Thirty Days Before the Dead

CHAPTER 6: The Calloway Watch

  His father’s house in Millbrook was a low, tidy ranch with a vegetable patch out front and a Ford pickup in the drive. The mailbox said W. CALLOWAY, MACHINIST (RET.) in his own painted letters. Ryan slowed as he pulled up, staring at the familiar house through the windshield, and for a moment, the memories of his previous life pressed so hard against his chest that he struggled to breathe normally.

  Walt Calloway opened the door in a flannel shirt and slippers. He was sixty-seven, broad-shouldered and gray-bearded, with big, scarred hands and a face like carved walnut. His eyes moved over Ryan's face, lingering on him with the sharp attention of a father who had known his son for thirty-four years.

  “You look terrible,” Walt said.

  “Hi, Dad,” Ryan replied, managing a small smile.

  “You lost weight. Or gained it. Something’s different.” Walt squinted at him before stepping aside. “Come in. I’ll make coffee. You can tell me why Vanessa’s mother thinks you’re having a nervous breakdown.”

  Ryan followed him inside, breathing in the familiar smell of coffee, old wood, and the faint trace of machine oil that clung to his father's clothes. Nothing in the house had changed. The same photographs lined the walls, the same worn chairs stood around the kitchen table, and the same clock ticked above the doorway. Ryan had spent so much time preparing for the future that seeing his father alive in the present nearly undid him.

  They sat at the kitchen table, as they had a thousand times. His father poured two mugs and waited, settling into his chair without rushing him. Walt was a patient man; he had once waited eleven days for a part to arrive for a lathe, and Ryan knew he would wait just as long for his son to speak.

  “Dad,” Ryan said, placing his hands on the table, “I need to show you something, and I need you to not say anything until I’m done.”

  Walt's expression grew serious, but he nodded.

  Ryan took out the pocket watch. The brass casing felt warm against his palm, and his thumb brushed the familiar worn edge before he set it beside his coffee. He did not explain what it could do or attempt to find the right words. Instead, he set a full coffee mug on the table, thought Store, and watched the mug disappear.

  Walt's eyebrows rose by exactly one millimeter.

  Ryan thought Retrieve, and the mug reappeared, still steaming. The faint curl of coffee vapour rose between them, untouched by the few seconds it had spent outside the ordinary world.

  For a long moment, there was only the tick of the kitchen clock.

  “Huh,” his father said.

  Ryan stared at him, unsure whether to laugh or demand a better reaction. “That’s all? Huh?”

  “Well.” Walt picked up the mug and took a sip, testing the coffee as if the disappearing cup had been a minor inconvenience. “That’s my father’s watch.”

  “You knew?” Ryan asked, leaning forward.

  “I knew it was peculiar.” Walt turned the mug in his big hands, his gaze settling on the brass watch. “Dad always said it kept the good things warm. I thought he meant it as poetry.” He looked at Ryan, and his gaze was quiet and level, but terrifyingly sharp. “Son. What’s it for?”

  Ryan took a slow breath and told him.

  All of it. The staircase. The forty-one days. Vanessa’s voice behind a steel door. Her confession about his father, delivered with the same calm cruelty he could still hear in his nightmares: Your father died in week two. I knew.

  He had not planned to say that last part. His voice cracked on it, and he looked down at his hands, ashamed of how easily the memory could still hurt him. He had survived hunger, violence, and betrayal, but the thought of his father dying alone had followed him into every quiet moment since he woke.

  His father said nothing for a long time. He placed the mug on the table, rose from his chair, and walked to the stove, where he stood with his back to the room. Ryan watched his shoulders move once, then remain still, and he resisted the urge to get up and follow him.

  “All right,” Walt said finally. His voice was rough. “Thirty days.”

  “Twenty-one now,” Ryan replied.

  “Then we haven’t got time to waste.” Walt turned, and his eyes were wet, but his jaw was set like iron. “What do you need from me?”

  Ryan had prepared himself for disbelief, questions, even anger. He had not prepared himself for his father to accept the impossible and move straight to the work. The tightness in his chest eased, and for the first time since waking, he felt as though he no longer had to carry the entire burden alone.

  Walt listened to the full plan, nodding slowly at each point. He asked practical questions about the house, the supplies, and the time remaining, but he did not waste a single moment arguing about whether the apocalypse was real. When Ryan finished, his father rose and went to the hall closet. He returned carrying a double-barreled shotgun older than Ryan.

  “Had this since ’82,” Walt said, holding it up. “Never fired it at anything but clay pigeons and one very rude raccoon.”

  “Dad, you can’t…” Ryan began, looking at the shotgun and then at his father's hands.

  “Son, I’m sixty-seven, not dead.” Walt cracked the breech and squinted down the barrels before closing it again. “I’ll take the roof. Better vantage. And I don’t have to run.”

