Fallout Dreams

miava 03

for the fourteenth time, trevor blasted through the lead door and looked up to the open hatch before whirling around, charging through the maze of shelves and jars, and squeezing between the vertical partition into the light of his computer where—two minutes before—he watched ava vanish into her bedroom, black because of the gifted goddamn paint.

he paced in front of his desk like mia paced the living room. "leave," he said aloud, then opened the music playlist. "leave," he said again, then cranked the volume until he could feel the bass through the brick and rock and steel. "LEAVE."

the girl—the cupcake little girl—had literally trapped herself inside when the only thing he wanted was for her to jump in a car and drive away.

but then she called her fucking boyfriend.

another person poking around.

another person to distract ava and find the hatch and SEE the face of trevor (and if that happened he would be forced to react and his transformation would never be complete).

as trevor checked the hatch for the fifteenth time, he realized the boyfriend might be an advantage...

back through the cellar. back to his desk. he snatched a failed recipe for cherry hooch, flipped it over, and scrawled FIVE WORDS in red marker.

he slipped the note in his pocket.

he grabbed the old silver key from the nail above his desk and slipped it beside the note.

trevor rushed again through the shelves to the storage room door with the padlock and the noose hanging on the spike. he snatched the rope with its century-old fray and duct-taped tail.

one last time he checked the hatch... then twirled a one-eighty and dashed through the tunnel.

the storm grew louder with every step, first on cement, then wood, then dirt, then mud. a brown waterfall cascaded from the shitter above his head. trevor reached through the rapids to find the rope (cut from the same cord as the noose in his hand), then grasped the knots to pull himself through the home's muddy asshole.

the shack swayed but didn't break. trevor trudged past the fire pit and through the woods, grinning in the tempest of dead leaves and horizontal rain. he clenched his chest and grit his teeth and refused, refused, REFUSED to find joy in the crashing clouds and torrential downpour, plodding through puddles without splashing, listening to thunder without busting a nut.

he dashed down the alley between the house and garage then stopped at the porch and crouched. he wound the noose taut around his lefthand glove. he reached in his pocket for the pills...

he forgot them. he forgot the fucking pills.

you're getting rusty, he told himself. but that means you're getting better. it means the last fifty-one weeks haven't been in vain.

most of all, it meant the boy was gonna put up a fight.

* * *

ava took comfort in the pounding music muffled through her thick closet walls.

she dangled her legs in the house's open mouth (does that make the hatch a tongue? she wondered). she opened her journal and scanned her most recent stanzas. she still couldn't call her poems "good," but they certainly weren't the prattlings of a love-sick basket case. they were... mature... and she owed it all to him.

ava closed the leather folds, tied the tie, and returned her journal to her pocket.

the throat was deeper than she expected; fifteen rungs to be exact. she stretched her leg to the first step, plunged into the dark, and leapt to the concrete pad at the base. she tilted her head to the open square, then mouthed the word "goodbye."