Page 97 of The End of the World As We Know It
We’d gotten as far as the Fort Lauderdale airport in my mom’s car. It crapped out a mile or so away from the ramp to 595. But it wasn’t like we were moving much by then, anyway. Cars were stopped across I-95, a sprawling array of metal tombstones, clogging one of the biggest pathways across the country. It was too much to process. But somehow, we were alive—Danny and me. My little man—his face so placid and caring, those deep, dark, knowing eyes. That perpetually thoughtful expression. I wanted to hold him close and makehim feel safe—whisper that this was just a bad dream, that we were going somewhere good and calm and cool—but he was smart enough to know that wasn’t happening.
I’m coming for him.
The words popped out in front of my mind—like a ghoul stepping into the light of a hallway, eyes aflame, mouth open and pleading. Erik’s voice hadn’t been pleading, or desperate—it’d been focused. That’s what had initially scared me, before any of this other shit happened. The idea that this man I’d left behind, this man I’d gone to every length possible to get away from, knew where to find me and our son.
“Where are we sleeping, Mami?”
Danny’s question pulls me out of my own mind. I tighten my fingers around his hand and look around. We were near Pompano Beach now. After the car died on 95, we tried to get off the highway—stepping over the bodies, around the car wrecks, through ravines and down ramps.The side streets are going to be our best bet, I thought. We could find a car and bob and weave through the back alleys and roads and just keep going. Away from all this, away from Erik—toward something else. Toward my dreams.
Of that woman.
Mother Abagail.
Something about the dreams feels different. They’re not just fevered visions, products of discomfort, desperate meals, and anxiety like nothing I’ve ever experienced. No, the dreams are almost real—like I’m tapping into something new, something primal. I see her. I feel her calling to us. Telling us to keep going.
But where?
I long for anything else—for the mundane tasks of my project manager job: the phone calls, the spreadsheets, the tedious meetings, and awkward lunches with my boss, who I knew wanted to sleep with me. Just looking for any kind of opening or signal to make hismove. I must have seemed like easy prey to him. Single mom, recently divorced, new on the job. I let him think what he wanted. I’d needed the job. Now it all just seems like a blurry vision.
“We’ll find a room, Danny,” I said, pulling him in closer.
I could feel his frame, the bones of his body jutting out more than they ever had before. We hadn’t been eating well—the flurry of opportunity that came right after the virus struck was gone. The stores had been picked dry, if not by people then by animals. We were lucky if we found cans—the can opener I’d yanked from a gas station in Hollywood felt like my prize possession now. A key to survival.
It was getting late. On days like this, when we couldn’t find a car—couldn’t pilfer keys or find something with gas in it, we just hoofed it. Just tried to make our way up the state. I loved walking—which was rare down here, where everyone stayed indoors, and if they had to go anywhere they hopped into their little air-conditioned cars and zipped around. Pedestrians were unicorns. We’d found a few crappy umbrellas from an Eckerd drugstore we passed along the way—a flimsy shield from the Florida sun that we’d packed in a crappy rolling suitcase dragged behind us, on the rare moments a cloud would block the blazing light. Sweltering heat aside, I loved the activity, no matter how hot it got.
Not my Danny, though.
He wanted to be on the couch, the temperature set to seventy-two, with a book in his lap—already reading fantasy novels and horror comics andArchiedigests. I could leave him there for hours if I wanted to. He wasn’t made for what the world was now. Haunted. Streaked with blood and bile. A smear over the map of what was once alive, vibrant—beautiful. This god-awful state. It just felt fucking endless.
Florida was miserable that way. Getting out of South Florida felt like such a victory—but it was a mirage. The area was endless—and once you got past Palm Beach, there was nothing… a shimmering void until at least Orlando, maybe farther if you were trying to get to Gainesville or, God forbid, Pensacola or Tallahassee. It felt likea series of challenges—a gauntlet of tests that I was never meant to face.
For me, a Cuban girl who grew up in Kendall listening to Célia and visiting myabuela’s house in Little Havana, the state north of Miami Shores felt almost alien. There’d never been a need to go anywhere else. I had everything at home. My job, my car, my Danny—
And Erik. At least for a while.
