Evidently, the man underestimated the powers of Introvert Prime.
She followed the road to Route 74 and hooked a left onto the dirt path that ran north of the open field where the ‘town meal’ had been held. She didn’t see a gathering of teens anywhere, and spent a minute turning in place, searching around.
Guess I missed it. She slouched with the same relief that always came over her when she found an excuse to avoid going to a party. Oh, well. Guess I’ll go home.
Footsteps scuffed the dirt to the south.
She turned, spotting Logan walking toward her from a tree. As soon as she faced him, he waved her over.
Oh, crap. It’s not like a party… it’s just him.
Fortunately, no one could tell she blushed in the dark. Nothing about him struck her as threatening, intimidating, or even offbeat like Tyler had been at his most approachable. Besides, she had a shotgun.
He’s just trying to be friendly. Talking won’t hurt anyone.
One seventeen-year-old boy she kinda spoke to already shouldn’t scare her more than a crowd of teens she didn’t even know, but Harper had to force herself to walk closer to him. Even though it seemed unlikely he’d do anything inappropriate, she suspected he liked her a little more than as a simple friend. Why else ask her to a place where they had time alone?
“Hey,” she said when finally getting close enough not to shout.
“Hey yourself.” Logan smiled. “Is your sister okay?”
“Yeah. She, umm, didn’t even seem to mind. I didn’t see you at first. I’m sorry for making you think of yours.”
“It’s okay. I know you didn’t mean to do that. Luisa was fifteen. Maybe she still is. Like you said, we haven’t actually seen Colorado Springs… just heard like everyone say it’s completely gone.”
“They could’ve been in the basement?” asked Harper. “Sorry. I’m just saying stupid crap now.”
He nodded back toward the tree. “Never a bad thing to hold on to hope, even if it’s unlikely. Sorry for startling you. I was stargazing. Want to join me?”
“Sure.” She couldn’t quite look at him.
He walked back to the tree and stretched out flat in the grass, staring up at the sky.
Harper sat next to him, laying the Mossberg on her right. A vast sky of stars above felt like a beckoning depth she could fall into.
“The stars are so much more intense without the light pollution of cities,” said Logan. “I mean, it totally sucks they nuked us… but sometimes I think that maybe technology hurt us more than helped.”
“Maybe. But I wish it didn’t happen.”
“Yeah. I know. Me too. But, it did, and we can’t undo it… so why not find things to be happy about?”
She leaned her weight back on her hands, not quite comfortable enough to lie down. A cool night breeze teased at her hair as she tried to remember anything about constellations. He had a point, the stars did seem much brighter than she remembered. “I think I forgot how to be happy.”
“My grandmother died a few years ago. Grandpa kept telling jokes about her.”
“That’s awful.”
Logan chuckled. “No, I mean, he loved her so much, but he knew she wouldn’t want him to give up on life just because she’d gone away. They’d be together again at some point, so why stay sad all the time?”
“Not sure I believe in that stuff. Afterlife and all.”
“Even if there isn’t, do you think your parents would want you to be happy, even now?”
“Yeah, probably. Parents are supposed to die before us, right? But… not quite so early. I wish I had more time with them. Dad spent so much time at the office, and Mom was always either working or out with Maddie. Maybe that’s why I’m not completely crazy now, sitting in a ball in the corner of some room crying myself to sleep every night. I basically spent the last like two years living alone. We saw each other a little in the morning and a little at night.”
“That’s sad. Come on, something’s got to have made you happy recently.” He regarded her with a roguish grin. “Tell me something that made you smile in like the past month.”
“Umm…” Harper thought, tilting her head side to side. “The first time Madison ran outside to play with her friend Becca and didn’t take her dead phone. That made me happy, but I kinda cried more than smiled.”
“Just one thing?”
“When I found Lorelei okay a couple days ago. Thought she’d been abducted.” Harper eased herself down, lying flat on her back, and laced her fingers over her stomach. “And yeah, I cried there, too. I’m such a cliché.”
“How so?”
“I am The Girl Who Cries At Everything. Used to cry when my father killed spiders.”
“Seriously? A girl who likes spiders?”
She glanced over at him. “I don’t like spiders, but that doesn’t mean I want them to die. What about you? What’s made you smile lately?”
“The look Zach gave you when he walked away.”
“Ugh. What’s that guy’s problem, anyway? Has he always been a racist idiot?”
Logan shrugged. “Probably. He didn’t show it that much before. I mean, yeah, when I joined the hockey team they made the ‘Mexican on ice’ cracks, but it never felt mean-spirited until now. Maybe he’s stressed out over losing his parents. That boy’s not used to the real world.”
“We’re not in the ‘real world’ anymore. We’re in some meth-addicted strung out cousin of the real world.”
He laughed. “Seeing the plants come up… those first bits of green showing in the dirt made me smile, too. Like if hope existed as something physical, it would be those leaves.”
“Yeah. That is something to smile about.”
