I guided her face to mine and we exchanged a passionate kiss that was driven by the force of love. I hadn’t felt a kiss like that ever. I never wanted it to end and it seemed like everything around us was dark and gone and out of sight. It was a moment of privacy but now was between us and the world wasn’t watching.
Or so I had thought.
When our lips parted and my eyes opened, Emily’s daughter stood at the entrance of the kitchen. I dropped my hands from Emily’s face and stepped back.
“Oh, Elyse. This…” Emily began. Her words trailed off. She stepped around toward her daughter and reached out to her arms. “Elyse, I’m sorry.”
“Mom,” Elyse said. When Emily’s hands touched Elyse’s arms, it shocked her. Elyse took a big step back. “Mom, it is fine.” She said surprisingly. There was also no anger in her voice. “It’s totally fine. Are you kidding? This is great!”
“Really? Are you sure you’re okay with this? We can talk about it.”
“Why wouldn’t I be okay with this? We don’t need to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it with you. I don’t want to talk to you.”
Elyse was smiling. She looked down at the ground and looked at her feet. She spread her fingers and soon her eyes were on her hands. She twirled in a circle and I could hear her repeating ‘I don’t want to talk.’ Emily looked back at me and I looked at her for a moment before looking back at Elyse, whose eyes were now focused on the bottle that sat on the counter.
She grabbed it and changed her emotions as she chucked it across the kitchen at me. I, just as before, threw my hands up and turned my head down and to the side but I wasn’t able to dodge the bottle as well as I dodged the fruit.
What felt like the neck of the bottle crashed into the side of my head and opened up a gash. The bottle shattered and some parts collected in my hair and clothes while the rest flew into the air and down onto the floor. I pressed my hand into it and could feel the blood pour into my hand.
“Elyse!” Emily shouted.
After I realized I wasn’t going to die from the incident, I looked back across the room to see Elyse storming out. Emily didn’t go after her, which was smart or she maybe would have ended up cut or hurt herself. She came rushing over to me and grabbed the sides of my scalp.
She turned my head and pulled it down so she could see into the cut. She told me it didn’t look good and might need some stitches. It wasn’t bad enough to run out of the room and grab supplies, though. Instead, we stood and stared at the glass on the floor and at the open area of the kitchen where Elyse had just been standing.
14
Kurt Elkins
B y the time we arrived back in Indy, the sun was almost completely set and only a dim light was peaking over the horizon. The night scared people. The darkness made people feel uneasy and unsafe. The light was great, right? The light was safe and calming and the dark was the absence of light. Which meant it was the absence of safety. The opposite of calm.
I didn’t feel that same panic when the night came. I never used to run up the stairs after turning the lights off on my main floor. I felt comfortable in the dark. It must have been the years I worked on the overnight shift. I used to park my car and walk into work when it was dark. I wasn’t afraid of monsters or spirits jumping out at me. I wasn’t even afraid of the more realistic chance that somebody was going to jump me and rob me.
I went to the grocery store during my lunch break, which was around 3 am. I sat outside on my car and stared up into the starless sky. I loved the night.
Walking back up on Doc’s Guns had my nerves shaking. The last time I was there, Nick got shot. So that could have been why I was nervous. Or, it could have been that I knew that I wasn’t going to get shot. Nobody was going to be shooting off any bullets from that place.
Doc’s Guns was all but torn to the ground. The windows to the store were shattered. The boards that were nailed up had been knocked down. Only one or two boards hung from barely hanging on nails.
We were down a man at this point, too. Frank and Reggie, just like Frank had promised, did not come with us. Frank wasn’t somebody to count on when things got messy. He wasn’t the person to step in the middle of a fight and risk his own life. He never got his hands dirty. I understood why. He spent every second of the day he was awake protecting his son. He managed to do that asleep, too.
Even without them, though, I felt like we were more vulnerable. Frank may not have been the guy that would have saved one of us, but at least it was another pair of eyes to see things we couldn’t. Two pairs of eyes, that is. And Reggie spotted more stuff than any of us. He was very aware of the world around him.
“Holy shit. This isn’t good,” Bryce said.
Zach had his gun in his hand and walked forward slowly toward the building just like a cop. “Bryce, shut the fuck up,” he said slowly.
I readied my gun and followed closely behind the two.
We stepped through the door that was now an open hole in the side of the building. Luckily there was just enough light that we could see what the inside looked like. It was bad. It was destruction.
“Bryce, can you find a light?” Zach asked. “Be careful.”
“Where?” he asked.
“Over there.” Zach pointed behind the counter and watched closely as Bryce ducked behind the counter.
We held our breaths for a moment. Bryce was out of sight. There was no sound. Zach and I connected eyes and waited for something. Anything. Then we heard some shuffling through the shelves. Bryce popped back up and had two flashlights. He turned them both on and the sudden glow blinded us.
He tossed one to Zach and then dropped down and grabbed a third one. That one worked, too. He tossed me one and the three of us worked as one giant spotlight and lit up the gun store.
