by Paul Curtin
Travers hunched over his bowl, slurping down soup by the spoonful. “Travers,” she said. He turned his head up toward her. “Oh my goodness,” Elise said, putting a hand on her chest.
His nose and lips were blackened with frost bite and his right nostril was missing. His cheeks were chaffed so badly they appeared raw and bleeding. He shied his face away from her. “I’m sorry,” he said.
She forced her hand back to her side even though it felt much more comfortable on her chest. “It’s okay,” Elise said. “It’s okay. I’m the one who should be sorry.”
“I didn’t warn you.”
“What happened to you?” Aidan said.
She blushed. “You shouldn’t have to,” she said and turned to Andrew. “Maybe we should take Aidan upstairs. Let our guest settle in. It’s time for bed anyway.”
“What happened to your face?” Aidan said.
“Aidan,” Elise said, “go upstairs. Come on, now.”
“But, Mom—”
“But, nothing. Go.”
Andrew grabbed Aidan’s shoulders and led the reluctant boy toward the stairs. As they made their way up, Kelly came down hugging a stack of clothes. Despite his deformity, she smiled at him and placed the items on the stone hearth. “I’m Kelly,” she said.
“Travers,” he said with a gleam in his eyes. “Pleased to meet you.”
Kelly pulled back toward Michael, and Molly appeared. “The generator is going, but it’ll take a little—oh.” She stopped.
“This is Travers, Molly,” Elise said and looked down at him. “My daughter.” She said to Molly, “Would you mind going upstairs and helping Andrew put Aidan to bed?” Sean straightened his back. “Just for a little while,” she said, watching him in her peripheral.
Molly nodded and shot up the stairs, but not before glancing a few more times at their guest. When she disappeared, Travers hung his head low. “I don’t mean to scare nobody.”
“You’re fine. Do you want to get changed? We have a mudroom behind the kitchen.”
“Changing might be a hassle.”
He gripped the edges of his gloves and pulled them off, slowly, his face contorted. He gasped when they came off. Elise covered her mouth. His hands were blue and speckled with wounds where frozen patches of skin had torn away from removing his gloves. They were spotted with a dead blackness from the tips of his fingers to his palm. Half his fingers were missing.
She swallowed. “Kelly, can you please go down into the reserves and get one of the first aid kits?”
“The reserves?” Travers said.
“None of your business,” Sean said.
Kelly went to the basement. Travers removed his other glove like the first and then extended both mangled hands toward the burning fire. “This is real nice of you folks,” he said. “Real nice.”
By midnight, Travers was dressed, showered, and covered in a thick blanket. He didn’t stray from the fire for long, as if walking away would extinguish it, and the chill would come after him again. His appearance had transformed. No longer concealed under layers, they could see the disaster had not been good to him. His skin stretched taut against his emaciated bones—his body skinnier than anyone she had ever seen before. His face had creases reserved for people a decade older. The cartilage at the top of his ears was gone, having been victim to the cold, and spots of skin on his face were permanently blackened.
Elise sat down near him. “Are you sure we can’t do anything about your hands?”
“I lost my fingers a long while ago, ma’am. You can’t bring ‘em back.”
Michael tossed another log onto the fire. Within a few minutes it was roaring. Sean sat in a chair at the back of the room, silent. His eyes showed all the signs of exhaustion, but there was an awareness there too, a penetrating stare that made her uneasy. The firelight reflected in everyone’s eyes, but the same glow made her husband look menacing. Like he was a tight, fraying cable on a bridge, moments away from snapping.
With the kids upstairs and Andrew in the spare bedroom, the adults hung around the fire, watching Travers suck down another bowl of soup and stare at the flames. Kelly rested her head on Michael’s shoulder.
Travers set the soup down and faced everyone. “This is the most unexpected welcome,” he said. “Warms my heart. Really does. I haven’t been in front of a fire for weeks.”
Sean shifted. Elise said, “You don’t have to thank us.”
“I will anyway. I don’t expect this kind of hospitality anymore.”
“Why do you say that?” Michael asked.
“Because it don’t exist, that’s why. You’re the first real person I’ve seen in probably two months. And the last person I seen wasn’t so friendly.”
“What happened?”
“Almost got shot. Man just up and fired at me for no damn reason.”
Elise asked, “Where?”
“It’s everywhere, ma’am. Nobody’s taking care of one another no more. Have y’all been here since the eruption?” Everyone nodded except for Sean, who stared Travers down, his brow furrowed and his chin lowered. “It’s something out there now. Something you don’t want to know.”
“What is?” Elise whispered.
“It’s a funny thing. People. They all wanna act like they’re all in it together—like they care. Until the storms hit and topple the—what’s the word—facade.” He smiled. “That’s how it started at first: people helping out, trying to help. Coming together. A few bad eggs tried to loot stores and things like that, but it was mostly people trying to take care of one another. But people got limits, I found. People wanted to help at first, but then the ash didn’t stop. Everyone thought it would stop after a while.”
