The Ocean in the Fire Page 17

  Or at least he thought he had.

  “Connor, what’s this about? You look as nervous as I feel. Why did you bring me out here?”

  Connor massaged the palm of one hand with the other, looking at the lines in the hopes that maybe they would tell him what to say next. No matter how little you valued the person you were talking to, it was always hard to say something you weren’t prepared to acknowledge yourself. And from the looks of his situation, he valued Drew quite a bit more than he thought.

  “I’m dying.”

  Silence.

  “I found out right before the pandemic hit that I have a bad heart.” He laughed. “Imagine being so prepared…every detail planned down to the wire, only to be hit with that. That’s the one thing I couldn’t figure out. Sure, I hoarded as much medicine as I could, but there was only so much I could get my hands on. No time. Unless we find out different, most everyone’s dead, and I really doubt there will be many people taking the time to make pharmaceuticals.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  Connor locked eyes with Drew. “I knew Blake was useless from the beginning.” He paused. “Actually she’d proven to be quite the fast learner, but I knew when you arrived that the only skills she could offer the group was helping to keep us all groomed.”

  Connor watched as the other man grew pale. “Don’t worry, it impressed me. Made me think you weren’t such a worthless person after all.”

  “If you knew, why’d you let her come?”

  “It wasn’t about her. It was about you. You saved her. You killed a man and his wife to save her. I need someone like that here, someone with the instincts of a survivor. Especially now.” He looked up to see the sun was completely hidden by the mountains, and the bright red was replaced by a dark blue. “I had to be sure though. Had to be sure that you would do that for the other people here, for not just your people…my people. And you proved that.” He paused. “How did you do that exactly? Jump into a pit of dead people for someone in the grand scheme of things you barely know?”

  Drew hesitated. “I don’t know really. Instinct I guess…and I tried not to look at them.”

  “How could you possibly not look at them?”

  “Because I knew if I looked at them I couldn’t un-look at them.”

  Connor pondered his answer for a moment. “That actually makes sense.”

  After what seemed like several minutes of silence, Drew pivoted to face him. “What exactly are you asking me to do?”

  Connor suddenly felt sick. He didn’t want to have to depend on this man to keep his children and his wife safe. That was supposed to be his job. He’d built his whole life around that task, and he felt it slipping away. His stomach twisted, and before he realized it, vomit fell across the tops of his shoes, and he felt unsteady. His mouth became dry and he ached for just a precious sip of water. Drew grabbed him by the arm. “Are you all right?”

  He wiped his hand across his brow. “I need you to be in charge here. After me. Keep them all alive.”

  Drew released him. “Gosh…don’t you think someone else may be more suited? What about Kate? Darius? Or maybe Cassius?”

  Connor grabbed Drew by the shoulders and shook him. “It has to be you. It has to.”

  “But why?”

  “Because you’re the only one who can. Cassius just wants to be in charge for the sake of it. Darius wouldn’t want it, and Gabriel…Gabriel’s not ready and he may never be. The girls are too young. Kate…Kate’s the most kind, forgiving person that ever walked this earth.” His sudden display of emotion made him feel vulnerable, and his head began to hurt. “Somewhere inside, you know as well as I do that kindness will be what ultimately gets them killed, without me to tell her no.” He paused. “And besides, you owe me.” He felt Drew attempt to lean back away from him. Desperation charged through his blood and he felt hot. “Please!”

  “Okay. I’ll do it. Of course I’ll do it.”

  Connor sighed in relief. “Thank you.”

  A long silence hung in the air between the two men. All they could hear was the mosquitos buzzing in their ears and the frogs croaking at the nearby stream.

  Drew was the first to speak. “You need more medicine. We need you around as long as we can have you.”

  Connor sneered. “Why, Drew, I didn’t know you cared.”

  “You know more about this place than anyone. And besides…” He trailed off.

  “What?”

  “Your children. They deserve as much time with their father as they can get.”

  Connor was surprised that he agreed with anything that Drew said, despite what he had just asked of him. Turning off years of bitterness with one conversation was impossible, though if he was going to get Drew ready, he would have to do it anyway. “What did you have in mind?”

  “Well first, where do you keep the keys to that heap of metal you call a truck?”

  ***

  The two men waited until everyone else went to bed. Connor kissed Kate on both the lips and the forehead the same as he had every night since their wedding. He didn’t know what ritual Drew and Vera had, but he was sure that they had participated in one of their own as he met him at the door to the kitchen. He saw Drew take one quick look over his shoulder as they stepped out into the night.

  The warm, wet air hit both of them like a Colorado autumn, suffocating them for just a moment before they steadied themselves. He took a moment to realize that they would never make it to Colorado, family vacations being one of the things lost forever to the disease. Or at least that’s what Connor told himself. A small part of him acknowledged he’d had no intention of ever taking Kate there to begin with, no matter how much she wanted to. So selfish, he knew, but the desire to stay away from throngs of loud, sweat-ridden tourists had overridden his desire to please his wife. He hoped there wasn’t a slew of other dreams of hers that he’d forgotten in order to feed into his own desires.

  “I’m putting her through too much,” Drew said.

