by Sylvia Ryan
Julia sat in the kitchen in the early evening. The sun shone straight onto the back porch and directly through the kitchen windows, warming the air. The complete silence, and the slanted rectangles of light that held glittering specks of dust suspended before her eyes, mesmerized her.
When Julia heard the soft tapping at the front door, she snapped out of her numbness, tensed, and grabbed her gun. Her heart thudded furiously in her chest as she walked into the living room. She peered through the narrow opening of the sheers at the picture window, trying to get a look at who was at the door. She could see the steps leading to the door but not the person standing on the landing.
“Who’s there?” she yelled through the closed door.
“Julia?” A faint voice floated back to her.
Julia unlocked and opened the door.
“Kaylee!” One of the girls from the group that had passed through a few days back stood solitary on the other side of the door. The six-year-old’s toothless grin Julia had received for doing the girl’s hair was gone. She was shaking and dirty. Her skin was ashen, with dried tear streaks on both cheeks. “Where’s everybody else?” Julia asked, pulling her inside.
Relief and exhaustion flashed over Kaylee’s face before she started crying. Through ragged sobs and an endless stream of tears, Kaylee relayed the story of the men that came in the middle of the night. “They were shooting and yelling,” she sobbed. “My mommy pushed me away from the fire, to where it was dark, and told me to run. I couldn’t, Julia. It was too dark and I was scared.”
Julia knelt and wrapped her arms around the small, hysterical bundle of skin and bones that collapsed against her. She cradled and rocked Kaylee as the tears poured out of her along with the rest of her story. “Mommy was turning to walk away from me, and then she just fell. I went back to her, and she got mad at me. She pushed me away and told me to go to your house. She said she would come get me here.”
Julia comforted the traumatized girl. She hugged Kaylee’s little body close to her and let her cry until there was nothing left.
“When did this happen?” Julia asked Kaylee after her crying had stopped.
“The night before last night,” Kaylee said, her big brown eyes looked to Julia with hope. “I spent last night by myself.” Kaylee’s voice wavered. “It was so scary.”
“You didn’t see Arden or Ben on your way back here?”
Kaylee shook her head. “No.”
Julia knew when the men left that there were dangers they would face. She hadn’t thought there would be people so brutal that they would kill women and children without provocation. A new level of understanding settled in to Julia’s soul. She had really been living in a fantasy world here.
“Julia?”
“What sweetie?” Julia said, distracted by her renewed fears for the men.
“I need some Band-Aids.” Kaylee lifted up her shirt to show Julia a gaping groove on her side, just above the waistband of her pants. It was about half an inch deep, maybe a little more.
“Oh my God! Kaylee! What happened?”
Kaylee shrugged. “It happened when I was leaning over my mom.” Kaylee looked down at the partially scabbed, oozing channel carved out of her. “I don’t feel good.” She rested her head back against Julia’s chest, and moments later she was unconscious. Julia wasn’t sure whether she passed out or fell asleep.
She carried Kaylee over to the love seat and laid her down. Then she ran around the house getting the supplies she needed to take care of the shallow groove, which Julia assumed had been caused by a bullet grazing the child.
With shaking hands and a churning stomach, Julia cleaned out the flesh with a washrag. Kaylee had no fat underneath the skin, and the structure of what lay directly underneath her open wound was exposed. Julia tried to remember human anatomy. High school biology class had been a long time ago, but she was pretty sure she was looking at Kaylee’s liver or intestines as she dug deep into the groove, cleaning it as best she could. She hesitated for a minute before putting the antibacterial on a wound so deep. She didn’t know if it was the right thing to do, but she ended up coating the raw flesh anyways. When it was thoroughly cleaned and coated, she placed a folded scrap of material over the wound and used duct tape to hold it in place.
Kaylee’s skin rose with goose bumps when her clothes were removed and the cool water of the washrag cleaned her skin. She was hot to the touch. Julia placed cool compresses on the child to bring down the fever. She found Tylenol in the medicine cabinet and decided she would give some to Kaylee when she woke up.
Julia sat in the rocking chair and looked at the sweet little girl until there was no light left. She wondered if anyone in that group of people survived, and if they did, did anyone other than Kaylee’s mom know where she was?
When Julia woke up at dawn, stiff and in a fog, it only took an instant before everything came rushing back. She went to Kaylee, and at first inspection, Julia knew the little girl was in a bad way. Her tiny body had not moved during the night. Her skin burned underneath the gentle press of fingers to her forehead. Julia tried to wake Kaylee up to give her water and the Tylenol, but she couldn’t rouse her.
She knelt next to the love seat, applying cool compresses in an effort to cool Kaylee down. It didn’t seem to be doing any good.
Frustrated with her helplessness, Julia returned to the rocking chair and watched Kaylee breathe in and out. In and out.
The hours passed. Julia’s stomach growled, and her bladder screamed for release, and still she sat staring, with a sob poised in her throat and her insides gutted. What else could she do for the girl? She didn’t know. She just didn’t know.
