by Ryan Schow
Her mouth curled into a delighted smile, highlighting a small pair of dimples he’d seen before and found adorable. She seemed to be enjoying herself. On the other hand, he felt more at ease being shot at than being with her. His head was a million unanswered questions. Questions like: does she like me? Can I be with this girl despite the age gap? What if she’s not interested? Things like that, things that might never have answers, but would persist anytime he was in her company.
“I know that,” she said. “I was wondering what specifically you were thinking.”
“Oh.”
Swallowing the lump in his throat, he reached out and brushed a strand of hair back from her cheek, just as he imagined, then said, “I was thinking about how beautiful you look in this light.”
She tucked her chin, an unguarded smile coming…a smile of satisfaction, one of enchantment.
“Do you think this is happening in other places, too?” she asked, her voice a little more timid, but not in a bad way. “All this…destruction by the drones? The loss of power?”
“I liked talking about us better,” he said. “But yes. I think it’s happened elsewhere.”
“Is that your instincts talking, or do you know something?”
“If I leaned in and kissed you, would you pull away?” he asked. He didn’t mean to ask the question, but he had to. He had to know.
She stopped, let go of his hand and turned to face him. “Is that what you want?”
“Yes.”
“Then no, I won’t stop you.”
And with that, he leaned in and kissed her. Her hand came to his face as their lips touched, and though it wasn’t a hungry encounter—because the night and the circumstances didn’t warrant that—it was probably the best kiss of his life.
When he pulled away, he drew a deep, satisfied breath and said, “Wow.”
“Yeah,” she replied, looking down.
He took her hand again and said, “You asked me if I see an exit here, and the answer is yes, but it’s not what you think.”
“Oh, yeah?” she asked, sounding breathless and a bit whimsical.
“This. You and me. What we did, what we’re doing. This is our exit. Our way out of the apocalypse.”
“So kissing? That’s your big plan?”
He laughed, then looked at her and said, “It’s more than that. I’m talking about the human experience. Before all this, we started out working hard to make something of ourselves. In my case I chose to defend the nation against enemies foreign and domestic. In your case, I would think you wanted to help people, yes?”
“Yes.”
“But then we went and ruined ourselves with real life. We saw too many horrors, or we felt cut short or abandoned by our employers, or we over-consumed, which is hard to do in a consumer society as healthy as ours. Either way, we created all our little disconnections. We stopped seeing the beauty of family, friends, lovers. It became more about paying the bills, stacking up a pension—”
“Getting through med school.”
“Exactly.”
“What was the last relationship you were in?” she asked.
“It’s been a while,” he said.
“Me, too.”
“Life can’t just be about things. Buying them, collecting them, paying for them. That kiss, our connection, it was amazing…it was the first time I felt…anything…in years.”
“Really?” she said with a girlish giggle.
“Yeah. It happened in the middle of all this, and yet it felt like the most beautiful thing ever. That’s our exit. Not a cleaned up world, or restored order, or even power or running water. Our exit is each other, who we are, how we come together.”
In the dying light of the day, a lone gunman walked out of a building where Ashbury dead ended into Fulton. He saw them then stopped. He had a hunting rifle with a scope on it and a tension about him Rider found alarming. He turned and aimed the rifle at Rider, then at Sarah. Rider tensed, stepped back and pulled Sarah behind him. The rifle inched back at Rider. He held his breath.
But the man didn’t shoot.
Rider slowly gave a subtle wave of acknowledgement, but the gun still didn’t go down. Until it did. The man hurried off into another building and they found they could breathe again.
“I think I might have just wet myself,” she said, more serious than not.
“Yeah, that was strange.”
“Want to head back?” she asked.
“I do.”
When they got back to the compound, the sun had already dropped and she was shivering from the onset of a stiff evening chill. As for himself, Rider could no longer mask the pain in his leg. He was limping a bit at this point.
“It’s been cold at night lately,” she said.
“No heat will do that.”
“I don’t have enough blankets, but I don’t want anyone else to go without,” she said, not looking directly at him, but completely aware of him.
“I have an extra one,” he said.
“Perhaps we could combine them,” she replied, now looking right at him, a hopeful, expectant look in her eye. “You could keep me safe, and warm, and I could give you your exit.”
“I’d like that,” he said.
The last thing he ever thought he’d have to think about in the apocalypse was falling in love. No one ever really said the words romance and post-apocalyptic nightmare in the same sentence with a straight face.
It could happen though, couldn’t it?
Statistically no one wanted to talk about soul mates and long days in bed eating strawberries and watching chick-flicks and dreaming about happily ever after while outside the pavement was painted red with some dead guy’s face, and in the houses all around him everything was rotting fruit, spoiled cream and unflushed toilets.
But Rider would be damned if something new wasn’t kicking around in that battered old heart of his.
He’d dragged a blanket and a pillow to her room from his and at first they climbed into bed and cuddled in the dark until she said, “We can produce more body heat together if we’re not wearing clothes.”
