.
John aimed a wink at the coin as Matt’s teeth found their target, just to show he didn’t mean it. The plucky little doubloon grinned and winked back - he was still too little to have yet mastered the art of closing one eye at a time, but John got the message, even if it was more of a long blink.
He flashed a quick smile from behind Matt’s back. John liked this costume. It kind of reminded him of what Halloween had been like back when he was a kid.
“Say ‘thank you’ to the Marshals now,” their mother admonished.
“Night,” John said, once they did, moving them along.
“Grinch,” Matt was muttering under his breath.
“Hey, I’m just tryin’ to help you avoid disappointing your customers.” John smiled to himself again over his mostly untouched plate of cookies, and gave a nod out at the rag-tag crowd beginning to mill about the driveway. Their house had already developed a reputation as the place that was handing out toys, along with the usual home-made treats. “You got a long lineup to get through by curfew,” he added. John looked up, eyeing the deepening twilight. “And we got first shift.”
Matt made a noise that sounded an awful lot like ‘humph’. But then his grin was outshining the moonlight as a pie-plate robot clanked its way up the stoop.
Robots were popular this year - as were space-aged princesses draped in white, with their hair wound into voluminous buns over each ear - most of the movies that they played at the Community Lodge when they got the generators fired up once a week had been a part of Matt’s collection once.
This was going to be the geekiest generation of Brooklyners in centuries.
***
The night was clear. One by one, the stars were beginning to appear above their heads, and Matt’s breath curled white against the dark as John watched him expertly set the string on his crossbow.
He turned his gaze out through the gates, scanning the horizon for movement. It was getting to be a rare thing now, to spot the hunched, distended shapes of the Howlers wandering this close to the barricades - but on a still night, sometimes you could hear the hoarse, wailing cry that earned them their name in the distance.
It was quiet.
“Tonight went well,” John said, his tone soft but conversational, once Matt had shouldered his weapon and settled his stance. “You were right.”
Matt had gotten a lot of resistance at the Town Hall Meeting the night he suggested pushing curfew an hour past dark to let the kids have a ‘real’ Halloween.
Matt smiled in the darkness, but kept his eyeline set on the horizon. “Hey, y’know.” He shrugged modestly against the butt of his bow. “Rioting has been down ever since we got the generators running, and the Scavenge and Supply teams coming and going on the reg.” Matt flipped his free hand over in the air. He was the steadiest bow-hand in the settlement, but to this day had never learned to keep them still while he talked. “There hasn’t been a reported case of the strain in months…” His tone was light but John saw Matt’s fingers stop, smooth casually over bow’s tiller. Touch wood.
Matt turned to look at him. “It feels like it’s time,” he said simply.
John nodded. Time. To move forward. To stop surviving and get back to living.
They turned and looked back out the gates.
“Did you see that one kid?” Matt reminisced, chuckling softly. “With the crazy antennae, and he had those ridiculously huge cardboard-“
“We really gotta find you some company,” John interrupted, as he un-holstered, checked the release on his own weapon.
“Again with the dog,” Matt scoffed into the crystalline air.
“Never said ‘dog’,” John argued. “I was thinking…maybe a different kind of adoption,” he admitted. He finished up his check, re-holstered and risked a look sidelong at his partner. Matt wasn’t even looking at him.
“…You made a lot of kids happy tonight,” John said.
Matt turned. John couldn’t see his breath showing up against the frosty night, now. “Are you…?”
It wasn’t the first time they had talked about it, but before tonight the one to raise the topic had never been John.
There were still a lot of kids who hadn’t had costumes tonight. Kids who bedded down at the Lodge every night hoping that the next morning would be the one when the Scavengers came back with more survivors. But every week that went by the odds got slimmer, and even the littlest kids could do math that simple - as Matt had never been too shy to point out.
“Too bad you just gave away all your good toys,” John said.
“Collectibles,” Matt corrected on reflex. It was a long-running private tradition - although there was a quirk in the corner of Matt’s mouth when he said it now. “And there’s more where that came from.”
