The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers

by Michael R. Hicks

  Ness blinked at the linoleum. “This isn’t fair.”

  “Fair?” She planted her palms on the table and leaned over. The wooden legs squeaked on the slick, dirty floor. “You know what isn’t fair? You expecting me to feed you until the day I’m feeding worms instead.”

  Shawn didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. Ness went outside to call for Volt and so they wouldn’t see him cry.

  The next morning, his mom made him hashbrowns and coffee. He dressed in his collared shirt and his black shoes and put on deodorant and combed his hair. Shawn was already at work.

  At the door, she smiled, eyes crinkling. “Good luck, Ness.”

  “Thanks.” He walked down the hill out of the trailer park and took Rodeo Drive (pronounced not like the famous Los Angeles street, but like the popular bullriding and roping event) through the subdivision to the highway. There, instead of waiting for the bus by I-95, he doubled back through the vacant lots and hiked over the mountain to the Rogers’ farm. Widget barked from the porch, but nobody answered the door.

  He wandered around the fields, scaring baby grasshoppers. He was missing a guild raid. He should have brought his laptop to Tim’s, but his mom would have asked too many questions. In the afternoon, he walked back to the highway in case they were watching, then doubled back to the trailer.

  They were waiting for him at the table. His mom grinned. “Well?”

  Ness headed for the bathroom. “It went good.”

  “Where’s your applications?” Shawn called.

  “I dropped them off already.”

  “You filled out that many on the spot?”

  “I didn’t want to have to take the bus again.” Ness closed the bathroom door. Footsteps creaked down the hall, following him.

  “How’d you get them your ID?” Shawn said though the door.

  “I’m in the bathroom!”

  “I mean, you left your wallet on the desk.”

  Ness flushed and took a long time washing his hands. He opened the door. His mom stood outside, arms crossed over her chest.

  “Did you even look?” she said.

  A blush flooded his face. “I made a list of where I want to apply. I’ll do the actual applying tomorrow.”

  “Goddamn right you will. Because I’m going to drive to every business in town, and if you don’t walk out the door with an application fluttering in your hand, I’m going to drag you back in by the ear.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  She laughed and glared down the hall. “The free ride just crashed into a wall. You come with me tomorrow, or I call the police and tell them I got a trespasser in my house.”

  He stared numbly. “I need to go clean my aquariums.”

  He didn’t—the only algae on the walls was in the crab tank, which he hadn’t cleaned in a while because removing the lid from the mesh was a hassle—but he needed to be with his fish. He dropped a crab pellet into the tank. It blooped into the gravel and began spitting tiny grains of feed into the water. Ideally, the tank would be self-sustaining soon. That was the concept: to form a functional ecosystem. He’d already managed it in one tank, where the sunlight fed the algae, the algae fed the snails, and the snails fed the puffer. Supposedly, the crabs could consist solely on the waste of the tiger barbs they shared their tank with, but he wanted to be certain they’d adjusted to the environment before he took them off their pellets.

  His heartbeat slowed to normal. Tending to his tanks always calmed him. He could found them, tweak them, perfect them. Raise them from rocks and water into tiny closed worlds. If he did it right, he could become a watchmaker god, setting his creations in action, then leaving them to grow and flourish on their own.

  That night, Shawn went to a bar for the first time in a week. To celebrate, no doubt. While he was gone, Ness put his pillow in the litterbox, sifted it with a handful of litter, and placed Volt in its center. She pawed, squatted, and peed.

  He had too much coffee in the morning. His mom beckoned him out to the old Subaru. He prayed it wouldn’t start. She took him to the Burger King, the Taco John’s, the Jack in the Box, where she bought him a bacon double cheeseburger. The parking lot smelled like fry grease. He crossed the lot to the strip mall and picked up applications from the UPS Store and the shoe store and the Papa Murphy’s. Back at the car, his mom made him go back out and get papers from the tanning salon, too. After the Office Depot and the Albertsons, she even drove him over the hill south of town to the Plant, the bar where Shawn spent so much of his money on the red mixed drinks they served in oversized mason jars. By daylight, the wooden floors were filthy, scarred in thin stripes by the too-high heels of drunken girls.

