Apophis (3 page)

“I’m
fine
,” he intoned more firmly.  His arms went around his broad frame and he hugged at his torso.

Despite the shock of the night, or perhaps because of it, my eyes began to feel heavy.

I clenched my backpack to my chest, a kind of safety blanket, before finally allowing myself to close my eyes, hoping to find rest.  But the howl of the unforgiving wind beyond the protective covering of our hidden shelter caused my body to tense even more rigidly than it had been before.

“Try to get some rest,” my grandmother urged from her sleeping bag beside me.  “Things will feel better when the sun is up.”

I didn’t believe her.  Not one little bit.  I shut my eyes and focused on the fading image of my mother. 

+++++

CHAPTER TWO

I woke up the next morning from a dreamless sleep.  The past few hours had been nightmare enough; my overly active imagination didn’t need to help.  Sunlight streamed through the open-air windows of the deer blind.  My grandmother quietly snored beside me, but except for the rhythmic sound of her sleep, everything else was silent.  I used to hate the chatter of birds outside my bedroom window when all I wanted to do was sleep in.  Their absence was now just another thing about the world after Apophis that I had once taken for granted.  More so than the cold it was the quiet of a technology-free world that had taken the longest to get used to.  Without the constant drone of the television set or the sound of highway traffic in the distance or the dinging alarms of smartphones or even the gentle hum of a refrigerator, the world had gone silent. 

My father was slumped against the same wall where he’d been standing when I’d finally fallen asleep.  I wondered how much sleep he’d gotten, if any.  I crawled out of my sleeping bag and when the wooden frame creaked with my movements, his head snapped up in my direction.  He held a finger to his lips, indicating that I should remain quiet.
 He pointed to my grandmother who lay beside me in her sleeping bag, sleeping soundly despite our primitive surroundings and the chill in the motionless air.

He jerked his head toward the deer blind’s door.  I followed him outside and climbed down the wooden ladder until we reached the ground.
 He stretched his arms above his head and tilted his head at an angle until I heard a distinctive popping noise.

“Are we going back?” I asked him.

He frowned and straightened up. “Back?” He echoed the word as if he’d never heard it before.

“To the house.  To take back what’s ours.”

“You and what army, Samantha?” my father countered. “They have weapons and they have numbers.”

“We can’t just leave Mom there.”

My father closed his eyes and pinched at the bridge of his nose with two gloved fingers. “It’s dangerous,” he husked.

“You’re really okay leaving her there with bandits?” I demanded angrily.  I knew I should be more cautious and keep the volume of my voice low, but I was overcome with emotion. “With those monsters?”

“Of course I’m not,” he snapped back at me. “But I have to keep you safe. Your mother is gone, Sam.  I can’t risk you and your grandmother by going back.”

“Can’t we just go and see?” I asked, feeling an uncharacteristic whine creep into my tone.  I felt so raw, so defeated.  And I missed my mom.  “Maybe they left.  Please, Dad.  I need to see her for myself.”

My father’s mouth was tight, lips pressed into a fine white line.  Finally, he nodded. “Fine.”

“I’m coming with, too,” I heard my grandma drawl.
I looked up and saw her peering over the edge of the deer blind.

My dad’s shoulders slumped.  I knew he hated being outnumbered.

+++++

We took our time traveling the few hundred yards back to the house.  The night before our movements had been hurried and hushed.  Now we stepped cautiously, cringing at the sound our boots made crunching through stale snow.  Above us the sun was high in the sky.  If bandits were still in our house, we wouldn’t exactly be sneaking up on them.  But my dad was right – how could a banker, a senior citizen, and a 20-year-old girl ambush a group of armed men? 

When the forest gave way and we were back in our backyard, I was relieved to see the house was still standing – the bandits hadn’t torched it.  The pole barn hadn't fared so well.  It had somehow collapsed upon itself.  My dad kicked at the rubble and cursed under his breath.

“Why would they have done this?” my grandmother asked.
 She stooped and picked up the old rusted lock that had once kept the honest people honest.

“Because they can,” was my father’s reply.  His voice was high and tight. “Laws mean nothing if there’s no one around to enforce them.”

“Well, there’s no sense standing out here and freezing,” my grandmother’s sage voice cut through the cold, thin air. “Let’s go survey the rest of the damage.”

The three of us walked to the front door together.  The snow leading up to the front stoop had been trampled, crushed beneath the repeated falling of heavy-booted footsteps. 

I touched my father’s elbow to get his attention.  “What’s that?” I asked quietly. Someone had spray-painted a giant X on the front door.  It reminded me of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when the National Guard had marked houses.

My father’s face relayed no emotion.  “Probably so they know they’ve already hit this house – that they’ve wiped it clean.”

“All of our supplies?” I asked, eyes wide. “You think they took them
all
?”

“Look at the snow,” my dad said, nodding toward the ground.  “The snow banks have been flattened like they had a sled.”

I thought about the mountain of canned food and the barrels of essentials like sugar and flour and rice that we had managed to squirrel away in preparation for the Frost.  It seemed an impossible task.  It was gone? All of it? An uneasy feeling settled in the pit of my stomach.

“I’ll go in first,” my dad announced.  “They could still be in there.  I’ll let you know if it’s safe.”  The hardened look on his face visibly softened.  “Are you sure you want to see her, Sam?  I could, I don’t know…” He stumbled on his words.
“
Move
her?  I don’t want that to be your last memory of her.”

“I need to see her,” I re-emphasized my earlier plea.

My father gave me a curt nod of understanding before disappearing through the front door.  My grandmother sat down on the swinging bench on the front porch and patted the empty space beside her.  I took the seat next to her and we sat there together, swinging in silence.  We didn’t talk, and I let myself get lulled by the rhythmic sound of the bench’s squeaking chains.

