The End of Lennie

Three days later, Lennie was back at her house. Her stay with Michael had been relatively uneventful. The first night, they’d slept in separate rooms with the doors locked, paying tribute to the mantra that swept through the country in its death throws: “total isolation in a secure setting”. The next night, they drank half of the Jack Daniels handle Michael had taken from McCrary’s and ended up passing out in the living room.

A good fifteen years younger, Michael was passably handsome and good company—at this point, Lennie had mused, even a Labrador retriever would have been good company—but neither of them had felt up to the task of any sort of sexual entanglement. Lennie had always found that frenzied post-apocalyptic fucking ridiculous—the Medieval orgies behind gated walls while the bubonic plague raged outside; the silver screen strangers desperately smashing their bodies together while zombies broke down the front door. For her, sex was about focus and all she saw when she closed her eyes was Milo’s missing cheek.

Even so, in one boozy moment, Lennie looked fondly at Michael and wondered if anything might happen between them. She must have fallen asleep shortly after. When she woke up the next morning, mouth dry and head throbbing, Michael was gone. She had called out for him and waited until the sun had arched more than halfway across the sky before leaving the barn and heading home. Still slightly dazed, she tried not to consider where Michael had gone—for all she knew, he was out running errands and would stumble back in moments before the sunset, with some delicacy like fresh fruit in tow. She couldn’t risk finding out if something worse had happened.

Pulling her bike up to the house, Lennie surveyed the property, which looked undisturbed. She reached the back door and found it still locked, and in one panicked moment thought she’d left the key. Fortunately, after a few moments of fishing, she found it and sunk it into the lock—the shadows were already beginning to fall. She re-boarded up the door and went up to her room, shut the door and lay down in bed.

Suddenly, she was dreaming again. She was whizzing through town on her bike, waving to people as she passed. Everything was back to normal—she saw Norm Callaway mowing his lawn and, passing the playground, all of the swings were in use. The sounds of the living! She’d forgotten the music, the lifetime of background noise she’d taken for granted.

A faint banging noise, like a nail gun, grew louder as she approached the source. She turned the corner and saw Tracy Horton, Michael’s mother, fussing over something, bringing her fist down on something again and again. She got closer and was about to call out to her before seeing that the fist was covered in blood. Tracy had someone’s head on her lap, and she was punching their face repeatedly. The limp body moved only with the force of each impact.

Lennie opened her eyes but the banging didn’t stop. She rushed to her bedroom door only to have it fly open in her face: Michael burst into the room towards her. He had something in his hand but Lennie shut her eyes before she could see what it was. She prayed it would be fast and luckily, for her, the first blow to her head knocked her unconscious, saving her from the terror that lay ahead.