“Can I pet your rabbit? Is it nice?” Kenner asked Octavia, who had picked up Edie’s purse and carefully placed the gun inside it.
“Sure, my rabbit’s nice. It used to be a robot, but it got its wish, and now it’s a real rabbit.”
“That’s cool.”
49
Edie, Kenner, and Abram lifted Gabrielle’s body back into the truck, and then the three of them, with Octavia sitting on Edie’s lap, made their way down the mountain. The air was infused with a concussive silence. Kenner drove, painfully with his broken ankle, blinking wildly as though he were opening his eyes to the world for the first time. Abram sat smashed next to Kenner, tears streaking through the dust on his face.
“How is this truck able to run if you set off a thing to fry all the electronics?” Abram said.
“It’s a non-common rail diesel engine, I bet. I wanted to get one for my truck, but they’re nearly impossible to get ahold of. Some states outlaw them. Old school, no spark plugs or anything,” Kenner said.
Edie slept with her head on Abram’s shoulder, silver mylar headwrap on and crinkling with every bump in the road.
Octavia pet the rabbit and held her aunt’s cold hand as the rabbit licked at the dry, clotted blood on her thin, lifeless fingers.
Kenner turned off the main road and down an unpaved side road while chattering away at Abram, who could barely hold his eyes open.
They reached a large black gate off the unpaved road, security cameras on either side. A high-end touchscreen key entry, blank, scorched on all sides from the melted copper internals. Kenner drove slowly against the gate, pushing it open and snapping the round aluminum smart lock with a loud pop.
“What are we doing?” Edie said, waking up, annoyed.
“We got lost and we’re almost out of gas so we thought we could stop here for a little while,” Abram said, rubbing his head.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. So we’re breaking into a mansion? I don’t like this, Abram. Why don’t we just drive into town?” Edie said, nervously examining the slightly more manicured property around them as they climbed the long driveway.
“We’re almost out of gas. We’re better off here than broken down up the road. It looks like you knocked their power out here, too.”
They pulled into the driveway of an obscenely large Spanish Colonial-style McMansion.
“What if they call the police?” Edie said.
“How are they gonna call the police?” Kenner said, laughing.
“What if they have a gun?” Edie said.
“Nobody has guns. You have a gun,” Abram said.
They cautiously knocked on the large front door and then the back door and checked all of the windows. Kenner busted the kitchen window with a stone planter and Abram crawled in and unlocked the door. They found an empty vacation home stocked with luxury canned goods and frozen meals that would soon spoil without electricity.
Abram and Kenner wandered back to the front gate and wedged it shut again, Kenner leaning on Abram and still hobbling on one foot. Octavia played in the backyard, running back and forth, throwing paving stones into the swimming pool as Edie watched from the balcony. The rabbit nibbled at gaudy flowers in stone pots.
The house smelled like smoke from the burnt-out electronics of autonomous vacuum cleaners and an ultra hi-def VR system. They opened all of the windows. Edie could tell by a scribbled note on the refrigerator that it had probably been at least six months since a living thing had been in the house. Ex-cept a mouse, maybe. She stood at the window and could see a large square dirt plot at the edge of the carved-out tree line, some high-end digging equipment, a past attempt at a garden.
Octavia stood on top of the large, dead mowing bot, singing something. Abram found an old shov-el used as a decoration, and they buried Gabrielle under a large eucalyptus tree of Octavia’s choosing.
The days carried over one after another, and Edie’s fears of pursuers subsided. She had night-mares that the blonde women found them in the house, that it was their house. Her Goldilocks and the Three Bears dream, was what she called it. She felt the finality, the end that the little red-haired girl had promised. She thought about the little red-haired girl and her heart ached. She should have saved her, kept her close.
They busted up the extraneous furniture in the house and created a makeshift stove, a firepit out of a now-obsolete electric grill. They cooked fish they found in the thawing freezer. Ate all the packaged food. Cookies. Kenner found a trove of energy bars.
Otherwise, silence pervaded most moments, as if they were the last humans on Earth, although they knew otherwise. They could smell smoke, sometimes very strong, and it would keep Edie and Abram awake at night. Edie had an N95 mask in her purse, and they would all take turns using it when they felt like it, for whatever good it did. On the third night of their third week at the house—although they had all completely lost track of their time there—Edie was awakened by a buzzing sound. She woke Abram and they followed the sound out into the night. The sky was filled with innumerable shapes, flashing lights and orbs chased in halos. The sky seemed to be melting with a fleet of falling stars, and a great feeling of peace swept over Edie and Abram as they looked into one another’s eyes, which were lit by a thousand flames. Just like starting over.
About the Author
Jacob Daniel Palmer was born in Midland, Texas, and attended George Bush Elementary School. He spent his formative youth in the most desolate expanses of the American Desert Southwest and his adult life in a tiny rent-controlled apartment in the exact geographic center of San Francisco. He is a largely unsuccessful artist and occasional shy musician. His first novel, The Fact of The Moon Is Stranger Than Most Dreams, is far more autobiographical than one would as-sume. For more information, visit www.jacobdanielpalmer.com.
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