The Lucky Ones (Evergreen Book 3)

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Wouldn’t have been much of a surprise if I told you about it.” He chuckled.

  “You could’ve been killed.” Harper relaxed the hug so she could look him in the eye. “This stuff is… sentimental, but it’s only stuff.”

  “Ehh, wasn’t no problem.” Deacon folded his arms. “Them boys didn’t give us any trouble we couldn’t handle.”

  “Not a bit.” Fred smiled.

  “Think they pretty much gave up on the outer burbs for the time being.” Ken traced his finger around in midair, perhaps drawing something that made sense only to him. “The Lawless seem to be staying up near the stadium these days. Probably think they got everything of value out of the houses already.”

  “Wait, you all went to our old place?” She blinked at them. “Great. Now I feel super guilty. If anything had happened to you…”

  “It didn’t. So don’t dwell on what-ifs.” Deacon patted her on the back again. “Now go on, cut that cake.”

  Madison ran into a hug with Cliff. Whatever she tried to say came out in a blur of crying.

  Once she collected herself, Harper sliced the cake. Carrie held plates out to receive each piece and gave them to everyone in line. Cake in hand, everyone clustered in groups: adults in the kitchen, children on the living room floor, and the four teens on the sofa, squished together.

  Carrie disappeared for a few minutes, returning with a fat bottle of champagne. “Dave’s firm gave this to him for his fifth work anniversary. We never did get around to opening it. This is a good a time as any to…” Pop!

  It struck Harper as oddly morbid to think that a bottle of fizzy wine would outlast the man it belonged to. But maybe Carrie wanted to get rid of it because it made her think of him. She didn’t appear at all somber or sad when she opened it, and had rarely talked about him much. Harper cut a small bit of cake off her piece with a fork and ate it. It didn’t taste exactly like cake she expected, but she couldn’t tell if she merely forgot what cake tasted like or if it had been made from improvised ingredients that came close to cake without fully hitting it.

  Voices filled the room around her in a meaningless blur. She stared into space, wondering if the guys had seen her parents’ bodies in the house. What had the place she’d called home for seventeen years looked like? Her clothes in the trunk smelled damp. She knew a large piece of concrete or something thrown by a nuclear blast punched a hole in the ceiling of her bedroom, half crushing her bed. It had rained numerous times since they fled, so the house had to be a ruin by now. The bed she’d spent her whole life thinking of as a place of security would likely be disgusting now. There’d be moldy, waterlogged carpet all over. At least upstairs.

  Even if they could go back to Lakewood, the building had to be unlivable. Never mind whatever horribleness came from her parents’ bodies sitting there for months. No… she didn’t want to go back there ever again. She couldn’t bear to see the place in a state like that. Better it remained in her mind as an idealized memory of happier times in a happier world, an alien world with small niceties like law, police, higher education… and hope.

  Random bullets happened before the war, too. Just not around where we lived.

  Bad enough, the two months they’d spent hiding in the basement after the strike had tainted her memories of home with terror. Even then, ‘the upstairs’ had ceased being a sanctuary and became dangerous territory. Someone could see them if they left the basement. Going above ground exposed them to possible fallout or other dangers.

  Her brain tortured her with imagining what her mother’s body might have looked like slumped over the kitchen sink, or Dad flat on his back in the hallway between the dining room and kitchen. She closed her eyes, trying to force the horrible thoughts away and focus on the house as it had been before. Laughter. Arguing with Madison. Friends over. Movie night with the family. Holidays. Homework.

  “Hey, birthday girl.” Carrie tapped her on the arm with a small glass of champagne, snapping her out of her daydream/nightmare. “Here.”

  “She’s spacing out,” said Renee. “We’ve been talking to her for like ten minutes and she’s just staring.”

  “Sorry.” Harper smiled and took the glass. “Thanks. Lot on my mind.”

  “Understandable. Lot of weight in those boxes.” Carrie sighed. “Don’t let sadness eat you up inside or there won’t be anything left. Not saying ignore it, but you can put it on a shelf for now. Enjoy today.”

