by Jason Ross
Sage nodded. “Sorry. My dad didn’t raise me to stand around, ya know?”
The officer chuckled. “Me too. But this ain’t the world our dads raised us for. Not no more.”
9
Mat Best
Mat & William’s House
McKenzie, Tennessee
* * *
It’d been two weeks since the ambush on the road to Henry. Since then, the convoy had been hit six times. Subsequent ambushes hadn’t been as coordinated, with the loudmouth ringleader cooling his dangly parts in the McKenzie jail. They hadn’t lost any hogs, but two volunteers had been shot—both grazing wounds or frag. Luckily, neither of them died.
Mat was deep in thought about the stretch of busted up highway as he approached his house on the sidewalk, stepped onto his front porch and reached for the screen door. A girl’s voice snapped him back to the present. Mat entered to find William on the edge of the couch with a pretty brunette.
The girl’s words trailed off as the screen door squeaked. “Horizon Zero Dawn is not so much a first-person shooter. It's more…”
William had been so engrossed in the conversation he hadn't noticed Mat's approach.
“Hi, Mat!” William chirruped. “This is Candice.”
“Hello, Candice.” Mat waved. “Bro, you didn't notice me walking across the yard. What did I teach you about situational awareness?”
Mat was fully aware that it was a weird thing to bitch about, but these weren’t normal times. No matter how Leave It To Beaver things seemed in town, there were thousands of despairing scarecrows massed outside the town limits, poised to ransack every cupboard.
William’s face flushed with embarrassment. Nevertheless, Mat doubled down.
“You're not eating a burger and fries at Hardees here. We're surrounded by thousands who would kill you for a stick of gum."
William’s face painted itself a deeper red. He stood up as he snapped at Mat, “I know that. I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal."
“Hello,” the girl interrupted. She offered a handshake. Her other hand touched the small of William’s back.
If Mat knew anything, he knew women. Females of the species had been de-escalating conflict between males for 10,000 years. Her touch calmed William like a magic spell. He leaned slightly toward the girl, and his posture relaxed. The girl had sent an unconscious message that the dominant male’s correction hadn’t diminished her interest in him. With the lightest touch, she smoothed over the wrinkle in their social grouping.
Candice filled the physical space between Mat and William with words. “My step dad is Jim Jensen. He organized the new classes at the high school. He’s a big fan of yours, sir. He says with you we stand a good chance of holding back the refugees.”
Instead of reading too much into the compliment, Mat mined for intelligence on Jim Jensen.
“What’s he teaching these days? Are they spending half of class talking about Ancient Mesopotamian gender roles and inclusive diversity among urban Aztecs?”
She laughed at the awkward joke like an adult woman might. William just looked confused. Mat guessed she was a very mature thirteen year old.
“Jim knows that times have changed,” Candice answered. “He's smart. He knows that no one cares about Shakespeare and political correctness right now. Classes are just a few hours a week—practical stuff like science, math and biology—how to care for livestock and how to make useful chemicals. We’ll probably all be farmers for the next hundred years." She laughed again. Mature or not, only a child could laugh at the loss of so much.
Mat heard Jensen speaking through the girl and it unsettled him—like she worshipped the science teacher or maybe feared him, which was weird given the guy’s balding head, oily complexion, and funky little pot belly. Who would fear that guy? Most kids her age were pushing back against their parents, not praising their wisdom.
“Jim’s trying to preserve as many of the modern technologies as possible, and hand them down to us. That’s the role of education now: to hang on to what mankind knew.”
She must’ve listened to her stepfather give that post-apocalypse education speech many times, and she recited it faithfully. Jensen was more politician than Mat liked, but the words made sense. Science Guy might be a good ally after all, egghead or not.
Mat could get the townsfolk up to speed on security. He could teach them what he knew about defending a forward operating base, but he needed an exit plan—someone to take over when he headed west. Jensen might be good at herding the committees.
Mat was no civic leader. He was a tool. When you were done with a tool, you put it away, or in Mat's case you gave him a truck full of dried pork and waved as he drove away into the sunset.
The girl had stopped talking. Mat put his daydream about leaving on pause and replied, “I’ve met your dad. He’s right about the future. It’s going to take a long time to come back from what we’ve lost.”
Candice looked away and blushed. “Jim's my stepdad. We're not related by blood or anything.” The pink in her cheeks tipped into red
“What's your mom's name?” Mat changed the subject.
“Dina. She doesn't live with us anymore. She’s in Louisville.”
William shot Mat a knowing look.
Louisville: they’d passed through that hell hole. There was a good chance Candice's mother was dead or enslaved by gangs. The girls eyes, though, begged for hope. Mat wasn’t going to shit in the middle of her hope parade.
“It's a big city.” William said, comforting her. He picked up one of Candice's hands.
It’s to hand-holding, Mat noted. Things must move faster with kids at the end of the world. Or maybe Mat had been too busy to keep an eye on the boy’s love life.
Candice drenched William in a grateful smile and gave him both her hands. “You're sweet,” she said. William swelled.
