Tales From the Lake by Kealan Patrick Burke

Author:Kealan Patrick Burke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook, QuarkXPress
Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing
Published: 2022-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

THE STORY OF JESSIE AND ME

Timothy Johnson

The world as we knew it was over. It doesn’t matter how it happened, whether by fire or disease or natural disaster. In truth, it was a little of all those things.

We always thought there would be some kind of sign, a flash of light maybe, the voice of God, something to tell us things would never go back to the way they were. But we had to figure it out for ourselves. Things got bad, and one day, one way or another, we all realized there had been a time when the world was more or less kind. And then it wasn’t.

Jessie and me were together since the high school gymnasium in Joshua. Every day, we got up off our part of the floor, folded our blankets if we were lucky enough to have them, got our rations of boiled water and whatever was coming out of the community pantry that day, and then we waited. We waited for someone to come and make everything all right. The state of the world still seemed temporary. We didn’t know any better.

Months passed. Spring turned to summer. The jets screaming toward Dallas had stopped. At one time, eight different voices on eight different radio stations broadcast reports from all over, and then the last guy on the air, on 1100 AM, was asking if there was even anyone still listening.

In all that time, Jessie and me stuck together, but we didn’t get to know each other too well. We were guarded, and hell, we thought it would all be over soon, and we’d all go back to our lives.

Then, the military came. We had this fence we’d stripped from the baseball fields and put up around the parking lot, and they just plowed right through it in their armored Humvees. We should have known right then and there.

They spread out from their trucks and rounded everyone up, got everyone together beneath the flag pole. The Lone Star was still up, but the Stars and Stripes had been taken down even before the school had turned into a refuge.

The soldiers said they had a camp outside Fort Worth. They had food, water, shelter. We said we already had those things. Those soldiers, most of them no more than boys and girls, gripped their rifles tight. We could see it in their stiff postures, the fear. They weren’t afraid that we might try to hurt them. They were afraid of what they might have to do.

They said they could protect us. Jessie was the one who said we should go because, she knew, our food and water were going with them whether we were or weren’t.

She was good, Jessie. In all the suffering that came on, she was a good thing. She straightened me out and kept me straight. She kept me going. But more than that, she kept me smiling and laughing at times I probably shouldn’t have. And I missed it, how lucky I was.

We went with the soldiers to that camp.

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