by Keys, Logan
She stayed silent, willing him to finish, willing him to feed her hopes beyond measure.
Terrance paused and stared at her without blinking. “I think you’re right. Not now, but at some point, maybe we go. When the storm quits. We go back because for some reason I think Corwin’s still there. And I think I was supposed to find you and tell you just that. I think I was supposed to find you at all costs.”
He touched his head.
The injury. He’d had it when she first saw him. Could it have done permanent damage? Then he crashed her truck, hurting his head all over again.
She wasn’t sure.
Patty sighed then smiled. Tears blossomed on her lids as she wiped them away and touched her belly. “Thank you so much, Terrance.”
He nodded, uncomfortable with her gratitude.
Patty grabbed his hands and held them tightly. “You just gave my whole world back.”
13
Southern California
Clive tripped over another body, stopping this time, and then he spun in a circle. They expected to see the big bodies, but not the little ones. Nothing prepared them for the little ones. Clive felt unprepared for any of it. But this…
He was in hell.
The mask was suddenly too tight, and the world was too big.
He staggered backwards, and Siri's voice sounded like it was coming from deep in a well.
She touched his shoulder, but he shrugged her away.
Somehow, he'd wound up on his knees, some disgusting sludge seeping into his jeans from the sodden ground. Little blonde hairs caught the light, strands in a breeze, and his stomach turned. It was as if her soul was still flying away.
Clive heard a sound that he realized came from his chest. A wheezing, painful noise.
He sat back on his heels and leaned his head back until he only saw the gray sky. He closed his eyes and a lifetime of memories peeled from the walls of his mind, colliding together, shooting him from one big moment to the next, until he landed on the small insignificant ones. “Souf,” he said quietly.
“What?” Siri asked.
“Souf.” His words were raw. “That was how my daughter used to say soup, and I remember correcting her. I would laugh and say, “No, baby, it’s soup, Caroline. Say soup for daddy.” His dry laugh was unhinged and full of broken regret. “She was in speech therapy when she was younger, did I tell you that?”
“No,” Siri said in a flat kind of way so that he opened his eyes to find the young girl frozen beside him, for once, unsure and serious.
“It was so important.” The mask forced his words back at him with bitterness so that each syllable was like a slap in the face. “Soup,” he said loudly. “It’s soup, Caroline!” he shouted the words sternly.
“I don’t understand.” Siri sounded afraid.
He shook his head. “Of course, you don’t. You’re just a kid. You don’t understand how it feels to think something so small is imperative only to realize they were moments wasted. How a therapist encourages you to fix your kids enunciation of a word and so you do it, and you work on it, and then you get in fights with your spouse because you forgot to do it, or because you used baby talk that one time when you got home, tired from work. I was angry because I didn’t think it was important enough one moment, and then worried about my child’s future the next. How on earth will she ever get a job if she can’t enunciate? But Sara was in it all day, every day, trying to prepare them for that world. And I’d frustrate her by being not available enough one moment and then micro-managing the next. And it was hard enough, Siri.” His voice broke. “It was already hard enough!”
“For who, Clive?”
“For her, for Sara. For Caroline. For everyone. The world was hard enough as it was…” He lifted his hands at the empty landscape in futility. “And now, it’s souf. I would listen to her say souf for the rest of my life if I could only just hear it one more time…”
His body racked with sobs and Siri moved, but it was too sudden. It broke him right there in the middle of the end of everything.
Clive didn’t want comfort. He didn’t want to mourn. He just wanted to tell Sara and the kids he loved them, and they mattered, and he’d never be too tired ever again. He’d thank Sara instead of giving her unnecessary feedback. He would appreciate the hell out of everything she did and was. And he’d work out. He would. He wouldn’t get soft and complacent and forget to love them and show them he cared.
He stood up and towered over Siri, barreling right past her. “I’m going to be sick!” he shouted as if in apology, but he wasn’t going to do it next to the bodies.
Clive ran, searching frantically for an empty street, some place where death didn’t lurk.
But there were only streets of melted people, like they'd been ice cream and not skin, and there were only poor souls who’d clawed at their faces until they’d finally died. There was only absolute carnage and no one to bury them or put them to rest, and Clive felt Siri's hand on his shirt pulling him back as he reached for his own face just like they had. “You can't take off your mask, Clive!” she cried desperately as he tore at it, trying to breathe.
“I’m gonna be sick!”
“Be sick in your mask!” Her alarmed features swam in and out of focus. She was hysterical now, too, and it only made it worse to feel her claws latch onto his arm, her voice a pitch so high it hurt his ears. “Clive! You’ve lost your mind!”
Right. And if he didn’t get this mask off his face, he felt like he’d lose his mind forever.
He tore at it and he yanked it off, and then he was sick everywhere, sucking in big giant breaths of the toxic air, only to puke it back out.
He finally finished when dots swam through his vision.
The sky spun in a circle above him, and he barely registered as Siri tried to shove the mask back on, but he gently forced her away from him as he sat down, resting on the ground. “Leave it,” he said. “Let me go.”
