Dead Last, Vol. 3

by Quaranta, Marc

  “Ready?” Zach asked.

  7

  Haylea Meyers

  M y new house was as pretty as a spread from a home magazine. The shutters were a pretty white covering over the blue painted house. The porch was white and the lawn was in perfect condition. If it were my house, I could have won awards in the previous life for just how perfect it was.

  I watched as Emily walked Elyse and Kylie into the house across the street. I wanted to say that my house was better, but it was hard to pick one. They were both perfect. I would guess that they were anywhere from $200,000 to $250,000. They weren’t huge or elaborate, but they were in perfect condition.

  Emily was going to live in the house across the street with Elyse and Kylie. She’d adopted a second daughter and didn’t even realize it. I never saw Elyse or Kylie talk. They were like sisters who were the same age but completely different people in completely different social groups. I waved at Emily as she walked into the house. It was weird. I knew she was over there and I could easily go across the street to see her, but it was weird not being under the same roof.

  Back at WTIX, I could stand on one side of the building and Emily could be on the other side and that distance was probably greater than the distance between the two houses. Being under the same roof, though, was a comfort. It was going to take some adjusting to.

  That was an understatement. I walked into the house and was going to need to adjust to many things. It was all so familiar- living in a house, but still felt new. I think because I had seen so much of the world crumble that living in a functioning house was never going to feel real.

  My two new roommates, Jack and Heather, and I walked around the first floor of the house. We moved through the foyer and to the kitchen. Jack opened up the fridge and I was able to glance inside to see that it was full of food. Fresh food. The fruit was ripe. The eggs were safely tucked into the door and there was a full gallon of milk.

  I turned to see Heather staring at the living room. The room was filled with furniture. There were two couches, a coffee table, end tables, shelves, and a TV hung on the wall. The shelves were stocked with DVDs and Blue-Rays and even VHS tapes. The shelves on the other wall were filled from floor to ceiling with books. A cupboard under the TV had board games and magazines.

  I heard water running and turned around to see Jack playing with the kitchen faucet. He turned the hot handle fully on and stuck his hand under the water. The pressure was strong. “Hot,” he said. He turned the water off and then turned the cold handle. He watched it for a minute before dragging his finger underneath.

  “Cold.” He looked at me. The left side of his lip curled up.

  “This place is fucking amazing!” Heather startled me.

  I watched her light up with so much enjoyment and happiness. Jack was not as amused. He continued to search through cabinets full of dishes and pans and opened the pantry to find a fully stocked supply of dry foods. Cereal, snacks, bottled water, and so much more covered the floors and shelves.

  “I cannot wait to take a shower,” Heather screamed. She all but jumped over the coffee table and sprinted to the stairs. She stopped and looked at me, “Does anyone care what bedrooms we get?” She asked with wide eyes. I truly didn’t care. I knew she wanted the biggest one with the best bathroom. I shook my head. “Great,” she said and ran up the stairs.

  Jack and I walked around in silence until the only sound was from the shower upstairs. He would look at me and look away. I would look at him and look away. I slid my hand across the top cushions of the couch. I traced the entire thing as if it was all a figment of my imagination.

  Jack’s mouth opened but words got stuck in the back of his throat. We stared at each other for a while at that moment but still didn’t say anything. Then we heard something that we hadn’t heard in over a month. It was a chilling sound that triggered a PTSD-type moment of constant flashbacks from the old world. I immediately had a vision of my mom and could hear her voice.

  It was the sound of a phone ringing.

  On the wall, off to the side of the kitchen was an old school phone. It was white. The cord dangled to the floor and was wrapped around itself. The cord stretched fifty feet. It brought back so many memories of my mom talking on the phone in her kitchen with a bowl in her hand.

  Jack stared at it and appeared to be having similar flashbacks to what I was having. He stepped over and picked up the phone. He put it to his ear but didn’t say a word. The ringing of the phone caused me to forget how deafening our silence at been.

  “Hello,” he finally said. “Uhh, what?” He looked at me and then starting scanning the house as if we hadn’t spent the last fifteen minutes doing that. “Okay. Bye.” He hung up the phone and pulled at the cord. He turned his back to me and looked through a cabinet for the second time.

  “Um, Jack, what the hell was that?” I asked.

  “Oh, that was Emily,” he said so casually.

  “What? What the hell is going on?”

  “Yeah, this place has phones. Emily said there is a directory. She dialed our number. She called us on the phone. She called us to let us know that they’re all going to clean up and get some rest. Yeah. She called us.”

  I couldn’t believe what was happening. This place had everything from our previous lives. It had everything that we had spent the last month forgetting had ever existed. We’d spent almost thirty days trying to get accustomed to a life without technology and comfort and normalcy only to stumble upon this place and get thrown back into it all.

  “Oh. Okay,” I said. I didn’t know what to say.

  Jack stopped at the kitchen table and started tapping on it. It was real wood, although, I don’t think that’s what he was tapping it to check for. He placed his palms on the table and then rolled his hands into fists. He gently lifted his hands up and dropped his knuckles onto the table. After two more times, he opened his hands back up and slammed them down on the table.

