First Light - An EMP Survival Novel (Enter Darkness Book 5) Page 7

  “Even as a girl I would have trouble getting out of bed in the morning. Not her. She was awake at sunrise arranging tea sets and painting watercolors and banging on the piano until Mom told her to stop. I was happy to let her dominate the relationship, most of the time, because her exuberance and zest for living was so contagious. I only really felt alive when I was with her.”

  There was something disquieting in this last admission that made Brad shiver without knowing why. “Being twins, I assume you must have been together a lot.”

  Anna shook her head, an upset expression flickering across her features.

  “I only saw her sporadically after the age of twelve,” she said. “I think a lot about how differently life might have turned out for us if Dad hadn’t died—if he had sought treatment for cancer instead of keeping it secret because he didn’t think we could afford the medical bills, because he had already decided he was dying and wanted us to have that money after he was gone.

  “Emily never talked about it—it was the one thing she never talked about—but I think his death hit her harder than any of us. For a couple years it was almost like we had switched personalities: I had to become the assertive one because I was trying to pull Emily out of her depression, trying to get her interested in the old games, and she didn’t care anymore. She’d spend days in her room blasting The Smiths and The Cure and sometimes wouldn’t even come out for dinner.”

  “I’m sorry that happened,” said Brad.

  Anna didn’t respond right away; she looked resigned but no longer bitter. He figured she had to be used to death at this point, she had seen so much of it. But as a girl, the loss of her father must have felt like the end of the world in miniature. The shock of it hadn’t entirely lifted, all these years later. The actual end of the world, a few years ago, wouldn’t have devastated her so deeply.

  “How old were you when he died?” he asked.

  “Nine,” said Anna, and Brad tried to imagine how he would have felt if he had lost his own father at that age; on balance, he might have been better off.

  “Mom didn’t stay single for very long, though,” Anna went on. “I don’t think she married for love—most women don’t, when they’re single and trying to raise two kids and their first partner has died or left them. Once you’ve birthed a couple kids, finding a new partner becomes less romantic and more a matter of survival.”

  “That’s what I’ve been told.”

  Brad found himself thinking of his own mother; he had been an only child, but their life had been nothing but struggle after Brenda’s divorce from Lee. Despite the differences in how things turned out for him and Anna, he felt emboldened by her newfound willingness to talk about her past.

  “But if your mom remarried and you had a new dad,” he pressed, “how did you and Emily lose touch with each other?”

  “Because we ran away,” said Anna. She was silent for a moment, leaving Brad to wonder how her relationship with her stepfather had deteriorated so rapidly. “He seemed great at first—a community college professor, owned his own boat, loved Boggle and Cranium and karaoke. But it was only a few months into their marriage when the drinking started, and the gambling started.

  “One weekend he disappeared for three days without telling us where he had gone. Mom was panicking; the police came to our house and questioned her. It turned out he had drained her savings and gone to Atlantic City, where he had blown through most of her money.”

  “God, what an ass.” Brad said. “How did your mom react?”

  “She forgave him, of course, because that was her duty as a wife and a Christian woman.” Anna rolled her eyes. “But of course Howard found ways of blaming her. He said he wouldn’t have been tempted to run away and spend the weekend gambling if she would learn to manage the house better, if she would clean more, if she wasn’t so frigid in bed—he actually said that in front us.

  “Every mistake he made was her fault. And of course Mom believed him. He projected his flaws onto her, convinced her that she was this toxic, abusive woman and he was the innocent victim of her manipulation. She would spend hours each night praying for God to forgive her.”

  “Sounds like a toxic relationship,” said Brad.

  “It was! He was a narcissist; he only cared about himself and his liquor. He didn’t hit her at first—that didn’t start until five or six months into the marriage, after he felt secure enough in the relationship that he knew he could get away with it and there would be no repercussions. I came home from school one day and noticed that Mom had this enormous, eggplant-colored welt under her left eye. I asked her what had happened and she told me not to worry about it, that she hadn’t been getting enough sleep. But I had seen circles under Mom’s eyes before and this was different.

  “Remember how I told you I had become the assertive one in the family?” Anna went on. “Well, I did something I would never have been brave enough to do in the past. I waited until Howard came home and confronted him, asked him what he had done to Mom.”

  Anna shook her head at the memory. “He was taken aback at first, looked flustered and dodged the question. But I kept pressing him and finally he hit me with his fist so hard that I went flying back into the counter, breaking a martini glass. Of course Emily and Mom heard the noise and came running downstairs. I was lying in a pile of glass, Howard standing over me. Mom started crying; she told him to get out of the house or she was going to call the police, but he just brushed past her and went into the living room and turned on the TV, turned up the volume until he couldn’t hear us.”

  “And that’s when you decided to leave.”

  “That was it. Howard had forbidden me and Emily from going into each other’s rooms—looking back, I think he was trying to separate us so we weren’t as much of a threat—but she came into my room that night after he had gone to bed and said we needed to talk. She said, ‘We need to leave. I don’t care where we go but we can’t stay here.’ I told her we had no money and no one to stay with, and she said, ‘I don’t care. We’re getting out of here by the end of the week.’

