In Another Life

by Liesel Browning

“No, look, I do,” Manny insisted. “Can I tell you what I understand? You and Amelia were thrown together at a young age, you were both vulnerable, and so you have this strong bond. Like me and my…my brothers. Right?” Sadie nodded and let Manny go on. “You’re together all that time, you go through so much together…you’ve got it in your head that you’re meant to be together.”

  We are, Sadie thought, but didn’t say it out loud.

  “All I’m saying is, don’t let all that blind you,” Manny said. “She’s the only thing that makes you lose your cool.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Sadie said. She knew Manny meant well, but she wasn’t trying to hear all that right now. Not while she was still so happy about what happened in Amelia’s bedroom. They weren’t just fucking, they were reuniting. They were both back where they belonged.

  Sadie got up and left the shed without another word. Manny did not follow her back into the house.

  Back in the living room, Sadie found Vanessa and Amelia alone on the couch. Uh, oh, Sadie thought with a smirk. “Where’d they go?” Sadie asked, sitting down next to her lover. Amelia sniffed Sadie’s shirt and gave her a mock stern look.

  “They’re having a little quality time in my bedroom,” Vanessa said. “So you see, honey, we go off into separate rooms to do our fucking,” she told Amelia with a wink. Amelia giggled.

  “Where’s Sophie tonight?” Sadie asked. She was surprised that Vanessa’s plaything wasn’t around.

  Vanessa looked proud as she told Sadie about her young lover’s work assignment. She’d be an intern at the new science lab. “I helped things along in that department, but she’s really very bright,” Vanessa said. “And she’s never had any formal education. Can you imagine?”

  Sadie shrugged. “I never finished the second grade.”

  “Sometimes I stop and think about how young you all were when it happened,” Vanessa said. “All the scientists up in that fancy new lab are older than I am, and they gotta pass on their knowledge somehow. Sophie’s more capable than most, I think.”

  “Wow,” Sadie said. She thought for a moment of her mother, who would have been suited for a job in a place like that. “So, what, she’s there now?”

  “You ever see any of those old scientists around town?” Vanessa asked. “They’re almost constantly at their work. She was excited to have a look around the new building and get started.”

  The three women chatted on the sofa for a little while. Amelia brought up her son Christian, asking Vanessa directly if she’d heard anything about his treatment status.

  “I need to approach my hospital connections tactfully,” Vanessa explained. Amelia frowned, but nodded, and Vanessa put a hand on her bare knee. “I understand,” she said gently. And Sadie, for one, had no doubt about that. After Vanessa’s wife died, she was on her own with their little boy Duncan. She and their son struggled for a decade, but Vanessa kept her kid alive, and they both made it to SC when he was a teenager. Vanessa was a handsome older woman, but her hair was completely gray from her former stressful life.

  Manny still hadn’t come back into the house by the time Yvette and Brooke came out of the back room. When the other two women said goodnight and left, Sadie and Amelia quickly followed. Sadie took Vanessa aside and thanked her for having them. “I know I should have talked to you before bringing Amelia over…”

  Vanessa shook her head. “Amelia’s great,” she said. “And I’m gonna try to find out what’s up with Christian. I promise.”

  Sadie thanked her influential friend again before taking her lover’s hand and leaving the little blue house. “She’s not married, is she?” Amelia asked as they headed back to their apartment building.

  Sadie shook her head. “She got a house ‘cause she came with a kid. I guess she’s exempt from a lot of that stuff, you know, since she’s older.”

  “You ever think it’s kind of weird, how there’s so many more of us younger people, yet the old folks are the ones in charge?” Amelia asked.

  Sadie hadn’t actually thought of it that way before. After all, for her entire life, the older people were always in charge. When the world went to shit, Sadie was dependent on an older person, her father, for everything. Though they were on their own for the last couple of years on the farm, Glenn ran the show until he was bedridden. And though a grown Sadie bristled under his authority, she didn’t necessarily question it.

