The Last Goodbye - Part 1
“Of fuckin’ course.” Kenny sighed, looking out over the city’s brutalized skyline with his one good eye. Backlit by the orange-red glow of the sun stooping below the horizon in the West, he could still make out the tremendous damage the buildings had suffered since the beginning of the plague. Some of them had been damaged by fighting, some by lack of maintenance and the wrath of Mother Nature. Some buildings were gone entirely. Collapsed, most likely, he thought as he trudged down the cracked and crumbling street.
The city had certainly looked better, he thought to himself, but the memory of that lively metropolis was almost less than a shadow in his mind now. That had been a different world. A better world.
The street was lined with the rusted hulks of stripped cars and charred bodies, some of them still moving as he walked quietly past, pitifully attempting to claw at his heels even though very few of them could rise to their rotting feet in time to give pursuit. The houses around him were disheveled heaps of junk and debris that looked more like corpses themselves than places where people used to live. The shattered windows and splintered, blood caked doors beckoned to him in the fading evening light with the false promise of shelter from the gusting wind and the dark clouds on the Eastern horizon, but he refused to spare more than a cursory glance at any of them even though each step he took became more difficult than the last. They were tombs, all of them, housing nothing more than the preserved remains of their owners’ final terrified moments.
It had been a faint hope, he knew, that Fort Lauderdale would have managed to hold off the end of the world. But seeing it like this was more painful than he expected. A lifetime of memories was buried here under the city’s shattered remains.
Finally he spied his destination. A small second wind came over the beleaguered fisherman just when he felt the last of his strength failing and pushed him forward the final hundred feet or so to his home. He hadn’t lived here for years but in his heart this home would always be his and Katjaa’s. It seemed to have held up remarkably well in comparison with the rest of the city, though admittedly that wasn’t a difficult bar to meet. Like the rest of the homes in the neighborhood his had suffered damage. The windows were gone and the door was smashed inward, hanging off a single hinge. The front face of the house had been thoroughly worked over by some crazed gunman with dozens of bullet holes visible from the ground all the way to the roof. Old, dry bloodstains were encrusted on the porch and its overhang with a few piles of spent shell casings lying beside them. A scene he had stumbled over a hundred times over on his trek back South, but one that had never been personal until now.
He pushed some of his graying hair away from his one good eye and strode toward the door. “Let’s see what’s left,” he said aloud to himself. He was careful as he stepped inside the darkened home and closed the damaged door softly behind him, making sure that the final hinge holding it in place wouldn’t break. He found the living room in a similar state to the exterior. Glass shards were littered all over the dirty carpet, a field of tiny razors for anyone unlucky enough to step into it without shoes. The television was on its side with the screen smashed in. The couch that once sat against the wall opposite the TV was overturned and torn to shreds. Directly ahead of him was the entrance to the hallway that led to the bedrooms and to the right was the door-less entrance to the kitchen, also connected to the hallway behind the living room.
It was still light enough outside that the setting sun was able to illuminate the dim interior of the house. He estimated that he had about an hour left before it became too dark to see but his objective wouldn’t take long to complete. He made his way into the hallway and took the left turn toward the master bedroom. The floorboards creaking under his feet was the only noise in the air. The graveyard city was silent. In the past he had tuned out the buzzing of the city and its life, confining it to a warm background hum that he had usually been able to ignore even though it was always there. Katjaa had called that sound the “White Noise of Civilization,” but it was a concept that had gone over his head until now. He always told himself he preferred the silence of the ocean to the bustling of the suburbs but the absence of that white noise seemed louder than anything he had ever heard.
The door to the bedroom opened without a struggle. Aside from a broken window and an overturned lamp the only major upset in the room was the body lying on the bed. She was a young woman. Her arms were covered in aged bite marks and dried blood. Kenny guessed that there were at least half a dozen that he could see and probably even more than he couldn't. The gun in her hand and the dark bloodstains on the pillow beneath her told the rest of the story. She had chosen not to turn.
