The End Where We Meet

The trees start whispering one morning, like a chatter of teeth, as the National Guard trucks filter through the one-way street of Highborn Avenue. Tommy Finch watches with an unease making his stomach flutter, his breath fogging out each scant moment, and he wonders if his father has awoken from the latest blackout last night. He peels his eyes away and shakes his head before he ducks under the nearby cafe’s awning.

It’s a luxury that he even has the spare change to buy a small cup of coffee, black, as he stuffs his pocket with packets of sugar. The cafe owner looks at him with something too much like pity. The windows of the shop are still boarded over from the last time the trucks rumbled through the streets.

At first they called it a precaution, nothing to see here, just a formality to make the people feel protected. Then the electricity came in waves and spurts, the water running dirty at times, the sporadic access to television channels and internet becoming faulty and unreliable so as to become almost obsolete.

Even the radio, a beacon from another era, began to fill with static. Like obstruction, subterfuge, from the inside out.

A year ago, Tommy had never known what the word “want” meant—though he had thought he knew. Now he’s a few inches taller and his dad’s favorite sweater fits him just right. When had that happened? Between the space of a few months and this moment that will never be captured in amber to be remembered.

No one has said the words, but he thinks it’s pretty clear: the world is dying. And there is not one thing anyone can do about it.

By the time Tommy shoulders his way into the rickety old house on the corner of Deere and Humbert, the coffee has grown cold. But it doesn’t matter. His dad is gone from the lopsided couch in the bare living room. Tommy doesn’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

‘Bad thing,’ he decides when he hears the rattle of metal in the galley kitchen.

All at once, his senses perk up as he draws the flexible knife from his empty jeans pocket. As if he has done this all his life, he flicks the blade open and creeps forward, avoiding the floorboards that will creak. He knows he’s already lost the high ground because of his entrance through the front door, but stealth and surprise are things he has learned tend to go the way of luck—either you have it, or you don’t.

When he rounds the corner into the kitchen, though, he does not expect to see a girl and a boy huddled together, eyes wide and bright with fear. The way the girl cowers over the boy, her arms nearly enveloping him, Tommy knows that’s her brother and she’ll fight like a rabid dog if that little boy is threatened. But still he does not lower the knife. People have become too desperate for niceties and common decency to outweigh utter survival.

“I won’t hurt you,” he says, low and slow, “but I won’t promise anything if you attack me.”

“We don’t have any weapons,” the girl says, her voice carrying with it the undertone of an accent he can’t place.

He wants to laugh, but he knows that would just make the situation worse. His dad tended to make battles out of small arguments just because the compass of his conversational skills were...lacking, at best. Tommy had inherited that same quirk, sadly enough.

“Not true,” he replies, gesturing at the room around him. “A frying pan would be a perfect thing to lob at my head if you go in the cabinets.”

Probably not the best thing to tell a potential threat, but he figures that the little boy will slow the girl down, even if she does make an attempt to incapacitate him.

The boy says something in a language Tommy thinks is Spanish, and the girl’s head jabs back and forth. Whatever the boy suggested, she’s not going for it.

“We just want some food,” she says in an unfaltering voice.

“So do I,” Tommy says. “But we have to deal with the ration card system till the supplies start rolling back in.”

Too bad that news alert from the infrequent airplay was already two weeks old—a lifetime in a disaster situation.

The girl chews on her bottom lip, as if she’s debating something. “We don’t have ration cards,” she says softly.

Tommy shouldn’t be surprised—they didn’t seem familiar to him in any way, not that he could pretend to know the whole town before it fell to shambles—but he finds himself taken aback anyway. “You’re from another zone?”

The only ones who were authorized to go between the zone lines were the Guard and essential personnel who continued running different facilities scattered throughout the country. And even that was information only by word of mouth.

The girl hesitates but then nods. “We stowed away in a pickup truck two zones over,” she says. “Our mom got us out during one of the riots. We haven’t had any food in days.”

The Tommy from last year would have hung onto every word with all the empathy and understanding in the world—but the Tommy standing in the decrepit house today had lived through the beginnings of an apocalypse with a father who was drunk half the time and nearly-sleepless nights where he wondered how he would get through another day.

“I can’t help you,” he says, voice heavy. “The ration cards barely feed my dad and me, and there’s nothing left to spare.”

Now the girl glares at him. In that moment, he realizes how much it took out of her just to admit her desperation to him, a stranger and a potential threat. “Is it that you can’t help us, or you won’t help us?”

Both. Either. It was all one and the same now, wasn’t it?

He heaves out a sigh. “Just take what’s left in that bottom cabinet there,” he says, gesturing with the knife. “But that’s it. There’s nothing else.”

The girl’s eyes spark with something, he can’t name what, but the little boy says, “Thank you.”

Tommy tries not to notice how the little boy looks like he is ready to break down in tears at any moment.

The leftover cans of beans and vegetables disappear into a plastic bag the girl takes from a pocket in her threadbare coat. It is only an after-thought that Tommy takes a jacket from the closet and gives it to the girl. When he hands it to her, her eyes glaze over as if she too is ready to cry—as if this simple gesture is too much to bear in a world gone haywire.

“Avoid the downtown area,” he says. “You might be able to make it to the edge of this zone if you go right before curfew ends in the morning.”

The girl nods and then says, “I’m Lucia. And my brother's name is Mateo.”

Tommy just stares at her. “Why are you telling me that now?”

“I just want someone to remember us,” she says, voice soft, and he hears the quiver in her voice. Last year, she was probably the same as him—going to school, struggling with peers and identity, trying to understand what it might mean to be an adult. And now—well, every day was its own grapple with survival. He understood that, even if he did not know her or her brother or even a grain of what their story might be.

“I’m Tommy,” he says. “Just—try to be safe out there.”

The words fall heavy, dull, despite the bright flare in Lucia’s eyes.

When she says nothing in return and just takes her brother’s hand, he knows he’ll never see her again—and perhaps that’s the saddest thing of all.

As they go out the back door, their footfalls leave barely a noise. Like ghosts, lost souls, the spirits that walk between this world and the next.

Tommy does not know why, but he begins to cry. There is still so much more of the end to come.