  Ryan laughed. The sound came up out of him, helpless and unexpected, and before he could stop himself, he was laughing with his hands over his face. The tension of the past few days, the terror of remembering his first death, and the relief of finding his father alive collided until he could no longer keep them contained. Walt reached across the table and placed his big, rough palm on the back of Ryan's neck.

  “There he is,” Walt murmured. “There’s my boy.”

  For the first time since waking, Ryan let himself cry. It took ninety seconds, though he had no idea why he counted them, and when the tears finally stopped, he wiped his face, straightened his shoulders, and pulled the notebook toward him.

  “Okay,” he said, clearing his throat. “Let’s get to work.”

  They loaded his father’s life into the Void in a single afternoon. Vegetable seeds, the welding rig, the machinist’s tools, three shelves of paperbacks, a half-ton of steel stock from the garage, and the old lathe, which Walt refused to leave behind, all disappeared into the storage space. They added a cabinet of hand-tools and his late wife’s quilts, which Walt folded carefully before handing them over.

  Ryan watched his father pause over the quilts, his fingers resting on the fabric for a moment longer than necessary. He said nothing, giving Walt the time he needed before the old man finally lifted the bundle and passed it to him.

  “I raised you to be kind,” Walt said as he hauled a toolbox toward the workbench. “I didn’t raise you to be a fool. You gave that girl everything.”

  “I know,” Ryan replied.

  “She didn’t deserve a thing.”

  “I know, Dad.”

  “Good.” His father spat into the grass outside the garage, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Now let’s go build a fortress.”

  On the way home, they made three more stops.

  At a big-box store, Ryan filled six carts with daily-use supplies: 800 rolls of toilet paper, 300 bars of soap, 100 kilograms of laundry detergent, 200 sets of thermal underwear, 80 pairs of boots, 60 coats, and 400 pairs of socks. Walt helped load the carts, occasionally shaking his head at the quantities, but he never questioned why they needed them.

  At an electronics outlet, they bought entertainment supplies: four game consoles, 40 games, two projectors, eight hard drives loaded with fifteen hundred movies and four hundred hours of television, 400 paperbacks, 60 board games, and a dozen chess sets.

  “Is the apocalypse going to have Monopoly?” Walt asked, glancing at the stack of board games.

  “It’s going to have everything,” Ryan said. “People who stay human survive longer.”

  His father gave him a thoughtful look but made no argument. Ryan had seen what hunger and fear could do to people, how quickly ordinary men and women could become dangerous when they believed survival was a competition. He wanted his father to have something more than walls and canned food to look forward to, even if the world outside became unrecognizable.

  At a farm supply store, they bought seeds in forty varieties, 200 pounds of each staple crop, ten hand tools, and six greenhouse frames. Ryan checked the seed packets before adding them to the list, thinking about the months ahead and the possibility that food supplies would eventually run out, even with the Void to preserve what they had.

  Their last stop was a quiet corner house across from Larkspur Court, a small brick bungalow with a rose garden.

  Abe Haskell, seventy-eight, was pruning a hedge when they pulled up. He peered over his glasses at Ryan the way a teacher might look at a student he had once been fond of, then set down his shears and straightened his back.

  “Ryan Calloway,” he said. “What brings you by?”

  In the old life, Abe Haskell had slipped a can of peaches through a crack in the door on Day 33, when Ryan had not eaten in three days. Take it, son. You look like you need it more than I do. He had died on Day 36, alone in his chair, and Ryan had never forgotten the kindness of a man who had so little left to give.

  “I brought you something,” Ryan said.

  He handed over a box. Inside were canned peaches, forty cans, twenty cans of chicken soup, and a hand-crank radio. Abe blinked at the contents, then looked up at Ryan with a puzzled expression.

  “What on earth…” the old man began.

  “If there’s ever an emergency,” Ryan said, keeping his voice low, “come to my front door. Knock twice. Don’t tell anyone.”

  Abe's expression changed. His eyes moved from the box to Ryan's face, studying him with the same sharpness Ryan had seen in Walt. “Is there going to be an emergency?”

  “There might be,” Ryan replied.

  The old man studied him for a long moment before setting the box gently on the grass. He did not laugh or demand an explanation, and Ryan found himself hoping that Abe's instincts would be enough to keep him safe when the time came.

  “I’m old,” Abe said. “I’m not stupid. I’ll knock twice.”

  Ryan felt something ease in his chest, a small knot he had been carrying since the day he woke. He could not save everyone, and he knew

better than to make promises he might not be able to keep, but he could at least give a decent man a chance.

  Then they turned into Larkspur Court, and the knot snapped tight again.

  The front door of number 14 stood slightly open.