  “Okay.” Harper sipped the drink, cringing at the fizz going up her nose. “Oof. Gah.”

  Grace snickered. “Never had this before?”

  “Nope.”

  Carrie gave the kids each a tiny portion, roughly equivalent to a shot glass worth. Jonathan made a face that said he’d be happy to live out the rest of his life without ever touching champagne again. Madison and Lorelei appeared to like it—the carbonation set the little one off giggling. Becca and Mila appeared to share Jonathan’s opinion. Christopher got the sneezes from it.

  “Toast,” called Cliff.

  “Ugh.” Harper blushed. Drat. He knows Introvert Prime doesn’t do the ‘talking in front of people’ thing. She stood, looked around, raised her glass, and said, “Thanks.”

  “Aww, come on. A real one.” Cliff winked.

  Her cheeks burned; her hands shook—but not as bad as when she had to address the entire militia. Children, family, and a couple of the militia guys she knew relatively well didn’t intimidate her as much as a crowd of strangers.

  “I’m still not sure if I should call you Dad or Cliff.”

  Laughter and chuckling went around the room.

  “You’ve been looking out for us eight months. And I know that’s not really a lot of time in the world we all used to live in. But now, things are different. I don’t know where I’d be, where Maddie would be, and Jonathan, without you here for us. Going back for that stuff is the most amazing thing anyone’s ever done for me. Thank you. And thank you for being Dad.” She raised her glass at Cliff.

  He wiped a tear. “Aww, I’m just a mall security guard who happened to get stuck with the overnight on the wrong damn day.”

  “Do we drink yet?” whispered Lorelei.

  “Wait for her to drink,” whispered Grace.

  “Thank you, everyone, for the birthday party.” She bowed her head. “I’ll be honest. I’m still pretty messed up about my parents and I’d been kinda hoping no one remembered today. I wanted to forget about birthdays because I didn’t want to think about how much has changed. Parents lost, friends missing, our whole future taken away and reshaped into something big, dark, and scary.”

  Everyone—even Lorelei—sat there in total silence, staring at her.

  “But…” She raised her head, not quite crying. “I’m glad you guys did the birthday party thing. Sometimes it’s easy to miss how much people care. You didn’t let me sit in the dark all by myself and dwell on the bad stuff. The future might be a scary bastard, but I’m happy that you’re all here to take him on with me.”

  Harper held her glass up.

  Logan tapped his glass to hers. “Good toast. You almost didn’t look nervous.”

  She chuckled.

  Deacon whooped. Carrie and Renee pumped their fists in the air while hollering. Fred toasted in silence. Cliff appeared choked up, but managed a smile as he raised his glass.

  “Nice!” said Ken.

  The kids all cheered.

  Jonathan farted.

  “Ugh. Really?” Madison stared at him.

  “Sorry. Her toast took too long. I couldn’t hold it anymore.”

  A few people sputtered champagne on sudden laughter.

  After the toast, the adults hung out in the kitchen talking while the kids ran to the backyard. Logan, Grace, and Renee remained in the living room with Harper, though Renee moved to sit on the floor so the other three didn’t squish together as much. Deacon, Ken, and Fred came by to wish her happy birthday again before heading out, citing militia detail.

  Renee tilte
d back the last of her champagne. “Well, it isn’t exactly the ‘mega-eighteen’ we’d been planning but, I’m—”

  “Stop.” Harper threw a small pillow at her. “This is awesome. Thanks, guys. Really.”

  “Okay, it wouldn’t be a proper birthday…” Cliff walked into the living room. “Without something super cheesy and lame like charades or Pictionary.”

  “Ugh, shoot me now,” muttered Harper. She held her hands up. “Joking. Just joking.”

  The remainder of the afternoon passed in a blur of lame party games and lamer jokes.

  Tired of charades, Jonathan and the kids went out to the yard. Madison gathered her dolls from the trunk. Prior to the war, she’d paid them little attention, claiming to have outgrown them. However, she appeared overjoyed to have them back. She gave some to Lorelei and told her she could play with any of them whenever she wanted. While Jonathan, Mila, Becca, and Christopher tossed a Frisbee around, Madison and Lorelei played with dolls, though Madison appeared more interested in amusing her little sister than the dolls themselves.

