by Tes Hilaire
“Shh… it’s okay. It doesn’t matter what you are. It’s who you are that counts. Okay?”
I’m not sure that makes any sense, but I can guess what he wants: Me to stop sniffling so we can get on with the mission. So I nod and mumble an, “’kay.”
He shifts me back, his hand reaching up to brush away a tear.
“Now, let’s go see if there is anything in your house.” He looks up at the sky. “I want to be out of here and on the way home by sunrise.”
Home. Home sounds good. I wonder though, all John’s talk of pack aside, can a monster like me ever really have a home?
34.
“Still not sensing anything?” John asks from where he is crouched, gun lifted and ready beside me.
I shake my head, but can’t draw my eyes away from the overgrown shrubs that hide more than half the front of the stucco house in front of us. Mom would be appalled if she could see this. The sugar bushes dad planted have gotten completely out of hand.
“I don’t smell any almonds, ‘cept you,” he says.
Neither do I.
He shifts his gun back over his shoulder, the tension easing but not totally dissipating from his body. “We’d better hurry. I don’t want to spend much time here.”
“And time’s running out.” Especially if what we’re looking for isn’t here.
I turn my attention back to the faded green door. My entire being is vibrating with a mixture of dread and anticipation. I don’t want to go in there, but I need to. And I need to do it alone.
I can’t explain my reasoning aloud though, hard to when you’re not sure what they are, so instead I go with logic. “Why don’t you get whatever supplies you need while I search. If I’ve found nothing by the time you get back, then we’ll head down to the Medical Center.”
John turns to look at me. I can tell, without meeting his gaze, that he wants to object—but one look at the sky has him nodding. “Okay. I won’t take more than an hour. There was a Walmart a mile or so back and that guns and ammo store. Might not be anything if there was much looting before the virus took hold, but it doesn’t hurt to check.”
He stands, starts to turn, but then stops, spinning back around.
“Eva?”
I drag my gaze from my house, looking up over my shoulder at him. He stands there, jaw working as if he’s unsure what to say. “Yeah?” I prompt.
“Don’t do anything that will get you in trouble, okay?”
“What could I possibly do that will get me in trouble?”
“I don’t know, but you seem to have a knack for it.”
And with that he is off, out of sight before I can blink. Huh, it just might be possible he is faster than me. It would explain why I had such a hard time keeping up with him back in Bakersfield. Even half-starved, I should have been able to outrun a human.
I turn my attention back to my house, trying to see past the overgrown bushes, the chipped stucco, and the grimy windows. It used to be beautiful, or pretty at least. I suppose I should be happy that it holds none of the sweetness or simple homey touches that would delude me into thinking the house is still a safe harbor for me. It’s a house, no more, no less. And if I want to be able to put it behind me for good, I need to get in there, get what I need, and get out again.
Up and at ‘em, Eva girl, every second you procrastinate, life is passing you by.
Right.
Taking a few deep breaths, I stand and force myself to walk across the brittle grass of the lawn. The front door looms bigger and bigger the closer I get until I’m standing before it. This close, it seems as monstrous as the doors in Alice in Wonderland—after she’d taken the drink.
It takes Herculean effort to bend down and lift up the planter that flanks the left hand side of the porch, and a giant leap of faith to take that step back to the door.
I can do this. I’m not stupid enough to think I’d really fooled John with my flimsy reasoning. I’m sure he realized I wanted to do this alone. Just as I’m sure he wouldn’t have left me here to this task if he didn’t think I could.
I stuff the key into the lock and twist, then, before I can change my mind, push open the door and step into the hall. It’s a mixture of relief and unease when the first thought that comes to me is: This is not my house. It is, of course. I’m not so far lost that I can’t remember the home I lived in for over seventeen years. But it holds none of the sense of home for me anymore. The toppled and shoved aside furniture, the dusty curtains that billow in the breeze I just let in, they are only props. Without the actors, the players, there is no life here. There is no love. There is no home.
With new eyes I once again look around the house. It takes me a minute to realize it, my eyesight is so good, even in dim light, but then I note that the only light in the place is from the door I just opened…and a slim stream that comes in through the kitchen in the back. Every window is boarded up. The door I entered through? Braced by a chair that now lays smashed on the floor between it and the wall.
Stronger than I used to be too.
I inch my way further into the house, gruesome images from the photos the queen forced me to look at overlapping the present time. There, upon the stairs in the pool of stained wood. That’s where he fell. If I were to go upstairs, I’d find the spot in the back bathroom where my mother was torn to shreds.
I move back into the kitchen, my gaze immediately honing in on the splatters of blood that stained the linoleum floor. Dumb dog. Stupid, lovable, brave dog.
I wipe my eyes, turning away from the signs of violence. It’s as I stare at the back door with its shattered window, torn off boarding, and missing hinge, that I’m struck with two thoughts: First: There are no bodies. Why are there no bodies? Did a scavenger find them and drag what remained after the zombies got to them? And second: they stayed. Why in the hell would they have stayed? Dad, more than anyone, knew the danger they were in. He knew the true horror of the virus. What would have made him and mom chose to board up the house and try and ride it out?