He could have said something clever, but the world was turned upside down and shaken loose and they could all be dead next week, or tomorrow, so instead of being witty or astute, he simply began removing his clothes.
From there he forgot all about the end of civilization as he knew it and lost himself in her body, her touch, in her kiss.
When a guy finds the right girl, nine times out of ten, she’s just good in bed and he might not have been laid in awhile. It was easy to mistake good sex with true love. Rider knew he shouldn’t do that, but he understood the charm of a fresh face, a new body, open intimacy. She was young, but she didn’t come off like it, and they’d had time to build their attraction to each other over the last weeks, which might have solidified what had become a mighty lust for her. So maybe it was perfect.
Maybe it had all the necessary ingredients of true love.
Or maybe she’d die tomorrow and it will have just been sex this one time at the front of the end of time.
“What are you thinking about now?” Sarah asked him, running her fingers through his hair.
“I’m thinking about the odds of something like you and me,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she asked, scooting closer to him, pressing her breasts into his side.
He was silent for a few moments, gathering his thoughts, trying to think of a way to say it that wouldn’t be off-putting or sound like rambling.
“When you go to war, you set aside the notion that you’re doing a bad thing. But war is a bad thing. Waging war, as I’ve come to learn, is more often than not a privilege of the elite. Us career guys think of it as protecting our country from foreign enemies, but the reality is it’s almost always about consolidation of both money and power. Then, when it’s over, and the rich got fat and well fed, guys like me are left with the nightmares in our head, with the battle scars, with the impossible weight of what we’ve done.”
>
“Is that why you go on walks?” she asked. “Why you keep to yourself and seem almost shy?”
“Mostly.”
“I hope this isn’t too forward, but have you had a relationship with a woman since you’ve been back?”
“One or two, nothing serious.”
“Your fault or theirs?” she asked.
He turned and looked at her in the dark, saw the faint outline of her face, and said, “Never mine. I’m amazing.”
She laughed at the joke.
“Sometimes when something runs its course,” he said, his voice striking a more serious tenor, “two people can walk away from each other and not feel scorned, or resentful, or even broken-hearted. They were like that.”
“What war did you fight in?” she asked, easing her leg over his, moving her body even closer to his.
“At some point in time I lost count.”
“There was only really one or two right?”
“America is always at war with someone or something, so much so that when you’re an operator like I was, you see only missions. Not wars to be won or lost.”
“So did you see much combat?” she asked, kissing his neck, his cheek, his earlobe.
“Fortunately and unfortunately.”
“And did you have to kill people?” she said, taking hold of him and moving her body onto his once more.
“As much as I appreciate—”
And with that she took him away from his past for a few moments, this time wearing him out damn near completely. When they were done with round two, and the silly notion of falling in love in the apocalypse no longer seemed so trivial—that it might even be a real possibility—he said, “Tell me one thing you’ve never told anyone else, something that would give me some deeper insight into the world of Sarah Richards.”
“What if I can’t name that one thing?” she asked, laying on her back, the blankets half off her, her body warm and flush beside him.
“So are you an open book?”
“Only when I trust someone, and then yes, I like to share. Can I trust you, Rider?”
“That’s something you’ll have to decide on your own, but I’ll tell you this, I won’t lie to you, deceive you or hurt you.”
She laced her fingers in his, laid there for awhile, and then she said, “I once put eye drops in my step-father’s coffee and he had explosive diarrhea for two full days. I never told anyone that.”
Rider laughed, barely able to picture that. “Why in the world would you do that?”
“I heard him call my mother a bitch with bitch children. I lived with my mom and younger sister at the time. My father left us a few years earlier for another woman. She was apparently pregnant and he claimed he needed to take responsibility for his actions, so he went and made a new family. I guess I just didn’t want another deadbeat dad around to break our hearts twice.”
“So poisoning him was the solution?” he asked with laughter in his voice.
“It worked,” she replied.
“Is your family here with you? I mean, are they here in the compound?”
“My sister died when her high school was bombed and I found my mother’s car near her work, burnt to a crisp. She was in the front seat. She tried to call me…”
She stopped speaking, her voice catching. He put his hand upon her face, cupped her cheek as the warm liquid ran from her eyes.
“Why’s all this happening?” she asked with a heaviness in her voice.
He rolled over and held her body tight, giving her no explanation, just the love she needed right then. In his arms, she felt so small, so fragile, so…broken.
Like him.
“My brother was in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban when he took friendly fire in the face. He died instantly.”
“You mean someone from our side shot him?” she said, sniffling.
He nodded.
“I think it was an accident, but a lot of those guys over there, they’re high strung, scared, they make mistakes, or stage accidental friendly fires. I’ll never know.”
“Accidental friendly fires?” she asked. “Is that even a thing?”
“You remember Pat Tillman?”
“Vaguely.”
