Juggernaut Page 15

  “What’s different about it?”

  Zach smiled his gentle smile, his thumb stroking the gilt letters on the cover. “It’s annotated with linguistic analyses of passages that have historically stirred up controversy because of questionable and possibly biased or politically motivated interpretations. For example, the word for ‘young girl’ being interpreted as ‘virgin’ when referring to Mary.”

  Nico snorted. “I bet your dad loved you reading that.”

  “Oh, he never knew I had it. He would have thrown a fit.” Zach’s smile turned a little edgier, as if he relished the thought of seeing his father blow a gasket over it. “I bought it last year, when I was helping out a man at a shelter where I volunteered. He was the first homosexual or bisexual man I’d ever knowingly become closely acquainted with. I had to decide how I felt about that and what the Bible had to say about it outside my father’s narrow interpretation of cherry-picked passages. Especially when I realized I was attracted to him.”

  “Oh?” Nico’s eyebrows shot up. Instinct finely honed by his profession had left him a decent judge of where other people stood on the issue of sexual preference. He’d picked up on the fact that Zach had an inclination toward men almost immediately, but he hadn’t expected Zach to be comfortable admitting it so openly. “So what does it say?”

  “Well, we could be here all day discussing that.” Zach smiled wryly. “There are a lot of places in the Bible where the original text might have several viable translations, and at times it’s possible those translations were made to suit the biases of the interpreters at the time. It’s hard to mistake the relationship between David and Jonathan, though some people will try. But then there are more debatable passages, such as Jesus healing the ‘honored servant’ of a Roman centurion. When you look at the cultural and linguistic intricacies of the words used to describe the servant, there’s a strong indication that he might have actually been the centurion’s male lover. If you accept that interpretation, the question then becomes whether or not Jesus condoned or even blessed the relationship by rewarding the centurion’s faith and healing the servant.”

  Nico gave him a dazed smile. The existence of such interpretations of the Bible was nothing new to him; they were used all the time by activists to counter fundamentalist dogma. He just would never have expected to hear the son of Maurice Houtman, spokesman for the extreme Christian fundamentalist renaissance, considering them.

  Zach blushed under Nico’s stare, and continued. “Just now I was reading about Ruth and Naomi, who the original text seems to indicate were quite likely life partners. Their story was speaking to me fairly strongly today.”

  Intrigued, Nico let the rest of his chevron drop into his lap. “Why is that?”

  Zach shrugged. “I’m not sure. Maybe because one of my sisters was named Naomi and I miss her. I’ll almost certainly never see her again, or even know if she’s alive. Or maybe I’m feeling just a bit like Ruth right now.”

  “How so?”

  “All common sense says Ruth was destined to go hungry and unprotected unless she returned to her father’s house after she was widowed. But she chose to endure danger and hardship with Naomi rather than take advantage of the security of her father’s care.” Zach lifted his eyes, meeting Nico’s squarely. “I defied my father. I threatened him with a gun—twice. I left a reasonably secure, well-armed house stocked with provisions and walked straight into uncertainty. With you.”

  Nico squirmed. “So, I’m Naomi in this scenario?”

  “Not necessarily. I don’t know. That’s why I was reading, trying to figure out where God is leading me in all this. Do you just happen to be going in the direction in which He wants me to go? Or is He leading me toward you, for some reason I haven’t come to understand yet?”

  The soft huff of laughter Nico gave felt forced, and he broke away from the intensity of Zach’s regard, wrapping up the remainder of his uneaten meat. “Well, if you figure it out, be sure to clue me in, because I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. If God wants to weigh in on it, sure, why not?”

  Zach rose as Nico came to his feet. “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “Not shutting me down when I talk about my faith. I realize you don’t share it, but you respect the fact that it’s important to me.” Zach smiled and turned away, beginning to pack away his Bible and other belongings in his duffel.