  At last, they drove home. From the bedroom window, Ness heard the tinny sound of a woman orgasming through computer speakers. Shawn shut it down by the time their mom unlocked the front door.

  He nodded at the papers rolled in Ness’ hands. “Nice haul.”

  Ness brushed past his shoulder. The bedroom smelled like lavender air freshener, Winstons, semen, and burnt fireworks. Shawn’s bed had been stripped bare of sheets and pillows. He smiled when he thought Ness wasn’t looking.

  At bedtime, Ness called for Volt for thirty minutes, staring into the darkness every time the cold north wind stirred the weeds. His heart grew tighter and tighter.

  He closed the door. Mom glanced over from her computer, where she was breaking blocks. “She’ll come back in the morning.”

  “She never stays out.”

  “She’ll be back.”

  Ness knew better. He closed his fists to control the trembling. In the bedroom, Shawn lay shirtless on his mattress, freshly laundered sheets draped across his waist. Pistols gleamed from the pages of the glossy magazine spread over his knees. A shotgun stood propped in the corner.

  Ness reached for it. “Did you shoot my cat?”

  2

  When Tristan Carter told her parents she intended to move back in after graduation, they exchanged one look and laughed.

  Tristan set her fork into her risotto al funghi. “I hope that’s sympathy laughter.”

  Her father smiled his indulgently bemused smile. Tristan had seen that smile often, back when she’d been small enough to lurk in his office without causing embarrassment to those who came to see him. He donned it whenever a member of his management approached for a raise without bringing the data to back it up.

  “Guess again,” he said.

  “I’m about to graduate.”

  “The defining feature of a graduate is his or her degree,” her father said. He owned the Redding Marriott. When she’d been accepted to Berkeley five years ago, a different smile had warred with a scowl for his face: he loved the prestige, but hated the students. “They typically employ this degree to get themselves employed.”

  “I’ve looked.”

  “Look harder.”

  “Dad.” She looked to her mom for help, but her mom regarded her with lifted eyebrows, a sweating glass of pinot gris paused halfway to her lips. Those eyebrows were as slim and perfect as ever. She needed them to be for the realty signs all across town, but she hardly needed to pluck; she was in her mid-40s, but still had the ability to make Tristan feel as dull as sand-worn glass. At Tristan’s elbow, Alden dropped a wadded-up marble of bread into her water. “Dad, I know you know about the economy.”

  He pushed his frameless glasses up his nose. “And I know you are two months away from a double major at Berkeley. Anyone who can’t get a job with a double major from Berkeley is unfit to operate her own fork.”

  “You don’t think I’m trying?”

  “I think you’re trying to move home.”

  “Right, that’s always been my dream,” she said. “To live with my parents forever. To be the Cheetos-stained belle of the shut-in’s ball.”

  Her mom set down her wine glass. “Isn’t this something you should have been working on since the start of the year?”

  Tristan poked an unfamiliar species of mushroom half-s
ubmerged in the creamy risotto. “Right now you have ‘08 grads who are still working internships. Unpaid. It’s not like you guys had it. When you stepped off campus and the firm threw a net over you and hauled you off to your brand-new job.”

  Her dad laughed. “When I was your age, I worked in a Sears shelving blenders.”

  “And that’s why you sent me to college? To shelve blenders?”

  He smiled angrily. “Can I still tell you to go to your room? Honey, am I allowed to banish her?”

  Her mom tipped back her chin and considered Tristan. “I think a child who wants to live with their parents—even a child who can legally vote and enlist and drink all our wine—remains legally and eminently banishable.”

  Tristan spooned up the wad of bread Alden had dropped in her glass, slipped it under the table, and splashed it into her brother’s lap. “This is my future we’re ha ha-ing about.”

  Her dad sawed the fat from his pork. “Well, you sound like you want your future to look a lot like your past.”

