Richard Cox - House of the Rising Sun

“Maybe your dad persuaded her. Or maybe she gave into the guilt.”

“Maybe so,” said Thomas. He looked out the window as if answers might be found in the approaching darkness.

“I think I understand your stories a little better now,” Skylar said.

“How so?”

“In Thomas World you were searching for a woman who could save you. In The Pulse you were the savior. Probably because money made you feel more confident.”

“I didn’t consciously intend that.”

“Even so, you need to understand something: Women don’t want to be saved. They don’t want to save you, either. They want to be respected. And if they find the right guy, maybe fall in love.”

“It’s not like I don’t know that,” Thomas said. “But I guess no matter how old you get, or how strong you feel, pain from childhood sticks with you.”

“So use those feelings to power your art. Don’t make some other woman carry that burden.”

The next day they walked back to the highway. When they turned south, Skylar immediately saw a road sign announcing two towns ahead: KIOWA VILLAGE and EAST TAWAKONI. Less than an hour later, they came upon three men with rifles standing in front of a golf cart. One of the men was shorter than the rest, clean-shaven, wearing a ballcap and jeans and a green T-shirt. He addressed Thomas while the other men stole glances at Skylar.

“Can we help you folks?”

“We’re looking for a town,” Thomas said. “We saw signs for Kiowa Village and East—”

“This here is Kiowa Village,” said one of the other men, a tall and skinny fellow who didn’t sport much hair on his head but had grown plenty on his face. He looked at Skylar even as he answered Thomas. “We don’t accept strangers.”

“Will you let us pass through and try East Tawakoni?”

“Not sure you want to do that,” said the bearded man. “They had a ration plan until some teenagers broke in and stole most of the food. You can find them four boys hanging from power poles off 276. The rest are starving and desperate.”

By Skylar’s count the pulse had occurred thirty-four days prior. As bad as things were now, what would they be like in a year? Why subject a newborn to such an awful world?

“Unlike East Tawakoni,” said the shorter man, “we run an organized community. By God’s good grace and our proximity to the lake, we are poised to survive this apocalypse. We have adequate supplies of food and there is plenty of water. But like Daryl said, we don’t accept new citizens.”

Now he looked at Skylar.

“But we do make exceptions for women. We need babies.”

Skylar felt like she had fallen into the opening scene of a country-fried horror film.

But Thomas inexplicably said, “What guarantee would I have that she would be treated fairly?”

“You have my word,” said the leader. “That’s the only guarantee I have to give.”

“Sorry we bothered you,” Skylar said. She tried to turn Thomas around. “We’ll be on our way.”

“That’s your choice,” the leader told them, “but you might want to think twice before a famous actress like yourself walks around these parts looking for help. You might get more than you bargained for.”

“Then we’ll go back to where we came from. I’m not leaving my husband.”

Thomas looked at her while the short man looked at Thomas.

“Are you a doctor? A carpenter? What was your trade before all this happened?”

“Nothing that would benefit you,” said Thomas.

“Let’s go,” Skylar said.

“She ain’t your wife,” Daryl said. “Is she?”

“No, she isn’t,” said the leader. “If she was, you wouldn’t give her up so easily.”

Thomas wouldn’t budge. He stood there like an oak tree, as if her fate was in his hands.

“Do you have a doctor in your town?” Thomas asked.

“We have a veterinarian and a kid who aimed to start medical school. Why?”

“I wanted to know if we could come back here for medical help.”

“For her, yes. I’m sorry to be so tough about it, but we can’t take every person who comes along. Ain’t enough food. We expect more hungry folks coming down from Greenville and we’ll fight them the way we fought off the first batch.”

“All right,” Thomas said. “Thanks for your help.”

He finally relented and turned to leave.

“We’ll figure out something else,” Skylar said to them.

She wanted to rebuke Thomas for his casual condescension, but by now what was the point?

Every morning Thomas took the shotgun and disappeared into the woods looking for game: rabbits, birds, deer, anything. The first problem he faced was that local wildlife had fled to regions even more distant. But the bigger complication was the constant influx of hunters, almost all of whom were desperate fathers chasing game with handguns or pellet guns or knives. These men stomped through the woods, cursing to themselves, as if noise was the secret to attracting prey. Most of them, Thomas reasoned, would be dead by August. And so would their families.

In the afternoon Thomas rested on the shaded porch of the cabin. In the evening he prowled along the lake shore, tossing lures at the water and reeling them in. When he was a boy, Thomas told her, he would catch largemouth bass with spinner bait and plastic worms. But that teenage experience didn’t seem to help now. And though he offered Skylar most of the fish he caught and cleaned, taking it made her feel guilty. He was barely producing enough food for one person, let alone two adults and a growing fetus.

The first time she picked up the pistol, she was impressed with its smoothness, with its heft. Here was a weapon built for one purpose—to extinguish a human life—and its solid mass and elegant design seemed to honor the gravity of such a crime. Still, wasn’t it worse to curse a newborn baby to a lifetime of misery? By now she’d missed her period and there was no doubt she was pregnant.

One afternoon while Thomas napped on the porch, sweat beading on his upper lip, Skylar tiptoed to the bedroom they shared and retrieved the pistol from the nightstand drawer. She sat on the bed and hoped her parents were dead. She didn’t want to think about them hungry and struggling against the humid urban heat.

If she’d been recording the days correctly, the date was June 30, six weeks and four days since the pulse. The fetus would be forty-one days old.

She picked up the pistol and pointed it at her nose. The interior of the barrel was a tiny black hole of oblivion. Of infinity. It was a singularity where nothing, not even life, could escape.

She raised the gun to her forehead and pressed it there. The barrel wasn’t cool the way she expected. It was warm and felt almost wet, as if it were sweating the same as she. She slid her thumb over the trigger. She wondered about her brother. She wondered about Roark. If anyone could survive this, Roark could. He was a man who never went quietly. She remembered the drunken night when he lowered her to the carpet of the Wynn hotel, in the hallway outside their suite, when he hiked up her dress and shoved himself into her and she liked it. She liked it. A tenant in a nearby room had opened her door. Had seen them fucking like animals on the hotel carpet. The tenant calmly placed her dinner tray on the floor not three feet from Skylar’s head and went back into her room. The click of the door lock had sent Skylar over the edge, had sent her tumbling down the waterfall. And while Roark grunted and shuddered, she thought to herself If I die tomorrow, at least I lived today.

Thomas had been different. He held her and caressed her and coaxed her to orgasm twice before he took anything for himself. Maybe he was truly tender or maybe he always submitted to the memory of his mother. Either way, the outcome was the same: He had given her a child and now the only thing left in the world was a choice.