by Paul Curtin
Michael spoke, but could only say, “Sean—”
“Take him to his mom or sister. They’re with Kelly. Just cover his eyes. Please. Don’t ask questions.”
Michael looked at Andrew and started toward the stairs before Sean grabbed his arm and stopped him. “Cover his eyes, Michael. Cover them the whole way up.”
Andrew watched the exchange without breathing. Michael nodded and left. Andrew hung back, unsure if he should go too.
“They made you load the food into their truck?” Sean said.
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s like asking a man to dig his own grave.”
“Will they come back?”
“They don’t have enough to attack us. Even if they wanted to.”
“They had guns.”
Sean reached around his back and pulled out a pistol. Without hesitation, he pointed the gun at Andrew’s face, and Andrew recoiled, putting his hands out as if it were enough to stop a bullet. The gun clicked. Andrew winced. Stood still. Not dead. He lowered his shaking hands.
Sean didn’t have a sadistic look on his face, wasn’t playing a mean joke. His eyes looked drained of his soul, like Sean was no longer there. “This is what they had in their guns.” He held it upward. “Didn’t even have bullets.” A tear dripped from his eyes. “They’re not coming back.”
Andrew’s heart drummed in his throat. “Never again?”
“Don’t know. I’m not sure we have enough left to justify the risk.” He looked around. “I don’t know how this happened. How could I have let this happen?”
“I don’t—”
“We should have never let that man in here. He brought death with him. Into this home.”
“We’re all still—”
“It doesn’t make any sense. How can people do this? Why did they do this? The man was an engineer. A few months ago, he was an engineer.”
Sean kept rambling. Incoherent.
Andrew shuffled closer to the stairs while Sean continued staring at the stripped shelves. As he reached the base of the stairs, someone rushed down them. Elise. She slowed. The flashlight lit the outline of Sean’s body, the fringes of his clothing glowing, his core dark. She held her gaze on him for a moment and then turned to Andrew, hugged him, and said, “You okay? Did they hurt you too?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“I’ll live.”
She nodded and cupped his face with her hands. She swallowed hard and exhaled. Without saying any more, she approached her husband.
“Babe,” she whispered.
Andrew inched closer to the steps.
“Babe, talk to me,” she said, standing next to Sean and turning his face toward her.
“Where’s Aidan?” Sean asked.
“Michael took him upstairs.”
He paused. “You let that man in,” Sean said in a low voice.
She pulled back. “How can you say that?”
“We should have left him outside. You and your brother—you let him into our home.”
Andrew moved up a step.
“I was trying to help. I was trying to—”
“Help? This was helping?”
“This is not the time to be having this discussion.”
“Because you know it’s true?”
“Because what difference does it make now?”
The air hung with cold silence. Andrew went up another few steps.
“I’m sorry,” Sean said. “This isn’t your fault. It’s mine.”
Elise sighed and hugged him.
He pulled away after a moment. “I fell asleep on the job. He wasn’t even gone yet, and I was sleeping.” Andrew could see Elise’s throat rise and fall, Sean saying, “I just don’t understand. I hadn’t slept like that for so long.”
“The body eventually just shuts down,” she said.
“No. This wasn’t like that. When they woke me up, it was like I was in a haze. Like I had taken one of my—” He stopped, and his jaw grew stiff, and Andrew could see his muscles throbbing under his cheeks. “You didn’t.”
“Sean, I didn’t know—”
“You didn’t know what? That people were going to attack us?”
“I didn’t think—”
“You never think. I saw you and your brother talking. Oh, Sean’s so paranoid. Sean needs to sleep. I didn’t need to sleep.”
“Sean.”
“Did you give me a sleeping pill?”
“I didn’t know—”
“Did you slip me a pill or not?”
“I crushed it up and put it in your potatoes. I thought you needed sleep. I thought you would—”
She saw it too late, Sean raising his hand, winding his arm back to deliver a blow, his eyes boiling with a fury Andrew had seen before—in his own father’s eyes. Sean pulled his hand back at the last moment, Elise flinching though, mouth open and hand pressed against her cheek as if Sean had gone through with it. He held his open hand up, primed his fingers into a fist, and let it drop to his side. “You killed us,” he said, his voice cracking. “You killed us.”
Andrew slipped the rest of the way up the stairs and came into the kitchen, his lungs constricted, scarcely able to take in air. He put his hands on his knees, taking in deep breaths before moving to the base of the steep stairway.
He climbed upward, noticing the first trace of a bloody footprint three fourths of the way up, the prints growing darker and clearer with each rising step. The stairs were dusted with drywall fragments, pellet holes along the wall. His eyes crested over the last step, and he jolted back and stumbled down two steps before grabbing the railing and steadying himself.
