Because You Exist (2 page)

Chapter 2

My hand almost reached the door when I collided with someone.

The presence of another human being in the deserted school caused me to let free a very unmanly yelp. I was about to make some excuse, joke off my nervousness when I saw who it was.

Scary Carrie.

Not a very creative nickname, but I gave it to her in the fourth grade—give me a break.

My heart began to pound at the sight of her. There was no way I’d dream of her. No, freaking way. Scary Carrie looked like she always did. Wild, red hair that curled beautifully or frizzed disastrously depending on the weather. Jeans. No makeup. Hoodie pulled over her head. Complete lack of effort. Scary Carrie’s signature style. Scaring the penis away since 1996.

I quickly tried to think of the last time I saw her but came up empty. She looked like I remembered her with the exception that there was an actual emotion on her face. She looked petrified.

Scary Carrie took a step away from me. “I...I thought I was alone,” she croaked out.

I didn’t want to hear her speak. It made her presence all the more real, and that was the last thing I wanted. Her being there with everything else I saw made it seem impossible it was anything but real. But if it was real...

The stench...

The body...

What had happened?

I couldn’t bear to look at her one second longer.

I felt it calling to me. The outside world. I wondered, wildly, insanely if it still existed. Was it possible that it didn’t? Where was all the noise? The students? Why did the school look like it hadn’t been in used for months? Why had that janitor hid in that closest with all those supplies?

I felt dizzy. I was on the brink. The edge. The whole world ready to slip away. I turned away from Carrie, pushing open the doors to the outside.

Destruction.

Ruin.

Absence.

The Wendy's across the street, the 7-Eleven on the corner even the I-HOP down the road. All destroyed. Had a nuclear war somehow happened in the midst of my freak-out? If so, someone should have bothered to tell me. It would have been the polite thing to do.

Every building that covered the streets surrounding my school—my kingdom—lay in ruin. Rubble. The silence was the most disconcerting. . Silence, despite popular belief, has its very own intruding, suffocating noise. It fills your ears and crawls its way down to the pit of your stomach, the place that alerts you to any heightened emotion: love, lust, disgust, fear.

My stomach was turning in on itself. There was no way what I was seeing could be real. It wasn’t possible. The same dust that covered the floors of my high school draped itself over the rubble of Virginia Beach. There were no people. No movement.

Nothing.

Just the silence that moved between the destroyed buildings and abandoned cars.

There was only one explanation. I must be dreaming. Or maybe the drug thing. I’d believe anything but what I saw. I simply had to wake up and this would all be over. But what if it wasn’t? I felt fear, real soul-crushing fear, for the first time in years.

I greedily reached for the door behind me and stumbled back into the school.

Back to Scary Carrie.

I couldn’t deal with her in that moment. Maybe not ever. I pushed past her, heading back to the janitor’s closest. I hoped to find some sort of answers there. I tried to ignore how wobbly my legs felt and how my hands had started to shake.

“Where are you going?” the girl called out. Her voice sounded hoarse. Unused. Rusty.

I walked on ignoring her.

“Hello! I’m talking to you! You won’t find anything that way except the janitor’s body!

I kept on walking. Maybe I’d seen it wrong. Maybe he wasn’t dead. 

“Why don’t you stop by Principal Jones’ office while you’re at it? You’ll find him and his family in there. All dead by the way,” she called after me. 

“I’m not talking to you,” I called over my shoulder.

“Well, usually I would be all for your Neanderthal antics, but I take it you looked outside. I figure we best get talking.”

“Shut up. I can’t hear myself think!”

“Mr. Jones is way worse than the janitor by the way. Much more bloody. And his wife...well, she has a gunshot wound in her head. It matches the ones her children have. Looks like he did them in before whatever finished him off.”

I was going to get sick. I walked faster. There was no way any of this could be true.

No way.

A dream.

A dream.

A dream.

Scary Carrie latched onto my arm and pulled me to a stop.

