There was now an entire room on their heated second floor that had nothing in it but clothes, in all shapes and sizes, for all seven of them. And so, Carol was sitting in the sun in the Hayden Library wearing a heavy men’s parka, snow pants, leather combat boots that fit perfectly after three layers of socks, and a ball cap, reading Braille with fingerless wool knit gloves.
About an hour into it—the book was exactly as dense and dry as she’d expected—she heard the familiar pitter-pat of canine feet from the other end of the library.
“Over here, Nolan,” she said, pulling out a piece of gristle from her pocket.
The coywolf walked over, panting and whining gently.
They had a system. When she was in the library alone, she left the door nearest the wolf den ajar. It was the only way he knew to get into the room to see her—there were several doors—so if it was closed, presumably he went on his way.
She put the gristle on the table and held out her hand, waiting. He greeted her by licking her fingers.
“Sit, Nolan,” she said, holding up the treat. “Are you sitting?”
She really had no idea if he was, but liked to think so.
She gave him the treat. He ate it in one gulp and then curled up under the table.
It had not been her intention when first striking out on her own to conquer the library—and stave off the creeping death that was Total Boredom—to find Nolan and train him to act like the dog she pretended he was. He’d found her. All of them had been wandering the buildings for well over a month by then, so he must have already known—from her scent—where to look.
It was, of course, terrifying the first time he showed up, but only for a moment. He came alone—he always came alone—and never exhibited any aggressiveness toward her.
Carol didn’t think he was really trained; she wasn’t about to put a leash on him and bring him back to the quarters to meet the others. But having him there made it easier to get the reading done. If another wolf walked in, Nolan had her back.
Likewise, if anything or anyone else showed up.
After about an hour, Nolan sat up, then got to his feet and started to growl. He did this when an animal was out on the lawn on the other side of the window, but on this occasion he was facing the wrong way for that to be the case.
Carol caught a whiff of a familiar ammonia smell: the stranger was back again.
“Nolan doesn’t like you,” she said.
There was no answer, which wasn’t new. Unlike their previous encounter in the dorm, the stranger didn’t speak to her at all. He just stood in silence, keeping his reasons for doing so to himself.
He wasn’t someone Carol imagined, certainly.
The coywolf settled into a low growl that she knew from experience would escalate shortly into barking.
“I don’t like you either,” she said. “Please go.”
She heard a click and felt a rush of air, akin to what would happen had someone opened a door on the far end of the room. Nobody had opened a door, so this was something else.
Nolan whined, sniffed, and then curled up under the table again.
“Good boy,” Carol said.
Fourteen
Bethany
The following day marked a drastic change in the weather.
According to Ananda, the angle of the sun indicated they were still in winter, but the temperature didn’t agree. It was hot. Not Let’s figure out how to air-condition the building before we die hot, but definitely I didn’t need a jacket to go outside hot. It melted a lot of snow, and very quickly.
All of this was great news, because it was also the day Paul and Win were expected to return with fresh meat.
To celebrate the first occasion in which all seven of them were in the same place since the start of winter, the Apocalypse Seven planned a big party. That the weather appeared to be in a similarly celebratory mood meant they could expand that party to the only open, guaranteed land-animal-free space available: the roof.
This was Touré’s suggestion. Bethany had to give him credit, because it was a good one.
She’d begun to appreciate that he maybe wasn’t one hundred percent of a total asshat one hundred percent of the time. Her opinion was probably affected by the couple of weeks in which she thought he was dead—she surprised herself by tearing up when she first saw him alive, and on a horse somehow—and also by the change in circumstance.
He’d stopped calling her kid, too, and stopped treating her like one. Those were both big steps forward.
The party took an extra day to plan and execute. Thankfully, the weather didn’t turn again in that time. For all any of them knew, warm weather meant another tornado was on the way.
But dammit if they weren’t going to party first.
Robbie and Touré had a charcoal grill. They’d evidently been eyeing it for a while, as it had been a part of the window display at the hardware store only a couple of blocks away, which happened to be the same hardware store they’d looted for the axes.
They brought that up to the roof, then the charcoal and the lighter fluid. Win and Ananda scrounged up some chairs and a table, as well as some plates, forks, and knives.
Then Paul asked about something to drink other than water, and soon enough he and Bethany were making a beer run.
There was a liquor store on Massachusetts Ave.—it seemed to Bethany like everything was on Mass Ave., and maybe that was true—only a few blocks away. They took the same wheelbarrow previously used to ferry the unconscious Paul around and headed toward where the booze was.
“So how have you been?” he asked. They were walking down the middle of the street. Around them, the snow had turned into rivers of water, the trees were showing buds already, and in a few days, they’d probably hear birdsong again. It was nice.
“I’m fine,” Bethany said. “How’s the shoulder?”
“About as good as it’s gonna get.”
