The Ending is Everything

by Aaron M. Carpenter

  “We need to take the jug off as quickly as possible, so we don’t spill water everywhere,” I said.

  “Why don’t we just lay the whole thing on its side, then take it off?” he said.

  We lowered the entire dispenser down, with care not to let the jug dislodge from the opening at the top. Once it was on the floor, we lifted the jug from the dispenser not spilling a single drop. With a look at Zero, we both smiled. That was easy.

  “Load the dispenser into the truck,” I said, as I brought the dolly over. “And I will try and find the break room and see if we can get some foil, saran wrap or anything to cover the top of the jug and hopefully some more of these things.” Zero nodded, and I went exploring.

  I found four more water dispenser’s throughout the building. The breakroom had the newer style, which was no use to us. The other three I found in various conference rooms with varying amounts of water. I also found, in a maintenance closet, two, untouched three-gallon jugs of water. Again, I thanked the Powers That Be. It took about fifteen minutes to get all the jugs into the truck. The hardest part was loading them onto the truck. In total, in that one office, we took six jugs of water, along with two dispensers.

  Zero asked about the second dispenser, “Why do we need another one?” I told him I would explain later, once we got back to my place.

  At a dentist office, we tried the door, with no such luck. I was looking at the hinges on the door when Zero grabbed a sledgehammer from the back of his truck. I saw him at the last minute as he raised it over his head to smash the glass to pieces.

  “Wait,” I yelled. He pulled back his swing at the last moment, missing the glass door by inches.

  He gave me a cross-eyed look. “What? What’s the difference?”

  “It’s one thing if things ever go back to normal, which still may happen, and finding their water stolen. It’s another to come back and find their front door smashed to bits.”

  “Why?”

  “One may spark an investigation, the other probably won’t.” That poor reasoning seemed to satisfy him momentarily. “Let’s check the other offices for open doors, then we can come back here, and you can smash at will,” I said, and a big grin spread across his face.

  We found another office with an unlocked door and two more jugs of water. Bringing the total to eight.

  “How many of these things do we need?” Zero asked.

  “As many as we can fit in your truck.” Which looked to be able to accept three or four more in the bed. We had moved all of Zero’s work equipment and the supplies we procured from Drew’s house into the cab and front passenger seat. I would take the return journey sitting in the back with our confiscated liquid passengers.

  Back in front of the dentist office, Zero had his sledgehammer high above his head waiting for the go-ahead. I nodded. With one fast swoosh, the sledgehammer struck the door above the door handle. A deafening sound echoed across the pavement. I, on instinct, looked around. No movement. No light. Zero had managed to create a glass spider web, about twelve inches in diameter just above the handle. He raised the sledgehammer again, with a big smile plastered on his face, like a madman playing the strongman game at a carnival. This time the door had no chance as it instantly shattered. Zero’s momentum almost sent him right into the falling glass shards, but he caught himself at the last minute and fell backward, landing on his backside.

  Zero sat on the sidewalk, motionless, then looked up at me with a bemused, ‘did I do that?’, smile and laughed. Sometimes there was nothing else to do but laugh. Neither of us were traditional thieves. Yet, here we were.

  Zero picked himself up, and we entered the dentist office, glass crackling under our feet. The waiting room had another water dispenser. We also found one in the small employees break room, but that one was of no use. Another jug was found in another utility room, that we had to persuade open. Two more to the count. I used a rubber band and saran wrap to cover the tops of the jugs, and we loaded them on the truck. Zero was about to leave when I went back into the dental office. I was not looking for more water jugs. When Zero asked, what I was looking for, I responded: Drugs.

  In one of the back offices, we found a closet with all types of drugs. Mainly topical anesthesia and a variety of mouthwash. But, we grabbed all the pain medication we could in a plastic trash bag.

  “We could get high as hell on some of this shit,” Zero remarked. Yes, we could.

