The End of All Things

by Lissa Bryan

  He was right that some people were more prepared to survive than others. He came into the situation equipped with more skills than most people. “Justin, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “I mean, I know you had to keep everything secret back in the old days, but I don’t think that’s still true now. I’m wondering how you learned all this stuff about survival. It’s not just the things you know, it’s a mind-set. What was The Unit? Did my dad know all of this stuff, too?”

  Justin was silent for a long moment. “He did. We all received the same kind of training. Wilderness survival. Psychology. Physical conditioning and hand-to-hand combat. Tactics. Languages. We learned how to blend in, how to hide in plain sight. Medical training. Five years of training for five years of service.”

  “What did you do?”

  Justin hesitated for a moment before he answered, and she wondered if it was from force of habit or because he didn’t want her to know. “Many things. Reconnaissance. Spying. Assisting resistance groups. Targeted military strikes. Rescues.”

  “So, you were like a SEAL team?”

  “In a way. We did the jobs they didn’t want to give to a SEAL team. We were a shadow unit, not even officially acknowledged by the U.S. military.”

  “Why did you just serve for five years?”

  Justin took a hand off the handlebars and rubbed his chin. “I . . . uh . . . Stress, I suppose. They thought we would burn out. And they were right. Some of us didn’t even make it the full five years. Others stayed on after their term of service was up to become instructors, like your dad.”

  “He must have seen some awful things. My dad, I mean. Because when he had the fever—” She couldn’t go on. “I think you must have seen some awful things, too.”

  “I have.” He didn’t elaborate, and his expression was carefully impassive. She knew better than to ask.

  “But it made you better able to survive in this new world. You can do things other people can’t.”

  He cursed softly. “That’s not always a good thing, Carly.” That impassive expression had become grim. She saw a muscle twitch in his cheek.

  “You’re not a bad person, Justin. Just one who’s strong.”

  “What if I told you I was a bad person, once?” Justin’s voice was low; it was almost lost in the whirring of their tire spokes.

  Carly thought about it. “I’d say you’re even more amazing for being able to change. Most can’t, you know. Most bad people justify their actions, at least to themselves. I bet if you took a poll, very, very few people would say they’re bad. They’re good people with bad circumstances, they’d say. And even those who seek forgiveness in religion or in the secular world don’t always manage to change themselves. That takes a massive amount of effort. Not many are able to accomplish it because it’s just too hard, or maybe they didn’t really want to change in the first place. They just wanted justification.”

  Justin laughed softly. “And you say you’re not smart.”

  Carly shrugged. “I read it in a book somewhere. But I know you’re not a bad person. A bad person would have hurt me and certainly wouldn’t have brought me along, or let me keep Shadowfax. A bad person would have hurt that man back there and taken what little he did have. But you’re able to be strong when you have to be. I would have given in and shared some of our supplies with that family. I’d be thinking with my heart, not with my head. But you? I bet you never think with just your heart.”

  “I have, a few times,” Justin said, and that muscle in his cheek twitched again. “It usually didn’t end well.”

  “Why did you join the army?”

  His hands tightened on his handlebars until the knuckles were white. “I didn’t have many options in life, Carly. I bounced around from foster home to foster home. I barely graduated high school and didn’t have a chance in hell of going to college. The day I turned eighteen, my foster mother handed me a duffel bag with my belongings, gave me twenty dollars, and showed me the door. A few months later, I passed a recruiting station, and it seemed like a good idea.”

  “What did you do for those few months before you went into the army?”

  “Things I don’t want to talk about,” Justin said bluntly.

  “Okay.” Carly had things she didn’t want to talk about either.

  “My recruiter happened to know Lewis, who was one of the commanders of The Unit at one time. He thought I seemed like a good candidate, and I was, but not for the right reasons. Ironically, it was The Unit that straightened me out.”

  “What did you do after you retired?”

  “Wandered around, for the most part. I’ve got a good pension. Had a good pension, that is. So I just traveled where the road took me.”

  “Were you looking for something?”

  Justin seemed startled by the question. He ran a hand through his hair and rubbed the back of his neck. “I never thought of it that way, but yeah, I think I was. I don’t know what that might have been, though.”

  She was pretty sure she knew what it was. “A home.”

  Justin stared at her.

  “You never had one, it sounds like,” Carly explained.

  “I owned a house in Chicago.”

  Carly shook her head. “That’s not a home. A home is where people love you.” It made her sad that he didn’t know the difference.

  “Tell me about yours.”

  She almost laughed at how he switched the focus to her, moving away from a topic he wasn’t comfortable exploring, but she played along. “My home? You were there.”

  “Yes, but tell me what it was like before.”

  This was hard. Talking about it brought a lump to Carly’s throat and made her voice husky. “I missed out on a lot because my dad was gone so much when I was little, but once he came home . . . I was the luckiest kid in the world when it came to my parents. My mom was sweet and kind, and she had this subtle sense of humor that always caught you by surprise. My dad was strict, but he was very loving, and he made sure I understood why we had the rules we did. I’m not going to say I was always obedient, and there were a few times during my teenage years that I caused my parents some grief, but they always loved me. When I was nineteen, I decided to get my own apartment on the third floor. I think, in a way, it was like college. Moving out and putting a toe in the waters of adulthood in a safe environment. I had my independence, but I knew they were right downstairs if I needed something.”