  “I feel like it would be easier for me to find the kind of job I went to school to get when I’m not busy flipping burgers all day just so I can scrape by in a one-room apartment with a communal toilet shared by the whippit-heads down the hall.”

  “Whippit-heads?” her mom said.

  “So you want us to continue supporting you,” her dad said, “for an additional and indefinite length of time.”

  Tristan drank around the crumbs floating on her water. “Well, when you put it like that, it just sounds disgraceful.”

  “Tell you what. You want to move back home, you have to be our maid.”

  “And chauffeur,” her mom said. “I hardly have time to keep up with Alden’s schedule these days.”

  “Make that our maid/chauffeur/nanny.”

  “Wow,” Tristan said. “Your terms are almost as generous as the firms who want me to work as an unpaid receptionist for six months before deciding to keep me on for six more unpaid months.”

  “Would you rather flip burgers?”

  “When am I supposed to have time to look for a job when I’m acting as chief steward of Carter Manor?”

  “Your father and I both have jobs,” her mom said. “We still manage to keep the house looking just mildly nuked.”

  Her dad dabbed his mouth with his napkins. “That’s the offer. Take it, or start memorizing the Taco Bell menu.”

  Tristan’s risotto had begun to look positively gruelish. “I don’t think this is especially fair.”

  “Alden has his kung fu lessons tomorrow,” her mom smiled. “Why don’t you drive him there and then start bitching about how tough your life is?”

  Tristan decided to leave it at that. After dinner, she found four texts waiting: three from Pete, one from Laura. She replied to Laura, who was busy that night, but was free for drinks tomorrow. By the time their conversation ended, Pete had sent a fourth message. Tristan ignored it. It was her spring break. She was supposed to be enjoying herself. Instead, she was back in her middling mountainous hometown, two hundred miles north of the Bay Area, and her only options for company were a younger brother who was already off with his online shooter and a boyfriend she had no intention of speaking to any time soon.

  She told her parents she was going to see Laura at the bar, then took her hand-me-down Lexus to the lake up past the mountain road. It was a shitty drive, gravelly and far too dark, and she could never quite shake the dread of running into a bear or a bearded killer, but the pines were black, the stars were bright, and the waters were calm. She squelched down the shore, small round stones grinding under her shoes.

  She hadn’t known what to expect from her folks, not really. She’d hoped they’d say yes, no questions asked, and that would be the end of it. Graduation had come out of nowhere, looming like the Titanic’s last date. Months ago, she’d applied for many, many dream jobs—the ones her music degree might conceivably qualify her for, from whom she’d heard back exactly nothing—and shied away from the communications-centric ones, largely from fear she might actually land one. More recently, though, she’d been applying for anything and everything that hadn’t sounded obviously god-awful. She had been offered internships and the promise of return calls that never came.

  She’d begun to doubt she could even find a nightmare job, at least in time to start paying rent by the end of school. And quite frankly—although it would sound horribly bitchy to speak aloud to friends like Laura who had been working since high school—she resented the very idea of having to apply as a dental receptionist or a server or whatever. If that was all she could do, why had she worked so hard in high school to attend a good college? Why had she studied so hard at said college? What was the fucking point?

  Especially when her parents were more than well off enough to go on paying for a few extra groceries and gallons of gas while she lived at home and searched for the job she’d spent the last eight years working toward. It wasn’t like she felt entitled to that support, exactly. Her parents had already done more than enough for her. But if they did just a little more, at the cost of three, maybe four hundred dollars a month, they could spare her years of misery.

  The moon shimmered on the water. The answer was very simple. She would just have to be very, very nice to them, and hope they remembered just how much they loved her.

  In a few weeks, when people started dying, she would look back on this thought in stark horror.

  * * *

  For breakfast, she made goat cheese omelets, sliced cantaloupe, and cappuccino brewed with beans she’d brought back for herself from San Francisco.

  Her dad gave her a look. “Is this supposed to redeem the $200,000 of room, board, and tuition we’ve spent in the last four years?”

  “It might once you try it.”

