by Skylar Finn
“Sounds familiar,” I said. “We realized very quickly that we were going to have to get Grace ourselves.”
Tom shook his head. “I’ve never met people with such an appetite for killing,” he said. “They were so casual about it; as if they were discussing their plans for a dinner party. They intended to annihilate them the second they stepped foot on the property. And of course Dexter’s men were unprepared. They hadn’t been expecting anyone but us. They were informed that we had very few arms and ammunitions, and were basically helpless due to the leverage they had over us.”
“How many people did they send?” I tried to remember how many people I’d seen fighting at the farmhouse, but they all blurred together. Towards the end, it had been difficult to distinguish the difference between Dexter’s men and Wentworth’s.
“There were only three of them,” he answered. “They were very confident this was going to be a quick errand: a walk in the park, like my dad always said.” He was quiet for a moment, remembering. “The looks on their faces...when they rode up and Wentworth’s men stepped out to greet them. They tried to fight back, of course, but it was over in minutes. And after, they celebrated. They were triumphant, about having killed these people.” He shook his head. “There’s no love lost between me and anybody who followed that murdering fiend. I thought I’d be glad to see them go. But to go from having lived a pretty peaceful life to seeing so many people killed outright in so little time…” He sighed. He didn’t finish his sentence, but then, he didn’t have to. I knew just what he meant.
“What happened to the one who was here?” I asked.
“He went back to the compound when you went to get Grace,” said Tom. “Said something about having to report to Wentworth.”
“Wentworth’s dead.” I told Tom what happened at the farmhouse, up to Dexter shooting Ethan and me shooting Dexter.
“You did what you had to do, Charlie,” said Tom. “We all did.”
My chin dropped to my chest. My eyes slid closed, and I shook myself, trying to stay awake. I had to remain vigilant. I needed to be there for Ethan. One way or another, I needed to know.
Tom watched me sympathetically in my fight to stay awake.
“It’s okay to rest,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Not yet, it’s not.”
In spite of my declaration, I was fighting a losing battle. I had slumped against the gray stone wall of the hearth when a creak from the hallway awakened me like a gunshot. My eyes flew open, and I stood, hardly aware of my movements. It was the same floorboard that always creaked whenever someone walked down the hallway.
It was Peterman. He came out of the back bedroom slowly, covered in blood. I knew I’d see that sight in my nightmares for years to come. He opened his mouth. I couldn’t wait to hear the worst news of my life, and I pushed past him, running into the bedroom and throwing open the door.
Ethan lay on the sheets, still and unmoving. My hand flew to my mouth. His head tilted to the side, and his eyes barely opened. Just enough to see me. The slightest hint of a smile and his eyes closed again.
Peterman came back to the bedroom and caught me by the shoulder before I could run to the bed.
“Careful,” he cautioned me. “His condition is fragile. It will be touch and go for the next twenty-four hours, but...he’s alive. He shouldn’t be, but he is. We have every reason to hope.”
I knew the next twenty-four hours would be excruciating. And maybe the next twenty-four days, weeks, months. Maybe he wouldn’t pull through, or maybe he would, but we’d still have new enemies to face. But for now, he was alive. And as Peterman said, it was reason enough to have hope.
Epilogue
When I was still in school, taking philosophy as an elective, I learned that times of war are followed by times of peace. It took me a long time to feel safe again. Some days, I’m not sure that I ever really have. But we have found some measure of peace.
In the ensuing weeks, it took a long time for Ethan to recover. The first few days, as Peterman warned, had been touch and go. There were moments where I thought we might lose him. But now we were a family again. And for the time being, that was enough.
It took just as many weeks as Ethan’s recovery lasted for us to fix the house after the damage that Dexter’s, then Wentworth’s people had done to it. The house had taken years to build and only moments to destroy. Destruction is so much easier than creation, which I suppose is why the weak embrace it so freely.
The farmhouse was in shambles; a graveyard. Wentworth’s remaining men, without Wentworth to unite them, moved on. They saddled up and circled their proverbial wagons. They decided, as EJ later told me, to hit the road and live like cowboys. It was the thing he’d most wanted to be as a child, he confessed. But it had never been a real possibility until now.
For a while, we wondered what we’d do if another lawless group came into town and took over. We worried and planned and fortified. I thought the day was inevitable and spent many evenings with Tom, who was just as grimly certain of this inevitability as I was, scavenging for more bullets and guns.
But the next appearance in town was an unexpected one: that of Lydia and Bud Alderson, who’d finally made it out of the city after holing up until the worst of it was over. The city was in ruins, they reported. When the worst of it had died down, they packed their essentials and headed out on foot. It had taken them days to make the journey.
A week to the day after the arrival of the Aldersons, the Phillips came out of hiding. They had an underground bunker at their place and hadn’t even known what was going on with Dexter, or Wentworth. They stayed inside while the storm raged above them. Dig Phillips expressed regret that he hadn’t known, stating resolutely that he would have joined the fight. I knew without asking that his wife, Tara, was relieved that he hadn’t.
