by Ryan Schow
“They feel amazing,” he replied with a grin.
“There’s something about a tough guy I find…curious.”
“I’m not a tough guy,” he said. “Just someone trying to survive this mess long enough to see what’s on the other side.”
When they arrived at the door leading outside, Rider opened it, held it for her. He didn’t care what anyone said, chivalry wasn’t dead. At least, it wasn’t dying on his watch.
“Thank you.”
Outside, she took his hand this time, which pleased him. He didn’t realize just how alone he felt until he found himself in the casual company of a new woman. Looking at her in the setting sun, a burning glow in the smoky eastern skies, he realized he was inexplicably drawn to her.
“What if there’s nothing on the other side of this?” she asked. “What if this is it?”
He stayed with this thought for a minute. He’d been wondering the same thing, especially after the lights went out and the power died. The EMP strike was meant to sacrifice the grid. Did they have a new plan for restoring power, or was this simply a reactionary strike?
He assumed he already knew the answer.
“I guess we make do with what we have,” he said, the pain in his leg trying to get the best of him.
“Just like that?”
“I spent some time in country,” he said.
“Which country?”
“Not this one,” he replied. “You can’t predict what’s going to happen when you’re deep in enemy territory, or caught in a firefight with no way out. You just look around and make do with what you have. The guy next to you gets shot—you tell yourself he’s the lucky one, and then you dig in. You get captured, or shot, or trapped, you dig in long enough and hard enough to find an exit.”
“Did you always find an exit?”
This question spurred so many memories. When they were in the field, if they didn’t have an exit, more often than not they made one. They went through a door, a person, a village. If they didn’t have a way out, they kicked a hole in whatever stood in their way with the full authority of the US government.
“Yes,” he answered, “we always found an exit.”
“Do you see one here?”
He held her eye and said, “Yes.”
“Where?”
They came up on one of the two guard posts, which was just a guy in the back of another truck with enough weapons to wage a war, or survive one.
“Evening,” the guard said with a subtle nod. He acknowledged Rider, but his eyes went directly to Sarah.
Rider thought the watchman’s name was Sal, but he couldn’t be sure. “How is it out there?”
Barely tearing his eyes off Sarah, he said, “Quiet.”
“On the street?”
The guy nodded and said, “On the street and in the air. You armed?”
“Of course,” he said.
They didn’t know each other yet, because the group inside the college was growing well into the dozens and he wasn’t the social type, but there would be plenty of time in the future to remedy that.
At first blush, Sal gave the appearance of a sturdy man, one who wouldn’t mind going knuckles in a tussle. He also looked like a guy who wouldn’t mind the company of Rider’s date.
Not that this surprised him.
She was beautiful. So beautiful and young to the world, in fact, that girls with looks and a body like hers tended to be the lure for many an aggressive man.
“Sarah,” the guard said with a polite nod.
“Sal,” she answered with a grin.
Rider pumped her hand lightly, prompting her to look at him. With bright eyes and an ease about her, she said, “Lead the way.”
“Be careful out there,” Sal warned. “Things can turn on a dime.”
“Don’t I know it,” Rider said.
Sarah and Rider walked up Ashbury Street, marveling at the canopy of telephone wires and the three and four story homes that looked like they all had a fresh face lift before this.
Rider was intensely aware of her, of her smells, the feel of her, how her hair was long and straight and he wanted to touch it, to brush it back from her face and tuck it behind one ear so he could better see her features—
Sarah turned and softened her eyes at him, and for the briefest moment, he realized she saw him. She saw his expression and she knew…
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Oh, this and that,” he said, playing coy.
Her mouth curled into a delighted smile, highlighting a small pair of dimples he’d seen before and found sexy-cute. She seemed to be enjoying herself. On the other hand, he felt more at ease being shot at than being with her. His head was a million unanswered questions. Questions like: does she like me? Can I be with this girl despite the age gap? What if she’s not interested? Things like that, things that might never have answers, but would persist anytime he was in her company.
“I know that,” she said. “I was wondering what specifically you were thinking.”
“Oh.”
Swallowing the lump in his throat, he reached out and brushed a strand of hair back from her cheek, just as he imagined, then said, “I was thinking about how beautiful you look in this light.”
She tucked her chin, a wide smile coming…a smile of satisfaction, one of enchantment.
“Do you think this is happening in other places, too?” she asked. “All this…destruction by the drones? The loss of power?”
“I liked talking about us better,” he said. “But yes. I think it’s happened elsewhere.”
“Is that your instincts talking, or do you know something?”
“If I leaned in and kissed you, would you pull away?” he asked. He didn’t mean to ask the question, but he had to. He had to know.
She stopped, let go of his hand and turned to face him. “Is that what you want?”
“Yes.”
“Then no, I won’t stop you.”
And with that, he leaned in and kissed her. Her hand came to his face as their mouths met, and though it wasn’t a hungry encounter—because the night and the circumstances didn’t warrant that—it was probably the best kiss of his life.