I’m going to faint, he thought. And then he did.
The worst part about waking wasn’t that it hadn’t all been a dream. No. The worst part about waking was that Siri sat next to him still. And with her mask off.
Her eyes were red as if she’d been crying. “Don’t worry,” she told him. “She said we’re already sick. The masks do nothing now.”
Clive sat up too quickly and his head throbbed. “What do you mean?” They were in a room now. How had Siri moved him? “Who told you that?”
“How is he feeling?”
Clive jerked around to identify the voice. A smallish person stood in the threshold wearing a hazmat suit.
“Easy,” the woman said, holding her arms up. A second hazmat wearer appeared. A man this time.
Was Clive in fact dreaming, and he’d not truly woken up?
“It’s okay,” Siri said. “Clive. These are the good guys.”
“Tell me what’s going on,” he demanded.
The woman slowly approached, and she squatted next to him using a pen light to look into his eyes. “First. Answer my question. How are you feeling?”
“I feel fine.”
He could see her delicate brown eyebrows pucker. “Really.”
No. Not really. He felt like death, but who were these people?
“You’re sick,” Siri said in her blunt-and-to-the-point way. “We both are.”
“What?” Clive tried to stand, but his legs wouldn’t hold him. “Why did you take your mask off? What did I tell you!”
“And you puked up blood,” Siri said. “Told you to lean forward, not back.”
“Any doctor worth their salt–”
Siri pointed at the woman. “She’s a doctor. She can answer.”
The woman ignored the argument. “Listen to me, Clive,” she said. “The masks didn’t work. Not alone, they won’t.”
“You’re wearing one.”
“Yes,” the man said, his voice soft. “A full suit with oxygen. Radiation protection. Very different.”
The
woman doctor gently went on as Clive sat stunned. “Very concentrated, but it’s lessened now. It wasn’t a cloud of poison, it was radiation, and it’s moving across and settling into pockets it seems. We’ve uh…” She sighed. “We’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“Who are you with?”
The man answered. “The EPA. Lucky for us, we’d just started a new program that trained quite a few of our agents to handle radiation sickness.” The man leaned down now, checking Clive over. “This is Doctor Hutchins and I’m James, an agent with the EPA. We believe you have an acute level of sickness, Clive, but the severity of the symptoms depends on the length of exposure. We need to move you and Siri to the coast, and quickly.”
“How much?” Clive asked, feeling like just the thought of radiation was enough to make him blister. His tongue felt thick. “How high?”
They shared a look but didn’t answer. So, a lethal amount. The doctor tilted her head. “We’ve given you medicine. Now all we can do is get you to a safer location and see if it works.”
Clive glanced at Siri who shook her head. She hadn’t told them about the bunker.
Should she?
“I can walk,” Clive said.
“Easy,” Siri said quietly, as if she were dealing with a wild animal.
“You want to go to the coast?” Clive asked her, and she nodded.
Going back wasn’t an option. If they had them open the door again, maybe they’d all get sick.
Clive was slow, but able. Together they followed the doctor and James. It seemed they’d found other survivors somehow as well, and had collected them, giving them medication and were herding them towards the coast. In a slow line they walked towards the west and the setting sun.
“We tried busing people out,” James said to Clive as they walked. “But none of the buses work, and the debris is too thick to drive through.”
They kept on until night, and then after a brief break, they were forced forward again until early morning.
Siri had grown pale, and she dragged her feet. They drank plenty of water, but neither had had to go to the bathroom all day and night. Not once.
Were their kidneys shutting down?
Clive had no energy to panic, though alarm bells rang in the back of his mind.
“You okay?”
Siri stared at the ground as she walked. “I have a fever, Doctor Hutchings said.”
Clive moved to the front of the line.
“Doctor, how many are there? Do you have anything for her fever?”
But someone fell and Doctor Hutchins rushed away before she could answer.
By mid-morning, Siri couldn’t go on. The doctor told James, “They’re too sick. Have them stay here to rest a while.”
The man’s gaze said he wasn’t expecting to see them again.
But they didn’t know they’d been in the bunker and not outside the entire time. So maybe…
“We’ll keep going,” Clive said.
Clive followed, stumbling every so often. “Should we put our masks back on?” The Doctor nodded but he could tell it was just for them to feel like they were doing something and not actually worth it.
They walked on, and he felt more tired than he ever had before. Siri had to lean on him after not too long. Sweat dripped from her face and she got heavier and heavier.
The group broke up from the front. Stragglers slowly fell along the way.
Clive and Siri soon fell far behind until they lost their direction in the fog. It had begun to snow again, covering the roads and making every path seem wrong.
Clive searched through the dense haze, trying to get Siri to move faster, but she was lethargic and exhausted, clinging to him like a stray.
“Should we go back to the bunker?” she whispered.
It was too late for that. She coughed and then stared into her hand. Smearing red across her cheek, she cried.
