“We’ll be on high alert, Dad, don’t worry,” Veronica replied.
The reminder of what was beyond the dining room walls subdued them and they ate the rest of their meal in silence. Soon they were done and dispersed to take care of their nightly chores. After helping clear the table, Veronica headed upstairs to the main bathroom.
“Quint, you up there?” she called out, craning her neck to see up the ladder that was propped against the open skylight over the bathtub. Her father had removed the glass pane after they boarded up the house, giving them easy access to the roof.
It was strange to see her mother’s decorative hand towels pushed aside to make room for the M1A rifles standing against the wall under the towel rack. The dish of potpourri that sat on the toilet tank had been replaced with boxes of ammunition stacked on top of each other. Toothbrushes and hand soap still took up real estate on the vanity but there were also pairs of binoculars and night vision goggles sitting next to the toothpaste. It was an odd tableau but it fit with what their lives had become in these last weeks: clinging to luxuries while the practicalities took over.
Quinton’s head popped into view in the skylight, a few unruly ginger curls falling forward into his eyes. “What’s up?”
“I was just wondering where you got to,” she said. “Noticed you got out of there real quick when it came time to do the dishes.”
“Just thought I’d get a head start on watch,” he said with a smile. “I didn’t even think about the dishes.”
She sighed in annoyance and picked up one of the rifles. “Of course you didn’t. You never think about them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you clean a dish in your life. You have this knack for disappearing right before it’s time to clean up.”
“What can I say? I’m talented.”
She snorted as she climbed up the ladder to join him on the roof. The night was warm, the ground still cooling off from the day of bright sun but there was a cool breeze that pulled at the tendrils of hair that fell out of her ponytail. She took a deep breath, the fresh air welcome after so many hours inside the stuffy, closed up house.
“The days are going to start getting hotter. We’re only at the start of summer,” she said to him as they moved to the highest point of the pitch. “That house is going to be a hotbox soon.”
“We won’t be here much longer.” She raised an eyebrow as she looked at him. “You know Dad. Now that the Singhs are gone, we can’t keep all of this secure. He’ll want to bug out, move us to one of his fallback points.”
He was right. Their father was probably already planning their exodus from town. He had always been more comfortable in rural areas and she’d bet her last roll of precious toilet paper that was where he’d take them.
“He’ll probably pick one of his hunting grounds. Better get ready for roughing it,” Quinton said, shifting around to find a comfortable spot on the rough shingles. “I wish Dad didn’t have to sell the cabin, at least it would be familiar territory for us.”
Made of logs and clay that were cut and dug from the forest that surrounded it, built by her father’s own hand and added onto over the years by the rest of the family, the cabin had been their home until Claudia had come along. Their mother had demanded they move into town, refusing to be so far away from the hospital with this pregnancy. So they had traded in the two room cabin with no running water for a three bedroom split level on a cul-de-sac.
“I wish he didn’t too. It would be a whole lot more use to us than the medical school it paid for.”
“You say that now but you wait until you’re bleeding out and then we’ll see who you come crying to.”
“I loved living in the cabin, surrounded by the woods. We’d spend all day out there, exploring. There was something so pure about being out there.”
“Yeah, you were always Miss Nature Girl. Probably why you kept going out there with Dad on all his hunting trips. Well that and you’ve always been trying to be his favourite kid. Which is useless because we all know, as his only son, I’m his favourite.”
She snorted. “Keep dreaming. I’m his first born, that makes me his favourite. You were just a disappointment after achieving perfection with me.”
“Please. Dad hit his knees the moment I was born and thanked God for not giving him another you.”
She laughed at that one. It had always been this way for her and Quinton. They just communicated better through teasing and sarcasm. There was an easiness to their relationship, probably because in a lot of ways they were mirror images of one another. They had the same sense of humour, the same morals and ethics, the same sense of duty and honour. If she had to chose one person in her life she was closest to, it would be Quinton. And if she had to pick anyone to spend the apocalypse with, it would be him.
The thought of what was happening out there had her belly churning around the chicken and rice she’d eaten for dinner. She had been plagued by anxiety since this had all started and though it ebbed and flowed, it never went away completely. She rubbed a hand over her stomach in a vain attempt to ease what felt like a ball of lead sitting there.
“You all right?” Quinton asked when he noticed her pressing on her belly. She knew he was shifting into Dr. Alpert mode and so she smiled at him in reassurance.
“It’s just anxiety. It’s got my stomach flipping around, that’s all.”
“I got it too,” he said, slinging an arm around her shoulder, “But it’s a good thing when you think about it. I’d be more worried if you felt completely calm and relaxed. It is the end of the world out there, after all.”
She side eyed him. “Wow. I hope this isn’t your bedside manner with patients. ‘You are worried because you have cancer which is good because you should be worried. You have freaking cancer!’”
Quinton chuckled. “You’re family. Family doesn’t sugar coat the truth.”
“Okay then lay some truth on me,” she said. “You really believe this is it, the end of the world?”
His face became serious, his brow drawn down and lips pressed together in a thin line. “I do. Whatever that infection is, it’s not anything the medical community knew about. It’s highly contagious and has a short incubation period. Last we saw on the news, they couldn’t keep up the quarantines which means it’s spreading fast.”
“But what if they find a cure?”
“A cure is unlikely but a vaccine for the healthy is possible. But even if they create it, it’s going to take time to manufacture enough to inoculate the population. And that’s only if they can find a vaccine. There might not be anything that can be done to stop it. This could be humanity’s extinction event.”
