“Have you read that one?” Will asked.
“I did,” she replied, her mind boomeranging back to Mike’s Taco Club. Sometimes she went with the brisket tacos, which came topped with this relish-slaw thing that was so good you’d eat it straight, with your hands if you had to.
“What’s it about?”
“It’s a science fiction story about two kids looking for their dad after he disappears.”
“Is it good?”
“I loved it.”
“What happened to their dad?”
“He was a scientist who disappeared while working on a secret project for the government.”
“And they went looking for him?”
“Yes.”
“Were they scared?”
“I’m sure they were.”
He pondered this, scrunching up his face in thought. It made him seem so grownup and so small at the same time.
“Do you get scared?”
She considered her response.
“Sometimes.”
“What are you scared of?”
She reached out and gently touched his face with the palm of her hand, quickly enough that he didn’t have a chance to pull away from her. His face blurred before her.
“Mainly I worry about you.”
He cut his eyes to the ground.
“It’s OK to be scared, you know.”
He continued staring at something on the ground. Had he spotted a bite to eat? Maybe a taco?
Tacos.
“Even the bravest people who ever lived were scared.”
“They were?”
“Yes. Being brave doesn’t mean you’re not scared.”
“It doesn’t?”
“It means being scared and doing it anyway.”
“I miss home.”
“I know,” she said. “We’re going to find a new home though. A new place for us to be happy.”
“When?”
“Bud, I’m going to be totally honest with you,” she said. “I really don’t know. I hope it will be soon.”
He nodded.
“Can we get some books?”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Something wet landed on her arm and she observed with some horror that she had been salivating.
“Yes. Grab some books,” she said. “I’m going to sit down for a second.”
As Will toddled off to browse, Rachel’s muscles failed her. That last bit of fuel powering her engines was spent, leaving her with no more to give. Her legs gave out underneath her and she slowly sank to the floor next to the inimitable Brooke.
Sitting down felt good. She pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around them. It did not strike her as odd that she was sidling up next to a decade-old corpse.
Will wandered the store, grabbing one book after another, stacking them by the wall. After a while, he sat down to read. As Rachel watched him, sitting side by side with the late proprietor of the store they were ransacking, she wondered when they would eat again.
19
A house.
What day was it
Walls.
What year was it
Floors.
Where’s Will?
Books.
Who’s Will?
Your son you dumb bitch.
Bitch was a good word.
You didn’t hear it enough.
You didn’t hear anything enough.
Like the sizzle of a steak hitting the grill. Nothing then a hiss of the juice hitting the blaze and a bloom of flame leaping to kiss the inch-thick ribeye. Then the air would fill with the rich, succulent scent of cooking meat. In the corner of the grill was a big eight-ounce potato, wrapped in aluminum foil, awaiting its destiny to be split open and loaded with cheese and sour cream and butter, a thick pat of butter that slid over the firm flesh of the spud.
No, you definitely did not hear that sound often enough.
Did people still eat steak?
Were there still cows?
Rachel woke up. Her head was clear, but it wouldn’t be for long. She didn’t know if that’s how starvation worked in other people, but that’s how it had been for her. Cycling between lucidity and madness, the periods of clarity growing shorter until they would be gone, and she would drift along in madness until she died not even knowing she needed to eat.
Lincoln now. They needed to get to Lincoln.
A decent sized city. Lots of nooks and crannies.
She touched her flank, counting her very visible ribs one at a time like she was thumbing through a file cabinet. Food. They had to eat.
Captain Understatement reporting for duty!
She wasn’t even hungry anymore.
But she was dying.
She and Will were dying.
A noise.
She sat up quickly and her head swam and she toppled over on her side. She primed her ears for the noise again, but it didn’t repeat. The bookstore settling perhaps. Or maybe someone breaking in to kill them and eat them. Because that’s what she would do.
She laughed.
Yessiree, she would gladly kill the first person she met and sauté the meat from his thigh with some onions and eat until she was good and stuffed. Or maybe she wouldn’t even bother with cooking the meat, just go after it tartare.
Will was asleep next to her. He slept a great deal now, his body conserving what little energy it had left. The clinician in her awoke and gave her the bad news that she gave her every morning.
No more than a couple of days now.
He wouldn’t last much longer.
It had been seventeen days since Charlotte died.
Give or take.
They should’ve eaten the bobcat. Looking back now, leaving the carcass behind had been a bad choice. The odds it had been rabid were awfully low, and it could have fed them for days. Sure, it would’ve been a risk, but it would’ve been a risk worth taking. Besides, they would have cooked the meat and if it did have rabies, which it probably didn’t, that probably would’ve killed the rabies virus it almost certainly did not have. And if it had had rabies and they died of rabies then they could have died with bellies full and even that would have been better than this.
She struggled to her feet, using the wall for leverage. It took a good minute, but eventually, she had managed to get herself upright. The nearest bookcase was about eight feet away from her; in her weakened condition, she would use the bookcases as way stations. Will would probably sleep the entire time she was gone. Even if he didn’t, he would stay put, knew his mother had gone scavenging. He was too weak to disobey her. At least that was something. She threw one more glance at him. He was stretched out on the floor, a stack of books next to him.
