by Tim McBain
“Alright,” I whispered. “Remember what I said. Wait until I give you a signal before you come through. Until I do that, play dead again.”
Izzy nodded.
With one final peek at the door, I thrust my head under the bottom edge of the tent fabric. There was a panicky moment when the top half of my body felt trapped under the weight of the canvas, and I worried I’d get stuck and suffocate. But then my head popped free and blinding sunlight beamed down on my face.
I’d come out right next to the stack of pallets I’d sat on with Breanne one night not that long ago. The night she’d been crying over Bennett and the people inside the tent were singing “Lean on Me.”
A shudder ran through me as I realized that all of those people were dead now.
Breanne was dead.
And if I didn’t get my ass in gear, Izzy and I would join them.
I dragged myself the rest of the way through and gave a quiet tap on the tent to indicate Izzy should follow.
She wriggled under much quicker than I had and joined me in a crouch next to the stack of wood.
At the corner of the mess tent, I peered out at camp. More bodies littered the ground outside. Over the frenzy inside the tent, I hadn’t been able to tell that it was happening out here, too.
Seemingly oblivious to the carnage surrounding them, six or seven soldiers loaded supplies into the truck Jimbo had been driving. Nausea welled in my gut. I squeezed my eyes closed and fought it, worried the sound of me vomiting might draw attention.
I still didn’t see Max anywhere, and it occurred to me for the first time that they’d probably already killed him. All of the men in the tent had obviously been in on the attack. They’d known what the plan was. Max would never have gone along with that. And Bennett wasn’t the type to allow for dissent.
I bent one knee so I was eye-level with Izzy and pointed at the gap in the fence. There was a large stack of straw to one side for scattering on the ground when it got muddy.
“Here’s what we’re going to do. When I say go, you’re going to run as fast as you can over to those bales of hay. Duck behind them and lie down on your belly. I’ll be right behind you.”
I checked our surroundings again.
“Ready? Go!”
Izzy took off at a sprint. I held my breath until she was safely behind the wall of straw, and then I let out a relieved sigh.
The murmur of voices approached, and I melted back into the shadow of the tent.
“It’s not all gonna fit in the trucks. Even without all the guys, it’ll take a few trips to haul everything.”
The earth tilted under my feet. I knew that voice. It was Max.
“No big deal. We’ll take whatever we can carry tonight, lock the gate behind us. Maybe leave a few guys behind to stand guard,” Bennett said. “It’s not like we’re in a rush.”
From the smacking sound his lips made in between sentences, I thought he might be eating something. The spoils of his victory.
“Alright. It’s just… fuel is going to become an issue at some point. Even if we find a source somewhere, we’ll need to conserve.”
“Mmm, a fair point, Rip. See, this is why I’m glad you’re on my team. Always thinking.”
My hand flailed at the tent wall behind me. I couldn’t believe he was helping them.
That he was one of them.
“Hey, you didn’t happen to see your little jailbait anywhere, did you?”
I think my heart stopped. I tried to hold as still as possible, so I wouldn’t miss a word, but my hands were shaking uncontrollably.
“No,” was all Max said.
Bennett continued, “I looked for her in the tent. Didn’t see her, but it’s kind of a mess in there. Saw Breanne though.”
He made a sucking sound with his teeth.
“All tore up. Which is a shame. If I could go back and plan things different, I think I’d have pulled them aside before the meeting. Kept ‘em somewhere safe while we took care of things. They could have been, you know, useful. We got kind of a sausage-y vibe going on right now, am I right?”
A sour burning sensation crept up the back of my throat at what Bennett was suggesting.
Max said nothing, proving even more what a coward he was.
“Lighten up, Ripper!” Bennett laughed. “Ah shit. I just thought of something. I told Rocko to burn the bodies in the mess tent. If we’re trying to conserve fuel, do me a favor and tell him not to bother.”
Max cleared his throat and seemed to find his voice again.
“What should I tell them to do instead?”
“Let ‘em rot,” Bennett said. “It’ll stink to high heaven, but we won’t be here to smell it, so who cares?”
I waited, counting to ten before I stepped out to peek around the pallets. They were gone.
My head was still spinning from everything I’d heard, but I forced myself to gather all my strength and wits and speed. And then I hauled ass to the stacked hay bales, convinced that every step would be my last, that Max or Bennett or anyone else would see me running and put a bullet in my back.
But I made it. I dropped to the ground next to Izzy, breath heaving in and out of my lungs.
“What took you so long?” Izzy asked.
“Sorry. I had to wait until it was clear.”
“I got scared you weren’t coming.”
I glanced over at her and took her hand.
“I’m not leaving you. Not ever.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
It wasn’t quite a smile that touched her lips, but she’d been satisfied by my answer at least.
“OK. We’re almost there. You’re going to do exactly the same thing as before, but this time, I want you to go straight past the catalpa tree and into the cornfield. Can you do that?”
Izzy nodded. “Just don’t wait as long to follow me this time, OK?”
I smiled for real.
“I’ll try not to.”
