The projectionist Jon had found for the night was able to start up the equipment inside the mall's cinemas. When Trevor and Nina arrived, they found Kristy Kaufman taking "tickets" and playing usher with Dante Jones running the snack bar. A portable generator got the popcorn machine popping and ran the projectors. Trevor and Nina saw thirty minutes of a romantic comedy before the film melted and the popcorn machine caught fire.
Instead of lamenting the disaster, Nina did something Trevor had never seen before. She laughed. She could not stop laughing. As a result, he laughed too.
They left the 'Eagle' under watch and traveled home in a convoy, killing two hostiles along the way.
Trevor escorted Nina to her apartment and paused at the base of the stairs.
"Sorry this wasn’t exactly a night on the town," he apologized.
She answered, "Everything went pretty much as I expected."
"Oh, now that’s just cold."
"Listen, we got back alive, right? I’m just saying that that ain’t half bad these days."
He had seen her smile more that night than in all the weeks before combined. In that, he found some victory.
"I hope you’ll give me a chance again soon. Good night," he told her.
Nina’s brow crinkled.
He asked, defensively, "What? What is it? What’d I do?"
"Well," she tried to be cute but she could not help grinning a big dumb-ass grin. "I mean, this kind of was our first date so shouldn’t we, you know, have, like, a good night kiss?"
"Oh," Trevor considered. "Yeah. I suppose you’re right."
He leaned in slowly. Despite smiling uncontrollably, Nina prepared her lips.
Trevor’s mouth drew closer…closer…then pulled away.
"I didn’t earn it," he smirked. "Next time."
– Trevor walked into the room. The afternoon sun beamed in through the windows illuminating the dust stirred to life by his movement. He sat on the bed.
The room felt both very familiar and foreign at the same time; like visiting a high school classroom years after graduation.
"I came to say goodbye," he told the room.
No one answered.
"I’m moving on now. I have to. I’m sorry I wasn’t here with you when… when it happened. I’m sorry all of our plans got shot to Hell. I really wanted to dance with you. I wanted to see you wearing that gown."
He gazed at the wedding dress on the floor.
"I bet you looked spectacular," his gaze rose to the full-length mirror. He could see the ghost of Ashley wearing the dress and smiling. "I bet you were gorgeous."
He picked up the dress. He held it close. He hoped maybe he could catch one last whiff of her. Instead, he nearly sneezed from the coating of dust.
"Thank you for caring about me, Ashley. Up until ‘all this’ I thought I was worthless and a nobody. Then you fell for me. Why? I’ll never understand. Thank you all the same. You made me feel…you made me feel like a man. But I have to move on now. I can’t be haunted by this anymore. I’m not going to feel guilty for caring about someone else. Nina is…different. I’m different now, too. You might not even like me these days. I don’t know if I like myself. But I love her. I know that as sure as I know anything. I can’t let her slip away because I’m holding on to a world that doesn’t exist anymore."
He walked to the closet, slipped the dress on a hanger, and then gently closed the door.
"So this is farewell. Ashley, I…" he felt he should say ‘I love you.’ Yet those words did not feel as true as he once thought.
"Ashley, I’m sorry things happened like this. Goodbye."
25. Walking After Midnight
Trevor paced the command center addressing six brave volunteers. He deliberately made eye contact with each of them, one after another.
"Remember, your job is to find out what's in our neighborhood and report back. Don't get into any fights."
The scouts divided into three pairs: McBride and Woody Ross would head west, Cassy Simms and Bird east, while Dante and Kristy Kaufman drew the northern route.
"Keep an eye on the weather. We could get a big snowstorm any day now. If you can go out as far as a hundred miles, great, but use your judgment. You’re looking for survivors and threats. Point survivors in our direction. A couple of days, no more. You can't carry much in the way of supplies in those hover bikes anyway. Oh, and there won’t be any rescue missions. You disappear we can’t go looking for you. We wouldn’t know where to start."
Dante blew Trevor a kiss.
"I love you too."
– Nina walked an afternoon patrol with Tolbert and Odin the Elkhound under a silky gray sky. They patrolled the lake perimeter road stopping to search vacant cottages, dilapidated bars, and crumbling ice cream stands.
Tolbert heard movement from "Joe's Pizza Parlor" and the two patrollers peered in a rear window. They saw Trevor-half his body blanketed in white powder-working around a giant mixer surrounded by bags of flour and something labeled ‘Qualbake’.
Tolbert asked, "What is he doing?"
"I think he’s trying to make dough for a pizza," Nina answered.
"Man, he must really like pizza."
She thought of the 'surprise' Trevor promised for their second date.
"No, but I do."
– Nina presented Trevor with a list of requirements for their second date. First, she did not want to shoot anything. Second, she did not want a crowd participating and, finally, she wanted to find out something about his life before ‘all this’.
Such conditions left only one option: he came to her apartment above the A-Frame’s garage with a pizza box from Joe’s, a bottle of red wine, and a CD. She met him at the door in a green turtle neck and jeans.
As for the pizza, the cheese posed the greatest challenge. Reluctantly, he used Parmesan because he could not find any edible caches of cheddar or mozzarella. But the dough-after sifting out infestations of bugs from the old flour-and the canned sauce turned out good. For a post-Armageddon pizza, it did not taste half-bad despite the odd cheese.
After dinner, they left the eat-in kitchen and migrated with wineglasses in hand to the living room. Trevor slipped a CD into the stereo and hit the "play" button before sitting on the couch next to Nina at a respectful distance.
After a moment, a woman crooned a gentle ballad
I go out walking, after midnight, out in the moonlight, just like we used to do…
She gazed at him in a manner that asked a question without saying a word.
"Patsy Cline," he answered.
"Patsy Cline? Well, that's a surprise."
Trevor explained the connection with his eyes pointing toward her but seeing something far away, long ago. He returned to his old world and she traveled with him.
"You haven’t seen it all until you’ve seen my dad and mom listening to Patsy. Patsy or Elvis. That is, cool 50’s Elvis not fat Elvis. I mean, we used to drive to my grandma’s out by Pittsburgh, back when I was a kid. It was like a five-hour drive. Super boring. So we’d listen to what my dad called ‘the classics.’ He’d put in a Patsy cassette and my parents would start mouthing the words to each other as they drove along. Then they’d turn and sing to me, then each other again. All the way out to Pittsburgh.
"My dad-seeing his lips moving and hearing Patsy Cline-I mean, you could only watch that for so long before you cracked up. Poor mom would laugh right at him. Both of us would, and he’d just keep on lip syncing."
His vision returned to Nina. She smiled; just a little.
"You really miss your parents, don’t you?"
His happiness faltered. She hurried, "What do you remember most about them?"
He sipped his wine and considered.
"You know, I think it’s how much they liked each other. I don’t mean just loved. Of course they loved each other; they married and had a wonderful kid, right?"
"Right."