"You'll get to sleep soon." It's the first thing Lydia tells him, and if it's funny she tells him that before he even gets a good morning, he's also sure he'd be the only one laughing.
"Sure, sweetheart," he says, and doesn't argue her. There's no point. Half the time she's right, and if he doesn't think this will be one of them, he learned a few years back that arguing just left her in tears and him throwing shit at the wall just to watch it break. His temper might be the only thing that's improved, but that's because despair has settled in where all that anger used to live.
She smiles at him, something soft and pitying, like she can see right through the lie, but he doesn't stick around for more. There's other mouths to feed besides her, including a twelve year-old kid and her mother. Her father died when the world ended, and sometimes he thinks that's a blessing. Sometimes he still wishes he had too.
It's an unproductive line of thought, the kind that still lives somewhere in the background, until it's become a morbid promise to himself. Someday. Someday, if the blonde prophet he's been following across the country stops telling him that everyone he's ever loved is still alive and still breathing. Someday, when they reach California, and find there's nothing but the same horror waiting for them. He stopped hoping for more a long time ago.
Still, by afternoon he realizes why she said it. That someday barreling up on him a lot faster than expected, when he gets the first whiff of saltwater. It's jarring, nostalgia and memory rushing up just as swiftly, of some beach vacation taken a thousand years ago, when his family was more than a dream he can't recall so clearly.
He smells it long before the gates come into view, and it kills the nostalgia fast, because this is the life he's become used to that. That balancing act of trying to gauge whether whoever is on the other side of that barricade can be trusted, and just as important, if they're willing to trust him.
He stops the truck, Lydia in the passenger seat next to him, but the brief glance he gives her doesn't tell him anything. She isn't even looking at him, drawing patterns on the window, and he sighs before climbing out.
"Stay here," he calls back to the rest, before moving forward, alone and on foot.
There's a gun slung across his back, his thumb hooked in the strap and off the trigger, because that's a harder road to come back from. And if the sign they passed a while back was any indication, than this was supposed to be it. The promised land, end of the road, and he wishes he didn't feel so numb to the possibility.
His gaze skims along the boundary they've set up, looking for signs of movement before clearing his throat. "Anyone there? Promise I'm a friendly."
