The Panics

Alaya hesitantly looked down at her trembling, blood-soaked hands and cried with no reservation. Hot tears collected on the tip of her dimpled chin, that hadn’t stopped quivering, ever since she heard glass shattering in the kitchen. The salted river of emotions overwhelming her, dripped into the sticky crimson evidence, making a swirl of watered down red in her palms. She froze in time and stared, hypnotized by the patterns settling into her palm lines.

What have I done? I had to do it. I had to. It was him or me.

Alaya grew up in a small town on the outskirts of civilization. Travelers would miss it if they so much as blinked an eye while flying down the single road, framed in rows of cows and corn, that cut right through the middle. It felt suffocating and characterless to the fifteen-year-old exuberant in wanderlust. She couldn’t wait to leave and see the world when she graduated, but four months ago, an incomprehensible virus hit the world and spread like wildfire in a drought, stealing that dream from her. The virus morphed the once humdrum town into a place that suddenly felt gigantic and intimidating.

She howled for her older brother, Laken, who charged through the back door like a shell catapulting from the end of a shotgun barrel. He was nineteen and home for summer from college when the virus took over. He promised his mother that he’d take care of his sister, but that was only supposed to be while she was away to meet a friend for the week. She left one week before everything went to hell and they hadn’t talked to her since the power went out a month into the virus.

He yanked Alaya by the arm and towed her to the creek that ran parallel to their property, without saying a word until she was knee deep in water.

“WASH! NOW! HURRY!” He panicked, sounding harsher than he meant to.

She snapped out of the trance and washed in a frenzy, sobbing excessively.

“It’s okay. You’re alright.” Laken tried to sympathize, while hiding how scared he was for her. “What the hell happened? Are you hurt?”

She sat in the creek, slumped, and defeated. “I’m not hurt…I…I…I was looking for a book in moms’ bedroom, and I heard glass breaking in the kitchen. I wanted to scream for you, but I couldn’t. I froze. I just froze Laken!”

“It’s okay. You’re okay…go on.”

“He found me hiding in moms’ closet, pulled me by the hair into the kitchen and demanded our food stash. He…He… He didn’t look infected but…but…but he acted unhinged like The Panics.” She continued. “I pulled the knife from my belt, and I stabbed him! I stabbed him Laken...in the neck. He bled out so fast. Oh, god the mess…the blood…it’s everywhere. I don’t know how to feel. I…I…I feel bad, sad, relieved, shocked. I had to do it, right?”

“Oh sis.” He paused, getting into the creek. He sat down behind her and cradled her like a fragile infant. “I’m sorry you had to do that, but you did the right thing.”

The infected earned their nickname, “The Panics,” after their first encounter with one in a house they were looting. The front door swung open and in stumbled an older lady; bloated, spasming and shrieking. They panicked and sprinted out the back door, leaving everything behind to be contaminated once her body exploded. The virus was fast acting and highly contagious. Once it was contracted, the infected had two hours to live. It caused every organ to swell rapidly, until eventually, the body detonated like dynamite.

Two more months passed without incident.

“I wonder if mom’s okay.” Alaya sighed, while picking corn next to Laken in the field behind their house. “Or if she knows I’m sixteen now. I think my birthday was a couple weeks ago.”

“Remember what she said last time we talked to her.” He placed another ear into a basket at his feet. “If something happens to her, she’ll send us a sign in the form of a heart, and I haven’t seen any damn hearts. Mom’s a badass and if she said she was going to make it home, then I believe her.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Alaya smiled. “I’m so tired of corn and fish. My shits have been ungodly!”

“You and me both! Neither of us smell good period, but I dig not having to impress anyone anymore.” He laughed, smelling his armpit and gagging.

“Yeah, never mind my burning nostrils, you asshole.”

“Fine, you win! I’ll clean up in the creek after we get some food in us.”

After dinner and baths, they retreated for the night into the treehouse their dad built ten years ago, before he passed away of a heart attack. Alaya didn’t feel safe in the main house after the break in and the treehouse was twenty feet off the ground, with a ladder they could pull up, so no one could get in.

“Dude, turn off the lantern. It’s getting dark.” Alaya demanded.

“One more chapter and I’ll have finished my first book in years, give me a few minutes.”

“No stupid! No one can know we’re up here! We’re gonna look like a damn lighthouse by the time you finish that chapter.”

“You’ve become so paranoid since you….”

She cut him off. “KILLED A MAN! Don’t be a dick!”

He huffed, turned out the light and apologized. “I’m sorry, sometimes I forget what kind of world we’re living in. I guess this miniscule town has it’s perks now. No one’s here anymore and we’ve kind of been shielded from what’s really going on out there past the fields.”

“Miniscule.” She snorted. “Learn that new big boy word in your book?”

He threw a pillow at her. “Goodnight brat.”

“Night douche.”

The next morning, Alaya woke to the sound of a car engine rumbling nearby. A sound she hadn’t heard in a long time.

