Authors: Jeremy Laszlo
Devon looks at me with a horrified expression that more than adequately conveys to me that he’s very clear on what I’ve said. I’m sick of all of it. If one of us needs to step up and be a leader, then that person is going to be me. Greg is a follower through and through. Noah doesn’t care about anyone but himself and Lexi. Henry is a sniveling fool now. Lexi is too emotional. I’m the only option. If we’re going to make it to Dayton, then I’m going to be the one who gets everyone there in one piece.
“Get the radiator in the truck,” I tell Greg and Noah.
Last night, we drank the last of the alcohol in silent memory of Marko. It wasn’t that Marko liked alcohol, it was just the only way that we could all cope with the loss of our dear friend. Katrina never stopped crying and she stared off into oblivion while the rest of us somberly lurked in the living room, thinking that we’d witnessed two deaths in the last two days. Marko hits a lot closer to home for everyone else, but Lexi and I are the two who have lost the most. Katrina and Marko were a new item, but she still loved him. Marko was a close friend and our father was, well, our father. Then again, no one actually compares who has lost more. There’s no room for such sick morbidity.
As I open my eyes, I feel like someone has taken a baseball bat to me and worked me over harder than I’ve ever wanted to be beaten. My eyes refuse to open at first and I think that I might just keep them closed and sleep for a few more hours. I already know that we’ve missed the first light deadline so I’m willing to compromise a little more time.
No
, I tell myself.
I’m the leader now
. I’m taking the role that Tony adopted long ago and we know just how well that worked out for him. I feel like I’m manning the helm of a doomed voyage just like his. But unlike Tony, we weren’t going for selfish ambitions. We’re going to find out what it was about Dayton and this man Jason that my father thought was so important. I get up and gather together the same clothes that I wore yesterday—the clothes that I’d been in when I witnessed those things killing my friend. It feels gross, but the world is gross. The world is a terrible, abandoned place now and I have to get used to doing what is necessary. I wash myself in the bowl left on the small table by the bed.
Once more, I’m alone in my bedroom at first light. I don’t know where it is that Greg keeps running off to, but he’s doing it silently. He’s not waking me up and that bothers me. I am an incredibly light sleeper. As I wash my face and arms and pits, I look at the bed and wonder just how long he’s been gone. The water is cold and as I get dressed, I remember the hole in the wall. Looking at it, I see that Greg put a picture of the two of us in front of it. I smile. He’s a good guy. No, he’s a great guy. I’m giving him too hard of a time lately. I’ve got to lighten up.
I stretch, my body craving the yoga that I’ve denied it the past few days. Maybe another time, but right now, I want to see who else is awake and moving in the house. I think about the shower schedule and realize that it is Henry and Greg’s day. Maybe that’s where he ran off to so early. I am turning into a bitch. He was about to call me one yesterday and I was too ignorant to see what he meant by it. I don’t want him to hate me, but I can’t help but feel like something’s off with him. It’s been off for a while now. I need him to just understand that right now, I need to be strong. That doesn’t make me a bitch.
Leaving the room, I can hear the voices downstairs. I stop outside my door and listen to them talking. They’re not happy voices per se, but they’re not sad or depressed voices either. In fact, they’re voices that seem hopefully optimistic about everything they’re discussing. I slowly make my way down the steps and before I get to the bottom, everyone is looking over at me.
“Didn’t want to wake you,” Greg says after a moment of me standing in front of the scene that almost stops my heart.
I feel like they’re eating everything. There are cans open and plates are covered in food. There’s so much food here that I’m hit with flashbacks of things that I hardly remembered until this very moment. I think of Christmas and Thanksgiving, times when there was so much food that it was practically a feast. I look at everyone with their spoons and their bowls and their plates and I feel like I’m going to explode. I look at them like they’ve betrayed everything that we stand for, because they have. I want to scream, fling their plates against the wall.
“What the hell is going on here?” I demand.
“Relax, babe,” Greg says diplomatically and I already hate the sound of it. I look at him and he can feel the fire wafting off of me. I don’t want to start a fight, but it looks like I just walked into the middle of one. “We divided the supplies and it turns out that your dad had a ton of stuff in the back of the truck. It’s more than we’ll be able to take with us and some of it is dehydrated food that we’re not going to be able to prep on the road. So we decided to have one final meal together and we’re all going to be civil and happy for each other the best we can.” He holds out a plate for me and I look at it reluctantly. “Why don’t you come join us?”
