The First Time Jake Pulls a Trigger

Eight days into the worst thing that has ever happened to America, a seventeen-year-old finishes what his father started. Episode 3 drops tomorrow.

Three weeks ago, Jake Smith was a senior at Cherokee High School thinking about a gap year before college. He was hitting cages in the afternoons and shooting paper at the range with his dad on Saturdays the way other kids do bowling alleys.

Tomorrow morning, in Episode 3 of Survival Dispatch: Remnant, he becomes the first person in the Smith family to put a round through another human being.

He is seventeen years old when he does it.

He is steady when he does it.

And the boy who walks out of the kitchen after he does it is not the same boy who walked into it three minutes earlier.

THE KITCHEN WINDOW

It started the way most of the bad things in this story have started. With the dog.

Casey was sitting at the bedroom door at five in the morning, not pacing, not whining, just sitting. Sitting the way he sat when something outside the house had earned his attention and he had not yet decided what to do about it. The amber eyes were flat. The cropped ears were forward. The full-length whip of a tail was perfectly still on the carpet, and that was what got Mark out of bed.

By six the man at the mailbox was at the kitchen window. By six-oh-two the kitchen window was glass on the floor. By six-oh-three the man at the mailbox was halfway across the counter, and a sound was coming out of him that was wet at the edges and climbed in pitch at the end.

Mark fired three rounds.

The man kept moving.

THE BOY WHO FINISHED IT

Casey hit the man at the waist. A hundred and ten pounds of dark brindle muscle put him on the kitchen tile, and the dog was working him the way Casey had never worked anything in his life.

And then Jake stepped past his father.

He had come down the hallway five minutes earlier in sweatpants and a t-shirt with his hair flattened on one side from the pillow and a Glock 19 in his right hand. He had held the line in the hallway when his father told him to. He had said the words back when his father gave the instruction.

Now he stepped past his father, raised the pistol, and put a single round through the man’s forehead at a distance of twelve inches.

The wet broken sound stopped.

The body twitched once and was still.

THE HAND THAT DID NOT SHAKE

Mark looked at his son. The boy’s face was pale, and there was a thin line of sweat at his hairline, and he had just put a round into a man’s forehead at a distance of twelve inches, and his hand was steady and his eyes were clear.

Mark thought, my son just killed a man. And the man was already dead before the round went in. And both of those things are going to live in this house with us from now on.

The kitchen was very loud and very quiet at the same time. Mark could not, for one long second, hear anything. He could see Jake breathing. He could see the dog standing over the body with his head down, watching it the way you watch something you are not sure has finished. He could see the broken glass on the counter and the blood on the tile and the pale blue bathrobe twisted under the body, and he could not hear any of it.

His ears were ringing. The pistol in his right hand felt suddenly very heavy.

And then he said the words every father has to say to a son who has just done a thing that cannot be undone.

You did the right thing.

WHAT HE CARRIED OUT OF THAT KITCHEN

Jake nodded once. He didn’t say anything. He went down the hall and up the stairs to clear the rest of the house, and his footsteps were slower than they had been on the way down.

He did the right thing in that kitchen. He did the right thing the way his father told him to do it. And he did it the only way it could have been done at the moment it had to be done, because the body on the floor was no longer a man and was about to become a problem his mother and his sister would have had to deal with if he had not.

But the boy who walked up those stairs was not the same boy who had come down them ninety seconds earlier.

He was something else now. Something the family was going to have to learn to live with. Something Sarah saw the moment she came up out of the basement and looked at her son and understood, in the way only mothers understand, that one of her children had crossed a line he could not uncross.

TOMORROW

Episode 3 — The Man at the Mailbox — drops Saturday at the usual time.

It is the episode where Jake Smith stops being a high school senior from Canton, Georgia, and starts being whatever a man becomes when he has had to do this. It is the episode where the family discovers that what came across the street that morning was not the only one of its kind, and was not acting alone.

And it is the episode that sets up Sunday night, when the second one comes for the front door, and the Smiths discover that the cost of what Jake did in that kitchen is just beginning to come due.

If you have been waiting all week to find out whether Remnant earns the work I have been telling you it took to build it, Saturday is the answer.

Subscribe to Remnant before tomorrow morning so the episode lands in your inbox the second it drops. Paid subscribers get early access and bonus material across the rest of the season.

Godspeed,
Chris Heaven, CEO
Survival Dispatch