Doom Days

by Beaman, Sara

  Isaac kept on moving, taking a long, winding route around the re-purposed golf course. He paused at Gretchen’s place. The steel-haired woman was leaning against the porch railing. She gave him a sidelong glance as he approached the porch.

  “Evening, Gretchen.”

  “Why is it whenever you start a conversation politely I just know you’re going to ask me for something?” Gretchen asked.

  “A man’s manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait,” Isaac replied. Gretchen gave a mild snort at this. Isaac went on, “I need something picked up from the Park.”

  “Getting too old to run your own errands, Isaac?” Gretchen leaned into the porch railing and stared down at him.

  “Too old to carry a spare tractor axle all the way back to town, for certain.” Isaac turned away from the porch, then added. “Best send two horses. It’s a heavy hunk of metal, and if it gets banged up we’re looking at a sorry harvest.”

  Gretchen muttered something as Isaac walked off, but he couldn’t catch what. It didn’t matter. He’d get the new axle.

  He walked on, toward the gate, intending to check on the Watch roster. Isaac told himself it wasn’t to check for Veneranda’s name on the sign-in list. More than likely she wouldn’t bother to sign in regardless. She usually didn’t, unless she was on duty with the Watch. She was more like her mother than him in that regard.

  He came to the edge of the large cul-de-sac that had become a de facto town green and stared at the area for a long while. Josephine. He could still remember standing here with her, watching twilight fall in late September, talking amongst the other families that had gradually straggled in that first year, looking for shelter in the empty promise of a ruined world. He could remember her laughing. He could see her face.

  “So who gets to name the baby?” Josephine had asked him as they walked home down the darkening street. He kept reaching for her arm, to guide her over the rubble, and for a wonder she let him.

  “What do you mean, ‘who gets to name the baby’? We do.”

  “Yea, but who gets the final say if we disagree?”

  “We compromise, like civil people!”

  “You’ve never even seen a civil person,” Jo had snorted. “Tell you what. If it’s a boy, you pick, and if it’s a girl, I pick.”

  Isaac paused for a moment. “You have an ulterior motive.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “You think it’s going to be a girl.”

  “How could I possibly know that?”

  “You think it’s going to be a girl and you want a ridiculous name.”

  “Isaac, that’s patently-”

  “What name?”

  Josephine looked at him. In the fading light, he could just make out the quirk of her lips.

  “Veneranda.”

  “No.”

  “It was my grandmother’s name.”

  “No.”

  “Too bad, her name’s Veneranda.”

  “No.”

  A hand on Isaac’s shoulder broke the spell. He blinked, back in the present. His eyes stung.

  “Isaac!” Paul clapped him on the shoulder again. Isaac put on his face again.

  “Paul,” he said with a nod to Paul and his wife, Irene.

  “We gonna have a harvest this year?” Paul asked.

  Isaac smirked. “I got the axle coming. Scout found one that’ll do. I went out to look at it yesterday.”

  “That’s great news, Isaac,” Paul laughed. “It would’ve been some work to harvest that field by hand.”

  “I know it.” Isaac glanced away, toward a knot of teenagers standing around Gretchen’s trading post. His eye found the gap in their number. “I’ll come by when it’s running.”

  Paul nodded and he and Irene walked away. Isaac continued on. The Watch House was mostly deserted at this hour. He checked the sign-ins, but she wasn’t there. He checked the duty roster second, just to prove to himself he’d had another reason for coming.

  “Everything alright, sir?” A boy, Bill Nelson’s eldest, stepped out from the unisex locker room. Isaac mentally squinted, trying to recall the boy’s name.

  “Just fine, Greg,” Isaac said, setting down the duty roster. Greg Nelson, thirteen this past June. Isaac almost shook his head. A boy that young should still be in school, worrying about girls and video games - or football, if he absolutely had to. Instead he was getting ready for a five hour night shift on the wall.

  Greg Nelson gave him a respectful tip of the head and left the building. Isaac looked around. This had been the community center, before the Collapse. He remembered how the pool had sent up thick clouds of mosquitoes each fall evening, till they’d finally managed to drain and fill it. The Watch used it as a practice yard and firing range, now.

