The Book of M

by Peng Shepherd

  “This isn’t soccer,” you protested weakly.

  “Exactly,” Paul said. “It’s worse. Definitely give it to Max.”

  “What is the matter with you?” Imanuel whispered sharply to Paul. Paul finally choked, and the giggles escaped him in a strangled gasp. You had been the only kid in their high school to ever score a goal for the opposite team—twice, I finally explained to the rest of them as Paul collapsed into a fit of laughter.

  We climbed down the mountain in silence, walking just next to the paved road that led up to the picturesque resort from Elk Cliffs Road. You, Paul, and Imanuel carried huge backpacks instead of weapons. “Odricks Corner,” Rhino said to us as we marched. “That’s the first neighborhood we’ll hit.” The trees opened up ahead.

  I braced for the eerie, deserted silence of Boston we’d seen on the news after all the shooting stopped, but Odricks Corner was chaos. Cars blaring at each other, women herding families back and forth across streets, people biking with mountains of belongings strapped to their backs. Men defending laden shopping carts in parking lots with their lives.

  “Food,” Marion said when she spotted a grocery store. It all dawned on us then. How much food did we have at Elk Cliffs Resort? Imanuel had booked caterers for the ceremony and reception, but how long would those leftovers last? How much was in their deep freezers for regular guests? How long would deep freezers last if the power went out? Would the power go out?

  Rhino stayed outside with the guns, asking passersby for information. The rest of us went inside the shop and pulled everything we could find off the shelves. You, Paul, and Imanuel tried to look large and intimidating as Marion and I snatched whatever was left. Single shoppers approached, eyed the five of us, then slunk away for other aisles.

  “Grab the rice,” Marion hissed at me as we wheeled ourselves into the never-ending line to pay. I grabbed as many as I could. In a strange way, it reminded me almost of something she and I might have done in university with our friends, while too drunk: run to the campus food store just before it closed and play various games—who could fit inside the plastic shopping cart seat like a kid again, who could swipe an entire shelf into the basket at once without dropping a single item, who could finish their list first and race to the checkout line before the other teams. But no one was laughing this time.

  “Please—I have children,” a woman behind us said. We turned around. Her cart was a third as full as ours, with food half as useful. The shelves were almost bare by then. “I have children,” she repeated. I wanted to crumble inside.

  “We have children, too,” Marion lied before any of us could answer. She knew me too well. She stepped in front of us, between me and the woman, so I had no choice but to set the rice back down into our own cart.

  “Please,” the woman said again, but weaker this time. “No, it’s all right.”

  “Has it reached Arlington yet?” Paul asked her gently. “We’re all—we’re on vacation. With our kids. We only just found out.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I think Maryland, at least. I saw something like that on the news. That’s when I came here. My sons are still at home.”

  “It’s in D.C.,” the man in line ahead of us said. He held up his phone. “They caught a guy downtown near the Verizon Center this morning.”

  The woman moaned. She sank lower over her cart.

  “How are we going to pay for this?” I suddenly whispered to you. “I didn’t bring my purse.” It was probably a month’s worth of food, and all I had was a handful of crumpled bills in my jeans pocket from the day before, from when you had to pay a toll fee on the highway into Virginia from D.C., to reach Elk Cliffs.

  “Put it on my card,” Imanuel said. “Wedding expenses.”

  “Oh, God,” the woman behind us said suddenly. We turned to look at her. She was holding her wallet as if it were white-hot porcelain, searing her fingers, but too precious to drop. “Oh, God.” We all looked inside. The dark green ink on the bills had somehow vanished. The papers were completely blank.

  “What the fuck,” Marion said in horror. “What is that?”

  “My children,” the woman wailed. “I have to feed my children!”

  “I’ll pay for it!” I gasped. I was crying, terrified. I tried to shove whatever bills were in my pocket at her, desperately pressing them against her chest. Far at the front of the line, a fight broke out. People began to yell. Then we all realized that my money had become the same impossible blank things as well.

