by Alyssa Cole
“And mine, too,” Maggie added, joining the group hug.
His parents both looked at me with confusion and hesitation. Obviously, a lot had changed while they’d been gone.
“You know how to cook?” his mom asked, scrutinizing my face.
I nodded.
“You know how to clean?”
I nodded again, trying to be polite although I thought these were maybe the least important questions she could be asking, given that they’d just escaped captivity and there was a body on the ground behind us.
“What about canning? You need to know canning,” she said, and that’s when I snapped.
“Okay, I’m sorry. I’m really glad you’re back, but I can’t deal with this right now.” My words flowed out in a hectic jumble as the events of the last few minutes began to overwhelm me. “I spent the morning thinking Maggie was dead, and then thinking John was dead, and then seeing Gabriel get shot, and I just killed someone. There’s a woman grieving, and I think that baby needs a diaper change. Can we save the twenty questions for later?”
There was a long, loaded silence, and then Mrs. Seong stepped forward and embraced me. She squeezed me with that golden ratio of firmness to tenderness that can unexpectedly unlock a Pandora’s box of emotions in the recipient. I felt a brief flash of guilt, thinking of my parents, but I imagined them in their garden hugging a lost and lonely young woman who needed them as much as I needed the Seongs. I didn’t know when I would see them again, but I would.
I’m okay, and you’re okay too.
“I think you’ll fit in just fine,” Mrs. Seong said. I don’t remember bursting into tears, but I did, clutching at this woman who knew how to hug in that way specific to a certain type of mother: good ones.
We still didn’t know what lay ahead. There was a body to deal with, a widow and her baby to console and a new family dynamic that would certainly have its ups and downs. But in that moment, I couldn’t help but feel just a little optimistic. No matter what was happening in the wider world, we would make it.
Epilogue
I was being super creepy, but I didn’t care. What was a little voyeurism when you had blood on your hands? Besides, I had a perfectly good reason for spying on Darlene in the middle of the night; I’d killed her husband only a week before. Since I was the last person she’d want to talk to, it was my only recourse.
I kept my step light, although I doubted she could hear me over the baby’s hiccuping cries. I’d always thought of newborns as fragile things, easily breakable, but the sheer force behind his yowling amazed me every time. He was like a tourist who didn’t understand a foreign language and believed that speaking louder was the only way to communicate.
I peeked through the cracked door of what used to be Maggie’s room and was greeted with a heartrending sight. Darlene held the baby, still unnamed, out in front of her. She was crying as hard as he was. “I changed your diaper. I fed you. I don’t know what you want from me.” Her voice was brittle, and her appearance matched it. We had spoken about zombies before she arrived, and if a stranger stumbled across her now he might mistake her for one. She wasn’t handling her newly widowed status well at all, and each day she grew more distant, despite the fact that the house was at full capacity.
Goddamn it.
I was tired of guilt and walking on eggshells—Dale had forced my hand when he’d attacked John and Gabriel, and I’d never forgive him for it. Taking someone’s life changed everything, unless you were a sociopath. I couldn’t jokingly yell, “I’m gonna kill you!” when John stole some Twinkies from the stash Mrs. Seong had given me in the hopes of cheering me up. We’d all learned the hard way that those words now resulted in a breakdown. I couldn’t go a day without second-guessing myself and wondering if I should have taken some other course of action. I couldn’t sleep while a fatherless child cried and an overwhelmed mother came apart like a fraying rope that couldn’t be mended. I was tired, and I was actually tempted to march into the room and take the baby from her. To smooth her hair down and tell her to get some sleep. I knew there was formula in the cellar...
I’d always considered babies parasitic moochers, and now I wanted nothing more than to snatch up that scared little guy and give him affection. My, how things changed when the world stopped spinning.
I sighed and tiptoed away from the door. Maybe one day, but not tonight.
