We All Looked Up (20 page)

“I guess it's just the two of us,” she said.

“I guess so.”

“Listen, I know we don't have long here, but would you mind holding me?”

“What?”

“Just one hug. Please. It's now or never.”

The guard glanced toward the office. “Only for a second.”

Eliza wrapped her arms around his neck. He smelled strongly of some kind of too-fresh body spray, probably with a name like “Mountain Air” or “Glacial Breeze.”

“Mmm,” she murmured, gently spinning his back toward the window. She went up on tippy-toe so as to see over his shoulder. It wouldn't be a great shot, but it would have to do.

“I'm Eliza.”

“Seth,” he said. “And I hate this job.”

Eliza laughed sincerely, then placed a gentle hand on the back of Seth's head. A moment later the door at the end of the hallway opened up again.

“Your turn,” Seth said softly.

Eliza winked at Kevin as they passed each other, to signal that she'd successfully taken the photo. Now all she needed was a few seconds alone with the phone, to attach the image and send the e-mails.

Inside the office, a massive mound of man sat behind a simple wooden desk, lit by an old-school banker's lamp with a green glass shade. He was totally bald, though the hair had only migrated elsewhere—to his thick red mustache and his hairy knuckles.
CAPTAIN MORGAN
, according to his nameplate.

“Is that a joke?” Eliza asked, shutting the office door behind her.

“Well, technically I'm
Major
Morgan now, but my staff gets a kick out of the old title.” He had a slight accent—something Southern. “But wait, it gets better.” He opened the bottom drawer of his desk and took out a bottle of Captain Morgan Spiced Rum and a tumbler. “You want some?”

“Sure.”

“Ha! Nothing doing, darling. Now, why don't you take a seat and tell me your name.”

“Eliza.”

“Eliza.” Captain Morgan poured himself a substantial glass of Captain Morgan. “So, Eliza, our mutual friend out there says you attempted to undress him. Is that true?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What are you? Sixteen?”

“Eighteen.”

“Well, I know every eighteen-year-old woman loves a man in uniform, but your buddy told me you were just messing around. Is that the case?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That's what I thought.” Captain Morgan sat back in his chair, swirled his drink. “How are you all holding up down there? It's pretty boring, yeah?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Just so you know, I would not have done something like this. All these kids locked up, with that big ol' rock coming. I mean, I don't know exactly what you're in here for, but if it was just because you happened to be at that concert thing—well, that's crazy, in my opinion. If it were up to me, we'd shut the whole thing down.”

“It could be up to you,” Eliza said.

Captain Morgan seemed to consider this, then shook his head. “That's not how it works, darling. I have to keep doing my job, the way I'm supposed to. Otherwise, what's left, you know?” He looked down into his glass, as if the ruddy dregs might tell him something. “All right, you get on out of here, Eliza. And keep your chin up.”

Back in the hallway, Kevin and Seth were standing by the stairwell.

“Come on,” Seth said. “It's almost time for dinner.”

But she hadn't had a chance to send the e-mails yet. She needed to play for time. “Hey, is there a bathroom up here?”

“You can use the one downstairs.”

“That one's coed! The boys leave it disgusting. Please?”

“Sorry. It's not my call.”

“Then I'm sorry too,” Eliza said.

“For what?”

“Grab him!” she shouted. Kevin slid to the ground and wrapped himself around Seth's legs like some kind of human barnacle. Eliza blitzed past them, turning into the first room she could find and slamming the door shut behind her. There was a twist lock on the knob, and she spun it just in time.

She let the phone slip back into her palm and clicked the icon for e-mail. Seth's keys were already jangling in the lock. Eliza added the photo to the prewritten message in her drafts folder and clicked send. The loading bar dashed across to the 90 percent mark, then stopped. Seth must have used the wrong key, because the doorknob only jiggled against her back.

“Where you gonna go, Eliza?”

