Archive of Our Own

He began to towel his hair before he thought better of it. It was hot and would dry just as quickly in the sun. His mother hated when he came home with the ends wet, but this late on a Friday, he thought, tucking the towel back into his locker, she might not notice at all.

He dressed and emptied the locker into his kit bag. He had waited in the shower until he had heard the other boys leave. Alone now, he hesitated by the door, turning his head from side to side. In the mirror, across the room, he looked drawn, his chin sharp, his eyes wide; all of him thinning, the hair too, the skin pale. Some days he didn’t look like a boy. Others he didn’t even look like a person. He pulled the jacket around him and shouldered the bag.

‘You took a long time.’ Lee sat across the hall from the changing rooms, squatting on the foyer floor.

Emmett shrugged and came over to him, offering a hand. ‘I thought coach finished with you at five?’

Lee smiled. ‘Yeah.’

‘And you’re still here?’

‘Yeah.’ Lee rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. ‘I wanted to wait.’

‘But it’s a Friday,’ Emmett said. ‘I always say go home.’

‘You feeling okay?’

‘I’m fine.’

Lee brushed a hand over his shoulder, fingers grazing his neck. His face was flushed and he was still in his uniform. Lee liked to walk home like this, had told Emmett enough times that he stopped asking why. He had always figured it was supposed to be impressive. Certainly Emmett’s mom liked it when Lee dressed up like that, the way most of the moms did, though she often wasn’t awake when they came home. Lee lifted his head a little, frowning at him. He shrugged again.

‘I’m fine.’ He looked at his feet. ‘Mine or yours?’

They stopped on the high street. He waited outside whilst Lee went in to sweet talk Barbara Singer’s sister out of some popsicles.

‘You hear about that big storm?’ He said, when he came out again, voice muffled as he tore his popsicle wrapper with his teeth.

Emmett raised an eyebrow.

‘Did Barbara’s sister tell you about it?’

Lee looked hurt. ‘What? No. It was on the news.’

Emmett laughed and turned away. The dye from the popsicle had made the edges of Lee’s mouth purple.

They ducked between the liquor and the hardware stores. Lee grabbed the kit bag and held up the fence. Emmett crawled through. The soil smelt sweet in the July heat, and the field had been mown recently. Pale daises bordered the plot. As they walked through the long grass to the other side, the thought of it pressed at him.

‘What storm?’ He said finally, biting.

‘In North Carolina.’

‘Okay, and?’

Lee kept walking, watched Emmett out the side of his gaze before smiling. ‘You seem pretty interested.’

‘Are you going to tell me or not?’ On the other side of the empty plot, Emmett bent and held the wire fence for Lee, who stopped before he crawled through. He took the bag back, had to grab it from Lee. He had the habit of carrying it the whole way.

‘So,’ Lee said. They kept walking. The sugar had made the inside of his mouth prickly. ‘It was really bad. It damaged buildings. Killed a bunch of people.’

He thought for a minute. ‘Scary stuff.’

Lee nodded. ‘I think that how it’s gonna go, you know.’

‘What’s gonna go?’

‘Well,’ said Lee. He took a breath, moved his hands through his hair. It was getting long enough around the ears that it was beginning to curl. Didn’t have the same way of making Lee look like less than a person. ‘You know, the world.’

Emmett stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. It took Lee a minute to realise.

‘What is it?’

‘You think — what, a storm’s gonna blow us all away?’

Lee shrugged, came back to him. ‘Maybe. Something like that.’

‘Some big flood?’ He thought of the leather-bound book in his mother’s bedside dresser. All the springs of the great deep burst forth.

‘I guess.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Last week you were convinced it’d be the government.’

Lee stopped him, a hand on his arm. The touch of it opened up something inside Emmett. Paper-cut thin but leaking. He quashed the feeling in his stomach and held himself still.

‘Now I think it’s the weather, what do you want me to say?’ Lee offered his hand, pushed his finger under the bag strap again. ‘Hey, let me take this.’

Emmett jostled him off. ‘It’s fine.’

‘You don’t seem—‘

‘It’s fine,’ he said, prizing Lee’s hand from his shoulder.

Lee shrugged. ‘Okay.’