  Three days after that, reports said that almost everyone in D.C. was now shadowless. We sat in circles around the main ballroom TV, cutting marshmallows into tiny pieces and eating them slowly, to make them last. The brand on the front of the bags was a name I couldn’t read. The letters looked like they had once spelled something, but didn’t quite look like letters anymore. Rhino suggested we start trying to hunt game for food in the forest around the resort with the guns.

  Philadelphia, Baltimore, then Arlington. After that, Elk Cliffs Resort lost power, because we were on the Arlington grid.

  The day after there was no more electricity, Rhino and Marion returned from the far side of the mountain stumbling under the weight of a small elk. The wedding band made a fire in the fancy stone pit in the courtyard using the strange, empty dollar bills as kindling. We burned it all. Not a single person kept even one piece. We wanted it gone. They roasted the elk while you, me, and a couple of other guests from Paul’s side went through what was left in the kitchen and separated it into “eat tonight, before it goes off,” “eat within the next few days,” and “save as long as we can.”

  The singer didn’t want to sing that night, or anymore. The rest of the band played something instrumental, and we all feasted on elk steak, shrimp, random fillets of fish, and a metric fuckton of ice cream.

  Tomorrow was going to be a lot worse than today, I realized dimly as I sat in front of the fire, digging around in my own personal gallon of mint chocolate chip. There was so much that every single guest got their own container. And the day after tomorrow was going to be a lot worse than tomorrow. Today was probably the last good day. After I finished that ice cream and crawled under our blankets with you and fell asleep it was never going to go back up again. Only down.

  “Want some rocky road?” you asked, and we swapped. The chocolate fudge was so gooey and sweet that it made the glands at the back of my jaw pinch painfully. That was probably never going to happen again either. A kind of sweetness so artificially strong that it could make my mouth ache.

  Suddenly I was crying again, before I even knew what was happening.

  “I have to pee,” I said hurriedly, and scrambled away from the fire before anyone else realized my eyes were swollen and red. I don’t think you saw.

  I stopped as soon as I left the manicured part of the hill and hit the trees, and found myself gulping desperately as I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. I should have savored it more, I thought. I should have fought violently for my favorite flavor. Then I realized someone else was already out here, probably doing the same thing in the trees.

  “The ice cream?” Marion asked through the darkness.

  I nodded. “It just . . .”—I tried to clear my throat—“it was so fucking good.”

  Marion snorted gently in agreement. I could tell she dug the toe of her shoe into the dirt only by the sound of it grinding.

  “It’s the phones for me,” she murmured.

  “Fuck,” I said. Her husband and daughter were still in San Diego. He’d had to skip the wedding to take care of their little girl who’d caught the flu. “Fuck, Marion.” I felt sick for having forgotten, in all the chaos. “What are you going to—”

  “Don’t,” Marion said. “I can’t think of it directly. Not yet.”

  I wanted to go to her, to hug her like we always did when one of us had just argued with a boyfriend or done poorly on an exam, but I didn’t know how to. We stood there for a while, pushing rocks around with our
feet instead, not saying anything.

  There was no more ice cream. There was no more of a lot of things. But there was still you, Ory, here with me. That was something. That was more than hope.

  Marion’s outline, barely visible in the night, was leaning against a tree, holding some kind of leaf. It was so dark, I realized I couldn’t tell if either of us still had a shadow anymore. I think that was the first time it occurred to me to wonder, and the last time I could ever have that thought without compulsively checking to make sure my own was still there. Of being able to do nothing else, not even breathe, until I saw that it was still a part of me.

  “What do you think—” Marion spoke suddenly. “What do you think caused this?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. It was true. I didn’t—not for sure.

  She laughed. It didn’t sound much like a laugh. “Rob and I separated,” she finally said. All the air went out of me. “Two weeks ago. Hallie doesn’t have the flu. I was going to tell you at the reception, once we were drunk enough. But then Boston happened.”

  “Marion.”