“Isn't this the bathroom?” she said, then to the phone, “Come on, come on.”

She looked up for the first time and noticed her surroundings. It was an office, empty but for a few posters on the walls. A still frame from a familiar movie, in which a shirtless man with a wide-brimmed black hat stared off into the distance, with a little speech bubble coming out of his mouth:
I LOVE THE SMELL OF NAPALM IN THE MORNING
. A kitten trying to climb up a ball of yarn. A yellowing newspaper article with a picture of a plane taking off and the headline
3-2-1-BLASTOFF: SAND POINT NAVAL AIR STATION CLOSES ITS DOORS FOR GOOD
.

Sand Point Naval Air Station! That had to be where they were. And if she'd only had another minute, she could have added it to the e-mails. But Seth had fit a second key into the lock, and this time the knob turned. Eliza ran toward the windows at the other end of the room. The loading bar was moving again. 91 percent. 92 percent. Seth was inside the office now, brandishing something that looked like a cross between a gun and a grocery-store bar-code scanner. Eliza pulled one of the windows open and dangled the phone outside; she didn't want Seth to know what she was sending.

“What is that?” he asked. 94 percent. 95 percent. “Give it to me!”

“What? This?”

96 percent. 97 percent. He was only a couple of feet away now. She tossed the phone as hard as she could, straight up. 98 percent, and then it was flipping too fast to read, up and up, then plummeting down toward the cement. She looked back to Seth just in time to see him squeeze the trigger. A strange flickering sound, like one of those old film projectors, and then her whole body was pumped full of fire. She blacked out.

P
eter

PETER HAD KNOWN FAILURE BEFORE
. He'd flunked a couple of math tests here and there, choked at the line at state championships (going three-for-twelve, to his eternal shame), and worst of all, he'd cheated on Stacy, which was the sort of failure he'd never even imagined himself ­capable of. But all of it was nothing next to watching Misery and Eliza disappear behind that line of riot cops, as implacable and impassable as a row of pawns on a chessboard. If he hadn't let himself get distracted by Bobo, he might have found Misery in time. If he hadn't secretly wanted Eliza to stay by his side, he probably could have convinced her to leave the park once the riot started. But he'd made all the wrong decisions, and now both of them were gone.

As a sort of punishment, he sat up in his bedroom doing exactly nothing. He didn't try to call Cartier or any of his old friends. He didn't exercise. He didn't check the web to keep up with Ardor's murderous progress through the heavens. His circadian rhythm capsized; the night teemed with too many terrors for sleep. Unconsciousness came only in fits and starts during the pale, misty days, when that toxic star was swallowed up in the brightness of the sun. His ­parents started leaving food outside his door; he ate just enough to keep the hunger pangs away. Once, in the middle of the night, he snuck downstairs and grabbed a handful of trash bags from under the sink. He wanted to get rid of all of the junk in his room: the trophies and the ribbons celebrating a bunch of victories that counted for nothing now; the love letters and keepsakes from a relationship that he'd sacrificed on the altar of a delusion; the old toys and stuffed animals left over from more innocent days. He didn't want to look at any of it anymore. When the bags were full, stacked on the floor of the closet, there was hardly anything left in the room but the furniture.
That's what my life adds up to
, Peter thought.
Nothing at all.

Four days disappeared in a fog of depression and regret. Then, late on a Thursday morning, there was a firm knock on his bedroom door.

“What?” Peter was in bed, and though he was only half-asleep, he didn't get up.

“I'm giving you ten seconds to get out of there,” his father said. “Ten, nine, eight, seven—I'm not kidding around here—six, five . . .” But Peter still didn't move. Part of it was the paralysis of despair—he found it hard to build up the energy for
any
sort of movement right now—but there was more to it than that. Deep down, he knew he needed whatever it was that his dad had planned for the end of the countdown—the grand gesture that only ever came at zero. “. . . four, three, two, one. That's one, Peter! All right, then. Zero.”

