Touré scooped them all up and shoved them into his pockets.
“Quest completed,” he said. “Let’s restore health and then work out what’s next.”
8
They settled on a bench near a shuttered newsstand, in the dead center of Harvard Square. The owners had pulled down all of the magazines in the windows and taken in the racks. The university bookstore across the street—the Coop—was similarly emptied out, with no books in the windows.
Touré began to get the unsettling idea that maybe he was in a hyperrealistic video game that they hadn’t finished rendering yet.
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” he said, between bites. He was on his second Snickers already, while the other two were still just thinking about eating their firsts. The candy bar was incredibly stale, but he had generous standards of edibility. “The three of us must have something in common that can explain why we’re still here and nobody else is. What were you guys doing last night?”
This didn’t end up being a fruitful line of pursuit. Robbie was at an off-campus party the night before, near Porter Square, and Carol had gone to a reception at a Chinese restaurant on Mass Ave. She was in bed by nine, Robbie at some indeterminate time past midnight. And Touré had crashed on a couch around three in the morning. None of that left enough time for the entire city to evacuate.
But they already knew that.
Their extended life stories weren’t any more helpful. Robbie was an African American from Connecticut, Carol emigrated from China as a child and was raised in Florida, and Touré was a second-generation Mexican American who grew up in nearby Jamaica Plain.
“Maybe we’re all sick and we don’t know it,” Robbie suggested. He seemed preoccupied with a quarantine theory, at which Carol shook her head whenever he brought it up.
“Maybe,” Touré said. “Seems sketchy. I don’t feel sick.”
“We could be, or we could not be,” Carol said. “This is a waste of time. We have to stop speculating and find someone who knows what happened. Why don’t we get a car and drive to where the people are?”
“We don’t know where they are,” Robbie said. “That’s the point.”
“We know where they aren’t,” she said, “which is a start. How far could they have gotten? I assume one of you knows how to drive.”
“I can drive,” Robbie said, “but I don’t know how to start a car without a key.”
“Neither do I,” Touré said. “All the cars around here look like crap anyway. Not sure they would even start.”
“You’re holding out for a nicer car?” Carol asked.
“That’s not what I mean. They look . . . junky. Not up to the task.”
“Then we’ll find another way to contact the outside world,” she said. “You boys are so interested in solving this mystery yourselves when there’s no need. We’ll ask someone who was awake when it happened.”
Touré thought this was overly optimistic of Carol, but didn’t say so. It was self-evident that the world ended and forgot to take the three of them, and that was that. She also wasn’t wrong, though, for the same reason he’d taken the bike to go out and look for additional survivors in the first place. He wondered if it made sense to do this again: leave Robbie and Carol to make do where they were, and head further out. Not to discover the entire city of Cambridge was now hiding in Arlington, necessarily, but to see if he could nearly run over another survivor or two.
“We could find a radio,” Robbie said. “One using batteries, since the power’s out.”
“I think we got hit by an EMP,” Touré said. “I don’t know what that does to radios. Killed my watch, and your phone.”
“We’ll know when we find someone who knows,” Carol said. She turned to Touré. “You need to stop sounding so excited about all this and think about what our real situation is, especially if the three of us are the extent of who we can rely upon, for the near future. Until we find someone else, we’re in a circumstance where we have no food, water, or shelter. It’s pleasant out right now, but it will be colder at night, and we have no heat. Unless one of you was a Boy Scout, I expect we don’t have the knowledge necessary to make a fire. Surviving this apocalypse you keep talking about isn’t going to be so remarkable if we can’t figure out how to last on our own beyond a week, whether we’re the only ones left or not.”
“I keep expecting someone to pop up and tell me this is all a joke,” Robbie said. “Or I was thinking that, until we met you. If it’s a joke, you aren’t in on it.”
“Nope,” Touré said.
“But I agree with her; it’s a big jump to go from nobody’s here to nobody’s alive. But for now, we should deal with what’s in front of us.”
“Yeah, okay,” Touré said. “Food, water, shelter. Once we’re settled down, we’ll work out where to check for more survivors. You’re both right; we need a camp. But we have a little . . . Hang on.”
Touré stood up, turned around a couple of times to make sure he had his orientation right, and then started laughing.
“What is it?” Robbie asked.
“I think I found some more time in the day for everyone to have gotten out of town,” Touré said.
“What do you mean?” Carol asked.
“It’s supposed to be morning, right?” he said. “We agree on that?”
“We don’t know what time it is,” Robbie said. He said it like this was the worst thing ever.
“Yeah, but morning. Because we all woke up and it was morning, because that’s when you wake up, right?”
“You’re going in circles,” Carol said.
“The sun’s in the wrong place.”
He pointed to the sun’s current position in the sky.
“That’s west,” Touré said. “It’s not climbing. It’s setting.”
Robbie stood and did some of the same calculations, albeit with different mental east–west markers.
“I think he’s right,” he said, to Carol. “I guess we’re both really late for class.”
