Rowan was lightheaded, but he nodded despite the pain and discomfort it caused him. He slowly trailed behind the girl, consciously counting the steps up the staircase to make sure he was at least five paces behind her.
They entered a rather small room, which housed only a single bed and a tiny window peering out into the backyard. The girl placed the lantern upon the dresser and lied down on the bed, while Rowan was directed by the man to stay seated on the wooden floor. It was uncomfortable to sit on, as the ground was too cold and too hard for his body to accustom to. The man then pulled up a chair and sat opposite to Rowan, making sure that his gun was still pointed at the boy’s head.
“I need to ask you about the sickness,” said Rowan. “I wasn’t lying when I said I don’t know much about it.”
“None of us do,” grumbled the man. “There isn’t much I can tell you.”
“So what can you tell me?”
“Nothing.”
“Fine.” Rowan sat back against the wall. “Can I at least get some food, then? I don’t want much—I just want to live.”
The man stared at him for a while. Rowan half-expected death, but he knew that if he didn’t ask the man for food, he would eventually be dead from starvation anyway.
After a grueling wait, the man finally turned to his daughter and spoke. “Lorena, bring him something to eat. I’ve got to keep watch on him.”
A tiny sliver of hope surfaced in Rowan’s eyes. He watched the girl speed out of the room, distracting himself in order to avoid eye contact with the gun that was still pointed straight at his head. Was the man trying to get his daughter to leave the room just so he could spare her from the psychological damage of murder? She did already witness her father kill someone, but perhaps this was different—there was a lot of light, and with the cramped space of the room, maybe Rowan’s blood would splatter not only on the walls, but on the girl as well.
Lorena returned. She handed Rowan some crackers and a bottle of water before sitting down on the edge of the bed, where she observed both her father and the mysterious boy. Only the sound of a feast in famine could be heard now: a clear reminder of the instinctual and voracious bestiality of human hunger.
The girl examined her father’s eyes. He wasn’t blinking, and it bothered her to see that there still lay no semblance of sympathy behind his deep blue, dilated pupils. Minutes passed, and he still remained as tense as ever. The boy wasn’t any better. He was staring back at her father, though his expression was a little different. He seemed to be a bit distant, despite the constant threats. His mind wasn’t here—it was chasing something.
Lorena stood up from the bed, though she did so carefully because she was unsure of whether or not the creaking of the bed frame would cut the silence deep enough to set her father off into an uncontrollable rampage. He didn’t seem to notice, so she spoke up.
“Dad, you need to stop being so mean to him,” she said. Her father didn’t mind her, as he kept his gun pointed at the boy. “If he was planning to do anything bad this whole time, he would’ve grabbed me when I gave him food and water.”
Again, the man didn’t turn his head. “I have a thirteen-year-old daughter to keep safe.”
“He’s almost as young as me. Doesn’t your behavior disturb you?”
“He could be sick, Lorena.” The man scowled. “You understand why I am the way I am, don’t you boy?”
“I—”
“But you’re sick!” Lorena screamed. “You’re sick and you’re nothing like that woman out there! If he’s sick like you, then he should be fine too!”
Rowan nearly stood up. Was this man really sick? How did the girl even know that? How was he still functioning and talking? Dr. Robinson had talked about how the sickness affected people differently—but he didn’t realize how drastically different these illnesses could all be.
“I can’t take any chances—”
“What does the sickness feel like?” asked Rowan. “I’m telling you that I really don’t know a thing about the sickness. I can’t keep stressing that fact. If you can tell me, maybe we can figure out if I’m sick or not.”
“We can’t figure it out that easily,” said the man. “It manifests in different ways for different people. There are too many damn questions I would have to ask you, and I don’t trust you telling the truth. Hell, the sickness could make you a liar for all we know.”
“What is it like for you?”
“I’m not telling—”
“He sees sores all over his body,” said Lorena. “I can’t see them. Only he can. He feels them, too. But when I touch them where he says they are, he doesn’t feel a thing. It’s only when he touches those sores that he feels any pain.”
The man finally turned to face his daughter, and though he saw fear in her eyes, he lashed out at her. “Don’t talk to him! He isn’t our fucking friend.”
“He can be. Please, dad. Why are you making this harder than you need to? Let’s help him—then he can be on his way.”
“We can’t do much to help him. We can’t. We can’t help anyone. We just can’t take that risk.”
“You can,” said Rowan. “I just need some questions answered. That’ll be enough for me.”
“Enough to get you to go?”
“Yes,” he said reluctantly. “Enough to get me to go.”
The man lowered his gun. “Fine. Ask away.”
“Please, tell me more about the sickness. Whatever it is that you can.”
“Like I said, it manifests differently for different people.” The man started poking at his arm. “I see sores all over my body. I see new ones every single day, and they fucking hurt. But I don’t even know if they’re real. My daughter says that there isn’t a damn thing on my body, but it sure as hell feels like there is.”
Rowan turned to Lorena. “Are you sick, too?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “If I am, then we haven’t figured out what symptoms I have. We might never figure it out.”
“Have you seen other people get sick?”