  Sadie would mull over this idea later, when there were more changes in SC. But that night, as she went back to Amelia’s apartment, all she was thinking about was how nice it was to be with her lover again. How right it felt, to stay in her bed, to make love to her two more times before they fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Sadie didn’t speak to her father for the rest of the trip up to her grandparents’ farm. She kept her head buried under her blankets, and every time she closed her eyes, she saw her mother being attacked and devoured by a small horde of rotting zombies. She only sat up to barf into a plastic bag a couple of times. Glenn made no comment about this, didn’t say anything at all.

  It was dark when Glenn pulled up to the farm. There was no gate, no wall, around the property yet. Sadie hadn’t even known they’d arrived, but she took the blanket off of her head as she felt the truck slowing down. “We’re here,” Glenn said huskily.

  Sadie sat up and looked through the windshield. Her grandparents’ farmhouse, somehow unchanged, unlike the rest of the world. She’d expected that they’d find the house dark, since her grandparents were in Florida when the war began and ended. But she saw a faint light shining at one of the windows. She pointed this out to her dad.

  “I see it,” Glenn said. “Wait here.” Glenn got out of the truck and locked the doors. Sadie sat in the backseat, staring intently at the light in the window. It looked like a candle, and she thought she saw shadows moving behind the curtains of what was once her grandparents’ summer home.

  Glenn headed slowly around the back of the farmhouse. In the dark, Sadie noticed that her father was carrying something. A hatchet, she thought. She’d see her parents packing that back in Iowa City.

  Sadie watched the lighted room for a couple of minutes before she was certain there were people in there. She thought she heard shouting…then she definitely heard a rifle shot.

  Sadie froze as two people came tearing out of the front door of the farmhouse. They didn’t seem to notice Sadie in the truck as they sprinted away into the night. She didn’t get a good look at them in the dark, but she thought they were young people, maybe teenagers. And someone got shot.

  Sadie watched as the room (her grandparents’ living room, she thought) got brighter, as though someone lit a couple more candles. She didn’t dare move, didn’t dare leave the truck, as she waited. If her father was the one who got shot, who was lighting the candles? She had no way of defending herself…

  Sadie sat in the truck for what felt like hours. Perhaps it was only a half-hour or so. But she was terrified, and at one point, she even pissed herself. She whimpered as she waited in the dark. She thought of her mother.

  Finally, she saw someone step out onto the porch. It was her father, but she still didn’t move. He came slowly to the truck and opened the passenger side door.

  “Come on,” he said. That was it. He turned and headed back into the house before Sadie climbed out of the truck. She was relieved, because he wouldn’t see that she’d wet her pants.

  Sadie was shivering as her father led her into the unheated house. When they went into the living room, Sadie saw that the extra light was a fire in the chimney. There were a couple of candles on the little table by the window, but they were put out.

  The living room was littered with tin cans, broken beer bottles, cigarette butts, and other assorted trash. The lovely Oriental rug that Sadie remembered lying on as she listened to her grandfather’s stories was gone. But otherwise, it looked much the same, the furniture undamaged and the pictures on the walls unharmed. Sad
ie thought that the people Glenn chased out were a couple of squatters. She felt kind of bad for them.

  Glenn was already retreating to the kitchen. “What happened?” Sadie asked. Glenn used a box of matches that he found to light a candle on the counter. He started searching his parents’ kitchen drawers.

  “Those kids were staying here,” Glenn said. “Made a mess out of the place, as you can see. I haven’t even gone into the bedrooms yet.”

  “What was that noise?”

  Glenn wouldn’t meet his daughter’s eyes as he continued his search, the candle his only light. “I tried to explain that this is our house, our family home, but they wanted to fight. I had to scare them away.”

  “By firing a gun?”

  “They had a rifle leaning against the wall,” Glenn said. He seemed to find what he was looking for: a box of black yard bags. He handed it to his daughter. “I just fired a shot to scare them off. It’s probably not a bad idea for us to have a weapon, anyway.”

  Sadie said nothing as she followed her dad back out to the living room. “Start bagging this mess up,” Glenn said. “Mind the broken glass. Keep the fire going.”