  “Tell me about the DVD you have in your bag. Tell me what it means to you.”

  Carly tried not to cry, but the tears spilled out anyway. She wasn’t a confident enough bicyclist to let go of the handlebars long enough to wipe them away. She told him about watching the world die on cable news and how her father had poured her a drink. As she spoke, she realized it was the first time her father had ever talked to her as an equal, not as his little girl. Had he somehow known? Or had he seen these events as the true dividing line between childhood and adulthood for her?

  Carly described watching the movies with him and how it had been a temporary respite from the horror and fear, a few last stolen moments with her father and one last happy memory. She scrubbed her wet cheeks against her shoulders. “What about your parents, Justin? What happened to them?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have any memories of them. From my social services file, I know I was abandoned at about the age of three at a fire station. They caught my mother and me on video from the bank across the street. She brought me up to the front of the station and sat me down on the retaining wall of a flower bed near the door. She gave me a toy, an Incredible Hulk action figure, and then just walked away. They found a note pinned to my shirt that gave my first name and date of birth, and that was all.”

  It was hard to speak around the lump in her throat. Her voice was unsteady. “She must have been in desperate circumstances to give you up like that.”

  “Or she was just sick of having to take care of a baby.” There was bitterness in his
tone.

  Carly’s heart ached for him and she wished there was something she could do to banish the ghost of that pain. “Justin, think about it, she took you somewhere she knew you would be safe, where you would be found quickly. If she didn’t care about you, she would have abandoned you in an alley somewhere, or sold you, or even killed you.”

  “Yeah.” Justin didn’t look at her.

  “What happened next? Did you go straight into foster care?”

  “No, the records say I stayed with one of the firefighters for a few years while they searched for my mother. That’s how I got my last name. The Thatchers wanted to adopt me, but the authorities wouldn’t allow it unless they located my mother and secured her permission. They never found her, so I went into the system.”

  “Do you have any memories of them?”

  “I have an early memory of a woman singing to me. That’s all. I don’t know if it’s my real mother or the firefighter’s wife, Martha.”

  “Why did they take you away from the Thatchers?”

  “Age, and probably the fact that they’d never had children of their own. When they took me in, Jack Thatcher was a few months from retirement. The authorities decided they were too old and inexperienced to care for an active toddler and wouldn’t approve them to be my foster parents, either.”

  “That’s terrible!” What sort of system would think it was better for a baby to be taken away from people who loved him and given to strangers?

  “That’s bureaucracy.” That hint of bitterness was back in his tone.

  Carly was quiet for a long moment as she wondered what it must have been like for a little boy to lose his mother and then the people who had lovingly cared for him for several years. That had to leave some scars. “How many families did you live with?”

  “Eleven.” He hid behind that impassive expression again.

  “Wow, Justin, that’s almost one a year.” Carly had always known she was a lucky girl to have such wonderful parents and such a happy home life. Half of her friends had divorced parents and some of them were tugged back and forth in their parents’ bitter squabbling. But Justin’s story was far, far worse than that.

  “I wasn’t the easiest kid to take care of. I was rebellious, always getting into fights.”

  “Were any of your foster families good to you?” She hoped for at least some bright spot in what seemed like a very bleak and unhappy childhood.

  His jaw tightened. “Generally, indifferent. I had one family who . . .” He cursed under his breath. “They were the Altons—Steve and Cindy. That was the biggest mistake of my life, and I always wonder how things might have turned out if I had accepted what they offered me. But I wasn’t used to someone trying to reach out to me. Cindy tried. God how she tried, but I rejected every overture. I was cruel to her.”

  “After all you’d been through . . .”

  That muscle in his cheek was twitching again. “My psychology classes later taught me it was a trust issue. I was testing the limits, trying to determine her sincerity by being as awful as I could be to see if she’d still treat me the same, if she’d still care about me. Eventually, I wore her down. I was fighting with her other foster kids, always getting into trouble, and lashing out at everyone. One day a social worker showed up, and I was taken to a group home for troubled kids. I never saw the Altons again.”

  Carly bit the inside of her lip so hard she tasted the metallic tang of blood.

  “I always thought of tracking them down, to say I was sorry for everything I put them and their family through, but I never did it, and now I’ll never be able to.”

  “It’s not your fault, you know.”

  Justin chuckled. “Oh, Carly, you’re so sweet. But it was my fault. I have to own my actions. I was old enough to know right from wrong, and I chose wrong.”

  “You were just a kid. A kid who’d had a horribly hard life.” Has he been carrying this burden all these years? Has he been hating himself for something he did when he was a child, a lonely, scared little boy who’d never had anyone in his life that didn’t abandon him?

