by Skylar Finn
“This is not your house,” he hissed, refusing to relinquish his grip on her hair. In fact, he wrapped her long ponytail around his fist and brought her closer. “You do not get to decide how I keep my property and my family safe.”
“She was harmless,” Ailani spat, hiding her grimace as best as she could. “You had no reason to shoot her.”
“You don’t know that,” Raymond replied. “And you are not a member of my security team, so you do not have the authority to assess whether that woman meant us harm or not. Miss Ho, I suggest you grow a backbone. Without one, you won’t make it in this world. I’ve taught my children this lesson every day. One of them actually listened.”
Ailani wrapped her hands around Raymond’s forearms and dug her nails in. He didn’t even flinch, and he shook his head to stop Matthew from interfering.
“I’m not one of your children,” Ailani said. “If I was, I can assure you I would have taken the same route out of here as Walt. You, Mr. Dailey, are an entitled asshole, and I refuse to let you intimidate me.”
“Yet you have no qualms living on my property,” Raymond replied. “Eating my food, drinking my wine, and swimming in my pool? Without me, you would have ended up like that woman, starving and begging for scraps.”
“At least she has a moral center.”
Raymond drew Ailani closer to his face. “I can make you wish you were never born. You think the apocalypse is difficult to survive? You don’t know the half of—”
“Get your hands off of her!”
Walt sprinted down the driveway. Ailani didn’t know how he’d caught wind of the situation, but she was exponentially relieved to see him. About twenty feet from his father, he stopped short, unwilling to get any closer. He had one hand behind his back. The other was curled in a fist to keep it from trembling.
“Get your hands off of her,” Walt said again, this time in a calm, steady voice.
Raymond smiled, as if his son’s demand amused him. “Or what? You don’t have any more power today than you did the day you left this house all those years ago.”
Walt drew his gun. He aimed at his father.
“Don’t!” Ailani said.
Matthew, who’d been nursing his wounds, scrambled to pick up his own firearm from the dirt, but Raymond stepped in his way. He jerked Ailani along with him.
“Stand down,” Raymond ordered the security guard.
“But sir—”
“You heard me!” Raymond never took his eyes off of his youngest son. “I want to see how this is going to go. After all, they say history repeats itself.”
Ailani clenched her teeth as Raymond pulled her hair tighter against her scalp. The gun shook in Walt’s hands. “Walt, please. Don’t do it. He’s not worth it.”
“Don’t worry, Miss Ho,” Raymond said. “He doesn’t have the audacity to fire. This isn’t the first time he’s pointed a loaded gun at me.”
Ailani stopped struggling against Walt’s father. “What? Walt, what the hell is he talking about?”
“Oh, he didn’t tell you?” Raymond asked with a sneer.
Several paces away, Walt shook his head, a silent request for his father to stay quiet. Raymond paid him no mind.
“We never kicked Walt out of the house,” Raymond said. “He was arrested and sent to a juvenile detention center when he was fourteen. Would you like to know why, Miss Ho?”
“Shut up!” Walt said, the gun wavering with his voice.
“No, son, I think your friend here should know what you’re capable of,” Raymond said. “You see, Miss Ho, when Walt was a teenager, he claimed he was misunderstood. He caused quite a bit of trouble for me and my wife, and when we attempted to discipline him, he revolted. One day, he’d decided to solve his troubles on his own. He took a gun from my locked safe, went into my study where I was sleeping, pointed the gun at my head, and threatened to kill me.”
Ailani’s breath shortened to desperate gasps, but she couldn’t tell whether it was from the pain in her scalp or the story about Walt. Walt’s eyes filled with tears, but he kept them from falling. He didn’t deny his father’s claim.
“You were abusive,” he whispered, his voice hardly audible over the noise of birdsong in the woods. “You hated me.”
“You were delusional,” Raymond said back. “And you still are. You wanna kill me, Walt?” He finally released Ailani, tossing her aside so he could fling his arms out wide. “Do it! Shoot me. I dare you.”
