Matt Shaner - The Reserve

The Reserve

By
Matt Shaner

Eternal Press
A division of Damnation Books, LLC.
P.O. Box 3931
Santa Rosa, CA 95402-9998

www.eternalpress.biz

The Reserve
by Matt Shaner

Digital ISBN: 978-1-61572-439-0

Print ISBN: 978-1-61572-440-6

Cover art by: Amanda Kelsey
Edited by: April Duncan

Copyright 2011 Matt Shaner

Printed in the United States of America
Worldwide Electronic & Digital Rights
1st North American, Australian and UK Print Rights

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any form, including digital and electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the Publisher, except for brief quotes for use in reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Dedicated to:

My son Carter,

I hope youll be proud of me.

Prologue

Beginnings

You might recognize me. Then again, you might not. Its been a long year and we, my family and I, are leaving the spotlight. The networks have stopped calling. The movie options are dropping figure by figure. The news vans disappeared from the driveway last month. We were called a tragedy, a failed experiment, a product of consumer culture. Its funny how we fight to name the most primal parts of life. Rage. Anger. Love. Hate. Passion. Forgiveness. Weve worn many labels and, after a while, you grow to accept them.

I dont know why we turned down so much help. A production team flew out here last week. Just sign, they said, Ed Norton has already agreed to play you. Naomi Watts will play your wife. Valerie, who actually looks like her, enjoyed that choice. They presented me a contract, a ticket to Los Angeles, and a chance to have the whole mess immortalized on the Silver Screen. I turned them down.

The others dealt with worse: reporters, photographers, talk shows, politicians, and the never-ending wave of fame. We met one final time and decided to break away and forget the last year.

Now here I am, on my new porch, writing to make sense of it all. Why we did what we did. Who deserved what they received. What the deep shining spark of truth is at the bottom of the trash. I hope I can find it somewhere underneath it all. Well, enough. Time to start at the best place: the closing.

Chapter One

The Closing

The major casualties of my childhood evolved from a loss of innocence. I was a lonely child fighting to find an identity in the wake of my parents divorce. Everything changed after I met my wife, Val, as a kid in high school. We dated through college and moved in together only minutes from my fathers old house and thirty miles outside of Philadelphia. As the days passed, things began to shift. We lived in an apartment that my job at a local investment company could pay for, while Val worked and improved at being a hair stylist. I proposed to her late on a winters night. One day, in the supermarket, the first piece of everything fell into our lives.

We were engaged and looking for houses, any way to get out of the city we could find. As we walked through the automatic doors, a large rack of identical pamphlets sat in our path. The top of the rack displayed a modern, beautiful house sitting on a serene lake, while a duck worked his way through the water. Just minutes from your door, claimed the words below it. We grabbed a brochure and went home, thinking nothing of another piece to add to our ongoing research. (Id go into details of our wedding, if you wanted, but I know what you want. You need to know why and how and ask every question weve answered a million times.)

After our wedding and more advancement in our jobs, we came into enough income to shop for houses and finally create our own reality. The first brochure on the table was the one from the supermarket. That Saturday morning we decided to go and look, choked up at the thought of our first home buying experience.

I followed the map on the form and, of course, managed to get lost. Val flashed her hazel eyes at me and took a sip of coffee from her thermos.

What? I said, I know where we are headed.

Yeah right, master of directions, she replied. She aimed an air vent directly onto her face and adjusted her sunglasses. You have five minutes until I call the number.

My dad always said that all roads lead to some bigger road, an ending. He was right. As I crested a hill, a group of structures rose like the Easter Island statues from the fields surrounding the road. Various construction vehicles manipulated dirt and other materials. One home, the model, stood finished, and a small crowd gathered outside around a woman in a power suit. We pulled the car into the last available spot next to the lonely looking curb, if you could call it a curb, considering it was a single concrete band running from our feet through the field.

Look at these people, Val said. She walked around the car and hooked onto my arm.

Im sure it will be a good time, I said.

We walked and sized up the others in the crowd. Four couples stood in a small C shape. One of the couples was pregnant and another had two small boys running circles in the model home parking lot. Their father, Bryan Dean as I would find out later, ran and grabbed them both. They yelled, and he took his place back in the C all in, what seemed like, under thirty seconds.

Thank you for coming, the power suit looked at us, and you are?

We told her our names. She wrote them into a daily planner she carried in her right hand, studded with a large diamond ring. I pointed it out to Val.

The independence ring, I said. She rolled her eyes.

Shall we get started? Everyone shared a nod. She continued, My name is Kelly Thompson from Keystone Realty and welcome to The Reserve. She swept the ringed hand over the green hillside. What you see here are acres of prime land and modern, custom homes for the new individual. Towns are over. Row homes are things of the past. Apartments are for old people.

I looked around. None of us were older than thirty. She could read character.

Our homes offer eight designs with their own unique traits and styles, she said as she started to walk, her heels fumbling on the stones every few steps. This is Main Street. It will run approximately a half-mile ending at a cul-de-sac for our Grand Estate model. We place one in each of our developments. The Grand Estate will back to those woods. She pointed, without looking, to a tree line that started after the end of the road. As she talked, I leaned into Val.

I love the area, I said.

I know. Could you imagine? Did you see that model home? she asked.

The two children in the group were staying with their father. The other couples were lost in their own conversations. Kelly kept talking.

Before we made the wood line, she stopped and turned back. It was time for the payoff, the model home. A breeze had kicked up as the summer sun found its way closer to the hillside horizon. We followed Kelly to the front door of the model. I had forgotten all of the talk from the road. Val, to my surprise, started to chat with a woman from another couple, Sara Lewis. Her husband never turned to acknowledge me. I didnt blame him.

This is our base model, the Meadow, Kelly said, as she opened the door to the house.

We started to file inside. Val walked with her new friend. I waited to let the others go in first. Another guy, Shawn Woods, stayed to the back.