Page 136 of The End of the World As We Know It

Through the flames of fear and suffering, Elise found something unexpected: hope. Some higher power had pressed society’s reset button. Everything would be different from here out. If ever there was a time for a new beginning, this was it.

Again, she went to Jason. Surely now he’d see reason. He’d avoided getting sick, but had woken up that morning—the last day of June—with a light fever and a cough. Just a smoker’s cough, he’d said, but it sounded wetter.

“It’s a ghost town out there. It’s scary.” Elise normally addressed Jason with her hands behind her back and her head lowered, like some chastened nineteenth-century daughter. Now she stood with her hands on her hips and her shoulders flared. “Half the stores on Main Street have closed down. The other half have been looted.”

“I know.” Jason sat at the kitchen table with his Hardballer stripped and laid out in front of him, cleaning the individual parts with a soft white rag.

“Big Wheel’s closed, too. Buddy Stagg died this morning.”

“I heard.” Jason picked up the slide and ran his rag back and forth, inside and out, with a tenderness she didn’t see often. “Poor ol’ Buddy. He was good to me.”

“You don’t have a job anymore,” Elise said. “Not a legal one, anyway.”

“Mmhmm.”

“There’s nothing here for us, Jason. We need to put El Centro in the rearview.” Elise took a deep breath. She didn’t like the way her chest tremored. “We need to find people… opportunities. We need to start again.”

“Agreed,” Jason said, and stifled a cough with the back of his hand.

Elise shook her head as if she’d misheard, but no, Jason showed his teeth in a good way. She asked again, just to be sure.

“You agree?”

“I do.”

“Oh, baby.” All the tension went out of Elise’s chest. She stepped around the table, peeled a curl of hair off Jason’s warm brow, and kissed him there. “You don’t know how happy I am to hear that.”

“Mmhmm.”

“I was thinking… Now, I know it’s a long way, but hear me out… I was thinking Nebraska.” She didn’t tell him about the dreams. If he knew that she’d suggested the Cornhusker State on the back of several (albeit vivid) dreams, he would shoot the idea down faster than a cat could lap chain lightning. “We could get a little farm, maybe, grow our own vegetables. I heard that—”

“Nebraska?” Jason slid the clean barrel into the clean slide and put these finished pieces to one side. “Why the fuck would I ever want to go to Nebraska?”

Elise stepped back with one hand to her chest. The tension had returned, just like that. He’d saidI, not we. Why the fuck wouldIever want to go to Nebraska?He was thinking of himself, and only himself, the same as always.

“I just… I’ve got a good feeling about it, is all,” Elise said. “A good feeling forus. Me and you. A better life.”

“Yeah, well…” Jason coughed against the back of his hand again. “Heck’s got a good feeling about Vegas.”

“HeckDrogan? Oh, baby, no. Not him.” She shook her head and fought back tears. “That’s not the new beginning we’re looking for.”

Jason looked at her, his smile subtly different, displaying his teeth in a less appealing way. “And Nebraska is? Up there with the hicks and cows? Call me crazy, but I think we’re better suited for Vegas. And it’ll for damn sure be more fun.”

Fun? The world had been knocked on its ass and he was thinking about havingfun.

“You don’t get it, Jason.” Elise put her hands on her hips again. She’d managed to keep the tears from spilling onto her cheeks, but there was so much disappointment in her voice. “It’s not El Centro I want us to get away from. It’s thelife.These negative influences, the cocaine runs, the crime. Vegas will be no different. Jesus, it’ll be worse. A thousand times worse.”

“We’ll be king and queen.”

“We won’t. We’ll be two rats in a city full of them.”

Jason started to say something, but broke off into a wild coughing fit, his chest and shoulders pumping, his face turning eggplant. He lifted the rag to his mouth and spat a gristly plug of phlegm into it. “Good Christ,” he said, and then, “It’s you who doesn’t get it, Elise. You think you’re better than all this, but you’re not. Never have been. Never will be.”

“Don’t say that.”

“You can’t escape this life.”

“That’s not true.”