In Another Life

by Liesel Browning

“Nah,” Sadie said. “The store’s all they’ve really got.” Just like the farm was all Sadie and Amelia really had. That, and each other.

  “Sometimes I wonder how people are living in other places,” Amelia said. “We used to live just south of where a lot of the bombs landed. I don’t think anybody’s living there anymore.”

  Sadie shook her head. Los Angeles was gone, surely. She wondered herself how Iowa City was holding up. The Midwest was a target for Russia or North Korea or whoever else had beef with the U.S., Sadie was too young at the time to keep it all straight. She was certain that there were more dead than living in her hometown.

  She almost said, maybe things will go back to normal someday. Maybe there were people somewhere, people who were capable and resourceful, working to put the pieces back together. To find a way to destroy the monsters and clean up the damage. But she just squeezed her lover and held her.

  Amelia tucked her son into bed before joining Sadie in their room. Since Glenn’s death, Christian had a room of his own. He even had the bigger bed. It wasn’t that Glenn died there, but Sadie still hadn’t wanted to change rooms. The thought of being with Amelia in that bed, the same one where Amelia was with Glenn…she couldn’t do it. So they still squeezed into Sadie’s twin bed.

  She preferred it this way. On a cold December night, it felt like old times. After they made love, they held each other, whispering in the dark. Amelia was worried about her son. “I wish he knew some kids his own age,” she said. It was far from the first time she’d expressed this concern.

  “Families come to the store, sometimes,” Sadie whispered. “Let me take him with me the next time I go.”

  Sadie could see that Amelia was frowning in the dark. She reached out and touched her face, pushing aside a thin strand of hair that had come loose from her braid while she was eating Sadie’s pussy. “He’ll be safe,” Sadie added. “He’ll meet some people. It’ll be really good for him.”

  Sadie thought that leaving the farm, just for a little while, would be good for Amelia, too. But she didn’t want to push it. Besides, if Amelia came along, Sadie wouldn’t be able to spend a little time with Manny.

  “Okay,” Amelia whispered.

  “Yeah?” Amelia nodded, and Sadie grabbed her face and kissed her. “It’ll be a good learning experience for him,” Sadie said. “You can only teach him so much from my grandparents’ old books.”

  “I know.”

  Sadie kissed her again. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You know I’ll take good care of him, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I love him,” Sadie said out loud for the first time. “He’s my little brother.”

  “He’s the only family we’ve got,” Amelia added. And Sadie knew this was true. Perhaps someone from her mother’s family was alive somewhere…what did that matter? All she knew was, Christian was the only blood relation she had. The link between her and Amelia.

  Amelia nuzzled up against Sadie’s chest. “That’s the best Christmas present I could get,” she said. “Hearing that you love Christian.”

  “Well, I do,” Sadie said. “And I love you, too.”

  They made love once more before going to sleep in their cold, dark bedroom. Beneath layers of denim quilts, holding each other, they were hardly uncomfortable. Sadie thought it was the best Christmas she could remember.

  *

  It wasn’t long after Christmas, years ago, that the bombs fell.

  Sadie wasn’t quite eight. She didn’t completely understand what her parents, all the grown-ups, were panicking about. She knew that she got some extra time off school, that wasn’t so bad. On the last normal day of her life (whatever that word, “normal,” was supposed to mean), she sat in the living room in her mother’s apartment in Iowa City, watching TV and eating some leftover Christmas cookies. School was supposed to have started up after the holidays a couple of days before, but here she was, still at home while her mother went to work.

  Sadie was dozing a bit, and when the door banged open, she woke with a start to find that the TV, on which she’d been watching Netflix, was paused. She looked up in confusion and saw her father standing there. “Where’s Mom?” he asked.

  “At…at work?” Sadie said.

  Glenn shook his head and stormed into the kitchen. He grabbed some plastic Hy-Vee bags from under the sink and started rummaging through his ex-wife’s cabinets.

  “What’s going on?” Sadie asked.

