Deadworld

by Bryan Smith

  Jake made a soft sound that was part laugh and part grunt. “I imagine surfing the internet is a pretty dull exercise without anyone out there to interact with, so I’m guessing that last scenario is the most likely one.”

  Emily pursed her lips. She looked at him a moment before speaking again, trying to decide whether he really believed that or was simply trying to make her feel better. “I don’t know about that,” she said at last. “I’m not saying I’m psychic, okay? Or anything like that. But sometimes I get really strong feelings about things, and when I get those feelings they’re usually right. And it feels to me like there’s no one out there in the world. Like the whole planet is just one vast graveyard. All that’s left is you, me, that sweet little girl, and that psycho asshole.”

  Now Jake really did laugh. “But that’s just not possible, Em. There’s other people out there. Somewhere. There has to be.”

  Emily was about to reply in a snide way when Abby came into the room. A curse died at the edge of her tongue when she glimpsed the child’s face. Emily made herself smile, a broad grin that must have looked as phony as it felt. “Hey, sweetheart,” she said, injecting a note of equally false cheeriness into her voice. “I thought you were napping.”

  Abby shrugged. She yawned and stretched her arms over her head, going up on her toes in a pose that made her look like a sleepy ballerina in pink pajamas. Then her arms flopped back to her sides and she came farther into the room. She craned her head and peered past Emily at the computer monitor. “That monitor’s broken.”

  Emily smiled. “I know.”

  Abby looked at her. “It’s old. Laura’s good monitor stopped working. She bought this one at a pawn shop. A ‘temporary fix’. That’s what she said.”

  Emily sat up straighter in the chair and tried not to fidget. She was uncomfortable discussing the girl’s aunt with her. Abby still talked about Laura in the present tense on occasion, and Emily supposed the girl still held out some faint hope the woman might yet turn up alive.

  Abby came up beside her and leaned over the desk to touch the wireless mouse. She moved it across the mousepad and closed the internet application Emily had been using. The pointer moved across the screen and stopped at a folder labeled ‘Stories’. Abby double-clicked the folder and a window displaying dozens of files opened.

  Abby looked at Emily. “My Auntie was a writer. She wrote lots of stories. Some of them were even in magazines.”

  “Wow.” Emily scanned the file names. Laura’s titles hinted at stories with a literary or postmodernist bent. She smiled at Abby. “You must have been really proud of her.”

  Abby shrugged. “Yeah. But writing made her sad. She said she loved it, but that it was hard.” She sniffled. “She said…trying to be a writer was dumb. That she should have tried to be a doctor or lawyer instead. She said it would be the death of her one day.” Abby swiped at her eyes, wiping away tears. “But she was wrong, wasn’t she? Something else was the death of her.”

  Emily pulled the suddenly sobbing girl into her arms. She patted her back, stroked her hair, and made cooing, comforting noises. She looked over the top of the girl’s head at Jake, who had averted his gaze. But his own eyes glistened with tears, too. He was trying hard to hold them back. And he was trying so hard to be strong for both of them. She felt the tug of another emotion, then, some welling of feeling within her. She was starting to love him, she guessed. Really love him. She didn’t know how to feel about it, whether she should be happy or depressed. Because what was the point of falling in love anymore?

  But she didn’t have to think too long on that one. The answer was right here in her arms. This little girl. A precious life that was worth saving and nurturing. Unless things changed again in some strange and unanticipated way, the three of them likely had a good shot at long term survival. Which meant she and Jake were obligated to become surrogate parents to Abby. There was a moral imperative here. The catastrophic events of the last several days had robbed them each of their birth families. Therefore the three of them had no choice but to become a new family, one forged in the fires of desperation, and from the need that dwelled within all humans to cling to one another, to find strength and solace and warmth in one another.

  And, yes, love.

  Jake looked at her now, saw the intent way she was studying him, and managed a nervous smile. He leaned forward in his chair and said, “Hey, Abby, what do you say you and me go do some more of those finger paintings?”

