Richard Cox - House of the Rising Sun

“That man on the roof acted alone.”

Anthony held a weapon. He could have pulled the trigger at any time.

“I was just doing my job,” he explained.

“And I’m just doing mine,” said the man with the shotgun as he fired.

The image of Anthony being hit at close range was something Seth refused to see. He looked down at his leg. Something had stung him in the thigh, the ankle. Something like a bee or a wasp. He reached down to swat his leg, to scare the bug away, and fell over.

Something was terribly wrong. He was on the ground. Fireworks were going off above him. Blood was spilling out of him.

That couldn’t be right. Blood was supposed to be on the inside. He wanted to scoop it up and save it because there was no way to get it back. But he couldn’t move his arms. They were bound to his sides.

Someone maybe stepped on him, crushing his bones together. He was rolling the bones. Standing at the head of a crowded craps table. A suited man on his right swallowed the rest of his whiskey and dropped $500 on hard eight. An Asian kid barely out of college explained to his three buddies how to bet. The boxman was bulky but observant, nothing distracted him, not even the famous actress who stood at the far end of the table holding Seth captive with her sea green eyes. She was speaking to him. The sound of her words was swallowed by cheers but he knew what she wanted. He threw bones at her. Tossed them against the interior wall of the craps table, little red cubes spinning in slow motion before settling near each other, four white eyes on each surface staring upward, and the suited man roared, the college friends cheered, and Natalie’s words finally resolved themselves as if they’d traveled a great distance across post-apocalyptic plains to reach him.

Thank you, Seth.

Though she couldn’t see any reason to live, Skylar was nonetheless afraid of death. It was all she could think about now, the moment when she would stop being aware of the world around her, when Skylar Stover would cease to be while the universe cruelly continued to exist. What a spiteful joke to be given something as lovely as life when the only point of the gift was to take it away.

In her mind the Walmart warehouse had always been more fantasy than reality, and during the journey she had bobbed like a fishing cork, sometimes floating on the allure of an alternate film reality and other times submerged into the dark truth of her imminent demise.

But watching two men be killed in front of her—first Blaise and then Larry—had condensed these possibilities into one. She wasn’t going to survive this, none of them were, so now she was adrift.

As they wandered through the woods, as Tim told pointless stories about Billy and Miguel, Skylar thought she saw a moving form in the trees. She considered telling Thomas but didn’t. If someone was hunting them, why bother to fight? Why not just get it over with?

When they were back at Tim’s, a long discussion ensued about whether it made sense to go back to the warehouse. Even if every person in the crowd had grabbed an armful of food, Tim argued, there would still be more. But Thomas didn’t believe it was safe, especially not for Skylar and him. Everyone had seen them. They would forever be associated with Aiden, who had opened fire on innocent people. The mood of the survivors would be dark. Savage. Power struggles were sure to develop, and eventually someone would seize control of the warehouse. Probably someone awful.

Eventually Thomas led Skylar into one of the empty bedrooms and announced his final plan to carry on with the charade.

“There’s a lake east of here where I almost bought a cabin. It will take us a day or two to walk that far, but maybe one of those cabins will be empty. Maybe the air will be cleaner and we can, I don’t know, hunt and fish.”

Skylar laughed. She imagined a million people could be walking in that direction.

“You still think we can survive all this?” she asked.

“Don’t we have to try?”

Not knowing what else to do, Skylar agreed to go with him. They probably wouldn’t get far.

The roads headed east were less crowded than she imagined, and when they encountered other people, these interactions were brief and guarded. It was frightening to discover how little was understood about what had happened. The farther they walked from the city, the more terms like “EMP” and “pulse” were replaced by “aliens” and “God.” Some believed the United States had been attacked by Russia or North Korea or both and expected military allies to eventually save them. One creative fellow explained, using disparate Bible verses, how the pulse had begun the Lord’s tribulation period. The destruction of technology was meant to cast divine confusion on the Arab enemies of Israel as a way to stop them from attacking the Jewish state. All this, of course, was a convoluted prelude to the Rapture.

With every step she took, Skylar’s mood sunk lower. So what if they found a place to stay? So what if Thomas could use his handgun to hunt for food? He would eventually run out of ammunition, and she didn’t care to eat game, anyway. She preferred her steaks wrapped in butcher paper or sizzling on a plate topped by a pat of butter. Except she would probably never eat butter again. She would never see her family again. She would never ride in a plane or visit Paris or sit on her deck and watch the sun set over the Pacific. She would never win an Oscar. She would never buy another pair of shoes or put on makeup or stand under a curtain of hot water in the shower.

She would never feel safe again.

They walked and walked and eventually Skylar realized it was easier to breathe and the sky looked almost blue. When Thomas tried to talk to her, she answered him with silence. She didn’t want him to believe, even for one minute, that she was happy to be here. She wanted him to be miserable the way she was. And if that meant she was an ungrateful, spoiled bitch, then so be it.

But when more hours had gone by, when the industrious look on his face refused to evaporate, Skylar ended the silent treatment and lit into Thomas.

“Why are we bothering with all this?” she said. “Why prolong the inevitable?”

“Skylar,” he answered patiently, as if to a disobedient child. “I know you’re frightened. You have every reason to be. All I’m trying to do is give us a chance to survive. I am not the enemy here.”

“What I’m saying is why bother? Maybe I don’t want to live with you in a little house on the prairie. Did you ever think of that?”

He turned and looked at her.

“I know you think you have a death wish, but if that’s the choice you wanted to make, you could have done it already.”

“I’m too afraid,” she said. “Will you do it for me?”

He refused to answer.

They walked until dark, when Thomas suggested they stop and make camp. He directed her well off the road and eventually found a spot under an oak tree. A little while later she leaned into him, his arms around her, against the tree.

“I’m sorry,” Skylar said.

“Me, too.”

“I keep thinking what a waste this is. All we had to do was plan ahead a little. It’s not like people didn’t know this could happen.”

“We gambled,” said Thomas. “We gambled with our future and lost. I guess it’s how we’re wired. We never plan for problems, even when we know they’re coming. We wait until the problem is already here, and this time that was too late.”

Skylar awoke to a violet sky and the sound of birds singing in the tree above. Thomas’ arms were wrapped around her and he was still asleep. Her mind wandered to her parents and her brother and what they might be doing… if they were still alive. She thought about babies born since the pulse, how so many of them would die senseless, blameless deaths. And what about the ones who didn’t? What would those fierce children think of the old world, that place of magic and privilege and unparalleled luxury they might never know except through oral history? Would they believe unhappiness could exist in such a world? Would they understand why people with such easy lives were determined to fight over the most trivial differences?