Once she’s back on the main road, Ella drives like a zombie, her mind overloaded and her whole body numb. Where do you go when you have nowhere to go? Where can you sleep in your car without being carjacked or, at the very least, questioned by the police? Before the Violence, there were twenty-four-hour stores and restaurants. She could go sit in a Waffle House and drink a Coke for a few hours or slip her car into a shady spot at the park. Now there’s a curfew, and people aren’t supposed to be out all night. You’re not supposed to be out driving unless you’ve got a good reason. And I have nowhere else to go because my life is falling apart is not considered a good reason. Most people’s lives are falling apart, just now.
Without really meaning to, she’s back at her neighborhood. She passes it by the first time, then turns around in someone’s driveway and goes back. There are several houses for sale where she might not be noticed, but right now she’s thinking about Mrs. Reilly. Ella used to do a lot of babysitting and petsitting around the neighborhood, and she watched Mrs. Reilly’s cats when the elderly woman went on trips to New York and then when she was in the hospital after a heart attack. After Mrs. Reilly died, her daughter was supposed to pick up the cats, but then the Violence hit, and the house has probaby been empty since then, at least according to the unkempt yard and broken shutters. Ella still knows the code to open the garage, and if nothing has changed, she can park inside and spend the night there. Mrs. Reilly’s daughter lives in Georgia, so it’s unlikely that she’s done anything to the house since picking up the cats.
And luckily, Mrs. Reilly lived on the opposite side of the neighborhood.
Ella pulls into the driveway, noting the high weeds and the pile of sodden cardboard boxes on the porch. She leaves the car running and jogs up to the garage door, tapping in the code, her heart in her throat, expecting at any moment to get yelled at by someone, anyone, for doing everything wrong. But the door just beeps and crawls open, revealing Mrs. Reilly’s Miata on one side and a familiar pile of cat food boxes on the other; Mister Mistofelees only eats a certain kind of fish, and Mrs. Reilly always kept stocked up.
Ella shoves all the cat food aside and pulls into the empty spot. Even if the house door is locked, she can sleep in her car in the garage and know that no one will tap on the window and give her a heart attack. But she was right—things are exactly as she left them the last time she fed Mr. M and Griz. The door is unlocked.
“Hello?” she shouts into the house. “Mrs. Reilly?”
Because if someone else is here, someone who belongs here, she can always pretend she was checking up on an elderly neighbor, even if that neighbor has actually been dead for a while.
No one answers, and she pushes the button to close the garage door and fetches her bags from the car. With her backpack, purse, and bug-out bag dangling from her arms, she heads into the house.
First of all, it’s hot, and it fucking reeks. Ella’s nose wrinkles against the mingled odors of cat piss and poop and rotten food. The hum of appliances tells her that the electricity is still on, at least, and the first place she goes is right to the temperature control. It’s still set on heat—of course, because Mrs. Reilly died in the winter. She switches it to air-conditioning and sets that to seventy degrees.
After closing all the curtains and blinds, she turns on a couple of lights—nothing too bright. It looks exactly as it did the last time she was here, when she fed and watered the cats before Mrs. Reilly’s funeral, giving them extra so they’d be okay until her daughter Toni came by. She only knew Mrs. Reilly was dead because the old lady had begged her nurse to let the catsitter know to keep feeding her precious babies. It was kind of creepy, but apparently on her deathbed, what she cared about the most was her cats. In any case, Ella never got paid, and she never spoke to the daughter, and she just assumed adults would take care of everything.
Judging by the smell, no one took care of anything. The house hasn’t been cleaned or sold—a bowl of fruit sits rotten and black and melted on the counter, and Ella isn’t brave enough to open the fridge. Lucky for her Mrs. Reilly was the kind of older lady who was tech-savvy, which means she must’ve set up all her bills to be paid automatically online, which is why the AC is humming and the toilets are flushing.
For a moment, Ella wonders if maybe Mrs. Reilly’s daughter never came after all…then she finds the cats. They’re in the kitchen. Mr. M is crusted to the floor by the food bowls, the meat stripped off his bones and chunks of long, gray fur everywhere. Griz is uneaten but just as dead, spread flat by the hole she was trying to claw in the back door just a few feet away. Ella’s stomach comes up and she runs for the sink, barely making it before she pukes up some bile.
They were nice cats. She wishes they’d made it to Georgia.
Holding her breath as well as she can, she gets garbage bags from under the sink and uses an old pair of tongs to peel up the cats—oh God, these cats used to crawl in her lap, and Mr. M would chirp when he heard a can open—and puts them in the bag and carries the bag out to the garbage can in the backyard. Opening the top, she finds a hot, seething mass of maggots that just makes her heave some more. She tosses in the bag and stumbles inside, where she takes down a spotless glass and runs water from the tap, swishing it in her mouth before gulping it down. It’s hot and tastes of minerals and metal.
Jesus, this place.
It should be heaven. Safety! Air! Water!
Instead, it’s a new kind of torture.
For the next hour, Ella gives up on any kind of relief or comfort and cleans out all the nasty shit that’s making the house unbearable. She holds her breath in big gulps as she cleans out all the rot in the fridge. She scrapes up what was under the cats. She struggles with the heavy, overloaded litter boxes and chucks them into the outside trash. She tosses out the fruit basket full of wet black glop and maggots. She dry-heaves again and again but doesn’t let herself have any more water because she knows she’ll just puke it up.
This pain will be worth it, she tells herself.