by Alex Mersey
Their husbands and fathers weren’t stuck in a bunker buried beneath the wastelands of D.C., the weight of every woman, man and child pressing down on his shoulders, every child except his own. The apocalypse hadn’t changed a damn thing. His dad was still off running the country while he was left to drift in whatever random shit life threw at him.
- 16 -
Chris
Later that night, pacing in the bedroom upstairs like a caged animal, that trapped—trapped in someone else’s nightmare—feeling hit hard. It was some other kid’s father who’d sent his son across a war torn landscape so he could concentrate on bigger, more important matters. He knew that kid was enraged, maybe even disgusted at the people of Little Falls who doubted his father’s commitment and devotion to this country, but it was just a fact, not an emotion felt.
He was a bystander in his own life, a place he could get comfortable in. A place he could disappear in.
He jerked himself back. “Get a fucking grip on reality.”
Chris drew open the curtains and unlatched the window, shoved it wide so he could push his head out and breathe, breathe. The high pressure that had blown the storm east rushed past his face in a warm, clammy breeze, doused the candle beside his bed, plunged the room into inky moonlit shadows.
A surge of restless energy got him leaning over the ledge, measuring the drop to the skirt of roof below.
The length of his body?
The slope of the roof would be trickier.
The fact that most seventeen-year olds wouldn’t have to resort to sneaking out of their bedroom windows racked up his determination.
Not that he was sneaking out.
He was just being considerate. The doctor had ordered Williams to get some decent rest. Williams, naturally, had interpreted that as taking up guard position in the armchair at the bottom of the staircase. Still, no reason to disturb him if he’d managed to droop off into slumber land.
Chris swung one leg over the ledge, turned as he scrambled all the way out so he could cling to the white-painted sill while he dropped. His sneakers touched the sloping tiles before his fingertips lost their grip. Dropping flat onto his backside, he slid closer to the edge and found a drain pipe to shimmy down until he could jump the last couple of feet to land near the kitchen window around the side of the house.
The moon was on its way to full, providing dimpled light from the clouds sailing overhead. He couldn’t remember if the gate squeaked or not, so he hurdled the low picket fence onto the pavement.
The doctor’s house stood near the top of Main Street, three houses before the gas station and the ‘Welcome to Little Falls’ signboard. That’s the way he headed. No plans of going too far, he’d done enough walking to last a lifetime, but he had his mind on the forest they’d driven through on the way into town this afternoon. Some place that didn’t belong to a stranger, that didn’t belong to anyone. Except maybe God. Or maybe the Silvers, now.
A pair of cars butted bumpers at the intersection by the gas station. You could drive around the cars, carefully, and no one had bothered to push them out of the way. Another car, a shiny blue people carrier, still stood beside a pump, as if waiting for the power to come on and get its tank filled up.
The store itself was dark, no grating on the windows that Chris could see and yet they all appeared intact. No looting had come to Little Falls. Yet.
Chris strolled along the blacktop road, listening to the sounds of nightlife, the wind rustling through treetops, the far off howl of an animal he couldn’t identify, the buzzing drone of insects.
It was hard to imagine that this was the end of the world, that half the country had been churned into dunes of ash.
We are not alone.
We’ve never been alone.
That part was the hardest to imagine, and not for all the usual reasons.
Chris had never felt more alone and isolated in his life.
Just outside the town, fields of long grass faded off beneath the moonlight on both sides. A couple hundred yards ahead, the road bent into the thickly wooded copse he was after. New sounds reached him before he made it, human chatter and a repetitive clunk, clunk, clunk.
He slowed his pace, turned about to walk backward so he could see what was coming. The shadows broke away from the buildings of the gas station, two on foot and a third silhouette cycling lazy loops in the road around them. That explained the clunking noise, something hitting the wheel spindles on each rotation.
The person on the bike spotted him and rode a straight, clunking line, shouting up ahead, “I told them we were wasting time waiting for your skinny—“ He cut off as he swooped in close enough to realize his error.
