A. R. Shaw's Apocalyptic Sampler: Stories of hope when humanity is at its worst

by A. R. Shaw

  Hell, he was rich but none of it mattered now, because he didn’t have her and instead, he had the nightmare of having destroyed her life inflicted on him every waking moment of his days and every sleepless night. The only person he’d ever cared about, and she was not only gone but destroyed too. And he was the one that did that.

  After a while, he thought perhaps she’d come back. So he built the empire for her but she never returned.

  After that night, where everything went wrong because of Kim.

  “She’ll never love you,” Kim yelled between the screams of pain. “You’re not one of them, Paul. You’re one of us. I thought…someday you’d figure that out. But you never did. Running me off like you did. Threatening to kill me. You didn’t need to do that.”

  “Your right ankle’s next, Kim. Where is she? Go ahead, keep screaming. No one will hear you. There’s a crisis going on in the city. Can’t you hear the sirens getting louder? It’s all on fire. No one will care if I take out some criminal scum out when their backs are turned.”

  “Don’t forget,” she said, seething, “you’re a criminal, too. I didn’t force you to rip off the old man. That was your doing.”

  “That was never the plan and you know it. We were there only to take pictures of the formula. Just so I could start cutting away at the restrictions. Make it look like a robbery had taken place. That was the worst it was supposed to be. But you…you had to go and kill him! And then set a fire. He was a good man.”

  “That wasn’t my fault. You didn’t count on the old man staying home that night. And what about the girl? You just think you were going to steal from her daddy and then she’d happily fall into your arms? Be her hero? Live happily ever after? Is that what you thought, Paul?”

  Somehow the increasing heat had Kim sweating in streams through the pain as she bared her teeth and taunted him. The blood from her left calf had already found its way into the crevices of the concrete warehouse floor. Then he fired again.

  54

  Dane

  On her third bottle of amaretto sour mix and water, Dane began to regret leaving her phone behind. She had no idea where the business was or where Paul lived now for that matter, but he was there somewhere. As she drove away from her shattered childhood home, she caught a glimpse of a billboard emblazoned with a familiar packet touting the new variety pack from Rebel Blaze. They apparently had a tasting room located somewhere near the Purple Pig Restaurant off Illinois Ave. “That makes perfect sense,” she said and gulped another mouthful of liquid.

  She remembered the Purple Pig. She, her father and Paul celebrated her father’s retirement there, her birthday, her dad’s birthday and even Paul’s birthday once or twice. It was their go-to special occasion place. She remembered they shared amazing appetizers, like Roasted Bone Marrow, served from the crevice of the cracked bone itself, that they spread over tiny toasts and this sweet and savory beet and goat cheese salad, all with a bottle of red wine. It would seem fitting Paul would find warehouse space somewhere around there. Then again, how could he? She thought of the old Paul, the one she grew up with, not the other one…not the greedy, thieving murderer.

  It took months to recover from the physical injuries she’d received that night. Not from the fire, from what had happened before the fire. But that didn’t matter then. The fire, her father’s death, negated any harm she’d come to earlier in that night…temporarily. She’d learned that the mind was adept at playing the worst tricks on you when you least expected them. Walking up that sidewalk with her home ablaze, blood already dripping from the scratches on her arms and staining the ground she walked on, as soon as she saw the flames, she ran around to the back entrance, discarding a victim’s grief in an instant. Her father! He was in there. He’d changed his mind at the last minute, deciding not to attend poker that night with the guys. Said he was tired and wasn’t sleeping well lately.

  She fought the flames through the back door of the house that night and into the living room, where she found him lying unconscious on the floor. She’d turned him over, her blood-stained palms on his soot-covered shirt. “Dad!” Blood on his head. A lens from his glasses was shattered near the remains of a discarded cigarette butt.

  “Dad!” A bookshelf, ablaze, fell to the floor.

  She’d covered her father’s face. Then she was coughing, her arm shielding her mouth. Her eyes blurred and stung so much she could barely see. She clenched her father’s shirt and tried to drag his weight only an inch. No air. “Dad!” She couldn’t leave him there. Her mother’s drapes fell to the ground, attacked by the flames—something so innocent gripped by the jaws of hell. There was no saving this place but her father? “Dad, no,” she pleaded. She pulled again but realized the back door was blocked by flames now, and then she felt her father’s arm grab hers and push her away. Or at least, she imagined that now. She wasn’t sure if he really did or if her mind only made her think so.

  “No!” But then it was too late. They were surrounded by flames until someone flung her aside, covered her in her mother’s quilt usually draped over the back of the couch, and hauled her away. Everything went black and the next thing she knew, she was out in the lawn. Paul was the first person she saw when she felt the wet dew of the grass beneath her.

  “Dane. No. It’s too late.”

  But she turned back toward the house anyway. “He’s a-live in there! He’s alive! He’s alive!” she cried and pulled.

  But Paul kept her from going back into the flames.

  55

  Kim

  “Tell me where. Your right knee is next, and then the left. Don’t worry; we’ll work our way up, but I’ll avoid the arteries, so you won’t bleed out too quickly.”

