“What?” Alex asks, but Dee just shakes her head.
She still has her keys. After all this time in the apocalypse, after all the hell she’s been through, she kept hold of her keys. She pulls them out now and fits the key into the lock. Her hands aren’t shaking; she isn’t sure why not. She twists the handle and eases the door open, heart thundering so hard in her chest it’s all she can hear.
“Jackson? Tucker?”
The house is silent. It has the smell of emptiness, of a place long-abandoned but it doesn’t smell like death.
The living room is clean. The kitchen, clean. Whatever happened, they hadn’t left in a hurry. That’s good, right? She thinks it might be.
Why is she relieved? Why is she happy?
Because they aren’t dead. Their bodies aren’t here.
She goes through the main floor with increasing joy mingled with despair. Not in the laundry room, not in the downstairs toilet. Upstairs, their rooms are empty, her room empty.
“They’re gone,” she finally says. She sits on her bed and feels all the world settle on her shoulders. “It’s over. They’re gone.” She will never know what happened to them. She hasn’t seen a note anywhere. It’s as if they were never here.
She puts her face in her hands and weeps. She weeps not only because the boys aren’t here but because there’s no spray painted D. Somehow, someway, she harbored the hope that Lana had made it here. That she would walk in the front door and Lana would be here waiting to take her into her arms.
Instead, it’s a stranger who hugs her. A woman she slept with only nights before, a woman she doesn’t even really know. Someone who could never replace her wife, but Dee is too devastated to shrug Alex off.
“I’ll be okay. I’m sorry.” The words wash over her, leaving her feel empty inside. Empty but for the pain that sits like a hard knot in her chest.
When she dries up, when the tears stop falling, she straightens. “I need to get something.” She opens the closet and stands on her tiptoes to reach the album from the top shelf. It’s filled with pictures of their little family, one book of many but this one has a little bit of everything. She doesn’t look at it, not now. She’ll fall apart if she looks at it now, so she tucks it under her arm and makes her way back downstairs.
When she gets to the kitchen, she puts the photo album on the kitchen table and digs through her backpack for her flashlight. “I have to check downstairs,” she tells Alex. She yelled down there when she first arrived, but now she realizes she must go down and take a good look around. The basement is dark, but not scary. It’s never been scary because they worked hard as a family to make sure the boys held no fear of it. Once again, it’s empty, but she already knew that when she came down. She isn’t here because she thinks they’re hiding, but because the boys have a place where they used to hide their treasures.
She goes to the far wall and pulls back the baseboard. A small tin container sits there and she pulls it out. Opens it. Sobs again when she sees the envelope. “Mom,” it says.
“Oh,” she whispers. There’s nothing else in the tin, but she clutches it and the letter to her chest and climbs the stairs to rejoin the rest of her companions. “Look,” she says, showing the envelope to Alex, to Peter and Gloria, before easing the flap out. It’s notebook paper, the ripped bits still on the side. Tucker then. He never tore off the ripped bits but his brother always did.
Did that mean—? No, she tells herself. Don’t.
She opens the paper and flattens it on the table.
Dear Mom and Ma,
We’re okay. We swear. We did like you said and stayed inside. Mom Mom and Pop Pop are fine too. We taught them how to kill the zombies—all those years of gaming paid off! Anyway, we have to leave. We have food, but the things keep coming around. We covered the windows, we’ve been careful but they know, Ma. I think they’re smarter than movie zombies. Mr. and Mrs. Peterson came over. They have their RV. We’re heading down to Eatonville. Mr. Peterson—Jimmy—says that they have old buildings, old tools, stuff we could use to survive this shit without electricity. Oh. Sorry. Stuff. Anyway, Jackson, Mom Mom, Pop Pop, the Petersons, me, and Natalie—you remember Natalie? From school? Okay, love you guys. Come find us soon. We miss you. We hope … Jackson says I’m supposed to be hopeful, but I’ve seen them out there, okay? It’s bad. I don’t know how you’ll get back here if this is what it’s like everywhere.
I guess if you’re reading this you made it. Go Mom and Ma!
Okay. Gotta go. Love you!
Tucker
She is sobbing again, this time happy tears. They are alive. Or they were.
She flips the paper over, hoping to see a D written on it but no. Nothing. The tin yields no further clues either. If Lana made it here before her, she didn’t leave a note.
“Do you have a pen? No, wait.” She gets up and goes to the junk drawer where Tucker always shoved every pen he ‘borrowed’ from his friends, his teachers, his mothers. She grabs one and flips the letter over, writing a note to Lana filled with all the desperation and love she’s been holding for her. Then she folds it back up, sticks it back in the tin, and tells them she’ll be back. She hides it where she found it, then rejoins them upstairs. “They’re alive.”
Peter and Gloria exchange looks, then they hug her tightly. “We’re happy for you, Dee, we really are.”
“I’ll help you get home, and then I’m headed south to Eatonville. There’s a living history place there. Took the boys a couple times when they were
