She steps toward the table, shoving past Noah and scoops down to snatch up our father’s bag. I watch her disappear, pushing past Noah again as she makes her way toward the living room. Outside, the world is warm, fading past noon. The world isn’t waiting for us and as we stand here, all I can think about is that my father needs to get in the ground. He needs to be buried, properly. I won’t have him tossed aside like some old, used piece of junk or left outside for the flesh-eaters, regardless of the last time we saw one. This is my father, the man who raised me. We’re going to treat him like the man he was.
“I need a blanket,” I tell everyone in the room, who is deathly silent, waiting for me to say something. “I need something to wrap him up in.”
It is Marko who moves first, which thoroughly surprises me. I slowly turn and look at Greg who is standing there, looking at my father. It occurs to me that this is the first person that any of us has truly seen up close and personal who is counted among the deceased. I look at my father and I can’t help but feel sick to my stomach. Why did it have to be this way? Why did my father have to come all the way here, only to die at my feet? It doesn’t matter. My mind continues to turn in circles, coming back to the same questions and thoughts over and over. There are no answers to questions like these, just sick curiosity and cruel reality. It doesn’t matter why it’s like this, only that it is like this.
When Marko returns, he’s carrying a blanket from one of the many beds inside the labyrinthine beach house, and he unfurls it over my father like a flag being thrown over a dead warrior from some ancient battle. I look at the blanket, soaking up the pool of blood on my father’s abdomen and wonder if Henry is going to kill himself because of this. I wouldn’t mind. I don’t think anyone will mind after all of this. In fact, I think we would all understand. I think we would all commend it. Marko, Devon, and Greg wrap up my father while Noah uselessly tries to be of some assistance. I watch them wrap up my father and still, there are no more tears. I’m not sure what I should be doing right now.
Chapter Three
“They’re taking him out back to bury him,” I say to Lexi as she blindly rummages through our father’s items. It disgusts me to look at her as she tears through them like some kind of feral hyena tearing up a bloated corpse, looking for the juicy good pieces. I want to slap her and tell her to snap out of it. I don’t know why she’s being so irrational. Lexi has always been stubborn and reckless, but she’s never been such an emotional storm before. Maybe this is the straw. Maybe this is what shatters all of her barriers and all of her defenses once and for all. She’s been crying a whole lot more than I have been. Am I dead inside? Is she acting exactly how I’m supposed to be acting? “Lexi, come on. We’re going to go bury him.”
“Fuck off,” Lexi lobs at me like a live grenade. I stare at her with absolute confusion. I am not her enemy. I am not the one who put a bullet through our father. I’m not the one who she should be shouting and freaking out at.
Truthfully, with every passing moment, the rational side of my brain tells me that I shouldn’t blame Henry. It whispers to me like a viper, telling me that there was no way Henry could have known who my father was. There was no way that he could have known anything standing before a man with a blade affixed to his stump. Sure, he should have waited, but I can understand the fear. We haven’t heard from or seen anyone from the outside world since shortly after we all made our sojourn to this place over a year ago.
Since that day, we’ve lost more than two thirds of our group and we’ve lived in isolation like an apocalyptic monastic order. Henry thought that my father was a threat and he did exactly what we all would have deemed as heroic and smart-thinking had it been some deranged killer. I will never forgive Henry, but I understand his actions. That’s about the best offer that I can give him. If he kills himself in the middle of the night, I’ll say so at his funeral.
But my sister, she’s beyond forgiveness. She’s in full vengeance and madness territory. The world ended and we were never given a time or period to adjust to things and told how we should handle them. In fact, we were given the exact opposite. We were tossed the keys to chaos and told to do what we will down the road of anarchy. No one wants that. No matter what the movies, the books, and the television shows said about the end of the world, it was not something to be desired or enjoyed.
I’m sure there are a bunch of psychopaths in heaven right now, living the dream, but I’m not one of them. From the looks of my father, he wasn’t either. But the burden of survival has weighed heavily on all of us. We lost a lot of close, good friends when Tony decided to take his army of conquistadors out into the world and left us behind. I look at Lexi, her brown wavy hair hanging over her face, her feral eyes searching our father’s bag and I can’t help but feel like she’s snapped—shattered.
I take a knee next to her, reaching out and putting a gentle, understanding hand on her shoulder. The moment I make contact with her, she stops, freezes what she’s doing and looks over her shoulder at me with her wide, bloodshot eyes. She’s been crying so much that she almost looks like a devil sitting in the room here with me.
“Lexi, you need to come with me,” I tell her softly. “We need to go bury him.”
She looks at me with a look so vulnerable that it chills me. It freezes me to my very core and I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with it. I feel like she’s lobbed me another grenade. I delicately hold it, trying to figure out how I’m supposed to get the pin back in before the moment is gone and I’m blown to bits.
