Chapter III: The Kids Are All Right

Scout’s voice comes in as it always does. The words are quick, their pitch a little higher than you’d expect, but with an undeniable authority about them. Every syllable hitting like a punch to the solar plexus, his suburban-Jersey accent coated in pointed specificity. Scout is neither the smartest nor most eloquent person you’ll ever meet, but the boy has an uncanny way of making you feel like he is. An intense, wild-eyed charisma that would have lent itself well to authoritarianism, if there had been more people around to observe it. There weren’t though. Sammy is the only one left, and a lifetime of exposure has left her with something of a tolerance to her brother’s magic. But she isn’t immune. 

She hooks her fingers hard into the front bumper of the rust-pocked Nissan NV, and pulls with everything she has. Thirty or so seconds of straining and grunting pass before her hand slips, her palm slicing across a jagged piece of metal as she falls backwards onto her ass. She sits in the dry dirt, watching that thin red line form between her ring finger and thumb, then thicken, beginning to ooze, flowing down over her wrist. Wordlessly, she rips off one of her sleeves, wrapping it around the wound, tying it tight with her teeth. Little by little, she is running out of shirt. 

“Yo Sammy, you still pulling?” Scout croaks from behind the van. “I’m busting my ass back here.” 

Sammy considers informing her brother of her latest injury, but doesn’t. The way he’s been acting lately, she suspects that he’ll resent her for it. Scout has been quick to frustration over the past month or so. She is starting to get the impression that he feels she is slowing him down. Irregardless of the fact that the van, as far as she is concerned, belongs to her, and that his last few months (Years? Weeks? Days? It’s hard to tell) or so of travel had essentially been one huge free ride. 

“Yeah, no, it’s not moving Scout.” Sammy replies as she pulls herself to her feet, catching her breath. “You remembered to put it in neutral, right?” 

A pause. “Yes Sammy, I remembered to put it in neutral, I’m not a fucking idiot.” 

It’s a short pause, quick enough that anyone else would have missed it, but Sammy speaks Scout fluently enough to translate its meaning. No Sammy, I did not remember to put the van in neutral, I am in fact a fucking idiot, don’t you dare call me out on this or I will sulk for the next month and a half. 

Sammy is sixteen minutes older than Scout, and about four inches taller. Scout is barely pushing five foot five, but he holds himself in a way where people rarely notice. Those who do, and say something, are usually treated to approximately fifteen minutes of Scout’s caustic whit, and they tend not to bring it up a second time. Out of Scout’s many magic tricks, this one is likely his most powerful. Any fault you can find in him, he can find a worse one in you. Not fun to be on the receiving end of, but kind of incredible to watch from the outside. Approaching beautiful, even. He can turn toxicity into poetry, when he wants to. 

That gift, and a handful of others, always seemed to pull a certain type of person into Scout’s orbit. Sammy had few memories of Scout in which he wasn’t attended by a gaggle of dour-faced youths. There was an aesthetic element to it, sure. Playing into a role. Not necessarily in a bad way, though. These were kids who knew who they wanted to be, so that’s who they were. 

And Scout’s style of leadership wasn’t all tyrant. He could apply the carrot just as competently as he could the stick. He was funny, pathologically loyal, and could get passionate about things in a way that would make other people passionate too. It wasn’t his words, necessarily. It wasn’t even necessarily the way he delivered them. If it was anything, it was probably his eyes. A drunken-Irish-green he shared with his twin. These were the eyes of someone who was intensely and powerfully alive. Eyes so incapable of deception that they could turn anything into the truth, just so long as he believed in it. 

And so it was that in the winter of 2013, Sammy received a call from Scout, informing her that he, along with his friends Kev, Otto, Ryan, and Young Dave, would be dropping the fuck out of college. Without a second thought, she packed up her things, stole her dad’s van, and drove to Vermont to join them. 

