“No, you wouldn’t,” he admitted, and I sensed he was hoping that we’d reach another classroom so he could literally duck out of this conversation.
Watching his discomfort reminded me of the nervous tension that had come up yesterday in his aunt’s apartment, and suddenly, I understood. “You were worried you’d hurt them.”
“More than that,” he replied. “I just…I never cared enough about them to let them know who I really am.”
That stung. Wasn’t that what he was doing with me? Keeping me separate from him so I couldn’t get close enough to figure out his secret?
“Not like you,” he added before stopping abruptly. It was immediately clear he hadn’t intended to confess that part.
I was stunned. It was the biggest departure from maintaining his aloofness that he’d made yet.
Clearly uneasy about what he’d accidentally confessed, he leaned into the next classroom door. I stayed quietly in place for a second before answering, evaluating him as he did regularly with me. He was uncomfortable with his disclosure, and yet he hadn’t really told me anything at all. Whatever he was harboring, whatever it was that kept him from making friends or turning them into something more, disturbed him, deeply. And had all his life.
My heart opened for him in that moment. I no longer felt the infatuated romantic interest that had haunted me since the first time I’d seen him and that had developed with each secretive look and passing glance. It was more now, stronger, warmer, more compassionate, because he was correct. We really were incredibly similar. My realization sparked a curiosity about his background that prompted me to ask, “So what’s your mother like?”
“Well,” he said, stepping back from the room and making his way on down the hall, “there was a guy on the ranch, an ancient guy, with skin that looked like leather. He’d been there since he was a kid, which was probably around the Stone Age. So I called him Cro, short for Cro-Magnon man. His real name was Burke, but he owned his nickname, squawking like a crow when something excited him.”
I nodded. “But about your mother…”
“I’m getting to that,” he replied softly in an attempt to discipline me for my impatience. I mentally wished him good luck with that. “Cro raised me, so I asked him once about what she was like, my mom, and he told me this story about her. He said that she wasn’t what you’d call an animal lover. Not that she disliked them, she just never gave them much thought. And then someone gave her a dog.” He chuckled thoughtfully to himself. “A little white fluffy yapper. That dog followed her everywhere, to every room, walking behind her when she walked, stopping when she stopped. When she left the house, he’d wait by the door until she returned. She never paid attention to him, didn’t name the dog, didn’t even seem to notice that he was there. Others in the household, the staff, made friends with the dog, but he just kept following her, like he knew she was the master. And then she got sick, not with…” he paused awkwardly. “Not with what she had when she was pregnant with me, but…sick. She was laid up for several weeks and somehow that dog crawled up on the bed with her and stayed right beside her the entire time. He didn’t move at all. The staff brought him water and food. Don’t ask me how he went to the bathroom.” We laughed quietly. “Eventually, my mom got to liking the weight of him against her leg, the little bark he’d give to warn her someone was coming down the hall, even his snoring.” We laughed again. “And when she got healthier, she took Phillip – because she did name him then – with her everywhere, and I mean everywhere, to the vacation home in the islands, to her weekly bridge games with her friends, on several trips to Europe. She even picked a fight with a restaurant manager for refusing to allow Phillip inside. It didn’t matter that it was a five-star restaurant or that it would violate health codes. She wouldn’t listen and ultimately bought the place so that Phillip could come with her. That,” he snorted, “was my mom.”
A few more paces and I prompted him for an answer to something that had been hanging in my mind since he’d started to talk. “You said ‘was,’ that ‘was’ your mom’.”
He answered plainly, but the sudden stiffness in his walk gave away his emotions. “She died delivering me.”
A few steps of awkward silence followed.
“I’m sorry.”
I contemplated what he’d said and then came to a conclusion. “It sounds like she was like you, Harrison.”
His head tilted back in surprise. “How?” he asked.
“Strong willed…protective of those she cared about.”
“How do you know I protect those I care about?” he challenged.
I didn’t answer him right away, allowing my smile to make an entrance and fade away.