  Nico shrugged. “Just respect that I have no interest in being converted, and that it doesn’t make you any better a person than me, and we’ll be just fine.” He ducked into the barn to gather up his clothes and bedding from the night before. He lashed the rolled blankets to the rucksack with a cord.

  Zach appeared in the doorway of the barn. “What do you think the chances are that these folks’ truck still works?” He gestured toward the driveway, where the vehicle in question looked like it had been sitting all winter.

  Nico stared at it thoughtfully. He’d noticed it the previous evening, but he’d been more concerned with the prospect of fresh meat. “If the fuel cell is dead, I have a replacement in my pack, and more in my car, if we can find where it crashed. Start raiding the pantry and load it up while I get it running.”

  Once they were certain the truck would run and they’d denuded the farmhouse of every provision they could reasonably carry, Nico splashed kerosene he’d salvaged from emergency lanterns in the pantry around the baseboards and set a match to it. Flames began to lick up the walls of the house, and Nico backed quickly out the door, watching until he was sure the fire was going to continue to burn. He forced himself not to think about the couple on the bed upstairs as people who had suffered and died a horrible death.

  “There. Now no one will stumble over the corpses and manage to get infected.” He wiped eyes that were burning from the smoke as he joined Zach. They loaded their accumulated baggage behind the front seat of the truck. The heavier rucksack. Zach’s clumsy duffel. The assault rifle he placed between them within easy reach.

  “Look at me,” Nico complained as he climbed into the driver’s seat. “This time last year, famous people booked me months in advance and spent thousands for a few hours of my time. I was well on my way to my master’s degree and only a few years off from taking over the most successful escort service in the country. And now—” He swept a hand up and down his body. “Well, at least I make refugee chic look good.”

  Zach snorted. “Oh, poor baby,” he scoffed, though he gave Nico a wicked grin that made Nico’s heart beat a little faster and, surprisingly, tugged on things south of his belt. He was a good-looking guy, this preacher’s son, with his dark reddish-brown hair that hadn’t seen a barber in six months, his sparkling aqua eyes, and cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass. But then Nico sobered as he pulled out of the driveway, remembering where they were heading.

  “I think the car crashed somewhere east of your property. I think. I limped around for a few hours before I found your place.”

  “All right. Take a left when we get out to the highway. I’ll get you to the country road that passes east of our house, and we can begin searching from there.”

  Finding the crash site took all morning, since it had been deep into a soy field, far off the road. Nico gripped the steering wheel tighter with each mile.

  “You have to swear to me you’ll stay in the truck,” he muttered to Zach when they finally saw the wreckage. “Let me gather everything up. Shoot anyone who approaches.”

  “We’ll be in and out faster if we both—”

  “No!” The steering column creaked in his hands, and Nico made himself loosen his grasp. His chest felt too tight, like he was trying to breathe with a hundred-pound weight sitting on his sternum. He shuddered, blinking away the burning in his eyes. “Please, Zach—”

  Zach laid a hand on Nico’s wrist. “It’s okay,” he said gently. “You’re all right. We’ll be okay.”

  “Sure.” He couldn’t meet that concerned aquamarine gaze. Not unless he wanted to fall completely
apart, and with the balls Zach had demonstrated in doing what he’d done the day before, he didn’t need Nico turning into a wreck on him.

  “You’re shaking.” Zach kept his hold on Nico’s arm, studying him with a frown. “And sweating.”

  “Sorry.” Nico didn’t know what else to say.

  “Let’s just find the provisions and get out of here as quickly as we can,” Zach suggested. The brisk note of confident determination sounded a little forced, but Nico appreciated the effort.

  Despite Nico’s plea that he remain in the truck, Zach proposed a better idea. He hauled himself up onto the roof of the cab with the shotgun, where he said he could practically see for miles in every direction. Nico couldn’t argue with that logic, especially since the flatness of the fields worked in their favor.

  Luck was with them in that apparently no one had found the wreck and raided the supplies, at least. The meat products had all been torn apart—though whether by animals or his mother, Nico wasn’t certain—but the water and the rest of the rations, in their sturdy, scent-proof packaging, remained untouched.