I see Devon sitting at the table avoiding eye contact with me. This is more than he deserves. I hope he realizes one day what an idiot he’s being by sticking around here and I hope on that day that he still has the energy and supplies to hit the road and look for something better than the beach house. I’ve more than doubled his supplies thanks to my father’s truck, but that’s more than he deserves. In fact, they don’t deserve any of it. If anything, they all deserve to be starved out of their complacency. Looking over at Katrina, I see that she’s still red-eyed, but she’s not crying which is a good sign, I suppose.
I reach out and I take the plate from him. Noah is sitting next to him and gets up to find a new seat, offering his old place to me. I sit down with Greg and look at the feast before us. There’s biscuits, muffins, pancakes, eggs, canned ham, cranberry sauce, stuffing mixes, crackers, and a dozen other things. There’s nothing really uniform or definitive about the meal, it’s just a lot of chaos thrown on a table for us to enjoy. When I sit down and offer all of them a tentative smile, they all go back to talking. I listen as Lexi regales them with a story of one of her teenage years’ misadventures. I look at her while she’s telling the story, remembering how less hilarious it was when we were living it. My father knew so little about what we got away with. Sometimes I wonder if he’d still claim us if he knew what we did. I’m sure he would, but we would have gotten lectures.
Heaping scrambled eggs and canned meat on my plate, I decide that it’s time to load up on protein and carbs before we head out. I’ll eat as much as my stomach can take before I explode. As I look at the plate, I can’t help but feel like I haven’t seen this kind of food in ages. Seriously, I can’t remember eating this much ever. Just looking at it I can feel my stomach rumbling, calling to my mouth and fingers to put some of the food in my stomach. Grabbing my spoon, I reach out and take the first the first spoonful of eggs, lifting the fluffy yellow goodness to my lips, taking in a deep breath before I take my first bite. It tastes so amazing that my stomach actually growls in satisfaction. I think I’m in heaven. In my heaven, the clouds will be made of food and I’ll eat my way straight to Hell. I know that this has to be my fate.
Listening to the others talking, I garner the tales of Noah and his retail exploits before the world ended and I listen to Greg talking about how he used to play football for his high school and was the closest thing to a national hero that they had in his town. The conversation goes everywhere, moderated mostly by Devon. They play the games that most of us have been playing with each other on one on one time, but this time it’s with everyone. They ask what everyone’s favorite movie was, their first kiss, last time they were home, and what they’d do if they could go back for just one day. It’s an exercise in mental health and nostalgia. I don’t care, usually throwing out fluff answers that keep Lexi from calling me out on them, just true enough. All I can think about right now is eating and that’s just what I do. As I stuff my face, I listen to them talk and relish the sounds of what the world used to be like. You forget how great cooked food smells and the sounds of clattering flatware or clanking silverware. They’re the kinds of things that make me wish I was back home with Lexi and our father on Christmas morning. We used to drink hot cocoa while we opened presents, then we’d eat a delicious and unhealthy breakfast, and when night came, we’d have our own dinner and dessert with just the three of us. Christmas was a personal day for all of us. I remember those days fondly as I eat a blueberry muffin. Deep within me, I feel the bite of nostalgia. I miss my father. I hadn’t given him much thought since the Collapse and our retreat to the beach house. I forget how great it was to just be the three of us.
It doesn’t take long to fill me up. I’m actually scared by how quickly I feel my stomach hitting that point where I just want to burst. I don’t stop eating. I know that it’s going to be a long time before I ever see a meal like this again. In fact, this may be the very last time I ever get a chance to have a meal such as this again. Deep down inside of me, that makes me sad. It makes me sad for myself and for everyone else at this table, but truthfully, it’s more than others got. I’m grateful for the opportunity to have what we’ve been given. Not only did my father bring us food, but he also brought us hope. Hope is something that has been slowly ebbing away from each of us. We were just sitting around, waiting to die.
