by James Sperl
It turned out she was closer to Dustin than Clarissa thought. At least in the beginning. When New Framingham exploded in population beyond expectations, she saw the future—the community couldn't sustain itself. So she had made a confidential recommendation that he prepare for a plan B, and Dustin heeded the advice, though, as he would admit to Clarissa, he never thought it would be necessary. He had that much confidence in New Framingham and humanity's ability to prosper. The only flaw in his faith was that he never saw someone like Travis Austin coming. Clarissa didn't think anyone did.
So, to Waltham it was.
“What are we waiting for?” Valentina said excitedly upon learning about Dustin's reserve. “Let's get going!”
Elenora was already nodding by the time Clarissa looked at her. Tears had pooled in her eyes. Clarissa wasn't sure if they were tears of hope or tears of sadness for leaving a place she knew they would never return to. She assumed it was probably a bit of both.
“I'll change Naomi before we leave,” Elenora said.
“Thanks, El.”
Clarissa gave Dustin's hand a squeeze then followed it with a kiss. Simply having a plan raised spirits. Though everyone in the van had unanimously agreed to go, Clarissa still had one person left to run it past.
Evan had been sitting on a yellow-painted parking curb for the better part of the morning. Clarissa had sneaked occasional glances to check on him, but he never once moved—not to throw stones or kick at the gravel littering the asphalt or even to rip leaves off a nearby shrub. He remained still as a statue and only stared blankly at someplace in front of him.
Clarissa lowered herself onto the curb beside him. She allowed the silence to breathe for awhile before she chose to interrupt it.
“Dustin's hurt pretty bad,” she said. “He's barely clinging to consciousness. But he just told us where we could find some supplies. Food. Things that will help us.”
Evan said nothing.
Clarissa passed her eyes over the dull sky. “It's sort of fitting, all this gray. It's like the earth recognized that it was a time for mourning. But I'm going to make a prediction. Tomorrow there'll be sun. It may not be much, but I have this feeling it'll try to poke through. And the day after that will be even better. I just know it.”
She glanced at Evan, but he remained silent. Clarissa didn't know exactly what she was trying to say to him. Her attempt to be uplifting and paint a picture of positivity sounded flat even to her ears. She could only imagine how Evan perceived it. The boy had just lost his second parent, both of his fathers having been taken from him inside of three months. No amount of colorful words could help that.
Silence was better. Clarissa would have been content to sit on that curb for as long as she needed to, but Evan decided that he'd had enough of quiet reflection.
“Why didn't I kill him?”
Clarissa looked at him sharply. “What?”
“That guy. Travis or whatever his name was. Why didn't I jump out of the van and help Andrew?”
Dried tear tracks stained his face, but no fresh ones appeared. Clarissa imagined he had cried himself empty.
“Evan...oh, honey,” she said, scooting over and taking his hand. “That would have been the last thing in the world your dad—or Andrew—would have wanted. It would have been too dangerous.”
Evan turned his entire body to face Clarissa. “But if I had helped Andrew then we'd know for sure that guy was dead! Then he couldn't kill anybody else...or their parents.”
Clarissa exhaled. She dropped her head then found Evan's wet eyes. “Evan. There isn't a person among us who thinks you couldn't have helped Andrew. It's not about your courage. It's about what the right decision was at the time. Andrew helped us. By holding off Travis, he allowed us to get away.”
“Yeah, but if I'd helped him and killed that fucking guy then it wouldn't have mattered!”
“Of course it would have mattered. New Framingham was a war zone. Every second we stayed in that place mattered. And if you had jumped out, who knows what could have happened.”
“I can tell you what would've happened,” Evan spat. “That guy would've been fucking dead!”
“Maybe,” Clarissa said, reminding herself that Evan was emotionally charged and that she needed to remain calm. “But what if it didn't happen that way? What if Travis turned the tables on Andrew and managed to get a hold of a weapon, then what?” Evan didn't respond. “Andrew...Andrew was tiring. He so much as told us so when he ordered us to leave. What happened if one of Travis's soldiers turned up while you were trying to fight him? What if five did?” Evan faced forward and stayed quiet. “Getting out of there as fast as we could was the only option we had. Evan.” She cupped his chin and gently turned him toward her. “It was the only option. Don't ever second-guess your decision to stay in the van. I won't hear of it.”