  Sadie didn’t protest as her father fired off orders. He left her alone as she knelt on the hardwood floor and gathered handfuls of trash. When she picked up an in-tact beer bottle and found that there was still some in it, she took a tentative sip. It was gross. It was the last beer she’d even see for a very long time.

  Sadie took the bottle to the dark kitchen to pour the rest in the sink. She didn’t think about the fact that the water wasn’t running anymore. After she discovered this the hard way, she sighed and looked out into the dark, snow-covered farmyard.

  There was no light from the moon. Ever since the bombs were dropped, the sky was filled with heavy clouds. There was hardly any snow south of Saskatchewan, and the snow this far north was a dangerous brown color. It looked like fluffy mud.

  But Sadie saw her father by the light of a kerosene lamp that was hanging from a hook on the garage. Glenn was dragging something heavy, and as Sadie watched him, he had to stop a couple of times to rest and catch his breath.

  Sadie examined her father’s long burden. It looked like a rolled-up rug, the Oriental one she remembered so well, perhaps. But the bundle looked awfully lumpy, and as Sadie had a horrible thought, she fled back into the living room to finish her chore. That was too much to process. She immersed herself in cleaning, determined to make the room look just like it had before, when she last visited her grandparents, when everything was quiet and calm and right.

  When Glenn came back into the house, he wordlessly helped his daughter finish cleaning up the living room. Glenn sorted the cans and in-tact bottles from the rest of the trash, a habit that no longer had any use, Sadie found herself thinking. But she didn’t say anything to her father as they finished cleaning up.

  Sadie helped her father unload their things from the back of the truck. The bedrooms, they found, were trashed even worse than the living room was. “We’ll deal with that tomorrow,” Glenn said. “You can sleep on the couch.”

  “Where are you gonna sleep?” Sadie asked. Glenn only chuckled a little in response.

  But Sadie found that sleep eluded her, too. She didn’t move from the couch, just laid awake and tried not to think about what she’d seen. Maybe the rug was ruined by those teenagers spilling beer or pissing on it. Her father had to take it out to the garage because it was damp and smelly. As far as the lumpiness…well, it was a big rug, and Sadie saw her father struggling with it…

  Her young mind tried to make sense of what she’d seen, and her reassurances were enough to finally let her sleep in that warm living room. When she woke up early the next morning, she thought for a minute that nothing was wrong. She saw the picture of herself as a baby, hanging on the wall next to the fireplace. She was just visiting her grandparents.

  But as she lay on the couch, she looked up at the vaulted ceiling. There wasn’t any damage from a bullet hole up there. Sadie didn’t want to think about where the shot actually landed.

  Sadie didn’t leave the couch until she heard her father in the kitchen. It wasn’t very bright out, with all the dark clouds, so Sadie followed the light from a candle her father had going on the kitchen table. He was boiling water on the old wood stove. Sadie’s grandparents had an electrical range, the wood stove more of a quaint decoration. Glenn didn’t look up at his daughter as he said, “Thank God they had this thing.”

  “I’m hungry, Dad,” Sadie said.

  “Look what we have in the pantry,” Glenn said. Sadie went in, but all they had was the food they’d brought with them. The pantry wouldn’t have been all that well stocked in the first place, with Sadie’s grandparents down at their winter home in Florida, but even her grandmother’s jars of raspberry and strawberry preserves were gone.

  Sadie got a can of ravioli. She might have heated it up on the stove, but she didn’t bother. She opened it up using the pull-back tab and found a fork in her grandparents’ utensil drawer. She stood at the counter and ate the ravioli as she watched her father prepare some tea, about the only thing left in the kitchen besides the dishes and cookware.

  “At least those kids had the decency not to smash up everything useful,” Glenn commented as he waited on his water to boil.

  “They probably just needed somewhere to stay,” Sadie said, remembering how terrified the two kids seemed when they ran out. She couldn’t see their faces clearly, but the young man and woman ran fast, ran for their lives. “Why’d you have to scare them like that?”

  “They were threatening me, Sadie,” Glenn sighed. “I’m not exactly a strong man, and it was three-on-one.”

