Apokalypsis Book One

by Kate Morris

  “Cool,” Connor answered.

  He forgot about the news he’d been trying to watch as he cleaned up after them and wiped down the counter, making sure to get the ketchup splatter off of the Italian marble. His mother would have a fit if it stained. Then he sat at the long dining room table and worked on Connor’s homework with him so that they wouldn’t have to try to fit it in Sunday night when things were always more hectic before the school week started again. When he was done, Roman told him to go and get his shower while he did his own schoolwork and tossed in a load of Connor’s dirty laundry. He could fold it tonight when he got home.

  Unfortunately for that big Chemistry test that was coming up on Monday, he got distracted by doing an internet search on his laptop instead of studying. Chemistry and most science classes came easy for him anyway. He looked before for Jane on social media sites but had never found her. With good reason. He was quite sure that the people at school would’ve stalked and tortured her on those, too. Tapping his pencil against his chin, he paused a moment and thought. Passing her grandmother’s farm every day, he saw her name on the mailbox frequently. Barnes. Her grandmother’s last name was Barnes. Her grandmother must’ve been the mother of Jane’s mother who was in prison unless Jane didn’t take her father’s name. Roman didn’t know. All families were patchwork quilts. It didn’t seem like any of his friends’ parents were still married to their original partners. Every family was a blended hodgepodge of dysfunction. Jane was and always had been a mystery. He typed into Facebook Jane Barnes and got a few hits, but none were her. Then he jumped over to Instagram. It only took a moment to find her. And there she was on the internet. She probably figured she was safe on that site with her grandmother’s last name and her first. If she was on other social media sites, then she was using a fake name. She had quite a few followers on Instagram, though. Most of her photographs were of animals and odd things like street signs and graffiti. He wondered if she took them herself. It seemed like she did. Other pictures were borrowed from other people and were of state signs or city signs. From what he could tell from her comments and hashtags, it seemed like she wanted to live in one of those other states. Did she want to leave Ohio? He wasn’t sure. She even had a picture of Siesta Key beach on there. It was hashtagged ‘vacation dreams.’ Roman knew of the area very well. His grandparents lived near there in Key Largo, and his family vacationed at least once a year to Florida to visit with them. Actually, he and Connor went a lot by themselves because his parents sent them on a plane without them. They always said the same thing: they were too busy with work to take time off. Either way was fine with him. He was crazy about his grandparents on his father’s side and visiting with them was always fun.

  He viewed another twenty pictures on her account and noticed one with a man. She was in the photo, probably taken last year when her hair was shorter. It looked like a camping or hiking trip because there was a small RV and woods in the background. It was tagged as ‘time with dad.’ Her father was mostly in shadow, so he couldn’t see his face well. He was a stocky looking dude. He was probably five nine or ten and built like a bull. She was smiling widely at whoever was taking the pic, her straight white teeth on full display and her dimples exposed. He didn’t even know she had such nice teeth or dimples at all. She looked so young and happy, not anything how she looked at school every day, which was miserable and shy and uncomfortable. She seemed relaxed, too. Her light hazel eyes were lit from the joy that was beaming from within her.

  His phone buzzed, and he swiped it to reveal a text from Heather, one of Stephanie’s friends. There was a sad face emoji, praying hands emoji, and a message begging him to come to the quarry tonight. He swiped it away and didn’t answer. He didn’t like Heather at all. He knew she liked him, though. She’d let her regard for him be known. However, she’d called Jane ‘fat’ one day, which had pissed him off. It was the second or third day of this school year, and he hadn’t talked to her since. She’d remarked that Jane had gotten fat over summer break. It was absurd. She wasn’t fat at all. He didn’t know a whole lot about girls’ sizes, but he knew that when he dated Steph, she’d told him she was a size six. Jane seemed smaller. He also knew that she worked at a horseback riding and boarding facility less than a mile from where they lived. The work she did there was probably laborious like cleaning out stalls and tending to the horses and such. Heather was probably a size bigger than Steph. She had no room to speak, and Steph told him that she downed diet pills and Ex-Lax like they were Tic Tacs. Heather was just a cruel, jealous bitch, one of the many in their school.

