After I Fully Prepared for the Apocalypse, the Ungrateful Cried with Regret novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Inner Gate

Robin shuts her outer gate on Troy's brothers, the deputy reveals Beverly asked for a welfare check before the party, and Nolan Kearns is waiting on the road: five days, you counted too.

The tow truck was parked inside my lane with its headlights on when I pulled up to Tolliver Road.

The chain on my outer gate hung cut in two pieces from the post.

That chain was a decoy. I had put it there so nobody would look for the motor.

The gate itself was a steel slide, eight feet tall, and it ran on a track I had poured myself.

I parked across the road and opened the app on my phone.

Three men stood in the lane between my two fences. Troy's older brother, Troy's cousin, and the one with the bolt cutters.

They were looking at my inner gate and arguing about how to get past it.

I pressed the green button.

The outer gate rolled shut behind their truck with a long, smooth rumble.

All three men turned around.

The cousin tried the gate with both hands. The brother swore.

I walked up to the fence and waited for them to see me.

"Robin," the older brother said, and put his hands up. "This isn't what it looks like."

"It looks like three men with bolt cutters on my property."

"Troy said you were signing it over. He said you were fine with it."

"I'm not signing anything."

"He told us you would," the brother said. "He said it was just a matter of getting you to sit still."

The man with the bolt cutters set them down very gently on the gravel.

"Who's the buyer?" I asked.

"Some guy from Columbus. Cash. Troy says the guy wants it by Monday."

"Monday is the twenty-fifth."

"I guess so?"

"Does your buyer know what's coming on the twenty-eighth?" I said.

He stared at me. The cousin looked at his boots.

Headlights swung across the road, and a four-wheeler bounced up the shoulder with a dog running beside it.

Amos Kell had a shotgun across his knees and a feed-store cap pulled low.

He was sixty-eight, and he had welded half my fence with me on his weekends.

"I heard the gate go," he said. "Figured you were home."

"I'm home," I said.

"Want me to do anything about these three?"

"Not yet. Just hold that."

He swung the shotgun a few inches toward the lane, and nobody asked what "that" was.

I called the county dispatcher myself.

The deputy took twenty minutes. She was a young woman with a long braid who got out of the cruiser and looked at the cut chain and the three men and the shut gate.

I let her talk to them first.

Then I showed her the deed on my phone, and she wrote down three names and three trespass citations.

"Ma'am, one more thing," she said when she had finished. "Your mother called our office this afternoon."

"My mother?"

"At about five o'clock. She asked for a welfare check on you at this address tonight."

I looked at her.

"The party started at six," I said.

"Yes, ma'am. She said you might not be answering the door."

She said it kindly.

"You seem fine to me," the deputy said. "I'll note that. But the request stays on file."

My mother had called the sheriff before she tapped her fork on her glass.

She had planned to have somebody at my door tonight, whatever I said at the party.

Chelsea's video was no accident either.

I thought about the little notebook in the grey coat's hand, and the way he had looked at my hands while Troy read my bank statements out loud.

He had sat at table six while they did it. He hadn't stood up once.

The deputy opened my outer gate herself so the three men could drive out.

Troy's brother stopped his window beside me on the way past.

"He said you'd cry," he said. "I'm sorry, Robin. I thought you'd cry."

He pulled out onto Tolliver Road, and the tow truck's lights went down the hill.

The deputy left a minute later. Amos stayed on the four-wheeler with his dog across his boots.

"You eat?" he asked.

"No."

"There's pie in my kitchen. I'll bring it by." He looked past me at the road. "You've got company, though."

I turned around.

A silver sedan had been parked fifty yards down the shoulder with its lights off the whole time.

A man was walking up the road toward me, hands out of his pockets and open at his sides.

He was tall. He wore a grey wool coat, and he had a scar through his left eyebrow that I hadn't noticed at the party.

Amos raised the shotgun about an inch.

"Miss Hartigan," Nolan Kearns said. "I'm not here to take you anywhere."

"Then why did you follow me?"

He looked past me at the four silos, black against the sky.

"Five days," he said. "You counted too."

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