by Ponce, Jen
“You okay?”
She realizes her cheeks are wet, that she’s been crying without even realizing it. “No.”
The table is quiet. She supposes they’ve had a lot of impromptu moments of silence like this. Alex takes one of her hands, Mel the other. More hands press against her shoulders, gentle squeezes, soft murmured words of sorrow and understanding. A single, wrenching sob escapes her before she can rein it in. It’s both affirming and embarrassing. It’s loud, it’s messy. It serves no purpose in this new world except to get her killed.
She’s grateful that they turn away, that they pretend not to hear, though perhaps they had their own moments like this. She’s also annoyed that they don’t press, that they don’t say, “Let it out.” Because she wants to, she wants that permission and there’s no way in hell she can give it to herself.
“I’ll go with you.”
She frowns at Alex, at this woman who doesn’t know her, who has been living safe here for months, who wants to help a complete stranger. Why?
Doesn’t she know what happens out there? Doesn’t she understand that everyone out there dies?
“I mean, if you want me to. It might be easier with someone watching your back.”
“Thanks. I’ll consider it.” She doesn’t want to, though, doesn’t want another death on her hands, doesn’t want to be responsible for anyone.
“I have a brother up there. I tried to get to him when the outbreak first started but it was just chaos. My nieces would be with him. My sister-in-law. If they … you know, survived.” Alex shrugs. “If you were worried I was being too altruistic. That’s why. Plus, I would hate for you to not get there now that you’ve come this far. It would be a shame.”
Mel rises, gathering her plates. “It would be a shame. When you leave, we can make sure you’re geared up. Food, water, weapons. Gas. Whatever you need. We can even call them. James over there? He rigged us some lures around the area. Sirens, noisemakers. That sort of thing. We can draw them to certain spots to keep them out of the road for you. At least for a few miles.”
“Thanks.”
Mel pats her. “When you’re ready.”
She should be ready now, but she finds herself reluctant to leave just yet. She’s still short on sleep after all and she’s just not ready to face the truth, whatever it ends up being. “When I’m ready,” she repeats, and wonders if that day will ever come and how she’ll be able to live with herself if it doesn’t.
31
Now
A week passes before she knows it. There’s so much to learn at the Complex, which is what the survivors call their little safe haven. They go out in small groups every day to make sure their maze stays clear. They also do what they can to make their neck of the woods a little safer. That entails killing them when they can, moving cars, searching nearby homes and businesses for supplies they can use. “Prescriptions, over-the-counter pills, first aid kits. Guns, ammo. Knives. Tents. That sort of thing. Whatever we can use here to survive,” Alex says as they go out with three others to search a nearby store that has fireplaces, fire pits, and barbecues.
They take a truck with a couple of dollies. If they have corn pellet fireplaces, they can heat their living spaces more efficiently next winter. They hadn’t frozen this year because they’d still had electricity through the worst of the cold.
“The corn pellet thing is supposed to be really efficient,” Mel says as she sees them out the door.
“She’s in love with the idea of corn pellets,” Alex says as they get into the truck, a large extended cab that fits them all with room to spare.
“Lana thought we should get one. A couple years back. She got caught up at the mall by some guy who was super into them.”
The big diesel grumbles in the way only a truck like that can. Dee stares out the windows at the quiet city, watching for them, waiting for one to struggle to its feet. The residents of the Complex have done a good job of clearing them out. There are a few, but none of the crowds just a few blocks away.
Have they learned, she wonders, to keep away from this place where the humans have dug in?
It’s a scary thought, one she ponders on long, lonely nights.
The store is only a few blocks away. The small commercial square with a few beauty stores, a vitamin shop, and an accountant’s office all look mournful in their stillness. The driver, a guy named Peter, shuts off the engine and they listen to it tick as they watch out the windows for them.
A siren blasts in the distance. It’s loud even here, though it sounds like it’s moving away from them, its blasts of sound almost sacrilegious in all this silence.