We went to the Davidsons’ house and to Davidson’s Drugs. We retrieved the bodies of Mary and Pat, and helped Tom lay his family to rest. He couldn’t stand to go on living in the house without them, and moved into the apartment above the hardware store.
The Aldersons and the Phillips, who’d remained safely entrenched and contended with remarkably little violence by comparison, were in good spirits. Lydia wanted to start up the old tradition of community barbeques again.
The Aldersons brought their golden retriever, Buzz, much to Grace’s everlasting delight. They played on the lawn for hours while Bud and Dig argued over the best way to cook ribs. Lydia was gentle with me, assigning me only the smallest and most trivial of tasks: having me help her peel potatoes or scrub vegetables. It wasn’t that she needed the help, but more to keep my mind off our recent memories, I think.
Ethan made his inevitable potato salad. Tom cooked corn on the cob. Peterman spent the week leading up to the festivities obsessing about a homemade rub he’d concocted. I stuck to the simple things and made lemonade.
We sat on the front porch and watched our friends and neighbors talk and laugh on the front lawn. Both Ethan and I were quiet. I used to wonder where he’d disappear, the times when we’d sit together quietly in the living room at home. I’d look over only to realize he was gazing off into the distance: both there and not there. Here with me, but also somewhere else.
I didn’t have to ask anymore. I was there with him. And he understood.
We didn’t talk much about the past. About the things that led us to this day, or the pain and fear we had experienced. The people I’d known in my previous life, friends in the psychology department, for example, would have had a field day with this. Repression, they would have said. Denial.
“Life goes on,” Ethan said simply, when I asked if it was okay that we didn’t talk about it. “We make our own way in the world.”
We have our scars. Ethan’s are literal. Other scars are unseen. I often wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, gunfire ringing in my ears that isn’t really there. It’s a holdover from the nightmares I still have. But I hope--I know--it will get better o
ne day.
At first, the idea of a barbeque, after the carnage we’d witnessed, was as foreign an idea to me as a garden party. It seemed somehow inappropriate in the wake of the waves of death we’d witnessed. But as Ethan pointed out, life went on.
It was up to us to build a new world.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read my story!
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EMP No Power
By Alexandria Clarke
1
On the day the world ended, Ailani Ho was getting coffee. All she did was get coffee. She hustled from person to person, actor to actor, director to assistant director, all over the stupid green screen stage for yet another scene that had absolutely no real elements to it. Everything was created by a computer these days. Did set designers have jobs anymore, or did every backdrop behind an actor fall to the hands of some little dude hunched over a laptop? Ailani was being judgmental. It was a natural state for her. In her line of work, jealous coded as judgment. If this was her movie, things would be different. She would have taken several location-scouting jaunts instead of relying on the green screens. She would have hired a script writer with original thought instead of picking someone who, in her completely objective opinion, had missed the point of the book they were all adapting. She would have casted someone other than Trip Travis, the country boy turned action star whose blond, brown-eyed version of handsome was just like every other action star’s version. But of course, this wasn’t Ailani’s movie. Despite a Bachelor of Arts and an MFA in film, as well as a graduate project that made waves at Sundance and Tribeca, Ailani was stuck as an assistant producer, the lowest on the food chain barring the custodial staff. Then again, she found herself cleaning up after people more times than she could count.
A movie shoot could be any number of things: exciting, boring, inspirational, boring, invigorating, boring, et cetera. What most people didn’t know about movie making was how much waiting around happened. After every take, it took anywhere from thirty minutes to a few hours to reset, depending on how complicated the scene was. You waited for the camera operators to get the focus they wanted, for the audio guys to get the mics working, for the actors to get their makeup and hair touched up, and for the director to get his shit together. For all that waiting around, Ailani rarely stood in one place. There was always something to do. She ran paperwork, filed paperwork, and delivered paperwork. If it involved paperwork, it fell under Ailani’s job description. She fetched actors, arranged transportation, and coordinated eager extras craning their necks for a look at the actual talent. She answered phones, ordered lunch and dinner for the cast and crew every day, and helped keep the set clean. Ailani did more work in a day than Trip Travis could ever dream of, yet he was paid twenty times the amount she was, all because of his stupid, handsome face.
Night shoots were the worst or the best, depending on your role in the movie-making process. The cast tended to get loopy and punch drunk after a few hours, no matter how much coffee and energy drinks they consumed. It resulted in a lot of breaking and endless laughing fits, which was great for bloopers but not for production costs or efficiency. For the first hour of nonsense, the director and crew got caught up in it, sometimes ruining satisfactory takes with an ill-placed chortle that would get everyone laughing again. It was funny until it wasn’t anymore, when the camera guy couldn’t get the shot because he was too tired to tailor his work to Trip’s inability to hit his mark. At this point, the director would finally get pissed off and yell at the actors to cut it out, get it together, and finish the damn scene. On every night shoot, Ailani anticipated the director’s breaking point. She longed for the cast and crew’s renewed concentration after the heated lecture.
