by Riley Flynn
At the heart of it all was Sammy. The house where she had used to live. The screen door which flapped in the evening breeze when he picked her up after school. The hanging chair they’d shared together under too many sunsets. All the physical detail of her life which had stayed with him while he’d spent years trying to repress any and every emotional detail. But it was all still there.
All of it etched into Alex’s memory. He had to see it again.
If she’s alive, she might still be there.
These thoughts crawled into Alex’s mind and he chased them away.
Don’t do it to yourself.
He knew the roads so well he didn’t have to slow down. Every corner, every road sign; they all tugged at the nostalgia and the dead memories.
There was no other traffic. Abandoned cars and desolate houses, sure. But no signs of life. But Alex could fill the road with his living memories, repopulating the road into town with his mind.
As he eased off the gas before a bend, he could feel the weight of the ring in his pocket. It had no right to be so heavy. It wasn’t just the metal. The whole thing was laden with half a life. Alex wanted to throw it out of the window but he knew he couldn’t do it. Not now.
He had to know.
Athena was dead and deserted, he’d been told, but if there was even the slightest chance – the one in a million shot – that she was there, he had to take it. For the first time in weeks, Alex felt his mind lighten. Perhaps it was the familiar drive. He didn’t have to think, acting on muscle memory alone. Instead, he could let his thoughts wander.
For a decade, he’d tried to forget Virginia. He’d tried to press down and pulverize the memories of his dead parents and the girl who’d left his proposal hanging in the air. Twice in his life, he’d lost control. He hadn’t been able to change the course of destiny then, no matter how hard he tried.
Then, when everything started to go wrong, when the world descended into chaos, he’d felt the pull of home. It had been comforting. Welcoming. Those memories, he’d hoped, would have healed. Going back to the farm had seemed like the best solution for someone trying to exert control and direction over their life. There was a safety there. It had made sense.
But then, he’d arrived. The one last chance, the last throw of the dice, it had been ruined. That was what Timmy and Joan and Cam would never understand. What Krol and Jamie and all the others did wasn’t important. The fact that they simply existed was enough to drive Alex toward the edge. To rile him, to enrage him, to show him that, no matter what he did, it was all random. Chaos.
Their existence was an insult, enough to prod and probe at the rawest emotions and to rub salt into the most open wounds in Alex’s psyche.
He let go of the steering wheel. His hands were white, his grip had been so tight. Allowing the car to hurtle along the road without a driver, he rubbed his palms, feeling the blood begin to circulate again. Embrace the chaos, he told himself, one hand in the other.
The vehicle leered to the left, in danger of careening off the road. Alex reached out with tired hands and corrected the wheel. At least he could control this. It wasn’t enough.
The car pulled into Athena without any trouble. It was empty. The same streets, the same corners. He knew it all too well. But not like this.
It had been a nothing town, teetering on the precipice of a few thousand people, going this way and that depending on the season. Winters and their fierce cold, summers and their sweltering heat. It wasn’t a town for everyone.
The houses were dark. Doors hung open. Wooden boards over windows. Every few blocks, Alex lost count of the white crosses drawn with paint. It looked like every other town he’d passed through. Dead or close to it.
Everyone who hadn’t died must have fled.
Thick columns of smokes rose up over the heart of the town. They curled and drifted, hanging lazily on the wind. Something was on fire. But Alex didn’t care.
Sammy had lived on the outskirts. The edge of Athena, the side closest to the farm. It wasn’t a long journey. Back in the day, it had taken all of half an hour. Today, probably half that.
Alex saw the house from the other end of the street. He slowed the car, easing it to a stop.
A two up, two down suburban cookie cutter house. Same as every other house on the street. If he hadn’t known exactly how many paces it was from the sidewalk to the front door, if he hadn’t known the exact way rose bushes hugged up against the windows, if Alex hadn’t spent most every day of his teenage years arriving at this very same place, he’d have driven straight past it.
