Page 5 of Hero

I stiffen with a jerk. “Stop what?”

“Stop all that worrying or stewing or whatever you’re doing in your head. You can’t think your way out of this.”

“I know that!”

“Then why are you trying?”

“I can’t stop what my mind does. I can’t turn off my brain the way you can. I’m not like that. I’m doing the best I can.”

“Well, do better. Because if you keep it up, you’re going to spiral into a breakdown, and that’s not going to help anyone.”

I give him a cold, narrow-eyed look. I wish I could pull away from him, but then I might fall down. “I’m not going to have a breakdown.”

“We’ll see.”

I suck in air through my nose and keep glaring at him, but I bite off my instinctive retort.

Continuing this silly argument would be futile. He’s not going to listen to me. He’s not going to understand me. He’ll never even try.

I don’t care what he thinks anyway. He’s a peripheral part of my life right now because circumstances threw us together, but he’s never going to be important to me.

I’ve got other things to be my center.

It’s never going to be him.

1

Year Six after Impact

The twelve houseson our cul-de-sac growing up were mostly two-bedroom bungalows. Small, inexpensive, and built in the fifties but well-kept with tidy lawns, flowerpots in the spring, and Christmas lights in December. That’s how I always remember them.

Now they’re abandoned rubble, flattened with the rest of the town by two weeks of nearly constant tornadoes five years ago.

That was almost a year after Impact, and we’d come to expect freak weather phenomena by then since the planet went into overdrive in reaction to the asteroid strike. Nearly everyone, including us, had left town that first year before the town was leveled anyway.

It’s a wasteland now—like all the other small towns in this region of southeastern Missouri. Collapsed buildings. Broken pavement. The scattered skeletons of a few holdouts who stubbornly refused to leave when everyone else migrated in search of food and safety. Every time I return, I walk over to my old house and think about my mom and stepdad. My older sister.

They’re all dead now, and our ruined house is the only memorial I have for them other than the rocks we used to mark their graves.

This morning I stand and look for only a couple of minutes. The fall air is brisk, and the days are getting shorter. I’ve got a three-hour walk back to the cabin when I’m done here, and Zed will let me have it if I’m not home before dark.

I say another mental goodbye to my family and keep moving, scanning my surroundings automatically and keeping one hand close to the handgun in my belt holster.

It’s a different world than the one in which I grew up. The one where I was a brainy girl who won spelling bees and stared at the stars for hours and bickered with my older sister over who got to sit in the front seat of the car. Now, if you aren’t on guard every minute, you’re likely to end up dead.

There are eight former communities in easy walking range of the cabin, including Givens, my hometown. The two towns closest to the main highway weren’t hit by the tornadoes and have been completely cleaned out for years by looters and scavengers. But the others were all flattened. They’re out of the way of any main travel routes, and the rubble left behind makes scavenging so difficult that there are still supplies to be found.

For the past three years, I’ve been systematically going through the houses in those towns one by one. At first there was a lot to be found—even canned food that was still edible. Now the pickings are slim.

Pretty soon there’s going to be nothing.

My stomach churns with a low-level anxiety that’s my constant companion now.

Ignoring it, I scan through my mental map to recall which block I stopped on during my last visit, walking half a mile to reach it.

I had a classmate who lived on this street. I went to her birthday party every year, although I was always more of a token invite than a friend. It doesn’t matter anymore. The past is more like a daydream than a memory. Too distant and foreign to be real.

I guess I used to be that smart, serious, quiet girl who wanted to be an astronaut and worried about everything and was never popular. The girl whose best friend was her sister. Who loved her mother and thought her stepdad was decent and tolerated his loud, extended family who were always hanging around.

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