I pushed back the bed covers and hurried to the window. My only concern was for Oliver. He was somewhere in the city, he could be right where the alarm was going off. Every part of my body drained of warmth, leaving me cold as I moved.
Pulling back the curtains, the city glowed down the hill in the distance. Between all the dilapidated buildings were plumes of smoke. Something was burning.
Something big.
I wanted to run down to them, find Oliver in the crowds and make sure he was okay. I desperately needed to know he wasn’t caught up in whatever was causing the huge fires. For the city to be so lit up the blazes had to be consuming a large portion of the streets.
Surely Oliver would know better and stay away from that kind of danger? Surely he would do everything he could to keep himself safe?
But he was still Oliver. And Oliver felt compelled to help every person he could. It was what made him such a beautiful person. His sense of selflessness had been proven to me time and time again. If there was a fire and people needed help, he would be in the thick of it.
Now I really needed to find him. I had to know he was alive and well. I wouldn’t be able to think of anything else until I knew for sure. If anything happened to Oliver… I didn’t know what I would do.
I didn’t bother dressing. I ran through the house and burst through the front door. I barely had shoes on my feet before I made it to the front gate.
And then I stopped.
Because I could not go any further.
I had not stepped foot outside that gate in almost a year. Not since I had chosen the house to be my home and refuge. Opening the wire barrier and passing through it seemed as impossible as the world being able to restore itself.
“She’s leaving.”
“No, she’s not.”
“She’ll never leave this place.”
“She could.”
“What’s stopping her?” The running commentary from my forty-three friends was invading my thoughts. That was all I needed at that moment.
“What’s the alarm for?”
“It’s coming from the city.”
“Oooh, it’s a fire.”
“A darn big one.”
“I hope it doesn’t come up here.”
“Why would it do that?”
“It’s a fire, it can do whatever it wants.”
“Kind of like you.”
“Not like Everly, though.”
“No, she can’t even leave.”
“She’s a coward.”
“You can’t say that.”
“I can if it’s true.”
The worst thing was they were right. I couldn’t leave. No matter how much my heart ached to know Oliver was okay, I couldn’t step one foot past the gate.
And I hated myself for it.
Oliver could be hurt somewhere, he could be in dire need of help with nobody else there to care for him. He could have been lying down hurt and hoping I would find him to save his life. And I wouldn’t come.
Apparently not even that horrible thought was enough to get me to overcome my fears. If Oliver needing me wasn’t enough, nothing ever would be. I was destined to spend the rest of my life in that house.
Alone.
With my ghosts.
I ran back inside and slammed the door behind me, regardless of who had followed at my heels. They kept up their chatter as we moved upstairs.
I crawled back into bed and pulled the covers up over my head. I didn’t need their opinions and judgments. I already loathed myself for choosing the path of the coward, I didn’t need to hear it from them, too.
Sleep was impossible from then onwards. There was no way I was going to get any more shuteye when the city was burning only a short distance away.
I tossed and turned as I thought about Oliver. I needed him to be okay, he had to be okay. If he wasn’t, I would have absolutely no reason to stay connected to the city. I could run further away, disappear into the world at large and never have to be reminded of everything we’d lost.
Or my guilt.
Morning was almost a relief as I had a reason to get out of bed. It was only to feed myself so I didn’t die of starvation, but it was something. I wasn’t ready to die yet, I was too much of a coward for even that.
“She’s up.”
“She looks terrible.”
“The poor dear didn’t sleep at all.”
“She should have gone into the city.”
I listened to them all the way into the kitchen. It was nearly impossible to drown them out. I had never met more opinionated people in my life. If I had, they wouldn’t have been in my life for very long.
Pouring my ration of cereal, I looked beyond the yard to see the city. It was no longer glowing, the sunlight drowned out any flames. There was still plenty of smoke, though. Plumes of the grey ghosting mists travelled upwards to the sky. I hated to think of the damage the fire had left in its wake.
Everyone it had killed.
There would be more ghosts in the city today.
I closed the curtains so I couldn’t see it anymore. I didn’t need or want a reminder that something terrible was going on nearby and I hadn’t done anything to help stop it.
Not that I could have done something anyway. It wasn’t like I was a master survivalist or anything close. I wasn’t even a fireman that would know what to do with a damn fire. I would have been useless.
That’s what I told myself, anyway.
I didn’t really believe it.
The phone’s high pitched ringing brought me out of my thoughts as my heart stopped beating in my chest and jumped up to my throat.
I ran for the house phone, practically the only appliance that still worked in the house. Picking up the receiver, I prayed to hear Oliver’s comforting voice on the other end.
“Oliver?” I asked hopefully. I didn’t breathe again until I heard a response.
“Hello? Is Jonah there?” It was a female voice, one I didn’t recognize.
“No, there’s no Jonah here.”