“Oh, right…,” he said, laughing to himself. “That’s another one of those judgments you’ve made about me.”
He shook his head as if it was at my peril to have done it, which I – of course – shrugged off. He could question my beliefs all he wanted. They wouldn’t be changing any time soon.
“What about your dad?” I asked. “What’s he like?”
“Dedicated,” he said quickly, rigidly, keeping his eyes forward. I had the feeling he was trying not to frown.
“To what?”
“Being the best at everything…” He shrugged one shoulder and added as an afterthought, “Except fatherhood.” He drew in a deep breath like he was trying to purge a swarm of uncomfortable feelings and repeated in a mutter, “Everything except fatherhood…”
After his disheartening acknowledgement an uncomfortable air settled around us. We walked the next section of lockers in silence, our footsteps echoing disturbingly off the walls. It was an odd parallel to the fine line I was walking. Don’t tread too hard or Harrison might shut down. He was the first person, the only person, I’d been interested in since my life changed so completely after my dad’s death, so I was starkly aware of how much I wanted to keep the conversation going. Finding Harrison was like finding life on Mars, stimulating, alluring, and a little intimidating to learn that I wasn’t the only one in this world who walked alone.
Testing the waters, I asked, “Is that why you haven’t called your dad?”
We walked a few more paces, checked a classroom, and turned the corner to another vacant hall of lockers before he answered. When he did, it wasn’t what I expected.
“You know, it’s probably best if he thinks I’m dead.”
My jaw fell open when I heard those words, and I know he saw my reaction. But before I could challenge him in what would undoubtedly be a crude argument made by baseless assumptions, he stopped me, and saved both of us.
“What about you?” he asked, peering into another classroom, although he quickly swung his head back to me. “What about your parents? What were they like?”
The fact that he applied ‘were’, as in past tense, to both of them surprised me. He knew more about me than I did about him, a lot more.
“Well, my dad was tough. He was never sick a day in his life, at least not that he’d let me know about. He had a lot of friends. Several hundred people showed up for his…” I stopped to swallow back the word before uttering it. “…funeral. And he was kind, generous. He gave me everything I ever wanted,” I shrugged, “after he understood what it was I actually wanted.”
A deep, subdued rumble escaped from the back of Harrison’s throat as he began to laugh. “Sounds like there’s a story there,” he hinted.
There was, and I smiled at the memory of it. “The earliest Christmas I remember was when I was four. The first gift I opened under the tree was a BB gun. The next gift was a flashlight. The third was a fishing pole.” Already Harrison was grinning, understanding where I was headed. “These weren’t exactly the kind of gifts a four-year-old girl wants.”
“No, not exactly.”
“But I got lucky. Someone must have educated him because when my birthday rolled around I got a doll house.” My dad’s face flashed before my eyes, lit up and laughing, which made me laugh too. “It
must have been hard raising a girl…”
“Especially when you’re a man like that,” Harrison added.
I got the impression that he was reading between the lines of what I was telling him, picking up on the details of what I wasn’t, details about why my dad had given me those gifts. I already knew Harrison was incredibly astute. For a guy who spent most of his time on the plains, he picked up on the fine points about people and their personalities fairly rapidly. In fact, he understood me better than anyone else ever had…or better than anyone else had ever taken the time to.
Oblivious to my train of thought, he continued his questioning. “What about your mom?”
“I never really knew her,” I said, peeking inside a janitor closet.
When I turned back around, he was giving me a questioning look.
“She died when I was two.”
He nodded somberly. “So we both grew up without a mother…”
“Yes, we did.” And without him having to tell me, I knew what he was thinking…we’d found another similarity between us.
We’d reached the library, which was vast enough for us to split up, but neither of us did. Instead, we quietly roamed the stacks until making it back to the door. There, he stopped and asked me a question that seemed to weigh on him in a way that was more than just thoughtful consideration. It was personal.