But here it was. Sammy’s house.
There was no hiding it now; he could feel the sadness. A decade wasn’t enough distance.
He saw the white cross on the door. A bad sign. Sickness. Alex began to walk forward.
What if she was inside? Alex didn’t have a plan. If she was alive and she ran towards him, throwing open her arms, what would he do? Hold her? Take her back to the farm? Or worse, what if she were laying down on the bed, like the man back in Detroit, all ashen faced and soaked in sweat? He would have to stay with her, right till the end.
And if that end had already come for her and taken her away? Every step he took toward the house, Alex could feel his thoughts turning darker and darker. He felt numb, his skin ice cold and his hairs rigid, brushing against the inside of his clothes.
Time to put that immunity to the test, I guess.
Alex didn’t take the path. He walked straight across what was left of the grass. No cars in the driveway, he noticed. Maybe they got away.
There was a smell on the air. Alex sensed it more with his tongue than his nose. It made his mouth dry. It made him gag. Whatever was on fire, it didn’t taste good.
Better to get inside, he thought. The door opened easily. No lock. Alex didn’t want to wait or pause outside. No time for ceremony. Just go in, he told himself. Just find out.
Inside, everything was familiar and different. The walls were in all the same places. The furniture had moved. The colors had changed. The materials, too. Like walking through a dream, desperately wanting to wake up.
But Alex knew it all.
It didn’t take long to search through the house. Alex went once, quickly, through every room. He called out, announcing his arrival. Unarmed. Friendly. He made sure everyone knew.
No one was home. The air was thick with dust, still and staid.
The white cross on the door. The empty house. Alex couldn’t stop the gears in his mind from turning and turning and turning. Putting the pieces together. Playing the odds.
He didn’t want to admit it.
No cars in the drive way, he told himself. No signs of struggle. No bodies. There was a chance.
Alex didn’t know what to do. Even as the virus had ripped apart the country, the memory of Sammy had lingered at the edge of his thoughts, desperate for attention. As the world fell apart, Sammy had returned to his life. After ten years of numbness in Detroit, sitting at an office all day and mindlessly tapping at a keyboard, she’d come back to him.
Not in person. Not deliberately. But her memory.
He had never been able to admit it, but Sammy was half the reason he’d headed straight for Virginia. One more chance. One more opportunity to play the hero. To win her back. It hadn’t mattered that they hadn’t talked in a decade, that the last time he’d seen her, his life had been torn apart.
But that was it, he realized. He didn’t want to be the hero. If he’d arrived back here, ring in his hand, and she’d been there, waiting, what would have happened? A fairytale ending? They would ride off together, into the sunset? The Eko virus would vanish and everything would be fine? Surely, he realized, confronting his subconscious, that couldn’t be true.
Alex didn’t love Sammy. Maybe he had, once. But then she’d turned him down. She’d said no to him and he’d never been able to ask why. He’d run away. He’d headed north and not looked back. After the chaos of his parents’ car crash, he’d sou
ght out the one stable part of his life and tried to lock it down, to wrestle control back from the specter of death. And she’d said no.
She had been right. At the time, he had been in turmoil. Reeling in every direction, desperate for any kind of stability. It wasn’t her that he’d loved, it was the idea of a future. That was what he’d lost. That was what had hurt him so badly. The kind of hurt he’d tried to forget. Sammy had been right the whole time.
When he’d told Timmy about his plan, that they’d pack up and leave Detroit and head home, he hadn’t been thinking about property or security or anything else. He wanted stability. He wanted an assurance that there was a future. The last time he’d had anything like that, he’d been on the farm. When the world began to fall apart, the only option was to go chasing after the past. Not Sammy herself or his dead parents or their house or the fields or the air or the birdsong.
Alex stood alone in the empty house. Incredibly, inescapably alone.
The light barely came into the room. The curtains had been drawn. Alex ripped them open.
Up on a shelf, his eyes caught a glint of glass. A row of photographs. He walked towards them.