  Abby sniffled and drew in a great, shuddering breath. She still had her face pressed against Emily’s chest, but she seemed finished with this latest crying jag. “Okay,” she said, the single word exhaled in a soft sigh. “But I paint better than you.”

  Jake chuckled. “Yeah, you’re a budding Picasso, that’s for sure.”

  Emily smiled and mouthed a ‘thank you’ at Jake.

  He winked and began to rise from his chair. Then he frowned and cocked his head in a way that made Emily think of a dog perking its ears. He stood the rest of the way up and began to move past Emily toward the window. Emily turned in her chair and watched him as he braced his hands on the sill and peered outside.

  Emily’s heart skipped a beat and she swallowed a hard lump in her throat. She had no good reason yet to be afraid, nothing tangible, but she’d seen and experienced so much awfulness recently that instant terror had become her default reaction to anything out of the ordinary.

  “Jake?” she said, sounding more timid than she wanted in Abby’s presence—but she couldn’t help it. “What is it?”

  He spoke without turning from the window: “Don’t you hear that?”

  Emily started to say ‘no’, but then she did hear something—a distant rumble growing louder by the nanosecond, a sound felt as much as heard. It soon became a rising roar, and Jake turned from the window and bolted out of the room.

  “Jake!”

  Panic gripped Emily. She took Abby by the hand and together they ran after Jake. In the living room, they saw the apartment’s front door standing open. Emily stopped in the center of the room and fixed Abby with the sternest expression she could manage. “Abby, I’m gonna go check on Jake. I want you to stay right here until we get back. Okay?”

  Abby’s young face reflected fear as well as a burgeoning defiance. “No! I want to come with you!”

  Emily gripped the girl by the shoulder, squeezing hard enough to elicit a wince. “I mean it, Abby!” Her tone was too harsh. She knew it at once, but she couldn’t help it. She had to make the girl stay here and then get after Jake. Damn him for running out like that! “Stay. That’s an order.”

  She left then, figuring it best to just get on with it and not give the girl a chance to pout or defy her again. She hurried down the single flight of stairs and dashed through the building’s front door. Jake was standing in the center of the courtyard, his head turned skyward. She called out to him, but the roar was so loud now the sound of her voice couldn’t penetrate it. She stood beside him and turned her own head to the sky.

  At first she saw nothing. Just that strangely washed-out sky they’d been seeing for over a day now. Then Jake raised his hand and pointed to a seemingly empty patch of sky in the distance. Except—it wasn’t empty. A wedge of something black came shooting over the horizon. A plane. Emily’s heart raced and she had difficulty breathing. It was a fucking plane. And not just any plane. It was something of obvious military design. A Stealth bomber maybe. It came in low over the city, so low Emily feared at first it was about to crash. Her next thought was that the plane was piloted by some rogue Air Force survivor, a whacko who meant to bomb the city for the sheer fun of it. But it maintained a steady altitude as it blew overhead and shot toward the downtown area. No bombs or missiles fell. They watched its tail end disappear, and several moments elapsed before they realized they could hear again.

  A sudden gasp burst from Emily’s lungs. “Oh my God!” She turned a wide-eyed gaze on Jake. “What the fuck!?”

  “I don�
�t know.” Jake shook his head. “Maybe…maybe there’s some rudimentary form of government still out there. Maybe it’s, uh…reconstituting itself. And this was some sort of recon mission.” He shrugged. “Or some rogue pilot is out on a joyride. One possibility is as likely as the other, I guess.”

  He frowned. “Where’s Abby?”

  Emily gasped again. “Aw, shit.” She smacked her forehead. “You had me so worried when you took off like that. I made her stay in the apartment.”

  Jake smiled reassuringly. “I’m sure she’s fine.”

  Emily’s brow creased. “Yeah. But let’s get up there and check on her.”

  They reentered the building and trudged back up the flight of stairs to the apartment, feeling tired now that the adrenaline rush triggered by the plane’s appearance had faded. Emily was first through the apartment’s front door. She stared uncomprehendingly at the empty living room for a moment.

  Jake came in behind her and moved into the middle of the living room, his head doing a slow swivel on his neck as he scanned the biggest room of the apartment for any sign of the little girl. “Where is she?”

