Chapter 8
Wyatt’s been smoking again while knowing that he shouldn’t. His wife hates it when he smokes. You’ll set the house on fire one day, she scolds. So he’s taken to lighting up at work before a flight or on the patio when she’s asleep. Quitting isn’t as easy as he thought it might be, or perhaps he’s just weaker than he’s willing to admit.
A lungful of smoke coats his insides, and he savors it, intending to snuff it out on the ground with his boot before going inside, but something catches his attention before he can…a flicker of light coming from inside the house.
He follows it with curious apprehension as the golden hue deepens, and he briefly worries that she’s gotten fed up with him for good now and set the house aflame herself after packing her shit and leaving him behind. They’d been fighting more than usual. Small, nitpicky arguments about nothing in particular that only end up confusing him once it’s all said and done.
She is angry at him every time he comes home, and he fears the answer as to why, so he hasn’t dared to ask. Hasn’t attempted any of that open communication their couple’s therapist suggested months ago because that might offer answers he isn’t willing to accept, like his wife admitting that she’s fallen out of love with him.
It is easier to let her say he spends too much time at work than it is to imagine her wishing he’d stop coming home.
It’s hard not to let that flickering light draw him in, though. He follows it through the living room and kitchen, the heat of it luring him close until the space of his house transforms into his wife’s apartment after their divorce. The walls melt, and the floor feels like jelly around his feet. He’s no longer coming home after a long day in the air, but searching for her in the wake of an apocalypse.
The sight of her rotting away on the sofa with her brain matter scattered across the fabric is enough to have him heaving with a combination of shock and grief. Why he’s grieving is anyone’s guess. She left him. Said she found someone else. He has no business coming here to offer help that she’d never accept, but here he is, checking on her because it’s the right thing to do when the right thing never got him anywhere good before.
It doesn’t now, either. No good deed goes unpunished, his mother used to say, and when the flames from the apartment fire begin to engulf him, stroking up the backs of his legs and digging into his skin to flay it off, he’s never been more certain she was right.
He runs into the inferno to escape certain death out the other side, screaming as the heat cooks the parts of him that it captured, twisting and turning and begging for relief.
“Wyatt?”
“Stop, make it stop, please, please make it stop,” he sobs.
“Look at me.” A soft hand tilts his face to the side until his eyes focus on the person beside him. “You have a fever, you’re not on fire. You’re just hot.”
There’s a pretty woman looking at him, all soft and sweet. She’s got a wet cloth running down his naked chest, which makes him shiver.
“You can’t be here,” he whispers. Doesn’t she know it’s not safe? “I can’t get you out! I can’t even get myself out.”
“What you’re seeing isn’t real. You’re delirious. You can’t trust your eyes right now.”
It’s only then that she becomes familiar. Her blonde hair and that smile he likes so much trigger a hidden memory. “Addison? Why am I on the floor?”
“You fell out of bed trying to get away from—”
“The fire.” He covers his face with his hands, hissing when she runs that cold cloth under his armpits.
“Sorry. Sorry. It’ll cool you off faster.”
Embarrassment at his condition makes him burn hotter than the fever. He’s half-naked on the floor while she gives him a sponge bath. That’s enough to have him ready to curl into a ball and never look anyone in the eye again.
He doesn’t need help. He can handle it himself. It’s not her job to take care of him.
All those bumps and holes in the ceiling stare down at him while tree branches scrape against the window, just like the crackling of splintered wood as it came apart around him in the hallways of the apartment building.
“Shit, we gotta go,” he curses, wrenching himself upright and hissing when his whole body aches.
It’s not unexpected. He always hurts. There are scars on his thighs and more across his back. Bruises from that fight over the plane with the looters. The plane…what if it’s gone? What if someone found it? That damn plane is his last resort if everything continues to go to shit, though he hasn’t gotten as far as where he’d actually go should he decide to use up the little fuel it has left.
If it’s gone, he’ll be stuck in Kansas unless he leaves on foot, and so will Addison.
“We have to go.” He stumbles to his feet and grabs her hand, dragging her down the hall.
“Wyatt, stop. You need to rest, you can’t walk—” She plants her feet and tries to guide him back to bed, completely oblivious to the urgency.
He grabs her by the shoulders, holding her stare and spitting out a frantic warning. “We have to go! If they get the plane, we’ll be fucked! It’s our only chance out of this now, you don’t understand.”
Why is she being so difficult? The dire situation they’re in is plain to see if she would simply take a moment to look.