“The Infected outside,” he said, “it doesn’t seem like you’re scared of them.”
“Well,” I replied with a shrug. “I know I should be, but no…no, I’m not. I was taught not to be afraid of anything.” While that had actually been the gist of my life growing up, admitting it and speaking the words out loud was slightly disconcerting. Harrison, thankfully, didn’t seem to pick up on it.
“Good,” he replied decisively as he pushed open the library door, indicating that was all he wanted to know. But as he held the door open for me and I walked through, he exhaled behind me…with discernible relief. As he came up beside me, and fell in step with my pace, I tried to chalk it up as a sign of him caring for my well-being, as he would for anyone, but his sigh lingered in the back of my mind as we headed down the hall, because I felt like it symbolized a window into his soul, showing me his true feelings again.
Both of us, being lost in thought, reached the gym in silence. There, he opened the door and went in first, as he’d done for the duration of our inspection. I noticed it was fine for me to leave the room first, but it wasn’t safe for me to be the first to enter. That made me smile.
The gym was cavernous, and the accordion stands having been stacked along the far walls made it feel even more hollow. We walked straight through and into each of the locker rooms. The lights were still on in both from Harrison’s rounds in the night. I stopped at my locker and opened it, pulling out a bag of personal items, deodorant, spare toothbrush, some toothpaste, and a few tubes of makeup that I hadn’t touched in months. Not knowing how long we’d be stuck inside our school, I figured I’d need these things. At some point my teeth would grow gritty and my personal body odor would start to make itself known.
Harrison, however, was a step ahead of me. As we left the gym, he suggested, “We need to let others know we are here.”
“You mean besides Beverly’s dad?” I said.
“Yeah,” he sighed, “I think she’s going to need to come to terms with that…”
We both knew what “that” was. We knew it was unlikely anyone was coming for us, and it only emphasized the need to signal an SOS, either by hanging a sign on the front of our school or arranging it in the rocks on the roof. We would need to be the ones to draw them to us. So, for the next hour, as Harrison and I checked the remaining parts of the school, we brainstormed on what we could do. By the time we made it back to the main hall we had a list in our minds and the rest of the group was beginning to stir.
Mei’s head lifted from Doc’s shoulder when we were only two locker rows away. She looked around, confused, saw Doc, and scooted a locker length back from him just as he started to blink. He yawned, opened his eyes fully, and the terror of what he’d seen the day before flooded his face, making his jaw slack and his face ashen.
Harrison saw it too and distracted him by mentioning, “You have a solid snore, Doc.”
It seemed to work. The fear left his face, he chuckled quietly, and then he commented, “You should hear me after a night at the lake.”
Harrison and I snickered as Mei radiated a slight grin. She still looked unnerved to have woken up on his shoulder, but she’d get over it. The only person who remained stoic was Beverly. She shoved herself up, opened her bloodshot eyes, and ignored us in favor of checking her phone.
Mei turned to her and asked in a way that confirmed she was torn between wanting to know and not wanting to know. “What does the news say today?”
“It’s…” she replied, scrolling through the headlines.”It’s the same as it was last night.”
She stopped scrolling, punched in a few numbers, and drew the phone to her ear. A voice drifted out from it and my heart leapt, until I realized it was an voicemail greeting.
“Dad, where are you?” Beverly demanded into the phone. “I’m stuck at school with G.I. Jane and the Lone Ranger.” As if she understood she was being offensive her eyes flicked to Harrison and me before landing on Doc and Mei. But that didn’t stop her. “And The Hulk and the Whiz Kid.” She sighed loudly into the phone. “Come get me.” As an afterthought, she added, “Please!”
When the phone dropped to her lap, she drew in a deep breath, and I thought she was about to break down and cry. Instead, she remarked miserably, “I’m hungry.”
There was a tense silence and I wondered if anyone was going to criticize her for her attitude. I guess everyone came to the same conclusion I had…she wouldn’t change anyway.
