The Summer the World Ended (29 page)

“As soon as we get internet, yeah. Thanks.” She crawled up as if to kiss him again, but thought better of it. “Uh… Dad’s in the window.”

She slid back to her seat and opened the door, using one foot and both arms to push the massive thing open. Kieran followed her to the porch. Again, she came close to kissing him, but Dad continued to hover.

“You wanna hit T or C maybe Saturday? Little more to do there than out here.”

She grinned. “Okay. Um… does this mean I’m like, your girlfriend now?”

He shot an appraising glance at the sky. “Do you want to be?”

Riley bit her lower lip, looked down, felt all sorts of weird, and giggled. “Maybe.”

“I’m glad you’re here.”

Mom…
She looked into his eyes. “I’m… uh… I―”

“I know. You’re not glad to be here. That’s not what I meant.”

“I’m glad I met you.”

“Me too.”

Before they could kiss, Dad pulled the house door open. Riley sensed him about to say something mortifying and cut him off.

“He was just leaving, Dad.”

“Mr. McCullough.” Kieran nodded at him. “I’ll stop by… Saturday?”

Dad offered only a blank stare.

“Okay then.” Kieran winked at Riley. “Maybe I’ll see you then.”

“Bye.” She waved.

She didn’t move until his car was an indiscernible speck in the distance. Dad waited a few steps inside the house, startling her with his ‘looming titan’ routine.

“Dad?”

“Put your arms out, legs apart.” He held up a device similar to what security guards waved over people at airports.

“Uh, Dad?”

“Just do it.”

She stood as if frozen in mid jumping jack while he ran the wand up and down her arms, over her fingers, and around her body.

“Okay, you’re clean.”

“What’s that? A ‘did my daughter just have sex’ detector?”

“No, I’m checking for electromagnetic signals.”

“Like a bug?”
Just a little melodramatic.
She let her arms fall against her sides. “Dad, I saw something strange.”

“A clown on a unicycle juggling flaming piglets?”

“I said I saw something strange, not dropped acid.” She wandered to her room. “An army convoy with trucks went through town.”

Riley leaned into the doorway of her room to toss the Xbox game on the bed, intending to get started on supper before doing anything else. When she turned to walk back, Dad was inches away.

She screamed.

He caught her before she fell. “What? You okay?”

“You scared the crap out of me.”

“Sorry. What did you see?”

“Uh, five big trucks with camo stuff on them and Humvees. Looked like they were loaded up with missiles. Lyle said they weren’t supposed to have them anymore, like ‘decommissioned’ or something a couple years ago. Then he said they might have been UAVs.”

Dad went pale again, and wandered to the living room where he paced an erratic figure eight. His lips moved as though he spoke, but he lent no voice to his breath. Riley stood motionless. All the worry she’d felt at the strange sight came back in triplicate. Dad stopped pacing two minutes later, blinked, and looked at her as if he’d forgotten all about what was on his mind.

He smiled. “You seem… happier than you’ve been since you got here.”

That was… messed up.
“I think I have a boyfriend.” She kicked her flip-flops into her bedroom and walked to the kitchen. “I’m gonna try to make tacos tonight.”

Dad chuckled. He headed for his room, but paused by the fridge. “I suppose you’ll have to get used to that food now.”

“He’s not Mexican, Dad. He’s Native American.” She thought about his father. “Well, half.”

“I know. It’s pretty obvious when you look at him.”

Riley skimmed over the directions on the back of the box of taco seasoning. “Yeah, I guess I was thinking about stuff. Can we get a phone?”

“They won’t run a wire out here.”

“What about getting my cellular turned back on?” She grabbed cans of refried beans and a frozen packet of chicken. “I so need to tell Amber about Kieran.”

Dad ducked into his room. “I don’t trust cell phones.
They
can watch you through them.”

“Which ‘they’ are you talking about? The people in the town, the government, or the KGB?”

“Little of column A…” His chair creaked. “Oh, and they’re the FSB now.”

“Seriously?”

“Well, I doubt the townies care. Anyone with the knowhow can tap a phone and watch or listen to everything going on around it. I handle too much sensitive intel for that. Why do you think I live out here in the middle of nowhere?”

Pain in the ass.
“I can’t call her from Kieran’s house… that would be too awkward.”

“Why would that be awkward?”

“Because!”
Geez, he is so clueless.
“I can’t talk about a boy with him right behind me. When is the Internet coming? I suppose I can wait and chat her.”

“Wednesday, remember? Six days.” Dad lowered his voice. “Copy, sir. Go ahead.”