  Renee randomly mentioned something idiotic Mr. Collins—a history teacher from their school—did that ended up destroying a photocopier, and that set off a back and forth with Grace as they compared stories of various people doing legendary, stupid, funny, or crazy things at their schools. Harper mostly tuned out of the conversation, not caring to be reminded of people she’d probably never see again.

  When it got on toward dinner time, Becca, Mila, and Christopher headed home. Carrie and Cliff cooked up a surprisingly robust meal of venison, potatoes and carrots. That explained his momentary disappearance—to grab meat from the refrigerators at the school building where the town had been storing it.

  Later that night, Harper caught a stiff case of the doldrums. She found herself standing in the corner at her own birthday party feeling like an intruder. Ken returned not long after they finished having dinner, bringing with him two one-gallon milk bottles filled with Earl’s homebrew beer. He, Cliff, and Carrie talked about something electrical related. The kids played Uno in the living room. Renee and Grace, still on the couch, sipped beer, both having made themselves tipsy. Logan hovered beside her all day, seeming genuinely happy to be there and not at all bored.

  Her sense of being an outsider started when she’d glanced at the two big boxes still sitting in the kitchen. Survivor’s guilt smashed her mood straight into the gutter. Those two trunks held all that remained of her life before the world went crazy. Perhaps it had been the beer and a half she’d drunk that made her feel as though she had become a ghost floating around someone else’s house, watching someone else’s party.

  When Logan excused himself to hit the bathroom and let the beer out, Harper snuck out the back door into a brisk, chilly night breeze. She sat on the rear porch, head down to her knees, long, red hair draping over her legs almost to the dirt.

  Despite consciously wanting to cry over her parents, she couldn’t summon any tears.

  Her friends had teased her all last summer with their mysterious, grandiose plans for an eighteenth birthday. Whether or not they actually had plans or merely messed with her, she didn’t know. If she survived the bombardment, Veronica would’ve been the first of her crew to hit the big one-eight last November, roughly two weeks after Harper fled her home. Her friend Christina would’ve turned eighteen on May twenty-third, again, if she lived. Andrea in April, on the thirtieth. Darci’s eighteenth birthday fell a little over a month from now.

  The voice of her pothead friend echoed in her memories, laughing her fool head off while explaining how she’d been a stubborn baby and didn’t pop out of her mother until 12:02 a.m. on July fifth, missing the fourth by two minutes.

  But, more than lost and possibly dead friends, Harper missed her parents. I should be in my fifties or older before I had a birthday Mom and Dad wouldn’t be there for. Not eighteen. Not goddamned eighteen. Bad enough she’d chickened out and let Dad get killed, she’d abandoned their bodies to whatever the gang might have done to them. I’m sorry for just leaving you guys there.

  She imagined her parents telling her she had to run and didn’t have a choice.

  The porch creaked.

  Someone large-ish sat beside her. Too heavy to be Logan. Definitely not Renee or Grace.

  “Hey,” said Cliff.

  Harper lifted her head, gathered her hair off her face, and picked her beer glass up. “Hey.”

  “I know you’ve probably been thinking about it all afternoon.” He offered a hand. “We buried them in the backyard. In the corner by that tree with the white rocks around the bottom.”

  She took his hand, flinching at the meaning of his words. “Thanks.” She pictured the spot right away, the same tree her father had made a tire swing on when she’d been six. Mom went through a phase a few years ago where she put little white rocks around most of the bushes and stuff. Random memories came and went of her backyard. Dad cooking on a grill for the party he threw when she’d won her first shooting competition. Being eleven and having her friends over to injure themselves on a Slip-N-Slide. A water-powered rocket kit she got for Christmas when she’d been nine. It landed on the neighbor’s roof the first time they launched it. Madison, at four, had spotted rabbits around that same tree in the corner of the yard by the fence.