They talked pleasantly enough about school. Outside Evelyn’s house, the multi-story on the corner of Maple, Lee made them walk slowly. As they crossed the road, he feigned tripping and caught himself on Emmett. The upstairs window slid open and Evelyn stuck her head out.

‘Hey!’

They waved back, though afterwards Emmett curled his hand in his pocket. Her smile was not for him.

‘Where were you?’

Lee threw his arms wide and turned around to gesture to the number on his blazer. ‘Practice!’

‘And you, Emmett?’

He nodded, shyly. Couldn’t bear to look up. It was sunny. From the window she looked less than real; a children’s illustration, a doll. Gold hair, red dress, tanned arms which she splayed on the ledge underneath her.

‘Where are you going?’

Lee held a hand up to shield his eyes from the sun. Half-smiled. ‘It’s Friday night.’

‘So?’

He pulled Emmett against him. The arm curled, the fingers over his ribs, for a moment feeling him breath.

‘Probably going to stay up and watch films,’ Lee said, and let go.

‘All night?’

‘All night!’

She laughed at him. In the quiet, something passed between them.

‘Well,’ Lee said. ‘I’ll see you Monday.’

‘Sure.’ Evelyn went to shut the window, and then stuck her head out again. ‘Come round for dinner after?’

Lee was beaming the rest of the walk home. They stopped by the Abbott house so Lee could raid the fridge. Emmett sat on the front step watching the wind move through the green ash in the neighbour’s garden. Through the window of the adjacent house a woman sat on her couch, reading.

Emmett lived in the final industrial strip of houses before the railway tracks. Beyond the tracks, the streets and gardens petered out into dry grassland. He went up to the front window and peered through. His mother had not pulled the blinds. She was asleep on the sofa, form huddled under the wool throw. He lead Lee around the side into the garden, onto the rotting bench and then scrabbled up onto the roof. From his rucksack, Lee produced his father’s bottled beer.

‘We could go tonight,’ he said, watching the tracks. From here the lines seemed to stretch indefinitely, buckle up with the swell of the horizon and disappear into something else. Another nothing town. The evening had lapsed into dusk.

Lee turned to him.

‘New York,’ Emmett said, raising the beer bottle. Lee clinked his own against it, still looking perturbed. ‘We should go right now. Tonight.’

‘We have school on Monday.’ Lee sipped at his beer and turned to watch the sky. There was a plane trail separating as the blue turned a hazy lilac.

‘And?’

‘I have classes. So do you!’

‘It was your idea!’

‘Yeah, and the summer after we graduate, we can go for as long as you need.’ Without looking at him, Lee drained the last of the bottle. He hesitated. ‘I think it would be good for you. To see it.’

‘So let’s go.’ Ignoring the sting of what he really meant. Lee couldn’t know, not really - he hadn’t even begun to conceive of other people’s differences. Earlier in the year, when the Jefferson kid had been pulled out of school by his father, Lee figured it was for getting someone pregnant. ‘Let’s go!’

Emmett sat up and began stuffing things back into his kit bag. His elbow brushed his empty bottle. He watched, chest tight, as it leaned, fell and began to roll down the red tiles. Lee lurched forward and caught it. They waited to see if his mother would wake. Across the street, someone ruffled the curtains.

‘We can’t,’ Lee said, hoisting himself up again. It was silent downstairs.

‘Why?’

‘Evelyn asked me for dinner on Monday.’

He put the bag down.

‘I forgot.’

‘It’s okay.’ Lee shrugged. ‘You have baseball. The school’s gonna lose both its star athletes. If we go missing, the district will complain.’

He thought of his mother, sleeping below them on the couch.

‘Yeah,’ Emmett said. ‘I know.’

He lay back. The edge of the tiling pressing into his spine.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it.’

‘I know.’ Lee offered him another beer, popping the lid with his keys. ‘We’ll go one day. You’ll love it.’

‘Hm.’ Emmett closed his eyes, wound his own finger over the gap between his ribs where his breath and pulse seemed to move in time. Traced little circles with his fingers. ’Tell me.’

Lee laughed, soft this time. ‘Okay. What do you want to know?’

