“Not now,” Harry said harshly, harsher than he needed to.
“But-”
“But what, Erin?” Harry snapped. “I don’t fucking know what we’re going to do. Stop asking.”
Erin sobbed.
That was how thin the line between calm and chaos had been. And Erin’s reaction would not be unique among the survivors. It wasn’t too far from her own. Already in her mind’s eye, she could see those blue eyes looking at her.
I’m hungry, Mommy.
At least she had the go-bags tucked away in her trailer. That would buy them another week. She didn’t feel bad about it, skimming off the top, an MRE here and there. The others had done the same, she was sure of it. In their trailers, in closets and under floorboards, tucked away. And if they hadn’t, that was their problem. They should have known this day was coming, and if they hadn’t prepared accordingly, then they were lucky to have made it this far. All this, this had been prologue to the way the world really was.
As the morning wound on, the entire community drew in on the ruins like moths to flame. They looked so small, so weak, so vulnerable, just a couple dozen of them wandering around lost. A few arguments bubbled up, but those quickly fizzled out.
This day had always been coming, ever since they had taken control of the warehouse. The thousand-piece puzzle was already complete. It was a matter of organizing the pieces, snapping this one into that one and so on until it was finished. Like the Toba super-eruption her dad had mentioned. The pressure inside that volcano had been building slowly for eons, pointing toward that day. It had always been fated to blow on that day and there was nothing the poor people living on the planet back then could have done about it.
The feeling of helplessness threatened to overwhelm her. She was bobbing along the river of time like an empty bottle, tossed to and fro by the currents, events bigger than her, events that shaped her into whom she was, and not the other way around.
Stop stalling, Fisher.
Behind her, the recovery crew was lining up the bodies. Without sheets, the dead lay exposed for the world to see. Many of the bodies had sustained terrible damage, gunshot wounds and crush injuries and head trauma. Her chest tightened as she watched them clean the bodies, clearing off the blood and the viscera accompanying violent death.
It never got easier. Thirteen years and so many dead, not even counting all those lost in the epidemic. Eventually, you got numb to it. Someone died, you mourned them briefly, and you got on with whatever life you had. That’s how it was. That’s how it was because it could be you the next day. And today it was her father. Today it was Adam Fisher.
She walked gingerly down the line, down the row of the dead, and knelt by Adam’s body. His work shirt was thick and cold with blood. His face was flat, unlined, almost at peace. She leaned in and kissed his forehead.
“Rest, Daddy,” she whispered, stroking the back of his hand with her thumb. “You rest now.”
The tears began to flow. Her shoulders heaved, and she sobbed ugly, a big nasty cry, her nose filling with congestion, her eyes cloudy with tears as she contemplated a world she had never known, a world without her father in it.
She had no use for notions of heaven or hell, believing instead that whatever bits of matter had once made up Adam Fisher would now go on to make up something else. His work on Earth was done, this burden he had carried for nearly a decade had finally been relieved. The years had been hard on him, as the finality of their situation had become more apparent.
“I’m sorry, Rachel,” Harry said, kneeling next to her.
She said nothing, her eyes fixed on her dead father.
“What do we do now?” she asked, the harsh moment between them long since dissolved.
“We bury them.”
“Then what?” she asked, her voice becoming a bit more manic.
“We keep going,” Harry replied loudly. “We were living on borrowed time anyway. All this does is change the timeline.”
Harry pointed at Adam’s body.
“He died for us,” he continued, making Rachel think of her days in Sunday school and Mrs. White, her young and beautiful and stern teacher. The guilt trip to end all guilt trips. Jesus died for you, you know, He hung from that cross, ribbons of blood flowing from His crucified hands and feet, suffering terrible, agonizing pain while His father, the Big Guy Himself, up there in heaven had looked on and done nothing, until Jesus’ lungs had quit, all for your sorry unsaved ass.
“They all died for us. The least we can do is to keep going. It’s what I would’ve wanted if I was lying here instead of Adam. And believe me, I’d trade places with him in a second if I could.”
“Don’t say that,” Rachel said.
She didn’t know why she said that other than it seemed like the right thing to say. She would absolutely have traded Harry’s life for Adam’s. She didn’t like Harry, he didn’t like her, and if the tables had been turned and he’d been the one lying dead here, she didn’t think she’d be all that torn up about it when you got right down to it.
“I would,” he said. “I sure as hell would.”
And yet his words stabbed at her like tiny knives. Her father lay dead before her, and it bothered her to hear Harry express his loyalty to him? What the hell was the matter with her? He had meant a great deal to the community over the years and in many ways had been its glue. The doctor, their liberator from the Citadel, the peacemaker, the counselor, the explorer. Even his trek east a few years earlier, a journey that had taken him away from them for eight months had not diminished his standing among them. If anything, it had added to his mythos. He had been the one to go out into the empty world, to check the pulse of whatever remained of humanity.
Their fight about it had been terribly bitter. She remembered her surprise at the vehemence of her objection to him going. By then, they had welcomed another physician to their ranks, and so she couldn’t make him feel guilty about leaving them high and dry. She didn’t think he would ever make it back; it was too dangerous, too unpredictable to assume the journey would end in any manner but with his death. If he died, she would never get to tell him the things she needed to tell him. And when he’d left, it was like he had died.
