In The End: a pre-apocalypse novel (10 page)

Angela hated the windows being boarded up so she wanted to
get out of the lodge and go sit in one of the cabins. Things were bad enough
with the possible nuclear war, her friends dying, being stuck on the mountain,
worrying about her family, and now,
sitting
around in
a boarded up building with hardly any sunlight – it was just too much. She was
trying to stay as positive as she could under the most negative of
circumstances, but it was hard. And now the dreary darkness of the lodge just
made it feel impossible.

After Terry explained why he’d
boarded up the windows and they talked about staying together to survive as a
group if they couldn’t resume their normal lives, she left the men to sort
through the loot from their last scavenging run, saying, “I’ll be back later,”
and started walking toward the door. “Oh, could somebody cook something for
tonight? I’m really tired and just want to rest a while.”

“Sure. I will,” Terry replied.

Both men watched Angela leave, then
Terry looked at Jim.

“Is she okay? She seems sort of
depressed.”

Jim shrugged. “I don’t know. Could be
the whole nuclear bomb thing, plus watching Hailey and Josh die…”

Terry shook his head and resumed
sorting supplies from the big pile.

“You do care about her, don’t you?”

Jim looked at Terry and bit the
inside of his cheek. He reached for a knife and dropped it alongside several
others off to the side. Then he examined the pile to see what he could sort
next. He started on medical supplies. After he gathered them into a separate
pile, he stood up and stretched. Terry was picking up ammo boxes and sorting
them by caliber.

“I’m gonna grab some empty boxes,”
Jim said, walking toward the front door.

Terry thought that was a bad lie
since the empty boxes were in the back by the pantry, but he didn’t say
anything.

Jim stepped outside and stood still
after taking a few steps away from the door. He looked over at the cabins and
saw flickering light coming from Angela’s. Her curtains were closed. A cold
wind blew through his shirt but he didn’t button his jacket. He just stood
there, staring at the one cabin with a dimly lit window. He put his hands in
his jacket pockets, tilted his head down and walked past the cars toward the
lighted cabin adjacent to the far end of the lot.

When he reached her door, he tapped
it with the side of his shoe three times. A few seconds later, the door opened
and he could see Angela’s breath inside the room as easily as he could see his
outside. It was cold and stunk of kerosene.

“You’re gonna freeze in there. You
should come back to the lodge.”

She turned around and went back to
sitting on the bed. She picked up several long strands of grass and started
braiding them together. Jim came in and shut the door.

“
You
makin
’
a wreath?”

She nodded. He sat down in the
upholstered chair to the left of the bed. He kept his hands in his pockets,
trying to keep them warm.

“What’s up, Ange?”

She stopped fiddling with the grass
and looked at him without turning her head.

“What do you mean?” She looked down
at her hands but kept them still.

“You seem off. I know life is
sucking pretty hard lately, but you seem different tonight. Is something wrong,
aside from the world coming to an end?”

She snorted and mildly shook her
head, still looking down at the grass she was holding. She started fiddling
with it, not braiding it as she was before, but just rolling strands between
her fingertips.

“It’s hard, Jim. We still don’t
have any clue about what’s going on. I think part of why I’ve been able to
block out the horror of what happened to Denver is because I can hope that it
only happened there and that our family and friends at home are still okay. But
I don’t even know. Everyone we care about could be dead.”

“Yeah, but that wasn’t bothering
you so much earlier today, or yesterday. What changed?”

She turned her head to look at him.
She rolled her lips inward and inhaled deeply through her nose. Her exhalation
was a long sigh.

“You’ll think it’s stupid.”

Jim bit the inside of his cheek and
waited.

“I know this doesn’t make any
sense, so please, don’t tell me how stupid I am, okay? It’s just… I think it’s
the windows being all boarded up. I hate it.”

“You don’t have any matches, do
you?”

“No. I used up the few I had
getting the lamp lit. There’s a bad draft in here.”

