by Skylar Finn
At first, I thought they wouldn’t return. But then it came: three resounding knocks on the door. Thud, thud, thud. I flinched.
“I’ll go,” said Ethan. I got up and went with him.
When I peered through the peephole, I was surprised to see that this time Dexter was alone. I thought he would come back with his full posse, guns blazing. He stood in the center of the porch, waiting patiently. I wondered if it was a trick or a gambit of some kind.
“What have you decided?” he shouted through the door. “You folks gonna make this easy on yourself? Or are we gonna have to do it the hard way?”
“We’re going to have to decline your offer,” Ethan called through the door. “Additionally, I’m going to have to insist that you and your people never return to our home. Or you will face the consequences of your actions, and you will not walk away.”
Dexter laughed. His gold teeth glinted. Even though it was night, he still wore sunglasses.
“Oh, is that a fact?” he asked.
“It’s a fact,” Ethan stated.
“Well, suit yourself, compadre. Don’t ever say old Dexter didn’t give you all a chance to save yourselves, which you politely and respectfully declined. I understand your reasons, but I can assure you: you’re making a mistake.”
“This is our final decision,” said Ethan firmly.
“Well, all right, then,” said Dexter, sounding suspiciously amicable at not getting what he wanted. “But rest assured, you’ll be sorry.”
“I guess that’s just a risk we’ll have to take,” said Ethan.
“Shame,” said Dexter. I watched as he backed up, descending the stairs. “You sound like nice folks. Hate to have to kill such kind, polite people.”
As he retreated and disappeared into the night, I watched the machine gun slung over his back. I turned to Ethan urgently.
“Ethan,” I said. “You know they’ll be back.”
“I know,” he said, looking at me seriously. He took my hand. “But when they do, we’ll be ready.”
13
The first thing we did was install a lock inside the closet door of the bedroom so that Grace could lock herself in if Dexter and his gang returned. Or, more likely: when they returned.
We had a plan: if and when that happened, whoever was on watch on the rooftop would sound the alarm. We had a second air horn in addition to the one attached to the trip wire on the porch, and the lookout would blow the horn three times and descend the ladder.
I would cover the back door, Ethan would cover the front, and Peterman would cover the windows. We determined we would shoot anyone on sight who tried to breach the house, which we worked on, in the meantime, to make it as impenetrable as possible.
“I hope we’re making the right decision,” said Peterman, nailing a fresh board over the front window. “I can’t stop thinking how easy it would be for us to just get in the Jeep and drive away.”
“How long would it take before we would encounter another group just like theirs?” I asked. “Even if we survived the attack, turned around, and came back, Dexter and his gang will have taken everything: the food, our water, Clover. They might take this place over or burn it down. I don’t think anyone’s tried to defend themselves yet against them, or stand up to them. We might be the first. Maybe they’re not prepared.”
We scheduled a round-the-clock watch from the rooftop. We no longer slept in separate rooms, but in the living room, on two couches and the floor. Safety in numbers, Ethan said. We slept with our guns at our side. We lined the front porch with more barbed wire entanglements. Ethan added more stakes to the stake pit.
In the morning, Ethan liked to station Grace as lookout on the roof to keep her as inaccessible as possible, though he confessed to me that he was certain they’d return under cover of night. Grace had the best eyes of any of us, so her station as lookout therefore served a dual purpose.
Ethan lamented the fact that we had no sniper rifle or night vision goggles. “I’d love to just sit on the roof and pick them all off the second they set foot onto this property,” he said wistfully.
I went up to the roof to check on Grace. I used the ladder we had propped up against the side of the wood pile. She was motionless in the red camp chair, beneath the bright blue umbrella we placed on the roof to shield her from the sun. The binoculars were glued to her face.
“Need a break?” I asked. I took a bottle of water from the pocket of my cargo pants and added it to the small stockpile next to her chair: Gatorade, Goldfish, and several packs of those horrible crackers that were filled with either fake cheese or fake peanut butter.
“No,” she said promptly, continuing to scan the horizon.
“It’s okay if you want to switch off early and get out of the heat,” I prodded her gently. I was worried she had entered a state of hypervigilance in order to please Ethan.
She shook her head, lowering the binoculars. “I enjoy it,” she said, startling me as usual with her typical preternatural intelligence. “I find it meditative.”
“Okay,” I said respectfully. “I’ll leave you to it.”
“Please do.” She raised the binoculars back to her face and I hid a smile. I started to descend the ladder, then paused. I popped my head back up just above the edge of the roof.
“Do you have your inhaler?” I asked.
“I have it,” she called back in a bored tone. She reached into her pocket and pulled it out, waving it around for my approval.
“Sunblock?”
“Yes.”
Satisfied, I descended the ladder. Ethan and Peterman were resting in the shade of the porch, on the front steps a few feet away from the barbed wire. Peterman’s face was burned red and peeling from the Texas sun. Ethan massaged his leg absently.
“Do you need a painkiller?” asked Peterman, noticing.
“I’m fine,” he said dismissively. “They make me cloudy; sluggish. We all need to be alert.”