  Roman scrolled down a few more pictures and saw the evidence of the job at the stables. There were shots of horses, and a few taken with her in them by someone that she must’ve worked with over there named ‘Noah.’ She tagged those as ‘Noah stealing my phone again, ugh.’ In some, she was riding the horses, probably exercising them or something. Roman didn’t know this Noah guy, who was in a few other pics with her, but he was instantly jealous that this dude got to spend more time with her than he did. He looked like maybe a college student, and in one photo had on a hoodie with the logo for Bowling Green University on it. She was smiling and trying to dodge his dirty hands in another photo that someone took of them horsing around. He had light blonde hair and what seemed like blue or light eyes. He was older, probably twenty or twenty-one and good-looking in a northeastern yuppie, ivy league school kind of way. Spying on her Instagram felt wrong, but it was like looking into a secret, private side of Jane, one he’d never seen before.

  “I’m done! When are we playing video games?” Connor yelled down the stairs.

  Roman startled and snapped the laptop shut. “Pretty soon, buddy!” he called back.

  Then Roman stowed his gear away and took his backpack and supplies up to his room. He checked in with Connor to make sure he was moving along in the getting dressed process. Then he grabbed his own quick shower in the bathroom attached to his bedroom. It was convenient, but he could’ve just shared a bathroom with Connor, who also had his own attached bath. His parents’ bedroom was on the first floor in the back of the house. It overlooked the seventh hole on the golf course. Roman hated golf. His father forced him to take lessons when he was younger, but it hadn’t instilled a love of the sport. It was dull and boring. He preferred doing things that moved a little faster. Connor’s bedroom overlooked the pool and their neighbor’s house. There were three other bedrooms on the second floor and one in the finished basement. The house, like most of the others in the neighborhood, was around five thousand square feet.

  His bedroom overlooked the cement retaining wall that was stamped to look like stone that separated their exclusive neighborhood from the property of Jane’s grandmother. He could see their house from his bedroom window. Sometimes he’d catch a glimpse of her strolling around her grandmother’s apple orchard. In the fall, like now, Roman would scale the wall and sneak into their orchard to pick a few apples. They were so much better than the ones from the store for some reason. She and her grandmother sold to a local organic, health food store crates of apples, jars of apple butter, and honey from the hives they kept at the far edge of the property where the few acres of woods started.

  After checking on the peaceful, quiet homestead of Jane and her grandmother, he dressed in clean jeans, a long-sleeved black turtleneck, and a black cable knit sweater. It was supposed to get cool later and maybe even rain. He wore black a lot, not because he was depressed or emo, but because he idolized anything and everything about Johnny Cash. Every song he ever made was loaded into his iPod. He even asked for a record player a few years ago and bought very old, vintage vinyl just so he could listen to Folsom Prison on there. It was awesome. Just the way it should’ve been heard. Roman also didn’t like matching and coordinating clothing and outfits, so it was just easier to wear black most days. Stephanie and her gaggle of fashion critics always accused him of being color blind and threatened to drag him to the mall. That certainly wasn’t ever
happening. The only thing worse than having to shop online for new threads would’ve been doing it in person in the damn mall. He’d rather go back to the orthodontist and have his braces put back on that he’d had removed two years ago.

  “Are you coming or what?” Connor blasted down the long hallway at him.

  Roman chuckled quietly and called back, trying his damnedest to sound stern, “Hold your horses! I’m coming.”

  He had a dark five o’clock shadow staring back at him in the mirror but didn’t want to leave his brother waiting too long. He simply brushed his teeth, ran a comb through his hair, which he always had cut in a pompadour style like his hero, Mr. Cash, and put on extra deodorant. That was about as into cologne as he got. Sometimes the locker rooms at school smelled like rushing through the men’s cologne department at the mall, another reason not to go.

