by Siara Brandt
It might not be a zombie apocalypse, but it was something very bad. Because of the warnings on the TV, Kate told the boys not to go outside. She muttered something about the grass not being that important after all. The trash didn’t get burned, either. But they did lock all the doors and windows.
Chapter 5
“What are we going to do?” Vayna Biggers asked her husband as she wrung her hands nervously before her.
“About what?”
“About whatever is going on down there,” she said as she gestured toward the open window.
Vayna was standing in the archway that connected the living room to the kitchen of their condominium. She stared at her husband’s back as he stood behind the flowered living room curtains and looked down into the street. He was holding a cigarette in one hand. The thumb of the other hand was hooked into a loop of his pants. He didn’t answer her question. He just kept staring out the window, taking his time to lift the cigarette to his mouth and draw deeply on it once more before he blew a slow, thick cloud of smoke above his head.
They were three stories up in their small condo but they could still hear the sounds of a very heated, very vocal disturbance coming through the open window. There was still a little daylight left. Not wanting to be seen from down below, Arlend Biggers was standing slightly back from the window, hiding behind the curtain. He didn’t voice his thoughts, of course, but he was thinking to himself that this confinement was starting to be a major pain in the ass. His wife was getting on his nerves more and more with every passing day. So much for having a supportive, obedient spouse, as he’d thought he was getting in the beginning. But then, why shouldn’t he expect a nag for a wife? He was used to getting the shit end of things.
Because she was still waiting for a reply, he glanced back at her, his expression unreadable while he silently congratulated himself on his ability to keep his dislike from showing openly on his face. But he should be good at it. He’d had enough practice during eighteen years of marriage. Her straight brown hair was pulled back from her face and gathered into a messy bun. She wore no makeup and her clothes were wrinkled because she had slept in them last night. That is, when she wasn’t tossing and turning and keeping him awake. Despite his cold glare, which in the first years of their marriage would have effectively shut her up, she looked like she was still waiting for an answer to her question.
In spite of his efforts to keep his face carefully blank, Arlend’s jaw clenched the slightest bit, giving a momentary illusion of strength to his normally weak chin. What did she want from him? he thought irritably as he turned back to the window without giving her an answer. He shook his head slightly. Was she really expecting him to go down there and get himself killed or beat up over a domestic disturbance that didn’t have anything to do with him? How stupid could she be?
Pretty damned stupid, he silently answered his own question. And of course she was going to persist with her incessant nagging. She always did.
“I’m getting worried,” she said. “What do we do when we run out of food? Do you think that’s why they’re fighting?”
Arlend rolled his eyes. She could ask the most moronic questions. How the hell did he know what they were fighting about?
No matter what the fight was about, he could see little sense in getting himself all worked up over it. It didn’t concern him and he couldn’t do anything about it. From the last news reports they’d heard, there was apparently rioting and looting going on everywhere, so it should come as no surprise to see people fighting down in the street below. If people wanted to fight, that was their business. He didn’t want any part of it. Only an idiot would get involved. And he, Arlend Biggers, was no idiot. He knew when to keep his nose out of things.
He was crankier than usual. He hadn’t had a good hot meal or a shower in a long time. He hadn’t been able to relax in front of the TV to help him fall asleep and, to top it all off, there was no air conditioning. And here she was worried about strangers in the street.
The power was out and had been for some time now, which was the reason there was no TV. That also meant no internet. Cell phones weren’t working, either. What little they did know had come from rumors, which couldn’t be substantiated and were as thick as fleas. They’d been completely in the dark for days, both figuratively and literally. Not that the news stations they listened to would have given them any useful information anyway. They prided themselves on being liberals, which kept them even more in the dark.
Stay in the safety of your homes, they had been told. After that, nothing. They’d seen signs of the military out there - armed soldiers in the streets and helicopters flying overhead - so Arlend had assumed that things would be handled by the authorities as soon as possible. But that had been weeks ago. They hadn’t seen so much as the shadow of a soldier since then. But Arlend was confident that once they got things organized, everything would be back to the way it used to be. It was just a matter of time.
“We’ll just stay inside for a few more days until it all blows over,” he told his wife just to shut her up.
“A few more days?” Vayna echoed, the worry in her voice raising his irritation a few more notches. “But we’re almost out of food and water now. There’s nothing in the house for dinner, except for some peanut butter sandwiches. The bread is stale - I don’t have enough light to even see if it’s moldy - and I’m not sure the peanut butter isn’t expired.”
Like she could cook anyway, Arlend thought to himself with an inward jeer. Why the hell didn’t she just hold the bread up to a window while there was still daylight to see if it was moldy? Why couldn’t she figure these things out for herself? Unfortunately, talking about food was making him even hungrier. “Maybe someone can go out and grab something to eat across the highway- ”
The highway. The same highway that was backed up bumper to bumper with abandoned cars that weren’t going anywhere. It had been that way for over a week now. Arlend tried to tell himself, and her, that so many abandoned vehicles wasn’t such a big deal, that the military, the authorities, would get things straightened out in no time. They weren’t going to just let those cars set there. And who was going to venture out there anyway? It certainly wasn’t going to be him. Of course, just to get away from her nagging for a while, it might be worth it.