  “We have to hurry,” Glenn said. “They’ve all declared war. It’s not gonna last long.” Sadie didn’t know what to think as her father bagged up all the canned goods he could find. He shoved a couple of bags into Sadie’s arms before storming down the hallway to Sadie’s bedroom.

  “Dad.” Sadie followed him.

  “Where do you keep your bag?” Glenn asked. Before Sadie could answer, Glenn pulled Sadie’s rolling luggage from her messy closet. “Why don’t you clean up?” Glenn demanded as he yanked the bag free. “This is costing us time!” He unzipped the bag and let it fall open. “Pack up as much as you can,” he said. “Warm clothes.”

  Before Sadie could question her father, he pushed past her and went to her mother’s bedroom. Sadie put down the plastic bags of food and did as she was told. She almost started to cry, wondering where her mother was.

  When Sadie brought her bag out to the living room, she found Glenn on his phone. “We’re heading to my place,” he said. “Yes, I have things for you, just hurry! Okay.”

  Glenn hung up and went back down the hallway. “Was that Mom?” Sadie called after him. But Glenn ignored her question.

  Sadie carried her luggage down the steps, following her father. He threw her bag into the back of his sedan, which was already full of bags of food. “Get in,” he said. “I’ll be right down.”

  Sadie saw that her dad’s keys were in the ignition. She sat in the passenger seat and fiddled with the radio. No music; all news, panicked reports about “threats of nuclear bombs” or something. Sadie at least understood what bombs were. She felt her stomach turn.

  Glenn hurried down with a bag, probably full of her mother’s clothes, Sadie figured. When Glenn got in, he hurried away from the apartment complex. The streets were jam-packed with panicked drivers, and Glenn sat back as they were stalled, taking deep, controlled breaths.

  “Is Mom meeting us?” Sadie ventured to ask. Glenn didn’t look at his daughter, but he nodded. Sadie felt a little better. Mom would be there.

  As traffic started to crawl along the busy streets near the University of Iowa campus, Glenn seemed to finally notice that the radio was on. He switched it off. “Dad?” Sadie asked. “What’s going on?”

  Glenn sighed. “Our country has enemies who have very dangerous weapons,” he said. “And we have dangerous weapons, too. Now, everyone’s saying they’re going to use them.”

  Sadie’s stomach turned again. She thought she might be sick. She’d gotten sick a couple of times when she’d been nervous lately. She got sick at school the previous month before the Christmas pageant. It was humiliating. She swallowed hard.

  “The weapons have dangerous chemicals,” Glenn went on. “We don’t know what’s gonna happen, but if bombs are dropped…we need to be somewhere safe.”

  “The basement?” Sadie asked.

  Glenn nodded. “We’ll seal everything up, and hide out there and listen for news.” Sadie felt a little reassured. They always went to the basement whenever there was a tornado warning. When she’d learned that her mother was moving to a second-floor apartment, she’d panicked. Where would she go if there was a storm?

  It took nearly an hour to get to her dad’s house in Manville Heights, and Sadie was relieved when she saw her mother’s big black truck parked in the driveway. Daisy was taking a box out of the back. Sadie jumped out of Glenn’s car before he even had the chance to finish parking and ran to her. “Mom!”

  Daisy put down the box and hugged her daughter tight. “It’s gonna be okay,” she said. “We�
�re gonna be fine.”

  Sadie let herself cry then, now that she was in her mother’s arms. Daisy held her for a moment, but had to get back to bringing things into Glenn’s house, the home they’d once all shared together. “Check out what I got,” she crowed to Glenn when they were in the kitchen. She showed him three rubber gas masks, lying on the kitchen counter.

  “Wow,” Glenn said. He picked one up and examined it for a moment, before he grabbed his ex-wife and kissed her. It heartened Sadie, in such a scary situation, to see her parents together again like this. They were still a team. Everything really was gonna be okay.

  Glenn and Daisy spent the afternoon putting things in the basement and sealing up all the doors and windows in the house with duct tape. Sadie assisted, and by the time they took all the blankets and pillows and settled in the basement with a battery-powered lamp and a radio, she was exhausted. She fell asleep on her cot as her parents huddled by the radio, listening to reports of what the president was doing in response to the threats against their nation. It sounded like everyone would be bombing each other, and it would mean disaster for everyone in the world.