  “We argued, of course. I told her I didn’t think we could just abandon Mom like that. But Emily could still be very persuasive when she wanted to be, and she convinced me that Howard would end up killing one of us if we stayed.

  “I stole some money from Mom’s purse—she had taken to hoarding hundreds of dollars in cash in her wallet ever since Howard had emptied her savings, but I only took enough to get us on a bus out of town and into a hotel. We had spent a long time debating whether or not we should tell her. We decided that it would be best not to have that conversation in person, but I wrote her a note explaining why we were leaving and that one day I would pay her back for the money we had taken. I knew that she would understand, and that eventually she would forgive us.”

  “Where did you end up?” asked Brad. By now he was so thoroughly engrossed in the story that he scarcely noticed the cold nipping at his exposed ears and wrists. He couldn’t imagine the girls had gotten far with their funds being so limited.

  “We got off the bus in Kansas City. Emily had heard that it was one of the cheaper places to live in terms of housing and thought we might be able to rent an apartment. That ended up being a mistake, as we were only thirteen with no credit or means of income and there were few places willing to sign a lease with a couple of runaways who had no guardian. We ended up meeting a colony of young artists who were squatting in an abandoned building downtown, painting murals and writing songs on guitar and doing whatever drugs were available.”

  “Did they pressure you?” asked Brad. “Into doing drugs, I mean.”

  “No, I wanted to.” Anna laughed ruefully. “I was smart enough to avoid the harder drugs like heroin and cocaine, and Emily wouldn’t let me do them—which I thought was hypocritical, because we were the same age and why should she be allowed to try things that I wasn’t? But over time I became wary of doing any drugs at all because I saw what they were doing to her.

/>   “My bright, brilliant, effervescent sister was disappearing in front of me. One of my last memories is of seeing her offering her body to a young man because she couldn’t afford other means of payment. A few hours later she came walking out of a dingy hotel room with three men, all in their late twenties or early thirties. She never told me what she did there; she said it was better if I didn’t know.” Anna shivered.

  Instinctively Brad put his arm around her. “I wish there was more I could say,” he said. “I’m so sorry they did that to you.”

  “It wasn’t their fault; not really,” Anna said with a shrug. “I sometimes think about how differently my sister’s life might have turned out if Dad had lived, if we had stayed in school, if we hadn’t run away from home. Looking back, I can’t honestly say that leaving Mom was the right choice. Emily probably wouldn’t have ended up in that hotel room if we had stayed in Jersey. Granted, she likely still would have died, either way.”

  One of the quirks of living in this post-collapse world was that you no longer needed to ask how someone had died; it was assumed that they had died the same way as everyone else.

  Instead, Brad went with another question.

  “When was the last time you heard from her?” he asked.

  “She phoned me from Dallas a few weeks after the virus broke out.”

  Anna paused. Up until now she had shown little hesitation in reliving the most painful memories, but Brad worried that he might have asked too much.

  “By then I had already had Sammy and had been living in Maine for six, seven years,” she went on. “There was already a mass panic, but no one had guessed how bad things were going to get. I think we were all in denial about it—thinking it would get better, that the CDC would invent a vaccine, that the disease would be quarantined before it killed too many people. Nobody thought this was the end.”

  “How could we?”

  Brad remembered what it was like. He had seen a public health official on C-SPAN trying to reassure a panicked public by reminding them of SARS, and Ebola, and other pandemic scares that had come to nothing. Despite the predictable hysteria on social media, most people had assumed the emergency would be contained. So they had tucked their children into bed at night and gone on filing their taxes and finishing their novels and buying their summer homes in the Bahamas, unaware that within a matter of months virtually everyone—they, the children, the taxman, the publisher, the seller of homes, the man on TV—would be dead.

  “I can still hear her voice on the other end of the line,” said Anna. “She had been unable to get health insurance, and had been forced to queue for medical assistance outside a free clinic. She asked where I was and I told her I was still here, in Maine. I’ll never forget what she told me. She said, ‘I want you to stay there, and I don’t want you to leave. Lock yourself in, if you have to.’

  “I asked her why and she said, ‘Things are worse than what they’re reporting. A lot of people are already sick. A lot of us are going to die.’ She told me to stockpile some food—at that point there hadn’t been a run on the grocery stores because we didn’t know how bad things would get—and to take Sammy and hunker down for a few weeks. I asked her if she was sick, and she wouldn’t answer. She just said, ‘I love you, and I’m sorry,’ and she hung up the phone.” Anna drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “And that was the last time we ever spoke to each other.”

  No words could possibly form an adequate response to Anna’s story, and Brad had never been the sort of person to offer vapid expressions of condolence.

  Instead, he did the only thing he reasonably could do, given the enormity of what she had shared: he stopped walking and drew her into a deep hug. A hug that seemed to say he was sorry for what they had both suffered, and he knew there was no hope of bringing Emily back, but he would try to save Sammy and Martha, if he could.