She shoved off, her legs like overcooked spaghetti underneath her, shimmying across the threadbare carpet. She reached the bookcase and grabbed tight, leaning up against it. Then one step at a time, she edged her way down the aisle, lost in a fog of brightly colored children’s books and stuffed animals standing guard atop the cases.
She became aware of a sticky, popping sound; her dried lips almost glued together from dehydration. Water. How could she forget about the water? Jesus, all the shit she had to keep straight. It wasn’t fair. Was this what people thought about as they died? The inherent unfairness of it all? You’re going to starve to death inside a bookstore in BFE, Nebraska. Quite the epitaph for her life.
She made it to the door. A turn of the knob and a jingle of the little bell and she stepped onto the stoop. It was chilly outside. She held the railing as she went down the steps, her legs rickety underneath her but holding on. The tiny town of Greenwood, which didn’t seem like it had been much busier before the plague than after it, spread out before her. The town was an afterthought, a skin tag on the map of Nebraska.
To the west was an automobile scrapyard, crowded with hundreds of rusted-out vehicles, abandoned long enough that they were starting to disappear under the foliage growing up around them, growing up through t
hem. In the breeze that morning, the carpet of vines pulsed.
Part of her wondered if they should have done more searching off the beaten path, away from the throughways between Omaha and Lincoln. Those would have been the most heavily trafficked and as such, the least likely to have any food. But drifting away from the main routes took them far away from population centers. She didn’t even know why she was bothering conducting another search of the town.
Maybe she’d missed something.
She wandered east along Main Street. There had been a small market about a quarter mile west of the house, but it lay in ruins. The roof had collapsed at some point in the past, leaving three walls and not much else.
It reminded her of a pie crust.
Pie. Apple pie. Cherry pie. Boston cream pie.
She didn’t realize she was salivating until a string of spittle struck her hand. It startled her back into reality. She continued up the road, past a line of cars parked by the curb of the erstwhile downtown area. A dry cleaner. A law firm. Heaton & Associates. Wills & Family Law. Talk about a dead industry.
She hit the law office first. Inside, the air was musty and old, rich with dust of decaying papers and books. It was dim, almost dark, but over the years, she’d become quite adept at scavenging in the dark. After a few moments, her eyes adjusted to the low light. There was a large appointment book at the reception desk, still open to that fateful August so many years ago. Each block on the calendar was chockfull of appointments. An old newspaper still sat folded on top of the desk, a copy of the Lincoln Journal Star. Above the fold, a headline screamed EPIDEMIC RAGES UNCHECKED. As she often did, she tried to picture the last day anyone had sat at this desk in the Time Before. The secretary, feeling sick, scouring the Internet for news about the outbreak. Her boss, telling her to go on home. As they always did, these little slices of life at the end of the world made her stiffen with sadness.
She checked the drawers, hoping beyond hope for a can of soup or spaghetti but coming up empty. There was a plastic bread bag in the bottom drawer, its contents long morphed into dust. She pressed deeper into the office, checking the small break room, the attorney’s office, the conference room. Nothing. If there had been anything useful here, it had long since been scavenged.
Back outside, another layer of hope stripped away, which would undoubtedly be replaced with another bit of hope, albeit a smaller dose. She didn’t know why she still had any hope left, but every building, every house, every office was steeped with potential. Like an addict, hooked on the next high, the next score, the next, the next. That’s what it was.
Onto the next.
The idea of searching for food electrified her, which struck her as silly. Why couldn’t she give up hope like a regular person? Just accept their fate. Let them enjoy their last few hours or days together and then die. What was she trying to keep them alive for anyway? This dead world, barren in more ways than one.
She took a step and felt her knee buckle underneath her, sending her down in a heap. Her elbow scraped against the ground and she hoped the scratch wasn’t too deep. Infection was never far from her mind, because wouldn’t that be something, a tiny cut metastasizing into a cesspool of necrosis and sepsis and killing her dead. She lay there, trying to summon the power to climb back to her feet, but the tanks were dry. This was it then. She would die here because she didn’t have the strength to stand back up. Everyone had a breaking point. She had reached hers.
“Mommy, get up,” Will whispered.
He was on his hands and knees, staring down at her with those eyes of his, the ones that reminded her of her father. How did she tell him that she couldn’t get up, that this was it, that he would be on his own now? He would never make it. She had killed him. She had killed her own son, no different than drowning him in a bathtub. She had been killing him for years, hiding him away from the world instead of teaching him the things he needed to know to survive. Even she hadn’t been willing to do the things she needed to do. She had given up on Charlotte. She had let the meat from the bobcat go to waste. Hell, even Eddie had been the one to ambush the folks on the wagon.