The scene was almost peaceful in the low light. It was almost enough to hide the blood and the bites.
He took the gun from her hands and checked the clip. It one bullet short of a full magazine. Kenny paused as memories of peaceful nights with Katjaa flooded his thoughts before shaking them out of his head and dropping to his aching knees with a grunt. He took a small look under the bed where everything was obscured in shadow except the outline of an old musty photo album. He retrieved it and stepped toward the door, closing it behind him as gently as he had opened it, and made his way down the hall and into the kitchen.
The kitchen was in a similar state to the rest of the house. The glass sliding door to the backyard was both open and smashed in, for some reason, and the glass shards cracked under his shoes as he walked to the liquor cabinet in the corner of the kitchen. He swung the door open to find a single bottle left, unopened and untouched. He took it with his free hand and limped to the kitchen table where he put down the photo album, pulled up a chair, opened the bottle, and flipped the book open.
The pictures inside were only a little faded with very little damage and Kenny quietly thanked God, or whatever power still existed, that at least this had been mostly spared from the city’s destruction. The album was nearly full. Each page bore more memories than the last, and each photo he saw was like another knife to the chest.
Him and Katjaa at their wedding, exchanging vows and putting on their rings.
A year later the two of them standing on the deck of the first boat he ever owned himself with bright faces full of hope and excitement for the future.
Then the first picture of Duck, such a small baby. Then his first birthday, and his next and his next.
“You were such a good boy, Duck.”
He reached the final page faster than he thought he would and examined the single photo there. It took him a few seconds to remember it because it hadn’t really been a special occasion when it was taken. Kat had just felt like taking a picture when all of them were together before their big trip. They were on the deck of his boat on a sunny day, less than a mile off the coast, all facing toward the camera. Kenny was smiling in the middle, his signature hat keeping the sun away from his eyes, and he reached up to adjust his real hat out of habit. His hand was halfway there before he realized he didn’t have it anymore. It was gone. Like so many other things.
In the picture Duck’s smile beamed brighter than it ever had as Kenny’s hand rested on the boy’s shoulder, so full of energy he could hardly stand still. And on the other side of Kenny was Kat, holding the hand he had wrapped around her waist and giving her own smile, small and soft, but so welcoming and caring. The spitting image of a happy family. It had been taken a week before they left Fort Lauderdale for the last time.
He slipped that picture out of the album and stood, leaving the book on the table and picking up the now half empty bottle. Checking the gun he took from the woman again, ensuring the safety was off, he stuffed the picture in his jacket pocket and walked out the back door with his sights set firmly on the ocean.
The sun was even lower now as he strode toward the marina, plunging the orange sky into a deepening purple sprinkled with the far off twinkling of stars. Kenny was swaying as he took another drink from the bottle and fell forward through the door of the marina’s registration office, catching himself on the reception desk at the last moment. He hoisted himself up, groaning with the effort, and determined that his balance issues could be solved with another drink, one way or another, and took a deep swig. He slipped again and the frayed bandage over his eye came loose. He managed to keep upright more or less thanks to the support from the desk even as the bandage fell away from his face. He cursed a few times, as was natural for him, as he stooped down to the floor in search of it. A small stinging sensation shot through his demolished eye socket.
He found the bandage after a minute of fumbling for it and stood as straight as he could again. He grabbed a roll of flimsy masking tape from the desk, rationalizing that it was better than nothing and he needed something to fasten his bandage back together. A mirror on the wall to his left had remained in decent shape bearing only a small crack in the lower right corner and a layer of dust and grime obscuring his reflection which he wiped away with his sleeve.
He wrapped his bandage again in silence as he looked at his reflection, taking it all in. Oddly enough he hadn’t really “seen” himself after the beating Carver gave him. He fished around in his jacket pocket and brought the photo he took from his house out, along with another picture he’d forgotten was there. He held the picture of himself, Kat, and Duck up with a shivering hand. His eye darted from the happy man in the photo to the scarred, one-eyed killer glowering back at him from the mirror. His vision settled on the photo after a few minutes, staring slack-jawed at the ignorant, unchanged man in the center, eyes wide with joy under the brim of his orange hat. Kenny taped the picture to the upper right corner of the mirror and kept looking at the happier image of his past life. “Who the fuck was that guy?”
