The Living Page 2

  “I don’t understand how this is even possible,” he said. “How he is even possible.”

  “And that’s why he needs more of you, not less,” she said. “He’s starting to ask questions.”

  Eddie’s eyes were fixed on the floor.

  “What do you tell him?”

  “That there are other kids.”

  “You lie.”

  “I lie.”

  Silence again.

  “It’s scary, you know,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “You. Your dad. Will.”

  She stood there, not knowing what to say, not sure there was anything to say.

  Eddie followed Will outside, headed for wherever it was he went when he wanted to pout.

  It was all clear now. All this time, stupidly thinking that Eddie was simply a shitty father like all the other shitty fathers that had preceded him. Producing shitty fathers, that had sort of been mankind’s thing. And it had been easy to lump Eddie in with all the others, her father too. It had even been understandable on a Psychology 101 level. Adam had been an absentee father when she was growing up, before the plague, so it made sense she had ended up with an absentee father for her own son. But now she saw that it something else entirely.

  Scary, he’d said.

  As if Rachel didn’t know how scary it was. As if it were somehow lost on her that Will had been the last baby born in their community to live to his first birthday. As though it had slipped her mind that for all anyone knew to the contrary, William Fisher Callahan had been the last person to live to his first birthday anywhere.

  2

  Rachel tended to the low fire in the woodstove and then went outside, locking the door behind her as she went. Will waited at the fence behind their trailer, gazing west, his little fingers curled around the chain links. They had a clear view of the western horizon, of the sunsets that helped them bid farewell to another day on their lonely planet. A sharp tang in the air burned her nostrils, a swirl of woodsmoke and cold reminding you winter was on its way. The air stank of rain yet to fall. The sun, veiled by vaporous clouds, was setting like a balloon drifting to earth, looking for its nest beyond the Rockies a thousand miles to the west. It was a weak sun, barely breaking through the cloud cover perpetually blanketing the Midwest sky.

  They walked north toward the employee cafeteria, past the main complex housing their food supply, a two-million-square-foot monolith, roughly the size of two city blocks. Will kicked a faded Pepsi can as they strolled across the dusty roadway, his path meandering as he followed the can’s unpredictable bounces and skips. The Warehouse, as it was known, was made up of three interconnected buildings forming an S shape, and seemed to go on forever. It took a full thirty minutes to walk its perimeter. Inside was the community’s lifeblood, the canned goods and non-perishable packaged foods that had sustained them through the years. It still amazed her that the food had remained viable for this long, so many years since the end. But as her father reminded her, if the cans remained intact, the cold, tasteless food inside could last indefinitely.

  The cafeteria was housed in a low-slung rectangular building west of the Warehouse. Linoleum floors, the blue-and-white checkerboard tiles cracked and peeling. Years of water damage had stained the ceiling with yellowish-brown blooms that looked like dying flowers. Inside, away from the chill, the smell of cooking vegetables wafting from the kitchen made Rachel’s mouth water. These were canned veggies, the kind she’d turned her nose up to before Medusa but that now literally kept them alive.

  The crowd thickened as they neared the cafeteria. Familiar faces, the same people day in and day out, like waves on a beach. Never the same face, not exactly, as the days, the months, the years did their work, hardening and etching the faces with wear. The faces were changing, growing longer, bearing new wrinkles, the eyes a bit dimmer. Muted chit-chat after a day’s hard labor, patrolling the grounds, shoring up the perimeter, doing inventory, disposing of garbage and waste. Later, those who were off duty would gather at the bar and drink their rotgut booze until the memory of another day was wiped away.

  They were always supposed to eat together, here, in this place. That was one of their unspoken rules, breaking bread together so the bonds of brotherhood and fellowship might remain strong in a world noticeably absent of both. That was the theory at least. Pleasantries were exchanged, heads nodded. And yet, it felt like another day of them becoming strangers to one another.

