Judgment

The barrier came down one year and 200 days after it appeared. Everyone on the outside expected to get their children back. Everyone expected things to go back to normal for the survivors. That's not what happened. Now it is ten years later.

They came from everywhere. It was California's own Roswell or Area 51, ever since the military erected the Fence where the Barrier had been. Now that no one was allowed in, it had more of a following than ever. Sam had seen it all. Conspiracy theorists, idiot teenagers, the activists, the scientists, the family road trip. They came, they looked, and when they stopped at the gas station, they asked questions.

Sam rarely answered, except to mutter tersely that the museum was next door. Just once Sam had ventured into the FAYZ museum. They had pictures. They had names. They had video footage. They only had some of the stories, a compilation of little half-truths that combined to form an amorphous bulge that was as wrong as it was right. Sam had stiffly shrugged off the grainy photos of mangled body parts, burnt corpses of buildings, but then he had seen something he hadn't known about. Francis and Mary, or what had been Francis and Mary before the barrier committed an obscenity against them.

He'd turned away from the display, mechanically coming up out of the dark basement to the glass front plastered with posters for FAYZCON 2024 and across to the alley. If only he could puke up his guilt with his breakfast. Sam had never gone into the museum again.

But in five years, he had also never left the Bowl. That's what they called the area around the Barrier. It was an odd area that attracted odd people, who could be at ease living on the edge of a giant mystery. Rubio, the fat, deeply tanned gristled owner of the gas station, didn't know Sam was The Sam, Sam Temple.

Same Temple didn't exist anymore. Not since Sam Temple was buried in a sea of law suits when he should have been surfing and trying out for freshman sports. Not since the media frenzy that had engulfed all the survivors and labeled Sam Temple a murderer instead of a savior.

Now he was Matt Upton, possessor of a high school GED and ex-soldier. If he kept his haircut military short, no one could connect the athletic, monosyllabic, distinctly unfriendly sergeant with the kid Sam Temple. Matt Upton didn't like to surf. He jogged and lifted weights excessively, but never accepted the offers from Bowlers to play in their pickup games. Matt Upton kept to himself, and if people wondered how he ended up in the leftover kitsch of a national tragedy, he never explained. Matt Upton was just another invisible thread in the fabric of The Bowl.

That day at the gas station was just like any other. Matt Upton didn't care at first that the annoying tinkle of the front door wasn't accompanied by the usual loud chatter. He didn't look up from the magazine open on the counter. Whoever it was wandered the outer aisle first. Matt Upton hadn't lost all his habits and if his eyes didn't track the customer, all his other senses did.

The hollow click clack of heels slowly paced down the chip aisle and past the soda cases in the back. It was probably a scientist. Only the scientists and government reps wore heels. They were usually arrogant asses too.

A coke and granola bar was shoved into his line of sight. Matt Upton rang up the purchase the way he always did, without acknowledgement, efficient and distant. He slid the sweating soda and granola bar back to the edge of the counter with the receipt. A pale hand covered his and Matt Upton lurched, whipping his hand back.

He looked up. Piercing blue eyes. Blond hair with professional highlights curled at her shoulders. He couldn't speak. She smiled, confident but faltering.

"Hi Sam."

Astrid.

Through the fog in his head, Matt Upton realized what she had said and the problem it posed. He shook his head and tapped his nametag.

"Matt."

"Oh," she said and blinked.

Matt Upton could see the gears in her brain whirling, putting the pieces together, just like she always did. Astrid may have lost God in the FAYZ, but she hadn't lost her brain. She nodded curtly and gathered up her snack food.

"It's nice to meet you Matt. If you happen to see Sam, I'm here for a few days over at the Holiday Inn."

Matt Upton just shook his head.

"Sam Temple doesn't exist anymore."

He didn't know why he was standing in front of the Holiday Inn. Bowlers would talk. Everyone knew Astrid was one of the survivors who still gave interviews. Too much had happened. This bridge was burned. There was no way she had forgiven him. One by one he ran through the arguments against going inside this motel.

Then he stepped into the lobby. There she was. Still beautiful. Still striking, confident, out of his league. Still so Astrid. She flicked her eyes in his direction, but never stopped giving instruction to the guy with the iPad who was jotting scrawled notes on the simulated notepad. Astrid's assistant nodded in time with the taps of his fingers.

Sam hovered, filled space, made a poor attempt at nonchalance, and failed. Astrid waved the assistant back, apparently finished. She purposefully went to the elevator without a glance at Sam, but he followed her pull.

They stood apart in the elevator, like strangers. Astrid reached into her bag for the card key and smoothly stepped out of the clatter of the elevator. She always could appear in control. Some things never changed.

Sam drank in her presence, a temporary peace in his eternal purgatory. The door buzzed and Astrid held it open for Sam to walk into the small nondescript hotel room. The door clicked shut and then everything was Sam and Astrid.