He picked one up.
There she was.
Sammy.
Older, sure. She’d changed.
But that was her. Exactly the same. Those eyes, that smile. That was the girl he’d left sitting on the porch so long ago. Alex smiled.
She wasn’t alone. Other faces lined the photographs. A man, kids. A family. They were happy.
In that moment, Alex could feel all the weight lifted off his shoulders. As if a pair of invisible hands had reached down and plucked away the heavy burdens of regret and guilt and remorse and everything else.
He felt lighter, could taste the air between his teeth, could feel the entire weight and pain of his past escaping out through every pore in his body and rising up, up and away into the ether.
All of a sudden, he could feel everything. The sadness of losing the girl all over again. The pain of his parents’ death. The fury at Krol and the rest of the strangers. The fear for the future. The guilt and the shame of the way he’d treated his friends, the way he’d sidelined them and allowed his emotion to run riot. The joy, ever so slight, of knowing that Sammy hadn’t spent a decade locked in the same turmoil.
Sammy had lived. She wasn’t a ghost which wandered the lonely corridors of his mind. Not anymore.
The world, quite suddenly, looked different. The light was surging into the room, now. There were more photographs, lining every shelf. Each image helped lift Alex a little higher.
He felt hope.
Maybe she’d gotten away. Maybe Sammy and her whole family had driven out west. Or south. Or anywhere. Maybe they were all together, free and happy and healthy. The chances weren’t on her side, he knew. But the uncertainty – the kind of uncertainty that had plagued him for so long – now felt like a release.
Alex began to leave. There was nothing left in the house. Opening the door, he paused and laughed. Reaching into a pocket, he removed the ring. I should leave it here, he thought.
Carefully, sweeping aside a thin layer of dust from a shelf, Alex laid the ring next to the photograph of Sammy. Time to leave it behind. All the memories and regrets and everything else. Leave it all to sit in this house in Athena. It made sense. It felt good.
He exited, pulling the door closed behind him.
The air outside was cold. It lit up his lungs, made them feel fresh.
The car had been left open. Athena was a dead town with nothing left for Alex anymore. It was time to go home. To sit in the car seat, to drive – slower this time – along the familiar road back to the farm.
When he tried to think of the people he’d left behind there, the anger which had spilled over and pushed him to the edge, Alex couldn’t recapture the feeling. That had been a different person, one burdened by terrible weights. Hell, he might even talk to Krol. This was a time to fix things. A time for the truth.
Alex laughed. His actions of even a few hours ago felt so strange. He’d acted like an idiot but now he could step outside of himself and see, at last, how ridiculous he’d been. God, he thought, suddenly worried, I hope they’ll forgive me. At least he could tell them the truth now. At least, he thought, he could tell himself.
Stepping away from Sammy’s house, away from the past, and out onto the sidewalk, Alex heard voices.
People talking. Soft, conversational tones. The sounds were coming from near his car.
There was no way he was walking back to the farm. He had to take the car. Alex craned his neck, trying to catch a glimpse of whoever was speaking.
When he was just ten feet from the car door, two faces appeared over the hood. They’d been bent down, inspecting something.
“Good morning, friend!” The voice was far too cheerful.
Alex stopped. There were two of them, dressed in the same drab, gray clothes. Not quite an over shirt, not quite a sweater, these people seemed to be wearing layers of uncolored cloth, fashioned into a basic outfit.
But it was the smiles which caught the eye.
A man, beaming ear to ear, began to wave. He was an average height, haired trimmed short and without much care. The eyes – green and deep and fanatically friendly – stared out above the rows of whitened teeth. And he kept waving.
“Good morning!” the woman standing next to him echoed, slightly too loud. “What a beautiful day!”
She was shorter and fitted with the same toothy grin. She didn’t wave. Both her hands were laid across the hood of the car. She tapped it, making the metal sing.
“We were just admiring your vehicle.” She stopped tapping. “A fine vehicle.”
