“Hi,” the woman said. “Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not.”
Ananda ran to the fence.
“Are you really here?” she asked.
“We’re real,” the woman said.
“What’s with the light show?” the man asked.
“I don’t know,” Ananda said. “Are . . . are you Paul?”
“I’m Touré,” he said. “That’s Win, and this is Elton.”
“Hello, Touré, and Win, and Elton,” she said. “Don’t move, okay?”
Ananda scrambled along the fence until she came to the opening she’d used to get inside, ran back again, and by some miracle they were still there. She hugged Win, not at all caring if Win wanted a hug or not.
“Whoa,” Touré said, not as a comment on the hug, but on the lights. They suddenly swarmed around him.
“I’ve seen this before,” he said.
“In Boston?” Win asked.
“Before that. Up the street in the back of a hardware store. Robbie was with me. It came in the shape of a person then.”
“A person?” Ananda asked, breaking off the hug. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, pretty sure. It was kind of memorable.”
“That’s peculiar.”
The lights dissipated. Touré looked upset.
“Aw, come back,” he said.
“I take it you’re the only one here,” Win said to Ananda.
“Yes,” Ananda said. “I’m sorry. About the hug.”
“It’s okay, I understand.”
“Does that thing make the lights?” Touré asked.
“I don’t know,” Ananda said. “I was just trying to work that out.”
“Oh. I was hoping it was a power source.”
“If it is, I don’t know how to use it like that. But I have power inside.”
“You do?” Win said.
“Solar. I have heat, too. And some food.”
Win reached into a sack attached to the horse and pulled out something that looked and smelled like pork.
“Food, we have,” she said.
“How about antibiotics?” Touré asked. “And some medical training?”
“And some answers,” Win said.
Ananda looked at Touré first.
“You’re injured,” she said.
“The fever nearly killed him,” Win said. “I found medicine, but none of it worked.”
“Yes, of course; it wouldn’t,” Ananda said.
This caught Win off-guard, clearly.
“‘Of course’?” Win asked. “Why, ‘of course’?”
“I do have some answers,” Ananda said. “Not of the big questions, but I know why antibiotics don’t work. It’s the same reason batteries don’t work. I’ll take you inside, but first, I have to ask: What year do you think this is?”
There was a pause as her new friends stared back at her for a little too long.
“What a terrifying question,” Win said.
Ten
Robbie
1
The snow was gone completely two days after the blizzard, which wasn’t nearly enough time for Carol to abandon the idea of moving.
For Robbie, spending two days in the dorms with Carol and Bethany when they were angry at him for asking sensible questions was pretty tough. But if it came to pass that they were actually stuck there for the winter—if, for example, another storm came along before the first was finished with them—he was pretty sure they’d relent eventually. When there are only three people left in the world and you happen to be angry with one of them, you can’t really afford to stay mad for long.
Plus, he really didn’t think he’d committed some kind of grave sin. He perhaps misread the degree to which Carol was rattled by her (possibly imaginary) encounter with an intruder, but that was all.
Robbie shouldn’t have minded moving all that much. They had collected entirely too much to move in one trip, but they were already storing their goods in multiple locations, with their only food source sitting in a vacant supermarket down the street. As long as they were staying in the Cambridge area, he could quite feasibly relocate Carol and Bethany, and then make trips back and forth until the whole supply was moved. As long as the weather held.
He did mind, though, because moving meant admitting Touré was probably gone forever. And he resented, just a little, that he was the only one who felt that way.
So he wasn’t in a good place when Bethany came at him with a map, alone, the morning after the thaw was complete.
“Where’s Carol?” he asked. “I thought you two had an attached-at-the-hip system going.”
“We did, but we’re driving each other crazy,” Bethany said. “She’s in the bedroom, door’s locked.”
The women had taken to sleeping in the same dorm room on the second floor, mainly because it had a lock on the inside. He had no idea how they dealt with having to use the bathroom during the night—the dorm didn’t have individual bathrooms, and the central bathrooms on the second floor had no running water—but didn’t want to risk asking the question and sparking a new argument. He’d been sleeping on the couch in the office off the common room, the same place they’d crashed on the first night they came to the dorm. He was on that couch when Bethany showed up.
“I’m here to talk about the move,” she said.
“Oh, that,” he said. “We’re still doing that?”
“C’mon, you know how she is.”
“And you know it’s more likely that this intruder was just in her imagination.”
“Sure,” Bethany said. “And I think she did imagine it. I thought that when it happened, too, but I knew better than to call her on it.”
“So we’re still moving is what you’re saying. I’ll have to go out and scout a new location. It may take a while. We have no idea when the weather will turn again.”
“Nah, we’re gonna do this all at once.” She put the map down on the desk. “This is dumb,” she said. “Do you have any idea how cool some of the homes around here are? And we’re sleeping in this old dorm like it’s the only option.”
“It’s where we’re safe,” he said.