I headed down to the kitchen to make some tea that would trick my brain into sleeping. I didn’t want to carry my angst into the bed I shared with Gabriel. I knew he would comfort me; he’d proven that to me every night since Dale’s attack and the elder Seongs’ return. The method varied—sometimes he read aloud to me from the stash of romance novels we’d found in the back of a closet. Mrs. Seong had pleaded the Fifth when we’d asked her where they came from and whether she really had a thing for leopard shifters.
Other times he fucked me senseless, literally, kissing and caressing me until there was no room for nightmares of Blue Hat or Dale or future attackers. He was always able to gauge whether I needed it fast and hard or molasses slow and tender. But the best was when we talked late into the night, unspooling vignettes from the tapestry of our pre-blackout life as we lay in bed. Sharing stories about my friends and my parents, and hearing his tales of med school madness, helped make the uncertainty of our future a little easier to bear.
There was a creak behind me as I climbed onto the kitchen counter to reach a high cabinet shelf. I didn’t startle at the sound. I smiled. Gabriel knew every loose floorboard in the house; his misstep was a considerate announcement of his arrival.
“Are you stalking me?” I asked. Something tickled my ankle, and I looked down to see his hands gripping the counter on either side of my feet. I grabbed the box of tea and dropped down between his arms, my ass skimming across the front of his body.
He embraced me from behind and dropped a kiss on my head. “I’m making sure you don’t break your neck trying to get the teakettle.” He reached above me and pulled down the familiar metal vessel that was likely older than both of us. “It’s just about perfect as far as necks go, and it would be pretty hard to replace.”
My angst began to recede, pushed back by the tide of adoration in his voice. He stepped away from me, and I watched him fill the kettle and place it on the camping stove. He rummaged in the cabinet and pulled out the chipped mug that was my favorite, emblazoned with the question What’s happening hot stuff? in fuchsia bubble letters. Like the romance novels, no one in the house seemed to know where it had come from.
“If you cared so much, you’d stop putting everything on the top shelf.” I gave his earlobe a nip as I passed him, then took my usual seat at the table.
“I guess I could leave it someplace more accessible, but then what would you need me for?” he asked as he took his seat across from me. The words came out playful, but I was starting to be able to differentiate between his joking and joking-to-hide-my-feels tones, and this sounded like the latter.
I walked around the table and stood behind him, running my fingers through his hair because I knew he liked it, and because I wasn’t ready to put into words what he wanted to hear. “What’s wrong, Doc Seong?”
His shoulders heaved and he pulled something out from his back pocket. It looked like a brochure, but as he unfolded it on the table in front of him I realized it was a map of the United States. A simple road map, like the ones they sold in convenience stores for people who refused to relinquish control to GPS. Except...
My fingers stilled in his hair.
This map had been altered—several lines had been traced across it in varying shades of ink. I wasn’t close enough to read the notes that filled the margins in the chicken scratch handwriting that pegged Gabriel as a true doctor, but I could see that the various routes all started from one point in upstate New York and stretched across the map to converge at a single pinpoint in Northern California.
My parents.
“Gabriel.” I wasn’t sure if
I actually said his name or just mouthed the word, but he looked over his shoulder at me, his golden gaze brimming with emotion.
He cleared his throat. “I just...I don’t know how long this is going to last, but if things don’t get better, there are plenty of ways for us to get to California. These are just a few. I was thinking we could figure out some alternatives together.”
For us. Together.
I thought all of my walls had already been scaled, but Gabriel’s words demolished my very last line of defense. I stood over him and wept, unabashed. My tears dripped into his hair as I crumpled forward, unable to shoulder the weighted significance of that simple map. He was gifting me the possibility of seeing my parents, of hope for the future. He was willing to leave his family, the most important thing in his life, and travel into a dangerous and unforgiving world. He’d do that for me.
Gabriel pulled me into his lap and held me as I cried, not from fear or despair, but from the bright, beautiful fluttering in my chest that left no room for darkness.
I wasn’t alone. I never had been.
“I didn’t mean to upset you.” He used the front of his hoodie to swipe at my face. As John would have pointed out, I was a hot mess.