“It’s not Jackson,” he shouted back to his group over his shoulder, skidding into a braking slide inches from Chris’s feet.
“Hey,” Chris snapped, standing his ground. “Watch it.”
The guy, somewhere around Chris’s age in the late teens, peered at him, snorted, then yelled over his shoulder again, “It’s a friggin’ reffie.”
The hair on Chris’ nape bristled. Whatever a reffie was, it sounded like an insult. But the guy was clearly a moron and not worth the effort. For one thing, his bike was some hybrid between a BMX and a chopper and looked like it should have come with training wheels. Maybe it had. For another, Chris noted the metal flapper clipped to the front wheel that seemed to have no purpose other than going clunk, clunk, clunk.
Chris spun about and continued walking, facing forward this time. He heard the stomp of footfalls as the two laggers came running, heard the call, “Hey, wait up!” but if they were anything like their biker buddy, he wasn’t interested.
The biker circled wide and came at him in another skid. “Where you going off in such a hurry?”
“What’s your problem?” Chris muttered and walked around him.
“What?” The guy came at him again, again, not sliding to a full halt anymore, just skidding close, too close, with each loop, shooting his mouth off. “You think you can just eat our food. Drink our water. Use our resources.”
“Jake,” called an approaching female voice. “Don’t be a dipshit.”
“I’m not the dipshit.” Jake circled wide and pedaled straight at Chris, forcing him to jump out of the way. “You can’t talk to us?” A bitter laugh. “What? We’re not good enough for the likes of you?”
“I don’t know anything about you,” Chris ground through a clenched jaw as he, once again, stepped around the moron to keep walking. “And you don’t know anything about me.”
“Jake!”
“He’s just having a laugh.”
“That’s so not funny.”
Jake seemed to find it incredibly funny. He grinned like the idiot he was and the next skidding loop shaved the air at Chris’ ear.
Enough was enough. Chris kicked out, didn’t even think about it, his sneaker jamming fast and hard into the back wheel.
Jake let loose a string of curses as the bike spun out from beneath him, hitting the ground with a metallic clatter while he went sprawling the other way like roadkill. Unfortunately he didn’t stay down.
“What the fuck, man…” One of his friends charged up to bend over the bike. “It’s wrecked.”
He sounded absolutely pissed, which led Chris to suspect he was the contraption’s true owner. Chris moved to get a better look and, yip, it was kind of wrecked. The wheel was buckled, the spindles bent. In hindsight, in a world where cars were basically road litter, regret filtered through his boiling blood. He should have aimed that kick at the moron and spared the bike.
Jake turned on him, limping, blood scratched onto his cheek, growling, “You’re dead meat, you hear me?”
A blurred figure cut between them, slammed a palm against Jake’s chest. It was a girl, definitely, in tight jeans, a skimpy top, choppy dark hair to her shoulders, standing at least as tall as the guy she glared at. “Cool it, Jake, you had that coming.”
“I was just messing with him.”
“You’re an idiot.”
Chris liked her already.
Meanwhile, the rightful owner scraped the mangled bike off the ground and pushed—or rather, wobbled it over. He wasn’t blaming his friend. His scowl bore into Chris. “What the hell’s your problem?”
The guy was taller, wider, thicker, and he had some serious ink rambling up his throat, but that didn’t stop Chris.
He returned the scowl. “That’s the question of the day, isn’t it?” he said and turned his back on the guy, probably not wise, but he was done.
He stayed on the road a good couple of yards, stubborn that way, before he veered off the hard shoulder and into the press of pines. The forest floor crunched a good few paces behind him, dried nettles and mulchy leaves.
Chris wrapped himself around a trunk, holding his breath to listen. As soon as the crunch drew level, he flung his arm out, grabbed as he stepped out and realized his mistake at once. The arm was too thin, the skin too soft. The floral scent and decidedly feminine yelp was his second clue.
He released her and stood back. “Sorry, I thought it was one of your friends.”
