Page 37 of The Reveal
I was afraid he would wake up in one of his rages, and I couldn’t in good conscience leave Gran to deal with that alone. Mostly because she has always been the one most likely to pull out the shotgun in moments of stress, and our family was jacked enough already.
Gran had been more mobile then. She didn’t require all the tending to, not yet. Maybe, looking back, it should have been clear that things were slipping. But I didn’t know that then. I didn’t realize thingscouldslip the way they would shortly thereafter.
I’d slept in past my usual predawn wake-up time, and when I went downstairs, I found Gran watching TV in the study on the first floor, which was odd for her in the morning. I frowned at the sight, but she didn’t move or seem to notice that I’d come downstairs. Also weird.
I went into the kitchen and made myself espresso in my stovetop percolator like a European, because working at the coffee stand has ruined me for drip coffee. And I think about those moments a lot, even now. Standing in the kitchen when the windows were still glass. Letting the morning light stream in and dance all over me like that wouldn’t be a luxury within days. Waiting for the espresso to be ready and sighing a little as the rich, earthy scent filled the room. Taking my first sip gratefully, sighing again as I stared out back toward what must have been a kicking garden back then, because Gran could always grow a plant or a flower seemingly at will.
I try to think back to what was on my mind on such a run-of-the-mill day. What was filling up my head. What I thought was important before the world changed.
I can remember every detail of what I did in the kitchen in those last few moments of normalcy, but I never have been able to recall what I was actually thinking about. Augie, probably. Whatever sad social life I didn’t really have going on.
At some point—a few minutes later? An hour? I’ll never know—I padded into the study to see why my grandmother was glued to the television set on a Tuesday morning when she had been known to unplug the TV on weekends to force us kids outside.
But somewhere between the doorway and the seat I took on the couch beside her, I forgot anything I might have said.
I don’t know which images I saw first. They all jumble together in my head. The explosions in far-off cities and the creatures celebrating them in force, though I thought, at first, that there was something wrong with my eyes. The CN Tower in flames with what I thought were people in ghoulish masks dancing around. Big Ben, swarming with those horrible bug things I prefer to believe stay on that side of the Atlantic, because the alternative is too horrible to accept. Gruesome scenes from everywhere, but the horror of the actual destruction of cities on television—like too many action movies exceptreal, though at first it didn’tseemreal—faded as I came to realize what was doing the attacking.
Then, of course, came the real horror.
And it came in stages.
Disbelief was first. It couldn’t be real. It was some Hollywood thing. I remember initially feeling angry and removed, furious that a joke like this could be played on so many people.
But that faded into a kind of numbness as image after image, with less and less commentary from newspeople, showed the hideous truth.
Monsters were real. And they weren’t hiding any longer.
At some point, Augie woke up too, and whether he was detoxing or not, what I remember is him sitting silently on that couch with Gran and me. For hours.
The three of us in a silence marred only by the disgusting, grisly scenes unfolding on the screen before us, sometimes staring at each other, sometimes weeping quietly, sometimes frozen still.
Maybe it was days. Time flattened out and never recovered.
There are things that stand out to me. That deep rejection of what I was seeing. My instant, bedrock conviction that it had to be a cut of some movie. A marketing experiment that some film studio was doing, like that Orson Welles thing from back in the day.
Though even as I kept thinking that, I knew better. I knew it wasn’t fake.
Death in the movies is a whole lot prettier.
We all have images in our heads now that we’ll never get out. It’s why some folks lose it altogether and opt in to whatever opiates they can find, and as much as I hate it, I get it.
It had to be the first night, though it’s hard to remember how time moved then. I remember that it was dark, or maybe it simply got gloomy enough in that room. Maybe the power had gone out by then, because it was off for months once it went.
Then again, it could have been the bright light of day. What I know for sure is that the three of us were sitting there, silent. Stricken. But together in a way we hadn’t been in a long, long time.
And then, together, we heard the wolves begin to howl.
It was the first time in my life I learned that “bloodcurdling” wasn’t just a thing people said, because I felt it.
It’s here,Gran said in a raspy whisper.It’s not just the cities. It’s happening here, too.
“We were lucky,” I tell Ariel now. “The people who were out doing errands and living their lives—very few of them made it. There were bodies in the streets. Augie and I went down at some point. It could have been days later, maybe a week, and we saw them. Then learned a valuable lesson about leaving the house without enough weapons. The hard way.”
It’s difficult to remember now that there was a time when I didn’t know how to fight. That I was ever foolish enough to drive into an unknown situation without numerous weapons at my disposal.
Once things changed, everything changed. And fast.
That particular day, a pack of wraiths swarmed the truck while we were still reeling from the piles of dead everywhere, and all Augie and I had going for us was that we were raisedjustrural enough. Our dad had taken us hunting since we were small. We knew our way aroundguns. Augie had taken the shotgun with him when we left the house, and that was all we had to work with, so we made it work.