  “I know it’s not karma,” she interrupted, cutting me off. “That would be—stupid. But I just can’t help but . . .” She took a shaky breath. “You and Ory, Paul and Imanuel—happy. Here we all are at the end of the world, and you guys are here together. I’m the only one with marriage troubles—and look at where I am, where he is.”

  “It’s not karma,” I said, desperately. “Karma doesn’t exist.”

  “I know,” Marion replied. “But it sure seems like it, doesn’t it?”

  I didn’t know what to say, but it didn’t matter. I knew what she wanted me to know: that if she’d known somehow that it really was going to end now—not in some far future time, but now, right now—she never would have left him. She would have cherished all the moments. We waited in silence for what felt like hours.

  “I’m going back now,” I finally said. I couldn’t think of anything to comfort her. There was nothing to say, without looking at the truth of it head on—no way to offer hope without also reminding her that she might never see them again.

  “I’m going to stay,” Marion answered.

  When I reemerged from the woods and sat down beside you again at the fire, Rhino was standing, stating to the group that he was going to drag his blankets out onto the grass after we put the fire out, because now that there was no electricity and therefore no air conditioning, it was going to be disgustingly hot in the ballroom where we were all camped out.

  He wasn’t really announcing it, I knew as I watched him. It was more that he was trying to ask the rest of us to join him without begging outright. For comfort in numbers. I realized that none of us had even tried sleeping in our individual guest rooms once. After the wedding reception had been interrupted by the news about Boston, we’d all banded together in the ballroom and never left, save to retrieve our suitcases and bring them back down. The courtyard where Rhino wanted to sleep was a couple hundred feet from where the rest of us were still set up inside. Nine days ago, that wouldn’t have been enough distance for me to be from a random stranger. Now it felt terrifyingly far.

  “That’s a good idea,” you said. “Let’s all move out here.”

  Over the top of the flames, Rhino looked at you so gratefully it made my eyes tear again.

  Mahnaz Ahmadi

  THE NIGHT NAZ CONSIDERED KILLING HERSELF, SHE SAW HER sister again.

  It was a few weeks after she finally took the Bluetooth headset off. She wasn’t sure of the exact date, but it was snowing outside, which meant she’d been in the studio for four or five months by then. Hiding, talking to herself, and beginning to starve. She’d rationed well, but there was no food left in the entire building anymore, or in the duffel bag. She’d gone out a few times to the roof, but all she could see beyond the vast, empty parking lot was darkness and the glow of flashing police lights, and all she could hear were the echoing sounds of people crying or being killed. She had her bow, but it was no good in situations like that. In the open or one-on-one, she might win. But against a crowd, in a city, a bow was almost useless. In close quarters, she’d never stop every single one of a gang before one of them reached her and took her down.

  She planned to jump. Or at least think about jumping, soon. Before the hunger made her too weak to find a quicker, more dignified death than starvation. Her mother had almost starved once, she’d told her. When the times were very bad. It was a way of leaving life that Naz never wanted to experience.

  But that night, there was a small, solitary shape standing uncertainly in the center of the parking lot. A woman.

  The sight didn’t frighten Naz. She assumed the woman was just a ghost. Naz had seen the apparitions of her sister so many times after the phone cut off—in the hall, across the room, sleeping beside her. Why not also lurking among the empty car spaces, looking up at her? She was about to ask it to point out some constellations, for old times’ sake.

  But then she saw that the ghost had a shadow.

  “Mahnaz?” it called softly.

  Naz was down every flight of stairs and out the front door before she even realized it. “Rojan?” she was screaming.

  Rojan had run for the entrance too, and had been pulling on the front door before Naz had made it to the ground floor and flipped the lock. They tumbled backward into the dark warehouse in a tangle of limbs, and then clambered to slam the door shut behind them and do up the locks again.

  “You promised. You promised,” Naz kept wailing, over and over. “You promised you wouldn’t do this. You promised you wouldn’t come.”

