Maurice tried not to listen to what the kids were saying, but the walls of his new home were not thick and sound bounced around the wood floors. They would need to find some carpets or it would feel like they were living in a bowling alley. He stood at the window in his small bedroom and looked out at the SUV still parked across the street. That was some bizarre shit. The son of the President of the United States in his house. He hated the kid’s dad, and Maurice usually got along with just about everybody. Clearly, he’d passed that along to Kayla at least. But, damn. He shook his head in disbelief at the turn of events his life had taken. Things used to seem so straightforward. Go to school. Get some skills. Get a job. Hopefully meet a fine-looking woman. Well, that’s as far as he got before everything went sideways. It went sideways slowly, over the course of years, but he knew what was going on even while it was happening. How much longer would they have stayed together if he hadn't forced the issue by being completely pathetic? He turned from the window and tried to banish those thoughts by focusing on the list of things that needed to be fixed around his new house.

Sure as Hell don't make ‘em the way they used to.

But he smiled. Fixing things made him happy and made him feel useful. It was after all, what he was good at. He’d be damn useful when the zombies came. That he knew for sure. Timing was everything.

Seventeen-year-old Maurice Thompson would not have been much help in the apocalypse. His only skill was getting into trouble with anyone and everyone: his parents, his teachers, and especially the local cops. Of course, in a small town in rural North Carolina, there were only two cops and one was a racist asshole, while the other was Maurice’s father, so there was no way he was gonna win. Fortunately for Maurice there was also a lot of logging in North Carolina and the largest company in the area had made a business decision that it was more profitable to pay fines and cut whatever and wherever they wanted rather than strictly obey the law. This was fortunate for Maurice, because one of the fines the company paid was to fund two-week adventure trips for local youth in the same wilderness the company was in the process of destroying. And one of these trips just so happened to coincide with a drunk-driving incident involving Maurice’s father’s car and a local maple tree. Maurice was on the company bus with nine other teenagers before he’d sobered up.

It was almost immediately apparent that this was not going to be a vacation or anything like the boy scout camping trips he’d seen on television. The company viewed the kids as free labor and planned to break even on this particular fine they were paying for their transgressions. On the first day, Maurice was handed a chainsaw and pointed toward a stand of trees. That had been fun as he and the others had tried to kill each other with falling trees, much to the amusement of the men who were supposed to be keeping them out of trouble and their limbs intact. But then something interesting happened. They were told to move the fallen trees to a spot closer to the road where the trucks could pick them up. Their minders just stood there drinking coffee and laughing as the kids tried lifting, rolling and eventually trying to chop the trees into smaller pieces. That got them a string of cursing from the real workers who would likely find more sympathy from their bosses if a kid lost an arm than they would if the lumber was made into kindling.

So, the men walked down and demonstrated how they could roll the trees across a set of smaller trees with teams of two men constantly grabbing trees that had been rolled over and moving them to the front. The men explained it was how the Egyptians moved the giant stones to build the pyramids. It was still hard work, but for Maurice it was like being granted secret knowledge passed down through the ages. He was hooked. When the two weeks ended, he dropped out of school and went to work for the logging company full time. His decision finally gave him some direction for the first time in his life and turned the company’s illegal logging operation into a successful recruitment campaign. Everyone came out ahead, except the trees.

For Maurice, it was like everything school never was, but should have been. He learned to drive trucks of all sizes, to operate backhoes, climb sixty-foot trees with a chainsaw on his back, and most importantly, how to fix everything. The work he was doing was far from any city or town, and the time it took to send something for repair or bring someone to them was lost time, and money, for the company. Anyone that could keep the equipment running was invaluable and within a year Maurice had become indispensable. By the time he was twenty-one, he was managing a team of five other men. By twenty-three, he was making more money than his father. By twenty-five, both the logging industry and Maurice were apparently past their primes.

Much like the avocado colored refrigerators of the early 1970s, the red maples of North Carolina fell out of favor as home builders and the fickle people who lived in the home builders’ homes changed their preference to the oaks of Appalachia. Maurice’s company suffered. It’s also possible that their corporate philosophy of completely ignoring environmental laws and paying fines finally caught up to them. Of course, by that time, the executives who put that philosophy in place were long retired and living in foreign countries with poor extradition laws, so, you know, not their problem.

Maurice found himself with lots of useful skills and no industry in need of them. So, he contributed to society in a different way, by adding more humans to it. He did this by having unprotected sex.

Sixteen years later he was staring at a handwritten list of things to be repaired around a house in a city he’d never lived in before. And his daughter was downstairs talking to the President’s son. At least releveling the bedroom door that would not close properly made sense to him. He knew he’d feel better after he crossed a few things off his list, so he got to work.