She shot him a questioning look at his last statement. “We’ve always known that there would be something that would wipe out the human race. Maybe this is it.”
“This conversation is doing nothing to help my anxiety,” she bit out with a glare at him.
“Okay, maybe it’s not an extinction event. Maybe this is a population bottleneck. A catastrophic event reduces a species’ population to a small number. There is a theory that it happened to humans at some point in history. Maybe it’s happening again.”
“Well that’s slightly better. We can keep our fingers crossed that we’re part of that group.”
“Hey, I’ll go one better and say we could be immune to the infection. Statistically there have to be some humans that are immune, who says it isn’t us?”
“See, that’s the bedside manner I needed,” she said with a smile and a nudge of her shoulder. He smiled back and they slipped into a comfortable silence, the two of them scanning the area around the house. It was difficult to make out much detail with the silver light of the half moon the only illumination. The tops of trees and roofs were easy to make out against the horizon but the ground below was covered in shadows.
She narrowed her eyes as she saw a faint glow on the horizon. “You see that?”
Quinton followed her line of sight, head cocking to one side as he studied the horizon. “What am I looking at?”
“It looks lighter over there, towards Main Street.”
She picked up the pair of night vision goggles Quinton had brought up and walked to the edge of the roof. She had to blink several times when she fired up the goggles but her eyes soon adjusted to the bright green scene before her. There on the horizon, a sickly green seemed to pulse as it grew brighter.
“There’s definitely something going on there,” she said, sensing Quinton coming to stand beside her.
“Maybe someone got a generator up and running,” Quinton offered but she shook her head.
“The light is moving. I think it’s a fire.”
Quinton let out a harsh breath. “Looting must have started up.”
“We better tell Dad,” she said, pulling off the goggles.
“He’s going to bump up the bug out plan. We’ll probably leave in the morning.”
“I hate the idea of leaving here,” she said, looking around at the house. “It’s home, you know.”
“Look at it this way, we’re heading back to that pure nature you loved so much,” he said. “Of course, you’ll probably have to piss in a dirt hole out in that pure nature.”
“Lovely,” she replied with a grimace. “I’ll go fill Dad in. And pack up the extra rolls of toilet paper I hoarded. No way am I using leaves with that dirt hole.”
She went back to the ladder and climbed down, her steps heavy and reluctant. She didn’t want to tell her father and set their retreat into motion. By falling back it was admitting it really was as bad as Quinton said. It meant that no amount of optimism was going to make this better.
It meant that hope was gone and that terrified her more than any looter or infected person.
Subject File # 745
Administrator - Some might say you have an unconventional parenting style.
Subject - That’s probably because I ain’t nobody’s daddy.
Administrator - Not by blood but you are still parenting those girls. You’ve been taking care of them, teaching them, helping them since you found them. You seem to be doing a good job, despite being unconventional.
Subject - Yeah well, come back and talk to me in a coupla years when they’re all grown up and we’ll see if my ‘unconventional parenting style’ fucked ‘em up or not.
Jackson had a sinking feeling that finding safety at the evacuation centre was as likely as finding the kids’ aunt out in California. They were ten miles outside of Hayden when he spotted the smoke on the horizon and it had only grown darker as they got closer. Two cars were stopped in the opposite lane, the hood of one crushed into the rear end of the other. Another car stuck ass end up out of the ditch next to them. When they passed the wreck, he spotted a bloody hand hanging out one of the windows. He’d never gone in on any superstitious shit but he didn’t think black smoke and a pile up filled with corpses were the best omens for their coming to town.
The sign welcoming them to
Hayden, Population 29,431
still stood just down the road from a service centre that had a NO GAS sign propped outside. He drove by both, keeping his eyes peeled for any sign of people. For the first time in his life, he was desperate to be in the company of other people.
Driving here in silence as the girls slept in the back, it sunk in just what he’d signed himself up for. He didn’t know the first thing about kids and he knew even less about girls. He could protect them, yeah, make sure they didn’t die but there was more to taking care of kids than keeping them alive, even he knew that much. What they needed was someone who knew how to be a parent.
When he came to the first major intersection in town, he spotted a sign made of plywood and spray paint pointing the way to the evacuation centre at the football stadium.
Hayden had sent their high school football team to State so many times that they got enough donations to build themselves a fancy stadium for home games. He wondered if any of the rich townsfolk that had coughed up the cash to build it figured it’d be used for emergency shelter of the unwashed masses in a disaster.
He turned the corner onto Hayden Huskies Lane and the stadium came into view, the curved concrete walls still standing. The large parking lot surrounding the stadium was full of cars and he could see some people moving between them. Jackson couldn’t stop himself from smiling at the sight.
It didn’t matter that they might be so full up that people were forced to sleep in their cars. The parking lot was surrounded by a tall fence and there were two green Humvees parked at the gate. This place was safe and that was all that mattered.
“Wake up,” he said, rousing the girls from their sleep.
“What is it?” Audrey asked, blinking wildly as she looked out the window and tried to make sense of what she was seeing.
“We’re here,” he told her, slowing down as they approached the gate. He knew there would be questions before they let them inside, maybe even put them into quarantine for a while. Didn’t matter though, quarantine or not, they would be safe.
He had expected to see a bunch of guys in camo fatigues and sporting M-16s jump out and tell him to stop but there was nothing and he came to a stop on his own by the Humvees. There was no one inside the cabs and whatever relief he’d felt finding this place started to slip away.
Didn’t make any sense to leave the place unguarded. Even if they were full up, they’d leave someone out here to force anyone new that came along to keep going.