The Nuclear Winter

by Brian Thompson

  THE NUCLEAR WINTER

  A Reject High Legacy novel

  Brian Thompson

  Copyright © 2019 by Brian Thompson

  Great Nation Publishing, LLC

  3828 Salem Road #56

  Covington, GA 30016

  www.authorbrianthompson.com

  E-mail: brian@authorbrianthompson.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recorded, photocopied, or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owner, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious situation. Any resemblances to actual events or persons, living or dead – are purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the editor.

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-0-9891056-5-1

  LCCN: 2019945587

  This work is dedicated to the memory of Claudette Thompson and Margaret Harley

  CHAPTER ONE

  Since my fifth-grade year, Death has wanted to meet me. Three years, almost four, he’d followed me back and forth to elementary then middle school, chemotherapy, radiation treatments, the shower — everywhere. Okay, so maybe stalked was more accurate. Like ice dissolving in cold water, I eventually came around to see the inevitability of our appointment. My invisible stalker was harmless, though, because my life belonged to him. No rush. He’d claim me when the time came, and the inch-long pink scar across my left wrist reminded me I was on his clock not mine.

  When I was born, my mother named me “Luciana” because nothing evil could coexist with light. She’d had me at seventeen, and my father wasn’t around, so her hopes had to be wishful thinking. That explained the constant hovering over me and monitoring. At home, I kept to myself. Then, she wouldn’t notice my behavior as much and have me committed against my will. Another visit to the mental floor of the hospital was a definite “no.”

  Tomorrow, I’d go back, not for an “involuntary hold of mental illness” but for removal of my Broviac lumen catheter and…I’d officially learn how long I’d have to live. It’d been the only thing I’d thought about since the first calendar alert chimed days ago. The goal was seeing the ball drop on the year 2030, which was a month and a half from today.

  “Hey.” Murdoch, a school resource officer who knew me on a first-name basis, pulled his police transport into my driveway. “Nice subdivision.”

  From the slick leather back seat, I felt his hazel-eyed stare and knew what he thought — I was a spoiled, rich chick with nothing better to do than cause trouble. Mom never said much about where she got the monetary units from to buy the house except that she’d inherited them, and an inheritance meant a person had to die for it to transfer, but who? We had no family to speak of.

  He opened my door and repeated himself. “Young lady. I said ‘nice subdivision’.”

  Under my breath, I’d admitted hearing him the first time. He gnashed his teeth. “Then, respond when I talk to you. Let’s go.”

  I got out and stepped forward, eyes on everything but the broad-shouldered, bald white man who towered over my five-foot-three frame. My heart leapt with fear when he nudged my lower back with his hand. “Walking slow won’t help.”

  Of course, it wouldn’t. I buried deep the fact that he’d rattled me. He’d taken me off school grounds without administrator permission. Murdoch wasn’t arresting me for smoking and letting a boy explore under my sweatshirt though I probably should be expelled. The guy flinched when, instead of my breast, he’d felt metal catheter prongs. That’s when Murdoch showed up. “Loosen up,” I told him. “What’s the rush? It’s not like I can outrun you.”

  He stopped me next to the dormant azalea bushes. “You’d prefer handcuffs?”

  Of everything I’d done, meeting Mom in handcuffs wasn’t one I wanted to try. “Faster it is.”

  When we crossed under the awning and stood on the rubber welcome mat, Murdoch rapped his knuckles hard against the front door. “Police,” he shouted while repeatedly ringing the bell. Murdoch turned to me. “Is she home, Luciana? What about your dad?”

  Hilarious. There was expectancy in his eyes. I shrugged and attempted to still myself, but the mid-November cold and Murdoch’s closeness to my sweat-drenched body made me itchy. Tapping my sneaker soles against the concrete porch and biting my lip helped ease my nerves until I heard high-heeled footsteps across the hardwood living room floor. Anyone with a regular nine-to-five wouldn’t have been home. Not Mom, who answered her holographic phone by the second or third ring. Whatever she did away from the house during business hours never took long. I’d found that out the hard way. Several times.

