Rare Air
Part Five
"No one who has lived through these last few years has survived without a story to tell. Yeah, none of us were boring or everyday anymore. That statement alone is horror."
"Kelly and Drew, they were my friends and comrades. My compatriots as our apartment complex days grew short and it came time for us to join the bewildered world of refugees."
"I don’t really know what to say about either of them now. Kelly was in her twenties, she worked security for Amazon downtown before the world went completely to shit. Drew was in his thirties and had a desk job that involved software development. He kept telling me it sounded more hip that it was and when I finally cornered him on the particulars he was right. He made it sound like he was a less interesting version of a garbage collector. I’m not sure how you make an eight-hour day out of fixing other people’s fuck ups and manage to stay sane but he did, I guess that mindset alone helped him in our new world."
"Not much of anything helped me besides having the two of them around. We saw and did things that I find myself reflecting on and being totally unable to associate with. I was there, I saw them, I did them. It just didn’t feel real and as time kept going by between those awful incidents it became easy to play that game with myself."
"This plague, this fucking thing, it’s unpredictable and it made all of us xenophobic to some degree. You found or made your little tribe and that was that. The three of us were some of the last ones to join in with the others as they tried their hand as civilized society 2.0 around the base of the mountain."
"Some of the refugees, especially the ones who were already there when we arrived, they were naïve. Some believed the calvary was on the way, we heard a lot of “just wait until Summer” and that turned into “wait until Fall.” The three of us agreed not to tell those sorts of people about our experiences on the road. Even as other more uh, seasoned, refugees arrived we just sort of stuck out like three sore thumbs."
"When the locals at the campground started sorting out jobs for their new, sad little fiefdom; and I shit you not, names went into fucking hats, they decided that there were two titles that needed more consideration. A rather heated debate and following vote came around for mayor of Nothingsville, sheriff though. No one voted. A few people pointed at me and I pointed at Kelly and that was that."
"Kelly forced Drew and I to accept the titles of deputy. I could be exclusive and say that sealed out fate but the reality is we were already ghosts. You don’t seal fate for shades."
"Kelly never took no for an answer and she took shit from no one. She wasn’t one of those “watch out for my bad days” people or one of those “my way or the highway” types either. Kelly was fair, honest, and those qualities meant the most to her in others. She did most of the heavy lifting as your standard idea of police work went. Drew pretty much became the camp quartermaster, his gift for numbers, fixing other people’s fuck ups, and his ability to shrug off the bad attitudes of others really shined there. "