by James Sperl
Clarissa's mouth fell slack. She looked at Rachel for confirmation, to see if she had just heard what Clarissa thought she did, but Rachel only watched her friends with meek passivity.
“If what's for the best?” said Clarissa. “Jon and the others leaving?”
Valentina's mouth twisted into an uncertain pucker. “Yeah?”
“Val, what the hell're you talking about? How could casting out a group of decent people just when we need them the most be for the best? Have you already forgotten about Travis?”
Valentina tugged at Clarissa's arm and pulled her even farther away from Jon.
“No of course not,” she whispered hoarsely. “But I've been thinking about what Andrew said. He's right, Clarissa.”
Clarissa could barely contain her incredulity. She crossed her arms over her chest then let them fall to her sides just as fast. “He's right? Oh, Val...Right about what?”
“About when does it end? What does happen when more people show up? More good people. What if next time it's ten? Or twenty? What's Andrew's obligation? We've got a good thing here, Clar. I didn't think so at first, but now I see it. We've got security. Food, shelter. Yeah, Andrew's a bit off his rocker at times, but it's not anything we can't deal with.” She paused. Clarissa thought it might have been so she could respond, but she said nothing.
“I just...we don't know how long this thing will last,” Valentina went on. “We just lost power and phone service, and who knows what'll go next as things deteriorate further. What happens if things get really bad? What do we do when gas stations run dry, or hospitals close, or the police stop responding? What happens when people start to get desperate and turn on each other because they don't know where their next meal is coming from? Do you think about that, Clar? Because I do. I do all the time. And the more people we invite in, the more we reduce our chances of making it through this. I like Jon and the others too, but they're going to be a drain on our supplies. I'm just not sure we can afford that.”
Clarissa winced as if experiencing physical pain. Valentina read it and averted her eyes.
“Am I a total selfish shit for thinking this way?” she said through a half-shouldered shrug. “Maybe. And I'm fine with that. I accept it. But the truth of it is, I'm starting to get a little worried that this thing is going to drag on indefinitely, and if it does, we're going to need every scrap of food we can find.”
Clarissa nodded, more as acknowledgment than agreement. Valentina made solid points, but Clarissa thought she was missing the bigger picture. Food was only a fraction of the problem they faced if things persisted. But where did she begin to try to explain her friend's shortsightedness? Rachel, to Clarissa's surprise, gave it an attempt.
“I don't know, Val,” Rachel said a little too loudly before she dialed back her volume. “I think we'd be making a mistake asking them to leave. I think Clarissa's right. We need people right now. Especially now. I think we'd regret it if we tried to go things alone.”
“You're just saying that because you've got eyes for Don Juan over there,” Valentina sneered. “You've probably been wet since he rolled up last night. You're not thinking clearly.”
Rachel's face morphed from an expression of hurt to one of disgust in a nanosecond. “First off, Cesare's Italian, not Spanish. And second of all, fuck you.”
Without another word, and with a stomp in her step, Rachel peeled away and charged for the front door. Evan was the only one from the table to look up and see her pull it shut behind her.
“Nice, Val,” Clarissa said.
Valentina rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. She knows I'm right, and so do you. On both things.”
“You're not 'right,' Val. You just have an opinion that happens to be different. But since we're on the topic of right and wrong, let me just say that what you said to Rachel was wrong, just like, in my opinion, your decision to want to kick Jon and the others to the curb is wrong.”
“Well, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.”
“If you say so. But think about this: how would you feel if the roles were reversed? What if you were the one asked to leave and find shelter elsewhere? How far would you get?”
The questions worked like low-voltage shock. Valentina's face contorted and twitched, her eyes searching and her hands kneading imaginary dough. For a moment, it looked as if she considered Clarissa's analogy. But only for a moment. With a flick of her head and a firmly jutted chin, she stood tall and said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”
She sauntered off toward the hallway—and the restroom located at the end of it—on the opposite side of the dining room. She walked a wide berth around the meeting taking place as if Jon and the others were contagious.
Clarissa sighed. Things had all of a sudden become complicated. Lines were drawn, and it was evident who stood on either side of them.
And she still had to talk to Andrew.
* * *
The pine cone shattered against the evergreen's trunk with a fantastic thwack, it exploding in a shower of desiccated scales. After five failed attempts—and a growing crick in his back—Andrew finally connected. And it felt great. It felt better than great, actually. It felt necessary.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. He wasn't going to negotiate with people over the terms of his survival. Not in his house. Not with his food or his water on his land. He was supposed to be going it alone, just the way he had always intended. He had planned for every scenario he could think of: earthquakes, fires, floods, societal collapse, even nuclear war. He was as prepared as any person could be without the benefit of military assistance. Did that mean shit still couldn't fly sideways? Of course not. One could only account for so much. He was no fool, though he was sure many folks in town considered him just that. But who was the fool now?
Yes, who was the fool indeed.