“We have to know what’s going on out there,” he’d said.
One spring morning, he and a man named Dan Davies had set out from the compound on horseback, leaving the medical clinic in the hands of the new doctor, Leila Gaskin, or her friend Charlotte Spencer, who had taken to the study of medicine quickly. And that had been that for eight months. After a torturous trip to Richmond, Virginia, where he had lived before the plague, Adam had returned shortly after the first snowfall that November, emaciated, gaunt, near dead, his horse not in much better shape. And alone. Dan had elected to stay back east, deciding to make a go of it near the ocean. Adam slept for days. He kept to himself for weeks afterward, talking little of his eastward journey. That was what had scared Rachel more than anything. The whole point of the trip had been to study the world, to make observations and to report to the community what they had found. But he hadn’t said much about it at all.
“Not much out there,” he would say, only when pressed. “About what you’d expect.”
He’d brought back mementos, photo albums, medical textbooks, his old notes, most of which remained tucked away in his trailer. A trailer that would be dark tonight. A lot of darkened windows in their little community. Not much of a community left, when you got right down to it.
Back home, she found Will waiting at the screen door, his face long and drawn. Above his head, a planter swung in the light breeze, the remnants of a long-dead house plant still hanging lifelessly over the rim. He was looking down, focused on a piece of dry skin in the palm of his hand.
“Is it true?” he asked.
She took a deep breath and let it out.
“I’m sorry, Spoon.”
He looked up, his eyes glassing over before the tears spilled over and ran down his cheeks.
> “It’s not fair,” he said. “It’s not fair!”
He stormed back inside, leaving her alone outside.
7
Rachel woke up early on the morning of the funerals, two days after the attack on the warehouse. She brushed her teeth and took a bucket bath, her first in a week. Pre-plague Omaha had been serviced by a lineup of 150,000-gallon water towers, many of which had been nearly full when they had moved in. Although electricity had drawn water into the tower, power was not required to push the water through the pipes; gravity took care of that. A team drew water daily from the nearby Platte River, which they deposited into the reservoir feeding their community. It had required a bit of trial and error, but in the end, water had become something they didn’t have to worry about.
If there had been one silver lining in all the dark clouds of their lives, it had been this one. They were careful to filter and disinfect all their drinking water, and to date, no one had become sick from drinking it. They also limited baths to two per week. It was the same way all over; water had never been a problem anywhere. She couldn’t imagine the hellscape their world would have been if they’d had to fight over water. It was bad enough as it was.
When she was done, she felt almost human again.
She dressed Will in a nice shirt and pants. The clothes smelled a bit musty and had yellowed a bit with age, but she didn’t think anyone would mind. While he waited in the living room, she settled on a plain black dress that hung loosely on her thin frame. After dressing, she went out to the living room, where a subdued Will fiddled with a comic book.
“How do I look?” she asked.
He shrugged his shoulders, not looking up.
His grief radiated from him like a fever. A terrible thing, a boy losing his grandfather. Not just a grandfather. Adam had been the primary father figure in Will’s life, given Eddie’s failure to step up to the plate.
“I miss him too,” Rachel said.
He shrugged his shoulders again.
She sat next to him on the sofa, silent. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him fighting back tears.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
He shook his head.
He hadn’t said two words since she’d told him about Adam’s passing. The first night, she could hear him crying softly for hours before she’d finally drifted off to sleep. He’d been a wreck the following day, ornery, angry. He refused to eat his breakfast, and when she had forced the issue, he had slid his plate onto the floor. She’d screamed at him for that, wasting food when there was so little to be had.
She took a deep breath and considered the day ahead. All twelve victims of the warehouse attack would be laid to rest today. Harry and Max had recovered the other victims from the ruins of the warehouse, which stopped smoldering when a rainstorm moved in later that evening.
It was hard to look at the ruins.
If they had planned better. If they had heavier weaponry. If they’d had their own tank.
If this.
If that.
You could if your way to the nuthouse in this world.
Rachel ignored the pang of hunger in her belly. She could make do with less, at least until they found a new source of food. Like a squirrel stashing away nuts for the winter. It would be okay. Even if she and Will had to strike out on their own, it would be okay. Two mouths weren’t that many to feed, right?
It was the first time she had envisioned a life out there, beyond, her and Will, eking out an existence. It was her first conscious acknowledgment of their new reality - Evergreen was dying. She wondered if the others shared her sentiment or whether they would want to press onward together in the face of this new challenge. She wondered what Eddie would want. Would he want to come with them? Or would he be glad to be rid of them?
They bided their time until it was time to go. Will puttered around the trailer listlessly. She wanted to reach him in some way, crack through that shell he’d constructed. He and Adam had been close, very close; it seemed Adam had made a vow to redeem his absent parentage of Rachel via his grandson. Adam gave the boy what little free time he had, yet another player in the card game known as Rachel’s Feelings Toward Her Father.