She sobbed. Her dehydrated body heaved as she wept, but no tears fell from her barren eyes. As Will stared down at her, she looked up into his eyes, desperate to impart some wisdom upon him at the end of her life. To give him something, some snippet of advice that would help him get past this crisis and onto the rest of his life.
The rest of his life.
She laughed at the cruelty of it all.
He would be dead in a week.
Voices.
Voices around her.
Now she was hallucinating.
Will lifted his head and looked around.
Great, maybe he was hallucinating too.
It’d be easier that way. Better than being too aware of one’s imminent demise. Talk to unicorns, run around in a downpour of doughnuts, play bass with ZZ Top maybe and fade away from this mortal coil.
“Mommy,” he said. “Someone’s here.”
His voice was small, tinged with fear.
Fear blitzed through her like an electrical current. She turned her head slowly, her eyes sweeping the landscape. A woman with a graying ponytail. She wore dirty blue jeans and a camouflage vest. A University of Nebraska baseball cap sat perched atop her head. Behind her, two more people, roughly the same age as Rachel. A younger man and a woman about Rachel’s age. They looked thin but healthy.
Rachel’s mouth watered at the very sight of them, a primal instinct buried deep within her that nevertheless made her feel ashamed. The very thought of it made her dry heave, the throaty grunts of her retching breaking the quiet around them.
Get up.
Get up and move.
Get up and kill them.
Will.
You have to protect Will.
But her body refused its orders, a mutinous soldier betraying her commanding officer. She pawed at the ground with weak arms, her brain telling her to push herself up and do something. The scraggly weeds poking up out of the ground felt cool under fingers as she tried to regain her footing. She felt Will’s hand snaking under her arm and then sliding around her back as he tried to help her up. But he was struggling, Rachel about as useful as a giant bag of rocks.
He grunted once, loudly, as she felt his arm give way. She slid back down, her chin catching the ground first, splitting the skin open. Her teeth clicked together hard, catching her tongue in between, and a burst of blood filled her mouth like warm chocolate from a truffle.
Then she passed out.
20
The sun streaming through the large plate-glass window woke her more than anything else, its warmth baking her skin. She blinked twice to clear out the sleepiness still lingering in her eyes. A thin sheen of sweat slicked her arms. As she regained her bearings, she drank in her surroundings, a sip at a time. She couldn’t quite remember where she was or how she’d gotten here, but there was a strange familiarity about it, the sense she had been here before. She was indoors, lying on a twin bed.
Somewhere, perhaps the next room over, a noise.
Will.
She knew the sounds he made even when he was out of her sight. The way he shifted a chair or rustled through his belongings, even the tinny clang of his utensils against a plate while he ate, she could isolate the sounds he made from those of anyone else on earth. She didn’t know what he was doing, but she could tell from the languorous movements that he was in no danger.
There was a plastic water bottle by her head. Looking at it reminded her how thirsty she was. She reached out for it, her thin arm trembling from the exertion, but she didn’t have the strength to reach that far.
“Will,” she called out, her throat dry, her voice small and cracked.
She waited a moment, but he did not respond.
“Will,” she repeated, this one a bit louder. The effort made her feel lightheaded and the room began to dissolve around her. A wave of nausea rumbled through her like a lon
ely freight train. She hoped he heard her because she couldn’t bear to call his name a third time.
No answer.
She slept again.
When she woke up, it was dark. The room shimmered in the light of a candle. Things would be a lot better if this were a dream and she were back in her trailer at Evergreen or even better if she was eighteen and still a freshman at Caltech. She touched her forehead again and found it cool this time. She tried getting up, but again her muscles failed her.
“Are you thirsty?” a strange voice asked.
She nodded. Her tongue felt swollen and thick, like it couldn’t get out of its own way. A bottle at her lips. The cool liquid against her dry, cracked lips stung and felt exquisite at the same time. Her jaw twitched, and a bit of liquid ran down her chin and into the hollow of her neck.
“What time is it?”
“It’s almost eight.”
“Where are we?”
“Lincoln.”
This bit of news galvanized her. That bookstore had been thirty miles away from Lincoln. She had no memory of anything since stepping outside.
“Lincoln? Where’s my son?”
“He’s fine,” the woman said with a hint of a Southern accent. “He’s sleeping in the next room. Cute as a button, that boy.”
“How did we get here?”
“You’ve got to take it easy, honey,” she said. “We’ll get to all that. First, we’ve got to get a little food in you.”
There was a tray on the nightstand next to the bed. On it was a small bowl of applesauce and some thick bread.
“It’s not much, but there’s more where that came from. Besides, I don’t think that skinny little body of yours can take too much. Even this bread might be too much for you to handle.”
“Who are you?”
“Sweetie, my name is Millicent.”
Millicent. Of course. Maybe next they’d start talking about cotillion and cucumber sandwiches.
“Rachel. My son’s name is Will. Did my son eat?” Rachel asked, biting off a small chunk of bread. It was lighter than she expected, still warm. She could not remember the last time she’d eaten something this delicious. Granted, at this point, she’d probably think the same thing about a moldy piece bread that was hard as diamond.
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