The Fall

by E S Richards

  “I couldn’t find anyone for ages,” Giles continued, “and then Lisa just appeared. She was just lying on the ground, but I think her legs are broken. I started to drag her out of the building but the fire kept making more things collapse. Lisa was just too weak; I tried to save her but…” Giles turned his head to look at Lisa, her eyes closed and her body completely still. Tears threatened to fall from his eyes but he held them back somehow, maintaining a strong outer resolve.

  “I’m so sorry, Giles. You did everything you could,” Amy said from beside him, turning away from the man for a moment to look back at James. “We haven’t managed to find anyone else, but there’s a storage building back there that’s still standing. It’s got water and should be a safe place to spend the night, I think.”

  “Yes,” Giles nodded, understanding the building that Amy was referring to. “I’ll join you in a minute, I just want to…” His voice trailed off as Giles looked back at Lisa.

  Amy seemed to understand what he was saying and nodded. “Do you want any help?”

  “No, it’s okay,” Giles shook his head. “Go and be with your son.”

  Amy squeezed the man’s shoulder softly before turning away from him and walking back to James. She could tell Giles wanted to move Lisa’s body somewhere, lay her to rest in some manner. Reaching her son, she took his hand in her own and squeezed it, telling him to walk back toward the storage building. It was the safest place available for them to spend the night and then they could plan their next move in the morning. Hopefully some of the food in the fridge might be salvageable enough for them to eat, Amy desperately wanted to give her son a proper meal and a decent night’s sleep.

  As James started walking, offering his mother a confident and reassuring nod as he went, Amy turned and walked back towards Mel. She wrapped an arm around the woman’s shoulders and tried to coax her in the direction of the storage building, speaking softly under her breath as she held the woman. Mel was in pieces and Amy had to half drag her back inside, struggling against her as Mel constantly tried to break free and run back towards Giles and Lisa’s body.

  Giles arrived about an hour later. Amy could see the man had been crying, but she didn’t question him. Both Giles and Mel were grieving, and all Amy could do was give them the space they needed. She held James in her arms all night as the pair of them drifted in and out of sleep, unable to predict what fresh horrors the next morning would bring.

  Chapter 17

  “We can’t leave!” Mel pleaded the next morning, reluctant to leave the place where she’d lost her daughter. Last night it seemed like reality was sinking in but now she refused to accept that Sue was really gone. “My baby’s still in there. We need to save her!”

  “We can’t, Mel,” Giles reasoned with her, “it’s not safe here. We need to leave. I’m with Amy on this one; we should go.”

  “The clubhouse only burned down because that girl was smoking!” Mel suddenly snapped in anger, her voice starting to rise. A night alone with her thoughts after losing her daughter had affected her in the worst possible way. “We would have been safe if it weren’t for her! My daughter would still be alive if—”

  “You can’t blame Lisa!” Giles voice boomed out around the storage building, silencing Mel as she tried to accuse Lisa of being the source of their downfall. “Anything could have caused that fire. And the building was old; it took more than one little cigarette to create all that chaos, Mel. I won’t have you placing the blame on her.”

  Amy stood with James by her side while the two of them argued, Mel alternating between screaming in anger and sobbing in pain. Over the night Amy had decided to keep heading north toward where her friends Ellen and Maria lived. She couldn’t be certain they would still be there, but she had to keep trying, she needed to have some sort of destination in mind. In the morning when she’d mentioned her plan to Giles, he had responded positively, offering to make part of the journey with them as he himself traveled back toward his parents’ house in the city of Grand Rapids.

  Amy was happy for his company on a leg of their journey, but Mel was putting up a fight. It was obvious why and Amy sympathized with her on that front. If James’s body were still trapped in the wreckage of the country club, Amy wouldn’t even consider leaving him; she knew that must be what Mel was thinking of too.

  As if on cue, the woman tore out of the storage building where they’d spent the night and started running back toward the wreckage. Most of the fires had stopped burning now, but smoke was still heavy in the air and it would be impossible to find anyone or anything inside of the crumbled country club. Amy watched through the now-open door as Mel started desperately digging through the ashes of the building once more, unable to cope with the truth that her daughter was now dead. Watching her instilled a strength in Amy to some extent as she felt James by her side; she would not let this happen to the two of them. She would not live to experience that pain.

  Her son was sitting quietly beside her throughout the whole ordeal. He had been tossing and turning all night against Amy’s body as they lay on the cold, hard floor, a few deckchair cushions making a rather poor substitute for a bed. Amy herself had hardly slept either, her mind turning through all the possible things that could happen next on their journey. She found herself thinking a lot about Len as well and what might have happened to him. After being so close to death in the country club and seeing Mel lose someone so close to her, Amy couldn’t help but think about the other people that she loved.

