by Ike Hamill
May—if that was her name—pointed Robby toward a chair and Hasp laughed to himself.
“Just don’t put yourself between me and the door. I haven’t been regular in a week and this fruit is going to change that, I imagine.”
Robby smiled while the young woman shook her head and covered her face. He took a seat next to the square table and waved off the crackers that she tried to hand to him. After a moment, they both turned their eyes to Robby. They had probably heard all their own stories a million times. His would be new.
“Back when we first got together, over in Portland, we used to gather in groups to share how we got there. We wanted to make sure that everyone knew what everyone knew. That way we wouldn’t have rumors circulating and forming their own truth,” Robby said.
“Smart,” Hasp said, drinking juice from his can.
“So I’m only going to tell you what I saw with my own eyes and nothing more.”
He started his story back at the window of the small house that his father’s family had owned since they settled on the island. He told about the storm that hit like a hammer even though the weatherman hadn’t predicted it. They listened and didn’t interrupt with their own stories. Robby told them about how his neighbors and then parents had been taken. He told them about how he had crossed to the mainland and made his way south.
Hasp held his breath while Robby talked about running into the liquid that had dissolved a truck out from underneath him. May—if that was her name—folded her arms when Robby talked about the devil of a man named Lyle, who had chased him twice. Their eyes were wide as Robby talked about the vines and the ball of light that had nearly claimed everyone left in the world. He ended his story before he got to the churn. His throat was dry and that was an entirely different story.
When he took a drink and set his bottle down, he looked to the young woman across from him, expecting her to start in with her story. That’s the way it usually went—stories were shared in kind.
Instead, she took a deep breath and said, “Thank you. We’ll see you in the morning then.”
Confused, Robby stood and made his way out of the post office on legs that had nearly gone to sleep. In the moonlight outside the place, he paused, looking back at the building and wondering. The crickets kept singing as he opened the door to his car and the yellow light came on with the alarm to tell him that the keys were in the ignition.
The town seemed dark and lonely. Robby thought back and tried to remember how long it had been since he had spent the night alone. Gordie was back at Gladstone, hopefully becoming a father of a new litter of pups. Brad was somewhere east, finishing the communication network that Robby should have been working on too.
He almost turned around to go back to the post office. She had invited him to stay in the sorting room.
Instead, Robby headed west. Someone had visited the grocery store already, but there was still plenty to scavenge. He filled the car with canned fruit for Hasp and everything else that looked useful. When that was through, and he was thoroughly exhausted, he found a motel between the regional airport and the river. He leaned over the front desk, snagged a bunch of keys, and then went down the row until he found a room that looked clean and not haunted by any ghosts of Thanksgiving past.
Once he was in the room, it was easy to put everything else behind him. This could have been any of the rooms that he and Brad had lived in while they moved across the states, setting up their network. Robby might have banged on the wall three times and Brad might have banged back. Being alone was an illusion. Just because Brad might be fifty miles away and Romie, Gordie, and Lisa might be two-hundred miles away, Robby was still with them. He still had people in the world who cared for him.
May—if that was her name—only had Hasp, and he was only partly there.
With that disquieting notion in his head, Robby went to sleep.
He woke up at dawn, hopped into his pants, and sprinted from the motel room. Normally, he and Brad would clean a place up and mark the door before they left. They were establishing little pockets of safe harbor as they moved around. This morning, Robby knew he had no time to waste. All night long, he had tossed and turned, bothered by what could have gone wrong. The fire might not have been all the way out. One of the cans that they picked up in Hilliard’s might have gone bad. Hasp had been eating the canned peaches like it was his last day alive. It was possible that he had unintentionally poisoned himself with spoiled fruit.
Across the miles, Robby could sense the crisis, but he had no idea what was wrong. He cursed himself for not leaving her with any way to get in touch. When they first met, she had been suspicious and wouldn’t have accepted a CB radio, but now? He should have insisted on leaving one. She would have relented eventually.
Behind the wheel, Robby could barely keep the car on the road. It had rained a little overnight and the roads were just slick enough to be deadly. Worse, the local deer had no sense to avoid the sound of his approach. He swerved around a buck that was standing right in the middle of the road, looking puzzled as his car streaked toward it. Even having never seen a car, Robby would have figured that an animal would have the instinct to get out of the way. This one didn’t. Robby had to swerve to the right at the last moment. The car clipped a tree and metal was twisted down into the tire. He could hear it grinding and scraping with each revolution. Still, Robby urged the car faster as he followed the curving road up the hill toward the post office.
In his panic, he nearly forgot about the tree and the moat blocking his approach. He slammed on the brakes and piled out of the running car. Remembering his slow crash from the day before, he returned to the car and shut it off before he ran for the door.
She didn’t answer when he banged on the door.
Robby hesitated and then let himself in.
As the door shut behind him, he was enveloped in darkness.
“May?” he called.
Robby stumbled forward a few steps before he dug in his pocket and produced a flashlight. Using the light felt like an intrusion—a violation of her space. She moved around with the bright glow of a lantern, not the probing beam from a flashlight.
