The next room was the master bedroom. I opened the blinds to let in the light. This room was the opposite of the craft room. It didn’t look ransacked like the kitchen. It just looked lived in and it looked like someone had left in a hurry. The bed was unmade and there were clothes scattered around. A suitcase and a pile of bags were on the bed. I wondered how much time they’d actually taken to pack once they decided to leave. Then again, maybe they hadn’t even made it out. The virus hit so quickly, once you had it you were pretty much dead.
I sniffed the air thoughtfully, not noticing anything strange or unusual. Maybe they had made it out, after all. If there had been bodies in here for more than a few hours, chances are we would not only smell the decaying flesh, but see the telltale flies, as well. I grabbed a bag and shuffled through some of the clothes. I grabbed a sweatshirt and sweatpants and shoved them into the bag. A change of clothes would be nice to have. I briefly considered changing out of my own jeans, but they were comfortable and I was only a day out from having washed. I'd be okay in these a bit longer.
"Paige," Brian called me from the other room. I followed the sound of his voice where he stood in one of the empty bathrooms. "Did you find a bag?"
I held up the small duffel I'd found and he motioned for me to hold it up. He started dumping the contents of the medicine cabinet into the bag. Apparently the Howards had been hoarders, at least when it came to pain pills. Motrin, Tylenol, and Percocet all went into the bag. Birth control pills went in, too, along with a box of condoms. Brian didn’t say anything as he tossed those in. He didn’t have to. You never knew, after all. We hadn’t really talked much about what we were doing together, but it was an unspoken reality that bringing a child into the world now would be a bad decision. The thought of giving birth unassisted, of any number of possible pregnancy complications, was overwhelming to me. Even though my mother’s crunchy friends were all about home births, I didn’t think I could handle it. The condoms would stay. Unopened toothbrushes, toothpaste, and dental floss also made their way into the bag. I didn’t want cavities, either.
"Brian, let's get out of here," I commented, glancing around nervously as he continued to load up the duffel. "This place is giving me the creeps." It had started suddenly, really. At first, I'd felt fine in the Howards' home, but after going through their belongings and ransacking the possessions of people I knew, I was starting to feel sick to my stomach. These were real people. These were their things. I briefly visualized someone going through my own bedroom at home, shuffling through my sock drawer or taking my favorite pair of sneakers to wear. I thought about all the little things I left in my room, just trusting that no one would see them. How would I feel if a stranger went through my medicine cabinet, my underwear drawer, or my nightstand?
Brian glanced at me for a moment, as if he wasn't quite sure if I was serious, if I really wasn't handling things as well as I seemed to. "Okay, Paige. We can go." That was it. No argument. He zipped the bag and slung it over one shoulder. He offered me his opposite hand and led me silently down the stairs and out of the house.
I was surprised that there wasn't more of an argument from him. After all, Brian wasn't exactly the strong, silent type. He was more of the strong, better-listen-to-every-word-that-falls-from-his-lips type. Maybe I was being too hard. He wasn't mean. He wasn't a jerk. He was, however, the type of guy that you needed to listen to when he spoke. Most of the time, Brian saved his words for when he had something important to say. So when he did finally offer up a token of information, of wisdom, you listened.
We headed over to the barn. Brian's shoes crunched on the gravel driveway and the sound seemed to echo for miles. I looked over my shoulder. I felt like I was being watched. Maybe it was a side effect of living in the city for too long. Had I forgotten what nature sounded like? What it felt like? Were those locusts I heard? Crickets? Every time I felt the wind tickle the back of my neck, I grabbed it and swatted at it, worrying that someone was just out of sight, taunting me, watching me.
"Paige," Brian said quietly, turning to me as we reached the edge of the barn. He placed his strong hand on my forearm and stared into my eyes. If I wasn't so jumpy, it would have been a really romantic moment.
"Yeah?"
"It's going to be all right."
"What?"
"Everything. Everything is going to be all right."
And then he opened the door of the barn.