  They were drifting apart, the bonds that had once connected them dissolving slowly. The graveyard shift, someone had called it. All of them, on the graveyard shift. Literally. One day, they would all punch out, and that would be it. A new day would dawn on planet Earth: Population, Zero. Maybe it was better this way. Maybe it was better to adapt to this kind of isolation now because things were only going to get worse. Not in a get-worse-before-they-get-better kind of way. No, in a get-worse-before-they-get-even-worse-and-then-worse-still kind of way.

  Will grabbed their trays as they approached the buffet line. A handwritten sign taped to the sneeze guard announced tonight’s offering. Vienna sausages, canned broccoli, and some flatbread they had learned to make over the years. It was a bit dry, but if you soaked it in the runoff from the meal, it was tolerable. A protein, a vegetable and a starch. There were no other options, unless you counted going hungry an option.

  She and Will went down the line, collecting their dinner, waiting as their names were checked off the list because there was always a list. Food was distributed based on a formula Adam had developed many years earlier. Rachel rated eleven hundred calories per day; Will got more to meet the needs of his growing body. Even so, it wasn’t enough. Sometimes at night while they sat and read or played with toys, the rumble of his stomach would tell her it wasn’t enough, or when they were at the cafeteria and he would vacuum his dinner and then look longingly at his mother’s plate and think she hadn’t seen him look. And then she would pretend she hadn’t seen him look because after all, she was hungry too, there was always room for a little more, always a little deficit that made things a bit uncomfortable. She was down a good thirty pounds from her pre-plague weight, the terrible irony that she finally fit in the clothes she never really cared about, except for the tiniest sliver.

  Around them, the dining room bubbled to life with the sounds of clanking silverware and chit-chat. Despite all the problems they faced, she still liked seeing the group together, even if it was no longer the slightly optimistic bunch they’d been a decade ago. It made her feel like there was still a little hope left, that things would work out somehow. She didn’t know how they would work out exactly, but that was hope for you. Blind and dumb and hopped up mainlining optimism. A chewy bit of faith at the center of it.

  No one joined them at their table, but that was par for the course, and she had gotten used to it. She understood. Besides, this gave her the opportunity to talk with him, about things he’d seen, things he’d learned, things he’d read.

  “How come Dad didn’t come?” he said, his eyes flitting around the cafeteria for his father. She watched him do it, she watched those blue eyes scan the room, a constantly shifting brew of hope and wariness.

  “He had some things to do, sweetie. He’s a busy guy, your old man,” she said, the lie eating at her like corrosive acid.

  Always making excuses for him.

  Will pushed his plate away.

  “I’m not hungry,” he said, his voice cracking. He stared down at the worn tabletop.

  “You know the rules, mister.”

  It was one of Rachel Fisher’s non-negotiable edicts. You cleaned the plate in front of you, no matter what (and truth be told, Vienna sausage tasted a little like a melted meat Popsicle). There was too much uncertainty, too many unknown variables at play to be skipping a meal simply because you were pouting, no matter how justified the pouting was. Every meal, every bite of food was sacred now, never to be taken for granted. Ever. The next meal was never guaranteed, and that was why
you always ate this meal.

  “But I’m not-”

  “Eat your dinner,” she snapped, a bit louder than she had intended, and suddenly it was quiet in the dining room and she could feel the others staring, watching her and judging. A stab of heat coursed up her back, and she felt guilty and angry and alone all at once. The moment passed, and the chit-chat resumed. But Rachel felt the prickly heat of being watched; she glanced up and saw her friend Erin Thompson, the next table over, still watching her. Erin was a few years older than Rachel, a petite but hard woman with hair that had gone gray before she turned thirty. They’d met about a month after the pandemic, while they were held captive by a man named Miles Chadwick. Once she’d been Rachel’s closest friend, now rapidly becoming another stranger. Twelve years earlier, her infant son, the first born in their community, had died of Medusa.

  “What?” Rachel asked Erin.

  “I guess everyone has their own parenting style,” Erin said, her fingers tented in front of her face.

  Across from her, Will looked down at his plate and began eating, painfully aware of his place in the community.

  “Why don’t you mind your own goddamn business?” Rachel said.

