If you’re wondering, I still hear the ringing in my ears. I was as surprised as anyone to find out it wasn’t just me, but knowing that made it easier to adjust. It’s always there. I can hear it if I pay attention. Most of the time, though, I don’t even notice.
And I don’t know if it makes me see better or hear better or think better, but I’ll tell you this much: I can shoot almost as well as Paige now, and she’s been practicing her whole life.
We’re camped off the road a bit, just north of a town called Phillipsburg, and I’m writing this by the fading sunlight. Paige is napping next to me. Brandon’s sleep has been restless, and I was about to check on him, but he just sat up and looked at me. You can’t imagine my relief.
“Mom,” he said. “Where are we?”
I told him we would be in Nebraska tomorrow.
“That’s cool,” he said.
Now he’s smiling. Watching me write this. My heart is so warm and
full.
“Where will we go after that?” he just asked.
I haven’t felt this much hope in probably my whole life.
FORTY-ONE
It was easier to feed himself after Thomas left Skylar with the men in Kiowa Village.
But it wasn’t easy to live with the idea that he was somehow broken, that years of emotional abuse from his mother had turned him into an unworthy romantic partner.
It was true that the best place for any baby to survive this awful new world was in the protective embrace of a community, but not being involved at all left Thomas feeling impotent and worthless. The right thing to do wasn’t always the best thing for you personally.
He killed the occasional rabbit or squirrel and caught just enough fish to keep his hunger in check. If he could avoid digging into his stores of rice until winter, there was a decent chance he could survive indefinitely in this new world.
In the bed at night, Thomas imagined Skylar beside him, her form cupped into his. He imagined waking up next to her, basking in the glow of her beaming smile. And even if Thomas wasn’t earnest enough to believe he loved her, he was sure with time he could. If nothing else he wanted to provide for her, protect her, to be a father to their unborn child.
A week ago one of the desperate hunters had wandered to the cabin and tried to get in. Thomas had been lying on the couch, half asleep, when he heard the front door rattling. At first he’d been seized with hope, with the idea that Skylar had come back, and he scrambled to the window to see who was there. Instead he found a bulky man in a pink golf shirt and plaid shorts. The man’s hands were trembling. He reached again for the doorknob and tried turning it. He threw his weight against the door and turned the knob again. That’s when Thomas knocked on the window with his pistol and pointed it at the man’s head.
After that, no one else came by. At least not until now. Not until you.
“You know what’s funny?” I say to Thomas while he pours dried potato flakes into boiling water.
“What could possibly be funny about this, Aiden?”
“I’ve been watching the lake for more than a week now and refugees are crawling all over the place. Up and down the shoreline, every cabin has had to fight off multiple break-in attempts. Several of these intruders have been wounded or killed. But you sit here and make powdered mashed potatoes and don’t have to worry about a thing.”
Thomas carves a spoonful of those potatoes and tosses it onto a plate. He makes a second plate and offers one of them to me.
“My pick?” I ask.
“Of course.”
By now I’ve been on the run for many days, and even though I’ve snuck into two cabins (and killed six people in the process), I’m still hungry. I wolf down the potatoes in seconds and desperately need a drink. You know how it gets when you eat a bunch of sticky stuff and can’t swallow.
Thomas is stirring two glasses of lemonade mixed from individual sugar-free packets. When he hands me one, I drink it in four large gulps, desperate to wash down the potatoes.
“So how do you do it?” I eventually ask him. “How do you keep refugees away from your cabin? Did you use your screenwriting skills to build some kind of force field around this place?”
Thomas smiles like he knows something I don’t. I hate that fucking look. Only a person who thinks he’s better than you smiles like that.
“If you really have so much power, why not fix all this shit? Put the world back to the way it was?”
“What makes you think it’s me who keeps people away from the cabin?” he asks. “How do you know it isn’t you?”
I blink. This is something I hadn’t considered.
“In my first film,” Thomas says, “the main character, who was me, always managed to avoid danger when it grew too close. He never got a speeding ticket. He never showed up on security cameras. Since the whole film was told from his point of view, the story wouldn’t work if he got into impossible trouble. Plus, I didn’t want those things to happen to me.”
“Makes sense.”
“An ensemble, omniscient piece leaves room for characters to die or otherwise meet their end. A first-person story only works when the protagonist makes it to the last scene.”
“Enough with the artsy-fartsy philosophical crap. Just tell me if you wrote all this.”
“I’m not completely sure, but I think this might be your story.”
“That sounds like a politician’s answer to me. And I don’t like politicians.”
“Let me put it another way: Since the pulse, have you run into any barrier that couldn’t be overcome?”
It’s a fair question. I rewind my memory, back to the carnage at the warehouse, to the journey to get there, back to the miraculous appearance of Ed’s pickup, to the evening when I killed not just Mitch but his lover, back to when I convinced Jimmy we should look for a warehouse in the first place, back to Keri’s loft, where I drank lemon vodka and ravaged her like a porn star might, back all the way to that night at Cinnamon when Jimmy paid twenty thousand dollars for a night of debauchery most men will never know… after reviewing all this, I realize I’ve walked through this fantastical story almost unimpeded. Which is ironic, since before the pulse I hadn’t caught a single break my entire life.
“You’re saying you wrote all this for me?”
“I don’t know,” Thomas says. “I don’t think we’ll ever know.”
“But if what you just said is true, I should be able to do anything I want. Like, I could kill you right now and everything would be A-OK.”
“Maybe, but even a first-person story ends eventually. And if the writer is any good, the ending you receive is the one you deserve.”
“Even after I murdered a hundred people on the lawn of the DC?”
“If the writer is any good,” Thomas says again.
That fucking smile is still on his face, that look of arrogance. He takes a bite of mashed potatoes and watches me carefully. He drinks a swallow of lemonade. Mine is mostly gone, but I pick it up and suck down what’s left.
Except now I notice it doesn’t taste right. It’s too bitter. It smells like almonds.
“What the fuck did you put in my drink?”
“It’s crazy what you can find in a cabin like this,” he says. “Fishing rods. Dry goods. Propane. It’s almost unbelievable.”
As I wait for him to go on, a strange sensation threads into my arms and legs, as if the muscles in them have turned to stone. I look at my hands. They don’t feel like mine. My fingers won’t move. My arms and legs and my whole body suddenly gasps for air.
“Even sodium cyanide,” Thomas says.
“But how did you—”
A thick tube of molten goo rises in my throat. I can’t speak. My body begins to shudder violently. My insides seem to crumple, as if my entire being has become a human windpipe being choked. I can’t breathe, I can’t think, I can’t kill him.