You, Eva girl. We did it for you.
The truth of this hits like a knife in the gut. I clench at my stomach, bending over as I hyperventilate through the nauseating sickness that threatens to take me and send me under.
No. I was gone. Missing, and though unbeknownst to them, already turned. They wouldn’t have stayed on a hope and a dream that I’d come back. Would they?
Yes, they would have. I, was their only daughter. Their much fought for child. My parents had been older than my friend’s parents, not because they’d waited so long to have children that they could only have one, but because it had taken them so long to have me. Ten years of miscarriages and infertility treatments and finally I came along. Neither mom nor dad had talked about it much, never wanting me to feel the pressure of being the only child, but occasionally the subject would come up.
They would have waited for me until the world ended. They would have ridden the fiery chariot into the depths of hell. For me.
I scream. The table is up and hurtling across the kitchen before I even realize I’m the one who threw it. The wood splintering crash as it hits the basement door is not nearly satisfying enough. I need more. I need to kill something. I need to find a zombie and rip its head off. I need to hunt down the queen and her bastard of a son and drive a stake through both their hearts. I need…
I need to calm down.
It’s hard though, so I settle for screaming again. And then I settle for ripping wood from every boarded up window and door in the house. I don’t even realize I’m done until I find myself back in the kitchen leaning against the marble sink, panting. There I squint my eyes to block out the disastrous mess I’ve made around me, and look through my mother’s gingham curtains. This is what settles me, staring through my mother’s curtains up at Orion as he passes with club and shield through the sky.
Just like I did the night before my last as a human.
It’s enough to calm me. When I’m sure I have my anger un
der control, I push off the edge of the sink and make my way to the basement door. It takes me a few seconds to clear away the debris, but then I’m on the stairs that lead down to my father’s home lab. Mostly used as a quiet space to get away and jot down his ideas, there isn’t much equipment down here. No more than you’d find in a high school lab. But it’s obvious a man of learning used this space. The metal shelves are filled with journals and plastic bound research papers. The white board is crammed full of equations and theoretical meanderings of the mind. Across the back wall is the old countertop that was stripped out from when my parents first moved in and decided a full remodel of the 1950’s style kitchen was needed.
Reverently, I move across the room toward the desk. I can see the outline of stack upon stacks of papers and notebooks, but the light coming down from the kitchen is too dim for even my eyes to see what they say.
Grabbing my dad’s wooden swivel chair, I roll it across the floor to the other side of the counter made desk. A quick twist to secure the back of the chair against the wall and I’m standing on it, ripping the boards off one of the two basement windows.
Moonlight spills into the dark basement, filling the corners, throwing silver beams across my father’s workspace. Anything in those beakers or test tubes would be too old by now, exposed to air and heat and cold. No, it’s too late for any secrets, if there were any secrets, to be revealed from them. I move instead back to my father’s desk, running my finger along the worn edge where the laminate is peeling away.
I pick up a paper from one of the piles, glance it over, shuffle it to the back. I flip through a few more before I stop myself. My dad was an organized man. If he found something as important as a vaccine, would he have stuffed it away in a random stack? No.
I need to think like him. I need to step into his skin. What would he have done with it?
I run back across the basement, grab his wheelie chair and yank it over in front of the desk. Taking a steadying breath I sit, the worn hinges of the swivel and rock groaning under my slight weight. Would have squeaked more with dad. He was a solid man.
I sit there, in my father’s chair before my father’s desk, waiting. Someplace predictable, but safe. Wouldn’t do for someone to find it out of hand and misplace it accidently. But, he’d want it easily found if something happened and he couldn’t show the person sitting here next where it was. So…
I yank open the drawer in front of me. It’s filled with pens and blank notepads and a scientific calculator. Okay, not there. Next I check the drawers on the sides. Files. Some correspondences. Receipts for equipment. There is even seven years’ worth of tax returns for the money he earns writing for scientific journals. Still no formula. I swivel the chair around, staring across the basement at the whiteboard. He wouldn’t have written it on something so… temporary?
I start to rise. My legs are heavy, and my hands refuse to let go of the arms of the chair. I stop resisting and plop back down. This chair. Here before the desk. I spin the chair back around, leaning back and looking up at the ceiling, my hands laced behind my head as my father often did. It’s as I’m tipping my head back that I notice it: the 11x14 picture of mom and dad and me from our trip to Cancun when I was thirteen. The frame is slightly off-kilter. Tipped slightly to the left with a distinctive smear of grease at the top corner…like a smudged up print.
I stand. I have to climb on the desk to take the picture down but as I do, something shifts, flopping against the paper backing.
My heart hammers in my chest, my palms slick on the gilt frame. I turn the picture around. There is a slit across the top of the tan paper. I quickly tip the picture over. The object inside slides down to the top. I slip my hand in. My fingers curl around an edge. A notebook. One of those composition ones that you get for English class.
I pull it out, setting the picture on the back of the desk with one hand. And then I sit and flip to the first page. Five words in and I know: If you find this, then…
My heart stutters. I clamp the notebook to my chest, tears blurring my eyes. If you find this. I don’t have to read anymore to know that this notebook, the work of my father’s blood sweat and tears, will contain treasure for the human race.