  Emily didn’t reply right away. She was too busy trying not to panic. If she didn’t keep a tight rein on her emotions, she’d start to hyperventilate, become a useless, gibbering mess. She needed to think clearly. But her brain was refusing to kick into gear.

  “Abby! Where are you!?”

  The sound of Jake’s voice was the impetus she needed. She ran into the bedroom, saw at once the girl wasn’t there, and threw open the the door to the bathroom. Which also proved empty. Each empty room was like a taunt. Some force—God, or whatever—was providing her with a heart-squeezing object lesson, showing her what could happen when you didn’t act responsibly.

  Christ, she should never have left the little girl in the apartment. Should never have let her out of her fucking sight. The idea that Abby might be dead occurred to her for the first time, hitting her with the force of two-by-four to the head. She’d only been out in the courtyard with Jake for a minute. Maybe two. Such a miniscule stretch of time. But more than time enough for someone (Aaron?) to come up the back way and snatch the vulnerable girl. She might have screamed. More than once, maybe. But they wouldn’t have heard her over the roar of the low-flying plane.

  Jake came into the bedroom. “Is she in here?”

  Emily saw it in his face. He hadn’t found her in the kitchen. Or sitting on the stairs out back. “Oh my God.” She covered her face with her hands. Shaking hands that pressed into her eyes to stem the flow of tears that wanted to erupt there. “Oh my God. Oh my God, Jake…”

  Jake gripped her wrists and pulled her hands from her face. “Emily, look at me!”

  She looked at him, her eyes shining with desperation. “She’s gone. Oh, Jake, she’s gone, and it’s all my fault.”

  He shook his head. “What do you mean?”

  And now tears did sting her eyes. She wasn’t strong enough to hold them back. But the tears shamed her. Were they for the missing little girl? Or were they a product of the massive guilt she felt for abandoning her? “I made her stay up here. She wanted to come with me. You shouldn’t have run off like that. Y-you scared me. I thought Abby would only s-slow me d-down…”

  Jake’s expression hardened. He bit his lower lip and looked away. She saw anger flash in his eyes, an emotion he’d never once directed at her. He turned and started to walk out of the room.

  Emily hurried after him. “Wait! Where are you going?”

  He didn’t say anything, and Emily followed him out of the apartment. He stomped down the steps and kicked open the building’s back door. It flew back and struck Emily in the shoulder on the backswing, sending a jolt of pain down her back. The pain barely registered. Everything was going to hell. It was amazing how fast everything a person held dear could be taken away. A thing she should’ve learned well enough already.

  She chased Jake down Fairfax. “Jake! Goddammit! I’m sorry. I wasn’t blaming you. Please stop. You’re scaring me. We’ve got to find Abby. Please…”

  Jake came to an abrupt halt in the street. He stood there with his back to Emily, his hands clenched at his sides. She watched his shoulders move up and down as he rapidly breathed in and out. He was obviously trying to contain an outpouring of rage. Emily didn’t know whether to take the struggle as a hopeful sign. She stopped ten feet from him, too afraid to touch him yet, or to get too close.

  But she did manage to speak again. “I’m truly sorry. I fucked up. I got scared and did something really dumb. Please don’t hate me. I…I love you, Jake.”

  His posture changed as the meaning of that last phrase registered. Some of the tension seemed to go out of him. He wasn’t breathing so hard and no longer looked ready to explode. In a moment he turned and looked at her. “I love you too, Emily.” The stern set of his features seemed to belie his words. But then his expression softened by the tiniest of increments. “I think I’ve loved you all along.” He licked his lips and let out a huge sigh. “But that doesn’t matter right now. We’ve got a little girl to find.”

  Emily moved closer to him, almost close enough to reach out and touch him—but she kept her arms at her sides. “Yes. Let’s find her. But, Jake…why were you going this way?”

  He pointed to something in the road. “That. I saw it as soon as I came out the door.”