For Ailani, night shoots were the worst. She was a morning person, not a night owl. Years of waking up at dawn to paddle out into the best waves of the day had honed Ailani’s morning ritual. She functioned better if the call time was five in the morning, not five in the afternoon. By ten o’clock, her eyes began to droop, and by midnight, she resembled an extra from the Walking Dead. It was her hatred of night shoots that drew the wrong kind of attention to Ailani that night, when she accidentally dozed off during a decent take and knocked over a light fixture during her slumber. The light fixture careened to the floor, and the aluminum casing around the bulb made a resounding crash.
“Cut! Everyone stop!” The director flung off his headphones and twisted around in his chair. “What the fuck is going on back there? Who’s knocking shit over?”
Ailani clenched her teeth together and stepped forward, raising her hand. “That was me, Sebastian. I must have nodded off. Sorry about that—”
Sebastian beckoned her toward him with one finger. Ailani set her resolve before forcing her feet to move. Sebastian Paris was as infamous an asshole as he was a director, his one-finger beckon the trademark of his assholery. The cast and crew held a collective breath as Ailani approached the director. He kept curling his finger in until she stood right beside his chair, so he could lean in and speak directly to her eardrum.
“What’s your name again?” Sebastian asked.
I’ve told you a hundred times already. “Ailani.”
“Ailani,” Sebastian repeated, his hot breath tickling the hair around Ailani’s ears. “Such a pretty name for someone so incredibly incompetent.”
“Sorry, it was—”
“Ah, ah!” Sebastian waggled his finger. “I don’t need excuses. You fell asleep on the job, damaged an expensive piece of electric equipment, and have caused a delay in production.”
Another set assistant—a tall black man with the face of a runway model and the beautiful biceps of a god—hauled the light fixture to its original place. “Actually, Sebastian,” he said, “the light’s fine. No harm, no foul.”
“I’ve had production assistants fired for faults less than this one,” Sebastian went on without pause. “Why shouldn’t I kick you off my set this instant?”
Sandy, an assistant producer who never went anywhere without a clipboard and an earpiece, hurried over to us. “Sebastian, sir? With all due respect, you can’t fire Ailani. She’s good at her job, and I don’t have the time to find some other PA who just moved to L.A., lied on their résumé, and has no idea what they’re doing. Please don’t put me through that kind of torture again.”
Sebastian smoothed the front of my sweaty T-shirt then patted my shoulder. “Ailani, who do you want to be? What do you want to do with your life?”
He didn’t want the real answer, and Ailani refused to give it to him to be mocked for. What she wanted to do was what Sebastian already did, except Ailani wanted to do it better. Given the chance, she would be a director, one that didn’t cater to dumb action films like this one.
“This,” Ailani replied. “I want to be a production assistant until the day I die.”
“You’re well on your way, my dear. Get me a coffee.” He waved her away. “Reset! I don’t have all night, people!”
As the crew scurried to obey Sebastian’s demands, Ailani slumped off the set to get his coffee. Sandy winked at her, and the godlike man who had stood up to Sebastian regarding the light fixture jogged after her. Once they wer
e alone in the next hallway over, he broke out laughing.
“Damn, girl,” he said. “It’s like you’re trying to get him to fire you.”
“Shut up, Walt.”
Walt Dailey had been Ailani’s best friend since she moved to Los Angeles ten years ago. He was a rainbow of talents—camera operator, editor, makeup artist, and model—but like Ailani and a slew of other people their age in the area, he found it difficult to break through the masses and make a name for himself. These days, Walt was more famous for the fabulous gender-bending photos on his Instagram page than he was for any of his film work.
“I hate night shoots,” Ailani declared as they made their way to the break room. “I’m sleep-deprived. Do you know what sleep deprivation does to people? If you’re not careful, you could die!”
“Slow your roll, hypochondriac.” Walt tossed her a fresh pod for the coffee machine. “Is this going to turn into another long-winded monologue like the one you deliver about green screens on a daily basis?”
“All I’m saying is the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie was filmed on an actual freaking boat.”
“That’s your argument? Honey.”
“Don’t ‘honey’ me.” She jammed the pod into the coffee maker and flicked the power switch. “Why isn’t this working?”
“It’s probably out of water,” Walt said. “Pirates of the Caribbean used huge amounts of CGI. Also, we don’t work for Disney, so you should probably lower your standards.”
Ailani allowed Walt to take over the coffee-making procedure. “All I’m saying—”
“All I’m saying,” Walt said in a squeaky voice, “is you should get some sleep before tomorrow night. Otherwise, you might be kissing this job goodbye, and I can’t afford to pay rent on my own.”
“Please. You’re an influencer. Your Instagram followers pay your rent for you.”
