Page 61 of The Last Stars in the Sky
“I’m sure that’s exactly what I’ll be thinking about at that particular moment,” I reply, and Kerry laughs while, improbably, I feel myself grinning.
We’re just about to head inside when Kyle appears at the door, looking as eager as a puppy—begging to be loved or even kicked. “I set a fire to thaw the ground so I can dig a big enough hole,” he tells us. “Mattie’s watching it, but I just wanted to check that was okay?”
Kerry’s smile broadens as she ruffles his now-clean hair. “That’s some good problem-solving skills right there, Kyle,” she says, as she walks past him. “Good thing we’re keeping you.”
We bury Darlene that afternoon, under a sky white with snow that is yet to fall, in the hard, unforgiving earth. The fire Kyle set managed to thaw it enough to make a shallow grave; we wrapped her in the tarp and covered the mound with some brush. Kyle made a cross with two sticks, nailed together; she would have liked that, I know. She went to the little Baptist church on the road to Flintville every Sunday.
There are no hymns because we don’t know any, and no one says any words because there doesn’t seem to be any to say. We simply stand by the graveside, as silent as Ruby, as we each remember Darlene.
I think of her words to me, just a few weeks ago.You are your father’s daughter. What would my dad have done in this situation? He would have looked out for everyone, I know that much, but I also know he would have been afraid. He was a man, not a superhero, but I know he always tried to do the right thing. He was generous, accepting, forgiving. Mostly, anyway, more than I’ve been. But he could also be irritable, short-tempered, moody. He wasn’t perfect, but I loved him, and I’m thinking of him now, as we bury Darlene.
I think of my mother too. She was the counterfoil to my dad’s bonhomie and dreaminess—utterly practical, sometimes ruthlessly so, thinking in terms of realities rather than wishes. Together, I think, they would have triumphed against this Armageddon disaster, the perfect team. They would have been excited by the challenges, I realize; in an entirely different way to those guys on the bridge, they’d been waiting for something like this, to put their homesteading to the test. Well, now it’s our turn.
“Right,” I say, as I turn away from Darlene’s grave. “It’s time to have a meeting.”
TWENTY
DANIEL
A mere ten miles outside of Clarkson, he is attacked. Althoughattackedfeels too violent a word; he’s ambushed, waylaid even, by a couple of teenagers, barely more than kids, cruising around in a big black SUV, rap music blasting, almost like they would be before this all happened, except now they’re just that much more reckless. There is a wildness in their eyes that Daniel recognizes in himself, a surge of something feral and uncontrolled he has so far kept at bay, all through his travels—through the farmer waving a gun in his face, and the camo-suited pretend soldiers parading in front of Walmart, the tanks he once saw heading down a country road, the fighter jets in the sky.
He kept himself hidden when he saw a bunch of drugged-up teenagers racing hospital stretchers down the street; he didn’t think there were any patients on them, but he knew he couldn’t truly be sure. He looked the other way when a gang robbed a mother and child of the pitiful amount of food they’d collected; the woman screamed and the child sobbed and Daniel stayed hidden.
While the world exploded around him, a frenzy of looting and larceny, pillaging and marauding like something out of a medieval siege or a Mel Gibson movie, he’d stayed calm andcontrolled, guilt-ridden yet determined in his self-interest, but now he senses in himself the fraying of his tether, how soon it will snap. He’s so close to Sam.
“Hey there, Grandpa,” they call out, as they pull onto the side of the road with a spray of gravel. Some of it hits him in the cheek, stinging. He pauses, hands gripping the handlebars, his expression guarded, wary, alert.
One kid gets out of the passenger seat and sashays toward him, one hand resting on his belt buckle. He’s Sam’s age, if that; he still has pimples and he has a few hairs sprouting from his chin, not much more, but he’s striding toward Daniel like he’s Jesse James, or maybe just Clint Eastwood. It’s all games to these boys, Daniel thinks. They’re so terrified they can only play-act at life because none of them can bear for this to be real.
“What do you want?” he asks. His voice is a throaty rasp; he can’t remember the last time he spoke out loud, and the sound of it surprises him. It has taken him two weeks to get from Utica to here, two weeks he does not wish to remember in any detail.
“What the hell are you doing on that little girl’s bike?” the boy asks; it sounds like a genuine question, but his laugh ends in a sneer, and before Daniel can react, before he realizes what thisjuvenileis about to do, the kid wrenches the bike from under him, so he sprawls back onto the road, hitting his head hard enough to daze him.
By the time he blinks the world back into focus, the boy is raising the bike over his head and then, with a methodical and even bored indifference that makes Daniel all the more outraged, he smashes it onto the road. A tire pops and the frame becomes bent and twisted; it is ruined.Ruined, and for what? It didn’t even look like this stupid teenager enjoyed his wanton act of destruction.
Daniel eases up onto his elbows as the boy smirks down at him. “What do you think of that, Grandpa?”
“What do I think of that?” Daniel asks, and something in his voice, the deadly matter-of-factness of it, or maybe the complete lack of fear, makes the boy’s eyes widen just a little. The boys in the car who were watching, grinning, suddenly go still, their expressions turning wary. They are children, Daniel thinks, and yet they are his enemies.
Slowly, deliberately, he rises from the road. He dusts off his khakis while the boy waits, watching him uncertainly. And then, with an assuredness he feels right now in every atom of his body, he unstraps the rifle from his chest and points it unhesitatingly in the boy’s face. “What I think,” he states levelly, “is that you just made a big mistake.”
The boy gulps. At a movement from the car, Daniel swings the rifle toward the driver’s seat window, which is rolled down. “Everybody out of the car,” he barks. “Slowly. No sudden movements. Trust me, I’m so trigger-happy right now, you don’t even want tothinkabout doing something stupid.” He’s never meant anything more; he knows part of him, a large part, would enjoy blasting the head off one of these stupid, stupid boys. Would positivelyrelishit.
Slowly, looking scared and young, far too scared and young, the boys get out of the car. They’re younger than Daniel thought, probably not even old enough to drive. Fourteen, maybe fifteen. Mattie’s age. His rifle, trained on their uncertain forms, does not waver.
“Stand by the side of the road.”
“Look, we didn’t mean it. We were just joking—”
Joking, Daniel thinks,joking in a nuclear fallout, this Armageddon dystopian nightmare?There is no joking. “Move,” he says. They shuffle to the side of the road. None of them have any weapons, not even a knife. How stupid are they, he wonders. What were they thinking, joyriding like this, with no weapons?
“Where are you from?” he asks them.
They look surprised by the question, a little wary, like he’s going to trick them somehow. “Clarkson.”
“Clarkson? At the college?” he demands sharply.
“No,” one boy, the one who broke his bike, replies sulkily. “The town.”