  The dining room went quiet again as the others’ ears perked up, ready for a little dinner theater. Erin stood up and collected her plate. Rachel’s skin flushed with anger, the red splotch creeping up her chest. Her cheeks felt hot.

  “I guess some people don’t know how good they have it.”

  She stormed away to dispose of her dinnerware, leaving Rachel seething. The crowd resumed its chatter a second time, and Rachel watched Will eat, turning over the events of the last few minutes in her head.

  Will picked at his food, each bite swallowed under protest, and now he was mad at her to boot, like she had committed some terrible crime in making sure he had food in his belly. Because that was parenting. Snipping the correct wire and the bomb blowing up anyway. Eventually, the plate was empty, because he was a growing boy, after all, and he’d been hungry.

  They got up wordlessly and left.

  The trailer was empty when they made it back. Behind them, the last bit of daylight had evaporated and darkness sank across the land, as though some bored deity had tired of his game and extinguished the light in his room. Will flopped down on the ratty old sofa and reached for a Spider-Man comic book.

  “Not so fast, buddy,” she said. “Time for bed.”

  “When’s Dad coming back?” he asked.

  Again, the question twisted in her gut like a knife.

  “I don’t know, sweetie,” she answered. “After you’re asleep probably.”

  He moped through his bedtime ritual, the brushing of his teeth, the changing into his pajamas. It probably took him thirty minutes to accomplish the task that should have taken three. Finally, he was done, and she tucked him into his bed, a twin mattress lying on the floor, and kissed his forehead.

  The room was small, a typical boy’s room, peppered with toys and gadgets he’d accumulated over the years. Transition, there was always a transition in progress, from these toys to those, from these clothes to those, from this book to that. His current favorite was his G.I. Joe collection, requisitioned from a Toys R Us up in Omaha. He had dozens of the action figures, all the vehicles and playsets, because, after all, there had to be perks that came along with being born after the apocalypse.

  “Good night, Spoon.”

  “Night.”

  After Will was in bed, Rachel sat on the couch in the small pool of light spilling from the lantern with an old Stephen King novel, Under the Dome, in her lap. Tonight, the book held little interest for her. She went out to the front stoop for a cigarette. It tasted old and hot and dry. The glowing orange tip bobbed in the darkness, a lonely craft in an ocean of blackness. Eddie hated it when she smoked, which made her enjoy it even more. The next morning, he’d make some comment about it, about how it made her smell like an ashtray in a New York City cab, and it would give her a secret little thrill.

  Around her the complex was dark. Good metaphor for her life. For all their lives. You could only see what was right there in front of you, no more. The years since the plague had shrunk the world down, leaving her in this small cocoon.

  She pitched the half-smoked butt and went back inside.

  3

  Rachel sat on the edge of the sofa, lacing up her heavy work boots, shaking the thin sleep out of her eyes. It was a little past six and the trailer was quiet. Will was asleep, having stayed up late the night before reading the first Harry Potter novel. She had picked it up at a library in an unincorporated community a mile outside the town limits. He had never heard of the boy wizard, of course, his world devoid of even the slightest glimmer of pop culture. Wizards and Quidditch and butterbeer and dragons. All good things for a boy of eleven.

  Eddie snored in their bedroom; at least the son of a bitch was here, hadn’t left her deciding whether she should leave Will sleeping alone. She had done it, God forgive her, she had left him alone and asleep on the nights Eddie hadn’t made it home on time and there had been no one else to ask.

  She carried the lantern to the kitchen, where she opened an energy gel pack and sucked out the viscous concoction. She winced at the chemical flavor that had been injected into the package more than a decade ago. Blueberry, my ass. Probably tasted the same the day it had been sealed shut, unaware of its fate as one of the last of its kind. Because there were no more blueberry-flavored energy gels rolling off assembly lines in Milwaukee or Joliet or Texarkana or wherever this packet had been born.