Scout makes one last heroic effort, almost snarling, the van tilting forward as he plows into it from behind. And it truly is heroic, rail-thin thing that he is. He had already been on the lean side, rarely able to focus long enough to make it all the way through a meal, and now, with their supplies dwindling, he’s practically a skeleton. Skin stretched tight around an angular, gangly set of bones. He kicks the already-dented bumper of the NV, curses as his toe crunches against the metal through his mostly-disintegrated shoe, and hops on one foot toward his sister.

“Alright, good news, we live here. This is our forever home, we’re desert people now. I mean good god, just look at the view. All of this is ours. Look out upon our vast and bountiful kingdom Sammy, tell me what you see.” 

Sammy squints, cupping her hands above her forehead to block out the harsh daylight, letting her eyes pan slowly across the sun cracked earth. A flat, sprawling, orange-grey expanse, spreading out in every direction. “Same shit we’ve been looking at for the last hundred miles.” 

“Exactly,” Scout replies, leaning back against the van, popping off his shoe to examine his bruised toe. “Which makes this as good a fuckin place as any. God damn it, I think I fucked up my nail...” 

He glances up at Sammy, scowling when she does not immediately offer sympathy, but his expression softens as his eyes settle on her hand. “Dude, what happened, are you okay?” 

Sammy glances down at her hastily improvised bandage, and is probably not as concerned as she should be to see that the once-white fabric has been dyed red. “Oh, right, yeah, I kinda sliced up my hand when I was pulling on the van. I’m good though.” She says, as the sodden scrap of t-shirt oozes a heavy crimson teardrop onto her shoe. 

Scout grunts, shaking his head, taking Sammy by the arm and dragging her toward the back of the van. “You’re bleeding like a fuckin pig, Sammy. C’mere.” He throws open the back doors, lifting up a compartment in the floor that had once held a spare tire in an age no one left alive remembers, and pulls out a first aid kit. He removes the t-shirt scrap, and Sammy winces as her brother splashes the wound with anti-septic, gingerly wiping it clean. When he’s finished, he wraps her palm tightly with gauze, emptying the roll. 

“Like fuckin hell you’re good, tough guy...” He mutters, half to himself. “You’re too smart to be this stupid. Actin like shit still doesn’t matter. You know I’d be dead if you weren’t around, right?” 

Sammy doesn’t have anything to say to that, so she doesn’t say anything. Scout fixes the two of them a couple of MRE’s they’d swiped from a bombed-out army surplus store a few weeks back, macaroni-and-cheese for him, turkey-dinner for her. Wordlessly, they wait for nightfall. 

There had been six of them, to start off with. Their own little Scooby gang, driving around the north east in a rusty Nisan with a broken fuel light and doors that only unlock from the outside. Sleeping in a big pile, pissing in the woods, and dipping into Ryan’s sizable trust fund any time they got desperate for food or gas. They didn’t talk much about that last part. None of them cared to think about whatever artless, inconsequential business funded their lifestyle, and Ryan, for her part, never felt the need to tell them about it. It would have clashed with their roving vagabond aesthetic. So, many night’s they’d dumpster dive, shoplift, or sleep huddled in the cold, knowing full well a hot meal or a warm bed were just an ATM away. That would have been missing the point. 

Sammy hadn’t gotten to know Ryan that well. Honestly, the same could have been said about all the others. Which was strange to think about in retrospect, given the close quarters they’d shared. It’s not that they hadn’t been close, or that their relationship had been superficial. It was more that their group had always put a premium on immediacy. The focus was always on the now and the immediate future, the next town, the next scam, the next wielder of the aux cable. Sammy knew that Ryan really, really liked Circa Survive. Sammy knew that if you ever got pulled over by the cops, Ryan was the one who should probably do the talking. Sammy knew that even in ripped jeans and an army surplus jacket, Ryan could flip a switch, and convince anyone that she was exactly where she was supposed to be. Why yes, of course we were invited to this wedding reception, and we haven’t even thought about stealing all of your liquor and shrimp sandwiches. 

