You’re a dead man.
You’re a dead man.
He pushed through the heavy swinging door and picked off the lady bartender first, then a guy on a stool. Then another.
You’re a dead man.
He’d clear the place out and drink in peace.
He stepped forward toward a stout little copper-skinned guy crouching next to his fallen companion.
Yep, he’s really gone. Your turn now, just look up. There you go. You’re a….
Trey never finished the thought.
OUTSIDE
A thick haze blanketed the sky, casting an even, ambient grey across the cityscape. Nothing moved but the slow drift of mist. Skyscrapers stood dark in the distance. Only a handful of lights snaked into the scene tracing the few undisrupted lines of the collapsed power grid.
A figure clad in faded greens and blues—dirty cotton and worn denim—ran furiously across a deserted parking lot. The runner stopped and knelt to retrieve a labelless but intact tin can from the ground next to a pale corpse that lay staring blankly across the pavement. The running man, his breath heavy and fast, glanced warily behind him before sprinting toward a low brick building.
Several seconds later, a second figure slowly crossed the lot and carefully picked her way along a barely discernible path. Bundled against the damp morning air, she inched along the wall of the seemingly abandoned factory. Her dark hair hung loose under her fur lined hood and fell across her brow when she cocked her head to listen.
PHOEBE
Phoebe stared at her phone and tried not to listen to her parents arguing in the other room, but their voices swelled and then her dad swore.
Tonk!
The noise her mother’s head made when it hit the floor sounded like just like what it was—not a watermelon or a coconut or a bowling ball—but a head smacking against tile.
“Mom?” Phoebe stepped warily into the kitchen. Her father’s mouth hung slack and his eyes stared, wide and desperate, as he crouched next to her mother.
“Oh my god,” he said, pulling at her mom’s shirt and lifting her slack body onto his lap. “Oh my god!” He turned his face toward Phoebe, his eyes wide with panic. “Help!”
Too scared to feel anything but urgency, Phoebe desperately helped her dad administer CPR. Blood spurted from her mother’s mouth and eyes and her ribs cracked loudly as her dad’s pushed down on her dead mother’s chest with stiff arms. When Phoebe finally pulled him off, they both collapsed in sobs. When the 9-1-1 call took too long to connect, she retreated from her father’s bellows of frustration to hide in her closet. Hours later she came out to sit in silence next to the body as her father raged inconsolably. The medics never came.
Neither of them understood what had happened until days afterward, at which point the entire world had collapsed. The death of Shelly Anne Hathford shrank to nothing, not even a statistic. No-one kept track. Why would they? Overwhelmed by their own atrocities, no one had time to judge the world at large.
Her mother—not a tragedy, not an anomaly, just one memory among countless others—existed only for Phoebe and her dad. They alone kept her soul alive. But the anguish Phoebe shared with her father, their mutual despair, could not overcome the fact that he, in that moment, now months past, had looked into her mother’s eyes and whispered in his mind: “Die.”
She could never forgive him.
Phoebe’s dad sat on an overturned crate across from her, pitching a handful of thumbnail sized stones, one by one, into a bucket on the floor. He looked as tired as she felt, although they’d both slept better in the last few weeks than they had in months. She wondered if they’d ever feel rested again. The fatigue made her dad look old. Maybe she should feel sorry for him, but instead she wished for the millionth time that he’d died instead of her mother.
“You’ve got such beautiful hair,” Anya said. Softly, as if she were talking to herself. The woman’s fingers pulled gently as she twisted Phoebe’s locks into braids. “I wish Scott would let me do this to his.”
Phoebe guffawed. Scott’s hair clung to his head like a giant fur ball. All matted and tangled and messed up with his equally dread-locked beard. He looked like some crazed Muppet or something. Phoebe didn’t understand how Anya let him get near her, let alone kiss her and… whatever else. Not that Phoebe’s hair looked better, exactly—droopy and oily and unwashed—but the idea of braiding the mess on top of Scott’s head….
“You’re too nice,” Phoebe said, finally responding to Anya’s compliment.
That was true, Anya was nice. Thank God they’d found her. Or thank God Anya’s little tribe had found them. Phoebe had never felt as alone as she had over the months since it all started, wandering through all the chaos with a father she barely knew and could never truly trust. Having another female around made her feel safer. It didn’t matter that Anya was as dangerous as anyone else.
Anya wasn’t the type of girl Phoebe would have hung out with before. Snooty and self-important, Anya wore makeup and dresses and fancy furs that she’d doubtless scavenged from some abandoned department store. Even in this disaster of a world, the woman dressed like a high-end escort. Phoebe only wore jeans and whatever layers the weather required. Yet despite Anya’s ultra-fem appearance, she radiated strength, and stubbornness. She didn’t bow down to the men at all. Just having another female, a comrade in this cruel new world, gave Phoebe a tiny glimmer of something like hope. The fact that her new friend strutted around like she stepped right out of Mean Girls didn’t really hurt, either.
Anya pulled gently on her hair and Phoebe let her head tilt back. The tension melted from her shoulders. Phoebe had inherited curls from her dad which she wore long, despite his suggestion that she just hack it all off. Probably because it was something she could control, something that was hers, she kept it long despite the maintenance burden. Yet another reason to appreciate Anya.
“I wonder what’s taking them so long,” Anya said.
“It’s getting harder and harder to find food close by,” Phoebe’s dad said. “You can only scavenge the same places so many times.”
The three of them sat in a corner by the stairs waiting for Scott, Anya’s boyfriend, and Derek, another of their group, to return from their foraging expedition. Phoebe’s father (she refused to call him Chad despite his insistence that it would make her feel more equal) still demanded she remain in his sight at all times. So, while Anya braided Phoebe’s hair, he sat throwing rocks into a can. He looked drained and ragged, his chin rough with stiff whiskers and cheeks smudged with grease from his latest maintenance project.
To be fair, living in the basement of an old factory building didn’t fill any of them with glee, but it was such an improvement over wandering the streets that Phoebe sometimes felt kind of giddy. Her dad had changed too. Maybe he wasn’t happy, exactly, but he at least he had things to focus on other than all the dangers, real and imagined, threatening his daughter.
They’d walked for days in a long line of people moving from one nowhere to another—she called it ‘The Parade.’ One afternoon, maybe a week in, a gang rushed out at them from a side street cursing and grabbing people. In an instant the slow, trudging procession of refugees transformed into a cluster of panicked killers. In her head, Phoebe repeated the single word: “Die, die, die”—just has her father had coached her.
She didn’t know what she actually remembered and what she only imagined later. She couldn’t be sure whether she’d glanced up, chanting, at one of the panicked boys and whether it was the same boy she’d found the next day lying among the uncounted dead, but since that moment Phoebe refused to defend herself with the despicable word and instead strove simply to stare at the ground whenever threatened.