  Harper tried to guess where they’d buried the bodies. Side by side most likely… straight in front of the tree, or against the fence to the left or right?

  “How… were they…?”

  “It didn’t look like anyone bothered them after.”

  “I mean. How bad were…” She shivered, then chugged the last half of her beer in one go.

  “You wouldn’t have known who they were just by looking at them.”

  She clenched her jaw, eyes shut. Two tears crept silently down her face.

  He put an arm around her.

  “Thank you.” She leaned against him. “Did you see any Lawless?”

  “Yeah. Small group came to check out the van. Nothing we couldn’t handle. Four of them, and only one had a working gun.”

  “You killed them?”

  “Yup.”

  She nodded. Just baddies in a video game. They don’t count as people anymore. I’d shoot them all if I could. Every last stinking one of them. Killing a hundred Lawless wouldn’t bring her parents back, wouldn’t change what happened.

  Another tear rolled down her face.

  Dad would be heartbroken at me wanting to kill someone. She leaned against Cliff for a few minutes, letting the rage and sorrow bloom and fade away. He kept an arm around her until she gathered herself enough to once again face the house full of people who’d come to help her remember what happy felt like.

  “You okay?”

  She squeezed him. “Better than I was. Not sure I’ll ever really be ‘okay,’ but today is helping. Thanks for getting our stuff, and… burying them.”

  “No problem. Figured that’d be better than a water pistol from Walmart.”

  Chuckling, Harper playfully punched him on the shoulder. “Yeah, just a little.”

  He grinned and took a sip of his beer.

  The door behind them opened.

  “What’s up?” asked Logan.

  Harper wiped her eyes before standing to go back inside. “Just needed some air. All good now.”

  Harper lugged the trunk of her stuff down the hall to the bedroom.

  Everyone who didn’t live there had gone home for the night. The kids gathered in the living room playing Uno or something. She sat on the floor in her room and stared at the trunk with little desire to open it. Harper had come close to asking a scavenging group to stop at her old house once before, but decided against it. The risk hadn’t been worth it… and she didn’t want to see her parents’ corpses. As much as she’d wanted her things—mostly clothing—now that they sat in front of her, it took her a few minutes to find the nerve to open the lid.

  More than simple objects sat inside the trunk. But she could
n’t ignore the emotions contained in there forever. Eventually, she gathered her willpower and got to work.

  Harper set all three framed photos she had of her parents on the dresser, creating something of a shrine to their memory. The trophies she’d won for shooting, though sentimental, went into the closet. Having them out in sight felt too much like bragging. She’d only displayed them in her old room for Dad’s benefit. Handling them made her think about him, how proud he’d always been of her… and how he had to moderate the comments on her YouTube videos. Aside from the usual creeps saying inappropriate sexual stuff, she got an alarming number of awful comments from people who made it sound like her father allowing her to touch firearms had been worse than giving her hard drugs or pimping her out.

  Every article of clothing she pulled out of the trunk set off a cascade of memories, either of the moment she bought or received each item, or a strong memory associated with wearing it, like her junior prom dress. Standing there being poked and fussed over by the woman at the shop had been so annoying. At least the junior year prom had been fun. She knelt there a while feeling sad that she’d never go to senior prom. Then again, she couldn’t claim any strong feelings for Micah. They probably would’ve gone together, but she doubted any relationship with him would’ve lasted much more than another year into college.

  One green sweater with a panda on it reminded her of Mom’s birthday two years ago when Aunt Caroline tripped and spilled an entire glass of white wine all over Harper, and that panda.

  I think everyone has an Aunt Caroline. It’s like a law of the universe.

  A construction-paper fairy that Madison made for her years ago went atop the dresser as well as a bunch of her fairy-themed collectibles, all of which mostly came from her mother or sister on various birthdays or Christmas. Her books, also smelling of wet dog, wound up stacked in the corner since the room had no shelves. At least the paper hadn’t gone moldy. She hung her old dresses in the closet and packed the non-hangable clothes away in a big trash bag to await laundry day. All of it still smelled funny: wet wood, mold, a hint of dead person.