Authors: Jeremy Laszlo
Inside the house, Devon, Marko, and Katrina are standing silently, looking into the living room where I can see that Lexi has wasted no time in terrifying everyone. I shake my head as I approach the room. She has her back to me, but that’s what I focus on first. She’s wearing a backpack and God knows how she got a bag packed so quickly or what she even put in there. I know that Lexi has the same memories that I have, the same events and training that our father gave us. He taught us what was valuable in the wilderness and what was worthless. We both know how to survive on our own if we need to, granted there was a lot more green out there in the world when he was teaching us all of this. There aren’t rabbits and fish out there to hunt and survive off of anymore.
But strapped beside the pack on her back is a rifle and I instantly feel a cold, nervous feeling in the sinking of my gut. What is she doing with it? Why does she need a gun? I know that Lexi is emotional right now, but a gun is the last thing that I think she needs. She needs a stiff drink and a night alone in bed. She’s bent over our father’s bag, rummaging, and I feel a cold anger roiling inside of me.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I shout at her, stepping past Marko and Katrina who are standing in the doorway, holding hands. They look at me as Lexi keeps rummaging through our father’s stuff. I feel angry. I feel furious at what I’m seeing. It’s like I’m looking at a grave robber stealing the clothes off of my father’s back. What right does Lexi have to go through this stuff without me? She doesn’t have a clue what she’s doing and I won’t let this emotional little brat break and destroy the last remaining tokens of our father that we have. I won’t stand for it. “I said: what the hell do you think you’re doing, Lexi?” I snap at her.
She slowly rests the bag on the coffee table that it was leaning on before we went out to say farewell to our father. Slowly she turns around and looks at me with pure venom in her eyes. I swear, if my sister could shoot lasers out of her eyes, I’d be a puddle of bloody goo right now. I look at her and I hold her gaze, refusing to relent. I’m not afraid to put her in her place. The way she’s behaving is childish and immature.
“What do you care?” Lexi growls at me.
“I care because you’ve got a gun and a stupid idea in your head,” I answer quickly, refusing to give her an inch. “Lexi, put the gun down.”
“I’m not aiming it at anyone, Val.” Lexi looks back at our father’s pack. “Chill out and stop being such a bitch.”
Bitch? Did she really just say that to me? I want to grab her by the hair and throw her to the ground. I’ve put up with a lot from Lexi over the years, but I will not let her just stand there and insult me. She clearly has no idea who she is talking to. I am not some punk freshman or some jerk on the street who flipped her off. I’m her sister and I’m not going to take it.
“What did you just say to me?” I step forward, putting Marko and Katrina behind me.
I see Noah on the far side of the room with Henry lurking in the doorway, cloaked in the shadows of the windowless area of the loft. He’s like a coyote lingering after being caught. I can’t stand the sight of him. Why doesn’t he just go away? I don’t care where he goes, downstairs or outside. Just give us all a moment away from him. He’s not the one who needs to make things right. He just needs to be at a distance before we can accept him again. I don’t doubt that in no time, we’ll tolerate him again, but this is all too soon.
“I told you to chill out,” Lexi says with her back still to me.
“No, you called me a bitch,” I snap at her, reminding her of her offense.
“I call them like I see them,” Lexi scorns.
“Put the gun down,” I order her again. I’m not going to give in on this matter. “Put it down right now, Lexi.”
“Or what?” Lexi snaps at me.
“Or I put you on the ground,” I tell her.
She doesn’t know what I’m capable of. She always thinks that I’m the weaker of the two of us, that I’m the soft one. Everyone thinks that, so she’s not alone in that thought. But I know how to take care of myself. I know how to deal with people and I don’t have a single doubt that I can take that gun away from her and throw her on her ass before she knows what’s happening. I once put Greg on his ass when he was drunk one night and that was the last time he ever tried to get handsy with me when he’d been drinking.
Thankfully, Lexi turns around and slips the rifle from her shoulder and tosses it onto the couch. “It’s not even loaded, Val,” she sneers at me angrily. I look at her, baffled and appalled. How could she think that it matters whether the gun is loaded or not? The fact that she thinks that she can just go grab a gun and carry it around like that points directly to how naïve and childish she’s being. “What’s your problem?”
