by Max Lockwood
The real cause of alarm, though, was the fact that they were all dressed in black.
Clara was suspicious. So many people congregating in one area meant something bad, and Clara held back watching them with a slight frown. She didn’t look away, until she felt a warm brush on her hand.
"Come on, let's go. We'll just have to move around them. If they're mourning, we shouldn’t interfere."
She followed his lead and they continued on to the hospital. Cooper declared he'd been too young to care about the view, but Clara had been an introverted type of teenager. When she didn’t have someone to talk to, she did a lot of observation. They were going off Clara's previous visit to the town to guide them. She wouldn’t call her memory flawless, but as long as she looked at buildings, not streets, she had some vague idea of the general area they were heading out to.
Clara stopped when she saw the hospital. It was still a distance away, but there was no need for them to get any closer. Cooper stopped right beside her, and they both just stood there in silence.
She had thought there was little else left that could leave her feeling horrified. Clara admitted to herself that she had been dead wrong. She'd seen the worst she could, but everything bad was going to be the worst when it was so fresh. Like every other time, this one would likely stick with her.
"Even I sort of remember. That was it, wasn’t it?"
The tone of Cooper's voice was grim, appropriately so. The hospital couldn’t even be called that anymore. The building was crumbling, a great deal of it gone, with a plane wreckage having destroyed half the building, and Clara stared at it in shock.
The place, the whole area, looked untouched. She remembered seeing those people in the city all dressed in black. If everyone was mourning, had anyone thought to dig inside the wreck for survivors that couldn’t have gotten out by themselves? Somehow she doubted it. Because back home, there were still people being pulled out, or bodies of people already dead. The center of their town resembled a ghost town, but the occasional medic or volunteer still walked around, or had when they'd cycled past.
Here, though. It gave a whole new meaning to ghost town she hadn't seen yet. The entire place looked like it had been abandoned. Clara didn’t even want to get closer, to see what was in there. If they were really desperate, they would have gone to try and dig through it for something. They might even have gotten lucky. Clara felt like she'd seen enough gore and destruction to last her a while, though.
"Cooper?"
She glanced over at him, and it took him a second before he met and held her gaze. He seemed to know what her look meant.
"We can't go there, it could be dangerous. What's left of the structure doesn’t exactly look stable, and we have no idea where to start looking." He sighed, and she watched as his shoulders slumped. "It would be a waste of time." And then he cursed. "But hell, if they got in the same situation we did, can you imagine what happened in other areas? There's no way that EMP could have been a concentrated strike. The damage just goes too far."
She'd thought so before when she went to see Mayor Charleston in his town. She'd thought of it, the day of the crash, how many planes went up in the air every day. How many of them had been in flight when this happened? In the back of her mind, she'd known, but she was only just starting to realize how badly the EMP had affected everyone, not just her town.
Clara wondered just how far the EMP had even spread. The state? Several others? Or maybe the entire country—even further? Where did it even come from, what had caused it? They had too many questions and no answers, no way to even get them. People had gotten too used to relying on machines and technology, the internet. With everything down, they weren’t just cut off from other countries and continents, they were cut off from the rest of the country.
They were struggling with the thought that help would be on the way, but what if…
"Hey, Clara, don’t look like that."
She blinked, pulled out of her own mind by Cooper's voice. She looked up, confused for a second where they were, but a glance at the building in front of them reminded her.
"We can't even get supplies now. We'll have to go back and report to the police what we found here." Her voice was cold, clinical. Nothing like her at all.
"Clara." She scowled at the concern in his voice. "Maybe you should sit down for a while. We can find somewhere we won't be disturbed. We don’t have to go back immediately."
Stop trying to comfort me. The words were dying to burst out of her throat, but she hadn't lost herself so much that she would blow up on Cooper for showing his concern. He was only being a good friend, after all, and the only reason he was here, seeing this with her after they both survived a different crash, was because she'd asked him to accompany her.
Maybe she shouldn’t have. She was pretty sure he could handle it, in fact, a lot better than she ever could. That fact didn’t change anything for her. He wasn’t hers to protect, but she wanted to protect him anyway. Because Clara went to Cooper when she was broken; if they both ended up broken, who'd pick up the pieces for the both of them?
So she swallowed back the words that wanted to come out.
"I don’t need to sit down, Cooper. And actually, we do need to head back, quickly." She gave the wreckage one last, long look before fixing her gaze on Cooper. "I know Tessa says a lot of crazy things, I can't stand them most of the time. But I can't keep calling her crazy considering the world we're now living in."
He frowned down at her, expression cautious, but still tinged with worry. "What does that mean?"
She didn’t want to admit it. Clara took a deep breath as she turned her bike around, Cooper following her and keeping to her side. She thought it would physically hurt to actually say the words out loud, after denying them for so long. Funny enough, what she'd written off as crazy before was all that currently made sense, and she could no longer deny or ignore it.
She was pretty sure their survival hinged on it, after all.