With a crash, the door flew open, sending a slim shard of wooden frame sliding across the floor. His dad stepped into the room with the majestic air of a knight who'd just slain a dragon. Did that make Peter the fair maiden?

“Your mom and I have come to a decision,” he said.

“Good for you.” Peter turned over, toward the window.

“We spent most of the past few days down at the police station, screaming along with all the other parents, but there's nothing we can do. It looks like your sister threw a beer bottle at a cop, or at least they're saying she did, and that means they can basically hold on to her for as long as they want.”

“That's your big decision? You're giving up?”

“The police promised us that Samantha is being held only with other juveniles, and that the facility is very safe, but they're not saying where it is. I think they're afraid that if people knew where their kids were, they'd go blow a hole in the wall or something. Given the circumstances, they're probably right.”

“I could have brought her home, Dad. She could be here right now. We could be on our way to California, like you wanted.”

“Peter?” The squeak of old coils as Peter's dad sat down on the other side of the bed. “Peter, look at me.”

Peter turned back over. He wasn't ready to accept the forgiveness in his dad's eyes; he wanted someone
outside
his head to berate him, so he could stop doing it to himself. “It's my fault. Don't try to tell me it isn't.”

“Fine. Then I'll just tell you that it doesn't matter whose fault it is. Blame is just a way to keep score, and adults don't play games like that. So grow up, Peter. Get your butt out of bed.”

With a groan, Peter lifted himself to a seated position.

“Hey!” his dad said, noticing the state of the room. “You cleaned up in here! I like it. Very spare.”

“Thanks.”

“Now come on. It's grocery day. You'll feel better with a little bit of fresh air.”

But Peter did not feel better with a little bit of fresh air.

“Grocery day” meant a day spent waiting in lines. At the gas station, cars had to alternate with men and women filling up iron jerry cans, plastic jugs, and, in one case, an empty beer keg. The air was rife with angry shouts and the raucous honk of car horns.

“Why do they want extra gas?” Peter asked.

“Generators,” his dad said.

“Do you think the power's going to go out?”

“It's already gone out twice. Didn't you have the computer on in your bedroom?” Peter shook his head. “Honestly, I'm surprised they've kept the juice flowing this long.”

Almost an hour passed before it was their turn at the pump. The price of gas had jumped again and again in the last few days; it hovered now at twenty-three bucks a gallon.

“What a racket,” his mom said. “If the world doesn't end, remind me to buy some Exxon stock.”

After filling up the tank, they drove over to Safeway, where the line stretched across the parking lot and a block and a half up the street. It moved at a grass-growing, paint-drying, watched-pot-of-water-­boiling pace, while the winter sun hovered at just that angle where it seemed to slice straight into your brain. You could try to turn your back on it, but then you wouldn't notice when the line moved, and everyone would yell, as if that next two or three feet were the only thing standing between them and a miraculous rescue from cataclysm. At one point, a fistfight broke out near the front of the line, and nobody bothered to break it up; the fight ended when one of the guys went down and stayed there.

A couple of hours of pained familial conversation later (“How's Stacy doing?” his dad innocently asked), they passed through the double doors and the suspicious stares of four armed National Guardsmen. A small bald man in a red T-shirt and chinos greeted them.
MANAGER
was stenciled onto his name tag.

“Welcome to Safeway,” he said, while the rest of his face said,
I'm no happier to be here than you are.
“Please be aware that we're asking everyone to limit themselves to fifteen minutes inside the store, so we can keep the line moving. Now, you're a family of three, so—”

Peter's mom interrupted. “We're a family of four.”

The manager counted them with one nod of his head each. “I'm seeing three.”

“Usually we're four,” Peter's dad explained, “but today we're three.”

“Then that makes you three, doesn't it?”

Peter wondered if he could punch the manager hard enough to shatter his blanched, egg-shaped skull and make the golden yolk spill out.