Later in the dark they lay on the floor of Emmett’s bedroom together, drunk and dizzy under a quilt. His door was open. Something of a warning to himself. Always there was someone watching or listening. The TV set in the living room cast a distant glow through the downstairs hall. Bathed the house in a dull light, like fog in the brain.

‘It won’t be a storm.’

Lee grunted in the dark.

‘I said it won’t be a storm.’

‘What?’ Lee said, through dry lips.

‘When the world ends.’

‘Oh?’

‘It’s already out there,’ Emmett said. The silent white flickering. Hands across Lee’s face, already touching him, taking him away. He was asleep again, drifting.

On the edge of consciousness, he thought that Lee knew. Still the careful touch, the waiting, the arm around his shoulder. Maybe he had always known, before Emmett himself did, that something was there.

‘It’s moving towards us,’ Emmett said again. The shadow of Lee’s eyelashes across his cheek. He reached out his hand across the floor. Let it fall. No closer. ‘It’s already here.’

*

After Laura died, he waited with her body. Closest he had come to prayer since he was a kid. He expected something to happen, was puzzled when it didn’t. She broke down, her skin turning purple. He gripped her hand even when it curled, went cold and hard.

In the old world, something would have happened. People didn’t just rot when they died in their houses and in their streets and in their beds. Eventually he pulled the thin sheet around her. Through the translucent plastic, her shape was distorted. At a glance he could pretend she was breathing. Then he went down into the bowels of the factory to die.

That had been the intention. His mind wandered when the spirits dwindled and the withdrawal passed. He began to see people that weren’t there. Flinched at first, once or twice invited a creature into the factory grounds because he cried out. Laura, Drew, Georgie, then his father. Eventually his mother, who never moved, but lay recalcitrant by the far wall and watched him with swollen eyes. In the bunker he starved his brain of oxygen so that Lee might appear before him, touch his shoulder again in that gentle way.

The day of the invasion he had seen everyone including his two boys killed. It was easy to imagine Lee dead, but more difficult to think about the fire from the roof he could see at the other end of the valley. He began to sketch them all. People who he had been to school with. The house Evelyn’s parents had owned. Lee’s farm, which he had been to a handful of times after the wedding. Both his boys. Laura. Lee. Lee, in all his forms.

Maybe it was easier to survive in places you didn’t know. He had grown up in this town, and had made the same walks back and forth all his life. Laura hadn’t, and couldn’t find horror in passing by the emptied high school or Main Street on their way to the factory. She didn’t even find being in the factory draining, beyond the tumours that took her away bit by bit. Certainly, he thought, she would like this collection of faces and places he was laying out on the foundry’s wall in charcoal and scrap. It was sick and stunted. But Laura was kind like that. Would’ve called it creative.

Across the baseball square, on that last day, he had watched Lee, had wanted to follow him from the bench. Feeling it as keenly as all the nights they had drunk until they could not stand. The all-knowing, all-destroying loneliness of the early hours. It’s here, Emmett had tried to say.

By his car, Lee had waved at him. ‘You want a lift?’

Laura was at home with George, he had to get her, get her medication before they tried to move. Then the thought, shameful as it was: take us with you. Take me with you.

And the light from the farmhouse roof. Night after night he watched for it, wondering how there could be room left in anyone’s life for that kind of love.

*

The first night he didn’t sleep. Regan slept in the doorway whilst he slouched outside, gun balanced over both his knees. He pulled his cap low and waited for the sun to rise.

What he said to her remained true. Watching the dark, he felt at last that he could admit to himself what it meant. He couldn’t be Lee. Had loved him a little too much and now couldn’t love anything else. Regan had the same goodness about her, though, and he knew he would stay whilst she needed him. Before six, she woke and forced him to switch places.

‘What are you thinking about?’ He said, enunciating. He was slow to learn.

You’re still whispering, she signed. Say it again.

‘What are you thinking about?’

She shrugged, thought for a moment. It’s good here.

‘You want to stay?’

She watched him. The bunker, she signed, waited for him to nod. Your pictures.

‘Your mom’s coming.’ He turned onto his side to see her better. ‘We don’t need to go back. There’s nothing important there.’

There were lots of drawings that looked like — she hesitated — looked like dad.

