by Justin Bell
“Brandon!” he shouted, more loudly this time, and started across the floor, towards the stairs. As he hit the third stair up, Brad appeared by the top landing.
“What’s going on?”
“We’ve got company!”
Brad turned and barked the message to Brandon.
“I’ve got keys!” Brandon shouted.
Max looked back out towards the lot. “It might be too late!” Doors were slamming shut and men were scrambling out of the vehicle.
“Door’s busted!” he could hear a voice yelling from outside.
Max charged down the steps again, stumbling at the end as his hip gave way, then limped towards the show car.
“In there!” one of the men outside shouted. “I saw someone!”
Three pops echoed from behind Max and he turned, watching Brad fire his pistol from halfway down the stairs. The man right by the front door lumbered backwards, grabbing at his chest and side as he shouted in pain.
A swift series of rapid blasts roared from the doorway as bullets slammed into the show car and Max dropped even lower. Brad ran down the rest of the stairs and dropped to a crouch next to his friend as Brandon appeared at the top level, firing his pistol down towards the two remaining gunmen. They moved away for a brief moment and Liu vaulted over the waist-high railing, dropping down to the level beneath, landing in a low, clumsy crouch.
“Get in the car!” he shouted, pointing to the show car. The spiffy red paint chipped and flew as gunshots punched from the outside parking lot, shattering one of the side windows. Brad opened the rear driver’s side door and scrambled in, with Max close behind. Brandon ran low towards the car, bullets screaming overhead, chewing apart the railing and shattering the glass partition at the second level. He crouch-walked to the car and peeled open the driver’s door, then slid inside. He rifled through the keys in his hands, keeping his head down low. The passenger window exploded and Liu winced but felt no pain. He didn’t want to know how close that bullet had come. The key went in and he gunned the engine, the sports car roaring to life in response. More gunshots echoed, sparks dancing along the low sloped hood and Brandon slammed the car in reverse, lurching it backwards, crashing into the stairs and smashing a desk into firewood. Shifting his feet, he punched down on the accelerator and the tires spun, catching on carpet and sending the sleek red car hurtling forward while Liu cranked the wheel to the right, in the direction of the jumping flashes of weapons fire. As the windshield shattered and exploded, he kept his head down and blasted through the front window, spraying glass shrapnel in a wide arc, and thumping into the two men beyond, sending their bodies tumbling over the hood and rolling across the metal roof. Brad looked up through the moon roof and saw the panicked, pained face of one man as he skidded, rolled, and somersaulted down off the car and onto the pavement behind them. With a rough bang the sports car crashed into the parked car outside, hood slamming hood, knocking the sedan aside as the newer vehicle burst past. Liu hauled the wheel, slammed the brakes and brought the show car into a tight turn around the parked vehicle, then hammered on the accelerator and sent the vehicle, and all three of them inside, out of the dealership and back out onto route 29.
***
“How long are you planning to stay this time?” Rhonda asked her, the voice coming through the narrow, faint tunnel of memory.
“They invited me for the whole summer, mom.”
She remembered the conversation, almost verbatim. Her and Lydia, standing in their small living room. Phil had been in the kitchen, clanking dishes, doing things that Phil did. Being present, but not being involved.
“What on earth are you going to do there all summer, Lyd?”
“It’s beautiful up there,” Lydia replied. “Certainly not as beautiful as the endless plains of concrete suburbia down here, but…”
“Lydia, please,” Rhonda said. “We hardly saw you the past few months. We used to spend so much time together.”
“C’mon, mom. I’m graduating in a couple of weeks. You’ll need to get used to me not being around.”
“I don’t want to.”
The pain of the conversation traversed time and space, whirling through the fog of remembrance.
“Lydia, sit,” Rhonda said softly, walking around the couch and gesturing for her daughter to join her. “Please. Just for a minute.”
Lydia rolled her eyes but followed her mother, joining her over on the couch.