Destruction was an understatement. Everything inside the store was gone. There were racks of clothes that were untouched, but the guns were gone. The ammo was gone. Everything was gone. The walls were punctured by dozens of bullet holes.
The carpet was stained with blood. I couldn’t tell what was torn clothing and what was ripped off flesh. The bodies of Clark and his men were somewhere on that floor, but they were unrecognizable.
“My God,” I said. My mouth hung low and Zach and I connected eyes for a moment. Bryce was leaning on the counter and was going to get sick.
“I don’t believe this,” Zach said.
I scanned the floors over and over, but there was nobody there. There were no survivors, and there wasn’t enough of the bodies for any of them to come back alive. They were torn to shreds. Ripped to pieces. Nobody was going to come back as a straggler.
“I know,” I said.
“No. You.”
I turned to see Zach looking my way. I shined the light at him but lowered it when I realized I was shining it right into his eyes. His eyes looked dark in the silhouette of the flashlight. Black eyes with no sign of life in them. He looked like the monsters that I never feared were in the dark.
“What?” I said.
“I don’t believe you!” He shouted.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
He started moving over to me and before I could react accordingly, he punched me in the face and then pushed me backward and hit me again. I fell to the ground, well, was tackled to the ground by Zach. We fell over a table, or shelf, or something that stuck into the back of my shoulder and crumbled under us.
“Guys!” Bryce shouted faintly from behind the counter. He might have screamed and there is a solid chance that my ears were ringing too much to hear him.
“We came all this way.” Zach lifted me by my collar and punched me again. “All this fucking way!” he shouted.
I was able to block his next punch and rolled him over to his side. I balled up a fist but didn’t land it the way I wanted to. We were both on our sides so instead of punching forward, my arm was straight up in the air and I brought it down like I was smashing a bottle in my hand. The middl
e knuckles of my fingers made contact first and I knew instantly I broke a few fingers.
Zach torqued his body enough to get around my arm and pulled it into his side. He hit me in the chest and then punched me in the bicep of my arm. I didn’t know if he was aiming for these strange spots, but damn did getting punched in the bicep hurt.
I managed to get my foot close to his body and kicked him back away from me. I rolled over and got to one knee. He was coming again. He was faster than I was at getting back to his feet, but the lower man always wins. I sprang forward and drove my shoulder into his chest and tackled him to the ground.
Thud.
I pressed down on Zach’s chest with one hand while I readied the other to punch him clean in the jaw. When I reached back and had an open view of Zach’s face, he was out cold. I held my first tight for a moment. Was he faking it? Was he going to jump up as soon as I relaxed? No.
He was out cold. I wasn’t sure what had happened right away but then realized that he had hit his head on one of the big gun safes that the store sold. I checked that he was breathing and then felt around the back of his head for blood. There were small drops on my fingers, but luckily it was nothing severe.
I fell back onto my ass and tried to catch my breath. I looked up at Bryce who hadn’t moved from behind the counter. He held the light on us firmly as if he was shining a spotlight on the main event fight.
“Wow,” he said. “I would have had my money on Zach.”
“Yeah,” I said through my breathing. “I would have, too.”
We waited a few minutes for Zach to come to. He was still pissed. It was as if he woke up and immediately picked up where he left off, minus the actual punching me in the face part.
“This is fucked,” he said rubbing the back of his head. “Son of a bitch.”
“Sorry,” I said unapologetically.
He looked at me and knew I didn’t mean it. Maybe that is why he kept berating me.
“You dragged us all this way to get help that isn’t even here anymore.”
“You didn’t have to come, Zach.” I inspected my broken fingers as I talked. Middle and ring finger both were cracked. “We needed help.”
“Oh, yeah! Let’s get some help.” Zach reached over and grabbed a disgusting mixture of torn clothes, torn flesh, and blood and picked it up. He held it high so I could see it and then tossed it toward the back of the store. His hand was soaked rather quickly in Clark’s blood. Somebody’s blood.
“That’s disgusting,” said Bryce quietly.
“Shut up,” Zach said to him. “I hope it was worth it because now we’ve lost an entire day coming back this way when Kylie and Haylea and the rest of your people are stuck in that place!”
“I know!” I yelled. “I was wrong and I fucked up, but we needed help and Clark and his people would have helped us! We can’t go back there without help, Zach. They’ll kill us.”
“They couldn’t even help themselves,” he said. He dragged his hand against a clean-ish part of the carpet. “Now what? You want to keep going and try to find some help? You want to build some shelter or just wait until next year?”
“I get it, man! Enough”
“No, I don’t think you do! We wasted an entire day coming here and we’re going to waste another getting back. I swear to God if Kylie…”
“Yeah, I get it, Zach.”
There was silence for a moment until Bryce climbed over the counter and back by us.
“Are we going back then?” Bryce asked.
Zach looked at me. He had just punched me in the face and criticized the moves I was making and yet he still looked at me to give him an answer. He was a machine and tough as hell, but he was nothing more than a coward.
“Yeah, we are going back.”
“But we don’t have any help,” Bryce informed us.