  One day, someone would eat the very last one, and that would be it. Extinct. She was lucky they had food at all, but that old sensation of not wanting anything here, atavistic, ancient, welled up inside her. What she wouldn’t have given for some orange chicken from China Dragon right then and there, what she wouldn’t have given. Even now, barely six in the morning, her mouth watered at the thought of the crisp battered chicken, its tanginess filling her mouth and look at her daydream take over there and run away like the dish with the spoon.

  Rachel grabbed her gun, the M4 rifle her dad had given to her many years ago. It had once belonged to Sarah Wells, the late love of her father’s life, brought together by chance or fate or karma in the unhinged days immediately after the plague. Using a book she found in an Omaha library, she taught herself how to care for it, maintain it, clean it, so it would always be that loyal friend she needed in this brave not-so-new-anymore world. She practiced with it religiously, and it had saved her life on more than one occasion. They all did. Weapons training was gospel around here.

  After loading her pack and pulling on her coat and gloves, she locked the door and headed out into the morning mist. She hadn’t always locked the door when she left, and she didn’t quite remember when she had started doing it again, but it put her mind at ease. It couldn’t have been a good sign that she was reverting to the old ways of distrust and suspicion. Walls were going up among them. Perhaps the others had started locking their doors and had been locking them all along and she hadn’t known it, any more than the others would know she was locking hers now.

  It was chilly outside, her exhalations drifting away in vaporous clouds in the pre-dawn gloom. She followed the familiar path to the warehouse. How many times had she made this trip? God might know; she did not. She liked leaving early for the morning shift - it gave her time to think, to clear her head, before embarking on the important but dull work of defending and maintaining the warehouse.

  Her father lived alone in the next trailer over. Next to him lived Erin and her common-law husband Harry Maynard, a refugee from the original town of Evergreen and their community’s constable. A little bit farther up, light glowed softly in Max Gilmartin’s trailer as she drifted by, and she could see his silhouette moving to and fro inside. Max. It was weird to think of him as an adult now, as she still remembered the gangly, pimple-pocked teenager she’d met long ago. Her father had found him in a grocery sto
re in the aftermath of the plague, a terrified teenager, and he had been with him as Adam crossed America looking for Rachel. He was huge now, well over six feet tall and two-hundred and forty pounds. TWO-FORTY! as he enjoyed yelling when he’d had a bit too much to drink. Now that was a guy they had a hard time feeding.

  Their trailer sat in the northwest corner of this distribution warehouse complex, a few miles southwest of Omaha, Nebraska. The trailer wasn’t much, a corrugated aluminum singlewide, once an office for some long-dead middle manager, now split into three rooms, one for Will, one for her and Eddie, and the tiny sitting room where they had played their game. They’d lived here for more than ten years now, ever since they had abandoned the Caballero Ranch after the crop failures and migrated north to Omaha. Making the best of a bad situation, that’s what Adam had called it. They’d been unbelievably lucky to find this place, luckier still to have taken it with minimal losses. Three of them had died in the battle to take it, and tragic as those losses had been, they had not been in vain.

  Now had it been three or four?

  She couldn’t remember exactly, but that’s the way it was. People died all the time now. Death was part of life, really part of it, not like in the old days when people said it but really they meant, oh, did you hear about Bob in Finance, he had a heart attack or a guy blowing through a stop sign and hitting a minivan carrying Andrea and three kids, you know, the one from the PTA. Sure those things had happened, but not that often, which was what had made them so remarkable, their relative rarity. Nowadays, people died young and violently and that’s just the way it was.

  Her row with Erin was still chewing on her a bit; they hadn’t spoken since. It was tough to let it go, no matter how much she empathized with the woman, no matter how often she told herself it was Erin’s misery talking. Grief knew no timetable. She missed her son. Didn’t matter that he had perished like countless billions. He was still dead, and she was still his mother. But sometimes Rachel wanted to snap back, yell it from the rooftops that it wasn’t exactly sunshine and puppy breath, this thing she was going through. Mothering the only child known to have survived infancy since the plague was not an easy crown to wear. But she could never say a thing like that because it would sound ungrateful. It would sound like she didn’t know how good she had it.