When Julia finally left the room to take care of herself, she returned in less than a few minutes. She walked over to Kaylee and tenderly picked her up. Julia sat down cross-legged in the middle of the loveseat with the small girl nestled in her lap, her head on Julia’s chest.
Julia felt the light exhale of each hot breath over her skin and was aware of every wisp of air Kaylee exhaled in the hours that followed.
She sat with her as the morning sun moved over the house, changing the light in the room and marking the hours they’d spent together.
She rocked and comforted the pint-size body that was struggling against what was attacking it.
She stroked Kaylee’s hair and smiled at the memory of her toothless, laughing glee from just a few days before.
She whispered in Kaylee’s ear about six-year-old things, favorite colors, riding bikes, and dressing up for the upcoming Halloween.
Julia felt Kaylee’s last breath, like the hundreds she’d felt before it, but only realized it was the end when Kaylee’s urine seeped through her panties and soaked into Julia’s jeans.
She sat with the dead girl in her arms, in shock. When she finally stood, Julia placed Kaylee on one of the blankets covering her mattress and folded her into it.
Dazed, she walked out the back door into the cold evening air and grabbed a shovel from the barn. She picked a nice spot near the beginning of the trail that led to Salt Creek and began to dig.
With each shovel of dirt tossed aside, Julia’s composure faltered until she completely lost it. She raised her head to the sky and shrieked the most bloodcurdling sound she’d ever made. She needed to assert her rage at God. How could he let this happen? Why would he lead Kaylee back to her and then just let her die? Julia was devastated and her faith irrevocably damaged.
She dug for what seemed like hours with an unending stream of tears clouding her vision and her nose dripping onto her shirt. It was dark when she finally placed Kaylee’s wrapped body into the hole she’d dug and began refilling it with dirt.
* * * *
The days since the men had left accumulated. Julia’s worry about whether something had happened to them intensified. Her trips to the end of the drive to see if she could see them returning grew more and more frequent. The question as to whether they would come back at all cycled endlessly through her
head. Time dragged. She felt hollow. She was making herself crazy.
She decided that she had to distract herself, or she was going to lose it. She had to find things that would keep her occupied.
She jumped up and filled a bucket of water from the pump. She had been neglecting herself. Now, she had all the time in the world to give a little more attention to her appearance.
Julia assessed her body. Her hair was coming back, everywhere. Talk about cave woman. She hated it. Arden had a straight razor that his father had used before the common use of the disposable variety. She had used it for her pits and legs a few times. It wasn’t waxing, but the results were satisfactory. But she was not going to use a straight razor down there. Too tricky.
She went through her little toiletry kit and grabbed the tweezers she’d found in the upstairs bathroom months ago. She propped a mirror and began tweezing. Mercifully, the job was time consuming.
Hey, at least I have a hobby. She laughed to herself as she painfully passed another day away.
The next morning, as if she wasn’t miserable enough, she got her period. This was her third since she’d gotten there. It was traumatizing in a whole new and disgusting way. How the hell was she going to deal with this for the next fifteen to twenty years? Folding up scraps of old flannel and stuffing them in her one and only pair of underwear was bad enough. But then she had to wash the flannel by hand to use again later. It sucked, really sucked. There was a bright side, though. At least Ben wasn’t around to make smart-ass comments about this month’s “visitor.” She was sure he’d be sorry he missed it.
Julia tried desperately over the next days to keep her mind busy. She started to write down the lyrics to the songs she used to have on her iPod. This activity took her through a full range of emotions because the songs she wrote down spanned everything from Aerosmith to Will Smith, with every possible genre in between. It kind of made her laugh to think she’d probably be wiping her ass with the paper she’d written these song lyrics on sooner or later. She also found that when she wrote down the lyrics of the songs and sung them in her head, she got just as much emotional therapy as she used to get in her old life when she ran and listened.
Julia woke up one morning determined to try making the soap recipe she had found tucked into Arden’s mother’s canning cookbook.
Fucking disaster.
She followed the recipe to a tee, using lye and rendered fat from the last deer that Arden had shot. And, as if it was going to make any difference, she put some lavender into the mix thinking she would have a sweet lavender soap to wash with. Ha!
What she ended up with was genuinely discouraging. As they say, desperate times called for desperate measures, and it would truly be a desperate time for her, or anybody else, to try to clean themselves with the burning concoction she’d made.
* * * *
The men knew where they were going, and as they traveled farther from their rural home, they found increased destruction and evidence of chaos. Arden saw firsthand much of what Ben had described after arriving at the farm. Fires had not only burned entire blocks of homes to the ground but had consumed strip malls, medical buildings and corner gas stations. Rubble and ash from the fires and remnants from the looting littered the streets among the stalled cars that hadn’t moved since the day of the EMP. In the stores that were still standing, electronics remained on the shelves while vending machines, restaurants, and grocery stores had been stripped bare. The bared stores and restaurants now only contained the decomposed corpses of those bested in the scramble for food. All of the destruction had come much closer to the farm than Arden felt comfortable with.