John raised an eyebrow out at what was left of the darkened, distant city skyline. “I ain’t organizing another salvage expedition just so we can go after the rest of your precious geek museum. We don’t have enough Rangers as it is.”
“I’ll go,” Matt replied, with another bow-shoulder shrug. “I’ll take the Land Rover.”
“Alone? Like hell you will.”
Matt cocked his head in an all-too-familiar display of annoyance. He set his safety catch and slung his bow on his back, the better for arguing. “Not alone. Brezekova would sit shotgun for me.”
“Brezekova wants in your pants.”
Matt gave a theatrical shudder that was definitely a commentary on the mental image, and not the evening’s temperature. Brezekova easily outweighed Matt by a hundred pounds, and John was pretty sure she had stopped shaving her legs long before razors had become a hot item on the commodities market.
But he recovered quick. “You think everyone wants in these pants,” Matt fired back, with another air-flipping gesture at his crotch. John let his eyes follow the direction of motion, and broke rank to take a step toward him.
“Stop,” Matt said, as John came forward. “Stop, stop…being distracting…” Matt gave in, laughing as they came together, but he put a hand up for the centre of John’s chest.
“I’m just saying.” John watched Matt’s features through the gloom, as they arranged themselves into something approximating seriousness. “Kids need toys. And we’re going to want them to have enough they don’t fight over them.”
It only came out the tiniest bit sly, but John gave him what he wanted like a sucker anyway, and took the bait.
“Wait, what?” He pretty well always took the bait, with Matt. “How many kids do you think we’re talking about here?” he asked, gruffly, as a hand came to rest on each of Matt’s slim hips.
“Uhhhh,” Matt said, like the answer was so obvious, he hadn’t been expecting the question. “Well. We’ll need a good mix, when they start training. You know, of cleaving and ranged weapons…”
“Matty,” John said, to stem the flow of chatter. “We’re going to be raising a family. Not an army.”
“Family,” Matt repeated. Even in this light John could see his eyes shining.
“…Yeah.”
John could see Matt’s breath come again in the blackness between them. They had another ten minutes or so before the next shift was due along, and then they could move the conversation somewhere private. Maybe the rug in front of the fireplace. But for now, John took his moment, chasing the little wisp of cloud with his own lips and closing the little distance between them in a kiss - firm but slow - like saying a vow.
John’s hand bumped Matt’s bow as it moved up his back, but he slid it up under the strap, and curled his palm into the long hair at Matt’s nape. Matt made a small but happy little sound against John’s mouth, and the hand at his chest fisted tightly in the fabric of his vest… And then they heard it.
A sharp whistle cut through the moonlit air.
It was closely followed by an approving whoop. “Hey! Get a room, Marshals! No booty on duty, McClane. Wasn’t that your rule…?”
Matt made a less happy noise, and reluctantly, John released his hold on him. Apparently the next shift had arrived early.
Though maybe not early enough. The sound broke from the north-east, sounding at first almost like an echo of the approaching shift’s wolf-whistle from moments before, but in a second there was no mistaking the long, drawn-out wail of Howlers.
And then, further off and to the south, the eerie call was answered by another.
“Guess we’re not getting that room just yet,” Matt muttered, as the two new Marshals hurried up to meet them. His weapon was already at his shoulder.
“Dammit Kosloski!” John swore.
“…Sorry Chief,” Kosloski apologized shamefacedly.
John waved it off. “Clemens, you head back to Central and put in a Code Yellow, then come back here and join Numbnuts here for the rest of your shift. Bring the night vision gear.”
“Sir, yes sir,” Clemens sounded off, before turning and jogging away into the night.
“I don’t know how many times I gotta tell him he doesn’t have to call me that…” John muttered. “Alright,” he told a grinning Kosloski. “Farrell’s with me, we’ll take the Jeep and make the circuit to all the outposts and have ‘em double the guard. You and Clemens stay here and try not to be such assholes.”
“Sir, yes sir!” Kosloski agreed, with a mocking salute and an even wider grin.
***
“Maybe we should start with a girl,” Matt was musing aloud, as he stared out the side of the Jeep and into the night as they bumped along. “They say girls are easier…”
John tried not to give him a reaction, but he must have made some sort of a movement or sound, because Matt shot him a suspicious sideways glance.
