At Least I Had Her
1 month 4 days after

It’s been a few days since we left the city and I’m already exhausted from almost constant 8 hours of gas mask use and walking. It’s about 4 in the afternoon, which means it’s time to stop and camp out. I knew from my research that there would be a high school off the side of the highway so we head that way. We go around the back, most likely where there is an entrance to the cafeteria. Shit, the door is locked.

“What are you going to do?” Lexi ask questionably while raising her eyebrow at me.

I raise an eyebrow back because I already have an idea. Luckily in my dad’s inventory, there was a weird machine that could unlock regular doors and biometric ones without breaking a sweat. I don’t even know how to describe it except for the fact that it’s very compact. I pull it out of my backpack and set it up to unlock regular locks and put it to the door. The door clicks and swings open slowly. I nod towards the door as if saying See, I got this, and we go inside. Luckily I was right in thinking that we were close to the cafeteria. I set my bag down so we can set up camp first before searching for any food that may still be safe from the smoke.

I turn on the air filter, so we can finally take our masks off for the day and we head towards the kitchen.

“Stay close,” I say to Lexi. “If you step out the bubble…”

“Yeah, yeah I know I’ll shrivel up.”

We walk over to what looks like a deep freezer and I set the air filter on the ground so it can cover the freezer too. I open it up and weirdly, it’s still nice and cool and no smoke seems to have entered. We look around and I find some bread and Lex finds some ham.

“Sandwiches for dinner?” I ask, holding the bread up towards her.

We settle down after I set up the force field, tent, and sleeping bags and have our sandwiches. After we eat, we decide to look around the school for any other things we could take but also just so we can explore and free up our bored minds that have been succumbed to staring at dead plants for 8 hours everyday while walking. We walk through a hallway filled with lockers and classrooms and immediately I start thinking about my school, our lockers, Carly. I tense up a little bit at the thought of her. Just a month ago, we almost kissed, and were supposed to hang with her family. When we checked their house yesterday, I tried to knock on the door and Lexi looked through the windows but no one was there. Her parents’ cars were still there so we wondered where they could have gone. To my dismay, I used the lock pick to open the door while Lexi held the air filter, hopefully keeping smoke from getting inside the house. We walked over to the living room, and there they were. I couldn’t help but cover up Lexi’s eyes but she shooed me away because she already saw it, their lifeless bodies blistered and bloody, probably from their lungs burning and they coughed up blood. We walked slowly to their bodies and all I could do was fall to my knees while Lexi hugged me and put her head on my shoulder, sobbing. Carly’s beautiful blue eyes were glassy and grey. Her hair singed. I don’t know when this happened. Maybe it happened soon after the bombs hit, before they had time to insulate all the doors and windows. The smoke probably crept in very slowly and they inhaled it. I tried to keep that image out of my head but after seeing the hallway of the school, everything rushed back. Everything. The hallways should be full of laughing teenagers talking about who they want to ask to the next dance and who their crush is. Not empty and pale.

We walk to the library so Lexi can find a book to read, which would be great on my part because Lexi brought her Ipad for some reason which has a bunch of stupid kid games on them that don’t need any data to be played. Disadvantage for me because all of the games are annoying and loud and she would play them in the middle of the night with no regard for me actually trying to sleep. She starts saying times tables, starting with the nines since she knew my little trick now.

“What are you thinking about?” she says interrupting my thought flow and her counting.

“Just thinking about what life was like before all of this. School, working on getting my license, hanging out with friends…”

“Carly,” she says somberly.

“Yeah,” I say with the same tone back.

“I know about you two. I know she was your best friend but you liked her, didn’t you and she liked you back? You guys were gonna kiss, the day everything happened.”

I just turn to her and roll my eyes because I knew she had seen that.

“Yeah. I liked her alright,” I say with pure confidence because I know I tried to avoid feelings for so long and it was hard to hold back. “We were very close. She was my best friend. I remember how I felt when she sat next to me on our 5th grade field trip to the zoo and she asked me if it was okay if she sat there. She was the new girl and didn’t have many friends so I made it my mission to make sure that she was okay.”

“That’s just who you are,” Lexi says.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Dad would tell me how when I was a baby you would hold me like I was going to break or something. He said that to keep me from crying, you’d make weird faces at me and sing. He said that’s when he knew that you were going to be best big brother and that you were just a very protective person.”