Peterman sighed. “Your dedication is admirable.”
Ethan glanced at him. “I don’t have a choice.”
At night, the fire crackled in the hearth. Night was always the most nerve-wracking time: a time filled by agonized waiting and electrified anticipation. We remained tense until the first glimmers of sunlight appeared over the horizon, granting a temporary respite of relief--relief that we’d survived another night; relief that we didn’t have to fight (yet). Regardless of who was on watch, we all slept badly, causing us to be fatigued and slow-moving during the day in the heat.
It was in this state that we languished, exactly one week to the day after Dexter’s midnight confrontation. We’d ceased target practice in order to conserve our ammunition. We’d reinforced every door, window, and wall. Peterman and I sat on the porch in silence, gazing out over the silent ranch. I wondered if it was the calm before the storm.
“I wish they’d just get it over with,” said Peterman bitterly, seeming to read my thoughts.
“Do you?” Ethan glanced up at him.
“Well, no,” admitted Peterman. “I just meant that it’s torture, anticipating the inevitable.”
Ethan looked back out over the yard. “When they do come, you’ll remember this time as paradise.”
An intensity had come over him in the last week. It rendered him, at times, unrecognizable to me. Since the EMP, I’d began to understand that there was a very harsh side to Ethan, a side he’d long concealed. He’d had a number of lives before he met me: his life with Sharon, and his life at the compound. In his most recent life, within our safe, suburban surroundings, he played the role of a pleasant, down-to-earth TV-dad: the eccentric neighborhood writer, lecturing neighbors on their lack of preparedness in the event of home invasions.
I was glad for it, of course; had I still been with my ex-husband, I’d probably already be dead. Either because we’d waited too long to flee the city, or because we’d have killed each other long before the EMP. But still, it gave me pause. It was odd to think I had known him for five
years and never known this side of him existed to the degree that it did.
Here, he performed each task with a cold, methodical precision. Whether he was sharpening sticks for the pit or assessing our inventory, it was clear that he’d done it so many times before that it was second-nature to him. Even though I’d never once seen him do any of it.
That wasn’t entirely true: I did have some inkling, as the result of the time I’d woken up in the dead of the night only to find that Ethan’s side of the bed was empty. He wasn’t in the bathroom and I thought that maybe he’d gotten up to get a class of water. I felt uneasy for some reason I couldn’t fully explain to myself: I’d had strange dreams that dissipated the moment I woke up, dreams which were already receding into the ether of my unconscious mind.
I thought I would brew a pot of herbal tea to calm down and help me fall back asleep. Maybe if Ethan was unable to sleep, we could keep each other company.
Ethan was downstairs, but he wasn’t in the kitchen. He was staring out the back door, across the patio, over the lawn. His eyes were fixed at some point in the distance and he was still.
“Ethan?” I said, uncertainly. He didn’t turn around or otherwise react to the sound of my voice. Instead, he slid the door back to the patio and went outside without putting on shoes or closing the door behind him.
I knew just as well as anyone not to wake a sleepwalker. He could have become disoriented and tried to attack me, before his brain fully awakened and recognized that it was me and not some outside threat or intruder. But I was concerned he’d trip over the sprinkler head or otherwise injure himself, so I followed him outside, across the backyard. He disappeared into the toolshed and a moment later, the light clicked on. I eased the door open.
He was at his workbench, meticulously arranging a series of bullets in front of him. His mouth moved as he counted under his breath, straightening each row until it was perfect and even before going on to the next row. I watched him, puzzled. I couldn’t figure out how he could see and count if he was asleep.
“Ethan?” I said uncertainly.
He glanced up, surprised to see me in the door. He’d been awake all along.
“Where did you come from?” He went back to arranging the bullets. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I followed you.” I went into the shed and sat down on the bench next to him. “What are you doing?”
He paused momentarily, staring down at the rows and rows he’d arranged in front of him.
“I feel like there’s not enough,” he said contemplatively. Then he went back to counting.
“That seems like a lot,” I said cautiously. “Why don’t you feel like you have enough?” He didn’t answer. “Are you coming back to bed?” I asked after another minute. It was cold in the shed and I was only wearing the thin t-shirt I slept in. In spite of his shoeless state, he seemed not to feel the cold.
He remained silent awhile longer, until he got to the end of his current row.
“I’ll be back eventually,” he said finally, without looking up. I got up and went inside.
I went back to bed, disturbed. I didn’t make my tea and while I turned out the light as soon as I got back upstairs, I laid awake in bed for a long time, staring at the ceiling. Though it was hours before I fell back asleep, he never came back to bed.
14
Over the coming days, we fell into a routine, however uneasy. Days turned to weeks. We became less tense, less fraught. It seemed almost easy to believe that Dexter might not return. Easy, and even reasonable. Why would he? They’d gotten everything they possibly could from the surrounding properties, and it wasn’t like any of them were going to magically restock and replenish themselves with no one there. Perhaps they were like locusts: they arrived, consumed all the natural resources of an area, and then migrated elsewhere. There was nothing here for them, nothing easily attained. Nothing but a few stubborn holdouts who would put up a fight.