Just then, they heard something that may have been a howl, from hopefully a great distance away. It started off high, and then lowered into a more canine register.
“I don’t suppose that was your dog?” Touré asked.
“No,” Carol said.
The sound had an impressive impact on the local wildlife. Two deer ran past them, then up JFK Street, unconcerned about the nearby humans, but clearly alarmed about the animal howling in the distance. Likewise, an abundance of smaller creatures scampered across the open area in search of shelter. Touré was stunned by how many there were; it was like seeing a nest of spider eggs hatching. Squirrels, raccoons, rats, wild cats as small as housecats and as large as bobcats, chipmunks, possums, a couple of foxes, and a possible badger.
“What’s happening?” Carol asked as a tabby cat darted past her leg.
“Um, not sure,” Touré said as another howl sounded, from a slightly different direction.
“I think it’s safe to say that everyone’s afraid of whatever’s making that noise,” Robbie said.
“It sounds like a wolf,” Carol said.
“It sounds like a lot of wolves,” Touré said.
“Maybe we should step up our plans to find food and shelter,” Robbie said. “Where’s the nearest supermarket?”
Touré had to think about it.
“If we go that way,” he said, pointing up JFK in the same direction the deer ran, “and dogleg left at the river, there’s one a couple of miles further.”
“Fresh water,” Carol said.
“It’s a river, so yeah, I’m pretty sure.”
“I know, I wasn’t asking. Access to a viable source of drinking water is of great value.”
“Can we make it?” Robbie asked.
“Shouldn’t be that tough,” Touré said. “It’s just down there.”
9
They only got a few blocks before it became obvious that Carol’s blindness was going to be a problem.
&n
bsp; Touré had his bike still, which he was walking down the middle of the street at the same pace Robbie and Carol were moving. It wasn’t fast, but she either couldn’t run or Robbie wasn’t willing to push her to go any faster.
“I can try jogging,” Carol said, aware of the tension in the moment. It had less to do with any immediate, in-their-face threat than with the general atmosphere of panic surrounding them. Even the birds sounded tense. And the baying of the wolves was now coming from at least three directions, and seemed to be getting closer. On top of that, it was as if someone had shot the sun out of the sky, given how fast it was going down. This part Carol probably didn’t know.
“Can you?” Robbie asked.
“Yes, if the surface is even. I used to run with Burton.”
“No, there are potholes everywhere,” Robbie said. “But we’re fine. Hey, Touré, why don’t you go on ahead?”
Touré stopped where he was. They’d made it as far as a parking garage he considered the symbolic end of the Square. He could see the bridge that spanned the narrow end of the Charles up ahead. He was pleased to see that the bridge was still there.
“You want to split up?” Touré asked.
“It’s just down to the river and then left, isn’t it?” Robbie asked. “I can find it.”
“Yeah, it’s hard to miss, if you keep the river on your right. It’s still a good distance off, though.”
“That’s fine. We’ll be fine. You go on ahead on the bike. It’ll give you a few minutes to figure out a way inside without breaking a window.”
Robbie had a point. The brick-through-the-glass approach worked great if you didn’t mind who else got inside with you. But now that a predator had been introduced to the dynamic, it was hard to understate the value of an intact window and a closed door.
“Okay,” Touré said, “but . . . I mean, you’ve seen at least one movie in your life, right? Splitting up is, like, a textbook mistake.”
“For goodness’ sake, this isn’t a movie,” Carol said. “We’ll catch up to you there.”
“All right, all right.”
He kicked his leg over the bike.
“Be safe, guys.”
Touré took off.
It was actually sort of a great feeling, getting on the move, even though he was about ninety percent sure he’d never see Robbie and Carol again as soon as he made it around the corner, and he was probably not going to like the way that would play out. An unscientific survey of every movie he could think of led him to the conclusion that if anyone was about to be eaten, it was him. The lone character sent ahead as a scout almost never makes it back unless he’s the hero. Touré liked to think he was the hero, but it was too early to tell.
Fortunately, as Carol took pains to underline, this was not a movie.
The air near the river was much cooler, although this could have been partly due to the impending sunset. The edge of the Charles was an absolute menagerie of waterfowl and land animals in need of water. Touré was thirsty himself, but—as good as Carol’s point about needing a water source was—he would kill for a coffee or an energy drink. If he thought he was dying, he’d have some water. Otherwise, something with caffeine would be really nice.
He was a couple of blocks from the supermarket when a large cat—he decided on the spot that it was a cougar, but had no history with cougars to support the theory—charged across Memorial Drive (which he was biking down) and attacked a crowd of Canadian geese near the waterline.
A standoff ensued between the largest goose and the cat, and if there had been some sort of glass partition Touré could stand behind, he’d have stopped to watch. There wasn’t, so he kept going.
He soon reached the supermarket parking lot, at the edge of which was a coffee shop that was just as closed as everything else in the city. It taunted him; he ignored it, and kept on the move, until reaching the main entrance to the market.
