Life After (Book 2): The Void

by Bryan Way

  “What do you want?” I ask solemnly.

  “Leave us alone.”

  “Us?” Melody asks.

  Jake and I both turn to her, and then I turn to Jake, watching his lips separate in disheartening shock. “You thought… ugh…” Melody shakes her head, cracking a smile in disbelief before she walks past the observatory door to the main stairwell. “You two are perfect for each other… you’re both nuts.” She says softly from the landing.

  Jake and I stand quietly as she descends the stairs, but after a moment, I have to wonder if he hears the same thing I do: a hollow screeching noise that could have been mistaken for static has begun trending upward in pitch. After a moment, the screeching is replaced by the steady thumping of helicopter blades. “Thank god…” I exclaim, moments later finding myself staggering across the floor after having been pushed. I turn back to see Jake’s heaving silhouette. “Fuckin’ dick…” Jake lunges again and shoves me with both hands, making my first thought correct; I’d have to see Jake starting a fight to believe it.

  “What is your deal ?!”

  “You ruin everything for me…” Jake spits.

  “Have you lost your mind!?”

  He takes a swing at me. “Stop! You can’t even throw a punch, man!” The second one connects with just enough force to piss me off. “GOD DAMMIT!” I give him a warning shot, hitting his face hard enough to make contact. He recoils, covering his nose with both hands. “I’ve had it with people tryin’ to hit me! And you think I have anger issues?!”

  He turns and darts toward me. I’m not sure if he’s intending to throw me to the ground, but he’s made the critical error of assuming I’m going to stand still. I swing my left leg back, catch him with my left arm, and use his momentum to lock it around his neck. Before he can move, I snare his right arm with mine and clasp my fists together, and he ineffectually pounds at my hip until he passes out. I drop down to my knees and let his body slide off me, hearing the hammer affixed to his belt clink to the ground. As expected, he regains consciousness fast.

  Since he’s still got a bit of dizziness and disorientation to look forward to, I head for the step while the helicopter blades continue to whirr in the distance. I hear a sniff as I start down the stairs and ignore it. The sniff is followed by a sob, and in a moment, I can tell that Jake is crying. I take another step, but a thought stops me. I turn around and stand in the doorway.

  “Jake…”

  “Go away…” He sobs.

  “I don’t know about you… but I don’t want to do this every week. If you don’t tell me why you’re mad at me…”

  “You don’t care…”

  “Jake… I’m here.”

  I step to the side, lean against the wall, and slide myself to the floor. “You got everything…” He says finally, trying to keep himself together. I wait for more, but he continues sobbing.

  “I… I don’t know what you mean.” I reply.

  “Julia… I… I loved her. She was the only girl who was nice to me.”

  “I didn’t…”

  I consider continuing, but figure it’s more important for me to keep my mouth shut.

  “I moved here from Darien in 2001…”

  “Dairy-en?” I ask.

  “Connecticut… my mom and I… in sixth grade, Jules sat in on my art class during her study hall… the teacher, he… he put my stuff up in front of the class and just… tore it apart…” His tears return. “But she defended me… the color… the contrast… she said it was brave to do it my way instead of copying someone else… he never did it again. The band played at graduation… Pomp and Circumstance… we always played louder when a bandie went up… when I saw her… ugh, I couldn’t wait ‘til high school… then I show up to band camp and find out about you… I hated you.”

  “Did you even know me…?”

  “Does it matter? That night… Bandrome… I was following Jules.”

  “What about Kate?”

  He looks both disappointed and relieved that I remembered her name. Jake takes a long time to form his sentence, and all the while, the helicopter blades continue to thump in the background.

  “Have you ever had someone care more about you than you do about them?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was Kate.” He mutters, ashamed. “She asked me to Sadie Hawkins in eighth grade… I just… I had to say yes. She always wanted to do something… like… she was afraid if we didn’t go out on a Friday it was because I didn’t like her. I just… I could never get inside her head, you know? It was like…”

  “You were afraid of hurting her.” I offer.

  “No…”

  “It’s okay… I was afraid of breaking up with my third girlfriend… didn’t want to deal with it. I told my friends I felt like she’d threaten me with suicide or something… in reality, I just didn’t want to imagine her crying alone in her room.”

  “Yeah… yeah… can you imagine how much worse it is… when you just… abandon her?” He wipes his tears away. “I didn’t even see Kate… once I got inside… she was all I could think about. You know, I just… she didn’t end up crying in a room somewhere. She probably bled to death. The next day, I… you didn’t talk me out of going after her… I just realized… it was over. I feel like… I’m gonna take it to my grave. Even if we were in here… it never would’ve lasted. But now she’s dead… and that’s my fault.”

  “…you never know… maybe she found her parents.”

  “She didn’t.” Jake replies flatly.

  “How do you know?”

  “She’s in the pool.”

  My blood runs cold when he finishes that sentence.

  “Few weeks ago…” He continues somberly. “You were moving the bodies in from the back.”

  “…I’m sorry.”

  “You made a joke.”

  “Oh Jesus…” I sigh.