When he pulled away, he drew a deep, satisfied breath and said, “Wow.”
“Yeah,” she replied, looking down.
He took her hand again and said, “You asked me if I see an exit here, and the answer is yes, but it’s not what you think.”
“Oh, yeah?” she asked, sounding breathless and a bit whimsical.
“This. You and me. What we did, what we’re doing. This is our exit. Our way out of the apocalypse.”
“So kissing? That’s your big plan?”
He laughed, then looked at her and said, “It’s more than that. I’m talking about the human experience. Before all this, we started out working hard to make something of ourselves. In my case I chose to defend the nation against enemies foreign and domestic. In your case, I would think you wanted to help people, yes?”
“Yes.”
“But then we went and ruined ourselves with real life. We saw too many horrors, or we felt cut short or abandoned by our employers, or we over consumed, which is hard to do in a consumer society as healthy as ours. Either way, we created all our little disconnections. We stopped seeing the beauty of family, friends, lovers. It became more about paying the bills, stacking up a pension—”
“Getting through med school.”
“Exactly.”
“What was the last relationship you were in?” she asked.
“It’s been a while,” he said.
“Me, too.”
“Life can’t just be about things. Buying them, collecting them, paying for them. That kiss, our connection, it was amazing…it was the first time I felt…anything…in years.”
“Really?” she said with a girlish giggle.
“Yeah. It happened in the middle of hell, and yet it was beautiful. That’s our exit. Not a cleaned up world, or r
estored order, or even power or running water. Our exit is each other, who we are, how we come together.”
In the dying light of the day, a lone gunman walked out of a building where Ashbury dead ended into Fulton, saw them then stopped. He had a hunting rifle with a scope on it and a tension about him that was a bit alarming. He turned and aimed the rifle at Rider, then at Sarah. Rider tensed, stepped back and pulled Sarah close.
The rifle inched back at Rider. He held his breath.
But the man didn’t shoot.
Rider slowly gave a subtle wave of acknowledgement, but the gun still didn’t go down. Until it did. The man hurried off into another building and they found they could breathe again.
“I think I might have just wet myself,” she said, more serious than not.
“Yeah, that was strange.”
“Want to head back?” she asked.
“I do.”
When they got back to the compound, the sun had already dropped and she was shivering from the onset of a stiff evening chill. As for himself, Rider could no longer mask the pain in his leg. He was limping a bit at this point.
“It’s been freezing cold at night lately,” she said.
“No heat will do that to a place.”
“I don’t have enough blankets, but I don’t want anyone else to go without,” she said, not looking at him, but completely aware of him.
“I have an extra one,” he said.
“Perhaps we could combine them,” she said, now looking at him, a hopeful, expectant look in her eye. “You could keep me safe, and warm, and I could give you your exit.”
“I’d like that,” he said.
The last thing he ever thought he’d have to think about in the apocalypse was falling in love. No one ever really said the words romance and post-apocalyptic nightmare in the same sentence with a straight face.
It could happen though, couldn’t it?
Statistically no one wanted to talk about soul mates and long days in bed eating strawberries and watching chick-flicks and dreaming about happily ever after while outside the pavement was painted red with some dead guy’s face and in the houses all around him, everything was rotting fruit, spoiled cream and unflushed toilets.
But Rider would be damned if something new wasn’t kicking around in that battered old heart of his.
He’d dragged a blanket and a pillow to her room from his and at first they climbed into bed and cuddled in the dark until she said, “We can produce more body heat together if we’re not wearing clothes.”
He could have said something cute, but the world was turned upside down and shaken loose and they could all be dead next week, or tomorrow, so instead of being witty, or clever, he simply began removing his clothes.
From there he forgot all about the end of civilization as he knew it and lost himself in her body, her touch, in her kiss.
When a guy finds the right girl, nine times out of ten, she’s just good in bed and he might not have been laid in awhile. It was easy to mistake good sex with true love. Rider knew he shouldn’t do that, but he understood the charm of a fresh face, a new body, open intimacy. She was young, but she didn’t come off like it, and they’d had time to build their attraction to each other over the last weeks, which might have solidified what had become a mighty lust for her.
So maybe it was perfect. Maybe it was true love.
Or maybe she’d die tomorrow and it will have just been sex this one time at the front of the end of time.
“What are you thinking about now?” Sarah asked him, running her fingers through his hair.
“I’m thinking about the odds of something like this finding its way into a life as simple and as intricate as mine,” he said.
“Explain,” she urged, scooting closer to him, pressing her bare breasts into his side.
He was silent for a few moments, gathering his thoughts, trying to think of a way to say it that wouldn’t be off-putting or sound like rambling.