  She wondered what her parents were doing and what was happening in that part of the country. By now she had figured that it had to be a nationwide disaster, the lack of government aid or emergency services telling her that. They must be stretched much too thin to concern themselves with a small town like South Haven, cities like Washington and New York being the main priorities.

  That at least gave Amy some hope that Chicago would be offered aid. It was one of the largest cities in the country and had some incredible resources; hopefully it was managing to keep itself together through everything that was happening. Len wasn’t a particularly well-organized man and for his sake Amy hoped he’d been somewhere safe when everything happened. Riding out the collapse from the comfort of your own home was exactly what Amy wished she could be doing at that moment in time.

  The possibility that Len was dead also played heavily on her mind. Despite everything, Amy knew how much he loved James and how much their son meant to Len. She knew it had broken his heart when Amy moved away with their little boy; at the time she was glad for doing it, but now Amy couldn’t help but feel a twinge of regret. If they still lived nearby there would be another pair of eyes to watch over James and another hand to hold onto his as he slept at night. She didn’t know whether she would ever see her ex-husband again, but strongly wished that she would. Some feelings were still there for him that she would never completely be able to lose. He was the father of her child, after all, and that created an eternal bond between them.

  Zoning back into the present, Amy saw that Giles was leaning on the door frame, watching Mel as she continued to try and find a way into the country club ruins. Amy didn’t know what to do, but she knew they needed to leave; there was no point waiting around the country club any longer. Squeezing James’s hand despite the sting of pain it caused to shoot through her burns, Amy smiled to him and pulled him to his feet beside her.

  “We’re going,” she spoke resolutely, not leaving anything up for debate in the statement. “You can come if you want,” she added to Giles, “but we’re going now.”

  Without waiting for a response Amy pushed James towards the door, giving Giles a soft look as they moved past him. He opened his mouth to speak but found himself without the words, so just shook his head slightly as she passed. Amy wasn’t sure what that meant, whether he was coming or not, but when the door to the storage building swung shut behind her and there was only her son by her side she realized she had his answer.

  Amy had found a
couple of small cotton bags inside the storage building. They had been filled with fancy china originally, but Amy had replaced the contents with bottles of water, a couple of tins of food they managed to find behind the box fridge, and a small penknife. She carried most of the contents in a bag by herself, James’s only weighed down with extra water bottles.

  The loss of her rucksack and the wooden box meant a great deal to Amy and it was one of the things that had preyed greatly on her mind through the night. While the items wouldn’t look special to anyone else, they carried huge sentimental value for Amy. Souvenirs from the most important moments of her life filled the box: pictures, letters, and little trinkets that took her back to certain moments in her life when everything was happy and she didn’t have to worry about where the next meal would come from or if they were going to survive to see another sunrise.

  Turning back to take one last look at the wreckage of the country club before it was gone from their lives forever, Amy noticed a figure jogging towards them from the storage building. Giles. He was alone and Amy stopped to wait for him, James standing stoically by her side.

  ***

  Giles pushed himself away from the doorframe, his gaze switching between Amy and her son walking away into the distance and Mel sitting cross-legged on the grass in the front of the country club, sobbing loudly with her head in her hands. He desperately wanted to leave the country club and head north with Amy, but he couldn’t let himself just walk away from Mel. Somehow he would manage to convince her, he said to himself as he walked towards the crying woman, it wasn’t safe for her to stay out here alone.

  “Mel?” Giles spoke softly, calling her name as he approached from behind. “Amy and James are going to leave now. I really think we should both go with them.”

  Mel didn’t say anything. She barely even gave an indication she had heard Giles, a small twitch of her head the only response Giles had to go by.

  “Will you come with us?” Giles continued, taking a step closer towards Mel despite the woman still crying into her hands. “We can take care of you.”

  Again Giles’s question was greeted with nothing but tears, the woman incapable of stringing a sentence together. Giles took another step forward, anxious to get through to Mel and catch up with Amy.

  “Mel?” he questioned again, leaning down and placing a hand on Mel’s back.

  “Don’t touch me!” Mel suddenly screamed and jumped to her feet, spinning around to stare at Giles as her chest heaved with ragged breaths. Her eyes were wide, bloodshot and crazed, the hours of crying taking a severe toll on her psyche.

  “Mel, please,” Giles started to speak again as he took another step towards the woman, his eyes not leaving Mel’s as he took in the woman’s state. “We need to—”

  “No!”

  Mel shuffled back a few feet further from Giles, her eyes now starting to dart around their surroundings. Before Giles could register what was happening she had drawn a knife from her pocket and was holding it in front of her like a weapon. Giles had no idea Mel had been armed, the knife not mentioned at all during the time they’d spent together in the country club. Now he was slightly afraid to stand in front of the woman, Mel’s mental health in a tailspin.

  “Whoa, calm down,” Giles spoke, holding his hands up in front of his body. “I’m not going to hurt you. I just want you to be safe.”

