Todd (4 page)

Sure,
he almost said, but
his heart gave a sudden jump.
The text!
he remembered.
Christ, I
almost forgot about the text!

They'd left yesterday in case of
some kind of attack, but now they'd been away for over 12 hours. Was it safe to
duck back? Was it
worth it,
just for Todd's video games?

Probably not, but then again, how
did he know he'd been interpreting the text correctly to start with? Wasn't the
most likely possibility that the message had originated with a human, somehow?

After 24 hours of near-total
isolation, of seeing the world empty, he was coming around to the idea of at
least finding out who had sent the message. Every other attempt to find another
survivor—phone calls, internet, television, radio—had failed, but the text was
a lock.
Someone
had sent it.

Hell, maybe he'd overreacted
yesterday. Maybe it really had been some kind of rescue message. He tried to
remember exactly what it had said, but his memories of the day before were
draped in panic. The message had been phrased weirdly; that was all he
remembered.

"Can we stop at our
house—?" Todd started. Any question not answered within three seconds
warranted repetition.

"I don't know," Alan
interrupted, then used that most reliable of time-honored put-offs: "We'll
see."

Heading to the grocery store took
them right past their neighborhood anyway. Part of him was curious to see if
the house was even still there. Maybe it had been vaporized, or something.

"How long will the power be
out?"

"I don't know, Todd. Maybe
for a long time. That's why I want to get some food while we can."

"But where will we put the
food if the fridge doesn't work?"

He opened his mouth to answer, and
realized his son had a point. Their fridge would be just as dead as the grocery
store's.

Shit
. Who was he kidding?
He wasn't made for this. He had never been into any of that survival crap. He'd
never even been a Boy Scout, for gods' sakes.

While his mind panicked, his mouth
said: "We're going to get a generator."

"What's
that?
"

"It's—" How did kids
always come up with such difficult questions? "It's a thing that you plug
other things into. It has outlets, just like we have at home, but it makes the
power itself instead of getting it from the wall."

Todd chewed on this, staring out
the window as they approached the bridge. Then he breathed a long,
"Whoa."

The bridge was fine, but the
highway beneath was a nightmare. Cars were thrown sideways or upside down, some
piled against the concrete of the underpass like bodies clawing for safety. A
semi truck had jackknifed and flipped, forming a
de facto
dam against a
river of tangled rubber and broken steel.

Alan eased the car to a stop so
they could get out and look. A number of cars had scorched overnight;
smoldering fires still dotted the whole stretch. Looking west he saw another
column of black smoke, probably from the highway. It had to be a fire. He
wondered how long before it spread to them.

"That's just
crazy
,"
Todd said.

"Yeah." Alan let out a
long breath, appreciating how lucky they'd been. "Good thing we weren't
down there."

"Yeah.
Really
good."

We have to get out of here,
something
told him.
It's not safe. All these fires. We need to get out, maybe go
north, find a farmhouse or a cabin on the north shore.

It was a romantic idea, something
he could imagine reading about in a zombie apocalypse novel, but it wasn't
right. He didn't know anything about farming or living off the land. They
needed to be near civilization, or what was left of it. They'd need the food.

Come winter,
he suddenly
realized,
we'll need the shelter.

So, no, it wasn't safe here. The
problem was, it probably wasn't safe anywhere.

13

They dodged dead cars as they
headed north toward the hardware store, hoping to find a generator. Most of the
vehicles had veered off the main drag before crashing, but there were plenty of
nasty pileups, too. When they came across these, Alan drove around through the
grass or a nearby parking lot.

None of this was too bad. What
scared him most were the standing fires.

"We should put those fires
out," Todd said.

"We can't put them all
out."

"Why not?"

"There's too many. We'd need
a fire truck."

The tires crunched through the
gravel as he brought the car over the shoulder, rejoining the road after a
particularly nasty tangle of vehicles. Intersections were the worst.

"But we can use the fire
truck," Todd pressed. "There's no one using it now."