“Lots,” said the girl. “We’ve seen lots of them. A lot of them are like that woman from earlier. Some of them are as fast as she was, but some of them are really slow. I—I don’t know why. But we’ve been seeing less and less people like you every single day. Someone who doesn’t look sick.”
There was a loud crash downstairs. The man grabbed his shotgun and took a peek outside the door before stumbling backwards into the room, exclaiming to both his daughter and Rowan to hurry.
“What’s wrong?” asked Rowan.
“More of them. More people.” He struggled to breathe out his words, but he went on. “We’ve got to barricade the room just in case. There’s a lot of them.”
Rowan and Lorena hurriedly pushed a wooden dresser over to the door, and as they propped it up against their only exit, they could hear the muffled thuds of something crawling up the staircase. Lorena then fumbled around the room, collecting books that she then stacked atop the dresser. She hoped that their weight would do something to stop others from getting in, though she knew that they would serve no purpose—they were only there to help her feel more safe.
“What should we do?” asked Rowan.
“We?” The man started coughing violently. “We, as in my daughter and I, have to get out of this place immediately and find shelter elsewhere. You’re not—”
“Dad, we have to go together,” said the girl, interrupting her father. “All of us. We’ll be safer. There aren’t many people out there like us anymore.”
Rowan waited, expecting the man to shut down his daughter’s proposal. But the man only glared at the ceiling, struggling to fight the grimace on his face.
“I have to head back to San Jose,” said Rowan, cutting the silence. “That’s where my family is. That’s where my friends are.”
“San Jose? That place is too damn far from here. None of these fucking cars work. We’re never going to survive the journey there. And besides, San Jose was one o
f the cities bombed in the initial air strike.”
Rowan’s heart immediately began thumping faster and faster in his chest. He paced around the room, darting from corner to corner, fighting the urge to cry. He needed to be reassured—to be reassured that the man was wrong about what he said. But he knew the man wasn’t wrong.
“Was the whole city leveled? Were there any survivors?”
“I don’t have an answer to that question. The power was cut off shortly after they began announcing all of the cities that were bombed. I don’t know how bad the bombings were—only the ones in Los Angeles. And those were awful. You saw how bad it was outside.”
Rowan dropped to the floor, his tears forming a heavy curtain on his eyes. As he blinked them away, he could no longer stop them from flowing. He forgot about the two other people in the room—he could only think about everyone back home. His parents, waiting for him to return, only to be dead in mere seconds to a fucking bomb. Caitlyn, too—she must have been at school. It wasn’t safe there. Where the hell would they have hid? Everyone at Fairfax High had to be dead.
“Hey,” whispered the girl, her voice soft and calming. She placed her hand lightly on Rowan’s back, delicate enough to the point that he couldn’t even feel it. “Your family could be alive. They have to be alive. My dad and I survived even though Los Angeles was bombed. Other people did, too. Shouldn’t that mean that some people in San Jose must’ve survived, too?”
Rowan wiped his tears away. The girl was right. Mom, dad, Allie, Caitlyn—they were strong people. They were alive. They had to be. He sat up and ran his hands through his tousled hair, realizing that he had to get home as soon as possible. His family needed to know he was alive, too.
“I need to get back home,” said Rowan. He headed over to the window on the opposite end of the room and unlatched the lock. “I’m heading north. I can’t stay in here any longer.”
“What the fuck are you doing?” asked the man.
“I already told you. I have to get home. Didn’t you want me gone in the first place?”
The man gripped Rowan’s arm. “First of all, you can’t even leave through there. You’ll break your fucking legs jumping out of that window. It’s a straight fall to the ground. Second of all, I’m not opening that damn door to this bedroom because there’s a whole herd of people roaming in and out of the house right now, and if I let you go, you’re going to get us all killed.”
Rowan reluctantly closed the window. “What’s the plan, then?”
“We wait until they’re gone,” said Lorena. “And then we leave. Together.”
“We’re only sticking around until we find a safe place with ample food and water.” The man suddenly began to choke on his own breaths. Lorena handed him Rowan’s nearly empty bottle of water, to which he looked at with disgust but finished anyway. “Once my daughter and I are safe, you’re on your own.”
“Fine with me.”
The girl went up to Rowan, who was sitting on the floor by the window, and sat down next to him. “We never got a chance to learn each other’s names.”
The boy stopped sulking for a moment. “I’m Rowan.”
“I’m Lorena. And my dad—I guess you can call him Andrew.”
“I’m sure if the circumstances were different, I guess it’d be a pleasure to meet you guys.”
Lorena looked over at her father, who was finally not spending every waking moment staring at Rowan. “Can I ask you something, Rowan? About you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Of course.”
“Why were you in that hospital?”
Rowan hesitated in his response, but he decided to be honest. For whatever reason, he felt like he owed it to the girl. “I told my best friend that I was going to kill someone. I’ve just been really mad lately. I mean, I’ve had a pretty bad temper my whole life, but there’s just so much going on right now that I don’t think I can control it that well anymore.”
Lorena was surprised to see that her father didn’t react to Rowan’s comment. He was, however, squirming on the bed, which she assumed was because of his sores. “Are you… better now?”