“What’s yours?” I snap at her. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m doing what Dad would have wanted us to do,” she tells me, like I’m being negligent and ignorant of some glaringly obvious fact. I look at her without a drop of comprehension. What exactly does she think our father wanted us to do? What point of clarity does she think she has? She turns back to the bag he’d brought all the way here and pulls out a folded sheet of paper. I recognize it as a map before she even hands it to me. My father had given us maps like this a dozen times and asked us to navigate for him on road trips. Back then, it had been such an honor to be in charge of navigating the way to our destination. She hands the map to me and I look at it. It’s a map of the United States. “He’s got another map in there,” she tells me. “They’re all marked.”
“So he kept track of the way he came,” I shrug. “That doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters,” Lexi fires back at me.
“Lexi, the world is dead,” I remind her. “There’s no reason for us to go home. There’s nothing out there but death and decay. Don’t you remember Tony and the others going out there and never returning? Don’t you get it yet? There’s nothing out there for us. Those who are left out there aren’t normal, they’re not like you and me. They’re killers out there.”
“You don’t know that,” Lexi spits at me.
“I do, Lexi,” I say coldly. I can feel all eyes on me right now. It’s a bold claim and they’re going to want evidence to back it up. I know that none of them want to hear this, nor are they ready to hear this, but the truth needs to come out. I take a deep breath and step back from the situation. Maybe it’s time for all of them to know what I know. Maybe it’s time for us all to be on the same field. “When Tony and the others left, I went downstairs to the basement. I hid one of those crank radios down there just in case we needed to get information about what’s going on. I only listened to it the once, but what I heard was enough. They say that there are people out there who have gone back to their most primal needs. They say that people have turned into cannibals, mindless killers looking to eat anyone who they can sink their teeth into. They were calling them Zombies. If that’s what’s out there, then it’s too dangerous for us to go there.”
“Bullshit, Val,” Lexi cries in disbelief. “Are you kidding me right now?” Lexi turns on me with her full fury. “Those people on the radio were as crazy as loons before we put a bullet in the radio. All they cared about was fear-mongering and keeping people from going outside. Who knows what’s out there? What if Tony and everyone else found sanctuary and safety? What if they found it and don’t care about us because we were all too afraid to do what was necessary?”
“Did you look at him?” I shout over her, cutting off her self-righteous diatribe. “Did you look at the wounds he had when he showed up on our doorstep? He’d lost one of his hands, Lexi! He’d suffered multiple fractures and breaks, he’d been shot, and did you see how malnourished he was? Lexi, these are not the normal accidents from the world outside. He had to have suffered so much to get here. There’s nothing out there for us but death and pain.”
“She’s right, Lexi,” Noah says, joining into the fray. I shake my head at his attempt to step into the argument. Noah is sarcastic and nerdy, he should stick to his strengths. Rational debates are not where he excels. “It’s not safe out there.”
While Lexi turns on her boyfriend, I’m given a moment of unusual peace to look at the map in my hands. I slowly unfold it as Lexi begins calling Noah every name that she can think of. She’s throwing everything she has at him. I don’t pay attention to them. Everything sounds like I’m underwater now as I look at the map. I look at the lines my father drew, the small notations he made here and there. He’s been working on some secret key that I don’t know, but I can guess some of them.
I notice the X’s that he’s drawn over some of the waterways. It doesn’t take a cryptographer to realize that those mean that the bridges are gone or washed away. Without plant life to anchor the soil, I’m sure that the world is changing after every wind storm and rain cloud. The world is being molded into a very different place. Not only is it different physically and topographically, but who knows what kind of political structure there is out there? If there are others who are holding out and defending their lands.
I look at the map, stretching it out and folding it as I go. When I see a place marked Dayton in Ohio, I suddenly remember my father’s panicked, imploring words. He had talked about this Jason with such fire and such intensity that I suddenly understand my sister. I suddenly get where she’s coming from. Granted, as usual, whenever Lexi is right about something, she usually takes the worst possible route in showing the rest of the world that she’s right. She’s the younger sister who always likes to take the victim stance when dealing with situations. She’s always wounded or insulted by everything. It makes for annoying and fairly violent arguments.