This was all wrong. All of it. He didn’t want to live in a world where Sean, who cared so much for his family—he saw the concern and love in the man’s eyes every day—almost hit his own wife. That was what Andrew’s dad had done. Not Molly’s. Not the man he knew. He didn’t want to live in a world where a man might chop off someone’s finger for no reason. Or a world where a dead body was at the top of the stairs, half his neck blasted away so that his head craned over at a ninety-degree angle, dark blood fanning out from under his neck like a bib tucked into his collar. This wasn’t the world he wanted. For himself.
For anyone else.
He held onto the rail. Acid rose up his throat, and he heaved. Nothing came out. After coughing for a minute, he stepped up to the top, cupping his hand around his eyes, diverting them away from the dead body. But the image had already seared into his memory. He squeezed around the banister toward the master bedroom.
Molly was exiting as he came into the hallway. They rushed toward one another, embracing, kissing, both of them crying, Andrew stroking her hair, pulling her closer. He pressed the tips of his fingers along her spine, massaging her tense muscles.
“God, I didn’t know what was going to happen to you,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“Are you okay? Do you feel all right? How’s the—”
“I’m okay.
“What about your finger?”
“It’s fine, Andrew. It was just a cut.”
“He was going to chop your finger off.”
“It’s not the worst thing that happened today.”
He stared at the closed door to the master bedroom, a muffled sobbing coming from behind it. He held Molly tighter. “What happened?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
The air felt heavier, colder. Molly sucked in her bottom lip and kept a strong face for him. “What happened downstairs?”
“They made us load up their truck.”
“And they got away?”
He nodded.
“How much did they get?”
Andrew sighed. “The generator. A lot of food.”
Molly covered her mouth. “How much?”
Andrew said nothing.
A tear formed on the edges of her eyes. “We need to tell him,” she whispered.
“Not right now.”
“He needs to know. Everyone does.”
“This isn’t the right time.”
“We can’t hide it for much longer.”
“You don’t understand—you, you just don’t understand.”
“I can’t keep pretending it’s not happening.”
“What’s not happening?” a voice said from down the hall.
Molly looked past her boyfriend, and tears rushed out of her eyes. “Daddy,” she said and bolted to him.
Sean lifted his daughter up in his arms and held her close. She cried awful, terrible sobs. Sean shut his eyes briefly and then centered them on Andrew, those eyes burning like a fire stoked, hot and ready to burn down everything in their path. And Andrew couldn’t stand the heat.
“It’s going to be okay, sweetheart,” Sean told her, turning his attention back to her.
But Andrew knew that wasn’t true. It wasn’t going to be okay. Nothing could ever be okay again.
Michael
Michael watched Kelly spend her days in silence. She didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, recoiled when he tried to comfort her. He encouraged her—pleaded for her—to eat more, offered her food from his plate every night, but she told him she wasn’t hungry. But she was hungry. He could see the bones in her jaw growing more defined, her cheekbones popping out a little more each day. He almost asked her once whether she didn’t eat because she wanted to die but stopped himself. There were questions he didn’t want answers to.
He had heard what happened to Kelly from Elise, but Kelly never spoke of it. And after a while nobody wanted to talk about it. Sometimes, if he was honest, that was okay with him. Because talking about it meant speaking of why those men had come in the first place, how they had gotten into the house with no one knowing, why he had never slept with the damn shotgun next to him like Sean had asked, why he had let his sister drug Sean. Even though nobody discussed it out loud, his inner voice wouldn’t stop repeating: They raped your wife, and it’s your fault.
He didn’t sleep much anymore. Most of them didn’t. Two weeks after the invasion and four or so months after it all started—Michael wasn’t sure exactly, time blurring together—each person had little dark circles under their eyes that hadn’t been there before. The corridors of the home reverberated distant and indistinct sobbing. Much to Michael’s surprise, Aidan seemed the least affected, maybe because he was brave, maybe because he didn’t fully understand the situation. Kelly’s withdrawal hit him hard though. He loved his aunt and just wanted to make her feel better. When he asked why she was feeling so sad, Michael told him that she was sick and left it at that.
Elise and Sean barely talked. The dynamic added unneeded tension in the home. Meals, now cooked over the fireplace, were torturous. Where there used to be conversation, now there was just the crackle of fire, teeth chewing and gnawing, and silverware clanking on dishes.
With the entire house now being pummeled with cold and only the living room fireplace to repel its assault, everyone spent most of their time there. Not that anyone could go anywhere else for long. The upstairs still had graphic splatters of dried blood they couldn’t expunge. Nobody wanted to see it. Or remember what happened along with it. And the other rooms were freezing cold. Michael spent his time pacing around, walking through the kitchen and then back to the living room, pulling at his beard, trying to kill time any way he could. And there was a lot of time to kill.
He walked back into the living room after taking a brief walk to find the kids playing a speed card game. Molly was dominating. Her hands flew across the coffee table and thumped a card down into a pile while Aidan and Andrew scrambled to keep up. He smiled, just a little, but it faded when he saw his wife curled under a blanket across the room, staring into the fire.
