by Ike Hamill
“Let go!” Lisa called, sloshing through the shallows to get to Ashley.
“No.”
Ashley shook her head.
“Help me!”
“This is crazy. Just let go.”
Lisa tried to reach her. The water was too deep. One more step and she would be swept away.
“Let go!”
“We need the raft and we need the rope. See if you can grab the other line.”
Lisa pushed back her hood and blinked into the rain. Downstream from the raft, she could see the other dangling line. It was right near another tree. Lisa grabbed one of the smaller trunks and pulled herself out into the current. A moment later, she was in the sweep of the water. It only took a second for her to lose control of her fate and become one with the rushing water. With a lucky grab, she managed to snag a low branch and redirect herself back toward the brush. The other line of the raft was within her reach.
She grabbed it.
“Let go!”
“Tie it first.”
Ashley had a good point. If she were to let go, then Lisa would be in the same terrible position that Ashley was in. Lisa wrapped the rope around the tree and tied a quick knot just before the other rope pulled through Ashley’s hand. She heard Ashley cry with relief.
Lisa was already slipping. The raft swung and pulled at the tree, snapping the rope taut. Lisa climbed up over the trees and found higher ground. Her hands were shaking and her breath came in fast gulps when she was finally secure.
“I’m so glad you came along,” Ashley said. “I was about to give up and go downstream with the raft.”
“Why would you do that? Why would you risk your life over a pile of stupid sticks and vines.”
“We need that raft. You think we’re going to be able to make another one?”
“It wouldn’t matter if you drowned trying to save it.”
“Well, it’s a moot point now. The raft is tied up and it’s not going anywhere.”
Looking at the raft and the knot that Lisa had tied, Ashley seemed to change her opinion by the end of her statement. She climbed past Lisa and picked her way downstream enough to get the other line again. With that, she secured the raft to a much bigger trunk. She also put her new knot as high up as she could reach, so the raft wouldn’t be pulled down when the river continued to rise. With that done, Ashley retied the line that Lisa had tied.
“Now what?” Lisa asked. “We’ll never make it back to the tents.”
“We can make it. I remember the way from before.”
Lisa wanted to explain that it wasn’t a matter of knowing the way. The problem was that Lisa had used up all her energy getting there. She didn’t have anything left in the tank for the return trip. Even expressing her desperation seemed like too much effort. Instead of saying anything, Lisa just let Ashley take her hand and begin guiding her back across the flooded marsh.
It was dark by the time they climbed the hill. Lisa glimpsed back over her shoulder, but she couldn’t see the river at all. There was only blackness out there beyond the trees.
“We have to stop.”
“Just a little farther,” Ashley said.
She pulled at Lisa’s hand.
One foot at a time, Lisa continued on. She promised herself that as soon as Ashley let go of her hand, she would collapse to the ground and never force herself to walk again. Unfortunately, Ashley never let go. She continued to drag Lisa, inch by inch. The passing time was marked with each slap of a branch against Lisa’s face. The rain continued in a dreary, endless infinity.
“We have to stop.”
“It’s right up here.”
Ashley had lied so many times that Lisa barely even registered it. There was no way that Ashley still knew where they were going. It was too dark to see anything and the jungle was a repetitive maze of leaves. To continue walking was only to prolong the torture that they had to face before they gave in to the inevitable.
“Keep going. I’ll look for more wood.”
Ashley left her there.
Lisa stood for several seconds before she remembered the promise that she had made to herself. Now that Ashley was done dragging her along, she would succumb to her fatigue.
Lisa began to sink down toward the ground.
“Lisa?” Tim asked. “Come under the tarp. I cooked the fish.”
Lisa blinked. She realized that she could see the glowing red embers of the fire. When she took a step forward, the edge of the tarp hit her forehead. Water streamed down and into her shirt. The cold water snapped Lisa awake.
“Fish?”
“Yeah. It tastes a little fishy, but not bad.”
Hunched over, Lisa shuffled toward the fire. The smoke had gathered under the tarp and it made her even more lightheaded before she began to ease herself down to ground. She collapsed to the ground and Ashley arrived with an armload of dead limbs. Ashley stacked the wet wood near the fire.
Tim handed them both portions of fish on metal plates.
“I was starting to think you guys weren’t coming back,” Tim said. “Then I realized—you had to.”
“We had to?” Ashley asked.
“Yeah,” Tim said. “It makes perfect sense, if you think about it. If I don’t make it back to the Outpost, that means I’m going to die out here alone, right? Well if I do make it back, but either one of you doesn’t, then I’m going to get shunned or someone is going to kill me. Again, I’ll die alone. The only way that I’m going to survive is if both of you also survive. Therefore, you had to come back. See?”
“No,” Lisa said, shaking her head. Aside from the bones, which were present in every bite, the fish was good. She felt the energy from it washing through her. It bubbled up, almost making her giddy. She was beginning to understand why Tim was being so goofy—he was drunk on fish.
“Who’s to say that you wouldn’t simply die?” Ashley asked. “That’s a definite possibility, right?”