He looked at the second picture in his pocket, the one he’d forgotten about. It had been with him for months, languishing in the pit of his pocket as his life had come apart all over again. Unlike the photo he'd taken from his house this was was creased in several places and faded, but he recognized the ski lodge instantly. The photo had been taken at Walter’s insistence a few weeks before his reunion with Clementine.
The photo showed the four of them sitting on the couch in front of the fireplace as snow came down in sheets just outside the window. Matthew was on the far left, grinning one of the dumb grins he always had and making a peace sign toward the camera. Next to him was Walter, with his arm around Matthew’s waist pulling him close, sporting one of his endless supply of ridiculous sweaters. Each day he seemed to have a new one and each day Kenny and Sarita were even more exasperated as to where he was getting them. Kenny remembered how he and Matthew complained about how ugly they were. Walter and Sarita thought they were lovely.
To the right of Walter was Sarita, in all her beauty, with Kenny’s hat on her head. He’d put it on her right after they sat down and took her by surprise. They’d all had a good laugh at how ridiculous she looked with it. She wasn’t looking toward the camera but, like Matthew and Walt, she was smiling as she reached up to Kenny’s unruly head of tangled gray hair.
And there he was, on the far right. His smile was far more subdued compared theirs. He was trying to divide his attention between smiling for the camera and playfully fighting off Sarita’s valiant attempt to bring order to the disorganized thicket on his head. Another happy family. All gone now.
He took another look at himself in the second photo at the lodge and could only frown. He gripped the picture in both hands and gently tore at the right edge, careful to be exact with each tiny rip until he’d managed to separate himself from the image. Seeing him sitting there with them made his blood boil. It was a fucking sham. Every moment he spent with them he was letting them think he was someone he wasn’t. The pain he felt. The pain he’d caused. The lives he’d already ruined before meeting any of them. Each “I love you” he whispered to Sarita a lie.
What would they have said if they knew he’d smashed a man’s head in with a brick of salt, or how he treated the man’s daughter after she saw him do it? Would they still care for him if they knew how he’d left that kid to die on that farm or how he’d mercilessly abused that idiot Ben? They deserved someone better than the prick in the picture with them.
He dropped the torn image of himself and stepped on it. He reached up to where he’d taped the picture of him, Kat, and Duck and placed the second one to the left of it, hiding the tear under the first picture as well as he could before he taped them to the mirror together. He looked one last time into the mirror and took everything in, his eye, the scars, the ratty hair and beard, the invisible blood on his hands and the manic anger behind his brown eye waiting to come out again as the monster in the mirror gazed back into him.
He felt that old, familiar hatred swelling up again as he stared his reflection down.
“You fucker.”
He stormed out and slammed the door behind him. Next to the office an overturned truck had spilled camping supplies all over on corner of the parking lot. Kenny grabbed one of the folding canvas chairs and stumbled around the side of the office to the dock where his boat had been kept before all of this. Naturally the dock was completely empty of anything remotely workable, just like Savannah, but it didn’t matter much. He hadn’t come here to sail off into the sunset.
He opened the chain fence gate separating the dock from the parking lot and shut it behind him. Staggering down the dock he fell to his knees a few times as the drink took hold of him and he could only crawl the final few feet to the end of the dock where he set up the chair and pulled himself painfully into it. He closed his eye and reached for the gun. Weighing it in his hands he went through his options. He hadn’t ever remembered a pistol feeling so heavy before.
He looked out over the Atlantic with the gun gripped tightly. The world was swirling and he nearly fell out of the chair as he hefted the bottle again. He took his final drink and tossed the empty bottle into the ocean.
He was still considering what he was going to do when the whiskey got the better of him and he passed out in the chair just as the sun vanished completely.