He looked away, sat on the floor, and watched the kids rapidly discard and pull cards from different decks. The back and forth, the laughter. Rare sounds. Molly slammed a card down and threw her hands into the air. “That’s game,” she said.
“You cheated,” Aidan said, though not the least bit upset.
“Losers weepers,” she said with a laugh.
Michael smiled at her. She had always been a pretty girl, but for some reason she had an aura about her, a glow to her skin, a composure, some secret well of courage the invaders hadn’t stolen from her like they had from everyone else. A confidence that an end would come to this disaster and that their last, dreary scraps of life would not be lived inside the surrounding walls.
“Okay, deal again,” Aidan said, slapping his knees.
“You want to lose again?” Molly said.
“Just do it.”
Everyone smiled, and Molly shuffled the cards. Michael put a hand on her shoulder. “How’ve you been holding up?”
She shrugged. “Okay, I guess.” She paused and whispered. “I haven’t gotten Kelly to talk yet.”
Michael forced a smile. “She’ll get there.”
She nodded, and for a moment—just for a moment—he saw that confidence disappear. She shuffled the cards in a smooth motion. “Hey, Uncle Mike, I have something I want your advice on,” she said, lowering her voice even more and not meeting his eye.
“Sure.”
“About my dad.”
Andrew grew rigid. He reached under the table and grabbed her leg. She shot a glance over to him, and they shared a silent conversation. She looked back toward her uncle and smiled. “We can talk about it later, if that’s okay.”
“Sure,” he said, looking between the two, “later.”
“Deal it up,” Aidan said.
Molly was dealing the cards when the door to the garage opened and Sean stepped through. Nobody spoke. He shed his coat, walked into the living room, and said a few words to Kelly before heading to the fire and extending his hands toward the heat. Michael followed with his eyes and then motioned to the kids. “Go on. Play.” As the kids started their game, Michael pushed himself off the ground and came over to the fireplace. Warmed his hands and said, “What’s the temperature like?”
“Cold,” Sean said.
That would be the answer Sean gave. Even when Michael was trying to be friendly, his brother-in-law was still an asshole. “Colder?”
“It actually went up a few degrees, but it’s not noticeable.”
He nodded. “Listen, is there anything I can help you with? I can chop wood, you know? I can—”
“I have something.”
He almost laughed it was so unexpected. “Yeah?”
Sean rubbed his hands together and motioned with his head. “Follow me.”
They marched up the stairs and around the banister, Michael keeping his eyes away from the blood. Sean led him upstairs to a wall at the front of the house and stopped. A hunting rifle was mounted between the partially open window and frame, its barrel craned upward outside and its stock resting downward inside like opposite ends of a seesaw. Michael pulled the stock upward and allowed gravity to settle it back down. On the sides of the gun, the window frame was stuffed with wood and cloth to block the cold.
Sean whipped a phone from his pocket and swiped his finger across it. “Our new security system,” he said. “Or one of them. Look at this.”
He held out the phone, and Michael took it into his hand. It looked like the image of the backyard, static and serene. “How do you still have a phone?”
“Battery-powered chargers. The solar panels still produce a little electricity.”
“And it works?”
“There’s no cell service, but I can still run things on batteries. Bluetooth and whatnot.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I took the camera from the re
serves and pointed it toward the backyard. That way I can keep an eye on it. The motion sensor buzzes in my pocket—gives me alerts if something’s moving on the camera. Has night vision too. I hooked it up to the bluetooth of the phone and there you have it.” He pointed to the rifle. “Aidan’s room faces the backyard, so I have a gun mounted there just like this.”
“This is for defense?”
Sean nodded.
“I thought you said they weren’t coming back.”
“They probably won’t. That doesn’t rule out someone else.”
“Who else’s going to wander into our place?”
“It wouldn’t be that difficult. The fireplace puts off smoke. And if there’s smoke, there’s fire. And that means anyone traveling can smell it and find us if they’re looking.”
“But who would be traveling through?”
“Don’t know. If anyone’s survived this long, it’s because they either planned ahead or they’re bandits. So, we can’t take any more chances.”
“Is that really going to be a problem?”
Sean paused. “Just like before. Because who would come to take our food, right? That’s what you said.”
He didn’t reply.
“We’re going to man the watch in shifts. Everyone will. We need to be vigilant. There are dangers out there we can’t allow back into our home.”
“Do you really think this’s necessary?”
“I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t think it was.”
He had to be the bigger man. Because as much as he hated to admit it, Sean had been right. Damn it, he had been right. He almost admitted it out loud a few times too. He said, “How can I help?”
“Take the first shift. There’s a button on the side of the scope that turns on the night vision.” He pointed to a box of ammunition. “I stapled some targets to the trees out there. We’ll do some practice later.” He turned to leave but stopped. “You see someone walking toward our house, don’t hesitate. Not for a moment. You shoot.”
Michael didn’t know what to say.
“You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” Sean said, pulled up a chair, tossed him a heavy coat and a few blankets from nearby, and left.