“No, it’s not,” Tim said. “If I die, then this is all needless suffering. I believe that the world supports suffering, but it’s never needless.”
“You’re crazy,” Ashley said, smiling.
“That’s a distinct possibility,” Tim said with a laugh. “The world definitely supports needless insanity.”
With that, they all laughed. Tim gave some of his fish to Penny and even the dog seemed to be smiling.
Chapter 42: Liam
Jackson set two tumblers on the table and fetched a glass jug of milky brown liquid from the lower shelf of the fridge.
“I’m all set,” Liam said, hovering his hand over his glass.
“Relax, it’s cider,” Jackson said. He shoved Liam’s hand away and poured them both a tall glass.
Jackson sat down and clinked his glass against Liam’s. The cider was sweet, aromatic, and more than a little hard. Liam squinted after he took a sip. He preferred to steer clear of alcohol when he was alone. Jackson took a big swig.
“When I was a kid, I used to pray for something interesting to happen, you know? All I wanted was for all the shitty people around me to disappear and leave me alone. Well, I shouldn’t say that it was all I wanted. I also wanted super powers.”
“I guess you got half your wishes.”
“I really did,” Jackson said. “I was up in my room when everything went down. My mother was yelling at my father. He went into the basement. He had everything in his shop put into a specific location. God save the person who ever moved anything in there. The rest of the house was a pigsty, but my father’s shop was pristine.”
Liam nodded and took another sip of the cider.
“Then, something in the kitchen crashed. I turned down my music for a second. All I could think was that my father had finally snapped. He had gone downstairs, fetched a pipe or something, and then gone back to the kitchen and bashed my mother’s head in.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah, I know. I had a very clear image in my head of the way that the blood spray would be across the win
dow. It would be a streak with drips all down to the sill. I turned off my music, cracked the door open and peeked around the corner. I was convinced that I would see it. I had been praying so long that I thought it had to be there.”
“This was on the day?”
Jackson nodded. “Thanksgiving Day. Normally, we would have gone over to my aunt’s house, but she was out of town with her new husband so we were having Thanksgiving at home. Anyway, I crept out to the kitchen and I saw what had made the crash. My mother had taken the turkey out of the oven and dropped it right in the middle of the kitchen floor. It was sitting there in the roasting pan, surrounded by a puddle of grease. Those things—you know those things you would wear when you pull hot pans from the oven?”
“Oven mitts?”
“Yeah.” Jackson put down his tumbler and pointed at Liam before he refilled his glass. “Yeah, there were oven mitts right on either side of the roasting pan. The oven was still on, too. I just stared at it. I couldn’t figure out where she had gone.”
“Where did she go?”
“I guess through the sliding door out to the deck. We had this big deck out back that we never used for anything. When my aunt would come over, she would smoke back there, but we never really set foot on it for some reason. My mother always complained about the bugs and my father never really sat still anywhere for any length of time.”
Jackson pressed a button and the monitor lit up. They saw the whelping box with the sleeping puppies inside.
“So I put the turkey back in the oven. It looked done, but I figured that was the best place for it until I checked with mom. I went out back and she wasn’t there. Then, I went downstairs. The door to the workshop was closed and I didn’t dare to go in. I knocked, quietly, and waited. After a minute, I knocked again. Nothing. So, I went out back to look for Mom.”
Jackson took another gulp of his cider.
“It didn’t match how I had pictured it, so it took me a long time to realize that it had really happened.”
“How long?”
“At least a day,” Jackson said. “I took the turkey out, turned off the oven, and I went back to my room. Maybe an hour later, I finally went into my father’s workshop. There was a back door with concrete steps that came up by the garage. That door was open and Dad was gone too. I wrapped up the turkey in foil and moved it to a glass casserole dish so I could shove it in the fridge. It wasn’t that big. All I could think was that they had gotten a last minute invitation to go somewhere else for Thanksgiving and they had decided that I didn’t want to go. I was always trying to get out of going places with them. Sometimes, they would just leave.”
Liam nodded. The whole situation seemed unfathomable, but there was no use in saying so.
“So, it took, like, a whole day for me to realize that they were really gone. That’s when I really started to think about it. Why would Mom leave the oven on and the turkey on the floor? Why would Dad leave the back door open? He was always complaining about the heat, you know? The car was still in the driveway. I went next door. Mom went over there sometimes to talk to Ms. Miller. Their door was open too. That’s when shit really got weird.”
“Yeah,” Liam said. Everyone had a similar story about coming to grips with an empty world. Even though it had been decades, people would still share their stories sometimes.
“Anyway, it took me a long time to realize that my wish had come true. Everyone had disappeared. First, I had to search everywhere I could think of. I ignored all the signs and kept assuming that they were all meeting somewhere. After I found Amy Lynne, she clued me in. We were together a little while when one day she asked me what my dreams had been before everything changed.”
Liam smiled at that. Sometimes he watched TV shows from before. Young people talked about their hopes and dreams. It seemed like the idea of “hopes and dreams” had disappeared along with civilization. If he wanted to do something, he just did it. But there was nothing to hope for and nothing to dream about.
