She nodded almost imperceptibly. Another moment passed. Finally, he appeared to grow impatient. He pulled his hands off hers and raised his left hand up over his face, running it across his brow like he was already exhausted with whatever exchange they were having.
“What are we doing out here?” he asked.
She still didn’t speak for a moment. Her hands started to move again, but she seemed to realize it and stopped herself, placing them flat on the table. “What are we doing anywhere?” she asked.
“What does that mean?”
She looked up, meeting his eyes for the first time since he had pulled up. She wasn’t still crying, but her eyes showed she was close to it again at any moment.
“You know what it means,” she said. “Are you happy? Seriously happy?”
He shrugged. “Who’s happy?” he asked. “Who has been happy since 2010?”
“Isn’t that insane? Doesn’t that just make everything pointless? We’re here now just to not die?”
“That’s all there is,” he said with another shrug.
“Then what are we?” she asked. The tears were falling now. “Why are we still plugging along, still doing —” she waved her hands around widely “— this?” He stared at her for a minute without responding. She exhaled deeply and started again. “Where do you see us in five years?” she asked.
He looked around in confusion, like he thought there would be a secret camera filming him. When he found nothing, he met her gaze again. “There’s no big world out there anymore, Candace,” he said. “I’m not going to win the lottery and retire to the Maldives. I’m not going to be discovered and have a reality show. In five years, I’ll be working around here, providing a life for my family.”
She looked at him and slowly shook her head. “I asked you where we would be in five years, and you said ‘I’ like 10 times in your answer and never once said ‘we.’ When was the last time you thought of us as us? I feel like we’re roommates… I miss you. I miss the man I fell in love with.”
He stuck his arms out wide. “I’m right here, Candace!” he cried. “I wish we could go to the movies on a Friday night too, but that isn’t the world we live in! It hasn’t been in close to twenty years! What the hell do you want from me!” He ripped his hat off his head and chucked it onto the ground, then almost immediately picked it back up, brushed it off and placed it back on his head.
Candace watched that. “That damn hat,” she said with almost a spit. “You show that hat more affection on a day-to-day basis than you’ve shown me in the last year. How many of your precious Blue Jays are even still alive? I’m right here. You know there are ways to have a date night without a movie or a five-star dinner, right? Go for a walk with me! Cook me dinner! And not your godforsaken jerky. I miss you. I miss romance. I miss being a person and not a survivor. Aren’t you tired of just surviving? We survived 2010. We found each other. We had the most beautiful little girl the world has ever seen. And I was fine with all of that as survivors, because that was what we had to do. I wanted to be an actress. When 2010 came, I was three weeks away from my big move to New York. I know that’s not going to happen anymore! I know this is all there is! But that doesn’t mean we have to sit back and wait to die. We can still live, damn it. It’s been almost 20 years. We still live in your dad’s house, exactly where you survived 2010. You said we’d move someday. You said we’d go places, do things. You said we’d build a boat and go out on the ocean. We live 15 minutes from the ocean and I haven’t been on the water since before we were parents. So again, what are we doing here? We can start to be people again. Don’t you want to just be a person and not a survivor?”
He stared at her, jaw clenched. She stared back with pleading eyes. They darted back and forth from his left eye to his right, like she was hoping at least one of the eyes would react to what she had said. But he stood in silence, just staring. He was breathing heavily, but other than the steady up, down of his breath and his jaw occasionally sliding back and forth, it was like he wasn’t even there.
“Nothing?” she asked after a moment.
He closed his eyes slowly, then opened them. When he spoke, it was measured, without affect. He adopted the tone of a man who had been offended by his server in a restaurant and wanted to know if the server knew exactly who it was he was dealing with. “I am very sorry you aren’t happy with the fact that you can do whatever you want every day instead of having to go out and farm and kill our food and find what we need. I am very sorry you are disappointed with the fact that I just spent the better part of a day collecting mulch so you can grow a flower bed full of things we can’t eat just because they look pretty. I am very sorry that we had a baby and have to work twice as hard. I am very sorry I’m such a goddamn terrible husband that you’ve never needed anything other than a fucking boat ride in the apocalypse. I’m sorry you’re such a child, Candace, that you can’t see everything I do for you every single day.”