It wasn’t that we let our guard down, exactly. Not even remotely. I don’t think that any of us believed we could truly be safe after what we experienced. It would be foolhardy to assume that everything was fine now and we could live happily ever after. Ethan, especially, was never one to adopt that fantasy. But we started to establish something closer to a normal life.
In the morning, we boiled water in the fireplace for our instant coffee. Well, instant coffee for Ethan, Peterman, and myself; hot chocolate for Grace. We tried to keep things as constant and low-key as we could in order to maintain an illusion of normalcy for her. True, Grace had never particularly enjoyed school or found routine stimulating, but we still thought it was preferable to being perpetually under attack and on edge.
Ethan once told me that Sharon became hysterical at the idea of home schooling Grace and thought she would grow up to be a maladjusted freak who never had a boyfriend. This frustrated him primarily because he thought the public school system was garbage, a broken institution designed primarily to keep children busy and out of sight during the day, not to educate them. He relished the idea of getting to have a direct hand in what Grace learned and the way she learned it.
I thought he missed his calling as a teacher. For English, he had Grace choose any book on the shelves, though preferably not his own. (He said he found it awkward to read, like hearing the sound of his own voice recorded.) Rather than simply having her read the book and discuss it after, he’d stage dramatic re-enactments of pivotal scenes in the book. He recruited Peterman and I to play Atticus and Scout Finch, Holden and Phoebe Caulfield, Gandalf and Frodo Baggins, among others.
He enlisted Peterman to teach Grace biology. Peterman found, among the many aging tomes on the shelves, what he said was an old and very valuable--probably a collectible--edition of Grey’s Anatomy. A bit outdated, according to Peterman, but more or less adequate for his purposes.
When Grace wasn’t sketching the circulatory system in her sketchbook or
beholding our questionable acting abilities in the living room, I taught her my lecture series on the sociology of survival. Grace was a much more willing and engaged participant than my freshman section, and we held class outside in the field rather than indoors. I wondered if I, too, had missed my calling and would have found more joy in teaching younger students. I had the dark thought that it was a bit of a moot point, now, which I pushed to the back of my mind. There was no sense in speculating on that now.
Once “school” was out, we had lunch in the kitchen. Over lunch, we discussed and assigned what chores needed to be completed for the day, with regard to preference: Grace always wanted to take care of Clover with Ethan, Peterman, who discovered he enjoyed cooking, wanted to plan dinner; and I found reassurance in the mindless monotony of endlessly cataloging our inventory: what had we consumed the previous day? What did we have left? How long until we ran out of this or that? Our ammunition supply had remained at a standstill since we arrived, thankfully, but the coffee would probably be the first thing to go. I realized this and repressed a shudder. I wondered if Ethan would consider coffee alone a valid reason for another supply run.
One day, after chores and before dinner, Peterman hesitantly brought up the prospect of attempting to discover whether or not Dexter and his gang were still in town. We hadn’t left the ranch since their first visit. We remained entrenched, battening down the hatches and fortifying ourselves against further attacks.
“Wouldn’t it be best,” he said as he carefully organized seasonings, “if we knew with a complete certainty, one way or the other?”
I would have appreciated the peace of mind, but the idea of venturing anywhere--into town, or one of the other houses where another scene of carnage might await us--was repellant to me. We had been safe for this long. Why tempt fate?
I could tell from his expression that Ethan was thinking along similar lines. He sat at the kitchen table, peeling potatoes. “If they are out there,” he said, “which for the time being, we have to assume they are, I don’t want to pop my head up
out of the gopher hole, only to get it blown off.”
Peterman fell silent at this observation. I did as well, but for different reasons. It was the sort of line he might have used in one of his books, but he spoke it with absolute conviction. It wasn’t until the EMP that I saw how the lines between Ethan’s life and his work blurred. I realized that to him, our safe and suburban existence had been far greater fiction than any he wrote.
That night, in spite of his reluctance to acknowledge the possibility that Dexter might be gone, that we might be safe, Ethan bent one of his own rules and suggested that we eat dinner on the front porch. We were all surprised. Normally, we ate in the kitchen, which was boarded up and completely shut off to the outside world. Occasionally we ate breakfast in front of the fireplace, far from the windows. To sit and enjoy a meal outside was considered on par with tempting fate.
“Are you sure?” I asked him as I stirred instant iced tea in a pitcher. “We don’t have to do this.”
“We can’t live like trapped rats for the rest of our lives,” he said. “Every once in a while, we have to venture above ground for a breath of fresh air. Otherwise, what’s the point of being alive?”
I saw his point. If we did everything in our power to preserve our lives but our quality of life was terrible, then what was the point in preserving them in the first place?
That evening felt like the most normal one I’d had in a long while. Even before the EMP, Ethan and I had been stressed from our respective jobs. Grace had been stressed out by school, which she hated. Peterman told us he barely left the hospital. In a strange and backwards way, it was like we were on vacation from our lives: we no longer had to be our public selves, our work selves, our school selves--we could simply sit back and exist.