The boy had turned twelve a few days after Caroline died—more than two months ago. At that time, neither of them had been in a mood to celebrate. Sheriff Morgan's wife, Beatrice, insisted on making him birthday pancakes. It took less fuel to heat a griddle than a whole oven.
From grief-sprinkled birthday pancakes to consoling a young lady suitor in just two months. Life and death came fast, and so, apparently, did love. William was smitten, and that might just be a bomb-proof emotional shelter from the catastrophe all around them. It made Mat glad. It gave him hope.
“Hey, Will.” Mat shifted to the slightly-more-adult version of the boy’s name. “Why don't you walk Candice home? It’ll be dark soon. I've got some people to see before night patrol, then I’ll be outside the wire with the new QRF. Please be back by dark. I'll see you in the morning. Maybe we can get something to eat together? Maybe talk about things?” Mat glanced at the girl, trying to send William a sideways message. “I want to hear all about your new girl,” the subtext read.
William nodded, barely paying attention.
Young William walked the tree-lined lane back toward home, reliving the last three, amazing minutes. It had been perfect. When they reached her door, she'd turned and taken both his hands in hers.
“Thanks for walking me home, Will,” Caroline had said. “I'm really glad you and Mat came to town.”
Then she’d leaned in, just like in the movies. William hesitated at first, but it was a clear signal: the lean in. He took the chance. He’d kissed her.
Candice had kissed him back. Her soft lips had held his upper lip for the sweetest, most exciting of moments. His first kiss, and it was perfect. He’d nailed it.
“Good night, Will,” Candice had said. She’d turned to the door, then looked back. “Umm… Don't tell Jim about that, okay?” He’d nodded. Then she’d disappeared inside, and the night had dimmed in her absence.
Twenty minutes later, William mounted the steps to his home. The house was dark. The whole town was dark.
He remembered they had candles. A few days earlier, Mr. Jensen held a candle-making class and Will brought home six of t
hem. He rummaged through the kitchen drawer for matches, lit one of the candles and built a small fire in the hearth. Firewood was scarce—dangerous to haul in from the woods—but he wanted light and heat. Just tonight. He fell asleep tending the fire, contented, with her smell lingering on his sweater.
Candice walked into the house and eased the door closed behind her. She didn’t want Jim to know she was home. She needed a few minutes to collect herself. Jim couldn’t find out.
She soft-shoed down the hall and through the kitchen. At the door leading to the basement she paused and took a deep breath. She retrieved her cell phone from her pocket. There was no service, of course, but she still carried the phone, a reminder of a past life. Her phone case had a mirror on the back. She checked her face and made sure she wasn’t flushed. She didn’t want her face to give it away; her scarlet cheeks that fairly cried I kissed a boy.
When she was ready, Candice headed down the stairs. Jensen was there in the basement, tinkling with glass beakers. For most people, having a laboratory in the basement, full of biology experiments and hazardous chemicals, would seem odd. But Jensen was head of the high school science department. The lab was only a little strange. She was the only person in the world who knew he’d gone on an ego-fueled binge after watching the show Breaking Bad. He’d taught himself how to cook crystal meth, just like Walter White. But he’d never achieved the perfect, mythically-blue product. He’d gotten spooked and sold all his meth stuff to a drug dealer in Oklahoma City.
That was far from their only secret—she and him.
Jensen was popular with the kids and the townies thought of him as a harmless “science geek.” If the town knew half of what he was doing in that basement, they would freak out.
Candice paused at the bottom of the stairs. Jim tinkered at a counter, facing away from her. She knew he’d heard her, but he wouldn’t stop and acknowledge her until he finished his current task. That was his way.
The basement lab was big; the same footprint as the house, packed to the gills with boxes, barrels of liquids and chemicals in glass or plastic containers stacked on industrial shelving. Jim kept his secrets from the town, but he bragged to her. She was his “special girl” and she’d been allowed into his private world of potions and science, genius and deviousness.
Her mom—a cocktail waitress at a bar in the town of Paris—had begun to disappear, a little at a time, over a year before. At first, Candice imagined she might be jealous of the teacher-student vibe between Jim and her daughter. Now, looking back, Candice saw her mother suspected the truth, but wasn’t strong enough to confront it. She had drifted toward friends in Louisville and left her daughter behind.
At first, Candice had felt the tiniest bit triumphant as Jim lavished attention on her in her mother’s absence. Over the months her mother waned even further, spending more and more time at “scented candle conventions,” and then an astral projection convention. She came home days later with bags under her eyes and a gray pallor to her skin. Her mother wasted away in front of her eyes. She and Jim pretended it wasn’t happening.
When the crash stopped everything in its tracks, her mother was in Louisville, and Candice was left in the hands of her stepfather. Bit by bit, in the weeks that followed, Candice suspected she’d discovered a new, insidious hell.
The lab contained explosives, of course. Not just useful chemicals that happened to explode when mixed wrong, but actual explosives, cooked up by Jim on purpose. Even before the collapse, he’d bragged about experiments with biological and chemical weapons. It was common to find dead rabbits in the trash bin. He kept a hutch of them in a dark corner of the lab.
