by J. D. Palmer
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Disclaimer
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Epilogue
THE MEEK
J.D. Palmer
Copyright © 2017 J.D. Palmer
All rights reserved.
ISBN:
ISBN-13:
Dedicated to my mother. I wouldn’t be able to write about strength, compassion, or dark humor without her.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Prologue
I’m incapable of focusing on anything, my heavy lidded eyes only allowing a blurred, cobweb-like view of the world. Blues and grays and whites swim in front of me.
I can feel the little hairs on my arms. The hairs on my legs and chest. I can feel the hairs on my head. I can feel them. They seem to tug my thoughts upwards, as if the cogitations were the seeds of plants impatient to blossom in the outside world.
What a funny thought, our hairs being the manifestation of ideas. Did bald people simply stop having original thoughts? I open my mouth to laugh and then forget what I had been thinking about. I shake my head, trying to clear the jumble and disarray from my brain.
I hear a bird. I can’t tell what kind it is. And there, to my left is a flash of bright green. Brighter than grass. Too bright. Why is it so bright…?
My mind wanders. I open and close my hands. They are clammy, damp with an unnatural sweat. I rub them along my jeans, slowly one side before flipping them over to the other. Something about the repetition feels good. I cut the nail on my pointer finger too close to the cuticle and it stings, but the pain seems far away, somehow removed from my own body. As if I was watching someone else with the same problem.
I was doing something. I had been doing something. What was I doing? What was I doing? I cling to that thought, a mantra repeated over and over again as I scramble to find the broken thread. It was important, I can feel it, and I shuffle this way and that through the dark rushes of my mind as I search for the answer.
I am, if anything, a stubborn man. My father always said it was my best quality, that more than my smarts or my athletic ability my “mulishness” would get me through hard times. I had argued that I wasn’t stubborn so much as thorough, he had smiled as though I had proven his point. Maybe I had.
My dad…
That was it. I was telling someone about my dad. What was I saying?
Football…
Grass…
I smack my hands together, an unconscious jerk as if I were catching a ball to my chest. My fingers uncurl and fall back to my legs. How long have I been sitting on the ground? It’s hard. Stony. I rub my palms over my eyes as if I can simply wipe away the grey sludge that clouds my vision.
“You’re not focusing, son.”
I jog back to the football laying in the grass, give it a savage kick back towards my father.
“You listening?”
“Just throw it again.”
He shakes his head and points at me with the ball.
“You’re already running down the field for a touchdown before you even catch the ball. You’re too impatient. You have to catch the ball first, then you run.”
“I got it.”
“No you don’t.” He seems angry. Or frustrated. “Stop trying to be the hero every play. BE PATIENT.”
I know what I’m doing. Fuck, I’m the leading scorer. I shake my head, angry spits of air out of my nostrils as I line up. I count to five and take off before my dad says anything. I run a deep route, juking out before veering left into the center of the park. I turn for the ball. Nothing is there but empty blue sky. I throw my hands into the air.
“You kidding me?”
How am I supposed to show him that I won’t drop it if he doesn’t throw it?
He’s lying down in the grass and my first instinct is to think he’s being a jerk. Napping if I’m not going to listen to him.
Wait.
I remember this.
“And that was the last thing he said to me,” I say through lips that feel swollen, my tongue nothing but a dry piece of cotton wedged between my teeth.
There is a laugh that wrests me away from the memory. Hur hur. Something is tossed onto my lap, my hands pulling it in as if it were the errant football finally thrown my way. I open my eyes and my head bobs, my gaze catching sight of red before I close them again. Is this a blanket? Why….?
What had I been talking about? Something, perhaps, about grass. Or football. About… There. About my father. My father in the middle of the park, surrounded by green. So peaceful. So… at peace. I had thought maybe it was better that he died that way. Better than the way everyone else had.
A figure looms over me. I try to give it the blanket. I don’t know why I have it. I must have been holding it for someone.
“No. That’s for you,” a voice says.
I pull the blanket back into my chest and blink up at the voice, face crinkling as I try to will my eyes to stay open.
“Dad?”
There is a laugh again, the same hur hur.
“No, boy, I am not your father. I am much greater than that.”
The steel cuff makes a dull clink as it snaps shut around my wrist.
Chapter 1
The world didn’t end with a religious war, or a race war, or an economic collapse. It didn’t end with everyone blowing each other up with nuclear warheads and it didn’t end with a natural disaster. It didn’t end because someone got offended in one of the million petty squabbles that were real, or fake, or imagined.
It ended quietly.
If there were enough people still alive to sit around and form some sort of opinion on the death of civilization, I think, perhaps, that they would be embarrassed.