Silence of the dead.
Except, they aren’t silent, are they?
When five minutes pass, we get out, our weapons at the ready. Pete and his wife Gloria grab the dollies and we go to the door of the store. It’s unlocked. The apocalypse happened here during business hours, she guesses.
The store is weird. Fireplaces are supposed to be dirty, functional things and they’re displayed like gold toilets under now-dark spotlights. We find Mel’s corn pellet stove. Two of them. They get loaded onto the truck. We grab a few fire pits and a rocket stove too, a contraption Dee once read about in a zombie apocalypse book of all things.
They search the back offices and employee lockers but find nothing of interest. It’s okay, though, because Alex is fun to be around, her outlook on the reduced state of humanity humorous. Light. Dee can tell Alex, wherever she survived before finding the Complex, didn’t have it so bad. Surely she wouldn’t be so happy if she’d lost what Dee had lost. Right?
Dee feels ashamed for thinking that way about this woman who is doing her best to make things suck less. Ashamed, yes, because she doesn’t have a monopoly on despair even though she’s lost so many.
Lost Lana.
“Hey, you’re gone again.” Alex bumps her, shoulder to shoulder. They are riding back now, Gloria driving while Peter sings a song about boat rowing. Jim, their fifth, sits staring out the window on Alex’s right. He doesn’t talk. Not anymore.
“Yeah.” Dee nods. Considers. “Who was it? That you lost?”
The question doesn’t take Alex by surprise. She doesn’t freeze up or get that lost, sad look other people get. “My girlfriend. My mom and dad. My brother and his wife and kids maybe.” She shrugs. “I’ve been here two months and I still haven’t gone to look for them.”
She looks closer at Alex, at the way she smiles a bit too sharply, gestures a bit too wildly. She isn’t calm or okay with things at all. She’s just found a way to stuff everything down and down and down until it was too deep to erupt. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too. So, you know, I meant what I said. I’ll go with you. I have to.” She tucks hair behind her ear, and smiles, though it’s melancholy, and not filled with her usual brightness.
Dee gave Alex her address the second night she’d been at the Complex, and they looked at a map together to see where Dee’s house was in relation to Alex’s brother’s home. It turned out they were only two cul-de-sacs away from each other. A small world, that was what Lana always said when she saw someone she knew in a store across town. A small world, she said when they ran into a colleague on their vacation to the Great Salt Lakes.
“A small world,” Dee murmurs.
“Yes it is.”
Dee digs through her coat pocket, the inner one, and pulls Will’s wallet free. She flips it open and hands it to Alex. “His name was Will. Met him on the way here, after I … lost everyone else.” She taps his picture, willing herself not to cry, not to remember. “I promised him I would find his family. They’re all the way in Kirkland.”
Alex swallows a few times, then rubs a finger across Will’s face. “There’s a lot of them between here and there.” She doesn’t have to ask what happened. She knows. We all know what it means when someone is not around to tell their own story. “Twenty-two years old.”
Yeah. Not much older than her boys. Schrödinger’s
boys. Both alive and dead until she opens the front door and fixes their fate with her observation.
“Gloria and Pete are from Kirkland. Tried to get back several times. Haven’t found a way in yet.” Alex passes the wallet back.
Dee folds it up without looking at Will’s face and tucks it away. “Everyone is dead. My wife. Dan. His son. So many.”
Alex studies her, her brown eyes searching. “Are you saying you don’t want me to come?”
“I’m saying everyone is dead.”
There’s a corpse flopped over the rooftop of a sandwich shop. A spray-painted sign hangs by a corner under the man’s dangling hands. ‘Survivors inside! Please help!’
Alex eyes flick up and away. She nods. “Duly noted.”