She swished her feet back and forth, her thoughts swirling among her worries about her siblings not having enough food or fearing that they’d get sick. Someone could invade the town, go crazy, start shooting randomly. While true that people she loved could’ve died at any moment even before the war to a car accident or any of a dozen different things, the reality of it hadn’t ever settled in her brain. No one really ever considered that every time they got in a car they might die. No one ever spared a second’s thought that a trip to the mall to go shopping might end with them being shot during an armed robbery. It could happen, but the odds were so remote as to be out of mind.
Now, Harper couldn’t stop thinking about every way a situation might go wrong.
Too many worries plagued her already without adding a boy to the mix. Logan seemed like a nice kid. Thinking of a boy as ‘nice’ could lead to thinking of him as more than that, to wanting to spend time with him, maybe even do the holding hands thing. How could she even think about dating a boy with the world in its present state? She had to protect her siblings, help protect the town, not spend her time running around with some boy. Maybe if her biggest fears remained getting into college and Starbucks not running out of sugar-free mocha syrup, she’d have the mental capacity for a relationship, but…
Her time to goof off with friends, not caring about anything but having fun, had evaporated in a nuclear fireball. Did she owe it to the millions of dead to remain somber, living in what amounted to an enormous graveyard named the United States of America? Did she owe it to Madison to set everything aside and focus only on keeping her safe? Or, might she owe it to herself not to let the war kill her inside as it had killed her parents?
“What are you thinking? You’ve been quiet a while.” Logan stretched, then clasped his hands together behind his head.
“Just stuff. Mostly bad stuff. Feels selfish to think about trying to have fun or be happy after so many people died. I have to keep Maddie safe.”
He sat up. “I think you should keep her safe and happy. What’s the point of existing if we’re consumed by guilt and never allow ourselves to experience joy?”
“Don’t they call that Catholicism?”
He chuckled. “I’m serious, Harper. We’re all trying so hard to survive, we can’t los
e sight of being human, too.”
“I guess. Maybe I’m traumatized, too. It still doesn’t seem real that I’ve had to kill people. Been thinking about it like I’ve gone inside a video game. Just nameless, generic bad guys, not people with names, families, friends… Before the war, they’d have been like anyone else. How do people go from working a nine-to-five to looting, murder, and kidnapping? Some things those creeps said to me still makes my skin crawl. Like two months ago, some guy who used to, I dunno, check groceries or something grabbed me from behind and whispered in my ear what he would do to me. How does that happen?”
“Who knows? Maybe they lost their families and went crazy. Maybe they’d already been criminals and just didn’t get caught. Some people would have done crazy shit if they knew they could’ve gotten away with it. The only thing holding them back had been the police, fear of going to jail. Now, that’s gone.”
“That kinda makes sense. And now that I think about it, I bet everyone who’d been in jail got out… at least if they survived the blasts. Maybe that’s where the blue gang came from. They’d all been criminals before the war.”
“Possible.”
They stared up into the vastness of the stars, talking about life before the war. She spoke of her parents, her worries about school, her friends, all the while feeling a deep weight in her gut over everything she’d lost. Though, the more she shared of her memories, the more she found herself coming to terms with what happened.
Logan told her a little about his younger sister Luisa. She’d turned fifteen in July, loved music, wanted to become a singer. She’d done a bunch of YouTube videos, even auditioned for The Voice, but hadn’t been selected for airtime. The two of them had been close, and the way he described her reminded Harper of the protectiveness Jonathan showed toward Madison. He didn’t dwell on his family for long, soon shifting the topic to his joining the hockey team mostly because his parents wanted him to do ‘something physical’ and he didn’t feel like taking karate classes. He also had two older siblings, a brother and sister who’d both already moved out. The elder sister had been attending college in Florida. His brother went into the Navy three years ago. He didn’t know if either one of them survived the war. Head down, he admitted assuming his parents and little sister had all died in the blast.
“What sucks the most is Luis and Ana probably think I died, since Colorado Springs got erased off the map.”
“Wait, you have a brother Luis and a sister Luisa?”
Logan smiled. “Yeah. Dad had a weird sense of humor.”
She sat up, crossing her legs… and almost took his hand. “Your brother and sister might not know. How would they? There’s no internet or TV anymore.”
“True. Think they nuked Orlando?”
“Who would be cruel enough to blow up Disney World?”
With a bad Russian accent Logan said, “The mouse must be destroyed as symbol of capitalist society.”
Harper giggled.
He smiled at her, though it came off forced.
“Oh…” Her mood crashed. “Sorry. Your sister was there, right?”
“Yeah. She went to the University of Central Florida. Orlando was a major city, so it probably got hit.”
“Hey.” She poked him. “We’re trying to think of stuff to be happy about, right?”
“Yeah. Sorry. It’s kinda nice here. Never thought I’d quit school and work a manual labor job, but…”
She smirked. “Not quite the same. We’re not working jobs. Everyone’s doing what they can to keep it going. I mean, we’re desperate. They even let me be a cop. I’ve got like the exact wrong personality for that.”
“Bet you’re good at it.”
“Ehh. Not really. I can’t investigate for crap. Not much of a fighter. But hey, I can hit a flying clay at thirty yards.”
“Heard you tagged that guy right in the face while he was holdin’ some little girl hostage.”