  “And not every kid who has a hard life makes the kind of decisions I did. I can’t make excuses, Carly. I made my choices.”

  “You’re not just talking about the Altons, are you?”

  “No.”

  Carly sighed. “Everything that happens in our lives shapes us into who we are. I made mistakes, too, Justin, but looking back on them, I realize I wouldn’t be who I was today if I’d made different choices. Right or wrong, good or bad, we’re the product of all of those decisions. You wouldn’t be the Justin who was selected to be in The Unit, and you wouldn’t have learned all of this survival stuff, and you wouldn’t be the Justin I know now.”

  “Maybe I’d be a better one.”

  “Better in what way? If you’d lived a nice, middle-class life with the Altons, would you have been a tax accountant? You never would have met me, that’s for sure, since you wouldn’t have gone into the army, and you wouldn’t have been wandering around Alaska, headed to a motorcycle rally. Would the other Justin have given away some of our supplies because he was thinking with his heart, not with his head? Would the other Justin have had the stomach to go into those buildings where the dead were to collect the supplies we need in the first place?”

  Justin rubbed the back of his neck again. “I see your point.”

  “So what’s the point of living with regret? Let’s say you had tracked the Altons down and apologized to them. Would it have changed anything? Would it have repaired any of the pain in the past?”

  “You might want to practice what you preach, sister,” Justin said, but his voice was mild, lightly teasing. “I can see you have your own regrets you carry with you.”

  Carly touched her father’s ring—the bump it made below her T-shirt. “I’m carrying them in my heart, not my head. I can’t help what my heart feels. It doesn’t use logic. But my brain knows some of the things I regret couldn’t have been changed. You, on the other hand, have them stuck in your head but aren’t using logic. You know all that psychology stuff. Use it on yourself. You know why you acted as you did, so why not accept it as a lesson learned, the path your life had to take to lead you to where you are now, and let it go?”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “Sure. It’s a process. But you’ve got to want to do it. Maybe you’re having too much fun beating yourself up over it to let it go.”

  Justin was startled again. He stared at her, and his mouth hung open slightly.

  Carly shrugged. “Some people like to wallow in guilt. I don’t think you’re one of them, but you kind of seem like you do it on occasion.” She glanced over at him and narrowed her eyes. “Did you use any of that psychology stuff on me when we first met?”

  “Yes.” Justin admitted it without a qualm. “You weren’t thinking clearly, Carly, and I had to get you out of that apartment. So, yes, I tricked you a little and manipulated your emotions. If that upsets you, I’m sorry, but I don’t regret doing what needed to be done in order to shake you out of your state of shock.”

  “I’m not mad about it. I understand what you mean about me not thinking clearly. And you sure weren’t doing it for your own selfish benefit or anything like that. You were doing it to help me.”

  “I picked your locks, and I . . . uh . . . I turned off your water.” He actually blushed a little at this confession.

  Carly gave a bark of surprised laughter. “Tricksy hobbit!”

  “That white pipe I took off to show you there wasn’t any water in it? That was your sink drain.”

  Carly laughed so hard she had to coast her bike to a stop or risk falling off. “You’re kidding!”

  “Jesus, Carly, didn’t you ever look at what pipe goes to what?”

  “No. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I’d ever looked at any of the plumbing under the sink.”

  “Too busy alphabetizing your cleaning bottles?”

  “You’re just jealous of my
organizational skills.” Carly remounted her bike and began to pedal again. Maybe she was fooling herself but biking for long stretches of time seemed to be getting easier. Her calves weren’t even sore yet.

  “ ‘Jealous of,’ no. Disturbed by, slightly.” Justin tossed a grin at her.

  Carly stuck her tongue out at him, and he chuckled.

  For a while, they pedaled in silence, and then apropos of nothing, Justin said, “Tell me about Noah.”

  “What about him?”

  Justin gave a small shrug. “The usual. How long you were together. How you met. That sort of thing.”

  Odd for him to be interested, Carly thought. “He was a friend of a friend. I’d been introduced to him a couple of times, but I didn’t know him all that well. Then, one day, he sent a flirty text to my phone. I messaged back, just a funny little quip or something, and we messaged back and forth for a few minutes. He asked me something about my brother, and I said I didn’t have a brother. At that point we figured out he’d thought he’d been talking to another girl. He called me to apologize, and we chatted for a bit, and that’s when he asked me out. We dated for about two years.”

  Justin waited for a moment. “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to tell me?”

  “What is it you want to know?”

  “Were you . . . serious?”

  Carly looked at him blankly. “What do you mean? I mean, we talked about getting married, but it was just talk. He never proposed, and I didn’t have a ring or anything.”

  “Did he live with you?” Justin’s voice was casual. He reached down to the frame of his bike and plucked his water bottle out of its carrier.

  “With my dad two floors down? He would have gone after Noah with a shotgun.”

  “Oh.” Justin squirted some water into his mouth and offered the bottle to her, but Carly didn’t think she could manage to control the bike with only one hand. She shook her head. She could tell he was looking for a way to phrase something, and she sighed.