“Laken! Damnit Laken! Wake up!” She whispered, smacking his freckled cheeks. “I hear a car!”

He popped up, eyes bugged in fear. “What the hell?”

“What if it’s mom?” She pondered out loud. “Hand me the binoculars and get the rifle loaded just in case.”

She peeked out of the treehouse window with the binoculars. “It’s an older man. Maybe fifty…sixty…alone.” She dropped to the floor. “Shit Laken, I think he saw me.”

She trembled, as a tear streaked her cheek in anxiety and in disappointment that it wasn’t their mother she saw on the other end of the binoculars.

They hunkered down, anticipating the worst.

“He’s in the backyard. Stay down.” Laken whispered. “I hear him by the fire pit. Stay quiet. Maybe he didn’t see you.”

“LAKEN! ALAYA! KIIIIDS!” The man hollered. “ANYBODY HERE?”

“He knows our names. How does he know our names?” Alaya spoke into her hands.

“I know you’re scared if you can hear me, but I’m Nate, a friend of your mothers! I said hello to you on the phone last time you talked to her. Remember? Your mother, Tina! She sent me.”

“Up here!” Laken yelled unsteadily. “But we aren’t coming down and we have a gun pointing at you.”

“What are you doing? What are you doing?” Alaya panicked, smacking his arm.

“I recognize his voice. Trust me. What if he knows where mom is?”

She nodded and together they popped their heads out of the window.

“How do you know our mom?” Demanded Laken.

“Oh son, your momma has been my best friend through all of this. We kept each other sane, even though all she ever talked about was the two of you and getting home.”

“Sooo, where is she?” Laken retorted with skepticism.

“Before I get into that, she wanted me to tell Alaya happy birthday! She felt horrible missing it, it tore her apart but she picked this up for you. May I toss it up?” He held out a gift and waited for a response.

“Sure.” Alaya piped up uncomfortably.

The siblings moved to the interior of the treehouse and stared at each other, eyes wide in disbelief. The small box was haphazardly wrapped in an old crinkled newspaper advertisement and electrical tape. On top, in permanent marker it read, “Happy Birthday Alaya. Love, Mom.”

“This is moms handwriting. I know it is.” She tore into the paper, flipped the box open and her stomach dropped. A chill ran down her spine, weakening her legs and dropping her body to the floor. She sat in limbo processing the realization.

“What is it?” Laken urged.

“She’s…she’s gone.”

“What?” Laken snapped back, confused.

“Laken, she’s gone.” She bellowed, in a deep guttural wail.

He grabbed the box. “I don’t get it. It’s a locket.”

“A heart shaped locket.”

“Oh my god...her sign. Mom’s sign. No. She didn’t make it.” Laken embraced his sister and they sobbed into each other shoulders.

A tender voice from below repeated softly. “I’m sorry kids, I’m so sorry.”

An hour passed and their cries tapered off, until all they could hear was the wind whistling through the cracks in the tree house walls.

“Kids.” The gentle voice called up again. “I have something more for you.”

They looked out the window and met his bereaved gaze.

“Your momma wanted nothing more than to come home to you guys, so she’s here. She’s made it home. It’s not how any of us imagined, but she’s home. I…I…I brought her body.” He stopped to wipe a tear and blow his nose. “That momma of yours, she got me though a lot and… and …and I had to fulfill her wish.”

The siblings let their guard down and dropped the ladder. They approached the man slowly, but kept their distance.

“What happened?” Laken asked.

“It wasn’t the virus. She and I seem to be immune. Everyone around us passed very quickly. We anticipated our own demise, but the virus never got us. I tell you what kids, the world out there was chaos for a while, but now it’s just empty and polluted in death.” He carried on. “She and I had been on the road for months trying to get here. We’d stop to hunt, loot and sleep, but this one hunt went wrong and…uh…she got her ankle caught in some kind of trap neither of us saw. I doctored her up as best as I could, but it was bad. Do you want to hear the rest?”

“I need to know.” The siblings whispered in unison.

“We made a pact to not let each other suffer if we got infected. I never anticipated an injury when we made that pact, but her wound got all kinds of infected. She was sick. So sick and…and…and dying. Sepsis, I believe. I couldn’t let her suffer. Before I did what I did, she drew me a map to get out here and asked me to make sure you guys knew she tried and loved you. Getting that necklace to you for your sweet sixteen meant the world to her.”

“I’m speechless…but thank you, Nate. Thank you for being there for her.” Laken put his hand out for a shake, but the man scooped both siblings into a hug.

“From your momma.” He said. “She wanted to do this herself. Shall we finally lay her to rest together?”

The three of them dug a hole in silence and as they rolled the wrapped-up body of their mother into it, the sky opened up as if she were there mourning alongside them. They said a few words and filled the hole, then laid on top of the muddied mound blanketing her sleeping body and watched the sky weep.

“Is it just me or does every cloud look like a heart right now?” Laken observed, taking Alaya’s hand.

“I see it. I see it. We love you too mom.” She whispered.