Daphne Lamb: The Girl's Guide to the Apocalypse

She clawed through the storage spaces and did manage to find an old bag of pasta, so that temporarily calmed her down. With nothing else to find, we hiked down to the next house, where once again she smashed a window and made me enter first.

“How long have you been with Darren?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Sorry – uh, our Lord.”

She beamed. “Almost a month. But it feels like forever. Just one big beautiful forever.”

I nodded. “I’ll bet.”

“And don’t try to talk to me about the way things used to be,” she said defensively. “I don’t care, I don’t remember and none of it is important now, anyway.”

“Deal,” I said as I opened a pantry door.

“Some people think it was so great back then, but it’s not,” she said. “We’re much better off now, and I’m so sick of having to defend what I was doing and how I got here. So don’t ask me about it.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

She stood in the middle of the kitchen now, breathing heavily. “My family told me to come home over six months ago and they even sent me money for it. And I didn’t, because no one ever thinks I can do anything on my own. But I can.”

“Of course,” I said. I pulled out a jar. “How does our Lord feel about Alfredo sauce?”

“He didn’t say,” she said. “I had the best job, working at the Circle K. I could drink Mountain Dew and watch TV all day and then my boyfriend asked me to start borrowing from the store, which I did, and then I got caught and fired. I was looking for a job, but no one wants to hire a high school dropout who got fired from the Circle K for stealing!”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “Didn’t you look into getting your GED?”

“I said I didn’t want to talk about it.”

“Right,” I said. “Sorry to pry.”

She hoisted herself up onto the counter and continued to talk.

“You know what really burns me, though?” she asked. “My sister thinks she’s so special because she got three kids and lives in Utah. What’s so special about that? She’s been engaged three times. Who fucking cares?”

I shrugged and kept zeroing in on what sat on the shelves. “There’s rolls down here, but they might be a little stale.”

“You keep looking and you keep looking now!” she said. Her crunchy hippie persona was long, long gone at this point.

Eventually, we made it back to the house with merely a half bag of pasta and a jar of Alfredo sauce to show for our efforts. I had, however, learned plenty about Tigerlily, despite her insistence that she had nothing to talk about and was an absolute closed book on the subject of her background. I learned she had a seven-year-old daughter she hadn’t seen in six years, and she was pretty proud of her job at Circle K.

“I used to deal drugs with my ex, but that was awful, so don’t ask me about.”

“Okay.”

“You meet a lot of bad people selling and buying drugs. I don’t want to talk about it, but this one time, this guy stole my Led Zeppelin sweatshirt and never gave it back.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Stop asking me about it!”

“Tigerlily,” I said. “How has Darren, I mean, our Lord, made things better? I watched him eat those closest to me. Although it’s good to see that Priscilla’s okay.”

“Who?”

“Mountain Spring. It just seems odd that no one is fazed by the fact that your Lord thinks eating people is fine.”

Tigerlily’s face turned an eerie calm and her voice became quiet and smooth. “He’s wonderful. He tells us stories, gives us important life lessons and provides us with food and shelter. He’s not only the leader of us but the rightful leader of the world. He’s currently writing a manifesto that will bring harmony to all nations.”

“Harmony being terrorizing small communities?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she was flippant. “He inspires us everyday to rebuild things better than the way we were given them.”

We walked up the road as I took in the various tributes to Darren along the way. His initials were carved out in trees and someone had tried to position rocks on the ground in the shape of his face.

“How do you know he’s not just using you?” I said.

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“You know how people are given power and abuse it? There are some people who have no real interest in helping others.” I let my voice trail off. “You know what, it’ll probably be different for him. As long as he doesn’t promise to bring in a chosen baby or something.”

“He’s wants one!” she snapped. “He just needs to find the right mate and he will bear a Messiah.”

We were almost at the house now.

“So is this mate application still open for interviews or has he picked his candidate?”

Tigerlily grabbed the door and went to open it. “It’s going to be me. He just needs some convincing.”

“Good,” I said. “Because that’d just be embarrassing for him if he asked me.”

She pushed her way in ahead of me and let the door slam in my face.

Later that night dinner was served, Alfredo on pasta with meatballs, by a tense staff. I didn’t ask where the meatballs came from. I knew enough about this guy to know that one shouldn’t ask for fear of being nauseatingly disturbed. Meanwhile, someone served Darren his meal in the dining room while the rest of us stood at attention, our backs to the walls.

“What the hell is this!” he yelled. “This isn’t marinara! Who serves spaghetti and meatballs with Alfredo sauce? Are we all just going to live like animals from here on out?”

We were all awkwardly silent. I stared at the floor, but I knew everyone else stared at me.

“It doesn’t even look like Alfredo sauce. It looks like you warmed over whatever Antigone threw up before we gave her away!” He looked at us all. “I demand to know who’s responsible.”

Everyone stared at me, so I figured I’d spare us all the building awkwardness and stepped forward.

“That would be me,” I said. “I brought you this.”

“Why would you bring this to me?” he asked. “I have a mind that has carefully been honed and sharpened for a greater existence, and you give me swill only good for rustic hill people to sup on.”

“It was a mistake,” I said. Someone jabbed me in the side and muttered something unintelligible. “Won’t happen again.”

The person on the other side of me jabbed me on the other side and muttered something just as unintelligible. Meanwhile, Darren stared at me with steely eyes.

“But what about right now?” he asked. “What do I do with this?”

“Perhaps you’d like to wait for me to whip up something in the kitchen,” I said.

There was a collective groan from everyone in the room.

“I don’t know the rules here,” I muttered.

“You’re a silly girl, aren’t you?” he asked.

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “It’s tough times, and I didn’t ask to be here.”

There was a gasp that went up. Everyone stared at me with eyes wide in horror.

“Do you not want to be here?” he asked. “Is there somewhere better for you to go?”

“No,” I said. “This is fine for now. I’m not complaining.”

His nostrils flared, and all I wanted was to appease him so I wouldn’t die in some horrible way.

“For now?” he asked. “ For now? ” He stood, paced and then waved his arms around. “This is all there is forever. You are standing on the edge of evolution, and you treat it like the waiting room for some free clinic on the bad side of town. You’re a silly girl, and you have no allegiances to anything, which makes you half-dead already.” He pointed to his dinner in front of him. “I am going into the other room to work on my manifesto. When I come back, I need to have a better dinner in front of me, not this this peasant shit.”