“It’s where two Harvard kids feel safe, but c’mon. I’ll show you.”
He got up and took a look at the map. Her finger was on a neighborhood he and Touré had never visited.
“This section here’s got it all, okay? Individual houses with fireplaces and yards. Big enough to sleep all of us, small enough to search quickly in case Carol gets another dose of the heebies. Over here is another grocery store, so maybe there’s more Noot bars in case no one figures out how to hunt by next year. I mean, I hope we do. I could use a steak, you know?”
“We haven’t seen a single cow,” he said.
“Deer steak, then.”
“Venison.”
“Yeah, that.”
“There are other neighborhoods closer to that store,” he pointed out.
“Sure, but that’s not all. Over here is Harvard Yard, and this?” She jammed her finger down on one location. “This is the public library.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Books, man. Come on, between you, me, and her, we don’t know how to do anything, right? Let’s go to the library and figure it out. If the public library’s gone or, well, not useful, like I said, Harvard Yard’s just over here. There are libraries there too, right? And there’s a museum right here, and two more there. We keep waiting around for some survivors who know how to do things to show up and save us. Let’s just admit nobody’s coming and see what we can do for ourselves before one of us breaks a leg and we don’t know how to handle it.”
He looked at the map again.
“You make a good argument,” he said.
“Thanks. I feel like I’m taping a PSA for the school system, but, I mean . . . I’m bored out of my skull here. I think we all are. No point living if it’s this boring, right? Reading is a solution.”
“You obviously have
n’t been looking at the same textbooks I have,” he said. “I see your point. But . . .”
“Dude, what?”
“What about Touré?”
She squinted at him. He could tell she decided to not say two or three things.
“What about him?” she asked.
“He’ll come here looking for us.”
“Write ‘Croatan’ on the wall or something.”
He didn’t know what that meant but decided not to ask.
“I’ll leave him a note,” he said. “Once we have a new address.”
He just had to be alive to find it.
2
They already knew it, but there was something seriously wrong with the weather.
First, there was the epic snowstorm that dropped more in two days than any of them could remember having experienced. (Robbie and Bethany, in particular; Carol never had to worry about snow in Florida.) And then six days later? A heat wave.
Before going anywhere, Robbie and Carol—who was speaking to him again now that he had agreed to move—debated the best way to get about town. He favored using a tandem bicycle from the shop, but since it was just him, he’d have to walk there, find one—he didn’t know if they even had a tandem there—and ride it back solo. The walk was a mile; doing this would burn up a decent part of the morning. But with a tandem, he could put Carol on the back seat and speed up the second part of this process.
Robbie was outvoted once Bethany made the perfectly reasonable argument that the neighborhood she picked for them was also only about a mile away, albeit in a different direction. It would be easier to spend the morning looking for a place to live and set Carol up there, and then Bethany and Robbie could go back and forth.
This would mean going to the bike shop to find Bethany a bike of her own anyway, but that didn’t seem to bother anybody other than Robbie.
They still left a lot later than they probably should have, because they couldn’t decide what absolutely, positively had to come with them on the first trip, assuming they found a new place to live on the first go. (For example: Did they need to bring winter gear when it was like eighty degrees out?) Then, after getting all that sorted out, they were a hundred feet from the dorm before Robbie realized they’d forgotten—yet again—to worry about food. So, they turned around, made room for a few Noot bars, and restarted.
Bethany was leading Carol, which freed up Robbie to walk ahead with the axe he’d grown to enjoy the company of. He only knew how to use it against inanimate objects so far, but it probably looked scary enough to keep away the average midsize predator, should they come across one.
“It feels like spring,” Carol said.
“Yeah, hey, maybe that was it for winter,” Bethany said.
A warm breeze cut across the lawn. Robbie checked out the sky, which was cloudless. The air looked brown.
“Probably not,” he said.
“I was kidding,” Bethany said, reacting to his tone. “Relax.”
I’ll relax when we’re safe again, he thought.
The path from the dorm to the area around Harvard Yard and the public library was all uphill. They took side street after side street, with Bethany telling Robbie which left and right and straight to take as they went. Rather than stay on the sidewalks, he took them right down the middle of the torn-up street, a practice he’d begun with the bike and now hardly thought at all about.
Touré was the one who’d convinced him there was no reason not to just saunter down the middle of the road, since no cars would be coming. It was sort of funny, given that on the first day, Robbie was almost struck by a vehicle the first time he tried it. It was definitely funny that Touré was the one who almost hit him.
Touré was also the only other person who would find that funny.
“This used to be kind of awesome,” he said.
“What was?” Carol asked.
The apocalypse, he thought.
“Nothing,” he said.
It was slow going. They passed nail salons, restaurants, an eyeglasses place, a black box theater, a bagel shop, and a secondhand clothing store. Robbie was lingering in front of each spot, ostensibly to wait for the women to catch up, but really to have a quiet breakdown.