Jim took his hands out of his
pockets and cracked his knuckles by interlacing his fingers and extending them
away from his body.

“I know. It’s freezing in here.” He
looked at her for a few seconds to see if she’d get the hint that they should
go back to the lodge with the huge fireplace. But she said nothing. “Why do the
boarded up windows bother you so much?”

“I’m not sure. I just know that’s
when I felt different - right after we got back from stealing people’s stuff.”
She looked at him, waiting to see if he was going to correct her again on the
difference between stealing and scavenging. He didn’t, so she continued.

“The lodge looks condemned, you
know? It was a lot easier to not think about how awful things were while we
were sitting on a beautiful mountain top, at a ski resort, which is a pretty nice
place to stranded. It’s a place for fun, vacation, getting away from it all,
and so on. When you’re sitting by the fireplace, listening to the wood crackle
and pop, looking out the window at the snow falling – you can just – I don’t
know, not think about the reality of the situation.

“But now it’s like we’re living in
a building that has been officially condemned; designated unsafe by a city
inspector or something. Like it’s going to be torn down. No more lodge. No more
skiing.
No longer a place where people go for fun.
It
changes everything here. And now all I can think about is how it’s just like
our lives. They’re shut down; condemned; not fun anymore.” She looked at him
for a moment. “Things are really fucked up, Jim.”

Angela tore the grass she was holding
in half and started to cry. Jim got up at once and sat beside her, putting his
arm around her. She turned toward him and put her arms around his back and laid
her head on his shoulder, muffling her cries in his jacket.

Jim bit his lip as he held her and
stared at the wall on the other side of the room. He had a million things he
wanted to say to her, but he said nothing. He wouldn’t allow himself to. He
reached up with one hand and softly stroked her hair. Angela was surprised to
feel Jim doing something so gentle and affectionate. She lifted her head up and
moved back a few inches so she could see his eyes.

“Now that I told you my stupid
feelings about the boarded up windows, maybe I should tell you my other stupid
feelings.” She looked at him with something like hope in her eyes.

“
Anj
, you
can tell me anything you want and I’ll never think you’re stupid.” He
understood what she had said about the lodge looking and feeling condemned now.
He didn’t like it either, but if it made them safer, they had to do it.

Angela moved her hands up from
Jim’s back and locked her fingers together behind his neck. She took a deep
breath. She never thought she would ever say what she was about to say. There
had never been any point in it before. She had always liked Jim romantically
but he had never shown any interest in her, so she just acknowledged her
feelings for him, and told herself that her feelings didn’t matter. They
weren’t something to get worked up over.

But for the time being, there
weren’t any other people around. And the population in general might be
drastically reduced for all they knew. Now her feelings for Jim had become much
more significant to her, and she thought that under the circumstances, he might
have started to feel something for her too.

“Jim, I really like you a lot, and
I have for a long time. I’m sure you know that. I’ve been wondering if… God,
now I feel stupider than ever, so I’m just going to spit it out. I want to be
with you, Jim. Do you ever think…? Do you have any…?”

She gave up on trying
to find
just the right words that would be the least
embarrassing to say out loud and quickly moved in and kissed him. It was the
first time they had ever kissed and it was just how she imagined it would be.
He acted like such a cold and uncaring person, but his lips were so soft and
warm, just like hers. She took his bottom lip between both of hers and relished
the feeling. She had wanted to kiss him for so long. She felt a desire she’d
tried to ignore for years awake inside of her and she felt her dark depression
start to lift.

When she felt Jim kissing her back,
she took that as the answer to her question about whether he had feelings for
her or not. He wanted her too. Despite everything that was happening in the
world, she rejoiced in the knowledge that there could still be love. She
wrapped her arms around him tightly and parted his lips with her tongue. Years
of pent up desire for Jim was suddenly unleashed and she wanted to kiss him
without ever stopping.

Jim drew back from her and gently
put his hands on her shoulders.