I remember vividly my first and only funeral.  My grandfather had died of a heart attack while shoveling snow.  To my eighth-grade self, he had looked so strange in his open coffin at the public viewing – unrecognizable in the suit I hadn’t realized he owned, with his pale skin and pink cheeks fresh from the undertaker’s heavy rouge.  But his mouth was the worst – oddly pursed and puffed up like a dog with a ball. 

Later, when I’d asked my mom about it, she’d told me he hadn’t looked right because the undertaker had put in his dentures.  I knew my grandpa had a set of false teeth because he loved to startle us by leaving them in unexpected places.  In the bread box.  In the glove compartment of the family car.  In the medicine cabinet.  But they were never in his mouth, not even during meals.  He was like this great, wide-mouthed catfish gumming at everything on his plate.

My heart felt heavy when I realized we wouldn’t even be able to give my mom a proper funeral and bury her in the family plot in the town cemetery.  No doubt the gas had been siphoned off in every excavator in town and the ground was too frozen to chip at it with only manpower and shovels.

“He’s been in there a while,” my grandmother murmured after a few minutes.  She looked worried, but we hadn’t heard any yelling or fighting so I assumed the bandits had truly left.

I patted her arm.  “I’ll check on him,” I said, trying to be brave.  I hopped up from my seat and stopped just in front of the front entrance.  “Dad? Is it safe to come in?” I called through the open door.  I anxiously toyed with the oversized hunter’s knife in its holster at my side.  It was the only true weapon I had.  Convincing my dad to let me carry even just a knife had been hard enough.  He repeatedly warned me that it could be used against me.  I repeatedly pointed out that I was dead either way. 

His response wasn’t immediate.  “I can’t find her.”

“What?” I rushed into the house and found my father in the kitchen.  He stood in the entranceway looking lost.

“She was there,” he said numbly, pointing at the floor in front of the kitchen sink.

“Where did she go?” I turned my head this way and that, but found no sight of my mother, no evidence she’d ever been there.  I turned to my dad.  “Did she go someplace else?”

His jaw flexed erratically.  “They must have moved her.”

“Why would they do that?” I demanded. 

My father’s features darkened. “That all depends on how hungry they were.”

When I understood his meaning, I gasped and staggered back a few steps.  “No. No.  That-that couldn’t have happened.  No one would ever do that.  What if she wasn’t dead?” I suggested naively. “What if she just walked away?”

He licked his lips, chapped from the dry, cold temperatures.  “They shot her in the head, Sam.  You don’t walk away from that.”

My grandmother had overheard our conversation and she came to investigate.  She stood in the doorway of the kitchen, surveying the damage.
“I’ll try to find something for us to eat.”

+++++

Dinner that evening was sparse and silent.  My grandmother had managed to scrape together enough oatmeal from the bottom of one of the wooden barrels to make a meager meal.  The quiet meal was punctuated with the sound of eating utensils scraping against the bottom of bowls.  As the three of us sat around the dining room table, my eyes rested on the empty chair that had been my mother’s. The oatmeal felt heavy in my gut and kept threatening to reappear.

The ground floor had been completely ransacked.
 The bandits had gotten into the house by breaking through the front picture window that overlooked our cul-de-sac.  On top of that, every shelf had had its contents knocked to the ground.  Every drawer had been removed from its cubby and its contents were spilled out as well. Furniture was tipped over and broken.  I felt completely violated.  It wasn’t enough that they’d killed my mother; they apparently had had to destroy my home as well.

We had spent the majority of the day cleaning up the broken debris crowding the living room, dining room, and my father’s study.  My dad had used one of the torn down walls from the dismantled pole barn to patch up the gaping hole left behind when the bandits had broken in through the picture window.  I don’t know if he thought if we could just pick up the broken glass and clear out the broken furniture that we’d find my mother's body.  But we never found her.  She, along with the majority of our stockpiled food, was gone.

“We can’t stay here,” my father announced, breaking the uneasy silence that had begun to feel oppressive. “This place is firewood now.”

“It would be foolish to leave, Brandon,” my grandmother protested.  “Where would we even go?”

“We’ll find something.  It’s not safe here anymore.  Now that the house has been compromised, the bandits will just keep coming back.”

“Then we stay and fight!” I exclaimed.  My body shook so violently, I nearly tipped over my bowl of oatmeal.

“These are dangerous, moral-free people, Sam,” my dad noted gravely.  “We’re leaving,” he said with a firm nod.  “We’ll pack up whatever’s left of the supplies, see what’s salvageable, and we’ll leave when the sun’s up.”

“Well,
I’m
not leaving,” my grandmother said, crossing her arms over her chest in a sign of defiance.  “I’m too old to be traipsing around the country.”

“We’ll figure something out, Mom,” my father insisted.  “It’s better than waiting here to die.  Please.”

“Fine,” she sighed.  Her sunken eyes closed.  I wondered what she was thinking.  In a life dotted with economic depressions and a World War, I wondered where this ranked.

I was happy she was going to stay with us.  I couldn’t handle losing her, too.  Not now, not so soon after my mother…

“Can I stay in my room tonight?” I asked.

“No.  I want you all where I can see you,” my father said sternly.

My grandmother laid a withered hand on his forearm.  Her hands reminded me of bread dough.  They were strong, capable hands, even for a woman her age, but they were also warm, soft, and seemed to always have a sheen as if she’d just been kneading lightly oiled bread dough.  “Let her have the night, Brandon.  If anyone comes, we’ll escape through the second floor stairs like last time.”