Using my elbows to inch around one corner of our barricade, I made sure no one was in sight. And then I told Izzy to run for it. Like a startled rabbit, she scampered along the fence, bounded through the gap, and beat feet across the expanse of grass. My hands were balled into fists as I swiveled my head back and forth from Izzy to camp, praying no one appeared there. The last glimpse of Izzy that I caught was a flash of sunlight on her curly head just before she disappeared between the stalks of corn.
I closed my eyes, thankful she was safe.
Now it was my turn.
With one last peek over my shoulder, I went for it. When I rounded the edge of the fence, my sleeve caught against some of the concertina wire. I didn’t pause, and the fabric ripped free with the tiniest clink of metal on metal.
“Erin?”
Despite my command that they not stop moving under any circumstance, my feet ground to a halt at my name. I turned slowly.
Perhaps twenty yards away, Max stood on the other side of the criss-crossed wire, staring at me.
“Erin, Jesus Christ. I can’t believe you’re OK.”
He kept his voice low and took a few steps toward me.
I inched backward.
“Wait. Please,” he said, taking on a pleading tone.
I shook my head, his face a blur through my tears. Maybe it’s pathetic, but the weak part of me wanted to believe him, wanted to believe he meant me no harm, wanted to believe he could protect me from Bennett and the others, wanted to believe that I could trust him.
I didn’t, though. I couldn’t.
With that realization, I pivoted on my heel and ran for the cornfield as fast as my legs would carry me.
“Erin!” he yelled after me. “Stop!”
I didn’t stop. My legs pumped like pistons, carrying me past the catalpa tree and into the strange green-tinted shadow of the cornfield. I didn’t slow as I passed Izzy, who waited just beyond the first few rows of corn. I grasped her hand and towed her along behind me, still running.
“
Who was that? Who’s calling you?” she asked.
“No one,” I said.
Erin
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
19 days after
That’s pretty much it. The end of the story. I went through three candles last night writing it out while Izzy slept on the couch next to me. She won’t let me out of her sight. If I get up to pee, she insists on coming into the bathroom with me and covering her eyes while I do my business.
Even now, she’s sleeping with her feet pressed against the side of my leg. When she was first falling asleep, she kneaded her toes against my thigh like a cat. It was kind of adorable and for maybe the first time since I don’t remember, I laughed.
Once we were under the cover of the cornfield, I led Izzy on a zig-zagging course through the stalks. I was afraid that Max would follow, and that if I took a straight path, he’d eventually catch up with us. I tried to zag a little harder to the south each time, so that we’d end up near the river. I figured we couldn’t go wrong with following the water somewhere. At the very least, we’d have something to drink, right?
I don’t know if Max ended up coming after me. If he did, I never saw him or heard him. When we reached the far end of the corn, I took us south through the trees until we hit the stream.
I don’t think I mentioned that we are in an abandoned house right now. And I don’t mean like the shitty boarded up houses in Pittsburgh that bums squat in. It’s a normal house, just nobody is in it.
Do you remember when we read Harriet the Spy in fifth grade, and then we talked about forming our own little Spy Club? And then we fantasized about sneaking into all of our neighbors’ houses to snoop? Of course, we totally chickened out and never did anything remotely spy-like except for buying some big black sunglasses and mini notepads at the dollar store.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that as I stood in the driveway of this house, trying to work up the balls to knock on the door. It is so weird being in someone else’s house. Just standing in their lawn feels like some kind of violation of privacy. I kept expecting someone to blow my head off with a shotgun.
I guess you go through life thinking most other people live pretty much exactly how you do, but if you get a glimpse of how things are for someone else, you see that’s not always the case. Maybe it’s never the case.
For example… these people keep their ketchup in the fridge!
OK, I know that is a terrible example. But how about this:
There’s carpet in the bathrooms. Consider for a moment all of the years of stale pee germs clinging to those fibers.
And then there’s the basement. It’s unfinished and pretty much empty except for a lone toilet. A fully functioning toilet, right in the middle of the floor. No sink, no walls, no door. Nothing. Why?
But I digress… I finally got up the courage to creep up to the front door. Izzy was clinging to me like a barnacle. Most of the time she’s pretty fearless, really. Especially for an eight-year-old. But she was scared approaching the house. Maybe because I was scared. It seems like if I’m freaked out, then it’s contagious. And I was almost shaking as we sidled up to the door.
I knocked and said, “Hello?” Which seems stupid now, but I don’t know… just trying someone’s door to see if it’s locked or not felt rude at the time.
No one answered, obviously. Everything was perfectly still. Empty. The house. The city. The whole world, it feels like. It’s so weird.
I reached for the door handle and gave it a twist. It was locked.
“Damn,” I said.
Izzy pursed her lips a little at that, which seemed funny because I was going to say Fuck but downgraded it just for her.
Then she said, “Maybe we could pick it.”
“Pick what?” I asked.
“The lock. Do you have a bobby pin?”
“No,” I said.
She looked really disappointed. It was almost funny. Then her eyes brightened.
“Oh. What about a lock pick?”
Now, I thought about pointing out a few things. Such as, why the eff would I have a friggin’ lockpick? Am I a 1940s criminal? And second, what kind of prioritizing is that: to ask for a bobby pin first and then a lockpick?