"I mean… that I think my sister could be right—no one is going to save us. Imagine the whole country being in the state we're in, how could anyone manage it, were they inclined to send help? It's going to be worse in cities, with so many people in one place, depending on food from the outside. The problems we're currently facing? They're nothing compared to that."
She paused to muse her own words, wondering when she'd grown so morbid herself. She almost felt amusement, wondering if big sister would be proud of her for thinking so clinically.
"We're all going to have to survive on our own."
Chapter Twenty-Three
The words had actually left her mouth. After years of thinking her sister mentally insane, Clara was going to start taking to heart everything she said. It had been nearly an hour ago, maybe more—she had no sense of time without a watch—but the words still rang in her mind.
A part of her wanted to reject it. There was just no way. Tessa, who lit candles and meditated in her room, who read tarot cards and talked about her 'predictions.' Clara wasn’t sure if she was ready to listen to and accept the whole thing yet. There was no denying the sense Clara could see in most of her words, though.
It scared her. The world her sister spoke of, dreamt about—'saw' in her predictions—was a bleak one, one Clara wasn’t sure she wanted to live in. She didn’t want to know what would happen if their situation never got fixed.
Not that there's much of a choice. It was basically to live, or not to live. No matter how hard, Clara knew she would always choose life, as long as she wasn’t alone. If there had ever been a decision to make, she'd made hers when she saw that plane hurtling down, and her first impulse was to run, and get Cooper to go with her.
Returning to town, Clara and Cooper were both silent and contemplative. Clara wondered what was going through his mind, if he thought she was crazy now, too, or if he was really thinking of what she'd said. The first day Clara left him at home and Tessa said something to freak him out, after talking to her siste
r, Clara had asked him to tell her what her sister had said. He'd clammed up, though, refusing to give any details. She wondered if it was any different from what she'd heard herself.
Clara almost didn’t realize they had made it back. They'd been cycling slowly the whole way back, each lost in thought. It was a miracle they hadn't had an accident along the way. They stopped by the police station and Clara reported on what she'd seen. It was another disappointment, but it was better than putting it off. Then she and Cooper rode back to her house.
"I think I need to talk to Tessa," she decided.
It was long in coming, though when she thought of having a real talk with her sister these days, this would not have been one of the topics she thought of, but things had changed yet again. Or maybe things hadn't changed—it was her that was now willing to listen to what Tessa had to say, and Clara was sure she had plenty.
"Talk to her about what, exactly?"
"I need to ask her about how to prepare for the coming issues we'll face. She's been talking about the apocalypse for a while, she even mentioned it the evening before the crash, but I wasn’t exactly up to hearing it then. But I know her, and I know that she's been preparing for years for something like this. I'd like to think I can handle it all on my own, but I also know I will need her help to pull through."
The whole thing, Tessa turning weird, had happened in the wake of their parents' death. Clara had always assumed that was all it was, but what if it really wasn’t? Then she'd been treating her sister like a crazy person for a decade, and was only now considering they could have been wrong about her.
When Clara returned, she found Tessa in her room, staring out of her bedroom window. She didn’t look up when Clara knocked and walked in without permission. For the first time in a long time, she felt awkward in her sister's presence, so she didn’t attempt to catch her attention immediately.
Instead, she looked around the room, like really looked. Most of her things were put away, so it was a pretty normal room, not so different from Clara's own. Though she spent decidedly more time there, she looked after her space. The only thing that looked out of place were her drawings.
Once upon a time, Clara had looked up to her sister. They had been relatively close for sisters with a four year difference between them. They were both normal, average, raised by wonderful parents…
It all changed after the accident.
They had been planning to go on a trip. They went on so many throughout the year, for the rest of the family, it was just another trip. For Tessa, though, it was different. She'd been excited at first, but after a nightmare, she 'had a feeling' their jet-ski experience would end badly. She tried to warn all of them, but their parents convinced her to go anyway.
Clara wasn’t even sure what happened, exactly. She woke up in a hospital, sharing a room with her sister, who was almost always hysterical. She didn’t even know if they made it to the jet-ski resort, she was just told there was an accident and her parents died. She was fifteen, recovering from injuries, dealing with a sister whose mental health was slowly deteriorating. If it wasn’t for their grandmother coming to collect them from the hospital, Clara would have been put in foster care, her sister, then nineteen, would have been put in a psychiatric ward.
In a lot of ways, they got lucky. Clara liked to think that luck had an expiration date.
After that incident, Tessa started to believe she could tell the future, she started spending a lot of time making predictions. Clara just wanted to grieve with her older sister, but Tessa acted like she didn’t exist for a long time, as if she had died with their parents, and Clara never forgave her for that.
Tessa never went back to finish her higher education. She quit her first year of college and remained unemployed and unfit for work. Viola suggested, several times, for her to see a psychiatrist. In remembered resentment for her sister, Clara had thought it was for the best. In truth, neither of the sisters were fond of the idea.