Paul stopped to take a look at the gun she had strapped to her hip. She’d spent two weeks making a holster out of old cloth for it. It wasn’t perfect—it was really just a pouch with a second strap for stabilization—but it worked well enough so she didn’t have to carry around the gun in her hands. She could also store it in her bag, but didn’t like how long it took to reach it when it was in there.
“Cute,” he said. “You wear that everywhere?”
“Only when I leave the castle,” she said.
He laughed. “The castle,” he said. “I like that. Touré?”
“Of course.”
“He’s special, that one. So, is the safety on?”
“Of course it is. It bounces all over the place when I run. Maybe we can find a real holster.”
“There’s a sporting goods store downtown,” he said. “Win loaded up her quiver there. Maybe next time we can find a holster for you.”
“That’d be great.”
Paul was also armed; he had a shotgun in a sling on his back. It looked a thousand times cooler than what Bethany was packing. She wondered if he’d let her try it someday.
“You been running around a lot out here?” he asked.
“A little. Why, are they worried about me?”
“They are. Don’t take it personally. It’s everyone’s prerogative to worry about everyone else now. Don’t think any of us have really come to grips with what’s happened. It’s too big. Much easier to concentrate on the little stuff, like Where’d Bethany get to?”
“Yeah,” she said.
Bethany didn’t know how well she was coping either, so she could hardly judge how everyone else went about it. And her trips away from the castle, sometimes overnight, clearly did alarm the others. Carol, in particular, had tried to talk to her about it on multiple occasions.
Bethany knew how it looked, but had no interest in explaining it to anybody—she’d been going back home . . . and preferred to keep that information to herself.
The idea was to find out all sh
e could about what had become of her family in the years since her disappearance. It was something none of the others could really do. Touré maybe could, but while he was raised in the same area, she didn’t know if his parents still lived there by the time of the whateverpocalypse. He probably didn’t know either, but he never showed an interest in checking.
The thing that stuck with Bethany the most was that her brother, Dustin, grew up, got married, moved to Tucson, and had a kid. Seeing his family portrait in her mom’s bedroom was incredibly disturbing, because Dustin’s son looked exactly like she remembered him looking last time she saw him.
On the same day she made that particular discovery, Bethany spent that night in her old bedroom, which was a phenomenally bad idea. She got almost no sleep and what little she did get was full of nightmares involving strange men in the shadows who smelled like pee.
Worst of all, when she woke up, the whateverpocalypse had still happened; it didn’t all turn out to be a dream.
“I think that’s the store,” she said. She was in charge of the wheelbarrow because of Paul’s various possibly permanent injuries. She steered toward it.
There was a metal gate pulled over the front door with a big padlock.
“Well, no wonder those two never tried to get in here,” Paul said.
“I don’t think alcohol was high on anyone’s list of priorities.”
Paul pulled down his shotgun, meaning to use it to open the door.
“Hold on, hold on,” she said. She lifted the padlock and took a look. “Yeah, I got this.”
“Ha. Just as well. I don’t know if I have enough shot to put a dent in that lock.”
“It’s always brute force with you guys,” she said, pulling out some bits of wire she’d been using to open doors. It had already turned into one of the more useful skills the team had, especially when a quarter of the doors in the castle came up locked. Robbie and Touré were talking about bringing her along to pick some of the ones they couldn’t get open themselves. It would have been a whole lot easier if they just figured out how to pick a lock—it really wasn’t difficult—but she didn’t mind being needed.
Paul put away his gun and waited. “You had water,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“I said, ‘You had water.’ That’s why nobody brought up alcohol.”
“I guess.”
She had a joke about Paul turning the tap water into wine so they could skip this expedition entirely, but she kept it to herself. She found Paul really interesting—of all of them, he had the best stories—but the God stuff made her uncomfortable.
“There it is,” she said.
The lock popped open in her hands. She tossed it to the ground and pulled the gate back. The door on the other side was glass in a metal frame with another lock.
“Okay, you can break the glass if you want,” she said.
“You can’t pick that lock?” he asked.
“No, I can, I just don’t want to be here all day.”
He shrugged, and shattered the glass with the butt of the shotgun, then reached through and unlocked the door.
“Not sure you’re even supposed to be in here, miss,” he said. “You’re a little young.”
“I’m over a hundred years old, mister,” she said. “Let’s find some booze.”
He laughed and held the door for her.
“After you.”
Touré
1
Touré burned himself twice while trying to cook the venison steaks.
When they set up the grill, he was under the impression that someone who had manned a barbecue once in their lives might take the lead. Specifically, he’d expected Paul to step up, seeing as how he was the closest thing they had to a dad. (Ananda was the closest to a mom. Both appeared to be somewhere between their late thirties and mid-fifties, at least to Touré, who, again, was bad at guessing ages.)
But since it had been officially his idea, everyone stood aside and let him burn himself repeatedly. Never mind that the whole concept of a party came out of Touré and Robbie brainstorming the best way to ease the group into the idea that Robbie had recently punched an alien in the face. They couldn’t very well share that thought process, and so apparently everyone went in assuming this was something Touré was familiar with in some concrete way.