“Oh, sorry, wrong number.” She hung up so all I could hear was the crackling dial tone.
It wasn’t Oliver. He was still out there somewhere.
The chatter started instantly around me. “Jonah? Who’s Jonah?”
“I don’t know.”
“It was a wrong number,” I stated, just to shut them up.
“She was hoping it was Oliver.”
“She’s worried about him.”
“She should be worried about him. Those fires were huge.”
“It’s still burning.”
“Still?”
I turned to face them all, addressing them in a way I rarely did. “If you’re all so smart, tell me what I should do.”
My question seemed to take them by surprise for a moment. There were a few seconds of absolute silence but it was a heavenly few seconds. I had almost forgotten what it was like to just have peace and quiet around me.
But then it started.
“You should go into the city and find Oliver.”
“No, she shouldn’t. It could be dangerous down there.”
“How could she find him in a big city? It’s not like he’s fifty feet tall.”
“She should try.”
“Two souls that care about each other always find their way.”
“She might not come back.”
“That’s probably a good thing.”
“We’ll be lonely.”
“She should do whatever her heart tells her to do.”
“Not if it will cost her life. No man is worth that.”
“I hear ya.”
Clearly I had been stupid thinking they might actually be able to help me. I should have known better, I had brought that on myself. But that didn’t mean I had to stand here and listen to them argue about my life.
I grabbed the book I had read twice already and hurried into the backyard. I settled myself on the deck chair in the sun and tried to get lost in the pages.
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It wasn’t going to work. I found myself re-reading the same lines over and over again. My mind was too buzzed with conflicting emotions to allow itself to be absorbed into the fictional world.
Everything used to be so different. Thinking back to the things I once worried about, they all seemed so trivial now. Just days before the Event, it had been the school dance I was concerned about.
I was going with Oliver. Not as a couple, just as friends. Everyone else in our group all had boyfriends and girlfriends. Oliver and I were the odd ones out. So we agreed to go to the dance as friends and help each other find someone to dance with.
I didn’t know what to wear because the weather was going to be cold. A dress would make me freeze but what else could I wear? I didn’t want to be the outcast that wore a tuxedo in some lame attempt to buck the system and be cool. So I knew I needed to find a winter-type dress that looked great but kept me warm at the same time.
It was embarrassing now to think of how much time I actually spent trying to find that dress. Oliver kept bugging me about what color tie he needed so we’d match. I kept telling him the perfect dress was out there somewhere, waiting for me, but I didn’t know what color it was.
I never found that dress.
The Event happened instead of the dance.
I wondered for the longest time what life would have been like now if we had all gone to the dance and everything continued on as normal. Perhaps I would have found the perfect guy and we would have fallen in love. We would still be attending school and getting ready to graduate. College would be looming in the distance like a big signpost.
There wouldn’t be one part of my life that resembled how it was now. I couldn’t have imagined how things went. Who would expect something like the Event to happen? Not even all the survivalists and doomsday preppers were prepared for it.
I closed the book because it was pointless keeping up the charade. I stared at the sky instead. How was it possible that it was still the same blue sky I had stared at before the Event? It seemed like nothing had changed above but everything had changed below.
Suddenly another siren started blaring from the city, jolting me upright. I had to stand to see over the fence but I instantly regretted getting up so quickly. Everyone followed me as I rushed to the gate to peer over.
Fresh plumes of smoke were rising up toward the sun, turning the blue into an orange-grey. At least it now looked like a different sky than I was used to. It somehow seemed appropriate.
“What on earth is going on down there?”
“You can go look.”
“I’m not going down there. I’m dead, I’m not stupid.”
“Why? You can only die once.”
“Can’t even do that right.”
“Nobody’s going down there,” I said sternly. Although, I’m not sure why I did. I didn’t care if the ghosts ventured into the city. Nor did I care if they came back. I would have been glad to get rid of them.
But, somehow, we were family. They were the only people I had. God knew they annoyed me as much as a real family did. The thought of being alone in the house at the top of the hill was a thought much scarier than having them around.
The alarm shut off as we stood in shock but the smoke still freely flowed. Two alarms in as many days, that wasn’t a good sign. Oliver was right about one thing when he visited me – they needed my help down there.
And they needed it now.
Chapter Three
Three days later, the fires were still burning in the city. I got up every day, expecting to see a clear sky and being disappointed. The air outside was so acrid with the lingering smoke that it seeped into everything. I never thought smoke had a taste before, but it did.
It tasted like death.
I stood in front of the kitchen pantry, trying to put something together for breakfast. My choices had severely dwindled. All that was left were a few cans of food. They had all passed their used-by date months earlier.
“You’ll end up like one of us if you don’t get some food soon.”
“I miss food.”
“Me too. My favorite was ice cream.”
“Chocolate.”
“Jellybeans.”
“Pizza.”