He lifted his cigarette to his mouth and puffed deeply, his eyes narrowing while his cigarette smoke drifted slowly out through the screen before disappearing into the darkness like a vanishing ghost.
Suddenly he jumped, startled out of his thoughts by the sound of two cars colliding in the parking lot of the building next door. It was a terrific, jarring sound. Even the people arguing down below had scattered and immediately taken off.
Vayna started for the window.
“Get back,” Arlend snarled, stopping her dead in her tracks. “Do you want to draw attention up here?”
Vayna stopped and stood there with one fist pressed tightly against her chest. “Maybe someone is hurt and needs help- ” she began.
“There are already people down there,” he cut her off. “Let them handle it.”
He was right. There were already shadows moving around down in the darkness, although he couldn’t really see what was going on. There were some alarming, muffled, garbled sounds, then nothing.
As he tensely watched the shadows from up above, Arlend quickly, silently amended his suggestion about going across the highway for some fast food. With the lights and the power off, the food places were probably closed anyway. There signs weren’t on, at least. Of course, someone was, no doubt, figuring out how to make money off of this. If only it was him. But he was never that lucky. He was always in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It was best to stay inside, he told himself as he continued to watch the scene below. That’s what they had been advised to do. Stay indoors. As long as his immediate needs were met, there was no sense taking chances. Surely there was something more than peanut butter and moldy bread to eat. But out of
his growing hunger and frustration, he gave a short sarcastic snort and said to his wife, “You’d never survive a real disaster.”
“What would you call a real disaster?” she asked him. “The power has been out for weeks. We’re almost out of food. We only have enough water to last us for two more days, if we’re careful. The air conditioning is out. The toilets don’t work. We’re out of toilet paper. And they’re saying that people are being attacked on the streets. They’re talking about zombies- ”
Arlend inhaled another deep lungful of smoke, released it and smoked again.
“You’re not seriously going to tell me you believe the dead are coming back to life,” he sneered as he turned to look at her. This would make a good story later on, he thought to himself. Cutting her down behind her back for her stupidity had become one of his favorite pastimes. This was something he could throw directly in her face for years to come.
After being married for eighteen years, Vayna was used to her husband’s sarcasm and his belittling. She didn’t like it, but she was used to it. “I didn’t say I believed it,” she said. “But something is going on. What are we going to do if things get worse?”
Though she wondered how, without toilet paper and the ability to actually flush the toilets, things could get any worse.
“Read - my - lips. They’re - not - going - to - get - worse,” Arlend told her, sarcasm lacing every carefully-enunciated word.
He had already made himself believe that. In the beginning, there had been a lot of talk about martial law being declared. Arlend hoped that was going to happen soon. Maybe it was already happening in other parts of the city. There was no way of knowing. But he was sure they would soon start dispensing free food and other necessities to the public. That’s what the government was there for.
Surely everything would be taken care of before very long. He still had no idea what had happened. A terrorist attack, race riots, a chemical spill, mass hysteria. There were all kinds of theories out there. He didn’t know was going on and he didn’t care. He just wanted it fixed. He wanted things back to the way they were. This whole thing was inconvenient. Damned inconvenient. And eventually, someone was going to have to be held responsible for not being on top of things.
He didn’t believe that this was as wide-spread as the rumors said it was, or that things were going to get a lot worse before they got better. The last reports that had reached them had included of a list of rescue stations, and that might have worried him, but they always exaggerated things on the news. That’s how they drew people in and upped their ratings. This time was no different. He was smart enough to know that, even if she didn’t have a clue.
“Ryland went out last night,” he heard.
“I told him not to go anywhere,” Arlend said, worried at the news though he kept it to himself. He had always worried that the day would come when Ryland would go off on his own, when he wouldn’t listen to him anymore, when he wouldn’t come back. Lately, he was showing signs of becoming more and more independent. What if he should leave one day? Then Arlend would be completely alone. It would be just him and Vayna for the rest of their lives. The very thought depressed him.
“He says there is no food anywhere and that the stores are cleaned out,” Vayna informed him. “He says that the shelves have been empty for a long time and that people were fighting each other for what was left a long time ago.
“There’s no food,” Vayna repeated, trying to make her husband understand the gravity of the situation, and even more, trying to get some kind of reaction from him. It was frustrating to always feel like you were talking to a wall. “Have you heard anything I’ve said? Have you given any thought to what we will we do if help doesn’t come?”
