4. Respite For The Drifting Soul

Morena felt empty inside today. She felt empty inside most days, but today there seemed to be a far more profound feeling of the void than the burden she normally shouldered. It was a dark emptiness, a reminder not only of loss, but of the circumstance surrounding that loss.
It was a year to the day now that she paused to think about it. Exactly one year ago to this very day her life had began its downward spiral that saw her lose her family, her job, her home, and her life in LA. She had drifted since then, drifting in a sea of despair and blown where the winds of fate might take her.
It was a year to the day that she had lost her son, her angel, her shining light. He was 6 at the time, out for a drive with David to no destination in particular. God it was a beautiful day, 32oC and no more than a wisp of cloud in the sky. They had been to the water park that morning, Josh had loved that, he always did. The slides, the wave machine... It broke her heart just to think of his smiling face, to think that she could see it now in nothing other than photographs that would only fade over time.
If only her grief would do the same.
David had been cruising down Sunset Boulevard with the top down, Josh still damp from the park and slurping on a big ice cream, neither of them with a care in the world.
It took mere seconds for her life to change irrevocably, in one instant, the blink of an eye, a single flash and everything started to crumble. David had taken a seizure behind the wheel, his body wracked with convulsions and he lost control of the car.
The car simply folded when it went into the bus.
Josh was killed instantly.
When he awoke in intensive care David could not understand what was happening, he could barely understand where he was, he could barely understand even who Morena was. It was days before anyone could summon the strength to tell him about his son, and a week before they could tell him that his seizure was the result of a brain tumor.
They gave him 6 months. He lasted 4.
It had all been too much for Morena. To lose her child and her husband.
She could no longer focus on work, she could no longer focus on her home. Her family called often to try and comfort her, to break the wall of despair that she had erected about herself. She had taken to drinking, she had taken to prescription medications, she had taken to anti-depressants. She took anything that would make the pain go away for a while.
Her job was the next thing to go, it was no longer seemingly to employ a person who had become a hazard onto themselves, that their addictions threatened to destroy them.
Eventually she had turned to the church. She didn't find Jesus, and God remained as elusive as he ever had. What she did find was a certain comfort in reading the works of people who had a true faith in something, a firm believe in there being a better world if only we would all work towards it.
For the first time in months she had slept soundly, though her days still filled her with emptiness and apathy.
Without a job she soon could not afford to keep up the payments on her home, but in her current state of mind that was to suit her fine. She sold the house, cashed in her savings and bonds and took to the open road with little more than a full tank of gas and her Bible.
She had traveled much of the West Coast trying to find some sort of reprieve for her broken soul, she didn't want to move inland, the sea was the only calming influence that remained in her heart and it would break her to be away from it.
The journey back south again had felt twice as long, she knew that the only thing before her was the world that she no longer wanted a part of, the world that had caused her so much pain. She saw it as a revenant, a malevolent specter sitting on the horizon with ill intent towards her, some sinister purpose, a depraved plan to destroy what little of her remained.
She couldn't take the thought of it. What Morena wanted was a respite from the demons that plagued her, clemency from the horrid things that sprang to her mind. The thoughts of death, the thoughts of blood. She wanted to escape it all.
An off-ramp led off the highway before her, the sign long having fallen and rusted she knew not where it would lead, but towards the coast she could just make out the outline of some buildings.
Briefly darkness seemed to be all about her as the road meandered through a wooded glade and an ocean mist was rising. The road seemed to go on forever, certainly far longer than it looked from the highway, surely there should have been houses by now?
Had she really seen buildings from the highway? Even if she hadn't then surely she should have reached the coast by now?
An apparition loomed out of the mist before her, a giant shadow.
Buildings!
At last, she had finally made it. The first signs of civilization.
A rusted sign proclaimed 'THE MISTY COAST WELCOMES SAFE DRIVERS' in an inviting font.
In bold beneath that 'PURITY BAY'.
Morena smiled, that was a nice name. As she drove by into the deserted and fog shrouded streets she spared only a moments consideration to how the Population count had been coarsely scratched from the sign.