  “Then why are you doing this?”

  Drew smiled a regretful smile. “Like you said, I owe you one.”

  Connor slid into the driver’s seat and turned the key. “Let’s get on with it then.”

  He watched Drew watch him as he drove the car toward the opposite direction of where they had come from that first day. “Where are we going?

  “You’ll see.”

  They drove around toward the back of the property. Just as Drew thought they were about to drive right through part of the wall surrounding the compound, a section of it slowly started to open. Connor reached over, opened the glove box in front of Drew’s seat, and pointed to a small red sensor that was hidden in the back of it, barely noticeable. “There’s a sensor on the wall that reads it.”

  “God, I couldn’t even tell that section opened.”

  “That’s the point. It blends in seamlessly. That way, there’s always an exit strategy.”

  “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “You know why.”

  The gravel road threw them about the cab with the sudden sharpness of a firework, and shot pains through their bodies like being punched by an angry child. The truck was built to act functionally, not for pleasant Sunday drives. Connor reiterated that if you have to get out of somewhere quickly, there was no time for creature comforts. Drew complained that surely, there was enough room for at least an old towel to sit on.

  They rounded the bend and the town greeted them with an image different than they could have ever imagined. Only a few months had passed, yet the town looked as if the earth had been scorched years before, leaving abandoned buildings with doors that had long since been left open swaying gently. The night was rather still, so Connor had an uneasy feeling as he wondered where the doors had found the breeze with which to move. Drew rolled down the window just enough so that they could listen for anything that would give them an idea that they were not alone.

  No sound drifted in.

  As the
y drove to the clinic, they looked at all the homes, and Connor could almost picture how they were supposed to look: in his mind’s eye, the porch rocking chairs still had people in them, knitting or sipping lemonade. Old women were gossiping and men clinked their blonde ales together, probably while discussing their high school glory days where they were more than a father or a friend, or at least they thought they were. The hot dog stand on the corner still had forty-year-old-with-a-grilled-cheese-gut Freddie Johnson waving his tongs at them as they drove by, a big smile on his face, his red and white striped apron stained with golden mustard. The park was still sprinkled with loud children, where it was impossible to distinguish if any of them were laughing or screaming.

  They parked the truck in the back of the clinic, careful to lock it and keep the keys with them. “There’s no one here,” Drew said.

  “Don’t get sloppy. That’s when you make a mistake. You can’t make mistakes when you are…” he swallowed and looked at the ground, then regained his composure. He wasn’t ready to say the three words that had flowed through his head like acid: when I’m gone. “Let’s go.”

  Connor had expected to break a window, but Drew pulled out a set of keys from his pocket and held them up for him to see. “I didn’t imagine that I would ever not need to come back here. Even as we were driving away it didn’t seem real.” He separated a little silver one with a red rubber marker encircling the top and plunged it into the lock. Connor had expected him to fumble around like an idiot, making too much noise, but Drew’s certainty reassured him. If only a little.

  As Drew moved to thrust open the door, Connor caught his hand. “Be careful. We go in quietly, no matter how it looks.”

  Connor expected some protest, but received none. He noticed that he suddenly felt a need to take time to instruct Drew on the more detailed aspects of survival, the tiny shreds of material that he hadn’t taken the time to teach the other people in the group. Drew would need detail as much as large scale knowledge in order to take his place. Connor hoped that he would absorb all new information quickly, and he had noticed the further they got away from the normalcy of the pre-apocalyptic world, the louder the ticking clock in his head had become. It pounded in his ears during conversations with his wife, as he tended the garden, even in the quiet of the forest as he hunted for their next meal. What was once a soft tapping now rang out like a pounding drum.

  The sickly feeling returned again. Connor wasn’t ready, though he knew he had to be. Nothing can prepare a person to instruct someone how to carry on after they’re gone. It’s an odd paradox of hoping they don’t fill your role as well as you do, yet also hoping that they do. More than most, Connor had to force his way past the first feeling and into the second. “Did you bring a weapon?” he asked just before they entered the building. Drew would always need to remember a weapon from now on. He wondered what the doctor would pick: a gun, knife…he struck him as more of a large object kind of man, something that could knock someone down but that would allow him to not get blood on his hands. Drew would have to learn to accept the burden that came with deliberately taking life, a very different circumstance than if someone happens to die on an operating table, and be able to thrust himself back into the world a moment after. He could not afford weeks of wallowing, no one could—not anymore.

  “You don’t let us have any. Remember?”

  Connor let the realization sink in for a moment then retreated back to the truck. Carefully and as quietly as he could, he opened the trunk with his own key and pulled out a four-inch thick piece of wood that had several nails sticking out of the end of it and handed it to Drew. He would start him off slow, but not too slow. “Aim for the vitals.”

  “What if they mean no harm?”

  “They always mean harm, whether they know it or not.”

  Drew opened his mouth, perhaps to argue, but closed it again and followed him back to the door, where Connor pulled out a switchblade knife from his back pocket. “Come on.”

  Carefully, Connor searched the building with Drew following closely behind him. He hoped Drew was paying attention, watching the way he moved, with soft, cautious steps, and looking around…always looking.