He was not. When Touré tried to get the fire started, he ended up with flames that either shot up past his head or threatened to go out entirely. When he put the steaks on the grill, he didn’t have any tongs, because he didn’t know he’d need them, so he made do first with his hands and then a dinner fork. He eventually added a towel, so whenever a steak caught fire he had something to put it out with.
It wasn’t going well. A couple of times he turned around to see half of the Apocalypse Seven with alarmed expressions on their faces and trying to hide it. He finally recognized that they were just trying to be polite.
“Guys, I do not know how to cook,” he said. “If anyone here does, please step up.”
“Oh, thank God,” Win said. “We were about to have Roasted Touré for dinner.”
“You’re going to burn the meat,” Paul said. “Step out of the way.”
Other than that minor hiccup, it went really well. They all got their own bottle to drink—because they forgot cups but fortunately remembered a bottle opener—and ate too much.
The meat was delicious, but the highlight was definitely the surprise dessert Ananda unveiled: a gigantic can of peaches.
“I know this isn’t much,” she said, holding it up, “and we’re going to have to address the balance in our diet soon. We have hardly any starches or greens. The Noot bars are somewhat balanced, but we’ll need to find a long-term source of vitamin C . . .”
“Hey,” Bethany said, “are you going to open that can or what?”
“Sorry, I’ll save the speeches for later. Let’s dig in, shall we?”
After the meal came a number of orders of business, which essentially just meant everyone took turns standing up and delivering a little speech.
Touré started by thanking everyone for coming and for stopping him from setting himself on fire, and then compared them to a Dungeons and Dragons party. The metaphor clearly made a lot of sense to him but probably not to anyone else.
He ceded the floor to Bethany, who surprised all of them by talking eloquently about how everyone felt like family. Touré thought this sentiment was leavened at least partly by the wine bottle she was in the middle of finishing on her own, but it was still really nice.
Win was more businesslike. She gave a rundown on how the hunting was locally and discussed plans for an expedition back to the part of the state where she’d discovered Elton to see if there were any other horses out there. Considering how useful Elton had been, it made good sense, but Touré didn’t think that was why she wanted to do it. She was trying to find Elton some company.
Paul followed up Win by thanking everybody for the party, describing what the outer reaches of their domain currently looked like, and saying a blessing. “I would have said grace before we started,” he said, “but you all looked awfully hungry.”
Next came Ananda . . . and a long lecture. She’d clearly been saving up a few revelations for when they were all together again, and she was going to lay them on everyone all at once. With drinks in their hands, no less. It had long been Touré’s opinion that alcohol made everything Ananda had to say easier to deal with.
The presentation included data written on a whiteboard. Touré flashed back to every classroom experience he’d ever had and not in a good way.
Her talk began with the other ways in which the world ended.
“As we know, the planet reached one of the points of no return climate-wise around 2039,” she said, pointing to one of the numbers on the whiteboard. “That was when we hit the plus-two degrees threshold. Does everyone know what that is?”
They did not, and thus began the lecture. When it was over, they lear
ned that some of the things the world went through while they were away included famines, which led to wars, which led to refugees, which led to more famines. Touré lost focus several times—again, just like those childhood classes, now with alcohol thrown in—but he did find it interesting that the invention of the Noot bar was likely in direct response to famine conditions. “Taste would have been a secondary consideration,” she said.
There were also coastal floods—Carol was alarmed to learn her family’s home in South Florida might be as underwater as the Boston piers—and a marked increase in extreme weather events.
“Extreme weather events like, say, tornadoes in Cambridge?” Robbie asked.
“That’s a trivial example,” she said, “but yes.”
“It wasn’t trivial when we were a few feet away from one.”
The part that Ananda found interesting, in that way of hers that made her sound like a cyborg, was that five years later, the increase in atmospheric carbon levels stopped.
“As if everyone on the planet decided at the same time to stop contributing to global warming,” she said. “Because . . . well, as you know, everyone appears to have died. The statistics bear out the year 2044 as being when that happened.”
“Jesus,” Win said.
It was all anyone had to say for a few seconds as the full magnitude of what Ananda was showing them really sank in.
“I’m sorry,” Ananda said. “We did know this already.”
“Nanda,” Paul said. He was the only one who called her that. Nobody had asked why or if they should do it too. Touré thought he just started doing it on his own and Ananda hadn’t figured out how to tell him to stop. “The problem we’re all having, I think, is that it looks like you just proved what we hadn’t been able to prove before now. Everyone died that year. Everyone.”
“Except for us,” Carol said.
“Yes,” Ananda said. “I guess that is what it means.”
They all fell silent again. Ananda didn’t look like she was sure whether or not to continue. Maybe she was mentally reviewing the rest of the presentation for other facts bound to upset non-cyborgs.
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