“We’ve never really talked about your grandparents,” Rhonda said. “We don’t really discuss my history with them.”
Lydia held up a hand. “I don’t need to hear it. That’s between you and them, mom. It’s none of my business.”
“It is your business,” Rhonda said. “You’re choosing to spend all this time with them.”
“They’re my grandparents,” Lydia replied. “They live in a gorgeous area. I go hiking, swimming, enjoy the outdoors. Get away from all this hyper-consumerism bull—”
“Hyper what?” Rhonda asked, drawing back.
Lydia gestured towards some phantom specter floating in the room. “This strip mall mecca we live in. Cookie cutter housing developments spat out in even spaces around an even more cookie cutter strip mall. Everywhere you look is places just looking to take your money. My sociology teacher had a theory that—”
“Where is this coming from?” Rhonda asked, interrupting again.
“It’s who I am,” Lydia replied. “Get used to it, mom, sorry.”
“I love who you are, Lydia,” Rhonda replied. “But you’ve been going to your grandparents every summer for almost five years now. I was hoping this summer, since you’re going to college next year, that maybe you’d spend it at home?”
Lydia drew in a breath and put her hands in her lap.
“Mom,” she said. “This isn’t about you. Or dad. Or Winnie or Max. It’s about me, okay?” She turned and looked at her mother. “I have a connection to that place,” she continued. “To that cabin. I love it out there.”
Rhonda nodded, the sting of tears threatening in her eyes, but she blinked them back. She had no desire to make Lydia feel guilty. She wanted her to know about the family history but didn’t want to taint her feelings of her grandparents.
“If that’s what you want,” Rhonda replied.
Lydia had been her best friend for so many of her eighteen years. They’d been about as close as mother and daughter could be. But perhaps she was finally growing up. Making that last, desperate plunge into adulthood.
The plunge was sudden and painful, and as much as she thought she’d been ready for it, she wasn’t.
***
“I can’t deal with this, Phil. I just can’t.” Rhonda stopped walking, looking at the surrounding buildings. Bracketed by brick structures, the dull darkness around them was further enhanced by deepening shadows.
“You need to trust the kids, Rhonda,” Phil whispered.
“I do trust them! It’s everyone else I’m petrified of!”
“I can tell,” Phil replied. “What were you thinking of? It looked like you were daydreaming there for a second.”
Rhonda nodded softly. “I was remembering. Those last few summers before Lydia went to school.”
“I get it,” Phil replied. “You’re talking about how big a deal you made of Lydia’s trips to your parents’ cabin? What we were talking about earlier? Every single time she went, you were an absolute train wreck.”
Rhonda glared at him through narrowed eyes. “There were reasons for that, Phillip.”
“I know,” he said. “You and your parents had issues.”
“You have no clue about our issues, Phil. None. You weren’t there, okay? You don’t know what I grew up with. What I was surrounded by. The kind of person they wanted me to be.”
“Woah, tiger,” Phil said, stepping towards her. He placed his hands on her shoulders and tried to draw her into a sense of calm. Rhonda was getting herself wound up and the tighter she was wound, the tougher it would be fo
r him to unwind her, especially now, with her children scattered to the wind.
Rhonda leaned back on a wall, lifting her eyes skyward. “To this day, the things they might have been putting her through,” Rhonda said softly, her voice far away.
“It couldn’t have been that awful,” Phil replied. “She kept asking to go back every summer, right?”
Rhonda nodded. “Every time she came back, she was a little different. Nothing major, but I can see it now, now that I look back on things.”
“You’re imaging things, honey,” Phil said. “She got to spend a couple of weeks in the woods. Learned to live off the land. I’m sure she was a bit different, probably better. I’m sure it gave her perspective.”
Rhonda thought back to her own time at the cabin. The endless hours she spent field stripping weapons, cleaning them, re-assembling them. Stacking, unstacking and restacking the basement bomb shelter. Hunting.
Killing.