  Sadie fell asleep, thinking more of her parents holding hands as they sat close together than the fact that the end of days had arrived.

  When Sadie woke up the next morning, her parents were somber. The radio was going all morning long…and then it cut out. The bombs had been dropped. Poisonous gas was destroying the atmosphere, destroying all life in proximity to the blast sites worldwide.

  They stayed in the basement for over a month.

  They eventually started picking up radio stations again. Sadie was bored. She wanted to listen to music, but all they had were a few old tapes, nothing she liked. Her iPad was long dead, and none of her apps were working anymore, anyway. And she hadn’t thought to bring any books with her.

  But her boredom turned to fear as Sadie heard reports of monsters, the living dead, attacking survivors. They were everywhere, killing everyone they could.

  Daisy panicked. “What’s happening?” she demanded. “We’re gonna run out of food. What’re we gonna do?”

  Glenn tried to get hold of his parents. They’d been in Florida when the brief, deadly war began. But cell phone towers, phone lines, were all down. According to the few reports they could get on the radio, communication was impossible. Glenn had no doubt that his parents were dead, as dead as Sadie’s useless electronics.

  After a few days of intense discussion between her parents, they decided to pack up the truck and head up to Glenn’s parents’ farm in Saskatchewan, where they’d been living for half the year since they’d retired. “Probably be the safest place we could go right now,” Glenn kept telling Daisy. And Daisy eventually agreed.

  When Sadie stepped out of her dad’s house for the first time in weeks, donning her child-sized gas mask, she saw that things didn’t look all that different on their street. It was quiet, and the sky was an odd color, but she thought the color was distorted because of her mask. What had happened, exactly?

  As Sadie sat in the tiny backseat portion of her mother’s truck and looked out the window, she saw that downtown Iowa City had changed quite a bit. The windows of every business were smashed, and people were still running around here and there, their arms loaded with whatever they could find.

  And as they crossed the river, Sadie saw a man on the bridge. A man who was missing the top portion of his scalp. He had blood around his mouth, and he was shuffling along in the middle of the street. Daisy screamed and hit him with her truck. “Keep driving!” Glenn snapped, and they went on. Sadie closed her eyes, and didn’t open them again for a long time.

  Chapter Six

  Sadie was surprised to find Christian already up, dressed, and at the table the morning she got up to go to La Ronge. It was still dark out. “Are we going now?” Christian asked eagerly.

  Sadie smiled a little and rubbed her heavy eyes. “We need to eat first,” she said. “Go out and get some eggs.”

  Christian got his coat (his new coat, oversized but puffy and plenty warm) and ran out to the farmyard with the flashlight. Sadie started a fire in the stove, and was just putting the kettle on when Amelia came in, wearing her robe.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you,” Sadie said, kissing her lover good morning. “We’ve got the stuff all loaded up already.”

  “I wanted to see you two off,” Amelia said. Sadie wondered if her lover hadn’t slept well the previous night, thinking about any awful thing that could happen to her little boy on the trip to town. “Where’s Christian?”

  “Getting eggs,” Sadie said.

  Christian came in then, the egg basket strung through his thin arm. He held one of the chickens, dead, in one hand. “Oh, no,” Amelia sighed, taking the frozen creature from her son.

  “How’re the other two?” Sadie asked.

  Christian shrugged. “They’re okay. Eloise tried to peck at me, but she missed.”

  Sadie shook her head. “I can’t believe you named those crazy bitches.”

  “Poor Chloe,” Amelia sighed. She put the dead chicken in the sink. “I guess she’s dinner tonight.”

  Sadie couldn’t complain about a chicken dinner, but that left them with only two chickens producing eggs. They had eggs every day, sometimes at two meals. They hadn’t gotten their hands on any chicks in a few years. Sadie hoped the Charles family would be able to set something up, come spring. It’d be too much trouble to keep a rooster, but…

  The dead chicken only distracted Amelia for a moment. After she checked that the rifle was properly loaded, she hugged her son close and kissed the top of his head. “Be safe,” she said. “Do as your sister tells you.”

