I grew close to Hannah, a girl who worked the hotel’s registration desk Monday through Friday. She was just a friend, but Alyssa resented the time I spent with her, and I resented Alyssa’s resentment. It wasn’t like I was having an affair or anything. All Hannah and I ever did was talk. Eventually, I found myself telling her things and sharing things with her that, for one reason or another, I couldn’t share with Alyssa. We began hanging out together, always in a group, with other friends, but sitting aside one another, laughing together, having fun. Alyssa confronted me about it, and I protested once more, assuring her that there was nothing going on. I told her she was being paranoid and jealous, and in my mind, I believed that to be so, because I hadn’t realized I was entering into an emotional affair with Hannah. I honestly saw her as just a friend—someone who could be emotionally intimate with me in ways that Alyssa could not. I didn’t want to lose Alyssa. I loved her. But she couldn’t give me what I needed, so I sought it elsewhere, and where was the harm in that? You do what you have to do to survive.
Despite our problems, Alyssa and I got married and ended up buying a little house. My friendship with Hannah waxed and waned. When Alyssa and I were having problems, Hannah always seemed to be there, ready to step up and open herself to me emotionally. We flirted somewhat, and joked about sex once or twice, but I never slept with her. I never even considered it until eight years later when Alyssa told me that she wanted a divorce. I remember that day so clearly. I’d come home from work, surprised to find Alyssa already home, as well. I gave her the customary hug and a peck on the forehead, but she felt distant and stiff. By then, I was used to that reaction from her, so I simply walked away and sat down on the couch. I had turned on a video game and was just getting ready to play when I realized that she was standing next to me. I noticed then that she’d been crying. Without a word, she sat down next to me and began to talk, and the things she told me about myself and about our marriage were the most awful things I have ever heard, because they were true. They were all true. I’d just never realized them until then. I was a self-centered, immature asshole who had lied to her and treated her like shit and had been engaged in an emotional affair with a co-worker for the entire eight years of our marriage. The worst part, she said, was that she knew I had the best of intentions. She knew I didn’t mean to hurt her. I was just too selfish to realize that my efforts not to hurt her were doing even more damage.
I pleaded with her. I promised Alyssa that I could change. I promised we could go to a counselor together. I wept and begged and swore. Each time I reached for her hand, Alyssa flinched and pulled farther away. We went on like that all evening, until there was nothing left to say. She wanted me out by the end of the month. She’d already contacted a lawyer and paid a deposit (her parents had lent her the money). At least we didn’t have any kids. Hell, we didn’t even have a dog or a cat to fight over. There was just us, and soon enough, there wouldn’t even be that anymore.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked her, as she walked me to the door.
“I’m doing what I have to do to survive, Pete. Isn’t that what you always say? Do what you have to do to survive?”
I couldn’t respond to her because there was nothing I could say. Alyssa was right. Many times since then, I’d played the conversation back in my head, searching for things I could have said, different words or promises that might have changed the outcome, but there are none. I know that now.
Things are how they are. It is what it is. You do what you have to do to survive. And if the situation changes, and life throws you a curveball, then you’d better well fucking adapt.
Adapt or die.
Things didn’t work out with Hannah. Distraught over the divorce and riding an emotional rollercoaster, I’d shown up drunk at her apartment, crying in the rain. She’d invited me inside and dried me off, and when I told her what had happened, she’d done her best to console me. We ended up having sex. I can’t call it making love, because it was anything but that. It was just sex. I lay there in the darkness after it was over, shivering and thinking about Alyssa. Her words, her accusations—her truths—echoed in my head. I turned over, looked at Hannah, and told her it had been a mistake. Then I got dressed while she sat there in the bed, a sheet wrapped around her breasts, staring at me with hurt and confusion. She asked me to stay, and I told her that I couldn’t. I told her we’d talk about it more later, but we never did. I went out of my way to avoid her at work. I stopped taking her phone calls and blocked her email address. Two weeks later, she quit the Pocahontas. I don’t know what happened to her after that. I’d like to think she found someone who treated her the way she deserved, and that she was happy, if even for a brief while before the world ended—but I just don’t know.
I don’t know what happened to Alyssa either, ultimately. Since becoming trapped in the bunker, I’d tried not to let myself dwell on the possibilities—whether she was still alive somewhere out there, or had instead joined the ranks of the walking dead. In either case, she was gone. Out of reach. In truth, I’d lost her long before the zombies came. Our story was over before this one began. A good friend of mine had told me—shortly after Alyssa and I split up—that divorce was like a death without a corpse, and that I had to grieve and mourn just like I’d have had to do if she’d died.
Thinking too much about Alyssa’s possible fate only led to more heartbreak and frustration. Late at night, I told myself that she’d escaped. I imagined her somewhere else, maybe in a police station or an Army base or maybe on a boat, out to sea and out of the zombies’ reach. I imagined her happy and alive, and maybe missing me. Somehow, that made my sense of loss much more profound.
I sat there in the incinerator room, overwhelmed with remorse, battered by my guilty conscience and sick to my stomach over everything from the way I’d treated Alyssa to the murder I’d just committed, and wondered again why I even bothered. What was the point in all this? Why keep struggling, trapped beneath a mountain with a bunch of madmen and slowly starving to death? Why not just end it all right now? Just start the incinerator up and climb inside, or poke my head outside and offer myself up as a snack to the zombies. Not that I’d be much of a meal for them, not with all the weight I’d lost.
I thought about the people we’d lost in the first few days of the siege—folks like Annie Leavell, a very kind, generous and gregarious woman who had worked in one of the Pocahontas’s shops and had passed away from a heart attack on our third day here, and Ryan Burack, a tourist from Wisconsin who’d been staying in the hotel when the shit hit the fan and died our first night in the bunker, passing quietly in his sleep. We never figured out the cause. We hadn’t even known Ryan’s name until we pulled out his wallet after his death. We knew that Annie had a daughter, Chesya, who she’d talked about all the time. It felt wrong, not being able to inform her daughter of her death.
We’d put Annie and Ryan and all the others into the incinerator, because it was the only way to dispose of their bodies. It had been a solemn, if gruesome task. We’d treated them with respect—offered words of peace and mumbled prayers before we sent them on their way, reducing them to ashes. Had they been the lucky ones? Annie had, quite literally, died laughing. At least she’d gone out relatively happy, despite the circumstances. At least she hadn’t died on an empty stomach. Would I be able to say the same? At that point, it seemed like it would be a lot easier just to give up and give in.