I am in Los Angeles. Or part of it. I think. It’s hard to tell with this city. It took the plane I flew in on forty-five minutes to get from one side to the other. I once asked my friend what was the difference between Los Angeles and New York City. He told me that New York is a candle, tall and thin and burning strongly. L.A. is a candle that burned too quick, wax spreading out and pouring over the land until it’s a massive puddle and no one knows where the wick is anymore. I thought he was just a jaded actor. But I’m in a beach community and on a clear day I was told I could see the Hollywood sign about twenty miles away.
Now that everyone is dead every day is a clear day.
I roll over onto my side. My hips have developed sores where my bones rub on the stone floor. Better that than the ripped and torn red blanket soiled by my own piss and shit. I scratch at the scab on my wrist where the iron cuffs have rubbed me raw
and wipe a dirty hand across my runny nose. I feel a cough coming on and roll to my other side and curl into a ball as the hacking rocks my body, torn lungs throbbing in pain.
How did I get to this?
My hands are clasped together in front of my face. I slowly uncurl them, searching them for signs of the person that was before. Faded callouses. The right pinky that broke and healed crooked. The brown orb of a scar where our dog, old and no longer lucid, had bit me when I was eight. My dad had put him down the next day, no matter how much I begged.
How did I get to this?
I stare at these thin, scratched, and grimy hands. A stranger’s hands, surely not mine. I turn over my long, slender fingers capped by broken and jagged nails. I can’t bear to chew them down. Not after what they’ve touched. Not when I need them. I stare at them and think back on my life, stubborn in my persistence to figure out just where, exactly, I had fucked up.
I had a lot of potential growing up. At least according to everyone around me. “That kid will rule the world one day,” they’d say. And I’d say something suitably humble while thumping my chest on the inside.
And I believed them.
My mom, especially, told me I could do anything I put my mind to. I know all parents say that. But my mother didn’t have that lie in her eyes that kids can see.
I could do anything.
Grade school went by and I received more adulation. I was an athlete and I had a brain. I could make shots on a basketball court that boggled your mind. Football, baseball, soccer; all came easy. And I’d offer to do other kids’ math homework. I did tests quickly and had a book handy to read just so the other kids could see how bored I was. Then I’d break the school’s mile run record.
It’s safe to say I was universally detested.
I didn’t hear the whispers after I raised my hand to answer a complex question, nor did I see the dark looks cast my way in the locker room. Spending weekends alone, I figured, was because people were jealous of me. It took me a long, long time to figure out that I was just an asshole.
Then my dad died.
Is that where I went wrong?
I can’t be the only one who daydreamed about the sudden loss of a close one. How I would keep my head up and put on a brave face and how everyone would remark at how strong I was in the face of this tragedy. They would ask me if I needed anything and I’d shake my head and say, “I’m fine, thank you,” and they would marvel at my poise.
How pathetic that seems. How sad. Reality is not like that.
“Be patient.”
Those were the last words my dad said to me, and it was almost as if they became etched onto the fabric of my being. Not a note, not the words of a loving father instructing his son on how to improve. For me it became a condemnation. The last words of the most important man in my life were a directive that I could not obey. I could not stop being impatient, or reckless, or competitive to the point of antagonizing each and every person around me.
So I quit.
That’s all I could think of to do. Remove myself from sports, from school, from everything. Become a spectator and perhaps, perhaps, I’ll honor my father’s last wish.
And it seemed to work.
High school carried along and I faded into the periphery. I played on my phone or read books. I did just enough schoolwork to pass. Apathy sank its roots deep down inside of me, tendrils wrapping around my stunted ambition and strangling it until it no longer existed. The courses and activities and groups that existed to help shape a person now held no interest for me. Art was a passing fancy. Sports were shunned. School was just something to get through. I became content showing up.
And then I stopped doing that.
I had shitloads of potential and I was turning into a disappointment. But I didn’t care. The ocean has potential too, right? The potential to turn into a tsunami and sweep us all away. Some things are better not fully realized, right?
A coward’s excuse.
I was given time to mourn. And then more time after that. Slowly I was pushed, then exhorted, then pled with. Sympathy turned to “it’s just a phase” to disappointment. People stopped asking me when I would do something, or take part in something, anything. I was allowed to fade into the background.
And the sad thing is that I was happy there. I was making friends. Genuine friends. I had time to go watch my sister’s band recitals and time to go swimming and… I met Jessica.
My mom worried about me. But she didn’t push the issue, at least not overtly. She knew my stubbornness well. The harder you push the harder I dig in. I got that from her, so I suppose she knew the best way to handle it.