  He was leaving the Watch House when he heard the sound of shouting from the gate outside. Without thought, Isaac rushed into the deepening twilight. The gates were shut, but someone on the wall was shouting about a figure. Still not thinking beyond the next action, sure but unsure how he knew, Isaac leaped to the ladder and scaled to the top of the palisade. He moved one of the watchmen aside, perhaps more roughly than he should have, and knelt to seize one of the few large-flood flashlights the town still had in working order. It took a knock from the heel of his palm to make the damn thing turn on. He was vaguely aware of the two or three watchmen standing nearby on the palisade gazing at him with some mixture of awe and horror.

  Isaac turned the lamp toward the long drive up to Thorn Creek’s gates. His daughter stood there, staring almost blankly up into the glare of the light. She was clutching her rifle in one limp hand. Her other arm hung loose, and there was a filthy bandage around her bicep. Her face was pale under a thick spattering of mud and grit.

  “Open the gate!” someone near him called, but Isaac was already on the ground, somehow. He must have jumped. His hands were on the winch bar and pulling, then he was through, as soon as it was wide enough to let him pass. Then he was in front of her, sweeping her up even as she collapsed against him, charging back toward the gate and roaring for the doctor.

  “I’m so sorry.” Isaac could barely hear her muffled sobs against his chest. “I’m so sorry, Daddy.”

  ****

  Isaac sat with Veneranda through the night, holding her hand while Sabina did what she could. The doctor cleaned the wound and packed it with gauze.

  “I’ll have to open up her arm tomorrow, to check for bone sparring or bullet fragments,” Sabina said.

  “Why not tonight?”

  “Not enough light, and if she’s in shock it could kill her.”

  “Right,” Isaac muttered, mind dull. Sabina moved on, checking on his daughter’s other injuries, giving her an oral antibiotic, examining her pupils. Veneranda lay on a cot in their home’s kitchen, still and quiet, but her eyes were focused. She stared at the ceiling, silent unless addressed. Eventually Sabina left, promising to return at dawn.

  Isaac clung to Veneranda’s hand. He watched her face, watched as her eyes slowly closed and she slept. Isaac remained awake, watching her chest rise and fall with her breath. Somehow, in the back of his mind a belief had lodged, that if he let go of her hand he would lose her.

  His thoughts became hazy, indistinct. He thought of Jo, of the sound of her voice and what she might say if she were in the room with him. He desperately wanted her to be in the room with him. Isaac was not sure he was up to bearing the weight.

  “You know it’s coming,” Josephine had said to him, sitting on the back porch and watching a three year-old Veneranda dash about in the garden. She was huddled under two heavy blankets, unable to get warm despite the noonday sun. Isaac was hot enough that he’d undone the first few buttons of his shirt.

  “What’s coming?”

  Josephine stared at him. “You know. And when it does, you can’t give up. You understand me?”

  “I don’t know what you’re-” Isaac shook his head violently. “Don’t talk like that. You’re fine. This is just-”
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  “Isaac, my mother died of cancer. My sister died of it too. Now I’m going to die of it. You have to keep going.”

  “Why?” Isaac stared at his daughter, knowing the answer, but stubborn enough and so full of mindless anger that he couldn’t bring himself to say it. Josephine just shook her head.

  “You know why, too.”

  “I do,” Isaac whispered aloud, in the present, almost surprising himself by the sound of his own voice. He clutched his teenage daughter’s hand and whispered again, “I do.”

  “Daddy?” Veneranda’s eyes opened to slits. She blinked, clenched her jaw. “Hurts...”

  “I know, baby. It’s okay. You’re going to be fine.”

  “I was stupid. I’m so sorry.”

  “Whatever you did was fine.” He reached out with his free hand and stroked her hair.

  She drifted off again, lids drooping over eyes glazed with pain and exhaustion. Isaac clung to her, his mind adrift in a fugue of worries he refused to acknowledge. He wasn’t sure how long it was before the knock startled him. He glanced at the window: still night. There was a flickering light from outside, dirty yellow from the crude vegetable oil people had begun to distill from crop leavings. He let go of his daughter’s hand and went to the door.

