Page 116 of Doomsdate

I see those flowers in my dreams, sometimes. I know their shape, each tiny stitched leaf.

Mom?

Everything smells of rot.

The thin red plaid shirt looks blue under here, and though my vision’s clouded with tears, I can still see the pearl snap buttons where they shine in the darkness over the sun-wrinkled chest. The small golden locket resting in the divot of her throat, sticky with blood. I already know, without looking, what’s inside. A baby’s thumbprint in faded india ink. I blink and shriek and run my hands over that chest, the once-soft cotton stiff where the blood’s begun to dry. The trail of long, white-blond hair stuck to the floor. I scream.

It’s not Gramps at all.

“Maisie, please. Back up, let’s pull him into the light. Come on.” Everett’s pleading with me, but I’m frozen with my fingers clutching the blue shirt, or is it red? I can’t tell in these shadows. My heart hurts. It hurts. It squeezes, and I can’t breathe. Everything swims, and I fall, limp, into Everett’s arms. He tugs me backward and holds me, cradling me to his chest like a baby. Like Mom used to when I had a bad dream. Is this a bad dream?

“She’s dead,” I hoarse out, burying my face in his chest. “She’s under there, and she’s dead.”

“Maisie, it’s Gramps, I think. Old man. Suspenders?”

“No.”

“Thick waist?”

“No!”

“A red plaid shirt.”

I’m shaking my head so hard, the stubble on Everett’s warm neck shreds the tender flesh of my cheek.

“He’s wearing dog tags, sweetheart.”

But I can’t say anything. Not anymore.

Everett holds me, shushing softly as the sobs rack my body, brushing my hair off my hot, swollen face. After a while, he presses a kiss against my forehead. “I need to move him, Maisie. We can’t leave him there. He might…”

“I know.” My voice sounds small and wrong in the still, enclosed air that reeks of his blood. How did I not smell it before? It’s thick and choking and awful.

Everett pulls Gramps out from under the stairs as gently as he can, and my tears start anew. It’s him, of course it’s him. But somehow, under the stairs of this dark root cellar, he looked like everybody I’ve ever lost.

There’s flesh missing from his shoulder, a long, jagged bite. But it’s the bullet hole in his temple that must’ve killed him. We find the gun still tangled between his gnarled fingers and a note in his other hand, folded into a neat square with a hastily penned “Maisie-girl.”

I unfold it, sobbing as I smooth out each crease.

“My sweet Maisie-girl,” it reads.

It is my greatest regret that you’ll find me this way. After what you went through with your mama, it is a horrible cruelty, and the only comfort to me in these final moments is thinking that maybe you’ll realize I’m gone before you get here and never find me at all. Maybe I’m just a stupid old man, but I can’t see any other way around it. After I got stormed by the bandits, and the swarm set upon us and forced me down here, I realized I was already done for. I refuse to put your life in more danger than I already have, Maisie-girl, which means I have to go and break your heart like this instead. Please forgive me, sweetheart, and if you’re reading this, promise me that you’ll go and live twice as much now for the both of us.

With all my love and every wish in my heart,

Your Gramps

“He shot himself,” I manage to get out. “Before he could turn.”

“He loved you very much, Maisie.” Everett brushes my hair behind my ear. “So much he chose to protect you the only way he knew how.”

I press the heels of my hands into my eyes, then remove his dog tags, wilbur fagan, jr., and loop them around my neck instead. “Oh, Gramps,” I whisper. With a shaking hand, I gently touch his cheek, the white bristly stubble there, the sun-worn pink of his skin underneath. I’ve only seen a few pictures of him over the course of our long friendship. His profile picture online, a hilarious, awkward close-up angled such that you could see straight up his old-man nose, and a sepia-toned picture of him in his air force uniform, taken during Vietnam, that he sent me to prove he was a young buck once.

My smile is watery as I look down on him now, old and at rest, but the remnants of that young buck are still visible beneath the looser brow, the chapped skin, the heavy smile lines. I can hear his laughter in my head even now. Will his voice join Mom’s? My very own prepper council that never leaves me be?

I wipe my tears away roughly. “I’m so sorry, Gramps. You deserve the whole ocean, too.”

“Maisie.” It’s all Everett says. It’s all I need to hear.