  The stressful part was how long it took to gather everything up and walk it back across the field to where the truck was parked on the road. The ground was too soggy to risk pulling the truck any closer. The back-and-forth trips took forever when he was hauling everything one armful at a time, but it was a relief not to have to leave all the fuel cells and extra weapons behind. By the time Nico was done loading the truck, the bed was packed. He hoped no one decided the full bed made them a prime target.

  Despite the fact that Zach never sent up the alarm and that gathering up and transferring all the scattered supplies wasn’t very heavy labor, Nico’s shirt was soaked through at the armpits and down his spine when he finally dropped into the passenger’s seat with a gusty sigh.

  “You okay?” Zach asked softly, and Nico nodded.

  “Yeah, let’s just get out of here. The whole afternoon is gone already.” He looked at the distant wreck of the lightcar with a strange sense of hopelessness. His mind kept playing images of his mother emerging from the debris or approaching from across the field, smiling and lucid and completely herself. It felt so real he wanted to cling to it, convince himself that it might still happen. But it wouldn’t, and if he didn’t accept that, he’d never be able to do what he needed to if he happened to cross her path again. His eyes burned and blurred, and he ground his palms against them before the moisture could spill over. “Just go.”

  Zach pulled back onto the road without another word.

  Silence settled between them, until Nico finally released a shuddering breath and murmured, “I should have shot her. It would have been the responsible thing to do. The kind thing to do.”

  Zach flicked a glance at him before returning his eyes to the road. “You’re not that man.”

  “Yeah, well, I need to become that man. We all do.” He wrapped his arms around himself, shivering despite the warmth of the truck’s heater. “I need to stop pretending the world hasn’t really changed. How many people could die because I left her alive?”

  “Nico—” Zach’s gentle hand closed over his knee. “She was your mother. Right or wrong, wise or unwise doesn’t factor into it. We’re still people, or I certainly hope we are or humanity truly is dead. Cold pragmatism is a good theory, but the Lord put love and compassion in our hearts for a reason. And I’d like to think, more often than not, love steers us in the right direction. Look at my father. The coldly pragmatic solution would have been to do what he intended to do and kill you preemptively when you yourself said you feared infecting us, but I stopped him. And even if that decision does end up putting me in danger, I don’t regret it.”

  “I know, but—” His voice broke, and his eyes stung again. It felt like he was moments away from completely cracking. “I’m not sure I can live in this world.”

  “We’ll find our way,” Zach said warmly, squeezing his knee again. “And you won’t be alone.”

  Nico managed a grateful smile and closed his eyes, pressing his face against the window until the nausea and despair passed. “I think what’s eating me is that I’m never going to have a chance to undo that decision. She’s gone, and unless I try to hunt her down, I can never correct my mistake. The rest of my life, I’ll know she’s out there and that I didn’t have the balls to do what she would have wanted me to do.”

  He peered at Zach, who was nodding thoughtfully, though not judgmentally. “I can only pray that you’ll find a way to make peace with that. If it’s any consolation, though, she was injured and without spare clothing or shelter in the middle of an ice storm and subfreezing temperatures that lasted for nearly a week.” The corner of Zach’s mouth lifted the smallest bit, and his expression went a little softer. “Maybe your inability to act when you think you should have was actually the Lord telling you to let Him handle it.”

  He said it with such simple, heartfelt conviction that Nico couldn’t bring himself to remind Zach that he didn’t share his beliefs. “Thank you. That’s a . . . That’s a nice thought.”

  He was damned if that incandescent peace Zach seemed to exude wasn’t contagious, though. Nico grew calmer. The choice he had made would haunt him, he was sure of it, but right now, it felt like something he could live with.

  Since Zach knew the area, Nico was glad to let him handle the driving for now. But gradually the mood in the truck shifted, tension creeping in. Zach’s profile became stiffer, the corner of his mouth drawn down.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Oh, nothing.” Zach pressed his lips together until they whitened, then sighed. “The only road that won’t take us any closer to more populated areas is going to go past my—our—my former house.”