  “What the fuck!” He screamed.

  It didn’t scare me. The phone could startle me, but Jack blurting out his frustration didn’t cause any reaction from me. I stepped back and leaned onto the top of the couch. I placed my hands down and sunk my shoulders into my body. My eyes met the floor I was standing on and waited for Jack.

  “What the hell is this place?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said quietly.

  “No, seriously. Look at this.” His hands shot up in the air and he spun in a circle. He started pointing at this and that. He pointed to his side, to something behind me, and at every item on the counter. “Look!”

  “What do you want me to say, Jack? Is it weird? Yeah, it’s weird.”

  “Weird? It doesn’t make any fucking sense! How did they do it? I mean, how did they fucking do this? How did they build this place?”

  “I don’t know, Jack! What difference does it make?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Jack ridiculed. He walked around the kitchen table and over to the living room wall. I turned around to see him. He started smacking the walls. “Are you fucking kidding me?!”

  “Calm down, Jack, Jesus Christ. Spit it out already. What’re you trying to say?”

  He slid his hand down the wall and took a few deep breaths. He walked around and fell into the second couch. I leaned over and rested my elbows on the first couch. I could see that sitting wasn’t helping him relax instantaneously. He took one more deep breath before looking up to me.

  “Think about it, Haylea. Think about how secure this place is when we drove up to it. The guards, the gate, the soldiers. Think about all the roads coming in and out. How many gates do you think they have out there? How much fencing around the perimeter? They’ve made sure that nobody can stroll onto the property without going through one of the gates.”

  I listened as he gave me more. “The stores. The food. The little shops. They have cars and a gas station. They have power. Running fucking water.” He pointed to the sink. “We’ve been living after this outbreak no
w for what? A month? Give or take a few days. How the hell does something like this get built in thirty days?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged.

  “It doesn’t. There’s no way. This place doesn’t come from the ground overnight. It is impossible.”

  “What do you think happened?” I asked. I crossed my arms. I wasn’t sure anything he said would give me comfort.

  “I think this place was already here. I think this place was already built. I think whoever built this town, be it Glen or whoever, was ready for what happened.”

  “That’s insane, Jack. You think Glen knew the outbreak was coming? You think they had this place ready to go?”

  “I don’t know, but how else do you explain this? How do you explain everything? Look where we’re sitting! Look what happened to us. Why would they attack us like that? They didn’t want us coming in here.”

  “That was Kendrick. Glen took care of that. He had nothing to do with that and locked the guy up in a jail cell.”

  “That’s what he told us, but how do we really know? What the hell is this place? Who the hell is that Glen guy? We’re just supposed to take a set of keys, get a brand-new house, and live the rest of our life in this damn place? No, thank you.”

  “No? What do you mean?”

  “I mean, we need to get out of here. We can’t stay here,” he said seriously.

  “You can’t be serious. Look at this place and you want to go back out there where we’re going to die one by one? There’s no way we’re leaving. Kurt is out there.”

  “I know he is, Haylea, but something isn’t right here. What is this place? I mean, really, what is it? Why is it here? Who is Glen?” He rose to his feet. “There is a bunch of shit that they aren’t telling us and as long as they’re keeping it from us, we aren’t safe here.”

  “You don’t know that. You could be wrong,” I interrupted.

  “And you don’t know that I’m not right,” he said. He put his hands on his hips. “Haylea, we need to leave.”

  “We’re not leaving,” I said sharply. “Kurt is still out there and he is going to come back for us. He’s coming back, Jack.”

  “How long can we wait?”

  He asked a question that I didn’t have an answer for. I had one answer, but it wasn’t logical. We couldn’t wait forever. I knew that. I also knew that I had to wait as long as I could, though. Jack was either going to understand that or he wasn’t. That was his issue.

  “As long as I have to. It’s Kurt. He ran back to WTIX in a homemade hazmat suit. He’s coming back.”

  “Then we will wait. But we can’t wait forever. I’m telling you, Haylea, and I’m not making shit up, something about this place scares me. Something’s not right.”

  For Jack to admit that something scared him was reason enough to take him seriously. I believed him. I believed that he was scared and unsure of things, but he didn’t have any proof. The place popped up quickly, we assumed, but seeing how many people lived in Esperanza was convincing. They very well could have been a fast and organized group. District 7-1 may have risen up from the ground in a few days.

  Or Jack was right and District 7-1 was going to be the place we all died.

  8

  Scott Daugherty

  I remember apartment shopping when I first moved to Indianapolis. No matter which apartment complex I went to, all of the apartments looked the same. I’d walk into a place with horribly painted white walls. Everything would look so square and plain. The window blinds were plain white and cheap. The carpet was cheap. It was the kind that felt like lying on stiff rubber.

  Glen walked me through the bar where my apartment was. There were people already inside. It was early in the afternoon, but some were already drinking. A couple was taking shots at the end of the bar top. I guess there wasn’t anything else to be doing.