In addition to declaring herself psychic, Tessa suddenly believed in all sorts of superstitions she'd only laughed off before, started practicing with tarot cards and palm reading and the like. Clara didn’t know who her sister was anymore.
The one thing that had remained constant was her love for art.
Tessa loved to draw, but most of all, to paint. She'd even thought of applying to art school, but then their parents insisted it wasn’t practical, and she went to business school instead. She continued to paint, but in line with every change about her, her focus for her drawing and painting changed.
Her sister's creations were beautiful, Clara had always thought so. They littered the walls, some of them stacked and put aside on her desk. Clara had stopped looking at them a long time ago. They were still good, if a bit too macabre, her pictures becoming dark in nature to depict scenes from her 'premonitions.'
Clara wanted to look at them now, every single one, and see what her sister saw. She couldn’t just take them, though. She'd need permission from the owner, and before that, they needed to talk.
She looked away from the pictures, turning back to her sister who hadn't moved yet. Clara wasn’t sure how long she'd been standing there, but she had the feeling it wouldn’t be so simple to get Tessa to cooperate. After all, in their last conversation, Tessa mentioned something about 'begging for forgiveness.' Clara wasn’t sure she could, even if it was deserved, she had her own pride and it had taken enough of a beating.
When Tessa still didn’t react, Clara sighed and decided she could be the first to break the silence, or they could be there for hours.
"Merry, would you look at me?" she asked tentatively.
She waited a few seconds, but there was no reply. So she took a deeper sigh, and went for the direct approach.
"Tessa, please. I need your help." She said the words slowly, enunciating each one so they were clear.
That got her a twitch, Tessa moving her head the slightest, before halting and staring out the window again.
"I know you don’t want to talk to me after the last time I was in here, but this is important. I went out again, to another town with Cooper. We saw… things. I just wanted to say that… I'm starting to think you were right, about everything. Please, Merry. Please help me."
She held her breath waiting for a response. She made herself be a little more patient, wait for longer. Her patience was rewarded when Tessa turned her head to the side, and finally spoke.
"Why should I help you just because you believe me now? You didn’t believe me before. You thought I was crazy, imagining things for my own benefit. So why should I?"
Clara bit her lip, wondering what she should say. Tessa had to have known the things she said made no sense to people who didn’t see or think the way she did, but Clara wasn’t sure of that anymore. More often than not, Tessa was locked in her own mind. She hadn't socialized with any people besides her and Viola, and Cooper—the only friend Clara had introduced to her family—more recently, for the past decade.
Defending herself wouldn’t get her sister's sympathy. Tessa wasn’t the sympathetic type, not anymore. Not even with their grandmother. When Clara left her to take care of Viola, she took it as a chore more than anything else, even if she did it when told.
So Clara took a shaky breath, and said her piece.
"When we came out of the hospital and you weren’t acting yourself, someone needed to look after you. Grandma couldn’t do it, she was there to stand in place as guardian so we could stay home, but you know full well we did most of everything around here, especially as she continued to age. When they wanted to drag you away in a straitjacket, Grandma stood up for you. And when you needed something, I was the one that did it for you.
"Take note of this, I may not have believed you about this before, but when we needed money for food, for the bills so we could get electricity and gas and water, I was the one that worked my ass off for it. I supported this family, like it or not, because you and Grandmother couldn’t after Mom and Dad died. I
cared for you, Tessa, for a long time, and I deserve one small favor in return."
She paused to catch her breath, noting her voice had been getting steadily louder, not enough to be considered a shout, but Clara didn’t want anyone outside the room to hear, or worse, Viola. She added her closing argument in a softer, but nowhere near calm, voice.
"Remember that I support the entire family, and I am the one that can take actions to help us in our future."
With that, she kept quiet and waited for Tessa to respond. It took a while, a lot longer than before, but she was ready to be patient. If her sister refused to cooperate, Clara was going to stop being nice.
She didn’t have to resort to that, though.
Tessa finally turned around, eyes slightly narrowed. "Fine. I haven't forgiven you, but I will help you."
Clara felt her body relax instantly, and she nodded, feeling relief course through her. Her sister wouldn’t lie. Tessa got up and approached her, looking stern.
"You need to be able to keep a secret."
Clara frowned, confused. "Secret?"
"Yes Clara, a secret. Yes, or no."
She wasn’t any less confused but she, reluctantly, agreed. "I will."
Tessa gave a sharp nod, and then she was walking out of the room. After a second, her confusion only growing, Clara followed. The frown on her face grew when Tessa took her out into the garden. The section where she and Viola had been planting looked obviously disturbed, even though they'd cleared the mud and the dirt already.
Was that what her sister wanted to show her? It couldn’t be, though.
"Merry, what are we doing out here…"
Her voice trailed off as her sister walked past the garden. A little further back, through a small path in the middle of the garden, they had a shed. Clara never went back there, there was never need for her to. She could remember when she was younger, it stored equipment her mother had used when she tended plants, mostly flowers, in their garden. There was no longer need for that once she was gone, though.