  She curled away from him, the whites of her eyes more apparent than the dark moons in the center. She turned her back to him and dragged her knees up to her chest with what was left of her shattered ankles. “Pleeease, Paul,” she screamed, showing her right palm to him. “Please, don’t.”

  “Moving away from me is not going to help you. Where is she?” He released the magazine of the Glock in his palm and checked to see if there were enough 9mm rounds, knowing this might take a while. “I have plenty of ammunition to make this a very bad day for you. Just like you’ve made the poor innocent souls who’ve had the bad luck to cross your path suffer. Where is she, Kim?”

  “I’m not going to…”

  “One, two…”

  “Okay, wait. Please wait.” Her arms were shaking out of control. He was going to shoot her again; she knew it. This wasn’t like the Paul she knew. He’d changed.

  “Kim, no stalling.” He racked the slide again.

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me. We were friends. What’s happened to you?” she cried.

  “Kim, for Christ’s sake.” He shook his head. “Last chance.”

  “Okay, okay….she’s, she’s in Montana.”

  “What? Montana? Why Montana? Where exactly?”

  “She’s a um, one of those smokejumpers.”

  “A what?”

  The pain and he still asked her questions. “You know…those people…they drop off in forest fires. She was a firefighter here just like her daddy was back then. She just went out west and fought in the forests instead of in the cities.”

  “How do you know this? I’ve looked everywhere for her. Everywhere.”

  “That magazine with the pictures…National Geographic.”

  “What?”

  “The magazine. They had a picture of her. There was a story on them, on the smokejumper training, in a place called Missoula.”

  “So you’re saying she’s there, in Missoula, Montana?”

  Pleading now…her legs hurt so bad. She couldn’t stop the shaking. “I…I don’t know. She was there a few months ago is all I can tell you. They move around a lot, I guess.”

  He turned his back on her and started pacing the room, the gun still in his right hand. She glanced to the far side of the room where her gun st
ill lay. There was no chance she could get to it.

  She knew he was probably going to kill her now. She’d already given up the ghost.

  “She could also be here, now, Paul. Didn’t they say on the news the smokejumpers were coming into Chicago to help? Didn’t you hear that, too? I did. Maybe ask some of the firefighters down the road. Track them down. If she came here, she might try to find you, even.”

  He stopped pacing and, gun in hand, walked toward her slowly.

  56

  Matthew

  He pulled up to the address. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find. It looked like an overgrown lot with a set of concrete porch stairs as the only telltale sign there was ever a house there. It was always amazing to him how nature took things over, like a healing Band-Aid after man’s destruction. Even in a dead city. But this was where Dane grew up. That was a hell of a thing.

  He also didn’t see any sign of her, and that bothered him. Wouldn’t she come here? He’d just stolen a company truck and now he was on a wild goose chase tracking down a girl…a girl he cared about a lot, more than he wanted to admit, before she got herself in real trouble. What the hell was he doing? Yeah, she’d killed someone the night before but only in self-defense, and he had it coming. This was different. This was revenge. He wasn’t saying the guy didn’t deserve it; he didn’t really know the true story, but he wanted to make sure Dane was prepared and ready for what she was about to do, if his guess was right. She’d have to live with that then.

  Okay…don’t go there, yet. Where would she go?

  Dane…would go where this guy Paul is. Then go where Paul is. Where is this Paul Torrio? And like before, he scrolled through the search results of his phone and could not believe his eyes.

  “Oh, man…that’s the connection? Rebel Blaze? Wait…her dad had a lab. Oh no. Did that really happen? Damn, Dane. Poor girl. Where’s the business location?” His blood started racing through his veins at freight train speed. This was it. She was after Paul. He’d stolen her father’s business, might have even killed him for it. It wasn’t hard to put together once you had the pieces. A simple map search later and Matthew was on his way.

  57

  Paul

  With the Glock in one hand, Paul knelt down and took a handful of Kim’s hair with his left. She wouldn’t look at him and he needed her to understand how serious he was. “Did you ever talk to her?”

  “Paul,” she sobbed.

  “Did you ever contact her? Tell me.”

  “No. Please don’t kill me. My babies…”

  “Don’t even say that. You don’t give a damn about your kids.” He shoved her away.

  “I do. I love them babies.”

  God, he couldn’t stand her. Couldn’t stand the sight of her or the sound of her whining voice. It was one thing when she was all cocky and brazen as hell…this was worse. Even in her pleas he couldn’t trust her, but could he kill her? He needed to kill her. No one would ever know but him and possibly Sammy. But hell, he was doing Sammy a freaking favor. Having her finally out of their lives was the best thing that ever happened to them. He was doing society a favor by ridding the world of her. She’d killed innocent people before out of sheer convenience. He knew this. He was an accomplice to one murder, though God help him, he didn’t mean for that to happen.

  But could he outright shoot Kim dead right here, right now? Take a human life in cold blood? He began pacing again. She was weepy, like a belligerent teen caught stealing at the mall. Trying to inch herself across the floor. “Stop moving, goddammit.”

  “You can’t,” she cried. “You can’t kill me, Paul.”

  “Shut up. You’re probably lying anyway. Lying about where she is or you’re making shit up now that your life is on the line. You care about no one but yourself.”