Something creaked in the attic.
“Then the news stopped coming from out west, closer to the eruption zone. Didn’t hear a thing. Everything’s covered in ash. Didn’t stop. I think people got wise after that. Started realizing they depend on food that keeps shipping to the grocery stores, you know? But the thing is, no trucks were shipping nothing no more. Everyone rushed to the stores the day of the eruption and picked it all clean. It filled up again maybe two or three times, but then the deliveries stopped. Ain’t nobody was gonna risk it. What I heard, people took to hijacking grocery store trucks and killing the drivers and taking all the food. You believe that?
“So once there was no more food, people started getting crazy. You ever seen those videos of countries undergoing a coup, something like that? Was like that ‘cept worse. People killing each other over a can of beans. A can of beans. No police. No army. After a few weeks, there was no TV broadcast except on the emergency lines—they kept telling people to stay in their homes.”
Travers put a hand on his forehead. “After a while it wasn’t even about the food no more. I seen with my own eyes these guys pin this one girl down—she was probably twelve or thirteen, I don’t know—taking turns raping her. What’s that tell you, huh? That ain’t about food or water or surviving. It was like the chains came off, you know? As soon as there was nobody to stop them, people started doing whatever they wanted.” He dragged his hand over his mouth and rubbed his lips. “First thing you had to do was get out of the cities. That was for damn sure. That’s what I did.”
“Why?” Elise asked.
“Wasn’t safe. A lot of people started to panic, and when a lot of people start to panic, no good thing comes from it.”
“Where did you come from?”
“Up north. Albany.”
“You have any family?”
“Had a wife. She died a few years ago—cancer—we never had kids.”
“Then how’d you end up here?” Sean asked, his voice coming out of nowhere like a sudden burst of thunder when she hadn’t expected a storm.
“I walked,” Travers said.
“You walked all the way here? From Albany?�
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“I mean, it took a while. I started with a car, but it ran out of gas. Everybody wants to go south, you know? Where it might be warm.”
“Then how’d you come across us?”
“I don’t understand,” he said and looked at the others. “I just came across you.”
“You’re right,” Sean said. “You don’t understand.”
Elise tensed.
“I want to know how you’re not dead.”
Travers leveled his eyes on Sean. “Managed it.”
“You said earlier that you haven’t been in front of a fire for weeks. The mercury outside says that it’s almost fifteen below. So how’ve you survived without fire for so long?”
“A little skill, a little luck, I guess.”
“What kind of skill?”
“Sean, please,” Elise said.
He ignored her. “What kind of skills allowed you to survive?”
“Scavenging, mainly. I’ve been in a bunch of people’s houses. All abandoned.”
“They would be just as cold as the outside. You’d freeze to death.”
Travers’s leg shook up and down, though he kept his voice steady. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I did, man.”
Elise wasn’t sure what he had done either. Michael said, “Sorry, just ignore him.”
Kelly smacked his chest. Elise wished she could do the same.
“Excuse me?” Sean said.
Michael looked at his wife and bit his tongue. “Nothing.”
“No, he’s right,” Travers said. Everyone looked at him. “Not him,” he said pointing to Michael, “that one. Sean, is it? He’s right. You shouldn’t trust people so easily.”
Something popped in the fireplace followed by a chorus of crackles and hisses. “Every one of you doesn’t get it, because this thing hasn’t hit you. Not really. You sit here in this cozy little home. Barely any ash in here. It’s neat. Sanitized. Cut off from everything that’s going on out there. From the dark and the cold and the pain and the hurt. You haven’t seen it yet, and you don’t get it because of it.”
Michael shook his head.
“You still live in the world like it was a few months back—where there are boundaries and limits stopping what’s really in your heart from being unleashed. You haven’t seen the cold cutting down the people you care about. And if the cold don’t get you, it’s the predators who want to keep living more than anything. More than sparing your sorry asses.”
Sean leaned forward in his seat.
“You haven’t seen someone carrying food when you got a deep ache in your belly so strong you don’t know what you’d do to relieve it. You haven’t looked a man in his eyes and seen he’s got no soul no more. No humanity. Or too much humanity. That ash and snow sucked everything good from the world and left a dirty gray and that’s all there is. The white snow ain’t coming back and no matter how much you want that clean again, it ain’t coming.”
Elise watched Sean’s face grow stormier, more fearful. More determined. God help her, more determined. Like a man being nudged closer to a precipice.
Travers said, “You know I always remember hearing, We live in an important time. This is the most important election or era or whatever. We might be the first people in a while to be witness to something that’s truly changing everything. So, enjoy all this while you can. Enjoy your hot showers and your warm fires and your hot stews. They’re a thing of the past. You just don’t know it yet.”
“Travers,” Elise said, her voice shaking.