32
Then
The next few weeks we spent searching for Lana, Owen, Ivy, and Evan and Jean’s girls. Isaac was glad for it. He used the time to kill as many of them as he could. We’d go out, search house by house, building by building and we’d come home tired, sore, and bloody, him most of all. He didn’t care if he wore clothes crusted with their blood. It was Paisley who kept him as clean as he’d allow. She’d force him to strip, give him something new to dress in. She used wet wipes to get the worst off his face, treating him like a child. Maybe it made her feel better, helped her keep on keeping on now that Jude was dead, but I itched to tell Isaac to get over it.
Lana was gone. Lana was missing. “Where are you?” I whispered at least a hundred times a day. I whispered it as we left a building that yielded no secrets. I whispered it as we rode out in the morning, as we made our search plans.
There was hope. We hadn’t found them, living or dead. If they’d been killed, surely we would have seen them walking around. We made noise up and down the highway every day in the hopes we’d lure them out if they’d … changed. Nothing. Oh, things came out of the fields, but they weren’t our people.
“Where are you?” I said again, not realizing I’d said it loud enough for Dan to hear.
“Hmm?” Dan had taken to staring out the window of the hotel room we stayed in at night. He said he was watching for signs of life in the neighboring buildings despite the fact we’d searched them. A flicker of light, smoke, other signs of fire. Something to give us hope.
“Nothing,” I said. I joined him at the window. “Anything?”
“No.” He sighed. “I thought I saw fire over there, but it was just the sun. The wind made the glass move, I guess. I don’t know.” He dragged a hand through his hair, then leaned his forehead on the cold pane. “It’s getting colder. Twenty-eight last night and it’s already thirty-three tonight.”
If Owen was out there alone, still alive but alone, he would freeze to death. If Lana was with him, or Ivy, then they would figure out how to keep themselves warm, which would mean smoke. Fire.
“Would they have gone north?” he asked. “Found another vehicle and kept going, hoping it would be safer the farther away from the city they got? Why? Why wouldn’t they circle back?”
I didn’t know. I’d asked myself this a million times. If they were alive, why would they leave? I thought back to what we’d done since that awful day. Had they circled back and missed us? Was this one big comedy of errors? “Do you think they found Evan and Jean’s bodies and thought we were all dead?”
“Wouldn’t they search for us the way we are searching for them?”
I didn’t know. If something bad had happened—and it obviously had, considering the van, the blood smear—if something bad had happened and Lana had to weigh searching for me and going to the boys … I thought she’d leave me behind. And really, how well could she possibly search with three little kids and Ivy on her hands? Ivy, who’d tuned out and hadn’t said a word since finding her daughter and grandkids dead. “There were a lot of them that day. Maybe Lana, Ivy, and the kids headed north. Maybe they were worried we wouldn’t make it and decided it was more important to save the children.”
A desperate flicker of hope lit in Dan’s eyes, though he tried really hard not to let it flare. I understood. I walked a dangerous line between wanting so badly to believe Lana was alive … and not wanting to get my hopes up for fear my heart would shatter if I found her body.
“I’m going to hit the hay,” I said. “It was a long day.”
“Yeah. I think I’ll stay up a bit longer. You know.” He gestured to the city outside.
I knew.
Dan and I were sharing a room, and Isaac and Paisley were across the hall. We had tents to sleep in and sleeping bags, having gone back to the store after the dead things moved on. The tents kept our body heat in, the sleeping bags too, and we each had a twin air mattress underneath us. It was quite cozy.
I took off my shoes but left on my thick socks and crawled inside the tent. I’d already changed my clothes when we got back to the hotel—no pajamas for us in case we had to get the hell out fast—and so I slipped inside my sleeping bag with a sigh, before rolling to my side to scroll through my phone. We’d gotten a couple of solar chargers from the store too, so I kept my phone plugged in and charged so I could look at the picture of Lana and the boys. I smiled as I studied the last picture I had of Lana. It was a selfie, taken at the hotel when we arrived in Omaha. Lana was squinting into the sun and smiling, her arm around my waist, mine around her shoulders. Goddess, I missed her. “Where are you?” I murmured. She smiled back at me but didn’t answer. Didn’t reveal her secrets. What had happened to the van to make them abandon it like that? Why had the door been open? What about the blood?