“When you go to war, you set aside the notion that you’re doing a bad thing. But war is a bad thing. Waging war, as I have come to learn, is more often than not a privilege of the elite. Us career guys think of it as protecting our country from foreign enemies, but the reality is it’s almost always about power and money. Then, when it’s over, and the rich got fat and well fed, guys like me are left with the nightmares in our head, with the battle scars, with the impossible weight of what we’ve done.”
“Is that why you go on walks?” she asked. “Why you keep to yourself and seem almost shy?”
“Mostly.”
“I hope this isn’t too forward, but have you had a relationship with a woman since you’ve been back?”
“One or two, nothing serious.”
“Your fault or theirs?” she asked.
He turned and looked at her in the dark, saw the faint outline of her face, and said, “Never mine. I’m amazing.”
She laughed at the joke.
“Sometimes when something runs its course,” he said, more serious, “two people can walk away from each other and not feel scorned, or resentful, or even broken-hearted. They were like that.”
“What war did you fight in?” she asked, easing her leg over his, moving her body even closer to his.
“At some point in time I lost count.”
“There was only really one, or two right?”
“America is always at war with someone or something, so much so that when you’re an operator like I was, you see only missions. Not wars to be won or lost.”
“So did you see much combat?” she asked, kissing his neck, his cheek, his earlobe.
“Fortunately and unfortunately.”
“And did you have to kill people?” she said, taking hold of him and moving her body onto his once more.
“As much as I appreciate—”
And with that she took him away from his past for a few moments, this time wearing him out damn near completely. When they were done with round two, and the silly notion of falling in love in the apocalypse no longer seemed so silly—that it might even be a real possibility—he said, “Tell me one thing you’ve never told anyone else, something that would give me some deeper insight into the world of Sarah Richards.”
“What if I can’t name that one thing?” she asked, laying on her back, the blankets half off her, her body warm and flush beside him.
“So are you an open book?”
“Only when I trust someone, and then yes, I like to share. Can I trust you, Rider?”
“That’s something you’ll have to decide on your own, but I’ll tell you this, I won’t lie to you, deceive you or hurt you.”
She laced her fingers in his, laid there for awhile, and then she said, “I once put eye drops in my step-father’s coffee and he had explosive diarrhea for two full days. I never told anyone that.”
Rider laughed, barely able to picture that. “Why in the world would you do that?”
“I heard him call my mother a bitch with bitch children. I lived with my mom and younger sister at the time. My father left us a few years earlier for another woman. She was apparently pregnant and he claimed he needed to take responsibilities for his actions, so he went and made a new family. I guess I just didn’t want another deadbeat around to break our hearts twice.”
“So poisoning him was the solution?” he asked with laughter in his voice.
“It worked,” she said with humor in her voice.
“Is your family here with you? I mean, are they here in the compound?”
“My sister died when her high school was bombed and I found my mother’s car near her work, burnt to a crisp. She was in the front seat. She tried to call me…”
She stopped speaking as the tears overtook her. He put his hand upon her face, cupped her cheek as the warm liquid ran from her eyes.
“Why’s all this happening?” she asked with a heaviness in her voice.
He rolled over and held her body tight, giving her no explanation, just the love she neede
d right then. In his arms, she felt so small, so fragile, so…broken.
Like him.
“My brother was in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban when he took friendly fire in the face. He died instantly.”
“You mean someone from our side shot him?” she said, sniffling.
He nodded.
“I think it was an accident, but a lot of those guys over there, they’re high strung, scared, they make mistakes, or stage accidental friendly fires. I’ll never know.”
“Accidental friendly fires?” she asked. “Is that even a thing?”
“You remember Pat Tillman?”
“Vaguely.”
“NFL player joined the Army out of his patriotic duty, then went over to Afghanistan and began to see the bs of it all. He started to speak out, and it pissed off enough people that when the opportunity struck, a few of his fellow soldiers basically gunned him down. They chalked it up to ‘friendly fire.’”
“That’s horrible.”
“Whether or not that’s the absolute truth, friendly fire happens, sometimes on purpose.”
“I’m sorry your brother died.”
“Me, too. I miss him every day. I was dug in to an op when he passed, so I wasn’t ever able to go to his funeral.”
“You never really got a chance to say good-bye,” she whispered.
“No. But neither did you. And for that, I’m sorry for you.”
As he lay there in her arms, with her warm, soft body resting beside his, a well of emotion flooded forth. He squashed it down. It wouldn’t stay buried, though. One day defined so many others, and he couldn’t get the memories out of his head.
How had his life come to this? How had he been so bad?
He once killed seven men who thought it would be fun to torment a young family. Visions of him beating these cowards to death unfolded in his mind, stamping out the feelings of loss he suffered thinking about his brother. Unfortunately, these horrors playing in his head also kept him from feeling everything he should be feeling about Sarah.
He didn’t know how to deal with the deaths of those he loved. He knew that now. His answer early on was to kill enough people to crush those memories down. It didn’t work. But even now, he kept trying, futile as it seemed.