But she is right. I have to give it to her. I don’t know where I parted ways with her, but my sister is absolutely right. My father didn’t come here to spend the rest of his days with us. He might have originally left his home to set out on an adventure to find out whether we were still alive and if we were, to die with us, but something changed. Along the way here, something happened around or in Dayton, Ohio. Whoever Jason is, he drew our father’s attention and that’s enough to make me more than curious. Jason made an impact on my father. He saw whatever Jason was doing and decided that he needed to tell us to go see it ourselves. Why else would he leave Jason’s name as one of his parting words and then have a map leading back to him? Lexi’s right. Our father didn’t come to the threshold of our home to spend the rest of our lives together. He came to get us and take us back. He had the truck and the equipment needed to do exactly that.
I look up and see that Lexi is still laying into Noah. At some point, Greg stepped in and is now sharing the wrath of my sister and her insatiable anger. I don’t know what’s gotten into her lately, but she refuses to let things go. She wants to rip all of our heads off. I think it’s finally getting to her. It’s been a year of looking at the same faces, the same walls, and the same day to day routines that are driving us all mad. Clearly she’s cracked, though.
At some point she’s decided that it’s my turn to again share in the venom she’s unleashed upon everyone in the house. I look up from the map, folding it back to the correct way. The corners are faded and curled from the use and the journey. I hold it respectfully, as if it were a Gutenberg Bible. I look at Lexi, her teary eyes and her flushed cheeks. I feel for her.
“How can you stand here in the same room with him?” sdhe accosts me. I’m ready for her, patient again. I’ve got the composure that she’s never had. “Every time I look at him, I want to rip his face off and make him eat it. At the very least, we should have tied him up and put a bullet through his stomach, just like he did to Dad.”
I realize that she’s talking about Henry and I share her ideas about that man. I’m torn when I look at him. The higher level of my cognizant soul wants to spare him, acknowledging what he did to my father as an accident, but the base darkness in my heart wants him dead. The best thing that he can do right now is to vanish and he refuses to do that. I don’t know why that’s so hard for him to realize. He keeps trying to plead his case, but he doesn’t realize that it’s futile. It’s vanity to try and make me or my sister see his line of thinking. Just shut up and leave us alone.
“If I stay here,” Lexi says with tenacious fire in her voice, “then Dad will have died for nothing. He will have been murdered without a single drop of value to his sacrifice and his struggle. I will basically be spitting in his face if I don’t at least try to go look for Dayton and Jason. You all were there. You all heard him say it. We have the maps and we have the supplies. I’m going to go see what he was talking about. I’m going to see what I can do or learn or whatever. I have to.”
I look at her, seeing that there is no swaying her opinion in this matter, and I don’t think that I should try. She’s right. She’s been right this entire time and rational Valerie has been the villain. I can’t believe that I’m about to say this, but I take a deep breath and know what the responsible thing to do is. It burns in the back of my throat, but I have to say it.
“Then I’m coming with you,” I tell her. She stares at me silently, her mouth quivering as if words are still coming out but someone has hit the mute button. She knows that I’m not kidding. I haven’t been kidding people for years now. When I say something, I mean it, and people know that about me. There’s no swaying me, there’s no doubt, and there’s no joking. “I saw our father’s body, Lexi. I saw what that journey did to him and if he was alone the entire time, then maybe if he had someone else he might have fared better. So I’m going with you. He came to see both of us and he told both of us to find Jason. So I’m going with you.”
“Like hell you are,” Greg chimes in again. “Do either of you remember what happened to Tony out there? Do any of you remember what you just told us minutes ago? About the Zombie people and the wars and the wastelands? What makes you think that we’re going to let either of you go searching for some Holy Grail that your dying father—no offense—tells you about in his last moments?”
“Step off, Greg,” Lexi growls at him like a feral dog.
“No, fuck you,” Greg snaps at her. “I’m sorry about your dad, I really am, but what you’re talking about is complete and utter madness. You have to see that you’re going to get yourselves killed and we’re not going to allow that. What if this Jason turns out to be a nobody? Or maybe he is a somebody and he does know how to save the world, but what if he’s dead? Who knows how much time has passed since your father saw him? He might be six feet under by now. So what happens then? You make it all the way to wherever Jason is and you’ve got nothing, you’re left holding the bag. I’m not going to let my girlfriend and her sister risk their lives like that.”