In The End: a pre-apocalypse novel by Edward M Wolfe Page B

into her daughter. Her teeth started to chatter and she was thankful
that Liz was asleep and therefore a little warmer than she was and unaware of
how cold it was in the room.
    Tori thought about how much
different her life was just one day ago. She almost laughed thinking of the
fact that she no longer had a job. The reason she was jobless wasn’t funny, but
the way her whole life changed in an instant, how her whole world had changed
today, it made her concerns of yesterday utterly ridiculous.
    A few hours before she had left
Kelly’s house to head back to Denver, Kelly tried as she always did to talk
Tori into moving to Kansas. They were sisters, she said. They needed to be
closer and see each other more often, and she wanted to be a bigger part of
Elizabeth’s life.
    Tori agreed with Kelly’s points,
but she really liked Denver and she didn’t like Salinas. She couldn’t imagine
living there. Her sister would be the only good thing in her life if she moved
there. And she’d have to start over from scratch looking for a job and then an
apartment. Just that alone was a depressing thought. She liked her current job.
Well, the job she had until yesterday, she reminded herself.
    Tori had worked as a CNA at a
retirement center in Westminster and had just gotten approval for partial
company financing to go to school to become an R.N. The future was just
starting to look brighter for her. She wouldn’t be forever worrying about how
she was going to provide for Elizabeth.
    Yesterday she was stressed about
the time she would have to spend away from Liz while going to classes, which they
would both hate, but she finally convinced herself it would be worth it. She
had agonized for months over whether she should go to school or not. While she
was grappling with the ironic merits of not being there for her daughter in
order to be a better mother, her sister was relentlessly urging her to move to
Salinas.
    Liz rolled over in her sleep and
faced Tori. She tucked the blankets under Liz’s far side and adjusted the trim
so it was just below Liz’s chin. She softly stroked her daughter’s hair as she
gazed at her sleeping little angel face.
    As frustrating as it was having to
constantly convince Kelly that she and Liz were happy in Denver and wanted to
stay in Denver – she now had to give her sister credit for her and Liz being
alive. If they hadn’t gone to Kelly’s for a visit, they’d be dead now – like
everyone else.
    Tori hoped it was only Denver that
got destroyed. It was bad enough that she most likely lost her parents today;
she didn’t want to think about the possibility that Kelly might be dead too.
She had no idea where her brother was. He might be nothing but ash billowing
around on the streets downtown, or he could be somewhere up here on the
mountain with the biker gang he’d been hanging out with lately.
    Tori rubbed her feet together,
hoping that if she made enough friction, she might be able to at least feel
them again. Her eyes flew open. Her feet were numb! She reached under the
blanket and felt Elizabeth’s feet. They were icy cold.
    “Oh God. I
have to pull my head out of my ass.”
    She had thought she could just
address the problem of the window in the morning. Right.  
She wanted to be a nurse, and here she was sitting around waiting for herself
and her daughter to succumb to frostbite.  She berated herself silently
for being so stupid and putting both of them in such grave danger.
    She got out from under the blankets
and sat up, determined to do something about the window right now. This wasn’t
something that could be put off. They were literally freezing in here. They
could die of frostbite. Jesus. What was she thinking?
    She doubled her half of the
blankets over Liz, effectively putting her under six layers of bedding. Her
hands hurt from the cold. She started to rub them together to warm them up, and
that made them hurt more. She stopped and told herself to think. What did she
know about