Kev and Otto, despite the fact that they shared no blood relation, and that the group already had a set of twins, were the twins of the group. They stood at exactly the same hight, tan, with the same strong noses, grey-blue eyes, and long dark hair. Born on opposite ends of the country, to parents with entirely different ethnic backgrounds. They’d latched onto each other early on, at first because it seemed like the natural thing to do, but they’d both been happy to find that their similarities were more than just skin deep. Alone, they were fun, if a little bit dense. But together, they added up to a surprisingly competent individual. They had always been engaged in some project, four hands working under a single mind. Never judging, never in conflict, each of them filling the gaps in the other to build out something greater than the two. They had never once disagreed, and this gave them an unusual amount of power within the group. A semi-autonomous nation living within the territory of Scout’s empire. They also fucked sometimes, and while nobody said anything about it, everyone  thought it was kind of creepy when they did. 

Young Dave was the group’s six foot eight, two hundred ten pound baby. He’d been a freshman during the groups formation, while everyone else had been juniors. A lumbering wall of untrained, natural-born Wisconsin muscle, sporting a face that was still struggling to grow its first beard. Young Dave always got to ride shotgun, if only because the back was too crowded any time he sat there. He was the kind of guy you wanted behind you if you could smell a fight brewing, because fights tended to dissipate whenever the other guy got a good look at him. All for the best, as Young Dave was not particularly fond of fights. 

In the time they had spent together, Sammy had only ever seen Young Dave hit someone once. They'd been at some dive bar, wearing out their welcome just south of the Canadian border. Scout had kept his big mouth open a little too long, said something that had maybe been a little too accurate to the kind of guy you shouldn’t get personal with, and the man had pulled a knife on them on their way back to the van. It had been quick. A firm, unglamorous backhand across the mans face, but the impact had hit him like a truck. He’d gone flying across the pavement, cracking his head against the hood of the NV, leaving a splotch of red at the point of contact. He’d slumped down across the asphalt then, and laid still. Everyone was quiet for what felt like a very, very long time. 

Sammy had thought about endings in that moment. About exactly how suddenly they could hit you. How things could be good one second, and destroyed the next. She knew they’d spend the rest of their lives running. And not in the comfortable way, anymore. Looking over their shoulders, avoiding every cop car. Even if no one ever found out, the six of them would know. This couldn’t be fun anymore. The fantasy had shattered, and she could feel herself falling, the crushing gravity of the real pinning her back down against the cold, loveless earth. 

But she didn’t get to think about it for long. A moment later, the bomb went off. 

The sound hit them first. It sent them to their knees, a blast so loud it went past what their brains were capable of processing and skipped straight to ringing eardrums and bloody earlobes. When the pressure from the sound wave finally abated long enough for them to look upwards, they saw it. A roiling, technicolor mushroom-cloud blooming out in the far distance. Large as a mountain, and growing rapidly, higher, wider, stars blotting out as it filled the sky. Within moments, the blast was the horizon, like a second planet sitting on top of ours, an enormous tumor bubbling out of the Earth. She knew, somehow, that this was not one blast, but every blast. Every explosion that had ever been, or ever could be, happening at the same time, at the same point, all at once. 

By the time any of them had gotten their wits about them enough to process what was happening, the wall of the mushroom cloud was expanding toward them at a terrifying pace. Moments ago it had been hundreds of miles away, but now they could see it rushing toward them, acres of forest torn up in its wake. They’d scrambled back into the van, peeling out hard, half way out of the parking lot before they realized they were missing someone. Sammy clocked him in the rear view mirror at the last second. Scout was still standing there, head craned back toward the sky, green eyes fixed on the apocalyptic light show unfolding itself before him. She whipped the van into reverse, burning rubber as she throttled backward, screeching to a halt right behind Scout, just as the firewall began to lick at the edges of the lot. Kev and Otto had thrown the back doors open, and yanked Scout inside. Even as they sped away, the van shaking unsteadily as they tore off-road, ripping through dense forest, death nipping at their heels, Scout still knelt with his face pressed against the back window of the van. He watched the world end. 