  Rojan was clinging to her so hard she could feel her skin going numb and bloodless on the parts of her arms where Rojan held them. They kissed each other’s cheeks until they had smeared the tears all over their faces, until all she could taste or see or breathe was stinging salt. “Thank God you’re here.” Rojan sniffed, and kissed her again. “I was so scared—I thought I’d finally make it here and you already would have left or something.”

  “You—you—” Naz could barely speak between the heaving sobs. The miraculousness of it was finally starting to pierce the anger. “You’re really here.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I said I—” She reached down and pulled a wad of paper out of her pockets—handfuls of notes she’d made, neighborhood maps she’d tried to draw, descriptions of the building she was looking for—everything she’d written down from their phone conversations. “I just couldn’t let you be alone.”

  “But how did you get all the way here from Tehran?” Naz interrupted. “How did you even get out of the house without Maman freaking out?”

  “What do you mean, ‘Maman freaking out’?” Rojan shook her head. “She’s the only reason I did make it here. You think I just had thousands and thousands of U.S. dollars lying around in my student dormitory room for a plane ticket?”

  Naz stared at her. “But—” She couldn’t finish.

  “The day after your phone died, she gave me everything she had. Emptied out her accounts. She told me to find you.”

  Naz was shaking. “She . . . she . . . she helped you come here?” She ran her hands up and down Rojan’s arms over and over, as if each time she did it she might discover Rojan wasn’t real. But she was. And she was in Boston. And now she was going to die, too. “Here? Here?!” Naz was screaming again, unable to control herself. “Didn’t she hear me? What this place is like? Why would she help you come here? Why would you do it?!”

  “There was a case in Tehran,” Rojan said softly. Naz fell into a stunned, paralyzed silence as the words sunk in. There was a case in Tehran. There was a case in Tehran. The words echoed in her mind, over and over. There was a case in Tehran. It was everywhere now. Rojan looked down at her hands as Naz swayed. “Naz, she made me come.”

  Naz heard what more her little sister meant to say. Because she wanted us to be together at the end.

  They both sat in silence in the darkness. Naz reached out
and took Rojan’s hand and held it, and they stayed that way for a long time.

  “It had only just happened—the shadowlessness. Tehran Airport wasn’t a madhouse yet. I got to London fairly easily. But Heathrow was not what I expected. I got stuck there in ‘departures’ for almost two months. I couldn’t find a flight out that was going to the United States. All the airlines had just stopped going there. I ate out of the vending machines—they were having to refill them twice a day, there were so many of us. Finally I overheard someone saying Switzerland might be making U.S. flights, or was making flights to somewhere that was making U.S. flights. I managed to get to Zurich a week or two after that, through Geneva. In Zurich, I found out the closest to Boston anyone was flying was Providence, in Rhode Island,” Rojan finally continued. “I mean, the sign said Boston, but they told us they were really flying to Providence—because it was safer, because for some reason that city is almost empty of people now—and we’d have to make our own way from there. They were charging—I don’t even know. I just kept throwing money at the counterperson out of Maman’s savings until the lady gave me a ticket. Someone tried to rob me after that, but the airport staff beat him off. I went in the bathroom and put everything I had left in my bra and underwear then. Not like it was much.”

  “What happened in Providence?”

  Rojan shrugged. “The guy sitting next to me on the flight said he has a daughter here in Boston somewhere. I gave him the rest of what I had in exchange for a seat in his rental car. Well, the car he found in the rental car parking lot and hot-wired. We split up at the roadblock on the freeway just outside city limits.”

  “Fuck,” Naz said. “He could have killed you or something.”

  “I—yeah,” Rojan admitted. “I kind of—I kind of can’t believe I did it now. I just didn’t know how else to get here.”

  They sat close, shoulders touching, as they ate the last of the bags of airplane peanuts the stewardess had generously gifted Rojan on the flight. Naz’s stomach ached ravenously. It was more food than she’d had in a long time. “So . . . what now?” she asked.