They had decided to not enter any homes to try to find supplies. The safety risk was just too high. People in their own homes had had plenty of time to build defenses and could be waiting in ambush for intruders.
Because of this decision, options were limited. They raided cars and went through obviously abandoned shops and homesteads with no luck.
They found sweatpants, a winter jacket, and boots for Julia in a Salvation Army donation bin behind a store. These finds alone almost filled up one of the backpacks. They also found a few cigarette lighters from car raids but no matches. Still no candles, wicks, or lamp oil, canning lids, tampons or pads, or the Holy Grail—ammo. Their wish list also included salt, medicines, bandages, and the ultimate luxuries of toothpaste and deodorant.
After only finding the clothes and a few odds and ends on the list, they carefully weighed the risks of continuing against the possible benefits. So far they had seen very few people. Arden figured those that were left were entrenched in their own safe havens. The few travelers they did see were armed, and they passed each other giving a wide berth.
Food was non-existent. They found none anywhere. The men relied on what they could shoot, steal from abandoned fields and gather from fruit trees and other edible plants. In the end, they decided together to keep going.
Arden and Ben walked for another day before they came to an industrial parkway. The buildings were windowless and would be dangerous to enter blind to who might be inside. They decided they would watch and wait to see if there were any people coming or going before trying to enter one of the buildings.
They spent a lot of time sitting in the shadows, watching, waiting, and whispering about Julia. In the vacuum of silence and boredom, discussion of her greedily took priority over all else. Arden fantasized about her in the privacy of his own head and in conversations he had with Ben. Together, they wondered how far she would go to let them both love her.
Arden accepted his friend’s love for Julia, believing that neither one of them alone would be able to fulfill what she needed in a man. Sharing her would be the only way either one of them could have her. Acceptance of that fact seemed to deepen their bond of friendship. Together, they produced a perfectly crafted plan of action that would serve Julia and protect the balance of love and friendship within the house. Arden and Ben made an oath with each other how this love would play out, or if Julia rejected either one of them, not play out at all.
After a whole day and half a night of surveillance, they deemed it was worth the risk to enter a parts machine shop that looked like it had already been broken into some time ago. Hoping that a first aid kit could be found, they hit pay dirt, finding two fully stocked kits mounted to walls on either side of the shop. Inside were Band-Aids, gauze, alcohol swipes, and antimicrobial ointment.
Ben broke into the machine in the ladies’ room and scored ten tampons for Julia. The vending machines in the lunchroom were completely empty, but they found some salt and sugar packets left over from lunches long eaten. After almost five days of skulking around with very little food and no protection from the elements, the men were happy with their haul and decided to head back toward home the following morning.
* * * *
They’d been gone seven days, and Julia’s fear practically immobilized her. Seven days was too long. Something had happened. They would have been back by now if everything had gone well. This was all so stupid. The ridiculous list of things they thought they needed was not worth the cost of two men’s lives. What were they thinking? She hadn’t cried since the day they left. But now, all she wanted to do was burrow into her lair of blankets on the mattress and hide, cry, and escape from feeling anything at all by sleeping as much as possible.
The weather had turned cold, and darkness came earlier. The sounds of summer seemed to give way abruptly to the November winds blowing outside. It was noisy, eerie.
How was it she could drift in and out of sleep all day, but when night fell, everything seemed to intensify her fears? The noises outside, her loneliness, the machinations of her mind all worked together to give her sleepless nights.
Julia still hadn’t lit the little pyramid of sticks that Arden left her in the wood burner. She wasn’t so cold that she felt she needed to, and there was a little piece of her that didn’t want to feel comfortable there without them.
Julia j
ust wanted them back. She promised herself she would not take them for granted when they returned. She now knew how important they were to her. She had never felt this way before. It scared her.
Julia had learned very young that love, when it went wrong, could tear a person apart, change the very being of who they were. She had protected herself against love so far, never really giving her heart away. But now? Shit, she was done for.
She crawled into her cocoon for the night and thought about Arden and Ben as she did every night when she tried to fall asleep.
When she woke, her head was still covered with one of her blankets, protecting her from the cold air outside of her cocoon. She rolled over and hit an immovable object. What the…? She uncovered her head and found Ben lying beside her, his face less than six inches away. He was fully dressed, stank to high heaven, and was dead to the world. She looked over to her other side and found Arden lying on his back with the crook of his arm over his eyes, also stinking and also sleeping. Her heart sang. Oh, thank God, thank you so much for bringing them home safe.
She lay between them bursting with happiness and relishing the feel of their warm bodies on either side of her. As they slept, she lay there and filled up the hole of accumulated loneliness with their presence and silently vowed that she would not let them leave her here alone again.
Chapter 12
Julia left them to sleep after carefully getting out of bed. She excitedly prepared for their reunion. First things first. It was too cold in there. She walked over to the wood burner and opened the heavy cast iron door. It groaned with a low resonating clamor. She peeked over her shoulder. She couldn’t believe neither man had woken up. She lit the wood teepee that Arden had set up for her and waited for it to catch.