Matthew, once again, tried to step in. “Sir, I don’t think this is a good idea.”
Raymond pushed the security guard away. “Don’t interfere, Matthew. That’s an order. This is between me and my son. Go on, Walt. I’m waiting.”
Walt stared at his father. He scanned Raymond from the triumphant, arrogant expression on his face all the way down to the expensive leather loafers on his feet. Ailani watched with bated breath from the ground as Walt squared his feet off. His hands stopped shaking. He chambered a round.
“Walt, don’t—”
He fired.
The gunshot echoed through the woods, sending birds and squirrels running from the trees. Raymond ducked just in time. The bullet whizzed over his head and disappeared into the forest beyond. Matthew tackled Walt, disarming him in less than three seconds, but Walt didn’t put up a fight. He kept his gaze on his father. Raymond sat in the dirt, the seat of his pants collecting mud and leaves. He panted heavily as Walt approached him and knelt down.
“Up until this point, I haven’t been able to fire that gun,” Walt told his father in a quiet voice. “We’ve been threatened and hurt by a few different people, but I could never bring myself to put a bullet in anyone. You, on the other hand, I’d love to shoot.”
Raymond, who Ailani expected to have a snappy comeback by now, looked up at his son with a trembling lower lip. For the first time since they arrived at the Dailey mansion, their roles had switched. Walt was suddenly the larger of the two, and Raymond had shrunk to the insignificant size of an ant.
“You taught me to aim,” Walt said. “I can shoot well, but I pretended not to every time you took me on one of those ridiculous hunting trips to ‘make me a man.’ But I can shoot well. If I wanted to kill you, I would have, but Ailani’s right. You’re not worth it.”
Walt straightened up, turned from his father, and approached Matthew. He held out his hand. “Give me my gun.”
Without a word, Matthew handed it over.
“I want you out,” Raymond croaked. “You and your friends are no longer welcome here. I want you out of here in the next hour. If you haven’t gone by then, Matthew will escort you out by force if necessary.”
Walt didn’t do his father the courtesy of replying. Instead, he helped Ailani up from the ground and linked their arms. Together, they left Walt’s father in the dirt.
“No!”
Keiko groaned and face-planted on her bed when Walt and Ailani came to tell her the news. She hammered her fists and kicked her feet on the lush bedspread. They waited out her tantrum. At last, she sighed and turned over.
“I like it here,” she said. “We’re safe here. We have everything we need. Why do we have to leave?”
“Because I almost shot my father,” Walt said. “Twice.”
“What?”
“It’s a long story, but it all hinges on the fact that my father is an asshole.” Walt hopped onto the bed and started jumping up and down. He actually cracked a smile as Keiko tried to catch his ankles to make him fall. “Anyway, I fired a gun at him because he was manhandling Ailani. Long story short, we’re no longer welcome here.”
Keiko looked to her sister. “What do you mean, he manhandled you?”
Ailani flipped over to show Keiko her irritated scalp. “There was a woman at the gates who needed help, and Raymond decided I was being too altruistic.”
Keiko’s face turned bright red. Unlike most people, where that sort of color symbolized embarrassment or shame, Ailani recognized it as anger in her little sister.
Every since Keiko was small, she’d had a temper.
“Keiko, relax—”
“I’m gonna kill him!”
Walt body slammed Keiko into the soft bed when she tried to get up, and they tussled breathlessly until Walt pinned her down. “Listen,” he said, stroking Keiko’s hair out of her face. “I spent a lot of time hating my dad and wishing he was dead. There’s no point playing games with him because he wins everything. I knew we wouldn’t be able to stay here long, but at least we got a nice break from the road, right? We can stock up and keep going.”
“Go where?” Keiko moaned. “I want to go home. I want to go back to Kauai and be with my friends. I don’t want to hike anymore or live in a weird commune. I just want to go home.”
Ailani piled on to the bed with Walt and Keiko. She planted a kiss on Keiko’s forehead. “I know you do, kid. So do I. We all do. Maybe we’ll get back home one day, but for now all we can do is keep fighting to stay safe together. Walt, where’s the map?”