Candace’s eyes filled with tears anew as he spoke. If she had been hunting for a specific answer, if everything she had said had been a test, her husband had failed that test. For the first time since he had gotten home, she stood up. “I gave you a chance,” she said. “I wanted to see if you’d even pretend to be the man I fell in love with. And you didn’t even try. I’m done. I’m leaving. When your dad gets back, I’ll gather our things, and she and I will go to a commune. We’ll sort things out later.”
“The hell you will.”
“You don’t own me,” she said. The tears were gone as quickly as they had come, and she was well and truly angry now. “I gave you a chance to show you still loved me. And you didn’t show me a thing. It’s over.”
She started to walk to the house. He watched her go angrily. As she put some space between them, he started to yell. “Candace!” he cried. “You aren’t going anywhere! You aren’t taking my daughter from me!”
Candace didn’t even look back. She kept walking and didn’t say a word. Her husband stared at her furiously, his eyes starting to fill with the tears he hadn’t cried during the whole conversation. But his face didn’t read as one of sadness. His face read anger.
Suddenly, a switch appeared to flip somewhere inside the man. He fumbled at his side for a moment and pulled his gun out of the holster. He pointed it at Candace’s departing figure with a shaking hand. “Turn around!” he yelled at her. “You aren’t taking my daughter!”
Still, Candace continued to walk, oblivious to the gun pointed at her. Oblivious, that is, until he pulled the trigger.
The bullet hit Candace in the back, chest-high, sending her falling forward. She cried out and rolled over, blood already covering her back and seeping out the front of her body as well.
Her husband appeared to realize what he had done. He re-holstered his gun and hurried over to her. As she struggled to gather her breath, he knelt by her side.
She looked at him, horror-stricken. “You …” she started as she coughed up a little blood.
He shook his head. “I had no choice,” he said. “You were taking my daughter from me.”
“You shot me!” she said with a gasp. Her breath was growing shallow and the blood continued to flow. She reached up to his face, knocking off his Blue Jays hat. It fell onto the ground, right where her blood was pooling.
“I couldn’t lose Adaline,” he said. “I had no choice.”
“Jack …” she said, but she never finished. She fell still.
Jack watched Candace breathe her last breath and he too fell still for a moment. He bowed his head and his shoulders shook, indicating the tears were back again.
And then they were gone. Within only a minute or two, Jack’s head snapped back up, like his alarm had gone off. He looked around briefly, his eyes eventually settling on the load of mulch in his truck bed. He left his wife’s body on the ground and hurried over to the truck, opening the passenger door and pulling his shovel out. Jack jumped into the bed and shifted the mulch around, clearing a spot in the
middle as best he could. He leapt back down from the truck bed and picked up Candace’s body. With his strength, Jack barely struggled as he hauled her body over to the truck and tossed her into the cleared space in the middle of the mulch. He climbed back in the truck bed and covered Candace’s body as quickly as he could.
Jack looked down at his body and realized he had blood all over his shirt. He ripped it off and buried it in the mulch as well, leaving only a dirty white tank top on his torso.
Right as he got his wife’s body and his own shirt covered, the first bits of sound started coming from the front of the property. Jack jumped down from the truck and then turned to look. Another pickup was making its way up the driveway. Jack looked around, and his eyes briefly went wide when he saw his Blue Jays hat sitting in the pool of Candace’s blood.
Jack grabbed the hat and shoved it into the back pocket of his pants. He got a shovelful of mulch and sprinkled it over the pool of blood. It wasn’t perfect, but someone would have had to look closely to identify the spot as anything more than an area where some mulch had spilled.