“You think this is a dream?” she asked. Had I said that aloud? It was obvious she was hoping it was a dream too. Of course she was.

“Wow. This is a dream. It’s your dream.”

Suddenly, it made sense. She was some kind of witch. Just like the Carrie I named her after. I caught a showing of Stephen King’s Carrie on one of my uncle’s movie channels when I was little. The nickname came to me the next day when this girl, whose real name I couldn’t recall, told the teacher that another student and I had pushed her down.

I never touched her.

Witch.

When I told my friends about the movie, I got major points for watching an R-rated flick. Bonus points for the nickname. It did rhyme after all. I left out the part about hiding every crucifix featured in my uncle's strangely religious-infused décor. .

“Excuse me?” Scary Carrie exclaimed, interrupting my walk down memories-that-freaking-suck lane.

“You used some spell or herb or some voodoo crap to pull me into your dream.”

This had to be it. It was just as easy, if not easier, for me to believe in some hocus-pocus crap than believe I blacked out and missed the apocalypse.

“You think when I dream that I fantasize about you? Really? The same boy who spent the first twenty minutes of health class debating with Richard if
Die Hard
was considered a Christmas movie or not?”

It did take place during Christmas.

She didn’t have to be so damn snarky.

I pushed the air out of my mouth through my teeth. “You can deny it all you want, sweetheart. Hell, maybe that’s part of your thing. Play hard to get and make me chase you. I don’t know. Nor do I care. I just want you to wake up. I’m not really down for being part of your 'make the boy I hate love me' fantasy.”

“Stop. You’re turning me on,” she replied, dryly.

“This isn’t funny,” I exclaimed.

It had stopped being funny the moment it began to feel real—the moment I saw my home looking like a damn set piece from some indie war flick.

“Do I look like I’m laughing?”

I shrugged dismissively. “You’re not really emotion girl. Hell, this is the first time I’ve seen you with your hood off in years. Maybe this is what amused looks like on the face of the heavily sedated.”

She rolled her eyes. “As much as your wit just keeps me enthralled, I’m going to find out what the hell is going on here.”

Carrie moved past me and headed towards the door. But I no longer wanted to be alone because if this wasn’t a dream I was in trouble. We both were. I didn’t need to see the decomposing body of my principal or his family to understand that.

Somehow the whole world had disappeared.

And we were stuck.

Together.

I reached out and grabbed Scary by the elbow. In the quickest of movements, she pushed me against the locker with a strength I thought impossible for a girl outside of those weird body-building infomercials that came on in the wee hours of the night.

“I don’t like being touched,” Scary growled.

Scary Carrie indeed.

“Not a problem,” I replied, holding my hands up in mock-surrender. I tried to suppress a gulp. I straightened out my jacket and pushed ahead of Scary. I looked back at her mainly to see she wasn’t about to stab me in the back—literally stab me in the back that is—when I caught her quickly pull her hoodie down over her face. I could only see the tip of her nose and mouth.

I pushed open the door with more force than I intended to use. Scary Carrie made a small noise in response. I wondered if it was possible that she could actually be scared of me?

I turned around to tell her sorry. I’m not sure why I felt the need to do so, but I did. Before I could get the words out, I watched as her mouth formed a small “o” shape. Her hand reached up and she pointed forward.

“Who the hell is that?” she whispered.

I whipped around to see a man sitting on a briefcase throwing an apple up in the air and catching it. And he was wearing the biggest smile possible.

Someone was having a good day.

Chapter 3

“Just delightful.”

Someone was having a really good day. And for some reason the sight of Scary Carrie and me seemed to make his day even better. The man was dressed in an impeccable black suit, and I assumed most girls would find him attractive. He looked like he’d stepped off the set of
Mad Men
, a show my uncle was obsessed with. Not that I ever watched it. The most I knew about the show was that it starred that guy who had hooks for hands on
30 Rock
.

I glanced back at Carrie. She didn’t seem too impressed. In fact, she took a step so she was behind me.