Walt hopped off the bed. They’d lost all but one hiking backpack in the attack on the RV park. They’d stowed the one that did survive in one of the pool house closets. It was too dirty to be seen out in the open with all the other spotless possessions. Walt pulled the crinkled, filthy map out of the backpack’s front pocket and smoothed it out. He laid on his stomach on the bed with Keiko and Ailani on either side.
“How long do you think it will take us to reach your uncle’s commune from here?” Ailani asked.
Walt traced a fresh route with his finger. The commune didn’t look too far from the Dailey Mansion on the map, but Ailani could never tell how distances translated in real life.
“Three days?” Walt guessed. “We’re closer than we were at the RV park, and there’s a shortcut if we go this way.” He pointed out a path through the forest. “We can prep for three days no problem.”
“In an hour?” Ailani asked.
“An hour?” Keiko said. “We have to leave in an hour? I don’t have time for one last dip in the pool?”
“Not unless you want to find out how shitty my dad can be,” Walt said.
A knock echoed on the glass door to the pool house, and Paul came in before anyone could get up to answer. He rushed over to Walt. “I heard what happened. Are you okay? Did he hurt you? I swear, I would have done something to stop him if I had known what was going on outside.”
Walt shook his brother’s hand. “Don’t worry about it. I think Raymond is more shaken up than I am. I knew it was a mistake to come here.”
“I shouldn’t have brought you here,” Paul admitted. “Or I should’ve snuck you into the pool house without telling anyone.”
“You tried to help us,” Walt said. “That’s what a good brother does. I’m not blaming you for anything.”
Paul hung his head. “But now you have to leave. I might never see you again. I’m not sure I can deal with that. Not again.”
Walt stiffened a little bit, drawing away from his big brother. “Hey, you made a choice not to contact me. You could have reached out at any time.”
“I know that,” Paul insisted. “I should have picked up the phone and called you, but you know how it goes. Any time I mentioned your name, Dad would look at me like I was crazy and Mom started crying. After a while, I stopped mentioning you. It wasn’t until this EMP blast messed everything up that I realized how much I missed you.”
Ailani and Keiko exchanged a silent look. They weren’t the only pair of siblings who had lost touch over the years. It was hard to believe the EMP blast was good for anything, but at least it had reunited them all.
“You could come with us,” Walt offered in a small voice.
“No, I don’t think so,” Paul said, then added hastily, “Not because I don’t want to, Walt. I think it would be a lot better if we all stuck together, but someone has to stay here and take care of Mom. I can’t leave her.”
Walt fist-bumped his older brother. “Solid. I can respect that.”
Paul dragged Walt into a hug. “But you have to try and contact me as soon as possible. I know the phones are fried, and the postal service is down, but do your best, okay? Send a carrier pigeon or smoke signals or whatever.”
“I’ll do you one better.” Walt took one of the mesh networking devices out of his backpack and gave it to Paul. He’d been holding on to it ever since they left Trip’s house. “Take this. It might help us stay in touch.”
Paul pocketed the device. He sniffled, hiding his face as he wiped his eyes, then cleared his throat loudly. “Anyway, I’m not letting you three out of here without prepping you first. How long do you think your trip is going to be?”
“Three days,” they all chorused.
“I’ll get you enough for a week,” Paul said. “Just in case. I’ll pack your bags. Meet me at the front gate in thirty minutes.”
When they arrived at the front gate half an hour later, there were no remnants of the fight between Walt and his father. Someone had even brushed the dirt around in the driveway to get rid of the messy footprints. Paul met them with three upscale hiking backpacks, the kind people used when hiking the Appalachian Trail all on their own. He had filled each backpack with non-perishable food, water, first aid supplies, and a heavy-duty sleeping bag each. As he handed the backpacks off to Walt, Keiko, and Ailani, he gave them instructions.