Scout and Sammy do not sleep anymore. It is unclear to them whether or not it is still necessary. They still get tired. They are very tired. But in the indeterminable amount of time since the bomb went off, they have not slept. Every night, they sit in silence, the doors locked, and wait for the voices outside to quiet. 

This night is no different. Scout and Sammy sit side by side, their backs against the wheel well, listening to the sound of nails scrapping against the outside of the van. Whispers spilling through the cracks in the door. Pleading to be let inside. Scout clutches his knees, wild green eyes fixed on the door. Scout is not afraid, Sammy knows. Scout is not afraid of anything. But not because he is brave. Because he is stubborn. The fear is in him, scratching at the door, but he refuses to let it through. He is not afraid, because he does not allow himself the option. 

Sammy reaches out, laying her bandaged hand atop of Scout’s. He shatters. He crumples in on himself, burying his head between his legs, and begins to shake. 

“What is this... What the fuck is this? What the fuck is happening Sammy, what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck, what the...” His words trail off into quiet, unsteady sobs. She curls an arm around him, pulling his head into her shoulder. 

“I’m so fucking tired.” He whispers. “I’m so tired, I just want to sleep.”
“I know.” She replies. “Me too.”
They close their eyes. Sleep never comes.

They’d lost Kev early on. He and Otto had taken to the apocalypse in a bizarrely positive way, at first. Together, they’d moved straight past fear and into a strange, morbid fascination. Nothing in the new world made any sense, but the two of them could find patterns in the strangeness. In those early days, their easygoing, pragmatic outlook had been the only thing holding the gang together. All things considered, the two of them reasoned, things weren’t all that different than they were before. They’d just been playing on easy mode, and the difficulty had been ratcheted up to extra-hard. Extra-hard mode included, among other things, blistering hot days, bone-chilling nights, roving gangs of men with guns, and deadly radiation. Strange mutated creatures, acute dyschronometria, and sleeplessness. And whispers. And scratching at the door. In some ways though, things were actually easier. If you wanted to walk out of a 7-11 with all the cigarettes, no one was going to stop you. Not unless they wanted them more, and were carrying a bigger stick. Lucky for all of them, Young Dave was a pretty big stick. It had been a bad situation, no one had any argument there, but they were making the best of it. Until they’d lost Kev. 

They had split up to scavenge food. Kev didn’t make it back before sundown. Just barely, but that had been enough. The five of them had sat inside the van, Young Dave holding Otto back as they watched Kev sprint toward them, just as the sun was dipping down over the horizon. Darkness covered the wasteland, and all that remained of Kev were his screams. 

There wasn’t any use pretending after that. No matter how brightly Scout’s eyes sparkled, none of them could trick themselves into thinking any of this was still fun. It was all the same to Scout. He wouldn’t have tried to convince them anyway. Ever since the bomb, he’d been lesser. The fire in his eyes still burned, but what had once been a raging inferno was now an ember. 

About two weeks after Kev died, or about as close to that as any of them could figure, it was Otto’s turn. Just as the sun had begun to set, he had swiped the keys to the van, stepped outside, and locked the door behind him. They had watched from within, horrified and helpless, trapped. He stood, staring into the sun, gaze fixed on it as it disappeared beneath the horizon. He hadn’t screamed. In the morning, he was gone. 

It was impossible to say how long they spent locked in the van. Days, at least. Maybe weeks. Long enough that they should have died of thirst, but they didn’t. 

“No.” The earth seemed to tell them. “You don’t get off that easy.” 

Except, sometimes, maybe you do. Ryan died trying to jimmy open the back door with an old pocket knife. It had slipped from her hand, and had cut open her bare foot. The infection killed her a week later. Young Dave had held her in his arms for... a time. Time isn’t what it used to be, these days. Not for those three, at least. That moment could have lasted a day, or a second, or a hundred years. It was all the same to them. When the moment passed, Young Dave made his way to the back of the van, grunted, and kicked the door open. 

