by Mark Lukens
“Oh God, Max,” Kate said, suddenly feeling a little lame for telling her story. “Did you ever speak to them again?”
“I spoke to my mother a few times, but she died of cancer when I was twenty-four. And my dad died a few years later. Heart attack.”
“What did you do when you left?”
“Kind of what you did. I worked my ass off. I ended up in a beach town in Virginia and I got two jobs. I lived on the beach for two weeks until I had enough money to rent a room in a scuzzy motel three blocks from the beach. I bought a bicycle at a garage sale and used that to pedal to work, to the store, to the bank. A few months later I bought a used car. It had an oil leak and nothing worked inside: no radio, no heat, no A/C. The headliner was falling down; the interior stained and ripped up. But I kept it clean and fixed what I could, and it ran. I saved every penny, like you said you did. I was disciplined because I had no one to fall back on: no parents, no grandparents, no siblings, no family at all. I had a few acquaintances at work, but no true friends.”
Kate nodded. She remembered the times of her struggles. They were hard years, but she looked back on them fondly. They had helped shape who she was. And she understood about having nobody to ask for help. She could only rely on herself and that had forged her discipline.
“I used to drive by these big houses with For Sale signs in the front yards. I used to dream about owning a house like that. I’m not ashamed to say that I wanted to be rich. Maybe going through the poverty I did, struggling like I had, spurred that desire in me. But I also think it was revenge. I wanted to show my mom and dad that they hadn’t hurt me, that they hadn’t crippled me by kicking me out. I don’t know if they expected me to come crawling back eventually, or if the trauma would somehow cure my homosexuality, get me to snap out of it somehow, but I would’ve rather died than returned home and let them win.”
Again, Kate had the same feeling.
“So I went to the library. I checked out books on success. I studied others who had done it. I was a frequenter of garage sales and thrift stores. I found more books, motivational tapes, and DVDs. I fell for a few scams, seminars, even lost a little money. But then I got friendly with an older man, a customer who came into the restaurant a lot. He was obviously wealthy, and one day I got the courage to ask him what he did for a living. He told me he was a real estate developer. Well, I thought that was out of reach for someone like me, but then he told me he had started as a real estate agent. It was like this light went on in my mind, like random puzzle pieces suddenly came together forming a picture I could see.”
Kate smiled. This customer was Max’s Mr. Diaz, the one who had inspired him.
“I poured all of my energy into learning about real estate, studying for my agent’s license. I had been saving every dollar I could, but I hadn’t had a plan up until then. I’d been waiting for something to come along. And when it did, I put all of my energy into it. A year later, I had my real estate license. But I was at the bottom of the agency. Again, I worked my ass off. I hustled. There were months where the market slowed down, and there were times I had to go back to waiting tables at nights just to scrape some money together. But I was also building relationships with clients. And slowly, over the next few years, clients were coming back to me to resell their homes. They were recommending me to other people they knew. I kept a notebook with lists of my former clients, conversations I’d had with them, their kids’ names, their pets, where they went to college. When one of those clients contacted me they were impressed that I remembered little details about their lives. And years later I met the love of my life, Glen. He’d been a contractor for years, and he wanted to get into remodeling houses and reselling them. I was all in.”
“Is he telling his real estate story again?” Petra groaned from the back seat.
Max smiled and seemed a little embarrassed. “Sorry,” he said to Kate. “I might have gotten a little carried away.” He looked back out at the woods again that lined both sides of the road. “And I don’t know how any of those skills I developed will help in this new world.”
“You can say that again,” Petra said.
Kate looked back at Petra. She still had her eyes closed, her head nestled against her wadded-up jacket against the door. Brooke was still asleep and her head was cocked in what looked like an uncomfortable position. Tiger lifted his head up and gazed at Kate for a moment with sleepy eyes, then laid his head back down. Kate had never known a cat who rode in a car this calmly, but it seemed like Tiger would rather be in a moving car than where he’d been.
“Don’t mind Petra,” Max said as Kate turned back around in the passenger seat. “She wakes up bitching.”
“Fuck off,” Petra mumbled.
Kate smiled, knowing this was just some good-natured bantering between the two of them.
“Petra loves this shit,” Max said, gesturing out at the world beyond their windshield. “She probably watched all the Mad Max movies and prayed for something like this.” He thought about it for a moment. “You know, I should be called Mad Max. Let’s give each other nicknames.”
“You’re Sad Max,” Petra said. “That’s who you are.”
Kate smiled again and looked back at the windshield. They weren’t too far from Astorville now.
CHAPTER 43
It was surreal driving down the streets of her hometown. Kate had switched places with Max, who said he’d been impressed with her driving skills when she’d raced away from the clubhouse at the trailer park. With Kate driving, it gave Max and Petra the ability to watch for rippers or other threats. They both had their guns ready, anticipating rippers the closer they got to Astorville. But so far they hadn’t seen any at all.
“I hope we find some more weapons in this town,” Petra said. “Or at least some ammo. Your folks got some weapons, Kate?”