  With no surprise in her voice, Mom greeted us, “Come in.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” I joked, maybe for one of the last times before she vaporized me.

  I plopped on our white leather couch. Mom stood close to me. Her dark brown hair in a bun meant she had finished lunch shift.

  She rolled up her white blouse sleeves. “Shoplifting? Destruction of property? Fighting? Truancy?” Her face dropped when she leaned toward me and sniffed marijuana.

  Though she’d sighed, I’d noticed no purple veins bulging out on her temples. She wasn’t mad? Progress! I always told her. “Why be pissed at me? Doesn’t change anything.”

  Murdoch sidled next to my mother and me. Every time we did this routine and the cop was a guy, he’d gaze at Mom with more than passing interest. She’d dyed strands of her shoulder-length hair silver and formally dressed to avoid it. Truth be told, with all that effort, she still didn’t pass for a thirty-two year old[XW1]. Her tanned skin was flawless satin except for multiple ear piercings she’d allowed to close. Before I got sick, I’d hoped to look half as hot as she did when I grew up.

  She produced her driver’s license and identified herself as my mother, Elayna Sandoval. He asked about my father, and Mom didn’t directly answer him. Nothing to say about him.

  Murdoch spoke matter-of-factly. I’m sure he’d delivered worse news than this to a parent before. “I discovered your daughter with drug paraphernalia and cornered by two senior boys at the high school.”

  Her perfect lips dropped a little. So far, she thought the worst thing I’d done in life was the weed. It helped with the nausea, and I liked not feeling miserable all the time.

  The pressure from her stare could’ve drilled holes into the right side of my face. After this run-in, she’d wonder how many guys I’d slept with at fourteen. I’d let her wonder. The truth would’ve shocked her. She wouldn’t have believed it. Not many guys want to have sex with a girl they thought might die in the sheets, and the ones that did I wanted nothing to do with.

  “And...”

  And Murdoch described the scene — nothing leading to something. They must’ve been medalists on Penn High’s track team. I’d blinked and they were gone.

  “Miss Sandoval, girls like your daughter don’t need that kind of attention.”

  Girls like me. He didn’t mean freshmen, or upper middle class, or Cape Verdean and Panamanian. I knew what he meant. Half-dying girls. Lonely, pathetic, desperate girls.

  I swallowed my protests. Everybody knows the surveillance cameras’ range, I’d have said. Because I’m sick, everyone knows I’m a virgin, and I don’t want to die that way. But I held my tongue. Heart twisting in my chest, I battled tears. I didn’t even like the guy. A month from now, who’d care about purity?

  “You could’ve been assaulted,” he told me. “Your life is important.”

  Right.

  My mom c
rossed her arms. “Okay. What are her charges, Officer?”

  Murdoch accessed the notetaking app on his holophone. “I’d like to have names or descriptions. I don’t have children of my own, but I wouldn’t — ”

  “She’s got the point!”

  Mom’s arm tensed and cocked at the elbow as if she intended to slap me. She settled for a kick to my calf, which hurt enough, and said, “Dile!”

  They looked at me. I didn’t want to tell him anything, especially since I didn’t ask for ID. Describing him meant he’d find out I was a well-endowed eighth-grader two weeks shy of turning fifteen, not a seventeen-year-old transfer student like I’d claimed. The tightness in my throat was unbearable. “Mom, I…”

  “Luciana.” Arms crossed, she stared me down.

  “I told him I was seventeen. Murdoch will arrest him.”

  She clutched my slumped shoulders and squatted in front of me. “Name or describe him, okay? He should be in jail for stupidity.”

  True. But I still wasn’t snitching. “It was a kiss, okay? He didn’t…”

  Mom’s rapid hand flinging meant I’d exasperated her. “Your information, Officer.”

  He digitally transferred his contact information to her holophone. “Here’s my private number. We don’t have to make it official.”