“May?”
There was still no answer. He looked in their storage room, the room where they took their meals, and then where they slept. He even glanced into the sorting room, where she had set up a cot in case he wanted to stay.
Robby’s heart was pounding by the time he pushed through the back door, out into the dawn. He was certain that she was gone forever, and he was starting to suspect that she had never been there at all. Robby saw the scorched patch of ground where he had burned the trash the day before. At least that much had really happened. He wasn’t completely crazy.
He lowered himself to the ground and sat on the dewy grass.
A sharp sound cut through the quiet. When it came again, he pinpointed the source—it was coming from the other side of the post office, where her ruined garden was.
Robby got up, brushed himself off, and moved quietly toward the corner.
She was there, in her garden. Her shovel stabbed into the ground and she tossed dirt on top of a pile. Robby opened his mouth to call to her again, and then closed it. There was a reason she was out here shoveling at dawn. He wanted to know the reason before he said anything.
Approaching slowly, the picture unfolded before him. On the other side of the pile of dirt was her hole. So far, it was only about a foot deep, but she had defined the outline of it. The hole was about seven feet long and a couple of feet wide. On the other side of the hole, a sheet was wrapped around what she intended to bury.
Robby grabbed a second shovel from her stash of tools and moved to the other end of the grave. Before he joined her, he waited for her to look up and give him a small nod. Without speaking, they dug.
The soil was full of small rocks that stopped the shovel short every time that Robby tried to stab it into the dirt. It wasn’t his first time digging a grave, and he knew that the effort
was all part of it. Through the digging, she would start to make sense of what had happened. The blisters, then the scabs, and finally the calluses would serve as a reminder that people require time to heal. Tender care has to be taken to avoid reinjury. Washing and covering up a wound will prevent infection from setting in.
Robby would help with the digging but nothing he could do would prevent her from suffering. While he shoveled dirt, Robby’s eyes returned again and again to the shape that was wrapped up in the sheet. Hasp had looked fine the day before. He had walked all the way back from the store and eaten peaches with a smile.
It was clear to Robby that his intrusion must have had something to do with Hasp’s demise. If he had kept out of her business, the old man would have still been alive. If he had even stuck around to drive them back to the post office, the old man wouldn’t have exerted himself so much.
That was all in the past. The only thing for Robby to do now was to help her dig.
They kept going, digging and digging in that rocky soil until they were back to back, occasionally colliding as they worked opposite sides of the grave. Robby’s hands blistered and then the blisters broke. The handle of his shovel was a bloody mess. If Ty saw it, he would chew Robby out, talking about infection and how they had to be more careful now that everything had an expiration date. It was too late to think about that though. The damage to his hands was done. The dirt was softer now that they were below the rocks and roots. The shovels made pretty easy work of it.
Robby listened for a moment and sensed that she was finished. He reached his shovel out and spanned the sides of the grave with it so he could pull himself up and out. On his way up, he saw under the sheet. His head was turned to the side and Hasps eyes were open, but lifeless. White foam had leaked out from his mouth and nose. If Robby were to guess, he would say that it hadn’t been a heart attack or stroke that had killed the old man. If he had to guess, he would put his money on pills.
She was still in the grave when he knelt down and offered his hand. Without saying anything, she took it. Their blood mingled in the grip and Robby felt fresh pain when their hands parted. She brushed herself off and let her eyes settle on the covered shape of Hasp.
“Thank you,” she said.
Robby was so startled that he couldn’t answer. He cleared his throat and looked at the hole.
“No problem,” he said. He regretted the words as soon as they had left his mouth.
When their eyes met, she blinked and then looked away.
“I mean for letting Hasp see the world one more time. It turns out that it was all he wanted. That was the one last thing that he was waiting for.”
“Oh,” Robby said.
“Get back in there and I’ll hand him down.”
Robby kept his mouth shut as he dropped to the edge of the hole and then slid back down into the grave. He looked up and saw her head silhouetted by the sun overhead. She was studying him, maybe thinking about how easy it would be to club him over the head and then bury him under Hasp. The old man had been the one thing that was pinning her down to this spot. Robby had been the key to her freedom. She would bury them both and then she would be set loose to wander.
She turned away, leaving Robby staring up at the sun. The next thing he saw was the old man’s body as he slipped from the sheet that had wrapped him. Hasp was naked and washed. Some of his muscles had already stiffened and some were still loose. He flowed into the grave almost like liquid. Robby struggled and failed to lay him down gently. In the end, Robby was on floor of the grave, cradling Hasp’s head while he slipped out from underneath all that flesh.
She sent the sheet down next and Robby stretched it carefully over Hasp. Before he left the man, he leaned in close to say goodbye and wish him well. Quickly, and as discretely as possible, he checked to make sure that Hasp wasn’t breathing and that his heart was truly stopped. When he was sure, Robby climbed to his feet and saw that she was holding her hand down to him. He took it and was surprised by her strength.