“My dad had a shotgun,” she answered. “That’s all I really remember.”
Petra didn’t respond, maybe disappointed.
Kate drove down the abandoned streets of Astorville as they entered the edge of town. She passed parked cars and pickups, none of them in the streets like she’d seen in the other towns. All the doors were closed on the vehicles. Her fleeting hope that somehow the plague hadn’t reached this far up into the mountains was squashed as soon as they entered the town. She saw the same thing here that she’d seen everywhere else: empty streets, windows busted out of businesses and homes, front doors wide open, trash and debris blowing around. But at least she hadn’t seen any DA symbols spray-painted on the buildings or cars, like the symbols she’d seen painted on her front door and the other doors in her neighborhood before she left. Maybe this little hamlet in the woods was too far out of the way for the Dark Angels, or maybe they just hadn’t made it here yet.
“You see anything yet?” Petra asked from the back seat.
“No,” Max answered. “It’s weird. I haven’t seen a single ripper yet.”
Kate agreed—it was weird. And she felt that small flame of hope trying to brighten inside of her. But she needed to be realistic; she could see the destruction all around her, the evidence that her small hometown hadn’t gone untouched by the plague.
Some of the stores looked like they’d been looted. She wondered if some gangs had done it, or rippers. She found it hard to imagine the townspeople doing that to each other—no matter how panicked they’d gotten, she couldn’t imagine them stealing from each other. They would have banded together as a town, everyone here knowing everyone else. They would have shared food, weapons, and medicine. They would have protected each other and shared any information they had. They would have comforted each other in these dark days.
But maybe when they’d seen their family and friends turning into rippers, things had changed, their faith and morals shaken.
Their SUV, even though the motor purred quietly, sounded so loud in the silence; there were no other sounds except the chilly wind rustling the leaves of bushes and trees.
Kate stayed away from
the main street that ran through the line of businesses. She took the road behind those stores, where the town’s church stood. There were more homes with acres of farmland when they got farther away from town. She turned left on Creekbend, driving toward Appleton Road, the corner where her mom and dad’s house stood.
They drove past open fields as the woods gave way, the crops unattended now, many disturbed by rippers or animals: deer and birds. A tractor stood at the edge of one of the fields, the machine painted John Deere green and yellow. It looked so strange to Kate, like an abandoned tractor in her hometown was more evidence of the apocalypse than anything she’d seen so far.
Kate’s heart beat quickly as she rounded the bend, the SUV climbing the steep hill that led up to her family’s home at the corner. And then she saw the house again for the first time in years. Her family’s home was modest, nothing like the Fosters’ farm a few miles down Appleton Road with their acres of crops and the huge barn where they used to hold town events.
Her parents’ home looked dark and neglected. Everything seemed still, like it was trapped in an old photo. Her dad’s pickup truck was parked beyond the side of the house in front of the free-standing garage, sitting on the gravel drive. Her mom’s car was gone. Trash littered their front yard just like it littered so many other front yards. A few of the windows on the front porch were cracked and broken. The front door was ajar beyond the wooden screen door of the front porch that was hanging by only one hinge. Her mom’s potted plants were tipped over, one of them smashed on the concrete walkway. The wood swing at the edge of the large front porch was torn down, two pieces of chain hanging from that end of the porch ceiling.
Kate’s heart sank as she parked right in the front yard. She knew she wasn’t going to find her mom and dad alive inside. She wasn’t going to find her brother or her sister. She wasn’t going to find anyone here.
“I still haven’t seen a single ripper in this town,” Petra said.
Kate kept her hands on the steering wheel, staring at her parents’ front porch.
“Yeah,” Max said. “It’s strange. Maybe they all got what they could from this place and then moved on.”
“Seems like there would be some stragglers,” Petra said, looking out her window with her pistol in her lap. “I mean, we’ve seen lots of big groups of rippers, but there’s always those stragglers wandering around.”
Kate still had the SUV running while they watched the house. Max had the passenger window rolled down, listening as the chilly air invaded their truck.
“Go ahead and turn it off,” Max said, looking out the window, watching for any signs of movement.
Kate turned the SUV off. Everything was quiet, but then Kate heard a few sounds: the cold wind blowing, insects buzzing around, birds chirping.
After a few more minutes, Max looked at Kate. “Okay. I guess it’s time we went in there and checked it out.”
CHAPTER 44
“Me and Max should go in first by ourselves,” Petra said.
“No,” Kate said. “I’m going in with you.” She looked at Max for help.
Max frowned. “What about Brooke?”
Kate didn’t say anything.
“Someone needs to stay in the truck with her,” Max said.
“And Tiger,” Brooke added.
Kate sighed and nodded. Max and Petra were right—it was the smart thing to do.
“Keep the truck turned off so you can hear any sounds out here,” Max told Kate. “But be ready to turn it right back on. If you see anything, honk the horn. We’ll go in, check everything out. We’ll only be a few minutes.” He turned around and looked at Petra. “Let me see the shotgun. We’ll take the handguns with us.”