“Thank you, dad.”
Smiling I pull the notebook from my breast and flatten it on the table. Another few pages and my heart is no longer stuttering, but racing with a kind of excitement that I thought impossible except during the blood lust. I’m so engrossed that I almost miss it. The other heartbeat, pounding in an accompanying rhythm to my own.
Of course, it’s been almost an hour.
“John, look at th…” I trail off, the scent of candied almonds choking my words back down. I stuff the journal under a pile of papers, spinning back around to face my worst nightmare. And there he is, standing in the shadows by the base of the stairs.
“What are you doing here?”
He shakes his head, stepping forward into the room. Silver moonlight glints off his hair, his eyes flashing like starlight in his dark face. My breath catches. Even now, the devil can seduce the light of heaven to do his bidding. He smiles.
“Why, Eva, don’t you know? I’m here to keep my promise.”
35.
Then…
“Eva, I promise. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
I clung tighter to Raoul’s muscular forearm, nervously eyeing the ballroom before us. His promise was easier said than done. I was going to be what happened to me. Helium balloons, strobe lights, a constant queasy stomach… dancing. Yup, this night was something out of one of my worst nightmares, but for one reason: I was there with Raoul.
I realized I was digging my nails into his arm, the Moonlight Twilight like a set of short, sharp blades cutting into his custom fit tuxedo. Forcing myself to relax my grip was difficult, but I managed to relax to something short of blood-letting levels.
“You know,” I said, my voice wavering to betray my nervousness—as if the death grip hadn’t already. “We could skip the prom. Go to the park. Or maybe a movie.”
He chuckled, pulling me closer into his side. “No way. I’m not going to let you miss this.”
“Why not? I really don’t mind.”
He shook his head, turning me to face him, his hands cupping my face on either cheek. “Eva. This is your prom. Girls dream about this from the moment they turn thirteen. I’m not going to steal you away and deny you this pleasure.”
“That’s my whole point. Dancing? Playing dress up? Not exactly my things.”
“You like music. And you are certainly good at dressing up.” He held me out before him. His gaze dipped down my body before settling back on my face where it lingered briefly on my lips before returning to my eyes. “You are beautiful. No…beautiful fails to describe you. You are stunning in that gown. Like a midnight waterfall against a backdrop of stars.”
My tummy warmed, even if it didn’t settle much. That was the thing with Raoul. He never made me feel like a piece of flesh. Just wanted, cherished. Still didn’t change the fact that I didn’t want to be here. “Raoul…”
He drew me close, kissed my forehead, the spot burning like a lick of the sun. I sighed, my objections trailing off.
“Let me do this for you, Eva. I promise I’ll take care of you.” He stepped back from me, offering me his arm again with a smile and a wink. “And I’m an excellent dancer. All you have to do is let me lead.”
Let him lead. Okay there. He’d change his tune when I’d stepped on his feet for the umpteenth time.
I let him draw me out on the dance floor. At first it was awkward, him trying to lead me, and my two left feet not wanting to be led. But as he whispered and coaxed, his body pressed against mine like a blanket of security, I began to relax. We’d never made it to the level of Dancing with the Stars or anything, but with Raoul leading me I was no longer hopelessly inept either, at least for the slow numbers. When they started up a fast one...well, suffice it to say, Raoul finally took pity on me.
> We stumbled off the dance floor, panting and laughing. Or at least I was panting. Raoul was just laughing, probably at me.
“And here I thought I was in shape.” I shook my head, letting him lead me to the refreshment center. “Three miles every other day and I can’t even spend ten minutes on the dance floor.”
“It’s a different sort of activity.”
“Still.” I took the punch he handed to me, lifting it to my lips. Fruity and bubbly. And no hint of alcohol—so far.
“Aren’t you having any?” I asked after noting he hadn’t gotten himself some.
He shook his head, his eyes firmly fixed on me, as if he were superman and had x-ray vision. “No. I thirst for something else this night.”
Oh boy. The cup in my hand shook. Thankfully it was almost empty, though that didn’t stop my urge to get rid of it. All of a sudden, with Raoul’s gaze sizzling across me like a caress, the fact that the prom was being held in a hotel with hundreds of rooms just a credit card swipe away took on a whole new meaning. If Raoul had reserved us a room, would I go?
Yes.
My heart hammered so loud I was sure it was drowning out the DJ. Where had that come from? We still hadn’t done anything more than kiss. Okay, maybe a bit of heavy petting—through clothing. But not once had we talked about bringing our relationship to the next level, let alone skipping a bunch of levels to get to renting a room at the prom. I was a virgin. And had decided a long time ago I was going to remain one until college at least. I wanted the moment to be special. A milestone that was worth the wait.
But could anyone you meet at college ever look at you like he does, Eva?
The plastic cup I was holding crinkled. As if he’d sensed the imminent danger, Raoul managed to snatch it out of my hand right before I completely crushed it into shards of plastic and spilled the last third cup of punch all over my dress.