“It sure took you two long enough,” the man chirped, still wearing his smile. Everything about him seemed off. Who was he?  Why was he wearing a suit? How was not a single strand of his hair out a place? How could he wear a smile amidst the destruction that surrounded us?

“Excuse me?” I mumbled.

The man laughed. “Sorry. This is all probably a bit confusing.” The man stood up and walked over to us, offering me his hand to shake.

I looked back at Carrie who now had her hoodie pushed back further down on her head, just enough so her eyes peeked through. She was staring at the apple. The man noticed as well. He pushed the apple towards us. “Hungry?”

“No. We’re not hungry,” she said lowly.

Of course I was hungry. I’m a teenage boy. But I agreed with Carrie; somehow the whole don’t take candy from strangers seemed to apply now to produce as well.

The man shrugged and stuck the apple inside his coat pocket.

“I guess we should get started then,” he said, breaking a silence that seemed to still everything.

“Started?” I asked.

The man nodded. “I’m sure you have a ton of questions, and there are a lot of rules you must understand.”

“Rules? Rules for what?” I asked.

“Logan, maybe we should go and look around,” Carrie whispered to me. I looked back to see her bouncing up and down, a nervous energy making her whole body come alive.

“I wouldn’t do that. Nope. Not a good idea. There’s all kinds of trouble around here. Don’t want to see anything happen to two of our stars.”

Did the man ever stop smiling?

I shook my head in an attempt to clear it. It wasn’t used to working this hard.

A trickle of blood began to seep from the man’s nose. For the briefest of moments, I saw the man’s smile begin to falter. He quickly reached up and wiped away the blood, holding tight onto his smile.

“All right QB1, how about you and Ms. Lambert follow me,” the man said, slapping me on the arm as if we were best buds.

“How...how did you know I’m the quarterback?”

“Well, because I know everything about you, Logan. Of course I do. You two are shifters, and I’m your orientation leader. I’ve been studying you for years. We make sure to watch all of our shifters. And when the time comes, we activate them.”

“What the what?” Carrie...er...Ms. Lambert sputtered.

The man sighed. Well, sort of sighed. It was such a fake sounding sigh that I was beginning to think the man didn’t care if we believed anything he said. He seemed to enjoy our confusion. With every question we asked, his smile got brighter.

“Right. You two don’t know anything yet. Shifters are those selected to travel through time. I mean this obviously isn’t your present. Well, it is your present, but not the present you’re used to living in. I mean, you’re definitely not in Kansas anymore.”

“Great. Clichés. That’s helpful” Carrie mumbled.

“Time travel? Really? Even I’m not dense enough to fall for that one. Even if that’s possible, you think I’d believe some teenager from Virginia Beach would be selected? Why not choose some Navy Seal or some rocket scientist? I’ve seen enough movies to know those are the time travel go-to guys,” I replied. “I don’t even own a pair of fake-hipster glasses. Glasses are a must for any time traveler,” I joked lamely.

The man let free another laugh and scratched the back of his head. “I know it seems unlikely, Logan, but trust me. You have no idea what you’re capable of, or who you even are. Besides, I didn’t pick you. But you were chosen, and we both must deal with that.”

“Dude. Neither of us believes you,” I snapped, my frustration slipping out. “ So, just tell us what’s really going on! Is this some weird psych experiment? Are we on some hidden camera show? Just tell us, and get it over with.” I was close to losing it.

I just wanted to go back to Hamlet.

The man’s smile finally left his face. His eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched. “A TV show? I’m going to need that talk to stop this very moment. Do you understand me? Everyone you two know and love is dead. And if you two don’t start listening to me, we won’t be able to stop it. We chose to bring you to this moment, this time. We need you to understand what is going to happen. In time, you’ll find out why you have been selected. But you are important to the mission. You. And her. And everyone else selected. You cannot be replaced. It can only be those selected. So, its time you stepped up, Logan. Otherwise, this world you love and all the people in it will end.”

“You’re lying,” I growled.

Why didn’t it feel like a lie?