Instead, Doc replied, “I thought you didn’t eat.”
“What?” she asked snidely, her head swooping down and aiming at Doc.
Obviously he sensed that he’d hit a nerve because he literally cowered from her. “I just…I was…I just never saw you eat anything…and you’re so skinny.”
She didn’t know whether to appreciate that observation or continue being offended, but she eventually chose the latter. “Well, I do eat,” she snapped back. “And I’m hungry.”
Harrison stepped in before Beverly could continue her rampage, which seemed to be exactly what Doc feared. “Kennedy and I were just about to head to the kitchen and assess the food supply.”
“Food supply?” Beverly muttered, hauling herself to her feet. “What is this, the military? All I want is a damn bagel with cream cheese.”
After Doc and Mei stood we walked down the hall silently, until Doc mumbled something.
“What?” Beverly asked, although her tone was less aggressive this time.
“Steak and grits,” he said. “I want steak and grits.”
“Fruit salad for me,” Mei mentioned.
“Cereal, I don’t care what kind,” I added.
Harrison remained suspiciously quiet, which made me wonder if he knew we were only throwing out cravings to keep our minds off what was outside and why we couldn’t simply leave for a quick trip home or to the store. Considering what surrounded us, I’d be surprised if anyone, besides Beverly, had the stomach to eat. That didn’t seem to matter much, though. By the time we reached the cafeteria, we’d covered all common breakfast meals. We entered through the main doors and collectively stopped in our tracks. The lights were on, and seemed to be programmed never to turn off, but other than that, no sign of life existed. Not even a fly hovered around the trash cans, which made the room seem unavoidably morgue-like. It was a far cry from the normal loud volume we were used to. Being separated between two floors with stairs on one side leading to the second level, the room was vast. Plastic chairs and circular tables covered the first floor and lined the railings of the second, which, of course, were all empty. The hot line, where food was usually steaming in large metal tubs, was e
mpty and polished to a high sheen. The salad bar was bare.
The room gave a new meaning to the word ‘deserted’.
“Did you check this during the night?” Doc whispered.
“Yes,” Harrison replied at full volume, confident that it was empty of everyone but us. And I believed him. “It’s clear,” he asserted, stepping forward to prove it.
Weaving around the tables in a single line, we made our way to the food prep area in the kitchen. Midway there, Doc looked back at Mei and me, preparing to mention something when a screech pierced through the room, jolting each one of us.
“Sorry,” Mei muttered in embarrassment while scooting the chair she’d kicked back in place.
It was a mistake, nothing more than that, but it reminded me that our nerves were frayed. What we’d experienced yesterday and the weight of our situation now had taken a toll on us.
In fact, Doc never did say what was on his mind. We quietly finished our walk to the storeroom and stood inside it, staring at what our parent’s tax dollars had gone toward. Most of it was boxed or canned. Good resources in emergencies. As we surveyed the shelves we found school staples; macaroni and cheese, dehydrated mashed potatoes, black beans, fruit salad, cookies and tortilla chips, which Doc grabbed a bag of and tore open. Some of it even had an indefinite shelf-life, like honey, salt, tea, cocoa, vegetable oil, white rice, and dried corn. What surprised me was the number of containers storing dehydrated and freeze-dried food. They had stockpiled large cans of eggs, ground meat, milk, cornmeal, oatmeal, wheat, broccoli, peas, green beans, chicken teriyaki, beef stew, chicken Alfredo, chili, diced chicken, diced ham, and diced beef. They looked like emergency preparedness cans, which I instantly attributed to Mr. Packard.
“Huh,” Doc’s voice broke the silence booming from behind us. He stood at the door, staring at a piece of laminated paper clipped to the inside, his body leaning toward it, his expression curiously confused. “We were supposed to have Spicy Chicken Sandwich with Tortilla Chips today. Hmmm…” He shrugged without looking at us and threw another chip in his mouth.
Haven (Apocalypse Chronicles Part 1) Page 8