  Calliope stood outside, one hand clasping a thick blanket against the night’s cold, the other holding up her lamp. She had a beaten old knapsack over one shoulder.

  “I heard from Gretchen. She got it from Caleb, I think,” she murmured. “Figured you’d want to know, seeing as the whole town’s liable to hear before morning.”

  Isaac nodded. Calliope’s blanket made him realize how cold the house was getting. He rummaged around the improvised wood stove while she lowered the knapsack onto a counter and unzipped it. When he finished lighting the stove she had laid a number of parcels out, and was looking at Veneranda.

  “Do you know who did it?”

  “No. She’s been in and out...hasn’t said much.”

  “Not many bandits, this late in the season...”

  “Might not be bandits,” Isaac muttered. But if not bandits, who? He felt his right fist clench involuntarily. He was grinding his teeth together. He forced himself to relax.

  “Anyway, I brought you some food. Wish it were hotter but-”

  “I appreciate it.” He tried to smile at her, but the muscles of his mouth wouldn’t move. Her lips compressed to a concerned line.

  “I could stay, if you want the company.”

  “No, you should get on home. It’s going to be cold tonight.”

  She nodded, turned to the door. “I’ll come by again tomorrow, in case you need something.”

  “Thanks,” he managed. She let herself out.

  He glanced at the food parcels on the counter. Calliope was a fine cook - better than fine, in fact - but his appetite wasn’t there. He fetched two blankets from the downstairs bedroom they now used for storage and draped one over Veneranda. The other he laid nearby for later.

  As he sat down again she stirred. Her eyelids cracked open. “Who was here?”

  “Just Calliope. She brought us some food, if you’re hungry.”

  “Thought it was Mom...” she said. Isaac clenched his jaw and stroked her cheek. She blinked at him sleepily for a moment. “Promise you aren’t gonna leave.”

  “Not even for a minute,” Isaac said. “We’re all here Ven. We’ll take care of you.”

  She nodded, the barest motion, and closed her eyes. Her hand found his. Together they rode out the night.

  About the Authors

  Visit our website at www.doomdays.com

  In 2011 during a meeting of the Raleigh Writers’ Cramp, Blakely surprised her fellow writers by saying, “Hey, guys, I have an idea.”

  That simple statement opened the door to a great deal of excitement, collaboration, and creativity. Soon the members of the Raleigh Writers' Cramp were all hard at work creating stories set in a world where something terrible had happened and most people died, leaving the survivors to carve out a life in a tough, post-Apocalyptic world.

  The inspiration for the project came from a series of books Blakely had read called Thieves’ World, where different writers wrote the stories, but they all shared a common setting. The members of the Cramp used these books as a jumping off point, but it wasn't long before they made the project their own, fleshing out a fully realized world populated with complex characters.

  Everything snowballed from there. The authors met in each other’s houses to hash out the details of a unique world, and pitched their story ideas to the group. Each author composed a story, and each story was critiqued and edited by other members of the group.

  There was no single editor who got the last word. There was no elaborate handbook spelling out the rules of the world. There wasn’t even a map, although there was a lot of talk about drawing one. Instead, there were a lot of emails and meetings and writing.

  And after all the hard work, the result was this book, Doom Days. We hope you enjoy it.

  In order of appearance:

  Sara Beaman is a bellydance instructor and ESL tutor. Her first novel Redlisted is available on Amazon.com. Learn more at her website www.SaraBeaman.com.

  CS Cheely is a scientist-gone-rogue with a Sci Fi novel in the works. See more of her writing on her website www.cscheely.com.

  Arlene Blakely is an attorney who gave it all up to become a high school English teacher. Her first novel Illegal Magic can be found on Amazon.com.

  K.D. Edwards never has a good bio quip ready when one’s needed.

  Daniel Wood waits for the muse to strike him. And when she hits, she hits hard.

  Cover art and design by Sara Beaman