It would take us a long time to get there—longer than I’d even realized at first. The building had an elaborate roof garden with a saltwater pool. Early on we rigged a ladder to get up there, and thanks to a retiree with an odd penchant for collecting seed packets, we were able to plant a vegetable patch that was pretty successful.
But on that first morning at the Overlook there was this moment when I was standing on the balcony with Nicky and the rising sun hit the pink-tinted windows of an apartment building a few blocks south. And suddenly, everything around us turned rosy; the world became soft and beautiful.
Nicky pulled me down into the chair next to her and she tilted her head back and I did the same. “When you only look at the sky,” she whispered, “it’s like nothing’s changed.”
And she was right. The wall of the balcony blocked the chaos below—I could no longer see the wrecks or the carnage. In that rose-tinged heartbeat, there existed a flutter of hope. I could see it in Nicky’s eyes—that what she’d said earlier wasn’t really true. Being the hopeful survivor wasn’t just a role. She didn’t believe in giving up, which is something I wouldn’t come to fully understand until much, much later, when her raw-ribbed chest rattled and wheezed.
I’d come onto the balcony that morning to give her the chance to circumvent it all: change her decision and choose a new path. She could fly over the railing or take the elevator down to the main level or find any other number of ways to determine her own ending.
All I could see were the ways our world had fallen apart, but somehow Nicky had found a way to show me that in some respects it was still the same, and it could be beautiful.
At the very end she would take it all back, of course. When death was no longer a promise but a pressing reality, I asked her if she regretted this dawn-inspired commitment to survival. Her answer had been a simple yes. That if she’d had it to do over again, knowing that rescue would never come, she’d have killed herself on that first morning.
And then she was gone and it was just me. The only one who’d never really hoped. The one who’d never seen the Overlook as some sort of waiting room before life resumed as it had once been. The one who understood that our world hadn’t been put on pause but shifted into a new reality and that days would continue to come and go, piling on one another as they always had.
I’d known from the beginning what Nicky had understood only at the very end. But just because I’d seen the truth from day one didn’t mean I needed to force her and the others to see it too. Because there’s something I learned in that sliver of pink sunrise: we all come into the world knowing we’re going to die. And maybe I’d figured out that our death would come sooner and it would come harder, but that didn’t make it any more or less inevitable.
And it didn’t mean there wasn’t something worthwhile about those days in between—the good and the bad of them. The kisses and the fights and the fears and the laughter. I was done with fearing death and I was done with fearing regret. I’d made my choices. Maybe they’d been the wrong ones, but I intended to live them to the end.
Eric Gregory
The kid didn’t have a feed. He glanced over his shoulder and scratched the back of his head, and I saw there was nothing in his neck. You didn’t find many folks without feeds in the city. Right away, I knew he’d brought me a problem. “I’m looking for Ez,” he said, and I said yeah, I was him.
He looked relieved then lowered his voice. “And you’re a guide?”
I wiped grease on the front of my jeans, closed the hood of the 4Runner, and gestured for the kid to follow me. He took the hint, nodding with absurd gratitude, and I led him down past the line of old rigs, all waiting to be stripped. Across the yard, someone cranked up a saw.
“Who gave you my name?” I asked.
“Guy called himself Coroner.”
“You don’t want to talk to him again.”
The kid gave a sad sort of smile. “No. I really don’t.”
He wasn’t the roughneck sort who usually came around looking for a guide. Right age, maybe: Seventeen, eighteen. But the boy had a pressed, conservative look to him. Skinny, clean-shaven, all done up in slacks and suspenders and a white, sweaty shirt. I didn’t know what to make of him, and I didn’t like that I didn’t know.
“You from around here?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, sir. Lynchburg.”
“Nice town,” I lied. Hive of fanatics. “How long you been here, then?”
“Not quite a day.”
“And you already want to go outside.” I grinned. “Jesus.”
It wasn’t much cooler in the office, but there was beer and shade. The kid settled onto my ratty, floral-print sofa, and I opened two Yanjings, thinking maybe he was used to the fancy stuff. I still couldn’t get a fix on him, but he dressed like a big spender. He folded his arms and crossed his legs at the knee, glancing at the old gas station signs on the wall.