Lexi had always been the adventurous one with our father. She’d spent her days going on adventures rock climbing with him, hunting with him, and practicing archery with him. She was always up for tracking some animal, just to see where the trail led. There was something about her that made him seem to enjoy things more with her. I think that it was just the simple fact that she was the baby, but I was always jealous of their connection. When she told him that she wanted to be a philosophy major, he’d encouraged her and been happy for her. Sure, he’d given me all the same congratulations when I told him in middle school that I wanted to be a veterinarian, but it just sounded more sincere when it was addressed to Lexi. That might make me petty, but I don’t care. It’s how I felt.
“Why did he have to die?” Lexi says finally.
Like I’m supposed to know the answer to that. I look at her and shake my head. I want to remind her that she’s the philosophy major here and that I’m just a student of science. I know that this isn’t the time, but I can’t help but feel like this sort of debating is childish at this point. Didn’t the whole fate and God question die out when the world started withering away into oblivion?
“I don’t know, Lexi,” I tell her honestly. “I’m just grateful that we got to see him again.”
Honestly, I am. I would never have recognized him passing me on the street, but sure enough, the closer I looked at his worn and exhausted face, I knew that it was my father. It was my father that I spent countless hours with over the summers hanging out on the patio, drinking beer with him like an equal. I have great memories of my father, but while I was forming those, Lexi was out partying with her old high school friends. Maybe that’s why it tears at her so much. She had wasted so many opportunities to show him how much she loved him and she let those slip through her fingers. I love my sister, but I can’t excuse her decisions.
“He literally died the moment we saw him again,” she shrieks bitterly at me. I feel her pain, but I don’t know what to do. She’s made it clear she isn’t looking to be comforted. My father was a good man. It doesn’t seem out of his nature at all to cross the entire country and brave countless dangers just to see us again. Since the moment our mother died, my father had always been there for us. His goal was to keep us alive, happy, and educated until it was our time to step out into the world and carve out our little chunks of it. “What kind of logic is that? What kind of cruel world do we live in?”
Isn’t it obvious? I w
ant to scream at her to wake up. The entire world is dying and she’s sitting here pouting. People who sat around pouting ended up dead. They were the people on the radio who ended up getting knifed in the back alleys or didn’t buy a gun when they had the chance because all of this just wasn’t fair. The world was a cruel place long before it started shriveling up.
“Lexi,” I say to her after a moment of silence, letting her gather her spiteful thoughts. “We need to go bury him. I know it’s hard. I know better than anyone else here how hard this is, but we still need to bury him. We need to say our goodbye to him.”
Lexi glares at me now. It’s the kind of glare that tells me I’m a fool and that I’ve missed everything that she’s been saying to me. I’m a worthless sister who wants to plant her precious daddy in the ground and be done with him. That’s what her looks says to me and I’m willing to take it. She can be pissed all she wants, but I’m not going to let her miss the meager funeral that we can give our father. I stand up and stretch out my hand to her, offering it to her so she can be pulled up. To my utter amazement, she takes it and I pull her up off the floor. She stares at me for a moment and passes me, making her way toward the back door where the large, open porch overlooks the gray, sickly ocean.
I follow her out, into the cold, salty air. It’s always salty here now. For a while, there were so many birds flocking out to the coast that it was maddening. All night long, we used to only hear the sounds of gulls shrieking and the shrill caws of ravens and other carrion feeders. Everything smelled like death as the fish and other aquatic life began washing up on the shore. We’d hoped, like so many others, that the ocean would remain immune to all of this death and destruction, but it didn’t. At least, not near the coast. There was too much runoff mixing with the ocean to keep anything close to the shore alive. It was like that with all the animals on land too.
This house had belonged to Olivia’s parents who were killed in Boston when terrorists from the neighboring refugee camp bombed the airport. She’d been devastated, but the property fell into her hands and in the ruins of her family’s shattering reality, she decided to offer up her home to anyone who needed shelter away from the cities. I’d known Olivia since my first semester in the dorms. She was a nice, sweet girl and when we heard her offer, we were more than happy to take her up on it. We sent out word to everyone. It was isolated enough that we felt comfortable hiding out here and it was definitely large enough for everyone to stay. We shoved five people into every room and we still had extra space. The only problem was when we heard a gunshot in the middle of the night down by the beach and found Olivia floating in the surf. She couldn’t take the world like this, not without her family by her side. Friends weren’t enough.
Thankfully, before her end, Olivia gave us this place of refuge and sanctuary during the chaos that followed. When we were at our prime, we had enough manpower and neighboring resources to fortify the place. We secured the fence, hiding metal spikes in the tall, dead grass just ahead of the wood fortified fences, so anyone who tried ramming their way in off the road would get a nasty surprise. We secured the house, boarding it up the best we could and set up the ground defenses. Jack knew enough about traps and stuff to set up a noise system of pots and pans should anyone try to approach the house from the beach, we’d all know they were coming. We made the best of what we had and it was honestly more than we could have ever expected. I know that there are millions out there hiding and scraping a living from the rocks and ruins of society who have far less than us.