  I wondered…would the head principal see it that way? Dr. Harris hated me as it was.

  “Thank you.”

  “Call me when she’s ready to talk.”

  If he had read my eyes, he’d know that’d happen right after the sun burned out. Who cared about my reputation or what people thought of me? I just didn’t want to do it.

  Murdoch showed himself out, and Mom voice-activated the locks. I expected a Hall of Fame lecture. The kind where I zoned out thirty seconds in. She’d demand to count my birth control. I skip a pill, and the cramp pain would kill me before the cancer did.

  Instead, she knelt in front of me and teared up.

  Let’s face it. Say by a miracle I survived past next month. I had no shot to pass eighth grade. I’m not spending my final days doing schoolwork no matter how “normal” a life it was. I’d never have a job or a bill to finance. We’d inherited money, and all I had to do to get a big piece of it, impossible as it might [XW2]seem, was stay alive for six more years. Nothing mattered. Why should it?

  “What?” I finally asked her. “Stop staring! What do you want from me?”

  “You’re crazy!” she served back at me. “Two legal adults and you? I — ”

  “The guy recording was seventeen...”

  “Recording?” She strung together several Spanish curse words. “They could’ve…”

  “They didn’t. Neither of them would have!”

  Mom’s skin lost color. I’d never seen her break down into sobs like she did at that moment. Her hands trembled, and she loudly wailed like she’d been personally injured by what I’d done.

  Part of me wanted to erase it all. Not just my actions. My existence, too. “Y-you...you want me to be some perfect Catholic princess. Knee socks and pigtails with straight A’s.” Spit flew from my mouth onto her sweater. “That’s not me. On my best day, I’m…below average.”

  “No,” she said between sniffles. “You’re not. You’re anything but. If you realized…”

  What? My potential? I’m special? Parents were supposed to think their kids were [XW3]special. I was not stupid. I was “not living up to my potential,” or “not trying hard enough” or “bright but lazy.” I knew myself. I’d hit my ceiling — a straight-C student with luck and hard work. And, if I didn’t give it everything I had, I’d fail. Like I was doing now.

  “So, I’m special?” I blinked back my own tears. “To you? I’m a pet you feed, clothe, protect, and keep from living.”

  Mom got to her feet. She looked as if she knew my feelings. Love, longing, and sadness mixed with regret and a dash of anger. “Fourteen years.” Her voice cracked. “Murdoch could’ve reported you to the principal, thank God, he didn’t. And fourteen years! I’ve been your mother and your father! And this is the thanks I get?”

  I grabbed the sharpest emotional knife I had and plunged it into her heart. “Nobody asked you to be my father, too! My father needed to be my father, and where is he?”

  The effect of my insult was sudden and dramatic. Tears rolled down her quivering chin. “Who cares, huh? How many events and ceremonies and ‘muffins with Mom’ have I been to? How long have I slept in your hospital bed, when you had nobody else, who was there, huh? And that’s nothing? You treat me like this?”

  Whatever. I didn’t care what she thought anymore. I clenched my fists and stomped to the staircase. “It’s not always all about you and how I treat you!”

  “Young lady,” she bellowed after me in Spanish. “I’m not done! Don’t walk away from me when I’m talking to you!”

  Mom had paused at the base of the stairs. I shouted over my shoulder. “Don’t see you stopping me.”

  “The only reason I don’t kill you right now is because you’re already dying.”

  The half threat, half joke, sounded serious, but she’d never touched me in anger. I pushed her further. “Do what you have to do, Elayna.”

  Her nose flared. “No friends, holovision, or holophone.”

  There went my aspirations for Winter Dance Princess.

  I slammed the door, backed against it and waited for a force to push it open. For a small woman, Mom was unnaturally strong. She didn’t come. Instead, I heard her voice command to lock down the house. In sixty seconds, I’d be confined to my room like a prisoner. She’d activate the signal dampener as well. I’d have old paperback books and painted walls to keep me comfortable.

