Page 38 of Doomsdate

Maisie lets out a startled laugh. “Hey, maces are awesome. Not sure why they ever went out of style, to be honest.”

She leans back on her palms, staring into the fire. After a minute, she says, more quietly, “Growing up, it was just me and my mom. I didn’t go to school, and we lived way out in the country, so I didn’t meet many people. Mom liked it that way.” Her eyes check my reaction, but I keep my face purposefully neutral. The truth is, I’ve been dying to learn more about her past.

“No TV, no movies, no phones, no internet. At times, no electricity, until Mom figured out how to go off-grid with solar. She taught me how to homestead, how to fight, how to read, and all the rest. What I had to learn from elsewhere, though, was that she was not okay.” Maisie breathes out, long and slow. “Mom was always terrified of crime—she was positive that if we lived any closer to town, we’d be robbed, raped, and murdered in minutes. That living among others was tantamount to a death sentence, and you couldn’t trust anybody but yourself. She didn’t fear nuclear war or zombie apocalypses or anything wild like that. She was afraid of people.” Maisie’s eyes have gone distant, her voice calm and strangely detached. “So, when she started seeing things—aliens crawling through our fields, men on horses who only came at night—I knew something was seriously wrong with her, even more so than before.” Her brow forms a solemn ridge as she looks at her hands, then flexes them. “It was schizophrenia, I think.”

“Was?” I ask gently.

Maisie nods. “When I was twenty, Mom died in a gun accident. She was hallucinating and got confused, I guess, and, well.” She pauses to swallow. “I found her barricaded in our storm cellar. Suddenly my whole world was gone, and I…I was completely lost without her. She taught me so much, but almost nothing about how the world outside our farm worked. I was so scared, going into town by myself that first time. Even knowing that my entire worldview had been shaped by someone with profound mental illness, it’s hard to unlearn that distrust, you know? Took me a few years, but eventually I got my GED, went to college, and got a job.”

“Calculating the actual risks of bad things happening,” I say, understanding flowing through me. “Oh, Maisie.”

She meets my gaze this time and holds it. “I’ve had to undo a lot of my programming. Actuarial science helps with that.”

It explains a lot. Not only her differences, but also how she seems to know exactly what to do out here, as though survival itself is a well-trained muscle she flexes easily.

“That’s why you’re so calm in the middle of all this madness.”

She cocks her head to the side. “I guess I’ve always been waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s almost a relief that it has. I can stop waiting, you know? I have a right to be afraid of other people now. The worst has happened. I’ve done my best to be ready for it, and so far, it’s enough.”

More than enough. Amazingly enough. And here I am, a professor of television, of media, of horror movies and comedies and all the fat on the bones of American existence that’s been immediately trimmed off since the apocalypse. She builds fires from scratch, and I make PowerPoints about my favorite zombie movies. I scrub my face with my palms and groan.

“What is it?”

“I’m so completely useless to you.”

“No, you’re…not,” Maisie says awkwardly.

“I am. I’m a burden, I’m utterly helpless out here without you, and I definitely eat way too much. Plus, I brought my cat.”

“Hey, your cat’s the best part.” Maisie pulls one of my hands down, holds it in hers, squeezes. It lasts a second, maybe less, but it sets my body ablaze. Her mouth quirks up into a smile. “And you’re not useless, just…survival-challenged. You’re learning. Give yourself some grace.”

I wish I could, but feeling helpless and useless is a form of self-hatred long seeded in my soul. It started when my parents disowned me for going to film school to pursue a totally “worthless existence” instead of West Point. Their rejection of who I am at my core simmered for the next fifteen years, but all those feelings went nuclear when Louise got sick. There was nothing I could do to stop the progression of her disease or the brutal way it brought her down. The bland food I’d cook, she couldn’t eat. The outings I planned, she was too weak for. The film festivals I orchestrated on our bedroom TV, she dozed in and out of, popcorn untouched. She slipped through my fingers, claimed by a higher, stronger power, and I couldn’t even drive her to appointments. I lost my taste for everything I loved when she died—food, travel, TV. It all seemed so pointless when there was nothing I could do to stop the woman I loved from leaving me. And now it hits me all over again, that feeling of not being enough when it matters, or where it counts.

“Besides,” she says, carefully avoiding my gaze, “you did help me today.”

“How have I possibly helped you?”

“You helped me leave. Durham was only the second place I’ve ever been, after my mother’s homestead.” Maisie’s voice is light, but her eyes are forlorn. “The thought of leaving was terrifying to me this morning, almost debilitating. Even though I’ve always, always wanted to be brave enough to travel, I’m just—not. But now you’re with me, and here we are. The farthest I’ve ever been.”

“What about New York?” I nudge her with my shoulder. “You’d bought a ticket to go there.”

She looks down at her hands. “I was never going to get on that plane.”

“Hey, you don’t know that.” I itch to wrap my arms around her in a hug, then maybe cry softly into her hair. I don’t know. I’m really confused right now.

She sighs, her breath making small bursts of fog in the cold coming night. “I wish I’d had more time. In the real world, I mean. I feel like I just got there, and there’s still so much I don’t know, or never experienced. And now I’m headed right back to a goddamn bunker.”

“To live with your grandfather?”

Maisie huffs. “Gramps isn’t my actual grandfather. He’s a prepper I met online, but he’s all I have. My only friend, my only family.” She kicks her boot against the ground. “I’ve never even had a boyfriend.”

“So…you really are a virgin?” I feel a blush rising in my cheeks.

Why did I ask that?

Maisie cuts her eyes to me. “Our date got further than any other one yet, but it ended the same as the others. I freak everyone out. Everyone runs away.”

“You didn’t freak me out. Your armory did.”