"I don't know how to use a
fire truck. Do you?"

"Maybe we could figure it
out."

Hell, maybe they could. Alan had
yet to see a destroyed fire hydrant. He imagined going to the fire station,
finding the keys, and starting up a truck. Maybe they'd have a training manual
somewhere. He and Todd could go gallivanting around Brooklyn Park, putting out fires.

He snorted. "There's too many
fires, Todd. Look, most of 'em have been pretty small. They'll burn out on
their own."

This finally quieted him. Alan
just hoped it was true.

There was a little hardware store
a mile up from 610. It took them 20 minutes to get there. A pickup truck had
crashed through the glass storefront and into the registers. The sun was behind
the building and the power was out, leaving the interior black as a cave.

They got out of the car. The day
was growing heavy and humid, a nasty piece of summer work.
Tornado weather,
Alan
thought, and realized there would be no sirens, no warnings. "Be careful,
here. See all the broken glass?"

Todd ignored him, already walking
toward the ruin of the front door.

"Todd, God damn it, hang on!
Do you see the broken glass?"

"Yes!"

"Well, listen to me for a
second. You've got to be careful."

"I know. I will." He
started to turn back to the window.

Alan took his shoulder.
"No." He turned him around. "Look. I need you to listen to
me."

Todd looked confused. "I
am."

"No, I mean right away. I
need you to listen to me like you listen to Mom. I know you've never really
cared what I say, but you need to start, because I'm the only grown up here
now."

Todd shrugged. "All
right."

He wasn't listening. He didn't
care.

Oh, he'd listen to Brenda all day.
When she asked him to clean his room, he'd do it. When she worked with him on
his homework, it would actually help.

Not with Alan. Never with Alan.

If Alan tried to help with the
homework, his son would just dig in his heels and insist it was impossible. If
Alan told him to clean his room, it became a days-long feud of escalating
punishments every time.

A couple years ago, Alan had just
quit trying and turned the whole Todd Problem over to his wife, since she could
handle it so much better. This had resulted in an uneasy truce, whereby any
time Alan wanted Todd to do something, he'd talk to Brenda. There had been the
occasional flare-up, but for the most part the truce had worked.

The casual disregard Todd was
throwing his way now was bringing it all back. It pushed every single one of
his buttons. An old rage woke in his chest, snarling for meat.
God dammit,
he
wanted to snap,
do you even fucking understand the situation we're in?

He took a breath, forcing himself
to calm down. If they started fighting, everything would get worse than it
already was.

And maybe,
he realized,
that
question isn't rhetorical. Maybe I should explain.

"Look. If you fall, if you
get a cut, we can't just go to the doctor. Okay? And I don't know how to do
stitches. So that cut could get infected. That infection could spread. It could
kill you,
Todd. You get a cut on your foot right now, it could kill
you."

Dramatic, maybe, but straight from
the gut. Todd looked sobered. "Oh. Okay."

He'd gotten through to him. Wonder
of fucking wonders. "Do your shoes have any holes in them?"

"No."

"All right. Let me go first.
Stay right behind me."

The truck had taken out most of
the store's front door, and twisted the support beams in the storefront into
spears. Alan went to the corner instead, where a single pane of glass was still
in one piece. He broke it out, then cleared the jagged shards as best he could.
His face was slick with sweat, the muggy air clinging like a second skin.
"Careful."

He ducked under the support and
into the store. Todd ducked in behind him, forcing Alan to do a double take.

When did he get so big?
He
made a mental note to tell Brenda, later, about how tall Todd was getting. It
was a reflexive action, like a tongue probing the spot where the tooth used to
be.

The realization punched him in the
gut, threatened to double him over:
She's gone.

He wouldn't get to tell her this
story. She wouldn't joke that they had to quit feeding Todd because he was
getting too big. There was no part at the end of this day where he would get to
lie down in bed with her snuggled against his chest, when he could secretly
admit to her how scared he'd been.