“Someone will fix it,” Arlend told her because he didn’t want to have to face the alternative. He knew she was just trying to get him worked up. It’s what she did best. Better to turn his anger and frustration towards her than to pour it into some vague, undefinable crisis that had no solution. “If this is as bad as you’re saying it is, there’s nothing we can do anyway. We have to wait for the government to do their job and solve it.”
“According to Ryland, the government is behind this.”
Arlend scoffed once again, but with less conviction this time. “Behind what? No one even knows what’s going on. Conspiracy theories and fear mongering aren’t going to help anything.”
Vayna stood there silently reassessing her husband. She had been doing a lot of that lately. Arlend Biggers had next to zero survival skills. His idea of roughing it was running out of soda or cigarettes for a few hours while she ran out to get some for him. Until now, his lack of skills hadn’t been much of a consideration. She just quietly went on with her own life without giving him another thought. Now- Now she wondered if his inadequacies could mean the difference between living and dying. For all of them. She was beyond frustrated at the fact that so far she couldn’t make him see the seriousness of the situation they were in, but she was also beginning to also realize that she was frustrated because she wanted him to do something. Say something. Show some kind of emotion. Maybe even try to make her feel better about things. Wasn’t that what a husband was supposed to do?
But that wasn’t going to happen. She knew that just as surely as she knew the lights would not be going on tonight. And she also realized that her feelings for him were changing on a very basic level. Or maybe she was just facing her real feelings for the first time because she had no choice and no distractions.
“Ryland said the power is not coming back on so there’s no sense waiting for it,” she said in a flat tone, accepting the fact that there was no hope of reaching him. Maybe she just needed to hear her own voice because that was the only one she had been listening to for a very long time. “The water isn’t coming back on, either. He said there won’t be any more food deliveries into the cities because the truck drivers won’t chance coming here, even if they had food to deliver, because of the looting and the rioting. Everyone is saying that if martial law was going to be declared, it would have been done already. And even if the military did take control of the city, they would confiscate everything useful anyway, including food. Ryland said that rationing won’t work because there isn’t enough to keep everyone alive. Tom next door said we should be thinking about getting out of the city while we still can. They left yesterday. Are you even listening to me?”
How could he not listen to her? She wouldn’t shut up.
“More fear mongering,” he grumbled. “And I told you not to listen to that idiot neighbor of ours.”
It was fear that made Vayna make one more attempt to confront him with the gravity of the situation. “Ryland said that people are already desperate enough that they’re taking the law into their own hands, that they’re desperate enough to take what we have.”
He sighed deeply, irritably. Didn’t she just say that they had nothing left?
But Arlend didn’t say all the things he was really thinking as he stared at his wife. “Are you finished?”
She didn’t answer him. All the things she could have said to him, all the things on the tip of her tongue, would have been unkind. Terribly unkind. And she was not like him. She did not enjoy hurting other people. Very soon after their marriage, she had learned that Arlend Biggers was not what he had pretended to be. Not only was he was mean and petty, but selfishness motivated his every decision. That had become evident in a very short period of time.
Her biggest disappointment in him was when she found out he didn’t like children. He had hidden that little fact in the beginning and he had not been happy when she had told him she was pregnant with Ryland. As a consequence, he had had little time or patience for his unplanned son. Then somewhere around Ryland’s sixth birthday things had changed. That’s when Ryland had become the center of the struggle between them. At its most basic, it was a struggle for control. Ryland had also become a way for Arlend to vicariously live the life he so deeply coveted, to reinvent the
past he felt he had deserved but missed out on. He could let Ryland make choices for him that he didn’t dare make for himself. Which meant that Arlend didn’t have to take the risks and, even more importantly, he didn’t have to take the consequences of his bad decisions. So when Ryland got older and got into more trouble, Arlend was secretly reveling in getting away with things he had never gotten away with before. And in some twisted way, he was also rebelling against her.
She stared silently back at him, the biggest single disappointment in her life, only then realizing just how much his shortcomings could have an impact on all of them, only then realizing how thoroughly she disliked him as a human being.
“We should have stocked food when we were able to,” she said, although she knew, of course, that it was useless to point that out to him.
“Well, we didn’t. And it’s too dangerous to go out there now. It’ll blow over,” he said in the face of her silence. “I say we wait it out. I’m not going out there. If you’re smart, you’ll do the same thing.”
“And when you run out of cigarettes, then what? Are you still going to wait it out?”
The cigarettes might become a problem, he confessed to himself, although he would never admit that to her. A thirty-year old habit wasn’t gotten over in a day. It was a good thing she didn’t know about his secret stash. Only thing was, he still hadn’t figured out how he was going to hide them from her if they couldn’t leave the apartment? She would probably demand he share them with her.
“I’d rather wait it out here where it’s safe than be like those idiots down there.” He glanced briefly out the window to the street below. “Who don’t have sense enough to stay inside and wait for help,” he added pointedly.
“Two days,” she said in a completely different tone than her usual voice, one he’d never heard her use before. “We have two days until we’re out of water.”