  Sadie didn’t comment on the fact that she only saw two people leaving the house.

  Glenn finally looked his daughter in the eye. “We have to look out for ourselves now,” he said. “Do you understand that everything’s changed? We can’t trust anyone right now.”

  Sadie frowned and nodded. She finished the can of ravioli, hungry as she was, and put the fork in the sink before she remembered that there was no running water to wash it with. How were they going to live?

  Sadie didn’t particularly like tea, but she didn’t argue when her father poured her a mug. They sat together at the table, their only light the single candle between them. Sadie watched their shadows on the wall as her father said, “I need you to stay out of the garage.”

  “Why?” Sadie asked.

  Glenn’s face hardened, in a way Sadie had rarely seen. He was never a harsh disciplinarian. He always had expectations for his daughter, as far as her schoolwork and her behavior and her church participation went, but he wasn’t strict by any means. But after everything that happened over the past few days, Sadie was actually afraid of her father for the first time.

  “It’s important that you do as I say,” Glenn said. “You need to understand, it’s very easy to get yourself killed these days.”

  Sadie swallowed the lump in her throat. Glenn perhaps realized his words were too harsh, because he amended, “The garage is a mess. The kids did a number on it in there. I need to go through and see what can be salvaged out of all the equipment. So you gotta stay out. Okay?”

  Sadie nodded. She sipped her tea. It wasn’t very good, and she wished she had some sugar. But over the next few years, that was only one of many things that would be difficult to come by.

  Glenn went on as Sadie stared at the table. “Everything I do, it’s to keep us alive,” he said. “I need you to understand that, Sadie.”

  “I do,” Sadie managed. She blinked back her tears.

  *

  When Sadie woke up in Amelia’s bed the next morning, she saw that she had just enough time to get up to her apartment and get showered before church. Amelia was still sleeping beside her, though, and she couldn’t help watching her for a moment. She was so lovely. Sadie hated to wake her.

  Amelia blinked at Sadie and smiled. “Hi,” she said. She put he
r hand to Sadie’s cheek and sat up just enough to kiss her softly. “This feels right, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Sadie agreed. She kissed her lover again. “We have to get ready for church.”

  Amelia sighed. “I know.” Sadie got up and threw on her clothes from the night before as Amelia sat up in bed. “I wonder if Zach ever came in?”

  Sadie hadn’t even thought of her lover’s husband. Zach, who was sucking the pastor’s dick, apparently. Sadie got the image of it in her mind, and she shook her head to clear it away. She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Will you meet me downstairs and walk to church with me?” Amelia asked.

  Sadie grinned. “Sure.” She climbed back onto the bed and kissed her lover one more time. She somehow resisted the urge to reach down and play with her cute little tits. It wouldn’t be good if they were late for church.

  Sadie left her half-naked lover alone in her bedroom. As she headed for the door, Zach came down the hallway towards her. Sadie froze. “Uh, hey,” she said.

  “Good morning,” Zach said. “How are you, Sadie?”

  Sadie bit her lower lip to keep from laughing. “I’m okay,” she said. “How’s it going?”

  Zach nodded. “All right,” he said. “I, uh, saw you stayed the night, so I slept on the couch.”

  “Oh,” Sadie said. “Uh, thanks. Sorry…”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Zach said. “Just don’t, uh, make a habit of it.”

  Sadie clenched her fists. “No problem,” she said. “We’ll stay at my place next time.” She stormed out before she lost her cool.

  *

  Sadie groaned when she found out that church that day would consist of group sessions. Every once in a while, the residents of SC would break up into small groups, ranging in size from a handful to a few dozen. Sadie hated it because engagement was an expectation, whereas sitting in a church that was crowded full of hundreds of people made zoning out rather easy.

  Sadie wasn’t too surprised when she was placed in a group of other couples who’d recently been relocated to the apartment block. This group was meeting in the worship center…and was being led by Pastor Steve himself. Sadie found her husband sitting in a pew, about as far back as he could without getting called out by the cheerful clergyman. Sadie went to him.