  Back at the truck, we were ready to leave. I sat in the bed with my back to the cab and my knees to my chest. “Ready whenever you are,” I said.

  Zero opened the little window that separated the bed from the cab and handed me a bottle of Jack Daniels.

  “I am now,” he said.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “In one of the desk at the real estate office.”

  Off in the distance we heard multiple, loud, popping sounds, echoing from all directions, like a spontaneous fourth of July celebration

  “What the hell is that?” Zero asked. All around us the lights sparked to life. Street lamps, lights in offices and then came a loud ringing, like a car alarm, except it wasn’t coming from a car. It was coming from the dentist office.

  “We better go,” I said. Zero nodded, and we headed out.

  CHAPTER SIX

  11/11/2024

  Seated in the bed of Zero’s truck, I watched the familiar places, streets, and intersections, hurry past, and I was consumed with an immense feeling of nostalgia, for this town I called ‘home.’ With the electricity now coursing through its arteries, the city began returning to life, awakening from a deep slumber.

  I was born in Rancho Cucamonga at the closing of the previous century. When I was a kid, the city had already boomed to a population of over one hundred and sixty thousand. My dad used to tell me that when he was a kid, there were huge trees that lined the main boulevard, of the grapevines and orange groves and how he used to walk three miles to school. I am sure that last part was made up, but as a kid, I used to imagine walking to school and having an adventure on the way, like in the movie, Stand By Me. I only took the bus.

  My parents lived in a mobile home (trailer) park when they brought me home from the hospital. They moved in when my grandparents moved out the year before and into the house where I currently reside. A passing of the residential torch, so to speak. Maybe three generations from now my descendants will be living in a huge house at the top of the hill?

  The mobile home park, or trailer park, was not as bad as others, who lived outside the park, made it out to be. Of course, I was a kid, and may not have been aware of some of the unsavory aspects. To me, it was a huge playground. A playing field that just expanded as I got older. Up until I was five I could only play on the street directly in front of the house. From five to eight, I could play on the road above and so on and so on until I had full reign of the whole park.

  My parents would let me do whatever I wanted as long as I was home on time, which depended on the day. I suppose, we were a new generation of latchkey kids. Too poor to have the modern leashes, like cell phones, tablets, and computers. The computer was for homework or for my mom to play solitaire on, that was it. We were not allowed on the internet unless one of my parents was present. “Too many perverts,” my mom used to say. I don’t think Ethan had access to the internet until his thirteenth birthday.

  I spent most of my time outside, especially at Ethan’s. Ethan’s mom was never home, and his dad left when he was five. Not before showing him Star Wars, so at least he had that. While Ethan’s mom was never home, always working a shitty waitressing job, we had the run of the place. We would play video games, watch movies we had no business watching and enjoyed the freedom of no parents. But, the best thing about Ethan’s, besides the freedom, were the snacks. The cupboards were always full of a variety of Hostess products. Cupcakes. Twinkies. Swiss Rolls. Every sugary, fantastic product you could think of. All of which were absent from my house. My parents were far too practical to buy
such snacks. It was kid heaven.

  When I was home, my dad was absent until after seven, when he would arrive home from his soul-sucking office job in a bad mood. Dinner was at seven-thirty. We ate, then watched some crappy TV for an hour and then went to bed. It was like this for most of my childhood. I would come home from school, drop my backpack off, and out I went.

  I haven’t mentioned my older brother, William. That’s probably because he wasn’t a part of my life when I was growing up. His main contribution to my life was to introduce me to the wonderful world of Punk Rock. He was five years older than me, was never home and if he was, he was in his room or should I say, our room. But, I never stayed in the room, except to go to sleep. It was HIS room, and I was just a tenant. When he left, after high school, I saw him only at Christmas. He was one of those dreamers. The guy who always had big plans and ideas, but they never quite worked out, because he never put in the work to achieve his goals. He drifted from place to place. He lived in Denver, for some time. Then Salt Lake City. Now? I believe he is in Oregon somewhere. We lost touch many years ago.