The presence of people lowered one's chances for survival, not improved it. Put two people in a room, and one will inevitably try to assert dominance over the other. It was just man's nature. It was ironic when he thought about it. Here he had compiled a life free from dependency, and yet the one event angle he would have never considered in a million years—could anyone have anticipated something as innocuous as a sound to bring the world to its knees?—turned out to be the very thing that forced him back into cohabitation, and with complete strangers no less. If it weren't so goddamn maddening, he might have enjoyed a laugh over the whole thing.
A part of him began to explore bold possibilities. What if he cast everyone out, Clarissa and her friends included? It probably wouldn't take much to convince them to join up with Jon and his crew. He could even send them off with a pantry's worth of food as a good faith gesture. Then they would all be gone, and he could go back to being alone—at least until Travis returned.
Andrew bristled at the thought of his neighbors' murderer. Travis was a vile, repugnant nuisance, but even his situation was solvable. With no one at the house, Andrew could quite easily stage what looked like a hasty retreat. Doors could be left ajar, and he could leave random canned and boxed goods scattered over the floor as if Andrew and the girls had been in such a hurry to leave they couldn't have been bothered to double back and scoop up what they dropped. He could sell that scene. Then it would only be a matter of hiding in his secret room until Travis and his horde of misfits left.
It sounded great on paper, but Andrew knew what sort of person with whom he was dealing. Travis was a destructive force, both of the physical and mental variety. He might be able to be convinced no one was home, but Andrew suspected his soul would ache for outright demolition of all things. He had been denied what he sought. Andrew stood him down and embarrassed him in front of his crew. His ego would not permit that to go unavenged. There would be hell to pay, and Andrew knew the house would bear the brunt of that vengeance, whether he was there or not.
But there were solutions for that too, even if insanely risky.
With no evidence that he remained on the property, Andrew could effe
ctively become an assassin. With a little luck and some deft planning, he could take out Travis and some of his more stalwart crew members inside the house by emerging from his hidden room and surprising them with a barrage of gunfire. Or, alternately, he could take the silent-but-deadly approach and spike a few intentionally left-behind beers with copious amounts of Roundup and other poisons, and let everyone wither like so many weeds. Ratcheting his “what-if” take-down ideas even further, he considered the effectiveness of going full bore and seeding his driveway with homemade landmines then detonating them all underneath Travis's motorcade.
Were the scenarios long shots? Without a doubt. But Andrew was a firm believer that anything was doable as long as you set your mind to it and wanted it bad enough. But neither of these personal tenets had applied when it came to Clarissa and her friends. He had only decided to flee because he feared for them, not because he didn't want to face down Travis. He couldn't mount a defense with three novices stumbling about underfoot. It would have been madness to try and look out for them and battle blood-thirsty delinquents. But going it solo? That he might be able to do. He might very well be able to best Travis and keep his home given enough planning. But even Travis wasn't the mitigating factor.
It was sleep.
Sleep was the fly in the ointment. The thing that cast aside all of Andrew's other provisional solutions like dry leaves in a howling wind. And even though he had no evidence to support the claim that watching over a person while they slept prevented said person from disappearing, it felt right. Sleeping with a guardian staved off ceasing to exist.
It wasn't the threat of death that unnerved him. It was the specter of non-death that sent spokes of fear into his heart. What if a person didn't die when they disappeared? What if they woke up alive and well but in someplace else so terrifying it completely defied human description? Andrew could come up with a thousand different but equally horrifying environments, but it was the places his human brain's limited imagination couldn't create that forced him into reluctant acceptance of the situation. Clarissa, as much as it galled him to admit, was right.
He did need people.
The confession sat in his gut like deep-fried butter. He didn't like people telling him what he needed, particularly a group of late-to-the-party millennials, who were more concerned with taking pictures of themselves than aspiring to do something noteworthy with their—
Andrew froze. His heart pounded. He stared past his hovering step at the ground. Slowly lowering his foot, he made sure not to step on the sight that had just arrested his attention. He moved to the side then dropped to a knee in a flash.
A fresh impression was stamped into the dirt. He traced it with his finger, circling the clear imprint of the word “VANS.” He scoured the immediate area, searching for other such footprints; with the exception of the muddy patch of ground in front of him, the forest was thick with damp leaves and rotting underbrush. He could see no others.
“Shit.”
Springing to his feet, Andrew crashed through the forest and sprinted for home. He put from his mind any notion that he maintained control over his life. Those days were gone, much like the footprint he ground beneath his heel before he ran toward home.
* * *
“There you are,” Clarissa said to Jon from the doorway of Andrew's office.
Jon spun around from his position in front of Andrew's desk.
“Sorry,” he said apologetically. “Didn't mean to wander off. I was just mentally organizing and got lost in my headspace when I stumbled across this room.” He faced forward and passed his eyes over the components comprising Andrew's ham radio rig. “I forgot Andrew said he had a shack.”
“Is that what you call all of this?”
Jon nodded and continued to analyze the setup. “Thought I'd give her a test drive before Andrew got back.”
“You think that's a good idea? He won't be a happy camper if he finds you in here.”
Jon shrugged. “What's he going to do, kick us out?”
Clarissa's entire framed slumped. “Jon, I'm so sorry about this. Don't rule him out just—”
“Clarissa, it's all right,” he said with a half-smile. “It's not your fault. It is what it is. I'm not bitter about it. But what I am is unprepared. I need to find out what I can before we hit the road. With any luck,” he said, thumbing at the radio, “someone out there will have some info.”