“That’s when I realized that I had been wishing for everyone to go away and they had. I started to feel guilty, thinking that maybe I had caused it all. Amy Lynne said that I was silly. She said that if I was able to make everyone disappear, then I should be able to give myself super powers also.”
“Didn’t you think that maybe your ability to make everyone go away was your power?” Liam asked.
Jackson shook his head. He looked confused as he poured himself another glass.
“No. If it had been me, I would have only made the people around me disappear, you know. My parents, the kids at school, and the teachers and everyone. I wouldn’t have made all the dogs and cats go. I wouldn’t have made some people spill their own guts and write on the walls with blood. Those weren’t my powers. You want some more?”
Liam shook his head, but Jackson poured anyway. It was good to talk to Jackson. At one point, Jackson and Amy Lynne had been like his godparents. Then, when Amy Lynne had left Jackson, Liam didn’t talk to him much.
“Toast,” Jackson said, raising his glass.
“To what?”
“To the beginning of the end.”
Liam shrugged and clinked his glass against Jackson’s. They both took deep gulps. Jackson slammed down his tumbler. Liam was more gentle.
“When Amy Lynne stayed with you, did you guys hook up?”
“What?” Liam asked. His eyes went wide.
“When she left me—when Merle was only a kid—I know she went to stay with you, right?”
“Listen, Jackson, that was just because she didn’t have anywhere else to go. It was cold out and I was just around the corner then. She didn’t want to take your truck and she couldn’t put Merle on the motorcycle.”
“I’m not pissed or anything, just answer the question.”
Liam wanted to say no. He wanted to immediately deny that they had gotten together, but he also didn’t want to lie. Liam had the sense that Jackson would spot a lie pretty quickly. He wasn’t the smartest person that Liam knew, but he was savvy. It would probably be easier to lie to him if he were a little smarter and a little less savvy.
“I don’t think we should talk about this now,” Liam said.
Jackson was able to read it in his face. He raised a finger and pointed at Liam.
“I knew it,” Jackson said. His words were beginning to slur around the edges. “She would never tell me where she went. You were just a boy, for crissakes. What were you, like fourteen?”
“Eighteen,” Liam said. That’s what Corinna had told him, at least. His birthday, and the number that had passed before everything went away, had been a little foggy when he met Corinna. She had assigned him an age and a birthday. When she announced that he was eighteen, he had announced that it was time for him to live on his own. Amy Lynne and Merle had shown up not long after. They hadn’t stayed very long either.
“She ran off to be with a boy,” Jackson said.
“She ran off. I just happened to be the first person who she ran into.”
Jackson frowned and shook his head. He narrowed his eyes at Liam. Something was about to happen—it was gathering over Jackson like a thunderstorm.
“I should get going,” Liam said. The chair legs sang on the floor as he pushed back.
“Yeah?”
“Sure. Thanks for showing me the…”
“Don’t go. Stay here. You can help me with the pups. The mom really trusts you.”
Liam slouched back into his chair and promised to think about it.
Chapter 43: Brad
“You can’t let her go,” Jim said.
“I’m not letting her do anything,” Brad said. He turned the corner to start down the next flight of steps. Maybe Romie had the right idea. At least if they went back to Gladstone, he wouldn’t have to deal with so many steps. It was entirely possible that the third-floor apartment had weighed strongly in Romie’s decision.
Jim and Janelle were in front of him, walking backwards down the stairs, trying to talk
him into staying.
“But if you don’t go with her, she won’t go,” Janelle said.
“I offered to go with Romie just so she wouldn’t have to drive alone. But if you think that she wouldn’t go without me, you kids have a terrible understanding of your Aunt Romie.”
“She doesn’t want to be alone,” Jim said. “She always said that she hates staying alone.”
“There aren’t even any dogs there to keep her company,” Janelle said.
“I don’t know what you’re arguing,” Brad said. “Clearly, she is going to stay alone. I’m only going to drop her off and then I’ll be right back tomorrow. If that was really a factor for her, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
The kids looked at each other and seemed to reach some unspoken conclusion. They gave up on Brad and ran ahead. Behind him, he heard Robby coming down the stairs.
“Pardon me,” Robby said. He slipped around Brad and ran ahead.
“Anything I should know about?”
“I’ll let you know when I know more,” Robby called. “Check your messages when you get to Gladstone.”
“Got it,” Brad yelled, but Robby was already gone.
Romie was waiting in the SUV. The kids were beseeching her through the open window. It made sense in a way—they had been uprooted and they were trying to keep their family together in this place—but it was odd how emphatic the kids were being.
“You ready?” Romie asked.
“You bet. Last chance. You’re sure?”
“Just drive.”
Brad put the vehicle in reverse and had to stop short when Robby pulled up in the truck next to him.
“Get in, kids,” Robby said.
Brad raised a hand and started to back up again.
“Where’s he off to?” Romie asked.
Brad shrugged. “I don’t know. Robby stuff.”
With the map from Mike, Brad was able to cut east before Albany. Romie fluffed the paper and shook her head. She adjusted the visor against the sun.