This was a vibrant city. Burger shops, bars, coffee shops, bookstores, secondhand stores, pizza places, movie theaters, all the stuff he used to have to drive a long way to get to, and he would have had all of it in walking distance from his new home at the college. He had been looking forward to living here for his entire life. Now, before he’d gotten a chance to live in it, it was a ghost town, because the world ended.
Robbie had to stop to collect himself. He sat down at a table in front of a gastropub with a menu on the wall outside that described a burger he would give anything to try.
“You okay?” Bethany asked.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I just need a second.”
Five wild turkeys walked past, tails fanned out and strutting. On the other side of the street, in a small patch of green, two deer were grazing. The sun had gone away already; a large bank of clouds turned up out of nowhere, just large enough to get in the way. He was pretty sure it was a rain cloud. Also, everyone he ever knew was dead.
It was a bad time for an existential crisis, but it turned out you couldn’t plan for one.
He was crying before he realized it. He wiped his eyes as Bethany sat Carol down in a nearby chair and pretended she didn’t notice him.
“How do you cope with this?” he asked, quietly.
They looked confused.
“Who are you speaking to?” Carol asked.
“Everyone’s dead,” he said, ignoring the question.
He got up and threw the axe into the front window of the gastropub, eliciting a yelp of surprise from Carol, to whom this must have sounded like an attack.
“Everyone!” Robbie said. “I mean, this is it—this is our lives now. I don’t want it. I want the life I was promised.”
“We all want that,” Carol said, levelly. “Breaking things won’t make that happen.”
“Well . . . it makes me feel better.”
“Then break your things and we’ll continue.”
“Right.”
“Robert, like it or not, we have to keep trying to survive, because that’s all we can do.”
“Just that? Nothing more? You know what we were doing before? Me and Touré? We weren’t just trying to find someone else who knew how to do this better than we do. It was to prove there was more. Because if there aren’t more people out there . . . why bother? Who are we staying alive for? Our families? I had a mom and a dad, and my little sister . . . She was in prep school, and she’s dead now. They all are. I had a girlfriend too, back home. We were broken up because I went off to college, but she was real and she was nice, and I liked her. Her name was Tina, and she’s dead too. So are her parents, and all the kids we were in school with, and all of their parents. I can’t . . . I just . . . I just want to know: How are you two dealing with all this? Because I can’t anymore.”
“Robbie,” Carol said, “it’s all right.”
She walked over and gave him the hug he evidently needed a great deal. He was crying like a child on her shoulder, was embarrassed to be doing it, and yet couldn’t stop.
“I don’t cope,” Carol said. “Not very well. But I don’t have to; you do it for both of us. We need you to keep doing that.”
“I don’t think I can,” he said.
“There isn’t anyone else,” Carol said. “I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.”
“I think we’re the ones who’re dead,” Bethany said, suddenly, loudly, as if saying this was something not entirely within her control.
“Not now,” Carol said.
“I mean it. I saw my own obituary.”
Robbie pulled away from Carol to focus on Bethany. He had to rub his eyes to do it.
“You mean that literally?” he asked.
“I woke up in my own ho
use,” she said. “Not a dorm, like you guys, and not on a couch, like Touré. There was a shrine, to me, because I’m a missing person. You guys probably are too. My family thought I was dead and had a funeral. I don’t know if that makes this worse or better, but they got to say goodbye, at least.”
“You said you thought we were in purgatory,” Carol said. “I assumed you were speaking non-literally.”
“I kinda was.”
“Why didn’t you tell us this before?” Robbie asked.
“Because I keep expecting to wake up from it, man. Don’t you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I do.”
“Maybe we’ll luck out one morning,” Bethany said. “Until then, she’s right. You’re who we’ve got. Cry yourself to sleep at night like the rest of us do, try not to attack so many restaurants during the day, and let’s get moving. It looks like rain.”
Robbie laughed.
“Terrible pep talk, thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” Bethany said. “Meltdown all done?”
“For now. Hey, maybe we are missing persons,” he said.
“I don’t know what that could even mean,” Carol said.
“I don’t either, but the library’s sounding like a better and better idea. Lemme get my axe.”
3
The rain came just as they reached the neighborhood Bethany had proposed relocating to.
It was a heavy downpour, but it was also warm, and the houses they were looking at all had porches, so it didn’t end up being too terrible since they were able to take refuge on them. Robbie found his spirits strangely lifted by the whole process, actually. It was as if they were Saturday-afternoon house-hunting in a neighborhood where everything was available.
It was just the kind of silver lining in the apocalypse Touré would have appreciated.
What they settled on was a musty place that Robbie decided had been owned by a professor—he wasn’t really sure why he thought that, but it felt correct—with creaky wood floors covered by worn area rugs. It seemed warm and lived-in, even though it was actually cold and drafty. Though every place was going to be drafty until they figured out how to acquire and apply some weather stripping to the windows.
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