Chapter 16
The sun streamed into the dark barn. Brian headed inside but I stayed back, choosing instead to observe the building from the safety of the great outdoors. If anything was lurking inside, or if anyone was in there, I would have a running start. I felt like a baby, really. After all, here I was, this so-called "country girl," and I was letting my boyfriend head into a dark, deserted barn alone. Some survivor I was.
I didn't know why I felt so off my game at Howard's. Maybe the exhaustion from the pandemic had finally gotten to me, but I was scared. I was scared to go into the barn, scared to see what was inside, and scared of what might not be in there. In this case, the latter was true. There was nothing. The barn was empty. It almost looked like it had been scrubbed. There was no equipment, there were no tools, and there were no vehicles.
Brian returned back to the sunlight a bit less enthusiastic, a bit less certain that things would be okay. This time I was the one who patted him on the arm, the one who looked into his eyes, and the one who told him "We'll be okay." He nodded simply, not speaking, and we started walking. More walking. We would walk forever, it seemed like. I had hoped that there was a car in the barn. It would have been so nice to get a break for just once in our lives, but it wasn’t meant to be. There was no use feeling frustrated or upset about it. It was what it was.
I knew the way to my mother's house. We could be there before sunset if we played our cards right. The problem was that we were both cold, hungry, and tired. When you're alert and you've had a good night's rest, you can accomplish just about anything. Pop quiz in your advanced calculus class? No problem! Eat a big breakfast your mom made you and be on your way. But in my world, take away your solid 12 hours of rest, your scrambled eggs with bacon, and strip away your blankets and pillows, and that test turns into a huge nightmare.
We moved slowly down the side of the road. Too slowly. The sun rose higher and higher until we were drenched with sweat. We stayed on the side of the road, choosing to walk on the gravel instead of in the ditch. Although the ditch was more shaded and cooler than the road, we got a lot more distance making our way on the road itself. It wouldn't be long now.
"How are you holding up?" I asked finally. I wanted to break the silence, to see what Brian was thinking. He hadn't said much since we had left his grandparents' place. Then again, there wasn't much to say. The world was a death pit now. The world was gross and ugly, not nearly as beautiful or fantastic as we had once believed.
Instead of answering me, Brian cocked his head and looked at me for a moment, then continued walking. He had maintained the same pace for hours, never breaking even when it was obvious he was exhausted. Now I wanted to know what was running through that brain of his.
"I'm sorry. It was a dumb question," I said finally. "It was stupid of me."
"Why do you down yourself?"
"What?" Did I do that?
"You're amazing, Paige. You shouldn't sell yourself short all the time. You're fine. You're just fine." Brian looked at me like he couldn’t believe I would ever doubt myself. What did he see in me that I didn’t see?
"Oh." My heart leapt within my chest. He liked me. He loved me, really. We both loved each other. We needed each other. But to have him tell me I was amazing felt pretty damn good.
"It wasn't a dumb question.” He said finally, “I just don't know how to answer it. Some moments I feel okay, like I'll be able to get through everything, but the next I feel like my entire world has collapsed and I can't breathe. I feel overwhelmed. I feel angry. My grandmother didn't deserve to die that way.
Neither of them did. It's not fair and I wonder what the point of it even is. Why are we even here?"
A knot formed in the pit of my stomach and I suddenly wished I had just stayed quiet. He was right and I felt the same way. What would we find when we got to my mother's house? Would it even still be there? Would anything ever be okay again? Without the Internet, without our friends, without colleges or society, what was the point of it all? Were we just supposed to repopulate the earth now? Were we just supposed to try to stay alive? I didn't know. None of us did.
"Turn right," I told him suddenly.
"What?"
"Right. This is it."
I grabbed his hot, sweating hand and turned off the road down a narrow driveway. I had to restrain myself to keep from running down the road.
"Wait, Paige. Wait." He stopped me and dropped the duffel bag. With both of his hands on my shoulders, he asked me, quite seriously. "You know they might not be okay, right? You do understand what we're walking into, don't you? I can go first if you want, Paige. I can go and you can stay right here. You don't have to go in with me. It's okay to wait."