“Families of three are allowed up to two hundred and fifty percent of the individual limit listed on any item, rounded down. So, if the card says one each, you're only allowed two, okay? Not two and a half.”

“That doesn't seem fair,” Peter said.

“Fairness is a matter of opinion, sir. We're trying to ration. Now please move along. You're slowing everyone down.”

“
You're
slowing everyone down!” Peter said, but his dad already had him by the arm and was pulling him through the second set of doors.

He would have kept arguing, but his anger evaporated as soon as he saw the state of the supermarket. Here was the real apocalypse, missing only a few tumbleweeds and a cow skull bleaching in the sun to complete the image. One glance at the decimated produce department shattered a childhood fantasy—it turned out that those huge pyramids of fruit, which Peter had always assumed were solid all the way through, rested on hollow wooden skeletons that gave them their shape and the illusion of abundance. The display stand of bananas had been picked clean but for a few lime-green pygmies that probably wouldn't ripen by the time Ardor came. The apples and pears had been just as savagely culled. All that remained were the most obscure fruits and vegetables—kiwis and kumquats, bok choy and chard. And if you didn't grab something the moment you saw it, you wouldn't get another chance. This wasn't a leisurely day at the grocery store; it was mortal combat. Like the doomed minor characters in a slasher movie, Peter and his parents split up, grabbing the maximum allowance of anything remotely edible—bacon-flavored potato chips, wasabi soda, off-brand animal crackers, gluten- and dairy-free oven-bake pizzas. The glass case in front of the butcher counter was empty, but there were still some weird-looking layered cheeses up for grabs.

They ended up with a pretty serious haul of second-rate food, lugging it back to the car with a mixture of triumph and disappointment, like Vikings who'd just conquered a village of penniless pacifists.

“That wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be,” Peter's dad said. He set his bags down on the pavement and reached into his back pocket for the car keys.

A rustling sound from a nearby hedge, followed by a burst of color—the three kids had grabbed a bag each before Peter even realized what was happening. He took off after them, a massacre on his mind.

“Peter, no!” his mom shouted.

“But I can catch them!”

“Please!” The note of desperation in her voice was just enough to stop him. “I bet they need it more than we do anyway.”

Peter sighed. She was probably right.

“Let's get home,” his dad said. “These bacon-flavored potato chips aren't going to eat themselves.”

The Internet was still technically around, but whole swathes of it had gone down in the past week. You could no longer spend the day skimming videos on YouTube. Facebook gave up a single, strangely cheery error message:
Uh-oh, seems like something's gone wrong on our end. We're looking into it.
Peter's e-mail account was still active, but he hadn't checked it since the day of the riot.

There were only two unread messages in his in-box, both of which had come in earlier that day, and both of which had been sent by a certain [email protected].

To Whoever's Getting This:

This is Eliza Olivi, of the blog
Apocalypse Already
. Attached is a picture taken from the window of the detention center where I and a few hundred other juveniles are currently being held. None of us know where we are, but hopefully this picture will mean something to someone out there. Don't bother writing back (I won't get your response), just bust us out, okay? I have a party to plan.

Eliza

Peter checked out the second e-mail before opening the attachment. Unlike the first message, this one was addressed only to him.

Dear Peter,

Hello from sunny jail!

If all has gone well, I've just blasted out a message to every e-mail address I could remember. Hopefully it'll help someone find us. But I wanted to send this message just to you, because there's something I wanted to tell you that's been eating away at me in here. Except I'm not going to say it, because you should already know what it is. And you should also know that I wish I'd told you when I had the chance. Okay. That's the best I can do. Hope to see you sometime.

—xE

Peter felt bubbly and out-of-body, capable of flying into space and stopping an asteroid with his bare hands. He opened Eliza's attachment with an unshakable faith that he would recognize the location. Otherwise, how could he rush in and save her, as the universe so clearly wanted him to?