A tear hopped Evan's lid. He palmed it away instantly.
“But...but how do we know that Andrew won? That Travis is dead and won't hurt anyone anymore?”
Clarissa inhaled, but it was more to steady her nerves ahead of her response. Andrew's absence was still a raw, open wound.
“How do we know for sure?” she said finally. “I guess the honest answer is that we don't. But in the same spirit of honesty, I can't conceive of an outcome where Andrew let that asshole live.”
Evan shot his eyes to her then trailed to the ground. He didn't ask the follow-up question she anticipated. The one about whether they would see Andrew again. For that small miracle, she was grateful.
“We need to go,” she said.
“I know.”
Clarissa dug into her pocket and pulled out the keys to the van. She held them out to Evan.
“Can you drive? I'd rather look after Dustin than be behind the wheel.”
A slight, knowing smile twitched at Evan's lips. So what if he viewed her offer as pandering to his adolescent yearning for adult responsibility? In this case, she was telling the truth—she wanted to be with Dustin. Even so, tasking Evan with driving duties would give his mind something else to think about other than the fact that he no longer had a family.
The accuracy of this gave Clarissa pause. Not because it shocked her, but because it simply wasn't true. She mentally retracted the thought. Of course Evan had a family. As did Elenora and Valentina and Dustin and especially Naomi, who would only ever know all of them as such. For that's what they were to each other now.
So Clarissa Evans, like any good matriarch, rallied her family to purpose. Then she pointed them in the direction of Waltham.
* * *
The sign designating Pastora's city limits drifted by from the berm of the road. It was peppered with bullet holes, and one of its support posts was bent, which caused the sign to dip and gave it the impression that it curtsied: Welcome back to Pastora!
For all Andrew knew, it was curtsying.
He was beyond the point of delirium. He had started seeing things earlier that day after his twenty-four-hour stint driving without any sleep became thirty-six then grew to forty-eight and now clocked in at a steady fifty-two—fifty-two hours of continuous driving. That gave a person a lot of time to think.
Andrew spent much of that time reflecting on his family, about what used to be and what he had lost, but a sizable portion had also been reserved for Clarissa. He thought a lot about the lie he had told her in the New Framingham parking lot. About seeing her again. He hoped she understood that any promise to reunite with her and the others was made from a place of urgency, that he would have said just about anything to get her in the van. But sometimes lies were told to ease other people's suffering. Sometimes they were told to ease our own. It was far from Andrew's preferred way to say goodbye to Clarissa, but when were farewells ever made from a place of convenience? She would be okay, though. He knew this, just as sure as he knew Travis would never bother her again.
For a fleeting moment, he had entertained ludicrous ideas that Clarissa was somehow to blame for his current situation, b
ut he quickly came to his rambling senses. After all, he was the one that had scooped up her, Valentina, and Rachel in the parking lot that day. He was the one who had taken them back to his home. But their role in what eventually played out was irrelevant. With or without them, Travis still would have shown up at Andrew's house to terrorize him. His malevolence and the subsequent destruction of Andrew's home—his life—would have happened regardless. Andrew conceded that Clarissa's presence played a part in inciting Travis to return, but it only served to advance an already established timeline. Travis was a cold-blooded murderer. His descent into becoming a depraved, violently unhinged individual was fated to play out just as it had, Clarissa or no.
Fate. Andrew hated that word. He hated the very idea that a person was out of control of his or her decisions, that things were predetermined to happen regardless of the choices a person made. But Andrew started to wonder if he couldn't alter the notion of fate to fit a different definition.
The fact that he had run into Clarissa at the grocery store those many days ago—and just minutes before the Sound roared—could be interpreted as fateful, but the decision to help her escape the chaos of the parking lot wasn't due to some cosmic suggestion: it had been entirely Andrew's decision. He could have just as easily kept on driving and left her behind. But he chose not to. For selfish reasons perhaps, but by his doing nonetheless.