Then I remembered that Izzy is eight, and we also almost just got totally murdered by a bunch of fucking psycho asswipe soldiers along with everyone else we know. Knew. And I decided to cut her some slack.
Honestly, I’m just glad I’m not out here alone.
I still dream about it most nights. Me and Izzy playing dead, I mean. Drenched in blood. A dead man’s limbs draped over us. The mess of corpses sprawled out around us in all directions.
So much death.
But we’re still here.
Your BFF, who hopes that you are somewhere out there, alive and safe. And not alone.
Erin
Delfino
Outside of New Bern, North Carolina
4 years, 50 days after
The Hellickson house burns as I write this. Maybe that’s a proper ending to it all. The only ending there could be.
The flames reach high out of the holes burned in the rooftop, licking into the sky. And sheets of ash rise from the opened up places. Floating, floating.
It’s an intense fire, the kind that cracks as loud as gunfire every few minutes, sparks exploding out of the freshly broken bits. The heat shimmers everywhere around it, blurring all the lines and edges.
And that fits, maybe. The world is this angry place, I think. Destroying everything. Consuming everything. Never fucking satisfied.
I don’t know how it happened. The fire, I mean. Maybe that fancy pizza oven is to blame. I doubt the dead started it intentionally. Say what you will about them: Murderers? Yes. Cannibals? Absolutely. But they don’t strike me as arsonists.
I didn’t want to ever come back here, but I’d hoped to get my things from the mansion. Boxes and boxes of things. Most everything I owned. It’s all melting now. Blackening and disappearing.
But it’s OK. It didn’t mean so much to me, I guess. Just objects.
The dead have cleared out, the best I can tell. I see no sign of them, and the swamp smell is gone.
I don’t know.
I’ve thought a lot about what all happened here, and I have no fucking clue. Was Hellickson putting that meat out there to try to appease the dead somehow? Doesn’t make much sense to me, but what do I know? Nothing seems to mean anything. There is no narrative that could make the Hellickson ending make sense, make it in any way just or natural or logical.
I guess that’s scarier anyway. That there’s no explanation. There’s no meaning at all. And even if there is, I’ll never get to know it. I’ll know just enough to let it torment me and no more. Like the universe just wants to hold its secrets at arm’s length. For always. Forever.
The harsh black seas of infinity. Indifferent. Unknowable.
That is all.
And the part you do get to know? Just death that finds you one way or another. Just death.
Meatball rests his head on my ankle. I wonder if he has any idea what happened here, any sense at all.
I suspect not. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and that seems OK to me. More than OK. The most merciful thing in the universe.
The two of us will clear out of here in time. We’ll get the Delta 88, load up as much gas as we can, and be gone. I imagine he’ll make a fine traveling companion. We understand each other, I think.
For the time being, we’ll sit here in this freshly manicured lawn and watch the Hellickson mansion disappear, and then we’ll drift off into some other place. Some other world, perhaps.
Awful as this all is, the fire is somehow mesmerizing to watch, especially as the day blushes into night. It’s bright and hot and violent and awful and destructive and beautiful all at once. I say that’s entertainment. Just wish I had a couple of those beers.
Father
Rural Maryland
9 years, 136 days after
I
t’s pissing down rain outside. Has been for coming up on fourteen hours straight. Unreal. It must be the remnants of some tropical storm raging up the coast or something. Hurricane Cuntrina.
The water gushes over the place where the downspout is clogged, slaps the ground continuously. It looks like someone dumping a never-ending pitcher off the corner of the roof.
I sent all the servants and advisers home for the day. Not like anyone can get much done. I hate being cooped up like this, but if it must be so, better it be alone.
I remember long ago, I wrote in times like this. Huddled in my little studio apartment. I kept a journal, more or less. More of a letter, maybe, but…
That was another life. Another world. Still, that urge to put pen to paper occurs to me now, that old feeling creeping over me like a graying memory.
So here I am.
Out here on the deck, the roof protects me from the worst of the storm. The spray mists me, but it’s not unpleasant. Just the opposite, in fact. I find the cold wetness of it vaguely exhilarating.
The thunder and lightning seem to roll in and out for stretches of time. The violence of the light and sound strike me as oddly comforting. Like watching a horror movie I’ve seen so many times, it veers from disturbing to nostalgic. There’s still power to it, to the violence itself, but it fails to shock me now.
Slowly, slowly, all wonder seeps from this world. What’s left is not intolerable, but it’s not the same as it used to be.
My mind wanders back to foreign affairs as it often does lately. The Sovereign Cities remain a problem, just as they have since they were little tent villages of raiders and rapists way back when. Like something out of the fucking Dust Bowl.
For years, they tried to storm us in disorganized fashion, and for years, we picked them off from towers and funneled them into the teeth of our defenses without much problem.
And though they haven’t attempted a strike on our camp in over three years, unfortunately they aren’t so disorganized these days. The various barbarian factions (for lack of a better term) have formed an alliance. They’ve stopped gutting each other like fish, and they’ve moved out of the tents and into actual buildings, though I suspect most still live in filth and squalor.
