Resistance

Chapter Twenty-Two

            Twenty-Two

          I slept on the dust-coated pew uncomfortably all night. By the time I woke in the black morning my hair was almost completely white and my back felt like it had been broken. It turns out that sleeping on your side doesn’t help in the least, needless to say.

            I’m not the first one up when I lift my head. Jagger moves quietly around the church, looking for things to gather and occasionally opening a book. I think he’s reading the bibles, but I don’t understand why he keeps switching between copies. In fact, he’s not even finding what page he was on. He just opens, reads, and closes.

            I scratch my bandaged head and cringe at the pain when I realize I’ve moved upright too past. I’m still throbbing but in an apocalypse I can’t just go to the drugstore to get expired prescriptions.

            “You okay?”

            I meet Jagger’s eyes in the darkness of the main room and nod once. It’s a half lie, to say the least. Physically, I’m sore, throbbing and cringing in pain. Mentally, I can’t remember my past, know that I’ve been lied to about it and I’m pretending not to know what I do. But overall, I’m alive. And to me, that’s okay.

            “What are you doing?” I ask as he closes a book on the sermon’s stand. He doesn’t move from his spot but quietly drops his hands to his sides.

            “Reading.”

            I place my palms on either side of me to balance myself and look around me as my eyes adjust. Cole is sprawled on his back on a pew to the far left, the left side of his body hanging off it. His fingers finger on the cold floor but he’s completely unaware that he could topple over at any moment because he’s snoring softly.

            “I mean you’re reading system,” I murmur when I notice that Bullet is lying beside my feet and Jack is nowhere to be found.

            “Jack is upstairs. The baby is over by Cole.” I wander my gaze over to see a pile of tattered fabrics making a make-shift cradle for the toddler. I can’t see him exactly from the angle, but I know he’s there, sleeping silently. “And to answer you, it’s not really a system. I just open one of the bibles and read what passage I open to.”

            “I didn’t know you’re religious,” I murmur quietly as I try to dust off my hair. It feels like there’s a bird’s nest in the back of my head.

            “I’m not.”

            I raise my eyebrows but don’t say anything. Upstairs, the wood creaks and I wonder what Jack’s doing upstairs.

            “I’m just seeing what I need to know,” Jagger tries to explain. “Like some greater power is telling me things by showing me whatever passage I open to.”

            “Like God?” I joke.

            Jagger smirks a little. “Like fate.”

            Slowly, I rise to my feet and carefully hold onto the pew in front of me. With a stiff back, sore, aching feet and a probable concussion, first morning movement is the worst. I take small steps until I’m standing beside Jagger, looking over his shoulder at the closed bible. Even though we still haven’t talked, last night when he assessed my head I felt like things were back to normal and had some sort of epiphany.

            What if Jagger never told me because of apparently I left? What if he was hurt and he’s saving me from whatever hurt I may have experienced? I still don’t know what happened and I don’t think learning from someone else will change anything. How can I make judgement on something that happened when I myself can’t remember it?