In that instant he realized how
badly he needed those quiet moments; how badly he needed her.

Oh, gods, she's actually gone.
It
was like stumbling into an open elevator shaft.

"It's really dark in
here," Todd murmured.

Alan leaned against a cash
register, fighting for control. He couldn't break right now. There simply
wasn't time.

"Yeah." He coughed and turned
away, slapping at the tears on his cheeks. "Well, at least we know there's
no one in here." The joke fell flat and died in the darkness. "Help
me find some light."

There was a stack of lanterns
close to the front, right next to the batteries needed to run them. They opened
two—one for each of them—and made their way into the back of the store,
spelunkers delving the depths.

14

A pretty woman smiled at him from
the side of the generator box, the shadows from Todd's bobbing lantern crawling
over her like ants.
Displacement 420cc,
the box read.
Bore: 90.
Alan
had no idea what it meant, and didn't much care. The price on the tag was
nearly $800. It would probably work.

He went searching for a loading
cart, Todd in tow. Piles of desolate clothing pockmarked the floor like cairns. Each threw a
shadow: long at first, then shorter as his lantern drew closer.

All these people were in the
store,
he thought. This pile was khakis and a polo shirt; that one a Mountain
Dew t-shirt and jeans. Next to the loading carts was a stroller with an empty
one-piece inside. The one-piece was green, with a cartoon chimpanzee. It read:
Silly
Monkey.

"You used to be small enough
to fit in one of these," he said, pointing at the stroller. Todd didn't
answer, but a familiar voice in his head did. It replayed his own words and put
them in context, helping him understand exactly how pointless they were. So
what if Todd used to ride in a stroller? He was too big now. Why say it? What
was the point?

What a dumb thing to say.

He'd fought that voice for a long
time. It had been hard, but Brenda had supported him, and eventually it grew
quiet enough that he could usually ignore it.

Of course, Brenda was gone now.

Allie's gone, too.
Everyone
is gone. None of this matters.

What's the generator for? To
mark time until you die?

"I know," Todd finally
said. "Mommy told me."

15

Once the generator was loaded,
they went back to the house.

Ultimately, he couldn't resist the
prospect of finding out who had sent him that text yesterday, even if it was a
risk to go back. Those words—

(okay stay)

—were the only sign of other life
he'd seen since yesterday. He had to know where they'd come from.

He was careful, though. He grabbed
the best weapon he could find—a little gardening fork from the garage—and eased
the door open. The house was dark and quiet, the air a stale reminder of
yesterday's air conditioning.

Todd didn't wait for him; he
darted toward his room and his games. "My 3DS is still here," he
reported from around the corner, "but the power's on red."

"Get back here," Alan
ordered. "Don't run off like that, I told you."

"Can I plug it into the
generator?" He ambled back into the living room, clutching his game system
and looking pensive.

"Just... come here. I want to
finish checking the house. Be quiet. No more running off until I say it's
safe." Alan considered asking him to wait in the kitchen, or maybe even
the car, but he didn't want him out of sight. There was probably no one in the
house, but if there was, he didn't want to find out by having them take his
son. "Stay close and stay quiet."

They went room to room. The house
was clear. Alan went back to the car, brought the generator inside, and cursed.

"What?"

"It... needs gas."

"We have gas for the
lawnmower."

"Yeah, I know, Todd."
That wouldn't be enough.

He felt like an idiot. How had he
thought it generated power? Magic? Where the hell was he going to get gas, with
all the power out?

His own incompetence staggered
him. His mind broke loose, a dog off its leash, and ran down the path of wild
speculation.

Even if he got the generator
running, then what? There was only so much food they could keep cold.
Eventually nothing that needed to be cooled—meat, vegetables, milk, butter,
nothing
—would
still be good. There were probably enough dry goods at the grocery store alone
to keep them fed for years, but would those
even stay good that long?
And even if they would, did they have enough nutritional value to keep them
from getting sick?