Sacrifice

He didn’t have the pictures he’d taken. He had no way to contact whoever had been sending those text messages—not that he wanted to. Anyone else he could think to call was either a liability—Becca, or maybe Hunter’s mother and grandparents—or a complete jerkoff who wouldn’t help anyway—Bill Chandler, Becca’s father, who was also a Fifth like Hunter, and a former Guide.

He tapped his pen against the paper and thought.

“What did you come up with?”

Michael looked up. Tyler was across the table, surrounded by textbooks and notebooks and loose paper.

“Not much,” Michael said. He sighed and rubbed at the back of his head. This felt weird, sitting here with a guy he’d spent much of his life hating. “Where’s your girlfriend? I thought Quinn would have practically moved in by now.”

“She lives with Becca, which means Bill has them both under lock and key until this is over.” He paused. “I wouldn’t want her here right now anyway.”

Michael understood that. They lapsed into silence again.

He couldn’t take it. He fought for something to talk about. “How’s schoolwork?”

Tyler opened a bottle of Mountain Dew and gave him a look. “You don’t give a crap.”

“You’re right.” But sitting here made him wonder if this was what his life would have been like if his parents hadn’t died. Tyler was a year or two younger than Michael, but he’d followed a traditional path: graduating high school, going to college, moving out and getting a place of his own. Tyler had beer in his refrigerator and cabinets full of food. Michael would buy a six-pack every now and again, but he’d always kept it hidden in the back of the garage—more so he wouldn’t have to explain it during a surprise social worker inspection than because of any worry his brothers would snatch one. Their own cabinets were always a little barren because four people went through food fast.

But the biggest surprise for Michael had been the quiet. Tyler’s apartment didn’t have four teenage boys banging doors or stomping up stairs or blasting music or roughhousing in the living room. Tyler’s apartment was his.

“Sorry my place isn’t a thrill-a-minute.” Tyler gestured at the television. “Watch TV or something if you’re bored.”

Bored. Was that what this was? Michael couldn’t remember the last time he’d been bored. If he wasn’t actively doing something, he was usually sleeping.

“What do you Merricks usually do?” said Tyler.

“They go to school,” said Michael. “I work. You know that.”

Tyler was silent for a moment. He sat back in his chair and balanced a pencil between his fingers. “What are you going to do about the landscaping stuff?”

“I don’t know.” Michael looked back at his list. “I need my laptop so I can call people. I don’t even know what jobs I had lined up this week. I know my regulars, of course, but it doesn’t matter. I can’t pull a trailer on my shoulders.” He tried to guess how many people would drop his service if he canceled this week. He didn’t want to think about it too hard—especially since they were coming into winter.

“If you can drive me to class, you can take my truck during the day,” said Tyler.

Michael almost snapped, but he reminded himself that Tyler wasn’t setting him up to watch him fall. Even so, he didn’t like feeling obligated to someone who once would have used it against him. “Thanks.” He paused. “It’s going to depend on whether I can get access to my stuff.”

“You want to go see?”

“Hunter said he and Adam were stopped at the end of the road.”

“Yeah, but it’s your house. You don’t think you can flash some ID and get access?”

“I don’t know,” said Michael.

“So I’ll ask you again.” Tyler leaned in against the table. “You want to go see?”

No cop car sat at the end of the cul-de-sac, but yellow sawhorses blocked the pavement and declared that the road was closed.

They still had a pretty clear view of the damage that had been done.

Tyler blew out a breath. “Holy shit.”

In the bright light of day, everything looked worse than Michael remembered. Family homes turned to nothing more than piles of charred lumber and rubble—with the exception of his own, which stood alone, dark and smoke damaged. The pavement had buckled in places, sometimes severely, and the sidewalk had the appearance of a shattered pane of glass, with broken lines scoring the surface. Beyond the homes, he could see downed trees along the edge of the woods. It looked like the set of a post-apocalyptic movie, not the barren shell of the neighborhood he’d grown up in.

He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to see this.

Tyler took his foot off the brake, and for an instant, Michael wondered if he’d spoken the words aloud, if Tyler was going to turn the truck around.

But no, Tyler pulled up on to the fractured sidewalk and drove around the barriers. They rocked and swayed with the motion of the truck moving across the broken pavement, and Tyler stopped at the top of the loop, just at the end of the Merrick driveway.

“Do you want me to drive all the way up to the house?” he said.

“No.” Michael swallowed.

“Do you want me to leave you here to have a good cry?”

“Shut up, Tyler.” But the words hit their mark. Michael unbuckled his seat belt and pushed the door open.

Nausea hit him as soon as his feet touched the ground. He had to hold on to the door for a moment.

Tyler stopped by the front of the truck. “You all right?”

“Yeah.”

But he wasn’t. A lot of people had died here. He didn’t just know it. He could feel it. The emotion, the energy, the memories and terror and destruction, all trapped in the ground.