“Anyone else hungover?” Noah asks as he leans forward and takes a drink out of some dehydrated orange juice drink that magically transitions from powder to strange liquid with just a bit of water. He takes a drink, grimaces and then swallows it.
“I am,” Devon answers. “Me too,” Lexi replies.
“Is everyone ready?” I ask, leaning back in my chair. Greg looks at me like I’m some sort of killjoy. Maybe I am, but we already lost one day on getting the radiator and that delay ended up killing Marko. I’m not ready for another mishap. Hangovers aren’t going to make me stay here another day. I’m fine and everyone else will be too. They nod to me and I look over at Lexi. “Is the truck fueled up?”
“Yeah,” Lexi nods, finishing off a biscuit. “Dad had a ton of fuel, probably enough to make the trip two or three times. It’s heavy, so we left it there. Devon said that he’s alright with what they’ve got.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” Devon speaks up. “There’s enough in the red tanks we stockpiled when we all came to live here. If anything happens, we’ve got the Sidekick. We’ll be fine.”
“You’re still planning on staying?” I ask him, hoping that he’d reconsider after hearing about the creatures at the Coast Guard base.
“Yeah,” Devon nodded. “Katrina and I talked it over last night. We don’t think there’s anything out there. We think it’s just a matter of dying like Marko did out there or dying here. We figure that we’ve got enough ammunition that if things don’t change, we can go out hunting for supplies like you guys did. Either way, it’s safe here and we’re planning on sticking it out.”
“Even though there’s nothing to stick out?” Lexi beats me to the punch.
“What’s the plan if you get to Dayton and there’s nothing there?” Devon asks Lexi and everyone else at the table who is going with us. “What happens when you show up and your dad was wrong about this Jason or whatever’s out there? Who knows what could happen between now and then? You could lose your supplies, get stranded, or half of you killed off. So how are you going to get back after that? It sounds like suicide.”
“No matter what we do, Devon,” I say to him with grim certainty, “we’re all going to die.” I rise from the table, completely stuffed and beyond. I look at him with an understanding face. I get where he’s coming from, it’s just incredibly narrow minded. He’s a fool and if that’s how he wants to end his life, then so be it. “Do you think with the three of you that you can hold this place if someone shows up looking to take it for themselves? Do you think the three of you are capable of holding off those flesh-eaters? I’m not asking you to be condescending or patronizing, I’m asking you because I’m worried. Do you think you’re capable?”
Devon takes a moment to think about it and finally says, “No.” I look at him with a mild amount of triumph inspiring me to respect that answer. At least he knows that they’re done for. He has that little bit of truth grilled into his head. “But it’s been over a year and no one has come looking for us. I think we’ll be fine.”
“If you’re not,” I tell him with certainty. “We’ll be in Dayton.”
“So I’ve heard,” Devon replies.
“Alright, everyone get the last of the things you’ll need.” I look all of them in the face. I feel like I’m asking them to storm the beach once more. They look at me with faces that are determined, but I can tell that they’re frightened. I’m glad that they’re frightened. It’ll keep them from being stupid, like they were yesterday. “Meet at the truck in twenty minutes.”
Everyone pushes back from the table and scatters, except for Skye who remains at her seat, picking at her muffin. Reloading my Sig, I stuff it in my pack, snatching it up, ready to get on our way. With the new radiator, there is nothing stopping us from getting out of here as quickly as possible. I walk over to Skye and sit down next to her.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come with us?” I ask her, hoping that she’ll change her mind. I don’t trust her and Katrina here with Devon. I want them to come with us, to find a new life in Dayton. I don’t want to abandon them here to certain death. Someone will find this place eventually and they will try to take it from them.
“No,” Skye says and I feel cold, icy fingers gripping my throat. “I’m going to stay here with Devon.”
“There might be a future for us in Dayton,” I tell her softly.
“Maybe,” she shrugs. She turns away from her muffin and looks me dead in the eyes and I feel like I haven’t heard her voice in forever. It sounds like it’s rusty, forgotten, and lost. It’s like a ghost of her former voice. She’s been crying, probably all of last night. She smiles sweetly at me but it looks like the kind of smiles that they carved on the faces of the angels at the cemetery. I don’t like the look of it. “I’m going to miss you, Valerie.”