“It’s nothing,” Clive said. “Hey. Hey. Don’t you want to see the ocean again? Maybe it will be normal. Like a vacation. We can get a tan.”
That seemed to put color into her cheeks, but her feet were rooted, as if she had cement for shoes.
Siri took a few more steps then faltered.
The doctor appeared again as if out of the mist and Clive let out a sigh of relief.
“Rest here for a little bit and get your bearings,” she said, looking Siri over. “Here are some more pills. Take them every four hours, okay? And this is for her fever. Try to get her to swallow these.”
He took them from her, and she touched Siri’s head before patting his shoulder, her eyes clouded with regret.
Clive wanted to panic. He wanted to demand that the doctor fix his friend. But he was out of energy.
Clive watched them move on, now able to see the long thin figures through the fog, until they faded. Then he watched the sun fade, too.
Siri coughed but didn’t check her hand anymore. Clive felt like his insides were melting into goo. He was hot and cold at the same time. His stomach was empty, and it was a good thing because it gurgled and threatened to embarrass him.
It was cold so he scavenged a few blankets from a house nearby when darkness fell. He also had a fever but saved the medicine for Siri.
He made her move to the garage and he started a fire. Siri’s teeth chattered as he rubbed her arms and legs trying to get circulation going. He kept her close but not too near to the fire.
“Keep the blankets off a minute and let’s see if your temperature goes down.”
“I stole the money,” Siri said, huddling deeper into the blankets instead. “Heaps of it. Enough to roll around in a bed of it. I stole it because I thought I was in love with Keith. He wasn’t wrong, thinking I took it. But he’s an idiot for thinking money matters now.”
“What did you do with it? Spend it?”
“Nah.” She sighed. “I went to the poorest part of town and stuffed it in all of the places I knew it would do some good. I made sure the kid’s home I’d been in before got the biggest chunk.”
Clive grinned and she finally smiled.
“Good for you. I’m sure he deserved it.”
“How do you know?”
“Cause no one runs around with mountains of cash unless they’re up to no good.”
“I did.”
“Yeah.”
Siri sniffed. “Maybe you’ll change your mind all about me when you hear the rest.” She glanced away. “We stole it together. I helped him rob a place. He found a nice house and we broke in and emptied their safe. He knew they were loaded, and he got the code from a friend who worked security for the people.”
Clive didn’t like hearing that, but he didn’t think Siri planned on doing it ever again, either. Sounded like she did it for what she thought was love. Love makes you do crazy, stupid things.
But he didn’t absolve her, either, not quickly. She’d think he was being fake.
Instead, they sat in the cold a while until Clive said, “I miss the summer.”
“Yeah. Me, too. What was your favorite part?”
“The kids laughing in the front yard. Or no, wait, the beach together digging sandcastles.”
“You’re a great dad, I bet.”
“You know, Siri, we all mess up sometimes. Take my brother. No one has screwed up worse than him, but at the core of him, he’s good. Really, he is.”
She sat up a bit. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. And I love his guts.”
Her eyes filled. “Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
Clive didn’t say anything else. It was like his throat stopped working.
“Summer,” she sighed, and her breath was visible. “All the other girls liked no tan lines cause boys liked no tan lines, but I was never dumb enough to be naked around the foster parents, so I liked my tan lines just fine.” She touched her hair. “But that year with Lila and Daniel I felt safer than the others. You can judge them all you want.”
He forgot how perceptive she was. “I don’t.”
“You do. It’s okay. That summer wasn’t all about stealing with Keith. First, it was lemon juice in my hair, baby oil on my skin, and chirping young girls running through the sprinkler.” Her tears were angry. Her cough deep. “So they let us smoke a little pot.” Her shrug was even angrier. “But rules are rules, right?”
He sighed. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Cause we might be dying, Clive. So, we do like in the movies. We tell sad stories and then good ones and then real sad ones again. Here,” she said softly, “hold my hand.”
He took it and Siri told him about her summers. The good ones. And then she went glassy-eyed and told him about the monsters, too, while her cough ripped through her in a shuddering quake. He gripped her tight as she let it all pour out as if she’d lanced a festering wound.
And then she sighed and fell into an exhausted sleep with her breaths too far apart and her head like a hot coal across his lap. Clive wept for her then. Angry tears over what she’d endured. He stayed up, watching over Siri through the longest night of his life.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Author’s Notes
02/01/2020
Dear Readers,
Thank you for joining me on my journey through Sky Fall. I can’t say that I knew half of what was coming, and it surprised me as much as it probably surprised you!
I’ve been trying to keep up with my deadlines, and yes, I fall behind. But I hope the story makes it up to you all and you’ll give me a chance to finish this awesome adventure.
I will be outlining Black Sun (Book Four) immediately after finishing this one so I can get this show on the road!
I spent about five years in Fort Polk, so I’m super happy that this story features that place and the bayou :D
Emails from you guys about the places you’ve been in my stories gives me life, so please do send anytime you want.
Also, please feel free to join my readers group on facebook. Logan Keys Fiction.