"No." I took a deep breath and turned back toward the familiar winding driveway. "It's my home. It's my family." I nodded firmly. "I can do it."
"Then we're going to be smart about it. If they're sick, we book it. If they're dead, we'll handle it. But Paige, do not touch anyone or anything until we know for sure what we're walking into." It was sound advice and I knew he was right. I couldn’t just run into the house and expect to hug my parents. I would check first, of course, to make sure they didn’t have the rash. Brian’s method of having the person take their shirt off had seemed to serve him well so far, so I would just do that. But then, once I knew my parents were fine, once I saw that they weren’t infected, I’d hug them forever. I smiled just thinking about the look on my mom’s face when she saw me. She was going to be so excited.
I nodded for the millionth time and then I kept walking. The driveway was lined with thick, heavy trees. When my parents' had bought the place, there had been nothing but open land. My mom hated how hot the house got in the summer and how high the electric bill got, so she decided to change something.
"We're planting trees this week," she had told me in her sweet, sing-song voice. "We're planting trees and we're going to make our own forest."
As a child, I had been fascinated with how we could just buy saplings at our local Wal-Mart and bring them home to plant. Over the course of my life, they had grown and blossomed into large, shady trees that were now thick enough to constitute a small forest, at least in my mind.
Now, as the driveway turned and curved into a small parking area, I saw the house for the first time in what felt like forever. It was beautiful. It was home. I ran up the front porch steps before Brian could stop me. The windows were quite obviously boarded up and they had been so in a hurry. The front porch was empty, but the door was locked and I didn't have my key.
"The back will be open," I told him, running past. "It's always open." He tried to grab my arm, tried to tell me to slow down, but I didn’t. I couldn’t wait. I wanted to yell that I was home, to scream it until they came running, but I didn’t. I reminded myself to keep my cool. That was important. It had been a long time since I’d be home, after all. I needed to show them how adult I was, how grown up and responsible their little girl could be.
I hurried around to the back door, jumping over familiar bumps in the ground and dodging random gopher holes I knew about. I hurried toward the back door and when I reached the top of the steps, I stopped. I stared at the doorway. I didn’t move. Brian, who had followed me, stopped too.
"Paige, don't go in." He didn’t have to say it. His words weren’t necessary this time.
The back door wasn't, as I had promised, unlocked. It was, however, completely gone. The glass in the back windows had been broken inward. Shards of glass and the remains of the door were scattered on the porch. The interior of the house was dark. I wanted to go inside. I wanted to see my family. I wanted to know what had happened. Were they okay? Were they still inside? Why hadn’t they fixed the door? Had they left? Had someone come for them?
"Paige," Brian urged me, placing a hand on my arm. "It's not a good idea."
"I'm going inside," I told him, "but I won't be stupid about it."
It was time to start showing Brian how responsible I really could be. He believed I was smart and independent, and it was time to prove it. Turning back down the porch steps, I walked to the side of the house where the chimney sat. Counting from the bottom up, I ran my hands against the hardness of the stone. I grabbed a specific brick, the one I had long ago helped my father chisel out and then replace, and wiggled it loose. Without a word, I pulled the small box from inside the hole and removed a handgun. Brian didn't say anything as I carefully loaded the accompanying bullets and turned back to him.
"Now I'm going inside."
This time he didn't try to stop me.
Chapter 17
For all I knew they were dead, but I didn’t want to think about it. For all I knew they were dead from the virus, dead from intruders, dead from starvation. Dead from cannibals. Dead from a storm. Dead from anything. Maybe they weren’t dead. Maybe they were hurt, but that seemed almost worse somehow. I tried not to imagine my parents holed up in the basement, too injured to rescue themselves, too hungry to think, too weak to move. Instead I promised myself I would find them. I had come this far, after all. I had come this far and clung to this weak thread of hope, this glimmer that life would be okay someday. Suddenly things didn’t seem so okay after all.
