Page 30 of The End of the World As We Know It

Corey surrendered, feeling bad in light of his private thoughts on Jared’s demise. “Okay. I’ll hang out a while.”

She brightened immediately, smiling as she took his hand and led him over to the merry-go-round.

As soon as they were within range, the lanky, long-haired male half of the lounging couple reached into the open carton and extracted a dripping-wet can of Bud. He tossed the can at Corey with another casual flip of his hand, sending it sailing through the air on a high, arcing trajectory that forced Corey to jog a few steps to his right and jump to snag it out of the air.

The lanky guy laughed. “He shoots, he scores. Wait, wrong fucking sport. Touchdown. That’s it, right?” He glanced at Corey again, an eyebrow raised as if seeking confirmation that he had it right. “Or whatever the fuck.”

He laughed again.

The guy sounded three sheets to the wind already, and it was only the middle of the afternoon. He shifted around on the edge of the big disk, leaning the back of his head against another of the rails. His eyes were red-rimmed and his hair was greasy, as if he hadn’t showered in days. The other girl hadn’t reacted to Corey’s presence at all yet and was still doing that thousand-yard-stare thing. She wore faded ripped jeans with large holes at the knees, and her fingers kept pulling at the loose threads of one of them, a nervous habit that was steadily making the hole bigger, unraveling the garment strand by strand.

Corey popped open the beer and foam rushed through the opening. He shook the moisture from his fingers and took a sip. “Thanks.”

The lanky guy smirked, his eyes at half-mast as his head lolled to one side. “No prob.”

Kristen said, “Guys, this is Corey Adams. You probably know his sister, Angie.”

A smile came to the lanky guy’s face. “Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Angie fucking Adams. She’s one fine mama jama. You guys live over on Phillips Street, yeah?”

Corey nodded. “Yeah.”

Kristen glanced at him, smirking as she said, “And these future members of Alcoholics Anonymous are Sean Hicks and Rebecca Robinson.”

Corey acknowledged this information with a grunt before taking another, larger sip of beer. The names were unfamiliar to him, not that it mattered. He fully expected to never see any of these people again after today.

Sean Hicks laughed. “An alcoholic I may be, but there ain’t noAA anymore, I’m pretty fuckin’ sure. All the drunks are dying off, just like everybody else. Just like us soon, maybe.”

Rebecca’s gaze came away from the ground for the first time. “Just like me, for sure,” she said, sniffling. “My clock’s already ticking.”

Corey was unable to suppress a wince upon glimpsing the large dark smudges under her eyes, a hideously stark contrast to her milk-white skin. Her eyes were red and her face was shiny with perspiration. Mucus leaked steadily from her nostrils, like water trickling out of a slightly open spigot.

Captain Trips. No fucking doubt about it.

Corey felt a sharp tug of bitter sorrow. “I’m sorry.”

She sneered. “Why the fuck are you sorry? It doesn’t matter. I’m not mad about it. Why would I want to stick around? The world’s gone to shit and this might be my last halfway okay day. So I’m gonna keep drinking and stay fuckin’ wasted as long as I can, and when I bite it, you all can just toss my ass in a dumpster and have a drink in my honor.”

Her brittle tone belied the toughness of her words. She was trying hard to make herself believe she didn’t care, but she was clearly terrified.

Corey took a much larger gulp of beer.

He already wanted to be far away from these people. They weren’t his friends. Their problems weren’t his problems. He felt bad for this girl, but only in the way he’d feel reflexively for anyone on the cusp of enduring the worst stages of the superflu.

Kristen made a sound of profound annoyance. “Stop talking like that, bitch.”

Rebecca looked at her. “Like what?”

Kristen tossed up her hands, a frustrated gesture. “Like you’ve already given up. You might still just have a regular-ass cold. You don’t know. Not yet.”

Rebecca snorted and shook her head, but said nothing.

Corey had the sense they’d already had this same argument many times.

A silence of more than a minute elapsed.

Sean crushed his latest empty and belched as he tossed the can to the ground. “Guess I’m never gonna hear that new Guns N’ fuckin’ Roses album now. Man, I was so looking forward to that.”

He sang a few off-key lines from “Civil War,” a song the band had debuted on a televised live performance at Farm Aid a few months earlier.