Kody Boye - Sunrise

The moment Desmond’s face fell against his chest, Steve began to cry.

I’ve lost nothing, he thought, stroking Desmond’s hair, yet he’s lost everything he could have ever had. How can he be so strong?

Bowing his head, Steve closed his eyes and let the tears run free.

“So,” Rose said, heaving a box of canned goods off a shelf and turning her eyes on Kevin. “Now that you’ve heard my story, what’s yours?”

“Sorry?”

“Your story,” she said, crouching down to wipe dust from the box’s surface. “You know, where you came from, how old you are, your family.”

“Minnesota,” Kevin said, “grew up in the Walker area. Thirty-nine. Wife wanted to get the family started early, so we had our first kid when I was only twenty-one.”

“How many children do you have?”

“Thruh… um… two.”

Kevin reached up to wipe something off his forehead, then turned as though taking note of the aisle they were in.

Rose pushed herself to her feet and grabbed another box of goods. Though she hadn’t been around the man for more than thirty minutes, she could already tell that he had more than a few loose bolts in the overall machine. The fact that he’d started to say something about his children, then stopped made her reconsider the question she’d just asked, so much so that she stopped reaching for the third box near the back of the shelf.

Did he lose one of his children?

Of course he had. It was ignorant to think that he hadn’t, but then again, she’d been with people who had sworn left and right they hadn’t lost a single thing. Sure, they’d said, I lost my million dollar home and my farm in the hills, but I didn’t lose anything important.

What was important in this day and age? Friends, family, children?

I know what’s important, she thought, tearing the box from the back of the shelf. I damn well better if I’m staying with them.

“You mind if I ask you something, Kevin?”

“What?” Kevin asked.

“You stuttered when I asked how many children you had.”

He sighed. “That.”

“May I ask what happened?”

“It’s hard to explain,” the older man said, looking down at the boxes before them. He craned his neck back to look in the aisle behind them, gestured her forward, then started forward himself, his long legs allowing him a much wider range of movement than Rose’s shorter ones. “You got a minute?”

“We’ve got all the time in the world as far as I’m concerned.”

“After I left Minneapolis with my boys, we went to the old family cabin up near Walker. It was far enough out of town and deep enough in the woods that I figured we’d be safe there, that we’d have our own happy little life at the end of the world. Little did I know that would be the exact opposite.”

“What happened?”

“Sometime between the time we got up there and the time a Native American man named Eagle stumbled across my property, Jessiah was bitten by his horse. I didn’t even know she was still alive up until the end, when he confessed on his deathbed that he was just worried and wanted to help her.”

“Wait,” Rose said, grabbing Kevin’s arm and tightening her hold on his wrist to get him to stop. “Did I just hear you right?”

“Pardon?”

“You said he was bitten by his horse. I heard that correctly then?”

“You heard it plain as day, ma’am.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means that whatever happened to that horse was happening to my son,” Kevin sighed. He bowed his head and kicked a dented can down the aisle. “I know what you’re thinking, Rose, but let me tell you, I thought the exact same thing. I thought that it was impossible for the virus—germ, parasite, whatever the fuck it is—to jump species, but I was wrong; so wrong, in fact, that I watched my son’s skin pale to the color of a fresh pearl and his eyes sink into the back of his head until all I could see was darkness.”

“What happened to your son, Kevin?”

“Can you promise me something?”

“What?”

“If I tell what happened, will you keep it between us? I don’t want anyone else to know what happened, especially not my children. They’re too young and full of life to know what happened to Jessiah the night before he died.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” Rose said. “I swear it.”

“Swear it like you mean it.”

“I swear on my best friend’s grave that I will never tell anyone.”

“The night Jessiah died, he was in so much pain that he could barely move, let alone speak. I knew from the moment I sat next to him that I couldn’t let my son continue living the way he was. He’d been in bed for a week before I even decided it was best to end his life. He could barely eat anything. When Eagle was still alive, he’d been mashing food to pulp or liquefying everything because Jessiah couldn’t keep anything down.” Kevin paused. “That night, Rose, he said his stomach hurt, then he reached up to hold my hand. His joints… goddammit! They were so swollen that he could barely even move his fingers. My son—my seventeen-year-old son— couldn’t even hold my hand without being in pain.”

“It’s not your fault,” Rose said, stepping forward. “You couldn’t have done anything.”

“Which is the most painful thing about it,” Kevin said, wiping the tears from his eyes. “Eagle mixed a fatal dose of herbs in with his chicken broth so I wouldn’t have to watch him suffer anymore. Oh God, Rose…I couldn’t even bear to watch him die. I sat in the living room with my two healthy children for ten minutes while Jessiah drank his broth, fell asleep, and died.”

At his story’s final climax, Kevin fell to his knees and sobbed.

With nothing more to do than stand and watch an old man suffer, Rose crouched down, kneeled before Kevin and took his hands in hers.

Each hot tear that fell on her skin only served to remind her how much she had lost.

All my friends, she thought. My horrible, ugly mother, my brothers…

They, too, were gone.

As Kevin’s sobs began to quicken and echo across the canned foods aisle, Rose too began to cry.

“You guys all right?” Erik asked, setting a bag of animal crackers before the two children.

“We’re fine,” the youngest boy said.

“We don’t need a babysitter,” the eldest, Arnold, said.

“You do when your dad says you need one,” Erik replied, seating himself on the couch across from the boys. “Don’t take it out on me.”

“We’re not.”

“To me, it feels like you are.”

“Our brother just died, asshole. What do you expect?”

I can’t believe I’m letting a fourteen-year-old boy get away with calling me an asshole.

Though he was capable of and more than willing to call the boy out on his language and for disrespecting someone, he chose not to. Instead, he watched Arnold’s face for any slight change—a curl of the lip, an irregular bat of an eye, a twitch in his cheek. When he didn’t find any, he sighed, leaned back and closed his eyes.

Almost immediately, his mind flew almost three-quarters of a way across the Pacific Ocean to an island he hadn’t been to for years.

Guam.

Beautiful, tropical, with shores of diamond-white sand and sunsets you could die for: it was, in essence, one of the most beautiful places on Earth, at least in his mind. He and Jamie had gone there for training years ago and had never wanted to leave, despite the burdens of war and everything else that was going on. It was a home away from home, a land of marvelous wonder, and each and every time he thought about it he smiled.