  There was a woman working behind the counter. She was very pretty. Her hair was curly and touched her shoulders. She looked over to Glen and I but paid no attention to her. Glen nodded to her but it was brief. We walked up a stairwell behind the bar and through a door leading to the apartment.

  It wasn’t like any of the other apartments I’d visited in Indianapolis. It was old, sure, but in a very antique way. The floor was hardwoods. It was a big studio place. There was a couch and a TV, a bed, and then a small kitchen. The table was a two-seater. Off to the side of the corner, in the kitchen, was all the boxes that Glen had told me about.

  The necks of alcohol bottles were poking out of the ones on top. The rest were taped up and closed. It was all the drinks and the dried foods for the bar. A few boxes said “Lays” but I don’t know what was in the rest of the boxes. Peanuts and pretzels would be my guess.

  The kitchen was an ugly pale-yellow color. It clashed with the dark brown of the floors. The backsplash behind the sink was pale yellow tile. It could have been a white tile that faded to a yellow. Either way, it was not an appealing color.

  “I said there were boxes. I’m sorry, I didn’t know there were so many.” Glen looked around at all of them. “I will try to find another place to store them, but in the meantime, you’re going to have to make do.”

  “No, it’s okay. They can stay here. I’m sure it’s easier for the bartenders to just have it upstairs from them. I don’t mind them.”

  “That’s your call,” Glen said.

  I looked around the place and tried to picture myself living there. It wasn’t going to take much getting used to. I’d be able to adjust nicely I believed. The weirdest thing was going to be living alone. It was the best thing for me, don’t get me wrong, and for the other people in my group, it’s just going to be weird.

  For so long we’d been living together inside WTIX. We were by each other nonstop, all day and all night. Every move we made had somebody there watching us asking us what we were doing. Now, I was all alone. I had my own kitchen, my own, bed.

  I walked across the creaky floor and opened the only other door in the room. It led to a small bathroom. A small square shower I’d barely be able to fit in, a tiny toilet, and a little sink. It wasn’t built for comfort.

  “Scott, I want to assure you that you are going to be alright,” Glen said.

  I turned the sink on and felt the cool water in the palms of my hands. I turned it off and rubbed my hands against my shirt. I went back into the room and closed the bathroom door.

  “This is a great place,” Glen continued. “It’s going to take some getting used to. I know that, but I hope you are open to the possibilities.”

  “I’m sure it’s great. Thank you, again, for helping me out with this place.”

  “Sure.” He gathered saliva in his mouth and swallowed it. “Listen, this place runs so well because everybody helps out. We all have jobs. Everyone works. It isn’t a Monday through Friday type of gig, but everybody puts in hours somewhere. We have grocers and gardeners, some work at the gas station, there is security. All kinds of things.”

  “I’ll help out in any way that I can,” I said.

  “With your building management experience, I’ll try to find something good for you. I’ll see what I have. I’ll find something for you, though. It’ll be great.”

  “Sounds great.” I walked over to him and shook his hand. “Thank you.”

  “Sure. Get settled in. The bartender makes good drinks downstairs.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I said with a laugh.

  Glen gave the room one last look around and then left closing the door behind him. I was alone. The last few times I was left alone my mind began to wander. Those were some of the darkest times of my life. Whenever people got too busy during our time in WTIX, I was left by myself. That was when my mind went to horrible places and I acted out.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I was alone specifically, but one of the last few times was moments before I raped Elyse. I remember being in the back with all the equipment doing one of my daily checks. That was the moment I realized the building was losing p
ower and that we wouldn’t have more than a month or two with power. I started to think about power and how I didn’t have any. My mind convinced me to find a way to get some.

  Moments later, I raped Elyse. I talked myself into it. I guess, though, I didn’t talk myself into it. Another voice talked me into it. I was hearing so many voices in my head and not a single one of them belonged to me. It had been a while since I had heard those voices, though. At the same time, however, it had been a while since I was alone with my thoughts.

  I was ready to accept that I was by myself and accept the possibility that I could hear those voices before I realized that I was no longer alone. A woman had crept into the apartment without me realizing it. She must have opened and closed the door so quietly that I didn’t hear her come in.

  “What are you doing here?” She asked me.

  “This is where I live now. Glen gave me this place. He’s going to let me stay here.”

  “Here? This is where you’re going to live?”

  “Yeah. It’s nice.”

  “It’s a dump,” she said. “This is disgusting.”

  “It’s a little dusty, but it is nice. I can clean things up.” I looked around the room and saw those dreaded boxes. “I can cover those with a cute blanket or something. Trust me, it will look nice when I have had some time to clean.”

  “Trust you? Ha!” She laughed more and was unable to talk through it. “Trust you, that’s a good one. If I had a dime for every time you told me to trust you, I wouldn’t need alimony.”

  “Babe,” I said.

  “Don’t you dare call me that anymore, Scott! I am not your ‘babe.’ I am not that girl anymore!”

  “Why are you so mad?” I asked.

  “I’m mad because I’m supposed to be dropping my daughter off to you because we agreed that you would be watching her when I went to work, but I can’t even trust you to find a decent apartment. This place is a shit hole and I shouldn’t have expected anything less!”