Behind Our Walls Read Free

in.
    James was already out of the parking lot and trudging up the road, bag slung over his shoulder as he stared off into the distant horizon. He didn't bother to look back and in that moment, Sophie wondered if he even cared about any of them. Corrine moved to walk off after him, Adam following close behind. Corrine paused long enough to throw a quick, spiteful look back as they moved out, sending a clear message that should Sophie choose to follow or not, it made no difference to her.
    "God damned child care," she said as she picked up her bag and made her way towards the road, Rowen walking alongside. She looked up at him, that patient look on his face that centered her and also made her want to put her fist through it. "You know that if you hadn't been here to help me through this, I would have probably ditched their asses a long time ago."
    Rowen smiled as he looked down at her. "No, you wouldn't have."
    Sophie shook her head and looked off across the fields around them. She didn't like encouraging his belief that he knew her so well, even though this often seemed to be the case. "I'm just trying to say thank you, idiot."
    "Fair enough."
    They walked in silence for several minutes.
    "I'll give you this much," Rowen said finally. "If we had tried to tough it out in that gas station much longer, we might have ended doing ourselves in from some kind of monoxide poisoning."
    He was trying to disrupt the awkwardness, but she shifted her attention as she looked up at the other three. Her sister, the husband-to-be and her father. It hadn't been that long since she had counted at least two of those as being firmly on her side, a core part of her being. Now she found herself lost in her own reality, fallen to pieces inside of this world, already reduced to ash.
    "You've got to give them time," Rowen said, noticing her glare. "I know how frustrating it is, but they can't keep this up forever. Eventually they have to come out on the right side of this."
    She snorted, a laugh that felt cruel, even to her. "You clearly haven't been paying enough attention to my sister's moods. And whatever she feels, that piss-ant that she's picked to spend the rest of her life with will feel the same. I can promise you that."
    "I know it seems that way, but eventually they'll recognize what you're doing for them and—"
    "But what am I doing for them? Really?" Now she turned to face him. The others didn't bother to stop or slow, but she knew that they weren't going to be getting very far. "Seriously, what have I done that's so great? Doesn't feel like much from where I'm sitting."
    "Well, they're all here, aren't they? Better than a lot of people can say. And what exactly do you think you could have done differently? It's not like there's any such thing as an emergency siren for when the government is about to collapse. Or to give you a heads up that the military is going to go crazy and try to create command authority over the public at large, or that—"
    "I know. I just feel like we've been making mistake after mistake. My mother..." This time she faltered and tried to cover the sob that rose from her throat with a volley of fake coughing.
    Rowen didn't answer at first, looking at something over her shoulder as he tried to collect his thoughts. Sophie glanced up the road, and saw that James was looking back at them, although the act seemed merely obligatory.
    "You know," Rowen said, "I constantly think about things and how everything fell apart. How it all seemed so harmless. Little hiccups. Problems here, issues there. None of it suggested where we might be headed, or what could be waiting for us. If someone had told you what was going to happen in a few months, you would have called them insane. But, next thing you know, the President is getting whisked off into the protective bunker and before anyone can even really figure out what that meant, nuclear bombs are going off all over the world."
    "I was there too, Rowen."
    "My point is that even if