  Mel panted in front of him, almost hyperventilating as she clutched the blade in her right hand. In that instant something about her appeared to soften, her eyes losing their insane look and turning into one drenched with sorrow. “Safe…” she whispered to herself, “we’ll never be safe.”

  Before Giles could react Mel dropped to her knees and dragged the blade of her knife across her throat in one smooth motion, dropping the bloody weapon on the grass beside her as crimson liquid started to pour from her neck. Giles screamed and ran forward, falling to his knees in front of the woman as he grabbed her body and tried to stop the bleeding.

  “I’m coming, Susan,” Mel muttered softly as her eyes fluttered half open and half closed. “I’m coming.”

  Giles felt the woman’s body go limp in his arms as she took her final breath, the flow of blood from the knife wound gradually slowing down. He shuffled backwards from her body, her blood staining his hands as he tried to wipe them on the grass beside him. He couldn’t believe what had just happened. The grieving mother so affected by the loss of her daughter that she had taken her own life. First Lisa and now Mel. Two women had died in his arms in a matter of hours. Giles couldn’t bring himself to look at Mel’s body. He wanted to give her some dignity in death, like he had offered Lisa, but he just didn’t have the strength to perform that ritual again so soon. Scrubbing at his red-stained skin, Giles climbed to his feet and started walking away from the dead mother.

  ***

  “Giles,” Amy called when he was within talking distance, “what are you doing? Where’s Mel?”

  “She’s…” Giles paused, uncertain of what to say. Mel’s death was weighing heavily on his conscience. He wished he could go back and bury her body but knew it was now too late. He had to keep moving forward and he wanted to leave the country club behind. “She’s not coming,” Giles eventually panted as he caught his breath, “but I’d like to. If that’s still okay?”

  “Of course,” Amy smiled and James nodded beside her. “We’d be happy to have you accompany us. Did you say you’re going towards Grand Rapids?”

  “Yes,” Giles smiled back at the pair of them as he fell into step on the other side of James and they continued walking, shoving his hands in his pockets to hide any remnants of Mel’s blood that he hadn’t been able to wipe clean. “My parents live there. They’re pretty old nowadays so don’t get out of the house very much, but now that there’s nothing left for me here I need to see if they’re okay.”

  “Do you have other family in the city as well?”

  Amy was happy to talk to someone else about their life rather than focusing on all the negative things happening in her own. Giles seemed like a nice, responsible man. He was fairly attractive too, even with his pale blue polo shirt covered in dirt and his right eye badly bruised from something during the collapse of the building. Amy wondered whether he truly had just been friends with Lisa or whether the two of them shared a more romantic involvement. He didn’t speak of any sort of significant other, just fondly of his parents and his childhood with them.

  As they walked, Amy learned that Giles was an only child, born and raised in Grand Rapids until he went away for college only to return to Michigan to manage the country club. He spoke fondly of the area, the east coast of Lake Michigan being the only home he had ever really known.

  “So you’ve worked there ever since you graduated?”

  “Yeah,” Giles nodded. “I got my degree in hospitality and then I was going to move out to California. Well, I did for a couple of months but I just hated it. My mom gave me a call one day and said the country club we used to visit when I was younger was looking for a summer manager and so I hopped on a flight and came back. Been there ever since.”

  “I bet it was a nice place to work,” Amy mused, the idle conversation serving her well and making her feel like the world wasn’t falling apart around them.

  “It was,” Giles reminisced, sniffing slightly at the fact that it was now gone forever. Neither of them could guess when aid would come to the country or when places would start to be rebuilt. They both knew it wouldn’t happen to places like the country club for a long time though, hospitals, schools, and factories the main priority for getting the country back on its feet.

  “What about you?” Giles asked, “What’s your story?”

  Amy laughed. “Where to start? What do you want to know?”

  Giles paused, looking between Amy and her son. James was contributing to the conversation where he could, smiling and looking between the two adults. Giles could see what a well brought up, brave little boy he was and made sure to keep him invo
lved. He knew the child must have been through so much already, the moment where the floor in the country club gave way and swallowed the room whole was a traumatizing event for a child to witness, let alone be a part of. Giles could guess that they’d seen much worse in the city too and didn’t want to sully the positive mood they were managing to maintain on their walk.

  “Tell me about the best day of your life,” Giles spoke softly, smiling a genuine smile that reached his eyes.

  Amy couldn’t stop herself from smiling back. For Giles to be so friendly and helpful after everything that had happened to him was incredible. He was a true gentlemen and asking her questions like that just made her even surer of the fact. If indeed he had been romantically involved with Lisa, then she had been a lucky girl.

  “The best day of my life?” Amy repeated, her mind wandering for a moment before she landed on the memory. “Ah yes, how could I forget…”

  ***

  “Len, can you come in here a moment?”