Oh, that’s not too bad.
“Okay. Dinner’ll be ready in like, forty minutes.”

ad went straight to the radio after supper. Despite not having Internet access to get any help from, the tacos came out okay—if a pale shade of what she’d had at Tommy’s. Of course, Dad couldn’t stop going on and on about how amazing they were. She smiled as she packed the dishwasher with plates, forks, and pans. He seemed in a much better mood after eating, maybe he would let her go see Kieran again in the morning. The setting sun made the little window over the sink look more like an oil painting than a view to the outside, and cast the kitchen in a warm shade of orange. Riley wiped down the counter, tossed the cloth into the sink, and went to her room.

The DVD waited where she’d left it. She scored the plastic open with a fingernail, snagged the disc, and popped
The Last Outpost
into her Xbox. She started playing at 7:18 p.m., after an annoyingly long installation finished. The plot centered on a man and his daughter who managed to survive a nuclear apocalypse, and then reemerged in a world full of irradiated zombies. She chose to play the girl, a sixteen-year-old whose non-fatal exposure to a virus had given her some kind of special powers. The ‘Dad’ was all guns and long range while the girl seemed more like an ‘agile melee’ character.

She started with a pair of standard combat knives and a basic crossbow with eight bolts. After an hour and change of creeping through the sewers of a nameless city, she found a crowbar, which the game portrayed as a two-handed weapon. Apparently, the character Lisa was strong enough to knock the shambling enemies twenty meters away on a single hit. Eventually, Riley stopped rolling her eyes at the superpowered heroine, and got into the storyline.

Most of the game revolved around their trying to survive endless hordes of mindless zombies, insane thugs, wild animals, and the harsh environment while making their way to Eden 3, a supposed oasis where civilization had reestablished itself. Lisa also wanted to find and rescue her mother, who had been abducted by one of the wild gangs populating the wasteland. When dialogue revealed Lisa’s mother disappeared when she was fourteen, Riley had to pause the game to gather herself. About forty minutes after eleven, she got up, went to the bathroom, had a cup of water, and trudged back to her bedroom.

Around midnight. That’s when Mom died.

Riley slipped out of her jean shorts, ditched her bra, and put on a knee-length tee shirt. Now comfortable, she stretched out on the floor with a pillow under her chest and grabbed the controller.

The digital teen wanted so desperately to see her mother again, Riley wound up crying right along with her as she begged and begged her dad to risk going after her. Predictably, the father gave in and the two set off on their journey.

Father and daughter split up at several points, giving Riley the sense the girl played as a stealth character while Dad was more of a run and gun type.
This is like Thief and Call of Duty had a baby.
Enough action sequences permeated the somber storyline to let her keep going. Dread built up in her heart that they’d find Mom dead. So far, the game had been that bleak. The Earth, post-apocalypse, looked like a horrible place. Whenever a zombie lunged out of the dense grass around an old warehouse, Riley screamed louder than Lisa. Twice, she died because she fumbled the controller.

I shouldn’t be playing this in a damn dark room.

Sneaking around behind a camp of gangers whitened her knuckles on the controller. A thug in a leather vest and sunglasses spotted her, but a quick sprint to a hiding spot under a semi-truck trailer lost him. She stayed still for three full minutes while ten virtual wild men walked in circles around the truck, unable to find her despite being less than two feet away in the game world. All the while, they joked and taunted about what they’d do to such a sweet young girl. Eventually, the crowd thinned, and Lisa pounced on the only man to remain, killing him from behind and dragging him to the ground as easy as pie.

After clearing the warehouse, a cutscene played where the characters interrogated a dying gang member. Lisa convinced her dad not to execute him, but the thug pulled out a hidden pistol as the two turned their backs to leave, and shot the father. He crumpled to the floor as another combat session began with the ‘boss ganger.’ After she killed him for the second time, more cutscene set up the next mission: Lisa had to escort her wounded father back to their safe house for medical supplies before he died. (She assumed someone playing as the father would be escorting a shot Lisa.)

I wonder how the game would handle co-op here. Not fun to have your character disabled. They probably add an NPC.

In her haste to beat the timed mission, she stepped on an unseen land mine in a field full of stacked concrete sewer pipes, killing them both and sending her back to the ‘load last save point’ screen.

The clock at the bottom of the screen read 1:42 am.

“Damn, it’s late.” She shut down the game and crawled from the floor to the bed.

Riley found herself sitting up in bed, unsure why she was conscious or why her heart raced. She looked around as if in a dream, wide awake and exhausted at the same time. Something crashed at the other end of the house.