Clarissa entered the office wearing a curious frown. “Do you even know how to use this stuff?”
Jon nodded. “Pretty much. I used to be a signal support system specialist in the Army.”
Clarissa cocked her head in surprise. It wasn't until after her jaw unhinged and her eyes swelled in accompaniment that she understood the reason for Jon's counter expression of incredulity toward her.
“I'm sorry,” she stuttered, her face rouging. “I didn't mean to look so shocked. It's just...”
“It's just that you've never met a queen who wore the green?”
“Jon!”
Jon chuckled and swatted a hand at Clarissa. “I'm just playing. Being gay's never been an issue for me, even in the Army. Actually, it wasn't until I got out that I saw people had more of a problem with it than the guys I fought beside. They may have talked smack behind my back, but I never heard anything. Mostly, all anyone ever wanted was for the other guy to do his or her job so everyone could get home alive. Now, Sean? That guy's as queer as they come.”
Clarissa's slapped a hand to her mouth. “Oh, my God. You're terrible!”
Jon let loose a satisfied laugh. “Gay as the day is long.” Clarissa whacked him playfully on the shoulder. “But he's the best thing that's ever happened to me.”
“You guys been together long?”
“Long enough to know that he was someone I could start a family with,” Jon answered. He turned on the radio's power supply. “We went the surrogate route a couple of times, but it never panned out. So we turned to adoption.” Clarissa raised her eyebrows into an inquisitive arc. “We fostered Evan when he was twenty months old then made it official by his third birthday. Been in domesticated bliss ever since.” Jon followed this with a sarcastic eye roll.
“You're not even close to convincing me that you don't love it,” Clarissa said with a wry grin. “I can tell you guys are one big happy family. Truth be told, I'm a bit jealous. Some of us would kill to have what you've got.”
“What's that, a teenage vampire prodigy?”
“Oh, stop. Evan's great. You should be happy he's so expressive and not dull.”
“I don't know. Sometimes dull sounds really good, especially when we fight over how much eyeliner is appropriate to wear to the library.”
Clarissa giggled, but her laugh was only a cover. Her loneliness hit her like a medicine ball to the stomach. It was all she could do not to burst into sobs of envious despair. She had been robbed of her future, and nothing indicated that she could restore it. The life she had imagined for herself, her dream to have a family, seemed to be vanishing as quickly as a plume of smoke in a windstorm. Jon was lucky. She was sure he knew it. Still, it didn't make it any easier to have the one thing she desired and felt was missing from her life flaunted in front of her. Maybe it was a good thing Jon and the others were leaving, she thought, though she didn't even begin to mean it.
“Okay,” Jon said, giving the rig his full attention. “Let's see what we've got.” He cracked his knuckles and positioned the microphone in front of him when his brows crashed. “You wouldn't happen to know Andrew's call sign, would you?”
“His what?”
“His call sign.” Jon rifled through the desk drawers. “It's a short series of letters and numbers. Every operator has one unique to them.”
Clarissa shook her head. “I have no idea.”
Jon fanned through a pair of ledgers but came up empty. He examined the equipment then leaned forward when he happened upon a series of faded, black letters scrawled along the side of the microphone.
“Here we go.”
Jon powered on what Clarissa remembered Andrew had called a transceiver. The machine's face was set aglow with colorful LEDs and an LCD interface screen populated with a string of large ice-blue numbers denoting frequency. An ominous low-volume hiss filled the room.
Jon reached for a large black dial on the transceiver. He rotated the knob slowly. The frequency on the LCD increased relative to the speed he turned the dial.
Jon shook his head. “Nothing.”
“What are you doing?” Clarissa asked.
“Searching for an occupied frequency.”
A robotic burp and a barrage of subsequent beeps brought him to a halt, but after a moment of squint-eyed listening, he continued. A quarter turn of the dial later, another set of sounds punched through the airwaves, these followed by the unmistakable sound of a human voice. The quality was poor, garbled. Jon searched for and located what he called a “clarifier” and attempted to fine-tune the signal, but after a series of micro turns he abandoned the frequency.
The drone of unused bandwidth was unsettling. The static, though occasionally interrupted by an anomalous noise or a crackly voice too dirty to clean up, served as a woeful reminder as to the state of things. What should have been airwaves flush with ham chatter was instead a sea of aural emptiness.
“Damn it,” Jon said. “Nothing. We'll try and call CQ.”
“Call who?”
“CQ. It's a, uh, radio protocol. It's sort of like saying 'calling everyone.' It's a way to let people know you're looking for someone to speak with.”
“I see.”
Jon searched until he found a frequency free from audible debris. He released the dial and gripped the microphone, peeking again at the string of letters and numbers written along the side. He offered Clarissa a hopeful glance before leaning in.
“This is KA7BTB, is anyone on this frequency?”
Clarissa noted a distinctive lack of a hiss as Jon spoke; it returned once he had finished. Ten long seconds passed before Jon gave it a second attempt.