  “Sorry.” Nico wasn’t sure what to say for a moment. He wished he could offer Zach the sort of comfort Zach had offered him, but he couldn’t. “You don’t think they’ll take a shot at us, do you?” he offered instead, grinning to let Zach know he was only joking.

  Zach scowled, but it gradually morphed into a smile as he caught on that Nico was teasing him. “I think by the time they realize they’re hearing a truck drive past and get the gun, we’ll be out of range.”

  Nico gnawed his lip. “Have I thanked you for standing up to your dad for me?”

  “It was long past time.” Zach shut his mouth with a snap, staring fixedly forward, cutting off any more discussion on that subject.

  Nico fell into an uncomfortable silence, peering west to try to determine how much longer they had until sunset. Rather than becoming more at ease with his decision to part ways with his father and brother, Zach seemed to be going in the other direction. What would he do if Zach wanted to go back? Would he have to make the trip all alone?

  “Are you changing your mind?” Nico demanded finally, as the sun was getting low in the sky and the shadows lengthening.

  “What? No.” Zach at least looked startled by the question, as if the idea had never crossed his mind. That was reassuring. “I’m just— I’m angry, all right?” he snapped. “Angry at my father for being such a hypocritical tyrant and angry at myself for putting up with it for so long. And I’m trying not to take that out on you, because it’s not your fault that I couldn’t see what was going on. But I don’t know what’s going to happen tonight, or tomorrow when we’re on the road, or once we get to Colorado Springs, and—”

  “And you’re scared.”

  “Yeah,” Zach breathed. “I’ve been trying to pray all afternoon because normally that calms me down, but I keep getting distracted by other thoughts.”

  “‘Other thoughts,’ huh?” Nico loaded the question with as much innuendo as he could. Zach seemed to respond well to being distracted with teasing. He blushed, and Nico grinned, finding himself suddenly on very familiar ground, indeed. This was too delicious to pass up. He slipped into flirtation like a comfortable pair of shoes. It was the first time in two weeks he felt something other than fear and worry and grief for his mother
. “You should have said something. We could have spent last night having some fun.”

  “What? I— No, I— I wasn’t—”

  “You weren’t?” He leaned close to Zach’s ear, letting his lips brush it as he spoke. “Why not? You already told me you’ve been attracted to at least one other man. And I’m awfully pretty.”

  “I’m not— I mean, I wouldn’t— I hardly know you?”

  The note of uncertainty at the end was so desperate that Nico cracked. Laughing, he shook his head and pulled away. “Relax, choirboy. I’m teasing. You go ahead and think whatever other thoughts you’re comfortable with. You decide you want to act on them, well, we can figure that out when and if it happens.”

  The crestfallen expression and conflicted yearning in Zach’s eyes when he glanced sideways at Nico stopped the laughter.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make fun of you. Why don’t you let me drive and you can get some sleep? You sat up all night last night.”

  Zach narrowed his eyes at Nico for a moment, as though looking for a trap, then shook his head, gesturing to the sun, already low in the western sky. “It’s only a couple hours until sunset. I’m okay.”

  “Suit yourself.” Nico leaned back in the seat and closed his own eyes.

  “Showers,” Zach said after a moment.

  Nico opened his eyes and looked dubiously at the clear sky. “Um, I doubt it.”

  “Not rain. Baths.”

  “What about them?”

  “You slept in a barn last night, after sleeping in a shed for two weeks. Might want to think about that next time, before you tease me about how pretty you are.”

  Nico gawked at him for a moment, then burst into laughter again. “Touché, man. Touché.”

  “They’re gone!” Zach stomped on the brakes, bringing the truck to a standstill in the middle of the road. The driveway to the left was as empty as the pit of his stomach.

  Nico jerked in the passenger seat, where he’d clearly been dozing. “Did they pull the car into the garage?”