  “Yeah… ‘think we have a whole horn section in there?’”

  “Jake… I’m sorry.”

  “I know you didn’t mean anything.”

  I don’t want to water down my apologies by piling on more, so we sit in silence, listening to the helicopters hum in the distance.

  “So… why’d you come up here?” Jake asks.

  “Like I said… didn’t want the soldiers to hear.”

  “What are they gonna do?”

  “…remember when I brought up the Fermi paradox?”

  “I think I’m the only one besides you who knows what that is.” Jake shouts as the helicopter blades suddenly become louder.

  “Our space agencies don’t direct messages into the cosmos… we just listen. The truth is, we have no idea what the soldiers would do… we’ve got a good thing here. If we go with them, we don’t know.”

  He says something, but I can’t hear him over the Chinooks. We both look out the greenhouse to see the running lights cut through the sheen of starlit darkness, dimly illuminating the roof as one helicopter takes off toward the southeast, followed by the other. I consider asking Jake what he said, but when I turn to him, he’s already making his way toward the main stairwell. He turns back to flash a smile.

  “I had an idea…” Jake shouts over the noise. “We should each pick a song… something we’d want to play at our funerals…”

  “That’s… uh…”

  “Morbid? Maybe… I mean… we’re all gonna die, eventually… but if we think about it like that… I don’t know, it’s kind of… peaceful…”

  “Huh… why not? What’s yours?”

  “Deadsy. This Goodnight.”

  “Don’t know it.”

  “You will. Eventually.”

  He smiles again before slowly making his way down the steps. After a considerable pause, I open the greenhouse door, inviting the cold inside before stepping out. The helicopter blades continue to fade off as they flap against the southern winds toward what I assume is a government office in DC. I take a moment to observe the sky, an activity that becomes more enriching as the ligh
t pollution becomes less and less. The full moon bathes the rooftop in bluish light, its luminescence preventing me from locating the dense white band that signifies the Milky Way. The forecasted snow clouds are now just wisps in the sky.

  Inspired, I head down to the cafeteria, finding a celebrating and intoxicated trifecta of Anderson, Rich, and Mursak. They attempt to entice me with shots, but I rebuff them and continue on to the keep. Karen, Elena, Jimmy, Helen, and surprisingly Ally are all sleeping inside, so I move on yet again.

  When I’ve arrived at the tech lab, I hear the sound of feet clapping against the tiles. Waiting a few moments brings me face to face with Melody as she jogs around the interior of the school. After exchanging pleasantries, I invite her up to the pinnacle for my Christmas present, attempting to sweeten the pot by telling her that she’ll be the first recipient. She reluctantly agrees, so I ask her to meet me at approximately 8:00pm, a span that should give me plenty of time to make my arrangements. She arrives around 8:15, wearing a winter coat and jeans.

  “Jesus it’s cold…” She starts.

  “I know… but it’s the only place I can give it you.”

  “…okay…?”

  “Follow me.”

  I open the observatory door and motion for her to join me inside. We walk along the exterior shell until we arrive at the lens of the massive telescope, which is focused above the tree line to the south. I peek through the viewfinder to make sure I’m still on target, and then yield the lens to Melody. “Take a look.” I say. She sidles herself up to the eyepiece and stares for about fifteen seconds.

  “What am I looking at?” She asks.

  “You see the pale blue circle?”

  “Yeah, that’s like, all I see…”

  “You’re looking at Uranus.”

  She snickers, a reaction I had anticipated. “Go ahead, get it out of your system.” She glances over to see me smiling before returning her gaze to the eyepiece. Her smile slowly recedes. “So what?” She says finally, looking at me. I hoped she would.

  “That’s our seventh planet… between where we’re standing and what you just saw, there are two billion miles and three planets… Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. It’s about fourteen times larger than us… if the Earth were that size, Pennsylvania would be bigger than all of our oceans combined. 365 days to us is 84 years to them.”

  “Them?” She asks.

  “I know… who cares, right? If Jupiter or Saturn were on the horizon I would have shown you them… Uranus is just a giant, inert ball of ice and gas. But our species has had thousands of years on this planet… and two months ago, everything changed. But not for Uranus. It’s the same as it was when an asteroid finished off the dinosaurs millions of years ago. And millions of years after humanity is gone, Uranus will still look the same. Imagine… descending through those clouds… there’s no true surface… just a never-ending gaseous ice age… so alien it’s hard to imagine. No matter how chaotic things become here… everything’s fine on Uranus… Jupiter, Neptune, Mars, Venus…”

  She looks through the eyepiece again and smiles.

  “There’s an entire universe out there… it exists without us, in spite of us… and you’re just seeing one tiny glimpse.”

  “Why are you showing me this?” She asks out of brilliant curiosity.

  “Because we have problems… but this is our context. Septillions of stars. Planets we’ll never see. A massive, living universe… I don’t believe in god… but if you want to be sure there’s something out there greater than us… look through that lens.”

  She purses her lips to restrain a smile, and then lets out a contented sigh, pulling away from the lens to hug me.

  “Melody… I’m sorry.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You know…” She starts, pulling away. “Sorry was never good enough for me.”