  Anna didn’t flinch from his touch; she seemed surprised at first, and stood paralyzed, but then her body began to tremble and when Brad pulled away there were fresh tear stains on the front of his shirt.

  “I’m so sorry, Brad,” she said, looking up at him. “My whole life, I trusted people who I shouldn’t have, and then you came along and I thought you were the same.”

  She hiccuped a sob before she went on. “I never appreciated what you did for us, and it took your dad shooting me in the goddamn leg before I truly understood where your priorities were.”

  Brad had to smile at that.

  “I’m done with running away,” Anna said then, wiping her tears away, clearly rallying. “It’s time to fight.”

  Chapter 9

  “What do you miss most about the old world?” asked Brad.

  It was late in the day and invisible birds bristled in the twilit haze overhead. They had been walking for about an hour in silence and he was beginning to feel that odd sensation of missing her despite the fact that she hadn’t left his side in nearly two days.

  “I don’t mean the obvious things like smartphones and not dying of preventable diseases,” he clarified when Anna didn’t answer immediately. “What are some small, overlooked things that you sometimes wish you could bring back?”

  Anna pondered the question in silence for a minute or two. The near-fatal encounter with the bear had badly scared her and she had been quiet for much of the afternoon, as if savoring this brief reprieve from death.

  “I used to say I would miss the internet most if the world ended,” Anna said, “and I do miss it as a utility—I miss being able to look things up whenever I needed to—but I don’t miss the hours spent staring vacantly at my phone or computer. I have a lot more time to think now. I’ve been paying better attention.”

  “If you could travel back three years into the past, just for one day,” asked Brad, “what would you do that you can’t do now?”

  “Hmm.”

  Anna seemed to relish the question because it took her mind off the endless walking. It was nearly dark now and soon they would have to settle down for the night and build an encampment. Brad wasn’t looking forward to the labor involved in lighting another fire.

  “I think I might go to the store and buy one of those gallon tubs of ice cream, the kind that you can’t find anymore,” she said. “And I’d take it and drive over to the chlorinated pool at the apartment complex where I used to babysit, and I’d sit there eating it with my feet in the water. It’s weird but I really miss swimming pools. I miss the way the light refracted off of them. I miss being able to wade into them. What about you?”

  Brad couldn’t say at first. He had spent so much of his youth living in a survivalist’s cabin that the modern world—what had been the modern world—came as a shock of revelation.

  He remembered his first trip to New York, when he had taken an underground train across the city from borough to borough, and how everyone had been complaining about the speed and the service, and he seemed to be the only one marveling. He considered himself a cynic about most things, but the sight of a plane flying through the air at over 600 miles an hour had always made his heart jolt. There were times even now when he found himself scanning the skyline, hoping to catch the familiar glint of silver wings overhead. He didn’t really know if the rest of the world had suffered the same fate as America, and there was no way of finding out.

  “I’d probably just treat myself to coffee and dinner at a moderately priced restaurant,” he said finally. “Nothing fancy, just grabbing dinner whenever I felt like it.”

  “That sounds…heavenly,” Anna said wistfully. “I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but we really did have the best food, didn’t we?” She grinned broadly. “You know what I wish sometimes? This is going to make me sound like a complete idiot, but I wish I could go back and slip a note under my door giving my younger self a bucket list of things to do before I hit my mid-twenties. I wouldn’t tell her about the nanovirus—I wouldn’t want her to freak out.”

  “If we had that power, though,” said Brad, “couldn’t we just warn someone a
bout the virus? Then all this could have been avoided?”

  “Haven’t you ever seen a time-travel movie?” Anna’s voice was rising, her tone growing strangely passionate. “It never works. They won’t listen. I had a cousin who tried to stop the assassination of MLK—”

  This last statement was spoken in such an offhand manner that at first Brad didn’t notice anything odd about it. “Wait, hold up.” He paused and raised a hand in the air. “Your cousin went back in time?”

  “I—I shouldn’t have said anything,” said Anna, looking strangely agitated. She ran ahead up the path and Brad watched with an anxious feeling. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Night was thrumming in the air around them and they wouldn’t be able to go much further without stopping.

  The flapping of birds’ wings above and around him awoke in Brad a tight sense of discomfort. He didn’t want to press Anna about what she had just said, just as he didn’t want to consider the factors that could have led to her making statements that would normally be expected from the type of person you would meet handing out flyers in front of a bus station about the army’s secret teleportation program.

  The best-case scenario was that she was daydreaming aloud in an attempt to distract herself from the pain in her leg—which had to be agonizing, he knew—but it felt more likely to Brad that the rigors of travel and the trauma of surviving a shooting attempt were having a corrosive effect on her mental health.

  Worst of all would be if the wound beneath that improvised bandage was now infected and Anna was showing signs of delirium. There was little he could do about that right now; all he could say for certain was that they had been walking for too long and needed to stop for the night.

  Judging from the dim sliver of light shining through the canopy of firs overhead and rapidly fading, it was nearing 5:00pm. This was around the time they had gone to bed the night before. They had been walking, with only a short break in the middle of the day, for over ten hours.