Maybe she figured it was a phase I’d outgrow. And I was spending a lot of time with Jessica. Hikes and long drives and bonfires on the edge of the lake. Long days in which I’d watch her take pictures in old barns or from the top of a hay bale and we didn’t need to talk. Maybe my mom thought it was therapeutic for me.
Maybe it was.
Only once did my mother ever say anything that crossed that line. We went out to a baseball game, my sister’s band was playing during the seventh inning stretch so I figured my mom asked me along to show support.
“You could be out there, you know. You were so good at baseball when you were younger.” I shrugged and avoided her sad eyes, doing my best to focus on the bright lights and the crackly loudspeaker. Anything to avoid talking about this. I stared at the bald spot of the guy in front of us and marveled at the accuracy with which he spat sunflower seeds.
A few minutes later, “your dad always thought you’d end up playing baseball.”
The old familiar pressure settled on my shoulders. And the thing was I did want to do something. Be something. Just not that. Just not… now. I had time. I had time for life to tap me on the shoulder and show me the way.
I thought I had so much time.
Then I was out of school and afloat in a world that demanded that you know your place.
I just wished someone would tell me.
I had so much potential. These are the thoughts that keep me company as the day passes in my prison. Not exactly wallowing in self-pity, more of a logical interest combined with despair. What choices lead me to this?
When the sickness came I had panicked, running outside for help only to be greeted by the same horror again and again. Men and women, and children, caught in a frenzy of panic as their insides turned to poison, the blood in their body thickening and darkening their terrified eyes before slowly they curled into a fetal position and… expired.
I kept going back to my friend’s apartment, the one place I knew in this foreign city. Then running out again. Shouting or sneaking or just walking. A frenzy of action that did nothing.
My friend was dead and I worried about my parents and my sister. I worried about Jessica, the love of my life, and the child she told me she is carrying. I worried and tried to use my phone to call someone. I tried to use the internet to connect with someone, with anything.
I accomplished nothing.
The lights were out and I was alone with fear and questions. Why am I still alive? Is it just L.A.? Will the world right itself soon? What if I rush home to find everyone dead?
I spent a lot of time waiting. Waiting to cope with the death all around me. Waiting for someone to explain what had happened. Waiting for the lights to come back on. I would wander aimlessly, eating and sleeping and then doing it again, lost in the sudden silence of a world gone dark.
Such a fool.
Being bereft of company showed me how important it was for me to measure myself against the rest of mankind. How could I grieve if I couldn’t compare my despair to the next man? How was I to know what was important if I did not see the struggles of someone else? What was my purpose without other people?
I struggled to keep myself together. Guilt at surviving collided with the grand scope of the change in front of me. The death in front of me. The absolute shock of the catastrophe with no one to talk to abou
t it.
This is where I went wrong. This…
I thought I had learned patience. I thought, in a distorted way, that the lesson my father desperately wanted me to learn had finally settled into my bones.
Two weeks ago I found signs of life, signs that I wasn’t alone. And I leapt without thinking.
Such an idiot.
If I had no sense of purpose I still had hope. The first two people I met after the world ended robbed me of even that. The man, Stuart, lured me into his home and drugged my food. He chained me in this room. Chained me in a room with a girl who is so broken that I’m not even sure she knows I am here. Ask me which scares me more and I’d be hard pressed to answer.
I was slowly weaned off of the drugs. My body given a week to diminish. Glimpses of the room and the girl and Stuart appearing out of the fog, slowly coalescing from dream to reality. I was slow to process everything. Maybe my mind couldn’t cope. It’s a drastic change from playing with your friends, face glued to an iPhone, to watching a whole city die. To finding yourself locked in a room with a girl who cannot speak.
The part of my mind that is analytical wonders if my mind would have cracked had I not been drugged. Would I have gone crazy? I was headed down that path before I met Stuart. Did he save me? Did he give me time to transition into this scary new reality? Or did I lose my mind and am I simply imagining this captivity?
God I’m scared.
We are in a room above a garage that was modified into passable living quarters. Or a prison. Stuart’s house is adjacent to the garage, his comings and goings marked by the squeal from the patio gate. He does not care if we know when he is in his house or has departed. He knows we are powerless to do anything regardless.
The girl sits across from me now just as she has every day for thirteen days. Like me she is chained to the wall, although she is only manacled on one arm. And she has a bed. Frilly pink sheets and satin pillows. I have the scraps of a blanket.
She does not meet my gaze, nor does she respond to me when I speak to her. The horrors visited upon her either by the death of those around us or from the man have caused her to retreat within herself. The only sounds I’ve heard from her have been involuntary groans when Stuart forces himself on her. Now, as is the case when she is awake, she stares out the window as her hands slowly run up and down her body, washing it with an invisible washcloth.