If they found another car, maybe they did go north. It would mean they were safe …
What about the blood?
Safe somewhere north of here.
I would have to convince Dan to move on soon. I could imagine Lana stopping, making signs for us. If she were alive, she’d want me to know it. She might not wait for me, the thought of the boys might drive her on, but she’d leave signs.
If I didn’t see any, I would know …
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to stave off the tears. I hated being in this place of not knowing. The boys had been bad enough but I’d had Lana with me. I’d had her to lean on, I’d had her to worry about. Now …
Fuck.
I heard Dan crying. He cried every night now, staring out at that window. I wished I could find his son for him. I wish I could say he was safe, that Evan and Jean’s girls were safe too. I had their picture in my wallet in case we found them. In case we saw them. I couldn’t imagine telling them about their parents, though.
“This whole thing sucks.” I didn’t realize I’d said it loud enough for Dan to hear until I heard his watery laugh.
“You got that right.”
“I think we need to lodge a complaint.”
The bed squeaked as he sat on it. “Is there a board that governs the apocalypse? How does one go about finding the forms? Do we submit them in triplicate?”
“Signed in blood.”
“I’ll bet there’s a dude with a big rubber stamp somewhere waiting for us to submit the paperwork.”
“The grim reaper?”
“Nah.” I heard the slide of laces and the thump of his boots on the floor. “He’s busy. Or dead. I mean, he’s probably in jail. I hope he’s in jail. He’s royally fucked up.”
I rolled to my back and stared up at the ceiling, smiling as I pictured the grim reaper in jail, knocking a cup against the bars of his cell. “He so has.”
“If there was a god, I’d find him and punch him in the face.”
My smile faded. I fell asleep listening to him cry.
33
Now
Another week passes. She likes it here. Likes being able to walk on the rooftops with Alex or Mel or two little kids named Suzi and Eddie. She likes feeling safe, likes not being on the road.
Of course, she can’t stop thinking about her boys, won’t stop. But her urgency has faded as if she’s been pulled in by a siren who has made her
forget her purpose.
She wants to go, makes preparations to go … but she also continues to convince herself that she needs more time to prepare. She can’t go without supplies. She can’t go without gas and water and weapons. She can’t go without intel from the group who has lived this area and seen what it’s like.
“I’m stalling,” she whispers to the city as she stands on the rooftop and stares in the direction of the boys. “Why am I stalling?”
“You okay?”
She turns to see Peter near one of the greenhouses, his thinning brown hair blowing in the steady spring breeze. “Yeah.”
“Thinking about those boys, right? Wondering why you aren’t headed to them right this minute.”
She pushes her hands into her pockets. “How did you know?”
“I’ve been doing the same thing. Wife and I. We keep thinking it’ll get safer. They’ll die off, rot to the point where they can’t walk, can’t see. We need more supplies. We need to find safe routes and contingency plans and and and.” He stabs a trowel into the dirt and digs in his pockets for a pack of cigarettes. He smokes when his wife isn’t around. Dee has been here long enough to know that. To know that their dogs were in their house when the apocalypse started, the dogs that they loved like babies, the dogs that were probably dead now. “We have to live with the fact that we didn’t try hard enough to get back to them. They starved to death and it’s our fault.” His voice roughened and he turned to gather himself. Eventually, she heard the flick of a lighter and he turned back to her. “You’re ready. You should go.”
He is right. She knows it. “I feel paralyzed, you know? I want to go but I’m afraid of what I’ll find. I’m so afraid …”
“Gloria and I will go with you. Alex too. She already said as much, right? We need to go, try again. It’s been a while. The roads into Kirkland might be cleared out.”
She doesn’t want to be the one that leads people into doom. She doesn’t want them helping her. They’ll die and then she’ll have to live with that.