Without turning, Jim said “Hey, sweetie. You’re back a little later than I expected.“
“I was with William.”
“That’s a good girl. You made friends with him? Is he beginning to trust you?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent.” Then he paused for a moment, as if thinking. He set an instrument down on the counter and turned to her.
“You sound like you’re hiding something.“
“I’m not.”
Jensen crossed the room in three strides. He reached out and touched her cheek. It took everything she had not to flinch. He hated it when she flinched.
“Then perhaps you’d like to explain why you’re wearing such a guilty face?
Candice couldn’t look him in the eye. She looked at his chin instead. “No reason. Will introduced me to his guardian, and I talked with him about you. Just like you asked me to do.”
“Will is it? Such a grown-up name.”
“William. He… we were at his house waiting when Mr. Best came home.”
Jim was obsessed with Mat Best. He wanted Candice to engineer a friendship between them: the genius scientist and the brawny soldier. Maybe Jim had seen a movie like that or something, but it was all he could talk about these days.
She offered him some hope. “I think you’d like what I said. I talked about how smart you are and how much you could help the town. Mr. Best said that your farming and chemistry classes were an amazing idea,” she embellished a little.
Jenson smoothed a lock of unruly hair with his fingers. “What did he say?”
“Mr. Best seemed really interested. He said he liked where you were going with things.”
“Good girl.” His smile almost reached his eyes. His expression hardened.
“You said Mat came home. So you were alone with William in their house? Where in their house?”
“I made friends. Like you said. We were on the couch. In the front room right by the door.”
Jensen took Candice’s cheeks in his hand. He stroked her hair with his fingers. “You won’t forget that you’re my special girl? You’ll remember that only a man like me can protect you now? A dominant, smart man. An alpha male. I’m the only one who can help you find your mother. When we finish our work here, and we have what we need to pacify the barbarians around the town, we’ll get her and bring her back. We need to put the rats down, then we can go find her. ”
“Yes. I know that,” she said, and she wasn’t lying. Her mom was adrift on a sea of chaos. She could almost feel the pulsing, hateful terror gathered around them all. Candice floated on a tiny island amidst a sea of abject horror, with only this minor fiend to terrorize her. This was survival, she told herself: enduring his repulsive hands in order to save her mother from the unspeakable evil of the world.
“Don’t worry. I’ll protect you.” He pulled her into his chest in an embrace. The front of his pants was soft, and that was good.
“Thank you,” she said. Part of her meant it.
“Excellent. Now give me a hand with this tank of ethylene. Then we can head upstairs.”
10
Cameron Stewart
“Of all that breathes and crawls across the earth, our mother earth breeds nothing feebler than a man.
So long as the gods grant him power, spring in his knees, he thinks he will never suffer affliction down the years.
But then, when the happy gods bring on the long hard times, bear them he must, against his will, and steel his heart.”
Odysseus, The Odyssey
* * *
Grafton Ghost Town,
Southern Utah
* * *
The Buffalo gourd seeds saved Cameron’s son. After ten days of choking down powdered seeds in his willow tea, Denny finally stood up.
Every time the boy shit, it was a clan affair. They picked it apart with twigs, counted the worms, and dumped the black mess in the pit latrine. After a glut of white, wriggling worms during the first week, they began to vanish from his poop.
Everyone in the family ate the seed powder, and they harvested many more backpacks of the wild-growing desert plant. The seeds were both medicine and slight nutrition. They probably burned more calories collecting gourds than they consumed, but the medicinal value made up for it.
The spectacle of worms in Denny’s poop triggered a renewed f
ocus on sanitation. They hardly had the energy to spare, but they did it anyway, sensing that the boy’s sickness was but a canary in a coal mine for the rest of them. If they didn’t make changes, they would all sicken and die. They couldn’t afford even run-of-the-mill dysentery. They were starving in earnest now, and diarrhea meant death.
Nobody in the group knew anything about sanitation. It’d been the sole purview of civil engineers and health departments back in the old world. The four adults washed their dishes in hot water, which turned out to be a sobering investment of calories: collecting wood, building a fire, boiling water to kill water-borne parasites, then using the cooling water to wash the dishes. They’d run out of paper plates long before. Now they used blown-off wood shingles as plates. Rough wood was exceedingly hard to sanitize.
Like a tyrant overlord, boiling water for dishes and drink taxed them half-to-death. They had no modern filter, and they couldn’t rely on their layered, homemade “survival filter” of sand and charcoal to remove parasite eggs from the river water. Plus, none of them knew how to make charcoal. Every time they tried, they ended up with mostly ash. So they boiled all their water—for drinking and washing. After Denny’s sickness, nobody suggested they play Russian roulette with the questionable, silty water from the Virgin River.
The boy was on his feet now, but he was greatly diminished. Denny barely lifted his feet as he shuffled around the yard. He no longer played with the other children, choosing instead to watch with half-lidded eyes. The worms had depleted all his reserves.