The moonlight didn’t quite penetrate the velvet brush of pines, but her face took form as he watched her.
She rubbed her arm, watching him right back. “You ran off so quickly, we didn’t get a chance to introduce ourselves.”
“I didn’t run off.”
“Walked off quickly?”
He shrugged, leant back against the tree and folded his arms. He had nothing to prove.
“I’m Rachel,” she said, a smile playing on her mouth. “Or Rache, Shell, Shellie… I’m easy that way. I’ll answer to pretty much anything.”
He dragged his gaze up from her lips, surprised at how long it took. He thought he’d passed the age of uncontrollable hormones.
“Chris,” he said, and he didn’t usually follow that with Merrick, as in the president’s son, but she was obviously from Little Falls and one of those townsfolk with a gripe against his dad and not elaborating felt a whole lot like cowardice. Which might explain why he added sharply, “Just Chris.”
“Hello, Just Chris.” She grinned impishly, looked around. “Going somewhere special?”
“Not really,” he said. “I needed some fresh air.”
“Would you like to go somewhere special?” she said, her tone deliberately suggestive.
It worked. His heart rate spiked and his tongue twisted.
“Relax, I don’t bite.” She laughed, flipped her long fringe from her eyes, tilted her chin to look at him. “Come on.”
And she was off, swinging her hips through the tangled path of trees.
Chris exhaled slowly and followed. “Where’re we going?”
“You’ll see,” she sang out.
He had to hurry his pace to catch up.
“What happened to your friends?” he asked, really wishing she’d correct him on that and claim they were no friends of hers.
“Jake went home to lick his wounds and Bran went home to nurse his bike.” She snuck a glance his way. “Score two for you.”
Great. Now I’m a bully.
The trees thinned, letting more moonlight through and allowing Chris to fall in beside her. “I don’t usually lash out like that.”
“Don’t stress it.” She dipped a smile at him. “Jake isn’t really all that bad, all the time…” She seemed to realize it was a lost cause and tagged on lamely, “…once you get to know him.”
“I’d rather not, thanks.” Chris got his first proper look at her. She was gorgeous, expressive brown eyes, those pouty lips he’d already noticed. There were worse things, he reckoned, than tailing her through the woods like a lost puppy. So what if he was a little dumbstruck? “What’s a reffie?”
“Refugees,” she said. “They’ve been streaming in over the last two days. We’ve set them up in the town hall, but people are getting nervous.” She glanced sideways at him through a curtain of hair. “We’re not uncharitable, mostly, but what happens when the space runs out, when there’s not enough food, when we don’t have anything to give and they start taking?”
“You don’t have to worry about me,” Chris informed her. “I’m just passing through.”
“I’m not worried about you, Just Chris.”
“How long are you going to drag that out?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
She never said, because just then strumming of guitar music wafted through the trees. Her smile burst on him. “Jackson’s here.”
“Another friend of yours?”
“And Jake’s big brother.”
Chris groaned. “Perfect.”
Voices rose above the music to the backdrop of what sounded like a rushing river. The orange sprites flickering through the last clump of pines they had to push through gave Chris a hint of what he’d find, but he still stood there a moment, stunned. A wide river churned white water over flat rocks, gushing alongside a shallow cave where a dozen or so people had a huge fire going.
Rachel grabbed his hand, tugging him along a couple of steps before letting go, filling him in as they went. “Jackson,” she said, waving at the guy perched on an outcrop, guitar across his lap.
He kept strumming, greeting her with a nod, not very interested in Chris.
She nudged his shoulder, directing his attention to the girl on her feet, swaying to the slow strum of Jackson’s music in the firelight. “Raven.”
“Seriously?” The girl had snow white hair flowing down her back.
“Short for raving bitch, and I’m not just saying that because she’s the prettiest girl in town or because she stole my boyfriend and dumped him twenty minutes later.”
Okay…
They slotted in by the fire between an entangled couple and Jackson.
