No One's Land

Chapter One

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Yes, canned peaches! I grab the can of fruit off of the nearly-empty grocery store shelf and drop it into my canvas bookbag, which sits on the dusty tiled floor like a hungry pet begging for dinner scraps. I zip my bookbag up and pull it on. On the way out of the store, I sing softly under my breath, though there's no one around to hear me. The parking lot of the Walmart is a vast sea of cracked blacktop and fading yellow and white lines like the paths of panicked fish.

I cross East Main Street without looking and walk up the hill to the hotel, a Hampton Inn. Leaves and bird nests cover the roof in a green and brown blanket of snow. All the other buildings in town are like this, and the smell of animal shit and rotten food is hard to escape.

This isn't a human world anymore.

I walk into the hotel and make way to the stairwell. Climbing the four floors to my room, I listen to the echo of my footsteps rather than the echoes of my thoughts. I reach my room, 412, and step into the open door. Just as with outside, doesn't exactly smell like roses in here. I shrug my bookbag, loaded with food, off of my aching shoulders and sigh, glad to be rid of the weight. As I walk into the main room, I catch a glance of myself in the mirror on the wall. How old am I? Forty-three? Forty-four, I think. I turn back to the mirror and examine my face. I see more lines in my skin than I've seen in most road maps. Worry lines etch my forehead with interstate highway curves, frown lines turn into country roads, crow's feet morph into three-lane freeways.

I turn from the mirror and look at the door across the room. This one doesn't lead back into the hallway; it's the second room of my two-room suite. Just looking at it, my heartrate picks up and my breathing becomes shallow. I edge over to it, slower than if I was walking across freshly frozen ice.

I don't want to do this; I need to do this.

There isn't enough air in the whole world. I feel my pulse in my temples as I lay my hand on the synthetic wood of the door. The surface seems to send a livewire current through my body as my palm rests against it. It's just a door, I tell myself. Just the door I

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opened the door and said his name softly, trying to coax him rather than jerk him awake

"Sammy. Sammy, we gotta get--" I looked around the room. His covers were wrinkled but looked okay. Not too messy. I walked over to the bed and pulled back the blankets. Sammy's Avengers pajamas lay there on the bed, arranged in a person shape: pants on bottom, shirt lying on the bed above their waistband. Why would he have arranged his clothes like that? I looked around the room, checking under the desk and in the closet while saying his name. Nearly yelling his name. I tried to fight back against the fear that pressed at the back of my mind. Glancing around, my eyes fell on the door to the bathroom, respectfully closed. He's in the bathroom, obviously. I accepted this, I think, because I wanted it to be true. I walked over to the door and knocked on it.

"Sammy? Sam's? Open up, buddy." I tried the knob. It turned smoothly and the door popped open. I peeked into the bathroom and my eyes fell on the toilet. The seat was down. No one was sitting on it.

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I shut my eyes tight and grit my teeth as I try to force the memory out, out, outoutout.

The first tear breaks through my eyelid and rolls down my left cheek. I don't wipe it away, even when it tickles my lip. I turn the knob of the door. It takes all of my strength to stay, to not run the two steps to the bed and dive under the covers like... like a six-year-old trying to pretend he's sleeping.

Once I turn the knob, the rest is a bit easier, even if the nearly-crippling weight of his life and death never leave my crumbling mind, aching shoulders, or turning stomach. I look around the room with teary eyes, as if he might have returned in the six hours I took to go shop(lift)ing. He's not here, as he hasn't been in twelve years. Even so, I cross to the bed and sit on it. Lay down on it. Cry myself to sleep on it, with Sams' pajamas balled in my arms.