They’d buried her, with considerable effort. The ground was hard and dry, and sunset had been dangerously close by the time they’d finished. The next day, Young Dave thanked Sammy and Scout for everything (what everything was, exactly, Sammy wasn’t sure), and set off on his own. Scout had been too proud to stop him. 

All at once, or perhaps over a very long time, it was just Scout and Sammy again. Things were harder than they’d ever been. The days were long, and the nights were longer. The van rarely worked, even when they could manage to find gas. But they still had each other, and that was enough. Just barely enough. 

When the sun begins to shine in through the blinds on the side window, Sammy opens her eyes. It’s the closest she still gets to feel to waking up. The back doors are already open, and Scout is sitting in the dirt with the camping stove, frying up some bacon. A smile teases at the corners of Sammys mouth as the smell drifts up into her nose. For a single, blessed second, she is able to pretend again. Any moment now, she’ll hear Young Dave cracking up at some joke Kev and Otto are telling. Ryan will poke her in the side and tease her about how badly she needs a shower. Scout will bring them bacon, and half of it will be burnt, and it will be perfect. She hopes that second will last for years, as seconds sometimes choose to do these days. It does not. So with some effort, she pulls herself to the back of the van, swinging her legs over the side. 

“Thought we ran out of bacon.” She says, watching as he flips a strip over, a little too crispy, just the way she likes it. 

“This is the last of it.” He replies.
“What, not gonna save it for a special occasion?”
“We’re having bacon, that’s the special occasion. I’m starting to think maybe we just have to make those up for ourselves. I don’t see any of them coming our way otherwise.” He glances up at her, eyes moving toward her hand. 

“How’s the... Jesus, Sammy no, don’t fuck with it!” He snaps, as she peeks under the bandage. 

“I mean, it still looks kinda fucked up, but I’ve had worse, probably.” And she had. Before the bomb, even. She’d always been accident prone, and not in a cute, fun way. She also had a remarkably high pain tolerance, and it was anyones guess which of those qualities was the result of the other. 

There’s a small moment of silence while they listen to the bacon sizzle. One of those long, small moments. Sammy has the presence of mind to cut it off. 

“So what are we doing about gas? I feel like we’re far enough into the middle of fuck- knows-where that even if we could find a gas station, it’d be a bitch to find our way back.” 

Scout doesn’t look up. He peels a strip of bacon off of the pan, laying it down atop their only plate. “I told you. We’re staying here.” 

Another small moment passes. Actually small, this time. Sammy laughs, quietly. 

“Yeah, okay. What, we gonna start a farm?” She swings her foot, letting the toe of her shoe scrape across the dry, dusty earth. 

“We have bacon.” He lifts another strip out of the pan. 

A long silence, now. Exactly as long as it feels like. For that moment alone, time moves as it should. 

“Yeah...” Sammy replies, slowly, carefully. “Like, four strips of bacon.” 

Scout watches the pan in silence, smoke beginning to rise as one of the strips starts to burn around its edges. 

“Scout?”
“We won’t starve.”
“...No, yeah, we definitely will.”
“We haven’t yet.”
“Okay, but, we almost did, a bunch of times.”
“We didn’t though.”
“...Scout, please don’t get weird on me. I need you to not be weird.”
Scout turns his head to face her. Eyes, for the first time, expressionless.
“Too late. I’m weird. I’m weird, you’re weird, all this shit’s fuckin weird. Weird is how it works now, I guess. How long were we locked in the van?” 

“Huh?”

“After Otto left. How long were we locked in the van?”
Sammy takes some time to think. “I don’t know... a couple of days?” 

“Two years.”

An infinite pause. 

“...Huh?” 

“Six hundred and forty nine sunrises. I counted them. And we weren’t even half way through by the time we lost Ryan.” 