But the true wealth of this place is the basement and the enormous pantry. We’ve eaten through most of our supplies, but that’s incredible in and of itself. At first, we were pigging out, eating as much as we desired, not caring about rationing out our supplies, but as we did, we still had more than we could have imagined. Now that we’re down toward the end of things, it feels scary, but I can’t help but feel extremely grateful. I look at the grill and fire pit where we nervously made s’mores, listening to the tales of horror and destruction on the radio. At the grill, Paulo used to make the best barbeque when we still had meat. Most of us were too afraid to ask where he got it, but it tasted good nonetheless.
I follow Lexi down the wooden steps until we hit the sandy knoll where the steps turn into concrete. I follow her over to where the others are gathered. Marko and Greg are digging a hole next to the ominous, haunting cross that marks where we buried Olivia and had the most somber moment of our lives, up until Tony decided to lead his crusade back into the world. I remember everyone crying, everyone spoke at Olivia’s funeral. We all said our apologies and our sad stories about how much we loved her and missed her. I don’t like thinking about Olivia and what she did to herself. I remember being scared that others might follow suit.
Lexi leaves me, her arms wrapped around her stomach as she walks over to Noah. She’s completely given up on her appearance in the last year. She wears big baggy sweaters that reveal her left shoulder and she wears men’s sweatpants. She looks like a slob and there’s hardly anything that she thinks is worth doing anymore. I honestly haven’t been able to stand my sister’s behavior for some time now and that’s saying a lot, considering all the things that she’s done over the years. She stands next to Noah, a foot away from him, just so it’s awkward enough to make Noah feel comfortable but not desired. I can’t imagine a more annoying limbo to be in. Noah must really love her to put up with all the crap he takes.
I look at my father’s form, wrapped in the blanket that Marko brought down. I can’t help but think about those last, few moments where I had him in my life. My father had been a driven, determined man in life. He’d known what he needed to do to pass the time between keeping us alive, in school, and happy, and wanting to die so that all his heartbreak and suffering could just end. He filled his time with hobbies, mostly about the wilderness and survival. I remember it started with him buying a book on knots. He spent hours practicing and honing his skill with knots. Then he started bird watching, but only because he wanted to identify birds. Then he bought a gun and hit the shooting range, then when he was bored with guns, it was a crossbow, then archery, and yet he was so gentle with us. I couldn’t imagine him harming a soul. My father was eccentric to say the least, but he always had a purpose or a goal that he was working toward. That’s why it haunts me that he came looking for us.
It wasn’t because he was bored up north. It wasn’t because he felt obligated to do it. It was because he loved us. He loved us so much that he wanted to come find us and along the way, he ran into someone named Jason. I remember the name because it felt so strange that he would so adamantly press upon us the name Jason and Dayton. I don’t know if I should trust the words of a dying man who had been wandering the wilderness and wasteland for months, or not. But, he claimed that Jason knew how to save the world. He was certain of that. I could see it in his eyes. It wasn’t something that he mildly considered. No, it was something that he wanted to drill into our heads before he passed. It was right up there with telling us that he loved us. There was weight to it that makes me feel uncomfortable.
I don’t know where Dayton is, exactly, there are several, I suppose, but I can’t help but picture a glorious oasis with palm trees, exotic fruit, and a vast, sprawling lawn where children run barefoot and giggle, trying to capture fireflies. I mean, it’s a fairytale. Besides, how many Daytons are out there in America? Dozens maybe? When the devastation was happening and the Collapse was right on the horizon, there were scientists everywhere that were trying to find some kind of cure. They were trying their hardest to put the world back in its place, or at the very least, retard the whole annihilation of everything green and edible in the world.
If someone had finally found the cure that everyone was looking for, then it wouldn’t be now. It wouldn’t be when all the labs were shut down, when all the money had dried up, and when electricity was a thing of the past. It’s not like they could just magically conjure up the cure without a massive, full-scal
e effort on a global level.
But my father wasn’t a stupid man. He was educated. He was a novelist and a professor who spent his time listening to NPR and reading books that no ordinary man would ever dare read on their spare time. If my father thought that there was some way or some possibility of saving the world, then I will legitimately believe it. He wouldn’t be selling us snake oil with his last words. He loved us more than anything in the world. We were all he ever truly had. I look at him, lying on the ground and I can’t help but feel like there has to be some severe weight to the words he shared with us before dying.
If Jason was out there, near Dayton, wherever that is, then I’m sure that it would be worth going to see him, but I can’t. I look at where my father is lying and my mind conjures up the images of his body, his bruised ribs and his missing hand. If my father had known that he was going to suffer all of this, then he would have done it anyways. That’s the kind of man he was and that’s how much he loved us. But right now, I don’t have a father out there, or two daughters that I love.
I only have my sister here and there’s a world of nightmares out there in the wilderness beyond our compound. I look at my father and can’t help but feel like his entire body is a warning to me. It’s a harbinger of things to come if we’re not safe—if we’re not smart. It’s a dark and dangerous world out there, and I have no business in it. Even if Jason has a cure to save the world in Dayton, let him save the world. Here, we’re safe.
LEFT ALIVE (Zombie series Box Set): Books 1-6 of the Post-apocalyptic zombie action and adventure series Page 51