He hopped off the bike. The sun was in its full glory now, a simply gorgeous and very red sunset. Touré had to hurry if he wanted to find a way in without breaking any glass, but he became transfixed, temporarily, by the red sun.
Portent of doom? he wondered. Or does that just work for comets?
“Never mind, man,” he said, forcing himself to turn away.
He checked the front door, which was locked. He’d have to find another way, and was about to when he wondered if it was even worth the trouble. The pharmacy had been looted clean. Why would it be any different here?
Leaning up against the window, he cupped his hands against the glass to block out the glare and peered inside.
What shelves he could see looked empty, all right, but there was something else in there. Something weird.
It looked like little cubes sitting on a pallet in the middle of an aisle. The cubes were unevenly stacked, and there was a sign in front of them that he couldn’t read.
He had no idea what he was looking at.
“I should just break in,” he said. “We’ll find another place to camp out in the morning.”
Then someone walked in front of the stack of cubes.
“Hey!” Touré shouted. “HEY!”
He banged on the window. The figure jumped at the sound, and turned. It was a teenage girl. He guessed she was no more than fourteen, but again, this was something he was bad at, and looking at her in the dying light through a tinted glass window did not help.
She walked closer. White girl, short black hair, tiny stature. He thought this was what an elf would look like, if elves were real.
“We’re closed,” she said.
“What?” he asked.
“I said, we’re closed.”
“Come on, you don’t even work here.”
She looked around.
“Says who?” she asked.
There was a loud howl from an entirely new direction: up the river, opposite from the way he had come, and very close.
We’re surrounded, he thought.
The girl on the other side of the glass heard the sound, too, and looked approximately as alarmed, even though she appeared to be in a safe place.
“Come on,” he said. “Let me in.”
She stared at him for a few seconds, evidently making her own Darwinian-perspective choice. He tried to look harmless and trustworthy.
“Go around,” she said, pointing to his right. “The side door.”
He ran past the main entrance and around the corner, to a windowless metal door next to a dumpster.
It was locked. He tried to open it a dozen times, but it continued to be locked no matter what. It was beginning to look as if his entire day was going to be defined by locked doors when it swung open from the inside.
“Come on,” she said.
He thanked her and stepped into the near-total darkness of the grocery store.
“I’m Touré,” he said, holding out his hand. “Thanks.”
“Bethany, and you’re welcome,” she said, without returning the handshake. She walked past him and back to the front of the store. The sunset lit up the front window; the red made it look like the river was on fire.
“How’d you get in?” he asked.
“I picked the lock. Figured you were here to tell me I was trespassing, but that’s dumb, huh? The world ended or something.”
“I’ve got two friends on their way here; we’ll have to let them in too.”
“Close friends?” she asked.
There was something pacing around at the far end of the lot. It was on all fours, and moved somewhat like a dog would be expected to move, except it wasn’t a dog. It looked to him like it was the size of a horse, although there was nothing for scale.
It howled.
“I just met them a couple of hours ago,” he said.
“Okay, because between you and me, I don’t think they’re gonna make it.”
Carol
1
It sounded as if she was in the middle of a stampede of ruminants, fleeing the predatory equivalent o
f a forest fire. There was no fire, and there was no forest, but there was something just as bad out there.
A wolf, surely. It almost howled like one. Carol’s prior experience with howling canines involved listening to the nature channel on weeknights. According to Touré’s theory regarding their current predicament, this would make her the world’s leading expert in howling, if only by process of elimination. Her own expert opinion was that the sound came in too high to be a wolf. A hyena was a little closer, but also wrong.
Wolflike, then.
She also couldn’t imagine wolves hunting in the middle of a city, but since deer running about in the city also made no sense, essentially nothing about this met the minimum rational vigor, and yet appeared to be true nonetheless.
“Careful,” Robbie said, without telling her what she was supposed to be careful about. They were walking alarmingly fast, but the frequency with which he stopped in order to lead her around an obstacle was so high that she had begun to question the wisdom of his chosen pace.
But there was a lot he wasn’t telling her, either because there was no time to describe it all or because he didn’t want her to become unnecessarily concerned. She could feel his pulse, though, through the wrist she was holding on to, and it was elevated.
“You’re worried,” she said. “We can’t have much farther to go.”
“I don’t think we do, but the sun is going down,” he said. “It’s happening fast; I can’t believe we didn’t notice sooner.”
“It has been a day of alarming things. The directionality of the sun wasn’t near the top of the list of concerns.”
“Yeah, but . . . I just don’t understand. Whoops, hang on.”
They stopped. She heard a creature with hooves walking ahead of them, left to right. A little further up the road, she heard the low growl of a cat. Above, a squirrel scampered among the branches. To their right, something made a sound like a trumpet.
“Deer crossing,” he whispered.
“I gathered. Just one?”
“Just one. I don’t think it’ll attack, but I also don’t want to be wrong. Okay, we can go again.”
The Apocalypse Seven Page 4