Why had it bothered her so much? The hunting. Why had that made such a lasting impression? Since the detonations, she’d killed more than once. Killed several times, and none of them had impacted her as much as the deer in that field behind the trees. Those blank black eyes looking back at her, simultaneously understanding and not understanding its place in this world.
Had they made Lydia do that?
The way she’d acted at the zoo, there was no way they would have convinced her to shoot an animal. No way.
“So why do you think they invited her to the cabin every summer?” Phil asked.
Rhonda shrugged. “Probably their way of staying involved in the family. Maybe as a way to poke and prod me just a bit. Lydia was the oldest, and they saw her more often than Max or Winnie.”
“Do you think Max or Winnie ever felt left out?”
Rhonda shook her head. “Are you kidding? You saw how Winnie was acting on that trip before…well, before things happened. She wanted nothing to do with the wilderness. I’m sure she was glad not to be invited. Max would have rather stayed home and played video games.”
Phil nodded. “All true.”
They stood in silence for a few more moments, Rhonda looking around at the buildings, then glaring over to the street, silently calculating some complex problem that Phil wasn’t privy to.
“So do you think about them now? Especially during all of this?” he asked. Phil had lost both of his parents, his father dying just two years previously.
“Sure,” Rhonda replied, half-heartedly. “I mean, I don’t hate them. I hope they’re okay. If anyone was prepared for this crap, it was them. I just…if given the choice I prefer not to think about them.”
Phil reached out, holding Rhonda’s hand in a clumsy attempt to sooth her nerves.
“I can’t believe we’re leaving them behind,” Rhonda whispered, pulling her hand away. Phil walked slowly towards the corner of a building, his pistol held at his waist, walking softly so as not to make too much noise. They had vacated route 29, and he’d carried her into a tightly clustered urban area, with thick groups of old buildings, intermixed with convenience stores and gas stations, but the whole small pseudo-neighborhood was dark and silent. She’d given up fighting him over leaving the kids and reluctantly followed him into the dark shadows between buildings, but even though she wasn’t physically resisting, she made sure he knew just how much she didn’t approve.
“Clear,” Phil whispered, and they moved out into the alley, looking both ways before crossing.
“Where are we going and what are we looking for?” Rhonda asked.
“We’re looking for transportation,” Phil said. “And we’re buying some time, then we’ll make our way back to the RV and see if everyone’s there. We have to trust they’re doing the same.”
“What if those guys are there waiting for us?”
“Then we’ll head to the Lakeview Mall. That’s where everyone was expecting to go, we have to assume they’ll head there if they can.”
“Assume? You’re talking about our children here, Phillip.”
“I know, Rhonda. You think I’m happy about leaving them? But if we’re dead, then what? They’re smart and they’ve proven just how resourceful they can be. They’ll be heading there, I’m sure of it.”
Though she didn’t answer, she wandered aimlessly across the alley after him, then joined him as he rounded the corner of a short building out into a parking lot with a series of gas pumps. No cars were in sight.
“I have to admit, I’m proud of those kids,” Phil said. “Have you seen the way they’re handling themselves?”
Rhonda shook her head. “I don’t know…Winnie is halfway to a nervous breakdown and Max seems just as happy to shoot someone as say ‘hi’.”
“They’re strong. They’re fighting. They haven’t given up. All of those people sitting in the grass out by the barricade? The ones killing rats and roasting them on the open fire? They’ve given up.”
“We’ve been lucky, Phil. Extraordinarily so. That could easily be us out there, with nowhere else to go. If we hadn’t run into Brandon, we’d—”
“We would have found another way. Just like we’ve been doing for a month. It used to be if my iPhone ran out of battery life, I felt lost. I couldn’t function. I think we’ve adapted darn well.”
“Is that something to be proud of? The fact that we can now survive the end of the world while everyone we know and love dies a slow and radioactive death?”
Phil stopped walking and turned back towards her. “What is up with you, Rhonda?”