He remembered a school field trip to Antietam back in eighth grade, during a class unit on the Civil War. He’d stepped off the bus and almost puked on Annabel Scranton. The entire day was a hazy memory, but it was the longest six hours of his life. He’d never been more relieved than when he was allowed to climb back on the bus for the ride home.

He’d thought he was getting the flu or something until they were driving down the highway and all the queasiness disappeared. He mentioned it to his parents that night over dinner, and his father had put down his fork and told Michael to grab his coat.

They’d gone to an old cemetery at the edge of town.

Michael had been glad he hadn’t eaten much dinner.

It had been one of the first signs that he was going to be far more powerful than his father ever had been.

He let go of the truck. “Come on.”

The still silence pressed down on Michael as they walked. His street was never silent in the middle of the day. Too many kids, too many cars, too many lives. Now there was nothing.

“Can you feel it?” said Tyler, his voice almost hushed.

“Yeah.” Michael glanced over. “How did you know?”

“I feel something too. From the fires.” He made a face as if he smelled something distasteful. “I don’t like it.”

Michael expected the front porch steps to flex and shift under his weight, but the wood was strong, though he could see a few panels farther down had cracked and split—whether from the earthquake or the fire, he had no idea.

The door wasn’t even latched, the frame splintered and broken where the firefighters had broken in.

Michael didn’t want to go inside. He could see blackened walls and melted carpeting from here, and he didn’t have any desire to get a closer look.

He felt like such a wuss. Suck it up.

Tyler touched the door frame and picked at a few splinters. “We should go back up the street to Eighty-Four Lumber and get some plywood. Board this up while we’re here.” He gestured at the shattered windows. “Those, too.”

The fire marshal had said the same thing, but Michael shrugged. “I doubt there’s much worth stealing now.”

“Still. You don’t want animals in here.”

Valid point. They went back to Tyler’s truck. They were a mile down the road before Michael realized that maybe Tyler had needed a breather, too.

Unfortunately, it didn’t take long to get plywood and supplies, because they were driving around the barriers again less than fifteen minutes later. Michael was better prepared this time, and the nausea didn’t hit him as hard.

They stacked the plywood and materials on the front porch, and then Michael stood there, facing the front door for a second time.

This was stupid. He’d gone through this door a million times. He’d already seen the damage; it wasn’t like it would suddenly be worse.

But somehow now was different. Staring at this damaged door hammered home just how little he had left.

Nothing. You have nothing.

This was so much worse than looking at the charred bookcases. Michael put a hand on the door and pushed it open.

The foyer still reeked of smoke and melted synthetics. Light poured through the front windows, displaying all of the damage in full color. Footprints were everywhere, but Michael had no way of knowing if they were all from that first night, or if someone had been in here since.

Tyler stepped up beside him. “Wow.”

Michael pushed through. He needed to keep moving or he’d collapse into a pile of despair. His shoes crunched on grit as he made his way through the dining room—where everything was a mere shell of what had been there. Table? Chairs? Burned and blackened. One of his brothers had left schoolbooks out, and they were just as unrecognizable as the rest of the room.

When he’d been fourteen, Michael’s mother had wanted the room painted in alternating stripes of high-gloss and flat maroon paint. Michael remembered measuring and taping lines on the wall with his father before breaking out the rollers.

Now, he couldn’t have told where the stripes began or ended. Everything was just black.

Tyler pointed at the destroyed books on the table. “I hope that’s not your landscaping stuff.”

The words spurred Michael into action. “No. That’s all in the kitchen.”

Luckily, the kitchen was somewhat better. Smoke damage extended in here as well, but instead of black walls, they faced a gray haze over everything.

Almost everything: the counter where he usually kept his laptop sported a familiar-sized rectangle of clean granite, untouched by soot.

His laptop was gone. So were the two binders where he kept invoice copies and paper records.

“Fuck!” Michael slapped the countertop. A crack split and tore across the stone surface before he could stop it.

Tyler raised his eyebrows. “I’m going to assume you didn’t just misplace stuff?”

“No,” he ground out. Michael wanted to hit something. Someone. He had no idea whether his things had been stolen or if the cops had taken them for evidence against him, but he’d never be able to contact all his customers without his records.

And he’d thought he had nothing five minutes ago.

A common thief wouldn’t have taken his notes. This had to be the cops, right? He wondered if David Forrest would be able to pull strings and get his laptop back.

Because Michael could totally afford to keep paying the guy seven hundred and fifty dollars an hour to do things like chase down his laptop.

He ran a hand across the back of his head and drew a long breath. “Let me see if I can find the keys to the SUV. Then we can get out of here.”

But he couldn’t find the keys. They might have been burned, or lost, or seized like his work stuff. No way to know.

At this point, Michael didn’t even waste energy being surprised or disappointed. He walked back to the front porch and picked up a piece of plywood and a hammer.

Tyler didn’t say a word. He simply did the same.