“A beautiful car, friend. Truly.” Finally, the man stopped waving and laid a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Say, Kate and I were just saying: we’ve not seen you around. Are you new in town?”
Alex stood still. He didn’t smile.
“Not the talkative type, eh?” The man gave a pantomime squeeze of the woman’s shoulder as he talked. “Hey, Kate. Why don’t we invite this newcomer around for coffee?”
“Oh, he’d love it. We can show him the town!”
“Welcome to Athena, friend!”
“Welcome!”
Picking up his feet, Alex started moving back to his car and found his voice.
“Sorry. I was just leaving.”
“Oh, no! But you just got here!” Kate’s voice was sickly sweet.
“There’s so many people for you to meet!” The man talked confidently, as though he were reading from an invisible script. No pauses or hesitations. “Say, I bet Pastor Dan would love to meet you.”
“Oh, he would. He would love that!”
“I can’t. Sorry.” Alex tried the passenger side door. Locked. “I’ve really got to go.”
The two smiled. They were standing by the driver’s door. Blocking it.
“Hey, Steve!” Kate turned to the man. “Why don’t you give our new friend here the guided tour?”
“Of Athena? Well, shucks, Kate. That’s a great idea. What do you say, friend?”
Alex could read the smiles. He could read the wave. These two weren’t going to let him leave. There were probably more of them, too. Hidden in the alleys. Watching. Fight them off or play along? It didn’t seem like much of a choice. Better to go along for now. Pick a moment.
Looking up and down the street, Alex took in the dead town. Bleak. Deserted. These two newcomers were acting like nothing had ever changed. He could feel the curiosity brewing inside him.
“I really don’t–”
“Great! Let’s start right away. Kate, why don’t you run along and tell Pastor Dan that we’ve found a new friend?”
Kate pumped her fists, turned to Alex, smiled, and scuttled off down the street.
Steve grabbed hold of Alex’s hand, squeezing it hard and pumping it up and down. He didn’t let go.
“Welcome to Athena, friend!” The smile never sli
pped. “We’re going to have so much fun!”
15
Steve and Kate walked Alex through Athena. As they rounded the corner of every block, heading toward the center of the town, the pair pointed out places of interest.
A store. A diner. A car dealership with no cars on the forecourt. They showed off the locations so proudly, Alex was left wondering whether they even realized how broken, beaten down, and deserted the town had become.
Besides, he knew it all. Even if the names above the doors had changed, the skeleton of the town stayed the same. This was his Athena, or what was left of it.
“Yeah, Tom’s diner. Best burgers this side of the state. And the milkshakes. Steve, tell our friend about the milkshakes.”
“Best this side of the state!”
Alex had eaten at Tom’s diner before. He’d spent more than a few Saturdays sipping milkshakes in a booth with Sammy. The burgers had been average, at best. Not much competition in small town Virginia.
Not wanting to question the stories, Alex kept quiet. Let them keep their delusion.
Together, they took Alex toward the town center. The pillars of smoke – so distant before – began to loom overhead.
Few of the buildings rose up above three floors. The way Alex remembered the town, there had been plenty of space. Wide sidewalks and open alleys between the stores. But walking through Athena now, it seemed tighter. More intimidating. Less welcoming.
It was clean, though. No junk on the streets. No abandoned cars or glass shards from broken windows. Turning another corner, Alex saw why.
A fence ran across the street, stretched between two alleys and over a road. Chain link for the most part, it had been bolstered by a makeshift wall. All that garbage which might have been littering the streets had been mixed with concrete and built into a crude barrier, ten feet high.
There was no gate in the fence, no entrance.
“Ah, you’ve seen our fence!” The pride in Kate’s voice was clear. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“It’s a great fence, right?” Steve said. “A real triumph.”
“What’s it keeping out?” Alex’s curiosity was getting the better of him. He wanted to know more. But he also wanted to get back to the farm alive. “Or in?”