I smile, because I hadn’t remembered that but now that she mentions it, I do. Guess that’s how my parents raised me but also because they decided to introduce a bouncing baby girl into my life when I was 8 years old. I was too old to cry about not being the only child anymore and when I held her, I knew this little fragile thing would never be broken by me.

“I do remember, that one day a couple years ago, you got on the bus and you looked like you wanted to die. You told me that some kids had been picking on you, didn’t tell me why but regardless, I just felt the need to do something so I did.”

She looks up at me with questioning eyes because I never told anyone this. It wasn’t a big deal anyway.

“The next day, I actually skipped the beginning of school to talk to your principal. I told her that you were being picked on and that something needed to be done about it. She told me that she will make sure that the teachers pay closer attention to how the kids interact and it was done. You were getting on the bus with a smile on your face. You were happier than you had been in weeks and that’s when I felt like I had done my job as your big brother.”

She all of a sudden stops walking and I turn around in confusion, looking down at her and she was crying.

“Hey. What’s wrong?” I ask.

She doesn’t say anything but she wraps her tiny arms around me like she doesn’t want to let go. All I can do is pick her up and comfort her in this empty hallway.

“I’m glad that you are my big brother and I couldn’t ask for a better one. I love you,” she says while sniffling up what seems like a gob of snot.

“Hey,” putting her down and putting my hands on her face. “We’re gonna make up. I promise you”

We get back to the tents so we can start our night of rest before the next very long walk in morning. She gets cozy in her sleeping bag and pulls it up over her head like she does sometimes when she’s just too tired to be bothered. I’m not quite tired so I decide to just read my book for a little while. It was Artemis Fowl. One of my teachers had suggested it to me one time, maybe because she knew I had an active imagination and loved stories about mythical creatures.

All of a sudden, I hear a loud bang as I get into chapter one. Lexi jumps up quickly and I tell her to stay quiet and stay in the tent. I hear voices and loud footsteps coming towards the cafeteria and go towards my backpack to get a small gun like machine that shoots out very small darts that have tranquilizers in it that last for hours. I close the tent flap back so that they wouldn’t be able to see Lexi, just me. They come in and point their guns towards me and looked confused.

“What are you doing in here, boy?” one of the men said.

“I’m just stopping to rest. Making my way up to Canada, you know?” I was very nervous right now and they could probably see it on my face, but instead of seeing me as a scared teenage boy, they saw me as a threat.

“How come you ain’t wearing a mask, huh?” Another says with a crazy grin on his face.

“Uhhh...umm” I stutter.

“Uhh...umm. Come on spit it out, boy!”

“Why the hell do you care?”

“Because, we’re tired of this shit here that killed our families and want to know a way that we don’t have to risk our asses every time we move.”

“Then just continue north. Go to Canada. They’re letting people through right now,” I say to see if they will finally leave. “Seriously, I’m trying to stay as safe as you here. I don’t want any trouble here.”

“Heh, we’ll see about that.” The man aims his gun towards me, releasing the safety. Loud shots ring out as I duck down just out of reflex and hear Lexi scream from the tent. They stop shooting as soon as they realize that they did no damage. Thank god for the forcefield. Keeps everything out but us. I look back up at the men who look dumbfounded and I just give a very sly smirk towards them and then shoot at them with the dart gun. I have terrible aim but this gun locks in on heat signatures therefore I’m not really doing any work! All of the men are down within seconds, and hopefully the dart doesn’t cause too much of a tear in their clothes. They don’t deserve to die, even though they tried to kill me…

I rush back over to the tent to tell Lexi to pack up her stuff. We can NOT be here when they wake up. She tries to quickly get her shoes on without stumbling. I check her hands and wrist to make sure her clothes are covered and then check me. Luckily we didn’t unpack too much since we got food from the cafeteria. I fold up the tent as quickly as I can, which I think I did in record time, stuff it in the back pack and then make sure we get our masks on. I feel like we have moved the fastest we have ever moved in our lives because it’s like those men went down 30 seconds ago.

We made it to another site that would hopefully put us off those men’s trail, but we had to backtrack and walk south west instead. We finally make it to another abandoned building and go to the basement.

“It’s kind of gross down here,” Lexi says but I just kind of roll my eyes.

“Look if you don’t want to be shot at again then you’ll just have to deal with it,” I say kind of angrily. She makes a huffing sound and crosses her arms.

We set up camp because those dudes took out a good 2 hours of sleeping time and 2 hours that we’ll have to add to our walk in the morning. The nerve of some people!

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