  Roman smiled patiently when his little bro hit him with an equally impatient frown at him taking so long.

  “Ready to get your butt kicked?” he teased.

  “Yeah, right! You’re going down!” Connor practically squealed with excitement.

  Roman settled in for a few hours of play all the while getting his butt kicked as predicted. It wasn’t because Connor was better than him. He was just distracted with anticipation.

  Chapter Three

  At seven-thirty, Jane finished up at the stables, having fed, watered and bedded down the twenty-one horses living there. The place was run by Mrs. Goddard, who was an exceptionally kind-hearted older lady. She was sweet, never treated Jane beneath her, even though she was quite sure Mrs. Goddard knew of her family’s sordid history. She often muttered comments about the rich, spoiled brats whose parents kept their show horses at her facility.

  Jane reached into her backpack and pulled an apple from it, one from their orchard, and fed it to Khemosabi, one of the older, sweet-tempered Arabians at the barn. He belonged to Mrs. Goddard, not one of the renters. He was a pretty bay with a crooked white stripe going down his nose, and he always begged a petting or an apple or a carrot from Jane, who nearly always obliged with one, two, or all three of the requests.

  Her cell rang as she was getting into her truck, and Jane answered on the second ring.

  “Hey! Are we still on?” Destiny inquired on the other end.

  “On for what?”

  “Duh, stupid,” her friend chided. “The party. You’re supposed to be picking me up in like forty-five minutes.”

  “Oh, crap. Sorry. I just got busy at the barn,” Jane said, sort of lying. She really did forget, but she wasn’t so busy that she couldn’t have left about a half hour ago. “Trust me. I don’t exactly look party ready. I’m a dirty mess, as usual.”

  “That’s what makes running water so great, dummy,” Destiny teased.

  “I haven’t even had dinner, Dez,” she tried. Jane really didn’t want to go to some party. That wasn’t her scene.

  “As if your grandma won’t have dinner ready when you get home.”

  She had a point. Nana Peaches always had dinner ready. She was Jane’s one constant in life, other than Dez.

  “Shower. Food. Then get your ass over here and pick me up,” Destiny demanded.

  “You’re the world’s worst friend,” she joked as she pulled out of the stable’s parking lot.

  “As if you’d know. Nine o’clock,” Destiny said and disconnected.

  Jane leaned her head back against the headrest and groaned. She drove the mile to her own home and pulled in on the gravel drive, parking beside the house in her spot. In the summer, she rode her bike to the riding facility since it was so close.

  “Hey, Delores,” she greeted her grandmother’s orange and white cat, which was obese and lazy and mostly lived outdoors. Housecat was a term meant for her, though. She didn’t even chase mice anymore. “Rough day?”

  She let herself in the side door and kicked off her dirty barn boots into the shoe tray that usually caught the mud and muck most of the time. The house smelled like it always did of comfort food.

  As predicted, her grandmother was at the old stove in the small kitchen stirring something in a big stockpot.

  “Mm,” Jane stated and wrapped an arm around her grandmother’s waist from behind. “Smells great. What is it?”

  “Irish stew,” she stated.

  “Nana Peaches, where do you get these fantastic recipes?” she marveled.

  “My head,” she said as if she found the question silly. “Now fetch some bowls, Jane.”

  “Well, I just hope you have them all written down so when I move out someday, I’ll have them to make on my own,” Jane commented.

  Her grandmother turned to her and said, “I never thought to write them down. You just need to spend more time in the kitchen with me.”

  “Yes, in my spare ten minutes each week, I’ll get right on that.”