“What do I call you?” I said.
He frowned into his beer. “P. K.”
“All right, P. K. You want to tell me about your deathwish?”
He shook his head.
“No deathwish. I just want to see my old man again.”
My turn to frown. “Your old man.”
“Yessir. He’s outside.”
I slid my bottle across the desk, back and forth from one hand to the other.
“How far outside?”
“Cherokee North. Between here and Johnson City.”
“That’s a lot of forest.”
He shrugged.
Some guides don’t like to get nosy. Take the job, don’t ask questions. Lot of those guides develop a nasty case of dead.
“You want my help,” I said, “you’re going to have to tell me what he was doing there.” If Coroner had sent him, I didn’t have many choices here, but maybe the boy didn’t know that. He nodded, answered without hesitation.
“We were out harrowing.”
Christ, I thought. And then: Of course—P. K.: Preacher’s Kid. Should’ve caught that earlier. I finished off the Yanjing, then opened the cooler and unscrewed a jar of whiskey. I’d heard of harrowers before, but never met one alive.
“You were with him,” I said.
“Yessir.”
“He preaches, you shoot. That how it works?”
The kid looked embarrassed. “I haven’t learned to bless yet.”
“And you got separated?”
He inclined his head. “Pack of wolves surprised us. We were running, and my father—” He paused. “He fell. Over a ledge. I saw him roll, heard him call out, but the slope sharpened and—I didn’t see where he landed. I searched until sundown. I love my father, but—” he pursed his lips “—but I’m not stupid.”
“You did right.” I leaned forward. “But you understand he’s dead.”
The boy was silent.
“I ain’t gonna sell you false hope. Your daddy’s gone. I’ll take your money, I’ll take you out there, and I’ll help you make whatever amends you want to make. But I want us both to understand what’s going on here. I don’t want any confusion between us. You have to show me that you know we’re not going to find him smiling.”
“I have to find him,” he said. “I know the odds.”
I wasn’t sure he did. “I ain’t cheap. And I ain’t stupid either.” I told him the deposit. “I need to see triple the advance in a credit account, and I need the account linked to my feed. In the event of my death, the triple transfers automatically to my family.”
Little joke, there. Family.
“That’s fair,” he said. “And if I die?”
“We link your feed to my account. The deposit transfers back.”
He shook his head. “I don’t have a feed.”
I’d forgotten. Mark of the Devil. I smiled through a stir of jealousy. The little metal nub in my neck let me work in the city, let me spend and collect credit, but mostly it just felt like a warm seed of debt, always itching beneath my skin, waiting for me to die or default, always threatening to grow.
“We can go to my credit agency and set up a timed withdrawal from my account,” I said. “If you’re not around to cancel it in three days, the advance’ll transfer to the account of your choice.”
He nodded. “Works for me.”
“I think we understand one another, P. K.” I took the Colt from my drawer, set it on my desk. The old, faded sticker on the grip said
Keep Asheville Weird.
“If you got the yuan, I got the yeehaw.”
And just like that, we were in business.
No one ran outside the law in Asheville without owing money to Coroner. He found you when you were down, desperate, earthless. He fed you, paid your rent. If you wanted to be a guide, he made it easy: Set you up as a company mechanic, pulled all the right bureaucratic triggers to assign you to truckers on his payroll, to divert shipping routes. Last Christmas, he’d bought me a suit of skintight armor straight out of Cupertino. Sometimes it was hard to figure out where the companies ended and Coroner began, but it was absolutely clear who owned you.
Coroner had placed me and Xin Sun together so often that I could tell you her granddaddy’s favorite singer (Johnny Cash) and the city where her mama was born (Raleigh). She was short, wiry, somewhere in her forties, with a line of faded hearts tattooed around her wrist. Her rig was a behemoth, a messy cross between a Humvee and an old furniture truck. I sat in the cab, behind the old automatic rifle mounted on the hood. P. K. huddled in the cargo crawlspace with the liquor.
Xin caught my eye as she eased toward the gate. “You’re a bad person, Ez.”
“Yeah?”
“The daddy’s gone,” she said. “Boy don’t need to see that.”
“I told him. He can make up his own mind.”