“NFL player joined the Army out of his patriotic duty, then went over to Afghanistan and began to see the bs of it all. He started to speak out, and it pissed off enough people that when the opportunity struck, a few of his fellow soldiers basically gunned him down. They chalked it up to ‘friendly fire.’”
“That’s horrible.”
“Whether or not that’s the absolute truth, friendly fire happens, sometimes on purpose.”
“I’m sorry your brother died.”
“Me, too. I miss him every day. I was dug in to an op when he passed, so I wasn’t ever able to go to his funeral.”
“You never really got a chance to say good-bye,” she whispered.
“No. But neither did you. And for that, I’m sorry.”
As he lay there in her arms, with her warm, soft body resting beside his, a well of emotion flooded forth. He squashed it down. It wouldn’t stay buried, though. One day defined so many others, and he couldn’t get the memories out of his head.
How had his life come to this? How had he been so bad?
He once killed seven men who thought it would be fun to torment a group of kids. Visions of him beating these cowards to death unfolded in his mind, stamping out the feelings of loss he suffered thinking about his brother. Unfortunately, these horrors playing in his head also kept him from feeling everything he should be feeling about Sarah.
He didn’t know how to deal with all the death he caused. He knew that now. His answer early on was to kill enough people to crush those memories down, to beat the feeling out of his head and heart. It didn’t work. But even now, he kept trying, futile as it seemed.
Sarah moved against him, kissed him.
“I feel so alone, Rider,” she said. “I know we’ve only just met, and you’re way too old for me, but there’s something honest in you, some sad, wholesome part of you that understands what I’m going through, but from a different level. For whatever reason, it makes me feel…not so alone.”
“I know you said I’m way too old for you, but did you ever think you’re way too young for me?”
Smiling in the dark, she said, “Of course not.”
He laughed, and it was the first jovial laugh he’d had in years. Perhaps the hard shell he’d constructed so thoroughly around his heart wasn’t so impenetrable.
“So what are you saying?” he asked, hoping she was saying what he hoped she was saying.
“I’m saying, you’re pretty hot for an old fart, and you can protect us if things turn ugly, which I’m smart enough to know they will. Plus I see the way you look at me. I know that feeling. I have it when I look at you, too.”
She was right, he thought. Perceptive and right. The fact that she was feeling the same about him was not only unexpected, but welcome.
If they were ever going to beat back the darkness and hopelessness this attack had left behind on the city and its people, it would be through moments like this with people like Sarah.
Would he still have to face all these demons though? Would he still want to hurt those who hurt others to make up for the part of him that lamented his brother’s death, and his own run of misdeeds? If so, in this city that once embraced nearly a million souls, there would be gangs, felons, power trippers and monsters.
Plenty of people meant plenty of trouble. And in times like these, the lawless, the cruel and the insane came out from the darkness and into the light. If he could put all his pain into ending their lives, then perhaps he could find meaning again. If he could dispense of it on others, maybe it wouldn’t leak out on Sarah, as had happened in all his other relationships.
Or maybe he was still an old, ruined fool.
Feeling her naked body curled against his, he brushed a strand of hair from her head and wondered how long it would be before he
broke her heart, before she gave up looking for that something inside of him that had long ago been hollowed out.
Chapter Forty-Four
Chad and Wagner set out into the night with their stack of bombs, their last baggie of weed, their papers and their lighter. They were already tripping, but not enough to concern them.
“There’s a lot of cars out here,” Chad says.
Wagner simply nodded.
“We should go a few blocks up, try out these things in a neighborhood that isn’t ours,” Chad said.
Wagner just nodded again.
“You okay?”
“I feel…I feel…do you feel it?” he asked, practically dazed. It’s dark outside and they were just walking down the street, away from their home.
“Mine’s wearing off.” His high. That soft, fuzzy edge of everything.
“Yeah, man.”
“Let’s head up into Presidio Heights,” Chad said. That’s where they were heading, but someone needed to say it. “Most of that neighborhood is vacant anyway.”
“How do you know?” Wagner asked.
“Is it cold out here, or is it just me?”
“Where’s your jacket?” Wagner said, looking up at his friend. Chad’s eyes were dropped down on the pipe bombs he was carrying in a box in his arms. Inside the box was his jacket.
“It’s keeping the bombs warm,” Chad said.
“If they get cold will they blow up?” Wagner asked.
“Of course, that’s why we have the jacket.”
Wagner rolled his eyes and said, “Dude, you’re dumb. Seriously. When did you ever see anything blow up because the conditions were too cold?”
“I may be dumb,” Chad said, “but you’re still high, so maybe we’re both stupid.”
At that, they both started laughing, then began talking about how to daisy chain a bunch of the pipe bombs together if they could only find a pair of cars close by.
“First things first,” Wagner said, “we try one and go from there.”
They walked for the next few blocks in the cold, quiet night, then Chad handed the box to Wagner and said, “This is getting too heavy. You carry it for awhile.”
“We’re far enough from home,” Wagner said.