Desolate The Complete Trilogy

20



The truck bounced over an especially large pothole in the road and woke Emily who leaned against me. She looked around with a little scowl and closed her eyes again. We were sitting in the bed of the truck with Dave and Ann. Tre drove and Minnie rode shotgun.

Dave noticed me looking at his rifle. I think it was one of those AK-47s like you see in just about every movie where the bad guys are Russian, Vietcong, or Taliban.

“Not too shabby, huh?” he asked. “Nabbed it from a drug house. Not much use for the piles of cash in there, but this has come in handy. I’d prefer my trusty M4, but it’s better than throwing rocks.”

Dave filled me in on my new traveling companions as we headed toward Montego Bay. He just turned forty and decided to retire from the Marine Corps when he made master sergeant. He and his wife moved back to Dave’s hometown of Sevierville, Tennessee. They came to Jamaica for a week to celebrate before starting their new life.

Ann Weston was a seventeen-year-old student from Cambridge, Ontario. Like Dave, her family picked the worst possible to time in history to travel out of the country. Both her parents and little brother got sick and died in the hotel while the entire resort fell apart around her. She was in the right place at the right time when the other three discovered her wandering aimlessly down the road. Ann mostly stared off in the distance as we drove and I could only imagine what she was going through.

Tre James and Minnie Garvey were both lifelong residents of Kingston. Minnie was the grandmother of eighteen grandkids and cleaned homes for a living in the nicer part of town. Even from the short time I’d been around her, I couldn’t help but notice her upbeat energy and optimism, which puzzled me considering the circumstances. A shrink probably would have chalked it up as a defense mechanism. Out of all of us, Minnie had the largest family to lose, and Dave implied she couldn’t find or communicate with most of them when things went wrong. Her smile was probably the only way she could cope.

Tre was twenty-three. When he wasn’t at his dishwashing job, he was practicing his freestyle in one of the hip-hop clubs around town. Jamaica already had a world famous reggae artist, so Tre shot for the biggest rap name on the island. I sensed some tension between Dave and Tre. It was obvious Dave was the de facto leader of the group and I had a feeling Tre wasn’t entirely on board with that.

As for my story, I kept it vague. I’m not entirely sure why, but I wasn’t ready to let any of my new companions know where I’d come from. For now, I revealed I was from Wisconsin and was here “traveling.” That seemed to satisfy Dave.





After about an hour or so of driving, my abdomen was really starting to concern me. It was worse than ever. I tried to write it off as aggravation from all the earlier stress, but riding in the back of the truck wasn’t helping. The six ibuprofen tablets I’d scrounged from the clinic didn’t touch it either. I tried my best to keep it to myself, mostly for Emily’s sake, but pretty soon I couldn’t hide the pain.

Ann, of all people, noticed it first. She broke from her daze and scowled at me. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

Dave, who had been watching the road behind us, looked over in my direction.

“You okay there, Howard? Not looking too great.”

I exhaled and wiped my forehead with my sleeve. It was hot of course, but everybody else seemed comfortable in the open bed of the truck. I was sweating bullets.

“I don’t know,” I said through clenched teeth. “God it really hurts.”

Emily looked at me with concern, but didn’t say anything.

I lifted my shirt and looked at the wound site. I almost expected it to be throbbing, on fire, or spewing blood, based on the pain, but it looked fine.

Dave crawled over to my side of the truck and inspected the scar. “Jeez, what happened there?”

“I got…stabbed a while back. It wasn’t hurting too bad until today.”

He pushed on my abdomen slightly and I screamed so loud Tre and Minnie heard. The truck slowed and Tre shouted out the back window, “What happened?”

“Just keep driving,” Dave commanded. “I’ve got it.”

The truck accelerated and Dave put his hand on my forehead.

“Sorry, bud. Man, you’re burning up.” I caught him glancing at my nose which probably had dried blood all over it from the shovel sucker punch. I knew what he was thinking and I shook my head.

“I’m not sick,” I stammered. “I…this is different, I don’t know.”

Ann handed me a bottle of water from the stash of supplies. I reached for it and was struck with such an intense wave of pain, I almost blacked out. My head felt like it was in a vice and I could feel the blood pounding though the arteries in my neck. I heard a crazy high pitched scream that I mistook at first for a woman until I realized it was me.

My last memory was my view from the floor of the truck bed. I was lying on my side, screaming. Dave was shouting at Tre to drive faster. Ann looked scared. Emily sat in her usual position, knees to her chin, hugging her shins tight. I could tell she was trying hard not to cry.

It was at this point that God finally took mercy on me, and darkness crept into the corner of my vision. My world turned to black.