And this choice is what got him thinking: Was one's fate custom tailored via the randomness of coincidence? Or was coincidence fate dressed up as chance?
Andrew didn't have the answers.
He couldn't dismiss the possibility that his and Clarissa's paths were destined to cross, and by virtue of that intersection, his and Travis's showdown in New Framingham became an inevitability. Andrew had achieved the desired outcome, and it had even carried some poetic justice—for what Travis had done to Clarissa, for what he represented as an antagonist both in Andrew's life and in the world—but the idea that their battle was fated to occur? That didn't sit particularly well.
Travis.
For a supposed drug dealer, he didn't carry a lot of product on him. But what the hell did Andrew know about drug dealers? All he knew was that he needed something to get him through the next few days, and he counted on Travis's reputation to live up to its hype. After a thorough search of his body, Andrew found what he was looking for. It was in the inside pocket of Travis's jacket—a tiny resealable baggie of Road Rage. There were ten of the distinctive red pills. It was more than enough to get him to where he was going. At least, he hoped so.
He understood its popularity—and its habit-forming tendency—straight away. Not a half hour into his first dose, the effects had hit him. He felt kinetic and alive, sleep the furthest thing from his mind. Also present was an inexplicable sensation of invincibility as if bullets would simply bounce off his chest were he shot. It was a highly addictive state that left him unprepared for the cliff-dive crash that happened some hours later. It was like driving off a ledge. Fatigue and headaches, nausea and pain—all instantly occurred. Andrew couldn't consume another pill fast enough. But they kept him awake, which was the only thing that mattered.
For all that the pill aroused, there were some things it couldn't affect. Andrew's arm had lost sensation a day ago. Though he had stopped the bleeding, he was unable to move his fingers. He had rigged a sling using a belt from a deceased man, but his arm hung like dead weight and felt removed from him. That was okay. He was almost there.
Almost there.
Where he was going and why he was going there would defy explanation for anyone not privy to the complex reasoning grinding away in his fatigued brain. If Clarissa and the others knew he had opted for his current excursion over meeting them in Ashland, there would be more questions fired at him than he could address—and probably no small amount of hurt feelings and confusion. But this was a personal mission. It was something he had to do. His time in this world was drawing to a close, and he didn't want to spend his final hours deceiving people he cared about into believing that he might recover. The writing, as they say, was on the wall. He knew they would have moved mountains to try to help him, but that was the entire problem. Their efforts, time, and resources would have been wasted on him. He couldn't in good conscience allow that. Better that they remembered him as someone who fought to the death to defend the people he loved. In a way, he supposed that was exactly what would soon happen.
Andrew moved Inferno's handgun from the passenger seat to his lap then quickly placed his hand back on the steering wheel—downtown Pastora lay directly ahead. Familiar signs and landmarks drifted into view as he coasted along Main Street. Shops and stores he thought he would never see again passed by outside his window. Signs bearing street names he had forgotten stood tall on the corner of each passing block to remind him of their purpose.
Everything was right where it was supposed to be, but Pastora hadn't emerged from the Sound unscathed. Structural damage was significant. Windows were broken, doors kicked in. RE/MAX's closet-sized real estate branch and its neighbor, an artisan bakery that shared a wall with it, had burned to the ground. Abandoned cars littered the street, some of them carbon-blackened shells. Trash was everywhere. Pastora had suffered, but the devastation wasn't the most shocking part to Andrew.
He saw people.
Some sat on the curb and talked casually in private groups, while others appeared to be out for a stroll, their only concern seemingly to take in some air. A woman read a book on a park bench. Two boys skateboarded across Main onto Heritage Street. Andrew even saw a man walking a dog.
He didn't know why the sight of so many people enjoying simple pleasures shocked him, but it did. Had they made the assumption that the Sound was over, as others had, or had the citizens of Pastora fought to maintain civility from the onset? The former seemed more likely; Andrew wanted to believe the latter had prevailed.