I saw a tiny hotel—motel, really. Beachfront deal. Small, faded pink paint, cramped, but hopeful. Surely there was an empty room—a bed that wasn’t festering with giant palmetto bugs and, if we were lucky, some sputtering water in the pipes. I imagined a shower. I didn’t dare think of hot water. But a shower would be nice. Perhaps a place to make a fire and warm up one of the six cans of Goyafrijoles negrosin my backpack.
I’m coming for him.
I felt a shiver run up my arm. I chalked it up to hunger. I stepped over a body—a man bundled in a large coat for some reason and who’d probably died here. I couldn’t make out his face, but I took that as a grace, not a missed opportunity. For a second, I thought I saw him fidget. But I pressed on, pulling Danny next to me, away from yet another fallen shape. Another life cut short—an incomplete chord, a few notes left silent.
I turned the knob on the front door and almost let out a sob as it opened. Danny handed me the small flashlight we’d picked up in Lauderhill and I flicked it on. We were in a tiny lobby area—I’d learned, over the last few weeks, to not linger over things. Not in places we were only passing through. Usually the smell said enough—whether there were bodies or food or animals festering. But you never knew. Sometimes you’d catch a glimpse of someone hunched back, their face melting off—flesh torn away by a desperate cat or animal, or worse. I shuddered to think about what Danny had seen in those moments. How each image had gnawed away at what little innocence was left in him.
I let the flashlight’s glare dance across the opposite wall. I pulled back once I saw it—the words smeared across what was once a bare, pale stucco. The longLalmost reaching from ceiling to just above a tattered couch positioned next to the front desk. I didn’t need to bring the light back to read the words—I didn’t need to think about what the dark, red paint it was written in truly was.
AHORA EMPIEZA LA MALA HORA
Roughly translated it meant “now begins the bad hour.” Butla mala horawas much more than that. A story myabuelastold me. Of a dark figure—a specter of bad tidings—who appeared in the blackest moments of night, bringing with him bad luck and hopelessness—a messenger of evil that haunted the gray corners of dusk and dawn. Once you were caught inla mala hora, there was no hope. There was no chance of escape. You were dead.
“What was that?” Danny asked.
I thought about pulling him back, about turning around and trying to walk a few more blocks—perhaps a few more miles—to find something else. Something less ideal, but certainly less terrifying. But if I was tired, I knew Danny was feeling worse.La mala hora—it was everywhere. Settling into this motel for one night wouldn’t make a difference, I thought. I said a quickpadre nuestroand pulled Danny into the motel behind me, the flashlight turned down toward the floor, illuminating only what was right in front of us.
We managed to find a room on the third floor. It was a mess, but it was empty—and after stripping the bed, it seemed almost livable after the journey to get inside. My heart ached each time I had to motion for Danny to step over a body or look away from something I knew he’d seen—a limb, a dead mother clutching something that was no longer there, or worse… the blood. Streaks of it. Droplets.The kind of red you knew meant only one thing, even at Danny’s young age.
I set up the portable, battery-powered lantern on the dresser to illuminate the space. I saw the loaded handgun, tucked in the back of our stuffed carry-on luggage. I barely knew how to use it. I never wanted to. But when we’d walked by the gun store on Bird Road, I knew we needed it. Something. Anything. “Just in case” became a lot more likely now. The chance that we’d have to point a gun at something—someone—was almost a certainty. I closed my eyes for a second, then turned to look at the small space we’d found for the night, the lantern’s light showing more than I probably wanted to see.
The room was drab and dusty. That felt like a victory, at least. The bad stuff was outside the door—the blood, the bodies, the sounds. I felt my throat tighten as I watched Danny methodically change into his blue spaceship pajamas, as if everything was just fine—we were on a family trip, heading to see friends or hisabuelos, perhaps even to Disney World or Epcot. I remembered dreading those trips. The lack of sleep. The dysregulated behavior. The tantrums. Erik was no help. He’d either make a beeline for the hotel bar or just drink in the room, and if he got a few rounds in and something set him off, I had to react. I learned, over time, that the best thing to do was to leave—to bite the bullet and take Danny out, to the park or anywhere, and just hope Erik didn’t destroy everything while we were gone. He had become a shell of a man to me at that point—a husk that resembled someone I knew, someone I fell in love with. In my more rational moments, I knew it was the drinking. That he was sick. But at other times, when I had to hurry our son outside of a cheap hotel room because his father was throwing up in the bathroom or screaming at the top of his lungs about some tiny, perceived slight—it was at those times I hated him. I wanted him to die.
