The Before by Emily McKay

Chapter One
     
    Lily
     
    “Lily, darling,” my uncle said as soon as I answered the phone. “I think it’s about time you girls came up to see me.”
    “Hey, Uncle Rodney. What’s up?” I asked, cheerfully ignoring the concern in his voice as I wedged the phone handset between my shoulder and my ear. I yanked open the fridge and gazed at the contents, hoping a chocolate cake would miraculously appear.
    “Your mom around?” he asked, ignoring my greeting, which was unusual. Even when he called to talk to Mom, Uncle Rodney wanted to know all the details of our lives. We were the only family he had now that Nanna was gone.
    “It’s not even five yet,” I pointed out. Mom wouldn’t be home until after six, at the earliest. She worked as a lawyer for a local nonprofit. You’d think that one of the benefits of working for very little would have been shorter hours. But not for Mom. She was a sixty-hour-workweek kind of gal. Since that chocolate cake hadn’t miraculously appeared, I shut the fridge door. “You want to call back later or do you want me to take a message?”
    “What the hell is she doing working at a time like this?” His voice rose sharply with concern, surprising me again. He never—never!—spoke ill of Mom. He disliked his neighbors, distrusted organized religion and reviled the government, but he adored Mom. And Mel and me along with her.
    I glanced out the window expecting to see—I don’t know—the dark green clouds of an approaching tornado. Or maybe fighter jets descending on suburban Dallas.
    Uncle Rodney was what Mom liked to call “eccentric.” He lived up in the Ozark Mountains in a three-room shack with a bomb shelter in the backyard. Three or four times a year he’d call and tell us he thought we should come stay with him a while. He’d been gleefully predicting the end of American civilization for most of his life and all of mine. He was one gas mask away from having his own reality TV show, but family was family and we all loved him.
    “What’s up this time?” I asked, teasing him. “Alien invasion? Tropical storm forming off the coast of Africa? Teacher protests in Austin getting out of hand again?”
    Normally, Uncle Rodney took teasing pretty well. Yes, he was hard-core about the whole prepping thing, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know when to take a joke.
    This time, however, his voice got low and serious. “Lily, I want you to go turn on the TV.”
    It was summer and Mel and I spent our mornings at the local rec center, where I worked part-time as a lifeguard and where Mel hung out and taught informal chess classes. I’d spent the hours since we’d come home streaming a movie off Netflix.
    I didn’t even wait for him to finish the sentence and went straight for the living room. Mel was curled up on the sofa with her portable keyboard out on her lap, her fingers flying over the keys. It wasn’t actually on. She was just playing along to the music in her head.
    My twin, Mel, was on the autism spectrum and she was kind of a musical savant. Thanks to years of occupational therapy, she functioned highly, but sometimes I still felt like she wasn’t really of this world. She did her real living in the world of music and sound.
    She didn’t look up when I entered the room, but frowned when I turned on the TV. An image of some cheesy sci-fi monster flickered across the screen. The movie was filmed in that fake documentary style, all grainy footage and jerky camera angles. The monster lumbered down the street of some dusty small town. Its features and body were human but not quite in proportion. Classic low-budget horror. Like they’d just shoved a mask onto the face of some stunt man.
    I rolled my eyes as I fumbled the remote. “Hang on, Uncle Rodney. The TV’s on the Syfy Channel. Let me turn over to CNN.”
    “Lily—”
    But the next channel was showing the same movie. I flicked again. And again. And again.
    “I don’t understand,” I muttered. Every