“Upset me? You destroyed me.” He was about to protest, but I tilted my head up and captured his mouth with mine. It wasn’t possible to express what he had done for me, but I tried to imbue our kiss with my gratitude and appreciation. I pulled away, finally. “Thank you.”
His brow knit in confusion. “I don’t understand what’s going on right now, but I think it’s good, so I’ll roll with it.”
“It’s better than good.” I hopped out of his lap and pulled a chair next to him to better pore over the map. My voice was wobbly, but I managed not to cry again. “I think this trip would best be taken once things are at least starting to get back to normal. I don’t want to end up in some desperate person’s freezer.”
He nodded, smirking a bit and revealing that hint of a dimple in one cheek. I ran my index finger over it and then looked back at the map.
“Right now your parents and John and Maggie need us. Darlene and the baby too. But we can start planning. We can be prepared to do this, together.”
The teakettle screamed, and Gabriel squeezed my hand before moving to silence it. The scent of fragrant herbs wafted from our mugs as I looked over a route marked out in hot pink. I smiled.
We were going to be okay.
* * * * *
Want to know what happens next?
Here’s an excerpt from book 2
in the OFF THE GRID trilogy:
SIGNAL BOOST
Chapter One
The sun usually rises at about 6:20 a.m. on a late May morning in upstate New York. Daybreak wasn’t even a pink tendril on the horizon when the baby started its nightly howling. I would have been annoyed if I hadn’t already been awake.
If this was before electricity, and modern society, had stopped working, I would have dealt with my insomnia by scrolling through my smartphone, checking out dudes I’d never have the nerve to contact on the gay hookup app. Or I would have turned on my gaming system, eager to explore vast worlds and be the hero of at least one story, even if it wasn’t real. Now when I couldn’t sleep I simply stared into darkness, waiting for something, anything, to break the monotony.
A crying baby would suffice.
The perpetrator of our nighttime wake-up calls, nicknamed Kojack due to his lack of hair and the fact that his mother hadn’t given him a name, quieted for a moment but then released a wail that rivaled the best of the Motown divas.
I couldn’t blame him—honestly, I’d be screaming too if it wouldn’t totally freak out everyone else in the house, which was packed tighter than a Gameland the day a new Jack Carjacker video game dropped. The guest list at Chez Seong now included my wonderful but meddling parents; my older brother Gabriel and my best friend Arden, who spent most of their time projecting sexual tension at each other; and my teenaged sister, Maggie, who was constantly redefining the meaning of mood swing. There were also Darlene and Kojack, the woman and baby we’d taken in after she and her husband had held my parents captive. Yes, we were one big post-apocalyptically happy family, trapped in a house in the middle of nowhere as we tried not to think of our dwindling supplies and the fact that society hadn’t returned to normal, as we’d hoped. That was enough to make anyone holler, but instead I had to keep my fear and anger bottled up inside, like a grown-up.
Maggie stirred in her bed across the room from me, but her mutant teenager ability to sleep through anything meant Kojack’s cries wouldn’t awaken her. Her mass of long, dark hair was pulled into a messy bun atop her head, revealing a face that was a strange mixture of child and woman. What kind of life would Maggie have if things didn’t change soon? One of isolation, where she was married off to the neighbor boy for a dowry of expired candy bars?
I sighed and threw off my blankets. I kind of wished Arden was still bunking with me, mostly so I could hear the string of expletives she was inevitably muttering as the baby cried out, but she’d moved into Gabriel’s room down the hall, now referred to in hushed tones as ‘The Shag Zone.’ The only thing keeping her from strangling Darlene for her poor parenting skills was the fact that she was blissfully besotted with my older brother—and that she’d already killed the woman’s husband. I mean, that was awkward enough, as far as living arrangements went.
Still, I heard the door of The Shag Zone open and Arden’s sleepy steps as she approached the room now inhabited by Darlene and the baby. She didn’t bother knocking anymore, since retrieving the baby and comforting him had become a nightly routine. Darlene wasn’t big on activities like eating, speaking, or child-rearing these days anyway, so there was no point in waiting for a response.
