In those eleven silent months before Lucy, Vick did anything she could think of to pass the time — worked on the house, researched, even worked out. She’d wrestled exercise equipment up the front walk. A stationary bike, a treadmill that, thank God, folded up and rolled on casters set into the base. She put them by the bay windows in the room she used as her study. Some days, when the voices of the past screamed in her head, she’d ride or walk — or run — for miles and miles and miles, her iPod pumping music into her ears.
Music. Sometimes the music hurt her most of all, but to not have it in her life in some way would have been another form of death.
But for all her evasions, Vick never reached the place where the past left her alone. It haunted her every waking and sleeping moment. She’d just become phenomenally adept at ignoring it — until the moments came when she couldn’t.
When the discordant notes swelled to a crescendo in her head and skittered screeching into cacophony, she fled as far as the confines of her life would let her go. On those nights, she descended into the farthest, blackest corner of the basement. There, alone, curled in a ball, she held herself until she could clamp it all down again.
As for a larger “plan?” She simply intended to go on doing what she was doing until she didn’t anymore. She didn’t, however, intend to ever come back as one of them. She carried a small personal explosive device at all times. A rather clever little thing encased in an Altoid tin. Lucy had one, too. She called them their DIY Unibomber kits. Snap off the locking clip. Wait 15 seconds. And take the bastards killing you straight to hell on your way out the door.
And if there was something . . . else . . . after that, so be it. But this life was what she had to work with right here, right now. At the lowest moment of it all, some benevolence left in the Universe sent her a friend. So, in part, Vick realized she now went on living for Lucy as much as for herself. The only “next” either one of them worried about was the coming moment.
Or at least they had until that day in the bank.
For several weeks, they’d both been troubled by the vague sense that something was coming. For the most part, they’d managed to minimize the role of the dead in their lives to the status of “nuisance,” because they took no risks and were always aware. Complacency was the real monster that lurked in Vick’s mind, the one she fought in herself and wouldn’t allow in Lucy.
So that day in the bank, she put down the shuffling man in the once pin-striped suit the way she would have any of them. She’d long since outfitted her automatic with a silencer. But in a completely silent world, the gun still made too much noise. When she knew she was going to be forced to shoot the man, she was already planning their rapid exit from the area. The bullet she put between his eyes was delivered on auto pilot.
And then he took another step.
And then he recognized her.
Vick didn’t tell Lucy that she had actually known that man. Not well. And she wasn’t a hundred percent sure until she’d approached the body for a closer look and saw the lapel pin. The one she’d looked at a hundred times at that very bank when she deposited her checks. He’d been the teller she always used. What was his name? Joe? Jack? John? Anyway. She knew the lapel pin. A tiny Masonic square and compass with a diamond in the center.
She also knew that before she put the second bullet between Joe/Jack/John’s eyes, he had recognized her, too. The fact of that glimmer of cognition was something she didn’t know how to process. The dead didn’t recognize you. They weren’t people anymore. Or were they?
When that thought entered Vick’s mind, everything about their situation changed.
To be continued . . .
About The Fermata Post-Apocalyptic
Survival Series
The Fermata Series is a collection of novellas
by Juliette Harper, the author
of The Lockwood Legacy novels,
the Selby Jensen Paranormal Mysteries,
the Study Club Mysteries,
and the Before Series short-story romances.
Want to know more about author Juliette Harper
and all of her projects?
Visit Juliette Harper’s home on the web
at www.julietteharper.com
Other books by Juliette Harper:
The Lockwood Legacy
Langston’s Daughters
Baxter’s Draw
Alice’s Portrait
Selby Jensen Paranormal Mysteries
Descendants of the Rose
The Study Club Mysteries
You Can’t Get Blood Out of Shag Carpet
The Before Series
Before Marriage
Fermata: The Winter
A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series
By Juliette Harper
Copyright © 2015, Juliette Harper.
Skye House Publishing
License Notes
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Fermata: The Winter: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series (The Fermata Series: Four Post-Apocalyptic Novellas Book 1) Page 6