“You’re leaving the shotgun with her?” Petra asked, but she handed it to Max.
Max laid the gun down on the floorboard of the passenger seat as he opened the door and got out. “The shotgun’s right here if you need it. It’s easy, just point and shoot.”
Kate nodded.
Max smiled at her again. “I don’t think there are any rippers nearby. Not as quiet as it’s been. If there were some around, I think they would have heard us driving around by now and come running.”
Max and Petra got out of the truck, Petra with her pistol and Max with Kate’s gun. She watched them walk from the SUV to the front walkway, then to the front porch. They climbed the steps and flanked the front door, both hesitating for a moment, looking at each other. Petra nodded and she went inside the house first, Max right behind her, both of them disappearing into the gloom.
Kate watched the doorway for just a moment longer and then she looked into the back at Brooke. She could tell Brooke was nervous. “I grew up here,” she told her.
“You did?” Brooke asked.
“Yeah. I was born in this town. Grew up here my whole life in this house until I was eighteen years old. That’s our last name by the front door on that wooden plaque.”
Brooke didn’t say anything, but she was staring out her window at the front porch.
“My mom planted flowers there in the beds in front of the porch every spring. And we used to have a tire swing hanging from a branch in that tree over there.”
“I don’t see it.”
“It’s not there now,” Kate said. The tire swing was gone, and so many other things had changed. But at the same time so much seemed the same. She hadn’t been sure how she was going to feel seeing her old house again, her dad’s truck, her mom’s flower gardens and potted plants she loved so much.
“We’re probably going to sleep here tonight,” Kate said.
Brooke didn’t say anything—she was still staring out the window.
“We haven’t seen any rippers here so far,” Kate said. “That’s a good thing. I told you we’d be safe here.”
Brooke looked at her, but she didn’t say anything. Kate wasn’t so sure Brooke believed this place was safe.
Kate watched the house again, wondering what was taking them so long.
A moment later Max came out of the house and shuffled down the steps, walking toward Kate’s window in long strides. At least he wasn’t running—that was good.
“How is everything in there?” she asked him.
He looked at her and nodded. “Everything looks clear inside.” He hesitated for just a moment.
“What is it?”
“We didn’t find anyone inside.”
Kate just nodded. That didn’t surprise her. She’d had the faintest of hopes, but she hadn’t really expected to find her mom and dad alive.
Max was still hesitating like he had more to say that he didn’t want to tell her.
“Go ahead,” she said, bracing herself.
“We didn’t find any bodies inside, but there’s some dried blood. Signs of violence.”
Kate nodded. She needed to be practical about this. She knew the odds were high that her family had turned into rippers, or at least been attacked by them. Her brother was in his early twenties and her sister was nineteen years old now, but they hadn’t moved out of mom and dad’s house yet.
Max opened the back door for Brooke. “Come on, pumpkin. We need to get inside the house.”
“What about Tiger?”
“Let’s leave him inside the car for a little while.”
Kate heard Brooke’s sharp inhale of breath like she was horrified by that idea.
“We need to make sure the house is secure,” Max said patiently. “We need to make sure all the doors and windows are shut or closed. You wouldn’t want Tiger getting out and running away, would you?”
Kate turned around in her seat and watched Brooke stare at Max with wide eyes, thinking it over as she petted Tiger right beside her. She shook her head no.
Brooke got out and Max closed the door for her. He opened the passenger door and grabbed the shotgun.
Kate took the keys out of the ignition and got out.
“Could you pop the back?” Max asked Kate.
She searched for the button an
d then found it, pushing it, hearing the thunk as the hatch popped open. Max was back there a few seconds later, grabbing their cardboard box of food and toilet paper.
“I’ll come back for the packs and for Tiger,” Max said, winking at Brooke.
The three of them walked up the steps to the front porch.
Kate was the last one inside. Max closed the door behind her. It closed but didn’t quite latch because it had been kicked in, but Max was able to force it closed enough to get the deadbolt to snap in place. It was better than nothing.
Petra came into the living room with a long white envelope in her hand. “Someone left this for you, Kate.”
CHAPTER 45
Kate’s heart felt like it had stopped for just a second as she stared at Petra who stood rigid in the archway to the dining room holding the envelope out for her to take.
“It has your name written on it,” Petra told her.
Kate took the envelope and looked at it. The envelope was sealed shut and her name was scrawled on the front in beautiful cursive handwriting, just her first name. It was her mom’s script, she was sure of it. She could tell by the curve of the letter K and the slash of the line through the letter T.
“Where did you find it?” Kate asked in a whisper.
“Upstairs in the master bedroom. It was hidden on top of the closet, tucked under a box.”
Kate just nodded, not saying anything, a lump in her throat now.
“Go ahead and read it,” Max said. “Take your time. I need to check all the windows and doors. See if I can get them sealed up enough for the night.”
Max walked away and Petra went back into the dining room. She seemed to be picking at the trash and rubble, seeing what she could salvage. Kate wasn’t sure what she was looking for, and her mind was now on the envelope in her hand.