  In my early teens, before high school, social media, and personal phones shattered everyone’s private life. While the rest of my classmates all had mobile phones, always texting and commenting on whatever it was they were commenting on, Ethan and I were out of the loop. Even when I brought up the fact that my parents could always get a hold of me and locate me if I had a phone. My mom just said, “Are you gonna be in a place where I don’t know where you are?” “No. But everyone else has one,” I replied with purpose. “If everyone else has a phone, then just borrow one of theirs if you need me.” My mom must’ve weighed the pros and cons of letting her twelve-year-old son have a phone and decided the cons were higher than the pros. Practical. Ethan never had a cell phone, because his mom couldn’t afford one for him.

  Both my parents were rational and practical. They always had an excessive amount of food storage, just in case. This would be an important trait, when they passed this, practicality, down to me. They never lived outside their means. While my dad made decent money at his office job, enough, I thought, to buy us a ‘real’ house, we still lived as though we were never financially stable. Christmas, our birthdays and Back To School, were the only times we received gifts or new clothes. If we went to the mall for its thirty-screen movie theater, we never went inside the mall. And I could never con my mom to buy me a video game, a movie, or a pair of sneakers, just because we were nearby and I wanted one. No matter how much I begged and cried. The money went into savings and I.R.A’s, not for the latest video game or candy at the grocery store. Practical and rational.

  As we approached middle school, another member had joined our little clique, Drew. He lived at the top of the mobile home park, while Ethan and I lived at the bottom, right along the main avenue. Drew lived in the enviable, triple-wide (a double-wide with an add-on), mobile home. It was just Drew and his mom, but she was more of an older sister than a mom. They had things like Netflix and a TV in every room. I watched some of the classic horror films in Drew’s bedroom, during sleepover’s. Drew loved his horror movies. He had an Apple phone and kept us in the loop, so we weren’t too big of outcasts when we went to high school.

  My high school was not the hell it was made out to be. It just was. The jocks didn’t terrorize the nerds, the potheads were not pushers, and the band was not a bunch of nerds with terrible acne. It was just kids. I made some new friends, including the one and only Zero. But, besides doing homework and having a few bad teachers, to me it was boring, tedious, monotonous and every other synonym for excessive boredom. My teachers would say I under-achieved. I remember watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with my mother (her favorite show) and its metaphor of high school being hell and thought that’s nothing like my school. No vampires or demons here. Not that I was an expert on what everyone’s experience was like at my school. I am sure some students had a terrible time. But, to me, it was a big bag of nothing.

  I didn’t play sports. The only team sport I ever played was roller hockey, and that was because Zero conned all of us into playing. My mom approved and bought used hockey equipment because it would keep me active. Zero, while hanging out with us, was one of the “rich” kids. He lived closer to the mountains, which in Rancho is how one deciphers who has money and who doesn’t. I think he wanted us to play so he could use the mobile home parks empty tennis courts as a hockey rink. And play we did. It was a lot of fun. It probably looked like slow motion to someone who played more seriously. But to us, it was the fastest game, on a mobile home parks unused tennis court, in the world.

  At sixteen my parents divorced. They calmly came into my room one night and said my dad was leaving. Moving to Ohio, for a job opportunity that he couldn’t pass up. My mom didn’t want to move out of Southern California, so we stayed. I was calmly told, dad would keep in touch and send money. A lot more money than he was making now. That meant more money for the household. That was good. A few weeks later he was gone. No muss. No fuss. Practical and rational. I never saw him alive again.