“Angela…”

She smiled, gazing into his eyes.
She couldn’t believe it. The look on his face was so serious. Did he actually
love her? Jim, who hated just about everyone, was going to say, “I love you?”
She couldn’t wait to hear the words.

“Yes?”

“I could never be with you.”

She froze. The cold air in the room
went right through her clothes, through her skin and into her bones. She felt
like her heart stopped beating and her blood stopped flowing. Her ears burned
and her throat closed tight around a lump that suddenly grew and made it
impossible for her to swallow. She thought she was going to choke on the lump
if she didn’t vomit from the queasy sickness that was now roiling in her
stomach and rising upward.

She finally breathed. It was a
sobbing gasp of air that hurt as it went in. She pulled her hands away from him
as if he was toxic and she moved away from the bed and looked around the room
frantically as if she was going to panic. She had never felt more stupid in her
life. A flood of tears gushed from her eyes as she ran from the room, leaving
the door open behind her. She cried out loudly as she ran. She couldn’t hold
back the pain. She didn’t care if he heard her crying. She didn’t know how she
could ever face him again anyway.

“Angela, wait! Come back!” The
sound of her crying diminished as she got further away. She wasn’t coming back.
“Angela!” he yelled, getting up to run after her.

She was running across beside the
parking lot, heading toward the two vehicles. Jim ran toward her and reached
her just as she was grabbing at the door handle of the BMW.

“You can’t leave. Where do you
think you’re going?”

“Anywhere away from here,” she
said.
“Away from you.”
She opened the car door and
slid inside. Jim ran around to the other side and got in quickly before she
could lock the doors.

“Angela, you don’t understand…”

“I understand, Jim. You hate
everyone, and now I know that includes me too. I never should’ve told you how I
felt. I’m sorry. I’m an idiot, just like everyone else you hate.” She hugged
herself, shivering from the cold as she resumed crying with deep sobs that made
it hard for her to breathe.

Jim reached over and pushed the
start button, then turned the heat setting to its maximum.

“No, Angela. You’re wrong.”

She took a few ragged breaths and
gained control of her voice for a moment.

“Okay. If you don’t hate me, then
you tolerate me. Forgive me if that doesn’t make me feel any better. I could be
the last girl on earth for all you know, but you could never be with me. That
really says a lot.” She dropped her head to the steering wheel and resumed
crying. He was hopeless.

“That’s not what I meant,” Jim
spoke through his teeth. He grabbed one of his hands with the other and began
wringing them. He bit at his top lip and looked around as if he hoped to find
someone who could help him say what he felt but couldn’t find words for.

Without lifting her head from the
top of the steering wheel, she asked through her tears, “Then what, Jim? What did
you mean? You think of me as a sister? You love me like a friend and don’t want
to ruin our friendship? I know all the excuses people use when they’re just not
into you. Just spare me the humiliation.” She lifted her head and tried to blot
the tears from her eyes with her arm.

“I could never be with you… because
I’m not good enough for you, Angela.”

She took her arm away from her face
and looked at him, narrowing her eyes. “What?”

Now that Jim had found the words
that explained how he felt about
himself
, the rest
came easy.

“Angela, I can’t be with you
because you’re too good for me. You’re the most precious thing on this earth.
You’re the best person—the only good person I’ve ever known. Yeah, I really do
hate people, Angela, but not you. You’re the one person I could never hate.” He
looked quickly away,
then
looked back at her like he’d
just quickly decided something. A tear rolled down from one of his eyes.

“I love you, Angela. I would give
my life for you, and with the way things are going, I probably will someday
soon, just to make sure you go on living so there will be one good thing in
this rotten, fucked up world. As long as you’re in the world, then whatever
crazy cosmic power there is out there will have to preserve it. You’re an angel
to me. That’s why I can’t be with you. You deserve someone a million times
better.
Someone who’s not… completely fucked up.”