  Emily wasn’t sure she wanted to see what he was pointing at, but she made herself look anyway. She gasped, and felt something brittle come close to breaking inside her. It was a pink Hello Kitty sandal. One of Abby’s sandals. She looked at Jake through eyes full of tears. “It must have fallen off her foot when…”

  She wasn’t able to say it.

  So Jake did: “When Aaron came running down this street with our little girl in his arms.”

  Emily sniffled. “Oh, Jake…”

  Our little girl…

  Neither had voiced it aloud, but they had both already been thinking of her that way. It was a crazy way to feel. They’d known her just over two days. But they were learning that desperate circumstances had a way of accelerating the arc of a relationship. Emily loved Abby as intensely as she would a child from her own womb. And now she was gone. Maybe forever. The thought drove back some of the swirling anguish that was trying to engulf her. Another, even stronger, emotion supplanted it. Anger. A burning, all-consuming rage, coupled with a sudden desire to commit murder.

  She looked at Jake. “I’m going to kill him.”

  Jake blinked. Then he nodded. “Yeah.”

  The idea of taking another person’s life would have repulsed Emily mere days ago. It wasn’t the kind of notion civilized, enlightened people were supposed to entertain. Justice was a thing to be meted out by the law, to be determined in an orderly way by courts and juries. But civilization itself was no more, nor was there any semblance of a police force. Justice—or retribution—was now a thing to be determined on an individual basis by those few left standing.

  In her mind, Emily had already judged Aaron Harris and found him guilty.

  And the son of a bitch had to hang.

  She nodded at the Glock. “We need another gun.”

  Jake looked up and down the street. “Yeah. But I don’t think we’ve got time to go looking for one.”

  Emily wanted a weapon of her own. But Jake was right. They had to resume the search. Every second that elapsed with them standing here greatly diminished Abby’s already slim chances for survival. She started to say so, but her gaze was drawn then by a glint of something silver winking in the sunlight. At the curb outside a small house a half block down the street was an array of things some departing student had set out for the trash collectors (or local scavengers), including a ratty sofa, a television set, a microwave oven—and an aluminum baseball bat with a handle wrapped in fraying tape.

  Emily almost smiled.

  She walked past Jake and strode briskly toward the clump of collegiate detritus.

  Jake hurried
after her. “Em? What are you doing?”

  But Emily had already arrived at her destination. She answered Jake by drawing the bat from the overflowing trash can. She felt a kind of wild elation, the sort experienced by warriors about to enter battle. Sure, she didn’t have a gun, but this was almost better. The bat had some real heft to it, but she felt it was short enough that she could wield it pretty effectively. She imagined taking a swing at Aaron Harris’s head and could almost hear the crack of his skull beneath the force of the blow.

  Yeah.

  She definitely liked this bat.

  She looked at Jake. “Let’s get after that motherfucker and take our girl back.”

  Concern flickered in Jake’s dark eyes. “Yeah. Let’s do that.” He touched Emily’s arm, gave her a gentle squeeze. “But let’s be careful, too.”

  Emily grunted. “Sure.”

  She brushed past him, returning to the fallen pink sandal. She scanned the surrounding area, trying to guess which way Aaron would have gone. And as she did she gripped the club’s handle tighter.

  * * *

  Aaron Harris couldn’t believe his luck. After two days of skulking about and waiting for just the right opportunity to strike, he’d been unable to bear it any longer.

  Enough fucking around, he’d thought. I’m just gonna go get the bitch.

  So he’d gone to get her. But things didn’t work out the way he’d envisioned. He didn’t have Emily Sinclair. Yet. But he did have another prize, one he suspected would soon bring the object of his most fervent desires into his possession.

  It was funny how things worked out sometimes. You set your sights on one thing, just completely devote all your energies toward accomplishing that goal, and something entirely unexpected comes along to alter your plans, change them in some uniquely delicious way.

  Aaron had never been a patient man. This brave new world he was so fortunate to inhabit was one in which he was able to do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. He could walk into a store, any store, and walk out with anything he desired. Gold watches, diamonds, rubies, and other jewels. He could drive a car with a list price of a quarter million dollars off the lot of a dealership, or walk into a bank and walk out with piles of money.