Chapter Seventeen
Maisie
“CQ, CQ, CQ, Gramps, this is Maisie-girl, come in.” I barely get the words out before a fireball of static booms out of my small ham radio’s speakers.
“OH, DEAR SWEET LORD!”
Everett glances up from the park bench in front of my rig, where he sits waiting for me to have my check-in. Guess he heard that. He tilts his head, questioning, and I mouth, It’s fine!
“This is Maisie, not god.”
“AFTER THE NINETEEN SEVENTIES, I DON’T EVEN BELIEVE IN YOU, LORD, BUT YOU CAME THROUGH!”
“Gramps, I’m fine.” I laugh a little, as glad to hear his voice as he is mine. “How are you doing?”
“Nearly DIED of worry!” Gramps exclaims into the mic. “But I’ve hung on long enough to chew you out.” The words come out thick and gruff, and from the rumpled, honking sound, he’s blowing his nose into a hankie. “Barely.”
Ah. The guilt trips have begun.
“Where were you, Maisie? Why didn’t you radio? I hear nothing from you last night. Nothing from you yesterday morning, and nothing from you the night before that!”
I cringe. I knew I should’ve radioed the evening we spent in the White House, but I wasn’t ready to tell Gramps about my decision to stay another night with Everett.
And then, yesterday, rather than radio him first thing, I’d intended to contact him after Everett was safely with his parents.
I figured I’d need the comfort, but of course, that didn’t happen when we got freaking kidnapped first.
“I’m so sorry to make you worry, Gramps. Everett and I—”
“Everett?” Gramps says his name in two angry syllables—Ev-rit?! “You’re still carryin’ on with that boy? What happened to dropping his ass off?”
My jaw clenches. “If by ‘carrying on’ you mean getting kidnapped, then sure.”
“That BOY KIDNAPPED YOU?!”
“Good god, Gramps. No. Not by Everett. By some weird gym people. Long story short, I took Everett to his sister’s house, but she wasn’t there.
She promised in a letter that her parents would come for Everett the next day, so I offered to stay with him one more night.
The next morning, the kidnappers caught us by surprise right before Everett was set to meet up with his family.
” I blow out a breath. “You know, if you ever meet Everett, you’re gonna feel awfully stupid for having worried about him so much. ”
“Why on earth would I ever have to meet him? You’re not bringing him to my bunker, are you? Because he ain’t allowed!”
The tone he uses—first disgusted, then accusatory—hits my stomach like a brick of bad food.
“Excuse me, but did you miss the part where I said we were kidnapped?” I press my lips into a tight line, then punch the talk button again before he can respond.
“If it weren’t for Everett, I might not have escaped at all, but luckily we did, and after spending an entire night outside with no gear and no food freezing our asses off, surrounded for miles by hordes of zombies, the last thing I want to hear is you dogging my survival partner! ”
The line is quiet for a full beat.
“If it weren’t for your useless survival partner, you wouldn’t have been in this mess at all!”
“You’re right, Gramps.” I punch out each word like a right hook, furious.
“I’d have been too scared to leave Durham if I’d never met Everett, and I’d be stuck there still, so maybe you ought to be grateful that someone has my back out here instead of yelling at me about the one good thing in my life right now! ”
Again, my admission is met with Gramps’s silence. But he doesn’t need to say a word, because I already know what he’s thinking. How could I trust Everett like this? How could I take these risks with my life and my heart?
“Maisie-girl,” Gramps finally says, his voice so loaded with disappointment and frustration and judgment it makes me want to scream.
“I’m afraid you’ve lost your head over this boy.
He’s got you making bad decisions. Choosing to spend a night in D.
-freaking-C.? What were you thinking?! Was it about your survival at all, or just that boy’s butt?
! Your mama’s probably rolling in her grave! ”
I suck in a sharp breath, then bark out a laugh in the empty car, rage pulsing through my body.
I jam the talk button. “You know what I’m thinking about?
I’m thinking about how I’m almost thirty years old, and I’ve never lived a goddamn day in my life until this zombie apocalypse started, and it’s because of you, Gramps!
You and Mom and all the people like you, who’ve trained me to avoid life because somewhere along the way, life hurt you, and you couldn’t get over it.
But that’s stupid, Gramps, and it’s unfair, because you had your chance to live and love and make mistakes.
You’ve traveled the world! But I haven’t—I haven’t done anything!