That done, Jack turned his attention to the hat in his back pocket. He shoved it as deep into the mulch as he could and scrambled to cover the spot back over. The other truck circled the driveway and pulled into view of the rear of Jack’s truck just as he pulled his hand back out.
The driver shut the engine off, and almost immediately, the passenger door flew open and a little girl leapt out, maybe five years old. She ran over to Jack and grabbed his hand. “Daddy!” she cried.
“Adie,” Jack said with a smile.
His daughter swung Jack’s hand back and forth like they were on a walk. “Where’s mommy?”
Jack looked at her for a moment like he was confused, but then shook his head and smiled. “I’m not sure, baby,” he said. “I just got here myself. Go inside and wash up. Maybe she’s in there.”
“Okay daddy!” she said and ran in the house.
As that exchange took place, the driver of the newly arrived pickup climbed out as well. He was a good bit older than Jack, in slightly worse shape, but with a generally similar build. Where Jack’s hair was salt-and-pepper with more pepper than salt, this man’s hair was almost entirely salt, except where it had lost seasoning altogether. He wore clothes similar to what Jack had been wearing upon his arrival, though he had no hat.
He walked over to Jack as Adie ran inside. As soon as the door closed behind her, Jack, without turning his gaze away from the door, said, “She’s gone, dad.”
His dad gave Jack a confused look. “What? Who?”
“Candace,” Jack said. “She was waiting for me when I got home. Said she was done. Said this was all too hard. She just … left.”
His father continued to stare, like he was looking for the punchline of a joke. When none came, he reached his hand up and placed it on his son’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”
Jack continued to stare at the door his daughter had just passed through. “I am,” he said. “I have my daughter. I have you. We’re still a family. And I’m sure she already realizes the mistake she made.”
“I hope so, Son,” his dad said. “I hope she’ll change her mind and come right back.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Jack said. He continued to stare at the house where his daughter was.
Chapter Two: Fault
2030
To his surprise, Mickey started to realize he had entered into the same stasis as the others. He had thought he’d have ideas, make a plan in short order after arriving at Salvisa’s. But it had been a while, and the only thing different now than it was when Mickey and company had arrived was the toppled fence and Jack continuing to try his various attempts to get Salvisa’s attention.
Mickey even felt himself starting to agree with McVay’s proclamation that there was no one in the house anymore. No movement, no sounds were coming. Even when Jack had shot out the window, it stirred nothing inside. Mickey couldn’t believe it, but he realized he no longer thought he was going to see Salvisa there — and that meant he was never going to see him again.
That was a weird emotion. It wasn’t that Mickey and Salvisa were friends, exactly — they weren’t. But they were friendly enough. Mickey thought about it like when a restaurant he had only been to once or twice would close unexpectedly. It wasn’t a spot he was counting on returning to, necessarily, but it was nice to know it was there, and losing it was just a weird feeling.
But at the same time, he couldn’t be sure. Maybe the old man was hiding out, nervous about the number of people outside. Maybe he had barricaded himself in his panic room. Maybe … Mickey didn’t know, and he didn’t like not knowing.
It all added up to Mickey needing to act. He had fallen in with the waiters, and that didn’t sit well with him. Jack was acting but wasn’t accomplishing anything. Mickey wanted to convince him to step back and come up with a plan. He walked over to his son, where he was once again pulling himself up on the bars over the window he had shot out and doing his best to look in.
“You’ve done that, what, five times now?” Mickey said as Jack let go and fell the four feet or so to the ground, landing lightly on his feet.
“At least seven,” Jack said.
“Do I need to define insanity for you, son?”
Jack shook his head. “I’ve got a different definition. Insanity is driving out into a world of Z’s and then hanging out in a front yard for hours on end because an old guy locked his front door.”
Mickey had to admit, his son had a point there. Jack might not be accomplishing much, but Mickey wasn’t either.
“How many times have you gone around back?” Mickey asked. He didn’t think there was any more accessibility to Salvisa’s house on other sides, but he had never scouted those areas much.