There was mud caked on the once-polished hardwood floors my mother had always worked so hard to maintain, to keep fresh and sparkling. I cringed as I stepped over the muddied footprints, wondering who had left them. Brian stayed just behind me, keeping close enough to guard me, but allowing me to walk first through the home I knew so well.
It was true that growing up somewhere gave you a perspective on a house that many people simply took for granted. The best home intruders, after all, are ones who are familiar with a home’s layout. And after living in a house for your entire life, you learn a lot about the way it’s structured. I could easily make my way through the dimly lit home without bumping into anything. My body knew, even when my mind didn’t, how many steps it was to the kitchen, how many strides to the sink, how many stairs led to my old bedroom, how many squeaks there were in the staircase to the basement.
I trusted my instincts and let my body guide me through the darkness, refusing to give in to the fear that was swimming through my heart. My mother’s cell phone was on the kitchen floor, shattered into a dozen pieces. I stopped as my foot crunched on the broken screen, pulling back to stare for a moment. Nobody had picked it up. The phone had fallen and broken and no one had picked it up. Why hadn’t someone picked up the phone? My mother never would have left a mess like that. Not in a million years. A clean house is a happy house, after all. At least that’s what she believed.
“We should just go,” Brian whispered to me, placing a hand on my shoulder. “It might be better to just leave.”
“Why?” I turned to him, my eyes wide. I felt cold. I felt broken. I knew they weren’t okay. “We’ve come too far. I have to know now.”
“There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to find out exactly what happened,” he told me. “You are not weak if you don’t want to keep looking. You are not a failure. You are not a bad person.”
But I knew that I couldn’t leave it at that. I couldn’t come all this way and wimp out at the brokenness surrounding me. There was glass all around the kitchen floor. All the pictures that had lined the walls depicting images of my childhood were scattered around the faded linoleum. All the China plates my mother had so delicately and deliberately decorated the top of the kitchen walls with were in pieces. Everything was broken. Everything was destroyed. Everything was gone.
“I don’t think anyone is here,” Brian commented after
a moment. “I haven’t heard any noises. I’m pretty sure whoever came through here is long gone and your parents probably are, too. I don’t mind clearing the house just to be sure, but I don’t think we’re going to find anyone, Paige.”
I sighed. He was right. The muddied prints had long ago dried and the back door to the house had obviously been open for awhile. The kitchen was nearly devoid of any food, save for a small bag of stale crackers in the back of one cupboard. I tore the bag open and Brian and I devoured it in minutes. Instantly thirsty, I opened the fridge to see if there was anything inside to drink. The smell of rotting meat was overpowering and I slammed the door, trying not to puke.
“Basement,” I muttered, motioning for Brian to follow me down the narrow staircase into the dark. I grabbed a small flashlight from a drawer and flicked it on. Thankfully, the batteries worked. The batteries always worked in flashlights at Mom’s house. As a child, I had loved playing with flashlights and exploring the house in the dark. The only rule had been that I had to replace the batteries as soon as they stopped working. That way, dad explained, you would always have something ready for a disaster. You would never be caught unprepared.
I avoided all of the squeaky spots on the stairs, just in case. I felt nervous, though, about the fact that the backs of the stairs were open to the basement. I wondered if someone was hiding in the dark, ready to grab my ankles and make me trip. I brushed it off, realizing how stupid the idea was, but somehow couldn’t shake it. Childhood memories of friends hiding behind the stairs and jumping out at all the worst moments swam in my head as I made my way down and finally reached the basement floor.
The air was cooler down there and the house was even quieter, if that was possible. The pantry was to the right and I grabbed Brian’s hand and guided him there. The door was closed, surprisingly, and locked. Had the people who ransacked upstairs skipped the basement? My heart leapt for a moment. Maybe my parents hadn’t been killed after all. Maybe they had left and someone had simply come over after their disappearance to look for food. Finding all they wanted in the kitchen, they hadn’t bothered to check the rest of the house. After all, how many people in the country had basements full of food?
Never Look Back: A Dystopian Novel Page 13