Home of the Brave

1.1 Waiting

Anna

It is raining when I wake up. I dive deeper under the covers and their comforting, familiar smell, snuggling my face into the softness of my pillow as I listen to the wonderful sounds of the weather outside. It thunders, and I curl my toes.

I fumble around the bedside table for my giant first generation iPod (a lame relic before the war, now a lifesaving treasure) and when I find it I manage, in my half-asleep state, to get some classical music playing. I sigh a little deeper into my bed. Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor.

Mornings like these make me forget, even for a little while, all that has happened over the past few months. But after a few minutes of bliss I remember, as I always do, that there is more outside my window than the rain. If it rains long enough, I wonder, I hope, maybe it will wash some of the blood in the street away.

"Anna?" my mother calls. "Are you up, sweetheart?"

"No," I shout and pull the covers over my head. I want to stay right here, right in the crook of these pillows listening to Mozart and the pitter-patter of rain on the windowsill and the occasional rumble of thunder.

"Dad is supposed to be coming back today," she reminds me, poking her head through my bedroom door as she opens it.

I sigh. "My hopes aren't up."

"Well, I had to try something to get you out of bed."

"Congratulations, you tried. Duty fulfilled," I grumble, but get out of bed after she shuts the door anyway. My boyfriend, Paul, went with my father on this latest outing, and I can't have them come home to find me bemoaning my existence and hiding in bed. Not when they risked their lives by leaving the house.

"Keep yourself busy," Paul instructed me. "Time goes faster that way. And before you know it I'll be back, alright Mozart?"

And I did keep busy, for a while. But they've been gone for over a week now, and I don't think the apocalypse and its straggling survivors aren't beholden to calendars (sorry, Mayans). Yes, today is the day my dad thought they'd return. But it could just as easily be tomorrow, or the next day...or next week. Or never. It just depends what they saw out there - or who saw them.

Everything collapsed when the war came to America. My house became one of the meeting places for a group of survivors. Right now a few of them – including my dad and Paul – are out trying to find another group we think might be trying to radio us from a few towns over. They are also supposed to try to bring back whatever they can round up in the way of food and supplies. Store shelves were emptied first, early on when the fighting began, and then homes were looted. I have little hope that they will find much of anything to bring back.

No one sane goes outside anymore. The only people who do are soldiers, rebel insurgents, the occasional gang, or just wandering crazy people. And the occasional small band of survivors, like us, moving from camp to camp, making supply trips; but we try to stay put once we found a good, safe spot.

There haven't been soldiers in my neighborhood for a week or so now, but a group appeared a few days after Paul and Dad and the others left, and so we worried maybe they ran into each other.

I go into the bathroom to brush my teeth. It's odd, the things we still do, the things that carried over. Of course we don't have running water anymore, that's been shut off for a long time. When we realized things were turning south, and that we weren't going to be able to leave the country, we made preparations, like filling the bathtub and buckets with water. We didn't know how long to prepare for – how long "it" would last, how long until the war ended, until we were rescued.