“Y… yeah. I had to.” She hurried an explanation. “Stupid wadding swerved low and hit her right in the forehead. I feel awful.”
“Was she hurt?”
“Just a welt, a small cut, and a bruise. It’s only plastic. Still. I shouldn’t have taken such a reckless shot. Like some William Tell crap with a shotgun. Sometimes pellets have burrs and they can spin wild out of the cluster. I could’ve killed her.” Harper stared at the dirt, thinking back to the guy who’d grabbed Madison. That guy had been even closer. She felt guilty as hell for a moment over possibly valuing Mila’s life less than her sister’s, risking a shot with her that she couldn’t bring herself to take when it had been Madison’s life in the balance. But, that had been a long three months ago. Harper had changed. The ‘sweetest girl in class’ had developed a hard candy shell. When that guy hid behind Mila and went for a weapon, she’d trusted her instincts, reacting without deep thought. And, as much as she hated to admit it, she had become desensitized to killing people.
Not that she could randomly end total strangers, but if someone threatened her or an innocent kid, she wouldn’t hesitate anymore. In a way, the blue gang had killed Harper Cody. Or at least the girl she had once been.
“You wouldn’t have taken the shot if you didn’t trust yourself. No time to think, right? You saved her life. Bet that made you smile.”
“Yeah… once I got done freaking the hell out.”
“I bet.”
Clattering drew her attention to the side.
A headless, blue glowing apparition crossed the field toward them. For a brief instant, Harper had a mental freak-out at a legit ghost coming right toward her… until she realized she stared at Grace wearing a dress so white it glowed in the moonlight. The metallic noise came from her left hand, a six-pack of silvery cans dangling from her fingers. Harper pursed her lips, caught between relief at not being alone with a boy and unexpected annoyance at not being alone with this boy.
That second part confused her enough to keep quiet.
“Hey.” Grace plopped down in front of them, forming a circle. “Heard there was supposed to be a party out here.”
“Umm.” Harper blushed. “I was expecting there to be more people.”
“My fault. I didn’t exactly make it clear,” said Logan.
“Oh… Sorry. Am I interrupting your date?”
“No!” blurted Harper and Logan at the same time.
She glanced at him.
Logan sat up, resting his elbows on his knees. “We’re just hanging out, yanno? Talking.”
“It’s kinda weird seeing you with a girl,” said Grace.
“As weird as seeing you wearing something that came from Walmart.”
She laughed.
“Why is it weird seeing him with a girl?” asked Harper.
“Just haven’t before. He didn’t even stare at the cheerleaders.”
Logan grinned. “You just didn’t see me.”
“Oh, that’s only a little bit creepy.” Harper whistled.
“Kidding. I used to be real busy with AP classes, hockey, and stuff. Never worked out that I met anyone.”
“So, you like girls?” Harper tilted her head at him.
“Yeah. Kirk’s just an idiot.”
Grace held up the Coors. “You guys want one?”
“Where’d you get that from?” asked Harper.
“Umm, the bar. That guy Earl. Don’t even have to hide it. So weird. They’re letting us drink if we’re sixteen or older now. Thought there’d be more people here… I didn’t like want to get hammered or anything. Figured I’d only drink one and share the rest.”
Logan took one. “Thanks.”
Harper waved her off. “Nah. I don’t really like the taste of beer.”
Grace and Logan popped a can each, sipping it while the three of them talked about true world tragedies like the lack of any new movies coming out for the summer. After a while, Harper came down with a case of the screwits and grabbed a beer.
“It’s weird to think that most of the people involved in produci
ng this beer are probably dead now, and the company is gone.” Harper examined the can, half tempted to leave it sealed as some kind of memento of the world that came before.
Logan nudged her. “Harper, you really need to cheer up.”
“No pressure,” said Grace. “Don’t feel like you have to.”
“I’m thirsty, it’s here, and one beer won’t do much.”
“Do you drink often?” asked Logan.
“No, not really. I think I was the only kid in my entire high school who had no interest in alcohol.”
He grinned. “Well, don’t drink it too fast then.”
She popped the tab and took a sip, cringing. “Bleh. This stuff is nasty.”
Grace and Logan laughed.
“It’s not that bad.” Grace took another sip. “Beer, in general, takes a little getting used to.”
Harper coughed. “Something that ‘requires getting used to’ is probably not good for people to have.”
“Does that include broccoli?” asked Logan.
“I’d adore some broccoli right about now.” Harper sighed. “I’d eat almost anything if I could have enough to feel full.”
“Anything?” asked Grace, wide eyed.
Logan coughed.
Harper gawked at her, blushed like hell, and couldn’t look at either one of them.
“What? Oh… no!” Grace cackled. “I meant like… oh, liver and onions or something horrible. Escargot?”
“Cliff might teach us which bugs we can eat,” said Harper, still too embarrassed to look at either one of them. “Last December, I almost threw up at the thought. Now… I think I’d eat grubs if I had them.”
“Wow, that’s hungry,” said Logan.
“As long as someone else cooked them and they weren’t still moving when I tried to eat them.”
“Ugh,” said Grace.
The World That Remains (Evergreen Book 2) Page 21