  “I will, Mommy.”

  Amelia kissed her boy once more before turning to her lover. “Don’t let him leave your side.”

  “He’ll be fine,” Sadie promised. She kissed her lover goodbye. “The people hanging around La Ronge are okay.”

  Amelia frowned. Sadie hated to leave her like that, but she didn’t think she could say anything to reassure her. Amelia was going to fret, no matter what. All Sadie had to do was get Christian back to the farm safely. That might loosen her up a little.

  When Sadie was unlocking the gate at the end of the driveway, she looked up and saw Amelia watching them. She waved. “Go back inside!” she yelled. It was well below freezing out that morning.

  Sadie didn’t run the heat too much in the truck, but it was plenty comfortable in their thick coats, the heat running just enough to keep the windows defrosted as they drove along. It snowed more since Sadie’s last trip, of course, and Christian watched as the plow did its job. He looked out over the landscape.

  “Do you think we’ll see any?” he asked.

  “If we do, they’ll be frozen,” Sadie said. “We should stop and smash their heads if we do.”

  “Okay,” Christian said, and Sadie smiled grimly. He might be curious at the idea of seeing one of those creatures, but he wouldn’t like the reality of it. As much as she wanted to shield her brother from the horrors of the world, she also wanted him to know. After all, could they really expect him to stay on the farm for the rest of his life?

  But the drive to La Ronge was slow and uneventful. When Sadie pulled up to the Charles family store and knocked at the door, it took a couple of minutes for anyone to answer. Sadie had to knock twice.

  The person at the peephole seemed to do a double-take before opening the door. Remy let them in, staring at Christian. “The little brother,” he said.

  “Christian, this is Remy Charles,” Sadie said. “He’s the one who gets you candy.”

  Christian looked up at the tall man. “You’re a Native,” he said.

  Remy smiled a little. “I guess.”

  “I’m Christian,” he said, and he stuck out his hand, the way his mother taught him. Sadie was a bit impressed that he remembered shaking hands. Remy chuckled and took Christian’s hand.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said.
“Let me see if I have something for you.”

  Remy helped Sadie unload the truck while Christian explored the shop. Sadie had to wait on her supplies as Remy dug up some old comic books for Christian. “You like these?” he asked, showing them to Christian. “They used to be my brother’s. We were gonna sell them, but…”

  Sadie frowned. She wanted to tell Remy to save them for his own family, maybe if he decided to have kids someday. But it seemed like a stupid thing to say. And Christian was delighted as he took in the large stack. “No charge,” Remy added.

  “What do we say, Christian?” Sadie asked.

  “Thank you,” Christian said, awed to have so much of anything.

  As Christian looked through the comic books, Remy and Sadie negotiated at the counter. “We got a lot of fuel from our last trip down to the Peg,” he said. “Some dude got it from siphoning all these abandoned cars in this random little hamlet.”

  Sadie got a few gallons of gas, and stocked up on the usual foodstuffs. She was happy to get her hands on some yeast. Amelia liked to have it on hand, as she was constantly baking bread for them. It took so much to have something so basic, Sadie thought.

  When her items were boxed up, Sadie glanced over at Christian. He’d settled into a plastic chair in the corner, reading one of the superhero comics Remy had given him. She turned to him. “That’s very generous of you.”

  Remy waved a hand. “Somebody may as well get some use out of them.”

  “You could have sold them, I bet.” Remy shrugged. “You mind if he just reads there while I go say hi to Manny?”

  Remy frowned. “Manny’s gone, Sade.”

  Sadie took a deep breath. “She went looking for that place. That…that Sanctuary Coast. Didn’t she?”

  Remy shrugged. “She up and left just after Mom passed.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Sadie said. Poor Remy. He only had his brother Johnny left, assuming Manny never came back. None of the others did, she said…

  He shook his head. “We just gotta keep things going,” he said. “It’s what we gotta do. That’s what my dad said right before he…”