“What? They’re sure as hell smarter,“ he said, with a little more conviction. “I think I’ll train her to use my katana. She’ll be Howler-proof, and look super badass. Kill Bill style.” John didn’t know what the hell that was supposed to mean, but Matt squirmed around in his seat and made some karate-chopping moves with his hands, so he could only assume it used to be some nerdy Kung Fu thing.
“Yeah, that’s normal,” John grumbled. “At least it’ll keep the boys away…”
Matt threw him another sideways glance, but this time there should have been some trace of a smile in it. There wasn’t.
“John…” Matt’s voice was almost too quiet to hear over the noise of the road and the cold night air whipping past the Jeep’s windscreen. Matt stopped talking and watched him for a minute. John watched the road, and waited for him to find his voice. “You’re serious about this?” Matt said finally. “After everything…”
John could feel a sigh suddenly, sitting tightly in his chest like it was trapped there. He had a pretty good guess what Matt was thinking about.
Matt told John a long time ago that everybody who ever met him used to laugh at Warlock’s End-of-the-World Insurance plan; all the shitty, outdated machinery, the cheesy 66.6 frequency. But no matter how much ridicule he took from various online cronies - and numerous alleged virtual dates, although John had his doubts - he never got rid of any of it. He would have open communication with the world outside - whether they be Zombies or not, he’d said. Well, it looked like Freddy had got the last laugh.
Thanks to the Warlock’s shitty, outdated system, they had been able to make contact with a few other colonies after the virus struck. They even found Jack - he was a Deputy, last John heard, running Security and Salvage at a settlement north of Poughkeepsie.
But Lucy…
Back when the outbreak started looking serious, the West went first. When cross-country communication was starting to get spotty, Lucy, being her father’s daughter, decided to take one of the last flights out to the coast, determined to find Holly. Being her father’s daughter, she also knew if she had told him her plan, John never would have let her go. Checking all the flight manifests in the JTTF database was the only way he had found out where she had gone.
They were working all the time on widening the Warlock’s range, but finding the towers and repairing the damage caused by the firebombing the Federal Government had hoped would control the outbreak was a long process, and there was the risk of running into a Howler-pack every time they sent out a team. The fires had raged all through the cornfields of the Midwest and Canadian forest land. It could be years before they had any news from the west coast.
Maybe never.
Matt was still watching him, as they moved along through the night. If he was worried about John, he didn’t need to be. John had had more than enough time these past few years since the outbreak to regret not getting the chance to say goodbye to his little girl. Not spending those last few days with her, instead of running around the city helping set up road blocks and barricades. He had had plenty of opportunities to lament all the time he wasted when he did have his kids close by; sleeping in the room just down the hall, but he was always out too late helping set up barricades and chasing around after psychos and dirtbags to kiss ‘em goodnight.
Who could say if John had learned enough in all of his deep-thinking time not to make the same old mistakes over again. But this time at least he was smart enough to know they were mistakes.
All the stars were out now. John could look up through the open roof and see them, silver pinpoints in the thousands of millions, encircling them in a bright dome from the Big Dipper straight overhead, right down to the horizon all around. They had always been there - thousands of years - though you could never see them from Brooklyn in the days of noisy, smoggy traffic and never-sleeping city lights. They would be there thousands of years more, whether anybody down here was around to see them or not. Just exactly the same. Constant. Eternal.
John looked back over at Matt, watching him with a look in his eyes like he was trying hard to keep the hope out of them. Matt, who - come literal hell, or high water - was always there next to him, riding shotgun with his long, dark hair blowing in the rushing night flowing endlessly past them. Matt who brought so much joy tonight to so many kids who got so little of it these days…
He was sure.
Matt was still watching him. Waiting.
“Yeah,” John said, and gave him a smile that he hoped somehow showed that, yeah, he knew that he’d done a lot of things in his time that he couldn’t be sure were the right ones - but this, was definitely not one of them.
“Yeah," he said again. "It feels like it’s time.”
.