“We’ll just have to think of something on the way. Zach’s right.” This was shocking for Zach to hear from me. “We’ve wasted enough time. There’s not going to be any help. We need to go back.”
The three of us went up onto the roof and barricaded the door so that nobody could come back out there and surprise us. We’d taken a bunch of clothes and blankets that were in the back offices and made as soft a bed as we could.
We weren’t going to be able to travel back in the middle of the night so we were going to sleep on the roof where it was safe and start moving as soon as the sun came up. I watched Zach make his bed and lay down and then I proceeded to make mine as far away from his as I could before falling off the roof.
15
Emily Clark
Day 29
A great night’s sleep was rare. I had a daughter who was quite possibly rolling off the deep end and sinking down into the darkening abyss, I had a new love interest who had a gash in his head because my sinking daughter apparently was in love with him, and I fell asleep in a new bed that belonged to a group of people that lived inside some sort of perfect world that wasn’t affected by the stragglers or the end of the world. With all of that…I slept great.
I didn’t dream about Sam last night. It wasn’t that I dreamt about him every night, in fact, I didn’t dream about him every night. What was sad about the way I woke up was that I didn’t think about Sam until after I used the bathroom, after I showered, and until after I was dressed. Ironically, I didn’t think about him until I thought about the fact that I hadn’t been thinking about him. I was forgetting my husband. It was worse than that, too. I didn’t even cry when I forgot to think about him.
I lurked into the hall as if I was afraid of my own daughter. Like I was going to accidentally run into her out there and it was going to spark a mother-daughter feud that had never before been seen in the existence of families. I needed to see her, though. I couldn’t let something like this just fade away. I feared it wouldn’t fade away.
I stepped lightly up to her door and pressed my face against the wood. It was silent on the other end. She was sleeping. Haylea had told me that she was acting weird and somewhat out of control, but I only hoped it hadn’t reached a point of no return. A small part of me feared she was on the other side of the door sitting crisscross on the bed rocking back and forth mumbling gibberish to herself as she thought about Jack.
I knocked softly one time. A second passed and I knocked a little bit louder a few more times.
“Elyse? Elyse, are you awake?” I waited an eternity that in reality was only about ten seconds before I gave up. I wanted to pretend that she was sleeping and didn’t hear me, but I just knew that she was awake and ignoring me. I just knew it.
I came down the stairs to find Kylie was already awake and watching TV. The number of DVDs and Blu-Rays the house had was ridiculous. There was an opened box set lying on the coffee table in front of her. She had put in one of those teenage drama TV series that I remember Elyse used to watch. It was Dawson’s Creek or One Tree Hill or something like that. I could never remember what shows Elyse was in to and what heartthrob she was dreaming of that month.
“Good morning, Emily.” Kylie turned her head and smiled. She held it for a moment.
“Good morning. How are you?” I asked her. She nodded and said good and then faced back to her show.
I wasn’t quite sure if I believed her. “Good” was the worst word in the dictionary. Students said it when teachers asked them how their assignment is going. Patients said it to me when I asked them how they’ve felt the last few days. At this point in time, the word actually meant the opposite. “Good” and “fine” should have been changed in the dictionary a long time ago.
“Kylie,” I said walking up behind her. She responded, but didn’t turn around. “Are you doing okay?”
I ran my hand through her hair and guided her to turn to me. She smiled and I knew it was tough for her to hold that smile.
“Yeah. I’m really okay, Emily. Really.”
“Okay.” I let go of her hair and turned to the kitchen to make myself some coffee. I had barely made it over t
o the Keurig, though, when there was a knock at the door. In this world, people didn’t wait for the homeowner to answer the door. People just knocked and then let themselves in.
People, in this case, was Jack. I peeked around the corner at him walking in. He walked into the house as gingerly as I walked out of my room earlier.
“Is this okay?” he asked quietly.
I waved him in and he closed the door as quiet as a mouse. He tiptoed through the foyer and into the kitchen.
“It’s okay, Jack.” I started my coffee.
“The two-inch gash in my head would suggest otherwise.”
“Well…it will be okay.” I grabbed some creamer from the refrigerator. “It needs to be okay.”
“Where is she?” He asked me. He saw that Kylie was on the couch, but he didn’t say hi to her.
“I don’t know. I think in her room still.”
“Sleeping?” We spoke softly.
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“What are we going to do?” Jack asked. “I can’t just disappear from your life, Em.”
“You can’t?” I asked with a smile. He shot me a look. He didn’t want to dive any deeper.
“Come here,” I said. His eyebrows wrinkled, but he realized after a moment I wasn’t being romantic in any way.
He came closer to me and turned, dropping his head to the side. I pulled back the bandage slowly. Some of his hair had come up with the tape. He let out a small hiss like a snake and I looked at the wound. It was still new but looked clean.
“Do you want any coffee?” I pressed the bandage back down into place and washed my hands quickly before putting the finishing touches in my coffee.
“No, I’m okay.”
“Now that I offered it, I don’t really know if you’re even a coffee drinker.”
“Not really.”
“No?” I was a bit surprised.
Dead Last, Vol. 3 Page 9