Sammy doesn’t know how to respond. Scout has always been the fun type of crazy, but now, he is scaring her. He offers her a slice of bacon. And because she does not know how to respond, she takes it. She holds it gingerly with one hand, the other clutching the edge of the van, hard enough that she can feel her wound reopening. 

“We’re not going to starve, Sammy. We’re not going to die. We don’t get to rest, because I don’t deserve to. We’re in Hell.” He says, matter-of-factly. “Obviously. That night at the border, when the bomb went off... that guy killed us. I’m in Hell, for... for I don’t know, fucking poserism? For fucking shoplifting or whatever, and...” He turns back to the van, watching as a blackened hunk of pig fat curls in on itself, acrid smoke raising up into the orange sky. 

“And I brought all of you with me.” 

Sammy slides herself off the edge of the van, and makes her way over to where Scout is crouching. She puts a hand on his shoulder. 

“Here’s what we’re going to do.” She says, softly. “I’m gonna take a shovel, and I’m gonna head out in a direction. Every fifty paces, I’m gonna dig a line in the dirt. Eventually, I’ll find gas, or... something, and I’ll use that to make my way back. Okay?” 

“Or you could not.” Scout replies, so quietly she almost doesn’t hear him. “Whatever happens is going to happen. If the universe wants me to find gas, I’ll get some, if it doesn’t, I won’t. But I won’t die.” 

Sammy crouches to get on Scouts level. She takes his face in her hands, forcing him to look at her. “Kev died. Otto-” 

“No they didn’t.” Scout cuts her off. “We don’t know that. Kev and Otto just disappeared. No body, no blood, nothing. Anything could have happened to them.” 

“And Ryan? What, you think she’s shambling around out there somewhere, looking for brains?” 

The fire in Scouts eyes ignites, briefly. Just long enough for him to shoot her a look that says, try to keep a straight face and tell me that’s not the kind of thing that might happen. 

“When the bomb went off, the mushroom cloud was miles away. Miles and miles and miles. Half a minute later, it was on top of us. I could feel its heat, Sammy. I could’ve touched it. And you still outran it. You know why? Because it didn’t want to catch me, yet. First, it needs to watch me loose the tiny fucking handful of things I actually give a shit about.” Muttering, his attention returning to the smoldering hunk of meat. “So let’s not give it the satisfaction, right? Let’s just stay fucking put. Refuse to play the game. Trust me. Food will fall into our laps. They'll keep us just alive enough to keep me miserable, and fuck me, I can handle miserable. And if I’m wrong... fuck it. I’ll finally get some sleep. But if you leave, you’ll never come back. It’ll be just me and dad’s stupid fucking van.” 

Sammy smacks him across the face. She instantly wishes she hadn’t used the hand with the gash in it. She winces for a second, then grabs her brother by the collar. 

“I don’t know if this idea has ever entered your myopic fucking brain, but I’m gonna blow your mind right now. That planet-sized psychedelic mushroom cloud that blew the fucking earth up? Yeah, I don’t think that was about you. You the only person I’ve ever met who could turn getting chased through the desert by monsters into an exercise in narcissism. The take away from this should not be that you’re some kind of fucked up reverse Jesus. The take away is that the world does not give a shit about us. The only pattern here is the lack of one, that’s what makes it all so fucked up. But you’re right about one thing. We’re not going to starve. Not because of some cosmic comeuppance you’re receiving, but because we’ve got a couple of good-ass fucking heads on our shoulders, and we know how to take care of ourselves.” She pulls her self to her feet, dragging out a shovel from under one of the seats. “And it’s MY stupid fucking van.” 

For the second time that day, time moves at one second per second. Scout takes that as a sign. He pulls himself up, nods, and takes the shovel from Sammy. He walks out a few paces, then tosses it high in the air, watching as it clatters to the ground. He picks it back up, and begins to walk in the direction it was pointing. Sammy catches up quickly. They mark their path as they go. 

A set of twins walk into an endless desert. One believing it to be his own personally tailored Hell, the other believing herself to be a victim of circumstance. They are both correct.