His hair was scraped back in a ponytail, his beard closely shaven, his eyes on Rachel. “Where’s the squirt?”
“He took a fall on Bran’s bike and decided to spend some quality time at home to ponder his sins.”
“I take it he’s okay?”
“He’s okay.”
The blonde-haired Raven swayed a path around the fire until she reached them.
Expecting a confrontation of the sort he generally preferred to avoid, Chris squared his jaw and tensed.
“This is Just Chris Just Passing Through,” Rachel introduced. “This is my best friend Raven.”
Raven rolled her eyes all the way from him to Rachel. “By the look on his face, I’m guessing you told him all about me.”
“Only that you’re a raving bitch.”
Raven grinned at him and nodded. “That I am.”
“And that you stole Nial Lossing from me and broke his heart.”
“That was in second grade and I was only after his mother’s choc chip cookies, which looked much better than they tasted. Are we gonna dance?”
“Um, I’m good, thanks,” Chris said.
“Oh, isn’t he adorable?” Raven held her hand out and dragged Rachel off.
“Don’t walk off quickly,” Rachel called to him over her shoulder. “I’ll be right back.”
Chris lowered himself in front of the fire and drew his legs up, no intention of going anywhere. Rachel was totally crazy, and he was totally intrigued. He stretched his arms out to lean back, listening to the chatter and laughter and Jackson’s strumming, watching Rachel through the flames as she accepted a bottled beer from someone and moved her body to the rhythm.
He lost track of time, but it couldn’t have been much more than a half hour when trouble arrived. Bran. He wasn’t home, nursing his bike. The linebacker with the rambling ink cocked his jaw and stared from across the fire until Chris’ skin prickled. That’s what drew his eye from Rachel.
Seriously, we’re going to do this now?
He tried to ignore that stare, but it kept burning into him until he pushed up from his fireside place. Bran didn’t wait, turned upstream and disappeared into the shadows of
the river’s edge alongside the cave.
Chris rounded the fire, had to walk past Rachel and Raven to get to the river. They were sort of dancing, mainly had their heads together in deep conversation. He pressed on when she didn’t seem to notice him passing, although he wouldn’t have minded another Rachel intervention between him and her goons.
He wasn’t afraid of the bigger guy. He’d been trained in self-defense to FBI standards and while he wouldn’t be taking any awards anytime soon, he could sure as hell hold his own. The thing was, he had no beef with this Bran guy. If anything, he felt a little guilty at busting the guy’s bike.
Bran hadn’t gone far. He crouched beside the river, elbow deep in white-water swirling over the eroded rocks like shallow rapids.
Aware that the gurgling water masked his approach, Chris called out in fair warning, “It’s Bran, right?”
“To my friends.” The guy shot up, shoved something cold and dripping wet into Chris’s stomach before he could even think of reacting.
So much for my FBI trained reflexes.
Chris grabbed at his stomach and it took another moment to realize he’d been offered a Bud Light, not gutted. Uncapped and river chilled.
“You can call me Brandon.” Bran held his bottle up, cheers, took a large swig before wiping his hand across his mouth.
Chris shook off his confusion and went with it. “Sorry about your bike.”
“Give it a couple of days, and you will be.” Bran washed that not-so-veiled threat down with another swig. “Old Harry reckons he can fix the wheel.” Another swig, then he pointed the bottle neck. “In exchange, you and I get to turn up his cousin’s spud field out by the Mill Creek place.”
“I’m not sure I know what turning up a spud field is,” Chris hedged.
“Shoveling up potatoes,” Bran said bluntly.
“I don’t think I know how to do that either.”
“You’re weaseling out of your debt?”
“Hell, no.” Call upon a man’s honor and you had him. Seemed like Bran wasn’t all muscle and no brain. Or maybe he’d just gotten plain lucky with his threats. Chris’ hand went to the wallet in his back pocket before he remembered the apocalypse. Bits of paper were useless. The new currency, apparently, was manual labor.