  He seated himself and allowed himself to be served. He cut off the smallest corner of omelet, as if he were wholly prepared to pitch the rest in the trash, and chewed skeptically.

  “This is a $200 omelet,” he conceded. “Which leaves a mere $199,800 to go. Not counting, of course, whatever living expenses you incur today.”

  “Sharecropping is illegal in this country, Dad.”

  “Then it’s a good thing it’s still perfectly legal to exploit your children.”

  With nothing else to do until Alden’s kung fu lesson that afternoon, she spent the morning reading. For fun. After four years of assignments that left her with no time for leisure reading during the semester and no desire for it during the summer, it was a revelation just to read some good ol’ fashioned garbage, as well as an engrossing way to totally ignore Pete’s texts massing on her phone.

  Twenty minutes before they were supposed to be at his lesson, Alden came to the foyer in jeans, t-shirt, and tennis shoes.

  “That’s your uniform?” she said.

  Alden cocked his head at the exact angle their dad did. “Sifu says he likes to practice in the same clothes he’d be wearing in a street fight.”

  “Is that so? How many brawls have you been in since you began your training?”

  “Tristan, we’re not supposed to use it on anyone.”

  She stepped out the front door into the afternoon light. “Then why do you learn it at all? To impress girls?”

  “No, come on,” Alden said. Was he blushing? “At first I just thought it would be cool, but it’s really fun.”

  The lawn smelled like fresh clippings; Ernesto had been there this morning. She wound her way out of the subdivision. When they’d moved in twelve years ago, three-quarters of the lots had been vacant, yellow weeds in gray dirt. Now they were boxed in by McMansions. Not long ago, Tristan had considered their brickwork, floodlights, and scalloped roofs stately, but after four years on and around campus, surrounded on all sides by proper cities, they now struck her as gauche, hopelessly, hideously tasteless. Now, every fourth house had a “FOR SALE” sign on the front lawn. Two were accompanied by pictures of her mother’s perfect, eager face.

  “Dad says yo
u expect life to be handed to you on a platter.”

  Tristan laughed. “What did you just say?”

  Alden rolled down the window to let in the cool mountain air. “He says you’d rather hold out your hand than get it dirty.”

  She sat at the stop sign a moment, stunned and stung, then turned out of the subdivision. “What do you think?”

  “That you don’t want to work? Sounds pretty lazy to me.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to work. It’s that I was promised something more than what’s out there.”

  “Who promised you that?”

  She thought a moment. “Everyone. Mom and Dad. Teachers. Politicians. The movies. They all said if you work hard in school, you won’t have to suffer some shit job all your life.” She glanced at him. “Sorry.”

  Alden gave her the side-eye. “Dude, I’m thirteen.”

  “Fine. Just don’t swear in front of Mom and Dad.”

  “So you’re saying I shouldn’t work hard in school.”

  “No!” She swerved into the turn lane at the last moment. She’d lived in Redding all her life and was already starting to forget how to get from one end to the other. “Look, if you bomb out in school, you guarantee yourself a shit job. I shouldn’t complain. But Mom and Dad have money. Several monies. I don’t see why they can’t help me out for just a little longer.”

  He slumped down in his seat, gazing out the window at the blue-green mountains and their white crowns. “Dude, you’re crazy. I can’t wait to move out from them.”

  She frowned. He pointed the dojo out to her, a long, barn-like building between a gas station and an AA center. She pulled into the gravel lot.

  He opened the door and leaned back inside. “Class lasts until seven, so I guess you can just pick me up then.”

  “I’m coming inside. I want to watch you kick ass.”

  The mortification on his teenage face would be worth the two straight hours of boredom. It also didn’t hurt that it gave her an excuse to be out of the house if Pete called or dropped by. She hadn’t given much thought to what the instructor would look like—a small Chinese man with a wise smile, assumedly—but found, to her racist embarrassment, a middle-aged white guy with a substantial gut and long, curly hair that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Fraggle. He tried to talk her into joining the handful of students on the dojo floor, but she laughed and shook her head.