End Times VI_Brother's Keeper by Shane Carrow

Author:Shane Carrow [Carrow, Shane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2018-06-01T22:00:00+00:00

December 5

In one sense Matt’s death was like a dam wall breaking because all of a sudden everyone wanted to tell me about their own losses. We never, ever speak about family because everyone knows there is some hurt there, some horrible loss when the world fell apart, before we ever crossed paths with each other. But now everybody decided they wanted to talk to me about it.

Jonas had a daughter, nineteen years old, studying medicine at university in Perth. He hadn’t seen her much in ten years because his ex-wife had won all custody rights. He was resigned to the fact she was probably dead, but he would never be able to know for sure.

Simon had a wife. They’d been married only a year. When things started to fall apart they’d dismissed the contract workers from their farm near Esperance and brought in his parents and her mother from town and stockpiled food and water. Two months in her mother had a heart attack and died and came back and killed both his parents and his wife before Simon could shoot her. Despite the sudden and horrific violence of that terrible day, Simon at least knows – he doesn’t have to wonder, like Jonas does.

Captain Tobias had a wife and two daughters – thirteen and eight. They lived in Lane Cove on Sydney’s North Shore. When the crisis first began and he was sent to Canberra to assist with evacuations to Darwin, then on to Christmas Island, it was not immediately clear that his family would be in any danger; that things were going to get that bad. By the time he knew, it was too late to go back, and in any case I got the impression that he would have chosen duty over family any day – not without anguish, but certainly without consideration. Like Jonas, Tobias has to live with not knowing.

The worst was Jess. Jess knew full well that I knew how her family had died. She came to me with the apparent intention of cleansing Matt’s reputation; of posthumously forgiving him.

“It wasn’t his fault,” she said. “They drugged him. Took him prisoner. It wasn’t his fault.”

“I don’t know why you’re telling me this,” I said.

Her eyes were rimmed red. She had been upset by Matt’s death, far more than I expected given their history. “I just... I know what it feels like,” she said. “To lose family. Especially after coming so far...”

“Please,” I said. “Just... please, just go away.”

She looked at me for a while, and then she left.

Why do they tell me these things? What do they think they’re accomplishing? Sharing their pain isn’t going to lessen mine. And they know that, because they’ve been here, they’ve felt the grief so powerfully overwhelming, so horrible, so real, that you can’t think about anything else. It sits in your stomach and your chest and your throat like a monster bursting out of you. Why do they do it? Why?

Why did he have to die?

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