“I don’t know,” said Rowan. “I feel like I am. I just had one bad lash out, you know?”
“But it was a pretty serious one, no? What made you feel that way?”
“A lot of things. It wasn’t just one singular moment that made me really mad. I’m about to graduate high school and go to college, and I’ve been really stressed out about that. Like, imagine moving away from your family for a long period of time and feeling pressured to do your best to succeed for them.”
“Is high school really that stressful?”
“To me it is. You know, despite everything, it’s a good thing that we won’t have school anymore. Fuck that place.”
“I was kind of looking forward to high school.”
“Really? What grade are you in, anyway?”
“Eighth. What makes high school so bad?”
“Classes get harder, and you’ve got even more things to stress about, but there is one good thing about it.”
“And what’s that?”
“The people there. Your friends.”
“That makes sense.” Lorena stretched out her legs. “What clique were you in?”
“Clique? Cliques don’t really exist in high school. Well, at least not in my high school. Nobody was really… cliquey. You hung out with people you liked, and vice versa. You don’t really need to like and do the same stuff. You just have to… well, mesh with each other. And have fun together. And support each other. That’s really it. My best friend and I aren’t entirely alike, and we get along really well.”
“Who’s your best friend? You mentioned them before.”
“Her name is Caitlyn,” said Rowan. “We met when we were kids. Used to be neighbors until I had to move. We’ve always done a lot of things together since then. I think I’m lucky that we ended up going to the same schools. Who knows who I would’ve been friends with? If you’ve got a best friend, you’ve got to keep them with you for as long as you can.”
“I’ve never really had a best friend. I moved around a lot as a kid, and I hate everyone in my middle school. That’s why I was looking forward to high school. It was gonna be a fresh start.”
“That’s kind of what happened to me in middle school, too. I literally hated everyone—well, almost everyone. Caitlyn is the only person I still talk to from middle school.”
“Are you guys really close?”
“Yeah,” said Rowan. For a moment, he felt like crying again, but he didn’t want to make Lorena feel like she said something wrong. “We’re really close.”
“I hope you find her. I really do.”
“I hope so, too.”
“Sorry for asking all of these questions. I’ve been stuck in this house with my dad and there hasn’t been anyone else to talk to. I just… I just want something to talk about. Anything.”
“It’s fine. I’m not bothered by it.”
Andrew spoke up. “Lorena. Go to sleep. We need to get up early tomorrow and get the hell out of here.”
“Okay,” she sighed. “Fine. Good night, Rowan.”
“Good night. I appreciated the talk. Really.”
Lorena stood up and lied down near the edge of the bed. As Rowan pressed his face down on the floor, he could now only see Lorena’s brown hair dangling over the pillow that she slept upon. Rowan didn’t feel like sleeping, but he needed rest if he wanted to get back home. He needed rest if he wanted to save his family.
6
Rowan awoke to the loud noise of something scraping and shuffling along the wooden floor. He wiped the crust out of his eyes and took a squinted look ahead of him, and through his blurred vision, he could barely make out the sight of Lorena trying her best to push the dresser away from the door. The boy slowly sat up so he could begin to help her, but he was suddenly interrupted by a pile of clothes and shoes that were thrown at him. He looked around and saw Andrew, whose bloodshot
eyes and drained demeanor suggested that he didn’t sleep last night, though Rowan was in no mood to socialize with the man in order to confirm his suspicions.
“Change into these,” said Andrew. “That hospital gown seriously makes you look crazy. It’s gonna get us killed.”
“I’m not too sure I fit into these. I’m not even sure if I feel comfortable wearing your dirty clothes.”
“Those are clean. You should be thankful I even gave you clothes.” Andrew walked over to the door to help his daughter move the makeshift barricades. “Just change.”
Rowan spent a brief moment watching Lorena and her father struggle with the dresser in front of the door. He decided that Andrew was annoyingly right, but right nevertheless, so he slid into the pair of jeans that Andrew gave him and slipped on the running shoes that surprisingly fit him quite well. He then removed his hospital gown and replaced it with a faded black t-shirt that had a small design of a black rose on it.
“Are you guys sure there aren’t any more people downstairs?” Rowan finally walked over to Lorena and Andrew, helping them push the dresser away from the door. “Shouldn’t we make sure that it’s safe first?”
“We’re never going to be sure that it’s safe down there as long as we’re up here,” said Andrew, stepping backwards. “The three of us haven’t had much food or water in a while, and we can’t stay up here forever. If we’re going to move locations, we have to get going immediately and save as many supplies as possible. We’re only going to get hungrier and thirstier by the minute.”
Rowan agreed and continued to push the dresser with Lorena. Finally, the door was clear of any obstructions, but as Rowan placed his hand on the doorknob, Andrew stopped him by pressing his hand firmly against the door.
“Be ready to kill anything,” he said. Before opening the door, he pulled a sheathed knife out from the displaced dresser, which he handed over to his daughter.
“Lorena, stay behind and use this knife only if you need to. I’ll make sure you’re safe.” He picked up his shotgun and opened the door. “Rowan, you and I are leading the way.”
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