I slid out of bed and emerged into the hallway just as Arden was walking by. “Boo!” I whispered near her ear as I jumped from my room into the darkened hallway.
Arden kept walking, not even breaking pace. “John, you need to come to terms with the fact that you’ll never make me flinch,” she said as we walked down the stairs, searching for the least creaky spots. “Don’t take it personally. Besides, after changing this kid’s diapers, nothing can scare me.”
Having had my eyebrows singed off by the smell emanating from one of Kojack’s more memorable incidents, I understood what she meant.
“Dammit, baby, why do you have to wake us up?” she asked a burbling Kojack as she settled into the comfy love seat in the living room. “Don’t you know how miserable it is for us to deal with you every night?”
Miserable? Our nightly hangout sessions were the one thing I looked forward to. It was the only time I really felt as if I could be myself, whatever that meant. Not someone’s son or brother, but just a friend. While everyone else slept, Arden and I made each other laugh, plotting who we’d eat first when the food ran out or choreographing elaborate dances to songs sung a cappella. Sometimes, we’d make each other cry, like when she pulled out her tattered road map and we planned various routes to Northern California, where her parents lived—if they were still alive. Arden was the only one who really understood me, and she considered the time we spent together miserable. Great.
I lit a tea candle, stuck one of Kojack’s premade bottles into the pan of water warming in the fireplace and snuggled next to her; this had become a nightly ritual too. She rested her head on my shoulder, moving slightly as she rocked the baby in her arms. Maybe she felt how stiff I was against her, or maybe she was just thinking the same thing I was, which wasn’t rare, but her next words made me realize how ridiculous I was being.
“You know I hate being woken up and dealing with all this baby shit, but I really do enjoy this. Just you and me hanging out, like old times, except I’m holding a baby instead of a bag of corn chips,” she said. “Thank you for always being here for me.”
“I thought Gabriel was here to meet all your Seong-related needs these days,” I quipped, still feeling tetch
y even though I knew I was reading more into her words than she’d meant.
“Gabriel fulfills certain needs, but you’re the Seong with first dibs on my heart and you know it,” she said. I glanced at her, only to find her worried gaze fixed on me. I’d seen that look a lot lately. “Did you manage to get any sleep before this guy started screaming?”
“Nope,” I said, grabbing Kojack’s warm, tiny foot when he pointed his leg toward me. I could have lied so she wouldn’t worry, but she knew me well enough to catch me. “I think seeing you wiping someone else’s ass of your own volition has traumatized me too much. I’ll never sleep again. That and the whole downfall of society, of course.”
Arden sighed with mock impatience. “John, it’s only been a few months since all the electricity stopped working and we had to flee our home and join your family in the middle of Bumblefuck. I mean, could you be any less patient? I think we should wait at least a year before expecting government intervention or an explanation of what the fuck happened.”
I twisted one of her long plaits around my fingers and tugged, and she smiled deviously.
“You know, I only recently discovered how much I like that,” she said. From the look in her eyes, I could tell she was thinking something about my brother that I didn’t want to know about ever.
I released her braid and dramatically wiped my hand off on my pajama bottom. “Unlike some people, I haven’t had an unending supply of peen to distract me from pondering my mortality. Thus, no sleep,” I said. I meant it to be a joke, but as the words left my mouth I realized they were a bit too close to the mark. “And to think I used to complain about my lack of dating options back in Rochester. I’d even consider that creepy Asian Studies major who kept wanting to show me his samurai sword collection at this point.”
She shifted and looked up at me. I’d always thought her beautiful with her large eyes and luminous brown skin, but since she and Gabriel had gotten together, she’d been glowing. That said a lot, given the fact that we were in the middle of a full-blown dystopian drama. I’d never thought my brother could make a woman look like that, or that Arden would let anyone close enough to even try. I was ecstatic for them, and miserably jealous too.