“Three,” Jack said. He was just staring up at the shot-out window as he spoke. “Just like this, but darker. Nothing much to see.”
Mickey nodded, then exhaled deeply. “At some point,” he said, speaking carefully to avoid setting Jack off, “you’re going to have to change your approach, right? Even if you’re being more proactive than the rest of us, yelling and knocking into the void isn’t actually accomplishing much.”
Jack didn’t look away from the house. “I’ll try this until it works or someone gives me a better idea,” he said. “No sense quitting.” With that, Jack resumed his banging on the door, and Mickey resumed his watching.
This went on for a tedious couple of minutes of Jack growing more frustrated about his inability to get in and Mickey growing more frustrated with his inability to come up with a better plan before the sounds of an argument started carrying on the air to where he was.
McVay had said arguments weren’t uncommon here, and Mickey believed it. Tensions were running high, and people who wanted answers weren’t finding them. That was definitely a recipe for conflict. So at first, Mickey just tried to ignore the argument. He wasn’t the boss of the area and didn’t want to invest in anything that wasn’t helping him accomplish his goals.
That determination lasted for about another minute. Try as he might, Mickey couldn’t help but overhear some of the cross words being exchanged, and in due time, he realized one of the voices was coming from the man Erik, the one who had come in making accusations. Mickey decided, as the only one there familiar with the woman Erik had accused, he had to be involved.
He walked over to where the commotion was coming from and saw the 50-something man and Erik standing in each other’s faces. The man stood about a head taller than Erik and was looking down on him, demanding something that Mickey couldn’t yet hear.
As Mickey drew nearer, he started to hear some of the commotion. And the first word he got was “liar,” coming from the older man he didn’t know. He didn’t like that. He didn’t believe Erik’s story about Michelle, but wasn’t sure enough that he should have said it to anyone and potentially cause more problems. Potential, he realized, that had come to be realized.
&n
bsp; “Are you a liar?” the man was yelling at Erik, in his face, looking like a manager screaming at an umpire over a blown safe/out call. All that was missing was a pot belly, ill-fitting uniform, and a home plate to kick dirt over. “Did you come here just to screw around with everyone?”
Erik was doing his best not to engage. Every time the man got in his face, Erik tried to back away. But the man wasn’t having it. He circled Erik to stay in front of him. Mickey could see that Erik was losing his calm and was trying to decide how to deal with it.
“Answer me!” the man yelled, his finger in Erik’s face.
“What do you want me to say?” Erik said, his voice nowhere near as loud as the man’s but his tone growing frustrated. “I told you my story when I got here. Do you want me to say it again?”
“I’m telling you I don’t believe it,” the man said. “I want to hear the truth!”
“I told you the truth!” Erik said.
“And I said you’re a damn liar!”
Erik tried to turn away again, but the man grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him back. That was a mistake, as Erik had failed to engage to words but reacted to physical interference. He shoved the man away from him and tried to walk away, but the man, who had a good four inches and 30 pounds on Erik at least and looked like he spent more time in the gym than anywhere else, rebounded from the push and cocked his arm back for a punch. Erik tried to duck, but the punch still connected with the side of Erik’s head, knocking him to the ground.
Erik was dazed, but he scrambled back to his feet quickly and backed away from the man. People started to gather around, though no one took steps to get in the way of the two of them. It was starting to resemble a high school fight, absent only was the chanting. Mickey felt that he was about to take on the role of the too-late teacher coming in to split them up. Arguments were one thing. Violence was another entirely.
As Mickey moved toward the duo, the man charged Erik again. Erik, realizing he wasn’t going to be able to back away, squared up for a fight he was likely to lose. Still, he tried, and threw a punch just as the man got to him. It didn’t do much, and the man’s momentum carried into Erik and brought both crashing down, the bigger man landing atop the smaller.
After Life | Book 2 | Life After Life Page 28