  Three years later my grandparents died a few months apart. I was at Cal State Santa Barbara, and my mom moved into their house and sold the mobile home. Two years after that, my mom was diagnosed with skin cancer and died three months later. Only William showed up at the funeral, my dad was unable to make it. Two weeks after that, Kaitlyn and I broke up. Two weeks after that, I joined the Army. Seven months ago, after three years in the Army, I was discharged and moved into my grandparent’s little house, where, after a quick drive home and the thoughts of my life up to this point flashing before my eyes, Zero and I pulled into the driveway, with our delivery of survival gear.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  11/11/2024

  Have you ever been hungover, with a travel mug of coffee in your hand as you prepare yourself for the daily grind, gone out to your car, turned the key, and was greeted with a loud blast of music, and immediately you are awake and aware? That’s what it was like when I opened the door and entered my home.

  “What took you guys so long?”

  “What’d you bring?”

  “What’s going on out there?”

  “Where’s my blanket?” said Jane, the six-year-old.

  As we walked in, everyone turned to us and began talking at once. Not only was it loud, but it was also bright. Just because the electricity was on, did not mean we needed to have all the lights turned on. At least, I will not have to worry about the electric bill.

  I had to raise my hand to stop all the questioning. “Give us a sec. I will try and answer your questions later, but first, we need to unload the truck.” As I spoke, I noticed some new arrivals. Jenna stood in the kitchen talking to Kaitlyn. Which, at first, took me a few seconds to process. Also present were Drew, Ethan, and someone, a young man, I had never seen before, having an animated conversation.

  While we unloaded the truck, I learned that the stranger was, in fact, Jenna’s boyfriend. He looked like Shia Lebouf with a Fu Manchu beard, short, with retro glasses and the coordination of a newborn deer. He almost dropped two of the water jugs.

  The water jugs were placed in the tiny dining room area, creating a small walkway to the kitchen. All the canned goods were scattered in boxes throughout the living room and kitchen, along with the camping gear. With, now, ten people in the house, it was beginning to feel crowded.

  Once everything was inside, I went to the front of the room and raised my hand. Everyone immediately turned to me and went silent, even the children seemed to view me as someone important, as they stood clinging on to their parent’s legs, eyes wide with curious trepidation.

  “Look, I know everyone has questions, and I gotta be honest. I doubt I have the answers. But, the first thing we need to establish right now is this...” I paused, trying to locate the right way to say what I thought I needed to say. “If you can. If you have family, that you can go to. I would say. Go now.” I realized the absurdity of what I was saying, as I wa
s saying it. If they had a family to go to, they probably would have. No one responded. No one even blinked. “Ok. If you are going to stay here. We need to set up some... rules. Not rules. But guidelines. Already the Santa Ana winds have stopped and shortly the ocean breeze will kick in. When that happens, and it will probably be tomorrow morning at the latest. We need to be inside. As secure as possible. Will it be a hundred percent secure? No.”

  “Secure from what?” a voice I didn’t recognize asked.

  “Aaron, is it?” I asked. He nodded. “We need to be inside and secure from the radiation. Each hour that passes the better it gets. So, after a week or so, we should be okay. But, I’m not an expert.”

  “Why don’t we just get out of dodge now?” Ethan asked, and I wondered if we should tell him we broke into his apartment.

  “It’s too late. The freeways and roads out of town will be backed up for miles and miles,” Drew replied. “We tried, but it was already backed up this morning.”

  “Right,” I continued. “And you think it’s bad in traffic on a regular Monday evening. It’s gonna be far worse and dangerous when people fear their life is on the line.” I paused for a response. None came. “So, we need to hole up here and wait.” Again, I waited for more questions. None came. So, I asked a question myself. “How long? I would say two to three weeks. Then we can see about getting out of town. While the radiation won’t kill us immediately like it would if we were closer to the blast site. It probably isn’t safe to stay here permanently.” I again paused. Nothing. They seemed to be agreeing or at least understanding what I was saying. “I am not saying someone couldn’t stay here longer or that it isn’t safe here. We are far enough away that as long as we stay inside, we should be good. But, my plan is after three weeks. Kaitlyn and I will leave and head to Utah.”