The two picked up their shovels and began the work of filling in the hole they had just dug. Robby paused to ask if she wanted to say any words. He saw her lips moving and figured that she was already doing it. She wasn’t sharing the eulogy, but she was saying goodbye.
It seemed to take forever to fill the hole back in. Robby paused at one point, realized how dehydrated he was, and found his way inside to get something to drink. He brought her out a couple of Gatorades that they had recovered from Hilliard’s. She drank them both without pause and tossed them to the side before returning to her work. Robby clenched and unclenched his hands to warm them back up and picked up the other shovel.
By the time they were done, she was so exhausted that she let the shovel drop and backed up until she found the wall of the post office.
May slumped down, pulling up her knees so she could rest her head against them.
Robby sat down next to her.
“He saved my life. Twice,” she said.
Robby considered a number of responses and then decided to keep quiet.
“The first time was when the fliers came. I followed my brother out into the yard, watched him get taken, and I was dumbstruck, waiting for them to take me too. Hasp ran across the yard, faster than you could imagine, and tackled me back into the garage. He put his hand over my mouth and made me wait until they were gone. I don’t even know how he knew it was safe, but he did.”
Robby pictured it. He wondered if she would have been taken even if Hasp hadn’t tackled her. Some people had escaped being taken by the invisible monsters in the sky. Other people, like himself, had watched helplessly while everyone around them vanished. Robby had come to believe that everyone who was left had been ignored, for one reason or another. She deserved to believe whatever she wanted about Hasp rescuing her. Robby didn’t have any definitive information to dissuade her.
“The second time was when I tried to escape. I figured there had to be someone still alive in Boston, so I set off to find out. When the acid took my car, Hasp was right there to pull me out of the wreckage before it could dissolve me. He had already lost half his foot by then, but he rescued me anyway.”
They sat in silence for a long while. When Robby stole a glance at her, he saw silent tears rolling down her face. She sat there, watching over Hasp’s fresh grave for hours. Robby brought her food and water that she eventually, absentmindedly, took. At the end of the day, she allowed him to guide her inside. He had cleaned up Hasp’s bed the best he could and lit the lanterns so it wasn’t so terribly dark inside.
“I’ll stay if you want me to,” Robby said. “Otherwise, I’ll come back in the morning to make sure you’re okay.”
She studied him for a moment, like she was trying to translate what he was saying into words that she could understand.
“And I made you this map. It’s a route that I’m certain is passable to where I live in Gladstone. I’ll leave you a CB, too, so you can call.”
“You’re leaving?” she asked.
“Only if you want me to,” he said. “If you want, I’ll stay in the sorting room.”
“No,” she said. “Let’s go now.”
“Go?”
“To this Gladstone place. You said there are other people there? More than just you and that guy who already left?”
“Scores of us,” Robby said.
“Then take me there.”
His kids were on either side of him, listening to this story that they already knew by heart. It hurt Robby to tell it to them while his oldest, Ashley, was lost in the world somewhere.
“So I took her back to Gladstone where Romie yelled at me for waking her up in the middle of the night. She slept until noon the next day. I waited for her to get up so I could say my goodbyes and go find Brad, but your mom wouldn’t hear of it. She wanted to come with me to help set up the last legs of the network. Of course I said yes.”
Robby sighed, remembering how she had used the trip to collect herself and mourn he
r friend. Robby knew too well what it was like. Initially, when he had lost all of his friends and family during the snow, the shock and panic had pushed away his opportunity to mourn them. By the time he had a moment to feel sorry for himself, he found that he had already begun to heal. Afterwards, losing Ted, Sheila, and later Pete was somehow a little harder. They had survived everything and joined him to help try to save what was left. They had faced death and lost, and their absence had hit hard.
May was dealing with all that and more. Hasp had saved her and then had deteriorated. Robby admired her strength in the face of that. Eventually, she had told him her whole story. Their trip took them to join Brad and finish installing the network of radios. By the time they were done, Robby knew that he was in love with her.
“You didn’t tell my favorite part,” Janelle said.
“Yes, of course,” Robby said. His kids always liked stories where he ended up looking stupid. “When we got back to Gladstone, Lisa had already set up a room for your mother. She said, ‘Martina, I’ve set you up in the room next to me.’ Your mother smiled like she had a secret. Confused, I waited until we were alone and I asked her why she hadn’t corrected your Aunt Lisa when she called her Martina.”
Robby was going to leave it at that until Jim prompted him with a nudge.
“Your mom said, ‘Because that’s my name. I didn’t correct you because I wanted to see how long you would keep calling me May.’ She was stubborn, but I was too. I still call her May to this day.”
Janelle laughed. Even Jim cracked a big smile.
“Okay, come on. Let’s see what the rest of the world is doing.”
The three of them got up together to head to the cafeteria.
Chapter 101: Brad
Liam gave them quick descriptions as he walked them through the utility rooms and then into the hallways that led to the living quarters. People were moving with a purpose. The residents of Donnelly, relocated to the bunker, were showing the newcomers where they could find a meal and beds.