She shook her head, scratched her neck. “He’s green as shit. The dead on the moon can see it. You ought to know better.”
“He’s shot his share of dead. He don’t need a mama, Xin.”
She stared straight ahead, gripped the wheel.
Asshole,
said the silence.
The traffic light changed, and Xin eased forward again. Bluecoats crowded around us with rifles and pads. My feed ran hot, so I could almost feel their fingers in the back of my neck, sifting through my licenses and permissions, my employers and outstanding debts. The bluecoat captain read through our manifest while his grunts looked over the cargo. Xin ignored me, and I tried not to touch my gun or crack my knuckles or otherwise announce that I was scared turdless. I listened to the clang of footsteps in the back and wondered what the kid was thinking, hidden down there with the liquor.
The footsteps in the back receded. The door slammed shut, and the captain waved us on. I tipped an invisible hat and Xin told him to have a good one.
The gate opened, and we drove outside.
There’s something about leaving a city that makes you want to get drunk and scream. You ride out into the emptiness of the frontier and you can feel the weight of gazes falling away with every mile. Debts, shopping centers, manifests—all that headsmoke recedes until it’s just you and the quiet, the clouds wrapped around road-carved mountains. I watched the trees as we rode out: The leaves were only just tinged with orange. Ahead, the Interstate wound through the broad swells of the Blue Ridge, all steep slopes and sharp drops. If you rode fifteen miles outside of Asheville, you could hardly tell that anyone had ever bothered to live on the mountains. Even the billboards were scarce and choked by kudzu.
“Want to let him out?” said Xin.
“Guess I ought to.”
I pulled myself out of the gunner’s seat, grappled my way to the back and ducked past stacked pallets marked in Portuguese, Italian, Chinese. All the world’s shit packed up in crates. You couldn’t see much by the emergency lights, and as often as I’d navigated Xin’s rig, they packed it a little different every time. I pushed a box of canned soup off of the hidden door, rapped three times, waited, rapped again. I heard the door unlatch from his side, and I pulled it open. P. K. stared out from the crawlspace, his arms crossed over his chest like an old-fashioned corpse, mason jars shifting slightly around him. He was red-faced, his hair sweat-wet against his forehead.
“Thank you,” he breathed.
I offered my hand. “Everything all right down there?”
He blinked. “Are we out?”
“Yessir.”
I helped him up, guided him to the front. “Have a sit-down,” I said, waving him into the gunner’s seat. Xin glanced over her shoulder and smiled at the boy.
“Hope you didn’t sample the whiskey,” she said. Gently, teasing. “I don’t want Coroner to come knocking.”
He flushed. “No, ma’am. I don’t drink.”
I tried not to imagine Coroner at my door.
Xin laughed. “That so? You’re either wise or insane. Not sure which.”
“Out here,” P. K. ventured, smiling nervously, “I think it’s for the best.”
“Out here, you may be right.”
On the side of the road, empty signs. Words scraped and weathered away. A lone dead woman, one-armed and skeletal, limped along the side of the road, stumbling now and then into the guardrail, threatening to tumble over and down into a far hollow. Xin and P. K. fell silent, and I watched the sky for birds.
I still couldn’t work out what Coroner was trying to say, sending me this job. When I’d called to line up the ride, I asked about the kid, but the minder only told me that the operation was important to the boss. “Make sure the boy and his daddy come back with you,” he’d said. “Finish the job, you’ll be fine.”
Coroner wasn’t an idiot—he knew the preacher was dead by now. Was he trying to play the kid for money? That didn’t make sense; this was small change for him. He wanted the job done, but I didn’t understand why. I didn’t know the stakes, didn’t understand what I stood to lose.
Xin braked hard, lashing me out of my thoughts.
I barely caught myself from toppling headfirst into the windshield. Ahead, an eighteen-wheeler lay on its side, its head curled into the median and its ass blocking half of the Interstate, splayed out like a sleeping cat. The semi’s rear turret was shredded, the cow-catcher banged up and twisted into bad art. Gathered around the cab was a cluster of red bears—dead, from the look of them—ripping the skin from the rig. In unison, the bears looked up from their work.
Some people call dead eyes dull, but I’ve never understood that. You look the dead in the eyes, you see the judgment.