Rhonda eased to a halt. “I’m tired, Phil. I’m tired and in pain, and we haven’t found Lydia, and every time I feel like we’ve moved forward, we get pushed back on our butts. I don’t know how long I can keep fighting.”
“Don’t give me that crap. We wouldn’t have survived the first twenty-four hours without you, Rhonda. Much less the three weeks since. Whatever your parents taught you, whatever little survival secrets you have, they’ve saved our lives.”
“Don’t give my parents credit for this,” Rhonda said. “Don’t do it.”
“What is it with you and them? You’ve never really talked about them before. Our kids have barely met them, aside from Lydia.”
“That’s for the best.”
“You told me they belonged to some militia prepper movement, but you’ve never really explained anything beyond that. These issues seem to go deeper, Rhonda.”
Rhonda closed her eyes and shook her head. “Do we have to go through this right now?”
Phil shrugged, and looked around at the dark, empty buildings surrounding them. “You have some hot date I don’t know about?”
“Yes. With our children. Back at the RV. I’m sick and tired of how nonchalant you are about this.”
“I’m not nonchalant, Rhonda, I’m petrified. I don’t even want to think about what might be going on at the RV, but if they kill us, this all ends. Did you see what Brad’s parents’ deaths did to him? How destroyed he is? How do you think Winnie and Max will react if that happens to us? I won’t do that to them.”
“And how will we react if it happens to them?”
Phil lowered his gaze. Every point he made, she had a counterpoint. His fingers clamped together, then released, moving in even rhythm.
“One of these days I want to hear more about it. More about them.”
“We weren’t middle class suburbanites like the elder Fraser’s, Phil. We were rural, and they believed in some crazy things.”
“Their beliefs have kept us alive.”
Rhonda hesitated in her response for a moment. So many memories raced through her head, memories of the hours spent in the wilderness. Memories of her father standing over her while she field stripped weapons, cleaning them and reassembling them.
Memories of the family dog. Deer running through the back lawn. Hiking in the woods with her mother under a low warmth of the summer sun.
Sparring in the front yard. The makeshift shooting range near the run of trees by the st
eep dive into the gorge.
Phil was right. Their beliefs have kept them alive. As much as Rhonda hated to admit it, not only were her parents responsible for her and her family’s survival to this point, but their seemingly irrational fears suddenly seemed a lot less irrational.
Those things that they believed would come true, did. The preparations they drilled into her from her youngest age had successfully prepared her for what was to come.
“I know they have, Phil. Believe me, that’s one of the hardest things about this. My childhood was a struggle, a real and true struggle. It’s messing me up that I’m now supposed to appreciate what they put me through while the memories of those years are still so fresh and raw.”
Phil clamped his lips shut. Rhonda’s mouth twisted into a grimace, and tears spilled down her cheeks, carving clean paths through the dirt and dried blood.
“I don’t want to talk about them,” she continued. “Not now. Not ever.”
Phil nodded and turned away, heading out towards the gas pumps, his eyes scanning for signs of an abandoned vehicle of some sort.
“Let’s just head back to the RV, Phil. Please? I want to see if the kids are okay. I don’t care what’s waiting for us there.”
Phil drew a deep, pained breath, not looking back at his wife, just looking out into darkness.
“All right,” he replied. “Come out this way, we’ll circle around, and head back south on Route 29. That should lead us right back to where the RV was ambushed. Is that what you want?”
Rhonda nodded. “That’s what I want.”
Phil stuck close to the building, keeping his eyes open, scanning the area past the gas pumps. The world was dark and quiet out there, an amazing feat considering how close they were to one of the largest cities in America. Rhonda followed close behind as they worked their way back out to the road, staying off the pavement and in the grass so as not to attract attention.
“I’m sorry, Phil,” she said.
“Why are you sorry?” he asked, still looking straight ahead.
“I know you’re just trying to help. The memories are…difficult. They’re sharp. Barbed. It stings to try to pick them up.”