He turned onto Third Street. Eyes regarded him suspiciously, but no one pointed a weapon at him, which was a welcome change. He was just a guy in a car. As he straightened out from the turn, though, he was reminded that time was the new enemy. His body shuddered. A flash of spasms raced up his leg into his chest and shot his eyes to bloodshot circles. His heart galloped. He had no intention of taking any more Rage—the drug had served its purpose—but his condition had little to do with the addictive pill. It was getting harder to ignore his deteriorating symptoms.
It's just sleep deprivation catching up with you, he thought. It wasn't the first lie he'd told himself since getting shot.
Aunt Mae's restaurant emerged on his right. Andrew guided the truck into an empty parking space and cut the engine. Except for the plywood sheeting that stood in for two-thirds of its front-facing windows, the building looked the same. The hand-painted logo over the door had escaped damage, and the pair of plate-glass windows that remained faced the most picturesque part of the neighborhood. Best of all, and to his surprise, it was open.
Andrew leaned over the steering wheel and peered inside. A waiter delivered a tray of plates to a table, the patrons for which Andrew couldn't see. With a sharp nod, the waiter turned toward the kitchen.
Andrew shook his head in disbelief. A grin formed on his lips, even though it hurt his face something fierce. He checked his bandage in the rearview mirror. He'd cleaned and kept the area where Inferno bit him covered, but it seeped continually. Even now the bandage was blotted with a milky red patch. Andrew knew he should replace it, but he didn't have the strength.
He shouldered open the door to the truck and climbed out. The ground tilted beneath his feet, and he had to clamp his eyes shut to ward off dizziness. The sensation didn't entirely pass, but it diminished enough so he could walk. It's getting worse. He set his sights on Aunt Mae's entrance and shambled inside.
There were fewer tables than he remembered. Of them, only three were occupied—the patrons from each one stared at him. Andrew was sure he looked a sight. With a bloody shoulder, his arm in a sling, and his pale and
sweaty face bandaged and oozing, he would have found it hard not to stare too.
The waiter approached him. He was a burly man with short, dark hair and a thick beard. Fading tattoos covered his forearms, and his bulging midsection indicated he was someone who hadn't gone without during the Sound's existence. Andrew met his uneasy gaze, as the waiter's eyes flitted over Andrew's questionable appearance. He anticipated an invitation to leave. Instead, the waiter's shoulders sagged, and he nodded.
“Well, I'd wager you've got a story to tell.”
Andrew regarded himself. “You don't know the half of it.”
The man leaned sideways and scrutinized him. “You all right?”
“Yeah,” Andrew said without conviction. “Just need to sit down.”
“Well,” the man began, “it just so happens a reservation was canceled and we have availability. Take your pick.” He gestured to the mostly empty room.
“How about that one?” Andrew said, indicating a table by the window. He barely had the strength to lift his arm to point at it.
“Fine choice. And, in my humble opinion, it's got one of the best views. Help yourself.”
The view was nice, but Andrew had only selected the table because of its proximity to him. He shuffled over to it and fell more than he sat in the chair.
“You good?” the man said. He reached out a hand to help but refrained from taking Andrew's arm.
Andrew exhaled and blinked slowly. “Yeah. Think so.”
The waiter didn't appear convinced, but he pretended to be. “So, what can I get you?”
Andrew looked past him into the dining room. There were no other servers, and in the part of the kitchen visible via a long, wide opening in the wall, which separated it from the dining room, a lone woman tended to something that smoked and sizzled. He suddenly became aware of the smell of bacon.
“Where's everyone else?”
“Everyone else?” the man asked. “You're looking at it. Just me and the missus.” Andrew frowned. The man read it. “This place was empty when we found it. Seemed a shame to let it just sit and rot, so once things cooled off a bit, we got her back to business. I'm more of a backyard chef myself, but my wife can whip up four-star meals from a can of beans and soda crackers. From what the locals tell me, this used to be a pretty popular place. You from around here? I don't believe I've seen you in here before.”