  I’m aghast. After a sincere apology, how could someone respond like that?

  “Sorry’s just a word.” She continues. “It’s not easy to say it and mean it… but I need more. I want you to tell me something… something you don’t want to. It’s like… penance, you know?”

  “I, uh… uh, okay…?”

  “When you were fighting with Ava… in the greenhouse… she called you a cheater.”

  I take a long, deep breath and sigh.

  “Okay. I told you… Jules and I had a rough patch…?”

  “Yeah.”

  “One day… she just stopped talking to me. When someone doesn’t say a word, you marvel at your ability to fill the gap with possibilities. I tried… shamelessly… to get her to tell me what was wrong. The best I could get was… brief interpretive phrases that meant nothing to me. I went to New Jersey with my friends, thinking I could forget about it… and met someone. I never had a problem telling girls I was taken before, but this time I just… lied. I lied. We made out… nothing really happened, but we ended up falling asleep naked.”

  “What a bitch.” Melody utters.

  “What?”

  “Julia… not talking to you…”

  “I couldn’t say anything to her after that…” I interrupt. “It was like… she sensed my silence meant something… it was the first time she talked about wanting to see me. So when I did, I told her. And she told Ava.”

  “Jesus…”

  “What I didn’t know was that Ava tried to make Jules choose between us. I got the whole story when Julia came back, but Ava never got over it…”

  “That’s a shitty thing to do.” Melody replies.

  “I know, I was… jilted, but that doesn’t excuse…”

  “Not you, Julia. I’d never do that.”

  “…do you really think… I mean… what you called me…”

  “No…” Melody says quickly. “I was angry. And you were being an asshole. Sorry about that.”

  “Well… quid pro quo.”

  “What?”

  “I told you something, now you tell me something.”

  “Okay, uh… the same thing happened to me.”

  “…what?”

  “I was going out with a guy… John Alescio? He was nice, you know… not my type, I guess… and I was just… I don’t know. I told him we were done… but I did it because my friends made fun of me. I think… my best friend Brenda was doing what Ava did… just… making me think he was a pussy. I guess… I never got over it. And I was… afraid to ask him back out… it was a rough year.”

  I smile at her candor.

  “I never won an award.” I start.

  “…what?”

  “I showed you that newspaper article… from my wallet?”

  “Oh yeah…”

  “I never won any award. I made it up so they’d write about me. I thought I deserved it… I was arguing that the undead would be good for society… all our… pretensions removed… that the apocalypse is a… cleansing event that gets us closer to appreciating being alive.”

  “You ever tell anyone that?”

  “Never.”

  She smiles back.

  “You know, I’m still pissed at you.”

  “Okay.” I reply.

  “…good talk.”

  She gets up with zero fanfare and heads for the door. “Melody…” She stops, turning back to face me. “We might not have done Christmas if it wasn’t your idea… why’d you push it?” She looks down, thinking for a moment. “Holidays give us something to look forward to.” As I nod, she smirks and heads out of the observatory. I check the lens again as I hear the door shutting at the bottom of the stairs, making sure the telescope is in alignment so I can keep Uranus in sight for as long as possible. I check my watch: 9:04.

  It occurs to me that I told Anderson I would take the security night shift, so I head down to the security office, finding it empty. Looking at the monitors isn’t even remotely interesting after about two minutes, which makes me wonder if Helen brings a book when she’s on guard duty. I walk to 218 and hunt around in the dark until I fi
nd a magazine, then take it back to the office and start reading while I pretend to pay attention to the monitors, passively observing as the road becomes coated with a thin layer of snow.

  “Jeff…” I wake up suddenly when I hear Helen’s voice behind me. It’s incredible to imagine this chair being comfortable enough to catch anyone in a nap, but with the total lack of stimuli, it’s clearly not impossible.

  “Jesus, sorry…”

  “It happens…” She replies. “I can take over if you want.”

  “Yeah, sure… I should be on watch anyway…”

  “Yeah…”

  In spite of my apology, we’re not in a place where conversation is going to be fun for either us. After taking a moment to convince myself of my consciousness, I check my watch again. It’s close to midnight, and the snow continues to pile up while nothing continues to happen in the streets. I relinquish the chair and head out the door, stopping in my room to put on a flannel shirt and turn on my cell phone before staggering to the cafeteria in serious need of caffeine. I hear music on my way down, easily identified as Radiohead’s OK Computer. Before I can get through the door I observe Melody jogging down the hall toward the main entrance, her ponytail bouncing with each step.

  Much to my surprise, both Anderson and Mursak are still drinking, the former becoming red-faced and sweaty in his celebration of our cancelled exodus. Rich joins them as I walk in, ripping open a bag of potato chips before he sits down. I can’t mask a smile as I make my way into the kitchen to get myself some Earl Grey and find a small package of chocolate chip cookies for a perfect snack. Feeling strangely antisocial, I eat in the kitchen as I listen to Anderson and Mursak fondly recall stories from our past. When I sense that they have worn themselves out on reminiscing, I close in on their hopelessly inebriated repartee.