Sacrifice
Page 53

But the biggest surprise for Michael had been the quiet. Tyler’s apartment didn’t have four teenage boys banging doors or stomping up stairs or blasting music or roughhousing in the living room. Tyler’s apartment was his.
“Sorry my place isn’t a thrill-a-minute.” Tyler gestured at the television. “Watch TV or something if you’re bored.”
Bored. Was that what this was? Michael couldn’t remember the last time he’d been bored. If he wasn’t actively doing something, he was usually sleeping.
“What do you Merricks usually do?” said Tyler.
“They go to school,” said Michael. “I work. You know that.”
Tyler was silent for a moment. He sat back in his chair and balanced a pencil between his fingers. “What are you going to do about the landscaping stuff?”
“I don’t know.” Michael looked back at his list. “I need my laptop so I can call people. I don’t even know what jobs I had lined up this week. I know my regulars, of course, but it doesn’t matter. I can’t pull a trailer on my shoulders.” He tried to guess how many people would drop his service if he canceled this week. He didn’t want to think about it too hard—especially since they were coming into winter.
“If you can drive me to class, you can take my truck during the day,” said Tyler.
Michael almost snapped, but he reminded himself that Tyler wasn’t setting him up to watch him fall. Even so, he didn’t like feeling obligated to someone who once would have used it against him. “Thanks.” He paused. “It’s going to depend on whether I can get access to my stuff.”
“You want to go see?”
“Hunter said he and Adam were stopped at the end of the road.”
“Yeah, but it’s your house. You don’t think you can flash some ID and get access?”
“I don’t know,” said Michael.
“So I’ll ask you again.” Tyler leaned in against the table. “You want to go see?”
No cop car sat at the end of the cul-de-sac, but yellow sawhorses blocked the pavement and declared that the road was closed.
They still had a pretty clear view of the damage that had been done.
Tyler blew out a breath. “Holy shit.”
In the bright light of day, everything looked worse than Michael remembered. Family homes turned to nothing more than piles of charred lumber and rubble—with the exception of his own, which stood alone, dark and smoke damaged. The pavement had buckled in places, sometimes severely, and the sidewalk had the appearance of a shattered pane of glass, with broken lines scoring the surface. Beyond the homes, he could see downed trees along the edge of the woods. It looked like the set of a post-apocalyptic movie, not the barren shell of the neighborhood he’d grown up in.
He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to see this.
Tyler took his foot off the brake, and for an instant, Michael wondered if he’d spoken the words aloud, if Tyler was going to turn the truck around.
But no, Tyler pulled up on to the fractured sidewalk and drove around the barriers. They rocked and swayed with the motion of the truck moving across the broken pavement, and Tyler stopped at the top of the loop, just at the end of the Merrick driveway.
“Do you want me to drive all the way up to the house?” he said.
“No.” Michael swallowed.
“Do you want me to leave you here to have a good cry?”
“Shut up, Tyler.” But the words hit their mark. Michael unbuckled his seat belt and pushed the door open.
Nausea hit him as soon as his feet touched the ground. He had to hold on to the door for a moment.
Tyler stopped by the front of the truck. “You all right?”
“Yeah.”
But he wasn’t. A lot of people had died here. He didn’t just know it. He could feel it. The emotion, the energy, the memories and terror and destruction, all trapped in the ground.
He remembered a school field trip to Antietam back in eighth grade, during a class unit on the Civil War. He’d stepped off the bus and almost puked on Annabel Scranton. The entire day was a hazy memory, but it was the longest six hours of his life. He’d never been more relieved than when he was allowed to climb back on the bus for the ride home.
He’d thought he was getting the flu or something until they were driving down the highway and all the queasiness disappeared. He mentioned it to his parents that night over dinner, and his father had put down his fork and told Michael to grab his coat.
They’d gone to an old cemetery at the edge of town.
Michael had been glad he hadn’t eaten much dinner.
It had been one of the first signs that he was going to be far more powerful than his father ever had been.
He let go of the truck. “Come on.”
The still silence pressed down on Michael as they walked. His street was never silent in the middle of the day. Too many kids, too many cars, too many lives. Now there was nothing.
“Can you feel it?” said Tyler, his voice almost hushed.
“Yeah.” Michael glanced over. “How did you know?”
“I feel something too. From the fires.” He made a face as if he smelled something distasteful. “I don’t like it.”
Michael expected the front porch steps to flex and shift under his weight, but the wood was strong, though he could see a few panels farther down had cracked and split—whether from the earthquake or the fire, he had no idea.