And I’m not some precious, fragile doll you can keep tucked away on a shelf, so stop trying to put me there! ”
“Maisie, baby, I hear what you’re saying, but now’s not the time to explore and live. Now’s the time to survive!”
“Well, sucks to be me, then, because I’ve been surviving my whole life, and I’m tired of it.
I want to live now. These last few days are all the time I have left before I have to waste the rest of my life living in an underground bunker with you, and I’m going to spend them doing whatever I want!
Do you hear me? I get to choose how I live—not you! ”
“Maisie.” His sad voice cracks my chest open, and regret fills all the spaces inside. “I’m so sorry that I’m all you have.”
Yeah. Me, too.
I punch the cushion of my seat, then exhale. “I’ll check in with you tonight. Seventy-three, Gramps.”
I turn the radio off before he can respond and, after a minute of deep breathing, unroll my window. “Hey, you.”
Everett looks up at me from the bench, concern painting his features. He probably heard a lot of that. He gives me a tentative smile, his eyes worried behind his glasses. A spiderweb of cracks shimmers down the right lens. “You okay?”
“Mm-hmm.” I force a bright smile onto my face in response. “You found your glasses!”
Everett
Errands shouldn’t be this fun, but tell that to my stupid, grinning face as I push this shopping cart with a whooping Maisie perched between my arms, her feet on the bottom rack and fingers gripping the handlebars.
I pick up speed in the empty grocery store parking lot to make her laugh louder, to feel her strong shoulders quake against my chest. Even Chicken is having a good time, lording over the cart’s front like the furry feline figurehead at our ship’s prow.
The blue skies above us in the small New Jersey town where we stopped to restore our fresh food supplies are idyllic and clear, the warm afternoon a preview of the spring that’s coming whether anyone’s around to see it or not.
It’s surreal. Buttery daffodils line the parking lot’s impeccably gardened beds, and baskets of hardy vining plants hang from hooks on the quaint green streetlamps.
We’re five days into this apocalypse, and except for the occasional decomposing human staring at us, you’d never know it in Sparrow Nook, New Jersey.
“Okay, okay, slow down!” Maisie manages between laughs as we near the store’s entrance, then hops down one foot at a time.
“What, you don’t enjoy my extremely inexperienced driving?
” I curb the cart’s tha-rupping wheels and let go of the handlebar and the shelter I’d created around her, ceding control of the cart back to her, to reach for the Fun & Stun holstered in my belt loop.
I force myself to smile against the loss of her warmth, like a spell summoned to ward off the hollow feeling blooming where she’d been seconds ago.
It shouldn’t feel disappointing to let go of her.
But with my chin still tingling from the whisper of her hair, it does.
After the sun rose this morning and the zombies’ moon-eyes set, we left our demented playground make-out fort and found Maisie’s car in the attached parking garage behind Connor’s gym.
The culties had raided our fresh food despite what they said, notably rejecting anything not Whole30 approved, and took most of Maisie’s armory, too.
“Those gym rats stole my mace,” she’d said as she rooted around her trunk, looking so pissed at losing that gory medieval killing stick that I thought she might break back in and kill them all a second time.
Luckily, they left the rest of our gear and our growing Taser stash alone, not recognizing the genius zombie-management devices for what they were.
They also didn’t find the documents, thank god. I’d hidden them in the wheel well.
Tsk-tsk, Connor, I silently gloat for the hundredth time today.
I can’t help it—seeing him drooling over Maisie’s ass like it was a French patisserie on cheat day brought out some sacred ancestral impulse to make his head go boom-boom on rock, then dance around his broken body.
Now Connor and his gym rats are three hours behind us, where, once night falls, they’ll happily hit all their most ambitious protein goals on the feral streets of Washington, D.Z.
, and we’re here, safely on our own again, a team of two plus cat.
Grocery shopping.
After Maisie’s very loud argument with Gramps this morning, it took a while for her to cool off, but now she seems lighter than she has in days.
Determined to have fun, happy for the detour I’ve created, vibrant and curious and appreciative of all the little towns we’ve seen, the many fingers of the Chesapeake Bay, the thick, fluffy clouds dotting the endless blue bowl of the sky.
The automatic glass doors sigh open to Gatherers Grocery, the only chain grocery store Maisie frequents and, coincidentally, the one I always used back in Durham, too.