  The office looked very different at night than during normal working hours, the blackness seeming to fit the sinister thing that happened to Connor’s family there. What was once a peaceful, beige-and-flower-covered family practice looked more like a deserted mental hospital in the darkness, the roses on the wallpaper looking like a dead bouquet left on a gravestone.

  Connor preferred it that way.

  Despite finding no one, he continued speaking in a whisper. “Where do you keep the samples?”

  “In the back.” Drew took him to the back room behind the front office and unlocked it with another key, this time, one with a blue rubber label encircling the round part of it. The lock on the door was a substantial one, large and gold. The door itself was thick and metal. He noticed that there seemed to be some dents in it, as though people had tried to break into the room before they had arrived and had no luck.

  “Why such a high-security door?” Connor asked.

  Drew struggled for a moment as the door stuck, damaged from defending its contents against the intruders. “Before this, I came from a practice that was situated in a bad neighborhood. We always had people trying to break in to steal medication. I told myself the minute I had my own practice, the first thing I would do would be to buy a medicine cabinet that would protect our stuff.” Drew went inside with Connor close behind him.

  Thank goodness for petty criminals, Connor thought.

  The room had no windows, and was lined on both sides with metal shelves. Connor picked up a bottle at the beginning and realized it was not alphabetized like he had hoped. “How the hell do you keep these straight?”

  Drew moved toward the middle of the room and picked up a bottle. “By ailment.” He held up a bottle. “See? Heart. H. Middle.”

  Connor snatched the bottle. “This isn’t what I take. Did you just take me here to pick out something to kill me quicker or what?”

  “Don’t be stupid.” That was the first time the good doctor broke his calm veneer. Connor liked it. “Grab that plastic bag over there and just dump them all in. See if your medicine is in here, but if not, just take it all and you can keep the ones you don’t recognize as a last resort.”

  Connor started sweeping everything in the “heart” section into the plastic bag. As he was doing that, he saw Drew leave the room and come back with a large, black leather bag. Throwing it open, with one swift motion he pushed everything on the first shelf into the bag. “What are you doing?”

  “We might need these too at some point.”

  Connor smiled. “What if other people come by and need them?”

  “I guess they will have to look somewhere else.”

  “Good answer.” Drew was adapting already.

  After he filled up the first bag, Drew grabbed two more bags that he found around the office: one briefcase, and one backpack that he said his assistant’s son had left there the day they first heard about the plague. By the time they were done, the shelves were empty. Drew loaded them into the car. When he came back, he found Connor sitting on the floor just outside the medicine room, his back against the wall. Not saying a word, Drew slid down beside him. They just existed next to each other for several minutes, letting themselves become part of the atmosphere: not disturbing it, just being in it like the air around them. Finally, Drew broke the quiet in two. “You know, you can live a long time with a heart problem.”

  “Maybe. In normal circumstances.”

  “Connor, you’ve made existing in this world possible. You decided that your family would live. And they did. Now decide that you will too.”

  “They aren’t ready.”

  “You aren’t giving them nearly enough credit.”

  Connor stared off into the darkness. “What would you do? Would you tell them?” He didn’t expect to ask the question
, and the words stayed in the air as if they had appeared on their own. More, he didn’t expect to care what Drew’s answer would be.

  “You mean you haven’t yet?”

  “No. I think it would be too much for them.”

  “I’d tell them.”

  Connor sneered. “In that case, I’ll keep it to myself.”

  They continued to sit in the dark for several minutes. When they would normally be assaulted with the sounds of nighttime: honking cars, the soft whir of a gas pedal, they were met with nothingness. “You know, I never actually said I was sorry.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry, Connor. You were right. It was my fault. I’m truly sorry about the baby…your baby.”

  Connor stood up a little straighter, and noticed a peculiar feeling sweep over him, something like relief, both from the crushing weight of hating someone and from the absence of needing acknowledgement of his suffering. He remembered something a teacher had told him once: do not say it’s okay after someone apologizes, because it’s not okay, is it? So he opted for a different response. “Thank you.” He paused. “And thank you for saving my daughter. I—I don’t know what I would have…” Connor caught himself. That was not the time for an emotional break. His family need him to be strong now more than ever. “Thank you.”

  Drew nodded, and as he sat in the building that had changed his life forever, amongst the folding chairs, nameless drugs, and children’s candy, Connor wondered if he felt a little lighter too.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  POE

  Drew and Connor didn’t think anyone saw them leave the compound, but they were wrong. After narrowly escaping death (though in their situation they could never be sure for how long), Poe was unable to sleep more than a few hours, and lingered at her blue velvet window seat long after night had fallen. Blake caught her staring out the window. “Were those headlights I saw?”

  “Yes. I think it was my dad and Drew.” Poe tried to ignore the sinking feeling in her stomach. Her dad never liked anyone to leave the compound, except to hunt, and he wasn’t hunting at night. If they left in that big of a hurry, there had to be something wrong. And for him to be leaving with Drew? Whatever it was had to have shaken him to the core, and the idea of her father being thrown off balance sent her teetering too.