Leda mouthed, “Let’s go,” and they started to back out of the room. Meg hugged Jared tight, partially pulling herself onto him and said into his ear, “You’ll never get to be a father.”
They walked south through disturbingly quiet neighborhoods. Four houses in a row were burned to the ground, only pipes and chimneys poking from the smoking beams and rubble. An old couple sat on a porch in rockers, faces shrouded in flies, their hands hanging between them like the last thing they did was to lot go of each other. Toys littered the yard of a house with a Wee Care Day Center sign over the door, the windows closed tight and draped inside.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
Ahead rose a house-covered hill. Eric leaned into the climb. Sun bleached the street. Flattened grass on unmowed lawns lay brown and beat. Last night’s storm had done little to revive it. We, Eric thought. We are a we? Most of the buttons were gone from her blouse, and one sleeve was almost torn off. Her slim shoulder glistened with sweat. “Following my dad,” he said. “I think he’s gone home.”
She opened her mouth as if to say something, then shut it. She shook hair out of her eyes and looked up at the sun. “Hot, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” The road flattened and they were at the hill’s top. Before them, the city fell away, houses on houses, streets pleasingly parallel and neat. Here and there, plumes of smoke leaned with the breeze. To their left miles away, the Denver downtown pushed its buildings high into the skyline.
“Are you religious?” she said. “I’m not. Seems to me that the end of the world would be more dramatic if there were a god. There’d be some sign.”
He thought about it. More of the city was visible now. He slopped. “What is that?”
“What?”
He pointed. Directly in front of them at the bottom of the hill, a narrow streak of houses two blocks long and a block wide was completely flattened.
“Jesus,” she said.
Eric thought, it looks like somebody stepped on that spot, and he remembered the dream about King Kong, about how Dad talked for hours about King Kong while Mom died in the cave. She said, “There’s another one.” A half-mile farther on, another block of houses were down. “And another.” She pointed. He saw three other spots of flattened houses leading away from him to the south. A trail! he thought. We’re following his footsteps. And for a second he thought he had a sign. God does exist, and he walked right here.
“What could have done that?” he asked, and he half expected her to answer, “It must be supernatural,” but she shook her head in puzzlement.
When they reached the first spot, Eric as if he crossed a boundary. Untouched, the last house he passed looked like all the houses on the street, but the next one was gone, the foundation stood out of the lawn, and lumber littered the yard. Wood shards stuck out of a tree trunk broken off like a match stick at hip height.
“This wasn’t a fire,” he said, levering up one end of a ceiling joist. “No charring.” She stepped carefully over a nail-studded section of roof, the shingles covering one side. “The destruction is so complete.” Bending over, she picked up a round object and held it to him. “Dinner plate,” she said.
“It’s not cracked.”
Next door, the story was the same, but the next lot, one wall remained, family photos hanging from it. The roof and all the other walls were gone. Just the roof was missing from the next house, but all its windows were broken out, the glass fanned across the lawn from each.
“Explosion came from the inside,” Eric said. “Somebody planted a bomb in these houses?”
“No sign of fire, remember?” She put the plate down she had been carrying and winced when she stood up.
“Are you hurt?” Eric asked.
“Just a bruise,” she said and gingerly massaged her shoulder, the one under the untorn sleeve.
“Let me see.” He walked around a pile of brick between them.
“It’s nothing,” she said, but she stopped and faced him. Suddenly, he felt awkward. The only way to check the bruise would be to move the blouse off her shoulder, and he wasn’t sure how to do it. Taking a deep breath he pinched the lapel of her blouse and pulled the cloth aside. She pressed her hand against her chest so her bra wouldn’t be uncovered, and turned her head away from him. She was shaking. She said, “Don’t touch it.”
“Oh, god.” Beginning at her collar bone, a deep purple mark ran to the top of her shoulder, part way down her back and all the way to where her hand rested on her chest. “Are you sure nothing’s broken?”
“Just stiff,” she said, rearranging her blouse.
“Was it Jared?”
“Yeah.”
“It looks awful.”
She smiled. “You say the sweetest things, but you shouldn’t be talking.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you could see your neck, you’d think I was fine.”
Eric touched where the rope had dug in. Pain flared and he snatched his hand away. “Pretty ugly?”
“The worst.”
They’d reached the end of the destroyed houses and walked through another undisturbed neighborhood. Most of the homes now were old, brick duplexes with twin sidewalks leading to twin doors.
“My father died last year,” she said. “Liver cancer. I didn’t know him too well. He and Mom separated when I was little and I mostly got to see him in the summers. He lived in St. Louis.” They crossed a street. On this block, three or four yellowed, folded and rubber-banded newspapers were piled before the doors. Eric shivered at the thought of the dedication of some newspaper boy delivering papers to homes where the subscribers had died. Leda followed his gaze.
“They kept the paper going until ten days ago or so. Guess they thought a newspaper would keep people believing things would get better.”
Eric asked, “Did you love your dad?”
“I didn’t know him, I said.”
“That isn’t what I asked. Did you love him?” “Well, sure. I had to.” He thought that over. A new area of destroyed houses began, much the same as the last one. “This is weird. What do you make of it?” He stood beside a telephone pole. The cross arms at the top were snapped off and the wires were wrapped tightly around the shaft, like giant children had used it as a maypole,
“Don’t know. Maybe there is a god. While the people are away. the gods will play.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Dad might have come down just this street, he thought, and glanced at the lawn, thinking he might see a mark, a sign that had passed this way. How would Dad have seen this?
“When my father died,” she said, “I didn’t accept it at first. I told my best friend that he was sick, but not that he died. It took me a while to believe it myself.”
Eric thought, why does she keep talking about this? “My dad’s not dead.”
“Of course not,” she said quickly.
“He didn’t come back to the cave, so he must have gone home. He wouldn’t have just left me there.” Eric clenched his hands into stone. We could be standing in his footsteps! “He would write a message and tell me where he went.” His face screwed up. He could feel the muscles by his eyes pulling in, his jaw tightening. He breathed in hitches.
“Of course. That’s what happened.”
“That’s why I’m going home. I’ve got to find Dad. We’ve got to go together and bury Mom.”
“Yes, that’s what we’ll do.”
Eric sat on the ground in the midst of the flattened houses, in the middle of God’s footstep, or King Kong’s. “My dad…” He gasped. “My dad is a survivor. He’s too strong.” Everything was letting go inside of him. He could feel the unraveling, and inside he tried to stop it, to hold back the wind. He put his face in his hands and he could feel his skin on his skin. Why do I feel this way?