by Skylar Finn
“There were only three of them,” he answered. “They were very confident this was going to be a quick errand: a walk in the park, like my dad always said.” He was quiet for a moment, remembering. “The looks on their faces...when they rode up and Wentworth’s men stepped out to greet them. They tried to fight back, of course, but it was over in minutes. And after, they celebrated. They were triumphant, about having killed these people.” He shook his head. “There’s no love lost between me and anybody who followed that murdering fiend. I thought I’d be glad to see them go. But to go from having lived a pretty peaceful life to seeing so many people killed outright in so little time…” He sighed. He didn’t finish his sentence, but then, he didn’t have to. I knew just what he meant.
“What happened to the one who was here?” I asked.
“He went back to the compound when you went to get Grace,” said Tom. “Said something about having to report to Wentworth.”
“Wentworth’s dead.” I told Tom what happened at the farmhouse, up to Dexter shooting Ethan and me shooting Dexter.
“You did what you had to do, Charlie,” said Tom. “We all did.”
My chin dropped to my chest. My eyes slid closed, and I shook myself, trying to stay awake. I had to remain vigilant. I needed to be there for Ethan. One way or another, I needed to know.
Tom watched me sympathetically in my fight to stay awake.
“It’s okay to rest,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Not yet, it’s not.”
In spite of my declaration, I was fighting a losing battle. I had slumped against the gray stone wall of the hearth when a creak from the hallway awakened me like a gunshot. My eyes flew open, and I stood, hardly aware of my movements. It was the same floorboard that always creaked whenever someone walked down the hallway.
It was Peterman. He came out of the back bedroom slowly, covered in blood. I knew I’d see that sight in my nightmares for years to come. He opened his mouth. I couldn’t wait to hear the worst news of my life, and I pushed past him, running into the bedroom and throwing open the door.
Ethan lay on the sheets, still and unmoving. My hand flew to my mouth. His head tilted to the side, and his eyes barely opened. Just enough to see me. The slightest hint of a smile and his eyes closed again.
Peterman came back to the bedroom and caught me by the shoulder before I could run to the bed.
“Careful,” he cautioned me. “His condition is fragile. It will be touch and go for the next twenty-four hours, but...he’s alive. He shouldn’t be, but he is. We have every reason to hope.”
I knew the next twenty-four hours would be excruciating. And maybe the next twenty-four days, weeks, months. Maybe he wouldn’t pull through, or maybe he would, but we’d still have new enemies to face. But for now, he was alive. And as Peterman said, it was reason enough to have hope.
Epilogue
When I was still in school, taking philosophy as an elective, I learned that times of war are followed by times of peace. It took me a long time to feel safe again. Some days, I’m not sure that I ever really have. But we have found some measure of peace.
In the ensuing weeks, it took a long time for Ethan to recover. The first few days, as Peterman warned, had been touch and go. There were moments where I thought we might lose him. But now we were a family again. And for the time being, that was enough.
It took just as many weeks as Ethan’s recovery lasted for us to fix the house after the damage that Dexter’s, then Wentworth’s people had done to it. The house had taken years to build and only moments to destroy. Destruction is so much easier than creation, which I suppose is why the weak embrace it so freely.
The farmhouse was in shambles; a graveyard. Wentworth’s remaining men, without Wentworth to unite them, moved on. They saddled up and circled their proverbial wagons. They decided, as EJ later told me, to hit the road and live like cowboys. It was the thing he’d most wanted to be as a child, he confessed. But it had never been a real possibility until now.
For a while, we wondered what we’d do if another lawless group came into town and took over. We worried and planned and fortified. I thought the day was inevitable and spent many evenings with Tom, who was just as grimly certain of this inevitability as I was, scavenging for more bullets and guns.
But the next appearance in town was an unexpected one: that of Lydia and Bud Alderson, who’d finally made it out of the city after holing up until the worst of it was over. The city was in ruins, they reported. When the worst of it had died down, they packed their essentials and headed out on foot. It had taken them days to make the journey.
A week to the day after the arrival of the Aldersons, the Phillips came out of hiding. They had an underground bunker at their place and hadn’t even known what was going on with Dexter, or Wentworth. They stayed inside while the storm raged above them. Dig Phillips expressed regret that he hadn’t known, stating resolutely that he would have joined the fight. I knew without asking that his wife, Tara, was relieved that he hadn’t.
We went to the Davidsons’ house and to Davidson’s Drugs. We retrieved the bodies of Mary and Pat, and helped Tom lay his family to rest. He couldn’t stand to go on living in the house without them, and moved into the apartment above the hardware store.
The Aldersons and the Phillips, who’d remained safely entrenched and contended with remarkably little violence by comparison, were in good spirits. Lydia wanted to start up the old tradition of community barbeques again.
The Aldersons brought their golden retriever, Buzz, much to Grace’s everlasting delight. They played on the lawn for hours while Bud and Dig argued over the best way to cook ribs. Lydia was gentle with me, assigning me only the smallest and most trivial of tasks: having me help her peel potatoes or scrub vegetables. It wasn’t that she needed the help, but more to keep my mind off our recent memories, I think.
Ethan made his inevitable potato salad. Tom cooked corn on the cob. Peterman spent the week leading up to the festivities obsessing about a homemade rub he’d concocted. I stuck to the simple things and made lemonade.
We sat on the front porch and watched our friends and neighbors talk and laugh on the front lawn. Both Ethan and I were quiet. I used to wonder where he’d disappear, the times when we’d sit together quietly in the living room at home. I’d look over only to realize he was gazing off into the distance: both there and not there. Here with me, but also somewhere else.
I didn’t have to ask anymore. I was there with him. And he understood.
We didn’t talk much about the past. About the things that led us to this day, or the pain and fear we had experienced. The people I’d known in my previous life, friends in the psychology department, for example, would have had a field day with this. Repression, they would have said. Denial.
“Life goes on,” Ethan said simply, when I asked if it was okay that we didn’t talk about it. “We make our own way in the world.”
We have our scars. Ethan’s are literal. Other scars are unseen. I often wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, gunfire ringing in my ears that isn’t really there. It’s a holdover from the nightmares I still have. But I hope--I know--it will get better one day.
At first, the idea of a barbeque, after the carnage we’d witnessed, was as foreign an idea to me as a garden party. It seemed somehow inappropriate in the wake of the waves of death we’d witnessed. But as Ethan pointed out, life went on.
It was up to us to build a new world.
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About the Author
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