  “No, no, I swear I’m telling you the truth. You’ve got to believe me.”

  “How do you know for sure it was her? In the picture you say you saw.”

  “Because…baby, there’s only one Dane Talbot in the world. It was her. They mentioned her name in the story about them firefighters. That’s how I knew.”

  “When was it dated?”

  “What?”

  “The magazine. When was the article written?”

  “I…a few months ago. I don’t really know.”

  “So it could have been an older copy. Years ago.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s bothersome. You know why that bothers me?”

  She shook her head.

  “Because you…wouldn’t come here with information that wasn’t truly substantiated. You’re not stupid. But you are evil.”

  “What? What does that mean?”

  “What it sounds like, Kim. You would have made sure it was her. How did you find out for sure it was Dane? Did you have any contact with her? That’s the last time I’m going ask you.”

  Because she whined but didn’t answer, he suddenly knew there was more to the story.

  “How?!”

  “I…I called someone.”

  “Who?”

  “The unit where she was assigned. Her boss…his name’s Tucker Johnson. I asked for her, but he said they’d been deployed.”

  “Where? Where were they going?”

  “He didn’t say. He wouldn’t give out any personal information. I said…I was family. He said he’d tell her. That was all but she never called back. She never called me back.”

  “You tried to talk to her?”

  “I was trying to find her for you, baby.”

  It was the pleading way she said it. Whatever was in her best interest at any given moment. He stood up. He could not imagine this…person ever having a link to Dane and in the end, he realized, he was that tainted link.

  He aimed at her again.

  58

  Dane

  Smoke gave way to sun, causing Dane to shield her eyes, and just as quickly the clouds took over again. One minute the vengeful rain, the next, the rays of hope, but between the two, the choking smoke won. Dane swerved halfway into a parking lot two streets over and several blocks away from her destination due to evacuations and blocked roads. She got out of the car when a man in fire gear ran past. He yelled, “Hey,” and recovered with, “Oh.”

  It took her a moment to realize he was confused by her apparel and the fact that her hair was still down, first thinking she was a mere trespassing citizen and then seeing the gear she still wore. It was confusing, she knew. A convenient distraction. She pulled her hair up in a knot and said, “I had to move it.” She added a tilt of her head, indicating the car. She grabbed her backpack and slung it on while watching for his response.

  He seemed appeased by the brief explanation. He gave a nod and kept going, never looking back. She noticed how odd it was that if you act like you’re supposed to be in a certain place with a show of confidence, people pay you no mind.

  She too took off in a weaving jog, but down a back alley and in a direction where no one would likely ask her intentions. People were too nosy in general. Why couldn’t they keep out of everyone else’s business? “Whoa,” she said out loud while trying to run in a straight line as her chest became tighter and tighter. It was hard to be back here amongst the brick forest she knew too well growing up. The memories came flooding in. At one time she knew these buildings inside and out. She’d grown up around here. They held meaning for her. Happy memories, too. And though she tried to hold on to the good ones like, as a girl, going for Treasure Island Warm Brownie Sundaes at Ghirardelli’s on Michigan Avenue with her parents after a movie, the most recent bad memories always won out. It was like a war. The horror took away the good. The fact that she was back here…her feet slapping the same old bricks, like in one of her nightmares, though she kept reminding herself…she was here to make things right. To right the wrongs. To get back at all those who’d shattered her good memories and replaced them with the bad.

  She was angry now. A little wasted too, but she needed the wasting
to do what she needed to do. “It’s all good.” She rounded the corner of the Purple Pig restaurant, briefly seeing her father, herself and Paul seated outside on the patio overlooking the next building’s terraced room. Laughing, drinking wine and happy. But they weren’t there now. Neither were the tables. No one was there. The empty space of the patio only had a few blown chairs overturned in the corners. The remains of someone’s foil hotdog wrapper blew past in the hot wind.

  “Keep going,” she reminded herself. “Don’t get stuck now. End this. End this.” She stopped the mantra when she spotted a few fire personnel turning the corner and was forced to run back and hide near the patio, kneeling down behind the half wall. They’d probably ask her questions. Ones she couldn’t answer. She pulled out another bottle in her backpack, ignored the memories she’d made not five feet away from where she sat, and waited for the fire crews to pass as she rehydrated. Fortunately, the fires were farther down the Magnificent Mile and had not yet reached that end of the famous Chicago street. Convenient enough for her to use their presence and noise as a distraction. Otherwise, the nosy people of the world might notice she was about to make Paul one less problem in her life. One less betrayal. One less ruin from her past.

  59

  Paul

  He didn’t shoot her this time, though he made her think he was going to. Instead, he leaned his foot against her wounded calf. It hurt like hell based on her screams. He was thankful for that. If only he could shut her up. But he wasn’t done with her yet. He was sure she had given him everything she knew. Or was that true? Was it that he couldn’t do the final deed? End her life. At this point he could run her to the hospital, knock her unconscious so she couldn’t squeal on him. Give him enough time to get the hell out of there. Go to the back woods of Montana and find Dane. Explain things—most things anyway—and try to convince her of his love. Take care of her.