  Right then, my stomach dropped and rumbled. I rushed to the toilet in time to flip the seat up and hurl. Good thing my hair hadn’t grown back too far past my ears.

  I lost my guts again, and the second time, it stung and burned, like I’d thrown up a small organ. Halfway through an ugly crying fit, a familiar arm surrounded my shoulders. How’d she gotten to me so fast without setting off the alarm? I’d have resisted her support if I’d had the strength. Most days,[XW4] I had it together. Others, I didn’t. Some, I tried to fake my way through.

  “Mmmm…”

  She understood my gurgling better than anyone. Her fingers squeezed my arm as I heaved and heaved and heaved until all I did was painfully groan into the toilet. Now empty, my stomach hardened like a stone. Whatever dignity I had left swirled around the bowl when I flushed it. I’d fought my mother and won and lost. I couldn’t have gotten through a sickness like this without her. And she was all the family I had.

  I wiped my mouth on a wad of toilet paper Mom handed to me. Then, she set a tall glass of ice water on my counter, like she’d always done. The first swallow would strike like ice daggers, but every gulp after that would be cool and refreshing — a swimming pool on a sweltering day. By the time I’d recovered enough to pry myself from the tile floor, she had left me.

  A look in the mirror revealed the damage to my face. Black mascara had run in jagged trails down my pale cheeks. My red lipstick had blurred, and the black hair on my head looked like picked-apart [XW5]straw. At least my brows were right.

  As I washed my face and freshened up my mouth, my thoughts drifted to my closet. Buried beneath a mountain of dirty laundry was a duffle bag I’d packed with toiletries, what little monetary units I could stash away,[XW6] and clothes. When the right moment came, I’d take it and run far away from this place. For my last days, I owed it to myself to see what kind of world was out there beyond my house, the school, and the bleak hospital walls.

  Right as I got to the closet, my prepaid holophone chimed. I’d bought it a while ago to get around my punishments. My best friend, Natalee Gupta, had requested a face-to-face. Mom hadn’t turned off the dampener.

  I accepted it as a voice call. “Good thing you called the temp phone.”

  “Figured your mom had the main one when it went to
voicemail.”

  No sense in searching. Off and going to voicemail meant Mom took it when I wasn’t looking. The Indian accent turned from ethnic to East Coast when we talked. “What gives, Sandoval? Turn on the camera already.”

  I flopped onto the bed, holophone in hand, and remembered the girl I’d seen in the mirror. “Uh-uh. Face is busted.”

  “Face stays busted. What else is new?”

  “I’ll describe what I’m doing instead. I have not one but two middle fingers for you.”

  “Nice of you to go the extra mile.” She paused so long that I thought the signal had dropped. No, she had been thinking of a way to bring it up in a way not to hurt my feelings. I’d tried to push everyone who cared about me away by mouthing off. Nat never left. “Umm…”

  The video. “That bad, huh?” I asked her.

  “Not really. You didn’t let him do much, at least, and he didn’t see your birthmark.”

  I licked my dry lips and sighed. “You’re a terrible liar. How many posts?”

  “It’s a good night to be off Wi-Fi. Take the weekend. And, I didn’t lie about the birthmark.”

  Memes, videos, pictures, of course. Good thing I hadn’t taken my sweatshirt off like he’d wanted me to. Then I’d have to deal with jokes about the birthmark between my breasts and my stained white bra. My shape was one good thing I got from Mom’s side, so no one would’ve talked crap about my chest. The stringy wires hanging below it were a different story. Tube-shaped with metal connectors, they transferred meds into my body. Not sexy at all. I hadn’t intended to do what I did today. I was buzzed and didn’t care.

  Natalee, though, had a plan for everything. A few months older than me and way smarter, she was beautiful [XW7]and petite with cocoa skin. I envied the wavy black braid that snaked from the back of her head over her shoulder and down to her belly button. Her father forbade her to do more than trim her broken ends. I’d thought it was a religious thing, they were Hindi or Buddhist, I think, but no. Mr. Gupta was a total control freak.