  Nana Peaches chuckled, her dimples showing. Her grandmother went by Peaches. Her real name was Bernadette, which she hated. When she was still a young girl, she used to love helping her own mother can peaches out of the orchard. Her father started calling her Peach, which morphed into Peaches. Then it was the only thing people called her. Even people in the community called her Peaches. And when Jane had first come to live with her, she’d insisted on being called Nana Peaches. Jane hadn’t even known what her real name was until about a year after she’d moved in. She’d gone to the bank with her and noticed her grandmother signing her name differently on a check.

  Jane brought down chipped ceramic bowls that Nana Peaches had made years ago in a pottery class. She had a lot of things like that around the house. Blankets she’d quilted, candles she made, soaps, paintings, items she’d crocheted. Jane had inherited none of her grandmother’s crafty skills.

  “We’ll have orange juice with our dinner, Jane,” she said. “Flu season will be just around the corner. We need to prepare our immune systems.”

  “You never get sick,” Jane noted. “Oh, hey, I got your meds.”

  She pulled the pharmacy bag with the bottle of prescription diabetes pills from her backpack and set it on the table.

  “I don’t even know why I take those,” her grandmother scoffed and waved her hand in front of her.

  “Um, because you have diabetes,” Jane smartly remarked just as she did every time this conversation came up.

  “Poison. Pharmaceutical companies just trying to kill everyone.”

  “Diabetes will kill you first. Just don’t forget to take them every day,” she said.

  “I heard on the news today…”

  Jane nearly tuned her out. She was a news addict. Most of it sounded like drama. Jane wasn’t sure where the line of reality television programming and the supposed news was drawn, but it was definitely a very thin one.

  “Virus going around overseas. Don’t want to catch that, either. Bad enough we’re going into cold and flu season here,” she continued.

  “Right,” Jane said, brought glasses over, and joined her grandmother at the small dinette table in the kitchen. They rarely ate in the actual dining room. That was her grandmother’s crafting space.

  She listened for a while longer as her grandmother talked about this disease spreading around across the pond. Like so many other diseases and flus like swine and bird, she doubted it would make it to America.

  “Would it be okay if I went out with Dez tonight?” she asked when her grandmother took a breath.

  “Out? Where?”

  “I don’t know. Some party or something one of the people at school is throwing.”

  “Party?”

  “I know. Not my cup of tea, but Dez really wants to go. I’ll be glad when she gets her license,” Jane lamented.

  “I don’t know about you going to a party, Jane. I’m responsible for you. Does your dad know?”

  She regarded her beloved grandmother, admiring the small, gray bun at the base of her neck. Her grandmother was a tall woman, lean but strong. She wore denim overalls and a blue plaid, flannel shirt. The
re was not a single hint of artifice about Peaches. She was the real deal, genuine and honest.

  “No, I didn’t think to ask him. I’m just getting the okay from you. Actually, it would be great if you said no. I don’t really wanna’ go at all.”

  Nana Peaches smiled before taking a bite of homemade bread. It was apple season, so there was fresh apple butter on the table, which was smeared on her grandmother’s bread. Jane wished she wouldn’t eat it. She knew the amount of sugar it contained. Her grandmother wasn’t really supposed to consume sugar, not with diabetes.

  “Will it be safe?” she asked with concern.

  “Yeah, I’m hardly gonna get date raped, Nana,” she answered. “I’d have to get a date first.”

  “Idiots. The lot of them are idiots, Jane,” her grandmother replied with a sympathetic frown.

  “I don’t really care. I don’t need the distraction of boys right now anyway. I don’t want to be tied down by someone like that.”

  “Careful what you wish for,” she said, thinking of her own life. “You don’t want to live the rest of your life alone, either, love. I don’t want you getting tangled up with some boy at such a young age, but there will come a time in your life when you will seek out the companionship of someone. Just make sure he’s worthy of you. You’re a diamond. You remember that.”

  Her grandmother rarely spoke with such open affection. She was always a little rough around the edges, hardened by the life she’d lived, which hadn’t always been easy and certainly not privileged. Jane knew her grandmother loved her, but it was not often spoken aloud.