Sometimes Sam was still in awe of clean sheets, and beds, and electricity. More so when those sheets tangled around Sam and Astrid's legs, and the evening sun glinted in Astrid's hair. Astrid couldn't help herself from sliding her fingers down his arms and across his toned chest. She had always loved his strength, but just as much she touched him to be sure it was really Sam.

For now, Sam was as relaxed as he could be. He knew what was coming, that Astrid was holding back a thousand questions and expecting a thousand and one answers. He knew he'd failed her and his reckoning was coming, but for now Sam was 15 again and with the person he belonged to.

Sam traced his fingers through Astrid's hair, muscles in his face unused to the smile he couldn't contain.

"Go ahead and ask. I know you're dying to."

Astrid shook her head. "We'll get there."

She leaned into another kiss.

It was dark now, but for once Sam didn't mind. No one came to his apartment, but if they did, the nightlights in every socket might have been a conversation starter. Here Astrid was light enough to drive away the darkness.

Now, with her face shielded by dusk, Astrid could ask, "Where did you go Sam?"

He didn't know how to put it into words, what it was like to walk around the halls of an unfamiliar high school and hear the world murderer follow in his wake. It had all been too much. The fighting instincts he couldn't just turn off to please the people around him. The mother who was a stranger to him, who seemed to be afraid to have her son in the same house as her. The endless government bureaucracy and the cameras. Classes he didn't care about and memories he wanted to forget. Actions he couldn't defend. That was how it had started, but Sam couldn't put it together for her.

He'd waited too long to answer. "It was complicated," he muttered.

Astrid pulled back. Just like that, the distance was back.

"I don't think it is. You owe me an explanation."

Then Sam was angry too. "It was crazy. You know that. How was I supposed to know your parents would put you in boarding school?"

"You could have called. You could have written. I did."

"Yeah," Sam barked.

Astrid's lips were pursed and she had pulled the sheet around her like a cocoon. Of all the things she had imagined he might say if Sam Temple reappeared in her life, this wasn't how it was supposed to be.

Astrid spoke slowly, coldly, the argument that had been on her mind since she was 16 years old.

"You disappeared on me. After everything, you left me. I couldn't control where my parents sent me. I tried. You didn't."

Sam let each word punch him with its full weight. He couldn't deny any of it. But he wouldn't apologize. He would never again explain himself to anyone. There had been too much of that. Sam wallowed in sullen silence instead.

Astrid struggled away from the bed, wrapping the sheet around herself. Astrid wrapped in a bed sheet wasn't exactly threatening, but her steel eyes cut Sam and he didn't argue when she opened the door.

"I think you should go now."

Sam had driven all day. He'd ignored the calls from Rubio. He'd kept his hands on the wheel and followed the roads aimlessly in a weak attempt at avoiding the one place he knew he'd end up anyway. It was the place he always ended up at. Sam stood alone in the evening sun on the lookout tower. If he had wanted to, he could look into the mounted telescopes at what used to be Perdido Beach, the fishing boats piled up in the harbor, or the cordoned off battle zones. Sam didn't need to see any of that. He kept his eyes trained on the graves, marked and unmarked.

Even now he could remember where each of his friends had fallen. People he should have been able to save, who had survived for so long.

"I saw your truck."

Sam didn't turn, didn't say anything.

"It wasn't your fault, the way it ended," Astrid's broken record was as useless now as it was when the first lawsuit was delivered on his doorstep.

But it was one time too many and now Sam found a rush of thoughts pent up too long burst out of him.

"I'm a hypocrite. All that time I worried about the questions people would ask, whether people would understand what I did. And then I finally decide I don't care and we somehow win. The barrier comes down. And I realized I had always cared. I just thought I'd die before it became an issue. I thought the FAYZ would never go away. It didn't matter. Then it did."

Sam had never spoken so much at one time since the FAYZ. For once, Astrid was helpless. There wasn't a fix for this, not anything she could give him. She felt 15 again, the girl who had sacrificed her helpless brother to save herself. Sam had taken her fragile self-assurance, the confidence she had cultivated, not from faith, but from her inner core hell bent on survival. She was ragged again.

Sam was the same. Astrid had pulled away the Matt Upton mask. He couldn't just politely ask for her to give it back. Astrid broke the silence.

"The lawsuits stopped. Won't you ever stop judging yourself?"

Sam didn't have to answer. His whole body angled toward the distant gravesites was answer enough.

Astrid stayed with him on the top of the tower for a while, occasionally filling in the silence before lapsing into the awkward silence again.

"We're building a memorial for everyone."

"I might sue that awful museum."

"I'm leaving in a few hours. If I came back…?"

Astrid eventually stopped talking and her presence faded away. The real sunset that Sam had never seen inside the barrier set across the actual waves lapping against Perdido Beach's bones. When it got dark he would retreat into the safety of car lights, but for now he continued to gaze into the FAYZ, waiting for something that would never come.