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I NEVER THOUGHT ID BE THE LAST ROGERS STANDING. Through the years, I'd thought up numerous different scenarios about how I'd leave this world. Many had nothing to do with the dead, and a whole lot more with my father.
I assumed it wouldn't be premeditated, but it would occur midst a fight. That I'd be trying to defend someone when he was lashing out, and he'd use too much force on me. A blow to the skull—or his hands wrapped around my throat.
I was the only one willing to fight back; it was no surprise he often found me as an opponent.
He was never good at finding someone his own size. But, at least I was closer to his size than Allie was. I had a few feet on her, which meant as long as I was in the house, she was left alone.
I didn't think I'd make it out of those four walls. I pictured the only way my body would be brought out of the house, were if it was closed in a casket.
When the sickness hit, it was my mother who'd been first to go. From all the fists she'd endured, the thing that ended her was a rusted nail. Then fell my father, by my own actions. Allie and I were on our own for months, before she too, eventually joined their hands in death.
I'd tried so hard to protect her—but taking care of a child was no task for another child. I'd done it for years in our own home, though, I wasn't prepared to fend for her and myself in the state our world was viciously thrown into.
Thereupon, left the very last of the Rogers. The girl who'd never expected to survive to adulthood. The only one who'd provoked the household wife-beater, and received the most fists in return. The one who'd thrown herself in front of altercations so that her baby sister and mother were left alone.
As I now sat in the dim train car, I thought back to weeks before she'd died.
We'd been holed up in a tipped over school bus that was abandoned near a gas stop. The entrance and exits were reinforced, so it hadn't mattered much that it was sideways. Sleeping was an entirely difficult story that usually started with discomfort, and ended with waking up stiff and terribly sore.