He shook his head. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare y’all. It’s just surprising, coming here. Getting a warm welcome. There ain’t no place I seen like this no more. With kind folks willing to share. I just want you to be aware. Not everyone’s as kind as me. Or y’all. Not even a little bit. Not by a long shot.”
Michael
Michael lay awake next to Kelly listening to Travers’s snoring as the fire dwindled down to coals. Travers was full of shit. Not entirely, of course. Michael had listened to enough half-truth telling clients to know when he was sniffing bullshit, and right now the scent was strong.
The world he knew was the one where good people helped each other get back on their feet. He had seen it time after time. Some disaster would strike, an earthquake in Haiti or a powerful hurricane that ravaged the Philippines. The aftermath always played out the same: good people reached out and donated time and money to help with the relief. People took care of one another. It’s always the way it happened.
And the same would happen again.
There was no savage land out there like Travers had talked about. Just because he had seen terrible things—if it was even true—didn’t mean that all of humanity was suddenly rotten. Anecdotal evidence was all it was. People were complex. Some good, some bad. If Michael had to pinpoint it, he’d say Travers’s story was a ploy; he was letting them think the outside was the worst hell imaginable so he could stay with them. He would say, You wouldn’t release me back into hell, right? He was playing them. And doing it well.
Because Kelly believed him. Long after everyone was asleep, he had to listen to her insist that there was a real danger outside and they needed to be prepared. He tried to argue with her, but she was inconsolable. “What if someone tries to come in and kill us?” she whispered to him. “What if it happens?”
“Nobody’s coming to kill us,” he said.
“And what if he’s right about all that’s going on?”
“He’s not.”
“Says who? You? You haven’t seen it. You haven’t seen the people eating each other out there.”
“He never said they were eating each other.”
“But you don’t know that.”
“You’re being ridiculous. Do you think there’s some biker gang who’s just going to stroll across the hills of Nowhereland, Pennsylvania and attack us? Come on. We have greater concerns inside our own house than outside.”
She wouldn’t hear it though. She took an hour to fall asleep and even then, she wouldn’t stop clinging to him. When her grip finally loosened, he scuttled out of his sleeping bag. He tiptoed toward the fireplace, grabbed a log from the woodpile, and placed it on top of the coals. The strands of bark and wood fibers burned like fine hairs. The log caught fire, and he sat mesmerized as the flames licked it over and consumed it.
“Thanks for feeding the fire,” a voice came from behind him, hushed but strong.
Michael jumped and twisted around. Travers snored from deep in his throat, and Kelly rolled to the side to get more comfortable on her pillow. Michael’s vision, with a deep purple spot in the middle from looking at the fire, swept over the darkness behind him but saw nothing.
“Relax,” the voice said.
He recognized it that time. “Where are you?”
Sean hushed him. The faint outline of his body, back-lit by a candle in the kitchen, came into focus. The details of the room eventually cleared, allowing Michael to walk without stepping on someone. He tiptoed around the couch, through the kitchen door, and into the orange dim glow of a candle atop the kitchen counter. Sean, his head turned toward Travers sleeping on the couch, looked at Michael.
“Jesus, Sean,” he whispered, “you scared the shit out of me.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Shit?”
“No, saying that name like that.”
“Why do you care? You don’t believe anymore.”
“Just don’t say it.”
“Fine.”
The candle flickered, the shadows dancing on the kitchen walls. “What’re you doing up?” Michael said.
“I could ask the same question.”
“Don’t be difficult.”
“Can’t sleep.”
“Me neither.”
The door to the reserves was cracked open. Sean always made
sure it was closed, which meant he had gone down into it. He refocused on Sean. Although the shadows concealed many of his features, the light caught the wrinkles and dark color under his eyes. Lack of sleep can do awful things to a man’s mind. “When’s the last time you had a good night’s rest?”
Sean stared at him. “I thought I told you to stop asking me that.”
“Listen, I know you don’t give a rat’s ass what I think. Or about me for that matter. But I care, all right? I don’t like you, but I care.”
He chuckled low. “Well, I don’t like you either.”
“Fair enough. My wife doesn’t like me too sometimes.”
They both smiled. Sean said, “I don’t remember the last time I slept for more than an hour.”
“You could take a sleeping pill.”
“Can’t do that now.”
“Why not?”
The distinctive sound of someone shifting their weight carried into the room. Sean jerked his head around to watch the couch. “Doesn’t matter.” He turned. “Listen, I really am sorry for earlier at dinner.”
“Just get some sleep, Sean.”
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
“You’ll be dead if you don’t sleep.”
“Just the opposite, Mike,” he said and sat in an old wooden chair near them.
Michael had nothing more to say. He walked back to his wife and slithered into his sleeping bag. As he was about to close his eyes, he looked across the room. For a moment, the fire reflected in the stranger’s eyes, beady and distant, before he shut them. A dreamy fog was filling Michael’s mind, and he thought nothing of it.
Nothing of the fact that Travers had been snoring only a moment earlier.