“I put a portable heater in Walt’s bag,” he rattled off. “It’s solar powered so all you have to do is stick it out in the sun for a couple hours. At least you can heat up your food or boil water if you need to sterilize something. Ailani, your bag has the big camp flashlight in it. Again, it’s solar powered so just put it out during the day if you want to use it at night. Keiko, the fire-starting kit is in your pack. I don’t know if you guys will use it, but I figured it might come in handy if you get cold or whatever. I know it’s California, but it can get chilly at night, and you might appreciate—”
Walt stopped his brother’s rant by hugging him. His enthusiasm forced Paul to take a step back to steady himself. He thumped his little brother’s back.
“Thank you for everything,” Walt said, drawing away. “If it weren’t for you, I probably would have been eaten by those crazy cannibals at that RV park.”
“Don’t mention it.” Paul rubbed his knuckles against Walt’s scalp as if they were still young boys. “You can’t leave right away though. I promised Mom she would have time to say goodbye.”
“Paul!” Walt protested.
“It’s okay,” Ailani said. “We can wait.”
A moment later, Victoria came running down the driveway. Her velvet house robe unfurled behind her like a pair of scarlet wings. She was a majestic bird ready to take flight. She flung herself into Walt’s arms, sobbing relentlessly. Walt patted his mother awkwardly on the back.
“I’ll be fine, Mom,” he said. “I promise.”
She took his cheeks in her hands. “Please don’t leave. I’ll talk to your father. I’ll convince him to let you stay. I did it before—”
“I can’t stay here,” Walt said, taking his mother’s hands away from his face. “I’m no safer here than I will be out there, but I’ll tell you what. When I see Uncle Xavier, I’ll make sure to tell him you said hi. Is that okay?”
Victoria almost reached for her youngest son again but settled for adjusting the straps on his hiking pack instead. “You tell Xavier to take good care of you. I’m expecting to see you again soon. You stay safe. That’s not a request, do you understand me?”
“Yes,” Walt said. “I understand.”
Ailani and Keiko thanked Victoria and Paul for all their hospitality and help. Then Paul opened the pedestrian gate for them, and they were on the outside once more. Without looking back at the mansion, the trio went on their way.
18
The world had changed so much in the past several weeks, and yet Ailani had already become accustomed to the new way of things. She’d stopped checking her phone for messages or calls that would never come. She
stopped thinking about scrolling through Instagram or updating her Twitter or wasting time on any of her other social media accounts that were now defunct. She stopped yearning for things like a good glass of wine, bubble baths, or new shades of nail polish. Instead, she thought about what was real and right in front of her. The important things boiled down to two: Keiko and Walt. As long as they were safe, Ailani could keep going.
It was impossible not to notice the other changes in the world. As they emerged from the woods to take a detour through a small town, the trio saw the start of rehabilitation efforts. Here, the people had erected large white tents, such as for weddings and other events, but used them as communal spaces. They had a cafeteria, a clinic, and gender-neutral living spaces for those who no longer had a working home to return to. The community had come together, pooling their resources rather than instinctively reverting to selfishness. The result was outstanding. While the rest of the state crumbled, the small town had managed to stay afloat. The people were kind and giving, even to outsiders. Since the trio was equipped already, they took nothing but space from the revived community. For one night, they stayed in one of the white tents to sleep safely and returned to the road the next day.
Along the way, they saw other small factions that operated similarly. Northern California was not like L.A., where everyone only cared about themselves. Up here, the people were more inclined to accept the nature around them. The attitude was not precisely carefree, but it was more aware and open to other options. After a while, Ailani stopped tensing her muscles every time they passed another person on the road. Since leaving the RV camp, they hadn’t run into a single person with bad intentions. In fact, strangers were more likely to offer help than harm. A bearded man wearing a tie-dye shirt gave Keiko his huge straw sun hat when he saw her sunburned face. Further along, a short-haired woman in hunting gear offered lunch to all three of them. She had pounds upon pounds of venison that would go to waste if no one ate it. She turned out to be a real-life version of Sam Gribley, able to live off the land because she knew it so well. She gave the trio a few tips for eating in the wild and sent them on their way.