He shook his head. ‘Some. Not all.’

I didn’t say all, she signed, moving quickly in the dawn light.

He swallowed. It was something he had not told Laura, had never expressed to anyone but his mother before she died. By that point, she was numb from her stroke, lying on her back in the ICU, and he figured it couldn’t hurt either of them.

‘I wanted to be like him,’ he said slowly. Regan frowned.

He shut his eyes as though he might sleep. Something contracted inside him. He opened his eyes and sat up again, looked at her carefully.

‘I miss him a lot,’ he said. ‘Because he — I thought.’ He stopped, swallowed.

She reached across the sleeping bag to pat his hand.

‘Because,’ he said again, and couldn’t finish.

Later, when the monster was dead on the floor and the distortion on the radio was still ringing in their ears, she crouched beside him and tried to stop the bleeding from his leg. Her hands were lurid in the red neon of the studio.

You don’t need to be like him, she signed. You’re good as you are. She moved slowly, making sure he understood. As you are.

*

They made a home on the island. Evelyn came with Marcus and the baby. They built fences and began patrolling at night. He and the other adults combed the island to search for bodies. In a ditch by the studio he found Jacob, still alive, missing an ankle.

‘My son?’ Jacob had said, reaching for him.

‘Safe,’ he said. On firm ground, under the sun, he could see where the rot from the wound had spread.

‘Don’t look,’ he said, and took the man’s hand. ‘Don’t look.’

After they cut the leg to the knee, neither of them could walk without a limp. In the foundry, this would have been a death sentence. Here it was different. There was time, at least, and space. He could see beyond the walls of his own room.

It’s not your fault. Regan signed and then took the gun from him whilst he climbed down the bank onto the beach. They were sweeping the perimeter, though for him it was a long and painful shuffle over rock and mud. Bleached sand shifting underneath him.

They walked in silence by the waves.

It is my fault? She moved in front of him, trying to catch his gaze.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’

Then why, she signed, would it be yours?

The infection creeping up Jacob’s leg, the look of fear as he had reached for Emmett, dragged across the floor of the garage away from them.

Unable to find a way to say this, he began tending to Jacob’s house instead. The window and the door had been damaged during the attack. He fixed it up, set the door back on its hinges and then reset the glass panel in the frame. Some mornings he would go into the house and ask how Jacob’s wound was. Others he would make him a lunch in silence and leave before Jacob sat to eat it.

‘You don’t have to do any of this,’ Jacob said, one day. He leaned back against the doorframe. Emmett felt him staring.

He cut the sandwich in two and set the knife down. ’Are you not hungry?’

‘I’m hungry.’ Jacob’s stick made a noise as he came closer.

‘Then what’s the problem?’

Emmett went to the fridge. They had power here. Sometimes, when he was alone in the house they had given him, he would sit on the floor with the fridge door thrown open. Tasting the cold. He filled a glass with juice.

‘Is Sam hungry?’ He moved past Jacob without looking at him and set the food down on the table.

‘He’s gone. Wanted to play with Regan,’ Jacob said, lowering himself into his seat. ‘You never eat with me.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You don’t need to make me lunch,’ said Jacob. ‘If you won’t join me.’

He pressed his lips together. Felt the old frustration as though his wife were in the room. It had been so long since he had lived with someone. ’Is there anything else you need?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘I know,’ Emmett said, avoiding his gaze. ‘But is there anything you need?'

‘No.’

‘Anything around the house I can do?’

Jacob leaned forward in his chair. ‘No, Emmett.’

They sat in silence while he ate. The instinct for suppression lived with them in the house. Every scrape of the chair, every slam of the door. Distantly from outside, he could hear Marcus laughing, he thought, or another one of the kids. There were enough of them here that it could be hard to distinguish, and there was comfort in that, sometimes.

‘Well,’ he said, when Jacob was done. ‘I’ll be going. I won’t come back unless—’ He thought of Lee, for some reason, taking his bag. He stumbled, grappling with this. ‘Well, find me if you need something doing.’

‘You could stay and eat lunch with me. I’m not complaining about the food.’

Behind his hand, Emmett smiled. ‘I’m okay, thank you.’

