“There’s something in the bathroom.”
“Something?”
“Something or someone.”
“Someone bad?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”
“But what if it’s someone good?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
She drags her brother into the elevator and presses the lobby button. The elevator drops, pushing stomach bile into her throat.
“But I thought that’s why we’re walking around! I thought we’re trying to find people who can help us.”
“This person can’t help us.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they’re lying on the floor under a bloody tablecloth.”
“Are they hurt?”
“At least.”
“Then shouldn’t we help them?”
Nora pauses. She looks at her brother. It’s a strange feeling, being judged by a child. He’s seven years old; where the hell did he get a moral compass? Certainly not from his parents. Not even from her. She supposes there must be people in the world who stick to their principles, who always do the right thing, but they are few and far between, especially now. Where does a child get an idea as unnatural as goodness?
The elevator reaches the bottom. Addis watches Nora hopefully. She sighs and presses the restaurant’s floor. They ascend.
The silver Tahoe is low on gas. Julie can hear her father muttering about it every few minutes, scanning the surrounding landscape for likely filling stations. Eventually, on some obscure cue, he takes an exit into what appears to be a primeval forest. There are no signs advertising food or gas or civilization of any kind, but after a few miles a tiny truck stop appears, halfway hidden in the trees. Most of the city stations are drained dry. To find gas or anything else of value anymore, they have to look where no one else would think to. They have to turn logic backward and trust intuition, a skill Julie was surprised to find in Colonel John Grigio’s stern repertoire.
“Does Dad have super smell?” she asks her mother as they watch him hook the hand-pump into the station’s diesel reservoir.
“What?”
“How’d he know there was gas out here?”
“I don’t know. He’s just smart that way.” She watches her husband work the pump, filling the first of six plastic gas cans. “You have to appreciate that,” she says in a quieter voice that Julie can barely hear. “If nothing else, the man’s certainly capable.”
The sickly sweet, rotten-apricot smell of chemically preserved fuel floods the air, and Julie watches her mother press a fold of her dress against her nose as a filter. A white dress, pulled in at the waist by a bright red sash. She doesntheret t seem to care that the hem is brown with dirt and engine grease, that there are small rips all over it revealing bare skin. The dress is pretty, so she wears it. Julie loves her for that, even though she herself is wearing Carhartt jeans and a grey t-shirt.
“I have to pee,” she announces and hops out of the car.
“Not alone. I’ll go with you.”
“I’m twelve, Mom.”
“Rapists don't check ID.” She grabs her Ruger 9mm off the dash and gets out of the truck. Julie rolls her eyes and walks around the back of the station with her mother in tow. She drops her jeans, her mother hikes her dress, and they crouch in the bushes.
“Remember those wine parties you and Dad used to throw?” Julie says.
“Sure.”
“I wish we could have one now. I’m old enough to have a whole glass, right?”
“I’d say so. Don’t know about your dad though.”
“I’ll talk him into it.”
Her mother smiles. “Maybe we can do something when we find the enclave. A housewarming party.”
Julie watches her urine pool around her work boots. She browses the decades of graffiti scratched and sprayed onto the station’s wall.
Big Dick Tim wuz here
Tim sux big dick
God still loves us
God loves corpses
NEVER GIVE UP
STAY HUMAN
DIE
“I want to get wasted,” Julie mutters.
Her mother laughs.
Julie wipes with a leaf and buttons her jeans. A dead thorn branch catches on her mother’s dress and pulls away with her when she stands. Her husband is waiting around the corner and he watches her tug at the branch until it finally rips free, tearing a surprisingly large hole in the bodice.
“You need some real clothes,” he says. “We’re not out for a picnic.”
“Fuck off, John,” she says cheerfully and brushes past him.
“By the time we get to the enclave you’re going to be wearing a bikini.”
“The better to seduce their leader.”
She climbs into the truck and sits there waiting. Julie watches her father’s jaw flex for a moment, then she gets in behind her mother. She thinks about wine parties. She thinks about their old house. She thinks about the day she found out her father used to have a band, and how her mother played his album for her and she laughed even though it was good, because how else could she react to the revelation that her father was human?
She focuses deep into the trees as they drive back to the freeway, searching for wildlife. Birds, deer, something stupid and innocent that she can pretend to be for a while. Surely creatures that simple know how to be happy.
The tall man is in pain.
The feeling that began in his stomach has now spread throughout his entire body and somehow beyond it. It radiates out from him like a cloud of ghosts, countless hands clutching at the air, reaching out for…something. He wishes he knew what it wanted, but it is a mindless brute. It lashes him onward with unintel Fhlingligible grunts of need.