Eddie arrived a few minutes later. He hadn’t shaved and his eyes were bloodshot. He appeared to be too hungover to engage in any argument. At a quarter to eleven, the trio left the trailer and made the walk to the makeshift cemetery where they had buried their dead over the years. About a dozen people had perished in their time here, forever interred in this lonely corner of the campus. Each grave was marked with a wooden cross, two thick sticks lashed together to form a T. She didn’t know why they used crosses, she didn’t know if the dead had been Christian or if they were even religious at all, but it felt weird not placing a marker, no better than leaving the bodies in a ditch. The markers classed it up a bit.
The sky was gray but bright, the overcast shimmer making her eyes ache. It was still the same distance to the cemetery it had always been, but the walk seemed much longer this morning. Her feet hurt, her legs felt heavy. Around her, other survivors were making their way as well, coming in dribs and drabs, their gaits, slow methodical, no one really wanting to do this. Will walked like he’d been kicked in a very sensitive spot. There was no malfeasance from him today. Just a boy who missed his grandfather.
Twelve open graves awaited them when they arrived at the cemetery. Harry had once again taken the lead in getting things organized. He had worked nonstop yesterday digging the graves, late into the night, and his face showed it.
She, Eddie and Will stood at the front, their son in between them. As she waited for things to get underway, the wooden fencing surrounding the physical plant building caught her eye. It was warped, rotting, the boards pulling away from the support posts. And then she was thinking about all the other things that were rotting around them. You could feel the world winding down around you, you could almost hear it, like an old watch, its batteries finally giving up the ghost.
“Good morning,” Harry said, his booming voice jostling her out of her daydream.
She glanced around the crowd; everyone was here. The faces were familiar, the same faces she’d been seeing month after month, year after year. Her gaze settled on Erin and Charlotte, the two people she’d probably been closest to in the community. They stood side by side, together, whispering. As Rachel watched them, she couldn’t remember when she’d last spent any real time with either of them. They’d been through a lot together, especially her and Erin, and here they were, not necessarily strangers, but not the family they had once been. She caught a glance from Charlotte, who gave her the pressed-lip head nod. Rachel returned the nod, and Charlotte dipped back into her conversation with Erin. If anything, she had grown closer to Charlotte over the years; Charlotte had never become pregnant, had never wanted to have kids, and remained one of the few women to not look at Rachel with envy or judgment or contempt.
Another thing winding down.
“We’ve suffered a terrible loss,” Harry said. He went on, and Rachel drifted into another daydream as he eulogized Paul, the one who’d been cut down trying to escape the warehouse. A little story about Paul. He’d been a regional manager for Best Buy before the epidemic and he had loved the Boston Bruins. He liked the Pats, Sox, and Celtics well enough, but the Bruins had been his first love. He’d been divorced when the plague hit. Had a son in the Army, assigned to a quarantine zone in San Antonio when everything had gone to hell. She tried to listen, she should listen, but these sad, beautiful stories of those they had lost simply did not hold her attention.
Soon it was her turn.
She squeezed Will’s hand and made her way to the front. Her head hurt and she could feel a twitch forming over her left eye. In her pocket, some notes she had sketched out, things she could say to celebrate the life of the man who had done so much for her, for all of them.
There was no podium, no dais, no slideshow of Adam’s life whirring behind her. Just Rachel st
anding there, looking out over those long, drawn faces, faces she might be saying goodbye to very soon. Things were ending here, she knew it the way you knew a relationship was over, even when it was still running on autopilot. She took in a deep breath of the chilly air and let it out, the cloud of breath transfixing her. The cold air brisk and refreshing on her cheeks.
“My father was a great man,” she said, reading from her note, her weight shifting from one foot to the other.
She had never given a eulogy before.
Was it supposed to be happy? Sad?
Was it for her? Was it for them?
Was it for him?
“Many years ago, he did a great thing,” she said. “For me. For some of you.”
It all came back to her in a rush, her time as a prisoner at a place called the Citadel. She’d been strapped to that hospital bed as those men had begun the procedure, looking up and seeing her father, positive she was hallucinating because how could he have found her out there, in the dark, in the cold, in the great nothing of the world after the outbreak. But there he’d been, against all odds, somehow, he had found her and saved so many.
Her hand absently stroked the inside of her wrist, home to the tattoo they had given her at the Citadel. A phoenix rising from the ashes. One by one, she made eye contact with the women who had been held captive at the Citadel with her, women who had identical tattoos, and each of whom nodded. The ones who would have died if not for Adam’s ridiculous rescue attempt. It had been something out of a movie. A regular old Rambo.
Her hands slipped behind her back, and she laced her fingers together, crumpling the note. Her feet were crossed now. She couldn’t get comfortable. She didn’t know what to do with her hands. A podium would have been nice. Something to hold on to. To give her purchase, here in the roiling waters of this terrible day.
She glanced at the note again. A few sentences she had jotted down last night as sleep had eluded her. Looking at them now, in the light of day, they looked naked, exposed, the emperor with no clothes. Letters making up words which made up sentences. Squiggly lines. Sharp lines. Jagged slashes. They looked dead on the page. Broken pieces of glass.
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