Jacob stretched his leg under the table. He winced a little and pushed the chair back to hold his knee in his hand. He looked up. Seemed a little surprised to find Emmett watching.

‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘There’s some work in the garden.’

The next Autumn, they had grown enough that it was no longer about eating. They harvested flowers, arranging them on the table in Jacob’s house, or sometimes on Evelyn’s doorstep when the baby wasn’t settling.

The root vegetables were the last to come up. Jacob watched from the step of his porch as Emmett knelt in the soil and dug. The leaves were turning again, speckled a deep green at the edges. He used the spray bottle to make the topsoil damp and then pried up the rhubarb. The trick was not to damage the plot in its entirety. If they ruined the soil now, there would be no crop next year.

He felt the earth move under his him as he forced his fingers down. Grit under the nails, blunt and sore. It felt heavier, somehow, for all of the care he was taking to not damage the thing. When the plant inevitably came away, it was all at once; he showered dirt over his lap as he started backwards.

Jacob laughed.

He worked through the afternoon, filling the basket with greenery. Sam and Marcus came over to watch them for a while, Marcus trying his luck with some of the weaker onions. Each one he pulled seemed to make him a little bolder, his grin a little wider. Jacob took a photo of the three of them, some chunky film camera they had dug out of storage. Marcus, grinning, with his onion held up like an award, Sam with his arms around him, Emmett a little more tense in the shoulders. Food basket in his arms like an offering.

When it was done, Marcus wrapped an arm around his shoulders, and then slid away. There was that crumpling again, in Emmett’s chest, in his back. He saw it in the both of them, more often than not. Traces.

Later, stacking food in the kitchen, Jacob touched Emmett’s arm to make him wait.

‘You want a drink?’

‘Not this late.’

‘I have tea.’

He hovered in the kitchen feeling overgrown.

With the water boiling between them on the gas ring, Jacob frowned.

‘I thought they were —’ Jacob looked down. ‘They don’t look like you.’

He nodded.

‘So how did you find them?’

‘Knew their parents.’ He tried to keep his voice even. ‘Knew Evelyn, before.’

The kettle peaked with a high wail and Jacob moved it, waiting for the handle to stop shaking.

’And your own kids?’

Emmett reached for the counter, pressed his fingers down hard so the nail bit the skin.

‘Gone,’ he said. ‘That first day.’

‘I’m — I’m so sorry.’

He had meant to stop Jacob, to tell him there was no need. It was a story every survivor carried. But in that moment he could only swallow.

In front of the fire, they sipped their drinks. Without looking up, Emmett found a way to close the tear inside him.

‘Sam’s mother — where is she?’

Jacob set his drink down and crossed his legs. The movement made him seem young, anxious. Arms curled around his knees.

‘My husband died getting us on the boat,’ he said.

Emmett was still for a second. Nodded. 'I’m sorry.’

‘He did it to get us here,’ Jacob started. ‘So it—’ The wobble was there, fine and hidden; it rose in his voice and he stopped. Couldn’t go on. Picked his tea back up and kept drinking. Again, the centre of other’s people’s pain: once he saw Emmett over the rim of his mug, he seemed to remember himself, the room he was in, the company he kept. ‘And your wife?’

‘Wasn’t much I could do for her,’ he said, thinking of the body through the curtain. ‘She was sick.’

When his mug was empty, he stood to leave but found himself hesitating.

‘I wanted to thank you,’ he said, coming to kneel beside him. He put a hand on Jacob’s bent knee, took a breath. Still the old shame inside. ‘For this chance.’

Jacob took his hand gently. ‘And you. You helped us.’ He looked away. ‘Saved me.’

The longer they spent on the island, the more he could work the feeling out of himself. One day in winter, bundled in their coats, Marcus and Regan tagged him into some game. Sam grabbed at his arm, pulling him away from his patrol. He was slow to follow, walking awkwardly behind them. Marcus yelled. Said he had to try.

Jogging along, he felt outwardly conscious of himself, of Evelyn and Jacob watching, of the other parents. It struck him then, running with the gait of a giant or a ghost, that this had been the feeling hanging over him throughout high school. The wait for his teammates to leave, the careful back to the mirror as he showered and changed. He didn’t like to look himself.