“Guys,” I interrupted. My stomach was growling just listening to them. “Don’t remind me what I’m missing.”
Agatha moved to the front of the crowd and placed her hands gently on my shoulders. I don’t know why she always did that, she couldn’t actually touch me. “You need food, Everly. You can’t delay it much longer.”
I moved from the depressing pantry to look out over the backyard instead. “Maybe I could grow some fruit and vegetables in the garden? Then I would always have food.”
“You need seeds for that.”
“And good soil.”
“I wouldn’t trust anything grown in that ground. Who knows how contaminated it is.”
“Maybe it will make things grow quicker.”
“Or bigger.”
I tuned them out when they started talking about mutant vegetables. My problem was real… and serious. If I didn’t find more food soon, I was going to starve. I had been on rations for so long that I was surviving on very little, but having nothing was not going to keep me alive.
I had already raided all the houses on the hill long ago. It was how I lasted this long. I knew it would be futile returning to the buildings to scour for scraps. If I had left anything behind, the rodents and wild animals would have scavenged it by now.
The situation couldn’t be ignored for much longer. I had enough canned food for one, maybe two days, at the most. If my body got too much weaker, I wouldn’t be able to make it into the city to search for more supplies.
I would be dead halfway down the street.
But it wasn’t only the food situation bothering me. I tried to convince myself it was, but it really wasn’t. I couldn’t even fool the ghosts into believing it either.
Today was the day Oliver normally visited. I would always pretend I didn’t notice and then secretly await his arrival all day long. Even though it was still only early, a voice in the back of my head kept telling me he wasn’t coming.
The fires had been too big, the sirens too loud, for Oliver to make it out of the city. My gut instinct was telling me it would have taken a miracle for him to be okay and then make it up the hill to knock on my front door.
He wasn’t coming.
I just knew it.
Oliver always came before noon. He was more reliable than clockwork, he always had been. I never needed to wear a watch when he was around because he kept a keen eye on his own and would tell me if I had to be somewhere.
Noon came and went with the echoing bongs from the old Grandfather clock in the living room. One of the ghosts insisted I kept it wound, although I had no idea why. It wasn’t like time meant anything to anyone anymore.
Nighttime fell as the full moon made its ascent into the sky. The city was barely a dim glow in the distance. Oliver never came. It was the first time he had missed his visit since he found me after the Event.
But wasn’t that what I wanted all this time? I had decided long ago I was never going to return to the city with him. I was never going to listen to a word he said. With every visit, I had told him to leave me alone and not come back.
I had received what I wanted.
Oliver wasn’t coming back, exactly like I had begged him to do on so many occasions. I was being left alone, alone with my forty-three ghosts that were slowly sending me insane. Alone to starve to death in the deserted street. Alone forever.
I went to bed exhausted. My stomach ached for something to eat but I didn’t dare delve into the few remaining morsels I still had. They needed to last longer than humanely possible. Perhaps the leaves on the few trees in the yard wouldn’t taste so bad? Maybe contaminates from the crumbling city had time to dissolve or evaporate? There had to be a slim chance they wouldn’t kill me.
Even through my hea
vy eyelids, I wasn’t able to sleep. Oliver filtered through my thoughts relentlessly. I wondered if he had chosen not to visit or if something really had happened to him in the city fires. Perhaps there was a lot more going on down there than I realized.
It wouldn’t have surprised me.
The night dragged on, impossibly long. The growling of my stomach was louder than the ghosts’ midnight chatter. The ache in my chest was even worse for my lost friend.
It became clear in the darkness I had a choice to make. I could give up completely and wait for death to take me away. I could then join the ghosts and roam the earth unbidden for the rest of eternity.
I could do that.
Or I could choose life.
I could choose to fight and leave the safety of my house to search for food. But more than that, I could go in search of Oliver. Something told me that if I could just see he was okay, half the aches in my body would settle. The hunger wouldn’t feel so bad, the demons in my head would be quieted.
For breakfast that morning I allowed myself five baked beans. That left six for dinner or lunch, depending on how long I could make myself wait. I drank water, trying to convince myself it would keep my stomach full. I don’t know what made me think I would be able to trick my own mind into believing it.
It wasn’t fooled.
I was starving.
I wrapped my only woolen coat around my shoulders and put on my thickest boots. Even on the warmer days I felt cold now. It was like I could feel the breeze right down to my bones and they would shiver underneath my skin.
The cold steel of the front gate was underneath my hands. I stood there, taking a few deep breaths to stop the dizziness. The food situation, I could handle. It was the constant concern for Oliver I couldn’t take anymore.
I had to move, I had to find him.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t alone.
“Here we go again.”
“I don’t know why she bothers, it’s not like she’s going to go anywhere.”
“Maybe she likes the view.”
“Of the dead city? I don’t think so.”
All The Pretty Ghosts (The Never Series Book 1) Page 2