Marcus tripped him up, hooking an ankle around his foot before taking off in the other direction.

Emmett sat up, trying to catch his breath. Something knocked out of him.

He stood and began to walk after Marcus as though impeded, exaggerating his limp. Marcus stopped to laugh with Regan as the two siblings eyed him. When he was close enough, he paused, took a breath and then launched towards them. The surprise had made them slow, and he was able to reach them, tagging Marcus in by the shoulder.

On it went. He became practiced at catching Regan off-guard, anticipating Marcus’s hiding spots, knowing where Sam would run to. When Sam was tagged, he remembered a favourite of Drew’s games and slowed down, dragging his legs behind him in the grass. Sam ran after him, tagging him back. With a swift twist, Emmett picked him up and spun him around until he laughed, squealed, and tugged on Emmett’s arm.

‘Again,’ said Sam, and he lifted him as he had lifted George and Drew so many times before. Swinging him as though flying, a little superman in his arms. He set Sam down and wobbled, falling back with a heavy thud onto the grass. The exertion had made him dizzy. He sat with head between his knees.

Sam put a hand on his back. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Fine,’ he said. It turned into laughter. 'More than fine.’

In that moment it came back as easily as it had slipped away. Being a father.

Regan came to his house some weeks later. The cold spell was beginning to break. There had been light snow, but now it mostly rained. There was another frequency from a station four miles down the coast.

‘Why does it matter?’

The same reason it always did, she had tried to explain to him. They were building a network.

Fighting back, she signed, and pushed the map into his hands.

He looked out the window. The sun rising above the blue sea.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘But you tell your mother.’

When he found himself outside of Jacob’s door, a hand over the knocker, there was no way to explain it.

Jacob opened the door, unsurprised.

‘Were you going to knock?’

He looked down at his shoes. ‘Was hoping you’d just open it. And you did.’

‘Strange man.’ Jacob clapped him on the back as he passed by him, brought him into the warmth of his home.

‘Keep it quiet.’ He held his finger to his lips. 'Sam’s still asleep.’

Emmett nodded. At the table he curled and uncurled his hands. ‘I’m going away. With Regan.’

Kitchen still but for Jacob’s breathing, sharp and fast.

‘Not forever,’ he said, quickly.

‘But away from here? Why?’

‘She thinks there’s another station. Down the coast.’

‘So she said. But why now? Why you?’

He remembered the sign she had taught him, after they had first made it here, had decided in fewer words to stay. ‘They’re family. All of them.’

‘So are we.’

Jacob came around the table and pulled out the chair next to him. He moved a hand across the table.

‘Did we do something wrong?’

‘You could never. She’s just — she’s set on saving the world.’

Jacob smiled. He moved a hand underneath his chin, resting his head there. ‘No world left to save.’

‘Maybe,’ Emmett said. The shame, the tremor, the tear inside. The prickling at his neck. ‘It’s all still out there, though.’

Something possessed him. A fever, a symptom he couldn’t name. He moved forward across the table with the want of an ill man and pressed his lips to Jacob’s chin. He missed his mouth, drew back, left the imprint there, the feeling of the thing. Waited for the anger.

Jacob stared at him through the dark. Eyes shining. He stood and pulled Emmett with him, lifting his cap from his head. Pushed his fingers through the grey hair, matted and frayed as it was. Grasped him by the temples, delicately, as though made of glass. Something precious. Jacob bent to kiss him, opened his mouth, wrapping an arm around Emmett’s neck. Thrill of heat in his belly.

When they woke in the morning, he understood he had taken too long. Regan was gone, and had left at dawn with Marcus. There was a note on the kitchen counter. Her mother was too tired to cry. The youngest had been screaming through the night.

Jacob listened from the kitchen, dividing food into boxes.

‘I have to go and find her.’

‘I know,’ Jacob said. He paused, fingers splayed against a tin. Emmett noticed the bag he had pushed into the far corner. The tin he shoved inside it. ‘But let me come with you.'

Emmett came over and held him. With his head on his shoulder, where Jacob couldn’t see, he smiled. Small and secret. The thing in his chest settled and was quiet.

— —